F for Effort

I saw Arne Duncan in the All-Stars celebrity match a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit he looked spectacular. He could be the Bill Bradley of the 21st century--if he wasn't so damned dumb. And lacking in empathy.

Picture from Fox News Orlando, of all places.

Former "reformer" (i.e. privatizer and "accountability" hound) turned actual reformer (i.e., someone who wants to improve schools in the US) Diane Ravitch has prepared a report card for the secretary of education, in the New York Review. I think it's a little weird on her part to criticize Duncan for disrespecting the Tenth Amendment, the one that grants unmentioned rights to the states, on the grounds that he's pushing for a federal takeover of the system; in the first place he isn't, and in the second place I think we on the left would be wiser to let the Tenth Amendment alone.

It would be wiser to let the feds do what is needed under the General Welfare clause and stop doing what isn't needed. Some states need federal help; Texas needs help (and I mean tough love) in curriculum. No state needs help in figuring out how to let private industry suck more cash out of the education system, but I'd like to see them get some assistance in not doing it.

Other than that, it is a nicely packed summary of what our department of education has been up to in the last three years, and why it should stop. So click above and read it.

The origin of specious

Attorney General Eric Holder has finally come forward to explain how it's legal under certain circumstances for the President to order the killing of a US citizen, and it isn't very pretty. For the argumentation and a learned critique, I'll refer you to today's series of posts by EmptyWheel, starting maybe with this one, which lays out Holder's claim that the "due process" promised in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments doesn't necessarily need to be a judicial process, and then methodically demolishes it.

This frail and unfortunate effort at Jesuitical casuistry comes just as I'm arriving at peak position in the cycle of Obama fandom, which waxes and wanes for each of us according to factors variously seasonal and unpredictable, not all of which have been successfully identified, but does have something to do with what the President actually does, and the long trajectory across which his plans come to a sometimes surprising fruition.

One thing that has had me gasping with Obama-amazement is his skill in managing the Israel-Iran confrontation without openly hurting anybody's feelings; as Binyamin Netanyahu barks and blusters his way through his Washington engagements, Iran and the Powers decide to resume negotiations, and Iran sends out one of those "signals" by reversing the death sentence against another American "spy", Amir Mirzaei Hekmati.

And then it starts to become clear that the Affordable Care Act, bless its ambivalent heart, is really driving a stake through the heart of the vampire health insurance industry, in that unbearably gradual Obama tempo (in this metaphor, the rules on medical loss ratio would count as daylight, and preventive care without copays is garlic). Denying coverage has been their big engine of profit, and if they can't do it they are going to die, and a semi-public system built out of those exchanges,  the nonprofit private insurers, and Medicare is going to rise, almost of its own accord, to take their place.

And then the Justice Department comes up with this stupid argument. Go figure. I can't write the post I wanted to write at all.

He was farther out than you thought...

Updated 3/12/2012

As the Wall Street Journal reported it,

"what we need to talk about to defeat Barack Obama is getting good jobs and scaling back the size of government and that’s what I do,” Mr. Romney said in a campaign stop [in Canton] Monday morning.... “Other people in this race have debated about the economy, they’ve read about the economy, they’ve talked about it in subcommittee meetings, but I’ve actually been in it,” he said.

"Come on in," he shouted back to his friends on the shore, "the economy's fine!"

But seriously, what's this about? "Getting good jobs and scaling back the size of government and that's what I do"—Oh, yeah? And when does he do it, exactly? In the small hours, in his special black mask and cape and Californio hat? Has old Mitt been cutting back the size of your government? When you weren't looking? He certainly wasn't doing it in Massachusetts. He has always gotten pretty good good jobs, though, all three of them, and probably for his kids as well.

"Other people may have debated about zoology, they've read about zoology, they've talked about it in faculty meetings, but I've actually been in it!"

Update:
Yup—ponied up $10 million to help young Taggart break into the high-rolling investment world in 2008, with his campaign finance director as partner, and the object of the business to buy into equity funds managed by his contributors. Aren't these people precious!

Presidents on parade

Snappy comebacks:

The German foreign minister, Guido Westerweile, said that President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus was "Europe's last dictator." Lukashenko said, "It's better to be a dictator than gay." But how can he be sure?

But it's best to be the Prez.

From The Australian. Photo by AP.

Man up, Vova! Moscow doesn't believe in tears! (Not my line, alas, but too good to pass up. Apparently state TV actually broadcast the gorgeous old Brezhnev-era movie on election [jump]

Aipac up your troubles

Portrait of mask and actor. Uncredited illustration from notes by William A. Johnson, University of Cincinnati.

Martin Indyk on NPR this morning (audio here) explained the Israel-Iran situation in a way that really made me understand the Israeli position better—not Netanyahu's position in particular, but the very broad position of everybody, basically, that isn't a dove.

He's talking about Iran's reaching the "threshold" of ability to build a nuclear weapon, [jump]

Women and narcomanes

In what sense would you suppose requiring insurance providers to buy women health insurance that covers preventive care including birth control is the same as Denmark giving away free heroin to drug addicts "so they won't commit crimes to get the money"? No, I can't figure it out either.

