« November 4, 2007 - November 10, 2007 | Main | November 18, 2007 - November 24, 2007 » November 11, 2007 - November 17, 2007 ArchivesNovember 11, 2007Propaganda of the DeedI guess it never occurred to me that there might be a sizable and vocal minority of Israelis who go around booing moments of silence for Yitzhak Rabin, urging lenient treatment of Yigal Amir by the Israeli prison system, but I guess it makes sense when you think about it. It's hardly an original-to-me observation, but Amir really does seem like the rare assassin who actually managed to be quite effective at advancing his agenda. Abu AbedGhaith Abdul-Ahad of The Guardian has a great profile of Hajji Abu Abed, one of the anti-government insurgent commanders who we're now paying to not shoot at American troops and to at least claim that whoever his men do shoot are al-Qaeda. History Lesson
Fred Kaplan's Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power won't be in stores for a few months yet, but it's terrific stuff, mostly focused on how the disasters of the Bush foreign policy stem from Bush's bad ideas rather than some lack of "competence" and that what's needed to replace them isn't just better people, but better ideas. Some of it, though, is good old fashioned mocking of the dumb stuff Bush says and does. For example: For several months afterward, as the insurgency morphed into sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, President Bush invoked the elections to dispute that anything of the sort was happening. "I hear a lot about 'civil war,'" he said at one press conference. "The Iraqis want a unified country. . . . Twelve million Iraqis votes. . . . It's an indication about the desire for people to live in a free society." Get it? At any rate, I'm afraid you may buy only one Eric Nelson-edited book about American foreign policy published by John Wiley & Sons in 2008, and if so I want to make sure it's my book and not Kaplan's that you buy. So whatever else you do, don't buy Fred Kaplan's book! But if you can borrow a review copy from a blogger friend or something, it'd be well worth your time to read it. Might even whet your appetite for someone else's book.... The Return of GeoengineeringEli Klintisch reports that some scientists who'd previously adhered to the anti-geoengineering consensus are now giving it a second thought as they grow increasingly pessimistic that countries will reduce carbon emissions enough to stave off catastrophe. Unfortunately, this superficially promising path remains full of pitfalls. Brad Plumer, for example, raises an issue I'd never thought of: Cloud-seeding in the United States has led to all sorts of lawsuits from farmers complaining about stolen rain. Chinese cities experimenting with this stuff have been warring over "cloud theft." The U.S. Air Force has drafted a report, "Weather as a Force Multiplier," discussing ways to use weather-modification as a weapon. If someone does come up with a way to cool the earth—say, giant space mirrors—there would be all sorts of tricky debates about who decides how it's used. It's hard to imagine that the international talks over that would be any less difficult than reaching an agreement on reducing carbon emissions. Right. You can't actually get around the need for a hard-to-achieve level of international coordination. The Air Force isn't wrong to think that weather control could be a weapon, after all. Krugman vs. BrooksMore calumnies from the left, with wild-eyed nutjob Paul Krugman arguing that Ronald Reagan's opposition to creating a federal holiday for Martin Luther King and his efforts to prevent Bob Jones University from losing its tax-exempt status for failure to desegregate might have had something to do with an effort to court the white supremacist vote. Hilariously, for some reason Krugman and David Brooks need to carry out this argument without referring to each other by name or even acknowledging that the other one exists. I think this is a very dumb policy the Times has, as it might be easier to have a productive argument if the participants in the debate could talk to each other properly. AssassinationsKevin Drum calls into question the idea that assassins usually fail to achieve their objectives, arguing, among other things: John Wilkes Booth may not have saved the Confederacy, but in the longer term he was probably pretty effective — though I suppose you can always make the argument that things would eventually have turned out the same regardless of whether or not Lincoln had served out his second term. But that's cheating: if you take that view of history, then assassins are ineffective by definition and the game is over before it begins. For one thing, I think you need to take the Confederates' goals here a little more seriously. It's true that the Jim Crow system that replaced slavery was grossly inadequate from the standpoint of social justice, but it really was a step up from chattel slavery. If the rebels had wanted white supremacy without slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Indeed, if they'd been willing to accept so much as a prohibition on the further expansion of slavery, they could have gotten that without firing a shot. Confederates wanted the Confederacy, and Booth didn't achieve it. What's more, though, it's not only "in the long run" that the assassination didn't make a difference, it didn't make much of a difference in the short-run either. Lincoln's death brought Andrew Johnson to power, and he was committed to white supremacy, but by 1869 Ulysses Grant and other Republicans committed to reconstruction were back in office. "Redemption" didn't happen until the 1870s and 1880s and the main Jim Crow laws were put in place in the 1890s. The Supreme Court overturned civil rights legislation in 1883 and Plessy v. Ferguson happened in 1896. The key political battles, in other words, happened after Lincoln would have been out of power anywhere. That said, Henry Farrell has recently pointed to two papers on the assassination question that I ought to look at. First, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin Olken (2007), “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War": Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination’s effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history. Next, Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn (forthcoming), “The Political Consequences of Assassination”: The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence, and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and economic effects on states. We investigate the extent to which the assassination of a head of state affects political stability, through an analysis of all assassinations of heads of state between 1952 and 1997. We examine the political consequences of assassination by assessing the levels of political unrest, instability, and civil war in states that experience the assassination of their head of state. Our findings support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations’ effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated. So with that, happy Veterans Day: heck of a job Princip. SolidarityFairly overwhelming support for the writers among Angelinos polled by Survey USA. When you think about it, the rise of digital technology -- ways to make it dramatically cheaper and easier to disseminate video content at higher quality to more people -- is just a tremendous business opportunity for the studios who own the infrastructure and expertise to create video entertainment. It's pretty sad that, instead, they've decided to join their friends in the music industry as seeing it primarily as a menace requiring them to put all kinds of new burdens and legal threats on their customers and, secondarily, as a way of trying to screw their workforce out of the compensation they got using analog media. Obama's SpeechThis seemed very strong to me. At times Obama's had difficulty combining a sufficient degree of partisan outrage against George W. Bush with an articulation of the idea that merely returning to the pre-Bush status quo isn't good enough. At the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, he threaded the needle pretty nicely: What's more, "if we are really serious about winning this election, we cannot be afraid of losing" is a nice sentiment. Lieberman For VeepSince Bill Kristol and Joe Lieberman both believe in a policy of all-war, all-the-time and both seem to put more weight on warmongering than anything else in American politics, I wasn't surprised to see Kristol float a trial balloon suggesting Lieberman could be a good Republican vice presidential nominee. Peter Wehner liking the idea seems a bit more surprising, since Lieberman's views on most everything else are well to the left of the GOP consensus and surely it's not hard to find Republicans with Lieberman-like levels of fanatical