Ah, fascists! Ilias Kasidiaris of Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party, who tried to beat up two left-wing members of parliament, both women, last Friday, on live national television, was locked up in the TV studio after people called the cops and escaped by busting in the door—now he's announced he's going to sue the women, for "unprovoked defamation", and the TV station for illegal detention.
David Brooks comes out all apocalypytic all of a sudden:
many Republicans have now come to the
conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. Yuval
Levin expressed the sentiment perfectly in a definitive essay for The Weekly Standard called “Our Age of Anxiety”:
“We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of
the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a
new era for which we have not been well prepared. ... We are, rather, on
the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state,
which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the
future of American capitalism."
Jeez, collapsing due to its internal contradictions! Ever hear that before?* And after Götterdämmerung, where are we bound? What's the new social order going to be like?
It's going to be like 1927! or maybe 1890, before that damned Grover Cleveland pushed the income tax in with the tariff bill! Because
the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of
the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care
and education. Successive presidents have layered on regulations and
loopholes, creating a form of state capitalism in which big businesses
thrive because they have political connections and small businesses
struggle.
You didn't think we were going to get Denmark, did you? It's the retroactionary program—when Romney's elected, they're going to Restore the Future, right? get rid of all that sleek blond wood and stainless steel of the future as we know it in favor of what? Steampunk, of course!
*You have to check this out from ExurbanDoug, a quiet Brooks disciple, born to blush unseen and waste his sweetness on the summer air. Presumably he gets these great big ideas atop his great big lawnmower tractor.
¡Todos se asemejan! The website RNCLatinos.com, wooing the Spanish-speaking vote for the Republicans, wanted a nice picture of jolly brown children to demonstrate their friendly feelings. They probably meant Spanish-speaking children, but what they got was a mixture of kids from different parts of Asia, as you can see from the original at Shutterstock. Apparently the gaffe is being repaired, but here's a screenshot—lest we forget.
Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R-18), the lawmaker who crafted
the state’s controversial anti-immigration law, SB 1070, also known as
the “Papers, please” law, was thrice denied a venue for a fundraiser
scheduled for Thursday afternoon, June 14. According to the Arizona Capital Times,
the former legislator asked two Mexican restaurants and a public school
library to host the event, only to be told to please campaign somewhere
else.
The fundraising event was originally planned to be held at Macayo’s
restaurant in Phoenix, but the plan was scuttled by activist Dee Dee
Garcia Blase of Arizona’s Tequila Party, a conservative Latino group
formed in reaction to the deportation-happy Tea Party. Garcia Blase
organized a protest to be held outside the restaurant during the event
and contacted Macayo’s corporate offices, which led the restaurant to
cancel the event on Thursday morning.
Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa). From Mesa Arizona Now!
How do you like the outfit? And how do you like this outfit, from Tucker ("I am so not gay") Carlson's Daily Caller, celebrating "with hot American women" for Flag Day on Thursday?
And this one?
Abbie Hoffman. Via Tristero at Digby's Hullaballoo.
(a) The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as
a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or
property.
(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.
(c) The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free.
(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or
drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but
always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always
arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red
below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front
of the platform, and for decoration in general.
(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in
such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in
any way.
(Apologies to Monsieur Bouffant for appropriating all his research here; I didn't mean to, but the image of Senator Pearce is my discovery and once I had that I couldn't stop.)
Washington Post wants to know why presidential campaigns in the US spend so much money on television advertising, even though it is known that it doesn't really work very well in general elections :
The notion that all that TV money will buy relatively little is
almost as old as TV itself. Dozens of academic examinations since the
1940s have shown that TV ads have limited persuasive effects on voters
in general elections, often accounting for no more than a 1 or 2 percent
difference, and often considerably less.
What’s more, outspending
a rival on advertising in a general-election campaign doesn’t guarantee
anything; John Kerry and his Democratic allies ran almost 200,000 more
commercials than George W. Bush did in 2004 and lost in a close
election. On the other hand, Obama had a narrower advertising advantage
over Sen. John McCain in 2008 and won relatively easily.
They have an idea for an answer, but it seems pretty lame to me; that they "can't afford not to." It's not likely to make any difference, but they figure you never know:
[Former Howard Dean advisor Steve] McMahon says the great danger for any campaign is to lose your “share of
voice” — the ability to match or exceed an opponent’s advertising. Such
imbalances could crop up more frequently in this election because of
unlimited spending by super PACs.
It's like saying we should go spend more money on a clearly ineffective missile defense system because maybe it could help in a real pinch. Oh, wait.*
I had an idea about this once that might be worth developing. You know the famous revolving door between the military and the defense industry, where muck-a-mucks leave the service to join "private" enterprise and their job is to tell the generals and colonels that were once their junior officers to buy the company's products, whether they need them or not? And the equally famous revolving door between politicians and their staffs and the K Street lobbying firms?
