I favor MSNBC coverage over all the other cable networks, but I mean it when I say it: Chris Matthews should be required to present three authorizing signatures each and every time he wants to use a sports metaphor.
Nevertheless, as Hillary Clinton so lawyerly put it, they broke the tie in Indiana tonight. She canceled her talk show appearances for the morning—indeed, all her public appearances for the day—and her campaign asks the commentariot to take a deep breath and not rush Sen. Clinton. I don't think there's any worry on that score. This week and next week promise a leisurely parade of superdelegates announcing for Obama to the drumbeat of media outlets recognizing Obama as the Democratic nominee.
Everyone who prognosticated that nothing changed tonight got the election basically right: Though it seems at this hour that Obama wins Indiana by a hair, it doesn't make for a substantial improvement in allocated delegates over the small number that Clinton was predicted to net. Obama won North Carolina like he was supposed to.
The thing that changed was that Clinton dropped the front-runner façade. She couldn't maintain it. She declared the victory she could, furiously backpedaling on the meaning of the contest and canceling her next steps. Oh, and it looks as though she loaned her campaign money to get to this point—and this performance isn't going to make the crowds throw money. She even said that she would work for the Democratic nominee, no matter the results.
What about this signal is going to convince a majority of undecided superdelegates who, for whatever reason, have all along abstained from pledging their support to the candidate?
She'll have the time she needs to tour West Virginia and Kentucky and work out the post-active phase of her campaign; no one will rush her through that. But Barack Obama will be named the Democratic nominee for President.
On Day One waded past the garbage out front to ask the Flophouse what we'd like to see the next President do on day one of his administration. Yglesias says the President should commit to global nuclear disarmament. Spencer says the President should withdraw from Iraq. (And on that note, read Spencer's interview with David Petraeus.)
I in fact believe that support for the Artist-Museum Partnership Act and tax-code revisions to bolster fractional giving can probably wait until day 90 or so. But those are concerns that I'd like to see the next President address.
Related info, in blessed non-vlog format: Obama on the arts.
So I'll see you all at Borders downtown tonight to see Yglesias give a talk on Heads in the Sand? Thought so.
So I've mounted a defense of Yale student Aliza Shvarts's controversial art project involving induced abortions over at the Guardian. Or rather, I'm criticizing Yale's response to the outrage that the project has predictably (and reasonably) provoked. The art, nothing doing: I haven't seen it, I don't know.
Suffice it to say, Guardian readers are not convinced.
For the Guardian, G.p friend and colleague Sasha Belenky has written a piece that touches on Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge's Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out in a larger examination of artists working today who romanticize radicalism. Belenksy takes the long view:
The consequences of race riots and the counterculture movement are still being felt, but these works don't focus on the present. Instead, they evoke nostalgia for a revolution that was never fully realised and disappointment at the feebleness of today's political activism. In the exhibition's catalogue, Rebecca Solnit argues that American youth have given up on the 60s-era dream of social revolution in favour of more personal steps like consuming local farm produce or purchasing hybrid cars - small decisions that will nevertheless change society gradually. Her optimism doesn't seem to be shared by the artists in the show.Often the talk about political art and its recent shortcomings, real and perceived, focuses on methods and aesthetics. What has been discussed less frequently (if at all) is the sort of grand tectonic shifts in the political/curtural landscape. Belensky is arguing in brief that today, political art comes up lacking because political protest takes other forms—namely, market decisions that emphasize personal virtue. One example that immediately comes to mind is this weekend's New York Times Magazine piece on reducing your personal carbon footprint.
Yglesias succinctly explains exactly why this kind of thinking is counterproductive:
Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive. The calculations involved in figuring out the aggregate carbon impact of this or that are just far too difficult for anyone to carry out. What's more, it's generally not going to be possible for a single person through his or her own exertions to really bring about dramatic cuts, and the last thing you need is people sitting around thinking "I drive a Prius, I've done my part" and then not voting the right way or otherwise being disengaged from the political process.Note, also, that Dick Cheney and like-minded conservatives have adopted the "personal virtue" language as a way of dismissing energy regulation, conservation, and so forth, since folks can just buy a Prius if they'd like to save the world.Beyond all that, the market in trendy "green" products has certain counterproductive effects -- it creates a profitable niche market in expensive green-branded goods that most people can't afford and lowers the price of carbon-intensive goods. But in a fundamental sense, the only way to make a green economy work is to make carbon-intensive goods expensive not render them stigmatized and uncool, which should, in tandem, help spur the development of more sustainable alternatives for a not-particularly-cool-or-trendy mass market.
