Month: April 2012

Ask Ackerman Anything

Ask Ackerman Anything

[Re-posted from Friday, with several more questions added by readers]

Spencer Ackerman is a regular presence on the Dish and one of the more colorful reporters on national security. You can review his bio here and follow his blogging at Wired's Danger Room. To ask Spencer anything you want, simply submit a question in the Urtak poll embedded above (ignore the "YES or NO question" aspect in the text field and simply enter any open-ended question). We have primed the poll with questions that you can vote on right away – click "Yes" if you are interested in seeing him answer the question or "No" if you don't particularly care. We will air the answers in daily segments soon.

Does It Matter Who Wins In November?

Mataconis and Dave Schuler maintain that the party differences are largely rhetorical. Keith Humphreys disagrees. Ezra Klein zooms in on Congress: 

I think it’s an open question whether a political party should prefer to control Congress or control the presidency. And if we’re talking about filibuster-proof control of Congress, I’m not even sure it’s close.

There is a huge amount that will not change, because of the deadlocked and polarized Congress. But there is obviously a significant policy implication. If Romney is elected, we will lose the possibility of universal healthcare, we will accelerate income inequality even further, we will double down on carbon energy, and we may see a Supreme Court more radical than in a century. Fiscally, austerity is coming, whoever wins. But the balance of that austerity will shift. Under Obama it will be borne more by the wealthy; under Romney, the budget will be balanced, as someone once said about a much milder proposal, "on the backs of the poor." I'm encouraged by Romney's hints that he will go after deductions for the wealthy, and am open to a serious plan for deficit reduction that does not tip us all into a precipitous double-dip. But the refusal to contemplate increases in revenue does not bode well for any kind of agreement, before the debt forces action on its own timetable.

But for me, this is first and foremost a foreign policy election. If Romney is elected, and if no deal with Iran is accomplished before then, we will go to war in a third Muslim country, and possibly escalate again in Afghanistan. The rebooting of the global religious war would be instant. The US will almost certainly become the guarantor of all of Greater Israel, rendering us cut off from the entire Arab and Muslim world, as well as increasingly isolated from Europe. Russia, Romney tells us, is the number one "threat". Torture could well return.

It is the return to global polarization, confrontation and war that concerns me above everything else. The calming of international relations, the slow reintegration of the US with the global community, the slow strategy with Iran, the quiet rebuilding of alliances in the Pacific: all these are now white noise. But if they collapse, war and terror will return as the polarizing norm.

We know what those things did to the world in the last decade. And we know what they did to the US. Much more and we may not be able to recognize ourselves at all.

Religion And The Dish

A reader writes:

I like your blog, but enough.  Organized religion = institutionalized superstition, IMHO. My enjoyment of your blog is declining as the god stuff seems to be taking over.

Another writes:

I am a lapsed Catholic, who believes pretty firmly in not attending church these days but who misses the opportunity for transcendence that an hour in a beautiful church, with incense and music and ritual and silence, can sometimes provide.  I have sought other avenues to experience spirituality on Sundays: creative writing, painting, making time to play piano, taking a long walk outside, etc.  But I have come to rely on the insights and thought-provoking content that the Dish provides on Sunday evenings.

This week, I had my annual check-up and my doctor found a small lump in my breast. 

I am scheduled for an ultrasound this week and I am of course hoping for a benign diagnosis. Nonetheless, my mind has been wandering to the more dire things.  Tonight, I read through the Dish's postings of the day, and found myself moved to tears when I read the commentary about the "two words" of Native Americans to describe the dead; I pondered the points made about "Living Without God;" and I was struck deeply by the commentary on the "Meaning of a Malady" from Mark Dery.

On a lighter note, I read the commentary from David Gessner about watching wrens nest and give birth to babies as he watched through the window with a great deal of joy. While in graduate school, I had the pleasure of watching two mourning doves nest, lay eggs, and nurture their chicks through the window, as I sat at the desk in my room.  The chicks learned to fly one day and I remember feeling such fear and awe as I watched them nearly fall from the height of the nest and the take flight.

So, on the eve of what is sure to be a scary week for me, health-wise, I wanted to thank you for providing a spiritual outlet each Sunday, for offering the opportunity to consider the big questions rather than certainty in the answers, and for consistent recognition through your content that joy demands a place in all of these debates.

Tupac Lives!

Holy crap:

Cyriaque Lamar is floored by the super-realistic hologram:

To make matters all the weirder, the digital Tupac greeted concertgoers at a festival that didn't even exist when he died. I can see this kicking off some newfangled touring trends as our century progresses. Why see the wheezing cybernetic body of Keith Richards play an arena when you can watch digital facsimiles of all of the Rolling Stones circa Beggars Banquet? And Ticketmaster will still be charging a king's ransom in quatloos* for that stupid service charge.

Could Palin Have Beaten Romney?

Douthat doubts it:

The best reason to think that Palin would have given Romney a much longer and tougher fight than Santorum is that she would have polled in the double-digits from the beginning and might have consolidated the not-Romney vote early, by winning Iowa and South Carolina and clearing figures like Gingrich off the decks. But I still have trouble seeing which of the various crucial states Santorum lost to Romney that Palin would have won. Michigan? Ohio? Illinois?

Bernstein mostly agrees:

Romney excelled at letting the other candidates destroy themselves. And that's something the Sage of Wasilla could be counted on to do.

But she had something that only Cain and Paul had: charisma. And she was the incumbent vice-presidential candidate. The problem, of course, is that she is a deranged fantasist. But in that, she reflects her party more accurately than Mr Plastic.

“I Don’t Think That Legalization Of Drugs Is Going To Be The Answer”

A depressing insight into Obama's inherent conservatism when it comes to the failed, failing and democracy-eroding war on drugs:

 

Mansfield Frazier fears the South and Central American response:

International trade agreements, while seemingly complicated, are really based on the simple principle of “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” If we want our neighbors to the south to continue buying American-made Caterpillar tractors instead of those made in China or other Pacific Rim countries, we have to be willing to help them with the huge problem American demand for drugs has created for their countries. Otherwise, they’ll shop elsewhere, and why wouldn’t they?

A Referendum Or A Choice?

Screen shot 2012-04-16 at 1.01.50 PM

Bill Galston insists that the election will be about Obama's first term: 

A race for an open Oval Office is about promises and personalities; a campaign for reelection is about the record and performance of the person currently occupying the White House. To be sure, Obama can offer his vision for the future and new proposals to flesh it out. But if the people don’t approve of his record, that won’t matter much.

Joe Klein counters:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a presidential election that was a pure referendum, and every presidential election I’ve covered involved a choice. There are good reasons for this. The presidency is our most intimate office. The President lives in our homes for four years. The media spend considerable amounts of time, sometimes too much, telling us who these people are. And then in October we get to see two, occasionally three, men–only men, sadly, so far–on the stage and we decide which one we want to invite into our homes for the next four years.

Both are right, it seems to me. Obama's task is to remind people of what he inherited and how far we have climbed out of that hole, while portraying Romney as a return to the wreckage of 2008. He's also entitled to illustrate Romney's personal cocoon of massive wealth, off-key moments, abiding cynicism and endless gaffes.

But solely attacking Romney, the way Bush did Kerry in 2004, may not be sufficient. I remain strongly of the opinion that if the president offers nothing in the way of tax reform and insists entirely on tax fairness in his campaign message, he will not have a positive enough message to win. And Obama is much, much better at a positive message than a negative one. There has been a tone lately in Obama's remarks that approaches snark. It's unattractive. And it doesn't work.

(Chart via HuffPuff sans Rasmussen, as usual)