Month: June 2010

Matsuyama, Japan, 6.22 pm

Josh Levin is on the Gulf Coast:

If the wetlands go, Louisiana will go along with them. The state's seafood industry would crater, and every bit of marsh that's lost means a higher storm surge when a hurricane careens through the Gulf of Mexico. But the state's wetlands were dying long before the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Indeed, as you fly over Grand Isle and Barataria Bay, the oil spill seems almost irrelevant. On the helicopter ride over from New Orleans, the Jefferson Parish police officers on board seem less awed by the scope of the oil spill than by the "amazing land loss" in southeastern Louisiana over the last few decades.

Ambers predicts:

Whatever Romney's difficulties in dealing with his Massachusetts health care plan will be, he seems intent on running as the candidate of pragmatic solutions in 2012. Daniels, with his call for a truce on divisive social issues, wants the same thing. Clearly, Romney and Daniels don't fit the profile of what today's average Republican primary voter is looking for, but they probably will: I anticipate that the overwhelming concern of 2012 primary voters will be a desire to, well, beat Barack Obama.  

And I also predict that voters will think strategically about their options. Even Republicans who identify with Sarah Palin must know — or they will know — that, as of right now, Palin, projected forward in 2012, cannot beat Barack Obama. They know that the most acceptable conservative candidate probably can. They're seeing the 2012 election shape up as a referendum on, yes, four years of Democratic rule, but also as a referendum on competence and action.

New England Center for Investigative Reporting studied arrests for disorderly conduct over five years and found no correlation with race.

This is what the MSM failed to do to another FNC-style candidate. It’s called journalism – which is not accepting the terms upon which public figures running for election can answer questions, but demanding answers to tough questions until the candidate answers them or, in Angle’s case, simply runs away.

A reporter can be confrontational if equally polite, as Baca was. And I’m not sure he’s interested in getting invited to a Sharron Angle water-pistol party.

The joy of being Mark Steyn is never conceding error. Here's his response: 

Conor Friedersdorf demolishes our argument by pulling up yellowing Times thumbsuckers from ten years ago about "honor killings" in the Arab world, Turkey, Pakistan – and, eventually, Berlin.

I think Friedersdorf, in his usual pedantic way, has not refuted my point but reinforced it: The Times was more enthusiastic about covering "honor killings" when they were way out on the fringes of the map and could be used for a distant anthropological study of remote tribal cultures. Now they're happening down the block in Buffalo, Peoria and Kingston, Ontario, and raise complicating questions for the prevailing pieties on diversity, multiculturalism, immigration, assimilation et al, questions for which most of the liberal press has no stomach.

…Why aren't Noor Almaleki and Aasiya Hassan as famous as Matthew Shepard?

Conor stands by his point. Steyn's notion that he was only concerned with MSM "silence" on honor killings in the US is pedantry when you read the post, and his previous fulminations. But even if we concede this tap-dance, he's still flat-wrong. The reason that Noor Almaleki and Aasiya Hassan are less famous than Matthew Shepard is because almost no murder victim is as famous as Matthew Shepard – well, maybe Natalee Holloway. They're white, Mr Steyn. That's why they're more famous. Unfair and wrong – but fame in America is often like that.

And on the key point, he's wrong again. Silence? Here's the coverage of the Noor Almaleki case by the biggest newspaper in the state where the murder occurred:

10/29/2009 — Subtracting 'honor' from 'honor killing.'

10/30/2009 — Glendale man accused of running over daughter found.

11/02/2009 — Woman in Suspected Honor Killing Dies.

11/06/2009 — Glendale honor killing victim, 20, just wanted to be normal.

12/21/2009 — Glendale dad accused in honor killing faces murder charge.

01/13/2010 — Religion issue raised in case of Glendale man in 'honor killing.'

02/19/10 — Dad accused in 'honor killing' will not face death penalty.

04/10/2010 — Police: 'Honor Killing' suspect may have been aided by family.

Again, this is silence? Or just take yesterday, in Canada's own biggest paper, the Globe and Mail. Here's the editorial – on honor killings in Canada, Steyn's home country:

Canadian justice needs to be unyielding with those who kill women and children for what they deem to be culturally appropriate reasons. There is reason to question whether it gave too much ground, in the murder of 16-year-old Aqsa Parvez of Mississauga, Ont., by her father, Muhammad Parvez, and her brother, Waqas.

So the test of epistemic closure at NRO is concluded.

"The infantile optimism of post-JFK America may have met its match down there in the Gulf. Nature is not mocked," – John Derbyshire.

"Why should Barton apologize? I mean “why” not in the prudential, career-saving, ass-covering sense. From that point of view, his retraction makes perfect sense. But if you ask “why” in the larger sense of disinterested inquiry, it’s hard to know what to say. Joe Barton was right. The White House was, and still is, engaged in a shakedown, “a piece of extortion,” exacting as high a price as possible from a private company in an effort to garner some PR brownie points (and a lost of cash). It is a disgusting spectacle, reminiscent of the administration’s criminal defrauding of Chrysler secured bondholders last year.

Oh, well. It was a pleasant fifteen minutes. Imagine!  A U.S. Congressman who actually had the courage to speak the truth.  What a novelty!  I should have known it couldn’t last.

If you happen to find Joe Barton’s testicles, you can return them to him here," – Roger Kimball, PajamasMedia.

We could get a real split here between the base and the establishment GOP.

DiA counters Yglesias over gerrymandering:

Perhaps the clearest way the Senate is "better than" the House? Senators can actually lose their seats.

Steven Taylor tosses the metaphor in the rubbish bin:

Fossil fuels, for all their problems, produce a huge amount of benefit in ways that dependence on drugs or alcohol do not. Our dependence on oil is not like an addiction to a drug, but rather it is more like our need for blood in our circulatory systems or oxygen in our respiratory systems.  We aren’t giving up either unless something just as efficacious is going to take their places.

…I do understand what the shorthand being deployed here by multiple persons is supposed to be.  However, it is a turn of phrase that has continually bothered me, as I think it inaccurately diagnoses the problem that we face.  Curing an addiction, difficult as it undoubtedly is, can be done.  Indeed, it is done all the time.  However, we are not going to simply stop using oil, either cold turkey or through a twelve step program.