Circumcision Fact
Yesterday's links roundup asserted that "87 percent of college women prefer a circumcised penis" but forgot to provide the actual link. I read it on Ezra Klein's blog citing this study.
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June 24, 2007 - June 30, 2007 Archives
June 24, 2007
Working for the Clampdown
Neil MacFarquhar has an excellent report in The New York Times about the extraordinary scope of the current crackdown in Iran, which extends beyond the high-profile arrests I'd heard about to a wide-ranging assault on improperly dressed people ("150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic") and a more forceful assertion of press censorship.
The point seems to be to try to shore up the regime's political position in the wake of serious economic problems -- they're on the verge of needing to institute gasoline rationing -- and, one supposes, to try to elide the fact that these problems are being worsened by the government's attitude toward the nuclear weapons issue. It's all very bad news for Iranians, but sort of suggests to me that the sort of policy the Bush administration has been pursuing in terms of sanctions may well bear fruit if it's continued for a bit and put on course for possible future intensification.
Uh-Oh
John Hollinger takes a look at the free agent class of 2008 and gives us something to worry about:
By the way, if you're noticing a lot of Spurs on this list, it's because they only have three players under contract after next season -- Parker, Ginobili and (once he extends) Duncan. In other words, the dynasty could potentially add somebody like Brand or Marion midstream. Fans of the 29 other teams just spit up in their mouths reading that.
Conveniently, Brand seems to be recovering his covering "incredibly underrated" status after his performance slipped a little bit last season after his outstanding performance during the previous campaign. I don't belong to any fantasy sports leagues, but normally they have some kind of veto provision to let stuff like this happen, right?
The good news, I guess, is that if Brand played on the Spurs, Tim Duncan would need to admit that he's a center.
The Trouble With the Challenge Index
Sara Mead demolishes Jay Matthews' "Challenge Index".
I'm thrilled to see Sara on The Washington Post's op-ed page, but it's worth saying something here about the cynicism. Matthews is an education reporter for the Post and for Newsweek (which published the index) and which are both part of the same company. They've been publishing his list for years. And Sara and her now-former boss Andrew Rotherham have been offering their criticisms for quite some time.
In short, this isn't some new controversy that just dawned upon the relevant editors, who ought to consider trying to make up their minds. If the Mead/Rotherham critique is correct, they should stop publishing the index. If the Mead/Rotherham critique is wrong, they should stop publishing the critique. Meanwhile, Sara and Andy are both far too polite to point out that the same corporation that insists on ranking high schools based purely on the number of AP and IB tests their students take also happens to own the country's major purvey of standardized test preparation services.
And The Winner Is
I thought I might run a spot-check as to whether or not Dick Cheney's claim to be immune to legislative oversight on the grounds that his office isn't really part of the executive branch was genuinely as crazy as it appeared to be. Surfed over to the old Volokh Conspiracy and the answer is . . . yes! Orin Kerr agrees that this is absurd.
Fredo
There's a ton to chew over in The Washington Post brilliant exposé of Dick Cheney's methods, but on a different note this was the first time I'd read that George W. Bush's nickname for the Attorney-General of the United States is "Fredo." Shouldn't this, alone, have been grounds for blocking his confirmation? Do Senators not get these pop culture allusions? Bush was clearly trying to warn us.
More Nicknames
Following up on the Fredo issue discussed below, Ezra Klein does seem correct to suggest that the codename "CURVEBALL" alone should have hinted that the person in question was less-than-reliable.
Chemical Ali
Sentenced to die. Human Rights Watch's comprehensive report on Anfal is here. I believe Chemical Ali's key role is here in chapter two. Here are the documents about the US relationship with Iraq at the time.
After Misconduct
An interesting New York Times article notes that prosecutorial misconduct of the sort seen in the Duke lacrosse case is, if not exactly common, then hardly unheard of either. Nevertheless, prosecutors rarely face serious discipline since the typical prosecutor who withholds evidence isn't up against well-paid private attorneys representing clients from prosperous families:
“A prosecutor’s violation of the obligation to disclose favorable evidence accounts for more miscarriages of justice than any other type of malpractice, but is rarely sanctioned by the courts, and almost never by disciplinary bodies,” Bennett L. Gershman wrote in his treatise, “Prosecutorial Misconduct.” . . .
The Chicago Tribune, for instance, analyzed 381 murder cases in which the defendant received a new trial because of prosecutorial misconduct. None of the prosecutors were convicted of a crime or disbarred.
In one, Alan Gell was sentenced to death after prosecutors withheld witness statements from the defense. The witnesses said they had seen the victim alive after Mr. Gell had been jailed on other charges and was physically unable to have committed the murder. Mr. Gell was acquitted at a retrial.
In this last case, the prosecutors got a reprimand, but they're still out there prosecuting and, I guess, getting more innocent people convicted on death penalty charges.
Saved
John From Cincinnati had me intrigued for a little while, but it looks increasingly non-promising. The good news, though, is that Flight of the Conchords, which airs on HBO Sunday nights after Entourage is pretty hilarious. Check it out.
Oh, The Irony
The current Jon Chait TNR column:
The official lobby of the partisanship scolds is a group called "Unity '08"--a collection of graying eminences from both parties who are calling for a bipartisan presidential ticket, perhaps led by Bloomberg. Their rhetoric appears to be targeted at people who enjoy kittens, rainbows, and David Broder columns. Specifically, Unity '08 says its ticket will run on "ideas and traditions which unite and empower us as individuals and as a people."
Today's David Broder column:
More than that, there is a palpable hunger among the public for someone who will attack the problems facing the country -- the war in Iraq, immigration, energy, health care -- and not worry about the politics.
Uh huh. It makes you think. If only, instead of the party that's been governing the country for the past six years, there was some kind of second major party whose elected officials supported substantial policy shifts on Iraq, immigration, energy, and health care. Wouldn't that be great? It could almost make this Bloomberg business irrelevant.
June 25, 2007
The Pony Fallback
So I've been reading the new Center for a New American Security outfit's report on Iraq. The bad news is that the lynchpin of the whole thing is a -- dum dum! -- an intensified focus on training. The report keeps noting that it's important that we not simply be creating more effective sectarian units prepared to wage the civil war of tomorrow, but it doesn't have much to say about how their proposed revamping of the advisory mission would achieve this.
The good news is that in a first for reports on Iraq, CNAS acknowledges that their pony might not materialize and that we might need to fall back to their Plan B or Plan C (basically: run away). Similarly, even though Plan A involves a very extended large-scale U.S. military presence in Iraq we do have here deeply establishment-oriented people arguing that at some point (December 2012 in Plan A; early 2008 in Plan C) we should actually not have any more American troops should be genuinely out of Iraq.
Last, it should be said that the conceit of the report is that the Bush administration will take their advice seriously and begin the process of withdrawing troops and transition to a training mission this very summer. That's a fun conceit, obviously, but equally obviously Bush doesn't care -- at all -- about what these people think, what's right for the country, what's right for Iraq, what's right for America's soldiers, or anything else.
It would be much more productive to write reports addressed at people who matter. A bunch of people are running for president. They could use smart people to think about what they should do about Iraq starting the day after Election Day on the assumption that Bush just keeps running the country into the ground. There are also a bunch of members of congress who are in need of feasible methods for the legislative branch to use the rather crude tools at its disposal (mostly money and time limits) to change policy in a more constructive direction.