Maybe there's the same kind of thing going on between campaign operatives and pollsters and media folk, advising politicians to make themselves known and then moving back to their ad agencies and PR firms, convincing each other that that TV market is really really important precisely because it's so expensive, i.e., profitable for the company, just like an F-35 or a $640 toilet seat.
And look how much money and fame there is in it! Look at the late William Safire, if you will, an advertising man from the start, or George Stephanopoulos**; look at the abominable Mark Penn!
So it's basically a con game, with Sheldon Adelson as the hapless mark. Looking at it this way really ought to make me laugh out loud, but it doesn't somehow. Not because, or not just because the relatively good guys must do it as well as the relatively bad; and certainly not because of what it does to my own TV, since we get almost none of that here, New York not being a swing market.
No, it's because of what advertising is primarily used for, to give value—buzz value, or wishful elegance, or significance—to the crappy stuff we are expected to buy, McDonalds food, the Adam Sandler movie, Paloma Picasso earrings. It's that our candidates see themselves as intrinsically valueless, as needing that kind of semiotic inflation. Which is true, in a sense, because the amount of money you raise governs the amount of attention you get from the news media, broadcast and print, such that only a candidate with x many millions of dollars is a serious candidate, and a striking ad is a news story in itself, with made-to-order visuals, way better than a policy speech.
And who sells advertising? Exactly. It's another revolving door.
*That's what poor old Mr. Cheney called the 1% doctrine, isn't it? That was a funny one, anyway. Even the most skeptical skeptic would admit that there's at least a 1% chance that human-created global warming would make our planet uninhabitable within a couple of generations, but that didn't rouse the Big Dick to action. Or maybe that probability is just too high; like, "OMG, Mr. Vice President, looks like the North Koreans are going to build a nuclear weapon!" "Well, there's just a 1% chance Iraq might do it first, so let's go whack them."
**I saw George Stephanopoulos once, toddling up West 79th St. from Riverside. I don't know why I'm telling you this, but in 20 years of living in New York that is my biggest celebrity spotting, unless you prefer Julia Child, which I do—Julia Child was gratifying, because I was studying an interesting restaurant menu, and I thought she beamed at me. Now she's gone, of course, and Stephanopoulos is still around, even though Blogger thinks his name is misspelled and underlines it with angry red dots.
Is the reproductive selection by some parents today entirely different from the eugenics of an earlier era?
This is another one of those cases where the Times copy department has strangely written their own Shorter. But you can't find it online, it's only on the page 3 teaser section in the paper paper.
The answer to the question, needless to say, is probably no for the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, but yes for the rest of us.
It is entirely different. The eugenics of the early 20th century was fascist in character, even if many persons of an otherwise progressive bent (Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger) favored it. That "otherwise progressive", by the way, doesn't mean they weren't racists, because they were. It was concerned with what the state ought to do about other people's children—not ours!
The folks now planning to bless their heirs with longer legs and a tighter brain than they have themselves as soon as the science permits are working out a private-enterprise program to do something about their own children—not anybody else's. Except to the extent that one of the benefits they hope to score from it is the admiration of everybody else of their blonde, straight-nosed, Yale-alumnus scions, alongside that of an amusement for their early adult years and a staff of support for their old age.
You could say it is boboist in character, since it is the behavior of people imagined by Ross's partner-in-pandritry David Brooks. Supposing there are any such folks, at any rate.
In the real world as we currently know it, there are basically two legitimate reasons for choosing or rejecting to have a baby based on its genes: parents-to-be practicing in vitro fertilization may use genetic information to decide which of their blastocysts they should toss out, assuming they don't want sextuplets; and some women may choose to have an abortion rather than keep a fetus doomed to intense suffering and an early death.
Oh! Did you say "abortion"? Alternative shorter Ross Douthat:
Nazis practiced forced abortion, so anybody who gets an abortion is a Nazi.
It's just the same old column after all.
N.B. I was able to write the foregoing virtually without looking at the column itself, on the basis of the teaser alone. Having read it, I need to make only a couple of further remarks.
First, the opening paragraph is an appeal to an article from the Yale Alumni Magazine. I initially assumed it was there to remind us that Ross went to Yale—to let us know, as it were, that when he finally mates with that chunky Reese Witherspoon, nobody needs to worry about how smart the baby will be. But Wikipedia tells us he went to Harvard, raising an irrelevant but fascinating question: What kind of person not a Yale alumnus could possibly find time to read the Yale Alumni Magazine? (I know: he only looks at it for the nude pictures.)
