Just a note on something I've noticed recently, and apologies if everyone else noticed this long ago. Seems the hawks want to frame the debate such that skepticism about the likelihood of establishing democracy in Iraq depends on skepticism about the "capacity" of Iraqis (or Iraqi "culture") to sustain it. This is a half-clever way of using against liberals their notorious love and sympathy for crazed savages.

First problem: this frame is false. The possibility of the emergence of a democracy isn't even primarily a matter of the "readiness" of its people. Just a few of the necessary conditions are: basic physical security, population groups distributed in such a way that democratic processes can lead to just outcomes, economic stability, religious homogeneity, and institutions that bridge pre-democratic and democratic periods. Add and subtract as you wish; the content of the list won't change the fact that any focus on the Iraqi people beyond questions of literacy is a red herring.

Second problem: trying to frame the issue this way leaves Bush vulnerable to a delicious rebuttal, namely, that he can't grasp complexity and so must personalize everything. It’s not about the Iraqi people’s “soul,” it’s about planning, and institutions, and being ready for contingencies, and being adequately prepared. I don’t think that even Bush’s supporters (and certainly not swing voters) think that he’s good at these things. And the Democrats can make serious hay (hay blessed with the virtue of truth, in this case) by letting the hawks ask about the capacity of Iraqis to make a democracy, and responding with, “It’s not about the Iraqi people. Even Benjamin Franklin couldn’t vote in these conditions. We went into Iraq expecting democracy to magically appear as soon as Saddam was gone, but building a democracy from scratch requires serious planning, and a willingness to deal with complexity. This President hasn’t shown patience for either of those things.” Props to the sound-bite man. And when the RNC comes out with some lame-ass talking points trying to rebut charges of inadequate planning, just point to this James Fallows article. Then point to it again. Let’s see if they’ll piss off Thomas Warrick enough to make him the next Richard Clarke.

At least Glenn doesn't like Ashcroft. Lately though, Glenn is Drudge, with less traffic.

If you can't take gratuitous partisan shots at the President when you're pseudonymous, well, you've got no business blogging, that's what. Two commenters in a thread at Kevin's site put the issue of Bush's intelligence into clear focus.

travey asks, "does anyone believe bush would be among the smartest people they know?"

some guy wonders, "Really, let's say your a corporate dude at Walmart - would you hire Dubya to manage Walmart Number 567 in Bumpdump, Texas?"

Great bijiminy, just contemplating the answer to that second question gives me willies.

This is a good exercise.

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So . . . what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Nifty. There are some more interesting ones if you follow the link. A couple:

The Two Things about Marketing:

1. Find out who is buying your product.

2. Find more buyers like them.

And...

The Two Things about Teaching History:

1. A good story is all they'll remember, not the half hour of analysis on either side of it.

2. They think it's about answers, but it's really about questions.

Kinda fun, eh? So I thought about how I'd answer for philosophy. Like all things philosophical, this will strike some as obvious, some as inane.

The Two Things about Philosophy:

1. Plato

2. Aristotle

Bring it.

I'm hungry; is this North Korea yet?

If you're a geek who cares about Google's back-end technology, this is a fascinating read. (via Brad DeLong)

Ha!: Pick salient fact; put in title. I think Paul had it first, though I hadn't seen his post.

Can this be true? (via Atrios) (And it's the whole thing so you don't have to register.)

Posted on Tue, Apr. 06, 2004

$2,000 meal, but no utensils

Silverware banned to prevent clinking while president was speaking

JIM MORRILL

Staff Writer

It was a mouthwatering menu. Not that you'd expect less for $2,000 a plate.

Seered [sic] beef tenderloins with golden tomatoes on an herb-encrusted baguette. Grilled garlic chicken with smoked gouda on a honey wheat wrap. Fruits and gourmet olives and crudite. A gourmet luncheon with only one thing missing: something to eat it with.

The explanation was at the bottom of the menus distributed at President Bush's $1.5 million Charlotte fund-raiser Monday.

"At the request of the White House, silverware will not accompany the table settings," it said in discreetly fine print.

No silver. No plastic.

The lack of utensils might have been why many plates went virtually untouched.

The reason: So the tinkle of silver wouldn't disrupt the president's speech.

"They're just doing it so people can eat their meals prior to or after the president's speech," said spokesman Reed Dickens, who said it's standard procedure for fund-raisers. "It's just a logistical issue. Nothing more."

Apparently the White House doesn't worry about all diners.

Behind a rope on the side of the ballroom next to many paying guests, reporters scarfed down their own buffet. It came with silverware.

Dickens' explanation makes no sense. Why have a note on the menu if 1) this is standard and 2) people can eat before or after the speech? Bizarre.

Seems the comment subscriptions aren't working properly. Hmm. I'll try to fix that sometime today. Apologies.

There's a nice way to say this, and a churlish way to say this, and I've been blogging long enough to know that churlish is the way to go. Crooked Timber links to this poll of "best-loved" Dylan songs, to which I say: People, people, people, tear yourselves away from the radio for a minute, for cripe sakes.

