"Why the Press can't report the campaign"

A very, very good post from Ezra Klein.

There's one thing I want to add to this: First, none of this, per se, is the media's fault. As Joan Didion wrote in "Insider Baseball" two decades ago, the fundamental audience for any campaign event is now television cameras. Reporters didn't ask for this to happen, but political strategists realized it was the best way to operate, so they started doing it.

So how do we fix this problem? I don't know. I think one way would be for news organizations to simply not cover the campaign as much, but that's unlikely to happen due to competitive pressures.

Understatements

Bob Woodward's title on this WaPo preview of his new book is merely "Staff Writer." Shouldn't it be something like "Fucking legend, God of all journalism, Conquer of Nixon, and Chronicle and Oracle of Truth"?

Nate Jackson for SecDef!

From an ESPN.com article on sports and the elections (via Dan Drezner):

Broncos tight end Nate Jackson wanted to attend as well, but he was in Arizona -- McCain territory -- preparing for the next day's preseason game against the Cardinals. Jackson, fresh off the field from a recent morning practice at Broncos training camp, said he's been an Obama supporter ever since he met the candidate at a fundraiser last year. Foreign policy concerns this football player.

"We shouldn't be shunning the rest of the world community. It's important not to isolate yourself from the world," said Jackson, who gave $500 to Obama's campaign in March. Then, standing outside the locker room while catching his breath, he closely quoted former President John F. Kennedy's edict, "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

Jackson said he believes Obama would espouse that ideal by working to build consensus with other countries.

And this is a true Axis of Evil:

Former Republican candidate Rudy Giuliani also had a strong sports appeal before he dropped out of the race in January... including... $17,000 from his hometown New York Yankees.

Former terrorists in love

Qaddafi loves Condi Rice:

After all, the Libyan leader had professed his “love” for the American secretary of state. “I support my darling black African woman,” Colonel Qaddafi told the network Al Jazeera last year. “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders.”

He continued: “Yes, Leezza, Leezza, Leezza... I love her very much.”

That's kind of creepy. But I think we should replace "Condi" with "Leezza."

Obama: Protectionist or Free-Trader?

I disagree with the following summary by Dan Drezner:

My favorite part of the speech was McCain’s take on coping with the global economy. It contained his only concrete proposal (reforming unemployment insurance) while also emphasizing their different takes on the global economy (Obama: protect old industries; McCain: prepare citizens for new industries). If my vote was based only on foreign economic policy, I’d be voting for McCain and it wouldn’t be a close call.

A lot of people on the right (like Drezner) seem to think Obama is a protectionist. A lot of people on the left think he's a free-trader. Likely, he's somewhere in between - he will try to "protect old industries," but not through subsidies, but through somewhat slightly stronger labor and environmental protections in free trade agreements. Also, I feel like Obama emphasizes creating new jobs in new industries as much as McCain does.

A Suprising Truth

This one:

Of Sarah Palin I know nothing except her lack of grace. She lashed into Barack Obama after a week in which he was the only public figure to defend her against the press, or at least to excoriate those who had focused on her daughter. She might have started with a thank you.

Eastern Elite

Mitt Romney just lashed out against "Eastern Elites" - you know, the kind of people who spend part of their time in college in France, receive both law degrees and MBAs from Harvard, then become billionaires by running consultancy and investment firms, and then use the money they made to enter politics.

You know, Eastern Elites.

Are scoops still important?

Many of the things Sarah Palin has done are probably no worse than some of the things Mitt Romney/Joe Lieberman/Joe Biden/any other VP candidate have done, but the reason the press is focusing on them is because the press had never heard of any of them. That's Jack Shafer's diagnosis, and I think it's 100% correct.

But this leads me to a second point - how important are scoops anyway? If the Washington Post scoops the Baltimore Sun on a story about Maryland governor Martin O'Malley, do Sun subscribers leave en masse and sign up for the Post? I don't think so. That's an odd example, because the papers aren't direct competitors, but there are very few direct competitors left in the newspaper industry.

For example, The Boston Globe isn't really competing with the Boston Herald. They're going after two different sets of geographical, political, cultural, etc. demographics. Generally, both papers are competing against everything else people could do with their time: play Scrabulous, watch a movie, etc.

But I don't think many journalists or newspaper execs realize this yet. People like to know about the news, but very few have to read the newspaper. Or, to put it another way, it's not the Huffington Post that's killing newspapers, but the internet in general. The 30 minutes someone once spent reading the paper isn't automatically going to reading online news (although it oftentimes probably is), it could be going to watching an episode of Arrested Development on Hulu.

"Architectural Determinism"

George Will, after describing the cushy home FDR grew up in:

People who believe in architectural determinism should believe that FDR's housing must have prevented him from empathizing with common folks.

I believe that phrase is a keeper.

Andrew Sullivan

For all his professed devotion to the issues, he seems to be awfully obsessed with certain scandals. He posted way too much about both the Palin pregnancy/nonpregnancy/daughter's pregnancy and the cross in the sand story McCain told during the Rick Warren forum. I think this is partially a function of the fact that Andrew posts all the freaking time, but it still seems weird coming from him.

Discredited experts

A guess at what David Brooks means when he says this (via Matt):

There simply aren’t enough Republican experts left to staff an administration, so he will have to throw together a hodgepodge with independents and Democrats.

I'm guessing he's saying that a lot of the Republican experts have the taint of Bush on them. McCain can't hire Wolfowitz, Feith, Andy Card, etc., etc. because they are too closely tied to an incredibly unpopular president. Or, like Jack Goldsmith, they've written tell-alls and are now persona non grata to the Republican party.

Chris Beam is on a roll

After last week's great piece about Lanny Davis, he has another entertaining piece on RNC protesters.

100% True Statements

Michael Kinsley:

The whole "experience" debate is silly. Under our system of government, there is only one job that gives you both executive and foreign-policy experience, and that's the one McCain and Obama are running for. Nevertheless, it's a hardy perennial: If your opponent is a governor, you accuse him or her of lacking foreign-policy experience. If he or she is a member of Congress, you say this person has never run anything. And if, by any chance, your opponent has done both, you say that he or she is a "professional politician."

Fossil Fuels Beer

Occasionally science just makes you stand up and clap.

Sometimes a story writes itself

A professional wrestler, a mayor, and local cable access television.

Palin

I think this from Jack Cafferty (!) via Ezra sums it up:

"Let's suppose that that phone rings at 3am in the morning and either Joe Biden or Sarah Palin has to answer it. You tell me," continued Cafferty. "After this pick, ask yourself again who has the better judgment, John McCain or Barack Obama."

Constitutionless Convention

Dahlia Lithwick laments.

Best Piece about the convention thus far is...

Chris Beam follows Lanny Davis around. Most unexpected factoid: Lanny Davis is the father of CBS/SI college basketball reporter Seth Davis.

Who knew Antimatter was so expensive?

A fun chart from Marginal Revolution.

Anthony Lane

Is one of the best writers alive. See his New Yorker Olympics coverage here and here. A snippet:

The best thing about the shot put was the cars. After the shot landed, and the distance had been measured, the precious sphere would be retrieved by an official and placed in the cockpit of an automobile: two feet long, bright red, with a tail fin—in short, the idealized vehicle that I drew during chemistry lessons when I was nine years old. Now it exists, for real, and there are two Chinese fellows with the best job in the world, who get to steer it back to the shot-putting circle by remote control. (It can also bring a hammer, or even a javelin, which slots neatly into the fin.) I followed the gaze of the spectators around me, and realized that most of them had entirely lost interest in what was happening on the track, so urgently were they tracing the progress of the cars, and so hastily were they revising their list of what they want for Christmas. One question, though, will linger after the Games are done. The red supercars are equipped with windshields, but why? Who needs to see out? Are there tiny drivers tucked in there, bred specially for the event?

