If you're interested in the foreign policy views of major Hillary Clinton financial backer Haim Saban, there's no need to follow the Atrios path of attempting guilt by association with Kenneth Pollack. He discussed his views on the Middle East and Persian Gulf region in great detail in a reasonably recent interview with Haaretz:
When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler. They speak the same language. His motivation is also clear: the return of the Mahdi is a supreme goal. And for a religious person of deep self-persuasion, that supreme goal is worth the liquidation of five and a half million Jews. We cannot allow ourselves that. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a religious leadership that is convinced that the annihilation of Israel will bring about the emergence of a new Muslim caliphate? Israel cannot allow that. This is no game. It's truly an existential danger."
You have a deep knowledge of the United States - will the U.S. take action to stop Iran?
"President Bush has no capital. He doesn't have the political capital to take a drastic step. We know what the Chinese and the Russians think, and a move by the United States alone - I doubt it. And now, with the Democrats in control of both Houses? I don't believe it will happen."
Saban was the largest overall contributor to the Democratic National Committee during the 2001-2002 cycle, when the party leadership was backing the Iraq War and Terry McAuliffe was DNC chair, and if Clinton becomes president, they'll be back in the positions of influence they enjoyed back then. I doubt this all means that Hillary Clinton's secretly itching for war with Iran, but it's yet another illustration of the fact that her views on national security policy are too neoconnish for my tastes.
Truly odd Gallup poll result. The question: "Next, we'd like to ask about your views on two different explanations for the origin and development of life on earth. Do you think [see below] is definitely true, probably true, probably false, or definitely false?" They rotated two different answers into the blank space. One was "Evolution -- that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life." The other was "Creationism -- that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."
In the Evolution sample, 18 percent said evolution is definitely true, and an additional 35 percent said it's probably true. In the Creationism sample, however, 39 percent said creationism is definitely true and 27 percent said creationism is probably true.
We've all heard of "framing effects" in polls, and that's what you're seeing here -- people seem inclined to agree with the questioner -- but the scale of the effect seems enormous here, especially since the question isn't particularly obscure.
The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.
The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.
That's some good counterinsurgency stuff right there, I guess? The old arbitrary detention followed by endless exile in Albania approach to hearts and minds.
As part of, I guess, the continuing campaign to get the United States to launch a war with Iran, there's going to be an article forthcoming by a liberal hawk that quotes a good friend of mine in a misleading way as part of his effort to make the case that the damn dirty hippies of the blogosphere have become apologists for Iran's ruling oligarchy (we know how this story goes). Meanwhile Jim Henley observes:
Gary Farber is onto important news about the actual effects of America’s “pro-democracy” program for Iran. It’s getting lots of people arrested, and various Iranian reform leaders abroad warned the State Department and others against stamping “Made in the USA” all over Iranian dissident groups within the Islamic Republic.
It's almost as if all this chest-thumping isn't really about putting serious thought into the best interests of the Iranian people.
Megan McArdle links to this propaganda classic of Stalin paying a visit to Berlin:
"Stalin, upon viewing it, is said to have remarked that it was so lovely, he wished he had actually gone," she says. Mark Kleiman adds that "By the same token, no doubt George W. Bush wishes he'd actually accomplished the mission."
A nice counterpoint to Dan Balz's weird Broderish moaning that "the political culture of Washington" didn't bring forth the immigration compromise he desired is provided by John Broder in The New York Times who points out that the institutions of American government are designed to make it hard to pass legislation on controversial topics.
All things considered, I think this is a bad thing, and think it's generally better to operate under more parliamentary methods. But like it or not, you go to war with the institutions you have, and there's no sense heaping personal scorn on individual legislators for institutional factors beyond their control.
Thomas Ricks reports on the plans for a permanent "post-occupation" force of 50,000 or so troops in Iraq. This is probably the best way to operationalize talk of "winning" the war. The goal, according to the war's proponents, is to create the kind of situation where the country is sufficiently stable and under sufficiently docile leadership as to be willing to play host to a series of permanent bases.
But, of course, it's precisely the widespread -- and, crucially, accurate -- Iraqi perception that US forces aren't there just to help them out and aren't planning on leaving that drives the appeal of both Sunni and Shiite nationalist groups that are opposing us.
UPDATE: Re-reading the piece it dawns on me that this plan is tragically consistent with the Democratic mantra of withdrawing "combat forces" from Iraq but leaving troops for training, force protection, and counterterrorism. Bill Richardson says let's really withdraw.
Gilbert Arenas says he'll opt out of his contract after the 2007-2008 season in search of more money, though he's hoping to get that money from the Wizards rather than go elsewhere. At his current salary, Agent Zero's a fantastic bargain, but he also strikes me as the kind of guy (tons of scoring, but not terrible efficient and not much as a rebounder or defender) who's poised to get overpaid by someone as a free agent.
Phil Leotardo, seeking to build support for his proposed decapitation of the Soprano crime family, cites, among other things, the idea that the Jersey mob doesn't do the initiation ritual properly. I'd read that as nothing more than puffery, but then I read this this afternoon:
New Jersey crime family mobsters talk a good game. They claim to be the models for The Sopranos. They once pulled off a hit for John Gotti when his murderous crew couldn’t get it done.
In Gang Land, however, the Newark-based DeCavalcantes have long been second class wiseguys. [...]
The problem, Palermo told FBI agent Nora Conley, was that decades earlier, legendary boss Simone (Sam The Plumber) DeCavalcante, (left) who took over the family in 1962, had altered important long-standing parts of the initiation rite.
These included the well-known use of a gun, knife and a burning holy card, Palermo said, recalling that during his induction in 1976, “DeCavalcate explained that he did not feel it was necessary to actually use these items in the induction ceremony.”
I lost the sort of reverent awe for the Sopranos that would have led me to be upset about the ending several seasons back, so I can't say that I was genuinely disappointed by the disappointing conclusion. At the end of the day, every single episode of this final demi-season has been eminently watchable which is more than you can say of, say, the dream episodes from the previous demi-season or else the vast majority of other television shows.
Speaking of disappointing endings, how about that Game 2, eh? Super-uncompetitive all the way through and then, suddenly, Cleveland comes out of nowhere to make it look like you're gonna be watching a basketball game and then . . . no. They say the ratings for Game 1 were historically bad, and going up against The Sopranos can't have helped Game 2 (thanks to the magic of DVR I saw both; it was even possible to "catch up" to realtime by skipping the adds in the Cavs-Spurs game) do any better. At this point, I think the NBA needs to seriously consider disbanding the San Antonio Spurs franchise. Meanwhile Chad Ford's mock draft says the Spurs are likely to snag a European guard with a late pick. Dude's name is Marco Bellinelli and he's a "A long, lanky combo guard who knows how to put the ball in the basket. Big-time scorer with an excellent 3-point shot." What's more, "He's a very smart player, with excellent court vision and a handle that would allow him to play the point occasionally in the NBA. Good athlete with nice quickness."
I feel like this situation has "I can't believe this guy slipped to 28" / "how does RC Buford do it" material written all over it. Haven't we seen this story before? I'm nervous. I don't even hate the Spurs. Indeed, I kind of like the Spurs, which is what makes watching them so depressing. If they were more dynamically despicable, things would be more interesting.
Andrew Sullivan directs me to Fred Thompson's pro-choice past. Of course, such flip-flops are hardly unheard of in either party or in either direction.
Still, this one's odd. Oftentimes, you'll see a politician (Mitt Romney, Al Gore) start out in line with local sentiment and then change his position to line up with the national party's position. Thompson, however, was running as a Republican in Tennessee, where I have a hard time believing he needed to be pro-choice in order to stay politically viable.
I was watching some PBS show about the 6 Days War yesterday. They were talking about how Israeli PM Eshkol was under a lot of pressure to attack Egypt but, personally, didn't really want to. He was desperately seeking some kind of victory short of war that would relieve his position. Thus, he kept appealing to the western powers to use their navies to force open the Straits of Tiran, believing that Nasser would back down from such a confrontation, thus defusing the crisis without the need for war. The documentary explains that none of the western powers were going for it -- except Denmark.
The show didn't explain anything about why Denmark was so much more eager to involve itself aggressively in the situation than was anyone else. Does anyone out there in blog-land know anything about this?
I feel like Scott Lemieux is suffering here from some kind of television version of the Stockholm Syndrome: Since David Chase is a genius, and The Sopranos is a brilliant show, it therefore follows that all of his narrative and dramatic choices were brilliant coups.
The idea that desire to see the story of the show brought to some kind of conclusion rather than this childish "is he dead?" / "did the FBI pinch him?" / "guess we'll never know" BS is inherently "middlebrow" has got to be the prime symptom of the illness. I think the beginning/middle/end narrative structure characterizes a lot of perfectly highbrow works. Not to give anything away, but at the end of Anna Karenina we find out what happens to Anna, and it's not because Tolstoy sold out.
I'm about to head out for the ONE Campaign's launch of their ONE Vote initiative now, s
The ONE Campaign is about fighting disease and severe poverty in the developing world, and the idea of the ONE Vote initiative is to inject this issue into the presidential race. Honestly, this strikes me as the kind of topic where elite views matter a lot more than popular ones and there's probably nothing to be accomplished by trying to insert it into practical politics, but I suppose getting all the presidential candidates to at least address the subect (Edwards and to a lesser extent Obama have already done so that I'm aware of) is probably important to shaping elite views.
