It's worth noting that not only did John McCain oppose Jim Webb's bill expanding educational benefits for veterans, but he has a long track record of fairly stingy behavior on veterans' issues. As Hilzoy puts it "McCain has supported basic appropriations for vets. However, when there are two competing proposals, he generally chooses the cheaper one, and often, when only one proposal to increase benefits is available, he opposes it."
One sort of wonders why this is. McCain's clearly not some kind of dogmatic libertarian, and he certainly seems to have a great deal of emotional attachment to the military. I believe the particular military family in which he grew up was a bit idiosyncratic in actually being composed of life-long military officers rather than veterans (Webb, by contrast, is also from a military family and is clearly very influenced by his military background but after graduating from the academy put his time in then took advantage of veterans' benefits to move on to other things) as such. Or maybe he just takes very seriously the idea that we can't make the benefits too generous lest it undermine our ability to endlessly prolong the war in Iraq.
The American habit of electing non-federal judges has always intuitively struck me as a bad-sounding idea. I think reverence for the founders often goes too far in this country, but their arguments in favor of a non-elected federal judiciary seemed sound. But does research back this up? Certainly the result Alex Tabbarok describes here doesn't sound like justice, though it does have a certain populist quality that perhaps some will deem appealing.
Based on traffic conditions yesterday, high gas prices certainly didn't seem to be keeping people off the roads, but that's why we rely on data and the data shows a fairly large decline in driving recently showing that even in a country where public policy massively, massively, massively subsidizes driving and provides for few alternatives that people still do respond to incentives. What we need to do now is start subsidizing driving less (including through implicit subsidies like parking regulations) and start plowing some of the savings into better service on our existing transit routes and the creation of new ones.
Rod Parsley withdraws endorsement of John McCain. Given McCain's decision to embrace Parsley, then continuing to embrace Parsley when Parsley's repugnant views were brought to his attention, and then to distance himself from Parsley when the MSM brought Parsley's repugnant views to the attention of the public, it's understandable that Parsley's not happy with McCain.
But still -- why not endorse? What's really changed here? From the point of view of a social conservative who yearns for Muslim blood to be shed, McCain clearly seems like the lesser of two evils whatever else you might say about him.
Young people looking for summer jobs this year are set to face some of the worst labor market conditions in a while. There's a lot of stickiness in the labor market, so during a downturn firms don't necessarily cut back as much as they would if real life were a frictionless plane (instead, you just like nominal wages stay flat as real wages decline). But many slightly unorthodox corners of the labor market -- the summer jobs segment among them -- don't have these kind of features and it's easy enough to just avoid hiring as many part time temporary workers as you did the year before.
I think to really appreciate how foolish it is to worry about literally regaining the loyalty of "Reagan Democrats" you need to look at the winning coalition Jimmy Carter assembled in 1976. That's the coalition Reagan disrupted, and I think it's safe to say that it's a coalition that's dead for good. It'll be a cold day in hell before you see someone win New York and Texas while losing California and Illinois. At this point, the past is a different country in political terms.
UPDATE: And note that even in the more normal 1968, Humphrey carried Texas but badly lost in Vermont. Humphrey did better in West Virginia than in Pennsylvania which could never happen for a Democrat these days, and Nixon got a higher percentage of the vote in Oregon than in Oklahoma.
John Sides argues convincingly in the LA Times that once the Democratic nomination race is finished, the dynamics of an Obama-McCain campaign are very likely to unify Democratic voters around Obama. It's a good piece, and a welcome reminder that it would be good to see more political scientists doing popular writing on these much-discussed points about election dynamics.
I'd say that the more legitimate concern about unity would have to do with elite unity. There's a certain set of people who, say, donated to the Clinton re-election campaign in 1996, to Al Gore in 2000, to the DNC when Terry McAuliffe was chair, to some pro-Kerry 527 groups in 2004, and to Hillary Clinton's primary campaign in 2008. These folks aren't going to vote for McCain, but how invested will they be in backing Obama? That's in part going to be a function of whether or not Bill and Hillary urge them to be deeply invested in backing Obama. And much the same could be said for other brands of elites -- interest group leaders, random consultants and strategists, etc.
Maybe Hillary Clinton would strongly prefer being Vice President to being Senator from New York. If so, her sway over these kinds of people could be a good reason for Obama to seriously consider a unity ticket even though such a ticket has a bunch of other drawbacks.
I'm not sure how much of a difference it would really make in the end, but I do think it'd be neat to have a president and a team who can write and deliver great speeches with this one wending together a tribute to Ted Kennedy with a call to service for young people:
Each of you will have the chance to make your own discovery in the years to come. And I say “chance” because you won’t have to take it. There’s no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should by. You can choose to narrow your concerns and live your life in a way that tries to keep your story separate from America’s.
But I hope you don’t. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, though you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all those who helped you get here, though you do have that debt. It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in America’s story.
As with many of Obama's speeches, I think it would be possible to sniff at this one and proclaim it banal. But I think part of the brilliance of Obama's rhetoric is an ability to elevate important but somewhat banal sentiments, like how cleaning the facade of an old building you've passed dozens of times can make you appreciate the architecture in a way you rarely have before.
Julian Sanchez is also at the beach with me, and he's experimenting with some kind of set-up where he records movies on his iPhone and then they upload to his server as vlogs. This one's about ways to make distributed reporting work:
There seem to be some wind-induced sound quality problems,
I was reading GQ yesterday and they were advertorializing on behalf of a $795 sweater. Does anyone really walk around wearing an $800 sweater? I've had the opportunity in my life to meet a healthy number of rich people, and still I'm blown away by the price tags on the clothing I see in magazines whenever I break out of the sad political magazine ghetto.
Fascinating. Not only did I like Barack Obama's speech on Latin America policy, but apparently lots of folks in the audience from the fairly hardline Cuban American National Foundation liked it, too. As with the gas tax, perhaps, it's possible to win some political points by eschewing a bit of the usual BS.
It seems the inventor of the frozen french fry, J.R. Simplot, has died. It seems he wound up with a billion dollar fortune off this invention (primarily through McDonald's) even though it's the kind of thing I wouldn't have even thought of as having "been invented" as such.
My friend Dave Weigel's one of the best political reporters in the country in general. And when it comes to a story like the Libertarian Party convention with its seven ballots before Bob Barr prevailed, his account is the definitive one.
Via Tyler Cowen and Chris Blattman an op-ed about the madness of donating more money to Harvard's already-giant endowment (various other private universities also work here) rather than focusing your giving on causes that will actually help people in need.
A university that rich ought to either embark on some kind of ambitious expansion program and start educating substantially more students, or else decide that it would unduly alter the character of the place to expand that much and just close up the development department and enjoy the luxury of being able to focus single-mindedly on the university's core teaching and research functions.
Ron Rosenbaum sings the praises of so-called "liberal guilt." I largely agree. He says, though, that "What I don't understand is why there doesn't seem to be any conservative guilt over racism." I don't actually find this puzzling at all: There's little conservative guilt over racism because political exploitation of racial animosity has been an integral element of the conservative movement's political strategy ever since the day when the conservative movement stopped issuing straightforward defenses of white supremacy.
Under the circumstances, anyone who feels too upset about racism can't make it far in the conservative movement. You don't need to be a racist, as such, but in your public work you need to express much much much more concern about the alleged evils of "political correctness" or some such than you do about actual racism.
Via Brad Delong, Stan Collender thinks the Bush administration embezzled $15 billion and nobody in the press seems to have noticed or really cared. Commenting on this report of money that can't be properly accounted for in Iraq spending, he says "it appears as if virtually every procedure and law designed to prevent just this type of malfeasance was circumvented."
Greetings. I left DC Saturday morning with a bunch of friends for a beach house in North Carolina, and I'll be here on the Outer Banks all week on vacation. That doesn't mean I won't blog at all -- I like blogging, and don't think I've skipped a day since some time back in 2003 -- but I don't intend to keep up the full-service posting volume you normally see here on a business day. Consequently, I'm enlisting the assistance of some guest-bloggers. Specifically, we'll have Kay Steiger, associate editor at Campus Progress (sort of like the Komsomol for the new liberal revival in America); Alyssa Rosenberg, staff correspondent at Government Executive (like Forbes or Business Week for the public sector is how they describe it); Kathy G. whose self-titled blog has been taking the intertubes by storm and describes her as "a shrill feminist, bleeding heart liberal, hardcore policy wonk, political junkie, ardent cinephile, and lover of 19th century novels"; Ta-Nehisi Coates author of a self-titled blog, this great article, The Beautiful Struggle, etc.; and last, out of white male solidarity, I've recruited Isaac Chotiner whose work you can often see at TNR or in yesterday's Week in Review and who's promised to say something about the NBA.
And, as I say, I'll almost certainly keep chiming in. So enjoy! And be nice!
First off, thanks to Matt for his hospitality. I'll try and blog a bit about the exciting NBA playoffs, which seem to have started months ago and show no signs of ending (or, for that matter, fatigue). But Hendrik Hertzberg's Comment in this week's New Yorker is a good place to start, because it makes the connection between Hillary Clinton's popular vote strategy, and the HBO movie 'Recount,' which premiered last night and was both diverting and unexceptional.
The problem with the Clinton strategy--and I don't mean in political terms--is not that it shows her willingness to change positions in the name of political expediency. Rather, it's that if the popular vote had been the metric all along, Obama would have used a different strategy that did not rely so heavily on caucus states and their (generally) small populations.
The strange thing about 2000 was that it was Bush who pursued a strategy that should have netted him a popular vote win; he spent many of the campaign's last 72 hours in states like California and New Jersey, where he ended up getting destroyed. Meanwhile, Gore was working hard to win Florida and thus an electoral vote majority, but still managed to beat out Bush by half-a-million votes.
Incidentally, is there any doubt that if the Florida recount had gone the other way, Karl Rove would have been branded as a dope for allowing his candidate to spend time outside of Florida and Pennsylvania in that last week before the polls opened?
Over at The Plank, my co-blogger Josh Patashnik has an excellent post on how politicians and pundits badly miss the mark when evaluating the importance of the vice presidential selection. Rather than obsessing over the short term political gain--which according to the available evidence may not even exist--candidates selecting running mates should focus on the fact that their choice will be closely identified with their party for decades to come.
In my mind, the most ridiculous aspect of the veepstakes frenzy is the focus on vice presidential "qualities" that will supposedly help the presidential nominee. This can be seen most humorously in John Heilemann's New York magazine article on the "possibility" of a McCain-Bloomberg ticket. The idea is crazy enough on its own, but this quote in the essay is priceless, and perfectly captures the degree to which the issue is blown completely out of proportion: “The GOP is losing on the economy by 10 to 15 points,” says Doug Schoen, who served as Bloomberg’s pollster in his mayoral runs. “With Mike on the ticket, that gap would quickly, dramatically close.” Instead of disputing this absurd statement, Heilemann even more ridiculously adds that the "McCain–Bloomberg–Arnold Schwarzenegger troika" would put California in play for the GOP!
Anyway, let this stand as a plea for no more Veep talk until at least late July. Okay, fine, how about June 1st?
I second Isaac's thanks to Matt, and extend my gratitude to him for taking over basketball coverage for the week. Now I don't feel guilty about throwing a little baseball into the mix. But before I get all serious, I thought I'd wave goodbye to the hour left in the long weekend and welcome summer in with a few thoughts on summer jams.
Far be it from me to defend Will Smith’s rap career. My own tastes run a little more towards the Dirty South and a little less towards “Welcome to Miami.” But New York’sVulture blog is running a search for the best new song of the summer, and none of the entrants so far are particularly...summery. Is there actually a better song about June, July and August than “Summertime”?
I’ve racked my brain and my iTunes playlist. And while “Summer of ‘69” and “The Boys of Summer” capture individual summer romances, and the entire early Beach Boys catalog is the best possible homage to surfing and driving, the former are kind of well…angsty, and the latter are more than a little dated. But no matter how passé Will Smith’s shorts and flattop are, I can’t imagine a time when firing up a grill and hanging out in the sunshine wouldn’t be more fun than, say, coming back to work after a holiday weekend.
If you need to procrastinate while you recover on Tuesday morning, throw your favorite summer songs in the comments and I'll put up a Muxtape of the most-mentioned ones at the end of the week.
First off, many thanks to Matt for asking me to guest blog. Matt has long been one of my role models as a blogger and I'm honored that he invited me here. If you want to read more of my stuff, you can visit my own blog, The G Spot.
