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.

Reviewing the Past

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

Dear Mr. Tanenhaus,

By critiquing only the latest books, the New York Times Book Review has helped ensure that our literary culture remains fresh and original -- and no less importantly, that our publishing industry remains profitable.

That said, however, I would encourage you to revisit the Review's central assumptions: first, that your readers are primarily interested in the newest releases; and second, that when they are not, the reader may refer to your review of a book at the time of its publication.

Although the first assumption still holds, your past success has concealed just how problematic the second is. And the trouble is this. Whereas any honest critic will admit that reviews are at least somewhat informed by context, the fact that you rely upon coetaneous reviews implies that you regard criticism as somehow a-historical -- ie, that you view assessments of a work's value as somehow divorced from their own literary moment. (Further, the very quality of your reviews actually works against you here. Because your critics are so attuned to contextual nuance -- and the reviews themselves so awash with cultural reference -- it's all but impossible not to regard your reviews as being historically contingent as well.)

Again, your success to date has obscured the significance of this problem. In the past readers who sought contemporary reviews of older works had no real options to turn to. But with the proliferation of web reviews and literary blogs, that is no longer the case. Should you fail to meet this demand, others will.

So my suggestion is this: set aside one review a week for a top scholar or writer, and then turn them loose. Let him or her review whichever book they please, regardless of publication date.

This way, whenever major news occurs, the Book Review would always be able to remain relevant. For instance, should Iran's mullahs finally fall, you could solicit a political theorist such as Michael Ignatieff, and then grant him or her the freedom to review, say, On Revolution by Hannah Arendt. Alternately, you could reverse the process: after the next tsunami, you could decide upon a review of Murakami's After the Quake, and then set about soliciting a critic to provide it.

This wouldn't be a perfect solution, but it would at least be a start. Your primary focus would still be the latest releases, and rightly so. Yet by providing your readers a backward glance, you'd be able to acknowledge the modest transience of all your reviews even as you also accentuate their urgency.

Thank you, and sincerely,

Chris Meserole

The Inevitable Condi

2005-08-12T18:18:00.000-04:00

The inevitable ascent of Condoleeza Rice ... Time magazine has an article on Condoleeza Rice this week.

As I read it I was continually surprised by how moderate she seemed to be. Then the reporter stepped aside and concluded the piece with a long quote:

"I've lived in a place where difference was not tolerated and difference was a license to kill," she [Condi] says. "I lived in a place that was not living up to the democratic principles of the United States but where, because the institutions were what they were, people were able to petition from within those institutions, not without ... People kept struggling toward those institutions and values and principles and, over time, we've gotten closer to the ideal.

"And so when I see Iraqis struggling with really hard issues or Afghans struggling with really hard issues, I'm probably less willing to say, 'Oh, they can't do it.' I look at [our history], and I say what seemed impossible on one day now seems inevitable. Well, that's the way great historical changes are. And it's why I have enormous conviction that these people are going to make it."

I don't doubt the legitimacy of Condi's life experience, since I myself have lived a lesser version of the same dream. But where I look at my past and humbly ponder how easily it could have been different, she apparently views her own as somewhat inevitable.

When applied to history as a whole, I cannot emphasize enough how misguided I think her viewpoint is. Whether it be towards the perfect God or the supreme state or the ideal society, human history is littered with the purges and battles and wars of those who saw themselves as taking part in an inevitable progress. The fact that constitutional democracy is the most just political process we have evolved to date does not mean its development should be promoted with similar evangelical zeal.

Progressive v. Liberal

2005-08-11T11:12:00.000-04:00

Pragmatic and progressive liberalism ... This is apropos of no one instance in particular, but after viewing yet another "progressive" website yesterday I finally lost it. It's time for a little review.

"Progressive" is a political modifier which regards societal development as a linear matter and, clearly, advocates progressive rather regressive movement. Its focus on forward-thinking is very much a vestige of the Enlightment, which saw society as proceeding towards reason and away from ignorance.

"Liberal," by contrast, does not necessarily view development as linear, and owes not to the Enlightenment but to Roman antiquity. The world itself derives from the Latin adjective liberalis,-e, which describes someone or something which has the qualities of a free man.

In the 18th and 19th century, liberals were inherently progressive. They defined classical liberalism primarily as the public exercise of reason and sought to incorporate a similar rationality within their own political bodies. The belief then -- and particularly in the 19th century -- was that if only society could be organized rationally, human suffering would be kept to a minimum and human injustice would largely disappear.

Then came the trenches of WWI, the gas chambers of WWII, and the nuclear armament of the Cold War. Suddenly a huge rift appeared: there were those who viewed those events as further evidence of human ignorance and saw reason as an even more necessary solution; and there were those who lost faith in reason as a social panacea and grounded liberal beliefs in pragmatism rather than political philosophy.

Which brings us to today. About five years ago there was a lexical shift in the American left. More and more people began to use the word progressive rather than liberal. The idea behind this was that "progressive" was fresher and more inclusive than "liberal", which in the 1990s had become something of a bad word, a cultural stand in for personal decadence and moral decay.

Yet the trouble is this: as we've just seen, progressive is not synonymous with liberal. At most the two relate synecdochally, since progressivism is a kind liberalism often taken for the class as a whole. But it ought not be mistaken for liberalism itself. There are many liberals, myself included, who cannot be identified as progressives -- I do not believe there is a more "progressive" state to which we should aspire, and in fact think that if anything history has taught us the danger of such aspirations. The world's problems need to be managed rather than solved, and adopting the liberal model of freedom has been shown, thus far, to offer the best example for peaceful management.

So please people. Stop saying progressive when what you really mean is liberal. And if you do use it, please take care to qualify that you are using it as against more pragmatic folk like myself. Thank you!

Hugo's Guns

2005-08-10T14:07:00.000-04:00

We don't like you much, Mr. Chavez, but here are your guns ... Hard to know what the State Department was figuring on this one:

CARACAS, VENEZUELA – While the Bush administration engages in a war of words with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, the US government has been giving permits to American arms dealers to sell weapons, tear gas, and other riot-control equipment to Venezuela.

At the same time, the US Congress has indirectly funded anti-Chávez pro-democracy groups.

"It's a bizarre working at cross- purposes," says Adam Isacson, who follows Venezuela for the left-leaning Center for International Policy in Washington. "You have bad relations with this government, and you're selling them the means to put down opposition protests."

Defense and Commerce department records show that in 2002, Washington issued licenses to export to Venezuela more than 7,000 pistols and rifles and 22 million rounds of ammunition, as well as riot-control equipment and interrogator sets. In 2003, it issued licenses for $43 million in military equipment sales, including a million cartridges, 1,000 pistols, and ammunition. Last year it issued $24.6 million in licenses, including $425,000 in tear gas. This year, the US has approved export licenses for police gear, restraint devices such as leg irons, stun gun-type arms and chemical agents.

To be sure, the U.S. has a rather sordid history of selling weaponry to states we disagree with politically. But most of that history occurred during the Cold War, when arms lobbyists could still use "the lesser evil" defense, according to which the U.S. needed to supply arms because if we didn't the Soviet Union would.

What's surprising about the Venezuela sales is not that that logic still holds but the specific form that the sales took. Aside from covert sales, arms transfers to foreign countries occur either as foreign military sales (FMS), in which case they're conducted by the Pentagon, or as direct commercial sales (DCS), in which case they're vetted by the State Department. The sales to Venezuela were DCS. Thus, the State Department -- and not the Pentagon -- had to grant the manufacturers involved specific export licenses for the sales to go through.

Given how anti-Chavez State Department has been, the riot-gear sales in particular are a marked departure from their official line. The only way I can read this is as a resounding testament to the strength of the arms lobby: they've long since held the Pentagon in the bag, but now it seems they can get State to cave as well, even on one of their staunchest positions.

Brokaw & the News

2005-08-09T12:23:00.000-04:00

The future of network news ... On Larry King's tribute to Peter Jennings last night, towards the end there was an interesting exchange with Tom Brokaw:

CALLER: Hi, Larry. I just want to say first of all, that I loved Peter. I grew up getting all sorts of events from him and my question for the panel is: What do you think the future holds for the three networks in terms of their nightly newscasts?

KING: ... Tom Brokaw, future of network news?

BROKAW: Well, I -- Dan and I talked about this a lot. I have strong feelings. I have not been able to persuade my network masters that this is the way to go, but with all this emphasis on reality shows, there is no greater reality than the daily news and the stories that we can develop. I'd expand it, move it later into prime-time, and I would marry it to the Internet. I think that we are treating these two medium -- two media as separate entities, and what we really ought to do is connect them, so that we can see more of the Internet and have more connectivity, if you will, between over-the-air television and the fascinating new, almost infinite universe of the Internet. But I'm not holding my breath.

I find this really surprising. My impression had always been that the corporate heads were the ones pushing for greater on-line integration, while the "old school" reporters were the ones holding things up. And I thought this must have been especially true at NBC, which -- unlike ABC or CBS -- already has a natural portal to use. The fact that the resistance is coming, apparently, from the execs who oversee both entities makes little sense to me.

All I can think of is that the execs don't want to risk alienating an older, televised audience by introducing more web stuff -- or turning off a younger, on-line audience with news designed for a more senescent crowd. But for any number of reasons that doesn't hold water either. I'm baffled.

Objectification, Take 2

2005-08-08T22:38:00.000-04:00

Internalizing Objectification, Take 2 ... Not surprisingly, my "one part culture, two parts wiring" theory for why women objectify themselves didn't play too well.

Since I'd discussed women's mags in particular, the most relevant response was probably this:

I think it is more about cultural programming than biological programming, especially given a recent experience I had.

I was meeting a friend and was reading a personal finance magazine on the train. I meant to tuck the magazine into my bag before I arrived, knowing that it wouldn't be culturally acceptable (for a number of reasons, one of which is linked to being female) for me to be seen by my friends with such a magazine. Of course, I forgot. And within five minutes of arriving, one of the guys made what I interpreted to be -- although maybe I just read it as such because I was nervous about being "caught" with the magazine -- a snide comment about my reading choice.

I doubt he would of made such a comment if I had been reading a fashion magazine or something of the like. No?

Enough of you have had experiences like this to be thoroughly convincing. The women's mag phenomenon -- and more specifically, the process by which women objectify themselves -- would indeed seem to be more a matter of nurture than of nature.

Of course, that still leaves us with the following question: we know that objectification owes more to society than biology, but where exactly is the line at which they intersect? For it's not until we can answer this, after all, that we'll know where to begin trying to effect genuine change.

And the answer begins, I think, with the commonplace assertion that our society is heavily commercialized. Capitalism is so thoroughly ingrained in our lives that pretty much any point of social contact -- from boardroom meetings to a night at the movies -- occurs in the shadow of a sale. Further, since sales are driven by advertising, this means we're left with a world in which ads are nearly as ubiquitous as cash itself.

Therein is where nurture meets nature. Since advertising must appeal to human psychology, and since human psychology is dominated by sexual impulses, ads that appeal to our sexuality end up dominating the advertising industry overall. Even worse, this logic only serves to set in motion yet another logical sequence: since men have more disposable income then women, and since visual images most easily stimulate male sexuality, the specific form ads acquire tend to include the image of a beautiful woman.

Thus does the pop culture, mass-market objectification of women begin. To maximize sales, advertisers rationally plaster "dead space" with pictures of women with the same three features: high cheekbones, a symmetrical face, a waist-to-hip ratio of .7.

Unfortunately, these ads are as unavoidable for women as they are for men. And the more of these ads that women see, the more likely it is that they will unconsciously define female beauty accordingly. As a result, when many women respond to sexual impulses of their own, they revert to the ads as the standard for how they should appear -- thus internalizing female objectification. Further, once these images have repeated themselves often enough to inform gender roles too, many women also begin to actively reinforce that image or role by, for instance, buying your typical women's magazine.

Now, for many of you I imagine all this will likely strike you as clumsy or crude or grossly oversimplified. But I really do think that all that is the gist.*

And yet ... I really don't find that answer particularly satisfying. For if women do internalize objectification primarily because of the prevalence of advertising, then how do you change that? Male biology is about as genetically immutable as it gets. So is, economically speaking, the role of advertising.

How in the world, then, do you effect change?

__
*Please note that the scope here was limited to objectification only, not to the origins and processes of cultural sexism itself. That is a much broader question and would have to account for, among other things, just why men have more disposable income in the first place.

The Anti-Friedman

2005-08-07T17:30:00.000-04:00

Why the regnum dei won't happen ... In the latest New York Review of Books, Thomas Gray takes Tom Friedman to task for his "World is Flat" meme. Gray is very much an intellectual heir of Isaiah Berlin, so his rebuke is hardly surprising. But what is unexpected is that in the process of reproving Friedman, Gray ends up writing one of the best essays on the meaning of globalization --particularly how it is neither a utopian nor distopian process -- that I've ever come across.

Definitely check it out if you get a chance.

Long Weekends

2005-08-05T15:43:00.000-04:00

Long weekends ... I've been mulling ten or so full-length essays for a couple months now. However, no matter how many times I say I'm going to let this site linger for a few days in order to write them, I'm never able to let it go. I simply enjoy writing here -- and interacting with you all -- way too much.

That said, I've got grad apps and a job change coming up, so if I don't put those ideas down now I won't have the chance to until next year.

As a result I'll be taking Fri-Sun off for at least the next month or so. I may check in on the weekends with a quick reference or brief point, but hopefully nothing too time-consuming.

In the meantime, be sure to check out this "opera". For those of you who were as fond of their Nintendos as I was, I guarantee you'll enjoy it.

(Hat tip: Lauren and Elayne.)

Iraqi PsyOps

2005-08-04T16:49:00.000-04:00

Where things began to go wrong ... When I was digging through my hard drive just now -- I was trying to find a DoD document on Iraq from two years ago -- I came across an image I'd saved then as well. At the time I hadn't yet begun blogging, but I downloaded it in order to send it out to a few friends.

