Fascinating front page of the Atlanta Constitution from July 4, 1905. Lead story was not Independence Day, and in fact I can't find a single reference to the holiday on the page; either it was not the practice at the time, or.... you know. It's good to see, however, that the mainstream media was once committed to round the clock battleship coverage.
Happy Independence Day! Soon I shall be drinking the Bloody Marys of Liberty...
I'm breaking into this 24/7 coverage of the Palin meltdown (god bless her I say) to observe that today is Independence Day. While I've been told that "It is impossible to be a true patriot and be a liberal at the same time", I actually do like my country a bit. What's not to like? We even let Canadians in to live amongst us on occasion. We're that open-minded and warm-hearted. I am hosting a traditional 4th BBQ here on the grounds of my stately English manor, fly the flag a bit, and after some beer and food, will grab my firearm and go hunt redcoats . . .
Glenn Beck is funny:
Seriously, what sort of "creative extremism" is Palin supposed to practice now that she's gone Galt on Alaska and thrown off the gubernatorial shackles? Will she ride a unicycle? Wander the land holding a giant puppet? I must confess that I don't understand why folks are straining to find some sort of credible motive or strategy in Palin's resignation, as if she actually still possessed a political future, much less a chance of running the country. Though we have a tradition in the US of electing Presidents who have lost previous campaigns for lower office, there's no precedent for advancing quitters to the White House.
Moreover, Palin's central argument -- that she's doing this for the good of her state -- is just bizarre; no one resigns from state office "for the good of the state" unless they're morally or legally compromised. The last people who genuinely believed their resignations were for "the good of the state" happened to be Confederates, resigning from federal office to preserve a racial caste system. Given Palin's bizarre political upbringing, I suppose that's not an inapt tradition from which to draw hope -- but though many ex-Confederates managed to get their jobs back, I don't think there's a chance that Sarah Palin can be reconstructed or redeemed.
Erick Erickson's inner child hasn't just been wounded; it's been beaten and left for dead:
I’ve had this running thought all day, perhaps because I was watching it on TV in HD for the first time, that this is kind of like Ben Kenobi letting Darth Vader strike him down.Via Thers.
Kristol backed derivatives are crashing. His crowning achievement in Republican party politics was Sarah Palin. He's trying to make lemonade, but I don't think anyone is buying:
It's an enormous gamble - but it could be a shrewd one.
After all, she's freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues - and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she'll take a hit for leaving the governorship early - but how much of one? She's probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a sympatico lieutenant governor in charge.
And haven't conservatives been lamenting the lack of a national leader? Well, now she'll try to be that. She may not succeed. Everything rests on her talents, and on her performance. She'll be under intense and hostile scrutiny, and she'll have to perform well.
All in all, it's going to be a high-wire act. The odds are against her pulling it off. But I wouldn't bet against it.
Palin's statement made clear that, while she'll be leaving the governor's office, she is not leaving the national stage. Her book is scheduled for release sometime next year. She pledged to support candidates in the upcoming elections without regard to partisan affiliation. She took aim at the Obama administration's budget-busting spending policies. Palin's enemies have already taken today's news to suggest that her political career is over. It isn't. But Palin may also be thinking that her retirement from office will cause her critics to stop attacking her. She would be wrong to think so. Neither Palin nor the Palin-haters are going away.
While we wait for Noon's on-the-scene reportage, I thought I'd mention that I agree with Steve's take on the Purdum article; it's either stuff you already know or not very damning. A representative example of what, when you strip the pejorative language/sexist double standards, is pretty weak tea as exposes go:
In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived.Or, in other words, she's...a politician. How many political figures of any consequence could most of this not be applied to? The same goes for the alleged dirt about her family; basically, I don't see anything she's done wrong that would be worth mentioning, which is rather more than you can say for, say, Saint McCain. The guilt-by-association we can recognize from Purdum's Clinton story and it's not really much more convincing, although at least it involves her family rather than her business associates.