Unlimited Government
Here we see Dick Cheney and someone we have to assume is David Addington arguing explicitly that the president is above the law:
Two questions remain, officials said. One involves techniques to be authorized now. The other is whether any technique should be explicitly forbidden. According to participants in the debate, the vice president stands by the view that Bush need not honor any of the new judicial and legislative restrictions. His lawyer, they said, has recently restated Cheney's argument that when courts and Congress "purport to" limit the commander in chief's warmaking authority, he has the constitutional prerogative to disregard them.
One could imagine the view that the president has a constitutional obligation to veto any congressional efforts to limit his warmaking authority (by, e.g., prohibiting torture, which is what's at issue here). One could imagine a stronger view that the courts have a constitutional obligation to defer to the executive branch in the case of a legal controversy over congressional efforts to prevent the executive branch from torturing people. Cheney, here, is standing on the strongest view imaginable -- that the executive branch can sign laws banning torture, then keep torturing people, then lose a lawsuit over it, and then just keep on torturing people because, hey, he's the president.
Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist, CFR fellow, former White House speech writer, and nominal Christian musters the view that the vice president's strong stand in favor of illegally torturing people is "principled" which is, I guess, good for him.
A Lesson of Sorts
Victory Davis Hanson notes that George W. Bush gets better press coverage in the state-controlled media of sundry US-aligned Arabic dictatorships than he does in the democratic West and concludes that Western media should act more like their brethren in the unfree sector of the press.
The Inconvenient Truth: Inconvenient!
Warned by Kevin Drum to expect the worst, I wound up needing to read Emily Yoffe's op-ed on global warming three times to try to figure out what she's saying. In essence, it seems that she doesn't want to dispute the fact that carbon emissions are contributing to climate change in a problematic way or that this provides us with a reason to hope for changes in our policies. Nevertheless, she wishes that Al Gore and other warmingmongers would just keep quiet about it because, well, all this talk of catastrophe is a downer.
So here's a deal. All Yoffe needs to do is convince politicians from oil, coal, gas, and automobile manufacturing states, plus conservative politicians generally, plus the leaders of large countries in the developing world like China and India, that global warming is really bad and that hearing about it is a drag. Then, with all those guys on board, we'll lick the problem super-fast and everyone can stop talking about it.
1,000 Is a Very Big Number
Lists are always a curious journalistic creature, but The Guardian's attempt to name the 1,000 Best Movies Ever seems to me to slightly founder on the simple largeness of the number. Here under the As, for example, I find American Pie and think to myself "okay, I liked this when it came out, and even re-watched it once, but it's not that good." But then you think -- okay, quick, can you name 999 better movies? And, no, I can't, at least not off the top of my head. Indeed, if I were to find myself listing my 1,000 favorite movies, the ratio of movies on the list to movies that aren't on the list but that I've actually seen would, I suspect, get too high for the exercise to make sense.
The End of Palestine
It's sort of amusing for Martin Peretz to go around acting as if maybe he was a huge supporter of the Palestinian people's national aspirations until just a couple of weeks ago and now he reluctantly needs to proclaim the end of Palestine.
Serve the Servants
Via Nicholas Beaudrot and Jonathan Singer comes Chris Dodd's ambitious plan for national service. These things seem to me to invariably founder on certain conceptual confusions and Dodd's plan is no exception.
The basic animating insight of national service is that, from a liberal point of view, mass conscription as practiced in World War II had certain kinds of benefits -- building social solidarity by throwing men from all regions and walks of life together. But, of course, absolutely nobody thinks we need a military as big as the one that would be generated by a program of WWII-scale conscription and the officer's corps doesn't want the sort of under-motivated, under-trained military that would result from replacing their cadre of professionals with a mass of conscripts. Thus, one adds the idea of drastically expanding the array of vocations that will count as service. Here, however, the idea of conscription seems bizarre. Military conscription is the sort of thing that might be justified by Michael Walzer's "supreme emergency" doctrine but you'd need genuine peril to the nation's existence. Otherwise you're just talking about slavery -- corvée -- and you have to think that conscript third grade teachers would do a terrible job anyway.
At this point you get to where Dodd is: National service that isn't universal and isn't mandatory, but instead consists of expanding already existing programs like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps that pay people money in exchange for performing certain public functions. There's nothing wrong, generically, with such programs but they really need to be looked at one-by-one on the merits primarily through the lens of whether or not they're cost-effective methods of achieving the public purpose in question. Does appropriating more money to the Peace Corps make sense as a development strategy, or would it be better to boost funding for the Millenium Challenge Corporation or the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
At this point, though, we're well beyond evaluating "national service" and down to the nitty-gritty of evaluating specific program effectiveness. It's often the case that you can recruit small numbers of young people to do public-oriented work at sub-market prices -- e.g., Teach for America or essentially all left-of-center non-profits in DC -- but it seems unlikely that one could scale these things up substantially without seeing costs explode or the programs become totally ineffective.
Photo courtesy of IowaPolitics.com used under a Creative Commons license
War for War's Sake
Shorter Roger Cohen: Because US policy in the Middle East before 2003 was in some respects unsatisfactory, the invasion of Iraq must be considered a good thing independently of its actual consequences.
This business where "Totalitarian hell - malign stability - holds no hope" whereas "violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless" and therefore the invasion is great is just moronic. The Iraq adventure was, among other things, massively costly both in dollars and in American lives. Once you start thinking about whether or not we should engage in massive expenditures for humanitarian purposes it makes sense to hold ourselves to a higher standard -- we might ask, for example, that our massive humanitarian expenditures have some clear benefits and not result in large-scale death and destruction.
On the Cohen standard, by contrast, if we take any bad situation and just render it very chaotic that counts as a good idea. So that, maybe, a massive preemptive nuclear first strike on Beijing would be a good idea because, hey, it would hold out "hope" of democratic change in China. Sure it would probably result in mass death and chaos leading to more mass death, but if we use a little "imagination" we can see that it might all be okay in the end.
Defense Department photo by Staff Sgt. Dennis J. Henry Jr., USAF.
The Flight From Responsibility
Okay, we're all already accustomed to hawks' blaming the opponents of their war in Iraq for the fact that their war in Iraq is failing. Now Brendan Nyhan catches Joshua Muravchik taking this in an innovative new direction -- apparently doves are going to be responsible for the outbreak of the war with Iran that hawks have been agitating for. If only we would just give Muravchik's demented pals in the administration a free hand to conduct policy according to their whims, then everything would be fine.
A New Kind of Politics
Barack Obama attempts to rise above the trivial matters (i.e., chemistry and economics) that divide supporters and opponents of liquid coal technology and makes everyone unhappy with a nonsensical compromise position.
UPDATE: To say more, I think Obama had an opportunity here to just tell the truth -- it's pretty obvious he backed liquid coal because he was representing a coal-producing state even though it's not actually a good idea, and now he's flip-flopping to the correct position because as president you need to respond to matters of pressing national and global importance.
UPDATE II: The good news, though, is that an Obama presidency promises to sharply raise the value of pundits capable of making NBA analogies. For example, Obama may be like LeBron but Hillary Clinton is like the Spurs.
Strategic Reset
I've had the chance to review the Center for American Progress' excellent new report on Iraq, Strategic Reset: Reclaiming Control of U.S. Security in the Middle East. It's a very serious report, though probably one the Very Serious People of the world won't be too pleased with. By the same token, however, when the Center's original Strategic Redeployment plan was released in Fall 2005 it was rejected as unserious, only to look prophetic within months. Had their advice been taken back then, or back in spring 2006 when they released Strategic Redeployment 2.0, it might be possible to view less drastic measures as viable today. But mistakes have consequences. For all the joking about Friedman Units, it's actually true that the U.S. has faced a succession of windows of opportunity in Iraq, and now most of those windows have shut. Realism about the nature of the situation and about American interests requires us, as they argue, to prioritize limiting the regional -- and global -- damage of the wreckage of the war rather than engage in further fantasies that a clever plan and a renewed emphasis on training can save Iraq.
