Month: June 2011

Jazz Shaw sees how Obama's praise for Huntsman could backfire:

All of the video clips making the rounds showing President Obama praising Huntsman will certainly be widely employed ammunition for the rest of the GOP field. But in the unlikely event that he somehow nabbed the nomination, those same clips would hobble the president in the general election. It would be fairly hard to start questioning the man’s credentials after heaping that kind of praise on him.

Spencer Ackerman focuses on a Huntsman strength: his foreign policy cred.

When it comes to presenting online material, Alan Jacobs finds "curate" pretentious:

Curators organize objects in space and present them for public scrutiny. They also educate the public in the understanding of those objects, and of the principles of organization employed. Curators also help to care for those objects, to make sure they don’t get damaged or lost. (In ecclesiastical language, the priest who cares for the people of a parish while the rector is away is called a curate.)

Almost none of this is at work when people link to interesting things they have found on the internet. If a person whose website links to other websites is a curator, then a person who walks into the Louvre with a friend and points out the Mona Lisa is also a curator. It seems to me that if we go with that usage we’re losing a worthwhile distinction.

Tim Pawlenty claimed that Reagan's tax cuts increased revenue "by almost 100 percent during his eight years as president." Bruce Bartlett, who served under Reagan, schools T-Paw:

[N]o one in the Reagan administration ever claimed that his 1981 tax cut would pay for itself or that it did. Reagan economists Bill Niskanen and Martin Anderson have written extensively on this oft-repeated myth. Conservative economist Lawrence Lindsey made a thorough effort to calculate the feedback effect in his 1990 book, The Growth Experiment. He concluded that the behavioral and macroeconomic effects of the 1981 tax cut, resulting from both supply-side and demand-side effects, recouped about a third of the static revenue loss.

Nick Paumgarten puts the latest numbers from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in perspective:

[T]he first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. … The NAEP results through more than four decades have been consistently mediocre, which may prove nothing except, as [Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford] wrote in 2004, “our amnesia of past ignorance.”

(Image by Chad Hagen from the series Anatomics)

Balko is batting them down. He debunks the notion that "the government can't punish you for a crime without first convicting you":

Under most civil asset forfeiture laws, the property itself is accused of the crime. The government then files a complaint against the property in civil court. Because it's a civil proceeding, the government's standard of proof is much lower. In fact, in some states the burden is on the property owner to prove he or she earned the property legally. That can be a difficult thing to prove.

The cost of fighting a seizure in court can often exceed the value of the property itself. As of 2008, the federal asset forfeiture fund had over $3 billion in assets. Less than 20 percent of the people from whom that property was taken were ever charged with a crime.

Felix Salmon's eyes widen:

I find these numbers quite shocking: after all, it’s hardly as though countries like the UK and Portugal have emerged from the recession unscathed. But the US increase in unemployment over the course of the recession was more than double the increase anywhere else.

Today on the Dish, we remembered the Iranian uprising of June 2009, when Andrew parsed the stolen election, men in green and black united, and Twitter came into its own. A reader today remembered Neda, whose death on YouTube will outlast any gravestone, and we debated whether the Green Movement failed. A reader wondered what would have happened if Iranians had occupied the square like the Egyptians did, the uprising got animated, and the chanting carried on in Tehran.

Andrew cheered New York on for the gay rights movement's own BFD, even if it didn't happen today. Andrew dismantled Romney's major talking point about Obama's effect on the economy, Peter Beinart urged the GOP to follow Reagan's isolationism, Ryan's plan still didn't offer a better life for most Americans, and compassionate conservatism sizzled. Bristol lost her virginity while camping, and readers demolished the Palins' hypocritical innocence. Krugman predicted a lost economic decade, California could corner the marijuana market, and the retirement saving starts now.

Exum slammed the Obama administration for calling Libya anything but a war, and Bernstein feared the more secretive wars we haven't heard about. Baghdad returned to normal, and Syrian experts eyed Assad's expiration date. Andrew insisted on the divine in magic mushrooms, the market for attention narrowed, and Netflix rode the wave of aggregation. David Gems treated getting old as a disease, iAtheism emerged, and Spinoza explained Jeeves. We reflected on father's day, Sam Harris made room for spirituality, and Gmail made room for judgement.

Charts of the day here and here, Yglesias award here, Hitchens bait here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

A reader with family in Iran sends us a clip from last week:

After the jump is probably the most dramatic rooftop video from June 2009 – that of a young woman softly speaking and crying behind the camera. It's still difficult not to choke up while watching it:

The Dish recently spoke with the young woman in the video, and we're happy to report that she is fine and "still hopeful for my country".

A reader writes:

I'm really aware of how absurd it is for me to have an opinion on this – it requires a lot of information I don't have. But my impression is that despite what we thought here in the US, the Islamic Republic had a fair amount of legitimacy among the people before the Green uprising. It was a repressive state in many ways, but it wasn't a totalitarian one, and many Iranian people were very religious and inclined to submit to the leadership of the Ayatollahs. To a certain, imperfect extent, they governed with the consent of the people.

That's finished now.

It seems to me that you can't really run a totalitarian state by half measures. The Iranian system wasn't designed to implement that kind of repression, and I don't think it will be able to do it effectively. There are way too many people in Iran – too many important clerics – who believed in the Islamic Republic in an idealistic sense for it to simply pivot into a totalitarian state after the events of last year. The only way the state can survive now is through the raw projection of power – through violence and oppression.

I don't think they can preserve the Islamic Republic that way – it has always depended too much on piety, on genuine faith, on the desire of many Iranian people to live in a godly nation. I don't think it was a cynical joke in the same way that Stalin's Russia was. It will probably take 10 years – time for the wheels to turn, for new people to cycle into positions of power. But it's not going to last. It's pretty clear in hindsight that the events in Hungary in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968 really damaged communism as a system. Those events were part of a process; they de-legitimized the system, and did a lot to spread the truth about it around the world. They didn't finish off communism, but they certainly nailed down some essential truths about it.

That's what the Greens have done. Beyond that, they've proved to the youth of Iran that there is a need for political planning, for strategy. The next time the opposition will be stronger.

Another writes:

I don't want to call it a failure. I also don't want to call it a victory, in Jahanbegloo's sense, because the movement gained the moral high ground in the international community (and of course, not all in the international community would agree it took that ground, anyway). Both views consign the movement and its goals to the past.

However, Alizadeh and Baji seem to think the movement was not beaten to death, just into temporary submission and dazedness. I'm betting on their view (and it's an informed view) as the right one. I'm betting the movement can rise again if circumstances change, and I hope our government and its allies craft their policies toward Iran with that rise as a primary goal. Defeatism would be a tragedy; a belief that if the Green Movement can't topple the regime, we must do it for them, would be a disaster.

And increasingly the face of marriage equality in New York:

In the wake of his announced “yes” vote for same-sex marriage, [Republican] Sen. Roy McDonald has unveiled a facebook page called “Stand With Roy” and urges supporters to donate and sign a petition. The page itself has more than 10,000 “likes” Monday morning. … When McDonald announced he [said] he was unconcerned about the impact it would have on his re-election chances. The lawmakers’ announcement, along with his blunt responses to questions about same-sex marriage, made him something of a star.

The Dish posted McDonald's money quote last week, but the source we used, the NYT, took out the best bit. Here's the quote in full:

You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn't black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don't care what you think. I'm trying to do the right thing. I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I'm trying to do the right thing, and that's where I'm going with this.