A shift on the blockade:
The prime minister told Blair that he never thought the blockade as constituted was particularly wise, as he understood that the civilian population, and not Hamas, bore the primary brunt.
“It’s important for me to have a policy that I can defend before the world,” Netanyahu told Blair.
Kevin Drum counters J.M. Bernstein's dependency theory with polls showing that tea-partiers are wealthier than the average American. He concludes that the current movement is nothing new:
[T]hey're the usual reactionary crowd that goes nuts whenever there's a Democrat in the White House and they're looking for something to be outraged about. And right-wing media and the Republican Party have decided (correctly, I think) that banging on about the deficit is a handy way to gin up opposition to pretty much everything Democrats want to do.
The previous tea party incarnations worked the same way, but their leaders chose topics suited to their time and circumstances. In the 30s it was opposition to the New Deal. For the Birchers it was communism. For the Clinton-haters it was the culture wars. Those were the most obvious and convenient stalking horses of their day for broad-spectrum outrage at Democrats, while today's is the deficits/socialism message. There's really nothing mysterious here. It's just ordinary partisan politics.
So please please please: trying to figure out what's behind the tea parties is fine. But psychoanalysis isn't the right tool. History and politics are.
This point also came through in the many emails. But the emotional intensity of partisanship is worth exploring further, and when human beings are involved, the unconscious is always as important as the conscious. And, for the record, I found Hofstadter/Adorno's critique more illuminating than Bernstein's.
(Image via The High Definite)
Here's a fascinating study on the correlation between areas of the former Soviet Union that were the most aggressive in the mass murder of Jews in the 1940s and subsequent levels of economic growth. Yes: genocide is not good for prosperity – although this is possibly the most absurd standard by which to judge such evil.
I guess I am not feeling the same visceral stuff that Maureen is tapping into, but I did not watch the president’s Oval Office speech last night. I did not feel the need to be reassured that the feds and BP are doing all they can to stanch this open wound and deal with the awful, ongoing clean-up and consequences. And I did not expect a detail-specific rallying cry for climate change legislation, however much I would have liked to hear it. You don’t issue a rallying cry of that kind from behind the Oval Desk, when grappling with a much more immediate and difficult crisis-management problem. You do not lay out legislation you know cannot be passed right now. I have read the speech and watched it online. It’s hard to differ from Jim Fallows’ assessment:
Will we look on this speech as signaling the moment when the United States stopped talking about the distortions of its oil-based economy, and did something about it? No.
And that’s the only thing worth noting. The rest is cable news-cycle blather.
The speech did, however, seem to me to achieve what it was supposed to: signal strong presidential engagement with this now seemingly permanent blight on the world and our consciousness. For those who need their hand held as we wait for the relief wells that have always been the only real solution, I guess this is important. But it missed an opportunity to explain who exactly is in charge now, as Clive notes:
One important accusation does seem fair, and might be starting to stick: there is no clear chain of command. Who is in charge of operations? Whose responsibility is it to co-ordinate the efforts of the multiple agencies and levels of government–to organise offers of help from abroad, and to put resources where they can best be used? I had innocently supposed that after two months such a structure must exist, but maybe not. If there is a chain of command, Obama could have done himself a lot of good tonight by explaining it.
He looked nervous too, don’t you think? It was an unconfident performance. He moved his hands too much. He did not look strong. It was a bad night for his presidency, and he would have been wise to give no speech rather than this speech.
I wouldn’t go that far. The real import of this moment will be how the president builds on even Bush’s grasp of America’s oil-addiction problem and does something in response commensurate to the broader crisis once this incident is resolved. That broader crisis is America’s continued addiction to a substance that empowers our enemies and cooks the planet. One thing at a time. I see this speech as laying down a marker not initiating a new crusade, however necessary that may be.
So far: two steps backward for every one forward. But it’s worth remembering that almost every step backward on innovating post-carbon energy comes from the GOP. Obama and the Dems would have passed a serious climate bill by now if it weren’t for total Republican obstructionism (with the fitful exception of Butters). Obama is not the real obstacle here: the American people are, however manipulated by short-term political maneuvering by Republicans. And he does not have the political capital at this point in time to twist their arms. He has already pushed so many as far as they can go – on the issues of the economy and health insurance.
I’m hoping one day he will be able to push again. Maybe with a more Republican Congress from next year on, he has more of a chance. Because they will be forced to say what they’re for, rather than always pivoting from day to day based on what they’re against.
