Matt Yglesias

Tom Toles

Good for him. I think it’s tough to hold your employer up to even the most deserved scorn and derision, and in this case scorn and derision are very well deserved.

Nathaniel Weyl

Jeet Heer suggests apropos of the latest flareups of the “are blacks inferior?” debate is that “One way to address this tiresome topic from an unexplored angle is to look at a now largely forgotten figure who is cited as an authority in The Bell Curve, Nathaniel Weyl (1910-2005)” and here it goes:

The flavor of Weyl’s thought can be captured in an article he wrote in 1967 for the journal Intelligence, arguing for the superiority of white Rhodesians with evidence from his own visit to Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia [i.e., Zimbabwe when it was under white supremacist rule]. “Thus, white Rhodesians are an elite element within the English-speaking world in terms of psychometric intelligence,” Weyl argued. “This finding is reinforced by visual impressions. Salisbury whites appear larger, healthier, more vigorous, alert and bright than London whites. Beatniks, transvestites and obvious homosexuals are conspicuously absent.” [...]

Weyl’s writings were once very popular: many issues of National Review in the 1960s carry ads for his books, available through the Conservative Book Club. But he’s disappeared from the memory of even conservatives in recent decades (The Bell Curve is surely one of the very few places where he’s cited with respect). Most people reading his comments about beatniks can spot the obvious political bias that shaped his work. I don’t think Weyl’s successors are going to enjoy a happier fate.

And no doubt back then there were people condemning Weyl as a racist, and others hailing him as a brave hero eager to speak the truth no matter how politically incorrect it may have been. Meanwhile, I’m shocked to find racists associated with race science! Or racists associated with the origins of the conservative movement! I don’t know where liberals get these crazy ideas.

Politics is Not a Dirty Word

What Dave Roberts said. You do hear with a frightening frequency people with green sympathies, up to and including Al Gore, suggest that global warming shouldn’t be a “political issue.” Drained of senseless rhetoric this seems to reduce to the view that “everyone ought to agree with my favored policies.” And, of course, I think everyone really should agree with my favored policies. But, in practice, they don’t. And so: Politics.

This is the world, and anyone who aspires to radically alter America’s energy use patterns needs to learn to live with it. Achieving the goals requires lots of political change.

Meanwhile, both whatever degree of climate change can’t be prevented and whatever prevention measures we adopt will all have different kinds of costs and benefits. Different policies will allocate these costs to different people. The mechanism by which we decide what to do is called “politics” and it exists so that individuals and organizations with somewhat divergent interests and ideas can make collective decisions about how to tackle common problems. The rhetoric of anti-politics isn’t just an analytic mistake, it’s part of the problem. A public that doesn’t believe divergent interests can be reconciled and common solutions devised for common problems — a public that doesn’t believe in politics — is going to be a public that doesn’t believe there’s anything that can or should be done to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Robert Gates is Making Sense

Via Mark Goldberg, it looks like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is making the sensible suggestion that our funding priorities shouldn’t tilt so dramatically in favor of the Defense Department, “Funding for non-military foreign-affairs programs has increased since 2001, but it remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military and to the importance of such capabilities.”

He makes a whole bunch of good points, and it’s genuinely rare in Washington to see anyone suggest that any other agency’s mission is important and deserves more money. That said, this is still in the “talk as cheap” neighborhood. Rare as it is to see someone suggest that someone else’s budget ought to be higher, it’s by the same token very easy to suggest that someone’s else’s budget ought to be cut to increase spending elsewhere. What would be really revolutionary would be a Secretary of Defense who not only recognized the point Gates is making here, but who was willing to see the needed money come out of the Pentagon’s pocket. Until that time comes, we’ll need to rely on Lawrence Korb and his Unified Security Budget for the United States reports:

The shift recommended in this report—$56 billion in cuts to spending on offense and $50 billion in additional spending on defense and prevention—would convert a highly militarized 9-to–1 security ratio into a better balance of 5-to-1.

