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.
In Search of the iPod
To me, the most interesting thing about this effort to figure out who makes the iPod (via Brad DeLong) is less its conclusions -- the biggest share of the revenue, $80, goes to Apple for designing and conceiving of the thing, while "Chinese workers contribute only about 1 percent of the value of the iPod" -- than for how difficult the task is.
Greg Linden, Kenneth L. Kraemer and Jason Dedrick all from UC Irvine and doing research supported by the Sloan Foundation (full disclosure: my uncle is taking over in January) looked into where the $299 retail 30 gig iPod Video comes from and ended up with $110 dollars in "unaccounted-for parts and labor costs" which is a pretty huge proportion of the total. To make a long story short, then, nobody really knows where it came from and its extremely difficult to figure it out.
Photo by Flickr user Kelly Chan used under a Creative Commons license
That Explains It
I was watching Atlantic senior editor Corby Kummer's web video about knives up on the Atlantic site and I'm trying to convince myself that I recognize him from around the office somewhere when suddenly the words, "right here where I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts" escape his lips, thus explaining why I don't recognize him from the office -- he doesn't work there. It's interesting, though, that I was able to convince myself that I didn't. The knife business itself is interesting. There's also a print article if you're old school:
Never buy a set. Few people use more than three knives, and it’s practically inconceivable that one manufacturer will make the three likeliest to please you (or will sell them as a set).
Words to live by, I guess. I wonder where this three knives factoid comes from, though. I'm seeing four knives (bread, meat, big vegetables, little vegetables), plus some random spares.
Fearing Rudy
Todd Beeton at MyDD notes that while Rudy Giuliani's primary campaign may be faltering, he's still an extremely tough matchup for the Democrats in a general election. I expect he's going to find himself trying to make the "electability" argument more explicitly soon, since it's really the best case I think he can make to conservative voters.
Free Siegelman
Mark Kleiman seems to me to have the goods on this one:
If you had any doubt that the fuss about Libby's sentence is largely a matter of Washington insiders, political and journalistic, rallying to the defense of one of their own, consider the contrasting silence about the Siegelman case. A highly popular Democratic Governor of Alabama was indicted by a highly political U.S. Attorney's office, which is now seeking a thirty-year sentence. He was convicted of appointing someone to a state board that the same man had been appointed to by three previous governors, in return for a contribution in support of a referendum campaign.
As Mark notes, rewarding campaign contributors with ambassadorships -- to say nothing of policy concessions -- is common. And the case seems at least a little fishy ("the fact that Siegelman was convicted of corruption in the course of fighting against Jack Abramoff, Abramoff's his Indian-gaming clients, and Abramoff's buddy, now the Governor of Alabama, may be merely ironic") on a few grounds. But even if there's nothing fishy about it, 30 years is a sentence for a vicious murderer, "And not a peep of protest from the Washington Post, which instead is running a non-stop campaign of whining about Scooter Libby's thirty months."
As a sidebar, it's not even clear to me how Libby came to be a member of The Establishment in such good standing. I have it on good authority that he was in arrears on his dues to Temple Rodef Shalom before any of his legal troubles even started going down.
New Blog on the Block
Dana Goldstein has been unleashed from the clutches of the Center for American Progress (she'll be started at The American Prospect very soon) and now has a blog. Check it out. It's instantly become the top source on the internet for gender issues in nineteenth century France (a topic I know much more about than you'd think, though not nearly so much as Dana) and megacity blogging.
Hayes on Moore
Just because I think I'm now the only liberal pundit who hasn't done a review of SiCKO, let me link to Christopher Hayes' effort. I have to say that to me, health care sounds like a dull topic for a documentary but I hope it does really, really well since I can only imagine that good things would result from a stunning success.
So Very Clever
I wonder who wrote TNR's unsigned editorial on Hamas and what was going through his head when he wrote this:
A great debate has already begun on the subject of who lost Gaza. Increasingly, one hears that the Israelis did, or the Americans did; that the disaster is the consequence of Israeli policies or American policies, of Israeli harshness and American indifference. It is necessary to insist, therefore, that the primary responsibility for Palestinian actions falls on Palestinians. To believe the opposite is to hold a condescending imperialist view of the Palestinians as the passive objects of others; as nothing but the wretched playthings of power, of circumstances over which they have no control; as people in some way unqualified for history.