I tend to agree with Matt Stoller that the Democratic primary campaign thus far has been fought in an unfortunately kid gloves-ish manner. There is, however, a good reason for this. One of the more insightful parts of Bob Shrum's book is when he's talking about the 2004 primary. There was a lot of sentiment inside the Kerry campaign that the thing to do was to hit harder against Howard Dean. The dissenters pointed out that hitting Dean would only drag Dean and Kerry down, and the real beneficiary would be someone else. The only hope was that someone else would start mixing it up with Dean, and then the fact that polling showed Kerry was favorably regarded by most Democrats -- even though few expressed an intention to vote for him -- would work in Kerry's favor, as people turned to him.
This year, you have three Democrats -- Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama -- who are all quite well-liked by primary voters. A candidate who viciously laid into the flaws of one of the other two could quite possibly sow some doubts. But he (or she) would also alienate some people. And, of course, the subject of the attacks would fight back. The real winner would be the third candidate.
The trouble is that it would actually serve everyone well to see the big, obvious attacks get rolled out and see all the candidates counterpunch. This is especially true, since all three really have very little electoral field testing.
Marc Ambinder has some advance skepticism about efforts to build support for stronger action against global poverty and disease on a bipartisan basis:
The second is to create a transpartisan set of solutions. That's going to be hard. The politics of poverty is perceived as intractable. Liberal and conservative solutions rarely overlap, and when they do, there are distinct political downsides for at least one of the political parties. Remember, the mass of Americans who want bipartisan solutions aren't the same Americans who vote in primaries. That's why Fred Thompson talks about bipartisan solutions and espouses fairly conventional Republican policies.
Naturally, this came up a lot in a small meeting I and some other bloggers attended with Bill Frist, Tom Daschle, John Podesta, and Michael Gerson who are, I guess, the key symbols of bipartisanship. I came away fairly convinced. Frist, who turns out to be almost shockingly impressive on this subject, specifically said that in his view "the real turn was the faith-based community embracing an issue that heretofore they'd been uncomfortable with, largely because of condoms." What happened was less that people with strong religious opposition to condom promotion decided to embrace it anyway, said Frist, but that people reach the conclusion that "we don't have to be out in front on all aspects of the issue" and just focus on helping in the ways they can help in good conscience (distribution of medical supplies, campaigns on the importance of faithfullness in marriage) rather than fighting other people over different prevention methods.
Frist did, however, concede that thus far it's the Democratic candidates who "have taken a leadership role today on these issues." The main obstacle, as best I can see, to bipartisan action on this front is that (as one conservative blogger in the room noted), on the right this kind of thing is specifically identified with exactly the kind of Gerson-ian "compassionate conservative" strain of conservatism that's becoming deeply unfashionable at the moment.
Arg. This is just incredibly frustrating. The US-sponsored alliance of Sunni Arab nationalists in Anbar Province aimed at ejecting al-Qaeda seems to be fracturing as some elements of the alliance accuse others of being dupes and collaborators with the American occupiers. And, of course, this is the essence of the problem. It's simply impossible for the United States of America to be the main sponsor of a credible nationalist resistance to al-Qaeda. The only way to take advantage of Sunni Arab discontent with foreign fighters in Iraq is for us to step out of the way and stop trying to micromanage events. Instead, though, we insert ourselves into every embryonic promising trend and wind up wrecking it.
Somewhat oddly, Democracy has an article advocating that we begin adopting the "arm Sunni militias" policy that has, in fact, already been implemented and that's running into some problems.
For all the talk of Iran's autocratic tyrants, here you have the president being burned in effigy, interrupted by firecrackers, and condemned to death, all while he's giving a speech. And he does nothing more than "smilie tightly" throughout it! In this country, if an activist exposes an anti-war t-shirt while the president is talking, she gets muscled out of the room. That's not to say Iran doesn't have all sorts of human rights violations of its own, but the attempt to make the country look like some sort of tyrannical, dictatorial regime is just another element of the war propaganda.
. And yet, as in 1967, too many progressives–so chastened by the Bush Administration’s deceptions over Iraq and the egregious mistakes that followed–are in danger of letting the past prevent them from focusing on the real threats looming ahead. Some even go so far as to excuse the Iranian regime, the better to deny the very existence of a threat. One prominent blogger, Ezra Klein, wrote, in a post titled "Autocratic Iran?" that the "attempt to make the country look like some sort of tyrannical, dictatorial regime is just another element of the war propaganda."
I think Ezra worded the half-sentence that Baer quotes out of context poorly, but taken as a whole I don't think any fairminded reader could reach the conclusion that Ezra is "excus[ing] the Iranian regime."
Meanwhile, it's frustrating to me personally to see yet another go-round of this with Baer who, thanks to his occasional participation on TPM Cafe, has some interactions with progressive bloggers, myself included. Every now and again he'll pop up to accuse progressives generally, and progressive bloggers in particular, of not taking the Iran issue seriously enough. Each time, I try to engage him in an actual argument about the merits of different policies vis-a-vis Iran but instead he kind of vanishes only to reappear once again, months later, with another effort to pathologize opposition to military action against Iran rather than wrestle with the many, many actual arguments that have been raised by a wide variety of knowledgeable experts as to why this would be a catastrophic course of action.
I'd like to know more about who created this John McCain mash-up, which is just a bit unfair but also, I think, pretty effective and cutting:
Mike Crowley says McCain is "at once defensive, irritated, and a little arrogant" these days. It seems to me that years of worshipful media coverage have sort of addled his brain. Years worth of having craven panders hailed as yet another example of your straight-talky awesomeness have, I would guess, rendered him incapable of coping with the idea that some people may doubt his intrinsic awesomeness.
I have to say that I'm a bit shocked by the regularity with which a criticism I offer of someone -- Martin Peretz, Jonah Goldberg, Ken Baer -- will be met with the response that person x is terrible and a liar and I should just ignore them. The notion that incorrect ideas will just vanish if bloggers with midsize audiences ignore them is pretty odd.
Sawicky says: "Another fearless forecast: the next great gangster epic will be about Russians." Certainly I hope so. La Cosa Nostra has been the subject of a ton of great American popular culture, but now I think it may be time to start moving on to more contemporary gangster stylings.
New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz proclaims Judith Miller to be "a damn good reporter." I wonder if Peretz thinks the other writers working at his magazine are up to the Miller Standard.
I don't want to focus too much on Ken Baer's Iran column, but since he's a professional at rhetoric rather than at foreign policy analysis, the column is a veritable font of key argumentative moves. One of the real signature ones is that Baer uses the failure of the Bush/Baer approach to the Persian Gulf region as a reason to continue the Bush/Baer approach to the Persian Gulf. In other words, instead of trying to grapple with the substantive reasons why lots of people have now reached the conclusion that preventive war is not a good approach to non-proliferation policy, he's psychoanalyzing opposition to his preferred Iran policy as based in the fact that "many progressives–so chastened by the Bush Administration’s deceptions over Iraq and the egregious mistakes that followed–are in danger of letting the past prevent them from focusing on the real threats looming ahead."
In short, the failure in Iraq is construed as putting a higher burden of proof on the doves since we now must operate under a cloud of suspicion that we're irrationally overreacting to Iraq. The hawks, meanwhile, just get to blithely move on without reexamining any aspect of their own beliefs. Instead, Iraq can just be dismissed as merely reflecting "the Bush Administration’s deceptions" and unspecified "egregious mistakes."
I was flipping through channels at the gym, and I saw that Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchanan were talking about Iran and figured I'd watch that for a bit. I thought it was strange that the "from the left" panelist for this topic was a "Democratic strategist" rather than some kind of Iran expert or a journalist who writes about foreign policy or something. Weirder, the "strategist" in question turned out to be Hilary Rosen who, a bit of Googling now that I'm home confirmed, was the Hilary Rosen who used to be the head of the RIAA.
As best I can tell, it's just not the case that Rosen is a Democratic strategist. She's a longtime recording industry lobbyist, who's also heavily involved with gay rights issues through the Human Rights Campaign, and currently works as some kind of lobbyist or PR consultant or something for a variety of media firms. I'm biased against her since I hate the RIAA (I was also a Cheryl Jacques fan back in her Massachusetts days), but she did a fine job. It's just always struck me as odd that cable networks rely so heavily on these random people described as "strategists" and even odder to find one such "strategist" who doesn't genuinely seem to be a Democratic strategist.
The indomitable Haggai reads dozens of pages of old Senate transcripts and finds that "Baer's analysis of the differences between Wayne Morse's instincts and those of his colleagues in the run-up to the Six Day War is somewhat subtly--but very importantly--incorrect. It just doesn't fit into the framework that Baer tries to put it in." I know you're as surprised as I am.
It's also worth saying that this is a very odd choice of analogy. Say what you will about the Six Day War, but Israel fought it alone and . . . won decisively anyway.
I'm gonna be at this conference sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Foundation today. I'm told there's going to be wifi right there, so the blogging should continue uninterrupted.
Rich Lowry argues against yours truly that the problem with leaving the Sunnis alone to fight it out with al-Qaeda "is that if we absented ourselves, al Qaeda would prevail." Frankly, I doubt it. As we've seen over and over again, local support matters a lot. It's extremely difficult for a foreign force to sustain itself in the face of hostile public sentiment even if the foreign force is in some sense superior from a technical point of view.