The image is from a DoD briefing in March or early April 2003, and portrays a leaflet that we dropped over Iraq in advance of our ground assault:

Is there any more telling example of how we lost the proverbial "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people? Never mind the text, which is not exactly what the eye is instinctively drawn too. Just focus on the image alone: at best the narrative it tells is ambiguous about whether American soldiers are the ones who have scorched the earth; at worst it implicates ourselves as the agents of carnage.

I don't know who heads the "PsyOps" program that came up with this image, but he or she clearly doesn't know the first thing about marketing. Long before the hooded inmate of Abu Graib, we deliberately gave Iraqis a thoroughly revolting image by which to viscerally fear us.

Update: My browser didn't load the image very well -- it's difficult to distinguish between the objects at the bottom right. But if you enlarge it on your own, you should see that the far right object is a slab of concrete, and the object just to its left, sadly, a dead infant.

Bad News

2005-08-03T11:47:00.000-04:00

When bad news is good news ... If prolificacy is a sin, Richard Posner is surely one of the more venial writers around. As a federal judge, a law professor, a voluminous author, and more recently, even a blogger, he has a clear tendency to spread himself thin; yet what he lacks in research and topical expertise, he typically makes up for with intuitive analysis.

Posner's recent 4,600-word essay on the present state of our media is a perfect case in point. As Jack Shafer lays out at Slate (warning: he does so in meticulous -- one might even say vindictive -- detail), Posner's essay suffers from a credibility gap of sorts when it comes to specifics. But the general thrust is both well-reasoned and convincing. Take the coda alone:

Thus the increase in competition in the news market that has been brought about by lower costs of communication (in the broadest sense) has resulted in more variety, more polarization, more sensationalism, more healthy skepticism and, in sum, a better matching of supply to demand. But increased competition has not produced a public more oriented toward public issues, more motivated and competent to engage in genuine self-government, because these are not the goods that most people are seeking from the news media. They are seeking entertainment, confirmation, reinforcement, emotional satisfaction; and what consumers want, a competitive market supplies, no more, no less. Journalists express dismay that bottom-line pressures are reducing the quality of news coverage. What this actually means is that when competition is intense, providers of a service are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer should want, or more bluntly, what they want.

Yet what of the sliver of the public that does have a serious interest in policy issues? Are these people less well served than in the old days? Another recent survey by the Pew Research Center finds that serious magazines have held their own and that serious broadcast outlets, including that bane of the right, National Public Radio, are attracting ever larger audiences. And for that sliver of a sliver that invites challenges to its biases by reading The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, that watches CNN and Fox, that reads Brent Bozell and Eric Alterman and everything in between, the increased polarization of the media provides a richer fare than ever before.

So when all the pluses and minuses of the impact of technological and economic change on the news media are toted up and compared, maybe there isn't much to fret about.

That sounds about right. Different people want -- and will pay for -- different slants on the news; the more accessible the news market becomes, the more news companies will, in order to meet a particular demand, identify themselves with a particular viewpoint; the more this happens, the more efficiently the news market as a whole behaves; the more efficiently it behaves, the less reasonable it is to bemoan the industry as being in "decline".

Or in my own, less systemic terms: I may not like Fox News, but believing in a truly free press means believing the connection that Fox has forged with its audience is in fact a healthy thing.

Bolton Appointment

2005-08-02T12:24:00.000-04:00

Bolton appointed ... So yesterday President Bush bypassed the Senate and unilaterally made John Bolton our "temporary" ambassador to the United Nations. Ed Kilgore has a nice post on why Bush should have done this only if Bolton is indispensible to that position -- and why, given Bolton's past professional performance, there's really no way that Bush can claim this is so.

I'm not going to be as kind as Kiglore and grant Bolton the courtesy of a professional review alone. Any serious evaluation of Bolton's qualifications must also incorporate whatever public statements Bolton has made regarding the U.N. as an institution.

And Bolton is on the record as saying the following:

There is no such thing as the United Nations. There is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States. ...

The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.

When I first came across these remarks last March, I assumed Bolton made them flippantly, as a kind of glib aside to a larger point. But if you watch the video of the remarks, what becomes so troubling is how deeply convicted he appears to be. This is not a man tossing off a quick headline to a reporter; this is a guy in the middle of a conference making the very deliberate point that the United Nations should not exist.

My deepest fear about Bolton is that Bush considers him indispensible precisely because of how fervently he rejects the U.N. mission. Clearly, no one should have pretensions about the U.N. functioning as a supra-national state, and further, no one should deny that, as corrupt and inefficient as the U.N. is, it is in desparate need of reform. But just as clearly, a limited form of international governance is indeed necessary: the world needs its peacekeepers, its relief workers, its diplomatic channels. There's simply no other global body with the resources, infrastructure, and, yes, legitimacy needed to provide those goods.

So if Bolton has been appointed to undercut even the U.N.'s minimal services -- and if he were, however implausibly, to succeed -- it would be difficult to exaggerate the damage he would do to the international community at-large. Perhaps he believes America alone could fill the vacuum it would leave, or that regional organizations would arise to take its place. But I doubt it. My guess is that he simply doesn't care what would happen -- his sole concern being the national interest of the United States, where "national interest" is defined as narrowly as possible.

Needless to say, such a mindset is a profound shame. Leaving aside the tenuous morality of such a position, on a pragmatic level alone it simply doesn't work. The U.N. was founded because the theory that a stable global order could arise out of competing national interests had, in the wake of two world wars, demonstrably failed. So at a moment of resurgent nationalism such as this -- where Japan, China, Iran, Russia, etc are all focusing intensely on their own cultures and interests -- it's hard for me to think of a more reckless position for both Bolton and Bush to hold.

Modern Marketing

2005-08-01T15:07:00.000-04:00

Modern day marketing ... One blogger I try to read occasionally is Tim Rickards. Tim doesn't post frequently, but when he does he typically offers worthwhile insights into the marketing world.

And since one of the things that intrigues me about modern business is the present role of marketing -- as opposed to advertising, which I see as less about connecting consumer and producer and more about creating demand -- I went ahead and asked Tim about it in an email.

Last week Tim responded at length. Initially I'd planned on excerpting a few passages here, but the truth is you should read the whole thing. Anyone interested in the subject would do well to check it out.

Uzbekistan Base

2005-07-31T11:59:00.000-04:00

More on Central Asia ... Earlier this month, I posted a speculative piece about how the U.S. would respond to the calls by a central Asian bloc -- specifically, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose membership also includes Russia and China -- that the Pentagon set a definite timetable for American withdrawal from air bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

So when Rumsfeld visited the base in Kyrgyzstan last week -- and essentially made an all-out effort to secure its use indefinitely -- I started to write a follow-up piece. But I scrapped it. Try as I might, I couldn't really figure out what was going on -- a personal visit by the Secretary of Defense seemed like a bit of an overreaction for a base that, on its own, is not vital.

Today, however, Rumsfeld's trip makes a lot more sense. Late Friday night, the U.S. covertly airlifted about 450 Uzbeki refugees, who had fled Uzbekistan following the Andijon massacre in May, to Romania. When Uzbekistan found out about the airlift yesterday, they were, predictably, displeased -- so much so that they evicted the U.S. from its base.

This sequence of events doesn't just suggest that Rumsfeld was aware of both the impending airlift and what the Uzbeki response would be. It suggests that the airlift wouldn't have happened had we not secured use of the Kyrgyz base first, and thereby made the base in Uzbekistan expendable.

Now, I don't know whether Rumsfeld was acting on his own here or in accordance with a Bush -- or perhaps Rice? -- mandate. But whoever is responsible for the airlift ought to get due credit. This is one of the few times during Bush's presidency that his administration has compromised a strategic military asset for explicitly humanitarian reasons. For that they should receive appropriate recognition, if not outright praise.

Hollywood, D.C.

2005-07-30T19:25:00.000-04:00

Politics and entertainment ... I'm not sure how to link to this, but one of the main advertisers for TPMCafe right now is Variety.com, the website for Hollywood's most influential trade newspaper.

All pros and cons aside, the fact that Variety now views an expressly political audience as a potential market surely says as much about the present correspondence between political marketing and celebrity management as any Frank Rich column ever could.

Executing Minors

2005-07-29T19:32:00.000-04:00

Executing Minors ... As yesterday's post should make clear, I'm generally too suspicious of absolute convictions to adopt beliefs which are at all immoderate or extremist.

When it comes to capital punishment, however, that truism no longer holds. I do not understand, in any way, how a society that expressly grants its citizens individual rights (all in the name of governmental fallibility, mind you) could nonetheless reserve for the government the right to terminate its citizens' lives.

So when it comes to capital punishment as applied to minors, let's just say there isn't a single issue less amenable to my own temperament or point of view.

Which brings me, however belatedly, to today's Times article on HRW's denouncement of two recent executions in Iran:

TEHRAN, July 28 - Human rights advocates have condemned the execution last week of two young men convicted of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy, calling it a violation of international law.

Mahmoud Asgari, left, and Ayaz Marhoni were prepared for execution on July 19 in Mashad after being convicted of sexually assaulting a boy.

The ages of the two men were not announced by Iranian officials at the time of the execution, which took place on July 19 in Mashad in northeast Iran. But Human Rights Watch said they were 18 and 19, and the younger man was a juvenile when the assault took place.

"Death is an inhumane punishment, particularly for someone under 18 at the time of his crimes," Hadi Ghaemi, an Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement issued Wednesday. "All but a handful of countries forbid such executions. Iran should as well."

What's missing here is the context. Typically the Times will, in reporting on a declaration by one particular organization, provide a history of past instances in which the organization has made similar declarations. But here they refrain -- ie, there's no mention of the fact that HRW has also denounced the U.S. for being among the "handful of countries" in question.

I'm aware that this is something of a trivial point to be making, especially in comparison to the awfulness of the executions themselves. And I can also appreciate that the Times adjusted its editorial process in order to abstain from moral equivocation. But it still troubles me that the periphery of this story is deliberately missing.

If you need a reminder of why it shouldn't be, just look at the picture above. Does the nationality of the two children at all change the morality of what is about to happen?

Berlin's Liberalism

2005-07-28T22:43:00.000-04:00

Ich bin einer Berliner ... In preparation for a piece I'll be putting up on the Huffington Post soon, I've been re-reading some Isaiah Berlin. In the process, I came across a passage that articulates well the sum of my own political thought:

...Sometimes a demand turns into its opposite: claims to participatory democracy turn into oppression of minorities, measures to establish social equality crush self-determination and stifle individual genius. Side by with these collisions of values there persists an age-old dream: there is, there must be -- and it can be found -- the final solution to all human ills; it can be achieved; by revolution or peaceful means it will surely come; and then all, or the vast majority, of men will be virtuous and happy, wise and good and free; if such a position can be attained, and once attained will last forever, what sane man could wish to return to the miseries of men's wanderings in the desert? If this is possible, then surely no price is too heavy to pay for it; no amount of oppression, cruelty, repression, coercion will be too high, if this, and this alone, is the price for ultimate salvation of all men? This conviction gives a wide license to inflict suffering on other men, provided it is done for pure, disinterested motives. But if one believes this doctrine to be an illusion, if only because some ultimate values may be incompatible with one another, and the very notion of an ideal world in which they are reconciled to be a conceptual (and not merely practical) impossibility, then, perhaps, the best that one can do is to try to promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different aspirations of differing groups of human beings -- at the very least to prevent them from attempting to exterminate each other, and, so far as possible, to prevent them from hurting each other -- and to promote the maximum practicable degree of sympathy and understanding, never likely to be complete, between them. But this is not, prima facie, a wildly exciting programme: a liberal sermon which recommends machinery designed to prevent people from doing each other too much harm, giving each human group sufficient room to realise its own idiosyncratic, unique, particular ends without too much interference with the ends of others, is not a passionate battle-cry to inspire men to sacrifice and martyrdom and heroic feats. Yet if it were adopted, it might yet prevent mutual destruction, and, in the end, preserve the world. Immanuel Kant, a man very remote from irrationalism, once observed that 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.' And for that reason no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs, and any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment and failure.

Now, there's a ton I have to say about this passage -- and hopefully at some point soon I'll be able to air most of those thoughts.

But for the moment my main question is this: is the position that Berlin espouses here necessarily an a posteriori one? -- ie, can you rely upon rational discourse alone to arrive at the conclusions he draws, or do you first have to experience, directly or indirectly, the catastrophic suffering to which 'final solutions' inevitably lead?

Berlin struggles to assert that we can reason our way to his conclusions, but frankly, in this one regard I don't find him convincing. For instance, I have a hard time believing Berlin himself could have written that passage had he not witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution as a child or, in his early 30s, lived through the second World War. Even more, I know I would not agree with his position had I not lived in South Africa for a year soon after apartheid, or even in Austria -- with its dim, if resonant, echo of the Holocaust -- this past year.

Meanwhile, the reason I place so much emphasis on the question of historical experience has to do with the nature of American politics. In a country like ours, where our wars are typically fought abroad and the most afflictive consequences of our policies are rarely felt by Americans themselves, do Berlin's conclusions ever stand a chance of significantly informing American political life?

Terrorist Responses

2005-07-27T16:42:00.000-04:00

Responses to terrorism ... After the second wave of bombings in London, a friend of mine there asked how I thought we should be responding to terrorism.

It's taken a few days, but here are my thoughts so far. (The first two are fairly obvious, the latter two perhaps less so.)

1. Distinguish between arbitrary and deliberate targets. The World Trade Center or Pentagon are deliberate targets. The #30 bus is not. Nor is anything in Cody, Wyoming. As a result, fortify strategic locations, but don't waste resources on buses, trains, or minor urban areas. The local county sheriff does not need any cool new toys to defend himself against Osama bin Laden.

2. Distinguish between arbitrary and deliberate means. Knapsacks and briefcases are an arbitrary means. Planes are deliberate. Consequently, pass legislation to make it harder for terrorists to gain control of an aircraft, but do not mandate random searches of backpacks. The latter will no doubt lead the police to more dime bags and illicit ritalin, but it will not produce any explosives.

