Temporarily Japanned

As anyone reading this undoubtedly knows, I am currently vacationing in Japan and so will not be posting again until about mid-June. Before I sign off, though, predictions for what will be the case by the time I come back:

• Hillary Clinton will be out of the race.
• McCain and Obama will be virtually tied in national polling.
  
• The Lakers will be NBA champions.
• I will have awesome shoes.
• I will have an awesome Batman shirt.
• I will have an awesome watch.
• I will have a newfound appreciation for how shitty public transportation in the Bay Area is.

Ok, well, bullets 4, 5, and 7 are cheating because they've happened already--but whatever.

'Tis but a scratch

This is the best leveraging of a Monty Python bit to take down a politician I've seen yet.

history pwn

William Kristol's distortion

In his latest op-ed, William Kristol portrays the California Supreme Court's gay marriage decision as a case of an over-active judiciary overturning the will of the people:

On Thursday, the California Supreme Court did precisely what much of the American public doesn’t want judges doing: it made social policy from the bench. With a 4-to-3 majority, the judges chose not to defer to a ballot initiative approved by 61 percent of California voters eight years ago, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

What Kristol fails to mention is that, since that ballot initiative, the California legislature has enacted civil unions for gay couples, which include all of the legal benefits and responsibilities of marriage. The issue before the court was whether officially calling these arrangements "domestic partnerhsips" instead of "marriages" violated a provision against discrimination in the state Constitution of California. As it says plainly in the opinion:

Accordingly, the legal issue we must resolve is not whether it would be constitutionally permissible under the California Constitution for the state to limit marriage only to opposite-sex couples while denying same-sex couples any opportunity to enter into an official relationship with all or virtually all of the same substantive attributes, but rather whether our state Constitution prohibits the state from establishing a statutory scheme in which both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are granted the right to enter into an officially recognized family relationship that affords all of the significant legal rights and obligations traditionally associated under state law with the institution of marriage, but under which the union of an opposite-sex couple is officially designated a “marriage” whereas the union of a same-sex couple is officially designated a “domestic partnership.” The question we must address is whether, under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

From what Kristol says, you get the impression that the decision substantively altered California's policy on gay marriage. In reality, though, the decision's impact was on semantics, not substance. So Kristol and other conservatives will continue to hold this up as an example of extreme judicial activism, when in fact there was very little of this so-called activism going on.

Clinton campaign post-mortem

For those of you addicted, here's some pretty high-quality crack.

Thanks sis!

More diversity within the pro-Israel movement

For those of you interested in what a non-neoconservative, pro-peace, pro-Israeli position looks like, you might want to check out J Street. Here's a sample of the sort of thing you can expect from them:

Speaking to Israel's Parliament, President Bush accused those who believe in diplomacy to make America and Israel safe of indulging in a "foolish delusion" and the "false comfort of appeasement." Even more offensive, he likened us to those who favored talking to rather than defeating Adolf Hitler on the eve of World War II. How dare he invoke the memory of the Holocaust to justify his disastruous policies.

It's good to see some other perspectives out there.

UPDATE: And here's a little promo video:

Pet Sounds, a capella

Apparently someone got a hold of the masters for Pet Sounds, and put a bunch of the vocal tracks on the YouTubes, e.g.:



God Only Knows is worth a listen, too.

George W. Bush is Bertram W. Wooster

I've always maintained that the appropriate characterization of President Bush is a modern-day, American version of Bertie Wooster. Like Wooster, he was born to privilege and attended an elite university, where he demonstrated more interest in school pride than actual academics. Like Wooster, he has an affable and aloof manner, and is prone to, er, grammatical ingenuity when he speaks. And, finally, like Wooster, he'll do anything to help out a pal whose landed himself in the soup.

A recent interview only confirms these Woosterish tendencies. Here he is, stoically giving up golf in a show of solidarity with the soldiers:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

...

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’"

And here he is, glassy-eyed with sentiment as he talks about his pals:

In January he plans to return to e-mail, which he gave up when he took office to avoid leaks. He said he looks forward to “e-mailing to my buddies,” and said he was a heavy e-mailer in Texas.