In the real world, no proposals of this sort are going to go anywhere unless Democrats are provided with substantial political “cover” by Republicans, so it probably does all hinge on whether or not people like Gates are willing to follow their insights where they lead instead of just vaguely suggesting that the State Department needs more capabilities. Still, this is a definite sign of progress.

Good Teammates Make Efficient Shooters?

One issue that comes up now and again is whether a player is likely to shoot more efficiently if he plays alongside other good players. Intuitively, the answer is “yes.” If you need to carry the offense single-handedly, the defense can collapse around you and it’s hard to score. If you play alongside other stars, by contrast, the defense is spread out and you can get easy shots. But just because it sounds reasonable doesn’t make it true. Some evidence is suggested by the above chart of the Celtics new “Big Three,” Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen, all of whom shifted from being the clear focal point of an offense to forming one leg of a more evenly-balanced offensive stool.

As we can see, all three saw their shooting efficiency take a tumble last season and now they’re doing better. Even more strikingly, all three are putting up career-high numbers in True Shooting Percentage thus far this season. That’s not definitive proof that they’re scoring more efficiently because they’re scoring together but it’s suggestive. Certainly it’ll be interesting to see if that trend holds up over the course of the season. Another good case to look at would be Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson.

Naomi Klein Was Right

When I signed on for my TMobile Wifi account, I figured one of the benefits of paying their monthly fee would be that not only are there Starbucks and Borders wherever you go inside the USA, but TMobile is this giant international firm so I’ll find TMobile hotspots everywhere I go. And, indeed, Amsterdam has them. But my username doesn’t work! Instead, I need to log on as a “TMobile USA” customer and pay some additional roaming fee. Multinational capitalism is really letting me down. Even worse, the TMobile hotspot appears to be emanating from the McDonalds’ across the street, and there’s probably some poor American sucker in there right now who bought an AT&T account because they have AT&T in McDonalds (and Barnes & Noble) in the US and figured it’d be a good international play.

Bluefin Tuna

I’d been wondering idly the other day what a “bluefin” tuna looked like and how it was different from a regular tuna, and now Kay Steiger gives me my answer. Of course, I’d only ever heard of bluefin tuna because thanks to overfishing and so forth you now can hardly find any.

How It’s Done

GFR flags Michael Cooper’s stunningly informative New York Times article on how Rudy Giuliani’s trying to fool people:

Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.” When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent.”

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record.

Even the headline-writer delivered, giving us: “Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again”.

How here’s the bad news. It’s striking to read a story like this, and Cooper and the Times deserve credit for doing it. But the world really needs more. As Cooper himself notes, Giuliani says this stuff over and over again and so what’s needed is for campaign coverage to regularly reflect the regular misstatements that candidates use, until it ceased to be worth their while to keep making them.

Trantor’s Population Density

Continuing with yesterday’s post on population density in The Caves of Steel, consider the description of Trantor provided by the Encyclopedia Galactica excerpt that opens section three of “The Psychohistorians”, where we learn that “Its urbanizattion, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of Trantorm, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.” Say well in excess of forty billion means 45 billion. 45 billion people spread over 75 million square miles is only 600 people per square mile:

That’d put the population density of Trantor at a bit less than what you see in the present-day United Kingdom. The UK is, to be sure, a densely populated country. But as you can see above, it’s hardly a single giant city stretching from sea to sea. And yet Jerril explains to Gaal Dornick that not only is the entire surface (save 100 square miles reserved for the imperial palace) incorporated into a city that’s so dense Trantorians go years without stepping outside, but a long elevator ride only took them 500 feet into the air. How?

Most of the time it was just getting up to ground level. Trantor is tunneled over a mile down. It’s like an iceberg. Nine-tenths of it is out of sight. It even works itself out a few miles into the sub-ocean soil at the shorelines.

For reference, the Empire State Building is less than 0.30 miles tall, so the total square footage you could get from a mile-deep tunnel covering 75,000,000 square miles of surface area would be mind-boggling and you could fit way, way, way more than 45 billion people there. Alternatively, you could fit the 45 billion into a relatively small proportion of the planet and use some of the surface area for agriculture, thus reducing the capital’s strategic vulnerability to attacks on its supply fleet.

