Month: June 2010

The definitive photographic collection (but not if you've just eaten).

That's the length of the meeting between Obama and McChrystal. Doesn't sound like a reconciliation to me.

Michael Hastings explains:

Well, they were getting hammered.

One thing one presumes is an advantage for the MSM is the layer of editing before something gets published. Blogs, even some of the best ones, invariably have more typos, misspellings and occasional brain farts than copy that has passed before copy editors. And then you read the NYT op-ed page on dead tree and find that Abraham Lincoln made a decision in 1962 and see the word "principle" used as an adjective. Just sayin'.

Tapper reports that the general has conceded that he has "compromised the mission". That surely means he is out. When even Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen have dropped him, it's curtains. Ambers, in his invaluable night-beat feature, writes this:

LOW BLOW: Avowed opponents of McChrystal are whispering about the DoD's inspector general's report on abuses at Camp Nama, which McChrystal oversaw as Commander in Chief of the Joint Special Operations Command. It hasn't been released.

Low blow? What we saw at Camp Nama was the same kind of towel-snapping, the rules-don't-apply-to-us arrogance among McChrystal's men that we see in the Rolling Stone fiasco. Except the result then was not political embarrassment but eager and unrestrained engagement in war crimes:

Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. 'Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?' And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the  Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in: "they won't have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators." …

McChrystal was always a wild card. From his cover-up of the Tillman death to his toleration of brutal torture in Iraq, he was enabled and supported by all of official Washington. It is not a "low blow" to note the consistent thread here. And it is surely understandable that McChrystal's men – who had pioneered the Ralph Peters macho kill-and-torture-first policy – found counter-insurgency so, well, gay.

Here's where we are in the neoconservative view of the Afghanistan war, now the longest in American history. Boot:

We just need to give it a little time.

Kristol:

If the war can’t be quickly won in Afghanistan, it won’t be quickly lost there, either. And in fact it can be won, though it will take some time.

The question is: can you imagine any feasible scenario in Afghanistan in the next decade in which either pundit would urge withdrawal? I can't.

Bundle runs the numbers:

The average American spends 72 minutes per day in transit….It's also a lot of money. The average household spent $5,477 on gas and auto expenses last year, according to Bundle data, an amount which accounts for about 14.5 percent of daily spending.* That's more than we spend on groceries or utilities, and more than we spend on travel, entertainment, clothes and shoes, and hobbies — combined.

…*Bundle's spending data does not include mortgage or rent.

(Hat tip: Flowing Data)

Vaughan Bell touts a fascinating study:

We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

But some are taking the collective impact a little far: divorce ceremonies.

Returning to one of his favorite subjects, Mark Perry colorfully illustrates how much cheaper electronics have become in the last fifty years.