Could the author of those lines seriously expect a single person on the planet to regard TNR as the authentic voice of anti-imperialism west of the Jordan River? Obviously not. But so what's the point? It reflects, I think, a dangerous self-deception. The piece much more appropriately on a rancid note of smug condescension:
For many decades, the world has clamored for Palestinian self-determination. Well, the clamor can now cease. Palestinian self-determination is here for all the world to see. So is self-determination good news or bad news? It all depends on what is determined.
What the argument here is supposed to be, I couldn't quite say? Is a decades-long program of illegal settlement-construction really given retroactive legitimacy by the outcome of an armed struggle in June 2007? Would it really be "imperialist" of me to note that the self-fulfilling prophecies of the Israeli right have been the Palestinian rejectionists' best friend for a long time? Meanwhile, I don't want to say anything untoward, but the editorial has a remarkable way of not grappling at all with US policy, either forward- or backward-looking; of saying what, if any, American interests are in play here and how they might best be advanced.
Dead Again
I can't say I'm all that surprised that the immigration bill can't pass the Senate. Demographically speaking, I think I'm about as close to being the core constituency for this bill as you can get without being either an illegal immigrant or someone whose business model depends on the employment of illegal immigrants, and I'm not all that broken up about what's gone down.
Pro-bill liberal groups were essentially reduced to arguing that the Senate just needed to pass something called "comprehensive immigration reform" so that the conference committee could change it around in a couple of dozen ways. That may well have been the correct calculation, but it's not the kind of thing that gets people calling their senator and urging him to vote for the bill.
The Era of Big Government: Looming
Mark Ambinder brings us the results of Tony Fabrizio's survey of the Republican Party base:
According to Fabrizio, the party’s social/cultural wing remains about the same size, while the economic wing has “shrunk by nearly two thirds.” Replacing those Republicans have been national security and defense voters. Free marketeers, per Fabrizio, comprise about 8 percent of the GOP electorate.
This, of course, explains why all the "Porkbusters" campaigns in the world are unlikely to deliver us into the clutches of actual reduction in the size of government.
Cheap, Cheap Gas
I'd known for a long time that Iran, despite its large crude oil resources, was actually close to implementing a rationing scheme for gasoline. Well, now the rationing's begun and with it the anti-rationing protests. What I hadn't realized until today was the precise dynamics of the situation. The issue is that gas is preposterously cheap -- "After a 25 percent hike in prices imposed May 21, gas sells at the equivalent of 38 cents a gallon." To make a long story short, the Iranian government is earning money selling crude oil then spending a hefty chunk of that cash purchasing refined gasoline and then selling it back to Iran's citizens at wildly sub-market prices.
If they were smart, they would just try to decontrol prices gently since rationing when gas is this cheap is just begging for a black market.
Activisting While Pink
Excellent. I thought I might never get a chance to re-use my painstakingly assembled (I used Seashore, a neat little open source ap) "pink" image (pictured above) but apparently the Concerned Women of America thinks its hypocritical of Code Pink to associate itself with this girliest of colors while they "advocate policies that are very aggressive and more often associated with men."
Hilarious. It's not the first time I've felt that if CWA didn't exist, the feminist blogosphere would have to invent it.
Politics as a Vocation
Young Ezra Klein makes a good point:
What I want is not a foreign policy vision that builds from a foundation of values, but from one of consequences. Whether a policy is concordant with America's view of itself is less important than its likely outcomes. The Paul Wolfowitzes of the world had thought plenty about values and were perfectly capable of discussing their vision of Iraq as a shining city on a Mesopotamian hill. What they hadn't thought about were outcomes -- constraints on our action and capabilities, the likely effects on others' actions of our use of force, etc. Good thing they weren't really pressed on the subject, lest they'd have had to conjure up a postwar plan for a reception that didn't include candy and flowers -- a plan they didn't have. But they weren't questioned, because they were effectively able to keep the conversation focused on values -- do you care about liberty? hate tyranny? believe Arabs can be democratic? -- rather than consequences.