Now on to my first post here, which I warn you will be looonnnggg.
A number of people I greatlyrespect have been touting Virginia senator James Webb as Barack Obama's vice presidential pick. Indeed, more than a few of my liberal male friends seem positively smitten with the man.
But I say, enough with the mancrushes already! It's true that Webb, a Vietnam vet who's been decorated with with two Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, the
Silver Star and the Navy Cross, is undeniably butch. But there are a number of reasons why he would be a terrible vice presidential pick.
Back in February, Ezra Klein made the case against Webb, and the reasons Ezra gave then still hold. For one thing, if President Obama wants to get anything done, he'll need a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. It would not be wise for him to choose a red state senator, because who knows if another Democrat could be elected to that seat? Also, as Ezra argued, the things that make Webb valuable as a "gadfly senator," such as his "brashness" and his "willingness to push the conversation forward," would be a bad match for the vice presidency, which would require him to "constantly watch his mouth" and not say anything that conflicts with the president's agenda.
All that is true, but the reasons why Webb would be a poor choice go way beyond that. Even Alex Massie, who strongly supports Webb for veep, has admitted that the man is "hopeless on the campaign trail":
You could see that it
pained him to even ask people to vote for him and he plainly had little
patience for the self-abasement and daily humiliations of life on the
campaign trail. He is not a natural baby-kisser. My sense - from his
own writing and what I've read about him - is that he is also
difficult, stubborn, awkward, cussed and not to be trifled with. these
too may not be attributes best-suited to a national campaign in the
modern political era.
Doesn't sound too promising, does it? But that is actually the least of my worries about Webb. No, what I worry about is the fact that Webb basically became a Democrat the day before yesterday, and he has a long history of holding some pretty wingnutty opinions and making some fairly outrageous and offensive statements. To quote a Rolling Stone profile of the man, just a few years ago he was saying that "Liberals were 'cultural Marxists,' and 'the upper crust of academia and the
pampered salons of Hollywood' were a fifth column waging war on
American traditions."
So. I've done my share of measured cackling at the fact that black folks have played a decisive role in the ending of Hillary Clinton's presidential ambitions. I go back and forth on whether the campaign race-baited or not. As this thing winds down though, I begin to lean on the old rule that incompetence is more common than conspiracy. Racebaiting or not, I think the racistfool Geraldine Ferraro was/is poisonous, and I wish Hillary had said something close to that. I think her hard-working, white people remark was something of a slip and I wish she could have acknowledged as much. I think Bill meant what he said in North Carolina, but the worst part is his insistence that Obama was, in fact, race-bating him. I think her recent charge that sexism is widely accepted, while racism isn't, is, as I've said before, akin to a welder opining on carpentry. Like all competitors in the Oppression Olympics, she's unqualified. But in that, she's got alot ofcompany.
Still, in general I don't buy a campaign of race-baiting for a couple reasons: 1.) It's not a particularly great strategy in a Dem primary. You essentially trade blow-outs across the South, for single to low-double digit wins in Ohio and Pennsylvania, which you likely would have gotten anyway. 2.) I know this is naive, but I give some credence to the fact that there are several black people supporting--and running--Hillary's campaign. I'd like to think they wouldn't go along with such a thing. My cackling is more based on black voters DQing someone who shared many of George Bush's worse managerial qualities--confusing loyality with competence, an inability to say I'm sorry, changing the rules to suit your needs. It almost redeems our shameful role in that 2004 roll-out of gay marriage bans across the states.
Alright so I'm rambling. My point is that there's been some speculation that Hillary's beef with black voters will follow her home. Black New York pols--most of whom back Obama--are claiming that she's going to have some bridges to repair here in Harlem, in Bed-Stuy etc. Let me be the first to step up and say that I don't see it. Begin with the fact Hillary doesn't even have to run again until 2012. I expect that she will, indeed, go all out and campaign for Obama. If he wins, than people will more remember her helping him get elected. If he loses, well she won't be running for Senate then anyway. Moreover, I just don't think the wounds are that deep. I desperately don't want her anywhere near the White House or the Naval observatory. But she's been a fairly decent senator. In fact, I'm more pissed at Schumer for rolling over for Mukasey. Call me daft, but I think the politics of the moment are just that. A year ago, no one expected Obama to be getting nine out of ten black votes.
And of course, peace to Matt for allowing me this platform to publish my various screeds, fulminations and love notes. I'll try not to lower your stock too much.
Which is why it's strange that almost three weeks after the Service Employees International Union announced that they'd spend precisely that amount both to swing the elections they're targeting and to support a massive mobilization to push for health care reform and the Employee Free Choice Act in the first 100 days of the new administration, not a single major news organization has written about that decision. In fact, nobody's really written about it all, unless Lab Law Weekly's decision to reprint the press release counts.
I'm not entirely shocked that such a big number has slipped between the waves. As David Simon and others have pointed out, the labor beat frequent falls on the non-essential list, unless you live in a city like New Haven, where labor is still an essential element of the political system. I do some labor reporting, and can testify to the fact that even in Washington, it's not a crowded beat. And in an election where even vaster fundraising numbers are getting tossed around on a daily basis, I can see a lot of scenarios where a lot of folks decided this particular $150 million wasn't newsworthy.
But it matters not least because SEIU is one of the first organizations to explicitly lay out a post-election plan. I've written elsewhere that this election is one to watch because many unions, not just SEIU, are trying to develop strategies that will keep their members mobilized, and will help boost organizing drives and win contract fights.
Two elements of SEIU's plan caught my eye: the commitment to involve a million members, 200,000 of whom would have leadership positions, and the development of round-the-clock activism centers, operating in multiple languages, to serve those members. Those centers, if they're advertised effectively, and depending on what resources they have, could play a huge role in activating communities of folks who rely on public libraries for internet access, and who may not have access to good non-English language newspapers. And the commitment to engage that many members speaks to an ambitious internal organizing plan. It's worth watching--and writing about.
If you were unfortunate enough to have dropped ten bucks on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull over the holiday weekend, the last thing you should feel is alone: The movie has made over $150million in just five days. And the reviews have been okay, too: According to Rotten Tomatoes, the movie garnered a not-unimpressive score of 79%. Still, you might be one of those (brilliant and thoughtful) people who thought the movie was nothing short of dreadful. If so, you are probably asking yourself, How on Earth could this film have been well received by critics?
A friend suggested one theory to me, which is that reviewers were scared to dump on a beloved franchise. This seemed plausible, although weren't the three most recent Star Wars films rightfully trashed? Well, sort of: Although not as well reviewed as Indiana Jones 4, none of the moves in George Lucas’ second trilogy received the drubbing it deserved.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of broaching my real problem with the film, which was its awful, awful CGI. David Denby, in an otherwise sensible review, actually seemed to enjoy some of the action scenes, including the big one near the end that looked to my eyes almost completely fake. Denby writes: "In a sequence like that, with wild improbabilities linked by speed and rhythm, Spielberg re-creates the spirit of Buster Keaton’s most elaborately synchronized gags, but on a much grander scale." This could be said of many Spielberg action scenes, to be sure, but not the one in question. In fact, the special effects are so bad that they make the scene the most ridiculous and ponderous in the entire film.
Critics who are so concerned about the dreck Hollywood produces every summer should be focusing more time and expending more ink on the CGI that is ruining action movies. If there was one series that should be have been immune to this kind of nonsense, it was Indiana Jones. But alas...
Commenter BigSister takes Obama post-racialism a little far and claims that I don't see race-baiting from Clinton because I'm "not black." OK, so I confess, it is indeed true that I'm a terrible dancer, I played Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, and I've got the sort of jump-shot that careens over backboard.
BUT--in my defense--I have dedicated my life to defending the beauty of fried whiting, congac, and Nia Long. More to the point, my parents are, you know, black. Alright, they are a brownish/yellow, but the point is either I am black, or I need to get a paternity test done on my son. I know I'm addicted to The Flaming Lips and all, and the time has come to "get beyond race," but come on guys, I live in Harlem for Christ sake. And I once wore a daishiki. And my name is Ta-Nehisi. Hello?
Wow. Rasmussen has Mitch McConnell losing in Kentucky. Of course, Barack Obama's horribly unpopular there meaning that "[w]hile McConnell will try to make Obama a part of Lunsford’s name, Lunsford will emphasize McConnell’s ties to the current President." You kind of figure that McConnell will probably pull this one out, but it's a real sign of how desperate the Republican situation is.
Meanwhile, in an interesting way Kentucky Democrats will probably be better off if Obama doesn't do too well in the presidential campaign. If he opens up a clear lead over John McCain, I think the argument that Kentucky should send a Republican to help obstruct the Obama agenda could be fairly persuasive but if the race is close then people will just focus on McConnell versus Lumsford and it seems like Lumsford has a real shot.
Obviously, it's bad news that the Chinese government is now rushing to evacuate survivors in case a dam created by the earthquake breaks. But it's been interesting to me to watch how the Chinese government has responded to the crisis, because it seems to signal the culmination, or at least a further development, of certain trends in Chinese governance.
I was in China in March, in part working on a story about how the Chinese government has forged partnerships with American universities, including Harvard and Georgetown, to provide continuing public policy education for Chinese civil servants. One of the folks I talked to, the incredibly generous and helpful Dr. Lan Xue, the Executive Associate Dean of School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University (the equivalent of MIT), said that two areas the civil servants he'd worked with over the past five years have grappled with are crisis management and public relations. Until the outbreak of SARS in 2003, most Chinese ministries didn't have spokesmen, much less the armies of public relations officers that government agencies here employ, and they didn't have the sense that people wanted information on a regular basis. So it's interesting to see someone like Wen Jiabao, who has been quick to recognize and feed that hunger for information, rise to the fore in the aftermath of the earthquake.
Dr. Xue said it was important to remember that the Chinese and U.S. governments view crisis through very different lenses, SARS and civil unrest, and 9/11, respectively. I never got anywhere near Tibet during my time in Beijing and Shanghai, which roughly coincided with some of the worst of the rioting and crackdown, but it was obvious from the Channel News Asia in my hotel going dead mid-broadcast, and from a cabbie's absolute refusal to take me and my father to Tianamen Square, that yes, they do things differently in China.
But the Chinese government has made big committments to these American-run programs, and the American professors I talked to emphasized that they haven't been pressured to teach any particular content or in any particular way. It's clear the Chinese government thinks its employees have something to learn from the American approach to governing, and it may be that some of those ideas are catching on.
Photo by Flickr user martnpro used under a Creative Commons license.
This weekend veterans from around the country paraded through the streets of DC on motorcycles, but last week the Senate passed massive Webb-Hagel GI Bill reform legislation with a veto-proof majority. While the bill on the national level is still in the works, it looks like some states are starting to step in and attempt to repair the GI Bill legislation on their own. New Jersey's proposed legislation is particularly generous, limiting the amount that a veteran or veteran's widow to pay only $50 per credit for a public in-state college or university. Other states that are offering free or reduced-fee tuition are Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Louisiana. The worry, of course, is that states will pass the legislation without compensating for the added cost. This could end up causing higher tuition among non-veteran students.
It seems that GI Bill reform is yet another thing that states are taking on to compensate for the lack of movement on the national level, much like immigration reform, health care reform, and gay marriage/civil unions. When there's lack of movement on a national level to create reform, states will start to pass reforms. The result is a patchwork of legislation around the country, leaving some veterans high and dry while others that have (limited) options.
Megan's guestbloggers have a goodconversation going about what happens to the news business as reporters get bought out, staffs shrink, and people devote more reading minutes to blogs and online-only publications. I have a couple of very quick thoughts to throw out there.
1) I think Tim is probably right that folks like Howard Kurtz overemphasize the value of newsprint. But I think he underemphasizes the impact on newsrooms of large buyouts that lead to the sudden departures of significant numbers of significant staffers. It's bad for the Washington Post to lose Thomas Ricks because he's a great reporter, but it's also bad for them--and the journalism community--to lose someone like Stephen Barr. Steve is not someone I'd wager that most readers of this blog are familiar with; he writes the Federal Diary column, about issues affecting federal workers. In addition to being a good writer and reporter, he's a genuninely nice, helpful guy who made me feel at home as a newbie on the federal workforce beat. When big papers shed senior reporters on small beats, some of those reporters will stay in journalism, and will continue mentoring other writers. But a lot won't just migrate to other publications or to blogs, and their knowledge, and the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge by bumping into them at a hearing or a press conference, won't get passed on.
