« July 1, 2007 - July 7, 2007 | Main | July 15, 2007 - July 21, 2007 » July 8, 2007 - July 14, 2007 ArchivesJuly 8, 2007Homeward BoundNYT editorial page: "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit." Yes it's true that this is a bit late, but I'll take it. I'd just like to see this -- departure without unnecessary delay -- become the progressive position, with things like CNAS's let's maybe end the war in a decade proposal (Hillary Clinton and Chuck Hagel at the launch event!) recognized as a conservative alternative. More Than Meets The Eye
I saw Transformers last night and I'm happy to report that the US Air Force has finally found a legitimate rationale for its pricey white elephant of an air superiority fighter: They're ideal in case you need to call in an airstrike against an invading group of alien robots. Well worth the hundreds of millions per plane that they cost. The Need for DarkoMarty Burns says Darko Milicic could be in line for a biggish payday: Milicic is expected to command a multiyear deal starting in the $7 to $8 million range. Some say that's optimistic, given that there are so few teams with any cap room. Assuming he winds up unable to pull off anything more than the midlevel exception, I think the Lakers have to sign him, just so the world can experience the Kwame/Darko All-Bust front line. Those two, Kobe Bryant, plus some Chinese dude from the ABA would be priceless. Nancy Goldstein's Gay MoneyVia Ann Friedman, Nancy Goldstein explains "why no Democratic presidential candidate is getting my gay money." I don't have any gay money, personally, but I think you've got to respect where she's coming from. It's worth observing, however, that presidential politics simply isn't a particularly effective leverage point for advancing gay rights as a general matter. If you have the chance, check out Josh Green's profile of Tim Gill a few months back in The Atlantic to see a more efficacious path. Gill's approach, in essence, is to try to scour the country in search of low-level elected officials who stand out of the crowd for their anti-gay activism, and then get big chunks of cash sent to their opponents. Green's lead example is "Danny Carroll, the Republican [ex] speaker pro tempore of Iowa’s House of Representatives" who sponsored his state's entry into the "succession of state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage." Over the summer, Carroll’s opponent started receiving checks from across the country—significant sums for a statehouse race, though none so large as to arouse suspicion (the gifts topped out at $1,000). Because they came from individuals and not from organizations, nothing identified the money as being “gay,” or even coordinated. Only a very astute political operative would have spotted the unusual number of out-of-state donors and pondered their interest in an obscure midwestern race. And only someone truly versed in the world of gay causes would have noticed a $1,000 contribution from Denver, Colorado, and been aware that its source, Tim Gill, is the country’s biggest gay donor, and the nexus of an aggressive new force in national politics. Carroll lost his seat. Let that kind of thing happen a few more times over the next few cycles, and suddenly you have politicians everywhere thinking twice about whether or not they really want to be leading anti-gay demagogues. It's much easier to impact elections for state legislature, and the preponderance of gay rights issues are state-level anyway. A Touch of SwarthWith all due respect, I think Andrew actually missed the worst part of Michael Fumento's complaints about Hollywood's alleged "war against anti-terrorism," namely the part where Fumento gets upset that in Live Free or Die Hard "one of the few good guys in the movie, the head of the FBI team that aids our hero John McCain, looks decidedly Arabic." That's right. Portraying the head of an FBI team as aiding the hero of an action movie is now un-American if the team head in question "looks . . . Arabic." I suppose he was also upset about the friendly Arab boy in Transformers who helped the Special Operations guys find a phone -- I mean, a positive portrayal of an Arab character's got to be even worse than a positive portrayal of a merely Arabic looking individual, right? UPDATE: Spencer suggests Fumento may want to read this. Edging CloserNouri al-Maliki's government seems to be edging closer to formal collapse. More FumentoCommenter Marlowe notes: The utter fatuous cluelesness of Fumento and his ilk is amusingly illustrated by his comment that the doctors suspected in the recent British terrorist plot was "a truly scary scenario that's right out of a movie like The Manchurian Candidate." That's true. The terror plot in question wasn't like The Manchurian Candidate at all. There was no brainwashing, no assassination attempt, no resemblance whatsoever. Good Name"China vs. Earth" by Elizabeth Economy. What a cool byline. Get Us An Easier Test!
The Washington Post reports what people who've been paying attention to the National Security Network's measuring the benchmarks will already know, namely that the "Iraqi government is unlikely to meet any of the political and security goals or timelines President Bush set for it in January when he announced a major shift in U.S. policy." Naturally, in response to this the administration plans to . . . abandon their own chosen benchmarks and instead "officials are marshaling alternative evidence of progress to persuade Congress to continue supporting the war." Defense Department photo by Sgt. Michael Pryor, US Army. July 9, 2007Courage"The soldiers think they can win," reads Bill Kristol's subhead in The Weekly Standard while "some Senators lose their nerve." This conflation of the actual physical courage exhibited by soldiers risking their lives in a war with the alleged courage demonstrated by pro-war pundits and politicians in advocating that the lives of others be risked is surely the most annoying tick of America's War Party. War is hard. Favoring war is easy. The distinction isn't difficult to grasp. Yo-Yo Girl CopI just saw this trailer. A friend apparently will be in possession of a subtitled version soon: I can't wait. Late to the PartyRosa Brooks on shocking recent discoveries of things people paying attention have known for years: Someday, historians will ponder our strange collective passivity in the face of Bush-Cheney madness. Why did the editorial boards of our major newspapers either parrot the administration line or raise only muted criticism on so many issues, and for so long? Where were the tough journalistic questions? Why didn't more members of Congress protest the administration's blatantly unjustified policies and transparent constitutional outrages? I think people who look back on this period from the future are going to have a very hard time figuring out what was happening and why. Holy War and the ProfessionsPaul Cruickshank writes about al-Qaeda's love of technically skilled professionals: Jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda have particularly focused their recruiting efforts on attracting highly skilled individuals, like doctors, as operatives. Such recruits are more likely to have the technical skills needed in assembling explosive devices and the discipline required to carry off an operation. Al Qaeda's standardized application form, discovered by the U.S. military in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, required candidates to specify their precise educational achievements and to list their "intellectual" and "professional skills." This helped Al Qaeda recruit only the most promising operatives from the thousands of jihadists present in Afghanistan. He also mentions in this regard an article by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey (PDF) which looked at the biographies of a sample of the 79 participants in the five biggest anti-western terrorist attacks and saw that "more than half of the group we assessed attended a university, making them as well educated as the average American." Marc Sageman makes similar points in his 2004 book Understanding Terror Networks. In my view, this shouldn't really be all that surprising. Political movements of all sorts tend to be led by relatively well-educated middle class professionals. That's true of the major social reforms of American history and the major nationalist movements of the decolonization era, and also of the Khmer Rouge, the Jacobins of the French Revolution, and, as best one can tell, al-Qaeda. Wolfe on KirkAlan Wolfe's essay on Russell Kirk is a delight to read. I'll confess, though, that in an obvious way it's just playing to my prejudices since I've never read any Kirk and am eager to believe that he's worse than you'd think. So, liberals, I think you should read Wolfe's essay. And conservative, you should recommend something Kirk wrote to me that I might find impressive. Subpoenas for Scooter
Mark Kleiman says let 'em fly: So call him in, giving him immunity from proseuction for anything he might say (thus barring any Fifth Amendment claim), to ask him whether he was covering up for Cheney and/or Bush when he perjured himself. Let Bush assert Executive Privilege and "direct" him not to appear, and then go argue in court about that. If Fielding tries to raise the question of what legislative purpose is served by the inquiry, the answer is simple: we're trying to figure out whether to impeach Cheney. Meanwhile, I'm also inclined to agree that "haul Sara Taylor off to the slammer" is premature since it seems that there's going to need to be some litigating one way or the other, and having her wait that out in prison only makes her look more sympathetic. Billups' Bucks
