Month: October 2009

Just a friendly reminder that for a British paper, "sources close to the administration," i.e. not in it and with no first-hand knowledge of anything … could be anyone at all. I don't know what the internal discussions are like, but I'm quite sure the Telegraph doesn't either. Maybe Obama has had a personality change overnight and is "furious". Or maybe Alex Spillius is inferring things and calling it reporting.

The Telegraph has realized that if they can use their looser sourcing standards to get links from big right-wing websites in America, they're going to do much better financially and beat their British competitors in traffic. Hence their recent penchant to hype stories based on sources no US paper would begin to credit.That doesn't mean they're wrong. It does mean a grain of salt is necessary.

(Now the Ahmadinajew story really is a scoop.)

A reader writes:

I think the title "The Case for Muddling Through" sums up why you have been blocked from completing this article. This takes nothing away from the piece as a whole, but the title could have easily been "The Case for Hurrying Up to Decide to Wait and See."

 

As someone who has written about such issues on dealine before (on a much smaller scale), that's a tough freaking position to start from. I have seen this blank page before and you know whatever you write will have the same conclusion: "I have no fucking clue and nobody else does either."

 

And to be honest, can that last line title any article written on Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran? I think so.

Who better to parse this than Jeffrey?

Juan Cole responds to a Dish reader.

[Re-posted from Sunday.]

Here's a funny and moving obit about the most characterful – and food obsessed – dogs I know:

Rosie, who died yesterday at 13, was the World’s Most Food-Motivated Dog. She won the title with a stunt modern science has yet to explain. One evening about five years ago, I returned home from a day-trip to Sydney with a notion to make a sardine sandwich for supper. I had left an unopened tin of sardines on the kitchen table before leaving for town. At least, I thought I had, but now I couldn’t find it.

Losing things is nothing new for this blogger and finding them is not his long suit. I spent a few minutes searching for the sardines, then made something else for supper.

While putting Rosie to bed later that night, I spotted the sardine can stashed among the blankets at the back of her sleeping crate. She had chewed the top off, and extracted every morsel of fish and every drop of sardine oil. The can didn’t even smell of sardines anymore.

In horror, I rushed to inspect Rosie’s mouth, expecting to find her lips and tongue shredded. Not a nick. Rosie was fit as a fiddle, and wondering when her next meal would arrive.

“Golden slumber close your eyes.” And sate your tummy.

Dusty, our eldest, is almost the same. When I got her as a tiny puppy twelve and a half years' ago, the vet told me not to worry about keeping her food intake down. I was told: puppies need lots of food, and you could even just let her eat out of the bag; she'll take what she wants and grow. This was probably the craziest advice anyone has ever given me. Barely a few inches long at the time and a few pounds, she  plowed into the bag with manic determination until she all but disappeared. I left for a few moments and returned to find that she had puked a couple of times already, eaten the puke, and started over with the food. I learned my lesson. She has been the same ever since.

Then there was the time when two friends came to visit, a gay couple one of whom had planned to propose to his boyfriend on the steps of the Supreme Court (yes, a drama queen if ever there was one) while he was visiting. They came by first and dropped their bag off and we went out to dinner. No one told me that in the bag were two large boxes of Godiva chocolates. They left the bag on the floor.

I came back early (can't remember why now). When I walked in the entire loft was an explosion of wrappers, ribbons, little bits of silver foil, ripped shards of boxes, in every corner of the room. In the middle of it, lay Dusty, bloated to almost twice her size, with a grin of ecstatic pleasure and satisfaction and chocolate smeared all over her face. After the shock, my immediate thought was panic. Chocolate can be poisonous for dogs and she'd eaten two boxes of the richest chocolate there is. I immediately tried to get her to vomit (if it ever happens to you, get a tea-spoon of salt and pour it down their throat). No luck. She seemed to need water, so I gave it to her and she just drank and drank until she looked like she'd burst. I rushed her outside and waited for the puke. No luck. I took her in to phone the animal hospital. And then it started.