“I can remember, as governor, I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off e-mails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals,” he said.

Ah, man. You know--I think in a funny kind of way, I'm gonna miss him.

People can't stand atheists

I appreciate David Brooks striking out on a topic of conversation that doesn't involve politics, but here he's just embarrassing himself:

Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

A subtle "jab" at Richard Dawkins that entirely misconstrues his "selfish gene" argument. It is not as if the metaphorical selfishness of genes in general entails that humans exhibit literal selfishness. There is nothing so far that has been discovered about the brain or anything else that argues against Dawkins' basic characterization of evolutionary biology as a marketplace where genes compete ("selfishly") for space on the genome.

Moreover, none of these empirical details have any relevance to a debate about materialism, which seems to be what Brooks is trying to rebut.

Obama on Israel

A must-read interview. Quote:

The notion that a vibrant, successful society with incredible economic growth and incredible cultural vitality is still plagued by this notion that this could all end at any moment -- you know, I don’t know what that feels like, but I can use my imagination to understand it. I would not want to raise my children in those circumstances. I want to make sure that the people of Israel, when they kiss their kids and put them on that bus, feel at least no more existential dread than any parent does whenever their kids leave their sight. So that then becomes the question: is settlement policy conducive to relieving that over the long term, or is it just making the situation worse? That’s the question that has to be asked.

As usual, everything is presented through a lens of empathy.

The Giant Pool of Money

Thought I'd pass along a good This American Life episode, which explains the housing crisis to us laymen.

USA: plasticized

Via Sullivan, an awesome map that shows only roads. It reminds me a lot of those plasticized figures in the Body Worlds exhibit where it's just the veins.

I'm jealous

From the Post:

Flying across the country, he made a rare extended visit to the back of his campaign plane to play the word-association game Taboo, cackling in delight as he and his aides twice defeated their foes in the press corps and making a joking analogy to the campaign. "At what point is this game over?" he asked the reporters. "When we win," one said. "That sounds familiar," he said with a smile.

What?! But I wanna play Taboo with Obama...

I wonder if he plays Settlers?

It's the policies, stupid

There have been a wave of articles recently about the impending demise of the Republican Party, and the potential loss of a House seat in Mississippi is threatening to accelerate the process:

The stakes in the 1st District special election couldn't be higher, strategically or symbolically. The loss of a traditionally GOP seat to a Democrat would be the third in a special election this spring and the second in the Deep South after the May 3 victory of Rep. Don Cazayoux (D-La.).

Rank-and-file Republicans say that would force a day of reckoning for their leadership.

Republicans are scrambling to find a way out of their predicament:

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), in a private meeting with Republicans on Tuesday, admitted the limitations of the anti-Obama strategy and tried to sell his troops on an Obama-like message of "change" as their only hope for success.

"We can't win SOLELY by tying our opponents to Barack Obama and his liberal views. We also have to prove Republicans are agents of change," Boehner told his colleagues, according to talking points prepared by his staff and provided to The Post.

Boehner expects to unveil portions of a new policy agenda this week, part of a year-long effort to "rebrand" his party's image.

Boehner makes it sound like the Republicans are suffering from some kind of temporary or superficial image problem, but what really ails them is the actual substance of their policies. The Iraq War is a failure, health care is in need of reform--and the Republicans just don't have any solutions.

It is interesting to me that the Republicans seem to assume, as a matter of course, that Obama's liberal views are a liability. I wonder if it has ever crossed their minds that they might be wrong about that.

The rare apt WWII analogy

From the AP:

"They had an inevitability strategy, which was sort of a political Maginot line. It was illusionary. You just went around it, and, you know, Barack Obama did that."

-Dick Harpootlian, a former South Carolina Democratic chairman and Barack Obama supporter on Hillary Clinton's campaign strategy

Take that, old people!

Lines like these are increasingly cliched--but they're still pretty juicy:

The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL, was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.

