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Saturday, January 10, 2009

10 Jan 2009 06:20 pm

Mental Health Break

Bob Dylan's "License to Kill" from the Letterman Show in 1984:

10 Jan 2009 05:40 pm

The Pietà Of The Arab World

Fallows' 2003 article on the case of killed Palestinian child Mohammed al-Dura seems all the more timely this week:

The truth about Mohammed al-Dura is important in its own right, because this episode is so raw and vivid in the Arab world and so hazy, if not invisible, in the West. Whatever the course of the occupation of Iraq, the United States has guaranteed an ample future supply of images of Arab suffering. The two explosions in Baghdad markets in the first weeks of the war, killing scores of civilians, offered an initial taste. Even as U.S. officials cautioned that it would take more time and study to determine whether U.S. or Iraqi ordnance had caused the blasts, the Arab media denounced the brutality that created these new martyrs. More of this lies ahead. The saga of Mohammed al-Dura illustrates the way the battles of wartime imagery may play themselves out.

10 Jan 2009 04:37 pm

Elements Of Limerance

What marriage can give you if you're really, really lucky:

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

Continue reading "Elements Of Limerance" »

10 Jan 2009 03:57 pm

Face Of The Day

Picture taken on February 10, 2006 shows wild boars near Allersberg, Bavaria. The number of wild boars in Germany has grown in the last years due to a milder climate. They come closer to cities and private houses, devastate gardens, dig in the rubbish and scare people. By Timm Schamberger/AFP/Getty.

10 Jan 2009 03:28 pm

Neuhaus And Gays

A full accounting of the man's crusade against any recognition in law or even public culture of the dignity and equality of homosexuals has yet to appear in the various obits. But Neuhaus was central to redefining Republicanism as Christianism, to seeing religion as indistinguishable from politics, and to cementing the marginalization and disdain of gay people as a pillar of the Christianist movement.

It was therefore unsurprising that it was Neuhaus to whom president Bush turned when deciding whether to back amending the federal constitution to ensure that gay people were for ever defined as inferior to straight people under the law; and it was Neuhaus' influence that allowed Bush to pursue this agenda without ever even acknowledging the existence of the human beings whose families he was seeking to penalize and stigmatize in the founding document. The homophobia of the Bush administration cannot be understood without understanding how Neuhaus personally pioneered and shaped it.

With Neuhaus as with Ratzinger, the gay issue was central and passionate and personal. This needs stating for the record.

10 Jan 2009 02:45 pm

Meet The Samounis

In contemplating the continuing Gaza offensive, statistics of the civilian dead never quite sink in as a human event. That is why this piece on one single clan caught in the crossfire is useful, if brutal and sobering. One wonders what Washington's opinion would be if thirty members of a single Jewish family were killed - even unintentionally - in the Middle Eastern conflict. No wonder talk of war crimes is surfacing, even in the Wall Street Journal. And Arab opinion seems increasingly moving toward Hamas. The chance of the PA establishing some post-war stability in Gaza certainly seems more remote. And the emergence of a poetntial terrorist training and recruiting ground in a failed and radicalized society in Gaza all the likelier. Friends and supporters of Israel should worry about this.

10 Jan 2009 02:40 pm

On The Palin Express

I haven't commented on the latest circus routine, but it is worth noting David Foster Wallace's Atlantic profile of the circus-master, John Ziegler:

KFI's John Ziegler is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.

10 Jan 2009 01:52 pm

If YouTube Comments Were Live

Or how you can ruin Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5:

10 Jan 2009 01:44 pm

The Cult Of Reagan

Massie opines:

...it is an iron truth of politics that prolonged success sows the seeds of future downfall. Revolutions run out of steam. They cannot be permanent. More damagingly still, what begins as an unorthodox and surprisingly successful approach calcifies into a stubborn orthodoxy that brooks no dissent, even as times and circumstances change.

Continue reading "The Cult Of Reagan" »

10 Jan 2009 01:43 pm

The View From Your Window

Gloucester, Virginia, 5.10 pm.

10 Jan 2009 12:26 pm

Nearly There

The Daily Dish, after a large number of votes, is now neck and neck for lead in the Best Blog category. Thanks so much for the support. As I've said, none of this means very much in the grand scheme of things - and the main benefit of the awards is to surf around and find new blogs worth reading. All the finalists are well worth reading and that includes our chief competitor, Hot Air. But this is your blog as much as ours, and this is one way of helping us (and our ad department) keep the whole show on the road. You can vote for any number of blogs here, and the Dish here. If you already voted more than 24 hours ago, you can vote again. Please do.

10 Jan 2009 12:15 pm

Purple Hearts And Marriage Equality

William Saletan joins the PTSD debate.

10 Jan 2009 10:50 am

What Equality Looks Like

When I came to America from Britain, the gay rights movement was way ahead here of the old country. No longer. Here is a list of the most powerful openly gay people in Britain. The whole list is a staggering contrast with the US. At the top:

1. Spencer Livermore, 32, Director of Political Strategy, 10 Downing Street
2. Nick Brown, 57, Deputy Chief Whip, MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend
3. Peter Mandelson, 54, EU Trade Commissioner. He's back in the cabinet as Business secretary and Brown's main spin doctor.
4. Angela Eagle, 46, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, MP for Wallasey
5. Ben Bradshaw, 47, Minister of State for Health Services, MP for Exeter
6. Andrew Pierce, 46, Assistant Editor, Daily Telegraph. Julian Glover, Matthew Parris partner, is opinion editor al The Guardian.

The bigotry that infects the Republican party and the cynicism and cowardice that dominates the Democrats on this issue prevent such success and integration in America. And yet many of the causes that have prevailed in Britain - marriage equality and military service, for example - were pioneered on this side of the Atlantic.

10 Jan 2009 09:48 am

The Smoke-Free Market

Jacob Grier looks at Arlington, Virginia and sees the benefits of a light touch in anti-smoking regimes:

Arlington makes an interesting test case. It’s one of the wealthiest, most liberal cities in the country, and residents would surely approve a smoking ban if they were allowed to. Fortunately they’re restrained by Virginia law that forbids local anti-smoking ordinances to exceed the state’s own rules. Every year a statewide ban is introduced in the senate and immediately shot down by the tobacco-friendly house.

The fact that popular bars and established restaurants are voluntarily choosing to restrict smoking shows that ban opponents have been right all along: given demand for smokefree environments, profit-seeking business owners will eventually provide them, if not as immediately as a legislative ban would. And as someone who generally prefers bars with clean air, I think that’s fantastic — as long as dive bars like Jay’s or the backroom cigar lounge at EatBar remain free to set their own policies too.

On a related note, Steve Verdon doesn't take kindly to the idea of "third hand smoke."

10 Jan 2009 09:08 am

When Will The Recession End?

It depends who you ask. Financial journalists in aggregate:

It should be noted that the journalists are now very bearish. Asked when the recession would end, 31% said early 2010, 26% said mid-2010, 22% said January 2011, and 21% said even later.  The survey also asked where the DJIA would close on June 30, 2009. The average of the responses was 8639.12, or about 100 points lower than today. Since journalists screwed up so badly last time and are reliably contrary indicators, this might be a signal that we’re in for a quick recovery.

The official line:

The consensus (and the Fed forecast) is that the economy will bottom in Q2 2009 with a sluggish recovery in the 2nd half of this year.

Nouriel Roubini aka "Dr. Doom":

The U.S. recession will last two full years, with gross domestic product falling a cumulative 5%, said Nouriel Roubini, ... For 2009, Roubini predicts GDP will fall 3.4%, with declines in every quarter of the year. The unemployment rate should peak at about 9% in early 2010.

Friday, January 9, 2009

09 Jan 2009 09:04 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

The "shrinking map of Palestine" to which you link is incomplete and inaccurate.  I offer only three examples.

 

First, its initial map of Palestine ignores at least two relevant points.  (A) Under the Ottoman Empire, "Palestine" did not exist as a political entity.  (B) In 1917, the British conquered the land on both sides of the Jordan River. Initially, the Palestine Mandate included both territories.  This is why, before its annexation of the West Bank, the country now known as Jordan was called "Transjordan."  Please see this Wikipedia map.  In 1922 (others say 1923), Britain unilaterally partitioned the land into "Palestine," comprising what today are Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and "Transjordan."  Some extreme Jewish nationalists and messianists claim that that partition either provided the Arabs of Palestine with a homeland ("Jordan is Palestine") or wrongfully deprived Jews of a part of our rightful patrimony -- "the Jordan has two banks, and both are ours."

 

Second, the author omits a map of the partition proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, which the Jewish Agency for Palestine, under David Ben Gurion, accepted, but the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee (under the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin el-Husseini) rejected. You can see how much land that rejection cost them.

Continue reading "Dissent Of The Day" »

09 Jan 2009 08:15 pm

Mental Wounds II

Michael Cohen is disappointed:

This failure to recognize PTSD has real consequences. Not only will those who are suffering not receive the added -- and much-needed -- medical benefits that come to Purple Heart recipients, but the stigma around mental illness in the military is only perpetuated by this action. One can only imagine the chilling effect that this decision will have on soldiers already uncomfortable about facing mental illness.

09 Jan 2009 07:33 pm

Face Of The Day

An injured policemen walks away during clashes with demonstrators from reaching the Egyptian embassy in Algiers on January 09, 2009. Several thousand protestors rallied in Algiers after Friday prayers, burning Israeli flags and denouncing Tel Aviv and its key ally Washington. 'The army and the people are with you Gaza,' they shouted, adding: 'Take us to Gaza.' By Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty.

09 Jan 2009 07:29 pm

Blindly In Support Of Israel

Yglesias makes a few good points:

Most Americans with strong feelings about Israel don't actually have strong feelings about the details of Israeli policy. Had the Israeli government chosen to talk rather than start bombing back in December, Americans would have supported them. Had the Israeli government bombed for a few days and then agreed to a cease-fire, Americans would have supported that. But instead the bombing was followed up by a land invasion, so they supported that instead. And politicians follow a similar lead. As France and Egypt were working on a cease-fire proposal Wednesday, Rep. Steny Hoyer was "scrambling to push out" a nonbinding resolution in support of Israeli policy, hoping to avoid being "out hawked" by House Republicans.

While this sort of politically motivated deference is understandable, it's also incredibly counterproductive.

Continue reading "Blindly In Support Of Israel" »

09 Jan 2009 06:30 pm

The Iran-Hamas Axis

Alex Knapp questions the assumption that Hamas is an Iranian proxy:

...as far as I can determine from researching online, no such collaboration appears to exist. The best I could come up with is that Iran does provide some funding for Hamas, but that funding level is at a paltry $3 million per year. Saudi Arabia and Syria are much bigger funders of Hamas, and some Hamas leaders operate out of Syria. Even at that, though, it’s pretty clear that Hamas is pretty much a home-grown Palestinian organization. They may accept funding and support from other countries, but there’s not much evidence that they act as a “proxy” for any of them.

Alex dukes it out in the comments with readers who aren't buying it.

09 Jan 2009 05:59 pm

A Beard Martyr

The tale of Joseph Palmer, from Fashions in Hair by Richard Corson (1965). More vital beard coverage here. Meanwhile, a step back in bear-parent relations:

09 Jan 2009 05:33 pm

Quote For The Day

"This end of History would be most exhilarating but for the fact, that according to Kojeve, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work or generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes.  The state through which man is said to become reasonably satisfied is, then, the state in which the basis of man’s humanity withers away or in which man loses his humanity.  It is the state of Nietzsche’s ‘last man,’" – Leo Strauss, On Tyranny.

09 Jan 2009 05:21 pm

Passive-Aggressive Notes

Why doesn't this get a blog award? I'm particularly struck by this entry. (You can still vote, by the way.)

09 Jan 2009 05:14 pm

Fisking Rove

Why is anyone printing the views of the most disastrous political strategist of recent times? A take-down of the latest Palin-level delusions.

09 Jan 2009 05:02 pm

The Ethanol Black Hole

Ronald Bailey summarizes a new study:

The Environmental Working Group has just issued a report that finds that 75 percent of all renewable fuels tax subsidies in 2007 went to environmentally damaging corn-ethanol production. In addition, the corn ethanol industry, teetering on the edge of collapse despite billions already wasted in subsidies on it, now wants additional billions for a bailout.

09 Jan 2009 04:45 pm

Mental Wounds

James Joyner agrees with the Pentagon that the Purple Heart should not be awarded for PTSD:

While I take PTSD more seriously than Stacy McCain, who asks “What next? Medals for dysentery?” I share his credulity that this was even under serious consideration.  To award the Purple Heart for psychological scars would be a slap in the face to the long line of combat wounded who have earned the medal the hard way, instantly cheapening it.

I find both judgments devoid of a real understanding of trauma and its profound mental effects. The mind can be wounded too in the line of duty. In the twenty-first century we should have some way of acknowledging that, even if the Purple Heart may not be the right way to go.

09 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

How to make a fruit salad using a deck of cards:

09 Jan 2009 03:44 pm

Expel The Heretics!

Erick Erickson hates, hates, hates Mitch McConnell:

The idea that Mitch McConnell is protecting us from the Democrats is bullcrap.  We should collectively rip off his jaw and shovel the crap back down his throat that he’s been serving us.

09 Jan 2009 03:15 pm

A Geographical Struggle

For those who don't know the area, looking at a map of Palestine's shifting borders helps explain the conflict in Gaza. So does the Economist's latest:

...a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

09 Jan 2009 03:11 pm

Relax And Lift

It's Friday. Time to be mesmerized by camp:

09 Jan 2009 03:00 pm

What Did The Five Fingers Say To The Face?

Slap. A bitchy blog about people who deserve the Rick James treatment. A few offerings: Inaccurate Wikipedia Contributor, Office Food Thief, and Passive Agressive Emoticon User. Expect the author to go the way of LOL Cats and Stuff White People Like and have a book deal soon.

09 Jan 2009 02:52 pm

Another 524,000 Jobs Lost

David Leonhardt studies the unemployment numbers that came out today.

09 Jan 2009 02:28 pm

With Apologies To Strunk And White

The Elements Of Spam.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

09 Jan 2009 02:18 pm

A Post-Ideological Administration?

Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge, is going to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Ezra Klein explains why that's significant:

OIRA is quiet, but important. It's the chokepoint of the entire federal regulatory apparatus. If used wisely, it facilitates the flow, provides welcome analysis and judgment, and aids in implementation. If used as an anti-government weapon, it can do a lot of damage. Sunstein can do real good there. But why would he want it? He's shown a taste for celebrity, and OIRA very much does not provide that.

It's worth remembering that Sunstein has recently achieved great fame for Nudge, a book which basically argues that we need to apply the insights of behavioral economics to the construction of regulation. And Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is the ultimate staging ground for those ideas. Reagan understood that OIRA was the central clearinghouse where you could affect the whole of the regulatory state all at once. He wanted to virtually shut it down. Sunstein wants to "nudge" it.

