Readers know I've been a big fan of the idea of Obama keeping Bob Gates at the Pentagon. Joe Klein's column fans the flames a little. It has this quote from Obama:
"I really admire the way the elder Bush
negotiated the end of the cold war—with discipline, tough diplomacy and
restraint ... and I'd be very interested in having those sorts of
Republicans in my Administration, especially people who can expedite a
responsible and orderly conclusion to the Iraq war—and who know how to
keep the hammer down on al-Qaeda."
“Hi, John McCain;
this is Alex. He’s my first. So far, his talents include trying any new
food and chasing after our dog — that, and making my heart pound every
time I look at him. So, John McCain, when you said you would stay in
Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because, if you were,
you can’t have him.”
How is that a lie? The woman does not describe combat; she describes a potential American soldier stationed in Iraq some time in the next thirty years. And she doesn't want her son there. It's not a lie. McCain's position is that he'd be fine with stationing American troops in fifty permanent bases in the middle of Mesopotamia for the next century or more. The woman in the ad is perfectly entitled to believe that such troops would not be in the same position as troops in South Korea or Germany - McCain's nutty analogies - and not to be deemed a liar for saying so.
One core issue in this election is that one candidate opposed this war from the beginning and wants all American troops out of Iraq as soon as possible and the other backed the war passionately and is happy with permanent bases for the indefinite future. That's the choice.
"During military operations it can be important to gain covert access
to denied or hostile space... We believe that a new class of soft,
flexible, meso-scale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver
through openings smaller than their dimensions to perform various tasks
will be quite valuable in many missions."
Larry Hunter expresses some of the mixed feelings a lot of us have:
The sad fact remains that, where foreign
policy and limiting individual rights are concerned, any Republican
candidate with a chance to win the presidency today is captive to
right-wing radicals, and where domestic policy is concerned, any
Democratic candidate is captive to left-wing radicals. Therefore, it's
a choice between a Republican candidate who would lead America on an
immoral suicide mission around the world and a Democratic candidate who
would maim all Americans in a misbegotten and deluded quest to bring
"justice" to some Americans at the expense of others.
Lamentable as that choice may be, it's not a difficult one. So take
heart--it may be that a little economic suffering today is the
political price we must pay to pave the way for a new force of
moderation in American politics tomorrow, perhaps a force that--for a
change--will be capable of getting both foreign and domestic policy
right at the same time.
Do higher taxes and a nod to redistributionism count more than habeas corpus, withdrawal from Iraq and some fiscal responsibility? McCain complicates things, but one paramount and genuinely conservative motive in this election is a simple one: to punish the Republican party for its betrayal of conservatism and contempt for the Constitution.
I can't say I care and see no reason why public financing is somehow morally superior to hundreds of thousands of small donors. But if you want to see a Democrat prepared to take a short-term hit in order to score a real long-term advantage over his opponent, Obama's your man:
The upshot here is that Obama is going to have at least $100 million to
spend that the RNC and John McCain and whatever 527s exist will not.
Add in the Democrats' labor spending, and that advantage is probably at
least $200 million. Financial disparities tend not to matter unless
they are huge, and this year, they are huge. McCain will need all that
much more of a moment in a debate, or a major Obama gaffe, to
perservere.
This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal
fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of
our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He
speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate
the Machiavellian ambition inside.
I never doubted his cunning or his charisma. It's the combo that's so lethal. Are the Republicans awake yet? The Clintons weren't.
“Whether your predictions for sea level rise are correct or not, it would be logistically impossible to end the opera by drowning the village under 20 feet of water,” - John Tierney rhapsodizing about the possibility of La Scala turning "An Inconvenient Truth" into an opera.
I have made this same point about the problematic relationship between conservatives and science. But most liberals are afraid to confront the fact that liberalism also has, for entirely different reasons, its own problems with science.
It is my view that both have created a less-than-productive discussion
vis-à-vis global warming, but I hope that we can start to move past
them a little bit.
"To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious. The word “unfunny” surely applies to Mr. Myers’s obnoxious attempts to find mirth in physical and cultural differences but does not quite capture the strenuous unpleasantness of his performance. No, “The Love Guru” is downright antifunny, an experience that makes you wonder if you will ever laugh again," - A. O. Scott, on Mike Myers' latest.
