Michael Isikoff reports that the guy John McCain picked to run the GOP convention has done some lobbying for the military junta that rules Burma. Then there's this dissonant element of the analysis: "But some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists."
But it's not just a perception that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists, he's actually surrounded by lobbyists. This is a quantifiable reality of McCain's campaign -- it's chock full 'o lobbyists.
Michael Hiltzik says the much-discussed trend of "jingle mail" or "walkaways" where homeowners who could afford to make their monthly payments simply choose not to because declining home prices have made it not worth their while may not be a real trend at all -- there's no real evidence that this is happening.
What Mark Kleiman said. But to recap, Glenn Reynolds said Barack Obama's economic policy views were socialism. I pointed out that they were not, in fact, socialism. Reynolds, rather than conceded that he was wrong, pointed out that Obama favors tighter fuel efficiency regulations for auto makers which Reynolds thinks is bad policy.
That's a fine opinion to have -- I'm not enthusiastic about efficiency mandates myself -- but that's still no reason to mislead your readers by misdescribing the content of Obama's economic agenda.
I went to Pete's New Haven Style Apizza yesterday for lunch (it's on the southeast corner of 14th and Irving) and had a pretty decent white clam slice. I've had better, but for by-the-slice pizza it's quite good. I think the "Yalie" at Comet Ping Pong is a better entrant in the DC clam genre, but that's not a very convenient location.
William Galston and Pietro Nivola have an interesting piece on the rise of geographic segregation in political presences, where more-and-more people now live in whole counties full of co-partisans. It ends, however, with a pretty lame entry into the literature of bellyaching about polarization:
Because politics is a contact sport, hard-hitting partisan competition is unavoidably part of the game. A party system that differentiates sharply between alternatives has virtues, not the least being that it engages more voters, offers clearer choices and enhances accountability. But hyperpartisan politics also do damage, not least to public trust and confidence in government — and many Americans understandably yearn for less polarization. Because the underlying structure of our politics remains so deeply divided, the 2008 election may not requite their wish.
These upsides are what I wrote about in my "case for partisanship" article and stacking the upsides against the Galston/Nivola downsides, I think polarization looks pretty good. On the one hand, we have more engaged voters, clearer choices, and more accountability. All of those are good things. The downside is allegedly "public trust and confidence in government." But it's not even clear that that's a bad thing. I don't trust the government as much as I did before I learned that it was running a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and organizing an illegal surveillance program, but I'd say that's a merited decline in trust.
Why would we pine away for a shift that would make government less accountable but more trusted?
Mike D'Antoni to the Knicks -- just when you thought the Dolans couldn't devise any new, extremely costly quick-fix solutions to their franchise's problems. Chad Ford calls is "an improbable home run that could immediately turn the fortunes of a franchise in desperate need of optimism" and says "D'Antoni will bring a pedigree of exciting, winning basketball that should inject new life into a tired Knicks franchise." Why, yes, this is exactly the thing to turn around a franchise that hasn't seen a marquee coach since, well, Larry Brown just a little while back.
Seriously, at this point isn't it obvious that it's the search for improbable home runs that's the problem here? When your roster doesn't contain good players, you can't win. And when the roster contains lots of players on bad contracts, it's hard to trade for better ones. The only solution is to admit that this is the kind of problem that it would take several seasons to solve and to stop trying to create an atmosphere of optimism.
On television, of course, it's difficult to make a nuanced point but it occurred to me when discussing the whole "should Hillary drop out" issue that a decision to end her campaign needn't deprive the Ellen Malcolms of the world their chance to register a vote for the first viable woman presidential candidate. If she announced that she was done campaigning on Monday, she'd still be on the ballot in West Virginia on Tuesday -- and in Kentucky a week later -- and she'd still probably win both states.
Folks are still out there voting for Mike Huckabee, after all. The difference is just that Huckabee isn't actively campaigning for their votes. He's endorsed John McCain and receded a lot from public view. And conversely, receding a bit and starting to transition to playing a constructive non-presidential role in Democratic politics is available to Clinton even if she doesn't drop out. What the party needs from her, fundamentally, is for her to avoid spending the time between this weekend and Puerto Rico launching a constant barrage of attacks on Obama. That's consistent with dropping out or with staying in the race, and dropping out is consistent with her most loyal voters still voting for her anyway. The specific modalities aren't very important, it's about shifting the national discussion to the problems with McCain.
Brad DeLong explains in a great posts that tours us from the contrasting course of the University of California and the Ivy League by way of a detour into the economics of working-owned firms in Communist Yugoslavia. Long story short if you, like me, are a graduate of a fancy college and the development people come around asking you for money don't do it save your money for institutions that (a) have less money and (b) do more to help people in need.
Mark Leibovich floats the idea that Hillary Clinton's done Obama a favor by toughening him up with an NBA analogy:
But there is a competing view that says that Mrs. Clinton, rather than being a spoiler, has in fact been an unwitting mentor to Mr. Obama, a teaching adversary who made him better. Could competing against Mrs. Clinton have improved Mr. Obama as a candidate in the same way that competing against Larry Bird and Magic Johnson in the 1980s made Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan champions in the 1990s?
I know it's very hard to convince people of this, but the transformation of the Bulls into a powerhouse dynasty had nothing to do with Jordan improving. From the numbers it's pretty clear that he had his best seasons in the late 1980s. Not only did Jordan have his highest per game scoring averages in those years, but he was a more efficient shooter, wracking up TS%s above .600 for four years straight in the 1988-1991 seasons. The Bulls just started winning championships when Jordan acquired better teammates.
But having better teammates didn't actually help Jordan by taking pressure off of him and letting him take fewer low-percentage shots. It's just that a slightly off-peak Jordan was still a phenomenal player and suddenly he was surrounded by other quality players and started winning championships. Also note that the "Bad Boys" Pistons won championships in the 1988-89 season and the 1989-90 season so I'm not sure it's quite right to say that Isaiah Thomas was a champion "in the 1990s." The implications of the above for the Democratic primary are, however, not large.
Today's my dad's birthday, which seems like as good a time as any to link to this 1972 Time review of his first novel, Hide Fox, and All After:
It is not often that a writer sees his main character as clearly and directly as Rafael Yglesias sees Raul, the precocious 14-year-old who bombs out of private school in this brief and crystalline first novel. The author avoids displays of virtuosity, the pleasures of romantic posturing, and all other possible uses of fiction except this one: to watch with great care a being who fascinates him. The steadiness and detachment of his view would be remarkable in any case, but are truly astonishing for a writer who was exactly 15 years old when he wrote the novel.
He had, however, reached the advanced age of 17 by the time the book actually came out. These days, though, he's an old man -- happy birthday!
Here in Round 2 of the NBA playoffs we're seeing once again that home court advantage matters a lot -- out of eight total games, seven have been won by the home team. Which makes me wonder -- is anyone aware of any good research on what the home court advantage consists of? Why should it be so strong?
Here in Washington, DC there are a lot of lobbying and PR firms. These firms do most of their work for businesses or business groups, and that's what they're best known for, but pretty much everyone who does corporate work in a serious way also does some similar services for some foreign governments or organizations. After all, one consequence of American near-hegemony is that ability to influence U.S. domestic politics is an important dimension of national power for many countries. So when you do what John McCain's done and staff your campaign with a bunch of lobbyists, you're going to wind up having staffed your campaign with a bunch of people with some ties to nasty foreign actors.
That's what made McCain's decision to fire a couple of people for being too cosy with SLORC so odd -- now everyone else is going to get scrutinized. And here's a bunch of scrutiny. It seems that Charlie Black, for example, has done work for Mobuto Sese Seko, Siad Barre, and Ferdinand Marcos, among others. There's also some stuff (less damning, in my view) Peter Madigan and Kevin Fay in there. And I assume that when eager-beaver oppo researchers have some more time to dig, they'll come up with more stuff. And of course given that McCain has put a hazy, militaristic vision of going bigger than "war on terror" to some kind of vaguely defined quest to stamp out all dictatorships everywhere, it's hard for him to say this kind of thing is all in the game.
While flying back and forth from LAX last week, I had the opportunity -- as one does on long plane flights -- to sample some seriously sub-par films. 27 Dresses turns out to be substantially better than Jumper and when you control for the fact that I'm in the Jumper demographic group rather than the 27 Dresses one you can figure that Dresses must actually be much, much, much better.