09 Jan 2009 01:58 pm

The Dish In Play

The Daily Dish, after a large number of votes, is now neck and neck for lead in the Best Blog category. Thanks so much for the support. As I've said, none of this means very much in the grand scheme of things - and the main benefit of the awards is to surf around and find new blogs worth reading. All the finalists are well worth reading and that includes our chief competitor, Hot Air. But this is your blog as much as ours, and this is one way of helping us (and our ad department) keep the whole show on the road. You can vote for any number of blogs here, and the Dish here. If you already voted more than 24 hours ago, you can vote again. Please do. Yes we can!

09 Jan 2009 01:24 pm

Stu Taylor's Argument

My National Journal colleague argues that one source in the Senate Armed Services report on the Bush-Cheney torture program was misquoted. Since he's referring to classified portions of the report that I have no access to, I can't say whether the alleged quip from CIA lawyer Jonathan Fredman - "if the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong" - was said exactly as phrased or not. But the defense Stu offers is telling enough:

This is not to suggest that Fredman denies making all of the controversial statements attributed to him in the committee's report. The report (and the "minutes") may well be accurate in stating that he had described the vaguely written criminal law against torture as banning only physical pain so severe as to cause permanent damage to major organs or body parts and mental pain so severe as to lead to permanent, profound damage to the senses or personality.

So the substance of the claim remains undisputed. And this is what it is: Fredman absurdly narrowed the description of torture to the loss or permanent damage to major body organs (a Gestapo standard the US nonetheless failed to reach), and anything less than this as "enhanced interrogation". Since many prisoners did actually die at American interrogators' hands, and many more were brutalized into insanity, Fredman was accurately describing the line that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld had ordered the CIA and military to dance on. His alleged quip suggests to me that he understood the intent of John Yoo all too well. Is Levin's report discredited because a quip might - and I emphasize might - have been slightly garbled?  Please. As Taykor concedes, the substance of the charges is in no doubt.

The lameness of this defense is replicated in Taylor's attempt to defend Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other war criminals on the Potomac. Consider this paragraph:

The report dismisses with scorn the Bush team's view that terrorists were unprotected by the Geneva Conventions, while ignoring the fact that this view had deep historical roots and was defended by highly respected scholars.(The Supreme Court rejected this position in 2006.)

There may be arguments as to what level of Geneva protection prisoners had and have (I don't favor full POW protections, for example, and never have), but there really is no serious debate about the baseline standards of Article 3 for all prisoners of any kind, standards the Bush administration knowingly violated. Then this argument:

Take the report's conclusion that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's December 2, 2002, authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo, on the recommendation of then-Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II, "influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques, including military working dogs, forced nudity, and stress positions, in Afghanistan and Iraq."

This is true to a point. And some criticism of Rumsfeld and Haynes is warranted. But the report's language might also foster an impression, unsupported by the evidence, that Rumsfeld, Haynes, and other top officials intended to encourage the widespread, wanton abuse of prisoners that Abu Ghraib came to symbolize.

I can appreciate Stu's attempt to be fair-minded here. Seeing people one knows and likes and has covered as war criminals is wrenching.

Continue reading "Stu Taylor's Argument" »

09 Jan 2009 01:09 pm

Why Not Let The Jett Travolta Story Go?

Owen Thomas rounds-up the inconsistencies.

09 Jan 2009 12:47 pm

Touchy Touchy

Richard Perle:

[A]bout the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

09 Jan 2009 12:38 pm

A New Day

The Panetta pick essentially shows that the long, tough struggle to get Obama elected was worth it in a fundamental, vital way. For me, as my endorsement indicated, a return to decency and the rule of law was the overwhelming priority in the last election. In that critical respect, we just won. In Spencer's words:

Second, and more important from a human-rights perspective, was what [Obama] said about torture and interrogations: "We must adhere to our values diligently and with no exceptions." No exceptions. None of this ticking-bomb crap that doesn't exist in the real world, none of these Jack Bauer distortions.

America is back. Know hope.

09 Jan 2009 12:20 pm

Getting Your Internet Money

Simon Dumenco questions whether Huffington Post is worth $200 million, notwithstanding the recently committed $25 million in venture capital money. This stopped me a little short:

Consider, for starters, HuffPo's revenue. As Nat reported, from January through August of last year -- the site's most-trafficked year -- "the site collected just $302,000 in ad revenue, according to an estimate from TNS Media Intelligence."

Gulp. But Huff is expanding into many non-political areas and has great brand recognition, even if it doesn't actually, er, pay the vast majority of people who contribute to it. Dumenco proposes:

Maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them -- for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech staff? Those jobs could be offshored to, I dunno, Third World child labor. If HuffPo takes such steps, I could see the site being worth maybe $4 mil.

The grim reality for online journalism is that we have yet to find a way to make money from it. We need advertizing. 2009 is not the best moment to seek it.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

09 Jan 2009 12:14 pm

Capturing New York City

The New York Times gets creative with new media. This may be its future.

09 Jan 2009 12:08 pm

The View From Your Window

Concord, Massachusetts, 9 am.

09 Jan 2009 11:53 am

The Two Neuhauses

I met Richard John Neuhaus only a couple of times, but he took the second occasion to tell me to my face, with his clerical collar on, that I was "objectively disordered". I remember this rather well because we were in an elevator at the time and I didn't quite know where to look. I have no way to judge him as a person, but admired his candor in a way, and the many glowing personal obits are testament to a man who clearly made great friends and was a witty, funny, humane companion. I knew his work and read it closely and appreciated his influence, which is why I've done what I can to engage and counter it.

Neuhaus began on the very far left and ended up rather quickly on the very far right.

Continue reading "The Two Neuhauses" »

09 Jan 2009 11:26 am

Not Paying Their Fair Share?, Ctd.

Auguste plucks out another data set from this report:

After-tax income
Lowest quintile: 15,300
Second quintile: 33,700
Middle quintile: 50,200
Fourth quintile: 70,300
Percentiles 81-90: 96,100
Percentiles 91-95: 125,500
Percentiles 96-99: 200,500
Percentiles 99.0-99.5:413,300
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 830,100
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 3,191,600
Top 0.01 Percentile: 24,286,300

09 Jan 2009 11:10 am

Obama's Left Flank

Krugman is restless about the stimulus and Gupta (no Michael Moore critics are allowed in Obamaland). And John Conyers chimes in against "Sunjay" referring to Krugman's "Noble" Prize.

09 Jan 2009 10:42 am

Conservative Degeneracy Watch

Michael Weiss:

What would Allan Bloom think about Joe on the frontlines?  Does it even matter anymore?

09 Jan 2009 10:37 am

Proportionality And Terror, Ctd.

A reader writes:

You mentioned in your first post on this that you thought you might be missing something from Just War, and I think I know what it is: the "supreme emergency exemption", a controversial part of the Just War story which posits, as you can probably guess, that in certain grave emergencies you basically do what you need to do to survive, even if it's morally untenable by standard jus in bello norms. As you can imagine, this is controversial stuff: you won't find anything about it in international law, but it does have its supporters, among them Rawls, Walzer, and most famously, Winston Churchill.

Continue reading "Proportionality And Terror, Ctd." »

09 Jan 2009 10:29 am

A Brand Whose Time Has Gone

But it remains true that HIV can help you stay slim, along with a balanced diet and exercise:

Get AYDS! is after the jump:

Continue reading "A Brand Whose Time Has Gone" »

09 Jan 2009 09:56 am

The Logic Of Cheney

It all makes sense in his head:

He also said he doesn't think anyone at the CIA did anything illegal during interrogations. He says they followed the administration's legal opinions.

And the administration lawyers were ordered to find torture legal.

09 Jan 2009 09:39 am

Will Gates Stay Indefinitely?

Some hints he doesn't see himself as a place-holder. Which is a good thing.

09 Jan 2009 09:25 am

Mum And Starbucks, Ctd.

A reader writes:

Just at about the same time you were writing that post, I was at a Starbucks sipping the exact same thing and said to two of my colleagues "this is the same thing that my Amma has been making for me since I was 8 years old and something that I drink every morning even today". Hilarious.

PS Amma is Tamil for mum, but you already figured that.

Another adds:

I pass along this anecdote from my own family - my Irish grandmother on her deathbed calling out "Please, God, just make me a cup of tea."

That will be my mum when the time comes. And it better be scorching hot.

09 Jan 2009 08:47 am

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

I've been casually reading your blog for about a year now, and while I think I understand your motivations behind posting the horrifying pictures of dead children in the most current Israeli-[insert enemy] conflict, it is too just too painful and depressing to view.  Obviously shocking photos bring the issue (war=dead children) straight to the forefront in a way that perhaps television (if they had any cojones), print and radio cannot.  We Americans do not know the tiniest molecule of terror that children live and die with in Gaza.

But as a mother of young children and a human being, I cannot bear to see those pictures. The child's bloody feet at the morgue were almost overwhelming, and while I only caught a glimpse of what looked like a head in rubble, it feels seared in my brain and I can't seem to scrub it off.  My first reaction was to remove your blog from my RSS feed, but I don't want to miss your opinions and messages, just the shocking photos of dead humans.  Perhaps you might provide more warning for us softies in the future?

Point taken. My policy is to air as much of the truth as I can. And one of the benefits of being a blogger is the ability to raise issues and publish images that the MSM won't. I published the Danish cartoons and the beheading of Nick Berg. I have posted countless victims of Jihadism and Islamist sectarianism and the falling bodies of 9/11 victims. And it seems to me that the moral issues involved in thinking through the Gaza blockade and invasion was helped, not hurt, by facing the photographic reality that is sometimes kept from MSM readers. My apologies if you were offended. I'll think about warnings before particularly graphic shots in future.

09 Jan 2009 08:43 am

In Need Of A Hospital

Goldberg has a good idea for Israel.

09 Jan 2009 08:20 am

A Trillion Dollar Gamble

Marc reports on stimulus happenings:

At the end of the day, Obama's name will be associated with an epically large stimulus package that may, in the end, do be too little, too late. Late last year, Obama hoped that the Democratic House and Senate would come to quick agreement on spending, and, by January 20, a bill would be on his desk. But aides say that the scale of the work exceeded their original expectations. It's just not that easy to figure out how to stimulate an economy in this condition. In a normal recession, small tax cuts might  boost savings, which, if the economy were growing, would be fine. But Obama needs Americans to spend, spend, spend, and not to save. And Americans, worried about mortgages, debts and the falling stock market, are keeping their cash in their mattresses. When people save a tax cut, aggregate demand is unaffected. But people, in this deep, deep recession, are demand-starved; they need money to pay for basics like their mortgage payments. The thinking, then, is that no one will save the money.

09 Jan 2009 08:01 am

Eartha Kitt On Bernie Madoff

She died too soon.

09 Jan 2009 07:38 am

Not A Big Fat Idiot?

Weigel speculates:

... once ensconced in the Senate, Franken will likely eschew the racier, angrier jokes that gave him political trouble and become a harder target for Minnesota Republicans, and barely a target at all for national Republicans. It’s not like he’ll become a cultural lightning rod like Rick Santorum or Katherine “Queen Esther” Harris — Franken’s a conventional liberal, which isn’t a controversial thing to be right now.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

08 Jan 2009 08:57 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"What we have learned is that once Islamists actually wield power, their popularity collapses. Religious fanatics do not know how to run countries; their real interests lie elsewhere (you can apply that on a much lesser scale, of course, to the competence of the Bush administration). The place where Shiite Jihadism is least popular? Iran. And remember how al Qaeda managed to turn off the Jordanians after various atrocities; and how they lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis (with the brilliant and brave help of US troops) - after the Bush administration unwittingly gave them a lease of life in that country?"

Here, sadly, is the difference.  Even when Islamists wield power poorly and are unpopular, they don't leave.  Iran is a perfect example.  Even if the mullahs aren't popular, they're as firmly entrenched in power as they ever were.  Yes, the Islamists (or Al Qaeda anyway) are less popular in Jordan now, but they don't control that country.  And it was a lot easier for the Iraqis to turn on Al Qaeda when they had American troops there to help them or at least watch their back.

Even if the rocket attacks on Southern Israel could be tolerated for a long time (this is, of course, a big if), how exactly is Hamas going to be dislodged from power?  They have the guns and the power and the state sponsor in Iran.  Their popularity may suffer (as no doubt it already had) but in power they shall remain.

08 Jan 2009 06:28 pm

Into The Future

Tom Ricks makes a few predictions about Obama's Iraq:

Obama's first year in Iraq is going to be tougher than Bush's last year. Three reasons for that: First, three rounds of elections are scheduled in 2009, and those tend to be violent in Iraq. Second, the easy U.S. troop withdrawals have been made, and the pullouts at the end of this year will be riskier. Finally, none of the basic existential problems facing Iraq have been answered-the power relationships between groups, leadership of the Shiites, the sharing of oil revenue, the status of the disputed city of Kirkuk, to name just the most pressing ones. Compounding the problem will be the incorrect perception of many Americans that the Iraq was all but over when Obama took office.

Despite the conventional wisdom that the war is nearly over, Obama's war in Iraq may last longer than Bush's, which clocks in at a robust 5 years and 10 months. "So now you back in the trap--just that, trapped," to quote Big Boi and Dre. My best guess is that we will have at least 35,000 troops there in 2015, as Obama's likely second term is winding down.

I think Ricks is optimistic. When one contemplates what president Bush has bequeathed - from $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see to a war without end in the Middle East to an intelligence capacity poisoned by torture - the jaw still drops. Did he really do this much damage to America and the world? Yes, he did.

08 Jan 2009 05:52 pm

Prop 8 And The Black Vote, Ctd.

Timothy Kincaid is skeptical of the new National Gay and Lesbian Task Force report (PDF) on prop 8 and race:

The fact is - regardless of how much NGLTF would wish otherwise - that the gay community does not truly have a strategic alliance with black voters. We do not have African American support. We can fully expect that unless something drastically changes, future votes on gay equality will have large percentages of African Americans voting against our rights.

Now there are a number of things we could do.

Continue reading "Prop 8 And The Black Vote, Ctd." »

08 Jan 2009 05:44 pm

My Mum And Starbucks

So I ordered the fancy-ass Tazo London Fog Tea Latte at Starbucks - because a man has to have something to help the petite vanilla bean scones go down. It cost over $3. And when I started to drink it, I got this Proustian feeling. Starbucks have discovered the old cup of cha that my mother reared me and my siblings on. The same strange blend of hot water and milk and sugar; the same black tea steeped a little too long; the same impact on the nose and lungs on a cold damp evening. All that's missing is that ritual: the English zen of making the tea.

My mum (yes, I have to use the English spelling) made around 10 of these a day. We were either drinking tea or the kettle was boiling. If my parents were having a fight, the kids upstairs listening to the uproar would wait until we heard the voices fade and then the all-clear siren: the sound of the water being drawn and the kettle being readied. When I told my poor mother I was a homosexual, it was her first impulse: "Oh my God, I'd better make a cup of tea."

My poor mum. Funny how a cup of tea reminds me how much I love her.