I believe, however, that it is strictly forbidden to make this point without citing Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation". What Ezra is complaining about is the need for US foreign policy to be guided by an ethic of responsibility focused on whether or not our actions will, say, lead to massive chaos and bloodshed rather than a focus on "moral clarity" or whether or not our policy proposals are, in some sense, grounded in high ideals.
Bye, Bye Nationhood
Martin Peretz, back from vacation, and ready to tell it like it is:
By the way, I think the conflict between the Arabs of Palestine and the Jewish state is of less import than the one between India and Pakistan, which like Palestine, is also not a country and the Pakistanis, also like the Palestinians, are not a nation. Oh, yes: why is this of such valence? Because Pakistan has the bomb.
The claim that Pakistan is not a country is simply bizarre, since it pretty clearly is. The idea that there is no "Pakistani nation" is perhaps comprehensible (though, I think, mistaken) as an argument about Pakistan's large degree of ethnic diversity, with the plurality Punjabi group compromising only 44 percent of the population, with the remainder deeply fragmented.
The claim that there is not Palestinian nation, however, both puts yesterday's TNR editorial on Hamas (why should Peretz' views be any more reputable than Palestinian rejectionism) in perspective and also recapitulates the most tragic of Zionist self-deceptions. The idea of creating a Jewish state has a certain logic to it. And the idea of creating this Jewish state in Palestine has an obvious appeal. Under the circumstances, it became convenient to believe that Palestine was not only the location of the historical Jewish state but actually "a land without people for a people without a land." The main problem with this theory was that it was, obviously, false -- Palestine wasn't very densely populated at the time, but there were certainly people there.
This deception eventually became untenable and transformed itself into the one Peretz is offering -- sure, there are people on that land, but they aren't a people, a nation. When I was young, I recall a Hebrew School teacher speaking of "15 Arab countries and only one Israel" (I think this is an underestimate of the number of Arab countries) the better to make the fate of the Palestinians a trivial matter. Again, this is a convenient thing for people with certain other commitments to believe, but it's just not true.
Hedge Fund Hotties
I had thought the point of becoming a super-rich hedge fund manager was that chicks would be into you no matter how bad you looked, so you wouldn't need to worry about dressing well. Just confused I guess. Speaking of confused, I think Chad Ford needs a remedial course in gender stereotypes:
Taking Kevin Durant is like dating a supermodel. She's hot. Everyone thinks you're cool for being next to her. For a few years everything is great. But when it's time to settle down, have kids, start a life ... she's eyeing younger guys. Partying late at night. Leaving you in the dust the next time a good thing comes along.
Taking Oden is like marrying the girl you don't want to date, but the girl you want to spend the rest of your life with. She's responsible. She looks out for you. She helps you be the best person you can be. She's not hot on the outside. But inside she makes your life worth living.
When she gets older, your trophy wife is going to dump you for a younger man? That's backwards. Ford's cliché only works if you reverse the genders and then we're in cads and dads territory. What's more, since Durant and Oden are both men, it makes more sense this way. Durant's the flashy guy you want, Oden's the solid guy you know you should want. And, yes, I'm wearing my Texas Basketball t-shirt right now. The problem is that Ford's so tangled-up in his own anxieties that he can't bear the thought of constructing an analogy that turns him into a woman (or maybe a gay man, but the stereotype really only fits if he's a woman).
Yi
When I was asking how to pronounce "Yi Jianlian" my focus was on pronouncing "jianlian." If the SportsCenter team is to be believed, however, we're supposed to pronounce "Yi" as "ee" rather than the way that seems natural. Since my own family name begins with a "Y" pronounced like "ee" I won't complain about this, but I do want an explanation.
Pay The Man
Refusing to put out the funding levels the IAEA needs strikes me as a really, really stupid idea. This isn't that much money in the scheme of things, and we're talking about nuclear proliferation and really deadly accidents.
