Archive
February 17, 2008 - February 23, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 200821 Feb 2008 01:45 pm The Other McCain Storyby hilzoy A few days ago I wrote about a loan John McCain had taken out, in which he tried to use his future eligibility for federal matching funds as collateral. Presumably, he did this in order to get the money he needed to keep his campaign afloat without using the matching finds themselves as collateral. And the reason it was important not to use those funds as collateral was that according to the FEC, doing so would constitute "accepting " those funds, and thus subjecting himself and his campaign to the limitations that go with it. I am not a lawyer, and thus have no opinion about whether McCain's loan violates the, um, McCain Feingold Act, or any other provision of federal law. But I did think that this was a pretty transparent attempt to violate its spirit. Campaign finance laws ask candidates to make a choice: either you take federal money, in which case you are subject to a number of restrictions, or else you don't take it, in which case you are not. Getting a loan by using the matching funds you have not yet received as collateral is a way of trying to have it both ways: essentially, you get to spend your matching funds now, but because the money did not literally come from the government, you can delay a decision about whether or not to accept the restrictions that go with them until later. If you can leverage the money into enough wins to generate contributions, you can pay back the loan and duck the restrictions; if not, you've lost anyways, so you might as well abide by them. That's exactly what campaign finance laws do not want candidates to be able to do. McCain tried to be tricky about this: he didn't use the matching funds he had qualified for as collateral, but he did use the fact that he could qualify for them at any time. That's why he had to give away his legal right to withdraw from the campaign if he lost: to satisfy his lenders, he had to promise to stay in long enough to actually get the matching funds he qualified for, and to give them first dibs on those funds. Whether or not this violates the law -- a law McCain authored -- I have no idea, but it is certainly an attempt to wriggle out of its requirements, and it ought to put paid, once and for all, to the idea of McCain as a straight-talking man of principle. Apparently, the FEC has the same questions I had about McCain's loan. The AP reports (h/t TPM): "The government's top campaign finance regulator says John McCain can't drop out of the primary election's public financing system until he answers questions about a loan he obtained to kickstart his once faltering presidential campaign. The FEC's letter to McCain is here (pdf); the amount McCain has already spent during the primaries is $49,650,185.36; the exact FEC limits on primary spending are not yet available, but if this were 2007, they would have been $40.89 million, which is considerably less than McCain has already spent. I assume that the AP got its figure of "about $54 million" from the FEC; if so, then McCain has about four and a half million dollars to spend between now and the Convention in September. One further problem: "Complicating the dispute is the FEC's current lack of a quorum. The six-member commission has four vacancies and Senate Democrats and Republicans are at loggerheads over how to fill them. The FEC thinks it needs a quorum in order to approve McCain's withdrawal. But it also needs a quorum in order to enforce its decisions. And as Mark Schmitt said about McCain, "it's pretty clear that his attitude toward the Federal Election Commission on this question is, "Come and get me!"" 21 Feb 2008 01:22 pm Waiting For More[Patrick Appel] Publius has a smart post on the New York Times and the McCain Iseman article:
I'm still trying to figure out how to respond to the McCain scandal. The New York Times is sticking by its guns, so, for now, I'm going to assume their reporting has some factual basis. We'll just have to wait and see how things shake out over the next few days. 21 Feb 2008 12:42 pm Dems Abroad[Patrick Appel] I should probably note that Obama won the Democrats Abroad primary getting 66 percent of the vote. Obama earned 2.5 delegates to Clinton's 2. The group will award 2.5 more delegates at their April convention. I'm not sure what a half-delegate looks like, but every delegate (or part thereof) counts at this point. This is Obama's 11th straight win. 21 Feb 2008 12:04 pm The View From Your Window
Pebble Beach, California, 8.20 am. 21 Feb 2008 11:30 am McCain Iseman Reax[Patrick Appel] The much anticipated story on McCain and Lobbyist Vicki Iseman finally broke yesterday. Marc outlines McCain's response strategy and here is video of McCain's press conference this morning. Yglesias' take:
James Kirchick explains what he sees as the gist of the piece:
Here's Matt Cooper on the NYT's reporting:
This story coupled with FEC Chairman David Mason asking questions about McCain's loan (which Hilzoy wrote about here) makes this a bad day for McCain. 21 Feb 2008 10:22 am With Friends Like These...[Patrick Appel] Obama doesn't need negative ads if Clinton supporters keep making videos like this: 21 Feb 2008 10:10 am How Lost is Like the War in IraqBy Peter Suderman No, really. Yes, Lost is on tonight, and I'm not sure I'll get to watch it. So instead: Theories! Continue reading "How Lost is Like the War in Iraq" » 21 Feb 2008 09:24 am Shorter Lostby Peter Suderman The most important result of the end of the $2.5 billion WGA strike is that Battlestar Galactica will not, in fact, be cancelled before the end of its four-year run—which had been a serious possibility. The second most important result is that we will see, if not a full season, at least a fully-developed storyline for the fourth season of Lost. Here's the story from Variety:
A compressed season may not have been a good thing for The Wire (although, hey, it's still not bad), but I think it stands a good chance of improving the prospects for Lost. One of The Wire's strengths has always been its expert pacing, balancing the various needs for character moments, plot development, and plain old suspense. The true scope and complexity of each arc usually took five or six episodes to develop and another five or six to unravel before the last two episodes provided closure. Lost, on the other hand, has had the opposite problem; it's been positively spastic with its pacing, usually too slow, and always too heavy on laying the groundwork for intrigue without providing nearly enough follow up. The creators are experts—perhaps the best on TV—at sucking viewers in. But they don't know exactly what to do with you once you're on the hook. A slightly compressed schedule could potentially force its writers to focus on what's truly integral to their story rather than on what's merely tantalizing. 21 Feb 2008 09:23 am Gays And Earthquakes[Patrick Appel] I tried to think of something clever to say about this, but it's so ridiculous there just isn't anything to add:
21 Feb 2008 08:49 am Pile-On[Patrick Appel] Post Wisconsin a lot of bloggers are realizing how bad of shape the Clinton campaign is in. Here is Dave Weigel:
And here is Junah Grunstein:
Even this Hillary supporter thinks she should call it quits. 21 Feb 2008 07:58 am Dissent Of The Day[Patrick Appel] In response to Peter Suderman's post yesterday, a reader writes:
Continue reading "Dissent Of The Day" » 21 Feb 2008 06:36 am Clinton Undefeated In Uncontested Elections[Patrick Appel] This comment over at the Plank is priceless:
21 Feb 2008 02:27 am January Fundraisingby hilzoy Earlier tonight, I went to the FEC's website to check out the January fundraising reports for Clinton, Obama, and McCain. Matt Stoller wonders whether the McCain campaign is broke, based on the fact that its liabilities exceed its assets. They do, but on the other hand, most of those liabilities are McCain's bank loan, whose due date seems to be in May, so he has time to drum up the money. (On the other hand, I had no idea it was possible to run up $720,164.57 on one's AmEx card. Not something I want to try at home.) I was somewhat puzzled by Clinton's statement, though. On the one hand, her campaign clearly took in considerably less than it paid out. About nine million dollars less. And that can hardly be good news. Moreover, she has a mass of debt: $7,576,700.48 worth, to be precise (not including the loan she made to herself.) Moreover, while some of it is large sums (over $2million owed to Mark Penn, for instance), there are a lot of pretty small unpaid bills to places throughout Iowa and New Hampshire. (Honestly, why not pay the $500.12 they owe to Premier Pizza in Algonquin, Iowa? Or the $615.25 they owe Depot Deli of Shenandoah, Iowa? Your average pizzeria or deli is not made of money, after all.) The puzzling part, though, was that despite all this debt, the Clinton campaign has tons of cash on hand. Nearly $38 million at the beginning of January; a little over $29 million at the end of the month. That seemed odd, especially in light of those news stories about their being broke after Iowa. As I was scratching my head about this, I came across a story in Politico that explained everything: "According to the reports, Clinton raised about $20 million in January, including her loan. She spent nearly $29 million during the month. That's the fact I didn't know: that these forms include money restricted to the general election. Which changes everything. If Clinton's receipts and spending for February match her receipts and spending for January, she will have blown through all the cash she has available for the primaries by the end of the month. Question: does anyone think that she will take in as much in February as she did in January? I don't. For one thing, January included both the period after she lost in Iowa and the period after she won New Hampshire, either of which might have prompted people to send money. But by February, losses were no longer a shock, and for most of the month, there weren't any victories. People want to back someone they think has a decent shot at winning, and after Maine, at least, Clinton's donors have to have been wondering whether she can pull it out. Besides that, February has also been a month full of stories about the Clinton campaign's ineptitude. If I were a donor, I'd think twice about giving to a campaign that had burned through so much money with so little to show for it, or that had declared Texas a must-win state without bothering to figure out its delegate selection rules. I assume that the Clinton campaign has cut back its expenses. But there are limits to how far you can cut back expenses without seriously affecting your chances of winning, and if donations drop considerably, the Clinton campaign will reach those limits. Clinton can always make another loan to her campaign, but I imagine there are limits to the Clintons' willingness to finance the campaign themselves. Which means that at some point, they are going to have to make some tough decisions. In their shoes, if I didn't dramatically turn things around in Texas and Ohio, I would think long and hard before continuing to Pennsylvania. Obama doesn't have to make those choices: he has plenty of cash on hand, and took in over $6 million more than he paid out last month. And Greg Sargent reports that he's on track to raise more money this month than he did last month. But Clinton will, I think, and soon. (Cross-posted to Obsidian Wings) Wednesday, February 20, 200820 Feb 2008 08:11 pm Face Of The Day
20 Feb 2008 07:15 pm What Recession?by Reihan James Hamilton seems to think that the spike in oil prices means the smart money is betting that a recession is not on the way.
