Category: The Dish

[Patrick Appel]

Hilzoy dismisses the argument that Hillary is vetted. The post reminded me of this paragraph from Josh Green’s 2004 article on oppo research:

Kerry was clearly not [opposition researcher David Bossie’s] first choice of nominee. In his basement he proudly showed me dozens, perhaps hundreds, of boxes marked "HILLARY: WHITEWATER" or "HILLARY: TRAVELGATE." He called them the "Sierra Madre of Hillary oppo," regretfully adding that what could have been "ready to roll in twenty-four hours" will now have to wait until 2008.

[Patrick Appel]  Bill Clinton, circa 1992, discounts the importance of experience:

A Christie’s employee displays a colourless diamond of 101.27 carats on February 19, 2008 in London, England. Estimated to sell for a minimum of $6 million, this rare gem is the largest to appear on the auction market in 18 years and will be offered for sale at Christie’s forthcoming Spring Hong Kong jewellery sale on May 28, 2008. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty.

by Reihan

Before Julian Schnabel made The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, David Edelstein’s favorite movie of 2007 (and mine, not counting Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod), he made another really remarkable movie about the life of Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls. Sanford Schwartz excellent review essay on Schnabel the filmmaker brought the movie to mind.

It, too, presents a person making his way through a distinct social milieu, in this case Castro’s Cuba during the 1960s and 1970s, when individual liberties were first celebrated and soon eradicated. Based on Arenas’s autobiography of the same title, the movie at its core is an urgent and affectionate portrait of a man who rose from a background of dirt-poor farmers in the hinterland to become an internationally recognized writer— and who was brutally punished for his views by Castro’s regime and eventually died in New York, a decade after he was able to leave Cuba, of AIDS.

Schnabel is as intimate and down-to-earth about Arenas’s life as a homosexual, and about the texture of Hispanic Caribbean culture, as he is about the hospital world Jean-Dominique Bauby inhabits. But Before Night Falls is a richer and deeper movie than The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It encompasses grittier and more tumultuous experiences and revolves around a person (played by Javier Bardem without, it seems, a false moment) who grows as we watch from a cautious kid to a lovely young man and then finally to a self-assured and hardly cautious lover and writer whose refusal to conform leads to imprisonment and torture.

And for a glimpse of the post-Castro future, check out Graeme Wood’s "Bay of Capitalist Pigs," featuring a wonderful illustration by Chris Philpot. I only wish you could read the longer version of the piece.

by hilzoy

As I see it, there are good reasons for Democrats to vote for Obama, and good reasons to vote for Clinton. Personally, I think that there are more good reasons to vote for Obama, but that reasonable people can differ on this score. But there is one argument in favor of Clinton that I’ve seen around lately, and that I think does not hold water: that the Republicans have already thrown everything they have at Clinton, and so we already know what’s out there and what effect it’s likely to have. Or, as Clinton herself put it:

“I’ve been tested. I’ve been vetted. I have been in the political arena in our country very intensely for 16 years. There are no surprises.”

I have no particular reason to think that there are any surprises out there. But I also don’t think there is any good reason to think that there aren’t. In particular, the fact that the Republicans threw everything they had at the Clintons while Bill Clinton was President would only imply that there was nothing left for them to throw if we assume that no new dirt has come into existence since 2000.

In thinking about this, it might help to read this NYT story, about Bill Clinton helping a mining company get a contract in Kazakhstan, after which the head of the mining company gave $31.3 million to Clinton’s charitable foundation, and pledged $100 million more. Alternately, one might peruse TNR’s list of Clinton’s shadiest donors, and reflect on Clinton’s failure to make her tax returns public. One might also ask oneself: if the Republicans knew about some scandal that had developed since 2000, would they be more likely to use it during one of Clinton’s Senate campaigns, when she was virtually certain to win regardless of what they came up with, or to hold it in reserve in case she ran for President?

Again: I absolutely do not want to suggest that there is any actual dirt on the Clintons for the Republicans to dig up. Nor am I trying to argue against voting for Clinton. As I said above, I think there are good reasons to vote for her. I just don’t think that this is one of them.

(Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings; this is generally true, whether I remember to say so or not.)

[Patrick Appel] Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway, has been working on a prosthetic arm dubbed the "Luke arm." It is named after the prosthetic Luke Skywalker receives in Star Wars. Tom Simonite writes:

The Luke arm is limited in the amount of feedback it gives the user…a big barrier for all prosthetics. So far it has only one sensor, on the thumb, which lets the user feel how they are holding something. Kamen has previously said it is his goal to make it possible to differentiate a grape from a raisin without looking.

A very good video of a prototype in action can be seen here.

[Jim Manzi]

Patrick Appel points to a very interesting debate about Intelligent Design at The Corner.  (To put my cards on the table, I believe ID to be pseudo-science.)

