Month: September 2008

Mark Bauerlein has an article on the difficulty of slow reading online. A taste:

In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, Nielsen exclaimed, "’Reading’ is not even the right word." The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines, and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the "nut" and nothing else. A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a "content blob," and they won’t read it unless they print it out. A "booklike" page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away.

Jonathan Rauch’s National Journal cover story on Bush’s legacy is well worth a read. His thesis:

Bush may go down in history as a transitional and comparatively minor figure. His presidency, though politically traumatic, may leave only a modest policy footprint. In that sense–though by no means substantively or stylistically — Bush’s historical profile may resemble Jimmy Carter’s more than Truman’s or Nixon’s. Recall that in 1980 many people wondered if the country would ever recover from Carter. Five years later, he was all but forgotten.

But if Carter had had two terms … ? Jon continues:

In other words, Bush may have accomplished something that seemed out of the question in January 2002, when he touched greatness, and in January 2007, when he touched bottom. Bush may have achieved mediocrity.

If that hypothesis sounds snide, it is not intended to. Had Bush left office at the beginning of last year, his tenure might indeed have gone down as calamitous. Winding up in the middling ranks, then, would be no mean accomplishment. Far from being happenstance, such a finish would reflect an unusual period of course correction that might be thought of as Bush’s third term.

A UCLA study assesses the success of the surge by using satellites to study light patterns in Iraq:

"Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning," said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. "By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left."

Petraeus was pushing at an open door – not that what he did wasn’t still remarkable. And so the decline in violence cannot be ascribed entirely to the surge at all:

"If the surge had truly ‘worked,’ we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods," said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. "Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing."

(Hat tip: Mark Thoma)

Nate Silver considers the Bradley Effect.

A bit from David Wise’s 1973 article on Nixon and the press:

…in Nixon’s view television ideally should serve only as a carrier, a mechanical means of electronically transmitting his picture and words directly to the voters. It is this concept of television-as-conduit that has won Nixon’s praise, not television as a form of electronic journalism. The moment that television analyzes his words, qualifies his remarks, or renders news judgments, it becomes part of the "press," and a political target.

The discussion on Real Time last night … eventually led to a real tough argument between me and Bill over religion. Yes, I’m defending people of faith:

To hire Chuck Kopp as police chief – because national Christianist forces were looking for a commitment before they helped launch her national career:

Kenai City Police Chief Chuck Kopp was a rising star in Alaska’s Christian conservative movement. He was a frequent speaker at local religious and patriotic gatherings. He was school board president of Cook Inlet Academy, the fundamentalist Christian high school in Soldotna his missionary-educator father founded. Kopp also was on the board of Port Alsworth’s Tanailan Bible Camp, also founded by his father.

Through Samaritan’s Place, Franklin Graham has been the chief benefactor of the Tanailan Bible Camp building and rebuilding a church and meeting hall and guest cabins. The evangelical scion of Alaska, Rev. Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, is on Samaritan Purse’s Board of Directors, so there’s a clear connection between Graham, Prevo and Kopp.

Only problem: Kopp was a known sexual harasser when Palin appointed him (and she knew it). But religious fanaticism and sexual acting out are not exactly strangers to one another, are they?

Barcelona, Spain, 7.30 pm.

A helpful non-partisan account of the facts behind the road to the bridge to nowhere Palin secured for Alaska.