That's too bad, because even though Jumper looked bad and got bad reviews, I like all of Doug Liman's other movies, even Go and Mr. and Mrs. Smith that nobody else seems to have enjoyed.
I'll be at the New America Foundation tomorrow at 12:15 to talk about Heads in the Sand, sign copies, etc. Please come if you can -- though obviously some folks have real jobs.
It strikes me as a bit odd that John McCain's climate change speech seems so focused on the need for nuclear power. Talking a lot about nukes in this context is a good move for, say, a pundit so there's always a healthy amount of demand for "counterintuitive" arguments like "environmentalists are the ones responsible for global warming!" But politically, what's the percentage in this?
Realistically, one assumes that any viable climate change bill is going to need to be backed by as broad a coalition as possible, so that probably means cutting nuclear in on the deal whether or not it's really warranted. Personally, I'd prefer to end our subsidies to coal, oil, and gas then implement cap and trade and then make due without any subsidies for other sources -- not nuclear, not solar, not anything -- above and beyond the large implicit subsidy of the carbon cap.
But all that's quibbling over details. What I'd really like to hear from McCain is about a different departure from environmental orthodoxy -- why, if he believes that global warming is a real problem that we should tackle by reducing carbon emissions, has he written a bill that doesn't reduce emissions enough to tackle the problem? Presumably McCain's belief about the nature of the problem comes from the same scientific sources as everyone else's -- so why's he endorsing half-measures? Certainly if half-measures are the best you can get out of the legislative process a president should accept that, but why would you start with an inadequate long-term goal?
Photo by Flickr user ilker used under a Creative Commons license
It's been a while since we've had a good chart around here, but this Paul Krugman post got me wondering about the relationship between national population density and national auto dependence. So I took his data on which percentage of trips are undertaken in a car, and put it together with population density information. The relationship winds up looking real but also fairly vague -- speaking English seems to lead to driving a lot in a more clear-cut way than does high population density.
But of course overall density data can be misleading here since some countries contain large empty wilderness areas that reduce density but contain so few people that they don't have a noteworthy causal impact on overall commuting patterns. If you lopped the Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territory, and Nunavit off of Canada, their density would be way higher but the total population would be very similar. One might get a more enlightening comparison by comparing some of these European countries to specific states. New Jersey, for example, is slightly denser than the Netherlands but seems to feature far more driving.
For you "A Team" of climate change analysis, you should always rely on Grist's Dave Roberts rather than me. His conclusion about McCain's proposal is that "it's better than expected, somewhat short of Lieberman-Warner, and far short of what Obama has proposed." On climate, interestingly, there's a clear choice between the two candidates and both candidates would be substantially better than Bush. Which shows you, I guess, how terrible Bush has been.
Neat video for "Again & Again" by The Bird and the Bee:
GFR wisely asks "Viral Mac marketing campaign or sincere music video effort?" Of course why choose -- in context, the best way to make the marketing effort succeed would be to sincerely try to make a good video.
Joseph G. Antolji, Prashant Bharadwaj, and Fabian Lange take a look at one of the most pressing questions we face -- given the growing rewards to educational attainment, how come Americans have shown so little proclivity to respond to these incentives by expanding the proportion of educated people? In other words, skill-biased technological change should be leading to an increase in the proportion of people who graduate from college. Instead, it's leading to an increasing wage gap between graduates and non-graduates as the proportion stays flat.
One weird thing about journalism is that most people who work in the news business are happy to concede that the press is somewhat more trivial than they'd like it to be. This is often chalked up to commercial pressures -- we're not doing a terrible job because we're idiots or bad people, the journalist says, it's because the audience is so horrible. And yet despite the theory that the "freak show" builds ratings and sells papers, the reality is that television, newspaper, and magazine journalism are all in long-term structural decline steadily losing audience. It's almost as if people don't, in fact, want to watch the news covered in a stupid manner but actually would be somewhat interested in learning important information about the world.
Along those lines, Joe Matthews started paying close attention to local news in the Los Angeles media market and found that the Spanish-language channels were substantially more substantive than the English-language ones. And guess which language they speak on L.A.'s top-rated local newscast? Spanish, of course, perhaps because "in Spanish, viewers got fewer soft features and more deeply reported, longer pieces."
We did ask a question I know in the exit polls about Reverend Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and whether that was influencing voters. What did we find? Right down the middle. About half said it’s important, about half said it was unimportant. Of those who said it was important, look at this in Indiana, 70% went for Senator Clinton. Of those who thought it was unimportant, again right down the middle, 65% for Barack Obama. So what you thought about the importance of Reverend Wright basically determined your vote.
As Lee Siegelman points out the causal inference here is all wrong. Much more likely is that voters already committed to Clinton -- or strongly predisposed to commit to Clinton -- adopted the view that Reverend Wright was an important issue because they knew it was an issue that reflected poorly on Obama. Note, for example, that both pre- and post-Wright, both Clinton and Obama took a fairly constant share of different demographic categories.
The thing is, you shouldn't need to be especially sophisticated about statistics to figure this out. Clearly, Wright may have swayed some voters, but equally clearly most people had opinions about the election before Wright ever came on the scene. But Stephanopolous is hardly alone here, almost every time I see exit polls discussed on TV it's done with almost no understanding of how to read them properly.
Sam Stein has a piece out titled "McCain Touts Green Policies At Wind Energy Firm - But He Opposed Their Key Legislation". I'm not sure the underlying charge is all that damning -- basically it's about how McCain voted against a 2005 energy bill that would have done a lot to help wind power firms. But it was a whole tangle of subsidies for other stuff, too. Basically, McCain cares more about pork busting than he does about boosting wind power, but I think that's a judgment reasonable people can disagree about. I'd go for Kate Sheppard's "The Myth of Green McCain" for critique of the McCain environmental agenda.
But the interesting thing about the Stein piece is that it got emailed to me by the Obama campaign. In short, after months of the Obama press team sending me primary-focused stuff, now they're more focused on McCain-focused stuff. Not a shocking development, but a noteworthy and, I think, welcome one.
Photo by Flickr user kavo1 used under a Creative Commons license
Fred Hiatt's descend into the worst kind of wingnutty foreign policy continues as we learn that we should blame the U.N. for the fact that SLORC is horrible and people are dying in Darfur. As Michael Cohen points out, this is senseless, the U.N.'s not a world government and it can't intervene anywhere unless member states want to. On Darfur, as he says, when Ban Ki-Moon said the U.N. needed to send more helicopters to Sudan, nobody ponied up the choppers.
But the U.N.-bashers who want to blame the organization for "inaction" on these points are the last in line for proposals to give the U.N. more money, and more institutional capacity. It's all absurd -- the idea that the U.N. Charter is the only thing standing between the world and an efficacious intervention in Sudan or Burma doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny. On Burma, meanwhile, it's worth asking what Hiatt even thinks should have been done -- the junta is behaving horribly, but it's not like we'd be able to invade the country, overthrow the government, and then stand up a new regime all in time to distributive disaster relief in a timely manner.
Man, Barack Obama's really got it coming and going. First John McCain runs around the country talking about how much Hamas loves Obama, now Edward Luttwak says Islam requires Obama's murder for the crime of apostasy. I'm no expert on Islamic law, but if this were any kind of real issue, shouldn't The New York Times be able to locate an actual Muslim who sees things this way?
We had a discussion around the office in the very early days of "Atlantic voices" about when it would and wouldn't be appropriate to use a profane word on the blog. I think I'm going to say that Ali Eteraz points out that Edward Luttwak is full of shit (see below) in a good HuffPoPost.
TPM's got some funny stuff out of the DOD document dump on their defense consultants propaganda project, but as Alyssa Rosenberg points out at the end of the day, the joke's on us here. I'd go further and just note that though public derision may be fun, that'll be the only consequence anyone involved suffers.
The officiating issue is the most obvious one to point to, but it's always seemed to me that the scale of home court advantage is too big to be explained this way. If this were the dominant factor, I think I'd expect to see teams' point differentials be similar at home or on the road, but they'd have better records in the close games at home. But instead the effect seems big and systematic. And as Kevin says, what's weird here isn't just that home court advantage exists, but that it seems bigger than the advantage in football or baseball, even though in football the crowd can (and does) interfere with visiting team play calls and baseball stadiums differ dramatically from each other.
