The facts about smoking and mental illness are stark. Almost half of all cigarettes sold in the United States (44 percent) are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day -- often three packs. Furthermore, smokers with mental illness are much more likely to smoke their cigarettes right down to the filters.
I'd like to see this demographic analysis drill down deeper. I imagine the mentally ill population differs from the general population in various ways that may correlate with an increased propensity to smoke.
Photo by Flickr user paszczak000 used under a Creative Commonse license
James Fallows notes a Pew research paper that concludes that "News about the Iraq war does not dominate the public's consciousness nearly as much as it did last winter." Public interest in Iraq news has declined, as has the quantity of Iraq coverage in the media. This reminds me that one of my pet theories about the 2004 campaign is that Howard Dean's candidacy was damaged by the mere fact that the primaries were getting closer as the primaries got closer. Coverage of the campaign squeezed out some of the coverage of Iraq and he was hurt by having his signature issue fade from confidence.
The situation today is very different in many respects, but this basic dynamic should hold. More and more and more of the minutes and column-inches dedicated to Serious News is going to be campaign related, so we'll hear less and less about foreign affairs and Iraq will need to share the stage with an apparently worsening situation in Afghanistan, with whatever happens in Pakistan, etc.
When the administration announced this plan to open up military airspace to passenger jets during the busy Thanksgiving travel season it sounded like a good idea to me, and I considered writing a post with a title like "Rare Good Bush Administration Idea." But then I thought to myself, "hey Matt, wtf do you know about air traffic control; lots of Bush's ideas sound good to people who don't know what they're talking about so you'd better reserve judgment." Now Fallows says it's a scam and won't do any good at all: "it's like thinking you'll be able to fit 300 cars into a 200-space parking lot if you open an additional entrance ramp." More here.
Fred Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon say we'd better get ready to deploy "a sizable combat force" to Pakistan for a mission that "would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership." Now since this is obviously a terrible idea, Kagan and O'Hanlon endeavor to make it less terrible by assuming a can opener and arguing that this force should come "not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations."
This plan and a pony will get you a pony.
Even more stunning in some respects, as Max Bergmann points out for Democracy Arsenal, is that they're quick to assure us that despite the necessity of this coming occupation of Pakistan, it wouldn't "be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan." Thus indicating, as Bergmann says, that "Kagan and O'Hanlon clearly have a hidden stash of U.S. soldiers."
The task of stabilizing a collapsed Pakistan is beyond the means of the United States and its allies. Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size. Thus, if we have any hope of success, we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.
Can you imagine a responsible member of the Pakistani military inviting a large foreign military presence into the country as a prophylactic measure against a government collapse that hasn't actually happened? Can you imagine what the popular response to that would be? People already seem tired of living under a military dictatorship over there -- transforming it into a military dictatorship that involved tons of foreign troops seems very unlikely to shift that calculus.
(Mr. Reagan was understandably anathema in the black community not because of his personal views but because of his consistent opposition to federal civil rights legislation, most notably the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.)
Hitler is anathema in the Jewish community not because of his personal views, but because of his consistent advocacy of the eradication of Europe's Jewish population, most notably during the landmark Holocaust of the early 1940s. There's something wrong there, eh? Reagan was a politician. His political views are what matters. And during the crucial civil rights fights of the mid-1960s, Reagan stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the forces of white supremacy. How important Reagan's background as an anti-civil rights activist was to his 1980 election win seems debatable — I've previously noted that it wasn't a close election and the objective facts about the late 1970s would have made it extremely difficult for Carter to win re-election under any circumstances — but Reagan's record is his record, and his views about political issues are personal views, whether or not some of his best friends were black.
I'm of the somewhat Grinchian cast of mind that does things like worry about the deadweight loss of Christmas every time to so-called "Holiday Season" comes around. To make a long story short, if two people each buy each other a gift worth $100 the odds are that both will wind up worse off than if they'd just spent the $100 on themselves. But try explaining this thinking to loved ones and you'll probably wind up worse off than if you'd just spent the $100. Tyler Cowen is working toward a solution:
Buy someone a book of stamps. It has the efficiency properties of a cash transfer (who doesn't need stamps?), yet if you choose an attractive issue it will show (a little) more thought than money alone. And hey -- you had to stand in line to get it, or endure their ugly web site, and at a monopolistic institution at that.
There you have it: Stamps, the efficiency-minded person's Christmas gift. I suppose farecards at your local mass transit authority also have some of the same properties (speaking of which, I actually need a new SmarTrip Card if anyone's looking to buy me something...) so consider that as well.
Photo by Flickr user threlkelded used under a Creative Commons license
Greg Sargent is obviously confused. "Tough" questioning isn't when you examine a public figure's claims for factual accuracy, it's when you examine them for consistency. So if Rudy Giuliani says Bernard Kerik was a good choice to lead the NYPD, it'd be "tough" to toss up on the screen some years-old statement in which Rudy said something that was different. Asking whether or not the things he's saying are true isn't what toughness is about.
I read in thePost that "About 61 percent of the [homicide] cases [in DC] have resulted in an arrest this year." That made me realize that I have no idea whether that's a high number or a low one. So on to Google. Here I learn that in New York City 40.2 percent of murders go unsolved. In 2002, "the clearance rate for murder was 64.0 percent." So DC doesn't seem to be far out of the typical range -- if you kill someone, you've got a bit less than a forty percent chance of getting away with it.
Arthur Schlesinger liked to defend his decision during the 1960 campaign to defect from the Adlai Stevenson camp to the John F. Kennedy camp in terms of the idea that Stevenson had a discomfort with the idea of power that, while arguably admirable in some respects, was fundamentally inconsistent with the realities of political leadership. I've seen analogies to this situation applied to the Clinton-Obama race several times. Available on the internet is this post from George Packer which lays the analogy out in some detail, and this interview with Sean Wilentz in which he refers to it more elliptically but explicitly draws the conclusion that Clinton is like Kennedy and Obama is like Stevenson and that this is the reason to support Clinton.
This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. For one thing, Schlesinger's morality play in which Stevenson is an honorable man but maybe too honorable to beat the GOP in '52 and '56 whereas the slightly seemier Kennedy gets the job done in '60 is a pretty weird interpretation of the politics of the 1950s. In 1952, the Democrats had been in the White House for 20 years, Harry Truman's approval ratings were in the low twenties, and the Republican nominee was one of the most respected and popular men in the world. What's more, instead of taking advantage of Truman's unpopularity and his personal popularity to try to revive American conservatism, Ike just ditched all of the GOP's less popular positions and ran, won, and governed as a moderate. Under the circumstances, Stevenson was doomed.
Meanwhile, the reality of the Kennedy Administration -- as opposed to the Myth of Camelot -- is precisely what makes people leery of Clinton. A 50%+1 win followed by a domestic agenda that goes nowhere in congress and a drift toward foreign policy disaster driven in part by a unshakeable fear of looking soft on defense.
And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.
Andrew says a hypothetical scandal in which Bill Clinton is revealed to have been conducting a post-presidential affair would be very bad for Hillary Clinton:
I may not care about the personal details of a president's marriage, but, given the Clintons' history, purple state Americans may not be so sure. The story could remind them of the psychodramas of the 1990s, dramas that impeded a president's ability to govern. It could remind them of how hollowed out Hillary Clinton's psyche has had to become - for enabling her husband's foibles as the price for her own political advancement.
