Finnegans Wake

New At The Guardian

2008-06-19T16:03:00.001-05:00

My take on John McCain's energy policy. One thing I didn't mention is McCain's support for building new nuclear reactors, which would be a good thing.

Also, there's someone called "Barak Koffler." My son is a time-traveller?

And Now, The Grim Reaping

2008-06-19T11:20:00.004-05:00

Interesting tidbit from The Hill's piece on Donald Rumsfeld refusing to endorse John McCain for president:

Rumsfeld declined to comment any further. He also declined a follow-up request for comment on the issue to his personal office.

“He has focused his energy on the Rumsfeld Foundation,” said his aide, Keith Urbahn. One of the foundation’s goals is to encourage young people to participate in public service.

Rumsfeld, a staunch Republican and defense secretary under Bush and President Ford, may find himself in a hard place come Election Day.

Rumsfeld, a former four-term congressman from Illinois and a mentor to Vice President Cheney, has not completely stayed out of politics this year.

“Mr. Rumsfeld is a Republican. He has been helping Republican candidates for decades and he continues to do so this year,” said Urbahn.

I've learned from various inside sources (like a certain Meith Murbahn*) that the population of Rumsfeldland feels completely betrayed by the Bush administration and loathes John "[Rumsfeld] is one of the worst SecDefs in history" McCain even more. Even so, I really, really hope they are not Obamacons.

*pseudonym

More Bright College Years

2008-06-15T23:53:00.004-05:00

I swear I wouldn't be posting this if I'd ever won anything like it before. ('Ov' means overseas not-EU.) Notice the female to male ratio. We're worse than physics!

End Of The Long Lonely Road

2008-04-11T09:22:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, about 12:30 pm GMT:

Daniel Koffler
Sent by email to: daniel.koffler@gmail.com

706 Ogden Ave.
Teaneck
New Jersey 07666
USA

Ref. ISF0809_CB_
410806

10 April 2008

Clarendon Fund Scholarship

Dear Dan,

Congratulations on your admission to the University of Oxford. I am delighted to offer you a Clarendon Fund scholarship to study for the full-time BPhil in Philosophy at Oxford University from October 2008 until September 2010. The Clarendon Fund was established in 2001 and makes awards to the most academically able international graduate students to study at the University of Oxford. Around 100 awards were made in 2007/08, which represented less than 5% of the total number of applicants to this prestigious scholarship.

Your Clarendon Fund scholarship will cover the following:

100% of the tuition fee for both of the two years of your course

100% of the college fee for both of the two years of your course

A full grant for living expenses for both of the two years of your course (£12,940 in 2008/09)

If you decide to undertake a DPhil upon completion of your BPhil degree, you may apply to the Clarendon Fund for a scholarship to cover the cost of your doctoral studies. The Humanities Clarendon Award Panel looks favourably upon such applications.

Today, about the same time:

Dear Dan,

Many thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Further congratulations are in order as I am now able to confirm that Exeter College have decided to accept your application and to award you their Peter Thompson Scholarship to be held in conjunction with the Clarendon scholarship. Well done on being awarded two prestigious scholarships! As such, I have issued a revised offer letter that is attached to this message.

It's been a hellish year. Here comes the sun, as they say.

New At The Guardian

2008-02-03T22:12:00.001-05:00

Forgot to mention this. Last week I had a new piece at CIF on the state of the FISA debate. This thing changes almost daily, but my basic contention, which I think stands no matter what happens from here on out, is that Harry Reid and the Senate Dems missed a huge opportunity to gain the upper hand, and risked losing everything needlessly. Money quote:

After six years of the administration using terrorism as a bludgeon against domestic opposition to its national security and foreign policies, the returns on that particular rhetorical trope have terminally diminished. The American people oppose warrantless wiretapping by a 3-to-1 margin, including a majority of Republicans. By a similar 3-to-1 margin, they want Congress, and not the president, "to take the lead role in setting policy for the country".

The Democrats should have been able to parley that massive structural advantage into an easy victory on Fisa by throttling retroactive immunity for telecoms and toothless oversight provisions in their legislative cradles, putting forward a bill to modernise Fisa that includes robust safeguards for civil liberties, and daring the White House and congressional Republicans to take a stand on whether national security or extra-constitutional claims of executive power are their top priority.

The events of the past week leave no doubt that Harry Reid has a surfeit of confidence in his dexterity as a parliamentarian. If only he had the backbone to match.

Also, I'm now blogging with Michael Weiss at Snarksmith.

G-Men!

2008-02-03T22:07:00.000-05:00

Whatever happened in this Superbowl, there were going to be a bunch of assholes gloating. Either it would be a cast of old cranks headlined by Mercury Morris, plus the Manning family, or else the entire state of Massachusetts and most of the rest of New England.

As with Rudy Giuliani going down, disaster has been averted.

Also, GO GIANTS!

Go Chargers!

2008-01-20T14:55:00.001-05:00

Their three best players are hurt, they're a slow-starting team against the best front-runners ever, they're a SoCal team playing in frigid New England --- what could go wrong?

Five minutes to kickoff. Go Chargers!

UPDATE (3:35): 3-0, can't lose now.

UPDATE (4:32): 14-6, Chargers driving inside the 25 with 18 seconds before halftime. Stall. About to kick a field goal. The San Diego defense has been very impressive containing the Pats. Take away the interceptions, and it's a very close game.

UPDATE (4:45): Halftime. Shannon Sharpe's take on the NFC game: "You want to play man-to-man, talent against talent. Unfortunately, some woman showed up, and that's mother nature." It's true; chicks ruin football. Also, Dan Marino's cell-phone went off three times during the halftime report. Jesus H. Christ, laces out, Dan.

UPDATE (5:17): Cromartie intercepts Brady with NE on the 2 yard line. The San Diego defense is pwning New England. The offense is playing damn well too. Just fucking finish a drive.

UPDATE (5:55): Goddamn. Once again, New England looks beatable, isn't beaten.

New At PJM

2008-01-18T12:35:00.000-05:00

I have a piece up called "Hillary Clinton's Democracy Problem," about the New York senator's attempt to prevent Obama-supporting casino and hotel workers from voting in the Nevada caucuses. I wrote the piece just before the ruling came down throwing out the pro-Clinton lawsuit, so there are a couple of seams in the tenses, but basically it all stands.

One argument against the Nevada teachers union suit I didn't mention, and should have, is that the Democratic Party of Nevada is a private organization, the caucuses are its meetings, and it has a right to organize them any way it wants to. If the Nevada Dems wanted to awarded 99% of the delegates to the winner of the World Series of Poker, and the remaining 1% to winner of the statewide vote, that would be their right.

New At The Guardian

2008-01-17T16:37:00.000-05:00

At the Democratic debate in Las Vegas the other night, all three candidates pledged to support the odious Solomon Amendment. No one seemed to notice, including Tim Russert, who asked the question. I did notice, though.

The Daily Show

2008-01-14T23:08:00.001-05:00

Wow, Jon Stewart really needs writers:

"If you taped over your child's birthday video with a martyrdom message, you might be an Islamofascist"... and so on, to the tune of Jeff Foxworthy's "you might be a redneck" spiel.

Divisional Playoffs Blogging

2008-01-13T19:53:00.000-05:00

Wow, what a great weekend. 3 of the 4 teams in the conference championships are sctually likable, while the most loathsome franchise in sports went down to ignominious defeat, and Tony Romo cemented his reputation as a choke-artist. What do you suppose the over/under on how long it takes TO to start attacking his coaches and teammates publicly?

The dark cloud on the horizon, of course, is the inevitable perfect season and superbowl championship of the second most loathsome franchise in sports. The Jaguars were able to shut down Randy Moss --- at the cost of an anemic pass rush and enabling Brady to pick them apart with everything else he had at his disposal. What might a winning strategy against the Patriots look like? Another way of asking this is, is there any plausible scenario in which the Patriots don't win everything?

Also, happy as I am with the Giants winning, it's time to stop defining successful quarterbacking down for Eli Manning. Throwing 12/18 for 173 yds and 2 touchdowns may yield a respectable QB rating --- which just goes to show that the rating algorithm is imperfect --- but all it indicates is competent game management.

UPDATE: Jesus, TO had a Hillary Clinton moment in the post-game presser, weeping at perceived press criticism of "my quarterback."

I'm An International Punk

2008-01-09T15:15:00.000-05:00

So, some news: I've got a piece at the Guardian's Comment is Free about the substance behind Barack Obama's "change and hope" theme --- and why it's congenial to libertarianism.

Also, Jamie Kirchick wrote a fairly devastating expose of Ron Paul's twenty year history of trading in racism, anti-Semitism, anti-gay bigotry, and conspiracy theories. I've got a companion piece at Pajamas Media, basically just cataloging some of the especially flagrant remarks in the Ron Paul Political Report.

Well, Matt Drudge linked to my PJM piece, and within about 15 minutes, it got more traffic than everything else I've ever written combined, or very nearly. True fact: Drudge rules the world.

Going in, I was fully aware of the buckets and buckets of bile the Paulites were going to hurl at me, but I thought that by being a libertarian, and explicitly stating that I was writing the piece as a libertarian, I'd be somewhat insulated. On the other hand, this was inevitable:

Daniel Koffler was James Kirchik's classmate at Yale.

This is the same story told by the original author's friend, yet passed off as another source in perfect disinformation style.

How do these things get so orchestrated and precisely timed?

That's right, the whole thing was a Skull & Bones/Illuminati/Bohemian Grove conspiracy to bring down Ron Paul.

My favorite response of all was the one I found at this anti-Semitic conspiracy nut web forum, under the heading "Other jews [sic] pick up TNR attack on Ron Paul." The thread begins begins:

Hi Alex,

Another hit piece, this time by Daniel Koffler (a Jew).

Then the webmaster quotes my bio and reacts to it:

Daniel Koffler graduated from Yale in 2006 with a BA in philosophy. He has written for Reason, Dissent, Jewcy, and the Guardian’s “Comment is Free,” among other outlets.

For people who think we overestimate the jewish [sic] network - this punk is one year out of school and he's writing for international publications. That does not happen without incredible connections. Jews are virtually the only people apart from sons of presidents who have those connections.

So true!

I'll be on the radio in Houston and Dallas tomorrow at 11:20 talking about the Ron Paul revelations. You can listen here.

In Soviet Union, Tonight Show Watches You

2008-01-03T01:27:00.000-05:00

Celebrating his return back to the air tonight, Jay Leno took questions from the audience. Here was one:

"Mr. Leno, do you think you'll ever bring your fine show to Branson, Missouri?"

"Missouri," naturally, was pronounced "Mizzur-a."

The Republican Youtube Debate

2007-11-28T21:27:00.001-05:00

Question: How would you improve the image of America in the Muslim world?

Rudy Giuliani: Stay on offense.

John McCain: Continue the surge.

Duncan Hunter: I will never apologize for America.

And there you have it.

Question: Is waterboarding torture?

Romney: It's not my place to say. I'm against torture. But I think what happened to Khalid Sheik Muhammad should continue to happen.

McCain: I don't know how anyone could favor torture like waterboarding. [Good for McCain--ed.]

Question: What commitment will you make to the Iraqi people?

Ron Paul: The best thing we can do for the Iraqis is to give them their country back?... What we achieved in peace [vis-a-vis Vietnam] was unachievable in 20 years of French and American war? [Boos, hisses follow]

McCain: We never lost a battle in Vietnam. We lost because American public opinion made victory impossible. So, he's against torture but for stab-in-the-back mythology.

Question: Rudy Giuliani, is it true that your entire campaign is based on saying "September 11" over and over again?

Giuliani: Not at all. For example, I worked in the Reagan Justice Department to enforce an obscene double-standard viz. Cuban and Hatian immigration. [Not quite how he phrased it, and the rest of the answer wasn't bad, but that is, in fact, what he was claiming--ed.]

Question: I'm a retired special forces general. And I'm gay. Why do you think soldiers aren't professional enough to serve with gay men and women?

Hunter: You can't use Israel or Britain as an example, because Americans are conservative. Conservatives can't serve with gays because gays make them uncomfortable.

Romney [after Anderson Cooper pointed out that Romney once said he looked forward to the day when gays could serve openly]: Now is not that time. Because we're at war.

McCain: DADT works.

Question: What does the Confederate flag represent to you?

Romney [his circuits visibly frying]: I don't like John Edwards.

Remember Dennis Miller?

2007-11-21T23:20:00.001-05:00

I do. Looks like Dan was prescient. DM has a show on VS. network --- quite a career path --- where he does standup about sports. I caught one joke: "It looks like Barry Bonds is going to prison. No word yet about whether he'll be violated in his cell as a Pirate or a Giant."

Eh, it's okay, but I think we need to hear more about how Gerhard Schröder makes Ramsay Macdonald look like Oliver Cromwell.

Announcements, Announcements

2007-11-07T18:41:00.000-05:00

Well, I got a paid gig writing for jewcy.com's group politics blog, The Cabal. My first post is here (see if you can spot the homage to the actual Rod). Hopefully this will spur me to produce more content here (which isn't really saying much).

Debate Fallout

2007-11-02T12:20:00.001-05:00

Well, I'm somewhat surprised and very pleased to see the CW congealing around Tuesday's debate that, whoever won, Hillary Clinton definitely lost. She comes in for a gentle ribbing from Chris Dodd here, and a sharp attack from John Edwards here (politics of parsing indeed!). At the same time, Barack Obama responds to one of the Clinton campaign's least attractive features (among many contenders), namely its woe-is-me brand of feminism, here. [Isn't some opposition to Hillary rooted in misogyny?--ed. Sure. And Clinton and her retainers' tactic of reducing all criticism of her to expressions of latent misogyny is all the more repugnant.]

