Month: November 2008

The ADN looks at an epidemic in Alaska:

Among the grim statistics:

• Alaska’s dropout rate, at 8 percent, was double the national average in the 2005-2006 school year, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Department of Education.

• 38 percent of today’s ninth-graders will have no high school diploma 10 years from now, according to the Alaska Commission on Postsecondary Education.

• Alaska ranks 50th, or last, in the number of ninth-graders who will likely have a bachelor’s degree in 10 years, according to the commission.

Just as well they have a role-model governor who is dedicated to the education of her own children – oh wait: Her eldest son has a history of vandalism and was given a GED on the way to Iraq; her oldest daughter was removed from high school for a mysterious length of time last year and is now about to have a baby (due December 18, Palin told us); her youngest daughter, Piper, missed school all fall because she was being carted around the country in Neiman Marcus underwear. And the governor herself, of course, couldn’t manage to stay in one college, graduated with a degree in sports journalism, cut her own town’s library funds and leveraged the town’s budget on a new sports stadium (with new house thrown in!).

Seriously: this woman is the future of Republicanism?

Saletan:

I’ve covered politics for a long time. I’ve seen shrewd polling and message-framing turn issues and elections upside-down. Eventually, I came to believe that the most potent force in politics wasn’t spin but science, which transforms reality and our understanding of it. But I’ve never seen a convergence like this. Here we have a left-leaning constituency (blacks) that has become politically pivotal on an issue (homosexuality) and is susceptible to a reframing of that issue (seeing sexual orientation, like color, as inborn) in accord with ongoing scientific research.

From prenatal hormones to genetics to birth order, scientists have been sifting data to nail down homosexuality’s biological origins. As they advance, it will become easier and easier to persuade African-Americans that being gay is a lot like being black. The lesson of Proposition 8 isn’t that blacks have stopped the march of gay rights. The lesson is that when they turn, the fight in blue America will essentially be over.

Ta-Nehisi takes issue with Saletan labeling African Americans "left-leaning":

Any writer who’s spent significant time in the suburbs of Atlanta, on the South-Side of Chicago, or here in Harlem, knows that black people aren’t "left-leaning"–they just think the GOP is racist. Surveys may show blacks leaning-left on certain issues (minimum wage? ending the war?) but take it from an actual black leftist, there is a conservative streak running through black America wider than the Mississippi. Don’t confuse "enemy of my enemy"-ism, with actual sympathy.

Sarah Palin’s former brother-in-law, trooper Mike Wooten, unethically targeted for firing by her and her husband, has now been reassigned:

The state trooper behind the abuse-of-power investigations of Gov. Sarah Palin is getting a reassignment after troopers received threatening telephone calls from Alaskans and outside the state. Public Safety Union officials say Mike Wooten has been on desk duty for his own safety in recent weeks since troopers began receiving hostile calls.

Alaska is a small and scary place at times, isn’t it?

The feared boycott by critical Shiites didn’t happen and the cabinet has approved the SOFA by a massive majority. Now: the parliament. Then: the withdrawal. The great news for Obama is that the Iraqis themselves have insisted that his fixed timetable be set in stone:

The draft approved Sunday requires coalition forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns by the summer of 2009 and from the country by the end of 2011. An earlier version had language giving some flexibility to that deadline, with both sides discussing timetables and timelines for withdrawal, but the Iraqis managed to have the deadline set in stone, a significant negotiating victory. The United States has around 150,000 troops in Iraq.

This is important because it removes from the hard right the possibility of playing the Dolchstoss card. The usual suspects – Reynolds, Hanson, Krauthammer, Kagan – will be unable to say that the chaos and mass murder that will almost certainly follow in 2010 and 2011 is Obama’s responsibility. It isn’t.

They will try to argue that Obama’s choice to withdraw has led to a victory for al Qaeda and that the Democrats have stabbed American troops in the back. (You can almost write Palin’s primary campaign message three years ahead of time.) But now that the Iraqis themselves have insisted on total US withdrawal by 2011 regardless, the neocons will not be able to play that card – or at leat play it with any credibility.

The looming civil war in Iraq will then be the Iraqis’ responsibility and Bush’s ultimate legacy in Iraq. Obama can avoid some of the blowback. And the genius of appointing Clinton as secretary-of-state is that she will have to absorb the blows of failure. Think of a possible Obama State Department offer to Clinton this way:

"You voted for this bloody war. Now you can end it."

And he will focus on the economy. Genius.

Felix Salmon questions if micropublishing is dead:

The dream of internet publishers was that media buyers would flock to a more niche medium, where they could target people much more accurately. But the problem is that media buyers, and ad sales people, get paid a lot of money: it’s just not worth their while to collaborate on a campaign which only reaches a relative handful of readers. To be successful in publishing, you need economies of scale, and that means big websites with a mass audience rather than niche blogs which need to be sold separately by expensive sales teams.

Obama is already waaay ahead of where Clinton was at this point in the cycle.

Jonathan Mahler knows that shutting down the camp won’t be easy:

Obama’s flexibility to handle the remaining detainees as he sees fit will be constrained by the manner in which they have been treated while in U.S. custody. Remember that Hamdan was chosen as the first defendant for the military commissions in large part because the prosecution thought it has a "clean" case against him—and yet on the very first day of his trial, his military judge threw out a number of his statements to interrogators, ruling that they had been coerced from him and were therefore unreliable. And that happened in a trial system effectively designed by the Pentagon to ensure convictions.

Look at it this way: Of the 200 or so detainees left on Guantanamo who have not been cleared for release (pending the necessary arrangements), the Bush administration intended to try only some 70 or 80 before military commissions. That leaves more than 100 whom it considered too dangerous to release but was not planning to put on trial. "What lies in those files that’s an obstacle to prosecution?" Waxman asks.

When Obama finds out, he may learn that his options for keeping them locked up are limited.

A reader writes:

Yesterday my girl friend and I drove to downtown San Diego to attend the wine and food festival.  We encountered much difficulty because of the No on 8 Marchers. 

Efforts at mob rule have always worried me. This great democracy is fragile and I think we do not fully realize how very small numbers of people can cause great disorder. We had an election and the majority of Californians voted to preserve the thousands of years old institution of marriage.  Demonstrations like the one I witnessed yesterday gain no sympathy from those of use who still believe the the rule of law and democratic process.

I am afraid we are going to lose this country.

Washington, DC, 8.30 am.