Louis Uchitelle profiles the voices of the new guilded age. Some, like Sanford Weill, aren't just richer than hell, they fully intend to be jerks about it. "We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built," he says at one point "and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs." Or there's Leo Hindrey who observes that Jerek "Deter makes an unbelievable amount of money, but you look at him and you say, 'Wow, I cannot find another ballplayer with that same set of skills." Others have their doubts:
A handful of critics among the new elite, or close to it, are scornful of such self-appraisal. “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,” Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve Board chairman, said in an interview, challenging the contentions of the very rich that they are, more than others, the driving force of a robust economy.
Right. The economy grew at a perfectly rapid clip in a broad-based manner in the 1950s and 60s.
I went to see this documentary by Jennifer Baichwal yesterday and while I liked it a lot, I should warn potential filmgoers that the marketing is a bit misleading. The previews I'd seen, at least, led some people to expect a seriously political film about environmental problems in China. The film really doesn't give you the kind of essayistic argument that you see in SiCKO and An Inconvenient Truth. Instead of being a political movie about environmental problems in China, it's an arty movie about Edward Burtynsky's still photographs of industrial processes and the landscapes that result from them in China.
Personally, I appreciated the non-didactic tone. The film's hints as to the filmmakers' political views made me think I'd be considerably more enthusiastic about China's economic rise than they are, but the movie mostly plays it straight. The takeaway point becomes not something about what must be done or the technical origins of the problems (you should probably read Christina Larson's article about China and the environment for that), but rather something about the sheer scale of what's happening. The combination of film and still photography does an excellent job of driving home exactly how much is changing how rapidly over there in a way that the brute numbers can't quite convey.
Tyler Cowen's upset with Jonathan Kozol's warning that "If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald's, Burger King, and Wal-Mart." And, indeed, if anything the problem with privatizing the school system is likely to be the reverse of this. Businesses go where the business opportunities are.
Given the difficulty of the enterprises, there's no reason to think that educating disadvantaged children is a market that smart businessmen are clamoring to get in on. The basic structure of the achievement gap problem in the United States is that all the evidence suggests that educating the disadvantaged is harder than educating the privileged, but the latter task attracts more resources than does the former. A privatized system could, in principle, change that; but a publicly administered one could as well. Either way, you'd need a setup so that the best people (in terms of teachers, administrators, or even vicious profit-maximizing businessmen) were drawn to doing the harder job rather than the easier one.
"America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people," George W. Bush, October, 2003, "Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule." That remark prompted these thoughts from John Judis in the July/August 2004 Foreign Policy:
As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush's rendition of Philippine-American history bore little relation to fact. True, the U.S. Navy ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But instead of creating a Philippine democracy, the McKinley administration, its confidence inflated by victory in that splendid little war, annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then waged a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a century later during Bush's visit.
As for the Philippines' democracy, the United States can take little credit for what exists and some blame for what doesn't. The electoral machinery the United States designed in 1946 provided a democratic veneer beneath which a handful of families, allied to U.S. investors-and addicted to kickbacks-controlled the Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke down in 1973 when Philippine politician Ferdinand Marcos had himself declared president for life. Marcos was finally overthrown in 1986, but even today Philippine democracy remains more dream than reality. Three months before Bush's visit, a group of soldiers staged a mutiny that raised fears of a military coup. With Islamic radicals and communists roaming the countryside, the Philippines is perhaps the least stable of Asian nations. If the analogy between the United States' liberation of the Philippines and of Iraq holds true, it will not be to the credit of the Bush administration, but to the skeptics who charged that the White House undertook the invasion of Baghdad with its eyes wide shut.
Now via Daniel Larison, we see Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell once again citing the Phillipines as a model of success: "The experience of successful counterinsurgency and stabilization missions in places such as the Philippines and Malaysia, by contrast, leads us to place a premium on tracking trends in the daily lives of typical citizens." To a remarkable extent our contemporary debates are just re-hashing the controversies over imperialism of over a century ago.
The Washington Post, taking a wide-lens look at the global warming debate, notes that "Wealthier Americans might be better able than poor Americans to afford new equipment -- more efficient air conditioners, better insulated windows, solar panels -- to cut energy costs."
This is a convenient all-purpose reason to never do anything at all that imposes costs of any sort. The way money works is that people who have more money will be better able than poor people to afford things. Like, if catastrophic climate change forces substantial alterations in lifestyle, wealthier Americans will be better able than poor Americans to afford that, too.
This house across the street from me looks nice and all, and I like this location very much, but it's by no means Dupont Circle.
I wouldn't mention it at all, but as it happens my house was listed -- by a different property management agency -- as also being in Dupont Circle, so I guess this is now a common tactic in real estate circles. Obviously, as with any neighborhood, the boundary lines get a bit fuzzy, but we're a little bit Shaw and a little bit Columbia Heights -- not Dupont Circle at all.
UPDATE: Incidentally, it's not that I'm unaware of the fact that it's common practice for real estate people to offer misleading neighborhood labels, I just think it's a bad thing. Bloggers push back against bogus White House spin and we should push back against bogus real estate spin as well. Nothing this far east or this far north could possibly be in Dupont Circle.
Intriguing new poll results from the Concord Monitor which sees Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton winning their respective primaries, even though they both fare worse than the competition in the general election. It's an intriguing dynamic, and I'd like to see a poll that ads a question about how much weight voters are putting on "electability" and get a sense of how much cognitive dissonance there is out there.
That's all sort of old news, however. What I hadn't seen previously is that polls show former governor Jeanne Shaheen absolutely crushing John Sununu by a 56 to 34 percent margin. I froze my ass off knocking on doors and holding signs for Shaheen's failed 2002 Senate campaign against Sununu, so I'd certainly like to see that work retroactively vindicated. Even more to the point, given the big-picture trends, this is the kind of Senate seat that would probably be pretty safe in the hands of a Democratic incumbent, but might also be extremely hard to win in 2014 unless another massively unpopular Republican president is in office at that time.
The only problem for Democrats is that Shaheen hasn't decided to run and the people who are in the race don't poll nearly as well. Her record is, to me, totally uninspiring but they like her in New Hampshire so I hope she decides to run.
There's been some call for me to remark on Bill Kristol's op-ed in today's Post. Here's what you need to know:
What it comes down to is this: If Petraeus succeeds in Iraq, and a Republican wins in 2008, Bush will be viewed as a successful president.
I like the odds.
Ha ha. If you read it, there turns out to be no clever "counterintuitive" argument here at all; it's just some baseless assertions. David Corn will write a rebuttal piece for the much-less-important Wednesday edition of the paper. Since Kristol brought up the gambling metaphor, it would be interesting to make this more precise. First, Kristol would need to explain what "achieving a real, though messy, victory in Iraq" would mean. Then we would need to hear from Kristol how much money he would wager on an even-odds bet that his predictions come true. Participants in Monday's Q&A with Kristol could be invited to cover his gamble if so inclined.
I bring it up not because Kristol's unique among pundits in offering bad predictions (I've made some myself), but because the article reads as so transparently written in bad faith -- it's utterly half-hearted and vacuous, clearly not intended to persuade anyone of anything.
"Obama," writes Matt Bai inThe New York Times Magazine, "would set a new precedent for inexperience in the White House; he was a state senator only three years ago, when he delivered the keynote address at the Democratic convention, and before that he was a community organizer."
Really?
If Obama is elected to the White House, he will have served eight years in the Illinois State Senate and four years in the United States Senate. In the twentieth century, I count Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan as all having served fewer than 12 years in public office before assuming the Presidency and I count exactly twelve for Warren Harding. To find a President with as few as six years of public office under his belt before becoming President, you need to go all the way back to . . . the current President of the United States so it's not like you need to be a historian to figure this out.
Now arguably some of these people were "more experienced" than Obama along other metrics than a raw count of years would indicate, but there's still no obvious sense in which Obama is a precedent-shattering figure. At a minimum, Carter and Abraham Lincoln were unambiguously less experienced.
Brad DeLong finds a new problem with everyone's favorite macroeconomic chart -- not only has the line been incorrectly drawn through Norway rather than to fit the data points, they haven't even plotted Norway correctly:
The revenues plotted on the vertical scale include oil excise taxes levied on corporations. The tax rates plotted on the horizontal scale do not--hence the Norway "tax rate" of 28% rather than the correct 52%.
In short, in non-Norway countries, tax revenues rise with tax rates across the range of rates actual countries apply (I think one should concede that, in principle, a tax rate could be so confiscatory as to decrease revenues; the question is whether we are actually anyway in that neighborhood) and this exact same pattern holds in Norway as well.
Ezra Klein: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being is something like 65% of the greatest book ever written and 35% of something you wrote for a freshman philosophy class and are now embarrassed of." And yet, in my view The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is like this but even more so. What's more, I think the whole kitsch business from Lightness of Being has been given new relevance by the Bush years, Fox News, etc. -- freedom fries, freedom isn't free, etc.
A cross-national survey conducted by the Commonwealth Fund found that America ranks near the bottom among advanced countries in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on short notice (although Canada was slightly worse), and that America is the worst place in the advanced world if you need care after hours or on a weekend.
We look better when it comes to seeing a specialist or receiving elective surgery. But Germany outperforms us even on those measures — and I suspect that France, which wasn’t included in the study, matches Germany’s performance.
What's more, as Krugman goes on to point out, it's one thing to have your procedure delayed because the equipment or personnel are needed to treat someone else's more acute condition. It's another thing entirely for the delay to be caused, as it typically is in the United States, because a company is trying to earn more money:
his can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. “It was only later,” writes Mr. Kleiman on his blog, “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. [...]
To be fair, Mr. Kleiman is only surmising that his insurance company risked his life in an attempt to get him to pay more of his treatment costs. But there’s no question that some Americans who seemingly have good insurance nonetheless die because insurers are trying to hold down their “medical losses” — the industry term for actually having to pay for care.
