I note, for the record, that Kagan's current kick about the need to revive great power conflict is orders of magnitude more wrongheaded and dangerous than the post-9/11 "let's invade Iraq" fad was. My friend DM likes to say that the one good thing about Iraq is that it distracted the neocons from their even crazier war with China schemes, but now those schemes are making a bit of a comeback.
Oftentimes policies designed to protect the environment involve difficult tradeoffs with economic growth. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes we have bad policies in place that encourage people to use space or energy wastefully, and these policies are both bad for the environment and bad for economic growth -- waste is bad. When confronted with such policies, politicians have an aggravating tendency to gesture in the direction of local culture suggesting that people in their jurisdictions just happen to have, as quirk, a strong desire to see resources used poorly. Thus via Robert Farley, we get Houston Mayor Bill White explaining why his city has such a low recycling rate:
“We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,” said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. “Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated. But Houstonians can change, and change fast.”
As Farley says, when you read things like "25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city . . . the city says it cannot afford more bins" you start to wonder if an independent streak and an aversion to hype is really to blame here. Like maybe if the city provided bins to people who ask for bins, then more people would recycle. Or maybe we're supposed to believe that Houston's independent streak extends to a desire to have government services provided ineptly.
Photo by Flickr user dnorman used under a Creative Commons license
Every summer The Hill newspaper puts out its 50 most Beautiful People on Capitol Hill list, a DC event like no other because hating Hill types is one of the favorite passtimes of non-Hill Washingtonians. It's also time for the annual DCeiver commentary on the list which is highly recommended.
But not to steal the punchline here or anything, but one of the people on the list is Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) who'll be resigning from congress after the one-two punch of a DWI followed by the revelation that he had a secret second family. Amusingly, his dating status is listed as "Married, with children" which I suppose is accurate, but still.
Here's another one for the "if a Democrat did it, the media would roast him alive" file. It seems the McCain campaign put together a joke site called Barack Book which is intended to mock Barack Obama and his supporters in a variety of ways. Since one of Obama's alleged political weaknesses is that unlike John McCain he's a charismatic, compelling speaker who people are excited about they chose to poke fun at him through the trope that, allegedly, his fans think he's the messiah. Specifically, Marc Ambinder explains the site "included a link to a real Facebook page, and next to an entry for 'employer,' the RNC wrote in 'Messiah Lutheran Church.'"
Messiah Lutheran Church, ha ha ha. Except this is the name of a real church, whose members are apparently mostly in Missouri but which has branches all across the country including this congregation in Florida whose photo I'm borrowing above.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure I even understand the McCain campaign's joke. They thought "Messiah Lutheran" was over-the-top and parodic, I guess? But it's not like the idea of a church dedicated to worshipping a messiah is wacky -- that's what they're doing in all the churches.
Wow. Here's a weird story and some awesome reporting from Mother Jones. The article's subhead sums things up about as well as anything else: "Mary McFate was a prominent gun control activist. Mary Lou Sapone was a freelance spy with an NRA connection. They are the same person." Now, naturally, gun control activists write large are worried that this isn't the only example and that their movement may contain more moles planted by the gun lobby.
The big challenge facing Barack Obama is whether or not ordinary people can relate to him. After all, he's a big-time elitist. He thinks that it's better, all things considered, to speak two languages rather than one. Meanwhile, John McCain continues to flaunt his regular guy attributes, showing off his $520 Salvatore Ferragamo Pregiato Moccasins in a variety of settings in much the same spirit that the legendary straight talker once traveled, like a man of the people, in the First Class car on the Acela to Philadelphia.
This comes to me via Chris Hayes who claims to be too high-minded to mock Mr. Fancyshoes. I, however, received a knowing nod of approval from Obama directed at my T-MAC 6s at YearlyKos 2007 so I owe him loyalty in all footwear-related matters.
Chris Bowers proclaims that if Barack Obama picks Tim Kaine as his VP nominee that "would also signal that Obama has no intention to govern as a progressive" whereas "by contrast, Obama / Sebelius would be fine, and Obama / Dodd would be exciting." This seems to me to be reading way too much into the VP selection. Ronald Reagan's selection of George H.W. Bush much more presaged Bush becoming a conservative than Reagan becoming a moderate.
The best guide to how Obama intends to govern isn't who he picks as VP, it's the stuff he's said about how he intends to govern and what he hopes to accomplish. That'd put him to the left of the Clinton-Gore era of the Democratic Party but to the right of the Open Left vision of where the party ought to be, and that'll still be the case no matter who Obama picks.
I saw this photo the other day and thought to myself "that looks delicious, too bad it's vegan fake chicken . . . mmm I should go to the Eden Center and get banh mi sometime soon." But now via McMegan I learn that it may be all in my head:
The clever experiment went like this: a large group of people were given a "human values" test which seeks to measure fifty six different values (loyalty, ambition, social order, etc.) Then, the subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on "social authority" - they believed it was important to support people in power - tended to label the "vegetarian" sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on "social power values" tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system. The scientists also conducted a similar experiment with Pepsi. Sure enough, people who fit the Pepsi demographic - they think having an "exciting life" is very important - always preferred Pepsi, even when they were actually drinking a generic cola.
Perhaps it's time to give vegan sausage a try.
Photo by Flickr user monkeyone used under a Creative Commons license
Kevin Drum is trying to find the answer to a question I asked him when I was in Orange County a little while back -- why is it that in southern California they use the definite article when referring to highways by number? Here on the east coast we drive on "I-95" or just "66" but over there they have "the 101." Thus far, his research isn't turning up anything very convincing. Anyone over in these parts have any thoughts? My pet theory has to do with Phantom Planet:
When I first heard this song, I thought they said "the 101" just in order to give their lyric enough syllables. Then I learned that's how everyone talks in that part of the country. But what if the band just brainwashed people into thinking they talk that way? Think about it.
I've had a Kindle for a couple of months now and my reactions largely follow James Fallows' first impressions right down to the fact that at this point I've become very attached to my Kindle and don't want to give it up, but at the same time have no intention of eschewing traditional books entirely.
One added observation, however, would be that the Kindle actually suffers from several ridiculous flaws. James refers to the inability to "flip" multiple pages at a time. It also doesn't let you cross-reference Kindle "locations" with brick-and-mortar page numbers. And you can only highlight whole lines at a time rather than starting with specific words. There are various other things like that. They're annoying. But at the same time, these are problems that I'm sure have solutions. When the basic technology of the Kindle Reader and Kindle Store are married to a design team (either at Amazon or at a competing firm like Apple) that's somewhat better at thinking this stuff through then I think you'll have a product a lot of people want to buy.
Via Frank Rich's column, a USA Today article on the growing prominence of the terrorist fist-jab greeting in business circles that scores very high on the unintentional comedy scale. If Obama wins, I think this could wind up being like JFK and men's hats.
Beer is back, regaining a large lead over wine as America's favorite alcoholic beverage after wine threatened to close the gap around 2005. Fascinatingly, I see no plausible way of correlating this "beer track"/"wine track" data with anything happening in politics.
He goes and picks up a pair of 16 kilo weights and starts curling them with his left and right arms, 30 repetitions on each side. Then, amazingly, he picks up the 32 kilo weights! Very slowly he lifts them, first 10 curls with his right, then 10 with his left.
Slateinteractive venn diagram of Bush administration criminals is fun and funny, but in that "having played with this for a few minutes I'm actually really depressed" kind of way.
Spencer was inspired by Joe Scarborough to try out some Cheetos. "They start off good," remarked Ackerman, "but there's a rapidly diminishing return. Soon you wind up eating because you don't want to leave the Cheetos in the bag but you start pining for a tastier snack." He recommends pretzels or Fritos as superior alternatives.
Robert Novak is driving a black corvette on K Street. He hits a pedestrian crossing the street in a crosswalk with a "walk" sign. And then he speeds away...until a vigilante cyclist, who also happens to be a partner at lobbying/law firm Harkins Cunningham, uses his bike to block Novak from evading the police!
This isn't the first time Novak's gotten in trouble with criminal driving. Fortunately, the 66 year-old man Novak hit has only minor injuries, which means Novak will probably only see a minor penalty. And that's too bad. The penalties for this stuff ought to be much stiffer. Morally speaking, what Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random. "He's not dead, that's the main thing," says Novak but that's just a coincidence.
I hate, incidentally, that coverage of this is using the euphemism that Novak is known as an "aggressive" driver. He's a criminal. Cars are large, heavy, fast-moving objects that share space with delicate flesh-and-blood human beings -- piloting them in an illegal manner is serious wrongdoing.
If I were to engage in guilt-by-association grounded in Obama campaign iconography, I would probably have observed that his campaign aesthetics seem to have something in common with socialist realism, but it takes all kinds I guess. Couthier:
Not only is this a political flier meant to influence American voters via the Deutchland, it is seriously unnerving propaganda. What are the Obama people thinking? This is nuts.
Surely we can all agree that something is nuts here. Meanwhile, I wouldn't want to alarm Dr. Couthier too much but up on the White House website I found this photo of George W. Bush posing as Hitler. Not only that, but it appeared under the headline "Supporting a Compassionate Society" and as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, compassionate conservatism is the newest and most insidious form of liberal fascism.
Patrick Ruffini slams the Obama campaign for using a foreign language in its promotional material for an event in Germany. Apparently it's now unpatriotic to so much as concede that they speak foreign languages in foreign countries. Or maybe American politicians should only be allowed to speak in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the UK.
Meanwhile, I understand that as a campaign tactic, contemporary conservatism's reliance on the national security issue and contemporary conservatism's embrace of xenophobia and insularity go together like a horse and carriage. But serious people ought to be able to understand that if you want the United States of America to play a global role, that the leading figures in shaping foreign policy shouldn't be infected by this sort of proud ignorance of the world beyond our borders. There's a coherent strain of conservatism out there that would combine dispositional insularity with advocacy of an actually insular foreign policy (read The American Conservative magazine or Pat Buchanan's books if you want to find it) but that's not where the mainstream GOP is and it's certainly not where John McCain is. But if you have these kind of grand aspirations for America on the world stage, then you need some internationally oriented people at the top. The kind of people who, you know, don't think it's crazy to use the German language in Germany.
In some sense all conferences suffer from these same problems, but this one aspires to be a yearly event, so if it's going to continue -- and I heard they had trouble maxing out the 2,000 slots this year -- they need to get creative about offering something worth traveling and paying for.
It's of course flattering for an event to have it sell out quickly. But all selling out really proves is that you haven't priced your event correctly. A venue selling tickets to something wants to maximize revenues not maximize sales and the revenue-maximizing price is rarely going to be the same as the market-clearing price. I've got tickets, for example, to the sold out Rancid show on August 11 at the 9:30 Club. If the tickets had been 20 percent more expensive, I still would have bought one and so would a lot of other people. Maybe the venue wouldn't have sold out at that price, but they still would have made more money even if the place was left only 85 percent full.
Back to Netroots Nation, though, I wouldn't want to see them depart as radically from the bottom-up programming model that the conference currently works with. I think all they really need to do is maybe slightly reduce the number of panels that get approved and work a bit more aggressively to gin up submissions. Given adequate competition, it should be possible to put up a somewhat higher wheat/chaff ratio.
It seems that one of Gordon Brown's aides was caught in a "honeytrap" and let a Chinese spy steal his Blackberry. Fair enough. But this doesn't have the ring of truth to it at all:
Experts say that even if the aide’s device did not contain anything top secret, it might enable a hostile intelligence service to hack into the Downing Street server, potentially gaining access to No 10’s e-mail traffic and text messages.
Can't the owner just report the phone stolen and have the service canceled? And why would a Blackberry let you do that anyway? This particular case aside, it seems to me more broadly that a certain set of people is taking advantage of low levels of tech literacy among certain elements of the western security services to make a lot of money by hyping up fake cybersecurity problems. It's true that Chinese encryption-breaking skills play an important role in Neuromancer but that doesn't make this a real problem.
I haven't written about the interesting scandal prompted by longtime Bush associate Stephen Payne being caught on tape talking about how he could provide access to the administration in exchange for access to the Bush library, but suffice it to say that Randy Scheunemann, one of John McCain's top national security dudes and a frequent spokesman for McCain, is now revealed to have close links to the shady dealings in question. Of course a little run of the mill corruption couldn't possibly do as much harm to the country as Scheunemann's past associations with Ahmed Chalabi have, but there seems to have been a collective decision that everyone who worked with Chalabi on swindling the country into a disastrous war deserves a free pass.
Every once in a while I toy with the thesis that someone ought to make a big deal about the fact that a lot of the standard statistical data about the United States that we track is of a kind of low quality. One noteworthy example is the poverty rate formula, which is basically nonsense. Apparently Barack Obama believes we should change it. This is a good idea on many levels, though one issue any time you change anything like this is that you don't want to lose the ability to track trends across time.
As for Disraeli, whose new conservative party was created out of opposition to free trade(!), his second premiership may indeed have led to the introduction of numerous social reforms. But voting was so restricted during that time--and the issues of the campaign so far removed from those of our own time--that to imply "the people" of the 1870's wanted incremental change from "conservative" politicians is almost absurd (Disraeli actually lost the popular vote in the crucial 1874 election). Disraeli's imperialism and nationalism are interesting to compare to Roosevelt's, but any comparison to modern-day America is downright silly.
This is perhaps a good time to note that I'm not really a fan of historical analogies as a mode of argument. The reason is that accuracy in historical characterization is rarely particularly relevant to the point the analogy-maker was trying to make. But under the circumstances, there's actually not much need to make the analogy. At the end of the day, I think I understand what Brooks is saying here perfectly well and I don't know anything about Disraeli. To me, the interesting thing about the use of the analogy is simply that for whatever reason modern-day conservative reformers don't like to site Eisenhower and Nixon as predecessors even though they would make more familiar references.
Normally, I go weeks -- months, even -- at a time without anyone mentioning Benjamin Disraeli. But here's David Brooks (via K-Drum) and here's The Economist (which is at least British) and here's Reihan Salam. Suddenly it seems one cannot understand contemporary politics without a sound grasp of . . . 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
Everyone needs a usable history, but this kind of seems like a weird reach.
Atrios asks about rumors that Kit Seelye was/is at Netroots Nation. Indeed she was, and I snapped this photo of her sitting near some hippie at the national popular vote panel:
The dude, if I understood him correctly, thinks the real answer to the problems with our electoral system is smaller congressional districts.
Are we going to need a South Africa-style truth commission to find the facts and clear the air after Bush-era war crimes? To me it more and more looks like that will be the case:
But I'm basically pessimistic that anyone will be held accountable for anything at all. The relevance precedent is probably Iran-Contra where the guilty parties just . . . came back into government a bit later and anyone who mentioned that they were crooks was dismissed as shrill. I recall that during the telecom immunity fight the Washington Postspecifically denounced immunity opponents on the grounds that they were interested in "using the tools of discovery to dislodge information about what the administration actually did." Can't have people know what happened!
For the past 24 hours or so I've been annoyed by some inconveniently located construction that makes it hard to get into the Convention Center. But I looked closer and it turns out to serve me right -- they seem to be laying track for a streetcar system.
I suppose I should explain the basic mechanics of the national popular vote campaign. The animating idea is to take advantage of the fact that states have, under the constitution, essentially unlimited authority to allocate their electoral votes however they want. NPV encourages states to pass laws saying that their electoral votes will be allocated to the popular vote winner if and only if enough states to comprise a majority in the electoral college also adopt such laws. In short, when a state passes an NPV law nothing happens at all in the short term. But if enough states do it to "win" 270 electoral votes, then suddenly there's a gestalt shift and the country has, in effect, a popular vote system.
