De Farco
From typo to coinage, Scott Lemieux defines a "de farco overruling" of a precedent as "A case, such as Carhart II, in which the Court makes a farcically trivial or specious distinction in order to avoid formally overruling a precedent."
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July 1, 2007 - July 7, 2007 Archives
July 1, 2007
Rate Your Blog
Oh, shit. The blog came is as PG-13 on the Mingle2 blog rating scale.
Mingle2 - Online Dating
"Suicide" it seems, was the word that kept out of God range. Motherfuckers.
Independents
Big survey, little new information. Many independents are actually partisans. Many others just have no idea what they're talking about. A few really do pay attention and swing anyway. The party that wins more independent votes tends to win elections. For some reason this leads the Post to conclude that "frustration with political combat in Washington and widespread skepticism toward the major parties" might be "enough to provide the spark for an independent candidacy by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg" even though this is always what independents think and third parties never win.
If This Be Minimalism
Cass Sunstein has a really strange TNR piece trying to make the case that even though Alito and Roberts vote all the same ways as Roberts and Scalia, there's an important difference in that the former two are "minimalists" (which Sunstein thinks is good) whereas the latter two make sweeping theoretical claims.
The obvious riposte to this is: So what? That they have a different literary style is neither here not there unless you have some reason to believe they might rule differently (ruling on cases, after all, is what justices do) from their conservative colleagues in the future, and Sunstein has none. At any rate, see Jonathan Zasloff and Scott Lemieux for more on this if you're interested.
Photo by Flickr user Blmurch used under a Creative Commons license
What We Owe
To Iraq, nothing argues Andrew Bacevich. Instead, our debt is too Iraqi people and we should become more welcoming of refugees at the same time that we get our own troops the hell out.
Journamalism
The MSM -- in this case the Bangor Daily News -- fails me again:
Rawding explained that "the more than 20 members of the [Blue Hill 'A Fourth to Remember"] committee … planned the celebration and set the time … so as not to interfere with the long-standing tradition of Brooklin’s Fourth of July parade that has always taken place in the morning hours."
Yes, but where and when exactly is this Brookin Fourth of July parade, oh Bangor Daily News. I can't tell! Give me the blogosphere any day.
Big Bucks
Ambinder can't copyright the facts so I'll steal the fundraising numbers from him -- $31 million for Obama, $9 million for Edwards, $7 million for Richardson, and an estimate of "about $20M in primary funds" for Clinton (who's also raising general election funds). Read Marc for analysis. He says the results "imposes an obligaton on all of us who cover the race: we need to figure out why the 'national' frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, isn't generating as much excitement as her chief competitior."
To me this isn't all that puzzling. Obama's supporters, though numerically fewer than Clinton's, are more drawn from the "high information" segment of the electorate that has both more money to donate and more inclination to do so. Donations would be a great proxy for intensity of support of you were looking at two demographically similar groups of people, but that's not the case here.
Life in Hell
I'm in the eighth circle of libertarian hell along with Reihan Salam. I had thought this was the place where I wander into the drugstore and just assume that CVS wouldn't sell me any aspirin that's actually poison because it would be bad for the brand's reputation. In fact:
Eighth Circle—The Fraudulent: The Malebolgeof public intellectuals—those who have a sphere of influence greater than most of us, and are negligent in their exercise of it by contributing to the darkness and confusion. This sphere contains everyone from know-nothing idiots like like Lou Dobbs of CNN and Bob Herbert of the NYT, to people who are really smart enough to know better yet resolutely avoid any systematic examination of their moral premises, like Matthew Yglesias and Reihan Salam. This circle is guarded by, who else, Friedrich Hayek.
I'll have to plead guilty to resolutely avoiding any systematic examination of my moral premises. I spent some time doing this in college and it genuinely didn't seem to lead anywhere productive.
Partly Pregnant
Like Brian Beutler, I've long been fascinated by the war the Iraq War appears to have spawned a whole new category of organized violence -- whatever it is that's happening in Iraq that somehow isn't a "full-scale" civil war. Call it the half-scale civil war. It sounds like BS to me.
No, Iraq's civil war doesn't look like the American Civil War, but if that's what we mean by "full-scale civil war" then it's almost certainly not the case that "the surge is keeping Iraq from descending into" one. That the groups who deny the legitimacy of the de jure government and the US occupation authority and deploy violence or the threat of violence in service of their political goals don't necessarily wear uniforms and fight in formation is rather typical of these kind of situations and not something the surge is preventing. Looked at a different way, Iraq's civil war is notable for the fact that the contending parties' don't have much in the way of heavy military equipment. That's all to the good, and we have good reasons for continuing to support efforts to keep things that way post-withdrawal, but efforts in that regard don't require the presence of over 150,000 American soldiers on the ground.
Public domain photo of the Gettysburg dead by Alexander Gardner
Banal Observation of the Day
Sea kayaking tends to induce fatigue, especially when you know longer really recall correct kayaking method.
July 2, 2007
Elect Rudy and the Tautologies Have Won
Unless I'm mistaken, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's main point here is that he thinks we should continue the surge if and only if he thinks we should continue the surge. Does he think we should continue? Well, he couldn't say. But he definitely will do the thing that he thinks he should do, whatever that is. Possibly. Also: He'll keep the country on offense. Fortunately, we have David Frum's word for it that vague and evasive though Rudy may be, he's less silly than Mitt Romney.
My Colleagues Went on a Junket and All I Got Was This Stupid Working Vacation
Atlantic bloggers Ross Douthat and James Fallows, along with James Bennet, Clive Crook, Corby Kummer, Carl Cannon are going to blogging the Aspen Ideas Festival, which should be excited, though I'm not entirely sure what the Aspen Ideas Festival is. I wasn't invited, so I'm still in Maine, but I'll be hard at work with full-tilt blogging action.
UPDATE: NPR says the Bush-Putin lobster dinner in Kennebunkport was "highly luxurious." Sara and I are going to cook some lobster tonight, but I think the luxury level will be only middling.
Bush Beyond Iraq
From the Post's "narcissistic child" article:
Bush is fixated on Iraq, according to friends and advisers. One former aide went to see him recently to discuss various matters, only to find Bush turning the conversation back to Iraq again and again. He recognizes that his presidency hinges on whether Iraq can be turned around in 18 months. "Nothing matters except the war," said one person close to Bush. "That's all that matters. The whole thing rides on that."
The Bush presidency is often seen through this lens. It's also true that for a two term president who enjoyed GOP congressional control for several years, he really does have remarkably few legislative accomplishments. Where other leaders would have seen an opportunity to push a governing agenda, Bush saw an opportunity to evade congressional oversight as he used the executive branch to commit crimes against the constitution, fill many executive agencies with incompetents, and fill others with people who helped his campaigns' financial backers rob the public. Which leads us to what's probably the most important aspect of Bush's non-Iraq legacy, his decision to provide an elegant demonstration of public choice theory and destroy public faith in the possibility of government action by showing exactly how poorly a government can be run.
Beyond that, we have a failed stab at immigration reform, massive tax cuts that saddled the country with big debts but produced a macroeconomic situation worse than that prevailing under his predecessor's policies, an increase in the level of subsidies for fossil fuel producers, an increase in the level of farm subsidies, a Medicare reform structured as a large subsidy to health insurance and pharmaceutical firms, the institutionalized use of torture and arbitrary detention, and a return of illegal domestic surveillance. Also -- No Child Left Behind, and an invasion of Afghanistan whose goals, though eminently justified, have not been achieved.
The South Will Brush-back Again
Cato head honcho David Boaz draws my attention to an intruiguing theory of the hit-by-pitch phenomenon:
“I found that pitchers from the South are not more likely in general to hit batters,” [Thomas] Timmerman said in a telephone interview, “but they are much more likely to hit batters after giving up a home run, or after a teammate has gotten hit the previous half-inning.”
Timmerman speculates that this may be due to the honor culture of the south. Boaz extends the hypothesis to say that perhaps the issue is not Dixie per se but the Scotch-Irish tradition (see Michael Lind and especially Senator Jim Webb), noting that "Two of the top non-Southerners on the list, Jeff Weaver and David Wells" are from Southern California, where the white population has traditionally been heavy Scotch-Irish.
No Respect
Jim Henley notes the very small gap between John Edwards and Bill Richardson in fundraising and argues that "surely Richardson’s dough means that he’s at least as credible an alternative to the Big Two as Edwards now. It’s either a two-person race or a four-person race, but it’s not a three-way." The difference, it seems to me, is that Edwards has mostly been leading in Iowa polls.
