That's not a Doctor of Journalism. This is a Doctor of Journalism.*

Our arrival was badly timed. Most of the pigs from The American Spectator had already arrived. I saw this at a glance. They were just standing around trying to look casual. It was a terrifying scene.

"I thought you should know about this," the boy said finally.

"Know? Me? Know about what?" I asked.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that this guy . . . this white supremacist guy . . . he says he's you."

My brain locked up. I couldn't think. The drugs were taking over. "Is he?"

"No . . . I don't think . . . but he did say something about guns and booze."

"Guns and booze? Guns and booze? Must be me." Jesus. What a terrible thing to lay on somebody with a head full of acid. Alright, I thought.

"Alright," I said. "This Nazi me with guns and gin, where . . ."

"No gin . . . he's just talking about gin like you talk about it when you . . ."

"Look," I said. "I'm a Doctor of Journalism. If I can't minister to my own sober self, what good am I?" I demanded the boy take me to myself.

He led me to a dense thicket of birches fit for Frost and introduced me as Manuel. "Well," I said. "Pleasure to make my acquaintance."

That me looked at this me confused. Something there is that loves a wall, I thought, and ain't that bastard something.

There he was, talking about my Samoan attorney, and here I was, looking at myself talking about my Samoan attorney . . . but what white power me said made no sense.

"Wherever you find guns, cigars and whiskey, good-looking womenfolk are sure to be flocking 'round, and I had my camera handy for the occasion."

"Flocking 'round"? Sounds nothing like me. Strange memories of nervous nights on who knows what I can handle . . . but this was an impostor. No . . . a robot.

I was being impersonated by a robot. Programmed to say what I say but like I was Rhett Butler. To trick it would require saying something it wouldn't expect me to . . .

"All this white shit on my sleeve is LSD," I heard myself say. Shit. I stole a glance at myself and saw his face turn white. I noted the effort it took for him to keep up my façade. Not that he didn't try.

"Folks around Sperryville won't go anywhere near the place at Pig Roast time, what with the rumors of cannibalism, human sacrifice, bizarre pagan rituals and so forth."

"And so forth?" I asked. "And so forth?"

"Wherever you find guns, cigars and whiskey, good-looking womenfolk are sure to be flocking 'round, and I had my camera handy for the occasion."

"You already said that you fucking robot!" I threw myself at the robot but must have licked my arm on the way there because the next thing I remember I was in a bathtub surrounded by six angry pairs of Dockers.

"You shouldn't have done that," one said.

"Stacy is delicate," said another. Fuck, I thought. I'd attacked some poor girl.

"Sorry," I said. "I went after the robot." They shot me looks I deserved. Calm down. Learn to enjoy pain. The important thing now is to leave with my balls intact.

"Stacy is not a . . ."

Intact and where they should be. My balls. Fuck would I miss them.

"Stacy wants you to apologize."

"Send her in." Don't run, I thought. They'd like an excuse to shoot you. Menacing vibrations . . . I felt them all around me. The door creaked open and there she was . . . there he was . . . there I was . . .

"Some fucking robot you are!"

"Get back here!" he shouted, but I knew she couldn't catch me.

---

*Written in honor of the lamest Thompson impersonation I've ever read . . . and I spent four years teaching literary journalism to starry-eyed undergraduates who idolized Thompson, so I know of what I speak.

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That Doesn't Sound Very WASPy...

Seriously?

[Robert] Gates doesn't travel much on the Beltway's social circuit, instead spending off-hours with his wife and a small cadre of aides. He smokes cigars, drinks Belvedere martinis with a twist (the first President Bush weaned him from gin to vodka), and watches trashy movies—Transformers and Wolverine were recent favorites.

George H.W. Bush drinks vodka martinis? Really? That's so... disappointing.

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Project Sapphire

The Washington Post had a nice article last week about Project Sapphire, the Clinton-era effort to spirit 600kg of enriched uranium out of Kazahkstan. If you haven't read it, take a look; this has to be considered one of the most important foreign policy victories of the post-Cold War era.

...a correspondent sends this, which just sounds kind of scary.

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I'm going to spend the rest of my life apologizing to Jack Cashill, aren't I?

(Warning: a very long post about a very silly man that I would've tucked beneath the fold if Blogger allowed such things.)

Because today he interviewed journalist Christopher Andersen (who, like him, writes celebrity biographies) on The Mancow Show and Andersen announced that "he had two separate sources 'within Hyde Park' [who claim William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father] but, understandably, would not elaborate." Two anonymous sources from, as they say, the neighborhood is the tipping point for me: when combined with the credibility Andersen has earned by dint of a "highly successful career as a celebrity journalist" and the evidence gathered during Cashill's "textual sleuthing," no intellectually honest person could doubt that there's a there in there. How could there not be? Andersen "interviewed some 200 people for the book," which is a whole lot. Here is a list of them drawn from the back matter and organized by chapters:

Chapters 1 and 2

1. Janet Allison
2. Maxine Box
3. Clive Gray
4. Joyce Feuer
5. Leslie Hairston
6. Lowell Jacobs
7. Keith Kakugawa
8. Eric Kusunoki
9. Julie Lauster
10. Alan Lum
11. Chris McLachlin
12. Abner Mikva
13. Newton Minow
14. Toni Preckwinkle
15. Vinai Thummalapally
16. Carolyn Trani
17. Pake Zane

Chapters 3 and 4

1. Loretta Augustin-Herron
2. Bradford Berenson
3. Cheryl Johnson
4. Hazel Johnson
5. Jerry Kellman
6. Mike Kruglik
7. Yvonne Lloyd
8. Alvin Love
9. Abner Mikva*
10. Judson Miner
11. Newton Minow*
12. Linda Randle
13. Vinai Thummalapally*
14. Laurence Tribe

Chapters 5 to 8

1. Janet Allison*
2. Letitia Baldrige
3. Mary Ann Campbell
4. Joyce Feuer*
5. Leslie Hairston*
6. Tom Harkin
7. Coralee Jacobs
8. Denny Jacobs
9. Lowell Jacobs
10. Mike Jacobs
11. John Kerry
12. Edward Koch
13. Rick Lazio
14. Alan Love*
15. Abner Mikva*
16. Judson Miner*
17. Newton Minow*
18. Jeremiah Posedel
19. Toni Preckwinkle*
20. Betsy Vandercook
21. Larry Walsh
22. Wellington Wilson
23. Zarif

If you subtract the sources I asterisked because they were counted in previous chapters, the final tally of Andersen's 200 some interviews is an impressive 43. That means that only 157 or so of them were unwilling to speak truth to the powerful lies of the President on the record. That so few of them were willing to follow the example of the young Obama's "roommate and closest friend . . . Siddiqi" and speak on the—hold on a minute. Does anyone see Siddiqi's name among those listed as interviewees? No?

Must be Andersen toeing the ethical line again and passing off information from someone else's published work as original research. No big deal: Siddiqi told someone that he had no memory of Obama having had a "year-long relationship with a rich, green-eyed lovely" who, as Cashill corroborated via independent textual sleuthing, was actually Ayers's former flame, Diana Oughton. The credibility of Siddiqi's memories is further enhanced by the fact that when he lived with Obama, he spent the majority of his time snorting cocaine, smoking marijuana, and perfecting his Cheech impersonation. Who wouldn't believe his memory of that period is infallible?

