NO MORE WAR: Many of Hezbollah’s constituents aren’t happy with Hassan Nasrallah’s latest declaration of war against Israel. (Hat tip: Tony Badran.)
Archive for 2008
February 21, 2008
IT’S NOT JUST A GOOD IDEA . . . IT’S THE LAW Over at concurring opinions, Daniel Solove interviews the creators of Battlestar Galactica about the legal and philosophical issues in the series.
IF you live in the Rochester area, and have any interest in seeing me on television, apparently they’ll be running clips from an interview with me on the ABC affiliate at 6 and 11.
NOAH POLLAK: “Obama seems proudly intent on sending the United States wandering naively into the Middle Eastern bazaar.”
A MOB IS STORMING THE US EMBASSY IN BELGRADE. They’re mad about the Kosovo independence vote. Even destroying the vital US ornamental shrubbery installations cannot break our steely will, nor silence the voice of Kosovar freedom . . .
CLINTON CAMPAIGN IN CHAOS? FOXNews offers confirming evidence for what I’ve been saying for months:
If American voters were casting their ballot today, Democrat Barack Obama would have a slight advantage over Republican John McCain in the race for the White House, while McCain would narrowly edge out Hillary Clinton, according to the latest FOX News poll.
Meanwhile, The Huffington Post paints a dark portrait of the Clinton Texas operation:
Although the Clinton Campaign has been telling the press that they have the ground operations to pull off a win in Texas, those ground operations have not been in evidence when I’ve traveled to small towns to see how Bill Clinton is doing on the Texas stump. Wednesday evening in Victoria, down in the southeastern part of the state, incipient chaos threatened to overwhelm the “Early Vote” Rally precisely because there was no ground operation. The well-oiled, beautifully constructed state-level HRC campaign machine, focused and determined in Iowa, Nevada and California, is beginning to break down.
“It’s a clusterfuck! Just a clusterfuck!” the Corpus Christi producer for a local news affiliate shouts into his cell phone. He’s telling his boss that there will be no coverage of Bill Clinton’s visit to Victoria for the 6 o’clock news. “Who’s running this campaign anyway?” the producer asks, of no one in particular. “And now five hundred people have stomped away mad.” He shakes his head. At that moment, twenty well-dressed elderly and middle-aged dignitaries and politicians exit the back of the local arts center and walk slowly for the intersection of Goodwin and Main. Presumably, they are Hillary Clinton supporters; however, given their dazed faces, they look more like commissars who have been turned out by the NKVD and cannot believe how suddenly their fortunes have changed.
On the other hand, I didn’t think she could win in New York. On the third hand, perhaps she wouldn’t have, if she’d been playing against the varsity. At any rate, it certainly doesn’t sound good.
MORE ON MCCAIN from my comments section (yes, if you want to comment on one of my posts here, you can go do it at my blog):
I spent some forty years working under FCC regulation, and it’s clearly not unreasonable to ask for help in moving the commission along.
They have been better or worse depending on the chairman at the time, but there is an incredible tendency to simply not take action if there is a real decision to make.
This is compounded by the deterioration in the quality of commission staff, now totally dominated by lawyers, many of whom fail to have even a elementary grasp of the technology they are supposed to regulate, and the poor quality of recent political appointees to the commission. By ‘recent’ I mean the last twenty years; I would indict both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
LESSIG IS MORE Julian Sanchez interviews Larry Lessig regarding a possible run for Congress:
One simple means of reducing the political power of campaign cash, Lessig says, “could be done tomorrow.” He wants to ban legislative earmarks, those juicy morsels of targeted federal funding legislators direct toward pet projects and political supporters. Lessig also hopes to encourage more robust public financing of campaigns, noting the salutary effect such policies appear to be having in states like Maine and Arizona. Most immediately—and perhaps most radically—Lessig says he will swear off contributions from lobbyists or political action committees, and he hopes to bring grassroots pressure to bear on other candidates to follow suit. (Prospective opponent Jackie Speier, he notes in passing in his online video, does accept such contributions.)
Larry Lessig and I do not see eye to eye on many issues, but one certainly can’t object to the prospect of more serious thinkers, and fewer professional politicians, in Congress. And earmark reform, however trivial its fiscal impact, is indisputably a blow for better government.
99% DETECTION of early-stage ovarian cancer. Bring it on!
SADR’S REALISM: Two aids for Moqtada al Sadr say the truce between his Mahdi Army militia and the American forces will be extended.
THE OTHER “OTHER” ISRAEL. David Hazony: “It is widely believed that Israeli Arabs despise the Jewish state, actively support its enemies, and willingly constitute a kind of fifth column in the Jewish state’s population. This is backed up by the wild rhetoric of Arab-Israeli politicians, who frequently bend over backwards to voice their hatred of the country that hosts them. But is this belief true?“
The publication of the article [on John McCain] capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn’t. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.
Lots of detail at the linked article.
