By Patrick Appel Reihan offers some brief thoughts on Maliki and the presidential race:
...if you believe that Colin Kahl is carefully signaling foreign policy elites, and I do, the debate between McCain and Obama over Iraq is increasingly about 80,000 vs. 50,000, not 180,000 vs. 0. Given that Maliki has to demonstrate his nationalist bona fides, an Obama victory is a better-than-acceptable outcome from his perspective. And by building trust with the Obama camp, he can restrain any impulse on Obama’s part to push for rapid withdrawal. We have every reason to believe that the partisan temperature of the Iraq debate will sharply decrease if Obama wins. Assuming Obama doesn’t win a landslide — he won’t — Democrats will be disciplined, including the MoveOn Democrats Chris Hayes profiled. Why? Because they want to win, and they’ll be more exercised by the Kulturkampf that an Obama victory will likely set off.
by Chris Bodenner Many people consider my favorite musician, Gregg Gillis (aka Girl Talk), no musician at all. In fact, certain
stuffed shirts want to prosecute him for what he does. That's because
Girl Talk creates mash-ups: tracks that blend samples from other
artists, usually without permission. Mash-ups began as novelties, and most
are just clever combinations of two songs. But on his last album
alone, Girl Talk sampled nearly 300 different songs (up to 26/track), spanning hip hop, indie rock, dance pop, and dozens of
subgenres. His more creative combinations include: the lyrics of Notorious
B.I.G. over Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," rapper Drama over Roy Orbison's
"You Got It," hip-hop duo Clipse over Grizzly Bears' indie hit "The
Knife." His albums are a seamless string of frenzied dance
tracks. At his live shows, the skinny, pasty, ex-engineer
flails around with his fans and ultimately leaves in boxers. (For a fuller profile, see this piece I wrote last year.)
Girl Talk just released his newest album, Feed The Animals. In the spirit of open source (and following the lead of Radiohead's Rainbows), he put the album online as a "pay what you can" download. It's not quite the masterpiece of its predecessor, Night Ripper,
but pretty damn close. Recently, fans have started to adapt Girl Talk
tracks into music videos,
splicing together snippets from sampled originals found on YouTube.
This one is truly brilliant (the intro blends '60s British prog
rock and Dirty South rap, and you can't miss the scenes from
"Footloose" at 3:25):
Girl
Talk embodies the Millennial Generation like no other artist. An
archaeologist from the future could find no greater musical artifact
than Night Ripper or Feed The Animals, which feature
music from the 80s (new wave, gangsta rap), 90s (grunge, Dirty South)
and 00s (emo, crunk). Much of the fun is recognizing songs you haven't
heard since middle school. But his albums aren't just nostalgic
soundtracks; their ingenuous genre-blending makes them far greater
than the sum of their parts. And Girl Talk would hardly have been possible without the generation-defining Internet. Online file-sharing
allowed him to get almost any song for free. Editing software
on his laptop (which he uses at live shows) allowed him to splice and dice music without the need for expensive studio equipment. And of
course blogs and websites made word-of-mouth and distribution far
easier for an amateur with a day job.
Also, I can't help but notice parallels between his music and the cultural atmosphere surrounding Obama. At age 46, Obama certainly isn't a Millennial. But his campaign - buoyed by young fans and volunteers - embodies that generation in so many ways, as does Girl Talk. Obama is a young, diverse, and unique politician running an innovative, grassroots campaign that thrives offs the Internet. Similarly, Girl Talk is a young, innovative, Internet-based artist whose level of sampling is unique and incredibly diverse -- racially and stylistically. And both Obama and Gillis draw from the same demographics: African-Americans and young liberal whites. Plus, they both put on killer live shows. (Incidentally, nearly half of the songs on Obama's iPod - including Jay-Z, Elton John, and the Stones - are sampled on the last two Girl Talk albums.)
Finally, I can't help but recall a great essay Reihan wrote on "rickrolling" - when someone booby-traps a link directed to the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit song, "Never Gonna Give You Up." In a critique of that video, he wrote:
His skin is a ghostly white.... And although he is pale and British, he sounds ... black and American. ... Astley could be condemned for appropriating a primarily black form of musical expression. But not only was he not condemned -- he was embraced by music-lovers of all colors.... The earnestness and lack of self-consciousness contrasts with the paralyzing cynicism of our own time. What we're seeing is the promise of a post-racial future, in which color distinctions melt away in the white heat (so to speak) of Astley's soulful vocals. Could it be that Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' is the soundtrack for the Age of Obama?
