The Pros Lose to the Cons: Lou Dobbs replaces Milton Friedman as the face of economic conservatism. (Matthew Continetti, 10/13/2008, Weekly Standard)
Globalization depends on the free worldwide flow of capital, labor, and goods. Pros want to help this flow, while Cons want to shut it off. Hence the Cons' position on free trade (against), immigration (against), and international finance (who needs it?). The leaders of the Pros are President Bush and John McCain. The leaders of the Cons are Representatives Duncan Hunter of California, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, and Ron Paul of Texas.These are not cut and dried labels. Conservatives can be anti-immigration and pro-bailout, or pro-trade and anti-immigration. But when you look carefully enough, it's fascinating how the same folks tend to line up together on global issues again and again. You also notice how passionately they argue their point of view. There were times during the bailout debate last week when National Review Online's group blog, "The Corner," resembled a rumble between the Crips and the Bloods.
The battle between the Pros and the Cons has been pronounced since 2006. Early that year the Bush administration sought to approve a deal that would have had a Dubai-owned company take over operations at major U.S. ports. This was exactly the sort of deal that you'd expect in a globalized world. Capital is supposed to cross borders with ease.
But the Dubai deal provoked a remarkable public outcry. Suddenly the federal government was "selling our ports" to foreigners. Who knew what could happen as a result? Hunter led the opposition, but the Democrats pitched in, too. A few brave souls tried to defend the global market. They cautioned that nobody was in any danger. They argued that America ought to be open to outside investment. They were totally ignored. Hunter and his allies scuttled the deal.
President Bush has continued to underestimate the power of the Cons. Soon after the Dubai ports controversy, Bush asked Congress to approve his immigration reform. America's remarkable economic performance over the last 25 years has attracted millions of immigrants. Plenty of them have entered the country illegally. Bush's reform was classic pro-globalization legislation and would have helped the American economy. It sought to stabilize the labor flow by instituting a guest-worker program and regularize the status of those immigrants who already were here.
But this was too much for plenty of House Republicans. They opposed the reform vociferously. They argued instead that the Bush administration should build a wall along America's southern border. Once again, Hunter led the opposition, and, once again, Hunter won. Bush's reform went nowhere. He failed with it again in 2007.
Two weeks ago, when Bush asked Congress to spend $700 billion buying up Wall Street's bad debts, the Cons blanched. Many of them railed against the bill as "socialism." But, contrary to popular myth, America has always had a mixed economy with elements of both the free market and interventionist government. The $700 billion, moreover, isn't going to be spent digging ditches in Nevada or bringing electricity to Appalachia. It's going to be spent buying securities that will later be sold-perhaps even at a profit.
The problem for the Cons and their advocacy of isolationism is that, whereas on questions of foreign policy it would be possible to keep the United States more or less on the sidelines, it is not a realistic option when it comes to economic matters. Unless, of course, we're prepared to be a really spacious version of North Korea. Brave as they were in facing down the scaryb Dubai ports purchase, they're utterly unserious about the actual security threat posed by dependency on foreign oil. They were able to delay the next round of immigration amnesty, but no one has any stomach for deporting immigrants nor for physically preventing subsequent illegal immigration. And their stand against the credit crunch relief bill lasted exactly as long as it took voters to see the economic effect of not intervening.
The Cons can, of course, take some solace from their success at nipping a previous period of rapid globalization in the bud--in the 1920s-30s, after WWI had soured Americans on the rest of the world and the period of globalization that had begun in the 1870s, the GOP managed to pass our first immigration restrictions and Smoot-Hawley trade protections and the Fed both raised interest rates to tighten money and ignored its obligation to assist the banking sector, pursuing a liquidationist policy instead. Remember how well that worked out?
We aren't headed for another Great Depression, but the sad fact is that we would be if the Cons had their way.
* Kind of strange how much trouble Senator Obama had simply saying that Iran benefits from high oil prices, like Russia and Venezuela.
* Does Mr. Obama realize that the Court has held the line-itm veto unconstitutional?
* Nicely turned by Mr. Obama when he notes that President Bush failed to call upon a willing America to sacrifice after 9-11, but then he doesn't say what sacrifice he'll ask for. That's the gas tax opening.
* Whether he makes sense or not. Mr. McCaion shows real passion when he talks about the environment.
* The "I don't understand why we invaded Iraq" is a huge opportunity for Maverick. And then Brokaw's follow-up really hoists him. The argument that we can't stand by during genocide but should have stood by in Iraq is morally inane.
* Mr. McCain biffs it.
* Way too much time on Russia--who cares? It's a dying entity.
* That sure as heck wasn't Lincoln/Douglas, was it? We could have just had them deliver stump speeches. Why not get rid of the "moderator" for one thing?
Obama money from abroad could total $3.3 million (The Associated Press, October 7, 2008)
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has raised about $3.3 million from contributors who did not list a home state or who designated their state with an abbreviation that did not match one of the 50 states or U.S. territories, according to records provided by the Federal Election Commission.Most of those contributors did identify themselves as living abroad in foreign cities. Under federal law, foreign citizens cannot make political contributions, but U.S. citizens living abroad can. [...]
The $3.3 million total does not include donors who have given less than $200 and whose contributions do not have to be itemized. Some of that money could also have come from overseas. About half of Obama's $455 million in contributions so far are unitemized. The campaign does not identify those donors. [...]
Republican John McCain's campaign lists all his donors, even those who give less than $200, on his Web site.
Slow-Cooker Beef and Guinness Stew (Chicago Tribune, 10/07/2008)
3 pounds boneless beef chuck, trimmed, cut into 1½-inch pieces½ cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 large (14 ounces) yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 can (14.9 ounces) Guinness Draught beer or 1¾ cups Guinness Extra Stout
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 can (14½ ounces) beef broth
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
2 small sprigs fresh thyme or ¼ teaspoon dried
1 pound small red boiling potatoes, halved
3 Carrots, peeled, cut into 1-inch chunks
½ small rutabaga, peeled, cut into 1-inch chunks
1 package (17 ounces) frozen puff pastry, thawed according to package, optional
1. Pat the beef dry with paper towels. Combine the flour, salt and pepper in a shallow dish. Add the beef; toss to coat well with the flour. Reserve the remaining seasoned flour for later.
2. Heat the oil in a large nonstick skillet. Add the beef in batches in a single, uncrowded layer. Cook, turning, until browned on all sides, about 10 minutes per batch. Transfer to a slow-cooker.
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Add the onion to the skillet; cook until golden, about 5 minutes. Add the Guinness and garlic; boil 1 minute, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add the mixture to the slow-cooker.3. Add the broth, parsley, bay and thyme to the slow-cooker. Cover; cook on low until meat is almost tender, 2½-3 hours. Sprinkle in the reserved seasoned flour; stir. Add potatoes, carrots and rutabaga. Cover; cook on high until tender, about 1 hour. Taste pan juices; adjust seasonings.