That said, while I'm not exactly persuaded Richardson should be the nominee, I am sure I wish he would get more respect and attention. Richardson has staked out the best positions on both Iraq and climate change, and a Richardson boomlet would indicate to the other candidates that these are important issues to their constituents. The effect here on Iraq, in particular, could be large. What's more, in crass terms, Richardson is well-positioned to damage Hillary Clinton in two of her major pockets of support -- Latino voters and voters who place a high value on "experience."
Hot Prospects
Jason Zengerle lets us know that Sacramento Kings draft pick Spencer Hawes is a global warming denialist. Hawes is also, I think, a solid candidate for bust status in light of his poor rebound rate and TS%, especially since the overrated white collegian is a well-known draft phenomenon (which makes how low Nick Fazekas went in light of his stats even more puzzling).
Over Here, Over There
In light of this British car bomb terrorist plot can we all agree that the presence of British and American soldiers in Iraq does not, in fact, constitute a physical barrier against terrorists attacking western countries? You stop terrorist attacks with law enforcement and intelligence.
Dog Bites Man
Fred Hiatt concedes that George W. Bush is a bad president but manages to lavish undeserved praise on him anyway:
But valuable strands of policy also may end up strewn in the wreckage, victims (in varying combinations) of President Bush's ineptitude, inconstancy and unpopularity. Among these are what Bush called compassionate conservatism, now moribund; American promotion of democracy abroad, now flailing; and accountability in elementary and high school education, losing ground as it approaches a major test in Congress.
The editorial goes on to note, correctly, that compassionate conservatism never actually existed since it "was an early casualty of Bush's fiscal policy, which tilted the tax code toward the wealthy at a time of rising inequality, forced the government to devote increasing sums to pay interest on the national debt and ensured that less and less would be available for social programs for the vulnerable." The editorial also notes that Bush has not, in fact, promoted democracy and his alleged agenda on this score "has had little success: Iraq and Afghanistan remain at war, tentative gains for democracy in the Mideast have been reversed, and autocracies in the former Soviet Union, China, Iran and elsewhere are emboldened." On education, meanwhile, the main legislative forces behind No Child Left Behind -- Ted Kennedy and George Miller -- are chairing the relevant House and Senate committees and none of the Democratic presidential candidates favor ending the school accountability provisions whose continuation Hiatt is worried about it.
There's just no story here. The Bush administration has almost no positive legacy, and on those areas where good things have happened (NCLB and AIDS funding are the two I can think of) Democrats show every sign of wanting to continue the positive and perhaps make some improvements around the margin. It's an inconvenient reality since I, too, would rather demonstrate independent thinking and cleverness by identifying some hidden downside to Bush not being president, but there's nothing there.
Civilian Casualties
If fewer civilians in Iraq really are dying that's great news, but I don't understand why we're supposed to take the Defense Department's word for it when the Pentagon "refuses to count civilian casualties, argues that civilian casualty counts are irrelevant to an evaluation of war aims, and either ignores or disputes the most sophisticated methodology for counting civilian casualties."
And I don't really mean this as a cheap "gotcha" -- it's a real problem. The US military seems to have weirdly conflicted views on this subject. They recognize that, on some level, reducing civilian casualties is important. On another level, they seem to think that reducing media coverage of civilian casualties is even more important. The latter goal leads them to reject efforts to quantify civilian mortality. But if you don't quantify civilian mortality, you can't effectively reduce. At the same time, however, they want to be seen as minimizing civilian casualties so they genuinely do expend a considerable amount of effort trying to do so. But because they're not measuring anything, nobody knows how well any of these tactics work.
DoD photo by Sgt. Tierney Nowland, U.S. Army
McCain Sinking
Starts overhauling campaign staff, flinging some of the rats from his sinking ship.
Wanted: Israeli Realism
Daniel Levy makes the case that what Israel needs is a school of "realist" thinking about its policies:
What is missing and needed is for an Israeli school of realism to emerge, capable of addressing the new challenges of the region. This realist school should set out four strategic goals for Israel: to stabilize Israel's security environment; prevent Al-Qaida copycats from gaining a foothold on Israel's doorstep; pursue an end of occupation that will allow for realization of permanent, agreed, recognized and legitimate borders on all fronts; and more effectively isolate the Ahmadinejadist wing in Iran's leadership.
This sounds correct to me. Israel is an interesting place in that it's extremely close -- both chronologically and ideologically -- to its essentially Romantic origins, which seems to make it difficult for the political system to wrestle honestly with what the country is trying to achieve. Is establishing a peaceful relationship with its neighbors a strategic priority, or is it something that might be nice if and only if it can be achieved consistently with other, more important, strategic parameters? If the nuclear arsenal is deemed insufficient to deter the use of an Iranian nuclear weapon, then what's it for?
Counterintuitive!
The Kaus-Yglesias-Shrum-Kucinich view of health care:
Another resonant point isn't yet CW, though--[Bob Shrum] argued that all the Democratic health care plans are too complicated, that whoever is the Dem candidate should just say he or she plans to let everyone join Medicare and leave it at that. People know Medicare. It's hard to attack Medicare as "socialized medicine." ... P.S.: I've never quite understood why this politically appealing position is fatally flawed on policy grounds. (If there are problems with Medicare, fix them! Surely they need to be fixed even if the program doesn't get extended to younger Americans.)
I think that's right. And if you don't have the votes for "Medicare for All" then you can take "Medicare for Everyone Over 50." If you don't have the votes for that, you can take "Medicare for Everyone Over 55." Then after the next election you come back and ask for more. And then more. And more. But you give the public a marker -- "Medicare for All." Sure, it's more slogan than program, but it's a good slogan.
Free Siegelman
Via Mark Kleiman, The New York Times editorializes on Don Siegelman:
It is extremely disturbing that Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, was hauled off to jail this week. There is reason to believe his prosecution may have been a political hit, intended to take out the state’s most prominent Democrat, a serious charge that has not been adequately investigated. The appeals court that hears his case should demand answers, as should Congress. [...]
The most arresting evidence that Mr. Siegelman may have been railroaded is a sworn statement by a Republican lawyer, Dana Jill Simpson. Ms. Simpson said she was on a conference call in which Bill Canary, the husband of the United States attorney whose office handled the case, insisted that “his girls” would “take care of” Mr. Siegelman. According to Ms. Simpson, he identified his “girls” as his wife, Leura Canary, and another top Alabama prosecutor. Mr. Canary, who has longstanding ties to Karl Rove, also said, according to Ms. Simpson, that he had worked it out with “Karl.”
As the NYT notes, normally one wouldn't necessarily give a ton of credence to these complaints, but we're not talking about a normal justice department. We know for a fact that the Bush DOJ engages in selective prosecutions in order to advance partisan ends, and we know for a fact that the Bush DOJ is willing to operate with a reckless disregard for the law. Under the circumstances, where there's smoke there's a decent chance of fire.
The End of UNMOVIC
The final report:
Despite some skepticism from many areas within the international community, in hindsight, it has now become clear that the UN inspection system in Iraq was indeed successful to a large degree, in fulfilling its disarmament and monitoring obligations. Crucial to the inspection system was the underlying backing of military, political, and economic pressure particularly from the permanent members of the Security Council. While it will be for others to judge the level success or shortcomings from the UN inspections regime in Iraq, it seems clear that without such international pressure, even limited success was not assured.
See also Robert Farley and Arms Control Wonk. In the immortal April 2003 words of Charles Krauthammer, "Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem."
Isn't It Ironic
Today's Washington Post notes that Bush "read three books last year on George Washington, read about the Algerian war of independence and the exploitation of Congo, and lately has been digging into 'Troublesome Young Men,' Lynne Olson's account of Conservative backbenchers who thrust Winston Churchill to power." Remarkably, they don't say anything about yesterday's Washington Post op-ed by Olson:
I've spent a great deal of time thinking about Churchill while working on my book "Troublesome Young Men," a history of the small group of Conservative members of Parliament who defied British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940 and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be largely limited to World War II buffs, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks about it, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the book's portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush's hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president's wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out -- but they're between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.
Seems relevant. I dunno. It'd also be interesting to know what it is Bush thinks he's learned from reading about the Algerian war of independence. There was a weird moment way back in 2003 that it came out that the Pentagon was screening The Battle of Algiers as some kind of how-to manual. It's always nice to have a reminder that "the lessons of history" are rarely clear or even especially useful.
Irrelevant Frauds!