devotion to the killing of foreigners. FrustrationIt seems the White House is mad at Gordon Brown who, like me, but unlike The Washington Post editorial page, doesn't understand why blustery threats to start a war are the best way "to help avert a new war in the Middle East." Journalism as SadismGarance Franke-Ruta reports from Iowa on the Village's field trip: "The joke last night at the Hotel Fort Des Moines bar is that the last thing you want to do the morning after a potentially-momentum generating speech is go on Meet the Press with Tim Russert, because he’s such a tough questioner." The level of respect most political journalists have for Russert is hard to overstate, as is the extent to which I find it difficult to respect people who respect Russert. The crux of the matter is this reputation for being a "tough questioner" and the notion that Russert's brand of toughness is worthy of emulation. And it's true that Russert is a tough questioner. Watch any Russert-moderated debate or a typical candidate appearance on Meet The Press and you'll see that he goes way out of the way to put the politician in a tough corner -- he'll ask about some unimportant issue that's politically awkward, he'll drag up a quote from five years ago to try to trip you up, he'll ask about stuff your husband said, he'll harp on whatever recent story has most damaged your candidacy -- he's tough. But while I wouldn't want to say that "tough questioning" is a bad thing, making toughness the goal is perverse. The goal should be to inform the audience. Climate change, for example, is a hugely important question. As a result, candidates ought to be subjected to questions about their climate change plans. And as it happens, the plans released by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are all based on good science and good economics. So asking them questions aimed at elucidating their plans shouldn't lead to any embarrassing incidents. Shouldn't, that is, unless the candidates are unprepared to discuss their own plans in an intelligent manner which really would be worth knowing about. John McCain, by contrast, might or might not end up embarrassed by serious questions about his plan, which moves in the right direction but on a schedule that's too slow and in a way that's too inefficient. Serious questions would give him the opportunity to make the case for half-measures and whether or not he winds up embarrassing himself would turn on whether or not he can give a convincing rationale for what he's doing -- which is at it should be. His Republican counterparts, by contrast, would almost certainly wind up embarrassed by serious questions about their views of climate change since their policies are badly at odds with reality. Turning back to the Democrats, a serious question about Clinton's biofuels subsidies or Barack Obama's past support of coal gasification schemes might prompt some embarrassment and would be worth asking. But it would be bizarre to jump initially to these topics since they're less important than the more general issue of carbon caps and auctioned permits and voters deserve to hear about the important issues. But Russert wouldn't do it that it. It wouldn't be "tough" to provide politicians with an opportunity to explain their plans. Rather, the "tough" thing to do would be to leap straight ahead to whatever question is most likely to create problems for the politician irrespective of the importance of the issue. The reason, of course, is that Russert doesn't care -- at all -- about whether or not his actions inform the American electorate. Rather, he cares about creating a "news-making" event -- likely something embarrassing for the politician -- and about burnishing his reputation for toughness. He attracts a circle of admirers who share his perverse and unethical lack of concern for whether or not his work helps produce an informed public, gobs of less-prominent television journalists seek to emulate his lack of concern with informing the public, print journalists eagerly court opportunities to appear on the non-informative shows hosted by Russert and his emulators, and down the rabbit hole we go. But he's tough. AnalogiesYou can't win "respect" as a concession in a collective bargaining agreement, but I know it's something a lot of screenwriters crave, so I thought I'd pass along Jonathan Last's analogy: Actors are quarterbacks, directors are running backs, and writers are offensive linemen. That's about how they contribute to the product, and how they're paid. And just like it was a welcome change when left tackles finally started being compensated more closely to their value a few years back, I think we should be happy to see writers moved a tiny bit closer to their real value. Well said. People don't usually have lists of favorite writers the way they do actors or directors, but it should be obvious that without good story and good dialogue, you don't have a good movie. Bad FandomI somehow hadn't realized that this afternoon's Wizards-Haws game, which wound up providing the 'zards long-sought first win, was even happening at all. November 12, 2007Department of Understated HeadlinesEric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson bring us "Broken Supply Channel Sent Weapons for Iraq Astray" which sounds pretty dull. The story, though, is not: By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand — Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors. It seems to me that when you're trying to establish security in a foreign country that making sure your own people aren't complicit in supply weapons to the enemy ought ought to be a pretty high priority. Malcolm X: JFK's a TricksterThis is pretty random, but Hugo Pottisch left a link to this video in comments on an unrelated post and it's pretty impressive: Meanwhile, I'm reading David Nichols' book A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Movement which makes the case that too little attention has been paid to Ike's progressive record in this regard and that one shouldn't regard things like the appointment of Earl Warren and other pro-civil rights judges as an accident. The Good Kind of ContrarianismDavid Ignatius reports from Jerusalem: Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, titled his memoirs "Man in the Shadows." But now that he's out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States and Israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries. This is quite right, and it's very sad that we've reached a point where it's regarded as incredibly "contrarian" to note that drifting to war without undertaking a good-faith effort at a diplomatic settlement would be a bad idea. The ChoiceI'm with Ilan Goldenberg on the political problems caused by unduly timid Iraq plans: Barry Posen recently noted, the Center for New American Security proposal for Iraq offers no strategic choice to the American public. Democratic candidates that flirt with the vague ideas proposed by Kahl are risking making the same mistakes made in 2002 and 2004 on national security – offering hair splitting difference on policy but no real strategic choice or contrast to Republicans. With the American public’s opposition to the Iraq war at an all-time high, the idea of offering a narrow plan not dissimilar to the policy already being pursued by the Bush administration – one which Kahl admits does not have a high probability of success – is politically tone deaf. With Bush not personally on the ballot, a debate over who would be the best person to manage a fundamentally similar strategy doesn't necessarily shake out in the Democrats' favor. Indeed, I think Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, or John McCain could all mount very successful arguments on that score. A debate about strategy, however, is likely to favor the party arguing for a bigger change from the failed policies of the past. The Case for EngagementI think I agree with Brendan Nyhan's take on the Brooks/Krugman spat over Ronald Reagan and race: But can't both of them be right? The Philadelphia, MS anecdote has been exaggerated and oversimplified, but it remains true that Reagan exploited the issue of race in various ugly ways during his political career. Was that so hard? I think this is part of the reason it would be better to allow columnists to argue with one another directly. It might make it harder for antagonists to metaphorically talk past one another were they not required to, um, talk past one another in terms of the formal construction of their columns. Bhutto and Corruption Again