4. If serving the stew with the pastry crust, heat oven to 400 degrees. Cut pastry sheets into quarters. Place on 2 baking sheets; pierce several times with a fork. Bake until crisp and golden, about 10 minutes. Spoon a portion of the hot stew into individual dishes. Top with a pastry square.
Note: To cook stew in the oven, transfer the browned meat and onion mixture to a large Dutch oven. Proceed with the recipe as directed; cook, tightly covered, in a 325-degree oven until meat is fork-tender, about 2 hours. Add vegetables, cover the pot and return to the oven until the vegetables are tender, about 1 hour.
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Video: Halperin Chats With Gibbs in Nashville (Mark Halperin, 10/07/08, The Page)
...Senator Obama is free to associate with the guy if he chooses to.
Barack Obama and Abortion: A response to John Kavanaugh, S.J. (Douglas W. Kmiec, SEPTEMBER 8, 2008 , America)
But there is also an undecided group of Catholics, who, as Father Kavanaugh notes, is watching and listening to Senator Obama most closely of all, especially with respect to horrific procedures like partial-birth abortion. Senator Obama recognizes that these late term abortions aggravate the moral disorder, and it is important for him to keep exploring in public conversation their proper restraint. To his credit, Senator Obama has indicated that in this context a mental illness exception must mean more than mental distress. In his words, such exception should “be defined by serious clinical mental-health diseases . . . [and] not just a matter of feeling blue.” Senator Obama has taken some flak from abortion right activists for raising this point, but one of the senator’s most admirable traits is his intellectual integrity, not just telling his supporters what they want to hear.Pro-life Catholics like myself and Father Kavanaugh have no illusions. Politics isn’t bean bag and for several generations the Democrats have been absent without leave from the defense of the unalienable right to life. In 2004, Democrats for Life could scarcely get an audience with the counselors to the nominee. Today, a different type of Democrat is open to the views of all and has already led his party to a better place, more affirming of this precious gift of life to which none of us have entitlement and all of us have an obligation.
While some Barack Obama backers are hoping to provide cover for his pro-abortion positions by saying he will advocate better health care, the Obama campaign is coming under criticism for refusing to say whether his governmental health care plan will require Americans to pay for abortions. [...][John McCormack] points to the speech Obama gave to Planned Parenthood activists in July 2007, where he pledged to cover abortions in any national health care plan.
"In my mind reproductive care is essential care. It is basic care, and so it is at the center, the heart of the plan that I propose," Obama said. "We're going to set up a public plan that all persons and all women can access if they don’t have health insurance. It'll be a plan that will provide all essential services, including reproductive services"
Mike Dorning of the Chicago Tribune followed up on the Obama speech and reported that an Obama representative said "reproductive services" included abortion.
Survey Finds Expansion of Housing in the U.S. (SAM ROBERTS, 10/07/08, NY Times)
Housing costs consumed 24 percent of income over all. Those costs were 13 percent for owners without a mortgage, 28 percent for co-op residents with a mortgage and 33 percent for renters. [...]The median size of all single, detached and manufactured or mobile homes rose slightly since 2005, to 1,769 square feet (and to 2,304 for homes built in the previous four years). The median amount of space per person also increased, to 769 square feet.
Why Won’t Obama Talk About Columbia?: The years he won’t discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about. (Andrew C. McCarthy, 10/07/08, National Review)
Well, Mr. Axelrod, how do you explain Obama’s breathless endorsement of Ayers’s 1997 Leftist polemic on the criminal-justice system, A Kind and Just Parent? As Stanley Kurtz has recounted, Ayers’s book is a radical indictment of American society: We, not the criminals, are responsible for the violent crime that plagues our cities; even the most vicious juvenile offenders should not be tried as adults; prisons should eventually be replaced by home detention; American justice is comparable to South Africa under Apartheid. Obama’s reaction? He described the book as “a searing and timely account” — a take even the Times concedes was a “rave review.”Obama and Ayers shared all kinds of views. That is why they worked so well together at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), funding the likes of Mike Klonsky, a fellow SDS and Maoist associate of Ayers who, as Steve Diamond relates, used to host a “social justice” blog on Obama’s campaign website. With Obama heading the board of directors that approved expenditures and Ayers, the mastermind running its operational arm, hundreds of thousands of CAC dollars poured into the “Small Schools Workshop” — a project begun by Ayers and run by Klonsky to spur the revolution from the ground up.
Precisely because they shared the same views, Obama and Ayers also worked comfortably together on the board of the Woods Fund. There, they doled out thousands of dollars to Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church to promote its Marxist “black liberation theology.” Moreover, they underwrote the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) founded by Rashid Khalidi, a top apologist for Yasser Arafat. As National Review’s David Pryce-Jones notes, Khalidi once directed WAFA, the terrorist PLO’s news agency. Then, like Ayers, he repackaged himself as an academic who rails at American policy. The AAAN, which supports driver’s licenses and public welfare benefits for illegal aliens, holds that the establishment of Israel was an illegitimate “catastrophe.”
Khalidi, who regards Israel as a “racist” “apartheid” state, supports Palestinian terror strikes against Israeli military targets. It’s little surprise that he should be such a favorite of Ayers, the terrorist for whom “racism” and “apartheid” trip off the tongue as easily as “pass the salt.”
And it’s no surprise that the like-minded Obama would be a fan. Khalidi, after all, has mastered the Arafat art of posing as a moderate before credulous Westerners while (as Martin Kramer documents) scalding America’s “Zionist lobby” when addressing Arabic audiences. The Obama who decries “bitter” Americans “cling[ing] to guns or religion” when he’s in San Francisco but morphs into a God-fearing Second Amendment enthusiast when he’s in Pennsylvania — like the Obama who pummels NAFTA before labor union supporters but has advisers quietly assure the Canadians not to worry about such campaign cant — surely appreciates the craft.
Obama and Ayers not only demonstrated their shared view of Khalidi by funding him. They also gave glowing testimonials at a farewell dinner when Khalidi left the University of Chicago for Columbia’s greener pastures. That would be the same Columbia from which Obama graduated in 1983.
Khalidi was leaving to become director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, assuming a professorship endowed in honor of another Arafat devotee, the late Edward Said. A hero of the Left who consulted with terrorist leaders (including Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah) and was once photographed hurling rocks at Israelis from the Lebanese border, Said was exposed by researcher Justus Reid Weiner as a fraud who had created a fictional account of his childhood, the rock on which he built his Palestinian grievance mythology.
We know precious little about Obama’s Columbia years, but the Los Angeles Times has reported that he studied under Said. In and of itself, that is meaningless: Said was a hotshot prof and hundreds of students took his comparative-lit courses. But Obama plainly maintained some sort of tie with Said — a photo making the Internet rounds shows Obama conversing with the great man himself at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together.
Said had a wide circle of radical acquaintances. That circle clearly included Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. When they came out of hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers took education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights — before earning his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.