Ross says that Chelsea doesn't need to answer questions about Monica but that Hillary does. In fact he says that Bill's prior infidelities are "remarkably pertinent" to her campaign. My immediate reaction is to dismiss this concern: The President's peccadilloes never amounted to an illegal activity, endangered national security, or slowed the markets. Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can't think of one single question to ask about the Clintons' marital life that would inform my vote. Maybe Ross will offer three questions the answers to which ought to matter to Democratic voters in the primary or American voters in the general.
I'm perplexed by this line by Dana Goldstein: "Power's comments promoted an awful stereotype of a female leader as someone who is inhumanly calculating, with no core beliefs."
Whatever you think about Power or the brouhaha over her comments, "monster" isn't a gendered criticism, is it? I suppose that Power was trying to impress (albeit off the record) that Clinton is inhumanly calculating, with no core beliefs. But I don't think that has anything to do with Clinton being a woman.
Courtesy Ross Douthat, Noah Millman offers a fictional debate between the candidates characterizing their respective "moral claims" to the convention for those who haven't been playing extremely close attention to the contest between Clinton and Obama. Those who have, however, may find the let-the-best-candidate-win spirit ultimately lacking in verisimilitude. Clinton threatened to sue the Texas Democratic Party when it seemed that Obama would overtake her. The Clinton campaign even went so far as to float a trial balloon about appealing to pledged delegates.
Millman's exercise is more useful in explaining the cases put forward by the candidates' respective supporters. The candidates themselves have not made their cases so straightforwardly—actually, one of the candidates has not. Which is fine; in fact, one almost hears chagrin in Obama's voice when he says that he won't go negative, and while it isn't negative campaigning per se to call for Clinton to release her tax records it is certainly harder ball than he's played so far.
With luck the rest of the primary won't see the candidates straying much further from Millman playing-nice into accusations (and soundbytes) that will prove to haunt the candidate in the general. But that's just wishful thinking—of course Clinton will go harder and nastier, party be damned.
Barack Obama is the sole candidate to provide a white paper on the arts. His position proves lacking in specifics and overly focused on education. To this end, the paper recommends that once elected President, Obama will:
Obama's further positions more directly address the role of arts in his vision for the nation. Specifically, as President, Obama will:
The last item in the paper, however, gets specific:
Free of charge I'll list two more concrete goals that come to mind—one that might be achieved simply with the President's support and one that represents a more ambitious charge:
These changes have essentially put an end to partial giving over the last two years. As President, Obama should re-incentivize this important mechanism for placing private art in the public trust.
A Department of Culture would likely aggregate responsibilities now held by the Department of State and the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. It would be much more than the sum of its parts, a signal to the nation's citizens and peers. With the creation of a Department of Culture, the President could announce an ambitious plan to correct a serious oversight: the lack of Arabic speakers ready, able, or willing to work in government. A Department of Culture, created and endowed by a President with a serious approach to global conversation, could start to do the job that Karen Hughes by her lonesome couldn't do.
Fall in love with Ann Althouse all over again. Sheesh.
The Daily Texan, newspaper for my alma mater, endorses Hillary Clinton. Fair enough—but really?:
But during Thursday's debate, Obama made a major gaffe in incorrectly stating that he had received endorsements from every major newspaper in Texas. We may not be considered a "major" paper to many, but we represent a crucial constituency of close to 50,000 young and enthusiastic voters, and we've been scrutinizing every move of the candidates leading up to today's endorsement. Sure, Obama took many under his spell when he graced our city with his presence early in his campaign, but we think he prematurely considered his work in Austin done.Aw come on you whiners! Obama wouldn't give you tickets so you're going to prove him wrong after the fact about saying he'd snagged every major newspaper endorsement?We've taken into account our communication with each campaign as an indication of how each candidate's government would function. Upon finding out the debate would not be open to students, Obama's campaign told us there was nothing they could do to get more students into the debate, whereas the Clinton camp was sympathetic in offering assistance. This makes us wonder how far Obama would go for us as president.
That is a lyric in need of a good a home. Feel free to drop it into a caring and particular slow jam, one that captures the groovy kind of love between a presidential candidate and his lobbyist.
I for one think this story does John McCain no favors, even if the New York Times clearly didn't get the goods and is never able to follow through. The way the right deals with this, or any brewing scandal, is by decrying it immediately as another example of the perfidies of the liberal, mainstream, insider-obsessed media run amock. The right doesn't wait for the other shoe to drop—the right chops both feet off at the ankles.
Though the GOP and its sympathizers know when and how to deploy the conservative bluster machine, will they? In a post titled "A Lesson for John McCain," Michelle Malkin writes: "If you lie down with MSM dogs, you wake up with stories like this." I think that if the right doesn't form a unified defense for McCain there's a risk that McCain's straight-talk enchantment over the media will be broken. Therefore I think it's highly likely that McCain's straight-talk enchantment over the media will be broken.