McCain's Agenda

Andrew Sullivan:

The agenda is war and the threat of war - including what would be an end to cooperation with Russia on securing loose nuclear materials and sharing terror intelligence, in favor of a new cold war in defense of ... Moldova and Azerbaijan. I'm sure McCain would like to have his Russian cooperation, while demonizing and attacking them on the world stage, but in the actual world, he cannot. Putin and Medvedev are not agreeable figures, and I do not mean in any way to excuse their bullying. But this is global politics, guys, and these are the cold, hard choices facing American policy makers.

And in this telling op-ed Lieberman and Graham simply do not even confront them. It's all about a moral posture, with no practical grappling with the consequences. It's the mindset that gave you the Iraq war - but multiplied.

John McCain is making it quite clear what his foreign policy will be like: tilting sharply away from the greater realism of Bush's second term toward the abstract moralism, fear-mongering and aggression of the first. Not just four more years - but four more years like Bush's first term. If the Democrats cannot adequately warn Americans of the dangers of a hotheaded temperament and uber-neo-con mindset in the White House for another four years, they deserve to lose. If Americans decide they want a president who will be more aggressive and less diplomatic than the current one, then they should at least brace for the consequences - for their economy and their security.

Newspapers vs. TV

Matt Yglesias reminds me of a point I want to make when he says this:

But that assumes that the cable networks are making some kind of good-faith attempt to inform their viewers and falling short, an assumption that I don’t think holds much water.

This is in contrast to newspapers, which (with the exception of tabloids like the New York Post, etc.) do make good-faith attempts to inform their readers and occasionally fall short. But too often, both liberals and conservatives group all TV networks and all newspapers together, when, really, each media organization should be considered separately.

Furthermore, it's important to remember that, at this point, TV networks drive news. The New York Times probably would have mentioned the Jeremiah Wright tapes twice (once in a story, once in a news analysis) if MSNBC/CNN/Fox hadn't been replaying the videos again and again and again. This is in contrast to the pre-CNN days, where newspapers (and the NYT and WaPo more specifically) drove news. Basically, a story would appear in the NYT in the morning and the nightly newscasts would follow up on it that night. However, today, this dynamic only exists locally, where newspapers break most of the news and then TV stations simply echo their reporting.

UPDATE: See Ezra Klein make this mistake. See TV. See newspaper. Also, see nifty internet.

+1 to David Brooks

I was going to quote David Brooks' column today, but then I realized my quote was going to be everything but the first paragraph. So read the whole thing. It's the best version of the "Goodbye to All That" thesis about Obama I've read.

The American Wanderer

Just wanted to spotlight this good piece on Obama and rootlessness from the New York Times. An interesting snippet:

But many presidents are shallow-rooted trees, even if they’re rarely perceived as drifters; far more often, “transplant,” with its connotation of re-rooting, is the unthreatening label they take on.

Ronald Reagan grew up in Tampico, Ill., wandered to Iowa and fell in as an announcer with the Chicago Cubs before heading to California. There he built one of the more enduring political personas of the 20th century. George W. Bush, Texas twang though he boasts, attended a blue-blood prep school in Massachusetts and summered in Maine, where the waters are chilly and the culture tight-lipped. Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas, moved to Kansas and came to call Pennsylvania home. Herbert Hoover spent his 20s laboring in the outback of Australia and then China. Teddy Roosevelt strapped on a six-shooter and moved to the Dakotas, the better to fashion an image as the “cowboy” president, even though he was as New York as they come. Abraham Lincoln, the prototypical Illinoisan, was born in Kentucky and grew up impoverished in Indiana. He moved often as an adult, a loner before fate set him right.

Maps and Legends

It's a collection of essays by Michael Chabon, who is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. It contains extended defenses of various types of literature Chabon views as underappreciated (Sherlock Holmes, Comic Books), as well as some interesting memoir-like stuff. Recommended.

The Unstatable Obvious

From Max Rodenbeck's review of Kenneth Pollack's latest:

What is troubling about Pollack’s view, which is fairly representative of his fellow liberal interventionists, who are likely to be in power soon, is its lack of clarity. Can’t we just admit that American support for Israel is strategically burdensome and is driven by the passion of several domestic constituencies rather than cold cost-benefit geopolitics?

Clearly, Max Rodenbeck is an anti-Semitic terrorist appeaser. In all seriousness, can't we admit this? I should add that I think there are additional good reasons to support Israel, namely that "abandoning" them would severly harm American credibility, and that, in general, we should try to protect democracies.

Blogging break

I've been on one. Your regularly scheduled programming should return soon.

Am I chauvinistic...

...to think that it's weird that Andrew Zimbalist, who specializes in the economics of sports, teaches at Smith, as opposed to the University of Miami or something? Looking at his homepage, he has done more than the sports in the past.

What made me think of this was this Forbes article about Nick Saban's compensation. H/T: Deadspin.

The US public can only focus on one country at a time

...And right now it's Georgia. Which means the apparent resignation of Perez Musharraf may go unnoticed by some people. But it's important, and via Dylan Matthews, I see the NYT did a good job reporting it.

A failure of Hillary's

From one of Mark Penn's memos leaked to The Atlantic:

Organize on college campuses. We may not be number 1 there, but we have a lot of fans—more than enough to sustain an organization in every college.

This turned out not to be true. I don't remember Hillary having much a presence at the large state university I went to, which did have active groups in support of Obama and Ron Paul. While I don't have polling or anything to back this up, I feel like she defintely would have been behind Obama, Paul, Edwards, and McCain in support and maybe behind Huckabee as well. And of course, Obama destroyed her on college campuses overall. Or perhaps this was a failure of the organizers and Penn was right.

Ideology doesn't matter

I've been trying to get at this point, but Spencer Ackerman says it clearer than I could:

I've noticed this sort of "Democratic Georgia vs Autocratic Russia" formulation occurring with some frequency. To the degree it's meant to actually describe a motivation for the conflict, the democracy/autocracy point is a category error. The Russian invasion of Georgia has absolutely nothing to do with a conflict over methods of political organization. I admit to a rather deep ignorance over Georgia/Russia issues, but the conflict is rather obviously over coincentric spheres of influence -- Georgia claims South Ossetia; Russia claims protectorate status over South Ossetia and, in a nontrivial way, also claims Georgia. These claims have deep historical roots and would hold even if Georgia subscribed to the Juche ideology of North Korea and Russia became an Islamic Emirate. To graft an ideological component to the current conflict is to guarantee misunderstanding it -- or, more cynically, to try to manipulatively rope the U.S. into it.

Obama and Race

I've done a lot of reading on the subject in the past few hours. I don't know how much it will affect his electoral prospects (although it certainly will) or how it will affect his presidency. I feel like a lot of people haven't thought about that second question, which Matt Bai muses on in the NYT:

Should they win in November, Obama and these new advisers will confront an unfamiliar conundrum in American politics, which is how to be president of the United States and, by default, the most powerful voice in black America at the same time. Several black operatives and politicians with whom I spoke worried, eloquently, that an Obama presidency might actually leave black Americans less well represented in Washington rather than more so — that, in fact, the end of black politics, if that is what we are witnessing, might also mean the precipitous decline of black influence.

The argument here is that a President Obama, closely watched for signs of parochialism or racial resentment, would have less maneuvering room to champion spending on the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial injustice.

The entire article is interesting and paints a nice series of portraits of various black politicians. However, like Ta-Nehisi Coates says, the title (Is Obama the end of black politics?) is stupid. I don't buy the Freudian stuff, though.

Then, New York has a very good package on Obama and Race, starting with this Patricia Williams piece. It basically argues that the national conversation about race is stunted and awkward because blacks and whites don't see the conversation starting in the same places. Money quote:

[B]lacks and whites tend to differ in their very definition of racism. Some years ago, researchers conducting a study for the Diversity Project, at UC Berkeley’s Institute for the Study of Social Change, asked black and white college students about their perceptions of racism on a given campus. White students tended to say there was none, but blacks and Native Americans said it was everywhere. In fact, the study documented an interesting phenomenon: As Diversity Project sociologist Troy Duster put it, “White students see diversity as a potential source of ‘individual enhancement,’ ” while African-American students were more likely to see the goal as “institutional change.”