Meh. I'm pretty sure most people would trade the "psychodramas of the 1990s" over the present situation. Meanwhile, it's just not the case that most people see Hillary's relationship with Bill in this light. The reality of the situation is that her highest approval ratings ever all come from 1998 and 1999; people view her and her handling of the situation sympathetically. After all, I don't actually think it's particularly unusual for a married couple's relationship to be strained by infidelity and for them to stay together nonetheless.
Digby offers up an interesting slice of history wherein David Broder acknowledges that he played a large role in assisting Richard Nixon's successful effort to destroy Senator Ed Muskie's political career, but doesn't seem to feel especially sorry about it or resolve to do anything differently in the future. It's typical of the common code within the press corps which isn't indifferent to the fact that it does its job in a way that wreaks horrible damage on the country, but actually wears indifference to the consequences of their actions as a badge of honor.
I was looking for some background on yesterday's ludicrous op-ed from Fred Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon about how we need to prepare to invade Pakistan, and I found this Charles Knight blog post from the spring. The post noted that Kagan and O'Hanlon collaborated on an essay for this book from the Stanley Foundation -- a collection of papers where one Republican and one Democrat team up to write something about US national security policy.
Well, what Pollack and O'Hanlon came up with was the need for a dramatic expansion in America's ground forces. And it turns out that one of the scenarios they canvassed to justify this troop build-up was precisely this sort of "stabilization" mission in Pakistan.
Mostly this goes to show how senseless it is to make "bridging the partisan divide" as such a goal of an intervention into the American political debate. There are lots of people with Republican Party backgrounds who have sensible things to say about aspects of US national security policy, and a person like Steve Clemons at New America who's gone to great lengths to try to find such people and get them networked with the progressives who've been leading the pushback against the Bush administration is a very valuable endeavor. But a Fred Kagan-O'Hanlon teamup, just like this teamup of Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan makes things worth rather than better. A bad idea doesn't become better just because you can find some Democrat somewhere who supports it.
I really meant to attend this GW event with Stephen Biddle, Nora Bensahel, and Larry Corb on Friday but I wound up unable to make it. Marc Lynch was there and recounts Biddle's argument that the surge might work: "if everything goes right and if the US continues to 'hit the lottery' with the spread of local ceasefires and none of a dozen different spoilers happens, then a patchwork of local ceasefires between heavily armed, mistrustful communities could possibly hold if and only if the US keeps 80,000-100,000 troops in Iraq for the next twenty to thirty years."
I guess I agree with that. To me, it sounds like a very good reason to leave. I'm not sure where Biddle stands on that, since he's usually tended to stay a bit cagey as to what policy recommendations he would make. At any it seems clear to me that even the "optimistic" scenarios for Iraq now amount to promising to bear huge costs for a smallish chance at an unclear payoff.
Foreign Policy interviews Mahmud Ali Durrani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States, and he's none too pleased about charges that Pakistan ought to better account for the aid money we give them:
This all illustrates a general problem with aid as a tool of influence. If you see a country that just seems awesome and worth supporting, you can give them a bunch of money and there it is. But if you see a regime that's not especially awesome, and think your aid money can rope them into a web of influence, you find that trying to actually use the aid to manipulate the other country prompts more than a little of the old nationalist backlash. Doesn't mean it's not worth doing in some circumstances, but there are real limits to what can be achieved this way.
She seemed somewhat muted Sat. evening, perhaps because she was slightly under the weather (I heard her people had requested tissues). Intentionally or not, her serious demeanor worked -- it played off the activist energy in the crowd and came off as hard-bitten, realistic, even, dare I say, presidential. [...] Effectively, she was saying, "I'm with you; I understand the problem. But you need to give me some room to work -- attacking those of us on your side for insufficient purity isn't helpful." [...] Clinton was by far the most responsive to specific questions. She argued in some detail for why she is uniquely able to accomplish something on this issue. [...] My impression -- and this was confirmed multiple times by various audience members I spoke to later -- is that Clinton had the best grasp of the political and policy details. She was the most comfortable speaking off the top of her head. As one political operative put it to me later, "she's always the smartest one in the room."
To me, this is the most convincing case to Clinton. Rather than Sean Wilentz's Stevenson versus JFK analogy, I would analogize it to Lyndon Johnson versus every well-known liberal politician of the 1950s and 1960s. There were dozens of politicians circa 1964 with better records of bold progressive leadership on the crucial issues of the day. And Johnson did little-to-nothing to actually create the great progressive opportunity of the '64 election. But in the wake of JFK's assassination and the Goldwater nomination and the decades of groundwork that had been laid by the Civil Rights movement and the progressive unions the opportunity presented itself. And at just that moment the country was led by a man who was an opportunist -- a veteran master of the political and legislative process saw the opportunity and seized maximum advantage of it.
But of course, you can't talk about Johnson without talking about Vietnam.
And this bothers me about Hillary Clinton in a way that extends beyond the mere argument-by-analogy. What Roberts recounts as Clinton's attitude toward the climate change issue -- she understands the problem, she understands the solution, and rather than telling advocates what they want to hear she's telling them that she also understands how to move the ball forward in concrete, realistic terms -- seems pretty appealing to me. And on climate change, health care, and most of the other big domestic issues, I believe that she does understand the problem and understand the solution. The left-right divide on those topics has relatively little to do with disagreements about desirable end-states. Rather, you mostly see disagreement about political possibilities, or even things that aren't disagreement at all, but just different politicians responding to different political circumstances.
On foreign policy, though, I have no idea what direction Clinton wants to take the country. Barack Obama, by opposing the invasion of Iraq from the beginning, by proposing a "grand bargain" with Iran, and by promising a return to our commitment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to work toward the goal of complete eradication of nuclear weapons from the world has sent me important signals about his goals. He, like me, wants us to return to a policy grounded in international cooperation and efforts to strengthen international law and international institutions. John Edwards has staked out similar policy terrain and compensated for his bad earlier position on Iraq by boldly criticizing the "war on terror" concept.
Clinton, by contrast, hasn't done any of that. She's gestured in the direction of enhanced diplomacy with Iran, but her Foreign Affairs essay pointedly didn't pull full normalization of relations on the table as a potential carrot and she hasn't espoused a push for a "grand bargain." On nukes, she's taken the very odd middle path of joining Obama and Edwards in praising the Schultz/Perry/Kissinger/Nunn initiative while mischaracterizing what they say as a call for "reducing reliance on nuclear weapons" -- which just isn't what they said.
All of which is to say that while on health care and climate I believe that Clinton and her rivals all want basically the same thing, and that somewhat plausible arguments can be made that each of them are best-suited to achieve those common goals, it's really not clear to me on foreign policy. The Democratic Party hasn't historically been organized around a foreign policy doctrine. Joe Lieberman was run out of the party in 2006, but was the Vice Presidential nominee in 2000, and he can very plausibly argue that his views didn't change in those intervening six years and he's always been a knee-jerk hawk. Clinton's been politically savvy enough to talk a liberal talk, and for all I know would be substantively savvy enough in office to avoid foreign policy disasters. But she's also been careful to avoid committing herself to foreign policy liberalism as firmly as Edwards and Obama have, and for all I know she has radically wrongheaded ideas about national security on the merits.