Not to totally ape Reihan, but could it be that Girl Talk is the artist for the Age of Obama?
Like Astley, Gillis is a pale, geeky white guy (Gillis was a biomedical engineer, after all). Yet his grasp on hip-hop - the genre that dominates his sound - and his ability to weave it through disparate subgenres - namely indie rock - is remarkable. Oh, and "Never Gonna Give You Up" is featured on the 7th track of Feed The Animals, so you get RickRolled every time you listen.
I feel that there is one point about theMyersaffair which is not being made clearly and often enough: that is, Myers was not merely attempting to provoke the ire of Catholics. Out of context, what Myers did with the cracker - I am among those who believes that's all it is - may seem strange, unnecessary, even hateful. Were he simply desecrating a religious symbol for the sake of desecrating a religious symbol, perhaps a case could be reasonably made that he was crossing a line. (Though, and I think you would agree, it would still not be reasonable to attempt to have him fired, to make threats against him, and make threats against his family - all of which Catholics have done in response.)
However, in context, Myers' actions are entirely justified, and quite
appropriate to the situation.
by Chris Bodenner Vanity Fair launches a gay car blog:
A car's gayness—like gayness in general—is based in its inhabiting the
margins of conventionality. A Gay Car is quirkier, more enigmatic, or
more fiercely accessorized than the average vehicle. (It also likes to
sleep with other Gay Cars.)
by Chris Bodenner "[McCain's newest attack ad] is sequel of sorts to the "Pump" ad from a few days ago suggesting that Obama uniquely was somehow to blame for soaring gas prices; anyone who believes that will, I guess, also believe that he'd torpedo a visit to see wounded troops because there'd be no flashbulbs popping in his face. Not only does that not fit the facts — he left his pool reporters outside when he visited Walter Reed a few weeks ago, and as I noted last night, his spokesman says the plan at Landstuhl was to keep the press on the plane — but even under the worst assumptions, it makes no sense. If you think (and I do not) that Obama’s a sociopath who sees wounded soldiers as nothing but political chips to be played in an election card game, surely we can agree that he's nevertheless savvy enough to grasp how horribly bad it would look to have photographers with him on a hospital visit in the middle of a campaign. If there were pictures on the wires of him shaking hands with bedridden vets while media vultures crowded around for close-ups, conservatives would have ripped him for it properly and mercilessly and he knows it. Why not stick with the 'he went to the gym but not the hospital' point, which is at least factually correct? Why go here?," - Allahpundit.
I predict these nasty, petty, and desperate attacks will only grow as Obama soars into November. What else does McCain have to run on? It's the same approach Clinton took after Feb. 5: if I can't beat him, I'll drag him down to my level and hope he hits back, besmirching his image as a "new politician." It wasn't exactly a winning strategy.
In 2001 Brooke Allen wrote in praise of the big-box book store:
Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. "I am a reader," the interior litany goes, "therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers." With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.[...]
Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are)...the fact is
that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a
sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact,
where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's
202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast.
Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the
suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has
radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban
intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural
wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest
in.
In a very basic level, modern hero stories explore a simple question: What would happen if human beings could do X? X, in this context, can mean anything from fly to shapeshift to lift trains to build mutation enhancers. In a way, it's simply an extension of the basic question of movies: What would happen if human beings were smarter and prettier and had better dialogue than they actually do? Well, one of the things that happens is that more people want to watch them go about their days. And that's turning out to be even truer when it comes to people who are smarter and prettier and have better dialogue and can fly. What we're finding from the superhero movies is that the action sequences are actually the least interesting. The fights in Batman were significantly less riveting than simply watching a sociopath like the Joker conduct his business. The climactic battle in Iron Man wasn't half as gripping as watching Tony Stark fly for the first time. The hospital scene in Hancock was basically an afterthought, and nowhere near as interesting as the scenes where Hancock awoke, drunk and lonesome, on a park bench. The epic clashes, in other words, have been far worse than the mundane scenes that preceded them.
By Patrick Appel A 1936 article on the Social Security Act (it was signed into law just the year before) details the circumstances which spurred its creation:
The depression has shown a marked increase in the number of aged
dependents. We find that, although older men are not often
discriminated against when work slacks off in industrial plants, it is
much more difficult for them to be reemployed when once off the
payroll. The problem of old-age security is intensified because, while
physical life is reaching further into the sixties and seventies, the
economic life of the industrial worker is dropping back toward the
fifties. This situation is not a product of the depression.
