In the economy of the 21st century, economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don't rely on economic incentive or public provision. Unlike 20th century innovation, the most important developments in innovation have been driven not by research funded by governments or developed by corporations but by the collaborative interactions of individuals. In most cases, this modality of innovation has not been motivated by economic concerns or the prospect of profit. This raises the possibility of a world in which some of the sectors of the economy particularly the ones dealing with innovation and creativity are driven by social interactions of various kinds, rather than by profit-oriented investment. This Article examines the development of this amateur modality of creative production, and explains how it came to exist. It then deals with why this modality is different from and potentially inconsistent with the typical modalities of production that are at the heart of modern views of innovation policy. It provides a number of policy prescriptions that should be used by governments to recognize the significance of amateur innovation, and to further the development of amateur productivity.
One often-underlooked element of the intellectual property debate is the ability of the IP regime to effect the balance. Some things are done on a commercial basis and some are done on an amateur basis. Strong IP makes it more difficult for commercial and non-commercial actors alike to be able to innovate. It compensates for erecting this financial hurdle by creating unique financial incentives toward innovation -- incentives that only help a commercial actor. In a world with weaker IP, more and more work should come from hobbyists, amateurs, and non-profit organizations.
Kevin Carey watches libertarian thinking on education policy descend from vouchers to a preference for tax credits, which will work like vouchers except be much more regressive. And of course that's the problem with relying on an ideological movement that doesn't believe there should be public services for advice on how to organize your public services. Once public schools have been replaced by vouchers and vouchers have been replaced by tax credits, the next logic step is to reduce the size of the credits and just have lower taxes overall.
People with the means and inclination to send their kids to a good school can do so, and families lacking such means or inclination can send them to a bad one or have them go out and get a job. That, after all, is the essence of freedom and who could be against that? Besides which, everyone knows that the lower tax rates resulting from the end of public education will produce more economic growth and benefit the poor in the long run.
It's my birthday! But don't buy me a present, buy a copy of Heads in the Sand for yourself. Amazon's now pairing it with Ron Paul's book, so you know it's got to be good. Or something.
Also -- reading/Q&A this evening at Politics and Prose, 5PM.
All things considered, I thought 26 was one of my top years. I'm pretty sure my dad once advised me to get married by the time I was 27 or I'd be bald by then, but I think I've still got a couple of good years left in me.
Lorelei Kelly reminds me of Jeffrey Record's excellent monograph "Appeasement Reconsidered" done for the Army War College's Institute for Strategic Studies (a noted hotbed of anti-American sentiment), a survey of the misuse of "appeasement" rhetoric to sell people on foreign policy boondoggles in the post-war era. John McCain and George Bush should check it out, they might learn something.
"Professor X," not only the world's greatest telepath but also the pseudonym of an actual professor says no in the new Atlantic:
Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.
For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.
I am the man who has to lower the hammer.
This is all true, but there are basically two ways of looking at the upshot. One would be to say that we have too many people starting college. Another would be to say that we need to do a better job of preparing more people for college. The growth in the wage premium associated with a college degree suggests the latter option to me. The fact that many European countries now have a higher proportion of people graduating from college also suggests the same to me. There's also the fact that currently at the college level we devote the most resources to the best prepared students while the worst-prepared students get the least resources (that's clear from Professor X's article) even though the objective level of need runs in the other direction.
A fascinating point from David Corn who notes that in John McCain's vision of 2013 he doesn't say anything whatsoever about hot button social issues. I assume John Paul Stevens won't still be on the Supreme Court by then, so as long as McCain is forecasting the future it really would be nice if he could say something about whether or not he believes abortion will still be legal in 2013.
Former Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler resigns as national co-chair of John McCain's campaign rather than step down from his lobbying gigs. The most interesting part of the story is, I think, this blind quote:
“No one in real America cares,” said one key Republican. “But McCain cares.”
I think it's true that no one in real America cares about this per se. But real Americans do care about hypocrisy, so the fact that McCain has made anti-lobbyist crusading the center of his public persona means he'd damn well better care. The other thing is that in real American the Bush administration is horribly unpopular, the Republican Party is horribly unpopular, but John McCain remains reasonably well-liked. That's based on the perception that he's not a business as usual corrupt Republican, which means that when he gets caught acting like a business as usual corrupt Republican it's in his interests to move swiftly.
As for how much McCain really cares about this stuff, well let's say he doesn't care enough about keeping his campaign lobbyist-free to have avoided putting lobbyists in tons of key positions, but he does care enough to take action ex post when people complain.
I had never heard of the uncanny valley until I read Tyler Cowen and Jason Kottke blog it today. The basic idea is that when you get quasi-human images -- cartoon people, talking animals, etc. -- they get more appealing to audiences as they become more human like. More appealing, that is, until they become too human while still not quite looking right, at which point they become repugnant.
So animators who know they can't perfectly replicate human appearance actually go out of their way to avoid getting too realistic.
Peter Scoblic did an op-ed over the weekend making the point that yelling "appeasement!" at the slightly sign of diplomacy is a longstanding trend in post-war rightwing foreign policy thinking and it just happens to be wrong all the time. You can read more about this in Scoblic's excellent book or, for that matter, in my book.
The crux of the matter is that while truly conservative foreign policy thought has a long history of wrongness in the United States it's rarely genuinely held sway on the big issues. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan all at key moments broke with elements of their conservative base to preserve containment, to initiate détente, to continue with the bilateral arms control process, etc., leaving run-amok rightwingery mostly to fester in third world battlefields rather than on the central point of America's relationship with Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Under Bush, though, we've seen it take center stage with disastrous consequences and John McCain is, if anything, more of a true believer than Bush.
I hadn't realized that there was a weird ad to go along with the weird speech:
Among other problems, doesn't this ad work just as well (or, as the case may be, poorly) with "the President: Barack Obama" or "the President: Mitt Romney" or "the President: Hillary Clinton" as it does with "the President: John McCain." The spot doesn't even get as controversial as forceful advocacy of mom and apple pie.
I kind of wonder on some level what the point of producing tons of McCain-bashing web videos is, since it seems like a foregone conclusion that pretty much the entire cohort of people inclined to watch web videos isn't going to vote for McCain in the first place. It's interesting, though, that we're seeing the emergence of a bifurcated media landscape and political conversation. People over a certain age exist in a universe where it's almost as if the web doesn't exist and things like the nightly news, the daily paper, and the cable networks are utterly dominant. For people below a certain age, the nightly news is totally irrelevant, the daily paper is primarily a website, and things like blogs and web videos matter a great deal.
This is one thing people forget when discussing the much-remember points that people who watched Nixon debate Kennedy on television liked Kennedy, but those who listened on the radio liked Nixon. In 1960 television was still a relatively new technology, and an older, late-adopter segment of the population didn't have it and listened to debates on the radio. That was a Nixon-friendly demographic, just as early-adopters of web technology today are Obama-friendly.
Mike Tomasky has a good column about how Barack Obama's changing the game in the U.S. foreign policy debate, holding his ground and fighting and it seems to be working. One thing I'll note about this is that while it may not be true that 99 percent of life is just showing up, Obama's been showing us that showing up is a lot of it. There's nothing really shockingly novel about what he's been saying, it's just that as someone who's genuinely untainted by the failures of the past seven years he stands up and labels attacks on him continuities with the failures of the past seven years.
It's not that clever, but it doesn't need to be any more clever than that. George Bush has already handed the other side a huge dump of ammunition. And now there's a candidate who's ready to pick it up off the floor and shoot back. Shoot back, I might add, on point without shifting targets to the economy or veterans' benefits or whatever else.
I'm not in 100 percent agreement with Jeffrey Goldberg's op-ed yesterday on "Israel's 'America Problem'", but I think it's pretty darn good. Especially as he says that "what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within" -- the threat posed by the West Bank settlements.
I think that gets it exactly right. A good friend doesn't just back his buddies up in whatever they happen to be doing at the moment, a good friend helps a friend pull back from mistakes and make difficult choices and that's what's needed. He concludes that "this won’t happen until Aipac and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen." Perhaps so, but if not I'd recommend J Street as an antidote.
Kevin Phillips stuffed the middle of this op-ed with plenty of caveats, but still winds up direly warning that "The loss of global economic leadership that overtook Britain and Holland seems to be looming on our own horizon."
It's worth taking a deep breath and looking back at those caveats. The United States is currently the richest country in the world by a pretty wide margin. Since China and India are both growing from a much smaller base, it should be possible for them to maintain higher average growth rates over an extended period of time eventually overtake us in terms of overall GDP. But it should be noted that there's nothing inevitable about this -- poor policymaking kept Chinese and Indian growth slow for a long time, and poor policymaking could easily return. How confident are you -- is anyone -- that China will go the next twenty years without a major political crisis?
But more to the point, even if that did happen, the typical American would still be substantially better off than the typical Indian. Visit the Netherlands some time and you'll see that it's a very nice country whose residents enjoy a spectacularly high standard of living. It just happens to be a very small country so the overall Dutch GDP is, in PPP adjusted terms, smaller than that of their ex-colony Indonesia. But nobody's sitting around in Amsterdam saying "it sure would be better if we were an economic leader like Indonesia!" They're doing fine, and we'll be doing fine, too, if big, poor countries eventually turn into big middle-income countries.
Tyler Cowen considers his favorite Japanese gangster movie: "Should I go with Sonatine? I don't know them all."
I don't know them all either, but in this category I prefer a different Takeshi Kitano movie, Fireworks -- or Hana-bi in Japanese -- that came out a few years later. There's a small movie theater next door to the building I grew up in that, back when I was in high school showed tons and tons of gangster and martials arts movies from Japan and Hong Kong so I became surprisingly well-versed in these sub-genres.
You've got to sympathize with the Bush administration. Sometimes you're running the government but, inconveniently, it's not the government of Burma and so you need to be accountable to voters, other branches of government, public opinion, etc. Under the circumstances, it helps if you can keep all your conduct secret. But that's hard to do purely through abuse of the classification process. So to speed things along, why not invent a new form of secret information? Good idea! Let's call it "Controlled Unclassified Information." More good ideas! The public has a right not to know.
Hillary Clinton's obviously the more popular choice in West Virginia, but their senior senator is lining up behind Obama part of a recent flood of superdelegate endorsements that's made it more inevitable than ever that he'll be the nominee.
Dana Goldstein explains why Barack Obama won't be able to just "declare victory" after tomorrow's primaries. I think she's right -- by the math and on the merits, he's entitled to do so, but the backlash against an explicit effort to force Clinton out before she's prepared to concede would be too big. His best bet would be to continue his current strategy of campaigning against John McCain and let the handful of remaining primaries play out.
Of course on the merits it's still true that Hillary Clinton's best bet, both for the country and for her own reputation, would be to bow out with some grace rather than staying in through Puerto Rico & South Dakota and then trying some kind of stunt, but I guess that's not going to happen.
Should we build agricultural skyscrapers in-or-near our major cities? It's certainly a cool idea. I think I'm going to put the notion that this is actually environmentally sound and feasible in my "too good to check" file. More plausibly, green roofs really are an environmentally sound idea, though not something with a good prospect for replacing farms.
Infrastructure is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of transit access.
This is all true enough (and what Duncan said) but before we try to run in terms of transit and infrastructure it makes sense to walk. Many Americans live in places where there is no transit infrastructure, and a healthy number of people live in places that just aren't well-suited to creating any such infrastructure. But it's a big country and some people already are living near transit infrastructure.