It's a good idea and it's made a lot of progress in recent years. Chris Pearson reports, however, that somewhat oddly this has become a partisan issue at the state level with Republicans usually in opposition. This he plausibly speculates is the legacy of 2000 where people see NPV as not much more than an effort to degrade the legitimacy of the Bush presidency. In fact, though, this should really just be seen as something that pits state against state. The currently "uncompetitive" states -- places like California and New York and Vermont and Massachusetts but also places like Texas and Alabama and Mississippi and Utah -- are the ones mostly clearly disadvantaged by the current system and that goes for Democrats and Republicans alike.
I went to see a panel on the National Popular Vote and before things started, prominent blogger Rick Hertzberg thanked me for helping to "paper the house." Naturally I thanked him in return, but I had no idea what that means. The good news is that these days it's a Google and we learn that "'Papering the house,'" for example, is a common producers' practice to fill unsold seats. It's done during previews -- to start buzz about a new play, and assure a full house when critics are in attendance -- or when a show is past its prime and ticket sales dip."
A friend described Netroots Nation as like a giant family reunion with Howard Dean as the crazy uncle. I thought that was about right as I watched him yesterday addressing a crowd outside the convention center as part of Barack Obama's "register for change" voter registration drive. On another reasonable view, however, Dean is more like a patriarchal figure, the foundational character from which all else flows. Ultimately, though, I think that's wrong -- Dean is not a blogger himself and is, at the end of the day, a bit besides the point when it comes to the larger movement.
He and his 2004 candidacy happened to be the point around which a lot of the early netroots energy coalesced. Over time, however, it's become clear that the real leaders of the movement were include a large number of folks who were early Dean supporters or followers, but that Dean himself plays an essentially peripheral, symbolic role in the whole thing. And it's to his credit, I think, that he's basically accepted that role and done it well while also focusing diligently on his job as DNC chief. I recall being skeptical at the time that Dean would work out well in that task, but I think he has.
Here courtesy of WalkScore is a nice map showing the "walkability" of different DC neighborhoods:
If you know the city at all, you'll see that being pedestrian-friendly is a strong correlate of being prosperous. This reality sometimes tends to confuse the debate over planning for walkers. Because walkable neighborhoods tend to be inhabited by well-off people, the whole topic gets construed as a concern "for" well-off yuppies. But really that's backwards. Walkable areas tend to be full of relatively rich people because they're relatively rare and relatively desirable -- their scarcity means that the less prosperous are priced out of these areas, but if we shifted policy to increase the supply of areas with good pedestrian access, people of more modest means would be able to afford them.
That, in turn, would be a serious blow for socioeconomic equity because at the end of the day while yuppies may like a nice walkable neighborhood, it's poor people, seniors, and older kids who are mostly likely to really be unable to drive where they want to go.
I had to resort to time travel scenarios to try to make sense of Bruce Bartlett's contention that African-Americans should like the GOP on the grounds that "Historically speaking," -- though, crucially, not currently or at any time in the recent past -- "the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats." John Holbo, however, sees zombies as the relevant issue:
But surely if African-Americans feel the need to be specifically receptive to long-dead candidates of not just one but both parties, then a oijia board, not a ballot box, is the appropriate medium.
It would be kind of fun to flip this Bartlett logic over and sort of cross it with Mark Penn microtrends. You could have necrotrends: McCain needs to reach out to recently deceased left-handed soccer moms. Or: Obama needs to be sensitive to the concerns of long-dead jai alai dads. So forth. So long as political considerations are divorced from concerns about biological vivification, the possibilities are endless. If some politician is caught with a ballot box stuffed with the names of the deceased, he could defend himself on the grounds that only letting the living vote is sheer ‘animism’.
Meanwhile, I'm hoping the reanimated corpse of Jesse Helms won't be haunting us, but the hosannas directed at him by the leaders of the conservative movement should remind us that the contemporary Republican Party has little continuity with the racial legacy of the pre-Goldwater, pre-Buckley version of the thing.
Kay Steiger writes about one somewhat hidden problem facing women looking to get ahead in academia:
Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various "service" commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research.
I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.
Something similar seems to be true in other professions and also for underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities. Because there are relatively few women (or black people or whatever) working for Organization X and there's a desire to make sure that women/minorities are included in this that and the other thing, the smallish number of members of the underrepresented group wind up overburdened with peripheral tasks rather than focusing on their core competencies. It's one of several ways in which the underrepresentation of women in certain fields just makes it per se more difficult for women to get ahead with the whole thing stuck in a bad equilibrium.
I know what you were thinking, "if only I, the blog reader at home, could read some kind of aggregator of Twitters from Netroots Nation participants." Well, okay, the odds that you were thinking this are low. But someone at the Huffington Post thought it would be a good idea and asked me to participate, which I may or may not actually be set up correctly to do. Check it out. Or not.
Meanwhile, Austin: very hot, full of bloggers and inexpensive alcoholic beverages.
Bruce Bartlett argues that black voters should give the GOP some consideration in November since, after all, "Historically speaking, the Republican Party has a far better record on race than the Democrats". There is, of course, a lot of truth to that. Certainly a black voter circa 1860 would have been slightly insane to vote against Abraham Lincoln. And if the Grant-Greeley matchup of 1872 were for some reason to be re-run in the modern day, you'd expect blacks to strongly back Grant.
But of course the fact that the Republican Party was, in the past, more in tune with the interest of black people is precisely why black people, in the past, tended to support Republican candidates. During the New Deal the picture became more complicated, and in the 1950s you had non-trivial levels of black support for both Democrats and Republicans. And starting in the 1960s, Democrats became the party that better-served black interests while the conservative movement incorporated white supremacists as a pillar element of their coalition. So since then, African-Americans have overwhelmingly backed Democrats.
In short, things are about as you'd expect -- the GOP used to be the better party on race, and they were rewarded for it. As the Democrats moved toward a pro-Civil Rights posture and the Republicans abandoned that posture, things changed. If John McCain were to go back in time and become Thaddeus Stevens while transforming Barack Obama into Theodore Bilbo, I'm sure black people would vote for him. But barring that, black voters are likely to do what white voters do and assess the parties based on their present-day positions rather than how things were back in the day.
Jumping off a Steven Medvic post, Phil Klinker rounds up data from the 2004 NES which shows that about half of white people think African-Americans are lazier than whites, almost 40 percent say that African-Americans are less intelligent than whites, and again about 40 percent of whites say that African-Americans are less trustworthy.
Think about the implications of that for, say, a black job applicant for a position for which there are also some white applicants who seem reasonably qualified. It'd be interesting to see something about the age structure of adherence to these stereotypes, or else a time series presentation of this information, so we could get a sense of how much things are likely to change over time.
Here's a weird result Al pointed out from yesterday's NYT race poll. They asked "Just as your best guess, about what percentage of all Americans are black: less than 10%, between 10 and 20%, between 20 and 30%, between 30 and 50%, or more than 50%?." You get these ranges:
White: 1 21 33 33 8 5 Black: 4 24 26 24 17 4
In short, blacks and whites are both massively overestimating the number of black people in the country. That's interesting. And I also think it's interesting how little racial divergence you see in the answers here. My guess would have been that thanks to residential segregation blacks tend to overestimate the proportion of African-Americans in the population while whites would underestimate it. But that's not how it goes.
Since Marc posted on this, I guess I should too. I recently accepted a new job at the Center for American Progress where I'll be working with the team that puts together ThinkProgress, the Wonk Room, and the Progress Report. From a reader's point of view, this probably won't make a huge difference -- the blog will have a different URL and a different design so it'll fit in with the ThinkProgress family, but the blog has changed URLs and designs several times in the past so that's nothing new.
Some people have been asking me questions about why I'm leaving the Atlantic, but really I'm just leaving the Atlantic because that's what you need to do to take a new job. I think CAP is a great organization, I miss the sense of collegiality that comes from working with like-minded colleagues on a shared enterprise, I think I can help advance their mission and when it turned out they felt I could too and were willing to make me an attractive offer, I was thrilled to take it -- no beefs with existing employer required. The new site should launch in early August.
I'm in National Airport getting ready to fly to Austin for Netroots Nation. If you'll be there, please check out my panel and ignore that other panel at the same time with losers like Krugman, Perlstein, Digby, and Atrios.
On a related note, I have a new candidate for "worst bagel ever" -- Jerry's NY Pizza and Subs in National's Terminal A.
I keep meaning to write this, but in my view the big flaw with Grand New Party qua book is that its analysis of why the GOP is the way it is struck me as very superficial and shallow. The book is very good on the nature of the GOP's predicament and on possible ways out of the predicament, but it seems to view the "how did we get here?" issue as just coming down to random luck -- Bush wasn't very bright or something.
I think that's wrong. And importantly wrong. Chris Hayes and Noam Scheiber both make arguments along the lines of what I would want to say, but I think they both weaken their argument by pitching an overly broad point. It's not the case that the Republicans literally only care about their super-rich financial backers. But what is true is that any other impulses Republicans might have are ultimately undermined by the stranglehold that the tax cut jihad holds over the party.
At the end of the day, a political party whose politicians all need to portray themselves as "tax cutters" is going to be very limited in its ability to do anything constructive. A lot of the models Ross & Reihan point to in their book were governors or mayors during the 1990s who, thanks to the robust economy, were able to cut taxes while also spending non-trivial amounts of new money on programs. That goes to show, I think, that Republicans aren't congenitally incapable of doing useful domestic policy stuff. But in order to do useful domestic policy stuff on any kind of consistent or responsible basis, they would need to be freed from the iron grip of tax cut mania.
How hard would it be to do this? I don't know. As recently as the George HW Bush administration, it was possible for prominent Republicans to act in a responsible manner with regard to tax issues. But John McCain's primary defeat in 2000 and his primary win in 2008 appears to confirm the idea that the GOP is first and foremost a tax cutting party. Maybe this is wrong, maybe Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth are paper tigers. Certainly I hope they are. But while Grand New Party is quite implicitly critical of the tax cuts uber alles forces, its authors seem to believe that those forces are sufficiently powerful that they shouldn't be taken on in a head-on manner. But unless they can be, it's hard to see how the kind of things Ross & Reihan would like to see happen could happen.
John McCain things so. Matthew DeLong says no, that "according to to the American Psychological Assn., research shows "that children of gay or lesbian parents are just as mentally healthy as children with heterosexual parents," and there may even be some positive effects. Also, the sexual orientation of parents has no impact on that of their children." But the facts are a small price to pay for the sake of discriminating against gay and lesbian couples.
Obviously, like all red-blooded Americans I'm outraged by the idea of a Belgian company with the silly name InBev purchasing our beloved Budweiser. Still, wouldn't it be kind of great if the Belgians started turning Budweiser into something more like the, um, vastly superior product they have in Belgium? Just saying. Relatedly, wouldn't it kind of suck to be Claire McCaskill and duty-bound to endorse absurd claims about the quality of mass market American beer?
On the question of how problematic it is that you typically need some kind of an "in" to get a job, I think you need to distinguish between some different cases of connections. After all, a lot of the people I know are people I got to know through work. If you get in touch with someone because you're working in the same field and admire/respect each other work, and that becomes a semi-social relationship, it doesn't seem at all problematic for that kind of "in" to perhaps pay off in work terms down the road. The only alternative would be for people to deliberately avoid social interaction with people whose work they admire.
Still, I think Peter Suderman is understating the scope of the problem, particularly in fields without clear metrics of quality. People obtain positions of some power/influence/whatever and then use those positions to build, in effect, patronage networks wherein they get to hand out favors to friends and hope that the ability to hand out favors will help shield then from critical scrutiny. I think a lot of journalism needs to be understood in this vein.
Good work, Washington Post opinion section for publishing this hard-hitting, fact-based piece by Matthew DeBord titled "Hummer We Need Thee"
When General Motors announced that it would subject its Hummer division to what in the automotive business is known as a "review," you could hear the tree huggers, the unreconstructed hippies, the postmodern Greens, Al Gore's organic peanut gallery, every single customer at the Pasadena Whole Foods and the United Prius Owners of America shove aside their alfalfa sprouts and commence clapping. [...]
It takes a certain kind of man -- it's almost always the owner of a Y chromosome -- to take a gander at the Hummer, in all its broad, burly, paramilitary gas-guzzling glory, and see himself behind the wheel, striking fear and loathing in the hearts of ecologically sensitive motorists. Oprah does not drive a Hummer. But Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a proud owner. As has Sylvester Stallone. The Hummer appeals to large men of even larger ego, men who aren't worried about their carbon footprint and believe that obstacles in life are meant not just to be surmounted but squashed flat. They like owning the beast because, when it bears down on lesser rides on the freeway, those lesser rides -- even the Teutonic triple threat of Porsche/BMW/Mercedes -- get out of the way. Every once in while, you see a little guy clambering out of a Hummer, painfully in need of a ladder, and you realize that it can also be viewed as a $57,000 ticket to enlarged self-esteem.
What kind of value do the Post's editors think this kind of thing is adding to the public conversation? The Post opinion pages are way less entertaining than Gossip Girl summer reruns or the copy of Tintin in Tibet I picked up earlier today (somehow missed reading that one when I was a kid) and if they're not going to be informative either then what are they for?
I saw this for sale at a conservative t-shirts website. I'm not necessarily one to say that torture is a subject about which we shouldn't joke. Torture-related satire and other forms of torture humor are, I think, a clear way of coming to grips with the horror of what our government have become. It's a difficult subject to contemplate, and express a view on, without resorting to humor on some level.
But that of course isn't what's happening here. Instead we see conservatives deciding to embrace torture as constitutive of conservative identity. If you're a conservative, you like torture. If you're against torture, you're not a conservative.
By Request: Does This Blog Suck? Do All Blogs Suck?
DeliciousPundit asks "What'd you think about David Appell's smackdown of you?"
The only thing I have to say to defend myself from those charges is that I don't think the post was really about why I suck, it was about why the punditsphere as a whole sucks with me just as a prominent example. And he's right. To gain any worthwhile information about any topic whatsoever, you need to be reading the work of someone with real expertise. To develop real expertise requires years of study, research, etc. And years of study, research, etc. can't be adequately condensed into a blog post. Thus, blog reading is a completely worthless exercise and nobody should really engage in it. I started writing this blog as a hobby; I thought it would be a fun thing to do. And I not only continue to enjoy writing it, but people pay me to write it. But the mere fact that I'm writing it doesn't make it a worthwhile thing to read, which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans have never read this blog and never will.
I really like gadgets in general and Apple stuff in particular, so I fully intend to buy one of the new iPhones when doing so becomes convenient. But I don't really understand the psychology of camping out to get in line to get one on the very first morning -- I was very pleased to spend last night in my regular bed. But Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman don't see things that way and they have some extensive coverage of the scene at the Clarendon Apple Store if you're curious. I mostly continue to find it a disgrace that our nation's capital lacks an Apple Store of its own.
Looks like the salmonella problem is spreading to our nation's valuable jalapeno reserves. Discussions are already under way in my house as to whether you might be able to use a habanero/poblano blend as a viable alternative in making some pico.
Scott wonders if people are making too big a deal out of FISA:
While I understand there are dozens of real policy difference to disagree with President Bush, I'm not sure FISA quite makes my top 10% list or even top 25%, or put another way I agree with Andrew Sullivan's view this is a venial not cardinal sin. So would be curious if you share the outrage and if not why you think so many people are upset on this topic.