Zing!

Fighting to the end

Hillary Clinton supporter Ellen Malcolm wants her to fight it out to the end:

So here we are in the fourth quarter of the nominating process and the game is too close to call. Once again, the opponents and the media are calling for Hillary to quit. The first woman ever to win a presidential primary is supposed to stop competing, to curtsy and exit stage right.

I can sympathize with her anger over people calling for her candidate to quit. If nothing else, it can look like the woman is being condescendingly patted on the head and ushered out of the still-very-male-dominated process--and I don't think even the appearance of that is acceptable.

But let's put things into perspective a little bit. It is not as though Clinton was the scrappy underdog who, through grit and determination, miraculously rose in the ranks to become a real contender for the nomination. The opposite is true: she was the heavy favorite to win, the "inevitable" candidate, the establishment favorite. By all accounts, she probably wouldn't be about to lose today if she hadn't shot herself in the foot in several creative different ways. So I think the victimization narrative that Malcolm is trying gin up here doesn't harmonize well with the facts.

In the end, I have no problems with Clinton finishing out the primary cycle, especially if she and her supporters feel that it is the fitting way to conclude things. But it's just an empirical fact at this point that Clinton has no chance of winning the nomination, and Clinton needs to recognize this. If she doesn't--and continues the harsh negative attacks, or, heaven help us, drags out the fight all the way to convention time--then she really will do serious harm to the Democratic Party.

Ironically, in the final analysis it is Malcolm who seems to be underestimating Clinton's power--by pretending that she is so marginalized that she cannot tear apart the party.

Caffeine Invention #2

I might not have been on drugs for this one, but I think it's a good idea all the same: multiple pairs of copy-paste keys, instead of just the one.

The need for this arises for me all the time: I'll want to copy two distinct swatches of text at the same time and be able to paste them at will. Maybe you could do it by incorporating the function and number keys: e.g., Ctrl+1 would paste what Ctrl+F1 copied, Ctrl+2 would paste what Ctrl+F2 copied, etc. Then you could maintain, like...nine or ten separate clipboards.

Amazing.

Caffeine Invention #1

I am greatly effected by the drug caffeine. If I have a lot of it--or even a little of it, if it's on an empty stomach--I get very noticeably high, and then an hour or two later undergo a very noticeable and crabby crash.

Anyway, during the high part, I tend to go into a sort of creative overdrive--coming up with new arguments, inventions, and business models, and also producing a surprising variety of impromptu insults and made-up showtunes. It's not as if the quality of any of these things are particularly good, but, still, they come out.

A caffeine invention I had today was something called "browser masks". What this would be is basically a browser plug-in that allowed you to draw basic shapes on a webpage so that you could cover up annoying ads. The browser would remember the positions of the masks so that they'd still be there if you ever returned to the page.

I'm not sure if this would be doable with current browser technology, but you could certainly accomplish it with AIR, Adobe's new runtime that, among other things, lets you manipulate HTML in any Flashy way that you want.

Of course, you could make whatever other superficial markings on a webpage--add comments, etc., and go ahead and take that in all sorts of interesting directions (esp. if you were to start tracking all this meta-info on a backend). But for now, I'd be happy with the simple, opaque masks.

The effects of rising gas prices

Paul Krugman has a post about the long-term elasticity of gas prices:

In the long run, the best estimate of the price elasticity of demand for auto fuel seems to be -0.7. That is, a 10 percent rise in prices will reduce gas consumption by 7 percent. Of this, 4 points come from shifting to cars with better mileage, 3 points from driving less.

If it's true that there's a widespread perception that gas prices are rising because worldwide demand is outpacing worldwide production--and that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future--then I bet the change in consumer's behavior would be even more drastic.

For example, if I thought that gas prices would increase but soon stabilize, or if I thought that they would eventually come down again, then I might still buy a more fuel-efficient car and drive less, but wouldn't make any more drastic lifestyle changes.