One piece of very low-hanging fruit is to promote denser development near our existing stations (instead of, e.g., bungalows and vacant lots near the Brookland Metro here in DC) which are often places where developers are clamoring to build and potential residents clamoring to live but incumbent property owners are trying to avoid sharing the wealth. Another opportunity is to improve service quality and frequency at things like our existing commuter rail lines. With gas prices rising, I bet a lot of Virginians are giving VRE a second look but they're probably discovering that it sucks. Making an existing commuter rail line more useful isn't brain surgery and doesn't involve any paradoxes or dilemmas, it just needs to be made a funding priority.
Last, it's always worth reiterating that while a lot of Americans live in genuinely low-density environments, many car-heavy parts of the U.S. are actually pretty dense. New Jersey is, as I've noted before, about as dense as the Netherlands which is one of the least driving-oriented countries. Los Angeles, too, though far from the densest city in the world is actually pretty dense and once featured a lot of transit in the form of streetcars while the well-designed Portland is hardly the second coming of Tokyo. If we start doing better with the relatively easy cases, that would create a more supportive environment for more difficult issues.
Photo of New Jersey Transit station by Flickr user Morrissey used under a Creative Commons license
The thing about something like this story of a soldier using the Koran for target practice is that it really sets into relief how audacious the goals of counterinsurgency theorists are for what U.S. military conduct could really be like. In the annals of wartime abuses, Koran-shooting is extremely stupid but also really not that bad compared to, say, massacre or pillage or torture. And it's so obviously dumb that, clearly, the chain of command was not sending tacit "everyone shoot Korans" messages down the line. And yet it's still really dumb and counterproductive.
Now consider that our deployment in Iraq has involved upwards of 200,000 soldiers at one time or another. I'd just be phenomenally hard to get a group of people that large together that didn't include any people who sometimes make the occasional idiotic blunder. Indeed, it'd be hard to get a group of people that large (about the population of Reno, Nevada) together that didn't include a few serious bad apples -- murders and rapists and the like. And historically speaking, while good discipline has always been an asset in war, nobody's won wars by having perfect discipline. But the prescriptions for successful counterinsurgency oftentimes seem to me to suggest that we really do need perfect or near-perfect discipline to succeed, and I just don't think that's realistic.
Sending me more emails about the units available at your new ugly condo dubbed "the Floridian" will not compel me to buy one of them. Week after week, month after month you keep emailing me about this property. Evidently, you're not selling units. That's because you're asking for too much money in a neighborhood that, though lovely, now has excess condo capacity. If you lower your price, I might buy one! And if not me, surely someone else will.
It can't be said often enough that the rules governing what is and isn't eligible for purchase under the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program is crazy and horrible (Ezra example -- soy milk doesn't count as "milk" but chocolate milk does). You could try to modify the program to make it less crazy, but it's obviously the result of a screwed up political process and undue power on the part of Big Cow.
It seems to me that we should just scrap the whole thing and make WIC-eligible people eligible for larger food stamp grants. The food stamps program is far from perfect, but it's a lot less ridiculous and the reasoning behind the idea of two separate-but-similar programs is less than compelling.
I can't remember the plot of the Prince Caspian book at all, but according to Ross the film version departed significantly from the book. So I can't say whether or not this objection applies to the book as well, but when I walked out of the theater I found myself badly disappointed by Aslan's proposed response to conflict between the Telmurines and the Old Narnians. Offering to transport Telmurines back to the island their ancestors came from in the distant past would make about as much sense as rectifying the unjust dispossession of the Native Americans by suggesting that present-day Americans all go back to the countries our ancestors immigrated from.
It doesn't make sense on a practical level (the Telmarines new neighbors aren't going to be happy with it at all) and it doesn't make sense on a moral level -- as best I can tell, your typical modern-day Telmarine (as opposed to the king and a small circle of high officials) hasn't done anything wrong. Putting this proposal in context of Prince Caspian riding to power at the head of an army of mythological creatures is just going to turn the Prince into a Quisling figure in the eyes of the human population.
Somebody sent me this Kathleen Parket column a few days ago all outraged and I scanned it and didn't quite get the outrage. Here's the lede:
That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for John McCain over Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president."
When I read this in a fog, not realizing who Parker was, I just assumed that was a set-up for a column about racist opposition to Barack Obama and skipped past the rest. But no! Parker is endorsing Fry's allegedly non-racist sentiments here. And yet, how could sentiments get any more clearly racist than by making explicit references to alleged deficiencies in Obama's bloodlines? Parker later cashes out the concept more thoroughly as "It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots." Again, blood equity? Heritage? That's not racist code words, she's just saying directly that Obama lacks the appropriate ancestry to be President and also that in virtue of his ancestry he's probably lazy.
Jon Chait notes the similarity to some traditional tropes of anti-semitism, "a device that's historically been used to deny the possibility that rootless, cosmopolitan Jews can be full members of a society." More broadly, it nicely dovetails with the anti-immigrant sentiment currently blossoming on the right as we learn that people with unduly recent roots abroad lack what it takes for full-bloodedness. How disgusting.
It seems that Haim Saban, a major Clinton donor and also the primary financial backer of Brookings' Middle East policy output, tried to bribe the Young Democrats of America into throwing their superdelegate support to Hillary Clinton. Sleazy, if true, and it certainly seems to be true.
John Hinckley, the deranged would-be assassin who attempted to kill US president Ronald Reagan in 1981, claimed that he was inspired by it. He said that his action was an attempt to impress Foster. (The movie features a scene in which a mohawked De Niro attempts to assassinate a politician.)
According to Mundell, the wave of sympathy for Reagan that was engendered by the assassination attempt deterred Democrats in Congress from voting against his proposed tax cuts. Because of this accident of history, the US administered a big fiscal stimulus at the same time that Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve was administering tight money. This, for Mundell, was vital in creating the era of prosperity that followed.
Frankly, all the evidence used in this argument strikes me as suspect. John Hinckley was a crazy person, and I see little clear reason to believe that in a Taxi Driver-less world he wouldn't have seized on some other putative reason to shoot the president. Nor do I see clear reason to believe that the Hinkley shooting was essential to getting the tax cuts passed (Reagan's large electoral win plus the fact that tax cuts are popular seem like an adequate explanation), or that the tax cuts had such a large positive impact on economic growth (after all, within a couple of years even Reagan was agreeing to start rolling them back).
But apparently Mundell has a Nobel prize, so what do I know?
I was over on ESPN's website hoping to read something interesting previewing tonight's Spurs-Hornets showdown (I think New Orleans will win and San Antonio will get an infusion of foreign talent during the offseason -- Tiago Splitter, etc. -- and win the 2009 championship when the odd-numbered year gives them the edge) but instead my eye was caught by this eye-catching headline: "Wade buys mom a church after she completes turnaround".
Can you even buy a church? I wondered. But it turns out that Wade didn't so much buy his mom a church as he bought a building in which to house a church that she founded a bit back. My assumption is that it's not actually possible to buy a church or other non-profit institution, though presumably one non-profit could be folded into a larger, richer one in a purchase-like scenario. Anyways, consider this a basketball/church thread.
Not that I'm incredibly surprised about any of this, but if Larry Kudlow's account of a recent Joe Lieberman talk is even vaguely accurate, the man has some odd ideas about American history:
Mr. Lieberman talked at some length about how the Democratic party has completely departed from the strong national-security principles of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. He said those leaders clearly understood the need to fight totalitarian dictators and regimes, and that they possessed the moral clarity that can separate friends from enemies in the long-run battle to promote freedom and democracy.
The the Lieberman/McCain/Bush/NRO line on current foreign policy issues, you would think from this description that FDR wisely saw that Hitler and Stalin were just two sides of the same totalitarian coin and determined to fight them both simultaneously. Or that Harry Truman recognized that the U.S.S.R. was a new kind of threat that could not be deterred and launched a preventive strike against Soviet positions. Or that John Kennedy recognized that there was no chance to strike a deal with a butcher like Khruschev over Cuba and we had no choice but to go to war.
It's certainly true that Liebermanism has some affinities for the Kennedy administration's screw-ups -- its over-enthusiasm for getting the United States more deeply involved in Vietnam or its decision to greenlight the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but those hardly seem like comparisons one wants to draw.
When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication — National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard — "and now I feel estranged," he said. "I just don't feel it's exciting, I don't feel it's true, fundamentally true." In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed "true." Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. "American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn't a big one," he said. "The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don't know if they can." He added, "You go to Capitol Hill — Republican senators know they're fucked. They have that sense. But they don't know what to do. There's a hunger for new policy ideas."
I have more thoughts on this matter, but for now the superficial -- does this really sound like a plausible reason for David Brooks to have agreed to become a New York Times columnist? Is there some long list of political pundits who turn down that particular job offer? I'm guessing Brooks took the job because he was offered a job as an NYT columnist and that's not the sort of job you turn down.
Guess who agrees with John McCain and George W. Bush about the need to take a paranoid attitude toward Iran? That's right, it's Osama bin Laden in a new taped message:
Bin Laden singled out by name Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, whose 2006 war against Israel boosted the group's popularity among Shiites and Sunnis. Bin Laden said Nasrallah claimed he had enough resources, such as money and combatants, to fight Israel. "But the truth is the opposite," he said. "If he was honest and has enough (resources), why then he did not support the fight to liberate Palestine." He also attacked Nasrallah for allowing the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon "to protect the Jews." Sunni al-Qaida has also stepped up its criticism of Shiite Iran, the main backer of Hezbollah, accusing it of trying to dominate the Middle East.
Again, the reasonable course for the United States is to attempt a rapprochement with Iran in order for us to deal with our common enemy, al-Qaeda. Alternatively, we can prattle on about "Islamofascism" in a desperate effort to find new allies for al-Qaeda while alienating potential friends.
Ilan Goldenberg goes beyond the observation that for conservatives it's always 1938 and notes the opposite lessons of World War I where various sides deemed themselves "forced" to fight a war nobody wanted and that served nobody's interests.
My strong sense is that 1914 scenarios are more common than 1938 scenarios. Trade and tourism are positive-sum interactions between nations. War and coercive acts short of war are negative-sum interactions. This means you should try very hard to seek peaceful intercourse via trade and tourism and to avoid negative-sum conflict-based interactions. Sometimes, of course, one faces a foe so determinedly fanatical that it's impossible to avoid the negative sum track where everyone invests vast resources in figuring out better ways to blow stuff up. But the kind of strong irrationality represented by a Hitler or perhaps a Pol Pot is very rare, normally people can't acquire and maintain political power without being sensitive to their own interests.
As Matt Stoller notes there's a remarkable effort under way to excise the debate over the wisdom of the Iraq War from the Democratic primary. Certainly, there was more than that one issue in play. Nevertheless, it's essentially unprecedented for a challenger to unseat an establishment figure as well-entrenched as Clinton, and it's very clear to me that it was the war issue that gave Obama a plausible opening to mount a challenge.
The war alone didn't -- and couldn't have -- put Obama over the top, but it's what create a base of discontent with the "inevitable" Clinton and what allowed an alternative to get a hearing. And that's an important development, a world in which Clinton became the nominee would be a world in which there was no conceivable political upside to opposing any war ever.
U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Matthew Plew
Dave Weigel writes about "liberal bloggers" eager to back Bob Barr as an anti-McCain spoiler. You can sign me up. There's a certain number of people who aren't going to be on board for John McCain's vision of authoritarianism (in support of endless war) at home, and endless war (in support of authoritarianism) abroad but who also just aren't going to be very sympathetic to Barack Obama. If push comes to shove, I think Obama can get most of those people to vote for him. But I'd rather push didn't come to shove -- give traditionalist, small-government, small-r republican conservatives their Bob Barr to vote for and the Obama will win and the GOP might shift in a more product direction over the medium term.