To me, personally, outrage requires surprise and I'm not at all surprised that the man who's likely going to be president in 2009 isn't interested in expending political capital on reducing his own powers. I'm just cynical that way. As to whether the outrage is overblown, I do think some of the rhetoric is overheated but at the same time this is a signature "netroots" issue a key example of what Mark Schmitt's called "politics below the Coasian floor" and the only way to organize effectively is for some key people to be really, really, really passionate about these issues. To put it another way, I'm glad Glenn Greenwald is out there pounding away on these questions and I don't really think it makes a ton of sense to complain that other people don't share my exact same set of issue priorities.
I suppose I shouldn't get too upset when people have overheated reactions to my annual bout of July 4 skepticism. Let me just make this one point, though, namely that to say it would have been better "had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together" is perfectly consistent with the belief that the English authorities bare the bulk of the blame for the split.
Indeed, my diffidence about independence stems in part from the recognition that war and separation wasn't by any means the first option of most of the men who wound up leading the movement for independence. But their efforts at compromise weren't welcomed in London and the result was a costly war. If you think that mistakes were made exclusively on the English side, I think you're being a bit naive, as these sorts of things never happen without a mutual lack of trust and some errors on both sides. But I don't think that the founders were wrong, sitting in Philadelphia in 1776, to think that under the circumstances independence was their best option. I only think -- as they themselves did -- that it was unfortunate that the course of events had taken them to that position, rather than to some form of compromise.
Here's a chart from the Washington Post showing that despite a substantial decline in the DC murder rate, and despite the fact that Baltimore and Detroit have overtaken us as murder hubs, the DC homicide rate is still really really high.
And of course one has to assume that the high crime rate is an impediment to economic opportunity. Depressed commercial corridors like George Avenue and H Street NE would probably have more vitality -- fewer boarded-up storefronts, more job opportunities -- if more people felt safer walking around the city at night. I'm not sure I have a theory as to why DC's crime control efforts are so ineffective compared to some other cities though the fact that the police department has to dedicate substantial resources to special capital-related stuff rather than to patrolling the streets doesn't help.
The New York Times takes a look at New Mexico's efforts to ban cock-fighting. It seems that they've only had a limited impact. Still, I would that despite the short-term failures, this may have a long-run impact by making it less likely that new New Mexicans (of which there will probably be many in the high-growth southwest) become habituated to the sport.
But should cockfighting really be banned? This doesn't seem like a very nice way to treat animals, I'm skeptical that this is meaningfully worse than the way we treat the chickens we raise for meat and eggs. I'm always interested in where the next "culture wars" will come from after the gay marriage fight is settled and maybe animal rights issues are a plausible candidate.
Meanwhile, if cockfighting's illegal in your jurisdiction but you've got a hankering for some bird-on-bird violence, YouTube's got you covered.
I did a sarcastic post on The Washington Post running an op-ed denouncing an Arabic textbook and the comment thread revealed a lot of substantive problems with the column. One commenter, for example, takes issue with the claim that there was anti-Israel cartography in the book:
I learned Arabic at Columbia using that same curriculum. From what I recall, they didn't "eliminate" Israel from the map in the book, but wrote "Israel and Palestine" over Israel and the Occupied Territories. I am pro-Israel, and think that Israel should exist alongside Palestine, and I think that the book was being reasonable just putting both on the map, without delineating the borders of each, which are tough to determine until a treaty is reached.
In fairness, Maha's constant whining got really damned annoying, and could drive anyone over the edge.
He should take Persian, in which our book had some sort of pro-monarchist slant that talked endlessly about Nawruz and Zoroastrianism while almost totally ignoring Islam. Then there are the Hebrew texts which have sample sentences like, "We only want to live in peace."
You must have had a subscription to What if...? comics when you were a kid. You sure do love counterfactuals. Maybe British colonialism would have done for North America what it did for Africa? Maybe the United States in the latter part of the 20th century more like South Africa than Canada. Maybe if the American revolution happens in 1915 instead of 1775 we find ourselves allied with German nationalists in the late 1930s. Maybe in the 25th century Isiah Thomas will be viewed as the best Knicks GM in history.
Assignment desk: Explain the value of counterfactuals and your affection for them.
My affection for counterfactuals and my sense of their value derives from when I took Richard Heck's class on "Realism and Anti-Realism" and we did a unit on counterfactuals. For that segment of the class we were assigned David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds where I was first exposed to the argument (much less controversial than Lewis' conclusions about the metaphysical status of modal claims) that there's an intimate link between talk about causation and talk about counterfactuals. My thoughts on this matter were further influenced by when I took the final course Robert Nozick ever taught which was on the philosophy of history (some of Nozick's thoughts on the matter are reflected in Invariances).
At any rate, among historians talk of counterfactuals is in a bad air. But philosophers generally find it pretty uncontroversial to say that (modulo certain complications) causal claims can generally be translated into causal claims. So you might say that the Casey v. Planned Parenthood opinion came out the way it did because David Souter turned out to be a moderate, rather than a conservative, replacement for William Brennan. Alternatively, you might say "if Souter had turned out to be as conservative as Ted Kennedy feared, the Casey decisions would have gutted constitutional protection of abortion rights." Now you can't say these things are precisely the same, because maybe Souter would have been a wingnut who got run over by a bus the day after his confirmation etc. etc. etc. but in a commonsense way the "What If?" question is just a vivid way of thinking about causal claims.
Aspen is a monumental shrine to wealth, clothed in the false modesty of a self-conscious homage to America's small town past. It is the Potemkin Village of the post-consumer culture. The place always puts me in mind of the "American" restaurants abroad--it looks like a diner, and the menu sounds like a diner, but when the food comes the chili cheesedog is made with bratwurst and limburger, and they've slathered your french fries with mayonnaise.
But the mountains are really beautiful.
Of course with "American" restaurants you never know. Back in 1997 at least, Buffalo Bill's in Prague was serviceable tex-mex at a time when the Czech Republic was not offering a ton of edible cuisine. Eleven years later I imagine things are very different, though.
One fascinating thing about the death of Jesse Helms is the conservative reaction. One might expect that Helms' death would prompt from conservatives the sorts of things that I might say if, say, Al Sharpton died -- that he and I had some overlapping beliefs and I don't regard him as the world-historical villain that the right does, but that he's a problematic guy and I regard him and his methods as pretty marginal to American liberalism. But instead conservatives are taking a line that I might have regarded as an unfair smear just a week ago, and saying that Helms is a brilliant exemplar of the American conservative movement.
And if that's what the Heritage Foundation and National Review and the other key pillars of American conservatism want me to believe, then I'm happy to believe it. But it reflects just absolutely horribly on them and their movement that this is how they want to be seen -- as best exemplified by bigotry, lunatic notions about foreign policy, and tobacco subsidies.
Alan Jacobs offers one about the late Senator Jesse Helms:
[A] story I heard years ago from a young man who as an undergraduate did an internship in Helms’s office. Senator Helms was a particular target of Bono’s persuasive powers, and indeed near the end of his career he threw his considerable weight behind increased funding for AIDS projects in Africa. This young man claimed that he was in the office one day when Bono came by with the Edge in tow.
“Senator Helms,” Bono said, “I’d like you to meet the Edge.”
Helms stuck out his hand. “It’s a pleashuh to meet you, Mistuh the Edge.”
Other wacky anecdotes include Helms' staunch support for apartheid South Africa, whistling "Dixie" in front of Carol Moseley Braun when she joined him in the United States Senate and how he enjoyed "railing against [Martin Luther] King, 'Negro hoodlums,' the media, 'sex perverts,' and anyone on welfare."
One strange aspect of the settlement of the Civil Rights controversy was that this social and political upheaval resulted in surprisingly little actual political turnover. Instead of segregationist politicians being defeated and hounded of out public life, in essence they agreed to stop challenging the core principles of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (gutting enforcement under GOP presidents was still okay) and in exchange everyone else agreed to sort of ignore their backgrounds. I've written about this before with regard to John Stennis and James Eastland but it's remarkable how little removed we are from the era when vast power was wielded in American politics by people with backgrounds as white supremacist politicians of which I guess you'd say Robert Byrd is the last.
And, of course, within that group there were considerable distinctions, with Helms holding distinction as amongst the very least-repentant.
Noam Scheiber and Jonathan Chait debate whether or not John McCain's flip-flop attacks against Barack Obama will work. Since Chait seems to think these attacks are both effective and unfair, it might be nice for him to spend some time dealing with the unfair flip-flop charges coming from his colleague James Kirchick.
But beyond that, my thought on this question is that conventional wisdom radically misconstrues the nature of the relevant decision-making process. In my model of the electorate, the majority of voters are voting as blind partisans. Of the rest, most are being driven by the macro factors (shitty economy, sick of Bush) or purely by issue salience (vote Republican when I care about national security, vote Democratic when I care about the economy) or other such things. And yet, few people like to say that kind of thing. And this is where the campaign comes in.
The main impact of campaign attacks, I think, is not to actually change anyone's mind but rather to familiarize everyone with the talking points of the side they agree with. In 2000, voters who valued "experience" turned out to favor Al Gore strongly. In the 2008 campaign, I think it's clear that voters who value "experience" will favor John McCain. That's not, however, because there's some coherent bloc of "experience" voters who shifted loyalties -- it's because "experience" was a Democratic talking point in 2000 and it's a Republican talking point in 2008 so people change which candidate attributes they value. In 2004, you could find a lot of Democrats who thought John Kerry military service proved important things about his fitness for office, whereas in 2008 Republicans are more likely to say that about John McCain.
I think that if Obama becomes unpopular and loses the election it'll be because a larger number of voters decide that having a "tough" foreign policy is the most important thing. But if they reach that conclusion, they'll find themselves suddenly agreeing with all manner of other attacks from John McCain's camp. By contrast, if voters continue to be focused on their desire for a sharp break with Bushism, voters will find pretty much anything Obama throws at McCain persuasive.
Here's Part II of "The Future of Party Politics" with Ross Douthat, Marc Ambinder, David Brooks, and yours truly (remember: you're in good hands with Allstate). Official description: "In this installment, Matt talks about the notion of an enduring Democratic majority, and David Brooks speculates on whether Hispanics are Jews or Italians. There's also an interesting discussion about whether parties have better ideas when they're out of office than when they're busy running the country."
As the world's premiere Jewish/Hispanic political pundit, I feel like I really should form a firmer opinion on the "are Hispanics like Jews" issue.
I've never been 100 percent clear on why you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but suffice it to say that while there were many more vile politicians in the world than the now-dead Jesse Helms they were pretty much all brutal dictators and the like. For a late 20th century United States Senator, Helms was just awful -- a bigot who's incredibly retrograde foreign policy views managed to do a surprising amount of harm for a non-president and he's probably responsible for all manner of ills I don't even know about. Good riddance.
As best anyone can tell, Brian Beutler's post-shooting surgery was a complete success and he's going to be totally fine. Fine, that is, but saddled with medical bills (and, yes, we should have better health care policy in the United States and also fewer criminals roaming the streets shooting people and getting away with it -- consider those points made) for which Spencer Ackerman has set up a BeutlerAid fund in case you're interested in supporting progressive media (who's got the goods on FISA? Brian Beutler!) and humanitarian goodness and helping out.
This was one edition of the Allstate Ideas Exchange at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Before taping I was encouraging Marc to engage in some old-time radio plugs for our sponsors but he demurred so let me be the first to assure you that you're in good hands with Allstate.
I've known since this morning, but it now appears that the word is out that my friend Brian Beutler was shot three times last night around 17th and Euclid back in DC. He's expected to make a full recovery, for which we're all thankful.
Carl H. Lindner Jr. is a businessman who recently co-hosted a big dollar fundraiser for John McCain. He also oversaw the payment of about $1.7 million to a terrorist organization. But that's okay because (a) the terrorists were Latin American rather than Arab, (b) the terrorists were right-wing Latin Americans rather than leftists, and (c) McCain is a straight-talker and the candidate of honor so it's not actually possible for any number of sleazy associations to taint him.
I'm not going to blog anything at the moment on the panel Ross moderate on "is higher education for everyone" since I think there's going to be embeddable video soon and I'll save my remarks for then. That said, I found it kind of hilarious that amidst the opulence of the festival and the high-tech wonder of multiple digital video cameras recording the proceedings was a . . . cassette tape deck, a technology that I thought had been reconciled to the ash-heap of history some time ago.
Photo by Matthew Yglesias, available under a Creative Commons license
Continuing with my Shelby Steele blogging, he went into what I thought was a really unfair attack on Barack Obama, drawing an invidious comparison between Obama and John McCain and Hillary Clinton on the grounds that we don't really know who he is. Instead, says Steele, Obama is running on a vague sense that he's a talented politician and a black guy. At first I thought he was going to take this in an unverifiably airy direction, but then he specifically said of McCain that if he's elected "we know what road that guy’s going to go down" whereas we don't know the same for Obama.
Now of course it's possible -- likely, even -- that many Americans don't know what road Obama would go down as president. But he's unveiled a fairly detailed policy record, and assembled a fairly consistent record in public life. It's John McCain, by contrast, who was against the Bush tax cuts before he was against them it's McCain who sponsored an immigration reform bill and then said he would have written against it. It's McCain who wants credit for tackling climate change but opposes all legislation aimed at curbing carbon emissions. It's McCain who's trying to run on an appealing biography while leaving cloudy impressions of his policy agenda.
Says on a panel "white Americans have made more moral progress in the last forty years than any people in the history of the human conditions." I think this is the sort of thing that gets you invited back to tony gatherings at scenic resorts.
I've been remiss in failing to wish a happy Canada Day to all my Canadian readers and to Canadaphiles around the world. Those of you from the states looking to learn a thing or two about our neighbor to the north should know that Canada Day celebrates not Canadian independence, but the passage of the British North America Act of 1867, which established the Canadian Confederation by uniting four separate British colonies -- the Province of Canada, the Province of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia -- into a single consolidated political entity. At the same time, the Province of Canada was re-divided into its constituent element of Ontario and Québec.
One motive for consolidation was that British and Canadian officials were concerned about a potential American invasion of Canada. We tried to pull this off during the Revolution and the War of 1812 and it continued to be a popular idea for a while. The feeling was that now that the US had put the Civil War (which heightened US-British tensions) behind it and the country had the experience of building a large and powerful military establishment, that our thoughts might turn to expansion. Consolidating Britain's North American holdings was thought to help make them more defensible.
Another thing Holdren said answered a question I'd been wondering about for a while -- why have the cool kids stopped using the term "global warming." Holdren said this phrase wrongly implies to people a uniform change and that, in turn, makes talk of a single-digit change in temperatures sound like no big deal. After all, lots of places experience a seven degree temperature swing in a single day. The point that needs to be gotten across is that the temperature change will produce all kinds of large, but somewhat localized changes as climate patterns shift about. He likes the phrase "global climactic disruption" though I think we'll probably have to stick with "climate change."
They say you should drink a lot of water to help acclimate to high altitudes. Apparently, at past Ideas Festivals that's meant handing out a lot of plastic water bottles. Not very sustainable. So this year, the good people at Chevron gave everyone durable water bottles and set up water stations like the one pictured above where we can fill up. Between that and their investment in geothermal energy (they're the world's largest producers) I can't imagine what complaints anyone could have about their environmental record.
