No ordinary candidate (Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe)
By the fourth or fifth time the question came up, McCain later wrote in his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For" (coauthored with Mark Salter), he could have delivered the new response from memory.
"But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph reporters that I really didn't mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president. I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn't make it less a lie. It compounded the offense. . . .
"I had not just been dishonest. I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable. All my heroes, fictional and real, would have been ashamed of me."
Now try, if you can, to imagine Hillary Clinton writing those words. Or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee. Is it conceivable that John Edwards, who fiercely indicts the moral shortcomings of others, would ever speak so bluntly and harshly about his own? Would Ron Paul? Would Barack Obama? Among America's leading politicians, I cannot think of any who is so forthright about his own failings, or so willing to let the world see him struggle with his conscience.
One doesn't ask for a Shakespearian hero (or tragic hero) when it comes to selecting a president (or a nominee), but in a race where every potential candidate is or has been a heretic on some issue or another, moral grounding becomes increasingly important. I took a pass on McCain in 2000 because I didn't think he had any. His ability to stick to his guns despite popular pressure (on immigration) and media pressure (on Iraq) and how important it seems to be to him makes me reconsider my previous view that he would persistently fold in the face of pressure from the media and coastal elites.
MORE: Is This McCain's Moment? (Robert Novak, Washington Post)
Beginning the year as the GOP's putative establishment candidate, McCain presided over a spendthrift, ineffective campaign. His decline reached its low point, however unfairly, when he came across as the apostle of immigration amnesty. Despite a free fall in the polls and the inability to raise funds, McCain has impressed the political community with six months of tireless grass-roots campaigning.
He never has been popular inside the party, even when it seemed that he might be its anointed candidate. He is still bitterly opposed by conservative activists Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed and is anathema to Cato Institute members and other libertarians because of his record on campaign finance reform. His opposition to earmarked pork and his demolition of the corrupt deal between Boeing and the Air Force have not enchanted fellow Republican politicians. Transcending ideology, he draws opposition because he will turn 72 in August.
But when Republicans get together privately, they tend to agree that McCain is the Republican most likely to defeat Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Even while some consider the old naval aviator cranky and hot-tempered, he has not exhibited those characteristics in debates. Rather, he exudes a heroic aura that goes beyond managing New York City or the Utah Olympics. That quality is shown in his Christmas-card television ad depicting a North Vietnamese prison guard making a cross in the dirt. McCain has managed to support the invasion of Iraq while criticizing President Bush's management of the invasion, and he maintains his fiscal integrity in a pork-driven, spendthrift Republican Party.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 27 December 2007, 08:58 AM | Comments (2)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 26 of 60 | Vote (+ / -)
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The Tony Snow Show (Shikha Dalmia, Reason)
[Tony] Snow's daily briefings with the White House press corps—a crusty and confrontational bunch whom he called his "customers"—were so full of his patented brand of repartee that they were dubbed "The Tony Snow Show." During one such briefing last year, Helen Thomas, the curmudgeonly 86-year-old correspondent for the Kings Feature Syndicate, launched into a soliloquy chastising the administration for failing to stop Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Snow patiently waited until she finished, then smilingly thanked her for offering "the Hezbollah view" of the issue and moved on to the next question.
Snow has been battling colon cancer for several years and cited the need to make more money as the main reason he stepped down as press secretary. Just before he left the White House in September, Snow sat down in his West Wing office with Reason Foundation senior analyst Shikha Dalmia, his former colleague on the editorial board of the Detroit News from 1996 to 2000, for an interview about his experiences as press secretary. Comments can be sent to react@reason.com.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 27 December 2007, 08:43 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 34 of 55 | Vote (+ / -)
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My Global Warming Question (Arnold Kling, TCS Daily)
I am worried about climate change. In one respect, I may be more worried than other people. I am worried because I have very little confidence that we know what is causing it. One of my fears is that we could reduce carbon emissions by some drastic amount, only to discover that--oops--it turns out that climate change is being caused by something else.
I am not a skeptic about the rise in average temperatures. Nor am I skeptical that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been increasing. However, I remain skeptical about the connection between the two.
My question is this:
what are the most persuasive reasons for believing that the rise in temperature is due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide?
What I am looking for is evidence that I can use to overcome my skepticism. My view of climate change is that we have about three data points--an increase in temperatures from 1900-1940, and slight decrease from 1940-1970, and a recent increase. There are a lot of variables that could affect climate, and I wonder how we can be confident about our understanding of the process, given that we have only those three data points to work with.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 27 December 2007, 08:41 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Environment
Positive votes: 36 of 65 | Vote (+ / -)
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Where is the conservative coalition? (Tony Blankley, Washington Times)
So, what would a majority right-of-center coalition look like in the next decade or so? It would have to hold almost all of its Reagan coalition, plus gain the support of at least 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote. As the white percentage of the country moves from 75 percent of the country in 2000 towards 50 percent by 2050, there won't be enough white people to make the 1980s-era Reagan coalition a majority. Depending on birth, immigration and voting-rate changes in the coming decades, the right-of-center coalition would need between 40 percent to 45 percent of the emerging Hispanic vote to supplement the shrinking white percentages.
It is pretty obvious that in a time of prosperity (post-World War II America), the left-of-center economic and populist appeals to northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestants were less compelling than the cultural fears being generated by society. But in hard times — or, equally importantly, if hard economic times are expected and dreaded — the historic appeal to those voters of populist and left-of-center economic arguments may regain their potency. If those blue-collar, rural, culturally and religiously conservative and (in part) lower-middle-class voters switch their electoral loyalty back to the left-of-center economic argument-based coalition, that will be the end of a majority right-of-center coalition.
Although the economy remains strong, the public's economic anxiety about the future has been steadily building the past half-decade. The emergence of China and India is engendering growing anti-free trade feelings (even 59 percent of Republicans now believe free trade hurts America, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll). Ever-rising health care costs and the anticipated burden of taking care of the boomer parents as we mentally and physically start declining all add to the economic fears for young and early middle age Americans.
It is precisely these kinds of economic fears that former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee is talking to (as well as his religious and culture message). Whatever happens to his candidacy in 2008, I think it is highly likely that the Republican Party (as the presumed continuing vehicle for a right-of-center coalition) will have to talk persuasively to the growing economic anxiety.