It's increasingly clear that John McCain intends to use his special relationship with the press to run a campaign based on relentlessly lying about his opponent:
At a press conference here, I just asked John McCain about why he keeps talking about Obama's alleged willingness to talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has no power over Iranian foreign policy, rather than Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who does. He said that Ahmadinejad is the guy who represents Iran in international forums like the United Nations, which is a fair point. When I followed with the observation that the Supreme Leader is, uh, the Supreme Leader, McCain responded that the "average American" thinks Ahmadinejad is the boss. Didn't get a chance to follow up to that, but I would have asked, "But isn't it your job to correct those sorts of mistaken impressions on the part of the American public?" Oh well.
But of course it's not. McCain and McCain's allies in the world of neoconservative punditry have deliberately created the entirely false notion that Ahmadenijad runs Iranian foreign policy. One point I've been making in my book-related appearances is that it's not a coincidence that the preventive war crowd told a lot of whoppers about Iraq before the war and is telling a lot of whoppers about Iran now -- the right knows that contrary to the prevailing conventional wisdom, there's just no evidence that the American people are deep down yearning for senseless violence and imperial adventurism.
I think George Packer's combination of reported article and review essay on the state of conservatism is clearly your big think political must-read of the week. I think he completely sums a take on things I share when I'm in a good mood, and advances the ball significantly in terms of fleshing that take out. You need to read and understand and think about this article.
But this morning I'm in a bad mood.
So in a bad mood, one wonders if it didn't feel this way in 1976 -- or even more so in January of 1977. Conservatism triumphant, yet unmoored from principle in the figure of Richard Nixon, then brought into a disgrace from which the more moderate Gerald Ford couldn't solve it. A new president from the outside promising change, and a new bumper crop of "watergate class" members of congress ready to shake things up. But it all went to shit. I am, personally, an apologist for the Carter administration which I think was doing good things and got torpedoed by an unfortunate combination of objective reality (oil shocks, the need to curb inflation) and blinkered behavior by congressional leaders. Others read those events the other way 'round and see Carter as brought down by his deficiencies. You could even push the analogy further by considering the looming shadow of the Kennedy family and its circle of retainers, convinced that they deserve to rule and more interested in seizing the mantle than in cooperating to make a success out of the Carter administration.
So I dunno. Maybe none of that will happen. Certainly it would be bizarre for history to repeat itself precisely, so doubtless some of it won't happen. But I'll be ready to write the conservative movement's epitaph when (a) Barack Obama is inaugurated, and (b) Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid enact some stuff with more lasting impact than the meager results of 1977-80 or 1993-4. There's real reason to believe a congressional party much less dependent on the votes of white south moderates will, in fact, be able to deliver more. But I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's very plausible to imagine a conservative movement that's still strong enough to frustrate progressives' main legislative goals, force Democrats to unilaterally make the tough moves to get the fiscal situation in control, and then once that's done return to power on a new platform of tax cuts for rich people.
The Washington Post writes up some new research indicating that the much-fretted-over "boy crisis" in education doesn't actually exist -- "both sexes have stayed the same or improved on standardized tests in the past decade" and family socioeconomic factors are a much larger demographic determinant of outcomes than is gender. Of course if you read Sara Mead's June 2006 paper on this topic you already know all this.
More Iraq combat veterans who don't understand the stakes:
As John McCain well knows, if we pass the Webb-Hagel bill and enhance veterans benefits, then this might encourage some combat veterans to actually leave the service at some point instead of signing up for the fourth and fifth and sixth tours of duty that make a policy of open-ended occupation viable. Under the circumstances, stinginess toward the troops is the only responsible alternative to dhimmitude.
Are assists routinely misattributed by the official scorekeepers as David Friedman alleges? I'd like to hear more about this than one game's worth of tracking and some complaints from Oscar Robertson about how the kids have it too easy these days, but it's a provocative suggestion.
Dave Alpert has some interesting thoughts on improving bus service. I'm a big advocate of route consolidation in which a city like Washington that has a lot of bus routes would pare them down to a smaller number of routes that are more frequently serviced. The benefits of frequent service for transit are, I think, hard to overstate. If you're trying to get into a bus that only runs once every 30 minutes then if you want to get anywhere on time you need to be paranoid about not missing the bus and usually wind up showing up too early and wasting time. What's more, if a bus happens to be a minute or two late, panic sets in that you've missed it or that some incident has taken the bus out of service and maybe you need to scurry off and find another way of getting where you're going.
That kind of stress and hassle winds up making the bus a "must avoid" transit method, and helps perpetuate the bad bus branding where you constantly meet carless young professionals who've lived in DC for years and know almost nothing about bus routes. Then low ridership means you can't justify frequent service, leading to inconvenience and fewer riders. Of course I'm a fanatic who'd happily say we should spend the money to just increase frequency on all our routes, but working within realistic budget constraints it's better to pare the number of parallel routes down somewhat and increase service frequency.
Meanwhile note that this isn't just an urbanism issue or an environmental issue (though better buses will make our cities more livable and sustainable), it's also an important equity topic. Buses play a much larger role in the transportation bundle purchased by poor people, so better service can dramatically improve quality of life for the working poor, make it much easier for people to find and keep jobs, etc.
Photo by Flickr user intangible used under a Creative Commons license
For a candidate who likes to complain that quoting him accurately constitutes out-of-context foul play, John McCain sure does love distorting things Barack Obama has said. For example, Obama says "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us." This, it seems to me, is indisputably true. But in the Land of Straight Talk where you lie constantly, McCain says "The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny" and that Obama calling it tiny "betrays the depth of Senator Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment." But of course they're only even disagreeing here at all if you leave out the part where Obama said Iran is tiny compared to the Soviet Union.
Similarly, it turns out that if you take a joke Barack Obama was making about duck hunting, and then change it around so that you have him saying that you hunt ducks with a six shooter, you can make a nice joke about how Obama thinks you hunt ducks with a six shooter. The one small problem in this narrative, of course, is that Obama never said you hunt ducks with a six shooter which makes a stump speech line about how he did say that pretty dishonest.
An interesting point from Michael Cohen yesterday: John McCain wants us to simultaneously believe that expressing a willingness to negotiate with Iranian leaders will "reinforce their confidence" but also to run around the country warning that people need to become much more alarmed about the threat posed by Iran, and stop dismissing them as some sort of medium-sized, middle-income country that's far away and has a barely functioning military. It's a bit of a tension.
More broadly, it's worth noting how hollow McCain's account of the Iranian threat winds up being:
But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant. On the contrary, right now Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers. They are the chief sponsor of Shia extremists in Iraq, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. And their President, who has called Israel a "stinking corpse," has repeatedly made clear his government's commitment to Israel's destruction. Most worrying, Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The biggest national security challenge the United States currently faces is keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists. Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, that danger would become very dire, indeed.
All the work here is being done by the ludicrous hypothetical that were Iran to attempt to build a nuclear weapon (which the most recent NIE says they're not doing) and they were to succeed (which they might or might not) and then give the weapon to a terrorist (!) who wanted to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack (!) on the United States, that that would be very dire, indeed. And indeed it would, much as if Russia decided to launch a full-scale nuclear strike on U.S. targets that would be an even more dire threat. But we don't normally spend our time worrying about crazy not-gonna-happen scenarios.
Similarly, the Iranian government's tough talk against Israel would be a lot more threatening to Israel were it backed up by some kind of actual capacity to destroy Israel. But in the real world, Israel has a vastly superior military establishment and a substantial nuclear deterrent.
Now we get to Iraq, where the hawks' logic becomes circular. Iran is evil because they're (allegedly) backing people who are fighting us in Iraq so we (a) need to stay in Iraq, and (b) need to fight the Iranians. We need to do (a) in order to stick it to the Iranians, and we need to do (b) in order to make (a) more viable. But that's nonsense. This is precisely one of the things we should be negotiating over -- a mutually acceptable outcome in Iraq. For Iran, that probably means an Iraq that's not used by the United States as a base of operations for regime change. For the United States, it means a scenario where our soldiers aren't being killed. Certainly the fact that we're engaged in proxy exchanges with Iran isn't a reason to avoid talking to the Iranians and trying to lower, rather than raise, the temperature.
I speculated maybe a week or two ago that soon enough we were regularly going to start hearing liberal hawk types excoriating Joe Lieberman as the new Zell Miller for saying exactly the kind of things they themselves said during the Years of Hubris. Take, for example, this Jon Chait post:
The Zell Miller-ization of Joe Lieberman Continues See Larry Kudlow rave.
Kudlow and Lieberman are arguing that Bush is the true heir to the Truman/Kennedy liberal tradition in American foreign policy. As you know, I think this is wrong. But before Lieberman was giving speeches about this, it was the thesis of Lawrence Kaplan's article "Regime Change: Bush, closet liberal" in the March 3, 2003 issue of The New Republic. Indeed, Chait himself defined Bush/McCain/Lieberman-style warmongering as the correct interpretation of the Wilson/Truman legacy while dismissing Lieberman's intra-party critics as "old cranks":
And the most prominent feature of Democratic foreign policy since September 11 is that there isn't much of one. Yes, a couple Democrats--mostly old cranks like Robert Byrd and Hollings--have worried about an open-ended conflict; but others--such as Lieberman--have staked out terrain to Bush's right. The general mood among Democrats in Washington is to lay low on foreign affairs and to confront Bush in the domestic arena. Not only does this mean that McCain's hawkishness would pose little barrier to his nomination; it also presents him with an opportunity to determine what kind of Democratic foreign policy will emerge in the wake of the war on terror. And here McCain has a chance to shape the future of American politics--which, like all things histori cal, can be highly contingent. After all, if Franklin Roosevelt hadn't replaced Henry Wallace with Harry Truman as his vice president, the Democratic Party would not have built its policy of containment in the two decades after World War II. In the post-post Vietnam era now beginning, McCain could redefine the Democratic Party once again as the champion of Wilsonian interventionism.
Now needless to say, I think Lieberman's interpretation of all of this is wrong and a substantial portion of Heads in the Sand is dedicated to laying out why it's wrong and how people came to have this wrongheaded interpretation. But in Lieberman's defense, he's not really "Zellifying" at all -- the things he's saying today were conventional wisdom among center-left elites five years ago and as recently as three years ago Peter Beinart could be found getting a respectful hearing for the idea that MoveOn members should be analogized to Communist Fifth Columnists and purged from progressive politics. It's just that most people who used to hold those views have abandoned them, often sotto voce, leaving Lieberman as an unexpected outlier.
I'm just getting home from what I think qualifies as my first-ever event on the Washington cocktail party circuit (in a neighborhood so fancy I hadn't realized it existed) and see Hillary Clinton's on TV giving her victory speech from Kentucky. Somehow, I don't see this speech turning things around and securing her the nomination. I get the sense watching her talk that she realizes this, though. A certain tension of the feisty underdog is gone -- she's smiling and having fun, talking about the issues that matter to her.
UPDATE: Okay, now she's shifted back into campaign flim-flam. Apparently, Kentucky is the only state that counts and she's talking tough about running all the way to the convention. I'm back to being disgusted by her, her staff, and her campaign and regret having said anything mildly positive above.
Well, as predicted Obama won Oregon canceling out Clinton's win in the similarly sized Kentucky. Meanwhile, I found this part of the Kentucky exit polls interesting. Obviously, given the extent of her win this didn't alter the outcome, but it seems that a pretty hefty chunk of Clinton primary voters in that state don't plan on voting for her in November -- they just really, really, really don't like Barack Obama.
