Brian Beutler

Elephant in the room

Condoleezza Rice is taking yet another stand against talking about the second most important foreign policy issue facing America with the people who could quite possibly improve the situation. She might discuss Iraq issues with her Iranian counterpart at a regional conference this week in Sharm El Sheik, she says. But U.S.-Iran relations are, of course, likely off the table.

“I would not rule it out,” Ms. Rice said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” today, referring to a possible meeting with Iranian representatives. “We will be there, not to talk about U.S.-Iranian issues, but to talk about Iraq, and how Iraq’s neighbors can help to stabilize Iraq. And I won’t rule it out.”

This reluctance continues to make no sense.

Bon Voyage

For the few of you who don't know, I've been updating this blog day in and day out from Buenos Aires. And while I feel slightly remiss for spending hours a day bloviating a bit about American politics when I could be at a parrilla or a tango show, I've still managed to see some tango and eat at literally dozens of different parrillas. So my Buenos Aires experience hasn't suffered too much as a result.

I would, however, feel more than slightly remiss if I didn't eventually get out of Buenos Aires and see a slightly larger cross section of Argentina and other parts of South America. So tomorrow I hop on a bus to Iguazu, then from there I'll be headed down to Salta, from Salta to Cordoba and Mendoza, then into Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile. I will not be bringing my computer with me, so needless to say my posting frequency will suffer. But keep me in your RSS readers. I'll be back in a couple weeks and should resume at my regular pace when I get back.

Saludos!

Banal observation(s) of the day

A lot of people out there want to know what Shaha Riza (of Wolfowitz fame) looks like. I know this because they stumble across my blog doing a google search for her picture. Good times.

Also, I added a picture of myself and a dog and another blogger in the background to my "About Me" page. I don't suppose that should in any way matter to you.

Where could we go? A sundry post

Journalists should learn some physics:

Astronomers announced last week that they had found what might be the first habitable planet outside the solar system. Known poetically as Gliese 581c, the new planet is only five times as massive as the Earth and inhabits a sweet zone around a dim red star in Libra where it is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water.

The point the reporter eventually makes is that, at 20 light years away, it would take about 300,000 years to get there at Voyager velocity. Perfectly true. However, there are still two problems here. The first is that the force of Earth-gravity on Earth-bound objects is directly proportional to the gravitational constant here on the planet's surface. That number (we call it "g") is itself directly proportional to Earth's mass, but inversely proportional to the square of Earth's radius. The fact that Gliese is five times as massive as Earth would might well pose a problem. Now it turns out that planets (and especially rocky Earth-like planets) tend to have comparable gravitational constants, and so their surface gravities aren't wildly different from each other. But humans are evolved to live at earth density. Not at moon density (about 20 percent of Earth's gravity) and not at Jupiter gravity (about 200 percent of Earth's gravity). It also happens to be the case that a rocky planet's have similar densities and so we can be pretty sure that Gliese's gravity is greater than Earth's gravity by a noticeable margin--my guess is by a factor of two. That means humans on the Glesian surface would experience--I would guess--a risk of bone fractures, muscle strains, and circulation issues, at least until we pumped up a bit. I don't really know what the heart can handle.

The second problem is that we find these planets by looking at Doppler perturbations in their host star's rotation around its own axis. We infer their existence. We don't know what their atmospheres look like, and therefore we can't possibly say what their surface temperatures are. There could be a tremendous greenhouse problem (a la Venus whose atmosphere is a smoldering blanket of toxic greenhouse nastiness) or a tremendous radiation problem (a la the moon whose lack of an atmosphere leaves it wide open for some of the higher-energy photons that the sun emits). We just don't know.

One possibly helpful fact, though, is that Gliese's sun is a dim red star. "Weaker" stars have longer lives than "stronger" stars and that means that Gliese's sun will likely long outlast our own sun, which will turn into a red giant and cook--and in some cases completely envelop--the planets in this solar system in a few billion years. The downside, though, is that our eyes (and our plant life and a host of other things) are evolved to be bombarded by our sun's light, which has a spectral peak at a green wavelengths. (That's why green laser pointers are better for using in lecture halls, though red laser pointers are cheaper and therefore hegemonize the laser pointer market). Living on a planet with a red sun would be odd. Who knows? Organic plantlife there might even, in some seasons, become invisible to our eyes.

Running

One of the few things I'm proud of myself for is turning myself from an unfit slob bachelor into a somewhat fit slob bachelor by adopting a (at times) fairly rigorous running schedule. By rigorous I mean relative to the average person and not relative to insane people like this guy and these people. This sort of comparison always annoys me though:

Some of the best endurance athletes in the world traveled to Tennessee to test themselves against the hardest course in ultramarathon running: a cumulative elevation almost equal to two climbs up Mount Everest.

Ok. I agree that the supermarathoners are incredibly impressive. But what they are attempting is in almost no way comparable to the physical demands and risks involved in climbing Mount Everest, which comes with attendant deep crevice dangers and actual (not just "cumulative") elevation issues. Those people need oxygen tanks.

I, to my best calculation, have run the equivalent of about one round trip across the country and probably several cumulative scalings of Everest. This, of course, sounds impressive, but tells you absolutely nothing about the actual intensity of my exercise routines.

Flummoxed

One important lesson I would teach the Bush administration if invited is the radical idea that their immediate interests are not always coincident with the immediate interests of our less-than-savory allies. In fact, sometimes there aren't really even tenuous points of contact between the two:

Bush administration officials have been scratching their heads over steps taken by Prince Bandar’s uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, that have surprised them by going against the American playbook, after receiving assurances to the contrary from Prince Bandar during secret trips he made to Washington....

[I]n February, King Abdullah effectively torpedoed plans by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a high-profile peace summit meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, by brokering a power-sharing agreement with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas that did not require Hamas to recognize Israel or forswear violence. The Americans had believed, after discussions with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis were on board with the strategy of isolating Hamas.

American officials also believed, again after speaking with Prince Bandar, that the Saudis might agree to direct engagement with Israel as part of a broad American plan to jump-start Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. King Abdullah countermanded that plan.

Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.

Leave aside for now the question of which course of action (American or Saudi) is actually wisest. It's obvious why these moves by Bandar would be disappointing to the administration (and therefore equally obvious why the administration would go straight to the press to get the word out that Bandar has gone off the reservation). But the idea that these are somehow surprising moves by the leaders of a fairly radicalized Sunni country is totally ridiculous. The Saudis' one-time (and perhaps future) willingness to play along with controversial American policies in the Middle East was based on an assumption of reciprocity. And when you've degraded your own country's ability to provide incentives for a different country to act against its immediate interests you probably shouldn't be surprised when that country refuses to act against its immediate interests.

Unusual

Some have noted that it's fashionable in the blogosphere to whip David Broder around. Now it's become fashionable in the New York Times op-ed page.

It’s our country’s bitter fortune that while David Halberstam is gone, too many Joe Alsops still hold sway. Take the current dean of the Washington press corps, David Broder, who is leading the charge in ridiculing Harry Reid for saying the obvious — that “this war is lost” (as it is militarily, unless we stay in perpetuity and draft many more troops). In February, Mr. Broder handed down another gem of Beltway conventional wisdom, suggesting that “at the very moment the House of Representatives is repudiating his policy in Iraq, President Bush is poised for a political comeback.”

Some may recall that Stephen Colbert offered the same prediction in his monologue at the correspondents’ dinner a year ago. “I don’t believe this is a low point in this presidency,” he said. “I believe it is just a lull before a comeback.” But the fake pundit, unlike the real one, recognized that this was a joke.

Funneling up

Nicholas Kristof catches on to an important story.

This will not make you a better person

Heh.

New lineup

The Atlantic Monthly seems to be pulling the blog-equivalent of a George Steinbrenner. What was once a blogless website now suddenly features Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and James Fallows. (The addition of Fallows is particularly exciting since a). I didn't know about his blog-move in advance, b). He will give, for lack of better words, editorial balance and reportage to the line-up, and c). It will probably mean more of his delightfully eclectic posts and also a dilution of the greater blogosphere's critical level of shrill stridence.)

Meanwhile, I'll be back here in Obscuristan if any of you guys want to shout out to me!

Marionettes

Ross Douthat:

[I]f the press is bored with the Presidential field, maybe they could pay some more attention to a Mike Huckabee or a Bill Richardson, a Chris Dodd or a Tommy Thompson (well, maybe not Tommy Thompson), all of whom are arguably more qualified to be President than some of the current front-runners. I'm all for watching candidates who are capable of "making the other smoothies on stage a little uncomfortable" - I just want those candidates to also be capable of saying something halfway interesting, and maybe even capable of winning some votes as well.

Although he's writing about something different than I am, these words raise a question: Is it just me or is this primary season the most frustratingly obvious example of the press rigging the election by formulating their own narrative and then becoming unhappy with the outcome of things?

The failures are many

Here's a (to my ear) new argument for withdrawal. If we abandon our participation in the violence in Iraq, we would be able to put more U.S. forces in charge of reconstruction efforts and infrastructure maintenance than we can currently spare. That way we could at least try to secure a few vestiges of civil society for Iraqis who want to enjoy need them and perhaps that will provide some small downward pressure on those who are advancing the fighting. Or, we can continue apace with our multidimensionally failed strategy:

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle.

Infinite universe

Robert Wright brings me back to my college days--that four-year stretch of time during which I studied physics and astronomy and from which I emerged with less of a feeling of understanding than I had when I began:

This week the mystery deepened: Why no space aliens?

On Tuesday, scientists reported finding the most “Earthlike” planet ever, Gliese 581c. Its sun is cooler than ours, but also closer, so Gliese is in that climatic comfort zone conducive to water — hence to life, hence to evolution, hence to intelligent beings with advanced technology. Yet they never phone.

The first three things you learn these days when you study astrophysics--specifically cosmology--are that the universe is infinite, its topography is flat, and its reaches are accelerating in their expansion. At least that's the consensus now. A couple years into the major, you learn the empirical rationales for the second and third parts of that consensus. The first part emerges from theory, but there's very little we can "see" that in and of itself demonstrates the universe's infinitude. But if it's true, then it raises what some would call bong-smoke-philosophical issues and what I would call really interesting questions.

If the universe is truly infinite, and if infinity means what I think it means, then, even if it all exits outside of Earth's causal universe (i.e. our "future light cone"), doesn't the fact that organic life exists here mean that it has to exist elsewhere? Speaking statistically, Earthlings are proof that there is a non-zero probablility that the universe can produce recipes for life on planets. But even if that probablility is extremely low, the fact that the sampling size is infinite implies that, not only does life exist elsewhere, but infinite amounts of it exist elsewhere, doesn't it?

Take it further: This would mean that there are infinite identical copies of our very own existence happening in various somewheres out there. In a place far far away from earth (and in infinite such far far away places), a thing we would call a man in a place that looks a lot like Buenos Aires, Argentina is sitting in something resembling cafe writing in a language identical to English about frivolous matters "he" isn't smart enough to understand. I'd like to meet this "man." Actually, I'd like to meet all of these "men." I bet they are handsome.

Fun things you find

While sifting through the New York Times' archive to figure out how often Maureen Dowd has compared  public figures to Cassandra (of Greek mythology fame) (don't ask me why I was doing this, just accept it), I found this fun lead quote from back in 2001.

Maureen Dowd: "I usually avoid sweeping generalizations." Oh?

I've never read a statement as comically self-negating or as unintentionally telling as this one. And I'm somebody who usually avoids overstatement. Well, ok, not really.

Be pragmatic about pragmatism

Some of the stuff here is really good, some of it is almost suspiciously blase:

BJORN LOMBORG, Director, Copenhagen Consensus Center: Well, basically, Ray, the point is to say, we don't care particularly about climate change, per se. We care about, what are its impacts? We care about the people who are going to get more risk in flooding, the people who are going to get more exposed to malaria, the people who are going to die more because of heat waves. And those are the people we actually want to help.