3. Recognize and address our (neuro-)psychology, not theirs. Here's what happens when you open your eyes: First, the visual data of everything you see is scanned through any number of visual centers in your brain. Second, once one of those visual centers recognizes a specific shape, pattern, or image, that image then gets scanned through an emotional center, which matches it with the appropriate instinctive response. (This is why children smile upon seeing their mother, but flinch upon seeing a snake.) Third, if the emotive response is strong enough (but not so strong it dominates our response) we deliberate the image consciously. So the trouble with terrorism is the way it cuts straight to the second step of that process. When the only images of Muslim men that we see are violent ones, we become wired to treat Muslim men either defensively or aggressively. Since this is not a deliberative response, it's incredibly difficult to address. But it's not impossible: the more Muslims we encounter peacefully, both in person or on television, the weaker that instinctive response of fear will become.

4. Have perspective. As counter-intuitive as this may seem, terrorism is not an issue of state security or ideology. Muslim terrorists in particular are not trying to win territorial sovereignty over the states they attack. Nor are they trying to persuade them to adopt their own model of social organization. What they are trying to do is influence the foreign policy of those states. Consequently, terrorism as a threat differs greatly from our past struggles against fascism and communism, each of which sought to extend its sovereignty and its ideology over foreign countries. However we respond to terrorism, we should always bear in mind, then, that this is a fight over the margins of our civilization rather than its core.

Medicinal Chocolate

2005-07-26T11:19:00.000-04:00

Big Pharma and the Chocolate Factory ... For twenty years now, my family has doubted me, my friends have doubted me, the whole world has conspired against me. 'Chris,' they would say, 'you're crazy. Your sweet tooth has gone to your brain. Chocolate may be tastey, but it's certainly not good for you!' 'Au contraire,' I would reply, and then, for utter lack of empirical evidence, mutter something unintelligible before popping back a few more M&Ms.

Now, however, I have, at long last, finally been vindicated:

Mars Inc. said yesterday it is holding "serious discussions with large pharmaceutical companies" about the development of a line of cocoa-based prescription drugs that could help treat diabetes, some forms of dementia and other ailments.

The McLean candy and food conglomerate for more than a decade has pursued research on the possible health benefits of cocoa flavanols, compounds contained in one of the basic ingredients of chocolate.

As about 20 Mars-funded researchers gathered in Lucerne, Switzerland, to discuss their latest findings, the company announced that it foresees a possible line of pharmaceuticals growing out of the work and that it was being pursued by drug companies interested in the medical applications of cocoa.

Many thanks to reader SM for the tip to this. I've long dreamed this day would come, but never thought it would actually happen.

Nuclear Targeting

2005-07-25T10:58:00.000-04:00

Paging Dr. Strangelove ... Over at Defense Tech, Jeffrey Lewis has a wonderfully digressive post that starts with Cheney's request that the Pentagon draw up plans to attack Iran and ends with a discussion of how "organizations abstract reality in order to manage it" -- in this case, the reality in question being the statistical failure rates of nuclear warheads.

The redundancy that those rates lead to is shocking. For instance, when General Lee Butler did a review of SIOP in the early 1990s, he found that "one [target] was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons." Why 69? Because for an underground bunker, a warhead has a kill probability of only 4%. Consequently, for the kill probability on the target itself to be 94%, you had to nuke it 69 times.

Hopefully whatever plans the Pentagon has drawn up for Iran will not incorporate that level of redundancy. But I doubt it: we may have more efficient weapons now for targeting bunkers, but there are also many more bunkers in Iran, some of which lie near densely populated areas like Tehran.

Suffice it to say, then, that if Iran really does sponsor a terrorist attack against us, and if we really do strike its bunkers in response with nuclear weapons, we will have forfeited whatever moral authority we had to the dry and altogether base precision of statistical certainty.

Women's Mags & Women's Lib

2005-07-24T22:00:00.000-04:00

Objectification internalized ... In general I'm very much a feminist. Women should be no less free to vote, work, marry, etc than men are. Further, these freedoms shouldn't be negative liberties: in areas where women continue to face cultural barriers, such as science or politics, we should be actively fostering their involvement. (Likewise, we should also be fostering male involvement in industries such as nursing and child care.)

That said, I still struggle with the notion that the "objectification" of women is somehow the result of a "dominant patriarchy." Men certainly indulge a few too many admiring glances, let alone lurid glares. But to an extraordinary degree women also objectivize themselves. As Mahalanobis notes, look at a rack of recent magazines, and you can no longer hold men alone accountable:

What I always find striking is that men's magazines tend to have covers with pictures of male athletes, or the new Dell servers, or beautiful women, while women's magazines tend to have covers with ... beautiful women. So I don't think it's a male conspiracy. Beauty and money are useful in obtaining the respect and admiration of others, especially the opposite sex (the latter more for men, the former more for women). We do not have as much control over these attributes as we would like, but that's life. I'm not sure the unfairness of life for plain looking women is any worse than for earnest young men who can't dance and drive used Ford Tauruses.

So why do women purchase magazines filled with beautiful women?

The academic answer is that the "patriarchy" has now become so dominant that women themselves have internalized its principle behavior. Perhaps that's true to an extent, but my guess is that the truer answer lies either in evolutionary biology or neuroscience. Call it the "one part culture, two parts wiring" theory: women see a beautiful woman and objectivize her for much the same reason regular guys see an alpha male and cower -- because they're programmed to.

Journalistic Transparency

2005-07-24T20:32:00.000-04:00

Reporters and politicos ... For those of you who look at the Rove leak and see only the latest sign of journalistic decay, click here to see why you're largely off on this one.

Journalism is much more transparent today than it used to be; that it appears less so is an ironic indication of just how far it has come.

John Roberts

2005-07-23T23:29:00.000-04:00

Supremely judicious ... I've been away all day at a conference held by Americans for Informed Democracy. Rather than assess the conference now, though, I feel like it might be wiser to let the memories settle and then offer some reflections in a day or two.

In the meantime, it just occurred to me that I haven't mentioned anything about the Roberts nomination.

Frankly, I don't have much to say except this: Roberts is probably the best political decision Bush has made all year. He hasn't publicly defended torture. He hasn't fulminated against the very existence of the U.N. He hasn't threatened Social Security or compromised the intelligence community. In fact, Roberts is -- much to the contrary -- about as squeaky clean as it gets.

So my hat's off to Bush on this one. He's found that rarest of commodities: a Washington insider with uncompromised integrity.

Senator Reid et al would be wise to continue hanging back.

Yuan Rising

2005-07-22T11:46:00.000-04:00

China unpegs the yuan ... The big economic news of the day: China, which has long pegged the yuan to the dollar, just floated the yuan against a range of currencies.

The yuan is still strictly controlled -- officials let it rise only 2% against the dollar -- but it's a significant move all the same. Among the possible repercussions:

• Long-term interest rates in the US could eventually rise since China is a major buyer of US Treasury securities. In the future, Beijing may not be buying as much US debt. This could increase the interest rates Americans pay for mortgages and slow down the US housing market.

• The US inflation rate might tick up if Chinese goods become more expensive. ...

• The rise in the value of the Chinese yuan as well as increases in other Asian currencies will give consumers in those countries more buying power. This could potentially mean more jobs for Americans if the US exports more goods.

I've gone into this quite extensively in the past, so I'll just reiterate my own take here: a rise in the yuan means the U.S. has to get serious about the fact that foreign credit has underwritten our current way of life.

Cheap mortgages and easy credit come with a cost. Unless we are honest with ourselves about the nature and consequences of that cost, foreign currency revaluations and fairer trade practices will never be enough.

The UnCapitalists

2005-07-21T19:39:00.000-04:00

The radical dream lives on ... Kevin Drum is taking a well-deserved break over at the Washington Monthly, but unfortunately he's left Lindsay Beyerstein in his place.

I say unfortunately because Beyerstein is the kind of radical academic that I don't have much patience for: brilliant but rarely practical, critical but never constructive.

To illustrate this, visit The unCapitalist Journal, a new site that Beyerstein spent a whole post shilling today. Beyerstein is a "team member" of the "uCJ", whose about page consists of the following:

About The UnCapitalist Journal

Cap•i•tal•ist 1. n. a supporter of capitalism || an investor of capital in business || a person of great wealth 2. adj. of or relating to capitalism || defending or engaging in capitalism

Un•Cap•i•tal•ist1. n. one who is suspicious of capitalism || one who critiques the excesses of capitalism and its forms of production || a person concerned about the subjugation of labor or other aspects of society by private capital or wealth 2. adj. of or relating to alternatives to unrestrained capitalism || critical or skeptical of capitalism

Now, I suppose I may be considered uncapitalist to the extent a) that I have my own reservations about unrestrained capitalism, and b) that I do not view capitalism as a utopic force.

But that is a far cry, I think, from what the uCJ folks are proposing. Although they take pains not to attack capitalism in general, that is exactly what they're doing: in arguing against both the organizational principles according to which capitalism operates and the understanding of human nature on which it rests, they are going after capitalism wholesale. And the trouble is, they have nothing to offer in its place: no effective social model of their own, no understanding of human nature that is reconciliable with reality.

Again, I have little to no patience for this kind of radical critique. For one, it provides ample fodder for radical conservative movements. For another, it implicates moderate liberals like myself as somehow ascribing to their viewpoint. Most of all, though, it neglects the fact that as imperfect as capitalism is, it is also -- after more than five millenia of human history -- the best we've come up with. If Beyerstein and her uCJ friends would dispute that, I suggest they dig into some historical monographs, starting with one on the century that just past.

Update: In general I try to refrain from invective, so in critiquing Beyerstein I hope I haven't crossed the line between criticism and vitriol. To the extent that I have, my apologies.

Superpower Light

2005-07-20T11:45:00.000-04:00

Superpower light ... Following Bush's recent recommendation that India, as a "responsible" nuclear country, should be able to buy nuclear fuel and parts for its reactors, Anand Giridharadas had this to say in the IHT:

Regardless of how soon uranium will flow to this fast-growing country of one billion, [Indian Prime Minister] Singh's visit [to Washington] may signify America's welcoming of a new type of superpower: militarily potent, economically dynamic, regionally assertive, independently minded, but still nonthreatening to the United States. Call it superpower light.

There's a lot you can read into this, but my own take is that this has as much to do with Iran and China as it does India. If you look at Bush's stance towards the few nuclear countries that have not ratified the major non-proliferation treaties, offering nuclear resources in exchange for open inspections is an extremely rare step; isolation tends to be their standard modus operandi.

The immediate reason they're making an exception here most likely has to do with Iran. For one, increasing India's nuclear energy would alleviate its economic dependence on Iranian oil and presumably diminish Iranian revenues. For another, the inspections we'd get in return would deter the kind of overt oil-for-reactors trade that has recently sprung up between Iran and Russia.

But by far the more pressing concern is China. In compromising with India on nuclear reactors -- and thus promoting the country as a "superpower light" -- Bush is acknowledging the fact that we now need India as much as they need us. Because we can no longer rely on the shared interests of South Korea, Japan, and Australia alone to act as a regional counterweight to China's power -- together they lack the demographic, if not economic strength -- we need India to be on the same page. Only if India perceives itself as sharing interests with those countries will the bloc have the collective resources necessary to contain China indefinitely over the coming decades.

I don't know if it's Rice or Rumsfeld or whoever, but someone in the Bush administration seems to be acutely aware of this. If not, I can't think of why else Bush would have caved on an issue he's been so loathe to compromise on in the past.

Update: Just came across the print version of today's Times. On page three there are two half-page stories: the top one is headlined "China Is Focusing on a Modern Military, Report Says"; the bottom is titled "U.S. Allies and Congress 'Positive' About India Nuclear Deal". One of life's minor coincidences, I guess.

... Also, check out Thomas Friedman's column today on U.S.-China relations. I'm not usually that impressed with his stuff, but this one is great.

Heroism

2005-07-19T11:03:00.000-04:00

Heroism in Iraq ... Via Andrew Sullivan, the Army Times had a great story a few days back on Pfc Stephen Tschiderer.

The short version: on June 2 Tschiderer, a medic, was shot in the chest by a sniper while patroling Baghdad. Presumably Tschiderer was wearing a vest, because he then "popped right back up, took cover and located the enemy’s position." Once the sniper had been secured, Tschiderer then treated the sniper's own wounds.

Clearly, Tschiderer's actions here stand on their own regardless of context. At a minimum, he acted in a remarkably professional manner; at most, his actions were merciful and heroic.

That said, I also can't help noticing the way context informs our understanding of what heroism is. For instance, in the second world war, when our enemy was just as capable as we were -- and when the outcome was very much in doubt -- our celebrations of heroism often involved surpassing bravery or lethality. Watch any of the specials on D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, or Iwo Jima, and you'll see what I mean. Yet in Iraq, where we are clearly stronger than our enemy, the heroism we celebrate often centers -- as with Tschiderer -- on magnanimity.

I don't say that to implicate one of the two as being better than the other. I just find it a curious difference worth pointing out.

Economic Gloom

2005-07-18T14:01:00.000-04:00

Depressive Economics ... After spending much of the past year in central Europe, one of the things that's surprised me upon returning home is how similar the economic pessimism here is to that of the euro zone, despite a significant disparity in both growth (roughly 3.5% to .5%) and unemployment (roughly 5% to 10%). Given the comparative health of our economy, it's hard to imagine what the mood would be if we were ever mired in a recession comparable to the one Germany is enduring now.

Yet the scary thing about our trade deficit today is that it makes us increasingly vulnerable to just such a recession. The Times op-ed page is currently running two columns to that effect. The more substantial of the two, by William Greider, is probably the best piece I've read to date on America's precarious role in the new globalized economy. The second, by Paul Krugman, conveys his typical exasperation with more mainstream economic forecasters. But it also contains a jarring coda:

...it's hard to see where further expansion will come from. We've already had four years of extremely loose fiscal and monetary policy. Tax cuts have pushed the federal budget deep into the red. Low interest rates have helped generate a housing bubble that has lifted real estate prices to ludicrous heights in major parts of the country.
If all that wasn't enough to give us a full economic recovery, what will?