Second, in the sentence on which the teaser was based, he gets part of the point about the difference between the fascist state and the hopeful mother:
Is this sort of “liberal eugenics,” in which the agents of reproductive
selection are parents rather than the state, entirely different from the
eugenics of Fisher’s era, which forced sterilization on unwilling men
and women?
But he misses the rest of it: the all-important difference between their kids and our kids, allowing him to move straight into his false equivalency through an idiotic strawman—
From a rigorously pro-choice perspective, the in utero phase is a space
in human development where disease and disability can be eradicated, and
our impulse toward perfection given ever-freer rein, without
necessarily doing any violence to human dignity and human rights
—to the metaphysical peroration on what makes us just like Nazis:
First, a relentless desire for mastery and control, not only over our
own lives but over the very marrow and sinew of generations yet unborn.
And second, a belief in our own fundamental goodness, no matter to what
ends our mastery is turned.
(Failing to distinguish the liberal belief that people are fundamentally good from the conservative belief that I'm fundamentally good and frack you...)
Walker is an obnoxious, hyperpartisan brute who exemplifies everything in movement conservatives I've been complaining about for years now, but you should vote for him because he thinks exactly the way I do.
That's only part of the column; for the rest, Dean Baker offers an enjoyably acid takedown.
Walker himself won, of course, but not everybody believes it's because Wisconsin agrees with him, as Roy Edroso translated it into our language,
that the problem with our economy is that garbagemen and schoolteachers make too much money.
Zandar at Balloon Juice and assorted colleagues argue persuasively from exit polls that Wisconsin just doesn't like recalls. Then again it seems that this recall has given control of the state senate to Democrats, so Walker will not be able to railroad any more of his ghastly program through it.
Tonight, we tell Wisconsin, we tell our country and we tell people all
across the globe that voters really do want leaders who stand up and
make the tough decisions.
That "tough decisions" phrase has to be one of the most abused in the zombie rhetoric repertoire, by the way. It sounds like a brave decision made by a politician without regard to cheap popularity, a "profiles in courage" choice. But it is invariably used to describe a decision that is self-evidently bad—a bogus solution to a problem that may not even exist presented as the only alternative, like trying to jail all the undocumented immigrants in Arizona—to conform with some kind of pharisaically pinched, narrow-minded notion of moral hazard: cutting off somebody else's nose to spite your own face, and ensure the votes of the nastiest people in your constituency.
Another piece of zombie rhetoric was used this week by secretary of defense Leon Panetta:
“We have made clear to the Pakistanis that the United States of America
is going to defend ourselves against those who attack us,” Mr. Panetta
said. “This is not just about protecting the United States. It’s also
about protecting Pakistan. And we have made it very clear that we are
going to continue to defend ourselves.”
Panetta is here answering, or refusing to answer, the question of whether drone strikes in Pakistan violate that country's sovereignty. The usage, as a rhetorical trick, comes from Israel: every time the Israeli government is caught committing some abuse against somebody in the neighborhood they cry, "Israel has a right to defend itself."
The implication is always that this is a plea: justifiable crime, because it's self-defense. But they never actually argue it, because it isn't arguable—self-defense doesn't justify everything. If the United States is violating Pakistani sovereignty by dropping bombs there maybe it is truly somebody's idea of self-defense, but it's still violating Pakistani sovereignty nevertheless, and no amount of zombie rhetoric can change it.
Truth terrorists: China
Wu Xiaoqing, the vice minister for environmental protection, demanded that foreign governments stop releasing data on China’s air.
In a criticism clearly aimed at the United States, Mr. Wu said at a news
conference that the public release of air-quality data by foreign
governments’ consulates “not only doesn’t abide by the spirits of the
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and Vienna Convention on
Consular Relations, but also violates relevant provisions of
environmental protection.” (New York Times, June 6, 2012)
What's supposedly wrong with the data is that it's not "representative"—I guess in the sense that instead of building its consulates in a very large random sample of locations, the US puts them only in major cities, the very places most likely to suffer from pollution; you get no idea of the bracing atmosphere in Inner Mongolia or at the North Korean border, or the sultry breeze in semitropical Hainan.
What's really wrong is that it's data the Chinese government didn't get a chance to edit—those consulates are nothing but a bunch of truth terrorists. Anyway Wu's statement shouldn't be interpreted as some kind of threat; the vice minister simply wanted to clear the air, heh-heh.
Obama also has wrecked havoc in the the Democratic Party.
No, you do not wreck havoc. Unless the meaning is, "You had some perfectly good havoc in the Democratic Party, and he went and wrecked it." Which would be a pretty odd thing—talk about concern trolling!