Ed Kilgore on the big survey of independents:
You should read the whole, elaborate thing, but the great utility of this survey is its typology of independents, who are neatly divided into five "D's": Disengaged (24%), Disguised Partisans (24%), Deliberators (18%), Disillusioned (18%) and Dislocated (16%). [...]
Overall, the survey casts a lot of light on some of the more outlandish claims about indies. They are not frauds or irrelevant, to be sure, but they are also not a centrist monolith that Democrats can win simply by moving to the right on this or that issue.
But, look, a huge proportion of them actually are frauds ("disguised partisans") or irrelevant ("disengaged") especially since I'm willing to wager that a non-zero fraction of the "disillusioned" are frauds, irrelevant, or both. It's just that when elections are really, really, really close you need all the votes you can get, so that even if "deliberators" are only a tiny slice of the electorate their views are still very important.
Fun With Precision
Wikipedia on the demographics of Brooklin:
As of the census of 2000, there were 841 people, 371 households, and 244 families residing in the town. The population density was 18.1/km² (46.8/mi²). There were 697 housing units at an average density of 15.0/km² (38.8/mi²). The racial makeup of the town was 98.45% White, 0.12% African American, 0.12% Native American, 0.59% Asian, 0.36% from other races, and 0.36% from two or more races.
A little multiplication reveals that 0.12 percent of 841 is approximately 1.0092, so I'm going to assume that the town has one black resident who comprises .118906 percent of the total population.
Honor Among Thieves
Bush commutes Scooter Libby's sentence. I didn't think he would do it, but it's really the only honorable course of action available to him. It would be silly for Bush to pretend to believe that people deserve to be punished for breaking the law to help cover up his administration's crimes when he clearly believes no such thing. Now it's out there in the open.
This is, however, an opportunity to raise a point from Sandy Levinson's book -- is the pardon power really a good idea? It seems to be an open invitation to abuse.
Against Commutation
60 percent of Americans think Bush should have left the pardon in place. I hope the Democrats are prepared to ignore the braindead crew at the WaPost editorial board and hang this around the necks of the Republican presidential contenders and congressional leaders. Hay should be made.
July 3, 2007
My Secrets Exposed
Jonah Goldberg master of insinuation:
I don't want to debate my book before people have read it for every obvious reason under the sun. But a lot of people want to discredit it and me before it comes out, either out of animus towards me or, perhaps, some more revealing worry.
At this point, I may as well fess up. I mock Jonah Goldberg because I'm a closet fascist and I want to pre-emptively discredit his a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care lest the Mussolini shrine (or is it Charles Lindberg) we keep in the basement between Spencer's room and the laundry machine be exposed. Brian Beutler has other theories.
The Op-Ed That Wasn't
Apparently Jeff Lomonaco submitted this op-ed to The Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago predicting the Libby commutation only to have it rejected. Some key grafs:
It is precisely out of the desire to avoid such uncomfortable questions for himself and his vice president that President Bush is likely not to pardon Libby but to commute his sentence, or otherwise keep him out of prison without fully clearing him. That would enable Libby to remain free while he seeks legal vindication through the appeals process. But more importantly, it would enable Bush and Cheney to continue the strategy they have successfully pursued in deterring journalists seeking their explanations with claims that they shouldn't comment on an ongoing legal proceeding. If Bush were to pardon Libby, he and Cheney would no longer have such a rationale for evading the press' questions - nor would Libby be able to claim the right against self-incrimination to resist testifying before Congress about the role that Cheney and Bush played in directing his conduct.
But if Bush simply commutes Libby's prison sentence without effectively vacating Libby's conviction, the appeals process goes forward and Bush and Cheney continue to have their rationale for not answering the press' questions. This strategy would also have the added benefit for Bush of eliminating the chance, however remote, that under the pressure of prison time away from his family and abandoned by the White House he served loyally, Libby himself would tell the true story of his own and others' conduct.
To repeat a thought from yesterday, I'm extremely skeptical that the pardon power is, on balance, a good thing. Clearly in principle it can be used to rectify serious injustices. In practice, however, the use I'm most familiar with is for Republican presidents to deploy the pardon power to facilitate cover-ups of serious wrongdoing -- think Gerald Ford and Watergate, George H.W. Bush and Iran-Contra, and now George W. Bush and Scooter Libby. A better president, like Bill Clinton, by "contrast" winds up using the pardon power in more trivially abusive -- but still abusive -- ways as with Marc Rich.
Alpha Girls
Jim Capozzola, an early political blogger and one of the originators of the progressive blogosphere, died yesterday. His essay, "Al Gore and the Alpha Girls" is not just an excellent piece of writing on its own terms, but probably counts as one of the key foundational texts of the whole enterprise. I imagine most people reading political blogs today weren't following them back in November 2002 when he wrote this and may not be familiar with his work at all. Go check it out.
Where's Laura?
Jim Henley notes that yesterday Washington Post pity party for Bush discussing how the man bears the burden of being a terrible president doesn't mention his wife at all as a source of strength and comfort. Curious.
The Christian Problem
Alan Wolfe and Ed Kilgore both have interesting things to say about Richard John Neuhaus' article on Mitt Romney, especially the way Neuhaus has constructed the problem so as to make it impossible for Romney to escape. In Neuhaus' telling, the issue isn't that Romney's Mormonism might lead him to implement bad policies as president. Rather, the issue is that Romney being president might enhance the social prestige and acceptability of Mormonism, "a new religion and, by the lights of historic Christianity, a false religion."
To me, though, the most telling thing about the article is simply that it gives voice to what's probably the one aspect of the Mormon issue that the press hasn't really raised which is that theologically conservative Christians tend to deny that Mormonism is a species of Christianity, whereas Mormons insist that it is. This raises some potentially awkward issues in the way that a Jewish candidate wouldn't. You can see that the Evangelicals for Mitt website adopts a posture of careful agnosticism ("we have explained numerous times that it is not our place to weigh in on the questions of whether Governor Romney or any other Mormon is a Christian") about the issue but I assume that Romney, if asked, would say that yes, he is a Christian, which is an assessment a lot of Protestants and Catholics will disagree with.
Analogies
Peter Howard and Robert Farley discuss the use of analogies by wartime leaders, and in particular the Bush administration's recent efforts to deploy Korea analogies in the Iraq debate. Analogies at War is the classic examination of this, and Jeffrey Record's Making War, Thinking History looks at more recent events through a somewhat similar lens.
Back to Basics
Noah Shachtman notes that some in the Army have decided that the US military has the whole counterinsurgency routine down pat and needs to refocus its efforts on conventional war fighting. The enemy, I guess, would be North Korea, though even in this eventuality the post-war management of DPRK territory would seem to be a substantially more challenging task than defeating North Korea's large army of starving people using obsolete equipment.
Salafis Versus Islamists
rather rambling article from Alastair Crooke in The London Review of Books contains this intriguing insight:
The problem for Hamas is that its constituency – the rank and file – and the wider Islamist movement have now embarked on a period of introspection. What is apparent – and this can be ascertained on any number of Islamist websites – is that the mainstream Islamist strategy of pursuing an electoral path to reform is now being questioned. This will have an impact well beyond Palestine – most obviously in Egypt and Jordan. Three events have triggered this reassessment: the sanctions imposed on the Hamas government; last summer’s US-backed war to destroy Hizbullah in Lebanon; and the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which raises not a peep of protest from Europeans. Continued Western hostility towards all Islamists, however moderate their policies, has also frustrated the grass-roots.
At a conference held in Beirut in April, the senior Hamas official present, Usamah Hamadan, was strongly criticised by Fathi Yakan, the leader of Jamaat Islamiyah in Lebanon, for having embarked on the electoral route in the first place. Yakan pointed to the failure – experienced by all Islamists without exception – of those who have participated in their national parliaments. No MP or deputy, from Islamabad to Cairo, or anywhere in between, has succeeded in bringing any significant change to their society. At the same time, young Egyptians in the Muslim Brotherhood have been debating whether their eighty-year-old movement has lost its way. Commentators have been arguing that for it to sit in parliament – while its leaders are being interned, its economic base is being attacked, and legislation is being passed aimed at excluding movements with a religious basis from elections – undermines its credibility and invites derision. The movement, it’s suggested, is too big, rigid and ungainly, and needs to be rethought – and perhaps broken up.
In other words, while Western governments dream up ways to promote moderate alternatives to Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, events on the ground may be trending in the opposite direction. Meanwhile, I always find that there's strikingly little self-awareness about the fact that when you hear talk of political reform in Egypt or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia that it's always taken as a premise that the US will only tolerate US-approved political parties to take power in those countries and that the debate over democracy is a debate over whether democracy would result in a US-approved outcome or how reform can be structured so as to ensure one.