2) I think Conor is right to worry about the decline in local news, but I think there are some real bright spots on the horizon, too. The New Haven Independent, an online-only publication founded by alt-journalist Paul Bass, has done incredible work, and has become part of a network of Connecticut news sites. I actually wish some bigger organizations would look at those smaller models for inspiration. I think there's a lot to learn from their mix of news reporting, video commentary, and lively message boards.
A neat spreadsheet from Nicholas Beaudrot uses demographics to predict Barack Obama's likely vote share in November, then looks at each incumbent Republican member to see which are sitting in districts where Obama's likely to do well. It's a pretty large number of districts.
The current Democratic strategy focuses around painting John McCain as "McSame" as Bush -- a man running for a third term. That's not entirely fair, as McCain really does differ from Bush on a few important issues. On climate change, for example, McCain is clearly better. But on national security policy, McCain is, if anything, more hard core than Bush. This is clear in his record, but we're also starting to see it on some forward looking issues like North Korea where McCain wants to repudiate Bush's current policy and go back to Bush's previous, more rightwing policy.
Bush abandoned that policy eventually because even he came to see that it was a disastrous failure but McCain, in keeping with his record, wants to bring back the super-duper-crazy Bush of 2003-2005 in place of the semi-chastened Bush we've seen for the past couple of years.
All those who dearly love the NBA have been forced to become Celtics and Lakers fans over the past two weeks for the simple reason that a Pistons-Spurs finals is too painful to even contemplate. And this is what makes the unbelievable cluelessness of Celtics coach Doc Rivers a huge, huge problem. Last night he insisted on playing veteran point guard Sam Cassell for 17 minutes, with predictable results (no points and no assists). Normally I could let this pass without comment, but the possibility of Detroit once again playing into June is a threat to decent Americans everywhere.
If you aren't a serious NBA fan, but have tuned into any Boston games, you probably found Rivers to be a likable figure. Unlike most coaches he will smile and display excitement, and even seems to have a rapport with his players. But his coaching in the playoffs has been absolutely dreadful (for the fullest take on this see Bill Simmons).
As a friend put it (in jest) this morning, "Don’t you think the NBA has to get involved at this point?"
Let me just say that I think it's a sad day for America when partisanship and a desire to bring down Barack Obama has led conservatives to demand that the Red Army's work in defeating Hitler and liberating concentration camps obtain sufficient recognition. Everybody knows that the idea of the pristine and wholly virtuous war in which American force of arms, with an assist from Winston Churchill's moral clarity, stopped Hitler's war machine is among the most cherished myths of our nation. Discussion of the Eastern Front is to be avoided at all costs!
Surely preserving this principle is reason enough to let Obama off the hook. We can't have people running around believing that the Greatest Generation was a greatest generation of Communists!
I'll try to write something on this subject soon, but a friend poses the following counterfactual which readers might enjoy discussing in the comments section:
If David Axelrod had run Hillary's campaign, and Mark Penn had run Obama's, a) would the outcome have been different and b) would we have had a very different understanding about the role gender and race play in this country? I think the answer to b) is definitely yes and to a) is perhaps yes.
Christy Hardin Smith over at Firedoglake reminds us of an issue that gets reported on occasionally: female soldiers that experience rape suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Apparently the problem is that MST=PTSD isn't always believed among VA medical professionals whose job it is to treat soldiers. I've been to a number of hearings that explored this topic, mainly centered on combat-related stress, but there are three in-patient treatment centers specifically designated that treat women who suffer from a combination of combat and sexual trauma and a smattering of other programs around the country. (Sen. Patty Murray has been something of a leader on this issue in the Senate.) The stories are heartbreaking. As Smith said, "As a female soldier or Marine, you prepare for service with a lot of training with your squad, a lot of extra time in the gym, a lot of mental and physical preparation. But nothing could prepare you for an assault ... a sexual assault ... from one of your fellow soldiers." Treatment for sexual trauma needs to widely accessible to women in the military, but with increasing medical costs for all veterans on the rise, there's a chance treatment for MST could get squeezed out of the budget. Ultimately, of course, it would be best if women in the military (and otherwise) weren't raped at all.
Former National Journal White House Correspondent, Reader's Digest Washington Bureau chief, and brand-new blogger Carl Cannon argues that the reporters who follow around the next president are going to get to spend some time in pretty sweet vacation spots. As much as Ellen may joke about getting hitched on the Crawford ranch, I can't imagine it's best place to spend time if you're a beach rather than a brush type.
All kidding aside, Carl knows just an insane amount about the presidency and what it's like to cover it, so it's great that he'll be sharing some of that experience daily and out from behind a pay wall. Plus, he is a really, really funny guy, and serious baseball nut, so hopefully once he's settled in, we can hear stories about hanging out with Frank Robinson, too.
There is a WaPoarticle today about a study released on a 1994 adoption law that was designed to increase adoption of black children. The problem is that the law didn't really work; adoption of black children increased, but only marginally. The law forbids discussing race during the adoption process, and social parents can't specifically address the issues of white parents raising a black child.
The law had not significantly changed the situation, the new report found. In 2006, black children represented 15 percent of the nation's children yet made up 32 percent of the half a million in foster care. Black children still waited longer for adoption than white children, and the adoption rate for black children barely rose from 17 percent of those awaiting adoption in 1996 to 20 percent in 2003.
It seems to me that the main problem with the law is that it's the same kind of erroneous thinking that's been applied to affirmative action for years. The thinking seems to be that people don't want to take race into account so in the end it is non-white people that end up losing out.
If there is a silver lining to this endless primary battle, it has been the public decomposition of Clinton apparatchik Lanny Davis. Davis, you may remember, was a big Bill Clinton defender during impeachment; he now spends his time blogging and spinning for Senator Clinton's campaign. If you missed his classic CNN breakdown, it's here.
Now, via Andrew, I see that Lanny has published what even for him must count as a pathetic attack on Obama. Portentously titled "Four Things the Obama Camp Couldn't Resist Doing to Anger Clinton Supporters," the post is even more unhinged than we have come to expect. Here's #1:
Couldn't resist waiting one day after Sen. Clinton won West Virginia by 41 points to announce John Edwards endorsement.
Eh? This decision was somehow nefarious? Moving on:
Couldn't resist waiting to win majority of all delegates to announce Jim Johnson as VP search committee head -- the first candidate in my memory ever to do so while his chief opponent is still fighting for nomination -- and winning in last primary in crucial border state by 36 points (Kentucky). What's the rush? Obama wouldn't confirm or deny the that Mr. Johnson has been appointed to head the VP search effort. That makes many Clinton supporters feel uneasy about Senator Obama.
I'm not even sure what Davis' point is here, but it does at least put on display the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger style that he likes to alternate with his generally angry disposition. Finally:
Couldn't resist listing Bill Richardson as under consideration for Veep - the one Red Flag name that infuriates even moderate Clinton supporters the most -- not because he chose to endorse Sen. Obama, but the way he did it, i.e., his inability to avoid making negative comments about Sen. Clinton while doing so -- another person who sometimes can't resist the temptation of not being gracious when he should be, a great disappointment to many of his former close friends from the Clinton camp and which will not be forgotten.
The phrase “I ain’t no punk” has probably led to more renditions of “Blessed Assurance,” more grandmothers in big hats and dark dresses, and more black boys laid out in closed caskets than any other four words in the English language. “I ain’t no punk,” is of course corner-talk for “I am foolish enough to mortgage my life on even the pettiest act of perceived disrespect.” I grew up in West Baltimore during the late 80s, a time when being seen as a chump was basically the worst thing that could happen to you. So I’ll admit to throwing out that line once or twice in my younger days, though I can’t think of one instance where the "slight" was actually that bad.
Having seen the cost of living by the “I ain’t no punk” credo, I have an instant distaste for posturing. This runs the gamut from rappers who threaten each other with great bodily injury (often mere months before doing a press conference, and recording a song together) to Democrats attempting to show that they're tough on the various annoying phenomena of the day. (crime, defense, obscure black people etc.) So I’m going to whole-heartedly back John Dickerson’s call for Obama and McCain to kill the “I’m more macho than you act.”
I like seeing Obama get after McCain as much as the next vino-sipping, Claritin-popping, trust-fund dipping, lefty. (It’s been told to me that you can put virtually any string of adjective in front of “lefty” now.) But I’m now seeing how much more I enjoyed watching Obama mix it up with Hillary. I think maybe because he was running against a woman, or a fellow Democrat, Obama basically didn’t get into a competition of brass balls. Instead he responded with the jujitsu of humor, which repeatedly exposed the stiff, stilted nature of Hillary’s whole campaign.
Much has been made of gender’s role in this race. To me, it’s most insidious effect was that Hillary always had to show she “wasn’t no punk.” In debates she was always solid on the issues, but then she’d throw these wild haymakers which would leave her open to some brutal counterpunches. It began with her yucking it up during an Iowa debate at a tough question about Clinton advisors on Obama's team, and Obama catching her flush with that "I look forward to you advising me Hillary" line. In the Ohio debate, she allowed Obama to get in the last swing (“I would reject and denounce.”) when Tim Russert had him in a tough spot on Farrakhan. What I remember most about her “Shame on you” rant, is how Obama turned it on its head with that Annie Oakley riff. Her woefully scripted “change you can xerox” line only served to highlight Barack’s earlier “silly season” response to the whole plagiarism flap.
But the jujitsu period of this campaign seems to be over, and now its Obama who has to show that he “ain’t no punk.” Of course, war hero John McCain is going for the gold in the "ain't no punk" olympics. So now we reconcile ourselves to a long hot summer of dueling press releases, miscellaneous rants, and feigned rage. Yay. Obama really shouldn't drop the humor from his pitch--it's one of his best qualities. McCain may not need to show toughness because of gender, but he can’t help himself, and does it anyway. I’m hoping Obama doesn’t leave me thinking he deployed his humor, strictly, against the only woman in the room.
NBA conspiracy theorists must reckon with the fact that the Los Angeles Lakers, the biggest ratings draw in the league, received some of the worst officiating of the playoffs tonight in San Antonio. No contact with Spurs players was too minor for the officials to blow the whistle. The first half was particularly egregious: Lamar Odom and Derek Fisher were forced to sit out with foul trouble, and what should have been a double digit halftime lead was only six points.
But stop right there, because on the last play of the game Fisher clearly fouled Brent Barry and the refs didn't make the call. So, let the conspiracy theories commence. Still, on balance, the Spurs got the vast majority of breaks tonight. And Barry should have taken Charles Barkley's advice and jumped into Fisher directly, rather than trying to get off a clean shot. If he'd done so, he surely would have gotten three free throws.
As for the Lakers, they now go up 3-1 and continue what has been a remarkable playoff run. I was skeptical a few nights ago when the TNT crew speculated that this Lakers team might be as good as the Lakers championship teams from the early part of the decade. But now, on the heels of very impressive series' wins over Utah and Denver, they are a win away from vanquishing the mighty Spurs in five games. (Remember, too, that they have been playing in arguably the best conference in NBA history).
Tuesday was, to my mind, the first full-fledged day of low-skies-shirt-sticking-to-your-back summer here in D.C. And because of that, when I sat down to watch the Red Sox game last night, I cranked up the AC, broke out the salted peanuts and opened up Once More Around the Park, which, even though Roger Angell sides with the Mets over the Sox in 1986 in "Not So, Boston," is one of the finest collections of baseball writing ever published. (A Great and Glorious Game is a close second.)
Warning to all, ye who enter here: I am an unrepentant baseball sentimentalist and Red Sox fan. Deal with it.
Is Barack Obama doomed in a matchup with John McCain among the demographic groups where he did poorly against Hillary Clinton? The AP says not really:
Polls this month show the Illinois senator leading McCain among women, running even with him among Catholics and suburbanites and trailing him with people over age 65. Results vary by poll for those without college degrees. And though Obama trails decisively with a group that has shunned him against Clinton -- whites who have not completed college -- he's doing about the same with them as the past two Democratic presidential candidates.
The key fact here is "doing about the same" with whites who lack a college degree as Al Gore and John Kerry. Gore and Kerry both lost narrowly, but they lost. On the other hand, though they both lost, they lost narrowly. I think it's totally feasible to win the presidency without improving on the Gore/Kerry performance among this demographic group (you'd have to make up the ground elsewhere), but it's hard for me to see how it would be viable to slip further behind and still win.