One wreaks havoc (past tense and participle wreaked) or occasionally works it (past tense and participle wrought). Not knowing this is illiterate, and illiteracy is a disqualification for writing a column in a national newspaper. See Zandar, again, for demonstration that the content of this column is even worse than the English usage.
At one point in Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage, the Liberals are out and the Conservatives are in, and considering reviving a failed Liberal bill to add two bishops to the C of E roster, much to the delight of Dr. Grantly, the High-Tory archdeacon of Barchester, though he thought it was devil's work when the Whigs were sponsoring it; as a Conservative bill, though, it might lead to a bishopric for himself! [jump]
Digby reports an amazing anecdote from Daniel Klaidman's Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency. It seems what convinced Eric Holder that there was something wrong with waterboarding was Christopher Hitchens's 2008 Vanity Fair article and the appended video about his own being waterboarded: [jump]
Lest you think the picture of education in New York City is unrelievedly grim, the Times runs a story today about (mostly elementary) schools where the PTA raises a million dollars or so a year in pledge campaigns that are largely supplanting bake sales and auctions as money makers. [jump]
[I]t is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with
ignorance and stupidity than youth. We’re all born idiots, and we only
get over that condition as we get less young. And yet there’s this thing
in this culture where, ‘Oh, young people are for it so it must be
special.’ No, the reason young people are for it because they don’t know
better. That’s why we call them young people. [...]
The fact that young people think socialism is better than
capitalism. That’s proof of what social scientists call their stupidity
and their ignorance. And that’s something that conservatives have to
beat out of them. Either literally or figuratively as far as I’m
concerned. (cited from Think Progress)
Maybe Jonah (who got his first winger-welfare sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute when he was 22 or 23) was just born old, but I'm guessing he must have been beaten pretty thoroughly.
Governor Cuomo's plan to build a casino and convention center adjacent to the Aqueduct racetrack in one of the most forlorn parts of Queens appears to have fallen through, as our Malaysian partner, Genting, withdrew, whether because of uncertainty as to whether the necessary changes to the state constitution would be made, or because they were expecting exclusive rights to gambling in New York City and not getting them, or maybe because it was just an awful idea. Because why on earth would anyone book a convention next door to JFK Airport—so they could walk over from the terminal? If you're visiting New York, you at least want to visit Williamsburg, right?
Skyway to the original Genting property, Genting Highlands in West Malaysia. Wouldn't work in Queens.
The Turkish pianist and composer Fazıl Say is in trouble for irreverent tweeting: as the Digital Journal reports,
In an apparent reference to Islam's enticement to men about the
afterlife, Say quoted from a verse by the famous Islamic poet Omar
Khayyam, tweeting,
You say wine will flow from its rivers,
Is heaven a pub?
You say two women per believer,
Is heaven a brothel?
Say also tweeted that he's an atheist
and proud of it. In another tweet he made fun of a muezzin that
finished the call to prayer in 22 seconds. He asked, "What's the rush, a
lover or the raki (booze) table waiting for you?"
An Istanbul court has charged him with “publicly insulting religious values that are adopted by a part of the nation,” with a trial date of October 18, and he could get up to 18 months.
If you think quoting Omar Khayyam is rude, you should see what he does to Brahms and Rakhmaninov:
As we know, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has backed down a little from his claim a year ago that there had been no civilian deaths in drone strikes since 2010:
Brennan was asked about his claim last June that for almost a year
“there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional
proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”
On
Sunday, he appeared to qualify his statement. "Well, what I said was
that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no
information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being killed," he
said. (Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2012)
Now we've learned from the New York Times how they manage to avoid the information: [jump]
This week, J Street is expected to land one of its biggest names when it
announces its endorsement of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the veteran
Democrat from California who sits on the Senate intelligence committee,
an important forum for Middle East intelligence. With Ms. Feinstein’s
acceptance of J Street’s endorsement, the group’s PAC plans to raise at
least $100,000 in support of her re-election bid, the officials said.
Founded in 2008, J Street’s political action committee is on pace to set
a fund-raising record this election. By November, it expects to raise
nearly $2 million in support of more than 60 [all Democratic] Congressional candidates
whose views on Israel are aligned with its own, said Alexandra Stanton, a
co-chairwoman of the PAC, and she said it had tapped into pro-Israel
donors who had no real political outlet before now.
J Street's passionate moderation on Israel and the two-state solution does not exactly reflect my views, which are more at the Peace Now end of the spectrum, but it's heartening that any kind of non-hawk standpoint is rising at this time when the discourse in Israel itself seems to have gotten so badly lost.