Jon Chait has an interesting article arguing that we shouldn't take the candidates rhetoric about forward-looking Iraq policy all that seriously -- both have incentives to try to outline crystal clear positions but, in reality, both would need to respond to some extent to events on the ground.
That's all very true, but at the same time I think we're in danger of seeing a tendency toward the smart set actually underestimating the extent of disagreement between Obama and McCain. Part of this is much is being made of the fact that some public statements by some Obama advisors seem to indicate that they are less enthusiastic about speedy withdrawal from Iraq than the candidate's stated vision seems to imply. A big deal gets made out of this because it's a newsworthy admission against interest type of thing. A less big deal gets made out of the fact that there are actually a lot of other people associated with the Obama camp who completely agree with Obama's rhetoric on Iraq. Something like "Obama Advisor Agrees With Obama Position" makes for a terrible article so you get less coverage of the fact that Obama really might just listen to Brian Katulis and Larry Korb and leave Iraq.
More broadly, though, Jon's article has been given the unfortunate subhead "Ignore what candidates say about foreign policy" even though that's not what the argument of the column says. But of course "foreign policy" is not equivalent to "ideas about appropriate force levels in Iraq in October of 2009." Foreign policy includes our relationships with Russia, China, India, Japan and the European allies. It includes our approach to Syria and North Korea. It certainly includes our approach to, say, Iran and it's clear enough that McCain and Obama have different ideas about Iran. But the course of U.S.-Iranian relations will have a big impact on America's Iraq policy. The causal line here isn't totally predictable -- Obama's Iraq policy will depend, in part, on the outcome of his efforts at diplomacy with Iran, but we can't know what that outcome will be. On the one hand, that supports Jon's point that there's a lot of uncertainty here. But at the same time, there are meaningful differences -- Obama might work out a good accommodation with Iran but McCain almost certainly won't, whereas McCain might blunder into a larger war with Iran while Obama almost certainly won't.
Commenter Dave asked yesterday if my post on the boy crisis myth was "some kind of odd way of admitting that you think No Child Left Behind is a great idea?" As I've written in the past, I don't think NCLB was a great idea, but I agree with Ted Kennedy and George Miller that it was a good idea that made federal education policy better than it was before. In particular, I think that while relying on standardized test scores to measure educational outcomes clearly doesn't meet some kind of God-like standard of clairvoyance it's superior to the available alternatives.
I think the specific standards provisions of NCLB were, in a concession to the realities of American political culture, rendered somewhat silly and potentially meaningless by offering essentially endless deference to state authorities in setting standards. I support moves toward national standards and in general toward less local control of schools in terms of funding and expectations for students. There are many flaws with the NCLB framework, and people are good at pointing them out, but people who just want to point to shortcomings without offering any better ideas about how to get schools to better serve poor students aren't being very responsible in their attitude.
Looks like Lebanon's political factions have reaches a deal that's okay with Hezbollah and may pave the way to relieve the atmosphere of crisis that's been gripping the country. I meant to link yesterday to an excellent point Fareed Zakaria made about Hezbollah:
Hizbullah is not like Al Qaeda, a rootless organization that engages solely in existential terrorism. It's a homegrown group with deep roots in Lebanon's Shia community. The organization was formed to oppose Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and still derives some of its appeal from that history of resistance. It's since become the voice of the Shia community, which is institutionally discriminated against in the country's power structures. (Shiites make up between 30 and 40 percent of the Lebanese population, yet are accorded only 18 percent of parliamentary seats.) Finally, Hizbullah runs an impressive network of social services, which provide health care, small loans and family support.
Right. Americans, because of our own situation, tend to look at Hezbollah primarily through the lens of its attitude toward Israel, to its attacks on U.S. troops in the early 1980s, and to its relationship with Iran. But to Lebanese Shiites, the primarily interesting thing about Hezbollah is its attitude toward Lebanon -- a country where political institutions structurally disenfranchise Shiite voters. And because political institutions disenfranchise Shiite voters, government social services are undersupplied to Shiites communities. Hezbollah both fills the void in terms of direct provision of social services, and through its lawless behavior and unwillingness to operate like a "normal" member of the Lebanese political process stands up for the interests of a community that's structurally disadvantaged by the process.
Talk of democracy in Lebanon needs to be put in this context. The pro-western, March 4 Coalition is not, for example, "pro-democracy" in the sense of favoring moves toward a fair voting system. But under the circumstances, it's hardly surprising if Lebanese Shiites decide that they don't really need democracy.
Last night I was invited to a reception at the Italian Ambassador's stunningly gorgeous residence put together by the Ploughshares Fund to support global nuclear disarmament. On hand were Chuck Hagel and Michael Douglas (yes, the actor Michael Douglas is a nuclear disarmament activist -- who knew?) talking about important issues. But Hagel also got a question about the dubious-but-persistent rumors that George W. Bush is plotting an unauthorized strike against Iran.
Hagel started his answer by specifically noting that the last time he mused about impeachment it got him in a lot of trouble, so he probably shouldn't muse about impeachment, but then proceeded to do just that, suggesting, I guess, that that might be considered an impeachable offense (which actually strikes me as a dubious contention on his part, but I appreciate the sentiment). But really his substantive remarks were more interesting. Hagel said, and I think he's correct, that we're witnessing a confluence of events in the United States and around the world has opened up the possibility of a new big push for disarmament in a unique way and we really ought to take advantage of it. He also said that in his opinion this is the most important issue we face, which really carries the implication that you should vote for Barack Obama since he agrees with Hagel about disarmament, but of course he didn't quite come out and say that.
[You can see much the same written up like a proper news article in the HuffPo]
It's heartening to hear that Syria and Israel are in peace talks. From Israel's point of view, a stable peace agreement with Syria that reduced the flow of weapons to Hezbollah would be much more valuable than the Golan Heights. And for Syria, accomplishing something concrete like regaining the Golan Heights would be much more valuable than maintaining complicity in the killing of some Jews. A deal of this sort would also, it seems to me, help Syria regain more freedom of action from Iran which I assume is part of the appeal to Damascus.
It's interesting that Turkey is serving as the intermediary, a minor coup of Turkish statesmanship and perhaps more to the point a reflection of the United States bizarre abandonment of the idea of trying to play a constructive role in the region.
David Brooks rightly lauds John McCain's opposition to the bad farm bill wending its way through congress is equally correct to note that Barack Obama's stance on this leaves something to be desired. The selfish, curious-journalist side of me would like to see McCain become president precisely because of his penchant for taking on these kind of doomed battles.
As a Senator, he gets to play the lonely crank with ease -- sometimes for good, as with farm bills, sometimes for ill as with his quixotic effort to ban mixed-martial arts competition -- just voting "no" and stuff and giving speeches that denounce it. As President, though, a lonely stand wouldn't just be a lonely stand -- he could veto stuff. Would he really do it? Really pick cataclysmic, likely unwinnable fights with congress over farm bills and earmarks and ethanol? A president Obama would, I assume, pragmatically bend to the immovable forces and try to find allies to pass his agenda on key issues like health care and climate change. That'd be one part cowardly and one part sensible. But you could totally imagine McCain deciding that he doesn't care if his entire domestic agenda turns into a trainwreck (he'd still have a free hand in national security policy) so he'd pick fights to his heart's content.
At the end of the day, I think that's probably a better model for how a pundit should behave than how a politician ought to behave (politics, after all, is the art of the possible) which probably explains why so many journalists love McCain. But qua pundit, if I got to vote purely based on the most entertaining possible outcome I do think a McCain presidency has some appeal.
To perhaps overanalyze, the trouble here is that "bitch" is what they call a "thick moral concept" in the philosophy game. A "thin" moral concept purely expresses a judgment -- so you might say something was "good" or "bad" and that doesn't carry any descriptive content apart from the ethical evaluation. But there are also thick moral concepts like "brave." To call an act "brave" is to praise it, just like calling it "good" is, but it's not merely to praise it -- you might agree that someone has done something praiseworthy but still say "brave" is an inappropriate description because it didn't involve risk in the right kind of way.
One of the ways in which sexism in our society works is that there are several highly-gendered thick moral concepts of which "bitch" and "slut" are probably the most salient. It's true, of course, that some women do manifest the non-normative descriptive qualities associated with those terms. But the crux of the matter is that the alleged accuracy or lack thereof of such a term is besides the point, the concepts themselves are part of an inherently sexist conceptual scheme -- the terms just are the moral vocabulary of the sexist.
The risk posed by Paul's success, however, is that it's going to lead analysts to look at other guys who are excellent ballhandlers who make the occasional "ohmygod I can't believe that's possible" move and who are too short to succeed in the NBA, and conclude that they can have Paul-like levels of success. But it's impossible to tell from watching highlights and very hard to tell from watching games, the small-but-real differences that have made Paul's 2007-2008 campaign much better than Allen Iverson's. Paul pulls down 6.2 percent of available rebounds, Iverson grabs 3.8 percent. Iverson's effective field goal percentage is 49 percent, Paul's is 52 percent. These are very small numbers, but they add up to large differences over the course of a season and it's not really clear that even Paul will be able to continue performing on this level, much less that other undersized guys will be able to find enormous success.
What they're lacking, right now, are the appropriate problems. Because they don't have solutions for 47 million Americans without health insurance. They don't have solutions for a failing invasion that's exposed American power as significantly more constrained that the world imagined it to be. They don't have solutions for high gas prices, or a credit and mortgage crisis, or a dawning recognition that we're ruining the only planet we have.
There's something to that, but I think the problem is actually much worse -- the problem with the conservative movement is that it's fundamentally malign. The plenty of things of, for example, a deregulatory nature that would enhance access to health care. Reducing the regulatory barriers that artificially restrict the supply of health care wouldn't "solve" the health care problem in America, but it sure would help! And it could be a conservative idea in perfectly good standing. Reducing senseless land use regulation that over-mandate parking and under-supply residential density would mitigate inequality and reduce carbon emissions. And that could be a conservative idea in perfectly good standing. The whole situation of professional licensing in the United States is a scandal and very bad for poor people, and easing the burden there could be a conservative idea in perfectly good standing.
The trouble is that no sensible person believes that electing conservative politicians will actually improve the situation because even though some instances of reducing the power of economic privilege would be deregulatory and conservative, actually existing conservatism isn't interested in reducing the power of economic privilege except on behalf of some other, greater privilege. Similarly, the conservative movement is correct to say that more stable family structure would be a boon to America's children, but its operational commitment to family values just consists of the political exploitation of anti-gay sentiment. The ideas have some merit, it's the actual moral character of the people able to move the levers of power that are the problem -- they're not fundamentally interested in the merits of ideas, even their own ideas, they're interested in power and greed.
This issue isn't on most people's radar screens, but it really would be nice if we emulated other countries and made different bills different sizes so that blind people could tell the difference between a $1 bill and a $20 bill. While we're at it, in fact, we can get rid of the $1 bill and replace it with a coin and scrap the penny, too. That's change I can believe in.
Washington Postcorrectly says that John McCain is "distorting history" as he criticized Barack Obama's pro-negotiations position. The United States really only has two experiences with a sustained effort at the Bush/McCain approach to diplomacy. One would be our effort to deny recognition to Communist China during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. This, it's generally acknowledged, was a strategic fiasco that denied us the opportunity to gain leverage vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, it was a fiasco of such enormous proportions that Richard Nixon's role in undoing it actually manages to stack up in a non-trivial way against his otherwise terrible record in office.