When I read something like Josh Marshall bemoaning his disappointment that the Obama campaign hasn't done a very good job of making a forceful argument for why he'd be a better president, I sympathize. But I also think I should take my hat off to Hillary Clinton's campaign -- I think this has been less a failure on Obama's part, then cleverness on Clinton's. She's managed to position herself on foreign policy issues in a way that signals her differences with Obama very clearly to the tiny community of specialists while completely blurring them to the broader audience of voters. I'm not sure how this can be overcome, but I'm sure it can't be overcome by having writers further obscure the differences by focusing primarily on what a good job Clinton's done of obscuring them.
The basic reality is that each and every time the candidates stake out a position on something, Clinton takes a less-liberal line. Then each and every time Obama starts getting traction with the argument that Clinton is too hawkish, she backtracks and makes the argument that there's no real difference here. And it's true that if you look at any one thing with a microscope, the "no difference" argument can be made to stick. But it's the pattern that matters -- the initial support for Iraq, the more hawkish caste to her advisory team, the "naive and irresponsible" line, the meager carrots she's prepared to offer Iran, her weird position on nuclear disarmament, her campaign's courting of CANF and AIPAC, her vote for Kyl-Lieberman -- all point in the same direction and it's a frightening one.
It's hard to prove that Clinton would be a bad foreign policy president. And it might be hard to prove because it's not true. But it might be hard to prove just because she's done a good job of making it hard to prove. And I'm not comfortable taking that risk.
Back in July, Jeff Klein wrote about perennial expectations that some success on the part of Iraq's national soccer team would bring the country together. As he notes, it keeps not happening: Soccer doesn't stop civil wars. And now we read in an article headlined "Iraq says the worst is over in Baghdad" that "The newfound calm, which continues to be shattered by occasional car bombs and roadside blasts, did not come soon enough for four members of the Iraqi national soccer team who fled during a trip to Australia and requested asylum."
I could understand if giant business enterprises were paying Alberto Gonzalez tens of thousands of dollars to give speeches. It'd be a kind of bribe, a kind of wingnut welfare -- yet another signal that in the United States committing crimes on behalf of the conservative movement can be a good career move -- that we're familiar with. But instead we've got colleges and universities getting in on the game, specifically the University of Florida and Washington University in St. Louis.
Laura Rozen reports on how Freedom's Watch, the group that made a name for itself whipping GOP support for the surge, is now gearing up to propagandize for the next war. One thing they'll have plenty of as they make the case for bombing Iran is money:
Its top donors include Sheldon Adelson, the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, a philanthropist for pro-Israel causes, and, according to Forbes, the third wealthiest man in the United States; John Templeton, a conservative philanthropist; Mel Sembler, a shopping mall developer from Florida, former U.S. ambassador to Italy, and a board member of the American Enterprise Institute; Matthew Brooks and Richard Fox, co-founders of the Republican Jewish Coalition; and Kevin Moley, a former advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and past U.S. ambassador to international organizations. One of group's financial backers told the New York Times that Freedom's Watch easily expected to raise $200 million in donations by November 2008. Raising big money "will be easy," said the anonymous benefactor, who added "that several of the founders each wrote a check for $1 million.
In addition to being really rich, Mel Sembler -- and a few other relatives in Florida -- is a very generous donor to sundry Republican politicians and Joe Lieberman. Adelson is much the same, but used to gives to Democrats as well as Republicans -- Harry Reid got $1,000 in 1995 (presumably casion-related rather than national security), Carl Levin got $1,000 in 1996, the DNC (i.e., Bill Clinton's re-election campaign) got $100,000 in 1996 -- but no Dems whose names I recognize seem to have gotten Adelson bucks in quite some time.
Historical Document: Holbrooke on Iraq, January 2001
I've written in the past in praise of the Clinton administration's focus on terrorism as it closed out its second term, and the misguided nature of the Bush administration's decision -- from Day 1 -- to refocus things on Iraq. Of course, not all Clinton administration officials were especially prescient on this score:
The effort to contain Iraq over the past 10 years, "while it is far from satisfactory," has been better than nothing, Holbrooke said. However, "the lack of sufficient solidarity among the enforcing nations and voting nations has undermined" the effort, he added.
The economic embargo imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait remains in force until the UN certifies that Iraq has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction. But nations have violated the sanctions and three permanent members of the UN Security Council have been pressing for the certification. In the meantime, Iraq has refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into the country since December 1998. "Saddam Hussein's activities continue to be unacceptable and, in my view, dangerous to the region and, indeed, to the world," Holbrooke continued, "not only because he possesses the potential for weapons of mass destruction but because of the very nature of his regime.
"His willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times," he said.
The Bush administration "will have to deal with this problem, which we inherited from our predecessors and they now inherit from us," Holbrooke said.
Now the good news is that Holbrooke didn't follow that up with "so Bush should invade the country for no real reason." Then again, neither did Bush start saying we should invade Iraq for no real reason back in January 2001. But after 9/11, Bush saw a political opportunity to build support for an invasion of Iraq, and Holbrooke agreed with him since, after all, Saddam's "willingness to be cruel internally is not unique in the world, but the combination of that and his willingness to export his problems makes him a clear and present danger at all times" so an invasion seems like a good idea once it's politically possible.
I'm not very excited by the prospect of Hillary Clinton making him Secretary of State.
Check it out, it's the Gucci Baby Carrier, "recommended for baby 3 to 9 months or up to 20 lbs." It can be yours for just $850. And since Gwen Stefani has one, I don't see how you can afford to do without. Purseblog remarks:
When I first laid eyes on the Gucci Baby Carrier, I was a fan but still a tad skeptical. It did seem a bit over the top. But now that I saw the proud new mommie, Gwen Stefani, carrying her adorable little Kingston in one, I am in love!
The training of the Frontier Corps remains a concern for some. NATO and American soldiers in Afghanistan have often blamed the Frontier Corps for aiding and abetting Taliban insurgents mounting cross-border attacks. “It’s going to take years to turn them into a professional force,” said one Western military official. “Is it worth it now?”
It's too bad that the quotation here really has nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is that the people we're proposing to fund are fighting alongside the Taliban. That's not "unprofessional" it's just not in America's strategic interests. The last thing we need is a better funded, trained, and equipped more professionalized pro-Taliban military force in Pakistan. I wish the article had looked at this a bit deeper.
There's tons of interesting information about the history of American public opinion on this site which has some tables made from the American National Election Study dataset. Here we see answers to the question "Are you in favor of desegregation, strict segregation, or something in between." I really couldn't say what that "something in between" would be, but it sure seems to be a popular answer. Between 1964 and 1968, the rise in support for the "in between" position seems mostly driven by the decline in support for segregation, which is all to the good. Then in 1970, support for desegregation reaches its peak as both segregation and desegregation decline.
But then in the next three surveys, support for desegregation consistently declines as more and more people shift into this mysterious middle ground position. It's too bad that they stopped asking this question in 1978 because public opinion was shifting throughout the 1970s and not just in the predictable sense of a steady decline in support for segregation.