It is, of coure, absolutely essential to prepare for the effects of climate change, but it is meaningless to prepare for climate change if we don't also stop climate change. It's a point I and many, many others have made many, many times before, but preparing for the "impacts" of global warming will be a lumbering world-wide project and, once it's complete, if we haven't sufficiently curbed, all that work will become obsolete in a blink.

If you spend millions of dollars and man-hours prepping farmers a particular lattitude for drought and millions more dollars and man-hours developing the infrastructure necessary to treat people in a different region for malaria, but don't stop the temperature from climbing, then a few years later, new parts of the planet will begin to suffer the same problems and the preparation process will have to begin anew.  We need to turn off the actual mechanism that's making the problem spread, or else we're behaving essentially like house cats chasing a laser point across the carpet. Except much less cute.

More Einstein

Maybe I just need to get a life, but I'm still befuddled by the Tom Friedman op-ed I wrote about earlier today, and am beginning to believe that it's just about the most senile thing I've ever read.

So my sense, from reading Mr. Isaacson’s book, is that if Einstein were alive today, he would be telling both America and China that they have homework to do.

I'm willing to bet my meager farm that Einstein (remember the tales of Einstein and his homework?) would never ever say anything even remotely like this.

Banal observation of the day

Some things just need more mayonnaise.

Almost daily Corner bashing part 3

Mitt Romney committed a Kinsley gaffe yesterday. It does not please conservatives:

[Romney] said the country would be safer by only "a small percentage" and would see "a very insignificant increase in safety" if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. "It's not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person," Romney said. Instead, he said he supports a broader strategy to defeat the Islamic jihad movement.

To this, Byron York says other peoples' lives, military effectiveness, and a big pot of American money are worth trading for a satisfying revenge kill:

I would say a) we have already spent billions and gone to a lot of effort to try to get bin Laden, and b) it would be worth still more money and still more effort to kill the man behind 9/11.  I can't imagine any serious Republican candidate for president would say otherwise.  Perhaps Romney should watch the tape of the planes hitting the towers again.

Fortunately, though Byron's right that most presidential candidates would never "say otherwise" (and Democrats are especially guilty here) I don't believe that even the most opportunistic politician actually thinks killing Osama bin Laden should be even a secondary priority for our military. And good for Romney for saying so out loud.

Almost daily Corner bashing part 2

Michael Novak:

This is not civil war in Iraq; it is a limited, strategic, and tactical ploy whereby foreigners try desperately to inflame Iraqis against one another. The aim of these foreigners is to bring about such a cataclysm of murder and insecurity and fear that their tiny, tiny minority can then capture total power.

New York Times:

[T]he overall violence had not subsided, and...large-scale attacks using car bombs against markets and other locations filled with civilians could still occur and set off more Sunni and Shiite revenge killings.

The case for withdrawing in no way changes if you simply define "civil war" out of existence. Even if you think a civil war is only a cival war if it wasn't ignited and flame-fanned by a small fringe group, it doesn't make the situation in Iraq any more salvagable. If I thought the escalation had any chance of ending the fight between Iraqi Shiites and Sunni nationalists, I might support it. Instead, I've heard plenty of compelling explanations of why it can't do that and not a single argument thus far from anybody that makes me think it can or will.   

Almost daily Corner bashing

I know that militaries are awesome and that explosions are neat and that disastrous occupations are a cause worth fighting for, but I have just one question for Byron York:

I have a new piece today about last night's Democratic debate. In that debate, moderator Brian Williams of NBC News asked: "If, God forbid, a thousand times, while we were gathered here tonight, we learned that two American cities had been hit simultaneously by terrorists, and we further learned beyond the shadow of a doubt it had been the work of al Qaeda, how would you change the U.S. military stance overseas as a result?" Two of the three frontrunners in the Democratic race couldn't bring themselves to mention any military action at all.

Given that al Qaeda is the guest of no willing government, what country would you recommend using military action against in the event of new attacks? What if the base of operations for the attacks was a mosque in London? Would that warrant the same response as an attack that was planned at a mosque in Saudi Arabia?

Equal time not all that equal

This, via Andrew Sullivan, is fascinating. What's particularly curious to me is that--despite all the pretense about having a 90-minute, eight person debate in order to give all of the contenders equal presence--the questions were issued and response times allocated in such a way as to allow the candidates to speak words in numbers that were, with a couple of exceptions, suspiciously proportional to their percentage positions in national polls:

• 1,872 - Senator Obama
• 1,766 - Senator Clinton
• 1,518 - Senator Edwards
• 1,281 - Governor Richardson
• 1,180 - Representative Kucinich
• 961 - Senator Biden
• 912 - Senator Dodd
• 753 - Senator Gravel

Kevin gets it right

I used the MIT Admissions Dean story yesterday to make an oblique point about the President of the United States*. (Did you catch it? No? Then read up.)

What I actually think about the issue Kevin captures perfectly here.

*=(I absolutely refuse to succumb to the pressure to use the acronyms POTUS and SCOTUS, except perhaps mockingly.)

Sending a bill to a desk

That's the standard language of basic legislative procedure. Congress passes a bill and then "sends" it to the president's "desk" to be either signed or vetoed. My question is: What the hell actually happens? A document comes out of a printer. Does Harry Reid hand it off to a courier who delivers it to the White House where some intern receives it, ferries it off to the Oval Office, and delivers it George Bush who--faithfully planted at his desk playing solitaire--hammers it with a comically oversized veto stamp and sends it back, via the same process, to Harry Reid? If that's right, why not just use email? For example:

To: George Bush
From: Harry Reid
Subject: Your stupid war funding package
(click here for attachment)

Dear George:
       Sign this!
       Love, Harry

To: Harry Reid
From: George Bush
Subject: Re: Your your stupid war fundiing package
(click here for attachment)

Dear Harry
       Suck it!
       Love, George

And thus the good work of Democracy would move forward faster, and with greater hilarity.