For a bit more on the subject of everyone's favorite Pakistani opposition leader and her formidable record of corruption, it's worth taking a look back at this old Slate article on Pakistan written the week after 9/11 by James Gibney, now an editor here at The Atlantic. Back then he wrote: While Pakistani political parties backed by extreme fundamentalists don't command wide support, they have built ties to Pakistan's military and intelligence services—an ironic byproduct of a political coalition forged in 1993 by that ex-darling of the West, Harvard-trained kleptocrat and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto. Obviously, Bhutto's corrupt past and the problems with her administration aren't a reason not to support Pakistani democracy. They are, however, a very good reason not to make the concept of "democracy in Pakistan" identical in our heads to the political fortunes of the woman who happens to be the West's favorite Pakistani politician. That kind of approach hasn't served us well with regard to Ukraine or Georgia, and didn't serve us well in the 1990s with regard to Russia. We should understand that something like a Musharraf-Bhutto power-sharing agreement of the sort we were trying to broker before the current crisis broke out isn't a close substitute for actual democracy. That's something to keep in mind when you read that two major Pakistani opposition parties say they won't agree to participate in elections held under emergency rule, while Bhutto's party remains uncertain. Obviously, the issue of what sort of arrangements are or aren't acceptable is something on which sensible people are going to want to defer to actual Pakistanis. But that, in turn, requires a recognition that there are multiple opposition groups in Pakistan and multiple opposition leaders, each with their own agendas. Westerners are entitled to like Bhutto more than the others if we like, but it's important not to let the fact that she went to college in the states totally obscure the existence of other Pakistani factions. Bottoms Up!It looks like the Bush/Petraeus plan to compensate for the failure of the surge to accomplish its goal by aiming instead for "bottom-up reconciliation" is running into the wee hurdle that "bottom-up reconciliation" isn't a kind of reconciliation at all and the Shiite-dominated government doesn't want to incorporate American-trained anti-government Sunni insurgents into its security forces. What a surprise! There's a reason, after all, why national reconciliation was postulated as the surge's goal -- absent reconciliation, there's nothing useful we can do. Unfortunately, when the surge failed to accomplish its purpose, instead of abandoning the strategy we abandoned the goal in favor of this nonsensical one. Soldiers of FortuneOnce again, key members of the House Blue Dog Coalition stand up for the values of their culturally conservative, economically downscale constituents by helping out billionaire hedge fund managers: The House today passed, 216-193, an $81 billion tax extenders package, including a one-year patch to protect 21 million taxpayers from the alternative minimum tax. Eight Democrats voted against the bill, including several who had voiced opposition to offsets used to pay for the package. Democrats voting no were Reps. Tim Mahoney of Florida, Jim Cooper of Tennessee, John Barrow of Georgia, Melissa Bean of Illinois, Nick Lampson of Texas, Jim Matheson of Utah, Harry Mitchell of Arizona, and Gene Taylor of Mississippi. No Republicans voted for the bill. The largely united Democratic vote belied more widespread concern in the Caucus about the offsets, though leaders managed to persuade them to support the bill despite misgivings. To offset the AMT patch, House tax-writers included a $26 billion provision to tax the profits of private equity, hedge fund and other investment partnerships at 35 percent instead of the 15 percent capital gains rate as under current law. The bill would also delay implementation of tax cuts for multinationals and yank tax benefits that hedge fund managers enjoy by deferring compensation on offshore income. Have I mentioned that balanced budgets is the signature Blue Dog issue and they have one of those silly national debt clocks (there's no point in reporting the debt as a giant, ever-growing nominal sum rather than as a ratio) on their homepage? Ron Paul's Friends
Daniel Siederaski of the Jewish Telegraph Agency has a story that should rile all those liberals oddly attracted to the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul: not only have neo-Nazis vocally expressed support for his campaign and form a crucial part of his online spam brigades, but one of their leaders has donated money and the Texas Republican hasn't decided yet whether to return it. Siederaski's got himself a solid story, one that includes the interesting tidbit that Paul was barred from a Republican Jewish Coalition candidate's forum not for his ties to white supremacists but rather "due to his stance against providing further foreign aid to Israel." The question, though, is why Kirchick feels this is a point that ought to be transformed into some kind of liberal-bashing exercise. It's liberals like Dave Neiwert who've done the pioneering work on this issue. Paul, white supremacists aside, has all kinds of positions liberals wouldn't like. The people attracted to his candidacy are libertarians and conservatives disgruntled with Bush's war. Liberals have nothing to do with it. Fire it UpI think there's an obvious confluence of interests between the Edwards and Obama campaigns in many ways, but this seems pretty odd: How good was Barack Obama's speech at the Iowa Democratic Party Jefferson Jackson dinner Saturday night? Long after the event ended, as a scrum of giddy Obama staffers were all-but-forcibly exited from the bar of the Fort Des Moines Hotel, they struck up a spontaneous chorus of the campaign's newly debuted catchphrase: "Fired up!" Beat. "Ready to go!" Beat "Fired up!" Beat. "Ready to go!" This slightly manic release of tension and elation wasn't surprising. What was surprising was the person leading it: John Edwards campaign manager Joe Trippi, who punctuated each explosive slogan with a pumped fist. Of course, while it would be inconceivable to me for Trippi to be hired by Hillary Clinton's campaign, one could imagine Barack Obama capturing the nomination and hiring Trippi for something or other so maybe Trippi has perfectly good reasons for playing footsie like this. More speculation from Noam Scheiber if you're interested. Did Paul Berman Tell Us So?In the midst of an argument with Ian Buruma, liberal hawk extraordinaire Paul Berman tries to convince us that he actually called Iraq correctly, and has merely been magnanimous in not pointing that out: I approved on principle the overthrow of Saddam. I never did approve of Bush's way of going about it. In the run-up to the war, I became, on practical grounds, ever more fearful that, in his blindness to liberal principles, Bush was leading us over a cliff. [...] It is true and it is a matter of satisfaction to me that, in the years since then, I have not made a career of saying "I told you so." Here's what Berman was actually writing in February 2003: In my own judgment, Fischer and his fellow thinkers in Europe and even in the United States are making a mistake in failing to press for a harder line against Iraq—a harder line that might bring about Saddam's collapse more or less peacefully or, if need be, not peacefully. It should be obvious that, in the Arab world, fascist and Nazi-like movements—political tendencies that call for random mass murder in the name of paranoid and apocalyptic ideas—have gotten completely out of hand. In the last 20 years, Baathist and Islamist movements—the two branches of what ought to be regarded as Muslim fascism—have killed millions of people and might well kill many more, and not just in the Muslim countries, as we have reason to know. A war against Muslim fascism ought to be seen as a continuation of the long struggle against Nazism and fascism in Europe—a continuation of the same decent and necessary cause that people like Fischer have always wanted to support, even if they have not always known how to do so in a sensible way. He was worried about Bush's failure to embrace liberalism, but it wasn't a worry that this meant the war would go badly, it was a worry that Bush wasn't being as rhetorically persuasive as he should have been: Maybe Fischer is not convinced because the Bush administration has presented a series of side arguments about weapons, U.N. resolutions, and dark terrorist conspiracies and has failed to present the main argument, which is the single huge argument that has always sustained the Western alliance. This argument is the one about totalitarianism. It is the argument that says: The totalitarians are dangerous to themselves and to us, and we had better fight them. Fight wisely, of course, which the New Left notoriously managed not to do long ago, but fight. Why can't Bush make that argument? I won't speculate. But he could change. He gave up drinking long ago. Let him give up his arrogance, small-mindedness, and aversion to large and idealistic ideas today. It might help. And here he was in January 2004 when many people still thought the war was going well: What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama. In short, Berman was wrong. The reason he hasn't made a career of telling us "I told you so" is that, in this instance at least, he didn't tell us so. But now he's trying to tell us that he did tell us so. But all he told us was that had Bush employed more Berman-style rhetoric then maybe more of Berman's friends would, like Berman, have wrongly deciding that an invasion of Iraq was a good idea. Jens Lekman