Chauncey Billups signs with Detroit for five years and sixty million dollars, with the fifth year as a team option. John Hollinger noted month ago that Billups has the characteristics of a point guard who ages well -- he's big, he's an excellent shooter, and he was something of a late-bloomer -- so the is likely to give Detroit good value. And, if he does wind up falling off the cliff three or four years from now, the team option lets them dump him. All very convenient. Still, it's hard to avoid the sense that the Pistons' window may have closed unless Joe Dumars can pull something more dramatic than resigning his existing star. Photo by Flickr user Farlane used under a Creative Commons license The Alleged Libertarian CenterHot new debate on the Cato Unbound site: In this month’s lead essay Cato vice president for research Brink Lindsey elaborates his argument in The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture that the culture wars are over and a vaguely libertarian consensus is the result. While recognizing that principled libertarianism doesn’t have a significant constituency, Lindsey argues that the soft libertarian synthesis constrains the Democrats and Republicans as they seek to cobble together working political majorities. Responses will be forthcoming from Jonah Goldberg, Matt Yglesias, and Julian Sanchez. Dykes Taking OverBill O'Reilly warns of the lesbian menace to our youth: This is via Jessica Valenti. See details at Pandagon and Orcinus. With Le Tigre on hiatus, I think Dykes Taking Over could be the name of a band aimed at filling that niche. See also Lesbians on Ecstasy. Brooks Comes AroundDavid Brooks, on PBS NewsHour July 6th: "And, then, the final thing, the problem with the Iraq Study Group--and Mark is absolutely right. I think the Bush administration bitterly regrets not embracing that now." Times change. The ISG report was, in my view, inadequate when it came out, but would have offered movement in the right direction. Now that the more perceptive hawks like Brooks are ready to embrace it, however, it's been essentially overtaken by events. And that's the tragic cycle we've seen in the Iraq debate -- a conventional wisdom that's perennially nine months or so behind the curve. Torture and Executive PowerVia Scott Lemieux, Marty Lederman's assembled an invaluable resource -- a complete list of every Balkinzation post on "Torture, Interrogation, Detention, War Powers, Executive Authority, DOJ and OLC." It turns out to be an awful lot of posts, but the current administration has generated an awful lot of "innovative" legal thinking on these subjects, so that's what you get. Impeachment Again"Obviously there's no chance of 2/3 of the Senate voting to convict anyone," writes Scott Lemieux, and "it's hard to see how serious impeachment proceedings (as opposed to stepping up use of Congress' oversight powers in general) would strengthen the Democrats' political position." I don't really disagree with that. That said, when you conduct a congressional investigation into allegations of serious presidential wrongdoing, it doesn't make sense -- logically speaking -- to rule out impeachment as the outcome. In the real world, the votes aren't there, the political benefits are all in doing the investigating, and there's not even enough time left in the Bush administration to complete major investigations in the face of White House foot-dragging. But still, one has to say that insofar as congressional investigators manage to secure real proof -- and it'd have to be real legal proof, not journalistic proof or convincing-to-me proof -- of serious wrongdoing, that people could get themselves impeached. Immigration FatalismThe post is a couple of days old, but Tim Lee goes into some detail here spelling out the common-but-odd view that stepped-up immigration enforcement somehow "can't work." Now, if you take "working" to mean that zero people will be residing illegally amidst a large, demographically diverse country of 300 million then, sure, it's probably not feasible to do that. At the same time, as Tim says the reason people immigrate here illegally is that there's a lot to be gained by immigrating illegally to the United States. And the reason people employ illegal immigrants is that there's a lot to be gained by employing illegal immigrants. But by the same token, if we take measures to increase enforcement the measures don't need to be 100 percent effective to raise the cost (or decrease the benefit) of immigrating illegally and thereby reduce illegal immigration at the margin. Now, I don't really think we have too many immigrants in the United States (though I'd prefer to see a higher ratio of legal to illegal immigrants) so I like the conclusion that enforcement is futile, but there's no real reason to think it is. LeadIt's bad for kids' brains. Really bad. And Kevin Drum says we could largely solve the problem for relatively little money. And check out this lead-related anecdote: Lead was banned from gasoline during the 1980s. The job was done by the Reagan Administration. Vice President George H.W. Bush and his "regulatory reform" task force had proposed loosening lead limits, but a brilliant analysis spearheaded by my friend Joel Schwartz (then at the EPA, now at the Harvard School of Public Health) managed to turn the proposal around; even the folks at OMB couldn't deny the data when they had their noses rubbed in them. Such deference to fact would be unthinkable today Astonishing, but true isn't? One couldn't imagine a policy argument on the merits of any sort convincing the Bush administration of anything. If the gasoline companies wanted something not to happen, it wouldn't happen. iphone Bloggingthe trick, it turns out, is that I couldn't make this work earlier just because I had the password wrong and had been blaming the phone which actually works fine. One word of caution is that buying one of these will make you do a lot of things that inspire your friends and blog readers to call you an asshole. Just keep telling yourself they're just jealous. Upon ReflectionAbsurd as it may be to blog from one's phone it's got to be less absurd than the fact that my gym has wifi on the the workout area. Of course once you become a professional blogger you're already through the technological looking glass anyway. A Surge of Question-EvasionConsidering that this is a stunt designed to make her look bad, I think Rep. Thelma Drake (R-VA) actually acquits herself quite well in this confrontation: Nevertheless, it's telling that the method by which she acquits herself is by evading the substance of the Iraq issue and instead hiding behind General Petraeus' fatigues and his looming September report. I think that makes for an answer you can get away with in July, and it's an answer you can get away with in August, and I can even imagine a sufficiently propagandistic and dishonest report (you know, the kind of report they're working on) might give a boost to the viability of the pro-war position. But even if it's a big boost how long is it supposed to last? Three weeks? Seven? Even three months wouldn't be nearly long enough and any report-related boost certainly won't last that long. For the past two years or so, the administration keeps finding that even its cleverest stunts can't overcome the steady drumbeat of reality, and if House Republicans haven't figured that out yet they may be a steep price. The Great UnknownI'd been wondering when the new Bowers/Stoller blog would emerge. It's here. Read this post on the vast mystery of what it is the "Big Three" Democratic candidates are trying to say about force levels in Iraq under a Democratic administration. Seriously?Apparently so. Being a fake celebrity is weird. July 10, 2007The Cost of WarVia Spencer Ackerman, the Congressional Research Service reports that we're now spending $10 billion a month in Iraq, plus another $2 billion in Afghanistan. That's a staggering amount and worth keeping in mind. The senseless prolonging of the Iraq War is consuming real resources that could be curing measels or sending kids to preschool or simply back in the hands of American citizens being turned into productive economic investments. Lead in Pakistan
Following up on yesterday's lead-blogging, Brad Plumer did a post that included this fun factoid: "In Pakistan, some 80 percent of children have dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstream, which in turn affects childhood development and, presumably, intelligence." Now since the Bush administration is very concerned about Pakistan, this would seem like an obvious area where we could try to help out, which would be good on its own terms and also perhaps strengthen the hand of those in Pakistan inclined to adopt policies that we're inclined to favor. On the other hand "The Bush administration loves lead. Loves it." They want it everywhere. Okay, that's only a slight exaggeration: Back in 2002, the White House tried to stack an advisory committee on lead regulations with industry types. Last December, the administration announced that it would consider doing away with the standards that cut lead from gasoline, at the behest of battery makers and lead smelters. And its EPA has weakened a rule on removing lead paint from older residences. All that research on the toxic effects of lead exposure? Eh, who needs it. So you can hardly expect an ambitious effort from them -- it would involve conceding that widespread lead poison constitutes a serious social problem, and you can't have that. Photo by Flickr user Babasteve used under a Creative Commons license Occassional Mark Penn BloggingAlso on the Brad Plumer blog, I read this: In other cigarette news, it seems like Hillary Clinton's main political advisor, Mark Penn, has spent a lot of time over the last two decades shilling for Big Tobacco. Now, I don't think it's entirely "indefensible" to oppose, say bans on smoking in bars, but it's more than a little creepy that Penn and Doug Schoen went about helping to create "smoker's rights" astroturf groups on behalf of RJ Reynolds. To me, what's creepiest about this Penn stuff is that Clinton obviously don't think it's creepy. She thinks he's great! Heh. Indeed.It's good to have Greg Djeredjian back blogging again: Meantime, and with an obliviousness to his ignorance on foreign policy matters so total that it can only be described as somehow charming, if in a poignant way, Glenn Reynolds is proudly manning the ramparts of the blogospheric 'know-nothing' brigades, as is his wont, announcing simply: "Syria Invades Lebanon", sans the merest smidgen of context. Well, yes, Glenn, Syrian troops might have gone 3 kms into Lebanese-Syrian border areas, as they've done for many decades, and by that standard, you can be assured Turkey has invaded Kurdistan, Iranians agents parts of Iraq, even potentially special Saudi forces Sunni areas of Iraq abutting the Kingdom, Israel Gaza, and so on and on. So what should we do now Glenn? Invade all those bastards messing with our allies Olmert and Maliki and give 'em a good licking, Nashville style? Tell us more, please, at least when you're not busily spewing out links to assorted ignoramuses dumping on just about each and every sane policy prescription of the past half-decade. More rubble, less trouble? I dunno. My Necktie Problem, And OursMark Kleiman discusses a proposal to ban necktie wearing by EU officials in the summertime. Speaking of which, we've just this week seemed to have commenced in earnest the awful DC tradition of 90+ degree days with high, high humidity. The trouble with the terrible DC summer, however, is that it's hard to sum up in one simple statistic. The heat is bad, yes, but it's also the humidity. But there are more hot-and-humid cities out there -- Atlanta, say. What makes DC different is its aspiration to be a northeastern-style walkable urban center where you can walk four blocks, get on a Metro, ride a way, then find yourself just a four block walk from, say, some destination somewhere. Which is fine, except you wind up arriving for your work-related event looked sweaty and ridiculous. All of which could be mitigated by attire except that DC is also one of the most formal of American cities at this point. I'll always remember this July 12 breakfast with Chuck Schumer from last summer for exactly how uncomfortable everyone (the Senator included) looked in our jackets and ties and remembering who, exactly, we were all trying to impress by dressing like that? Vitter's Statement