That was the venturesome analogy offered by Bill O'Reilly, reacting yesterday to the testimony before Congressional Democrats of Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, [jump]

What Atrios said

I mean, sometimes there isn't really anything to add.

The smart bet in this country for decades has been to find new and creative ways to siphon taxpayer money into your pockets. That's what education privatization is about. That's what social security privatization is about.

Except all the other stuff—prisons, mail, health care, defense services, diplomatic protection, tax refund processing... Granted, once you get started it could keep you up all night...

Between Barack and a hard place

From Obamulkes.com.

MadDog in comments over at EmptyWheel reads the Obama interview by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic and the Netanyahu analysis by Daniel Levy in Foreign Policy and asks us:

Ask yourself if Bibi hasn’t boxed Obama into a explicit “strike Iran” corner, or at the very least, shifted US foreign policy on Iran so far to the right that the US will have no choice but to commit to “strike Iran"?

Given that Bibi has already locked up a guaranteed Repug commitment to his “strike Iran” cause, then view Bibi’s moves described in those 2 articles as closing the deal with Obama.

So I did, but I got a different answer than he did; namely, "No." And if anybody's boxed in, it's the icky PM.

Levy's article seemed to me to be about how Netanyahu may be strong at the moment in political position in Israel but is weak by nature, a typical bully, really, dangerous only [jump]

Eleven-dimensional Chutes 'n' Ladders?

Maori prisoners in the Waikato Wars. Illustrated London News, February 1864, from New Zealand History Online.

You read it here first. Or you could have, anyway, if you wanted to. When President Obama issued his signing statement with the signature of the noxious National Defense Authorization Act, last New Year's Eve, I was online almost instantly to let you know that it didn't look so bad after all—that I was pretty sure that he at least really really disliked putting people under indefinite military detention.

Now, from Talking Points Memo via Vyan at Kos, we've got the administration's [jump]

Truth terrorism lives!

In a victory for truth terrorists everywhere, with some wonderfully heartening news from Jay Rosen via Kos's The Troubador, National Public Radio has issued a new ethics handbook (This is NPR. And these are the standards of our journalism) clarifying the network's policies on the issue of "balance" vs. truthfulness, and come out in favor of the latter:

we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

A detail I especially like is the recognition in that "all sides" rather than "both" that it isn't ever just a question of adopting what she said or what he said but of developing an independent understanding.

This does not constitute an endorsement of Mamma Stamberg's frozen cranberry relish.

Zombie pin-up girl tote bag from BuyZombie: The Undead are Online.

The week in the Persian Wars

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]

Stockmen and bondsmen

Now that the Dow has closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, I wonder if the Times is going to redo their famous chart showing the stock market difference between Democratic and Republican presidents from October 2008:

Given that it's already up 56% since Barack Obama took office three months after that, it might even lead a person to suspect that the Times has a liberal bias and is waiting till October 2012 to do it. If things carry on as they have been doing, that's going to be pretty graphic, as they say.

But speaking of liberal biases, I now have a new idea on the foundational difference between Democrats and Republicans that is directly related to this news. Like so many others who have grown to feel that the liberal-conservative classification doesn't apply any more, I have been talking for quite a while now in terms of a conservative party that we have to vote for and a crazy party that explains why we have to vote for the conservative party, but I'm not really satisfied with that either.

Partly because it's still fun to vote for Democrats, because they're still so truly forward-looking in so many little ways, whether we're talking about same-sex marriage or [jump]

Stratfor the memories

Clown Bluey entree.

Kos exploded around lunchtime yesterday with news from the WikiLeaks dump of internal mails from the global strategies espionage firm/paranoid travel magazine Stratfor, and the revelation that Israel had destroyed all of Iran's putative nuclear weapons facilities sometime late last year. It was wonderful watching how the wisdom of crowds works—by the time I was done with lunch just about the whole mob of us had come to realize that the story was just idle gossip and [jump]

Grapple from the Apple

In a sane world, it would be the New York City United Federation of Teachers local that would be clamoring for the city to release the test score–based teacher ratings to the public, while the Department of Education would be begging to keep them a secret, because it only takes a glance at the numbers to see how stupid and unserious these numbers are, using the scores of tests that have been totally discredited in the first place, leaping all over the map for any individual teacher from year to year, and with incredible error margin spreads of 35 percentage points for the math scores and 53 (!) for English.

“No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone, and we would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,”

said Shael Polakow-Suransky of the DOE, trying to be reassuring, but why would they make any use of it at all? The numbers are basically arbitrary, and should not play any role in principals' decisions whatever. The fact that they have used them shows, really, what bad faith the mayor and his chancellors have been bringing to the table in this long debate.

Photo from Village Voice.

