Month: October 2007

A reader writes:

I’m currently reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro, probably the definitive biography of Robert Moses, and came across this passage, referring to one of Moses’s first political battles, a battle over eminent domain in Long Island, that struck me:

"If ends justified means, and if the important thing in building a project was to get it started, then any means that got it started were justified. Furnishing misleading information about it was justfied; so was underestimating its costs.

Misleading and underestimating, in fact, might be the only way to get a project started…But what if you didn’t tell the officials how much the projects would cost? What if you let the legislators know about only a fraction of what you knew would be the projects’ ultimate expense?

Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you had spent it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted, and that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been misled, that would mean that they hadn’t investigated the projects thoroughly, and had therefore been derelict in their own duty…Once a Legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it."

Will he throw his support to McCain or Giuliani? If Giuliani, a big deal. Why not Huckabee?

A new line of greeting cards – "for the pretentious ass who’s never wrong". 

We’re Arabs. The travails of getting work as a non-Muslim actor in the Middle East. It’s gotten a lot worse.

In a rapidly warming world, everyone wants some ice. The Brits are now making their move. They’re not the only ones.

Matt notices a slight shift in rhetoric in Bush’s arguing yesterday that the US must act to prevent Iran even having the knowledge to make nuclear bombs:

Were you to want to use military force against the Iranian nuclear weapons program tomorrow, you’d run into the problem that there’s nothing there. If you define the threshold down to some kind of war on knowledge, however, you put yourself in a position where maybe you can define the centrifuges Iran already has as constituting the knowledge they must be denied or at least a program to obtain the knowledge. Thus you have, on the level of rhetoric though not international law or sound diplomacy, the justification for military action.

My own sense – and, of course I do not know for sure – is that the decision to bomb Iran under this president has already been made. It has been made by Bush and Cheney. It was probably made months ago. Nothing – no facts, no arguments, and certainly no democratic or constitutional processes – will be allowed to come in the way of this. The public arguments are just an attempt to provide some rationale for what will happen, and are interesting solely as a means to detect what is actually going on behind the scenes. We have no role here. There was one accountability moment, remember, which was November 2004.

And when the Decider makes the decision, his putative heir, Giuliani, will declare that any opposition to it is a function of cowardice or masochism or treason. The military will be placed in the awful position of having to obey orders that are constitutionally unlawful. Fred Kaplan mulls the scenario here. In the next sixteen months, in other words, we may face a constitutional crisis that is no less grave because we can see it coming. I pray I’m wrong. Since these decisions are made in total secrecy, we have no way of knowing. But it seems to me that such a grave step would be extremely reckless without a full Congressional debate.

An American success-story in China.

Berthoud, Colorado, 4.55 pm.

Cillizza has some thoughts. Meanwhile, Lowry is urging McCain and Giuliani to think about quitting Iowa.

Heilbadheiligenstadt, Germany, 10 am.