Doomed, I say. Doomed.

Yeah... Bill Ayers and The Weather Underground are responsible for the unrest in Egypt... or something...

I'll let Adam Serwer at the American Prospect take this one:

I tend to think this would be more frightening if it were comprehensible, but it's a symptom of a basic problem which is that several basic heuristics conservatives use for slotting things into "good" and "bad" categories are clashing with each other. So democracy is supposed to be good, but Muslims are bad, liberals are bad, and if Muslims are bad and liberals are bad, then the protests must be some kind of combined Marxist-Islamist conspiracy that will lead to Islamists and Marxists splitting the globe between each other.
This all reminds me somewhat about that old joke about the German Jew reading the Nazi newspaper. His friend asks him why he's reading that anti-Semitic trash, and the guy reading the newspaper responds that he doesn't understand how he could read anything else, since it's all good news: Jews control the banks, Jews control the government...Anyway point is that no one has a higher opinion of their enemies than Beck and the conspiracy-minded conservatives he speaks for. If there are any religious extremists concerned that peaceful resolution of the protests in the Middle East might make their extremism obsolete, they should just watch Fox News, where they're actually on the verge of establishing a modern caliphate that extends from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean.

Morning Update XXXV: The Nice Poster Edition

(1) What with all the big papers getting a little WikiLeaks action, I thought I might too. So here, from WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables on the problem of what to do with the 174 remaining Guantanamo detainees (via the February 2011 issue of Harper's--no link) is proof that politicians can be clever even behind closed doors:

"I've just thought of something," the king [Abdullah of Saudi Arabia] added, and proposed implanting detainees with an electronic hip containing information about them and allowing their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth. This was done with horses and falcons, the king said. [White House adviser John] Brennen replied, "Horses don't have good lawyers."] -U.S. Embassy Riyadh

Brennen might have also noted that the Government of the United States of America, should, as a general rule, avoid treating people in its custody like horses and falcons...

(2) And speaking of laughs, let's turn to the Republican National Committee. Though Michael Steele and his off the hook, lesbian bondage fiasco-style politics are gone, there is at least one reason to keep an eye on the RNC: the fascinating intonation of new RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. As Mark Liberman at Language Log notes:

In the tradition of English intonational description that goes back to Henry Sweet, Harold Palmer, and Roger Kingdon, the contours of the tonic syllables of tone-units have come to be called "nuclear tones". There are various inventories and taxonomies of these patterns — thus David Crystal ("The analysis of nuclear tones", in L.R. Waugh & C.H. Van Schooneveld, Eds.,, The melody of language: intonation and prosody, 1979) discusses seven ("Low fall", "High fall", "Low rise", "High rise", "Level", "Rise-fall", and "Fall-rise"), and alludes to others (e.g. "fall-level", "rise-fall-rise"). The question of how to characterize these patterns remains a subject for debate: What are the tonal "atoms" that make up these contours, and how do they combine? What are their dimensions of quantitative variation? For example, American linguists since Pike have generally preferred to decompose rises and falls into sequences of level targets. Other recent approaches have decomposed local regions of pitch contours via orthogonal polynomials or functional principal components analysis. In any system, it's natural to wonder whether the "high" and "low" variants of rises and falls are really qualitatively distinct patterns or just parts of a pitch-range continuum. The most important difficulty is the lack of any intonational equivalent of psychological "word constancy". If you promise a class of elementary-school kids that the first one to raise a hand when you next say "chickadee" will get a dollar, you can expect some arguments about whose hand went up first, but not about whether you said the word; in contrast, if you offer a reward for flagging your next "high rising nuclear tone" (of course exemplifying it rather than naming it), you'll get confused looks at first, eventually replaced by plenty of arguments about whether you produced one or not. For similar reasons, it's hard to trust phonetic studies of intonational categories whose data is produced by asking laboratory subjects to pronounce particular contours. But the distribution of English intonational patterns in natural speech seems to be roughly as non-uniform as the distribution of words; and so some contours are less studied than others just because they're usually less common. This is where Mr. Priebus comes in. Judging from his remarks after being elected the new chair of the Republican National Committee, he's a reliable source of the "level" nuclear tone, which is otherwise somewhat difficult to find.

If you know what the hell Liberman is talking about, then I'm sure you're very excited (and smarter than I am). There are examples of Priebus's fascinating intonation at Language Log.

Thank God, I guess, that someone is studying these sorts of things.

(3)The following are excerpts from the forum, "A Super Bowl Spot for Uncle Sam," a transcript of which appeared in the February 2011 issue of Harper's (no link). The premise of the forum is this:

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, polls showed that more than 70 percent of Americans trusted the federal government, purveyor of such beloved products as the interstate highway system, the G.I. Bill, and the Social Security check. Then, abruptly, in 1966, the government's favorability ratings began to fall, and fall. Last September, when pollsters at Gallup asked Americans to "describe the federal government in one word or phrase," 72 percent of the responses were pejorative. ... We may be more politically polarized than ever, but when it comes to the federal government, we stand united in our disgust. One often hears that we should run government like a business. What would a business do if it saw brand loyalty give way to such brand hostility? Wouldn't its executives summon the alchemists of advertising? The day after last November's midterm elections, Harper's Magazine gathered creatives from four ad agencies and assigned them a daunting task: to develop a television spot for the federal government. And not just any television spot. We wanted one both memorable enough and entertaining enough to compete in the most expensive televised-marketing event of the year--the Super Bowl.

So, best. premise. ever. right? Some choice moments:

Perry Fair: The train station I use has a huge sign saying, THIS RENOVATION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE STIMULUS PACKAGE. I'm like, "By who?" There's no branding. I walk away all, like, "Thank you, that's nice." This is the worst print ad I've ever fucking seen.

And,

Thomas Frank: As far as government advertising goes, we're not aiming for anything dishonest. That's what the Soviets did. If the Soviets said it, it was propaganda.

Mark Fitzloff:They had some really nice posters, though.

And,

Fitzloff: Let's mate a donkey and an elephant and have their offspring talk. Perry Fair: A donkephant. A green donkephant. Sobier: Green's to polarizing. Hohn: All the colors are taken! Fitzloff: Purple. Hohn: No, purple's got some problems.

And, from a storyboard of an ad

The Supreme Court justices dance onstage in a Rockettes Kick line. A surprisingly nimble Ruth Bader Ginsburg breaks the line to do a high to-touch jump, landing in a split.

I must say, I like the idea of "branding" the government, but I'm not sure a superbowl ad is necessary. How about better "print ads" for construction problems? How about a receipt for your taxes (Ezra Klein links to a couple of examples)? More effective, I would think--though far less funny.

Morning Update XXXIII: The Last Word Edition

Zak Smith

"...Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily with a busted bicycle..." (page 39 of Gravity's Rainbow

here

(1) First things first. There's something off with the numbering of the "morning updates." I believe that this is correctly numbered XXXIII, and I've adjusted the others to follow suit. Here's the thing: Including this one, only 29 are tagged, which means I'm missing two. It's a puzzler. If any enterprising reader wants a free Ich Bin Ein Oberliner mug, then go through the archive and see if you can't figure out what's going on. First (correct) one wins.

