Democratic Vista

Good News

2005-09-19T23:01:00.000-04:00

Good News ... The paint is now dry, the boxes are unpacked, and the door is most definitely open.

Please come on over to our new home, at www.democraticvista.org.

India & Iran

2005-09-15T10:47:00.000-04:00

India & Iran ... Two days ago over Tapped, Matt Yglesias published a brief post on Iran. The gist of his argument was this: "Both militarily (thanks to the awkward position the Iraq War's put us in) and economically (thanks to the energy situation) Iran has more capacity to damage our interests than we do to damage Iran's."

That's more or less what I've been saying here for a while now. Simply put we have no recourse for imposing any kind of hardline policy on Iran. Large-scale military strikes are out, as are, for different reasons, small-scale ones. Meanwhile, national economic sanctions aren't working because of the energy crisis, and specific corporate sanctions wouldn't work because the individual companies in Iran are typically Russian banks which operate outside our purview.

As a sign of just how desperate the administration is getting, the Times reported today that the U.S. is now leaning heavily on India to join the EU effort to refer Iran's nuclear activity to the United Nations Security Council. It'll be interesting to see which way India goes on this. On the one hand, they should side with us because of the nuclear technology we promised them this summer; on the other, India's alternate estival accord was with Iran, which agreed to a pipeline deal that would pump natural gas directly into India.

But the real trouble here is that the U.S. should have to rely on India at all. Bush administration policies may not be directly responsible for the current political climate within Iran, but they are responsible for having deprived the State Department of the resources needed to confront and contain Ahmadinejad's nuclear program effectively. Beginning with the rampant unilateralism prior to the Iraq war, we have systemically stripped ourselves of the political leverage necessary to engage Tehran successfully.

Consequently the regional threat Iran now poses is very much a problem of our own making. And while it would be nice if India opts to help us out of this mess, we should bear in mind that it should never have come to this point in the first place.

Cheney's Pipeline

2005-09-14T10:12:00.000-04:00

Cheney's Pipeline ... At this point Josh Marshall is probably best known for the lead role he took in staving off Bush's "private accounts" social security reform.

Yet well before that effort Josh had already established himself as the preeminent blogger of the American left. Although part of that reputation owes to how well he conveys the news behind the news, Josh's greater talent lies in how acutely he perceives the national implications of seemingly local stories.

A great case in point is his post this morning about an oil pipeline in Mississippi. Evidently Vice President Cheney ordered the pipeline up and running on August 30 -- a day after Katrina hit, and even though getting the pipeline on-line meant that two rural hospitals went without power.

To get the story, Marshall followed a brief tip in the Washington Post back to its source in the Hattiesburg (Mississippi) American. In the process his post becomes, however unwittingly, a textbook example of how local news analysis ought to inform political commentary.

Definitely check it out if you get the chance.

More Housekeeping

2005-09-11T16:31:00.000-04:00

More housekeeping ... Between Iraq, Katrina, China, the Chief Justice, North Korea, the economy, and oh by the way Iran, there's about a thousand and one pressing things to write about today. However, before I can get to those issues I need to do some housekeeping first.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, we're in the process of moving this site over to its own domain, or more simply, to www.democraticvista.org. But to make the switch extra special, I also decided to switch to a different blogging software.

Fortunately, anyone who visits the site itself won't notice a change. The homepage will look the same, the comments will work the same way, etc. The difference is that I'll be able to do some technical things that will make the site significantly easier to find for media members and media observers alike.

I mention this now because several weeks ago I started putting the new software through a demo run. Fortunately, it's as good as promised. Unfortunately, I realized today -- when one reader officially subscribed to the demo site -- that the demo site's server completely warps search engine results. Of course, in the long run that warp promises to be a boon. But for now it means that a Google search of, say, "democratic vista" will land you at a site that isn't fully ready yet.

If you've also noticed the anomaly, my apologies for the confusion. Although there's little I can do about it now -- search engine entries are notoriously difficult to erase -- we should be up and running at our own domain soon. Until then, I'll keep posting here.

