Month: October 2010

Chris Wallace continues to hold Republicans' feet to the fire.  Here he asks Carly Fiorina for the seventh time what specific spending she would cut. Money quote:

WALLACE: I’m going to try one last time, and if you don’t want to answer it, Miss Fiorina, you don’t have to.

FIORINA: It’s not a question of not wanting to answer it!

WALLACE: Let me ask the question, if I may, please. You’re not willing to put forward a single benefit – I’m not talking about the people 60 or let alone 65, or 70. I’m talking about people under 55. You’re not willing to say there is a single benefit eligibility for Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security that you are willing to say “Yeah, I would cut that?”

FIORINA: What I think we need to do to engage the American people in a conversation about entitlement reform is to have a bipartisan group of people who come together and put every solution on the table, every alternative on the table. Then we ought to engage in a long conversation with the American people so they understand the choices.

As Wallace notes earlier in the interview, "Back when there was talk about a non-partisan, or a bipartisan deficit, debt commission you blasted that idea in January and said we know all the solutions." If you are a fiscal conservative, vote for these Republicans at your peril. They're frauds and liars.

Scott Horton interviews Steve Hendricks about his new book, A Kidnapping in Milan:

Before September 11, 2001, the CIA carried out at least seventy extraordinary renditions—the vast majority, it seems, under Clinton. We know very little about most of these renditions, but the fact of our knowing little suggests they were carried out with a degree of discretion and competence. Under George W. Bush, the quantity of renditions went up and the discretion and competence went down.

 At the very least Bush rendered several score victims, and more probably a couple hundred. His demands for renditions were so great that, for example, the CIA’s in-house air fleet didn’t have enough planes, so the agency had to lease torture taxis from outside the agency. The CIA also rented many of the renderers—the on-the-ground planners, the heavies who actually grabbed the victims, the in-flight medics, you name it. A lot of them were poorly trained. …

Even in the best of times, the CIA thinks it can get away with murder (sometimes literally), but under Bush the hubris reached heights not seen since the anything-goes Cold War days. A lot of people involved in renditions believed they would never be punished, even when breaking the laws of other countries. For all these reasons, the CIA’s renderers left a lot of prints in a lot of places, Milan being the foremost example.

I finally saw The Social Network this weekend. So I can now agree that the movie's misogyny, pace Sorkin's defense, was indeed staggering and the notion that most Harvard geeks (or most anyone else) ever gave a shit about Final Clubs, let alone the Phoenix, was obsolete in my day in the 1980s, let alone now. Of course, getting laid is the underlying goal, sublimated or not, attenuated or not, of most undergraduate life. So they got that right.

But it was a gripping movie in its own right, very Sorkin in its acidic wit and one-liners, brilliantly acted by Jesse Eisenberg (if not Justin Timberlake) and really did capture the excitement of being at the dawn of an online venture and watching it take off in real time. Of course, my tiny-in-comparison experience was with a little blog and four years' earlier. But the wonder at this new technology – and the priapic psychic boner of its potential – was beautifully evoked. It hasn't gone away – along with the sense that the sheer creative destruction is the point, not the money. And getting there first, even by a whisker, still matters. But somehow I missed the coke orgies and the billions. Bummer.

Of course, this fictional Zuckerberg is an asshole.

But he was a brilliant, funny, hard-working asshole, compared with the douchebags always on his shoulder, having almost the right formula, not quite as much talent, and far less psychic need to prevail. In the end, I have to say, I was rooting for Zuckerberg, however gorgeous the smarmy WASPs and however appealing the winsome, rained-on Eduardo. The moment that rang truest for me was when their server went down and Zuckerberg went nuts on the phone, insisting that any disruption, any glitch, could destroy the whole rhythm and ruin the entire experiment. I had exactly that conversation in the early days of the Dish, with more expletives, and a little more desperation. Good times.

(Meanwhile, Andrew O'Hehir debunks the attempts at debunking the documentary Catfish. Warning: it includes spoilers.)

