May 19, 2004
Tort Reform
Ever wondered what tort reform was? Ever found yourself unable to argue a dittohead who seemed obsessively focused on litigious Americans? Thanks to the Gadflyer, you can say goodbye to those days.
Every Which Way But Up
The Bush Administration is trying to trumpet spending increases in programs it tried to cut.
It's like a series of Picklerisms, except relevant.
May 18, 2004
Things to Read
Matthew Yglesias on the paucity of conservative triumphs.
Brad DeLong on Matthew Yglesias.
Me, on how hollow the conservative movement is and the imitation of progressivism Bush goes through to gain electoral support.
The American Conservative Union can say what they want -- they're losing this war.
One Way Street?
John O'Sullivan makes an utterly bizarre contention here:
Namely, which side they're on.
How many journalistic "mistakes" in the leadup to the war did these supposedly anti-American news sources make? And how many benefitted (and continue to benefit) Bush and Blair's position?
Another quick question: O'Sullivan brings up abuse in American prisons, as many conservative commentators have done to quickly try to make hypocrites out of the "liberal" media. A question for him and for the other people who've brought this up - when was the last time they brought up American prison abuse in any light other than attempting to score partisan points with others' purported inattentiveness to it? Rich Lowry wrote a whole column about it last week, but reading back over what he's written in the past, he didn't seem to give two shits about it until it served as an attempt to make anyone who cared about Abu Ghraib into a hypocrite.
CT Does the Movies
The Crooked Timber guide to movie evaluation:
Movin' On Up
In response to Jesse's post below, I'd like to mention that UCLA is losing Ben Shapiro and gaining me. Now there's a trade...
Friendless in Washington
You've really got to read Fred Kaplan's analysis of Abu Ghraib scandals path from here. It paints a much more coherent picture of how various Washington and politicial institutions are responding to the scandal, and why their responses add up to "the biggest tsunami since the Iran-Contra affair, maybe since Watergate. President George W. Bush is trapped inside the compound, immobilized by his own stay-the-course campaign strategy."
Something to watch is the Senate's reaction in the coming weeks. I'm getting the distinct impression that a fair chunk of Republicans are no longer invested in this President's reelection. It's a combination of worry over the direction of their party, an irritation at being so far out of the loop and a growing realization that Bush's reelection will be bad for the War on Terror and disastrous for Iraq. Contrary to what some think, most politicians want the best for the country, they just have peculiar ideas on how to get there. The unavoidable understanding that appears to be sweeping the halls of power is that the closet is too full of skeletons to pack any more in there -- there's a desire to get it all in the open to see how bad it is before we've got this guy locked in for a second term.
This scandal is being dragged along for immunization purposes -- it might hurt, and even kill, the Bush presidency. But without the shot, the disease might be much worse, and far more contagious. That means is the Bush Administration is essentially friendless where it matters. Blair is fighting for his life at home and the NeoCons have lost all credibility here. Bush is standing without allies and without goodwill and, as Fred Kaplan reports, the scandal seems to stop directly at his doorstep...
You Better Run For It
Man, when your own school lays the smackdown on your factually lacking book, it makes for a rather inauspicious start to a real-world career of being the Jewish, male Ann Coulter.
This was my favorite part:
After canceling his interview, he did not return calls and messages left to his home and cell phone but responded in a later e-mail that he would not be able to talk for "the next several weeks."
He wrote that he is busy with the publicity campaign for his book, which in an interview last week he said would launch today.
When asked about factual errors, a spokeswoman familiar with Shapiro's book declined to comment before speaking with a legal team.
Now that's what I call gangsta. He got fronted on, and he straight stepped back and started running like his name was Forrest. I remember someone once told me I could be the liberal answer to Ben Shapiro. The consensus response seemed to be, "Why aim that low?"
Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye!
Well, that's the end of Chalabi. No more US support leaves him with nothing. I guess he could always be carried to the top on the shoulders of the Iraqi grassroots, but he might as well mmake a saddle for the flying pigs if that's his plan.
You Know What Else Is Old? Adultery.
John Derbyshire just really, really, really wants to not like gay people. So much so that he actually proposes that within a generation we'll be able to breed out homosexuality in the womb...and that we should.
Supposing this is true, let us conduct a wee thought experiment — admittedly a fanciful one. A young woman in the late stages of pregnancy, or carrying a small infant, shows up at her doctor's office. "Doctor," she asks, "is there some kind of test you can do to tell me if my child is likely to become a homosexual adult?" The doctor says yes, there is. "And," the woman continues, "suppose the test is positive — would that be something we can fix? I mean, is there some sort of medical, or genetic, or biochemical intervention we can do at this stage, to prevent that happening?" The doctor says yes, there is. "How much does the test cost? And supposing it's positive, how much does the fix cost?" The doctor says $50, and $500. The woman takes out her checkbook.