June 29, 2007
Today in Benchmarking
In the latest of the National Security Network's efforts to measure progress toward the various benchmarks in Iraq, we see that nothing of note has happened on constitution reform and that nothing is likely to happen given how difficult the process for amending the Iraqi constitution is.
This is the crux of the matter for evaluating America's recent successes in collaborating with tribal leaders in Anbar province. The leaders in question were the insurgency -- and were collaborating with Al-Qaeda in Iraq -- just last year because they found both the US occupation and the Iraqi constitution intolerable. There's no sign that they've begun to find these things any less intolerable today. Weapons and training we provide these tribal groups are all-but-certain to be turned against the Iraq government down the road -- and against us if we're still in Iraq, still supporting that government. Which isn't to say that finding local people interested in fighting al-Qaeda is a bad idea. Instead, it's to say that we ought to do our best to get out of the way.
The Case for Dictatorship
Yesterday I hailed Communism for producing enough human misery that teaching middle school became a highly attractive job. Today George Packer makes the case for life in a crumbling dictatorship:
National cinemas often become great just as dictatorships loosen up or fall, when there’s the right combination of freedom of expression and miserable conditions. Think of Czech cinema during Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring, Polish cinema during the early years of Solidarity, Yugoslav cinema during the country’s disintegration after Tito, or Iranian cinema during the now dead reform era. Totalitarian rule makes artistic creation impossible, but, apparently, social peace threatens it with triviality.
This by way of praising 12:08 East of Bucharest.
The GOP and the Hispanics
Jonathan Singer points out that the GOP is now getting hammered among Hispanic voters. Bush had made significant progress on this front and "built the GOP share to 35% in 2000 and at least 40% in 2004" defeats that pulled the party close enough to win one close election and "win" another. "By 2005, nearly one-third of Hispanics called themselves Republicans or leaned that way."
Now, though, as we can see on the graphic even when you push people to lean, only 20 percent are willing to call themselves Republicans. Obviously, if GOP self-identification can go down 10+ percentage points in two years, there's also the possibility of a GOP recovery. It appears, however, that the party is going to be stuck on an anti-immigration kick at least through the fall of 2008. Meanwhile, since the Hispanic share of the electorate keeps growing, Republicans really can't afford to even be just treading water.
Randolph to New York
This Zach Randolph trade feels a bit funny. After all, one of the few things the Knicks don't need is a low-post scorer who's a bit suspect on the defensive end and in terms of focus and effort. But insofar as they got him for cheap, it seems that the Knicks pulled off a solid deal, strange as those words are to type. Meanwhile, Portland either has a lot of faith in Channing Frye as a prospect, or else very little faith in Randolph. I tend to think it must be the former, since even if they were absolutely desperate to rid themselves of Randolph he seems to me like a guy that more than one team would be interested in getting their hands on.
The New Sonics
Meanwhile, from the "what are they thinking" files the Seattle management seems to have spent too much time reading Free Darko or something. They draft Kevin Durant, an amazing talent, but someone who, unfortunately, plays the same position as their second-best player. Thus, they decide to trade their best player for another rookie small forward.
Presti sees this glut as a benefit, not a hindrance. He wants players who can play a variety of positions and give a commitment to defense.
Um . . . okay, but defense starts from the inside out and this is a deal that leaves the Sonics with diddly squat in the middle. If they're going to play with this lineup, though, they should really find a way to get Don Nelson to coach the team.
Subtitle Mania
I really like this idea: "The Totalitarian Temptation from Plato to Piggly Wiggly."
More Siegelman
Scott Horton has been all over this story (as has Glyn Wilson of the an affidavit about the husband of one of the two female U.S. Attorneys for Alabama boasting that "his girls" were going to put Siegelman out of action had her house torched and her car run off the road — plus the Justice Department angle, the Abramoff angle, and the Rove angle, this one smells to me like a major scandal brewing.
I'm just catching up on this story myself, but here's the latest from Scott Horton. Also check out this post from Laura McGann that lays out much of the relevant information.
