Month: November 2010

J.L. Wall points out that president Obama put the US in good company:

Greece is the nation that gave us Plato, Aristotle, and gave birth to what we know as Western culture.  (We won’t be getting into the messy questions of “what is Greece?”/”who is Greek?” here.)  Britain is not only the nation which was home to the political theorists and philosophers from whom the deified Founders drew inspiration, and is not only a nation which illustrated the transition from monarchy to democracy, but it also, at the height of its empire, saw itself as the heir to a mantle which had previously belonged to Greece and Rome.

By putting us in the company of Greece and Britain, Obama is putting us on that same continuum.  

The much-maligned mentioning of other nations in the same breath as the United States was, on one level, meant to imply that we now carry that mantle — that it is our role to be the exemplar of Western society and values, and that the contributions of our Constitution are already as influential as those of Greece’s and Britain’s past heights.

Claiming that it is insulting, or anti-exceptionalism, to compare America to Greece or Britain turns exceptionalism into a sort of zero-sum competition.  It ceases to be a point of pride, or a lofty obligation to fulfill, and becomes a quixotic undertaking not merely to be exceptional, but to remove the United States from the realm of history and nations.

A reader writes:

I think both you and Jack Shafer are a little late to the party. This is Rachel Maddow from just last week, "coming out of the closet" at 6:08.

Another writes:

Being liberal (Maddow) or conservative isn't partisan. Being an arm of the Republican Party (Fox News) is partisan.

Doha, Qatar, 10.30 am

Clay Shirky has a long, fair, but also devastating post on the Times and Sunday Times’ experiment in online subscriptions. (Full disclosure: I have a column with the latter.) The data are very hard to pin down, but Shirky calculates an unsurprising 97 percent collapse in web traffic, at a moment when some media bosses are seriously considering a shift back to paywalls. Shirky retreats to basics:

The “paywall problem” isn’t particularly complex, either in economic or technological terms. General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That’s the problem. Everything else is a detail. The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can’t charge such rates. In a competitive environment like that, milk becomes a commodity, something whose price is set by the market as a whole. Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.

The internet commodifies the business of newspapers. Any given newspaper competes with a few other newspapers, but any newspaper website compete with all other websites. As Nicholas Carr pointed out during the 2009 pirate kidnapping, Google News found 11,264 different sources for the story, all equally accessible.* The web puts newspapers in competition with radio and TV stations, magazines, and new entrants, both professional and amateur. It is the war of each against all…

Most of the historical hope for paywalls assumed that through some combination of reader desire and supplier persuasiveness, the current form of the newspaper could survive the digital transition without significant alteration. Payalls, as actually implemented, have not accomplished this. They don’t expand revenue from the existing audience, they contract the audience to that subset willing to pay. Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity. This is, invariably, most of them.

…

Murdoch and News Corp, committed as they have been to extracting revenues from the paywall, still cannot execute in a way that does not change the nature of the organizations behind the wall. Rather than simply shifting relative subsidy from advertisers to users for an existing product, they are instead re-engineering the Times around the newsletter model, because the paywall creates newsletter economics. As of July, non-subscribers can no longer read Times stories forwarded by colleagues or friends, nor can they read stories linked to from Facebook or Twitter. As a result, links to Times stories now rarely circulate in those media. If you are going to produce news that can’t be shared outside a particular community, you will want to recruit and retain a community that doesn’t care whether any given piece of news spreads, which means tightly interconnected readerships become the ideal ones. However, tight interconnectedness correlates inversely with audience size, making for a stark choice, rather than offering a way of preserving the status quo. This re-engineering suggests that paywalls don’t and can’t rescue current organizational forms. They offer instead yet another transformed alternative to it. Even if paywall economics can eventually be made to work with a dramatically reduced audience, this particular referendum on the future (read: the present) of newspapers is likely to mean the end of the belief that there is any non-disruptive way to remain a going concern.

Shirky’s response to critics is well worth absorbing as well.

Tim Lynch catches The Golden State's lame duck leader in a peculiar bit of pandering:

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s days as governor of California are almost over—so he made a stop at one of the late nite shows and made news by saying, “You want to smoke pot?  Who cares?”

Well, Mr. Governor, as you well know, it is a federal crime to smoke marijuana.  People get arrested and jailed for smoking marijuana.  And you, Mr. Governor, could have done something about the war against cannabis because there was this ballot initiative called Prop. 19 in your state that would have made it legal for adults to smoke marijuana in private.  Instead of fighting for Prop. 19, you opposed it!

Here's MoDoBro giving us the Full Fox Jacket:

The voters left no doubt about their feeling for his super-nanny state where the government controls all aspects of their lives and freedoms.

Not just nanny, but super-nanny! And in just eighteen months "the government controls all aspects of voters' lives and freedoms". Again: all aspects of voters' lives and freedoms. I'm not even sure totalitarian states achieve that; China doesn't achieve that. Maybe Burma and North Korea qualify under that standard. So in 18 months, one president has ended the constitution and turned American citizens into North Korean subjects?

Where is this remarkable claim substantiated in the column? Does MoDoBro offer a single piece of evidence? Here's the substance graf, so far as I can find one:

Instead of focusing on jobs and turning the private sector loose to provide them, he insisted on giving the American people things they did not want: expensive health care, more regulation and higher taxes. He clumsily interjected himself on behalf of the mass-murdering Muslim Army major, the ground zero mosque, the civil trials of enemy combatants and the lawsuit against Arizona.