Of course this is not happening anywhere in the U.S.A. right now. If my understanding of the state of current research is correct, however, it might very well be happening on a daily basis ten years from now.
If this really comes to pass, the results will be curious and interesting. They will not necessarily bring an end to homosexuality right away. No test, and no $500 fix, is likely to be 100 percent effective. Also, there must be some few borderline cases who "turn," or get "turned" quite late in life. For sure, though, if such a thing becomes reality, there will suddenly be a vast reduction in the numbers of homosexuals. From the current proportion — from 1 to 4 percent — of the population, we might, in a couple of generations, see a drop to, perhaps, 0.01 percent.
That would be a radically different situation. It would also be a very miserable one for homosexuals, as they became an aging, fading cohort, with practically no younger people of their inclination to socialize with. The situation would also be self-reinforcing: As more and more parents took the test and got the fix, the loneliness facing homosexuals would become so dire that no person of conscience could think of raising a person who might become homosexual. The fix might even be applicable later in life, with adult homosexuals "converting" en masse.
In which case, there would be someone, somewhere, who was the last homosexual. What a situation! Think what a playwright or a novelist could do with it!
I'm sure someone is going to say this is a joke, but in a piece that argues homophobia is okay mainly because it's very, very old and widespread (amazingly, so is anti-Semitism), that's about as likely as me paying the $250 to get a shirt possibly signed by him in NRO's fundraiser drive. Children may be born gay, according to studies Derbyshire never cites, but if we can change that, shouldn't we? Particularly since everyone's hated them forever, and we can make life living hell for the few homos that will remain?
Getting Gassed
Only in a world where tax cuts are actually tax raises because taxes weren't cut as much as some would have liked can a call to stop filling the Strategic Reserve be construed as a call to withdraw from it.
I was taken by this bit, if only because I want to see those 11 times he supported higher gas prices.
"John Kerry voted for a highway appropriations bill. That would have made people drive more. If people use up more of the supply, there will be more demand, and prices will go up. He has a pattern of things like this."
A "Bleg"
Hey - Ezra and I are starting a fundraiser. We want to raise $10,000 for all the great work we put out. We provide so much original content, and so much independent thought, that we think we deserve it. If you donate $500, you can get a signed Mitsumi PS/2 Keyboard (with Whisper Quiet Keys!).
Now, I want to write a book. If anyone can help me with them, please send me an e-mail.
1.) The roots of institutionalized racism in America from 1600 to the present day.
2.) Instances of George W. Bush talking about the Iraqi war.
3.) Any essays which talk about the American left from WWII to Kennedy's assasination.
4.) The entirety of Western philosophy summed up on a cocktail napkin.
5.) Anything stupid a conservative has ever said.
The last time I asked for you all to write my book, I only got 15 responses - and of those, only 6 were actually usable. I expect better from you.
Remember - you're paying us for all the work you do. $10,000 by Thursday! Oh, and Ezra and I are also hosting a cruise, but it's more of a trip to The Beach that costs $1500. Now, an interminable discussion on how Mary Shelley felt about gay people, and whether or not Torque is a liberal movie.
May 17, 2004
Maybe I'll Just Reimburse Him
Happy Birthday to Matt. When I get to DC, I'll buy you a birthday beer. Unfortuantely, you're going to have to drink, and purchase it, on your own. I've just hit 20, after all.
The Two-Day Rule
Something that I think we all forgot in the long lull between WMD-related news from Iraq: give anything that warbloggers declare is finally proof of WMDs two days before you address it seriously. Often, it's about two hours, but in general two days should be more than enough time. Remember when we found botulism, but it turned out to be an unweaponizable strain from Virginia? Or when we found those mustard shells that turned out to be from the 80s and looked more like gigantic Frosted Mini-Wheats than actual shells? Remember the trailers, the buried centrifuge parts, the atomically-engineered badgers with their laser destructo-eyes?
None of them turned out to be true, even though many of us bought the Chippy the Atomo Badger shirts and wore them proudly. And most of them were met by this huge onrush of pro-war energy, which quickly faded into a series of mumbles about how it would've been true, if not for us pesky kids.
I'm sure that before the election, we'll discover a "cache" of WMDs that all came into Iraq in the past few months from outside the country, at which point we'll all be reminded (again) that this was a war for liberation, not to find WMDs, silly.