Turns out the Denver Airport has an indoor smoking lounge, a sign that despite Barack Obama's lead in the polls Colorado's not yet a truly blue state. But the fact that I immediately interpret the signal that way is a reminder that it's a bit strange that relatively smoker-friendly public policy is typical of both middle America and the dread Europeans.
Haven't done one of these in a little bit, and the schedule's going to be kind of hectic for the next few days between traveling to and from Aspen and trying to attend/cover the Ideas Festival but what are you guys interested in?
I flipped over to the "Notes" function on my iPhone and found a note I apparently wrote a couple of weeks ago and forgot about. It reads simply "Populism With Results: What the GOP Could Learn from Hamas and Hezbollah." Talk about a grand new party!
1. Take out your iPod (or Zune, I guess...really, who buys a Zune?) 2. Press shuffle songs. 3. Answer the following: a) How many songs before you come to one that would absolutely disqualify you from being President? b) What is that song?
My fourth song was the Decemberists' "When The War Came" but despite the political themes I think it's okay. Then at 18 we get Metric's "Too Little, Too Late" which is too obscure to cause a scandal, but in principle sentiments like "Meet me at the motel / Tie my right hand to the bible" aren't what middle America is looking for. Finally, at number 24 Metric comes up again and ends my political career with "I.O.U." and "Every ten year-old enemy soldier / Thinks falling bombs are shooting stars sometimes" and the rest of the Left's tired blame America first schtick.
Spencer Ackerman has a new new blog home at http://attackerman.firedoglake.com and today he's finishing up his first day there. It's a cool-looking site, and a great get for FDL.
Barack Obama's official line of state-specific Obama t-shirts doesn't include a DC for Obama shirt. Well that's fair, you say, as we're not a real state. But such other colonial entities as Guam and Puerto Rico have shirts.
Approximately one-third of those who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic; which means that roughly 10% of all Americans are former Catholics. Other surveys -- such as the General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972 -- find that the Catholic share of the U.S. adult population has held fairly steady in recent decades, at around 25%. What this apparent stability obscures, however, is the large number of people who have left the Catholic Church. Losses have been partly offset by the number of people who have changed their affiliation to Catholicism but more importantly by the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.
The emergence of new demographic groups to proclaim "vital" "swing" constituencies is vital to keeping America's political pundits employed, so I proclaim this A Good Thing.
Meanwhile, using the Q Street bike lane the other day I noticed something I'd never seen before -- a bike shop on Q Street between 14th and 15th. Investigating with a colleague earlier this morning it turns out to be The Bike Rack, and advertises itself as "gay owned and operated." Do gay cyclists have distinctive bike shop needs? The comments of Andrew "The End of Gay Culture" Sullivan would be appreciated.
The presence of the salt does allow the water temperature to drop below 32 degrees, but this trick also works in part because the salt speeds up the melting of the ice. The phase transition from solid to liquid absorbs heat, which helps keep the water extra cold.
That's why calipygian's trick is related; it simply uses the transition from liquid to gas rather than from solid to liquid. Just like melting ice, evaporating water absorbs heat from its surroundings (in his example, the warm bottle).
The idea of a Progressive Book Club to help connect progressive authors with progressive audiences has been in the works for some time, and it's very exciting to see it coming to fruition this week.
The Atlantic's web video content is branching out past things directly related to articles in the print magazine to include, for example, David Lynch talking about where his ideas come from:
What would you guys like to read about in the future? Specific questions are easier to grapple with than general topics, though I will take topics under advisement.
What would you like to see me write about? It's okay to repeat suggestions from yesterday, and also okay to repeat/refine suggestions made earlier in the thread since intensity of preferences counts.
With the nation facing sky-high gasoline prices and the public hungry for viable alternatives to driving and flying, the Bush administration's decided to veto Amtrak funding citing, hilariously, the notion that the bill doesn't provide enough "accountability."
I think I'm going to start stealing a page from Ezra Klein and doing a daily requests thread. I put up the thread, you guys suggest topics you'd like to see me blog about or questions you'd like to see me answer, and then the next day I answer the request. It seems to me like a feature that's worked well for him, so why not here? So -- what would you like to read about?
Henry Farrell quotes an Inside Higher Ed article about Owen Cargol, until recently the head of American University in Iraq:
The university’s lofty aspirations, as espoused on its Web site, make the selection of its first chancellor all the more puzzling. Owen Cargol, who took the helm at AU-Iraq in 2007 and resigned in late April of this year, had a checkered past that could have been revealed to university organizers with a simple Google search. The sexual harassment scandal that brought down Cargol at Northern Arizona University in 2001 was well publicized, in all of its explicit detail, but apparently never came to the attention of the U.S. officials who trusted Cargol to help reshape the Middle East. [...]
Cargol’s 2001 resignation stemmed from allegations made by a Northern Arizona employee who alleged that Cargol, while naked in a locker room, grabbed the employee’s genitals, the Arizona Republic reported. In a subsequent e-mail to the employee, Cargol described himself as “a rub-your-belly, grab-your-balls, give-you-a-hug, slap-your-back, pull-your-dick, squeeze-your-hand, cheek-your-face, and pat-your-thigh kind of guy.”
That'd be the creepy assaulter kind of guy, I guess. This information literally comes up on the first page of results if you Google the guy's name, so it's pretty puzzling that you'd let him slip through the cracks. But given the general conduct of the operation in Iraq, I suppose it's not all that surprising.
The White House never wanted to have the way the case was made, the way the intelligence was used to sell the war to the American people looked into by Congress. This was delayed for quite some time and Senator Rockefeller pushed this forward to get to the truth. And, the White House can continue to bury their heads in the sand but the reality is still the same.
Did somebody say Heads in the Sand? I think somebody did! Come see me talk at the Strand in NYC Thursday at 7.
Well, he's probably still evil. But it is nice (and kind of funny) that Weyrich is a big fan of large-scale investments in rail. I'm not really sure that bus rapid transit is so bad as he says, when done right it can be a useful option. What I primarily fear about BRT is that we'll get into a "defining BRT down" scenario since it lacks a very clear definition.
Ross posts a classic ad, with Jason Alexander pitching McDonalds' McDLT. To the modern environmentally conscious consumer, the styrofoam packaging may be a bit shocking:
This comes via Vic Matus who commenting on McDonald's announcement that it's going tomato-free says "Hold on a second. There were tomatoes at McDonald’s? I think the last time I had a tomato at McDonald’s was when I ordered a McDLT." The "premium" chicken sandwiches (Premium Grilled Chicken, Premium Grilled Chicken Club, Premium Crispy Chicken, and Premium Crispy Chicken Club) are all normally served with tomato. What's more, a sandwich identical to the McDLT is still served under the name Big 'N Tasty.
I didn't really care for Central Michel Richard when I went there (not that it's terrible, but I had an "it was fine, but..." reaction to it) and ever since I've been eager to condemn it as "overrated." But I've been unsure how highly rated it is. Ezra Klein doesn't like it either! But now that it's won a James Beard Award I can officially proclaim it underrated [UPDATE: by which, of course, I mean "overrated"].
By contrast, the Bagaduce Lunch in Brooksville, ME, which apparently also won an award of some kind, offers absolutely delicious fried seafood baskets in a delightful outdoors setting for just a fraction of what Michel Richard is charging for his pretentious take on unpretentious food.
McCain promises to "veto every beer" which can't go over well with the white working class.
He also promises to veto every bill with earmarks in it. This is certainly something he likes to talk about, but it seems like a potential disaster to me. Isn't the crack Obama organization going to be able to send out customized mailers to everyone in America featuring a list of locally popular projects that McCain's promised to get rid of? Seems like something a good database and a dozen interns could pull off.
Eye-opening video from the Women's Media Center rounds up some of the sexism in recent campaign coverage. But what's on cable is nothing compared to some of the garbage in the comments section of the video.
This time the Hewitt/Patterson duo really have Barack Obama and Trinity United Church of Christ nailed as Pastor Wright congratulates some young parishoners on their graduation from college. The madness! When the public finds out about these newsletters, Obama's toast.
James Joyner has a very good rundown. Personally, I miss the old more amateurish days in a lot of ways. But then again, almost by definition everyone's going to enjoy a hobby they do on the side more than they enjoy their job, and as far as jobs go I consider myself extremely lucky to have been able to turn my hobby into one.
At my reunion, they distributed the results of a survey of the Class of 2003 that's based on a healthily sized, though not-really-random, sample of the class. On the politically relevant points, 66 percent call themselves Democrats, 13 percent say Independent, 8 percent say Republican and the rest have sundry other self-descriptions. 19 percent are very liberal, 44 percent somewhat liberal, 27 percent in the middle, 8 percent somewhat conservative, and just 0.9 percent very conservative. A staggering 93 percent say they're "dissatisfied" with the way things are going in the United States. And in a poll of candidate preferences taken before Obama locked up the nomination, 59 percent preferred him, 18 percent liked Hillary, and 13.1 percent liked McCain.
Basically -- it's a liberal group. Perhaps not so surprisingly. Somewhat more surprising, though, is that the margin of people who say they've become more liberal since graduating (15 percent) is bigger than the margin who say they've become more conservative (12 percent). That's in line with one's sense of where the country's moved over the past five years, but goes against the stereotype of students shifting right when they encounter the "real world."
Check out Dave Weigel's debunking of Larry Johnson's smears. My sense is that when the CIA rigged elections in postwar Italy and Japan, they showed a little more finesse than this.
Hugh Hewitt's lackey Duane Patterson has an odd post up introduced thusly:
This is from the "Pastor's Page" from the April 9, 2006, Trinity United Church of Christ bulletin. Barack Obama was a member of the church at the time. It is unknown if he attended services that day. Click on the image to enlarge.
You read that and you're expected to see some scandalous stuff. But what follows is incredibly unremarkable:
Yes, that's right, Pastor Wright tried to help one of his congregants get a kidney transplant and if you put his former parishoner Barack Obama in office, next thing you know churches all around the country will be, um, trying to help people. The same post also has this shocker:
Yep, there Wright goes again trying to help Katrina victims and help poor people receive the federal tax credits to which they're entitled. He's like the second coming of Elijah Mohammed, this guy. Can you imagine a white church being able to get away with engaging in charitable endeavors? Never!
This comes to me via an equally baffled Andrew Sullivan. Mostly these circular letters seem me to be a reminder of why one might have long been a member of Trinity -- most of the church's activities seem to be basically unremarkable, socially conscious engagement with the community, precisely the sort of institution a rising local politician would want to associate himself with.
Ace reporter Spencer Ackerman tells me over IM that he's experiencing "extreme fog" delays at Dulles Airport this morning. Yesterday at National they told us a flight was delayed because of fog. The thing of it was that you could look outside and there was clearly no fog. I attempted to vent about this to a fellow passenger, but he sheep-like took the view that if they say there's fog there must be fog. I tried to gesture to the numerous large windows, but to no avail.
“I consider all American constitution” evil, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] said, because it permits “same-sexual marriage and many other things that are very bad.”
I'm heading up to Cambridge, MA for my fifth reunion and what do I see via Jessica Valenti but an ars technica item about how " new study suggests that, when it comes to math, we can forget biology, as social equality seems to play a dominant role in test scores."
To Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, the debate over torture is really all about women's underwear, with which he seems to have an unseemly obsession:
An exasperated Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-Mass., reminded Rohrabacher that interrogators were also seen physically abusing detainees.
"This isn't about panties on the head," Delahunt said. "This is about physical pressure, waterboarding and other techniques that apparently were utilized at Guantanamo."
Rohrabacher made a final point.
"I, in no way, will ever apologize that someone put panties on the head of this 9/11 terrorist and treated him without respect," he said. "That man should have no respect."
If we don't engage in fraternity-style pranks against suspected terrorists, then the terrorists have won.
One virtue of having a reputation as a straight-talker is that you can get away with constant lying. For example, in response to a question about why he twice voted against a commission to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina, John McCain says he voted in favor of every investigation. In reality, just as the New Orleans local news reporter said, he twice voted against a commission to investigate the matter.
Now there's probably some crazy strained reading of McCain's remarks so that his claims are consistent with reality. And since everyone knows McCain's a straight-talker, the press will read it that way. And because that's been the press's response each of the dozens of times in the course of this campaign that McCain's told bald-faced lies, his reputation for straight-talk never vanishes. A lesser figure who was in the habit of constantly lying and flip-flopping would develop a reputation as a kind of madmen, so invested in self-love that he thinks he has no obligation to political principles or basic factual accuracy.
I probably shouldn't write any more about this woman and her staff. Suffice it to say that I've found her behavior over the past couple of months to be utterly unconscionable and this speech is no different. I think if I were to try to express how I really feel about the people who've been enabling her behavior, I'd say something deeply unwise. Suffice it to say, that for quite a while now all of John McCain's most effective allies have been on Hillary Clinton's payroll.
High gas prices lead to a New York City bike shortage. Dana Goldstein has a nice column about cycling as well. Basic bike-friendly policies -- some lanes, some parking -- are pretty cheap for local government to implement and a pretty large number of people live in places that are sufficiently high-density for bikes to be a viable car replacement for at least some trips.
Karl Rove is facing contempt citations for his refusal to answer subpoenas to testify before congress. But lucky for him, he's gotten himself a friendly judge in Bush appointee John Bates:
A former deputy independent counsel in Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation, Bates is the same judge who threw out a Government Accountability Office complaint against Vice President Dick Cheney in December 2002. Back then, the GAO's comptroller general, David Walker, was seeking access to internal documents from Cheney's secretive Energy Task Force, using arguments similar to those the judiciary committee is making today—namely that the White House's refusal to provide information to congressional investigators is damaging Congress' oversight mandate.
Note, of course, that a background working for Ken Starr clearly does not in this case signify a strong belief in vigorous oversight of the executive branch. Rather, as Bates' previous rulings make clear, he's a believer in vigorous oversight of Democratic Party presidents while Republicans can do whatever they want. Bush clearly chose well when deciding to make this guy a judge.
Baghdad used to be home to a large Jewish community that mostly emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s after the climate for Jews in Arab countries turned frigid. But a small number remained through the decades, and were able to keep at least one synagogue open until Meir Tweg "was closed in 2003, after it became too dangerous to gather openly." Now there's just a handful left, profiled by The New York Times's Stephen Farrell.
Farrell doesn't make a big deal about it, but the upshot of the factoid about the synagogue seems to be that the U.S. invasion actually turned Iraq into a less hospital place for Jews than was Saddam Hussein's rabidly anti-Zionist rapacious dictatorship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Tyler Cowen reports on an advance so awesome that I'm prepared to declare 21st century Japan the pinnacle of human culture -- a glasses-cleaning machine that deals with the problem that the post-cleaning drying of the glasses tends to smudge them again. "I've never ever had my glasses so clean before," reports Tyler.
And yet, this kind of miracle is never going to be properly accounted for in purchase power parity calculations.
A little bit earlier today I shaved my beard off for the first time in quite a few years (I can't remember if I've had it since 2004 or since 2005) and, perhaps foolishly, I didn't even solicit my girlfriend's opinion first. But I figure that if the reviews are bad it's easy enough to grow back.
The other day I was complaining about Urban Land Company's habit of responding to their inability to sell units in their new condo "The Floridian" by increasing the volume of email they send out rather than lowering prices. Some research in my own inbox reveals, however, that that's not quite accurate -- an October 25, 2007 missive stated:
Studios from $244K 1 BRs from $345K 2 BRs from $444K Penthouse from $450K
For the past several rounds of emails, the prices have in fact changed from what they were asking seven months ago. Now it's:
Studio from $244K 1 BRs from $301K 2 BRs from $442K Penthouse from $625K
The giant increase in the Penthouse asking price perhaps reflects an effort to use framing effects to make the other units look like a good deal.