Statement from Senator David Vitter's office: U.S. Sen. David Vitter made the following statement today about his telephone number being on the old phone records of Pamela Martin and Associates prior to his running for the U.S. Senate. He respectfully requests that the statement be used in full without editing or paraphrasing. It's really too bad that when politicians get caught doing stuff that shouldn't be illegal, they never, ever, ever seem to respond by redoubling their efforts to reduce the criminalization of victimless conduct. Does Vitter think Vitter should go to jail? Does he think the hookers he had sex with should go to jail? If not, then doesn't he think he should use his authority as one of the guys who gets to write the laws to create a more just legal system? PermanenceClose reading with Spencer Ackerman. The key line: "Instead of operating under a U.N. mandate, the United States would negotiate an agreement with the Iraqi government for a smaller, long-term presence." "Progressive"I don't think it makes a ton of to try to evaluate presidential candidates in terms of how often they describe themselves as "progressive". On the right, the term "conservative" has a pretty clear valence -- if Candidate A is more conservative than Candidate B, then Candidate B is more moderate than Candidate A. "Progressive" is, among left of center people, a much more mixed bag of a term. Some people would use it to mean something like "John Edwards' domestic policy is more progressive than Barack Obama's," meaning that its more ambitious, less respectful of elite CW about balanced budgets, etc. On the other hand, when the DLC wanted to start a think tank they called it the Progressive Policy Institute. "Progressive" in this sense is meant to denote a Third Way approach and provide a contrast with the traditional "liberal" orientation of the Old Democrats or the "socialist" orientation of Old Labour. The Closing DoorFrom Chris Bower's latest report on the state of the progressive blogosphere: It has been over one and a half years since a new blog has broken into the "short head" of the national progressive blogosphere, whereas not long ago new members of the "short head" used to be fairly common. Over time, their appearances slowed to a trickle, and now seem to have stopped entirely. Back in October of 2005, Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory might have been the last great individual breakthrough. Now, even Glenn Greenwald has gone institutional and blogs for Salon.com. The entry costs to the "A-list," the "top tier," and the "short head" have simply become too high for individuals to sustainably break through on their own. A caste system is solidifying and a new establishment is crystallizing. Now, the flipside of this is that the existence of high-traffic multiply-authored blogs means that it's now possible for a new blogger to rise to prominence without that meaning a new blog becomes popular. Crucial Vitter FollowupAt Ezra's blog I saw this bit: Asked by an interviewer in 2000 whether she could forgive her husband if she learned he'd had an extramarital affair, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Livingston's wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the Times-Picayune: "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me." Yikes! Goose, Gander, and Economists
I agree with Brad DeLong: The Democratic proposal to slap a punitive tax on Chinese goods and the people who buy them unless the People's Republic re-values its currency to something the US Congress is happy with is a bad idea, and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama shouldn't be supporting it. As Brad says, it's "a classic threat to shoot ourselves in the foot." Now where I tend to lose the plot is this. If mainstream economists like Brad think it's a bad idea to use threats of tariffs to push China into changing its exchange-rate policies, how come the economics mainstream seems to have so few complaints about the fact that it's completely normal for US trade negotiators to use exactly this sort of leverage to try to get other countries to change the intellectual properties policies or to privatize their water systems or what have you? Why is the threat to shoot ourselves in the foot okay when made on behalf of pharmaceutical companies and movie studios, but not when made on behalf of import-competing manufacturers? Often when I see this argument made, I feel like the point is -- aha! hypocrites! you should support our China bill after all! -- but I really do think Brad's right, this is a bad bill. But by the same token, the people who complain about this sort of thing ought to complain about the other sort of thing as well. Photo by SEIU International used under a Creative Commons license It's a Big CountryCato's Michael Tanner warns that Democratic health care proposals "would radically increase government control over one seventh of the US economy, would increase taxes, destroy jobs, and slow economic growth, and most importantly would lead to worse health care for millions of Americans." A lot to chew over there. I see no particular reason to think these plans would destroy jobs or slow economic growth, but those would be good reasons to oppose a health care plan. "Worse health care for millions of Americans," on the other hand, genuinely might be a price worth paying. After all, a proposal that have eight million Americans worse health care, improved health care for 120 million Americans, left 160 million Americans with about the same health care, and saved everyone some money would be a fantastic health care plan. One could also warn in ponderous tones that would lead to "worse health care for millions of Americans." It's a big country! The "jobs" issue is one that I think doesn't get pursued enough. There seems to me to be decent evidence that labor market flexibility leads to employment growth. It also seems clear that America's health care system generates substantial labor market rigidities as people with medical histories need to maintain a seamless web of insured-ness in order to remain insurable. There economic costs here seem potentially quite large, but obviously you'd need some really smart people to take a look at it. The O'Hanlon FactorAtrios takes us on a little Michael O'Hanlon memory tour. The noteworthy thing about this incident, though, is that it occurred at a congressional hearing convened by a Senate committee under Democratic control. A lot of things about the current media environment are both crappy and also very hard to alter. This, however, is easy to alter. As things stand, the next time O'Hanlon publishes some liberal-bashing op-ed somewhere, the editor who published it can always say "but look, this is the expert the Democrats in the Senate turn to on Iraq." But Democrats could just, you know, not turn to him. The first step in building a better "expert" class would be for the politicians and their staffs to take some time to actually think about who they want to be putting forward. The Pod PeopleNorman Podhoretz joins Rudy Giuliani's campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor. Yes, this Norm Podhoretz: The one who wants to launch an unprovoked unilateral military attack on Iran. Two points. One is that even though the Romney campaign keeps failing to trumpet my endorsement of Multiple Choice Mitt as the least-bad Republican contender, it's still true. The other is that you should think about what would happen if it turned out that Ahmadenijad's senior foreign policy adviser had recently published an article called "The Case for Bombing the United States of America.". People would be freaking out, no? Rashard Lewis RevisitedI feel like Dave Berri's missing my point here: "Now we have the argument that the value of Lewis should not depend upon position played. The numbers tell us that playing Lewis at power forward will cost Orlando rebounds. But we should ignore this fact and simply give Lewis extra credit for making an effort." No. This is what I'm saying. Suppose you have two players. One is Rashard Lewis, excellent small forward (according to Berri's numbers) and average power forward (again, according to Berri's numbers). Now you have a second player. Call him "Lashard Rewis." Rewis puts up Lewis' exact same numbers, but if his coach tries to insert him as a power forward he refuses to play. Which player is better to sign -- Lewis or Rewis? Berri says it's Rewis -- Rewis will have a better position-adjusted Wins Produced number. I say -- and basic common sense says -- it's Lewis. In any situation where Rewis could help the team win by playing small forward, Lewis can do it, too. But some situations will arise (suppose your starting power forward has fouled out and your backup power forward sucks, while your backup small forward is an above average player) where Lewis is a more useful player to have on your roster. It's true that teams employing Lewis do well to remember that he's much more effective as a small forward than as a power forward (assuming that's true) but it's also true that it's better -- more useful to your coach and GM -- to be able to "play out of position" with a modicum of success than to be totally useless. That said, it's slightly absurd to even discuss positional matchups within the Wins Produced framework because it doesn't deal with defensive matchups at all. Is Player X quick enough to "downsize" and stay with his man? Is he tall and strong enough to "upsize" and not get pushed around? The Wins Produced framework doesn't differentiate between (very useful) players who can guard multiple positions, and (unfortunate) players who defend two positions because they're equally ineffective at both spots. Fear of a Descended From Spanish-Speakers PlanetJonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart debate debate whether "we" should "fear a Hispanic-majority United States". I have to say that while I don't normally feel particularly Hispanic this sort of exclusion-by-premise from the conversation has a way of getting underneath my skin. Beinart says almost everything I'd want to say about this, but it's worth noting that it's kind of hard to see what this scenario even means. I mean, do I -- with a paternal grandfather who grew up in a Spanish-dominant Cuban immigrant community in Florida plus three "Anglo" (i.e., Ashkenazi Jewish) grandparents -- count toward this looming Hispanic menace? And since we're talking about a future scenario, would my kids. Their kids? It doesn't seem to make sense. It always seems to me that this is part of the reason that the public seems to underestimate the extent of Hispanic assimilation. People descended, in whole or in part, from immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries don't wear little yellow stars marking us out from the rest of the group. If you're English-dominant and your skin tone gets either too light or too dark, you don't "count" as Hispanic at all. But English-dominance and intermarriage are key markers of integration. So you wind up only noticing the Hispanic presence in the United States via its less assimilated members. McCain Cuts and RunsJohn McCain on the need to leave Haiti now: In my view, we need to fight the voodoofascists in Port au Prince or we'll be fighting them in Portland. Like Rain on Your Wedding DayOmar al-Baghdadi, a leader in the "Islamic State of Iraq" al-Qaeda franchise who the US military said was dead, apparently isn't dead, and is threatening Iran with reprisals if Teheran doesn't stop meddling in Iraq. This via Greg Djerejian who suggests we dispatch Norm Podhoretz to handle the diplomatic outreach. I feel like Michael Ledeen needs to get involved somehow. Libby Commutation: Grossly UnpopularIt turns out that people really, really don't think Bush should have commuted Scooter Libby's sentence:
There's got to be a campaign issue in this somewhere. It'd be nice to think the press might offer more follow-up reporting on this story than on John Edwards' scandalously fashionable haircuts. Damn Dirty HippiesBack in February of 2003, the bountiful internets put forth a grand convergence of pro-war punditry, with National Review's Katherine Jean-Lopez interviewing The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol and The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan: Lopez: Is there anyone you can think of (nation, pol, constituency) the Bush administration has not convinced that going into Iraq is necessary who should and can be convinced? A friend quipped that the strengthening of American power as a result of the invasion certainly does seem marginal. Basketball = FreedomChina's censored news media takes a stand for freedom, urging Yi Jianlian to ignore his agent's concerns about playing in Milwaukee. "Yi, stand up and speak for yourself," China Daily said, citing an article in the Beijing Evening Post. "Don't hesitate anymore and don't let anybody control your life." Of course, an alternative interpretation is that it really is Yi who doesn't want to play for the Bucks, the Chinese government is trying to pressure Yi to go to Milwaukee (perhaps as part of an invasion plot in conjunction with Venezuelan space terrorists), and this business about Dan Fegan is just an effort to give Yi a face-saving way of backing out. A New Magnitude of InterferenceHenry Waxman gets some testimony from Richard Carmoma, Surgeon-General of the United States from 2002-2006, on the subject of George W. Bush's unprecedented political interference with that office: Carmona's opening statement here. Sadly, people die when public health agencies see their missions undermined by financial interests and ideological fanatics and that's what George Bush is all about. Why I Read David BrooksYes, it's true, his column's invocation of Pink and Avril Lavigne is clumsy and unconvincing, and the precise claim he's making about pop music trends breaks down on any number of levels. You can see Ezra Klein, and several posts from Dana Goldstein having good sport with some of these issues. That said, Brooks' observation here is true and, I think, not made often enough: Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules. This is a much more sensible entry-point into the endless "hooking up" disputes than the standard "what's with all these sluts these days" fare that you usually get from the right. The reality is that technological and economic change has raised the age at which people -- particularly more upscale people -- do things like get married and have children. But biology stays the same. Consequently, people in their teens and early twenties engage in a lot of courtship-related program activities that don't really entail a good-faith search for a spouse. This is a real and meaningful change from the recent past, that, like any significant, change, is going to have some downsides. Downsides that people are going to notice and talk about, and that deserve a more thoughtful treatment than what you get from Laura Sessions Stepp. Now, I do wish Brooks had spent less time on Pink and more time on trying to reach some kind of conclusions about this, but as far as observations go, it's not a bad one. There just ought to be a maximum age above which you can't casually opine on pop music trends. UPDATE: Much more from Dana who notes, among other things, that "traditional" patterns of American family life are actually of relatively recent (i.e., post-WWII) vintage rather than representing the timeless wisdom of the ages. July 11, 2007Family Structure Blogging"This," I write below "is a real and meaningful change from the recent past . . . that deserve [s] a more thoughtful treatment than what you get from Laura Sessions Stepp." The internet delivers in the form of Kieran Healy's writeup of a new book by Stanford sociologist and social demographer Michael Rosenfeld, The Age of Independence: Since around 1960, increasing numbers of young people have left home but without themselves starting families soon afterwards. Instead they go off to college by themselves, and then perhaps move to work in a city, surrounded by people much their own age and, like themselves, unmarried. This is the Age of Independence. It can last ten or fifteen years. Much as the teenager emerged as a social category and life-stage in the early post-war period, the Age of Independence becomes established as a phase in people’s lives. [...] Sounds fascinating. The Ghost of Scandals PastThis happened quite some time ago, and he's already apologized, but it seems that back in the day Bill Richardson was yukking it up with Don Imus and both men were showing off their knowledge of Spanish-language homophic slurs. Merit Pay: So What?
Readers have probably noticed that I'm favorably disposed to Barack Obama, but his modest embrace of merit pay schemes doesn't seem like a very good reason to be excited about his campaign even if you accept the premise (as I guess I do) that he's correct on the merits here. This simply isn't much of a federal issue. Presidential primary campaign talk about teachers is always going to be dominated by efforts to court union support precisely because education policy is such a tiny proportion of what a president actually does. If Ruth Marcus genuinely wants to promote some kind of education reform initiatives -- rather than dreaming up reasons to carp about Democrats -- she should find some state-level politicians who actually make the bulk of the education policy and give them some backup in efforts to buck entrenched interests. Photo by Flickr user Allison Harger used under a Creative Commons license Looking Forward to ArmageddonRick Santorum, appearing on the Hugh Hewitt show, predicts "some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK" over the next eighteen months or so that are going to lead people to have a "very different view" of the war in Iraq and the vital importance of "confronting Iran in the Middle East." Avedon Carol wonders if it shouldn't "concern us that Republicans are constantly talking about how people will all wise up when the next terrorist attack at home comes?" After all, they seem to really be "looking forward to it, and they take great delight in the thought that, by God, people will see things differently when it happens." There's really, even, a larger structural issue here. Namely that while clearly on some level the conservative movement would like to make the country safer from terrorism, on another level everyone knows that mass fear of foreign threats to Americans' physical security are a boon to the conservative movement's fortune. On the one hand, this creates systematic incentives to overstate the extent and nature of the real threats facing America. On the other hand, it creates systematic incentives to ensure that such threats as do exist are never ameliorated. In particular, it gives everyone a very strong self-interest in not understanding the extent to which overreacting can be counterproductive since both the overreaction itself and the counterproductive blowback may serve the interests of the Republican Party. The McCain ExodusI'd been assuming that the large-scale departures from John McCain's campaign staff were an essentially controlled phenomenon -- a combination of a purge of people McCain had lost faith in and efforts to control costs. But if it's true that "Late yesterday, McCain and aide Mark Salter telephoned several other top aides to urge them to stay put" then that's clearly not the case, and things have metastasized beyond that. Nuclear Athletes
Chad Ford reaches exciting new heights of hyperbole in his writeup of 2008 draft project Alexis Ajinca who's said to be a "Super long, wiry forward with nuclear athleticism." Yes, nuclear. Freakish is out. And the wingspan? "Amazing 7-foot-8 wingspan" so no worries. We still need wingspan. Nevertheless, he's only the 87th best prospect overall but might be good a good prospect "maybe two or three years down the road." Photo by Flickr user Dyxie used under a Creative Commons license Measuring the BenchmarksAn interim report from Rand Beers and Ilan Goldenberg details the costs of escalation (600 dead soldiers; 3,000 wounded; $10 billion per month) before concluding: Unfortunately, this investment has yielded no real progress. The President’s policies have failed to bring security to Iraq. The country remains mired in multiple civil wars with Sunnis fighting Shi’a, Sunnis fighting each other in Anbar and Diyala, Shi’a fighting each other in the South, and Kurds fighting Sunnis around Kirkuk and Mosul. Iraqi Security Forces, who are supposed to be taking on greater responsibilities, cannot be trusted to enforce the law fairly, and all too often turn on American troops or take part in sectarian violence. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is teetering on the verge of collapse. One third of the Cabinet, including the major Sunni party as well as the party of Muqtada Al Sadr, is currently boycotting the government. Without the participation of these groups there can be no meaningful progress on any of the key political benchmarks including the oil law, de-Baathification, or amending the constitution. See the full report in PDF. What Beers and Goldenberg don't seem to consider, however, is that by simply adopting new, different benchmarks we can achieve Success By Definition, the ultimate accomplishment of any armed force. Historical Analogy of the DayOverextension frequently results from local failures of imperial management rather than simply "foreign policy" dynamics. The Spanish Habsburg's conflicts with England -- which scholars often cite as a key factor in Spanish overextension -- were, in part, a byproduct of a peripheral uprising in the Netherlands. Both Philip II and Philip III hoped that, by either conquering England or forcing it to capitulate to Spanish hegemonic coontrol, they could cut off England's strategic support for the Dutch (e.g., Allen 2000). Sustained rebellions represent, in fact, only an extreme case of these dynamics. As resistance to imperial bargains grows, empires will find it more difficult to garner and direct resources -- manpower, money, trade, and so forth -- from and toward peripheries. As their political capacity to manage peripheries diminishes they will, in turn, be more likely to suffer from overextension. Those who currently advocate American -- or American-backed Israeli -- military action against Syria and Iran embrace very similar reasoning to that of the Spanish: they argue that American problems in Iraq, and in the entire region, might be resolved if only the United States could neutralize those regimes that sponsor resistance to its objectives (e.g., Kristol 2006). That's Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright, "What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate?" available in your May 2007 issue of the American Political Science Review. More here. Independent WomanThis exchange between Steve Sailer and Brad DeLong led me to some data on the median age at first marriage in the United States which I used as the basis for my chart:
The story we see here is that in 1890 men waited until the relatively old age of 26.1 years before getting married -- perhaps representing the time at which they could acquire some land and support a family, and they married substantially younger women -- 22 years old on average. Over time, growing prosperity led the first marriage age for men to drop steadily and substantially to 22.8 in both the 1950 and 1960 snapshots. At the same time, women's age at first marriage declined steadily and slightly to 20.3, giving us the "traditional" (i.e., postwar) family. At this point, the trends reverse and average age at first marriage rises steadily. By 1980, women are getting married at the 1890 age again, though men are still getting married younger than their 1890s counterparts. By 1990, however, 1890 marriage ages are back in style for men, and women are getting married later than their 1890s counterparts. By 2000, at 26.8 men are getting married slightly later than they did back in the way, but women at 25.1 years old are now getting married way than either midcentury or late 19th century women. From 2000-2003, ages continue to creep upwards for both genders, and after that I have no data. Get Us Some More KagansKimberly Kagan writes that the surge is working in The Wall Street Journal. It keeps being funny each time this happens. Is the conservative media machine really so short on wannabe apologists for Iraq at this point that it can't find enough non-Kagans to write about the Kagan-authored escalation scheme. If You Want Peace, Prepare for Absurd ScenariosI followed a link from The Weekly Standard's blog to a post by David Axe discussing Air Force Monthly's coverage of an F-22 getting shot down in some simulated combat by an F-16. Lieutenant Colonel Dirk Smith notes that "the beauty of Red Flag is that we were able to go out and practice our tactics in a challenging scenario, make a mistake, learn alesson, and be that much better prepared for actual combat." Axe, in a section the Standard quotes favorably, concurs: I totally agree: failure is the best way to improve. And if losing one simulated dogfight against other Americans flying F-16s was such a profound experience for our Raptor jockies, imagine what they might take away from a no-holds-barred match with experienced foreign pilots flying a genuinely dissimilar aircraft, say Indian aces in Su-30s or veteran Russian pilots in Su-27s – or even top British aviators in the Royal Air Force’s new Typhoons. Uh huh. But think about that. Why would the US Air Force be fighting Indian aces in Su-30s? And that's to say nothing of the Royal Air Force. I don't want to say it's inconceivable that the United States would find itself engaged in a struggle for air superiority with a near peer-competitor but it's way, way, way, down on the list of contingencies that any reasonable person would be hedging against. Alien robots seems like an only slightly less plausible adversary. Robert Farley threatened a little while back to write on the question of whether we ought to have an Air Force at all, and I think it's a topic that needs further exploration. Clearly, the military needs air power, but setting up a separate, coequal, "air" service seems to create very bad institutional incentives to over-invest our resources in the sort of things that would justify the existence of an air force. The ISG Is BackJohn Podesta, Lawrence Korb, and Brian Katulis warn progressives not to be taken in by the recent revival of interest in the Iraq Study Group. That comes via Michael Crowley. I promise I have a piece on closely related topic on the Guardian's Comment is Free thingy, but I can't load the site at the moment. UPDATE: Here it is. Against Training
Stephen Biddle makes the point that while withdrawing some troops and leaving many behind to continue training makes a certain amount of political sense as a compromise, it's nonsense on the merits. If you're going to have a whole bunch of troops in the country, you need enough troops to make a difference. Withdrawing tens of thousands of Americans is only going to leave the tens of thousands who remain in a more dangerous and fundamentally untenable position. If we want to withdraw troops -- and we should -- we need to get essentially all the way out. Defense Department photo by Corporal Samuel D. Corum, US Marine Corps. Enterprises Run by IdiotsMark Schmitt nails it; you'd have to be out of your mind to entrust campaign strategy to someone dumb enough to give up a rent controlled apartment in the Village. That's just silly and I'm not even a huge NYC fan. Waiting in AmericaI've really only been to the doctor a handful of times as an adult. Each time it's happened, though, I'm left to wonder about the view that the problem with a national health care system would be that it would lead to waiting times. I always seem to need to wait to see a doctor. At any rate, Business Week writes this up a bit and Kevin Drum has more. Michael Bay and the National Security StateSteve White at Tapped sees in Transformers an apologia for militarism grounded in Michael Bay's close relationship with the defense-industrial complex. To which I say, eh. In purely ideological terms, Bay's oeuvre doesn't carry much of a message. The invasion of Cuba in Bay Boys II is egregious beyond belief but Transformers is, I think, basically sound. Obviously, the film is soaked in enthusiasm for military hardware. On the other hand, the threat from the Deceptacons is quite real. Meanwhile, until the climactic battle with the Deceptacons, the tension in the film within the "good guy" camp. Mostly, the paranoia of the national security apparatus -- represented by the chief of Sector Seven and the guys who want to imprison Bumblebee -- versus the correct liberal view that we need to widen the circle of allies, distinguish between good and bad alien robots, etc. Similarly, the Autobots have a minor conflict between the more hawkish Ironhide and the more dovish Optimus Prime on the subject of killing humans, in which Optimus' more pacifistic stand gets a positive portrayal. All-in-all, I saw a balanced, patriotic, security conscious liberalism not the run-amok nationalism and militarism of the Bush-era GOP. UPDATE: If you're interested, you might want to read a blog post on this subject from John Rogers, who has a story credit on the film in question, though I genuinely don't believe that the views of members of the creative team should be given special weight on these issues (he agrees with me, basically, but authorial intent is still irrelevant). Solid Intelligence
I think I agree more with what Andrew says here about Dick Cheney than I do with Ross' belief that Cheney and others were perfectly sincere in their WMD scare stories. Among other things, it's worth recalling that there were always sort of two different Iraq debates happening on parallel tracks. One debate, for the cognescenti, was about America's strategic posture in the Persian Gulf vis-a-vis Iraq. You have Ken Pollack worrying that a nuclear-armed Saddam may invade Kuwait again, forcing us to either fight a second war to dislodge him (potentially subjecting our troops to nuclear attack) or else to acquiesce in Iraqi hegemony in the Gulf. You have concerns that a nuclear-armed Iraq might feel able to become much bolder in its sponsorship of anti-Israel groups. You have concerns that a nuclear-armed Iraq might become incredibly prestigious in the Arab world, making Saddam a kind of new Nasser and creating problems for our friendly governments in the region. Rawls' InfluenceMarc Ambinder, pondering the significance (if any) of Russel Kirk, remarks of John Rawls that "Liberals might not know much about him, but his writing and thinking underpin the modern Democratic Party theory of redistributive rights and expansive government." This is obviously a complicated issue, and I'm about to give it short shrift, but it's worth noting that the timing is wrong for Rawls to be politically influential. A Theory of Justice is published in 1971, after the key elements of the Great Society and the War on Poverty were already in place. The main progressive policy accomplishments of the post-TOJ era have tended to be remote from the concerns about the distribution of wealth and income that Marc is alluding to here. July 12, 2007All News Is Good News
If, that is, you're a Republican. Atrios points us to an Associated Press article reporting that "U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded al-Qaida has rebuilt its operating capability to a level not seen since just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." Brendan Nyhan points out that later in the same piece, this damning indictment of George W. Bush's policies is described as something that "could bolster the president's hand at a moment when support on Capitol Hill for the war is eroding and the administration is struggling to defend its decision for a military buildup in Iraq." I mean, look, anything's possible especially if the press is going to pre-emptively report the news in an up-is-down manner without need for aggressive administration spinning, but the intuitive thing to say here is that it's likely to weaken Bush's hand and strengthen the hand of those arguing that the country needs new policies. The point of the report, after all, is that just as war-skeptics have been saying, while the Bush administration's been chasing its own turds in circles in Iraq, al-Qaeda's been rebuilding its capacities in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area and parts of Europe. Photo by Sargent Brandon Aird, US Army. "My Oath, Like Your Oath, Is to Uphold the Constitution"This is some good indignation right here from Senator Pat Leahy (D-VT) in response to Sara Taylor's view that her oath of office was an oath of personal loyalty to George W. Bush: Expressing good, old-fashioned outrage isn't my strong suit since I'm really way too soaked in the culture of irony. But this kind of thing is almost beyond outrageous. The lack of self-awareness that has to go into a person who knows she under fire saying something like that, as if she genuinely has no idea that public officials are supposed to uphold the law and the constitution. Strong ReadingEzra Klein objects to efforts at a politicized reading of Transformers on the grounds that "This is a movie about GIANT ROBOTS some of whom want to DESTROY THE EARTH" and therefore "may not, in fact, be a commentary on the righteousness of Operation Iraqi Freedom." This is, I think, naive and wrongheaded. It would be odd for a film like this to have been self-consciously conceived as a commentary on political events, but lots of films can nonetheless contain ideological content. Indeed, it's the very shallow nature of Transformer's plotting that makes it so pregnant. The standard format for a not-very-original action movie pits a Hero against, of course, a Villain. But beyond the Villain, the Hero must also do battle with the Faceless Institution whose inability to grasp the true nature of the situation imperils the entire situation. This Institution comes in, roughly speaking, two guises. In some films, like Bad Boys, the Institution is portrayed as comprised of feckless bureaucrats who don't understand the Hero's need to Get Things Done. In other films, like Transformers, the Institution is portrayed as comprised of power-mad authoritarians who can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. Now, of course, better, more sophisticated stories can have more nuanced ideological content (the Terminator films, for example, provide both a critique of the military industrial complex and a statement of the security dilemma), or else possibly none at all, or, perhaps, an ambiguous message (First Blood) that'll be read according to pre-existing prejudices. The key in all cases, though, is not to look for specific commentary on the passing tide of events (i.e., the SecDef in Transformers kinda looks like Don Rumsfeld) but for what broad values the film appeals to and endorses. The Limits of DisclosureAndrew thinks The Wall Street Journal should disclose Kimberly Kagan's involvement in the authoring of the surge plan when running her commentaries on how brilliantly the surge is working. That would be nice but, honestly, how about just . . . not running her commentaries? There are hundreds of conservative pundit and think tankers around time; just find one not named Kagan! Call Steve Hayes. Call anyone. This isn't brain surgery. The History Factor