Finally, as a reward for those of you who're still reading this post, here's my quote of the day, by the inimitable Ben Stein: "We do not need to have 6,000-pound cars driving 100-pound humans to buy one-liter bottles of imported water."

Danner on Al Qaeda

2005-09-10T08:10:00.000-04:00

Danner on Al Qaeda ... Last May Mark Danner crafted one of the finest pieces of prose in recent memory.

Now he's done it again.

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Update: The latter link is not to the long-form article that ran in this week's New York Times Magazine. Rather, it's to the abridged piece that ran in the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune. The latter version may not be as exhaustive in its references, but the quality of writing is far better. (Perhaps in a later post I'll get to why this is almost always the case.)

Open Convergence

2005-09-09T23:24:00.000-04:00

Open Convergence ... Mention the term open source, open access, or open science to someone, and even in today's information age you're likely to get a blank stare. Maybe a vague idea of what they are, or a hesitant reference to "that Linux thing". But the names of Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman, the closest figures the open source movement has to Bill Gates, almost certainly will not be cited.

Part of that ignorance has to do with the anonymous nature of "open" productivity, but it owes more, I think, to the antagonism that long dominated the relationship between a predominantly academic open access community and a society at large organized by proprietary law. Simply put, both open source and open access were long viewed as threats to the core principles of capitalist enterprise. As a result, it really wasn't until IBM began airing its Linux ads last year that their relationship was popularly understood as complimentary rather than inimical.

I mention all that because for those of you interested in getting caught up on the history of the open access movement, I'd recommend this paper by John Willinsky. Thanks to Lawrence Lessig I just came across the article today, and I have to say it does a fantastic job of weaving together the recent convergence of the open source, open access, and open science movements.

I should also note that it starts with a remarkable comparison between the convergence today and the intellectual, political, and scientific convergence of late 17th century England. For someone like myself -- who has nothing better to do on a Friday night -- that's about as good as it gets.

Katrina & the News

2005-09-08T21:02:00.000-04:00

Katrina and the News ... Twenty years from now, when New Orleans has been rebuilt and things have long since returned to a new normal, Katrina will be remembered for at least two things. The first is the obvious incompetence demonstrated at all levels of government, both in its response to the storm and in its failure to adequately defend against it. (One reader even sent in this National Geographic article, which reads like an exact description of Katrina -- until you realize it was published in 2004.)

The second is that Katrina established the model for how network newscasts will work in the information age. Far from dying out, network news still have a lot of life left. The catch is that news programs now must have an anchor whose "brand" extends across a variety of media platforms.

If you haven't guessed it by now, the example I'm thinking of here is Brian Williams. His on-air reporting last week may have validated his selection as Brokaw's successor, but it was his on-line reporting for which he will be remembered. Earlier this summer numerous commentators noted the unprecedented access that Williams' blog granted his audience, particularly with regard to NBC News' editorial process. Now he has just one-upped himself. His on-line reporting just altered a story in a way that was once possible only on-air; this post yesterday forced FEMA to reverse course dramatically in its attempt to exclude reporters from New Orleans.

Unfortunately, to really flesh out the story of that post requires more time (and energy) than I currently have to spare. But the bottom line is that in a way Brian Williams has just reinvented network news, and it is for that transformation -- among many other, more troubling things -- that Katrina will in part be remembered.

Egyptian Politics

2005-09-07T16:54:00.000-04:00

Egyptian elections ... The early reports of today's presidential election in Egypt have been predictably muddled -- most praised the appearance of a democratic process but criticized how insubstantial that appearance was. The Times was typical: "Egyptian voters went to the polls today in this nation's first multicandidate race for president, but the initial refusal to allow any form of nongovernment poll monitors and the ruling party's overwhelming presence on the streets and at the voting stations led to concerns about the integrity of the process."

Yet what I found most interesting is that none of the articles I read placed the significance of these elections in a regional context. It was only discussed within a national framework, as if Mubarak felt compelled to offer a semblance of democracy apropos of nothing, or as if the Egyptian people -- and particularly the "Kafiya" movement -- began pressing for political reforms out of the blue.