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while
American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance
of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her
hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United
States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already
knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake.
Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.'
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man
to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the
last man to die for a mistake?... (John Kerry, in testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971)
The colonialist faction of the conservative movement—the what?—Well, Dinesh D'Souza and crypto-Belgian wannabe terrorist Newt Gingrich charge Barack Obama with being an "anti-colonialist" as if that were a particularly bad thing, so I guess their own stance must be pro-colonialist. Anyway they're back in the news, as D'Souza's 2010 Regnery best-seller The Roots of Obama's Rage gets filmed, in a production by Gerald Molen and with some financing from Joe Ricketts (the one who runs one campaign to cut wasteful government spending and another to raise $200 million in state-backed bonds for renovations to his family's own Wrigley Field, at the same time), for release this summer. Go ahead and watch the trailer:
You wouldn't necessarily think, in the second decade of the 20th century, that colonialism was going to be a very high-stakes issue. Colonialism where? Nobody ever refers to the occupied West Bank as a colony because HOLOCAUST! IRAN! SHUT UP! so are we talking about American Samoa? Gibraltar? the Galápagos? Alberta? That's what made it funny in the first place, like Ron Paul's fixation on the gold standard—Republicans earnestly worrying about the concepts of Captain Mahan and Colonel Roosevelt, as if they were still waxing their mustaches and knocking back oysters three dozen at a go.
What I wasn't thinking of was the mysterious ability of the Republican mind to conceptualize an inverse time, from future through present to past, in what I have called the retroactionary tendency. Republicans can imagine the Obama of 2016, proposing himself as a socialist dictator of the world, inveighing against colonialism, as the direct cause of the independence of Kenya in 1963. Worse yet, that independence, continuing backwards, leads inexorably to the horrors of the Mau Mau insurgency of 1952-59, etc., etc.
By the same token, they themselves are the optimists, looking forward to the conquest of the Philippines and Hawaii! It's morning in America, if the sun rises in the west!
While we're on the education subject, TPM invites us to note that President Obama has been making a campaign theme of the idea that Willard Mitt Romney wants to expand public school class sizes without apparently realizing that his own education secretary, Arne Duncan, takes a position that's hardly different from Romney's.
It isn't the first time he is attacking his own education policy, either. Remember what he had to say about high-stakes testing a little over a year ago at a Univision-sponsored town hall: [jump]
The New York Times has been commemorating the 58th anniversary (May 17) of Brown v. Board of Education with a series of articles dealing with the fact that American schools are still segregated by race (in a beautifully written thick-description feature by N.R. Kleinfield
describing the consequences of segregation at a charter middle school in
Flatbush, Brooklyn), the apparent fact that the authorities don't seem to see any reason for doing anything about it (David L. Kirk's op-ed
asking why school reformers have abandoned desegregation as a way of
narrowing the school achievement gaps between racial groupings), and the widespread belief that it really isn't a problem anyway (in an 8-way debate—"Jim Crow is dead, segregation lives on. Is it time to bring back busing?
"—about what needs to be done).
Really! That is, some of the debaters thought desegregation was a pretty good thing and worth reviving, of course, but others seemed not to understand why it was even an issue; according to Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute, for instance,
Falling back to 1970s-style desegregation policies like busing ignores
new schooling options that weren’t available decades ago and which offer
better educational opportunities for minority students.
As if the original desegregation policies had merely been techniques for wringing inefficiencies out of the system. It's like arguing that there's no point in enforcing anti-slavery laws because there are better ways of maximizing profit for cotton cultivators. School segregation is illegal, according to the law of the land as established in Brown in 1954, and it is illegal because it is wrong—because it deprives people of certain rights guaranteed them in our constitution.
It was amazing to me to see in these essays, as also in the reader comments, how many apparently respectable people don't seem to know that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was decided wrongly; that separate can never be equal. Kirk's article makes it seem, in fact, as if the Supreme Court has effectively overruled Brown and restored Plessy to its original status, in the sense that it has been gradually disallowing all the means for desegregating. (Indeed, the reputedly evil Michelle Rhee was actually on the left side of this one, since she argues in the Times debate for "socioeconomic integration", i.e., for a method of achieving racial integration without mentioning race, which might make it acceptable to the Court and effective at the same time.)
In particular the proponents of various kinds of "school choice" and charter school approaches appear genuinely to believe that separate but equal institutions are possible. They emphasize the spiffiness and modernity of the charter school or Small School of Choice, its advanced electronic equipment, its youthful (underpaid) teachers. Izumi even cites a fraudulent "proof" of the high quality of the new schools in terms of what a spiffy study it was
The study used the most rigorous experimental design, randomized control trial...