To say that we have to leave Iraq expeditiously isn't to deny that bad things may results, but merely to acknowledge that "many events that some fear would result if U.S. troops left Iraq are unfolding now just as the U.S. troops presence is getting larger." The fundamental dynamic is unfolding according to its own logic, and while the course could change it's clear that we don't have any methods at hand to change it. In terms of our moral and humanitarian obligations to Iraqis, CAP suggests we do what we can to address these directly -- increasing the number of Iraqi refugees we accept, pressuring regional allies to do the same, and dispersing US personnel and assistance in Iraq away from the central government to promising local actors, if any -- rather than trying to fulfill these obligations through a doomed effort to micromanage Iraqi political developments. Similarly, they suggest that the regional fallout from our failure in Iraq be dealt with directly -- at the regional level, by returning our military forces to locations where they're more welcome and easier to sustain, and through diplomacy guided by the reality that none of the major regional players want to see a spreading arc of chaos.
At any rate, read the report for yourself if you're interested. It's very good stuff, and something the presidential candidates should embrace instead of these vague formulas about a residual training presence plus force protection to guard the trainers plus god knows what else to make that work. The most important thing, as they note, is that this business of arming and training Iraqi security forces in the absence of a political solution is not just a waste of time and money, but directly counterproductive. Our weapons and funding are fueling civil conflict in the face of deep political fragmentation and there are absolutely no guarantees as to who these arms will be turned against next year or the year after that. "The medicine of more weapons and training for Iraq’s security force may actually end up killing the patient—and will certainly end up killing more Americans, too." The training concept has become, in my view, a kind of psychological crutch for US elites who don't want to face their own basic inability to improve things. The idea that you could help resolve an ongoing multifaceted conflict by introducing greater quantities of lethal weaponry and better-trained fighters is absurd on its face. At best, we're in the position of arming several sides in a multi-pronged civil war in the vague hope that whoever prevails won't notice we were also arming their adversaries and be loyal to us down the road, which seems like a really, really, really stupid bet.
Boring Draft Analysis
Obviously, the NBA draft (like all sports drafts) isn't an exact science and picking Greg Oden ahead of Kevin Durant could end up looking foolish in retrospect. Still, I think things like Bill Simmons' effort to turn this into a controversial debate are pretty foolish. Consider, say, Seattle. If you could put Oden in the middle with Ray Allen and Rashard Lewis scoring from the perimeter plus a competent Luke Ridnour / Earl Watson platoon at the point, you're in pretty solid shape.
But if -- as seems likely -- you wind up with Durant, what kind of a big man are you going to snag in a sign-and-trade for Rashard Lewis? There's just way, way, way more depth out there in terms of quality perimeter players and it's genuinely rare at this point to see a seven footer in the draft who isn't a "project" (i.e., crapshoot) of some kind.
Edwards' Big House
On Jason Zengerle's recommendation, I read Jay Cost's argument that John Edwards is an amateurish politician. It turns out to focus heavily on criticizing him for building such an enormous house. I know there's a pretty widespread sentiment that this huge house will be politically damaging, but that seems like a mistake to me.
The basic reality is that Edwards is a rich man, and there's no hiding that -- big house or small house. Edwards' giant house, however, is not just expensive -- it's tacky. Its tackiness, however, perfectly reflects Edwards' working class roots and his whole "son of a millworker" narrative. I would never in a million years build a house like that no matter how much money I had, but that's because I'm a snob and nobody would ever vote for me. Something like one of these multimillion dollar condos would have doomed Edwards, but 28,200 square feet in exurban North Carolina is solid.
Zenebech Injera
On the recommendation of Tyler Cowen, I went with a friend last night to check out Zenebech Injera, an Ethiopian establishment lying a bit east of the gentrification frontier near the confluence of 6th, T, and Florida. I'd passed by the place in the past and never gone in since it looks profoundly unpromising, and even though it's close to my house there are almost a dozen more proximate Ethiopian restaurants.
I wouldn't quite give it the unqualified endorsement ("This restaurant with two tables is now the best Ethiopian place in Washington") that Tyler does, but the Doro Wat is unquestionably the best I've had in town. I like the titanic tibs at Madjet more than the lamb tibs I had at Zenebech. The place is definitely worth checking out if you like Ethiopian food and don't mind a total lack of ambiance.
Fair and Balanced
I scanned over James Kirchick complaining about The Nation's editorial on Gaza, but then I saw the mighty Alterman also complaining so I went and read it and while I agree with some of what they say, this is pretty misleading:
It is commonly argued that negotiations are impossible because Hamas will not recognize Israel and is bent on its destruction. But Hamas leaders have repeatedly stated that they can live with a two-state settlement, or at the very least a long-term hudna (truce). Both Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and his political adviser, Ahmed Yousef, have made this point in op-eds in the past month.
Yousef's job, clearly, in the op-eds in question was to frame the Hamas line in a manner as congenial as possible to a Western audience. Nevertheless, his op-ed here is silent on the issue of recognition of Israel, but does defy Hamas' critics "to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas' military structure has struck against any force outside the theater of the occupation." Given that Hamas certainly has attacked Israel proper, this raises the question of what's meant by "occupation" in the list of Hamas demands as "the end of occupation; the release of political prisoners; the right of return for all Palestinians; and freedom to be a nation equal among nations, secure in its own borders and at peace."
All that is to say nothing of the issue of a "right of return for all Palestinians" which isn't consistent with any conventional understanding of a two-state solution.
The Six Percent Doctrine
Michael Hirsh says folks hoping economic sanctions may pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear program are dreaming:
Iran's oil-fueled prosperity tends to undercut another still-prevalent idea in Washington and European capitals: that with yet one more set of U.N. sanctions Iran will give up its nuclear program. Even many reformers who despise Ahmadinejad and his clumsy defiance of international opinion say that's not going to happen. America's confrontational approach to Iran, says S.M.H. Adeli, Iran's former ambassador to London, "has already gone on for three decades, and it hasn't worked. Why should it work now?" U.N. sanctions are shrugged off by most Iranians as a cost of doing business, adding about 6 percent to prices in general.
To me, six percent sounds like a lot; I feel like a politician proposing some policy initiative likely to generate an across the board six percent price increase would be doomed. Maybe that's just me. Hirsh's description of the actual conditions of Iranian life are interesting.
Think of the Children
It sounds moronic, of course, a horrible cliché. It is, however, genuinely true that children suffer horribly in war, especially in war that's gone so very badly as this one has.
June 26, 2007
Lugar on Iraq
You can count me as a longtime skeptic that Republicans will ever abandon Bush on Iraq in substantial numbers come what may, but there's no denying that Dick Lugar took a major step with this statement on the floor.
Still, if the job of a US Senator was fundamentally to make statements, then reasonably sound statements made by Dick Lugar -- along with a lot of centrist Dems like Joe Biden -- before the war would have put us in much better position than we actually found ourselves in. The difficulty is that at the end of the day what a Senator does is cast votes. Will Lugar be there on efforts to restrain Bush's discretion over Iraq policy, or will he still be a functional vote for the Decider? For now, though, we do have a pretty solid speech.