Observing all this, Andrew Sullivan comments: "This race is shifting a little, isn't it?" In the beltway, undoubtedly, it is. Elsewhere, I'm far from optimistic. Since Democratic primary voters somehow have found Clinton's position(s) on the war not only not disqualifying, but indeed unobjectionable thus far, and assuming the gender-baiting nonsense actually works with them, she will be very tough to beat.

Democrat Debate Blogging

2007-10-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

This is the first debate of either party that I've deliberately sat down to watch, and I understand the conditions in play here may be different from all the others since it's the first debate since Barack Obama acknowledged publicly that avoiding all potential conflicts while Howard Wolfson did his deceitful, demagogic tap-dance was not a winning strategy. I should also add that I have a strong bias; I'm not only supporting Obama but I would actually vote for Mitt Romney against Hillary Clinton for reasons I'll elaborate at some later point.

All that said, I am dumbfounded by the strength of Hillary Clinton's candidacy to this point given her performance tonight. Every single answer of hers was not only a dishonest, calculated hedge, but was transparently so. And she was unable to give a coherent explanation of her vote for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment. The notion that Kyl-Lieberman accomplishes anything diplomatically, on one hand, and does not lend a patina of bipartisan support to the administration's war plans, on the other hand, is a ludicrous fantasy Hillary Clinton's admirers have been able to indulge in because not enough nor prominent enough Democrats have been calling bullshit on it. Again, this debate may have been a heretofore unseen moment of mass sanity among the candidates, but almost all of them* did indeed call bullshit. A good thing too. The Clinton candidacy is a paper tiger; there is very little there beyond the growl, and a series of winks and nods in every conceivable direction. I know all about how depressingly uneducated and uninformed average voters are, but that's not the same as being stupid, and I will be shocked if Democratic primary voters, after tonight, can't realize they're being lied to. (Whether any of them are watching is another matter entirely.)

I don't think that Obama's performance has been stellar by any means. He did, however, make the very salient point, responding to Hillary's harping on the fact that Republicans are attacking her as if it's a point in favor of her candidacy, that Republicans are attacking Hillary because it's a fight they are comfortable with, partly because they think they can win, and partly because, should they lose, their vital political interests --- most especially warmongering lunacy --- will not be threatened. Hillary has already won, let's not forget, both the Michael O'Hanlon and the Charles Krauthammer primaries, which is a good prima facie reason to ensure she doesn't win the Democratic primary. If anyone thinks, after a Hillary victory in November 2008, that in 2012 we won't be in the middle of a civil and/or regional middle-Eastern war while torturing innocent people in Guantanamo and at black sites in eastern Europe --- well, it's possible, but vanishingly unlikely, and if you believe it, please sit on a broom on Election Day.

If this debate has any effect on the race, it will be as much because of post-debate spin as anything else, and having observed the 2000 and 2004 elections closely, I'm far from sanguine about the ability of the pundit class to call lies 'lies' and liars 'liars,' but this debate surely demonstrates that the Clinton juggernaut is built on a flimsy foundation, and given that there is no argument for her candidacy on substantive policy grounds, but only on pragmatic, evict the bastards grounds, it should be clear that there is, in fact, no argument for her candidacy at all.

*Except for the gobsmackingly buffoonish Bill Richardson, whom I had regarded favorably up to this point in virtue of his position on Iraq. Granted, I had barely observed him in action up to this point, and had assumed his bizarre performance at the HRC forum [affirming that homosexuality is a choice? what? He must have been told to say yes to any mention of 'choice' -- ed.] was a fluke. But no, he really is that dumb. The spectacle of his pleas for comity among the candidates was humiliating for everyone involved, and would have been more efficient and more bearable if he had prostrated himself in front of Hillary Clinton's podium and pledged to sacrifice a virgin and a fatted calf if she would make him her vice presidential nominee.

Extra Points For Style

2007-09-20T12:47:00.000-05:00

T.A. Frank has an article at the Washington Monthly pondering why so few people read Bob Herbert's columns relative to those of his NYT colleagues. Full-disclosure: I don't read Herbert myself, mostly because I haven't read any NYT columns since the advent of the recently departed Times Select, except for what gets excerpted at various blogs I read, which never seems to include Herbert.

Frank doesn't come to any firm conclusions himself. Jonathan Zasloff offers a sadly compelling way of untangling this Gordian knot:

Bob Herbert is an African-American journalist who writes about issues of poverty and race.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, speaking for himself, defends serially ignoring Herbert thusly:

[O]nce I know the topic of a Herbert column, I can predict every single self-satisfied, self-righteous platitude that is about to come.

Now, that may be true for all I know, not having nearly enough exposure to Herbert to come to any judgment, but let's consider just what flaws Sullivan is alleging. Herbert is self-satisfied, self-righteous and platitudinous. These qualities, of course, set Herbert apart from wordsmiths like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, the various Kagans and Podhoretzi, all of whom would gladly commit ritual mass suicide rather than let a self-righteous note sound from their trombone-like voiceboxes. Would David Brooks or Maureen Dowd let a cliche or platitude pass their lips? Fie on't.

Bush's Brain

2007-08-16T07:47:00.000-05:00

"[P]residential elections are always about change particularly in the future" --- Karl Rove, greatest political mind who ever lived. He did not add, but meant to, that mid-term elections are about change in the past. On a related note, it seems that Foreign Affairs will publish just about anything these days.

Let's Think Before We....

2007-05-20T12:40:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in my apartment watching the National Heads-Up Poker Tournament, in which Shannon Elizabeth is in the semifinals [what?--ed.] against Paul Wasicka. Before the last commercial, Shannon (if I may call her that) had a ~3:1 chip lead when Wasicka went all in with pocket 10's. Shannon called with AcQc. In other words, the hand was close to a coin-flip, but Wasicka had a slight lead. A queen fell on the flop, making Shannon a big favorite at that point---until Wasicka back-doored a straight.

Since this happened, the broadcasters have, by my count, described the hand as a "bad beat" three times, a "suck-out" twice, and a "beat" twice. Now look, I get it that both commentators want to sleep with Shannon Elizabeth. So do I. So I can sympathize with their (faux) sympathy for her. But this trope is retarded, and I've seen way too many instances of it in poker coverage, and it needs to be strangled in the cradle. If you go all-in with the best of it, and your opponent improbably takes the lead, only for you to come back and win the pot, that is not a bad beat or a suck-out. Enough. It's enough.

UPDATE: Now they're talking about the "emotional roller-coaster Shannon's been on."

UPDATE: On the final hand of the match, Shannon went all-in with 65, Wasicka called with AK. The flop came AKQ. Thus: "Shannon can chop with J10, and can return the suck-out favor with running 5's or 6's."

UNRELATED UPDATE: Although the episode must have come out ten years ago, I only recently got why the Simpsons episode featuring a drink called the "flaming homer"/"flaming mo" is so funny, when I heard someone use the expression "flaming 'mo."

RELATED UPDATE: One of the broadcasters is named "Ali Nejad." Therefore, I blame Rod for this.

All Your Base Are Belong To Iran

2007-04-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

On the placard behind Mahmoud Ahmaghinejad (get it?) in his just-finished presser annoucning the release of the British hostages, there was a Persian motto I couldn't make out followed by this (apparent) English translation:

Cling together firmly by means of God's rope and do not separate.

Now, what the fuck does that mean?

Easy There

2007-03-22T17:23:00.000-05:00

If you haven't yet paid attention to today's episode in the blog-war between Jonah Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan ostensibly in re: John and Elizabeth Edwards but in reality in re: how much they dislike each other, see Sullivan's posts here and here, and Goldberg's inordinately bitchy riposte here.

Sullivan then responded with a post entitled "Blacklisting and Conservatives." After addressing the content of Goldberg's charges --- which had become irrelevant by this point --- Sullivan noted Goldberg's comment that "I think I've been pretty good about not posting much about Andrew Sullivan" and wrote:

What can this mean, except a petty sand-box approach to journalism? I disagree with many people at NRO but I always link and write and even praise when it occurs to me. In contrast, Jonah's comment suggests an actual informal policy of blacklisting this blog and its arguments at NRO. Blacklisting others is not, I think, a sign of a movement's intellectual health. It was done to Bruce Bartlett's book as well. NRO spent much more ink on D'Souza's excrescence than on the serious and increasingly salient critiques that Bartlett and I have made about the Bush administration.

Now, reluctant though I am to offer an even partial defense of the author of Liberal Fascism, it seems to me that Sullivan's interpretation of this remark makes sense only on the assumption (to paraphrase William F. Buckley) that Sullivan's opinion of himself and the universe's opinion of him are entirely or at least substantially aligned. That is, only if one takes it as a given that Sullivan's critique of the contemporary conservative movement is as earth -shattering as he believes it to be, does it follow that Goldberg's demurral in responding to Sullivan is the result of an implicit blacklisting policy at NRO. (Jeremy, e.g., reads Sullivan's critique without experiencing any seismic activity.)

Much more likely than that Goldberg is inadvertently copping to an implicit blacklisting policy on the part of NRO, is that Goldberg is making the much more mundane claim that Sullivan's arguments are so overwrought, bombastic, self-contradictory, etc., etc. --- there is a basic list of charges that his opponents on the right level at him --- that serious thinkers should not take him seriously. Never mind that Jonah Goldberg is not a serious thinker. This is a claim that stands or falls --- falls, in my opinion, but whatever --- on its own merits. And it is not the claim that those who stray from conservative orthodoxy must be (literally) proscribed.

Note now, Sullivan's response: A choice by certain individuals and institutions to ignore him is equivalent to blacklisting. What instance of egomania and general derangement does this resemble? Why, none other than David Horowitz's delusion that he has been roundly rejected by the academy because it is populated by Stalinist ideologues [takes one to know one--ed.], rather than, say, because he is an intellectual pygmy. In other words, this is dangerous stuff.

Condolences

2007-03-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

Well, oddly good news about Elizabeth Edwards this morning. The Edwards' announcement is part of what seems to be a new medical paradigm in which diseases are treated and (with luck) rendered asymptomatic rather than aggressively --- and as anyone who has seen the effects of substantial radiation or chemotherapy can attest, poisonously --- attacked. If we could have a direct election for first lady, Mrs. Edwards would surely win in a landslide. I'd vote for her for president if she were running.

In considerably sadder news, Cathy Seipp, an indy journalist and very smart and all-around charming woman whom I met when I was working in LA a couple of years ago, has succumbed to lung cancer after surviving it four or five years longer than she was supposed to. RIP.

UPDATE: Just to clarify what I meant by "oddly good news," the story the slightly-more-reliable-than Drudge Report Politico unfurled early in the morning was that the illness was bad enough to compel Edwards to drop out. As George Burns is supposed to have said when asked how he felt on the occasion of his 90th birthday, "Considering the alternative...."

March Madness

2007-03-15T16:24:00.000-05:00

Dick Enberg: "And Patrick Ewing now on the floor for Georgetown." What year is it?

A Very Modest Request

2007-03-13T12:15:00.000-05:00

Could we possibly have a moratorium on coverage of the Paul McCartney-Stumpy McGoldigger* divorce involving lame puns on Beatles' song titles? I just saw Norah O'Donnell trot out "Can't Buy Me Love," "We Can Work It Out," and "Penny Lane" in the span of about 3.5 minutes. Joe Scarborough seems to have a contractual obligation to mention the "Marital Misery Tour" twice in every show. MSNBC is relatively --- repeat: relatively --- watchable, but my guess (not having and not planning to watch them) that CNN and Fox are better on this score. The former, because their average viewer likely conceives of Paul McCartney as a goddamn punk kid, the latter because their average viewer likely conceives of McCartney as a goddamn red commie.

*This appellation is not mine, but rather belongs to one of Don Imus' paid sycophants (I'm not sure which; actually, I can't tell one apart from another). Still, I like it.

Eve Of Destruction

2007-02-10T11:23:00.000-05:00

Sweet dreams:

US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.

This will make us look back on the Iraq war as a time of peace and tranquility.

Goaltending

2007-02-10T11:17:00.000-05:00

David Kurtz at TPM links to a report on the Bush DOJ's of history of stonewalling congressional inquiries, and its present efforts to train other departments in the executive branch to do likewise. What is to be done? How about: subpoena all relevant officials and documents, and when and if they do not comply, hold them in contempt of congress and begin to subject them to fines, jail time, and/or impeachment proceedings. Checks and balances, etc etc. These things are not so complicated.

The Apotheosis Of Bergerdom

2007-02-04T16:12:00.000-05:00

To wit:

Are you striving for a higher degree of professionalism for your fantasy sports league? Would you like an impartial and effective method for resolving disputes with other teams? Do you needa comprehensive league constitution? Or, might you be looking for that extra degree of scouting intelligence that can make all the difference during the season?

Professor Marc Edelman's "SportsJudge™" brings an unsurpassed level of experience and expertise to the competitive world of fantasy sports. As a practicing attorney and professor trained in the legalities of professional and virtual sports, Professor Edelman has quicklybecome recognized as a leading authority and resource by
those who take their fantasy sports seriously.

There's training in "the legalities of virtual sports"? Only and Danandrich University (est. 2011).

