Month: November 2010

Gothenburg, Sweden, 8.27 am

A reader writes:

I think you're onto something in your discussion about writers in an era without staples. I just had to double check that my bookmark to Dave Weigel points to Slate now, but it does. I don't read Slate. Why would I? But Weigel and Dahlia Lithwick are bookmarked. Same with Kevin Drum; I almost never visit Mother Jones online, but I read Drum almost every day. The "institutions" they're part of are invisible to me and I'm not interested. But I like those writers, so I read those writers. God knows I've followed the Dish across a bunch of different platforms over the years.

The question now is how to find an economic model to allow those writers to wrest free from their various platforms, if they so desire, and yet be paid for their work. That's why a discerning ad network that pooled all the best writers and paid them a cut of the revenue is such a promising idea. It would allow one to read, say Ezra Klein, without having to endure the notion of helping the Washington Post.

Here's the beginning of a long Greenwald post attacking my position on Anwar al-Awlaki:

Hauling out a decades-old zombie canard that will probably never die — namely, that a lawyer who advocates for the Constitutional rights of a Bad Person is acting improperly or even subversively – Andrew Sullivan, in a post entitled "Defending an Active Terrorist," writes:

The decision of the ACLU and CCR (the Center for Constitutional Rights) to represent Anwar al-Awlaki, even as he continues to emit clear death threats to writers and cartoonists, seems to me to cross a line.

I'd really love to know:  which "line" would this be?

Even Bush-43-appointed federal judge John Bates — who presided over the 3-hour hearing on the request by the ACLU and CCR for an injunction against Awlaki's assassination — repeatedly acknowledged that the American-citizen-targeted assassination power Obama is asserting is extraordinary, and the DOJ's unrestrained executive power theory invoked to justify it is unprecedented.  Does Andrew really believe that it's the duty of every Good, Patriotic American lawyer to refuse to participate in a judicial adjudication of these critical Constitutional questions?  It's preferable to simply cede this power to the Government without any judicial review or ruling as to its propriety or Constitutionality — just allow the Government the power to compile hit lists of American citizens far from any battlefield without even having to defend the Constitutionality of those actions in court?  What conception of patriotism calls for that?  Which "line" compels abstention from such proceedings?

No line. I have no desire to prevent the ACLU or CCR from doing what they are doing. That is their right. But I sympathize with one board member of CCR who has reservations about this. The reason? Awlaki is not imprisoned; he has not been seized extra-judicially and tortured. What makes this different from defending the rights of terror suspects who are already under our physical control and in our custody (which I have not stinted in doing) is that Awlaki isn't. He is currently a core member of the faction of al Qaeda that is actively trying to murder us. You will find no such account of Awlaki's record of despicable Jihadist terror in Glenn's post. As for "imminent" and "immediate" threat, maybe Glenn could have a word with the cartoonist for Seattle Weekly who, even now, is living in hiding and has had to change her name because of Awlaki's fatwa of death against her. I'm sure she regards the threat as imminent. 

And, at some point, standing up for her – and for Glenn's and my right to speak freely – seems to me more important than defending Awlaki's free speech, rather than noticing his enmeshment in a lethal al Qaeda faction that has already tried to murder countless innocents in the name of holy war.

A reader writes:

It’s funny that a reader brought up Nancy Pelosi going to Syria as precedent for Eric Cantor’s trip, considering what he had to say about that specific matter over at the National Review:

Presenting Assad with ‘a new Democratic alternative’ — code for making President Bush look feckless — Mrs. Pelosi usurped the executive branch’s time-honored foreign-policy authority. […] Several leading legal authorities have made the case that her recent diplomatic overtures ran afoul of the Logan Act, which makes it a felony for any American ‘without authority of the United States’ to communicate with a foreign government to influence that government’s behavior on any disputes with the United States.

So three years ago Cantor condemned and questioned the legality of Pelosi doing in Syria exactly what he just did with Israel.

Cantor is the classic Beltway pol: if they do it, it’s treason; if I do it, it’s patriotism.

Below, you’ll find Ross excusing the right for not being too over-the-top in welcoming Bowles-Simpson on the following grounds:

The cuts it proposes don’t even remotely “slash the size of government”; they merely slow its future growth. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, federal revenue has hovered around 18.3 percent of G.D.P. since 1980, breaking 20 percent only during the halcyon days of the dot-com boom. Under Simpson-Bowles, it would stick at 21 percent, a solid 10-15 percent boost over how the American government taxed its citizens in the Reagan and Clinton eras.

The reason I don’t believe this holds much water? Because in a fast-aging and increasingly unequal society, given our inherited commitments to the elderly, the sick and the poor, some growth in government is simply unavoidable. What Bowles-Simpson does is get out ahead of this and try to restrain it. Even so, their healthcare proposals essentially require rationing (but not by price) within Medicare. We could probably do better if we reinstituted the perfectly reasonable proposal – struck from the health insurance reform by Palin’s dumb-ass demagoguery on death panels – that seniors prepare in advance for the final days of healthcare. But not much better.