For a couple of years now, I'd been engaged in some kind of obscurely-motivated obstinate refusal to listen to Jens Lekman. But yesterday faced with the imminent expiration of some Emusic downloads, I got Oh, You're So Silent Lens and, um, just like everyone says it's awesome. And, indeed, When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog is awesome, too. And I'm pretty sure that if he has other albums, they'll be awesome as well. The moral of the story, in short, is that I've got to spend more time paying attention to the conventional wisdom. Similarly, when you find everyone touting the Nordic model (here too, but you need a subscription) of economics as well as indie pop, then maybe it's time to just embrace it. Roger Cohen's Case for Al-JazeeraI got a rumor in my inbox this morning about how today's Roger Cohen column was good and indeed it is: he argues that people should knock off the campaign against al-Jazeera's English-language broadcast service and that this is a perspective people ought to hear. That all seems quite right to me. I would add that there's a pressing need, in my view, for someone to put up the money to start an outfit that would provide English-language translations of important stories in the Arabic press. Something like MEMRI but without the crazy political agenda. Beer Goggles
Jonah Goldberg and Steven Haywood both find the following scientific confirmation of the "beer goggles" effect to be objectionably obvious: A recent study at the University of Glasgow found that alcohol makes the opposite sex appear more facially attractive, at least in the eyes of the drinker. Compared to abstainers, drinkers were more likely to rate someone of the opposite sex as attractive. Alcohol had no effect on the rating of same-sex attractiveness. This may explain why drinking in bars and at parties often leads to sex. I actually think it's an interesting finding. My hypothesis would have been that the causal mechanism was almost entirely a case of lowered standards and that something like "he looked better last night" was a pure ex post facto rationalization for past bad decision-making. Photo by Flickr user Anders Ljungberg used under a Creative Commons license What Happens in Neshoba...
Emory historian Joseph Crespino argues fairly persuasively that David Brooks has it wrong about Reagan and the Neshoba County Fair. Meanwhile, it was while Googling around to find an image to use for this post that I learned that the state flag of Mississippi is the emblem of treason and white supremacy you'll find above, making it the only state that continues to use the Confederate Battle Flag as part of its state flag. Not only is Mississippi unique in this regard, but the voters of the state reaffirmed their commitment to white supremacists imagery in a 2001 referendum, in which the flag secured the support of 65 percent of Mississippi voters, which is approximately the size of the state's white electorate. Under the circumstances, and given the state's consistent support for white supremacist candidates in the 1948, 1960, and 1968 elections it's hardly a stretch to imagine that white supremacist sentiments played a role in its political fate in 1980. November 13, 2007What You Need to Know About Iowa PollsKey lines from Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics with emphasis added: I think the problem is that we do not have a reliable metric to measure the state of the race. Polls are of limited utility for gauging Iowa Democrats. This is a subject I discussed earlier in the year. There are two problems. The first is devising a sample of voters. Turnout in the Iowa caucuses is difficult to measure because it takes a good degree of devotion to participate. [...] A poll of Iowa Democratic caucus goers does not really mimic the process in which they participate. [...] Democrats begin by standing in an area designated for their first choice candidate. Then, for thirty minutes, they either persuade or are persuaded by others to switch their choices. At the end of the half hour, electioneering is halted and caucus officials count the number of supporters that each candidate has. Candidates who have less than 15% or 25% are deemed not to be viable. And so, another thirty minutes for electioneering is once again granted. The supporters of nonviable candidates must find new candidates to support, team up with supporters of other nonviable candidates to make their candidate viable, or abstain. In short, the polls tell us that Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Barack Obama all have a large enough group of supporters in Iowa that they could win. They really don't tell us anything else, since the polling firms have no real ability to model what's going to take place. Term Limits?Ross suggests term limits for the major op-ed pages. I think it's a pretty good idea. Most of all, though, I'd like to see The New York Times abandon its twice-a-week frequency. The Times' current practice seems implicitly based on the idea that the number of truly worthwhile columnists is so tiny that it's better to accept the hit in quality that comes from making the columnists write so frequently than it would be to water-down the page. But surely the reverse is the case. It's a great big world out there, and having the columnists write less frequently would let all of them write better and open up the space for a greater variety of voices. Instead of David Brooks twice a week, Brooks once a week and an interesting libertarian like Virginia Postrel once a week. That kind of thing. It seems like no-brainer to me. Surely this is a sufficiently desirable job that they could have their pick of writers from all throughout the country. Aggressive TreatmentAlex Tabarrok discusses the positive externalities associated with flu shots. Brad DeLong notes the ways in which our present health-care finance system fails to operate with any awareness of the large social value of getting one's flu shot. Indeed, one thing that seems clear to me is that there are certain segments of the health care universe -- things like vaccinations -- that almost certainly ought to be "socialized" in a pretty strong sense irrespective of what we do with the rest of health care. A public Flu Shot Corps should be running around the city (or the shopping mall, wherever you're likely to find people) with credible badges and uniforms handing out flu shots and hunting people down in their homes, offices, supermarkets, wherever to ensure that getting these things are not only free but as convenient as possible. Then they could give you a sticker (so people stop annoying you) and a lollipop or something. This kind of thinking obviously doesn't apply to the entirety of our health care system (indeed, it might only be a small part) but these kind of simple preventive measures are the highest value portions of the system, and they ought to be pushed on people (not coerced but provided aggressively and conveniently) not charged for. How hard would it be for people armed with Sphygmomanometers to run around testing people and handing out brochures to those with problems? PrioritiesSpending on various kinds of energy R&D versus spending in Iraq. Why Not Ron Paul?I've previously voiced my view that Mitt Romney would be the Least Pernicious Republican President, but Kevin Drum's making me take a second look at Ron Paul: "Still, if I had to choose between Ron Paul and, say, Rudy Giuliani for president, would I vote for Paul? You bet. There are worse things than being a crank." I guess that's right. On the subjects where Paul seems unusually wrong for a Republican, there's just no chance of Paul's policy preferences being enacted into law. On the issues where Paul's views are a lot closer to mine than they are to the average Republican, by contrast, the executive has a great deal of discretion. Paul's foreign policy ideas about the use of force are a good deal more dovish than mine, but I think at this point I'd rather see the country go too far in Paul's direction than too far in Giuliani's. So there you have it. Ron Paul: "Less Torture and His Domestic Policy's So Crazy Congress Will Be Able to Block It" it seems like a convincing least-pernicious Republican bid to me. A Clean BreakI'd highly recommend Ed