Cashill anticipates that the critics who balk at the "lack of attribution by Andersen" or believe that "the citation of [Cashill] as a source and/or a reliance upon [him] as a source" constitutes a demonstration of intellectual unseriousness. Neither of those positions (both of which I have taken) "imply," as Cashill claims, "that Andersen is a fraud and a liar and the he contrived the story he told" because I'm not implying anything.

The sloppiness of Andersen's research demonstrably proves that he's not the sort of celebrity biographer an intelligent person trusts with anonymous sources. Andersen's inability to recognize the worthlessness of Cashill's impressionistic "textual sleuthing" demonstrably proves that he's not the sort of celebrity biographer an intelligent person trusts to do responsible literary analysis. Need I remind you of the "quality" of Cashill's work?

The A-level match

Cashill:

What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in [A Kind and Just Parent] and Obama in [Dreams From My Father] make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case . . . Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago" . . . This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way.

Reality:

Both Ayers and Obama misquote the opening line of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," substituting "hog butcher to the world" for "hog butcher for the world." This mutual error would be significant (an "A-level match") if Ayers and Obama were the only two people who ever made it, but according to Google Book Search—a secret search engine to which only I have access—the same mistake has been made by Nelson Algren, Alan Lomax, Andrei Codrescu, H.L. Mencken, Paul Krugman, Perry Miller, Donald Hall, Ed McBain, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Nathanaël West, Ezra Pound, Wright Morris, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. (To name but a few.) According to Cashill, I have now proven that Dreams From My Father was written by many a dead man of American letters, a living mystery writer, a New York Times columnist and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. That bears repeating: I have an "A-level match" that proves that Obama's autobiography was written by a "study of the economic and social effects of automation and other technological changes on industry, commerce, agriculture, education, manpower, and society in Illinois" when Obama was only six years old.

The "baleful" affair

Cashill:

Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl." In [Ayers'] Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams . . . In [A Kind and Just Parent], he talks specifically about a "yellow dog." And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm." I had to look it up.

Reality:

Cashill cited as "A-level" evidence the fact that Ayers and Obama used a word he didn't know, despite his being the Executive Editor of Kansas City’s premier business publication, Ingram’s Magazine; despite his having written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard; despite his having authored five books of non-fiction; and despite the word "baleful" having appeared in print 342 times in the past six months alone. Granted, all those appearances were in high-minded literary publications like Newsday ("[w]ith his baleful countenance, wild hair, sonorous baritone and sage pronouncements") or leftist rags like The Washington Times ("warn them in baleful tones if they've forgotten, say, the Constitution"), so it would be unreasonable to expect Cashill to have been familiar with the word . . . or would be, were it not for the fact that it also appears 19 times in the pages of the American Thinker, the publication for which Cashill penned this tripe. (Seems he can begin his careful literary analysis of the other 848,000 potential ghost writers closer to home.)

Lawyers and legal jargon

Cashill:

To this point, I have just skimmed the 759 items in the bill of particulars in my case against Obama's literary genius. Not familiar with the term "bill of particulars?" Uncertain myself, I looked that one up too. It means a list of written statements made by a party to a court proceeding. Ayers and Obama each refer knowingly to a "bill of particulars." Doesn't everyone?

The answer, of course, is no.

Reality:

The phrase "bill of particulars" is an uncommon construction, and its repeated use indicates that the speaker has a specialized vocabulary in which this construction regularly appears. According to LexisNexis, this is exactly the case: in the past six months, that exact phrase has been written 509 times and every single one of them looks like this:

United States v. Clark, NO. 05-6507, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT, 09a0422n.06;, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 12940; 2009 FED App. 0422N (6th Cir.), June 15, 2009, Filed, NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION. SIXTH CIRCUIT RULE 28(g) LIMITS CITATION TO SPECIFIC SITUATIONS. PLEASE SEE RULE 28(g) BEFORE CITING IN A PROCEEDING IN A COURT IN THE SIXTH CIRCUIT. IF CITED, A COPY MUST BE SERVED ON OTHER PARTIES AND THE COURT. THIS NOTICE IS TO BE PROMINENTLY DISPLAYED IF THIS DECISION IS REPRODUCED.

The only people who regularly use the phrase "bill of particulars," then, are lawyers[.]

Self-evidently hilarious examples of "textual sleuthing"

1. Common words are common: "Another note of interest is that all of the distinctive words in the last sentence above—'master,' 'beast,' 'grim,' 'unapologetic,' and 'deed,' as well as the phrase 'hunkered down'—appear in Fugitive Days."
2. The sea is a pregnant metaphor: "Ayers and Obama both use words that relate to the sea ('fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky')."
3. People are lonely: "After the neighbor's death, the police let themselves into the old man’s apartment, and for no good reason Obama finds himself in the apartment. 'The loneliness of the scene affected me,' he writes. Loneliness as a theme courses through Fugitive Days as well."
4. Old men are stooped and people wear hats: "In the opening pages, Obama makes an exception to his New York solitude for an elderly neighbor, a "stooped" gentleman who wore a 'fedora.' In Fugitive Days, it was Ayers’ grandfather who was "stooped" and a helpful stranger who wore a 'fedora.'"
5. Some people are quiet: "Obama tells the reader that the neighbor’s 'silence' impressed him. 'Silence' impressed Ayers as well. There are at least ten references to the word in Fugitive Days."
6. Angry people feel rage: "[B]oth Ayers and Obama speak of 'rage' the way that Eskimos do of snow—in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, here as 'impressive rage,' elsewhere in Dreams as 'suppressed rage' or 'coil of rage,' and in Fugitive Days as 'justifiable rage,' 'uncontrollable rage,' 'blind rage,' and, of course, 'Days of Rage.'"
   

The Kicker

Cashill tells us he wouldn't believe himself either: "I have as much faith in the hypothesis that follows as . . . biologists do in evolution, so bear with me please as I, like they, present my evidence in the indicative." He has as much "faith" in his hypothesis as biologists do in the hypothesis of evolution. I wonder what Intelligence Design advocate Jack Cashill has to say about that kind of faith?

ID partisans across the board believe in micro-evolution: that is, evolution within a species. Some believe in evolution between species, macro-evolution, if guided.

What the ID movement challenges is Darwinian mechanics, random variation and natural selection, an elegant idea in 1859 but in 1999 still just an idea. Neo-Darwinians have as much trouble explaining how complex organs like a wing or an eye—or even a single cell within an eye—could be the result of unguided, incremental change as Darwin did.

Darwin could only hope that the fossil record would one day prove him right. It hasn't. No evidence has surfaced of a transformation from one species to the next. Nor has anyone offered a satisfactory explanation for the rash of new animal life that inexplicably entered the fossil record during the so-called Cambrian explosion.

I am not about to dignify that creationist nonsense by responding to it. If Cashill really wants to know what use half a wing might be to a flightless bird, he can go ask a penguin.

Conclusion

When I first wrote that anyone who uses "Cashill's juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things [they] already believe about Obama," I didn't know that Cashill also bought into Intelligent Design, but it makes sense that someone who could compile and be convinced by the evidence above would be a subject of King Tendentiousness himself. Like ID, Cashill's theory consists of details inexpertly cobbled together by deeply interested parties. The similar caveat applies in both: should it turn out that one day the Great Designer reveals Himself or Obama admits that Ayers helped edit his memoir, the soundness of their respective methodologies would not be validated—all that will be proven is that sometimes tendentious idiots get lucky.