I should add that I agree one hundred percent on Ross’s evisceration of liberal response to the plan. But I fear that demographics alone all but guarantee that spending will go up in the future. And capping it at 21 percent is in fact the best possible scenario for fiscal conservatives.

Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell's WaPo article from the weekend was too dumb to bother rebutting. This paragraph tells you everything you need to know:

If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.

James Joyner points out the bleeding obvious:

Recall … that every second term president is in the position to which Schoen and Caddell advise Obama to skip ahead.  Does anyone recall the halcyon bipartisan achievements of the second Bush term?  The second Clinton term?  The second Reagan term?  The second Nixon term?

Weigel dubs it the "worst column of the year." But Schoen and Caddell's hackery has paid off:

Caddell and Schoen have inspired almost 5,000 "likes" and almost 2,000 comments (and counting), in what has become the paper's most-read piece of the day. Undoubtedly they've inspired some smaller number of TV producers to book "One and Done" segments, even though no one buys the Schoen/Caddell argument that Obama could achieve more by declaring himself a lame duck. …This is the paradox of the opinion industry: If it sounds stupid, it leads. If it's counterintuitive, it's surely because the columnist has found a fresh angle on a mundane problem, and this angle will produce insights. Data is unexciting, especially if it's the same data everyone else has. Discussions of fantasy scenarios that could prove your theories right? Exciting!

Weigel gives away for free six ideas for op-ed columns in this genre. Drezner applies Weigel's rule more broadly:

 When it comes to policy debates I'm always on the side of John Stuart Mill — the best way to deal with stupid arguments is to counter them with better arguments in the public sphere.  That said, there's a serious cost to this philosophy in a world in which the stupid ideas can command the policy agenda.  The opportunity cost to the inordinate amount of time that is spent swatting away these ideas is that less time is spent debating policies and ideas that have a real chance of being enacted.  Furthermore, sometimes the dumbass idea just goes into hibernation among a few die-hard believers until a propitious moment arises for its zombie revival. 

In the end, I think Mill still carries the day.  Still, every once in a while, it sure would be nice not to have to waste the energy and the attention on stupid policy ideas.  

 

Obama says if he tried, the florist might not believe him. Tyler Cowen disagrees:

What could you say to prove, over the phone, that you are the President of the United States?  If you assume the florist is at a working computer terminal and can access Google, you could promise to answer questions about your life, and to answer them so quickly the florist would not think you are googling to those answers.  Plus you are dialing from a 202 area code and you sound like President Obama (because you are President Obama), whose voice is well-known and distinct.  I would think he would have an especially easy time establishing his identity over the phone. 

Furthermore the audience, wondering that maybe you are the President of the United States, would fall into the deference mode, even if some residual doubt remained.

Impersonating the President of the United States might draw interest from the law, or at least an inquiry, and that would discourage potential pranksters and make your claim more credible.

Who would have a tougher time establishing a credible identity over the telephone?  How about Lady Gaga? 

The person to ask would be the butcher from whom she bought her meat dress.

Douthat defends the lukewarm reception that Simpson-Bowles has received from the right:

[M]y back-of-the-envelope calculations, federal revenue has hovered around 18.3 percent of G.D.P. since 1980, breaking 20 percent only during the halcyon days of the dot-com boom. Under Simpson-Bowles, it would stick at 21 percent, a solid 10-15 percent boost over how the American government taxed its citizens in the Reagan and Clinton eras. And that’s just looking at government revenue as a share of the economy’s overall size. As an absolute number of dollars, obviously, a shift from 18 percent to 21 percent in a (hopefully) growing economy would increase federal revenues by leaps and bounds over today’s $2 trillion-plus size tax base.

Given these realities, I think it’s entirely appropriate that small-government conservatives have reacted relatively favorably but not ecstatically, since there isn’t anything here for partisans of a smaller federal leviathan to get ecstatic about. And by the same token (and to reiterate the point I make in today’s column), the fact that so many Democrats look at Simpson-Bowles’s vision of a future where the government takes in substantially more revenue than it does today and see a dreadful sell-out to the right tells you something important, and depressing, about liberal intransigence where the future trajectory of federal spending is considered.

Wise words from Bill Gates:

Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game. If tomorrow some other country invented cheap energy with no CO2 output, would that be a bad day or a good day? For anybody who's reasonable, that would be, like, the best day ever. If all you care about is America's relative position, every day since the end of World War II has really been bad for you. So when somebody says to me, "Oh, the Chinese are helping to lower the cost of it, or creating something that emits less CO2," I say, "Great." The Chinese are also working on new drugs. When your children get sick, they might be able to take those drugs.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)

From William Saletan:

Life expectancy at birth has risen dramatically over the last 200 years. In countries where records have been kept that long, the data indicate that the average lifespan has more than doubled. But these big leaps are due largely to reductions in child mortality and infectious diseases, which can change an individual's lifespan by 50 years or more.