Month: February 2010

TNC has one answer. Jonathan Bernstein another:

I want Members of Congress to lose sleep if they think they're doing something that their constituents wouldn't approve of.  I want them to want reelection.  If I was to really pick one thing that might be seriously wrong with the contemporary Congress, it's that the reelection incentive might not be strong enough — if it was, perhaps Republicans during Bush's second term might have bailed on his unpopular policies.  My guess, however is that the Republicans defeated in 2006 and 2008 (and the Democrats defeated in 1994) are doing just fine for themselves.  Those Republicans may sleep well, but they ran their country into the ditch. 

But one overwhelming reason they did was precisely because they worried about being out-machoed on the Iraq war and torture or pummeled by opposing the Medicare Prescription Drug Act, to name just three. I prefer Edmund Burke's advice myself. It's called representative – and not direct – democracy for a reason.

Check out a very rare piece of third party documentation of governor Palin's long plane-trip back to Alaska, in labor with her fifth child, many hours after her water broke. It's an eye-witness account of her state of mind in an airport lounge. Several readers have noted that the interaction seems to have taken place in the Seattle airport lounge, not Dallas. So she was even closer to giving birth at that moment than I previously believed. Thanks for the eagle eyes. Use them to peruse the rest if you're stuck in the snow like we are.

More contemporaneous emails on this subject from this period in Palin's life to come. Stay tuned.

A time-lapse:

E.G. at DiA watched Palin's speech:

Politics is intrinsically adversarial and successful politicians have to know how to win an argument. Although Mrs Palin often attacks other politicians and says that her policies would be better than theirs, she doesn't welcome debate, and her preferred oppositional strategy is abrupt withdrawal. Think about the resignation from the Oil & Gas commission and from the statehouse, or her choice to "go rogue" rather than convince the McCain campaign of the merits of her approach. That's how you get 30% of the vote, not 51%. And it goes without saying that it wouldn't be an effective way to govern.

Frum dead-blogged it on YouTube:

As Palin barrages the audience with statistics about unemployment, both they and she seem bored. It’s very abstract, she does not seem to bring to unemployment anything like the energy she brings to her expressions of personal contempt for the president and (especially) the vice president.  Ronald Reagan would have told some heart-rending anecdotes. Bill Clinton would have communicated empathy and sorrow. Palin’s emotion? Resentment that the administration has slighted “somebody up there in Alaska.”

It was much tamer than the controversy around it suggested:

Basically a rather touching, funny way for Focus on the Family to airbrush its image. And nothing wrong with that. Amy Davidson reflects on it.

A reader writes:

I try to tip well, because I have been in the service industry, and often you are getting minimal pay for very busy and sometimes stressful work. I've noticed that friends and family who have put years in the service industry are generally more likely to tip better than those who didn't. This isn't a hard rule cut in stone, it isn't something I've conducted a scientific study on, and I'm likely bringing my own prejudices to the table, but it's how things appear to me. People who haven't worked in the service industry much, or it's decades behind them are more likely to tip less and explain to the party that they are doing so because service didn't meet expectations. I don't use low service to dock a tip (I start off at 18%), since everyone has a bad night and I'd rather not make it worse. I will use good service to increase my tip though.

Some businesses don't even pay minimum wage, at least in Colorado, since the law allows for tips to be rolled into the server's hourly wage.

I have problems with this method, because it takes some of the burden off the employer with regards to pricing food items and whatnot, it places that burden directly on the consumer, whether they are aware of it or not. Tipping isn't mandatory, yet in this situation it is necessary for an employee to make minimum wage. True, the employer must make up any deficit if tips don't reach the minimum, but if you think you are giving your server a little something extra for good service, that may not necessarily be the case. You might just be aiding their employer in giving them the minimum paycheck required by law.

Having done food delivery a few years ago, I also tip well for delivery drivers. Why? Because oftentimes they are putting their own property on the line for their job. Some joints will chip in a little extra for mileage and wear and tear, some won't. Plus, drivers have to put in their own money for gas, at least at locations where I worked. After going through two cars, I learned that delivery driving is a fool's game in the long run, unless you work for a company that provides you with a vehicle. This is another way that restaurants can run a business while putting an undue burden on someone else to provide an advertised service.