I can't imagine that that was the case. Others have written about this more extensively, but at a minimum I think one has to acknowledge the role satellite television has played. The substance of democracy may be notoriously difficult to transmit, but the images of democracy are not; and over the last several years, there have been any number of iconic images -- most notably the purple fingers on Jan. 30 -- that have been beemed throughout the Middle East. As a result, there is now enough popular momentum for democracy that Mubarak was forced to cede a thin layer of control.

At a maximum, meanwhile, I think you also have to tip your cap to the foreign policy initiatives of the infamous neocons. Don't get me wrong: those initiatives overall have proven a horrific failure and inflicted irreparable damage on countless U.S. interests. But at a certain point you also have to call a spade a spade. And this is one instance in which the "democratic domino" scenario is in fact playing out, albeit in a limited way. We would not be observing the introduction of reform in Egypt now had the U.S. not radically altered the regional balance of power and fostered a sustainable environment for reform.

However inconsistent it is with the other consequences our policies have had, we ought to be hearing about that success now.

Political Bifurcation

2005-09-06T23:50:00.000-04:00

Political bifurcation ... Juan Cole's take today on Spencer Ackerman's latest at TNR:

As Ackerman says, this alignment of Washington and Najaf has been a long-term project of the Neoconservatives. I think they just want to divide the Arab world between Sunnis and Shiites so as to make trouble and weaken the Arabs, for the benefit of the Likud Party in Israel. Frum and Perle even want to encourage Shiite separatism in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia so as to split up Saudia and defund the Wahhabis ... As if the Shiites of Qatif and Hufuf would necessarily be pro-American!

Anyway, if Bush wants a constitution to be passed in Iraq, he needs it to be endorsed by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. The provision that no law may be passed contravening Islamic Law (article 2A) is a non-negotiable demand of Sistani. Without it, he might well come out against the constitution, which would certainly sink it. He has bucked Bush quite successfully before. Ackerman's concerns all flow from the Jan. 30 elections, which the fundamentalist Shiites and Iran won, and which Bush lost. It's been over with all this time.

To begin with, I want to clarify that I stopped reading Juan Cole regularly some time ago -- not because I necessarily disagreed with him, but because he'd become manifestly careless when it came to checking himself against the contrapositive. Or put differently, Cole has simply drawn the same conclusions from the same arguments for so long that he now treats them as premises. And when critics stop being self-critical, it's tough to trust their criticism in general. (The Likud reference above demonstrates this: certainly the neoconservatives overwhelming align themselves with Likud, but it's not an absolute alignment.)

Now. All that said, the two thrusts of the particular passage above both play out. Let's start with the election. Despite the exultant coverage at the time, Bush got creamed in the actual voting. And when Cole says "it's been over with all this time", he's really going back not to Jan. 30, but to the crucial post-war decisions to dissolve the Iraqi Army and to prohibit Ba'ath party officers from holding office in the new government. Once that happened Sistani became central, which meant that the "Article 2A" provision became a given. And that, in turn, meant that the constitutional referendum we're now facing was lost long before it began. As with so many other aspects of the occupation, the decisions made in April and May 2003 still haunt us today -- and will do so for years and even decades to come.

Which brings me to Cole's other point. The "divide and conquer" principle is not knew. In the West it goes back to imperial Rome and classical Greece and undoubtedly even before. But what is new is that in the last fifty years we now have examples of how disastrous bifurcation can become when those divisions are then forcibly incorporated into a self-determinative national sovereignty. For instance, that the Kurds are spread over Turkey, Iraq and Iran is not an historical accident; it was an intentioned consequence of British colonial policy, and it continues to have profound regional effects today. Given how many examples like the Kurds history offers, the fact that neoconservatives consider ethnic bifurcation to be viable indicates both an astonishing disregard for the lessons of history and a reckless faith in the lasting efficacy of contemporary political solutions.

Cole may be a little over the top at times, but he's dead on the money with this one.

Lincoln's Melancholy

2005-09-05T16:09:00.000-04:00

Lincoln's Melancholy ... Fresh from the cover of this month's Atlantic Monthly: had Hamlet lived to be king, he'd have been Abraham Lincoln.

