Month: July 2008

The Maverick’s ‘Goose’?

by Chris Bodenner
The VP buzz surrounding Romney is getting louder and louder.  The NY Times calls him McCain’s "wingman extraordinaire" on the cable circuit. Romney just announced he’s swallowing the entire $45M he borrowed for the primaries, thus taking one for the team.  And now McCain is heaping praise on Mitt and getting cozy with the whole Romney clan.  Kornacki thinks a McCain-Romney ticket "is beginning to feel as inevitable as the John Edwards buzz was four years ago."

K-Lo must be quivering.

After The Prison Boom

By Patrick Appel
Bruce Western gives reversing mass imprisonment serious thought:

….we can edge away from mass incarceration by promoting two kinds of policies: expanding support for the reentry of prisoners into society and scaling down the size of the prison population. The two steps are linked; we expand our support for ex-prisoners in the community by using incarceration more sparingly and revoking freedom less willingly. Money that we now spend on prison can be spent on treatment and jobs.

Western goes on to partially blame "America’s meager welfare state" for the huge increases in the prison population during the last 30 years. Eh, maybe. I’m more apt to fault tough on crime legislation and the war on drugs. Whatever the causes, figuring out how to re-introduce prisoners into society is going to require legislation as smart as many tough on crime laws were dumb. If reducing the overflowing prison population correlates with a spike in the crime rate, as it very well may, we could be in for another round of politically expedient but logistically disastrous tough on crime laws. Considering the current state of prisons, I’d be willing to accept a slight increase in crime in return for a more sensible prison system, but I’m not so sure the public would agree. 

Mercy Killing

By Patrick Appel

A bit of Daniel Maguire’s 1974 meditation on the right to die:

When the law imputes malice to mercy killings it is indulging in the Anglo-Saxon penchant for confusing reality with legality. Happily for the human race, legality and reality do not always coincide. That is why wise judges are needed to temper the shortcomings of the written law. That is also why the Greeks insisted on the virtue of epikeia, whereby it is reasoned that the law is too general to cover every particular case and that therefore there are valid exceptions which epikeia discovers. Epikeia discerns the primacy of the spirit over the letter of the law. It is the virtue that knows that the spirit gives life whereas the letter can be lethal.

“More Realistic”

by hilzoy

Patrick Appel noted this story earlier:

“Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.”

The Spiegel interview is here:

“SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

SPIEGEL: Is this an endorsement for the US presidential election in November? Does Obama, who has no military background, ultimately have a better understanding of Iraq than war hero John McCain?

Maliki: Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems. Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business. But it’s the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that’s where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition troops in Iraq should be limited.”

Transcription error? Reckless and unrealistic assessment by someone who hasn’t spent enough time on the ground? We report; you decide.

In all seriousness, Spencer Ackerman has a good analysis of the background (expletives altered):

“When those negotiations [on the terms of a continuing US presence in Iraq] began, the U.S. reportedly presented the Iraqis with terms so breathtaking that they’d embarrass Lord Curzon. Bush wanted unilateral control of Iraqi airspace; legal immunity for all U.S. troops and contractors; the unilateral right to arrest and detain any Iraqis his commanders desired, and for unspecified periods; and several military bases. When Maliki indicated discomfort over acting like Gaius Baltar on Occupied New Caprica, Bush gave another indication of his “friendship and cooperation” — blackmail.

All this came in a political context that Bush was either unattentive to or dismissive of. Despite spotty media coverage in the U.S., the deal prompted a massive backlash in Iraq, where basically every organized political force not part of Maliki’s government rejected it. Maliki’s allies were likely to lose the looming provincial elections already; now he had given them the albatross of clear collaborationism. And something similar was at work in the U.S.: the candidate with a clear and consistent history of opposition to the Iraq war won the Democratic primary, while the Republican candidate backed an endless occupation that he said might last a hundred or even a thousand years.

Maliki has read the tea leaves and evidently realized what the rest of us considered obvious: that the only one demanding that he turn Iraq to permanent foreign domination is a president thoroughly discredited in his own country who’ll be out of office in a few months. That president’s replacement might very well decide on a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, abrogating any deal Maliki was strongarmed into signing, at which point the U.S. would essentially be cutting Maliki off. Oh motherf*cking sh!t, Maliki surely thought, if I sign this deal, my people will run my body through the streets and hoist me from a f*cking lamppost. Not that the electricity works, but still.“

It will be interesting to see how McCain responds. Thus far, he has not been forced to explain what he would do were he forced to choose between his view that withdrawal in sixteen months, with or without a timetable, would be a disastrous move that could lead to “horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide”, and this earlier statement:

“Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because— if it was an elected government of Iraq— and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.”