The key point here is not that America's foreign debt and high trade deficits are necessarily a prelude to disaster. There is a scenario in which the "managed interests" Greider references will lead to continued global growth and development, concurrent with a gradual decrease in American debt.

Rather, the key point is that there's no longer any margin for error. All it would now take to spark an American recession is an unexpected shock in the global oil supply or a rash monetary decision on China's part. If either of those or any number of other plausible scenarios occur, then there's nothing else the Bush administration could do to stimulate the economy upwards.

Crucially, this does not mean that we should join with central Europe in bemoaning our fate -- I'd much rather have our structural problems than theirs. But it does mean that if we're not duly cautious -- and worse, possibly even if we are -- we may have reason to join them soon.

Gordon Wood

2005-07-17T11:26:00.000-04:00

Good history ... A while back David Greenberg had a column in Slate on academic versus popular history. His point was that the two needn't be antagonistic, and the main work with which he illustrated this was Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

To that point Wood was someone I'd long heard about but never encountered directly (except of course for the brief passage Matt Damon recites in Good Will Hunting). So with Greenberg's praise in mind I figured I'd finally give him a go.

Now that I've finished Radicalism, I have to say that Wood certainly doesn't disappoint. He may be too exhaustive at points, but other than that the book is remarkable for how coherent and accessible it remains even as it makes its most abstruse arguments. Further, it also expands the idea of history itself: although Wood relies upon a preponderance of factual evidence, he goes well beyond providing a factual record to create a kind of ethnography of late colonial and post-Independence Americans. In that sense, Wood owes as much to the sociology of Hannah Arendt as he does to the primary documents of the time.

So for the history fans among you, if you're bothered by the topical surfeits of popular histories like 1776, be sure to check out Radicalism if you haven't already. As I mentioned, it won't disappoint.

Wedding Crashers

2005-07-17T00:04:00.000-04:00

Wedding Crashers ... Just saw it tonight with my sis. The title pretty much sums it up, so I won't spoil the movie with a review.

But I will say this: I pretty much didn't stop laughing from the opening credits on. Definitely check it out if you get the chance.

Foreign Jihadists

2005-07-16T13:08:00.000-04:00

Foreign jihadists ... Anyone who has even remotely followed the Iraqi insurgency is aware that it contains a small but significant foreign constituency.

Perhaps I've been out of touch, but I never realized just how significant it was until I came across this report today:

The suicide bombings brought out another point about the evolving insurgency: that foreign infiltrators are thought to be inflicting a high proportion of the casualties.

American military intelligence estimates of the number of insurgents have varied widely in the course of the war, but most put the total at no more than 20,000, of which foreign Arabs - including Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, Sudanese and Syrians - are a tiny minority. But American commanders say they know of no instance in the past year in which a suicide bomber has been an Iraqi, although they acknowledge that the evidence they have for this, given the fact that most of the bombers are obliterated by the blasts, is sketchy.

To my mind that is astonishing. We do not know of a single Iraqi suicide bomber. And while the evidence is indeed difficult to come by, we need only look at Hamas or Hezbollah to realize that physical evidence wouldn't be needed. The appeal of suicide bombing rests in large part on the honor you receive for it from within your community, so if Iraqis themselves were committing these bombings then presumably we would be hearing about it from the communities themselves.

So the main difference between Iraqi and foreign insurgents is that the Iraqis apparently want to survive long enough to view their triumph. They want to fight but also to live. And that is encouraging: they're fighting with a political agenda in mind, and as such are an enemy that can be engaged.

Not so, however, for the foreign jihadists. They are fighting -- and in many cases, deliberately dying -- not for a political ideal but against what they perceive as an assault on Sunni Islam. A large part of that perception, clearly, derives from the American invasion and occupation. However -- and this is a key point -- an American withdrawal is not their primary goal. If every American troop left tomorrow, they'd still keep coming, because they would still view Iraqi Sunnis as a persecuted constituency.

So the main focus on our part should be getting the Sunnis better representation and political influence in the Iraqi congress. If that happens -- and if Sunnis are no longer seen as the shameful losers of this whole affair -- then and only then will the wind start to be taken out of the foreign insurgents' sails.

A few will still keep coming, on the idea that any compromise constitutes a loss of honor. But in general it will be viewed as far less acceptable to sacrifice other Muslims to the cause.

Political Insularity

2005-07-15T10:46:00.000-04:00

Focused within ... John Vinocur has yet another great column on France this week. I won't give it away in full, but it's essentially about how myopic and out of touch Chirac and his leadership are.

For now, though, what interests me is this paragraph:

The issue is not the people, at home in a country that truly remains exceptional in its beauty, style and ingenuity. Rather, the issue is large parts of a leadership caste, so tuned only to itself, so played out, so fearful of saying we've got to change our act, that it approaches autism.

Now, to be sure, France and the U.S. are two vastly different beasts. But when you read this White House briefing with Scott McClellan or this story on our Secretary of State's response to South Korea's surprise energy offer, you can't help but wondering which country Vinocur is describing.

Unlike France, America's political insularity may be oriented towards the future rather than the past, and it may draw its authority from the greatness of our economy rather than our culture. But it is nonetheless insular. And at moments of global conservatism such as this --and especially for a country with as much global influence as ours -- such a circumscribed focus is regrettable at best and dangerous at worst.

Innocent Executions

2005-07-14T20:10:00.000-04:00

Capital punishment ... Bob Herbert has a column today on Larry Griffin, who was convicted and executed for a murder we now know he almost certainly didn't commit.

Herbert didn't address this, but Griffin's case highlights an important question: what is the number at which the amount of innocent convicts who have been executed is no longer acceptable?

I ask the question not to those like myself, who oppose the death penalty on moral grounds. Nor do I ask it to those whose favor the death penalty insofar as it constitutes retributive justice.

Rather, I intend the question for those who support capital punishment for pragmatic reasons -- ie, the economists and social scientists who follow Isaah Ehrlich to argue that every number of executions x deters x + n number of homicides.

It is to Ehrlich's disciples that I address my question because it is only they who are bound to answer it. For once there is evidence that innocent convicts have been executed, they must redo the math: what is the ratio of innocent to guilty executions at which capital punishment no longer serves as a deterrant? Or, put differently, how exactly do you include the execution of innocent convicts as a variable within the the penal calculus that determines the efficacy of capital punishment overall?

As base or contemptible as the question may seem, it's one that pragmatic proponents of capital punishment need to answer. If they're willing to do the grisly math necessary to determine its "value," they must also do it when an execution vitiates their claim.

Negative Exceptionalism

2005-07-13T11:45:00.000-04:00

Foreign military aid ... When it comes to foreign affairs, there's no more difficult question to answer than whether it is better to grant military aid to non-democratic regimes in the hope that such aid will promote reform or refrain from such aid in the fear that it will be used illicitly.

I used to think that we should always refrain. After all, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden each received arms from the U.S. Further, you can trace the largest and most destructive conflict of the last decade -- the war in Congo, which has claimed around 2 million lives -- to militias funded by the American military.

In the past year or two though, I've started to come around on this issue. In no circumstance should we be granting aid carte blanche to whoever seeks it. But the question should be framed, I believe, with a regime's regional context in mind.

Just look at Uzbekistan. As the Times noted in a great piece on today, on the one hand U.S. mililtary training and aid did help secure a peaceful revolution in nearby Georgia. Even more, the U.S. would be wise to counter regional pressure being exerted on the country by both Russia and China. However, the Uzbeki government isn't exactly deserving of our assistance: it recently authorized its troops to open fire on -- and indeed massacre -- anti-government protestors.

My own guess is that Uzbekistan may be a battle we have already lost. In the next year or two, they'll likely begin insisting that we close our base there. And since we won't have the resources to counter Russian and Chinese pressure, we'll likely yield.

But the ethical complexity of dealing with the Uzbeki regime underscores the need, in my view, for a foreign policy based on what might be termed negative exceptionalism: the belief that America ought to extend its influence not because it is morally right, but because not doing so would be morally wrong.

Or as Michael Ignatieff wrote recently, if you think the American military is contemptible, just imagine what the world would be like without it.

Man on the Moon

2005-07-12T10:38:00.000-04:00

Man on the moon ... God knows I love a good conspiracy theory. JFK? A total mob hit. Aliens in the desert? Duh, of course they landed there.

NASA, however, doesn't seem to think they're all that amusing. From DefenseTech:

If you believe they put a man on the Moon . . .

. . . or even (especially?) if you don't, this one's for you.

In 2008, NASA says it will send a "Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter" into low orbit around the Moon. While it's primary mission will be to scout for the next manned lunar mission (ostensibly planned for around 2020), it also will do something to defeat those wacky conspiracy theories about how and why the United Stats allegedly faked its Moon missions.

It's going to photograph what astronauts left on the Moon, "providing the first recognizable images of Apollo relics since 1972," NASA says.

There are six landing sites scattered across the Moon's surface, but even the Hubble telescope can't photograph them.

Apparently, NASA says, the fact that they haven't been photographed since the Nixon administration adds fuel to the conspiracy theory fires.

Good lord. I guess I can see where NASA is coming from -- if you spent your life working on this stuff, all the conspiracy theories probably would get under your skin.

But still. So long as the proof is coming from NASA, can't it just be discredited with the same arguments that the landings themselves were?

And besides, isn't it kind of fun having the conspiracy theorists around? Doesn't the lunacy of their arguments just belie what an extraordinary accomplishment the landings were?

So I'm with the conspiracy guys on this one ... I mean, if NASA is trying to disprove the conspiracy, then it clearly takes the conspiracy claims seriously ... which means maybe it has something to hide ...

Srebrenica

2005-07-11T11:39:00.000-04:00

Srebrenica victims interred ... Once you visit a recent genocide site, you never really view the world the same way again. Absolute convictions seem either quaint or suspicious; morality seems delicately human; life becomes at once far cheaper and much more precious.

And, too, you can't help but emphasize with the places you have not been, the sites you have not seen. I may have visited several locations in Rwanda, but I feel no less concerned with places like the one in Srebrenica pictured at the right.

Just look at the three figures in the foreground: is the woman shoveling a grieved mother, a widow, or both? Is the child staring at her hands -- who is too young to have known whoever she is there to help bury -- a belated sister, or perhaps even daughter? Is the woman clenching her fist against her pate exhausted from digging or overwhelmed by anguish?

Whatever the specific contexts and exigencies of genocide, these are the questions that they inevitably give rise to.

With the situation in Darfur still unresolved and Iraq (especially with a U.S. withdrawal) threatening to implode, hopefully the agony underlying them will provide sufficient impetus for us to do all we can to ensure that they'll never be asked again.

Chinese Censorship

2005-07-10T17:09:00.000-04:00

Chinese censorship ... A friend of mine is currently in China. The following is the bulk of an email she sent out:

Was watching CNN on the treadmill today and during a "CNN Celebrates it's 25th anniversary" commercial, important scenes in recent world history were shown (in clips). Naturally, Tiananmen was included (the theme was "where were you when?") and as the commercial started to show the (in)famous tank stopped by the lone man in Tiananmen, the broadcast cut ENTIRELY to black and then came on like 10 seconds later. I literally laughed out loud.

The funny thing about this place is that on the surface there is this very open and dynamic commercial sector that is striving to place China on the world stage. And yet, to an obviously English-speaking and very specific/educated audience (eg. the people watching CNN in China which are only foreigners or those rich enough to afford satellite TV and/or visit a foreign hotel), they need to censor something that happened over 15 years ago. What, may I ask, are they
so afraid of?

The worst part of this is that after I asked permission to post the email, she asked me not to use her name for fear of being identified by Chinese immigration. I hadn't planned on doing so anyway -- unless specifically told otherwise I don't use anything other than initials -- but the fact that she took the threat of deportation sufficiently seriously is chilling.

Globalist on Terror

2005-07-09T11:03:00.000-04:00

The Globalist does it again ... For my money, Roger Cohen's "Globalist" column in the IHT is the best commentary out there today.

Here's his take on the social transformations at the heart of the global terror movement:

Behind the wars of the first half of the 20th century lay many factors, not least the instability engendered as European empires imploded and nation-states emerged. But perhaps the greatest catalyst was the social upheaval provoked by a rapid industrialization that redefined working conditions and politics in ways that proved uncontrollable. Communism and Fascism were two of the results.

An upheaval of similar scope is now under way. It is not entirely visible to us because we are part of it. But its outlines are clear enough.

This revolution is being driven by new technologies, usually identified with the United States, that are eliminating distance, destroying barriers, prizing open closed systems and rendering visible everything that was once remote or inaccessible. The unknown is merely mysterious, but what is seen may be envied or hated.

The great global opening and acceleration represented by American-driven information technologies and the Internet have created opportunities on a scale as great as the invention of electricity. But these irreversible developments have also stirred resentments that, in their most extreme form, ignite the extremism that kills.

...

Information and images are liberating. They are also destabilizing. We have embarked on a century that will make a diverse world more unified, prosperous and free than ever before. But the battles of that transformation have just begun.

To be sure, each instance of terrorism occurs within a specific context and derives in large measure from specific concerns. But what Cohen's column does is lay out, again, the social transformation that links those concerns in a generalized way.

God knows that this been done before, but it typically emphasizes religious fanaticism over the sociological effects of our recent technological and economic growth.

In my view, there hasn't been nearly enough commentary that comes at the issue the other way around. Thomas Friedman has often tried, but the vocabulary he employs is typically too redundant to be useful.

Yet until we learn to publicly address the sociological roots of that reality, we'll never come up with a strategy with which to avert the destruction that is bound to continue. You cannot speak to religious exremism, but as both Live 8 and the G-8 summit have demonstrated, you can speak to social change.