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Further thoughts from Anne Applebaum: The slut was asking for it

Incredibly, Applebaum's followup to her original contribution on the Polanski rape is even more clueless and offensive than the original:

Of course, there were some very legitimate disagreements, including two excellent ones from my colleagues Gene Robinson and Richard Cohen, and I take some of their points. But to them, and to all who imagine that the original incident at the heart of this story was a straightforward and simple criminal case, I recommend reading the transcript of the victim's testimony (here in two parts) -- including her descriptions of the telephone conversation she had with her mother from Polanski's house, asking permission to be photographed in Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi --and not just the salacious bits.

Here's the relevant part of the transcript:

Q. What happened out there after he indicated he wished to take pictures of you in the jacuzzi?

A. We went inside and called my mother.

Q. When you say “we called,” did you call or did Mr. Polanski call?

A. He told me to and I talked and then he talked and then I talked again.

Q. What did you tell your mother?

A. She goes, “Are you all right?

I went, “Uh-huh.”

And she says, “Do you want me to come pick you up?”

And I went, “No.”

And he said that we’d be home kind of late because it had already gotten dark out.

Q. When you said “he said,” did he tell you or did you hear him tell your mother on the phone?

A. He told my mother.

Q, Did he tell your mother any other things?

A. Not that I was listening to.

Q. After talking to your mother on the telephone, what happened?

A. We went out and I got in the jacuzzi.

Applebaum can't even read 20 lines of a trial transcript accurately (the victim never asked her mother for permission to be photographed in the jacuzzi). But that idiocy pales to insignificance in comparison to the moral blindness involved in suggesting, as Applebaum clearly does, that if the 13-year-old victime had in fact asked her mother's permission to be photographed in a jacuzzi by a 44-year-old man that would somehow transform the man's subsequent drugging and raping of the girl into something other than a "simple and straightforward criminal case."

Applebaum's first post on this subject might have been ever so slightly excused by the possibility that she simply hadn't thought through exactly what she was defending. This has no such excuse.

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"The Left" Strikes Again!

Neo-neocon bring her mad yoosta-bee skillz to the Polanski issue:

The reaction of no small number of pundits on the Left to the Polanski case is to recommend that we let bygones be bygones.

Amusingly, the post goes on to engage in some speculation about the motives of these dastardly "pundits on the Left" without getting around to naming any of them or their their alleged specific arguments, which one would think would be necessary for her project. And the reasons for this are obvious: leaving aside Hollywood directors/writers and mediocre French "philosophers" (who don't fit the criteria anyway), the most prominent American pundit to apologize for Polanski has been...Anne Applebaum, whose politics are essentially identical neo-neo con. The one dismaying actual leftist exception to this is Katrina VandenHeuvel, who posted a one-line twitter agreeing with Applebaum's idiotic column, which she's partially walked back (albeit with a regrettable endorsement of Wanted and Desired.) And...that's it. (And, no, Richard Cohen really doesn't count.) Pretty thin reed to hang an indictment on "the Left," I'd have to say. (Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey's reactions would be far more representative.)

And now, the punchline:

But thank goodness the rank and file liberals at HuffPo and Salon don’t happen to agree with their journalist “betters” that Polanski should be let off the hook.

Yes, damn Salon for publishing so many apologies for Polanski! I'm afraid neo has a lot to learn about writing lazy indictments of "the Left"; it's generally a bad idea to even name sources, because it makes it embarrassingly obvious that you haven't even read the ones you're criticizing.

For rather more useful contributions on Polanski, see Lauren and little light. They don't even blame Polanski on the moral relativism of "the right!"

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Au revoir, les enfants

This reads like a wingnut parody of degenerate France and degenerate Hollywood engaging in an orgy of amoral pomposity. (As a lawyer I confess ignorance regarding the principle of immunity from legal process for film festival attendees).

I can only hope that most of the signatories to this kind of thing aren't actually familiar with the facts of the case. Of course that sort of selective blindness is a huge problem of its own.

As djw notes in a thread below, the worst part of minimizing Polanski's crimes is that almost all the arguments used to do so are classic rape culture tropes. (Consider the central claim of this petition, which is that Polanski was arrested on a "morals" charge, as if it were obvious that it's perfectly possible for a 44-year-old man to have genuinely consensual sex with a 13-year-old girl, let alone one he had first drugged up, and who has always insisted that she was forcibly raped).

Depressing.

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Clutching at Straws

Gordo lays out his vision for the next Labour government.

Most of it is the typical Labour shopping list (and the Tory critique that it hasn't been costed out does ring true). I am intrigued by the long awaited constitutional / electoral system reform.

Two suggestions stand out. First, he wants to adopt the recall for MPs. I wrote about the sheer lunacy of this back in June; I will temper my reaction somewhat now by observing that it would need to be implemented very carefully for it to work. I still see large problems in tightly balanced parliaments or minority governments.

The second is that he has come out in favor of the alternative vote to elect MPs. This I like. While I would prefer MMP, the AV is a classically British incremental approach to reform: it would retain single member districts, and be less likely to lead to coalition government than MMP. It would also significantly reduce the probability of tactical voting as it increases the incentives for a sincere vote. I hope to find the time to explore the ramifications of this in greater detail, but as this is the first week of the semester at my august institution, I've been hilariously busy. Indeed, as we have undergone our own restructuring over the summer, I find myself temporarily without an office, with my PC packed away in a box somewhere. An advantage of this arrangement is that I am now permanently housed in the Elections Centre, where we have the data and expertise to have a quick chat about how this may change the electoral landscape.

Of course, none of this matters. In a move that surprises nobody, the typically opportunistic Sun has shifted its allegiance from Labour to the Conservatives for the first time since the 1997 election. While Labour have received what appears to be a stable bump as a result of their conference, they are still 11 points down. With the Conservative conference upcoming, expect this gap to widen as the Tories manage to say something tangible for a change. Also interesting is a recent MORI poll that places the Lib Dems in 2nd place, but I suspect that this is an outlier.

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Blue Dog Votes

In addition to the fact that Blue Dogs who won't allow up-and-down votes are pretty much entirely useless, it seems to me that Blue Dog votes on cloture provide a pretty good first approximation of whether Republican-collaborationist Blue Dogs are primarily worried about constituents or donors. If the former, for low-information voters a no vote on the merits should be good enough; "sure, she voted no, but she refused to prevent a majority vote" isn't going to make a good campaign ad. If your primary audience is high-information donors and lobbyists, though, you're going to have to vote for filibusters.

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One Last Thing

I will hopefully leave this subject for a while, but before I do, for those who haven't seen Wanted and Desired I can't recommend Lauren Bans's post more strongly:

Excepting the lawyers who worked on the case, the majority of the voices in the film are Polanski’s Hollywood friends, and they make great strides to point out the “reputation” of the victim. More than two people note that the girl was not a virgin. In a clip that made me want to stab out my eyeballs, one female friend of Polanski’s goes so far as to mention that the girl’s mother introduced herself to Polanski as “an actress” and then asks, “Why would her mother let her daughter go to a photo shoot alone with him in the first place?” Oh yes, I see, clearly her mother deliberately set her up to be raped in order to advance her career! Now there's some stellar logic fit for inclusion in a documentary.

I had read enough about the film to expect it to be somewhat tendentious. But absolutely nothing prepared me for the extent to which Zenovich allowed various Polanski allies to smear the victim with reactionary and misogynist stereotypes, made all the worse by the fact that she chose to excise the most important parts of the victim's grand jury testimony. And the fact that so many reviewers ignored this elephant in the room while describing the film as persuasive or even-handed is also dismaying, and sadly instructive about the power that retrograde sexual politics still holds over too many people.

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You forgot about Keyes!