Somehow I don't think Nouriel Roubini is buying this line of argument. If Roubini is right, I'm planning on stockpiling enough emergency beef stroganoff to last me through the next two decades. 20 Feb 2008 07:04 pm Josh Levin on NBA Tradesby Reihan By demonstrating that he can unravel the tangled mess that is NBA trading, Josh Levin demonstrates that only he can extricate the United States from the tangled mess that is the Middle East. Unfortunately, he's too busy trying to remember his bank security password. 20 Feb 2008 06:21 pm Dear Chris Matthews: Please Do Your Jobby hilzoy Last night, Texas State Senator Kirk Watson, an Obama supporter, was embarrassed on national TV when he couldn't name any of Obama's legislative achievements. (He wrote what I think is a pretty decent and disarming account of it here.) David Kurtz, for whom I normally have enormous respect, writes: "I suspect this is a bit of a Rorschach test. Depending on your perspective, it's proof that Obama is a lightweight, just goes to show what a gasbag Matthews is, or appeals to the same voyeuristic instinct that makes you slow down and gawk at a car accident." I think it's only a Rorschach test for people who don't bother to find whether or not Obama actually has any actual legislative achievements. If he does, then of course this just shows that this one supporter didn't know what they are. If he doesn't, it might show something more, e.g. that Obama is a lightweight. As it happens, Obama does have substantive legislative achievements. I have written more about them here. A few highlights, all of which became law: * Ethics Reform: Obama was the Senate's point person on ethics reform, and sponsored or co-sponsored the bills that made up what the Washington Post called "the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet." I'm also a fan of this bill, which I think of as the Journalists, Bloggers, and Citizens' Muckraking Empowerment Act: it creates a searchable database of recipients of federal grants and contracts. * The Lugar-Obama initiative to strengthen the Nunn-Luger framework for securing loose nukes, and to extend it to securing and destroying stockpiles of conventional arms. (For instance, shoulder-fired missiles that could be used against passenger airlines, fired at our forces, or used to make any number of ongoing conflicts more deadly.) * Various bills concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina, including an amendment putting strict limits on the use of no-bid contracts after disasters, requiring planning for the evacuation of people with special needs and senior citizens, creating a National Emergency Family Locator System, etc. There are also a lot of good bills he worked on that did not make it, including the compromise immigration bill and a proposal to create an independent Congressional Ethics Enforcement Commission, and some that are on the Senate calendar now, like a bill to criminalize various deceptive election tactics, like deceptive robocalls, providing misleading information about where to vote or what conditions you have to meet to be eligible to vote, etc. There's a lot more. Honestly, there is. I wrote a summary here (and an earlier one here), and provided lists (1, 2, 3) of all the bills and amendments sponsored or co-sponsored by Clinton and Obama in the 109th and 110th Congresses, just so it would be as easy as possible for people to see for themselves. (Fun fact about each side's legislative records: during the 109th and 110th Congresses (which is to say, the time that both Obama and Clinton have been in the Senate), only one sponsored a substantive bill that became law. Guess who it was? Hint: the bill concerns the ongoing conflict in the Congo.) Which brings me to my larger point: I did this because I had heard one too many people like Chris Matthews talking about Obama's alleged lack of substance, and I thought: I know that's not true, since I have read about Obama's work on non-proliferation, avian flu, and a few other issues. And if people are saying he lacks substance, then surely I, as a citizen, should try to find out whether I just hallucinated all this interesting legislation, or whether this talking point was, in fact, completely wrong. So I sat down with Google and Thomas and tried to find out. But I'm just an amateur. I have a full-time job doing something else. Chris Matthews, by contrast, is paid large sums of money to provide political commentary and insight. I assume he has research assistants at his disposal. He could have done this work a lot more easily than I did. But he didn't. He was more interested in gotcha moments than in actually enlightening the American people. So here's a challenge for Chris Matthews, or anyone else in the media who wants to take it up. Go over Clinton and Obama's actual legislative records. Find the genuine legislative accomplishments that each has to his or her name. Report to the American people on what you find. Until you do, don't accept statements from either side about who has substance and who does not, or who traffics in "speeches" and who offers "solutions". That's lazy, unprofessional, and a disservice to your audience. Do your jobs. Don't leave it to bloggers like me to do it for you. 20 Feb 2008 05:49 pm A-Rod is Weirdby Reihan While reading Jim's post on Adam Shepard (who seems like a bit of a punk, but what a great idea for a book), I thought, "Could this have something to do with our role models?" James Heckman has argued that a big part of the poverty problem has to do with the uneven distribution noncognitive skills. The bourgeois virtues are an important part of success, and this insight is clearly at the heart of Shepard's effort. There's an obvious sense in which modeling the behavior of sober, responsible middle-class parents helps kids learn how to succeed. But what about kids who, for example, look up to crazy A-Rod? Consider his absolutely insane remarks about Andy Pettite.
