March 27, 2008
Declaration of Exasperation II
Perhaps the last post deserved to be accompanied by some art.
Posted by dag at 8:28 PM | Comments (0)
Declaration of Exasperation
Flipping channels (I'm working from home today) I ran across a CNN article about Clinton's recent letter-writing campaign against Nancy Pelosi for her suggestion that Super Delegates should vote with the will of the people (which would, of course, benefit Obama).
Incredibly, her supporters are also pointing out that pledged delegates are not, strictly speaking (of course), bound to vote as the voters they represent suggested. In essence, they are arguing that she does not need popular consent within her party to be its candidate is entitled to be her party's candidate, regardless of the voice of the voters in her party. No doubt a similar argument is in development for November.
On a completely unrelated note (I assure you) I was flipping away from the conclusion of an episode of HBO's superb John Adams that featured the spectacle of the delegates to the Continental Congress standing by as the Declaration of Independence was read for the first time.
A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Posted by dag at 1:00 PM | Comments (2)
March 5, 2008
The Incredible, Indomitable Clintons
Last night I had an epiphany (couldn't you smell the smoke?): the Clintons simply cannot be killed by conventional weapons.
By the logic that kept her in the race thus far, I now find it highly unlikely that Hillary will pull out ahead of the convention. Even if Obama continues to slowly build his delegate lead, Hillary will put everything on winning super delegates and getting the Michigan and Florida delegates seated. After all, there is always that mathematical possibility.
Well, maybe its about time: its been a good 40 years since we had a 1968 in the Democratic Party. After all, what's worth doing is worth doing disastrously.
Posted by dag at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2008
A Lion Has Passed
In other news, that cheeky little chap Gary B. Trudeau and I are in agreement for the first time:
postscript: Don't bother asking me how I could spend three decades reading and enjoying Trudeau's stuff yet disagreeing with him about most of the large and small points .... even I can't answer that question.
Update:
The NY Times provided the following image of the Great One at work:
Now that's what I call an office.
I must admit that in this regard Buckley and I can even call Al Gore a Fellow Traveler:
Posted by dag at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
October 3, 2007
Over-reach
Recently, in fleeting moments of clarity, I've been thinking a great deal about the intellectual chest-thumping going on in the Liberal blogosphere and I have reached the conclusion that if it ever amounts to anything in terms of the direction the (in my mind likely) next Democratic administration will take these people may actually be sowing the seeds of the resurgence of the Republican party.
This post at Open Left is a prime example of the kind of silly political logical leap to which I am referring. Never mind the obvious problems (for instance, this guy in all reality probably has about as nuanced an understanding of GM's problems as I do, which is to say that he's talking out his ass), what strikes me as interesting is the kind of generalized political opening people like him see in the current unpopularity of the Bush administration. And I think this trickles down to the everyday rank and file (at least according to my own gross casual empiricism). The other day someone explained to me "the people have had it with this empty, Reagan-style robber capitalism; the time has come for a big coalition that brings everyone back together to understand that was wrong and focus more on things social justice and the environment." If my liberal friends are thinking it, surely all of them are. These people are like a latter-day Bison herd.
The only trouble with this ambitious outlook is that I suspect there is virtually no political mandate for it outside of the political Left itself. Bush's popularity has suffered in the face of the public perception of an almost unbroken string of errors from Iraq to Katrina, though who knows what the longer view of history will be (and there are reasons to believe that could break either way, a consideration that, by the way, I extend even as a conservative to Presidents like Johnson, Carter and Clinton as well). I also think the end of the Star Wars movies had something to do with it: once you fully explain away a man like Darth Vader, the powerful mystery of someone like Dick Cheney also seems diminished.
But in the end only one among these has been politically decisive: Iraq. Virtually all of his popularity decline (at least the part that has endured once shocks like Katrina largely fell out of the news) has been driven by this war.
And therein lies the problem I think the Left faces: however unpopular Bush is, I don't think that translates into much of an affirmative mandate for their ideas. But I am increasingly convinced that the Left has mistaken his unpopularity, primarily due to this single issue, for just such a mandate. I think you are starting to see (as in the Open Left post mentioned above) the kind of wishful thinking and reaching that comes when people are beginning to lose contact with the political mothership.