Bottom line though, if I can't afford to tip and tip well, I can't afford to eat out or order out.

E.D. Kain explains:

I don’t think the debate is really between “moderates” and “conservatives” so much as it is between reasonable people and people who are in it entirely to win.

In this sense, the reasonable people may be very conservative – Paul Ryan, for instance, is hardly a “centrist” but he is in every sense of the word a reasonable man whose politics are well grounded in first principles.  Bruce Bartlett has added to the conversation not by being a “moderate” but by coming up with new and relevant ideas.  Conversely, there are those on the right with very little grounding in conservative first principles who take so well to the rightwing populism of the day that no one would ever consider them to be “centrists”, even if philosophically they are anything  but principled conservatives.  A certain former governor of Alaska leaps to mind.

Bruce notices a revealing shift in the WSJ editorial page that begins to drag them back to fiscal sanity as well.

Ellicott City, Maryland, 9.45 am.

The book, The View From Your Window, with 200 of the best window views published by the Dish over the last three years, beginning at dawn and ending at dusk with a foreword by Andrew Sullivan, can be previewed here and ordered here.

A reader writes:

I have to take issue with Totten’s judgement on "Hurt Locker.” I was in Iraq in 2004, and the movie gets SO MUCH wrong. But most important, it gets things wrong that are timeless, like military culture.  I just watched it, and the essential message is that of “Top Gun.” It’s that military and unite cohesion are boring, and the maverick lead character gets a great deal of praise for channeling his inner Sarah Palin. This, I think, is the main reason its getting slammed by a number of vets and journalists who were there. But the details also shred it:

For instance, this is supposed to be 2004. But the uniforms are the 2006 versions. US troops also don’t roll up their sleeves like their British counterparts. They use terms like “insurgents,” which wasn’t widely in use at that time. There’s a scene at a UN compound with a big car bomb. But the UN compound was destroyed in August 2003, and the UN pulled back to Amman after the bombing. They certainly weren’t in a big building with a big blue “UN” sign on the side. And don’t even get me started about the lead going AWOL and jogging back to Camp Victory in the dead of night. He’d have had to go through Amiriyah, the neighborhood, and he wouldn’t have made it out. (It was dominated by Baathists and Sunni insurgents at the time.) A bombing in the "Green Zone" seems to blend seamlessly with the city at large, as they don’t have to cross through any security to get into a inner-city Baghdad slum. (oh, yeah, they also split up so they can cover more ground; that would never ever happen.) So much for the blast walls ringing the area. Finally, this one three-man EOD team is cleaning up Baghdad all by itself. They often operate out of a single humvee and just kind of toodle around the city. 

What is interesting is that Bigelow was also willing to explore that for some people, war can be fun — a point made by the naïve, doomed doctor officer. It just seems like it started out as something interesting and then got Hollywood-ized. And then, she decides to say, “Oh, but it’s more complicated than that!” The problem is she waits until the last 5 minutes to reveal how complicated war can be for young, restless men. It’s like an O’Henry story stretched out to two hours and for me, as a journalist who spent three years there from the very early days with Back to Iraq and the TIME Magazine, it felt hollow and a bit offensive.

Is it the best feature film on Iraq? Well, it’s more like the least bad one.

From Andrew Bacevich's article in The American Conservative:

An alternative reading of our recent military past might suggest the following: first, that the political utility of force—the range of political problems where force possesses real relevance—is actually quite narrow; second, that definitive victory of the sort that yields a formal surrender ceremony at Appomattox or on the deck of an American warship tends to be a rarity; third, that ambiguous outcomes are much more probable, with those achieved at a cost far greater than even the most conscientious war planner is likely to anticipate; and fourth, that the prudent statesman therefore turns to force only as a last resort and only when the most vital national interests are at stake. Contra Kristol, force is an “instrument” in the same sense that a slot machine or a roulette wheel qualifies as an instrument.

John Quiggin follows up:

[T]he US faith in force reflects a long history of aversion to foreign wars, going back to the Founders. The US had its share of bellicose nationalists, but compared to nearly all previous states, where success in war was taken as the primary measure of greatness, the US in the 19th century stands out for its pacific nature. But on the relatively rare occasions when the US went to war, it usually did so under (perceived and sometimes actual) conditions of necessity and with the unqualified commitment that entailed.