The last word? Unless someone gets back to me with the correct answer and documentation on the number of "morning update" posts, then I will never ever speak of this again. How's that for a tie in!?

(2) Second things second. I didn't really want to write or deal with the controversy over the proposed Islamic cultural center in New York. I really didn't. But, like a moth to a flame, I am drawn to teh stupid.

I know that most--if not all--who regularly read this blog probably think the conservative hubbub over the "Ground Zero Mosque" is not only stupid but bigoted and crazy to boot. I feel the same way. What more is there to say?

Well, a few things, I guess. Here we go, and may I never write about this again.

(3) Ezra Klein on the evolution of the controversy:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either. The test I try to use is this: Could I imagine a world in which this thing was happening but no one ever thought to comment on it?

Well, yes. I can't imagine that world for unemployment, or financial-regulation reform, or the Afghanistan Wikileaks. But it absolutely could've been the case that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf decided to build an Islamic community center and no one really noticed, or cared, and maybe a few local politicians from both parties showed up to help cut the ribbon. As it happened, a few opportunists went after it, which brought it to the attention of a few sensationalistic media outlets, and then some opportunistic politicians jumped on board, and then their colleagues felt compelled to comment, and then more legitimate media outlets had something to cover, and on and on. The story is a story because of the incentives of the people making it a story, not because there's something about an Islamic community center a few blocks from Ground Zero that just screams out for national attention.

(4) It's fair to say that few of the actors involved in this mess have any self-awareness at all. Glenn Beck never did, and that's no surprise; the media often doesn't, which somehow still surprises me; and the Democrats can't seem to understand why no one takes them seriously when they go around to the base and claim to have anything resembling a back bone.

Klein is close to something, but a little too dismissive. He's correct, of course, that:

You get a lot of these mini-manias in the 24-hour news cycle, and it's always hard to say which you should take seriously and which you should ignore. After all, if you jump on everything that cable news makes into a big deal, you've become part of the problem, because you're helping the story along. But you don't want to just dismiss everything, either.

But his test isn't doesn't catch 'em all. There's something about this story and the way in which it arrived that's important. It's important, not only because it encapsulates what's wrong with both parties (one's crazy, and one's spineless), but also because it's emblematic of an ailing media (and I don't just mean that it's susceptible to right-wing pollutants).

Consider the headline in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune:

POLITICS OF THE MOSQUE DEBATE

First, while it is a debate over a "mosque," it really should be a debate over a community center that includes prayer space. But I guess that really isn't the point now is it.

The truth is that the "politics" of this debate are shaped by the media coverage of this debate, which seems to be lost (or at least only tacitly recognized) by the media actors involved. One of the upshots of the entwining of commentary and journalism is that you end up with journalism that can masquerade as commentary and commentary that can masquerade as journalism.

That, all too often, is happening here. And of course, Fox News practically invented the modern incarnation of this effect, but that normative wolf in positive clothing is not limited to Fox. When Newt Gingrich says that we wouldn't allow the Nazis to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum, and the "journalist" merely nods and asks some Democrat to respond, that journalist is (1) creating false equivalence and (2) ignoring the facts--Nazis are perfectly within their rights to have signs in front of the Holocaust museum.

By acting as though this is just another two-sided debate--like always--the media is endorsing the idea that both sides have equal standing. But they don't, and the media shouldn't act like they do. After all, it's not the "Ground Zero Mosque," despite what it has been dubbed; you can't see Ground Zero from the damn community center. The hubbub over the "radical" imam is ginned up; President Bush and he worked together. I could go on.

And so, with the media's blessing, the story floats along in this strange context-less bubble, and instead of popping the damn thing, they report on it, and it grows ever-larger and swallows up ever-more of the already small space American's have that isn't devoted to watching people lose weight and sing shitty pop songs.

I'm reminded of what Roger Hodge wrote in Harper's:

The disease manifested itself almost everywhere at once, but the superficial effects were most spectacular in our national mirror: the Media, which absorbed and digested the once proud opposition of the Press and made of it a mere legitimizer of horrors. The self-refuting absurdity of the Bush presidency, with its pretensions to manufacture an imperial reality, parallels the rise of the aggressively oxymoronic genre of “Reality Television,” with all its unintentional ironies. Among so-called news programming, Fox’s “Fair and Balanced: We Report, You Decide” is of a piece with Anderson Cooper’s “Keeping Them Honest” and, to give an extreme and perhaps gratuitous example, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric. More perniciously, the self-importance with which the quality newspapers fawned on George W. Bush and his retainers in the decisive years after September 11, 2001, particularly in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, bears comparison with the bitter satires of G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh.

The disorder from which we suffer—known among its close observers as Self-Satirizing Syndrome, or SSS—is a cruel one. Not only have we been made to witness the betrayal of almost every promise made by our Founding Fathers, and seen their direst prophesies confirmed, we must also suffer the indignity of seeing our constitutional ideal turned into a shabby mockery of itself. Somehow, by a trick of dialectical cunning, the United States of America has vaulted over the tragic phase of history in favor of a relentless pursuit of historical farce.

It's endlessly fascinating--though perhaps not all that surprising--that The Daily Show's takedown of both the controversy itself and the media's reaction to it remains one of the best I've seen.

Fascinating because The Daily Show is in a sense utterly ajournalistic and yet on occasion it gets at the truth--an ever more elusive specter in these times--better than journalists. Not surprising because what the media lacks, self-awareness, The Daily Show has in spades--albeit in the form of a healthy dose of ironic distance.

I'll let Hodge play me out:

The medicinal literature I have in mind is not fiction, though fiction can serve in this role as well, but the literature of fact, a variety of narrative journalism (of a provenance far too ancient to be called “new”) that has long sought to place a strong bulwark of wit between the reader and history’s perpetual invitation to despair. Today that protective coating has become a medical necessity. In times such as these, healthy citizenship requires the insertion of a human proxy into the stream of historical happenstance. What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.

Anatomy of a WTF

Well, Greater Wingnuttia is in an uproar over the revelation that there was an private email list, “JournoList,” of 400-or-so liberal bloggers, reporters, writers, editors, and academics. I’m in an uproar, too. Surely, I’m an important media figure, what with a blog that reaches about ten people a day and an editor at two news outfits in Collegeville Bumfuck, Ohio.

So, what gives? Seriously, Ezra Klein started the damn thing, and I link to him ALL THE TIME. JournoList is gone now, but surely JournoList’s new incarnation “CabaList” (great name, btw) could include me. I await your email, Mr. Klein.

In all seriousness, though, I feel like Will Ferrel’s character in Zoolander. Have I been taking crazy pills? I honestly don’t understand the hubbub over this list, which, if you’ve been reading conservative blogs (and why would you do that?), you’d think is a cross a Marxist political rally and the cabal from The X-Files. Says Jonathan Strong at The Daily Caller:

In 2007, when Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein founded Journolist, an online gathering place for several hundred liberal journalists, academics and political activists, he imagined a discussion group that would connect young writers to top sources.

But in the heat of a bitter presidential campaign in 2008, the list’s discussions veered into collusion and coordination at key political moments, documents
revealed this week by The Daily Caller show.