UPDATE: Snark aside, I'm with Yglesias: This is a loathsome move on behalf of the Times. It's innuendo as reporting and I'd be outraged if McCain were my man. McCain has a substantive scandal on his hands related to Iseman and corruption, so the paper of record doesn't need to resort to wink-wink, nudge-nudge allegations in order to report a shady discovery.
UPDATE II: Spencer is calling (well, fictionalizing) Huckabee for McCain's Vice President. With those shadowy allegations of an affair sure to eat up headlines, McCain will need the light of Huckabee's virtue more than he will need a Wall Street–vetted veep.
Obama campaign poster for the March 4 Texas primary by the Date Farmers (Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma)
Just in time to remind us that the Texas primary is not over yet and Western-hemisphere Communist imagery hasn't fallen out of fashion just because Castro's left office. This nifty campaign poster comes courtesy of California's Upper Playground, who has made some limited-edition screenprints available for purchase, proceeds of which will benefit other artists who are creating materials to support Obama's campaign. Which is sort of like giving to the Obama campaign itself.
Sorry to be so short lately. Here's something I thought I'd pass along: More people have personally seen or felt the presence of a ghost than approve President Bush's job performance. Which is in the basement. Where the ghosts live.
National Journal contributing editor Chuck Todd is saying on MSNBC right now that that given the incredible margins of Obama's victories tonight, Clinton will need to take Texas and Ohio by 60 percent at least.
What an exciting night! For reasons not least of which being that my Air-O-Swiss Ultrasonic Humidifier 7135 arrived today.
Virginia exit polls show Obama leading among nearly every voter cohort. Seemingly the only thing Virginians like better than Barack Obama is personalizing plates.
Photo by Matt Wright
Read Marc Ambinder on the Texas primaucus. It warms my heart to see that in a primary system that's funky nationwide, Texas has nevertheless carved out an especially screwball way of doing things. Obama fans may take heart: All the talk of the race coming down to Texas and Ohio ignores the fact that they are different states with very different methods for choosing delegates. Ambinder (emphasis added):
[T]here aren't any delegates awarded to the winner of [Texas]—no statewide bonus delegates, nothing. For another, a third of the delegates will be chosen through a complicated caucus system.So the state senate districts are determined by some equation factoring the performances of John Kerry and Chris Bell. (This doesn't quite make sense, since Kerry ran in 2004 and the last gubernatorial contest was in 2006, but I guess that the math accounts for the disparity.) That "liberal third party challenger" is Kinky Friedman, bless his heart, that old hellraiser. Ambinder needs to know that in the primary, those voters who supported Friedman (and Nader before him in 2000) have all glommed onto the "Paulistinian" plight. The white vote will not split evenly: Ron Paul will siphon voters from Obama in the most liberal, delegate-rich districts.* And as Chris Hayes learned the hard way, it's unwise to forget about Mike Gravel.And instead of proportional allocation by congressional district, the rest of the delegates will be proportionally allocated by state senate districts. George W. Bush's '04 performance really changes the math. That's because the number of delegates allocated in those districts are based on how well (or poorly) John Kerry did, as well as the performance of the last Democratic gubernatorial candidate (who himself had votes taken away by a liberal third party challenger.)
The delegate-rich districts are the most heavily liberal state senate districts. According to this calculation, they're in Austin and in two of the most concentrated African American parts of the state. Advantage: Obama.
Clinton will get plenty of support from Latino voters, but they tend to be more spread out and thus will see their votes somewhat diluted in the 31 separate primaries. In order to "win"—both enough delegates and statewide, you need to organize what amounts to caucus-like campaigns in each of these districts.
The white vote in Texas will probably split, with Obama taking men and Clinton taking women. Though Latinos make up a slightly larger share of the electorate than African Americans, they tend to vote in lower proportions.
The process has two steps. First, folks vote. 126 delegates will be accorded proportionally via state senate district. Then, when polls close, they caucus in more than 1,000 precincts.
Be that as it may, the Lone Star Primaucus sounds to be better news for Obama than the Ohio primary. His campaign made the decision to send the South Carolina team there, and may their efforts not be wasted. The last poll, conducted in January, is not emboldening—with Clinton at 48% and Obama at 38%—but there have been momentum-shifting contests since then and polls don't necessarily tell the story in a primaucus contest.
