Month: December 2012

Senator Jim DeMint announced today that he’ll end his eight-year stint in the Senate to lead the Heritage Foundation, despite having four years remaining in his tenure. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley will name his successor. Weigel weighs in:

Maybe we should have seen it coming. Earlier this year, DeMint set loose the Senate Conservatives Fund, the inside-outside Republican PAC that encouraged conservatives to run, and even to primary moderates. He blew a few races, but he succeeded in marshalling through a group of reliable, energetic, media-savvy conservatives, like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. DeMint was the first to talk down his own political skills and talk up the people he’d recruited. His work here was done.

Doug Mataconis considers the implications of DeMint’s departure:

[This development] sets up an interesting situation in South Carolina, where speculation was high that Lindsey Graham would face a tough primary fight from the a candidate on the right. With two Senate seats now open in the Palmetto State in 2014, though, that is likely to reduce the pool of candidates that would take on Graham and may end up making him far less vulnerable.

John Stanton disagrees and argues that DeMint can now “play kingmaker” in both of South Carolina’s Senate races, making Graham all the more vulnerable. How Tomasky sees the move:

I don’t know if it was even possible for Heritage to move further to the right, but if it was, it just did so. Heritage is the preeminent conservative policy shop; the AEI people might argue with me, but Heritage is certainly the biggest, anyway. The conservative intellectual/policy class right now faces a choice: lead the party they exist to support in some new and interesting directions, or double down on all the extremist and unpopular positions they currently hold. Heritage just chose. 

Noting that DeMint is likely to receive more than $1-million in salary at Heritage, Yglesias wonders if we’re not seeing the emergence of a larger migration trend:

[G]uys like Billy Tauzin and Evan Bayh have been blazing a trail that was formerly dominated by Hill staffers, namely moving voluntarily out of the public sector and into the lobbying space. When Representative Heath Shuler (D-NC) announced plans to resign at the young age of 40, for example, that naturally prompted questions about whether he was planning to become a lobbyist. He said no at the time but on November 26, Duke Energy announced that he’ll be their new Vice President of Government Affairs.

The reaction on the right side of the blogosphere is mixed. Ed Morrissey laments DeMint’s decision:

Frankly, I’m disappointed by the move…. [C]onsidering the fights ahead of us, it would have been much better to have DeMint as a stalwart on the inside rather than an activist on the outside.

Erick Erickson likes the news:

Jim DeMint is, like [current Heritage Foundation president] Ed Feulner, not indispensable. But his ideas are. It is time for the tea party senators he brought to the Senate to stretch their legs and prove they are Jim DeMint’s ideological heirs. In the meantime, he will be on the outside providing them the support and intellectual ammunition they need.

Jennifer Rubin says good riddance:

DeMint has been a destructive force, threatening to primary colleagues, resisting all deals and offering very little in the way of attainable legislation. He has contributed more than any current senator to the dysfunction of that body. He has worsened relations between the House and Senate, as he did in the budget fights in recent years, by meddling and pressuring his home state representative. His departure leaves other senators who seemed impressed with his brand of politics free to find their way to a more constructive position in the body.

John Podhoretz hopes Heritage continues to produce policy ideas:

The temptation for DeMint will be to stress the institution’s role in opposition, which is his stock in trade as a senator, and to downgrade its policy role, which has had its major “up”s (welfare reform) and its blind-spot “down”s (advocating a health-care mandate in 1994). But if ideas do not play the central role, Heritage will hollow itself out, and that would be a great shame.

(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

Transparency International just released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index. Al Jazeera notes very little improvement in the Arab Spring countries. Olga Khazan highlights how broken Afghanistan still is:

Afghanistan ranks as one of the most corrupt countries, and it seems bribes and fraud permeate nearly every level of life there. One Afghan in seven paid a bribe in 2010, and the average bribe is equal to one third of the average Afghan salary. A recent report found that high-level political interference and institutional failures thwarted efforts to probe the 2010 collapse of Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank, recover hundreds of millions of dollars from fraudulent loans and prosecute the people who profited, the Washington Post’s Pamela Constable reported. The Transparency International authors concluded last year, "Corruption, weak institutions and a lack of economic development pose a fatal threat to the viability of Afghanistan," and it seems the situation this year is sadly no different.

