Month: November 2011

Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com Video archive here.

Andre Tartar notes that several candidates endorsed torture:

On subject after subject, the candidates tried to out-hawk each other and the president, with perhaps the most surprising development being that Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry would all like to reinstate waterboarding.

Conor Friedersdorf was wowed by Huntsman's and Paul's responses to the waterboarding question:

Jon Huntsman made the most eloquent case against waterboarding. "This country has values," he said. "We have a name brand in the world… I've been an ambassador for my country three times. I've lived overseas and done business. We diminish our standing in the world and the values that we project that include liberty and democracy, human rights and open markets when we torture. We should not torture. Water-boarding is torture. We dilute ourselves down like a whole lot of other countries and we lose our ability to project values that a lot of people in a lot of corners of the world are still relying on the United States to stand up for." 

Jonathan Bernstein:

Candidates are strongly inclined to do in office what they promised on the campaign trail. Torture, war with Iran — these aren’t throwaway lines on the campaign trail but what we can reasonably expect if Republicans capture the White House, at least unless Ron Paul or Gary Johnson or Jon Huntsman shocks us all and wins the nomination.

Jennifer Rubin, no surprise, calls Perry's call to re-examine all foreign aid a gaffe: 

[Perry's] pronounced that “absolutely, every country would start at zero on aid.” Asked specifically, he said that included Israel. Now, they’d probably get a hefty amount, he added. Well, oops. As fast as you could say “damage control,” the Perry campaign was out with an e-mail explaining how he was committed to Israel (which he is). But why treat Israel as any other supplicant? And really, as a budgetary matter, foreign aid is insignificant. Perry no doubt would be a warm friend to Israel, but the gaffe was the sort of rookie mistake one might expect of a governor lacking foreign-policy nuance.

Bruce Reidel agrees:

The reality is that military budgets are planned on multiyear cycles. Friends don't rethink their friendships each fiscal year. The Pentagon and the IDF are tied together ’round the clock with hotlines and early-warning alert centers. I helped set up the hotline from the defense secretary's Pentagon office to the defense minister's Tel Aviv headquarters. It conveys the constancy and consistency of the alliance, a special relationship.

Kevin Drum's impression of the debate as a whole:

Herman Cain almost charmingly demonstrated that he simply knows nothing about the outside world, and Rick Perry beat expectations by not imploding spectacularly again. All of the candidates insisted that they'd take a completely different approach to Iran than Barack Obama, but then proposed doing almost exactly what Obama is doing. For the most part, though, as Dan Drezner says, the candidates kept the crazy bottled up fairly well. But not always. 

James Joyner:

Huntsman is clearly the most seasoned foreign policy hand in the  field. He’s trying desperately to capitalize on that, including launching a new ad in the run-up to the debate. But it just doesn’t seem to matter. 

Dan Drezner graded each candidate. His review of Herman Cain:

 The worst debate performance of the night.  Slow, rambling, evasive, and contradictory.  His answer on torture contradicted itself inside of 30 seconds; his Pakistan response was a total dodge.  His solution on Iran — energy independence! — would be like suggesting that the appropriate response to a rising China would be to move all Americans to Mars.  Both activities will take the same length of time.  Grade:  F. 

Fred Kaplan was equally unimpressed:

Cain was remarkably honest about how little he knows, about anything. Is Pakistan a friend or foe? “We don’t know.” Would you send American ground forces to clear out the sanctuaries in Pakistan? “That is a discussion that I would make after consulting with commanders on the ground” (and with the Afghans and Pakistanis too). How would you know when to overrule your military commanders? I’m afraid I dropped my pen in astonishment, so didn’t get an exact quote, but Cain said that he would surround himself with “the right people … multiple groups of people offering different ideas,” then choose the ideas that “make sense.” (So that’s how it’s done.)

Josh Marshall thinks Rick Perry did well, relatively speaking:

If this Rick Perry had shown up for the other debates it’s interesting to speculate where this race would be now. Less hypothetically, can this kind of performance along with the massive amounts of money Perry’s now readying to spend on TV ads change the equation and get him back into the race? It’s really hard to figure how he gets back into it. But who knows?