After Bush
Nobody gave me a review copy of Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy so I guess I'm going to have to go buy a copy. It has, already, however, started to spawn some interesting commentary. I think Matt Stoller, for one, is right to see how transient the current eclipse of Bushism is:
The fight over Bush's Presidency is ongoing, with a possible war with Iran in the cards. But even if we manage to prevent that war, the 'stabbed in the back' canard, which is extremely powerful, will be used to resurrect the conservative movement nearly instantaneously. That's why when Bush leaves office, the fight over his legacy will be ongoing, until the movement that put him there is fully discredited.
This is quite true. Matt's attitude, I suspect, is that progressives need to steel themselves for ferocious political combat, which is probably true. It also highlights, however, the need for ideas about national security with a little more depth and staying power than thin critiques of Bush's "competence" or his contracting policies but which actually leave much of his overarching theory unchallenged.
With the Colleagues You Have
Mark Kleiman notes that one surprising element of the Post's recent long account of Dick Cheney's power is that "is Condoleeza Rice's passivity in the face of this interference in her communication with her own staff" which one would expect pettiness and thirst for power, if not professionalism and good sense, to keep in check.
Jim Henley counters with the observation "that Dick Cheney played a large role in selecting the Bush Administration’s cabinet and senior staff and he knew what he was doing when he gave the nod to Rice and Powell. Surely at the top of his list of criteria for NSA and Secretary of State was 'Who can I roll?'" According to Jim Mann's account in Rise of the Vulcans Cheney very much didn't want Powell as a colleague (they'd worked closely together in the Bush I administration, and Cheney knew he didn't like him), but his appointment was ordained by the political situation. Thus, one of Cheney's key priorities was to arrange the rest of the national security team in which to make ti possible to roll Powell. It wasn't clear that this was going to work, but Bush apparently felt upstaged by Powell at the press conference announcing his appointment and agreed to Cheney's Powell-checking scheme.
For Rice, I would take a look at Joshua Kurlantzick's 2004 examination of her ineffective spell as National Security Advisor.
All Alone
US government having trouble finding countries willing to host the proposed new Africa Command. It's much easier to get favorable basing agreements when the local government is actually the product of your invasion.
Cheap Talk
With regard to the Dick Lugar question discussed below, the AP's coverage of his speech clarifies that Senator Lugar doesn't intend to do anything about his qualms with Bush's Iraq policy:
"In my judgment, the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved," Lugar, R-Ind., said in a Senate floor speech. "Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term." . . .
However, [Lugar spokesman Andy] Fisher said the speech does not mean Lugar would switch his vote on the war or embrace Democratic measures setting a deadline for troop withdrawals.
Bush can at least say that he's implementing a massively wrongheaded Iraq policy, leading to untold deaths and the trashing of American interests, because he doesn't know any better -- Lugar's doing it because, what, it would be impolite to do otherwise? Because he's just a bad person and doesn't give a damn? This stuff makes me angry.
Since When Does This Matter?
Karen Tumulty and Greg Sargent both seem to think it's some kind of a problem for Rudy Giuliani that his new South Carolina campaign co-chair is a huge racist. I'm not so sure. This, after all, is the same world where George Will can publish columns praising George Wallace for "giving an aggrieved minority a voice" without mentioning that the aggrieved minority in question was America's smallish but influential white supremacist minority.
Offseason: Now With Bonus Speculation
Chad Ford outlines a mega-trade scenario:
- The Wolves send Kevin Garnett and Marko Jaric to the Lakers.
- The Lakers send Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum to the Pacers and the No. 19 pick to the Wolves.
- The Pacers send O'Neal to the Celtics.
- The Celtics send the No. 5 pick, Theo Ratliff, Gerald Green and Sebastian Telfair to Minnesota.
Ford seems to me to be leaning on the notion that Telfair is a "prospect" rather than a "bust" in describing this deal, and even he doesn't think Minnesota would go for it unless "another young player or future draft pick were included." On the other hand, once you get Kevin McHale and Danny Ainge talking to each other, there's no telling what kind of goofy deals will result as we recall from the deal that brought Wally Szczerbiak to Boston.
Photo by Flickr user Compujeramy used under a Creative Commons license
Loving Fred
Admittedly, this is grounded in my crude and stereotypical view of how the Republican Party works, but I think Jon Chait's case that Fred Thompson is the likely GOP nominee is pretty convincing. What's more, he's a pretty solid general election candidate, though 2008 just isn't an especially promising year for a conventional conservative.
Free Advice
Will Wilkinson has some ideas for improving campaign theme song decision-making.
Cuomo Catches Broder Disease
The New York Times' Patrick Healy reports that former governor Mario Cuomo writes a regular memo to friends called "the Update" offering his take on the political scene (sounds like a blog):
The Update reads like a set of talking points for the most serious of policy wonk Cassandras who believe that politicians are ignoring looming threats at the nation’s peril: Iraq, health care, Medicare and Medicaid, the Middle East, global warming, immigration, trade and budget deficits, and so on.
Look, this is preposterous. The Democratic presidential candidates each have a global warming proposal. What's more, they all actually have very similar proposals, featuring different quantitative degrees of ambitiousness in terms of where they want to set the carbon cap in a cap-and-trade system. The issue is simply that as we're seeing with energy legislation currently pending in the congress that the existence of conservative legislators makes it difficult to pass these plans. Similarly, you may not like the Democratic contenders' plans for Iraq (I'm not thrilled myself), but they definitely exist. Nor is anyone ignoring immigration. Indeed, it's been consuming the Senate recently.
Healy remarks that "The memo also reads like it could’ve been written by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City." This is true, but they sound the same because the two of them are basically peddling the same B.S.
Green Lantern in Indochina
British journalist Johann Hari hops aboard the National Review cruise in a hilarious TNR article, only to discover the conservative take on the Vietnam War:
There is something strange about this discussion, and it takes me a few moments to realize exactly what it is. All the tropes conservatives usually deny in public--that Iraq is another Vietnam, that Bush is fighting a class war on behalf of the rich--are embraced on this shining ship in the middle of the ocean. Yes, they concede, we are fighting another Vietnam; and this time we won't let the weak-kneed liberals lose it. "It's customary to say we lost the Vietnam war, but who's 'we'?" Dinesh D'Souza asks angrily. "The left won by demanding America's humiliation." On this ship, there are no Viet Cong, no three million dead. There is only liberal treachery.
As Spencer Ackerman wrote in one of his last New Republic articles, this is in many ways the original sin of conservative foreign policy analysis. Trapped in the intellectual prison of Vietnam revisionism, the right is fundamentally incapable of seeing objective limits to US military capacity or domestic political debate as actually vital to the appropriate conduct of national security policy.
Photo by Flickr user Flydime used under a Creative Commons license
"Touchback"
Ed Kilgore comments on the latest developments in the immigration bill:
The latest developent in the long, painful saga of the Senate's consideration of immigration legislation is the decision by Republican backers of the bill (presumably with White House support and at least grudging acceptance from some Democrats) to sponsor an amendment expanding the "touchback" requirement for illegal immigrants who want a "guest worker" visa. In the original "grand bargain," illegals would only have to go home to their country of origin when their visa expired, or in order to apply for permanent legal status (i.e., to get on the "path to citizenship"). Under the amendment, they'd have to go home to apply for the guest worker visa.
Not only is this a bad provision, but it's a really inept metaphor. A "touchback" is when you get tackled in your end zone in football. What they seem to have in mind here is something akin to "tagging up" in baseball after a fly ball is caught. In that scenario you have to go back to the base you came from, touch the bag, and then you can run to the next one.