However, if I thought that there was no predictable ceiling on gas prices at all, I might make a more drastic and permanent decision, like moving from the suburbs to the city to eliminate a lengthy commute, or move somewhere with decent public transit options. Moreover, cities would start seeing a demand for more public transit and higher density housing that is closer to places of employment.

So I wonder what the public's perception is as to why gas prices are increasing, and whether they think the trend is likely to continue for a long time.

The relativity of "outrages upon personal dignity"

A series of exchanges (four letters: here, here, here, and here) between Senator Ron Wydon and Bush's Justice Department reveals some disturbingly bad thinking about how the CIA is to interpret the Geneva Convention's prohibition of "outrages upon personal dignity". Apparently, the Bush administration believes that part of what determines the outrageousness of the act itself is the ultimate intent of the interrogator--for example, if the interrogator's ultimate intent is to humiliate the detainee, then this would make the act more "outrageous" than if the interrogator's ultimate intent were to, say, protect America from an imminent terrorist attack. Says the Justice Department:

At the same time, some prohibitions under Common Article 3 [of the Geneva Convention], such as the prohibition on "outrages upon personal dignity", do invite the consideration of the circumstances surrounding the action. As we noted in our previous letter, a general policy to shave detainees for hygienic and security purposes would not be an "outrage upon personal dignity", but the targeted decision to shave the beard of a devout Sikh for the purpose of humiliation and abuse would present a much more serious issue. In such an example, the identity of the detainee and the purpose underlying the act clearly would be relevant. Similarly, the fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation and abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.

This explanation doesn't work, because there is a serious incongruity between the example where the Sikh is shaved to maintain hygiene and the example of the unspecified case where an act is judged to be less outrageous because of the actor's intent to prevent an attack. The difference between them equivocates on what we mean when we talk about a person's intent in performing some action. One in the same action can in fact have many different intents behind it of varying immediacy. For example, when I go to Circuit City and slap a $100 bill on the sales counter, there are many different ways of describing what my intention was in doing that. My intention was "to give money to the salesperson"; but it was also "to acquire a new stereo"; you could also say it was "to prepare for the dance party I'm throwing"; and you might even say that, ultimately, my intention was "to impress Beckie Smith with my awesome dance moves". Though these stated intentions have varying degrees of causal proximity to the actual act, they are all true answers to the question, "What was your intention in slapping that $100 bill on the counter?"

In the Sikh example, the shaving is judged to be less outrageous because of the innocuousness of the action's immediate intent: to maintain the hygiene of the detainee. In this case, even though the act of shaving might have indeed humiliated the prisoner, the person acting can at least truthfully say, "It was never my intention in any way to humiliate this individual or offend his faith"--and it is precisely the actor's ability to truthfully claim this that renders the act less outrageous. However, in the other example (which tellingly lacks any kind of concrete details), where it is merely the acting person's overarching, non-immediate, ultimate intent to save America that is supposedly mitigating the outrageousness of the act, it is not clear to me that the person can necessarily truthfully claim, "It was never my intention to commit an outrage on the prisoner's dignity", because it still could have been that the actor's immediate intent was to commit an outrage on the dignity of the prisoner. So it seems to me that using the actor's non-immediate intent to gauge the outrageousness of the act is tantamount to saying that, when determining the outrageousness of an act, the ends can have a justifying effect on the means.

The Justice Department engages in similar tricky business elsewhere in the letters:

To be clear, neither the executive order nor Common Article 3 would permit an individual to commit an "outrage upon personal dignity" based upon the type of information a detainee is believed to possess or the government interest at stake.... To make this clear, the executive order provides illustrations of the kinds of conduct that would be prohibited in all cases, regardless of the circumstances and purported justifications, including forcing an individual to perform sexual acts, threatening an individual with sexual mutilation, or using an individual as a human shield. At the same time, these provisions reflect the common sense notion that a reasonable observer, in determining whether conduct should be deemed outrageous and particularly revolting, would take into account the circumstances surrounding the conduct, including what justifications might exist. [Citations omitted.]