That the anxiety has arisen during economic boom times may suggest something about the current president's ability to communicate.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 27 December 2007, 08:39 AM | Comments (6)
Filed under: General, Business/Economics, American Politics
Positive votes: 33 of 57 | Vote (+ / -)
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The Speaker's Grand Illusion (David Broder, Washington Post)
An honest assessment of the year would credit [Congressional] Democrats with some achievements. They passed an overdue increase in the minimum wage and wrote some useful ethics legislation. They finally took the first steps to increase the pressure on Detroit to improve auto mileage efficiency.
But much of the year's political energy was squandered on futile efforts to micromanage the strategy in Iraq, and in the end, the Democrats yielded every point to the president. That left their presidential candidates arguing for measures in Iraq that have limited relevance to events on the ground -- a potential weak point in the coming election.
The major Democratic presidential hopefuls all have their political careers rooted in Congress, and the vulnerabilities of that Congress will in time come home to roost with them. Today, Democrats take some comfort from the fact that their approval ratings in Congress look marginally better than the Republicans'. In the most recent Post poll, Democrats are at 40 percent approval; Republicans, at 32 percent. But more disapprove than approve of both parties.
That is another reason it behooves the Democrats to get real about their own record on Capitol Hill. It needs improvement. And in less than a year, the voters will deliver their own verdict.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 27 December 2007, 08:34 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 29 of 53 | Vote (+ / -)
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2 Candidates, 2 Fortunes, 2 Views of Wealth (David Leonhardt, New York Times)
In the decade that followed, Mr. Edwards would win one big verdict after another, and Mr. Romney would oversee a series of hugely profitable investments.
Like thousands of other Americans in a global, high-technology economy in which government was pulling back and wealth was being celebrated, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney used talent, hard work and — as both have suggested — luck to amass fortunes. They became a part of a rising class of the new rich.
Whether this class is a cause for concern — whether it deserves some blame for the economic anxiety felt by many middle-class families — has become a central issue in the 2008 presidential race. And Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney are basing their candidacies in large measure on the very different lessons each has taken from his own success.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 26 December 2007, 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 25 of 41 | Vote (+ / -)
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Be our guest! (Megan McArdle, The Atlantic)
That's one troubling question. Here's another: do we let the guest workers date and marry American citizens, as they will? Because if we do, we'll find a lot of our guests have become permanent members of the household.
Then there's the question of social services; even if we force employers to cover health care costs, what do we do for guest workers who are between jobs? Send them back to Mexico? If we let women in, we will end up with a largish number of new citizens: are we obligated to educate them? Can they sign up for S-Chip?
But mostly, I worry about having a large number of people in the country who are, definitionally, not planning to stay here. There's something corrosive about transience: witness the way college students treat their neighborhoods. (And don't tell me they're young; they're prime guest-worker age.) Civic bonds can withstand culture clash, but I'm not sure they can withstand pockets of people who are just there for the job.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 26 December 2007, 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 33 of 54 | Vote (+ / -)
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Charming and aloof, Huckabee changed state (Adam Rossiter & David Barstow, New York Times)
[T]he novice governor found the sea legs in 1997 to help enact, with overwhelming support in the heavily Democratic Legislature, a major expansion of health insurance for children of the working poor whose families did not qualify for Medicaid. It was one of the first such expansions in the nation, coming before the federal government authorized them, and it baffled some Republicans in the Legislature.
“None of us understood what he was trying to do,” said Peggy Jeffries, then a Republican state senator and now executive director of the Arkansas affiliate of the Eagle Forum, a national group of conservatives.
Easily elected to a full term in 1998, Mr. Huckabee was emerging as something of an unquantifiable presence in the state capital, sometimes exerting leadership, other times not, and often floating above the details and minutia of governing.
But he confounded Republicans again when he pushed for a fuel tax increase to finance an ambitious road-building program, and eventually won support for what historians say was the largest highway bond program in Arkansas history.
Meanwhile, a style of leadership was developing that frustrated Republicans and Democrats alike.
As Orrin Judd suggests, Huckabee had an ambitious agenda and found ways to pay for it. Libertarian conservatives may not like the agenda, but his governorship sounds somewhat different than merely playing tax collector for the welfare state.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 22 December 2007, 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 24 of 43 | Vote (+ / -)
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How McCain Could Win (Jonathan Alter, Newsweek)
The candidate is 71, "old as dirt," as he likes to say, and shows it, especially in his hands, which still bear the imprint of his five and a half years of captivity in Hanoi, and in his face, where he suffered a bout with skin cancer several years ago. But he's thinner, more disciplined; that coiled energy and sharp mind dispel any idea that he should be disqualified for reasons of age. The spirit and good humor that made him so popular eight years ago up here remain intact, even if the jokes are a little stale. Whatever one thinks of his politics, it's hard not to have a good time with John McCain.
The meltdown of McCain's bloated and pandering campaign last winter was probably a blessing. If he were still the front runner he'd be a sitting duck. Instead he's preparing for a possible sequel to a legendary insurgent campaign in 2000 that for reporters like me was the most fun we ever had in politics.
What a relief that Mr. Alter recognize what's really important in a presidential campaign.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 20 December 2007, 12:38 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Media/Journalism
Positive votes: 31 of 53 | Vote (+ / -)
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Guests in the Machine (Kerry Howley, Reason)
If larger economies were to introduce guest worker programs like Singapore’s, the impact on migrant welfare would be enormous. The number of foreign-born residents in the wealthy countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is now a mere 7 percent of the total population, as compared with the Asian city-state’s 43 percent. The Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimates that if OECD nations were to administer small temporary labor schemes, with the imported workers totaling just 3 percent of the countries’ labor forces, the result would “easily yield $200 billion annually for the citizens of developing nations,” dwarfing the $60 billion the same countries offer in official development aid.
Beneath these clean numbers lurks a tangle of ethical quandaries and unanswered questions. For those who want a less restrictive regime, these programs are a compromise and an accommodation. There is no constituency for a policy of open borders in any of the wealthy countries of the OECD, and government-run guest worker programs are a politically viable means of increasing mobility. Like tightly regulated medical marijuana dispensaries, they are a highly regimented alternative to prohibition. In a political environment where full mobility is as unlikely as full drug legalization, such incremental change may be the only alternative to stasis.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 20 December 2007, 12:35 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, International Politics
Positive votes: 27 of 55 | Vote (+ / -)
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Why does the GOP Establishment fear Huck? (Rod Dreher, Beliefnet)
It's funny, but when it looked like Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal, was going to be the nominee, we didn't see many, if any, establishment Republican opinion leaders freaking out over what kind of danger to the future of the party and the nation he represented, even though as Ross points out, Giuliani hasn't exactly been deep on policy (I had to research Giuliani for our Dallas Morning News editorial board debate on which candidate to endorse, and I was genuinely startled by how vague he was on many things). I think it's fair to say that it was assumed that Giuliani would be a sound representative of the Republican Party, and that the social and religious conservatives would do like they always do and get in line. Pat Robertson sure did.