Will Warner Retire?
Jonathan Singer notes that Senator John Warner (R-VA) isn't acting like a man who's running for re-election. I assume that were a strong candidate like Governor Mark Warner to throw his hat in the ring, that would help nudge him in the direction of retirement. But, of course, the Democratic Warner is much more likely to run if it's an open seat.
TNR on Libby
I'm reliably informed that New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz has, paradoxically, no influence over the work that The New Republic's staff publishes in The New Republic. Thus, I strolled over to The Plank fully expecting to see some full-throated commentary on the commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence, Peretz' participation in the Scooter Libby defense fund notwithstanding.
Nor was I disappointed. Yesterday, Alex Massie offered the view that "Regardless of whether or not one thinks it wrong (or proper!) that Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence, it seems politically smart to me." Noam Scheiber took a different view, arguing that "commuting the sentence strikes me as the worst of both worlds." A fascinating discussion! Did the president spare a wrongfully convicted, wrongfully prosecuted man from hard time he didn't deserve? Did the president abuse his pardon power to help further the obstruction of justice? Nobody cares!
UPDATE: I had forgotten that David Greenberg wrote two articles (one; two) defending Libby back in March, one on the website and one in the print magazine.
UPDATE II: Here's the kind of thing I was hoping to see.
Reminding I Needed
Inevitably, the subject of Marc Rich comes up every time presidential pardons come up. Without going into all of the issues, can we just remind the world that... Marc Rich's lawyer was Scooter Libby.
I had totally forgotten that. Still, the fact that noteworthy recent uses of the pardon power seem to range from abusive in a minor way (nothing bad happened as a result of Rich getting pardoned, but it was still wrong) to abusive in major ways (this Libby business, the outrageous Iran-Contra pardons) doesn't make a strong case that the unchecked pardon power is a good thing.
Sentences Worth Commuting
David Boaz has some suggestions.
"Direct Hit"
Catherine says "Art Brut is an acquired taste." I think I liked them from the get-go, but I'm kind of weird like that. One way or another, I'm digging the new album. Here's the video for "Direct Hit"
I say it's funny. Also note that they do a great live show.
Tuesday Diamagnetism Blogging
I'm reading James Kakalios' The Physics of Superheros which, combined with Google, eventually led me to this discussion of Magneto and diamagnetism:
It's fascinating stuff. You can see Dutch scientists levitate all kinds of objects here on the University of Nijmegen's website.
Snark Retraction
Fresh Libby-bashing at the Plank here and here. Plus an excellent piece from Sandy Levinson on "Scooter Libby and the Constitutional Crisis." Sentiments expressed here by me are now inoperative.
Distinguished?
I guess I'm glad that after relentlessly propagandizing on Scooter Libby's behalf, Fred Hiatt has decided that commuting the entirely of Libby's sentence was the wrong thing to do, but I would have traded that small concession to reality for them not making reference to Libby's "long and distinguished record of public service." What record? What distinction? As best I can tell, Libby has done exactly two things in government service -- he's worked for Paul Wolfowitz and he's worked for Dick Cheney.
Wolfowitz performed so poorly at the job of Deputy Secretary of Defense that George W. Bush decided to bump him to the World Bank in order to get him out of his administration, from which post he was later fired due to a combination of corruption and mismanagement. Hilariously, of Libby's two patrons Wolfowitz is the less embarrassing one. Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Libby were all, of course, intimately involved in the fraudulent selling of the Iraq War and the idiotic "planning" for the post-war occupation of Iraq. In their most noteworthy previous collaboration, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Libby all collaborated on the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance that proved to be so addled that President George H.W. Bush disavowed it.
There's a record of service here, but it's not distinguished. Indeed, at 11-12 years it's not even all that long. Joe Wilson had a long career of distinguished service. Valerie Plame had a long career of distinguished service. Libby had a medium length career that mostly lacked distinction and involved the occasional -- but extremely accute -- lapse into catastrophe, before he found himself resigning because he'd been caught breaking the law.
Lewis Gets Paid
I think this business of signing Rashard Lewis to a maximum contract is madness. They could use this as an example in a class on the "winner's curse". Cap management matters in this league, a lot. You just can't be throwing that kind of money at a sub-par rebounder who's terrible at defense no matter how good a shooter he is. John Hollinger begs to differ:
Plus, with Billups and Carter intent on re-signing with their respective teams, Lewis was the single best "portable" free agent available. Getting the No. 1 guy rarely fails as a free agent strategy; even if Lewis somehow fails to live up to his Seattle numbers, the Magic still are getting a quality player.
Larry Hughes is laughing all the way to the bank on the basis of this theory.
A Surge of Kagans
In this week's edition of bizarre right-wing quasi-journalism follies, The Weekly Standard gets Kimberly Kagan to team up with "surge" plan creator Fred Kagan to write a cover story hailing the surge:
The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-hold operations that will follow. The deployment of forces and preparations for this operation have gone better than expected, and Phantom Thunder is so far proceeding very well. All aspects of the current strategy have been built upon the lessons of previous successful and unsuccessful Coalition efforts to establish security in Iraq, and there is every reason to be optimistic about its outcome.
No word on why Robert and Donald weren't available to cosign the piece.
July 4, 2007
Independence Day
A July 4 question: Why do you hate America? I've given this a lot of thought, and I think the main reason I hate America is that I'm a fascist. What I can't quite decide is whether I'm a fascist because I'm a liberal, or if I'm a fascist because I sometimes shop at Whole Foods.
Mankiw Agonistes
Brad DeLong analyzes the torments of an honest man who goes to work for George W. Bush. To make a long story short, honesty gets compromised and he's not working for Bush anymore anyway.
Ignoring Things
I don't watch the Beinart/Goldberg diavlogs because they appear to involve the premise that Jonah Goldberg is a person you should debate seriously, but I found myself reading a James Kirchick post that begins "Given Peter and Jonah's discussion today about whether or not liberals are ignoring the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow last week, the first thing that came to mind when I heard about the failed bombs was a warning delivered by the British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell almost two years ago to the day."
I'm pretty sure I haven't been "ignoring" the bomb attempt, but I've certainly said less about it than, say, the NBA draft. That said, I find there to be two curious presumptions built into the question. One is that "you're paying less attention than you should to failed bombings in a foreign country!" is framed as some kind of cutting accusation. Second, is that it's taken as a given that hyping-up the threat of terrorism is something conservatives will want to do whereas downplaying it is something liberals will want to do.
It's interesting because on another level if a liberal wants to make the case that Bush has been a horrible president implementing horrible policies, probably the most natural response is to say "look, some of what you say is true, but at the end of the day there haven't been any more attacks since 9/11." At that point, it falls to the liberal to point to all this international data indicating a substantial surge in Islamist violence during the Bush years as evidence of the administration's failures.
Relegation Can Save The Day
I attended a secret Midcoast Blogger Summit yesterday in Ellsworth, Maine with two of the FreeDarko crew who are up in the Mount Desert area at the moment. Talk naturally turned to How to Save the NBA. Unfortunately, I forgot to present my actual idea on this before leaving. My thought, though, is that the intrinsic competitive imbalance problem driven by the short supply of tall people (see also here or, more briefly, the reason you pick Greg Oden with the number one pick) would best be addressed by adopted a European-style system of having multiple tiers of play with teams promoted or demoted according to how they fare.
Obviously, the details could go in a few different ways, but in broad outline you might do three different divisions -- Division A, Division B, and Division C -- each with 12 teams. At the end of the season, the two worst teams in Division A would get demoted to Division B for the next year. The two worst teams in Division B would be demoted to Division C. But Division C's two best teams would get promoted to Division B, and Division B's two best teams would get promoted to Division A. The result is that almost every team would have "something to play for" throughout the season.
A Patriotic Post
Tyler Cowen explains why freedom is good for prosperity. One might add that prosperity is good for freedom, as well.
Marketing Gone Bad
I think I've never blogged this story before, and it's pretty funny. I was in Russia during the summer of 1998 on a program involving maybe a dozen other American high school kids. We were all living with Russian families that had kids enrolled in the advanced English class in this one high school in Nizhny Novgorod. For several days in early July, the Americans were all sporadically busy thinking about how we would mount a July 4 celebration. Eventually, we found some sparklers, some peanut butter, and I guess maybe some stuff from McDonalds.
It was only near the last possible moment that this one Russian dude got to asking what it was we were celebrating. "Thees fourth July is for eendependence day?" Yes, of course. "Eees eeemportant holiday in U.S.?" Yes, of course. "Americans make eemportant day for movie? Will Smeeth fight the aliens."