We also see further demolition of hip replacement myths. It's worth saying, of course, that people who kill people in exchange for money in the US health care sector aren't, on some level, bad people. If you worked for an insurance company and construed your job as facilitating the delivery of medically useful health care to patients in need, you'd rapidly find yourself unemployed. Similarly, a doctor whose practices don't serve the insurance company's needs will find himself off the roster and useless to anyone. A company that cared more about helping sick people than earning profits would see its stock value decline to the point where it would be taken over by some other company that was willing to kill for money.
It's the logic of the system and on some level it's no different from any other business. But whereas Apple or Toyota or Starbucks make money by delivering their products to people, insurance companies make money by not delivering health care to sick people.
Daniel Mitchell thinks it's hypocritical for Norway's government to favor international action against tax havens, while Norway's government-run pension fund invests in companies that take advantage of tax havens.
The hypocrisy here entirely escapes me. I don't understand why libertarians pretend not to understand this, but it's not at all hypocritical to simultaneously say "insofar as X is permitted it's rational for me to do X, and therefore I will do X" and also "X should not be permitted." Generally the idea is that absent a prohibition on X, it's rational for many individuals to do X, but that prohibiting X would serve the common good. The rationality of doing X (polluting, investing in tax havens, defrauding investors, etc.) is generally the basis for thinking that regulation of Xing is required.
With apologies to Brian Beutler for stealing his title, he reminded me that I really ought to plug my friend Charles' band, the City Veins pictured above playing at the Velvet Lounge on Friday (photo taken on my iPhone, naturally).
They're quite good, in my view, and also have a properly updated blog, not like one of these bands that says they're going to do a blog and then doesn't really follow-through. Even better, you don't need to take my word for it, since you can download their album here for free -- all you need to take my word on is the idea that you should should click the link and listen to a free EP.
Also, Le Loup, another local band I went to see recently is worth a bit of your time. No free downloads, but you can listen to a few songs here. Given the name, I feel they ought to be located in Montreal with We Are Wolves and Wolf Parade, but I guess some things don't work out the way I'd like.
Okay, this is pretty funny, but my high-school had mixed-grade homerooms and when I was eighteen and Simon Rich was fifteen we were both in Mr Young's homeroom and he really wasn't the "sitting silently in the corner" type. I distinctly recall him showing off his juggling moves.
I've been remiss in not linking to my latest diavlog with Ross Douthat. One point worth emphasizing is probably this one about the Bush administration's remarkable inability to ever capture the conventional wisdom on Iraq and thereby stabilize his political situation. The starkest example is the case of the Iraq Study Group report, which was released in December and which moderates in both parties and Broder-types were begging to see made the basis of post-midterms Iraq policy. Instead, Bush announced the "surge" and only now is turning back to Baker-Hamilton, months later, tentatively, after support for that position is already slipping away.
I don't really know whether or not I think that's a bad thing, but it's a distinctive feature of Bush's political strategy. Conventional presidential strategy suggests that one should seize opportunities to occupy the middle ground and defang the political opposition. Bush, though, has tended to do the reverse and deliberately magnify policy disagreements with Democrats (lots of pro-war candidates in 2002 got attacked as soft on Saddam anyway) in hopes of winning dramatic politcal confrontations. From the vantage point of 2007, that's obviously worked terribly. But it worked a lot better -- and for a lot longer -- than I think almost anyone would have predicted back in early 2001.
I'm not really much of a death penalty abolitionist, insofar as I don't see it as necessarily wrong to execute people in all circumstances. One circumstance in which it's a really bad idea to execute someone, though, is when he's being set up to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit. This certainly appears to be the problem with the looming execution of Troy Davis who, it seems, isn't allowed to present evidence of his innocence -- including the fact that three of the four witnesses against him (and there was no physical evidence) have recanted their testimony -- because of something called the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 which, I guess, rebuilt the Democratic Party's credibility on the crime issue at the cost of the lives of an unknown number of innocent people.
UPDATE: To clarify, "Not much of a death penalty abolitionist" means I am, in fact, a death penalty abolitionist. I think of the "real" abolitionists as making sanctity of life appeals, which I wouldn't do, but I'd certainly vote against the death penalty in a referendum.
Ezra Klein makes the case for a regulatory guarantee of more vacation. I agree 100 percent with his analysis of the situation, but I'm not totally sure I agree with the conclusion. One reason is that unlike with a lot of other juicy liberal regulatory schemes, the price to be paid in terms of economic growth is real enough in this case. Less work equals less output in a straightforward way.
There's also the basic fact that I'd be pretty pissed, personally, if I were made to accept more vacation days in exchange for less pay. It's clear that the equilibrium that results from the current free market system isn't to everyone's liking, but realistically there's no way you can arrange things to the taste of every citizen of a giant country. What's more, I'm actually not all that worried by the prospect that associates at large corporate law firms aren't getting a fair shake from the labor market -- they have clear opportunities to change jobs if they don't like what they're getting.
Lawyers aside there are, of course, also going to be working class people with fewer economic options who might like more vacation days. They make a better object of sympathy. But at the same time, a working class person forced to go on vacation when he would have rather put in another week on the job to earn the money he needs to complete some home repairs gets more of our sympathy than does the hypothetical professional blogger who wants more salary and less vacation. In a parallel to the climate change case, the crux of the matter is that poor people should have more overall compensation and mandating more vacation time won't accomplish that -- it'll leave working class people with more time off and less money to use that time off doing fun stuff (I can't be the only one who's sometimes been reluctant to vacation not because I couldn't take the time off but because I couldn't afford to spend the money).
Last, one should consider retirement as a factor here. If you worked 50 weeks a year for 40 years and then retired, you'd have 2000 weeks worth of earnings to work with in your golden years. If you wanted 2000 weeks worth of savings on the basis of a 46 week year, you'd have to work 3.5 extra years. Under the circumstances, it's not totally clear to me that additional mandatory vacation necessarily results in more leisure over the course of a lifetime. All-in-all, I'm inclined to say let's take the higher GDP level and the additional tax revenue that implies, and spend the revenue providing people with more services.
Photo by Flickr user Jon Worth used under a Creative Commons license
Okay, I agree with Ezra about this. Most of these positive trends in teen behavior are certainly positive, but I don't see why teens having less sex, as such, is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with seventeen year-olds getting it on while mom and dad are out of the house.
Just kidding. He'd like kids to stay healthy. It's just that if they get sick, he wants them to die. Thus, his plan to veto a bill expanding S-CHIP, a program to give health insurance to kids. The issue, as The New Republicexplains is that "for every ten people who gain insurance through s-chip expansions, between two and five fewer will get private insurance" because along with giving insurance to people who currently lack insurance, it'll also be an opportunity for some people to move out of the nightmar world of private health insurance which, of course, is bad if your job in politics is to represent the financial interests of private health insurers.
It seems that the Sacramento Kings want to pay $18 million over three years for the services of Mikki Moore, based on his breakout season lats year. The trouble, as Dave Berri points out, is that there was no breakout -- he just played more minutes, and had essentially the same per minute production.
His scoring efficiency was up a bit from his career average, but his rebounding was down a bit. Overall, it was an above average year, but not enormously above average, and the dude's 31 so it's not as if these were flashes of promise likely to be built on in the future.
Thomas Ricks takes a look at the new habit -- attributed in Ricks' piece to Bush, but reflecting a wider swathe of the right -- of "wielding [Genera David] Petraeus as a shield against a growing number of congressional doubters." Ricks floats the theory "that the general is being set up by the Bush administration as a scapegoat if conditions in Iraq fail to improve." That seems doubtful to me. The administration expended no effort whatsoever on setting Generals Casey, Abizaid, and Franks up as scapegoats (Franks even got a medal of honor) before turning on a dime and deciding to make them scapegoats.
Which isn't to say that Petraeus won't become a scapegoat -- Bush'll do it the minute he thinks it serves his interests -- but just that that's unlikely to be the specific motive of the current parade of Petraeus-adulation. Most likely, it just is what it appears to be -- an effort to cover for the bankruptness of the strategy by hiding behind a man with a glowing reputation among reporters.
The music and visuals on this Mitt Romney ad reminds me of a euphemistic ad for an erectile dysfunction pill, but everyone I know who's smart about politics tells me that these issues (ironically, including the ubiquity of ads for ED pills on television) resonate with the voters:
That said, at times here I feel like Romney sounds like one of those computer-generated voices, where each word has been separately recorded and it's stitched together into a odd-sounding sentence.
Lurking in this New York Times article about "solar thermal" power is a good reason to prefer straightforward carbon taxes to more complicated subsidy schemes as a way of generating cleaner power:
In the solar thermal variant, heat from the sun is used to preheat the water that the exhaust gases will boil into steam. Proponents say that such a system could get about one-sixth more work out of the natural gas by operating at 70 percent efficiency. Most current plants operate with efficiencies in the range of 50 to 60 percent.
The World Bank is considering financial help for projects in Egypt and Morocco that would create such a hybrid. In the United States, such systems are not practical because they would lose the tax benefits that the federal government gives solar projects.
And there's the rub. Part of the genius of a carbon tax is that it creates incentives for more green friendly power at the margin, so that something like this which produces meaningful carbon reductions is rewarded precisely in proportion to the extent to which it does, in fact, reduce emissions. Right now, our subsidy scheme doesn't reward companies at all for adopting this sort of technology. But changing the scheme to make these plants eligible for the solar subsidies would be bad, too, since a mixed plant isn't nearly as clean as a true solar one.
It seems that my aspirations to handgun ownership are going to need to wait a little while, as DC Mayor Adrian Fenty announced his decision to appeal to the Supreme Court to overrule a lower court ruling that deemed the city's ban on handgun ownsership unconstitutional. Cato's Tim Lynch disappoints by deeming this "great news" since "the whole idea of this lawsuit has been to get a good case up to the Supreme Court."
I, on the other hand, actually live here and would have been happy just to see the law amended.