But lo, it turns out that the candidate who's caught fire comes straight out of the religious/social conservative wing of the coalition, and he is unsound on issues most important to the fiscal wing. It's not supposed to work that way. Nobody at the elite level seems to expect the economic conservatives to suck it up for the sake of party unity. What does that say about the place of social conservatives in the party all these years?
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 20 December 2007, 12:34 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics, Religion
Positive votes: 26 of 51 | Vote (+ / -)
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Has global warming stopped? (David Whitehouse, New Statesman)
Global warming stopped? Surely not. What heresy is this? Haven’t we been told that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all that’s left to the so-called sceptics is the odd errant glacier that refuses to melt?
Aren’t we told that if we don’t act now rising temperatures will render most of the surface of the Earth uninhabitable within our lifetimes? But as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent IPCC’s Synthesis report that says climate change could become irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something is not quite right in the global warming camp.
With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 – there has been no warming over the 12 months.
But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.
The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect.
Years of global cooling (David Deming, Washington Times)
Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up.
Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 19 December 2007, 03:00 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Environment
Positive votes: 35 of 56 | Vote (+ / -)
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The Other Fallujah Reporter (Michael Totten, Commentary)
My colleague (of sorts) at least acknowledges that “military actions are down to the minimum inside the city.” He adds, however, that “local and U.S. authorities do not seem to be thinking of ending the agonies of the over 400,000 residents of Fallujah.”
This is nonsense on stilts. Marines distribute food aid to impoverished local civilians. The electrical grid is being repaired now that insurgents no longer sabotage it. Solar-powered street lights have been installed on some of the main thoroughfares and will cover the entire city in two years if the war doesn’t come back. Locals are hired to pick up trash that went uncollected for months. A new sewage and water treatment plant is under construction in the poorest part of the city. Low-interest microloans are being distributed to small business owners to kick start the economy. American civilians donate school supplies to Iraqi children that are distributed by the Marines. Mr. al-Fadhily would know all this if he embedded with the U.S. military. Whether or not he would take the trouble to report these facts if he knew of them is another question.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 19 December 2007, 09:08 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Media/Journalism, American Foreign Policy
Positive votes: 30 of 52 | Vote (+ / -)
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Huckabee Getting Harriett Miers Treatment? (James Joyner, Outside the Beltway)
Still, there are similarities. In both cases, conservative intellectuals rebellied against someone we perceived as unqualified for the office to which they’re aspiring. Miers had a fine career, all the more remarkable for a woman entering the legal profession at a time when that was unusual, but she hadn’t demonstrated a sharp judicial philosophy. Huckabee was presumably a fairly competent governor but he seems not to have any grasp of conservative principles beyond “What Would Jesus Do?”
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 19 December 2007, 08:58 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 32 of 49 | Vote (+ / -)
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Obama's Gordian knot (Paul Beston, City Journal)
Steele and Obama make a compelling pair. Both children of interracial marriages, they have carved out unique places in America’s racial landscape. Obama, of course, is a black presidential candidate who, unlike his predecessors in that effort (Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton), could conceivably win. Steele is America’s bravest and most eloquent racial commentator; he views American race relations as an existential struggle for moral innocence. In his telling, blacks, by virtue of their history of oppression, claim victimhood as a source of political power. As the historically wronged group, they can collect on grievance by exploiting white guilt. For whites, the quest for racial redemption often leads to a kind of narcissistic selfishness. White liberals, in particular, favor racial policies that preserve their own sense of goodness, even if these policies’ effectiveness, let alone justice, is dubious. The result is a fundamentally corrupt racial dialogue.In his new book, Steele brings this distinctive perspective to the Obama phenomenon. A Bound Man manages to combine some of the philosophical sweep of Steele’s previous work with a focus on one individual’s character and thinking. Obama’s candidacy has sparked excitement, Steele writes, both because of its plausibility – he is a legitimate contender for the Democratic nomination, not a mere protest candidate – and because it symbolizes “the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference.” And yet, notwithstanding this sense of what Steele calls “high possibility,” Obama is “bound” between the two competing pressures that hold blacks today: the need for belonging within the racial group, which requires that he cultivate his “blackness” and to some degree adopt the language of victimization; and the need to be true to himself, which requires rejecting the crippling and false premises of victimization and Afrocentrism and acknowledging his broader humanity. In Obama’s case, that humanity is broad indeed, as he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and was raised largely by his white mother, who emphasized not bloodlines but self-reliance.
Steele is clearly sympathetic with Obama. He identifies with Obama’s struggle as a young man to understand his racial identity, complicated further by his black father’s abandonment of the family when Barack was only two. He has high regard for Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from My Father, which he likens to a novel for its narrative power and anguished psychological probing—and which probably predates Obama’s recognition of his larger political ambitions.
Obama’s struggle to define himself is made more difficult by the confining pressures of racial identity in America, and specifically by what Steele calls the two “masks” that black Americans have typically worn when dealing with whites: challenging and bargaining.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 18 December 2007, 09:37 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, American Politics
Positive votes: 34 of 55 | Vote (+ / -)
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This is not your land anymore (Jonathan Last, OpinionJournal)
The legal phrase "eminent domain" has become all too familiar to nonlawyers in recent years as the U.S. Supreme Court has gradually expanded the power of municipalities to condemn private property and seize it for "public" use--even if they just end up handing property over to another private party. The court's now infamous Kelo decision (2005) no doubt pleased the city fathers of New London, Conn., who had taken possession of some residential neighborhoods for the sake of private developers. But it outraged nearly everyone else, not least Susette Kelo, the plaintiff whose home was coveted.Outrage, appropriately, is the sustained effect of Carla Main's "Bulldozed," the case study of another instance of eminent-domain abuse, this time in the working-class town of Freeport, Texas (pop. 13,500), on the Gulf coast. Six years ago, after decades of decline, Freeport decided to revitalize itself by building a private marina on the Old Brazos River, which runs through the center of town. City leaders hoped that the development would attract hotels, restaurants, art galleries and tourists. But to make it all happen, they needed the land of a local family business. "Bulldozed" tells the story of a fight over domain, eminent and otherwise.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 18 December 2007, 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, American Politics
Positive votes: 27 of 57 | Vote (+ / -)
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The Alternative: A bad sign for coaching (Jay Mohr, Fox Sports)
Karl Dorrell was hired in large part to clean up the off-the-field messes that Bob Toledo's Bruins spread all over Westwood for almost a decade. Dorrell is a former Bruin himself and was counted on to bring class and respectability back to the UCLA football program. He did just that. The only thing he couldn't do was put a basketball school emphatically on the football map.