Said was so enamored of Ayers that he commended the unrepentant terrorist’s 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days — the book in which the haughty Ayers brags about his Weatherman past — with this glowing dust-jacket blurb:
What makes Fugitive Days unique is its unsparing detail and its marvelous human coherence and integrity. Bill Ayers's America and his family background, his education, his political awakening, his anger and involvement, his anguished re-emergence from the shadows: all these are rendered in their truth without a trace of nostalgia or “second thinking.” For anyone who cares about the sorry mess we are in, this book is essential, indeed necessary, reading.
Sorry mess, indeed. For his part, Ayers is at least equally enthralled by Said, of whom, even in death, Ayers says “[t]here is no one better positioned … to offer advice on the conduct of intellectual life[,]” than the man who was “over the last thirty-five years, the most passionate, eloquent, and clear-eyed advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people.”
Oil Recession: Analyst Foresees Oil at $40 a Barrel or Lower: Equidex President Phillip Gotthelf tells Bloomberg TV oil prices poised to drop much further. (Jeff Poor, 10/07/08, Business & Media Institute)
“I think that the commodities really outlived their, their useful rallies because they’ve exceeded the elasticity of the consumer,” [Equidex President Phillip Gotthelf] said. “And commodities are consumables, they’re not investments. They’re speculative equals sometimes, but they’re certainly not investments.” [...]“I’m somewhat amused. Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) was forecasting $200 a barrel for oil,” Gotthelf said. “I see that their forecasts are getting more and more conservative. I said $200 a barrel was ridiculous. Even $150 I thought was ridiculous. We were looking at $24 a barrel in 2004. Everybody is now making comparisons in the financial sector to the implosion of stocks in 2002, 2003 – the last stock recession. Why shouldn’t we see oil return to $40, maybe even below $40 a barrel?”
If Gotthelf’s prediction were to come true, the price of a barrel of oil would reach a low point not seen in almost four years. The last time oil was at $40 a barrel was late 2004. At that time, the media were concerned about paying $2 a gallon for gas.
MORE:
Bernanke Signals Fed May Consider Lowering Rates: Minutes Show Rate-Cut Debate in September (BRIAN BLACKSTONE, 10/07/08, Wall Street Journal)
With inflation likely to moderate in response to the steep drop in oil prices since July, a growing number of Wall Street economists now expect the Federal Open Market Committee to lower interest rates later this month after a five-month pause with the target fed-funds rate at 2%. Some economists are even calling on the Fed to revisit 2003 lows on the fed-funds rate at 1%.Mr. Bernanke remarks Tuesday appear to support that view.
Polls show McCain closing gap with Obama (Mike Sunnucks, 10/07/08, Phoenix Business Journal)
A CBS News poll gives Obama a 48 percent to 45 percent lead among more than 600 likely voters. Another poll by Reuters and Zogby International of 1,200 voters shows the same three-point lead for Obama. And a Diageo/Hotline Daily Tracker Poll of 900 likely voters has Obama with a 46 percent to 44 percent lead.
'NYT' Drops Sports Section Today -- Day After Metro Disappears (Greg Mitchell, October 07, 2008, Editor & Publisher)
To use a sports term: It is a twin killing.For regular New York Times readers in the metro area, Monday was a shocker, although long-planned: The end of the Metro section, now folded ingloriously into the end of the A-section. At least it had a Calvin Trillin gluttony story.
Now Tuesday: goodbye Sports. It now comes at the end of Business (causing conflict in who knows how many households).
And it's only six pages long, even with baseball playoffs on and football seasons in full swing -- more like the national edition than the local, or a mid-sized daily.
Top Geneticist: Human Evolution Is Over (Times of London, 10/07/08)
Human evolution is grinding to a halt because of a shortage of older fathers in the West, according to a leading genetics expert.Fathers over the age of 35 are more likely to pass on mutations, according to Professor Steve Jones of University College London.
Speaking Tuesday at a UCL lecture entitled "Human Evolution Is Over," Professor Jones will argue that there were three components to evolution — natural selection, mutation and random change.
"Quite unexpectedly, we have dropped the human mutation rate because of a change in reproductive patterns," Professor Jones told The Times.
Our Founding Partisans: A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign by Edward J. Larson (Robert D. Novak, September 2008, The American Spectator)
Imagine that in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, President George W. Bush was directing the government to arrest, convict, and imprison his critics. Imagine that John Kerry was paying a scandalmonger to dig up dirt on Tom DeLay. Imagine further that John McCain was working secretly against Bush's re-election, that DeLay was plotting to replace Bush with Dick Cheney as president, and that John Edwards was conspiring to be elected president instead of Kerry.Unimaginable, surely. But 204 years earlier in the presidential election of 1800, that's roughly what took place. The perpetrators were the statesmen who now are virtually deified as the Founding Fathers. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and just about everyone else on the political scene were performing in a dastardly manner that Bush, Kerry, Cheney et al. would never have contemplated two centuries later.
It is all laid out in A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign by historian Edward J. Larson, the acclaimed 2007 book now available in paperback (Free Press). The 1800 election is celebrated for establishing the precedent of the American presidency changing hands, from Federalists to what were then called Republicans, without bloodshed. But Larson's gripping account exposes what was not only a really close call, but also no model of governmental decorum and ethics.
We're Not Headed for a Depression: No, this isn't the crisis that kills global capitalism (GARY S. BECKER, 10/07/08, Wall Street Journal)
The main problem with the modern financial system based on widespread use of derivatives and securitization is that while financial specialists understand how individual assets function, even they have limited understanding of the aggregate risks created by the system. That is, insufficient appreciation of how the whole incredibly complex financial system operates when exposed to various types of stress. In light of such limitations, it is difficult to propose long-term reforms. Still, a few reforms seem reasonably likely to reduce the probability of future financial crises.- Increase capital requirements. The capital requirements of banks relative to assets should be increased after the crisis is over in order to prevent the highly leveraged ratios of assets to capital in financial institutions during the past several years. Possibly a minimum ratio of capital to assets should be imposed by the Fed on investment banks and money funds. As much as possible, the measure of capital should not be its book value but its market value, such as the market value of publicly traded shares of banks. Book value measures, for example, apparently badly missed the plight of Japanese banks during their decade-long banking crisis of the 1990s.
- Sell Freddie and Fannie. The government should as quickly as possible sell Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to fully private companies that receive no government insurance or other help. These two giants did not cause the housing mess, but in recent years they surely greatly contributed to it, partly through congressional pressure on them to increase their purchases of subprime loans. They have owned or guaranteed almost half of the $12 trillion in outstanding mortgages while having a small capital base. The housing market already has excessive amounts of government subsidies, such as from the tax exemption of interest on mortgages, and should not have government sponsored enterprises that insure mortgage-backed securities.