Another awesome holiday light sync:

Uganda's barbaric anti-gay bill is back. Nora Caplan-Bricker helpfully decodes Ugandan politics:

Gay rights activist Frank Mugisha told me the bill naturally monopolizes attention at home and abroad, and speculated on Twitter that it may come up for discussion sooner rather than later to distract from two oil bills that are dividing parliamentarians. Many lawmakers believe the petroleum legislation proposed would give Museveni’s oil minister too much free rein, and the legislative body shut down for part of last week after arguments about the oil bills became shouting matches and the speaker stormed out. The anti-gay bill is next on the schedule after the oil bills, and given its vast popularity, it could be a good way to smooth tensions and give parliament something to agree on after a series of contentious sessions. And, if the oil bills pass, the anti-gay bill could divert constituents’ attention from the suspect amount of power they would give Museveni’s cabinet—yet again, good cover for government corruption. With the anti-gay bill on the table, Mugisha says, “people forget about all the other issues, including the oil bill.”

Box Turtle Bulletin has extensive coverage of the anti-gay bill.

Seoul, South Korea, 1.50 pm

Jon Lee Anderson assesses the situation:

Whatever the regime’s real intentions with regards to its chemical weapons, the next chapter in Syria will be an ugly one, and before it is all over, many people are going to die—from bullets and bombs if not from sarin gas. Thanks to the boy-who-cried-wolf legacy of the Iraq invasion and the W.M.D.-that-weren’t, it is not surprising that the alleged Syrian chemical weapons threat has thus far failed to cause panic in international circles. This could prove to be an unfortunate historical lesson, for, as things stand, there is no guarantee that they won’t be deployed. And if they are used, Syria’s conflict will become a threshold conflict in more ways than one.

Dominic Tierney ponders Western opposition to chemical weapons:

Strip away the moralistic opposition to chemical weapons and you often find strategic self-interest lying underneath. Powerful countries like the United States cultivate a taboo against using WMD partly because they have a vast advantage in conventional arms. We want to draw stark lines around acceptable and unacceptable kinds of warfare because the terrain that we carve out is strategically favorable. Washington can defeat most enemy states in a few days–unless the adversary uses WMD to level the playing field. 

Waldman adds:

That may be part of the story, but it's more than just strategic—we want to define our means of warfare as ordinary and any other means as outside the bounds of humane behavior, less for practical advantage than to convince ourselves that our actions are moral and justified.

Michael Crowley's related thoughts:

Unless he runs out of conventional weapons, Assad would be foolish to incite America by tapping his chemical arsenal. He’s spent most of the past two years inflicting blood-curdling suffering on his people. There’s little reason to think we’ll try to interfere–so long as his sadism is the conventional kind, the kind we apparently can tolerate.

Sumathi Reddy explores what science says about selecting presents:

[A] recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General … concluded that gift givers are better off choosing gifts that receivers actually desire rather than spending a lot of time and energy shopping for what they perceive to be a thoughtful gift. The study found thoughtfulness doesn't increase a recipient's appreciation if the gift is a desirable one…. "The secret to being a good gift giver…is to give them what they want," says Dr. Epley, from the University of Chicago.

Reddy also notes that regifting is increasingly acceptable.

Silver thinks it's possible:

If the Democratic nominee in 2016 is someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton, who embraces a relatively traditional Democratic agenda, she will have better places to compete. But a Democrat who was perceived as being of the center-left or the libertarian left, especially one from a western state like Colorado’s governor, John W. Hickenlooper, could conceivably be competitive in Alaska. And if Alaska continues to add population from states like California and Washington, it could be competitive on a more regular basis in 2020 and going forward.

Jen Doll considers why "falling or being pushed into the subway tracks is one of the commonly held great fears of city living":

Like a plane crash, when it does happen it is not a small event. It is often tragic and both physically and emotionally disruptive to not only the victim but also to the witnesses of the event and to the city at large. And when it ends as well as we could hope—no one dies—there are extreme reactions as well: We laud the subway heroes who thought, or didn't think, but simply jumped, and succeeded. We wonder: Would we have done the same? What would we do if we were victim; what would we do, almost as horribly, if we were witness? Would we be a subway hero, or would we take the other course—run away, hide, shield our eyes, switch quickly to another train and get out of there as fast as we could? Would we stand and document; would we freeze? Would we try to help, and fail? And if we didn't try, could we live with ourselves afterward?