The now funniest line from Palin's ridiculous Runner's World interview:
I betcha I'd have more endurance. My one claim to fame in my own little internal running circle is a sub-four marathon. It wasn't necessarily a good running time, but it proves I have the endurance within me to at least gut it out and that is something. If you ever talk to my old coaches, they'd tell you, too. What I lacked in physical strength or skill I made up for in determination and endurance. So if it were a long race that required a lot of endurance, I'd win.Of course you would.
Apparently something incredibly entertaining is happening in Alaska. Where is Dave Noon??!?! WHERE IS DAVE NOON!!!!>!>11!!>>!>>>???
UPDATE (from davenoon): Jeebus! The Year of the Shit-Smearing-Crazy Governor continues. This is quite possibly the greatest birthday present I've received since -- well, some notably cool stuff happened when I turned 21, but . . . Wow. I can only assume that Palin figured that Mark Sanford and Michael Jackson had already taken the more enthralling paths to news-cycle dominance and that just absent-mindedly setting fire to her political career would have to do.
From the sounds of it, Palin implied that ethics complaints and negative national press coverage were interfering with her duties as governor. The opposite, in fact, is quite likely the better explanation -- her level of interest and engagement with Alaskan politics has been minimal, and her behavior over the past few months has been fitting for someone who views the job she has as a hindrance to the job she wants. She was a terrible, terrible governor after returning from the campaign trail. It's hard to overstate how badly she performed in Alaska this year. She lost fights with the legislature over stimulus funding, the state budget, and cabinet appointments, and she fought against the residents state capital by pushing a succession of unqualified goofballs into line for an interim job as Juneau's state senator. A lot of folks more knowledgeable about the situation than I assumed that she'd not run again next year, mainly because she'd be likely to face (and even possibly lose) a challenge in the GOP primary. It's safe to say that no one expected this, but really -- who's complaining?
Responding to Jack Balkin on the Court's "minimalist turn," Johnathan Adler argues:
It's an interesting post, but I reject Balkin's premise. There's nothing "sudden" about the Roberts Court's minimalism. Rather, a conservative minimalism has been the defining characteristic of the Roberts Court and, as a general matter, of the two newest justices. In this regard, NAMUNDO and Ricci, are of a piece with Wisconsin Right to Life, Ayotte, Gonzales v. Carhart, NRDC v. Winter, and many other cases in which the Court either adopted a very narrow, incremental holding or avoided reaching an underlying constitutional question.I think, however, that the claim that nothing has changed is missing something important. I attempt to defend the distinction in detail in this paper for anyone who's interested, but I think it's crucial to distinguish between formal minimalism and substantive minimalism. I agree with Adler that Roberts and Alito have always been formal minimalists, declining to explicitly overrule precedents or make broad pronouncements. But prior to this term, this minimalism has often been strictly formal -- several of the cases Adler cites were not substantively minimalist. Carhart II, in which they declined to formally overrule Carhart I although they were upholding a statute virtually identical to the one the Court had previously struck down, is the most obvious (and farcical) example. As for Wisconsin Right to Life, I can't resist once again quoting from Scalia's footnote 7:
The claim that §203 on its face does not reach a substantial amount of speech protected under the principal opinion’s test—and that the test is therefore compatible with McConnell—seems to me indefensible. Indeed, the principal opinion’s attempt at distinguishing McConnell is unpersuasive enough, and the change in the law it works is substantial enough, that seven Justices of this Court, having widely divergent views concerning the constitutionality of the restrictions at issue, agree that the opinion effectively overrules McConnell without saying so. This faux judicial restraint is judicial obfuscation.How the Court characterizes the relationship between a holding and its precedents is much less important than whether a holding actually is consistent with precedent. In many cases, Alito and Roberts' formal minimalism has concealed a substantive disregard for the relevant precedent. In this sense, the VRA case really was different. My guess, though, is that it's an outlier, an unusual case where a conservative substantive outcome and formal minimalism were essentially incompatible. In the future, I would expect the formal minimalism of Roberts and Alito to continue to mask a substantive conservatism that differs from Thomas and Scalia's primarily in that it's even more consistent.