Needless to say it will thrill me to no end to see this contest come down to Texas (and Ohio). If Obama shaves even a nominal victory from Clinton's delegate edge, there will be barbecue. I find the notion so distasteful that we might effectively emerge from the primary contest with a draw, with the candidate to be selected then by backroom bargaining, intra-party intrigue, and superdelegate shuffling, that I'm definitely holding out hope for that queer Texas orneriness to see this contest finished. Hook 'em hope! Remember the Alamo!
* Note that the Texas system is a semi-open primary. Paul supporters will need to declare before entering in the booth that they wish to vote on the Republican ballot (no matter how or whether they're registered with the parties). Two things could cost Paul votes: ignorance of Paul's party status (he's not the head of the Re-Love-Ution party or however you write that) or distaste for voting on the GOP ticket (after all, there are twenty other contests on the ballot, none of which offer an equivalent protest-option candidate for liberal dumbass college students).
UPDATE: Burnt Orange Report breaks down exactly how Texas delegates are awarded (in fewer than 5,000 words).
I don't see that Al Gore has to endorse one of the candidates merely because he is a superdelegate. He will cast his vote long after the point his endorsement would have any effect on the candidates' campaigns—all he needs to do is not call a press conference within the next few weeks. I would welcome Gore's endorsement, though, and Gore he does play kingmaker I hope he's selecting the candidate with the wisest plan on and most likely path to market caps on emissions and other reforms to curb global warming.
This is pretty funny:
though I think it misses the point. There is a massive population to whom this sort of language is fundamentally appealing. Many, many people respond to this category of talk about blood sacrifice, endless war, greatest generations, cultural decline, and neverending occupation. It's a weird marriage between American exceptionalism and conservative defeatism that causes some people to shake their heads, more in sadness than in anger (but also in anger) at the sorry state of America and these kids today, etc., while advocating for U.S. presences across the globe and planetary hegemony in general. Maybe that isn't exactly what McCain is selling—he seems to lack the religious component, although his candidacy will have that if he tacks on Mike Huckabee. What McCain is selling is very close to the cultural conservatism I'm thinking of. Relatedly, Yglesias: "[John McCain] appears to regard the self-sacrifice of the military man not as admirable because it helps protect and sustain a liberal society at home, but because it's actually preferable to have people's lives organized around regimentation, comformity, and sacrifice."
Tyler Green is right: A primer on the Democratic candidates' dedication to funding and supporting arts would be very useful. Naturally a prospective plan for fundings arts ranks some ways below foreign policy outlook and universal health coverage as a concern in a primary campaign. Even slim, marginal differences between the candidates on these crucial issues would outweigh in my estimation very great differences between the two vis-á-vis the arts.
Priorities noted. And that said, the political situation of the arts still matters greatly and there is an opportunity for a candidate to take a leadership role in communicating to the nation and to the Congress what those issues are. So I'll agree with Green's tentative proposition: It's both worthwhile and timely for the arts community to debate and identify three federal/national policy issues that we want to see a Democratic candidate embrace. Three that come to mind would be the estate tax, public art, and local access.
The first one I'll be discussing in a piece on a new exhibition at the Phillips Collection, "Degas to Diebenkorn: The Phillips Collects". I don't want to scoop myself so some of those comments will have to wait for the time being. I've debated the value of publicly funding art at every libertarian happy hour I've ever attended, so I feel familiar with the for and against arguments on that score. Local access is a more loosey-goosey category but I think it's important to discuss art as it happens beyond the coasts—and pace the conventional wisdom it's in the flyover country where things like National Endowment of the Arts grants have their greatest impact.
More to come.
I've been too tied up on the phone today to do much writing, but I did manage a quick pun. Fierce head-nod to Spaq for the link.
I'm in over my head with work. Go read Marc Ambinder about how inside DNC baseball may wind up deciding the Clinton/Obama contest after all. It seems grossly unfair that Florida and Michigan delegates could be considered after the states moved ahead with early primaries under the full knowledge (assented by all the Democratic candidates) that delegates from those states would not be credentialed if they did so. Can't Howard Dean do something equally unfair to ensure an outcome that preserves DNC rules/the primary schedule as it stands?
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970.
Nancy Holt, widow of Robert Smithson, has sent a note around alerting people to a proposal before the state of Utah that would permit oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake near the site of Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
Here's a map showing the proposed location for the drills:
And here's another map showing where the Spiral Jetty stands relative to the drills:
Gunnison Island is the mile-long float of land in Gunnison Bay, for reference. That puts the nearest drill easily within two to three miles of the Jetty and would mean for infrastructure, roads, construction, and noise within sight of the famous Earth artwork.
I'd draw in arrows to make the sites clearer, but the window for consideration on this contract is narrow and drawing to a quick close. Protest should be lodged with Jonathan Jemming at (801) 537-9023 or jjemming@utah.gov by close of business today (7 p.m. EST). If you call or write to complain, refer to application #8853.