Here, the Justice Department is saying here that though the government can never commit an "outrage upon personal dignity" in order to achieve some ends, it is nevertheless the case that we must take into account the value of the ends in determining whether the act rises to an "outrage upon personal dignity" in the first place. But this, it seems to me, is nothing more than using semantics to sneak an ends-justifies-the-means argument through the back door. A proper, non-ends-justifies-the-means evaluation of an action seeks to look at the action in itself, independent of the goodness of its consequences further down the causal chain. But this independence is spoiled if the very criterion by which you judge the action takes into consideration the goodness of the consequences of the action down the line. It's flim-flammery, I tells ya!

Sigh. If nothing else, these various tricks and obfuscations show that the Bush administration lawyers are more interested in ducking and lawyering the Geneva Conventions than adhering to them in good faith. The next administration will have to work very hard to undo the damage to American principles that has been wrought by the Bush administration, and to purge the culture of disregard for the law that has come to permeate the executive branch.

"Blood and treasure"--but whose blood?

When people talk in an offhand way about why the Iraq War was a mistake, they usually say something about "blood and treasure"--i.e., the costs to the United States in terms of money and casualties. But what bothers me about this is that it leaves out the toll of civilian deaths in Iraq. Surely the fact that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have lost their lives should count as one of the reasons the war was a mistake, right?

And yet in the mainstream press, civilian deaths are only mentioned as an afterthought, if they are mentioned at all. I think a lot of the reason for this is because talking about civilian deaths quickly gets you into an argumentative thicket, where you have to start making somewhat complex distinctions--or at least, complex by the standards of discourse in the mainstream media. What I mean is, there are morally distinguishable types of civilian deaths, and so it is not always clear what you are accusing the United States as having done when you bring the subject up.

Here is my personal rough list of the different kinds of civilian deaths, in order from least evil to most evil:

1. Minimized collateral damage. In this case, civilians die as a side effect of a legitimate attack against the enemy. The attacker does as much as can practically be done to minimize the amount of harm done to civilians. Examples: America using precision guided bombs to take out a specific target; America choosing to destroy enemy buildings at night when there are less civilians in the building.
2. Negligent collateral damage. In this case, the attacker pursues its military goals without regard for the harm done to civilians. Examples: not sure exactly.
3. Civilian deaths as a means to a legitimate end. Here, civilians are actually targeted in an attempt to achieve some military ends, like demoralizing the enemy. Examples: America dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to get the Japanese to end the war; American firebombing of Dresden and also Tokyo.
4. Civilian deaths as a means to an end that isn't justified or legitimate. Same as (3), but the goal is different. Examples: Hitler bombing London; a suicide bomber blowing up a bus to get into heaven; a terrorist destroying a building in order to establish a caliphate.
5. Civilian deaths as ends in themselves. This is categorically the worst form of civilian killing--when the actual stated purpose of the exercise to kill as many civilians as possible. Examples: Any genocide.

Now, some of this may be arguable and some cases might not fit neatly into one category. For example, some people might say that there shouldn't be a moral distinction made between (3) and (4), because even making that distinction requires an "ends justifies the means" argument. Or you might look at the case of a Palestinian suicide bomber and think, "Well, he has a hatred for Jews which puts it at level 5, but then again he's also doing it to drive the Jewish people from the area, so there's some level 4 mixed in" (or, level 3, if you think the Jewish people shouldn't be in that area). But the point is, there are definitely moral distinctions between civilian deaths that take into account the circumstances of the deaths and the intentions of the attacker.

There are many liberals and anti-war types who don't take pains to make these distinctions when they argue against the war, and so speak of the many thousands who are "slaughtered" in Iraq at the hands of the American military, and generally portray the United States as no better morally than some third-rate junta somewhere. But this has had the effect of making any such arguments radioactive in mainstream political discourse--it makes it very difficult to put civilian deaths at the forefront of an anti-war argument, because it is so easy to paint the arguer as an unreasonably anti-American hippy.