On the one hand, it's a huge deal that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan is now out there admitting that the Iraq War was a mistake sold with lies. But on the other hand, it's sort of banal. We've known this for years. It's a shocking truth about our current state of affairs, but not a truth that any longer has the capacity to shock me. On the other hand, this from Byron York was interesting:
One of the main reasons John McCain is facing such an tough job today is that we are now in the sixth year of a war that the president of his own party started by mistake. That's a major headwind when you're running for president; an error of that magnitude will exact a political price. Would anyone be surprised if voters say that they've had enough?
That all seems reasonable enough to me, but what York is missing is that McCain doesn't think it was a mistake. One would think the virtue of nominating a guy who doesn't have close personal ties to the Bush administration would be that McCain could say something like "hey, I think liberalism is wrong and conservatism is good, but that doesn't mean I'm a sociopath who loves war so much that he still thinks the invasion of Iraq was a good idea." But he doesn't say that, presumably because he doesn't believe it. At even a time when the chief propagandists of the Bush administration are willing to admit that there BS was BS, he's a true believer.
The world only spins forward, but sometimes it spins in fits and starts
[Alyssa]
There's lots on Hillary Clinton and issues of feminism and sexism to read today. Harold Myerson warns her die-hard supporters not to "turn feminism into the last refuge of scoundrels," but I think the more important piece is Michelle Cottle and Amanda Fortini's discussion over at The New Republic.
The Democratic field this year was a cornucopia of opportunities for voters to address their anxieties about what it would be like for a black man, a Latino man, or a woman to run the country. And while opportunities like those are exciting, they also involve deciding which societal ill to address first, and no matter the scenario, that's a profoundly uncomfortable decision for anyone who cares about eliminating both racism and sexism.
Of course the chance to address race, or sex are far from the only things that matter. Mechanics of the campaign, the candidates' personal histories, voting records, speaking abilities, etc., have all been crucial in this race, and those elements shaped how Clinton and Obama presented the narratives of their respective gender and race. But race and gender were visible and important issues in this race; it wasn't just about mechanics, and it's not just about societal perceptions. And as Michelle puts it so eloquently:
You have pundits like Andrew Sullivan waxing rhapsodic about how fantabulous it would be for America's image, how great and glorious a morning it will be, when we have an African American taking the oath. You would never hear someone say that about a woman. Even if they're talking about the historic nature of it, they don't talk about it in such grand and soul-cleansing terms. And I think part of it is that in the history of this country, slavery, Jim Crow, and racism have been much uglier, more overt, nasty phenomena than sexism.
Sexism is here, sexism is present, but it's been more paternalistic, and presented in soft, warm and fuzzy terms...Women weren't persecuted for burning their bras. Feminism is a different cause than civil rights. Slavery is kind of a moral scar for America, so we can be poetic about how great it's going to be when we, at last, elect an African American. And we just can't talk that way about electing a woman.
Whether that was a conscious choice we made or not, America's going to seriously grapple in a general election with what it will be like to have the first black president before it takes on what it will be like to have the first woman president. That's not a right or wrong priority, it's just what we've got. But it doesn't make it wrong for people who care about seeing a woman in the White House to be frustrated about that their vision is still a ways away from reality.
Update: Quick clarification. I don't think that electing a black man, or a woman, or a Latino, or anyone in particular is going to--in and of itself--produce substantive change in the lives of Americans, much less produce a magically just society where everyone gets a pony, seasons tickets to the sports franchise of their choosing and a mint-condition copy of "Meet the Beatles." But I do think that who is in the White House gets folks talking and thinking about what the role of that office is, what qualities matter in leadership, and the face we present to the world, and those conversations are one stop on the road to much bigger, and more pressing, changes.
The news that Virginia has performed it's first execution in two years got me thinking about a topic that seemingly fallen off the radar this season--criminal justice reform. The death penalty, sadly, seems here to stay. But one of the reasons I so emphatically fell for Jim Webb (before Kathy took him apart) was because in addition to being outspoken about veterans issues, he's probably the most prominent senator i've heard speak on reforming our prisons. I could be wrong on that, and would love to be corrected. That said, I have heard very little about this issue out on the campaign trail. Frankly, this is as it should be--you don't win elections by talking about shortening the sentences of criminals. Still, I hope this issue is a priority, should Obama win.
Indeed, to me, one of the promises of an Obama administration would be that he could (hopefully) deracialize certain issues that really occur to me as matters of basic fairness and justice. Heather Macdonald has had a field day dismantling those who claim that the criminal justice is racist. But I think that's a strawman. Frankly, I don't much care about whether the law was intended to hurt black people, nor do I care whether it's called racist or not. To the extent that the "racist" label is a distraction, it should be jettisoned. It seems like the real question should be, Does our drug policy make sense? Are we helping or hurting the situation in our inner cities?
Polling English people on the question of which British actor does the worst American accent on television seems a bit bizarre. Shouldn't Americans decide who's doing an American accent well? Meanwhile, any list along these lines that features Ian McShane's depiction of Al Swearengen as a bad American accent has some serious problems. The character's just supposed to have been born abroad -- it's not an American accent at all! Oh well.
Smithsonian has an amusing list of the ten most outrageous art thefts of the last century. I didn't know, for example, that the guy who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911 was offended by the idea that an Italian masterpiece was in a French museum, or that the Irish Republican Army ripped off 19 paintings from Russborough House in 1974. It's hard to imagine, in today's transnational and uber-pricey art market that there are many art theives inspired more by intense national pride than the money involved (although this particular crook got caught when he tried to sell Mona Lisa for some serious-in-1911 coin). And stealing art seems like a pretty impractical way to finance your armed resistance movement. In fact, theft is probably best left to bored, art-loving fictional playboys, period.
But whatever the reason, big heists are always fun to think about after the fact. There's the object of the theft to consider: how do you decide your target is going to be a massive museum coin collection of mixed value? There are the logistics: if one is going to steal the Gutenberg Bible, one might factor the fact that it weighs 70 pounds into the planning process. Finally, it's giddy and transgressive to think about. Art theft isn't a victimless crime, but it's less directly and immediately harmful than robbing a little old lady or committing murder or defrauding a pension fund. Prints are cool, but it's fun to imagine having the real thing tucked away to look at.
In her interesting discussion with Amanda Fortini over at The New Republic, Michelle Cottle says the following (see, also, Alyssa's post below on the same topic):
The best way I've found to explain it is through a contrast with the media's reaction to Barack Obama's candidacy. You have pundits like Andrew Sullivan waxing rhapsodic about how fantabulous it would be for America's image, how great and glorious a morning it will be, when we have an African American taking the oath. You would never hear someone say that about a woman. Even if they're talking about the historic nature of it, they don't talk about it in such grand and soul-cleansing terms. And I think part of it is that in the history of this country, slavery, Jim Crow, and racism have been much uglier, more overt, nasty phenomena than sexism.
Sexism is here, sexism is present, but it's been more paternalistic, and presented in soft, warm and fuzzy terms: "We want to protect the women! It's not that we don't like them." Even when talking about being in battle, it's, "We don't want women to get hurt." Women weren't persecuted for burning their bras. Feminism is a different cause than civil rights. Slavery is kind of a moral scar for America, so we can be poetic about how great it's going to be when we, at last, elect an African American.
There are two important points here, the first being that the media seems much more excited by the prospect of a black president than a female president. The second is that the world would be more excited by a black president than a female president. To take the second point, I think Michelle is right to note that the particular history of America is one of the reasons that people abroad would see a black president as a more historic step. Our place in the eyes of the world, after all, is in part defined by our historical role in the slave trade, and by what many see as a legacy of racism that extends to this day. Were a dark-skinned man with Algerian parents to be elected as the president of France, I think it would be a very, very big deal here and abroad (or at least as big a deal as French elections can be).
The gender issue is more complicated because every country and every society has "gender issues." Some nations have already chosen female leaders, and some nations are beset by vastly more misogyny and sexism than the United States. So the election of a female American president, viewed through the various prisms of people abroad, will mean a variety of different things (yes, many countries have ugly racial histories, too, but there is still a distinction to be made, I think).
I think this point has probably been made elsewhere, but from a rainy day at my beachy retreat it occurs to me to point out that one really ought to look at the selection of a Vice Presidential nominee as something where the substantive merits are important. Of our eleven postwar vice presidents (Nixon, Johnson, Humphrey, Agnew, Ford, Rockefeller, Mondale, Bush, Quayle, Gore, and Cheney), four have gone on to become president and three more have gone on to become a major party presidential nominee. That's by no means a perfect batting record, but generically speaking becoming vice president is the best means of going on to become president. Under the circumstances, it seems foolish to advocate for someone or other purely on the grounds of political expediency.
Indeed, I suspect this is part of the reason that "veepstakes" conversations tend to get so annoying. Much like "electability" controversies during presidential primary season, people are playing without putting all their cards on the table, and tend to coincidentally get the result that the person who they think would be the most politically savvy pick is also a substantively good choice.
I really said I was going to stop talking about this. But I just read through the convo over at TNR between Amanda Fortini and Michelle Cottle, as well as Isaac's response, and I just want to throw in a couple notes.
1.) Picking up on Isaac's great point about "excitement over a woman/black president," I think so much of this has to do with the candidate themselves. This whole notion of masses of people "excited about a black president,"in particular, ignores the fact that since 1984, we've had a black person at least declare for president every year. In 2004 we had two--a black man and a black woman. I don't recall there being much excitement around the notion of President Al Sharpton, amongst blacks or whites. It's true that there is a great deal of excitement now about electing a black president--but that's because the prospect is Barack Obama. Ditto for Hillary. This sort of reductionist thinking that focuses only on her gender--independent of much more mundane factors like ignoring caucus states--is myopic. It misses, and greatly diminishes, the power of the individual.
2.) If there is one thing that all this gender/race analysis has taught it's this simple lesson--There Are No Black. Women. Anywhere. Ever. There's been great handwringing over an alleged schism between younger and older feminists. But if that's a schism, I don't know what you call the chasm between black and white feminists. We all are very interested in how the campaign would have unfolded if Barack Obama had been a woman. But we could care less how it would have unfolded if Hillary had been black, mostly because the answer is much simpler--there would have been no campaign to begin with. She would, most likely, be hooked up with a black dude, and thus likely would never have been First Lady of Arkansas, much less of the United States, and much less a Senator from New York. An inability to even consider other worlds explains why every time I see some writer attempting to assess the interplay of race and gender, it's rarely someone who actually has to, you know, deal with race and gender. That of course includes yours truly.
Amnesty International released their report on human rights abuses, and it has a pretty scathing take on the United States. One of the top abuses they list are indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the imprisonment of conscientious objector soldiers, and the coercive interrogation policies in place. It's not really surprising that the United States would be subject to scrutiny by AI, given the controversial nature of these practices domestically. (Although there's a pretty strong argument to be made against COs in a volunteer military, unless that person enlisted before the United States was at war.) AI's report is a reminder of how the Bush administration's policies on war and torture damage the credibility of the United States when decrying other countries for humanitarian abuses. What the Bush administration has essentially done is used the second-tier excuse of human-rights abuses to invade Iraq, then piled on to the laundry list of human rights violations in the world with his own policies on torture and indefinite detention. The record on human rights had damaged the credibility of legitimate work Americans want to conduct on human rights abuses in the future, even given a new administration that is presumably less comfortable with torture.
Other practices by the United States in the report included were failure by the government to properly address sexual violence against Native American women, the criminal justice system that includes a death penalty, and victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita who (still) lack access to housing.
I'm a bit behind the curve, but it seems that John McCain offered up a perfectly reasonable speech on nuclear proliferation issues yesterday. It wasn't earth-shatteringly good and didn't break any new ground, but it did involve him embracing several ideas that liberals and non-proliferation experts have been pushing for a while now and that Barack Obama has already embraced.
I guess that's good news, but as Ilan Goldenberg writes it's pretty annoying to see people hailing McCain's ideas when they're so contrary to his record over the past ten years including things he was saying just months ago when we were going to be booting Russia out of international organizations and forming a League of Democracies to battle to the death with the forces of autocracy. Certainly I'm not one to say a politician should never be allowed to change his mind, but when you see someone abandoning a decade of extremism in favor of moderation in the middle of a presidential general election campaign it's reasonable to suspect that you're seeing some "tacking toward the center" rather than genuine rethinking of things. Would it be too much to ask to get some kind of explanation from McCain of how he wants to square these new ideas with his old ones?