08 Jan 2009 05:36 pm

Shallow Thought

Isn't it great to have conservatives complaining about government spending again? It's been eight long years ...

08 Jan 2009 05:35 pm

A Time For Prayer

Jeffrey Goldberg links to a prayer for the children of Gaza.

08 Jan 2009 05:34 pm

The Gay Liaison

Obama has picked Brian Bond, which makes my day. Brian is a pragmatist but, unlike some others, actually believes in real equality and is prepared to take risks for it. He's a good man. And this is another inspired pick.

08 Jan 2009 05:21 pm

Now This Is Anti-Semitism

It seems to me to be important to allow a debate about the wisdom and morality of Israel's current military incursion without accusing critics of being anti-Semites at the first opportunity. But it is equally important to note when genuine anti-Semitism really does rear its disgusting head. Item One.

08 Jan 2009 05:20 pm

Faces Of The Day

Seagulls sit at sunset and wait for food from passers-by on the promenade of Crosby beach on January 8, 2009 in Crosby, England. Much of the UK has been waking up from a heavy frost and sub zero temperatures with clear skies producing spectacular winter sunrises and sunsets. By Christopher Furlong/Getty.

08 Jan 2009 04:50 pm

Post-Racial?

Blumenthal praises Ambers' new piece on how the Obama campaign approached race. Cornell Belcher, one of Obama's pollsters, gives his take:

Belcher resampled the white voters whose racial animus he had measured before. More than half had voted for McCain, but not by an overwhelming margin. Belcher concluded that Obama might have done better among them had he not been black. In 1992, Belcher noted, 85 percent of voters who said the economy was bad broke for Bill Clinton. In 2008, in a verifiably worse economic climate, only 66 percent of voters who said the economy was bad voted for Barack Obama. “The economy is clearly not the only story. I could argue that the economy wasn’t as big an impact this time around as in 1992,” Belcher told me. “You can’t look at that swath of hard-red counties that actually grew even redder and say that we are post-racial.”

Surely the truth is that there is greater polarization on this than ever before. The range of views and feelings in America on race and gender and sexual orientation now has a far wider span than in the past. Crude bigotry endures at one end while total post-racial consciousness grows at the other. This stretches both across generations and regions, creating a bewilderingly complex picture in which everything you could say about America is true in some respect. Americans, to take the gay example, are probably more homophobic and more accepting of homosexuality than any other modern culture. There is Appallachia and Provincetown. And racially, there are those parts of America that actually trended GOP this past cycle - and then a place like Adams Morgan.

To me, this is an overwhelming reason for federalism. America cannot endure as a coherent polity without more of it.

08 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

A cat owner wondered what his feline friend does at night and set up a time lapse camera. I know a beagle with similar habits:

08 Jan 2009 03:58 pm

Not Paying Their Fair Share?

Greg Mankiw cites a  Congressional Budget Office report (pdf) on effective tax rates. The breakdown:

Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent

Mankiw notes: "These figures include all federal taxes, not just income taxes."

08 Jan 2009 03:36 pm

The Online Right

Does Pajamas Media believe that the future of journalism really belongs to Joe The Plumber? Or that this is really worth publishing? It seems to me that the right is still culturally disoriented. If they are still promoting Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber and Ann Coulter and culture-war resentment as their core message, they are obviously in deep denial about what this election really meant. If their only unifying theme is hatred or reified "elite liberals", they are doomed.

This denial - this calcification of the worst of the right in the last eight years - is the real danger to Republicans. What they need is a grappling with the public policy issues at hand, and an imaginative constructive, conservative approach to them. But the posturing is so much easier, isn't it? And still, one presumes, really lucrative for a tiny few.

08 Jan 2009 03:12 pm

A Green 2009?

Freakonomics hosts a debate: how will clean technology will be affected by the recession? George Tolley:

The major kicker clouding the future remains how high the international price of oil will be; this is a more powerful influence on clean technology adoption than any U.S. policy.

Of course, we get blowback either way. If recovery makes gas more expensive, we bail out Tehran and Moscow. If recession keeps gas prices low, we fail to make the deeper shift toward noncarbon energy that will undermine Tehran and Moscow in the long run.

08 Jan 2009 03:10 pm

Gentle Reminder

It's time to take down that Christmas tree.

08 Jan 2009 02:41 pm

Obligatory Porn Industry Seeks Bailout Post

We might as well get it over with.

08 Jan 2009 02:39 pm

PUMAs Keep On Trucking

Harriet Christian angles for Hillary Clinton's senate seat. You remember her, right?

08 Jan 2009 02:19 pm

The Outing Of Tintin

You knew this was coming.

08 Jan 2009 02:01 pm

Rockets From Lebanon, Ctd.

David Kenner sees the risks:

The rockets were likely fired by Palestinian militant organizations based in the refugee camps, not Hezbollah. Still, the rockets put Hezbollah in an awkward position. Hassan Nasrallah, after announcing that his group "will not abandon the fight or our weapons," cannot easily condemn the rocket attacks. Note that Hezbollah's initial denial of responsibility for the rocket attacks did not come from the group itself, but from Tarek Mitri, the government Information Minister. Nasrallah may not want a war, but he has placed himself in a position where he cannot oppose one.

Continue reading "Rockets From Lebanon, Ctd." »

08 Jan 2009 01:53 pm

Malkin Award Nominee

"Unlike her compadres Jagger, Galloway and Livingstone, who all have notorious histories of Communist fellow-traveling, Lennox is not known for far-left or anti-Israel posturing. Indeed, her political activism has thus far mostly consisted of feel-good stuff like singing at the Live 8 concert and generally raising awareness about global poverty. So one wonders what prompts her current, passionate antipathy towards Israel. Maybe it’s something as petty as the 2000 break-up with her Israeli husband, Uri Fruchtmann?" - Jamie Kirchick, Big Hollywood.

08 Jan 2009 01:26 pm

The Truth About Marriage's History

A reader makes some great points:

With Larison's argument against marriage equality, I think you miss the most fundamental flaw. Larison assumes that changes to marriage are made explicitly.  But birth control and the destigmatization of out-of-wedlock childbirth have changed the institution of marriage as profoundly as no-fault divorce laws.  Throughout the Western world, marriage is no longer invariably associated with procreation.  People have children without being married; people are married with no thought or even possibility of having children. My father & stepmother, for example, married when she was menopausal.

Historically, marriage has never been solely about procreation; it was about extending kinship ties and the concomitant financial security of an extended family.  That's why in the west, in-laws once played such a significant role in selecting mates and in rearing the children.  In the 1700-1800s, when the idea of marriage become associated primarily with the couple, the nuclear family grew in importance, & the industrial revolution changed the role of the extended family in financial security, the nature of marriage changed significantly. Once we stopped being an agrarian society, large families went from being an economic plus to a minus, which is a major reason the push to develop effective birth control became so important.

These bottom-up changes in the definition of marriage far surpass anything proposed by gays seeking equal access to the institution. And that is why the only way to strengthen the older form of marriage so prized by social conservatives would require repealing no-fault divorce laws (not something that likely to happen, insofar as conservative men seem to enjoy their trophy second & third wives as much as liberals do), repealing all opportunities for women to earn wages independently of their husbands, outlawing any corporate policies that allow or encourage people to move away from their parents' homes, etc.  Those kinds of explicit social, legal, and economic changes are just not going to happen. So unplanned change is going to continue in how Americans create & maintain their families. Since a certain amount of instability in family arrangements is beyond the control of conservatives, they'd better look for where they can bolster stability. Do committed relationships between adults foster more stable societies or weaken them? Surely the answer is that they foster stable societies, and for that reason, they should be not just accepted but encouraged.

Why do social conservatives not want to encourage stability, responsibility and commitment among gay Americans? What real policy do they have for gay Americans at all?

08 Jan 2009 01:15 pm

Marc Ambinder On Hulk Hogan

Can you resist?

08 Jan 2009 12:41 pm

The View From Your Window

Glendale, California, 11 am.
 

08 Jan 2009 12:29 pm

Oy, Ctd.

Goldberg quibbles with Daniel Levy:

Palestinians interested in a two-state solution would have viewed the withdrawal in 2005 as a first, important step toward independence. They would have used the billions in aid money that flowed to Gaza to build schools and hospitals and roads and farms on the abandoned land of the Jewish settlements. But they turned those ruined settlements into rocket launching pads. Sharon was wrong to pull out of Gaza without extracting concessions from the Palestinians, and he should have done it in the framework of a negotiation, but that doesn't change the fact that he gave the Palestinians of Gaza what they said they wanted. 

08 Jan 2009 11:48 am

What We Cannot See

Israel's refusal to allow the international press into Gaza means we don't have the best sense of what is actually going on there. But this glimpse is very troubling:

The statement said a team of four Palestine Red Crescent ambulances accompanied by Red Cross representatives made its way to Zeitoun Wednesday where it “found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.”

08 Jan 2009 11:40 am

Daily Fear Mongering

A supervolcano is going to destroy us all!

08 Jan 2009 11:36 am

Rockets From Lebanon

Abu Muqawama believes Hezbollah:

a) I honestly do not believe that Hizballah has an interest in sparking an Israeli counter-attack (just yet) through an action of their own.

b) If this was Hizballah, I would think it would be a little more spectacular than three to four rockets.

c) This has happened before. Some rogue Palestinian group or Sunni group will manage to launch a few rockets into Israel. Hizballah will get a case of the red ass because, hey, resistance along the Blue Line is their territory -- and theirs alone. And as long as the Israelis play it cool, no one else gets hurt.

Totten adds: "CNN suggests they were fired by Palestinians, not by Hezbollah, and I'm guessing they're right."

08 Jan 2009 11:33 am

The Gay Agenda

Jeffrey Toobin profiles Barney Frank:

Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. “We’re going to do three things in Congress,” he told me. “First, a hate-crimes bill—that shouldn’t be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”

I'd take Barney seriously. It's the same agenda as in 1988, and the Human Rights Campaign will ensure that their 20-year-long priorities are taken in order. And not-too-fast either, or the reason for their existence - and the sources of their funding - might dry up. Soldiers can wait; couples should focus on the state level. Pragmatically speaking, it seems dumb to fight this, although I'm against all hate crimes laws and believe that ENDA will mostly be a symbolic piece of legislation.

One small prediction: now the Dems are back in power, the political divisions among the gays will probably widen. That was one unintended consequence of the Bush years: he united the right and left of the gay world into a seamless whole. Now: we get to fight again about our competing visions for a gay future. Back to the 90s we go ...  I look forward to becoming the most annoying conservative on gay lists soon.

08 Jan 2009 11:20 am

The Lowest Point Of The Bush Years

Joe Klein names it.

08 Jan 2009 10:57 am

"The Old Man"

Pro-quarterback Kurt Warner tells us what God looks like to him:

08 Jan 2009 10:55 am

Conversate Amongst Yourselves

Ta-Nehisi does some Ebonics reporting.

08 Jan 2009 10:37 am

Watching The Newshole

Gaza takes center stage.

08 Jan 2009 10:12 am

The Incidents Of War

And so the Gaza conflict isolates Israel even more:

The United Nations says it is halting all aid deliveries to the besieged Gaza Strip. It is citing a series of Israeli attacks on U.N. staff and installations. The announcement came shortly after the driver of a U.N. truck was killed by tank fire as he was headed to an Israeli border crossing to pick up an aid shipment.

The U.N. said the delivery had been coordinated with Israel. The Israeli army has not commented.

And the dog that didn't bark ... ? A few rockets fly in from Lebanon, but Hezbollah denies responsibility. Is it a good thing that Hezbollah didn't fire the rockets? Or that they're lying about it? Or is this not a good thing at all?

                        

08 Jan 2009 10:04 am

Containment And Islamism

Hitch makes an excellent point in his excellent Gaza column:

Life in Islamic Gaza was not such as to induce ecstatic happiness and prosperity among the populace: In common with many fundamentalist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood in its local Palestinian incarnation had badly overplayed its hand. It seems improbable that we'll ever know what would have happened in a free vote, but I think it's safe to say that recent events have further postponed the emergence of a democratic and secular alternative among the Palestinians. I even think it's possible that some people in Israel and some other people in Gaza do not want to see the emergence of such a force, but let me not be cynical.

The truly good news of the last couple of years has been the decline in support for al Qaeda and other Jihadist elements in Muslim public opinion. What we have learned is that once Islamists actually wield power, their popularity collapses. Religious fanatics do not know how to run countries; their real interests lie elsewhere (you can apply that on a much lesser scale, of course, to the competence of the Bush administration). The place where Shiite Jihadism is least popular? Iran. And remember how al Qaeda managed to turn off the Jordanians after various atrocities; and how they lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Iraqis (with the brilliant and brave help of US troops) - after the Bush administration unwittingly gave them a lease of life in that country?

Now: if you're a rational kind of person you might deduce from this that containing Islamism and letting it collapse under its own insanity is certainly a viable policy, given the unsavory alternatives. You might at least consider that taking the bait from these guys and reigniting religious wars might actually be giving them the oxygen they need. And yet prudent containment - even after the Iraq debacle - is still equated with surrender on the hard right. This makes no sense if we actually want to win this war. And we will only win this war when Muslims fight the people whose arguments we keep unwittingly legitimizing.

08 Jan 2009 09:52 am

The Times Lives?

Felix Salmon tangles with Michael Hirschorn.

...many smaller newspapers will close their print editions, which have lost the classified-advertising bread-and-butter revenue stream upon which they've historically relied.

But the New York Times is not a small newspaper. It has an enormous display-advertisement inventory, and sells most of it at high rates. It's also incredibly well placed to go national, as smaller papers close, and become a replacement for people who've lost their local paper and who shudder at the prospect of ever reading USA Today.

James Surowiecki piles on.

08 Jan 2009 09:22 am

Senate Approved

Congress gets into the toy business.

08 Jan 2009 08:53 am

Palin For Senate?

Nate Silver says not to get too excited about this poll. Know fear.

08 Jan 2009 08:40 am

The Best Bad Option?

Ross wades back into the Gaza muck:

In the face of such a calculus, what's Israel to do? The answer is simultaneously simple and impossible: In the midst of a hotly-contested domestic political scene, they need to balance their short-term security concerns (all those rockets flying out of Gaza, in this case) against a twofold long-term goal - the need to incentivize Palestinians to stay within hailing distance of the negotiating table (which is awfully hard to do when you're smashing through their cities in pursuit of Hamas rocketeers), and the need to act unilaterally, in the absence of a plausible negotiating partner, to preserve their state's long-term viability in the face of the looming demographic time bomb (which is awfully hard to do, as Israel has discovered in the wake of the Gaza pull-out, without compromising your short-term security). And it's the Kobayashi Maru-style impossibility of all this that makes something like the Gaza incursion so hard to analyze: It seems like a bad idea, but within the constraints that Israeli leaders operate under it's possible that it's the worst option except for all the others.