Photo by Flickr user Robert Nelson used under a Creative Commons license
Chucky Atkins says he's "looking forward to winning a championship in Denver" as he replaces Portland-bound Steve Blake on the Nuggets. Size-wise, Atkins doesn't seem like a great backcourt-mate for Allen Iverson, but he can hit the three which is a great fit for Denver's personnel. He had his best season by a large margin last year at 31, which was weird, but the Nuggets really aren't paying him very much so even if that turns out to be a total fluke they're covered. It's still probably not championship material, but it'll be fun to watch the New Nuggets play a whole season together.
Am I getting this right? Tonight the Senate is going to have an all-nighter debate on Iraq to highlight Republican obstructionism of the Reid-Levin Amendment? That sounds . . . like something I won't want to watch. But good for Reid. I don't think this is particularly good political theater, as such, but something needs to be done to highlight the fact that things aren't passing the Senate not because "congress" can't take action or because "the Senate" is rejecting various proposals but, specifically, because the filibuster lets the GOP block the majority's initiatives. Why the press couldn't cover this stuff correctly in the first place, I couldn't say, but maybe this'll change things around.
I'm looking over some of the RNC's oppo research, and I have to say it's pretty unimpressive. Here John Edwards stands condemned for criticizing some business practices that he's had some second-degree association with in his private sector life. Maybe it was through these activities that Edwards learned about the issues and became convinced of the need for public action. Robert Oppenheimer wasn't a hypocrite for having worked on the Manhattan Project and being opposed to nuclear weapons.
This on Obama is, if anything, even worse. He stands accused of having views on forward-looking Iraq strategy that aren't the same as his views in June 2006 and that are radically different from his views in September 2004. But everyone's opinions have shifted over the years -- the situation keeps changing; keeps, in fact, getting worse.
Unlike the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China isn't anything resembling a peer of the United States when it comes to nuclear weapons. Yes, the PRC has nukes. And, yes, the PRC even has nukes capable of hitting the United States. But it doesn't have all that many, nor as they particularly sophisticated. What's more, as Kier Lieber and Daryl Press note in the current Atlantic, the gap appears to be growing, "the United States is pursuing capabilities that are rendering MAD obsolete, and the resulting nuclear imbalance of power could dramatically exacerbate America’s rivalry with China."
America's "counterforce" capabilities -- the ability to "win" a nuclear war -- are much, much, much more advanced than China's. This means China can't be confident that it's second-strike nuclear deterrent would prevent us from nuking China. But that means China may, in a tense standoffy moment, feel the need to be much more proactive with its own arsenal than you would expect in a MAD situation. If the Chinese believe an America first strike would result in victory, then launching a first strike looks like a good idea for the Chinese. And if Americans think a Chinese first strike makes sense from a Chinese perspective, but that an American first strike will result in victory, then a US first strike looks like a good idea for Americans. But if the Chinese knows that . . . and if the Americans know the Chinese know that . . . and the Chinese know the Americans know they know that . . . etc., etc., etc.
At any rate, it's a fascinating -- and disturbing -- article. For more on this see Benjamin Schwarz's column written where their academic study was completed, this post from Brad Plumer and this one one Robert Farley both from back in 2006, and Lieber and Press' March '06 article in Foreign Affairs.
National Archives photo of Operation Ivy via PINGNews.
Georgia Board of Pardons and parole gives Troy Davis a 90 day stay of execution so they can consider the evidence of his innocence -- that the eyewitnesses on the basis of whose testimony he was convicted have recanted -- the very evidence that the courts are prohibited by federal law from considering.
Someone or other mentioned to me yesterday that in a sick way Davis is lucky he got the death penalty since that meant some people were paying attention to the case and a minor ruckus eventually got raised. Suppose Davis had just been sitting in prison on a 20-to-life sentence, would anyone have even noticed? The extent to which the criminal justice system allows for the railroading of poor people with little means is simply off the charts, and the incredible reliance on wildly unreliable eyewitness testimony is a big part of the issue.
UPDATE: Wait, wait; it looks like the Board of Pardons and Paroles may not actually have the power to pardon, only to commute the sentence to life in prison. Oy. If the man's innocent, he's innocent.
His conclusion is odd, but today's David Brooks column is pregnant with things to blog about. For example:
Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.
Now I suppose their must be some conservatives for him this "are supposed to distrust government" dictum applies, but for the past fifty or so years that's clearly not the case. The mainstream conservative belief is that the government needs to be given dramatically greater scope to gather information and to deploy force -- including deadly force -- and threats thereof. This isn't an innovation of the Torture and Arbitrary Detention administration, it's a longstanding pattern. Conservatives didn't like the Warren Court's criminal justice jurisprudence, they didn't like the Church Commission's inquiries into the CIA, they chafe at contemporary military reticence about civilian casualties, etc.
There are exceptions to this (as there are exceptions to everything), but the dominant view in post-war American conservatism has been of almost boundless faith in violence and in large government institutions like the military, the prison system, etc.
Today's edition of Brian Beutler's almost daily Corner-bashing locates Larry Kudlow's scintillating analysis of national security policy "Despite all the criticism President Bush has received over his administration’s Iraq war policies, isn’t it interesting that stock markets have been booming during the whole period from early 2003 onward? [. . .] Stocks are giving the president a vote of confidence."
Um, okay. Meanwhile, lurking in the ellipsis is Kudlow's confession that he doesn't know anything about economics. Or, as he puts it, "I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health and wealth of a nation." That verges on being silly -- huges swathes of economic activity, after all, are conducted by organizations that aren't publicly traded companies. It's fascinating, however, in a sociological sense. Kudlow isn't a specialist in something else who's just freelancing in economic ignorance on the National Review blogs. This is supposed to be his area of specialization. But he doesn't know anything about it. And National Review's editors are either too ignorant to do anything about it, or else just don't care. And, more tellingly, nobody in the conservative hierarchy who interacts with National Review's editors has communicated to those editors in a convincing manner that it reflects poorly on their publication to regularly run economic commentary by someone who doesn't know anything about it.
Via Mike Crowley, the AP breaks down presidential giving by employer. Barack Obama's biggest sources of funding, for example, are all investment firms: Lehman Brothers, $160,760; Citadel Investment Group, $152,150; Goldman Sachs, $103,550; JP Morgan Chase, $101,950; Citigroup $61,125. John Edwards, by contrast, has two investment firms (Fortress and Goldman Sachs) plus two law firms -- Lerach Coughlin and the Watts Law Firm. Bill Richardson's best fundraising haul comes from employees of the State of New Mexico.
Hillary Clinton's number two company, it turns out, is Cablevision, the company that destroyed the New York Knicks.
Tom Schaller brings us the cutting edge in anti-immigration arguments, the onrushing Mexican hordes are making us short:
This list I found online shows America already dropping to 27th in average adult male height by 2006, behind most of Europe and -- get this -- Iraq, which ranks 21st! Of course, with all the discussion of how immigration is adversely affecting the country, I wonder if the new study accounts for the decline in average height attributable to the arrival of millions of Mexicans and other Latin Americans who, on average, are shorter. No Latin American country ranks higher than 37th (Uruguay), and Mexico is 51st. (I once recall playing a pickup basketball game in Peru, ranked 39th, where I was basically a power forward. As Borat would say: “Niiiiiice.”)
From a sports perspective, it's interesting that the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries -- all full of tall people -- are places where basketball doesn't really seem to have taken off. One imagines that if that portion of Europe showed the level of enthusiasm for hoops that you see in Spain or Greece, it'd probably generate quite a few more players.
Photo by Flickr user Mr TGT used under a Creative Commons license
Anne Applebaum: "No troops? Though deeply appealing to the "we told you so" crowd, this plan is clothed in the greatest degree of hypocrisy. How many of the people who clamor for intervention in Darfur will also be clamoring to rush back into Iraq when full-scale ethnic cleansing starts taking place? How many will take responsibility for the victims of genocide? I'm not saying there will be such a catastrophe, but there could be: Mass ethnic murders have certainly been carried out in Iraq before."
This line of argument has been in vogue for some time now, but it seems singularly nonsensical. For one thing, I think there are real questions about the math -- how many people arguing for withdrawal for Iraq really are advocates of large-scale insertion of US ground forces to Darfur? Not me! Numbers aside, I think it's fairly obvious that if the US does withdraw from Iraq and full-scale ethnic cleansing does result (something Applebaum concedes is by no means certain) that very few withdrawal advocates are going to be clamoring for intervention. Here, I guess, is where the hypocrisy comes into play.
But it's not actually hypocritical to favor interventions to prevent mass slaughter where you think such interventions will be effective, but not otherwise. The idea that consistency's sake requires one to either be a pacificist or else to support whatever military adventure happens to be fashionable in the Washington Post opinion pages at the moment is daft.
In his own way, Carmona is the poster boy for the Bush administration -- a low-level Colin Powell, another non-quitter, a saluter who went along with the program and now talks more in defense of his own reputation than he ever spoke as an internal critic or, more likely, secret doubter. Such loyalty -- not to principle, conscience or integrity but to the boss -- is as much an essential ingredient for failure as are incorrect intelligence reports or fervid ideology. What Carmona and others like him too often forget is that when it comes to loyalty, they owe it not to the president but to you and me. Last time I looked, we were still the boss.
It's very strange times we've been living through.
"The New Jesus is the guy the boss has just brought in to solve the problems that the slackers and idiots already on the staff cannot handle. Of course sooner or later the New Jesus himself turns into a slacker or idiot, and the search for the next Jesus begins." Now James Fallows says David Petraeus is Bush's new New Jesus. I think that's right. And it's no smear against Petraeus to note that he is, in fact, just a man.
If literature is in crisis in America -- or in the world -- people like me are almost certainly to blame. I know how to read. Indeed, I'm pretty well-educated. And, in fact, I read a ton of stuff. Books, even! But novels? Almost never. But Harry Potter novels? Yeah, I read those. I've seen all the Harry Potter movies and read all the Harry Potter books and pre-ordered my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.