To me, the overestimation of al-Qaeda's ability to impose its will upon Iraqis is just of a piece with earlier overestimation of the United States' ability to impose our will upon Iraqis. This stuff is hard. It's crucial to recall that the Taliban was not just a religious movement, but also an expression of Pashto nationalism, and that that the Taliban had a lot of trouble expanding into areas where other ethnicities predominated.
Based on everything I've ever heard, Mudcat Saunders is an asshole. Thus, I wasn't especially surprised to see him acting like an asshole, slamming bloggers and the dread "Metropolitan Opera wing" of the Democratic Party. It was a bit surprising to learn that he's a John Edwards advisor. It seems odd to have one of your aides out there insulting a bunch of people who've treated you well.
Madeleine Albright just walked right in to one of my pet peeves, calling for the United States to adhere to a moderate (i.e., neither isolationist nor imperial) foreign policy, and then sets it up with the old "consider Harry Truman." Frankly, I think people should consider spending less time considering Harry Truman.
If there's some very specific thing Truman did that you want to do again, that's great, but overwhelmingly the only point Truman-invokers are making is that they want a foreign policy that's not too hot and also not too cold. This is nice, of course, and Goldilocks agrees, but it's really not an especially deep point or one that carries a ton of analytic bite.
It's telling, for example, that Peter Beinart was able to maintain his "liberals should emulate Truman" message in both his pro- and anti- phases on the Iraq War. Realistically, all we're seeing there is that "position yourself somewhere between two extremes" covers an extremely broad range of positions. I'm sure that Charles Krauthammer believes he, too, is inhabiting a wise middle ground in some sense. After all, he's not like Ann Coulter who wants to convert all Muslims to Christianity.
More substantively, Madeleine Albright mostly said things that I think are true but also a bit banal (Bush has squandered American power, China's rise, Iran's rise, we've "paid for mistakes in Iraq," "Iraq has made everything harder," UN reform is good, but it's difficult) but waded into riskier waters with a forthright defense of the view that we should be backing democratic reform -- elections -- in the Arab world. Crucially, she conceded that "if Arab democracy develops, it will be to advance Arab interests" as understood from an Arab perspective and, in particular, there's no reason to expect elections to "soften attitudes toward Israel."
She didn't follow that up with much in the way of saying how we should be doing those things. Shadi Hamid, for example, thinks the congress should make aid to Egypt conditional on reform. I see some strong arguments on both sides of that issue, and it'd be interesting to hear more people weigh-in on it, since it seems to me that this is certainly the most obvious lever to use if one were to want to put something more than rhetoric behind the idea of Arab reform.
Damon Linker writing in The New Republic has an odd take on Richard Rorty's influence on the development of liberalism. Linker accuses Rorty of "implying that every outlook but his own inevitably clashes with liberal politics" and of therefore coming "perilously close to transforming liberalism into a monistic philosophy--a comprehensive doctrine to which all liberal citizens must pledge absolute allegiance." Curiously, Linker doesn't quote any writing by Rorty that carry this implication.
He then recommends as an alternative "less dogmatic philosophies of liberalism--those found in the essays of Isaiah Berlin, in the later writings of John Rawls, and even in the books of conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott," people who "defended a form of liberalism that Rawls called 'political, not metaphysical.'" The thing is that this is exactly what Rorty thinks. His essay on "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy" (see also this) is an explicit defense of later Rawls against critics who maintain that he needs deeper philosophical foundations.
I totally understand the need to provide a patina of bipartisanship, but it strikes me as a big mistake for the American Progress / Century Foundation event to feature Gordon Smith as a speaker. When someone like Chuck Hagel plays this role you say to yourself "he's from Nebraska, you've got to take what you can get." But Smith's from Oregon, he's got an eminently winnable seat. The last thing progressives need to be doing is helping him bolster his moderate credentials ("we need more leaders like Gordon Smith," says the woman from CAP who's introducing him).
Writing about Democrats' tendency to want to shoehorn energy policy issues into discussion of national security, Ezra says he "can't quite decide if the subject is acting in a complementary way to a straight national security policy, or serving as a substitute for an issue Democrats are still uncomfortable talking about."
The correct answer is that it's serving as a substitute for an issue Democrats are still uncomfortable talking about. Global warming is an extremely important issue for the country. It's potentially a favorable issue for the Democratic Party. But when people say they want to hear from Democrats about foreign policy, they're saying they want to hear a message about war and peace. The trouble is that you can't articulate a clear theory about war and peace that doesn't provide a clear conclusion about Iraq. And reaching a clear conclusion about Iraq would involve confronting the large number of Democratic elites who backed the war.
People on both sides of that divide, however, have been very interested in sort of covering up the breach and having everyone play together nicely. And party unity is a good thing. But you're never going to have a clear, forceful message on the core foreign policy issues unless you're willing to take a stand on preventive war, on democratization by invasion, etc.
Is it even worth recommending E.J. Dionne columns? People should be reading him anyway. But if you're not already a regular follower, read this one on "political hypochondriacs" who like to blame "the system" when legislation they want doesn't pass:
It's all nonsense, but it is not harmless nonsense. The tendency to blame the system is a convenient way of leaving no one accountable. Those who offer this argument can sound sage without having to grapple with the specifics of any piece of legislation. There is the unspoken assumption that wisdom always lies in the political middle, no matter how unsavory the recipe served up by a given group of self-proclaimed centrists might be.
Indeed. It's just too bad that convention prevents Dionne from specifically calling out his colleague Dan Balz, whose commentary on the immigration is the perfect illustration of the dynamic he's complaining about.
The only innocent in the show that I remember (who can forget her?) is Tracee, the young, unsiliconed, and doomed stripper; and the only pure villain, beside whom even that cocksucker Leotardo looks complicated, is Livia Soprano, the demon-mother who sets the saga in motion but is its least explored figure. Otherwise there are no heroes and no villains: there are good people who sometimes do bad things and bad people who sometimes do good things.
I think this "ooo, shades of gray!" reading of the show was natural, initially, but would have made for an extremely trite show were it to continue for seasons and seasons. By the end, I think it's clear that this is all backwards -- for the core characters, at least, there's no gray at all. These are bad people. Evil people, really. Not just people who do bad things. But people who do bad things, confront the fact that the things they're doing are bad, semi-seriously wrestle with the idea of not doing them anymore, and then deciding to keep on doing them.
What's true is that at the same time as these are evil characters, they're also complicated characters -- characters with real depth, real feelings, real idiosyncrasies, and even some real virtues. The show makes us confront our own voyeuristic fascination with them, and it also makes us sympathize with them. We sympathize, however, not because they aren't bad people, but because we aren't bad people and bad as the bad people may be, they're still people and we, as good people, recognize a common thread of shared humanity between us. The fact that Tony Soprano isn't a cartoonish villain doesn't mean he's not a villain.
Damon Linker was kind enough to send a response to my doubts about his take on Richard Rorty. You'll find it below the fold. I'll write some more about this later, but for now here's Linker:
Zbigniew Brzezinski at the conference says the US and Israel should try to put their demands for Iranian disarmament in the context of support for a regional nuclear-free zone (i.e., Israeli nuclear disarmament). After all, he says, if we're supposed to believe that Israel's nuclear arsenal isn't a sufficient deterrent to ensure Israeli security in the face of Iran's nuclear program, then it obviously isn't a very valuable asset.
This sounds smart to me. The odds that nothing would come of such a proposal a pretty high, but even if nothing comes of it, calling the Iranian bluff in this regard would be valuable and it would help reframe the issue, regionally and globally, in a useful way.
Jonah Goldberg's for it, Sara Mead's against it. I bet you can guess whose side I'm on. Sample: "Goldberg comes to this conclusion based on the Washington Post's recent series focusing on the horrible state of the District of Columbia Public Schools--which is sort of like concluding we should abolish the U.S. military because of the Abu Ghraib scandal." Indeed.
It's all over the internet already, but it really does look like some Albanian steals Bush's watch here:
At about 0:50 seconds, you can see a watch on Bush's wrist. Then his wrist is obscured for a bit because he's shaking hands and then when you next see the wrist, there's no watch.
Fun fact: I realized recently that most older people don't realize that these days few young people wear watches because we're all used to checking the time on our cell phones.
A person affiliated with a rival campaign directed my attention to this Ted Koppel commentary on NPR in which he observes:
I ran into an old source the other day who held a senior position at the Pentagon until his retirement. He occasionally briefs Senator Clinton on the situation in the Gulf. She told him that if she were elected president and then re-elected four years later she would still expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq at the end of her second term.
I find that the tendency when I talk to people leaning in a Clintonish direction is that they express confidence, as Clinton herself does in the debates, that all of the Democrats will, if elected, move rapidly to end the war. If anything, I think the stronger argument for Clinton is the reverse -- that while she seems disinclined to really end the war, it's not clear that her main rivals are inclined to do so either. Neither Edwards nor Obama has, after all, exactly come out swinging against Clinton on Iraq in a forward looking sense. There have been some indications that Clinton's envisioned "residual" force would be bigger than what other candidates have in mind, but her main rivals haven't argued this explicitly.
With regard to the Middle East nuclear free zone, Kevin Drum's quite right that for the US to unilaterally propose this only to have the Israelis reject it would be counterproductive. What I believe Brzezinski was saying is that Israel would serve its own interests well by being open to the establishment of a region-wide nuclear free zone, were such a zone to be implemented in a verifiable way.