(Similarly, their indictments of people on the Right are becoming increasingly shrill and silly. It was also recently explained to me that another symptom of the backward outlook of the Right is the dominance of Left-wing blogs (implication: those on the Left are more savvy and, their favorite term, progressive on the technological front as well). I'm less than convinced. First, has anyone really scientifically surveyed this? Second, if memory serves the Right-wing blogosphere (to the extent that the term is appropriate to describe the scene back then) seemed to be the far more active one during the Clinton years. Which leads me to my third point: even if the Left-wing blogosphere is more active right now, that is most likely merely a symptom of the fact that they are still, in terms of the big Kahuna, the opposition.Wait until the Right is back in that position.)
Of course, this may not matter. I suspect the Democrats will win the White House in 2008 (though that is far from assured), and I think the new occupant will be named Hillary. Whatever else I think of her, I do believe that she is a pretty disciplined and grounded politician. Hillary is not a person who goes easily or often to the Kool Aid well, and so hers is likely to be a mightily disappointing administration for the Left-wing blogosphere. But if that is the case, then the current dreamy visions and sweeping triumphalism of the Left are nothing more than meaningless masturbation. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The only way any of this will matter is if they can exert enough power within the Democratic Party to force people like Hillary to have a serious go at all or some of their ambitions. If that happens (and it has in the recent past: I am convinced that the likes of Michael Moore and MoveOn.org and their ilk, and the contorted posturing they forced Kerry into even as he struggled to maintain a grasp on the middle, were central to Bush's re-election), I am betting that the main beneficiaries will be the Republicans. When you overstep your mandate, American political culture has a way of bringing you back to earth very quickly: just ask Mr. Bush in the wake of his attempted reform of Social Security. The vibes grew terrible, and he could no longer hear himself think over the roar of those damned bats...
As the Bush Presidency continues, I am becoming more convinced that what ails the modern Right is that it has become a victim of its own political success. As a resistance movement in the Seventies looking in, conservatives more or less got it right in diagnosing the sclerosis that had overtaken the country in the wake of the (largely ineffective) New Deal and the (far more effective, and alarmingly so) Great Society and regulatory culture that had grown up in the preceding four decades. The Democrats were (more or less) the establishment. Then Reagan was elected and conservatives were able to put much of their agenda into action, in large part because I think they had gradually built such a strong mandate to do so following Goldwater's defeat (and no, Mr. Krugman, it was not simply an axis of bigotry: lot's of ordinary Americans heard what people like you were peddling back then and simply rejected it).
Here's the problem though: the more you succeed at this business, the less there is of a Left-inspired monstrosity to tear down. You basically run out of fuel, not because you failed but because you succeeded. That is where I see the party now. Some time in the wilderness should be good for it: it will re-focus itself, re-prioritize, impose some political discipline, and the Left will no doubt supply plenty of political oxygen if they do begin to over-reach while in power. Of course, it is possible that the Republicans will, like England's Conservatives, spend a long time in the political wilderness. But American political dynamics suggest that that is unlikely: at the national level ours is just too fiercely competitive a political culture to breath easy for long. In other words, I am betting that 2008 will be more like 1976 than 1932. By the same token, I've never thought much of Right-wing triumphalism about their track record in Presidential politics since 1968: a slight electoral advantage does not a clear pattern make, and in any case the Democrats kept re-taking that hill from time to time.
(And if you want to know what I really, really think: the almost immediately terrible approval ratings for the Democratic-controlled Congress (see below) suggest to me that neither of the two Parties has articulated an agenda that really meets the priorities of the current American electorate.)
To be sure, right now there are real openings for the American Left. I think, for example, that there has been real movement in opinion at the level of American political bedrock on the issue of climate change (traditionally one of their issues). Of course, that does not guarantee success either and the Left better look beyond their old, shop-worn playbook if they want to really translate this into workable, enduring policy.
Liberals are starting to feel a kind of political confidence that they have not enjoyed for a generation. In some limited areas, I do think that is warranted. But, even as they revel in Bush's terrible approval ratings, they would do well to consider those of the Democratic-controlled Congress: their little revolution is marching on thin ice. If they want to stick around and have a more enduring legacy, I might suggest they think about a common piece of advice given to overly demonstrative rookie dunkers in college and pro-Basketball: "act like you've been there before and will be there many more times to come."
Posted by dag at 7:55 AM | Comments (2)
May 10, 2007
The Movers are Coming! The Movers are Coming! (Tony and Cherie addition)
Today Tony Blair announced the end of his time at Number 10 Downing is approaching fast. While we are already seeing retrospectives on the Blair era at the substantive level (before we have even actually officially seen the backside of that era), I for one already miss his irrepressible wife Cherie.
