framing fail

DeMint is now unable at this point to speak with proper grammar. TNR:

[Y]esterday on ABC 's "This Week," Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, whom Michelle Cottle recently profiled in TNR's pages, took this practice to a comically nonsensical extreme:

DEMINT: We can't promote freedom and democracy by repressing free speech. That's not the way to do it. I think people should be able to come together in associations and organizations and spend money to get their message out. I think that's going to promote the democrat process, instead of really what we've got now, is where you essentially give the labor unions carte blanche over our system, grassroots as well as spending.

The democrat process? DeMint has so thoroughly conditioned himself to avoid the label "Democratic" that he apparently now has trouble uttering the word even when it comes with a small 'd.'

Ugh.

Tea Party's roots

Las Vegas Sun: "The Tea Party's (old) paranoia"

Beck and the Tea Party movement of which he is a central figure are often portrayed as a new and exotic political phenomenon. Pollsters treat the Tea Party movement like a third political party, and indeed, it is especially popular at the moment among unaffiliated voters new to politics.

For voters — most recently in last week’s Massachusetts special election — who believe big government and big business are engaged in a corrupt marriage, the movement feels like a refreshing voice for average people who aren’t in those backrooms and so aren’t getting cut in on the deals, like during health care reform negotiations.

Indeed, Kay Lawrence, a retired art gallery manager who attended a Tea Party event in Las Vegas recently, voices this complaint: “We’re sick of these sweetheart deals.”

For all its apparent freshness, however, the Tea Party movement is neither new nor novel, historians and political scientists say.

It is firmly rooted, in its ideology, rhetoric and — there’s no polite word for it — its paranoia, in the post-World War II American right.

Connecting them back to the Birchers and others.

professor label

NYT: "Professor is a label that leans to the left."

A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.

Gets to Bourdeiu classifications thing, also the efforts to construct political identities over generations. Good assignment for CP.

culture industry - Ailes edition

1. NYT article on Roger Ailes and his pernicious influence. ("Fox chief at the pinnacle of news and politics") Good Perlstein quote that provides good hook to use in culture war II week.

2. Also, Digby writes about the Post ombudsman finally addressing the paper's outsourcing of content to the right-wing Peterson group Fiscal Times. Opening section:

The Washington Post ombudsman finally responded to the complaints about the paper's inappropriate relationship with Pete Peterson and his new "news" operation the Fiscal Times. He says there's nothing wrong with it because Peterson has hired good reporters and the stories will be edited by the paper's staff.

Dean Baker wonders if he would say the same thing if the paper contacted with the NRAs "Firearms Gazette" or the tobacco industry's "Smoking Today." After all, he seems to think that theFiscal (End) Times can be trusted, with safeguards, to write unbiased copy. But here's the rub:

Can anyone imagine the Peterson Foundation putting a story showing how much the failure of the Fed to combat the housing bubble added to country's debt? How about a piece that showed that the U.S. deficit problem is driven entirely by our broken health care system?

No, these pieces, or many others like them, are not going to run in the Fiscal Times, because that is not what Peter Peterson wants to buy with his millions. And, the very good reporters who have signed up to work for the Fiscal Times know very well what the boss wants, even if he does not intervene directly in their reporting.

Culture industry meets culture war! Good for the last weeks.

3. Glen Greenwald on the new court gossip book that's dominated news the last few days. First two grafs suffice:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book,Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is pouring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.

This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is. The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent littleVersailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze. Virtually every "political news" TV show is hyping it. D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting howintensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations. Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.

As he notes in closing: The people who brought you two years of Bill Clinton's penis haven't gone anywhere. They've only gotten stronger.

Nobel Peace Price, 2009 vs 1905

Interesting read in HuffPost today from James Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers, and the new The Imperial Cruise), using Obama's Prize receipt yesterday as a bridge to talk about Teddy Roosevelt's long-ago win.

Article has good comments about modernity, Japanese-American affinities in this period:

Roosevelt viewed Asia through strict ideological lenses. One of his theories was that the Chinese and Koreans were declining "impotent" races. In contrast, Roosevelt believed that the Japanese were a rising "potent" race, "a wonderful and civilized people ... entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world." About the Russians, Roosevelt wrote, "No human beings, black, yellow or white could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant -- in short, as untrustworthy in every way -- as the Russians."

By supporting Japan, Roosevelt believed he was championing America's long-term interests in North Asia. When the Japanese military ignited the Russo-Japanese War with a surprise attack (which would resemble their later attack on Pearl Harbor) on the Russian navy at Port Arthur without a declaration of war, the Russians naturally condemned the action as a shameful violation of international norms. Not so Roosevelt, who wrote privately to his son, "I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game."

The crux of much of the article is that TR was actually working with Japan throughout the negotiations - and therefore kind of scummy, if you think about it. Even worse, actually criminal and impeachable:

Three weeks later in a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, Roosevelt approved the Japanese takeover of Korea and agreed to "an understanding or alliance . . . among Japan, the United States and Great Britain . . . as if a treaty had been signed." The "as if" was key, because by making this secret treaty without Senate approval, Roosevelt was committing an unconstitutional act.

Bradley says TR encouraged the Japanese to think in Monroe Doctrine terms about Asia. Wonder how that turned out?

Article would make good link in 002, 132.