The point is that Israel would be better off with a nuclear free Middle East than with a Middle East featuring many nuclear powers and that the odds of maintaining Israel's sole possession of a nuclear arsenal are poor over the long run.
Good line: "Rudy Giuliani has been married more times than Mitt Romney’s been hunting." Quite so. What's more, I can honestly say that I've been hunting more times (i.e., once) than I've been married. Back in my Camp Winnebago days I was even a pretty good target shooter.
I should probably say something more substantive about it and, in fact, plan to do so tomorrow. For now, though, let me just note that my diavlog with Ramesh Ponnuru is online and that he's damn reasonable for a conservative, justifying my contention last week in an off-the-record email discussion that we should seek to replace all currently existing conservative pundits with Ramesh Ponnuru.
Well, nearly so at any rate. It was a very close game, but at 3-0 it's certainly not a close series. As a result, the ongoing ratings catastrophe is sure to get worse. At this point, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that game four amounts to must-see TV. I'll watch since unless something dramatic changes I've got nothing better to do, but it's not exactly gripping drama at this point.
In both his initial article on Richard Rorty and in his reponse to my original criticism posted on this blog, I continue to feel as if Linker is misreading Rorty, John Rawls, or both. Linker says we should be Rawls-style "political liberals" whose liberalism isn't intrinsically tied to any comprehensive metaphysical (or, in Rorty's case, anti-metaphysical) view and that this vision is preferable to Rorty's. I say -- and, crucially, Rorty says -- that this is Rorty's vision.
Over at Atrios' place I see Bob Shrum observed that "The blogosphere was a lot more right about Iraq than all the experts in the Democratic party." This is a nice thing to say to bloggers, but in important ways it's not really true. After all, lots of progressive bloggers (your truly, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, I'm sure there are more) got this wrong. And, at the same time, it's just not the case that all the experts got Iraq wrong. What happened was that all the experts the Democratic Party leadership listened to were wrong. Plenty of other, non-obscure voices were around, but the leading figures in the party decided not to listen to them.
This is possibly one good way of getting into the difficult question of assessing the Democratic contenders' foreign policy differences. As I said to Ramesh it's my sense that Barack Obama would probably appoint a sounder team, but I've found it difficult to articulate what's driving that sense. After some chit-chat at yesterday's conference, the basic shape of it comes clear. Basically, left-of-center foreign policy professionals who opposed the Iraq War felt very alienated by the party leadership's embrace of the war back in 2002-2003. Since Obama opposed the war, and since Obama entered the Senate as a celebrity figure interested in foreign policy, those people have tended to cluster around him. Conversely, the left-of-center foreign policy professionals who won the argument in 2002-2003 tend to find themselves in Clinton's orbit and see boat-rocking as a bad thing. The Edwards situation is less clear to me.
Now, since the next president isn't going to hop back into a time machine and redo things, maybe we don't care about this. The point, however, is that the division over the war has a kind of institutional legacy in terms of what kind of people are likely to influential in one administration versus the other.
Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was only released three weeks ago, told Der Spiegel that he had travelled with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish citizen, to Mogadishu in December. He says that after the Ethiopian troops invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia and US soldiers and sent to the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
Awad claims that they were held on a military base and interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time or longer, and were not given access to a lawyer. He says that they were accused by the Americans of being al-Qaida fighters. DNA samples were taken and they were questioned about Swedish Muslims. He says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.
Questioned about Swedish Muslims? What did they want to know?
That, however, is the exact same message of June 2004, which failed to reassure anyone. The US's allies in Iraq want the US to stay in force - if not forever, at least for some extended duration. The US's enemies in Iraq - a far more numerous and politically salient force - want the US out expeditiously. Anything that reassures one horrifies the other, leaving US troops caught in the crossfire. The Iraqi political process is meant to provide equilibrium for the complex dynamic of post-occupation, but it has only dragged the country into a zero-sum sectarian contest, with each side inspecting the US's intentions to see which faction it will back.
As the 2004 handover demonstrated, Iraqis are unlikely to be fooled into thinking 40,000-plus US forces stationed indefinitely in the country represents an end to the US presence. Worse, if the idea is to either protect Iraqis from a slide into chaos or safeguard enduring US interests - be it preventing genocide or fighting al-Qaida or keeping the oil flowing - then keeping only 40,000 troops in Iraq is senseless. As Major General Joseph Fil commented to Ricks: "My nightmare - the thing that keeps me up at night - is a failure of Iraqi security forces, somehow, catastrophically, mixed with a major Samarra mosque-type catastrophe." Leaving the Iraqi security forces aside, another huge sectarian provocation is guaranteed. In 2009, US commanders of a post-occupation force will find themselves powerless to deal with it. At that point, US troops will be little more than a constabulary force to keep the Iraqi politicians who failed to avert the crisis - and probably contributed to it - alive.
Right. We don't have 160,000 troops in Iraq right now because that's somehow a convenient or expedient thing for us to be doing. The plan never called for that many forces to be in the country. Rather, the US ideal is a much smaller force along the lines of the Democrats' "residual" or the Bush administration's "post-occupation" force. The trouble is that 40-50,000 troops turns out to be far too few to exercise meaningful control in Iraq. At the same time, it's far too many troops to credibly wash our hands of things. 50,000 troops indicates a commitment to controlling the situation, but 50,000 troops is too few to control the situation, so why not surge another division in? Meanwhile Iraqis opposed to a US occupation (i.e., the vast majority of Iraqis) will still feel occupied, and the fact that the troop presence will have the imprimateur of the Iraqi government will do more to discredit that government than to legitimate the presence.
To me this sounded like one of the worst TV show premises ever. But the first was pretty intriguing. Certainly intriguing enough that, given that I already subscribe to HBO, I'll watch the second episode. I could totally see this show sucking after two or three episodes, since TV built around a Central Mystery isn't normally my cup of tea, but the pilot was very well-executed so I'll give them some benefit of the doubt. What's more, the whole first episode's available online.
Word to the wise -- no fan of woman-fronted Canadian indie rock's record collection will be complete without Tegan & Sara's The Con. Given my general inclinations, I don't understand why it took me until last week to get my hands on So Jealous, but their both great. "Hop a Plane" on the new record wins bonus points for incorporating a "Clash City Rockers" riff into the beginning.
Filterobserved that that track and the preceding one ("Back in Your Head") "are a little bit poppier and carefree-er, but we're probably not likely to hear them at baseball games, like we did 'Walking With a Ghost.'" This is probably true insofar as any particular song is extremely unlikely to get played at baseball games, but I'd say that "Hop" is definitely poppier than anything on So Jealous.
In case you were wondering whether Republicans will really turn against the war if there's not progress by September, note that we're actually in the midst of witnessing significant regress. Drum and Rosenfeld lay it out, but American casualties are up, the Iraqi government hasn't met any of its political benchmarks, and the Pentagon is now raising estimates of the number of Iraqi security forces that need to be trained.
Back in the 1940s, US Army advice to American soldiers included "There are also political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won't help matters any by getting mixed up in them." More in PDF form. Via Danger Room and Robert Farley.
Okay, here's another reply from Damon Linker on Rorty and Rawls below the fold. I think I'll let it drop after this since Linker and I don't really disagree on the core point; we're reduced to an exegetical argument about Rorty and since I don't have any copies of Rorty's books in DC that seems like a bad kind of argument to have. I thought, however, that I might also link to Ross's post on the subject.
New website lets Hill staffers (and only Hill staffers, you need the right kind of IP address) post anonymously to a message board for all the world to read. Potentially an interesting resource, though at the moment there's not much up there.
Progressives are not so much appalled by Libby's lies as they are frustrated that this is all they have: Libby and only Libby. Left with only this, they want this small victory unspoiled. They want someone to pay.
But if the President pardons Libby, and by this act makes the case his own, he will have picked up a portion of the cost. Libby will fall back, restored to obscurity. Bush will step forward and take the lead role. He will have to explain himself; he will have to answer questions.
That seems true enough to me, if a bit bank-shottish. Indeed, this is exactly why I think most people think Libby will be pardoned, if at all, during the lame duck phase of the Bush presidency. But there's the rub -- if Libby's in jail, then Libby's the villain. If Bush springs Libby, then he's officially sanctioning involvement in a coverup, and he becomes the villain, which is as things should be.
Good to know. Rudy Giuliani says he doesn't need an Iraq policy because "that’s in the hands of other people." This as part of his response to the question of why he didn't include anything about Iraq in his "twelve commitments." Greg Sargent correctly wonders if the media really intends "to let Rudy skate by with such answers?"
The answer is: probably! Giuliani has, for example, tended to get a free pass on his effort to position himself as an immigration restrictionist. He's achieved that positioning by opposing the immigration compromise and saying his opposition is grounded in the fact that its ID measures are insufficiently stringent. Be that as it may, when he was mayor of New York City he went as far as legally possible to create a citywide amnesty zone and even went to court to push the legal boundaries further. The press, however, doesn't seem to care about this.
And, of course, for years now they've been pushing the idea that Giuliani has credibility on national security issues even though he has no experience with foreign policy or military issues. So from his perspective, why shouldn't he get away with not having answers to Iraq questions.
This is definitely true. If you're working for a presidential campaign, you'd be well advised to very strictly avoid blogging unless you're putting the campaign's official message out.
Is it possible that American desires for a large, semi-permanent military presence in Iraq have something to do with a desire to maintain leverage over Iraq's oil policy? Nah, that's impossible.