Update: It would seem some clarification is in order. Obviously there's no connection between the two where royalty is concerned, and further, there's scant correlation between the events of the play and the history of Lincoln's life. But when it comes to the anguish of introspection and the urgency of political action, I'm not sure literature has ever produced a greater character than Prince Hamlet, nor reality a greater human than Abraham Lincoln. Each knew well the isolation of power, and each felt acutely a profound separation from the "divinity which shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will." The Atlantic story makes no mention of this connection -- it's just a thought I've had for a while now -- but for myself at least, the essay's long-overdue emphasis on Lincoln's depression as a principle source of his political genius only illuminated that connection all the more.

Richard Ford

2005-09-04T15:10:00.000-04:00

A lexicon of grief ... Five years ago, in the basement of the Harvard Book Store, I stumbled across The Sportswriter by Richard Ford. It's not often that a Pulitzer Prize winner will take on a subject better suited for Sports Illustrated, so I figured I'd give it a go.

It didn't disappoint: the listless sportswriting of the protagonist, Frank Bascombe, gradually reveals just how ill-equipped he is to mourn the loss of his child. Only when Ford begins to suffuse the book with his own vocabulary of grief is Bascombe able to approach any kind of resolution. To the end the extraordinary beauty of that vocabulary remains as reserved as it is effectual, and as such calls to mind many another southern writer, particularly Walker Percy.

I bring up The Sportswriter because in today's Times Richard Ford has created an even more resonant language of grief.

Technically it's an op-ed column, but in truth the essay is an elegant meditation on what it means to lose a city, a place, a past. Read it.

Katrina Relief

2005-09-03T22:24:00.000-04:00

The Politics of Relief ... Aside from a brief respite Thursday evening, I spent the latter half of this past week in orientation training for a new job. As a result, I didn't get a sense of just how bad things in New Orleans had become until today.

What would seem to be obvious at this point is that human fallibility has severely compounded the suffering of an otherwise "natural" disaster. And as is typically the case when catastrophe and error intersect, the tragedy as a whole has consequently acquired a political nature. Even before the situation has been brought under control, the political class is already either accepting liability or contesting blame.

Since both parties agree that the federal government has responded with gross incompetence, to the extent that political discord exists the responsibility lies with the left. And that responsibility is, in my view, shameful. Those on the left who have begun attributing the manifold failures of the government here to the same Republican policies that they decried prior to Katrina are betraying both a profound ignorance of crisis management and a reprehensible willingness to exact political gain out of the most abject suffering.

To illustrate this, we need look no further than two common criticisms:

#1. The Bush administration is racist. This accusation is immaterial to the case at hand. Bush was slow to respond not because the victims were black but because of an alarming incapacity to calculate the population of non-evacuees and an equally stunning inability to grasp the magnitude of damage to local infrastructure. To the extent that racism played a role, it did so only at the city and state level, where officials failed to account for poor black communities in evacuation planning.

#2. The recent budget defeat for proposed levee construction reflects the insufficiency of limited government policies. Again, this is immaterial. Even if the Democrats were in power, the proposed construction would never have gone through. The reason lies in the numbers: the likelihood of a category 4 or 5 hurricane striking New Orleans is .5% in any given year; the likelihood of a congressional election, 50%. Given the low probability that a Katrina-type hurricane would happen in any one congressional session, the political liability of authorizing the exorbitant price tag was far greater than the liability of not doing so.

Back to the point: scoring cheap political points at a time of national crisis is abhorrent. The incompetence of our federal response speaks for itself, in the refugees that remain unattended and the corpses that remain untouched. Partisan gamesmanship bespeaks nothing more than the rank insensitivity of those who engage in it.

American Refugees

2005-09-01T21:09:00.000-04:00

American Refugees ... The lede from WaPo's current Katrina headline:

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 1 -- Federal and local authorities struggled Thursday to regain control of this ruined and lawless city, where tens of thousands of desperate refugees remained stranded with little hope of rescue and rapidly diminishing supplies of food and drinking water.