Babysteps back into blogging. Hat tip: Radley Balko

Placeholder

2007-01-30T21:55:00.000-05:00

I'd probably have to kill myself if I let all of January go by without a post. I promise (sort of) I'll start writing again soon, provided I can get this new blogger switch to happen.

Hail The Virgin Birth

2006-12-21T09:43:00.000-05:00

Just in time for the anniversary of Our Dear Savio(u)r's Birth, a komodo dragon Virgin Mary gives birth to the Son of Lizard. I think I know how this plays out.

Bright College Years

2006-12-03T22:18:00.000-05:00

The 2006 issue of the Yale Philosophy Review, which came out in print at the end of the summer, is now online. The lead article (by me) is essentially a condensed version of two sections of my senior thesis. As often is the case in academic philosophy, enough time has passed between composition and publication that I no longer agree 100% with the positions I espouse in the paper, but I do think it is valuable at least in providing a glimpse at an important and currently hot debate in metaphysics.

Block That Metaphor Dept.

2006-12-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

Bill Keller, on NPR this morning: "[The mid-term election] turned the zeitgeist on its axis." It's wordsmithery like that wut makes you executive editor of the New York Times.

Classy To The Last

2006-11-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

Which major Republican fundraiser and activist demonstrated the tightness with which his thumb is affixed to the nation's pulse thusly?

"Sherwood's seat [in Pennsylvania] would have been overwhelmingly ours, if his mistress hadn't whined about being throttled...." Any lessons from the campaign? [he was asked] "Yes. The lesson should be, don't throttle mistresses."

Answer here. (hat tip to Bradford Plumer)

Feingold Out

2006-11-12T19:54:00.000-05:00

Russell Feingold won't be running for president. Press release here.

And in other, happier news, a German court is preparing a war crimes prosecution of disgraced ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose authorization of interrogation techniques which flagrantly violate the Geneva Conventions, and whose explicit order to General Geoffrey Miller to "gitmoize" Iraqi detention facilities, resulted in the death, torture, and physical and psychological maiming of some uncounted hundreds if not thousands of innocent people. Like disgraced ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger --- whose trademark bloodthirsty, ruthless incompetence Bob Woodward helpfully revealed was the guiding spirit in George Bush's Iraq pseudo-policy --- Donald Rumsfeld will not be traveling abroad anytime soon.

Question for the gambling classes: What are the odds that a certain Yale '06 ex-Rumsfeld speech writer will make the list of Rumsfeld co-defendants? And will said individual recognize the irony if he is unjustly prosecuted?

UPDATE: Yeah, that one.

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over (?)

2006-11-08T01:38:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting at my computer at 1:32 am, considerably later than I've been awake at any time in the past three months. This is a good night. Looks like I lowballed the Dem pickups in the House: it's going to be 30-35. And in the Senate, Democrats have taken Republican seats in Rhode Island (what a putz Lincoln Chafee must feel for not jumping ship with Jim Jeffords), Ohio, and Pennsylvania (Senator Frothy Mixture gets wiped out). Tennessee stays Republican, thanks to a blatantly racist ad blitz directed at Harold Ford in the last three weeks. Three seats to go: Missouri, Montana, and Virginia. Right now, it looks like the Democrats are in a position to win all three.

Election Eve

2006-11-06T21:36:00.000-05:00

I wanted to post something, partly to prove that I still know how to use blogger and also to make up for these last few months. Let's leave it at this: Every senior member of the administration belongs on trial at the Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity; and with the indefinite suspension of habeas corpus, we find ourselves ruled by a petulant tyrant who believes the constraints on executive power outlined in the Magna Carta, never mind the Constitution, do not apply to him. These bastards must be stopped. There is no such thing as a sensible Republican legislator anymore; any individual who caucuses with the Republican congressional delegation is party to the coverup of high crimes and misdemeanors. They must all be voted out of office, everyone of them, and then tried for obstruction of justice.

Now back to reality. Here are my predictions for tomorrow. Democrats pickup 25 House seats and retake the House. They pickup Senate seats in Pennsylvania (Santorum begone), Ohio, Rhode Island, Missouri, and one of Montana and Virginia; that's +5, meaning Cheney breaks a 50/50 tie for the Republicans.

Oh, and Lieberman, sadly, wins.

The Lost Year In Iraq

2006-10-22T09:18:00.000-05:00

Everybody should watch this gripping PBS Frontline special, "The Lost Year in Iraq." It portrays Bremer in a very complicated and interesting light. A rather committed but green corporatist-turned-colonial administrater who drank Bush's democracy kool-aid AND Wolfowitz/Feith's Ba'ath = Nazi, trauma-theory kool-aid, and then got fucked by everyone.

The Tombstone of Reaganism

2006-10-22T09:14:00.000-05:00

I hope Newberry cleans up the bizarre typos and grammatical mistakes that litter this piece, because, beyond those formal deficiencies, it is a compelling take down of a series of myths about conservatism whose culmination Newberry locates in Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul." Newberry sees the second Bush era as the culmination of Reaganism, rather than some straying from the reservation, which is the narrative that the few remaining semi-sane conservatives are trying to ride to respectability.

Populism vs. Centrism, or Whatever

2006-09-04T00:37:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman have had a little argument about centrist "technocratic" solutions to social and economic problems versus more populist and implicitly or explicitly Democratic ones. DailyKos presents a roundup of the conversations this argument has sparked in different corners. All I really wanted to add, was that it seems to me that beyond the sometimes seductive, always irksome, philosopher-king pretensions of DeLong's POV, what is very clear from his situation of "technocratic centrism" is the following: what centrists like DeLong want, and this is a group that, at least rhetorically, includes folks like Joe Klein, Sullivan, Lieberman, but also probably much more intelligent people, like DeLong, is really an end to politics, not a "centrist" politics. politics are agonistic all the way down, that's how they happened, that's how they work. i don't really love the stupidity this leads to, but that's the way it is. so a politics of sustained centrism is really only code for an end to politics. i think this position is alluring to a large group of intellectuals, burghers, and media-friendly politicians who cringe at the memory and the history of America's various flirtations with a faddish marxism, and who also cringe at the apparent barbarism of the cultural right. but, as always, the far left and the far right have concerns that, however unpleasantly articulated, are real concerns, real expressions of desire. and not just the far left or right -- people. and people who perceive that they have needs, material or spiritual, bring their desire to the forum. what folks like DeLong want is the forum to be closed, regulated, administered, secure. His is a Utopian vision, that like all utopianisms is quite beautiful, but also brutal, wrong-headed, and destined to fail.

Lee Siegel Lee Siegel Lee Sprezzatura... What (?)

2006-09-02T06:33:00.000-05:00

Lee Siegel has been shitcanned by The New Republic for posting comments on his own blog under a pseudonym. Schadenfreude here, here and here. Frankly, in the context of getting fired for writing things that embarrass TNR, this is the equivalent of Capone getting busted for tax evasion.

How Civil Wars Become Regional Wars

2006-08-18T06:15:00.000-05:00

The Guardian reports:

Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases...

Frustrated by the reluctance of the US and the government in Baghdad to crack down on the PKK bases inside Iraq, Turkish generals have hinted they are considering a large-scale military operation across the border. They are said to be sharing intelligence about Kurdish rebel movements with their Iranian counterparts.

"We would not hesitate to take every kind of measures when our security is at stake," Abdullah Gul, the Turkish foreign minister, said last week.

It's over. Let's go home, please. (via Josh Marshall)

Uh-Oh

2006-08-16T17:06:00.000-05:00

If Sullivan's already talking like this . . .

So far, no one has been charged in the alleged terror plot to blow up several airplanes across the Atlantic. No evidence has been produced supporting the contention that such a plot was indeed imminent. Forgive me if my skepticism just ratcheted up a little notch

Stick A Fork In Joe

2006-08-11T10:19:00.000-05:00

Looks like the Republicans are going to field a real candidate in the CT Senate Race [as opposed to the current candidate, a Republican not named Bill Bennett who has a gambling problem -- ed.]. That being the case, there is no way Lieberman could possibly win, as his only hope is to draw sufficiently many non-Dem votes to outstrip Lamont's Dems and independents. N.B.: Many of said independents, pace TNR staff, do not believe that tongue-wrestling with the dolt who created --- through his stubornness, ineptitude, messianic delusions, and regal pretensions --- one of the biggest military and foreign policy catastrophes in American history, is conduct befitting a United States senator.

A credible Republican candidate means there are simply not enough votes in play for Lieberman to win, i.e., Joe is shit out of luck. Should he stay in the race, two scenarios could follow: 1) Joe draws just enough Dem votes to tip the election to the Republican; 2) Joe draws virtually no Democratic votes, and hands the election to Lamont in a landslide. However, since Lamont is a lock against any Republican in a 2-way race (and since, given our first-past-the-poll system, margins of victory are irrelevant [can you say "mandate"? -- ed.]), it follows that the only way that a Lieberman independent bid could affect the outcome of the election is to give it to the Republican. We'll find out what the old windbag's true colors are soon enough. I'd bet on him to stay in the race.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, while I'd obviously prefer a Lamont victory, I wouldn't be totally displeased with a Republican victory in the senate race. Yes, yes, I know what it means vis-a-vis control of the Senate, but on balance, I think, Lieberman is such an rapidly metastasizing tumor on the body politic that the USA will be better off without him in the Senate, (almost) no matter who replaces him.

Bye Bye Joe, You Won't Be Missed

2006-08-09T09:30:00.000-05:00

The senator from the medieval fiefdom of Connecticut loses, Lamont wins, and though not by the crushing margin I'd been hoping for, Schumer and the DSCC are behind him:

The Democratic voters of Connecticut have spoken and chosen Ned Lamont as their nominee. Both we and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) fully support Mr. Lamont's candidacy. Congratulations to Ned on his victory and on a race well run.

And so dies the career of an egregious fraud who, confusing pomposity for moral rectitude, proceeded to spend twenty years rolling around in his own shit.

In other news, Marty Peretz is: a) lying to himself; b) lying to others; c) lying to himself and others (we report, you decide).

New Age?

2006-07-31T18:20:00.000-05:00

A bold claim from Mark Schmitt:

"the era of interest-group politics is dead, and the strong party that the netroots advocates foresee will take its place, and while that won’t be without some disruptions, it will be to the good."

The whole post is interesting.

Hagel on Middle East

2006-07-31T12:36:00.000-05:00

Chuck Hagel gave a speech a few days ago at Brookings, which hasn't really gotten a ton of blogospheric coverage. Here's the transcript, courtesy of The Washington Note. Steve Clemons' in-short description: "Chuck Hagel: Israel vs. Arab Nations A False Choice for U.S."

The Dark Side of the West Wing

2006-07-31T06:03:00.000-05:00

Atrios already linked to this, so you've probably read it (yes, I felt a little queasy writing that sentence). But it really is a must-read. How the top Dem consultants really are on the wrong side.

Toy Soldier Genocide

2006-07-30T20:47:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Jeremy for stepping up to the plate. I'll try to have something more substantial to say sometime in the near future, but for now, nothing expresses what I'm feeling more aptly than Atrios's pitch-perfect characterization of the war party's contortionism in attempting to dismiss the plain facts that the US has lost the war in Iraq and that the middle East is unevenly but steadily spiralling out of control:

Every time they worry they're going to lose their little game of risk, they dream of dropping a basketball on the board to end the game.

Meanwhile, perhaps even more of a wonderful surprise than the NYT's endorsement of Ned Lamont in his primary campaign against Martin Peretz and Lee Siegel Lee Siegel Lee Siegel (just ask them), is Fareed Zakaria pulling off the kid gloves in describing Donald Rumsfeld's lack of fitness for his position:

He seems literally in a parallel universe and slightly deranged. If you listen to what he said last week about Iraq, he’s living in a different world, not a different country.

Back in the actual world, the US government has no foreign policy whatsoever; the Bush administration does maintain a public relations policy in the form of foreign policy pronouncements, but now that the two goals (bolstering the administration's image and reaching a not-civil war resolution of the Iraq crisis) have become irreconcilably opposed, we face the prospect of two and a half more years of government by incompetent dullards who are determined to let the world go to hell for the sake of their own pride. Over to Glenn Reynolds for why this is Bill Keller's fault.

"Sustainable Cease-Fire"

2006-07-30T13:04:00.000-05:00

Just to be clear, that's one more linguistic representation of the insane brutality of our current American government. There is no such thing as a sustainable cease-fire. You either keep firing or you stop. If you are Israel, you either keep murdering children or you stop. If you are Hizbullah, you either keep murdering children or you stop. If you are America, you either keep pursuing the deaths of hundreds of thousands or you stop.

This is nothing more than an addendum I guess to my previous post. But one of the greatest failures of human civilization, and indeed perhaps an eternal indictment of it, will be its incapacity to learn from the twentieth century, to mourn it, and to begin again. Our tolerance for cold-blooded murder is the gravest moral failure of the new millenium. Our nation, which is so strong, so oppulent, so gifted and blessed, to march across the globe with blood dripping from its teeth, craving more, is an abomination. And our generation and our children's will suffer dearly for it.