John McCain's campaign has put together this video of Mitt Romney, apparently still pro-choice, some six months after his alleged conversion to the anti-choice cause:
The pro-Romney spin here is that he was just sticking with his 2002 campaign promise not to change the state's abortion laws. In short, he didn't want to flip-flop. But the problem with this defense is that the Romney campaign's story is that he did in fact flip-flop back in 2004.
The situation in the Palestinian territories has really deteriorated to a level of awfulness that I really don't know what to say. I suppose I do wonder why the Bush administration, having underestimated Hamas' electoral strength, then went about implementing a post-election policy that was based on underestimating their military strength. I think I should have linked to this Daniel Levy post yesterday back when it was still more prescient than poignant:
Given the apparent rigid opposition of the Bush administration to a political compromise between Fatah and Hamas, its rejection of the Mecca deal, and the embargo on the Unity Government -- it is apparently safe to assume that the second option was rejected. However, the first option, even ignoring considerations of the desirability or ethics of such an approach, simply makes no sense in the Gaza context. Currently Hamas clearly has the upper hand militarily, and that was predictable. But even if Fatah were in a stronger position, a military victory, if at all possible, would likely have come at a massive price in human terms but also in terms of social disintegration, and a likely after-effect of increased radicalization. So the US was encouraging a military confrontation that its favorite could not win, and was further muddying what would anyway have been a very difficult political accommodation.
It's hard to see this as much of a win for Israel, either. This turn of events could be used as a pretext for reoccupying Gaza, but there's nothing Israel wants there and the settlers have already been removed.
It seems that the newest bad energy fad is taking congress by storm as "top Democrats were circulating a proposal to provide $10 billion in loans for plants that make diesel fuel from coal" as part of a larger energy bill. The problem with using liquid coal as a fuel is that even if it didn't require subsidies it would still be worse for the environment than all kinds of alternatives. Subsidizing it is just terrible. The good news is that Brian Beutler says Harry Reid will oppose this nonsense and he doubts it'll go through.
It was also good to see at the national security conference earlier this week that the message about the trouble with slogans about "energy independence" is breaking through. They had one panel on energy policy during which nobody used the term. A questioner asked why nobody had used the term, and everyone was unanimous in the view that it's become a pernicious concept. There's a problem with over-reliance on dirty fossil fuels, not with over-reliance on "foreign energy" as such.
If you don't know what that headline means, or why you should care about it, you really need to read Kevin Drum's explanation. It's probably the most undercovered issue in American politics today.
Whack-a-mole approach to Iraq note working. Good for The Washington Post for laying things out so clearly right here in the lede:
Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.
The surge, as you'll recall, was launched amidst a tide of praise for General David Petraeus, warrior intellectual and student of all things counterinsurgency, who was to be put in charge of the enterprise. All of Petraeus' work on the subject of counterinsurgency, however, along with the things he himself was saying somewhat subtly, all pointed toward the conclusion that peace in Iraq required not a "surge" but political reconciliation between a sufficiently large set of Iraqi factions as to represent the overwhelming majority of Iraqis. The "surge" was, in some vague way, supposed to facilitate that, which it hasn't, it was never a realistic method of securing the country on its own, which is why it hasn't worked.
Amidst all the sturm und drang of the Iraq debate, one thing both parties were able to agree on was the need to create a series of "benchmarks" for the Iraqi government to see if we're making progress toward realistic goals. The National Security Network, an underrated newish outfit, is doing us the favor of trying to measure the benchmarks in a series of reports. The first one looked at Iraqi security forces:
Incredibly, it has been 707 days since President Bush first declared that, “As Iraqis Stand Up, We Will Stand Down.” Now, almost two years later, the Administration is still making the training of Iraqi security forces a key component of its escalation plan. Unfortunately, Iraqi security forces are still incapable of providing security. In fact, because of their poor performance and lack of manpower, the President’s Baghdad Security Plan is already far behind schedule. Meanwhile, these forces cannot be trusted to enforce the law fairly. Numerous times, trained Iraqis have turned against American forces or taken part in sectarian violence. Put simply, on this front the Administration is failing to meet its benchmarks for success and there is little sign that progress is likely.
In May of 2003, the Bush Administration enacted ill-conceived de-Baathification laws, which alienated the Sunni population, fomented sectarian divisions and established a recruitment pool for insurgents. Repealing the harsh de-Baathification laws is absolutely critical to bringing Sunnis back into the political fold in Iraq and achieving reconciliation. It has been more than a year since President Bush declared progress on this front and yet there is still no agreement. The latest attempt to amend the law was thwarted this spring by Ahmed Chalabi, a former ally of neo-conservatives, who and used his position as head of the de-Baathification Commission to build opposition and block the legislation. With Iraq’s government still in gridlock, progress in the near future appears unlikely.
Ezra Klein gets serious about liberal hawks and Iran:
Insofar as Iran is a serious foreign policy issue -- and it is! -- those who pride themselves on their seriousness in such matters should be honest in offering their answers. The "dovish" view is that a military campaign against Iran would be a seriously bad idea. It is a view shared by many generals, most foreign policy experts, and, according to some reports, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Liberal hawks seem to dispute that conclusion, but won't quite say why. The danger of Iraq, it turns out, is not that too many liberals overlearned its lessons, but that too many liberals didn't learn them at all -- and instead have merely become more circumspect in their saber-rattling.
One point I was discussing with a few other people the other day is that we need to understand one of the costs of the continuing US military presence in Iraq as constantly posing a small-but-real risk of war with Iran. It's one thing to have such chilly relations with a country on the other side of the world, and another thing entirely to have the kind of poor relationship we have with Iran while simultaneously maintaining a huge military presence right next door. It creates a situation where screwups or confusion on the part of relatively low-level members of either nation's military and intelligence apparatus could easily lead to an "incident" that hot-heads in either government would exploit.
Bob Wright points out to me that our very first BloggingHeads.tv diavlog took place shortly in the aftermath of Hamas' electoral victory. He was a Hamas optimist (Hamastimist?) who saw this as, finally, an opportunity for Israel to negotiate with a government that was actually capable of controlling anti-Israel violence and thus being held accountable for a failure to do the same. I was more pessimistic and thought that the Israeli government would primarily see this as an opportunity to secure international diplomatic support for continuing a no negotiations posture. Predictions are rarely perfect, but I think I came out pretty well on this point.
Have I really not recommended The National's new album, Boxer, yet? Unlike some albums I enjoy because they're exactly the sort of album I'm usually into, The National is more the kind of band that a bunch of my friends would love and I'd be kind of unimpressed by. But I really like this one. Alligator had, I thought, two great tracks ("Secret Meeting" and "Looking for Astronauts") but this new one is all good.
They also appear to have posted a whole bunch of videos right here, though I've only had the time to look at one, so maybe that page sucks. But then again, maybe it doesn't. What do you really have to lose?
Hillary Clinton's crushing her primary rivals among woman voters, but fares no better than past male Democratic nominees or her male primary rivals among women in general election trial heat polls. I don't totally understand that dynamic, but I think it clearly deserves more scrutiny. My friend Dana Goldstein's done a great piece on progress women's love for Clinton, but it doesn't give much sense of why this appeal doesn't carry over at all to independents or moderates.
UPDATE: To be clear, it's not surprising why Clinton would do better with Democratic women than with independent women -- that's because she's a Democrat. What is surprising is that, all else being equal, she does better than other Democrats with Democratic women -- seemingly because she's a woman -- but does no better than male Democrats do with independent women.
Jon Chait makes short work of the argument that if you think it's sometimes a good idea to intervene to stop genocide, then you must be a hypocrite unless you support the indefinite continuation of a fruitless war in Iraq.
Democrats complain about "income inequality", and at the same time
support importing a bunch of low skilled/low wage workers into the
US. Huh?
Look, that's moronic. It's obviously possible to both believe that something is a problem and also to not support every conceivable initiative to ameliorate it. I, for example, think it's a problem that the streets in American cities are so dirty. I don't, however, think that we should execute people for littering. Nor do I think we should import Mauritanian slaves to clean the streets. What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans are solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite.
By contrast, what really is baffling is the strain of conservative thinking which holds that income inequality isn't a problem but that then turns around and cites inequality as a reason to curb immigration. There's nothing hypocritical about rejecting certain solutions to certain problems, but it doesn't make any sense to propose a solution to something you don't think is a problem.
UPDATE: To be clear that I'm not dealing with a straw restrictionist here, Mickey Kaus is both the author of a book about why we shouldn't care about income inequality and a passionate defender of the view that we should restrict immigration to curb income inequality.
I'm something of a Fantastic Four apologist, but I really can't believe they're doing midnight showings of Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. I think I'm the only person I know who doesn't consider the original to have been absolutely horrible, and even I think it only achieved mediocrity thanks to my very low expectations going in.
I wasn't really as blown away by John Edwards health care as some others I know (it was good, though) but this here is a real game-changer:
Edwards' plan would remove long-term patents for companies that develop breakthrough drugs and then reap large profits because of the monopolies those patents provide, according to a statement by Edwards obtained Wednesday evening.
Edwards said offering cash incentives instead would allow multiple companies to produce those drugs and drive down prices.
That's an idea that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Obviously, the details matter, but competent people can work out appropriate details -- what Edwards is giving us here is the political leadership necessary to start putting details on the table. Realistically, this goes in the "unlikely to happen" file anyway, so they details sort of don't matter (sort of), but fortunately there are a whole variety of ways a president sensitive to the perversity of the current intellectual property status of pharmaceuticals could make things better.