Withdraw not just because Bush is bad

E.J. Dionne says a lot of the same things, today, that I've been saying (writing) since I started this blog:

The president needs to convince Americans that a decent result in Iraq is still possible. Above all, he needs to answer the essential question: If we shouldn't have timetables now, how long does he think we'll need to keep combat forces in Iraq? Two years? Five years? More? And to what end?...

The burden should no longer be on those who say we are reaching the limits of what military force can achieve in Iraq.

Indeed. However, I fear E.J. doesn't go far enough earlier in the same article when he says, "Cheney assumes that opposition to the administration's policies must be "blind" rather than a considered, rational response to four years of failure." But it's more than that.

If George Bush had been a competent president this whole time and yet we found ourselves in the same position, or if George Bush woke up tomorrow having been magically transformed into a fantastic president, or if a competent president takes office in 2009, there would still be no better option than to withdraw. It's not just that an incompetent president got us here, and not just that an incompetent president remains in office. It's that, no matter what the political realities in America now, withdrawing is the smartest way forward. When Cheney and Bush attack Democrats and other liberals for advocating withdrawal, they are trying to make withdrawal seem as if it's a decision that has been arrived at by approaching the problem politically. The political element is of course there, but the withdrawal position remains the best option and when we defend that position by framing it as a reactive stance to Bush's failures, we appear to be validating their critique.

Why Einstein?

If I was as smart as Albert Einstein, I don't think I'd be making too many pronouncements about the relative growths of the American and Chinese economies. I certainly wouldn't (and don't) assume that China's economic growth is per se dangerous to us, or detrimental to our own economic growth. On the latter point, I'd probably say the opposite. But then again, if I was as smart as Albert Einstein, I probably wouldn't be wasting my time on a political blog. And I probably wouldn't be devoting my life to whittling geopolitical concepts down below the point of usefulness on the op-ed page of the New York Times:

"If Einstein were alive today and learned science the boring way it is taught in so many U.S. schools, wouldn’t he have ended up at a Wall Street hedge fund rather than developing theories of relativity for a Nobel Prize?" asks Thomas Friedman. Well my answer is "That's a weird question! I don't know!" But, as Einstein taught himself math and science as a boy and then failed his entrance exam to a university where they taught science "the boring way", and then managed to make it through a boring science program anyhow only to work on science brilliantly as a lowly patent clerk, presumably Einstein really wanted to be a scientist. And so, today, would probably also have been a scientist.

It gets weirder.

In the meantime, we should heed another of Mr. Isaacson’s insights about Einstein: he found sheer beauty and creative joy in science and equations. If only we could convey that in the way we teach science and math, maybe we could nurture another Einstein — male or female — and not have to worry that so many engineers and scientists in our graduate schools are from China that the classes could be taught in Chinese.

I agree that the way we teach science in secondary schools in America is bad. But that's probably because the way we teach everything in secondary schools in America is bad. I suppose if more American high-school graduates wanted to be engineers, we could enlarge our engineering schools or restrict student visas or something. The net effect on the American economy in that case would no doubt be positive. But the net effect on the Chinese economy would also likely be positive. The same would be true, of course, if China expanded their own university system.

But leave aside for now the question of why, if the way we teach science and math is so bad, we attract all of these worrisome Chinese people to our universities. And forget as well the bigger question of why they should worry us in the first place. I have a sillier gripe. I don't understand at all why the success of  an occasional extraordinary genius should be seen as a reflection of any education system. Einstein was a fluke. A self-nurtured one at that.  He developed the theories of special relativity and the quantum theory of light (photoelectric effect) in Switzerland, alone. Like a rebel. He developed his much more extraordinary theory of general relativity (for the most part) in Germany many years later. And though he did that research while working at a conventional technical university it was also done during the days of the German Empire, World War I, and the Weimar Republic, a place and time where you might imagine geniuses didn't flourish. But you'd be wrong. Moreover, that innovation, while perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of all time, had likely zero impact on the economy of any country.

Obviously these two issues--having a strong educational/economic system and having a handful of extraordinary geniuses around--have generally very little to do with each other. Having "an Einstein" around would tell us nothing about the effectiveness of our educational-economic matrix. Edward Witten--perhaps the greatest physicist alive, a man with an Einstein-like intellect--does fascinating, obscure work that has no visible impact on the economy. And yet he was educated at American schools that, for all their fame and prestige, teach science very conventionally.

Friedman goes on:

A society that restricts imagination is unlikely to produce many Einsteins — no matter how many educated people it has. But a society that does not stimulate imagination when it comes to science and math won’t either — no matter how much freedom it has.

I'd add a third iteration to that theme, and then expand it a little: No society is ever likely to produce many Einsteins.

Additionally, the few Einsteins it does produce are likely not to do anything to radically advance the economy. And at the same time, all societies should strive to have the best lower- and higher-education systems that they can possibly have, and to not worry when people from other societies benefit from those successes.

Ranking the debaters

I generally thought the debate was pretty low on substance, and certainly low on new information. And so (shock!) the candidates will once again be judged more for style than for substance. I might chime in later tonight or tomorrow on particulars, but for now I'll just rank them. Obviously it's impossible not to let biases influence something like this, and I realize that dozens of other bloggers' will have reactions of their own, some probably the exact opposite of mine. But I'll do my best.

1). John Edwards. Deflected the haircut question well, though he took a lot of backhanded jabs about it from the other candidates all evening. His response to the question about his moral leaders was heartwarming, and all the more masterful, I thought, for taking the time to give a sincere answer. He had the best line of the night, too, saying "it's time to ask the American people to be patriotic about something other than war."

2). Joe Biden. Surprise of the night! Sounded very natural. Poised. I'd even go as far as calling him clean and articulate. His answer to the question of whether we could trust his conduct atop the world stage ("Yes!") was show-stoppingly funny.

3). Bill Richardson. He sounded awkward but had some big answers.

4). Dennis Kucinich. Sounded remarkably calm for him. His answers were on point, which is much more than I can say for just about anybody else.