In this week’s Times Literary Supplement, the usually engaging Niall Ferguson has a long review of a new, generally sympathetic Henry Kissinger biography. In addition to recommending the book (which, despite a few questionable assertions, appears to have some interesting stuff on Kissinger’s childhood), Ferguson poses his review around the following question:
Has the ferocity of the criticism which Kissinger has attracted perhaps got something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is Jewish?
Before returning to this particular topic, it’s worth mentioning a few things about the rest of Ferguson’s piece. It’s a vigorous defense of Kissinger, and also a critique of Kissinger’s critics, among them Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens. Ferguson starts off very shakily, with a notably weak plea for leniency:
It would in fact be much easier to implicate a number of Kissinger’s predecessors in civilian bombings, coups d’état and support for murderous regimes. Unlike the case of Chile, to give a single example, there is no question that the Central Intelligence Agency had a direct hand in the coup that overthrew an elected government in Guatemala in 1954. It also played an active role in the subsequent campaign of violence against the Guatemalan Left. Many more people (around 200,000) died in this campaign than were “disappeared” in Chile after 1973 (2,279). In any case, Richard Nixon was not the first President to seek to influence Chilean domestic politics. Both of his immediate predecessors did so. Yet you will search the bookshops in vain for “The Trial of John Foster Dulles” or “The Trial of Dean Rusk”.
There are two responses to this. The first is that it is not a ringing defense of the former secretary of state (only 2,279 people killed under Pinochet!). And the second is that if someone did write a book about Guatemala called “The Trial of John Foster Dulles,” you can be absolutely sure that Niall Ferguson would be the first person to accuse the author of hyperventilating and reducing a “complicated” period in American history to a “naïve and simplistic” bill of wrongs.
...from arguably the last group of people who should be giving advice on race. I won't get into this too much, but I just want to say that rather than writing a memo to Obama on how to deal with "white voters" and the "race problem", Newsweek would have done better to send "white voters" a memo on how to deal with Obama and the "race problem." It was tragic to see so many interviews with folks in Kentucky and West Virginia saying point blank that they wouldn't vote for Obama because he was a colored. The conclusion always was, "Wow this is a huge problem for Obama," not "Wow. this is a huge problem for these people."
I know that seems backward, but roll with me for a second: We can all agree that a presidential election is an extremely important event, arguably the most important mass event in the country. If you have voters who essentially disqualify candidates, on race alone, isn't that, like, kind of a problem for the voters? Please do not counter with "but blacks vote for Obama on race!!" As I've said before, it ain't the same dog. Blacks--because we've basically had no other choice--have a long record of voting for white people, and will continue to do so. A guy who openly says "I'm not voting for a black guy," get's no such consideration.
Anyway, my point is that this is of a piece with the widely held view that racism is basically a problem for black people, not whites, that our history of slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, housing covenants are an injury to black people, not to the larger country. We think about the Civil War, as a war to free the slaves. But here's another way to think about it: It cost us 700,000 American lives--and the near fracturing of our country--to accomplish something that the rest of the civilized world accomplished with the stroke of a pen. I'm simplifying I know, but the point is racism poisons everything and everyone. Black folks obviously pay the most obvious price, but we really aren't its only victims.
Lately, we've heard a lot about how conservatives are allegedly "outofideas." Lack of ideas is supposedly the reason conservatives have recently been losing a slewofelections and scoring low ratings in public opinion polls, and why George Bush is the most hated president since the final days of Richard Nixon. What conservatives need, say some, are "new ideas." That's the ticket! Then their fortunes, currently in such spectacular free fall, will rally once again and stage a dramatic comeback.
I confess that talk of ideas in the context of American electoral politics long puzzled me. What on earth are these idée fixe-ated pundits talking about? Surely they don't mean ideas in the philosophical sense. American political discourse in no way resembles the Oxford Union debating society, let alone Plato's Republic.
Then I finally got it. By "ideas," by and large the pundits seem to mean a boutique-y marketing of a political agenda to the policy-making elites. As the historian David Greenberg once wrote, the main task of the Heritage Foundation (and I would argue, of other think tanks as well) is to "flood politicians and editorialists with ready-made policies and easy-to-digest talking points." Many political "ideas" amount to changing the packaging, but not the basic product. Old wine in new bottles and all that. Because I don't believe there really are any big "new ideas" in politics. It's just the same old ideas dressed up in a fancy new set of clothes.
One of my friends from college had an Electronic Frontier Foundation sticker on his laptop bearing the legend "Information Wants to Be Free." One of the coolest examples of that sentiment I've seen in recent years is this joint Israeli-Palestinian venture to build a no-cost virtual computer, called G.ho.st, by integrating functions from services like Google Documents and Flickr.
This is hardly the first project in recent years to try to address the problem of computer access in under served communities, particularly for children without steady computer access. On the hardware end, probably the most elegant solution is the One Laptop Per Child project, which combines tough, portable technology with simple functionality. Obviously, G.ho.st won't produce hardware that individuals can keep and access any time, but it also can't fall prey to hardware breakdown or lack of maintenance.
Leaving the Israeli-Palestinian cooperation element aside, which the project leaders acknowledge is an important byproduct, if not the main point, of their collaboration, G.ho.st seems to represent another step forward in thinking about what you really need for personal computing. It seems to me like Apple went in the wrong direction in creating the MacBook Air; the product is both utilitarian and elegant, but its hefty price tag for the power makes it less accessible than other computers that can do more. While people who can afford it will probably continue to want increasing bang for the buck in their computing purchases, projects like G.ho.st and One Laptop Per Child, or really for that matter Google Documents, raise good questions about what we actually need and want out of our computers. G.ho.st's primary purpose will probably be to provide computing services to people who wouldn't be able to save documents and access them again later otherwise, but I know I'd be interested in some kind of effective services integrator simply because it's convenient.
And hey, G.ho.st even has sense of humor about itself. The official launch is slated for Halloween.
First Lethal Weapon. Then Die Hard. Then Indiana Jones. And now...
One advantage to starting a series when your star is 23-years-old, however, is that you can make a sequel a quarter of a century later and he will still be mobile. Still, with Brett Ratner directing, my expectations for this are not high.
I haven't been over to Martin Peretz's blog in some time, but if I'm reading this post correctly, the New Republic editor in chief's position is that the so-called "occupied territories," including both the Golan Heights and the West Bank, must be kept perpetually in Israeli hands in order to punish Syria and Jordan for past acts of aggression. He writes:
After World War II, the allies allocated to themselves (and their allies) territories from which Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had aggressed against the rest of Europe. These are the costs paid by the bellicose and the belligerent. Japan paid a similar price, too.
This of course raises the question of what to do with those pesky Arabs who happen to live in this territory. They could be given full Israeli citizenship, of course, though that would entail a fairly radical departure from the Zionist concept of a Jewish state. Alternatively, they could be perpetually held captive as stateless subjects of a Jewish herrenvolk democracy. Or, of course, they could be forcibly removed from the territories -- told they had to depart under thread of death. I take it by Peretz's approving citation of the handling of the situation in postwar Europe that this is what he wants -- something similar to the mass expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe following the war.
But if this is his preferred resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, surely he should say so more plainly than this. He's the editor-in-chief of a well-regarded biweekly magazine, after all, so it's not as if he couldn't find a venue in which to publish the (counterintuitive!) case for ethnic cleansing in a straightforward manner and let people debate this vision of the Jewish future in a more head-on manner.
Man, this is Carville (courtesy of The Jed Report) blaming the Obama campaign, and how they played the assassination story, for Hillary potentially pushing this race past June 3rd. Incredible. I was in college for most of the 90s doing the sort of illicit, dumb things that people in college do. But I read a newspaper now and again. Were these guys always this dastardly? I know others have claimed that they were, but does it says something about progressives that we backed people like this?
...you go into an election with the voters you've got, right? Now it's pretty clear that a lot of folks in the left blogosphere would like to do their own purge of the voting rolls--get rid of those dirty, smelly hillbillies, etc., maybe with a literacy test [I've actually seen that proposed on some blogs--ah, progressivism!], but to borrow the metaphor, that dog ain't gonna hunt. In a democracy, it's the voters who reward and punish, for better or for worse. Ta-Nehisi is right: It's a moral problem for the voters, not for Obama. But it's an electoral problem for Obama. He's the one who has to do the wooing. Like El Cid, I think it can be done. Most of these voters who are being interviewed know little of him beyond skin color, and they're not sophisticated enough to mask their racism with the smoke-screens used by middle-class whites; thus they're readily exploited by sensation-seeking journalists. But they're also people with real problems that need to be addressed [and it's telling that "progressives" on this comment thread use those problems as an excuse to dismiss them]. Count me in with those who think Obama needs to take an Appalachia tour. Voters can't be changed by talking down to them; they need to be engaged.
I basically agree with all of this. I especially think the part where he said "Ta-Nehisi is right" is incredibly insightful. But there is one thing I would differ with: I think racism isn't just a moral problem for this country, it's actually a practical one too. The reason I cite the the Civil War example is because the practical consequences were so grave. My good buddy Jelani Cobb, has written some about the fates of Birmingham and Atlanta during the post-Civil Rights era. He argues--and I am going to try to get this right so bear with me--that basically both cities were on the way up during the mid-20th century. But in Atlanta, when the Civil Rights movement hit, then mayor William Hartsfield basically saw the change coming and guided the city through it, crafting this image of Atlanta--in contrast to the rest of the Deep South--as "the city to busy to hate." This (along with many other factors) allowed Atlanta to attract a Coca Cola, to attract a CNN, to host the Olympics. Meanwhie, Birmingham became known as, well, Bombingham.
That's a rough translation of the story. Maybe there are some Southern cats here who can help me out with that one. But my larger point is that racism has tangible costs for blacks and whites. Deciding your president on something as stupid as race could mean (for instance) that you have less access to health care, that your children work in a stagnating economy, that your neighbors kids will die in a stupid war. Or maybe not. Maybe the white guy is completely right. But if you're a racist, you will never know.
Let me be utterly candid her and speak for myself. I grew up in de facto segregation. I didn't have a white classmate until I was in high school. I didn't have any deep relationships with anyone who wasn't black until I was in my early 20s. I also had some very retrograde views about gays (I'm probably most ashamed of that). When I started working in Washington, I had some truly beautiful colleagues, many of whom I'm friends with today. But when I started the gig, I wouldn't hang out with them after work; I thought something might happen if I got drunk around them. That didn't change until my job hired another brother and he informed me of how ignorant I was. A short time later, I moved to New York, and was shocked to live in a place where the black/white dichotomy didn't really exist. I mean it's here, but not in the same way.
My point is this--it's quite likely that had I not been shaken out of my ignorance, had I not let go of my prejudice, you wouldn't be reading this right now. It was not simply ethical for me to become a more open person--it was to my advantage. I know that the math isn't the same for white people, but the point, I think, still stands. Let me end with a nod to America's greatest past time. The Boston Red Sox were the last team in pro baseball to integrate. And for their belief in the grand purity of the Great White Race, they sacrificed a shot at Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and probably a World Series or two. White racism rewarded them with decades of heartbreak. Not saying racism was the only factor. But it didn't help.
The DNC's lawyers rule against Hillary Clinton and in favor of the rules. It continues to be the case that the easiest way to resolve this situation in a way that doesn't alienate Michigan and Florida voters in November is for Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race.
Kate Harding over at Broadsheet asks why more women don't take up trade professions, presumably work like an electrician or plummer. These professions don't require a lot of costly education, she reasons, and the earning power is often on par or higher than other white-collar work. Some women already in the professions are trying to encourage younger women to take up the toolbox.
But I think that Harding forgets that there are plenty of women that already work in trades -- it's just that those trades are very gendered. The standard non-college career for a number of young women I went to high school, for instance, was hair dresser and not auto mechanic. Furthermore, the amount of sexual harassment that most women experience in blue-collar male-dominated professions serves as severe discouragement. For those who saw North Country, I don't think I have to remind you how terrible it was for women driving trucks in the iron ore mines of Minnesota. (Although the movie was set in the 1980s, such harassment still exists.) The problems with women entering high-end blue collar technical trade professions is more about systemic cultural sexism and gendered roles than it is about women just not realizing how lucrative trade work can be.