On The Outside
Andrew on Scooter, Bush, and Marty Peretz:
Marty is a great friend. I have no doubt he is sincere in defending Libby. I have no reason to doubt that Libby is a very nice man, for a perjurer and a smear artist for the powerful. But the law must always count for more than mere friendship. Libby broke the law and undermined the judicial system; and Bush's commutation of the sentence is a clear declaration that the rule of law ends at the administration's edge. Thousands of other perjured felons could get a commutation, but they're not friends with George W. Bush and Marty Peretz. And so they have no chance. The bottom line for Americans is this: George Bush's friends do not go to jail. Your friends do.
Well said. Bizarrely, The Washington Times seems to get this even if none of the rest of the conservative establishment does.
Wise Words
Sara and I were in Blue Hill sitting on a picnic table with a five year-old girl, a seven year-old boy and their grandma waiting for the fireworks to start. It had gotten too dark for me to read my book, so I was playing Tetris on my cell phone -- a game the kids found fascinating and had apparently never seen before. The girl asked if she could try. I wasn't quite sure what to say, but grandma interceded on my behalf "no, that's not a toy." RIght, I thought, except it sort of is. "Well," said the boy, "it's a toy for grownups." This seemed very wise and I don't even have my iPhone -- the real toy for grownups -- yet.
July 5, 2007
Meet The New Boss
Michael Scheur profiles Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid, the new officially designated al-Qaeda pointman in Iraq.
Mapquest
What do you think the cost to the taxpayer would really be if the USGS let people download high-quality PDF (or some other image file) version of their 1:24,000 quadrangle maps instead of just offering little JPEG thumbnail images and selling print copies for $6.
You're talking some number of lost sales to people who would otherwise have bought the print copy. But not a lot of lost sales. The kinds of things people are most likely to do with these maps -- take them hiking or sailing or kayaking; hang them on a wall -- aren't well-suited to electronic media. And there'd be some cost associated with the bandwidth. The service, meanwhile, would be potentially quite useful to at least a few people, and would open unknown doors to the enterprising.
La Bomba
Not only is Spanish guard Juan Carlos Navarro leaving Winterthur FC Barcelona to join the Washington Wizards, but he seems to have a well-entrenched nickname in Spain "Bomba Navarro," as seen on his official website, BombaNavarro.com, available in both Catalan and Castellano dialects (no English, sorry).
The inefficiency of the NBA personnel market is always a marvel to behold. The three point specialist is a type whose value varies substantially from situation to situation and while if Navarro works out that'll of course be good for DC, you'd hardly put the Wizards on the list of the top five teams who could really use a three point specialist. Someplace like Cleveland, Houston, or Utah (where they always seem to be on the lookout for white guys in general) would make a lot more sense.
The Suburbanist Paradox
Whenever I say that one key pillar of a viable strategy to curb global warming ought to be efforts to promote high-density living arrangements, I'm invariably confronted by a kind of circular argument that Ross captures well here, channeling Joel Kotkin but with my emphasis added:
The traditional unipolar urban downtown isn't going to make a comeback: Young couples with families can't afford to live there, and aging Baby Boomers don't want to. The American city of the future will be more of an archipelago of suburbs than the kind of one-downtown organism bred by the Industrial Revolution: "We aren't creating more New Yorks and Chicagos; we're creating more Los Angeleses.
There's the paradox. The urbanist proposal isn't "hey, jerks, why don't you all move to dense downtowns." Rather, the proposal is something like "why don't we impose carbon taxes so that things like driving long distances and heating or cooling large detached structures are priced in accordance with their social cost? Why don't we stop having the federal government heavily subsidize driving cars as the preferred mode of transportation? Why don't we have more areas that allow for high-density zoning, thus reducing the cost of urban housing?" It's not that we urbanists are unaware that many people live in low density areas because its cheaper, it's precisely that we are aware of this fact that makes us believe that the "traditional unipolar downtown" could make a comeback.
Now, will it come all the way back? Of course not. Douglas Rae's City quite brilliantly explains the connection between the high-tide of urbanism and a particular technological moment when the availability of fast, cheap rail and water transit and the total unavailability of cars encouraged very dense settlement patterns. Quite naturally, the combination of cars being invented, cars being massively subsidized, and governments being successfully lobbied by car companies to dismantle mass transit systems led to a massive shift in the direction of sprawl. But by that same token, if we step away from those policies to some extent we'll see a rebalancing in the direction of urbaism.
Neither Ross nor Kotkin cares to deny that the future will entail less driving. Instead, they rely on this aperçu "Telecommuting, not mass transit, is the wave of the future" (combined with the nonsensical observation that "if you take New York out of the equation, there are already more Americans telecommuting today than taking mass transit"; by the same token if you ignore the three percent of Americans who do the most telecommuting very few people telecommute!), but why choose? It seems to me that the thing to say is that the cost of driving should be priced more appropriately and that people will respond to that policy shift in a variety of ways.
This is all, I should say, a bit irrelevant to the issue of whether or not cities should have unipolar downtowns. Contra Kotkin, New York City, for example, is strongly multifocal just like LA. The cities have very different development patterns, but the existence or lack thereof of a unipolar downtown isn't the issue.
A Question of Priorities
Brian Beutler quotes Roger Cohen and finds some problems with this snip:
The United States should propose broad, high-level talks with Iran across the range of issues confronting the two countries — Iraq, Afghanistan, nuclear weapons, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine — while dropping its meaningless insistence that Iran suspend nuclear enrichment activities before talks begin....
If the answer to the invitation is no, and Iranian-orchestrated attacks in Iraq continue, America should play hardball.
For my part, not as an objection to Cohen but merely as an observation, the issue here is that it's all a question of priorities. As Cohen notes, there are a lot of issues in US-Iranian relations. There's also the question of escalating the level of US-Iranian conflict. From where I sit, the most important issues on the DC-Teheran docket are verifiably committing Iran to remaining a non-nuclear weapons state and preventing the emergence of al-Qaeda safe havens in Iraq and Afghanistan. These two goals can only be genuinely accomplished through peaceful agreement between the United States and Iran. Under the circumstances, I would regard the outbreak of open hostilities between the US and Iran as a disaster due to its deleterious effects on both the fight against al-Qaeda and our hopes for stopping nuclear proliferation.
Others, though, take a different view of the situation. Some place much higher weight on securing an Iraqi government that's likely to be willing to play host to a large US military contingent for an indefinite period of time. Some place more weight on making Afghanistan a place where poppy for opium export isn't grown. Some place more weight on trying to get Iran to stop its financial support of Hezbollah. What's more, some think unilateral military action isn't the method of stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program that's least likely to succeed -- they think it's the way that's likeliest to work. My guess is that Cohen and I disagree about some of these things, though I'm not quite sure. My view is that it should be quite possible to secure my priorities through diplomatic means, and essentially impossible to secure them through military means. At the same time, my interest in preventing Iran from building a nuclear bomb and in preventing al-Qaeda from obtaining safe havens in Iraq or Afghanistan is sufficiently strong that I would agree to some deals with Iran that others would reject.
Photo by Flickr user Koldo used under a Creative Commons license
Tollbooth Trouble
Tyler Cowen notes studies which suggest that switching electronic toll-collection leads to higher tolls. Mark Thoma's suggestion seems plausible -- electronic tolls reduce congestion and inconvenience, allowing authorities to raise the monetary price while keeping the overall hassle level the same.
From where I sit, though, a low toll is a scandal. Somewhere between Portland and Brooklin driving up I found myself paying something like a 50 cent toll -- and, of course, dealing with the various delays associated with this toll booth. Better fewer, but higher (as Lenin might say). If your tollbooth's only going to raise a little bit of revenue, just get rid of it, let the traffic flow freely and make taxes a little higher. If you are going to put a toll somewhere, make it higher and really get into people's pockets. The point is that it's not worth causing all that inconvenience as a way to raise money unless the money is going to be a large fraction of the total costs to drivers.
Photo by Flickr user Redjar used under a Creative Commons license
The Search for an Enemy
James Fallows, reports that according to Gary Hart and Lee Hamilton, Lynn Cheney wanted to start a war with China back in the pre-9/11 era. According to Francis Fukuyama among Bill Kristol and his circle in the 90s "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" in the absence of a pressing foreign threat, and the consensus was that the enemy should be China.
These are crazy people.