I took the 32 largest U.S. urbanized areas and added Austin and Honolulu for good measure. I pulled the Census data on each census tract partially or completely contained within each of these urbanized areas. I calculated the standard density (i.e., total population/total land area) for each census tract. I also calculated each census tract's share of the total population of the urbanized area. I then assigned each tract's density a "weight" equal to its share of the total population. I summed the weights to get the weighted density for the urbanized area.
JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?
BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable.
GOP Reps. John Boehner and Eric Cantor decided to prove they studied hard in the school of misreading and misrepresenting:
It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’ These sorts of words and characterizations are the words of a politician with a deep misunderstanding of the Middle East and an innate distrust of Israel.
Eliding here is the difference between calling Israel, the country, a sore and calling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a sore. But I guess Reps. Boehner and Cantor think the conflict is a good thing, that's helpful to Israelis, and makes America's relationships with other Arab political actors easier? Andrew Sullivan, Marc Ambinder, and Goldberg offer further commentary. I'll just say that, at the end of the day, I think Israel and Israelis will be better off with an American president who thinks the conflict is a serious problem that he'll put a relatively high priority on than with a president who intends to pay Israel the false compliment of pretending that the situation is somehow no big deal.
Photo of Herzliya Station by Flickr user David55King used under a Creative Commons license
Reading an article about how the current wave of immigrants is assimilating just fine thank you, Atrios remarks that "as someone who lives in a city which still has plenty of white ethnic enclaves I've long been puzzled by the widespread belief that today's immigrants are somehow 'different,' aside from the skin color of some of them."
One point is simply that a lot of people seem to have exaggerated ideas about past assimilation and simply don't realize that 100 years ago, just like today, major American cities had foreign language newspapers and things like Yiddish theater that were the equivalent of Univision. There never was a time when people got off the boat, immediately enrolled themselves in English-immersion classes, and gave birth to perfect little Anglo-Saxon children. It was always the case that linguistic, social, and economic integration was a complicated multigenerational process
Ryan Avent and Kevin Drum focus attention on an important difference between the Obama and McCain climate change plans, Obama would auction tradable emissions permits to would-be emitters, whereas McCain would give them away. Either plan would increase the price consumers pay for energy and reduce the overall quantity of emissions (Obama sets more aggressive targets, but that's a separate issue) but the differences comes into play in terms of who gets the extra money generated by the higher energy costs.
In the case of the McCain plan, most of that money goes right back into the pockets of polluting industries in order to compensate them for the costs of no longer destroying the planet. In the case of the Obama plan, the money will accrue to the U.S. Treasury whence it can be spent to alleviate the burden on consumers by offering offsetting tax cuts, investments in transportation alternatives, subsidies for fuel efficient vehicles and alternative energy, etc. The McCain plan would be an improvement over the status quo, and certainly if compromising on the goal of 100 percent auctions is necessary to get a bill through the Senate I'm prepared to compromise, but the 100 percent auction is really a dramatically preferable option. The costs to individuals of adapting to a new low-carbon economy will be bearable but quite real and it's a very good idea to generate as much cash as possible to plow into helping people out with the transition.
Don't miss Dave Weigel's writeup of Bob Barr's announcement of his candidacy for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. I think this is a potentially significant turn of events as Barr, a former wingnutty member of the House GOP leadership, is an unusually credible LP standard-bearer and his biography is well-designed to attract the votes of conservatives who loathe the war and Barack Obama with equal passions.
Third party candidacies never go anywhere as candidacies but often wind up playing a substantial role in presidential campaigns nonetheless. Ralph Nader got only 2.7 percent of the vote in 2000, but that was enough to make a difference.
Some U.S. Christians are not reconciled to McCain's candidacy but instead regard the prospective presidency of Barack Obama in the nature of a biblical plague visited upon a sinful people. These militants look at former Baptist preacher Huckabee as "God's candidate" for president in 2012. Whether they can be written off as merely a troublesome fringe group depends on Huckabee's course.
Now there appears to be know actual evidence that Huckabee, working in tandem with God Himself, is actually fighting to deliver the presidency to black nationalist muslim devil-man Barack Obama but Novak's got plenty of idle speculation.
So if you just think about how much cash went into the shoebox and how much came out of it, a more accurate accounting for Harvard for FY 2007 would, in rough numbers, be a lot more like the following:
Receipts = $2 billion of operating revenue + $7.3 billion of investment income + $0.6 billion of gifts to the endowment = ~$10 billion.
Operating costs = ~$3 billion.
Profit = $10 billion – $3 billion = ~$7 billion.
This explains why Harvard’s net assets increased about $7 billion in 2007, from about $35 billion to about $42 billion.
Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.
I have no idea whether or not this endowment tax idea kicking around in the Massachusetts legislature really makes sense. My guess is that it may not since the flow of resources toward Harvard may well be good for the state in which it's located even if it doesn't particularly serve the public interest. But the people making additional gifts to Harvard and similar institutions really ought to rethink their giving strategy. Even in terms of helping your kids get in, if you're really rich and give a lot of money to deserving charitable institutions, the admissions office will still view you as a good development prospect and let your kid in. Then just don't pony up the money!
Sichuan Province = Szechuan cuisine -- yes or no? James Fallows rounds up some accounts of the situation in Chengdu from Americans on the ground there. What can one really say?
Spencer Ackerman reminds us of a previous episode in Joe Lieberman's penchant for declaring victory -- back in November of 2005 he opined in The Wall Street Journal that "I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there." And of course back in December of 2003 he accused Howard Dean of being in a "spider hole of denial" for his inability to see all the progress we were making back then.
Lately, I've been noticing that there's a weird ideological element to debates over whether the current run-up in oil prices is driven primarily by speculation or primarily by the fundamentals. Why, I wondered, would it break down like that? Now that I've read it, I think Paul Krugman nailed it yesterday: If oil prices continue to rise, we'll probably see more call for government intervention in public transit and energy efficiency, and "I don’t find that vision particularly abhorrent, but a lot of people, especially on the right, do. And so they want to believe that if only Goldman Sachs would stop having such a negative attitude, we’d quickly return to the good old days of abundant oil."
Of course you can run this argument backwards -- I prefer walkable, transit-oriented places so I'd like it to be the case that objective reality is trending in a manner that will make more people share my preferences. That said, Krugman's argument (and Kevin Drum's argument here) seems fairly persuasive to me.
But that said, the right way to resolve this dispute isn't with punditry, it's with speculative investments. A person who really thinks he has reason to believe we're in the midst of an oil bubble could earn a lot of money off that belief. Seeing conservative institutions deciding to invest funds in selling oil short would be more persuasive than any number of arguments.
He doesn't actually seem to have one when pitted against John McCain. Rather, Jewish Americans like Clinton best, Obama second-best, and McCain least. Keep this in mind next time you read an argument that seems to assume that white working class Clinton supporters would prefer McCain to Obama -- it's perfectly possible for Obama to be someone's second-choice, just as Clinton is the second choice of millions of Obama voters.
If I'm working at the NSCC, I'm not liking these poll results out of North Carolina and Texas one bit. One assumes the GOP will pull both of these out in the end, but you've got to spend money defending your incumbents, and you really don't want to be spending money on what ought to be safe Republican seats where conservative legislators untainted by any incredibly shocking scandals are just running for re-election.
In the last 20 years, only one player shorter than 6-6 -- Allen Iverson -- has ever gone No. 1. When in doubt, NBA GMs almost always opt for a big man. However, as we watch point guards such as Paul, Williams and Tony Parker dominate in the playoffs, the thinking is beginning to change. It's no longer considered a given that a big man is the key to winning in the NBA.
Tony Parker is a very good player, but realistically he's the third-best guy on that team. Certainly anyone who's looking at the San Antonio Spurs, 1999-2008 and thinking to himself "maybe a big man isn't the key to winning in the NBA after all" really ought to pay more attention to that Tim Duncan guy. Similarly, Deron Williams is a young player that any team (except the Hornets) would be thrilled to have, but the one-two punch of Okur and Boozer is nothing to sneeze at in terms of big men.
Paul makes the point better, this season at least he's having a genuinely dominant season in the way that normally only big men have -- the talent distribution curve for backcourt players is generally much flatter and it's rare to have someone stand out from the pack the way Paul has. But it seems to me that it would be pretty crazy to toss out decades worth of information indicating that the odds favor going with the big guy purely because Paul had a fantastic season this year. Weird things happen in life, which is what makes it interesting, but to just expect that every talented college point guard is now going to put on Paul-caliber performances is crazy.