Fighting a Just War

2006-07-28T17:28:00.000-05:00

Michael Hirsh has a generally good peice in Newsweek about the series of strategic, tactical, and ethical stupidites that have constituted American involvement in Iraq. The piece allows me to make a quick point which I intended to pursue in the context of Michael Walzer's recent just-war analysis of Israel-Lebanon in The New Republic, but was too inarticulate and tired to make. Hirsh, in describing the nightly raids on Iraqi civilians by American soldiers, carried out on poor intelligence, crudely, and needlessly, in order to exemplify the failure of American commanders to correctly win the hearts and minds of civilians, a strategic error, writes:

"Like [Thomas] Ricks, The Washington Post's first-rate Pentagon correspondent, I don't really fault the soldiers on the ground for the mistakes made. These young men and women were in a hellish situation, and as warriors they performed superbly."

It seems that the general liberal critique of the Iraq war, often made not just in the name of attacking Bush, but in defense of a bold secular humanist tradition of reason and moral clarity, presents "war" or "just war" as a goal almost accomplished, but disastrously missed. These descriptions of our current conflicts in the Middle East seem to suggest that the empirical war = "war" + unfortunate aberrations, where "war" is the just war that we all want our boys and girls over there to fight. This talk, which seems to be the most level-headed around, is only a cruel and foolish form of utopianism.

If I had a large audience, and charisma that I lack, I would dedicate myself to convincing folks, any folks really, that perhaps war is the aberration itself. That we keep trying to fight this just war, and we get all these bad side effects. These side effects are nothing other than the expression of war itself. Only an absolutely unreformed idealist could argue otherwise. Where are the empirical contours of the non-aberrant war? In major newsmagazines and books mostly.

But back to the soldiers. What I really wanted to say, and this is a thing that one doesn't feel that comfortable saying, is that the heart of the problem, the heart of our continuing infatuation with the pursuit of proper war, is the sort of statement I quoted above.

If the 20th century has not taught us that following orders is a purely individual choice, and in order to maintain the very integrity of any concept of the human, we must insist that one chooses to follow orders, and is thus culpable, I don't know what further civilizational failure will teach us.

I am writing from a comfortable apartment on a nice Dell laptop. I studiously avoid violence out of fear. I certainly do not have the courage of those who fight. But I am not ready to accord their courage an uncritical positive evaluation.

In what brutal pax romana do we live in that the idea of warriors performing superbly is a replacement for moral judgement? What kind of vaunted church-state separation is there if at the heart of our concept of state is that at anytime its abstract authority wishes it may absolve men and women of any and all crimes. This is crucial. All the rhetoric of the past 5 years about rogue states and terrorists is essential to the continuation of any sort of just war ideation. Because we believe, along with Hirsh et al. that as long as the invisible "state" bestowed as it is with a sort of amoral goodness, orders war, then its human subjects no longer act in a moral context. The soldiers' sins become mistakes, misfirings of the war machine. But this amoral field can only be allowed to certain invisible forces, and thus we invent "state" versus "non-state" putatively freeing our citizens who choose to fight of the grotesque moral baggage their allegience entails.

But of course the freedom only accrues to the amorality of the state. The soldiers will be haunted by their actions. They, or most, will have to reckon with their brutality. But by then they will have returned into the interior of true freedom, which does not offer a license to kill, but only the pain of regret and the weight of self-appraisal.

There may come a time, and it will mostly likely not be at the behest of either political party, that people come to realize that supporting the troops during a war is a fatuous exercise, because the war is waged as much against the guilty as the innocent, and that rather than supporting "troops" you must support the humans that they actually are. The only way to do this is to disarm them and keep them home.

Michael Ledeen's Wet Dream

2006-07-18T14:39:00.000-05:00

A play in one act:

Liebermaine: Hold thee, Cheney; wear two imperial crowns;
Think thee invested now as royally,
Even by the mighty hand of Liebermaine,
As if as many kings as could encompass thee
With greatest pomp had crown'd thee emperor.

Cheney: So do I, thrice-renowned man-at-arms;
And none shall keep the crown but Liebermaine:
Thee do I make my regent of Persia,
And general-lieutenant of my armies.--
Michael Oren, you, that were our brother's guide,
And chiefest counsellor in all his acts,
Since he is yielded to the stroke of war,
On your submission we with thanks excuse,
And give you equal place in our affairs.

Michael Oren: Most happy
emperor, in humblest terms
I vow my service to your majesty,
With utmost virtue of my faith and duty.

Cheney: Thanks, good Michael Oren.--Then, Cheney, reign,
And govern Persia in her former pomp.
Now send embassage to thy neighbour kings,
And let them know the Persian king is chang'd,
From one that knew not what a king should do,
To one that can command what 'longs thereto.
And now we will to fair Persepolis
With twenty thousand expert Soldiers.
The lords and captains of my brother's camp
With little slaughter take Michael Oren's course,
And gladly yield them to my gracious rule.--
Gonzales and Addington, my trusty friends,
Now will I gratify your former good,
And grace your calling with a greater sway.

Gonzales: And as we ever aim'd at your behoof,
And sought your state all honour it deserv'd,
So will we with our powers and our lives
Endeavour to preserve and prosper it.

Cheney: I will not thank thee, sweet Gonzales;
Better replies shall prove my purposes.--
And now, Lord Liebermaine, my brother's camp
I leave to thee and to Marty Peretz,
To follow me to fair Persepolis;
Then will we march to all those Indian mines
My witless brother to the Secularists lost,
And ransom them with fame and usury:
And, till thou overtake me, Liebermaine,
(Staying to order all the scatter'd troops,)
Farewell, lord regent and his happy friends.
I long to sit upon my brother's throne.

Michael Oren: Your majesty shall shortly have your wish,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis.
[Exeunt all except Liebermaine, Marty Peretz, Podhoretz, and Anusrocket.]

Joe Liebermaine: And ride in triumph through Persepolis!--
Is it not brave to be a king, Podhoretz?--
Anusrocket and Marty Peretz,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

Podhoretz: O, my lord, it is sweet and full of pomp!

Anusrocket: To be a king is half to be a god.

Marty Peretz: A god is not so glorious as a king:
I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven,
Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth;--
To wear a crown enchas'd with pearl and gold,
Whose virtues carry with it life and death;
To ask and have, command and be obey'd;
When looks breed love, with looks to gain the prize,--
Such power attractive shines in princes' eyes.
So in the Lord's Prayer,
"Thy will be done In Earth."

Liebermaine: Why, say, Marty Peretz, wilt thou be a king?

Marty Peretz: Nay, though I praise it, I can live without it.

Liebermaine: What say my other friends? will you be kings?

Podhoretz: I, if I could, with all my heart, my lord.

Liebermaine: Why, that's well said, PodhoretzTechelles: so would I;--
And so would you, my masters, would you not?

Anusrocket: What, then, my lord?

Liebermaine: Why, then, Anus, shall we wish for aught
The world affords in greatest novelty,
And rest attemptless, faint, and destitute?
Methinks we should not. I am strongly mov'd,
That if I should desire the Persian crown,
I could attain it with a wondrous ease:
And would not all our Soldiers soon consent,
If we should aim at such a dignity?

Marty Peretz: I know they would with our persuasions.

Liebermaine: Why, then, Marty Peretz, I'll first assay
To get the Persian kingdom to myself;
Then thou for Parthia; they for Scythia and Media;
And, if I prosper, all shall be as sure
As if the Turk, the Pope, Afric, and Greece,
Came creeping to us with their crowns a-piece.

Podhoretz: Then shall we send to this triumphing king,
And bid him battle for his novel crown?

Anusrocket: Nay, quickly, then, before his room be hot.

Liebermaine: 'Twill prove a pretty jest, in faith, my friends.

Marty Peretz: A jest to charge on twenty thousand men!
I judge the purchase more important far.

Liebermaine: Judge by thyself, Marty Peretz, not me;
For presently Podhoretz here shall haste
To bid him battle ere he pass too far,
And lose more labour than the gain will quite:
Then shalt thou see this Scythian Liebermaine
Make but a jest to win the Persian crown.--
Podhoretz, take a thousand horse with thee,
And bid him turn him back to war with us,
That only made him king to make us sport:
We will not steal upon him cowardly,
But give him warning and more warriors:
Haste thee, Podhoretz; we will follow thee.
[Exit Podhoretz.]
What saith Marty Peretz?

Marty Peretz: Go on, for me.
[Exeunt.]

Adapted freely from Marlowe's Liebermaine the Great.

Render Unto Caesar

2006-07-18T14:21:00.000-05:00

This is beyond surreal. Money shot:

For years, he has claimed that he is employed by God and has no income or property because everything he owns belongs to God. He believes man and dinosaurs inhabited the earth together and has offered a $250,000 reward to anyone who can offer him satisfactory proof of evolution.

Hovind's attorney, Assistant Public Defender Kafahni Nkrumah, told U.S. Magistrate Judge Miles Davis at a hearing Monday that his client did not want to enter a plea because he does not believe the United States, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Attorney's Office "have jurisdiction in this matter."

Thing is, I'm inclined to think that Hovind is not trying to weasel his way out of paying taxes, but genuinely believes he owes none.

Journalistic Courage

2006-07-17T13:54:00.000-05:00

Walter Pincus has a great little essay on the subject. Money shot:

A new element of courage in journalism would be for editors and reporters to decide not to cover the President's statements when he -- or any public figure -- repeats essentially what he or she has said before. The Bush team also has brought forward another totally PR gimmick: The President stands before a background that highlights the key words of his daily message. This tactic serves only to reinforce that what's going on is public relations -- not governing. Journalistic courage should include the refusal to publish in a newspaper or carry on a TV or radio news show any statements made by the President or any other government official that are designed solely as a public relations tool, offering no new or valuable information to the public.

Pincus is limited by space constraints, but his closing graf is really only step 1. Step 2 involves, I dunno, having the balls to run the headline "President Reserves Right to Break 750 Laws," when the president, in fact, reserves the right to break 750 laws.

Lamont-Lieberman-Lee Siegel Lee Siegel Lee Siegel

2006-07-17T13:35:00.000-05:00

Okay, the most salient feature of the Lamont-Lieberman primary election, despite what the staff of TNR seems to think, is not a pissing match between the left-wing blogosphere and TNR (too many links to wade into it; try a google search for "blogofascism"), but Holy Joe's apparent determination not to win the Democratic nomination. For example: using the most well-known pro-Bush (well, anti-Kerry) slogan from the 2004 race in his advertising. Does Joe think Connecticut Democrats are going to be inspired to vote for him by his ripping-off of a Karl Rove one-liner? He's not that stupid. [Yale BA, Yale JD -- ed.] Which leaves two possibilities: 1) Lieberman is delusional; 2) Lieberman is intentionally setting himself up to lose the primary. Either way, he seems to believe --- did you catch the debate by any chance? --- that his senate seat is a personal fiefdom. Which attitude is, frankly, anti-democratic. Surprised? Anyone who would say this:

It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril.

is unworthy of the office of New Haven county dogcatcher.

Bonus Round: Improve this:

Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel ... Oh! There you are.

Hmmm. Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lee-sie-gel: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lee. Sie. Gel. Perfect.

Bonus Round 2: Dear Jonathan Chait, It's just you and me here. Off the record. Marty's out yelling at anti-war protestors to get off his lawn. Jason Zengerle is inventing e-mails. Aren't you a little embarrassed for/about being associated with Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel, Lee Siegel?

Happy 60th Birthday President Bush!

2006-07-06T17:31:00.000-05:00

You'll live to see the rapture yet. Have a piece of yellow cake.

The Great Wiesel Shoot

2006-06-22T14:57:00.000-05:00

As I may have indicated some time ago, I recently wrote a response-essay to Leon Wieseltier's philistine review of the new Daniel Dennett book in the New York Times back in February. It's out now, and you can read it here. If I do say so myself, I've got the old gasbag dead to rights. Money quote:

The first philosopher to appreciate the problem of induction fully was not a Christian apologist like Plantinga, but the consummate atheist David Hume, who casts his shadow over any discussion of naturalism and the limits of naturalistic explanation because it is his epistemology that provides the theoretical foundation of the actual practice of science. To enter into the discussion, therefore, a working knowledge of Hume’s epistemology is absolutely indispensable. The root source of all of Wieseltier’s trouble is that he gets Hume’s epistemology completely, utterly wrong, and the cause of that error in turn is that, undeterred by a surfeit of biographical evidence and a consensus in Hume scholarship to the contrary, Wieseltier attributes to Hume a belief in the existence of God on the basis of an argument that contradicts the essential character of Humean philosophy. “His God was a very wan god,” asserts Wieseltier, understating matters to the point of absurdity. “But his God was still a god; and so his theism is as true or false as any other theism.” The meager evidentiary basis of that claim is a single sentence outside either of Hume’s two major philosophical works:
The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion. (The Natural History of Religion).
It does look fairly convincing on first glance that Hume both believed in the existence of God, and held that belief on the basis of an argument from design. Indeed, passing off this remark without further consideration of the major themes of Hume’s corpus is so suspiciously convincing that it precludes the possibility that it is just an honest mistake. Quite simply, either Wieseltier has been defrauded himself or he is attempting to defraud his readers. For in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, nearly universally regarded as Hume’s masterwork, and again in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he gives a devastating counterargument against affirming the existence of God from observations about design. Though Hume’s argument against theism-from-design has been cleaned up and formalized over the centuries, it has never been substantively improved upon.