Patients await dental care at the Remote Area Medical (RAM), clinic July 26, 2008 in Wise, Virginia. The free clinic, which lasts 2 1/2 days, is the largest of its kind in the nation, and organizers expected to treat more than 2,500 people over the weekend, mostly providing dental and vision services. Residents of the 'coal counties' of Appalachia are some of the most impoverished in the nation, and most are either underinsured or have no health insurance at all. For many, the RAM clinic is the only medical care they may receive each year. Healthcare for the nation's disadvantaged has become one of the main issues in this year's presidential race. Photo by John Moore/Getty.
...the question stands: would you rather live in a world in which politicians and their minions can show the outside world what's actually on their minds -- and suffer the occasional monster -- or a world in which we spend two thirds of waking life trying to get Mark Penn or Samantha Power fired?
By Patrick Appel Tamsin Osborne summarizes a study on male and female life-time happiness levels:
Apparently, women are happy with their lot earlier in their lives, whereas men have bigger financial goals and tend to be unfulfilled during their 20s, both financially and in their family lives, which makes them miserable. But by middle age, men have fulfilled their financial and family life goals and have cheered up, whereas women are more likely to be unfulfilled and unhappy. The authors think a major factor underlying this is the shift in the proportion of men and women in relationships: men are more likely to be single in their 20s, and women are more likely to be alone in middle age.
By Patrick Appel McCain changes his tune, and then semi-corrects himself:
BLITZER: So why do you think he said that 16 months is basically a pretty good timetable?
McCAIN: He said it’s a pretty good timetable based on conditions on the ground. I think it’s a pretty good timetable, as we should — or horizons for withdrawal. But they have to be based on conditions on the ground.
As Mark Murray says: "calling 16 months a "good timetable" is something McCain hasn't said before -- and probably never would have said a week ago." Obama welcomes the change in a press conference:
In terms of his comment about — that maybe 16 months sounds good — we are pleased to see that there has been some convergence around proposals that we've been making for a year and a half. The fact that John McCain now thinks that we should put more troops into Afghanistan I think is a good thing and that the Bush administration acknowledges that as well...The fact that John McCain now thinks that it's possible for us to execute a phased withdrawal — I think that's a positive thing and if the administration believes that as well, then I will, I will be fully supportive.
A bit of David Samuels's article in the New Yorker on medical marijuana in California:
The limited legal protections afforded to pot growers and dispensary owners have turned marijuana cultivation and distribution in California into a classic "gray area" business, like gambling or strip clubs, which are tolerated or not, to varying degrees, depending on where you live and on how aggressive your local sheriff is feeling that afternoon. This summer, Jerry Brown, the state's attorney general, plans to release a more consistent set of regulations on medical marijuana, but it is not clear that California's judges will uphold his effort. In May, the state Court of Appeal, in Los Angeles, ruled that Senate Bill 420's cap on the amount of marijuana a patient could possess was unconstitutional, because voters had not approved the limits.
By Patrick Appel Part of an opinion piece against internet classes in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
At the most basic level, to be a student has always meant actually dragging one’s exhausted body into class with readings in hand, being (more or less) awake, alert, listening, and ready to open one’s mouth. And to be a teacher, for me, means seeing the faces of the students and how their bodies reflect their thoughts and emotions, hearing the timbre of their voices or the lilts in their dialects, experiencing them before me in the rich mix of ideas.
Jake Bronstein recently bought a toy vending machine off the Internet. He filled the toy capsules with ideas of fun things to do and started placing the machine in various spots around New York. For 50 cents you get the original toy, an idea, and a map to guide you to the location for your idea. Each capsule also contains a quarter, refunding half of your purchase price (the machine wouldn’t let him charge less than 50 cents.)
By Patrick Appel Samuel A. Chambers & Alan Finlayson have done a study on Ann Coulter:
...it is not only extremely easy but also terribly tempting to dismiss Coulter as a minor media-made irritant, a flaky extremist or just another pundit. And Coulter has, of course, been accused of deliberate distortion, selective misquoting and outright falsification (Franken 2003). But all five of her books, from her 1989 indictment of Bill Clinton through to Godless, have topped the New York Times' best-seller list. Although other denizens of the right have questioned the soundness of her work (e.g. Horowitz, 2003) she continues to enjoy regular media appearances, persists in writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and remains very successful on the lecture circuit. It is a safe bet that Ann Coulter is much better known amongst Americans than John Rawls or Joshua Cohen will ever be. Furthermore, while Coulter may be on the edge of the American political spectrum this is simply indicative of how far the centre has been pulled to the right. And it has been pulled there by people such as Coulter, who herself must be understood as part of a much more general and highly successful political style that has achieved national prominence thanks to channels such as Fox News, talk radio and, latterly, internet conservative town-halls and blog fora.