THE MAKE UP FOR REAL MEN
I’m going to be interviewed today by satellite for a Rochester-area station; the subject is my Atlantic article on what happens to America when the baby boomers retire, which was partially set in my mother’s hometown in western New York State. In the process of setting the details of who does my makeup (answer: me), Evan Dawson, who will be interviewing me, sent this observation about life in the glamorous world of television news:
As an aside, the first time your girlfriend asks to borrow your bronzer, it’s embarrassing. The second time, not so much. The third, and you begin to wonder if you could make a fortune by inventing “Cover Guy” to compete with the heretofore monopolizing “Cover Girl.”
HUNTING MENGELE’S MEMORY IN PARAGUAY My colleague Graeme Wood has a terrific piece in the Smart Set.
OH, GOD . . . I’m not sure if “thanks” is quite the word for the reader who offered me a concrete visual to go with my metaphor about the demise of the Clinton campaign.
IN THE MAIL: Reagan’s Disciple: George W. Bush’s Troubled Quest for a Presidential Legacy. Actually, I kind of doubt that George W. Bush spends a lot of time thinking about “legacy” issues.
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR asks the hard questions: “The NRA and the ACLU both can’t buy ad time in the days before an election because doing so, by virtue of the ethical senator’s own philosophy, is manipulating the people and hurting democracy. But when McCain hops a flight with a campaign contributor, it ought to be obvious that he’s maintaining his integrity. Why is it that associations comprised of every day citizens are suspect, but a powerful politician is not?”
MICHELLE OBAMA — RETROGRADE AMERICAN WIFE, old-style leftist, affirmative action neurotic, or something else that I’m not even going to mention? Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus debate. The moose is deployed, and Mickey worries that he’s trafficking in stereotypes.
“PERSONALLY, I don’t see anything wrong with a senator doing to a lobbyist what the lobbyists do to the rest of us.” As Glenn himself would say, heh.
On a more serious note, Mark Kleiman links to the AP story, which has more detail on what, exactly, McCain is supposed to have done wrong.
In late 1999, McCain twice wrote letters to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications — which had paid Iseman as its lobbyist — urging quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh. At the time, Paxson’s chief executive, Lowell W. “Bud” Paxson, also was a major contributor to McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.
McCain did not urge the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal, but he asked for speedy consideration of the deal, which was pending from two years earlier. In an unusual response, then-FCC Chairman William Kennard complained that McCain’s request “comes at a sensitive time in the deliberative process” and “could have procedural and substantive impacts on the commission’s deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties.”
McCain wrote the letters after he received more than $20,000 in contributions from Paxson executives and lobbyists. Paxson also lent McCain his company’s jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel.
Kleiman asks “Is it routine for a Senator from Arizona to pressure regulatory agencies on behalf of companies based in Florida?”
Fox News has these details, and is making it sound like this is not a big deal, because the senator did not press for an outcome, but only a speedy resolution. But regulatory uncertainty is very costly for firms; just getting your case jumped to the head of the line could be a pretty valuable special favor. It doesn’t cost the rest of us much, of course–unless we happen to work for the company whose case was delayed while everyone dropped everything to deal with the senator’s request.
That said, I don’t have a good sense of how much impact this sort of thing actually has, and I suspect it’s (sadly) rather common.
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT Georgia is trying to move part of its state line more than a mile north, claiming a nineteenth century survey error.
COLE CITY HOLLOW, Tennessee – Nearly two centuries after a flawed survey placed Georgia’s northern line just short of the Tennessee River, some legislators are suddenly thirsting to set the record straight.
A historic drought has added urgency to Georgia’s generations-old claim that its territory ought to extend about a mile farther north than it does and reach into the Tennessee — a river with about 15 times greater flow than the one Atlanta depends on for its water.
Local Tennesseans are resisting, not least because Georgia, unlike Tennessee, has a state income tax
THE RICH REALLY ARE DIFFERENT . . .
They have more social conflicts. Few people realize how hard a wealthy socialite works. But Cookie mag has apparently launched a new investigative series that reveals the gritty underside of life in the jet set:
Only just last month, she was forced to choose between a trunk show, the Guggenheim Young Collectors Council’s annual Artist’s Ball, and a dinner party at a hedge-fund manager’s lavish home! Horreurs. Happily, she made the right decision and went to the trunk show. “At the event I saw rising It girl Chessy Wilson,” she relates in her inaugural column, “who regaled me with a story about her handbag catching fire earlier that day when she accidentally dropped a lit match into it.” Hahahahaha — barf. But it’s not all clinking and chortling for this real housewife. There is a dark side. “The problem with the New York City social scene is that it sucks you in,” she writes. What, like Michael Alig? Will Tatiana’s addiction to nightlife end in blood and guts and jail?
A BIG CIGAR? THERE?! That seems so wrong.
“IF REPUBLICANS ARE MAKING TOO MUCH of Michelle Obama’s gaffe that ‘for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country’ — and well they might, because it could win them the election — Democrats are making way too little of it.”