The other is our fifty year effort to starve the people of Cuba into rebelling against Fidel Castro. McCain actually defends continuing this policy, but everyone with a functioning brain understands that it's been a ludicrous failure. So that's the path Bush has been taking with Syria and Iran and used to take with North Korea. McCain wants to keep on taking it, put North Korea back under the interdict, and perhaps add Russia to the disfavored list. Like McCain's apparent belief that it would be better if we'd spent another decade or two fighting in Vietnam, it really calls into question whether he has any understanding of what he's talking about.
Ezra points to a chart showing stagnant wage data for college graduates and non-graduates alike during the oughts and says it "cuts powerfully against the comforting story some tell themselves about inequality, which is that it's skills-based and simply a reflection of educational differences in our grand polity. The massive gains in wealth in this country are apportioning to a small slice of rich people at the very top of the income distribution, not the broad mass of skilled, college-educated workers who hoped they were buying into the economic ruling class but, in fact, are just the new middle."
I think this is misleading on a couple of levels. Take a gander at my chart, reproduced from an EPI report on "Education and the Inequality Debate" and you'll see that while they find no increase in the wage premium in the past few years, there was a huge run-up in the wage premium in the 1980s that hasn't declined at all. It's true that there's more to the inequality story than this, and it's a mistake to monomaniacally focus on educational attainment as the only factor driving inequality, but it's equally foolish to deride the data showing an increase from a 30 percent premium in the early 1970s to a new plateau around 45 percent in the 1990s and 2000s.
An increase of that scale ought to lead to a European-style increase in the proportion of people who graduate from college, increasing the supply of college educated professionals and bringing the premium back down to earth. But it hasn't, for reasons that remain slightly mysterious but appear to implicate, among other things, inadequate preparation for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and screwy priorities on the part of institutions of higher education. Nor, I note, should we view this part of the story as especially "comforting" -- there are some good ideas around about improving the education system, but there are also a ton of unanswered questions and a mountain of information to suggest that dramatically improving school performance for kids from difficult backgrounds is incredibly difficult.
Given that you've got to assume essentially all House Democratic candidates can be linked easily enough the Nancy Pelosi, perhaps we'll see more of this:
I think this is a promising direction for the GOP, mainlining homophobia with no real fig leaf rationale or anything. Vote Democrat, and they'll turn your kids gay. If anything, they ought to camp this spot up some.
UPDATE: Okay, there's some suggestion here that the ad is supposed to be about miscegenation but if that's the case shouldn't they find a butcher, more scary-looking black guy? Plus everyone knows San Francisco = gay. Either way, I'm a bit saddened to see that "west coast liberals" seem to have overtaken "east coast liberals" in the conservative pantheon of ills. Doesn't sit well with my Greenwich Village values.
By now you've heard all about Barack Obama's radical pastor and secret Allah-worship, but Jim Geraghty's got the scoop about Obama's secret association with Portland-based indie rock bands. Yes, that's right, the Decemberists played Obama's 75,000 person rally. Quoth Geraghty, "I'm sure Obama would draw a big crowd either way, but wasn't that worth mentioning in the coverage?" Now Jason Linkins argues that "as the Decemberists are a modestly successful indie outfit, more apt to perform at venues such as the 1,200-person capacity 9:30 Club, it would be more accurate to suggest that the promise of an Obama rally is a great inducement to come see the Decemberists, rather than the reverse." Linkins misses the point, of course, that the Decemberists are popular enough to often play the 9:30 Club on consecutive nights so you can see that Obamamania's all hype.
More to the point, as Geraghty points out, this is yet more evidence that Obama is a Communist:
From Wikipedia: "Named both in reference to the Russian Decembrist Revolt (which may explain its use of the National Anthem of the Soviet Union as an introduction at many concerts)..." Lovely.
I wonder if they played, "Sixteen Military Wives." The video depicts a bully named "Henry Stowecroft" (Kissinger and Brent?) representing the United States in a grade school model United Nations who declares war on Luxembourg. I kid you not when I tell you the video begins with the bully putting on a flag pin.
Noah Pollack being dense as usual is a good opportunity to repeat something:
Why is McCain allowing himself to be dragged into a debate about presidential-level diplomacy, when the more important question — and the question whose answer is more politically favorable to McCain — is whether diplomatic engagement will actually get anything accomplished? McCain should be asking Obama what concessions he realistically thinks he’s going to get from the Iranians upon going hat in hand to Tehran. UN Security Council sanctions have done virtually nothing to impede Iran, nor have EU diplomacy or IAEA reports. Russia and China continue to stand as the major impediments to the kind of UN sanctions that might so cripple Iran that it would give up its nuclear development.
The problem here is that, once again, we see hawks not understanding what diplomacy is. But think of diplomacy as a kind of bargaining. Like you might do at a yard sale or something. Diplomacy doesn't exist at one end of a spectrum of coercive measures -- we try war, we try sanctions, we try diplomacy -- any more than bargaining operates on a smooth continuum with robbery. The point of bargaining with a vendor is to see whether or not it's possible to find mutually acceptable terms that improve both parties' positions. In terms of diplomacy with Iran, the idea isn't that Obama's steely gaze would force concessions out of the Iranians, the idea is that we might be able to give Iran something Iran deems more valuable than weapons-grade nuclear material, and in exchange we would get verifiable disarmament.
The "something" here would presumably be some form of security assurances plus an accommodation to Iranian interests in Iraq, along with Teheran and Washington laying out a pathway to gradual normalization of relations in exchange for an end to Iranian support for terrorism and Palestinian rejectionist groups. Would it be possible to strike such a deal? Maybe, maybe not. But the purpose of a negotiating session would be to find out by attempting to do the bargaining rather than having five more years of back-and-forth blog posts speculating about the possibility. The general theory of diplomacy is that rational actors should, through negotiations, be able to achieve positive-sum settlements rather than negative-sum conflicts. It's always possible that your would-be negotiating partner will prove irrational (as George W. Bush did when he rejected Iranian peace overtures several years back) and the process will fail, but it's worth attempting in good faith.
Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and strategist for Hillary Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign, went “off message” (his words) today with a warning to his party: Don’t run against GOP nominee John McCain by painting him as Bush III, because he’s not. Bucking the Democratic National Committee’s talking points that characterize a potential McCain administration as tantamount to a third Bush term, Blumenthal told our Liz Halloran that running on that strategy in the fall would be a mistake. “I understand people’s political reasons for doing that,” he said. “I think it’s more helpful to describe [political opponents] as they are.” Bottom line, Blumenthal calls the strategy “a mistake and adds: “The public doesn’t see [McCain] that way. That’s a hard sell.”
I'll just note that I think it would be silly to base a campaign strategy on how the public currently views John McCain (the point of the swift-boat attacks, for example, was to change perceptions of John Kerry) and then say it's probably best to bracket the question of campaign strategy and just ask straight-up how different Bush and McCain are:
In foreign policy, I think you'd see substantial Bush-McCain continuity since McCain pioneered a lot of Bushist ideas and I would suspect that any change would probably be for the worse as McCain seems to agree with the Bush administration's very worst instincts on North Korea and Russia.
On detainee treatment and torture, McCain's been pretty weasely, but you could say the same for various Democrats and he'd clearly be a change of some sort.
On climate, McCain is clearly better than Bush and clearly worse than Obama and the leading progressives in congress.
Whether you like Bush's education policy record or not, that's clearly an issue he's identified himself with over the years and taken an interest in. McCain, by contrast, literally can't be bothered to offer an education policy, though he says he'll do so at some point.
By contrast, McCain's domestic passion is anti-pork crusading, something he's stuck with through thick and thin and that Bush has never cared about at all.
On immigration, they're identical business-oriented cheap labor Republicans willing to try to cut a deal with liberal groups.
On taxes, they once had different ideas, but McCain has made clear and unambiguous promises to continue Bush's tax policies.
On health care, they offer similar ideas about trying to get individuals to directly bear more of the costs of care in hopes that this will reduce costs overall down the road.
Temperamentally and personally they're quite different, but appear to share a fundamental lack of interest in policy issues.
These are real differences. You could imagine McCain becoming a much better president than Bush were he to lead the country down a path of carbon emissions reduction and set the stage for a world in which we avoid the worst consequences of climate change. You could also imagine McCain becoming a much worse president than Bush were he to neoconize our relationship with Russia and China. On domestic policy, one suspects that McCain would be more inclined than Bush to reach compromises with congressional Democrats, but he hasn't made any commitments in that regard, and his promises on the tax issue would make it impossible for him to govern as a moderate even if he were inclined to do so.
Basically, I think that despite their differences Bush really would end up substantially "McSame" as Bush unless you assume he's just lying about tax policy which would be a significant change in its own right and also open the door to more un-Bushian acts on other domestic policy issues. Perhaps that's right, certainly McCain does lie about a lot of stuff, so he might be lying about this. Then again, I think it's equally possible that his moderate take on taxes in 2001 was mostly a reflection of personal animus against Bush and he'll govern as a perfectly orthodox anti-tax Republican.
Jeff Goldberg, still talking sense about AIPAC and West Bank settlements, is throwing increasing quantities of hysterical accusations at John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt in order to guard his right flank as Max Boot flings hysterical accusations at him. Says Goldberg:
The second point concerns Walt and Mearsheimer: One of their many sins, perhaps one of their bigger sins, was to make impossible an open conversation in the Jewish community about the impact of pro-Israel lobbying. By accusing American Jews of acting against the best interests of their country, they not only made themselves worthy heirs to Father Coughlin and a long list of antique Jew-baiters, they sent us into a defensive crouch.
But of course Walt and Mearsheimer didn't say that all Jews are acting against the best interests of their country (which would be outrageous) nor did they say that some Jews are acting against the best interests of their country (which would be trivial -- Jews disagree about lots of stuff and some of us must be wrong). Rather, they said certain "pro-Israel" institutions, including AIPAC, are harming American interests.
Goldberg, meanwhile, charges AIPAC with preventing the United States from putting any meat on the bones of its policy against Israel's West Bank settlements. Walt and Mearsheimer agree with this. Goldberg argues that unless Israel removes those settlements, it will increasingly find itself becoming an apartheid-style country where a Jewish minority rules over a disenfranchised Arab and Muslim minority. Walt and Mearsheimer think so, too. The difference is that Goldberg primarily sees this as bad for Israel whereas Walt and Mearsheimer primarily see it as bad for the United States but surely it can be bad for both! And even if not, the disagreement here is about something relatively minor with both sides agreeing that the American failure to apply pressure is a bad thing, and both sides pointing the finger at AIPAC.
Surely there should be room for some difference of interpretation here that doesn't involve either party to the dispute being motivated by racial hatreds.
Thrilling Lakers comeback, and Chicago beats the odds to win the lottery. I feel torn about these developments. My fundamental perspective as a fan is that of the hater who likes to see the mighty brought low. I bonded with Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker when they crushed the Shaq-Kobe juggernaut in 2003. By 2008, San Antonio has arguably become the evil empire. But despite enormous success since 1999, San Antonio still doesn't really rank up their as an "elect" franchise like L.A. and it rankles to see a team become so good thanks to such a one-sided trade.
In the short-run perspective, in other words, the Spurs are the juggernaut possibly unseated by an upstart Laker franchise. But taking the longer view, the Lakers are still the juggernaut. Chicago winning the lottery, meanwhile, just reeks of rigging. Sure, why not send the number one draft pick to Chicago, all we need to do is tweak the raffle! Now of course last offseason it seemed like the Bulls were going to be good and then, inexplicably, all of their young players regressed instead of progressing. Consequently, the franchise is basically impossible to project.