I'm not arguing that the best-loved aren't great songs, but to say, as Chris does, that including just one post-1976 song "is as it should be," is preposterous. (That's right Bertram, preposterous.) Check it:

On 1989's Oh Mercy, there's the wicked Man in the Long Black Coat. And Dylan does a wildly different rendition of this live, which is just rock & roll.

On 1993's World Gone Wrong, there's Lone Pilgrim, and the title track, both of which are great songs. And then there's Delia, which is sublime. If you can listen to Dylan singing "all the friends I ever had are gone," and not get all choked up, you must be, I don't know, an analytic philosopher or something.

Which brings us to 1997's Time Out of Mind, which is one of Dylan's best albums, and Not Dark Yet, which is one of his best songs.

I'm not sure yet whether any of the songs on Dylan's lastest, 2001's Love and Theft are "great," but Floater, High Water, and Cry a While are all damn close.

And we haven't even talked about the really early stuff that you'll find on the Bootleg series. These aren't Dylan originals (though he does make some changes of his own) and, among them, Seven Curses stands out as a great song, and--I admit it--I have a soft spot for Talking Hava Negeilah Blues.

The new Harry Potter trailer is available. With Alfred Cuaron directing, it could be (and looks to be) the first good movie of the bunch.

I hope this isn't indicative, and I hope to God it doesn't become America's Hama.

A coup d'etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu'la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi'ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn't come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi'ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.

No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47's are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically. Baghdadis are horrified and everyone seems to have made up their mind to stay home tomorrow until the situation is clear.

via Insty

UPDATE: Color me chastened. Zeyad has posted an update saying, bascially, "well, maybe not so bad after all." Next time, I'll wait for confirmation.

Here's a googlebomb I can support. Jew.

Seen here; more info here.

Hearts and minds, baby, hearts and minds.

SO: This might be a fake, of course. I know very little about the topic, but this seems like a fine time for proponents of methods to detect alterations in digital content to speak up. It's become very easy to alter photographs and we really need a way to know if what we're seeing is a more-or-less faithful representation of a scene. It's your big chance, marketing dudes!

Seriously, this just rocks.

Hey, I'm an "O," right? Hmm.

Gary Farber has a bunch of great stuff up, as usual. (And drop him a few bucks if you've got a few to spare.)

This is a hilarious thread at CT. I say that not because Holbo gives me undeserved credit in the comments, but because the entries are really, really funny. The game is: fiction mash-ups. Put book titles together for to make amusement.

Now calculate what great problems might have been solved with the intellectual energy displayed on the comments thread, and laugh or cry, depending.

My new favorite:
Moby Dick Tracy ("Call me, Ishmael-- on your wrist-radio") from chuchundra

Matt Stoller has a good discussion of the Kos debacle here.

I didn't think this was possible, but I've become even more annoyed by Glenn Reynolds' outrage-when-expedient stance. Remind me to email his advertisers the next time he "heh"s something extraordinarily stupid. Wait, in order to do that, I'd have to read his fifty-seven posts a day. And that's not possible, because I have a job. Like he does. Heh. Ass.

Ok, if the referrers are any indication, people aren't even trying to act sane anymore. These were all within a couple of hours this morning.

if i got hit by auto when walking,can i still do good that way?

relation of fucking between men and women show me pictures

good word to say for each player eat drugs

The fact that about half of my iTunes collection is Dylan songs has me thinking about something I noticed a while back: I've heard dozens of covers of Dylan songs, but I've never heard one that I thought was better than the original. Some are wonderful: Nanci Griffith's Boots of Spanish Leather (iTunes link); Vedder and McCready's Masters of War; Richie Havens' Just Like a Woman; but, in each case, I think the Dylan version is definitively better. Odd, considering Dylan is supposed to be a horrible singer (or an acquired taste, anyway). He has a very strange voice, no question, but I'm starting to come around to different view: Bob Dylan isn't just the best American songwriter (and poet, in fact) of the past fifty years, he's also a great singer.

FOR EXAMPLE: Lordy, how beautiful are these words and this song?

MORE:This doesn't apply to songs Dylan has covered. His version of The House Carpenter (iTunes), for example, is very good, but not nearly as good as Clarence Ashley's.

Salon, which badly needs a redesign, actually has a blog that's pretty good. Check it out (watch ad or subscribe, etc.).

SEE WHAT I MEAN? Did you know Salon was serializing a Dave Eggers novel? Neither did I, and I check the site daily.

Everyone's telling you to read Thomas Frank's article in the new Harper's, but who takes the time to type out some incendiary paragraphs as a teaser? Me, baby, me.

Welcome to the Great Backlash, a style of conservatism that is anything but complacent. Whereas earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues-- summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art-- which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends...

In fact, backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern-- that Values Matter Most, as one backlask book title has it. On these grounds it rallies citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism. Old fashioned values may count when conservatives appear on the stump, but once conservatives are in office the only old-fashioned situation they care to revive is the regimen of low wages and lax regulations. Over the last three decades the have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: It is a working class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate. Values may "matter most" to voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won. This is the basic earmark of the phenomenon, absolutely consistent across its decade-long history. Abortion is never halted. Affirmative action is never abolished. The culture industry is never forced to clean up its act. Even the greatest culture-warrior of them all, Ronald Reagan, was a notorious cop-out once it came time to deliver.