A Fox "sexpert" argues that getting of to porn when you're married or attached is a form of adultery:
"They assume their partner understands that using porn, at least beyond a magazine like Playboy, is the equivalent of having an actual affair."
Julian Sanchez thinks this is "obviously insane". Ross doesn't:
Hard-core porn, in turn, is nothing more than an indirect way of paying
someone to fulfill the same sort of voyeuristic fantasies: It's
prostitution in all but name, filtered through middlemen, magazine
editors, and high-speed internet connections. Is it as grave a betrayal
as cheating on your spouse with a co-worker? Not at all. But is it on a
moral continuum with adultery? I don't think it's insane to say yes.
Well, "not insane" is not exactly a strong defense. Wilkinson responds to Ross:
I
think this only makes sense from the perspective of a once almost
universal, now simply common, and in any case very silly assumption
that sex with a spouse is the one permissible form of sex. So, any
deviation from that one case of good sex is some grade of bad sex.
And Ross continues to defend his position. The reason Ross is unpersuasive to me is that the core sin of adultery, from where I sit, is infidelity with another actual person. The physical absence of such makes a huge difference. But then I'm a dissident on sexual matters as far as the Catholic church is concerned and Ross isn't. His view is coherent, if a little, to my mind, strained.
Caleb Crain (hi, Caleb!) has a thoughtful essay on the whole subject. He was reading Larkin's early novel "Jill" and noticed its easy pace, its expectation that a reader would give a book time and space to get attention:
The internet is inhospitable to that kind of quietness. If your browser
were to happen on such a page, your eyes would likely go blank with
impatience. Who is this guy? Why aren't there any links? And, more damningly, Is anyone else reading this?
A text on the internet rarely takes for granted your decision to read
it or to continue reading it. There is often, instead, a jazzy,
hectoring tone. At home my boyfriend and I use a certain physical
gesture as shorthand to describe it. To make it, extend your index
fingers and your thumbs so that your hands resemble toy pistols. Then
waggle them before you, like a dude in a cheesy Western, while you
wink, dip your knees, and lopsidedly drawl, "Heyyy." The internet is
always saying, "Heyyy." It is always welcoming you to the party; it is
always patting you on the back to congratulate you for showing up. It
says, You know me, in a collusive tone of voice, and Wanna hear something funny? and Didja see who else is here? This tone is not absent from print; in fact, no page of New York
magazine is without it. Certain decorative effects in language may be
compatible with it, but it seems to be toxic to imagination.
No big surprise that an internal critic of torture was fired by Bush flunky, Alberto Gonzales. And no surprise either that he played with the US attorney's office as if it were a purely political tool. But the lack of surprise does not mean a lack of disdain. These people have behaved like criminals nailing down a cover-up.
"The good news is that in recent years teen marijuana use has declined. The bad news is that 10.7 million teens still report that they have used marijuana. The worst news is that teens who use the drug are playing a dangerous game of Russian roulette with the bullets of addiction, accidents, crime and mental illness in the chamber" - Joseph A. Califano Jr., Chairman of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.
Longtime readers know about my annual pilgrimage to the end of Cape Cod. The last two days have had June-clear skies and the town is in its preparatory crouch. After the mind-numbing and seemingly endless intensity of the primary campaign, I found myself trudging out to the furthest dunes yesterday and today, finding a spot and just crashing out for an hour or two. I woke to cool evening breezes and dunegrass waving across my face. There's nothing out there. Yes: a few fellow sun-bathers, but far fewer than when July strikes. And the marshes are still low, the water still really cold, and the newness of this scene I've looked at for almost two decades still shocking. I let myself think nothing for a while. Just watched and breathed and lived for a while.
US President George W. Bush waves as he walks on the South Lawn of the White House upon his return to Washington, DC on June 19, 2008. Bush returned after touring flooded areas in the midwest. By Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images.
Is this for real? It's a really bad idea, if so. My area of
scientific expertise is the learning of new visual cues that affect
perception. These optical illusion speed bumps are a lovely example
of "visual statistics pollution" (Backus, 2001). In order to
construct perceptual representations, our brains exploit statistical
regularities in the visual world. This is why artists paint a shadow
at a person's feet if they want the person to appear to be standing on
the ground. Our visual systems continually monitor our retinal images
to update their knowledge of these statistics. Creating flat objects
that contain depth cues (in this case shading and perspective cues)
will, over time, literally train our brains that these cues are
unreliable, or worse, that they indicate the absence of a bump.