Shadow Cabinet
The always-provocative Jonathan Rauch has a slightly curious column in The Atlanic praising the new front-loaded primary schedule. Yes, he acknowledges some flaws, but he thinks a longer general election campaign would be a pretty good thing. Finally, he writes this:
For me, though, what tips the scales in favor of early primaries, with the resulting long general-election campaign, is that they give U.S. politics an opportunity to mimic one of the best features of British-style parliamentary politics: the shadow government. American commentators often observe, with envy, that political campaigns in parliamentary systems are much shorter. In Britain, the formal campaign and election span weeks, not months or years. But such commentators tend to overlook the fact that by the time a British election rolls around, voters have had months or years to get to know the candidates, parties, agendas, and even cabinets. The party and prime minister in office are known quantities. Typically, opposition leaders are familiar too, because the parties choose their leaders well in advance of most elections. And these leaders choose shadow cabinets, the men and women who would ascend to ministerial portfolios if the party won. In other words, the voters decide not just between two candidates or even two parties but, in effect, between two governments.
For me, I'm all for the shadow cabinet concept. It's also even arguably true that "Until the modern era of front-loaded primaries, any similar arrangement in the United States would have been all but impossible." Still, just because it's now possible doesn't mean it's actually going to happen. Indeed, the odds of it happening strike me as overwhelmingly small. The reason is that it serves candidates interests just fine to leave as large a pool as possible of semi-important people looking for jobs. Absent a shadow cabinet, you'll probably have Richard Holbrooke telling everyone who might possibly care what Richard Holbrooke thinks that whichever person happens to have won the Democratic nomination is a brilliant individual with sound instincts guided by the greatest team ever assembled. But if you do have a shadow cabinet and it doesn't include Holbrooke well, then, here come the off-the-record quotes about how so-and-so's a bit of a softie, not really up the job, a bit of a left-wing nut, etc., etc., etc.
And that's not to cast any particular aspersions on Holbrooke, I just don't know off the top of my head the names of any likely candidates to be a Democratic Secretary of the Treasury. The point is that candidates try to avoid sending clear signals about this kind of thing for a reason.
Sopranos Revisited
Emily Nussbaum's weeks old New York Magazine retrospective on The Sopranos is the best thing I've seen written about the show post-finale. It's also the definitive text on what I think is the most plausible emerging narrative of support for the show's ambiguous ending. And, indeed, this literature has convinced me that my initial harsh reaction to the end was misplaced and that the show's final scene is going to go down as a creative risk that paid off in a big way.
What Nussbaum makes me realize, however, is that my anger at the ending was a form of displaced upset at the actual problem with the show. The difficulty is that if you read her brilliant reconstruction of what the show is about and then step back to think about your own recollection of the show, you'll see that an enormous amount of the screen time was dedicated to things that are utterly tangential to Nussbaum's reconstruction. What you have, in essence, is a brilliant overarching story, a great team of writers, a fantastic cast, and . . . a lot of padding.
Characters with multi-episodes arcs (Furio, that one priest, Richie Aprile) don't really play a role and any number of dominant threads in individual episodes are reduced to the status of one-offs and character sketches. In this regard, The Sopranos winds up having quite a bit in common with some of the better-regarded network dramas of the 1990s. The X-Files drew a sharp distinction between episodes that advanced "the mythology" and those that were just episodes. Buffy wasn't quite as hard and fast, but it's still clear if you go back and watch it on DVD that some episodes (including some of the best beloved ones like Hush) don't really have anything to do with "the story" of the show.
The Sopranos is even more graceful about not walling off its tangential threads, but it's still full of them. The most relevant contrast, in this regard, is to The Wire which, through four seasons, has been the very model of narrative economy with nary a wasted gesture. This characteristic isn't identical to show quality (Rome has it to a greater extent than The Sopranos, but the latter is still the better work all thins considered) but to me it does count as an important desiderata. Sadly, in the case of The Sopranos we're also aware, extra-textually, that this padded out quality isn't even a flawed artistic choice but pretty clearly the result of the huge amount of money on the table persuading the creative team to make more episodes than their instincts suggested should be made.
Taxing Capital Gains
The New York Times was, of course, correct to argue yesterday that private equity firm managers should need to pay the normal income tax rate rather than the much lower capital gains tax rate. The larger story, however, is that all income should be taxed according to a single rate schedule. Right now, capital income is taxed much more lightly than labor income, which is great if you're rich, but otherwise not such a hot idea.
Ron Wyden has a proposal to clean this up, which seems to be in some ways modeled on this older proposal from the Center for American Progress. I'd like to see presidential candidates take this issue up.
Killing the Patient
I should mention with regard to ongoing discussion of the Center for American Progress' recent Iraq report that one of the report's main authors, Brian Katulis, had a brilliant (and shorter) piece out earlier this month specifically on the foolhardy nature of the training mission:
The United States has poured more than $20 billion into building an Iraqi national army and police force designed to defend a government that simply cannot forge the key political compromises necessary to unite their own country. The so-called “surge” of U.S. forces, alongside stepped up training of the Iraqi army and police, is supposed to create the political “space” necessary for the country’s squabbling political leaders to reach these compromises, yet that’s not happening.
Why? Most of Iraq’s violence is related to a vicious struggle for power that only has a political solution. Training and skills building are not the fundamental issue for Iraq’s security forces. In fact many of Iraqi security forces have more training than hundreds of U.S. soldiers being deployed as part of this surge. Their problems are motivation and allegiance.
Right. Politics is strictly primary in this kind of situation. If you have a political actor whose goals you support, and that actor has a bunch of people prepared to fight for those goals, then you might come in and offer weapons and training to help them achieve their goals. But the idea that US military personnel are hypnotists whose training methods are going to transform Iraqi fighters into the people it would be convenient to us for them to be is silly.
Gangland Fun
A couple of weeks back we were talking about which sort of crime syndicate might make a good successor to this thing of ours in American popular culture. One candidate was the Salvadoran gang MS-13. I was skeptical of this proposal, since even living 'lo these past few years right around DC's main concentration of Salvadoran people, MS-13 has never seemed to do anything especially interesting (I suppose a machete attack would be fun to watch).
More recently, though, I discovered the MS-13 blog (a blog about the gang, not by it) and it turns out to be more interesting than I'd thought -- much wider in scope, in particular.
A Random Sidebar
I don't normally read Red State but I found myself mentioned in this brief item which linked to a larger post by Blackfive, a former Army officer, supposedly taking me to school on counterinsurgency theory. It goes off on a little tangent that's really a classic of the politics of ressentiment:
I realize that Mr. Yglesias is hampered by a Harvard education; that is a disadvantage for anyone. Harvard was once a great institution for learning, the greatest in America; but that time has long gone. It no longer educates the complete man, and yet its reputation is such that its alumni believe themselves to be educated to the highest degree. They do not grasp that their institution has failed them.
Sure, sure. And, look, I wouldn't want to pass myself off as some kind of expert on military affairs; I'd say I'm better-informed than your average political pundit, but it's not a super-high bar. Nevertheless, if one really does want to delve into the details of my undergraduate education, it's actually true that my intense skepticism about the ability of the United States to wage a successful counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq does owe something to a college course I took on military strategy. The professor was Steven Peter Rosen, and he served in the Defense Department (in the Net Assessment office) and on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration.