When the white students were asked to give illustrations that substantiated their positions, they spoke of their own experiences and of personal intentions. “Last night, I had dinner with a black friend,” they might offer. Or, “I have a black roommate, and we get along”; “I play basketball with a couple of black guys”; “I’ve never used a racist epithet”; “I treat everyone the same.”

The black students cited instances of relative privilege, things that were more structural, institutional, atmospheric. “The campus police are always stopping us”; “I get followed around in stores”; “Most of the white students don’t have to think twice about how much it costs to take prep classes for the LSAT or to spend spring break skiing in Aspen or partying in Cancún.”

They follow this up with a piece on the "Obama Kids," and one on the politics of Obama's marriage, which contains this absurdity:

Outside a Subway in Atlanta, a bunch of white kids parse Obama’s lineage, at least the fanciful one that they learned about on the Internet. “It’s such a crock that Obama keeps saying he’s going to be the first black president,” says one of them. “He’s half-white, first of all, plus 44 percent Muslim, and only 6 percent African.”

What. The. Fuck.

Meanwhile, John Heilemann continues his election-long hot streak with a piece on race preventing Obama from doing better in the polls. He is able to state the obvious:

Obama, after all, isn’t having trouble with African-American voters or Hispanic voters or young voters. Where he’s lagging is among white voters, and with older ones in particular. Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black?

It also contains this nugget, which is probably bad news for Obama:

In October, Obama’s former pastor, Wright, will publish a new book and hit the road to promote it, an occasion that might well place the topic of Obama’s blackness (along with his patriotism and his candor about what he heard in the pews in all those years at Trinity Church) squarely at the center of the national debate. How Obama handles that moment may determine whether he becomes the next occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This thought also makes sense, unfortunately for Obama:

For many Democrats, Obama’s eventual residence there has long seemed a foregone conclusion. But cast your mind forward twenty years and imagine looking back on this election. Would it really seem strange from that vantage point if the first black major-party nominee—a guy with a thin résumé, no foreign-policy credentials in an era scarred by terrorism, a background alien to much of Wonder Bread America, and the full name Barack Hussein Obama—lost? No, it would seem inevitable.

The Right and Anti-Hippieism

This is very, very true:

It’s hard to overestimate the role the old hippie-loathing, and the anti-ideal of youth rebellion in general, still play in the social thought of the modern intellectual Right. (In a recent review of The Wackness, for example, John Podhoretz described The Catcher in the Rye as a “pernicious book,” pernicious because it enshrined the pose of disaffection as the model for thoughtful youth.)

That's from Matt Feeney at The American Scene.

The loathing of certain aspects of youth culture is what creates, in my opinion, the vast majority of teenage conservatives* - particularly the nerdier ones. These kids are generally so frustrated by what they see as the sheer stupidity of the people around them - Don't they know smoking (cigarettes or weed) is bad for them? Don't they see that their anti-intellectualism (expressed by not doing basic homework assignments) will doom them?

Of course, other people simply have a boundless hatred of hippies, which causes them to become conservatives (generally with a libertarian streak). Their philosophy is best summed up by Matt Stone:

I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.

At this point, I feel like it's important to note that the "South Park Republican/Conservative" label was retarded if only because the people who embrace it (along with Matt and Trey) just seem to hate anyone who is actually trying to make a positive change in the world.

*The one other thing that might create a lot is religion. But I think recent polling has shown a lot of religiously devout teenagers are liberal or apolitical.

Pirates and Terrorists aren't likely to team up

A combination of Osama bin Laden and Johnny Depp would have been unstoppable! But it's not likely to happen, according to a new RAND study cited in The Atlantic. A summary:

Pirates are increasingly marauding on the high seas, a Rand report finds, but the dreaded (and terrifying-sounding) “terrorism-piracy nexus” won’t emerge anytime soon. Pirate attacks increased drastically between 2000 and 2006, to an average of more than 350 per year. In part, pirates just have more targets because of the huge boom in global maritime shipments. But they also take advantage of the shipping industry’s growing dependence on a few dangerous “chokepoints” like the Strait of Malacca, as well as widespread government corruption and lax port security. Most conditions advantageous to piracy would seem to benefit terrorists as well, and rumors of extremists hijacking ships to train for a “9/11 at sea” have led to worries that terrorists might start subcontracting their work to buccaneers. But the author argues that such a partnership is highly improbable. For one thing, terrorism in remote stretches of the ocean is unlikely to generate spectacular news footage. And no single attack would be likely to have wide-ranging economic consequences (for all their plundering, pirates cause at most $16 billion in losses a year—in an industry that handled upward of $7 trillion worth of goods in 2005). Perhaps most important, while jihadists would presumably aim for the destruction of the maritime economy, pirates depend on it for their livelihood.

Too bad the questions weren't new

From the NYT (emphasis mine):

Several outside experts on contracting said the report’s numbers seemed to provide the first official price tag on contracting in Iraq and raised troubling questions about the degree to which the war had been privatized.

People who don't need political advisers

Angelina Jolie is one of them. From the WaPo:

As the Democrats and Republicans gear up for their nominating conventions, one voter still hasn't made up her mind: Angelina Jolie.

"I have not decided on a candidate," Jolie told Variety's Wilshire & Washington column, in a statement provided by her political adviser, Trevor Neilson. "I am waiting to see the commitments they will make on issues like international justice, refugees and how to address the needs of children in crisis around the world."

Wow

When people talk about how YouTube is changing politics, they're talking about videos like this one:

Now, I don't necessarily agree with everything said in the video - but it's certainly compelling and was made well.

Could Clark come back?

Everyone thought Wes Clark's VP chances were squadoosh after his comments about McCain's military service. But here's Nate Silver backing him, citing the Georgia conflict, which, in theory, helps McCain be refocusing the debate on foreign policy as a reason to pick a general. But why not avoid the awkwardness by picking a more obscure military man who didn't put his foot in his mouth? Eric Shinseki, perhaps? Or James Jones?

Conclusions about Russia and Georgia

Matt Yglesias (with help from others) makes several points about the limits of Russian power:

• Russia's GDP is equal to that of Portugal.
• Russia's economy isn't diverse and is extremely reliant on oil and natural gas.
• Its military is years behind the United States'.

He summarizes:

Russia’s combination of resource wealth and nuclear weapons makes it a hard country to push around which, in turn, makes it difficult for anyone to stop Moscow from pushing Georgia around. But on the whole, Russia’s clout is still puny compared to what it was back in the day and demographically it continues to be in decline while a large number of countries once subservient to Moscow are growing more prosperous than ever in the western orbit.

Long story short, the whole “Russia’s Back!” narrative needs to be kept in perspective. There’s a lot of demand out there for “new cold war” scenarios featuring Russia or China or maybe both, but fundamentally that kind of talk is out of step with reality.

It's not like Georgia is that important anyway, says Andrew Sullivan:

The US will do nothing but diplomacy because there is no vital interest at stake in Georgia, and because the US military is completely absorbed in two wars that make this Georgia-Russia conflict a tea-party. Russia knows this; the US knows this; the EU knows this; and the Georgian leadership was too cocky to absorb it.

So can we quit the hyper-ventilating, please? This is another indicator of how the world is not uni-polar, and how badly this administration has managed American soft and hard power for the last seven years. A stronger, more belligerent Russia is part of the post-Bush picture. And there's not much anyone can do about it now.

After reading quite a bit on this crisis, I've come to the following conclusions:

• The U.S. and NATO aren't going to go do anything militarily or go beyond diplomacy in any way.
• The attacks on Georgia will stop when Putin wants them to stop.
• Saakashvili screwed up and thawed the "frozen" conflict.
  