Would Wieseltier have us believe that the man who constructed the definitive rebuttal to the argument from design nevertheless upheld the argument from design himself? Does Wieseltier believe Hume was a schizophrenic? Not even schizophrenia could make the notion of Hume-the-theist remotely plausible: Hume’s general methodological principles provide rules for rebutting all arguments of the type of which the argument from design is a token, and they also helpfully reveal what is actually going on in the passage from The Natural History of Religion. In contemporary philosophical discourse, “Humeanism” denotes the doctrine, as described by the metaphysician David Lewis, that “all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another.” The foundation of Hume’s epistemology is the denial of necessary connections anywhere in nature. In the Enquiry he sets out to demonstrate that all we can ever have knowledge of is the conjunction of one event with another; reason then applies the concept of causality to our experiences and tries to deceive us into thinking that causality is something real, “out there,” rather than a cognitive illusion:
The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers?
“No,” goes the answer resoundingly. The evident dependence of the existence of causality on the necessary constancy from one moment to the next of invisible “secret powers” should tip us off to the fact that nothing makes it so that uniformities in nature are necessarily so. Belief to the contrary is based on phantoms in the minds of those whom reason has successfully misled. So Hume does not think there is any justification for inferring the necessary existence of cause-and-effect relations from observing nature. The suggestion that Hume believed God’s existence could be inferred from the same method is farcical.

What sense, then, can we make of the solitary line Wieseltier takes as dispositive of Hume’s theism? Quite the opposite, in fact, of what Wieseltier takes away from it. Consider precisely what it is Hume says: No “rational enquirer” can suspend his belief in theism and religion. But Hume is not, in his own idiom, a “rational enquirer”; he is the champion of empiricism, and rationalists are his philosophical antagonists. Of course a rationalist of the sort Hume is criticizing cannot suspend belief in God. Rationalism takes as indubitable the postulate that what pure reason makes out of perception is reality. Anyone laboring under that false doctrine, and who perceives nature as bearing marks of design, would be powerless to resist fallacious inferences from the appearance of design in nature to the reality of the existence of God. In a line from the Treatise I would find it hard to believe Wieseltier has never come across, Hume makes his thoughts about the role of reason overt: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” The rationalism Wieseltier believes is common ground between himself and Hume is in other words the precise object of Hume’s intellectual scorn. Hume is not affirming the argument from design, but laughing at those who do.

There are, of course, alternatives to Humean science, and Plantinga points the way to one. Call it Kierkegaardian science — believe in God and, by virtue of the absurd, the science will follow. Aristotle’s science dominated most of the history of Western civilization, until Galileo and Copernicus embarrassed its geocentrism, Newton embarrassed its mechanics, and Darwin embarrassed its notion of biological species as eternal and unchanging. But the undoing of Aristotelian science is its method, not its conclusions. A science according to which penicillin cures bacterial infections because it possesses an antibiotic virtue is not a science capable of discovering penicillin in the first place. Moreover, it takes Kant, not Aristotle, to provide a principled basis for erecting the sorts of walls between science and philosophy and between individual sciences that Wieseltier proposes. The theoretical cost of doing so is accepting Kant’s theory that space and time are nothing more than “forms of sensible intuition,” and consequently that not even the images captured by the Hubble telescope advance us one inch towards an understanding of “things in themselves,” i.e. true, transcendental reality. Wieseltier wants Kantian science without Kantian metaphysics, a possibility ruled out not by the sinister scientistic machinations of the likes of Dennett, but by the minimal requirements of intellectual defensibility.

However, the science Wieseltier actually lends his support to is nothing so dignified as Kant’s, but the only science that could result from the self-parodying rationalism he mistakenly attributes to Hume (and here is where the political implications of Wieseltier’s arguments become apparent). There is unfortunately no shortage of bullies who claim to have proved, on the grounds that it seems to them that “nature bespeaks an intelligent author,” that such an author necessarily exists. The name of that peasant revolt against knowledge is “intelligent design theory,” and Wieseltier, for all his erudition, is its oblivious footsoldier. “[W]hy must we read literally in the realm of religion,” wonders Wieseltier, approximating candor, “when in so many other realms of human expression we read metaphorically, allegorically, symbolically, figuratively, analogically?” What a silly question. Of course we may read any way we choose to, and no one has suggested otherwise. All that naturalists ask is that we not mistake our right to read metaphorically for the power to make metaphors into literal truth by believing in them strongly enough. The occasional stridency Dennett displays in reminding us that the universe is indifferent to our thoughts about what it should be is nothing compared to the metaphysical hubris involved in self-righteously refusing to pay heed to those reminders.

More World Cup Blogging

2006-06-15T18:38:00.000-05:00

Now that every team has played at least once, why not pause for a few reflections and make a few (premature) predictions. First, because I'm a shameless imperialist capitalist running pigdog, I should mention that I'm not really concerned with any of the minor/non-contending countries, except inasmuch as their presence affects the sides with a chance to win. And sitting at the head of the table of non-contenders, surely, is the United States of America, which on Monday put together some of the worst 90+ minutes of international soccer I have ever seen. It's not that there haven't been worse teams and worse performances (there have been worse American teams and worse American performances), it's that the gameplan seemed to be not even to try to do anything with the ball in Czech territory under any circumstances.

The American performance on the pitch was downright impressive, however, compared to ESPN's coverage of the match. Let's not mince words: It was the most slanted reporting of any kind and of any subject in recent memory. ESPN's coverage of the US-Czech Republic match made Sean Hannity's interview with Dick Cheney look like an interrogation at Abu Ghraib. The "worldwide leader in sports" spent a week promoting, to the exclusion of any other angle on the match, the fact that this American team is the best ever and it is up to them to shock the world and prove that the USA is the best in the world even at a competition we regard as somewhere in between sport and a gay hippie orgy conducted in rhythm with the Internationale. A spectator who knew nothing about soccer but the line that ESPN was pushing that week would have assumed the US were favorites in the match. All three "experts" --- Eric Wynalda, Alexi Lalas, and Julie Foudy (more on them momentarily) --- predicted an American victory, which indicates that they are either retarded or dishonest creeps. [Both!--ed.] Once the Czech Republic sent Claudio "Asshole" Reyna, Landon "Asshole" Donovan &co. off the pitch in disgrace, ESPN's official line switched immediately to, "Will the valiant underdog superpower recover from this self-inflicted loss by defeating Italy, and has Oceania always been at war with Eastasia?" (Answers: "Yes and yes"). And so it has been ever since: unceasing hawking of the US-Italy match throughout their coverage of every other World Cup match. There are reminders of the time and date every few minutes or so, and whatever is actually happening on the pitch, you can count on Marcelo "Rocky" Balboa and his sidekick [I think it's Alan Colmes--ed.] to explain why it's just like the American match, or (just maybe) just like the predicament the Americans find themselves in. At one point during the Germany-Poland match yesterday, the area of action on the pitch was blocked out by a fucking promo for US-Italy. This bears repeating: ESPN blocked out German and Polish players contesting for the ball with a graphic advertising the next US match. Finally, about the aforementioned three musketeers, Wynalda, Lalas, and Foudy: You know that stereotype that certain classes of athletes (hockey players, lacrosse players, maybe football players) tend to be cretinous while others (i.e. soccer players) tend to be bright? Yeah, so much for that.

As for the actual soccer: If I were an England supporter, I would be weeping. They lucked out a win over Paraguay by virtue of an own goal, and barely beat Trinidad and To-fucking-bago today. They'll be playing either Germany or Ecuador, and will deservedly lose to either one. Which brings us to Germany: The team is better in all respects than the 2002-finalists, except that Jens Lehmann is no Oli Kahn (and apparently these days, Oli Kahn is no Oli Kahn, else he wouldn't be on the bench; or is Jürgen Klinsmann nuts?). Ballack has some forwards to play with, Lahm and Frings are more than competent, though utterly uncreative, and the defense seems to have sorted out the lazy nonsense that led to Costa Rica's two goals on blown offside traps. That said, I doubt Germany will win, but they'll stay around longer than several teams that are better on paper. The best team on paper is Brazil, and by all rights, they ought to have lost to Croatia. Brazil's durability in the tournament will depend on whether or not their coach is willing to bench Ronaldo for the rest of the tournament. He is awful; and his replacement, Robinho, looks dangerous. No one, myself included, will be surprised if Brazil goes all the way, but they're not my pick. Against Croatia, they looked like 10 primadonnas and a keeper, not a soccer team. This is the classic set-up for a World Cup collapse. Which is the fate that will befall Argentina, Italy, and the Netherlands. Portugal is the most exciting team to watch, but they appear utterly uninterested in playing defense, and will lose accordingly.

My pick: The Czech Republic, with or without Jan Koller. They are a team that includes phenomenal talents. I can't see them losing.

P.S. If I were watching in any other country in the world --- especially in Europe; nothing brings out the Real American Hero in me like listening to blond, orange-tracksuited Eurotrash idiots mock Americans for being fat and stupid [that rapier European wit--ed.] --- I'd probably be cheering the doughboys on. As things are, I want them not only to lose but to be humiliated and booted from the tournament as quickly as possible. Which makes me, as you know, objectively pro-terrorist.

UPDATE (6/17/06): Man is my face red. I stand by everything I said about ESPN tenfold, though.

Ann Coulter: Cross-Dressing In A Brownshirt

2006-06-10T16:57:00.000-05:00

So this is hardly the worst thing Ann Coulter has ever said, but it may just be the thing that finally reduces her to the basement-dwelling newsletter schrifter she ought to have been all these years. Sometimes, it just takes the right put-down. As Auden put it in "Under Which Lyre" (which may be my favorite poem):

By night our student Underground
At cocktail parties whisper round
From ear to ear;
Fat figures in the public eye
Collapse next morning, ambushed by
Some witty sneer.

Michael Crowley and Jamie Martin [blog has been rolled--ed.] agree: this, from Andrew Sullivan, might be just the right sneer to collapse Coulter (sans the 'fat' part, natch.):

She's a drag queen impersonating a fascist.

Invade Germany

2006-06-10T11:45:00.000-05:00

Whatever you think of TNR and their ongoing support for Joe Lieberman, their World Cup blog, "Goalpost," is superb. See especially this and this. Me, I'm pulling for Germany. (It goes back, if you must know, to seeing them beat Argentina in the final in 1990, which was the first soccer match I can remember.) Realistically, I don't expect the Germans to win --- though host countries do tend to do awfully well --- and their opener against Costa Rica, while high scoring, did not exactly inspire confidence. That said, I'd be quite satisfied with this world cup if any team but Brazil wins (I'm ABB).

"The New Saladin"

2006-06-04T09:27:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the absence. Chris Matthews, about ten minutes ago, rough paraphrase: "I'm afraid that the Iranian mullahs would prefer an attack from the United States to giving up their nuclear program... that they want to be the new Saladin, the heroes of the whole Arab world." Okay, problem: Saladin was a Kurd, the Iranians are Persians, and neither like Arabs very much. Other than that, spot on Chris.

UPDATE: And then, Joe Biden responding on MTP responding to Tim Russert's question about the effect her vote for the war will have on Hillary Clinton's primary chances: "I would be surprised if the vote on the war will be the defining issue of the primary." Well, that's a little self-serving Neil, I mean Joe. Anyway, I've seen the polls indicating that HRC is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, but I have yet to encounter anyone who actually supports her (besides this asshole). Who are these pro-Hillary Democrats? And will someone put me on the phone with them please? We have a lot to talk about.

Well, That's Awesome

2006-05-26T20:55:00.000-05:00

"Invisibility Cloak May Be Possible" --- I think this means we need to invade Iran now. Mr. President, we cannot allow an invisibility cloak gap. (HT: Jim Henley)

Uncle Pat's Miraculous Jesus Juice and Cureall

2006-05-26T20:10:00.000-05:00

The very reverend Pat Robertson (R-Jesusland) is selling a protein shake he credits with enabling him to leg press 2000 lbs. Andrew Sullivan declares himself an unbeliever, simply because he's never seen a leg press machine capable of holding 2000 lbs.:

How many leg-press machines can handle 2,000 lbs? I've never seen one. Assume that he used 100lb plates - rare, but they exist. Ten on each side? Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to say that a leading light of the Republican Party is lying to sell protein shakes.

Now, I've never seen such a machine either (and I spent a summer at Gold's Gym in Venice). Nor has Slate's Mike DeBonis. But who's to say that a septuagenarian couldn't outlift one of the freakiest bodybuilders in history by 735 lbs., simply on the grounds that machines that can hold that much weight don't exist, or that the only evidence Robertson provides for his miracle leg press claim is a video of him fooling around with a 940-pound leg press (though he tells his chipper associate that it's 1000) by cheating, using terrible form, and putting himself at risk of serious injury. Maybe accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior is a safe alternative to steroids for high-schoolers looking to get big.

Pat Robertson: Fucking Loser

By the way, I sent Sullivan the link for this post.

UPDATE: It gets better. Robertson (or whoever writes on his webpage) claims that his doctor leg presses 2,700 pounds. More than twice Dorian Yates' total. That, dear friends, is bullshit.

UPDATE: Speaking of lying in Jesus' name, James Dobson's execrable organization is sending out fake letters to newspaper editors in support of the God Hates Fags Amendment.

Oh. My. God.

2006-05-26T19:05:00.000-05:00

It's the tenth anniversary of the O'Reilly Factor. Fox is showing the BEST SEGMENTS EVER from the last ten years. Right now, they're going over O'Reilly's coverage of the Lewinsky scandal. Tune in and watch as Billo's hairline recedes and jowls expand, and prominent Democrats start boycotting his show in a timelapse setting. (Also, thesis: the unit measure of evil is troy ounces of jowl fat. Discuss.)