Perhaps it's the fact that I've got two children currently being leveled by illness, or that I haven't had a decent night's sleep in -- I dunno, months? -- but this paragraph keeps making me laugh today:

Sarah Palin is done with her memoir, which will be titled "Going Rogue: An American Story"; Rick Santorum's trip to Iowa will happen this week, with a speech at the University of Dubuque Thursday; Eric Cantor pooh-poohed President Obama's attempts to get the Olympics to Chicago in 2016; Mitt Romney, meanwhile, praised them; Romney says he wants to return to Iraq and Afghanistan; Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal raised a combined $350,000 for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell; and Jindal will attend fundraisers in Virginia and DC tonight and tomorrow.

It's like Ocean's 11 for shitheads. God bless.

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"I'm not a racist, I just wish black people were more white."

(Before I begin, I want to thank Rob, Scott and company for the invite and y'all for the warm welcome. That said, remember when you were in seventh grade and had spent all summer mowing lawns to buy an elegantly awful Z. Cavaricci ensemble only to arrive at the bus stop to discover that everyone was wearing Girbaud and you cursed the heavens and vowed never to try too hard again? Me neither. But if I did, writing this post would sorta feel like that.)

Listen closely to outrage manufactured over an utterly innocuous NEA conference call and you can almost hear Pat Buchanan regaling the Republican faithful with tales of brave white soldiers taking "back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block." Fearful his symbolism might prove too subtle, he charged the overwhelmingly white audience to "take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country." He never specified exactly who they would be taking back their cities, culture and country from, but he didn't have to—one look at the army that'd be doing the taking said it all. None of the current crop of complaints are explicitly about race any more than Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican Convention was, but now as then, one look at the enemy they fear and the forces they align against it and the identity of their antagonists becomes obvious.

The question, then, is whether this is a story we want told twice. America, conservatives insist, bought a false sale of goods, and the only way Obama can sustain his popularity is to pull the wool before our eyes via the political equivalent of an atomic wedgie: overt propaganda. Attacking the National Endowment for the Arts comes straight from the '90s script: every dollar the NEA disburses will be tracked by the likes of Andrew Breitbart until the perfect moment to introduce the world to the next "Piss Christ" arrives. They've already begun to remind the troops of all the old tropes, but their attempt to preemptively undermine the institutional credibility of the NEA indicates that this generation of conservative critics might be more media savvy than their '90s counterparts. Tim Slagle's response to a recent MoveOn campaign is a sign of smears to come:

It looks like the NEA’s call for artists to promote health care initiatives has been heard by some comedy artists.

MoveOn was not a party to the infamous conference call, but because it involves actors, and actors are artists, it's a party to the propaganda agenda established during that call. As a consequence of that call, all artists—whether they shoot a crucifix in urine like Andrew Serrano or urinate on themselves like Will Ferrell—will be seen as complicit in a conspiracy to undermine America so grand even Goebbels would blush.

But while they may be savvy, they're far from smart. In the article quoted above, Slagle offers a "prize to anyone who can name all eight [actors in the MoveOn video] without using Google," includes the name of all of them in his tags not once, but twice, and his commenters are still stumped. And the one and odious John Ziegler calls for a return to "the Golden Age of television (the 70's and 80's)," when Americans came together to laugh at black people for the wrong reasons, before he realized—or was told—that he should be laughing at Archie Bunker, not with him.

That his list of programs excludes The Cosby Show is no surprise. He prefers Sanford and Sons because its humor was a function of its characters' blackness, whereas the comedy on Cosby was situational, and Ziegler found its situations implausible. How could a black obstetrician treat white women without race becoming an issue? The specter of miscegenation may not, I confess, be responsible for him preferring Golden Age shows with majority black casts, but his vision of American unity is undeniably odd:

The major networks used to create a de facto “team photo” of our nation which (after a slow start) eventually included everyone in the picture. Now, each race, gender, and age group has their own “team” and tends to watch programming that is built to only appeal to them. In short, we end up living in very different realities with almost nothing in common[.]

So in the Golden Age, when Norman Lear was adapting the BBC sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part and Steptoe and Son for American audiences, television became "a de facto 'team photo' of our nation [that] included everyone in the picture." First, white and black do not a photograph of America make; second, in Ziegler's photograph there are shows with majority white casts and shows with majority black casts, but none, like Cosby, with what could be called integrated casts. Ziegler further complains that his inability to find Tyler Perry funny represents "a net loss to the strength of the fabric of our country," because once upon a time he could laugh at the scheming of Fred Sanford, but now that black people have shows built to "appeal to them," they appear to be "living in very different realities with almost nothing in common."

He seems not to realize that they did then and do now. A commenter who named himself after Dane Cook does his damnedest to embody the plain racist underpinning of Ziegler's argument:

For the most part, blacks on television have assimilated into the mainstream of society and no one thinks much about it any more.

The mainstream of society . . . they assimilated into the mainstream of society . . . now what would that be again?

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Crime and punishment

Several commentators in the Polanski thread are apparently taking the view that if a particular exercise of criminal punishment is unlikely to deter crime or rehabilitate the offender, then punishing the offender is pointless at best if not actually barbaric.

Leaving aside the question of whether or not punishing Polanski would deter anyone from committing rape in general or child rape in particular, I find it odd that some people so easily dismiss the idea that Polanski should be punished because he deserves to be punished. One doesn't have to be a strict Kantian to accept the idea that a person who commits a henious crime should be punished irrespective of whether the punishment specifically deters the offender, or generally deters others from committing similar acts.

For example, I imagine hardly anyone would accept the idea that if Polanski had murdered his victim it would be wrong to punish him unless one could show the punishment was likely to deter murder.

All of which is to say that arguments about how there's no "point" in punishing Polanski now are only plausible to the extent that it's accepted that what Polanski did wasn't a particularly serious crime.

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Polanski Addenda

• See Harding, McEwen, and Hess. Eugene Robinson's column on the subject is so good that I suspect that as we speak Fred Hiatt is firing him so he can buy Anne Applebaum and Richard Cohen more crayons. Speaking of Applebaum, I guess one of the topics at that blogger ethics panel is going to have to be "dishonest or inept?"
• Reading comments here and elsewhere it seems that the leading non-insane line of defense seems to be a porkbusters-type argument -- i.e. given California's fiscal problems why are they spending money to put away an old man? These arguments are perhaps even less persuasive than most such arguments. Like all porkbusters arguments, it has the obvious problem that the money involved is, in the context of California state expenditures, trivial. And while the isolated programs identified by porkbusters are sometimes (though not always) genuinely wasteful, compared to the other things the prosecutor's office might plausibly spend money on bringing a child rapist who fled the jurisdiction seems pretty comfortably above the median in terms of priorities to me. Certainly, people making this argument explaining why we should assume that money that isn't used on the case of the fugitive child rapist will be used in a clearly more efficient manner.
  
• A related good point from Daniel Davies: "I hesitate to even make this point because I have so far had little success in finding a way to express it which doesn’t look like trivialising the actual crime, but more or less notwithstanding the crime, there has to be a general principle of especially harsh treatment of fugitives from justice. The system has to defend itself against people who undermine its authority by trying to lead lives which publicly flaunt the fact that they have escaped the prescribed social sanctions."
• Leaving aside the fact that nominally "consensual" sex between a 40 year-old and a (drugged) 13 year-old is plenty horrible, people asserting that what Polanski did isn't "rape-rape" really do need to come up with some evidence that the victim lied to investigators and then lied under oath to a grand jury.
• I'm glad JMM at least fixed his link to Wyman's excellent review of Wanted and Desired.
• And a good point here: I don't recall many people rushing to argue that we should just live-and-let-live with elderly priests who molested children. Although I guess those victims were often boys, so they count more, and they probably weren't sluts whose mothers totally set them up.
  