Excellent cartoon. Not being a Clinton supporter myself, I obviously don't think all expressions of opposition to her presidential aspirations are driven by sexist. It is, however, extremely telling about the sort of society in which we live that hostility to her presidential aspirations so often finds expression through these sexist scripts.
Her campaign is rescued from the dead. As the Clinton campaign sagely points out "no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916" and therefore Obama's primary loss shows that despite his large lead in the polls over John McCain, he can't possible win the election.
What's even more interesting is that no Democrat has won the White House without carrying Minnesota since 1912 (it went for Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose party) so given that Obama won Minnesota and Clinton won West Virginia, McCain is guaranteed to win the general election unless the eventual nominee can somehow completely replicate the social and political conditions prevailing in pre-WWI America. The outlook, in short, is very grim.
Richard Kahlenberg observes that it would be politically savvy of Barack Obama to embrace a shift toward class-based affirmative action and that the logic of several things his said over the years seems to point in this direction. I tend to think so as well, and have been hopeful that this might happen at some point, but then I read this Noam Scheiber article focused on another topic and saw this graf:
The run-up to South Carolina was rife with talk that post-racial Obama was morphing into a decidedly pre-post-racial candidate. To reverse the slide, blogger Mickey Kaus suggested he give a speech embracing class- rather than race-based affirmative action, something Obama had flirted with in the past. Kaus had a point: The atmospherics would have been irresistible to ambivalent whites. I pushed a milder form of the idea on my own blog. Not long after, I got a response from an Obama adviser: Never gonna happen. Urging Sister Souljah politicking on him was the surest way to provoke a scowl.
Well that's that. But in the hopes of persuading people otherwise I wouldn't really see this as "Sister Souljah politicking." To me, the defining feature of the S.S. stunt was that, on the merits, it was silly. The point was just to show that Bill Clinton was picking a fight with black people which proved he wasn't one of those nasty ol' liberals. But shifting from the current system of affirmative action to one with a firmer grounded in actual socioeconomic disadvantage would, especially paired to a broader critique of other dimensions of privilege (legacy admissions, etc.), be the right thing to do on the merits.
And a black politician would be the right person to lead the charge -- the current system isn't sustainable over the long term and it would be much better to see it dismantled by someone with genuine concern for social justice than to go down at the hands of someone intent on fanning the flames of racial resentment and then leaving every other inequity in the education system unchallenged.
This business of Travis Childers winning an extremely Republican district on the heels of two other Democratic special election wins drives home how infuriating the idea of even having an extended "electability" argument about "who can win" is at this point. The reality is that given current conditions, either Clinton or Obama is very likely to win. That, I assume, is why Clinton is fighting so hard. There's no need to join David Corn in reaching for esoteric explanations, she's fighting hard for the prize of the nomination because it's a very good prize to have.
Objective conditions could, of course, change. Maybe some kind of spate of unexpected good news from Iraq or the economic picture will save John McCain. But unless that happens, he's looking to be in terrible shape. The GOP brand is so terrible that it's dragging candidates down in solid red districts, and McCain is currently doing not-so-hot in polling matchups even though Americans are now inundated in unflattering information about Clinton and Obama while most people have never heard sustained from-the-left criticism of McCain.
On the House side, NRCC chair Tom Coles seems to be heavily leaning on the notion that it's somehow underhanded of Democrats to nominate culturally conservative candidates to run in culturally conservative districts. Needless to say, the GOP does the same thing in culturally liberal districts because this is just common sense. But more to the point, the idea that the GOP can turn the ship around by November by "revealing" this strategy is going to be of little comfort to the large number of Republicans defending more culturally moderate districts outside of the South. Democrats aren't going to pick up many more seats in places like the MS-1 but they hardly need to.
Still, everyone knew that but relatively few imagined them being in a position to eliminate the San Antonio Spurs. In particular, many would have agreed with David Freedman who writes "I thought that the Hornets' lack of playoff experience would hurt them in postseason play." It's difficult, however, to see any clear evidence that lack of playoff experience has any genuine tendency to hold teams back. The teams that win usually have playoff experience because normally the best team in year N was at least pretty good in year N-1 and because playoff experience is pretty widespread in the NBA generally.
What Sam Boyd said -- if MSNBC is considering this idea at all, they should hurry up and do it. She's been the best thing about the best election coverage team in cable news all primary season long.
This is hardly the only preposterous aspect of President Bush's notion of giving up golf because he's sad about Iraq, but it does seem worth pointing out that he hasn't given up recreational boating and fishing at his family's enormous summer estate in Kennebunkport, Maine during the same period. If, as Bush says, "playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal" then what's the difference between that and his other leisure pursuits?
Bought Sim City 4 last night, but was busy doing this and that and couldn't start playing until around midnight. Next thing I knew it was 4:00 AM and now I'm very tired.
Impact on sleep aside, from an urban policy perspective, the game has several flaws and one hopes Sim City 5 will allow for mixed-use buildings (apartments with ground floor retail, etc.) and take some account of bicycling as a possible mode of transportation. At the same time, the game is curiously optimistic about middle class people's willingness to ride a bus to a subway station then take a subway then get on another bus and take that to work. Maybe when gas costs $20 a gallon, but in the real world I think people who aren't in desperate financial straights are only going to use transit if it's reasonably convenient.
I'd mark myself down as skeptical that we're going to see a ton more Childers-style wins in the context of a non-special election, but if we do it'll be built on the backs of guys like Josh Segall who's running for congress in Alabama and who I met last night courtesy of our mutual friend Chris Hayes. Josh is, among other things, running on a strong campaign of economic nationalism that he thinks will appeal to the enduring sensibilities of Alabama voters at a time when they're disgruntled with the consequences of military nationalism abroad but hardly eager to abandon the entire mindset.
On the merits, I don't think that kind of approach to economic policy is very promising, but it's an interesting theory of electoral politics and I think not as problematic on the merits as things like doomed efforts at world conquest. Meanwhile, Segall's marrying that to a welcome message about the need to do more for our veterans and especially our national guardsman. Not sure he really has enough of a drawl to pull off Alabama, but he's a legitimate 4th generation Alabamian so maybe it's just my yankee prejudice that says he needs a thicker accent.
This is an interesting development -- it seems that Thad Cochran, 70; Pete Domenici, 76; Chuck Grassley, 74 all told The Hill that they're too old to be Vice President. They're also, of course, all roughly the same age as the Republican Party's presidential nominee. I think this'll be an interesting issue to keep an eye on. Young people will definitely mock McCain for being old and his age will probably render people below a certain age immune to the cult of personality around him that's impacted a lot of self-loathing boomers in the press.
But if anyone develops serious worries about McCain's age per se, it'll probably be his fellow senior citizens. Most folks I'm familiar with in their seventies are, like these GOP Senators, pretty aware of and realistic about their own situation and that of their friends and other peers in ways that might give them doubts about McCain.
Photo by Flickr user wfeiden used under a Creative Commons license
Another thing about "playoff experience"-based doubts about the Hornets is that it's not entirely clear how inexperienced the team really is. Starting center Tyson Chandler went to the playoffs with Chicago in 2005 and 2006, Peja has a ton of experience in the U.S. and internationally, Morris Peterson was in the 2007, 2002, and 2001 playoffs, guys like Bonzi Wells off the bench have experience, etc.
Now obviously Chris Paul doesn't have playoff experience and he's an important part of the team. But after watching him play in the first round, was there any reason to think he'd suddenly dissolve in round two? The Hornets may yet lose the series (though they probably won't -- tied series after four games almost always go to the team with home court advantage), but if they do I don't think experience will be the problem.
NARAL endorses Barack Obama and if you read the page, you'll see they're just taking for granted that Obama's the nominee and his opponent is John McCain. It seems that nobody's going to "force" Hillary Clinton out of the race, but when you have her natural allies deciding that the time's come to endorse in the Obama-McCain race you can see it's over in more than just the mathematical sense.
Until I read about it on Andrew's blog a while back I, like most Americans, had absolutely no idea about the bizarre restrictions on travel the United States tries (obviously, key elements of the rule are impractical to enforce) to impose on HIV-positive would-be visitors or immigrants. This is a crazy rule that doesn't accomplish anything, an act of petty cruelty born in an era of hysteria whose time is long past.
Kay Steiger blogs about this EPI chart showing the substantial gap in wages for male and female recent college graduates. The good news, though, is that thanks to deteriorating male wages, the gap is narrowing . . . if we just continue our 21st century economic trajectory, college educated man and college educated woman alike can be equal in penury.
