Here's a response to Malaki by Randy Scheunemann, McCain's foreign policy adviser, from earlier this evening:
The difference between John McCain and Barack Obama is
that Barack Obama advocates an unconditional withdrawal that ignores
the facts on the ground and the advice of our top military commanders.
John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the
ground. Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view,
and did so again today. Timing is not as important as whether we leave
with victory and honor, which is of no apparent concern to Barack
Obama. The fundamental truth remains that Senator McCain was right
about the surge and Senator Obama was wrong. We would not be in the
position to discuss a responsible withdrawal today if Senator Obama's
views had prevailed.
Josh Marshall calls it pretty weak.
It's certainly muddled. While Scheunemann paints Obama as committed to
a fixed timetable and indifferent to the consequences of pulling out of
Iraq, in reality Obama has consistently said conditions on the
ground would inform his timeline for withdrawal. McCain may be able to
argue he was right about the surge, but Obama can argue he was right
about the war. Scheunemann seems to acknowledge that we're in a
position to "discuss a responsible withdrawal," but he also says that
"John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the
ground." If we're in a position to discuss a responsible withdrawal,
doesn't that mean those conditions have largely been met?
Twice now the Dish has written that "the McCain and Obama positions on
Iraq will be as minimal as McCain can make them by November." I simply
don't understand how that could be politically tenable for McCain.
Obama is favored by something like 30 points on the economy and 20 on
domestic issues more generally. Iraq and foreign affairs more generally
are the only issues McCain can feasibly run on. If he moves towards
Obama he will cut his own legs out from under him. Maliki has more or
less done that already, putting McCain in a very awkward position. But
moving towards Obama on Iraq would take away one of the few contrasts
that could possibly be favorable to McCain. How does he avoid an
overwhelming landslide if he can't keep both sharp contrasts and focus
on the Iraq issue?
Just read "Dumbing Down the Presidency" and something clicked. I think
part of the reason Bill resents Obama is because he's doing a lot of
things the way Bill wanted to do them, but was talked out of by his
advisors.
Obama's speechifying is everything Clinton's could have been -
unrestrained, rhetorically brilliant, unapologetic - except that Bill
chose to go the "dumb-down" route and so eschewed all the intellectual
acclaim that the former Rhodes Scholar could have claimed. He chose to
accept the conventional wisdom that the average American was too dumb
to follow a collegiate level speech. Seeing Obama pull it off must be
infuriating - it's like watching someone win a race you know you could
have won too, except everyone told you not to enter.
From John Crawford's 1962 article on beating the Russians by packing on the pounds:
Muscles may be useful in hand-to-hand combat, but I fail to see what advantage they give one in the Cold War. Indeed, that gaunt and bony look so much in fashion among Americans today may be a positive liability in the battle for the minds of men. How can we expect the world's starving masses to believe that a nation of emaciated people is as well off as it pretends to be? We seem to have forgotten that while obesity is the bane of modern America, it remains the ultimate symbol of happiness and security to that portion of mankind which goes to bed hungry every night.
"I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a
brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out. That's what autism is.
What do you mean they scream and they're silent? They don't have a
father around to tell them, 'Don't act like a moron. You'll get nowhere
in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don't
sit there crying and screaming, idiot.'"-Michael Savage.
As it stands, Los Angeles households pay $2.80 for the first 885 gallons they use per day. That's enough water to fill 18 bathtubs. The next 18 tubs cost $3.40, which is only 20% more. Most L.A. households don't even see this price increase, since the average household of three uses just 350 gallons--about seven bathtubs--each day. For that water, the household pays only $35 a month. If they use twice the amount, the bill merely doubles.
I propose a system where every person gets the first 75 gallons, or 1.5 bathtubs, per day for free but pays $5.60 for each 75 gallons after that.
Marc's take on Maliki endorsing Obama's withdrawal timetable:
This could be one of those unexpected events that forever changes the way the world perceives an issue. Iraq's Prime Minister agrees with Obama, and there's no wiggle room or fudge factor. This puts John McCain in an extremely precarious spot: what's left to argue? To argue against Maliki would be to predicate that Iraqi sovereignty at this point means nothing...Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, "We're fucked."
