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Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up
Your one stop pundit shop.
Bob Herbert argues forcefully and persuasively against escalating our involvement in Afghanistan:
The government we are supporting in Afghanistan is a fetid hothouse of corruption, a government of gangsters and weasels whose customary salute is the upturned palm. Listen to this devastating assessment by Dexter Filkins of The Times:
“Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.”
Think about putting your life on the line for that gang.
If Mr. Obama does send more troops to Afghanistan, he should go on television and tell the American people, in the clearest possible language, what he is trying to achieve. He should spell out the mission’s goals, and lay out an exit strategy.
He will owe that to the public because he will own the conflict at that point. It will be Barack Obama’s war.
Ron Chernow wants a "sweeping inquest" into how the current economic crisis came be, and says to look at Ferdinand Pecora's investigation into the causes of the 1929 crash for inspiration.
Richard Cohen says that it's stupid to blame the current conflict on Israel, but that:
The horrors of war are not to be dismissed or demeaned. In 2006, Israel accidentally killed 28 civilians in the Lebanese village of Qana when it attempted to take out a nearby rocket site. In Gaza, innocent Palestinians are being killed. The suffering is great and cannot be ignored. But what has been ignored is the series of events that led to this war. Anyone could see how it was going to start. As always, though, it's a lot harder to see how it ends.
Kathryn Lopez is upset at the "orgy of abstinence bashing" after a study said that teens who take "virginity pledges" are as likely to have sex as those who haven't taken the pledge.
William McGurn, while less colorful than Lopez, goes after the same study on teens and sex.
E.J. Dionne Jr., on what the current fight to lead the Republican National Committee says:
Right-wing loyalists can talk all they want about how President Bush's problem was that he wasn't "conservative enough," but the numbers show they are misunderstanding their party's problem. Obama and Kaine are appealing to a moderate country moving gradually in a progressive direction and have a party behind them prepared to grapple with the realities of politics now.
Ben Lieberman is afraid the incoming Obama administration won't want to drill, baby, drill.
Steve Calabresi and Michael Saks argue that justice requires twelve angry men, not six.
H.D.S. Greenway says that the "times are too dangerous, both at home and abroad," to waste time trying to stop Roland Burris from being seated as the newest Senator from Illinois.
British government proposing "name and shame" equality list
The government's equalities office is drawing up an amendment to the equality bill that would force companies to publish figures in annual accounts showing the number of men and women in particular pay bands. The bill is due to be published early this year.
Business leaders reacted angrily to the proposal. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) complained that forcing companies to produce "meaningless statistics" would do little to tackle the underlying causes of inequality, while the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) said the response was "over-prescriptive".
The minister in charge of the bill, Vera Baird, the solicitor general, is understood to be sympathetic to the scheme following criticism that the existing requirement for public sector bodies to report on gender pay inequalities did not go far enough to close the pay gap.
Men are paid 17.1% more than women for full-time work, according to government figures published in November. In part-time wages, the gender gap is 36.6%, according to the Office of National Statistics. Over a lifetime, that disparity means that women in full-time employment will be paid £369,000 less than their male counterparts, the EHRC estimated.
Separate research by Cranfield Business School showed the number of women holding executive directorships in FTSE 100 companies fell in 2007 to the lowest level for nine years. Only three of Britain's top companies have female chief executives.
UK report: 25% of families will have no disposable income in 2009
In November, a survey by Nielsen, the market research firm, and trade body the British Retail Consortium (BRC) found that 21 per cent of families had no spare cash left after essential living expenses. However, sector insiders expect this to grow to at least 25 per cent by the spring.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) survey last week showed that six in 10 people believe they will have less disposable income in 2009 than they had last year. Those in the lower socio-economic DE classifications were particularly gloomy, with nearly 70 per cent convinced they would have less money to spend on the high street.
Stephen Robertson, director-general at the BRC, said: "A fifth of all families had nothing left to spend [after core expenses] and I think that will get worse during 2009."
A leading retail figure predicted that the next Nielsen/BRC survey, due in May, will show at least 25 per cent of families lacking the cash needed for minor luxuries.
Yeah, But Scarier
Anyone else starting to get worried that this economic situation could be worse than we fear (even though we fear like a sonofabitch)?
I mean, it’s everywhere.