• This is nothing but the confirmation of something we already knew: the world is no longer uni-polar.
  
• Sucks to be Georgia.

All Tied Up

Matt Yglesias:

If Kristol really thinks we should go to war with Russia, he’s being crazy and irresponsible. If he doesn’t think that, then he has no business busting out these Munich analogies. Nowhere in his column does he propose a single concrete step with any meaningful chance of altering the situation — it’s all dedicated to mocking doves, but utterly lacking in viable alternatives.

I linked to this because I think it gets another problem caused by the War in Iraq. If we had no troops in Iraq, we could have still, in theory, come to the aid of Georgia militarily. Would we have done so? Probably not. But it would have served as a deterrent. Right now, the bad actors of the world - Iran, Russia, whoever - have free reign because they know there is nothing the United States is tied up elsewhere and can't do anything to stop them. So Kristol knows he can't call for war with Russia because we have no troops to fight said war, but still wants to make fun of anyone who would be opposed to a theoretical war.

That's dedication

Connecticut's Secretary of State in a NYT op-ed (emphasis mine):

Outside on the sidewalk, I met Martin O’Nieal, a 92-year-old man who lost a leg while fighting the Nazis in the mountains of Northern Italy during the harsh winter of 1944. Mr. O’Nieal has been a resident of the hospital since 2007. He wanted to vote last year, but he told me that there was no information about how to register to vote at the hospital and the nurses could not answer his questions about how or where to cast a ballot.

I carry around hundreds of blank voter registration cards in the trunk of my car for just such occasions, so I was able to register Mr. O’Nieal in November. I also registered a few more veterans — whoever I could find outside on the hospital’s sidewalk.

Do most Secretaries of State do that?

Does Putin really hate Democracy?

Robert Kagan in the WaPo:

Putin's aggression against Georgia should not be traced only to its NATO aspirations or his pique at Kosovo's independence. It is primarily a response to the "color revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia in 2003 and 2004, when pro-Western governments replaced pro-Russian ones. What the West celebrated as a flowering of democracy the autocratic Putin saw as geopolitical and ideological encirclement.

I think Kagan, both here and in his recent (and very good) TNR essay (I haven't read the book version), places too much emphasis on ideological differences between the United States and Russia/China. I don't think the "ideological encirclement" matters as nearly as much as the geopolitical one. If Georgia was a democracy that hated the United States, I don't think Putin would be invading it. To extent that Georgia's form of government matters, it's only to the United States/NATO, where many would believe we have more of a duty to protect a democracy.

Why Newspapers Aren't Going to Die (Yet)

This has obviously been a horrible year for the newspaper industry, but there's reason to believe that the main cause of the current cutbacks has been the economy, not the overall death of the medium. For example, look at this NYT piece on cutbacks in auto advertising:

According to the newspaper association’s own data, the share of newspaper advertising from automakers is shrinking rapidly: in the first quarter, auto advertising represented just 2.8 percent of all national advertising in newspapers. As recently as 2005, the figure was more than 10 percent each quarter.

Advertising is generally one of the first things a company cuts back on when times get rough. Right now, times are rough everywhere, so a lot of companies are cutting back. But when the economy picks back up (eventually), newspapers should start doing a little better than they are right now.

Too Much Information

Tom Friedman:

Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!

Not quite as bad as the infamous Peter King colonoscopy episode, but still.

Nick Kristof on U.S. diplomacy (or the lack thereof)

Some damning statistics from Nick Kristof about the United States' overreliance on military solutions to foreign policy problems:

• The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.
• This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.
• More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

And this is something that the next Secretary of State (who will have Robert Gates' backing, as Kristof points out) should tell every member of congress:

A new study from the RAND Corporation examined how 648 terror groups around the world ended between 1968 and 2006. It found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process. The second most common way was to be defeated by police work. In contrast, in only 7 percent of cases did military force destroy the terrorist group.

“There is no battlefield solution to terrorism,” the report declares. “Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.”

"Iron River of Guns"

American-bought guns are fueling the war between drug cartels and the government in Mexico. From the L.A. Times:

More than 6,700 licensed gun dealers have set up shop within a short drive of the 2,000-mile border, from the Gulf Coast of Texas to San Diego -- which amounts to more than three dealers for every mile of border territory. Law enforcement has come to call the region an "iron river of guns...."

"Just guarantee me that arms won't enter Mexico," Mexico's public-safety chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, told a radio interviewer recently. Stop the flow of guns from the United States, he said, "and the gasoline for the crimes that we have will run out."

This GQ piece blames the war on... NAFTA? It actually kind of makes sense:

Every day in Juárez, at least 200,000 people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquiladoras. The exact number varies: Right now roughly 20,000 jobs have vanished as a chill sweeps through world markets; just after the millennium, about 100,000 jobs left the city for mainland China, because as Forbes magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. (Those greedy Mexicans were taking home $60, maybe $70 a week in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States.) The barrios where these maquiladora workers live are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Turnover in the grinding maquiladoras runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The factory managers say this is because of the abundant economic opportunities of the city. And in a sense, they are right: A drug peddler, for example, makes a maquiladora worker’s monthly wage each week. And there’s even more money to be made in other trades: A few years ago, the going rate for professional murders in Juárez was $250 apiece.

But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could not be contained, the North American Free Trade Agreement was ballyhooed as the answer that would bring prosperity and end the violence.

What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.

The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.

A book I plan on reading

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. From the NYT Review:

In a study of one 15-block area near U.C.L.A., cars were logging, on an average day, 3,600 miles in pursuit of a place to park. It’s not only the number of parkers on the roads that slows things down. It’s the way they drive, crawling along, sitting and waiting and engaging in other irritating examples of what one expert calls “parking foreplay.” The answer? Sorry: more expensive street parking to encourage the circling hordes to use pay lots.

MLK in Berlin

Via the useful History News Network, this from a Chicago Tribune op-ed by a U of Chicago History Professor:

There are many photographs of Kennedy's 1963 speech at the Brandenburg Gate and of Kennedy gazing over the wall into East Berlin. King did more than look: He went. Invited by an East German church official, King was determined to speak directly to East Berliners. The U.S. State Department was equally determined that he would not. The American embassy confiscated King's passport and recalled his German guide and translator. Undeterred, King went to the wall. King had just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; surely someone would recognize him at Checkpoint Charlie? But his face was not enough for the East Germans. Informed that he had to prove his identity, King flashed his American Express Card.

Grim Statistic

From a Vanity Fair piece on Mugabe and the Zimbabwean elections (Oh, how quickly something fades from the news):

Zimbabwe today has the world’s shortest life span—the average Zimbabwean is dead by age 36 (down from age 62 in 1990).

Another good quote:

The world’s major powers are unlikely to take significant steps against Mugabe. Zimbabwe lacks both of the two exports—oil and international terrorism—that attract direct intervention.

Liu Xiang is a Pig

Not in that way. In a 1984-way. All Chinese athletes are equal, but some are more equal than others:

Liu is exempted from having to run qualifying times to ensure his place on the team. His preparations are deemed more important. He is tended by a special team of coaches, doctors and gofers. They train him, feed him, supervise him and drive him around. In Beijing, he shares a two-bedroom apartment in an athletic dormitory with his hurdling coach, Sun Haiping.

That's from a NYT magazine profile. It's a good background look at the man expected to be one of the top stories of the Olympics.