A few weeks ago, Ross argued (somewhat persuasively) that McCain should run on the surge. In the last few days, the McCain campaign and his supporters began pursuing that strategy. An independent pro-McCain group, Let Freedom Ring, announced today it is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars running an ad attacking Obama over Iraq. And the McCain campaign put out a new TV ad along similar lines yesterday. But with Maliki backing Obama's Iraq strategy and Bush accepting time horizons, those ads feel tone-deaf. Andrew's prediction yesterday, that "the McCain and Obama positions on Iraq will be as minimal as McCain can make them by November," seems especially prescient today.
"His domestic politics require him to be for us getting out," said a senior McCain campaign official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The military says 'conditions based' and Maliki said 'conditions based' yesterday in the joint statement with Bush. Regardless, voters care about [the] military, not about Iraqi leaders."
That doesn't make McCain's position much more tenable. Larison has a typically insightful post in response.
The mere notion that a regional candidate could amass gargantuan popular majorities in only certain parts of the country while blowing off the rest ought to shock into sobriety anyone who gives the notion of doing away with the Electoral College a moment's thought. Not only would it matter merely to win a given State, but by how many votes; if you think you've seen ballot stuffing in its highest form in this nation's electoral history, then you'll be in for a genuine revelation. Even more alarming is the prospect of a heightened imperative to systematic disenfranchisement of voters in particular locales who may be expected not to vote "the right way" come election day.
With that in mind and on top of it --and this should alarm first-principles conservatives who still believe in a few old-fashioned virtues as they would pertain to the right of the States to manage, to the extent feasible, their own affairs-- we're looking at the potential (nay, the necessity) of federally administered presidential elections, right down to the level of the polling place. Nothing like more government to solve a "problem" that exists only in the minds of sore losers; it's worth reminding that nowhere in the Constitution is there a guarantee of the right of an individual citizen to cast a ballot for the office of president in the first place.
"Not only would it matter merely to win a given State, but by how many votes": how is that a bad thing? And why would ballot stuffing be any more prevalent with a popular vote model? One would have to falsify hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of votes to change the outcome. If you want a smart take on incremental electoral college reform, Rick Hertzberg has writtenextensively about it.
by Chris Bodenner Nate Silver ran 10,000 simulated elections and determined that
Michigan -- Romney's home state -- is the top "tipping-point state" for
the fall.
Update (7/20): Sean at 538 emails to note: "The polls are updated constantly which affects the Tipping Point chart, and Michigan has dipped to 22% and 3rd, behind Ohio (41%) and Colorado (23%)." He also points to his skepticism about running mates helping in their home states.
I myself have always been skeptical of the ability of Romney to carry MI. He won the state by just 9 points in the Jan. primary -- before the national economic downturn, which is hitting states like MI harder than others. The conventional wisdom says that Romney's major strength is economic issues, but I fail to see how a multimillionaire CEO of a private equity firm will help with struggling Rust Belt voters. If anything, he'd be a liability for McCain (with Gramm's "nation of whiners" the icing on the cake). Huckabee said it best back in January: "He is the boss that fired you, not the guy you work with."
by Chris Bodenner The VP buzz surrounding Romney is getting louder and louder. The NY Times calls him McCain's "wingman extraordinaire" on the cable circuit. Romney just announced he's swallowing the entire $45M he borrowed for the primaries,
thus taking one for the team. And now McCain is heaping praise on Mitt and
getting cozy with the whole Romney clan. Kornacki thinks a McCain-Romney ticket "is beginning to feel as inevitable as the John Edwards buzz was four years ago."
By Patrick Appel Bruce Western gives reversing mass imprisonment serious thought:
....we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.
Western goes on to partially blame "America's meager welfare state" for the huge increases in the prison population during the last 30 years. Eh, maybe. I'm more apt to fault tough on crime legislation and the war on drugs. Whatever the causes, figuring out how to re-introduce prisoners into society is going to require legislation as smart as many tough on crime laws were dumb. If reducing the overflowing prison population correlates with a spike in the crime rate, as it very well may, we could be in for another round of politically expedient but logistically disastrous tough on crime laws. Considering the current state of prisons, I'd be willing to accept a slight increase in crime in return for a more sensible prison system, but I'm not so sure the public would agree.
