Month: January 2009

Dan Drezner, Marc Lynch, Tom Ricks, David Rothkopf, and Stephen Walt have fancy new digs at Foreign Policy.

More fat cars by artist Erwin Wurm here.

A promising start at Obama’s OLC. Imagine: a presidency concerned to uphold the rule of law. Only a couple of weeks left of the protectorate.

Marc Lynch analyzes Maliki’s trip to Iran:

Maliki’s friendly trip to Tehran and chat with Khamenei are important signals. But I’m not highlighting it in order to fan any kind of hysteria or outrage. In fact, I think it’s a potential positive if managed well. The idea that this Iraq could be free of Iranian influence has always been an odd fantasy, and Iran has always cultivated a wide portfolio of Iraqi allies and partners far beyond the Sadrists upon which American attention tends to focus (their closest ally, of course, has always been ISCI, the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq — something else they share with the U.S.). As the incoming Obama administration contemplates direct engagement with Iran — and Iraq prepares for a series of elections and transitions, while Iran prepares for its own Presidential election — a constructive relationship between Baghdad and Tehran is hardly the worst development imaginable. Depending on how it’s managed, that is…

Bob Kaplan is unillusioned about the huge risks involved but says we have no choice but to go along and hope for total destruction of Hamas as leverage for future negotiations with Iran. I have to say that the logic of his broader argument strikes me as a good one for containment, not aggression. But there are many factors in play – elections in Israel, Iraq and Iran soon – that will doubtless force all of us to keep re-thinking.

Kudos to Jimmy Wales for raising a cool $6 million to keep Wikipedia ad-free (what ads? – ed.) This made me chuckle:

Wikipedia bills itself as the free online encyclopedia anyone can edit. And while indeed that is true, do you ever wonder who does the bulk of the work?  … Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it’s actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."

A strategy to make all of New England a marriage-equality zone by 2012.

In defense of Somalia’s pirates.

SUV and truck sales surge. Rapier sighs:

If people are going to flock back to gas guzzlers instead of using their extra pocket money to pay down their debt, then I would rather gas prices go ahead and recover. Based on the trends in vehicle sales, I am sure I will see that wish fulfilled before too long.

"Some people are p-ssed off at [Americans for Tax Reform President] Grover [Norquist]. Some people are p-ssed off at the Conservative Steering Committee. Some people are p-ssed off at [current RNC chair] Mike Duncan. Some people are p-ssed off at social conservatives. The social conservatives are p-ssed at leaders in Congress. Everyone is basically p-ssed," – a Republican consultant who has worked with the RNC on the leadership contest.