I think Kevin Drum's focus on foreign policy "instincts" in raising a question like "Iraq aside, do you think Gore has fundamentally changed his worldview since the 90s in ways that Hillary hasn't?" is a mistake. It's worth considering principles. Iraq was premised on two big ideas. One was that unilateral preventive military force is a good way to handle non-proliferation policy. The second was that unilateral preventive military force was a good way to advance democracy. People who opposed the war, like Gore, believed that neither of those things were true. People who supported the war believed that one or both of those things was true.
I, for example, never really thought that invading random medium-sized dictatorships to try to turn them into democracies made sense. I did, however, believe that the use of unilateral military force as a tool of non-proliferation policy was a good idea. In retrospect, I, like John Edwards, no longer believe that. Does Hillary Clinton still believe it?
But to look at it from the "instincts" point of view, I'm not sure how much we can really conclude from looking at the Clinton years. I think the policies Bill Clinton enacted while in office were pretty good. At the same time, it's clear that the Clinton administration perceived itself, rightly or wrongly, to be making foreign policy under circumstances of tight political constraints. And, in particular, they believed that the tight political constraints made it unwise or impossible to pursue really big policy initiatives. That makes it hard to say exactly where anyone's instincts lay. It's clear that some members of Bill Clinton's administration left office feeling it was too bad that the political circumstances didn't exist that would make it possible to launch a preventive war in Iraq (Kenneth Pollack says as much in The Threatening Storm). It's also clear that some members left office feeling it was too bad that the political circumstances didn't exist that would make it possible to ratify the Kyoto Protocols (Al Gore, obviously). And some people probably thought both of those things.
And so on and so forth down the line. I don't find anything in the Clinton administration record terribly frightening. But it wasn't perfect either. There's raw material in there for a great foreign policy and also material in there for a terrible one. To me, the most troubling thing about Hillary Clinton is that her read of the politics is to always err on the side of hawkishness. And of course if she (a) votes for Iraq, (b) watches Iraq turn into an unpopular disaster, (c) declines to apologize for her actions, (d) wins the Democratic nomination, and (e) wins the presidency then that's only going to re-enforce that interpretation of politics. After all, if unapologetic support for a hugely unpopular foreign policy disaster doesn't even doom you in a Democratic Party primary, then why shouldn't you always err on the side of hawkishness?
His blog for The Atlantic is now officially up and running, find all the Clive Crook you want here. His first post says stuff I don't really agree with about Social Security, though at the same time I do think a lot of folks have been harder on Obama's statements than he deserves.
The TV and movie studios say writers can't get fairly compensated for internet-related revenues because there are no such revenues and never will be. Or sometimes it's because the revenues are so uncertain. Why, one wonders, are they so eager to hog all this money if there isn't actually any money at stake? Maybe it's because in other contexts they're actually quite confident that they'll make a lot of money off the web:
Under Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party assembled a political coalition so vast and diffuse that it included the "solid south" voting bloc of white supremacists, but also included most African-American voters, who were attracted to the New Deal's economic program and who were beginning to be incorporated into some Northern political machines. This, in turn, helped spur the growth of a civil rights bloc inside the Democratic Party that saw its first meaningful stirrings during Harry Truman's administration. When Dwight Eisenhower came along to try to rebuild the Republican coalition, the GOP both pursued a strategy of trying to take advantage of Southern disgruntlement to win outer south states, and a strategy of trying to win black voters back over to the GOP. This latter strategy had some success in 1956 (driven in party by Ike's endorsement by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.) but by the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race those gains had all been re-erased. David Nichols recounts the post-election assessment discussion between Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, RNC chair Thruston Morton, and a few other White House aides (A Matter of Justice, page 262):
Ike turned the discussion to civil rights. He observed that Attorney General Rogers was "somewhat to the left" of himself on civil rights. Nixon groused that a statement during the campaign by his vice-presidential running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., about possibly putting a Negro in the cabinet "just killed us in the South." Eisenhower bitterly complained: "We have made civil rights a main part of our effort these past eight years but have lost Negro support instead of increasing it." Negroes, the president said, "just do not give a damn." Nixon remarked that black loyalty to the Democrats was "a bought vote, and it isn't bought by civil rights." Morton agreed with the vice president and said, "the hell with them."
Eisenhower was tempted to agree with Morton, but he pulled the conversation back to a more civil tone. He would not say "the hell with them," although he could not comprehend why his efforts were not more appreciated. No one, he said, was "more sincere" than he was in "bettering opportunities" for African-Americans. He recalled reading about economic reprisals against Negroes in Tennesee and said that such reports still "infuriated him."
After a couple of years of dawdling, the Kennedy administration eventually got behind a strong civil rights program -- stronger than anything Ike had ever embraced -- and LBJ was able to get it passed through congress. With that done, the correct direction of the cynical calculation shifted decisively in favor of the Nixon/Morton "to hell with them" point of view and the rest, as they say, is history.
I'd like to be able to answer that question, but unfortunately it'll take a little while. During the pre-Thanksgiving rush to leave town, the Office of the Inspector General's press operation is in the hands of Terry Heide, who normally handles congressional affairs for the OIG. When I called Heide and posed the question, she replied, "The OIG has no further comments on anything related to Mr. Krongard's situation." Attempts at a follow-up were repelled by an instruction that there was "no need to call us back, because we have no comment." Click.
That's in response to the whole Krongards investigating Krongards situation they have over there at the State Department.
How did former Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales' lucrative appearance at the University of Florida go? Well, two protestors got arrested but as best anyone can tell they aren't being held incommunicado without charges or tortured, so things are looking up.
As part of my continuing commitment to bringing you, the blog-reading public, the very best in Canadian indie rock video, here's "Backed Out on The..." off Spirit If by what we're apparently supposed to call Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew.
This apparent scientific breakthrough in the use of non-embryonic stem cells puts me in the mind of the Democratic wedge issues of yore. Embryonic stem cells, of course, were supposed to cure America of its affection for the religious right. But do you remember how for several years debates about health care policy in the United States were dominated by the push for a Patients' Bill of Rights? For 2008, all of the Democrats seem determined to go forward with almost frighteningly non-trivial agendas, so we may not see the likes of these issues again for several years, so start savoring stem cells now in case this research pays off and the whole controversy goes away.
I think Tom Lantos has been a problematic force, especially given his commitee chairmanship, on foreign policy issues these past few years, but at first glance a primary challenge doesn't seem particularly promising to me since, as Kos and Stoller note he's very liberal on domestic issues so there's not a ton of vulnerabilities there ... it's a hawkish attitude toward the broader Middle East and apparently complaints about inattention to the district and not much else.
Writing about the whole race and realignment issue, Ross says the key thing to keep in mind is that "Publius is right: 'Nixon’s law and order message was lost on no one.' It was lost on no one because violent crime went up three hundred and sixty-seven percent between 1960 and 1980." Silly Publius, silly liberals.
But wait, Nixon was elected in 1968, not 1980. Meanwhile, the population grew between 1960 and 1980. And the overall violent crime index is unreliable thanks to the vagaries of classification standards. But lets look at the homicide rate which works for comparisons over time. We see that the murder rate went up a good deal from 5.1 per 100,000 people in 1960 to 6.9 per 100,000 in 1968, at which point Nixon's "law and order" message captured the hearts of America's silent majority. But as you'll see from the above chart, there's no clear further correlation between either the absolute level of crime or the trend in crime and partisan or incumbent party success. Nixon wasn't punished in 1972 for the fact that, despite his law and order platform, crime kept going up. Crime was way higher in 1984 than it was in 1968. And so on and so forth.