Most Americans don't follow goings on across the pond that much, which means they've really lost out on the hilarious saga of the Cherie-end of the Tony&Cherie show. Cherie (pictured above behind the HRH fossils in what is either a jaw breaking yawn or a moment when she just nearly lost control of those well documented anti-Royalist feelings) has been a near constant source of amusement for observers like me for years now. When she isn't defending human rights she's doing her part for Labour each and every day (for what she paid her stylist, she could and should have just hired a general contractor to sand blast the whole surreal edifice away and rebuild completely, but I understand her hesitation: there are only three heavy-engineering firms, two in the US and one in Japan, with the technical know-how to deal with history's most idiotic grin). Her Wikipedia profile contains a brief overview of the various controversies surrounding her. A complete coverage might have required the storage capacity of a whole new Wikipedia. Really, it's rare that a woman like Cherie comes along who can leave Hillary Clinton and Nancy Reagan in the dust, and leaves us so wholly in awe after the years of entertainment she provided. She set a standard for utter shamelessness that should serve as an inspiration for us all.
As the Australian puts it so well, it's now time I guess for the Blair Rich Project. I'll be following that closely: it will be the best thing on TV (even if, on this side of the pond, it will be shown only on obscure cable channels) and I can already tell that Gordon Brown and ...what's her name?...won't be able to hold a candle to Tony and my beloved Cherie.
So long Cherie, and thanks for all the fish.
Posted by dag at 1:24 PM | Comments (0)
May 6, 2007
The Birth of a Nation
From a recent review of Barbara Holland's The Joy of Drinking:
She reminds us that in 1787, two days before their work was done, the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 of whiskey, 22 of port, 8 of hard cider and 7 bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.”
It's no wonder I'm such a strict constructionist.
Posted by dag at 3:08 PM
March 1, 2007
Divided We Stand
From the Washington Post, we have an editorial that gets right down to brass tacks: our government is subject to vicious partisan division because we are.
And speaking of bitter divisions, Carolina and Dook will collide again on Sunday.
Is it just me, or are the televised broadcasts of NCAA, and ACC in particular, hoops much lower quality this year???? Watching the Maryland game this past week, it felt as if Tyler Hansborough was barely in focus for much of the game.
And here comes my rant for the week: the FCC's blackouts for locally televised sporting events CHEAT THE CONSUMER!!! I paid for ESPN HD in large part so that I could watch Carolina in HD. The last Carolina-Duke game was nationally televised throughout the nation on ESPN HD-except in the Chapel Hill-Durham area. Why? Because Jefferson-Pilot sports was televising it locally, and hence ESPN apparently had to block it out.
However, Jefferson-Pilot sports provided the crappiest, low-rent non-HD feed. The game was actually painful to watch. In other words, they did not provide a local substitute for the product WE PAID FOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nice job FCC. Whatever side you are on, it is clearly not that of the consumer. This was state sanctioned theft of something we paid for, pure and simple.
Posted by dag at 10:28 AM
February 5, 2007
Lt. Watada
Why did this guy join the army? The timing of his enlistment leaves one with no choice but to question either the sincerity of his legal defense or his intelligence (how could he have not seen how his enlistment might rapidly bring him to this current pass, given his feelings on the war)? I suspect it is the former: given his family background, I have a feeling that a set play is being run here, and this is part of an ideological agenda (one with which I have few sympathies). Regardless of my own sympathies, the practical consideration remains that the Army cannot allow itself to either become a platform for political theater or a democracy. It is a machine, and he must be hammered for his failure to play his role in it. In an all-volunteer Army, his basic position has no legitimacy whatsoever.
Update: As a colleague just pointed out, it is interesting that he hasn't gotten a single prominent person without an obvious axe to grind viz the Iraq war to defend the legitimacy of what he is doing. For instance, his list of celebrity supporters is basically the standard who's who list of tired old left wing hacks.
Update 2: I agree with much of this. Even to those who support Watada's views (and I'm not one of them) I would offer the following: can you not see how this man's conduct sets a standard that could one day become the beginning of a slippery slope to a Julius Caesar or a Sulla?
Posted by dag at 2:18 PM
January 28, 2007
The Edwards' Pad
Reading today's local rag, it occurred to me that many of you outside of the Chapel Hill area might be unaware of John Edwards' dig. Here is how the "hero of the people" lives.