Someone asked me the other day why we can't just drop relief supplies on Burma, nevermind what SLORC has to say about it. That seemed like a good question to me, and I didn't have an answer. Barbara Stocking, the director of the UK branch of Oxfam, says this won't work logistically and that there's no alternative to either somehow pressuring the junta into letting relief workers enter the country. Or else, more likely I suppose, to watching more Burmese be essentially slaughtered by the obstructionism of their rulers.
Via Kevin Drum, a useful report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities about how if we sell carbon permits (as Barack Obama wants to do) instead of giving them away (as John McCain wants to do), we can raise the necessary funds to help the people most in need adjust to the new environment in which energy is more expensive. It turns out that such compensatory spending leaves us with a big pot of money left over.
The things they suggest spending this money on are basically sensible, though I should say I'm not so high on the popular notion of plowing money into clean energy subsidies. For one thing, I think there's very good reason to be dubious about the government's ability to pick technologies effectively. For another thing, the mere fact of the auctioned carbon permits would constitute a large de facto subsidy to alternative energy sources so it's not really clear that further subsidy is needed. Last, in a lot of ways the whole idea of subsidizing energy consumption goes against one very promising path, namely using less energy overall -- lots of elements of current U.S. policy subsidize or encourage lavish energy consumption and that's part of how we wound up in our current pickle.
Rather than spend new funds on further entrenching overconsumption of energy, we should just try to invest it in productive infrastructure. The biggest problem with adapting to a reduced carbon environment won't be that it's impossible in the long run for people to live in a high-cost energy environment, it'll be that so much of our existing infrastructure isn't well-suited to such an environment. A short-term infusion of cash is a good opportunity to start changing that (and, of course, imagine what we could have done over the past six years if we hadn't spent $1 trillion in Iraq).
If you're the sort of person who knows who Richard Rorty is, you'll want to check out Raymond Geuss' reminiscences of the man. I've had a lot of opportunity in my life to meet famous philosophers, but not the one whose work I like the best.
Interesting conversation between Tom Daschle and Ezra Klein about health care. Daschle, of course, was one of the earliest major figures to endorse Obama and there are a lot of ex-Daschleites on Obama's staff, up to and including Obama's chief of staff in the Senate. Daschle's take on health care policy is, meanwhile, somewhat sounder than what Obama's put forward during the campaign (though Obama's plan is good on its own merits) so I hope the rumors that he may play a major role in an Obama administration (chief of staff is what people are saying around town) are true in this regard.
Congressional Republicans are apparently starting to think they should separate themselves from the grossly unpopular George W. Bush. John McCain, it seems, is thinking much the same thing.
This all goes back to the weird decision-making of the congressional Republicans in November 2006 through February 2007. After the spanking the GOP took in the midterms, conventional wisdom held that congressional Republicans would tell Bush that either he was going to embrace Baker-Hamilton and moves toward winding-up the Iraq War, or else he was going to face mass defections. The shrill blogger set, reading recent history, accurately predicted that no such thing would happen and we were right. But the Republicans' determination to behave this way is still odd. And now John McCain's running for President and he is different from Bush in some respects and is now wisely trying to emphasize those points of difference, but on the key driving factor of the rise and fall of Bushism -- national security policy -- McCain is more Bushite than Bush and wants to resolve the problems with our current approach to the world by banging the table much harder.
I'm really confused as to what's going on in the Iraq section of John McCain's big speech. His rebuttal to the idea that he favors endlessly prolonging a ruinous war is that he hopes things will go much better in the future. This is his vision of the future:
By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension.
No word on whether or not there will be a pony in every garage. I mean, look, presumably when Bush first invaded Iraq he was hoping it would turn out well. When he warned in 2004 that violence would get worse if we left, he was hoping things would get better in 2005. But instead things got worse. Then when he warned in 2005 that if we left there would be civil war, he was presumably hoping that staying would avoid civil war. But it didn't. McCain's conceit here is perhaps that our Iraq policy has been failing due to a lack of grandiose dreams and wishful thinking, though as Ilan Goldenberg notes McCain himself has had plenty of wishful thinking over the years.
I totally sympathize with the ethical position Leif Weinar is adopting when he suggests that dictators who sell their country's natural resources should be thought of as thieves, but boy-oh-boy does prosecuting them in court as if they were thieves not seem like a workable response to the problem. See also Tyler Cowen's remarks.
People often seem to forget when talking about foreign policy notions that it's not good enough to adopt policy ideas that express admirable sentiments about sundry global scumbags -- what's needed are ideas that are actually helpful, and few if any ideas for moving into a new era of dictators vs. democrats global clashes will actually have beneficial humanitarian impacts over the long- or medium-terms.
Rasmussen finds that 38 percent of Democrats think Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race, while 29 percent say she ought to mount an independent campaign for the presidency. I think we can safely assume that's not going to happen.
Unlike Tim Lee, I haven't read Ben Clemens' book Math You Can't Use. Indeed, I just now heard of it for the first time. But good title! And it's a good subject for a book -- the case against software patents. This is not an issue that's on most people's radar screens, but the growth of software patents is a wholly unjustified trend that threatens to put a perpetual drag on the global economy. Maybe I'll buy the book.
Chuck Schumer's the best in the business at ginning up issues and headlines, albeit in ways that often seem designed to make him a one-man case for libertarianism. Today his big idea is to say that we should block planned arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless they make oil cheaper. This is a silly idea on a number of levels, but it does help illustrate the point that the shared conceit of the right and the left that our forward-leaning military posture in the Persian Gulf is helping us out economically by giving us leverage over the natural resources there is ultimately pretty hollow -- our policies are just mistaken ones that fail to serve our interests.
As for Schumer, though, it's always disappointing to see how deeply invested he is in gas price gimmicks. The United States is a very auto dependent country, obviously, but Schumer (along with Hillary Clinton) represents by far the largest pool of Americans who walk or use mass transit regularly (not just NYC residents, but also the large number of MetroNorth and LIRR users in the suburbs), as well as the city that forms the hub of our only decent intercity passenger rail network. On top of all that, barring major scandal he's never going to lose his seat. If anyone in the Senate should be an advocate of good sense on transportation policy, it should be Schumer.
Photo of Riyadh by Flickr user Bakar2007-2008 used under a Creative Commons license
Mike Lillis has a nice piece in The Washington Independent about the House Blue Dog caucus' perverse obstructionism of Jim Webb's bill boosting veterans benefits on fiscal austerity grounds. You can expect more of this kind of nonsense under an Obama administration. Hundreds of billions of spending on a futile war that a Republican asks for? Blue Dogs love it. Giant tax cuts for the rich that Republicans ask for? Blue Dogs might be for that, too. But spend a single penny on a Democratic priority? Hell no, that's time for fiscal responsibility.
And of course it's not just the Blue Dogs. Expect most institutions who cried blood every time Bill Clinton wanted to spend a dime, then went mum on the enormous post-9/11 defense spending and war fighting orgy, to suddenly recover their taste for fiscal discipline in January of 2009.
If you're a conservative and your ideas make no sense, then your opponents must be Neville Chamberlain. Hence, Bush at the Knesset:
Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
The standard point to make in response to this is still a true one -- we refer to this day to the "lessons of Munich" and make a big deal out of Adolf Hitler because that was really unusual whereas to hawks it's always 1939, every foreigner we don't like is a new Hitler, and preventive war is always the only solution. Bush and McCain truly are the ideological descendants of the folks who urged Eisenhower to go for "rollback" and who insisted that Ronald Reagan betrayed the true path when he sat down with Gorbachev for arms control talks.
Meanwhile, Bush continues to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose and nature of diplomacy. The idea of talks isn't that you marshall convincing arguments and beat your enemies back with force of words. The idea is that it's sometimes possible to achieve a reconciliation of partially divergent interests. Maybe Iran wants a nuclear weapon in order to deter American attack. And maybe America wants a nuclear-free Iran to help preserve stability in the region. Down one path, we have conflict and the U.S. sanctions and bombs Iran which causes suffering but only delays Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon. But down another path, each side discusses it's top priorities and we reach an agreement on verifiable disarmament in the context of security guarantees and a path to normalized relations. Down the road, that gives the U.S. the stability we want and creates more prosperity and security for Iran.
Maybe that won't work -- it wasn't possible to reconcile interests with Hitler -- but that's what's on the table. Now if you believe that literally every antagonistic force in the world is exactly like Hitler, then the distinction collapses, but only an idiot would believe that.