UPDATE: Actually, this is really fascinating. Apparently, the show was originally called "The O'Reilly Report" and was an extension of his tabloid work on Inside Edition. What's more, O'Reilly acted like a nice enough tv-idiot. In addition to "Most Ridiculous Item of the Day," there was a segment called "Most Encouraging Item of the Day." Then, things sort of changed.

The most interesting feature of the show was that in this ostensible greatest hits compilation, there were no post-2004 election clips, and few post 2000 clips. If you recall, it was in October 2004 that O'Reilly's psychosexual dysfunctions became public knowledge. No real surprise that that's when the descent into paranoia and psychopathy really began to pick up steam.

UPDATE: Wanna see full-blown insane O'Reilly? Go here.

UPDATE: If you missed the Best Of O'Reilly, you can still catch Greta van Susteren's very timely hour-long special on Natalee Holloway, if you head over to FNC right now. I'm waiting.

UPDATE: Ok, since you asked, here's my theory on Natalee Blue-eyes. She was having consensual sex with Joran van der Sloot and his father when she OD'd on something they'd given her. They freaked out, chopped up her body or threw it in a woodchipper or something, and had done with. Also, this may be the whiskey talking, but I think the disappearance of a single attractive white female is more important and more worthy of a one-hour special than the mass-murder of a group of Iraqi civilians at the hands of US Marines. However, that would not be the case if she were not white.

Wait, This Looks Big

2006-05-25T15:54:00.000-05:00

Turns out Rove was Novak's source for the Valerie Plame column, and the two concocted a cover-up.

Al Gore...

2006-05-24T18:41:00.000-05:00

...will be the next president (which isn't to say that I've stopped supporting Feingold, or that I've become less ambivalent about Gore).

Just A Reminder

2006-05-24T18:34:00.000-05:00

Evan is a great blogger...go over there. (I once almost wrote a think-piece about Bush Derangement Syndrome myself, but it turned into a wierd thing about justified belief. Anyway, has Krauthammer been checked for Anti-Bush Derangement Syndrome? Cause, I think he's got it.)

This Looks Big

2006-05-24T18:20:00.000-05:00

Dennis Hastert: under investigation by the FBI, in connection with the Abramoff bribery racket. To paraphrase David Cross, it's not that only Republicans are corrupt, it's just that all Republicans are corrupt (except Ron Paul).

By the way, as I type, idiot senator, future president, and role model for DKE George Allen (R-Cisallegheny Virginia) is getting grilled by Chris Matthews over his fetish for the confederate flag and nooses. Allen is not doing well. He claims that he "saw [the confederate flag] as a regional pride symbol in, you know, in Virginia." Problem: Allen became a neo-confederate while being raised by his French mother in southern Califonria.

Well, That's That

2006-05-24T17:51:00.000-05:00

So college is finally over. The only words that are coming to mind are Auden's "Fall of Rome":

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes and abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agenst of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportatnt clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity
Little birds with scalet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Goodbye, Yale.

Irony

2006-05-20T00:58:00.000-05:00

Once again, Andrew Sullivan produces a statement so ludicrous that he burdens my hermeneutic capacity to distinguish between irony and zealous infantilism. On the fact that McCain gave commencement speeches at both far-right Liberty College and the "p.c. left New School [a bizarre phrase in-and-of-itself]":

His choice of venues is in itself a statement. He intends to be a uniter, not a divider. Unlike the current president.

Great point, Andrew.

The Got Hates Fags Amendment, Again

2006-05-19T01:20:00.000-05:00

It got through the Senate judiciary committee. Unsurprisingly, Feingold comes off looking pretty good:

A U.S. Senate panel advanced a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage on Thursday as the committee chairman shouted "good riddance" to a Democrat who walked out of the tense session.

"If you want to leave, good riddance," The Senate Judiciary Chairman, Republican Arlen Specter, told Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold, who refused to participate because, he said, the meeting was not sufficiently open to the public.

"I've enjoyed your lecture too. See you later, Mr. Chairman," Feingold told the Pennsylvania senator before storming out of the private room where the meeting took place.

How spineless is ol' One Bullet Specter? Glad you asked:

Specter said he voted for the amendment because he thought it should be taken up by the full Senate, even though he does not back it.

UPDATE: More raw sewage from the world's most overrated deliberative body; the senate has passed an amendment to declare English the national language by a sizable margin. Bill Frist rolls around in shit:

Another quick post to let you know that I am co-sponsoring Senator Inhofe’s amendment to declare English as the national language of the United States.

Haditha: An American Atrocity

2006-05-18T07:56:00.000-05:00

I don't know what to say:

A Pentagon probe into the death of Iraqi civilians last November in the Iraqi city of Haditha will show that U.S. Marines "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," a U.S. lawmaker said Wednesday.
From the beginning, Iraqis in the town of Haditha said U.S. Marines deliberately killed 15 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including seven women and three children.

One young Iraqi girl said the Marines killed six members of her family, including her parents. "The Americans came into the room where my father was praying," she said, "and shot him."

On Wednesday, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said the accounts are true.

We all know Murtha is objectively pro-Michael Moore, but don't take his word for it:

Military officials told NBC News that the Marine Corps' own evidence appears to show Murtha is right.

A videotape taken by an Iraqi showed the aftermath of the alleged attack: a blood-smeared bedroom floor and bits of what appear to be human flesh and bullet holes on the walls.

The video, obtained by Time magazine, was broadcast a day after town residents told The Associated Press that American troops entered homes on Nov. 19 and shot dead 15 members of two families, including a 3-year-old girl, after a roadside bomb killed a U.S. Marine.

On Nov. 20, U.S. Marines spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Pool issued a statement saying that on the previous day a roadside bomb had killed 15 civilians and a Marine. In a later gunbattle, U.S. and Iraqi troops killed eight insurgents, he said.

U.S. military officials later confirmed that the version of events was wrong...

One military official says it appears the civilians were deliberately killed by the Marines, who were outraged at the death of their fellow Marine.

"This one is ugly," one official told NBC News.

I await Hugh Hewitt's claim that NBC is aiding the enemy by reporting this. (link via Mark Kleiman)

Dionysus

2006-05-17T03:19:00.000-05:00

Via Majikthise, perhaps I need a corrective on this. I have no quarrel with the idea of T.S. Elliot being an anti-semite, which is pretty obvious to me and the historical record, though I reject the term anti-semite, which is overly broad, and philologically inaccurate. I don't even have a quarrel with the idea that intentionally "anti-semitic" poetry might be good poetry. I am a little tips right now, however, so I just want anyone who reads this to check the Guardian article I'm linking to, and see if I am justified in thinking that its writer is a stunning illiterate. It's the most repetitiously bizarre, begging-the-question argument I have ever read. But, again, maybe I'm just pulling a Hitchens.

Those Goddamned Maps Again

2006-05-16T20:43:00.000-05:00

Remember the county-by-county maps of the results of the 2000 and 2004 elections that Republican hacks liked to gloat about? You know, the ones that showed most of the country red because Republicans live in huge counties with .7 voters per square mile? Yeah, take a look now.

UPDATE: Et tu, Assrocket?

He Had His Chance...and he blew it. He should have given the speech I told him to. As soon as he started talking about guest worker programs and the impossibility of deporting 11 million illegals, it was all over.

Don't worry, don't worry, it's more Paolo and Francesca than Caesar and Brutus:

President Bush is being destroyed by vicious people who hate him.

World's tiniest violin here. Link via John Cole (because Powerline is largely unreadable), who adds:

Instead of mincing words, let’s just play it straight- anyone who thinks deporting 11 million people IS a viable option, or one that our leadership has the political will to carry through, is an insane crazy person. Period.

Heh. Indeed.

Rumor Swirl

2006-05-14T05:15:00.000-05:00

Jason Leopold of Truthout is reporting, and the Huffington Post repeating, that Karl Rove has been indicted. So far, no newswire has picked up the story. Mark Kleiman throws some cold water on the whole thing here. Count me as extremely skeptical. Meanwhile, Michael Isikoff is reporting that the Fitzgerald investigation is narrowing in on Cheney himself. Andrew Sullivan comments, "I have a feeling that Fitzgerald isn't even close to finishing his work. And if I were Karl Rove, I'd be having a rough weekend." Sounds about right. The Sunday shows might be exceptionally (however unintentionally) good this week.

In related news, Dick Cheney before he dicks you. But you knew that already. At Balkinization, Marty Lederman shows how Cheney's repugnant haecceity is germane to the debate over impeachment:

[T]here are two reasons why Bush remains in office, and neither of them has anything to do with legal and historical testimony of Cass Sunstein and Sean Wilentz. The first is that the Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. The second is that even if the Democrats controlled both houses, impeachment and conviction of the President would only make matters worse -- much, much worse. See the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, section 1.

Marty's first reason --- which could be extended to cover the basic fecklessness of the Democrats and hence the unlikelihood of impeachment even in a Democratic congress --- is basically undeniable. But on the second reason, Marty is ignoring the possibility of impeaching Cheney too.

UPDATE: Kevin Drum nails what's so egregious about the wiretapping policy in general and Cheney in particular: "The programs we got — monitoring of all phone records and eavesdropping on calls into and out of the country without warrants — were actually compromise positions."

UPDATE: Former NSA official Russell Tice: "I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them."

Bush To Cross The Mendoza Line?

2006-05-08T15:20:00.000-05:00

At some point, declines in public evaluation of a president cease to be elastic and become plastic: there is a point of no return. Bush is now at 31% in the Gallup poll; my guess is, that means he's already crossed the Mendoza line. But just imagine what will happen if he hits anything south of 30%. The number 20 has a kind of intuitive power that will break through even to the paranoid remnant of support for the president. 20-something percent approval? That just doesn't happen, barring national crisis. And that's precisely what we're facing now. Because of our presidential system, there is no opportunity for a vote of no-confidence and a creation of a new government. For the next two-and-a-half years, the United States will be in a state of de facto anarchy, at least with regard to the federal government.

This is the best reason there is, incidentally, to elect a Democratic congress in the fall. Should the Republicans retain control of both houses, the remainder of Bush's term will be spent coasting along into ever greater budgetary catastrophe and international insecurity. A Democratic house or two of congress might (emphasis: might) be able to string together some semblance of government, and that is the best we can hope for.

UPDATE: Jesus H. Christ

UPDATE: Josh Marshall on Bush at the Mendoza line. Josh is right that there must be an asymptotic limit >0 to Bush's sliding approval but (as I think Nick Gillespie said recently) I'm cheering for him to drive himself into single digits just to prove it can be done.

UPDATE: An e-mailer informs me that schmuck Ohio governor Bob Taft has made it into single digits.

UPDATE (5/12/06): And there it is. 29% approval.

Trout For Factitious Bait

2006-05-07T06:25:00.000-05:00

My last two undergraduate seminar papers (and last two undergrad papers period) down, three finals to go.

Little to Say

2006-05-07T02:12:00.000-05:00

Or actually, quite a lot about Galbraith, I'm sure. I sheepishly admit that while I think that Galbraith is brilliant, and clearly his place in the intellectual cannon of twentieth-century America has been painfully entombed by many of his peers, I am not an economist, and fear going down the road of extra-disciplinary grand-standing. A lot of his ideas make relatively reasonable sense to a reasonable person, and I think that is powerfully in their favor. The very fact that economists get so uppity about him demonstrates that he was on the right track. The most enlightening thing about reading The Affluent Society for me was in demonstrating how occluded any counter-arguments are in general (i.e. non-scholarly) economic discourse. The only real bone to pick I have with the sense I have of Galbraith is he had a little too much faith in government for my tastes. I utterly agree with the need to shift production from private to public sector goods, but I am not totally comfortable with the little that there is said about how one ensures good government and management of production. The major sticking-point for me in this problem is on education. I am adamantly opposed to the right-wing anti-public-education movement, which has, in the end, designs on mental and cultural genocide. BUT, I have little love for certain aspects of the Teacher's Union, and on a more theoretical level, am more of an anarchist when it comes to education. Galbraith simply takes it as a given that eduction must be a public good (commodity). And while he often seemed to think that was his strongest example, I actually think it may have been his weakest.

For the biography of Galbraith, an exhaustive explanation of his work, and a theory of why he has not influenced politics and academic economics as much as he should have, see Robert Parker's 820 page giant, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.

For a quick summary of Parker's book, and a modified take, see Brad Delong's review in Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005.

It's Not The Crime, It's The Cover-Up

2006-05-04T19:29:00.000-05:00

Branford College Master Steven Smith apparently whacked some freshman in JE with a wiffleball bat when said JE freshman was pulling a prank in the Branford courtyard. Yeah, whatever, he's an inhuman monster.

But get a load of Smith's excuse:

In this instance I allowed my anger -- thymos in Platonic terms -- to get the better of me.

It's talk like that wot leads to abominations like this.

John Kenneth Galbraith, RIP

2006-04-30T00:47:00.000-05:00

The author of The Affluent Society has passed away. I'll leave it to Jeremy to say a bit more.

Which Character Was Not On "Seinfeld"?

2006-04-23T18:51:00.000-05:00

a) Soup Nazi
b) Ned Flanders
c) Puddy
d) Jackie Chiles
e) Mr. Peterman

This was a question on Greed, just now. The contestant answered, (c).

Sunday Sermonette II

2006-04-23T16:43:00.000-05:00

[T]he ontological arguer who says that his world is special because his world alone is the actual world is as foolish as a man who boasts that he has the special fortune to be alive at a unique moment in history: the present...

