Ross thinks I am presenting false choices on Iraq:
There are certainly people for whom the debate over troop levels in Iraq is ultimately about whether American foreign policy gets set on a more explicitly imperialist trajectory, and there’s no question that such voices will be more empowered under a McCain Administration than by a President Obama. The question is whether the likely practical results of a McCain Presidency – a Presidency that will be constrained by all kinds of factors, foreign and domestic – will so empower the Boot vision of America’s role in the world (which I do not share) as to make a vote for McCain a vote for Boot. The alternative, which seems more plausible to me, is that a vote for McCain under these circumstances is a vote for something [more] modest: Namely, a reduction in U.S. forces in Iraq that will proceed more gradually than the reduction Obama is promising, and that will leave the long-term question of the size and scope of America’s entanglement in the Middle East for future administrations to wrestle with.
I sure hope that's the case. But there are so many hardcore new American century neocons around McCain that I doubt it. One thing I have learned these past few years is that there is no longer any moderating instinct within neoconservatism. It has become an absolutist ideology, which is why its cooptation of the word "conservatism" is so repellent. Give them an inch, and they'll take a country.
I've gone to the Human Rights Campaign's website looking for what they're doing, how they're helping lobby for what could be the most important policy change in this Congress, how well they are informing their membership. Alas, the last reference I can find is from March. The issue goes unmentioned in the week's news. It is absent from their "Press Room." On the page that deals with immigration, there is no mention of the HIV ban. They did not include the issue on their candidates' questionnaire this year. It's enough to make you scream.
Nonetheless, they have been helpful in lobbying for the repeal of the HIV travel and immigration ban, working closely with Smith's and Kerry's office, and all of us dedicated to removing this anachronism are grateful. Where HRC has failed is in not bringing this issue to the fore sooner, not informing their members better, not making the public case, something that could and should have been done years ago. They can and must do better - but on the lobbying front, they've helped move this along once the momentum was there. Credit where it's due.
As for the latest, the Republican rump blocked a unanimous consent option this morning, and so the vote won't happen till after the July 4 recess. The odds are looking a lot brighter - thanks in part to your help. But this is the Hill and anything can happen, so emailing your Senator on the HIV ban, if you haven't, could still help. Here's the contact list. A quick message asking them to end the HIV travel and immigration ban is all that's needed.
Is Max Boot completely loony? Does he not realize that a significant reason we needed to stay in Germany and Japan for so long was because we did not want them to rearm and threaten their neighbors and the world again? In Iraq, we are willing participants in re-arming the nation. We want them to be a threat to their neighbors. So we should be able to leave when they are.
But not if the real goal was to establish an occupying US force to attack Iran. And:
The Iraq war rationalizers repeatedly use the Germany-Japan-Korea argument to justify our remaining in Iraq as if there are clear and unequivocal historical parallels between the two when none exist beyond the fact of our invading the damn countries and then occupying them. To draw a parallel on this basis when no evidence exists to support it amounts to ignoring the basic laws of physics. A more relevant parallel would be that of the British occupation of Iraq post World War I but somehow that never gets brought up. And we wonder why history keeps repeating itself.
The neocons never mention the British occupation of Iraq in the last century. The reason is obvious. Even experts at imperialism were defeated by the "ungrateful volcano" we now plan to sit on top of for ever.
Despite its long and occasionally dreary originalist exegesis, the Heller
majority is not really defending the values of 1791. It is enforcing
the values of 2008. This is no accident. Indeed, the result in Heller
would have been impossible without the success of the conservative
movement and the work of the NRA and other social movement actors who,
over a period of about 35 years, succeeded in changing Americans' minds
about the meaning of the Second Amendment, and made what were
previously off-the-wall arguments about the Constitution socially and
politically respectable to political elites. This is living
constitutionalism in action.
"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture
somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child,
there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that..."
In the two months since Pennsylvania's April 22 primary, Democrats
have added more voters than Republicans in all but five of the state's
67 counties and increased their statewide lead by 40,566 voters by the
end of last week. Republicans have lost nearly 1,500 registered
voters since the primary.