Bernie Madoff - how it (may have) happened
The State of Journalism
A longtime newsman steps down and reflects on his career and the state of the industry he departs. Howard Weaver provides some really interesting takes. He’s a guy I’ve come to know from a series of email exchanges and from us perusing each others’ blogs. Just one of those weird web acquaintances that we’ve all come to take for granted. Too much so.
Howard, if you’re reading, the timing of your retirement couldn’t be worse for me. I was just about to ask you for a job as a columnist. It occurred to me that I knew this big time dude in big time journalism, so what the heck?
This year's list of words that should be banned
First Dude "Skateboard English is not the appropriate way to refer to the spouse of a high ranking public official," says one commentator on the university's website.
Maverick The word has been left so battered and bruised by the assaults perpetrated on it by John McCain and Sarah Palin that it might be a kindness to leave it in peace to recover for a while.
Staycation Banishment of this seems harsh. Staycation is a succinct, witty way of labelling the new trend for staying in your home country at holiday time, but it is suffering for enshrining both green and economic concerns, which as we have seen above, is a sure way to tick people off.
Chris has used staycation on the blog, and I had no idea what it meant until I read his post, so I'm not sure that one's being overused, yet.
Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds and Expats
At The Denver Post, Ed Quillen writes:
One of the few positive media developments in 2008 arrived after the national political conventions, when Rachel Maddow got her own nightly hour on MSNBC.Not that I always concur with her politics, but unlike most such hosts, she doesn't badger, talk over or needlessly interrupt her guests. She might argue with them, but she always offers them a chance to speak. Nor is she full of herself like Keith Olbermann, who can elevate pomposity to stratospheric levels.
Lately Maddow's show has offered a nightly feature called "Lame Duck Watch," which observes that George W. Bush is still president of the United States of America, and thus in position to issue regulations, pardons and executive orders that deserve scrutiny, especially when most eyes are focused on the impending presidency of Barack Obama.
This got me to wondering about the origin of the phrase "lame duck." We use it to describe an office-holder whose replacement has been elected but not sworn in. It connotes a sense of being crippled, even though the lame duck still holds the full powers of office. ...
The phrase did not originate in politics. According to my favorite bathroom reference book, "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," the expression originally came from finance, and referred to "a stock-jobber or dealer who will not, or cannot, pay his losses" and has to "waddle out of the alley like a lame duck." It also applies to a defaulter on a loan, and goes back to 18th-century London.
What Mister Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney defaulted on was not a loan but rather their oath of office. Scarcely a more appropriate pair of lame ducks in U.S. history deserve to be flipped the bird.
• • •
The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story Anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman dies at 91.
More Panetta reaction
Our Bombs Are Friendlier
Hey, remember all those news images we saw of children and women killed or injured and in the hospital during the initial phases of shock and awe?
Yeah, me neither.
Is it a fair way to cover war? Maybe it is. It’s certainly the way we cover Israel. But it’s not the way we cover it when we’re doing the bombing. Somehow a battle (and we won’t even get into who started that battle and whose tactics really lead to the civilian toll) that has resulted in a few hundred deaths looks a whole lot more brutal and bloody on TV than the one that led to a few hundred thousand deaths (minimum). Worth considering.
Open Thread and Diary Rescue
This evening's Rescue Rangers are Louisiana 1976, taylormattd, jlms qkw (pulling a double shift), dopper0189, and grog with shayera editing.
- joetex recounts how he and his neighbors got through the power failure following Ike in Hurricane: Saved by the Electric Mini? (Louisiana 1976)
- Vladislaw gives us a potpourri of science and science fiction news in Burt Rutan: "Houston, we have a problem." Kennedy Quote. Poll Results. (jlms qkw)
- Michael Alton Gottlieb writes an essay speculating what the future holds after the breakdown of the current international order: End of Empire: Beginning of Wisdom. (dopper0189)
- supak wanders through depression, chemistry and emotional demands in A Crock Full of Happiness. (grog)
- Schopenhauer Telescope contrasts his current teaching position and the children of a private school with his previous experience in a public one in The Educator Diaries, Part I: Educating the Elite. (Louisiana 1976)
- newfie53523 shares an easy way to make someone happy in Making a difference in the life of a child one birthday cake at a time. (jlms qkw)
jotter has High Impact Diaries: January 4, 2009.
Eddie C has Top Comments 01-05-2008 Sixty Years Ago Today Edition.
Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread.