In another post, Doll relays an MTA subway conductor's advice on what to do if stranded on the tracks:

The best thing you can do is run as far down the platform as you can (in the opposite direction from where the train enters the station) and wave your arms frantically to get the train operator and passenger's attention. Believe me, the passengers WILL be doing the exact same thing, as nobody wants to see you get run over and their train get delayed. If you can get to the far end of the platform, it gives the train more room to stop, and there is a ladder at the end of each platform where you can climb back up — do NOT try to climb up from where you are. So many people have been killed trying to jump back up rather than getting away from the entrance end of the station.

Brian Palmer's advice:

After assessing your surroundings, you should consider four options.

Obviously, the optimal choice is to get back onto the platform, often with the help of bystanders. Dramatic subway rescues are somewhat common. In 2009, for example, an off-Broadway actor rescued a stranded man by hoisting him back to safety. (The good Samaritan said his stage role at the time required him to lift and carry other actors.) If you can’t boost yourself up in time, look for a space beneath the platform edge. In some stations, particularly in Manhattan, there is enough room between the train and the platform to accommodate a person. If the platform appears flush with the approaching train, you could take shelter in the space between the two sets of train tracks. This is a dangerous choice, though, because you’d have to traverse the third rail, which carries 660 volts of electricity, more than enough to kill a person. A final option is to simply lie flat—there may be enough clearance for the train to pass over you. In 2007, when a seizure caused a man to fall onto the tracks, a Vietnam veteran saved his life by pinning him to the ground between the rails until the train passed. Both men sustained minor injuries.

A reader sends the above footage:

A couple years back a drunk woman fell on to the subway tracks in Boston, and the whole incident was caught on tape. With a train coming at full speed, the only thing bystanders could do was to wave and point in the path of the train, which stopped inches – inches! – short of the woman. The stumbling woman kicked – but was somehow not electrocuted – by the third rail, and was finally helped back on to the platform. No wonder no one jumped in front of a moving train.

Previous Dish coverage here.

Chris Barton toe-taps through the signature work of jazz musician Dave Brubeck, who died this week at the age of 91:

Written by Brubeck's saxophonist Paul Desmond, the immediately recognizable "Take Five" was in 5/4; "Blue Rondo à la Turk" – a song inspired by Turkish folk music Brubeck heard while on State Department-sponsored tour — shifts between 9/8 and 4/4; and the whole album continues the theme, shifting between waltz, double waltz and straight time with impossible ease. To casual music listeners, such information can look like a fractions exam, but these songs upended the idea of what a jazz song could do. 

David Graham looks at the larger picture:

Brubeck was a major exponent of West Coast or "cool" jazz, a style that was (and is) often accused of being a whitewashed version of jazz, played by and for white guys, a lite-swing alternative to the knottier and greasier styles being practiced by hard-bop musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Horace Silver, and Miles Davis on the East Coast. Brubeck didn't fit the mold, musically or socially. Extremely conscious of color, he refused to tour apartheid South Africa and collaborated with Louis Armstrong on a musical about race relations and jazz. And while he could do "pretty," he could also attack the piano aggressively.

Henry Grabar digs deeper into his civil rights work:

Brubeck was as aware as anyone of the advantages afforded to a white musician, and, like Benny Goodman before him — another white musician at the helm of an integrated band — he used them to fight for civil rights. He led his group through the South in the tumultuous years between the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Riders, refusing to compromise the group's identity for the prejudice of Jim Crow.

Former student Brian Chahley remembers Brubeck's mastery at the piano, even late in his life:

Never have I met somebody who kept his youth so strong through his music. Sometimes it would take Dave three minutes to get to the piano (often with the piano comically far to the left of the stage, to minimize travel distance), but when that man sat down at the keys, all the stiffness and age melted away and he became the most incredible character. Seeming only 12 or 13 years old, he moved up and down the keyboard as though he had been saving the best for last. It taught me that every performance is a privilege, and never to take even one note for granted.

Andrew Cohen's dad raised him on Brubeck:

We grieve of course when we lose a loved one. But we may grieve again years later when we lose someone, even a stranger, who we know meant something special to the loved one we have lost. The new death reminds us anew of what the old death took from us. I feel that way about Dave Brubeck. His death today makes me think of all those Sunday mornings, and the joy my dad shared with us, a joy which now is gone from this earth. I suppose I could look at it that way. Or I suppose I could see the vivid memory of it all as just another blessing the two men, strangers but collaborators, each in his own way, bestowed upon my life. And I suppose I could make sure that I play "Blue Rondo" this Sunday for my own son.

Salon is rounding up videos of top performances.