I don't want this man anywhere near children, including his own. Oy, talk about a character reference. At least he didn't say he would conscript his toddlers into campaigning against Barack Obama. But this is almost as bad. 20 Feb 2008 05:43 pm The 527s Gear Up[Patrick Appel] A Pro-Hillary 527's ad running in Ohio:
20 Feb 2008 05:38 pm Clinton and Classby Reihan Does Hillary Clinton have some deep, profound bond with waitress moms and other working-class demographics? Given Clinton's background and cultural proclivities, there is no reason this should be so. And sure enough, her advantage among these groups is eroding fast. Nick Beaudrot explains why.
Right now, interestingly, we're seeing the rumblings of a mild anti-Obama backlash among elite types (this is entirely anecdotal, by the way), but there's probably not enough time for it to trickle into the mainstream. It's all in the timing. 20 Feb 2008 05:16 pm Chaos Hawks Revisitedby Reihan Last year Kevin Drum wrote a smart post about "Chaos Hawks." I found the post particularly interested because I suppose I've become a "Chaos Hawk." Continue reading "Chaos Hawks Revisited" » 20 Feb 2008 04:40 pm The Collapse Of Hillary[Patrick Appel] Crowley on Clinton:
20 Feb 2008 04:37 pm America's Greatest Political Blogger?by Reihan It goes without saying that I think Andrew Sullivan is America's Greatest Political Blogger, but I consider myself his loyal sidekick and stooge, so perhaps that doesn't count. Who would come in second? I think a strong case can be made for Daniel Larison, a polymathic paleocon young fogey with a scintillating intellect and a scabrous wit. Larison is a great enthusiast for things unmodern and antimodern, he is a Byzantinist, and he is an enthusiastic believer in the virtues of the Old Confederacy. He doesn't just want the United States out of Iraq -- he'd like to see the United States splinter into a half-dozen or more pacifist agrarian republics. How's that for anti-war? Suffice to say, I'm pretty sure he finds most of my interests, enthusiams, and allegiances more than a little insane. On top of that, I'm pretty sure he'd want my immigrant family to hightail it back to rural South Asia, where we could live a more authentic life of spinning khadi and worshipping Khali. All this is to say that Daniel and I don't always see eye to eye. For example, as I blog I am wearing a mammoth stovepipe hat modeled on that worn by Abraham Lincoln. But yes, anyway, I like to think I recognize a true talent when I see it, and Daniel is it. Recently Daniel moved his blog, Eunomia, over to the website of The American Conservative. I urge you to check it out, particularly if you think his ideological commitments sound absolutely insane. Just think: this guy studies the Byzantine empire for a living and he knows politics better than just about any professional journo. Antimodernist though he may be, Daniel reminds me of the many virtues of the Internet age. I'd also recommend, in an entirely different vein, that you read Will Wilkinson, the yin to Larison's yang and a person I'm convinced will become one of our most important public intellectuals. This used to be a minority view, but it seems the cat is out of the bag. My sense is that these two guys can't stand each other on a visceral level, in no small part because each sees the other as the embodiment of much that is wrong with the world. I love them both, which is a testament to my utter incoherence. Let me also abuse my privileges here by urging Brad Plumer to blog more. I am willing to raise money for a significant bounty of some kind if that's what it takes. 20 Feb 2008 04:05 pm Clinton and Obama: Together Againby Reihan Many Democrats are worried that the ferocious primary fight between the Clinton and Obama camps will weaken the party's chances of recapturing the White House. There is a simple solution, one that will clear the air and unite the party. Hillary Clinton must challenge Barack Obama to a duel. Andrew Jackson, in some sense the founder of the modern, populist, egalitarian Democratic Party, was a great lover of dueling, as one of our nation's finest magazines (yes, I'm talking about Cracked) notes:
Dueling might sound senseless to you, but as Graeme argues in his review of Randall Collins's Violence,
Rather than engage in underhanded tactics and scurrilous accusations, wouldn't it be better if the Clintons simply tried to face off against Barack Obama under the gentlemanly rules established by our forefathers? 20 Feb 2008 03:48 pm Paging Mark Pennby Reihan Ben Dueholm channels Mark Penn:
It gets better. All I know is that I wouldn't get on the bad side of a bunch of Wiccans. Last time I did that I woke up with hind legs and a beard like a billy goat. 20 Feb 2008 03:40 pm Taxi Cab Confessions[Peter Suderman] After serving time in solitary, er, Northern Virginia (which, okay, is actually pretty nice) I'm finally moving into the District this weekend. Naturally, I've been following the cab-fare changes and the ensuing controversy (D.C. cab drivers are currently striking during business hours one day a week) with much interest. Over at my old haunt, OpenMarket, Eli Lehrer, Michelle Minton, and John Berlau have been debating how free-market advocates ought to think about city taxi commissions. Lehrer says that "taxi cabs as we know them exist by virtue of government regulation," but at least in theory, I have to side with Minton on this one when she writes:
The common argument for commissions that set fare prices for all the cabs in a city is that you can't really have a competitive market; someone hailing a cab on a street doesn't have the same options and price information as someone picking between orange juice brands in the grocery store. But as Berlau points out, cab branding—such as in the case of New York's yellow cabs—helps solve many of the problems of customer captivity. All this is purely theoretical, of course, and the only place in the U.S. we're likely to see cities without taxi commissions anytime soon is in fan-fic sequels to Snow Crash. From a purely pragmatic perspective, then, I have to say that I'm personally pretty thrilled with Fenty's recent rate cuts, as I suspect that, in the areas I frequent, I'll rarely have a terribly tough time finding a ride. 20 Feb 2008 03:30 pm Sweet Sweet Obama Cakesby Reihan It's a small world after all.