Also in a sane world, if the city's police force wants to investigate potential terrorists, instead of infiltrating Muslim student organizations all over New Jersey they could try infiltrating the FBI, because pretty much every terrorist plot they have uncovered over the past x many years has had an FBI informant right in the middle of it—doing practically all of the work, too. There's a pattern there.

Up a slippery slope

The irrepressible Rick Santorum was chatting with folks at James Dobson's American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Miss., February 3, when he got to the subject of slippery slopes and the example of the Netherlands, where, he said, elderly people feel the need to wear bracelets saying "Do not euthanize me" to keep safe from the murderous medics prowling the cities:

Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.

You can hear the audience gasping in horror: Those poor old folks! But it's not true, [jump]

Sunday breakfast links

Juan Cole, whom we depend on for interpretations of mid-East events, has been adding something quite new to his bag of tricks: translations from the Persian of Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (1048-1131), better known to the rest of us as Omar Khayyam. Unlike the heavily scented Victorian versions of Edward FitzGerald, Cole's translations are as clean and crunchy as celery, sometimes funny and always bracing:

If a stranger proves faithful,
I adopt him into the family.
But if a relative sins,
I take a dim view of him.
If poison proves helpful,
it is actually an antidote,
and if an antidote attacks me,
it is really a toxic sting.

I don't think we know when they're going to show up, you just have to follow the blog.

The Friendly Bear. Persian miniature, 18th century.

The above illustration is from the extraordinary blog (multilingual, but mostly in English, sometimes not quite idiomatic) Poemas del río Wang, and a very lengthy post on bears, which ranges from an excerpt from a dialogue by Erasmus in which a bear and a lion discuss correct Latin pronunciation to a very recent short-short story translated from the Czech.

 Gill Mann at Rumproast offers an answer to the age-old question of what if Michael O'Hanlon were an advice columnist. The Brookings Institution wunderkind warrior (actually in his 50s, but tousle-haired as ever) would definitely have his own distinctive voice.

The website Letters of Note collects letters by the famous and not-so-famous, from Billie Joe Armstrong to E.B. White and so on, including this masterpiece, written or dictated in August 1865 by the freedman Jourdon Anderson and addressed to his erstwhile owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, in response to an invitation to come back and work on his farm.

Cheap shots and chasers 2/24

Cantor Can’t Explain Why Americans Oppose GOP Agenda

The story itself doesn't quite live up to the headline—Cantor wouldn't acknowledge that Americans oppose his agenda, of course, so he just didn't answer the question—but isn't it fun to imagine him losing that perpetual sneer for a moment, scratching his head, and telling the interviewer, "Honestly, I don't have a clue. Strangest thing I ever saw, in fact."

Dana Loesch, 2/17/2012

 in fact, this big battle that I’ve, uh, totally won with Keith Olbermann by the way, like, not only won once but twice and three times… uh, there were individuals saying, [high voice] “Oh what about the Virginia rape? The rapes that, the forced rapes of women who are pregnant?” What!?

Wait a minute, they had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.

What Dana doesn't realize is that most boyfriends don't have stainless steel penises.

Chris and Dana Loesch. From Riverfront Times. You'll remember Chris as one of the tastefully wigged rappers at the CPac convention a couple of weeks ago.

In a nice little human interest story about a Rodeo Drive screening room (Oscars color commentary), Susan Stamberg mentioned that the subject matter of the film The Flowers of War is "the Rape--some have called it--of Nanking". (Audio here.) That's NPR's recalibrated objectivity policy: when they say they don't want to seem biased to conservatives, they include Japanese conservatives, some of whom prefer to call it the "Blind Date of Nanking", where the two parties had a nice time but decided it wasn't really going to lead anywhere.

Japanese soldiers practice their bayonet technique in Nanjing, on live Chinese prisoners. From Dismal World.

And in other moderation news, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has hired a special PR firm to help them deal with the fallout from the foundation's unintentional attempt—well, it wasn't everybody's intention—to do something bad to Planned Parenthood: Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), founded by former Democratic pollsters (doesn't say what the "former" applies to) Mark Penn and Doug Schoen. Penn's strategy is as yet under wraps, but rumor has it he'll be raising an entirely meaningless slogan and subtly suggesting that Planned Parenthood uses cocaine.

There's something about a bishop...

There's something about a bishop...
There's something about a bishop that is
comical but at the same time deeply unnerving.

From Flavius Josephus, at Byzantine, Texas. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Bulgaria's commission charged with announcing the names of people who collaborated with the country's former communist-era secret services announced on January 17 2012 that 11 out of 15 members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church's governing body, the Holy Synod, had worked for State Security....

Galaktikon was agent Misho; Domitian, agent Dobrev; Ignatii, agent Penev; Yoanikii, agent Kirilevich; Grigorii, agent Vanyo; Yosif, agent Nikolov; [jump]

Request for signatures

The Australian government is contemplating plans for a marine reserve of a million square miles, but they need expressions of international support; you can send one through the very international Avaaz, at http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_coral_sea_4/?vl.

Image from Supergreenme.

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Photo from Wikimedia Commons.