This is the man who thinks he's some kind of latter-day Tribune of the Plebs just because he had a middle class upbringing.
Posted by dag at 9:49 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2007
Reflections on a Gun Show
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Today I attended a gun show at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds. Partly I did this while I still can: I think the prospect of a strange kind of state paternalism, call it 1984 with Birkenstocks, lurks somewhere not far behind Nancy Pelosi's maniacal grin. I suppose that a history of weak sales resistance coupled with a bizarre lifelong fascination with things that go boom also had something to do with it.
The wife and I arrived at the Fairgrounds just as the show opened at 9am. We were immediately confronted with an outdoor entry line filled with one long, disgruntled slice of America waiting to pay their entry fee. The line was nearly wholly male at this point, and the entire crowd can be categorized into one of the cells of a four-by-four matrix with "too angular" and "too spherical" on one axis and "too scraggly" (a category to which I assign mullet-heads as well) and "too clean cut" on the other.
This was one surly crowd of Red Ne...er, Appalachian Americans. Where had all the love in this country gone? I wondered to myself. It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should not be too vocal about having spent the previous evening watching the opera Die Zauberflöte on DVD while sipping apple brandy from France.
To be fair, the ominous vibes weren't all about the kind of Fear and Loathing the Good Doctor first chronicled. The fact that it was 34 degrees and slightly windy probably had something to do with it. I'm not sure what it is about the South (maybe it's the water, perhaps contaminated by some awful effluent that is a by-product of NASCAR), but cold temperatures just seem colder below the Mason-Dixon line. 34 degrees and slightly windy in Raleigh, North Carolina feels like 11 degrees and gale-force winds in Albany, New York. I'm sure there's some algorithm so translating temperatures, probably developed by some NC State geek in the spare minutes when he wasn't complaining about Duke and Carolina.
After a few minutes in line we spied out friend and neighbor "Dirt Nap" Dan. I call him "Dirt Nap" because every time I hang around with him my odds of taking one increase by 47 percent (for instance, he had the rocks to cut ahead to us in front of this heavily armed crowd). He was forlornly clutching a box of spent brass and mumbling something about saving a buck or two from the entrance fee by carrying it.
I started to survey the line again. Perhaps one third of the men were carrying weapons. Were they planning to sell or trade them? Were they carrying them to gain some sort of psychological edge on the drive home? In the American South it's tough to tell.
The weapons they were carrying were also sort of interesting. They can be placed into two categories: those used to drive back Sherman and those damned Yankees (ie very historical -by which I sometimes mean ratty- looking pieces) and those that could be used to drive back the North Korean army (ie better not let the ATF agents inside get a close look at them).
We finally reached the ticket booth after your typical episode of Southern Efficiency (it only took 94 minutes for two ticket sellers to collect $8 from each of the 41 people in line ahead of us). Now, in my life I have never heard a persuasive argument against the 2nd Amendment. But at the ticket booth I think I finally saw one: the 300+ pound ticket seller in hot pink pants wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed "Gun Show Girl". She smiled at me and winked. Her teeth reminded me of a piranha while the rest of her evoked a kind of down-market Mama Cass, had she lived. Looking at her, I suddenly understood that a noble concept had somehow gone horribly awry across the time and space separating Federal Hall in New York City in 1789 from Raleigh, North Carolina on this gray morning in 2007.
Having gotten through this first circle of hell, we entered the hall where the line broke up into two streams: those who could proceed directly into the convention hall at the Gov. Jim Hunt building and those who needed to have their weapons flexi-cuffed to render them in-operational (after all, we're always been all about safety in North Carolina). As we reached the threshold of the hall things looked promising: roughly two football fields worth of tables that appeared to be devoted to all manner of weaponry. I watched a father and his young sons shuffle in ahead of me and was suddenly seized by a kind of melancholy: I lost out on so much by growing up in Mario Cuomo's New York. I'm sure Proust expressed similar sentiments.
But enough tears, goddamit. This was clearly going to be a savage kind of experience, and I had to gather myself. I had several objectives:
1. A tricked-out kalashnikov. I wanted one with all the bells and whistles: night vision, tactical grips, laser sites, cup holder, cigar cutter. This is, after all, essential equipment for any serious Man of Letters.