Tom Lee made a nifty animation out of the DC 2007 crime data:
The big crime cluster in the middle is the densely populated part of the city, and we can see that virtually all of the crime west of Rock Creek Park happens either in Georgetown or on Connecticut or Wisconsin Avenues -- again, crime happens where the people are. I know independently that a wildly disproportionate share of murders take place east of the Anacostia, but that doesn't really come through clearly in this graphic.
Sending me more emails about the units available at your new ugly condo dubbed "the Floridian" will not compel me to buy one of them. Week after week, month after month you keep emailing me about this property. Evidently, you're not selling units. That's because you're asking for too much money in a neighborhood that, though lovely, now has excess condo capacity. If you lower your price, I might buy one! And if not me, surely someone else will.
It's my birthday! But don't buy me a present, buy a copy of Heads in the Sand for yourself. Amazon's now pairing it with Ron Paul's book, so you know it's got to be good. Or something.
Also -- reading/Q&A this evening at Politics and Prose, 5PM.
All things considered, I thought 26 was one of my top years. I'm pretty sure my dad once advised me to get married by the time I was 27 or I'd be bald by then, but I think I've still got a couple of good years left in me.
When I stayed at one of your hotels recently and asked if it would be possible to email a copy of my receipt to me and your clerk said "yes" I was hoping for a copy of the receipt to be emailed to me and was not hoping to be inundated with spam on a near-daily basis.
Action on either of those points would be appreciated.
Bought Sim City 4 last night, but was busy doing this and that and couldn't start playing until around midnight. Next thing I knew it was 4:00 AM and now I'm very tired.
Impact on sleep aside, from an urban policy perspective, the game has several flaws and one hopes Sim City 5 will allow for mixed-use buildings (apartments with ground floor retail, etc.) and take some account of bicycling as a possible mode of transportation. At the same time, the game is curiously optimistic about middle class people's willingness to ride a bus to a subway station then take a subway then get on another bus and take that to work. Maybe when gas costs $20 a gallon, but in the real world I think people who aren't in desperate financial straights are only going to use transit if it's reasonably convenient.
Reading an article about how the current wave of immigrants is assimilating just fine thank you, Atrios remarks that "as someone who lives in a city which still has plenty of white ethnic enclaves I've long been puzzled by the widespread belief that today's immigrants are somehow 'different,' aside from the skin color of some of them."
One point is simply that a lot of people seem to have exaggerated ideas about past assimilation and simply don't realize that 100 years ago, just like today, major American cities had foreign language newspapers and things like Yiddish theater that were the equivalent of Univision. There never was a time when people got off the boat, immediately enrolled themselves in English-immersion classes, and gave birth to perfect little Anglo-Saxon children. It was always the case that linguistic, social, and economic integration was a complicated multigenerational process
Ezra Klein's take on the Kindle. I'll say this. I love gadgets and I like books and I don't really like carrying books around or go in for nostalgic reveries about the scent of paper on my fingertips. So basically, I'd like a Kindle. But at $399 it seems a bit pricey. Or, rather, at $399 the books should be cheaper. After all, distributing a digital text is way, way, way cheaper than than manufacturing, storing, and shipping a hardcover book.
But Amazon's selling a physical copy of Great American Hypocrites for $16.47 so you're only saving six bucks by buying the Kindle version. But at its best, the transition to digital media is all about volume -- subscription services like emusic (and of course illegal downloads) are what makes the iPod good.
I just took my first-ever ride in a meter-equipped DC cab. It wound up costing almost precisely what it would have cost under the old zone system. But if I'd want to travel a bit further, it would have cost marginally more. Similarly, if I'd wanted to take a slightly shorter trip, it would have cost slightly less money. Crazy idea.
Well, just for the record, it turns out that last year the library was transferred into the federal system and a new director, Tim Naftali of the University of Virginia, was named director. The old private foundation still controls a couple of buildings, but basically it's now a nonpartisan institution under federal control. Naftali told me that they're busily updating the displays and that Nixon's presidential papers, kept in Washington until now, will be shipped to California as soon as a new archive building is constructed. It is, one might say, the New Nixon Library.
If you read, say, this you'll get a sense of where Tim's coming from politically.
It's the biggest hack trick in the book, but my cab driver remarked as we cruised toward LAX that there'd been less congestion in Orange County recently. He attributed this to the high price of gasoline, and said that people were car pooling more on the way to work, having one friend pick up another en route to socializing rather than everyone taking separate vehicles, and even taking the bus (though he limited this option to "poor Latinos") in order to save money.
They say you should remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes" but in journalism school you learn that there's a cab driver exception to this rule. This is especially the case when cab-based anecdotes fit the writer's preconceived political views. Ergo, people actually have somewhat more flexibility in terms of how much they drive than is often realized. So let's hear it for higher gas taxes, and for Orange County to spend money building bike lanes and providing more frequent bus service.
I keep realizing I haven't mentioned the horrifying tragedy in Burma and then realizing I'm not sure what I could possibly say about the horrifying tragedy in Burma. But I suppose one thing to say is that, as is usually the case in these situation, you've got a natural disaster which is then compounded by bad, unaccountable government (sort of like Katrina amped-up by a few orders of magnitude) of the sort that really only an autocracy can bring you. It's a reminder that we should be fairly confident that, over the long haul, democratically governed nations can survive and prosper in ways that it's very difficult for dictatorships to do.
Just one more reminder about tonight's Nixon Library event for Heads in the Sand. I realize there are a lot of folks in L.A. proper for whom the time/location's no good but this is all I've got in terms of travel to the area (the terms of the trip are that I can't use the Nixon Library dime to come out west and then do events at other places) so try to come if you can.
Seriously, though, charter schools are great. Parents ought to have some diversity of options when considering where to send their kids to school, but the public money shouldn't be spent without a measure of public accountability and the charter school framework is a good way in which to accomplish that.
A reminder that tomorrow at 7:30 PM Pacific time, I'll be doing a Heads in the Sandevent at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Please come out if you can, since I can't coerce random friends into filling the room.
More on the District's unrelenting war on my house. Don't these guys know we were featured in the NYT Style section? We could have important taste-makers crush them like bugs.
It seems unfair for the city to refuse to pick up our garbage for several weeks and then to send an inspector around threatening to fine us for having too much garbage sitting outside the house. We live in the house and don't want the garbage to be there either.
Washington Postwrites up Color of Change and other activism-oriented African-American blogs. Much as with white activist bloggers, some of the dramatic rhetoric and transformational aspirations seems overblown, but I think the impact is very real and fundamentally positive.
David Sirota has a nice post up on book-related anxiety as a publication date becomes imminent. The good news, as I've discovered, is that either my book is universally beloved (unlikely, but if true perhaps not reassuring to other authors) or else that in general people who don't like one's book are too polite to say so (reassuring).
If you're going to use a gun in a crime, try to stay away from custom-made Belgian guns. The question becomes, how does this impact the Indiana primary? Is a custom-made Belgian gun beer-track because it's a gun, or wine-track because it's Belgian?
And, yes, I'm trying to avoid talking about the Wizards game.
One of the odder aspects of American punditry is what a bunch of shrinking violets a lot of my colleagues are -- it's an endlessly polite business and when some bloggers come on the scene with their name-calling everyone freaks out ("he said 'wanker!' I'm shocked"). Meanwhile, in the UK Martin O'Neil describes London's new Mayor:
As well as being a famous liar, Johnson has skirted the borders of criminality when it has suited his interests or those of his foul, larcenous and over-privileged friends. [...] Boris Johnson is not only shady, dishonest and incompetent. He is also a particularly offensive kind of clown, as is evidenced by his absurd litany of gaffes and insults. [...] Worst of all is Johnson’s casual racism, although it is perhaps not wholly surprising from someone of his class and background. [...] In any sane society, Boris Johnson would not be a plausible candidate for Mayor, even within the Conservative party.
I'm going to be doing a reading / talk / Q&A on Thursday, May 7 at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California at 7:30PM. My grasp of southern California geography is a little shaky, so I'm not really sure who that's convenient for and who it doesn't work for, but I'm not doing any other events in the area at this time so if you can make it please do. I think the folks who came out to Borders last night had a good time (maybe they'll chime in in comments and tell me I'm wrong).
UPDATE: Nixon library? Yeah, it does seem a bit weird. And yet, they asked me to come and so off I go.
Less annoying book-blogging in the future, but I do think it makes sense to remind folks that I'll be at the Borders at 18th and L in DC tonight at 6PM for some reading, talking, and signing.
Ilan Goldenberg, policy director at the National Security Network, has a very kind writeup of Heads in the Sand that expresses many of the book's core ideas and helps apply them to the current moment. I thought I also might link to Spencer Ackerman's two part live-blog (one, two) of Friday's CAP event and once again to the page for the FDL book salon where I've now added some new remarks.
If you don't bike at all for years and years, and then go buy a bike and ride 10+ miles a day for two days in a row, you wind up with very sore legs. I suppose if I'd thought this through I could have switched off the arc trainer in the gym and used the stationary bike instead to get prepared, but I'm not really big on thinking things through. So for now -- ouch!
I can tell from my Google Analytics that I actually have readers in the DC area who aren't people I know. Sometimes, I even meet one or two of you out at bars. So if you really do exist out there, reading this blog, you're probably eager to come to the first Heads in the Sand book debate this Friday at noon at the Center for American Progress. Beyond yours truly, some of the key leaders of the most influential new institutions thinking about the future of progressive national security policy -- namely CAP's Brian Katulis, National Security Network's Rand Beers, and the Center for a New American Security's Kurt Campbell -- are going to be on hand to explain why I'm wrong, so it should be a great event.
It's a showdown of epic proportions as Mayor Adrian Fenty is threatening to levy $1,000 fines on any DC cabs that don't shift to charging people via a meter, but with less than two weeks to go few drivers have installed meters. One friend of mine says he's seen a meter in a cab, but I haven't and nobody else I know seems to have seen one.
Looks like someone on John McCain's staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain's family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn't have any favorite recipes, it's not as if failing to include a "Cindy's recipes" section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.
In other news, Spike from Top Chef is opening a burger joint in DC even though his previous work has primarily been in the Vietnamese genre. That's really too bad, because you know what we could use here in DC? A Vietnamese restaurant! The city's extreme weakness in this category is made all the more galling by the presence of large numbers of Vietnamese people and delicious Vietnamese restaurants right near by in Seven Corners in Fairfax County, VA. I'm pretty sure one of the restaurants from the Eden Center could move to DC, double its prices, and do well for itself. Or Spike could open a Vietnamese restaurant. But someone's got to do something.
As talk resurfaces of a male birth control pill, Dana Goldstein asks " men out there: Would you take birth control pills if you knew they were safe and their effects were reversible? Would you trust yourself to remember to take them at the very same time every day?"
I say sure, why not, though it seems to me that most women are skeptical of the idea of offloading the responsibility to someone else, since a man can't promise to become pregnant if he screws up. But for me (and probably for most people) it would all come down to whether or not there are some terrible pill-related side effects.
I don't come into the office every day, but perhaps I should, for if I hadn't come in today I wouldn't have been turned on to the obscene URLs concept. Basically, some organizations have names that, while totally vanilla and inoffensive, don't translate well to the space-free domain of the URL. Consider, for example, Pen Island "the best pens on the internet" and available at penisland.net which if you, like me, have the emotional age of a twelve year-old will find hilarious.
Like Atrios, I recently concluded that while the professional blogger lifestyle affords many benefits, I was also driving myself crazy hunting for wifi networks I could hop on. The better alternative was to sign up for a Verizon wireless broadband account and get a nifty USB modem. The per month cost strikes me as more than would be worth paying for most people, but if Verizon wants to give me a corporate sponsorship and pick up the tab for mine I'm happy to revise my opinion on that and recommend that folks who don't blog for a living sign up as well.
It is a doomed office. No President and Vice President have trusted each other since Jackson and Van Buren. Mistrust is inherent in the relationship. The Vice President has only one serious thing to do: that is, to wait around for the President to die. This is hardly the basis for cordial and enduring friendships. Presidents see Vice Presidents as death's-heads at the feast, intolerable reminders of their own mortality. Vice Presidents, when they are men of ambition, suffer, consciously or unconsciously, the obverse emotion. Elbridge Gerry spoke with concern in the Constitutional Convention of the "close intimacy that must subsist between the President & vice-president." Gouverneur Morris commented acidly, "The vice president then will be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father."
It's interesting to me how conceptions of the Vice Presidency have changed over time. As we saw on John Adams last week, the first Vice President was not deeply involved in the counsels of George Washington's administration. He did, however, succeed Washington and become the second president. Then Jefferson and his party took power, and for a while succession ran to the Secretary of State with Madison succeeding Jefferson, Monroe succeeding Madison, and John Quincy Adams succeeding Monroe. This makes a certain kind of sense, since the SecState needed to be someone in whose abilities the president had a lot of confidence whereas the Vice President could be an expendable ticket-balancer.
But then in the second-half of the twentieth century we wound up with a lot of Vice Presidents who either became President or at least secured their party's presidential nomination -- Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Gerald Ford, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore -- which creates demand to try to pick a plausible president, and in the case of both Gore and Dick Cheney saw the Vice President emerge as an important member of the administration. But of course everyone hates Cheney now, so maybe we'll see a move back away from that. Certainly, I think most indications are that John Kerry picked John Edwards for VP despite a lack of personal rapport betweent hem.
Via Kathy G., Beverly Gage reminds us that Warren G. Harding was widely rumored to have had some black ancestry, thus -- if true -- making him the "first black president" by one drop rule standards. Of course, as Anthony Appiah has pointing out if we were to seriously try to apply this rule, we'd get some pretty odd results:
While most Americans understand this to mean that some African Americans will "look white," they mostly suppose that this phenomenon is rare in relation to the African American population as a whole. But in fact, it seems that very many -- perhaps even a majority -- of the Americans who are descended from African slaves "look white," are treated as white, and identify as such. To put the matter as paradoxically as possible: many people who are African American by the one-drop rule are, are regarded as, and regard themselves as, white.
The crux of the matter is that we have have a lot of ancestors once you start going four or five generations back. Under the circumstances, relatively small levels of interracial child-births generate a huge number of people with at least some black ancestry. And conversely, most black Americans have some white ancestors.
I have to say that I found this article about the stresses of being a full-time blogger a bit bizarre. Yes, it's true that I sometimes feel run a bit ragged by my job (and I've gone a few years without ever having a post-less day), but basically everyone feels that way about their job sometimes. And to me the most draining times are really those times when I've undertaken substantial work on top of the blog.
Most of all, to me having flexibility in my schedule is a great blessing compared to the conditions most people have to work under. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty good job and I consider myself pretty lucky.
Somewhat ironically, what I believe to be the first Heads in the Sand review is a James Kirchick piece in the City Journal. Not surprisingly, he's unconvinced by my arguments! I don't think it would make sense to respond in great detail, but one issue he raises does point to an issue worth elucidating:
He echoes Osama bin Laden when he argues that Islamist anger against the West is a justified response to foreign powers that “occupy Muslim land.” This is a bold assertion, and yet Yglesias doesn’t care to explore why Iran and Syria—countries where foreign soldiers haven’t set foot for decades—continue to be the two most active state sponsors of international terrorism.