Tyrone Willingham was called on to do the same thing at Notre Dame. He cleaned up the Irish image with a no-nonsense approach and an eye for detail. He was jettisoned soon after the great, wise white men in charge of football in South Bend wanted someone else.
We all know the amazing improvement Mr. Weis has brought to the Irish. He has helped them become the laughingstock of Division I football as well as an albatross around NBC's neck. Nothing like being contractually obliged to showcase a three-win team every Saturday. Way to go, guys.
Mohr is only the latest to use Ty Willingham as an example of a "good black coach" that has been screwed by the (racist) system. I wish they would stop as Willingham is (or has been post-Stanford at any rate) a mediocre coach with a good press agent.
Willingham's winning percentage at Notre Dame (.583) was the same that got his predecessor fired and even despite Charlie Weis's awful season (loaded with freshman and hit with injury) his record is nearly identical to Willingham's (Weis: 22-15, Willingham: 21-15). Had Willingham gone 19-6 his first two years as Weis did, he would have gotten the same contract extension that saved Weis's career. Willingham's record at Washington is 11-25 with a winning percentage very close to that of the predecessor that got him fired (Willingham: .304 and still employed after 3 seasons, Gilbertson: .306 and fired after 2 seasons).
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 17 December 2007, 05:17 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Sports
Positive votes: 25 of 45 | Vote (+ / -)
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Kung Fu Monks Don't Get Kick Out of Fighting (Geoffrey Fowler & Juliet Ye, Wall Street Journal)
Kung fu master Shi Dechao can swing his 22-pound "monk's spade," an ancient Chinese shovel, like a majorette twirling a baton. His lightning punches, in a style the ancients called Iron Fist, generate a thunk! straight out of kung fu movie sound effects. A powerful grunt punctuates his routine.
But Dechao, and most of the other martial monks at the 1,500-year-old Shaolin Temple in China's central Henan province, decline to join in one of the biggest kung fu battles of modern times -- a competition to be staged in tandem with next year's Olympic Games in Beijing.
Clad in saffron Buddhist robes, Dechao insists that real kung fu monks don't fight. They meditate and practice kung fu to reach enlightenment. "Every fist contains my love," says the 39-year-old Dechao, also known as Big Beard.
The Shaolin Temple's decision to stay out of the competition, to be held at the same time as the Olympics and passing out medals of its own, made headlines in China. And it has rekindled a disagreement familiar from the movies: Is kung fu a form of devotion, a style of fighting or both?
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 17 December 2007, 08:52 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Entertainment, Society/Life
Positive votes: 28 of 58 | Vote (+ / -)
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Ron Paul Sets New Single-Day Fundraising Record (Steven Taylor, PoliBlog)
I don’t think that the “Rock Star” analogy is the appropriate one. Instead of acting like the fans of a rock star or other run-of-the-mill celebrity, I would argue that Paul’s followers are actually more like scifi fandom (e.g., Trekkies and the like). Like scifi fans, Paul supporters represent a specific, passionate segment of the population who are willing to mobilize and put their money where their mouths are, and are convinced that their numbers are bigger than they really are. Plus, Paulites, like most scifi fans, are computer savvy, whether in terms of fundraising, or in terms of rapid-response to online discussion of their candidate.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 17 December 2007, 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 26 of 43 | Vote (+ / -)
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Hetracil, for Real This Time (Julian Sanchez, Notes from the Lounge)
For perhaps understandable reasons, gay activists have staked a lot on the notion that sexual orientation is—whether by genes or early environment—biologically hardwired, not the result of any conscious choice. But of course, this meant that someone might one day come up with a biological means to artificially produce either orientation. If something like this ever reaches the market—still, to be sure, a far-off hypothetical—I'm guessing we'll watch X-Men III play out, though (alas) with fewer mutant powers.
SOURCE: Family Planning (Megan McArdle, The Atlantic)
We already have a test case: deaf children and cochlear implants. We've never spent any time quibbling about whether deafness is innate or chosen; the answer is obvious. Or, it was. Because now congenitally deaf children can be given a device that will transform them into hearing children. While they may never hear as well as I do, the cochlear implants pull them out of the deaf community: they acquire spoken language, go to hearing schools, and usually don't learn to sign. This is a choice that unfortunately must be excercised not by the children, but by the parents; unless kids get them early, their oral language acquisition will always be stunted. [...]
If we can turn most deaf kids into hearing kids, the quality of life of the remaining deaf people will suffer dramatically. There will be fewer services available for deaf people, less research into products that can improve their lives. They will have a smaller pool of people from whom to choose friends and spouses. Less deaf culture will be produced--and it's fairly hard for them to consume most non-visual arts, particularly those who are illiterate. It's not crazy to worry that deaf culture and institutions would be crippled, leaving the few remaining deaf people stranded in an island of silence.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 17 December 2007, 08:39 AM | Comments (1)
Filed under: General, Health/Medicine, American Politics
Positive votes: 32 of 54 | Vote (+ / -)
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A revealing history of church-state relations (Jonathan Dorfman, Boston Globe)
The publisher Alfred A. Knopf snared the cover of The New York Times Magazine in August with an 8,000-word excerpt of Mark Lilla's "The Stillborn God," an intellectual history of church-state relations. But it would be a shame if all the talk this book has generated were reduced to a bumper sticker bromide about keeping religion out of politics.This is a lucid book of great learning and shrewd insights into political and religious psychology. Lilla, a distinguished public intellectual at Columbia, has an unusual biography for a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books: He once was a Christian evangelical, and writes about the fire of religious awakening from the inside, and with understanding.
The nexus of his book is the contrast between two strands of Western thinking about religion and politics. The first is well-known to Americans: the revolution in thought, largely in response to the Wars of Religion which left a devastated 16th-century Europe soaked in blood, in which Thomas Hobbes and later John Locke sought to free the political order from theocratic control. "A Great Separation," as Lilla calls it, "took place, severing Western political philosophy decisively from cosmology and theology. It remains the most distinctive feature of the modern West to this day."