Meanwhile, the town of Clinton, Japan is in the slough of despond. The town elders have accused Obama's sweet bean cakes of being secretly Muslim, and of not being tough enough to take on Republican sweet bean cakes. 20 Feb 2008 03:29 pm Who Says No One Is Standing Up For Liberty In China?[Patrick Appel] Even the Chinese have limits:
20 Feb 2008 02:57 pm Harold And Maude: No Good![Peter Suderman] The world's greatest movie blog, The House Next Door, has footage of a talk Jonathan Demme gave at a Valentine's Day screening of Hal Ashby's Harold and Maude. I am aware that this film is well-regarded by any number of people, but I admit to being utterly baffled by the largely positive reputation it continues to enjoy. The 70s produced an awful lot of great films -- as far as I'm concerned, the era between Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver is cinema's best -- but Maude is a symbol of everything that's awful about the free-love hippie ethos of the era. It's unforgivably smug, crude, obvious, naive, and stylistically shallow -- and I say this as a near feverish booster of Wes Anderson. I felt the same way about Ashby's Being There (despite my generally favorable inclination toward anything with Peter Sellers), a sort of proto-Forest Gump that was equally cloying and self-satisfied. I saw both Maude and Being There movies during film courses in college, and on both ocassions I seemed to be the only person who wasn't smitten with Ashby's cutesy narcissism. In a weird way, he reminds me of Edward Zwick, another director who irritates me to no end. The problem with both directors is a complete lack of self-awareness combined with a monstrous self-obsession. Both filmmakers evince an inflated sense of self worth combined with an obliviousness to what they're actually doing. 20 Feb 2008 02:39 pm Food Was My Kryptonite[Jim Manzi] My reactions to Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous book Nickel and Dimed, in which she purposely lives on low-income jobs for a couple of years, weren’t very lofty. First, I’ve had some pretty unpleasant jobs in my life, so I felt simultaneously bad for people who had these jobs, and glad that I didn’t. Second, I was confident that in that situation, I would find a way to get out of it over time. It seemed clear to me that she was making stupid choices. Would you really live in hotels for a sustained period if you worked for minimum wage? Would you really “eat fast food, or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store" as your primary diet? Would your reaction to the possibility of a telemarketing job really be that it “can be dismissed on grounds of personality”? (Really you, not some imaginary person that you think is “not prepared to make intelligent choices” or whatever) A 2006 college graduate, Adam Shepard, apparently had a similar reaction, and decided to put this to the test. He says that he showed up at a homeless shelter in Charleston, South Carolina with $25 plus the clothes he was wearing, and set himself the following goal: have a car, a furnished apartment and $2,500 in savings within one year without using either his credentials or connections. After 10 months he had the car, the apartment and $5,000, and ended the project to deal with an illness in his family. He has written a book about this experience, and described it in a recent Christian Science Monitor article, as well as a more detailed email interview. What was his “secret”?:
Interestingly, he didn’t see himself as unique:
Now, of course, Shepard was a young, white, healthy male with no dependents. He also had the accumulated social capital represented by his upbringing and education. But unless you think that his ability to get ahead was created primarily by the reactions of other people to him based on his immutable characteristics (which seems pretty implausible), then you have to ascribe it primarily to his behavior. Even if you don’t think that it is fair to demand that other people without his advantages behave this way, it does tell you some important things about contemporary poverty. Human agency matters. Many people have it within their control to improve their economic standing. Policies should recognize that much (not all) poverty in America is created by behavior rather than insurmountable circumstances, and should therefore focus on changing behavior rather than changing external circumstances. 20 Feb 2008 02:28 pm Great Moments In TiVo History[Patrick Appel] This next-gen PC isn't very practical, but it gets point for originality:
20 Feb 2008 01:46 pm DADT Data[Patrick Appel] A reader writes:
20 Feb 2008 01:39 pm The View From Your Window
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1 pm. 20 Feb 2008 01:03 pm Personality Plagiarism[Patrick Appel] It's rampant on Internet dating sites, apparently:
20 Feb 2008 12:55 pm Environmentalism, The Politics Of Fear, And The Search For Meaning[Peter Suderman] Jim Manzi is the (guest) resident expert on the economics of climate change here, and he's written at length on the issue for both National Review and The American Scene. I find his conclusions extremely compelling, especially when he writes about the fundamental uncertainties in long-range predictions of either environmental or economic outcomes, and I'll leave the economic details to him. But while the economics of the issue are fascinating, in a policy wonk sort of way, there's another side of the issue—a political and rhetorical side, in which environmentalism in general and global warming in particular become a totalizing ideology that stifles both individual liberties and democratic politics. In the newest edition of n+1 (highly recommended!), Alex Gourevitch puts it marvelously in his essay, "The Politics of Fear," in which he compares the presentation of the war on global warming to the war on terror:
The issue also included several responses to Gourevitch's piece (not online), but I found these almost entirely unconvincing. Ben Kunkel argues that drastic societal change is inevitable and thus "the sole alternative is to organize the world on a more local, modest, and… egalitarian basis." Chad Horbach essentially ignores Gourevitch's argument by insisting that since the current Democratic presidential candidates are talking about the issue using pro-growth, "business as usual" rhetoric, the politics of fear must not play a substantial role in the larger discussion of the issue. And Mark Greif says that while Gourevitch's worries might be legitimate, maybe that's no so bad if it leads to the success of progressive goals. It seems to me that the shared essence of these responses actually proves Gourevitch's point. Continue reading "Environmentalism, The Politics Of Fear, And The Search For Meaning" » 20 Feb 2008 12:01 pm Photography As Architecture
[Patrick Appel] I loved these photo-installations by Isidro Blasco. It is as if he has taken the collages of David Hockney and expanded them into three-dimensions. Photography naturally has a very thick skin; using photos as objects is unsuccessful more often than not. Blasco succeeds because he embraces the wooden supports, making them as important to the viewer's experience as the photographs. 20 Feb 2008 11:11 am The President and the Economy[Peter Suderman] Do a president's economic policies matter? According to John Stossel and Tyler Cowen, not so much. Here's Stossel:
And here's Cowen, making a slightly more tempered argument:
There's truth to all this, but let me offer a qualified disagreement. It's certainly true that presidents don't have as much power over the economy as they claim or as press coverage often attributes to them. No president is going to be able to stride into the Oval Office and single handedly fix -- or, for that matter, destroy -- the American economy. It's too big, too complex, and significant changes generally require the support of Congress. On the other hand, the president is still quite obviously an incredibly influential figure when it comes to the general direction the country's economic policy will take. What the president says and supports is hugely influential as far as what policies are introduced and the details of how they're crafted. A president may not be able to control every wave and current, and may not even always have his or her hands on the rudder, but one shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that the president isn't playing a major part in steering the ship. So while a president's economic promises may overstate the case, they're far from being all talk. In a pleasantly ornery speech (telling the largely pro-war and anti-immigration crowd in attendance exactly what he thought of their ideas) at CPAC a few weeks ago, Robert Novak said that, for all his disagreements with McCain, he knew there would be clear differences (in his view, improvements) in domestic policy between a McCain presidency and the presidency of any Democratic candidate. That strikes me as the right way of thinking about it. The president, in other words, isn't our national econ policy deity, but is hardly powerless, and anyone concerned with economic policy would do well to keep a candidate's stated economic views in mind when heading to the polls. 20 Feb 2008 11:04 am Military Recruitment II[Patrick Appel] A reader points out something that I had missed earlier:
20 Feb 2008 10:58 am Shenanigans[Patrick Appel] I enjoyed this post by P.M. Carpenter on Hillary's prospects:
I think Clinton could still come back, but it would require a massive change in fortune. Expect the next two weeks of campaigning (and the debate this week) to get ugly. Clinton will keep coming after Obama, trying to find a line of attack that works. The person who is most likely to benefit from that strategy: John McCain. McCain gets to see how going negative on Obama is likely to play with the electorate without having to invest his own money or risk tarnishing his image. 20 Feb 2008 10:05 am Military Recruitment[Patrick Appel] This survey of officers' feelings on how to improve recruitment has some staggering data. Here's Matt's breakdown:
One of Kevin Drum's commenters makes this counterpoint (a good one, I think):
20 Feb 2008 09:56 am Free to Choose[Jim Manzi] Ramesh has a great series of posts at The Corner commenting on a debate at City Journal on school choice. Sol Stern wrote an article recanting his support for markets as the key enabling reform for school improvement, and arguing that we should instead focus on making the current system work better. He calls this the “instructionist” approach in contrast to the “incentivist” market-oriented approach. There is an amazing series of long letters written to City Journal in response to this article, presenting viewpoints at various points on the instructionist-to-incentivist spectrum. The article plus the letters collectively comprise an excellent introduction to the school reform debate. I could write a lot about this, but I’ll try to limit myself to four points that I think are most important. 1. School choice improves the performance of participants today. As per my earlier post on evidence of causality in social science, one can make this statement with about as much certainty as one can make any non-trivial statement about causality relevant to public policy because we have multiple replications of true random assignment trials. Further, there are natural experiments (normally called “differences-in-differences” analysis in education research literature) indicating that school choice probably also improves performance for students who do not personally participate in it, but are in school systems where choice is introduced, presumably because competition forces improvement to their schools. Throwing sand in the air about aggregate levels of system performance, overall trends and other rhetorical techniques can’t really get past these facts. 