5). Hillary Clinton/Chris Dodd (tie). Hillary was good, if canned-sounding. But her equivocation about Iraq and her answer about attacking a country in the event of another terrorist attack will (or ought to) come back to haunt her. Dodd did perfectly well, has a good platform and a great speaking voice, but--and I feel badly for him for this--he had to my count about three minutes of stage time.

6). Barack Obama. Other surprise of the night! He did very poorly. He looked and sounded uncomfortable, had very few on-point answers, pulled himself toward the center several times, pivoted to his "changing politics" schtick over and over again, and got beat up by the underdogs--unfairly, I thought--to a far greater extent than Clinton did.

That's all!

Lying on your resume

Anybody lookin for a job should apply to be Dean of Admissions at MIT:

The dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who had counseled students applying to colleges not to try to “measure up to everybody else’s standards,” resigned from her post today after acknowledging that she had padded her own résumé.

Marilee Jones, who was in charge of the office that decides who gets in to the prestigious university and who does not, at a time of fierce competition for entrance to the best colleges, admitted to her supervisors that she had “misrepresented her academic degrees to the Institute,” school officials said today....

Ms. Jones had claimed on her résumé that she had received degrees from Albany Medical College, Union College, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but in fact she had not.

The article makes it sound like she was actually really good at her job. But that's beside the point. Speaking as a staff writer at the New Yorker and as a nobel prize-caliber economist, my ballsy opinion of the day is that I don't think society should allow people who tell big, pertinent lies to maintain positions of great power.

Debates tonight

Political debates in this country aren't actually political debates at all, but rather simultaneous question and answer sessions wherein those being questioned occasionally attack--or defend themselves from attacks by--the other people being questioned. It has the effect of turning what could be a real debate (proposed: I should win the nomination!) into a two hour pivot-and gab-fest in which everyone tries to say something memorable so they can ride the resulting media wave for a few weeks.

That said, I think this is an opportunity for the underdogs to say something memorable so they can ride the resulting media wave for a few weeks. Specifically, this is a substantial opportunity for Edwards (semi-underdog) and Richardson and (though he's really down there in the polls) Dodd. These are people with extremely substantive and in many cases popular ideas who will be able to, Kucinich-style, challenge Clinton and/or Obama to answer for their respective weaknesses using memorable language.

So. My prediction, for what it's worth: Clinton is a punching bag, loses badly, and suffers the only noticeable dip in the polls. Obama says little new, sees little change in his numbers. Richardson makes the biggest absolute gain though not big enough to make him a contender, and Edwards moves closer to second place in the national polls.

Banal observation of the day

There are at the same time too many and never-enough delicious things to eat here.

It's veto time

Here's the (predictable) roll call for the Senate vote on the supplemental:

Republicans Gordon Smith of Oregon and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska sided with 48 Democrats and Independent Bernard Sanders in supporting the bill. No Democrats joined the 45 Republicans in voting against it. Missing from the vote were GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both staunch advocates of the president's Iraq policy.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., sided with Republicans in opposing the bill.

K-Lo has a cow (also predictable).

Folly

Peter Ford of The Christian Science Monitor dishes on China's slowly changing position on greenhouse emissions.

"Climate change has become a huge challenge to China's social and economic sustained development," Zheng Guoguang, head of the China Meteorological Administration, said Monday. "China is determined to mitigate and respond to climate change as a responsible nation."...

At the same time, China's first Climate Change Assessment Report, dated September 2006 but broadly distributed last weekend, rejects obligatory ceilings.       

"If we prematurely assume responsibilities for mandatory greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, the direct consequence will be to constrain China's current energy and manufacturing industries and weaken the competitiveness of Chinese products," the report warns, adding that, "For a considerable time to come, developing the economy and improving people's lives remains the country's primary task."

While I've long argued that it's an immoral dodge to use China's unhealthy emissions levels as an excuse not to limit our own, China's emissions are in and of themselves a problem. And I've gotta say, the news out of China always dispirits me, because it invariably hints at the idea that China will only get serious about global warming once the economic costs of not getting serious about global warming outweigh the economic costs of getting serious about global warming. 

It would be nice if climate change worked that way--if all developing nations could build their economies steroid-like on coal and then, at the moment things got too hot, drastically cut emissions. But, since the impact of emissions on temperature take time to manifest themselves, once we've reached that point, we are by definition too late.

Arresting Condi

If she refuses to appear under Waxman's subpoena, she could go to jail. What a pity.

Establishmentarianism

Being an establishmentarian requires no merit. It's about proving to both hemispheres of the establishment that you are no more of an asset or liability to one hemisphere than to the other. Therein lies the essential function of David Broder.

Here's a Washington political riddle where you fill in the blanks: As Alberto Gonzales is to the Republicans, Blank Blank is to the Democrats -- a continuing embarrassment thanks to his amateurish performance.

If you answered " Harry Reid," give yourself an A. And join the long list of senators of both parties who are ready for these two springtime exhibitions of ineptitude to end.

This might be the narrative that Broder wants to advance. But even a casual inspection of the facts reveals that Harry Reid, while not perfect, is beloved by most Democrats and liberals. They love him for his mastery of Senate procedure and for using that mastery--as both the majority and (more importantly) minority leader--to  fairly ethically advance the Democratic agenda to the greatest extent possible. Alberto Gonzales, on the other hand is a liar, an imbecile, probably a criminal, and a power-sodden apparatchick.

What is Barack Obama

Is he pensive? Is he an equivocater? A naval-gazer? A pontificator? All of the above, says David Brooks.

You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.

If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic about the need to get energetically engaged. He’ll talk about the shared interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no. “There’s no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel doesn’t have the right to exist.”...

He has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as Bromide Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about bringing people together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go small and concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George F. Kennan.

Muslim fears

Andrew Sullivan exculpates George Bush:

The paranoia among many Muslims with respect to American foreign policy is not, I think, fair. Nor do I think Bush intended Iraq to end up compounding the problem rather than alleviating it.

On the first point, I couldn't disagree more strongly.