(It may be a rigorous design, but it's not very rigorously applied; in fact, an absolutely crappy study—I've discussed the work in question at some length here.)
But if you look at the typical features of these new schools—the high ratio of administrators to teaching staff, the focus on high-stakes test scores and test prep, the elaborate discipline and dress codes, the de-skilling of teachers who are often required to stick to a script—you can see that they are not at all equal to the kind of school you want for your own children, in spite of the bells and whistles. They're not meant to instill habits of critical thinking but of swift obedience. They're not meant for "our kids" but for "their kids". And Brown has not yet become irrelevant.
As you will recall, Saddam Hussein had his own little camp of Iranian terrorists on the Iraqi side of the border, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), acquired after Saddam's downfall by our dear JSOC and subsequently by Israeli intelligence, who used them to murder Iranian physicists. They've always had a big sad about everybody calling them terrorists, just because they do a lot of terroristic, um, stuff, but now we learn from emptywheel that the Obama administration is thoughtfully working to get them off that list. Great headline:
MEK to Be Delisted as Terrorists in Reward for Engaging in Terrorism
And guess where else they're showing up this week? In Hamburg, of all places, where they have provided Die Welt (summarized in English in Haaretz) with another one of their specialty packages detailing how Iran has intensified work on its nuclear weapons program, if it has, which is as usual far from clear; as in previous such packages of 2002 and 2008, MEK's assertions can't be independently assessed, and they don't have a very good track record. Not to mention the infamous Laptop of Death they hung around Colin Powell's neck in 2004.
Maybe they've moved up into specializing in metaterror: frightening us with the news that we're going to be frightened. Wonder if there's a list for that?
Meanwhile in Israel, amusingly enough, Iran seems to be virtually forgotten in the exuberance in the new political arrangement, in which Likud and Labor and Kadima have united in the common purpose of let's please just not have an election for a long while, revealing Binyamin Netanyahu's real top priority to be pretty much the same as that of his rival Shaul Mofaz.
What will really be interesting is if Iran's upcoming talks in Baghdad, conducted, for once, without Netanyahu standing outside waving his finger in everyone's face, actually got somewhere for a change. Thomas Erdbrink for the Times sketches out a really interesting picture of how this might happen with Iran declaring, essentially, victory—they've got the peaceful nuclear program they always said they wanted. This is the first really new-looking thing I've seen on the issue in a long time: read it.
My own mother, Dorothy Bloom, born in 1924, died unexpectedly but very peacefully at the beginning of the month just a month short of her 88th birthday. She was in a hospital upstate (as I languished in my hospital in the city) for observation following an apparently minor cardiac event, had a fun evening of card playing and gossip with relatives and nurses, and then just passed sweetly and swiftly away without any sign of fear or confusion.
She was a greatly exceptional person in just about every way, and it was such good fortune for the five of us to be her child that it seems almost ill-mannered to mourn—like, you want more? Anyway, here's some music, dedicated to her.
As you all know by now President Obama has shed those silly-looking gills and taken his flashy new lungs up onto permanent land residency; his lengthily evolving position on marriage equality has evolved itself right up to where some cavilers will say it should have been a year or three ago. Not me! And I'll tell you why.
Fins to limbs, from shark to Eryops. From McGraw-Hill Access Science.*
*Note by the way that the bottom three species—shark, coelacanth, lungfish—all still exist, while the others are extinct (the natural selection process is not, as vulgarizers of the theory and Tom Friedmans and the like continually allege, about new species replacing old ones but rather about new species exploiting new ecological niches).
Entertaining the question of whether Vice President Biden had jumped the gun by endorsing marriage equality earlier in the week,
“I had already made a decision that we were going to take this position before the election and before the convention,” Obama said in his interview with ABC News that aired this morning. (via Think Progress)
Do you see that weird little pronoun shift in "I" decided that "we" would take the position? This is not a mistake; it reflects the complexity of what we are talking about when we talk about "the" president; the citizen Barack Obama, the institution that is President Barack Obama (with the special US wrinkle that that is two institutions, the Head of Government and the Head of State), the forests of committees that carry out the institution's functions, and the fact that Obama really is, as poor George W. pretended to be, the "decider"—the ultimate chair of all those committees. Citizen-chairman Obama decided not just that the views of the institution were going to evolve, but which direction they were going to evolve in and how far.
The Obama who favored same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996 was clearly Citizen Barack; and so was the one who rejected it in 2004, running for the US Senate and presumably thinking about voters black and white from outside his own sophisticated district (and not being very brave, perhaps, but not being exceptionally dishonest either).