Yet the most interesting thing about Lilla's book is subtle exposition of the second strand of Western thinking about political theology, the philosophical tradition which stands opposed to that of Hobbes, Locke, and American notions of the separation of church and state. That tradition begins with Rousseau, a thinker typically associated with the left. The pedigree of this political theology will surprise those who associate the marriage of religion and politics with controversial figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But it was Rousseau, the forebear of the French Revolution, who believed that man in his natural state is inherently religious, and that the state should encourage the religious impulse.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 16 December 2007, 04:43 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, Religion
Positive votes: 23 of 50 | Vote (+ / -)
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Writing her off: Condi's story of triumph dismissed yet again (Michelle Bernard, New York Post)
Bumiller conducted numerous interviews, and the book has some fascinating moments, but she misses the mark in trying to capture Rice's wonderful story of American achievement. Indeed, many of those interviewed do not believe that Rice authentically represents the American dream, and they are seemingly incapable of understanding what fuels Rice's self-made potpourri of idealism, pragmatism and determination to succeed. I couldn't help wondering whether veteran members of the feminist movement and self-described progressives can be fair to a woman whose political views do not match their own.Bumiller and many of those she quotes in her book are unable to fairly consider a black woman who embraces individual liberty, personal responsibility, limited government and the free market. She mistakenly concludes that Rice's “real ideology was not idealism or realism," but “succeeding." In analyzing Rice's evolution from concert pianist to political scientist, Democrat to Republican and political realist to idealist, Bumiller concludes that “shedding so many skins raises the question of what she really stands for . . . she is a pragmatist who for four overwhelming years got swept away by her devotion to the president." Isn't it possible that Rice has simply evolved rather than “reinvented" herself as Bumiller suggests?
Elisabeth Bumiller, who covered the White House for the New York Times during most of George W. Bush's presidency, has labored to present an evenhanded look at Rice. She shows some sympathy for her subject and even more understanding. But, in the end, this is a portrait of a talented, ambitious woman who has allowed intense loyalty to cloud her judgment and good sense.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 16 December 2007, 04:38 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, American Politics, American Foreign Policy
Positive votes: 27 of 56 | Vote (+ / -)
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Reading the Bible Anew (Jerome Segal, Washington Post)
Surely the Bible can teach and inspire. But has it lost the ability to startle? To make us gasp? In our society, where 90 percent of households possess a Bible and more than a third of American adults say they've read from it in the past week, it's hard to see the text with fresh eyes. Even if you're in the small minority that admits to never having read it, you probably know something about it. Maybe too little to embrace it. Or maybe too much.
Eighty years ago, the Jewish philosopher and Bible scholar Martin Buber maintained that modern man cannot, if he is honest with himself, approach the Bible with the solid faith of previous generations. At the same time, Buber judged that one loses all that is biblical if one takes what the Bible has to say as merely figurative, metaphorical or allegorical. His solution was that "modern man" must "read the Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham statements that cited the Bible as their authority. He must face the Bible . . . as something new." Within the Jewish tradition, which emphasized reading the Bible through the interpretive lens of the ancient rabbis, this was a radical break. Part of Buber's rationale rested on his assessment of the Bible as literature. It is not that Buber viewed the Bible as mere literature; being literature was not incompatible with being a source of revelation. Rather, he argued that scripture "uses the methods of story-telling to a degree . . . that world literature has not yet learned to use." And so, he said, "it remains for us latecomers to point out the significance of what has hitherto been overlooked, neglected, insufficiently valued."Despite the title, How to Read the Bible, James Kugel does not offer us latecomers a new way to read the Bible. Instead, over some 700 well-written pages, Kugel goes through the Hebrew Bible (which Christians have traditionally called the Old Testament) alternating a discussion of how ancient interpreters understood key passages with what modern scholarship can tell us about the origins and accuracy of the text. This is wonderfully interesting stuff, extremely well presented.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 16 December 2007, 04:27 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, Religion
Positive votes: 29 of 51 | Vote (+ / -)
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'Myriads of tiny architects' (Tom Holland, Telegraph)
There is something pleasingly fantastical about the title A History of Histories. It is the kind of phrase that one could imagine Borges delighting in. Like his "Library of Babylon", it seems to suggest a tantalising, impossible infinitude.John Burrow's new book, however, is no magic-realist jeu d'esprit, but precisely what its title suggests: an attempt to map the development of the historian's craft over the course of two-and-a-half thousand years, from Herodotus to the History Channel. This is a project that, for its nerve alone, deserves to be regarded with awe.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 16 December 2007, 04:22 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts
Positive votes: 21 of 55 | Vote (+ / -)
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Raiders of the faux ark (Eric Cline, Boston Globe)
NOAH'S ARK. The Ark of the Covenant. The Garden of Eden. Sodom and Gomorrah. The Exodus. The Lost Tomb of Jesus. All have been "found" in the last 10 years, including one within the past six months. The discoverers: a former SWAT team member; an investigator of ghosts, telepathy, and parapsychology; a filmmaker who calls himself "The Naked Archeologist"; and others, none of whom has any professional training in archeology.
We are living in a time of exciting discoveries in biblical archeology. We are also living in a time of widespread biblical fraud, dubious science, and crackpot theorizing. Some of the highest-profile discoveries of the past several years are shadowed by accusations of forgery, such as the James Ossuary, which may or may not be the burial box of Jesus' brother, as well as other supposed Bible-era findings such as the Jehoash Tablet and a small ivory pomegranate said to be from the time of Solomon. Every year "scientific" expeditions embark to look for Noah's Ark, raising untold amounts of money from gullible believers who eagerly listen to tales spun by sincere amateurs or rapacious con men; it is not always easy to tell the two apart.
The tools of modern archeology, from magnetometers to precise excavation methods, offer a growing opportunity to illuminate some of the intriguing mysteries surrounding the Bible, one of the foundations of western civilization. Yet the amateurs are taking in the public's money to support ventures that offer little chance of furthering the cause of knowledge. With their grand claims, and all the ensuing attention, they divert the public's attention from the scientific study of the Holy Land - and bring confusion, and even discredit, to biblical archeology.
Unfortunately, when fantastic claims are made, they largely go unchallenged by academics. There have been some obvious exceptions, such as the recent film "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," which inspired an outcry from scholars by claiming that archeologists had found, but not recognized, the tomb of Jesus more than 20 years ago. But much more common is a vast and echoing silence reminiscent of the early days of the debate over "intelligent design," when biologists were reluctant to respond to the neocreationist challenge. Archeologists, too, are often reluctant to be seen as challenging deeply held religious beliefs. And so the professionals are allowing a PR disaster to slowly unfold: yielding a field of tremendous importance to pseudoscientists, amateur enthusiasts, and irresponsible documentary filmmakers.
