Saturday, February 21, 2009

21 Feb 2009 07:17 pm

Face Of The Day

An activist of the Ukrainian Progressive Socialist shouts during an anti-government rally in the center of the eastern industrial city of Donetsk on February 21, 2009. Participants in the rally demanded President Viktor Yushchenko's resignation. By Alexander Khudoteply/AFP/Getty.

21 Feb 2009 07:08 pm

Why e-Books Rule

A reader writes:

All of these articles miss the single biggest benefit of e-books, that I found a few years ago when I started buying them for my palm pilot but fell in love with the reader for the computer: You can adjust the font and the typeface size. As our cohort of boomers gets older and our eyes get worse, we can keep cranking the font size. No more "large type editions"- we bake our own. I think this will be their most important feature.

As I learn to wear my own first reading glasses, I see his point.

21 Feb 2009 06:25 pm

Proofing Porn

Thessaly la Force highlights a few paragraphs from Katha Pollitt’s entertaining Learning To Drive wherein she talks about her experiences copy-editing erotica:

On the plus side, unlike the writers I had encountered in a brief stint proofreading at Esquire—short men who swaggered through the office like Latin American generals and whose names I still remember by the linguistic atrocities that used to send us, the women of the copy desk, into fits of resentful hilarity—the authors at Beeline never complained if you fixed up their prose a bit as you went along. They never said things like “I used “thrusting” ten times in two pages on purpose, it’s part of my rhythm.”

21 Feb 2009 06:13 pm

Fact-Checking The Washington Poobahs

Another brutal take-down of the Post's treatment of a George Will column. Maybe Will will deal with the question in his next column. That's what a mere blogger would do. TNR, meanwhile, has not added a correction to Leon Wieseltier's column, either, despite having the error noted here and in the comments section of the piece. Wieseltier baldly asserts that Ronald Reagan's statement that "government is not the solution to the [sic] problem; it is the problem" was

"proclaimed categorically, without exception or complication"

when in fact the very quote he cites begins with a clear and critical complication and exception - "In this present crisis ..." (The quote itself - one of the most famous lines in any Inaugural address - is also wrong in a minor way, substituting "the" for "our.") That Wieseltier uses this error to prove Reagan a "fool" makes this much more than a throw-away line. And yet it still sits there uncorrected online - evidence that the magazine has lower online standards of fact than any number of bloggers whom Wieseltier has spent much of the last ten years dissing.

21 Feb 2009 05:20 pm

Mental Health Break

The creative power of a little paper and a lot of patience:

Mykonos from Grandchildren on Vimeo.

21 Feb 2009 04:11 pm

The Future Of Books

Mike Shatzkin imagines the publishing industry ten years from now:

The robust e-book market—more than 50 percent of the sales of many titles (also a bit more than 10 years off)—will have been fueled by features built into e-books that can’t be replicated in print versions. For example, e-books will frequently use moving images as illustrations, rather than stills. And, of course, e-books all will have links, which will be consistently listed as the No. 1 deficiency responsible for the rapid abandonment of paper books.

21 Feb 2009 03:22 pm

The IQ Debate: Pro And Con

Steven Rose argues against scientists studying the connection between race and IQ:

In a society in which racism and sexism were absent, the questions of whether whites or men are more or less intelligent than blacks or women would not merely be meaningless — they would not even be asked. The problem is not that knowledge of such group intelligence differences is too dangerous, but rather that there is no valid knowledge to be found in this area at all. It's just ideology masquerading as science.

Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams counter:

There is an emerging consensus about racial and gender equality in genetic determinants of intelligence; most researchers, including ourselves, agree that genes do not explain between-group differences. But some issues remain unresolved, such as identification of mechanisms that bring genetic potential to fruition. Censuring debaters favouring genetic explanations of intelligence differences is not the answer to solving such mysteries.

21 Feb 2009 01:38 pm

The Santelli Clause

Josh Green explains.

21 Feb 2009 01:20 pm

Not Confused

Alex Knepper, a gay Republican, speaks out:

I am unable to relate to the faction of gay men who revolve their lives around their sexuality: their neighborhood is gay, their friends are gay, their music and movies are gay, their academic interests are gay, the stores that they frequent are gay — their lives are gay. I am not interested, though, in living my life as a gay man, but simply as a man. I envision a future in which a person's sexual orientation will be an afterthought. I do not in any way whatsoever see the Democratic Party furthering that.