Note the dependent subject there: "refugees." That is not a word often used in an American context, to describe American citizens; our systemic responses to natural disasters have become so efficient that there are few catastrophic events which we cannot quickly contain. In fact, neither the terrorism four years ago nor any severe weather in recent decades -- even hurricane Andrew -- has created a situation of such vast destruction that an effective response lay beyond the capabilities of our governmental resources. Consequently the word "refugees" has largely been removed from domestic news reports and left to international news alone, where it is regularly invoked to describe the displaced persons at the margins of failed states or the victims of natural disasters in countries to poor or ill-equipped to administer the necessary aid.

So it's shocking to see "refugees" used again in relation to a domestic crisis. At risk of sounding preachy, I think its reappearance now should make us all recognize anew the awesome power nature holds. And even more, I think it should make us humble. No matter how wealthy and developed we become, we will always remain at the mercy of our environment; no matter how knowledgeable, we will all still empathize with the silence of Job.*

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*For the non-clergy-offspring among you, please see Job 37:24-38:1, where Elihu concludes his remarkable speech on the sheer power of God and then God responds rather than Job.

Friedman Cartoon

2005-08-31T07:38:00.000-04:00

Friedman cartoon ... As many of you know, I'm not a big fan of Thomas Friedman's "flat world" rhetoric. For those of you who aren't particularly impressed with his thoughts either, here's a fantastic strip that one reader tipped me off to.

Accidental Virginity

2005-08-30T10:02:00.000-04:00

Steve Carrell and natural law ... Natural law is an inherently fraught concept, but no more so than when it attempts to define human sexuality.

In its more religious or theological versions, natural law defines sexuality as being inherently heterosexual, since it is only through heterosexual intercourse that procreation -- and thus the regeneration of the natural world -- is possible. Conversely, in its secular versions human sexuality is natural only when an individual "orients" his or her sexuality according to biological or genetic instinct. Ultimately the two views prove incompatible, and any consensus on a "natural law" or "natural order" impossible, because each differs in premise rather than argument.

What's curious, though, is that each treats virginity, in itself, as being deviant. Only when virginity is willed does it become celibacy or abstinence, in which case sexual restraint is consecrated by God or accepted as a form of evolutionary behavior. Unintentioned, post-adolescent virginity, by contrast, is identified as either perverse or inexplicable.

Which brings me to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in which Steve Carrell plays the accidental virgin who finally stumbles his way into love and deflowerment. I saw it recently, and very much enjoyed it. But I also found its message about sexuality (along with Wedding Crashers, it's an encomium of love rather than sex) to be inconsistent. As funny as it was, it was still based on the idea that virginity is a condition which must be cured, as if it were a disease.

And therein the problem lies. The movie clearly lies in a secular moral universe, in which sexual orientation is to be respected but sexual inhibition is not. That seems odd to me. From emotional disorders to physical disfigurement, there are any number of "causes" for unintentioned virginity. The film's protagonist, for instance, clearly had a kind of genuine emotional disorder. Fortunately for him Katherine Keener was there to save the day, but in real life can be so lucky.

In the end, then, I can't help believing that virgin jokes, however hilarious and even well-intended, are counter-productive. They may prompt a rare few toward true love, but in general all they do is reinforce the perception of virginity as being socially or morally deviant. To understand the anguish that perception causes, all you need do is watch Carrell's expression after he's been "outted". Not a pretty scene, that. And certainly not something that our culture can condone without become woefully inconsistent with its other secular and even religious values.

Chavez Protest

2005-08-29T11:28:00.000-04:00

Venezuelan tear-gas ... I'm still working on the site stuff. But in the meantime I couldn't help but notice this story yesterday in the LATimes, which reports that "a street march by hundreds of Venezuelans opposed to President Hugo Chavez turned violent Saturday, when people believed to be government supporters threw rocks and tear-gas canisters at the protesters."

Recall that I a few weeks ago I posted on how the State Department had cleared $24.5 million in direct commercial sales (DCS) of military hardware to be sold to Chavez's government. That amount includes one DCS of $425,000 for what is listed as "Riot Control Chemicals (Anti-Pers)".