These writers grew up reading conservative classics — Burke, Hayek,
Smith, C.S. Lewis — but have now splayed off in all sorts of quirky
ideological directions.
There are dozens of writers I could
put in this group, but I’d certainly mention Yuval Levin, Daniel
Larison, Will Wilkinson, Julian Sanchez, James Poulos, Megan McArdle,
Matt Continetti and, though he’s a tad older, Ramesh Ponnuru.
Like the blogosphere itself, it's an open group. And the only criterion for membership is a modem.
The Time poll is much less dramatic than Newsweek's or Bloomberg's. And Gallup shows a tie. In Time's poll, independents are split equally, but Latinos have moved heavily into Obama's column. McCain's national security strength is settling down:
When asked who "would best protect the U.S. against terrorism," 53% of
respondents chose McCain to just 33% for Obama. And nearly half, 48% to
Obama's 38%, trusted McCain to handle the war in Iraq, though 57% said
they believed the U.S. was wrong to invade Iraq and 56% said they would
like to see the troops brought home within the next two years.
...the realities of day-to-day life for many poorer rural Americans, who rely especially heavily on automobile travel and lack real public transportation options, mean that taxes on gasoline are straightforwardly regressive. The wealthy have alternatives: they can, if they live in higher-density areas, take the train or the bus, or they can buy more fuel-efficient cars, or they can switch jobs or telecommute. But those living in tiny houses in rural Alabama and driving tens of miles to low-paying factory jobs have no such options, which means that it is likely that they will end up paying the lion’s share of a gasoline tax in terms of both relative and - perhaps - absolute income as well. If progressive taxation is “immoral” (and does Andrew really think that??), levying especially high taxes on purchases that are disproportionately inescapable parts of the lives of the rural poor is downright evil.
For the record, I was talking about higher gas prices not taxes in the post John mentions. But he does get to a core philosophical disagreement here, one that puts me, I know, far out in right-field. To put it as plainly as I can: I don't believe in a governmental attempt to engineer a substantively "fair" society through taxation. I see taxation as a necessary evil to pay for those few social goods that private individuals cannot provide for themselves. And the mode of taxation, in my view, should be as simple and as market-friendly as possible and should treat citizens equally, irrespective of their incomes. I believe in formal equality and a very limited state, not substantive equality and the welfare state. I know this is pie-in-the-sky, given our current Byzantine tax code and the entrenchment of certain socialistic assumptions in our political culture. I don't expect any radical change any time soon. But I'm not going to enable this kind of thinking without a challenge to it.
So yes: a flat tax so far as possible for as many as possible and no deductions. That's my goal. How that differentially impacts the lives of citizens should not be government's primary concern.
How about a bad hair life? There's a rare disorder that goes by the name "incombable hair syndrome." I promise I'm not making it up:
An abstract from Pediatr Dermatol. 2007 Jul-Aug;24(4):436-8.
A 4-year-old boy was noted to have unruly, spangled hair, which could not be combed flat. His mother reported that his hair had always had that texture and that it seemed to grow slowly. A hair pull test demonstrated that hairs could not be easily extracted, and light microscopic examination of the hair revealed pathognomonic characteristics of uncombable hair syndrome, including a triangular cross-sectional shape and canal-like longitudinal depressions.
For most consumers, the sleek design and the product’s environmental perks are of the same ilk—distinctive qualities that mark the consumer who uses such a product as being of a better class. Environmentalism is not a ethos but a design quirk. This may be the only way to corral individuals into acting on a problem that is far too large for any one person’s actions to affect—to ignore outcomes and sell it on style.
The broader vision is that the Republicans can and must find a way to be more friendly to the non-rich. Personally I don't see any reason to tie all of this to the Republican Party but I agree with most of their proposals...The deep question is why something like this hasn't already happened. You'll find the superficial "Republicans are just pro-corporate crooks" answer from bloggers like Kathy G. Another possibility is that Republicans don't get much electoral credit for pro-poor initiatives (just as many voters simply won't believe that "Democrats can be tough"). The more competitive political messaging becomes, the more this constraint binds and so the policies of upward redistribution are more likely to be enacted by Republicans in the resulting political equilibrium. If the authors are to get their way somehow this dynamic must be reversed.