Really really bad idea.
Greenwald is furious at the FISA deal capitulation:
What's particularly amazing about this whole process is that the House
leadership unveiled this bill for the first time today -- and then
scheduled the vote on it for tomorrow. No hearings. Nothing. They all
have less than 24 hours to "read" the bill and decide whether to
eviscerate the rule of law and the Fourth Amendment. I recall Democrats
long complaining that they were only given one day before being forced
back in September, 2001 to vote on the Patriot Act, yet here they are
-- even without the excuse of the 9/11 attack -- doing that to
themselves. I'm sure their votes tomorrow will be the by-product of a
very conscientious, thoughtful and diligent review of this lengthy bill
-- just as thoughtful as Pelosi's review was before she whimsically
pronounced that it's all just six of one, half dozen of the other.
I feel less strongly about the telecom companies' retroactive immunity than I do about the sweep of surveillance that the bill appears to endorse. Here's the NYT summary:
The deal, expanding the government’s powers in some key respects, would
allow intelligence officials to use broad warrants to eavesdrop on
foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on
American targets for a week if it is determined important national
security information would be lost otherwise.
Still: I'm not as livid as Glenn. At least the White House appears to have conceded that the Congress has the final say on what is and what is not legal in eavesdropping.
The "Media Bloggers Association," who the AP said they would meet with to establish "standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers," doesn't seem to be on the level. Here's what Teresa Nielsen Hayden's digging turned up:
The Media Bloggers Association substantially consists of one lackluster blogger named Robert Cox. His weblog, Words in Edgewise, and the MBA website, are two halves of the same site. Robert Cox isn’t all that interested in blogging per se. What he’s really into is self-aggrandizement by representing himself as someone who speaks for bloggers and blogging. An embarrassing number of organizations have fallen for this.
When I first saw the clips, my suspicious and mean-spirited nature
kicked in. I went to my computer and looked up the demography of that
Hartford neighborhood. Uh-huh. (That’s just the broad zip code, which likely includes some gentrified zones. Here are student stats for the nearest public high school. Here
are the same for the nearest public elementary school.) Yet in all the
TV news and talking-head coverage of the incident, nobody bothered to
tell us about neighborhood demographics. Not only did they not bother
to tell us, they pointedly refrained from telling us. The talking heads
were all: “What’s the matter with us?” and “How did we get this way?”
and other verbal hand-wringings, while vast numbers of white TV viewers
who’d already guessed the thing I’d looked up, were thinking to
themselves: “Whaddya mean, us? This isn’t us, it’s them. Nothing to do with us.”
Just a reminder of what sometimes lies beneath the prose at NRO.
Over the very long term, I suspect we'll look back on the era of the 85-mile commute as a historical curiosity. That kind of distance is so enormous compared to any kind of human scaling that it just doesn't make sense as a way to live.
The journey from the kitchen to the home office is much greener.
Perhaps the most fascinating question for neuroscientists to explore is why people dance in the first place. Certainly music and dance are closely related; in many instances, dance generates sound...As a result, we have postulated a “body percussion” hypothesis that dance evolved initially as a sounding phenomenon and that dance and music, especially percussion, evolved together as complementary ways of generating rhythm. The first percussion instruments may well have been components of dancing regalia, not unlike Aztec chachayotes.
Unlike music, however, dance has a strong capacity for representation and imitation, which suggests that dance may have further served as an early form of language. Indeed, dance is the quintessential gesture language.
The rest of today's blogging will take the form of interpretive dance. Maybe not.
The governor of Minnesota's wife may be his most powerful argument for being McCain's veep:
She is a graduate of Bethel University in Minnesota, which
describes itself as teaching a "distinctly evangelical Christian
philosophy of education." Mary Pawlenty is also a longtime member of
the Wooddale Church and is a close friend of the church's pastor Leith Anderson. (Make sure to check out this profile of Mary Pawlenty from Bethel's alumni magazine that was written in 2000.)
Anderson is a powerful force in the evangelical community, having served as the past and current president of the National Association of Evangelicals.
"If [Pawlenty] were chosen it would reverberate with the 30 million
members of those churches almost instantaneously and very publicly,"
said [Vin] Weber.