David Biello explains the relationship between birth control and climate change:

Overall, curbing population growth could reduce greenhouse gas emissions; reducing peak population to roughly 8 billion, for example, could save 29 percent of expected greenhouse gas emissions. Economic growth seems like one way to accomplish that, considering that rising wealth has historically slowed birth rates. But O'Neill and his colleagues warn that, if fewer but richer people consume more—as current consumption patterns in places like the U.S. suggest—those greenhouse gas savings become increased emissions.

Megan McArdle ventures onto GM's factory floor, to see whether Americans got their money's worth from the bailout:

The bailout wasn’t a good idea, and it will probably cost billions. But the government wastes billions of dollars every year, because for the United States, $1 billion adds up to the equivalent of less than one venti latte per American. At least in this case, we got something in return: a functional car company, resurrected from the ashes of the old GM’s bloated carcass. Americans probably won’t notice the few extra dollars they spent on the bailout. But they may eventually be glad when another shiny new Buick Enclave rolls off the Lansing assembly line, and into their driveway.

A reader writes:

Let's give some credit to what Israel does right: Argo Medical Technologies, in Haifa, is ahead of Berkeley Bionics in developing technology that allows paraplegics to walk. Here's a video of Argo's competing technology. Here's an article discussing the two technologies.

Silver’s updated prediction:

Republicans are given a 73 percent chance of taking over the House, up incrementally from 72 percent last week. During an average simulation run, Republicans finished with 227 seats, up from 226 last week; this would suggest a net gain of 48 seats from the 179 they hold currently.

… [The] consensus [among forecasters of around a 50-seat Republican gain] … is somewhat misleading — because it does not adequately capture the fact that there is considerable uncertainty on either side of that 50 seat estimate, more so than in past elections. 

Conor is confused by an Instapundit post that seems to blame President Obama for a bigoted act against a South Carolina mosque. Outside the Beltway is pushing back too:

Barack Obama has made plenty of mistakes in his eighteen months in office, but to suggest that he is somehow responsible for a rise in what can only be described as religious bigotry is just absurd. Rather than trying to find yet another thing to blame the President for, conservatives would do well to condemn the bigotry and those within heir ranks who have been perpetuating it.

Instapundit blamed all of the future debt on Obama too – barely into his first year in office. He’s a Republican partisan hack. Expecting some kind of fairness from him is absurd – something one has learned over the past few years. Personally, I find the message of the video above hard to beat.

Give a gift to remember:

Pearl Necklace is a seemingly amorphous cast silver shape on a chain that is actually an accurate representation of semen. It is a visual marker of chaos turned perfection through an act of beauty and lust. Pearl Necklace is a physical reminder of a fleeting moment of pleasure.

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)

Brian Mockenhaupt has captured one platoon’s effort to teach their replacements the lay of the land in the dangerous Arghandab Valley region in Afghanistan:

Lachance and his platoon mates called the area “The Devil’s Playground.” I’d seen the ledger of their time there, tallied in photographs. “He was killed. He was shot in the face. He broke his back,” Staff Sgt. Edward Rosa told me one night, pointing at pictures on a laptop screen in a small plywood-walled room at the outpost, part of a motel-like warren of sleeping quarters that 2 Charlie had built to augment the school’s half-dozen classrooms. “He’s gone. He’s gone. He’s gone,” Rosa said. His voice trailed off. 2 Charlie first came to Afghanistan in September 2009 with 42 soldiers; nearly half had been killed or wounded, mostly in the Arghandab.

But with the losses came experience.

After months of patrolling the valley, the platoon had learned bloody lessons about where to walk, which areas to avoid, and how to spot an ambush or a hidden bomb. Even an infantry unit would have trouble adapting in the middle of fighting season, but the incoming 101st artillery unit, trained to fire cannons that can lob 100-pound shells up to 20 miles, had the added burden of learning a new job. They had trained for several months on infantry tactics before deploying. Now the best 2 Charlie could do was walk through the area with them, and pass on scraps of accumulated knowledge.