At a time when the world is increasingly divided by religion, both domestically and internationally, and when many people are biblically illiterate, legitimate inquiries into the common origins of religions have never been more important. I believe that the public deserves - and wants - better. We have an obligation to challenge the lies and the hype, to share the real data, so that the public discussion can be an informed one.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 16 December 2007, 04:16 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Religion, Society/Life
Positive votes: 15 of 53 | Vote (+ / -)
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Fred Thompson: The stand-up guy who stood up too late? (Byron York, NRO)
Something has happened to Thompson in recent weeks. Yes, his schedule is still astonishingly light for a presidential candidate. And yes, he sometimes still underwhelms audiences. But in the last month or so Thompson has acted like a man who has been liberated from something. And that is what voters saw on stage Wednesday: a presidential candidate who has declared himself fully free of the stupid stuff one has to do to become president of the United States.
If you’re going to ask Fred Thompson to participate in a grade-school show of hands, or demand that he sign a pledge, or insist that he speak emotionally and at length about how much his religious faith means to him, well, you can just forget it. He’s not gonna do it.
The moment of final liberation came when Des Moines Register editor Carolyn Washburn, the schoolmarmish moderator whom commentator Fred Barnes would later refer to as “Nurse Ratched,” asked the candidates to raise their hands if they believed that “global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity.” Before anyone could say anything, Thompson interrupted.
“I’m not doing hand shows today,” he said. “No hand shows.”
“Is that yes or no for you?” Washburn asked. “Do you believe that global climate change is — “
“Well, do you want to give me a minute?” Thompson responded.
“No.”
“Then I’m not going to answer it.”
“How about thirty seconds?”
“No. You know — you want a show of hands. I’m not giving it to you.”
The audience loved it. Thompson, and Thompson alone, had stood up to the silliness that can characterize even self-styled serious-minded debates like the one conducted by the Register.
Fred wins, Iowa loses (Dean Barnett, Weekly Standard)
The bulk of the post-debate analysis will probably focus on how maladroit Washburn was at the job. She did the impossible--she moderated the last Iowa debate between the Republican candidates before caucuses and yet saw to it that none of the candidates engaged each other. In other words, the moderator ensured that the debate would be as lively as a 12 part PBS series on "How Grass Grows." A personal aside to the Des Moines Register--"boring" is not synonymous with "serious."
The problems went beyond Washburn's lack of mad moderating skillz. From the outset, Washburn announced that the candidates would not be discussing either Iraq or immigration. Swell! It's the biggest debate of the season, so let's take the two biggest issues off the table. For what it's worth, Washburn brought all the charm to her assignment of a latter-day Nurse Ratched.
At some point, the political parties will have to begin to wonder why they entrust such a critical part of our president-choosing process to people like Carolyn Washburn, people who obviously aren't up to the task.
Good for Fred Thompson. Most candidates take pains not to offend media types, even insipid ones. In this instance, it was nice to see a candidate slap down an insipid question asked by an awful moderator.
Surely we can do better.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 14 December 2007, 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Media/Journalism, American Politics
Positive votes: 17 of 51 | Vote (+ / -)
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His dark material: The unsubtle atheism of Philip Pullman (Leslie Baynes, OpinionJournal)
First of all, "His Dark Materials," unlike the Harry Potter series, is real literature and, as such, deserves serious attention. Mr. Pullman, a graduate of Oxford University with a degree in English, knows his stuff. The books are loaded with allusions to Greek mythology and philosophy, Milton, Blake and the Bible, with images ranging from the obvious (the Garden of Eden) to the obscure (the bene elim, or angelic Watchers mentioned in Genesis 6:1-4). These allusions, unlike the throwaway Latinisms of Hogwarts' spells, drive the plot, characters and themes of Mr. Pullman's series. Indeed, a child who investigates them would begin to gain the rudiments of a classical education.Moreover, again in contrast to J.K. Rowling's books (which were criticized by some Christians for their use of magic and witchcraft), Mr. Pullman's series is bluntly anti-Christian. In the third book, "The Amber Spyglass," a former nun tells the two child protagonists, Lyra and Will, that "the Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that's all." The church and its members do nothing but evil.
The main problem with "His Dark Materials," however, is not the atheism per se but rather its mindless dogmatism.
MORE: An Interview with Philip Pullman (Intelligent Life), A labor of loathing (Peter Hitchens, Spectator).
I read the Pullman series some years ago, and found it to be tedious reading -- not because of any religious or anti-religious undertones, but simply because it was a bore.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 14 December 2007, 04:33 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Books/Arts, Religion
Positive votes: 18 of 52 | Vote (+ / -)
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Our view on war in Iraq: Surge's success holds chance to seize the moment in Iraq (USA Today)
On the Republican side, the White House has been busy making excuses for the Iraqi government's failure to move toward national reconciliation (which is the goal of the troop surge), and it has lowered the benchmarks for success to the level of irrelevance. That translates into reduced accountability, continued dependency and an open-ended commitment. Lowering the bar for the Iraqi government sends a message that Baghdad can enjoy security paid for in American lives, and reconstruction aid paid by America's taxpayers, and ignore its responsibilities.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, seem lost in a time warp. They could try to impose new benchmarks that acknowledge the military progress. Instead, too many seem unable or unwilling to admit that President Bush's surge of 30,000 more troops has succeeded beyond their initial predictions. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who in the spring declared the war lost, said last week that "the surge hasn't accomplished its goals." Anti-war Democrats remain fixated on tying war funding to a rapid troop withdrawal. Yet pulling the troops out precipitously threatens to squander the progress of recent months toward salvaging a decent outcome to the Iraq debacle.
What's needed is acknowledgment that the surge is achieving what was intended: not complete military victory but enough stability to make political compromise possible. What's missing is Iraqi will to take advantage of the success.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 13 December 2007, 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics, American Foreign Policy
Positive votes: 14 of 43 | Vote (+ / -)
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First Things, Intelligent Life Blogs
The Economist's has a quarterly lifestyle magazine called Intelligent Life, which has a blog called More Intelligent Life.
Catholic magazine First Things has also started a blog.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 12 December 2007, 02:17 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General
Positive votes: 19 of 42 | Vote (+ / -)
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Poll: Huckabee would lose to top Democrats by double digits (CNN)
While presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is surging in new polls of GOP candidates, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday shows he would lose to all three leading Democratic candidates by double digits in hypothetical contests.
In head-to-head matchups -- the first to include Huckabee -- the former Arkansas governor loses to Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York by 10 percentage points (54 percent to 44 percent), to Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois by 15 points (55 percent to 40 percent) and to former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina by 25 points (60 percent to 35 percent).