Judicial Nominations

2005-07-08T12:49:00.000-04:00

Judicial Nominations ... From the CSMonitor:

The ads are up, the grass-roots have been activated, and money is flooding pressure-group coffers. Talk radio and cable TV are alive with sound and fury at a turning point in American history.

In many ways, the battle over who will replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court has the look and feel of an election campaign - and, to further the analogy, right now it's the primaries. But there's a big difference: the audience. Ultimately, voters have no direct say in whom President Bush nominates or whether the Senate will confirm him or her.

Perhaps I'll change my mind when Bush actually does nominate someone. But for now it's hard for me to look at the activism on this as anything other than a marketing tool for Political Action Committees. What, exactly, is MoveOn or Focus on the Family or any other interested party going to do with the funds they raise for this? Blow it all on lobbyists who can target the fifteen moderate Senators who are actually going to matter?

For once, I think Bush is actually on the right track by telling everyone to calm down. This isn't a matter for us. We had a say last November and, prior to that, during the previous two senatorial elections. So feel free to write a letter to your Senator or call his office to let him know what you think. But that is all you can do. Get over it and move on. And where the PACs are concerned, have the integrity to raise funds only when you know you can put them to use.

The other final comment: this is not a problem of the left's creation. Seven of the nine justices, I believe, were appointed by Republican presidents. That is where the vast majority of the fury and activism is coming from -- the extraordinary frustration that comes with winning politically but still losing judicially. To the extent that this activism is an internecine dispute the left would be wise to steer clear of it.

London Terrorism

2005-07-07T11:09:00.000-04:00

London Terrorism ... Here's the close of an email I just received from London:

I will keep you posted if I hear anything more. Everyone is pretty shaken and unhappy, particularly about the timing. Yesterday there was so much excitement about the 2012 Olympics, and the effect that Live 8 might have on the G8 Summit.

love,
J

How poignant, and how awful.

Church-State Solution

2005-07-06T12:52:00.000-04:00

Church and State ... A few years back, a friend asked me who the smartest person I'd ever met was. I paused for a minute and then blurted, "Noah Feldman."

Not surprisingly, my friend had no idea who he was. So I explained that Feldman graduated summa from Harvard, had a J.D. from Yale Law, had a doctorate from Oxford, had clerked on the Supreme Court, and, most impressively of all, had been a "Junior Fellow" at Harvard. (The Junior Fellow program is little known, but trust me when I say it's the most difficult position for a young scholar to get.) All of this, and Feldman was barely in his late twenties.

Since then identifying Feldman has become easier and easier. For one he's now a professor at NYU Law, and for another he's begun appearing on political talk shows.

Most recently, though, he authored the latest Times Magazine cover story, in which he modestly proposes "A Church-State Solution:"

Put simply, [my solution] is this: offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities. This approach ... is drawn from the framers' vision and the historical experience of separating church and state in America. The framers might well have been mystified by courthouse statues depicting the Ten Commandments, but they would not have objected unless the monuments were built with public money. Having made a revolution over unfair taxation, they thought of government support in terms of dollars spent, not abstract symbols.

Clearly, there's a lot to unpack there. Feldman's proposal has direct implications for everything from school vouchers to congressional prayer. Meanwhile, there's probably not a single governmental function that it wouldn't indirectly effect.

Although Jack Balkin has criticized Feldman for not articulating those implications in full, I'm not convinced that, as Feldman himself put it in a response, a "full jurisprudence" is necessary.

The reason is that Feldman's solution isn't oriented towards the law so much as society. That is, he's not providing a new legal position on an old constitutional problem so much as attempting to persuade a democratic populus to resolve, politically, an intractable social dispute. And at the core of his attempt lies the novel suggestion that a) we consider the intersection of religion and government in terms of symbolic and monetary moments, and b) that we allow the former but not the latter.

Whether you agree with that secondary point, I think we'd do well to take his advice and look at the issue in terms of public funding and public expression. As Balkin notes the two can be blurred at times, but in general the two are vastly different beasts, and we should be discussing them as such.

______
Update: After a quick proofread I fear I may have lent the impression that I know Noah better than I do. When I was an undergrad and he was a Junior Fellow, we played basketball together on an intramural team. Aside from a brief discussion about an article he was writing then -- on Islamic law, I believe -- our conversations pretty much held to the sprightlier topics of jump shots and reverse dribbles.

London Olympics

2005-07-06T12:20:00.000-04:00

London Olympics ... Chirac, it seems, just can't catch a break. The IOC announced this morning that following Beijing in 2008, London will host the summer Olympics in 2012.

So much for all the 'gagnons les jeux!' slogans around Paris. On the up side, at least effete Parisiens will no longer have to complain about the 'monstrous' neon lights that have been tacked up all over the city.

Backlash in Asia

2005-07-05T14:04:00.000-04:00

Backlash in Central Asia ... It's long been supposed that the Bush administration has viewed the war on terror as a fortuitous circumstance. If you go back and read the many position papers and speeches Bush's cabinet members gave before the fall of 2001, you get the sense that they wouldn't have minded much if the U.S. had a permanent military presence in Central Asia. Not only would such a presence have enabled us to keep an eye on Russia, but even more, it would have been a backdoor way to check the regional influence of China. (Remember the fuss about China in the spring of 2001?)

Small wonder, then, that when the war on terror began, the administration seized on the legitimate target of Afghanistan to open military installations in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Now, though, China and Russia have convinced the two countries to press back:

ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) -- An alliance of Russia, China and central Asian nations called for the U.S. and coalition members in Afghanistan to set a date for withdrawing from member states, reflecting growing unease over America's regional military presence.
...

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, at a summit in the Kazakh capital, said in a declaration that a withdrawal date should be set in light of what it said was a decline of active fighting in Afghanistan.

''We support and will support the international coalition which is carrying out an anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan, and we have taken note of the progress made in the effort to stabilize the situation,'' the declaration said.

''As the active military phase in the anti-terror operation in Afghanistan is nearing completion, the SCO would like the coalition's members to decide on the deadline for the use of the temporary infrastructure and for their military contingents' presence in those countries,'' the declaration continues.

It'll be interesting to see how the Bush administration handles this. My guess is that they will in fact cede the Uzbeki and Kyrgyzi bases, but that they'll take their sweet time doing so -- not because they don't respect the sovereignty of those countries, but because they don't want China and Russia to get the sense that it was their pressure that led us to leave.

On the other hand, knowing Bush he may well come out on the offensive. Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have effectively come out and said that they don't think the U.S. will exert a regional influence over the long haul. It's hard to imagine Bush ever yielding to that kind of gambit, even though -- given how thinly stretched the Pentagon currently is -- he will pretty much have to.

Either way, like I said, it should be interesting to see how Bush reacts.

Whitman's Vistas

2005-07-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

Whitman's Democratic Vista ... Outside of the occasional English professor, until quite recently few people probably realized that today marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Since the book launched American literature, the anniversary more than merits the celebration it's receiving. As Verlyn Klinkenborg has noted, when it comes to Whitman's perception, "There is no catching up with him. He is always ahead of us."

So with public attention currently focused (however marginally) on Whitman's writing, I figure now's about as good a time as any to mention that the title of this site owes to Whitman's great essay on American culture, Democratic Vistas. The essay is all but impossible to summarize briefly, but suffice it to say that Vistas accomplishes in prose form all that Leaves of Grass achieves in its poetry: namely, it articulates with exuberant lucidity the countless triumphs and challenges and contradictions of American life.

I'm a little surprised -- and ashamed -- that I haven't gotten around to explaining 'Democratic Vista' until now, but there you have it.

Have a great Independence Day, everyone. And be sure to check out some Whitman, should you get the chance.

Web Accountability

2005-07-03T14:07:00.000-04:00

Photo credits and the Public Editor ... If you're looking for a particular instance of how the internet is changing the news media, you'd do well to consider today's column by Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times.

Calame's column has to do with a photograph that accompanied the June 12 "Interrogating Ourselves" cover story in the Times Magazine. Across from the title page of the article, Calame notes, the Magazine ran

a color photograph with a mid-torso view from the rear of a person with wrists handcuffed. Below the plastic handcuffs, a red stain ran down from one wrist across the soiled palm onto the fingers. The credit at the bottom of the facing page: "Photographs by Andres Serrano."

But there wasn't any explanation that the photograph had been staged. There was no caption. Four pages later, the same was true for the full-page staged photograph of water torture. The cover picture of a person with a sandbag hood also was identified only as a photograph by Mr. Serrano. [emphasis added]

When Calame aired his concern internally, the response, evidently, was that

top editors seem confident that readers can sort out - and allow for - differences in journalistic tone and practice from one section to another. Readers have long understood the difference between the news columns and the editorial pages, these editors reason, and the Magazine and Book Review are just other distinct parts of the package.

Yet on the website, the various sections within the Times are not separated with the same distinctiveness. Although rubrics like "Week in Review" or "Times Magazine" always appear above the online versions of articles, the placard is typically faded and, moreover, easy for the casual reader to either miss completely or dismiss as irrelevant. The result is that when photographs are published online without due specificity, the editors can no longer assume that the reader can distinguish staged photographs from real ones simply by which section they appear in.

What's so unique about Calame's column -- and the reason I bring it up -- is that his concern already seems to have prompted a reaction. This week the Magazine has credited its photographs in far more detail; it lists everyone from the photographers themselves to those responsible for "digital manipulation".

Would such a swift and noticeable response have occurred if the Magazine's editors were concerned only with its print version? I don't think so. If Calame hadn't alerted the editors to the perils of web publishing, there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't have relied, as before, on the tired assumption that "the reader" can understand the difference between what's staged and what's real, and that, therefore, no one will hold them accountable to make distinctions between depictions of natural and artificial reality.

In this instance, then, the unprecedented openness of the web has produced greater accountability, not less. And since the conventional wisdom holds that the opposite is true, this is no small accomplishment for Calame -- especially considering it's still his first month on the job.

Salutations & Gonzales

2005-07-02T22:13:00.000-04:00

Salutations & Gonzales ... As those of you who read this site regularly are aware, I spent the last few days at my brother's wedding. So let me start off with a hearty congrats to Jeremy and Kim, who ought to be enjoying the St. Lucia nightlife as we speak. (That said, if either of you are reading this, I take back everything I said about how wonderful your marriage is going to be.)

Further, I'd like to thank my friend Addison -- who was busy last week on an ACLU project -- for taking the time to post yesterday.

Now back to the world at-large. Clearly, the biggest news of late has been the surprise retirement of Justice O'Connor. I don't have much to say about her specifically, except to reiterate that her career was extraordinarily unique and that replacing her will prove all but impossible.

But the speculation about her successor brings me to the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.

For those still unfamiliar with him, Gonzales's career has been intertwined with Bush's ever since Bush was a Texas governor. Back then Gonzales was Bush's state attorney general. Thereafter, he was tapped to serve as lead council during Bush's first term and as Attorney General during Bush's second. Since the two have worked together so closely for so long, it's been widely supposed that Bush would nominate Gonzales for any Supreme Court vacancy.

The trouble is, as good a move as that would be in theory -- not only is Mr. Gonzales Hispanic, but his personal life is as impeccable as it is praiseworthy -- the political math simply doesn't add up.

I say that because for the Republican Party, the Supreme Court is of political importance for one clearly identifiable reason: abortion. Having a pro-life platform is the glue that weds the "guns" people with the "God" people. Gonzales, however, is far more a guns guy than a God one. Yet Democrats will oppose him no less vigorously than if Bush nominates an adamant pro-lifer: Gonzales wrote the famed White House memo that declared as "obsolete" the prohibition against torture within the Geneva conventions. Senate Democrats bruised him badly for this during his AG confirmation hearing, and there's no reason to suspect they wouldn't press just as hard during a Supreme Court confirmation.

So Gonzales has the same downside as a far right pro-lifer, but much less of the upside. Consequently his nomination just wouldn't make sense. It's not that he isn't conservative enough, as the the Times has implied, but because he's too conservative, if only in a different way.

O'Connor Retires

2005-07-01T13:44:00.000-04:00

Today's announcement by Justice O'Connor that she is retiring after 24 terms on the Supreme Court will enable President Bush to fill the Court's first vacancy in 11 years. Speculation had abounded that Chief Justice Rehnquist would be stepping down this week (a decision that may still be forthcoming). As a dependable conservative vote, Rehnquist's retirement would not have shifted the delicate balance that has existed on issues ranging from affirmative action to the separation of church and state. With O'Connor's retirement, however, the Court loses its crucial swing vote on these issues whose bearing on the nature of our democracy can hardly be overstated (though, notably, Roe v. Wade still enjoys a 5-4 majority with Kennedy now holding the decisive vote).

Peter Rubin, writing for the American Constitutional Blog (http://www.acsblog.org/), offers a brief sketch of the forthcoming changes in constitutional jurisprudence:

Justice O’Connor’s retirement from the Supreme Court represents a seismic event in American law and the life of our country. Her replacement by a conservative in the mold favored by President Bush would likely mean, among other things, the end of affirmative action in higher education in the United States (it was held constitutionally permissible by a 5-4 vote in her opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger); a lowering of the wall of separation between church and state – something that has served both religion and government so well in this nation – so that public display of religious symbols by government even with a primarily religious purpose would be permitted (hers was the fifth vote this Monday in McReary County v. ACLU which invalidated, 5-4, the posting of the Ten Commandments in a Kentucky courthouse); and that, at the very least, many, many more restrictions on women’s right to abortion would be upheld (Justice O’Connor was the fifth vote in the Court’s most recent abortion case, Stenberg v. Carhart, invalidating by a 5-4 vote a law that would have prohibited one method of performing abortions and that contained no exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman).

[Guest blogger, Addison Thompson, submitted this post].

Best Man

2005-06-29T18:16:00.000-04:00

Going to the chapel ... As some of you know, my brother is getting married this Friday.

Since I happen to be best man -- and since I also happen to be thrilled about his fiancee -- I'll be doing my best over the next few days to make the wedding as special as possible for them.

