Month: January 2009

The NYT responds to Hirschorn. Henry Blodget looks at the NYT balance sheet and thinks the paper will have to cut costs. He suggests:

• Cut costs at least 20% this year and 20% next year
• Continue to raise subscription prices for the print edition
• Explore charging $80-$100 a year for a web subscription

He adds: "The first two moves are no-brainers.  The third one, we realize, is sacrilege. We’ll defend it in a future post." Web subscriptions are not going to work. Henry suggesting it makes one question the rest of his analysis.

Pissed that Obama sat down with several conservatives last night? Paul Hinderaker Mirengoff demurs:

Brooks arguably is no longer a conservative, and may well have voted for Obama, while Will has bashed President Bush and John McCain for years.

Heh.

Thomas Ricks praises a new article by H. R. McMaster, a U.S. Army Colonel who has advised Petraeus. It’s well worth reading as a guide to the limts of Rumsfeldism.

Chait makes a point:

Imagine this counterfactual: George W. Bush (or maybe a victorious John McCain) sat down before his first inauguration with Paul Krugman, E.J. Dionne, and Frank Foer. Would conservatives have reacted with the same equanimity? No, I think they’d have gone nuts. And the reason is that they wouldn’t have confidence in Bush or McCain to be surrounded by liberal ideas without being deeply influenced by them. I don’t think they’d have reacted this way if, say, a President Mitt Romney did the same thing.

And that’s why liberals aren’t having a cow.

I found the lack of liberal snittiness about last night to be a sign that Obama has us all on a learning curve. What matters is not who’s up or down, or who’s in or out. What matters is what he’s proposing to do and whether it makes sense. This is quite a change for Washington and it will take adjustment. But it maikes a lot of sense.

I mean: If you’re concerned with government before politics, as Obama is, and intellectually confident, as Obama is, you are not afraid to encounter any number of countervailing opinions. Obama isn’t afraid. Increasingly, I think his greatest strength is simply his emotional intelligence in this respect. He knows that people need to feel engaged, respected and not neglected – especially his domestic opponents and America’s enemies.

I also predict that Obama will win over the conservative intellectual elites in Washington as effectively as he did at Harvard and Chicago. He won’t win over the pure partisans. But the intellectually honest and open-minded ones? You watch.

A reader writes:

You asked (referring to 24): "Do people take this stuff seriously?"

Quite unfortunately, yes. I guess you’ve forgotten the comments of one of Justice Scalia:

"Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles . . . . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…. Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Then, "I don’t think so… So the question is really whether we believe in these absolutes. And ought we believe in these absolutes."

Pretty scary, huh?

An unidentified relative of Hamas fighter Mohammed al-Kintani mourns during his funeral in Gaza City on January 14, 2009. Israel bombed smuggling tunnels and battled fighters in Gaza today as UN chief Ban Ki-moon arrived in the region seeking to end the war on Hamas that has killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians. By Mahumd Hams/AFP/Getty.

Israel continues to prevent journalists from reaching the war zone. So we are left with testimony from Jawad Harb, who works for CARE in Gaza:

The leaflets came yesterday, telling us our neighbourhood would be attacked. The whole population of the area is terrified. We have nowhere to go. My neighbour checked at the UNRWA shelter but it was full. Overflowing. There is nowhere to go. We waited to be bombed.

The bombs came today. It was terrifying. We have nowhere to run. There was an air strike every five minutes. Thick black smoke 100m-150m away from us. People were scared, ran outside of their houses and gathered together in the street. 300-350 people in the street. The street was the safest place. If our house is bombed, we’ll get trapped and die like the people we saw on television.

My children have seen the dead bodies of children on television.

They cry, they are crying now, they are terrified. When will this end? There was screaming. It is dark and cold but most of us are still outside. My family is outside next to the house. We are terrified to go inside. 

It is quiet for 20 minutes now but we don’t know if it will start again. What if it is just a short break? We can’t take the risk. My children are shivering. It is getting so cold. Some neighbours went back inside, but they are staying on the first floor, next to the door so they can run outside. We don’t know what will come next. This is the closest it has come to our house. The neighbourhood next to ours was bombed. What do we do? We don’t know. We have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go.

(Hat tip: Change.org)

Bono forces the NYT to run a correction on his first column.

The main impression I get from the various Obama peeps and appointments and, well, vibe, is that their fundamental interest is in governing. For eight years, we had an administration interested entirely in politics. These incoming people have actually thought about what to do with respect to actual, practical problems. Joe Klein gets it:

I spent the day at the Clinton confirmation hearings and came away impressed, as always, with the woman’s sheer ability to process information. Not a missed beat, not an "I’ll have to get back to you on that…" It was several hours into the hearing that the full force of the new Administration hit me. Clinton was being asked by Senator Benjamin Cardin whether we could exert our influence on mineral-rich countries to share their wealth with their people. The Secretary of State-designate immediately brought up Botswana’s "excellent work" in this area, the education and infrastructure programs that had been funded. And I thought: Botswana? Wow. We’ve got people who are really interested in governing–who really love public service, who understand that foreign policy means more than simply issuing threats–coming back to your nation’s capital! Enthusiasm and care don’t always result in wise policy-making, but we’ve seen how fecklessness and carelessness works.

Adam LeBor tries to answer whether Israel and Hamas are guilty of war crimes. There is no question, however, that Hamas commits such crimes. They are a genocidal gang of religious nutcases. Random targeting of civilians is evil; so is using civilians as human shields. Everything my colleagues Mark Bwden and Jeffrey Goldberg say about such tactics is true.

Although I think Israel’s actions have failed some core just war tests, the operation in Gaza does not, to my mind, qualify as a war crime. What we’re debating, as LeBor points out, are three discrete incidents. Until we know all the facts, this will remain murky. But I cannot say it looks good.