Rejoice Not
As the right rejoices in a Sarin bombing (Two people were injured in the greatest show of power last year's Imminent Threat has been able to muster), they might want to look at how their war-to-stop-all-tiny-sarin-delivery-devices is going on the ground:
And in the tragic irony corner, Salim was killed by Abu Musab Zarqawi. You remember that guy, he's the one coordinating the most vicious of the attacks, the one we could have killed but didn't because we thought it would erode support for the war. Now he is the war.
Continue reading "Rejoice Not"Responding To The Writers Of Instapundit
In other words, answering his reader mail.
Continue reading "Responding To The Writers Of Instapundit"Beating Crest
Ed Gillespie's comment that a billion dollar election isn't a problem because:
George Bush's ads attempt to convince voters that a single vote on an appropriations bill means John Kerry is against body armor, freedom, smiles, puppies, children, tax cuts, hugs and vitamins. The repetition of simulated votes on these wonderful happy things that George Bush supports is clearly meant to give the impression of multiple votes. That's a problem.
Right now, money is spent not to edify voters but to manipulate them, to scare them, to enrage them. Few people would defend such things (though these same people would admit their necessity), and yet expenditures on them spiral ever-upward. As Chris Rock would say, "That ain't right!".
Ed's big lie is to say the spending is to get "people to vote and participate in the system", but his formulation is unwittingly correct. Billions of dollars to increase civic participation would be a great thing, and a perfect example of the good money can do in politics. I want 5 minute ads from our candidates, I want infomercials (like Ross Perot did) where they discuss their plans, I want huge events all over the country that allow ordinary citizens to feel like part of something larger than themselves. Let's spend the money, let's blow it like drunken sailors -- but let's make Ed's lie into a truth. Let's actually use billions to repair the civic fabric on the country. Fuck toothpaste, I want minty fresh democracy.
Oh, Just Kiss My Ass
Zell Miller compares the torture at Abu Ghraib to having to shower in gym class.
Yes, I remember the first time I had to shower in a locker room. It was my first time naked (or with a towel on) in front of other men. I was embarassed a little bit. However, since nobody locked the door, put a bag over my head, beat me, sodomized me with broomsticks and light sticks, forced men into sexual acts with other people, threatened my life, and took pictures of the whole thing for their amusement, I never thought to compare it to what happened in Iraq, because it wasn't even in the same galaxy of occurences.
Jesus.
Michael Graham, No Paper For You
Oh, God, Michael Graham, just shut the fuck up.
The GOP ran a pedophile for a Senate seat in 2000. (And if Gore and Lieberman had prevailed, he would have been a sitting Senator when the allegations broke.) Another Republican committed manslaughter. In many cases, reports on these two rarely mentioned their partisan affiliations, or if they did, buried them at the bottom of their reports.
Is a conservative media bias at work? This transcript never mentions Giordano's political affiliation. This story mentions Giordano without his political affiliation. This story takes 18 paragraphs to mention Giordano's political affiliation. The New York Communista Times doesn't even mention his affiliation.
Why must the media hide the pedophilic tendencies of Republicans???
The worst part about this is that political affiliation really shouldn't be mentioned unless it's necessary. It would be just as pointless to write "Republican Is A Pedophile" as it would be to write "Democrat Is A Pedophile", because political affiliation has nothing to do with it.
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The End Of The Story On Zell Miller
He is motivated by no ideology, only a desire to get the Democratic Party to pay attention to an increasingly embarassing temper tantrum. I'm not angry at him, just sort of ashamed. I mean, I understand he's relatively new to the Democrat-bashing game, but it's not like there aren't volumes upon volumes of reference materials in multiple media that would allow Miller to construct a better bad argument than "tax and spend Taxachusetts liberal". It's not particularly accurate to begin with in light of Massachusetts' relative burden of taxation and receipt of money from the federal government...but it also smells faintly of mothballs.
Zell really needs to get up to speed on this anti-Democratic firebrand deal. I feel like I'm watching basketball without a three-point line here.
No....Really?
Hold on...you mean that Republicans are aggressively questioning the integrity and patriotism of anyone who lodges any criticism of their plan in Iraq or in the War on Terror?
HOLY SHIT. I mean it. Grab the babies and head for the shelter, we've just seen the Fifith Horseman of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, Death, and Fucking Obvious.
Credibility Abounds
After the latest CNN/Time Poll, I'm sure many people are going to be celebrating the horse race numbers, which have Kerry up on Bush 51/46 and Bush's approval/disapproval at 46/49. There's a more important story here, and it's one that's worse for Bush than national reelection numbers or even approval ratings.