California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban. This will presumably create political headaches for liberals -- John McCain will be able to argue with some plausibility that judges appointed by Barack Obama are likely to make similar rulings (not that there's anything wrong with that, but the voters may feel otherwise) -- but it's a victory for justice.
The smart set thing to do at this point is, I assume, to argue that this is a good outcome but the process is bad. Realistically, though, the courts that rule in this direction are doing their jobs. I think there's good reason to think that America's system of very strong judicial review is a mistake and there should be some kind of override process (as in Canada) but judges are supposed to rule under the system we have.
UPDATE: Of course state court rulings can be overridden with amendments to the state constitution which, in California and most other places, isn't all that difficult. The problem arises at the federal level where it's preposterously difficult to pass a constitutional amendment.
Speaking of Bush's Knesset speech (see below), Joe Lieberman put out a release saying he heartily approves of the president's remarks. I wonder how Joe's old pals at the DLC and so forth will respond to Lieberman's increasingly demagogic attacks on the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. I suspect the strategy will be to argue that this is a new, Zellified Lieberman, but in truth this is the sort of rhetoric New Dems regularly engaged in back in 2002-2005 when it was cool.
as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?
“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”
Is it possible that John McCain is really not aware that the whole "legacy of colonialism" issue is also kind of a sore spot in the Middle East? Here for the first time I actually have a ray of hope about a McCain administration's foreign policy. I'd been thinking that he was motivated by grotesque moral and strategic errors, but maybe he's just kind of dim-witted and lacking in basic factual information. Maybe if somebody tells him that the whole Arab world (and Iran) was carved up by the British and French empires in the wake of World War I, a light bulb will go off in his head and he'll change his whole approach!
Actually, though, I think McCain's not alone here. Very few Americans (even American elites) seem to recognize that most of the "pro-American" regimes in the region -- all the monarchies, basically -- just are colonial regimes set up by the British imperial authorities. Eventually, the United States took over from Britain as the foreign underwriter of those regimes. But to understand U.S. policy in the region and how the U.S. is viewed, you need to understand that Jordan and the G.C.C. aren't just autocracies, they're autocratic creations of the British Empire and CENTCOM is seen as the successor to the Colonial Office. Meanwhile, the "anti-American" or "radical" regimes in Syria, Iran, and (formerly) Iraq all have their origins in rebellions against colonial regimes. The Egyptian regime shared those anti-imperialist origins, but eventually switched sides and joined Team America.
J Street, the new pro-Israel, pro-peace PAC is doing one of it's first actions around the fact that, referring to his political opponents, Bush "likened us to those who favored talking to rather than defeating Adolf Hitler on the eve of World War II. How dare he invoke the memory of the Holocaust to justify his disastruous policies. Write to Bush now and tell him - Shame on you!"
As they say, we've had years to see what Bush's policies accomplish -- not much for the United States and not much for Israel either -- just more war, instability, growing al-Qaeda recruitment, and more nuclear proliferation.
Dana Goldstein notes that there appears to be a massive backlash from state NARAL chapters and major financial supporters against the group's decision to endorse Barack Obama. National NARAL seems to have gotten too clever by half here. They essentially endorsed Obama in an Obama-McCain race, which would have been a non-story, but by jumping the gun by a couple of weeks thought they could earn themselves some brownie points and get some attention.
But it got attention, of course, because the timing made it a bit of a shivving of Hillary Clinton even though in the real world they waited until after Clinton had dropped well below the threshold of viability. And now people are mad. At the end of the day, this seems to be a situation where a little less clever PR and a little more education and outreach could have done some work -- it's clear that many of Clinton's fans genuinely don't understand that it's not possible for her to make up the ground she needs to and view efforts to get her to drop out as unfair efforts to rig things for Obama.
Geoffrey Millard, a soldier with the New York National Guard, was a general's assistant in Iraq. He related a story he attended a briefing his boss about: a soldier at a traffic control point, faced with a speeding, oncoming car, "made a split-second decision" to fire "more than 200 rounds into the vehicle," killing its inhabitants. "He then watched as the mother, father and two children were carried from that car.
"That evening, as it was briefed to the general -- and I flipped the slides for that briefing -- Col. [William] Rochelle, from the 42nd Infantry Division, DISCOM [Division Support Command] commander -- and I have to apologize for a little vulgarity here, but I feel it's intricate for my testimony -- he turned in his chair to an entire division-level staff, and he said, and I quote, 'If these fucking Hajjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen.'"
To me, in a sense, it's these checkpoints incidents, more than anything else, that exposes the fundamental folly of occupation.
Via Fallows, the Atlantic's 1958 special supplement on Burma. Props as always to the web team for finding this stuff in the archives and getting it up on the site.
David Brooks says cutting edge neuroscience will pose a new kind of challenge to the traditionally religious: "The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism."
You can see Ross, who thinks this is more like a kind of pantheism, for a theological take on this but here's another kind of thought -- if India and China (and other smaller Asian countries) keep growing, we're going to see much more cultural prestige and geopolitical importance attached to non-monotheistic societies. Fareed Zakaria goes so far in The Post-American World to describe India and China as places where people just don't have religions. I wouldn't put it that way (he's basically defining Christianity and Islam as the only "real" religions) but there is a real difference between Christianity and Islam on the one hand, and all these other practices that try to meet spiritual needs by focusing on specific and personal religious obligations -- obligations to caste or to ancestors or to the Jewish community -- plus some somewhat separate ideas about universal ethics and personal spirituality.
Yesterday, not only did George W. Bush decide to take the basically unprecedented step of lashing out at his domestic political opponents in a speech to a foreign parliament, but John McCain chimed in to say he agrees with Bush. He busted out the frequently heard idea that "serious negotiations" that are "done in a face to face fashion as Senator Obama wants to do" is a step that "enhances the prestige of a nation that's a sponsor of terrorists" and sundry other evils.
This is such a common talking point on the right that you'd think that somewhere out there you could find some kind of causal explanation of how this works. Obama takes office. The Iranians, having heard his campaign rhetoric, send a message through the Swiss or something about the possibility of arranging a summit. Our guys talk to their guys, the meeting happens, and this gives Khatami enhanced prestige in the eyes of whom? And what does this enhanced prestige allow him to do? What, in other words, are we afraid of?
Gershom Gorenberg makes the case that Barack Obama would be the best candidate for Israel, from the point of view of someone with different ideas about what would be best for Israel than what some of the "pro-Israel" dogma in the U.S. demands. That said, at this point in time I think you'd have to say that most Obama fans who care about U.S. policy toward Israel are basically seeing what they want to see and hearing what they want to hear.
I hope that folks like Gershom who have sound views on this matter are right about what they're hearing, but Marty Peretz likes what he's hearing, too and it's genuinely not clear to me what Obama's trying to say. In part, I do think that reflects the fact that the divide between the hawk and dove camps is, at this point, actually quite a bit narrower than it's historically been. But fundamentally it's a reflection of a political strategy of deliberate ambiguity so we'll just have to see what happens.
Bush loved farm subsidies when the Republicans controlled congress, but now that the Democrats are running the show he's gotten religion and is sensibly proposing that we change the current rule which says you can't get subsidies if you earn more than $2.6 million a year (in income, not in gross revenue) to a more parsimonious $200,000. Congress is trying to hold the line at $950,000 which prompts Megan McArdle to wonder "Of all possible reforms, this would seem to be a no-brainer. How many fabulously wealthy Democratic farmers in swing states can there be?"
I think there's a twofold answer. One is that farm state residents and their elected representatives may well believe that subsidies to rich farmers have positive trickle-down impacts on the whole community. Indeed, one mistake I think liberals sometimes make is to assume that political disputes about "economic self-interest" will naturally break down as higher-income versus lower-income rather than region versus region or industry versus industry. The other is that money really does talk in politics, as in Larry Bartels' finding that the preferences of voters in the bottom-third of the income distribution "have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes." There may not be many farmers earning between $200,000 and $950,000 a year, but the fact that their interests carry a lot of weight in the halls of congress isn't actually especially aberrant.
Photo by Flickr user jdickert used under a Creative Commons license
Conservative radio host Kevin James is on Hardball to call Barack Obama and appeaser, and Chris Matthews hits upon the nice idea of asking James to explain what it was that Chamberlain did wrong at Munich. As becomes apparent, James has no idea! He just likes to say "appeasement" a lot, but doesn't know what it means, what the context was, what was wrong with it, or how it might possibly apply today. Basically, he's an idiot, which is no surprise, but it is rare to see these things so amply demonstrated.