08 Jan 2009 08:14 am

Seating Burris

Nate Silver gets it about right:

I think Reid can be criticized for one thing -- for failing to advocate for a special election. But even if the Democrats had made a more earnest push to hold a special election, that would still have provided for the possibility that Blagojevich would attempt to nominate someone in the meantime. What were they supposed to have said? "You know Rod, we really have no legal grounds to block your nominee, so please pretty please with a cherry on top don't do it?"

So does Dave Weigel:

I don’t believe this "Burris will be seated" story. That would involve Harry Reid fumbling and caving. Ridiculous!

Heh. For a legal anaysis of the case see Sandy Levinson. I have to say I remain a skeptic as to whether Fitzgerald really has the goods on the sleazebag Blago, and have no problem with Burris at all.

08 Jan 2009 07:15 am

Prop 8 And The Black Vote

Ta-Nehisi flags a new report.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

07 Jan 2009 06:50 pm

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

As one of your very-weed-friendly-but-not-quite-a-stoner readers, I want to apologize for not letting you know about the hilarity of Pineapple Express before now. 

We were going to tell you, but we totally forgot.

07 Jan 2009 06:11 pm

The End Of White America?

Could it also mean the demise of the GOP? Publius reacts to the notion that Republicans need to twitter more to attract the next generation:

I think the GOP's youth problem is actually a non-white problem. Obama won generally among 18-29 year old voters by 66-32. However, he won white 18-29ers by a more modest +11 margin. Thus, the larger youth gap comes from the fact that McCain (considered a more moderate GOPer) got absolutely shellacked among young non-white voters. Embracing social networking sites isn't going to help much with that particular problem.

And the country ain't gettin' any whiter.

If you haven't check out the Atlantic cover-story on this very theme, here it is.

07 Jan 2009 05:59 pm

Face Of The Day

Mourners of Israeli army Staff Sgt. Alex Mashavisky, who died during combat in Gaza, take cover as a rocket alarm goes on during his funeral on January 07, 2009 in Beer Sheva, Israel. International calls on Israel and Hamas to introduce a renewed ceasefire deal have increased following a day of significant conflict and an increasing death toll. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.

07 Jan 2009 04:46 pm

No Solution

Reihan considers a two state solution:

I really wish that something like John Bolton’s fanciful scenario could work, i.e., hand over an impoverished Gaza with its poisonous political culture to an Egypt that has more than enough on its plate, and hand some slice of the West Bank to a Jordanian state that warily eyes its restive Palestinian majority, all while Israel’s increasingly radicalized Arab minority (many of them self-identified “Israeli Palestinians”) look on. But it clearly won’t.

Continue reading "No Solution" »

07 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

Oh, Blimey, look at the mattress:

07 Jan 2009 03:57 pm

What Happens Then?

Noah Millman's thoughts on the Gaza end-game are well worth your time:

That’s what the war is about, strategically: providing Israel’s government with domestic and international cover for the next phase of unilateral retreat from its post-1967 positions to more defensible ones.

Not terribly inspiring, nor terribly complicated, is it?

07 Jan 2009 03:35 pm

Godless Wimps

Allahpundit isn't too impressed by his fellow atheists' ad campaign:

The good news: They exceeded their fundraising target by 2,700 percent. The bad news: They totally wussed out by tossing “probably” in the slogan. The worst news: They couldn’t think of anything better to do with £135,000 than buy dopey ads on the side of a bus.

07 Jan 2009 03:21 pm

A Pentagon Bail-Out?

Seriously? Taxpayers for Common Sense fisks Martin Feldstein:

In a Wall Street Journal editorial published on Christmas Eve, Feldstein argues that plowing an extra $30 billion into DOD would produce 300,000 jobs. With all due respect to Dr. Feldstein, his reasons do not reflect the well-documented realities of the Pentagon budget.

Continue reading "A Pentagon Bail-Out?" »

07 Jan 2009 02:59 pm

Gender Difference And Marriage, Ctd.

Freddie locks horns with Helen:

...many people see marriage, as Helen does, as bound up in child-rearing and traditional gender norms. The problem is that many people, straight or gay, don't particularly give a shit about child-rearing or traditional gender norms, thanks, and will be subverting them anyway. The difference is that the straight couple gets to subvert them from inside marriage and the gay couple doesn't. This is yet another example of a situation where cultural conservatives are trying to use form and rules to fight a battle that was won in psychology and culture long ago.

Continue reading "Gender Difference And Marriage, Ctd." »

07 Jan 2009 02:52 pm

Two Comedy Recommendations

We're a Netflix-and-beagles marriage so it occasionally behooves me to point out those few occasions when contemporary movie comedy rises above the usual Sandler dreck. I don't know why the critics were luke-warm toward Burn After Reading. Dish readers will love it. But, seriously, I don't know why my stoner readers did not let me know about Pineapple Express before now. Jesus, guys, seriously.

There are very few movies that I have laughed almost continuously through to the point of incapacity. The first Austen Powers, Team America, Borat, Harold and Kumar II, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and now Pineapple Express. Plus: Seth Rogen and James Franco are my finalists for Sexiest Man Alive. Never hurts in a movie, does it? Rent it. It's gnar-gnar.

07 Jan 2009 02:29 pm

Loopholing Just War Theory

Larison joins the debate. A tart point:

I think that the purpose of the standards set forth in just war theory is to make it as difficult as possible to meet them, because war, while sometimes necessary, is a great evil. It should not be easy to go to war even in self-defense, much less should it be easy to escalate or start wars. For the loophole crowd, the reason for invoking just war theory seems to be mainly to gain the political benefits of being able to claim to being on the right side, and preferably without having to meet most of the obligations that just war theory requires (or to lower the standards for meeting those obligations such that virtually every operation will meet them no matter what happens).

There is something striking about how rigorously theocons apply Vatican teaching to questions of private individuals' sexual and emotional relationships and how loosely they apply it when it comes to tempering right-wing governments from embracing torture, economic inequality, the death penalty and pre-emptive war.

07 Jan 2009 02:06 pm

The Lesson Of Iraq

Yglesias laments that many politicos still haven't learned it:

I’m strongly inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that the aggressive use of military force will accomplish their objectives, and also inclined to believe that political actors are much too eager to believe that bloodshed is morally justifiable.

Being chastened is not something Washington ever does well.

07 Jan 2009 01:59 pm

123456

The five hundred most common passwords.

(Hat tip: Slog)

07 Jan 2009 01:37 pm

Quote For The Day

"The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way," - Clay Shirky, the Guardian.

Meanwhile, my colleague Michael Hirschorn has a must-read piece on how the NYT could possibly survive the next few years. It's a grim set of options.

For my part, I really hope the dead-tree edition doesn't die. I'm an early adopter of techy shit and was blogging for years before most people knew what a blog was. But every morning, I still take an hour with the dead-tree NYT, some fresh coffee and a box of ginger snaps. It's a ritual I've maintained for twenty years, but actually feel more grateful for now in the age of the web than before. There is something deeply precious about letting expert editors guide you through the news of the day. I find and read stories serendipitously I would never find online. And I read them through because I trust the editors to have done their job. Yes, you wince and splutter from time to time. But most of the time, even the NYT's critics will concede they also learn a huge amount. Under Bill Keller, I have fallen in love with the paper all over again. And I hope they figure out a way to keep it afloat.

07 Jan 2009 01:08 pm

The Logic Of The IDF

VDH:

To decouple Hamas and Gaza from Arab solidarity, to strengthen in comparison the PA, to discredit somewhat the value of being an Iranian proxy, to reestablish credibility in the IDF and to curb (though unfortunately not end entirely) rocket barrages into Israel, and to establish a future paradigm of overwhelming response to Hamas provocations.

He thinks withdrawal is imminent.

07 Jan 2009 01:08 pm

The View From Your Window

Seattle, Washington, 11.30 am.

07 Jan 2009 12:53 pm

The Damage Begins To Sink In

"Over the past eight years, Bush has done more to undermine conservatism than all of the country’s college faculties, elite media and Hollywood studios put together... Conservatism’s core values rested on notions of a strong national defense and free market economics. Bush has punctured these ideas in a way that transcends the effects of historically anomalous scandals such as Watergate or Clinton’s extramarital affairs. Bush has not only dinged the conservative car, he has totaled it," - Joel Kotkin, Politico.

I did what I could.

07 Jan 2009 12:25 pm

What To Do About Torture?

Marc ponders a truth commission. Some seem to think this is an act of retribution. Actually, it would be a path deliberately avoiding retribution. It would seek transparency and accountability for those acts committed by the Bush administration that crossed the line of core human rights. It would do so as a way to prove that the United States is returning to the rule of law and to the moral norms of international behavior that the US itself pioneered. Prosecutions will probably happen anyway as evidence of war crimes increases as the Bush administration recedes (insiders will be much less afraid of whistle-blowing, as time goes by). It's not as if DOJ can simply ignore evidence of criminality in government:

Obama might not be able to stop Justice from prosecuting CIA officers. If investigations are initiated, the White House can't very well intervene to stop them. It is tempting to think that Obama is granting himself plausible deniability here; the White House can express its opposition to prosecution but say that the U.S. Attorneys' independence is a cornerstone of our legal system, and nothing can be done.

By setting up a truly independent body, bipartisan, above reproach, on the lines of the 9/11 Commission, Obama could insist that his presidential emphasis is on accountability - and not in any way partisanship or revenge.

07 Jan 2009 12:01 pm

Dreaming Of War, Ctd.

The response to violence is, I think, at the core of today's conservative divide. A reader writes:

A reflexive abhorrence of violence of all kinds (war, torture, even the death penalty and abortion) is inherently conservative – part of any meaningful definition of conservatism.  War may be a necessary evil, but a real conservative gives that idea more than lip service – he or she feels the abhorrence in the bones (a feeling that let us down and gave way to excitement for too many of us in the lead up to Iraq). 

But all conservatives (and more than just the neocons) obviously wouldn’t agree with that definition.  Part of the confusion, at least superficially, is that military spending during the cold war was one of the defining issues of the Reagan conservative revolution. Far from being a pro-war position, though, the whole point of buying so many weapons was to never actually use them.  That’s all changed.

I think of Reagan as a conservative of non-violence. I know that's a contestable statement - Grenada, Libya, the contras, etc. - but a conservatism of nonviolence need not be pacifist or unaware of the prudent use of force. But deep down, a conservative wants peace and is content only with peace. Reagan proved this in his second term. He hated nuclear weapons. Once there was a crack in the Soviet empire, he leaped to take advantage of it. He dreamed of a world at peace. This was his vision of the future of mankind.

It is not the dream of some neconservatives, for whom war is the only state of being that brings out public virtu. And constant war to advance what is seen as the good - and stiffen domestic sinews - is something devoutly to be wished. Cheney is a conservative of this stripe. Eisenhower was the opposite. McCain is a warrior; Ron Paul is a conservative of non-violence. At some deep philosophical level, this is the dividing line between Oakeshott and Strauss, as well. (And one has to ponder how Zionism may have contributed to this divide.)

I stand with Oakeshott and Eisenhower. Somehow, we have to recover the prudent, non-pacifist conservatism of non-violence and freedom. If not in America, where?

07 Jan 2009 11:40 am

Half-Right

Steve Coll dissents on Panetta.

07 Jan 2009 11:33 am

Kramer vs Cole

One of those eternal blog-spats that gives you a reason to get up in the morning. Or did I just reveal too much about my pitiful life?

07 Jan 2009 11:19 am

When Tucker Carlson Found God

He was reading a book called "Wishful Thinking."

07 Jan 2009 11:07 am

Cool Ad Watch

A German ad campaign - with impeccable placement - against bulimia:

07 Jan 2009 10:55 am

Er, Yes

Mark Murray:

Does the fact that Feinstein so quickly backed down make the point of those that thought she was mostly angry about Panetta because she wasn't told in advance?

Or, as Harry Reid put it,

"I think you need better reasons for coming out against somebody than somebody didn't call you."

In the US Senate? Surely he jests.

07 Jan 2009 10:29 am

Ross, Holbrooke, Haass

A three-some for Obama.

07 Jan 2009 10:28 am

Graham, Roberts, Bayh

A three-some for Panetta.

07 Jan 2009 10:27 am

Morning After Pill Dogma

Saletan fisks the Vatican. Ross gets this right:

I am bound to accept the Church's moral judgment that the taking of innocent human life at any stage from conception to natural death is a grave evil (and would not have become a Catholic if I did not), but that I am not bound to accept a Vatican document's summary of where the science stands regarding whether the morning-after pill does in fact take a life, by preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo.

The Vatican's inability and/or refusal to understand the science of procreation is something I deal with in great detail in The Conservative Soul.

07 Jan 2009 10:19 am

Panetta's Qualifications

Here's former CIA deputy director John McLaughlin:

"While intelligence experience is obviously desired, it is not absolutely essential. Other qualities are capacity to make decisions when there are no easy options and to take responsibility for them, situational awareness about the secondary and tertiary consequences of those decisions, good judgment about what is right, true, or advisable when presented with conflicting assessments -- a common situation in a field where you are almost always dealing with incomplete information.  An instinct for dealing with people -- at the core of the job.  The capacity to communicate clearly to a work force that needs an understanding of the larger picture in order to fit their discrete jobs into the broader mission. From what I know of Panetta, he should be good at most of these things."

It looks as if they're retaining Kappes as his deputy. But remember: the direct CIA experience thing has to be balanced against the torture inheritance. It was never going to be an easy balance, between continuity and change at the CIA. But I fail to see how Panetta-Kappes isn't about as good a combo as any.

07 Jan 2009 09:14 am

Quote For The Day

"The African in him is the one who is making him ask, 'What is the consensus?' That’s the African way at its best. The good leader in Africa is the leader who keeps quiet and lets others speak and then says at the end, 'I have heard you all, and this is our mind,'" - Desmond Tutu on Obama.

07 Jan 2009 08:41 am

Why A Bipartisan Stimulus?

Duh.

07 Jan 2009 08:28 am

On Not Taking Sides

Ezra Klein cites David Miller:

In these conversations, I always end up back at Aaron David Miller's insight: It is very hard to reconcile the interests of a threatened nation and an occupied one. But it is impossible if you only understand the interests of the threatened and refuse to admit the grievances of the occupied. As Levy concludes, "American politicians need to find a language that at the same time is both staunchly supportive of Israel and its security but also able to convincingly empathize with the Palestinians and their predicament." Without that, you can't broker peace. All you can do is take sides.

Yes, but Jeffrey Goldberg's words from a few months ago also ring true:

...comprehensive peace will come about when the Arab side understands clearly that America has red lines of its own. The Palestinians suffer sometimes from the irrational hope that America's support for Israel is mutable, and that the key to success is to bring about direct American pressure on Israel. This won't happen for any number of reasons, and...American pressure will only encourage Israeli politicians to descend into the bunker.