Brian Beutler recommends what's got to have been David Halberstam's last magazine article, an attack in Vanity Fair on the Bushie view that his actions will be vindicated by history. I agree with what Halberstam has to say, but I was actually a bit disappointed by the article. At this point, just about any hack pundit (me, for example) can do the sort of "I've read books about Harry Truman, and you, sir, are no Harry Truman" thing Halberstam has on offer here. The world could really use a solid treatment of the role the concept of history plays in the Bushian worldview that goes beyond this kind of thing. If you read, for example, David Samuels' big Condi Rice profile in The Atlantic from earlier this year that at every point where the conceptual confusions at the heart of her agenda threaten to tear the whole edifice down, Rice makes an appeal to "history," but I almost feel like it should be written "History," as if she believes her worldview doesn't need to make sense because the World-Spirit is her copilot. At any rate, I think there's some chance that Bush actually will be "vindicated" by history in some sense; I don't see any real evidence that presidents' historical reputations track their actual performance in office. Retreat to KurdistanThere's long been a certain strand of sentiment that we ought to basically withdraw our forces not out of Iraq, but out of Arab Iraq and into Kurdistan. This seems like a seriously bad notion to me; people need to think about how that's going to play in the Arab world. People also need to understand that "Kurdistan" is a contestable concept and that the people running it have a very expansive conception about what Kurdistan is. Having the US military underwrite Kurdish claims to rule over the Mosul region doesn't seem very smart. That said, it makes sense to me that people are worried about the prospect of leaving the Kurds to be slaughtered once again. This, however, neglects the basic point that by every estimate I've seen the Kurdish peshmerga are a substantially superior fighting force to anything that exists in Arab Iraq. We don't really need to do anything at all. But if that's not the case (and this is something where, I think, you'd want to get an assessment from MNF-Iraq and not just rely on Google and bloggers) this is a situation where a "training / equipping" mission would make sense, particularly on the equipping front. Leaving Iraq is probably going to entail abandoning a certain amount of military hardware, and one can try to exercise some control over whose hands it falls into. I Didn't Mean It!Fred Thompson explains that he's pro-life by conviction, but willing to take pro-choice positions in exchange for money! Raise your hand if you're impressed by the depth of his commitment to the sanctity of life. The Iraqi ViewI was talking to someone about this last night, but not making my point very clearly. Fortunately, we have Nick Kristof: First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse. . . . Right. Now it is true that the Iraqi government takes a different view. On the other hand, this isn't a passing whim of Iraqi public opinion -- it's been consistently expressed fro years. It's not clear, by contrast, who the Iraqi government represents. The government is the product of post-election negotiations between leaders of parliamentary factions that were elected on the basis of a strict party list formula. What's more, the political coalition led by incumbent prime minister Ibrahim al-Jafari actually won the election only to see Jafari dumped as a result of, among other things, intense American pressure. On top of all that, it's worth being clear that Iraqis aren't merely expressing an abstract preference for our forces to leave. Iraqis say they approve of attacks on American soldiers serving in Iraq. Under those circumstances, it's obviously going to be challenging -- as in impossible -- for American soldiers to effectively provide security. Surprise of the DayWhite House review of White House Iraq policy deems said policy to be successful; White House decides, based on the report, to continue with its same policy. There's something, I dunno, degrading about this exercise. Bush is the Bush. The Republicans plus Joe Lieberman constitute a majority of the Senate. As few as 34 Senators can uphold Bush's vetos. Bush has no practical need to do anything other than keep playing the role of petulant boy-king. Why the pretense? I have in my inbox a ""Benchmark Report Fact Check" email that is, of course, devastating. If it included a link, I would link to it. But I won't attempt a summary. It says the report is BS. But, of course, you already knew that. Jim Fallows watched the press conference. UPDATE: And here's your link. Fun With Statistics
Jessica Valenti's upset about an HHS website that's been altered to inform readers that "Abortions can have complications. There may be emotional consequences, as well: some women say that they feel sad and some use more alcohol or drugs than before." The real genius of this bit of trickery is that it is, of course, true. Given that a reasonable large number of abortions are performed each year, it would be astounding if "some" women didn't "use more alcohol or drugs" after their abortion than before it. Conversely, I'm willing to venture that "some" women use less. You could probably make this claim to come out however you want to. "Some" women who've had abortions become thieves, "some" get run over by buses, etc. Photo by Flickr user Alcest99 used under a Creative Commons license Canadian Constitution BloggingI don't really have a strong view on whether or not state-level health care initiatives make sense, but I do think this element of David Sirota's typically measured critique of Ezra Klein could use a little more context: Spend 5 minutes on Wikipedia, and you'll learn that Canada's much-vaunted universal health care system began as a provincial initiative. The provinces provided both the better political opportunities, and ultimately the better initial implementation platform that ended up launching the federal program. Back when I was in Introduction to Canadian Politics class, I was taught that the reason for this is that Section 92 of the British North America Act of 1867 stipulates that "The Establishment, Maintenance, and Management of Hospitals, Asylums, Charities, and Eleemosynary Institutions in and for the Province, other than Marine Hospitals" is one of the areas in which "In each Province the Legislature may exclusively make Laws." Much of the history of health care federalism in Canada essentially amounts to steady backdoor federalization of the nominally Province-based health care system precisely because assigning primary responsibility for these matters to the Provinces doesn't really work well in the modern context. Too EasyJim Geraghty reports that Tony Snow is calling for a "surge of facts." I presume that means he'll be resigning. Cheney
Sitting on the table next to me is a copy of the imminently forthcoming masterwork, Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President by . . . Steven Hayes (yes, that Steven Hayes). The jacket copy is priceless: "With exhaustive reporting, Hayes shines a light into the shadows of the Bush administration and finds a very different Dick Cheney from the one America thinks it knows." In short, Hayes was able to penetrate the legendary veil of secrecy surrounding the Vice President and uncover the shocking truth that -- Dick Cheney is awesome! Why, one wonders, has the administration been covering this up? But then again, one also wonders why the administration was covering up this convincing evidence of an al-Qaeda/Iraq connection that Hayes claims to have discovered. For example, it turns out that Joe Wilson sucks! Also -- Cheney's wartime leadership is vital! Gerald Wallace ReupsSigns with the Bobcats for the bargain price of $57 million over six years. Rashard Lewis, we'll recall, got a $110 million. And it's true, of course, that if we neglect the fifty percent of the game known as "defense" that Lewis is a slightly better player. PricesEveryone's already linked to James Fallows' hilarious-in-retrospect 1982 article about how computers are awesome, but check the price -- he paid $4,000 for this machine. That's about $8,500 in contemporary money. For a computer with 48k of RAM. UPDATE: Similarly: "You have to understand, they told me, it can take five or ten minutes to load a long draft into the computer from tapes, whereas a disk drive (which would add a thousand dollars to the cost) could do the job in seconds." July 13, 2007Waiting TimesRobert Farley wrestles with the horrors of socialized medicine: So, after a year of trying to make my cholesterol problem go away by ignoring it, I decide to finally get my prescription of Zetia refilled. I call up the clinic to ask about a refill, and get told that I have to go and see the doctor again. This isn't terribly surprising to me, so I go ahead and schedule an appointment. Unfortunately, the first appointment available is in two months. Fine; I just hope that I don't have a heart attack between now and then. Oh. Wait. That happened right here in the United States of America. Waiting for appointments -- can you imagine? The horror, the horror. The Great MysteryThoreau locates a walker in Southern California: My wife has found a job, and we have found a nice and reasonably priced apartment (by local standards–$1095 for a large 1 bedroom with lots of closets and shelves) 1.5 miles away, which in good weather is walking distance. In bad weather (be it heat or rain) there’s the bus. Which means that we will be able to pull