In a key episode, Journolist members openly plotted to bury attention on then-candidate Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman, for instance, suggested an effective tactic to distract from the issue would be to pick one of Obama’s critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

Conservative critics of Washington’s journalistic establishment have long charged the media with a striking liberal bias. But those critics have also said the problem was mostly unintentional, the result of a press corps made up mostly of Democratic-leaning scribes.

Yet Journolist’s discussions show an influential left-wing faction of the media participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias.

Journolist’s members included dozens of straight-news reporters from major news organizations, including Time, Newsweek, The Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, PBS and a large NPR affiliate in California.

I guess that's supposed to be shocking and/or freightening. It's certainly supposed to be evidence for Strong's claim that "an influential left-wing faction of the media [is] participating in a far more intentional sort of liberal bias."

Of course, it's none of those things. It's Spencer Ackerman, who is a liberal blogger, bitching about the Jerimiah Wright coverage to a bunch of other liberal bloggers and reporters, which isn't that strange.

And as best I can tell, the "open plotting" and "collusion" involved a few (not all 400, not even close) bitching about how they would like to change the coverage of the Wright scandal. Indeed, by Strong's own lights, we're talking about, at most a dozen-or-so well-known liberal columnists and bloggers discussing ways to change the narrative.

What does Strong think? Does he honestly believe that Ezra frickin' Klein is giving marching orders to 400 journalists? that after hearing Ackerman's master strategy, the entire media changed course? I've yet to see a shred of evidence indicating that it went any further than a few people bitching.

And then there's the charge that JournoList is somehow in cahoots with the Obama administration, even though there is--by these guys' own lights!--no indication that anyone actually employed by the Obama administration was active in the list at the time they were employed--one of Klein's rules for JournoList.

There are, I guess, a number of emails on the list that included strident defenses of Obama, and urged others to defend him too--which is exactly what a lot of liberals do all the time. Indeed, Obama sends me emails encouraging me to support him. It's a conspiracy I suppose. Think of all those press releases! Finally, proof of a liberal media conspiracy!

All the hubbub, all the utterly bizarre demands that all JournoList members and their associates ought to be named and shamed is really, at it's core, incredulity on the part of conservatives that liberals talk to each other and bitch to each other like normal people.

Indeed, it seems to me that, even if the "straight" journalists (i.e. people whose writing is actually supposed to be neutral) were writing about their support for Obama--and there's no evidence that they were--that's not exactly a big deal. Except for the inevitable question-raising, I haven't seen--despite a couple hours of paging through the swamp that is the conservative blogosphere--any evidence that their journalism was actually affected by their evil email list.

Are we supposed to somehow prevent journalists from having and discussing their private opinions? Perhaps they should be required to publicly post their dinner-time conversations, so that we are sure that they're not saying mean things and discussing politics with their families.

Amanda Marcotte agrees it's high time that we ensure liberals have no opinions:

The fundamental argument justifying the fit is that liberal journalists don’t have a right to speak to each other in confidence, a right that conservatives apparently get to enjoy on the grounds that they’re specialer than us. I imagine that if this all works out for them, they’ll be delighted to know they have a new line of attack on liberals. It’s way more than listservs, after all. Liberals communicate with each other in private in all sorts of ways. Now that they’ve managed to make this fact controversial, there’s no end to the possible scandals. I’ve made a list of what we can expect next, in terms of created controversy.

Scandal will erupt when it’s discovered:

*Many liberals are married to or dating other liberals, which often includes actual sexual congress going on behind closed doors.
*Liberal homes are often installed with telephones, and most phones made from them go unrecorded.
*To make this worse, most liberals nowadays carry their phones with them. At any point in time, they have access to confidential conversations with other people who are often also liberal. And just to add to the wickedness of it all, many also employ text messaging.
*Liberals are permitted to enter restaurants that serve dinner to people without recording their conversations. No doubt many of these liberal take advantage of this to discuss politics over dinner with other liberals.
*Did you know there’s no law against liberals having cocktail parties?
*To make it even worse, many liberals working in media or politics have offices where they work with other liberals, and therefore have unfettered access to unrecorded conversations with each other.
*But it turns out even those who don’t work in physical proximity with other liberals often use instant messaging services to conduct conversations with each other as if they worked together. Not only does instant messaging create a scandalous veil of privacy over these communications, but it’s also rumored that they use improper grammar and spelling.
*Liberals are permitted to both purchase books written by other liberals or check them out of the library. Either way, they brazenly read those books quietly, and enjoy thoughts about them that they aren’t forced to share with other people.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the only form of communication we’ll be allowed is blogging, but only if every reader reports their thoughts straightaway in comments. Maybe also Facebook, but only if all the privacy controls are turned off. And then they’ll have to create new rules to explain why it’s scandalous to allow us even this.

I'm not sure why I'm writing so much about this. The only thing I can think of is that it's just so fucking crazy that I can't take my eyes off of it.

I mean here's a list of the "known JournoListas" and their associations. Including links that demonstrate that some of them are work for "maoist" publications (the evidence? A House Committee on Unamerican Activities report that calls The Guardian an arm of the Soviet Union. Of course that would make the communists or maybe even Marxists, but certainly not Maoists. Whatever.)

Then there's the utterly bizarre, quasi-anti-semetic stuff:

What’s so funny, in a sick, sad way, is that, looking at the Journolist, it really does seem as if there is Jewish domination of the media — except that the Jews doing the so-called domination are completely in sync politically with Oliver Stone. They’re all left, left and more left. They’re just all too dumb to realize that, when you get as far Left as Stone, the antisemitism stops being coy little references to capitalism, Israeli imperialism and Palestinian victimhood. Instead, it becomes the active antisemitism that travels from Chavez’s attacks on Jewish businesses, to Stalin’s periodic kangaroo court purges and suppression of religion, to Hitler’s final solution. (And I mention those three Leftist antisemites here because Stone specifically speaks of them as either admirable or misunderstood, or both.)

If you want to get away from “Jewish domination” and get into a more balanced media, with representatives of all sectors in American society you have to go to the conservative media. There, you’ll find as mixed a bunch of people as you can ever hope for: Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim (a few), male, female, gay, straight, and some I know I’ve forgotten or haven’t even imagined.

I do analytic philosophy. I'm supposed to be able to parse arguments, and I have no idea what this guy's point is.

Of course, the whole thing is ludicrously hypocritical. The conservative media is well-known for their "collusion," which is really just message discipline. It's not that nefarious; it's just that conservatives are really good at hammering on certain issues and talking points at the same time. If you want to read more about that, read this of this.

One conservative actually calls this bullshit out, which is nice to see:

Everyone who has reason to be embarrassed by a direct quote in the Daily Caller's series on Journolist is an openly opinionated commentator. (The one partial exception is Jeffrey Toobin, who presents himself as a middle-of-the-road analyst on CNN, but his weaselly nature has always been pretty obvious.) Everyone who has been shown to have their work influenced by conversations on Journolist is, likewise, a commentator. That Chris Hayes tries to get perspective from other liberals before he goes on TV to opine on a topic, or that Joe Klein incorporates ideas from off-the-record exchanges into his blog posts, is not exactly earthshaking news. Commentators on the right do exactly the same thing -- it's just our emails don't get leaked because we're smart enough not to conduct these exchanges on listservs where we let the audience expand to include 400 people. This practice is a double-edged sword -- you get the benefit of idea-sharing, but you have to be careful not to get sucked into groupthink. Liberals seem more prone to the latter failing, but that's more a problem for them than for anyone else, and it's not much of a scandal.