Lincoln Rolls Back Over
So here we are, a few weeks after the overly aggressive news conference held by the much-esteemed prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and it’s looking like Lightening Rod Blagojevich’s pick for the Senate seat will end up joining that body.
Blagojevich didn’t buckle under the pressure to resign. The Senate doesn’t appear to have a legal method to keep Roland Burris from his seat. During the Nessian, over the top news conference in which Fitzgerald announced his findings, he proclaimed that the governor’s conduct, “would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.” In the short term, Abe may roll back over to keep from having to watch cable news.
RNC chair says Iraq was Bush's greatest failure
“I think we failed in the way that, originally, we were prosecuting the war," Duncan said at a debate with five rivals for the chairmanship.Of course, not to be outdone, one of the lead candidates for the RNC chair job, former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, said that Bush's biggest failure wasn't the war, Katrina, and the economic mess, but rather the "failure to communicate on the war, Katrina, the bailout."
Yes, if only Bush had written better press releases about Katrina, Iraq and the economy, everything would have gone so much better.
Update on the pictures below.
On Israel, Palestine, and the U.S.
In the following I make three claims, which I will state upfront in exaggerated terms, both to get the point across and so my errors are more visible. (1) The United States (or factions in it) has more of a stake in the outcome in the Israel/Palestine conflict than Israel does. (2) Israel does not need the U.S. (3) Understanding (1) and (2) is key to resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict. Or so anyway I want to try to argue. My argument will take the form of a discussion of a post from Juan Cole, although what I want to say is not primarily about Cole's post.
On Sunday, Juan Cole posted a longish piece about Israel, Palestine, and the current fighting between them. Typically for a Cole piece, it provides a good bit of historical background and original thought. He makes a more-or-less elaborate argument about The Big Picture for the two peoples, to which I will get in a moment. The argument he makes is worthwhile and non-simplistic; but I think he overlooks or slides past an obvious point -- and I think that addressing that obvious point requires making the Big Picture, Bigger.
As an aside, I am not here attempting to argue for a position in The Standard American I/P Debate. I have a position in the SAI/PD -- I largely agree with david mizner's recent diary -- but knowing my position in the SAI/PD is about as helpful, I think, as would be knowing my opinion of the Dragon Variation of the Sicilian Defense in chess, if the real issue were that Sicily was burning down. Chess has nothing much to do with the flammability of Sicily, and The Standard American I/P Debate has nothing much to do with the problems in Israel and Palestine. The frame of the SAI/PD is all wrong. The debate misses the point. And what is "the point"? Well, (1), (2), and (3) above. I'll get to them. First, back to Cole. The next few 'graphs are about his piece.
Cole argues that the fighting between Israel (or "the Israeli government" if you prefer, though at the moment Israeli opinion polls show that most Israelis support their government's actions, or did prior to the ground invasion) and Palestine, and more generally the ongoing and often violent dispute between Israel and her neighbors, is ultimately a war for global public opinion. How the conflict is resolved will depend crucially on what the world thinks about the players in the region. This is so, Cole argues, because Israel relies heavily on commerce, tourism, and immigration of Jewish people from abroad. Israel can win every battle, but if in doing so Israel disgusts the world so much that the world wants nothing to do with it, Israel will collapse. Israel knows this, and so do her neighbors. Cole writes:
The Israeli leadership knew that it could not reply to Hamas's microwar without engaging in total war on the Gaza population, and that this step would be unpopular with the world's publics. But the Israeli leadership has successfully thumbed its nose and world public opinion so often and so successfully that this sort of consideration does not even enter into their practical calculations (except to the extent that they are careful to do a lot of propaganda for their war effort). Their estimation that they will suffer no practical bad consequences of attacks on civilians is certainly correct in the short to medium term.
-- snip --
Israel will suffer no practical sanctions from any government. Egypt and Jordan are afraid of Hamas and are more or less handmaidens of Israeli policy toward Gaza. Syria and Lebanon are weak. Iran, for all the hype it generates, is distant and relatively helpless to intervene. European governments have largely ceded the Palestinian-Israeli issue to the US and Israel.
-- snip --
War on them [the Palestinians], circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state.
It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel's economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war.