A bit of Daniel Maguire's 1974 meditation on the right to die:
When the law imputes malice to mercy killings it is indulging in the Anglo-Saxon penchant for confusing reality with legality. Happily for the human race, legality and reality do not always coincide. That is why wise judges are needed to temper the shortcomings of the written law. That is also why the Greeks insisted on the virtue of epikeia, whereby it is reasoned that the law is too general to cover every particular case and that therefore there are valid exceptions which epikeia discovers. Epikeia discerns the primacy of the spirit over the letter of the law. It is the virtue that knows that the spirit gives life whereas the letter can be lethal.
"Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.
In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible."
"SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?
Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.
SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?
Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business. But it's the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that's where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited."
In all seriousness, Spencer Ackerman has a good analysis of the background (expletives altered):
"When those negotiations [on the terms of a continuing US presence in Iraq] began, the U.S. reportedly presented the Iraqis with terms so breathtaking that they'd embarrass Lord Curzon. Bush wanted unilateral control of Iraqi airspace; legal immunity for all U.S. troops and contractors; the unilateral right to arrest and detain any Iraqis his commanders desired, and for unspecified periods; and several military bases. When Maliki indicated discomfort over acting like Gaius Baltar on Occupied New Caprica, Bush gave another indication of his "friendship and cooperation" -- blackmail.
All this came in a political context that Bush was either unattentive to or dismissive of. Despite spotty media coverage in the U.S., the deal prompted a massive backlash in Iraq, where basically every organized political force not part of Maliki's government rejected it. Maliki's allies were likely to lose the looming provincial elections already; now he had given them the albatross of clear collaborationism. And something similar was at work in the U.S.: the candidate with a clear and consistent history of opposition to the Iraq war won the Democratic primary, while the Republican candidate backed an endless occupation that he said might last a hundred or even a thousand years.
Maliki has read the tea leaves and evidently realized what the rest of us considered obvious: that the only one demanding that he turn Iraq to permanent foreign domination is a president thoroughly discredited in his own country who'll be out of office in a few months. That president's replacement might very well decide on a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, abrogating any deal Maliki was strongarmed into signing, at which point the U.S. would essentially be cutting Maliki off. Oh motherf*cking sh!t, Maliki surely thought, if I sign this deal, my people will run my body through the streets and hoist me from a f*cking lamppost. Not that the electricity works, but still."
It will be interesting to see how McCain responds. Thus far, he has not been forced to explain what he would do were he forced to choose between his view that withdrawal in sixteen months, with or without a timetable, would be a disastrous move that could lead to "horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide", and this earlier statement:
"Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it's a hypothetical, but it's at least possible.
McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because— if it was an elected government of Iraq— and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."
"Curious. The White House apparently just emailed the Reuters story linked above to its entire press list, with a subject line: "Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan - magazine." This hit my emailbox at 12:59PM, with the sender listed as "White House Press Releases.""
David Glenn on the debate over the economics of file sharing:
Does file sharing decrease CD sales, or doesn't it? A widely publicized study released last year by the Canadian government found that file sharing actually increases CD sales. But that study is an outlier. A majority of economic studies have concluded that file sharing hurts sales, though often to a more modest degree than the record industry would like the public to believe.
By Patrick Appel Sam Anderson explains why Obama's speeches send a thrill up Chris Matthews's leg:
In a new book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim subjects all the words ever publicly intoned by American presidents to a thorough statistical analysis—and he finds, unsurprisingly, an alarmingly steady decline. A century ago, Lim writes, presidential speeches were pitched at a college reading level; today, they’re down to eighth grade...Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7. Today’s State of the Unions inspire roughly 30 seconds of applause for every 60 seconds of speech. Although it’s tempting to blame the sorry state of things on the current malapropist-in-chief, Bush is only the latest flower (though, obviously, a particularly striking one) on a very deep weed. Our most brilliant presidents, Lim says, often work hard to seem publicly dumb in order to avoid the stain of elitism—amazingly, Bill Clinton’s total rhetorical output checks in at a lower reading level than Bush’s. Clinton’s former speechwriters told Lim that their image-conscious boss always demanded that his speeches be “more talky”; today, he’s widely remembered as a brilliant speaker who never gave a memorable speech.
Obama seems to have taken the opposite tack: He’s a Clinton-style natural who flaunts the artifice of his speeches and refuses to strategically hide his intelligence. Compared with his rivals, Obama’s skill-set seems almost otherworldly. His phrases line up regularly in striking and meaningful patterns; his cliché ratio is, for a politician, admirably low; his stresses and pauses seem dictated less by the usual metronome of generic political speech than by the actual structures of meaning behind his words. He tolerates complexity to such an extent that he’s sometimes criticized as “professorial,” which allows him to get away with inspirational catchphrases that would sound like platitudes coming from anyone else. His naïve-sounding calls for change are persuasive largely because he’s already managed to improve one of our most intractable political problems: the decades-old, increasingly virulent plague of terrible speechifying.