He makes several important points, not least of which is the compatibility of being gay with being a classical liberal, a cultural integrationist, and a foreign policy hawk. But to avoid the core refusal of the Republican base to see gay relationships as worthy of even minimal legal or civil protection is a form of blindness. You will not change the GOP by telling them that they have nothing to apologize for in their recent record.

21 Feb 2009 01:15 pm

The Dish On Condit

Yes, this blog has been around that long - and in the summer of 2001 was in the midst of a major blog-spat with Mickey, Fox News, and CNN. Some posts that look better today than they might have: here, here and here. Money quote:

I'm not defending Condit. He obviously should have been forthcoming to the cops early on. But I do think the press should focus on issues relevant to Levy's disappearance, not to Condit's private moral conduct. It's still possible he's completely innocent. And that should count for something.

21 Feb 2009 12:41 pm

Will Gary Condit Be Cleared?

Maybe justice will finally be served. Will the media give him an apology? Will Connie Chung? Will Mickey? Or will he thrash it all out again as entertainingly as in those distant bloggy years before 9/11? Money quote from July 2001:

The CW (conventional wisdom) holds that Condit's already been damaged badly by his behavior in the Levy case. But the very seriousness of what's been insinuated in the press--that he had something to do with Chandra Levy's disappearance--suggests that if he turns out to be a Richard Jewell, the wave of public sympathy and media self-flagellation will be so great he might come out of it as popular as ever. And with national name recognition!

Two, four, six, eight ... time to go self-flagellate! Bonus Kausfiles item here.

21 Feb 2009 12:14 pm

The Timing Of Nationalization

Andrew Sprung notes Nuriel Roubini's advice for Obama:

"I think that we're going to see the policy adopted in the next few months . . . in six months or so." That long? I ask. "Six months from now," he replies, "even firms that today look solvent are going to look insolvent. Most of the major banks -- almost all of them -- are going to look insolvent. In which case, if you take them all over all at once, you cause less damage than if you would if you took over a couple now, and created so much confusion and panic and nervousness."

Take your time, but hurry up.

21 Feb 2009 12:03 pm

The View From Your Window

Tacoma, Washington, 11 am

21 Feb 2009 12:00 pm

The Housing Plan

It's a lot easier to organize a tea-party, but Clive Crook has actually studied the foreclosure plan in detail:

The administration says that its scheme does not reward people who recklessly borrowed too much. This is untrue: the plan will certainly help some people who borrowed more than they should have. No doubt, it would be fairer to help only borrowers whose standard repayments (after teaser rates expired) were no more than say 30 percent of gross income to begin with, and/or who borrowed less than 80% of their property's initial value--in other words, to help only borrowers who behaved prudently, and who are now in trouble because their income has fallen. But of course this would have meant many more defaults. Because foreclosures also hurt innocent bystanders, there is a public interest in limiting them. The second part of the plan, I think, is indeed unfair and does raise moral hazard concerns--but I'd say that is a price worth paying if it stems the tide of foreclosures.

21 Feb 2009 11:25 am

Tales From The Woodlief Homestead

Tony Woodlief has a charming post on his family's run-in with a pony.

21 Feb 2009 10:39 am

The Power Of Words

John Corvino captures a moment of social transition. When his mother first got to know his boyfriend, she kept referring to him as John's "friend":

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when Mark (my partner of seven years) and I were visiting my parents in Texas. We stopped by the large salon where Mom recently started working.

I’d visited the place before, but Mark hadn’t, so Mom grabbed him by the hand and started introducing him around. “Hey, everybody—I want you to meet my son-in-law.”

And that's without marriage equality in either Michigan or Texas, where John, his de facto husband, and parents live. But John sees the connection:

In calling Mark her “son-in-law,” Mom is saying something that is false legally but true socially. The fight for marriage equality is largely a fight to align the legal reality with the social one. And the more often ordinary people refer openly to that social reality, the easier it will be for the legal reality to catch up.

If we build it, they will come.

21 Feb 2009 09:02 am

The First Internet Newspaper

Gabriel Sherman's profile of Politico caused quite a stir this week. Ezra Klein wrings his hands:

The thesis of my earlier post is that the Politico treats politics much like ESPN treats sports. It uses that as the connective tissue that makes both stimulus and Bristol Palin interesting. It's for fans. You might even say it's for politicos. And what the outlet is brilliant at doing is situating itself at the center of their world. It's closer to the nerve center of the average news junkie than, I think, any other outlet going today. Its startlingly rapid rise reflects that.