It is true of any world, at that world but not elsewhere, that that world alone is actual. The world an ontological arguer calls actual is special only in that the ontological arguer resides there --- and it is no great distinction for a world to harbor an ontological arguer. Think of an ontological arguer in some dismally mediocre world --- there are such ontological arguers --- arguing that his world alone is actual, hence special, hence a fitting place of greatest greatness, hence a world wherein something exists than which no greater can be conceived to exist. He is wrong to argue thus. So are we.

---David Lewis, "Anselm and Actuality"

Sunday Sermonette

2006-04-23T16:40:00.000-05:00

In The American Religion, Bloom says that as a religious critic he has tried to follow something uttered by his secular deity, William Blake, that "Everything Possible to be Believed is an Image of Truth." One would need such an aphorism to avoid breaking out into derision at the Mormons, the Christian Scientists, and the fundamentalists. It looks like one of Blake's sillier lines, itself an image of untruth; unless, of course, Blake actually meant that everything possible to be doubted is an image of truth--that every doubtful thought contains a truth. Harold Bloom, aloft on his sublime religion of art, has never been much enamored of doubt. The hint of it at the end of his book gives his writing a new, and decidedly belated, energy.

---James Wood, "The Misreader"

War, Economy, History; or, the radical evil of American "Conservatism"

2006-04-20T11:18:00.000-05:00

Here's a very interesting book review by Jacob Heilbrunn of Darthmouth prof Jeffrey Hart's new book on "The Making of the Conservative Mind." Hart is a longtime contributor to National Review, the newest anti-bush con, and has written a sort of intellectual history of 1950'sff. conservatism, from the non-neo-con, non-evangelical-perspective. Nevertheless, the best graph in the article, which has already been tagged by wash monthly's kevin drum is Heilbrunn's response to a lot of the aristocratic handwringing:

In reality, though, conservatism hasn't really changed all that much. The Christian right has certainly infused it with moralism and anti-Darwin mumbo-jumbo, but what's more striking about the GOP over the past 100 years or so is its continuity. The party's main, almost sole, purpose has been to ensure that as much money as possible goes to those who need it least and that as little as possible goes to those who need it most. In a party of moneybags, Theodore Roosevelt was the exception, not the rule. Whether Bush manages to extricate the United States from Iraq or not, his avalanche of tax cuts has already justified the main reason that Republican pooh-bahs selected him to become their candidate for president.

The failure of Iraq, our status of non-declared semi-illegal war, and the looming threat of our response to Iran are the crucial issues of the moment. Nevertheless, that these issues are crucial is still somewhat of a successful by-product of a militarist agenda that cannot be sustained but by a governing economic ideology. And contra the bandwagon jumping foreign policy critique that has now become de rigeur among the somewhat brighter lights of a dim intellectual candelabra, the economic critique is the one that has always been most obvious and most needing to be made.

Wake Up Peter Johnston (And Leon Wieseltier), I'm Calling You Out

2006-04-19T07:59:00.000-05:00

Okay Peter, just because I let you off easy once doesn't mean that this aggression will stand. What aggression? After about 500 words of throat-clearing, in two and a half newspaper-sized paragraphs, Johnston proves substance dualism to be true, that we have free will, and that God exists. Problems solved, time for philosophy departments to pack up and go home. Take a gander:

I have not given my mom a phone call for a month and have no legitimate excuse. Such an excuse would be nice for me; if it were impossible that I call my mom, I would not have to take responsibility for my actions. Determinism is so useful! Unfortunately, when I explain to my mom the mass of forces of this fatalistic universe conspired to coerce me into not calling her for a month, she is generally unlikely to buy it. I am responsible for my inappropriate action because I was free to do otherwise. I have the capacity of free will.

But we know material forces act according to natural laws and the velocity of every atom is an effect with a proportionate cause. The human body and brain are made of atoms. If the human body constitutes the human being, it is materially determined.

I have established that I have the capacity of uncoerced action. All of us experience freedom. The human body, then, must not constitute the entirety of the human being. In addition to this facet, the human being must also have a non-material facet. I will call this the soul. I know this soul is non-material and enables the capacity of uncoerced action. But I know I, as a human, have an origin. Thus, my soul must have had an origin. My soul must have been created by something. No material thing could have created my soul, for the effect would have been greater than the cause.

There must be a non-material thing that created my soul. I will call this God. I will explore the consequences of this and define my position in a column next week.

Got that? There's going to be more. Actually, this abortion of a column is only leg two of a triathlon which began with this philistine piece on "ideological evolution" [sic] and will culminate with---I shudder to think what with. As a colleague of mine put it, Johnston deserves a commemorative plate or something for the three-fer.

Now, why is this worth writing about at all, you ask? Answer: Because Johnston is at least as sophisticated a philosopher as any bigtime pundit; his conclusions may look out of the mainstream, but the bullshit coming out of his mouth bears a close formal resemblance to the philosophastering of respected news and opinion journals.

What's bullshit about it, you ask? It may be a position you disagree with, but it's still a position? Answer: Utterly wrong. It is not a position. It is a compilation of lecture notes (second- and third-hand ideas play this role for professional pundits) with massive confusion, equivocation, and unexamined bias grafted onto it. The sad thing is that the philosophical concepts in play are not of a nature that requires any exceedingly technical analysis, and they are crucially important in the moral decisions about how to order one's life that every person, philosopher or not, aware of the fact or not, inevitably engages with.

The best advice in philosophy is to take things slowly, so let's do that. I said at the outset that Johnston proves (well, "proves") substance dualism, the existence of free will, and the existence of God in sound-bite sized chunks of language. Those are three separate conclusions. Johnston evidently believes them to be one, or thinks them all intimately connected, or fails utterly to appreciate where the conceptual dividing lines are. And in that error, he is joined by some significant proportion of people who would consider themselves literate and cultured, even liberal. The idea is: physicalism is incompatible with free will, there is free will, therefore some non-physicalism is true, therefore---and here the paths diverge: Thomism and the Francoism into which it has evolved, i.e., what's left of the philosophical substance of the religious right, after making a series of unwarranted theoretical leaps, now leaps off a cliff from non-physicalism to dualism to theism to Christianity to trinitarianism. Not one step follows from the last. But liberals have no right to laugh it up; so much better than the blinkering dogmatism of the religious right are they, that they'll indulge in every spiritualistic, supernaturalistic mania before confronting the blatant question-begging of the presupposition of the existence of free-will, and the less blatant but still theory-killing question-begging of the assumption that non-physicalism can handle the paradox of free will any better than physicalism can.

And here is the simplest statement of the paradox of free will. If you're going to argue that free will exists, you must have an answer to this---or you just don't count. All of the following four statements jibe with intuition but at least one of them must be false on pain of contradiction:

(1) We have free will.
(2) If the universe is deterministic, we don't have free will.
(3) If the universe is indeterministic, we don't have free will.
(4) The universe is either deterministic or indeterministic.

(4) is simply an instance of the law of the excluded middle. If you're prepared to deny (4)...you're not actually prepared to deny (4), whatever your protestations. You live by assuming the law of the excluded middle.

So one of (1)-(3) has got to be false. But (2) and (3), while not truths of logic alone, look pretty sound. The denial of (2) and (3) is compatibilism, and to cut a long story short, it doesn't work. [UPDATE: This can get really complicated, and it would be a distraction to get too heavily into the technical work that's going on; suffice it to say, compatibilism gets the modalities wrong.]

So that leaves (1). It's not in whole or in part a truth of logic. It's not a statement with any empirical confirmation of the sort admissible in science behind it. It's an intuition, just an intuition. "It's not just an intuition," squeals the free-will dogmatist. "I actually have the experience of acting freely." Indeed. And many people do not have that experience, after reflecting on it just as thoroughly as the upholders of free-will. And what's more (and more important), given the absence of free will, the alternative theories do indeed predict the datum of the experience of free will. If the universe is deterministic, then the laws of nature and the states of fundamental particles at the time of the Big Bang determine that in 2006, Peter Johnston will have the experience of having free will. If the universe is indeterministic, then by quantum coin flip, Peter Johnston had the experience of having free will. The experience anyone has of having free will is therefore utterly irrelevant as evidence for or against it. So the intuition is just raw assertion. It might have utilitarian backing of some sort---perhaps societies flourish where belief in the existence of free will is dominant---but that tells us nothing about whether or not free will exists. Hence, of (1)-(4), (2) (3) and (4) have varying degrees of objective backing, (1) has none. And one of (1)-(4) must be false. So the only warranted conclusion is that (1) is false. QED.

But pretend Johnston wasn't dead from the get-go. Suppose that some very sophisticated instruments are actually able to detect free will indirectly through, let's say, surface spectral reflectance of medium-sized dry goods. What then? Has physicalism been disproved? Hardly. The question of free will vs. determinism vs. indeterminism is utterly separate from the question of physicalism vs. dualism (or any other contender). Whichever of physicalism and dualism is right must necessarily be consistent with whichever of free will, determinism, and indeterminism is right. And whether physicalism or dualism is right, the appearance of law-like regularities in nature is unaffected. According to physicalism, all of nature is related by physical laws. According to Berkeleyan idealism, all of nature is related by psychological laws (God's coordination, or whatever). According to dualism, there are physical things and mental things, the physical things related to each other by physical laws, the mental things related by psychological laws, and the mental and physical things related to each other by psychophysical bridge laws of some sort. Well, that's quite the conundrum. Laws don't become less restrictive when you multiply them. In fact, they have a tendency to become moreso (ask any libertarian). So if free will exists, it must be consistent with law-like regularity, whatever the nature of the relata that the regularities relate might be.

It's not just Johnston that is completely hopeless engaging with this stuff. It's paladins of intellectualism like Leon Wieseltier too. I'm working on a long-ish journal article about the old bore, so I'll confine things to a lowlight:

You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason.

The context is a scorched-earth review of Daniel Dennett's new book that manages to commit errors a freshman in an introductory lecture course in philosophy wouldn't be able to get away with. Wieseltier attempts to convict Dennett of genetic fallacy, hence the quoted tangle. Now, while it's quite correct that the only way to show that ~p is to show that ~p, there is nothing fallacious about questioning the grounds for belief in p. For example, some people believe that God exists because the Bible says so and God wrote the Bible. But if you were to show them that people wrote the Bible that says that God exists, you would not have proven that God does not exist, but you would have removed one of their reasons for believing that God exists. And if they have no other reason for believing, then they have an epistemic obligation to suspend belief. It's not disproof, it's disillusion.

Things just get worse for Wieseltier. "If you believe you can disprove a belief [without disproving its content], you don't believe in reason." Hmm. I see a conditional. An if p, then q. Let's all take out our truth tables. (If p then q) is false iff. p is true and q is false. So: S believes you can disprove a belief without disproving its content; but S does also believe in reason, and is just confused about what genetic fallacy is (sound familiar?). So p is true, q is false. So (if p then q) false. So the conditional is false. Who doesn't believe in reason? Just goes to show that sipping martinis with Saul Bellow is not a form of enlightenment.

Nothing In The News, Right?

2006-04-19T07:09:00.000-05:00

I mean, our government's not planning nuclear strikes against Iran, is it?

Despite these days being some of the most newsworthy ever, end-of-term/college work has kept me from blogging. I can't promise it'll resume with any regularity until all this shit is done---and what I'm staring at, while not quite as bad as a 90 page senior essay over the course of a week, is pretty intimidating. [N.B. A revised version of a couple of sections of the essay are forthcoming in the Yale Philosophy Review, under the thrilling title, "Objects, Worms, and Slices in 3 and 4D. It's about eminent domain--ed.]

The blogroll's been updated a bit: Print Culture, a blog Jeremy has been telling me about for a while, is on the list (they picked up that Carly Simon's paradox thing in a sidebar on the right); also, a really good blog called Empire Falls.

UPDATE: Speaking of news, I see that my semi-celebrity neighbor, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, has passed away.

Anyway, when things get back into full swing, May-ish, there may be some big changes, maybe even a switch to typepad.

Iran

2006-04-13T15:03:00.000-05:00

Brent Scowcroft on Iran:

ARE we pursuing the right strategy to ensure that Iran (or, for that matter, any other aspirant nuclear power) does not cross the threshold to join the ranks of nuclear weapons states?

To deter Tehran, it is essential that there be a united front between the US, the European Union, Russia and China to prevent Iran from exploiting any differences or finding any sort of wiggle room that would allow it to continue with its program.

The issue, of course, is that under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Iran - as well as any other signatory to the NPT - is entitled to a fuel cycle as part of its right to peacefully use nuclear energy for civilian purposes. The problem is the process and equipment for enriching uranium and reprocessing spent fuel for peaceful purposes is identical to that for producing weapons-grade material.

What we need to do, therefore, is find a mechanism that will allow all NPT countries to enjoy the benefits of a civilian nuclear energy program while preventing the production of weapons-grade nuclear material through close supervision.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council should be prepared to make the following offer to Iran. Acknowledging that Tehran has every right to exploit nuclear energy for civilian use, Iran should be guaranteed an adequate supply of nuclear fuel for its reactors in return for abiding by all International Atomic Energy Agency regulations. This, in turn, should serve as the basis for a new international fuel-cycle regime that applies to all countries. Any approach to stemming nuclear proliferation that singles out specific countries - such as the Bush administration is doing with Iran - is not likely to succeed.