"Clark Rockefeller"

Whatever his actual name is, his story has fascinated me in a way celebrity-crime stories like this usually don't. Two things I wanted to note:

• This Dahlia Lithwick piece on father's rights. Money quote:

  Despite the fact that divorce is rarely triggered by violence or abuse, the incentives to allege that a man is abusive and out of control are undeniable. They tap into age-old stereotypes about men and ensure that Mom becomes the primary custodian. Even without abuse allegations, simple rules of physics (one child cannot be split into two and two cannot be split into four) make it likely that many good fathers will be downgraded from full-time dads to alternating-weekend-carpool dads. They will be asked to pay at least one-third of their salaries in child support for that privilege. Simple rules of modern life make it likely that an ex-wife will someday decide that a job or new husband demands a move to a faraway state. At which point the alternating-weekend-carpool dad is again demoted—to a Thanksgivings-if-you're-lucky dad.

  The rest of the piece discusses how although this may be incredibly unjust, Rockefeller really shouldn't be the poster boy Fathers looking for reform want to cite.
  
• The Boston Globe sent a reporter to Germany to talk to his brother. Really? Out of all the things the Globe could send a reporter to Germany for, they choose this? They couldn't have called the guy? Or found a Germany-based freelancer to do it? Or called up the Papa Times and asked them to send their Berlin reporter? It just seems like a poor allocation of resources. Oh yeah, they also had five reporters working the story from Boston.
  

More on ABC News/Anthrax

Bloggasm has more on whether ABC should reveal its anonymous sources, including an interview with Glenn Greenwald. It's good stuff.

Pineapple Express

It's funny, but it's no Superbad. There are several gaping plot holes and unfinished storylines, but I suppose that's not why people are going to see it. It left me with the feeling that there are going to be a lot of deleted scenes on the DVD. Also, it's hard to laugh at the characters when they just finished killing 20 or so drug dealers and it's hard to get too sentimental about the relationship between buyer and drug dealer.

More on Georgia vs. Russia

Things could have been a lot worse. Larison:

Remember, both Obama and McCain wanted Georgia to join NATO, and the Bush administration tried to have them admitted at the last meeting in Bucharest. Had it not been for the resistance of several European governments, this small, ugly crisis could have potentially been the trigger for an international disaster that might have dragged in all of Europe and the U.S. I assume that this does not just mean that Georgia won’t be allowed into NATO, but that it also means that eastward NATO expansion in its entirety will halt. Of course, that would make sense. If I know McCain and his obsessive Russophobia, he will take this episode as proof that we must make Georgia a member of NATO and must do it right now.

I don't pretend to know too much about this subject, but Larison's post is the most informative I've read thus far.

The Olympics are shiny...

And are distracting the media and the public from more important news like this and this.

The Pledge of Allegiance

It's creepy, says Alex Tabarrok. He quotes Cato's Gene Healy:

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club....

While I am sympathetic to the argument that the pledge is somewhat creepily about placing the state before yourself, I don't think that's going to persuade many people. After all, a lot of John McCain's campaign rhetoric is about placing the state before yourself. Furthermore, the argument Gene and Alex make is a poor one.

They essentially seem to be saying the pledge is guilty by association:

• Socialism is bad.
• The pledge was written by a Socialist.
• Therefore, the pledge is bad.

By this standard, The Jungle and 1984 are also creepy because both Upton Sinclair and George Orwell were socialists. (True, Orwell isn't the same type of socialist Bellamy seemed to be and the final few chapters of The Jungle are hilarious/horrifying knowing what we know now.)

The picture Alex uses - showing that the original way to the salute the flag is the same salute the Nazis ended up using - is even sillier. Insinuating that the pledge is fascist because it had the same salute as the Nazis is a very Jonah Goldberg-esque argument.

Why I Love the Wall Street Journal

At least once a week, they tell me about something I had no idea existed. This week? Hungarian communist children's railroads.

Things Everyone Forgot About

The horrible treatment in the first few months of Arab-Americans after 9/11.

Hipsters = Visigoths

So says Adbusters magazine:

Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance...

The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

Um...... sure.

The Anticommons

Columbia law professor Michael Heller, in his new book, “The Gridlock Economy,” [writes about] the “anticommons.” We hear a lot about the “tragedy of the commons”: if a valuable asset (a grazing field, say) is held in common, each individual will try to exploit as much of it as possible. Villagers will send all their cows out to graze at the same time, and soon the field will be useless. When there’s no ownership, the pursuit of individual self-interest can make everyone worse off. But Heller shows that having too much ownership creates its own problems. If too many people own individual parts of a valuable asset, it’s easy to end up with gridlock, since any one person can simply veto the use of the asset. The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste.

That's from the New Yorker. The article primarily deals with economics, and has very good examples relating to art and wind power. But I feel this also illustrates a key public policy dilemma: how many checks and balances are ideal?

In the United States, it is very difficult to pass truly meaningful legislation, because it has to pass the muster of at least four different bodies - the House, Senate, Presidency, and judicial branch. In all of those bodies, it is possible for one key person to stop the legislative process altogether. There are literally dozens of choke points a bill must pass through in order to become law. This results in the power of government to change laws being "underused and wasted," regardless of how obvious the change may be.

But removing those check points would create different problems: overuse. Rapid changes from administration to administration and from congress to congress would be likely and the chances of stupid legislation passing due to political pressure would be higher.

Chinese Sports Culture

A very good op-ed in the New York Times. Interesting quote:

But for the most part, Chinese athletes perform best in sports that few Chinese care about. This is a country without private guns but with crack sharpshooters. With few public pools but the best divers. Fencing, canoeing, women’s softball — China excels at these despite the fact that very few Chinese show an interest in them.

Yes, but does he like Asian Girls?

Ezra Klein thinks Evan Bayh will be Obama's VP pick:

But my hunch now is that it'll be Evan Bayh, if for no other reason than Evan Bayh is the single whitest man in America, and I have a feeling that the Obama campaign wants America's Whitest Man in some pictures these days.

I dispute that Evan Bayh is the single whitest man in America. For evidence, I will consult the holy bible of whiteness.

From looking at his Wikipedia page and general knowledge/guesswork, I bet Evan Bayh likes:

#1 Coffee
#4 Assissts
#5 Farmer's Markets
#7 Diversity
#8 Barack Obama
#12 Non-profits
#16 Gifted children
#35 The Daily Show
#36 Breakfast Places
#44 Public Radio
#46 Sunday NYT
#53 Dogs
#56 Lawyers
#62 Knowing what's best for poor people
#64 Recycling
#81 Graduate School
#84 T-Shirts
#86 Shorts
#88 Having Gay Friends
#92 Book Deals
#94 Free Healthcare
#99 Grammar
#101 Being Offended
#105 Unpaid Internships
#106 Facebook

While this is an impressive display of whiteness, I feel that I, for one, am much whiter than Evan Bayh.

"The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class"

Pete Hamill from 1976 in New York Magazine. A few noteworthy passages:

It is very difficult to explain to these people that more than 600,000 of those on welfare are women and children; that one reason the black family is in trouble is because outfits like the Iron Workers Union have practically excluded blacks through most of their history; that a hell of a lot more of their tax dollars go to Vietnam or the planning for future wars than to Harlem or Bed-Stuy; that the effort of the past four or five years was an effort forced by bloody events, and that they are paying taxes to relieve some forms of poverty because of more than 100 years of neglect on top of 300 years of slavery. The working-class white man has no more patience for explanations.

"If I hear that 400-years-of-slavery bit one more time," a man said to me in Farrell's one night, "I'll go outta my mind!"

Another:

In any conversation with working-class whites, you are struck by how the information explosion has hit them. Television has made an enormous impact on them, and because of the nature of that medium—its preference for the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image—much of their understanding of what happens is superficial. Most of them have only a passing acquaintance with blacks, and very few have any black friends. So they see blacks in terms of militants with Afros and shades, or crushed people on welfare. Television never bothers reporting about the black man who gets up in the morning, eats a fast breakfast, says goodbye to his wife and children, and rushes out to work. That is not news. So the people who live in working-class white ghettos seldom meet blacks who are not threatening to burn down America or asking for help or receiving welfare or committing crime. And in the past five or six years, with urban rioting on everyone's minds, they have provided themselves (or been provided with) a confused, threatening stereotype of blacks that has made it almost impossible to suggest any sort of black-white working-class coalition.