Catherine Andrews recommendsWashingtonian's guide to "dining out in U Street and Shaw" which includes the hilarious assertion "$30 or less." This is true in the same kind of way that "grass is green or Bush is a great president" is true rather than the sense in which you might realistically spend $30 there. If you got two chili half smokes (both come with potato chips), plus an order of chili cheese fries, plus two large sodas, plus two slices of cake, that comes to $24.80 and you'd almost certainly die if you ate all that.
Also, the review falsely states that Ben's "is best known for its chili dog and chili burger" and doesn't even mention the chili half-smoke which is actually what it's best known for, and contains the odd assertion that "Ben's is at its best at breakfast." On the contrary, Ben's is at its best when you're drunk off your ass. For an old-school U Street breakfast, go to the Florida Avenue Grill.
Photo by Flickr user Josh Thompson used under a Creative Commons license
If you want to learn more about the US role in promoting Fatah-Hamas warfare, check out Tony Karon. Deliberately initiating a proxy war and then having your proxy lose is really just incredibly shoddy. I've said before that we should hope for a Democratic Party that puts something better on the table than superior implementation of a Bush-esque worldview, but it really would be nice to see some better implementation.
A few weeks back I was talking to an adviser to one of our Democratic campaigns who was making an observation about the narrow focus of our political debate at any given time. Right now, we've very concerned with Iraq. We're also pretty concerned with events in some countries near Iraq -- Iran, Israel, Egypt, etc. These related issues form a kind of rough-and-ready political spectrum that we understand and can refer to in convenient shorthand.
But it's a big world out there. Today, I read Rick Perlstein's long article on China and also Gary Schmitt's brief op-ed on the subject. I also recently read a long James Fallows article about China in The Atlantic. What's striking is that though Rick and Schmitt are definitely saying different things, the lefty historian and the former PNACster also have a great deal in common -- a common sense that the country is in the grips of an establishment (one that includes me and, quite possibly, Jim Fallows) of dupes caught in the grips of an unduly benign view of China and its rise.
At any rate, if we're fortunate as a nation, the current series of blunders in the Gulf region will come to an end at some point, and China-related issues will start looming much larger. At that point, you can probably expect to see a lot of things configure themselves in different ways from how they are at the moment.
All this talk of reseeding the playoffs thanks to the West's superiority seems a bit premature to me. Let's review some history:
1996 Finals winner: Chicago (East) 1997 Finals winner: Chicago (East) 1998 Finals winner: Chicago (East) 1999 Finals winner: San Antonio (West) 2000 Finals winner: Los Angeles (West) 2001 Finals winner: Los Angeles (West) 2002 Finals winner: Los Angeles (West) 2003 Finals winner: San Antonio (West) 2004 Finals winner: Detriot (East) 2005 Finals winner: San Antonio (West) 2006 Finals winner: Miami (East)
There's nothing about the present day that seems unusually imbalanced. Indeed strictly in terms of the finals the current era seems unusually balanced, rather than the reverse. I'm not dogmatically opposed to shaking things up, but the system doesn't seem especially broken.
Former (and quite skilled) Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson laments the demise of the centrist political tradition he says Bill Clinton and George W. Bush shared. James Fallows isn't buying it:
natural path for people leaving an Administration is to angle for inclusion in the Council of Elders, the DC permanent-pundit class who spend the following decades wringing their hands about how much nastier and less public-spirited politics is now than the olden days. Politics is plenty nasty now. But is interesting, to put it mildly, to hear one of the Bush Administration’s main rhetoricians locate the lost golden age at 1992 and 2000. Sentences like this, from the Post column, are written as applications for the Council: “The abandonment of Bushism and Clintonism is also leaving many Americans ideologically homeless.” So is a title like this: “Two Parties Fleeing the Center.” Moral equivalence indeed! It would be convenient to think that Bush is a conciliator, whose ideal of harmony is sadly being ignored by the squabbling midgets who hope to succeed him. But donnez moi un break: you know, we’ve been reading the papers these last six and a half years.
Of course, reading the papers might be the problem on some level, since they're the ones who spent years painting notions like "let's not wage speculative wars against countries that haven't attacked us or our allies" as fringe left-wing ideas barely fit for serious discussion.
There's not much to say about the San Antonio Spurs at this point, but it is worth taking a moment to savor how difficult it is to win four championships in nine years with today's rules. On top of that, they've consistently done it from the tougher conference and show no particular sign of relenting.
Photo by Flickr user Compujeramey used under a Creative Commons license
WIth the benefit of follow-up reporting from Ezra Klein, John Edwards' plan to establish prizes for pharmaceutical research turns out to be less awesomely radical than it at first appeared:
This was muddled in their fact sheet and much of the initial reporting, but this program is not, in any way, a replacement for the current system of patents. It does not, in any way, change the way patents are awarded, or how long they last, or who can apply for them. Rather, it creates a separate and parallel track, a pilot program of sorts, wherein a committee would identify diseases and conditions that would benefit from alternative incentives for innovation, and offer prize money as the reward.
This revised plan is wildly less ambitious than it had appeared. What's not clear to me is whether companies who invent drugs under this "prize track" would need to forgo a patent in exchange for the prize. If not, this is a mildly useful way to encourage the development of drugs whose market potential isn't so hot (malaria treatment, say). If the answer is yes, by contrast, then this turns into a neat pilot program that, if successful, could come to supplant the current development model.
UPDATE: Factsheet (PDF) kind of buries the lede in my view (everyone's for this other stuff that comes before it in the document) but makes it clear that the answer is yes. There's also stuff in there about efforts to combat "everygreening" and other abusing patent practices. All in all, very strong, and readers know how I love intellectual property reform.
Photo by Flickr user Janet Calcaterra used under a Creative Commons license
I like to think of Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes as locked in a perpetual struggle for the title of "America's worst pundit." Brian Beutler, however, views Bill Kriston as the country's "most dangerous" pundit on the grounds that he "has what seems like a mainline to the White House and yet, of all his colleagues, he is the most casually dishonest, the most outwardly war-hungry, and the most recklessly illogical." Beutler cites the following as an example:
Real progress has already been made in the war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, and the terrorists know it.That's why they're surging against our surge, and why they are attempting to convince us that we have lost when it is they who are losing.
Also: War is awesome. Indeed, Kristol is like a horrifying right-pundit Chimera fusing together the worst aspects of Krauthammer and Barnes, but adding in a strain of raw cleverness that elevates -- and yet denigrates -- the resulting punditry from banal categories like "worst" to more exalted realms of "dangerousness."
Ezra Klein explains a bit about its rise from the dead: "The key is a pay-to-play structure, in which precisely 22 amendments will be offered, and every Senator who offers an amendment agrees to vote for cloture in return. This, theoretically, will get the bill through cloture -- and Reid and McConnell wouldn't be bringing it back if they believed it would fail a second (well, technically, a fifth) time." I'm fine with the bill, as amended by Byron Dorgan to sunset the guest worker provisions. Of course, for those of us who are neither deeply opposed to anything including an amnesty, nor committed to an amnesty above all else, the bill that matters will be the one that emerges from the inevitable House-Senate conference committee.
Time runs a story lauding California Republican Arnold Schwarzennegger and New York City Republican Michael Bloomberg, "Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger: The New Action Heroes". Jonah Goldberg smells liberal media bias. I mean, I know the guy's a hack, but I think my alternate hypothesis -- lavish praise of moderate Republicans indicates a center-right bias in favor of the moderately conservative -- has a certain Occam's Razorish quality to it.
On a related but less serious note, Bill Richardson was quoted saying the following about negotiating with North Korea: "Their U.N. guy calls. His name is Ambassador Kim. K-I-M. They're all named Kim." A tip for future presidential candidates: It's never a good idea to say "They're all named ____" about any ethnic group.
I'm not one to rant and rave about political correctness out of control, but this is political correctness out of control! If you've ever tried to learn about anything Korea-related, as an American, one thing that happens is you rapidly become confused about who's who because, well, it's actually the case that an incredibly large proportion of Koreans are named "Kim." Specifically, of the nine members of the DPRK cabinet, eight are named Kim. Wikipedia says that twenty percent of South Koreans are named "Kim." It makes telling anecdotes about one's interactions with Korean officials somewhat confusing in a funny kind of war.
UPDATE: As you should be able to see at the link, it's four not eight Kims out of the nine DPRK cabinet members. I have no idea how I made that mistake. Apologies.
Reihan Salam notes that by some odd coincidence David Brooks and Paul Krugman both wrote their columns about height. What's more, they both live delightfully up to stereotype. The subject of Krugman's column is that Europeans used to be shorter than Americans, because they were poorer. Nowadays, though, Europeans are (mostly) taller than we (even when you control for race and hispanictude) thanks, it seems, to Europe's beneficent socialism.
In Brooksland, however, none of this matters, because he's looking forward to the genetically engineered super-children of tomorrow who'll all be as tall as you like. Ultimately, I think Brooks' more optimistic perspective exemplifies the qualities that have led to conservative political dominance. Voters, I think, don't like this whinging style -- "oh, sure, you think we've got it good, but they're so much taller in the Netherlands" -- and much prefer to hear can-do spirit "science will make us huge!" The thing of it is that the standard liberal points almost always can be phrased in an optimistic forward-looking manner ("the Krugman Five Point Plan for Increased Stature") and, I think, we should endeavor to do so.