2. Accessories for my Springfield Operator.
Unfortunately, I failed at all three. It's not really my fault: contrary to the occasional report in the blogosphere by a bio-diesel drivin', Dennis Kucinich supportin' pocket mulcher who visits one of these things with the expressed purpose of documenting our "disturbing" (an old stand-by word when seized of intellectual constipation consternation) gun culture, the truth is that for people like me (the seriously disturbed) gun shows are often a mighty let down. And this was no exception.
To begin with, the pistol selection was just terrible. Many were older models that looked like they had accompanied John Wayne to "The Sands of Iwo Jima" and been last cleaned shortly thereafter. There were tons of Glocks (the pistol industry's answer to Microsoft) and some other stuff, but few really great tactical pistols (particularly at my preferred caliber, 45ACP). I was looking for the kind of thing that would help me out in a Dallas SWAT kind of situation, whichever side I happened to be on. But it was not to be. And there were no decent accessories for my Springfield Operator.
The Kalashnikovs were pretty uninspiring as well. Particularly when you consider that the Kalashnikov has been subjected to about 3500 variations, the selection at the gun show was pretty narrow. Basically every table had the same three to four variants and, unlike Goldilocks, I was unable to find among them one that was "just right".
The lack of variety also had something to do with the fact that only a minority of the vendors were actually selling firearms. Many were, in fact, selling the kind of junk that floats just below the market niche of your typical Army-Navy store: crappy Nazi and Confederate memorabilia (who buys broken old SS ashtrays and alarm clocks?? James Longstreet beer can holders???); ancient WWI dough-boy helmets; stained and fraying surplus unit patches for the 101st Airborne, 3rd Marine Division; Duluth Animal Control, etc.; rusted Imperial Japanese bayonets; etc. etc.
There seems to be a whole economy based on selling this kind of junk, which most self-respecting soldiers wouldn't even loot off the enemy dead. I can't really understand what drives these people and, more importantly, what they use for fuel. How do they support themselves? They never seem to actually sell anything (if you don't believe me, visit a gun show sometime and watch one of these vendors for a while). Are double-wides outside of Tallahassee really that inexpensive? And what draws them to this life? That's probably a question I'll never be able to answer. My anthropological context is just too different. But I do feel fairly confident that these are the kind of people that think Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby is a drama.
My wife being there also had something to do with my abject failure, particularly in terms of objective 1. Men at gun shows often lament the failure of their wives or girlfriends to "understand them". They don't seem to understand themselves that it is far worse to have a significant other who, like my wife, actually embraces the gun culture.
The problem is that it turns out that women shop for guns like they do for everything else. Sampling the kalashnikovs, my wife rejected one after the other: too heavy; too light; grips too rough; grips too smooth; etc.. Then there are the bizarre aesthetic ("the flow of that receiver does not really go with the motif of the barrel") and sartorial ("I don't have any shoes that match this synthetic stock") reasons.
The customers were an interesting bunch. As devoted as I am to the 2nd Amendment, I must admit that the idea of some of these people being armed does give me pause. Aside from the four varieties in line, I noticed a number of over-buffed faux tough-guy metrosexuals who looked like they had just left NJGuido.com. I saw one lean, urbane, bookish looking twenty-something who looked like he had just stepped off the set of Grey's Anatomy...with one wicked looking Springfield So-Com II slung over his shoulder. Most fascinating to me were the heavily armed and handicapped: people moving around in wheel chairs with machine guns and pistols in their laps. The physics of their setup fascinates me: wouldn't the fierce kick from, for instance, a Galil (which one of them had) make it impossible to fire and remain stationary?? One small man with a walker clutched a Desert Eagle (which, for the uninitiated, is a pistol so fierce I have difficulty firing it with both hands). How does he shoot it without tipping over?? In any case, think hard before you park in a handicap spot.
As the hours wore on (gun shows are huge, and so require time and enormous stamina) I noticed more and more women in the hall. They ranged from the sort that looked like they had just jumped off the pages of "Elle" to those who looked like they...well, hadn't. I wonder what kind of guns elegant and sophisticated women favor. If their sleek cell phones are any guide to the kind of look they were seeking, they were going to be as disappointed as me.
Then there are the athletic types: they shoot like they are riding a mountain bike on a tough trail. I remember visiting an indoor range a few years ago and watching with increasing amazement as a young woman, athletic in a Mia Hamm kind of way, went through her shooting routine with the steely determination and total aerobic control of a spinning class instructor. She must have fired 1000 rounds in fairly short, crisp and efficient order, carefully and quickly retrieving and documenting each target as she did so. If only to chart her progress over time in Excel.
