Month: November 2008

It’s now in the dictionary. Feh. Appleyard claims it for Auden. Heh.

Steve Benen and A.L. want Spitzer to have a place in the Obama administration. Benen:

Do we have to exclude Spitzer from addressing the issues on which he has considerable expertise? Issues that have nothing to do with an unrelated sex scandal?

The discarded foreskins of babies are now being used cosmetically:

This summer, Karen, a surveyor, agreed to have her face injected with millions of microscopic new skin cells, cultured from babies’ foreskins, as part of a trial into a new cosmetic procedure.

Hope your breakfast is sitting well with you. A primer on The Dish’s long campaign against circumcision here. And an innovative business card idea for circumcizers.

The NYT has National Review’s traffic at 788,000 unique visitors and The Weekly Standard’s at 490,000 last month. What struck me, unless the numbers are off (and in web traffic, it’s sometimes murky), is that by the standards of some blogs now, those don’t seem like big numbers. I bet Malkin or Reynolds are in the same ball-park, if not more successful. So what happens to the conservative magazine when most political debate is online and one or two single conservative blogs can have more readers than an entire brand, like Buckley’s fast-evaporating National Review or Kristol’s now-tainted Weekly Standard? Is there a shift in the balance of influence? Who is more influential – National Review or Michelle Malkin? The Weekly Standard or Glenn Reynolds?

The difference, of course, is that NR and TWS have buildings and staffs and commission and pay for articles and columns. But opinion magazines have never really paid competitively – because opinionated people are writing not just for money but for influence and for the cause.

But this applies to bloggers too of course: many of them find other ways to make money but use their blogs to help change minds or just express themselves. And they can instantly reach as many readers as NR subscribers. So the competition for the opinion-reader is intense. And the financial edge of individual bloggers with relatively no overhead and free content will surely undermine the clout of such magazines over time.

It may be that the blogosphere will kill off opinion journalism as we have known it. In so far as that might mean less groupthink, less control by a few big money machers, and lower barriers to new talent and expertise, that strikes me as pretty good news overall. Or maybe the print magazines will hang on as appendages to the online debate, as a way of milking those email addresses for money and offering a luxury product that will still be worth it. But I suspect that model works better for a monthly magazine like the Atlantic, which is more than opinion journalism, than a bi-weekly like NR, let alone a weekly like TWS. Their days may be numbered.

A reader writes:

This AP story is, to my mind, remarkably naive in the way it approaches the issues.  No one expects Obama to enter the White House and direct that prosecutions begin against his predecessors for war crimes.  That’s not the way our criminal justice system works.  Nor is an Obama attorney general going to pick the issue up.  That’s jumping to conclusions and preempting proper analysis, which is the style of the Bush Administration. 

What Obama needs to do is have a panel fully study and document what occurred–give it subpoena power, appoint eminently respected and nonpartisan figures to it, and issue strict orders to the intelligence community, the State Department, the Department of Defense to cooperate.

President Ford, for instance, in setting up the Rockefeller Commission to study CIA abuses, told the CIA and other intelligence agencies that they could not claim privilege against surrendering documents and information to Rockefeller. In his order he said he–the president personally–would make all those decisions, and if they wanted to claim a privilege, they would have to persuade him. (He also made pretty much clear that nothing was going to persuade him). That worked fine.

This will take several years. Let’s get all the seedy, dark facts on the table and let’s get some distance away from the elections, and then let’s see what the public thinks about prosecutions.

 

That seems pretty much on the mark to me.

The AP is reporting what I fully expected. It just isn’t in Obama’s interests or nature to seek prosecution of the president or many others in the Bush administration for committing war crimes. He wants to unite, heal and move forward. For him to initiate charges would seem partisan. And yet acquiescing to covering them up would be fatal. So what to do? Hilzoy proposes a special prosecutor:

This prosecutor should be someone with an unimpeachable reputation for wisdom, rectitude, and non-partisanship. (Think Archibald Cox.) He or she should be given complete independence, and should decide, without any interference from anyone in government, whether or not to bring charges. That would allow charges to be brought if they are merited, while minimizing the chances that they would be seen as partisan.

That’s better than leaving the precedent that a president can break the law and pardon himself later – especially when the law we are talking about is the prohibition on torture. But it might also be feasible for Obama to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that, in return for legal immunity in the US, could at least unearth and publicize the full evidence and records of the past eight years. We would at least know more about who authorized what and when. And in a democracy, we need to know, when such immense power is being exercised on our behalf.

Michael Shellenberger & Ted Nordhaus feel that Gore has shifted away from CO2 regulation:

We have long argued that it has been both a policy and political mistake for greens to place a higher emphasis on carbon prices and regulation rather than public investment in technology. The reason for this is simple: The order of investment and regulations matter. Investments aimed at making the technological innovations to reduce the price of clean energy alternatives should come first, as they are crucial to making future carbon regulations work. Moreover, these investments should not depend on being funded by the auctioning of pollution allowances. Gore’s shift shows what it looks like when greens go from rhetorical support for public investment as ancillary to regulating carbon to making it their central focus. Other environmental activists would be well-served by following his lead.

Avent dissents. I’m with Shellenberger and Nordhaus (and Manzi), especially facing a global depression. Innovation should always trump regulation. Because it will work better.

Eric Martin tackles what Andrew Bacevich calls the "severed the connection between military spending and all other fiscal or political considerations":

That "severing" as Bacevich terms it, renders meaningless the clamoring for "small government" and "fiscal discipline" that percolates from conservative quarters every time a Democrat inhabits the White House – even if some now rush to repudiate the Cheney claim that "deficits don’t matter."  Discretionary spending is a relatively small fraction of government outlays when you factor in real costs of operating government, spending on entitlements, financing the debt and, alas, defense spending (discretionary and non).  And yet the small government proponents bracket off defense spending and remove it from all discussions on how to reduce the size of the federal budget.  But by doing so, they have rendered the conversation moot, unless they want to really make a push to eliminate (or vastly reduce) entitlement programs.  Good luck with that.

The next few years will require a massive deleveraging of America. By that, I mean ordinary people finally paying down their insane levels of debt, the federal government beginning to undo the legacy of the most spendthrift administration since LBJ, and withdrawal of troops from Iraq by 2011. More to the point: we may have no economic choice at all in any of this. Call it the Bush straitjacket.

As of mid-September, this is what the Human Rights Campaign had donated of its own money to Prop 8:

Jeremy Pittman, the national deputy field director for the Human Rights Campaign, said his organization donated $237,409 in staff time, and collected more than $2 million dollars from donors, including the $1 million from Bastian.

Can you imagine how they calculated $237,409 in "staff time"? And notice how they take credit for "collecting" $1 million from a donor. By that time, the LDS church had donated a hefty proportion of the $16 million the Prop 8 campaign had raised – compared to the $10 million for No on 8 by then. So HRC was, once again, not exactly on the ball in the biggest civil rights struggle in the history of the gay movement. I know I’m a nutcase about them a lot of the time – but can you begin to see why?