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The Polanski Arrest

You've probably heard that Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland. I think this is a very good thing, and find most of the outrage over it baffling.

One thing to note here is that Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired was an absolutely appalling whitewash. Bill Wyman has a great deal of detail about this, but you know that you're in for a disgraceful rape apologia when early on the film conveniently truncates the victim's testimony before she actually describes the rape, preserving the illusion that it's a "he said/she said" case even though if you pay attention you'll notice that nobody actually disputes her version of events. The film's portrait of the judge is just as sloppy and morally odious; it's not just that the details about his life are both irrelevant and not very damning (he may have had sexual relations outside the sacred bounds of matrimony! With two women!), but that the attempt to create hypocrisy where there isn't any plays into the fundamental misdirection of the Polanski camp -- i.e. that he was prosecuted for being a European roue just too sexually sophisticated for provincial Americans, not because he raped a 13-year old. And the way in which Zenovich allows people to speculate about the victim's (again, completely irrelevant even if true) possible history of consensual sex is even more disgusting, although it inadvertently reminds us that one reason she probably went along with a far-too-light plea bargain is that she wasn't looking forward to the similar victim-blaming that would have undoubtedly happened in court.

In addition to any issues with a conflict of interest, most of what Anne Applebaum says is similarly unconvincing. The fact that the victim forgives Polanski doesn't give him a license to skip out on his punishment, first of all. Even worse is her bringing up alleged "evidence that Polanski did not know her real age." Since the sexual relations were not even nominally "consensual," I fail to see how this is relevant to anything -- it's OK to rape a 16-year old but not a 13-year old? And as with Zenovich's film, the allegations of "judicial misconduct" remain frustratingly vague -- there's some evidence that he acted oddly, much less that he actually went beyond his legal discretion. In any event, the proper venue for determining whether the judge acted properly is a court of law, and Polanski has the resources to get a fair hearing.

I've said before that evaluations of Polanski's art should be kept distinct from his crimes, but this cuts both ways -- the fact that he's produced great art shouldn't give him immunity for a severe violent crime. As Kieran says with the proper acid, "I look forward to more detailed explanations of who the Real Victim is here, and more fine-grained elaboration of the criteria — other than “marvelous dinner guest” — for being issued a Get Out of Child Rape Free card."

[X-Posted to TAPPED.]

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Sunday "The Right Reaches a New Low" Blogging

Shorter Dan Riehl: Was Bill Sparkman murdered for trying to rape children? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

H/t Joe.

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Safire

At his best, he was a clever writer with a commitment to civil liberties increasingly absent from the Republican Party; at his worst, he used his establishment credentials to push the most unabashed wingnuttery. If you replace "civil liberties" with "moderate advancement of the welfare state," in other words, a classic Nixonite. R.I.P.

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Welcome Aboard!

It is difficult for me to convey my pride in the announcement that a man decried by no less an authority than Jeff Goldstein as "a sophist and a hamfisted prevaricator," and "a liar and a fraud" will be joining Lawyers, Guns and Money. That's a recommendation that money... could probably buy. In any case, give a hale and hearty welcome to Scott Eric Kaufman!

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Patuxent Naval Campaign

I have a review of Flotilla: The Patuxent Naval Campaign in the War of 1812 up at ID. Check it out, if you dare.

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Hmm, I'm Not Sure About This Pick Again...

At least she did grow up in the Bronx, a mitigating factor...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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On Embracing Our Contradictions

It should go without saying that I a) substantially agree with all of Scott's critiques of major NCAA athletics, and b) will be cheering heartily today for both the Cats and the Ducks. For the former, I think this exchange is appropriate:

Moe: All right, Homer, I'm not gonna lie to you. There's a good
chance you can beat Tatum. But you gotta visualize how
you're gonna win, okay?
Homer: Gotcha.
[dreams on about his victory]
Announcer: A congenital heart defect has apparently felled Tatum moments
before he could step into the ring.

Go Cats! Go Ducks!

.... Question; do people actually beat rented mules, or is that just an expression?

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In Defense of Exploitative Cartels

In comments, Nerdlinger writes:

No, I don't support that rule change, because then you don't have college athletics as we know it. You wouldn't have 120 I-A football schools, and you wouldn't have 342 basketball schools. You'd have, I don't know, 45 football schools and 80 or so basketball schools. Paying a fraction of today's player base -- many of whom will go pro anyway -- more, so the vast majority of today's player base will get much less, or nothing. And almost certainly killing most of the interest in college football and basketball along the way, along with most of the non-revenue sports like swimming, wrestling, gymnastics, etc. Whee.

The problems here:

• The biggest problem is the utter implausibility of the scenario. In case you haven't noticed there's no competitive balance in college athletics now. Most football programs have no chance of competing consistently with Florida or USC, and many football programs aren't profitable, but this hasn't killed interest in college athletics. Many other schools maintain "non-revenue" sports either without football programs or with football programs that are a financial drain. Good programs also greatly outspend programs in many of the approved (i.e., those that don't allow players to be fairly compensated) ways -- coaches, facilities, recruitment, etc. Other schools play football without even offering scholarships -- they won't be affected. I see no reason to believe that permitting universities to fairly compensate players if they choose will dramatically change the landscape of college sports.
• If you think these arguments are awfully similar to those used to oppose unionization and free agency in baseball -- according to the owners, we had to pay players a fraction of what they were worth to preserve the competitive balance of the glorious fifties, when New York teams constituted 70% of World Series appearances -- well, you're right.
  
• Even if parts of this "nightmare" scenario actually came to pass, I wouldn't say they remotely justified the gross exploitation of players. I'm not sure what's sacrosanct about having 120 Division 1-A football teams, exactly. Nor do I think there's anything sacrosanct about the specific number of athletic scholarships (as opposed to other kinds of scholarships) being currently offered. I'm happy to let the chips fall where they may.
  

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Bithermercial!

Tom Vu, come back, all is forgiven...

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Ertugrul Osman RIP

Ertugrul Osman, heir to the Ottoman Empire, died yesterday in Istanbul. I profiled his dynasty here. The head of House Osman is now Bayezid III, who was born in Paris, lived in New York, and once served in the US Army.

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Today in NCAA Peonage

Just in case you forgot, NCAA rules seem to derive from the concept that everyone should be able to make as much money as possible off of college athletics except for the athletes who actually create the value and take the (often severe) physical risks themselves. Because if they made even a dime from things like, say, their likenesses being sold to videogame companies that would be unethical.

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Texas: Executed Innocent Man

Murderer

Hopefully you've all read David Grann's remarkable New Yorker story about Cameron Todd Willingham, an almost certainly innocent man who was executed for arson based on worthless junk science roughly on a par with astrology and the highly implausible testimony of a mentally ill jailhouse snitch. (The kindest construction you can put on the state of Texas here is that -- although since he was at the scene of the "crime" you can't prove the negative -- they executed a man despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence at all that he was guilty.) I don't even want to excerpt it, because it's all an essential portrait of the death penalty as it functions in the state that executes the most people -- state-serving testimony from exceptionally dubious "experts," inept and/or underfunded defense counsel, irresponsible prosecutors, and an appeals process (in both the judicial and executive branches) that would have to accrue some rigor to rise to the level of being "cursory."