"Why the hell should I work with spades," he says, "when they are threatening to burn down my house?"

And a third:

The revolt involves the use of guns. In East Flatbush, and Corona, and all those other places where the white working class lives, people are forming gun clubs and self-defense leagues and talking about what they will do if real race rioting breaks out. It is a tragic situation, because the poor blacks and the working-class whites should be natural allies. Instead, the black man has become the symbol of all the working-class white man's resentments.

"I never had a gun in my life before," a 34-year-old Queens bartender named James Giuliano told me a couple of weeks ago. "But I got me a shotgun, license and all. I hate to have the thing in the house, because of the kids. But the way things are goin'. I might have to use it on someone. I really might. It's comin' to that. Believe me, it's comin' to that."

What all these passages get at is the gap between perception and reality. The white guy doesn't hear about the black people who work just as hard as they do, so he assumes all of them are lazy. He only sees the lazy ones, or the militant ones - in general, the ones at the extremes. And, despite what the bartender says, it's not "coming to that." No black person was going to burst into his house and slaughter his family - but the militants on TV kept threatening to do so and he believed them.

Should journalists give up lying sources?

From Glenn Greenwald:

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood.

More from Greenwald on this here.

My answer to this question is a resounding "Yes." The contract between a journalist and an anonymous source is something like this: Journalist gives source anonymity. Anonymous source gives journalist hard-to-get information. If the information is false, then the contract should be shattered. If the anonymous source isn't exposed, then there is no incentive for anonymous sources to tell the truth.

Jay Rosen explains it well:

But the only way that system can work is when sources know: if you lie, or mislead the reporter into a false report… you will be exposed. People who believe strongly in the need for confidential sources should be strongly in favor of their exposure in clear cases of abuse, because that is the only way a practice like this has a prayer of retaining its legitimacy.

Things You Should Read

• This RealClearPolitics piece on the relationship between William F. Buckley and Playboy.
• This NYT article on the the increasing prevalence of Jellyfish in the world's oceans.
• Boston Globe reporter Michael Paulson's blog on religion. Paulson is a great reporter and his blog is a great example of what a newspaper blog should be like.
  
• This GQ profile of Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopalian Bishop from New Hampshire.
  

Bill Simmons, a Nation turns its lonely eyes to you...

I realize he's on vacation, but doesn't the Manny trade warrant a Bill Simmons column?

Now this is more important than Doha...

From an NYT article on the effect of rising fuel costs on globalization:

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

Read the whole thing.

An Open Letter to David Kuo and Bill Bennett

I was working on a much longer piece about the possibility of a conservative version of Slate, which is one of my favorite websites. The post dealt with the ideology of Slate and The Atlantic and was sort of rambling. Then I realized I have only two things to say about the possibility of a conservative version of Slate:

Dear David Kuo and Bill Bennett,

Hire the staff of The American Scene to staff LibertyWire. Also change its name from LibertyWire to something more Slate-y or Salon-y. LibertyWire sounds like the name of a Pat Robertson-sponsored competitor to the Associated Press.

You're welcome,

K.

The Real McCain and Reluctant Muslinging

Reading this New York magazine piece on the campaign made me think two things:

1. It's fully possible McCain did want to keep the campaign as civil as possible - right up until the point he realized that if that happened, Obama was going to kick his ass. I'm guessing most politicians don't really want to call their opponents traitorous child molesters, but are willing to do so when strategists tell them it's the only way they can win the campaign.
2. Lately, some journalists, perhaps egged on by John Weaver and Mike Murphy, two McCain advisers from 2000, have been claiming the McCain that is sliming Obama isn't the "real" McCain. I'm sure this is true. What's equally true is that the 2000 version of McCain - "The Maverick" - wasn't real either. Both are just creations of the strategists running the campaign. There's elements of truth and elements of fiction in both, and there are elements of truth and elements of fiction in how Obama is presented by his campaign.
   

Is Doha Important?

Paul Krugman says the failure of the Doha trade talks in Geneva is no big deal:

[E]xisting agreements stand. This isn’t Smoot-Hawley; it isn’t even the 2002 Bush steel tariff. Life, and trade, will go on.

The Economist initially appears to agree:

You can construct a plausible argument that the collapse of yet another set of talks on the Doha round, which is now coming up to seven years old, is of little importance. While the world’s trade ministers have alternated between talking and not talking to one another about Doha, the world’s businesspeople have carried on regardless: the growth of global commerce has outstripped the hitherto healthy pace of global GDP. Developing countries in particular have continued to open up to imports and foreign investment. You might say that not much was on offer in Geneva anyway: one study put the eventual benefits at maybe $70 billion, a drop in the ocean of the world’s GDP. Global stockmarkets, with so much else on their minds, either didn’t notice or didn’t care. On July 29th, the day the talks broke up, the S&P 500 index rose by 2.3%

But no so fast, it continues:

The lowish estimates of the economic benefits of the round miss out two things. One is the value of the unpredictable dynamic benefits of more open markets. Access to more customers allows exporters to exploit economies of scale. Competition encourages not only specialisation, the classic result of more open trade, but also increased productivity. The other is what you might call the “option value” of the Doha round. The WTO inhabits a sort of parallel universe in which countries negotiate not on what tariffs and subsidies will actually be, but on maximum (or “bound”) rates and amounts. Although many countries have cut tariffs and farm subsidies—if only, in the latter case, because of rising food prices—too few have turned these cuts into commitments. Tighter binding would cramp their ability to turn back to protection. It would have made up the bulk of a Doha deal.

I'm slightly more sympathetic to Krugman's argument - if only because it is based in the short term and is more predictable. However, agricultural subsidies and tariffs do need to be abandoned - the U.S. Farm Bill, for example, was criticized by basically every member of the American public who is not a member of a congress or a farmer. But, despite Obama and Hilary's pandering in the primaries, does anyone really think a new wave of protectionism is going to sweep the globe?

Racist? No. Stupid? Yes.

Considering the Wall Street Journal already posed the question, I might as well provide an answer. John McCain is stupid. Ok, he's not, but his campaign's "Celeb" ad is. But it's not racist. As a reader wrote to The Daily Dish:

All of those other individuals are famous for something - there is substance behind their celebrity. Britney and Paris are paper-thin and without any substance whatsoever. That's the comparison McCain was going for - trying to allege that Barack Obama is without substance, a celebrity for celebrity's sake.

The McCain campaign was saying Obama is like Paris and Britney, not that he was fucking them. Nonetheless, the concept of the ad is stupid for numerous reasons: Obama transparently has some substance, McCain is also a celebrity, it reeks of just a stupid, desperate attack.

Right now, the McCain campaign is just flailing about in the dark, it seems.

McCain deserves better surrogates

Really, he does. I don't think he's actually insane, but his surrogates might be.

I mean, computer illiteracy can't really be a good thing, can it?

Jon Voight? Really, that's the best you can do? Hollywood really must be as liberal as everyone says. But seriously, not even like the guy who created 24?

I can't even explain this.

Obscure Ethical Debates

Can Vegans eat honey?

Obama's charisma

You could do what Andrew Ferguson says:

Anyone who wants to understand Barack Obama would do well to stay away from the radio and the TV. Obama is a theatrical presence. That's what it means to be "charismatic": To an unnerving degree his appeal relies on sight and sound rather than sense. Better, in my opinion, to stick to the printed word. On paper (or the computer screen) his words can be thought about and chewed over. You can understand him at your own pace, undistracted by that rich baritone, the regal bearing, the excellent drape of his Burberry suits.

Or you could be like me and recreate Obama's voice in your mind whenever you read something he says in the paper. It makes it so much cooler.

Assorted Links

• Jon Chait indirectly calls McCain a 'sociopath.' Didn't he just saw he loved him last week? That was a quick breakup.
  
