Phelps has not denied or confirmed anything. He has instead apologized for setting a bad example, which
it most certainly was. No matter how many people defend marijuana and
extol decriminalizing it, there are studies that say the stuff is bad
for important functions like reasoning, and can lead to worse abuses.
The swimming federation and Kellogg have every right — in fact, a responsibility — to punish Phelps.
Ah, yes, bad for reasoning. Unlike a lifetime of drinking beer or whiskey.
I don’t believe I have the right to an opinion about something I know nothing about—constitutional law, for example, or sailing — a notion that puts me sadly out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism, or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don’t believe in it. Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing rant, and bloggers’ speculation that’s so divorced from actual, demonstrable fact, that’s so not true, as the kids would say, that the mind goes numb with wonder. “Way I see it is,” a man in the Tulsa Motel 6 swimming pool told me last summer, “if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us."
Cory Doctorow profiles Darren Atkinson, a man who has made a living off dumpster diving for sixteen years:
..."there's plenty of nights when it's snowing so hard that you can barely see, nights that you might want to stay home instead of going out to work," he says. "But those are exactly the kind of nights where someone might just set something out beside the loading dock, instead of putting it into the compactor. Those are the nights where you make the big score. I've tried to apprentice people, but they never want to do it like I do, methodically, avoiding left turns and red lights, logging what you found in each dumpster and not wasting time on the ones that are never any good, going out when the weather stinks.
(Photo: Jason Samuels looks through a trash dumpster for edible food thrown out by an Au Bon Pain store, 12 January, 2006, in the Greenwich Village section of New York. Samuels was participating in a tour of the area by an informal group called 'freegans' who use alternative strategies for living, including 'urban foraging' or 'dumpster diving' which involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Freegan is a combination of 'free' and 'vegan', although many of the people are not strict vegetarians. By Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)
The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.
I remember fantasizing about this several years ago. But it's is not going to work for the reasons Felix Salmon cites and because there is too much good content out there for free. Seth Roberts retorts:
...before occupational specialization came hobbies — skilled work done for nothing. The mental tendencies that led us to do hobbies are still within us.
And the web vastly lowers the costs of sharing the fruits of said hobbies with others. You can't monetize it all. But I, for one, am grateful for David Bradley. (Plus: we're doing pretty well with ads.)
A job-seeker reads the guide for a job fair on February 7, 2009 in Beijing, China. After the Chinese New Year holiday, thousands of migrants have returned to the city earlier than usual in an attempt to find jobs. Around 20 million migrant workers are believed to have have lost their jobs because of the economic downturn. By Feng Li/Getty Images.
Nicholas Kristof had a column on Burma a few days ago. He elaborates at his blog:
I’m sure plenty of readers who follow Burma are going to be horrified by my opposition to general sanctions, such as those on the garment industry. My feeling is that those have just made life worse for ordinary citizens, and that isolation simply strengthens the regime. Instead, I’d like to see targeted financial sanctions on people close to the leadership — and, especially, a big push to curb arms sales to Burma, and to embarrass those who do sell weapons to the Burmese regime.
JPod responds and explains why he compared the Dish to a purveyor of nineteenth century anti-Semitic filth:
Sullivan wrote a post yesterday arguing that neoconservatives gulled him into supporting a war against the Saddam Hussein regimer whose true, hidden, secret purpose was to create a permanent occupation of Iraq and a state of permanent war in the Middle East and Israel. And why? To benefit Israel and its most irredentist elements, a cause that is, by this analysis, more important to us neoconservatives than the fate of the United States. Since this plan was obviously not laid out step by step in an easy-to-use guidebook for Sullivan, the poor and innocent scribe so easily duped by us fiendishly clever fellows in the neocon clan, it must have been devised in secret by a — dare I say it — cabal. Of — dare I say it? — Jews.
But at no point did I say that neocons were preferring Israeli interests to American ones, which would be tantamount to accusing them of treason (a charge Podhoretz nonetheless directed at me in his post, accusing me of wanting the US to "lose" in Iraq out of personal pique). I made no mention of a cabal. I implied no secrecy. There is and was no secret cabal: all this was open and clear and arguable - and I publicly agreed with them. Neocons are also not uniformly Jewish and I made no mention of Jewishness at all in my post. My one name reference was Cheney, who is about as goy as you get.