I'm not quite sure why he's playing dumb here, but the crux of the disagreement is that I think the appropriate response to 9/11 is for the United States to engage the various instruments of American power against al-Qaeda. Iran and Syria have their own reasons of state for providing support to Hezbollah, thus earning the designation "the two most active state sponsors of international terrorism." But in terms of al-Qaeda this is all neither here nor there -- both Syria and Iran have, at various times, indicated an interest in collaborating with the United States against al-Qaeda.
Kirchick, following the prevailing conventional wisdom on the right, thinks we should eschew a narrow, focused, and efficacious assault on al-Qaeda in favor of a vaguely defined "war on terror" that includes sundry Muslims Behaving Badly including Saddam Hussein, the Assads, the Iranian, Hamas, Hezbollah, and whoever else you like. Which is fine if you think the past several years worth of blundering around have been a good idea and you're eager to see the United States follow John McCain's lead and start thrashing harder. But I don't think this constitutes a reasonable response to 9/11 or a sensible means of dealing with al-Qaeda. What's more, I think most of the hawks know that it doesn't make sense to most people, which is why they insist on using a lot of terminological funny business to obscure the move away from al-Qaeda and toward a wide variety of not-really-related other adversaries.
If you happen to be in Morgantown, West Virginia tonight (and why wouldn't you be?), you should come check out the star-studded panel discussion I'll be appearing on tonight -- Matt Yglesias! Ross Douthat! Terry Samuel! Abbi Taton! Ana Marie Cox! Philip de Velis! Mike Tomasky! It'll be a not-to-be-missed discussion of new media and the election.
I had written something very long and nonsensical about all this, but what I have to say boils down to this -- life is full of attachments and affections that aren't strictly rationally defensible and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, life would be terribly dull without such attachments. But what distinguishes the liberal's approach to his patriotism from, well, the wrong approach is that a liberal will recognize the contingency of it. Most people love the country where they were born and raised and think it's the finest in the world. Intelligent people don't lose that love, but they do recognize that, in fact, they love their country because they were born and raised there and not because it is, in fact, the finest in the world. That doesn't mean you stop loving your country, but it does mean that you open yourself up to other kinds of affections both bigger and smaller than "the nation" and also recognize that there's a circumscribed relevance to this sort of thing.
But a cosmopolitan in the real world doesn't become one by purging himself of particularist affections, rather he multiplies them and recognizes that others have affections of their own and that these sentiments are all owed a certain amount of respect and consideration.
Lurking behind really dogmatic professions of universalism, especially in the political arena, tends to be an especially rancid form of nationalistic hubris -- think of George W. Bush proclaiming that American interests and American ideals are one and the same and also completely congruent with the demands of the universal human yearning for freedom.
Via Paul Krugman, reports of a financial speculator attack on Iceland. You've got to figure that Iceland is almost uniquely vulnerable to this kind of thing. It's a rich country, but with a tiny population of only around 300,000 people that still left it with a 2006 PPP-adjusted GDP of just $12 billion. Under the circumstances, lots of individual people and institutions are rich enough to make huge waves in the Icelandic economy if they're so inclined.
Photo of Reykjavík by me, available under a Creative Commons license
I haven't really known what to say about this, but my maternal grandmother, Helen Yglesias, died early Friday morning. It's a sad thing to have happen, but she was an old woman (born in 1915), had been ailing, and went peacefully and comfortably after a full and successful life. Like my father and his father, she was a writer and published several novels after an unusually late debut in her fifties. Previously, she worked at literary editor at The Nation so you can see that the family is slowly moving right and selling out over time.
There are a couple of brief biographies available online for those who are interested here and here though of course it's always slightly bizarre to read a "professional" account of someone like your own grandmother who you came to know and love at an early age when you didn't know anything about this sort of thing. Nevertheless, she led a fairly inspiring life when you get right down to it, always committed to her passions.
From a Wikipedia article on Haiti: "Buteur took charge of the Cannibal Army and promptly renamed it the National Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti." That seems like a wise branding decision as it's hard to imagine a "Cannibal Army" having much appeal beyond its base.
Check out this last of America's largest urban areas ranked by weighted density. You'll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn't especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters -- if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we'd have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.
Noah Feldman says it's awesome but his article seems deeply confused to me for roughly the reasons Noah Millman points out. Feldman's running a lot of different ideas together, and getting too cute by half.
So apparently Hillary Clinton was "sleep-deprived" when she forgot that she'd never dodged sniper fire while running from a plane in Tuzla. All "misspoke" theories of the case seem to me to founder on the fact that the version of the story that got her caught was only the most extreme version of a narrative of danger she's mentioned repeatedly throughout the campaign. But maybe we have an explanation of her war vote -- maybe she was sleep-deprived when she authorized the war? Maybe she's been staying up all night studying the classified National Intelligence Estimate trying to get to the bottom of things? Well, okay, she wasn't doing that, but maybe it was something. Presumably her plan is to be well-rested during her freaky 3AM phone calls.
Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations is taking suggestions about future episodes. See Spencer Ackerman's video proposal for a trip to sample the culinary delights of Iraqi Kurdistan (video's not strictly appropriate for children). I'd watch that.
Bloggingheadsing with David Frum, Jacob Weisberg explains that there's almost no content to George W. Bush's understanding of his Christian faith:
Of course one might note that there's little real content to Bush's understanding of anything, so it's no surprise that he has a vacuous take on faith as well.
There's absolutely nothing in the world I find more baffling than the right's continuing critique of liberal bias in Google logo choices. Do I need to recommend some reading on free markets?
Elisabeth Bumiller does us all the service of focusing some attention on McCain's flirtations with becoming a Democrat, first in 2001 when considering switching parties to flip control of the Senate, and then in 2004 when considering running as VP on John Kerry's ticket. McCain naturally decided to sweep all this under the rug when he decided to hug Bush and start positioning himself to run as a Republican in 2008 but his staff was taking this stuff seriously by most accounts.
I think it's pretty clear that McCain's been less-than-totally honest about this stuff, but beyond that, what's the point? I'm not really sure what the point is, myself. On the one hand, to some extent it highlights McCain's unseriousness about the bulk of domestic policy issues that he's drifted around so much on those topics and was willing to consider basically jettisoning his entire record. But at the end of the day, he didn't do it and (especially in 2001) domestic issues were presumably at the center of that. He really does have a conservative record and a conservative self-conception, and wanted to stick with that.
Here's wishing an enjoyable holiday to the Christians in the audience! I find Peeps sort of bizarre, but I'm hoping to find myself some chocolate in a bunny shape later today.
Several good points came up in comments on the Starbucks/Dunkin' Donuts thread, including the point that Starbucks isn't really much of a pointy-headed elitist choice (try an independent shop!) and the fact that Hillary Clinton's base among old women probably doesn't drink a ton of takeout coffee of any sort,
For quite some time now a very large parcel of land between 9th street, 11th street, New York Avenue, and H Street where the city's former convention center used to stand has stood essentially vacant as an open-air parking lot in the middle of the city. Naturally, I've more than once wondered what, if anything, is supposed to go there. And now we know. The project looks pretty cool, though it does seem that skybridges are a bad ideas.
What's the deal with "basis points"? Like if the Fed lowers interest rates from 4.5% to 4.25% why is that called a cut of 25 "basis points" instead of percentage points?
I'm gonna be on Fox News at 5:20 PM Eastern tomorrow to talk about the Michigan/Florida delegations controversy and how its existence proves that Democrats are craven appeasers who want terrorists to devour your children.
Some further notes on the perennially controversial issue of pizza:
Whatever an NYC pizza lover may say in virtue of my hometown's best pies, there's also no denying that NYC has a staggering quantity of terrible by-the-slice outlets. Meanwhile, one should not overlook the fact that New York's Italian-American population has largely decamped to the suburbs at this point and brought a lot of good pizza with them (I would guess that Rhode Island, which is filled with the right kind of people, has good pizza, but I've never had the chance to test this theory out).
By the same token, while Ezra Klein is right to note that some good pizza is now available in DC, it tends to be a very different kettle of fish -- more "gourmet," less rooted kind of thing -- largely owing to the district's lack of Italian-American heritage.
Last, one shouldn't neglect the fact that the pizza in Italy seemed better to me than the pizza here; I was going to random places without any real insight or know-how and stumbling across tons of great pies. In general, there are better ingredients available in Europe, but cheaper labor available in the U.S. so we do well with really labor-intensive foods but pizza is much closer to the ingredients side of the scale.
Via Jonathan Kulick, The Mail On Sunday reports that "Finnish Minister admits sending 200 dirty texts to erotic dancer from taxpayer-funded phone". It looks, however, like the minister in question is going to be alright, since "Though some MPs have voiced their displeasure at the latest scandal, the chairman of Kanerva's National Coalition Party said merely that if the story was true, he hoped Kanerva would use more consideration in the future." Meanwhile:
Earlier this month Finland's prime minister, who accused his former lover of hurting his feelings by writing a steamy kiss-and-tell account of their relationship, lost a court case over the book but unexpectedly gained popularity. Matti Vanhanen, 52, prime minister since 2003, has been enjoying a wave of support since the disclosure that he likes to take a sauna before sex and enjoys his favourite meal of beef and baked potatoes afterward.
Do we think that's really as steamy as the book gets? Unfortunately, I assume there won't be an English translation.
That said, annual family income is a pretty crude metric of people's financial situation. The bottom end of the income distribution chart includes a lot of retired people, who aren't necessarily poor in any intuitive sense. Down there at the bottom you've also got a certain number of students and people in apprentice-like jobs (entry-level positions at political magazines) that they're expected to quickly transition out of. As a result, while $88,000 a year is good enough to put you in the top twenty percent, it's not nearly good enough to put you in the top twenty percent of real grownups (say, people over 25) who have full-time jobs. And of course wealth matters here as well. There's a difference between someone earning $88,000 a year and someone who's the beneficiary of a trust fund that pays out $88,000 a year. There's also a difference between earning $88,000 a year free and clear and earning $88,000 a year while trying to pay off college and law school debts.
The creative class strikes again on behalf of Barack Obama:
As I've said before, I think hip, with-it irony is a losing strategy and the Clinton campaign's avalanch of lameness is about where the median voter is.
Talk of bloggers who don't like to use the phone naturally brings to mind Jonathan Rauch's article on introverts, which is a perennial Atlantic web hit since there are so damn many introverts on the internet. Still, I don't really understand why being somewhat introverted would make me especially adverse to talking to people on the phone -- I think I'm really pretty outgoing face-to-face at this point.
I think it's obvious that if you look at the Clinton-Obama primary, race has been an important determinant of voting behavior. Working class blacks and working class whites have voted in such radically different ways that it's clear that both candidates are securing a substantial racial solidarity vote. Since there are more whites than blacks in most Democratic primaries, racial tensions are, on balance, an advantage for Clinton. But Orlando Patterson's suggestion that the Clinton campaign's 3 AM ad was part of a crypto-racist ploy seems beneath the dignity of an important scholar. This was run of the mill fearmongering, reflecting Clinton's ideas about the politics of foreign policy.
Frankly, I think a lot of the charges of racism against the Clinton campaign have been overstated. Where they've been guilty, I think, is that in their characterization of primary results they've tended to act as if black people just don't exist in the United States so Obama supporters are all highly-educated latte-sipping intellectuals or rich caucus-goers and states with too many black residents "don't count." Speaking merely even as a white person living in a majority black jurisdiction, this is an absurd and offensive way of looking at the world. But the ad's a pretty banal, if disreputable, attack on Obama's liberal approach to foreign policy and not really anything to do with race.
UPDATE: Anti-Clinton charges that I think are overstated, I should say, do not include charges that Geraldine Ferraro is being an ass and wrecking her reputation.
After my remarks on the evils of the telephone it started to seem that everyone who's anyone in the blogosphere hates phone calls. But now we learn the truth -- Ezra Klein loves talking on the phone. He, in short, is the person who keeps this horrible advice in business. If we could just kill him off, then we'd all live happily ever after with SMS-sending devices in our pockets. Maybe he's got Skype shares or something?
I picked up Transit Maps of the World yesterday and have been enjoying browsing through it. Basically, it's a book of transit maps from all around the world! The book goes city-by-city and covers both large and small systems and mixes maps with text which describes both the history of the system and the history of efforts to graphically depict the system.
Normally people will probably find this book extremely dull and weird, but it makes an ideal gift for the transit enthusiast in your life. Obviously, buying copies of Heads in the Sand for everyone you know should be a higher priority, but the right kind of person (i.e., me) will love Transit Maps.
Megan Hustan bemoans the decline of the phone call as a tool of business. Apparently she learned vital skills while eavesdropping and first made a mark for herself as a placer-of-phone-calls for her boss. Personally, I couldn't be more thrilled with the phone's decline. I used to be painfully shy as a person, and while I've largely gotten over that IRL I still find it incredibly stressful to talk to people on the phone.
Instead, I email. I SMS. I blog. I Twitter. I write on Facebook wall pages. I use IM and GChat constantly. Anything but the phone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, and in the years to come we phone-haters will inherit the earth. I call it progress.
StrangeMaps has a fantastic graphic by Stephanie Gray outlining the area codes in which Ludacris claims to have hoes in his 2001 hit "Area Codes." He's very popular in the northeast corridor and also select West Coast metropolises, plus a significant swathe of the south.
You can tell that I've officially jumped the shark, since there's an article in The New York Times Style section about how my roommates and I all have blogs and are friends with other political bloggers. The good news is that while I was afraid intrepid reporter Ashley Parker would try to compensate for the fact that we're not very interesting by being really mean, she seems to have resisted the temptation. Plus, I really like the photo Michael Temchine took that I stole above and they used with the article. Do people care about this stuff? Probably someone does, and whoever that is probably isn't you, the kind of person who's reading blogs on a Sunday. Instead, you, my readers, are going to make fun of me.
And that's fine. Mock all you like. But if you don't pre-order a copy of Heads in the Sand, I'll cry.
There are several gyms available for use by Harvard students. It seems that one of them is now a bit special:
Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men.
I'd need to think a bit more about it before I was sure whether or not this was a reasonable accommodation to make to the needs of Muslim students, but I'm positive I'd think a bit more about it before I went and wrote something like Andrew's post titled "Sharia at Harvard":
They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What's next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.
Suppose I were to inform Andrew that Harvard, like all American institutions of higher education of which I'm aware, shuts down and creates a holiday in late December that just so happens to coincide with an important familial and religious observance for Christians whereas no such allowance is made for Passover visits. Christianism? Worse, it happens in public high schools and elementary schools all across the country, the very same country in which no mail can be delivered on Sunday! Meanwhile, when I was a student at Harvard there was a ban on having anything on fire in a dorm room and also a movement to create an exemption so that Jewish students could light Hanukkah candles. I don't recall whether or not the exemption was granted, but if it was that certainly wouldn't constitute the dawning of a new era of Jewish theocratic rule at the university. I know for a fact that they allow students to reschedule exams for religious reasons, like a Jewish or Muslim obligation to avoid taking an exam on a Saturday (no exams are scheduled on Sundays).