Kilgore's thoughts on different approaches to the politics of national security available to Democrats (though I think his #3 is something of a straw man, whereas #2 and #4 are very real and vibrant strains of thought) and the best way for going forward. What I would add, though, is that I'm not sure how available Ed's number five really is to those Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq back in October 2002. Ed characterizes the best way forward as: Find ways to compete with Republicans on national security without supporting their policies and positions (e.g., the 2002-2004 Clark/Graham "right idea, wrong target" criticisms of the Iraq invasion as distracting and undermining the legitimate fight against terrorists). I'll call it Clark/Dean because I think Dean's been unfairly maligned on this score and Graham wound up articulating the really crazy view that we should go to war with Hezbollah. But old fights aside, we could also call it the "John Kerry at his best" strategy: Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist. The trouble is that this kind of message, nicely re-enforced by the fact that Rand Beers resigned from the Bush administration in protest over the president's Iraq strategy and wound up working for Kerry, cut against Kerry's actually record. Just a few sentences later, Kerry was shifting into an HRC-like explanation of why his vote in favor of authorizing the war didn't mean he favored the war: He also said Saddam Hussein would have been stronger. That is just factually incorrect. Two-thirds of the country was a no-fly zone when we started this war. We would have had sanctions. We would have had the U.N. inspectors. Saddam Hussein would have been continually weakening. This is, in a vacuum, plausible. It's not, however, consistent with the strategic focus argument since handling Iraq Kerry's way (recall that "there was a right way to hold Saddam Hussein accountable and there was a wrong way") still would have entailed the shift in focus away from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and Pakistan and toward Iraq. Consequently, while I think this sort of argument is a great one for Barack Obama and other challengers like Jim Webb who can easily adopt it, folks who backed the war aren't that well-positioned to do so because the strategic focus argument isn't really consistent with trying to wriggle away from a pro-war record by citing the manipulation of intelligence. All of which is to say that while someone like Dennis Kucinich who opposed the Iraq War because of an extremely dovish overall outlook would still have a very hard time winning an election, someone like Webb or Obama or Dean or Clark who can plausibly claim prescient judgment about what's become an extremely unpopular war is just in a much fundamentally stronger position to go up against a candidate (at either the presidential or congressional level) who's be a die-hard war supporter but not someone who was personally involved in the well-known Rumsfeld-era cavalcade of ineptitude. Good IdeasLooks like General Petraeus is having meetings with some of Muqtada al-Sadr's people which is the right thing to do in the context of any kind of overall strategy, though it doesn't change the fact that the overall strategy is still wrong. Meanwhile, I don't know if "ironic" is the right word for it, but it's noteworthy that the key things Petraeus has started doing in 2007 are just things that the right would have labeled treasonous policies of "retreat and defeat" back in 2004 and 2005. Back then, holding direct talks with insurgent groups and trying to reach compromises with them was anathema even though back then this kind of compromise-oriented approach had much better prospects for success since the sectarian wells hadn't already been poisoned by the extreme sectarian violence of the intervening years. Tancredo's AdGarance seems shocked that this Tom Tancredo ad would actually air in Iowa: To me, it's not surprising at all. I used to think that 2008 was going to see a Tancredo surge based on his ability to tap into grassroots loathing of brown-skinned people on the home front as well as in foreign policy. But then came the comprehensive reform fiasco which happened early enough in the race to get all the mainstream candidates on the anti-immigration bandwagon, so as a result Tancredo needs to escalate his rhetoric to stay relevant. New Edwards AdJohn Edwards has a new ad focused on his threats to cut off health care for members of congress and senior federal officials if they don't pass his health insurance plan: I've previously taken the view that this is probably unconstitutional, a violation of the twenty-seventh amendment. The Edwards campaign says that, as pertains to administration officials, he would seek a pledge from them before appointing them. They also take the view that legislation ending health coverage for administration officials and members of congress would stand up as regards congress because the purpose of Amendment XXVII is to prevent pay increases rather than pay cuts (I have no information about the legislative history) and that it's not clear it applies to non-salary benefits (which sounds tendentious to me). Edwards' campaign also tells me "if they want to fight about it, it is a fight President Edwards would be willing to have - because it is time to hold leaders accountable." It's all good rhetoric, I'll give them that. Veterans' BenefitsOn the radio yesterday, I heard a story about this new report on homeless veterans from the National Alliance to End Homeless that included the striking fact that veterans "represent roughly 26 percent of homeless people, but only 11 percent of the civilian population 18 years and older. This is true despite the fact that veterans are better educated, more likely to be employed, and have a lower poverty rate than the general population." The report is chock full o' solutions, but clearly on some level the homelessness problem among veterans just scratches the surface of challenges that people face after wartime. Kay Steiger had a Veterans' Day article looking at some mental health issues, and congressional efforts to get education benefits provided in a form National Guard members can actually use. Ron Paul and the JewsAn important proviso regarding the Jamie Kirchick item I linked to yesterday is that it seems to be false. JTA DC Bureau Chief Ron Kampeas emails Andrew:
I probably should have known better than to take the original at face value. TV Blogger StrikeChris Hayes notes that a bunch of popular TV blogs are putting down their virtual pens in support of the strike. This blog will press on, however, to note that Ellen, which should be off the air already, is continuing to operate because and keep writing her own material, even if her staff writers won't work. I bet my blog doesn't have a huge overlapping audience with Ellen but in case you are an Ellen fan, I'd urge you to tune out and register your disappointment with her decision with a letter or whatever. A Man of ConvictionsSpeaking of New York Times columnists, I like that Bob Herbert today goes beyond questions of signaling and dog whistles to look at the policies: And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation. Now whether Reagan pursued these policies inimical to the interests of black people because he didn't like black people or because he simply adhered to free market principles whose policy upshot was inimical to the interests of black people, I couldn't say. These days, I think a politician whose sincere views about the sanctity of the market led him to the conclusion that landmark civil rights legislation was a serious violation of the demands of political justice would just lie about it, much as Ronald Reagan never proposed eliminating Medicare though surely whatever principles drove his push to reduce anti-poverty spending (and if you look at the poverty numbers, you'll see that poverty in the Reagan-Bush years was consistently worse than under Nixon-Ford-Carter or Clinton-Bush) would also have indicated that Medicare should be gotten rid of. Taking the Gloves OffVia Ambinder, Walter Shapiro says that "Every time Obama takes off the gloves, he immediately feels compelled to lace them up again." This is such a frequently used metaphor that it had never occurred to me to think about what it's specifically referring to. But that makes sense: boxing gloves. The problem is that, as I understand it, you can actually do more damage to someone wearing the gloves, since the gloves primarily serve to protect your hand while still letting you inflict incredible head-trauma on your adversary. If I were a more clever writer, I'd now explain why that's exactly like Obama's campaign strategy but the boring truth is that he seems to be hoping that John Edwards' aggressive attacks on Clinton will wind up doing his job for him (and he just might be right). Bare-Knuckled Blogging