The straight-news reporters who were on Journolist are being accused of being complicit in the partisan hackery they observed (even if they didn't participate in the discussions), but the charge doesn't really wash unless you can look at their work and point out how it is skewed by exposure to liberal conversations. Orrin Judd provides some useful perspective:

[O]ur friend Rick Perlstein was on the list and, in the meantime, he also had his own list of pet conservatives from whom he'd gather the opposing viewpoints. So there's nothing wrong with the list per se. Nor does this seem like a conspiracy to shape the news, no matter how much a few participants might have wished it to be one.

I guess I'll take the knocks in here, as long as I get to take the fact that all the "hyperventilating" on the right is just hypocritical, logic-free, nonsense, which, I suppose, is a pretty good description of the conservative blogosphere.

Links with Little to No Annotation, Part 1 of n

Because I recently went through a week's worth of unread posts in my RSS reader, I now have 20 or so starred items. Starred items mean, I should write about this. Well, instead of writing about them, why don't I just link to them and start to get my diigo (yeah, I didn't know what it was either) skills a-workin'.

Ready, set, go!

Links!

(1) Ta-Nehisi Coates says:

The more I think about this, the more I am faced with the kind of question I feel naive and stupid for asking--What kind of human being writes a 4,000 word article to prove that someone's long-dead relative wasn't lynched because he was beaten to death? Callousness is scary. Stupidity is scary. When you combine the two....I mean seriously, What the fuck? It's the worst of everything.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(2) Via Digby at Hullabaloo, this (from Pew) is great journalism. Awesome job, guys!

Thirty-seven governorships are up for grabs in November, along with all 435 seats in the House and 37 in the Senate. And only a handful of the more hotly contested races will get significant national media coverage from now through Election Day.

So it’s a little surprising that the national press is now lavishing the most attention on a candidate who cable pundits and political analysts expect to lose big in November: Alvin Greene.

The South Carolina Democrat has been the lead newsmaker in 2010 coverage since coming out of nowhere to win the June 8 Senate primary. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism crunched the numbers and provided The Upshot with its internal analysis of media coverage across 52 major news outlets, from South Carolina’s primary day through July 18.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(3) There's a new model of the universe that doesn't include the big bang--or dark energy. Can I have just the latter and not the former? Don't worry; it's still preliminary (via Tyler Cowan)

Intrigued? Go, read.

(4) Sara Mayeux says:

A professor of mine, asked why he teaches history, replied that he wants his students, whatever profession they go into, not to be "prisoners of the present." That is, to understand (not just abstractly to know) that the way we live now is not the only way humans can live, or ever have. That's a lesson you don't have to go very far back in time to learn—in a sense, I wonder if Ta-Nehisi's frustration that America "is too ignorant of itself" doesn't have something to do with the tendency of Americans to imprison themselves in the present. Thus race has always been the subject of mere "conversations," marriage has been a man and a woman in love for time eternal.

Intrigued? Go, read.

(5) But I say to Ben Zimmer of Language Log, "what the hell is an obscenicon, and where can I get one?"

Intrigued? Go, read.

The Almost Meta-post

Who has two thumbs and doesn't deserve a column? This guy! Public Domain image courtesy of Wikipedia, here.

I'm thinking of adding a new tag to this blog, viz., "David Brooks Doesn't Deserve a Column." God knows I've written enough about David Brooks.

Some might think that petty, or call me jealous. I suppose would be fair critiques. It is a cheap shot, and I am a little jealous that someone who pretty much just vomits out 500-odd words of bullshit gets a job at The Times. I do that all the time, and the best I get is a position with the Oberlin Communications Dept. (for which, of course, I'm very grateful).

I'm not going to talk about the most recent column, which was not only wrongheaded but obnoxiously written (repetition is fine when it serves a purpose, but all that "green jacket" shit was just a patently transparent, and ineffective, framing device that did little except add column inches to what was essentially a two-paragraph and inane collection of faux-centrist talking points).

I'm going, instead, to give you this gem from a bit back:

When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal era–when government intervenes to seize wealth and power and distribute to the have-nots…. It’s a progressive era, based on the faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.

Eric, over at The Edge of the American West (which I believe is written by a group of professors at some college or other) has this to say in response.

So to be clear, according to Brooks, the progressive era, which saw Congress and the state legislatures adopt constitutional amendments for the direct election of senators, an income tax, and the enfranchisement of women, wasn’t a time when government redistributed wealth and power to the have-nots. This seems obviously wrong in a way that would earn an undergraduate an F.

Eric, more charitable than I, goes on to say something almost nice about Brooks, which is sweet.

Intrigued? Go, read.

The Annals of Journalism

Sunset over Wheat Fields -- Coffin Road, photo by Scott Butner, used under a CC License, here.

I recently came to the decision that everyone should read Harper's. The article that solidified this pronouncement is "The Food Bubble" by Frederick Kaufman in the most recent issue (July 2010).

The short version of the article is that Kaufman is giving an unorthodox explanation for the 2007-8 Food Crisis, which was a dizzying and sudden increase in food prices around the world--a rise that led to political instability in the third world and economic insecurity in the first, not to mention starvation.

The villain of Kaufman's story is familiar, though unexpected: Goldman Sachs and Wall Street.

The brilliance of the article, however, isn't in the astute and compelling reportage, but in the way it is framed:

Grain trading was not always brainless. Joseph parsed Pharaoh’s dream of cattle and crops, discerned that drought loomed, and diligently went about storing immense amounts of grain. By the time famine descended, Joseph had cornered the market—an accomplishment that brought nations to their knees and made Joseph an extremely rich man.

In 1730, enlightened bureaucrats of Japan’s Edo shogunate perceived that a stable rice price would protect those who produced their country’s sacred grain. Up to that time, all the farmers in Japan would bring their rice to market after the September harvest, at which point warehouses would overflow, prices would plummet, and, for all their hard work, Japan’s rice farmers would remain impoverished. Instead of suffering through the Osaka market’s perennial volatility, the bureaucrats preferred to set a price that would ensure a living for farmers, grain warehousemen, the samurai (who were paid in rice), and the general population—a price not at the mercy of the annual cycle of scarcity and plenty but a smooth line, gently fluctuating within a reasonable range.

While Japan had relied on the authority of the government to avoid deadly volatility, the United States trusted in free enterprise. After the combined credit crunch, real estate wreck, and stock-market meltdown now known as the Panic of 1857, U.S. grain merchants conceived a new stabilizing force: In return for a cash commitment today, farmers would sign a forward contract to deliver grain a few months down the line, on the expiration date of the contract. Since buyers could never be certain what the price of wheat would be on the date of delivery, the price of a future bushel of wheat was usually a few cents less than that of a present bushel of wheat. And while farmers had to accept less for future wheat than for real and present wheat, the guaranteed future sale protected them from plummeting prices and enabled them to use the promised payment as, say, collateral for a bank loan. These contracts let both producers and consumers hedge their risks, and in so doing reduced volatility.