Photo by Flickr user Catherine Trigg used under a Creative Commons license

Export the Awakening

I keep forgetting to link to Spencer Ackerman’s excellent column on the folly of proposals to “export” the “Anbar Awakening” model to Pakistan. You can tell Spencer knows what he’s talking about because he uses so many damn acronyms just like a real defense guy:

In Pakistan, nothing like this exists. The FATA tribes show no sign of tensions with AQSL. The Times reported that many of the same tribes that would form the basis of a FATA Awakening still actively fight alongside the Taliban — as do elements within the Interior Ministry that would be responsible for nurturing the Awakening. Within SOCOM, which has developed the proposal, analysts have no idea whether the tribes would accept or reject American support. In short, the basic strategic condition that allowed the Anbar Awakening to exist — a split between Iraqis and al-Qaeda — isn’t in evidence here. All sorts of other potential problems arise: for one, this potential paramilitary tribal force, with its minimal control by Islamabad, wouldn’t augur well for the internal stability of a nuclear-armed country. But without the basic FATA/AQSL split, it makes no sense to consider such second-order questions. And in that case, flooding the FATA with money and guns is about as wise as making a blank check out to Osama bin Laden.

I agree. Spencer further argues that the development of this deeply unsound strategy from within the military’s special operations command reflects a kind of “Iraq Syndrome” effect:

Right. And here we see a potentially looming institutional problem wherein military officials looking to salvage some dignity from a debacle in Iraq that’s not really their fault (it’s always important to keep in mind that the objectives of the war, as initially framed, just weren’t compatible with the use of sound counterinsurgency tactics on the battlefield) will start seizing on faint glimmers of success and want to apply such “lessons” as soon as possible, whether or not there’s really evidence in their favor.

Extra Mandate Blogging

I should say with further regard to the health care mandates issue that this is pretty much exclusively a disagreement about tactics. The people who drew up John Edwards’ and Hillary Clinton’s health care plans think they’ve devised a really clever method of moving the country to a much better health care system. I think they’re overestimating their own cleverness. But either plan is something I’d be glad to see passed into law as an alternative to the status quo, and if either one of them becomes president I’ll roundly condemn people trying to block the reform.

If it were up to me, I’d either try something more ambitious than what they’re proposing (have taxes pay for people’s health insurance), or else I’d try something more modest (have taxes pay for kids’ health insurance) and focus my spending mojo elsewhere (health care’s important, but so’s climate change, preschool, infrastructure spending, housing programs, etc., etc., etc., and realistically no president is going to build Matt’s Social Democratic Utopia by 2012), but since I’d like to see something more ambitious on the merits I’d support the Edwards or Clinton plans. Indeed, they’re both very good plans all things considered, I just don’t happen to think the mandate aspect — which has become the focal point of attention since it’s the place where they can disagree with Obama — is a particularly appealing element to their proposals. Unfortunately, in the context of the primary campaign you hear less about the area of overlap between all three candidates, which contains tons of good stuff.

Coffee Nomenclature

I think there’s a lot to be admired about the Dutch approach to drug regulation, but the nomenclature aspect seems to be in clear need of reform:

A Dutch establishment advertising itself as a coffeeshop is likely to be primarily in the business of selling cannabis products and possibly other substances which are tolerated (in Dutch: “gedoogd”) under the drug policy of the Netherlands. A koffiehuis sells coffee and light meals, whilst a café is the equivalent of a bar. In the Netherlands, the selling of cannabis is “illegal, but not punishable”, so the law is not enforced in establishments following these nationwide rules.

Surely soft drugs, alcoholic beverages, and coffee can all be sold in different types of establishments without giving them all such similar names.

Racists Polluting My Race Science!