Theorists and scientists...have shown that laughter from tickling is not quite the reflex response we often assume it to be. For a start, it is next to impossible to raise a laugh by tickling yourself (whereas you can easily make your own leg jerk by striking your patella with a hammer). It is also the case that when tickling happens in threatening rather than friendly circumstances, it doesn't produce laughter, but screams or tears. Hence the conclusion that—while there may be some purely biological prompts to laughter...the link between tickling and laughing is largely a social one, not a reflex at all. From this stems a range of theories that go on to explain laughter as the result of evolutionary adaptation within early society. One idea is that laughing functioned as a "false alarm" device. It was a sign to primitive hominids that despite all the rumpus that other hominids were creating, this was no enemy attack but friendly knockabout.
Asked how they feel about the fact that their choice is the party’s nominee, 50 percent of Obama’s current voters say they are “enthusiastic.” Just 16 percent of McCain’s supporters say that about his candidacy.
But the 2004 contrast is interesting:
Even in polls taken just before the 2004 election...67 percent of Bush voters said they supported
him strongly, compared with just 49 percent of Kerry voters. And while
37 percent of likely Republican voters said they would be “excited” by
a Bush win, just 24 percent of likely Democratic voters said they would
be “excited” by a Kerry victory.
Public support for gays serving openly in the military is now overwhelming:
Seventy-five percent of Americans in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll said homosexuals who are open about their sexual orientation should be allowed to serve in the U.S. military, up from 62 percent in early 2001 and 44 percent in 1993. Majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents alike now believe it is acceptable for gays to serve openly in the U.S. armed forces.
By Patrick Appel Juan Cole on Bush accepting a time-something:
Bush has agreed in all but name with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on a timetable for US troop withdrawal from that country. As usual Bush's staff made up an implausible euphemism for the timetable, calling it a "time horizon" for "aspirational goals?" Language like that is a sure sign that Bush is too embarrassed to call it like it is.
By Patrick Appel Matt Pressman tries to figure out why people love to hate the NYT. Amid the bashing is Slate press critic Jack Shafer's semi-defense of the newspaper:
“What newspaper do they think does a better job? If you go to the library and start cranking through the microfilm of 30-year-old New York Timeses, I think you’ll quickly realize that it’s a more lively, more intelligent newspaper than it was 30 years ago. And it wasn’t a bad paper then. Does the paper aggravate, does it contradict itself? Yeah, but it’s a huge, huge monster. It’s on practically every continent every day, and our expectations of The New York Times are huge, as they should be.”
The Atlantic's once yearly news-stand only fiction issue is out. If, like me, you find digital short stories wanting, you can pick up a dead-tree version on the magazine stand. Aryn Kyle's story, Nine, is a standout piece as is Ann Patchett's essay on book tours. A snippet from Patchett:
I can never get very far from the niggling belief that something about book tour is inherently wrongheaded, that the basic premise of authors selling their books is a flawed one. Most people who are capable of sitting alone day after day, year after year, typing into the void are probably constitutionally ill-suited to work a room like a politician (though I am not, in fact, afraid of public speaking, and I’m good at it). We’re a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit. Reading, no matter what book clubs tell us, is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.
Some early reaction to Maliki's endorsement of Obama's withdrawal plan. Yglesias:
Maliki here -- and for the past couple of weeks more broadly -- is
addressing himself to the most fundamental "facts on the ground" in
Iraq of all, the gross unpopularity of the American military presence.
Under those circumstances, only real desperation (such as the terrible
situation prevailing in 2006) makes it make sense for Maliki to
uncritically endorse an open-ended presence.
To really understand the importance of Maliki's , comments you need to consider their opposite. Imagine if Maliki had walked in front of the cameras and said, "at this stage, a timetable for withdrawal is unrealistic, and we hope our American friends will not bow to domestic political pressures and be hasty in leaving Iraq just as the country improves." It would be a transformative moment in this election. John McCain would talk of nothing else. The cable shows would talk of nothing else. Magazines would run thousands of covers about "Obama's Iraq Problem." Obama would probably lose the race.