And at no point, moreover, have I shifted the blame for my own
misjudgment onto anyone else. I take total responsibility for my own
views. I wasn't gulled. I was a neocon too. I was merely proven wrong - and have tried to make sense of the issues in that context.
I think, however, that my recent bloggy shorthand use of the term "neocon" has gotten far too crude. It has failed to account for the many divides within neoconservatism and has unfairly painted with an overly broad brush. On that JPod has a point. Brief bloggy blasts can end up conflating things unfairly. I hope to respond to that serious and valid critique soon.
Susan Mohammad studies how to deprogram a jihadist. It helps to figure out how they were programmed in the first place:
In the aftermath of 9/11, when the West became captivated by the psychology of suicide attackers, [Andrew Silke, a forensic science expert] says a good portion of terror research funding was directed at defining the personality profile of a terrorist. “A profile is something governments want as a simple solution to the complex problem,” he says. The problem is, there’s no indication one exists. Instead, current research examines how environmental and psychological factors combine to radicalize people in the first place. “It’s a gradual process,” says Silke. “For most, radicalization takes two or three years.” Undoing that process should also be a matter of social and environmental factors. And there is evidence, Silke says, that rehabilitation is possible for soft-core members.
The stimulus package that may well end up getting passed with a handful of Republican votes may shortly be eclipsed in the public debate by the looming bank reform package due out on Monday. But it seems to me that in the context of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, it's worthy of conditional support. It isn't perfect and the debate at times seemed surreally disconnected with the global crunch, but its fundamental goal, it seems to me, is to lessen the chances of a deflationary spiral that truly should scare the shit out of people. Perhaps it's too crude; or not big enough. But the following facts seem to me the most pertinent:
a) no one knows quite what will work for sure;
b) Obama was elected in part to tackle this crisis and the election was obviously not a vote to continue the approach favored by the GOP;
c) Obama will be held responsible for the effects of the package, as he should be;
d) in the context of the current collapse in demand, the distinction between a "stimulus" package and a "spending" bill seems increasingly esoteric;
e) Obama did a great deal to try and bring Republicans on board and to allow for a to-and-fro; the GOP, for good or ill, had no interest in cooperating with the in-coming president. They too should be held accountable for this. If the bill fails to make a dent on the collapse of demand, and if it does end up hurting the US through even more debt, then the GOP will be able to make that point in the next election. But if it works, their opposition should be recalled.
f) none of this makes sense if looked at entirely alone. The looming financial reform package must be seen as part of the rescue. If Obama can find a center for serious long-term entitlement reform, then the long-term consequences of more debt in the stimulus bill will be drastically mitigated. Again, true fiscal conservatives will focus on entitlement reform as the balance to this bill - not stupid posturing over trivial issues like pork.
Politically, as the dust settles, I suspect Obama outfoxed his opponents, again. They are playing the 24 hour news cycle game. That's all they know (ditto cable news). Obama isn't. That's why he's president. Eventually, they'll figure it out.
Oliver Letwin writes that "the fundamental thesis of a Cameron-led government would be that progressive ends can best be achieved by Conservative means." Money quote:
The progressive Conservatism being advocated by the Conservative Party today is thoroughly allied to a liberal agenda. The Conservative means which are intended to achieve the progressive goals are liberal.
Several of my co-workers had relocated from other areas, where they had worked at other Wal-Marts. They wanted more of the same. Everyone agreed that Wal-Mart was preferable to the local Target, where the hourly pay was lower and workers were said to be treated with less respect (an opinion which I was unable to verify). Most of all, my coworkers wanted to avoid those “mom-and-pop” stores beloved by social commentators where, I was told, employees had to deal with quixotic management policies, while lacking the opportunities for promotion that exist in a large corporation.