As pollsters point out, Huckabee's name recognition is his chief liability and that would obviously change (for better or worse) if he got the nomination. More significant is that Huckabee is beating Clinton in Arkansas, where they are both "favorite son/daughter" candidates to one degree or another. Clinton beats Giuliani and Romney soundly in Arkansas, and I doubt that's because of ideology (Obama beats Giuliani, but within the Margin-of-Error). Of course, winning Arkansas is a necessary but not sufficient component to winning the national race, and time and attention to Huckabee will sort it all out in due time, but if he had the glass jaw that Democrats apparently believe him to have, I'd expect it to show up in the state where the voters know him best.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 12 December 2007, 08:47 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 19 of 50 | Vote (+ / -)
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Blockhead: Higher education's imbalancing act (Peter Wood, NRO)
Is there anything really to be concerned about in the Left’s preponderance in faculty positions at prestigious public and private universities, ordinary colleges, and so on down the line? Is it useful to bear in mind Gross and Simmons’ point that the hard left, the real radicals, are in the minority, and the mainstream of higher education is just somewhere in the vicinity of Al Gore, Ralph Nader, and perhaps John Edwards? Does it matter that, although the Left predominates in virtually all areas of the university (including, contrary to the stereotype, most business schools), the super-concentration is limited to the social sciences and the humanities? (Gross and Simmons found that 25.5 percent of American sociologists who have academic appointments consider themselves Marxists.)
Moranto, I think, has a pretty compelling point in suggesting that the scarcity of conservative views on campus injures students. If one spends four years (now, more often, five or six years) in an environment where the pieties of the Left are treated as plain commonsense; where disdain for America’s history, our key institutions, and our foreign policies is normative; where the invocation of “diversity” trumps any argument on any subject, one isn’t much prepared to find one’s way in actual American life.
This isn’t a hypothetical circumstance. If you talk to recent college graduates, many of them seem in a state of resentful befuddlement. They have been taught that America is bad. They carry around their disdain for this unworthy nation along with their tattered editions of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Some seem to have arrived from another country — as though they had spent their years in Kazakhstan and knew America via poorly translated comic books. Mostly they do not see themselves as aligned with the political Left. That’s because the category of “Left” is meaningless without a contrasting term, and all they know about conservatives is that they are heartless, exploitative, money-grubbing, hate-mongering hoarders of class, race, and gender privilege.
They may have a cause or two they uphold. AIDS prevention. Abortion. But most often it is the fight against global warning — a fight for which they lack any hint of “critical thought,” despite their four, five, or six-year immersion in pedagogy that ostensibly values “critical thinking” above any other intellectual endeavor.
This portrait of our college grads is, as I intend it, exaggerated, but I have run into the genuine article often enough to let it stand. Sending students off to college to hear what Leftist professors have to say about the world is not the problem; the problem is that, if that’s all they hear, they end up with a shallow education, and very little grip on the reality of American life. A diet of ideology is like a diet of candy bars; and we have filled up our universities with candy bar salesmen.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 11 December 2007, 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Education/Academia, American Politics
Positive votes: 24 of 58 | Vote (+ / -)
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Scandal equivalence (John Tabin, The American Spectator)
Mainstream media outlets followed by reporting the TNR and NRO stories together, implying a symmetry between the two cases. But the cases are quite different. Lopez responded within weeks of Smith's dispatches being brought to her attention, and handled it straightforwardly. Foer took months to finally retract Beauchamp's stories, and spent those months lashing out at TNR's critics. Beauchamp has refused to speak to reporters; Smith has sought reporters out. (It was Smith who first contacted TAS, not the other way around.) Foer refused to take phone calls from reporters who were following the story closely enough to ask pointed questions; Lopez did a detailed and thorough interview with blogger Ed Morrissey.
It's easy to see why Smith is upset. His errors remain troubling, though. Anonymous sources, even self-interested anonymous sources peddling rumors, certainly have their place. The cardinal rule: Tell readers as much about your source as you can. Smith failed to even mention that he had sources, implying in some cases that he was relaying first-hand accounts. "My mistakes were that I didn't source and attribute everything that I was saying in blog posts, which I absolutely should have done," he admits. "But that does not mean that I am a liar or a fabricator." Indeed, some Lebanese activists insist that Smith's accounts were largely accurate.
A 48-year-old Marine Corps veteran, Smith has been working as a journalist for more than a decade (though he has somewhat less experience as a foreign correspondent). Smith even taught journalism at the University of South Carolina for a few semesters several years ago. There's no excuse for his poor sourcing; he should have known better.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 11 December 2007, 10:12 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Media/Journalism
Positive votes: 21 of 53 | Vote (+ / -)
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It's time to abolish the CIA (Christopher Hitchens, Slate)
To say that Iran has "stopped" rather than paused its program is to offer an opinion, not to present a finding. (For more on this, see the excellent article by Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin in the Dec. 6 New York Times, and also Jonathan Schell's Dec. 9 piece on the Guardian's Web site.) The mullahs are steadily amassing the uranium and plutonium ingredients of a weapon and will indeed soon be able to pause, along with other countries, like Japan, at the point where only a brief interlude and a swift spurt of effort would put them in full possession of the bomb.
Why, then, have our intelligence agencies helped to give the lying Iranian theocracy the appearance of a clean bill, while simultaneously and publicly (and with barely concealed relish) embarrassing the president and crippling his policy? It is not just a hypothetical strike on Iran that is rendered near-impossible by this estimate, but also the likelihood of any concerted diplomatic or economic pressure, as well. The policy of getting the United Nations to adopt sanctions on the regime, which was about to garner the crucial votes, can now be regarded as clinically dead. A fine day's work by those who claim to guard us while we sleep.
One explanation is that, like Mark Twain's cat, which having sat on a hot stove would never afterward sit on a cold one, the CIA has adopted a policy of caution to make up for its "slam-dunk" embarrassment over Iraq. This is a superficially plausible hypothesis, which ignores the fact that for most of the duration of the Iraq debate, the CIA was all but openly hostile to any argument for regime-change in Baghdad. This hostility extended all the way from a frenzied attempt to discredit Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, to the Plame/Wilson imbroglio, and the agency's "referral" of Robert Novak's disclosure to the Department of Justice. Interagency hostility in Washington, D.C., between the CIA and the Department of Defense has never been so damaging to any administration, let alone to any administration in time of war, as it has been to this one.
And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.