Problem Solved
Jim Henley has the solution I've been looking for. Let the president keep the power to pardon, but:
Amend the President’s pardon and commutation power to exclude executive-branch employees convicted of crimes carried out in the course of their professional duties. Vest the power to pardon those people in the Congress, maybe by a super-majority of the Senate - a kind of inverse impeachment.
Sounds right to me.
Were Crimes Committed?
I thought I'd elevate this comment that Steve left a couple of days ago because it lays things out clearly:
The answer is that the reason why Armitage, Libby, and the other leakers weren't prosecuted under the IIPA is that the IIPA requires proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the leaker had actual knowledge that the CIA agent's employment was classified at the time of the leak.
To prove that, you need to be able to prove how the person found out about the fact of CIA employment. In the case of Armitage, it was clear that he didn't know; he found out from a document that said nothing about Plame's covert status. In the case of Libby, it was less clear what he knew, but Fitzgerald nonetheless concluded that he couldn't prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt.
The real issue is what Cheney knew and when he knew it. Libby's lies were intentionally designed to keep Fitzgerald from getting a closer look at Cheney and determining what role Cheney had in the leak campaign and whether he knew Plame was covert. That's why the obstruction was a big deal. That's why no one was charged; the IIPA requires that you prove knowledge and Fitzgerald couldn't.
An additional point that's relevant. Most of Libby's defenders -- George W. Bush, David Brooks, etc. -- don't seem to be denying that Libby committed a crime by lying under oath to investigators. They want us to say that, rather, he deserves to be treated very leniently because there was no big deal here. The alleged absence of an underlying crime is key to that theory. The converse theory is that there was an underlying crime and the crime can't be proven because Libby lied to investigators.
If that theory is wrong -- if there really was no crime -- then it seems we ought to get some kind of explanation from Libby as to why he lied. People sometimes do have reasons to lie to investigators other than a desire to cover up criminal activity (hiding non-criminal activity that's embarrassing is the obvious one) but if Libby wants mercy he should offer up a plausible score on this account. But Libby hasn't offered any such story. Instead, he's offered a wildly implausible story -- that he's innocent. Under those circumstances, it's very odd to offer clemency. He's shown no remorse and appears to be continually engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Maybe there was no crime here; but if there wasn't, then what was Libby doing? He's not even trying to convince us that he had some other reason to lie.
I Never Would Have Dreamed...
... that Michael Rubin would be bolstering his foreign policy fantasies with made up facts. I'm shocked. Just shocked.
Ken Silverstein's Ethics
What Mark Kleiman said. This "controversy" is initially baffling, and then revelatory of how corrupt the media elite has become.
Jihadi Falling Outs
A couple of days ago Brian Ulrich linked to this Christian Science Monitor account of tensions between jihadis in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. The piece "focuses on a difference in tactics between Beitullah Mehsud, one of the most influential Taliban leaders in Pakistan, and a commander named Qari Hussain Ahmad, who has been waging an aggressive campaign against traditional tribal leaders in the hopes of eventually replacing the Pashtunwali tribal code with shari'a."
Part of what I think people need to take away from this is that the "Taliban" concept underdescribes what's going on. The United States has a clear interest in getting Pashto-inhabited territories to submit to central rule from Kabul and Islamabad if the only alternative is for that territory to be administered by people interested in playing host to anti-American terrorists. Insofar as there may be Pashto leaders who aren't interested in using autonomy in that manner, however, then we needn't necessarily be troubled by them.
I Don't Understand
Whatever Rilo Kiley is trying to do with their website, I don't like it. Tiny, endless, annoyingly repetitive snatches of songs? Very bad.
Photo by Flickr user Emmaline used under a Creative Commons license
IP Fact of the Day
Via Tom Lee, I learn that Pirate Bay is responsible for half of all BitTorrent traffic. I suspect that this isn't helpful in convincing anyone that BitTorrent technology has substantial non-infringing uses (though it certainly does), or -- perhaps more importantly -- that the entire "piracy" conceptualization of copyright infringement is badly flawed.
Am I Dreaming
Or was there a story early today about Hillary Clinton's campaign trumpeting her endorsement by failed minority leader and current corporate lobbyist Dick Gephardt?
Fraud Caucus
Pete Domenici comes out in favor of his own re-election campaign:
I have carefully studied the Iraq situation, and believe we cannot continue asking our troops to sacrifice indefinitely while the Iraqi government is not making measurable progress to move its country forward. I do not support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq or a reduction in funding for our troops. But I do support a new strategy that will move our troops out of combat operations and on the path to coming home.
When Domenici starts voting with Democrats to override presidential vetos, then we can start discussing whether or not he deserves any kind of credit for a deathbed conversion.
"Politically Motivated"
Shockingly enough, there continues to be a substantial quality control problem with the blogging that occurs under The New Republic's banner written by the magazine's editor in chief. Today, for example, we learn this remarkable series of facts about the trial of Scooter Libby:
It was from the beginning a politically motivated case, as Dershowitz argues in this morning's Post, the appointment of the special prosecutor, the prosecutor's own obsessions, the case itself with the doubtful and understandably doubtful but diverse memories of many witnesses, including the defendant, the especially harsh sentence pronounced by the judge, the refusal of the appellate court to continue Libby on bail -all of these were politically motivated. And, thus, in and of themselves, unjust.
The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, became a US Attorney when appointed to that post by George W. Bush on the advice of the Republican Senator from Illinois. The decision to name a special prosecutor was made by James Comey, who was appointed by George W. Bush to be a US Attorney and then appointed by George W. Bush to be Deputy Attorney General. Fitzgerald made the decision to prosecute. The jury undoubtedly had members of both political parties. The judge who offered the "especially harsh sentence" (actually: a sentence in line with federal sentencing guidelines) was appointed to his seat on the federal bench by . . . George W. Bush. The appellate court that unanimously rejected Libby's claims contains -- at last! -- a Democratic appointee. And also two Republicans.
This is the kind of patently absurd statement you expect to see published when the author of the statement, say, owns the publication in which it appears. Given that that's not the case, the existence of this paragraph is somewhat puzzling.
UPDATE: I see Andrew beat me to this.
July 6, 2007
How The Leopard Changed His Spots
Gene Healy has a fascinating overview of the intellectual history of the conservative movement's embrace of presidential power over the years.
Suing Nelson
I'm a Mark Cuban fan in the vast majority of respects, but this certainly seems to put him in serious WATB territory:
That's according to Don Nelson's attorney, John O'Connor, who said Cuban is suing Nelson, claiming the Warriors beat the Mavs in the first round because the Warriors' coach -- and former coach of the Mavs -- had "confidential information and he [Cuban] wants to enjoin Don from coaching against the Mavericks."
Maybe O'Connor's badly misrepresenting the substance of the lawsuit or maybe there's some hidden aspect to this that I'm unaware of, but this certainly seems pretty ridiculous. There are former members of the Spurs organization sprinkled throughout the league (Mavericks coach Avery Johnson, for example) and they don't recuse themselves from playing against San Antonio.
Photo by Flickr user KK+ used under a Creative Commons license
Volatility Re-estimated
In light of this study from several Brookings scholars, Jacob Hacker is now revising his estimate of the increase in income volatility downward. There continues to be substantial dispute about precisely how to measure this, with some people seeing essentially no increase in volatility.
I can't find it now in the Prospect archives because of their redesign, but this is why when the Hacker's The Great Risk Shift initially came out I was a bit skeptical of the wisdom of grounding progressive policy too deeply in this thesis (sidebar: the risk shift thesis itself only partially hinges on the technical question at issue here). I didn't -- and still don't -- have the statistical chops to properly understand the question about the data here, but I did know that Hacker was overwhelmingly putting forward policy proposals that I would have supported whether or not there had been a large increase in income volatility since the 1970s. And I still feel that way today! Whether we use Hacker's old estimate, Hacker's new estimate, the Elmendorf / Dynan / Sichel estimate, or even a lower estimate things like a system of national health insurance and measures to help the laid-off bounce back and survive the transition still make sense.
Head Start
Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen reads an abstract making the case for massive socialism:
Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from data, as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn, initial human capital, and initial wealth -- features which are chosen to match observed properties of earnings dynamics by cohorts. We find that as of age 20, differences in initial conditions account for more of the variation in lifetime utility, lifetime earnings and lifetime wealth than do differences in shocks received over the lifetime. Among initial conditions, variation in initial human capital is substantially more important than variation in learning ability or initial wealth for determining how an agent fares in life. An increase in an agent's human capital affects expected lifetime utility by raising an agent's expected earnings profile, whereas an increase in learning ability affects expected utility by producing a steeper expected earnings profile.