• Excellent article in the New Yorker about China's "Angry Youth." They want China to join the world stage as an equal to the United States, not as its morally deficient younger brother. This quote sort of sums it up:

  Boycotting the Beijing Games in the name of Tibet seemed as logical to him as shunning the Salt Lake City Olympics to protest America’s treatment of the Cherokee.

• The United States' "culture war" pales in comparison to Turkey's, as this WSJ article makes clear. I had always understood that Turkey was founded as a secular state, but never this clearly. The piece is just filled with interesting facts like this one:

  Just as Muslim activists mine the Quran for verses to boost their cause, Turkey's hard-line secularists and their foes delve into Ataturk's voluminous writings and speeches -- Turkey's secular scripture. The sheer volume of Ataturk's words gives plenty of scope for argument: a single speech he gave in 1927 lasted 36 hours, spread over six days.

• The Weekly Standard shoots down programs designed to scare kids sober.
• Bill James meet a Lemur. I bet Lemurs have good range ratings.
  

What made America strong?

Ezra attributes American economic power to geopolitics (natural resources, not getting beat up in World War II).

David Brooks attributes it to education and economic freedom.

Who's right? I think Ezra's argument enabled Brooks' argument. Relative peace made it easier for the United States to invest in education instead of in rebuilding broken bridges and buildings. But economic freedom and education played a role as well - the United States' smaller government and lower taxes did enable more economic success (if not more happiness for most of its people) and the United States was able to be a dues ex machina in the two World Wars partially because of technological advantages we had, which were at least indirectly attributable to public education.

Also worth nothing from Brooks' column is the following:

Third, it’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.

Unlike every other blogger on the planet, I have not read Grand New Party (What? I'm a poor college student and books are freaking expensive), but that seems a very GNP-ish argument to me.

Shit. You mean I have to write?

Via The American Scene, this depressing news from Will Wilkinson:

When I was a teenager, I had a fanstasy that I could get paid or famous simply from having interesting ideas. It turns out people won’t pay you for interesting ideas unless you show up at a certain place and at a certain time to express them verbally in an entertaining format, or unless you write them down. It’s hard for me and not at all as nice as doing the backstroke through Platonic heaven.

Unfortunately for this aspiring journalist/scholar/intellectual/guy who writes for a living, this is very true.

Discovering New Bloggers is Fun!

Although he'll probably make me smash my laptop against the wall at some point in the future, I've really been enjoying Daniel Larison's guest posts at The Daily Dish this week. He normally blogs at The American Conservative.

One nice post from him today:

At the TAC main blog, Clark Stooksbury points us to this gem from Limbaugh:

How does it make you feel that Zhang Linsen has a big Hummer with nine speakers blaring as he pulls out into a four-lane road with so much smog he basically can’t see the car in front of him, and you are trading in all of your cars and trying to go out and find basically a lawn mower?

Actually, it makes me feel relieved that I don't live in smog-infested cities where marathoners collapse and die because of the pollution.

Things people shouldn't write about

Metro columnists shouldn't write about baseball. Adrian Walker:

Right-thinking people in this town have finally had enough of Manny Ramírez.

What was once charming and eccentric is now self-centered and selfish. Ramírez suggested last weekend that he's had enough. Everyone, it seems, has had enough.

Honestly, I think most Red Sox fans would rather give up their right nut than Manny.

Mark Penn shouldn't write about, well, anything, really. Active grannies? Mark, can you share whatever is you're smoking?

I wonder if the stock moved ten points

Via Regret The Error, the ghost of Malcolm Gladwell strikes the New York Times:

An article on Friday about earnings at JPMorgan Chase misstated the bank’s income from investment banking in its second quarter. The division reported a net income of $394 million, not a loss of $785 million.

Your Turn, Europe

So says Anne Applebaum:

[The] new administration, Democratic or Republican, would immediately offer the Europeans the "leadership" and "partnership" they so often say they desire. Between the sinking housing market and the soaring price of food, the high price of fuel and low growth, the new president is going to have so much on his plate that a group of Europeans who appear from across the Atlantic announcing, say, a plan to fix southern Afghanistan would be welcomed with open arms. In fact, I'll wager I could find a dozen future members of either administration who would roll out the red carpet and greet them like envoys of a fellow superpower if the Europeans so desired.

Yet at the same time, I'd also wager that I could not find a dozen current members of any European government who have even thought about coming up with any ideas at all. This is the hour of Europe—but do the Europeans even know it?

Judging by the press and the popular reaction to Barack Obama's visit there last week, they don't. Just about every account of the speech noted the dearth of applause for its single line encouraging European participation in world events. "America cannot do this alone. … The Afghan people need our troops and your troops" was not a crowd pleaser. Neither was "We can join in a new and global partnership" to fight terrorism. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, meanwhile, spoke tartly of "the limits" of Germany's contributions to the Afghan cause, making it clear she didn't favor such upbeat talk, while another senior German official worried that his colleagues "will have trouble meeting [Obama's] demand to assume more common responsibility."

And:

And as the election gets closer, the anxiety will grow. In a strange sense, Bush's catastrophic diplomacy was a gift to Europe's politicians. "Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy," wrote one British columnist this week. Bush also allowed them to blame American "unilateralism" for their own lack of initiative, to use bad American diplomacy as an excuse for doing nothing.

This reminds me of old posts by Megan Mcardle and Matt Yglesias over whether when people say "someone should do something about (Darfur, Burma, etc.)," if that 'someone' inherently has to be the United States.

But I'm not sure if this is right. Megan says that Britain, Australia, and Israel could also single-handedly intervene in a conflict (but Israel, in particular, is loath to do so). That may be true.

But without know much about the respective strengths of various world militaries, would it not be possible for an alliance of say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy to intervene in Darfur? Or for Canada to join hands with Norway to keep the peace in the Congo?

In other words, I think Europe could have a much larger military (and political) role in world affairs, but have gotten so used to American leadership, that they have sort of entered an intellectual malaise. It's almost like they are saying: "We can't intervene in Sudan. That's America's job."

But it shouldn't be. And for all the complaining of American hegemony, I don't see Europe all that eager to work with the United States to solve any problem that requires military force or real confrontation.

"Who do you think you are? A Kennedy?"

Leaked trailer for Oliver Stone's W. The most notable part of this trailer, to me, is how huge Richard Dreyfuss' eyebrows are.

Assorted Links

• Expelling a kid because he has a 2.8 is pretty dumb. I understand the need for standards at a magnet school as popular as Thomas Jefferson is, but a 3.0 is too high. I think it should be like most colleges - if you're below a 2.0 for consecutive semesters, you're done.
• This has to be an intentional Talledaga Nights reference.
• In the movies, someone would try to secretly establish Atlantropa. In real life, however, these sorts of grandiose schemes are always publicized, probably because their backers are convinced of their brilliance. ALSO: Strange Maps is definitely a site worth visiting on occasion.
• Via Yglesias and Wonkette, DC Prep also seems to be based on a false premise: that the sons and daughters of U.S. public officials live in Washington, D.C. At least for members of congress, I am under the impression most kids live in the home districts of the parents.
  

McCain and Russia

From Joe Klein's column in Time:

But that's the point: McCain would place a higher priority on finding new enemies than on cultivating new friends.

The entire thing is very good. Klein does his usual good job of blending policy and politics into a coherent analysis - something a lot of journalists struggle with.

The most baffling part of McCain's foreign policy is his extreme dislike of Vladmir Putin and Russia, which Klein calls "rather exotic." I would call it retarded.

From what I know, his plan to kick Russia out of the G8 has no supporters outside of his campaign and certainly none outside the United States. The G8 is an informal body with no real power - kicking Russia out would have no positive effects. But it would force them closer to China and perhaps restart the Cold War, generating a whole new set of enemies for the United States.