But the forward contract was a primitive financial tool, and when demand for wheat exploded after the Civil War, and ever more grain merchants took to reselling and trading these agreements on a fast-growing secondary market, it became impossible to figure out who owed whom what and when. At which point the great grain merchants of Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis set about creating a new kind of institution less like a medieval county fair and more like a modern clearinghouse. In place of myriad individually negotiated and fulfilled forward contracts, the merchants established exchanges that would regulate both the quality of grain and the expiration dates of all forward contracts—eventually limiting those dates to five each year, in March, May, July, September, and December. Whereas under the old system each buyer and each seller vetted whoever might stand at the opposite end of each deal, the grain exchange now served as the counterparty for everyone.

...

The decline of volatility, good news for the rest of us, drove bankers up the wall. I put in a call to Steven Rothbart, who traded commodities for Cargill way back in the 1980s. I asked him what he knew about the birth of commodity index funds, and he began to laugh. “Commodities had died,” he told me. “We sat there every day and the market wouldn’t move. People left. They couldn’t make a living anymore.”

Clearly, some innovation was in order. In the midst of this dead market, Goldman Sachs envisioned a new form of commodities investment, a product for investors who had no taste for the complexities of corn or soy or wheat, no interest in weather and weevils, and no desire for getting into and out of shorts and longs—investors who wanted nothing more than to park a great deal of money somewhere, then sit back and watch that pile grow. The managers of this new product would acquire and hold long positions, and nothing but long positions, on a range of commodities futures. They would not hedge their futures with the actual sale or purchase of real wheat (like a bona-fide hedger), nor would they cover their positions by buying low and selling high (in the grand old fashion of commodities speculators). In fact, the structure of commodity index funds ran counter to our normal understanding of economic theory, requiring that index-fund managers not buy low and sell high but buy at any price and keep buying at any price. No matter what lofty highs long wheat futures might attain, the managers would transfer their long positions into the next long futures contract, due to expire a few months later, and repeat the roll when that contract, in turn, was about to expire—thus accumulating an everlasting, ever-growing long position, unremittingly regenerated.

Intruiged? Go, read.

The Not-So-Dead Dead Tree Magazine

Everyone's looking for a way to save print. Generally--and counterintuitively--we've turned to the internet. I have two pieces of anecdotal evidence that suggest a different way out--viz. be better.

First, from Jeremy Peters's piece on Rolling Stone in today's The New York Times (here):

But no more. Those same subversive tendencies that led Jann Wenner to help found the magazine in 1967 were reawakened under the presidency of George W. Bush. And now, rather unexpectedly, Mr. Wenner’s magazine is hitting its journalistic stride — aggressively tackling the American government on financial regulation, the environment and the war in Afghanistan — with a Democrat in the White House, one that Mr. Wenner supported. ...

Rolling Stone’s explosive piece “The Runaway General,” which last week brought a disgraceful end to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s career, was just the latest in a string of articles resonating in the nation’s corridors of power.

Its excoriating takedown of Goldman Sachs last summer was one of the most provocative and widely debated pieces of journalism to come out of the financial crisis. In the article, the writer Matt Taibbi described the investment bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

And this month, the magazine published a critical take on the Obama administration’s regulation of the oil industry, which started a firestorm on cable news and in the blogosphere. (The current issue contains a follow-up on BP’s plans to drill in the Arctic.)

And the result of this journalistic renaissance?

As many of his peers in the magazine world have gathered moss, Mr. Wenner has pushed Rolling Stone back uphill. While its single copy sales for the first three months of 2010 were down slightly from 2009, it has attracted enormous attention for its political coverage and consistently draws a young readership, with an average age of 30.

Over all, the biweekly magazine’s circulation has grown to about 1.5 million copies an issue from about 1.4 million in 2008.

That's right; the magazine grew! The point? Let your writers run. In the era of blogs and twitter and texts and everything else bemoaned by curmudgeons and worshiped by technophiles, perhaps there's a space--a need--for the kind of long-form, adversarial, and deep work championed by Rolling Stone.

And, dare I say it, Wilder Voice.

Lazy Journalism and Pseduo-Sociology

Shorter Eli Saslow: Real people don't think that Obama's a real man. The article is called: Despite his roots, Obama struggles to show he's connected to middle class. The evidence for the claim? Obama is the president, also:

[N]early two-thirds of Americans believed that his economic policies had hurt the country or made no difference at all; almost half thought he did not understand their problems.

In response to the empirical data: (1.a.) Another way of saying "almost half" is "over half." Saslow very cleverly hid a normative claim in a speciously positive one: if he wanted to deliver it straight, he would have given the actual number, which he didn't.

(1.b.) Saslow has, probably intentionally, not put this number in context. Surely the same question has been asked about other presidents, so why not give those numbers. If the number has any significance, then Obama's must be different than others (note, it's only a necessary, not sufficient, condition for significance).

(2.a.) The second piece of empirical data--that nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that his economic policies had hurt the country or made no difference at all--is only evidence for the claim that Obama isn't connected to the middle class if you make a number of other assumptions, viz. Obama doesn't care that his economic policies haven't accomplished much or something to that effect. Indeed, it isn't hard to imagine that people might feel "connected" to Obama but not think his policies are working.

(2.b.) The best explanation for the phenomena that a large segment of the population doesn't believe that Obama's economic policy is working is that The economy is in the shitter. This explanation doesn't require any auxiliary (and murky) assumptions about the mindset of the people polled.

But the real problem with Saslow's article isn't the misuse of data; it's twofold: (1) the fallacy of equivocation with the term "connected" and (2) the tacit--and, I might add, normative--assumption that the "middle class" (which is hardly an homogeneous block, and I take issue with his use of the term, but I digress...) finds it to be a problem that the President of the United States of America isn't behaving like he lives in the suburbs.

To elaborate: (1) It's equivocation because the sense of 'connected' that makes sense in policy and non-identity political terms is something like understands the problems of. It would seem that, if indeed Saslow is trying to write about that, he would present evidence relating to that sense of 'connected.' Instead, Saslow switches gears away from that sense of 'connected' when he gives evidence; what he does give evidence for is that Obama isn't connected to the middle class in the sense that he isn't--and doesn't behave--like he is middle class. Saslow talks about how Obama gets flown around on a plane and lives in house with personal staff and whatnot. The reader is supposed to think that Saslow has presented evidence for a claim about one sort of 'connected,' and instead he presents evidence for another--textbook equivocation: exploiting the ambiguity in a term to make an argument seem valid when it isn't.

(2) Now, Saslow might object that he wasn't equivocating, that he is, in fact, arguing that Obama isn't 'connected' in the sense that he does not behave as though he is middle class. But, that's obvious and trivial. Obvious because the man is the President of the United States: Of course he gets ferried around in a jet. Of course he has personal staff. Of course he doesn't act like an "Joe Average" who lives in three bedroom house in the suburbs. It's trivial because that's inherent to being President and everyone already knows that.

I also find it hard to believe, just on principle, that Saslow doesn't live in a bubble as much as Obama. The man writes for the Washington Post and the middle class signifiers that he obsesses over (dropping the 'g' at the end of words that end in 'ing,' etc. Seriously, Saslow actually catalogs how many 'g's Obama dropped in a town hall) don't speak at all to the middle class experience. Shorter: how is it that the Washington Press Corps got to be experts on middle class behavior?