Platt says that such stories are not easy to place in magazines:
Kellogg's has profited for decades on the food tastes of marijuana
using Americans with the munchies. In fact, we believe that most people
over the age of twelve would not eat Kellogg's products were they not
wicked high.
Heh. My own commitment to boycott Kelloggs was weakened a little by the fact that the Phelps contract was expiring anyway. But the prissiness of all this is really galling especially when you consider that
a quick Wikipedia search shows the founder of Kellogg's - John Harvey
Kellogg - was a total frickin' weirdo who believe in putting children's
genitals in a cage to keep them from playing with themselves and also
believed in yogurt enemas.
It's certainly possible to imagine - and hope for, from this administration - a liberalism that's more pragmatic and evidence-based than was George W. Bush's conservatism. But the debates that have dominated the first two weeks of the Obama Presidency ought to be an object lesson in why ideological preconceptions always matter, no matter how empirically-minded you aspire to be.
An Afghan girl looks on as she waits to receive medical aid in Kabul on Febuary 6, 2009. After seven years of US-led and NATO military support and billions of dollars in aid, security in Afghanistan is deteriorating. Another 30,000 US troops are due to arrive by mid-2009 to combat an expected Taliban surge. By Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images.
Wilkinson has highlighted something that I have been feeling for some time. American media, be it sports, gossip, celebrity, or politics, has for at least the past ten years (I am 24 so my sample size is rather small) presented each story of the day as something that is a really important, defining event. In turn, this has had the effect on me and many of my peers of the feeling that nothing is important. Which is why I have been so excited to see something truly important happen in my lifetime when Obama was elected. Now we have another truly important event, the economic crisis, and the media is still making micro events the story and missing the enormous picture. It truly is dumbfounding to me.
Government-subsidized borrowing gave us the housing bubble, precipitated financial Armageddon, helped prompt recession and mass unemployment. But, as the infomercials say, that's not all! By zealously pushing home-ownership, federal housing policy has pinned to the map many now-jobless Americans who otherwise would have moved to find new work.
David Rose has one of the more comprehensive and detailed accounts of the Binyam Mohamed affair now roiling trans-Atlantic relations. Pressure is also building on the Obama administration to allow Britain's highest court to release evidence that relates to the Bush administration's torture policy.
The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is
essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly
intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change
its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or,
deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is
wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for
political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques,
etc., can of course be relaxed?
If you read those sentences as written, they seem so banal as to be meaningless. The change on detention is to restore due process and end the practice of throwing disappeared suspects into black sites indefinitely. And what does "stance regarding interrogation" or "relaxing" interrogation techniques mean? No one is suggesting that interrogation be relaxed. What we're demanding is that illegal torture be ended so that actual interrogation can resume. It's amazing the lengths some will go not to use the word torture. If Bush's chief prosecutor at Gitmo can call it what it is, why cannot Noonan?
Take Father Franz Schmidberger, a member of SSPX headquarters in Germany. He went on German radio on Thursday to censure German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her critical comments about the pope's handling of the scandal and about the need to clearly condemn Holocaust denial. "She doesn't understand, after all, she's not Catholic," he said. Then he turned his attention to the Prophet Muhammad. He had "sexual contact with an eight or nine year old girl," Schmidberger said according to a statement released in advance of the interview's broadcast. "In today's terminology, we would certainly call that child molestation. But I don't want to belabor the point, I haven't specifically studied the issue."
What I try to argue is that empire (or at least an expansionist foreign policy) once paid. Indeed, if we cite the Louisiana Purchase as the beginning of serious American expansionism, then it paid quite nicely for at least the next century-and-a-half ... The problem is that for roughly the past four or five decades empire (or expansionism) has ceased to pay. Unfortunately, our political elites, deeply invested in obsolete and bloated conceptions of "global leadership," won't face the facts.
McCain campaigned on
rural broadband as a way to stimulate the entire American economy. In
fact it was a centerpiece of one of his economic plans: "Broadband
access needs to be a top priority." But now that he's senator, he's
against it. In fact, he brought it up on FOX news last week as being
the epitome of wasteful and unnecessary spending, but I've been to a
campaign rally where he campaigned for it.