This, it seems to me, might be a moment of opportunity for a literary critic. A chance for someone with the requisite chops to publish in the popular press an article that said something about the Potter books as literature, something smart and insightful that made me think "hey, this guy has smart things to say about books!" Something that would situate the books in some kind of context vis-a-vis the much larger cultural sweep of the novel. Something that might get an intelligence person who enjoyed the Potter books interested in some larger, more highbrow segment of the literary enterprise. Instead, the publication of each Potter book seems to herald the publication of a bunch of stuff like Ron Charles whine in The Washington Post which, to me, makes Charles -- and through his role as a stand-in for the larger enterprise, all the literati -- look like sneering losers who've decided to elevate their idiosyncratic hobby above everyone else's in order to look on the rest of us.
Not that the literary world is unique in this regard, but it's a weird impulse. If someone expressed an interest in some niche product that I enjoy I would, I dunno, try to convey some of my enthusiasm about the subject. Try to share some wisdom. Try to build further enthusiasm. Make recommendations. Anything other than act bitter and petulant.
I haven't read the Spine in a while, but this post is really off-the-wall. Peretz is mocking Joe Wilson for encouraging headwaiters at restaurants to address him as "your excellency" even though Joe Wilson doesn't do this. And it goes on from there!
Richard Clark says "It's more about what it doesn't say than what it does say." In particular, it doesn't say we have al-Qaeda on the run -- because we don't.
Anything else? My view is that these NIEs have started to suffer from a kind of Heisenberg Principle problem. They only constitute fodder for valid political point scoring if the authors aren't expecting them to become political footballs. Since that's clearly not the case with a report like this, it winds up having little probative value.
As if looking to get mocked on blogs, the RAND Corporation has released a study which, according to the accompanying press release, "RECOMMENDS U.S. MILITARY ADOPT CONSUMER MARKETING STRATEGIES TO REACH IRAQI AND AFGHAN CIVILIANS." My first thought was that we could start deploying brand loyalty cards like they have at CVS or the grocery store. By asking civilians in occupied countries to swipe their card each time US forces come to their assistance (in exchange for free MREs, maybe), we could learn more about the circumstances under which civilians feel threatened by insurgent attacks.
Alternatively, a colleague suggests we might let the Iraqis into the PXs, where they can redeem their bonus points from various transactions -- checkpoint searches, midnight interrogations, etc. -- thus softening the blow of humiliating foreign occupation. Soothing muzak could be used during operations. The jokes write themselves. Be that as it may, flipping randomly through the full document I hit upon a perfectly decent point, namely that we need to be more sensitive about how different messages play in different contexts.
One example was that this White House photo of Bush giving the "hook 'em horns" salute to the Texas marching band seems endearing in the United States. In Norway, however, Bush was taken to be a Satanist. What's more, people in Mediterranean and some Latin American countries "saw the President indicating that someone’s wife was unfaithful (that they were cuckolded and had 'grown horns')." As a more relevant example, to a Muslim, something that's "jihad" is by definition a good thing, so when US officials refer to adversaries as "jihadists" we're implicitly accepting their definition of the conflict as one pitting Muslim holy warriors against enemies of the faith. This doesn't, it seems to me, actually have a particularly tight relationship to consumer marketing practices (James Fallows mentioned it in a brilliant September 2006 article without bringing up consumer marketing), but it is true that these lessons need to be learned.
I'm not sure The New York Times really needs to worry that anything might "return Mississippi to the days of racially polarized politics". Things seem plenty polarized. Check out this exit poll from 2004 -- Kerry got 90 percent of the black vote, and Bush got 85 percent of the white vote; there are so few Latinos and Asians that they can't even be measured.
Justin Logan watches Kay Bailey Hutcheson debate Iraq and is astounded: "If we let a caliphate take over the world, we are not going to live in freedom." I see progress in the right direction. Unlike a lot of things defenders of the president say these days, it is, if vacuous and dumb, at least true.
The Spurs trading Luis Scola and Jackie Butler for what amounts to nothing is a bit puzzling. Scola, in particular, seems like a good player. Given his age, he lacks superstar potential but according to John Hollinger's Euroleague formula, based on his translated stats he "projects as one of the few Euros who could start in the NBA immediately." He's mature, he has experience winning at the highest non-NBA levels of competition available, etc. He seems, in short, like an asset you wouldn't just give away -- to a rival team, no less.
That said, at this point "maybe RC Buford is a moron" doesn't seem like an incredibly plausible scenario. What's more, given that Manu Ginobili and Fabricio Oberto are on the team, it's hardly as if the Spurs organization is driven by a pathological loathing of Argentinians. Nor do they seem like the kind of people inclined to arbitrarily discount accomplishments in the ACB or international competition. Indeed, the reverse seems to be the case. The Spurs would seem to be in a much better position to evaluate Scola than anyone else is. So what do they know? What do they think they know?
I was channel surfing yesterday in the early evening and I saw something almost shocking on CNN. It was Candy Crowley explaining that yesterday's National Intelligence Estimate on al-Qaeda was good news, politically, for the Democrats. For years now it's been a staple of press analysis of politics that, in essence, all news -- or at a minimum, all terrorism-related news -- is good news for Republicans. Events or reports that make the threat seem less severe demonstrate how awesome Bush's leadership has been. Events or reports that make the threat seem more severe demonstrate how badly we need Bush's leadership. Now something seems to have snapped, because it's not just Candy Crowley.
Check out this news analysis by Michael Abramowitz in The Washington Post that leads with the idea that the report is "fresh political peril" for the White House and that Bush's key argument in favor of his approach to terrorism "seemed to unravel a bit" given the report. It's a big change. Of course nothing in the world has changed, but now that Bush is unpopular already, this is the kind of coverage he gets.
[In a prison interview with the FBI, Cunningham] Insisted there were no prostitutes at Wilkes' Washington poker games, but said Wilkes hired prostitutes for him during a Hawaii vacation. Cunningham was miffed that Wilkes got the “younger and cuter” prostitute and said he was “somewhat embarrassed on this occasion because he had some difficulty in completing intercourse.” On the next night, Cunningham again had a prostitute but said he “did not have sex” with her “because he felt guilty about his behavior.”
Hilarious. Maybe he should have gotten some pointers from David Vitter?
Michael Gerson warns that Rudy Giuliani could be the next Richard Nixon and doesn't mean it in a good way. I tend to agree. The fact that Giuliani's trying (and, possibly, succeeding) in papering over his substantive differences with the conservative base primarily by emphasizing his visceral hatred for liberals and liberalism doesn't reassure me. The appealing, humanizing, part of the cultural conservative vision is the idea that one might at least love the sinner, a sentiment that seems totally alien to Giuliani.
Brink Lindsey's response to me and Jonah Goldberg and Julian Sanchez is now up at Cato Unbound. I'll quote his concluding questions:
Let me close with questions for my interlocutors. What constraints do you see on possibilities for a leftward push for collectivism or a rightward push for traditionalism? Is anything like European-style social democracy (which even now, on its home turf, has retreated considerably from its earlier ambitions) in the cards? Is a full conservative victory in the post-’60s culture wars really conceivable? If the fondest dreams of progressives and social conservatives are likely to go unfulfilled, why? Might not the arguments I’ve made here have something to do with it?
Is it just me, or is the full list of people Dick Cheney met with as part of his energy task force almost laughably un-scandalous. There's a lot of polluting energy company executives here! Plus folks from some smaller green firms! And a few people from environmental groups. Plus members of congress from both parties. Superficially, this actually seems like the sort of process that might have produced an okay energy policy. Except, at the end of the day Bush and Cheney just did what their campaign contributors in the oil, gas, coal, etc. sectors wanted them to do.
“I want you to move to the Green Zone, meet with the Iraqi factions and do not come home until you’ve reached one of three conclusions: 1) You have resolved the power- and oil-sharing issues holding up political reconciliation; 2) you have concluded that those obstacles are insurmountable and have sold the Iraqis on a partition plan that could be presented to the U.N. and supervised by an international force; 3) you have concluded that Iraqis are incapable of agreeing on either political reconciliation or a partition plan and told them that, as a result, the U.S. has no choice but to re-deploy its troops to the border and let Iraqis sort this out on their own.”
The last point is crucial. Any lawyer will tell you, if you’re negotiating a contract and the other side thinks you’ll never walk away, you’ve got no leverage. And in Iraq, we’ve never had any leverage. The Iraqis believe that Mr. Bush will never walk away, so they have no incentive to make painful compromises.
Friedman claims to believe that Bush's reluctance to do this is baffling. I'm not sure if that's just a columnists gamesmanship, but my fear is that Friedman is genuinely baffled. But here we are, over four years after the invasion, and it's time to face up to the possibility that the Bush administration's policies in occupied Iraq haven't been driven exclusively by a sincere and idealistic commitment to the well-being of the Iraqi people and the principles of liberty and democracy. Shocking, yes. But not to put too fine a point on it, it's the imperialism, stupid.
Bush won't adopt a bargaining strategy that involves walking away as an option, because he's not willing to walk away. The objective is to retain Iraq as a platform for the projection of American military power in the region, to continue a larger regional struggle against Iran and Syria, to maintain physical control over Iraq's oil resources, etc. That means Bush can't walk away and can't "let Iraqis sort this out on their own." To accomplish his objectives, the United States needs to be intimately involved in Iraqi affairs to give us leverage and prevent the possibility of the dread "Iranian influence." It's unrealistic war aims that launched this war, it's unrealistic aims that have made it last so long, and it's unrealistic aims that prevent it from ending.
Defense Department photo by Specialist Elisha Dawkins, U.S. Army
Harold Bloom, writing in The Wall Street Journal seven years ago, showed us a flash of a better approach to sneering at Harry Potter:
The ultimate model for Harry Potter is "Tom Brown's School Days" by Thomas Hughes, published in 1857. The book depicts the Rugby School presided over by the formidable Thomas Arnold, remembered now primarily as the father of Matthew Arnold, the Victorian critic-poet. But Hughes' book, still quite readable, was realism, not fantasy. Rowling has taken "Tom Brown's School Days" and re-seen it in the magical mirror of Tolkein. The resultant blend of a schoolboy ethos with a liberation from the constraints of reality-testing may read oddly to me, but is exactly what millions of children and their parents desire and welcome at this time.