By Patrick Appel "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes," - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
By Patrick Appel Matt wants to get rid of the electoral college. Hendrik Hertzberg has similar wishes:
...once Americans have experienced the advantages of one or two national popular elections—dramatically higher turnout, campaigns waged on national issues, political energy in every corner of the country, candidates turning up in more than a dozen or so states, every vote counting equally, and no more red state/blue state blather (to say nothing of no more losers stumbling into the White House)—the new arrangement will quickly be formalized in the Constitution itself.
Elizabeth Kolbert gives a brief history of the American lawn:
What began as a symbol of privilege and evolved into an expression of shared values has now come to represent expedience. We no longer choose to keep lawns; we just keep on keeping them. In the meantime, the familiar image of Dad cutting the grass and then, beer in hand, sitting back to admire his work, is, in many communities, a fiction: increasingly, lawn care has become another one of those jobs, like cooking dinner or playing with the kids, that’s outsourced to someone else.
While Andrew is away, I'll be checking his e-mail account and posting reader dissents, responses, and window views as per usual. As Politics Of Scrabble remarked this week, blogs act as a "portal to the vast fields of information out there to be harvested" working as "second-by-second synthesizing plants and clearing houses" for news and opinion. We'll do our best to keep the blog chugging along. Don't hesitate to e-mail.
I'm taking a vacation next week and working on an essay for the Atlantic magazine the week after. I'm leaving this blog in the interim in the very capable hands of Patrick Appel, my aide de blogue, and two Dish alums, Jessie Roberts, my ancien aide de blogue and Chris Bodenner, former Dish intern and now Hotline wunderkind. They'll be trawling the web and blogosphere for the familiar Dish goodies, and revealing how superfluous I am fast becoming in these parts. Next week, they'll also be joined by Hilary Bok, Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, and the week after by Daniel Larison, whose blog, Eunomia, is currently at the American Conservative. I don't know how to categorize either Hilary or Daniel, which is why they are particularly welcome at the Dish. But I do know they're two of the freshest, sharpest new voices to have emerged from the blogosphere. Welcome to my parlor, said the spider, etcetera.
I'll be back in August and balls-to-the-wall till November. Reculer pour mieux sauter. And all that.
Mitt Romney is already in line to be the nominee in 4 years if McCain loses under the GOP Law of Primogeniture. Why would he want to muck it up with a VP run? If McCain loses, it is all downside for Mitt. People would forget all the positive aspects of his Presidential run and remember his role on a losing ticket. (See Edwards, John.)
The main positive reason I can conjure for voting for
McCain is divided government. However, since the current divided
government situation has not generated much in terms of addressing
these keys issues about executive power, one wonders about that
argument as well. At a minimum I find myself for the first time in my
life in a position where I could see myself voting Democratic,
Republican or Libertarian. And, I suspect that I am not alone. I was
having a conversation the other day with a lifelong friend who is also
a lifelong conservative. He concurred that he, too, had a similar view
on the choices and his own possible voting behavior.
Bainbridge replies in the comments:
I can sympathise with your position, but I have just three words of caution: Judges, judges, judges.
I see no reason to think that Obama would be less prone to interventionism than McCain. My strong sense is that he’d model himself after Bill Clinton and be eager to use military force for humanitarian and do-gooder reasons, whereas McCain would be more likely to use force aggressively in pursuit of security goals.
Nor do I have any reason to believe Obama would be less prone than McCain to overreach in his use of executive power to advance what he believes to be legitimate and necessary goals. Indeed, Obama’s seeming lack of sense of humor and condemnation of any and all criticism as beyond the pale worries me greatly on that front.
A policeman wearing gas masks stands by during a mock terrorist disaster drill in preparation for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games at the Sha Tin Olympic Equestrian venue on July 18, 2008 in Hong Kong, China. The Chinese Special Administrative Region is the host city of the Equestrian event of the 2008 Olympic Games. By MN Chan/Getty Images.
James Pethokoukis tallies the cost of Gore's call for 100% renewable energy by 2018:
By my math, using Pickens's numbers, converting the whole economy to renewable energy in a short period of time might cost $5 trillion—and that is if you assume that government-led projects come in on budget. (Remember, the current U.S. gross domestic product is $12 trillion.) That would be like creating another Japan. Or fighting World War II all over again. The latter analogy is especially apt since the Gore Plan would effectively transform our free-market economy into a command-and-control war economy full of rationing and scarcity. Of course, there are many folks like Gore who view global warming as the moral equivalent of war. But Gore would extend the concept into the economic equivalent of war. Again, all this makes sense if you think we are doomed otherwise.