They talk about bowling and arugula, brush clearing and beer, and we're supposed to accept that that is what the middle class experience is? None of those things are necessary or sufficient conditions, and, more importantly, none of those things are even close to being a part of some kind of "family resemblance" description of the term "middle class." (Obviously, I've moved away from Saslow, this specific article doesn't make all of these claims, but it is indicative of a class of narative often employed--especially against Democrats.)

Of course, the whole obsession with these sorts of political traits is just stupid beyond belief. It's lazy journalism mixed with the worst kind of pseudo-anthropological mumbo-jumbo, and it says nothing--nothing--about the policy, which is what actually effects people, Obama will pursue.

No one would have mistaken Ted Kennedy for a middle-class, Average Joe, but the man, with few exceptions, fought for policies that would have greatly improved the lives of the majority of Americans. And even if you're a Republican and don't think his policies would have helped, you'd be hard pressed to say that he didn't try.

Morning Update XXIX: The End of Politics Edition

Keegan Wenkman
"Flying Dutch"
Here.

I won't lie to you, gentle reader(s); at one point in my life, I really enjoyed Keith Olbermann. Of course, it's been several years since I've owned a TV, so I didn't really watch full shows, and I'm not sure that what I loved was really an accurate representation of Olbermann, but what I knew I enjoyed and respected. Every month or so, I'd come across some Edward R. Murrow-esque special comment, replete with multisyllabic words and alliteration, and I'd go all googly-eyed.

I think I enjoyed these not only for their eloquence (and for the gooey feeling I get when I think of Edward R. Murrow), but because it seemed to be above the back-and-forth banality of the rest of broadcast punditry. He spoke about torture and executive abuses and divorced it from politics. Of course, then he started making special comments every other day about every issue under the sun, and started getting involved in the he-said, she-said debates of the primary, and he started to seem less like Edward R. Murrow and more like a cable bloviator--albeit one with whom I tended to agree. Of course, I can get punditry from people with whom I agree and not have to deal with the obnoxiousness of a cable bloviator if I just go online, so that's what I started to do.

And that's the story of why I didn't really give a shit that Jon Stewart started using Olbermann as a punching bag. It lacks the deliciousness of Stewart's attacks on conservatives (I only say that because I'm a liberal), but it was funny and well-deserved nonetheless, and though I had some reservations because, as bad as Olbermann is, he's not the liberal equivalent of Glenn Beck or Bill O'Riely (yes, all three are cable bloviators, but, no, Olbermann doesn't peddle in conspiracy theories and take part in eliminationist rhetoric).

So, when Olbermann actually apologized for his over-the-top comments on Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown, I was pleasantly surprised. Of course, even watching the clip, I couldn't help but notice that Olbermann's something of a self-absorbed bloviator, but at least he apologized, which is just another reason why Olbermann is a hell of a lot better than a "liberal Beck," and just another reason why MSNBC is a hell of a lot better than a "liberal Fox." See for yourself (via Michael Scherer at Swampland):

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It should come as no surprise to you that David Brooks writes stupid columns (nor should it come as a surprise that I write a shitload about David Brooks writing stupid columns), but his latest is not only stupid but speciously so. Apperently. Ezra Klein, who's normally quite incisive missed the strawman arguments and fallacies of false equivalence in Brook's latest burning heap of stupidity. Klein writes:

I don't agree with everything in David Brooks's column on populism, but this is a smart distillation of what populist campaign rhetoric translates to in Washington:

Populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power.

I'm probably too hard on Klein; it's true that many beltway Democrats are that condescending, but but they tend to side with Republicans that "voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s." I'm looking at you Evan Bayh.

Of course they will say that and shake their heads sadly, and then vote with Republicans because "that's what the country wants" (even thought it's not) and because "we might as well not even try" (because they're political cowards). But I digress.

What is it that's so stupid about Brooks's argument? Well, first there's the blatent assertion that the important thing about the populism debate is identity politics. I'll readily concede that both Republicans and Democrats play identity politics, but whereas the Republicans only have identity politics, Democrats tend to back there's up with actual substance.

Brooks writes dismissively:

Both attitudes will always be with us, but these days populism is in vogue. The Republicans have their populists. Sarah Palin has been known to divide the country between the real Americans and the cultural elites. And the Democrats have their populists. Since the defeat in Massachusetts, many Democrats have apparently decided that their party has to mimic the rhetoric of John Edwards’s presidential campaign. They’ve taken to dividing the country into two supposedly separate groups — real Americans who live on Main Street and the insidious interests of Wall Street.

It's true, of course, that both Palin and Edwards use identity politics. Edwards talks about his poverty-stricken upbringing, and Palin talks about being a Real American. The difference is that Palin's policies wouldn't help Americans, real or otherwise, and Edwards's would.

That's the key distinction in the populism wars, and the thing that Brooks doesn't seem to grasp: populist rhetoric is only bad when it's hypocritical. There's nothing wrong with saying you're going to fight for the little guy, as long as you're actually going to fight for the little guy--they could use it.

And for all Brooks's glibness over PhDs and MBAs, the truth is that educated people can fight for the little guy, and the PhDs good Democrats want to be setting policy would. Look no further than Krugman. That which Republicans use to discredit PhDs is purely ID politics: PhDs are not like you; they're pussies. That which Democrats use to discredit MBAs is by-and-large true: The MBAs on Wall Street want to screw you out of money.

So, Mr. Brooks, spare me the false equivalence. And spare me the strawman; you write:

That’s because voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country’s problems.

The populism espoused by Democrats isn't just "bashing"; it's policy that will genuinely help middle- and lower-class Americans.

From The Monkey Cage
(via Ezra Klein)

Ezra Klein says:

the basic finding is not that there aren't plenty of people calling themselves "independents." It's that most of them are as predictably partisan as everyone else.

I buy it. Of course the question is, why is it that the media "coninual[ly] talk[s] about independents as if they're some giant, dominant, bloc," when, in truth most of the electorate is partisan to a pretty big degree?

If I might venture a response: the media likes the idea of independants because partisanship is icky--particularly when they're partisan Democrats. The only people worth anything are Real Americans, who are independent, hearty, salt-of-the-earth types. This means Republicans and independents who are actually Republicans. Occasionally it means culturally conservative Democrats (remember the Pennsylvania primary?). It doesn't mean urban blacks--rich or poor. It doesn't mean urban professionals. It doesn't mean urbanites of any sort. Of course, that's a key Democratic constituency. It means suburbanites--if they're white and "independent."

You see, partisanship is icky, and a purely beltway phenomenon (according to CW). In order to demonstrate that they're not beltway, media folks like to imagine themselves as divorced from partisanship, so they obsess over Real Americans, who are, of course, independents and culturally conservative.

I'll admit, I don't have a lot of evidence for this, but if you want a little, think about Chris Matthews bloviating about Obama's bowling score and orange juice choices, because that proved that he wasn't a Real American. Of course, neither of those things says anything about being a Real (or to use Matthews's word) Average American. It shows he doesn't bowl well and he likes OJ. But, since the truth is that most of the media and pundocracy is thoroughly beltway, they come up with meaningless signifiers of what they imagine Real America to be like, and then beat the shit out of those icky parisans who don't fit that bill.