With regard to the post below, Alex directs my attention to the boxing gloves Wikipedia page which explains: Because of their added weight, heavier gloves are generally considered safer, since impulse in physics is a measure of force over time and a padded glove increases the time over which momentum is transferred. This reduces the average force experienced by both the boxer's hand and the target. Several commenters, meanwhile, hypothesize that "take the gloves off" may be a reference to hockey in which the players take off their gloves before fighting. That made me think I should link back to an old post I wrote about hockey fights, but all I could find was me complaining that the Capitals need cheerleaders and Justin Logan writing about hockey fights. Oh well. November 14, 2007This Seems Like a ProblemVia GFR who remarks (correctly) that it explains a lot, Celinda Lake tells Matt Stoller that fully 96 percent of voters -- as opposed to people at large -- have health insurance. This obviously looks like a substantial challenge to building a political campaign around a promise to help out the uninsured. Duncan vs GarnettJosh Markovic (Mimmiville): Can we finally come the realization the KG is much better than Tim Duncan? I don't think either player is "much" better than the other by any reasonable definition, and this sort of ring-based argument (by which logic Robert Horry is better than KG or Charles Barkley) gets tossed around all the time, but is this really what we need from ESPN's stats specialist? Couldn't Hollinger at least have made a reference to PER? Well, since I want to try out my new copy of Numbers here's a PER comparison:
The striking thing is that Hollinger's arbitrary formula actually backs up his rather silly line of argument. Out of the ten seasons Garnett and Duncan have both been in the league, Duncan has been better than Garnett six times and Duncan has won the championship four times, and Duncan was better than Garnett in all four of his championship seasons. Of course, Hollinger's same formula says Garnett 2006 was better than Duncan 2006, Duncan 1999, or Duncan 2001 and it didn't get Garnett a ring. Indeed, Hollinger's formula says Garnett reached a level of excellence in 2004 and 2005 that Duncan's never reached. Now that's hardly the last word in this debate, but since it's Hollinger's own formula you'd think he could make some reference to it. Ron Paul's Money, Rudy's Crooked FriendsI have to say that I don't really understand Andrew's take on Ron Paul's contributions from white supremacists: "Here's an idea: when Giuliani disowns his abusing priest, his mafia-consigliere and his anti-Semitic nutcase, Ron Paul should send back the $500. Deal?" I don't really see the rationale for a quid-pro-quo here. If at the end of the day you want to decide that Paul would be a less pernicious president than Giuliani (my view as of yesterday morning) then fine, but the fact that Paul should return the contribution is totally independent of the fact that there are about a dozen things wrong with the Giuliani campaign. Similarly, while it's interesting to note, as Glenn Greenwald's been doing, that there's a double-standard wherein Ron Paul's crazy views get him labeled "crazy" whereas Rudy Giuliani's crazy views get him labeled "tough" and Charles Krauthammer's crazy views get him a spot on The Washington Post op-ed page, it's still the case that these are all people with crazy views. National Review and Joseph McCarthy
The fascinating things about the excerpts Brad DeLong posts of National Review's defense of McCarthy and McCarthyism is how little it does to defend McCarthy on the merits. One might expect a dialogue between McCarthy and his critics to involve McCarthy pointing out that there were a bunch of traitors somewhere or other, a critic pointing out that McCarthy had no evidence of this, McCarthy insisting he did have evidence and the people he named were traitors, and so on like that. But National Review says McCarthy "should not be remembered as the man who didn't produce 57 Communist Party cards but as the man who brought public pressure to bear on the State Department to revise its practices and to eliminate from responsible positions flagrant security risks." In short, they concede that the McCarthy program consisted of persecuting innocent people but they like it anyway. Maybe Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should not be remembered as the architect of the murder of thousands of civilians on 9/11 but as the man who brought public pressure to bear on the FAA to harden cockpit doors? This tends to put the contemporary American right's blithe lack of concern about illegal surveillance, arbitrary detention, and so forth in a proper perspective -- apparently the persecution of the innocent isn't just a price you sometimes need to pay, but some kind of positive good. StandardsCheck out Kevin Carey's report (PDF) and blog post about states using watered-down standards to meet NCLB-mandated "adequate yearly progress" standards without making any actual progress in educating children. This seems like an obvious problem with the law's strategy. A state where political conditions prevent the watering down of standards (or simply the creation of bad standards) is going to be a state that doesn't really need a federal standards-mandate. Conversely, a state where political conditions require a swift federal kick-in-the-ass to do a better job of educating poor or minority children is going to be a state where politicians are eager to drive through the giant loophole of the states being allowed to set their own standards. To be sure, at the margin a loophole-ridden mandate might have some impact, but at the end of the day if the federal government is going to get into the standards business the logic of the policy is federal standards not just a mandate to create some standard or other. Sign 'em UpIt's too bad it's been left to Cato's Michael Tanner to point out that individual mandates aren't working very well in Massachusetts. Lots of people aren't following the mandate to buy insurance, and there's no real enforcement mechanism in place. That doesn't mean we should all become libertarians, but it does mean that if we want to create a government program that gives health insurance to everyone who doesn't have health insurance right now, what we need is give them all health insurance. This mandate idea looks okay if you get to assume the policy equivalent of a frictionless plane but the enforcement issue is a huge real-world problem that's being introduced for the not-very-good reason of wanting to put a "centrist" facade on the policy. Don't Tell Dick CheneyIran full of dangerous atoms. InnovationJonathan Cohn's article on why universal health care won't kill medical innovation is getting widespread praise and deservedly so. Here's Tyler Cowen for the opposition. May I note that I don't entirely understand this controversy? It often seems to me to take place in a hypothetical world in which we not only have a universal health care system, but we've also banned out-of-pocket medical expenditures, which I don't think anyone is proposing we do. Insofar as there might be some projects that aren't worth doing at the price the UHC system is prepared to pay, you could just try to get people to pay out of pocket for it. If the innovation's so great, why won't those with money be willing to pay for it? Obviously, the poor won't be able to afford it, but they're no worse off than they are today as un- or under-insured patients. And of course if a significant quantity of medical innovations are coming onto the market that are inducing the rich and upper-middle class patients to pay out of pocket for these innovative treatments (thus signaling that the UHC system's budget has been set at a level that's too low to afford many newish useful technologies) then that'll create the political momentum for boosting the system's funding. The arguments from innovation don't seem to me to be arguments properly directed at the universal health care proposals that are actually being put on the table. Instead, they seem to be arguments against hard price controls and bans on private insurance or out-of-pocket medical spending. Whether or not you buy those arguments (ask your local pharmaceutical company executive what he's done that competes with penicillin) it's worth asking what they're really targeted at. A lot of this stuff has a "because command-and-control athletic shoe design failed so miserably in the Soviet Union we shouldn't try to stop Nike from using child labor in its factories" quality about it. BigotsMark Hemingway waxes indignant for National Review: Krugman's mentioned the Reagan/Nashoba incident four previous times over the last two years; Bob Herbert has mentioned it eight previous times