We have a saying down in Texas. "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you."  But let's invert that a bit here: "Just because they're not out to get you, doesn't mean you shouldn't be paranoid about them." This could be a projection problem. Neither I nor any of my friends have anything like ill will for Muslims, and I'm sure Andrew doesn't either and it's nice to imagine that Muslims use the intentions of people like us to guide them to their conclusions about American foreign policy. Unfortunately, what's actually guiding them to their conclusions is American foreign policy. Which--whether ill intentioned or just stupid--is in fact something Muslims have every reason to worry about.

This brings us to the second point. Plenty of people on the right--particularly ones who have come around to criticizing the president--spend precious time defending his intent as it pertains to matters that he's screwed up. And at the same time, plenty of people on the left devote precious time to attacking Bush's intent as it pertains to those same matters. Some call him evil. And while all decent people agree that that's true of at least Dick Cheney, I'm not sure what intent has to do with anything outside of perhaps investigating Bush (or Cheney or whomever) for the reasons for particular screw ups. The important point is that--whether out of evilness or incompetence--he's screwed everything up.

But the consequence is real and measurable, in terms of global Muslim opinion. And occupying a Muslim country indefinitely doesn't help.

That's the spirit!

Almost daily Corner bashing

I'd imagine that one of the most fun things about being a conservative pundit is having carte blanche to use numbers (or other forms of misdirection) to sneak lies past your readers. And to do so not just with impunity, but no doubt also with the fawning approval of colleagues and editors. Here's today's installment, again from Ramesh Ponnuru:

As in past Congresses, the act includes the ludicrous "finding" that "Prior to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, an estimated 1,200,000 women each year were forced to resort to illegal abortions. . ." This claim, a favorite of Boxer, is based on dubious studies and makes no sense. There were 900,000 abortions in 1974 and 1 million in 1975. Are we really supposed to believe that the nationwide legalization of abortion caused the number of abortions to drop?

The 1.2 million abortions claim is a nationwide estimate culled from statewide estimates. Ramesh calls the studies dubious. I call them about as good as you could get given the issue. But even if the number is off by 500,000, which it most certainly is not, 700,000 is 700,000 too many.

Of course, 1.2 million may very well be right on the money. The assumption that Ramesh is foisting upon his readers--an assumption that he knows is false--is that the instant Roe was decided, every woman who wanted an abortion got one from a doctor at a certified clinic, hospital, or office. The number of abortions certainly didn't drop by 300,000. It's just that it took more than a handful of months for women to learn the law, to know where to go, to  to feel safe, and for the culture to change. All these statistics imply is that, in the months after Roe, significant numbers of women were still cowed into self-aborting by decades of having to resort to those methods by dint of law.

Of course, his point here is not to argue against Barbara Boxer's legislation on the merits, but to make her--and Democrats generally--look like liars. And, not surprisingly, in order to accomplish that, he has to resort to obscurantism and outright deceit.

Paternalism on the Supreme Court

Ruth Marcus's rendering is must read stuff:

Kennedy [writes]: "While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained." No reliable data? No problem....

"It is self-evident," he adds, "that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast-developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form."

Therefore, "the State" can step in to assert the "ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition." In other words, it can protect women from the consequences they may or may not experience as a result of the ignorance from which they may or may not be suffering.

The right constantly assaults people who are pro-choice for reducing what they call a human person to what they call an inanimate object or an inconvenience. But when a Reagan appointee is in the position of writing the majority opinion of a Supreme Court case banning an abortion procedure, they do exactly that. Can anybody imagine Kennedy issuing a similar ruling banning, say, the sale of a certain type of car on behalf of those consumers who don't understand what a DOHC is? Or that a rotary engine is harder to repair than a V6? Or because some people eventually come to regret buying a car at all? Certainly not. And nor should he.

But that's exactly the sort of transaction the court has vulgarly whittled this down to, even as the five men who comprise the majority certainly know that they ruled as they ruled because they think abortion is murder. It's more than clear--it's almost definitional--that they lacked the courage to use their beliefs--justifiable or not--as the basis for their ruling. And so, instead, Kennedy issued one of the most degrading and paternalistic opinions in the recent history of the Court. 

Yay oversight!

Subpoena for Rice and immunity for Goodling. I'm particularly happy about the Rice summons because it finally means that the new Congress will be taking a serious look at a top level Bush official on an issue other than (and greater than) the U.S. Attorney scandal.

Darn those fuel efficient cars

Darn them all to heck. Here's a story, from the Wall Street Journal, in the wake of the news that Toyota is outselling GM worldwide for the first time ever:

Cars and trucks are getting more fuel-efficient, and that's good news for drivers. But it's a headache for state highway officials, who depend on gasoline taxes to build and maintain roads.

The Federal Highway Administration estimates that by 2009 the tax receipts that make up most of the federal highway trust fund will be $21 billion shy of what's needed just to maintain existing roads, much less build new roads or add capacity. Trying to compensate for highway-budget shortfalls, a handful of states are exploring other, potentially more lucrative ways to raise highway money.

"In 10 years, we are going to be in an intolerable financial position, and we need to start fixing it now before the problem starts," says James Whitty, manager of an alternative funding project in the Oregon transportation department.

One obvious fix to this--for those states so impacted--would be to raise the gas tax. That, if it was indexed to the price of gasoline or to inflation, would do the trick. Another, I think more progressive, move would be to raise the gas tax while simultaneously increasing the income tax burden on the wealthy people of those states by a fixed amount. That extra tax could be tied to a small refund if gas tax revenues proved to be greater than expected. Each of these would have the twin incentives of incentivizing fuel efficient vehicles and discouraging unneccessary driving. 

Instead, the suggestions are mostly regressive and--pardon the expression--all over the map:

In a year-long pilot program overseen by Mr. Whitty, the cars of 260 volunteers were outfitted with Global Positioning Systems and electronic odometers that recorded the number of miles driven. The drivers bought gasoline at specially equipped service stations, where computers on the pumps subtracted the 24-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax and added a 1.2 cent fee for every mile driven....