And yet, even if we assume that every practical measure was taken to minimize civilian deaths in the Iraq War, if the basis for the war is called into question, then it renders all those deaths--all that "collateral damage"--completely unnecessary. Moreover, if it can be shown that the path to war was paved in negligence, then it starts to make all those level 1 deaths look like level 2 deaths. Indeed, when you hear stories about how feeble the evidence for WMD in Iraq turned out to be--intelligence data lifted from a grad school paper, the wildly inaccurate source dubbed "Curveball"--the term "negligence" starts to seem charitable.

And so I think that the huge number of civilian deaths in Iraq is a principle tragedy of the war, and something that should be mentioned far more often in addition to the costs to the United States in "blood and treasure". Saying so needn't entail claiming that the United States is some kind of genocidal killer--but at the same time, there shouldn't be any hesitation to criticize a war that runs contrary to our deepest-held principles.

PS: The story surrounding the estimate of Iraqi deaths is an interesting one in itself. The most controversial studies done were the two Lancet surveys, one done in 2003 estimating the toll to around 100,000 and one in 2006 estimating the number to be 600,000--although that number includes everyone killed as a consequence of the war, whether they were combatants or not and whether the death was violent or not. Nevertheless, both numbers were lots higher than those produced by other studies using different methodologies. If you're interested, I'd recommend an episode of TAL about the 2003 study, which focuses not only on the authors of the study but on one of the people in the CIA who is responsible for minimizing "collateral damage".

GravellaHellaCopter

Gravel continues is decent into pop-culture suffused madness:



Also, for anyone who missed it, here's Gravel channeling 1968...er, or something:



Thanks Eric!

Hillary Clinton's quest to piss off everybody

Her latest inflammatory comments:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Now, in a primary race against the first serious black nominee ever, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. I don't think there was intentional malice here--I don't think she was making some kind of political calculation to be racially divisive--but I do think that she has got it into her head that, somehow, in making this kind of observation she is simply being a political realist, and that the thought of her being racist in any way is so laughable that no one would ever think of calling it racially divisive. And so she goes ahead and says it.

But in doing so, she's pissing everybody off. For example, she's certainly got Bob Herbert's hackles in the 12 o'clock position:

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

...

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

The crazy thing about it is, I'm sure the Clintons are so steeped in their perception of themselves that they'll fail to see how opinions like Herbert's have a legitimate basis. They'll probably come to the conclusion that Obama supporters are playing the race card on them, accusing the Obama campaign of turning a non-racist comment into a semi-racist one.

And none of this does the Democratic Party any good whatsoever.

Awesome T-shirt

Via Dinosaur Comics, an awesome T-shirt. It's got some truth to it.

Tact

There's been a bit of a dust-up recently over some comments that Hillary Clinton has made about Iran:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said.

"That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said.

The thing is, though what she is saying is correct--any policy of deterrence entails the sort of massive retaliation that she is talking about--the way that she says it makes her sound unnecessarily aggressive.

In the first place, the question itself was a fairly outlandish hypothetical--there is absolutely no one who seriously believes that Iran would launch a direct attack against Israel. In fact, the reason this is the case is precisely because Iran and everyone else already knows that the United States would retaliate in such a situation (in addition to the retaliation that would be carried out by Israel itself). Therefore, Clinton's first reaction should have been to give a careful preface to her answer to make it clear that this was a purely hypothetical question with no immediate relevance to the current situation with Iran.

Next, rather than use colorfully bellicose language like "totally obliterate", she should have couched her answer in the most boring technocratic terms possible. I mean, you don't want to sound like you relish the idea of having to retaliate. Non-emotional, bureaucratic, mechanistic--this is how you want to express a policy of deterrence, because it gets the substantive point across without making anyone nervous or sending any confusing rhetorical messages. Moreover, she could have even avoided singling out Iran altogether, instead choosing to give her answer in terms of what the US generally does to protect close allies, Israel being one of them.