going back to 1997. Enough already. Nobody believes Reagan is a bigot. This is a dodge. For one thing, it would hardly be shocked for a white man born in 1911 to have held some prejudiced views about African-Americans at some point in his life. But more importantly, none of us can know what Reagan's subjective feelings about black people were. But since he was consistently involved in public affairs throughout the second half of the twentieth century, we can evaluate his record -- a record of opposition to the Voting Rights Act, of support for Barry Goldwater's anti-civil rights presidential campaign, of hostility to fair housing legislation in California, of support for tax deductions for segregated universities, avowed advocacy of "states rights," etc. Maybe Reagan had warm and friendly feelings about black people. Maybe he was consistently hostile to civil rights legislation because of sincere libertarian convictions. Maybe he didn't involve himself in anti-segregation activism in the 1950s because he was greedy and only interested in causes that GE would pay him to espouse. Who knows? But the issue is his record on civil rights issues, a record that I find deplorable, though no more deplorable than National Review's record on these same issues. The Awful TruthI've been pondering what, exactly, makes the primary season so unbearable and the crux of the matter is that it's the epistemology, damnit. If I had to vote today, I would definitely vote for Obama, because when I think about the factors that I feel certain about they definitely tilt in his favor. On the other hand, when I think about the race as a whole the set of knowable factors is a pretty tiny subset of the set of relevant factors. I know a lot of people who have, for example, really strong feelings about the likely general election performance of these candidates. And if you forced me to make a guess, I think I could make an educated guess. But the reality is that it would just be a guess -- I don't think I or anyone else has any real way of knowing. Around Democratic Washington -- and among political junkies all around the country -- people have tons of barroom wisdom about the electability, judgment, experience, managerial competence, etc. of the various candidates but frankly I think the evidence available on all of these scores is indecisive and that the issue is pretty inherently unknowable. Unfortunately, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has experience running against a conservative Republican in a "red" or "purple" jurisdiction and neither of them have held executive office. We can make educated guesses about their skillz in these regards, but we're just guessing. The evidence from the campaign trail suggests to me that Obama would have a better foreign policy, but the evidence of history suggests to me that campaign-based evidence is a terrible predictor of how foreign policy will actually be conducted. Which candidate is most likely to be able to get his or her agenda through congress? I have no idea and I don't think there's any way to figure it out. It's just a very frustrating thing to spend one's time thinking about. Sieradski Right After AllA new email from JTA DC bureau chief Ron Kampeas: I wanted to clarify that I wrongly faulted Dan Sieradski in this. He posted his original comment a couple of weeks ago on his personal blog, before Paul had replied to our request. Jewcy reposted it Nov. 9, the day after I first reported Ron Paul's statement in a short article unbylined article for JTA. Dan upated his post and alerted bloggers who had picked up the original item as soon as he was aware of Paul's statement. I'm not acquainted with the mechanics of the blogosphere, but just like in journalism (or anything else) I guess it's not hard for one hand to do something without the other being aware. Sieradski's item, in short, was accurate at the time he wrote it, though the claim that Paul's campaign won't take calls from Jewish media isn't defensible now. Meanwhile, Paul should really return the campaign contribution in question. The Type of Town I Could Spend a Few Days InBlogging is never light around here, but it may get a bit sporadic for the next 36 hours or so because I'm going to Miami to speak at this event and do a little reporting, and I'm not totally sure what my level of internet connectivity will be: South Florida, of course, is full of Cubans and full of Jews, and I'm both. I'm not, however, a "Jewban" -- a person of Cuban Jewish ancestry. Rather, my mom's family and my paternal grandmother's family are standard Ashkenazi Jews and my dad's dad was Cuba. Either way, I think I'd be a good candidate for office in Florida. Investment AdviceIf you're listening to WEDR-FM "99 Jamz" in Miami and hear that ad about the condo where they'll sell to you with a $500 down payment even if you've had credit problems in the past, don't buy the house there are already foreclosures all over this city. Silly MeI used to hate George W. Bush but then I read this Peter Berkowitz column and calmed down: "And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal." See, the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal so here I've been wasting my time being upset that the administration has redefined various forms of torture as "not torture" and therefore legal. Oy. This is via Brendan Nyhan. I used to have Berkowitz in my "often thought-provoking, though rarely convincing" file but this is really laughable stuff. November 15, 2007Howling BackSo I wrote this post about how Tim Russert is whack, and then Kevin Drum linked to it and added the idea -- not present in my post -- that "this is not a partisan issue. The gotcha routine, no matter who it comes from, is bad for everyone, both Republicans and Democrats." Bob Somerby threw a fit, declaring "It’s time to give up on Kevin and Matt and all the Good Boys of the Village suburbs" and throughout the item just attributes Kevin's views on this to me, though I said no such thing in the post I wrote. Meanwhile, though I don't really want to speculate as to Russert's motives, I think the impact of his methods is pretty unambiguously bad for Democrats. It's not a "partisan issue" in the sense that one could, in principle, be both a member of the Republican Party and also be a politician whose career would benefit from participating in a serious discussion of important issues, but in practice the whole ludicrous enterprise is a boon to the Party of Flim-Flam. Then on top of that, what I didn't get into because I wanted to talk about Russertism more broadly, is that it seems obvious that Russert has a special animosity for Hillary Clinton or perhaps for both Clintons. That gets into the whole other question of why it is that possession of a bitter and contentless aversion to the Clinton family is considered something worth flaunting -- or even exaggerating -- in DC press circles (which I guess we're supposed to call The Village these days, but since I grew up in the Village in NYC I don't care for the term) rather than the sort of thing one keeps to oneself. But to summarize, Russert's interview methods obscure the good ideas of people who have good ideas, but also obscure the bad ideas of people who have bad ideas, drawing all political conversation into a miasma of substance-free posturing. I don't happen to think it's worthwhile to append every lamentation of the sorry state of political discourse with the observation that said sorry state is bad for liberals and (most) Democrats (seems to work fine for Joe Lieberman and it was always a boon to John Breaux) but for what it's worth I think Kevin should consider the fact that partisan politics is an essentially zero sum game so given Russert's considerable influence his quirks and derangements can't really be non-partisan in their impact. "The American People"David Broder is a prominent newspaper columnist. He also obviously doesn't care for Bill Clinton. And that's what's going to happen now and again -- prominent columnist dislikes prominent politician. But for some reason instead of Broder saying that he, Broder, has some kind of problem with Clinton followed by an explanation of the nature of his beef -- an argument about Bill Clinton -- warns us darkly that "The former president's intervention" on the campaign trail in South Carolina raises "the prospect of a dual presidency" which "will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president." Broder doesn't go on to try to present any research or data to back up that claim. And why should he? After all, in this context "the American people" doesn't refer to the people who live in America, rather it means David Broder or, possibly, Broder plus some of his friends who, acting in their capacity as The Great and the Good, eschew the first person (plural or singular!) and write instead in the voice of "the American people." But the real American people like Bill Clinton, liked him throughout the impeachment farce, liked him throughout the alleged "Clinton fatigue" era, like him today, would have elected him to a third term, etc., etc. etc. Satellite