The problem is not one of divided loyalties, as if Israeli interests are being put first and American interests second, but the mistake of seeing the interests of both states as largely or entirely complementary and almost identical. When Anglophiles made this mistake in 1917 and plunged the U.S. into WWI, they were not exhibiting “divided loyalties,” but had a fundamentally mistaken understanding of what the American interest was. Talk of “divided loyalties” comes up because the interests of any two states are not nearly so close or complementary, and those who conflate the interests of two states can end up making poor judgements about what the national interest of their country really is. In the case of the Iraq war, you did have people, including neoconservatives of various backgrounds, making such a poor judgement because they misunderstood what was in the interest of both the United States and Israel. It is not a question of loyalty, but of judgement. Having first misunderstood and then identified the interests of the two states too closely, they ended up harming both. The real issue is not motives, but the effects of terrible policies.
Israeli participants hold up the multi-colored Gay Pride flag together with the national flag during the controversial Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, on June 26, 2008. Some 3,500 participants marched down town Jerusalem and were secured by 2,000 police officers due to past years violence from Ultra Orthodox Jews opposing a gay parade in the holy city. By Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty.
This is an aspect of the withdrawalist critique that I find particularly frustrating. “Aha! But you didn’t turn Baghdad into a harmonious multifaith enclave of cosmopolitan prosperity! Yet” Right. The history of partitions in divided societies is long and ugly. That said, we don’t exactly think of Greece or Turkey, or even India or Pakistan, as failed states. We consider them troubled states that are fragile in many respects. The question is, is the ethnic cleansing reversible? Even now, over a decade after Dayton, Bosnia remains a divided society. Some refugees have returned home, but many more have not — many more have built new lives in new parts of the country or overseas. But maintaining a single state allows the possibility of long-term reconciliation. Refugees are returning to Iraq, perhaps prematurely. This will be an enduring challenge. Yet it is a challenge that can be managed successfully, provided we don’t abandon the Iraqi state at its most vulnerable point.
I think it's extremely premature to start talking about Iraq as if its fundamental problems have been solved, just because we have had a breathing space in the conflict long enough to make both withdrawal and a permanent occupation more palatable. I do not believe permanent US bases in Iraq will mean anything but endless war and endless expense. The question now is: how do we get out with as little catastrophe as possible?
...there's one distinction between the case of Germany and Japan and Iraq today that gets far too little mention. It's not a matter of culture or religion. It is the fact in the aftermath of World War II, both Germany and Japan had been conquered by the United States and her allies in a wars of aggression that Germany and Japan had started. The civilian populations of each country, whatever their war guilt, had experienced shattering levels of violence and privation in the final years of the war. And both countries were immediately faced by nearby hostile powers they feared much more than the United States. There are almost countless differences between the two historical situations, either separate from these points or growing out them. But taken together, these three factors explain a great deal of why our occupation of Iraq lacks both the legitimacy and the acceptance we enjoyed in those two countries.
Many of you have emailed me to let me know you emailed your senators on the HIV Immigration ban. I'm immensely grateful. Here's the list of email addresses. Here's my argument for lifting the ban. Know hope.
I am a white South African, teaches Constitutional Law at an SA
university and follow US politics very closely. I am supposed to go and teach at a Law School in the US for a
few weeks next year but I am having such a hard time deciding whether I
should or could do it. It would require me to ask for SPECIAL BLOODY
PERMISSION to enter the US merely because of my HIV status and that
seems so insulting and so reactionary to me. It suggests that being HIV
positive is some kind of evil perverted disease that one should
apologise for.
Even South Africa - whose President in the past have
denied the link between HIV and AIDS - do not have a similar policy. It
really makes me want to go to a more civilized place - Colombia? Sudan?