Chinese companies are paying white men to pose as fake businessmen to burnish their global profile.
First a congressman assaults an amateur reporter, now a verbal assault from the NYT's James Risen, who caught flak for his story on Afghanistan's mineral bonanza:
"Bloggers should do their own reporting instead of sitting around in their pajamas," Risen said. "The thing that amazes me is that the blogosphere thinks they can deconstruct other people's stories," Risen told Yahoo! News in an increasingly hostile interview that he called back to apologize for almost immediately after it ended. "Do you even know anything about me? Maybe you were still in school when I broke the NSA story, I don't know. It was back when you were in kindergarten, I think." (Risen and fellow Times reporter Eric Lichtblau shared a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Bush Administration's secret wiretapping program; this reporter was 33 years old at the time.)
Yahoo reporter John Cook reveals more about the interview via Twitter:
NYT's Jim Risen just told me bloggers criticizing his Afghan minerals story are "jerking off in their pajamas." Yahoo worried abt language.
Exum lays into Risen for his "phenomenal arrogance":
[I]f you think you don't need to answer to bloggers, some of whom have spent years doing field research or working in Central Asia and now blog as a hobby, the invisible hand of the market is going to find you out. And before you know it, you'll have taken a buy-out from the New York Times and be teaching creative writing in Maryland. And, let's face it, probably blogging on the side.
Both responses are, it seems to me, acknowledgment of the new media's power to rattle authoritah – the authoritah of congressmen and the authoritah of Pulitzer Prize winners (a political bauble if ever there was one). Score one for the web.
Take this with a grain of salt, along with all other information about the Palin famille:
"Bristol and Levi are still very close," a source close to Bristol, 19, tells Us. The eldest daughter to former Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin claimed in the June issue of Harper's Bazaar that ex Johnston, 20, was "a stranger to me." But the source reveals, "Now that Mama Palin is out of the picture and Bristol is on her own in Anchorage, they spend more time together than most people think." Adds the source: "Levi even stays overnight. I even think they are back together."
Palingates follows up on the rumor, first floated by an Alaska gossip blog. Bristol tells Radar that she and Levi are merely "co-parents." By the way, Mercede now has a blog.
Catherine Rampell finds a chart on the composition of the American population over the next four decades:
By 2030 — shown by the bars in the middle-shade of green — the entire baby boom generation will have moved into the ranks of the elderly.
This has bigger consequences than just a longer line for the early bird special. It means that a smaller portion of the population will be working, and inversely that a larger portion of the population will be depending on government services (and/or family members and meager personal savings) in order to get by.
Tim Kowal ghettoizes reams of foreign policy opinion:
People make flip assessments about domestic policy because, well, it’s domestic policy, and we’re going to have opinions about where we live. Besides, we’re forced to be somewhat engaged and to develop our ideas because, at least to some extent, we all reap the consequences of those policies.
Not so with what goes one half a globe away, as most of us have no first-hand knowledge about what’s going on. And the problems are toxic, complex, and decades old. It’s as if you tried explaining over the phone to your 80 year old blind grandfather how to assemble a neutron bomb. At best, it’s futile. At worst, it’s dangerous. This is generally what I think of eight minute radio segments and 500 word op-eds on the middle east.
E.D. Kain nods. And I take the general point. But this was a post by Jonah Goldberg, for Pete's sake. It describes the attack on the Mavi Marmara as an attack by Turkey against Israel. It describes the blockade of Gaza as one constructed by Hamas, without any assistance from the Israelis. Its core argument – that once any conflict with terrorists is enjoined, it can never be ended for fear of giving terrorists a victory – is so absurdly ahistorical and illogical it can only come from the template of an ideology that requires barely any actual analysis of events or people on the ground whatsoever to make Solomonic judgments.
I guess my point is: not every foreign policy op-ed is at this level of agit-proppery.
Drezner captures it:
There are plenty of sports in the United States that occasionally capture the intermittent attention of the casual sports fan, but won't "break through" the sports zeitgeist until and unless the United States fields a successful national team. This is how it tends to work with the Olympic team sports, and it's how it will work with the World Cup. If the United States can advance far in this tournament, Americans will become more interested; if not, they'll switch back to baseball and the NFL draft. In this approach, the casual sports fan is using a strategy of "rational ignorance" — i.e., not caring until the team is sufficiently successful.
The Dish 