He runs the Olin Institute along with Samuel Huntington. Make of that what you will. I have no idea whether or not Rosen would agree with my contemporary political opinions. The point, however, is that this picture of elite educational institutions as little islands of ignorance and lefty cocooning are substantially off-base. Introductory economics, for example, was taught by a Reagan administration official until a Bush administration official took over teaching responsibilities.
The New Scene
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be plugging non-Atlantic blogs, but the new American Scene blog sure does look cool and features several of the most wortwhile righties in the 'sphere.
June 27, 2007
Patriot Dollars
Except for the fact that actually implementing this idea through the use of ATMs would be needlessly complicated, I've been a fan of the "patriot dollars" proposal from Bruce Ackerman for some time now. It's a variant on your standard public financing of campaigns, where each citizen would be given a campaign donation voucher to award to the candidate (or candidates) of his or her choosing.
No New Thing Under the Sun
It's worth recalling, now and again, that the Bush administration's efforts to leverage wartime hysteria into serious abuses of civil liberties is hardly a new story in American history. Amy Zegart, for example, writes up some newly declassified documents relating to the CIA's LBJ-vintage (and then continuing into the Nixon years) "Restless Youth" initiative:
: The C.I.A.’s Restless Youth study, which appears to have been commissioned in the late 1960s to examine radical American college students. In a meticulously worded 1973 memo, the C.I.A.’s deputy director for intelligence details exactly which version of that study went to whom. Notably, the president, his national security adviser and the deputy secretary of defense got the fully loaded version that included the agency’s highly sensitive investigations of American students. Other Cabinet members got versions without the U.S. student radicals section. And Attorney General John Mitchell got an even more abbreviated edition in March 1969. There’s more: an unsigned 1968 memo on the next page explicitly notes that Restless Youth violated the C.I.A.’s charter AND that it was conducted at the behest of the national security adviser at the time, Walt Rostow.
I suppose the difference is that these days David Addington would have written a memo about how the CIA was under no obligation to abide by the CIA's charter because the CIA's not part of the executive branch or something. Back then the mentality seems to have been more, "we want to do X, but X is illegal, so let's keep things quiet."
Tagging Up
I blundered in my post criticing the use of the "touchback" metaphor by misstating what a touchback is. A safety is when you get tackled in your endzone. A touchback is when the other team punts or kicks it into your endzone and you choose to take the ball on the twenty yard line rather than attempt a return.
Either way, my main point stands. The so-called "touchback" provision of the immigration bill requiring illegals to return to their country of origin before applying for one or another form of legal status bears very little resemblance to a touchback in football. It does, however, seem to have a lot in common with tagging up in baseball.
Photo by Flickr user banker12 used under a Creative Commons license
Nine Votes
When contemplating the way the Employee Free Choice Act managed to fail yesterday in the Senate despite having 51 votes in its favor, it's worth going back to the "Gang of 14" compromise moment. The anti-EFCA filibuster doesn't really matter this year because Bush would have filibustered it anyway. It is, however, reasonably probably that in 2009 we'll have a Democratic president. It's not, however, even remotely likely that Democrats are going to gain nine Senate seats.
This sort of thing is why I really wish Democrats hadn't made that compromise over judicial nominations. Instead, let the GOP unleash the "nuclear option" and bar filibusters for judicial nominees. Then it would have been easy enough for Democrats to just nuke back once they controlled the Senate. At the end of the day, the filibuster is a very bad thing for progressive politics notwithstanding its utility during the 2003-2006 period. Labor law reform is absolutely vital to the long-run future of American liberalism (and, indeed, America) but very unlikely to happen as long as the filibuster lives. And think about trying to get 60 votes for health care reform.
Of course, even with the compromise in place there's nothing but timidity (and, I suppose, consistency) stopping Democrats from unleashing a nuclear option of their own.
Solidarity
Josh Marshall wrote yesterday evening about the paradoxical political benefits of GOP congresspeople standing by Bush on Iraq even though the war is hugely unpopular:
As long as that's the case, as long as the vast majority of Republicans oppose Democratic attempts to end the war, that will keep Democrats (not saying it's right, just observing the dynamics) from really going to the mat over it. And as long as Democrats don't force a major confrontation that keeps it all sort of murky in the public mind who's for or against.
Now, Josh thinks this logic will break down eventually, especially because if it does break down "no one wants to be the last one to the door." This is all no doubt true, but I also think it's worth dwelling a bit on the paradox. It seems to me that one of the big lessons -- if not the big lesson -- of the past 15 years worth of legislative politics is that there are huge political benefits to party unity as such. Vote against the Clinton health plan and watch it pass, and you're screwed; but if everyone just stands and opposes it, not only does the plan fail, but the president becomes unpopular because he's a failure who can't solve the big issues.
This sort of thinking turns the traditions of the American system on their head, but I think it will persist into 2009 and beyond since the benefits seem real enough to me.
Obama and the Middle East
MJ Rosenberg was impressed yesterday by a Barack Obama statement on the Israel-Palestine situation. Well, at least sort of:
Nevertheless, I don't judge candidates statements on the Middle East against the ideal but against the pander garbage almost all of them cynically and invariably put out.
By that standard, this is fine.
Well, okay. To me what's actually more intriguing about Obama on this front is just the fact that I think the campaign has spent some level of energy trying to signal to the MJ Rosenbergs of the world that they should be excited about Obama. Normally, candidates want to get the support of the most fanatically "pro-Israel" people they can find, and don't really care about anyone else.
Too Little, Too Late
It's frustrating to see this level of attention given by the MSM and the Huffington Post alike to the theory that GOP Senators are taking on Bush over the war. I was writing about this yesterday and have a Guardian column out about it but we're way past the point for this kind of B.S.
Democrats had a bill that passed congress that would have substantially rolled back the war. Bush vetoed it. The GOP helped Bush sustain that veto. When Republicans want to revisit that legislation and vote to override Bush's veto, then they'll be breaking with Bush on Iraq. Until then, both the ones talking a good game and the ones talking bad one are, in fact, backing the president.
What's more, it seems to me that we're well passed the point where any political purpose is avdanced in a useful way by deliberately exaggerating the extent of intra-GOP disagreement. Before the 2004 election was a good time to hear about Republican dissent. Before the 2006 election, even. But folks who wait until after an electoral drubbing to start distancing themselves from their party's leaders don't deserve to be hailed as great independent thinkers.
Jobs I Wish I Had
I sometimes feel like being paid to blog about . . . whatever for an extremely prestigious magazine is an impossible-to-beat job. Then along comes Chris Hayes who points out that I could be a professional gadget reviewer basking in the glory of a free iPhone, comparing it to a Helio Ocean, etc., etc., etc. Now the question becomes: Is there any way to convince the world's consumer electronics firms that getting reviewed by The Atlantic's bloggers is vital to their financial future?
Panopticon World
Thomas Friedman sees people who see people:
For young people, writes Seidman, this means understanding that your reputation in life is going to get set in stone so much earlier. More and more of what you say or do or write will end up as a digital fingerprint that never gets erased. Our generation got to screw up and none of those screw-ups appeared on our first job résumés, which we got to write. For this generation, much of what they say, do or write will be preserved online forever. Before employers even read their résumés, they’ll Google them.
Ezra gets appropriately deflationary about these claims, but I think there's obviously something to what Friedman's saying. One constant in human history is that norms about privacy are constantly switching as what the underlying technology and economy make possible shift as well. When people were too poor to afford multi-room houses, certain things were normal. Now that people are rich enough to afford all kinds of gadgets and Web 2.0 tools, other things are becoming normal.