off the 1 car thing, a feat without precedent for a couple with 2 jobs in southern California. This reminds me of the Great Shame of American urban planning. What does and doesn't constitute "walking distance" is highly weather-dependent. The best weather in the nation, meanwhile, is in Southern California, a region that would be one of the best places in the world to walk except for the fact that it's . . . horribly unfriendly to walking. Meanwhile, your Northeastern cities are all quite walkable in urban planning terms, but climactic conditions make long walks unpleasant on a large number of days. It should be all the other way 'round. Cold, damp Boston would be an excellent location for a car-dependent city and LA would be a great place to put Manhattan. The Petraeus DodgeMost of today's Krauthammer article is just the sort of deceptions you'd expect from him -- attributing things that happened in regions where there was no surge to the surge, etc., etc. -- but it's noteworthy for making this line of thinking explicit: It is understandable that Sens. Lugar, Voinovich, Domenici, Snowe and Warner may no longer trust President Bush's judgment when he tells them to wait until Petraeus reports in September. What is not understandable is the vote of no confidence they are passing on Petraeus. After that, the column is just full of "Petraeus," "Petraeus," "Petraeus." You would have no idea that along with General Petraeus there's a CENTCOM commander, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Secretary of Defense, a President of the United States, a Vice President of the United States, etc. Apparently, now, the entire evaluation of the war is supposed to be grounded on the reputation of one upper-mid level official. It's a very strange rhetorical move. I'm not sure, for example, where the idea that Petraeus is a magician who can make the impossible work came from. This is the same Petraeus who ran the training of Iraqi security forces from June 2004 to September 2005 and nothing came of it. I have no reason to think he did a "bad job" of organizing the training, but good training as such wasn't capable of accomplishing anything, anymore than doing a good job of commanding the 160,000 American troops in Iraq is going to accomplish anything at this point. It's not a reflection on the personal competence of any individual soldier or officer -- or even on any giant group of soldiers and officers -- to understand that some things can't be done. Fred Thompson's Colorful Sex LifeThe other day, Andrew wrote that it was lucky for Fred Thompson that "regular GOP voters turn out to be relatively tolerant when it comes to sexual minorities and private sex lives," since he's "had a colorful and wide-ranging sex life, as I'm sure we will soon find out." Ace of Spades wonders whether I'll "take co-blogger Andrew Sullivan to task for his bottom-feeding gossip-columnist smear of a non-gay man as gay?" referencing an earlier post in which I'd taken him and Glenn Reynolds to task for observing, with regard to Glenn Greenwald, that "Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold." Several points in response. One is that making gross and obviously derogatory statements about a gay man's sex life is pretty clearly a different sort of thing than simply observing that a gay man is, in fact, gay. Next, Andrew didn't say Thompson was gay. The defenders of Thompson's heterosexuality point to his well-documented series of flings with several attractive women, often substantially younger than Thompson, as evidence of his robust desire to have sex with women. This, of course, is what Andrew was talking about -- Thompson's not very "focus on the family" sex life as a straight man. A good companion piece to this dispute is The Washington City Paper's article on Last Night's Shots, a DC social club for young conservative assholes. It's notable that the young men reported on in the article clearly don't see pursuit of a colorful and wide-ranging heterosexual sex life as in any way in conflict with their conservatism. One gets the sense, however, that this is a no gays welcome sort of club. Which I think tells us something about the enduring appeal of homophobia as a conservative trope; most elements of traditional sexual ethics have the unfortunate side-effect of asking people to refrain from doing things that would be fun. The claim that avoiding gay sex is serious ethical obligation is, by contrast, enormously appealing to the large majority of people who have no intention of having any gay sex anyway. Thus, evidence of Thompson's colorful sex life becomes a rebuttal to rumors of a colorful sex life, because the only form of male sexuality that can be conceived of as possibly in opposition to social conservative dictates is gay male sexuality. Hot Prospects
Watch past the part where he's being asked about this party photo of him, and you'll see Greg Oden discussing his new life as a blogger. Considering that he's only 19 years old, I'm a bit surprised to see him noting the difficulty of composing a coherent post when you come home at 2:30 AM after being out somewhere. He's too young to drink, and fatigue alone rarely makes blogging difficult. Do you think some people might break that law? Wild stuff. At any rate, here's the Oden blog. Like me he has some typo issues ("A lot of them talked about their colleges and most of them where from Michigan"). Personally, Brian Beutler's going number one in my blogger draft (tremendous upside), but for putting a basketball team together I think I life Oden. Photo by Flickr user Tonyvu used under a Creative Commons license Full of Shock and Self-PityWhen conservative president George W. Bush, having promised to nominate conservative Supreme Court justices like Scalia and Thomas, selected life-long conservative John Roberts to be a Supreme Court justice, and this pick was met with universal acclaim among conservatives, sensible people espied a pattern here Roberts would be a conservative Supreme Court justice. Others, however, saw a more subtle pattern. An unsigned September 26, 2005 New Republic editorial argued: From the Annals of Headline WritingAP: "Report Hints Troop Surge May Extend". Gee, d'ya think? The story's author, Robert Burns, gives us the much better "strongly implies." The Unlibertarian CenterMy response to Brink Lindsey's essay on "The Libertarian Center" is now up at the Cato Unbound site. As Jonah Goldberg notes, he and I may disagree about many things, but we're on a pretty similar page with regard to a lot of the issues Lindsey raises, in particular that while libertarians may like the results of the liberal cultural politics agenda, it's not actually a libertarian agenda. Benchmark RoundupVia Robert Farley, some additional bashing of the White House's interim Iraq report from Winslow Wheeler, from Fred Kaplan, and from Anthony Cordesman. The Romney SurgeMJ Rosenberg and Ezra Klein hop on the bandwagon of liberals who definitely won't vote for Mitt Romney, but would choose him over Fred Thompson, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani if forced to do so. McCain Doubles Down
With regard to the post below, Marc Ambinder's report on how John McCain hopes to revive his dying presidential campaign by giving a speech in which he "will steel his audience to prepare for a 'Long War'" is a reminder of why McCain and Rudy Giuliani are both so dangerous. They both rely on mindless warmongering as their only hope of securing the nomination. The contract they're making with the GOP base is "you may not like where I stand on X or Y, but at least I'll go to war with Iran." Romney's stated views on foreign policy are no less idiotic than his rivals' but one can at least imagine him flip-flopping away from them. When McCain promises that his approach to resolving our failed policy in Iraq is to let that same failed policy continue for another 18 months, then take office as president, and keep continuing the same failed policy forever and ever, that's all he's got. That's his pitch. He won't -- and, indeed, can't -- back down from the view that "Defeatism will not buy peace in our time" and we just need to continue our futile effort to occupy Iraq contrary to the wishes of Iraq's population. Photo by Flickr user Sooz used under a Creative Commons license More WaitingMark Kleiman has a totally non-funny story about how, yes, you need to wait to get health care in America and, consequently, he almost died. The punchline is here: It was only later that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn't know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to "Tier II," which would have meant higher co-payments. The procedure is designed to get very sick or prosperous patients to pay to jump the queue. The insurance company almost killed a man in order to try to persuade him to buy more expensive services. Bad GMsChad Ford writes about bad deals: In many cases, the battle between agent and general manager is not a fair fight. On one side you have the agent, a professional negotiator who spends all year thinking about how to drive up the player's price. On the other side you have GMs, many of whom are former players who have seldom handled negotiations. They usually had agents for that. Fascinatingly, Ford mentions this and then just lightly moves on. But doesn't it seem like a big deal? It's a business job. Why don't teams hire people with business experience? Lieberman and Hewitt, Sitting in a TreeJoe Lieberman does the Hugh Hewitt show. There are so many howlers here it's hard to just pick one. At any rate, since James Kirchick seems confused on this point, I'll just highlight Hewitt and Lieberman mongering for war with Iran: HH: Right. In a statement earlier this month, Senator Lieberman, you said that, and I’m quoting here, “The fact is that the Iranian government, by its actions, has declared war on us.” Given that, if President Bush announced he felt compelled to take military action against Iran, would you support him? Lieberman also informs us that Saddam Hussein "had a network of chemical and biological experts working on it, and a kind of fallback network on nukes, which is what he really wanted." In purely political terms, it's worth noting how stunning it is for Lieberman to go on the radio show of a hard-core partisan like Hewitt in order to attack Democrats while still operating under the Democratic Party banner. ProgressThis seems like a pretty effective ad to me: It's worth saying that the sort of cost estimates you see in this ad, while accurate, are substantial under-estimates of the real monetary cost of the war. Soldiers injured during wartime will, for example, continue to receive medical treatment for their wounds for years if not decades. Somewhat similarly, a lot of the equipment that gets damaged or destroyed in Iraq is either being replaced with money that doesn't come out of the Iraq-designed funds or else hasn't actually been replaced yet but will need to be replaced down the road. The fiscal cost of the war isn't the most important aspect by any means, but it is a good shorthand way of understanding why it is that we can't just keep doing this out of a vague hope of rolling snake eyes thirty times in a row. Worst Editorial Ever?