If the program is fully implemented at some point, Oregon would likely have to keep dual tax methods. Out-of-state drivers, whose cars wouldn't be equipped with the required mileage devices, would continue to pay the gas tax, while Oregon drivers would be switched to the mileage-based fee....

Virginia is planning a different route to raise highway money: It's researching various way to penalize drivers for violating driving rules. The penalty would be in addition to the regular fees and fines. For example, a driver with several points against his license might have to pay an additional $1,000 just to keep driving. This month, the Virginia legislature, after years of debate, is allowing the state's two most populous areas -- one in northern Virginia/Washington and the other in the southeast around Virginia Beach -- to establish specialized taxing districts to pay for roads and underwater tunnels.

Here's the (kind of sort of important) background, in the last two paragraphs of the story:

Most states levy gasoline taxes of 10 to 20 cents a gallon. Voters are reluctant to increase the tax; as a result, some states have the same rate they did two decades ago.

Oregon's gasoline tax, for example, has remained at 24 cents per gallon since 1993, Minnesota's at 20 cents since its inception in 1988 and Virginia's at 17.5 cents since 1986. The federal gasoline tax, which is 18.4 cents per gallon, hasn't changed since 1997.

Not that this could be spun as the cowardice of legislators or anything.

Valuable new property

The Independent:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland's remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea.

Predicting the response of the Wall Street Journal, this valuable new coast line should send real estate prices on the island soaring.

 

The size of the military, part 2

Matt's point about this is not lost on me at all:

If you're worried that more troops would be used for occupation duty in Teheran I think that's a smart worry, but the solution is to elect a president who won't invade Iran.

I agree. But only to an extent. Things like military size and culture change over much longer time intervals than one presidential administration, and if we want to secure a lastingly safe foreign policy, it would be better not to have to renew that commitment with every election. Personally I think the next president--especially if he or she is a Democrat--will have neither the desire nor the public support to embark upon an Iraq-like military fracas. But eventually the next president will be a former president, and somewhere along the line, we'll elect another reckless one. Perhaps she'll be elected at a time of peace like George W. Bush was and only reveal herself to be a belligerent leader after some sort of national crisis.

An eventuality like that could in theory be forestalled as early as 2009 if Obama--or whoever--decided to scale the military back (troops-wise, technology-wise, bureaucracy-wise). I doubt any of the contenders this year would be elected on such a platform, and I don't expect it to be a feasible policy idea in the near future, so of course I'll vote for the time being for a president who won't use our currently-too-large military for deadly wrong reasons. But I don't think this way of doing things is a particularly smart strategy for making and keeping ourselves a peaceful nation.

Obstructing consensus

I think nothing, not even fear of a tainted legacy, will make the president embrace the national consensuses (consensi?) on stem cell research, global warming, and Iraq. Which is the reason I wonder why Ron Brownstein is using that angle--the legacy angle--to attack Bush for his stubborness:

[O]n stem cells, global warming and Iraq, Bush seems intent on defending the decisions he's made already, even at the price of obstructing a new consensus attempting to form around him. If Bush continues to view standing alone as the highest form of principle, he will never escape the dead end into which he's steered his second term.

If only doing what the people want was Bush's animating principle. But at least on the global warming and Iraq fronts, the much, much more damning point is that the president is doing lasting harm to the country and the rest of the world.

Everybody look busy

But instead of actually doing work, watch this episode of Frontline. If you're not versed in how we got to where we are on global warming, this is useful. If you already do know, it's always invigorating to hear the maddening story told again.

Banal observation of the day

If we ruin the earth, maybe we can all take big space mobiles here.

(Note: Geoff Marcy and Eugene Chiang were professors of mine once upon a time. Big ups!)

The size of the military

Kevin Drum, parsing the Obama speech, questions Obama's call for nearly 100,000 more troops in the armed services:

On the one hand, if we're going to occupy countries, we ought to have the troops to do it right. (Though I note very little in Obama's speech about what those 92,000 extra troops would be focused on.) On the other hand, I'd just as soon that we didn't occupy any more foreign countries, and a larger military simply encourages us to think we can do this effectively. On the third hand, not every war is a war of choice. We might well be faced with a defensive war in the near future, and if we are we ought to be prepared for both combat and occupation. On the fourth hand, if we are going to add a few divisions to the active force, it would also be nice to hear at least some lip service paid to scaling back some of our more fanciful technology expenditures.

I don't expect to make up my mind on this score anytime soon. Most of the time I come down in favor of expanding the military, on the basis that (a) if you're going to do something, you should do it right, and (b) we're not likely to continue to be ruled by petulant children forever into the future. Needless to say, (b) is a gamble.

It's a blogger-weakness that's been pointed out before, but when commenting on politics, it's almost impossible not to switch, from issue to issue, between writing on the one hand in terms of political reality and in terms of abstract policy on the other. I'm as guilty as anybody. But when I mentioned yesterday that I thought the Obama speech was full of "great policy," I more accurately meant "refreshingly detailed, if slightly imperfect policy." And, though it wasn't conscious, I think the reason I picked the words I used had to do with my lone disagreement with Obama: on the size of the military.

 I've long believed that our military and our military budget are dangerously oversized and that the fact of that enormity has been a dangerous recipe for a violent American foreign policy. And I believe that if, after pulling out of Iraq, Obama adds 100,000 servicemen to our military, even if Obama uses that military wisely and morally for his four or eight years, it will eventually aggravate that phenomenon.

That said, the political milieu in this country is what it is. It's changed some, but I don't think it's changed that much. And it would probably be an unforgiving race for a candidate who called for a smaller military. Specifically, think such a candidate--a Democrat who suggested scaling back the armed services, or even one who made no reference to somehow reversing the troop depletion that the Bush years have seen--wouldn't make it much past the opening gates. And for that reason, I think Kevin's words are important to keep in mind.

Apropos of her last column

Dowd again, this time it's Obama:

Many people I talked to afterward found Michelle [Obama] wondrous. But others worried that her chiding was emasculating, casting her husband — under fire for lacking experience — as an undisciplined child.