The Israel Analogy
It's easy and, indeed, appropriate to mock Bush for the public diplomacy fiasco involved in saying that his plan is to make Iraq more like Israel but this shouldn't completely obscure the fact that Bush is making a sound analytic point. What he's saying about Iraq is, in essence, what John Kerry was saying about the US when he said he thought we should aim to reduce terrorism to a kind of nuisance. Naturally, Kerry got savagely attacked for saying this, but at some point somebody's going to need to have the courage to make the argument that setting ourselves maximalist goals vis-a-vis terrorism doesn't make sense.
Plenty of countries have long suffered some degree of terrorism -- Spain, Britain, Israel -- while being more-or-less pleasant, economically successful democracies whose citizens enjoy a high standard of living. These countries would, of course, like to completely eliminate their terrorism problems and rightly do make efforts in these regards. But during their better moments, at least, all of these countries recognize that the goal is to reduce the harm caused by terrorism to manageable levels, not to turn everything upside down in pursuit of a possibly chimerical "victory." What we really, really, really need to focus on is making sure no terrorists get nuclear bombs while, beyond that, we keep the risks involved in conventional terrorism (even in Israel you're more likely to die in a car wreck than a suicide bombing) in perspective.
Your Moment of Zen
Via Ezra Klein, White House press secretary Tony Snow plays the jazz flute:
Weird.
Washington Read
Kinsley in TNR. Hilarity ensues. There's really not what you'd call a quotable moment here, so I'll just quote this:
Excited, I borrowed a copy of the book and gave it a "Washington read." That means looking yourself up in the index. It's best to find a copy you can peruse in private. You can do your Washington read in a bookstore, but it's tricky. People can see you pathetically scanning for your name and, even more pathetically, not finding it. And OK, fair enough, why on earth would you be in the index of a history of medieval France? Answer: for the same reason you might be in any book--i.e., no reason at all. Unless, of course, you are Henry Kissinger, in which case virtually every book published in the past few decades, if it contains an index at all, devotes several lines of it to references to you. The contrast between Kissinger and everyone else in this regard is a special burden on those of us who share Kissinger's neighborhood in alphabetical order. At least Zbigniew Brzezinski is spared this. But remind me to bomb Hanoi in my next life.
Even more important than checking to see if you're in the index is checking to see if you're in the acknowledgments. By the latter metric, I am, in fact, in a book on French history, albeit not medieval French history.
Silly Season
David Frum describes the experience of witnessing Mitt Romney answer some tough foreign policy questions:
Mitt Romney has an amazingly orderly mind and an impressive grasp of detail. He also has a serious Garbage In/Garbage Out problem - that is, while his mind processes information in a lucid and logical way, his intake valves lack filters for screening out nonsense. The overwhelming impression that I took away from his presentation was that it was ... silly.
I don't actually understand this metaphor. If Romney's mind is so sharp, so lucid and logical, then how come he can't catch the nonsense? Meanwhile, Frum also tells us that Rudy Giuliani "skips lightly over crucial details" and has ideas that "are much less worked through than Romney's" but on the plus side "the spirit behind them is exactly right." At this point, Frum (with Giuliani in tow) departs planet reality. "As he said: the mullahs released the hostages in 1981 because they looked into Ronald Reagan's eyes and saw something they did not see in Jimmy Carter's. I saw that same something in Guiliani's." Okay, sure. Lessons learned: Romney is silly, whereas Giuliani will force terrorists to back down with his steely gaze and David Frum has no understanding of how international relations work or the history of US-Iranian relations.
Photo by Flickr user Editor B used under a Creative Commons license
Fear of a Desert Planet
Brad Plumer gives us something more to worry about:
On a related note, the United Nations released a new report today, concluding that a whole bunch of fertile land will probably crumble into desert within the next generation, especially in Africa and Central Asia--creating an "environmental crisis of global proportions." About 50 million people are at risk of displacement. (A fifth of the population of Mali, for instance, already moves to Ivory Coast during drought years.) Some African countries, presumably, will have to give up trying to feed themselves and start importing food. Not all of that is due to climate change, but some of it is.