The median case suggests the effect on gasoline prices in 2025 will be a mere $0.02 a gallon. The immediate effect will be zero as we’ll have to wait a decade to see any oil from ANWR. If this is Bush’s and McCain’s answer to today’s high gasoline prices, it is no answer at all.
The public would be likely to entertain an argument that emissions reductions will increase energy costs, but the problem here is that Republicans are not going to be able to reduce energy costs. No one will. So all Democrats have to say is that, look, these costs are going to continue to rise. Better then to make an effort to switch to renewable fuels that don’t involve massive emissions and massive transfers of wealth to fossil fuel exporting nations. The Republican position will also be very vulnerable to the (not inaccurate) charge that they’re primarily concerned about the bottom lines of big energy companies.
But to see why the GOP will ultimately have to join Democrats on this issue or face political disaster, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper, or talk about the news with anyone who doesn’t cover these issues for a living. The weather has been really freaky recently, and that’s not coincidental. It’s going to get worse. You’re going to see oddly intense storms, and stories about droughts and desertification, and heart-wrenching tales of cuddly animal extinctions. And then you’re going to see pictures of thousands of dead Bangladeshis and millions of climate refugees. And the GOP is going to win electoral victory forever by saying that all we need to do is build bigger levies.
Has the former fiscal conservative surrendered to the "deficits don't matter" crowd? David Leonhardt has a must-read column:
As the conventional wisdom has it, neither senator has been serious
about the long-term budget deficit; both have made rosy assumptions
about the revenue that will come from cracking down on waste, fraud,
abuse, overseas tax loopholes and other vague fiscal bogeymen.
All this is true enough. Mr. Obama, for instance, relies on
hypothetical savings from electronic medical records to claim that he
can reduce the deficit, and he hasn’t been totally clear about his tax
plans. But the unknowns about the McCain agenda are simply on a
different scale.
Photographer Phillip Toledano's statement about his work:
"At the beginning of 2001, I started taking pictures of recently abandoned offices and the things people had left behind. This project was more than photography for me. It was economic archeology. America has not suffered such a vertiginous economic collapse since the 1930’s, and I wanted to document the human cost while it was happening. There is something very strange about walking into a recently abandoned office. The heavy, Pompeii-like stillness, punctuated only by the occasional sound of the air-conditioning turning itself on. A coat-hanger waiting patiently for a coat. A limp ‘happy birthday’ balloon on the floor. A drawer stuffed with take-out menus. Everywhere, signs of life, interrupted."
One day, it will happen, but probably not in America:
In the past two years, I have spoken with two investigating magistrates in
two different European nations, both pro-Iraq war NATO allies. Both were assembling
war crimes charges against a small group of Bush administration officials. "You
can rest assured that no charges will be brought before January 20, 2009," one
told me. And after that? "It depends. We don't expect extradition. But if one
of the targets lands on our territory or on the territory of one of our
cooperating jurisdictions, then we'll be prepared to act."
The email you posted today gets it, I think, precisely right. Though it was not public, I’ve spent an hour in a room with Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus (who seem like great guys) a couple of months ago, and the points of agreement and debate were exactly what your correspondent indicated. In effect, it comes down to a debate about the size of the technology investment (though the numerical difference is huge – like two orders of magnitude huge).
This is a technical debate that boils down to what one thinks of government investments to direct the economy. I am inherently skeptical of them, other than for targeted purposes with clear logic for why only the government can do it, while S&N are much more sanguine about the ability of the government to direct economic resources effectively. The discussion, however, was positive and collegial, involving no accusations of either communism or fascism.
Rights don’t exist if you eliminate all procedures to vindicate
those rights. Otherwise, the rights become only words on paper, rather
than living breathing liberties that must necessarily be enforced.
In short, actions speak louder than words. And in the world of
action, McCain has been a consistent opponent of habeas.
"I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are
responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in
the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use
9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let’s talk about 9/11.
The people who were responsible for murdering 3,000 Americans on
9/11 have not been brought to justice."
I defy you to convince Americans that it’s worth radically raising the prices of everyday goods–the real life effect of strict carbon caps–to marginally allay the costs of global warming in the distant future. This is why global warming is a winning issue for conservatives: inertia will lead to resistance towards radical change, a resistance that conservatives share.