- No more bailouts. The "too big to fail" approach to banks and other companies should be abandoned as new long-term financial policies are developed. Such an approach is inconsistent with a free-market economy. It also has caused dubious company bailouts in the past, such as the large government loan years ago to Chrysler, a company that remained weak and should have been allowed to go into bankruptcy. All the American auto companies have asked for and received handouts too since they cannot compete against Japanese, Korean and German car makers, partly because these American companies have been incredibly badly managed. A "too many institutions in trouble to fail principle," as in the present financial crisis, may still be necessary on rare occasions, but failure of badly run large financial and other companies is healthy and indeed necessary for the survival of a robust free-enterprise competitive system.
Is this a final "Crisis of Global Capitalism" -- to borrow the title of a book by George Soros written shortly after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98? The crisis that kills capitalism has been said to happen during every major recession and financial crisis ever since Karl Marx prophesized the collapse of capitalism in the middle of the 19th century. Although I admit to having greatly underestimated the severity of the current crisis, I am confident that sizable world economic growth will resume before very long under a mainly capitalist world economy.
Consider, for example, that in the decade after various predictions of the collapse of global capitalism following the Asian crisis, both world GDP and world trade experienced unprecedented growth thanks to the power of market competition on a global scale. The South Korean economy, for example, was pummeled during that crisis, but has had significant economic growth since. World economic growth will recover once we are over the present severe financial difficulties.
The Bomber as School Reformer: The Press—and debate moderators—shouldn’t let Bill Ayers and Barack Obama off the hook.
(Sol Stern, 6 October 2008, City Journal)
Back in the early eighties, in an interview with David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Bill Ayers remembered his reaction upon learning that he would not be prosecuted by the government for his bombing spree as a member of the Weather Underground. “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,” he exulted. Ayers is now a university professor, but he must have been exulting all over again after reading Saturday’s front-page story in the New York Times.The article explored the putative relationship between Ayers and Barack Obama during the time they worked together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a five-year philanthropic venture that, starting in 1995, distributed over $160 million in school-improvement grants to the Windy City’s public schools. Ayers wrote the grant proposal that secured seed money for the schools and ran the implementation arm of the project; Obama became chairman of the board that distributed the grants. Not only did the Times exonerate the Democratic presidential candidate of having anything like a “close” relationship with Ayers—their paths merely “crossed” while working on the Challenge, the paper said—but it also bestowed the honorific of “school reformer” on the ex-bomber. “Mr. Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform,” the article maintained. On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Tom Brokaw—who will be moderating tomorrow’s debate between the presidential candidates—picked up this now conventional wisdom and described Ayers as “a school reformer.”
Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”
High School Musical 3 breaks records: The third film in the High School Musical series has set a new box office record, despite its release date being two weeks away. (Anita Singh, 07 Oct 2008, Daily Telegraph)
Such is the anticipation surrounding the Disney sequel that advance ticket sales in the UK have topped £800,000 and will be pushing £1 million by the time the film hits cinemas.The pre-release takings exceed the previous record holder, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and dwarf advance bookings for every Bond film including the latest, Quantum of Solace.
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Why Elite Women Hate Palin (Ann Marlowe 10.07.08, Forbes)
It's not so much that Palin isn't one of our own--an Ivy League type, or an Eastern preppie, or a self-made intellectual like Rice. It's not for the fake feminist reasons that "she's against freedom of choice" or "she didn't tell her daughter about birth control." (Though there is an element of hatred for her fertility, and the fact that it hasn't impeded her rise.) It's not because Palin only got a passport a few years ago and doesn't speak any foreign languages.No, it's because Palin makes us look like the slackers we mainly are. We've had our bit of success, but we've also spent a lot of time smelling the roses. We've gone back to school to get another degree, volunteered in poor countries, devoted ourselves to a sport or a hobby. We've not had kids, or if we have, we've had one or two, and we've had nannies paid for by our work or our husbands or our inherited money.
We not only have had passports for decades, we've put serious mileage on them. We've lived overseas or spent months wandering around Africa or India, we understand foreign people and places in ways Palin never will--and yet it's she who could become vice president, not one of us.
It's not hard to see why. The boyfriend of one of my freshman roommates at Harvard is now governor of Massachusetts--a man no less and no more qualified than many of my classmates. Why him and not us? As with Palin, it comes down to wanting it badly enough and being singleminded. It means spending a lot of time in deadly dull meetings talking about school bond issues or where to put a new off-ramp.
It means spending a lot of time in small towns where no one you know has a country place or ever will.
Obama returned cash to Gaza donors (Jewish Telegraph, 10/07/2008)
The Obama campaign returned $33,000 to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who purchased a large quantity of campaign T-shirts.
Beauty Is Truth (Michio Kaku 10.07.08, Forbes)
The real story concerns the search for beauty and simplicity in physics, the idea that guided Einstein for most of his life. Physicists think that nature, at its most basic level, must be fundamentally gorgeous. At the instant of the Big Bang, they believe, all the forces of the universe were unified into a coherent whole--into a single, mysterious, beautiful superforce. So beauty may ultimately reveal the true secret of creation.To a physicist, however, beauty is not some squishy, touchy-feely, ephemeral concept. Beauty to a physicist means symmetry, which can be reduced to precise mathematical equations, whether it's the symmetry of a snowflake or starfish, the beauty of a blazing star, the radiance of a diamond or the patterns of sub-atomic particles.
Here's the rub. At the atomic level, everywhere we look, we see only shattered fragments of this master symmetry. Physicists were shocked to discover a whole zoo of sub-atomic particles in their atom smashers. (The father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was so frustrated by this deluge of particles that he solemnly proclaimed that the Nobel Prize should go to the physicist who had NOT discovered a new particle that year.)
Light, gravity and nuclear forces seem totally dissimilar. So physicists are like detectives, trying to arrange the shattered pieces together, hunting for clues, trying to recreate the scene of the "crime," for example, the Big Bang.
There's nothing left of the heckler at the end of this clip but a chalk outline and maybe some lipstick traces....
The Anti-Semite's Favorite Jewish Prayer: The centuries-long controversy over Yom Kippur's Kol Nidre. (Michael Weiss, Oct. 7, 2008, Slate)
Of all the Jewish prayers, Kol Nidre is one of the most recognizable—and certainly the most controversial. Neil Diamond intoned it in order to penetrate the stone heart of his cantor father at the end of the remake of The Jazz Singer, and Al Jolson sang it, mercifully out of blackface, in the 1927 original. Max Bruch used the haunting music that accompanies the prayer to furnish the full title, and half the theme, of his celebrated adagio in 1881. Beethoven, too, borrowed the theme for the sixth movement of his String Quartet Op. 131, which had been commissioned by the heads of Viennese Jewry seeking to honor the founding of a new synagogue. Even Perry Como and Johnny Mathis recorded their own renditions in the late '50s.For observant Jews, Kol Nidre represents the liturgical kickoff for Yom Kippur (opening services are named for the prayer, which means "All vows"), a repetitive and crescendoing piece of Aramaic recited before sunset on the Day of Atonement. For anti-Semites, it's evidence that Jews are duplicitous and two-faced. The trouble has to do with a misconstrued doctrine of pre-emption. The full text of the prayer reads:
All vows, obligations, oaths, and anathemas, whether called konam, konas, or by any other name, which we may vow, or swear, or pledge, or whereby we may be bound, from this Day of Atonement until the next (whose happy coming we await), we do repent. May they be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, and void, and made of no effect; they shall not bind us nor have power over us. The vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be obligatory; nor the oaths be oaths.