You know what? That's interesting! Unfortunately, instead of continuing in that vein of saying interesting things about the relationship of JK Rowling's books to the English boarding school genre, we get a predictable rant about the sad state of things.
Jennifer Rubin warns in the Politico that "Left could push pro-Israel voters to GOP." And, I suppose in some sense that could happen. It's worth recalling, though, that by the standards of AIPAC, The Weekly Standard, etc., the vast majority of Jewish Americans hold dastardly "anti-Israel" views and want to see the US government get more involved in pushing for regional diplomatic settlements and the institution of a two-state solution.
I understand that it's good for presidential candidates to project an aura of optimism, and I understand that it's good for presidential candidates to cut ads with their spouses saying nice things about them, but this seems weird:
"I've been blessed for the last thirty years to be married to the most optimistic person that I've known," just doesn't seem like the kind of compliment a person would offer her husband. This has been a slightly weird tic of Edwards' going back to the 2004 campaign, telling us how optimistic he is instead of projecting optimism. Which strikes me as odd, since Edwards is actually really good at projecting optimism.
Sometimes I think we might need to keep abstinence-only sex education around just for the sake of the hilarious analogies. Ann Friedman brings us the news of the comically named Eric Love of the East Texas Abstinence Program. The New York Times explains that he runs a Virginity Rules program (and, indeed, it's almost as fun as sex) which includes the following delightful analogy:
To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”
By the same token, if gay tape comes to live in your house all the rest of the tape will suddenly lose its adhesive properties. That's why even though there are gay bars, there's no such thing as a gay tape shop. Everyone understands that we need to preserve the sanctity of tape.
Photo by Flickr user RileyRoxx used under a Creative Commons license
You want to navigate to The Bird and the Bee's MySpace page and listen to their song "Fucking Boyfriend" (not safe for work if your employer's incredibly lame) -- you won't be disappointed. I'm still evaluating the rest of the album.
You've probably read this on some other blog already by now, but it seems Harry Reid has decided to further raise the stakes in the Iraq standoff. The structure of the situation is that the Senate was slated to consider the authorization bill for the Defense Department. Democrats want to attach an amendment to the bill that would provide a framework for withdrawal from Iraq. The GOP is using the filibuster to prevent a vote on this amendment. Now Reid is saying that he's going to pull the whole Pentagon authorization bill from the floor and just move on to other subjects unless the Republicans allow a vote.
It's worth keeping in mind that even if the GOP backs down eventually and an amended bill passes congress, Bush is likely to simply do what he did with the war supplemental -- veto the bill and then accuse the Democrats of refusing to fund "the troops" unless they pass an un-amended bill. To make a long story short, the country is still many, many Republican defections away from a point where congress will be able to end the war without the cooperation of a less stubborn president.
Brian Beutler alterts me to Jonah Goldberg's curious proclamation that "realism, properly understood, demands that we pay some respect to the idea of promoting democracy." Interested to find out what Jonah meant, I clicked through and found:
Andy may not have liked all of the democracy-mongering in defense of the Iraq invasion, but the case for regime change would be beyond impossible without appeals to America's sense of decency and, yes, mission. There's a lot of unrealistic realism on display out there when people talk about how we should have — and could have — destroyed the Saddam regime and then walked away. It's a seductive position, but I have a hard time seeing America or Congress supporting that or being able to stay on the sidelines as America-induced chaos took-over in post-Saddam Iraq.
Now it's probably true that it would have been politically unrealistic to try to sell the war in pure realist terms, but it's also true that that's now what "realism" means in this context. In foreign policy terms "realism" isn't just an adjective meaning the same thing as "practical," it's a school of thought with defined tenets including, notably, the view that the internal political organization of states is irrelevant to international relations.
In other Jonah Goldberg-blogging, his LA Times column makes the point that people tend to take an expansive view of presidential power if and only if the current president is one they like:
Today, the dynamic is reversed. Liberals fret over creeping fascism while conservatives give Bush the benefit of the doubt. Both sides are open to charges of hypocrisy, and neither is immune to partisan amnesia. The only consistent crowd are the Libertarians, who distrust all government power.
I wish I had some solution to offer, but my guess is there is none. Indeed, you can be sure that if Hillary Clinton is elected president, someone will denounce her as "the most radical president we've ever had" — whether it's true or not.
I think there is a solution to this, albeit an impractical one. The crux of the matter is that proponents of a strong presidency are right -- the legislature shouldn't be able to hog-tie the administration of government. But the proponents of a weak presidency are also right -- the executive shouldn't able to run amok irrespective of the legislature. The solution, as applied in all sorts of countries around the world is parliamentary government wherein the executive (i.e., the prime minister and his cabinet) are able to govern with a very free hand, but must at all times retain the confidence of the parliament.
The current war debate highlights the intrinsically problematic nature of the current structure. It really is pretty ill-advised for the congress to be attempting to dictate military strategy. At the same time, it's even more ill-advised to keep letting an incompetent president and his discredit team have a free hand to continue their failed policies. In a proper country, the result of the 2006 elections would have been a new cabinet that had the confidence of the new parliament. Alternatively, the GOP would have dumped Bush as leader rather than plunge into an election with such an unpopular, inept chief.
Coheed and Cambria • Bad Religion • K-OS • New Found Glory •
Killswitch Engage • Pepper • Underoath • Tiger Army • Cute Is What We Aim For • Paramore • Chiodos • The Starting Line • Pennywise • Circa Survive • Red Jumpsuit Apparatus • Amber Pacific • Straylight Run • Poison The Well • Funeral For A Friend • Hawthorne Heights • Escape The Fate • Gallows • Bayside • The Unseen • Spill Canvas • The Toasters • The Dear and Departed • A Static Lullaby • The Rocket Summer • Vincent Black Shadow • The Human Abstract • Alesana • Bless the Fall • Haste the Day • The Graduate • Mayday Parade • Madina Lake • Anberlin • Cinematic Sunrise • Big D and the Kids Table • The Almost • Meg & Dia • The Matches • Boys Like Girls • Parkway Drive •
Scary Kids Scaring Kids • P.O.S. • Family Force 5 • All Time Low • Evaline • The Fabulous Rudies • Bleed the Dream • My American Heart • Valencia • Mustard Plug • Throwdown • The Chariot • Pure Volume • The Mix Tent featuring Street Drum Corps • One.Be.Lo • Massive Monkees • Addverse • Cottonmouth Texas • Comedians
Pennywise, Bad Religion, and the Toasters -- yeah. I think I saw a Hawthorne Heights flier once. And then who? And yet the Warped Tours of 1997-99 were seminal moments of my life. I used to know this stuff.
I stole this graphic from Brian Beutler. It serves as a reminder of how far things have slipped in Iraq. In April 2005, people generally thought we were having a difficult time of it in Iraq. And if you'd suggested then that the daily number of attacks in Iraq would get to around 100, people would have understood you as predicting a dramatic worsening of the situation. From today's vantage point, however, 100 would be major progress. But progress toward what? Toward a return to the unacceptably horrible conditions of early 2006, I guess.
But you can see it all on the chart or any other years-long metric of the war -- if there ever was a time when the situation was amenable to "fixing" it was a long, long time ago before things metastasized and anything resembling the current dynamic took hold.
Specifically, the Hugh Hewitt show. Andrew has concerns:
If I were eager to maintain a semblance of military independence from the agenda of extremist, Republican partisans, I wouldn't go on the Hugh Hewitt show, would you? And yet Petraeus has done just that. I think such a decision to cater to one party's propaganda outlet renders Petraeus' military independence moot. I'll wait for the transcript. But Petraeus is either willing to be used by the Republican propaganda machine or he is part of the Republican propaganda machine. I'm beginning to suspect the latter.
"Wait for the transcript" seems like the right thing to say. I've done the Hugh Hewitt show. It was a mistake. People shouldn't go on his show. But not everyone realizes that. At any rate, the transcript's up now and it's a mixed bag. Petraeus keeps resisting Hewitt's efforts to get him to say something like "this is just one front in the endless struggle against Iran-directed Islamofascism." At the same time, Petraeus seems unfazed by the fact that the core base of political support for an open-ended military commitment to Iraq is composed of lunatics like Hewitt. Hewitt's asking the questions so, naturally, the political situation in Iraq doesn't get brought up.
But it's precisely the dynamics of Iraqi politics that doom our mission there. It's nice that we've trained effective commando units, but on some level so what?
Suppose you know that there is free will or that moral reasoning is not futile. Next, suppose you find that the universe is made out of only whatever the universe is made out of. What do you infer? You infer that free will and moral reasoning, which occur inside the universe (or as aspects of the universe), whatever they may be, are made possible because of whatever it is the universe is made out of. And there you are.
David Chalmers tackles some related issues in his relatively accessible paper "The Matrix as Metaphysics". One point to note is that even within the materialist framework we've experienced some rather stunning revelations as to what the world is made of. The discovery, for example, that matter is composed of atoms didn't lead everyone to freak out and say "oh my God! I used to think the kitchen was full of cookware but now I know it's really full of atoms!" Rather, the kitchen continues to be full of cookware, but the cookware is made of atoms.
Then you learn that the atoms are made of subatomic particles. That, in fact, the atoms are mostly empty space. That the subatomic particles obey the odd principles of quantum mechanics. All kinds of weird stuff. None of this, however, undermines your pre-existing knowledge of the macroscopic world. Pots hold water, but colanders don't. It's interesting to learn more about the ultimate nature of matter, but that doesn't make our everyday knowledge of the world endlessly renegotiable. Similarly, moral reasoning does in fact make sense -- people do it all the time.
There are at least two shoes that haven't quite dropped yet in Iraq. One is the Kurd-Turk situation, involving both Turkish military action in northern Iraq, and Kurdish guerillas moving back-and-forth across the Turkey-Iraq border. The other is that Iraq's constitution schedules a plebiscite to determine the status of the Kirkuk region (i.e., in Kurdistan or out) and there's little reason to think the losing side will accept the outcome of the vote peacefully.