07 Jan 2009 07:59 am

The Opening Act

Tyler Cowen is pleased that tax cuts are making up such a large part of Obama's stimulus:

It's already a talking point that "the Democrats have lost their nerve" but the reality is not so devious.  Obama wishes to deliver on his pledge to cut taxes (always electorally popular) and upon close inspection the economic team probably hasn't found a lot of first-year stimulus spending it likes.  That leads to this obvious policy conclusion and of course it is very good news.  No, I do not think these tax cuts will drive recovery but a) less money will be wasted, and b) it shows that the Obama team is willing to flinch and be realistic, not just as a final compromise but indeed as an opening gambit.

I don't want to jinx it, but so far, the Obama transition has been two things - focused fundamentally on what works, and finding a way to bring as many people into the coalition as possible. It's immensely impressive.

07 Jan 2009 07:42 am

Why Ike Was Right

Stephen Walt and Matt Yglesias explain.

07 Jan 2009 07:30 am

Bagram

A reader writes:

Thanks to you, I've been reading up on Bagram all day long.  And I've gotten more and more depressed. The torture and abuse that went on there is chilling. But one thing really stands out:

"The torture and homicides took place at the military detention center known as the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which had been built by the Soviets as an aircraft machine shop during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1980-1989). A concrete-and-sheet metal facility that was retrofitted with wire pens and wooden isolation cells, the center is part of Bagram Air Base in the ancient city of Bagram near Charikar in Parvan, Afghanistan."

We took a facility built by the Soviets, and we turned it into a Gulag. Despite Obama's promise and pledges of reform, this is a stain that will not wash away.  Ever.

Bush and Cheney took Saddam's Abu Ghraib and made it a torture zone under American control. They took Soviet sites in Eastern Europe and revived their record of torture, under the American flag. Bagram was part of a pattern. And people wonder why a person untainted by the past should be CIA director.

07 Jan 2009 06:47 am

Size Matters

Arnold Kling wants a smaller stimulus.

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

06 Jan 2009 09:34 pm

The Reality Of War, Ctd.

Jeffrey Goldberg makes an important point:

One story the media isn't telling, because it's impossible to get this story in these circumstances (especially because Israel stupidly won't allow foreign reporters into Gaza) is how much resentment the Hamas policy of using Palestinians as human shields causes among Gaza civilians. Early reports indicate that Hamas mortar teams were firing from the UN School. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

One more thing, speaking of pornography -- we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? 

Continue reading "The Reality Of War, Ctd." »

06 Jan 2009 08:36 pm

Invading Blind

Today Marc Lynch attended a lecture by Sallai Meridor, Israel's Ambassador to the United States:

Asked three times by audience members, Meridor simply could not offer any plausible explanation as to how its military campaign in Gaza would achieve its stated goals. Indeed, he at times seemed to offer this absence of strategy as a virtue, as evidence that the war had been forced upon Israel rather than chosen: "we have no grand political scheme... we were forced to defend ourselves to provide better security, period." With current estimates of 550 Palestinians dead and 2500 wounded, and the region in turmoil, the absence of strategy is not a virtue.

06 Jan 2009 07:34 pm

A Propaganda Wave

From the AP:

More than 70,000 Iranian students have volunteered to carry out suicide bombings against Israel, Iran's state news agency reported Monday, but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not responded to their request for permission.

Volunteer suicide groups have made similar requests in the past and the government never responded, giving the campaigns more of the feel of propaganda.

06 Jan 2009 07:06 pm

Getting The Panetta Pick

A useful reading of the tea-leaves from Fred Kaplan. Then this from Les Gelb:

 

The CIA veterans may never give up their fight against Panetta, but at least the Congress and the press should not let themselves be hoodwinked into believing that Panetta isn’t as good as a pro, and for purposes of doing what needs to be done at the CIA, better than a pro.

06 Jan 2009 06:48 pm

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

You overlooked an important element in Bush's plan for funding AIDS services organizations. I think your statement that Bush made a "genuine attempt to figure out what worked in Africa and went with it," is misleading. Bush's AIDS policy was in many cases ruled by a commitment to something called the Anti-Prostitution Pledge, which denied services to all AIDS organizations that worked with or on behalf of sex workers in Africa and the rest of the world.

This moralistic approach is impractical when it comes to AIDS treatment and prevention.

Continue reading "Dissent Of The Day" »

06 Jan 2009 05:48 pm

Misinformation?

Daniel Levy weighs in:

There is also some appalling misinformation being spread – one frequently hears the claim that Israel left Gaza in 2005 in order to build peace but all it received was terror.  I appreciate the Gaza evacuation of 2005 and how difficult it was  and I in no way condone the launching of rockets against civilian targets from Gaza but the unilateral nature of the Gaza withdrawal was a mistake (and I said it at the time) and I don't appreciate this rewriting of history.  Israel at the time did not evacuate Gaza as part of the peace process.

Continue reading "Misinformation?" »

06 Jan 2009 05:16 pm

Murkowski 57; Palin 33

A new poll in Alaska on a possible Senate race. Know hope.

06 Jan 2009 05:03 pm

Proportionality And Terror, Ctd.

Law blogger Kevin Heller considers proportionality as defined by the UN charter:

Proportionality is not measured by comparing the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas attacks to the number of Hamas “terrorists” killed by Israeli attacks; it is determined by comparing the number of Palestinian civilians killed by a specific Israeli attack relative to the military advantage gained by that attack.  As Article 51(5) of the First Additional Protocol says, an attack is indiscriminate — and thus prohibited by IHL — if it “may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”  Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the Rome Statute is worded similarly, although it requires the incidental damage be “clearly excessive,” not just “excessive.”

Whether an Israeli attack is disproportionate, therefore, is completely independent of the lethality of Hamas’s attacks. The proportionality analysis is the same if Hamas’s attacks kill one Israeli civilian or 1,000. In either case, IHL obligates Israel to respond only with attacks that, on their own merits, are proportionate.

Noah Pollak takes this to the following conclusion:

This is where Andrew’s critique conspicuously runs aground, and for a very simple reason: Hamas is still firing rockets; ipso facto, Israel is not using excessive force.

Heller helps and makes an important point about the core relationship between means and ends. Noah, I think, goes too far in suggesting that a single Hamas rocket in what would now be self-defense justifies anything further the Israelis want to do. I agree with Ross that seeing no just war distinction between unintended but still unavoidable civilian casualties and the wanton terrorism of Hamas makes just war theory untenable in the modern world.

The just war question here might therefore be better honed in the following way: does the massively one-sided violence of the past 11 days offer a chance for a real peace that could justify the death and trauma we are watching? As Ross and others have pointed out, this is, at this present moment, unknowable. But from a moral perspective, I think I should adjust my take a little and concede that you could make a weak but real case for the morality of the Israeli attack if it really changed the situation into one that made peace possible.

I guess that's my problem. I don't see, frankly, how another ever-more brutal crushing will achieve the goal Israel seeks. The familiar points about who would inherit Gaza from Hamas still operate. But the deeper point, made very well by Bob Kaplan, is that Hamas' real advantage is not military; it's ideological. Sometimes, in these asymmetric cases, clearly excessive military action can strengthen the ideological power of the enemy and actually make peace more, rather than less, distant.

To put it bluntly: dead Palestinian children, we can all agree, do not help Israel, even if you were to ascribe moral responsibility for every single one to Hamas.

Continue reading "Proportionality And Terror, Ctd." »

06 Jan 2009 04:32 pm

Breaking The Silence

Obama talks briefly about events in Gaza:

The loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I’ll have plenty to say about the issue.

06 Jan 2009 04:32 pm

Figures

Eugene Volokh finds an old law still in use.

06 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

Procrastination from TutoxNet on Vimeo.

06 Jan 2009 04:08 pm

The Evil Of Hamas

Michael Weiss makes the case that Hamas isn't just a threat to Jews:

One has heard about the cult of death that underwrites Islamic attentats, and it would certainly not strike most Western ears as newsworthy that Hamas is a fundamentally anti-Semitic movement. But that it is openly dedicated to the "annihilation of America" should hit home with sympathizers and apologists, eager to invoke sinister and histrionic moral equivalences between the current Israeli incursion into Gaza and 9/11, and eager to view Hamas as pledged to little more than national "resistance," albeit draped in colorful religious garb. If anything, Hamas' anti-American sentiments reflect Iran's supervisory role as both the party's main financier and as its imperial guardian in an ideological war that extends well beyond the borders of the modern Levant.

06 Jan 2009 03:54 pm

Quote For The Day II

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them" -- George Orwell. M.J. Rosenberg applies this quote to Gaza, but it also reminds one of events in the US these last eight years.

06 Jan 2009 03:18 pm

Dreaming Of War

Joe Klein fisks Kristol:

In the end, Kristol's saber-rattling is the death rattle of a simplistic, extremist ideology that has caused the U.S. great damage. A more sensible, centrist approach to international affairs won't have the bang or melodrama of military kinetics. It will take time to work, if it works. But it also won't have the bloodshed and torture that have stained our nation's history these past eight years.

The longer I observe the neocons the more I realize that for many of them, war is a natural state of being, even a vocation. Some actually view a martial society as more noble than a peaceful one, and believe in war as both morally good and socially beneficial. I am much more interested in conservatism as a temperament that recoils from violence, rather than being attracted to it. And while I see war as a necessary evil, I have been forced by the Iraq debacle into a much better grasp of its limits and its potential for catastrophe. Others seem emboldened by an occupation they are now declaring a "success."

06 Jan 2009 03:04 pm

Not Safe For Dogs

Or any other creature with a spidey sense:

Your video of Terry McAuliffe just popped up in my Google Reader.  My dog is laying behind my chair.  As soon as I started the video, Charlie (a hound mutt from the shelter) started growling at my computer.  I've never seen him do that before.  I've always been kinda blasé about Terry, but I think my dog just judged him better than I ever could have. As soon as I turned off the video, he stopped growling.

06 Jan 2009 03:03 pm

Proportionality

Bret Stephens proposes:

For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of "proportionality" is just the endgame that Israel needs.

How is that an "endgame" exactly? Isn't it actually a formula for the war never ending?

06 Jan 2009 02:49 pm

Alaska News

Claims that the case against Sherry Johnston was slowed for political reasons have been withdrawn. Levi Johnston has quit his new job because it requires a high school diploma:

Levi figures it's best to leave the job and pursue his education, Keith Johnston said. Levi's not eligible for the apprenticeship program without the diploma, he said.

"You guys are watching him so tightly," Johnston said, referring to the media. "He's being treated different than an average 18-year-old kid. He has to do everything by the book now."

       

06 Jan 2009 02:44 pm

Children With Epilepsy

A helpful and moving piece about the agonizing choices parents often have to make.

06 Jan 2009 02:42 pm

Quote For The Day

"Scientology is unalterably opposed, as a matter of religious belief, to the practice of psychiatry, and espouses as a religious belief that the study of the mind and the healing of mentally caused ills should not be alienated from religion or condoned in nonreligious fields.

Continue reading "Quote For The Day" »

06 Jan 2009 02:30 pm

Bringing DiFi Around

Elana Schor:

Feinstein seemed to acknowledge the Obama team's desire to find a CIA director who would signal an end to the abusive interrogation tactics of the Bush years. "We all want a break with the past," she told the reporters milling around her in the Senate. "I was the one who went into the conference committee" between the House and the Senate last year with an amendment that would use the Army Field Manual as the universal standard for detainee interrogations, she added.

Meanwhile, Roberts is fine with it. Scott Horton thinks the Blair-Panetta combo is inspired. Me too.

06 Jan 2009 02:25 pm

Cutting Deep Powder With Jesus

This is for Trey Parker and Matt Stone:

06 Jan 2009 02:14 pm

The GOP's Number One Priority

Ruffini dreams:

Right now, I yearn for the legislative acumen -- and in this case, the spine -- of Bob Dole, who rallied even John Chafee -- Lincoln's father -- to oppose the 1993 Clinton stimulus... The GOP's number one priority politically is to set into motion a series of events that will make Obama look more ineffective, partisan, and unpopular than he is today. Playing hard-to-get on the stimulus is one way to do it. And we need to set the stage for a unified and effective Republican opposition that will actually fight from top to bottom.

06 Jan 2009 02:09 pm

A Single Giant Button

Apple's new "key-board-free" laptop.

06 Jan 2009 01:55 pm

Block That Metaphor

"Suppose a dozen clowns die in a circus fire. Not funny. Now, if a dozen clowns burst into flames while attempting in unison to program their VCR: funnier. Now suppose a dozen clowns beat each other to death with whole, unfrozen bluefin tuna: goddamn hilarious. (Let it be said, for the record, that I am indifferent to clowns, except that I have it on good authority that circus clowns have no souls.) Watching the legal wranglers of torture, "preemptive" military action and Unitary Executive-ism pen an ode to the proper encumbrance of executive power? It is at least clown-and-tuna funny," - Hunter at Daily Kos.

06 Jan 2009 01:39 pm

Paralysis

Jeffrey Goldberg explains why he isn't writing more about Gaza.

06 Jan 2009 01:25 pm

Colorado

Not so redneck any more.

06 Jan 2009 01:18 pm

Fart-A-Friend

The iPhone's most popular and least celebrated new app.

06 Jan 2009 01:07 pm

The Other Gitmo

It's called Bagram. The very name makes one shudder at this point.

06 Jan 2009 12:51 pm

Gender Difference And Marriage

Helen Rittelmeyer has a couple of interesting posts up on marriage questions. As Helen may know, I've long been a believer in the biological power of gender. (See my essay on testosterone from a while back.) I think gender differences are obviously culturally created to some extent, but not all the way down. There is a profound biological difference between men and women that affects our behavior and minds in ways that are irreducible and unchangeable. It is also quite clear, it seems to me, that a marriage between a man and a woman, and between a man and a man, and between a woman and a woman, is each going to have distinct characteristics. They will each be experientially different experiences, and find different ways to endure, and have different problems to tackle. What love brings together gender complicates. I don't need to tell heterosexuals that.

But, for that reason, I don't believe this change will reinforce theories that gender is entirely a social construction. Nothing exposes the power of gender than seeing a subculture or an institution that is of one gender alone. And, in fact, you will find no greater manifestation of gender's reach beyond culture than examining the differences between gay male life and lesbian life. (To throw one true cliche around: Men are generally horndogs; women generally more emotionally mature; in the US most same-sex marriages are therefore unsurprisingly lesbian and a high proportion of gay male marriages occur -again unsurprisingly - among the older and more settled - less testosterone to fuck it up.) All of which is to say a male-male couple will doubtless have a different core dynamic than female-female marriage and male-female marriage (although the demands of commitment and responsibility tug us all in the same direction). But, to return to Helen, bringing this out into the open does not disprove gender difference; it may well actually help illuminate how men and women do actually differ in terms of some core issues, such as intimacy, love, commitment, sex, and so on. (There is, of course, enormous diversity within these categories too - I'm not denying that, merely saying that the deeper, gender issues are at play as well.)

Does this mean that somehow gay marriages will alter the gender dynamics of straight ones? If you believe in gender difference as biological at its core, the answer is no. The power of gender in the lives of 97 percent of the population is never going to affected deeply by cultural acceptance of the homosexual minority. That's why it's odd to find conservatives so frightened by the prospect. Could the emergence of dramatically equal forms of marriage strengthen the model of male-female equality within straight marriage and undermine slightly the fundamentalist insistence on the subordination of wives? Yes. But only in so far as 1 percent of marriages change the 99 percent.