As stand-alone statement, divorced of its context and Talmudic source material, it does seem to suggest that there's no such thing as a promise or oral contract affirmed in Judaism. But, of course, context is everything, and the prayer refers only to personal vows—those made by man in relation to his own conscience or to God, not interpersonal ones made by man to his fellow man. Contrary to claims made by perplexed exegetes such as David Duke, Kol Nidre was not invented as a sinister tribal clause to cheat gentiles or one another with impunity.
So I was prowling the Web to find links for Walter Lippmann and stumbled into two excellent interview archives:
The Conversations with History site from UC Berkeley, for instance, includes this chat with Mark Steyn:
And the Internet Archive has an Open Mind section, a thoroughly wonky show that will be famliar to fellow shut-ins from the Tri-State area. It's been on longer than Kiner's Korner was.
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Democrat Shea-Porter Struggling to Hold NH Seat (Rachel Kapochunas, 10/06/08, Congressional Quarterly)
Freshman Rep. Carol Shea-Porter is in the rare, and unenviable, position of being a Democratic incumbent in trouble. Not only has she failed to gain a clear edge over former Republican Rep. Jeb Bradley in New Hampshire’s 1st District, but polling data indicates the race remains within the margin of error just weeks out from Election Day.Due to these and other factors, CQ Politics is changing the rating of the race from Leans Democrat to No Clear Favorite, our most competitive category. [...]
The demographics of the Republican-leaning, mainly conservative district are working against Shea-Porter. Though the area remains competitive, it is home to many GOP areas as well as blue-collar Democratic communities where Shea-Porter will need to make inroads.
District voters favored Shea-Porter over Bradley by less than 3 percentage points in 2006 but voted narrowly for President Bush in 2004— 51 to 48 percent.
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With friends like these ...: McCain finds his own radical friend (Steve Chapman, May 4, 2008, Chicago Tribune)
Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology -- and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he's not so sure.Obama has been justly criticized for his ties to former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, who in 1995 hosted a campaign event for Obama and in 2001 gave him a $200 contribution. The two have also served together on the board of a foundation. When their connection became known, McCain minced no words: "I think not only a repudiation but an apology for ever having anything to do with an unrepentant terrorist is due the American people."What McCain didn't mention is that he has his own Bill Ayers -- in the form of G. Gordon Liddy. Now a conservative radio talk-show host, Liddy spent more than 4 years in prison for his role in the 1972 Watergate burglary. That was just one element of what Liddy did, and proposed to do, in a secret White House effort to subvert the Constitution. Far from repudiating him, McCain has embraced him.
How close are McCain and Liddy? At least as close as Obama and Ayers appear to be. In 1998, Liddy's home was the site of a McCain fundraiser. Over the years, he has made at least four contributions totaling $5,000 to the senator's campaigns -- including $1,000 this year.
Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as "an old friend," and McCain sounded like one. "I'm proud of you, I'm proud of your family," he gushed. "It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."
The Irrational Electorate (Larry M. Bartels, Wilson Quarterly)
One of the best-selling political books of the 2008 election season has been Just How Stupid Are We? a report on “the truth about the American voter” by popular historian Rick Shenkman. Shenkman’s little book presents a familiar collection of bleak results from opinion surveys documenting some of the many things most Americans don’t know about politics, government, and American history. “Public ignorance,” he concludes, is “the most obvious cause” of “the foolishness that marks so much of American politics.” Lest this pronouncement seem dispiriting, an obligatory hopeful coda offers anodyne proposals for civic improvement.Never mind whether the additional civics courses and “democracy parties” Shenkman proposes are really going to stem the tide of public ignorance. The reader’s first response to Shenkman’s indictment should be: So what?
Does it really matter whether voters can name the secretary of defense or know how long a senate term is? The political consequences of “public ignorance” must be demonstrated, not assumed. And that requires focusing not just on what voters don’t know, but on how what they don’t know actually affects how they vote. Do they manage to make sensible choices despite being hazy about the details of politics and government? (Okay, really hazy.) If they do, that’s not stupid—it’s efficient.
Obviously, what counts as a “sensible choice” is itself a matter of legitimate disagreement. Shenkman seems to think that since “foolishness . . . marks so much of American politics,” voters must be making stupid choices. However, most analysts have aspired to judge voters by less subjective standards—criteria grounded in specific notions of procedural rationality, or in voters’ own values and interests, or in comparisons with the behavior of better-informed voters who are similar in relevant ways. Moreover, such analysts have recognized that what really matters is not whether individual voters go astray, but whether entire electorates do. A lot of idiosyncratic behavior can be submerged in the collective verdict of 120 million voters.
According to Shenkman, “The consensus in the political science profession is that voters are rational.” Well, no. A half-century of scholarship provides plenty of grounds for pessimism about voters’ rationality.
When social scientists first started using detailed opinion surveys to study the attitudes and behavior of ordinary voters, they found some pretty sobering things. In the early 1950s, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University concluded that electoral choices “are relatively invulnerable to direct argumentation” and “characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.” For example, voters consistently misperceived where candidates stood on the important issues of the day, seeing their favorite candidates’ stands as closer to their own and opposing candidates’ stands as more dissimilar than they actually were. They likewise exaggerated the extent of support for their favorite candidates among members of social groups they felt close to.
In 1960, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan published an even more influential study, The American Voter. They described “the general impoverishment of political thought in a large proportion of the electorate,” noting that “many people know the existence of few if any of the major issues of policy.” Shifts in election outcomes, they concluded, were largely attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters with little grasp of issues or ideology. A recent replication of their work using surveys from 2000 and 2004 found that things haven’t changed much in the past half-century.
Indeed, I've just been reading Lippmann's Public Opinion and the frontis piece is this famous passage from The Republic:
And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.I see.
And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.
You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
Yes, he said.
And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
There's really no need for you to read the book--though it is available for free on-line--just consider the obvious contradictions in his own description of what he's up to:
The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance. He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs. The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters. And so in the chapters which follow we shall inquire first into some of the reasons why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside. Under this heading we shall consider first the chief factors which limit their access to the facts. They are the artificial censorships, the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs, the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives.
The analysis then turns from these more or less external limitations to the question of how this trickle of messages from the outside is affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision itself. From this it proceeds to examine how in the individual person the limited messages from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified with his own interests as he feels and conceives them. In the succeeding sections it examines how opinions are crystallized into what is called Public Opinion, how a National Will, a Group Mind, a Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed.