Link, email, call, and write. Roads and industry threaten to undermine the work. The site for the Jetty was chosen for being remote, austere, inaccessible, and useless. Call or write now if you'd like to keep it that way.
Download the contract in PDF by clicking here.
CORRECTION: Gunnison, not Guttison.
I know that G.p isn't your first stop for political commentary, but I'm happy to refer you to sources that ought to be. For example: Dana Goldstein on Edwards's supporters in the wake of his campaign.
Color me surprised that Edwards isn't throwing his support behind Obama immediately. But by holding onto his margin of delegates for the time being, he can continue to impress upon Clinton and Obama the fact that they need to talk about issues Edwards cares about—if only to impress him.
I'll disagree with what Matthew Yglesias writes here and point to the post just below it. Politically there may not be a vast difference between Clinton and Obama, or at least, both candidates have given themselves sufficient wiggle room that whatever those differences are aren't likely to play out beyond the rather vague horserace indicators, like when one candidate stands and the other doesn't during the President's State of the Union.
Electorally, though, the candidates promise very different elections. If Obama wins the primary, breathless Obamafandom dies instantly among conservative pundits—but so does mouthbreathing Clintonhatred disappear among the base, the dragon having been vanquished. Rabid hatred isn't so transferable as the right might wish. There would be frightening room for unforced errors from the untested Obama campaign, but beyond the crass racist appeal (hints of which we've already seen) and I would even imagine in spite of the racist blunders from the Imuses and so on who won't be able to keep their mouths shut during a general election (which would affect the right's appeal to the middle), whatever conservative conventional wisdom emerges on Obama cannot hope to match in terms of temper or pervasiveness the right's standard lying line on the Clintons, built up from the hardened bilious secretions of a fevered conservative organ that has brooded in its indigestion for more than a decade.
On the right, then, we have McCain—who remains on every issue (except neverending war) the least conservative candidate to vie for 2008—whose paradoxical strategy depends on appealing to independents who fundamentally disagree with what he's saying, that is, with the rhetoric he has tailored for a base that is turned off by him. He presumes quite rightly that the press will hide his seams, but I'd think that Obama would compete for some of those "maverick" votes that make up McCain's center/right compromise candidacy even as the base, with no Clinton candidacy to contemplate, wipes the foam from its mouth and stays home.
Clinton energizes McCain, whereas Obama draws from McCain—granted, for reasons that have no resemblance to the actual differences between Clinton and Obama, but nevertheless.
The inestimable Jason Linkins, advocate for freedom and keytars for all men, asked some writers (including your correspondent) to share their favorite State of the Union memories. The Huffington Post has compiled them for your approval.
Cloverfield is a good movie, y'all.
Spencer has a whopper of a summary piece in the newly launched Washington Independent on the state of U.S. interrogations. Here's a snippet:
[T]he program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.Read on about the Polygraph Unit, where "employees—who were not case officers or intelligence analysts—would perform the closest thing to interrogations as existed institutionally in CIA." Not exactly a professional Inquisition the Bush administration is running. The thing that the report makes clear is that there isn't any dominant philosophy about interrogation. You have on the one hand the Bush administration claiming that harsh interrogations produce results, committing to a sort of consequentialist defense of its policies. It's hardly clear whether CIA interrogators agree but it's also not clear that there is polarization on the issue. As Spencer writes, "The former senior CIA official rejected rejected the idea that behavioral scientists know more about interrogation than interrogators. 'Some of these people are like sex experts who know 80 ways to make love but don’t know any girls,' he said."In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA's interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.
Worse still, the interrogators can't seem to tell the girls from the terrorists, so you wind up with the CIA wasting time—and the Bush administration blowing political capital and international goodwill—on detainee interrogations that produce no valuable information. Meanwhile, the Bush administration doesn't identify this situation as a problem to fix—the only question they bother to address is the legality of torture (perfectly legal, they say). They're fixing the CYA, not the CIA.
At the risk of making a glib observation on an important holiday: The design of the forthcoming Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial leaves something to be desired. By emphasizing the accomplishments of the larger Civil Rights movement and that era's actors, the monument signals a confusion about its purpose. For example, the plaza's upper walkway is given over to 24 niches—"naves of reflection", each one commemorating the lives lost along the way to equality. Several are left blank, a poignant reminder that MLK's work remains undone—yet the implicit suggestion that others may give up their lives before King's dream is realized is macabre. The tragic losses in the struggle for freedom deserve commemoration, but losses don't tell the entire story of the Civil Rights movement. Nor should one memorial seek to tell the entire story of Civil Rights in the first place. Encapsulating King's singular achievements and great contributions is goal enough for one monument.