That's Tyler's emphasis and mine as well. He views the lesson as "treat your kids well, invest in them, and realize that determinism is not altogether crazy." This is true, but I don't think one should ignore the political upshot that equality of opportunity is a sham.
You Go to War With The Army You recruit
Kat Steiger notes that the US Army is using video games in its recruiting including one that features the delightful "curb stomp" move (speaking of which: go watch American History X if you haven't seen it). Kay goes in one direction with this, but I'm curious as to how this sort of thing is supposed to fit in with the new kinder, gentler, counterinsurgency-oriented Army that's decided things like "massive firepower" are "be of limited utility, or even counter-productive in COIN operations."
Or, to put it another way, I've been approached twice by Army recruiters while playing Time Crisis II and never while browsing the Middle East History section of my local bookstore. There's nothing surprising about any of this, but there's an obvious tension here. If you genuinely want to reorient the force around a whole new approach to warfare, you can't hold everything in place but then hand people a new manual.
Assumptions
Brendan Nyhan criticizes liberals for simply assuming the existence of an underlying crime in the Scooter Libby case and sweeps my post here into that rubric, wondering of Libby "Couldn't he just be protecting his superiors from exposure of embarrassing but non-criminal conduct?" He certainly could. But let's assume that's true. Is "I broke the law to help my boss cover-up embarrassing but non-criminal conduct" a reasonable case for lenience? No. Is "he broke the law to help me cover-up embarrassing by non-criminal conduct" a reasonable case for granting someone clemency? Also no.
The bottom line is that on one theory -- Libby broke the law to spare his superiors embarrassing revelations of their lawbreaking, and is being pardoned by those same superiors to help perpetuate the cover-up of their embarrassing lawbreaking -- Libby deserves to go to jail and Bush has seriously abused his power by pardoning Libby. On Nyhan's alternative theory -- Libby broke the law to spare his superiors embarrassing revelations of their embarrassing non-criminal conduct, and is being pardoned by those same superiors to help perpetuate the cover-up of their embarrassing non-criminal conduct -- Libby also deserves to go to hail and Bush has also seriously abused his power by pardoning Libby.
This -- that the President of the United States is abusing his power in a serious way -- is a substantially more important issue than the question of whether Josh Marshall should be slightly more circumspect in his characterization of the serious abuses of power.
UPDATE: See Brendan's update. Bottom-line, I think it's rock solid that Bush abused his power, and until someone can offer a plausible account of what kind of non-criminal conduct Libby is helping to cover-up, I'm not going to be too upset if people assume that what's being covered-up was, in fact, a crime. The fact that Bush is actively and openly participating in the cover-up (and there's no serious doubt that something is being covered-up) naturally whets one's suspicions. Bush and Cheney are, however, clearly entitled to a legal presumption of innocence.
The Case for Michael Bay
I haven't seen Transformers yet, but since I have a reputation in the blogosphere as a leading Michael Bay apologist, I thought I'd note that to truly glimpse the man's skillz, you need to look at his earlier short-form work:
Genius. Compare that to the disappointing "Elevator Love Letter" video.
In Retrospect
Reading Ed Kilgore's post on Hillary Clinton and the question of "change" I was a bit taken aback to see an Official New Democrat seem to characterize the view "that the Republican Congresses Clinton faced made it impossible for him to pursue a truly progressive course" as some kind of slam on Clinton perpetuated by reactionary paleoliberals. I would think that something along those lines would be part of the case for Clinton; it's unfair to criticize him for not delivering results that it wasn't possible to deliver.
Indeed, this is what I find a bit distressing about Hillary Clinton framing her campaign in terms of nineties nostalgia -- the goal of restoring the policy status quo circa summer 2000 seems weirdly timid and not especially true to the actual spirit of the Clinton administration. There is, however, a psychological problem here. I have no doubt that if you took a time machine to January 1993 and showed Bill Clinton what he would have accomplished by January 2001, he would have been a bit disappointed. This is, after all, someone who came into office promising to transform the health care system and make it so that if you work hard and play by the rules, you won't be poor. But by the time Clinton left office, he doubtless wanted to convince himself not just that he'd done a good of coping with a difficult situation, but that he was actually a world-historically brilliant political leader. Which would be fine if it were purely a question of individual ego (one doubts that non-egomaniacs get elected president), but it becomes problematic as a forward-looking political agenda. Imagine what kind of Senator Ted Kennedy would be if his worldview was centered around the idea that congress frustrating JFK's legislative agenda was actually the height of sound government and he had to protect the party from the grips of these LBJ-style radicals who wanted to pass Civil Rights laws.
Joe Lieberman, Warmongerer
I like that he's managing to compress what should be a years-long transition from moderate Democrat to psychotic rightwinger into just a few months.
Morals and Medicine
Brian Beutler notes the fear that Michael Moore has put into the hearts of insurance executives. It seems to me that the main cause here is that Moore has gone where liberal health wonks fear to tread, touching not only on the policy issues but on the question of ethics. He helps tap into the anti-capitalist folk instincts that worry Bryan Caplan. The crux of the matter is that ordinary people think that if there's a sick person, and you're in a position to help the sick person, that you ought to help the sick person.
Insurance companies strengthen this commonsense moral obligation by actually entering into contracts -- you pay them, each and every pay period, so that when you're sick, they'll help you. But insurance companies are largely in the business of devising excuses to avoid helping you when you're in need. They employ people wake up every morning, drive to the office, and work all day denying sick people health care. The labors of these individuals line the pockets of the companies' executives. Most people find this repugnant. Bloodsucking vampires and flesh-eating zombies have the excuse of being driven by insatiable urges. Insurance companies have free will and just choose to do bad things because they're greedy.
That's not an argument that'll win you high grades in a public policy class or get you made a fellow at a think tank. It's demagogic and anti-intellectual. But it's effective and not, I think, entirely wrong
Settlement Sprawl
It seems that ninety percent of Israeli settlements "sprawl beyond their official boundaries despite the large amount of unused land already allocated to them."
The Antipoliticals
Everyone's already raked David Ignatius over the coals for his inability to understand that political controversy exists because disagreement is a real phenomenon of American life (see Benen in particular). To merely extend the analysis a bit, there's also the point that there are actual conflicts of interest existing in society -- some people would benefit from things being done one way, others would benefit from them happening a different way.
This, I think, is at the root of elite distaste for argument and democracy. There's an enormous desire on the part of the people near the top of the political-media pyramid to believe that they are participants in some kind of ethereal realm of Pure Ideas. The idea that politics is a clash of interests is disturbing to their self-image. It's disturbing, but also undeniable, which leads to a desire to somehow purge and purify things. The ideal would be something like the court of Frederick the Great, where the country is ruled by an absolute monarch who likes to gather the leading intellectuals (but none who are too radical) around his table to debate the issues and then the winner gets his way -- never mind what the peasants think.
July 7, 2007
SiCKO At last
I'll probably have more to say about this at a less sleepy time, but let me just note that in my opinion this film has been dramatically undersold by your liberal media. The tendency has been to assign health wonk types as reviewers so they've written health wonky reviews, ignoring the fact that Michael Moore's made a very successful film -- frequently laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally poignant, and at one point sufficiently moving as to prompt me to shed a tear. The focus of the film is on what he's best at -- and what health wonks are worst at -- human stories and experiences.
The result would, I think, be utterly devastating politically were it not for the detour into Cuba which winds up raising a bunch of issues only tangentially related to Moore's core point -- primary reliance on private health insurance is a hellish experience for patients, and a ghoulish one for doctors; other wealthy liberal democracies in good standing have a variety of different systems and they're all better than the American one. If this isn't quite the death blow to the insurance industry, then it's something like the blow that leaves you unconscious in the middle of the highway waiting for someone to run you over.
Doing the Impossible
For instance, right now we are trying to both extend the reach of the Maliki government as far as possible across the country and also to support Sunnis in their sectarian skirmishes against both Shiites and other Sunnis wherever an alliance is possible. Not surprisingly, these two objectives are almost definitionally at odds with each other. We're foolish to even try to promote both a factionalist and a federalist effort at the same time, but we're especially foolish when that means trying to bring a Shiite-dominated government into power over a land peppered with U.S.-supported Sunni tribal regions. My impression is that even as individual efforts these would both sink anyhow. But it's amazing that, with all of the resources the administration has handed over to the war effort, we're still approaching problems in such a way that even incremental plans are more likely to fail than they ought to be.