Peter Wehner has a long response to my criticism. Some responses in turn. Pete concedes that the administration originally seized far, far more detainees than it could prove guilty (or ever tried to prove guilty) and has released thousands falsely imprisoned. Of the thousands seized, Pete concedes many were abused and tortured, with over a hundred deaths occurring during interrogation, two score of whom the administration has itself conceded were murder-by-interrogation. All this occurred after the president decided his actions as commander-in-chief could not be constrained by the law, after he had waived the baseline Geneva Convention protections for prisoners in wartime - in violation of the policy of every previous president of the United States from Washington on - and after critical memos were signed allowing American interrogators to do anything to prisoners short of death or loss of a major organ. Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff explains what this means in terms any morally responsible person would understand:
As I compiled my dossier for Secretary Powell, as I did further research, and as my views grew firmer and firmer, I needed frequently to reread that memo. I needed to balance, in my own mind, the overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture which, at its worst, had led to the murder of 25 detainees in a total of at least a 100 detainee deaths. Death, Mr. Chairman, seems to me to be the ultimate torture, indisputable and final. We had murdered 25 or more people in detention; that was the clear low point of the evidence.
And all this was done not in the chaos of a battlefield or even by rogue units or POW camps. It was not done in a war with anything like as many soldiers and battles as World War II. It was done in a closely managed war by a professional military and intelligence service in every theater of combat as a concerted policy to get more intelligence about Jihadist terror and the Iraq insurgency. It was authorized directly in the chain of command by the president, who knowingly broke the law and hired lawyers to tell him he hadn't. No clever argumentation that "only" 270 prisoners remain at Gitmo can gainsay that. And it is not, by the way, evidence against the fact that this administration seized countless innocents and tortured them to say that they eventually released most of them. It is no consolation to the torture victims at Abu Ghraib that they were eventually set free and their innocence confirmed. Those are the standards of benign dictatorships, not democracies.
Now, you could argue that the administration, after initial understandable over-reach, has tried to set things right. But you would be wrong.
I think the real point is that this is the debate we should have been having years ago. The right wing attack on science, especially of global warming, has meant that in fact the real necessary arguments about cost, level of mitigation, etc are not being played out. I happen to disagree with Manzi, and can site some pretty compelling arguments, but the point is that's an argument we should have. An honest one not about the existence of a fact, but the proper way to manage it going forward. Fundamentally, there is no cost to a polluter for polluting, so there are no incentives to prevent pollution. Mitigation by counting on declining supply of energy to drive pricing still ignores this basic fact.
Iraq is not an island, but DC sure is. And here I'll inject my own pessimism: It would be political suicide for Obama to change his stance on Iraq--even though it is clearly the right thing to do. We've reached a point wherein hand-waving rigidity is lauded as righteousness (in both parties) and nuance is punished swiftly. Never mind that Obama drafted his plan for withdrawal a full 18 months ago, or that the drawdown from the surge is behind schedule, or that Maliki is emboldened by recent successes, that Bush is kicking the can down the road, or that General David Petraeus has declared that we won't know we've made progress "until we're six months past it." The pitchforked mob will have the flip-floppers, dead or alive.
But the Obama campaign, it seems to me, is fueled by the opposite conviction: that we can use reason in politics, not dumb-ass Morris-Rove tactical blather. On an issue as profound as this one, there is no need for a U-turn; the goal is still withdrawal of all troops as soon as is prudent. That's all Obama need say: that he wants us to leave entirely as soon as makes sense. He was against the war from the beginning, which makes him a far more credible advocate for withdrawal than McCain.
I guess I would never have supported Obama if I thought he were incapable of prudent, pragmatic adjustment in policies. We'll see.
Sometimes governments have too much information for their own good:
Cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you'll get so much information that you'll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.
Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.
Just over 2,700 marriage licenses were issued in the state between 5:01 p.m. on Monday -- when the state Supreme Court's ruling lifted the ban on gay marriage -- and the end of business on Tuesday. The statewide average for a whole week in June is about 2,460.
"As a witness sitting here in a hearing, I feel like I have some obligation to say something about this. And I'm very limited, I think, in what I can say.
But if the subcommittee has been informed that there was a total of three minutes of waterboarding, I would suggest the subcommittee should go back and get that clarified, because that I don't believe is an accurate statement," - Dan Levin, formerly of the president's Office Of Legal Counsel.
Marty Lederman has a helpful summary of Dan Levin's testimony yesterday here.
June 15, 2008 - June 21, 2008
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