The design looks to be both broad and literal, offering a number of elements drafted from quotes from MLK's impressive oratorical record—including a "Mountain of Despair" and a "Stone of Hope". (Both of these famous metaphors King used are illustrated in literal terms, appearing as significant sculptural/architectural features.) Like the World War II Memorial, this design is all too aware of its audience and how it will be used. That a memorial should also be a sort of park might be justified, in this case, by its location along the tidal basin. For any other use, it should be obvious that the site should include places where tourists can get off their feat.
But a monument to King shouldn't be so practical. It should be iconic. It should strive to give some sense of the largeness of the man himself.
Today while I worked watched the Wizards hand it to the Mavs (where was that explosive bench, Dallas?), players and NBA associates spoke about King's legacy. Some players spoke about their parents making them watch King's speeches or listen to recordings of his homilies. That seems significant to me. Realizing King's metaphors in granite doesn't speak to his gravity as a speaker, and his memorial ought to pay homage to this particular gifts. He was the most gifted narrator in the history of this nation, a true uniter, and so on. This is a fussy memorial that encourages you to find your own solitary rapport with his message and that doesn't basically reflect the man.
Somewhat related: To celebrate MLK Day, TMC is showing Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep tonight at 8:00 p.m. and then again at 12:30 a.m. It is one of the most beautiful films you'll ever see and I'm ecstatic that it has been so rediscovered. Via Kottke, courtesy of le Cath.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is hosting a panel on Wednesday on how candidates for the 2008 U.S. presidential contest are ballooning Islamophobia in a crass appeal to voters. I couldn't think of a single example and couldn't make heads or tails of this, until I remembered that the presidential contest also includes the Republican primary. Right, those guys.
Juan Cole, a longtime favorite read, will be discussing the fear-for-votes issue; here's hoping that he's open to speaking off-message, too, and winds up lingering on Shiite and Sunni cultural and societal realignments in Iraq, which I believe is one of his special areas of study, concerning information that is a little harder to come by than fearmongering on Hannity & Colmes.
Fretting over Islamophobia. That's how I'll be spending my twenty-eighth birthday. Who says the late 20s aren't wild! I do worry that I'm getting this all wrong, though. Aren't I supposed to be developing irrational fears about the other as I age? Meta fears about their representation in public rhetoric doesn't seem to suffice.
Kieran Healy, commenting on the UK's national debate on informed versus presumed consent on organ donation proposed by Gordon Brown:
Cadaveric organ procurement is an intense, time-sensitive and very fluid process that requires a great deal of co-ordination and management. Countries that invest in that layer of the system do better than others, regardless of the rules about presumed and informed consent.Healy also writes, "I think that the main effect of a change in the law, if it happens, will be as a public signal to prospective donors (and their next of kin) that the socially accepted default option on donation has shifted from 'Ask permission' to 'You have to object.'" Moreover, it makes it easier for leaders to invest in coordination and management without seeking permission from or being stymied by opposed political interests. A law that makes it easier for hospitals to transfer organs without actively seeking consent signals permission for leaders to fund these programs without actively seeking consent (any more than is already vested in them). I wouldn't say rules "regardless"—the rules make rights.
I approve of presumed consent and hope that our society endorses that outlook, but as I grow older and superstition seeps into my mind, I find myself looking at that donor symbol on my driver's license warily. I do not believe in an afterlife, but I have some slippery notions about the aesthetics of death (which are mostly informed by a passage from the Aeneid). As wolf-faced crazy as that sounds, it's true, issues of propriety continue to have a strong hold over my beliefs about burial and death rights (such as they are) and I think a lot about taking myself off the organ donor's list.
I understand that when I buy things at the grocery store, graphs at universities in fifty states erupt in a fit of activity, as demand curves race to intersect with supply lines. But my knowledge of the hows and whys of this arcane phenomenon is extremely limited. My economist friends will tell you that they've enjoyed a meal ticket whenever I've needed to understand things like derivatives markets. Beyond the smattering of economic facts I've gleaned from these friends over dinner (for example, I know that this constitutes an exchange of goods for services), I'm the last person that any voter should consult when it comes to assessing a candidate's financial principles.
But when the voter's a member of the immediate family, it's a different matter. As the son who lives in the Nation's Capital, my parents depend on me to parse the debates that they see on the news. Well, that's not quite right—typically they depend on me to yell at them for being gullible when they read me slanderous news accounts from e-mail forwarded by my aunt. This week, though, I've played political consultant, fielding questions left and right (and about left and right) concerning the candidates and their positions as my parents' interest in the topic reaches its winter solstice.