The candidate, anyway, is never just presenting his citizen-self to the public, but is trying out for the role of the committee chair, whose speech must be more circumspect. This is a political thing, and it is not far removed from seeking out political positions that get votes, but it is not quite the same thing if the candidate is doing it the right way.
Willard Mitt Romney's Etch-a-Sketch approach is drawn from his corporate business background; it is basically applying for a job by offering to be a total toady for whatever your employer wants, personally or publicly. It's not very dignified, in comparison to applying on the basis of one's ability to carry forward the work of the firm, and it's really not wise to hire such a person, though I guess that's how the Masters of the Universe roll, recruiting their fellow psychopaths, measuring their ability to bully in the future by their ability to grovel today.
Obama's campaign technique is to sketch out a range of territory where he would be interested in acting, in such a way as to attract the most possible voters of course, often including some who are going to feel burned by what he actually does. Sometimes he cannot find a very broad range at all, as with closing down Guantánamo, and sometimes he can, as with the throwing together of all the different kinds of civil-union and marriage options.
After the inauguration, the citizen and the chair have to start negotiating their respective roles and contributions, which can get pretty complicated; it's here that the turning-round-an-ocean-liner metaphors come into play. The marriage equality issue was an especially easy one in some senses: Citizen Barack's views were on record (that would of course not bother Romney, who would simply deny that he had said anything of the sort), very important sectors of campaign money (Hollywood!) were for once on the radical side, and so were the rapidly moving trends of public opinion.
This is where things stood in 2010 when Obama made his declaration that his own views on the subject were "evolving", and I think everybody should have understood exactly what he meant, instead of complaining about the coyness of the expression: that Citizen Obama had seized the tiller on this issue and would be leading it in his own preferred direction. There was only one direction in which it could be said to "evolve" in any case; bird species may on occasion stop using their wings, but they do not transform them into tiny velociraptor claw arms.
So for this week's announcement, it basically looks earlier than supporters had any right to hope—before the campaign even starts when I would have been betting on 2014. It's great news!
OK, Mr. P.? I've totally got your back on this one—now, can we start talking about holding prisoners without charges, and persecution of whistle blowers? Any evolution going on back there?
Bill Johnson, ex-politician (R-Alabama,
sometime gubernatorial candidate) and current international
humanitarian, discussed in a post here last December, resurfaced recently (via General Stuck in comments at Balloon Juice).
Possible recipients in the Rotorua mud baths. Picture from Fodors.
Johnson was the strange soul who went off to New Zealand to help with earthquake relief and while living in Christchurch took to the unusual hobby of sperm donation, [jump]
After the unmistakably weak employment report for April, it’s obvious
that the economy will not heal itself without more government help.
Gosh, Sparky, ya think? And that oh so subtle line between "obvious to everybody not representing a major journalistic enterprise or the Republican Party" and obvious toutcourt, what does it specially have to do with this April's report as opposed to, oh, say, the report for April 2009?
Nevertheless the editorial itself is not so ingenuous, and not disingenuous at all; it may start off all "nor is it clear where more growth will come from," but it's very clear about the source of the dissipating unclarity:
Election-year politics are bound to further confuse the economic picture
and the way forward. On Friday, Mitt Romney blamed President Obama for
the April jobs figures, saying that in a normal recovery “we should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month."
The truth is that the economy has not seen job growth like that in
nearly 30 years. More to the point, the policies Mr. Romney espouses —
notably deregulation and tax cuts for the rich — were the favored
policies under President George W. Bush, years when job growth and wage
gains were, at best, anemic.
The reason it's this April is that it's the April of the presidential campaign, and the reason it's newly obvious is that the policy debate for the campaign is taking on its definitive form, with its Democratic picture of job growth as something that can be done by anybody who can put some money together with a job description and a hire, and your Republican picture of "job creation" as some kind of quasi-ethnic property, like the ability to cure scrofula, remaining there even if it is unused, so that Willard Mitt Romney was still a job creator when his main job was slashing thousands upon thousands of actual jobs and in all the years he has been a simple rentier (with a hobby of political campaigning rather than RV travel and the like).
And even though what would really be nice is if it inspired somebody to say, "Hey, let's ship some money out to those state capitals," just taking that position is a help.
*We are selectively aware of certain Internet traditions.
I didn't really have anything I wanted to post except I had to get up a performance by the extraordinary Czech violinist and singer Iva Bittová before I lost her again in my memory hole. See below.
It's every time that Obama puts on a tux and does some standup, you know, it's like a sign that something's underfoot. Immediately after last year's WHC dinner, the killing of Osama bin Laden (on which coincidence this was a kind of great column); then after this year's, the signing of an agreement with President Karzai in Kabul. The Times is kvetching that Obama's speech for the occasion was "short on specifics" for how he planned to accomplish something that—as you'd think even they might have realized at this point—is just not likely to happen.