Uzbekistan? - but I studied in New York and love the US so I do not know what to do. It is so sad that the US, who
used to be a beacon of hope and light for many reasonable people in the
world, has come to this.
It may be over soon. Here's how you can help. It says something that George W. Bush has had a more retrograde policy on HIV in this solitary respect than Thabo Mbeki.
The former client of the DC Madam is the only real obstacle to removing the unique legislative prohibition against non-Americans with HIV visiting this country or immigrating here. Earlier, I asked readers to contact their own senators to urge them to support the PEPFAR renewal, with the bipartisan Smith-Kerry language removing this stigmatizing ban.
Please help. Here's the link for all the senators' email addresses and comment forms. If you have a minute, we can do this.
Sound from the starter's gun is known to take longer to reach athletes who start from the outside lanes than their competitors on the inside. Now a new study suggests that competitors nearest the gun have another advantage – the loudness of the bang shocks them into starting more quickly.
Together, these extra boosts may amount to more than a tenth of a second in some races, which is easily enough to make the difference between gold and silver.
"Just reading what Sally Quinn said is enough to give any Christian, especially Catholics, more than a 'slightly nauseating sensation.' In her privileged world, life is all about experiences and feelings. Moreover, Quinn's statement not only reeks of narcissism, it shows a profound disrespect for Catholics and the beliefs they hold dear. If she really wanted to get close to Tim Russert, she should have found a way to do so without trampling on Catholic sensibilities. Like praying for him--that's what Catholics do," - Bill Donohue, oozing caritas as usual.
I think Novak is right when he notes that Obama's appeal among some conservatives has much to do with a reaction against the direction of the Republican Party. By exclusively relating it to this, however, he misses a key aspect of Barack's appeal for some conservatives, which is that Obama's story confirms what conservatives have always believed about America.
He is the black son of an immigrant, raised by a modest single mother and yet despite the obstacles inherent in this background he is approaching the pinnacle of American success. Isn't he the poster boy for what conservatives have always assured us is possible here in America? Conservative perseverance, not liberal victimization explains Obama's rise. He is a black Horatio Alger whose life adds to the long list of American success stories that began with Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. He personifies the American exceptionalism which is at the heart of American conservatism. If he wins conservatives, even those that vote against him, can justifiable take pride in their nation and say, "Only in America."
Inbound links are like gold for newspaper websites, and publishing full RSS feeds, far from making it difficult to monetize content, are the best way of generating those precious inbound links. It's simply not true that the only way of generating revenue from people reading RSS feeds is by serving those people ads directly. The trick is to use those people as multipliers, as free generators of fresh uniques.
When I remember the glory days of bloggy homesteading back in 2000, I'm staggered by how far we've come.
No aspect of the FISA bill has been more ferociously fought over than this, and it shows us how Washington works in the Rovian age. One constant drives the debate and the action, and that is money. If we survey the horizon of those who have worked intently to bail out the telecoms, we find quickly that each has his campaign coffers lined by his telecom friends. Money talks; Washington is a pit of corruption today, and the corruption knows no partisan limits.
Have we become too protective of children in the wake of new awareness of pedophilia? There's an interesting new report out in Britain:
Anyone working for a voluntary organisation who comes into contact with children in any way has to take the paedophile test.
‘From Girl Guiders to football coaches, from Christmas-time
Santas to parents helping out in schools, volunteers—once regarded as
pillars of the community —have been transformed in the regulatory and
public imagination into potential child abusers, barred from any
contact with children until the database gives them the green light.’
(p.x)
The effect of this treatment is to put some people off volunteering
altogether.
It appears as if he is the only Senator opposing the removal of the HIV travel and immigration ban. The White House is on board, as are hefty bipartisan chunks of the Senate. Here's how you can still help: email your senator asking him or her to support the removal of the HIV travel ban. The next day or so could make the difference. If you have a second, this would help enormously. Urge them not to side with Vitter.
The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. Even though Ventastega is likely an evolutionary dead-end, the finding sheds new details on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods. Tetrapods are animals with four limbs and include such descendants as amphibians, birds and mammals.