There's something pretty cool about the shape of the Miami-related sprawl when you pull it out to an appropriate distance. I'd been interested to know what, if anything, is legally or practically preventing the city from just expanding further and further west if anyone happens to know. UPDATE: Yes, yes commenters I know it's a freaking swamp but there's plenty of development on ex-swampland in Florida -- hence all the canals and weird-looking lakes. Coffee Shop DiscriminationTim Harford looks at evidence that men get served faster than women in coffee shops and wonders of female customers are being discriminated against. My guess would be that this is our old friend the double-standard, rather that specific discrimination on the part of baristas. Basically, men in coffee shops are more likely to act visibly impatient and demanding. And this, in part, is because aggression is generally seen as a good, socially-approved trait in a man and a bad, frowned-upon attribute in a woman. I Think Everyone's Already Blogged on this AlreadyIn case you haven't read it elsewhere, Barack Obama's gone and released some very worthy technology and media policy stuff, thus securing the crucial Larry Lessig endorsement and garnering yon effusive praise from Matt Stoller. Good stuff. Romney's Own Petard
Josh Marshall notes that Huckabee's Iowa surge could doom Mitt Romney, and Andrew on a not-unrelated note excerpts messages from folks citing theological disagreements with Mormons as a reason not to vote for him, before lamenting: It seems to me a shame that a largely competent, decent, Rockefeller Republican like Mitt Romney should be a victim of the party the Christianists have constructed. Compared with Giuliani, he is a blast of adulthood. There is some shame here, but I don't pity Romney. He could have tried to run as a political heir to George Romney on the basis of his record in Massachusetts, as a moderate technocrat. But he decided to try to remake himself as the Christian Right candidate, so it's really pretty fitting for him to be laid low by a real-deal preacher man like Huckabee or even a more plausible actor like Hollywood Fred. Clive CrookWhile I was out of town, The Atlantic seems to have secretly added a Clive Crook blog to the website and not told me. He says Hillary Clinton's baby bonds plan was a good idea and it's too bad it wound up getting dumped, and I agree. Candidate AttributesLarry Bartels emails Ezra Klein some data about his research on the impact (in terms of statistical correlation) of perceptions of different candidate attributes on voting behavior: "The analysis was based on survey questions asking voters to rate presidential candidates on a variety of dimensions. Here are the estimated effects of those evaluations on voting behavior, averaged over elections from 1980 to 2000. (The numbers are not directly interpretable, but the relative magnitudes are.)" I turned the numbers into a handy chart, showing the average on the left and the 2000 result on the right:
I'm not really sure what to make of this, though, as I sort of feel like people may tailor the characteristics they say they're looking for to suit the candidate they're going to vote for. Mainly, you want to be strong yet caring. Or caring yet strong. Tilting at WindmillsI was Googling for something else and found this 2005 Robert Atkinson article about inequality: While there is considerable agreement among economists over what has happened, there is much less consensus over why inequality has worsened, whether it is a problem and what, if anything, governments should do to address it. Many on the right see growing inequities as actually a spur to growth. Many on the left blame the New Economy's dynamism and competition and pursue a Don Quixote-like effort to resurrect the old economy. New Economy aside, I think Atkinson should abandon his quixotic effort to convince us that "Don Quixote-like" is a phrase people should be using. Blaming the MediaRobert Toll of the Toll Brothers' home building firm blames the media for the poor state of the housing market: “Perhaps as the presidential campaign heats up and moves to the front page, negative articles about housing will move off the front page,” he said. “Then, hopefully, the positive underpinnings of low interest rates, low unemployment and a decent economy will raise new-home-buyer confidence.” That to me indicates that the market has a good deal further to fall. If this is the best hope of an industry insider, then he obviously doesn't have much on which to pin his hopes. If anything, the media's role in this has been the reverse -- as the bubbles was inflating, papers seem to have done a lot of cashing-in through ad-heavy and cheerleading-oriented special real estate sections that I think helped obscure how unusual the then-happening price trends were. Good NewsMortgage reform passes House 291 to 127. The Blue Dogs took some heat over this issue, but at the end of the day they did the right thing and every single Democrat voted for the bill. The leadership tends to only attract attention when something goes wrong, but this is a significant success. Judis Kyl-LiebermanThe debate's finally gotten back to this issue, which is good because earlier today I read a very good precis of exactly what's so troubling about Clinton's support of the resolution, notwithstanding her backpedalling since she started taking heat for it. I'll just turn this over to John Judis: Clinton's reason for supporting the resolution was that, as the Times put it, she was shifting from "primary mode, when she needs to guard against critics from the left, to general election mode, when she must guard against critics from the right." Clinton, the article said, was also "solidifying crucial support from the pro-Israel lobby." Right. This isn't just about the impact of the vote, it's about what the vote tells us about Clinton's approach to these issues. QuestionsAs ever, it's really striking to observe the difference between the audience-generated questions and the journalist-generated questions. Wolf Blitzer's main interest is in asking questions designed to put Democrats on the wrong side of public opinion, even if those questions are about things like driver's licenses or "merit pay" for teachers that aren't really under federal purview. Efforts to reframe those questions by putting those topics in the larger context of immigration policy more generally or education more generally are derided as cowardly dodges. The point, after all, is to force a choice -- piss off an interest group, or say something that could be used in a GOP attack ad. The real people, by contrast, ask about problems in their lives. The mother of an individual ready reserve member wants to know about Iran policy. The mother of an active duty soldier wants to know about military pay versus pay for military contractors. An Arab-American wants to know about racial profiling. Then the candidates explain what they think about these issues. The voters are curious and want to learn where the candidates stand. Blitzer doesn't care about informing the public about the issues -- he actually objects when candidates try to explain their views on broad immigration policy issues -- he's just interested in trying to embarrass the candidates. UPDATE: Great example. An audience member makes the sensible observation that the candidates haven't talked about the Supreme Court and asks them to say something about their approach to picking nominees. I'd be interested to hear the answers to these questions. The journalists decide to change this isn't a pointed question about a Roe litmus test -- gotcha! -- do Democrats violate the "no litmus test" taboo, or do they piss off feminists? Good work! Blah. November 16, 2007ComebackLooking at things the morning after, it seems like the fake narrative coming out of yesterday's debate is that Hillary Clinton is now "coming back" after her fake "stumbling" in the previous debate. As best I can tell, she didn't actually stumble then and she's not actually coming back now and nothing has actually changed. I thought John Edwards' thing about how the last time we had unified Democratic control, we passed NAFTA but killed health care was a nice (if slightly unfair) dramatization of the point that pure partisan thinking doesn't bring about big progressive change, but it seems to me that there's little evidence in the public opinion data that attacks -- even very warranted attacks -- on Bill Clinton's record can sway a Democratic primary electorate. Between FriendsThinking about Wolf Blitzer's atrocious performance as moderator and Tim Russert's slicker, better-executed |