I'm struggling to explain why I find this video so entrancing, but it seems to me to have perfectly welded together various visual cliches from the alt-rock hits of yore.
Swapping Juwon Howard for Mike James seems eminently sensible, though obviously at this point the Timberwolves are well beyond the point where deals of this sort are in any real way relevant to their situation.
The American Propsectexcerpts a bit from Tara McKelvey's new book Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:
Seventy to ninety percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, according to an October 2003 International Committee of the Red Cross report and sworn statements made by members of the 470th Military Intelligence Group, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, and the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, were arrested by mistake or had no intelligence value.
Provance met one of the prisoners who seemed to be there for the wrong reason. "They got him to the point where he was naked, shivering, and covered in mud and then showed him to his father. That's what broke [General Zabar] down after a 14-hour interrogation," says Provance. "He said, 'I'll tell you anything.'"
"It struck me as morally reprehensible," Provance says.
In November, he says, he overheard a conversation in the dining hall at Camp Victory. One soldier told his friends at a cafeteria table how detainees were being treated in Abu Ghraib. "They would hit the detainees as practice shots…The detainees would plead for mercy," according to Provance's sworn statement in Major General Antonio Taguba's March 2004 report on military abuse, "Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade."
"The whole table was howling with laughing," Provance tells me.
Tom Edsall reports that "Key leaders in the rapidly growing Latino evangelical community" mad as hell about conservative unwillingness to embrace a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants residing in the United States. And, of course, this political dynamic only gets worse for Republicans if some form of amnesty does pass at some point (possibly in the very near future) since that would expand the number of Hispanic voters and one would expect amnest-ied Latinos to be extremely enthusiastic about the politicians who helped them out.
Justin Logan seems to see growing British disenchantment with the "do what America wants" approach to foreign policy, but the Anatole Kaletsky column to which he links seems to demonstrate the reverse:
When Gordon Brown returned from his fact-finding tour of Iraq on Monday, he proclaimed the importance of learning from our mistakes but also of looking forward instead of backward. Did this admission hint at a shift in Britain’s foreign policy when Mr Brown takes over in ten days’ time? To judge by the announcement he made in the next sentence – a restructuring of the British security apparatus to guard against future intelligence failures such as the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction – the answer is “no”. Mr Brown’s foreign policy will remain as backward-looking and self-deluding as Tony Blair’s.
In short, Kaletsky thinks Britain needs a new approach ("breaking publicly with the Bush Administration and trying to develop a genuine European alternative to the suicidal American-led policies, not only in Iraq, but also in Israel, Palestine and Iran") but Gordon Brown is reasonably happy with the status quo. It seems to me that there are strong sociological reasons to think a substantial reorientation of UK foreign policy is unlikely in the short run. At this point, everyone in a commanding position in the UK diplomatic, military, and intelligence apparatus will have essentially spent his entire life implementing a policy of being a loyal ally to the United States and are going to be strongly inclined to belief (not necessarily wrongly) that the current series of disasters are a passing storm that will soon be over.
Now, if by 2009-2010 the US is still pursuing policies that everyone all 'round the world think are crazy (also very possible) then things may well change. The significance of the Bush administration and its initiatives is something we're only going to be able to grasp in retrospect. If his successor substantially changes course, he'll be an outlier. If not, then not.
With civil war breaking out in Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon while the weather Gods give DC a respite from summer humidity in favor of something cooler and more pleasant, why not revisit the Arab Spring of 2005? Here's Charles Krauthammer:
The Bush doctrine, which we have pursued since 9/11, is based on what states do internally. We care about their external actions, but we also care about who makes the decisions. The theory is that non-dictatorial regimes—which represent democratic aspirations and adhere to the democratic principles of the rule of law, protection of minorities, and human rights—are more likely to have normal relations with us.
We have now tested the theory. And just recently we have had the Lebanese revolution, the Egyptian announcement about electoral changes, the Iraqi elections, the Afghan elections. Kuwait has just extended suffrage to women, and Syria has announced, however disingenuously, that they are moving toward legalizing political parties, purging the ruling Baath Party, sponsoring free municipal elections in 2007, and formally endorsing a market economy (Washington Post, May 17). What we have seen in the last six months has been simply astonishing—well, astonishing to the critics. I am pleasantly but not entirely surprised.
Nothing, however, can beat this Jeff Jacoby op-ed, which consists essentially entirely of gloating that's mostly conducted via fake exhortations against gloating.
In the circles I travel in, the analytic point of the Third Way's months-old analysis "The New Rules Economy" and their just released "Middle Class Compact" are very controversial. Roughly speaking, Third Way asserts that middle class families are better off than most progressives say. To me, though, this is all a bit besides the point. When you bore down to policy specifics, Third Way frames the problems in pretty uncontroversial ways. On health care, for example:
Under the old rules, businesses could afford rising wages and generous benefits for their employees. Now they are competing in a global economy, and soaring health care costs have made yesterday’s calculation difficult. In fact, rising health care premiums cut $3,250 a year from the paychecks of average workers. We now have to rein in health care costs and shift some of the burden away from businesses so they can readily increase wages while remaining globally competitive.
Control costs, shift responsibility away from employers. Pretty uncontroversial stuff, if a bit on the timid side. But their actual proposal is this: "Enable small businesses to pool together to purchase insurance for their workers at lower prices." Now, look. I'm on the timid side in terms of what's advisable to propose, and this is just laughable by any standard. For most workers and most employers it just won't change anything. And even for small business owners and employees it doesn't do much. At best, it puts your typical small business in something closer to the position of a large business, which just gets us back to the point that health insurance costs are growing at a frightening pace.
The public's anti-foreign bias is equally pronounced. Most Americans think the economy is seriously damaged by companies sending jobs overseas. Few economists do. People understand that the local hardware store will sell them a better, cheaper hammer than they can make for themselves. Yet they are squeamish about trade with foreigners, and even more so about foreigners who enter their country to do jobs they spurn. Hence the reluctance of Democratic presidential candidates to defend free trade, even when they know it will make most voters better off, and the reluctance of their Republican counterparts to defend George Bush's liberal line on immigration.
It's worth noting, however, that absolutely all of the Democratic candidates are proposing policies that would result in very high levels of foreign trade. Dennis Kucinich has by far the most radical view on this matter and wants us to withdraw from multilateral trade pacts and "go back to bilateral trade conditioned on human rights, workers' rights, and the environment." Such a policy would, it seems, entail essentially unrestricted importation of goods from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan plus maybe a few other places.
And, needless to say, Dennis Kucinich isn't going to be president. The most trade-skeptical positions I've heard outlined suggest either that there should be no new trade deals until a larger welfare state is established, or else that no new trade deals should be signed unless they include rigorous labor and environmental standards. Perhaps this would lead to a situation in which President X presides over an administration that implements no new trade deals whatsoever. Even were that to happen, the US economy would still be substantially more open to foreign imports than it was 15 years ago before NAFTA or the Uruguay Round of GATT.
For that to be the case, either the public must not actually have an especially strong "anti-foreign" bias or else the political system is already highly insensitive to public opinion. Were Caplan's vision of a country at the mercies of irrational voters closer to the mark, surely we should expect a Kucinich boom as he's actually proposing a reduction in the volume of foreign trade.
Young Ezra observes that "One could easily imagine a left win that's closer to the Dobbsian/Christian Democrat compromise of social conservatism with economic progressivism." And, as he says, it's easy to imagine a situation in which politics takes place on an axis between a party of Economist-reading elites and Dobbs-watching populists. Indeed, one often witnesses libertarians imagining just that -- see, e.g., Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies and Brink Lindsey on "liberaltarians."
Fortunately, the modern world actually provides many different examples of mature electoral democracies. I'm not positive about this, but my sense is that a survey of two-party dynamics would indicate that something roughly resembling the American pattern is the rule rather than the exception. In Spain, gay marriage was brought in by the Socialist Party. Labour in Britain is the party of the unions and the party of gay rights and multiculturalism. The Liberals in Canada are opposed by low-tax, traditionalist Conservatives. And so it goes.
Obviously, this would be more a topic for rigorous academic research than a blog post, but my sense of things is that there's some relatively "deep" reason that this configuration of political coalitions is so much more common than the alternative.
Tying together recent threads on prescription drug policy and tradE, here I see PPI's Ed Gresser (PPI is the DLC think tank) making the case that our trade policy needs to change not to become more favorable to the interests of working class Americans, but to become more favorable to the interests of movie studio executives and pharmaceutical company shareholders.
A colleague alerts me to the fact that Tim Armstrong of Rancid has a solo album, "A Poet's Life." MP3s of three tracks "Wake Up", "Hold On", and "Oh No" are available for free on the Epitaph website. It's all sounding disappointingly ska-ish. Spencer Ackerman, who I guess isn't allowed to write about this stuff on TPM Muckraker, remarks "look dude you're not prince buster, write me some fucking punk songs" which reminds me that I don't quite recall what the upshot was of the conversation Andrew, Ross, and I had with James Bennett about the appropriate use of the word "fuck" on an Atlantic-branded blog.
Spencer also offers the view that Rancid's Indestructible is "way underrated" but I think Life Won't Wait is the underrated Rancid album.