McCain's view of the world seems to be like The Dark Knight in reverse. Where in The Dark Knight, the presence of Batman creates the Joker, in McCain's world, the presence of Batman requires a Joker. He seems to think that because the United States is good, there must be evil.

Good Sentence

From a David Frum WSJ piece on party conventions:

The parties made the conventions dull in self-defense, because anything exciting can and will be used against them.

The rest of the story (including a delightful H.L. Mencken quote) is also good. As the kids say, read the whole thing.

"The Reporter's Worldview"

Ezra Klein nails one of the problems of contemporary journalism (emphasis mine):

Oddly enough, it's not really considered reporting to read Anthony Cordesman's latest report on Iraq. It is considered reporting to call Anthony Cordesman on the phone and ask him what he thinks. It's not considered reporting to read through Barack Obama's speeches on nuclear proliferation and emerge with a coherent understanding of his stated policies. It is considered reporting to land an interview with Barack Obama and ask him what he thinks, and it would be considered ace reporting -- A1 level reporting -- to unearth a copy of Obama's college thesis on nuclear non-proliferation and publish his conclusions....

In part, this is due to the competitive pressures of journalism. The journalist's job, in theory, is to learn things that other people can't learn, so work conducted largely by analyzing documents and information in the public domain isn't journalism...

An underlying worldview in journalism (is): That politicians are all bullshit artists, that politics is all artifice, and the reporter's job is to cynically expose it as such and then peer behind the curtain to uncover the moments of spontaneity and honesty. Within this rubric for journalism, there's no reason to read speeches or policy plans or interview transcripts, no reason to stick in the public domain because it's all crap anyway. Better to try and trigger moments of surprise -- when truth might slip through the cracks created by shock -- then take seriously a politician's stated plans for the country.

This is partially because editors consider it "lazy" to just rely on information in the public domain. Adam Nagourney could easily just rewrite Obama's policy papers, stripping them of glittering generalities and bureaucratic BS, call one or two outside experts, then go take a long lunch. I have no doubt he would prefer to do this. But he also feels the need to show editors he is working. So he has to call Obama's press office and ask them to put him in touch with Obama's policy advisers and because most press officers are fucking useless (the most underreportered story ever, because reporters can't afford to piss them off), he has to sit around and wait 3 hours for them to get back to him, while repeatedly telling his editors he has "calls in" and doing nothing.

Basically, aggressively pursuing stuff like Obama's college thesis also makes it look like a reporter is working hard. Note: if an editor thinks a reporter is not working hard, he will undoubtedly assign the reporter a story idea the editor has. The idea will be either a. dumb or b. impossible to report. There is nothing reporters hate more than story ideas editors come up with.

The Politics of The Dark Knight

There has been a good deal of discussion about the politics of The Dark Knight on liberal blogs today.

For me, the movie could have been far more political than it actually was, but I feel like its quick pacing prevented the sort of reflection and dialogue that would have been needed for it to make a truly coherent political statement. Ultimately, it just sends mixed messages. Is Bruce Wayne right to build the eavesdropping device? Or is Lucius Fox right to destroy it? (Iron Man, in my opinion, was the same way.)

I feel like there's two key points I still want to make, however.

First, does Batman equal Dick Cheney as Spencer Ackerman claims? And does the Joker equal Al Qaeda?

The answer to both is no.

I would say Batman doesn't equal Cheney for several reasons:

• Batman views this as moral quandry. Cheney doesn't appear to do so.
• As shown in Charlie Savage's excellent Takeover, Cheney had wanted to seize extrajudicial powers for the executive branch long before September 11 happened. He simply used that as an excuse. Batman only becomes Batman after his parents are killed. For Cheney, the trauma was an excuse. For Batman, it was a cause.
• Lastly, Batman never actually breaks his "one rule," as the Joker puts it. While he does other immoral, risky things, he never breaks his established moral code in the way Cheney has trampled over the Constitution.

There is one main reason the Joker doesn't equal Al Qaeda. I'll let Bruce Hoffman explain (italics mine):

Terrorism, in the most widely accepted contemporary usage of the term, is fundamentally and inherently political. It is also ineluctably about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to achieve political change. Terrorism is thus violence -- or, equally important, the threat of violence -- used and directed in pursuit of, or in service of, a political aim.

Whereas Al Qaeda has a specific goal/ideology and is at least a pseudo-rational actor, The Joker is insane. He doesn't want power - he just doesn't want anyone else to have it. He wants to ruin the plans of the schemers of Gotham City. He has no desire to acquire power - although he certainly does end up acquiring a good deal of it. This actually makes him a much more significant threat than Al Qaeda, who need to make political progress as well as terrorism progress to acheive their goals and to stay popular in the Islamic world. The Joker has no need for the political system.

Ouch.

I don't have much to add to this, which is from George Will's column:

General Motors' market capitalization recently dipped below that of the Hershey chocolate company.

Something I found weird

Gary Oldman plays both Commissioner Jim Gordon and Sirius Black.

Also, yes, The Dark Knight was one of the best movies of the year. I just can't wait for Justice League and The Avengers movies.

Things you should read

• Ryan Lizza's New Yorker profile of Barack Obama. Fascinating stuff about both Obama and the Chicago political scene. Far more than the rehashed stuff you get in the NYT's "The Long Run" series and elsewhere. It's a shame the cover overshadowed Lizza's story.
• This WaPo piece on the future.
• This Washington City Paper piece on the Post's Chandra Levy series. I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, the series has been fantastic. On the other hand, this is totally true:

  Pierre wrote that he found it “unconscionable” that the paper would devote a year and 12 chapters to the murder of a white woman, when around 200 people per year are murdered in the District–most of them male African Americans.

  The analysis by Erik Wemple is also good. I hope the series takes a harder turn soon, and really starts critiquing the media, the police, or someone and becomes more than a shortened John Grisham book. Or it ends with "BLANK... killed Chandra Levy.
• 10 most amazing ghost towns. Simply cool.
• This brief NYT profile of Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested for war crimes yesterday.
• This NYer piece on "Obama's" email. How did they find this guy?
  

The false hope of wonkery

Like Hilzoy, I am a wonk. I love policy. Love reading about it, love writing about it, love analyzing it, etc. However, I am even more loath than she is to put much into the candidates' position papers and websites. Why?

Because, to a certain extent, it doesn't matter what the President wants. It matters what Congress wants.

Ultimately, it is up to Congress to write and pass laws, with all the compromise and squabbling that entails. While presidents can and do use the bully pulpit, congress can decide to shit or piss all over any proposal a president can make. Because Democrats are likely to retain or expand their congressional majority in the fall, this makes President McCain's plans, in particular, pretty irrelevant because none of them will be enacted. There's no way Pelosi and Reid will allow McCain to stack the courts with right-wing judges, pass massive tax cuts, etc.

Freeman Dyson scoops David Brooks

A few days ago, I stumbled upon this quote from Anglo-American physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson:

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

I feel this is the dividing line in upper-class America has well. David Brooks said it this way in a more recent column:

Political analysts now notice a gap between professionals and managers. Professionals, like lawyers and media types, tend to vote and give Democratic. Corporate managers tend to vote and give Republican. The former get their values from competitive universities and the media world; the latter get theirs from churches, management seminars and the country club.

The trends are pretty clear: rising economic sectors tend to favor Democrats while declining economic sectors are more likely to favor Republicans. The Democratic Party (not just Obama) has huge fund-raising advantages among people who work in electronics, communications, law and the catchall category of finance, insurance and real estate. Republicans have the advantage in agribusiness, oil and gas and transportation. Which set of sectors do you think are going to grow most quickly in this century’s service economy?

The shift here, I speculate, has to do with how engineers break. Engineers and technical workers used to work for industrial firms (GM, factories) in the Rust Belt. Now they program and type for media, internet, and technology companies (Google, Intel, etc.) in the Sun Belt. The Rust Belt engineers vote Republican. The Sun Belt ones vote Democratic.