Last week I was talking to one of the sharpest knives in the progressive economic policy drawer and he made what struck me as an odd claim about what he claimed as an important divide in progressive thinking. Some people (including the two of us) think that public policy can affect workers' total level of compensation by affecting overall labor market conditions. We don't, however, think that mandating the provision of certain kinds of benefits can increase total compensation. I didn't believe him at the time, but it seemed to me to be part of what was going on during the vacation debate in the comments section of the blog.
In particular, in my view a lot of people are being misled by the concept of a "paid vacation." A paid vacation is a kind of accounting fiction -- you continue to draw a paycheck (and health care benefits, etc.) even while you're on vacation. But nobody's going to pay you to go on vacation. You're paid for the work that you actually do. The money you get on your vacation days is part of your payment for the work you do on the other days. Over the long run, if the government mandates a certain number of paid vacation days, then positions that currently offer fewer vacation days then that will become less lucrative.
In the real world, wages tend to be sticky, so a government mandate of more vacation probably wouldn't lead to immediate pay cuts, but a government mandate of more vacation probably wouldn't involve immediate implementation anyway. The point, though, is that while we definitely could use public policy to shift the money/leisure mix the American workforce receives, we can't just conjure up free money through a regulatory mandate -- if everyone is made to work less, then everyone will earn less money. That's perhaps a defensible trade off (the French certainly seem to think so) but there's a real price to be paid.
John Hollinger says the Houston Rockets had the most offseason improvement:
In the big picture, the Rockets aggressively addressed their three main problems: stagant offense, point guard and power forward. Between the coaching change, the additions of James and first-round pick Aaron Brooks at the point, the pickups of Scola and Butler up front, and the de facto addition of Wells, this team suddenly looks loaded. At this point in the offseason, nobody has upgraded more than this club.
I tend to agree. Is it possible that the West now has the four best teams in the league? This sounds like a better lineup than Cleveland or Detroit can muster.
David Broder, in the course of a much-better-than-usual column, nonetheless feels the need to praise Saint John McCain as "the most stubbornly principled person in the Republican field. He is being punished now for saying what he believes about Iraq and immigration, among other things." Note that more principles than Mitt Romney is a low bar to pass, so it's entirely plausible that McCain is, in fact, more principled than the other major GOP contenders. That said, the fact that the most principled contender's principledness doesn't extent to such minor matters as taxes & the federal budget should indicate that there are some limits here.
But perhaps to the point, though John McCain's views on national security (bombs away!) certainly are principled, they're also disastrously wrong. Like Bill Kristol, who backed him in 2000 for just this reason, McCain has spent the past 10 or so years being really enthusiastic about war -- there's no foreign policy problem he won't address by starting a war. He's totally principled about it, and he's even right sometimes, but it's in a stopped clock is right twice a day kind of way.
Is he in a bunker? Has he been muzzled? He's still the head of the Democratic Party, right?
I think Dean is keeping a low profile, letting the congressional leaders and the presidential candidates speak for themselves. But this certainly is an embarrassment for Dean fans and Democrats in general. I mean, how come he's not taking the sort of large public role that we've come to expect from political celebrities like Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan, a household name if ever there were one.
I agree with Ross and with Jason Zengerle, that Ezra Klein's account of why John Edwards can't get ahead (lack of media coverage) isn't very plausible. If anything, Edwards has gotten more coverage vis-a-vis Bill Richardson than he seems to deserve.
That said, I don't think Ross is quite right either. There's actually nothing to explain here. Ex ante a former one term Senator and former losing Vice Presidential candidate just doesn't have a very good chance of winning the presidential nomination. Given the objective realities of the situation, his campaign's doing pretty well. He's leading in Iowa. Lefty intellectuals love him. Progressive bloggers love him. Labor leaders love him. If he continues to establish a lot of good will among opinion leaders on the left, plus continues to be a white man in a world where a lot of people think a white man is more electable than a woman or a black guy, and pulls off a win in Iowa, then he just might be able to "bounce" his way to victory. How much better could he realistically be doing?
Without taking a stand on the larger issue, I think the sentiment that "the magazine market will still exist, and you'll still see the newsstands with their endless plane and train-reading options." Insofar as print magazines depend on the plane- and train-reading market to find an audience, they're probably doomed. How far off are we from a point in time when trains are equipped with WiFi or when everyone carries around wireless broadband devices? It might take a little while, but it's surely not going to take forever.
Cato's Michael Tanner sheds a tear for Andrew Biggs:
Just when you thought partisan idiocy in Washington couldn’t get any worse, the House voted last night to cut off the salary of Andrew Biggs, the new Deputy Commissioner of Social Security. No one doubts Biggs’ qualifications for this position. But his sin is having supported proposals to allow younger workers to privately invest a portion of their Social Security taxes through individual accounts. Apparently holding a position that Democrats disagree with is now so abhorrent that it disqualifies you from public office.
Biggs, like Tanner, thinks Social Security is a bad thing and should be dismantled. House Democrats, like the American people, think Social Security is a good thing and should be protected. There's no reason Biggs should draw a Social Security Administration salary to help work to undermine the program.
Habitual overpraiser Catherine Andrews proclaimsFriday Night Lights "hands-down, the best show that's been on television in the past couple of years." Which it is, if you neglect several better shows. That said, it is the best show to have appeared on the dying medium of network television in the past couple of years. More interestingly, she points out that the entire first season is viewable online at NBC.com as the network tries valiantly to secure an audience for their excellent, but little-watched show before it enters its second season.
At any rate, these efforts will almost certainly fail and the show will almost certainly be canceled, though it'll be interested to know if the network and the creative team manage to destroy the show's quality (see, e.g., Veronica Mars) before it dies or if they let it go down nobly. For whatever reason, network television is incapable of sustaining a good show the way a subscription model or even ordinary cable (The Shield, Battlestar: Galactica) is and I think we should all just come to terms with that reality.
Michael Currie Schaffer mounts a convincing defense of Joe Wilson's self-promotional tendencies in The New Republic. As he notes, had Wilson been the sort of decorous wilting flower the establishment seems to think he should be, serious wrongdoing by public officials would never have come to light. And that, of course, is precisely why establishmentarian types find Wilson so unseemly.
Steve Francis signs on with Houston. This has suddenly become a very deep team, though it would have been a more likable one without this signing. I feel like he should have gone to Cleveland.
Ron Brownstein notes that historically an unpopular incumbent president does drag his party down even if he's not on the ballot:
Unpopular departing presidents, though, have consistently undercut their party in the next election. Democrats lost the White House in 1952 and 1968 after Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson saw their approval ratings plummet below 50%. Likewise, in the era before polling, the opposition party won the White House when deeply embattled presidents left office after the elections of 1920 (Woodrow Wilson), 1896 (Grover Cleveland), 1860 (James Buchanan) and 1852 (Millard Fillmore). The White House also changed partisan control when weakened presidents stepped down in 1844 and 1884. Only in 1856 and 1876 did this pattern bend, when the parties of troubled presidents Franklin Pierce and Ulysses S. Grant held the White House upon their departure.
It should be pointed out that 1856 is a not very encouraging precedent for the Republicans. In essence, the opposition Whig Party had collapsed (garnering only 21.5 percent of the vote) but the Republican Party hadn't yet consolidated its position (garnering only 33 percent of the vote), throwing the election to the Democrats by default. I'm fairly confident that the Democratic Party isn't in the midst of a Whig-style collapse.
Back in June, Michael Hirsch wrote some articles from Iran persuasively arguing for diplomatic engagement. He also argued that the extent of domestic repression in Iran has been dramatically overstated. George Packer convincingly responds that Hirsch is substantially understating the degree of repression:
Why did a journalist as experienced as Michael Hirsh not notice? Because, justifiably arguing for dialogue and against fantasies of easy regime change, he wants to be able to say that things are not as bad as you think in Iran. The truth is, things are worse than you think for any Iranian who tries to exercise minimal political rights. Just as the neoconservatives concocted a simple case on Iraq and, now, Iran—claiming that the locals would welcome regime change from outside—people like Hirsh want to make a simple case, too. It’s a great temptation to say that, because X is true, Y, which seems to point in a different direction from X, must be false. We all want total vindication. But in politics there is no total vindication, on Iran or anything else. The regime there is brutal, and we should talk to it.
This seems mostly right, but it's worth examining the idea of "worse than you think" in this regard. It sort of depends on who "you" are. For example, Iran is often characterized in the American press as a "totalitarian" regime, by both conservative and liberal hawks. Leading Democratic Party political operatives like Ken Baer will call you an apologist for the Iranian regime if you dispute this "totalitarian" concept. Thus "you" may well think that Iran is, in fact, a totalitarian society.
Which it isn't. The Iranian regime, though harsh on political dissidents, isn't Stalin's Russia or China during the Cultural Revolution. Crucially, it's not more repressive in any clear way than lots of countries -- China, Saudi Arabia, etc. -- we have perfectly normal diplomatic relations with. One of the reasons Hirsch probably overstated the case somewhat is that so many people -- powerful people -- seem invested in overstating things on the other side.
Photo by Flickr user Farshad Ebrahimi used under a Creative Commons license
I think it's completely fair for Clinton fans to argue that Hillary Clinton has the strongest record on women's issues of the major candidates in the race and to decide that that's a good reason to support her. On the other hand, nobody should walk away from this conversation with the idea that the image of Clinton as the least-liberal candidate overall is the result of some kind of smear campaign waged against her by male bloggers.
She and her husband have consistently and self-consciously identified themselves as members of a centrist or third way wing of the Democratic Party over a period of years. That's not an accusation to be leveled against them, that identification was at the core of the Clinton political strategy in Arkansas, throughout the Clinton presidency, and through Clinton's term in the Senate right up until the moment when she found herself challenged in a primary election by two candidates running to her left, when she began to fudge a bit. She's part of the DLC leadership team, her husband helped found the organization, her chief political strategist is the DLC's pollster, etc., etc., etc.