Emily Bazelon points out, however, that there's additional blame to go around:

My answer starts with the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which President Bill Clinton signed in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings. The Supreme Court also gets a share of the blame for the noose-tightening way in which it interpreted AEDPA. Justice Antonin Scalia has led this charge and went so far as to write recently, in the appeal of Troy Davis, “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.” But more centrist justices also lined up on the side of "finality"—the idea that there is value in closing the doors of due process. Grann quotes Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who wrote in a 1993 case that the "execution of a legally and factually innocent person would be a constitutionally intolerable event." But in that case, Herrera v. Collins, O'Connor ruled against the defendant. And that is one of a string of rulings from her that made it more and more difficult for defendants to bring to light new evidence and to get the courts to pay attention to flaws in their convictions. Cameron Todd Willingham is dead because of a bad and abstruse law and a series of even worse legal rulings from our high court.

And it hardly seems likely that this is the only case where the process has failed to this degree...

...slightly edited to reflect the fact that there is, of course, no evidence that a "crime" was committed at all.

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Enjoy her! She's a perk.

I've been wanting to write about the differences in culture between American and British higher education, but largely due to my dissatisfaction with my present employer, I've demurred, as I do like my job security. Thanks to the Vice Chancellor at Buckingham University, I have an opening.

This is, of course, bollocks. But it does speak to a difference in the culture. We don't have tenure in the UK any longer, which was one of Maggie's many reforms. I can't speak for the entire island, but at my institution, at least, having relations with one's students is, while not encouraged, also not frowned upon. It's treated as a natural outcome, and dealt with.

Through paperwork. A lot of paperwork.

We have these end of year meetings: panels and boards. At the panel, which is held at department level, the first item on the agenda is always "does anybody have a declaration of interest?" My first experience with this concept was back in the 03-04 academic year. So, being literally foreign to the concept of the panel meeting itself, let alone its nuances, I raise my hand at this question.

All of my colleagues stared at me from around the table, the look on their faces was "you've been here five minutes, and you have a declaration of interest?" When I had the floor, I naively asked, "what is a declaration of interest?"

The response was, basically, "You're shagging one of your students?"

Holy crap. In the American university culture, there's only a few ways you can lose your job once tenured, including disagreeing with the Bush administration, or shagging one of your students. Being trained and professionalized in that culture, I look out on my sea of students professionally: I'm paid by the state to teach them, and that's that.

Not here. I've had a couple colleagues who had to fill out the paperwork (one male and one female). I do wonder, however, if the British approach is more pragmatic as opposed to American morality. Even though I personally can't entertain the notion, it does happen.

Thanks to my friend Jenaya Dawe-Stotz for bringing this to my attention.

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Ginsburg Hospitalized

Hopefully she'll be OK.

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Rebuilding Your Reputation

I just have one thing to say about the Red Dawn remake: I will not complain that it is "too wingnutty." In fact, I'll complain if it's not wingnutty enough. If Barack Obama isn't depicted as the agent of Communist domination, and ACORN his Fifth Column, then I'm walking out of the theater.

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How delusional is Glenn Beck?

I realize this is only scraping midway down the barrel of Glenn Beck's yawning madness, but for reasons I can't adequately defend I was actually listening yesterday when he explained why he found the idea of an Islamic Anti-Christ to be gentler on the stomach than Walter Lippmann:

I've read some pretty excruciating stuff. I have read some stuff -- I've read about the twelfth Imam. This is the guy who I think could be construed as the Antichrist. The twelfth Imam, the one that today Ahmadinejad is going to say again you mark my words. He will say it again in front of the United Nations, "Oh, Allah, give me the strength to hasten the return of the promised one." The promised one is the twelfth Imam. I believe that is the Antichrist. It is it has all of the earmarks. I've read some pretty dark stuff. I have never closed a book, ever, and said I can't read this anymore; it's just wicked stuff. Walter Lippmann. Walter Lippmann, who was one of the guys who was instrumental at CBS. I think he was the head of CBS for a while, he's one of the guys who started the Council on Foreign Relations. He was one of the guys who did the Versailles treaty, he's one of the architects of Woodrow Wilson. He is just evil stuff. I couldn't read it anymore. It's so dark, it is such a depressing look at humanity where they are saying you'll never be able to get stupid people to vote; that's why we have to breed eugenics -- breed smarter people to weed out the riffraff. I couldn't read it anymore.

Which is to say, Beck never read Lippmann in the first place. If he had, he'd know that Lippmann was the precise opposite of a eugenicist -- so much so that he wrote a series of articles for The New Republic in 1922 that condemned (a) the belief that "hereditary IQ" could be measured; and (b) the cruel mischief that had already been, and would continue to be, inspired by the World War I-era Army Intelligence Tests. (Given Beck's views on immigration and his unimpechabley non-racist interpretation of what the Constitution has to say about citizenship, it's safe to say that Beck shares more in common with Lippmann-era eugenicists than Lippmann himself did.) In those essays -- the fourth one being the most scathing -- Lippmann warned that testing advocates

have committed themselves to a dogma which must lead to such abuse. They claim not only that they are really measuring intelligence, but that intelligence is innate, hereditary, and predetermined. They believe that they are measuring the capacity of a human being for all time and that his capacity is fatally fixed by the child’s heredity. Intelligence testing in the hands of men who hold this dogma could not but lead to an intellectual caste system in which the task of education had given way to the doctrine of predestination and infant damnation. If the intelligence test really measured the unchangeable hereditary capacity of human beings, as so many assert, it would inevitably evolve from an administrative convenience into a basis for hereditary caste.

Beck's real aim, of course, is to insist (inaccurately) that Lippmann was a "founding father" of progressivism and to claim that progressives anticipated Hitler, would have wanted to kill Baby Trig, and so forth, so things like "facts" are probably unhelpful to the cause.

I suppose if Beck had actually read any of Lippmann's work -- and someone has obviously summarized/caricatured Public Opinion and The Phantom Public for him -- he'd likely be outraged by Lippmann's (amply rewarded) skepticism that "the people" constitute the repository of all virtue in a democracy. By the early 1920s, Lippmann was of course dismissive of the belief that "the people" exist as an "organism with an organic unity" in the first place -- which meant that Lippmann was, among many other things, skeptical of the nostalgic "phantom" community that animated Mussolini's fascism or the Anglo-Saxon tribalism of the KKK. You'd think that Beck would at least appreciate the fact that Lippmann's skepticism eventually led him to oppose significant parts of New Deal (including Social Security and the Revenue Act of 1935, which raised top marginal tax rates to 75 percent) and to vote for Alf Landon in 1936. But who am I kidding? Even Jonah Goldberg -- our era's most careful and detailed chronicler of the liberal fascist menace -- doesn't mention that in his book, so how is Beck supposed to know? Besides, he's busy thinking about other stuff at the moment.

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"Revisionism"

Perhaps the funniest (although certainly not the most disturbing) part of Glenn Back's racist analysis of the 14th Amendment is his claim that to interpret the clause "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside" to mean that people born in the United States become American citizens would be a "revision" of the 14th Amendment. A more faithful interpretation, apparently, would be to see that the plain language of the clause doesn't apply to classes of people that Glenn Beck doesn't like. But don't call that racist or anything! And for God's sake don't keep reading the 14th Amendment further -- many more nutty ideas in there.

This kind of thing might merely be a sideshow if it wasn't also being echoed by, say, major Republican candidates in presidential primaries and state and federal Republican legislators.