It was a beagle Linda Blair – with viscous chocolate liquid projectile vomiting everywhere in sight. I went to grab her to get her outside. She decided this was a game. So yours truly spent the next ten minutes chasing a projectile chocolate vomiting beagle around my loft until every single item of furniture, every rug, and the bed was covered in what felt and looked like chocolate mucus. My low point was actually slipping in some and careening headfirst into a pile of still-warm, and very slippery chocolate goo. That's when my guests returned, to find their secret busted. But all they could do was laugh at me until they near-collapsed.

Dusty's twelve and a half now. Last week, as I prepared to leave Ptown, I took her out for a walk on the beach. There's a rock that juts into the water halfway down the beach – and since she was a baby, she has always loved to climb it and just sit there looking at the bay for a moment. She's done it many times every year since and if we are walking past that rock, she pulls me so she can clamber up. In the last year, her back knee has given out and the vet has said it would be far too difficult and counter-productive to have an operation that probably wouldn't work anyway. So she's on an anti-inflammatory and some baby aspirin and seems irritated by it but not in any real pain. But she now limps a little, and this time, even with her bad knee, she dragged me to the rock like a steam engine. She couldn't clamber up, so I lifted her.

She looked out at the sea and the sky as the wind made her beagle ears into little sails, flying back past her head. Dusty smiles all the time. 

But this time, tears came into my eyes. I had the unmistakable feeling that she knew this could be the last time, and she was taking it all in. The last time I had this feeling was 14 years ago on a beach with my dear friend Patrick, who died a week later. Dusty is a fighter and a character and she may well be around for a few years yet. But she loves that place as much as I do, and she's been there every summer since she was born. 

I used to think that dogs were just dogs, beneath us humans, different in fundamental ways. I don't any more. I see the trace of God's love and God's creation in every one. But I only really see it in the one I love and have lived in the same room with for twelve years and counting.

Evgeny Morozo argues that the internet will not lead to greater democratization. In June the Dish proved that the internet can document an uprising in a way no technology has before, but Morozo’s viewpoint is still worth airing. It’s twelve minutes long but engaging throughout:

(Hat tip: Sager)

Ezra Klein explains:

The Wyden folks quietly slipped in an amendment giving states enormous flexibility to experiment upward. Essentially, states can ask the federal government for a waiver that allows them to keep the federal funds they're receiving and do pretty much anything they want with them, so long as the coverage they provide is "at least as comprehensive as required under the Chairman’s Mark" and will "lower health care spending growth, improve the delivery system performance, provide affordable choices for all its citizens, expand protections against excessive out-of-pocket spending, provides coverage to the same number of uninsured and not increase the Federal deficit."

That could be used for a public option. But it could also be used for single-payer. The potential problem, as Jon Cohn points out, is that a Republican statehouse could use it to ratchet back coverage in existing public programs. But since the amendment doesn't allow anything to drift beneath the levels envisioned in the bill itself, it's hard to imagine a conservative state using it to be any less generous than the state would otherwise be.

Tom Ricks on what he learned yesterday:

General McChrystal is asking some people to commit to joining him in Afghanistan for three to five years, which tells me that we don't yet understand what a remarkably different approach he intends to take there.

DiA makes a good point:

Probably the signal difference between this year's GOP and 1994's version of the party can be summed up in three words: Contract with America. The Contract, at the time, drove Democrats insane. They thought it represented a return to Reagan-era governing formulas that were proven failures. But while some of the Contract's planks were pernicious (the balanced-budget amendment) and others were irrelevant (the black-helicopter crowd's "National Security Restoration Act", which forbade the president from placing American troops under UN command, or from mind-melding with extraterrestrials), the document did represent a coherent blueprint for what Republicans promised to do if they were given power.

Republicans couldn't actually keep much of their contract when they took power in 1995; some died in the Senate, some was vetoed by Bill Clinton. Nancy Pelosi found herself with similar problems keeping her legislative promises in 2007. But the GOP today isn't even trying to outline a programme of governance.

From Calculated Risk. Donald Marron explains the significance of the dotted line:

[T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the number of jobs in March 2009 was 824,000 lower than it previously thought. But BLS won’t include this adjustment in its official data until early February. The official, as-yet-unadjusted data indicate that 7.2 million jobs have been lost since the recession started in December 2007. The future revision to March figures, however, implies that a better estimate would be 8 million.