I haven't seen much of Coulter on television or in the news since before the California primary when she was threatening to campaign for Obama or Clinton instead of McCain. I wonder if she has changed her tune.
By Patrick Appel Mark Benjamin, a father of two, beefs up his bike so that he can buy groceries, ride around his kids, move a grill, and even blend margaritas:
It just so happens that Xtracycle also manufactures the perfect mental liberation: the pedal blender ($300). You heard me: a blender to make smoothies. You attach the pedal blender to the bike in place of the SnapDeck. As the rear wheel spins, so does your smoothie. You can either pedal around town and be a Jamba Juice on wheels or attach two small medal stands that elevate the back wheel for blending in place. I called two friends with Xtracycles for a triple date with our wives. We got together in my friend Jeff's backyard, pulled the SnapDeck off his bike, put it up on the stands and popped in the blender. In went the ice, tequila, triple sec and lime juice. I climbed aboard and pedaled our way to Margaritaville.
By Patrick Appel Amy Wilentz, a former mentor of mine, has a profile of Carter in the latest issue of New York:
What’s most interesting about [Jimmy] Carter at the age of 83 is not that he’s an eccentric, or that he’s outspoken, or that he continues to be a part of the debate, but that his mind-set and his policies seem to jibe so well with the attitudes of young people, students, and the blogosphere. In many ways, Carter seems more relevant than George W. Bush, his ideas more contemporary, his interests more outward-looking. He builds houses in New Orleans and elsewhere with his Habitat for Humanity project; he jets around the world, funding projects to deal with global health crises; he makes sure elections are free and fair. Carter is more like Bono than he is like Bush.
Hendrik Hertzberg praises the piece, while Marty Perez is critical.
By Patrick Appel Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses blogger-hate:
There are many things wrong with Alter's analysis, but let's begin with the fact that Alter is basically taking the top 5 percent of print journalism--a mature form that's had a chance to iron out its wrinkles--and comparing it to the worst of a very new form. It's true that "anyone can sit at home pontificating in their PJs," but not everyone does it well, which is why some bloggers attract an audience, and some don't. Moreover, the idea that blogging consists of simply spouting off is moronic and reductionist. The first thing I discovered--and this has been repeatedly rammed home to me--is just how much reading I have to do in order to be credible. Frankly, I still don't do enough. But the sheer amount of info you have to absorb, in order to be good, is pretty incredible. The best bloggers may not pick up the phone much--but they do research. It's just not clear to me that talking to some bureacrat is anymore revelatory than reading a ton. It's probably best to do both.
I read 8 to 12 hours a day and blog the best of what I find, less than 1% of the total. Google reader tracks how many blog posts I've read: as of this writing 21,779 posts in the last 30 days. And that doesn't count the times I go directly to blogs or news websites, something I do frequently throughout the day. Reporting is important but I fully agree with Coates that reading is a key part of blogging. Blogging isn't just writing; it's editing.
By Patrick Appel Yesterday the ACLU released three new documents on the government's torture program. Here are some key quotes:
...If a defendant acts with good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent. A defendant acts in good faith when he has an honest belief that his actions will not result in severe pain or suffering...Although an honest belief need not be reasonable, such a belief is easier to establish where there is reasonable basis for it...Prolonged mental harm is substantial mental harm of sustained duration, e.g. harm lasting months or even years after the acts were inflicted upon the prisoner.
So torture doesn't count if you think happy thoughts when you are doing
it? TPM gets this quote in response:
The reader you quoted at 5:57 pm must not have great reading skills. Myers claimed that he obtained a post-transubstantiation wafer. The line "Myers might as well have snagged a bottle of red wine from a liquor store and "desecrated" the blood of God" completely misses the facts here. PZ solicited post-transubstantiation crackers in his earlier posts, and confirms that this specific cracker was "post-t" at comment #200.
Also, your blog's first post on the actual desecration quoted the paragraph where PZ described what he did, but did not quote the final paragraph. (Except for the title "Nothing is Sacred") That's too bad. Why quote the throat-clearing and not the message?