I don't disagree with Harding that women entering trade professions would be a great step toward gender equality generally, and probably earn those women a lot more than white-collar jobs as an assistant (or even a manager). What would help is first what these truck mechanics Harding points to are already doing, mentoring young women in non-traditional fields. Secondly, unions that represent those industries need to not only be free of sexism themselves, but aggressively pursue lawsuits that would discourage sexual harassment. This is happening with some larger trade unions already, but it's not as wide as it should be. Maybe then Harding's instructions to take up the toolbox rather than the curling iron will be a reality.
I'd say the reason DC's ultra-high end dining scene doesn't hold up to some of the country's other major cities isn't only that our area isn't as big as a New York or a Chicago, but also that its economic structure is too egalitarian. Despite DC's high poverty rate, the metropolitan area is one of the wealthiest in the country. But it's wealthy in the sense of having lots of moderately well-off folks who get puzzled at the idea that $200,000 a year is a lot of money. What it doesn't have are many movie stars or hedge fund wizards or executives of huge companies.
If you go down one ratchet from the places like Per Se that David Park is wondering about, DC is full of excellent options (I like Zengo, Capital Grille, Ten Penh, Jaleo, DC Coast) but these are places that a decent swathe of Washingtonians can afford to go to now and again for a special occasion. I find the hyper-inequality on display in centers of financial services, entertainment, and technology is responsible for many things I find annoying, but it does create some positive externalities in terms of supporting the existence of institutions that wouldn't otherwise exist. At the end of the day, I don't think the fact that Pharaoh was able to build the pyramids makes the unjust political system of Ancient Egypt a good idea, but inequality is good for restaurants both in terms of driving demand for high-end food and creating a supply of restaurant labor.
Alex Tabarrok posts this chart of burgeoning educational attainment in China, and says that though "Many people worry about what the Chinese education explosion means for the United States but I am optimistic." I agree. In fact, if anything the thing to worry about is that these kind of statistics are too optimistic about what's taking place in China -- oftentimes you'll hear a claim about some Asian country producing ninety trillion new engineers a year and it turns out that they're just counting every repairman as an engineer.
That said, the underlying point is that a better-educated, more-prosperous China is something Americans should welcome. Not only is it good for Chinese people (hardly a small thing) but it's good for Americans, too.
I'm glad Ta-Nehisi brought up the Red Sox as a metaphor for how racist people and institutions can end up punishing themselves, because I think the metaphor can be extended even further. In 2002, the new Sox ownership started a comprehensive effort to address the team's racist legacy by, among other things, equipping a 16-team baseball league run through a network of black churches. Given that African-American representation in the Major Leagues is at its lowest point in more than twenty years (8.2 percent of MLB players are black), that seems to be an appropriate investment. The Red Sox Foundation, the team's charitable arm, also formed a partnership with the Dimock Community Health Center in Dorchester in 2004, helping keep its Teen Center open.
I'm not saying that any of this represents reparations for the virulent racism that kept black players out of Boston for so long, and that inspired such poor treatment of black players when they finally got to put on Red Sox uniforms. But I think that the new ownership, when it decided to confront this ugly chapter in Red Sox history, did an intelligent thing. They looked to community needs that the team could meet in ways that leveraged its unique resources: access to baseball equipment and training. They didn't just give away free tickets, they made an investment, and took action consistent with the principle that if you want to reconnect with people divided from you by race and economics, you meet them on their turf.
I'm not sure what the model would be for Obama to do that, given the nature of campaigning, especially the nature of his campaign, and given that he doesn't have any obligation to make up for past institutional and individual wrongs. But if he wants to be the person starting conversations about the impact of those wrongs and how to overcome them, starting in Appalachia, on someone else's ground, seems like a good idea.
The NBA is going to start fining people for flopping, beginning next year. I should let Matt weigh in, but this does raise the question of whether Manu Ginobili will go broke by the All-Star break.
Today Campus Progress has an interview up with Matt about Heads in the Sand. Here's a brief highlight where Matt talks about humanitarian militarism and why it's, well, overrated:
We need to stop making foolish proclamations like, “Well, if we invaded this country, we can solve all its problems.” The truth of the matter is that it’s really hard to solve problems by invading other countries. There’s a certain mindset—a kind of false machismo that comes around where some people get interested in humanitarianism and in helping foreigners only when killing some other foreigners is the method at hand. There’s a desire to cherry-pick situations where allegedly sending in the Marines and dropping bombs will help people, which I think reflects an attitude of militarism more than it reflects a concern with humanitarianism or human rights.
Mike Huckabee denounces libertarianism as a "heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism" that poses "the greatest threat to classic Republicanism" and is "not an American message." Justin Logan blows a gasket. I, personally, am greatly looking forward to the infighting that will occur in the right-of-center camp if McCain loses.
Jessica Yellin talks about "pressure from corporate executives" to slant coverage in a pro-war direction.
But of course we're not supposed to talk about this, anymore than we're supposed to talk about why Phil Donohue got fired or why Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan both had fierce anti-war positions off air that they avoided expressing on camera.
There's no reason the DC government should make suburban commuters the priority in its transportation planning decisions -- the streets ought to serve the interests of the people who live in the city which, correctly, is at the center of the DDOT study's recommendations.
DC USA is a big urban mall type thingy that brought a Target, a Marshall's, a Best Buy, a Circuit City, and some other retailers to DC's gentrifying Columbia Heights neighborhood. It's located in a walkable community where most people don't own cars, across the street from a Metro station and within two blocks of four or five bus lines and right on the city's main north-south bike thoroughfare. Naturally, there was demand to build a huge quantity of parking for the facility much of which is now sitting empty.
This kind of overbuilding of parking is a substantial problem. There are only so many Metro stations and hence only so much space that's close to a Metro station. That space is a precious, precious commodity since building out a line to incorporate a new station is hugely expensive. It's fine for some of that valuable "right by a Metro station" space to be used as parking, but it ought to be economically competitive with other possible uses as housing, retail, or office space. Meanwhile, when parking is scarce and more people ride the Metro or the bus or walk or even just find themselves parking a few blocks away then the surrounding neighborhood is able to attract more benefit from the presence of customers heading to the big new complex. What you'd like to see in Columbia Heights is the new chain stores having a spillover effect that helps drive customers to the strip of local restaurants retail a few blocks away on 11th street (where right now a lot of the storefronts are vacant) but that doesn't happen if move move directly from car to garage to store to garage to car without ever setting foot in the neighborhood.
It's somewhat hard to see the damage done by this kind of overparking when it comes to such a large project as DC USA, but something like this smaller example illustrates the point clearly and then when you scale it up to a much larger facility things only get worse.
Working in Washington, for a company that specializes in its coverage of American politics, it's been easy for me to believe that absolutely no one, anywhere, has anything really new to say about this election. Which is why it was so refreshing to read this piece by David Runiman in the London Review of Books. It's worth taking a look at just to be reminded how...I won't say weird, different, maybe, our election process looks when it's viewed across the pond.
I don't agree with everything Runciman has to say, but I thought his best observation was this: there is more and better writing being done about this election than in any previous contest, especially by non-traditional media outlets, but none of that argument seems to be swinging voting patterns in the way an endorsement from an influential newspaper might have in the past. He writes:
The BBC, whose coverage of British politics looks increasingly lame, has been hopeless at Obama v. Clinton. It’s not enough any longer for a correspondent to paint some local colour about the weather or the quirks of the voting system before asking a seasoned observer from the New York Times or Washington Post to explain to a British audience what it all means. The seasoned observers no longer have even the appearance of a monopoly on wisdom. They are just shouting to be heard like everyone else....
At the start of the campaigning season, the hope was widely voiced that the 2008 election offered an opportunity to reflect on what had gone wrong in the United States, and to think seriously about how things might be different. Much of the increasingly regretful comment that is being passed on how things have turned out reflects the fact that this opportunity has not been taken. Each side blames the other, for dwelling on race, or gender, or youth, or age, or hope, or fear, or the future, or the past, and imagines some alternative campaign in which the real issues would be debated in serious and open-ended terms....But in truth, it is absurd for anyone to claim to offer a plausible alternative to the way this election has been conducted. For all the elegance, intelligence and wit on display in the many tens of thousands of words I have read over the past few months, nothing that’s been said appears to have made any real difference to how most people see the candidates.
He tends to attribute that to the simple din produced by the number of new media outlets. But I wonder if it's more likely that, as the blogosphere matures and grows, it tends to reflect public opinion, much as a poll improves with a larger sample size, rather than to guide it. And I don't think that's necessarily a loss, if what the blogosphere pushes the media as a whole to produce is more informed debate rather than a public swayed to one particular outcome.
I don't see what J Street is complaining about here:
Well, no, okay I understand perfectly well what J Street is complaining about. Joe Lieberman's just so utterly committed to the higher good of endless war in the Middle East that he doesn't really care.
Obama vs. [InsertInterestGroupHere] is the standard story for big media these days. It began over year and half ago, here at home, with this trumped up question of "blackness." Heh, Peter Bienert memorably called it "Good black" vs. the "Bad Black." That one still makes me laugh. I don't think I'll ever forget Shelby Steele going on Hardball to proclaim that because Hillary Clinton, on the basis of her identification with Al Sharpton, was "in many ways blacker" than Barack Obama. Steele wasn't alone, Deborah Dickerson, Stanley Crouch and Andrew Young all played on the same theme.
All of these cats are over fifty, and I think, were reflecting a notion of race that had been shaped by the culture wars. When Obama declared his presidency, they simply applied to him the same rules they'd used in the 80s and 90s, with no sense that things had changed. The "not black enough" line was lazy thinking that backed up this idea that we spend our days thinking about white people, and all the ways we can make them feel guilty.
Now we have moved on to Obama vs Jews, Obama vs. Appalachia and Obama vs. Women. I was thinking about this after I read E.J. Dionne's piece, which is one in a series of articles that warns of potential backlash among women voters against Obama. Much like the "not black enough" stories, the piece is based mostly on anecdotes and punditry. One thing I've learned in my time doing this job is that you can string together five or six quotes about nearly anything. I could probably get seven or eight accredited scientists to tell me UFOs existed.
I don't think there's much of question as to whether gender/sexism affected the election. The need for pundits to comment on Hillary's appearance has always seemed bizarre to me. But I'm leery of confusing anecdotes from a few voluble Hillary supporters, with women voters en masse. On average, Barack Obama lost the female vote to Clinton by six points. In many states like Vermont, Virginia, Missouri and Utah, he actually won the female vote. In Wisconsin, he tied Clinton. Thus this idea that there are great numbers of women who really believe that Clinton was robbed strikes me as also as hokum.
Media feeds on conflict, and the flatter the conflict, the easier it is to write. But one of the great revelations of this election is how diverse America really is. We tend to get hung up on small--but important--factors, like Obama's problem in Appalachia. But I'm just going to level with you--there is no way I thought a black man would ever carry Oregon and Iowa and then also get 90 percent of the black vote. What that says to me is that there is so much out there that I really don't know. And that I also should stop blogging so much, and get out more.
As Ezra says, I think it's clear that a lot of the Jim Webb fanboys in left-of-center ranks are significantly driven by a somewhat Chris Matthews-esque infatuation with his Acqua Velva scent. On the other hand, a lot of what's driving pro-Webb sentiment is a meta-level sense that these qualities will appeal to other voters in much the same way that various liberals thought John Kerry's war record would make him appealing to other people.
And, of course, as I've said before it's hard to even tease these things apart, because people have a tendency to project onto swing voters a desire for the exact same qualities that they themselves desire. One interesting twist on this, however, is that the most prominent pushers of a strongly masculinist conception of the presidency haven't been Obamaphile Webb fans, it's been a certain segment of Hillary Clinton supporters who in a weird way seem to have decided that backing a woman candidate give them carte blanche to be as sexist as they wanna be in arguing that Barack Obama's too effiminate to be president.
Last, it's worth noting that the best evidence available suggests that women who acquire a major party nomination don't face any unique disadvantages. Instead, we have few women in elected office because they don't run as often largely because of structural barriers. I think the apparently widespread assumption (one contradicted by the fact that women who do run seem to do fine and, of course, the fact that most voters are women) that the public is craving hyper-masculinity counts as one such barrier and it's one that's massively restricting the talent pool for progressive politics since a large majority of liberals are women.