I’m a little bit confused by Will Saletan’s mea culpa here:

For the past five years, J. Philippe Rushton has been president of the Pioneer Fund, an organization dedicated to “the scientific study of heredity and human differences.” During this time, the fund has awarded at least $70,000 to the New Century Foundation. To get a flavor of what New Century stands for, check out its publications on crime (”Everyone knows that blacks are dangerous”) and heresy (”Unless whites shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy they will cease to be a distinct people”). New Century publishes a magazine called American Renaissance, which preaches segregation. Rushton routinely speaks at its conferences.

I was negligent in failing to research and report this. I’m sorry. I owe you better than that.

Saletan, basically, is apologizing for having cited a racist’s work in penning his column. Which would be a reasonable thing to do, except that the thesis of Saletan’s column was that one of the key empirical claims of white supremacism is true. In particular, calling on whites to “shake off the teachings of racial orthodoxy” is exactly what Saletan was doing in his own article. Similarly on the crime front. It’s well known that African-Americans commit violent crimes at a higher rate than do white Americans. And if the Saletan Thesis of intrinsic African-American genetic intellectual inferiority is true, extending the analysis to explain the observed gap in violent crime rates seems like an obvious move.

Saletan was busy trying to have his cake and eat it, to, and when confronted with Rushton’s rhetoric suddenly finds himself choking on it. But of course the research “proving” blacks’ genetic inferiority to whites is shot through with racism; what else would the race-science paradigm possibly be infused with? Somehow, Saletan was so busy with his counterintuitive pirouettes that he didn’t notice what side he’d landed on.

Feeling Sorry for my Dad

Celtics beat Knicks, 104-59 (!), thus forcing us to spend the rest of the season attaching a proviso to any discussion of Boston’s prodigious average margin-of-victory stats.

Build!

Yes indeed if you oppose building a bigger building on the SW corner of 14th and U (right now there’s a rinky-dink one story development there) you’re a bad person and desperately need to stop being ridiculous. One of the great things about Washington, DC is that our Metro system is pretty good. And part of the very essence of making a pretty good Metro system viable over the long run is that in the immediate vicinity of Metro stations you’re going to want to have big buildings and dense developments. That’s just how it works. If you don’t have dense development near transit, you can’t have viable transit systems.

It’s so incredibly frustrating to see time-and-again proposals to hear talk about how Americans “don’t want” to live in cities or use mass transit or whatever else and then turn around and see tons of examples of situations where people certainly seem to want to build high-density structures and are confident that others would rent or buy space in the structures. Obviously, not everyone is going to want to live that way, but evidently many more people would like to than are currently allowed to.

Healthcare Mandate Blogging

I’m in total agreement with Kevin Drum’s criticisms of John Edwards’ now-more-detailed individual mandate plan. And I should say that I don’t think this is a problem with Edwards as such. Other advocates of an individual mandate have mostly evaded the flaws of Edwards’ plan by just avoiding discussion of how this is supposed to work in practice. I think that in a whole variety of ways, it’s just a fundamentally flawed approach. See Matt Stoller for more on this.

The best alternative would, of course, be a proper system in which we achieve universality by having the government either sign everyone up for a health care plan (universal!) or else sign up everyone for a health care plan who doesn’t have one. Unfortunately, of course, the only person in the race with a plan like that is Dennis Kucinich. And if people tell me something like that is politically infeasible in the short run, I’m happy to believe them.

Where my thinking departs from the current Democratic consensus is that I don’t think it follows from the desirability of a universal system and the impracticality of doing it right in the short run, that we ought to therefore put an absolute priority on creating something — anything — that counts as universal no matter how flawed the design. To me, the incrementalism-in-a-good-way aspect of both the Edwards and Clinton plans is the introduction of strong public sector competition with crappy, crappy private health insurance. Over the long run, I think that gets us where we want to be. The mandate itself is neither here nor there. But if the candidates insist on universality-by-mandate as the core principle, then there’s a real risk of the best aspects of these bills getting gutted by congress leaving only a shell of individual mandates and subsidies to insurance firms.