Finally, there are what I call the Bernice Goetz type in honor of Bernhard Goetz, the iconic subway gunman from New York City. Superficially submissive in posture, you get the feeling that one day they will snap and waste the entire office flow chart above them if their boss touches their ass one more time.
Among the vendor tables, I noticed that the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) had set up a booth. Aside from the shakes I get thinking about their organizational mission (to undermine the Constitution), there is something about the look of the agents they put on display at events like this that really un-nerves me. At the ATF, the heavy lifting is done by a bunch of grizzled mountain men. But the "public face" of the ATF is a bunch of clean cut, sharply dressed white-as-Wonderbread young people who somehow come across as a hybrid between cheery (in a sociopathic kind of way) kids from the plain clothes division of the Hitler Youth and the Mormon kids you see proselytizing on UNC's campus. And they always seem to sport a kind of crazed and spacey smile that evokes the devotees of some kind of strange desert cult hopped up on Qualudes all the time.
I wish I had some pics of a new toy, but I don't. Eventually, I gave up hope. I was tired and my eyes were irritated by stealth smoke (a universal truth of gun shows is that you can always smell cigarette smoke but never spot anyone smoking). It was time to re-group and grab some Pho for lunch. Afterward, the wife and I visited Costco where some degree of redemption occurred: they had 2002 Niebaum-Coppola Rubicon. I snatched three bottles.
I hope the May gun show is better: Nancy Pelosi's maniacal grin seems to grow bigger by the day.
Posted by dag at 7:23 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2007
Adjustment
On reflection, I have decided to re-name the category "I, Claudius" to "I, Cicero".
Why? I am motivated by the example of none other than the man himself, Marcus Tullius Cicero:
Author.
Intellectual.
Gadfly.
Coward.
Witness to the last days of the Republic.
But perhaps the other side (ie those destroying the Republic) deserve some sort of intellectual representation in these pages. Should add "I, Gaius" as a category?
Posted by dag at 2:13 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2006
The Jackass Donkey, Part Deux
Virtually everyone is talking about the rise of the populists. So the Democrats may be turning their back on the Clinton Approach.
What would you think of, for instance, an NFL team that enthusiastically latched on to every strategy but the one that has been proven to work?
Posted by dag at 1:39 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2006
The Jackass Donkey
Posted by dag at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
November 8, 2006
Oh yeah: Mike Nifong
If there is one local race that got my blood moving, if only a little, it was the effort to remove our District Attorney Mike Nifong (of the Duke Rape Case fame). Though Nifong is a Democrat, the real issue in this election is was* his character : there are many around Durham who feel that he trumped up charges against the Duke students because political reality (he was an unknown trailing Frida Black in the Democratic primary in a heavily African American city) dictated that he do so. (Of course, there are others who do not feel this way.)
Says the local rag (the News and Observer) of Nifong's opponents:
They can pick Lewis Cheek, a Democratic County commissioner on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate. Cheek says he is an alternative to Nifong but promises that he will not accept the job if he gets the most votes.
Or voters can select Steve Monks, the chairman of the county's Republican Party. Monks' name doesn't appear on the ballot but has to be written in on a blank line. Unlike, Cheek, Monks says he will take the job.
The results of the race:
Mike Nifong (D) 26,116
Lewis Cheek (Una) 20,875
Steve Monks-WI (R) 6,193
(56 of 56 precincts reporting)
Nifong may have gotten the most votes, but given the setup of this whole gig isn't this like coming close to losing to a dead guy?
*The results above leave me totally satisfied that the issue has been settled...totally.
Posted by dag at 11:24 PM | Comments (0)
And speaking of dumb-assed ideas...
Have any of your heard of Measure Y in Santa Monica? I don't object to the spirit of this measure (the marijuana laws are counter-productive and survive more due to the prison industry lobby than anything else), but is it a good idea to make police procedures and priorities subject to popular initiative??? I can easily see how this might end up undermining civil liberties, public safety, etc. if pushed in the wrong directions. This seems to me a dangerous precedent that could lead to the further politicization of police departments.
Update: reviewing the ballot initiatives nationwide, the religious right did not do so well.
Posted by dag at 4:54 PM | Comments (0)
Morning in America?
The Democrats have taken back the House, and it now seems to me that they are likely to re-take the Senate as well. Alas poor Santorum, we knew thee well!