An article of mine was just published days ago in the latest issue of Party Politics, which is one of the top Political Science journals in the UK. This one, like a bunch of my stuff, concerns turnout. I take a practical approach to turnout; where many argue that voting is the norm and non-voters are dysfunctional somehow, I argue the opposite. The benefits one receives from voting are marginal, the probability of your single vote making the difference impossibly small, thus the costs outweigh the benefits, however marginal those costs are. Of course, those costs increase at the margins for potential voters of lesser faculties, which in part explains the strong association between education and turnout.
Gentlemen's Singles Semi-Final, The Championships, Wimbledon.
Now, if we can only get someone to take on parades:
Meanwhile, the professional fireworks display is an exercise in pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris.And boring. Don't forget boring. If you're at a decent July 4th party, whatever you were doing is more fun than the fireworks.
North Korean ships are carrying missiles and materials from which chemical and nuclear weapons can be made -- to other tyrannies, such as the oppressive regimes in Myanmar and in Yemen. The United States leads a group of more than ninety nations that are committed to stopping such traffic, but North Korea has stated that such interventions would lead to war. One hears extremely little from progressives about what the United States should do next...
Yet, we hear next to no sounds of approval from the progressive camp; one is hard put to find editorials from the left stating that this time we've got it right. Are progressives holding that all problems can be treated with merely goodwill, foreign aid, and talk? Or are they willing to fess up and acknowledge that when all other means have been exhausted, and there is clear and present danger--the time to act is now, and to act may entail putting at least one foot down?
It's nice to see so many wingnuts lifting Helen Thomas -- the recipient of so much of their loathing over the years -- and bearing her aloft on their shoulders after she claimed that the Obama administration is more obsessed with media control than Richard Nixon.
Beyond the fact that she seemed most exercised over the Nico Pitney non-story, the merits of Thomas' argument are of course laughably thin. Call me, for example, when the Obama White House employs people to forge press releases on stolen GOP letterhead, or when it orders wiretaps placed on prominent reporters who disclose the details of illegal invasions, or when it tries to institute prior-restraint over the press as a whole, or when White House aides openly discuss poisoning a nettlesome journalist.
But the manufactured outrage from conservative bloggers is especially ludicrous, given the previous administration's own preference for simulated spontaneity, arguably the worst example of which was the infamous scripted press conference just prior to the Iraq War. More to the point, if these folks hadn't spent years cheering Bush's press psy-ops, advocating the imprisonment (or worse) of journalists who belatedly reported on the administration's criminal fuckups, wailing tediously when imprisoned photographers were released after years of being held without charges, or regularly accusing press organizations like the AP of functioning as terrorist front groups, I'd be more inclined to take them seriously when they complain about a health care town hall whose choreography was typical of the genre.
No matter how many clever and complex rationalizations I hear to justify the extensive coverage, I still don't understand why I should care at all about Mark Sanford's sex life, and I still don't understand how stuff like his private emails to someone who shouldn't be called his "mistress" can be considered political news. (And, yes, yes, I understand the meta-tautology that whether or not it should matter it does so it was irresponsible for, say, John Edwards to conceal an affair while running for president. But it still doesn't answer the crucial first question.)
Adam Liptak has done an excellent job as the Times' Supreme Court reporter, and while address some other aspects of his term-end roundup in a subsequent post I was especially gratified to see him note what few mainstream commentators are willing to about reasonable, moderate, thinking-man's conservative Sam Alito:
The two newest justices, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., both appointed by President George W. Bush, agreed 92 percent of time, the highest rate for any pair of justices. But Justice Alito often wrote concurring opinions to underscore or try to extend conservative rulings, especially in criminal cases. He may well now be the court’s most conservative member.