On terrorism, the Bush/Kerry spread is 49/42. It's seven points...but when most other polls had the spread around seventeen points, it's a huge deal. In every category, Kerry is running close to or ahead of Bush, on many domestic issues well ahead. Whether through design or the machinations of world events, Bush is losing credibility and Kerry is gaining it - rapidly. Until the conventions are done, these are the numbers to look at if you're interested in seeing Bush out of office. Kerry is not going to lose credibility any time soon on domestic issues - but if Bush keeps losing ground on foreign policy and terrorism (which he has, severely), he's not going to have anything to fall back on.
Bush's strength on anything is a rapidly eroding myth. And when the horse race becomes relevant (i.e., after the conventions) it's numbers like these that are going to make or break Kerry. Nobody's going to care in September that Kerry was running ahead of Bush in May, other than political baseballers. It is going to be relevant, however, to be able to say that people have trusted Kerry more than Bush on certain issues for months (the entire Bush line has been built on aggressively promoting this idea for him, even when it stopped being true).
Kerry's campaign is in a lot better shape than most of us give it credit for.
Killing Them Softly
As Massachusetts completes their final preparations for The End of Society As We Know It, I wanted to point you all to the latest issue of Reason (strangely absent from their website) and Jonathan Rauch's article on gay marriage. He enters into a pseudo-Hayekian analysis and proceeds to demolish it, but the inevitable detonation of the straw man isn't what I want to point out. It's the first part of his piece, the bit setting up the Hayekian argument for tradition and intuition, that merits a closer read.
As most supporters of gay marriage have found, there's very little in the way of coherent argument against it. The obstruction on the path towards equality lies in unacknowledged, and generally unexamined, biases, feelings and instincts stemming from beneath logical analysis and thus impervious to reason's sword. It lies in slippery slope arguments like this one from the Weekly Standard. It's important that we suppress the urge to simply label holders of such opinions bigots or backwards, beliefs have power even when they have limited merit and such traditionally codified biases are understandable, if not sustainable. The right wants to force us onto ground where we condemn and attack our opponents, not because they think this'll win them the argument, but because they think it'll win them the election.
The culture wars that flare up every few generations have geberally been won by the forces of progress. Even abortion, whose foes have made inroads in the past few years, has been a major victory for advocates of choice, their opponents reduced to desperately, and pathetically, seizing victories on the margins (the major exception being in foreign policy with the global gag rule). They might try and move farther in, but as the Economist noted a week or two ago, the remobilization of the women's movement over such paltry changes points makes further gains unlikely. If papercuts to Roe prompted such a spectacular display, knifing it will create a national backlash.
But what we win in the courts we lose at the ballot box. Though segregation hasn't come back and Roe hasn't been overturned, the steady march of progress has alienated vast swaths of this country and allowed Republicans to trump our economic message with their coded paeans to traditional values. It's not good for anyone's self esteem to lose time after time and that bruised pride has given the right the cracks needed to turns whole regions against their countrymen 'up North".
Continue reading "Killing Them Softly"I Shiver
Those godless heathens in Massachusetts are marrying folk as of a few hours ago. I know we did this during the San Francisco marriage, but just in case you needed more fire in the belly, behold the faces of evil, the destroyers of civilization:
May 16, 2004
Further And Further Back We'll Go
On Fox News Sunday this morning, Brit Hume's jowls pondered that the Abu Ghraib story "wasn't going anywhere", with the obvious implication being that it was only being kept alive through the gargantuan efforts of the librul media and the Democrat Party (which is an adjunct to the Democratic Party whose actions are determined by reactionary conservatives).
I could understand this from an "entertainer" like Rush Limbaugh. But you would think someone who works for a news organization would actually be following the story. (To be fair, I think that Hume has been very attentive to the story. I think he's just lying.)
Anyway, I'm wondering what the reaction will be to this from the paragons of journalistic integrity at Fox.
"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions," Newsweek magazine reported. Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account.
Out of pure curiosity, why is it that every single stupid thing the Bush Administration does fits into the exact same template? A member of the executive branch does something incredibly stupid, Bush signs off on it, Colin Powell goes off about how ridiculously bad of an idea it is, it still happens, and it comes back to bite them in the ass.
I hope Powell and Richard Clarke go on a tour as the Cassandras once Kerry's in office. (Did anyone see Powell's MTP appearance, by the way?)
I'm Convinced
This President's reelection effort, like his administration, takes no prisoners. And when it does, it brutally beats and humiliates them:
LA
UCLA accepted me this morning. I will start there in the Fall. I am deliriously happy about it. I have resisted the urge to include emoticons in this post. That is all.
Update: Mark Kleinman better watch out. That Volokh guy too. How many bloggers can one campus take? Any I'm forgetting?