So what does all of this mean? Is this the end of the Republican Revolution? Are the Democrats the new and emerging majority??? I fear that whatever the answers, the most urgent issue confronting our Republic (subsidies to make high-end Burgundy wine affordable) will remain on the public back-burner.
I have a couple of reactions to yesterday's events:
1. This is a vote against (Bush, congressional scandals, Iraq, etc.) rather than for (any kind of coherent Democratic agenda) anything. This sort of thing can buy the Democrats at most an election or two (as with the hang-over from Watergate). To really capitalize on this, the Democrats will have to come up with some kind of politically attractive affirmative agenda. Domestically, the question will be which branch of the party (the self-styled "progressives" or the centrist "Clintonites") will define their agenda. If it is the former, this will likely be a short-lived victory. If it is the latter, we may have an election on our hands in 2008 (though, ironically enough, I think that Sen. Clinton might be a risky choice to pick up the Clintonian standard). In terms of foreign policy, I think the issue gets more clouded: Clinton left no real coherent ideological legacy in that arena. Taking a really critical view of the Clinton era, his foreign policy legacy is as appalling as Bush's, with the possible exception that US casualties were lower and he made Europeans feel all warm and fuzzy. Indeed, most of the things Bush has screwed up involved outstanding challenges and threats from the Clinton era that Clinton tried to keep on hold (so he could simply hand them off to his successor) rather than resolve. And the Democrats have no better idea (from what I can see) what to do in Iraq. Their prescriptions are, on careful inspection, no more than the left-of-center analog to glib Rumsfeldian slogans.
2. In some sense, this might be as much a vote for conservatism as anything else. What I suspect will prove as important as who showed up at the polls is who didn't. I think there has been a certain loss of enthusiasm for the Republicans on the part of conservatives and libertarian types. From Medicare part D to that bloated monstrosity of a highway bill that passed recently, this White House and Congress have consistently delivered exactly the kinds of things that Republican government is supposed to protect us from.
3. In 2000, there were signs of waning Evangelical enthusiasm for the Republican Party (if the religious right had shown up in Florida, there would have been no debate about who won). By dint of an enormous amount of political footwork, Bush, Rove and the gang got them back out in 2004. I wonder whether all of the scandals in Congress took their toll again in 2006. If 2004 was a high-water mark for Evangelical support for the Republicans, I wonder what this will mean in 2008 and beyond. On the one hand, the religious right has been the margin that gave the Republicans such comfortable margins in elections. On the other hand, I have always felt that they represented a sort of ideological vulnerability. Just as the Democrats do best when they dance to the Clinton's tune, the Republicans are probably at their most competitive viz ordinary Americans when they stick to Reagan's big tent conservatism. The problem for both parties is that these positions are both centrist to center right, with considerable overlap. This makes elections more of a random affair driven by, for instance, personal idiosyncracies of the candidates.
4. Ceteris paribus, yesterday's events probably make a Republican presidential victory in 2008 more likely.
Posted by dag at 10:23 AM | Comments (1)
November 2, 2006
Another Zinger from the Post
Posted by dag at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)
November 1, 2006
Spot On
The latest from Robert Samuelson. Am I the only one that notices that most of the best editorials in the past years or so have emerge on the pages of the Post, and not the Times??
Posted by dag at 6:51 PM | Comments (1)
October 31, 2006
Gathering clouds
I only have a few minutes to write today, but wanted to touch on two issues.
First, I have been watching the wrangling over the hand-over of power to a pre-vote caretaker government in Bangladesh with increasing worry. The installment of President Ahmed thankfully does not appear to have exacerbated the situation as badly as some of the alternatives might have. The big test will come on November 3, the deadline for meeting the opposition Awami League's demands for reform. Some of these seem pretty hard to get done by then, though it would seem that the Ahmed has already made some gestures in their direction. What will their response be to partial fulfillment of their demands???
Second, over the past few days I received a couple of emails from web people I know asking for my thoughts on the Stern report on global warming (which suggests that the economic costs of warming could be large). Most of the attempts to predict the economic impact of global warming rely on pretty heavy guess work against spotty facts. The Stern report is no exception. The reality is that even if we fully understood the likely climactic trajectory from a scientific standpoint (which we don't, and won't in any convincing fashion for the forseeable future), predicting the economic consequences is a tricky business. There are just so many variables involved, the partial equilibriun effects (let alone general equilibrium net effects) of which remain the subject of intense research and debate.