Very interesting report from Al-Jazeera. It's hard to imagine an American news outlet's report cutting so deep:
This is obviously an awkward subject. Hillary Clinton and her supporters haven't wanted to acknowledge that their ranks have, to some extent, been swelled by racism. At the same time, insofar as Obama looks likely to lose a substantial number of voters purely because of race that is a real, if unseemly, tactical objection to giving him the nomination.
Noah Millman is willing to concede that Munich analogies are inappropriate but wants to know "what is the historical model for Obama’s 'meet with Iran/North Korea/Cuba/Venezuela without preconditions?'" Well, the trouble with trying to find an analogy of any sort that really holds up is simply that the geopolitical circumstance of unipolarity doesn't have real precedent.
But if you want to talk historical models, I think the best model to look at is just the recent past history of North Korea. At times, we've conducted diplomatic talks with the North Koreans. When we've done that we've made progress. Conservatives, meanwhile, have screamed "appeasement!" and when they got their chance to try isolation they managed to make the situation much, much, much worse. Now, clearly, the Agreed Framework didn't actually wind up involving a Presidential-level with Kim. But in my view, the current dispute between Obama and Bush/McCain isn't really about the question of presidential-level meetings. If Bush/McCain were willing to have good-faith, high-level talks with Iran at the Foreign Minister level but had some weird hangup about the idea of a presidential-level meeting, I'd consider that odd but not so pernicious and perhaps justified by the ambiguity as to who the Iranian Head of State is.
But my understanding of what the current debate is really about is that the things Obama has said indicate an interest in vigorously pursuing good-faith negotiations with various countries, whereas conservatives are open to the "you surrender and then we don't bomb you" model but fundamentally think that it's not possible to reach agreements with evil regimes so we need to avoid putting ourselves in a position where the other side appears to be making a serious offer.
ABC's Brian Ross has a thorough report on how John McCain's spiritual guide Rod Parsley hates Muslims and believes that the United States was founded, in part, to rid the world of Islam:
But of course anti-Muslim bigotry has a large constituency in the United States so it's not a political weakness to be affiliated with it. Similarly, it's true that having a president who likes to associate himself with anti-Muslim bigotry would be a disaster for American foreign policy and national security, but since the essence of McCain's foreign policy vision is that he wants to maximize the number and duration of wars this won't actually be a problem for him. Ross shows that McCain is a huge hypocrite, but basically we know that already. So I say it's a non-story -- the MSM should really devote less attention to this and more to Decemberists-gate.
At this point, I've reached the conclusion that further criticism of Hillary Clinton's behavior from people who everyone knows prefer Obama on the merits is useless and perhaps even counterproductive. What's needed is for people who prefer Clinton on the merits to defect now that her campaign has lost and is continuing to engage in bizarre and reckless behavior. But I suppose it is worth noting that comparing her situation to that of the opposition movement in Zimbabwe is a really offensive way of trivializing the work of some very courageous people.
Incidentally, this isn't all an academic discussion. The question of whether inequality is a simple function of education is important. If so, then it can simply be solved by sending more people to school (though that, as Matt does point out, is very hard). If not, then it's a function of any number of forces, ranging from globalization to tax rates to corporate culture, that might require more direct government intervention This is why folks like Bush are invested in the education explanation, and say things like, "The reason [for inequality] is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards education and skills because of that education," and David Brooks writes columns that pin inequality entirely on "the education gap." The gap in education is a problem, to be sure, but it's been a long time since it was a plausible driver of the increase in inequality.
I think this is a little crazy. Yes, some conservatives have overstated the role of the skill premium in growing U.S. income inequality over the past 35 years. But the fact that it's not all skill premium, doesn't mean it's not partially skill premium. There are several different kinds of factors at work, but inequality has grown, in part, because the proportion of people graduating from college hasn't kept pace with the growing labor market demand for college graduates. What's the sense in denying this? Similarly, what difference does it make if the skill-related component of growing inequality happened in the 1980s? If it had happened in the 80s and then been reversed that would be a good reason to ignore this element of the picture. But it happened in the 80s and then has just stayed with us. But it should still be reversed!
Now I agree, on top of the skill premium element of inequality -- the tendency of the top 20 percent of the population to pull away from the top 80 percent -- we've also seen another phenomenon in which very tiny groups (the top 1 percent, the top 0.01 percent, etc.) pull away from the rest of the crowd. This is in many respects a troubling social phenomenon that calls for a policy response (restoring the estate tax comes to mind) but the other thing is also a troubling social phenomenon in its own right. Meanwhile, it's not at all clear to me why so many liberals have decided to agree that aspiring to increase the number of people who finish college should be coded as a "conservative" policy idea when the most promising solution is probably huge increases in public spending on early childhood education. Nothing about doing that would stop us from also making it easier to organize unions, or raising the minimum wage, or whatever else.
It's really too bad that the folks behind Five Thirty Eight.com have gone and created such a compelling website based around state-by-state general election polling. It's all really well done and, as such, I can't really bring myself to look away. But this stuff is all really and truly meaningless. Six months ago, no polling showed Barack Obama winning the Democratic race, and no polling showed John McCain winning the Republican race and the general election is about six months away.
Interesting exchange between Arlen Specter and Robert Gates:
Gates has, of course, long been on record as favoring a new approach to Iran, but ever since he went to go work for George W. Bush he can't be sensible too loudly.
So John McCain's education policy advisor is Lisa Graham Keegan, who turns out to be a rather colorful figure in Arizona politics which included a stint as the founder and director of a group called the Education Leaders Council:
In a pair of 2006 reports, the inspector general for the U.S. Education Department said the ELC had used money inappropriately during the time Keegan was its chief executive. The ELC also had a poor financial-management system and inadequate written procedures for subcontracting, the reports said.
Even before the report, The Arizona Republic reported that some ELC board members were alarmed about Keegan's $235,000 salary and six-figure deals for other executives. During a three-year span beginning in 2003, eight members of the ELC's board of directors quit, along with four of its top executives, including Keegan, the auditors wrote.
But before she was an inept and possibly corrupt non-profit executive, she spearheaded the rapid growth of charter schools in Arizona in the 1990s. Her policies led to the creation of a lot of charter schools (nice), but did so with extremely sketchy oversight and accountability (less nice), leading to a situation where "accounts of charter schools gone bad in Arizona became commonplace" including districts selling charters inappropriately, unconstitutional religious instruction, illegal discrimination against disabled people, etc. and an eventual spate of reforms aimed at reigning the system in.
I heard a rumor that Keith Gessen's novel All The Sad Young Literary Men contains a pseudo-autobiographical character named "Keith" who's a liberal political blogger who graduates from Harvard and publishes a 2008 book about foreign policy. A quick glance through Google's "search inside" function seems to confirm this:
[Page 29] Everything I wrote then had a kind of glow -- from a spark that I had hoped but did not know was in me -- and it returned to me in print, or online (I had so many ideas that I started a blog at one of the liberal magazines), with
an alienated majesty. [...] [Page 234] In Brooklyn I quickly finished my book about the Bush administration's foreign policy (The Damage Done, I called it -- it was an angry book) and found an agent, a fancy agent, and she took me to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art.
Sounds like a great guy. At any rate, my understanding is that the world has now entered an n + 1 backlash phase (it strikes me as odd that there can even be a backlash against a small-circulation quarterly) but I still like it.
The liberal opposition to media consolidation has always struck me as puzzling. The ACLU, for example, worries that "Six major companies control most of the media in the country, including the most popular sites on the Internet." But that list of six companies doesn't include Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo -- surely influential internet players. And if the concern here is about the health of our democracy (which I take it it is) then I don't think one would one want to deny that The New York Times (owned by the New York Times, Co.) or The Washington Post and Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post Company) are significant media outlets that remain outside the grasp of the Big Six. And, of course, other, lesser newspaper companies like the Tribune Company (Chicago Tribune, LA Times) and Gannett (USA Today) are also outside the Big Six.
But if you ignore newspapers in favor of a single-minded focus on television, then you'll find that things are, indeed, pretty consolidated but they're a good deal less consolidated than they were when NBC, ABC, and CBS were the only players in town. Meanwhile, there are the public broadcasters (NPR and PBS) and thanks to the internet the opportunity to enjoy foreign media outlets, etc. In terms of reasons people might not be all that well-informed, the fact that folks are too busy to follow the news closely or otherwise disinclined to do so strikes me as a way larger factor than any alleged consolidation problem. A person with cable and an internet connection in 2008 has access to a far more diverse set of information sources than did a person in 1988 or 1968.
Back when Kevin Garnett was a fantastic player stuck in crappy teams in Minnesota, Bill Simmons was in the habit of blaming the Timberwolves' lack of success on Garnett, rather than on his bad teammates. Then Garnett got traded to Boston! And Boston became the best team in the NBA! And Simmons loved Garnett! But now Boston seems to be underperforming in the playoffs, so naturally Simmons blames KG. But in truth, Garnett's playing almost exactly the same -- a few more minutes, leading to more points but with a slightly lower FG% (though a slightly higher FT%) and rebounds and he's managed to turn the ball over slightly less often.
Consider instead blaming Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Leon Powe who are actually playing substantially worse than they did during the regular season leading, naturally enough, to worse outcomes for Boston.
Any statement which the speaker or writer feels the need to preface by saying "I'm not a racist, but ..." is bound to be racist, right? That's not a logical rule, but the empirically observed regularity is striking.
If we are going to solve our energy problems we’ve got to think long term. It’s time for us to be serious about investing in alternative energy. It’s time for us to get serious about raising fuel efficiency standards on cars. It’s time that the entire country learn from what’s happening right here in Portland with mass transit and bicycle lanes and funding alternative means of transportation.
That’s the kind of solution that we need for America. That’s the kind of truth-telling that we are going to do in this campaign and when I am President of the United States of America.
Well said. Obama's outlined a good transportation policy thus far but hasn't, in fact, always been incredibly outspoken about it.
If you think of Karl Rove as a basically malign person who doesn't care at all about the well-being of the American people or the world at large, this is a pretty clever point:
If Mr. Obama believes he can change the behavior of these nations by meeting without preconditions, he owes it to the voters to explain, in specific terms, what he can say that will lead these states to abandon their hostility. He also needs to explain why unconditional, unilateral meetings with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea's Kim Jong Il will not deeply unsettle our allies.
Obviously, the problem here is that it would be irresponsible for Obama to spell out publicly and in advance precisely what kind of deals he'd be aiming to strike with Iran or North Korea. Nobody negotiates for anything that way. But the plan here is that when Obama correctly declines to do that, Obama can then be mocked for allegedly having "secret plans" and so forth.
As with a lot of conservative national security gambits, I could easily imagine this working except for the fact that conservative foreign policy has at the moment been revealed as a huge and unpopular catastrophe which makes it easy to (accurately) shorthand these critiques as part and parcel of John McCain's determination to continue with Bush's failed policies. So I don't see it working. But qua talking point, it's a good one.
Michael Scherer explains how the McCain campaign plans to release medical records in a manner carefully calculated to make it as difficult as possible for accurate information about McCain's medical history to reach the public:
The actual medical records will be viewed by only a select few news organizations, and even fewer print reporters. According to a report in the New York Times, the pool that will view the actual medical records Friday morning will include reporters from the three national wire services, the Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg, as well as the major television networks, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox. Only two newspapers are scheduled to be allowed access, the Washington Post and the Arizona Republic. While prior McCain campaign pool events have included a spot for a newsmagazine reporter, no reporter from TIME, Newsweek or U.S. News will be allowed to view the records, the campaign confirmed Thursday morning. All print reporters traveling with the campaign will receive a pool report of the records review, which will be written by pool reporters.