"I shall be on Alan Colmes free-for-all radio show tonight, 11pm-1am local time. Looks like a totally goyische line-up there for a change. I hope Alan won't feel lonely," - John Derbyshire, today.
Yes, the Award has been retired for some time now - except when Derb writes something like this. He has dibs.
Your post on your colleague Megan lamenting the end of the American "upper class" accent was interesting. I would venture to guess that this accent disappeared because it was an affectation more than a genuine accent. I had a Connecticut born, Yale-educated prep school teacher (long deceased) who used to talk like that. We, his students, all knew that if he was given enough gin he was perfectly able to speak "normally." The Texas drawl, African-American speech, the Boston brogue, the speech patterns of the Deep South or Northeastern Maine -- all of these are genuine accents rooted in culture and migratory patterns. The "upper class" American accent, which arguably did descend from American Yankee inflections, was also known as a "mid-Atlantic" accent and it was largely a creation of the movies.
In Hollywood's Golden Age there was a small industry devoted to training "thespians" to talk like this (there's a wonderful scene in "Singin' In The Rain" that satirizes this fetish). My ex-mother-in-law, the daughter of a California rancher and a Hollywood starlet during this era, continued to use her "upper class" accent until she died a few years ago. This way of talking metastasized nation-wide through the movies and died out as the old studio system died. It's been widely reported that even William F. Buckley, an arch practitioner of this way of speaking, was the only member of his family who spoke like that. To the extend the "accent" was phony (even if unselfconsciously so on the part of those who used it), I suppose one could say "good riddance, y'all."
Another reader adds:
The expert on the historical tides underlying the decline of the
"upper-class" accent that Megan McArdle mourns is William Labov, a
sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. His findings are more
subtle, and more interesting, than the sudden death perceived by McArdle.
Labov's work was covered nicely by The New Yorker's John Seabrook in 2005,
available on the web here.
The call to produce "100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years" is off the charts. To blandly claim that this is both "achievable" and "affordable" is a typical Gore touch--as is the hyperbole about the end of life as we know it if we fail to do as he advises. Gore says, "The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis." Well, among other things, that depends what you mean by "dramatic"; so far as am I aware, nobody else is saying, "eliminate carbon from the US electricity supply by 2018 or we are doomed." [...]
I agree with Gore about some things. I agree with his preference for a carbon tax over other carbon control regimes...But eliminating carbon from electricity within 10 years? Does he even mean it? "I see my role as enlarging the political space in which Senator Obama or Senator McCain can confront this issue as president next year," he says. Translation: I advocate the impossible so that the possible becomes more probable. Fair enough, one might say. But propaganda in a good cause is still propaganda, isn't it?
A reader explains why it shouldn't be under-estimated:
After seeing Obama's
speech on the steps of the Springfield courthouse, I gave him $50. The
next month I signed up for a small recurring gift. Then somewhere in
there I bought a t-shirt and a hat. A couple times the campaign invited
me to match a first-time donor, and I'd give another $25. I also bought
a t-shirt, and then a hat at a small $100 fundraiser (it was November
and I was cold). The recurring gift stayed through the primaries, but
then every so often he'd get beat and I'd want to lend a hand with
another $25. In an e-mail today announcing the June fundraising
figures, the Obama campaign told me what I've donated: $1,103.78.
Kevin Drum notes an interesting demographic nugget:
Among cell-phone-only users (i.e., people who don't have landlines at all and use cell phones exclusively), Obama beat McCain by a whopping 29 points, 61-32.
"Bush said it like a man who, with a cautious optimism and a deep yearning, ultimately looks forward not simply to more time in Crawford, but after that, to the full revelation of those mysteries come his Judgment day. The president’s words demonstrate an awareness of his place — even as the leader of the free world — in Creation," - Kathryn-Jean Lopez, National Review.