2. These results have been achieved within almost comically artificial “markets”. Conditions vary, but one fundamental issue is that in many localities schools don’t lose the funding for a student if the student leaves the school by participating in a choice program. This would be like your local hardware store having its annual revenues set by a “hardware board” based on the number of people who live in the area that need flashlights and screwdrivers, independent of now many flashlights and screwdrivers it actually sold. My guess is that they wouldn’t be staying open late on Saturdays. Another issue is that when, as in many systems, some tiny fraction of the population is allowed to participate (normally by lottery, which is why we have so many replications of random assignment trials), there is insufficient demand to stimulate the creation of much alternative school capacity, achieve scale effects that would induce large enterprises to start new school chains and so forth. In other words, these are markets with huge limitations on the demand side and the supply side. 3. The instructionist vs. incentivist debate is kind of silly. For one thing it confuses means and ends, and for another it represents an entirely static view of instruction. It’s like two guys in 1980 in the Soviet Union arguing about whether they need an open consumer market for PCs in order to compete with the Western computer industry, or if it’s smarter to just get their factories to implement known improvements to chip design and fab processes. Of course, one of the goals of creating a real market is to force the implementation of such (painful, and hence politically resisted) design and production reforms that won’t happen without the incentives created by a market. Beyond this, markets are required to invent new reforms (or at least to discover what innovations are working) and apply them broadly, as well as to match non-uniform educational alternatives with the, to put it mildly, non-uniform needs among tens of millions of students. 4. Advocates of school choice do need to move beyond current efforts if they are serious about materially changing American K – 12 school results. A Republican Party that wanted to win would make this a major initiative spanning administrations. I summarize what I think needs to be done in an article in the current National Review:
20 Feb 2008 09:33 am Night Shift[Patrick Appel] Clinton tries to shore up her working-class base with this new ad running in Ohio: 20 Feb 2008 09:01 am Malkin Award Nominee[Patrick Appel] "...all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics...Time for some investigative journalism about the Obama family's background, now that his chances of being president have increased so much," - Lisa Schiffren. An award glossary here. 20 Feb 2008 08:12 am Half Full Or Half Empty[Patrick Appel] Regarding the elections, Pakistani blogger Raza Rumi is relatively optimistic:
While Sepia Mutiny is skeptical:
(hat tip: Neha Viswanathan) 20 Feb 2008 12:05 am Blowout[Patrick Appel] The door is closing on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Obama is doing better with lower income voters and Gallup shows him making gains with Latinos. Texas suddenly looks like much friendlier territory. A seventeen-point loss in Wisconsin isn’t something Clinton can spin. Here is David Kurtz:
20 Feb 2008 12:03 am Comic Book Revolutionariesby Reihan Fellow comics nerds might appreciate Julian Sanchez's excellent "The Revolt of the Comic Books," a look at the strangely self-contradictory political valence of contemporary comics. Um, that sentence sounded self-parodic. Sad to say, it was entirely unintentional. But that doesn't change the fact that the essay is excellent, so read it. You might also want to read Shooting War, a creepily convincing premonition of the future of, among other things, Iraq, Jamie Lynn Spears, Maureen Dowd, and our media-saturated culture. Can't say I was too impressed by the portrayal of women, but I'm a bit of a bluenose. Tuesday, February 19, 200819 Feb 2008 10:57 pm Lessig Isn't Kidding Aroundby Reihan I recently wrote a post praising Lawrence Lessig, and it looks as though he is taking the idea of running for Congress very seriously. He took a courtly, gentlemanly, and utterly devastating shot against Jackie Speier, the leading candidate, that strongly suggests to me he's in the race. Or, as a friend tells me, this could all be an elaborate scheme to raise money for Creative Commons, a worthy cause if there ever was one.
But anyway, while watching Lessig's video, a couple of things leapt out at me and gave me pause. The first is Lessig's apparent conviction that public financing of political campaigns will help ameliorate the worst aspects of what he calls "the economy of influence." So what exactly does Lessig mean by public financing? I'm not sure. I imagine his detailed policy proposals will actually be pretty sophisticated and smart. Right now, his Change Congress platform is summarized in three planks. Candidates would pledge to (1) refuse money from lobbyists and PACs; (2) ban "earmarks"; (3) and "support public financing of campaigns." The wording suggests that Lessig favors tough limits on private contributions or at the very least a very large-scale expansion of public funds. This, in Lessig's view, will drive change. Might it instead protect incumbents, or entrenched ideas? Mark Schmitt, who has been closely involved in efforts to regulate campaign finance for well over a decade, wrote a terrific, insightful reassessment of the campaign finance reform movement for Democracy last year. He ended the essay on a chastened yet optimistic note.