Which means, of course, no posting. In my stead you may hear from a good friend of mine, but if not I'll be posting again starting Saturday.

Until then, feel free to check out a piece I put up yesterday on the Huff Post.

Putin & the Pats

2005-06-29T16:21:00.000-04:00

Putin and the Pats ... It's rare that sports and international politics intersect directly, but according to the Globe that's exactly what happened yesterday in Moscow:

It could be an international incident of sorts, a misunderstanding of Super Bowl proportions. Or it could be a very, very generous gift.

Whatever the case, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is out one championship ring, and President Vladimir Putin of Russia has scooped up some very flashy bling.

At a meeting of American business executives and Putin on Saturday in Russia, according to Russian news reports, Kraft showed his 4.94-carat, diamond-encrusted 2005 Super Bowl ring to the Russian president, who, after trying it on, put it in his pocket and left.

It was unclear yesterday whether Kraft intended to give Putin the ring. It was just two weeks ago that he presented this year's championship baubles to Patriots players at his Brookline manse. A Patriots spokesman said yesterday that Kraft was still traveling overseas and could not be reached for comment.

Now, I generally try to keep my personal biases separate from the public statements I make on this site. But this is ridiculous.

If Putin wants to he can seize Lukos, play coy with China, even build a nuclear reactor in Iran. I won't like it but I'll let it slide. But one thing Putin cannot do is pocket a Pat's super bowl ring.

Does he have any idea how hard we -- and oh yes I do mean we -- worked for our three championships? The blood, the sweat, the tears? The generation that came before mine, filling seats and cheering in freezing winds at BU, Harvard, and Foxboro? The six years of torture I personally endured among rabid New Yorkers, blocked-out from even watching the Pats play?

I don't know about you, but it seems pretty clear to me: this calls for war.

____

Update: I'm only half-kidding. We even have a picture of him stealing the thing. Didn't we invade Iraq for less?

Brooks on Sachs

2005-06-28T15:01:00.000-04:00

Brooks on Sachs ... I didn't come across this until now, but David Brooks' latest column is baffling. "Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from conservatives and I have mine," he begins. "Mine include the differences between Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush." Thereafter he spends half his column lambasting Sachs for his philosophical influences before taking a belated -- and inaccurate -- look at how Sachs' plan for economic development differs from Bush's.

I've generally admired Brooks for the way he refrains from personal attacks, so the only way I can explain his column is that Sachs must have said something to or about Brooks that rubbed him the wrong way, perhaps for one of the columns he wrote after he made a recent visit to Africa.

But I find it hard to imagine that Sachs would have said something to sufficiently warrant Brooks' invective. Before Sachs left Harvard to take his post at Columbia -- and thereby be closer to the U.N., which he regularly advises -- he taught a Core class on the Economics of Development. I took it my senior year. Although I disagreed with a few of his positions, no one in the class could have doubted, let alone reproved, his sincerity: in his final lecture, as he challenged us to care about poverty, his voice began to crack, his eyes looked away, and -- for one remarkably poignant moment -- he openly wept.

David Brooks has every right to debate Sachs' positions, but not the integrity with which he has arrived at them.

Digital Piracy

2005-06-28T08:26:00.000-04:00

Hollywood and digital piracy ... Last night Kevin Drum took up the digital piracy issue:

As bandwidth increases, DVD technology improves, and software becomes as easy to use as a toaster, every piece of digital content on the planet will be available within minutes. It's possible that the movie industry could survive for a while based on the dwindling band of old farts who like to sit in theaters, but that's about it. Unless a movie has enough cross-promotional potential to make the production worthwhile all by itself, it will be impossible to make any money in the movie industry. Ditto for music.

As on point as Kevin typically is, I think he misses a key distinction here between movie production and movie distribution.

The demand for movie production has always held fairly constant: people enjoy being entertained. That said, there's only so many times you can watch Spiderman before it stops being entertaining. So if no new movies were made for, say, a year, by the end of that year people would be quite willing to dish out cash for new content. How exactly they'd make that payment -- watch ads, buy a dvd 'bond', etc -- is open to debate. But the point is the demand for the production of movies will always be there.

Not so, however, for distribution. Currently an enormous chunk of a movie's full expense is tied up in marketing and distribution costs. I don't know the exact figures off the top of my head, but it's at least half the price of a ticket. What a digital platform is going to do is drive down the price of that half-ticket. As with the music industry, file sharing programs will match producer and consumer directly and largely bypass the traditional distribution points in between.

The people crowing the most about digital piracy are the theatre chains and major studeos, each of whom have significant stakes in the distribution process. But what they're really concerned about is not the piracy per se so much as, again, the platform. They dominate the way films are currently distributed, so this represents a huge potentially huge loss of revenue for them. But the all important fact here is that revenue gained from film distribution does not finance subsequent movies.

So there's no way I'm shedding tears for those guys. They're trying to say Hollywood will disappear when the truth is only they will. Technology is radically altering how their business; they need to deal with it the same as everybody else.

MMA & No. Korea

2005-06-27T14:30:00.000-04:00

Church activism and foreign policy ... In itself, civic activism based upon a religious principle is neutral. Whether it's a moral good depends on the particular principle in question and how it relates to the context it's being applied to.

When church leaders began pressing for action in Sudan, for instance, I thought it was a good thing. Darfur is a mess because no politician can currently be held accountable for what's going on there; only if there's popular support for change will politicians feel compelled to act. Consequently, if a group of pastors wanted to help increase Darfur's public profile -- even if their desire to do so stemmed from absolutist religious convictions -- then they had my blessing.

But North Korea is a totally different issue, which is why this story concerns me:

Christian supporters from President Bush's Texas hometown, believed to have been instrumental in pressuring the White House to raise concerns over war-ravaged Sudan, are launching another international human rights campaign -- this time against North Korea's hard-line regime.
Members of the Midland Ministerial Alliance, a network of more than 200 churches in the city, are in Seoul this week seeking support for their latest push for improved human rights in the communist North.

''North Korean human rights will be the primary focus that we encourage the community here to actively engage in, to use their influence, and to not rest until the lives of North Koreans have changed for much better," alliance spokeswoman Deborah Fikes told South Korean lawmakers Friday.

As much as I respect the idealism here, applying the same absolutist approach to Pyongyang as to Darfur is a needlessly dangerous gambit.

To say the least, there's a few significant differences between North Korea and Sudan. First is the fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons. Second is the fact that North Korea is not a failed state: it may be corrupt, brutal, and tyrannical, but it is not failed; by all accounts Kim Jong Il's regime has access to and control over every region of the country. So right there you're talking about regime change rather than merely keeping the peace.

Then, finally, unlike Sudan two years ago, the world hasn't ignored the plight of most North Koreans because they've overlooked them. Every industrialized nation knows full well what's going on there and how bad it is, but they're clueless as to what to do. As a result, improving the lives of North Koreans isn't a matter of merely airlifting supplies or installing an embargo.

I agree with the Midland Ministers Alliance that North Korea needs to improve -- and further, that God must be appalled by what is happening there. But I also believe, quite fervently, that given the current context it is in God's hands rather than our own.

That doesn't mean we should ignore what's going on, just that we should be treading incredibly carefully. No one should apply undue pressure to Pyongyang unless they're certain of what we'll get -- and right now, only God, if anyone, could have such certainty.

Billy Graham

2005-06-26T10:59:00.000-04:00

The Politics of Billy Graham ... Christianity Today has been a staple in my parents house for about as long as I can remember. Not surprisingly, the latest issue has a lot on Billy Graham, both on his career as a whole and his current crusade in New York City.

To my mind, the most telling passage actually comes not in any of the stories or commentary about Graham, but in CT's "Reflections" page, which cites the following gem:

It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.

--Billy Graham in Parade (1981)

Say what you will about Graham as an evangelical or a theologian, but as a politician he was astute enough to know the value of staying outside of the political sphere. Not only did he recognize that within either political party Christianity would always be a subservient force, but even more he understood that refraining from politics granted him access to whichever political party was currently in power. From JFK to Nixon to Reagon to Clinton, he stayed relevant because he stayed out.

Ahmadinejad Wins

2005-06-25T12:05:00.000-04:00

Iranian elections ... There's two things I have to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory yesterday in Iran's national elections:

1) We will not be leaving Iraq any time soon. If it's ever been in doubt that the model for our post-war engagement in Iraq was not the first gulf war but the occupations in Germany and Japan (where we continue to have troops to this day), Bush's response to this election will likely underscore how significant he thinks Iraqi real estate is. To give him (some) credit, this is primarily about restoring Iraqi sovereignty. But the key ancillary motive here is establishing a base from which to exert a substantive geopolitical influence throughout the region.

2) Ahmadinejad's victory is the latest in a long string of conservative and nationalist triumphs, ranging from Bush's election here to the French and Dutch rejections of the EU constitution to, finally, a resurgent patriotism in China. What each illustrates is that conservatives have been far quicker to realize that what the poor want is not money but justice. They understand, that is, how to capitalize on indigent ressentiment. Consider the platform of Ahmadinejad:

Ahmadinejad, 49, ... called for eliminating the growing gap between rich and poor, repeal of unspecified ''weak" or un-Islamic reforms, and a restoration of the original spirit of the revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979. He received strong support from paramilitary and radical Islamist organizations.

When you are born poor in a world of conspicuous wealth -- and further, when your society lacks economic mobility -- you have to integrate the stark inequity of your poverty with your conception of the world at large. The only way to do this is to appeal to a transcendent figure, typically either God or a patria, and to believe adamantly that its sense of justice will in some way redeem your own personal suffering. In the face of that kind of psychology, money doesn't help. What does is a political leadership which corresponds with its absolute values. The one similarity between Bush and Ahmadinejad is that they have understood this far more intuitively than their rivals.

Kelo Comedy

2005-06-24T21:59:00.000-04:00

Kelo Comedy ... Kieran Healy has two great "snippets" of satire today on the Kelo decision.

At least, I'm assuming Healy intends them as satire. Either that, or he's been reading a little to much Karl Marx lately.

Chinese Trade

2005-06-24T13:59:00.000-04:00

Call it coincidence ... The day after a Chinese oil company announced a hostile takeover bid for the American oil giant Unocal, Fed Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan advised Congress that trade tariffs imposed on Chinese imports wouldn't work.

Clearly the timing was just a coincidence -- the hearing had to have been scheduled prior to the Cnooc announcement -- but it underscores what a major issue Chinese trade has become, and how confused Congress is in reacting to it: Congress is currently thinking in terms of manufacturing and currency, but China itself is now thinking in terms of capital.

In a sense, then, Congress's current debates are already anachronistic; if China persists in its attempts to acquire U.S. interests, in the long run it will be in China's patent interest to revalue the yuan, which in turn would significantly impacting its manufacturing.

In other words, the currency and import issues would eventually take care of themselves.

Meanwhile, the issues which would take their place all have to do with America's current dependency on cheap credit. As I've noted before, at present China is underwriting America's trade imbalance by buying Treasury notes. Should China begin to significantly divert their earnings into capital markets, some pretty funky things would begin to happen -- chief among them a rise in domestic interest rates. Yet that, in turn, would depress growth most in the one sector currently driving the bulk of U.S. growth, the housing sector.

I know that analysis is stretched thin, but in my view the gist is thus that the Unocal bid wasn't a warning shot to America's board rooms so much as its consumers. Rather than renewing calls for protectionism, our response should be to focus on our Achilles heal -- the dependency, even addiction, to artificially low-interest rates.

Internet's End

2005-06-24T11:57:00.000-04:00

The End of the Internet ... This has to be, in my opinion, the most conclusive evidence to date that there is in fact a website for everything:

www.cryingwhileeating.com

I recommend scrolling down to "Spenser." Be prepared to feel conflicted, though. It'll make you want to laugh and cry -- and possibly even eat.

Public Use

2005-06-23T23:14:00.000-04:00

Public use for private means ... I've spent the last few days working on a piece for the Huffington Post about how corruption today nearly always occurs when private interests are extended into the public sphere. (As opposed to when state agents seize private property.)

Then yesterday the Supreme Court unleashed a bombshell of a decision in which it ruled that the city of New London could seize the property of private interests for the "public use" of other private interests. The decision uses all kinds of language to try and safeguard the abuse of this "public use" understanding, but as Justice O'Connor notes in her dissent, it essentially dissolves the distinction between public and private altogether:

Under the banner of economic development, all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded--i.e., given to an owner who will use it in a way that the legislature deems more beneficial to the public--in the process. To reason, as the Court does, that the incidental public benefits resulting from the subsequent ordinary use of private property render economic development takings "for public use" is to wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words "for public use" from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Needless to say, the stakes here are huge. The state has long been able to seize private property under eminent domain, but only for explicitly public goods such a road, dam, school, etc. Now the state can seize one person's property in order to give it to another, so long as it can demonstrate that there would be indicental public benefits. The result? Anyone with a demonstrably underdeveloped property -- such as, say, a modest beachhouse -- can now have their property legally taken from them.

If this doesn't scare you, it should. One of the corporations involved with the development plan in New London is the drug company Pfizer. If they or a comparably large company started lobbying your town council to put an office park or industrial plant where you live, who do you think would have more resources with which to persuade them?

Blair Speech

2005-06-23T17:48:00.000-04:00

Blair and the EU ... In a speech to the EU parliament yesterday, Blair laid the groundwork for his 6-month EU presidency in the second half of this year. According to the London Times, Blair didn't mince any words:

"It is a time to recognise that only by change will Europe recover its strength, its relevance, its idealism and therefore its support amongst the people. And as ever, the people are ahead of the politicians...

"We have to renew and there is no shame in that. All institutions must do it and we can, but only if we re-marry the European ideals we believe in with the modern world we live in."

That last line seems as elegant a summation as any of the political challenge the EU is currently facing ... What is typically absent in the EU rhetoric about human rights is the recognition that economic growth is the moral good which often secures them in the first place. Kudos to Blair for trying to re-work the continent's political vocabulary in such a way that both idealism and modernity can now be seen not only as compatible but complimentary.