On top of all that, this is going to be done on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend so that stories will run on one of the lowest-audience news days. A responsible reporter doing a story on McCain's medical records would, of course, want to obtain the actual records and then discuss the documents with, say, independent doctors who might have actual expertise on the matter. Even really great campaign reporters obviously aren't qualified to look briefly at some medical documents and draw any meaningful conclusions from them.
Metro ridership way up in Los Angeles. Smart local governments will be seizing the day to improve frequency and quality of their transportation services -- it's obvious that high gas prices are causing people to start seeking out alternatives, and government has a duty to make them as good as possible. There's a lot of stuff that can only be changed in the long-run, but there's also plenty that can be changed in the short-run.
Ambinder sez: "McCain veepstakes team: it's difficult to find another candidate who's working harder for the party than Romney right now."
Of course the problem with Romney as a VP choice is much the same as the problem with Romney as a Presidential nominee, namely that Romney's a hugely unpopular phony loathed by most Americans. Indeed, this problem is even more acute as a VP choice since all indications are that John McCain is one of the millions of Americans who despite Mitt Romney. Now as I said many times during the GOP primary, I think all indications are that Romney, despite his professed desire to "double Gitmo," would be a better president than McCain. But as a candidate, he would have been a terrible choice, all but ensuring a Democratic landslide. The VP pick can only do so much harm, but it would still be an idiotic choice.
Indeed, I think Romney's VP campaign is, on some level, just a kind of kabuki. If McCain loses in the fall, which he probably will, conservatives will engage in a bout of wishful thinking and reach the conclusion that McCain was a weak candidate who lost because he's too heterodox even though, in reality, it's hard to imagine any non-McCain figure being even remotely competitive. That will then create some kind of opening that Romney could effectively exploit were it not for the fact that everyone hates Mitt Romney.
In my view, there's no American interest in who controls which corner in Sadr City, but it's always good to see fewer people dying. Apparently what it took to stop the situation where people kill each other was for the United States to stand aside:
Sadrist leaders said they had demanded that American soldiers remain on the sidelines of the military incursion.
"We stressed that the occupation forces do not come in," said Selman al-Freiji, a senior Sadrist leader in Baghdad. "We welcome the entrance of Iraqi troops."
U.S. officials have said they were happy to let Iraqi troops take the lead. "It is heartening to see Iraqi security forces operating peacefully while enforcing the rule of law," Capt. Gordon J. Delcambre, a U.S. military spokesman said in an e-mail.
And you know what, it is heartening the see! So how about we take some troops out of Iraq, then some more, and then some more, until there are none left? It seemed to me back in late 2004 that the looming elections in January 2005 would be a good opportunity to declare victory and go home on a relatively upbeat note. Instead, the president decided that we needed to stay in order to forestall civil war and ethnic cleansing. Then came several years of civil war and ethnic cleansing. Now we're looking at another spate of good news. So why not take the opportunity to leave?
Joe Klein seems kind of pissed -- "I'm mentioned in two columns today with similar themes: that people like me--the liberal elite media, we're called--are playing into Obama's hands by insisting on accuracy from John McCain (according to Bob Novak) and by hoping that, given the mess we're in, this can be an election about big issues (Steven Stark)."
This has been going on for so long that it hardly even phases me anymore, but it's striking the extent to which the conservative discourse about Iran hinges crucially on misrepresenting uncontroversial facts about Iran. How many articles or speeches have you read on the subject of the Iranian nuclear program that dwell at length on inflammatory rhetoric from Ahmadenijad without noting that he doesn't control the relevant aspects of Iranian policy? Beyond that, I recall at least one Weekly Standard article that was unable to make due with outrageous things Ahmadenijad actually said and just decided to attribute some additional conduct to him. Beyond that, it's been over two years since Charles Krauthammer said Iran was months away from nuclear capacity almost two years since Bernard Lewis confidently stated that Iran would unleash the apocalypse on August 22, 2006, etc.
There's just no concern -- at all -- with facts or accuracy on this issue.
John McCain decides he can quit John Hagee after all. In one interesting possible future, McCain reaches the conclusion that he's got the GOP nomination and conservatives have nowhere to go so he brings back the "agents of intolerance" talk, maybe picks a pro-choice running mate, and makes a serious high-risk high-reward effort to definitively separate himself from the mire into which the rest of the party is sinking.
Tom Lee made a nifty animation out of the DC 2007 crime data:
The big crime cluster in the middle is the densely populated part of the city, and we can see that virtually all of the crime west of Rock Creek Park happens either in Georgetown or on Connecticut or Wisconsin Avenues -- again, crime happens where the people are. I know independently that a wildly disproportionate share of murders take place east of the Anacostia, but that doesn't really come through clearly in this graphic.
The latest reporting from Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny on talk of Hillary Clinton as vice presidential nominee helps me clarify my thinking on this topic. Consider two different scenarios. In one scenario, Clinton herself would strongly prefer being a candidate for the vice presidency than being a United States Senator with a clear shot at 2012 if Obama loses to McCain. In another scenario. Clinton herself isn't necessarily sold on the idea of being #2 but could be open to persuasion.
My assumption throughout these discussions has been that we're in scenario number two. Under those circumstances, I don't think there's a good case for Obama trying to persuade her. As unity proponent Ed Kilgore recognizes there are all kinds of "threshold problems" with the idea, and I think the upside to picking Clinton over a Janet Napolitano or a Kathleen Sebelius is hard to see. But if we're in the scenario number one, it's a different matter entirely -- you don't need Clinton on the ticket to unify the party unless Clinton wants to make it the case that you need Clinton on the ticket to unify the party but if she does want to do that, I think she probably has it in her power. If that's her attitude, that'd be a kind of crappy attitude to have, but it wouldn't shock me and much as Paris is worth a Mass, the White House would be worth tapping Clinton as a running mate.
But I remain skeptical that Clinton actually does want to be Vice President. My take is that a substantial swathe of her staff wants her to be Vice President because they think a "unity ticket" is now their best realistic shot at getting jobs in the executive branch. As I've observed before, Bill and Hillary have great fallback jobs -- as a multimillionaires, and the head of an important foundation and a U.S. Senator respectively -- but that's not at all true of lots of their campaign staffers.
John McCain, who didn't mind Rod Parsley being a bigot when only smallish liberal publications were complaining about it, is now eager to ditch the man since the story's hit the MSM. McCain, it seems, still regards the reporters at major news organizations rather than the conservative rank-and-file as his real base.
Now that John McCain's decided he's through with John Hagee, what about his friends in the "pro-Israel" community at AIPAC and elsewhere. I've always wondered how a man whose view of his own policy prescriptions is that they'll lead to the destruction of Israel can count as "pro-Israel" but I suppose by the perverse logic some Jewish leaders apply, anyone who supports killing some Muslims somewhere must be a friend to our people. They started J Street to provide a home for those of us who are tired of that sort of thing, so check it out if you fit the bill.
Brendan Nyhan says that the early state by state polling actually does have some predictive value, but that the important caveat to this is that the "toss-up" states are genuinely toss-ups. Tom Holbrook did an analysis comparing 2004 presidential election outcomes to polling in spring 2004 and found that "across all four months [March-June] the poll result called the wrong winner in 17 of the 36 cases in which Kerry's share of the two-party vote in trial-heat polls was between 47% and 53% (this excludes two cases in which the poll result was tied)."
To me, at the end of the day this essentially reenforces the idea that early polling isn't very valuable. We don't need a poll to tell us that John McCain's going to win Utah and Barack Obama's going to win Florida. We do need a poll to tell us Obama's narrowly ahead in Colorado and McCain's not a slight edge in Nevada but those polls are too close to be predictive. We also know that forecasts based on the fundamentals suggest that Obama will likely win the popular vote.
Gawker has the goods on blog readers and the blogger-authors -- and worse, editors who have contracts to blogger-authors -- they wind up disappointing.
The kind of military operation with the best track record of actually delivering humanitarian results is traditional, more-or-less consensual blue helmet U.N. peacekeeping operations where the presence of a third-party force can help parties who want to make peace overcome problems of distrust and so forth. Naturally, this kind of work is perpetually slighted by the kind of folks who are only interested in helping foreigners through the mechanism of killing foreigners. Naturally, President Bush decided to underfund these missions because, hey, why help people when you could spend the money on tax cuts for hedge fund managers and an endless war in Iraq instead?
But at the time, the White House line was that the funds would be requested in a future emergency supplemental. Except the supplemental request came out yesterday and the money's not there. Justin Rood explains the whole thing but to make a long story short, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Cote D'Ivoire are all screwed. But a humanitarian policy fiasco that isn't also an opportunity to sing hosannas to unilateral militarism or to try to convince people that if only it weren't for that damn international law we wouldn't have any problems won't get covered at all in the punditocracy.
Photo by Flickr user ctsnow used under a Creative Commons license
The other day I was complaining about Urban Land Company's habit of responding to their inability to sell units in their new condo "The Floridian" by increasing the volume of email they send out rather than lowering prices. Some research in my own inbox reveals, however, that that's not quite accurate -- an October 25, 2007 missive stated:
Studios from $244K 1 BRs from $345K 2 BRs from $444K Penthouse from $450K
For the past several rounds of emails, the prices have in fact changed from what they were asking seven months ago. Now it's:
Studio from $244K 1 BRs from $301K 2 BRs from $442K Penthouse from $625K
The giant increase in the Penthouse asking price perhaps reflects an effort to use framing effects to make the other units look like a good deal.
Jeff Goldberg deems this dimwitted column arguing that Muslims have a proclivity for "national suicide" to be convincing. In fact, as Farley and Drum argue it's silly. In particular, anyone who really thinks that Saddam Hussein "could have avoided war and conquest by allowing UN inspectors to search for (the apparently non-existent) weapons of mass destruction wherever they wanted" is so far out of touch with reality that you'd have to worry he was the delusional fanatic with whom no compromise is possible.
Beyond that, all these efforts to convince people that the Iranian leadership is longing for its own destruction are based, it seems to me, on trying to get people to forget that the Iranian Revolution is almost thirty years old. Sure, in 1981 we might have needed to guess about whether or not the revolutionary leadership was suicidal and self-destructive, but surely the fact that they've never chosen martyrdom over survival over the past several decades is dispositive here.
Looks like contra Jodi Kantor, Jewish voting behavior has been trending left over the past several cycles. It's curious, then, that The New York Times would run an article stating that "in recent presidential elections, Jews have drifted somewhat to the right."
It's curious that the Times would report the facts wrong, but equally curious that the impression of a rightward shift is so widespread. Has there been an increase in the number of prominent Jewish conservatives, perhaps?
Spencer Ackerman notes that George W. Bush is once again lying about the basic nature of the situation in Iraq. He'd like us to believe that what's primarily happening in Iraq is that the U.S. is fighting an "enemy," that the enemy is predominantly composed of al-Qaeda members, and that it's likely that a U.S. withdrawal would lead to some kind of al-Qaeda takeover in Iraq that leads to a terrorist attack on the American homeland. There are various people I respect who, wrongly, believe that staying in Iraq is a good idea. But nobody with a shred of honesty or intelligence believes in this line of reasoning that the president likes to endorse.
One thing I've been saying as I talk about Heads in the Sand is that liberals should take the fact of Bush's constant lying a bit more seriously. The administration wouldn't have gone out of its way to make such a dishonest presentation of the case for invading Iraq if they had really believed that they thought opposition to a doctrine of preventive war was politically untenable. Similarly, if the Bush administration thought withdrawal from Iraq was a political loser, they'd be happy to make an honest case for staying.