Here's the final paragraph the reader is talking about:
By Patrick Appel Forcing bridesmaids to buy a dress they are never going to wear again isn't so bad. At least, not when compared to what some brides ask of their attendants:
Becky Lee, 39, a Manhattan photographer, declined when a friend asked her -- and five other attendants -- to have their breasts enhanced. "We're all Asian and didn't have a whole lot of cleavage, and she found a doctor in L.A. who was willing to do four for the price of two," said Ms. Lee, who wore a push-up bra instead. Not for nothing are some maids known as slaves of honor, but this kind of cajoling is a recent development on the wedding front.
An actress from Maoxian County puts on her make-up before a rehearsal of the Qiang ethnic traditional dancing 'Qiangzu Tuigan', literally Qiang ethnic's pushing the poles, which is part of the performance of the Olympic Games opening ceremony on July 25, 2008 in Chengdu of Sichuan Province, China. The 'Tuigan' dancing are performed by 120 artists, most of whom are from the quake-struck Wenchuan and Maoxian Counties. Photo by China Photos/Getty.
by Chris Bodenner The inimitable Shelby Steele had a great op-ed in the WSJ this
week. In a sort of political eulogy for Jesse Jackson, Steele goes beyond
the "Jesse is jealous" argument and delves into the profound generational
gap between Jackson and Obama:
Mr. Jackson was always a
challenger. He confronted American
institutions (especially wealthy corporations) with the shame of
America's racist past and demanded redress. He could have taken up the
mantle of the early Martin Luther King [and] argued for
equality out of a faith in the imagination and drive of his own people.
Instead -- and tragically -- he and the entire civil rights
establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.
Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the
civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. ...
They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said
to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To
argue differently -- that black development, for example, might be a
more enduring road to black equality -- took whites "off the hook" and
was therefore an unpardonable heresy. ... And now comes Mr. Obama,
who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by
giving up his moral leverage over whites.
I think it should be pointed out that Myers is absolutely correct when he says that the eucharist he has is nothing but a "cracker" -- and the pope himself would agree. As a former altar boy and parochial school inmate, I can say with confidence that no one in the Catholic Church treats the wafers themselves reverently until AFTER the transubstantiation that takes place during the mass. Before each round of 2nd-graders received their first communion, they would get a "practice run" with an un-sanctified wafer (presumably so no child would spit it out in disgust during the actual ceremony); occasionally one of the altar boys would goad another into snagging some of the eucharists as a pre-mass snack. I mean, Myers might as well have snagged a bottle of red wine from a liquor store and "desecrated" the blood of God.
By Patrick Appel Phillip Toledano has a stunning set of photographs of his 98-year-old father (click near the bottom of the screen to scroll through). We've blogged Toledano's work in the past here and here.
Poulos's remarks ignore the historically expanding notion of community, from clan
to village to city to nation. And the nation is by no means natural; it's a
metaphorical extension of kinship ties to an imagined community. Americans, to
take one example, already feel these ties to millions of people that they have
never met, never will meet, and many of whom are quite different from them.
Perhaps adding another zero to the population in our community is too much, and
perhaps the differences between the various populations in the world are too
great, but it seems pretty historically myopic to discard the idea of world
citizenship outright.
By Patrick Appel Jeffrey Goldberg recently sat down with Daniel Benjamin to talk about al Queda. Benjamin's response to a question about experts who believe there is a 50 percent chance an American city will be attacked with a nuclear device sometime in the next ten years:
I don't think the chance is anywhere near that high, but an attack with an improvised nuclear device is plausible. When you interviewed Michael Chertoff in Aspen, he said he thought that threat would be real in a couple years, right? I ran a study a few years ago that brought together nuclear weaponeers and terrorism experts, and the conclusion, in essence, was that if al Qaeda could get the fissile material - the hardest part of the process, but by no means impossible - they would likely be able to build a weapon. I'd put the likelihood of that happening at a small fraction of the 50 percent you cite, but the impact would be so devastating that we need to allocate lots of resources and effort to ensuring that doesn't happen.
by Chris Bodenner According to the latest polling, Obama is crushing McCain in the Hispanic vote -- 66% to 23%. (So much for his "Hispanic problem"). GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio:
"That number should be very, very sobering for the McCain campaign. The bottom line: Despite all of this positioning he's taken on
immigration, it's shielded him nothing with Hispanics and it's another
point of distrust with Republicans."
Danny Finkelstein chides Obama for brushing off the foreign press:
He hasn't, as yet, given an interview to a foreign newspaper. He doesn't, as far as I know, have any foreign press on his plane on this trip. He has received many requests by foreign journalists to accompany him on his travels in the US, but has turned them all down.