And he once introduced legislation supporting it. There's a helpful piece on rural broadband here. It strikes me as a classic bit of counter-cyclical spending. As for McCain? We learned what he is in the last campaign: an appalling fraud.
Hamas would get 28.6 percent of the vote compared with 27.9 percent for the rival Fatah faction of Western-backed president Mahmud Abbas if elections were held today, according to the survey by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre.
Just as important:
Ironically Thursday's poll found that Hamas has stronger support in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, still administered by Abbas, than it does in its own Gaza bastion. In Gaza, the poll put Hamas at 28 percent against 33.6 percent for Abbas' Fatah. In the West Bank, the poll gave Hamas 29 percent support against 24.5 percent for its rival.
I suspect this was the point: to make peace impossible.
I would institute an immediate and permanent reduction in the payroll tax, financed by a gradual, permanent, and substantial increase in the gasoline tax. I would make the two tax changes equal in present value, so while the package results in a short-run budget deficit, there is no long-term budget impact. Call it the create-jobs, save-the-environment, reduce-traffic-congestion, budget-neutral tax shift.
There's more - and it's, er, stimulating, although his skepticism of all government spending projects in a depression strikes me as excessive.
Preliminary election results in Iraq are being reported. Lynch is worried about Baghdad:
Preliminary results from the Baghdad provincial council election have begun to filter out into the Iraqi press.
The lead story will probably be that Maliki's Rule of Law list won more
than half the seats. But the more important story may be that all of
the Sunni lists combined evidently only won four or five seats between
them. That, combined with the fiasco in Anbar,
could put Sunni frustration firmly back into the center of Iraqi
politics – risking alienation from politics, intensified intra-Sunni
competition, and perhaps even a return of the insurgency.
I've given up counting, but I should note that none of her defenders on the right have really dealt with the documented fact of her repeated self-refutations and delusional assertions of "facts" that are indisputably non-facts. Her unstable grip on reality, taken for granted in Alaska, is the reason many of us simply do not believe a word she says unless we have actual evidence for it. Anyway, the latest trivial evidence that she just makes shit up as she goes along comes from Esquire:
Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin says her daughter's comes from Bristol, Conn., home of the sports network ESPN.
Palin tells Esquire magazine that when she was in high school, she wanted to be a sportscaster and was disappointed to learn where ESPN was located.
The Alaska governor says Connecticut was too far away. So instead, she says, she named her daughter Bristol.
Palin said the eldest girl was named after Bristol Bay, where the family fishes.
[Correction: I should have read the full Esquire excerpt rather than the Courant summary of it. In the actual interview, she gives all three reasons for Bristol's name. So no contradiction. My bad.]
[Update: on the other hand, many readers have written to say that Palin was highly unlikely to have known of ESPN in high school. It was only founded in 1979 and became widely known only in 1982.]
The first reflex at the Times will be to offer another conservative the Kristol slot. Although the paper has committed to ordering a refill, I've got a better idea: Why not drop the Kristol slot into a vat of boiling acid and turn the space over to the best copy Deputy Editorial Page Editor David Shipley can lasso on whatever turf he's wrangling that day.
"We are in the early stages of the Reid/Obama/Pelosi recession and nothing they are even talking about doing will help," - Grover Norquist. A reader adds:
The best thing about this is that the line was
a joke last night on 30 Rock, Jack pointing to a group of out-of-work
young financial officers and saying, "They’re victims of the recession
caused by Nancy Pelosi."
And the massive debt caused by eight years of a Democratic president and Democratic Congress! Just ask John McCain.
The legislative process is as ugly as a wart. We only notice it when an earth-shattering monstrosity like the stimulus bill comes gallumphing down the track, but there is no such thing as elegant legislation. You always have to throw in a little sweetener--the museum of organized crime in Las Vegas, the military kazoo band, whatever--if you want to cobble together the votes needed to win. This is business as usual--and Barack Obama is guilty as charged: he's trying to get this thing through the old-fashioned way. So what? What's new is his priorities: his efforts to put the needs of the working poor and the unemployed ahead of the wealthy, to build a new green economy, to fund inner city education and remake the health insurance system. That is what the American people voted for after an era of Republican neglect. The messiness of the current process is not only inevitable, it also says very little about Obama's ability to deliver on those very necessary goals.