And fortunately,
One wonders if Lessig has spoken to Schmitt and others who've been in the trenches. If he hasn't yet, I hope he does. The two proposals that appeal to me closely related: the first is from James Carville and Paul Begala, and the second is from David Cay Johnston. Both are zany and possibly daft, particularly the Carville and Begala proposal, but both come from people who know political corruption inside and out and both ask the right questions about the sources of corruption. Then, finally, there is the second thing that gave me pause: Lessig's firm belief that the reason we aren't taking urgent action on climate change is the millions of dollars spent on "junk science." But what if the proposed solutions, like cap-and-trade and a carbon tax, are in fact very bad ideas? That's a case Jim Manzi has made very persuasively at The American Scene. And by persuasively I mean, "I used to support a stiff carbon tax and now I don't thanks to his arguments, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't on the receiving end of any subtly corrupting influence." This serene confidence in the rightness of received wisdom is never a good thing. Of course, I'm pretty sure Lessig is better on this score than almost any other member of Congress, so I can forgive him. It does make me think, though: if Lessig does run, and I hope he does, how great would it be to also have Richard Epstein in Congress? And Richard Posner on the Supreme Court? And Santa Claus in the White House? Santa would straighten FEMA out, that's for sure. There would, however, be a firestorm of controversy regarding his overreliance on non-union elf labor. P.S.- Below you'll find the most compelling argument against Professor Lessig's case for a free culture. The following video, which I urge you to watch until the stunning conclusion, can be used and abused by any and all humans under a Creative Commons license. Continue reading "Lessig Isn't Kidding Around" » 19 Feb 2008 06:33 pm Bertram on Cubaby Reihan Chris Bertram writes,
But the perhaps too obvious point is that there is a tight interrelationship between the criminalization of capitalism, and by extension of capitalists and their lackeys, and the crimes and repressions Bertram rightly abhors. To be as polemical and tendentious as possible, consider the fate of the Ugandan Asians, expelled from their country on grounds of being a race of lackey capitalists, not to mention all the other Mercurian minorities that have suffered mightily on the same spurious grounds. As a cosmopolitan of the left informed by the Marxist tradition (and Rousseau!), Bertram would never endorse such policies. They are barbaric, and I imagine he associates them with right-fascism rather than left-Bolshevism. The trouble for this view is the historical record, in particular in Africa and the Soviet bloc. As far as I know, and I know very little, there are no Castroite pogroms against Cuba's Chinese and Lebanese minorities. The persecution of homosexuals, which merits nary a word in Bertram's brief account of the glories of the Cuban Revolution, was less about the insidious influence of markets and more about machismo and nationalism and an ignorance and hysteria surrounding the body that is the inevitable result of a closed society. It's true that Castro's Cuba isn't exactly a "republic of fear." I wouldn't be surprised if many Cubans embraced many aspects of Castro's defiant nationalism. But is this defiant nationalism a product of "solidarity forever," a spontaneous fellow feeling fueled by democratic centralism and robust egalitarianism? Or is it the product of a sustained propaganda campaign aimed at eliminating subversion that threatens the elite that profits most from state capitalism? And remember, the Cuban state has embraced state capitalism since the Soviet collapse: extracting wealth from a small group of privileged foreigners, carefully isolated from Cubans who are not servants or sex workers. The hard currency has to come from somewhere, after all. I have to say, there are brief moments when I am impressed by Cuba's achievements, like the so-called organic food revolution that replaced the calories lost after Soviet aid ended. That's pretty neat. I too would enjoy conducting mad experiments on a nation of over 10 millions. The thing is, I couldn't stomach all the killing it required, and I couldn't stomach the idea of preventing people from trading and collaborating with other people, including capitalist lackeys, through force. Hasta la victoria siempre! indeed. This is, I'll admit, low-hanging fruit. Bertram took a contrarian and quirky stand, which is admirable, and I suppose I shouldn't pile on. But there is, I hope, a small lesson in this rant, namely that our own sanctions policy is also intellectually and morally bankrupt. We're hardly innocents. Robert Kagan's A Twilight Struggle serves as a smart and useful defense of the American role in Nicaragua and by extension the region, but I have to say, reading Greg Grandin's The Last Colonial Massacre was an eye-opener. See this excellent Corey Robin review. There is a reason "Yanqui imperialism" is despised in much of Latin America, and it's not all xenophobia and bluster. 19 Feb 2008 06:28 pm Wisconsin Exit Polls[Patrick Appel] Ben Smith gets an e-mail from Mike Allen:
[Update:] Here is Marc's breakdown of the exit polls. 19 Feb 2008 06:26 pm Pakistan Rejects Fundamentalism?[Patrick Appel] Juan Cole on the elections in Pakistan:
February 17, 2008 - February 23, 2008
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