And this is surely one of the biggest blindspots of the Christianist right.

Continue reading "Gender Difference And Marriage" »

06 Jan 2009 12:46 pm

Feinstein and Rockefeller

The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that the snub of these two was a deliberate signal. Their oversight of Bush's war crimes was pathetic. Ditto Harman. Obama is telling us he is serious about both improving intelligence and drawing a clear line - for the entire world to see - between the United States and the war criminals who will soon be leaving office, and those who enabled them. Meanwhile, more support from the smart right.

06 Jan 2009 12:21 pm

Tim Roemer and Panetta

Ambers has the interview:

Somebody with Leon Panetta's public experience, his national security experience as chief of staff, his ability to build trust between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, and his openness to be able to communicate with the public. All these skills will be needed in this new job.

Ambers rates the chances of confirmation at 80 percent.

06 Jan 2009 12:15 pm

Bob Gates And Leon Panetta

Crowley discovers a clue to the puzzle.

06 Jan 2009 12:11 pm

Robert Baer On Panetta

Another supporter who sees the key rationale:

Leading Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee Jay Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein have already criticized the choice of Panetta, claiming the CIA needs to be led by an experienced intelligence professional. But right now political clout, and the ability to be a strong advocate for the CIA, far outweighs the virtues of being a professional spy, someone who knows the difference between a "live drop" and a "dead drop." A professional from the ranks would be eaten up by Hillary Clinton at State or Bob Gates at Defense. Or end up like Bill Clinton's CIA Director Jim Woolsey, shut out of the White House, ignored and irrelevant.

06 Jan 2009 11:47 am

Iraq's Free Press

Alive In Baghdad reports on the explosion of newspapers in Iraq.

06 Jan 2009 11:30 am

The Panetta Pick

Laura Rozen talks to various intelligence insiders:

The Panetta choice makes sense to him, said Philip Zelikow, a former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and Foreign Policy writer). "The issues of presidential trust and clean hands are, at this moment in history, most important," Zelikow said by e-mail. "And even an 'intelligence professional' would have to rely on others in many ways. ... So Obama and his team have made a certain kind of tradeoff."

06 Jan 2009 11:25 am

The View From Your Window

Moscow, Russia, 3 pm.

06 Jan 2009 11:03 am

When Tanks Meet Humans

Reports are coming in of a particularly grisly encounter at a school in Gaza. Maybe 40 dead in a U.N. school. For a glimpse of how these images are being seen in the global media - very different from American sources - check this story out. The carnage is a cable news 24 hour story:

The cycle begins with rooftop-mounted cameras, capturing the air raids live. After moments of quiet, thunderous bombing commences and plumes of smoke rise over the skyline.

Continue reading "When Tanks Meet Humans" »

06 Jan 2009 10:50 am

Neocons For Panetta

First Ledeen, now Doug Feith and Richard Perle. Obama is scrambling things ideologically again. In a good way.

06 Jan 2009 10:41 am

Into The Van

Jett Travolta's body has been turned into ashes. No details of the autopsy - monitored by Travolta's own physician - have been announced. Travolta himself piloted the plane as it landed in Florida with his son's remains:

The plane was met by a large van with logos and insignia from the Church of Scientology on the tarmac, and a source said everyone who disembarked, got into the van.

06 Jan 2009 10:38 am

Purple Reign

Weigel studies the initial numbers from the Swing State Project's tally of congressional districts' voting habits:

In just the preliminary numbers put together by Swing State Project, there are 24 Republicans whose districts voted for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008. Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, now represents a "blue" district. So does Mary Bono Mack, whose Palm Springs, California district has not been at risk since her late husband, Sonny Bono, won it 14 years ago.

Continue reading "Purple Reign" »

06 Jan 2009 10:20 am

A New War

Petraeus gives an interesting interview to Foreign Policy. The interviewer asks whether Iraq and Afghanistan are fundamentally different from prior wars. Petraeus replies:

We looked at this issue closely when we were drafting the counterinsurgency manual. And we concluded that some aspects of contemporary extremist tactics are, indeed, new. If you look, as we did, at what [French military officer] David Galula faced in Algeria, you find, obviously, that he and his colleagues did not have to deal with a transnational extremist network enabled by access to the Internet. Today, extremist media cells recruit, exhort, train, share expertise, and generate resources in cyberspace. The incidence of very lethal suicide bombers and massive car bombs is vastly higher today. It seems as if suicide car bombs have become the precision-guided munition of modern insurgents and extremists. And while there has been a religious component in many insurgencies, the extremist nature of the particular enemy we face seems unprecedented in recent memory.

(Hat tip: Crowley)

06 Jan 2009 09:50 am

Children, Sickness And Parents, Ctd.

A reader writes:

In your post, "Children, Sickness and Parents," you asked what rights children have when their parents seek to deny them medical care for religious or ideological reasons.  As the author of an article on this topic that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in April, 1995 ("Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church," ) and a subsequent book, God's Perfect Child:  Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (Metropolitan Books, 1999), I can answer that question. 

The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts, which concerned a Jehovah's Witness convicted of violating state child labor laws after insisting that her religious beliefs required her child to distribute Witness literature at night, that "the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death... Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves.  But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children." 

Continue reading "Children, Sickness And Parents, Ctd." »

06 Jan 2009 09:20 am

Bush's AIDS Legacy

Jay Lefkowitz provides a fascinating insider's account. What's impressive about it - and what the outgoing president should always be respected and admired for - is the combination of moral clarity and pragmatism. They genuinely tried to figure out what worked in Africa and went with it. Fauci and O'Neill also helped avoid some dead-ends, like the chimera of a vaccine, and focused on treatments that could and did save and restore countless lives. In the balance against the countless lives that ended because of decisions made by George W. Bush in wartime, these lives lived must also be taken into account. He was a torturer and a man who cared about the victims of AIDS.

06 Jan 2009 09:14 am

The Opposition To Panetta

Josh is onto something:

I'm not certain what I think about this appointment yet. But on first blush, the nature of the opposition makes me more inclined to support it.

That strikes me as exactly right. Feinstein and Rockefeller sense a real individual with real clout at the agency, whom they cannot control. There may have been a lack of foresight here in not phoning Feinstein ahead of time. But it is also indisputable that many leading intelligence Democrats were deeply complicit in the Bush torture program and his illegal wire-tapping. It was just as important for the president-elect to pick someone not beholden to them either.

Some are now citing Panetta's appointment as somehow "political" rather than substantive. But it's obvious that Obama has actually found someone both capable of running a bureaucracy as complex as the CIA, of a stature to be approved by the Congress and maintain good relations, and with the good sense to know how interrogation based on torture is never right and much less effective than legal methods.

It remains an inspired choice. And the critics help show why.

06 Jan 2009 08:51 am

The Logic Of Quagmire

Max Boot explains:

The odds are that once Israeli troops leave, Hamas will rebuild its infrastructure, forcing the Israelis to go back in the future. This is the definition of a quagmire, yet Israel has no choice but to keep doing what it's doing. Unlike the French in Algeria or the Americans in Vietnam, it cannot simply pack its bags and go home.

And where on this scale would Americans in today's Iraq fall? Are we Israel in Gaza or France in Algeria? Or do we not really have as good an excuse as either?

06 Jan 2009 08:34 am

Fighting The Good Fight

Ross tackles just war theory:

My own view, though, is that just war theory has always been in crisis, and that modernity has only heightened the contradictions - because almost all of the standards the theory sets are so malleable in practice, and so difficult to apply consistently to the complexity of war and statecraft. Consider the Catechism's definition: Who gets to define what sort of harm is "lasting, grave, and certain" enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict "have been shown to be impractical or ineffective"? Doesn't almost everybody enter a war convinced they have "serious prospects of success"? ...

This doesn't make the theory useless by any stretch, but it's useful primarily because it provides a broad framework of restraint: If you're thinking about questions of justice, you're less likely to commit an injustice, even if no perfect consensus exists on the distinction between a licit campaign and an illicit one.

And if you need to win an election ... ?

06 Jan 2009 08:33 am

The Question At Hand

Sydney Freedberg asks whether Israel is a liability to the US:

Yes, Israel and America cooperate on counterterrorism, but how many of the groups on which Israel provides intelligence would be gunning for the United States if it wasn't supporting Israel? Setting aside for a moment the emotional and religious anchors of the U.S.-Israel alliance, what is its value to the United States in practical, realpolitik terms?

Michael Scheuer, Patrick Lang, Bruce Hoffman, Dov S. Zakheim, and James Carafano respond.

06 Jan 2009 08:01 am

Total Asshole Runs For Governor

Terry McAuliffe announces:

06 Jan 2009 07:52 am

A Hack Blockade

How do we know what's actually happening? Journalists are still unable to get into Gaza. Dion Nissenbaum reports:

For the moment, the only comprehensive coverage coming out of Gaza is from Al Jazeera English, the young channel still not available on US satellite channels.

06 Jan 2009 07:18 am

Yglesias Award Nominee

"So let’s get this straight: Robert Gates will be the Defense Secretary, we’re ramping up U.S. forces in Afghanistan and providing a reasonable period of time for a hand-off in Iraq, there isn’t going to be a windfall oil profits tax or income tax hike but there is going to be a huge set of business tax cuts – and Rick Warren is giving the invocation at the Inauguration. Who won in November? I’m sure there will be times during the next four years when Obama administration’s decisions on issues (e.g. judicial appointments) have conservatives banging their heads against the wall, bemoaning the fact that John McCain wasn’t elected. But so far it’s hard to imagine McCain would have been doing more than the incoming Obama team seems to be proposing  — and with as much chance of success –to further some key center-Right policy aims," - Jennifer Rubin.

Monday, January 5, 2009

05 Jan 2009 09:11 pm

The Reality Of War

The legs of the body of one of three Palestinian siblings from the Al-samoni family, killed by an Israeli tank shell, are seen in the mortuary of Al-Shifa hospital, on January 5, 2009 in Gaza City. Seven members from the Al-samoni family were killed including the mother, three children and a baby, when an Israeli shell struck their house south of Gaza city. By Abid Katib/Getty.

05 Jan 2009 08:32 pm

Proportionality And Terror, Ctd

A reader writes:

The problem with the doctrine of Just War, I would submit, is that it can only be applied in retrospect. In prospect, it is at once too restrictive and overly permissive. It requires an unachievable degree of certainty. But when leaders or their population nevertheless convince themselves that a conflict meets its standards, even though it cannot, it tends to grant them a sense of moral absolution that leads to callous indifference to the loss of human life.

No, the Israeli assault on Gaza cannot be said to be Just. Declaring it to be so is a manifestation of moral cowardice, of an unwillingness to face up to its awful price. It is merely a war: a messy, dirty conflict that injures all who are involved. It will exact a terrible toll on soldiers, militants and civilians, and there is no possible set of justifications which should blind us to that fact.

But that does not necessarily mean it merits moral condemnation. It does not mean that Israel was necessarily wrong to launch it, nor wrong to finish it. Those judgments tend to become clear only with the virtue of hindsight.

Continue reading "Proportionality And Terror, Ctd" »

05 Jan 2009 08:25 pm

Yglesias Award Nominee

"I always liked Panetta. He served in the Army and is openly proud of it. He seems to be a good lawyer (oxymoronic though it may seem). He's a good manager. And he's going to watch Obama's back at a place that's full of stilettos and a track record for attempted presidential assassination second to none. But Italians know all about political assassination; you may remember Julius Caesar. Or Aldo Moro. The self-proclaimed cognoscenti will deride his lack of "spycraft," and he's never worked in the intel bureaucracy or, for that matter, in foreign policy or national security. But he's been chief of staff, which involved all that stuff. I think it's a smart move," - Michael Ledeen, NRO.

Joe Klein comments here. Others, like Goldberg and York, peddle the line that no one who has operated in the "real world" of intelligence could agree with Obama's attempt to move the US past the torture era. No: a huge majority of intelligence professionals agree with Obama on effective interrogation. But after eight years of a CIA tainted with torture and presidentially-sanctioned lawlessness, drawing a bright line under the recent past is critical.

That's why the Panetta pick is inspired. The more I think about it, the more that seems true. This is change we can believe in. And in this necessarily secret area, public trust is vital. For the first time in a long dark patch, we will regain it.

05 Jan 2009 07:15 pm

Another Take On Proportionality

I hope to respond to Noah tomorrow. Meanwhile:

Israel’s just playing by Chicago rules:  “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.  That’s the Chicago way!”

05 Jan 2009 07:13 pm

The Gaza Crisis

In discussing this with a colleague, and thinking how reasonable it is for Israel to expect that its own citizens should have exactly the same freedom from fear and terror as those in other Western countries, I could not help but recall the great Onion headline from their classic book, "Our Dumb Century." It's from 1948:

War-weary Jews establish homeland between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt

'In Israel, our people will finally have safety and peace,' says Ben-Gurion. Jordan welcomes new neighbors with celebratory gunfire, rock throwing.

05 Jan 2009 06:37 pm

Face Of The Day

Christian Califano of France rests during the third motorcycle stage of the 2009 Dakar Rally between Puerto Madryn and Jacobacci, in Argentina, on January 5, 2009. Marc Coma of Spain won the stage and keeps the lead of the race. By Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty.

05 Jan 2009 06:14 pm

The Price Of Unvictory

Marc Lynch's take on Gaza:

However this round of violence ends -- and it's hard to see any scenario in which it produces remotely positive results for anyone involved -- the outcome at the regional level will likely be to further exacerbate these conflicts and to undermine the chances for the incoming Obama administration to make early progress.

Continue reading "The Price Of Unvictory" »

05 Jan 2009 05:25 pm

An Occasional Primate

Ross catches up on Christmas blogging.

05 Jan 2009 05:20 pm

Kaplan On Gaza

A reader writes:

Very interesting piece – but the core argument, that this is somehow about neutralizing Iran, really is a stretch.  As the Israelis know better than anyone, there is no way they can cleanly or decisively dismantle Hamas with this invasion.  The foreseeable results are: (1) inconclusive withdrawal without fundamentally damaging Hamas; (2) permanent re-occupation; or (3) the elimination of Hamas with such horrific loss of civilian life that they lose even the Sunni regimes’ tacit support (and garner world condemnation).

It’s tempting to tie this to a wider geopolitical strategy (just as it was to tie the proposed Iraq invasion to a resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict), but I don’t think the Israelis are as delusional as our own neocons.  I still think it has more to do with domestic Israeli politics than anything else.