...

In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Although they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization, and although they face the same array of economic forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today's rebels make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold.

There's lots more, including some nice jabs at David Brooks. In typical Harper's style, it has its overstated and misleading moments (some quoted above, in fact) but still: read the whole thing, as they say. The central mystery-- why do people vote against (a significant part of) their interests with such verve-- is still worth thinking about.

He goes in for concept-y cartoons that no one really gets; I go in for defacements of "cathy" involving several violations of the laws of decency. All will be revealed when you go here and scroll down to the entry for 8 August. It turns out that the pussyranch blog is pretty hilarious, in its way.

Speaking of funny cartoons-- and we were, almost-- you should check out this inspired piece of evangelism: "Crusaders" comix! What are these, you ask?

These are full-size, full-color comics about Timothy Emerson Clark (former Green Beret) and James Carter (former urban stereotype), two buddies who travel the world evangelizing to the sort of people who make major spiritual decisions based on what guys in really tight shirts tell them. These comics are definitely the best value in paranoid religious conspiracy graphic literature with homoerotic overtones available on the market today.

From the late, lamented Brunching Shuttlecocks.

Suddenly I'm curious about something: how much of what people like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Hannity say do you think they believe? What's your working assumption? I hadn't given it much thought, and maybe this is horribly arrogant and closed-minded, but if I had to guess, I'd say I was walking around thinking that they believe about 10% of what they say, and the rest is show business.

UPDATE: Be sure to see this cogent and convincing take on just this issue.

Sure, Eleanor Clift is a liberal, but is there any other way to understand the White House's insistence that Bush and Cheney testify together?

A top Republican strategist dubbed the legal document striking the unusual deal “the Wizard of Oz letter” because it strips away the myth that Bush is in charge. Until now, it’s been all speculation about Vice President Cheney’s influence. With the revelation of the tandem testimony, nobody with a straight face can deny Cheney is a co-president or worse, the puppeteer who pulls Bush’s strings.

Does this even matter? Do the people who don't already know this even care?

If you're not a subscriber, this would be a good one to buy.

Here's one right up Fontana's alley: the gayest seeming (but not gay) member or ally of the Bush administration. You can vote (but Derbyshire's not included).

Ok, fine. "The Charlie McCarthy Hearings" is funny.

The President at all times, even on trips to the men's room, will be accompanied by the Vice President.

The Commission must agree in writing that it will not pose any questions directly to the President. Mr. Bush's statements will be restricted to asides on Dick Cheney's brushoffs, as in "Just like he said," "Roger that" and "Ditto."

What's nice is that she gets mad by the end:

The Vice President will not address any queries about why no one reacted to George Tenet's daily "hair on fire" alarms to the President about a coming Al Qaeda attack; or why the President was so consumed with chopping and burning cedar on his Crawford ranch that he ignored the warning in an Aug. 6, 2001, briefing that Al Qaeda might try to hijack aircraft; or why the President asked for a plan to combat Al Qaeda in May and then never followed up while Richard Clarke's aggressive plan was suffocated by second-raters; or why the President was never briefed by his counterterrorism chief on anything but cybersecurity until Sept. 11; or why the Administration-in-amber made so many cold war assumptions, such as thinking that terrorists had to be sponsored by a state even as terrorists had taken over a state; or why the President went along with the Vice President and the neocons to fool the American public into believing that Saddam had a hand in the 9/11 attacks; or why the Administration chose to undercut the war on terrorism and inflame the Arab world by attacking Iraq, without a plan to protect our perilously overextended forces or to exit with a realistic hope that a democracy will be left behind.

The real question here, though, is whether the Bush-Cheney 'we testify together, like ra-ma la-ma la-ma ka ding-a da ding-de dong' moment is the greatest boon to presidential comedy in the history of the republic, or only one of the greatest. It's hard to say.

Please, Mr. President, give the gift that only you can to struggling comics everywhere: show up at the 9/11 commission wearing a "daddy's bitch" collar.

With apologies to Peaches.

A friend sent along this curious site, for those who are really into women getting their cars stuck in the mud. God bless the internet for bringing odd fetishists together.

Site is work safe: no nudity, just chix in carz in mud.

I wonder if there's any overlap between devotees of this sort of thing and those who go in for one of my other favorite oddities, pony play (not so work-safe, but you'll want to have a look, don't deny it). "I've got my horsecart stuck in the mud-- whatever shall I do?"

Is Peter Shaffer dead? Is he rolling in his grave?

This isn't a new insight, but Gary Hart is the person with the highest profile that has said it.

You know why I think George Tenet is still in his job? I think there are smoking guns all over the White House. I think if you crack the White House safe, you're going to find memos from Tenet saying, "The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming."

So you think the intelligence community was giving Bush information he should have acted on before 9/11?

Precisely. And that's the only explanation I can think of for why no one's been fired. Which leaves open the possibility that the president misled the American people.