Via Brad DeLong, Marc Thoma finds a winner. The culprits, naturally, are at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, specifically Kevin Hassett. That doesn't even remotely resemble a best fit curve. They've drawn the line straight-through an outlier. And look how steep it is at the right hand side. They're asking us to believe that the marginal impact of increasing corporate income tax rates above the Norwegian level is not only negative, but massively negative in a way that none of the non-Norway data bears out. It's an insult to everyone's intelligence. At this point, one needs to think that letting Rupert Murdoch destroy the WSJ news pages might be better for the world than letting the WSJ news pages' credibility continue to provide a "halo effect" to the editorial page. Prices
Apropos of yesterday's post on computer prices, it seems that back in 1982, James Fallows paid $4,000 for his computer featuring 64k of RAM plus another $800 for a floppy disk drive. According to the handy CPI calculator on the BLS website, $4,800 in 1982 is equivalent to a bit over $10,000 in today's money. Naturally, I had no choice but to scroll over to the Apple Store and see how much computer I could get for $10,000. Well, I got myself a Mac Pro with two 3.0 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors, 8 gigs of RAM, four 750 gig hard drives, two Super Drives capable of reading and writing CDs and DVDs, a 30 inch Apple HD Cinema Display, a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. That comes to $9,449. I believe that's a 128,000-fold in RAM. The improvement in storage capacity is, in some ways, even more impressive. Photo by Flickr user Rudolf Schuba used under a Creative Commons license Tour de DullIf I may venture an observation, bicycle racing -- at least as broadcast by VS -- isn't a very interesting television sport. Forgive and Forget?I agree with E.J. Dionne that on some level I'm "rooting for [Senator David] Vitter [R-LA] to survive because I so want to return to a time when we -- that 'we' includes the media -- chose to pay little attention to the extracurricular sexual activities of our politicians." I don't, however, think we should "grant Vitter our collective absolution and move on." Among other things, while Vitter seems to have something to apologize about to his wife, there's really nothing prostitution-related "we" need to collectively forgive Vitter for. I don't feel wronged by Vitter having purchased the services of one or more prostitutes, so it would be silly to forgive him. Nor do I feel wronged by Vitter's hypocrisy since, at the end of the day, as far as sins go hypocrisy is pretty weak tea. What I do feel wronged by is Vitter's wrongheaded views about public policy whose wrongheadedness is demonstrated by the sympathy decent people have for Vitter's situation. I mean, who among us thinks that what the world needs is for the state to do a more vigorous job of harassing David Vitter into conforming his sex life to traditional norms? The answer, it turns out, is . . . David Vitter; except that maybe it turns out that Vitter thinks there should be a David Vitter Exception to his general views on the matter. Either way, Vitter is wrong. And if Vitter wants forgiveness he should come by it honestly and bring his views in line with the way he would want, personally, to be treated. FlashbackHitchens in 1976, as a cautious admirer of Baath Party tyranny: The Kurds now have a very attenuated version of autonomy, and former members of the Barzani armed forces are being moved to the South. At least, however, Iraq constitutionally recognises that she is a partly Kurdish state, which is more than Iran or Turkey do. Further tests for the regime lie ahead. The quarrel with Syria, which involves differences over Ba’athist ideology as well as a dispute over Syrian damming of the Euphrates river, has now extended to the Lebanon, where Syrian troops have attacked newspapers and buildings controlled by Iraqi-sympathising Palestinians. Relations with Iran are still far from cordial. In response to requests for criticism in the party press, some demands were raised for a constituent assembly, and other complaints voiced about the tightness of the regime. All these remain to be acted on, and as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussain will rise more clearly to the top. Make a note of the name. Iraq has been strengthened internally by the construction of a ‘strategic pipeline’ which connects the Gulf to the northern fields for the first time. She has been strengthened externally by her support for revolutionary causes and by the resources she can deploy. It may not be electrification plus Soviet power, but the combination of oil and ‘Arab socialism’ is hardly less powerful. Fascinating. The al-Qaeda FactorGeorge Packer notes that while the White House likes to assert that al-Qaeda is primarily responsible for the violence in Iraq, the CIA's internal government reports say otherwise. Joe Klein also tackles this issue: Recenntly, in his desperation, starting with his speech at the Naval War College on June 28, [Bush] has been telling an outright lie, and he repeated it now, awkwardly, in Cleveland: "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is the crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims, trying to stop the advance of a system based upon liberty." No, it isn't. July 14, 2007The Iraqi ViewWhile arguing the other day that Iraqis want us to leave their country, it was necessary to concede that the Iraqi government seems to enjoy having the US military at its disposal. Now, though, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seems to be saying he can get along without us, though he wants more of our heavy military equipment (possibly a bad idea, but a discussion for another day). Weigel Versus KirchickIt's not a close call. Post-Jewish PolandDana Goldstein linked the other day, to a fascinating New York Times article about a revival of interest in judaica in today's more-or-less judenrein Poland. She analogizes this to: [H]ow the United States has appropriated a certain vision of Native American culture. We name our sports teams after tribes and turn Native people into face-painted mascots. We consecrate a holiday (Thanksgiving) that ignores most historical evidence to mythologize non-coercive friendship between European settlers and Native Americans. In the town where I grew up, where the local Sint Sinck tribe was deplaced by white settlers into the Connecticut River valley, a middle class neighborhood of Cape Cods is referred to as "Indian Village," with street names such as "Mohawk," "Ramapo," and "Mohegan." There is a certain similarity here, but the people the NYT talks about seem to have a level of sincere interest in Ashkenazi Jewish culture that's substantially deeper than what's implied in the United States' appropriation of Native American place names. After all, there not only used to be a lot of Jewish people in Poland (10 percent) but they were a substantial and integral element of the cultural, political, and economic life of the country even if they were never fully integrated or accepted. Mitt's Money
Marc Ambinder notes Mitt Romney's decision to release some financial information in the form of a Friday dump. In particular, "now we know why ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney wrote himself a 'nightmare' $5M check at the end of the second quarter: he spent more than five million more than he raised. Put together, Romney's burn through about 99% of his receipts." Good news for Fred Thompson? Victory NH photo used under a Creative Commons license Health and Cigarette TaxesThe other thing about paying for health insurance with cigarette taxes is, of course, than in the case of a tobacco tax you're actually trying to move over time to the right hand side of the laffer curve, where your tobacco tax and other public health measures reduce smoking to a level where tax revenues decline. Health care expenditures, meanwhile, are more-or-less destined to go up over time. If you're going to earmark cigarette tax revenues for anything, it should be to fund some kind of anti-smoking efforts (Nicorette subsidies? hire people to enforce the rules against selling tobacco to under-18s?) or else just don't earmark the money. Health care needs a sustainable revenue stream. How Anti-War Were Democrats?Matt Stoller takes a trip down memory lane to explain why Hillary Clinton can be so popular without apologizing for her vote to authorize the Iraq War: There are a good number of Democrats that straight up opposed the invasion, but many of us were what I'll call 'antiwar but'. In March, right before the invasion, a CBS/NYT poll asked whether the US should take military action against Hussein even if the UN voted against it. 42% said yes, 55% said no. An antiwar majority, sure, but hardly overwhelming. In February, according to a Time/CNN poll, Democrats opposed the invasion by a 42% to 50% margin. Once again, an antiwar majority but not overwhelming. In early February, an LA Times poll found a 42% to 50% margin among Democrats. I'm struck by how the Democratic base had around 30% composition at that time that trusted Bush's instincts. So while being antiwar made you slightly more popular within the Democratic Party at the time, both antiwar and prowar positions were mainstream Democratic positions. Interesting stuff. Similarly, I recall that just after the war -- late march and April 2003 -- the war polled well enough that it was pretty popular among Democrats. A Classic DebateThanks to the good offices of Rob Goodspeed I'm now a Late Night Shots member, and it really is hilarious. I'm reading through a thread on whether or not it's acceptable to go out in Adams-Morgan. Many of the early posts center on the question of whether or not it's a dangerous neighborhood. Then one poster chimes in: With me (and I assume this is the case with others), the question is whether I would go to Adams Morgan and hang out with a bunch of thugs and poorly bred, unattractive girls, or go to Georgetown, where it is safe, people are more courteous and the bars are nicer. Another counters: I don’t know. I saw a lot of poorly bred, unattractive girls this pas Thursday in Georgetown. I actually totally agree with this anti-AM sentiment, though mostly that's because the neighborhood is too LNS-ey for my taste. At any rate, I just hope these guys don't make it any further east than Adams-Morgan or else I might run into them somewhere. A Friend For JoeSpencer Ackerman locates an al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader who wants the US to stay in Iraq and help fight the "real enemy," Iran. Joe Lieberman needs to give this guy a call. Observation of the DayIt's a rare day when you eat goat for lunch and dinner, but it's tasty! |
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