Along these lines, if a move to the right was really the consequence of rising crime rates, one would expect the most conservative groups in the electorate to be those most afflicted by violent crime -- low-income African-Americans. But of course that's not how it works at all. Thus while "crime" and "law and order" were obviously successful electoral themes for the Republican Party in the 1970s and 80s there's little indication that their utility as messages was tightly linked to the objective facts about crime. After all, if the appeal of "crime" messaging was really about crime, its effectiveness should have diminished in years (1972, 1988, and to some extent 1984) when GOP leadership failed to address the issue and/or its effectiveness should have been correlated with the audience's risk of being victimized by crime, but neither is true.
I've been wondering for some time now how Mitt Romney would finesse the point that few theologically orthodox Christians consider Mormonism to be a species of Christianity. Byron York kinda sorta got an answer to the question:
Sometimes one forgets that Romney was trained as a lawyer, but not on that day. I tried one more time. “Well, okay, if you have been told that by other people, what is your reaction to the substance of what they are saying?” “You know, the term ‘Christian’ means different things to different people,” Romney told me. “Jews aren’t Christian. That doesn’t preclude a Jew from being able to run for office and become president. I believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of the world and is the son of God. Now, some people say, well, that doesn’t necessarily make you a Christian because Christian refers to a certain group of evangelical Christian faiths. That’s fine. That’s their view. Others say, no, anyone who believes in Jesus Christ as the son of God and the Savior should be called Christian. That’s fine, too. I’ll just describe what I believe and not try to distinguish my faith from others. That’s really something for my faith to do and for the churches amongst themselves to consider.”
Basically, Romney seems to be trying to indicate that he believes he's a Christian (which is the Mormon view) without quite saying so, thus attempting to avoid getting into an argument with people who think that's wrong. Daniel Larison says "this attempt to have it both ways is going to dissatisfy a lot of Christian and Mormon voters alike." It certainly seems more like an argument that liberals would find appealing than one likely to persuade conservatives, but I have no idea how much this kind of thing bothers people. As a non-Christian myself, I'd kind of like to see Romney embrace the non-Christian label and try to break some barriers, but evidently he thinks trying to fudge the difference will work out better for him.
I can see I haven'tconvinced Kevin Drum. But I'm not sure I'm going to try any harder to "prove" that her foreign policy will be mad. Maybe it will be good. There's a lot of uncertainty. If there were some other clear reason to prefer Hillary Clinton, maybe I'd back her despite my doubts. But I don't think there is. In domestic policy and electability terms, I think all three have some strengths and some weakness. On foreign policy, every indication available to me that there's any difference between her and Edwards or Obama suggests that it'll be a difference that doesn't reflect well on her.
How sure am I that she'd be worse? Not incredibly sure. But to me the great difficulty of this race is that Clinton's established such a strong presumption that she'll be the nominee that it gets difficult to argue against her without making the case that she's somehow horrible. Either she's the devil, or else she should be president. But that's silly.
When I see a race between two politicians, one of whom got Iraq wrong and one of whom got it right, to me that establishes a presumption in favor of the candidate who got it right, no matter whose husband the wrong one is. When it turns out that the one who got it wrong also has a group of advisors heavily weighted toward the group of pro-war "experts" who helped push so many Democratic politicians into taking her wrong position on the war in 2002, that re-enforces my presumption. When the one who got it right is closer to a circle of people who were cast out of favor due to their opposition to the war or willingness to associate with Very Shrill Howard Dean, that re-enforces my presumption. Stuff like the Kyl-Lieberman vote, the funny business on nuclear weapons, the "naive and irresponsible" bit all further re-enforces my presumption.
And I think once you look at it that way, the whole race looks different. There's been a ton of commentary about how Barack Obama hasn't said or done anything to debunk people's presumption that Hillary Clinton should be the nominee. And that appears to be true. But what if you don't start with that presumption? And I don't think we should. To me, the presumption that a candidate who can say he has a record of sound foreign policy judgment that can be contrasted with Republican X's record of support for Bush administration fiascos makes a lot more sense than the presumption that Clinton should get the nomination.
Here's National Election Survey data on voters' view of the question of the role of women in society. Specifically, "Some people feel that women should have an equal role with men in running business, industry and government. Others feel that women's place is in the home. Where would you place yourself on this scale or haven't you thought much about this?" The question asks you to locate yourself on a seven-point scale, I've graphed just the two extreme values which show a sharp trend in favor of the egalitarian position.
This is one respect, at least, in which the United States has become a far less conservative country since the 1980s. What's more, if you look at these demographic breakdowns you'll see that while a lot of the shift is accounted for by cohort replacement, a lot of it represents within-cohort change of heart.
Marc Ambinder takes a closer look at the lack of disclosure of who's donating to Bill Clinton's library and foundation. As I've written before, the Clinton's really ought to engage in more disclosure here. They're legally within their rights to do what they're doing, but the voters deserve to know. The Clinton Foundation's not a nickle-and-dime operation and it's not being funded by small grassroots contributions, either. As best one can tell the donor list is full of corporate titans and foreign potentates and one can only assume that these people are giving in part out of an expectation that they're currying favor and getting "access" in political terms along with whatever charitable notions they may have.
TNR asked a bunch of political consultant types what they thought the smart play was about the immigration issue, and to me the striking thing is that there's no agreement whatsoever. Henk Sheinkopf says "you can only lose support the more you talk about it, and that's particularly hurtful in the four states where this election will be decided--Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania." But Stan Greenberg says "Immigration is too central, too much a part of the set of issues voters are angry about." Whereas Norman Adler thinks the polling (done by, among others, Greenberg) showing huge levels of public concern about this is wrong says "I've been doing polling around New York state for some of my clients, and when we ask an open-ended question about what people are concerned about, immigration comes in well behind taxes, the economy, and health care." Bob Shrum thinks it's all about character "and it's probably more important to have an image of being a consistent truth-teller than it is to line up with the majority on every single issue--particularly one like immigration, which, in the end, isn't going to be the most important thing in determining how people vote."
Which is just to say that when you're looking at consultants' role in the political system, it's always worth recalling that these guys operate with the professional standards of witchcraft or astrology they don't have methods that lead practitioners to converge in their judgments about even big, obvious questions like "do voters care a lot about immigration, or do they only care a little." Basically, a determined politician will be able to go out and find a consultant -- and not just any consultant, but a reasonably successful and experienced one -- who tells him or her whatever it is that he or she wants to hear about just about anything. Which isn't to say the consultants are unscrupulous (though some of them are) but merely that there's a great diversity of opinion out there.
He's surging in Iowa. It seems to me that the ultimate beneficiary of this is probably John McCain. If Huckabee can beat Romney -- or even come close -- I think it exposes Romney as weak and fatally flawed. Similarly, Fred Thompson seems to have already demonstrated an inability to put together a viable presidential campaign. That leaves Giuliani.