The debate about evolution is a great example of the kind of sucker play that often ensnares conservatives.  Frequently, conservatives are confronted with the assertion that scientific finding X implies political or moral conclusion Y with which they vehemently disagree.  Obvious examples include (X = the Modern Synthesis of Evolutionary biology, Y = atheism) and (X = increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 will lead to some increase in global temperatures, Y = we must implement a global regulatory and tax system to radically reduce carbon emissions).  Those conservatives with access to the biggest megaphones have recently developed the habit of responding to this by challenging the scientific finding X.  The same sorry spectacle of cranks, gibberish and the resulting alienation of scientists and those who respect the practical benefits of science (i.e., pretty much the whole population of the modern world) then ensues. 

In general, it would be far wiser to challenge the assertion that X implies Y.  Scientific findings almost never entail specific moral or political conclusions because the scope of application of science is rarely sufficient.  In fact, for the two examples that I provided, I have tried to show in detail that X does not come close to implying Y.

Conservatism has often been called (by intellectuals) the “stupid party”.  But I think it is more precise to say that healthy conservatism from Burke onwards has been the party of “facts trump theories”.  Naturally, if you are in the business of spinning theories – that is, if you are an intellectual – this can be pretty frustrating, and it will often be to your advantage to characterize this as “stupid”.  But this is what makes contemporary conservative ideology that refuses to engage seriously with the scientific enterprise so damaging: it sacrifices the key conservative virtue of empiricism.

[Patrick Appel] Ambinder weighs in on the accusation that Obama is guilty of plagiarism:

Our political conversation is not subject to a copyright, thank goodness, and the controversy over whether Barack Obama borrowed a phrase or two from his friend, the governor of Massachusetts, is silly. […]

Using the standard that finds an objection in what Obama did, every politician owes residuals to the corps of political pollsters who created the library of platitudinous phrases that so often comprise the average stump speech. "In the end, it’s about the children." "This election is about the future, not the past."

The best speakers tend to appropriate and expand; Obama’s speeches pay tribute to the entire Kennedy family (and to the Sorensenian/Shrumian influences on their rhetoric); to Martin Luther King and to Barbara Jordan, ("Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation?"), to Calvinist preachers; to Jesse Jackson, to Cicero and Aristotle.

Nonetheless, Obama’s speeches are more original, more authorial, more persuasive than any of his competitors.

[Patrick Appel] Jeffrey Lewis says that we shouldn’t go ahead with the plan to shoot down that dying spy satellite. His reasoning:

Holding aside my general worry that this Administration is not to be trusted with sharp objects, there are specific reasons to be skeptical of both the accuracy and the completeness of this Administration’s calculations.  I strongly suspect that they are systematically discounting two types of hard-to-quantify risks — the possibility of error within the estimates and the political costs to conducting an anti-satellite intercept.

by hilzoy

Via Matt Yglesias, it turns out that the Clinton campaign didn’t manage to field a full slate of delegates in Pennsylvania:

“Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign failed to file a full slate of convention delegate candidates for Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary.

This despite the possibility the primary proves critical and despite Clinton owning the full-throated support of Gov. Rendell, state Democratic Party leadership, Mayor Nutter and, presumably, the organizational skill all that entails.

And despite a Rendell-ordered extension of the filing deadline that could be viewed as more than just coincidental..”

My first reaction was to think: this probably has no practical effect, as long as the missing delegates are spread out among Congressional Districts. A candidate has to win a very large percentage of the vote within a given CD to send all of his or her delegates for that CD to the convention (how large depends on how many delegates that CD gets.) So in most cases, having, say, one delegate too few wouldn’t be a problem. But then I read Atrios, who actually lives in PA, and who suggested that this was wrong. He notes that in PA people vote directly for delegates, and “not having named delegates on the ballot is a problem.”

Hmm, I thought: wouldn’t that mean that if everyone voted for his or her preferred candidates’ entire slate of delegates, the PA primary would essentially be winner-takes-all for each CD? And doesn’t that violate Democratic Party rules? So, reluctantly, I decided to do some research. And since the Iron Law of Blogging holds that no good research should go unpublished, I’m about to inflict it on you.

First: in PA, people do, in fact, vote for delegates, as well as for President. But the votes for delegate determine not which delegates will actually go to the Convention (so that if, say, all of Clinton’s delegates got more votes than any of Obama’s delegates within a particular CD, that CD would send a 100% Clinton slate to the Convention.) Rather, the candidates are given (pdf) a certain number of delegates based on the candidates’ share of the popular vote, and the votes for delegate (along with other rules designed to ensure roughly equal representation for men and women) determine delegates’ rank on a given candidate’s slate.

Second, as the original article notes, the DNC’s rules (pdf) state that “if a presidential candidate (including uncommitted status) has qualified to receive delegates and alternates but has failed to slate a sufficient number of delegate and alternate candidates, then additional delegates and alternates for that preference will be selected in a special post-primary procedure.” (13c, p. 19.) So there’s really no possibility that Clinton could wind up ceding delegates as a result of her failure to submit complete slates.

It’s another unforced error, and it comes at a time when the Clinton campaign does not need any more questions about competence. But as far as I can tell, it will not affect the actual allocation of delegates.