ScentHighlights and Media Bias

2005-06-23T04:05:00.000-04:00

ScentHighlights and "spreading activation" ... Google searches, apparently, are so twentieth century. The CSMonitor has a story today on what's next:

The reading experience online "should be better than on paper," Chi says. He's part of a group at PARC developing what it calls ScentHighlights, which uses artificial intelligence to go beyond highlighting your search words in a text. It also highlights whole sections of text it determines you should pay special attention to, as well as other words or phrases that it predicts you'll be interested in. "Techniques like ScentHighlights are offering the kind of reading that's above and beyond what paper can offer," Chi says....
ScentHighlights gets its name from a theory that proposes that people forage for information much in the same way that animals forage in the wild. "Certain plants emit a scent in order to attract birds and bees to come to them," Chi says. ScentHighlights uncovers the "scent" that bits of information give off and attract readers to it.

If the reader types in "Wimbledon tennis," for example, ScentHighlights would highlight each word in its own color in the text, as search programs do. But ScentHighlights adds additional keywords in gray that the system has inferred that the reader would be interested in (perhaps "US Open" or "Andy Roddick"). It would also highlight in yellow entire sentences that it deems likely to be especially relevant.

To do this, ScentHighlights combines two approaches, noticing how often words are near each other in text and using a technique called "spreading activation." Chi says: "It basically mimics how humans retrieve information." ScentHighlights actually knows nothing about tennis, he says. "It's a purely statistically based technique."

Off the top of my head, the most interesting thing about this is that it could help document media bias. Imagine doing a search on "evangelical", for example. The keywords ScentHighlights would come up with would probably include "socially conservative" or "religious right". By contrast, if you searched "liberal agenda" you'd quite possibly come up with something like "unpatriotic". By matching words with qualifiers and attendant phrases that have a far higher frequency than would be statistically expected, the program could help indicate just how pervasive media bias truly is.

Unfortunately, ScentHighlights hasn't quite hit the market yet. But there is at least Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases, which turns up some pretty funky stuff within books themselves.

Tracking Osama

2005-06-22T17:56:00.000-04:00

Tracking Osama ... I'm a little surprised I haven't come across this elsewhere. But in an interview this week with Time magazine, Porter Gross, the CIA head, aired some pretty telling frustrations:

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE? I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?

So basically Gross is saying that Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. But the U.S. cannot go into that area because it would be a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. Not only so, but Pakistan's President can't send troops there either because it would compromise the tenuous political balance on which his authority is currently based. As a result Osama can now essentially just chill out in broad daylight.

Reading even further into this, my guess is that Gross is actually annoyed as hell at Rumsfeld. As substantial as the geopolitical hurdles are with going into Pakistan, we could handle them if we wanted to; all it would take is a fair amount of local pressure followed by a quick exit. The trouble is Rumsfeld and the DoD have bungled Iraq so badly that there is currently no way to summon that pressure. Consequently, the CIA now has to spin its wheels. They did their job and found bin Laden -- Gross wouldn't be saying those things, especially after the intel failures with 9/11 and Iraq, if he didn't know exactly where Osama is -- but their intelligence isn't yet "actionable" because so much of our military and diplomatic resources are still tied up in Iraq.

So that's my guess. Gross could get Osama if we let him, but our military ineptitude is holding him back -- and he sure as hell knows it.

Changes

2005-06-22T09:25:00.000-04:00

Blog Changes ... Ever since I began Democratic Vista there have been countless times that I came across a great quote or interesting story, but didn't share it with you. The reason I didn't was that briefer, more colloquial posts would have seemed a bit incongruous amid the longer, more formal pieces; and it was to have a platform for more formal commentary that I began this blog in the first place.

However, now that I've started writing at the Huffington Post and also in the discussion groups TPMCafe, I no longer need a private platform for formal analysis. As a result I can now, finally, open this site up. With any luck, over the next few days and weeks it should start to seem much more spontaneous, informal, and above all, fun.

For that to happen though, I'll need feedback from you -- as things noticeably change, let me know what you think!

Gay Marriage

2005-06-21T08:05:00.000-04:00

Gay marriage ... Sunday's New York Times Magazine more or less hits the nail on the head when anti-gay-marriage movement:

...the Christian activists aren't vague in their opposition. For them, the issue isn't one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual -- being black, say, or a woman -- and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can't be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.

There's really only three things I have to add to this.

First is the lexical distinction that the Judeo-Christian scriptures never address homosexuality as such but only homosexual acts. As a result the scriptures are ill-equipped to address questions of homosexual identity, which did not emerge until a century ago during the Oscar Wilde trial and on which any constitutional defense of homosexual marriage rests.

Second, in theological terms this is at root a hermeneutical problem. You cannot ask someone who believes in the infallible authority of the Bible to approve of gay marriage without also asking them to displace the Bible's centrality to their faith. Homosexual acts are so explicitly and frequently forbidden throughout the Old and New Testaments that for an acolyte to disavow any passages pertaining to such activity is in one sense to disavow the legitimacy of the scriptures as a whole. Consequently overlooking the Bible's preaching on this issue alone requires an incredibly delicate exegetical foundation -- one which it would be unreasonable to assume all believers can or even ought to make.

Third, in sociological terms what we are talking about is a group of people who refute the separation not of church and state but state and society. In this sense -- in urging political representatives to act on their behalf for exclusively Biblical reasons -- the Arlington Group in particular is ultimately attempting to restore a pre-Revolutionary understanding of community in which the claim that state and society were somehow separate would have been met by a host of blank stares. Yet for any number of economic, cultural, and political reasons restoring that understanding simply is not possible. The end result is that states which enact Marriage Amendments end up with a political body of indeterminant nature, since for some it is defined a) by a monopoly on violence, b) as a provider of public goods, and c) as a third-party adjudicator, while for others it is defined not only by all of the above, but also by d) its (religiously informed) social function.

More on this later, I'm sure, but that's all for now.

Credit Reports

2005-06-20T09:01:00.000-04:00

Credit Reports ... Today's USA Today has a frontpage story that weighs the pros and cons of granting consumers the right to freeze their credit reports.

It's not hard to see why the piece largely sides with consumers. Here's the argument for why consumers shouldn't have the right to control their credit reports:

Lenders, credit bureaus and businesses argue that the inconvenience created by a credit freeze outweighs potential benefits. Credit-freeze laws allow consumers to "unfreeze" their reports, but that typically takes about three days.

In the meantime, a consumer could miss out on a low mortgage rate or one-time credit card offer, says Nessa Feddis, senior federal counsel for the American Bankers Association. "It sounds good, but people don't realize how often they request their credit reports be pulled for a good deal," she says.

Opponents also argue that existing laws protect consumers from identity theft without the hassles of a credit freeze.

Yep, that's right: years of financial and legal hassling clearly do not outweigh my need to have instant access to a credit report.

Please. A three day wait? Are they kidding me? If it means eliminating the risk that someone can take out a major loan using my credit report, I will gladly wait three days on the paperwork to go through for a new car or house or even, hypothetically, consumer electronics. After all, a built-in delay would only extend the deliberation I already go through whenever I purchase something substantial enough to require a loan in the first place.

Yet what really gets me is the presumption that businesses know better than consumers when they would want to use their credit reports. This represents commercial condescension of the most egregious kind, and as such grates against the fundamental premise of modern capitalism -- namely, that each individual is best suited, as a rational agent, to make their own financial decisions.

Dies Patris

2005-06-19T17:08:00.000-04:00

The best part of living abroad is how consistently novel and invigorating your experiences can be. The downside is that you miss out on the fam. Thank God, then, for days like today, which are especially suited for rectifying such an imbalance.

Have a great Father's Day everyone.

EU Crises

2005-06-18T17:16:00.000-04:00

Since returning to the States two weeks ago I've largely cooled down on the EU debate. Quite frankly, I've aired about as much as I have to say on the subject.

That said, today's quote from EU president Jean-Claude Juncker is too exceptional to ignore:

"People will tell you next that Europe is not in a crisis," Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, who holds the rotating EU presidency, said after a two-day summit ended in acrimony.

"It is in a profound crisis." [emphasis added]

For those who haven't been following the story, the immediate impetus for Juncker's remarks was the failure of the EU commission to approve its next six-year budget. Britain and Holland effectively killed the 100 billion euro plan; and rightly so, at least for Britain. In my view it makes little sense that the Britain should have to subsidize continental welfare systems because only they have had the wherewithal to liberalize their markets.

Yet the larger impetus, and what Juncker was really talking about, were the failed EU referendums in France and the Netherlands. Those rejections led the EU into what are actually two separate crises. The first is, as perhaps was hinted at above, the legitimacy of continental welfare systems. France wants the amenities and living standards of a post-industrial economy without the attendant risk. At present only Britain and the newer, more Eastern European countries seem to fully recognize the paradoxical nature of that position.

The second crisis is what I would call, if history hadn't already lent it such a bad name, ethnic strife. For all the talk about peace and liberalism, the reality is that Europe has yet to fully supercede the ethnic divides of the last two decades. Their political systems may have evolved beyond ethnic identity, but their popular consciousnesses have not. The result is that in cultural terms the French or Dutch identity still incorporates a remarkable degree of ethnic criteria. When it comes to the EU, then, the all-important ramification is that a French or Dutch citizen has a hard time swallowing, in purely cultural terms, how the hell he or she can share an identity with a Bulgar.

Consequently the challenge for President Juncker and the other EU leaders is now to communicate to their citizenry a) that the welfare states which worked wonders for the last fifty years are no longer viable in a post-Cold War era, and b) that neither are the ethnic and even tribal identities by which they define themselves.

This will no doubt take a long time; it took the U.S. several decades. But as Juncker no doubt is aware, if Europe is to be saved, it needs to be done.

Moderate Christianity

2005-06-17T15:40:00.000-04:00

I spent the last hour or so coming up with a response to John Danford's editorial today in the Times. Then I realized I wasn't doing much of anything except echoing Danford's welcome perspective:

It is important for those of us who are sometimes called moderates to make the case that we, too, have strongly held Christian convictions, that we speak from the depths of our beliefs, and that our approach to politics is at least as faithful as that of those who are more conservative. Our difference concerns the extent to which government should, or even can, translate religious beliefs into the laws of the state.

People of faith have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to bring their values to bear in politics. Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.

Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.

When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.

When we see an opportunity to save our neighbors' lives through stem cell research, we believe that it is our duty to pursue that research, and to oppose legislation that would impede us from doing so.

We think that efforts to haul references of God into the public square, into schools and courthouses, are far more apt to divide Americans than to advance faith.

Following a Lord who reached out in compassion to all human beings, we oppose amending the Constitution in a way that would humiliate homosexuals.

For us, living the Love Commandment may be at odds with efforts to encapsulate Christianity in a political agenda. We strongly support the separation of church and state, both because that principle is essential to holding together a diverse country, and because the policies of the state always fall short of the demands of faith. Aware that even our most passionate ventures into politics are efforts to carry the treasure of religion in the earthen vessel of government, we proceed in a spirit of humility lacking in our conservative colleagues.

In the decade since I left the Senate, American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. I do not think it is a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two. To assert that I am on God's side and you are not, that I know God's will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God's kingdom is certain to produce hostility.

By contrast, moderate Christians see ourselves, literally, as moderators. Far from claiming to possess God's truth, we claim only to be imperfect seekers of the truth. We reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. We believe it is God's work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today's politics.

Amen.

Liberalism & Christianity

2005-06-16T09:04:00.000-04:00

The retired journalist James P. Gannon -- not to be confused with the "reporter" Jeff Gannon, whom Karl Rove planted last year in the White House Press Room -- has a great column in today's USA Today.

Responding to Howard Dean's recent comment that Republicans are a bunch of "white Christians," Gannon makes the important point that Dean's rhetoric is simply the latest instance in which Democrats have needlessly alienated Christians in general and pro-life Christians in particular.

"Let's get the facts out here," Gannon writes, and then lists the following points:

• I have been white all my life. I was born white in Minneapolis, one of the whitest cities in America. When I was growing up — in the white-bread 1950s, when "multicultural" meant that both Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics lived in the same parish — I knew only white people. There were only two kinds of people in the world, as far as I knew — Catholics and "non-Catholics." You couldn't marry non-Catholics, and you couldn't go to funerals or weddings in non-Catholic churches.

• Fact No. 2: We were Christians, though we never thought of ourselves that way. "Christian" had a vague, slightly non-Catholic feel to it, and it wasn't until after Pope John XXIII and Vatican II that Catholics began to feel comfortable being called "Christians."

• Fact No. 3, and here's where Dean has overlooked something important — we were white Christians, but we were not Republicans. Republicans were mostly Protestant, wealthy and members of country clubs. We were Catholic, middle-class and Democrats.

For most of my adult life, I considered myself a Democrat and voted for Democrats for president — from John F. Kennedy in 1960 to Bill Clinton in 1992. I began voting for Republican presidential candidates, and thinking of myself as Republican, only after it became abundantly clear that people with my views on abortion, prayer in school and other moral issues were no longer considered welcome in the Democratic Party.

A whole lot of us crossed over, taking our whiteness and our Christian beliefs into the party of the country-club set. We didn't feel so much that we had abandoned the Democratic Party as it had abandoned us. Borrowing the spirit of the "No Irish Need Apply" mentality of my grandparents' time, the Democrats posted a "no pro-lifers need apply" sign on their party doors. (emphasis added)

Although I ultimately disagree with Gannon -- yes, the Democrats are regrettably intractable when it comes to abortion, but I think the Republicans are equally intransigent on a host of other lamentable positions -- his perspective is one which Democrats need to begin heeding in earnest.

As Gannon illustrates, the Democratic Party has banished from its midst one block of conscientious voters in order to galvanize another -- its "base" -- even though that group has yet to demonstrate that it can effect meaningful results. Even worse, the moral pretext they've used to do so is exceedingly thin. What, after all, is so objectionable to favoring life? The pro-choice argument may be founded on legitimate ethical principles, but castigating the pro-life platform is not. The fact that Democratic leaders have repeatedly engaged in such rhetoric is merely acceding toa vocabulary in which they can be seen as abhorrent at worst and morally neutral at best.