I'm pretty sure that re-vetting his entire staff to try to ensure that there are no more embarrassing incidents like SLORC lobbyists popping up in key campaign positions isn't how John McCain intended to kick off his presidential campaign. This hubub over lobbyists for the unsavory does, however, tend to highlight exactly how radical and absurd McCain anti-diplomacy views are.
To him and his campaign and many of his supporters, the idea of so much as having state-to-state negotiations with a rogue state like Iran or Syria is repugnant and absurd. And yet all kinds of other business gets done with all kinds of other nasty regimes. I'll confess that I own products manufactured in whole or in part in the People's Republic of China. And guess what? So do you. And all kinds of American firms are doing business in China. The Queen of Jordan is the toast of Washington whenever she comes to down, NYU is opening a campus in Abu Dhabi, SLORC has lobbyists in the United States. This is the world we live in. All of these regimes do some pretty awful stuff. And yet doing as McCain has and promising to reconfigure international relations around the idea that we only have real diplomatic relations with countries whose internal policies we approve of is impractical and absurd.
And of course McCain himself doesn't intend to apply it with any kind of logic or consistency. He's not saying that having a meeting with Chinese officials constitutes appeasement or that we should invade Saudi Arabia to turn it into a democracy. But he is saying we should create a League of Extraordinary Democracies to kick ass globally without the Chinese say-so and then it's just fantastical to think there won't be a response to that. Any kind of serious policy needs to be made in the actual world of diplomacy and business where we don't get to just pretend that these countries don't exist or don't have interests.
When I stayed at one of your hotels recently and asked if it would be possible to email a copy of my receipt to me and your clerk said "yes" I was hoping for a copy of the receipt to be emailed to me and was not hoping to be inundated with spam on a near-daily basis.
Action on either of those points would be appreciated.
But here's my question; why would Clinton want to be Vice President? Wouldn't Senate Majority Leader (and I suspect this could be arranged) be a more powerful position? Wouldn't she have more influence over policymaking there than in the Vice President's office? I mean this question in all seriousness; Clinton seems to be indicating that she'd like the spot, but I'm befuddled as to why she'd take it, much less fight for it. I suppose that it sets her up for another run in 2016, or perhaps more importantly precludes the emergence of a Vice Presidential rival that year, but marginal improvement on her chances in eight years would seem small recompense for the powerlessness of the VP slot. Let's remember that Vice Presidents have exactly as much power as the President gives them, and if it's true that Obama really doesn't want Hillary (and I wouldn't credit such assertions too heavily at this point), then he certainly isn't likely to grant her much power in his administration.
I don't think her odds at the Senate leadership are really all that good (too much fighting with Obama-endorsing senior members at this point) but certainly if I were Hillary Clinton I would want nothing to do with the vice presidency. If Obama becomes president, she's an unusually high-profile senator for as long as she wants to be, one whose national following and large donor base can let her exercise a lot of influence in congress. And if Obama loses to John McCain, she can run again in 2012 and say she told us so.
My suspicion is that hints from the Clinton camp of interest in a unity ticket have more to do with the desires of the campaign staff for a better crack at executive branch jobs in an Obama administration. After all, Hillary has a solid fallback job as a Senator, that's not true for everyone on the team.
Steps are under way to bring true high-speed rail to California, albeit not until 2030. But that'll just give Southern California plenty of time to ensure that when San Franciscans hop off their train in LA there are tons of good ways of getting around that don't involve renting a car.
I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"
McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."
Well, um, times change I guess. And look who wants to negotiate with Iran -- it's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates! Note also the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on co-chaired by Gates that released the very sensible "Iran: Time for a New Approach" report. And, yes, the new approach was not a McCain-style "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran."
John McCain doesn't like John Hagee's anti-Catholic views, but he loves his Israel policy, telling CNN, "I'm grateful for his commitment to the support of the state of Israel, and I'm very grateful for many of his commitments around the world, including to the independence and freedom of the state of Israel." Ben Smith wisely points out that the actual terms of Hagee's support for Israel are that he thinks a strong hawkish stance will help lead to Israel's destruction as it is covered beneath "a sea of human blood." And what about the Jews?
The Jews, however, will survive the battle, Hagee says, long enough to have “the opportunity to receive Messiah, who is a rabbi known to the world as Jesus of Nazareth.”
So Hagee supports Israel, or he supports the destruction of Israel followed by a mass conversion episode and presumably the death of whichever Jews remain Jewish, and McCain specifically sites Hagee's views on the Middle East as praiseworthy. That doesn't sound very good to me, but Hagee's got the AIPAC good housekeeping seal so I suppose "sea of blood" is the new pro-Israel.
An interesting question raised at the Ed in '08 conference: The idea of universal pre-school (in other words, affordable for everyone) isn't very controversial, unlike the idea of universal health care. But should pre-school be mandated? In other words, should we be requiring that all three and four-year-olds be enrolled in some kind of education program, even if it's "home schooling?"
On requiring, probably not. What I think this analogy does is highlight the distortions on our thinking forced by the health policy community's determination to find a way of reforming the health care system that involves appeasing the insurance companies rather than destroying them. In a rational and humane universe, health insurance wouldn't be universal. It'd be kinda rare. Something very rich people or the idiosyncratically risk averse paid for out of pocket. What would be universal would be health care. And as with universal preschool, the existence of universal health care wouldn't imply that at any given time every single person was actually receiving health care. Nor would it quite guarantee that everyone was actually receiving all the health care they need -- ornery people might just not go to the doctor.
Rather, the promise of universal health care would be that, as with the promise of universal preschool, the care would be provided to anyone who wanted it at a price that everyone could afford.
But if you want to keep the insurance companies in business, then you're looking at a different picture. Barack Obama has a plan to make health insurance affordable for every American. But many analysts think that a program like that is fundamentally unworkable unless you require that everybody buy health insurance. The problem is that there's a difference between only showing up to get your health care when you find yourself in need of care (that's normal!) and only showing up to get your health insurance when you find yourself in need of care (that's against the whole concept of insurance). Then, of course, once you decide on a mandate your problem because enforcement. But this mostly serves to underscore the fact that the compromises being made in terms of trying to create a realistic legislative package for 2009 are very real compromises, major steps away from ideal circumstances that introduce unnecessary complications into the system.
Photo by Flickr user Ninjapoodles used under a Creative Commons license
Tom Lee has some more background on software patents, for those of you who seem to think these are a good idea. Remember that, yes, stronger IP protections create larger financial incentives to innovate. But they also make it more expensive to innovate and ultimately reduce the level of competition. You can already copyright your software so people can't just go and copy what you've done.
Adding a layer of patent protection on top of that makes life too difficult for programmers (who don't know what they're allowed to do and may not be able to afford to do it) and too comfortable for incumbents.
Kevin Drum looks at the trendlines in growing support for gay rights and concludes that a gay marriage referendum in California is likely to be a close-run thing. But of course whatever happens this November, this is essentially a fight the right has already lost. Individuals' views are evolving in a more pro-equality direction, but perhaps more importantly pure cohort replacement effects doom the conservative position on gay rights questions with equality enjoying overwhelming support among younger Americans.
And then of course there's the Ellen DeGeneres factor, as these days an openly lesbian woman can regularly attract a large audience of very middlebrow people and announce her engagement to a cheering studio audience.
A lot of attention focused yesterday on John McCain's audaciously hopeful plan to win the war in Iraq though the power of positive thinking, but if you bore down into his speech you see that vague aspirations are actually going to accomplish all sorts of wonderful stuff by 2013.
John Boonstra, for example, is confused about McCain's plan for a coalition of countries with no leverage over Sudan to successfully pressure Sudan into resolving the conflict in Darfur. What he's not considering is that McCain would really like this to happen and would like to emphasize that it'd be really great if it worked.
Via the traitor Steve Clemons, I see the appeasement set over at the Council on Foreign Relations has released a new report on approaches to Latin America that calls for rethinking our policy toward Cuba. What nonsense, we've been embargoing them for only around 50 years and just this year it's finally bearing fruit in the form of age taking its toll on Fidel Castro. If we just keep on doing the same thing for another 100 or so years, surely it'll work by then.