While an earlier discovery found a slightly older animal that was more fish than tetrapod, Ventastega is more tetrapod than fish. The fierce-looking creature probably swam through shallow brackish waters, measured about three or four feet long and ate other fish. It likely had stubby limbs with an unknown number of digits, scientists said.
I could just imagine an Andrew Sullivan of the 1940’s writing something similar about Harry Truman’s crazy idea to station troops in Germany and Japan without an exit strategy: “In fifty years’ time, the West Germans will not be able to defend themselves against the Soviet Union? Or East Germany? Please.” As it happens, the West Germans wouldn’t have been able to defend themselves against a broad array of enemies without a long-term American troop presence. That presence has served other important goals too, namely reassuring Germany’s neighbors that it would never threaten the peace of Europe again and fostering Germany’s internal democratic development. But just because we’ve had troops in Germany and Japan for 60 years–and in South Korea for more than 50 years–doesn’t mean we’re occupying those countries. We are there are the request of democratically elected governments.
The same is true, whether Klein or Sullivan concede it or not, in the case of Iraq.
Maybe it's my long experience in Israel, but I believe that the
average, law-abiding citizen can be trusted with a firearm. More than
that -- and again, maybe this is my experience in Israel talking -- I
don't like the idea of subcontracting my own defense to the police. Why
should a person who is paid $40,000 a year, who doesn't know me, who
doesn't live in my neighborhood, risk his life for me when, properly
armed, I'm fully capable of defending myself? It never seemed fair to
me.
One of my good friends is a DC cop. I'd trust him to defend me. But he'd also trust me to defend myself. I should add that I live on a corner in DC that has had its share of gun violence. I will feel no less secure after this decision.
Word on the Hill: senator David Vitter, a frequent client of the DC Madam, will take the lead in trying to strip the removal of the HIV travel ban from PEPFAR. They never disappoint, do they?
My kind of people: breaking overwhelmingly for Obama in Wisonsin, Minnesota and Michigan. Less an indictment of McCain, I'd say, than a repudiation of today's GOP. And well-deserved.
If the Sadrite militias just melt away, does that mean they're defeated? A useful corrective to complacency from Abigail Hauslohner:
"I think the situation is still very fragile," said Talal Ahmed Said, a political writer in Baghdad. "It's possible for any explosion to happen at any time." He thinks the Amara campaign is a sham. "They announced [Amara] a week before [it happened], so all members of the [radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's] Mahdi Army left. After a month they could come back, and likewise in Mosul and Basra."
Daniel Libit takes on TV's mislabeling commentators as Democratic and Republican strategists:
...the fractured nature of cable news time, particularly midday, allows almost anyone who’s articulate and politically inclined to act like a campaign insider. Rollins, who often appears on CNN himself, blames the cable news networks for “dumbing down” good analysis in the name of multitudinous voices. “I think the networks are idiotic in that they have capable people who have been around, but they want 12 panels,” he says. Independent TV analyst Andrew Tyndall thinks the “mislabeling” is also the product of the media’s unyielding “bid to seem as though they are inside the horse race.”
I will run out and vote for John McCain this year, as I believe that Obama is a statist and bad for the country. This despite the fact that I know that my Republican party will probably get the good swift kick in the ass that it richly deserves.
One of the reasons it will get hammered is Heller. It’s hard to get the RKBA crowd all harem-scarem about Obama’s rather obvious distaste for Second Amendment rights when the SCOTUS has taken the issue off the table. It’s done, and this will be seen in future as a nail in McCain’s coffin.
Obama may disagree, but he will do so in a centrist manner that doesn’t endanger his Blue Dog allies and his prospects in Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, and Iowa.
The McCain campaign should be careful how they handle the Court's
decision on handguns. While the Second Amendment in general is a
winning GOP issue, the handgun aspects of it are more problematic with
swing voters. In the end, this election will be decided by white
females and ticket-splitting independents. The handgun issue is no huge
winner among this group. McCain should applaud the decision, but tread
carefully.
June 22, 2008 - June 28, 2008
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