The Los Angeles Times is reporting that California Senate Republicans have blocked a plan to build new health-care facilities in the state's prisons and are going to block a proposed settlement of a prison overcrowding lawsuit. These are, in every possible way, pretty terrible ideas. The prison system is in receivership, and the receiver says he'll raid the state coffers to pay for prison hospitals, if he has to. Without the settlement, the lawsuit will go to court, where the judges have the option of freeing large numbers of prisoners, which the Republican Senators have said they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Look, I like a Howe & Hummelesque mass-prisoner-release-on-a-technicality story as much as anyone, but letting one happen in this case seems to serve not puckishness but political grandstanding. And it's particularly disturbing given that the $7 billion the court receiver wants for prison hospitals would be aimed at providing beds for prisoners with long-term medical problems and mental illnesses.
While the Bush administration has always insisted that there are clear distinctions between prisoners being held in Gitmo and those in the general prison population, I wonder how the existence of Gitmo and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan affects American prison administration. Even before the administration started playing by a very different set of rules for war on terror prisoners, jail in the United States sounded like a terrifying place to be in any capacity. But I wonder if Gitmo's existence and use have made it easier for prison administrators to draw a harder line on prisoner treatment--or if our treatment of prisoners of war has made domestic incarceration look good by comparison, and blunted prison reform as an issue.
Folks, I've done my best to restrict my maniacal affections for great hip-hop from leaking out, while guesting here; somehow I'm thinking we don't have to many MF Doom fans in these parts. But I do want to note that David Paterson pardoned Slick Rick, a man to whom I owe some measure of my career as a writer. Good for the Gov.
UPDATE: For the Doom fans we do have here, this is Gnarls Barkley on Fresh Air. Nuff said.
Stephen Hayes was on NPR a few minutes ago complaining about how Scott McLellan wasn’t very interesting, because he was just delivering ‘left wing blogworld talking points.’ This complaint itself, of course, being itself a re-iteration of a Karl Rove talking point.
Ironic, yes. More broadly, this line of response to McClellan simply consists of repeating what's so damning about McClellan's new book but saying it as if this discredits him. But the point is this: Scott McClellan, longtime George W. Bush press flack, is now talking like a left-wing blogger. Right-wing flack talking like a right wing flack -- not news. Left-wing blogger talking like a left-wing blogger -- not news. Right-wing flack talking like a left-wing blogger -- news. It's as if a man is biting a dog in the middle of the street. Is this enough penitence to redeem McClellan for his sins? Not in my book. But it's still an extraordinary turn of events.
Today's New York Times has a good short history of the Governor's history on gay rights in the wake of his decision to declare that New York will recognize the marriages of gay couples who get hitched elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, this anecdote leads the piece:
When David A. Paterson was growing up and his parents would go out of town, he and his little brother would stay in Harlem with family friends they called Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald.
Uncle Stanley and Uncle Ronald, he said, were a gay couple, though in the 1960s few people described them that way. They helped young David with his spelling, and read to him and played cards with him.
“Apparently, my parents never thought we were in any danger,” the governor recalled on Thursday in an interview. “I was raised in a culture that understood the different ways that people conduct their lives. And I feel very proud of it.”
It's always interesting to hear about the personal places that politicians' stances come from. That this story illustrates a pretty basic principle--that people who get to know gay people usually end up supporting their rights to live in full equality with everyone else--doesn't make it any less compelling.
With the publication of his bombshell book, Scott McClellan is getting it pretty hard from both sides. Predictably, many on the right are outraged at his alleged perfidy -- at Pandagon, Pam Spaulding does one of her periodic, always entertaining forays into the demented parallel universe that is Freeperville, and comes up with some beauts. The Freepers throw every name in the book at poor Scottie, calling him a "lowlife," "a backstabbing bum, and "a little worm;" he's also unfavorably compared to "a turd on a stick," and that's just for starters. They also offer such awesome political advice as "I wish W had chosen Ann Coulter to be his press secretary," and my personal fave, "One reason W is in trouble and legacy is in jeapordy IS the fact that he DID NOT SELL HIS VIEWS ENOUGH." (Triple bonus points to the latter for the all caps and the spelling!).
With a few exceptions, the response on the left has not been a whole lot warmer. Ezra Klein refers to the book as
the tinny bleatings of a man who abetted a lying, disastrous presidency
because it seemed like a good gig, but doesn't want his name maligned
by the historians. . . This doesn't come close to clearing his name.
McClellan has every reason to lie or twist events: making himself a
sympathetic character helps him sell books and he wants to minimize the
role he played in one of the most flagrant violations of the public
trust by the office of the President in history.
At Daily Kos, Bill of Portland Maine had this to say:
If there was any justice in the world, Scott McClellan would have to
travel to the home of every family member who lost a loved one in Iraq,
get down on his knees, and beg forgiveness. But he won't. Instead, we
get 341 pages of, Hey, I was just following orders.
The only thing that Scott McClellan should collect from his book is dust.
But unlike most liberal journalists and bloggers, I think McClellan deserves quite a bit of
credit for going public with this, even at this late date. Writing this kind of book could not have been easy for him. He has undoubtedly lost friends. Many of his former colleagues will never speak to him again. If he'd written the kind of anodyne snoozer that Ari Fleischer did, then surely he'd be set for life on the wingnut welfare circuit. But now? Well, let's just say he'll never eat lunch in that town again. And it's not like the liberals are eager to embrace him with open arms, either.
Here's a good one, John McCain smacks Barack Obama around for not realizing that force levels in Iraq are already down to pre-surge levels. This shows, according to McCain, how Obama's not having taken a recent guided tour of Iraq makes him unqualified. But of course McCain's wrong about how many troops are in Iraq! It's almost as if being a cranky and arrogant old man isn't the same as possessing actual understanding. Here's the video:
I think the general idea is that if McCain asserts loudly enough that Obama doesn't know what he's talking about, that people will believe it.
Because both John McCain and Barack Obama have been touring the Interior West, I’m getting a lot of calls this week about regional strategies for the Electoral College and reaching the magical 270 threshold. I’m relieved analysts are finally discovering that, among other things, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico combined have almost the same number of electors (19) as Ohio (20) and that adding those to John Kerry’s 252 total from 2004 would put Obama over the top, however narrowly.
This is really what's exciting about Barack Obama having raised a ton of money. John Kerry perceived a need to really choose between a focus on Ohio and a focus on that Southwestern trio and decided in the end that Ohio was the more promising choice. But a flush Obama campaign has money to do both and some left over to play in Virginia and the big (cheap) empty square plains states where Democrats have elected a lot of governors and senators.
Andrew flags a Hillary Clinton interview where she says the following about the state of her campaign:
"You can't tell how far a frog will jump until you punch him."
Okay then. But her other comments were even stranger:
"I am tired," said Clinton with exasperation. "I am tired of politicians and people in the press saying we cant do things. We are the can do nation."
Clinton was asked Wednesday night if she really wanted reporters to be more vigorous and aggressive – she said that she does, but on the "right things."
"I really do," insisted Clinton. "I really do. On the right things. On things that are important to the future of our country. On things that really matter. I would love that."
For more Clinton weirdness on the trail, check out Mark Liebovich's piece in today's Times.
As for E.J. Dionne's column today on Hillary's angry female supporters, I agree with Te-Nehisi's point that--in essence--the plural of anecdote is not data, and thus that we should be wary of extrapolating a larger meaning out of quotes from individual women. But I do take issue with his juxtaposition of these two sentences:
I don't think there's much of question as to whether gender/sexism affected the election. The need for pundits to comment on Hillary's appearance has always seemed bizarre to me.
One can agree with the assertion in the second sentence without thinking it has anything to do with the first sentence. Sure, sexism affected the election, and sexism affects how people treat Clinton's physical appearance, but listening to HRC supporters (like the ones quoted by Dionne) can almost lead one to believe that Clinton lost to Obama because of some Drudge photographs and a Washington Post article that mentioned cleavage. Please.
I'm an unabashed Nancy Pelosi admirer. She's the most influential real liberal in Washington, DC and depending on how things turn out in the Obama administration will either retain that title or else will have been the one who blazed the trail he walks down. Her elevation to become top House Democrat was thought by centrists likely to doom the party to the "McGovernite wilderness" for a generation, but instead she led them to victory only to be met with a weird boomlet of enthusiasm for dumping her in favor of Rahm Emmannuel. But she's done a good job as Speaker, and the excitement around Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has often made me wonder why there hasn't been more excitement around her rise to power -- a rise which actually fits the model of a smart, tough woman making it in a male-dominated world without compromising her principles much better.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I really enjoyed Michelle Cottle's appreciation of Pelosi in the new TNR and encourage others to check it out.
"How Sex and the City are we right now? I'm Samantha, you're Charlotte and you're the lady at home who watches it."
[Alyssa]
I am just as horrified as anyone by the idea that someone would pay $19,000 for a ticket to the Sex and the City premiere and "experience" in New York. Sex and the City was a very good show, and I watched a lot of it during one post-breakup summer with one of my best girlfriends (who I'm going to see the movie with tomorrow morning), but it is not the Bible.
On the other end of the spectrum, though, lies an equally annoying person: the critic who doesn't understand that most Sex and the City fans understand that the show is not the Bible. I'm not going to see the movie to get life cues from Carrie Bradshaw any more than I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to learn about South American archeology from Indiana Jones or the Star Wars movies for helpful hints on how to run a political movement (though not setting up your base of operations in an ice cave is probably a good idea).
The movie is a big, dumb summer fantasy. And while actually not accumulating savings because you buy too many designer shoes and running the risk of losing your apartment would be a very bad thing in real life, I think most women are not going to actually make that kind of mistake. I guess I don't really understand why wanting a lightsaber makes someone a harmless geek but wanting a closetful of Jimmy Choos makes someone riddled with avarice. Getting either one is really equally unrealistic for most people. It's just wishful thinking. In my fantasy life, I'd take one of each.
Update: Hey, to defend my geek cred, I never said that the Hoth fortress wasn't awesome. Awesome, however, is not the same as practical. I'm pretty sure that making the place warm enough for humans to live in, lubricant not to freeze in X-wings, etc. would leave a huge, detectable heat signature. Also, building your fortress of material that's prone to cave-ins, etc., especially when your military equipment presumably isn't terribly easy to replace (it's not like they can waltz into the Coruscant shipyards and order up a new fleet of planes stat) doesn't seem like a very good idea, at least to me.
Thousands joined a Sadrist rally to protest the Bush/McCain vision of a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, but thanks to recent operations to gain military control over Sadr City it was possible for Iraqi Security Forces to reduce the ability of anti-government protestors to peacefully assemble (progress!). Also of note, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim also issued a statement in opposition to this idea.
So the U.S. congress and Iraq's two largest political parties are both opposed and of course naturally this means Bush will press ahead without congressional approval. And I assume that whatever Hakim or anyone else has to say about it now, as long as Bush is commander in chief of a 130,000+ thousand strong occupying army, he'll be able to persuade Iraqi politicians to sign off on his plan.
Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO)'s ongoing campaign against San Francisco continues to amuse:
There was some controversy last time around about whether or not "San Francisco" just means "gay" but this time I think there can be no doubt. Perhaps his opponent will be able to get Dockers to finance a ferocious pushback.
Via Larison, some interesting polling from GQR for NPR. They test some different Democratic and Republican messages head-to-head. And they do them two ways. In one round, each message starts "Democrats say..." or "Republicans say..." whereas a different batch of people get the message test with just "some people say..."
In all instances, the Democratic message beats the Republican message fairly badly. But identifying the Democratic message as "Democrats say..." uniformly results in a slight decrease in its popularity whereas identifying the Republican message as "Republicans say" slightly increases the message's popularity. I'm not 100 percent sure how to interpret that -- on the one hand, it speaks to some enduring strengths of the GOP brand, but on the other hand the Republican messages poor very poorly overall so their brand is hardly in good shape.
Recently we have seen an acceleration of the collapse of journalistic standards. Veteran reporters like Walter Cronkite are appalled by the mergermania that has swept the industry, diluting standards, dumbing down the news and gutting newsrooms. Rapid consolidation, evidenced most recently by the breakup of the once-venerable Knight-Ridder newspapers, the sale of the Tribune Company and its media properties and the swallowing of the Wall Street Journal by Murdoch's News Corp continues the steady replacement of civic and democratic values by commercial and entertainment priorities. But responsible journalists have less and less to say about newsroom agendas these days. The calls are being made by consultants and bean counters, who increasingly rely on official sources and talking-head pundits rather than newsgathering or serious debate.