But I think it also leaves orthodox, McCain-hating conservatives a chance to reconsider whether they really think McCain's heterodoxies are worse than Giuliani's. And I don't think they are. Meanwhile, McCain would have a lot of Rudy-esque benefits as a general election candidate but without nearly as much in the way of a track record of scandal and much and bizarre crazy outbursts (though he has some of these too). In particular, for years now he's been the rational, "respectable," face of lunatic schemes of global American military domination. Ramesh Ponnuru's probably the smartest totally orthodox conservative out there and that's how he sees it and I think more will join him if Huckabee succeeds in bursting the Romney Bubble.
Back last season when he wasn't getting any burn, I'd be yelling "Blatche!" at opportune moments from my seat whenever the game wasn't looking very competitive. Well, thanks to the departure of Calvin Booth and the injury to Etan Thomas it looks like this season is Andray's chance to play, and everyone in the Verizon Center was going wild last night at his beautiful line of 26 points on 12-14 shooting plus eight boards and a block in 29 minutes. Breakout game, woo! And, yes, he still can't really play defense, but this is still the Wizards.
Traveling today, should be relatively light, weekend-esque levels of posting. There's be some stuff out throughout the day, though, if you're still stuck at the office. Otherwise, happy Thanksgiving.
Speaking of the crime issue, I should say that while I think the United States has gotten unduly complacent about crime since the big "crime drop" of the 1990s. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to get the murder rate back down to 1950s levels if we try, and I think there's pretty good reason to believe that sustained further reductions in crime levels can help create a situation where our ludicrously high prison population can start coming down. What's more, I think we actually learned a lot during the 1980s and 1990s about effective crime control strategies. McMegan waxes vague:
On the other hand, "culture matters" doesn't get you very far as a poverty eradication program; no matter how much money you give welfare mothers, they'll still be on welfare. And "they're poor" has proven to offer little in the way of crime-reduction strategies; we've been much more successful with things like more police on the beat.
And, indeed, there is good evidence that more police officers helps reduce crime. What's more, though I really, really, really don't think Rudy Giuliani should be elected president, the Compstat system he and William Bratton implemented appears to be a helpful way of deploying the cops you have more effectively. And, indeed, Bratton is currently following up his successful runs in Boston and NYC with successes in Los Angeles and all this presumably has something to do with his methods (i.e., things that can be copied) rather than with his Batman-style crime fighting abilities.
What's more, as I somewhat reluctantly concede in this article, mass incarceration, though cruel and expensive, is somewhat effective as a crime-control strategy. Meanwhile, another big part of the 1990s story is that while welfare handouts may not reduce crime (this is a bit unclear, since welfare goes overwhelmingly to women and crime is committed overwhelmingly by men -- the gender gap also being a good reason to doubt that objective material need is the key variable here) wages for unskilled workers are an important determinant of crime rates in a way that's pretty intuitive -- if there's more money to be made working, you're ceteris paribus more likely to spend time working, and when you're behind the desk at CVS you're by definition not robbing anyone.
Relatedly, while I don't really believe that improved educational attainment is the key factor in curbing inequality, better performance at the bottom end -- fewer high-school drop-outs in particular -- could do a lot to reduce crime. Similarly, high-intensity early childhood interventions seem to work.
Last, while we spend a fortune on locking people up in prison, we also have all these parolees who are being supervised in a very bare-bones and largely useless manner. Something more expensive than traditional parole -- something like "Coerced Abstinence" -- would be way cheaper than full-time incarceration but way more effective than what we're doing now.
Photo by Flickr user Hisgett used under a Creative Commons license
Doing nothing about Kosovo independence -- "freezing its status" as they say -- would be the right thing to do, and demonstrate an unusual dose of prudence and good sense on the part of the Bush administration. There's nothing wrong, in my view, with the idea of Kosovo being independent, but obviously Serbs don't like it and it's become an important point of pride and whatnot for Russia. Under the circumstances, a unilateral Western recognition of Kosovo independence would do relatively little to help Kosovars in concrete terms and a great deal to worsen US-Russian relations with potentially bad consequences for our policy in the Caucuses and Iran.
Yesterday's post taking a brief look at the politics of civil rights in the 1950s serves as a reminder that the much-derided polarization of the contemporary era is in many ways a good thing.
Today, if you live in a state represented by a Republican incumbent, and the GOP controls congress, and you want policy to move in a more liberal direction, you can vote for the incumbent's Democratic challenger who's all-but-guaranteed to be more liberal than the GOP incumbent. And if the GOP incumbent's defeat leads control of the congress to flip, then the GOP Majority Leader will be replaced by a more Democratic Majority Leader and all the Republican committee chairs will be replaced by more liberal Democratic committee chairs.
Back in the day, it wasn't like that. Impacts were unpredictable. Booting a moderate northern Republican in favor of a liberal northern Democrat would shift things to the left. Unless, that is, it flipped control of the Senate in which case it might empower new Dixiecrat committee chairs who were more conservative -- especially on civil rights issues -- than were their GOP predecessors. Beyond that kind of unpredictability, voters were often confused as to what was at stake. In 1952 and then again in 1960 according to the National Election Survey just 50 percent of the public felt it could discern "any important differences in what the
Republicans and Democrats stand for?" In 1966 that fell to forty percent. In 1992 by contrast, it went up to 60 percent and it was all the way up at 76 percent in 2004.
Those, remember, are polls of people who actually voted. So while pundits may not like it when the parties draw clear distinctions, it seems to me that it's clearly preferable for the voters to be put in a situation where they feel like they understand the stakes and there's a relationship between votes cast and policy outcomes. A world in which the electorate is left perpetually baffled by the decisions they face and then the important issues are settled through arcane committee negotiations rather than on election day is just a means of empowering elites, not a path to better governance.
The good news for Obama, however, is that it gave him a chance to tweak Hillary yet again about Iraq. I don't know for sure if that's a winning strategy, given that his forward strategy for withdrawal isn't very different from HRC's, but it's a helluva lot better than Social Security. If he wants to disinguish himself more sharply from Hillary, this is the place to do it.
This is all true, but it's worth going non-meta here. Hillary Clinton's past support of invading Iraq doesn't really tell us anything about her forward-looking Iraq policy. And it's true that both candidates have left enough vagueness in their forward-looking Iraq policies that it's hard to say if they'd do things any differently. But past conduct vis-a-vis Iraq isn't a predictor of forward-looking Iraq policy but it does offer a glimpse at various other issues.
The thing that I feel people who want to discount the Iraq issue or write it off as some kind of teenage foible are missing is that the Iraq debate had actual content about the appropriate shape of American foreign policy. In particular, after 9/11 a lot of people -- Matt Yglesias, Hillary Clinton, Kevin Drum, George W. Bush, John Edwards -- decided that it was important for the United States to become more willing to engage in preventive war to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Obviously, I'm not going to stand here and tell you that that was an unforgivable mistake, since I made it myself. But since I've decided that that was a mistake -- not just Iraq, but the change of heart about preventive war that led me to support Iraq -- I'd like to find a candidate who didn't make that mistake (Obama) or who like me now thinks it was a mistake. Hillary Clinton, as best one can tell from her record, her public statements, and the views of people associated with her campaign, doesn't think that was a mistake.