I know good people (my girlfriend, for example) with career-long associations with the centrist wing of the party but they, like Hillary Clinton, are less liberal overall than your average Democrat. That's the whole idea of the enterprise. They're progressive, they're on the left, but less so than others. It would hardly be unprecedented for the Democrats to nominate a candidate DLC Democrat -- one was president from 1992-2000 -- and I'm not nearly as hostile to the New Democrat approach as some people I know but that is, in fact, Clinton's approach. The view that Clinton's leadership on women's issues outweighs other things is perfectly legitimate (I don't think telling people to be less interested in what they're interested in, and more interested in what I'm interested in makes sense) as is the view that a centrist approach is what's best for the country. Less legitimate is deciding that Clinton's twenty previous years as someone who's positioned herself as less liberal than your average Democrat never happened.
Where I would least expect it, Ruth Marcus takes a hard anti-Vitter line while David Ignatius makes excuses in a predictably establishmentarian way. Both links come via Ross who also wants Vitter to go.
And I agree -- it's hard to understand how criminal activity undertaken by a US Senator could constitute a "private matter." When police officers -- public officials -- catch people committing crimes, they're hauled before judges (public officials) by prosecutors (public officials) and sent to jails staffed by guards (public officials) or put under the supervision of parole officers (public officials). Breaking the law is the quintessential public matter. Perhaps if we were talking about allegations that Vitter broke the law when he was nineteen it could be conceived of as private, but that's not the case here.
If Vitter and Vitter's friends in the GOP caucus and the press don't think he should be punished for hiring a prostitute, I certainly sympathize with that view, but then they should take the line that nobody should be punished for this sort of thing. For the "DC Madame" to be on trial, where her Senator client gets off the hook because it's "private" is ridiculous. What about her privacy?
I still know plenty of people on the left hand side of things who think that we should stay in Iraq more-or-less indefinitely for humanitarian reasons. I would recommend to such readers Charles Krauthammer's enthusiastic write-up of the surge and the war. He's dead wrong, but at least relatively clear-eyed:
That's why so many Sunnis have accepted Petraeus's bargain -- they join our fight against al-Qaeda, and we give them weaponry and military support. With that, they can rid themselves of the al-Qaeda cancer now. And later, when the Americans inevitably leave, they'll be better positioned to defend themselves against the 80 percent Shiite-Kurd majority they are beginning to realize they may have unwisely taken on.
And that right there is your training. If your concern about Iraq is humanitarian, the solution is political reconciliation. Unfortunately, we've spent the past two years showing that the US government has no way of bringing this about. The training, by contrast, does sometimes "work" and create somewhat disciplined armed groups of people trained and ready to do some killing. This, though, is the civil war. The policy is to make training and equipment available to multiple factions so as to encourage different groups to try to curry favor with us. The consequence is that we're arming multiple sides of a hugely complicated civil conflict -- fueling the violence and distrust that have torn Iraq apart in order to better maintain the viability of a large US military presence in the country.
There's a demented Krauthammerian logic to this, but it's the logic of a war without end. There's no guarantee that our friends tomorrow will be the same as our friends today. The Sunnis we're arming were fighting us twelve months ago. It's folly and it's hubris. At best, it's cold-eyed cynicism. Nothing about it is humanitarian.
Do I work for Clive Crook? Perhaps it's time to find out. I agree with Brad DeLong that Crook's Financial Timescolumn on the trouble with populism is pretty odd (see extensive excerpts. Brad's wrong to say that "Crook approves 100% of the Democrats' substantive policy agenda" -- Crook doesn't approve of the China currency stunt legislation that many Democrats are pushing.
Still, he seems to approve of, say, 90 percent of the substantive agenda. But instead of praising it, he criticizes it. Brad says that "What Clive Crook wants, I believe, is Whig measures sponsored by Tory men (and women)." Perhaps. His complaint really does seem to be that Democrats shouldn't say mean things about business executives or rich people -- shouldn't employ the rhetorical language of populism. This, however, seems a bit like a demand for Democrats to play a Washington Generals role in American politics and just settle for being noble losers until the end of time. Well-crafted political rhetoric tends not to have the measured tone and rigorous exactitude of a seminar presentation.
The Israel Project, a newish hawkish adjunct to the existing hawkish Israel policy infrastructure, seems to have issued some kind of open invitation to political candidates to provide them with pandering statements about Iran which they then compiled here. The Democrats are all a bit vague, but seem to be saying different things. They do, however, frame things differently. Hillary Clinton leads by laying it on thick:
Today's event has the important goal of drawing attention to the security threat posed by Iran. Iran poses a threat to our allies and our interests in the region and beyond. The Iranian president has held a conference denying the Holocaust and has issued bellicose statements calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. His statements are even more disturbing and urgent when viewed in the context of the regime's quest to acquire nuclear weapons. This regime also uses its influence and resources in the region to support terrorist elements that attack Israel. Hezbollah's attack on Israel last summer, using Iranian weapons, clearly demonstrates Iran's malevolent influence even beyond its borders.
John Edwards is a bit more measured, but like Clinton seems interested in deliberately misleading the American people about who the lead decision-maker is in Iran: "Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a politically unstable leader and an open supporter of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons could also set off a regional nuclear arms race in one of the unstable regions in the world, which directly threaten US interests." Edwards does, however, partially atone for his sins by directly emphasizing the need to place carrots on the table. Obama says the least in policy terms (surprise!) but also avoids the Ahmadenijad demagoguery of the other two.
As someone who favored the Kosovo War, I sure am glad Bill Clinton didn't Take Tom Friedman's advice (April 23, 1999) and bomb Serbia into the 14th century:
Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.
The actual policy was, obviously, not without deleterious consequences on the lives of ordinary Serbians, but certainly much less harsh than the Friedman "send a war criminal to catch a war criminal" collective punishment approach would have been. And it more-or-less succeeded in getting Milosevic to back down. It's amazing what war fever and a desire to prove one's masculinity by demanding that other people kill additional other people can do to someone. In Friedman's defense, the actual point of the column was to argue against those calling for an immediate ground invasion, so perhaps he felt the need to cover his left flank with that little bloody-minded reverie.
Photo by Flickr user Charles Haynes used under a Creative Commons license
Wow. It looks like the FBI is investigating an NBA ref who was betting on games he was officiating, twisting the calls to impact the point spread. This probably isn't going to get people to think any better of the already much-derided NBA officiating quality.
Should we respond to the al-Qaeda presence in Pakistan with U.S. military action? Blake Hounshell says no, arguing convincingly that the Pakistani population is supportive of efforts by the Pakistani government to crack down on violent groups but would turn sharply against American incursions.
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.
''Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now -- where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife -- which we haven't done,'' Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.
''We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea,'' he said.
Right. Just because there's a very bad situation someplace doesn't mean you take action to halt it whether or not that action will work, makes strategic sense, or is likely to improve the situation. Occupying Iraq isn't working, and can't be made to work; the fact that more tragic days are likely ahead for the Iraqi people is no reason to stubbornly continue a failed policy.
California faces a budget deficit so they cut $1 billion from mass transit funding. This kind of thing, of course, is crucial to understanding the urban/suburban/exurban balance in American life. We get sprawl because people want to move out to these far flung places. But by the same token, nobody would want to move out to them if roads didn't go there. A patch of affordable land near a well-maintained road that's connected to a network of other well-maintained roads is an attractive place to live. A patch of affordable land that's connected by a crude trail to a dirt road isn't.
Similarly, if you never make building and maintaining the infrastructure of less car-dependent lifestyles a priority, people wind up not wanting to live those lifestyles. It's all perfectly understandably, but it'll ultimately be very, very, very hard to get climate emissions under control without some increase in the number of families living with fewer than one car per adult.
Ari Berman notes a Jerusalem Post article featuring Colin Powell being sensible. "They won an election that we insisted upon having," Powell said. "And so, as unpleasant a group they may be and as distasteful as I find some of their positions, I think through some means, the Middle East Quartet… or through some means Hamas has to be engaged."
The normal next step after Powell says something sensible is to furiously denounce him for having endorsed the policy he's now denouncing back when he was Secretary of State, but the "isolate Hamas" blunder is an entirely post-Powell Bush administration screw-up. His hands are clean!
(well, okay, semi-clean; his public support was important to Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections so in some sense everything really is his fault)
Photo by Flickr user Charles Haynes used under a Creative Commons license
I found a lot to agree with in Chris Bowers' post on identity and ideology in primary politics, but I do think he goes a bit astray in acting as if the "ideology" of a candidate is a simple, easy-to-determine thing. I have nothing better to do all day than to try to figure out which candidate I think would do the best job of handling Iran and . . . I really couldn't say.
I end up resorting to this kind of tea-reading that, ultimately, doesn't have a ton of probative value even if done right. It's perfectly plausible that a candidate with a more hawkish political persona would feel more able to take political risks and de-escalate tensions. It's perfectly plausible that the campaign rhetoric is totally meaningless -- George W. Bush didn't implement a "more humble" foreign policy and Bill Clinton didn't take on the "Butchers of Beijing."
Most people aren't going to take the time to figure out exactly where the candidates stand, and even people who do take the time to try to figure it out tend not to be all that successful. By contrast, it's easy to determine someone's basic socioeconomic background pretty easily with a great deal of accuracy. Identity also seems like a not-entirely-terrible proxy for a person's priorities. Politician behavior is kind of unpredictable, especially when you're talking about someone moving into a new office, so I think it's totally understandable that people don't put tons of weight on trying to scrutinize where people stand on the issues.
A reader sends a link to this curious article by Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, head of the Israel Project, which we met this morning pressing presidential candidates to get hawkish on Iran. Her key thesis -- "if I go to yet another synagogue that has a sign about Darfur and nothing about the threat of Iran, I think my heart will break."
Not that she's against worrying about Darfur per se: "Worry about Darfur? Yes. But why can’t we worry about Iran — perhaps the greatest threat to Israel ever?" Once again, one is left to wonder why Israel went through all the trouble of building the most powerful conventional military in the region and acquiring a nuclear arsenal if all this actually leaves the country more vulnerable than it was in 1966 or 1948. And, again, we see the wearing pattern continue where failure to manifest dual loyalties makes one a bad Jew, but any suggestion of the existence of dual loyalties is anti-semitism.