There's probably no way of knowing whether the specific tear-gas canisters which were thrown at the protestors were made in the United States. But the fact that tear gas was used against the very protestors our administration claims to support makes it all the more imperative we understand both who at State cleared the sale of the riot control chemicals to Venezuela and why they did so.

Greenspan's Privacy

2005-08-26T17:19:00.000-04:00

Blogging news and economic ironies ... I'm currently in the process of shifting this blog over to another platform and a new domain. Working out the kinks and details will probably take a fair amount of time, so if I don't say much over the next few days, that would be why.

In the meantime, here's an interesting profile of arguably the most influential and least understood man of the last twenty years: Alan Greenspan. The most fascinating part, I thought, was Greenspan's private comment in 1999 that "We really do not know how this system works ... It's clearly new. The old models just are not working."

What's so intriguing to me about that comment is not so much his professed uncertainty, but the fact that he professed it privately. That he deliberately refrained from airing publicly his personal doubts underscores one of the more interesting paradoxes of a modern economy: the fact that it demands both the appearance of centralized control, however limited, and an actual structure that is deeply decentralized and non-determinative. Why that should have to be the case, and the social and political consequences it causes, are subjects for another time. But interesting to ponder for now.

Robertson Apology

2005-08-25T09:44:00.000-04:00

Robertson Apology ... Robertson's apology yesterday for his now infamous remarks concerning Hugo Chavez brings to mind a post by J. David Velleman last June. Written when Karl Rove was being pressed for an apology, Velleman noted that "the difference between rejecting the content of a remark and condemning the act of making it is mirrored, on the speaker's side, by the difference between retracting the remark and apologizing for it."

To an extent that is a trite point to make, a matter of semantic relevance alone. Most people would probably view the retraction of a particular statement and an apology for it as more or less synonymous acts.

But the perceived synonymy also underscores the need to distinguish between the two actions. If you make an offensive comment and later have a change of heart, then you may apologize for the offense. But if you make an offensive comment and later regret only the fact that you spoke, then you should only retract the comment. The difference lies in regretting what you said versus having spoken at all.*

In Robertson's case, he should only have offered a retraction. Anyone who has seen the clip would likely concur that he appeared acutely convicted assassination was the way to go. However offensive -- and arguably insane -- that conviction may seem, he is entitled to it. If he now regrets having aired that conviction, he apologize neither for it nor for having aired it. Rather, he should demonstrate some biblical "courage of conviction" and retract the comment alone.

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*Because Velleman argues from the negative, this is slightly different from what he is saying. Since I don't have the time to elucidate the point further, all I can say is just trust me that our arguments ultimately are in fact the same.

Profiling and PR

2005-08-24T15:34:00.000-04:00

Profiling and public relations ... Tucked away at the bottom left of the Times frontpage today is a story which lacks the scope of the other lead stories, but is, in a sense, more telling than any of them.

The story concerns a Justice Department official, Lawrence Greenfield, who was picked in 2001 to head Justice's independent research branch, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), but was recently asked "to move on." Although Greenfield has been with the BJS for 23 years, in his new post he apparently ran afoul of his political supervisors:

The flashpoint in the tensions between Mr. Greenfeld and his political supervisors came four months ago, when statisticians at the agency were preparing to announce the results of a major study on traffic stops and racial profiling, which found disparities in how racial groups were treated once they were stopped by the police.

Political supervisors within the Office of Justice Programs ordered Mr. Greenfeld to delete certain references to the disparities from a news release that was drafted to announce the findings, according to more than a half-dozen Justice Department officials with knowledge of the situation. The officials, most of whom said they were supporters of Mr. Greenfeld, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters.

Mr. Greenfeld refused to delete the racial references, arguing to his supervisors that the omissions would make the public announcement incomplete and misleading. Instead, the Justice Department opted not to issue a news release on the findings and posted the report online.

Some statisticians said that decision all but assured the report would get lost amid the avalanche of studies issued by the government. A computer search of news articles found no mentions of the study.