But in unbundling politics from news, just as newspapers are (unhappily) unbundling news from classifieds, we're getting to a point where it's not clear what subsidizes the articles that don't sell: The long pieces on urban decline in Baltimore or Medicare reimbursement fraud. Politico has figured out that maximal efficiency for a political news operations doesn't include those stories. Other newspapers are figuring out the same thing, and foreign bureaus are closing and niche beats -- health, labor, etc -- are being eliminated. This is not a story confined to the Politico.

21 Feb 2009 08:04 am

On Either Side Of The Atlantic

Fallows (respectfully) tangles with Bowden over the F-22. You won't find two more informed people writing intelligently about what may be the biggest defense procurement decision for the Obama administration. So read them both.

Friday, February 20, 2009

20 Feb 2009 09:02 pm

The Messy Innovation Of America

A reader writes:

Last semester I took a course on Political Innovation. Positively brilliant course. But one of the things we discussed is that America's system, due to federalism, local and individual autonomy and other factors, is really great at producing innovation. At the same time, the system is set up to resist change. In Europe, on the other hand, the system is not very good at producing change at all, because those ingredients are not present. But because the bureaucracy has more power, and because there are fewer levels of government, it's much easier to implement change.

So what you have, ironically, is American innovators coming up with brilliant ideas, and overseas countries being the first to implement them--which explains why, for instance, the rest of the world is now ahead of us on gay rights even when America played a huge role in creating the movement in the first place.

This is an excellent addendum to my frustration at the way in which the US has in some ways been left behind by Europe on gay equality. And, to be perfectly frank, I find the messiness and honesty and conservatism of the American system preferable, for all its faults.

20 Feb 2009 07:02 pm

The Iraqi Government Declares A Hiring Freeze

Salam Pax is very worried about the unemployed in Iraq.

20 Feb 2009 06:33 pm

Headline Of The Day

"Shark Attacks Drop; Expert Cites Ailing Economy," - AP.

(Hat tip: Massie)

20 Feb 2009 06:14 pm

Malkin Award Nominee

"Swear to God, if they ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order would be to deploy the IDF in a north-south line, facing east. My second order would be "forward march" and the order to halt would not be given until it was time for the troops to rinse their bayonets in the Jordan. After a brief rest halt, the order "about face" would be given, and the next halt would be at the Mediterranean coast," - Robert Stacy McCain. Words fail.

20 Feb 2009 06:03 pm

Face Of The Day

An injured man is taken to a ward in the main hospital of Colombo on February 20, 2009 after he was wounded following a rebel Tamil Tiger attack. Tamil Tigers carried out a kamikaze-style attack in Sri Lanka's capital late tonight, smashing a light aircraft into the main tax building, killing two people and wounding 50, officials said. Sri Lanka's air force said anti aircraft guns shot down one of the light aircraft that had flown over the tightly-guarded capital while the remains of the second was found inside the Inland Revenue building, which caught fire. By Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP/Getty.

20 Feb 2009 05:53 pm

The Ticking Time Bomb

Karen Greenberg, the director of NYU’s Center on Law and Security, warns Obama:

The longer it goes on, the more President Obama owns Guantanamo. It is crucial that the Gitmo policy disaster be clearly ascribed to a President and an administration that has been voted out of power. In contrast to the innumerable myths perpetuated by many inside the Bush Administration along the lines that “law is an impediment to national security,” the abuses at Guantanamo have in fact alienated a great deal of the world, including our allies, making us less safe as a nation. President Obama cannot fix everything that Bush broke. But the highly symbolic case of Guantanamo, he needs to move forward swiftly, showing what it means to redress this legacy of mistakes and paralysis in good faith.

20 Feb 2009 05:30 pm

The Temptation of American Optimism

Daniel Larison is conservative in ways many now aren't:

One of the most tired accusations is that so-and-so “blames America first,” which in a more sane world would be understood as taking responsibility for one’s own flaws. One would think that a more damning charge would be to say that someone never blames America, and so refuses to take responsibility for anything done in her, our, name, but even this use of the word blame is misguided.

Continue reading "The Temptation of American Optimism" »

20 Feb 2009 05:21 pm

The Hair Weave Kevlar

A technological breakthrough against urban violence?

20 Feb 2009 04:53 pm

What Torture Is

Norm Geras joins the conversation:

I think one needs some concept of acts that are inflicted directly upon the person, under physical constraint, and are in context severe enough to affect the physical or mental integrity of the person.