RELATED: Intelligence failures (Angelo Codevilla, Claremont Review of Books)
Perceptive observers have long recognized the insufficiency and dysfunction of U.S. Intelligence in general and of the CIA in particular. David M. Barrett's masterly The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story From Truman to Kennedy (2005) notes that legendary New York Times national security correspondent Hanson Baldwin derided the CIA as full of "chair warmers" and "empire builders" even in its salad days. The great radio journalist Fulton Lewis, Jr., said that the CIA had few of the sources it claimed—"if any." And Congressmen John Taber and Henry M. Jackson, the CIA's principal mid-century overseers, agreed. There has always been an enormous gap between what presidents, Congress, and the public imagine the CIA knows and what it can really deliver. Occasional tidbits of privileged information get lost in a sea of the Agency's own opinions. Its "estimates" have always been inherently political documents, and its executive summaries are written to be leaked.
Every president (with the exception of the first President Bush, a former CIA head) has fumed about being embarrassed by the Agency's failures or undercut by its ploys. But none has yet disabused himself and the American people of the myth, which Hollywood loves to reinforce, that America is served by real spies, valiant men of derring-do. The mainstream media have given top cover to this fiction, indulging conspiracy theories of the CIA as right-wing imperialism's invisible hand. The Agency eats it up.
The CIA has always valued fighting battles in Washington more than fighting America's battles abroad. Thomas Powers's The Man who Kept the Secrets (1979) relates how Frank Wisner, one of the Agency's founding greats, would "drop everything" to get "Scotty" Reston of the Times "back on the beam." Because CIA officials have always seen themselves primarily as policymakers, feeding pet journalists (Joseph and Stewart Alsop in the 1950s, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff today) is standard practice. There is no comparison between the treatment that the CIA gives to journalists and scholars (and to their inside sources) who are part of the Agency's long campaigns on behalf of its point of view, and to those who are not. Lately, the CIA has raised the stakes by encouraging its officers to publish books. Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris (2004) and Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies (2004) were part of its campaign against George W. Bush's re-election. Although its policies and prejudices usually match those of liberal presidents (they never match those of conservative ones), they are always its own.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 11 December 2007, 08:57 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics, American Foreign Policy
Positive votes: 16 of 45 | Vote (+ / -)
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The “Mormon Factor” Over The Decades (Daniel Larison, Eunomia)
This reminds me of the remark you hear all the time in commentary on this question: in the 1968 election, George Romney didn’t face this problem. This is not true. He did face this problem, but failed to gain any ground as a presidential candidate before there was that much time for the issue to become a prominent one. We may forget, as we now enter the eleventh month of this election campaign (11 down, 11 to go!), that Romney started his campaign for the Republican nomination in November 1967 and by the end of February he was out. He was a declared candidate for a little over four months.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 11 December 2007, 08:44 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics, Religion
Positive votes: 15 of 45 | Vote (+ / -)
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Questions for John Podhoretz (Deborah Solomon, New York Times)
What do you make of writers like Eric Alterman, who have criticized your appointment [to head Commentary] as an act of cronyism, which goes against the conservative belief that jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit and not affirmative action?
That’s a very personal thing. Twenty years ago, I refused to shake his hand.
Why is that? Shouldn’t you make some pretense of civility toward your fellow writers?
I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 10 December 2007, 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Media/Journalism
Positive votes: 19 of 47 | Vote (+ / -)
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The view: Why Fox want to mutilate your thirst (Danny Leigh, The Guardian)
And now, let's hurtle back to the present, pausing only to note that in Judge's movie, the end of civilisation was hastened by energy drink Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator - a toxic-green swill whose popularity eventually made water redundant, leading to the collapse of American agriculture. Because, while Idiocracy now languishes in unwatched semi-cultdom, Brawndo has become a reality - thanks to none other than Fox, which has joined forces with drinks retailer Redux Beverages to launch this lemon/lime flavoured confection of caffeine, guarana and electrolytes, the whole sorry process having been documented by pullquote and Spout Blog, with the website available here.
In summarising, I gladly defer to Spout Blog's Karina Longworth: "So, to recap: Fox wouldn't support a film about Brawndo, the energy drink that destroys plants, debases the human race, and makes those who drink it 'win at yelling', but they are now putting wholehearted support behind the actual drink."
It's hard not to love a country as crazy as ours.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 10 December 2007, 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, Entertainment, Business/Economics
Positive votes: 18 of 44 | Vote (+ / -)
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A Race Nobody Can Win (Ross Douthat, The Atlantic)
Note that I'm not saying the Republican field is weak, exactly. In a certain sense, it's the most accomplished primary field of any major party in a long time; indeed, you could argue that almost all the GOP candidates (including Huckabee) have more impressive resumes than the three leading Democrats, who between them can boast about ten years in the Senate and the weird quasi-accomplishment of being First Lady. It's just that ideologically-speaking, none of the Republican contenders make nearly as much sense as candidates for the nomination of the present-day GOP as Obama, Clinton and Edwards do as candidates for the nomination of the present-day Democratic Party.
Posted by R. Alex Whitlock on 10 December 2007, 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 15 of 46 | Vote (+ / -)
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Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 (Joby Warrick & Dan Eggen, Washington Post)
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort.
Two words come to mind re: those leaders: Fakes and Phonies.
Posted by Kevin Whited on 09 December 2007, 03:49 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics, American Foreign Policy
Positive votes: 18 of 47 | Vote (+ / -)
Citation: Sphere: Related Content | Technorati | Bloglines
Huckabee plays the religion card (Charles Krauthammer, RCP)
Mormonism should be a total irrelevancy in any political campaign. It is not.
What Krauthammer really means is that these pesky quarrels over religion and Christianity don't much interest neocons like himself, although he is forced to concede that they apparently do interest significant numbers of GOP primary voters.
RELATED: Mitt's Mormon Dilemma (Terry Eastland, Weekly Standard), Romney flunks a religious test (Steve Chapman, Real Clear Politics), The book of Romney (OpinionJournal), Romney dodges doctrine (Collin Hansen, Christianity Today).
Posted by Kevin Whited on 09 December 2007, 03:40 PM | Comments (0)
Filed under: General, American Politics
Positive votes: 12 of 40 | Vote (+ / -)
Citation: Sphere: Related Content | Technorati | Bloglines
A word to our readers (Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO)
I apologize to all of our readers. We should have required Smith to clearly source all of his original reporting from Lebanon. Smith let himself become susceptible to spin by those taking him around Lebanon, so his reporting from there should be read with that knowledge. (We are attaching this note to all his Lebanon reporting.) This was an editing failure as much as it was a reporting failure. We let him down, and we let you down, and we’re taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
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