Month: December 2008

The Economist joins the debate:

I think [that Felix Salmon and James Surowiecki] miss something about the current market for news, namely, the fact that it’s glutted. Technology hasn’t just changed the demand for newspapers, it’s also changed the supply of information. News used to be an oligopolistic business, now it’s just about perfectly competitive. Barriers to entry are minimal, and plenty of suppliers are happy to provide content at next to nothing. That’s a recipe for a big drop in price, and any organisation built on market power and rents is sure to fail in such an environment.

Does this mean that news, as a business, is dead? Not necessarily. Some papers will survive by selling things other than news—reputation, say, or exclusivity. Others will hang on until the print market shrinks enough that profitability is possible for a handful (or fewer) of national papers. Survivors in both groups are also likely to capitalise on the demand for news products that remain scarce—especially investigative reporting.

(hat tip: Tim Kane)

Joe Cao, a newly elected Vietnamese-American representative for a heavily African American district, looks like he is going to try to join the Congressional Black Caucus. Ta-Nehisi supports the move:

It’s one thing to have a Caucus specifically interested in the welfare of African-Americans. It’s another to have a private, race-based, social club. The whole "reverse discrimination" deal has about as much truck with me Newt Gingrich fear of "gay Nazis." But this fight is stupid on two counts. 1.) As Adam points, tactically, you have absolutely nothing gain. 2.) You’re just wrong.

Manzi carefully explains the limits of the idea:

A $2 per gallon a gas tax sustained for decades would surely reduce U.S. petroleum consumption somewhat, but logically by a small fraction of the difference between the U.S. and Germany. It might even be a good idea as compared to other ways to raise revenue, which is one thing it would certainly do effectively – mostly because burning a gallon of gas is so valuable to people that they’ll keep doing just about the same amount of it, even if you double the price. Of course, that’s also exactly why it’s not a very effective way to address projected global warming problems, or de-fund hostile regimes.

Joe Carter censors a post at Culture11’s LadyBlog. Will Wilkinson counters:

Man, what a huge embarrassment. This is an instance of moral stupidity. Ladybloggers: You’re on notice! You are NOT taking part in a forum where free inquiry and open debate are valued. Think twice before posting an independent thought, because your reactionary, lady-policing editor might send it down the memory hole! God forbid this blog become interesting. I know and respect a lot of people who write for C11, and I hope they’ll honor their sense of intellectual integrity and push back against a very effective attempt ruin this website’s reputation.

Carter is a Christianist. Of course, heresies have to be excised. (Hat tip: Freddie)

Dave Weigel surveys libertarians to see what they expect from Obama:

With the Bush administration ending in a frenzy of disappointment, most libertarians don’t expect much more luck with Obama, outside of a few issues involving drug policy and executive power. The debate in Washington now is on how much effort to spend trying to remake the Republican Party. "We’re fighting for the soul of the GOP," says Tanner, who adds that libertarians need to look beyond the party, at other reformers, other populists, people who won over Americans as much as Bush has lost them. "We need to seize that Ross Perot mantle of fighting against these guys."

I’m with you, guys.

This is the best rationale Caroline Kennedy supporters can come up with? Ugh:

She genuinely, cornily, wants to advance the ideas the family cares about, and she knows better than most that only so much can be accomplished through symbolism. An actual seat at the bargaining table is still more valuable. This is also the way in which her choice makes the most sense for New York, and elevates her candidacy beyond her thin résumé and mere sentiment: Kennedy’s Democratic patrician values and her power-elite connections are not negligible assets. And of course, there are all the sword-in-the-stone connotations, the political magic (fantasy?) that a new Kennedy in the Senate conjures.

I just hurled. Kennedy is not as dumb, crass or as uneducated as Sarah Palin. But she is less qualified to be a Senator than Palin. I am so sick of this nepotism. What are we, some kind of neo-monarchy? Clinton got her seat because of nepotism and now Kennedy gets it be the same methods.

It appears to have evolved into refrigerating the beach.

I should count it as a victory of sorts that Instapundit was finally forced to read the report that proves that the techniques used at Abu Ghraib – those in the photos that Reynolds once called "torture" deserving "jail or execution" – were indeed SERE techniques authorized by president Bush as commander in chief. He then argues that these techniques can only be directly linked to Bush at Gitmo, not Abu Ghraib, or in the countless other theaters of war where war crimes took place against prisoners in US custody. The trouble at Abu Ghraib, Reynolds claims, accusing me of dishonesty, was a matter of "climate". Let’s unpack this a little. It is a mercy, I suppose, that Reynolds finally cops to the fact that the president authorized the techniques at Abu Ghraib – beatings, hoodings, mock executions, stress positions, nudity and use of dogs to terrify, among others. Even he cannot deny the memos or their contents that we have discovered since then, when he is forced not to simply ignore them. He also cannot dispute that he has endorsed Jack Goldsmith’s view that the president who authorized these conscience-shocking acts was engaged in an understandable "mistake", for which he has already suffered enough, and not war crimes, subject to impeachment or prosecution. So Reynolds’ position has changed, from viewing these acts as torture deserving jail or execution to viewing them as political mistakes that should be forgiven and let be. The change is attributable to only one thing, so far as I can tell: he believes it’s torture worth jail or execution when a reservist does it; it’s a political mistake when a civilian official or friend authorizes it. If you want to see how deep the corruption among the Bushies is, look no further than a law professor making arguments as transparently unjust as these. Punish the grunts; excuse the commanders; protect the civilians who made the real decisions.

It remains an inconvenient truth, however, that, under military command, the superior officer is always responsible for the acts of those beneath his command.

When that commander-in-chief has personally authorized such techniques himself, he assumes total legal and moral responsibility for those war crimes. So even if Reynolds’ own skewed view of the report is accepted, his conclusion still doesn’t follow. Bush is responsible, morally and legally and operationally, for war crimes under his command – war crimes for which Bush refuses to take any responsibility.

But, of course, his view is skewed, as partisan propaganda often is. As the Taguba and Fay and Jones reports found, the importation of the Gitmo techniques to Iraq was directly ordered from the very top. General Geoffrey Miller was directly sent by Rumsfeld to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" it, i.e. to transport the Communist torture techniques honed at Gitmo to a theater of war that even Rumsfeld believed was subject to Geneva. Miller was ordered to take the gloves off and round up thousands of innocents for mass abuse and torture because the Iraq insurgency had taken Bush and Cheney by surprise and they responded in the only way they knew or trusted: by violence, force and torture (which we now know were the pillars of their war strategy from the first). Does Reynolds believe that the mass round-ups of Iraqis into Abu Ghraib jail were not authorized by the commander-in-chief? Does he believe that the order to get intelligence on the insurgency was invented by a few bad apples on the night shift? Does he really think that the exact same SERE techniques authorized by Bush were replicated in exquisite detail by barely literate grunts like Graner and England by some sort of telepathy or "climate"?

Well: this is what you have to believe if you are to keep defending this administration.