Nonetheless, I think that the Economist more or less got the handle, when it suggested that the report is more of a political instrument than a work of serious economic analysis, the purpose of which is to get America off her ass. The desire to see America take the lead is probably driven by several considerations. First, we are the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, and no serious attempt at global stabilization of such gases could ever be made to work without doing something about our enormous and growing contribution, even if we are to be overtaken in the forseeable future by China. Second, we are the Romans, we have the imperium, they respect our authoritaaaay, l'etat c'est us, etc. etc. and as such we still set the fashion. Despite the anti-Americanism so fashionable around the world today, it never ceases to amaze me in my travels the degree to which the really cool kids around the world want to emulate us. On a political level, it is nearly impossible to think, for instance, that China will be swayed by the global crowd pushing atmospheric carbon stabilization without the weight of the US on board.
A third and important but often overlooked argument is that if America changes her ways she will suddenly create a massive market for the latest and greatest in environmentally friendly technology. Make no mistake about it: we have no intention of taking a European out whereby we lose ground for a cooler world. No, as usual, it would be the American style to insist that we have our cake and eat it too. So you have a country with massive wealth, an enormous carbon hole to dig ourselves out of, and the desire to do it with as little sweat and tears as possible. If that doesn't create an exciting new market for a certain type of emergent technology I don't know what does. If the American ship were to change course on this issue, we wouldn't even recognize the environmental technologies of twenty years from now. The promise of our demand would make financially reasonable investment in research and technology that seems irrational right now. This would be a development with extraordinary salutary global effects.
However, there is a giant cloud wrapped around this silver lining (hey, I am a dismal scientist), one that I have already explored in an earlier post: from a strictly self-interested standpoint, the US has little to gain from switching course. Nothing in the Stern report convincingly suggests otherwise. The reality is that the anticipated abatement costs (associated with, for instance, the meaningful US contribution to stabilization of global atmospheric carbon concentrations at any of the suggested thresholds) are large against the likely benefits for us (in terms of the environmental losses we avoid). This is doubly true of China.
This enormous global asymmetry of incentives between sovereign nations has been the 800lb gorilla that activists on this issue have consistently missed. Maybe it seems too dirty to them (the business of haggling over the global environment's future). I'd urge them to remember the following: China, the nation that sacrificed millions to build the Great Wall and the US, a country determined to, for instance, prosecute her Civil War or pursue reality TV programming at any cost, are unlikely simply to volunteer to do something against their interest. Moreover, we are the nation that has endured just too many decades of John Madden's Maddenisms ("they are down 31 to 18, so their strategy now should just be to score two touchdowns", "the only way the Cowboys are gonna win this one is to score more points than the Giants", etc.) to be worn down now by any kind of persistent intellectual assault. So how do you get past an 800lb gorilla? Simple: offer it some bananas.
Posted by dag at 8:17 AM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2006
Housekeeping
I have made a few changes to Aging Disgracefully, mostly in the categories department. First, I have renamed the category "Food" to be "Bread". Why, you might ask? Because it occurred to me that it might be a nice juxtaposition with "Circuses: The Holy Game", another new category. "Circuses: The Holy Game" has been created to cover the all-important upcoming NCAA basketball season.
"Immortal Beloved" will serve as a tag for all posts related to my wife. I chose this in honor of my favorite composer and because it occurred to me that the wife might interpret "The Relentlessly Nagging Shrew" as negative in tone.
"Plinian Eruptions" is a special category reserved for outbursts. I had planned on two categories here: "Plinian Eruptions: Time Warner Cable" and "Plinian Eruptions: Everything Else", but it occurred to me that that might make that area of the site seem too crowded.
"The Bittersweet Symphony" is for music. "The Epicurians" is for every form of indulgence not covered by another specific category.
"The Meditations" is where I'll go on endless and tedious philosphical digressions, each and every turn of which I am sure you, dear readers, will follow with breathless anticipation and excitement.
"I, Claudius" is where I will follow politics in the next few years. It would seem that we may be in for quite a ride in this regard. It is also where I will address all matters related to the Empire, whether of Claudius's time or ours (cleaving to the matter at hand, Cartman had the essential handle then and now: "They Don't Respect Our Authoritaaaay").
Finally, I announce this in "L'Etat", my new category related to the management of Aging Disgracefully.
Update: I have created yet another category, "Dismal Science", to house all of my ramblings on Res Economia.
Posted by dag at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)