I think Haggai and Kevin Drum need to rethink their blasé attitude toward the time and place at which president Bush decided to foray into presidential politics with attacks on Barack Obama.
Kevin writes that "24/7 cable news has made the distinction of where something is said mostly obsolete and the symbology of showing a united front on foreign soil little more than a quaint relic of an earlier age." I'd say this is true insofar as we're saying Bush should feel no compunction about saying something in Israel (or some other country) that he'd be comfortable saying in the United States. But I do think there's a difference when you're talking about using the Israeli parliament as the setting for your speech. Basically, when you do that you're dragging foreign government officials into our domestic political dispute. It's not the greatest outrage in the world, but it's not really an appropriate way for the president to conduct himself or the country's foreign policy.
I think the thing you have to understand about the surge of pundits wanting to invade Burma is that it's the very absurdity of the idea that makes it such an appealing op-ed thesis. It's self-righteousness without responsibility. Advocate an invasion of a country you don't know anything about and have it happen and, well, all kinds of things might go awry in a way that's embarasing. But since everyone knows there's not going to be an invasion of Burma, you can say there ought to be one and then make up a nice story about how well it hypothetically went. You can even show your thoughtful seriousness about matters of war and peace by chalking up the tragic failure to invade as yet another disastrous consequence of the war in Iraq.
At the start of the playoffs, I felt like the Celtics were pretty substantial favorites to win it all. Right now? Not so much. It still seems like they'll beat Cleveland and I'd pick them to win against Detroit, but the Lakers are definitely looking like the superior team at this point. After all, one of Boston's advantages was supposed to be its much easier path through the playoffs. Instead, they can't win on the road even against markedly inferior teams.
To echo what Ezra Klein says here, it really can't be pointed out enough that health care policy reform is mostly about improving people's economic situation so that we have fewer cases of medically driven financial catastrophe or insurance-induced labor market rigidity. Broadening the supply of health insurance should make the population somewhat healthier, and as the gains would be concentrated among the worst-off Americans the equity value would be very real, but the overall impact would be relatively modest compared to the gains available in other areas.
The most likely gains in public health would come from improvements in lifestyle factors, predominantly diet where many Americans are eating plenty of food but not enough nutrition, and exercise where many Americans aren't engaged in nearly enough physical activity. There are a lot of very cost effective things you could do on this score, but it hasn't been a topic on the political agenda and there are few interest group pressures here. I will say that one reason I think curbing carbon emissions may not be as costly as some think is that adapting to a lower carbon lifestyle would, in most instances, entail adopting a healthier lifestyle.
The other thing is that insofar as health care really can have dramatic impacts on health outcomes, the most important things tend to be the simplest and most basic ones. Here lack of insurance is a problem, but so are the vast array of supply-side restrictions. It ought to be quite cheap to get a basic tooth cleaning or medical checkup or secure a routine diagnosis and prescription. But it's generally not because entrepreneurship in medical services is strongly discouraged by the current rules, the law tends to require full-fledged doctors and dentists in situations where they're not needed, and there are incredible impediments to increasing the supply of general practitioners and so forth.
Photo by Flickr user Normanack used under a Creative Commons license
It was interesting, though not really surprising, to learn from Matt Bai's piece that John McCain is a big fan of Lewis Sorley's book, A Better War. The nickel version of Sorley's argument is that after the Tet Offensive and the revelation that the past several years' worth of U.S. policy in Vietnam had been built on a tissue of lies caused domestic support for the war to collapse, the country adopted new and more awesomely effective tactics that were winning the war before public opinion and congress pulled the plug.
''The Sorley analysis is wrong,'' writes David Elliott, author of the exhaustive and widely lauded ''The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-75.''
"For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone would think [clear and hold] was a success in Vietnam,'' writes William Turley, author of ''The Second Indochina War, 1954-1975.''
''Lewis Sorley is completely wrong,'' concurred retired General Le Ngoc Hien in a recent interview. As deputy chief of staff for operations in the North Vietnamese Army, Hien was responsible for compiling the overall military strategies for both the army and the Viet Cong. [. . .]
It is hard to know what to make of the claim that South Vietnam, after fighting a horrendously bloody and interminable guerrilla and conventional war against Communist foes within and without for two decades, finally succumbed because of the refusal of a supplemental appropriations bill by the US Congress in the spring of 1975. Of half a dozen experts on the war queried via e-mail-including Elliott, Turley, Clemson's Edwin Moise, and several others-none besides Sorley thought South Vietnam could have held out for long. Its army was plagued by corruption and factionalism; it had never established firm popular support. ''There is no way that the RVN could have repulsed the Communist offensive of 1975,'' responded Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Studies Forum.
But in some ways a more interesting point is simply the fact that hawks are so invested in this revisionist take. If you zoomed back in time to 1963 or 1969 it would be taken for granted that the purpose of U.S. involvement in South Vietnam wasn't just to "win" in some abstract sense. After all, who cares about South Vietnam? Why should hundreds of thousands of Americans go around the world to fight for South Vietnam? Because, of course, the war wasn't about South Vietnam. The theory behind the war was that if a Communist takeover of South Vietnam happened, that Communism would sweep across Asia in a way that was massively detrimental to American interests.
And since South Vietnam did fall to the Communists, we can say truly and definitively and without recourse to any hypotheticals that the hawks were totally wrong. South Vietnam went Communist and . . . we were fine. There was no red tide sweeping across Asia. India and Japan and Australia were never threatened. But to John McCain, the mere fact that staying in Vietnam forever wouldn't have accomplished anything doesn't change matters. He likes "victory" so he thinks we should have stayed forever. And, similarly, he wants us to stay forever in Iraq. Not because the benefits will be worth the costs or because he has any vision of Americna strategy. But just because.
Lots of interesting material in Michelle Cottle's notebook dump on what various Clintonistas think the campaign did wrong. Two small points before I get to my big point. One:
"Devastating vulnerabilities such as Obama's associations with Wright and Ayers were not unearthed by the campaign's vaunted research team in time to be fully taken advantage of--despite being readily available in the public domain."
I'd heard about Wright and Ayers from Clinton supporters long before the Clinton campaign started officially pushing these issues. I simply don't believe that the "vaunted research team" hadn't "unearthed" this information. Rather, I think the campaign thought it would be sleazy and counterproductive to start campaigning on this stuff until they got truly desperate. And I think they were right.
Two -- when you lose a big race by a close margin there are a million things you can second guess and no one true answer.
Big point -- it's fascinating to me that nobody mentioned the war. Clinton supported the war. In retrospect, the war was a terrible idea. Her support for it was a mistake. What's more, it's inconceivable to me that Obama's campaign could have gotten off the ground had Clinton spent 2002 and 2003 as a lonely liberal voice speaking out against the war, then spent 2005 and 2006 being completely vindicated in her judgment. It's not just that Obama wouldn't have beaten her, he wouldn't have run at all -- it would have been preposterous. She would have faced a from-the-right challenge in the primary that would have gotten some attention but never posed any real threat.
But Clinton's error on the war opened up serious doubts about her substantive and political judgment about one of the highest-profile issues of the moment. In many ways it's a testament to how brilliant her campaign was all throughout 2007 and 2008 that they never allowed the war issue to bury her, considering that an overwhelming majority of Democratic primary voters think she made a mistake.
I've blogged before about the case of Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter who was going to be barred from competing in the Olympics on the theory that his high-end prostheses give him an unfair advantage. Now it looks like he's getting the green light. I, for one, welcome our new prosthetically enhanced overlords.
If there comes a time in the future when sprinting is completely dominated by double-amputees using prosthetic legs/feet, I think this is clearly a decision that's going to have to be revisited. But that doesn't strike me as an especially likely outcome, and the Olympics will certainly benefit from the addition of an interesting plotline.
Marc Ambinder reports that Black told him "as he has told other reporters, that his firm ran every potential foreign client by the State Department and/or the White House in whatever administration was in power and asked whether the scope of the work fit with American foreign policy goals." He also quotes Black as saying he's "not ashamed of anything the firm did."
There's no question that helping the Mobutu regime in Zaire was something the American governments of the time were okay with. But anyone who had anything to do with aiding Mobutu and isn't ashamed of it really needs to get his conscience replaced. I highly recommend Michela Wrong's book, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. American support for Mobutu was an enterprise that involved a lot of people over a long period of time, so Black's hardly the only one with something to be ashamed of, but he really ought to be ashamed.
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Heads in the Sand