Let's examine the first claim – that Obama has not focused on jobs. The stimulus, which almost every economist, even critical ones, believes saved jobs, and spent a third of its money on tax cuts to boost demand in the private sector is left out (except, of course, to buttress the claim that the government now controls everything!). The auto-bailout – which, amazingly, has steered GM to a remarkable comeback, saving countless jobs in related industries – is ignored. Then we get the private sector canard. The latest data show private sector growth in employment and public sector decline:

Overall, the private sector has now added more than a million new jobs over the past  year — a good start, in the wake of the 8 million job losses we saw over the course of the recession. And 400,000 of those new jobs have come in the past three months. For people with jobs, wages and hours are rising, too. Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings are up 1.7%, while average hours worked are up 1.8%, resulting in a rise in average weekly earnings from $753.20 to $779.64. That’s a raise of $1,375 per year — pretty healthy, given the state of the economy and the large number of people out of work … But government employment is down.

Yes, government stepped in, but only temporarily and only modestly. And the recovery is largely in the private sector, where it belongs.

Next up: Expensive healthcare?

Under the pre-Obama status quo, healthcare costs were rocketing and premiums were soaring. Under the health insurance law, Medicare is actually cut, and a provision is in place that establishes

an executive commission that regularly amends reimbursement rules so that Medicare spending is held down to a specified target — and whose amendments automatically become law unless Congress overrides them and provides alternative amendments that meet the target.

That keeps healthcare spending under control, not unleashed. And that, remember, was what the GOP ran against, turning an attempt to restrain costs into the threat of "death panels". Remember those ads accusing Democrats of trying to cut Medicare? And Kevin thinks Obama is the enemy of cost-control?

More regulation? Well, MoDoBro has a point there, especially with the healthcare law. Some of that could be addressed by a GOP interested in reforming the bill rather than repealing it, but somehow I suspect Kevin wants revenge, not reform. Higher taxes? Does Kevin even know that the hated stimulus was one third tax cuts? Yes, the Fox masses believe that their taxes have been raised, even though they have been cut. Why? Because their ideology demands that Obama be a tax-hiker. So he is. Reality is irrelevant in this tightening circle of epistemic closure.

Then we enter the cultural zone. Kevin pulls together several Obama comments to reinforce the alien nature of the president. The unifying theme? First that the president actually sought to protect American minorities from abuse: legal Hispanic immigrants who could get targeted by the cops under the Arizona law for the color of their skin, and Muslim-Americans who have been conflated by Fox News with al Qaeda. Second, that trying terror suspects in civil trials is somehow anathema (when the Bush administration did it, and the alternative is no justice at all); and that any rush to judgment with respect to a one-man terror attack should await the full facts. You will also notice that Kevin believes that Obama has actually been prosecuting war crimes:

To Eric Holder: Try suing the bad guys.

And again, this is completely untrue, a fantasy. Today, we discover that in the only instance yet revealed of actual investigation into war crimes and obstruction of justice even beyond the Yoo standard, the CIA has been spared any legal consequences. Yes, they destroyed tapes of their own illegal torture sessions in a conscious pre-meditated attempt to erase any evidence of guilt under the plain meaning of domestic and international law. And they have gotten clean away with it. Why? Because Obama has decided to be enmeshed with war crimes himself rather than actually defend the rule of law and throw war criminals into court and the slammer where they belong.

What thanks does Obama get for what he regards as an act of patriotism? He is accused of doing exactly what he has refused to do. Only in the world of the Big Lie can that kind of absurdity gain traction.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama gestures as he delivers a speech at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta on November 10, 2010. Obama said Muslim-majority Indonesia's national philosophy of unity between people of different faiths and ethnic backgrounds is an inspiration to the world. By Jim Watson/Getty.)

It’s all so 198os. The first protests against the Cameron government’s austerity measures are beginning. From the Conservative Party headquarters in London, vicious violence to protest rises in tuition fees at universities:

Rocks, wooden banners, eggs, rotten fruit and shards of glass were thrown at police officers trying to beat back the crowd with metal batons and riot shields. Inside the building, windows were kicked in, desks and chairs were overturned and the walls were daubed with anarchist graffiti.

Protesters set off fire extinguishers, overturned filing cabinets and threw office paperwork and business cards from the smashed windows. Dozens swarmed onto the roof where they hurled fire extinguishers, burning banners, bottles and cans into the crowd. Several people were knocked unconscious and some were seen with their faces streaming blood after being hit by missiles thrown by protesters.

I can’t imagine this will help the students’ case. More photos here. 50,000 students turned up, apparently. The BBC’s Mike Sergeant is on the scene:

The police seem to have a measure of control over the building now. The line of riot police is holding firm and stopping anyone else from entering the building. It still seems there are some protesters on the roof and in other parts of the building.

Some of the students are dispersing, but in the last hour people have been turning up who are not necessarily part of the original protest. They’re wearing hoods covering their faces, and arriving with cricket bats and other improvised weapons.

It’s calmer than it was, but objects are still being thrown, and there are hundreds if not thousands of students observing events.

The police presence in the building has certainly increased, and they’re better equipped, with helmets and riot shields, than they were initially.

(Photo: Student protesters smash windows as they clash with police after entering Millbank Tower home of Conservative Party headquaters on November 10, 2010 in London, England. Student groups are protesting against the government’s proposed funding cuts to education and an increase in tuition fees. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

A reader writes:

I swear you make a cameo in the new commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops (the one featuring Kobe Bryant, Jimmy Kimmel, and a variety of Joe/Jill Publics shooting up an urban wasteland). Around the 30-second mark, you appear to fire a explosive round into a car. This is either a strange coincidence or you are going to great lengths for cross promotion. I've attached a screen shot of you, or your double, to verify.

A half-dozen other readers were also on to me. But I do not wear and never have worn a polka dot tie and matching suspenders. I also have no idea how to shoot a gun. But if I had one, 'tis true, I probably would shoot a car.