It's important to understand that this is the context in which the training fantasies of the "withdrawal lite" school of thought are unfolding. The training is a fallback position, a useful psychological crutch that people have also convinced themselves is a useful political crutch, but it has nothing to do with what's happening on the ground. If there are two sides fighting and you want one of them to win then, sure, you can train your side. But we're just training everyone who'll agree to be trained; equipping multiple sides in a civil conflict and creating a situation where the weapons and expertise we're providing is just as likely to be deployed against our interests as in favor of them two or four years down the road.
DOD photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Summer M. Anderson, U.S. Navy.
The Official iPhone Review
Here's the thing about my new iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone, and don't feel like spending $500-600 dollars to get one, you can think up various excuses for yourself, you can think up a whole bunch of them. One should distinguish, however, between inadequacies in the sense that "I wish they'd done X" and a situation where the iPhone is actually worse than some alternative. On this latter score there's only one genuine problem -- the EDGE network is inferior to Verizon's mobile broadband and if you were a really heavy user of Verizon mobile web functions (I don't know anyone who fits this description, but such people must exist) you'd find yourself frustrated with EDGE.
Other than that, it's clearly the best gadget thingy ever made. The reviews that say it's hard to type on the touchscreen pad are misleading. Those reviews were written by guys who review gadgets all the time and are very accustomed to typing on Blackberries and the like. To my fingers, the iPhone is tricky to type on, but no trickier than I find the Blackberry keypad. The difference is that people who've been using a Blackberry for a while have already honed their Blackberry skills but have no iPhone skills. I'm already about three times as good at iPhone typing as I was when I took the thing out of the box and have no doubt that I'll continue to improve.
That said, this is obviously a situation where if you wait 12 months a new iPhone will be available that's going to be better than the one in my pocket, and probably have the same price in nominal terms. If you already own an iPod and you already own a smart phone, there's nothing that awesome about the iPhone that should override one's basic prudential wariness of first generation devices. Unless, that is, you just want to own the best phone available. My iPod was stolen about six weeks ago, and I was using a Verizon Razr, so in those circumstances buying it was a no-brainer. Footnotes below the fold.
Values and Foreign Policy
Hilzoy and Robert Farley offer up what I would consider to be the standard philosopher's rejoinder to Ezra Klein's fatwa against "values" as a center of US foreign policy, namely that policy choices irreducibly implicate value decisions and allegedly value-free concepts like "the national interest" are, in fact, both contestable and, in practice, contested.
I think this is right, but I also think it misses the true force of Ezra's point. The point isn't, literally, that the problem is that we have "too much values" in our foreign policy and need to somehow wring it out with a judicious focus on consequences and pragmatism. The point, rather, is that our political debate has become unhealthily deductive -- with more time and column-inches being spent on the part of the argument that goes "does policy X flow logically from value Y" than on the part that asks "if we do Y, what's going to happen?"
Basically, an enormous amount of intellectual energy has been expended since 9/11 on the proposition that we can effectively outline policies for coping with problems emerging from the Muslim world without availing ourselves of rigorous empirical knowledge of the countries or people in question. This makes sense because the broad American elite basically had no knowledge of these issues. Insofar as the most important people were knowledgeable about any foreign places, those places tended to be in Eastern Europe or the Balkans. Even worse, the community of regional specialists on the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions tend to hold politically unacceptable opinions about the US-Israel relationship and, indeed, the general thrust of US policy in the area. Under the circumstances, the idea that better policy requires better reasoning about values has a natural appeal, but relatively little actual utility.
On the other hand, I do think it's important for progressives to develop more effective public articulations of what it is we're trying to say about US foreign policy, and I do think that communicating these ideas to a mass public requires this kind of flight into the ether of values. In that sense, I think Anne-Marie Slaughter's (the nominal subject of this conversation) ability to link up specific policy ideas to values-stuff is actually extremely valuable.
Ch-Ch-Ch Changes
Spackerman has the muck on DC's newest "regime change in Iran" think tank.
The New Virginia
The Washington Post takes a look at the collapsing Republican position in Virginia -- Democratic governor, one Democratic Senator, and now 40 percent of Virginians say the next president should be a Democrat and just 33 percent want a Republican. Beyond the more obvious points, I like to think that this also does show something about the significance of governing.
When Mark Warner first ran for governor in Virginia, it was pretty clear that only a "different kind of Democrat" kind of Democrat could win in the state. But not only did Warner win, he governed in a popular manner. And while he continued to be a "different kind of Democrat," he didn't shy away from being a Democrat and playing a role in the national party. Tim Kaine and Jim Webb have very much continued in that tradition -- neither are central casting Democrats, but both have actually represented the national party on national television in State of the Union responses. And as a result, their performance in office winds up not just keeping them afloat personally, but also serves to rehabilitate the party's overall image.
Nervous in Boston
I promise that my initial intention in setting out to do some research for this post was to cast a little doubt on the widespread-on-ESPN.com assumption that Ray Allen's career is about to head off a cliff. That led me to Basketball-Reference.com which judges Allen's career thus far to be substantially more similar to Mitch Richmond's than to anyone else.
Unfortunately, between the 97-98 season (when he was 32) and the 98-99 season (when he was 33), Richmond experienced a sudden and dramatic decline in playing ability, transforming overnight from a star-quality player to a decided state of averageness.
Photo by Flickr user Skidrd used under a Creative Commons license
Modeling in Circles
Strange phenomena in NBA player-performance modeling as the Wages of Wins Journal discusses Rashard Lewis:
Lewis is a comb0-forward, which means he has logged minutes at power forward and small forward in his career. WP48 is calculated by comparing a player relative to the average player at his position. Because power forwards tend to rebound at a higher rate than small forwards, power forwards tend to offer higher levels of productivity. So when Lewis is compared to players at the four spot, he tends not to look so good. Relative to small forwards, though, he can be very good.
To illustrate, consider last season. When Lewis played power forward his WP48 was only 0.096, which is close to average. At the three spot his WP48 was 0.209, which is above the “perfect” mark.
This is more than a little perverse. Good power forwards are hard to come by. That Rashard Lewis is capable of performing competently in that role is an asset he has as a player. But thanks to the WoW position-adjustment method, it registers as a problem for his game. If he was much, much worse at playing the 4, he'd never be asked to do it, and his WoW rating would look much better. But in the real world, he'd be a less valuable basketball player.
The Impeachment Option
With sentiment on the question of impeaching Bush running at a pretty strong 39 percent for giving him the boot (with 49 percent opposed), I think this needs to enter the mainstream conversation. And, insofar as Bush appears determined to use his constitutionally granted authority to shield his subordinates from the consequences of breaking the law, I would say that removing him from the office which grants that authority is something that should be discussed.
The fact remains, however, that impeaching and convicting Bush means, in practice, only that Dick Cheney becomes President. In a weird way, it was the very trumped-up and trivial nature of the charges against Clinton that made impeachment plausible -- replacing Bill Clinton with Al Gore really would have had a material impact on the quantity of tomcatting in the executive branch. Removing Bush doesn't accomplish anything. I suppose you could impeach Cheney, and then impeach Bush before confirming a new vice president, and then Nancy Pelosi becomes president. And that, of course, is going to get 67 votes in the Senate sometime after they establish congressional representation for flying pigs.
UPDATE: I don't think the "impeach Cheney" option makes much sense, though public support for it is quite strong. The problem is that the VP doesn't have any independent legal authority from the President. If Bush delegates authority to Cheney, and Cheney uses that power in an illegal manner, then either Bush needs to hold Cheney accountable for that, or else congress and the public need to hold Bush accountable. Having the buck stop with Cheney creates a terrible set of forward-looking incentives.
The thing to do is to impeach Bush and Cheney on a dual docket and have Nancy Pelosi and Robert Byrd both say that they would decline the presidency in the event of a dual vacancy (they can even note that many scholars think putting members of congress in the line of succession is unconstitutional anyway), thus making Secretary of State Rice the heir apparent, in order to demonstrate a lack of partisan motivation.
You're still left with the problem that this is only getting the requisite votes in fantasyland, but I think it's a perfectly cogent political agenda.
Telekinesis
If you've ever wanted to remotely access the files on your mac's hard drive through the Safari application on your iPhone (and who hasn't?) then you'll want to download Telekinesis from the genius mind behind Quicksilver. This also allows you to turn your iPhone into a remote control for operating your Mac's iTunes, although given that my computer actually shipped with a remote that I never use as is, the somewhat clunky web-interface for duplicating this function doesn't seem incredibly useful. Suffice it to say that I fully expect this program to get better when it's had more than a week to exist.
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Heads in the Sand