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Mullen in Favor of Women on Subs

Tom Philpott at Defense Tech:

Women should be allowed to serve aboard America’s fleet of nuclear submarines, the nation's top military officer, Adm. Michael Mullen, quietly has told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

If the Navy agrees to it, this would be a huge policy change and potentially a significant expansion of career opportunities for female officers and sailors.

Women have been barred by Navy policy from submarines, even as the sea service began 15 years ago to integrate females into other seagoing combat roles including aboard surface warships and in fighter jets.

Mullen, former chief of naval operations and a career surface warfare officer, made his position on submarines known in written responses to questions from the committee to prepare for Mullen's confirmation hearing to serve a second two-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

"As an advocate for improving the diversity of our force, I believe we should continue to broaden opportunities for women. One policy I would like to see changed is the one barring their service aboard submarines," Mullen told senators.

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Watch as We Pretend that this is a Reasonable Position...

It's unfortunate that these Eastern European leaders feel that they need to humiliate themselves in the cause of solidarity with Saakashvili; the Hitler-Poland analogy is barely worthy of Michael Goldfarb, much less Vaclav Havel. I very much doubt that the EU report will apportion blame primarily on Georgia, despite the fact that almost all evidence revealed since the war has indicated that the Georgian attack on South Ossetia was the proximate cause of the conflict. I suppose it will be a very long time before the screech of "Appeasement!!!" rings entirely hollow...

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Separated By The Same Language, Deficit Style

according to Mock the Week. Thanks to Simon Dyda and Brieg Powel for bringing this to my attention. It affords me greater optimism every time I look at my monthly pay stub to now know that HM Treasury have at least a grasp.

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How to Be A Serious Foreign Policy Thinker

Follow these simple rules, and Fred Hiatt will always have room for you.

...and don't forget publishers.

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Joe Paterno and the Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism

Penn State University's titular head football coach, Joe Paterno, is old. Really, really old. How old? Well Chalmers ("Bump") Elliott was Michigan's football coach for ten years, before retiring from the profession 41 years ago this fall. He then went on to be Iowa's athletic director for 20 years, before retiring from that position 19 years ago. Elliott is a year older than Paterno.

Anyway, PSU under Paterno was for decades a remarkably consistent program. They finished fifth in the nation in overall winning percentage (out of 121 D-I programs) in the 1970s, seventh in the 1980s, and sixth in the 1990s. Then age suddenly seemed to ambush Paterno, and the team more or less collapsed. In the first five years of this decade PSU fell to 72nd in overall winning percentage. Paterno's behavior on the sidelines and at press conferences started going from charmingly eccentric elder statesman to disturbingly crazy old coot.

After racking up a several-year won-loss record that would have gotten any other coach at a historically elite program fired, Paterno hung on, cashing in a mountain of institutional chips, and leaving observers to wonder how long it would be before his career ended in some Woody Hayes-like incident (Hayes, the legendary Ohio State coach, was fired in 1978 after punching an opposing player on the sidelines at the end of a game).

Then something unexpected happened. Penn State got things turned around. In the four and a third seasons since 2005, PSU is more or less back to where they were before the decline and fall of the Paterno empire. Their 43-11 record is 8th best in Division I over that span. What happened?

Apparently, Penn State's assistant coaches somehow managed to wrest all actual decision making power from their putative boss. Long time defensive coordinator and heir apparent Tom Bradley is now all but openly acknowledged by everyone but JoePa himself to be PSU's real head coach. Now during games Paterno sits in a booth high above Beaver Stadium, a quite possibly unplugged headset straddling his still remarkably dark hair, a video monitor before him, which for all anyone knows may be playing highlights of the 1983 Sugar Bowl in a continuous loop.

Perhaps some sociologist or political scientist with an interest in institutional theory (and college football) will one day study this bloodless coup with the analytic rigor it deserves.

Update: I thought it was fairly obvious this post was somewhat tongue in cheek (I don't actually believe JoePa was watching the 1983 Sugar Bowl on his monitor during games). Still it would be interesting to try to figure out the processes by which guys like Paterno and Bowden cede much or all of their previous decision making authority, while still holding on to their jobs. (It's clear both of them have, although the extent of their semi-retirements isn't.)

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Castro: But I Want to Nuke them Now!!!!

Ahem:

In the early 1980s, according to newly released documents, Fidel Castro was suggesting a Soviet nuclear strike against the United States, until Moscow dissuaded him by patiently explaining how the radioactive cloud resulting from such a strike would also devastate Cuba....

The Pentagon study attributes the Cuba revelation to Andrian A. Danilevich, a Soviet general staff officer from 1964 to ’90 and director of the staff officers who wrote the Soviet Union’s final reference guide on strategic and nuclear planning.

In the early 1980s, the study quotes him as saying that Mr. Castro “pressed hard for a tougher Soviet line against the U.S. up to and including possible nuclear strikes.”

The general staff, General Danilevich continued, “had to actively disabuse him of this view by spelling out the ecological consequences for Cuba of a Soviet strike against the U.S.”

That information, the general concluded, “changed Castro’s positions considerably.”

This is interesting in that it mirrors the (very public) conversation that the Soviets and the Chinese had about nuclear weapons in the 1960s. To sum up very briefly, the Chinese argued that the Soviets should be much more aggressive in their thinking about nuclear weapons, while the Soviets were quite realistic about the prospects for victory in nuclear war. In that case, the Soviets had insufficient leverage to bring the Chinese into line, and eventually concluded that a certain political distance between Beijing and Moscow was desirable in case the Chinese did something stupid. In the Cuba case, the Russians of course were able to essentially dictate policy to Havana.

The report is also intriguing in terms of thinking about the relevance that information plays in actor behavior. It's sort of remarkable to think that Castro wasn't aware of the consequences that a nuclear attack on the US would have on Cuba; I'm inclined to think that just about everyone in the US (or at least everyone after November 1983) was aware of the devastating environmental effects that nuclear war would entail. Maybe Castro was just playing for bargaining space, in the same sense that it's possible that Mao was feigning ignorance about the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in the 1950s. But then again, it's not wholly unreasonable to think that Castro, a busy man, may simply never have taken time to educate himself on what nukes really do.

Finally, I find it interesting that the Soviets took the "even if we win, you lose" tack in explaining the situation to Castro. I suspect that the Soviets were well aware that, even under the most rosy scenarios of a pre-emptive attack, nuclear fallout was the least bad thing that could happen to Cuba, and that the utter nuclear destruction of the island was much more likely. As a corollary to this, I have to wonder whether Castro, like some American policymakers, was taken in by the idea that the Soviets had presumptive nuclear dominance and could destroy the US whenever they liked. Team B made this a fashionable opinion in the US, and it'd be interesting to see whether it filtered in modified form to Havana.

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Cracking Down on Ratings Agencies

This is a very important step, and hopefully something like these proposals will go forward. As with the collusive accounting practices that were a major part of the Enron scandal, the principal-agent problems with the ratings agencies are indeed severe -- it's not just that the ratings agencies have their own independent interests, but that those interests are intertwined with the companies they were allegedly scrutinizing. Which means stronger regulation is essential. (And speaking of corporate "free speech," I'm amused by the recently rejected argument that the First Amendment immunizes credit agencies from being sued for deceptive ratings. Does the First Amendment mean that laws against perjury are illegal too?)

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This Can't Be Right

The Yankees may not use the greatest pitcher athlete in Yankee known human history in their post-season rotation? If they remember his countless great starts -- why, who can forget that masterful outing when he gave up only 4 runs in 5 2/3 innings, he certainly celebrated like he just pitched a shutout in Game 7 of the World Series, and surely that counts for something -- I'm sure they'll reconsider.