“Alito is staking out some room to the right of the chief justice,” said Pamela Harris, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, “and you would have thought there is no such room.”
[...]
If there were surprises, they came from Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
“For all the talk about Scalia and Thomas being the most conservative justices on the court, they are the justices most likely in play,” said Jeffrey L. Fisher, a law professor at Stanford who has argued several important criminal cases before the court.
It is a feature of modern American life that those who screech loudest for FREEDOM!!1!!1 have the greatest contempt for the practice of democracy.
In spite of their longstanding neoconservative and general baby-killing tendencies, Loomis and Trend are keeping abreast of the situation in Honduras. See also MSS and, of course, Randy Paul.
Scalia's concurrence in Ricci elaborated an alleged conflict between equal protection and the disparate treatment of the Civil Rights Act. I won't call this a false conflict, exactly -- as with many legal and constitutional values, there is potential tension in marginal cases. But I think Ginsburg's response gets it right:
I'll leave a discussion about how the Court's conservatives have used different standards of evidence to prove discriminatory intent for another post. But, in general, not only is paying attention to disparate impact consistent with enforcing civil rights and the equal protection of the law, it's necessary. To use the old analogy, it's silly to pretend (as the ahistorical formalism practiced by the Court's conservatives* demands) that a woman kept in chains and fed bread and water and a woman given a professional training regimen are in an equal position because they both start at the same line. The effects of history don't vanish when the law changes. Legacy admissions in formerly racist colleges, for example, perpetuate white supremacy whether they are intentionally discriminatory or not, because they provide a benefit to some whites that are not available to black people. This isn't to suggest that dealing with a history of discrimination is easy, of course, but there's a reason why virtually nobody who supported civil rights contemporaneously thinks that John Roberts' empty homilies are an adequate response.
Neither Congress’ enactments nor this Court’s Title VII precedents (including the now-discredited decision in Wards Cove) offer even a hint of “conflict” between an employer’s obligations under the statute’s disparate-treatment and disparate-impact provisions. Cf. ante, at 20. Standing on an equal footing, these twin pillars of Title VII advance the same objectives: ending workplace discrimination and promoting genuinely equal opportunity.
Yet the Court today sets at odds the statute’s core directives.
One of the many things I find utterly fascinating about my adopted land is its unwritten constitution. Writing on the strength of an unwritten constitution, a book review in the recent Economist states it well enough:
The constitution was not a set of fundamental and broadly unalterable rules but simply “what happened”. The fact that government’s workings could easily and unobtrusively be changed was accounted a virtue: Britain escaped the ancestor worship that fixed canons like America’s imposed. Its elusive constitution seemed to ensure both stability and freedom. It was envied abroad and taken for granted at home.Its strength of flexibility and malleability is at once its primary weakness: while it does an admirable job of adapting in most respects, on occasion the lack of clear and precise principles beyond the sovereignty of Parliament (and technically the Monarch) can lead to a ludicrously botched state of affairs. The piece in The Economist is rather quiet on the weaknesses inherent to the British constitution save for an observation attributed to the Queen herself: "The British Constitution has always been puzzling and always will be." It is perhaps at its most puzzling when it comes to devolution of some powers to some regions.
A hostile legislature and a hostile executive were so tied together, that the legislature tried, and tried in vain, to rid itself of the executive by accusing it of illegal practices. The legislature was so afraid of the President's legal power, that it unfairly accused him of acting beyond the law. And the blame thus cast on the American Constitution is so much praise to be given to the American political character. Few nations, perhaps scarcely any nation, could have borne such a trial so easily and so perfectly. This was perhaps the most striking instance of disunion between the President and the Congress that has ever yet occurred, and which probably will ever occur.Bagehot was writing about the impeachment of one Mr. Johnson. I also do not mean to suggest that there aren't similar anomolies in the U.S. (see the District of Columbia for a hilarious example) or that Scotland, Wales, or even Cornwall deserve some degree of autonomy.