Hua Hsu praises Harold & Kumar's contributions to the stoner movie canon: 

One effect of Harold & Kumar was that it was suddenly OK for Asian-Americans to be as stupid, irresponsible, or chinky-eyed as everyone else. … There are two versions of the vaunted "post-racial" dream. The first, which will remain unachievable, imagines a future when we as a society have figured out a fair, just, and universally respectful way to deal with difference, if the very idea still holds at all. In the second version, we are all at the same party, cresting on the same contact high, icing each other ad infinitum. In this way, Harold and Kumar were visionary figures, possessing a new chalice of American identity, one that deemphasized the importance of race.

Elizabeth Dwoskin considers various arguments:

The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as “immigrant work” is relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the program’s completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state. Many braceros—the term translates to “strong-arm,” as in someone who works with his arms—were granted green cards, became permanent residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans never returned to the fields. “Agricultural labor is basically 100 percent an immigrant job category,” says Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. “Once an occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very difficult to erase the stigma.”

Massey says Americans didn’t turn away from the work merely because it was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of it as beneath them.

 

Nicole Gelinas wants to change how we prepare for retirement:

Right now, people can contribute only $5,000 a year before taxes to personal-retirement accounts outside their employer plans—a ridiculously low amount. The government should invite people to save all they can, eliminating the annual limit and imposing only a lifetime limit of $1 million. Those who don’t like the 401(k) plans that their employers provide or simply want to save more outside those plans would then have a substantive choice.

A resident of State College writes:

About Mike McQueary … people outside Happy Valley should understand that Sandusky was not just a former coach of his at Penn State.  McQueary grew up in town here, and his parents and the Sandusky family are long-time friends. And so when he walked into that shower scene, he was not just seeing some "random guy" or even a former coach.  He was seeing someone he's known since he was a boy, and we don't know if there was even perhaps some 'history' between the two, or with some of McQueary's other friends who were in the same environment.  At the least, it would have been like seeing his own uncle in there, and talking to his father first doesn't seem so strange when you think about it that way.

Yes it fucking does. If you see anyone – even your own father – raping a ten year old in the showers, the first thing you do is stop it yourself. You don't even call the cops right away. You clock the rapist in the head or drag the boy out of his clutches. I'm so sick of these excuses for the inexcusable. McQueary is as depraved as all the others who stood by and did nothing.

A recent Nation article was pilloried for its portrayal of Joe Therrien, an OWS activist who left a job to get a degree in puppetry and is now unemployed and saddled with debt. Michael Baron doesn't believe the government could offer any help to an artist like Therrien. Will Wilkinson reframes the debate: 

Conservatives sometimes bitch about the National Endowment for the Arts, but they rarely bitch about the fact that State U employs a healthy handful of poets, sculptors, violists, and other artists totally extraneous to the goal of winning the economic future from the Red Chinese. For the past half-century at least, government, in the form of the public university system, has been a pretty damn reliable complement to the private sector when it comes to subsidizing artists and the arts. It's just as accurate to say that Joe's problem is that there's only one puppeteering MFA program. If there were a raft of them, as there is in music, theater, dance, creative writing, and so on, then maybe he could land a gig as an assistant professor of puppeteering at some cozy State U somewhere, which sounds like a nice life to me. 

Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology, recalls a card game with her father:

At age 89 my father's memory was fragile – he was showing his years. One day we were playing cards and I began to think that I should let him win. I soon realized that, if I saw someone else behaving that way, I'd tell her to stop being so condescending. I might even explain how negative prophecies come to be fulfilled, and I'd go on to explain that much of what we take to be memory loss has other explanations.

For instance, as our values change with age, we often don't care about certain things to the degree we used to, and we therefore don't pay much attention to them anymore. The “memory problems” of the elderly are often simply due to the fact that they haven’t noted something that they find rather uninteresting. And then, while I was weighing whether to treat him as a child because part of me still felt that he would enjoy winning, he put his cards down and declared that he had gin.

Langer's post is part of a larger collection of pyschology-related stories. BPS asked many psychologists to recount how their discipline has helped them in real life. You can read their submissions here.

Lydia DePillis profiles successful but inconspicuous DC architect Eric Colbert:

The big names of D.C.’s architectural past all had distinct styles. You don’t have to be a trained historian to spot their signatures: Wardman’s front porches, Gessford’s attic pediments. Colbert, on the other hand, prides himself on fitting in—an odd boast for a designer, who might presumably seek to stand out. But this explains why Colbert is so sought after: To actually get anything done in 21st-century D.C., it’s a lot easier to just copy what’s around you.

 Stephen Smith adds his two cents.

(Photo by Flickr user roger4336.)