Yet to return to the larger issue here, the Dems need to do a better job of accepting Christianity in its terms rather than theirs. Many liberals like to think of themselves as "enlightened" individuals as compared to "ignorant" believers, and as a result go after religion per se rather than religion as practiced in the public sphere. The line may become blurred at points, but in general the two are distinctly different. One is a faith; the other a politics. Until the Democrats can learn to react only to the latter and not the former, they're going to continue losing theJames P. Gannon's of the world.

Which is a shame, because the sincerety they practice within their belief is precisely the kind of exacting virtue American liberalism could currently use.

Bush and Karimov

2005-06-15T04:26:00.000-04:00

As if Gitmo and Abu Ghraib weren't enough, it seems a new paradox is emerging in the war on terror:

A report that US defense officials helped block a NATO demand for an international probe into last month's killing of protesters in Uzbekistan is proving an air base there to be one of the more diplomatically costly "lily pads" in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's new lean, mean restructuring of the US global military presence.

Located in southeastern Uzbekistan near the border with Afghanistan, the Khanabad base is seen as key to the US war on terror, as a Q&A on the website of the Council of Foriegn Relations, a prominent Washington-based think-tank, explains. "Officially, the role of the troops in Uzbekistan is limited to humanitarian relief and search-and-rescue missions inside Afghanistan, but a joint US Special Forces command center at Khanabad reportedly played a key role in directing the activities of US Special Forces personnel during the early phase of the fall 2001 US attacks on the Taliban [in Afghanistan]. Information about current day-to-day activities of US forces remains shrouded in secrecy."

But continued access to the base means the US must tread carefully in its criticism of Uzbekistan's leader Islam Karimov, who has routinely been accused of brutally stifling dissent, including allegedly covering up the government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month.
The Uzbek government has admitted that 173 people were killed on May 13 in Andijan but independent witnesses and human rights organizations put the number of victims at between 500 and 1,000. Human Rights Watch, for instance, has called the incident a "massacre." Karimov has portrayed the killings as a necessary response to a revolt by Islamic extremists.

Many countries and organizations, including the US, have called for an independent investigation. But The Washington Post reports that US defense officials – together with their Russian counterparts – "helped block a new demand for an international probe" last week.

Personally, I have to confess that I'm not entirely against this, provided that the Uzbek base is as vital as the military seems to think. Further, if used properly, we could use the aid we give Karimov to pressure him into making reforms more consistent with international human rights.

The main trouble arises when U.S. policies towards Karimov are compared with Bush's absolutist rhetoric. Remember his State of the Union address? All that lofty praise for freedom? It's hard to see how supporting one of the few dictators still around is at all accordant with Bush's democracy-at-all-costs doctrine.

In the end, Bush's problem is that, given the manifold exigencies of the world, there's no way to maintain a dogmatic approach to foreign policy and not expose yourself as either hopelessly naive or boldly duplicitous. So if Bush is going to take a nuanced approach with regimes like Karimov's, he had better cut out the rhetoric: as is, he's undermining American foreign policy as a whole.

Product Placement

2005-06-14T17:22:00.000-04:00

Humph. Evidently the post that I thought I'd published just before work today never went through. As my dad would say, such is life.

Thus, an abridged version of the post: Proctor and Gamble, which spends more on advertising than any other company (some $3 billion), decided recently to cut back on upfront purchases of television advertising, particularly when it comes to cable. The reason is twofold: partly to wait and see which shows actually catch on, but mostly to increase spending on product placement.

And I don't like product placement.

There are various reasons why, but the gist is that it collapses, quite blatantly, the creative and financial impulses of a film. To believe that the two are ever fully separate contingencies is of course nonsense, but to consciously and quite conspicuously synthesize the two is only madness of a different kind: it is to communicate to your audience that you don't particularly care if they believe in the reality of the narrative at hand.

In certain instances that can be forgivable, but in general it erodes a kind of cultural trust that underpins the industry as a whole. So while product placement may boost profits in the short-term, in the long run it's going to hurt Hollywood more than it thinks.

Truth and Trust

2005-06-13T09:52:00.000-04:00

Truth and politics have always been rather curiously intertwined, but in a democratic state they are especially so: the truth becomes a political ideal even as it remains, at most, a political instrument. The result is both a populus and a press which are left to grapple constantly with political facts that never quite seem to matter as much as they should.

I was reminded of this again over the weekend, when I encountered two works that either noted or tried to account for an absence of political truth. The first was a superb commencement speech delivered this year at Berkeley by Mark Danner, who mentioned -- albeit largely in passing -- that "never in my experience has frank mendacity so dominated our public life." The second came from yesterday's Times Magazine cover-story on torture, in which Joseph Lelyveld writes that

An implicit understanding has been reached, or so I would argue, between the governed and those who govern: that the prime task is the prevention of future attacks on our own soil as opposed to the punishment of past attacks; that extralegal excesses, not excluding kidnappings and physical abuse, may be necessary in the effort to suppress terrorists seeking to implant sleeper cells in our midst and equip them with deathly substances and bombs; that in pursuit of this goal, much can be forgiven, including big mistakes (the abuse and indefinite detention of innocent people, the tacit annulment -- for foreigners, anyway -- of legal guarantees, not to mention a costly war of dubious relation to the larger struggle); and that the less we know as a people about our secret counterterrorism struggles and strategies, the less we contemplate the possibly ugly consequences, the easier it will be for those in authority to get on with the job of protecting us.

As the story on torture implies, our principal political concern is not with truth but security. The American public is willing to cede its concern with truth provided that either the resultant ignorance or mendacity ensure its safety.

Yet this can only ever be a short-term mandate, and one, furthermore, that must be restricted to a military or investigative sphere. The reason has to do with the proper function of political truth in a democratic society: namely, to foster trust between public representatives and the public itself. Propagate ignorance or dishonesty for too long or in too many ways, and eventually you will erode the public trust in your ability to govern, regardless of whether or not you provided the requisite security.

At present, Bush has expanded the sphere of what might be termed "acceptable prevarication" well beyond its "acceptable" limit. As the Clooney affair demonstrates, mendacity is now a part of his administration's general modus operandi rather than one specific to security concerns only. It may not show now, but in time this will catch up to him: he is eroding not the trust in his performance, but the very possibility of such trust.

Call me an optimist, but I have an abiding faith that that will, in fact, prove his downfall.

Frank Rich and the Limitations of Blogging

2005-06-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

Argument #1 for why blogs won't fully eclipse the traditional editorial media: when it comes to weekly, page-length columns, blogs are not commercially viable. To keep up internet traffic -- and to get sufficient hits on advertising links -- bloggers need to post frequently throughout the day. Yet to compose a formal column, you need the luxury of a weekly or even bi-weekly deadline.

The reason I bring this up is Frank Rich's current column in The New York Times. Over the past week, the blogosphere has done a thorough job of dissecting and analysing the Deep Throat / Mark Felt story. But none of the bloggers I've read have been able to put the story in both its historical and present context as well as Rich has. Doing what Rich does takes time, both in the sense of having several days to write a piece and of knowing that you have 1,000 words to state your case. Neither of those luxuries apply to bloggers, or at least not to those who blog for an income.

I realize to some extent I'm stating the obvious here, but with all the hoopla surrounding blogs lately -- one author I met last week described blogs as having 'reinvented the book' -- I just felt the need today to stress that there are some things blogs cannot do, at least not as effectively as other platforms. Blogs are wonderful things, but so are editorial columns. Formal and professional analysis is just as necessary to a productive national debate as the democratic, informal commentary that blogs provide.

For bloggers to be as efficacious as possible, they really need to keep that in mind.

Debt-Relief

2005-06-11T02:03:00.000-04:00

At long last:

The finance ministers of the world's eight wealthiest nations agreed Saturday on a deal for immediate 100 percent multilateral debt relief totaling $40 billion (33 billion euros) for 18 of the world's poorest countries...

The G8, comprising Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States, agreed to immediately write off $40 billion of debt owed by 18 countries to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the African Development Bank.

The 18 nations include Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

They are the first to qualify for eligibility for a debt relief joint initiative backed by the three financial institutions. The HIPC initiative offers debt relief to the world's most impoverished nations that agree to undertake economic reform.

For those who haven't been following the story, the 18 HIPCs essentially spend so much of their income paying off former debts -- often taken out, furthermore, by previous non-democratic regimes -- that they have little to no income left to combat the health and productivity losses which frequently result from abject poverty.

The only thing I would add: as great as the debt write-off is in theory, the specific nature of the "economic reforms" in question will determine its true value. After all, should the structural reforms turn out to be just as inhibitive as the debt payments, then today's celebratory announcements will seem risible in retrospect.

Perhaps that sentiment will prove inappropriately cynical, but the U.S., the World Bank and the IMF have all insisted on ill-advised reforms in the past (think Argentina). Here's to hoping that this time they prove far more judicious.

Is David Brooks on the Bush Payroll?

2005-06-10T10:57:00.000-04:00

When it comes to the Times columnist David Brooks, I tend to disagree with his viewpoints but respect, appreciate and even enjoy his style.

After reading his column yesterday, however, I can't help but wonder: is Brooks on the government payroll?

In large part I ask the question in jest. From both his columns and a few interviews I've seen, I get the impression that Brooks is someone whose journalistic and personal integrity would proscribe even the idea of receiving payment in exchange for espousing specific political programs.

Nonetheless, at the end of his latest piece on AIDS in Africa, there's a singularly telling line:

This is a world of people trying everything, of doctors from Russia, Egypt, Cuba, Germany and Zimbabwe. Many are backed by money from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, finally doing the work they've always dreamed of doing.

We could be on the verge of a recovery boom.

Does anyone else find the emphasized line -- especially in its context -- the least bit curious?

As Brooks touches on elsewhere, President Bush has quite often been criticized (and in my view, rightly so) for actively promoting policies which facilitate rather than hamper the spread of AIDS. Further, his insistence on unilateral aid delayed its delivery for years, thereby preventing many AIDS victims from receiving what little relief they sought.

Yet what grates me most is the implication that both the money and the relief program are somehow singularly attributable to the President. That is sheer poppycock. Not only has Bush worked against AIDS relief, but the money in question comes from U.S. taxpayers, and the program itself is administered by the U.S. government. If anything, that line should have read "money from the U.S. Emergency Program for AIDS Relief."

To return to my initial point, the fact that a writer as acutely discerning as Brooks should be so atypically exuberant -- and so specific in his praise -- makes me wonder, given the Armstrong scandal earlier this year, whether he isn't perhaps being paid to shill for one the President's programs. Odds are, I'm just being overly cynical, and David Brooks is simply drawing attention to a program he sincerely believes in. But even if that's the case, the fact that I'm doubting Brooks at all illustrates just how much damage the Bush administration's tactics have caused: even someone as reputed as Brooks can now be legitimately associated with one of the administrations more perfidious scandals.

God Bless Oprah

2005-06-09T09:16:00.000-04:00

When I was in the local Barnes & Noble a few days ago, I came across an unexpected site: a storefront display filled with a trilogy of Faulkner novels. Piqued, I looked closer. Turns out, as the world now knows, that Oprah has selected Faulkner as her novelist du mois for June, July, and August.

Although Oprah has since been lambasted by some, I can't help but tip my hat to her on this one. Faulkner is arguably America's most innovative author, one whose effusive style and illicit narratives chronicled the post-bellum South in a way that no historian dared broach until well over a generation later.* If the result is that his prose is often arduous or even inaccessible, I would argue that such difficulty is simply a matter of form following function: Faulkner was delving into a national consciousness that had, to that point, patently refused to confront a set of local mores that were starkly at odds with its national ideals. In that sense, Faulkner anticipated and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement that emerged at the very close of his career, some twenty-five years after he had published his most reputed works.

How anyone can deride Oprah for her choice is beyond me. Yes, many of her readers will be daunted by the difficulty of Faulkner's novels, particularly when it comes to The Sound and the Fury. But at least she's going to get people to try Faulkner, rather than neglect him altogether. And in the meantime, I have to believe that at least a small percentage of her readers will stick it out, and in so doing realize that Faulkner's difficulty only makes him all the more rewarding once you grasp his central concerns.

Summoning the audacity to lead a mass audience headlong into one of America's most well-known but least read authors is no small accomplishment. For that reason -- and believe me, I never thought I would be uttering these words -- I say, God Bless Oprah.
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*I'm thinking here specifically of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, but also of the large body of work in general on the both the Reconstruction and Jim Crowe eras that has proliferated since the 1960s.

The Morality of Economic Growth

2005-06-08T06:02:00.000-04:00

I'm going to get into this more over the next few weeks. But one of the main realizations I had while living in Europe is that economic growth is a principal moral good, and that consequently any liberal platform needs to have at its core policies which foster economic growth. If liberals fail to realize this, then they are ceding a cardinal moral ground to conservatives.

To illustrate this, just look at what's happening today in Germany. According to Deutsche-Welle,

Loud are the cries that youngsters up and down the country are displaying signs of the very conservative values their emancipated parents educated them against. Trend researcher and analyst Roman Retzbach said there is every reason to suggest that Germany is rekindling its relationship with the bourgeoisie...

"What we see now has a lot to do with German unification. The current economic crisis has pushed interest in individual circumstances to the foreground," Boehnke said. "It is easier to be generous about the world and society when everyone is doing well than when people are struggling."

As the passage shows, if liberalism is grounded only in social rights and foreign aid, then its fortunes will be contingent on those of the economy. By contrast, liberalism needs to have pro-growth policies which drive the economy rather than follow it, so that its economic success will grant it both the practical and moral authority to implement and secure its social platform.

I'll articulate how that's feasible a little later. But since many liberals see pro-business policies as utterly anathema to a liberal agenda, for now I just wanted to get the idea that economic growth is a paramount moral good out there.