Month: July 2010

Kate Gosselin, Sarah Palin will allegedly go camping together. What's next: a Martini summit with Danielle? But this I had to love:

Sarah Palin has even reportedly said that she will “teach Kate how to avoid bears” during the visit.

Joel Wing explains the diplomatic withdrawal:

The U.S. currently has a series of branch embassy offices throughout Iraq that would be closed down by 2014. The State Department is also due to take over the police training program in Iraq from the military, and that too will come to end in 3-5 years. The 16 Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) would also be consolidated into three offices and two consulates, before being phased out as well. After five years then, the U.S. diplomatic presence in Iraq would consist of the American embassy in Baghdad, an office in charge of military sales, and a consulate in southern Iraq and one in the north based upon the PRTs.

Still: no government; al Qaeda able to score a major attack deep in the Green Zone; and the Awakening movement is being left out to dry. But repeat after me: the surge worked. If you say it often enough, as every Washingtonian does, you may even come to believe it.

A big boom in construction and services has taken experts by surprise. Unlike the US, almost all the growth came from the private sector. The buoyancy makes the looming austerity less troubling, it seems to me.

A new video on Social Security inequality by Shawn Nee:

Thank You For Your Call from Shawn Nee / discarted on Vimeo.

Noah Millman says it well:

Some of “them” are “us.” There are American Muslims. There is an – there are various – American Islam(s). That’s just a fact. There are certainly Muslims (mostly non-American) who deny that fact – who want to argue that Muslims in America can have no true loyalty to America, but must be loyal to some imaginary global Islamic communal interest. And there are certainly non-Muslims who would deny that fact in similar terms. But a fact it is. The problem with this Republican line is not so much that it discourages moderate Islam – though obviously the message “no Muslims wanted” is a terrible one – but that it quite blatantly writes American Muslims out of the American people.

A reader writes:

That graphic is interesting, but it seems a bit misleading. 100 million hours may have been spent creating Wikipedia — but a great many articles are based off the fact that people spent 200 million hours watching TV, updating pages on LOST, updating pages on The Golden Girls, writing biographies for M*A*S*H actors, etc.  And I wrote some of my finest theological writing last year because I'd spent 50 hours watching Battlestar Galactica and doing some reflection in response on the nature of humanity and what constitutes a human person.

So while I'm sure a great many of those 200 million hours weren't spent on deep thinking, I'm equally sure that labeling the entire 200 million hours as a waste of cognitive time isn't accurate either.  And I'm also certain, after many hours spent vegging by following endless Wikipedia links and editing in trivial information, that not every hour spent creating Wikipedia was time well spent.

Brendan Nyhan counters Matt Bai:

What Bai doesn't seem to realize is that elections do not ever indicate the will of the people in some well-defined sense (there is a vast technical literature on this point). The best political science research to date convincingly argues that mandates should be viewed as a social construction. Moreover, it's not clear that presidents enact legislation intended to make them more popular. Contemporary presidents tend to pursue the agenda of their party, not the median voter. Finally, the public mood tends to shift in the opposite direction of the party in power. For all of these reasons, the appealing notion that presidential candidates will propose an agenda, enact that agenda in office, and be rewarded by the electorate for doing so rarely occurs in practice.

Jacob Hacker et al project that economic insecurity is reaching news highs. Drum summarizes:

Basically, [the Economic Security Index] measures the number of people who have experienced a major loss in income (25% or more) — either due to a decline in income or large out-of-pocket medical expenses or both — and who lack adequate financial wealth to buffer the drop. By their projection, the number of Americans in this category is now over 20%, far higher than in any previous recession.

From a reader in Shenzhen, a Chinese export hub:

There's two issues with that China "wage" graph. The first is that it compares wages using PPP, purchasing power parity, which is a number adjusted for cost of living. While this is a fine chart to show the relative average buying power of Chinese vs. Vietnamese, it doesn't do anything to show the actual GDP per capita, which could potentially tell you something about wages ($3678 for China, $1060 for Vietnam). Why not just compare real wages, or even minimum wages?

The second issue is the assumption that wages are really all that important.

For a $600 iPhone 4 made in Shenzhen, less than $7 went to wages. What China has, and other countries listed don't, is a massive and recent investment in modern infrastructure and entire comprehensive regional supply chains. It's not just that the iPhone is assembled in Shenzhen, it's that most of the non-Foxconn chips inside it are manufactured nearby as well. China Law Blog recently did a post on this topic, showing how political stability and corruption in nearby competitors will likely ensure China's manufacturing dominance into the near future.

What annoys a lot of China watchers, especially those living and working here, are the little mistakes that add up when people without a lot of experience in China write about it, especially when they drop nuance make big points.

Today on the Dish, Argentina sealed the deal for marriage equality. Andrew took a step back from the Breitbart-Sherrod scandal to revisit Obama's long game. Remaining race commentary from Josh Marshall, Adam Serwer, Conor Friedersdorf, E.D. Kain, and Ron Radosh. Drum pointed the finger at Fox. Andrew also shook his head at the latest Journo-list revelations and Fallows weighed in. 

Newt slithered into the NYC mosque mess, Yglesias smacked him around, and Larison found higher ground. In other Palin coverage, readers pounced on her NYC/Real America hypocrisy, Friedersdorf took a turn, Roger Simon concurred with the Dish on 2012, and Noah Millman shivered. Chin-scratching Trig posts here and here.

Sharron Angle continued to embarrass herself in the face of the press. Richard Silverstein went to bat for Andrew over Tablet's smears, a reader dissented over his take on the rape-by-deception case, and Frum reminded us (with reader feedback) of Israel's strengths to the US. Andrew held up the Cameron-led coalition as a model for Republicans.

Kinsley revived the estate tax debate and Glenn Reynolds stood up to the police state. Another, broader look at the WaPo series here. Dreher engaged Rauch on the move towards marriage equality. Andrew played with conversation. 

Mike Tyson talked shit about his tattoo. Crazy campaign ad here and a fun new blog here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here.

— C.B.