I expect Republicans to attack him on the basis that he only does it because he's oversensitive to criticism. "If somebody made fun of me for going on the Jimmy Fallon show would I just turn around and do something crazy like setting up the end of the Afghan War? Of course not! But that Obama just can't stand being second-guessed about anything!"
While from the Jerusalem office of the permanent campaign, the Times's Jodi Rudoren, writing less than penetrably a couple of days ago:
At the same time, there is a growing sense that Israeli elections will
be called this fall rather than next year. And while Mr. Netanyahu’s
popularity remains all but impenetrable, coalition politics means a
robust campaign filled with charged language nonetheless.
I think she meant you can't poke holes in the popularity, not that you can't understand its causes and mechanisms. But then again, in the followup Tuesday, she added that most Israelis reject the prospect of an independent strike against Iran, but they love Netanyahu anyway:
“Israelis like the hawkish rhetoric,” said Mina Zemach, director of the
Dahaf Polling Institute. “Netanyahu is very strong now. What the public
hopes is that Netanyahu prepares us just in case, if no one will stop
Iran, then we have to attack.”
So it's impenetrable in that sense after all. "I'm not voting for some clown who's only as crazy as I am, it has to be somebody considerably crazier than that!"
On the state math test, P.S. 30 did better in 2011, with 41 percent of
students scoring proficient — a 3 or 4 — versus 29 percent for P.S. 179.
But on the state English test, P.S. 179 did better, with 36 percent of
its students scoring proficient compared with 32 percent for P.S. 30.
And yet, when the department calculated the most recent progress report grades, P.S. 30 received an A. And P.S. 179 received an F.
Is P.S. 30 among the best schools in the city and P.S. 179 among the worst? Very hard to know.
No, you know, it's really not very hard to know at all. Or if you prefer, it's hard to know because it's a profoundly stupid and trivial question. Not so much hard to know as not worth knowing, because when distinctions are being made on this fine a metric then the difference between best and worst is not important.
I want you to understand this, Michael Winerip, because it's really making me crazy. If Schuyler sells slightly more cocktails on Thursday than Wednesday but fewer shrimp entrees, while Eugenie's cocktail sales decline a little between the two days but she does somewhat better on the shrimp front, do you ask if one of these persons is among the best waitresses in New York and the other the worst? Do you fire Schuyler and close down her section, replacing all the tables with tropical fish tanks? Or starting a "sharing" experiment with an avant-garde taco boutique?
The fact is that both these young women are very talented and commendable workers and the information gleaned in this little statistical observation is of no appreciable value in judging them. P.S. 179 and P.S. 30, in the same way, are both pretty dismal institutions, in spite of the Herculean efforts of many talented and compassionate people, not least the students and parents, and for reasons that are largely very well known that nobody appears to have any intention of doing anything about. One of these things would be support from institutions that seem instead determined to figure out ever more Byzantine ways of judging and condemning them.
Whether a principal is removed or receives a $25,000 bonus depends on the report card grade.
And yet, what appears to be a substantial difference in two schools’
achievement scores can come down to just a few correct answers per
child.
Yes, you do need evaluation metrics in the New York school system, but the failure you need to focus on isn't on the teachers, or even the principals, but the effectiveness of the support given by the DOE, or withheld as the case may be in favor of schemes to make it look as if the DOE is carrying out its responsibility...
Teacher accountability taco designed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Photo from The Taste Spot.
Cerberus at Sadly, No suggests that Mrs. Romney really hasn't ever worked a day in her life:
Bitching at the help to do a better job cleaning your house and raising
your children is so far removed from the notion of “work” by any
interpretation of the word that… Well, frankly, I have to believe that
brain-sucking parasites is the only reason that anyone is taking it
halfway serious.
Are you kidding? In her class that's what the husbands do as well, except for the "house" and "children" part, and do you realize what they get paid? It's called "management", my dears. And "multitasking". And if they buy you for breakfast it gets their husband a tax break. That's called "job creation".
I say, give a man a fish and he will eat today, teach him to fish and he will eat a lifetime, give him a low-interest loan and he might stay alive through his fishing lessons.
And lastly, give him a little Taj Mahal and... just give it to him. Does there have to be an economic reason for everything?
“But again, we’re very busy in Washington with a corrupt government,
with a government that I said a year ago, because of the money, because
of the TARP and stimulus funds, was going to be the most corrupt
government in history, and it is proving to be that.”
In other celebrity news, Kermit the Frog complained that President Obama's skin is the greenest of any president's in history.