This is all about frontier integration. Globalization is like America’s rapid and aggressive push Westward across the 19th century: a lot of the same bad actors and a lot of the same tools applied. So don’t be surprised when the Pinkertons show up, or when the covered wagons are attacked, or when the Injuns head to the Badlands for sanctuary. Thus, the goals of our frontline players are fairly straightforward: create the baseline security to allow the connectivity to grow.
It's a good indication of how the Republican party views her bigotry last time around. Maybe this time she'll call the president the n-word. What else has she got left?
The programs that would meet the bill’s 90-day restriction are, for the most part, an unappealing mix of projects that were either shelved after being fully designed and engineered, and have since become outmoded or irrelevant, or projects with limited scope and ambition. No one’s building a smart electric grid or revamping a water system on 90 days notice.
I think the problem with the American media is that it’s full of Americans who overestimate the importance of American micro-politics, and so, consciously or subconsciously, undertake every damn story as a public-opinion-shaping framing [or] counter-framing exercise and eventually forget how to report the obvious interpretation of events.
This last week of breathless coverage has weaned me off cable for a while.
I think that Blagojevich is probably a crook, and so does everyone
else, so the question may seem academic. But it's not. Overturning an
election is fundamentally antidemocratic and, in a democracy,
potentially dangerous. When it needs to be done, the proceedings need
to be objectively distinguishable from a railroading.
The current unemployment rate needs context. Michael Mandel provides:
...in the midst of the gloom, it’s essential to point out that the damage is still concentrated in the ‘tangible sector’—that is, those industries which either produce,move, or distribute physical goods...Meanwhile, the jobs losses in the intangible sector are much more moderate. Education and healthcare are still growing, and other intangible-producing industries have relatively small losses.
The pundits are jumping to the same old formulae, like they did all of last year. Here's what Obama understands and why it matters:
Now, I just want to say this -- I value the constructive criticism
and the healthy debate that's taking place around this package, because
that's the essence, the foundation of American democracy. That's how
the founders set it up. They set it up to make big change hard. It
wasn't supposed to be easy. That's part of the reason why we've got
such a stable government, is because no one party, no one individual
can simply dictate the terms of the debate. I don't think any of us
have cornered the market on wisdom, or that do I believe that good
ideas are the province of any party.
This is a conservatism of doubt. In a liberal Democrat. And here's the kicker:
But we're going to have to do it by not thinking about ourselves, not
thinking about how does this position me, how am I looking. We're going
to have to just think about how are we delivering for them.
And we wonder why Washington is having a hard time grappling with that.
While I generally find myself in agreement with your writing, the
post "The Presider Gets Results" on the Collins-Nelson stimulus cuts is
way off the mark. What we're witnessing is not, in fact, bipartisan
cooperation. What we're witnessing is pure political maneuvering,
where wasteful pet projects like highway spending that are near and
dear to the hearts of senators are retained and some of the best and
most stimulative parts of the bill that lack a defined constituency are
removed.
In efforts to stabilize troubled banks, the Treasury Department overpaid those institutions by nearly $80 billion, the head of a bailout oversight panel told lawmakers Thursday.
I appreciate your honesty in expressing how you don't know what the proper solution is, and you are correct in observing that neither do most of the experts.
I would just like to remind you that one of the core tenets of being a believer of free markets, or a classic liberal, or a conservative or whatever we are called these days is the confession that when it comes to complex problems, no one man has the right answer. Even if such a man does exist, there is no guaranteed way of identifying him. This is why folks like us ultimately defer to the power of dynamic systems such as markets. Some have argued that given the unprecedented nature of this decline, we have to abandon that kind of thinking and take our best shot. But it is when a belief is most challenged that it must be most adhered to, otherwise there is no point in having any kind of conviction.
February 1, 2009 - February 7, 2009
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