The crisis is widespread, and it affects not just our policies but the politics that might improve them. There are two critical issues on which a free press must be skeptical of official statements, challenging to the powerful and rigorous in the search for truth. One of them is war--and in the case of the post-9/11 wars, our media have failed us miserably. (Even former White House press secretary Scott McClellan now acknowledges that the media were "complicit enablers" in the run-up to the Iraq invasion). The other issue is elections, when voters rely on media to provide them with what candidates, parties and interest groups often will not: a serious focus on issues that matter and on the responses of candidates to those issues. Instead, when the Democratic race was reaching its penultimate stage, the dominant story was a ridiculously overplayed discussion about Barack Obama's former minister. Before the critical Pennsylvania primary, studies show, the provocative Rev. Jeremiah Wright got more coverage than Obama's rival for the nomination, Hillary Clinton. And forget about issues--the most covered policy debate of the period, a ginned-up argument about whether to slash gas taxes for the summer, garnered only one-sixth as much attention as Wright.
I find these complaints about quality plausible, but the alleged connection of these problems to mergers and consolidation is hard for me to see. Preventing firms from assembling chains of newspapers (for example) wouldn't alleviate the declining revenue issues that are driving papers to cut their budgets. What preventing consolidation would do is make it difficult for newspaper firms to realize efficiencies (does every big city newspaper really need its own set of film and television critics? do the LA Times and Chicago Tribune need separate Washington bureaux?) that might let them still produce a decent product in the new economic climate.
What does seem true to me is that really excellent journalism is probably not compatible with strict adherence to a profit-maximizing imperative. It's not a coincidence that the most interesting newspapers and magazines in the United States tend to be run as private or family-controlled or non-profit enterprises, thus allowing managers to pursue ideals other than the pure pursuit of profit. That's long been the case and will presumably continue to be the case, and the issue is largely one of whether or not an adequate number of new people and families can be persuaded to step up, as some old players (like the Bancroft's) decide to abandon journalism.
But it's difficult for me to see how enhanced FCC scrutiny of proposed mergers is going to compel news organizations to become more substantive in their coverage. And it's very difficult for me to see how enhanced FCC scrutiny of proposed mergers is going to compel news organizations to become more skeptical of official claims. It seems to me that such scrutiny would make news organizations more inclined to shade their coverage in order to curry favor with the powers that be.
Obviously, a political gimmick is what a political gimmick is, but there's really something very strange about the conceit that flying to Iraq and taking a guided tour courtesy of the U.S. military is the best way to learn about the country. I went to Spain for a week once, saw the central parts of Madrid and took some day trips to noteworthy towns that were easily accessible by train, but to answer even very basic question about Spain like "how wealthy is this country?" or "how many immigrants live here?" you need to look up the data not wander around. The McCain approach leads to a lot of incidents like this, "McCain's claim that Mosul is "quiet" was disproved earlier today in grim fashion. Three suicide bombings -- two in Mosul and another in a surrounding town -- left 30 Iraqis dead and more than two dozen injured, according to pressreports."
Of course we can expect to hear more about this and about related things like McCain using General Petraeus in fundraising appeals, since turning MNF-Iraq into an extension of the McCain is a pretty appealing tactic. Active duty officers will try to avoid getting dragged into the political fray, but the Bush administration has repeatedly shown that it can be done easily enough, and active duty generals are hard surrogates for Obama to push back against.
So, I think it's probably fair for me to guess that almost all of you have no idea what my employer, Government Executive, does. I didn't either, until I started freelancing for them, and discovered that this magazine catering to federal employees had almost 80,000 subscribers and web traffic growing in the direction of half a million unique visitors each month. I just had no idea the audience was out there, because I never really bothered to think about it. But since I started covering federal workforce issues full-time, I've learned two things, one about journalism, and one about government.
1) Niche publications may be an increasingly important part of journalism's future, as long as the niche is of reasonable size. There are 1.8 million civilian federal employees, not including Postal Service workers. That's a huge market, and those readers are incredibly hungry for information about the conditions that govern their jobs.
And by narrowing down our beats, we get to do much deeper reporting than we might if we were at a publication that had a broader mandate. For example, my colleagues Robert Brodsky and Elizabeth Newell took the New York Times' story on AEY Inc., ran with it, and figured out the backstory behind how AEY got labeled a disadvantagedbusiness, a status that proved crucial to the firm's success. The Times had the story of what happened, but Elizabeth and Rob figured out why.
2) What's going on in the federal workforce right now is drastically under covered. Huge numbers of career federal employees are about to retire, especially in senior leadership ranks, and hiring freezes in the 1990s mean there aren't enough people to move smoothly up the ranks to fill those vacancies. These circumstances are prompting a reform boom: federal agencies are working to streamline the hiring process, adopting alternate work schedules and telework policies, and developing programs in coordination with nonprofits like the Partnership for Public Service to reach recruits of all who wouldn't have considered federal service before.
But those efforts may be too late to prevent disruptions to federal services and federal agencies. Wonder why your plane is late? It's partially airport capacity, but it may also partly be due to a mass exodus of air traffic controllers. Has it taken forever for you to get a passport? The State Department had to shift junior employees to process applications. Upset about the U.S. Attorneys scandal? The complexities of the relationships between political appointees and career federal employees provides key context. More stories than I ever realized come back to the people who work in government.
I know I promised ya'll a summer mixtape, but I do have a day job, and I haven't had time to sort through all your suggestions yet. So I'll ask Matt if we can put one up as soon as I can get it together, by the first day of summer at the latest. And feel free to keep the selections coming.
Well folks, it's been thrilling being here. I want to thank Matt for letting me house-sit for the week, especially in such estimable company. Anyway I figured I'd go out on a humorous note, and what's more humorous than Geraldine Ferraro these days? Via Balloon Juice:
As for Reagan Democrats, how Clinton was treated is not their issue. They are more concerned with how they have been treated. Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them and their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.
Whom he chooses for his vice president makes no difference to them. That he is pro-choice means little. Learning more about his bio doesn't do it. They don't identify with someone who has gone to Columbia and Harvard Law School and is married to a Princeton-Harvard Law graduate. His experience with an educated single mother and being raised by middle class grandparents is not something they can empathize with. They may lack a formal higher education, but they're not stupid. What they're waiting for is assurance that an Obama administration won't leave them behind.
Get it? When you think an Ivy-educated black couple is elitist, but think an Ivy-educated white couple is the salt of the earth, you aren't a racist you just resent black people racially. Big Difference. I mean, you wouldn't attend a Klan rally or anything, but elect Barack and soon they'll be marrying your daughters. I would offer a rebuttal, but Colson Whitehead closed the book on this months ago:
I’m confused, myself. For years, they said you can’t have this because you’re black, and then when you get something the same people say you got that only because you’re black. I mean, here I am, The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, and yet the higher up you go in an organization, the less you see of me.
It’s as if Someone Out to Prevent Me From Getting What I Worked For is preventing me from getting what I worked for. If only there were something — a lapel pin or other sartorial accessory — that would reassure people that I can do the job.
Some people say Barack Obama and I get everything handed to us on a silver platter. But we don’t let it bother us. We’re taking those silver platters and making them our canoes. Then we’ll grab our silver spoons and paddle to a place where people get us. North Carolina, maybe. Or Indiana. I hear Oregon is nice this time of year. We’ll paddle on, brother, paddle all the way to the top.
One last question. I was only nine when Ferraro ran in 84. Was she really this much of an idiot then? Or has time done a number on her?
I'm not sure if any of you have been around college undergraduates recently, but those of us who have (The Atlantic's offices are right by the GWU campus) have noticed a somewhat distressing trend toward young women wearing tights as pants. Under the circumstances, I thought I might take the opportunity to plug the work of the good people at TightsAreNotPants.com who are trying to point out that tights are, in fact, not pants.
This comes to me viaNylon magazine which it seems also has a print feature on this in their May issue.
A couple of days ago, Noam Scheiber noted that it seems strange for John McCain to be so eager to talk about Iraq considering that Iraq is a horribly unpopular fiasco, the issue on which he's most closely associated with the horribly unpopular incumbent Republican administration. Noam thought it might reflect a baseline lack of adequate cynicism on McCain's part:
My hunch is that McCain really wants to debate Iraq--he really, truly thinks it's the most important issue facing the country, and thinks he can persuade people on the merits--and so his political advisers are doing the best they can with it. I guess I respect that on some level. And, politically, it does reinforce his truth-teller, "I'd rather lose an election than lose a war" image. But, assuming Obama is able to establish a minimum level of national security credibility, which I think he will, McCain may be making a strategic mistake.
I mean, I suppose McCain does think that stuff, but honestly what else is he supposed to talk about? I don't think it would serve the candidate well to talk about issues he doesn't care about or doesn't know anything about. And as best I can tell, that's, um, all the issues. But even though a clear majority of the American people recognizes that endless war in Iraq is a bad idea, a large swathe of elites agree with McCain's view that there's no number of American deaths that would be too many to try to spare elites from the embarrassment of admitting that Iraq's been a failure. This doesn't seem all that promising to me as a campaign strategy, but it's more promising than tired health care mumbo jumbo that McCain himself doesn't seem interested in.
Ilan Goldenberg wisely proposes that progressives ditch the term "soft power." He focuses mainly on the marketing aspects of the particular labels "soft power" versus "hard power" but I would go further and say that the distinction Joseph Nye was trying to draw is a bit ill-conceived. People here those words and they think of two kinds of power -- two kinds of means of coercion -- some of which might be "hard" and others might be "soft." In fact, what Nye is trying to draw a distinction between all forms of coercion (including "soft" ones) on the one hand, and then stuff that's not coercive at all -- qualities that make a country likable.
But that stuff -- the fact that American political ideals are attractive to people whereas Chinese political ideals aren't -- isn't really a kind of power at all. It's important, but if you think of it as a kind of power you're just going to wind up thinking of it as a kind of really shitty and second rate power, rather than simply as something that's different and important in its own right.
In a pretty fascinating story yesterday, a group called Survival International released aerial photography of an "uncontacted tribe" of indigenous people's living in the Amazon jungle. The group is an advocacy organization on behalf of isolated tribal peoples and they say "We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist."
And, indeed, I had no idea that any such groups existed until I saw these stories. But there are around 100 such groups in the world, with about half of them living in Brazil, then another large group in the western half of New Guinea, and then the rest living in other parts of the Amazon. You can learn more here. The tribes face dispossession from the usual suspects for deforestation, but are also extremely vulnerable to epidemic disease.
Research indicates that "primitive" hunter gatherers actually enjoy a higher average standard of living than have most people in historical times and, indeed, higher than in many of today's poor countries. Agricultural techniques allow a given piece of land to support a much larger population, but at a lower standard of living.
Well, I'm back from North Carolina and the guest bloggers have gone away, so I'd like to say thanks to an excellent team for some excellent work. Hopefully those of you on the other side of the intertubes liked some of what you read and will follow these writers in the future.
Dana Goldstein reports from the Hillary Clinton rally outside the DNC meeting:
That's not to say the rhetoric wasn't a tad overheated. Dozens of people said they wouldn't vote for Obama if he prevails. "Count me now, or don't count on my vote," read the sign carried by Cindy Malzan, a 51-year old from Buffalo, New York. "No."
It seems to me that it's one thing if Clinton backers from upstate New York want to argue on behalf of Clinton backers from Florida and Michigan that delegates selected in those states' illicit primaries should be seated. But it's really a bit bizarre for Malzan to be acting as if someone is casting doubt on the validity of her vote. Nobody is dispute Clinton's right to her delegates from New York or California or any other state where the won a properly conducted primary.
Meanwhile, people who are seriously drawn to Hillary Clinton's plans on health care, climate change but also think they might vote for John McCain in the fall rather than the candidate with plans that are very similar to Clinton's are being a bit confused. People who are seriously drawn to Clinton on feminist grounds but are considering staying home in the fall so McCain can replace John Paul Stevens with another justice in the mold of Alito or Roberts really need to think harder.
It turns out that Hardee's, where I'd never eaten before, serves a much better fast food burger than what you get at a McDonald's. They're also the subject of this fascinating/horrifying Portfolio story about the company's efforts to make itself even more unhealthy than the competition, but I stuck to their normal-sized burger, eschewing items like the 1,400 calorie Monster Thickburger.
| 
Heads in the Sand