This is the New York Times' darling once again pawing the earth like a bull readying herself for a full-strength charge at Barack Obama. Soon he--for having a seemingly healthy, jocular relationship with his wife--will be painted as the pillowy, novice candidate whose apparent gravitas rests on his willingness to lets his wife wear the pants. My prediction: He will be, in the Dowd narrative, the middleweight candidate between heavyweight Hillary and John Edwards the Pansy.

Sustainability

A fantastic and optimistic primer.

A post that could make me look foolish

I think it's faaaaairly safe to say that there's a high probability that the next president will be a former senator. Will that be enough to give the lie to the notion that senators are inherently ill trained for presidential election politics?

No confidence

Sam Rosenfeld:

A Senate staffer just told me that the chamber plans to hold a vote of no confidence on Alberto Gonzales.

This would be a fantastic opportunity for all of those Republican senators--the ones on the record using STRONG language decrying the Gonzales DoJ--to prove they meant what they said. Of course, in an open vote, that would mean standing up to the White House. Think they'll pull a Norm Coleman?

Limiting free speech for the DoD

I don't know what the legal situation currently is or what the Constitutional feasibility would be. Maybe one of my dear readers does. But doesn't it at least feel like it should be illegal for our Department of Defense to knowingly and deceitfully propagandize us?

Military and other administration officials created a heroic story about the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman to distract attention from setbacks in Iraq and the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the slain man’s younger brother, Kevin Tillman, said today.

Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Mr. Tillman said the military knew almost immediately that Corporal Tillman, an Army Ranger who left a career as a pro football player to enlist, had been killed accidentally in Afghanistan in April 2004 by fire from his own unit. But officials chose to put a “patriotic glow” on his death, he said.

Mr. Tillman said the decision to award his brother a Silver Star and to say that he died heroically fighting the enemy was “utter fiction” that was intended to “exploit Pat’s death.”

Read the whole article. Even if it's old news, it's utterly astonishing.

Almost daily Corner bashing

Here's some news. Ramesh Ponnuru agrees with the magazine he writes for.

The editorial in question pretends to be a Constitutional argument against the new bill--passed by the House--mandating Congressional representation for Washington D.C. But in reality, it's an explanation of the Constitutional hurdles the law faces, paired with a series of non-justifications for a morally dubious policy of preventing hundreds-of-thousands of (liberal) people from having a meaningful say in the affairs of their own government. The intended effect is to make it seem as if there's a defensible reason for the status quo, without actually saying what that reason is.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, they were concerned about the possibility of a single state’s holding too much influence over the seat of national government. So they created a special federal district, outside the jurisdiction of the states and under the exclusive authority of Congress. Today, the balance of power between the states and the federal government has reversed, with the states more worried about federal encroachments than vice versa. But the words of the Founders remain, and they cannot be disregarded.

The problems with the current legislation are manifold. If D.C. is not a state but is nevertheless entitled to a seat in the House of Representatives, then what about other federal commonwealths and territories? Are the good people of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands also worthy of full congressional representation? If a non-state such as D.C. deserves a seat in the House, then by what principle will it be denied a pair of senators, another privilege reserved by the Constitution for “each state”?

Inasmuch as the Federal government has legislative influence over the lives of the people living in those places, I'd like to hear answers to those questions from Ramesh. And, personally, I'd like those answers to be more compelling than the tired dodge that the Founding Fathers knew more about the America of today than Americans of today do.

McGovern

What he said!

Jonah Goldberg: wanker

Jonah Goldberg thinks you're stupid. In fact, he thinks you're too stupid to make proper judgements for yourself. It's not that he thinks you're particularly dim-witted or that your mental horsepower barely rivals the human equivalent of a Geo Metro (though he may actually think that). He just thinks you don't know enough about this country's government to make smart judgements about only semi-related issues. Don't know who the Senate Majority Leader is? Well then why should we care if you think Alberto Gonzales should be fired. Etc.

[W]e are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn't pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85% who couldn't name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31% of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can't identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Atty. David Iglesias?

This is a particularly grating abuse of logic for at least a couple reasons. The first reason is that, as far as his main example (Gonzales) goes, he actually seems to agree with the supposedly suspect conclusions  of public opinion. ("Oh, before we proceed, let me make clear: This isn't a column defending Gonzales. This administration should have long ago sent him out of the bunker for a coffee-and-doughnut run and then changed the locks.") Which means this column only serves to assert that most people know less "things" than Jonah knows. (This is a column about how confused and at times idiotic the United States is about polls, public opinion and, well, democracy itself.") This is safe, I suppose, because everyone knows that, in journalism, liberals are the elitists. It's good to be a conservative pundit, eh? 

But it's not just the condescension. The flipside of Jonah's argument, of course, is that people with detailed knowledge of the government will generally have wiser opinions about broad matters of statecraft. Detailed knowledge. Wiser opinions. Sounds reasonable, right? Except that, um, one of those people--the guy making the point, even--is Jonah Frickin' Goldberg.

Celebrity activism

Sheryl Crow:

"We [celebrities] get a bad rap for putting ourselves out in front on issues, but my response to that is... I don't really care.... If people are going to be critical, they're missing the point."

E.J. Dionne:

Do you find it obnoxious when super-rich people in the music industry come forward to preen about their exquisitely sensitive social consciences?

Is there something worse than a multimillion-dollar televised entertainment operation patting itself on the back for weeks on end in celebration of its brilliantly inventive and groundbreaking approach to philanthropy?

Actually, there is something worse: a total indifference to human suffering.

Virginal brainiacs

From Dana Goldstein, this fact is the one and only reason I didn't go to Harvard. Yup. No other obstacles to getting into Harvard 'cept this one. If I remember right, Harvard was practically begging me to enroll.

Yes.

Playing into caricatures

Barack Obama's foreign policy speech looks to me to be the most substantive thing he's said on anything this important since I first learned who Barack Obama was in 2004. Unfortunately, after giving several hundred speeches about hope and the need to address fundamental issues without actually saying how, the press reports of his speech are focusing entirely on the ethereal stuff and not at all on the substance.

The New York Times coverage is full of sentiments lik