Here's a fun story from Politico -- it seems John Boehner wants to fire two of the top staffers at the NRCC, but NRCC Chair Tom Cole (R-OK) says he'll resign before firing the dudes. This in the context of poor NRCC fundraising, and poor candidate recruitment. Given the generally adverse political climate, if you ask me it's very important to Boehner's future that he not get his way on this issue. That'll set up Cole and his key guys as useful scapegoats in case the Democrats make big gains.
As an aside – one of the most aggravating things about Saletan, Sullivan, Douthat etc’s embrace of the scientiness of race and IQ is that they seem to have convinced themselves that they are bold truthsayers fearlessly committed to challenging commonly accepted falsehoods etc etc etc.
Quite so. In particular, Saletan and my bloggy colleagues seem to have convinced themselves that there's overwhelming opposition in public opinion to the view that whites are intrinsically smarter than blacks and also that there's strong scientific consensus in favor of that hypothesis. As best I can tell, however, neither is true. The "black genes make you dumb" crowd is siding with widely-held popular prejudice against what most researchers believe.
Now, of course, that doesn't mean the racialists are wrong. It's entirely possible that the sort of views about black inferiority that were sufficiently widely and strongly held as to provide key ideological support for centuries of enslavement, imperial conquest, Jim Crow, etc. and had public support for desegregation in the low thirties and trending down as recently as 1978 are correct. Maybe the slave-owners, white supremacists, imperialists, etc. were right all along about the facts of the matter but simply drew the wrong normative conclusions. Maybe the scientific consensus over the past handful of decades is a mistake -- an ideology-driven overreaction to an ethical backlash against white supremacists.
But if that's your hypothesis, it should be seen as what it is, the hypothesis that a long-established widely-held popular prejudice is correct and the more recent expert consensus is mistaken. And of course one wonders why it is that Saletan is saying things like "I've been soaking my head in each side's computations and arguments. They're incredibly technical." Is Saletan a technical expert in the relevant fields and therefore felt a need to adjudicate? No. So what's the prurient interest in race science? And I say it's a prurient interest precisely because Saletan doesn't go on to draw any sweeping white supremacist conclusions.
Indeed, he concedes that there's evidence of a trend toward a narrowing of the black-white IQ gap that may in the future close the gap to zero, he just offers the opinion -- speaking as a non-technician whose decided to enter a debate he regards as highly technical -- that it probably won't. So he's not entirely sure he's right that blacks are genetically inferior, and he doesn't think this fact has any clear implications for public policy or how we should interact with individuals we encounter in our daily lives, but he just thinks it's really important to go on record with the view that blacks are inferior. Why? Given the source, the diagnosis of knee-jerk contrarianism run amok seems most appropriate but it's pretty odd.
I imagine the bulk of the blog-reading audience will be congregating with their families today. I'm off to the grandparents' house in Great Neck shortly. Enjoy your turkey, etc.
James Fallows honors Thanksgiving with a comprehensive debunking of the notion that the Bush administration's decision to open military airspace in the northeast corridor this weekend is some kind of boon to NYC-area air travelers. In fact, as he points out, this changes nothing -- restricted airspace was never the cause of any congestion, so opening it doesn't solve anything. The New York Times's editorial page was, however, taken in, so I guess that's mission accomplished for the White House.
President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."
I can understand (though not, I think, agree with) deciding to ultimately take an "our S.O.B." point of view on this. But that hardly commits us to embracing an up-is-down view of what it takes to be someone "who believes in democracy." It should seem obvious that reacting to an adverse Supreme Court ruling by suspending the constitution, having the head justice fired and arrested, and then ordering mass arrests of political opponents and civil society leaders is not consistent with a "no line crossing" policy.
I was dimly aware that our farm subsidy policies weren't just economically inefficient, but bad for public health, too. But Neil Sinhababu brings the point home with a striking fact, namely that just 0.37 percent of farm subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. And here's the factoid in graphic form:
This he mentions by way of pimping for John Edwards' policy agenda for fighting hunger and malnutrition which certainly looks good to me.
The New York Times has an article that takes a look at the continuing declines in New York City's murder rate over the past few years. I think understanding this is, among other things, an important part of how we understand Rudy Giuliani's legacy. Before 9/11, of course, his signature accomplishment was his association with the massive crime drop the city experienced during the 1990s, a tumbling in the murder rate that was paralleled in most other major American cities, but that happened to a much greater extent in New York than elsewhere.
Giuliani and his supporters would tend to argue that certain apparent black marks on his administration's record -- Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Rudy's generally horrible relationship with the African-American community -- were all just part of the price you had to pay for his super-effective anti-crime measures. But then Bloomberg came into office, kept much of the same policy framework in place, but went out of his way to try to be a bridge-builder who got along with all sorts of people. And the poof is in the pudding -- this works just fine. Nothing about sound crime control policy required Giuliani to be acting like a jerk or a madman, he just did that stuff because that's who he is.
McClatchey continues its revolutionary journalism efforts by looking at the records in office of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, as compared to their current rhetoric:
Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney share a big problem as barnstorm across American trying to act like tough guys on immigration: their past.
Each ran a jurisdiction that's arguably among the nation's most tolerant, where cracking down on illegal immigrants wasn't good politics.
But now, Giuliani, the mayor of New York from 1994 to 2001, and Romney, the governor of Massachusetts from 2003 through January, are battling for the Republican presidential nomination amid an uproar over illegal immigration. So they're gritting their teeth, squaring their shoulders and vowing to throw the bums out and keep them out.
The whole piece is pretty strong, except for the unfortunate decision to quote the embarrassingly-in-the-tank Fred Siegel defending the consistency of Giuliani's views as if he's a neutral source. The question that remains, though, is what does this spell for their likely future policies as president. More broadly, however, the 2008 elections shake out, we're likely to see a majority in congress that secretly favors a comprehensive reform approach along Bush/Kennedy/McCain lines and we're likely to see a president who thinks the same way. But at the same time, it seems exceedingly unlikely that we'll get such an approach, since politicians of both parties have pretty firmly decided that the politics of the issue require ever-growing boasts of toughness.
It's obvious why law enforcement officials would sometimes want access to things like GPS data embedded in "enhanced 911" service and other location-tracking functions cell phone providers are increasingly selling. Indeed, it's also obvious why judges would sometimes grant law enforcement officials' requests to look at that data. But why on earth would anything about the availability of this information lead anyone to decide that there's no need to establish probable cause.
Ann Scott Tyler had a little-noticed scoop about General David Petraeus being recalled for a brief trip back to DC to chair the board that's in charge of recommending who'll get promoted to one star general in the Army. Fred Kaplan did a column hailing the good news here, with the Army finally stepping away from some of its "big war" commitments and recognizing the need to reward expertise in counterinsurgency and stability ops in concrete ways.
One should note, though, that this good development is deeply tied in with a less-positive development, namely that the counterinsurgency advocates inside the military are increasingly deciding that the fate of their bureaucratic struggle against the "Big Army" crowd is intimately linked to the Iraq War. Whereas a couple of years ago, these people tended to be a major source of dissent on the war from inside the government, Petraeus' appointment and the GOP's thunderous political embrace of his all-encompassing genius have changed the calculus. And if he now has the opportunity to be a key patron for a new generation of senior counterinsurgency-focused officers, then Petraeus' standing, counterinsurgency's standing, and the war's standing all become more-and-more tightly entwined.
