Month: May 2010

Lisa Margonelli says there was no proximate cause of oil spill in the gulf:

As people who like simple narratives, the public and policy makers will be tempted to try to find one locus for blame — whether it's BP or BOP's (blow out protectors) — but that may prevent us from figuring out the deeper system of problems that lead to this accident. And we may determine that business as usual doesn't work for offshore drilling — which leaves us unable to count on the 40 percent of domestic oil production we were expecting to get from the offshore industry in the next ten years. Rereading what's been written about offshore oil drilling over the last few years, it's obvious it was thought to be the methadone for our overseas oil addiction. Now what?

Image of "what it looks like, four thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven feet down, when oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of thousands of barrels a day" from Amy Davidson.

Here's a list of several. The first one:

We need more generalists. Generalists outperform specialists in many tasks.

Yglesias's contribution:

As I noted in my previous post on this controversy, I find it a bit curious that strident defenders of Israeli foreign policy take a harder line on Richard Goldstone’s apartheid-era conduct than does Nelson Mandela and the leadership of the African National Congress. It’s almost enough to make you think that some of these attacks on Goldstone are offered in bad faith, and are more motivated by dislike for his conclusions about Israeli conduct during the Gaza war than genuine concern about his past conduct.

Chait returns fire:

This is a good example of the general phenomenon I'm talking about. Begin with the characterization "strident defenders of Israeli foreign policy." I'm certainly more strident than Yglesias. But I (hesitantly) opposed the Gaza incursion. I blame Netanyahu, not the Obama administration, for the recent Israel-U.S. blow-up. Goldberg made his name authoring a book critical of Israel's occupation, wrote a long op-ed blasting Aipac, and so on. Goldberg and I do find Israel distinctly more sympathetic than Hamas. Yglesias would probably object to somebody who painted the United States as no better than al Qaeda. That wouldn't make him a "strident defender of American foreign policy." At best Yglesias has picked an imprecise description, and at worst he's outright misleading his readers.

Jonathan's basic position:

Accusations of bad faith are both impossible to disprove and an effective tactic for avoiding the substance of the issue. As I've said before, the important question is the truth of Goldstone's findings. He did report evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. He also made a lot of shaky or hard-to-justify claims. Part of the controversy around Goldstone has dipped into questions of his character — supporters paint him as a fearless truth-teller, critics as a man who molds himself to the ideology of whatever institution he's attached to. I think his Apartheid history has some relevance to this small but non-trivial question.

Today on the Dish we rounded up reaction to the Cameron-Clegg alliance. Andrew sized up Cameron and his similarities to Obama, Clive Crook was skeptical of the alliance, Frum addressed its concern over the debt (US version here), LSE looked at voting reform, and Gideon Rachman remembered the new chancellor.

In other coverage, Palin came out with a new book, Laura Bush came out for marriage equality, and another cartoonist was attacked. Greece update here. Andrew updated us on the latest smearing of Goldstone, Fallows investigated the state of online journalism, Ramesh broached the topic of race in the court confirmation, The Economist stood up for burqas, Packer diagnosed Karzai, Lexington learned from the spill, and Balko followed up on the puppycide video.

Readers continued to dissent over Andrew's view of Kagan, one stood strong with him, others loved our recent tribute to mothers, and another confessed from the closet. Stephen Asma grappled with the soul and Drum discussed his lack of faith. A funny new site for parents here. 

— C.B.

Avent counters Leonhardt over whether Greece's fate will be our own:

Degree is important here. America's trend growth rate is higher than Greece's. Its political system is less dysfunctional. Its economy is overwhelmingly on the books and taxed. Its labour markets are more flexible, its public sector is smaller, and its unions are less powerful. It's currency floats, and its monetary policy is its own.The bottom line is that it's not clear that there is any set of policies Greece can adopt which will prevent default. Debt costs are too high and growth is too slow. There are many different ways that America could close its budget gap; it's merely having an intense political debate over which way is the best way. This could potentially be a problem, but it's a different problem from the one in Greece.

Krugman has related thoughts. Derek Thompson's contribution:

We don't have to make spending and revenue perfectly equal. Nobody is saying we need to balance the budget in 2015. We can run deficits. We just can't run structural deficits that add to our debt faster than we grow the economy.

From a Michael Rosenwald profile of Tyler Cowen:

Cowen also has rules about stories: He distrusts them, particularly ones like this profile. The writer is arranging facts to keep readers reading. "The more inspired the story makes me feel, very often the more nervous I get," he once said. He believes nearly all stories follow seven templates: "monster, rags to riches, quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy and rebirth."…Cowen, based on his reading of thousands of books, thinks stories trick readers because they are filtered: Writers "take a lot of information and they leave some of it out," he says.

Frum asks:

There’s much talk of the “instability” of this new government. I wonder. The closest area of coalition cooperation looks to be Britain’s debt emergency. The Liberals are under-represented in defense/national security portfolios – and over-represented in economics and finance. That seems to imply that the Liberals and Conservatives share a similar sense of urgency about Britain’s horrific budget deficit. Frankly, it would be interesting to know how much even the new leadership of the Labour party disagrees. Britain is not Greece, debt repudiation is not an acceptable option. I’m wondering if the real model for Britain’s next decade is not Canada’s 1990s, also a time of governments that were weak on paper, but that were able to act strongly, because their opponents tacitly approved and accepted their most important decisions.

Laura Bush on marriage equality:

Balko follows up on this video, which now has over a million views:

Shooting the family's dogs isn't unusual, either. To be fair, that's in part because some drug dealers do in fact obtain vicious dogs to guard their supply. But there are other, safer ways to deal with these dogs than shooting them. In the Columbia case, a bullet fired at one dog ricocheted and struck another dog. The bullet could just as easily have struck a person. In the case of Tarika Wilson, a Lima, Ohio, SWAT officer mistook the sounds of a colleague shooting a drug dealer's dogs for hostile gunfire. He then opened fire into a bedroom, killing a 23-year-old mother and shooting the hand off of the one-year-old child in her arms.