Win-Win

Dana Goldstein thinks this new Republican Majority for Choice ad airing in New Hampshire and Iowa and presumably aimed at boosting Rudy Giuliani’s fortunes is “backfiring and mostly benefiting” Mike Huckabee:

Huckabee quite possibly will benefit from the ad, but the underlying dynamic is that Huckabee is in many ways Rudy Giuliani’s best friend in this race. As Ramesh Ponnuru says:

I have always thought that Giuliani could not win a two-man primary. I no longer believe that. He could beat Huckabee even in a two-man race. He can root for Huckabee to take out all his stronger competitors.

Right. Obviously, best-case for Giuliani would be to win Iowa. But that hasn’t looked realistic for a long time. A Huckabee win is probably his next best option.

Light Rail Coyote

One distinctive attribute of Amsterdam relative to the American cities I’ve spent time in is its extensive use of electric trams for mass transit purposes. I don’t really understand why we don’t see more of this in the United States. From one point of view, we’re a country that has preposterously little in the way of mass transit options. At the same time, we seem in some respects to be a bit subway-crazed, with little metro systems popping up in places like LA and Miami and even Baltimore.

There’s nothing wrong with subways, of course, but a lot of these systems seem a bit half-assed and consequently don’t wind up being very useful, which is really no good for anyone. The problem with building bigger subway systems, though, is that it’s obviously really expensive. For the same amount of money, you could build a lot more tram track. Now it’s true that a tram line won’t let you move as many people as a heavy rail line, but a tram can carry substantially more capacity than a bus, and it’s cleaner, quieter and takes up less space as well. And at the end of the day, though the large carrying capacity of subway systems is great for those cities where the system is comprehensive enough to draw a large customer base (New York, Washington, etc.) there’s really no point in building a system that a lot of people could use in principle if it doesn’t actually have sufficient scope to make the system an attractive option.

Also, though it’s hard to quantify this precisely, I think the trams look cool (the ones they have here in Amsterdam, at least, I recall feeling that the trams I saw in Prague and Nizhny Novgorod in the 1990s were ugly) which is nice. And on some level, aesthetics do matter. My impression of the Philadelphia subway system mostly related to the overpowering stench of urine in whatever station I was waiting in.

The Bush Factor

Dana Goldstein remarks after watching the Republicans debate that they “are terrified of the words ‘George W. Bush.’ A smart Democrat would force her or his Republican opponent to face up, as often as possible, to the legacy of his party’s leader.”

Quite so. Which is one reason why it’s probably a good thing for the Republicans that their race is being shaken up a bit by somewhat unorthodox candidates. It’s also why the Democratic nominee is going to have to be prepared to mount an ideological critique of Bush and Bushism rather than a purely personal one. One will want to argue “Bush was President, all this terrible stuff happened that made him incredibly unpopular, that stuff followed from his ideology, Republican X shares the relevant aspects of that ideology, therefore if you hate Bush, don’t vote for Republican X.”

In particular, I think Democrats need to worry about a possible Republican blurring strategy on Iraq especially if the Democratic nominee voted for the war. On a political level, “incompetence dodge” arguments suggest that what’s needed isn’t a different approach to foreign policy but a president with better “strong leader” attributes, which is a place where Rudy Giuliani and John McCain both rate pretty well. Bush’s onpopularity is bound to be a drag on the GOP one way or the other, but you can see in the early head-to-head polling that dislike of the incumbent doesn’t automatically transfer to the rest of his party.

The Perception Gap

Back on Monday, though Ross saw no hope for the GOP in efforts to pick up black voters in 2008, he was fairly optimistic about their longer-term prospects, citing in particular this result from a recent Pew survey on racial attitudes:

A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don’t get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.