There's a range of things one can think about these policies. The preferential treatment granted by public institutions to Christmas rankles, but given the vast number of Christmas-celebrators in the country it's also inevitable and practical. The "no mail on Sundays" thing is poor public policy and obviously has religious origins of a sort, but it's hardly some intolerable burden on minorities, it's just bad public policy. Letting people reschedule exams for religious reasons, but not just because they happen to feel like taking them in some other order, seems like an eminently fair and practical way of dealing with the situation. New York City public schools make the Jewish High Holy Days a day off, due to the city's large Jewish population, most other jurisdictions don't do that but will look the other way if Jewish kids don't show up -- reasonable responses to the objective situation in both cases.
Finding a way to accommodate observant Muslims' concerns about co-ed workouts, in short, is hardly some per se outrageous violation of a strict U.S. tradition of secularism. Is the particular way they've done this unduly burdensome? I think to say whether or not it is you'd need to look at the situation and the available alternatives in some detail.
Overheard at a local coffee shop: "seventh street is the new eleventh street." I would have said that ninth street is the new fourteenth street, since eleventh is kind of nothing. Oh well.
I love that The Washington Post's editorial response to people being pissed that they ran an article about how women are stupid was to slightly tweak the online teaser to make it a piece about why women "act so dumb." Also, it's now a tongue in cheek piece of woman-bashing by a professional anti-feminist. "Tongue in cheek," it seems, is newspeak for "poorly reasoned."
Yesterday, Canadian television reported that Obama advisors were telling Canada's ambassador in Washington not to take the candidate's NAFTA rhetoric too seriously. Now what really seems to have happened is that Austan Goolsbee tried to get someone from the Canadian consulate in Chicago to be a bit less worried about Obama. Whatever the details, this kind of ambiguous messaging is likely to recur time and again.
I recall being at a meeting in Cambridge, MA around the time of the 2004 Democratic Convention where John Kerry's top economic and foreign policy advisors were essentially promising a group of assembled ambassadors that all of his anti-trade rhetoric was just empty rhetoric. This seemed like a typically Kerryish thing to have happen, but it would serve Obama may to try to avoid the same kind of thing repeating.
One occupational hazard of punditry and blogging is being accused of being "in the tank" for someone or other. Another, of course, is actually being in the tank in question. But where does that phrase come from? What kind of tank? Julian Sanchez explores.
It's the ultimate credit card infographic over at Foreign Policy magazine. South Korea's surge of credit card debt is intriguing, I'd like to know more about what the deal is with that.
Molly Young has a worthwhile essay on n + 1's website about her use of Adderral as a performance enhancing study drug in college. It's something I tried a few times, both as she describes and as a recreational drug, back in the day but I found its effects to be pretty mild. The big plus side is that if I tried to pull all nighters based on drinking coffee or Diet Coke, I would eventually get shaky and feel a bit ill, whereas on Adderral I could really keep plugging along. It's not, however, something I really ever had great occasion to use.
Some people, though, clearly experience great effects and it does raise some questions. Do we really want to create a situation where some students may feel that they have to abuse prescription drugs to stay competitive in school? Then again, if there's a pill out there that's safe to take and helps kids learn a bunch of stuff, doesn't it seem like we should be prescribing more of it? I'd want to know more about what the real medical affects of taking the stuff before I made any kind of judgment. I will say that I was a bit shocked to hear about some of the younger faculty using it to help get their work done, but even though at the moment Adderral seems to mainly be a vice of college students there's no particular reason it couldn't be useful (in good ways or bad) for a much wider range of people.
My old boss Mike Tomasky has an excellent review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that does a good job of getting to the book's main salient qualities -- it's tediousness, it's habit of announcing widely-known facts as if they were shocking discoveries, and Goldberg's failure to argue from any identifiably coherent perspective ("Why isn't he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn't fascist?"), etc.
Barack Obama says that immigration policy needs to prevent "people with Spanish surnames from being discriminated against." Quite so. Nobody should discriminate against me!
I normally don't trust other "Matt"s, but Matt Wright took one of my favorite pictures of me, so in my view his relaunched photo blog definitely deserves a link. But more important than any of that, he's also the man who took the most politically relevant photo of the month:
Let me join Steve Clemons in congratulating Joseph Cirincione on his new gig as the president of the Ploughshares Fund. Joe's been doing vital work at the Carnegie Endowment, the Center for American Progress, and the New American Foundation on nuclear proliferation issues and and will doubtless continue to do so in his new role. Cirincione's January 2006 article on the absence of a viable military option as a tool of non-proliferation policy is, in my view, one of the very most important things that's been published thus far this century.
Identical twins are not, of course, literally identical, but now it seems that they aren't genetically identical either thanks to "tiny differences" that are "relatively common" and "could have a major impact on our understanding of genetically determined disorders." I suppose, then, that we ought to just call them "very similar twins" which somehow or other reminds me that I haven't had a look at Reasons and Persons in a while.
The fact of the matter is that my origin story is tweaked, but only slightly. The major difference in the Ultimate Yglesias continuity concerns my rogue's gallery. Ultimate Jonah Goldberg, for example, isn't a nepotism hire at all, but rather a 100,000 mile long swarm of robotic drones that threatens to destroy all life on earth. It's true to the spirit of the original, but also a pretty bold re-imagining that keeps things interesting even for old-time fans.
Reacting to a story on the opening of a vegan strip club in Portland, Oregon Ann Friedman remarks:
This is definitely part of a trend -- startingwithPETAads -- in which women's bodies are used as a way of promoting veganism and vegetarianism. There's also L.A.'s Vegan Vixens, "sexy, trendy and fun loving women whose goal is to inspire men to live a longer and happier life, by making healthier decisions on what they consume." And now the vegan strip club.
One common thread here is that all of these efforts are aimed at making veganism appealing to men. The Maxim-like PETA ads, the Vegan Vixens, the strip club: All are saying it's okay to buck the stereotype of Real Men Eat Red Meat, because here are some naked ladies to reassure you that you're still a superhetero manly man! Almost as if they're saying, you won't even miss eating meat, because you'll get to look at so much of it! Or as Diablo puts it, “We put the meat on the pole, not on the plate.” It's a substitution. This trend seems to confirm much of what Carol Adams observed in the Sexual Politics of Meat -- and then turn it on its head.
I think this misreads the vegan strip club concept. Strip clubs in general aren't in the business of using sex to sell booze and food, they're using sex to sell sex. The vegan strip club isn't using strippers to sell veganism, it's using veganism to sell stripping to Portland-area guys with self-conceptions as liberal nice guys. After all, food quality is probably not a significant factor in strip club marketing.
I try to keep a very light hand with the comments section on this blog, but if I see folks (and, yes, SLC, this means you) persisting in using the term "raghead" or other ethnic slurs I may need to do something about it. Please knock it off.
Time reports that the popularity of the goatee in the 1990s was "partof a backlash to feminism". Seems like an odd interpretation. Indeed, the timing doesn't even make sense. Time for a blogger ethics panel?
My colleague Marc Ambinder has been nominated for a Golden Dot Award in the best political coverage category. You should vote for the man, he does great work.
David Carr has an excellent analysis of the ambiguous nature of the resolution of the writer's the strike. The Guild wrung concessions out of the studios, which is definitely a win, and they secured the key points of principle, so it superficially looks like a big win, but when you bore down to the details the didn't acquire a great deal of concrete significance.
These coconut-flavored (a bizarre choice in itself considering the available alternatives in Afghanistan: cardamom, raisin, almond, yak… ) balls are sold in purple boxes (not to be confused with Purple Heart boxes) and feature Bin Laden’s bearded mug preaching peace and enlightenment among tanks, warplanes and cruise missiles. Delicious, and now available for the Olympics, too. Get them while stocks last.
I don't personally go in for coconuts, but tastes differ.
Just to piss Ross off, I acquired some CFL bulbs yesterday at Target and installed them. The light they emit looks, um, totally fine to me. Congressional action to ban incandescent bulbs does, however, strike me as at least somewhat unfortunate insofar as they've now made it inevitable that claiming to be able to detect a major difference between CFL light and traditional bulbs is now going to become a point of pride for conservatives across the country. Once again, the best thing to do would be to put a price and carbon and let people work out the best adjustments on their own rather than trying to mandate specific technological solutions.
A little slice of the changing face of the United States, as Northern Virginia's Vietnamese community celebrates Tet in a strip mall parking lot. The unassuming Eden Center features a great Asian supermarket, but several excellent ban mi shops and sit-down Vietnamese restaurants. For the purposes of the holiday, the mall was festooned with Republic of Vietnam flags.
So I'm contemplating trying to do some podcast interviews as part of the Atlantic's ever-growing commitment to multimedia. Basically, I'd talk to someone, record the conversation, and then you could listen to us talking. Is that something there'd be any interest in? Are there (plausible) interview candidates you'd be interested in hearing from?
This 1943 article offering tips on how to manage female employees for business driven by WWII exigencies to expand their labor pool is pretty hilarious. Among other things, you've got to stay away from the skinny ones:
3. While there are exceptions, of course, to this rule, general experience indicates that "husky" girls – those who are just a little on the heavy side – are likely to be more even-tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.
It's always striking to be reminded that though the pace of change often feels frustrating slow when you're working for it, an incredibly amount of progress has actually been made thus far during the lifetimes of the older people alive today.
DFW airport appears to have discovered an as-yet-unknown-to-me way of making air travel unpleasant -- there are no electrical outlets anywhere. At first, I'd thought this was just a particular instance of the common airport phenomenon of insufficient outlets. But no -- there are these power charging stations where you can pay money and charge up your iPod, cell phone, laptop, whatever. Nice work. It makes you wonder why they let you use the restrooms for free. Both in the airport and on the plane, that's a potentially lucrative profit center.
I don't imagine there are many people leaving Arizona on this fine Super Bowl Sunday, but I'm one of the few. If I don't miss my connection in Dallas, I should even get home in time for the game. Unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling that God hates me and I'll miss my connection.
I hadn't heard about this before, but apparently it's all the rage in some conservative circles to refer to John McCain as "Juan McCain." It's Glenn Beck, but it's not just Beck by any means. The idea, it seems, is that to call someone a Spanish name is a witty and cutting insult. After all, he likes immigrants.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans have Spanish names. You can meet us in your neighborhoods or even read our blogs. It's sad to think someone somewhere might be calling Matt Church by my name as some kind of diss.
I'm traveling today to a Liberty Fund conference. Bloggy goodness should continue throughout the day, but I may wind up a bit off the news if something important happens. Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman reports that security is re-deteriorating in Iraq according to "Iraq security statistics over the past 13 weeks, obtained exclusively by The Washington Independent."
I stand by my pregame predictions. The thing about patenting human life was odd. I'm concerned that human-animal hybrids using steroids may have taken over Mars already. We need to get that manned mission going, pronto.
I'd like to note that not only is The Washington Independent generously providing me with beer, pizza, and a place to watch the State of the Union, but its launch today is the most exciting event in journalism since The Atlantic started hiring bloggers.
See their blog here. Or a good Holly Yeager article here.
I was looking at my Flickr page and I remembered that I'd snapped this photo fully intending to blog about it back months ago whenever I was in Amsterdam but then forgot. Nevertheless, the point still stands that there's a bar called Cheers in Amsterdam still trying to secure customers on the basis of an American sitcom that's been off the air for over a decade. Meanwhile, and perhaps relatedly, for some reason the in-flight entertainment on my flight involved a Cheers episode.
Tyler Cowen marvels at the popularity of Tide and wonders "Is Tide so good? Does Tide really 'know fabric best'?" My eighth grade science project actually involved comparing different brands of laundry detergent and while I don't recall the details, the conclusion was that Tide was, in fact, superior to the then-available alternatives. Things may have changed since then, however.
Are men smarter than women? No. But they sure think they are. An analysis of some 30 studies by British researcher Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London, shows that men and women are fairly equal overall in terms of IQ. But women, it seems, underestimate their own candlepower (and that of women in general), while men overestimate theirs.
Of course I myself am far too smart to fall into any such patterns of misestimation.
I went to the Washington Auto Show last night which I was expecting to be interesting but wasn't. It did, however, get me thinking about cars. Specifically taxis. Specifically, why don't I see more hybrids being used as cabs. A hybrid is more expensive than a conventional car, but it uses less fuel which saves you money. Thus if you drive a lot, a hybrid can save you money. And what kind of car puts on more miles than a taxi? Plus, they're mostly city miles where hybrids are super-duper efficient. Or maybe there are Prius cabs all over the country and DC's just behind the curve.
The next very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made before with such care or in such detail is ready to hit the shelves soon:
He also wheels out the novel claim that he's being attacked because he's "hit something real," a defensive gesture I'll be sure to remember when my new project, Freemasons Rule the World, hits bookstores next month. I expect to take some knocks for my argument -- which essentially exposes the fact that Freemasons control the world -- but I'm pretty sure my anti-Masonic friends will understand that I'm actually making a very cautious, thoughtful argument. In spite of what the title suggests -- it comes from an episode of The Simpsons, an allusion my Masonic critics are bound to miss -- I don't argue that contemporary Freemasons actually control the world. Instead, I'm interested in the ways that important Freemasons around the world exert control over lots of things that are in the world, like governments, the global economy, science, and those sorts of things. It's a work of political theory.
Sounds provocative! (I actually live near a Masonic temple on 10th and U which a few months ago started renting out its first floor to CVS, a company that I think really might control the world)
When I was over in the Netherlands I caught wind of this big controversy about whether or not to cut down this big tree near the Anne Frank house that's mentioned in her diaries but that's become a threat to the structure. In a small country without a lot of really big social problems, public controversy seemed to consist of fighting about immigration and then fighting about the tree. But now the spirit of compromise has prevailed with regard to the tree: "city authorities, residents, the Anne Frank museum and conservationists said they had agreed to build a frame around the 150-year-old tree before the end of May."
Immigration, though, I imagine will stay controversial.
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or. unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides-and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.
I feel as if the issue of King's commitment to non-violence tends to get obscured on these occasions. How many politicians who pay homage to King today will tomorrow be preaching the necessity of keeping preventive war "on the table" as a tool of non-proliferation policy?
Are people aware of this gesture? It's apparently a hand gesture the kids make these days during an awkward moment. Here's an example of the awkward turtle in action:
Each year, the disease kills about 55,000 people — that’s 150 a day — almost all of them in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia, and more than 7 million people receive post-exposure treatment after being bitten by a rabid animal. Treatment is not just expensive, but time-consuming: a full course of vaccination requires five visits to a hospital or health clinic during one month. Which, if you live in rural Africa, can mean many hours of travel and time not working. Indeed, the global economic cost of rabies is estimated to be more than $583 million. And that doesn’t count the trauma that deaths from rabies inflict on families and communities. For though rabies kills many fewer people than malaria, it causes far, far more fear.
Olivia Judson says the good news is that "Rabies could be eliminated in as little as five years" if we were willing to commit the resources. And, indeed, we should. One unfortunate consequence of the "aid doesn't work" literature is that it's tended to obscure the fact that even if aid doesn't produce economic growth (and I think this claim is overstated), public health aid most certainly does save lives. People used to die of smallpox and now they don't. 150 people die of rabies every day, and if we took action to stop that, that would be "working" in my book.
The courts have ruled that the at-large caucus sites for shift workers in casinos on the Vegas strip are legal. The Clinton team's nominal complaint that this procedure still makes it very difficult for other shift workers to vote is accurate, but of course their proposed remedy of making it harder for casino workers to vote is no remedy at all. Caucuses are, in general, an abomination but working to make them even less democratic doesn't help anything.
Neil Sinhababu brings the funny as we get to ask the GOP Presidential contenders "which Buffy villain are you?" Romney as "The Mayor" seems particularly apt.