But they think, correctly, that an honest case for staying would be a huge political loser. Now just because the honest case would be a losing one, doesn't mean the GOP will lose with their dishonest one. But it does mean that the key to winning the debate is to expose the dishonest argument for what it is, which means putting forth a clear alternative and expressing in no uncertain terms how outrageous it is that Bush and McCain want more and more Americans to fight and die on a lie.
DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Miguel A. Contreras, U.S. Navy
Who says we need copyright? As Reihan Salam amply demonstrates modern information technology lets individuals create bizarre and exciting -- well, bizarre and mildly amusing -- new content with ease using nothing more than a laptop.
Charles Krauthammer huffs and puffs an awful lot before raising a real question about proposed negotiations with Iran:
What concessions does Obama imagine Ahmadinejad will make to him on Iran's nuclear program? And what new concessions will Obama offer? To abandon Lebanon? To recognize Hamas? Or perhaps to squeeze Israel?
Unlike all the other words in this column, this makes sense, except for the part where Krauthammer does that thing conservatives do where they misinform their audience about who controls Iranian foreign policy -- Krauthammer is afraid that an Obama administration would strike an unwise deal with the government of Iran. But what's not clear is why Krauthammer believes this. It's not like the possible contours of a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement are all that mysterious.
The United States has various problems with current Iranian policy (their nuclear activities and their support for Hamas and Hezbollah primarily) and we've undertaken various kinds of sanctions against them and threatened to overthrow their government. A deal with Iran would involve them modifying some of their policies, and us relaxing some of our coercive measures. Krauthammer's paranoid fantasies about Obama somehow selling Israel down the river to curry favor with Iran have nothing to do with it -- why would Obama make an offer like that? Why would Iran even be interested in an offer like that?
New HRC campaign rationale -- Obama might get shot and killed before formally securing the nomination, so she may as well stay in the race!
UPDATE: On a more serious note, the difference between the current race and other previous campaigns that may have lingered on into June is that given this year's primary schedule there simply aren't enough delegates left at stake for future primaries to make a difference. If she were holding out for a June primary in California that she thought would let her catch up, that'd be a very different story from the actual "waiting for Puerto Rico" scenario we're currently in.
At last a website comes along to ask: Is Barack Obama Muslim? As the site says, the answer is no. I hope if we all link, the Google ranking will go up.
Tumulty, like so many others, are ignoring Clinton's only goal, which is to make the case to SuperDs that she would be the best nominee against John McCain, the traditional media, as well as the Obama blogs, are missing one of the greatest political dramas ever to unfold, second only to the 2000 election.
Clinton is campaigning on counting every single vote. But also that every Democratic delegate should be focused on who can win in November.
Now, I just disagree with Marsh on the Florida/Michigan issue. But it's quite true -- and indeed quite striking -- that the Clinton campaign has now shifted to a pretty single-minded focus on electability. The reason, of course, is that they know Obama will win a majority of delegates and they think the electability argument is most appealing to Democrats. The trouble is that the electability argument they really need is an absolutely electability argument which holds that it's almost inconceivable that Obama will beat McCain in November. That, however, isn't at all plausible and I was on a call yesterday where Howard Wolfson was at some pains to clarify that he wasn't making that argument.
Instead, she's leaning on the relative electability argument which holds that she's simply more likely to beat McCain. This is much more plausible as an argument. But unfortunately, it's also much less persuasive. Nobody ever really wants to say that they're backing the less electable horse in a nominating contest, but it's also true that nobody ever really wants to say they're passing up a superior candidate in favor of a more electable one. Thus, by convenient coincidence, in essentially every hotly contested primary fight, the people who think Candidate A would be better on the merits also deem Candidate A more electable. The reality is just that nobody knows who's more electable and nobody ever really knows or even knows how we might find out. Consequently, with a clear majority of self-IDed Democrats now backing Obama it's inconceivable that the superdelegates will do what Clinton wants.
Chris Bowers could convince me that Janet Napolitano is unacceptably hawkish on Iraq to be a VP nominee I could support, but I don't think linking to a fourteen month-old statement that "In my view, we got into this war without thinking through everything we should have, we should not get out of this war without thinking everything through" really fits the bill.
Yes, that's a lame wanky sentiment that I didn't agree with fourteen months ago, but it was fourteen months ago. I wouldn't want a vice president who would oppose withdrawal or who had some kind of record of chest-thumping rhetoric he or she couldn't walk away from, but that's not what this is. Chris also deems her insufficiently progressive on immigration, but she was a supporter of the comprehensive reform bill so I don't really see what the beef is here.
In a sane world, Republican leaders would listen more to Grover Norquist:
Listen more to him on foreign policy that is! Instead, they decide to ignore his advice on that subject, and focus instead on his crazy tax policy advice which they then link up with a crazy foreign policy vision.
A little bit earlier today I shaved my beard off for the first time in quite a few years (I can't remember if I've had it since 2004 or since 2005) and, perhaps foolishly, I didn't even solicit my girlfriend's opinion first. But I figure that if the reviews are bad it's easy enough to grow back.
There's a tendency, given the urgency of the moment, to treat "foreign policy" as equivalent to "Iraq" for political purposes but of course it's a whole much broader subject than that. The world's a big place, and nobody can say what's really going to look important in 2011, so it's always good to look at people's ideas about other subjects. In that vein, I liked Barack Obama's Latin America speech a lot:
No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past. But the United States is so alienated from the rest of the Americas that this stale vision has gone unchallenged, and has even made inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua. And Chavez and his allies are not the only ones filling the vacuum. While the United States fails to address the changing realities in the Americas, others from Europe and Asia – notably China – have stepped up their own engagement. Iran has drawn closer to Venezuela, and just the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits.
That is the record – the Bush record in Latin America – that John McCain has chosen to embrace. Senator McCain doesn’t talk about these trends in our hemisphere because he knows that it’s part of the broader Bush-McCain failure to address priorities beyond Iraq. The situation has changed in the Americas, but we’ve failed to change with it. Instead of engaging the people of the region, we’ve acted as if we can still dictate terms unilaterally. We have not offered a clear and comprehensive vision, backed up with strong diplomacy. We are failing to join the battle for hearts and minds. For far too long, Washington has engaged in outdated debates and stuck to tired blueprints on drugs and trade, on democracy and development -- even though they won’t meet the tests of the future.
When you think about the tension in U.S. foreign policy between the internationalist strand and the imperialist strand, Latin America -- the part of the world we encountered before the rise of liberalism -- has always been a locus of imperialist thinking. As Greg Grandin fairly persuasively argues, one way of understanding the Bush foreign policy is that he's taken ideas and techniques developed in America's (mis)treatment of our near abroad and gone global with them. Obama wants to do the reverse, and bring the internationalist spirit of respectful engagement and cooperation to the Western Hemisphere:
No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum. His predictable yet perilous mix of anti-American rhetoric, authoritarian government, and checkbook diplomacy offers the same false promise as the tried and failed ideologies of the past. But the United States is so alienated from the rest of the Americas that this stale vision has gone unchallenged, and has even made inroads from Bolivia to Nicaragua. And Chavez and his allies are not the only ones filling the vacuum. While the United States fails to address the changing realities in the Americas, others from Europe and Asia – notably China – have stepped up their own engagement. Iran has drawn closer to Venezuela, and just the other day Tehran and Caracas launched a joint bank with their windfall oil profits.
That is the record – the Bush record in Latin America – that John McCain has chosen to embrace. Senator McCain doesn’t talk about these trends in our hemisphere because he knows that it’s part of the broader Bush-McCain failure to address priorities beyond Iraq. The situation has changed in the Americas, but we’ve failed to change with it. Instead of engaging the people of the region, we’ve acted as if we can still dictate terms unilaterally. We have not offered a clear and comprehensive vision, backed up with strong diplomacy. We are failing to join the battle for hearts and minds. For far too long, Washington has engaged in outdated debates and stuck to tired blueprints on drugs and trade, on democracy and development -- even though they won’t meet the tests of the future.
I think this is the correct way of making the Bush-McCain linkages. A lot of people chafe at the idea that Bush and McCain are "the same" since the animosity between them is well known and insofar as one can tell about these things (not so far, in my view, but nevertheless...) they seem to have rather different characters. But across very large swathes of the issue landscape, they have the same policies with Bush having adopted some of John McCain's 2000-vintage ideas and McCain having adopted some of Bush's ideas, leaving us with few areas in which McCain even says he wants to change Bush's policies.
Much of Emily Gould's article about her life as a professional blogger doesn't seem similar at all to my life, but her description of the odd phenomenon of quasi-fame that comes from being a blogger has some resonance with me:
I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in line at Balthazar’s coffee bar, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. “Emily, don’t quit Gawker!” a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or looking at the stain on my sweater or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was.
It's a pretty weird phenomenon, though since I've been doing this blog for over six years now (over 22+ percent of my life!) I've gotten used to it. People sometimes come up to me in bars, Metro stations, etc. and introduce themselves as if I were a real celebrity which is always flattering but then again it makes me worry that I'm somehow not living up to the blog persona or something.
EW reports: "90210 spinoff casts Tristan Wilds of The Wire". This is all wrong. What they ought to do is make a Wire spinoff that's also an update of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in which Wilds, as Michael, moves in with rich Southern California relatives. In fact, I would pay good money just to watch David Simon's facial expression upon hearing that pitch.
One thing I'm not sure most people realize is that unlike magazine articles, books don't go through any kind of formal fact-checking process whatsoever. An author worried about inadvertent errors sneaking into his work (i.e., me) can hire someone out of pocket to check things, but there's nothing stopping an unscrupulous writer from just passing off fabrications as true. Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House (the basis for 21), for example "is not a work of "nonfiction" in any meaningful sense of the word."
So it's no surprise to see that Mezrich's proposal for a tell-all book about the true story behind Facebook seems to have some questionable sourcing. But some of this stuff is just sloppy -- Mezrich talks a bunch, for example, about a Facebook predecessor that he thinks was called "FaceSmash" but was in fact called "FaceMash." They have a campus newspaper and everything that covered this when it happened.
Tyler Cowen reports on an advance so awesome that I'm prepared to declare 21st century Japan the pinnacle of human culture -- a glasses-cleaning machine that deals with the problem that the post-cleaning drying of the glasses tends to smudge them again. "I've never ever had my glasses so clean before," reports Tyler.
And yet, this kind of miracle is never going to be properly accounted for in purchase power parity calculations.
Meh. I liked the Vampire Weekend column. It's just that while I almost always enjoy the "comic sociology" pieces that made Brooks famous, I wish they came with footnotes or something so we could learn whether or not there's actual sociology to back up the stuff Brooks is saying. Is there real evidence that the rise of geek culture is politically relevant as he implies toward the end? It's an interesting issue, which makes it an interesting column, but while I liked the joke about Barack Obama being the Prince Caspian of the iPhone set, I'd also kind of like to know the answer.
Via Neil Sinhababu, Rep. Tom Davis (R)'s twenty page strategy memo for Republicans observes that the Iraq War is "the ultimate cultural issue, fueling and giving oxygen to the cultural left, as well as planting doubts in many swing voters' minds about the direction of the country."
Of course it's also an actual war in which over 100,000 Americans are risking their lives, in which tens of thousands of Americans have been wounded, millions of Iraqis displaced, many people killed, hundreds of billions spent, etc., etc., etc. But maybe that goes without saying?
| 
Heads in the Sand