Obama, I think, is perceptive in seeing the potential trouble that remarks like Clinton's are likely to cause down the road:

"When Iran is able to go to the United Nations complaining about the statements made and get some sympathy, that's a sign that we are taking the wrong approach," Obama said.

Moreover, he seems to know how to give the more careful answer that I think is better to give:

"We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran."

Israel is "the most important ally" the United States has in the Middle East, and that Washington would respond "forcefully and appropriately" to any attack, Obama said Sunday.

"But it is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we're shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we've seen out of George Bush," he said. "And this kind of language is not helpful."

It is not as if the sort of cowboy-diplomacy sloppiness of Clinton's remarks can be attributed to hers being off-the-cuff comments--she had already said earlier that Iran would undergo "massive retaliation" for an attack on Israel, and so she should have had her wording on this issue down pat.

In the end I think it comes down to a sort of fearfulness on the part of Democrats that has been ingrained in them by Republicans on national security issues, especially since the Republicans rose to dominance in the 90s: they don't want to look weak, and so they protect themselves from this perception by mimicking the Republicans, in style if not in actual policy. The result has been the dangerous lack of a counterweight to the sort of macho, with-us-or-against-us Bush foreign policy--an imbalance that expressed itself most painfully in the Democrats' non-existent opposition to the Iraq War resolution in 2003.

One thing I like about Obama is that he doesn't seem to have this fear. I greatly look forward to him taking on McCain on foreign policy in the general election.

Kobe, Pau, and Co.

I would just like to say that the Lakers are playing some fine, fine basketball. Nothing too flashy: just consistent team play conducted with a high degree of intensity and focus. Of the six games they've played so far in the playoffs, not only have all been victories--but they've all looked like the same victory. Let's hope for a couple of more uneventful, 10-point victories going into Utah...

Hard screwing

A funny line from a well-written article by one Peter Keating:

Wright screwed Obama as hard as any noncandidate has ever screwed an American presidential contender.

Hot.

...letting it die

Looks like the Obama campaign is going to let the Hillary campaign run its course, as it should:

Its campaign quarry finally cornered, the Obama high command gave it space. The Illinois senator was on track to become the first black presidential nominee of a major party and aides produced a small trickle of superdelegate supporters. But there was nary a word about hastening Clinton's departure.

"I think that it would be inappropriate and awkward and wrong for any of us to tell Senator Clinton when it is time for the race to be over," said Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, speaking on a campaign-sponsored conference call with reporters.

Of course, I don't want to jinx anything--but the whole tenor of the media has suddenly shifted. Clinton's stock is plummeting. Can it be that we're finally nearing the end?

Clinton campaign must die a natural death

I think it's clear at this point that the Clinton campaign is in its final throes. Assuming realistic outcomes for the remaining contests, she cannot win in pledged delegates, and she will undoubtedly lose the popular vote, as well. Her remaining trump card--reinstating Michigan and Florida--would require the determined support of the party elites, but her support with them is waning: every day she bleeds a few more superdelegates.

However, the smart thing for the Obama campaign to do would be to pretend that none of this is the case, and to stop harping on tactical arguments as to why Clinton should drop out of the campaign "for the good of the party". Leave that argument for the punditry to make; coming from the Obama camp, all it does is raise the hackles of Clinton's base of supporters and make them feel like their candidate is getting elbowed out of the process.

If there is the appearance that Clinton withdraws from the race entirely of her own volition, it will go a long way towards healing the rift that has cropped up in the Democratic Party over the course of the long primary season. I know that if the situation was reversed and Obama was facing bleak prospects for the nomination, I'd certainly be happier with Clinton and the Democrats if they allowed my candidate to withdraw from the race on his own terms.

And if it turns out that Clinton is just absolutely determined to drag things out until the convention, then, well--there wasn't anything anyone could do about it anyway.

"Race is over", NYT meta-declares

There is a NYT front page article that says that the punditry says that--with Obama and Clinton splitting North Carolina and Indiana yesterday--the race is over:

Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC.

The comment was echoed on Drudge and soon repeated by many others.