What Norm is concerned with is the possibility that broad environmental effects, such as simple indefinite imprisonment itself, or fear of what could be happening to one's family outside, could be construed as torture under the rubric I discussed. I think there is a clear distinction here, and it lies in the word coercion.

Continue reading "What Torture Is" »

20 Feb 2009 04:31 pm

Keeping Them Honest

Hilzoy goes after the WaPo and its ombudsman:

All those people who supposedly fact-checked [George] Will's article as part of the Post's "multi-layer editing process" -- "people [George Will] personally employs, as well as two editors at the Washington Post Writers Group, which syndicates Will; our op-ed page editor; and two copy editors" -- should be fired, either for not doing their job or for doing it utterly incompetently.

Read it all. It's what the blogosphere exists for. Will the WaPo correct? For that matter, will TNR correct their factually inaccurate statement about Reagan? So far, the error remains uncorrected on TNR's website. That's a lower standard for accountability than most blogs.

20 Feb 2009 04:22 pm

Correction of The Day

"John Gibson never compared Eric Holder to a monkey with a bright blue scrotum," - Huffington Post, February 19, 2009.

(Hat tip: Upturned Earth)

20 Feb 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

No need to adjust your sets; it's a new technique called datamoshing:

20 Feb 2009 04:06 pm

Tricky, Tricky

Greg Mankiw parses the administration's stimulus rhetoric:

The expression "create or save," which has been used regularly by the President and his economic team, is an act of political genius. You can measure how many jobs are created between two points in time. But there is no way to measure how many jobs are saved. Even if things get much, much worse, the President can say that there would have been 4 million fewer jobs without the stimulus.

I find the crude Shrummian formula of government "creating" or "saving" jobs to be cringe-inducing.

20 Feb 2009 04:04 pm

The Corner Re-Discovers Executive Power

The jaw drops a little farther. Jerry Taylor:

Congress has delegated so much power to the executive branch that the old rules we learned in high-school civics are now null and void. Those old rules, remember, held that the legislature made laws and the president executed laws. Now, Congress routinely delegates massive amounts of broad law-making authority to the president in order to avoid responsibility for anything.

Meanwhile: Palin-Santelli 2012! I kid you not. With extra starbursts!

(Hat tip: Matt)

20 Feb 2009 03:58 pm

The Other N Word

Josh notices an interesting silence from the White House. I stand by my prediction.

20 Feb 2009 03:51 pm

Buttars Ousted

The crazy-ass Utah state senator proves too much even for his fellow Republicans.

20 Feb 2009 03:39 pm

Free The Uighurs

Hilzoy reminds the president:

The Uighurs have been cleared of all charges. Uighur communities in this country are prepared to help them out if they are released. The Uighurs are not, and never were, enemy combatants. Some of them are starting their eighth year of captivity. During much of that time, their families did not know whether they were alive or dead. Some of them have children they have never met.

President Obama does not need the court's permission to order their release. He could do it today, and he should.

20 Feb 2009 03:07 pm

Constitutional Inerrancy

Damon Linker keeps exposing the radicalism of theoconservatism:

...the theocons seek to turn a normal partisan political dispute into a theological conflict about the nature of the American liberal regime itself. In the eyes of the theocons, the American Constitution and the principles upon which it is based derive from Catholic-Christian sources -- and our failure to acknowledge these sources is likely to lead to national disaster. America must be recognized as a Christian nation, and not merely in the sense that a large majority of citizens identify themselves as one kind of Christian or another. America must be recognized as a Christian nation in the sense that its form of government -- its regime, liberalism in the first sense -- is essentially, ineradicably Christian. (Our failure to do so is what led theocon Richard John Neuhaus on numerous occasions to liken our historical moment to the years just preceding the American Civil War, when the nation's citizens killed each other en masse for what was, at bottom, a dispute about the metaphysical status of black slaves.)

And this is also how Benedict sees the EU. Noah Millman, meanwhile, has some worthwhile thoughts on Linker's attempt to diffuse the culture war by overturning Roe.

20 Feb 2009 02:42 pm

Playing Wack-A-Mole With Terrorist Hot Spots

Fred Kaplan asks:

If Islamist terrorists have an officially sanctioned haven inside Pakistan itself, does the fate of Afghanistan matter very much? How much blood and treasure is a sideshow worth?

Joe Klein picks up the football and runs.