Hasn't been one of the NBA's better-known officials, but that's about to change as he turns out to be the one accused of betting on games and slanting his officiating to help cover spreads.
To pimp the company's product for a bit, not only did I like Corby Kummer's online video about knives from last month, but I like this month's edition -- about grilled sardines and other oily fish -- even more. I like the gross canned sardines, too, but, obviously, this is a superior fish when cooked properly.
There's been a lot of hype about YouTube over the past twelve months, but I think the real digital revolution is likely to be things a little bit more like this: Medium-sized organizations capable of mustering a bit more quality in terms of production values moving in on the terrain of television.
I read this post and was ready to unleash my usual Putin-apologetics, pointing out that it's genuinely true "that Putin restored Russian strength . . . despite American efforts to isolate the country" and Russian textbooks might as well say so, but when you get to stuff about Josef Stalin being "the most successful leader of the USSR" (at killing people, I guess) we really are in troubling territory.
I've been turning the implications of the administration's broad new view over in my head all day. I think to grasp how stunning this is, you need to listen to David Rivkin's defense:
David B. Rifkin, who worked in the Justice Department and White House counsel's office under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, praised the position and said it is consistent with the idea of a "unitary executive." In practical terms, he said, "U.S. attorneys are emanations of a president's will." And in constitutional terms, he said, "the president has decided, by virtue of invoking executive privilege, that is the correct policy for the entire executive branch."
That makes a certain kind of sense, I suppose, and also offers an explanation as to the meaning of the "unitary executive" metaphor. The executive branch is, clearly, composed of many people. But it's personified by a single president -- the unitary executive. The US Attorneys who might serve a contempt citation are part of this executive. They can't enforce rulings against the decisions of the head of that unitary executive because they are part of it. Here's the relevant Richard Nixon interview with David Frost:
FROST: So what in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it's in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.
FROST: By definition.
NIXON: Exactly. Exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they're in an impossible position.
It's disturbing stuff. In an ideal world, enough GOP members of congress would be more jealous of their institutional powers than eager to back a co-partisan, and we'd see some veto-proof legislation getting passed to address this. I'm not optimistic.
Oh no! But, yes. This is Sara's cat, Jelly. Jelly doesn't like me very much, to be frank, preferring to flee to another room or hide under some furniture when I show up. Nor am I all that enthusiastic about the weird whining noise she likes to make early in the morning. That said, unlike seemingly everyone you meet (including lots of cat owners), I'm not at all allergic to cats, so I think they should like me. The picture comes, incidentally, from the iPhone, which has an okay camera for a phone but here at last is the feature where the lack of physical buttons really does bother me.
Check out Ed Kilgore's post on the contrasting approaches to fighting poverty that Barack Obama and John Edwards have outlined in recent days, "with the former arguing that some poor and isolated urban neighborhoods need to be broken up, and the latter arguing that they can be revitalized." Ed connects this to a long-running debate in anti-poverty circles going at least as far back as the 1968 primary where RFK had a more Obama-ish view and Edwards a more McCarthy-ish one.
More broadly, this seems to reflect the difference between a community organizing background and a more detached, "let's have some smart people study the problem" way of having approached the issue. In practice, though, this seems like the sort of subject where either candidate would wind up with a variety of different people working for them and end up espousing a mixed approach. What's more, it's not the 1960s and one assumes that any anti-poverty initiative will wind up heavily shaped by the views of influential members of congress who represent poor districts.
CORRECTION: I worded this backwards. It's Obama who wants intensive re-investment in poor communities and Edwards who wants to give poor individuals opportunities to move into other areas.
Photo by Flickr user Ellie van Houtte used under a Creative Commons license
For someone who actually spent several years living in France, Mitt Romney is remarkably ignorant about the country if he really thinks Hillary Clinton is running on a platform that's too left-wing to win an election there. He also called her a Marxist, demonstrating once again that Romney's key strategy to winning the GOP nomination despite his moderate pre-campaign political profile is to say a lot of crazily dumb stuff.
In the rest of the article, we learn that president Romney will crack down on "child-sex predators" and loves torture. Perhaps the predators will be tortured. Except he doesn't quite have the guts to say he embraces torture. Rather, he insisted that "enhanced interrogation . . . is not a euphemism for torture" which, of course, it clearly is.
Isaac Chotiner is leafing through Steve Hayes' opus on Dick Cheney so you don't have to and uncovers an interesting anecdote, in which Cheney's staff is briefing him for an appearance on Chris Wallace's Fox News show and ask him if he agreed with the president's decision to sack Don Rumsfeld. "'Absolutely not,' Cheney replied without elaborating. His answer surprised the small group with him, but it was the answer he was determined to give if Wallace asked, even at the risk of angering his boss."
Wallace didn't ask the question, so nothing ever came of it.
This is several days old, but Kevin Arnovitz at TrueHoop has the lowdown on NBA-related political contributions. Inept Celtics GM Danny Ainge is backing Mitt Romney, but so is Daryl Morel who seems to be doing a good job in Houston. Outside the box coaching superstar Mike D'Antoni is backing John Edwards, as is Charles Barkley. Barack Obama has the most player support, including from Starbury, Baron Davis, and Shane Battier. Tons of owner-love for Hillary Clinton, including evil ones like Paul Allen and James Dolan.
While I wait for the mailman to bring me my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows I've had some time to consider the views of my roommate and highbrow arts critic on the great Potter controversy:
On the millions of copies that will be purchased at midnight by readers seeking the final say, Charles observes: “There’s something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private.” Too true. Slicing an apple affords none of the benefits of peeling an orange.
But his argument has a tinge of disingenuousness to it. After all, he asks, “How could the ever-expanding popularity of Harry Potter take place during such an unprecedented decline in the number of Americans reading fiction?” Why should he care? Charles privileges a private, reader/author relationship—but then laments that it isn’t shared by all. He strenuously objects to the thing that’s popular, but not to popularity on principle.
It does sound a lot like a high-school narrative—the sort you shouldn’t want to read.
I read this paper by Shadi Hamid when it came out last month, but forgot to blog it. I think Hamid somewhat overstates the case that lack of democracy is the key political grievance in the Muslim world, but it's certainly an important grievance and this is a much more realistic take on what "democracy promotion" would entail than what one normally sees:
This report calls for a new U.S. policy for the Middle East that unequivocally gives democratic reform priority over so-called "stability." To be credible, however, such a policy must recognize and engage mainstream Islamist parties, which often offer the most effective and organized opposition to the region's autocratic regimes. Whether we like it or not, such parties are often seen as more legitimate champions of popular aspirations than more secular and liberal groups. The United States, of course, should not engage Islamist groups that refuse to foreswear terrorism or whose commitment to democracy expires the moment they actually win power. But our government must become much more sophisticated in its ability to distinguish mainstream and extremist varieties of political Islam, and in dealing with groups that have a genuine interest in democratic reform. To isolate extremists and cultivate democracy in the region, America must enter into dialogue with political Islam.
Unfortunately, the hostile reaction Turkey's AKP Party -- probably the Islamist political party the US establishment should find easiest to swallow -- has me pretty skeptical. In some ways I wish conservative types would just concede Andrew's point that there's a large "Christianist" strain in US conservatism, argue that there's nothing wrong with that, and then recognize that in an overwhelmingly Muslim country, any populist political movements are bound to take on an Islamist form whether or not Americans find that to be an appealing vision.
Photo by Flickr user Khoogheem used under a Creative Commons license
"There is a broad consensus, from McCain/Lieberman, to Friedman/Pollack, even to Zinni/Batiste, that the consequences of an Iraq withdrawal, precipitate or otherwise, are profoundly dismal," writes Gregory Djerejian, "But would quitting Iraq, over 20 months, say (logistics likely require such a protracted time-frame), be so terrible, unleashing regional conflict, genocide and other horribles?" His answer is "perhaps not" and I'd recommend his entire post.
Another way of making the point is, as Atrios suggested yesterday, with reference to the concept of "sunk costs." Most of the bad consequences that will or might follow from withdrawal are, in fact, costs that have already been incurred. It's true, for example, that our credibility will take a hit, but there's genuinely nothing we can do to avoid that. Clearly, deploying our Pony Locator would avoid it, but had we a working model it would have been deployed long ago at this point. Moving to withdraw our forces as soon as that's practical, by contrast, lets us move as swiftly as possible to damage control and trying to rebuild our assets (military, diplomatic, etc.) around the world.
The decision of Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) to deny rather than nourish a bipartisan agreement is, of course, irresponsible....A Democratic strategy of trying to use Iraq as a polarizing campaign issue and as a club against moderate Republicans who are up for reelection will certainly have the effect of making consensus impossible — and deepening the trouble for Iraq and for American security.
Yes, yes . . . providing political cover to moderate Republicans who want to distance themselves from Bush while minimizing the practical impact of their actions would solve our problems in Iraq.
This issue was getting discussed in comments over here the other day, and now Chris Bowers has an insightful post on the changeover from the 2003-04 primary season when activist bloggers were all endorsing candidates and the 2007-08 season where neutrality rules the day.
I would add, though, that the issue differentiation between Howard Dean on the one hand, and Lieberman/Kerry/Edwards/Gephardt on the other over Iraq was an unusual situation that has no real parallel in the current primary. The candidates are all presenting themselves as wanting to end the war in Iraq and achieve universal health insurance and curb global warming, and essentially arguing over who is best-equipped to instantiate a fundamentally common vision for the country.
I understand that the NBA is a business and that in the business world, business is business, but what's happening to the Phoenix Suns is pretty maddening. The Suns are giving away their first round draft picks in 2008 and 2010 as a sweetener to get the Seattle Supersonics to take Kurt Thomas -- a legitimate rotation player -- off their hands in exchange for nothing. The draft-related cost cutting thus far hasn't been so bad, but even though Thomas is hardly the league's best player, it's very difficult to see how to square ditching the guy you use to guard Tim Duncan (or Yao Ming!) with a good-faith effort to win a championship.
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Heads in the Sand