Aside from the obvious perils of racial profiling, there are three things worth highlighting here. First, the Justice Department's behaviour in this instance is consistent with the Bush administration's general pattern of prioritizing political expedience over the nonpartisan integrity of an internal, independent branch. Second, given the current controversy over confidential sources, this would seem to be the perfect example of why and how they should be used. The anonymous sources cited in the article were all necessary to the story, had no obvious ancillary motives for speaking out, and, finally, clearly could not have spoken on the record without fear of severe professional recrimination.

Third though, and to my mind most important, is the way the story illustrates the central role that public relations has come to play in our press. Note that the alleged misconduct here was not that the BJS had to shelve its report; the misconduct only arose insofar as its release was not overtly publicized.

The nature of that offense speaks volumes, however implicitly, about the current state of our media coverage. As the article notes, the report was on-line and available to all, but not one newspaper ran a story on it. Now, I realize that the federal government, despite its current penchant for secrecy, still produces so much information that sifting through it is a Herculean task. But sifting through the titles of those reports is not -- and nor is following up on reports that appear as if they might be revealing at the time they are commissioned.

In this instance, for example, all a reporter would have had to do was visit the BJS homepage and click on "what's new" rather than on "press releases". In April 2005, that reporter would have seen that three reports had been released, on Prison and Jail Inmates, on Jails in Indian County, and on Contacts between the Police and Public. Yet only one report -- on prison and jail inmates -- warranted a press release. Now, if that reporter was a good journalist, wouldn't his or her instincts have been to immediately check out the other two reports? And more, if that reporter were working a paper's judicial or criminal beat, wouldn't he or she always be checking, if only once a month, the handful of reports that are released against the one or two that are publicized?

All I can think of for why reporters don't do this is that perhaps they've become accustomed to relying upon press releases. Not for specific cases or crimes themselves, of course, but for more general reporting. Even though I'm not a reporter, I certainly get enough press releases now that I can see how you could eventually just rely on them to fill in the holes.

But here's the thing: I've deliberately never run one. If someone has to publicize a report or product, then they either don't trust that it would stand on its own or they've got an attendant interest which they presume you share. Either way -- and especially if you're trying to develop a professional reputation for journalistic integrity -- that's not enough to stand on.

Army Recruitment

2005-08-22T21:32:00.000-04:00

Paging the US Surgeon General ... Bob Herbert, an Army veteran, has this to say about current Army recruitment policy:

The Army actually has an online video game that it likes to brag is one of the "top five" on the Web. Geared to children as young as 13, it has more than five million registered players.

But war is not a game. Getting your face blown off is not fun. The fundamental task of the military is to fight and kill the enemies of the United States, and fighting and killing is a grotesquely brutal experience. Potential recruits should be told the truth about what is expected of them, and what the risks are.

I can see it now. Stamped in a small white box on the cover of each Army brochure:

WARNING: WAR CAN KILL YOU.

I say that in jest, of course ... but only just.

Bankruptcy Law

2005-08-21T13:46:00.000-04:00

Bankruptcy law ... This past spring, a congressional debate over federal bankrutpcy laws prompted a fair amount of commentary throughout the blogosphere -- most notably by Elizabeth Warren at TPM's old bankruptcy blog (now the Warren Report at tpmcafe).

At the time I stayed away from the debate, partly because I was still in Europe, but even more because I didn't feel like I knew enough about the minutiae of bankruptcy law to say anything insightful.

Frankly, I still don't. But today's lead story in the Times is about the practical effects of the bankruptcy law that was passed, and about that more experiential question I do have something to say. My family filed for bankruptcy when I was in high school. I know firsthand the frustration and shame it brings: to be bankrupt is to have been either profligate or unsuccessful, and in a society as heavily commercial as ours, either is considered a grave transgression.

Yet such stigmatization ignores, on the one hand, the necessity of risk within capitalism, and, on the other, the increasing role that credit has come to play in our health care system. Again, I'm not qualified to talk about the former, but I can speak on the latter. After several years of paying down either medical or credit card bills (but never both), we finally had no choice. Bankruptcy was the only way out.