The first five parts constitute the descriptive section of the book. There follows an analysis of the traditional democratic theory of public opinion. The substance of the argument is that democracy in its original form never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside. And then, because the democratic theory is under criticism by socialist thinkers, there follows an examination of the most advanced and coherent of these criticisms, as made by the English Guild Socialists. My purpose here is to find out whether these reformers take into account the main difficulties of public opinion. My conclusion is that they ignore the difficulties, as completely as did the original democrats, because they, too, assume, and in a much more complicated civilization, that somehow mysteriously there exists in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach.
I argue that representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions. I attempt, therefore, to argue that the serious acceptance of the principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralization, and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs. It is argued that the problem of the press is confused because the critics and the apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy, and that the readers expect this miracle to be performed at no cost or trouble to themselves. The newspapers are regarded by democrats as a panacea for their own defects, whereas analysis of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion. My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today. This organization I conceive to be in the first instance the task of a political science that has won its proper place as formulator, in advance of real decision, instead of apologist, critic, or reporter after the decision has been made. I try to indicate that the perplexities of government and industry are conspiring to give political science this enormous opportunity to enrich itself and to serve the public. And, of course, I hope that these pages will help a few people to realize that opportunity more vividly, and therefore to pursue it more consciously.
If you've followed this far you will hardly need me to point out the obvious fatal flaw in this reasoning, but here goes: if you and I are just watching the shadows and the press turns out to just be watching the shadows then why aren't political scientists just watching the shadows too? And if there is such a thing as a "political scientist" who can see beyond the shadows how would we identify him?
And it is here that Mr. Lippmann himself subverts all that has come before, in his own conclusion:
When Plato came to the point where it was fitting that he should sum up, his assurance turned into stage-fright as he thought how absurd it would sound to say what was in him about the place of reason in politics. Those sentences in book five of the Republic were hard even for Plato to speak; they are so sheer and so stark that men can neither forget them nor live by them. So he makes Socrates say to Glaucon that he will be broken and drowned in laughter for telling "what is the least change which will enable a state to pass into the truer form," because the thought he "would fain have uttered if it had not seemed too extravagant" was that "until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one... cities will never cease from ill,--no, nor the human race..."Hardly had he said these awful words, when he realized they were a counsel of perfection, and felt embarrassed at the unapproachable grandeur of his idea. So he hastens to add that, of course, "the true pilot" will be called "a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing." But this wistful admission, though it protects him against whatever was the Greek equivalent for the charge that he lacked a sense of humor, furnished a humiliating tailpiece to a solemn thought. He becomes defiant and warns Adeimantus that he must "attribute the uselessness" of philosophers "to the fault of those who will not use them, and not to themselves. The pilot should not humbly beg the sailors to be commanded by him--that is not the order of nature." And with this haughty gesture, he hurriedly picked up the tools of reason, and disappeared into the Academy, leaving the world to Machiavelli.
Thus, in the first great encounter between reason and politics, the strategy of reason was to retire in anger. But meanwhile, as Plato tells us, the ship is at sea. There have been many ships on the sea, since Plato wrote, and to-day, whether we are wise or foolish in our belief, we could no longer call a man a true pilot, simply because he knows how to "pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art." He can dismiss nothing which is necessary to make that ship sail prosperously. Because there are mutineers aboard, he cannot say: so much the worse for us all... it is not in the order of nature that I should handle a mutiny... it is not in the order of philosophy that I should consider mutiny... I know how to navigate... I do not know how to navigate a ship full of sailors... and if they do not see that I am the man to steer, I cannot help it. We shall all go on the rocks, they to be punished for their sins; I, with the assurance that I knew better....
Whenever we make an appeal to reason in politics, the difficulty in this parable recurs. For there is an inherent difficulty about using the method of reason to deal with an unreasoning world. Even if you assume with Plato that the true pilot knows what is best for the ship, you have to recall that he is not so easy to recognize, and that this uncertainty leaves a large part of the crew unconvinced. By definition the crew does not know what he knows, and the pilot, fascinated by the stars and winds, does not know how to make the crew realize the importance of what he knows. There is no time during mutiny at sea to make each sailor an expert judge of experts. There is no time for the pilot to consult his crew and find out whether he is really as wise as he thinks he is. For education is a matter of years, the emergency a matter of hours. It would be altogether academic, then, to tell the pilot that the true remedy is, for example, an education that will endow sailors with a better sense of evidence. You can tell that only to shipmasters on dry land. In the crisis, the only advice is to use a gun, or make a speech, utter a stirring slogan, offer a compromise, employ any quick means available to quell the mutiny, the sense of evidence being what it is. It is only on shore where men plan for many voyages, that they can afford to, and must for their own salvation, deal with those causes that take a long time to remove. They will be dealing in years and generations, not in emergencies alone. And nothing will put a greater strain upon their wisdom than the necessity of distinguishing false crises from real ones. For when there is panic in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the constructive use of reason, and any order soon seems preferable to any disorder.
It is only on the premise of a certain stability over a long run of time that men can hope to follow the method of reason. This is not because mankind is inept, or because the appeal to reason is visionary, but because the evolution of reason on political subjects is only in its beginnings. Our rational ideas in politics are still large, thin generalities, much too abstract and unrefined for practical guidance, except where the aggregates are large enough to cancel out individual peculiarity and exhibit large uniformities. Reason in politics is especially immature in predicting the behavior of individual men, because in human conduct the smallest initial variation often works out into the most elaborate differences. That, perhaps, is why when we try to insist solely upon an appeal to reason in dealing with sudden situations, we are broken and drowned in laughter.
For the rate at which reason, as we possess it, can advance itself is slower than the rate at which action has to be taken. In the present state of political science there is, therefore, a tendency for one situation to change into another, before the first is clearly understood, and so to make much political criticism hindsight and little else. Both in the discovery of what is unknown, and in the propagation of that which has been proved, there is a time-differential, which ought to, in a much greater degree than it ever has, occupy the political philosopher. We have begun, chiefly under the inspiration of Mr. Graham Wallas, to examine the effect of an invisible environment upon our opinions. We do not, as yet, understand, except a little by rule of thumb, the element of time in politics, though it bears most directly upon the practicability of any constructive proposal. We can see, for example, that somehow the relevancy of any plan depends upon the length of time the operation requires. Because on the length of time it will depend whether the data which the plan assumes as given, will in truth remain the same. There is a factor here which realistic and experienced men do take into account, and it helps to mark them off somehow from the opportunist, the visionary, the philistine and the pedant. But just how the calculation of time enters into politics we do not know at present in any systematic way.
Until we understand these matters more clearly, we can at least remember that there is a problem of the utmost theoretical difficulty and practical consequence.