As a related factor, Cole makes the sometimes stated but often overlooked point that the one of the real goals behind Hamas and Hezbollah rocket attacks is to scare Jewish people from immigrating to Israel, or to provoke Jewish moral condemnation of Israel's response -- in any case, to keep Jewish people from wanting to move there. Israel is small enough, the thought would go, that Hamas and Hezbollah can ultimately win even if they lose every battle, simply through demographic attrition. This seems like it should be a sobering thought for Israelis: no one wants to live in a place like the one the conflict creates, no matter who wins the conflict.
In any case, let me restate Cole's conclusion:
It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel's economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war.
There is a curious and non-trivial lacuna in Cole's argument, here. As he surely knows, Israel has lost "the war of global public opinion." The people of planet Earth have made up their minds about this issue, even if America has not. March 2007 BBC report quoted at the University of Maryland's PIPA (PDF, page 5):
Israel is viewed quite negatively in the world, possibly because the poll was conducted less than six months following the Israel/Hezbollah war in Lebanon. On average, 56 percent have a mainly negative view of the country, and just 17 percent have a positive view, the least positive rating for any country evaluated. In 23 countries the most common view was negative, with only two leaning towards a positive view and two divided.
Unsurprisingly, the most negative views of Israel are found in the predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East, with very large majorities in Lebanon (85%), Egypt (78%), Turkey (76%), and the UAE (73%) having negative views.
Large majorities also have negative views in Europe, including Germany (77%), Greece (68%) and France (66%). Indonesia (71%), Australia (68%) and South Korea (62%) are the most negative countries in the Asia/Pacific region. Brazilians (72%) are the most negative in Latin America.
The two countries with mostly positive attitudes about Israel do so in modest numbers. Forty-five percent of Nigerians and 41 percent of Americans have positive views of Israel’s influence in the world, while nearly one-third in each country has negative views. Kenya and India have populations with divided views of Israel.
This would seem to refute Cole's argument. World opinion is against Israeli actions towards her neighbors; the world takes Israel to be a belligerent nation. Yet, this fact is not, so far, doing anything like, in Cole's words, "lead[ing] to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state." So that would seem to undermine the Big Picture being painted by Cole.
But, why not? If I could ask a blockheaded question: why isn't Israel subject to more boycotts? After all, there have been more U.N. resolutions against Israel than any other country, both in the General Assembly and the Security Council, even if the U.S. tends to veto the latter.
Well, it's obvious. Israel doesn't get boycotted because it is an ally of the United States. But that makes the following remark from Cole all the more interesting: "sooner or later, [Israeli actions] will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state." Cole is here imagining a future in which "rising economic powers" and "Europe" are willing to cross the U.S.
This means we can't discuss the future of Israel or Palestine without discussing the future of U.S. dominance in the world. The three are, at the moment, inextricably entwined. I take it that this is the primary reason that we as citizens of the U.S. have such a hard time discussing the I/P conflict -- the range of acceptable opinion in the U.S. on this matter is even more restricted than it is in Israel itself. In a funny kind of way, the U.S. has an even bigger stake in the I/P conflict than Israel does. Hence, (1), my first claim in the first paragraph of this post.
Now, (2): Israel does not need the U.S. Let me put this as strongly as possible, so it can be most easily disagreed with: The United States creates more problems for Israel than it solves, and it creates more problems for Israel than Palestine, or Hamas, or Hezbollah do. In exchange for military assistance, Israel is willing to play the part of the US's Western Bulldog in the Middle East; it is willing to make itself into practically a giant military base for US control of ME resources. This is a bad deal for Israel: it creates the illusion of necessity of conflict, strife, and ill feeling between Jewish and Arab peoples. It creates, and this is the devilish part, the illusion that Israel needs all that military assistance in the first place. Thus, we have a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one whose spell can be broken.
Perhaps the longstanding dream of a U.S.-brokered peace deal between Israel and Palestine is itself just a trick, meant to keep us from seeing that what is really needed is for Israel to broker a peace between the U.S. and Palestine, and between the U.S. and the Middle East more generally. But in order to see things this way we have to readjust a lot of perceptions and biases -- perceptions and biases even deeper than the ones motivating the endless Standard American Israel/Palestine Debate. Dare I call those biases "racism against Arabs and Jews"? Sure, why not; this is just a blog post, and if I am accusing everyone in America of getting sucked into it then I am also accusing myself.
Thinking about the good of Israel, as opposed to the good of the U.S., perhaps the best thing Israel could do is make its own peace, and tell the U.S. (or, as I say, factions in it) to piss off -- to abandon the bulldog deal. Now that would be giving peace a chance. And that would be (3), and my conclusion.