Now, perhaps, he will.

***

Amusing note from Joe Klein Karen Tumulty (oops):

“Curious. The White House apparently just emailed the Reuters story linked above to its entire press list, with a subject line: “Iraqi PM backs Obama troop exit plan – magazine.” This hit my emailbox at 12:59PM, with the sender listed as “White House Press Releases.””

Song Stealing Hooligans

By Patrick Appel

David Glenn on the debate over the economics of file sharing:

Does file sharing decrease CD sales, or doesn’t it? A widely publicized study released last year by the Canadian government found that file sharing actually increases CD sales. But that study is an outlier. A majority of economic studies have concluded that file sharing hurts sales, though often to a more modest degree than the record industry would like the public to believe.

Dumbing Down The Presidency

By Patrick Appel
Sam Anderson explains why Obama’s speeches send a thrill up Chris Matthews’s leg:

In a new book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency, Elvin T. Lim subjects all the words ever publicly intoned by American presidents to a thorough statistical analysis—and he finds, unsurprisingly, an alarmingly steady decline. A century ago, Lim writes, presidential speeches were pitched at a college reading level; today, they’re down to eighth grade…Since 1913, the length of the average presidential sentence has fallen from 35 words to 22. Between Nixon and the second Bush, the average presidential sound bite shrank from 42 seconds to 7. Today’s State of the Unions inspire roughly 30 seconds of applause for every 60 seconds of speech. Although it’s tempting to blame the sorry state of things on the current malapropist-in-chief, Bush is only the latest flower (though, obviously, a particularly striking one) on a very deep weed. Our most brilliant presidents, Lim says, often work hard to seem publicly dumb in order to avoid the stain of elitism—amazingly, Bill Clinton’s total rhetorical output checks in at a lower reading level than Bush’s. Clinton’s former speechwriters told Lim that their image-conscious boss always demanded that his speeches be “more talky”; today, he’s widely remembered as a brilliant speaker who never gave a memorable speech.

Obama seems to have taken the opposite tack: He’s a Clinton-style natural who flaunts the artifice of his speeches and refuses to strategically hide his intelligence. Compared with his rivals, Obama’s skill-set seems almost otherworldly. His phrases line up regularly in striking and meaningful patterns; his cliché ratio is, for a politician, admirably low; his stresses and pauses seem dictated less by the usual metronome of generic political speech than by the actual structures of meaning behind his words. He tolerates complexity to such an extent that he’s sometimes criticized as “professorial,” which allows him to get away with inspirational catchphrases that would sound like platitudes coming from anyone else. His naïve-sounding calls for change are persuasive largely because he’s already managed to improve one of our most intractable political problems: the decades-old, increasingly virulent plague of terrible speechifying.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Tickle Fit

By Patrick Appel

Mary Beard looks at the origins of laughter:

Theorists and scientists…have shown that laughter from tickling is not quite the reflex response we often assume it to be. For a start, it is next to impossible to raise a laugh by tickling yourself (whereas you can easily make your own leg jerk by striking your patella with a hammer). It is also the case that when tickling happens in threatening rather than friendly circumstances, it doesn’t produce laughter, but screams or tears. Hence the conclusion that—while there may be some purely biological prompts to laughter…the link between tickling and laughing is largely a social one, not a reflex at all. From this stems a range of theories that go on to explain laughter as the result of evolutionary adaptation within early society. One idea is that laughing functioned as a "false alarm" device. It was a sign to primitive hominids that despite all the rumpus that other hominids were creating, this was no enemy attack but friendly knockabout.

Political Energy

By Patrick Appel
This isn’t surprising:

Asked how they feel about the fact that their choice is the party’s nominee, 50 percent of Obama’s current voters say they are “enthusiastic.” Just 16 percent of McCain’s supporters say that about his candidacy.

But the 2004 contrast is interesting:

Even in polls taken just before the 2004 election…67 percent of Bush voters said they supported him strongly, compared with just 49 percent of Kerry voters. And while 37 percent of likely Republican voters said they would be “excited” by a Bush win, just 24 percent of likely Democratic voters said they would be “excited” by a Kerry victory.