The trouble here is that though the counterinsurgency people are, I think, generally correct about the sort of scenarios we should be preparing our military for, Iraq is, at this point, completely lacking in strategic rationale. But the two ideas -- should we be fighting in Iraq, versus should we be preparing more for stability operations rather than big state-to-state warfare -- really ought to be considered separately.
Furthermore, elites often expressed or ignored other forms of bigotry. Anti-Italian sentiment, while less acceptable than anti-black sentiment, could still be seen in major news publications before the war. Indeed, this rhetoric appeared in descriptions of the most popular Italian-American of the day, New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio. In May 1939, Life wrote, “Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now twenty-four, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well-adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.” The article also included a picture of DiMaggio with Joe Louis, captioned “Like Heavyweight Champion Louis, DiMaggio is lazy, shy, and inarticulate.”
Speaking personally, I would be a bit frightened to call a championship boxer "lazy."
I'm not sure I agree with David Brooks' implication that anti-immigrant appeals will be bad short-term politics for the GOP, but his larger point here seems quite correct:
At the moment, Giuliani and fellow moderate Mitt Romney are attacking each other for being insufficiently Tancredo-esque. They are not renouncing the policies they championed as city and state officials, but the emphasis as they run for federal office is all in the other direction. In effect, they are competing to drive away Hispanic votes and make the party unelectable in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and the nation at large.
In this way, they are participating in the greatest blown opportunity in recent political history. At its current nadir, the G.O.P. had been blessed with five heterodox presidential candidates who had the potential to modernize the party on a variety of fronts. They could be competing to do that, but instead they are competing to appeal to the narrowest slice of the old guard and flatter the most rigid orthodoxies of the Beltway interest groups.
It's genuinely strange. You could imagine a Republican primary being dominated by orthodoxies because all the candidates had fairly orthodox records, or because a party riding a favorable political wind saw little need to rethink anything. The Democratic field seems to be experiencing a combination of the two. But the Republicans are in the reverse situation. Their party's generic brand is in terrible shape, they're losing in the early polls and in the fundraising battle, and they have tons of candidates at hand with semi-heterodox records. But they're all compete to adhere ever-more-rigidly to the hard-right line on immigration and on taxes and on the war.
Writer's strike propaganda marches on as Nancy Franklin abruptly decides to turn her essay on Gossip Girl away from the subject at hand, and conclude instead with a complaint about the injustice of the studios' demands:
“Gossip Girl” has indeed become a hit, though not a megahit. It’s now possible—and necessary—for Nielsen to count viewings of shows that people have recorded on their DVRs and watched within seven days, and “Gossip Girl” ’s ratings jump from not so hot to respectable when those figures are taken into account. It’s also the top TV show on iTunes at the moment. It was on the basis of these two elements of our brave new multiplatform world that the CW decided recently to order a full season of “Gossip Girl.” Advertisers’ being drawn to a show that sells well on iTunes wasn’t even a concept until a couple of years ago. All the new ways of delivering shows to viewers are starting to pan out for the studios and the networks that own them. That they continue to balk at sharing a larger fraction of their stupendous wealth with writers—the people who make that wealth possible—is as mystifying as it is sensationally wrong.
At any rate, I agree with pretty much everything Franklin says about the show, but to me it seems remarkable to comment on Gossip Girl's decision to portray rich New York City as a place that doesn't contain any Jewish people.
Australia's Labor Party has won a crushing victory that looked improbable about a year ago, and will put an end to long-time Conservative rule in the Land Down Under. Interesting from a US perspective is that it seems Labor and their leader Kevin Rudd were able to use the Conservatives' unwillingness to take action on climate change as a symbol to help advance a broader argument about John Howard being stuck in the past and unable to deal with the realities of the modern world.
Interesting stuff: "Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that his country could suspend uranium enrichment if the United States and Western Europe agreed to acknowledge that its nuclear program was peaceful." But of course there's a problem, since Iranian Ambassasor Ali Asghar Soltanieh also told McClatchey:
We don't trust the United States. We could suspend nuclear enrichment. We did it before for two and half years. But it wasn't enough then, and wouldn't be enough now. We will not suspend enrichment again because there is no end to what the United States will demand.
And, indeed, it's not clear that a policy of appeasement would be wise. True, we've seen rational leadership even from vicious dictators like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, but the contemporary United States is led by religious fanatics, which introduces a new element into the equation. What's more, the USA is the only country on earth to have ever actually deployed nuclear weapons. Indeed, current political elites are so war-crazed and bloodthirsty that they not only engineered the 2003 attack on Iraq -- a country that tried to appease the Americans by eliminating its nuclear program and allowing IAEA inspectors to certify that it had done so -- but they continue to deny regretting it to this day. And that includes not only radicals like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but so-called "moderates" like Hillary Clinton as well.
Key religious leaders like John Hagee explicitly argue that the United States should attack Iran in order to hasten the coming of Armageddon, and Hagee gets not only a respectful hearing at the White House, but also works closely with AIPAC giving him important entrée with many Democrats. All of the incumbent faction's candidates from office have said they'd contemplate a nuclear first strike against Iran, media sources generally lambaste anyone who criticizes American moves to ratchet up conflict with Iran, and in general any responsible Iranian leaders needs to wonder if the USA is really a country that one can risk doing business with.
Went with my dad to watch the Knicks beat the shockingly woeful Bulls and whatever one may say about Isaiah Thomas or the Knicks, there's no question that the crowd at Madison Square Garden is light years better than anything DC has at the Verizon Center. The level of intensity and spontaneity and fan understanding of the events on the floor is off the charts. It's easy to see why the owners want to build a new facility with more and better luxury boxes and sightlines, but they've got a pretty good thing going with their fanbase and their home crowd despite the crappy teams, and they'd better not screw it up.
I was looking into The Atlantic's past coverage of race and IQ issues, and found this 2001 article from Steve Olson that's really focused on other issues, but contained this paragraph:
Take IQ tests as an example. In Japan the Buraku are a caste of people discriminated against in education, housing, and employment. Their children typically score ten to fifteen points below other Japanese children on IQ tests—about the average black-white difference in the United States. Yet when the Buraku emigrate to the United States, the IQ gap between them and other Japanese vanishes.
However, there is a problem with their argument when it is placed into cross-cultural perspective: Differences in group IQ are not necessarily the result of differences in genetic endowment. Consider the case of the Buraku minority in Japan, which has lower IQ test scores and lower school performance than the dominant Ippan group in the Japan, even though the two groups are of the same "race." On the other hand, as immigrants to the United States, the Buraku minority and the Ippan majority do equally well on standardized tests, and both make good grades in school (DeVos, 1973; Ito, 1968; Y. Nabeshima, personal communication, August 30, 1999; Ogbu, 2001; Ogbu & Stern, 2001; Shimagara, 1991).
Truancy rates in elementary school in 1960 were 12 times as high for buraku children as for others. Now they are twice as high.
Burakumin have almost caught up with their peers in the proportion who graduate from high school, a tremendous achievement. But only about 24 percent of burakumin go to college, compared with 40 percent of other Japanese.
Here's a 1973 Time article looking at rising demands for recognition and equal treatment. It's a fascinating subject -- Japan is usually portrayed in the US as an almost totally homogenous society and what discrimination I'd seen reporting about
in the past had to do with Koreans.
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Heads in the Sand