I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I didn't know Rhode Island's full name, so while I would support efforts by states to make their names longer and goofier, I guess don't especially care if the Ocean State decides to change it based on flimsy historical interpretations of the term "plantation." The broad argument made by the bill's sponsors and advocates are reasonable enough; apparently, it's possible to get an education in Rhode Island and not learn much about the significant role it played in the colonial slave trade. I doubt that altering the state's official letterhead will do much to correct the problem, but Rhode Islanders -- unlike the supporters of the Honduran coup -- don't seem to be especially threatened by the notion of a public referendum, so more power to them.
It would certainly be nice if the debate in Rhode Island were to spur similar reflections in certain other states -- say, those of the defeated Confederacy -- where the public landscape is littered with memorials to actual slaveholders and their political and military defenders, all of which would serve a more useful purpose if they were hauled away by crackheads meth addicts and sold as scrap metal. I suppose I shouldn't hold my breath on that one.
Attempts to use Ricci to derail Sotomayor's nomination won't work, but (as Paul also said earlier today) they do show how silly the whole "empathy" criticism is.
Finally. And, while perhaps this overstates his rationality, now that Coleman has conceded it's hard to imagine Pawlenty making the courts issue a writ to force him to act.
Spencer puts his finger on something that I've never quite understood about Tom Ricks' "unraveling" series; elite and popular Iraqi opinion (with the partial exception of Kurdistan) is united around the idea of the United States leaving. Whether or not the precarious peace created in part by the Surge holds is pretty much irrelevant to that point. The Iraqi preference for an American withdrawal has held steady pretty much from the day the Americans arrived (public opinion in Afghanistan has always been different, although the gap is closing). Any talk of staying on to "finish the job" or "hold things together" is just so much nonsense in the face of this strong, consistent Iraqi preference. Iraq may unravel, and it will in some important sense have been our responsibility, but by the Iraqis' own account it's not our job to prevent that from happening.It's a "carnival" in Baghdad, according to the Post's Ernesto Londono, filled with Iraqi troops grinning as they take their lives into their own hands and graffitti writers further south demanding, "Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty." Don't tell them tomorrow is just another day. These are the people in whose name the U.S. justified six years of a blunder. Like any rational people enduring a foreign military occupation, they light candles and wave banners and sing patriotic songs when the occupier pulls away.
Occupier -- what a nauseating word to hear; what an enfeebling thing to be; what a distorting condition to bear. Remember when Zell Miller told us that nothing made that Marine madder than to hear U.S. troops described as occupiers and not liberators? His complaint should have been registered with the man who made them into such a thing, not with those who wouldn't speak euphemistically or patronizingly about it. What U.S. troops have endured they have endured heroically, in a manner that those who haven't served can't comprehend. I consider it more heroic that they've done it in spite of the war's maculate conception.
That was the question a young man who stopped by my office a few months ago had for me. He had read something I'd written, and was so impressed by my powers of perception regarding what's really going on that he felt he could share with me certain recondite truths, including but not limited to
(1) The rock band Rush controls most of the world's economy. The members of the band hold controlling voting shares of stock in Microsoft, Oracle, Sun, Intel, and several other of the world's largest corporations.
(2) They use their power of international commerce in the service of Satan.
(3) They used their powers a few days earlier to have him arrested by local law enforcement.
(4) All this and much more is practically self-evident to anyone who makes a close examination of the lyrics of their albums. It's all right there if you're just willing to look.
It was an interesting conversation, but one thing I didn't do was argue with the guy about potential flaws in his theory.
I was reminded of that conversation by this Thomas Sowell column, replete as it is with barking paranoia of the most unhinged sort. I don't want to argue with Sowell either. I mean what would be the point? He's a crazy person.