I don't know if this is right, but I do know that engaging in the same old Standard American Israel/Palestine debate is no better. My suspicion is that the SAI/PD is not about Israel and Palestine at all (two peoples who would both do well to tell us to shove it), but about us, and the occasional American vanity -- even on the left -- of trying to rule the world while convincing ourselves we are saving it.
Update 10:28 pm: further discussion of Cole's article is in Lefty Coaster's diary Juan Cole on Gaza the West Bank and global public opinion.
Gov't. Asks Court to Revoke Madoff's Bond
Bernie Madoff is in more hot water. He and his wife mailed packages of jewelry and other personal effects to their sons and a few others last week, in violation of a court order preventing him from transferring assets.
The Government asked the Court to revoke Bernie's bond. The Court has ordered briefs.
Bernie's lawyer also now disputes he is cooperating with the Government. He said that it's the company that is cooperating.
Say It Isn't So HuffPo
A post at HuffPo jumps the megladon. Now admittedly, I don't know much about the site. But most of the articles I've read there were decent. Which makes this one all the more out of place for a premier website like Huffington Post:
So, no one needs to say the words "climate" and "change" in the same breath -- it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable.
For starters, the author spends several previous grafs implying that changes in climate contributed to everything from the fall of Rome to charred witches. From which he then, somehow, draws the curious conclusion that climate change is an oxymoron, and then goes on to make the even froggier leap that it's a big lie and should therefore be casually dismissed. It manages to go downhill from there.
The writer, I'm sad to say, lives in my beloved hometown of Austin. A cursory search reveals he runs talkingabouttheweather.com, which is a non stop tirade of wingnut catnip, antiscience buzzwords employing every transparently dishonest trick in the fossil fuel lobby's big black oily book. I gotta assume this nitwit doesn't represent the views of HuffPo, in which case we have to wonder why his incoherent screed shows up under the 'green-as-in-environment' tab.
Is it flamebait looking for links, sloppy editorial control, or some kind of too clever by half attempt to portray the right in the most unflattering light possible? Beats me. But none of those possibilities reflect particularly well on HuffPo. Because, there really is such a thing as credibility. And this kind of crap is a big step on the road to losing it.
Further discussion and debunking is going on in A Siegel's recommended diary.
More from Josh on the tax cuts
Second, the amount of the bill that comes in tax cuts leaves the spending side of the bill really small -- judged by the standards of what most economists seem to think is necessary, like $400 billion over two years. So it's not just the logic of the tax cuts on their own merits but the degree they're beggaring the spending side of the ledger....
Obama seems to be telegraphing that to a significant degree the fundamental structure of the legislation is being built around accommodating the concerns of Republicans -- members of a political party that are about as unpopular and weak as you can get at the moment. And that sounds a lot like he's negotiating with himself, something that will embolden opposition and invite Republicans to up the ante even further.
Reid says it's over for Coleman, but Franken stays in Minnesota
After two months of counting and recounting every eligible ballot in Minnesota's U.S. Senate race, Al Franken has won fair and square and will be the state's next U.S. Senator. Nonetheless, he won't be in DC tomorrow as the rest of his class gets sworn in because Norm Coleman is vowing a legal fight to delay the inevitable.
Lest there be any question over how this will turn out, Harry Reid has flatly stated that it's over for Norm Coleman.
"Norm Coleman will never ever serve [again] in the Senate," Reid told Politico’s Manu Raju. "He lost the election. He can stall things, but he'll never serve in the Senate."
...Reid added that he will not be trying to seat Franken in the Senate on Tuesday. When asked if Franken would be sworn in tomorrow, Reid said: "No."
In his victory statement today, Franken said he was "ready to go to Washington and get to work just as soon as possible." But a Franken campaign spokesman said he has not yet made plans yet to travel to Washington.
Despite the fact that Al Franken is still in Minnesota, RNC chairman Mike Duncan is accusing Franken of having stolen the election.
Fortunately, Duncan is on a bitter little island of his own. Nobody (outside of the far right) who's looked at the situation thinks that Coleman won the election.
It might not cause that much harm to humor Norm Coleman for a short period of time, but Democrats need to spell out Coleman's legal wrangling for what it is: petty, obstructionist tactics from the GOP in the middle of a national economic crisis.