But one fascinating element of this trend is how variable it all is. If you have a fairly rare name, it's easy to scope out information about you through Google even if not much is there. If you're Tom Lee or Susan Smith, however, (to name a couple of friends) then things get much less clear. And, of course, if there does happen to be another Matthew Yglesias out there somewhere, it's really hard to find information on him.
Draft Science
John Hollinger's gone where stat guys normally fear to tread and attempted to devise a formula aimed at projecting college players' likely levels of NBA success. He backs himself up, naturally, with historical arguments looking retrospectively and what his formula says GMs should have done. Here's his results for the 2003 draft:
Obviously, if you passed on Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh to grab Michael Sweetney, you'd feel pretty dumb, but for every Sweetney there's a Darko. All in all, the results seem to be okay. The interesting thing, though, is that the formula winds up giving a ton of weight to steals ("This is the one item that gets the most weight, actually -- it's even more important than PER!), to blocks, and to offensive boards along with giving players a big bonus for being young. The formula also tells you to give a boost to guys who nail three pointers, and to watch out for people who are too short -- or too ineffective on the boards -- for their position.
At the end of the day, the method winds up sounding a lot like "scouting." Instead of relying too heavily on how successful a college player the guy was, you look at his game results for signs of athleticism (steals, blocks, offensive boards), specific skills (pure shooting), and appropriate physical assets. You give a big bonus to younger guys, because you figure they'll learn. The formula doesn't really have much to add to this. It doesn't, in particular, do much to resolve any draft conundrums. Faced with an undersized power forward who was a successful rebounder in college, do you think he'll be one of those guys who continues to enjoy rebounding success despite being short (Paul Millsap) or one of those guys who's too short to handle the pro game?
A formula that helped answer questions like that would be tremendous. This one, not so much. It does, however, do the good service of cautioning against drafting the Adam Morrisons of the world -- guys who seem like unpromising pro prospects but who random sportwriters will just assert possess the "will to win" or something.
Fine Young Social Democrats
The New York Times offers us the latest evidence of a youth movement toward the left with some salient finding on a couple of big issues reproduced below. One thing that writeups of these findings tend to miss out on is that the cohort of 18-29 year-olds contains a substantially smaller proportion of white people than does the 30+ cohort. Viewed through that lens, combined with basic knowledge of race's heavy role in US politics, the left-leaning tendencies of the youngest voting cohort aren't that surprising. The contrast with the substantially more conservative "Generation X" cohort is, however, telling.
In some ways, this brings us back to the immigration bill. If it seems a bit baffling as to why some Republicans are so devoted to trying to push something through even though it tears the GOP apart and the bill seems unpopular, I think these facts about the changing ethnic composition of the United States probably keep some Republican strategists up late at night worrying. The GOP needs to get Latinos to vote more like white people -- at least like white people of equivalent income levels -- or else they're looking at big problems.
Two Makes a Trend
John Quiggin makes an interesting observation here that is less, I think, about the long-run trends in Anglosphere public policy than simply about the human tendency to see patterns where there isn't necessarily anything happening. "When Blair took office, he was generally seen as offering Thatcherism with a human face," he observes, while "Ten years later, the picture is quite different, superficially at least. Brown seems much more Old Labour than Blair, and Cameron is eager to be seen as anything but Thatcherite."
Similarly, in the US I recall having heard Bill Clinton referred to as the "conservator of the Reagan Revolution," which made a certain amount of sense circa 1999 or 2001. But Clinton's successor was, though a Republican, substantially less anti-statist in his approach to economics than Reagan. And if Bush is succeeded by a Democrat who stands to Clinton's left on economic matters (which seems reasonably likely), then suddenly Reagan starts to look like an outlier, and Clinton the guy who got the ball rolling down the hill again. On the other hand, if Bush is followed up by a Republican who follows through on promises to return to small government orthodoxy, then even Bush's deviations will probably vanish from sight.
Health Care Clubs
I congratulate Michael Cannon on his efforts to form an anti-universal club aiming to take universal health care proponents on directly rather than much around pretending that everyone agrees on the goals and we only disagree on the methods. I'm fairly certain that, politically, "we don't care if you can't afford health insurance" is a losing slogan. Even better, though, is Arnold Kling's club:
I once wrote that "The original sin of America's health care system is employer-provided health insurance." The best outcome might be for America to abolish employer-provided health insurance, try single-payer, have it fail, and then experiment with the sorts of policies that I talk about in my book.
I'll take that bet in a heartbeat. We all remember Europe, right, where national health care systems were build in the postwar period only to be abandonned in the late 1970s still in place across the board. Indeed, I'll even be fairminded and note that Kling is putting his own side at an unfair disadvantage. Anything as giant as a universal health care system would be nearly impossible to dismantle almost irrespective of its merits. The same features of US political institutions that make it almost impossible to start significant new programs make it even harder to get rid of them.
Covers
For some reason, I find cover songs almost endlessly fascinating. Julian Sanchez remarked yesterday that "For some reason, I had remembered the Bangles cover of 'Hazy Shade of Winter' as being much better than it is." Similarly, up until yesterday I had recalled Orgy's cover of "Blue Monday" as bad, but then I heard it randomly and it's really, really, really bad. Conversely, the comment thread to Julian's post turned up a link to Johnny Cash's cover of "Hurt", which is fantastic.
The true tragedy of the "Blue Monday" episode, however, is that they were covering a perfectly excellent song. The best covers, accordingly, are the ones that actually take a bad song and turn it into a good one. "Love Buzz" is what comes to mind, but there are others.
Too Much of a Good Thing
Dare I suggest that the whole concept of a 100 Blogs We Love list is fundamentally misguided. Nobody could love 100 regularly updated blogs, in the sense of following them religiously -- you'd run out of time and never get anything done. There's a big set of blogs that I'm very glad exist because now and again the situation arises when I want to see someone with something smart or witty to say on Subject X and I know that blogs A, B, and C are out there to scratch that itch. But the number of blogs I genuinely love needs to stay relatively small.
At this rate, you might as well just put together a list of 1,000 movies. Oh, wait.
Biden Real Constituency
Says he's running for president because "the press wants me in this thing," cites favorable coverage by elite pundits as signpost that his campaign is doing well.
Pharmaceutical Research
I don't have a ton to add to Kevin Drum's views on pharmaceutical research, except that it's worth stating clearly that there are good reasons to believe that the market mechanism substantially misallocates R&D dollars away from social optimal purposes because rich people and poor people tend to have divergent medical needs.
The relatively small size of the market for malaria treatments, for example, doesn't really reflect a lack of consumer demand for such treatments nearly so much as it reflects the very low incomes of people who live in malarial areas. This sort of thing is why we already have substantial public investment in drug R&D and why we should be looking at introducing more reliance on things like prizes into the R&D mix. I think there will always be a room for the private sector, patent-based path since there is a lot of genuine value in the development of so-called "lifestyle" drugs and the public sector probably wouldn't do a very good job of targeting investment in those kinds of things. Nevertheless, unleashing the public sector has a lot of promise.
The Inconveniently Boring Truth
At the end of his inevitable post on the horrors of Emily Yoffe, Chris Mooney goes on to make a great point about the intersection of science and political commentary:
If I'm being a bit hard on Emily Yoffe, it's because there's a larger point here. Yoffe's piece strikes me as indicative of how some aspects of the Washington journalism culture treat scientific information. A lot of the time, what's prized in that world is the ability to make a clever argument -- to turn conventional wisdom on its head.