The first step should be an immediate freeze on all new capacity for the enrichment and reprocessing of uranium anywhere in the world. I am concerned about a trend that we see reflected in the US-India nuclear deal where we try to address proliferation risks by assessing the character of regimes and governments. Such an approach also opens up divisions, with each making a list of friends who can be trusted with nuclear technology and foes who are dangerous risks. Iran is certainly trying to capitalise on perceived disagreements among the US, Europe, Russia and China.

Focusing on a process eliminates such loopholes: this freeze would apply equally to Iran, Brazil, South Korea, Argentina or any other state that is contemplating developing an enrichment and reprocessing capability, regardless of whether they are democracies, dictatorships or something in between.

Once the ban is in place, the next step would be to work out the mechanism, under the guidance and supervision of the IAEA, as to how enriched fuel would be delivered, used and returned to supervised facilities. The Bush administration's proposal for Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (where member states of the nuclear supply group would provide enriched uranium to customers across the world) is a step in the right direction, but in its present form it lacks guarantees that all countries would have access to adequate supplies of nuclear fuel. This arrangement would still give individual suppliers the ability to arbitrarily cut off or suspend deliveries.

What is needed is an international guarantor so countries that lack an indigenous fuel-enrichment cycle would always have access to nuclear fuel. Indeed, it may be in the interests of the leading nuclear states (perhaps under the auspices of the G8) to subsidise such a program, so that no country would have an economic rationale to defy the ban and proceed with developing an indigenous fuel cycle, on the grounds that relying on the international system might prove too costly.

Could this proposal serve as the basis of a workable settlement with Iran? It could certainly stymie the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad approach, which has relied on using the nuclear issue - and the perception that Iran is being denied its legitimate rights - to stir up Iranian nationalism to distract the population from the pressing domestic problems of the regime.

Having the international community - and the US in particular - take at face value Iran's claims that it needs a civilian nuclear energy program to reduce reliance on diminishing hydrocarbon reserves and cut down on a growing pollution problem caused by fossil fuels places more pressure on the Iranian Government to demonstrate its good intentions.

A US-led international front that starts out by recognising that Iran has legitimate rights and concerns can go far in depriving the present regime of its ability to use Iranian nationalism in this crisis.

And should the Iranian Government reject an international proposal that implicitly recognises and safeguards its rights to a nuclear energy program under the NPT, it would become easier to convince other leading states of the need for sanctioning the regime.

Iran's strategy remains predicated on the assumption that no united front is possible, that even if the US, the EU, Russia and China all agree that a nuclear-capable Iran is undesirable, disagreement over the tactics will preclude any effective action.

The Bush administration needs to be prepared to find common ground with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council. This includes being prepared to talk to the Iranians and to put the question of security guarantees on the table. Indeed, something that might develop as a result of such a process would be a move towards giving all non-nuclear states firm security guarantees and territorial integrity as a way to provide further incentives for non-nuclear states not to pursue a nuclear program.

I have found the Europeans and Russians with whom I have discussed these ideas to be supportive of moving towards creating such an international regime to control the fuel cycle. But we also need to recognise that, in the case of Iran, we need to be prepared to strike deals with the other large powers to take their interests into account.

In particular, China is caught between its stated desire not to see Iran become a nuclear weapons state and its growing energy dependence on Iran. The US and other countries should be prepared to guarantee to China that if, as a result of pressure placed on Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, oil and gas supplies to China are affected, all efforts will be undertaken to minimise the disruption to the Chinese economy and that China would suffer no more than anyone else.

Washington should be prepared to offer similar considerations to other countries (such as Russia or European countries) that may have to put significant economic interests at risk to apply pressure to Iran.

We should never take the stand that "virtue is its own reward" when dealing with a serious issue such as nuclear non-proliferation.

Nuclear weapons technology is no longer a closely guarded secret in the possession of a handful of countries. An approach that relies on determining the character of regimes to assess worthiness to use nuclear energy is full of loopholes.

Only by creating an international regime - and applying it without exception, across the board - can we hope to guarantee that all countries can enjoy the benefits of nuclear energy without risking the spread of the world's deadliest weapons.

Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to US presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, is president and founder of the Scowcroft Group in Washington. This is adapted from the spring 2006 issue of international affairs journal The National Interest.

New At YDN...For The Last Time

2006-04-12T01:39:00.000-05:00

This'll be my last column in the Yale Daily News, at least for the time being. I think this is a good note to sign off with (for those not around here: the backstory is, some Crazzzy Christers held an "I agree with Adam" festival last week, wherein attempts at missionary work were made and rejected. The whole thing was creepy and culty, but that hasn't ever stopped Christers in the past):

A fragment of a Lost Gospel, recovered from the banks of the Quinnipiac and translated into English from Ugaritic in the Year of Our Lord the Two Thousand and Sixth:...

"Indeed, if I may quote the Book of Ecclesiastes, 'There is nothing new beneath the sun.' The first coming of Adam at Penn State in 2000 was heralded several months earlier by a reborn John the Baptist, a sophomore (of course) at the University of Arizona named Dave Goffeney, who was the focus of his very own 'I agree with Dave' week. (Naturally is Adam descended from Dave, for was it not foretold that the Savior will be of the line of David?) The earthly ministry of Dave, in turn, was rooted in the teachings in the mythic past (1998) of the great lawgiver Tom Rickstren of the Humboldt State University Campus Crusade for Christ in California.

"Proclaiming an 'I agree with Tom' week, which he aptly described as a 'supernatural experience,' the prophet donned an 'I am Tom' shirt, no doubt in keeping with the revelation of God that he received atop Mount Shasta, California, known in all the lands as a mountain of mystery and terror. The Tablets of Tom are the Law of the Campus Crusade for Christ International, consisting in Four Commandments: '1) God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. 2) Man is sinful and separated from God. 3) Jesus Christ is God's only provision for man's sin. 4) We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.'

"Behold, Adam comes not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it: He believes 'There is a God who loves us.' He believes 'that every person … thinks and behaves in a way hostile to God, and this hostility separates us from Him.' He believes that Jesus Christ 'rose back to life, defeating death and making it possible for humanity to be reconciled back to God.' And He believes that it's 'up to us whether or not we accept this gift of reconciliation through Jesus.' It is a wicked and faithless man who would attribute the almost perfect resemblance between Adam's creed and the CCCI's Old Dispensation to dumb chance. As Jesus tells us in Luke 16:17, 'It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for one little stroke to drop out of the Law.'

The Emperor Has No Clothes

2006-04-10T17:14:00.000-05:00

You Tube got the caption wrong on this one. I fear for my country.

A Star Is Born

2006-04-10T10:02:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to Al, who can now afford to do more Delino posts. As always, TV will answer the pressing questions, namely --- how did Mike Sexton analyze his play? and --- what nickname did Vince van Patten give him?

UPDATE: Al in a WPT-Behind-the-Scenes™ interview here. Danger Dave: Isn't this really exciting for you? Al: Yeah, yeah it is exciting. I don't really know what else to say.

Rejoice Thirsty Masses

2006-04-08T00:15:00.000-05:00

The Actual Rod's blog may be all but dead, but here he is, in the flesh, at a Ned Lamont rally at Naples yesterday (link via Atrios).

Frist Fucking

2006-04-07T23:51:00.000-05:00

Ahem, Kaus --- how's that for a pun (scroll up slightly).

Now then. Bill Frist's political action committee sent out somewhat unusual invitations to its annual gala event. Go here to find out what a red handkerchief in a right back pocket means (hint: the title of this post is a hint).

Thought for the Day

2006-04-06T22:11:00.000-05:00

no, let us rather choose
Arm'd with Hell flames and fury all at once
O're Heav'ns high Towrs to force resistless way,
Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms
Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise
Of his Almighty Engin he shall hear
Infernal Thunder, and for Lightning see
Black fire and horror shot with equal rage
Among his Angels; and his Throne it self
Mixt with Tartarean Sulphur, and strange fire,
His own invented Torments.

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

And for the record, pace Fish, Kerrigan, etc., Milton's God by William Empson is the only way to go re: Satan, God, and which side are you on.

More Duke

2006-04-06T16:35:00.000-05:00

Nothing is more vital in our justice system than the idea that an accused is innocent until proven guilty, and I am not trying to violate this idea. However, the penultimate paragraph of this NYTimes piece is noteworthy:

The police affidavit says the woman was examined by a forensic sexual assault nurse and a physician shortly after the attack took place. "Medical records and interviews that were obtained by a subpoena revealed the victim had signs, symptoms and injuries consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted vaginally and anally," the affidavit said.

I guess this is brand new information due to unsealing of the affidavit, but isn't this really the biggest piece of news? I.e., usually when rape allegations are false there isn't medical evidence that the accuser was raped. No one, and correct me If I am wrong, has claimed that there was consensual sexual activity. In that case, it seems to me that the physical evidence is pretty damning.

Duke

2006-04-06T15:24:00.000-05:00

The link is to an open letter former Yale dean and current Duke President Dick Brodhead wrote addressing the men's lacrosse rape charges. I think it's about as good a document as could have been produced at the moment, with the police investigation still ongoing. Thoughts?

Another Reason To Be For Russ

2006-04-05T12:56:00.000-05:00

Josh Eidelson sends along this press release from Senator Feingold's office:

FEINGOLD OPPOSES DISCRIMINATORY AMENDMENT; SUPPORTS MARRIAGE EQUALITY

April 4, 2006

Washington, D.C. - Responding to a question posed at his Kenosha County listening session over the weekend, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold said he strongly opposed the proposed civil unions and marriage ban facing Wisconsin voters this November. He also expressed his support for the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Feingold holds listening sessions in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties every year. Later this year, Feingold will hold his 1000th listening session as a U.S. Senator.

“The proposed ban on civil unions and marriage is a mean-spirited attempt to divide Wisconsin and I indicated that it should be defeated,” Feingold said. “It discriminates against thousands of people in our communities – our co-workers, our neighbors, our friends, and our family members. It would single out members of a particular group and forever deny them rights and protections granted to all other Wisconsin citizens. It would also outlaw civil unions and jeopardize many legal protections for all unmarried couples, whether of the same or the opposite sex. We shouldn’t enshrine this prejudice in our state’s Constitution.”

At the listening session, held at the Village Hall in Paddock Lake, Wisconsin, Feingold also expressed his support for the right of gays and lesbians to marry.

“As I said at the Kenosha County listening session, gay and lesbian couples should be able to marry and have access to the same rights, privileges and benefits that straight couples currently enjoy,” Feingold added. “Denying people this basic American right is the kind of discrimination that has no place in our laws, especially in a progressive state like Wisconsin. The time has come to end this discrimination and the politics of divisiveness that has become part of this issue.”

Feingold noted that removing the prohibition against gay marriage would not impose any obligation on religious groups. He indicated that no religious faith should ever be forced to conduct or recognize any marriage, but that civil laws on marriage should reflect the principle of equal rights under the law.

UPDATE: How's that for a headline?

Carly Simon's Paradox

2006-04-03T18:52:00.000-05:00

If the song is about you, you're not vain, just accurate. And if it's not about you, you're not the referent of 'you'.

Sunday Sermonette

2006-04-02T22:19:00.000-05:00

Has there ever been a worse poet than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? I doubt it:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

Bin Laden

2006-04-01T00:33:00.000-05:00

This is a bold analysis of some of Bin Laden's rhetoric. Bin Laden's recorded speeches, as the post indicates, have been compiled in a new book put out by Verso.

Finnegans Wake

New At The Guardian

And Now, The Grim Reaping

More Bright College Years

End Of The Long Lonely Road

New At The Guardian

G-Men!

Go Chargers!

New At PJM

New At The Guardian

The Daily Show

Divisional Playoffs Blogging

I'm An International Punk

In Soviet Union, Tonight Show Watches You

The Republican Youtube Debate

Remember Dennis Miller?

Announcements, Announcements

Debate Fallout

Democrat Debate Blogging

Extra Points For Style

Bush's Brain

Let's Think Before We....

All Your Base Are Belong To Iran

Easy There

Condolences

Blogrolling

March Madness

A Very Modest Request

Eve Of Destruction

Goaltending

The Apotheosis Of Bergerdom

Placeholder

Hail The Virgin Birth

Bright College Years

Block That Metaphor Dept.

Classy To The Last

Feingold Out

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over (?)

Election Eve

The Lost Year In Iraq

The Tombstone of Reaganism

Populism vs. Centrism, or Whatever

Lee Siegel Lee Siegel Lee Sprezzatura... What (?)

How Civil Wars Become Regional Wars

Uh-Oh

Stick A Fork In Joe

Bye Bye Joe, You Won't Be Missed

New Age?

Hagel on Middle East

The Dark Side of the West Wing

Toy Soldier Genocide

"Sustainable Cease-Fire"

Fighting a Just War

Michael Ledeen's Wet Dream

Render Unto Caesar

Journalistic Courage

Lamont-Lieberman-Lee Siegel Lee Siegel Lee Siegel

Happy 60th Birthday President Bush!

The Great Wiesel Shoot

More World Cup Blogging

Ann Coulter: Cross-Dressing In A Brownshirt

Invade Germany

"The New Saladin"

Well, That's Awesome

Uncle Pat's Miraculous Jesus Juice and Cureall

Oh. My. God.

Wait, This Looks Big

Al Gore...

Just A Reminder

This Looks Big

Well, That's That

Irony

The Got Hates Fags Amendment, Again

Haditha: An American Atrocity

Dionysus

Those Goddamned Maps Again

Rumor Swirl

Bush To Cross The Mendoza Line?

Trout For Factitious Bait

Little to Say