By Patrick Appel Marc ponders a new poll on independent voters:
Among the key findings: Democrats have a built-in structural advantage among independents to the score of between five and ten points. But McCain remains competitive because a lot of those independents are ideological conservatives who have weak partisan attachments to the Republican Party. Without being pushed, 45% of the sample, including 59% of the self-described moderates in the sample, said they would vote for Obama and 39% said they would vote for McCain. With leaners, McCain makes up two points of the margin.
by Chris Bodenner Highlighting a horrifying account of anti-gay brutality, this report paints a bleak picture for homosexuals in Iraq:
Coming out as gay is not easy in any country, but to do so in Iraq could mean a death sentence or torture. ... Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the situation for gays and
lesbians in Iraq has deteriorated. Ridiculed under Hussein, many now
find themselves the targets of violence, according to humanitarian
officials. ... When CNN asked Iraqis in Baghdad how they felt about homosexuals, we found intolerance to be widespread.
One man said he considers gays no different from "criminals and terrorists." Another claimed that homosexuality was "illegal under Islamic law, and [gays] should be punished by law like criminals."
In case you're wondering, the most densely populated block group is one in New York County, New York -- 3,240 people in 0.0097 square miles, for about 330,000 per square mile. The least dense is in the North Slope Borough of Alaska -- 3 people in 3,246 square miles, or one per 1,082 square miles. The Manhattan block group I mention here is 360 million times more dense than the Alaska one...
By Patrick Appel Eric Alva, a former marine who lost his leg to a landmine, discusses his experience with DADT:
Even under the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, I was out to a lot of my fellow Marines. The typical reaction from my straight, often married friends was "so what?" I was the same person, I did my job well, and that's all they cared about. Today I'm godfather to three of those men's children.
McCain repeats his "rather lose a war" charge in today's Columbus Dispatch:
Q: Does that mean it's the same as putting politics ahead of country?
A: It means ... I said, I will repeat my statement again, that he would rather lose a war than lose a campaign. Because anyone who fails to acknowledge that the surge has worked, who has consistently opposed it, consistently never sat down and had a briefing with General Petraeus, our commander there, would rather lose a war than a political campaign.
This is not wholly different from what McCain told voters in New Hampshire, or told Katie Couric. But after taking some heat for his remarks, McCain is not backing down. In fact, he has broadened his criticsm: now anybody who fails to acknowledge the success of the surge -- and probably anyone who opposed it in the first place -- is apparently branded as something just short of a traitor.
By Patrick Appel The Economist takes Noam Scheiber to task:
It has been a bad eight years for Atlanticists, when many out there now assume European and American distaste for each other, and that European affection for an American must be zero-sum—that it will cost him an equal amount of affection at home. Or that an American's pride in his country is similarly zero-sum, costing him among Europeans. I don't think this image costs Mr Obama, on net. It is truly a churlish, and in my opinion rare, American who actually takes pride when an American president is protested, jeered and hissed at abroad.
By Patrick Appel Tyler Cowen cites a study on immigration:
Using our estimates and Census data we find that immigration (1990-2006) had small negative effects in the short run on native workers with no high school degree (-0.7%) and on average wages (-0.4%) while it had small positive effects on native workers with no high school degree (+0.3%) and on average native wages (+0.6%) in the long run. These results are perfectly in line with the estimated aggregate elasticities in the labor literature since Katz and Murphy (1992). We also find a wage effect of new immigrants on previous immigrants in the order of negative 6%.
By Patrick Appel Poulos expands upon his remarks about Obama's use of the term "world citizen":
Our yearning for pan-human solidarity is an absurdity, the absurdity of the human condition, and the most utopian of all utopian ideas is the idea of a Brotherhood of Man: because the human race is not a family, just like it isn’t one big polity. We are stuck with differentiation; there is no metaphor that allows us to redefine humanity as a closer relationship than it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. Indeed, the only trope that allows us to develop closer amicable relationships with strangers is the trope of friendship, and the only way to close the relationship with a stranger is to make friends. Not to ‘make citizens’; not to ‘make brothers’. This is crazy European talk — the discredited language of the bloody French and German experiments in various kinds of border-busting solidarity. (The genius of the EU is how it functions best without an ounce of romanticism about solidarity; its inability to even generate its own preamble to its own constitution is proof that our apparently pan-human longing for pan-human solidarity may actually be a parochially European hang-up which it can only resolve by forgetting.)
July 20, 2008 - July 26, 2008
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