Well this has turned into a semi-incoherent rant. I think that means it's time for me to call it a post and hit publish.

Sorry about that.

That's Good Punditry

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Rachel Maddow kicking ass
(via Glenzilla at Salon, via Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic)

It's not often that I'm truly impressed by a pundit on cable news, but it looks like I should start watching Rachel Maddow more. Even people with whom I generally agree and are often eloquent (read: Keith Olbermann) bloviate a bit too much for my taste, but there's something about the way Maddow eviscerates this guy without once raising her voice or yelling over her guest that's truly amazing to watch. Glenzilla says it best:

(1) Rachel had obviously done a substantial amount of work prior to the interview, having even read the guest's books and being able to refer to various parts of them quickly [...] .

(2) Rachel, despite being unfailingly civil and polite, was obviously indifferent to whether the guest liked her. She bombarded him with questions that made him extremely uncomfortable and which conclusively proved that he was simply lying. Media stars who host political interview programs would never subject powerful people to treatment like that for fear of losing access and/or their standing in the Beltway world.

(3) Rather than treat the guest and his claims as entitled to respect and deference, Rachel explicitly pointed out when he was lying, and even more important, demanded that he accept responsibility for his conduct [...] .

Greenwald, of course, has much, much more to say--his posts are, as often as not, tome-like. But, in many ways, Maddow is Greenwald with some of the wrinkles ironed out. While it's quite true that Maddow is "indifferent to whether the guest liked her," Greenwald tends to use language a bit more loaded than Maddow.

Can you imagine how much better those obnoxious "watch pundits yell at each other" shows would be if the pundits in question actually talked about the issues, you know, intelligibly (and, more importantly, intelligently).

As Greenwald says:

Just imagine how much better things could be if our political leaders were routinely subjected to the kind of surgically probing, lie-exposing interrogation which Rachel imposed on her homosexual-converter guest. But the reasons they almost never are speak volumes about our media stars and their true function.

And You Thought Our Media Was Bad

So funny it hurts.

Mincemeat and Its Malcontents

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Lou Dobbs Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Well, when Jon Stewart is on, he's on.

Watch the interview (and, if you have time, go and watch the whole thing online, here). I almost feel bad for Dobbs (almost); Stewart opens in the interview with a Mariachi band (literally), and then spends the rest of the time coolly beating the crap out of Dobbs. And, after the Mariachi band, Stewart didn't have to use one cheap shot (speaking of cheap shots, Lou, you may want to look up 'disinterested' and 'uninterested,' because I'm pretty sure 'disinterested' doesn't mean what you think it means...). Here's a representative sample (Transcribed, perhaps poorly, by yours truly):

DOBBS: a[n] aspect of the Obama months is a continued disinterest in representing the American people. [...] What is different this time is an Attorney General who actually started speaking about a few changes to the second amendment, not reflecting the majority view--whether it be health care or cap and trade. I'm not arguing with the principle of the decision, but--
STEWART:--I would even argue those facts: I think a lot of people in this country--some of the polls say a majority, or a large majority--want a public option. There has been no attempt, really, to restrict Second Amendment rights. And if you want to talk about fundamentally changing the character of the country, David Addington--who was in Cheney's office, who advocated the unitary executive, advocated that we could torture--is a more fundamental change in our country's fabric that expanding medicare.

Let's quick put something to rest: it wouldn't matter if the Attorney General wanted to "make a few changes to the Second Amendment," because it's not in his power to change. What's more, gun rights have been upheld consistently by the Supreme Court for years, so I don't really know what that's about. Hell, I wouldn't mind making a few changes to the Second Amendment, but, unfortunately, I hangin' with the framers, so I wasn't given the option. But even with that said, the Second Amendment, in full, reads like this:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The point wasn't that everyone should have a gun so that they can go hunting or even everyone should have a gun so that they can shoot the bad people who are coming after them.

Gun rights were meant to allow for the existence of citizen militias, in a time before large standing armies. Why it is, then, that the originalists are so hell-bent on preserving this is beyond me. At least liberal jurisprudence is honest--it accepts the fact that its "interpretations" can--and should--have policy motivations.

Back to Dobbs: he's a tool.

Sad Day

It is indeed a sad day when Giraldo Rivera is the voice of reason. But that's Fox News for you.

But, seriously folks, if the goal of terrorism is to inspire terror, then it seems to be working--at least over at Fox. Putting aside the most clearly irrational fear that, if terrorists are in NYC under lock and key, attending trial, they will somehow be able to cause--from sheer force of will--more terrorist attacks, let's focus on what I think is the more disturbing question: what if they're acquitted? It's nice to know that Fox has so little faith in the American system of justice that they believe it isn't capable of dealing with people as clearly guilty as KSM. It's almost funny (or at least it would be if it weren't so serious); after all, Fox and the rest of the Village's obsession with legal-political relativism is probably, in part, responsible for the undermining of faith in our legal institutions. They have, in effect, politicized the law.

All their hand-wringing over the mere possibility of legal proceedings against government officials who--it would seem--broke the law stems from their mistaken notion that to uphold the law (and prosecute tortures) is a political act on par with filibustering a bill or going on a talk show. The notion that a court makes findings of fact or tries to discover "the fact of the matter" seems utterly lost on them.

So, is it surprising that now, when there is a clear cut case of a crime and a remedy (judicial action), they treat it like political fodder, not an actual legal proceeding?

I'm not sure I'm articulating this part of my revulsion that well...

I'll let Glenzilla take you through the great irony of Republican manly-man-ness:

the Right's reaction to yesterday's announcement -- we're too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country -- is the textbook definition of "surrendering to terrorists." It's the same fear they've been spewing for years. As always, the Right's tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system. They didn't allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice. Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country's 2004 train bombings. The British put those accused of perpetrating the London subway bombings on trial right in their normal courthouse in London. Indonesia gave public trials using standard court procedures to the individuals who bombed a nightclub in Bali. India used a Mumbai courtroom to try the sole surviving terrorist who participated in the 2008 massacre of hundreds of residents. In Argentina, the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes.

It's only America's Right that is too scared of the Terrorists -- or which exploits the fears of their followers -- to insist that no regular trials can be held and that "the safety and security of the American people" mean that we cannot even have them in our country to give them trials. As usual, it's the weakest and most frightened among us who rely on the most flamboyant, theatrical displays of "strength" and "courage" to hide what they really are. Then again, this is the same political movement whose "leaders" -- people like John Cornyn and Pat Roberts -- cowardly insisted that we must ignore the Constitution in order to stay alive: the exact antithesis of the core value on which the nation was founded. Given that, it's hardly surprising that they exude a level of fear of Terrorists that is unmatched virtually anywhere in the world. It is, however, noteworthy that the position they advocate -- it's too scary to have normal trials in our country of Terrorists -- is as pure a surrender to the Terrorists as it gets.

Yes, but liberals hate America, because we don't have any faith in the goodness of its institutions... or something.