05 Jan 2009 05:19 pm

What are the Isaelis Thinking?, Ctd

Yaacov Lozowick tries to answer the question:

What's the end game? It could be weeks of sifting through the city of Gaza until Hamas has effectively been disarmed. I expect, however, that it's more likely that Israel itself will now speed up the diplomatic process, starting with the visit this evening of Sarkozy: You want a cease fire, all you folks out there? You want to avert weeks of slow house-by-house searches as the populace suffers? So do we. So let's all agree on the mechanisms that will ensure that Hamas never regains its military capacities, and you, the international community, will help ensure the mechanisms stay in place; once that's been arranged we'll leave Gaza and hope never to return again. Sometime in the next 12 months elections need to take place, and perhaps the Palestinian voters will choose peace over strife this time. Ironically, all this violence is making it likely the next Israeli government will be eager to cooperate with the Obama administration on seeking ways towards a just peace.

A mite over-optimistic, if you ask me. But who can say?

05 Jan 2009 04:56 pm

Proportionality And Terror, Ctd

A reader writes:

I have found your posts on the conflict in Gaza fascinating, in particular the most recent one on whether Israel's actions meet the criteria of a just war.  But I have a concern.

With hindsight, I imagine that most people would agree that it would have been better for everyone and therefore morally preferable if Britain had been able to take military action against Nazi Germany sooner than they did - either in response to the annexation of the Sudetenland or to the remilitarisation of the Rhein-Ruhr.  If Germany had been checked at that early stage, Hitler might have been deposed before he had a chance to launch total war in Europe and the Holocaust.

I also imagine that most people would now agree that it would have been better for everyone and therefore morally preferable if the first President Bush had deposed Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, or if Bill Clinton had taken bolder military action against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But I cannot see how any of those actions would have passed your criteria for a just war, because at the relevant points the damage inflicted on Britain/the West was not 'lasting, grave and certain' and 'all other means of ending Hitler/Saddam/Al-Qaeda's aggression' had not been shown to be 'impractical or ineffective'.  A moral theory which cannot provide a basis for the essential strategy of 'nipping bad things in the bud' is fundamentally flawed, surely?

Continue reading "Proportionality And Terror, Ctd" »

05 Jan 2009 04:20 pm

Mental Health Break

A mashup of Billboard's top 25 songs from 2008:

05 Jan 2009 04:07 pm

In Search Of Pragmatism

Petra Marquardt-Bigman notes what the term means for Jihadists:

Of course we often hear that there are also more pragmatic leaders in Hamas -- but being more pragmatic than Rayyan doesn't necessarily mean much. Currently, the more pragmatic Hamas leaders make sure that they stay out of harm's way, but it is also clear from their conduct over the past one-and-a-half years since Hamas took control of Gaza that pragmatism for Hamas means first and foremost trying to tighten their hold on power over the coastal strip and its 1.5 million residents -- irrespective of the consequences for the welfare of the people of Gaza.

05 Jan 2009 04:00 pm

Panetta At CIA

Way, way better than Brennan, and, significantly, detached from the torture regime and its apparatus in a way that anyone involved in the CIA in the last eight years would not be. As my colleague Marc Ambinder just said, the man who has had every job in Washington now has the most thankless task in Washington. But this appointment and Johnsen's are extremely encouraging for the restoration of Constitutional order after the Bush-Cheney protectorate. Then this:

How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear. Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock? The simple answer is the rule of law. Our Constitution defines the rules that guide our nation.

Continue reading "Panetta At CIA" »

05 Jan 2009 03:49 pm

Quote For The Day

"Here is a partial answer to my own question of how should we behave, directed especially to the next president and members of his or her administration but also to all of use who will be relieved by the change: We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation's past transgressions and reject Bush's corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation's honor be restored without full disclosure," - Dawn Johnsen, the new head of OLC.

05 Jan 2009 03:20 pm

When A Frozen Bubble Breaks

It looks as cool as this.

05 Jan 2009 03:07 pm

Blogosphere PSA

Dan Drezner, Marc Lynch, Tom Ricks, David Rothkopf, and Stephen Walt have fancy new digs at Foreign Policy.

05 Jan 2009 02:45 pm

America - Personified

More fat cars by artist Erwin Wurm here.

05 Jan 2009 02:38 pm

Ending The Torture Regime

A promising start at Obama's OLC. Imagine: a presidency concerned to uphold the rule of law. Only a couple of weeks left of the protectorate.

05 Jan 2009 02:25 pm

The Friend Of My Friend Is My Enemy

Marc Lynch analyzes Maliki's trip to Iran:

Maliki's friendly trip to Tehran and chat with Khamenei are important signals. But I'm not highlighting it in order to fan any kind of hysteria or outrage. In fact, I think it's a potential positive if managed well. The idea that this Iraq could be free of Iranian influence has always been an odd fantasy, and Iran has always cultivated a wide portfolio of Iraqi allies and partners far beyond the Sadrists upon which American attention tends to focus (their closest ally, of course, has always been ISCI, the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq -- something else they share with the U.S.). As the incoming Obama administration contemplates direct engagement with Iran -- and Iraq prepares for a series of elections and transitions, while Iran prepares for its own Presidential election -- a constructive relationship between Baghdad and Tehran is hardly the worst development imaginable. Depending on how it's managed, that is...

05 Jan 2009 02:22 pm

Israel Has Begun Its War With Iran

Bob Kaplan is unillusioned about the huge risks involved but says we have no choice but to go along and hope for total destruction of Hamas as leverage for future negotiations with Iran. I have to say that the logic of his broader argument strikes me as a good one for containment, not aggression. But there are many factors in play - elections in Israel, Iraq and Iran soon - that will doubtless force all of us to keep re-thinking.

05 Jan 2009 02:11 pm

The Wiki Core

Kudos to Jimmy Wales for raising a cool $6 million to keep Wikipedia ad-free (what ads? - ed.) This made me chuckle:

Wikipedia bills itself as the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit. And while indeed that is true, do you ever wonder who does the bulk of the work?  ... Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."

05 Jan 2009 02:07 pm

Six By Twelve

A strategy to make all of New England a marriage-equality zone by 2012.

05 Jan 2009 01:50 pm

"A Volunteer Coastguard"

In defense of Somalia's pirates.

05 Jan 2009 01:38 pm

Gas Tax Now!

SUV and truck sales surge. Rapier sighs:

If people are going to flock back to gas guzzlers instead of using their extra pocket money to pay down their debt, then I would rather gas prices go ahead and recover. Based on the trends in vehicle sales, I am sure I will see that wish fulfilled before too long.

05 Jan 2009 01:33 pm

Quote For The Day

"Some people are p-ssed off at [Americans for Tax Reform President] Grover [Norquist]. Some people are p-ssed off at the Conservative Steering Committee. Some people are p-ssed off at [current RNC chair] Mike Duncan. Some people are p-ssed off at social conservatives. The social conservatives are p-ssed at leaders in Congress. Everyone is basically p-ssed," - a Republican consultant who has worked with the RNC on the leadership contest.

05 Jan 2009 01:23 pm

Signs Of The Times

From the front page of the Boston Globe:

The Globe is no longer publishing a stand-alone classified advertising section Monday through Thursday.  A classified section will appear in the paper on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, and local classifieds may also be found in the Thursday regional sections.

And a display ad on the NYT front page.

05 Jan 2009 01:22 pm

The Downturn Diet

Appleyard reports on the recession's silver lining:

The strange thing is that people get healthier in a recession, according to Chris Ruhm, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina. Some years ago he decided to test the conventional wisdom that hard times make people sick. He found the opposite.

Continue reading "The Downturn Diet" »

05 Jan 2009 01:02 pm

Is The Gaza Attack A Just War?

My preliminary take from this morning is here.

05 Jan 2009 12:58 pm

Correction of The Day

"Dominic Holden, news reporter at The Stranger, regrets that in an attempt to spell out the word “brassiere” in a Slog post, he mistakenly spelled it “brazier,” which actually means “barbecue.” He further regrets that upon trying to amend his error, he spelled it “brassier,” which, if anything, means “more brassy.” Holden recognizes that, as a homosexual, he should avoid subjects related to women’s undergarments." - The Stranger.

05 Jan 2009 12:37 pm

"One Extremely Serious Seizure A Week"

That was what Jett Travolta was dealing with, unmedicated, according to the Travolta lawyers. One anti-seizure drug had been used in the past but was stopped because of ineffectiveness and side-effects. No other treatments are cited.

05 Jan 2009 12:28 pm

The View From Your Window

Portland, Oregon, 3.06 pm.

05 Jan 2009 12:14 pm

The Institution Of Marriage

Larison makes his case against marriage equality:

When endorsing a change, particularly one this radical, a conservative would need to show not only that it does not do harm to the institution in question but also that it actually reinforces and reinvigorates the institution. Whether or not “gay marriage” harms the institution of marriage, it certainly does not strengthen it. It is therefore undesirable because it is unnecessary to the preservation of the relevant institution, and so the appropriate conservative view is to leave well enough alone.

"My Big Fat Straight Wedding" argues the opposite. I think allowing gay couples to marry does strengthen the institution, because it ensures that everyone in a family has access to the same civil rites and rights, and so the heterosexual marriages are as affirmed as effectively as the gay ones. (It is not my experience that the straight siblings and families of gay people feel their marriages affirmed by excluding some of their own.) By removing the incentive for gay people to enter into false straight marriages, which often end in divorce or collapse, wrecked childhoods and betrayed spouses, heterosexual marriage is also strengthened. And the practical alternative to marriage equality - civil unions for straights and gays - presents a marriage-lite option for everyone that clearly does threaten traditional marriage in a way that gay marriage never could.

Serious conservatives understand that these are the three practical options on modern America: including everyone in civil marriage; creating a two-tiered system of civil marriage and then lesser civil unions for straights and gays; or simply resisting any change and using the government and law to perpetuate the stigmatization of homosexuality. If those three are the choices, my view is that the first is easily the most authentically conservative. I suspect that the impact on those states that now allow such inclusion will prove it in due course.

05 Jan 2009 11:58 am

Despite Herself

Sometimes, K-Lo gives good political advice. (Hat tip: TS.)

05 Jan 2009 11:56 am

Dissent Of The Day

A reader writes:

Israel's rationale is not that hard to figure out. Check out Rosner over here. Here's the summary paragraph:

So - the IDF and Israel's leaders have three goals in launching this ground war: First, they want to make Hamas pay a price that will force it into a renewed ceasefire. Second, they must prove to the Arab world that Lebanon 2006 did not turn Israel into a country afraid of war. And third, they must engender renewed Israeli confidence in the country's armed forces.

Continue reading "Dissent Of The Day" »

05 Jan 2009 11:44 am

Win-Win

Krauthammer proposes a gas tax, balanced by a payroll tax reduction. Joe Klein applauds:

Krauthammer is, not surprisingly, more sympathetic to the national security arguments for higher gasoline prices than the environmental ones--Krauthammer remains unconvinced that global warming is man-made. But it is fascinating to see this proposal on the cover of Bill Kristol's magazine. (And yes, one might argue ulterior motives--let a Democrat self-immolate by imposing a gas tax...one wonders where Krauthammer was on this issue the past eight years?)

Still, the simplicity of the thing is beautiful--especially when you compare to the mind-numbing complexity and scam-ability of a cap-and-trade program to limit carbon emissions.

Kinsley also made the case recently. I've long been on board.

05 Jan 2009 11:25 am

Some Data Points

This is instructive:

In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed, compared with about 400 Israelis. In the past eight days of war, more than 460 Palestinians were killed, and four Israelis died by rocket fire.

From 2-1 to 100-1 in six years is a big gain in killing efficiency. Just so long as the Israelis never expect any actual relationship with any actual Gazans, it works after a fashion. But does it deny Hamas a psychological victory?

05 Jan 2009 11:16 am

And There Was No YouTube Then

Andy Warhol really was ahead of his time, wasn't he?

Boing Boing asks the necessary:

Also: coke or weed? Discuss. (my money's on coke.)

05 Jan 2009 10:51 am

Filling The Vacuum

Yglesias worries about "catastrophic success in Gaza":

...something you need to look at here is the risk that weakening Hamas will only lead to the rise of more extreme groups. The high level of power that Hamas had achieved as of last week was, after all, precisely the result of a deliberate Israeli campaign to weaken Fatah. The hope was that this would bring some more accommodationist Palestinians to the fore, but instead the reverse happened. And now that Israel is going about trying the same thing with Hamas, one needs to worry that Hamas will be displaced by Salafist groups who think Hamas is too weak-kneed.

05 Jan 2009 10:25 am

Distinctions

Conor goes out on a limb and makes one:

Hamas is a despicable organization. That it triumphed in an election speaks very poorly of the Palestinian polity. But that is different from saying that everyone voted for Hamas because they want to blow themselves up in an Israeli discoteque. The very fact that Hamas performs lots of social service functions implies either that they are by nature philanthropists or that doing so helps them to bolster their popularity.

I have a little less hope for Palestinian society than I do for Iraq in the foreseeable future. But I assume there is some distinction between a Hamas mafia boss and the average Gazan. Of course, that distinction has largely been erased - for the time being - by Israel's aggression. And the blockade and destitution within Gaza - and its emergence as an isolated, battered terrorist-run township - may also have elided the distinction further. But I don't believe the distinction has never existed or cannot exist. Larison, meanwhile, contrasts the Georgia and Gaza conflicts:

Continue reading "Distinctions" »

05 Jan 2009 09:36 am

Proportionality And Terror

Noah Pollak asked me to provide some framework for a discussion of proportionality and just war theory with respect to the Israeli attack on Gaza. In re-reading my Catechism and brushing up on just war theory, I am struck first of all by how alien the context seems for the current war. The asymmetric nature of the threat and the emergence of failed states run by mafioso religious fanatics makes everything more complicated. You could argue that this makes just war theory more important, rather than less, since we are in danger of having the rules of war dictated by barbarians. Or you could argue, along with the neocons, that Jihadist barbarism demands a response in kind. I favor the first view. And it is nonetheless fair to say, I think, that Israel's actions in Gaza fail every traditional just war justification.

In the history of the West, the laws of war are clear enough. You do not launch a just war if it leads to greater evils than the status quo ante. There must be a reasonable proportion between means and ends. Both sides should be able to acknowledge common human values, even as they fight over territory or ideology. And yet Hamas has never done this; has no capacity for abiding by even minimal moral norms, believes it has a moral responsibility to eradicate the Jewish state, and certainly finds the universalist and liberal moral law embedded in Western and largely Christian culture meaningless outside Islamic hegemony. Israel, for its part, is on a different moral plane than Hamas. Its internal critics write op-eds; they are not taken out and shot. But, in the face of what is, essentially, a 60 year war against enemies on all sides and within, it has long since disappeared down the self-reflecting mirrors of survivalist logic and existential panic. It looks to me like a society in danger of losing its sense of restraint to the logic of violence. It is lashing out because it feels it can do no other and senses its long-term survival at stake. Even if violence does not solve the problem and may make it worse, war can seem a better option now than disappearing passively in the next couple of decades. The stunning near-unanimity of Israelis behind the Gaza attack is proof of this. In Israel, it seems, it is always America in 2002.

But the point of just war theory is to give us a vantage point outside any particular contingency. Even though I may provoke a Jewish-Catholic fight here, the Catholic Catechism has as useful and concise a statement of the right of self-defense as anyone:

At one and the same time:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Let's take each condition separately.

