The Dish

Froomkin:

Journalists should strive for accuracy, and fairness. Objectivity is impossible, and is too often confused with balance. And the problem with balance is that we are not living in a balanced time. For instance, is it patently obvious that at this point in our history, the leading luminaries on one side of the American political spectrum are considerably less tethered to reality than those on the other side. Madly trying to split the difference, as so many of my mainstream-media colleagues feel impelled to do, does a disservice to the concept of the truth.

No wonder Hiatt fired him.

Women for Afghan Women (WAW), "a nongovernmental organization that runs women's shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan," is calling for a troop increase. Michelle Goldberg:

To a large degree, the answer depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism. After the last eight years, that's a hard faith to sustain. Staying in Afghanistan seems indefensible. The trouble is, so does leaving.

A reader writes:

In your post you picked a section of Jerry Coyne's review where he suggests that observed changes in characteristics such as weight, cholesterol, age of menopause etc are "evolutionary change" and evidence that our species is evolving. My first two reactions were "wow, could they have picked a worse set of characteristics to study?" and "wow, how could he possibly draw that conclusion?" There is not a single characteristic listed which is not significantly affected by the lifestyle and environment of the subjects, something which any layman

can readily understand.

Despite his own caveats, where he notes that even the authors of the paper point out that the study was unable to differentiate between the effects of genes and culture, he still draws the conclusion that this is evidence that humans are evolving. The problem with his 'probable assumptions' is that they are speculations (by no less than his own admission), not science, which have been lent some air of authority due to the author's position as a prominent proponent of evolution. He also notes that these predictions will be hard (perhaps he should have said impossible) to verify due to the very same reason which I believe make them completely unreliable as indicators of evolution in the first place, namely that the behavior of the population effects these characteristics.

His conclusion also takes the concept of evolution completely out of context. He goes out of his way to let his readers know what evolution is in the review, that an individual will possess a trait which will increase the individual's chance of producing offspring and passing on an inherited advantage, but then goes on to declare these changes to be "evolutionary." The only way which this conclusion is reasonable is if you expand the definition of evolution to include learned behaviors, which he actually does in his first caveat, and introduces Richard Dawkins' idea of 'memes' without giving it the name, which is yet another area of speculation. By this reasoning a person who changes their diet and loses or gains weight has evolved.

Regardless of whether or not behavior is considered a part of evolutionary theory, it was not the point of the study, which was to find a connection between genes and the specified changes. This reminds me of Barack Obama's promise that the stimulus would "save or create" a certain number of jobs. A brilliant political move considering it is impossible to truly measure how many jobs are saved. Both of these cases demonstrate a common method of appearing to have successfully accomplished a desired goal by making goal posts sufficiently ambiguous as to make it possible to claim accomplishment where there is, in reality, none.

Scott Payne interviews Alex Massie:

I think the internet’s influence on the media and politics in Britain has taken time to build in part because the British press, for all its faults, is a much more open, raucous and cacophonous creature than its American counterpart. In other words, it shares some qualities with the blogosphere. In other words, there was less need for the blogosphere than there was in the US. At least in terms of holding politician’s feet to the fire.

Money quote:

Only $12,360 of the $265,341 he’s raised came from potential constituents. Hoffman collected money from donors in 35 states. Of the total 146 donors, only 22 were actually from within the district he hopes to represent. The campaign’s biggest backer is the Washington-based Club for Growth, accounting for more than one-third of all fundraising ($83,260).

“Reagan is a conservative. An extreme conservative. All the blockheads and dummies are for him, and when he says that something is necessary, they trust him. But if some Democrat had proposed what Reagan did, with you, they might not have trusted him,” – George H W. Bush, according to Mikhail Gorbachev.

More stunning insect photos by Igor Siwanowicz here.

"I think you're right, the term "leg-work" definitely could imply something I wasn't meaning to imply. If that's the way fair-minded people are reading it, then it's my mistake," – Jeffrey Goldberg, disavowing his insinuation that Trita Parsi, the heroic and decent head of the National Iranian-American Council is somehow a defender of the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad coup regime.

For some reason, this statement has not yet appeared on Goldblog itself, the natural place for such an important correction. On Goldblog, Jeffrey writes:

I think it's fair to say that Parsi's organization, the National Iranian American Council, functions as a kind of AIPAC for Iran.

This is not a retraction for saying that Parsi "does a lot of leg-work for the Iranian regime." It is an avoidance of the critical issue (something Goldblog did not do when asked by Mother Jones).

There is an enormous amount of difference between representing a country and representing its regime and in the current case of Iran, that distinction is everything.

Parsi is, of course, one of the Iranian coup's most tenacious and dedicated opponents. The implication that he is somehow a tool of the regime is unfair, untrue and malicious. It is not, however, an accusation that he is actually funded and supported by Ahmadinejad and Khameini. That insane accusation is left to the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb to seize and propagate.

If Goldfarb were a journalist or the Weekly Standard were an honest magazine, a correction and apology would be forthcoming. But we know that smearing anyone even slightly inimical to Israel's perceived interests is what the Weekly Standard exists, in part, to do.

Michael Crowley tries to stay positive:

I just heard Abdullah on NPR and he was trashing Karzai, saying that the president bore the blame for the chaos of the past eight years. So, Obama may be forced to carry on with an illegitimate partner in Kabul. That is a fundamental taboo of counterinsurgency doctrine. But that illegitimacy doesn't have to be permanent. If Karzai can make some quick and visible shows of reform, the situation could be salvageable. It's also worth recalling that the Maliki government in Iraq wasn't particularly legitimate when the surge began, either. There may be hope yet.

Where to begin? The surge has failed in Iraq to create the national unity it was designed to achieve; and its security achievements are just not replicable in Afghanistan. Expecting Karzai to reform now when he is in a civil war and just defeated his opponent makes no sense at all. Enormous pressure on him for years made no discernible difference.