(h/t Yglesias)
I'll have more tomorrow, but like Publius I was amazed to come home and read Alito's remarkable-and-not-in-a-good-way concurrence focusing on the Scary Black Guy who allegedly caused New Haven to jettison its testing process for promotions. As Adam also points out, Ginsburg was devastating in noting that Alito's stories were strikingly unencumbered by any evidence that Kimber actually had any influence at all on the politically insulated commission that reached the decision, let alone more influence than the other interests that strongly supported the lawsuit. Indeed, not only is there no evidence, there isn't even a plausible chain of causation; it's just wingnut innuendo all the way down.
At any rate, I'm sure Alito's excessively candid sharing of beside-the-point race-baiting Republican talking points should provide some comic relief when Republican Senators claim that Sotomayor is insufficiently impartial, what with her "empathy" and all.
Erik Loomis happened to be in Honduras the other day, just as Kermit Roosevelt happened to be in Iran during the summer of 1953.
It appears that the Israelis have ditched plans to purchase the Littoral Combat Ship:
In a radical revamp of its surface fleet modernization program, the Israel Navy has shelved long-held plans to purchase Lockheed Martin-produced Littoral Combat Ships (LCS), as well as a fallback option involving corvetees built by Northrop Grumman.
Instead, sources say, the Navy is pushing to establish a combat shipbuilding industry through customized, locally built versions of a German corvette design.
We now have *shudder* a Twitter feed. Adjust your behavior accordingly. We expect that the feed will include not only self-serving links to LGM posts, but also unique examples of the quality socio-political commentary you've come to expect from LGM, distilled down to 140 characters.
I've had Vo Nguyen Giap on my death list for four years running. This year in History of Strategic Thought, we read People's War People's Army; while the first half is pretty much standard Marxist agitprop, his account of the siege and reduction of Dien Bien Phu is a beautiful thing to behold. A couple of the students were astounded to hear that the old man is still alive. It turns out that not only is he still breathing, but he's still kicking:
Vietnam’s great war hero, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, has stood up to defend his country once again, this time against what he says would be a huge mistake by the government — a vast mining operation run by a Chinese company.
Now 97, the commander who led his country to victory over both France and the United States has emerged as the most prominent voice in a broad popular protest that is challenging the secretive workings of the country’s Communist leaders.
In an unusual step, the government has taken note of the criticisms in recent weeks and appears to be making at least gestures of response, saying it will review the project’s environmental impact and slow its full implementation...
... The government might well have brushed off its critics if General Giap had not spoken up, first in January and twice afterward, saying the project “will cause serious consequences to the environment, society and national defense.”
The old campaigner now appeared to be rallying public opinion against the country’s leadership, calling on scientists, managers and social activists to “suggest to the party and the state to have a sound policy on the bauxite projects in the Central Highlands.”
I will be in a car returning from a graduation party most of the day. So if, as expected, the Court hands down its decision in Ricci today and reverses the Second Circuit, let me say that this in no way shows that Sotomayor was "wrong" on the law. First, because the Supreme Court can create new law in way that Circuit Courts can't. And, second, because cases interesting enough to make it to the Supreme Court generally admit to multiple reasonable interpretations, and New Haven's belief that civil rights law did not allow it to use a test that would disproportionately promote white people unless it could show a much stronger relationship between the test and job performance was certainly plausible, and a legal position that obtains 3 or 4 Supreme Court votes in particular cannot usefully be said to be "wrong."