Too Dumb to Refute

Little known fact: not only is Obama a secret Kenyan, he's also an agent of Japanese Emperor. Sure, the Emperor has no real power now, but as we all know, Kenya has long been a major source of support for the erstwhile Japanese Emperor. Surely, it isn't too much of a stretch to think that the Kenyans--on behalf of the Japanese--sneaked birth announcements into Hawaiian newspapers so it would seem that Obama--who was chosen by a secret ACORN lottery--was eligible to be president.

Here is the easily-deducible meaning of this bow. As Japan-expert Karl Rove said, bowing is an act of weakness. Here, Obama bowed in order to let the Emperor know that he was ready to give Hawaii and California to the Japanese.

Or something.

It's Crazy Time!

Oh dear god. Glenn says that "the rain is coming." I love, in particular, his belief that government injecting money into the economy doesn't lead to "real" economic success. I think Keynes might have something to say about that, but, whatever...

It's amazing, too, how he manages to shift from his laments about the unemployment rate to snidely deriding the government bailout of GE: "We couldn't lose all those jobs. We wouldn't want Americans to get a boo boo." And then he shifts again: "How were the people of Detroit repaid?" he asks. And he answers this by making fun of a new factory (which, no doubt, includes jobs) in Delaware.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt; I do. But even if you only watch this clip of Beck, his vacillations between tears for lost jobs and derision for economic measures taken to create/save jobs is, at best, idiocy and, at worst, a complete act.

In other words, he's either stupid or a liar, and, let's be honest, he's probably both.

Let's get building people.

The Village and Its Discontents

Here.

When I first started avidly reading political blogs, so many years ago (okay, like five), I was struck by how they created a language all unto themselves. Some words I really loved. The verb 'to fisk', for example. Or, even the noun 'blogosphere.'

But on a list of important blogosphere contributions would have to be "The Village." I'll let Greg Sargent take this:

“The Village” and “The Villagers” are terms frequently used in the liberal blogosphere as a derisive epithet for the Beltway media and political elite. The term “Village” appears to be a reference to a famous 1998 article written for The Washington Post by D.C. society hostess and WaPo writer Sally Quinn, in which she explained the Beltway establishment’s outrage over Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Quinn wrote, without irony, that Establishment Washington — which she described as “the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it” — is “not unlike any other small community in the country.”

“They call the capital city their `town,’” Quinn wrote. Thanks to the Lewinsky mess, she added, “their town has been turned upside down.”

Digby, who coined the term, has this to say:

Greg is right that it stems from the notorious Sally Quinn article about the Clintons. But it's more than that. It's shorthand for the permanent DC ruling class who have managed to convince themselves that they are simple, puritanical, bourgeois burghers and farmers, even though they are actually celebrity millionaires influencing the most powerful government on earth.

It's about their phoniness, their pretense of speaking for "average Americans" when it's clear they haven't the vaguest clue even about the average Americans who work in their local Starbucks or their drive their cabs. (Think Tim Russert, good old boy from Buffalo, lately of Nantucket.)It's about their intolerable sanctimony and hypocritical provincialism, pretending to be shocked about what they all do, creating social rules for others which they ignore themselves.

The village is really "the village" an ersatz small town like something you'd see in Disneyland. And to those who argue that Versailles is the far better metaphor, I would just say that it is Versailles --- a very particular part:

A Picturesque Little Village
Part of the grounds near the Trianon were chosen by Marie-Antoinette as the site of a lakeside village, a crucial feature of picturesque landscape gardens then so fashionable among Europe's aristocracy. In 1783, Richard Mique built this amusement village where the queen played at being a shepherdess.

In 1784, Marie-Antoinette had a farm built, where she installed a farming couple from the Touraine region, along with their two children. They were charged with supplying the queen with eggs, butter, cream and cheese, for which they disposed of cows, goats, farmyard animals.

Perhaps the strangest thing about "The Village" is its bizarre insularity--not just from outside facts and criticisms (i.e. shouting The Public Option is Dead and Only Liberals Like the Public Option even though polls consistently give well over 50 percent support for it...), but from self-analysis. They are, if not patient zero, certainly a victim of what Harper's calls Self-Satirizing Syndrome.

If you ask me, this is why The Daily Show is so popular. Stewart doesn't even have to say anything. He can can just juxtapose clips of the Villagers vituperating from week to week, and, presto, the hypocrisy, the shallowness, the mind-blowing dissonance is self-evident.

Morning Update XXIV: The George Will Edition

Thank you, Crooked Timber.

This news is not new: George Will is a jackass. This news also isn't really new: George Will twists data in order to support his Global Warming denial. But, he's at it again. Sez Ezra Klein:

[G]lobal warming is not shorthand for “every day will be hotter than the next everywhere on the planet.” It is shorthand for for the observation that an "anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is amplifying the natural radiative forcing of the troposphere’s temperature," thus creating a general trend toward higher temperatures. The year-to-year variability that forms the basis of Will's column is not a challenge to this theory. It is built into it.

Now, I could let dedicate more of life debunking George Will's column without even knowing much about Climate Science. But, I just got up, and I've only had one cup of coffee, so let me just say this: Either George Will is confused about the most basic ways of interpreting the data given to us by science, or he's intentionally being a horse's ass; either way, he doesn't deserve a column.

Even though I know that this is the way the world works, I hope I never lose my awe and amazement that people who are so consistantly, and empirically, wrong get to keep their jobs as pundits. Seriously, if you're a conservative, what do you have to say in order to get fired? Yes, yes, I'm looking at you, MSNBC's Pat Buchanan.

And this is awesome. A contest from Crooked Timber:

So your job, this Reality Thursday, is to write a song – or poem – expressing as clearly as you can, with extra style points for keeping it intelligible to an 8-year old – your favored philosophy of science. Does it consist of sentences, or does it consist of reality? You decide! The only thing I can think of that rhymes with ‘paradigm’ is ‘spare a dime’.

And for the winner, in my opinion (no winner was announced): Jim Harrison!

We think the scientists do science
And nature just sits there and poses
In fact, without a firm alliance
Of man and thing there’d be no gnosis.
The line between the S and O
Is dotted and moves to and fro.
It’s like what happens on a date
If you get lucky and you mate.
We get inside of nature’s pants
Because the lady wants to dance.
Or to make the selfsame point
Without alluding to your joint:
Science happens
As much in things as in the mind
Else the naked eyeball of our pride
Would be definitively blind.

I should note that, being one of those ever-unfashionable realists, I disagree with this guy's take, but his poem is awesome.

Lastly, I have no sympathy whatsoever for Roman Polanski. He drugged and raped a thirteen year old. If you're a fan of Herr Wittgenstein, here's a fascinating look at the way in which we distinguish between the concepts "statutory rape" and "rape" and why it's unhealthy and detrimental. Sez Neddy Merrill:

One of the interesting features of the Polanski conversations around the internet is the way the director’s defenders emphasize that he pled guilty to statutory rape while the prosecutorial-minded among us emphasize that he is guilty of rape. And if the victim’s grand jury testimony is accurate, this was a case of rape regardless of her age. (That she kept saying no was one clue.) This leads to some thinking about statutory rape and why people tend to find it…if not exculpatory, at least a mitigating factor, not-quite-real-rape.

Intruiged? Go, read.

And, I'm off to class. Posting to resume later tonight.