For the most part I merely try not to raise my voice when I'm explaining that B. Hussein Obama isn't a Wahhabist terrorist. You'd think that Google would be able to answer all these questions, but the forwarded emails are smarter than that; one that I fielded recently suggested that the intel had been vetted via snopes.com—where you'll in fact learn that Obama was not sworn in on a "Kuran," should you bother to check after you've been assured you don't need to.
This isn't to say that my folks are rubes—just like everyone else, their understanding of the issues is predicated upon their media consumption habits. They just don't consume a whole lot of media about politics, and the information they do receive comes from unreliable sources.
Yesterday, though, I found myself debating a substantive issue with my mother, who (along with my dad) tends to vote on values issues. She approves Obama, for all the dirt she's received about him, but she thinks she should stick with the candidates she's more comfortable with: Mike Huckabee. Southerner, Republican, former governor, Baptist, rarely associated with Wahhabism. The issue that places her firmly in Huckabee's camps is his proposal to eradicate income tax and establish a (what is it? Thirty-odd percent?) national sales tax.
That strikes Mom as eminently fair, even though it's not in her best economic interests (folks are both retired). In response I decided to go for the nuclear option and explained, authoritatively, that Huckabee's plan amounted to regressive taxation. Far from impressed, however, my mother didn't know what I was talking about. Neither did I, I realized.
How do you explain, without using words like "Rawlsian" or reading aloud from Brad DeLong's archives, that flat tax plans that seem so simple and fair in fact shift the economic burden from rich to poor? Another word that isn't so self-evidently clear as I'd long believed: "burden". I stammered on for a spell about pies and proportions, arguing that in life, some people are delivered small personal pan pizzas whereas the lucky get the extra-large meat lover's. It went downhill from there:
Mom: But it's fair if everyone's giving up the same percentage of pizza!I passed the question along to my political-journalist betters, but I ask you: Is there an easier analogy I'm missing, some clearer and cleverer rhetorical path to progressive indoctrination?
Me: But then poor people don't have enough slices left to meet their basic pizza needs!
UPDATE: I don't know that Mom will thank me for it, but I am getting a lot of responses. A few heavyweight economists responded to a bleg on the cabalistic journalists' email network (no, really, it exists; I believe Ezra Klein is the admin), one saying that rich people don't spend, so under a fair tax unemployment rises. Julian Sanchez wrote me with a wealth of devil's advocacy. And Yglesias offers a good point and illustrates it with a detestable celebrity.
Things like this make me worry for the safety of the Democratic frontrunner.
(Via comments on Obama's facebook page)
Wars should be safe, legal, and rare. When the United States does go to war, it should be under the authority of Congress, with every care taken to protect our troops while they're gone and after they return, and war should only ever be the option of last resort. To my mind Barack Obama's greatest appeal is in his unqualified critique of imperial war powers. I believe that he offers a real promise to reclassify war as our nation's response to clear and present dangers, not vague and foreseeable conflicts of interests. And putting a candidate in the White House on that message is an opportunity to re-insert that message into the mainstream.
It's a little distressing then that, during his acceptance speech, Obama makes more than a few glancing references to the coalition of interests who granted his victory, including Republicans and Independents. It was as if he were speaking from a place beyond—larger than—the Democratic Party. Now, it's critical that Obama court self-proclaimed Independents, especially if he winds up facing self-styled "maverick" John McCain in the general, so I don't begrudge him this. But part of his great appeal to me is the unique opportunity he affords to reform the Democratic Party as its leader.
That's about what I can say in the way of critique of his victory speech last night. In any other respect, it was thrilling. You owe it to yourself to watch the speech if you missed it last night. What can I say? There was a part that gave me goosebumps. He seems like a leader from a different age. He absorbs interesting things that you might say about him before you can so that what you end up saying sounds wistful and cliche.
I can't help but think of this classic exchange:
Tyrone: [ . . . ] Speaking of Obama, I need to get t-shirts printed up to sell.Speaking of t-shirts, where's Mike Huckabee's?John: I can do that on the web. What do they say?
Tyrone: Don't You Dare Kill Obama
John: How about Don't You Dare Kill Obama (... and we know you're thinking about it)
Tyrone: Niiiiice.
John: Or You Kill Obama and WE WILL BURN SHIT DOWN
[Huckabee gag via the Associate.]
Dan Flavin, untitled (to a man, George McGovern) 2, 1972.