Paul Krugman writes about trade, China, and inequality. He says that in the late 1990s he, like most economists, thought the impact of trade on inequality was small. He says that the same models that showed a small impact then, point in the direction of a much larger impact in more recent years (and in the years soon to come), essentially because (to oversimplify a bit) China is so giant. Brad DeLong has his doubts:
But if those goods were to be produced here in the United States, they would be produced with higher-skil labor and with lots of capital. The key question is how has the shift in economic activity created by expanding trade affected the demand for different kinds of labor and capital here in the United States. We have had:
A shrinkage in export and import-competing manufacturing.
A tremendous expansion in construction.
An expansion in consumer services.
I don't see how those shifts significantly reduce the demand for factor of production "labor" and enhance the demand for factor of production "capital." Construction employs lots of capital--but so does tradeable manufacturing. I want to see Leontief input-output matrices for the U.S. before I upweight trade and downweight education, collapsing unions, migration, changing norms, monetary policy, and other factors as more likely to be responsible for the lion's share of the increase in U.S. inequality over the past generation and a half.
I'm no economist, but DeLong and Krugman are partly talking past each other here. DeLong says the lion's share of growth in inequality "over the past generation and a half" are due to non-trading factors. Krugman, however, is talking about very recent events and events that are likely to occur in the near future.
To argue with guys with PhDs, if I were answering a question on the AP Macro test about opening up large-scale trade with a country featuring a huge labor force, I would say it should permit a faster rate of non-inflationary growth than previously existed. 21st century America has seen steady GDP growth but not anything remarkably faster than what took place previously. At the same time, we've seen little-if-any wage growth for most people. This is all related and the economy "should" (in some sense) be growing much faster.
I think that Hollinger is making the assumption (which you have to in an "objective" system) that the quality of play is constant. Otherwise, it devolves into argument about the level of play, which can't be proved, and you wind up with (as I saw on a blog this weekend, referring to the statements you made in a column) someone saying that the Celtics and Lakers of the eighties can't be among the greatest ever because Bird and Magic weren't "athletic" by today's standards -- like they were considered athletic then.
That was my blog. And to be clear, all I was doing was observing that the overall level of athleticism on display in elite 1980s NBA matchups was extremely low by today's standards. The question of how 1986-vintage Larry Bird would fare in the NBA of 2007 is, as Mitt Romney would say, a "null set." If '86 Bird played in today's league, he would train like today's players. All things considered, it does seem to me that it's best to try to avoid making literal comparisons of players (or teams) across eras because it makes things imponderable and irrelevant.
Thus, there's nothing wrong with saying that the '86 Celtics are one of the greatest teams ever -- they dominated the league that year. There's just no real sense in arguing over whether or not the 2007 Spurs could have beaten the '86 Celtics. What we know is that the '86 Celtics performed better in terms of W-L record, point differential, etc. and that the game changed substantially over the 21 years that separate them.
A new outfit composed, basically, of people from the old outfits. Laura Rozen calls it a "shadow government in waiting" and I think she's right -- these are, at a minimum, people who would very much like to have important jobs in a Democratic administration (I mean, they'd take jobs in a GOP administration, but it doesn't look like any of the GOP contenders want to even slightly moderate the level of insanity in current US foreign policy).
I'll note as a first impression that if President X has any sense at all, she won't put anyone even vaguely associated with this project in charge of naming anything -- what they've come up with here is just terrible.
Notwithstanding anything I may have said previously the key thing to know about historical comparisons and the NBA is that you can't listen to Celtics fans on the subject of the 1996 Chicago Bulls. Simmons asks, "who's guarding Shaq on that team? Who's guarding McHale? Who's guarding Kareem? Shawn Kemp destroyed them in the Finals, what do you think those guys would have done?"
Ah, yes. Imagine if the 1996 Bulls had had to face off against Shaquille O'Neal. What would have happened then? Why, it might have looked a little something like the 1996 Eastern Conference Finals in which the Bulls played an Orlando Magic team led by the young Shaq. And in the second round, the Bulls played Patrick Ewing and the Knicks. And in the first round, they played Alonzo Mourning and the Heat. And, yes, Kareem-at-his-prime was better than those guys but it's hardly as if the Bulls only won games because they never faced a quality big man.
Via Jessica Valenti, I see that recently in Slate Meghan O'Rourke made the case against diamond engagement rings. That seems like as good an excuse as any to help the company out but reminding people that Edward Jay Epstein's classic 1982 article on the diamond trade is available for free on the Atlantic website. It's an absolutely brilliant article, and you just can't look at the diamond engagement ring concept the same after reading it.
Photo by Flickr user beeep used under a Creative Commons license
Martin Indyk, Bill Clinton's ambassador to Israel, has a plan for Palestine. Roughly speaking, let Hamas run Gaza and then deal with Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank "where he can depend on the Israel Defense Forces to suppress challenges from Hamas, and on Jordan and the United States to help rebuild his security forces." Abbas will gain control over the West Bank and then "could make a peace deal with Israel that establishes a Palestinian state with provisional borders in the West Bank and the Arab suburbs of East Jerusalem."
Serious leakage in The New York Times where we learn in a more on-the-record sense than before of a split pitting Condoleezza Rice "against the few remaining hawks inside the administration, especially those in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office who, according to some people familiar with the discussions, are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities." Thus far, Rice continues to have the upper hand, and rightly so.
The one thing I would observe about this is that even if neither President Bush (listening to Rice) nor Supreme Leader Khameini (listening to the Iranian version of Rice) want war, there's still a very dangerous situation. You have a lack of institutionalized diplomatic relations between the two countries, and almost 200,000 American soldiers and unknown numbers of Iranian personnel of various sorts in countries bordering Iran. There's a lot of scope there for provocations, incidents, and incidents and other problems of various sorts. Add in to the mix your Cheneys and your Ahmadenijads trying to push everything toward escalation and there's no telling what could happen.
Photo by Flickr user Koldo used under a Creative Commons license
Somehow this Government Executive article about the Air Force looking to get in on the counterinsurgency game doesn't leave me feeling any rosier about the Defense Department's new alleged focus on irregular warfare. The same old bureaucratic imperatives seem to be in play, except now instead of the military focusing on conventional conflicts because that's what justified expensive hardware, we're now going to have all the same equipment and inter-service politics, but everyone will just assert that it's all about the counterinsurgency.
The Air Force, for example, "has taken to touting show of force missions as a vital tool in counterinsurgency." What does that mean? Well, it involves "low-level fly-overs" that are "intended to intimidate opponents on the ground." For example, "Jet aircraft fly a few hundred feet above rooftops in downtown Baghdad and drop a string of flares." Greg Grant, the reporter on the story, nicely deadpans that "it's difficult to discern how show of force demonstrations compete with an enemy who cuts off its opponents' heads and leaves the bodies lying in the streets."
What about the fact that the use of air strikes in counterinsurgency situations creates civilian casualties on a level that makes them massively counterproductive? Well, General. Allen Peck, director of the Air Force Doctrine Center, "agrees that recent air strikes, particularly in Afghanistan, have caused civilian casualties and generated ill will." Nevertheless, he assures us that "the Air Force follows strict rules before dropping bombs, Peck says, constantly refining the process to minimize possible civilian deaths." I've made this point before, but while I'm sure there's some truth to this, the basic reality is that the Pentagon doesn't even count civilian casualties, so they can't possibly know whether or not they're minimizing them and, on some level, they're obviously not taking that mandate very seriously.
Haggai's views on what to do about the Hamas takeover in Gaza. Bottom line:
As I've said, I think the only thing that can sustain a peace process is to have the final status parameters placed on the table up-front. Hence my disagreement with Indyk on provisional statehood. International-boycott-wise, my price for having it lifted would be participation in THAT process, i.e. one that seriously aimed for final status, not one that says "just recognize Israel up front and we'll go from there." In effect, this would fall into Indyk's camp of a separation/"West Bank first" approach (he's using that term as an ironic twist on the "Gaza first" initial stage of Oslo). And if that kind of comprehensive approach could work in the West Bank, the hope would be that it could either moderate Hamas in Gaza, or moderate Gaza to rid itself of Hamas. Short of participation in that process, I would not lift the boycott on Hamas. I see no other way of achieving real progress. Any short-term attempt to increase contacts on the ground between Israel and Hamas (or, as we've just seen, between Fatah and Hamas) is not likely to last long at all before collapsing into more violence.
It's also true, as Jim Henley says, that one should always hold open the possibility that it may be impossible to resolve the problem in a satisfactory way no matter what the US does. That said, there's no way for America's close relationship with Israel to be viable unless we can also be seen as engaged in the Palestinian problem in a somewhat constructive way. The effort to do otherwise during the Bush years has been a disaster.
The Washington Post takes a look at some web -based ways to meet friends and go do stuff. I've never engaged in any formal online activities explicitly oriented around friend-making, but I do owe several of my friends to the quasi-social online activity known as blogging, and when you add in friends of friends in various degrees, blogging is probably the biggest avenue through which I know anyone.
This is, I think, an under-recognized aspect of the internet. Since typing away is a solitary activity, time spent on the web is often conceptualized as a substitute for interacting with people. More realistically, though, the internet actually substantially decreases the search costs associated with getting to know people and facilities meatspace interactions.
Raptors pick up Carlos Delfino for two second round picks. Seems like a solid pickup to me; Delfino's improved in each of his NBA seasons. Toronto sure is putting a lot of foreigners on the roster. The Pistons are shedding salary, I guess, but Delfino's contract isn't very expensive at $1.8 million.
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Heads in the Sand