Nicholas Carr responds to criticism of his article on the Internet destroying the ability to concentrate:
Shirky is nothing if not an optimist. He believes that, somehow, we will find a way to “secur[e] for ourselves an ability to concentrate amidst our garden of ethereal delights.” But here he’s stating a desire that he criticizes in others: a desire to turn the clock back. He simply assumes that the “ability to concentrate” will return even as the Net changes so much else about who we are and how we think. It’s telling that Shirky uses gauzily religious terms to describe the Net...as what he’s expressing here is not reason but faith. I hope he’s right, but I think that skepticism is always the proper response to techno-utopianism.
Surely, a great deal of our raising involves society tricking you into doing things that are not in your immediate self-interest. Similarly, I assume that contrary to the popular stereotype, men actually must do much better out of marriage than women do, because society expends so much energy on telling women that they cannot be happy unless they marry, and trying to make sure they can't be happy by stigmatizing women who don't. If women genuinely got more benefits out of marriage, we wouldn't have so many social institutions that punish them for failing to enter that happy state.
I think Megan is almost certainly right about men getting more out of marriage than women (even though they often feel in their hornier moments that they have the raw end of the deal). I'm almost a year into marriage and I'm honestly surprised by how much happier I am. Aaron and I joke about how we've almost turned into lesbians, going to bed early, worshiping the dogs ... Megan is writing about kids of course. But even without them, and even after writing a lot about the positive effects of marriage as an institution, I'm shocked by my own evolution. I'm sure we'll have rough patches, as every married couple does. But so far, it's been a revelation and confirmation of an intuition: in some ways, gay men may benefit from marriage more than any other group.
Keith Gaddie, a University of Oklahoma political science professor,
called the book "one of the strangest things" he'd ever seen. "I've never seen a comic book with the phrase 'anal sodomy' in it before. That was a new one for me."
You quoted Steve Clemons in criticizing Obama for not going to Brussels.
Amongst other things he wrote:
"But Brussels is the capital of Europe. It is the promise of what Europe is
struggling to become that makes Brussels a vital stopover point. Obama is
visiting some of the key, strategic nodes that give Europe some of its legs
-- but the trip looks like an "Old Europe" trip, not a new one."
As a native European I can only say - You've got to be fucking kidding me!?
"The sheer breadth of fluff in this story is something to be marveled at," New York Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet said. "It's all here. Favorite books, movies, meals, and seasons of the year ranked one through four. Sure, we asked Obama what his favorite ice cream was, but Time did us one better and asked, 'What's your favorite ice cream, really?'"
A new field poll finds a majority of Californians now opposed to amending their constitution to deny gay couples the right to marry:
The new poll, released
today, is the first independent statewide measure of public opinion on
the proposed constitutional ban since gay men and lesbians began
marrying legally in Californiaon
June 16. It was also the first time Field Research has polled voters on
the official ballot description of Proposition 8. A narrow majority of
51 percent of 672 likely voters said they would vote against a ban,
while 42 percent said they would vote for it.
The anti-gay vote can be under-represented in the polls - but it's very rare for a proposition to come from ten points behind to win. Only 7 percent said they were undecided.
First William Burns, now this euphemism for a timetable:
In the area of security cooperation, the President and the Prime
Minister agreed that improving conditions should allow for the
agreements now under negotiation to include a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals
-- such as the resumption of Iraqi security control in their cities and
provinces and the further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq.
The President and Prime Minister agreed that the goals would be based
on continued improving conditions on the ground and not an arbitrary
date for withdrawal.
A prediction: the McCain and Obama positions on Iraq will be as minimal as McCain can make them by November.
In another twist in the changing politics of the Middle East, Juan Cole cheers Bush:
The decision by the Administration to send William Burns, the State Department’s third ranking official and a career diplomat, to participate in the five power talks with Iran over its nuclear activities, certainly invites speculation as to how far the Administration has changed its policies regarding Iran...
The decision to send Burns certainly was made by President Bush, who certainly is well aware of the controversy it will arouse domestically from his own partisans and is also well aware of the thus-far successful North Korean model. He also would know that his decision undercuts John McCain’s position on Iran and his claim to superior experience, and validates Barack Obama’s judgment favoring the negotiating track. The President must also know that the multilateral process will take time to unfold and any useful results might not be realized until after his term in office. So, for a change, cheers for George Bush.
I have a feeling that historians will look at the Bush administration in three periods: pre-9/11, 2002 - 2006, and 2006 - 2009. The finish is looking stronger, as Gates and Rice and Petraeus And Hill consolidate the new array of forces the first term created.
July 13, 2008 - July 19, 2008
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