Via "d" at Lawyers, Guns, and Money check out this bizarre comic book put together by George Wallace during one of his campaigns to be governor of Alabama. It's fascinating how casually his steadfast white supremacy is wound into a general populist appeal that's all about job creation and the need to boost pensions.
The panhandle of Idaho is geographically isolated from the rest of the state by lots of wilderness. Up there, they have a lot of activity with the cities on the Washington side of the border, like Spokane. It's a pain in the ass to change time zones everytime someone in Coeur D'Alene has to run over to Spokane to do some shopping.
And, indeed, as illustrated above there's an interstate link going from Coeur D'Alene into Washington, while the north-south road links aren't nearly as good. Thus, the northern bit of the state is more closely integrated with parts of Washington than with southern Idaho. You learn something new every day as a blogger.
Tonight's Michigan primary raises an important question in the eyes of the east coast media elite -- what time zone is Michigan in? As we see above, despite its alleged Midwest status, Michigan is an eastern time zone state. Meanwhile, check out this business along the border between Idaho, Oregon, and Washington -- why doesn't the time zone line just correspond to the border?
I sometimes find myself disturbed by how, um, boring and banal my dreams tend to be. Under the circumstances, I was glad to learn that it's actually common to dream about your job as I've certainly had my fair share of dreams about blogging.
So Dana Goldstein went and read the Wesley Yang essay on "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" in N + 1 that I recommended so highly earlier and came away with some criticisms. Or, rather, she came across a somewhat ambiguous passage which, if you construe one way, seems to be making an objectionable claim. When I read that part, I assumed that that wasn't what Yang was trying to say since, as Dana argues, that wouldn't be a very smart thing to say.
In general, I think it's usually wise to be generous in your interpretation of other people's arguments when they don't have some kind of bad track record or something. At any rate, Yang himself jumps into the comment thread and says what I would have expected him to say -- that's not what he meant, and the essay isn't really about why Seung-Hui Cho become a mass murderer at all. Rather, it's about looking into the face of a mass murderer and seeing and exploring character traits that are much more widespread.
Yesterday, Andrew was fretting about the turn toward a focus on identity politics in the presidential campaign:
Some cultural identification is inevitable in America, and not the worst thing in the world. What's worrying is when candidates do not just accept this, but seek to exploit it directly. Huckabee's appeal to Christianists is the most troubling; but Clinton's on gender grounds is not that much better. So far, Obama's campaign has resisted crude racial appeals, but this has seemed to unravel a bit in the wake of the Clintons' rhetorical slips this past week. Less is more, on this front. Or we begin to lose the capacity to see ourselves as equal participants in a democracy, rather than interest groups fighting for what's and who's ours.
I believe things are different in the UK, but it's worth saying that American politics has typically been more structured around issues of identity than around issues or ideology. In northeastern urban areas, for example, Italian-Americans have traditionally been Republicans for no better reason than that Irish-Americans have traditionally been Democrats. Similarly, white protestants were Republicans because Catholics were Democrats (except for the Italians) but southern white protestants were Democrats because Abe Lincoln was a Republican.
I tend to agree that this tradition hasn't been the most admirable element of the American political system, but parties organized around clumsy ethno-sectarian coalitions are the practical alternative to the much-bemoaned partisan polarization of the present day. On the Democratic side, the candidates have allowed almost no ideological daylight to shine between them, so you get identity-based coalitions. On the GOP side there are bigger ideological differences so the voters aren't breaking down as strictly along demographic lines. Even here, though, each Republican is presenting himself as the One True Reagan Conservative instead of explicitly self-identifying as representing an ideological sub-sect.
Ever since I found out about the ridiculous Apple RAM overcharges, I've become slightly obsessed. I'm not sure, for example, what you would really want 32 gigs of RAM in your MacBook Pro for, but Apple will do the job for $9,100 (that's the price of the RAM alone, the computer costs more) but you could buy the same thing over here for $2,749. That's a jaw-dropping price differential.
The fascinating thing about this invitation to come bribe Rep. Al Wynn (D-MD) is that while AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and TimeWarner Cable all have PACs, Verizon has a "Good Government Committee." Truly they're on the Orwellian frontier here, the rest of the telecom industry risks being left in the dust.
Iranian authorities appear to be presiding over a surge of brutality, with hangings way up over the past several years. Meanwhile, "human rights groups in Iran expressed shock after judicial authorities disclosed they had amputated the left feet and right hands of five criminals convicted of armed robbery in the southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan." Optimistically, one can perhaps view this kind of activity as reflecting a regime that knows it's in crisis.
Reihan Salam raved about this essay in the new n + 1 and rightly so. It's by far the best thing I've read in a good long while. I don't really want to tease it beyond that; you should go and buy a copy of the magazine, it contains other good stuff and they deserve your support.
Spencer Ackerman's noted that somehow in the course of composing his tome You're a Fascist: Nanny-nanny boo-boo, Jonah Goldberg managed to become a pretty serious apologist for Mussolini. And now here on his brand new "liberal fascism" blog we see the same thing. He means to argue that Mussolini, Hitler, and Vladimir Putin all admirered FDR and that therefore FDR was a fascist, but he can't help but get himself tied up with the idea "that Mussolini was the first world leader to stand-up to Nazi aggression" and some bemoaning of the fact that many of the pro-Mussolini segments of his book got left on the cutting room floor.
Now we shouldn't find this surprising since, as Jeet Heer has observed, National Review were Goldberg works has a long history of admiration for fascist political movements. But of course this is why people associate fascism with the political right. Jonah Goldberg, American conservative, thinks Mussolini, fascist, gets a bad rap just as his predecessors at NR used to pen paens to Franco.
The world often seems awash in people with hazily-defined "consultant" jobs of various sorts, so I was fascinated to read this (emphasis added) in Tyler Cowen's review of Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day:
His, subject, too has moved on. J.T. grew tired of running a gang, particularly when the crack trade dried up and with it a lot of the business. He tried managing a dry cleaning business and then started a barber shop, which failed. For a while, he tried to market himself as a consultant for higher-ups in the drug economy. Right now he seems to be living off his savings. The two men see each other every now and then, but they don't seem to have established their previous rapport.
It's interesting that it didn't work out. I wonder if that was due to some specific failure on J.T.'s part or if the world of drug distribution just shows an admirable ability to resist the consultantification that's sweeping over the rest of the economy.
Am I totally crazy, or has the Bush administration's "surge" policy in Iraq produced a surge in the use of the term "surge" in America? I feel like every time a candidate's polling number start improving these days, we say he's "surging." Was that always the word in vogue? It's common, of course, for war to impact the language -- "shell shocked," etc. -- but I'd always hoped "shock and awe" would be Iraq War Deux's distinctive contribution to the American lexicon.
Andrew Olmsted whose blogging you, like me, may have followed at Obsidian Wings and elsewhere has died in Iraq. Deepest condolences to his friends and family. For commenters, please try to respect his wishes regarding not using this as fodder for political arguments.
Apple's Mighty Mouse. I've been a laptop user for so long that the whole idea of mouse use is somewhat unfamiliar. But thanks to Bluetooth, you can now get a wireless mouse that's simple to carry around in your bag and use when appropriate. What's more, after years of resisting the whole two button mouse concept, Apple's gone and developed the most elegant implementation of it out there. Unfortunately, they seem disinclined to brag about this since that might entail admitting that they were wrong on the utility of the second button, so you actually need to go into the system preferences and change one of the default settings to enable the right button functionality.
Also recommended: Third party RAM. Someone pointed out to me a little while back ago that RAM's not nearly as expensive as I thought -- Apple's just wildly overcharging people for it. And they're not even wildly overcharging for some kind of double super-secret proprietary RAM -- you can buy stuff that plugs right into your computer all over the internet with ease. It's just a pure price discrimination scheme: don't be a victim, but also don't be running your computer without enough RAM.
I'm not, of course, actually at my computer blogging right now. Rather, I'm getting drunk at a party and this is a prescheduled post. What are you doing?
Via Robert Farley, a brilliant 1863 editorial by The New York Times on what they mistakenly believed to be the occassion of John C. Breckenridge's death. First sentence: "If it be true, as is now positively declared, that a loyal bullet has sent this traitor to eternity, every loyal heart will feel satisfaction and will not scruple to express it."
Last year, after two failed attempts earlier in life, I decided to quit smoking as my New Year's resolution. I was a pretty heavy smoker, picked it up when I was sixteen, did about a pack a day through college, and then stepped it up to more like a pack and a half a day plus some more on top of that on heavy partying nights after I graduated. Thus far, I've been totally on the wagon, smoke free since around 4AM on 1 January 2007.
Ryan Avent says that if I hate political prediction markets so much, why don't I bet on them and make a bunch of money. Well, I don't do that because it seems to me that it would call my professional work into question. I don't want it to be the case that if I say stuff about the candidates I get accused of trying to juice my contracts.
The Baby Name Wizard NameVoyager is one of those things I start playing around with obsessively for a few hours and then completely forget for months. But Dana Goldstein's brought it back to my attention, using her own name to create this chart which illustrates the phenomenon of name sex changes where a name starts androgynous but then reaches a tipping point of girlishness and falls into disuse as a boy's name.
Andrew links to S.L. Price's Sports Illustrated account of playing basketball with Barack Obama. By the time Price took him on, though, Obama was already a presidential candidate. For real fake insights, what you want is Marshall Poe's recollections of playing against Obama in the late 1980s.
One hears from a lot of secular people worries that the country is plunging over the edge into theocracy. At the same time, the press often seems to feel that the country is experiencing a massive religious revival that it needs to cover by hiring new "religion" correspondents. The truth, as shown in the above chart based on National Election Survey data, is more like the reverse -- more people than ever say "other" or "none" when asked about their religious beliefs.
It's this, rather than an intensification in fervor, that's made it possible to mobilize conservative Christianity for political purposes. Back in 1960 there were so few avowedly irreligious people out there that trying to rally opposition to the perils of secularism was a non-starter.
I just realized that Google Reader has a "recommendations" function whereby Google makes suggests of new feeds "generated by comparing your interests with the feeds of users similar to you." Their number one recommendation is . . . my blog. Basically, I have the reading habits typical of someone who would read my blog. Which makes sense, of course, but still seems a bit odd.
Charles Murray loves Liberal Fascism: "'It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion,’ Jonah Goldberg writes near the beginning of Liberal Fascism. My first reaction was that he is engaging in partisan hyperbole. That turned out to be wrong. Liberal Fascism is nothing less than a portrait of 20th-century political history as seen through a new prism. It will affect the way I think about that history--and about the trajectory of today’s politics--forever after."
As everyone knows, American Jews celebrate Christmas with a meal composed of the North American Ashkenazi Diaspora's traditional cuisine, Chinese-American food. Thus, Jeff Weintraub directs our attention to two key documents. One, Brandon Walker, "Chinese Food on Christmas":
I'll be celebrating by watching the NBA doubleheader, going to Chinatown Express, and watching Alien Versus Predator: Requiem. And, probably, writing more blog posts. The rest of you do whatever it is y'all do....
I'll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I'd take the fingers, no question.
It's horrible, terrible, inhuman torture. I can hardly imagine worse. I'd prefer permanent damage and disability to experiencing it again. I'd give up anything, say anything, do anything.
Seth Roberts read the account and made some musings about human evolution:
This shows something non-obvious: We are hard-wired to avoid drowning and like all good safety systems, the system kicks in well before damage occurs.
For such a system to evolve, humans must have spent a lot of time in water deep enough to drown in. We don’t now, of course. The sheer fact of Scylla’s post — the fact that waterboarding is torture isn’t obvious — shows this.
All this — Scylla’s initial ignorance, what he experienced and concluded — is consistent with the aquatic ape theory of human evolution and inconsistent with alternatives to that theory (e.g., the savannah theory), which assume no long aquatic phase. Belief that the aquatic ape theory was probably true was one reason I started omega-3 self-experimentation, which led to the discovery of very clear experimental effects.
Well, someone else read that post and used Google Reader's new "share" function to flag it and then I read the post and though I already knew waterboarding was torture, I'd never heard of the Aquatic Ape hypothesis before so I've been looking into that (it seems that most scientists reject it for what sound to me like good reasons) ... all in all an excellent way to waste some time while semi-watching the Giants play the Bills.
Tyler Cowen says "dressing up actually might make people more productive, but then would not at least a few of us blog in suit and tie?" Julian Sanchez actually does this quite frequently. And, actually, I feel like I am more productive on those days when I have an event to attend that I'm dressed up for.
The thing is that to actually blog in suit and tie all the time, I'd need to buy more suits, shirts, ties, etc. plus probably face higher dry cleaning bills. So the financial and "hassle" costs of shifting to a suit and tie model would be fairly high. The returns, meanwhile, seem uncertain. I feel like my blogging productivity is at a point of diminishing marginal returns. Would 20 percent more output get me 20 percent more traffic? A 20 percent salary increase? It all seems unlikely.
Dave Roberts contemplates the filibuster and runs pretty exhaustively through the flaws with the conventional thinking on how Democrats might effectively respond to Republican obstructionism. And I think he's right -- no amount of grandstanding will really work. The good news is that there's a perfectly workable solution to this problem:
At issue is a seldom-used, complicated and highly controversial parliamentary maneuver in which Republicans could seek a ruling from the chamber's presiding officer, presumably Vice President Cheney, that filibusters against judicial nominees are unconstitutional. Under this procedure, it would take only a simple majority or 51 votes to uphold the ruling -- far easier for the 55-member GOP majority to get than the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster or the 67 votes needed to change the rules under normal procedures.
Republicans wound up not doing that because of the dumb "Gang of 14" deal. Democrats could do the same thing (you'd need to pick a time when a Democrat, rather than Cheney, was presiding) except instead of "filibusters against judicial nominees" you'd just rule that filibusters in general are unconstitutional. The rules of the Senate aren't written in stone -- they've changed several times over the years. The filibuster rule, though obviously useful when the political party I prefer is in the minority, isn't a procedure with some strong claims of universal justice. Democrats should scrap it.
And they should scrap it this term. It'd be a huge controversy. But the controversy would die down a bit as attention moved to veto battles and the presidential campaign. That way, by 2009 it'll be a fait accompli and the GOP minority won't be able to scuttle the new administration. It's not going to happen, but it's what ought to be done.
It looks like Washington, DC's finally going to get a quarter of our own just as if we were a real state. I feel all fuzzy inside. Maybe someday we can have congressional representation, too.
From the random-but-interesting pile, the 1990 Polish elections get rough as Lech Walesa and a rival solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki trade barbs. This via Tony Karon. I love archives.
In honor of December 15, Bill of Rights Day, a little bit of fun. If only the amendments banning detention without due process and torture (it's cruel, it's unusual) were in such good shape.
I recommend that you read the entirety of John Quiggin's post on achieving emissions reductions in the tourism sector. Also this post. But for the short term, I'd like to draw attention to one of its more trivial aspects: "BTW, what is the plural of Prius?" Inquiriting minds want to know.
Photo by Flickr user Mstorz used under a Creative Commons license
This story by Ellen Barry for The New York Times is just fantastic. It's about a Liberian-born woman raising her family in a rough neighborhood on Staten Island who decided that the best thing for her teenaged son would be to get off the streets by . . . being sent to live in war-torn West Africa.
I don't have much to say in an analytical vein, but I'll note that some of the issues raised seem similar to the questions Mary Waters writes about in Black Identities.
