Month: August 2011

David Sessions reads the Texan's screed, Fed Up. Money quote:

War seems to be a love like no other for Perry—the one arena where he’s happy for the federal government to break all his rules. After bemoaning in chapter after chapter the federal government’s inherent, hopeless corruption and waste, he asserts that the U.S. seriously underspends on national defense and that the Pentagon’s sprawling bureaucracy is both indispensable and infallible. He even argues strenuously against cutting funding for the F-22, a fighter jet the outgoing defense secretary, Robert Gates, called a Cold War relic and a source of massive waste.

Yglesias sees no good alternative:

[I]t’s tough to be the guy who’s going to bat for convicted murderers, pimps, and rapists. But the reality is that most people convicted of these crimes don’t serve life sentences. They don’t get executed either. So they have to do something. And the nature of the modern American economy is that the majority of job opportunities involve interacting with other human beings. … [W]hat is the job you want your ex-con murderer to be doing? We can’t ship them to Australia. Penalizing ex-cons by making them unemployable is only going to backlash against us in the form of reduced reintegration and more crime.

The worst political strategist in modern times has it in for the Texas governor, as does the entire Bush family. This sounds like the materfamilias to me, or someone channeling her:

“If you’re really trying to be the nominee and want to go the distance, you just don’t want the former president of the United States and his people working against you.”

Here's their comment on his statement that "we'd do" "something pretty ugly" to Ben Bernanke in Texas:

Everybody knows Mr. Perry meant no literal harm and was indulging the irrational exuberance that is one of his trademarks. The faux-outrage from liberals who routinely refer to the tea party as "terrorists" shouldn't be taken seriously.

There is nothing faux about the outrage here. And the bargaining position of the GOP over the debt ceiling was classic economic terrorism – using a collapse of the entire global economy as leverage for their anti-tax fanaticism. The threat of personal thuggery is not "irrational exuberance." It is rational intimidation.

Lisa Bramen wonders why certain countries don't put frozen water in drinks:

One explanation I’ve heard elsewhere, and which may hold some truth, is that Europeans see ice as taking up valuable real estate in the glass, so that they would feel cheated if they got too much ice and too little beverage. This theory has two problems: It doesn’t explain, again, why water shouldn’t be served with ice, and it doesn’t take into account the fact that one is often served a whole can or bottle of soda, which could then be used to refill the glass.

Arnold Kling admits that raising the Medicare eligibility age won't save much money. Peter Suderman agrees but says we should do it anyway:

There's … a political argument for raising the eligibility age: It could help make it easier to truly transform the program. One of the reasons that Medicare is so difficult to reform, despite its well-known broken finances, is the size, commitment, and influence of the coalition of beneficiaries. As Kling argues, "reducing the proportion of the population on Medicare would help to lower the political rigidity that surrounds it." Raising the program's eligibility age, then, is a reform that could pave the way for bigger, better reforms—and help demonstrate that structural changes to the program wouldn't be painful as some people seem to think.

Peter Lawler is fascinated by the film:

The one pleasure of these white women, it seems, is tyrannizing over the woman who actually does work and love in their homes. They are utterly repulsed by physical contact with blacks, and their concern with hygiene (reflected in an intensifying effort to make sure the races use separate bathrooms) is really a desire to have no emotional connection with those over whom they rule without limits. Still, they turn their children over to "the help," and let their hired women lavish loving affection on the their kids  as if they were their own. What's especially striking is the utter lack of gratitude of the white women for what they have, for all the help they have received.

Alyssa Rosenberg, on the other hand, was disappointed, viewing the villians as "so cartoonish that viewers won’t risk recognizing themselves or echoes of their behavior in them." But she's excited about another project:

I’m less interested in the badness of this particular piece of art, and more interested in why we keep making Noble White Ladies Meet the Civil Rights Movement movies, and how we can get something different in production. Turns out, all it takes is Brad Pitt, who is adapting Twelve Years a Slave, the memoirs of Solomon Northup, a free black man who in 1841 was kidnapped, held in slave pens in Washington, DC, and sold into bondage in Louisiana.

Peter Vine thinks the Syrian protestors are collapsing Turkey's "zero-problems" approach to its Middle East neighbors:

As the protests inch closer and closer to home, Turkey faces an unprecedented foreign policy challenge as a tense Lebanon combines with a mass protest movement in Israel, a surge in violence in Iraq and a Syria in meltdown. This has seen Turkey in some ways revert to type as its unilateral tendencies start to re-appear. Already Turkey has darkly hinted that what is happening in Syria is an "internal Turkish matter" as it frets about the possibility of a long porous border becoming a backdoor for Kurdish terrorism. Nobody is predicting a Turkish intervention in Syria, but then again few had predicted the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

The options for Turkey now are limited. It can either wait and see or follow its zero-problems strategy and simply shift its stance to accommodate the new order falling across the Middle East.

Ariel Cohen sees a conflict with Iran on the horizon:

If Turkey abandons the pro-Iranian Assad, which it is in the process of doing, it will face another strategic headache: a confrontation with Tehran. Until now Turkey played a sophisticated game of rapprochement with Syria’s Shi’a patron, increasing trade and lobbying for Iran in the international arena. However, the demise of the Assad clan may open a new avenue for the Sunni Turkish Islamic AK Party, which is also close to the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest opposition force in Syria and in Egypt.

And herein lies the rub. The Middle East historically has five power centers: three Arab (Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad) and two non-Arab: Iran and Turkey. As one of these (Damascus) undergoes a meltdown, and two others (Cairo and Baghdad) are very weak, the remaining two non-Arab centers are doomed by history and geography to compete.

Jonathan Raab, a veteran, explains the difficulty other veterans face when trying to reenter the civilian workforce:

The veteran unemployment level is currently four percentage points higher than the national average. Although most people are not paying attention to the wars, their legacies are filtering back into our communities, one veteran at a time. Most of these men and women are just glad to be home and are ready to work. Some have many problems, some have just a few. What we all share is the desire to be respected and appreciated for our service — whether completed or ongoing in a reserve capacity — and to be seen as a benefit to the employer, or an opportunity by the employer to directly support a military that is all too often cleaved from the civilian world it fights to protect.

(Photo: U.S. Army veteran Manuela Rodriguez, 37, arrives to a job fair for veterans on December 10, 2009 in Denver, Colorado. Rodiguez served two tours of duty in the Army, as a generator mechanic and later as a finance specialist and had been out of work as a civilian for the last year. By John Moore/Getty Images)