I had known something along these lines was going on, but 50 million is an awful lot of people when you focus your mind on it.
Photo by Flickr user Gary.Fotu under a Creative Commons license
"Why Don't You Get a Job?"
For some reason, Alamo gave me a rental car featuring XM satellite radio without telling me. Once I figured it out, I naturally turned to Lucy where every day is the ultimate nineties alt-rock party. At any rate, "Why Don't You Get a Job" by The Offspring came on, and while I'd remembered it as a bad song, oh my God it's terrible.
In addition to its pure sonic badness, it's just an egregious rip-off of "ob-la-di ob-la-da," and is conveying what I've got to believe is the least punk message in human history. I'm almost inclined to believe that the whole thing is a kind of deeply ironic joke about the willingness of commercial radio programmers to give airtime to whatever crap the record companies feed them.
Friday Asian Carp Blogging
Last week we learned about Barack Obama's struggle against the insidious fish and the cynical media that refused to believe there was a real problem here. This week, a dramatic video details the threat:
Be afraid.
Fair Weather Originalists
Scott Lemieux takes on conservative justices who espouse originalism when it backs conservative policy conclusions and ignore it when it doesn't.
Time for a Utopian Moment
The iPhone definitely looks cool. This, if it works, would be even cooler: "His goal is to make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane, used as a feedstock for other fuels. Such an achievement might reduce dependency on fossil fuels and strike a blow at global warming."
I was going to turn this into a post about techno-utopians who think there's no need for serious action against global warming because they just assume these magical genetically engineered bacteria will solve all our problems. Reflecting, though, the point is that there's sigificant synergy between utopian dreams and standard-issue regulatory impulses. Any rigorous effort to curb global warming, especially a cap-and-trade system, would dramatically increase the monetary value of the sort of thing this guy is trying to create and make it much more likely that novel technologies along these lines secure invest dollars and get brought to market.
Warnings Ignored
Via GFR, Scott MacLeod takes a look at the administration's efforts to fund Iranian civil society groups backfiring exactly as the initiative was predicted to backfire. As Garance says, "The reverse-Midas touch of this administration is really a thing to behold."
Also: They Have Funny Accents
Is it just me, or does Stephen Hunter seem to be stretching to find things about SiCKO that are worth complaining about:
His anecdotes draw pointed contrasts with Europe, as he returns to France and England as examples of superb health-care systems, but the comparisons are never put in any kind of context. France and the United Kingdom each has a population of around 60 million, a fifth of America's 300 million. Is it easier to administer a program so much smaller? I don't know, but I'm not investigating health care; he is, he should and he doesn't.
Well, look, no filmmaker can consider every possible permutation. If Hunter wants to complain that Moore has ignored some relevant issue, he ought to make the argument for its relevance. Maybe he could ask one of his colleagues at The Washington Post who covers health care if he thinks this is an important issue. My guess is that large population size is probably an asset for a national health care system, since the existence of a larger populations means it'll be easier to project future health care needs.
I might worry that some countries are too small to engage in the right sort of planning. But I'll concede that like Holmes (and, I guess, Moore) I haven't thought a lot about the issue. It would, however, be pretty simple to divide the country into five semi-autonomous "health care regions" for the purposes of administering a national health care system. Obviously, one loses ones card as a Serious Independent Thinker unless one professes disdain for Michael Moore, but Moore's basic thesis here (admirably summarized by Holmes as "American health coverage = BAD, European health coverage = GOOD") isn't especially controversial among the most earnestly wonkish analysts you can imagine.
Photo by Flickr user Gadl used under a Creative Commons license
Webb's Monkey Wrench
Good for him. One of the big plusses of having guys like Webb with a military background in the Democratic congress is that he not only has pretty sound instincts about national security issues but has a lot of self-confidence and a willingness to push the envelop on these things.