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Sotomayor on Economic Issues

An interesting article by Jess Bravin about Sotomayor's recent oral argument queries about whether treating corporations as the equivalent of persons for constitutional purposes:

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

After a confirmation process that revealed little of her legal philosophy, the remark offered an early hint of the direction Justice Sotomayor might want to take the court.

"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center.

It does seem possible that while Sotomayor might be a Breyeresque wet on civil liberties issues, she may also bring an economic liberalism that really has no representation on the current Court.

The rest of the article is very much worth reading, with good background information about Santa Clara County. What's striking is how cursory the arguments in favor of the very important concept of corporate personhood were, although the constitutional text is silent either way and it's certainly not obvious that it follows from the classical liberal principles that animated the rights in question.

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The Liberal Democrats Gunning for Labour

Which given the current polling context, is not news that Labour need. While in the early summer I speculated that Labour still had a chance for a hung parliament, especially with the replacement of Gordon Brown with Alan Johnson, now that looks highly unlikely.

The Lib Dems and Labour present the UK with the most likely coalition partnership in an electoral system that rarely produces the need for such talk. Indeed, they did serve in a coalition government of Scotland, but then the electoral system for the Scottish Parliament facilitates coalition government.

This says more about the chances of the Liberal Democrats, and they appear to believe that they can replace Labour into second place. This I doubt; while early polling indicated that the Liberal-SDLP Alliance erm, Liberal, SDP Alliance had a chance at supplanting Labour as the official opposition, by election day their support had attenuated. Now, the Lib Dems don't even have this level of support in the polls.

An election, of course, is around seven months off, so a lot can change; it remains to be seen whether the sustained support for the Tories and David Cameron result from their innovative policies, or simply exhaustion with 12 years of a Labour government. As Cameron et al. are understandably coy about what, if anything, they stand for, I suspect the latter.

What makes this interesting to watch is that if the Liberal Democrat strategy comes close to success, it might suggest the chance of a realignment in British politics on the left. In 2005, considerably more of Labour's 5% loss in vote share from 2001 went to the Lib Dems (3.7%) than the Tories (0.6%). If this did not result from only contextual elements specific to the 2005 campaign (e.g. the unpopularity of Michael Howard and the lack of cosmetic innovation in the Tories) this could perhaps bring about conditions that may allow a realignment on the left.

I've argued in class for the past couple of years that Brown's best move, short and long term, is to introduce a form of PR into Westminster elections. With Tory support topping out around 44% in my lifetime, and only currently polling at 43%, it would appear that there is a natural ceiling for the Conservatives. A form of PR, while eliminating the current electoral system's ability to deliver crushing parliamentary majorities from slim popular vote results (witness the 35% Labour secured in 2005), would ensure a coalition government so long as the relative strength of the three main national parties remained stable. So long as the Lib Dems worked with Labour, it would shut the Tories out of government for the forseeable future. Since neither Blair nor Brown maintained their enthusiasm for electoral system reform following the 1997 results, that was never in the cards.

And of course, the Liberal Democrats can't seem to agree on much, anyway.

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Hack of the Day

Michael Barone. (Am I right to remember that Barone once had a reputation as being something other than a fourth-rate op-ed propagandist?)

See also, although of course even if Gladney was a genuine victim of assault it would hardly prove anything about "liberals."

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It's about time...

...conservatives pulsed with outrage over an actual outrage. Or not.

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Obstruction of justice

It's always difficult to figure out what's going on from news reports regarding a criminal investigation, but this story raises a lot of questions.

First, why isn't Zazi being charged under one of several very broadly-worded federal anti-terrorism statutes? If, as the FBI asserts, Zazi admitted attending courses "at an al-Qaeda training facility in the FATA (tribal) region of Pakistan" and that "he received instruction from al-Qaeda operatives on subjects such as weapons and explosives," those are very serious crimes -- far more serious than giving false statements to investigators.

Second, the crime with which Zazi, his father, and the NYC informant have been charged with is essentially a form of obstruction of justice. But the federal statute that supposedly criminalizes this conduct is a textbook example of a law that's subject to abuse by overzealous prosecutors. Obstruction of justice at its core involves acts like witness tampering, intimidation, and the like. But a catch-all provision in the statute allows making false statements to an investigator to be treated as a free-standing crime.

Note that when they agreed to submit to questioning none of these people were under oath, or had been charged with anything. The "crime" they have supposedly committed is that of giving inaccurate statements to investigators. Meanwhile the investigators are free to lie with impunity to the people they interview.

Third, this kind of case appears to illustrate how easily civil libertarian and due process concerns can get tossed out the window when the magic word "terrorism" is invoked. From what's been reported there appears to be no solid evidence of an actual plot of any sort, or the existence of real weapons, or indeed anything beyond some suspicious movements and conversations. This probably explains why the suspects haven't been charged with any crime other than that of failing to cooperate appropriately with their interrogators. (Note too the absurdly transparent pretext that Zazi's rental car was stopped by the NYPD as part of a "random drug stop.").

Now of course it's always possible that Zazi is part of an actual Al Qaeda cell of some sort, as opposed to say a clownish amateur who hasn't done enough to be charged with a real crime. But then he ought to be charged with one.

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He wanted to distinguish the "known knowns" from the "unknown knowns"

Some people evidently had too much time on their hands:

Donald Rumsfeld had to be talked out of editing his own entry on Wikipedia, which he referred to as "Wika-wakka." He was a Drudge Report reader and used to watch YouTube clips that made fun of his press conference performances.

Good thing there's not a "Rate My Defense Secretary" site. Rummy totally would have given himself a chili pepper.

Rumsfeld's Wika-wakaa page, incidentally, has already been updated to include this important news.

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The Process Projection

I obviously agree with Ed Kilgore's point that voting for cloture should be the minimal acceptable standard for being a Democratic caucus member in good standing, but I think this is an especially important point:

Since 60 votes are required to “invoke cloture” and proceed to a vote, the White House strategy on health reform has oscillated between efforts to pull a few Senate Republicans across the line (shoring up “centrist” Democrats as a byproduct) to get to 60, and schemes to use budget reconciliation procedures, which prohibit filibusters.

This latter possibility has aroused dire threats of Armageddon from conservatives, most notably from New York Times columnist David Brooks, who said use of reconciliation for health reform would be “suicidal,” and would “permanently alienate independents.” Brooks cleverly conflated public misgivings about health reform with support for a filibuster, and equated a simple majority vote with an effort to “ram health care through” Congress. There is zero evidence at this point that voters are versed in the intricacies of Senate procedure, or cherish the right of 41 senators to dictate national policy.

The idea that because David Broder considers it important to adhere to whatever ad hoc procedural obstruction the Republicans have come up with means that the public cares about this stuff is absurd.

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On Paying the Price

Mike Goldfarb and I have fun re: missile defense. Here Mike insists that Obama will pay a price for killing the Eastern European system, and I disagree:

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24th

Holy crap. Not only did we not break Oregon State's hallowed PAC-10 record of futility, thanks to Idaho (for whom one of my future brothers-in-law works for), but on the heels of the 16-13 upset of USC, Washington is in the rather unlikely position of being back in the national top-25.

Where we belong.

This time last year, the UW would have had a difficult time breaking the state top-25.

I was going to say something about English cricket in the one day internationals against Australia, but they somehow managed to win the seventh and final match, thus dragging their record in that series to 1-6. Good thing the Ashes don't factor in the ODIs.

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