20 Feb 2009 02:36 pm

What Do You Want To Ask Bobby Jindal?

David Gregory could use your help (play nicely).

20 Feb 2009 02:24 pm

Liberaltarianism, Liberalism, Vietnam

Matt Steinglass doesn't think that liberals and libertarians will be seeing eye to eye anytime soon. Meanwhile, Wilkinson keeps the debate simmering.

20 Feb 2009 01:55 pm

Obama And Torture

A video discussion between Glenn Greenwald and Jane Mayer, moderated by Amy Goodman.

20 Feb 2009 01:48 pm

How We Got Into This Mess

This was very helpful:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

20 Feb 2009 01:45 pm

The Web vs. The Greatest Military On Earth

The Google strikes again.

20 Feb 2009 01:34 pm

The Looming Inflation

Here's the kind of column you long for in times like these. And this, alas, is quite obviously what American profligacy these past two decades will lead to:

So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt -- public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages -- in half.

Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you'll get 20. Plan for 20 and you'll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that's not the plan, what is?

No: that's the plan, Mike. That's the plan. Maybe Ron Paul really will be president in 2016.

20 Feb 2009 01:07 pm

The View From Your Window

Kühtai, Austria, 8.17 am

20 Feb 2009 12:58 pm

As If We Live On Mars

How do you write a column about the stimulus package while barely mentioning the only reason it existed at all: the sharpest depression since the 1930s? Yuval Levin managed it. How do you write it without mentioning well over $300 billion in tax cuts from a Democratic president (far more than anything the Republican actually proposed last fall)? Levin managed that too. He also managed to argue that the two parties represent deep, stable and coherent views about human nature, and the relationship of the citizen to the state. The Republicans, one infers, represent fiscal responsibility, the freedom of the individual vis-a-vis the government, the resilience of human nature, and prudent strength in foreign policy.

Hmmm. Which party added over $32 trillion to future unfunded liabilities, turned a surplus into a trillion dollar deficit, and endorsed indefinite nation-building at a simply staggering cost in two of the most intractably divided non-countries in the world? Which party asserted "near-dictatorial" powers for the executive, the priority of the will of the leader over the rule of law, and a mantra, in the words of the most "conservative" vice-president in memory, that "deficits don't matter." Which party described prohibitions against torture "quaint" and presided over the most reckless, and irresponsible period in American finance since the 1920s? Ah, yes, I remember ... Levin's party. And Levin's president. And Levin's vice-president.

Quite a racket, that partisanship, don't you think?

20 Feb 2009 12:36 pm

The Last Burkean?

More here.

20 Feb 2009 12:26 pm

Sorry, Mr. Scarborough

The results are now in:

Only 30% say Obama hasn't done enough to cooperate with Republicans in Congress — the GOP base vote, basically — while 62% say he's doing the right amount and 6% say it's been too much. Flipping it around, only 27% say Republicans have done enough to cooperate with Obama, with 64% saying not enough and 5% saying too much.

Shouldn't the cable echo-chamber inhabitants in DC ask themselves a few searching questions before pontificating again?

20 Feb 2009 11:58 am

Fact-Checking TNR

I posted Leon Wieseltier's defense of liberalism earlier because it was elegantly written and because I think his logic is now irrefutable. We are entering a liberal era and I suspect it will get more ambitious as the economic crisis deepens. But in one respect, Leon was unfair to conservatism. Money quote:

Ronald Reagan, when he proclaimed categorically, without exception or complication, that "government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem," was a fool.

But, of course, the most famous invocation of this formula - in the 1981 Inaugural - specifically did have an exception and complication. In fact, it had more than a complication, it had a context:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Some conservatives have indeed forgotten that essential caveat, which rescues conservatism from a dogma into a temperament - and made it particularly effective against the deadly liberal buildup of the 1970s. But not all conservatives. And not Reagan:

Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

20 Feb 2009 11:47 am

Nervous Goats

Because it's Friday.

20 Feb 2009 11:32 am

The Bush-Obama Combo

Ezra Klein talks to some government officials:

The Obama administration believes that the entitlement problem is a health care entitlement problem, and the health care entitlement problem is a health care system problem. And so the focus now is on health care reform: The fiscal responsibility summit will be used, in part, to make this argument. In Obama's Washington, a plan to cut Social Security is no longer enough to qualify you as "fiscally responsible." You need an answer to the Medicare and Medicaid questions, which means you need an answer to the health care system.