MORE:
An Admirable Folly (Denis MacShane , Wilson Quarterly)
Although the personality strengths and flaws of top political leaders in Europe are under constant scrutiny, nothing matches the minute examination of those who aspire to the White House. John Major succeeded Margaret Thatcher as Britain’s prime minister in 1990 without anyone knowing or reporting that he was carrying on a passionate affair with a fellow Conservative member of Parliament and minister named Edwina Currie. The story came out only when she published her diaries after both had left public life. François Mitterrand became president of France while keeping his mistress and their child in a Paris apartment. I am not making a moral point, but a practical one. To the European eye, the American news media’s relentless invasion of the privacy of those who seek the nation’s highest office is another factor that firms up the perception that personality rather than policy is central to U.S. presidential contests.Another striking difference between the American and European styles of electoral warfare arises from the fact that paid political advertising is banned from European television, removing some of the heat and personal vitriol from campaigns and keeping the focus on policy differences. I once showed a group of hard-bitten British political infighters the Willie Horton ad George H. W. Bush’s backers used to destroy Michael Dukakis in 1988, featuring the African American Horton, who committed violent crimes while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. These veterans of the British political wars sat back in horror at the vicious but effective crudeness of the attack, with its blatant exploitation of fears about race and crime.
In British, German, and Spanish elections, televised political pitches are limited to formulaic party broadcasts. Each party is allocated a number of slots—usually of up to five minutes—after the main evening news. An independent commission oversees the broadcasts, and while the tone is partisan, direct onslaughts are out of bounds. Some broadcasts simply present the party leader talking directly to viewers—as boring as can be, especially compared to the normal fizz and snap of television advertising in Europe.
Because European politicians have little direct access to the public through the media, journalists are the perpetual mediators (which leaves politicians perhaps even more obsessed than their American counterparts with controlling the news). Televised inquisitions of wannabe government leaders are a major feature of elections. Some countries have formal debates in which the main candidates answer questions from a panel moderated by journalists. Face-to-face debates between aspirants do sometimes occur (though not, oddly, in Britain, where no prime minister has ever consented to debate the leader of the opposition). Yet, as in the United States, the TV duels usually disappoint, as both candidates are prepared and coached to be expert on defense so that punches rarely land. Moreover, since, other than in France, there are usually more than two main party leaders bidding to win seats in the parliament, there is rarely a one-on-one duel. Instead, European candidates endure tough individual inquisitions by respected TV political journalists who avidly seek to trip them up. This is a continuous process, not confined to elections, and any politician in Europe who aspires to high office has to face regular hard-hitting interviews on TV and the still-popular European radio services such as the BBC, which command big audiences for political programs every week.
Aspiring American presidents mostly avoid such rigors, especially during the primaries, when candidates can largely confine their audiences to the adoring crowds of staged town hall meetings and the small caucuses in some supporter’s living room. Anyone hoping to lead a government in Europe has to convince the public and party professionals over months, if not years, by dominating in parliament, public meetings, and the press, and by walking on the hot coals of a televised grilling without flinching or fumbling. By the time an election arrives, a principal candidate will have been battle hardened in dealing with the toughest of broadcast interrogations. When Tony Blair sought to oust Britain’s Conservatives from power in 1997, he already had 14 years of tough parliamentary experience behind him and had forced his Labor Party to come to terms with economic and geopolitical modernity by imposing his will upon recalcitrant Labor leftists. But the Tories still sought to depict him as Bambi—a child without experience.
However, the greater scrutiny does not necessarily make for better leaders. Europe has had its share of duds. Although politicians such as John Major in Britain and Jacques Chirac in France won elections, the economic, social, and foreign policies of their countries under their stewardship were unimpressive. The Austrian Socialists won power in the fall of 2006, but so ineffective was the new Socialist chancellor that he had to dissolve his government and call fresh elections after less than two years in office. The center-left administration headed by Romano Prodi in Italy won power in 2006 but was so incoherent it could not stay in office for more than 20 months. Even under the presidential system in France, both Mitterrand and Chirac found themselves in office but having to share power with opposition parties that had a majority in the National Assembly and could determine who would be prime minister and hold other cabinet posts.
-Walter Lippmann (Wikipedia)
-OBIT: Lippmann: Philosopher-Journalist (TIME, Dec. 23, 1974)
-OBIT: Walter Lippmann, Political Analyst, Dead at 85; Walter Lippmann, Eminent Writer on Public Affairs for Six Decades, Is Dead (ALDEN WHITMAN, December 15, 1974, NY Times)
-The New Republic (Founder)
-AMERICAN WRITERS: walter Lippmann (C-SPAN)
-HYPERTEXT: Public Opinion by Walter Lippman
-INFO: Public Opinion (Wikipedia)
-BOOK SITE: Liberty and the News (Princeton University Press)
-ETEXT: A Preface to Politics by Walter Lippmann (Gutenberg)
-EXCERPT: Isolation and Expansion from Isolation and Alliances: An American Speaks to the British (Walter Lippman)
-ESSAY: Debunking Intelligence Experts: Walter Lippmann Speaks Out (Walter Lippman, 1922, New Republic)
-ESSAY: CONTAINMENT: 40 Years Later : The Cold War: This article is excerpted from a series of articles that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in 1947; the full series was republished by Harper & Brothers under the title, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (Walter Lippmann, Spring 1987, Foreign Affairs)
-ESSAY: The Museum of the Future: It was after several visits to the National Gallery in Washington to see the paintings from the Berlin galleries that WALTER LIPPMAN, made newly aware of the inaccessibility of most great works of art, reached these conclusions about the museum of the future. This paper is the substance of an address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association of Museums (Walter Lippmann, October 1948, The Atlantic)
-ESSAY: Blockade Proclaimed (Walter Lippmann, 25 October 1962, NY Herald Tribune)
-ESSAY: Cuba and the Nuclear Risk: Those of a skeptical nature in the United Kingdom and in France have raised the question of whether the United States could be trusted to defend the NATO countries in all contingencies, and if not, whether it might be wiser to have a nuclear striking force of European origin. This is Walter Lippmann's resounding answer, which he delivered in Paris on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Paris Herald-Tribune. (Walter Lippmann, February 1963, The Atlantic)
-REVIEW: AMERICA'S FUTURE; Pictured in a Decidedly Quaint Modern Novel: a review of Philip Dru: Administrator by Edward House (WALTER LIPPMANN, December 8, 1912, NY Times)
-Walter Lippmann (Spartacus)
-Guide to the Walter Lippmann Papers (Yale University)
-PROFILE: Elucidator (TIME, Sep. 27, 1937)
-ESSAY: Journalism and its discontents: Ninety years after Walter Lippmann first railed against the complicity of the media in wartime propaganda, we're back at ground zero: Editor's note: The following is the author's afterword for a reissue of Walter Lippman's "Liberty and the News," to be published this month by Princeton University Press (Sidney Blumenthal, Salon)
-ESSAY: 1922: Walter Lippmann and John Dewey debate the role of citizens in democracy (History of Education: Selected Moments of the 20th Century, A work in progress edited by Daniel Schugurensky)