Of course, the pundits will inevitably start talking about the NYT article...it's turtles all the way down, I'm telling ya.

Sixty minutes of Clinton

In case you're interested, here's an unvarnished hour of George Stephanapoulous questioning Hillary Clinton in a "town-hall" setting. She double-downs on the gas tax holiday nonsense, including the surprising statement that she "doesn't throw in her lot with economists". Huh?

More internet muck

Ok, on balance it's probably pretty bad, but there are a few redeeming moments (particularly involving Howard Dean and Abraham Lincoln) that I think make it worth passing along:

1108-27

As the purveyor of a lightly trafficked, strangely titled blog, I don't expect much "internet presence". But I don't think it's too much to ask for my blog, humble as it is, to turn up as the first result when the search term is its explicit title.

And yet, when you Google "iz/ott", this humble space is second. This in itself isn't too surprising, though--the internet is a big place, and "iz/ott" is not all that unique an invention--you could imagine someone somewhere stumbling upon the same phrase in an article or blog post somewhere. So why am I complaining?

I will tell you why I am complaining. It is because "iz/ott" appears to be not some word typed by a human and used in a sentence, but instead the garbled result of a PDF's attempt to interpret the string "1108-27" in a scanned image of a typewritten document.

Ok, that's a little wild, you say--very improbable, and yet, still within the bounds of what we might expect from a vast internet filled with arbitrary strings. So really, David, why the fuss?

Oh, I will tell you what the fuss is, my dear reader. I will tell you why I shake my fist at the internet and wail at the injustice of the universe. It is because the typewritten document in question--the one that displaces my humble blog as the number one search result for "iz/ott"--is what appears to be a 1964 progress report by the Institute of Paper Chemistry addressed to the Fourdrinier Kraft Board Institute Rigid-When-Wet Committee as to the feasibility of a corrugated cardboard box that can remain structurally intact when wet to facilitate the boxing of chickens.

I shit you not. Go ahead an search within the document for "iz-ott".

Damn you, Project 1108-27! Damn you to hell!

How to talk to an empiricist

An empiricist scoffs at a religious man who has spent his life contemplating the spirits of a particular waterfall and some oddly shaped rocks. "You are worshiping childish fairytales and superstitious nonsense", the empiricist says. "None of it is real--you've frittered away your life."

The religious man replies: "Yes, you are right--none of those things are real. There's no empirical support for them whatsoever. But to ridicule me on those grounds is to miss the point--like ridiculing someone on an exercise bike because, for all their effort, they are traveling nowhere. Like the exercise bicyclist, my intent with spirit worship is not to affect a change in the world but to affect a change in myself with respect to the world. The bicyclist's movement is not 'real', but his muscles are strengthened all the same; my spirits are not 'real' but my being is grounded and revealed to me all the same."

The empiricist nods. "Fair enough. But remember well this distinction you make as you carry on your business in the empirical world. Just as a person on an exercise bike should not yell at people to get out of his path, neither can you impose on others in a way that presupposes the realness of your spirits."

"Of course," says the religious man.

***

The above dialog takes place on the empiricist's "home court", so to speak--the religious man admits his deities are not real, but given the context I think it's clear that by "real" he means empirically real--i.e., it can be observed with the senses in the material world. So I don't think he's really yielding any ground to the empiricist, and yet is able to carve out a philosophically defensible position that must appear to the empiricist for all the world like a mysterious and impenetrable walled city that shuns outsiders and keeps to itself.

Geez, Bill

Looks like Bill got a little carried away:

Former President Bill Clinton was in West Virginia on his wife's behalf. In Clarksburg, he called her a scrapper and contrasted her appeal among working-class voters with the elitists he said support Obama.

"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."

That's the "great divide" in this country? And I like how Obama supporters are the ones who are playing by "a different set of rules" when in fact it is Hillary Clinton who is trying to reverse the rules agreed upon with regards to the Michigan and Florida delegates.

Although maybe I should hold back--there doesn't seem to be much context given in the article, and so his comments could very well have been less sweeping than it appears here.