Is the damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel "lasting, grave and certain"?

Taking the vantage point of the conflict from May 2007 on, Hamas has fired several thousand Qassam rockets with such imprecision that no distinction between civilian and military targets is meaningful (which is to say they were all war crimes). Until the recent conflict, Israel suffered 11 military deaths, 131 wounded, 8 civilian deaths and 83 wounded, with more than a hundred treated for shock. In a country of several million, these deaths and injuries were sustained within a relatively small and limited geographical area. (Gazans, in the same conflict, with a much smaller population and far more geographically concentrated, suffered 409 military deaths, 436 injured, and 92 civilian deaths - before the current outbreak even started.) The idea that the indefensible damage Hamas has inflicted on Israel makes an "all-out war" on all of Hamas and Gaza morally necessary in Charles Krauthammer's typically nuanced view, is obviously a non-starter. But one recalls that Krauthammer also believes in the moral imperative of torture.

Have all other means of ending Hamas's aggression been shown to be impractical or ineffective?

At some level, this is meaningless with Hamas. It exists in order to wage total war on Israel. But it is also unclear if the brutal economic embargo on Gaza - imposed by Egypt, Israel and the West for more than a year - was not actually already weakening Hamas from within, and rendering it less popular. It's certainly a plausible reading of recent history. And under just war theory, any possibility that the goal of restraining Hamas or undermining it could be achieved by non-military means renders the current Israeli counter-attack illicit.

Are there serious prospects for success?

We will see. Perhaps the "don't fuck with the Jews" message will finally be heard and a profound shift will occur in the hearts and minds of Gazans. But the Middle East's history of the past two decades (and its culture of eternal revenge) is not exactly encouraging in this regard.

Continue reading "Proportionality And Terror" »

05 Jan 2009 09:26 am

Hormones

The reason Steve Jobs says he's been losing weight.

05 Jan 2009 09:25 am

Resist The Executive!

On cue as a Democrat becomes president, John Bolton and war criminal John Yoo rediscover their conservatism.

05 Jan 2009 09:02 am

Someone Else's Problem?

Juan Cole has a long historical post on the origins of the Gaza conflict:

I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn't going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel's problem.

Continue reading "Someone Else's Problem?" »

05 Jan 2009 08:26 am

The Essence Of Cheneyism

Michael Goldfarb channels John Yoo:

To be clear, he’s not saying that it’s sometimes okay to kill a bad guy’s innocent children as part of a military operation directed against the guy. He’s saying it’s better to kill his children than it would be to avoid killing them.

Goldfarb favors a near-dictatorial presidency with the power to detain and torture. John Yoo was even prepared to countenance crushing the testicles of the children of terror suspects as inherent in the constitutional powers of the American executive. Yoo is a fellow at AEI, and Goldfarb was spokesman for McCain. This is neoconservatism, guys.

05 Jan 2009 08:24 am

Eye Of The Storm

Over the break, Noah Millman had a long, insidery post on ratings agencies and the financial downturn. It's worth a read.

05 Jan 2009 08:08 am

Israel's Democracy - And Ours'

A reflection on what total war does to civilized people:

It is doubtful whether Hamas will be cut down to size as a result of this wretched war. Yet, the face of the state has been cut down to size, as have civilian elites who are apathetic and scared. The "peace camp," if it ever existed, has been cut down to size. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz authorized the Ghayan killing, regardless of the cost. Haim Oron, the leader of the "new left-wing movement," supported the launch of this foolish war.
 
Nobody is coming to the rescue - of Gaza or even of the remnants of humanity and Israeli democracy. The statesmen, the jurists, the poets, the authors, academe, and the news media - pitch black over the abyss. When the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel: The blood pipeline it laid has been completed.

05 Jan 2009 07:19 am

Conflicts Of Interest

Manzi explains the danger of government funded pharmaceutical research:

Ezra Klein has an interesting post up in which he correctly points out the conflict of interest inherent in having pharmaceutical companies that develop new drugs execute the clinical trials that test for their safety and efficacy... Klein recommends a paper that presents a simple solution: the government should fund contract research directly. 

But the obvious point that this misses is that a government bureaucracy has its own conflicts of interest. Most directly, bureaucrats and politicians tend to have enormous career risk from an unsafe drug introduction, but almost none from a rejected drug that would have been effective had it been introduced. Publication and study design bias can be pointed in both directions.

05 Jan 2009 12:41 am

More Annoying Than Al Gore

Pshaw.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

04 Jan 2009 10:04 pm

Another Suicide Bombing

Today's atrocity claimed at least 40 lives, mainly Shiite pilgrims. Over 24 tribal leaders were massacred by one of their own in a suicide bomb attack Friday. On December 27, a car bomb killed 24. So in the last week or so, close to a hundred people have been murdered by terrorists in Iraq, with hundreds more wounded. This is occurring even with 130,000 US troops still in the country. And this, remember, is "victory."

People keep asking me for predictions for 2009. Here's one: we will either leave Iraq in a bloodbath or we will never leave Iraq.

04 Jan 2009 09:36 pm

Israel's Strategy II

Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi say it's all about Iran:

If Israel successfully overthrows Hamas in Gaza, it would strengthen anti-Iranian forces throughout the Mideast and signal the region that Iranian momentum can be reversed. The Israeli military operation could begin the process that topples a terrorist regime that seized power in the Gaza Strip in 2007 and has fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli neighborhoods.

And whether or not Hamas is ultimately overthrown, Israel can achieve substantial goals.

Continue reading "Israel's Strategy II" »

04 Jan 2009 09:19 pm

Israel's Strategy I

As I scour the web to find one that makes sense, this piece by Martin Kramer pops up. It's well worth reading, because it brings the West Bank more fully into the equation. The goal, according to Kramer, is to destroy as much of Hamas as possible, and get a ceasefire without any lifting of the blockade. The aim is to bolster the PA in the West Bank by opening up the border and rewarding coexistence with engagement - while at the same time pounding the Gazans into the dust. As a way to enforce the cease-fire, Israel might also want to use PA officials and military to go into Gaza. The trouble is: I'm not sure who would replace Hamas in "governing" Gaza. If it were the PA, there could be a brutal civil war in which the potential for more terror - as well as more human devastation - is real; and the threat to Irsrael could even worsen. Kramer himself acknowledges this:

What could go wrong with this scenario? A lot. Hamas assumes (probably correctly) that its Palestinian opponents fed Israel with much of the intelligence it needed to wage precision warfare against Hamas. There is likely to be a vicious settling of scores as soon as a cease-fire is in place, if not before, and which could approximate a civil war. This could open space for small groups like Islamic Jihad and other gangs, which could shoot off rockets at their own initiative (or that of Iran). If something can go wrong in Gaza, there is a good chance it will.

So Israel will have killed many innocents, wounded itself in international opinion, lost soldiers and treasure ... to create an even more unstable and beleaguered Gaza. Maybe they hope to cede Gaza to Egypt; or maybe this is the beginning of a war Israel wants with Iran sooner than later. Or maybe it's just another blind military leap whose full consequences were not fully thought through. Imagine that.

04 Jan 2009 08:52 pm

Face Of The Day

A wounded Palestinian boy is helped as he arrives at a hospital on January 4, 2009 in Gaza City, Gaza. Medics and witnesses have reported that Israeli shells killed at least 12 Palestinian civilians and wounded 40 others when they exploded in Gaza City's main shopping area. By Abid Katib/Getty.

It's the hand I can't get out of my mind. Please pray for him - and for everyone suffering and dying in Gaza.

04 Jan 2009 07:47 pm

Words To Live By

"You can go back to your, what do you call it, your Google, and you figure out all that," - president George H.W. Bush on the catastrophe of his son's presidency.

04 Jan 2009 07:39 pm

Children, Sickness And Parents

The possibility - and we do not know for sure - that John Travolta refused his son anti-seizure medication raises broader questions of what responsibilities parents have to the bodies of their children. We rightly understand sexual abuse to be horrifying and a legitimate reason to intervene. But withholding vital medication from a child out of religious or ideological reasons strikes me as no less abuse. I'm reminded of this acutely by the case of Christine Maggiore, a woman I met and interacted with as another person with HIV. Christine adamantly denied that HIV was related to AIDS and refused anti-HIV medication on those grounds. She died last week. Of AIDS. That was her choice, it seems to me, however tragic it is.

What was also her choice, however, was to refuse anti-HIV meds when pregnant and then to refuse HIV meds for her daughter when she was born. Eliza Jane lived three years before succumbing to HIV-related pneumonia. Magiore was never prosecuted for negligence, since she had taken Eliza Jane to doctors. One of those doctors suffered mild professional consequences.

What rights did Eliza Jane have to protect her very life from her own mother? What rights did Jett Travolta have under the control of Scientologist parents? I find it hard to believe they had none; and I find the sympathy for parents under those circumstances to be misplaced.

04 Jan 2009 06:02 pm

That Word "Robust"

A glimpse into the Cheney mindset, courtesy of Andy McCarthy. The world right now is about who will "crush" whom. McCarthy knows which side he's on; and his moral guide is Osama bin Laden:

Remember bin Laden's refrain about "the strong horse and the weak horse" — the fact that people (particularly those targeted for jihadi recruitment) are always drawn to the strong one. That's the language jihadis understand, and no other.

And how easily some Americans seem to have picked it up.

04 Jan 2009 05:09 pm

Conservatism And Gay Couples

In the US, one of the striking aspects of the Republican rump is its insistence that one of only a handful of defining policies is its opposition to marriage rights for gays. Joe Carter recently argued that it was inconceivable that conservatives could support such a thing, or that a conservative case can be made for it. If that is true, then the British Tories are no longer conservative:

Nick Herbert, the Conservative party's Shadow Justice secretary has apparently become the second member of David Cameron's Shadow Cabinet, to enter into a civil partnership.

The news leaked in the Telegraph society column. Think of a Republican cabinet with two openly gay and legally married men in it. I can dream, can't I?

04 Jan 2009 04:18 pm

News From Alaska

Accusations of political meddling in the case of Sherry Johnston, Palin's daughter's kinda-mother-in-law.

04 Jan 2009 03:10 pm

The View From Your Window

Vancouver, BC, Canada, 12 am.

04 Jan 2009 01:56 pm

"Just War"

Noah Pollak unveils what he sees as the real goal of the Gaza invasion:

[I]t is intended to push Hamas off the territory it has been using near the Israeli border to launch rockets.

I'm not sure how that works in practice for more than a short time. I'll respond to his just war questions later but wanted to link to this point first.

04 Jan 2009 01:49 pm

Aliens

I think Glenn Greenwald - who has less fear than any journalist I know in Washington - is onto something important here:

Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries -- from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan -- are able to do so because they don't really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.

The inability on both sides to see Jews and Arabs as equally and indistinguishably human before they are Jews and Arabs is at the heart of the problem. In a contest between Israel's flawed democracy and Hamas's theological murderousness, I see no moral equivalence. But Israelis and Arabs demand exactly the same respect as human beings, every single one, including the "worst of the worst". A refusal to grapple with the moral costs of this conflict, and a glib dismissal of the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans) is a sign of moral unseriousness. But it is the same mindset that can authorize the torture of human beings and see it as "coercive interrogation" only when Americans do it to Muslims.

And when I read Michael Goldfarb, I become more and more aware of just how disgusting the McCain campaign was; and how lucky we are to have removed these thugs from office.

04 Jan 2009 12:30 pm

To Put It Mildly

I have to say the online discussions of whether the "conservative" movement has the right institutions, think-tanks or online skills to compete with Obamania seems misplaced to me. You can have the best set of think-tanks in the world and still be useless in the face of a Republican administration determined to combine the worst foreign policy utopianism of the left with the worst social draconianism of the right. No conservative institution could or should have backed the Bush administration. In doing so for so long, they eviscerated their brand and destroyed their intellectual coherence. They richly deserve the wilderness they face.

Same goes for online journalism. However good your marketing or messaging, a pile of doo-doo is still a pile of doo-doo. Or as Julian helpfully summarizes,

Conservatism has much bigger problems right now than a paucity of Twitter skills.

04 Jan 2009 12:20 pm

The Photographic Dictionary

Enjoy.

04 Jan 2009 11:37 am

From Travolta's Biographer

An explanation:

In private, [John] and Kelly were always very practical and positive about Jett’s health. They put him on a detoxification programme and encouraged his love of the outdoors, of sports, swimming, cycling and hiking.

In public, John clearly adored his son and spoke of him in glowing terms but he was always wary of delving too deeply into the details of his illness. It was simply too painful a subject.

Even when people saw Jett and it was obvious something was wrong, John refused to talk about it. In fact, the only time John made any public comment was when it was suggested that his son was autistic, an allegation he strongly denied and which hurt him deeply.

04 Jan 2009 11:16 am

Baby Doc

The new Who is revealed. A little too much like Pater Davison for my taste. One assumes the hair will improve.

04 Jan 2009 10:57 am

A Platform I Can Live With

Peter Berkowitz proffers the following as a basis for conservative renewal:

- An economic program, health-care reform, energy policy and protection for the environment grounded in market-based solutions.

- A foreign policy that recognizes America's vital national security interest in advancing liberty abroad but realistically calibrates undertakings to the nation's limited knowledge and restricted resources.

Continue reading "A Platform I Can Live With" »

04 Jan 2009 09:31 am

The Kuttner Test

Obama is passing it, according to Mickey.

04 Jan 2009 09:27 am

Life As Language

Patrick Tucker searches for the essence of morality:

According to Hauser, the human brain learns right from wrong the same way it learns language. The vast majority of the world’s languages share at least one thing in common: a system of guidelines for usage. This is called grammar. Just as languages have rules about where to put a subject, an adverb, and a predicate in a sentence, so too every culture has a set of guidelines to teach people how to make moral decisions in different situations. So just as learning a language means learning not only words, but also a system for putting the words together, the same is true for morality; there are very specific “commandments” that are unique to every culture, but there are also softer usage guidelines. People who have mastered the moral guidelines of their particular culture have what some might call principles or scruples. Hauser calls this a moral grammar.

04 Jan 2009 09:12 am

The Missiles They Used

This may help explain some of what is going on:

The Israel Air Force used a new bunker-buster missile that it received recently from the United States in strikes against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, The Jerusalem Post learned on Sunday [last week].

The missile, called GBU-39, was developed in recent years by the US as a small-diameter bomb for low-cost, high-precision and low collateral damage strikes. Israel received approval from Congress to purchase 1,000 units in September and defense officials said on Sunday that the first shipment had arrived earlier this month and was used successfully in penetrating underground Kassam launchers in the Gaza Strip during the heavy aerial bombardment of Hamas infrastructure on Saturday. It was also used in Sunday's bombing of tunnels in Rafah.

The attack on Gaza may be a test-run for Iran's nuclear sites. In that case, what we may be witnessing is Israel's initiation of full-scale war with Iran. That would certainly make as much sense as the current stated rationale for invading Gaza.