-ESSAY: Walter Lippmann and the Phantom Public (Stephen Bender, Lew Rockwell)
-ESSAY: The Elusive Goal of Mastery: The Shadow Side of Technological Control (Wilfred M. McClay, Provocations)
-ESSAY: "Outsider" Stone vs. "Insider" Lippmann (Myra MacPherson)
-ESSAY: FACT AND FANCY AS TO "SUPPRESSION OF NEWS" (NY Times, 3/21/1920)
-ESSAY: "Can Democracy Work?" (Eric Alterman, December 23, 1999)
-REVIEW: of Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism 1911-1939, by John M. Jordan (Brink Lindsey, Reason)
-AWARD: Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient: Walter Lippmann
-ARCHIVES: Walter Lippmann (The Atlantic)
-ARCHIVES: Walter Lippmann (Find Articles)
-REVIEW: of Liberty and the News by Walter Lippmann (MICHAEL SCHUDSON, December 31, 2007, The Nation)
-REVIEW: of Liberty and the News (Scott Horton, Harper's)
-REVIEW: of Liberty and the News (David L. Ulin, LA Times)
-REVIEW: of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (Neofusionist)
-REVIEW: of Public Opinion (Frumkina R., Social Reality)
-REVIEW: of Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann, edited by John Morton Blum (John C. Chalberg, National Review)
-REVIEW: of Public Philosopher (Warren F. Kimball, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW: of Conversations with Walter Lippmann (Christopher Lasch, NY Review of Books)
-GOOGLE BOOK: Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel
-REVIEW: of Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel (Anthony Lewis, NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW: of Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Thomas Griffith, TIME)
-REVIEW: of Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Harry C. McPherson, Jr., Foreign Affairs)
-INTERVIEW: with Ronald Steel (Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley)
-VIDEO INTERVIEW: with Ronald Steel (Richard D. Heffner, 1980, The Open Mind)
Syria plays hardball with the Saudis (Sami Moubayed, 10/07/08, Asia Times)
One of the first to realize that the Syrians are overpowering the Saudis in Lebanon was Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a strongman of the March 14 Coalition. He realized that the US-imposed isolation of Syria has crumbled, after Bashar Al Assad's visit to Paris in July 2008. The Turks and the Qataris are firmly behind Syria in its indirect peace talks with Israel, a strong counterbalance to the Saudis, which might result in a peace treaty as of mid-2009. If that happens, the Hariri Tribunal (on which the Saudis had placed high hopes) will be consigned to history.The US administration, wrapped in controversy in Iraq, is clearly uninterested in regime change in Syria, as was the case several years ago. Their ally, Abdul-Halim Khaddam, has by all accounts ruined himself by betting on the wrong horse in 2005. What's worse, the Saudi-trained and funded March 14 forces were defeated on the streets of Beirut in May, when they tried to confront Hezbollah.
Within hours, Hezbollah rounded up all militiamen on the payroll of Saudi Arabia and forced the cabinet of Prime Minister Fouad al-Siniora to back down on legislation taken earlier against Hezbollah. It was clear: the US and Saudi Arabia lost the war for Beirut, and Syria and Iran won.
When fighting shifted to the Druze villages on Mount Lebanon, Hezbollah fighters encircled Jumblatt's home - despite all the backing he had from the Saudis - but did not invade it. He got on the telephone with speaker Nabih Berri (who is pro-Syrian and strongly allied to Iran) and said, "Tell Sayed Hassan Nasrallah I lost the battle and he wins. So let's sit and talk to reach a compromise."
Last month, Jumblatt went further, accusing Hariri in the Beirut daily al-Akhbar of building a militia and allying himself with Islamic hardliners. Speaking about the arms of the Hariri team, Jumblatt said, "To form a militia today? To face whom? Hezbollah? This is crazy."
More recently, what worried both the Saudis and Jumblatt was the semi-rapprochement that started developing between Syria and the US. Last month, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at her request, and discussed a variety of issues related to the Middle East.
That was the second meeting between both ministers since May 2007. According to the Syrian minister, Rice showed willingness to support Syrian-Israeli peace, a u-turn in the American position, which until now, has been uninterested in the indirect talks taking place in Turkey.
This week, the Doha-based al-Jazeera news agency quoted American "sources" saying that they were reconsidering their policies towards Syria during what remains of the George W Bush administration. A "senior US official" was quoted repeating exactly that on Israeli radio, adding that this would lead to the lifting of sanctions imposed on Syria by the Bush administration since 2003.
The Syrians believe, although they have not said it bluntly, that the Saudis are furious at Syria's repeated diplomatic successes. Eager for vengeance, they are now financing Islamic fundamentalism in Lebanon to strike at both Hezbollah and Syria and have not yet digested the outcomes of May 2008.
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Justices attend annual Red Mass (CHRIS RIZO, 10/05/08, Legal Newsline)
Five members of the U.S. Supreme Court were among those who on Sunday attended the annual Red Mass, held the day before the nation's highest court begins its fall term.Four of the five Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court - Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas - attended the Mass presided over by Cardinal John Patrick Foley, a Vatican official.
Associate Justice Samuel Alito did not attend the Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, joined his colleagues for the service.
Author of anti-Barack Obama book detained in Kenya (Lee Glendinning, 10/07/08, guardian.co.uk)
Jerome Corsi, who wrote The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, is being held at immigration headquarters in Nairobi while his immigration status is checked.Police picked Corsi up from his hotel today because he did not have the temporary work permit needed to conduct business in Kenya, according to Carlos Maluta, a senior immigration official. "We still haven't decided what to do with him," he said.
If the anti-NAU cause has a prophet, it is Corsi. In 2004, Corsi was a leading spokesman for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; last year, he co-wrote a book on the Minuteman Project with its founder, Jim Gilchrist. Earlier this year Corsi published a book, "The Late Great U.S.A.," and it was here - and in his columns on the conservative websites WorldNetDaily and Human Events - that the NAU conspiracy theory emerged in full flower.A new continental government will grow out of the tri-national working groups set up by the SPP, complete with bureaucratic agencies outranking the three national legislatures, and a North American Court able to overrule national courts. There is talk, Corsi writes, of issuing North American passports, and of meshing the three nations' militaries. And the infrastructural backbone of the sprawling new superstate is already being built: The NAFTA Superhighway, a "four-football-fields wide" Mississippi of concrete and rail along which goods, cheap labor, narcotics, terrorists, and pandemics will flow unimpeded from Mexico (and, via Mexico's Pacific ports, from China) into the United States and on to Canada.
Corsi said in an interview that his belief in the NAU stemmed from his realization that it was the only logical explanation for the Bush administration's refusal to police the US-Mexico border adequately. "I kept asking myself why, six years into the war on terror, was Bush not securing the border?" he said.
When he heard about the SPP, he had his answer: Bush, bent on creating the NAU, saw the border as a near-anachronism, fated for irrelevance in a North American superstate.
"He's creating a fait accompli," said Corsi. "First you change the North American reality, then you can change the regulations."
Corsi's warning cry and gift for detail have given the theory traction in circles where anxieties about immigration and corporate oligarchy intersect. Lou Dobbs, whose CNN show portrays both free trade and increased immigration as sops to multinational corporations and body blows to the middle class, has devoted investigative segments to the NAU, the amero, and the NAFTA Superhighway.