Um, no one cares what Jose Maria Aznar thinks, but this is an especially useless effort. The comparisons between Iran and the Soviet Union are delivered with the stupidity that's customary for the genre; it's hard, for example, to know where to begin his claim that Western support for Soviet dissidents (a) made Soviet leaders fearful of treating them badly, and (b) eventually brought town the government itself. Whatever force "the Free World" was able to exert upon Soviet human rights was a direct result of the fact that the US and the Soviet Union had, from 1963 through the mid-1970s, established a reasonably successful record of negotiating on a variety of issues of mutual interest (e.g, nuclear testing and arms limitations, grain shipments, etc.) So far as dissidents were concerned, their treatment during this period was mild by the obviously unpleasant by historical standards -- not because the government feared Johnson, Nixon or Ford (who were, it's worth pointing out, not hollering conspicuously about Soviet dissidents) but because Soviet leadership saw little to be gained domestically from "ruthlessly [doing] away with them," as Aznar insists they would have. After Khrushchev's disclosures, a full revival of Stalinist brutality was probably an impossibility; whatever ill needs to be spoken of the post-Stalin era, it's insane to claim their behavior was held in check simply out of fear of external punishment. The state viewed dissidents as enemies of the regime and suppressed them as best they could, but by the late 1970s and 1980s -- when Aznar presumably believes US support for dissidents was most consequential -- the Soviet leadership hardly required the aid of dissenters (or critiques by American leaders) to bring discredit to its own project.
That said, it's hard to imagine what sort of guidance Aznar thinks his flawed history might provide for the Obama administration. This is of course a problem for anyone who's been insisting that Obama Must Do SomethingTM, but Aznar captures the vagueness of the argument with impressive brevity:
This is no time for hesitation on the part of the West. If, as part of an attempt to reach an agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, the leaders of democratic nations turn their backs on the dissidents they will be making a terrible mistake.See, I'd been under the mistaken impression that the US would be hard-pressed to find a constructive role to play with respect to the Iranian crisis. But I forgot that by simply not hesitating* and by facing the protesters squarely in solidarity**, we could actually set limits*** on the behavior of the Iranian state!
President Obama has said he refuses to "meddle" in Iran's internal affairs, but this is a poor excuse for passivity. If the international community is not able to stop, or at least set limits on, the repressive violence of the Islamic regime, the protesters will end up as so many have in the past -- in exile, in prison, or in the cemetery. And with them, all hope for change will be gone.
USA v Brazil. 19:30 (BST), BBC 3. 14:30 (EDT), 11:30 (PDT). And other times. Google, kids, don't miss this one.
Ignore the Italy and the Brazil match. Well, perhaps Brazil is relevant, but when you play a man down, as we seem to prefer doing, you sort of stack the deck against you. This side came into its own in the Egypt and the Spain matches. And it's been a transition for a few years. 2002 was a long time ago, and we have been coasting since. 2006 was a disaster. Arena lost the plot. But it's a transformed side now, and I think it's come into its own. We still miss some cutting edge in the final third (or, as Arsenal fans might recall, the 'fox in the box') but I like the midfield, and really, really like the back four. DeMerit has impressed -- no, that's selling him short. He has got himself a ticket out of Watford.
We will miss Michael Bradley. While I know he has been impressing with his work rate for a year or so now, I don't get to see the CONCACAF qualifiers out here in the UK much, but this tournament has convinced me -- he is our best midfielder. (Setting Landon aside, of course, but he is a different kettle of fish, more a second striker than a midfielder). I don't know who goes in for Bradley, but safe bet it isn't Beasley. The best he has this summer is his SPL champion medal (Rangers had to win eventually, and hopefully this will be their one title for a decade or so), but did he even qualify for that? I think Bradley goes with Feilharber or Kljestan.
I'm going out on a limb here. I predict a USA victory. Brazil have not been all that of late, and they had as many if not more qualifiers than the US had in the run in to this tournament. And to further my exploitation of cliches, the USA seem to be gelling at the precise right time.
I find this website hopelessly entertaining. There's probably something wrong with me. H/t Elise.
This had slipped my mind, until I finally found it skulking in one of my Google Reader folders. Ralph Peters:
Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies.
This is the fourth installment of a seven part series on the Patterson School's Summer Reading List.
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