It’s intriguing, but also a somewhat ill-posed question in my view as it excludes a large middle ground of possibilities. I’d say, for example, that the legacy of discrimination as manifest in things like the large black-white hap in asset ownership plays a large role. What’s more telling, I think, is the persistence of giant racial gaps in perception of the existence of racist discrimination. Pew asked if blacks face discrimination in the areas of employment, housing, college admissions, and day-to-day retail and you see a huge split between the number of blacks who feel there is “frequently” or “almost always” discrimination, and the number of whites who feel this way:

In short, though relatively few blacks see racist discrimination as “mainly responsible” for the condition of “blacks who don’t get ahead,” most African-Americans think African-Americans get discriminated against a lot. Adding the numbers up presents an even starker image:

Blacks see an America where there’s pervasive discrimination. Most whites, by contrast, hardly see any discrimination at all. People who feel like they’re the victims of frequent discrimination in many walks of life are going to be drawn toward political leaders who seem to share their concerns and show some inclination to do something about it. Democratic Party politicians are good at doing that. Republican Party politicians, almost all of whom are white people who’ve spent their entire careers securing the votes of other white people and then caucusing with all-white groups of colleagues, are really, really bad at it.

The Statistical Analysis We Need

I was looking at this latest iteration of efforts to use adjusted +/- statistics to evaluate NBA players, and it served as a reminder of how frustrating I find it that such a large proportion of efforts to apply quantitative tools to the analysis of basketball are dedicated to these searches for magic formulae to assess player quality. There are other, more interesting and probably more fruitful, lines of inquiry where quantitative skills could shed some light.

For example, there’s a popular conception of a link between pace and defensive orientation — specifically the idea that teams that choose to play at a fast pace are sacrificing something in the defense department. On the most naive level, that’s simply because a high pace leads to more points being given up. But I think it’s generally assumed that it holds up in efficiency terms as well. The 2006-2007 Phoenix Suns, for example, were first in offensive efficiency, third in pace, and fourteenth in defense. But is this really true? If you look at the data season-by-season is there a correlation between pace and defense? When pace changes leaguewide, does scoring efficiency also change? Then there are lots of interesting team level issues to ask. Intuitively, some teams’ offenses are optimized for the fast-paced style and will function less efficiently during games that wind up being played at a slow pace. And vice versa also probably holds. But are there some teams who are making a mistake? Squads who score more efficiently when they play slower, but usually try to play fast?

I’m too lazy to actually conduct research into those questions, and I’m not even sure I know how to calculate a coefficient of correlation correctly these days, but I’d read someone who wanted to do it.

Asimov and Population Density

For today’s nerd break, let’s consider Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, an excellent sci-fi novel sadly undermined by a failure to really grasp population density. The setting for the novel is a future version of earth in which the existence of advanced technology has failed to stem a decline in living standards (on the planet Earth, that is, the Spacers are better off than we are). The trouble is that the proposed population of Earth — 8 billion — is way to low to produce the effects Asimov is concerned with. Humanity, in this vision of the future, lives in giant, mostly underground mega-cities the better to leave the surface of the planet available for the exploitation of natural resources. As Wikipedia explains:

The eponymous “caves of steel” are vast city complexes covered by huge metal domes, capable of supporting tens of millions each. The New York City of that era, for example, encompasses present-day New York State, as well as large tracts of New Jersey.

But here’s the thing. Present-day New York State encompasses 54,520 square miles and present-day New York City contains 27,000 people per square mile, so you’d be talking about 1.47 billion people in New York alone. And that’s ignoring the “large tracts of New Jersey.” What’s more, that’s Asimov’s NYC has the same population density as present-day NYC. If instead you assume it contains Manhattan’s 66,940 people per square mile, you could fit 3.652 billion people in New York State (again, we’re ignoring the New Jersey Sectors). But Asimov suggests that the population density of his NYC should be even higher than that:

To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn’t been a City.

There were no Cities then. There were just huddles of dwelling places large and small, open to the air. They were something like the Spacers’ Domes, only much different, of course. These huddles (the largest barely reached ten million in population and most never reached one million) were scattered all over Earth by the thousands. By modern standard, they had been completely inefficient, economicaly. [...]

For that matter, take the simple folly of endless duplication of kitchens and bathrooms as compared with the thoroughly efficient diners and shower rooms made possible by City culture.