It's no surprise to me that several of the families profiled in the Times article went through similar ordeals -- neither profligate nor unsuccessful, just unlucky. They used credit cards to get by during a medical crisis, and ultimately they were burned for it.

By making bankruptcy law even tougher to secure, Congress has both further privatized risk and made bankruptcy in general even more of a forbidden sin than it was; all I can hope is that the media will continue to report on the effects of the new bankruptcy laws, and that Congress will eventually be "shamed" into revoking the revisions they've made.

But, sadly, somehow I doubt that that will happen.

Update: One more point. Credit companies love consumers with poor credit reports because they can charge them higher interest rates and thus generate greater profits. The reason they are able to charge higher rates is that the consumer's poor credit indicates to the company that there is a greater risk of the consumer defaulting on the loan. Yet Congress' revision essentially allows companies to have their cake and eat it too: they can charge the same high rates even though they've now been shielded from more of the risk. Good news if you work for a credit card company, bad news if you're a middle or lower class family whose insurance won't cover the full costs of an unexpected medical or financial crisis.

Iraq and Yugoslavia

2005-08-18T23:17:00.000-04:00

Iraq and Yugoslavia ... Normally I write for the Huffington Post only if I've already posted a thought here that day. Today though I got to thinking about Iraq, and since Cindy Sheehan and other members of "Camp Casey" have been posting there, I felt that that site would be a more appropriate space.

Please read the piece if you get the chance -- not because I wrote it, but because I think it asks an unusually relevant question about what America's role in Iraq has now become.

Engaging Iran

2005-08-17T23:30:00.000-04:00

Engaging Iran ... Seymour Hersh is the New Yorker writer who broke the Abu Ghraib story. Last night Hersh went on the Daily Show and said he'd heard, among other things, that Iran was talking with Venezuela about causing an oil shock in order to pressure the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq.

That seems like a bit of a stretch to me -- or better, exactly the kind of ploy Iran wants to have floated around so it can use the mere threat of a shock to gain political leverage.

But however implausible that scenario is, the fact that a credible reporter can publicly air it speaks volumes about the leverage Iran already has. Whatever Iran wants to do domestically, we are utterly powerless to stop: our military is tied up elsewhere, and after twenty-five years of sanctions, Iran's economy is now impervious to them. The only avenue left -- to sanction individual companies that finance Iranian programs we don't like -- is also purposeless, because those "individual companies" are all Russian banks.

So Iran's domestic sovereignty is pretty much absolute. Which means it will get its nuclear weapons sometime soon, and, in turn, means its foreign policy will become increasingly powerful too. Compound this with a Shiite Iraq, and Iran suddenly emerges as the dominant force in the region.

The question is what the U.S. should be doing about it. And far from continuing our futile attempt at isolating the country, we should be engaging it. Reduce sanctions, generate foreign investment, and do what we can to foster an Iranian business community that is strong enough and influential enough to check the use of nuclear weapons once they develop them.

As Hersh is all too aware, a nuclear Iran and a regionally polar Iran are now givens. We need to have policies in place which recognize its growing stature and seek to influence its authority rather than isolate it.

Assimilating Islam

2005-08-16T16:05:00.000-04:00

Assimilating Islam ... At some point this summer I'd planned on writing a longer piece on why Europe, with all its professed liberalism, is nonetheless having so much trouble integrating its Muslim populations. I never quite got around to it, if for no other reason that on any given day another issue seemed more pressing.

Now it turns out I won't have to write it all: David Rieff has already done so.

Rieff slightly understates, I think, the reality that Europe never quite defined its national identities according to political ideals rather than ethnic heritage. But otherwise he articules just about every point I have to make on the subject.

Letters

2005-08-15T21:26:00.000-04:00

Letter to the editor ... After reading through this week's New York Times Book Review, I finally whipped out a letter to its editor, Sam Tanenhaus.

I've published the letter immediately below. If you agree with what I have to say, please use the "email to" link beneath the post at the bottom right. You can send it to books@nytimes.com.