When you apply this approach to science, however, there's an utter mismatch. In science, "conventional wisdom" is a consensus perspective that has withstood repeated expert attempts to unseat it. In this context, being "counterintuitive" -- especially when one is doing so well outside of the traditional channels of scientific discourse -- usually amounts to little more than being just plain wrong.
Yes, exactly. It's obviously the case that scientists sometimes do reach startling, revolutionary findings that upend conventional ways of thinking. But most science -- Kuhn's normal science -- involves incrementally refining, testing, or expanding existing knowledge that's been painstakingly built up by a community of researchers over a period of time. An amateur sitting at home trying to think up an interesting column topic just isn't going to be able to debunk it using Google and a clever turn of phrase.
Also: Storm World -- check it out. But don't spend all your money on other people's political books, because soon enough I'll be begging you to buy mine.
Photo by Flickr user Marc Gutierrez used under a Creative Commons license
They Make Videos
A friend was telling me that she didn't really understand the point of the recent heavy spate of blog posts about women getting harassed on the street. Well, I wouldn't want to claim that this is the point, but it's the sort of thing where, as a man, I really didn't appreciate either the scope or the bothersomeness of this until I sort of had myself hit over the head with it with a ton of blog posts and links to things. At any rate, via Ann Friedman here's a brief documentary on the subject:
The more I think about it, the more remarkable it seems that this phenomenon goes unremarked so frequently.
Stabbing and Backs
Brian Beutler gives Jonah Goldberg a good fisking. Jonah seems upset that when I complain that American conservatives are perpetuating a "stab in the back" theory of the war in Iraq to explain away their own hideous errors of strategic judgment without bothering "to make a tight link between the National Socialist reaction to German surrender at the end of WWI." Kevin Baker's already lay it out in Harper's at some length, so I haven't bothered personally because it wouldn't be a Very Serious, Thoughtful, Argument That Has Never Been Made in Such Detail or With Such Care if I did it.
Suffice it to say that I think the main point of analogy is that mainstream contemporary American conservatism, like inter-war Nazism, believes that military defeats are primarily due to failures of national will. They believe this in part because they massively overestimate the significance of will in determining outcomes of this sort. They also, like Nazis, seem to deny that it might ever better serve the national interest to abandon a military adventure than to continue it. These beliefs serve to foster the further belief that several constitutive elements of liberal democracies -- committed to free speech, to unfettered political debate, the existence of active political opposition movements -- are a source of national weakness.
Credit Where Due?
I really hate arguments of this form, but it seems to me that you need to give Tony Blair credit for at least having the courage of his convictions in taking on this thankless and doomed to fail task as special envoy to the Middle East. At the moment, his record is largely composed of good things, plus a giant Iraq-shaped stain. To basically double-down on the Mideast-related aspects of his legacy is gutsy.
Gutsy, but also kind of dumb. Not totally unlike risking his legacy on Iraq in the first place.
Cutting and Running
Just FYI, Tim Noah has the best mockery of Jonah Goldberg's subtitle switch available on the internet ("the totalitarian temptation" now runs "from Hegel to Whole Foods" instead of "from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton"). Talk of liberal fascism always puts me in the mind of this piece from National Review which observed that "Meyer contributed to an unfortunate tendency among conservatives toward theoretical maximalism, as in his casual reference to 'the totalitarian implications of the federal school lunch program.'" Just to show that, yes, Goldberg really is worse than some of his colleagues.
June 28, 2007
Questions
Siftung Leo Strauss has a question:
As a random thought experiment, which of you, Dear Readers, could offer a coherent paragraph summation about the foreign policy (note, not just Iraq) vision of the oh, top three candidates of either party? Without cheating and clipping and pasting some crap a 24 year old intern posted on the web page from a think tanker angling to be the new Dep.Asst.Sec. of something. We mean, in real time, an off the top of your head kind of thing.
Just as he suggests, one can't really do it. "Just bits and pieces of AgitProp and gibberish. Maybe you, Dear Reader, might have more luck." One thing it's worth pointing out is that there's nothing unusual about this. Presidential candidates tend to be vague and somewhat contradictory in describing their thinking about foreign policy. The true significance of what they were saying on the campaign trail is usually only clear in retrospect. Looking backwards, one can see Bush laying the groundwork for his post-9/11 nationalist binge back in the campaign talk of 2000 but very few people saw it at the time.
So Nice, I Watched it Twice
A slightly random observation, but I watched the first episode of Firefly last night and liked it much, much better than I did the first time I'd seen it. The key is that the storytelling is brilliantly subtle about revealing what's going on. As the second scene begins, you're already in the thick of things and nobody's stepped back to explain "Earth That War," why the outer planets are so poor, that the Alliance won the war, what a Brownshirt is, or anything. The storytelling just proceeds. When you first watch, though, you're so taken in by trying to "figure it out" that it's a little hard to appreciate how delicately the whole contraption's been constructed.
It's something one must keep in mind when dealing with any sophisticated TV show. I've seen the first three seasons of The Wire all at least three times, and my relative rating of them shifts over time (in particular, season two is superficially seductive but starts to look clumsy compared to the other two, while season three has a lot of hidden resonances) in a way that makes me believe the current month's worth of Sopranos-talk will all need to be revised once people finally have the chance to watch the entire run on DVD.
Good Health, Comrades
Having noted last week that the US manages to squeak one position ahead of Cuba in international health rankings, Brian Beutler discerns the "hidden rationale for our mixed up Cuba policy," namely that "if we were to open up trade with Cuba, they would likely will surpass us on the WHO list of international health care systems, which would make both Michael Moore, universal health care, and communism look good."
No doubt true. That Cuba has managed to construct a middling health care system in the midst of a totally crapped-out economy serves as a reminder that while Communism is a very bad political and economic system, it does have certain benefits. Specifically, adopting Communism either eliminates outright or else eliminates the attractiveness of a huge swathe of the professions that smart, highly-educated people tend to undertake. This has the effect of making it much easier to recruit smart, highly educated people to be tenth grade English teachers or basic doctors and nurses. This is part of the reason why the USSR, for all its very many problems, managed to be really good at teaching little kids reading and basic math -- getting a job doing that is much more relatively attractive in a Communist system than in a liberal one, so you can get better personnel on the job. Of course, that relative attractiveness is achieved largely by making everything awful (note incredibly old car in the photo above), so it's not a strategy I'm inclined to endorse, but still, there it is.
Photo by Flickr user Dr. Poulette used under a Creative Commons license
Triumph of the Macrobiotics
Reader R.Y. writes that "the thing about Whole Foods" is that:
It's one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the country. Not fascist (of course!!!) by any means. Still, this could present Jonah with something of a problem--every typology of fascism--as well as its actual, historical iterations--include the crushing of labor unions. So, it sounds like maybe Whole Foods is a GOOD candidate for proto-fascism, no?
But Jonah LIKES union busting--making him, by that logic, something of a proto-fascist himself!! Thus the whole thesis collapses upon itself.
He should have stuck with Hillary Clinton....
This is why I'm such a strong supporter of labor law reform. Whole Foods is a great place to purchase food. It's great, in part, because it's owner is a devious practitioner of the capitalistic arts. Naturally, given our current socio-political climate, this makes him "viciously anti-union." My heart cries for the UFCW every time I buy a delicious, delicious Whole Foods tomato and contemplate the awful state of the produce on sale at DC's Safeways and Giants. I could take or leave the "organic" food concept, which feels to me like a scam, but there's no denying that WF has better fruits and vegetables than the competition. But the guilt. So Whole Foods needs a union and it needs a legal environment in which it can get a union no matter how viciously anti-union the management may be.