As a nation turns its lonely eyes to DiMaggio Des Moines, one can't help but consider how remarkable it is that so much change should be collapsed into a single time and place. A second- or third-place finish shouldn't spell doom for any of the Democratic candidates, but it will pave the likely way for the winner. Coming as this primary does now just days into the new year lends it a significance above and beyond that it gained in 2000, when John Kerry steamrolled his way to victory and never looked back after squashing Howard Dean in Iowa. It's hardly desirable to lend so much decisionmaking authority to some marginal fraction of a state whose population is already low. But you look forward to the light at the end of the tunnel that you have, not the one you want.
And now that that light's here, it's easy to forget that the last four years have felt so desperate and dark. Reading Yglesias's post on David Simon's The Wire and despair makes me that hope is a kind of hindsight. It's a mechanism, just a way to assess disappointments and frustrations and deal and continue. Simon might be the sort to say that one can't look back because the hits never stop coming. "The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment." That sounds like the conclusion that pere Roth's character draws in The Plot Against America, and which he holds to until the very end, despite the novel's tidy finish—which Roth writes with nearly comic ease, like tying a shoe's laces. It doesn't sound to me like a copout, either. Pere Roth got it right in that book. Things didn't work out fine in the end though it appeared that they did: those dark portents weren't false even if circumstances never conspired to raise a fascist flag over America. And the politicians and journalists and critics who have shown how the Bush administration has transformed the nation in dangerous ways are as right as Moishe the Beadle, even if that danger is never totally realized. Isn't hope the wrong response, isn't that tantamount to not quite admitting the nature of the threat? And yet of course it is impossible to go around feeling maximally despairing all the time, and if there's any truth circumscribed by the feelings that we have when we are not concentrating and the things we do when we are not provoked, it's not warranted to fret forever.
Far be it from me to defend the death penalty as it's practiced today, but I'm frustrated by today's New York Times article on capital punishment in the state of Texas. The Times reports:
This year's death penalty bombshells — a de facto national moratorium, a state abolition and the smallest number of executions in more than a decade — have masked what may be the most significant and lasting development. For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, more than 60 percent of all American executions took place in Texas.In fact nothing has changed about the rate or the application of the death penalty in Texas, except that they slowed somewhat. So what's the development? Nor is it honest or edifying to hang the whole article on that 60 percent figure—which is jarring, even blindly horrifying, but not meaningful without controlling for state population and murder statistics.
There are vastly many more people in Texas than in any of its peer states that assign capital punishment. There are vastly many more murders in Texas than in any of its peer states that assign capital punishment. Comparing the number of executions in Texas with the number in South Dakota dramatically understates the fact. Death penalty rates are better for comparison's sake.
A study performed by Cornell University in 2004 found that Texas assigns the death penalty at a rate lower than the national average (2 percent versus 2.5 percent). The most death penalty-prone states were not Texas or Florida, but rather Oklahoma (6 percent) and Nevada (5.1 percent). In part this rate disparity owes to Texas's sentencing standards. In order for the death penalty to be assigned, a crime must meet certain objective criteria (scroll down). For example, when a police officer or firefighter is murdered, when a child under age 6 is murdered, or in the case of multiple murders. Subjective criteria—the "heinousness" of a crime, for example—are not considered. Texas's sentencing standards are those that tend to find sympathy among even moderate opponents of the death penalty.
The speed with which the state carries out capital punishment, however, finds no quarter among sensible observers. Both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the Texas Fifth Circuit are prosecutorially oriented; a state prosecutor explained to me today that there are no is only one defense lawyer serving on the Court of Criminal Appeals. The speed of the system is aggressive, as critics point out, and is certainly out of step with the current national mood. (Indicators of which include the so-called national moratorium—although it is no such thing. The Supreme Court has merely stayed every execution by way of lethal injection that has come across its desk. A formal SCOTUS moratorium would have delayed the hasty execution of Michael Richard; the "de facto" moratorium did not.)
The Times: "The death penalty developments that have dominated the news in recent months are unlikely to have anything like the enduring consequences of Texas' vigorous commitment to capital punishment." True for the convicts put to death, of course; true for the families of their victims, I would imagine. In other respects, this is a dramatic statement. The state's execution of executions is impressive and awful, the product of a pervasive political problem that inflects the justice system. Its devotion to the death penalty, however, is truly average.
Ezra Klein on the sharp uptick in cloture votes under this Congress:
When minority Democrats sought to slow the Republican agenda by asserting filibuster power far more infrequently, Republicans convinced the media to tar them as "obstructionists" unwilling to permit "yes-or-no votes." Conversely, the Democrats, facing a much greater display of intransigence, have been deemed ineffectual by the media, and the situation has been represented as if they are inexplicably failing to pass their agenda, rather than watching the Republicans act to block it.Why on earth don't majority Democrats hand minority Republican