Gotta Get Away
Light blogging today (I'll post some stuff here eating breakfast) as I'll be driving with Sara from the Yglesias family compound in Brooklin, ME to Acadia National Park on the other side of the bay. I was a little upset to see yesterday that the Bangor Daily News's usual steady diet of small town-ey stories has been interrupted by George W. Bush's decision to follow me to Maine and, even worse, bring Vladimir Putin with him.
National Park Service Photo
June 30, 2007
The World Is Flat
It's pretty amusing that corporations upset about China's new labor law dust off essentially identical talking points as they might use to oppose a bump in the New Jersey minimum wage. Surely it would make more sense for the businesses in question to use this turn of events to try to undercut the "race to the bottom" globalization narrative and help bolster support for business-friendly trade policies.
Uh-Oh
Okay, I'm not a fan of "electability" arguments and this result is an outlier, but things like this ought to make people wonder if this is really the front runner the Democrats need: "More than half of Americans say they wouldn't consider voting for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for president if she becomes the Democratic nominee, according to a new national poll made available to McClatchy Newspapers and NBC News."
Taliban Spreading
It's a bit odd that Pakistan's security services are warning Musharraf about the spreading Taliban problem when, to the best of my understanding, Pakistan has gone back to its previous policy of seeking "strategic depth" in Afghanistan by backing Taliban forces. I should also add, though, that at least some people I've communicated with who are familiar with Afghanistan object to characterizing the forces in question -- ethnically Pashto, strongly traditionalist -- as "the Taliban," arguing that Pashto nationalism is a larger and longer-lasting phenomenon than the specific institutions and individuals we came to know by that name.
Stay Calm
Via Jim Henley, the impressive troika of Stephen Cook, Ray Takeyh, and Suzanne Maloney says we don't need to fear a regional war if we leave Iraq.
Allies We Don't Need
Media Matters notes a curious trend. The Washington Post endorsed the confirmation of John Roberts. The Washington Post endorsed the confirmation of Samuel Alito. Now, The Washington Post has gone an excoriated the recent spate of 5-4 decisions in which Roberts and Alito, predictably, joined with fellow conservatives William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas to do the sort of things that conservative judges do.
One wishes, at this point, that the Post would simply endorse the decisions as well. If the Post wants to become conservative on judicial issues, the way it's become conservative on foreign policy issues then it is, of course, free to do so. But hewing to a liberal line when it doesn't matter only adds a veneer of credibility when they put forward conservative views on question that do matter -- who should and who should not be confirmed. They could, of course, redeem themselves by noting the contradiction and swearing that they won't carry water for conservative nominees in the future. I, however, won't be holding my breath.
No More Hilton
I've heard some suggestion that this (via Ezra Klein) may be staged, but it's excellent one way or the other:
And how.
It's a Mystery!
CNN's SiCKO analysis concludes:
As Americans continue to spend $2 trillion a year on health care, everyone agrees on one point: Things need to change, and it will take more than a movie to figure out how to get there.
Yes, it will. We could, for example, read the earlier sections of the article. For example:
The United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care -- no other nation even comes close to that number. France spends about 11 percent, and Canadians spend 10 percent.
France . . . Canada . . . cheap . . . but does their health care suck? Well:
Like Moore, we also found that more money does not equal better care. Both the French and Canadian systems rank in the Top 10 of the world's best health-care systems, according to the World Health Organization. The United States comes in at No. 37. The rankings are based on general health of the population, access, patient satisfaction and how the care's paid for.
So, okay, it's not that hard to figure out. France and Canada both have two difference systems of health care delivery both of which are cheaper than the US system and both of which are more effective. What's more, these aren't obscure countries. Lots of people have heard of France. Lots of people have heard of Canada. How hard is it for them to just write the words "Michael Moore is right; American health care would be improved if we adopted French methods instead"? Their articles supports the claim 100 percent. Instead, we get this Andrew-pleasing nitpicking about how Moore didn't talk about Medicare. What should he have said? Talked about its low, low overhead costs and high levels of patient satisfaction?
The Totalitarian Temptation from Jonah Goldberg to LOLCats
Jon Swift explains.
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Heads in the Sand