People live in some pretty small apartments in Manhattan, but they haven’t adopted collective kitchens. Nevertheless, even sticking with the Manhattan assumption, the single City contains over 1/6th of the world’s population and it’s not even the biggest City. Under the circumstances, it’s very hard to imagine what could have compelled people to adopt the City revolution with hyper-density measures like collective kitchens. If the entire United States had the population density of an inner-ring suburb like Westchester County you could fit almost 8 billion within our borders.

Bad Answers

This Daily News article on Hillary Clinton’s hawkish advisors doesn’t advance the ball very far, but it’s good to see the issue bubbling into less-elite circles. It’s also noteworthy for the fact that Lee Feinstein, the top foreign policy guy on the campaign staff and thus presumably in job for a second-tier nationals security post, has a very silly response to these complaints:

“A lot of Obama’s advisers thought this was a stupid war in 2002, and a lot of Hillary’s advisers thought it was a good idea in 2002,” said one Democrat with a national security résumé. “That’s the original sin which causes people to make some choices.”

“The campaign’s advisers reflect a broad spectrum of opinion within the Democratic Party,” countered Clinton national security guru Lee Feinstein. “The candidate makes her own decisions about her foreign policy positions.”

Uh huh. Of course she makes her own decisions. But that’s the point — she decided that invading Iraq was a good idea, and her team is mostly made up of people who agreed with her. The concern isn’t that Dick Holbrooke and Feinstein are controlling her mind. The concern is that she’s working with the people she’s working with because their thinking reflects her own thinking. And advisors are worth taking a look at, because “experts” tend to lay their ideas out in the press in more detail than do politicians. Clinton, for example, just hasn’t clearly said one way or another whether or not she believes unilateral preventive war is a good basis for non-proliferation policy. But she did authorize the use of force against Iraq, and several of the people working for her on a high level have taken clearer stands in favor of preventive war, so it’s natural to refer to them in raising the issue.

Simply noting in response that Clinton makes her own decisions (of course she does!) doesn’t dispel one’s doubts that she’s not being clear about these issues because her beliefs on these matters aren’t things Democratic primary voters will agree with.

Random Old Children’s Book Bleg

Does anyone out there on the internets have any information about an old book called Kintu: A Congo Adventure by old-timey children’s author Elizabeth Enright? Unlike her other books, this one seems to have vanished down the memory hole which, when combined with the title, makes one suspect it’s incredibly racist or something. But is that true? Conventional research methods — Google, Wikipedia, using Google to find Wikipedia pages — don’t reveal much.

Rudy’s Bills

Ben Smith at Politico broke the story of how “Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records,” but it took the more tabloid flavor of the New York Daily News to give us the image above. They also situate the scoop nicely:

It has been known since 2000 that then-Mayor Giuliani used his official, taxpayer-funded NYPD detail to escort him to weekend getaways at Nathan’s Southampton condo as early as 1999, well before his marriage to Donna Hanover dissolved the following spring.

Back then, the Giuliani administration stonewalled reporters trying to nail down the costs for guarding the mayor during his Nathan liaison. The full tab remains a city secret.

But the documents obtained by the Politico.com Web site through Freedom of Information laws now show for the first time how Giuliani’s administration seemed to scatter travel costs for security details during that time among obscure mayoral offices.

Looks like it’s time to say “9/11!” some more. I’m sure it’s relevant somehow. Speaking of which, in the construction of the Giuliani 9/11 mythos, part of what’s gone missing is the large role that George W. Bush played in setting the stage for Rudy’s heroics by so utterly failing to perform his head of state functions properly in a moment of crisis. That day people were really freaked out since, after all, nobody was quite sure what had happened and the President of the United States spent the bulk of the day running and hiding or something, and then that evening delivered a terrible speech. Under the circumstances, Giuliani’s composed performance felt very reassuring. But it was only a big deal because Bush was so inept; a better response from him and there would have been no “America’s Mayor.”