The Left at War

Tapped has a review of Berube's new book, The Left at War. Review begins with the closure of the Birmingham School:

In June of 2002, a British university dissolved one of its smaller departments. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was shuttered, and students eager to research the culture of soccer hooliganism or the effect of teen-rag advice columns on adolescents' burgeoning sexuality were effectively cast adrift. Officials at the University of Birmingham cited low marks on research evaluations as reason for the closure. The centre's defenders cried foul, speculating it was punishment for the department's history of radicalism. Nine months later, the United States would lead an invasion of Iraq, setting in motion a war still not over. Could the prevention of the former have helped stop the latter -- save the cultural theorists, save the world?

Liberal blogger and "dangerous" academic Michael Bérubé would like us to at least consider it. In The Left at War, Bérubé links progressives' inability to control the conversation on national security during the Bush administration to cultural studies' failure to deliver on its promise of a vibrant New Left. And in the process, he also tries to imagine a newer and better one -- a left that both knows what is worth fighting for and how to fight for it.

Possible good last reading for CP, since it gets to some of the problems with cultural studies, and the possibility of creating anything in the real world.

Professionalism and PhDs

Ugh. Great article though. Louis Menand in Harvard Magazine: "The PhD Problem. On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy's self-renewal."

The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well.

Very interesting observation that CP kids would really like this - systems of knowledge, power-knowledge, its production, and the like.

Remember remember 11 November

LGM argues that 11/11 shouldn't just be a day for veterans, but for WWI. But that will never happen.

Uses the post as an excuse to link Robert Bourne's 1918 essay that gave us the famous quote "War is the health of the state." I had not read that in a long time - would make a fantastic pairing with Weber for week 2 of CP.

The gist: In republics, the state fades - or at least we think that it does. In reality it lies dormant waiting for war to allow it to take over again.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.

LGM commentary reminds us of Bourne's own situation when he wrote this - destitute, because he was driven from opinion journalism by the Wilsonian insanity of WWI.

decline of conservative intellectualism

WSJ has an article about how Palin represents the Republicans' 20 (40?) -year slide into anti-intellectual populism. What once was a movement of ideas and exchange has (long) become about denigrating knowledge, the people who have it, and the institutions that produce it:

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on "The New American Right" that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter's influential "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963). But over the next decade and a half all that changed.

He chronicles the rise of conservative intelligentsia, and describes it as a refreshing alternative to then-ascendent liberalism and the post-60s craziness of leftist politics. But then, in the 80s, "leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an 'adversary culture of intellectuals.'"

Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

And with Palin they reached their apotheosis. The question is where it goes from here.

Whose empire?

Mark Mazower's book Hitler's Empire gets reviewed in the Washington Post. ("Axis of Incompetence") Sounds like a good book, but the review itself is noteworthy because of how popularity-seeking it is. Mazower gives it a snappy title, the Post puts a snappy headline, and the body reads like the Nazis wore blue suits and red ties.

The reason: Nazi articles of faith amounted to grotesque fantasies about how the New Order would function, and they couldn't possibly survive prolonged, or even relatively short, clashes with reality.

An interesting fixation on photography and humiliation, meant to evoke Abu Ghraib.

In the midst of a widening conflict, German officials methodically photographed and examined Polish families, discriminating in favor of those who appeared to have "the soundest German blood." All of which was guaranteed to stir resentment. Even Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, one of the German commanders in Poland, noted: "The idea that one can intimidate the Polish population by terrorism and rub their noses in the dirt will certainly prove false."

Will have to check out the incidents that the review describes. Have never really encountered foced pseudo-medical photography before (but of course it makes total sense if they did).

Possible assignment in combination with book-review paper, or for own paper about historicity.

The Obama Doctrine

The American Prospect interviews Obama's foreign policy team and gives him his own Doctrine. It's not just about specific foreign policy issues, but about - as he often says - "the mindset that got us into war in the first place." And more than anything, it's about Democrats finally abandoning their reflexive tendency to play Republican light because they fear looking weak.

Obama is offering the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we've heard from a serious presidential contender in decades. It cuts to the heart of traditional Democratic timidity. "It's time to reject the counsel that says the American people would rather have someone who is strong and wrong than someone who is weak and right," Obama said in a January speech. "It's time to say that we are the party that is going to be strong and right." (The Democrat who counseled that Americans wanted someone strong and wrong, not weak and right? That was Bill Clinton in 2002.)

That's a bit unfair to Clinton, I think, because it comes off as if he's advocating being wrong. I think he was just observing, accurately, the reason Dems got pummeled that year: they hadn't stood up for their beliefs. But of course his wife is Exhibit A of that, as are most of the Boomer Dems in leadership over the last 15 years.

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.

A good start for a new century. If a few years too late... but it's never too late!

yelling "appeasement"

They always do it, and they're always wrong. Peter Scoblic in the LA Times:

if there is anything that has been discredited by history, it is the argument that every enemy is Hitler, that negotiations constitute appeasement, and that talking will automatically lead to a slaughter of Holocaust-like proportions. It is an argument that conservatives made throughout the Cold War, and, if the charge seemed overblown at the time, it seems positively ludicrous with the clarity of hindsight.

He goes through the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter, and Reagan administration examples. It's insane. These people are warmongering psychopaths at every turn. They do not change their tune. Our foreign policy successes have for 60 years come when they are ignored, either by Democrats or by their own party. Even in Bush II:

The Bush administration has been little different, refusing for years to talk to North Korea or Iran about their nuclear programs because it wanted to defeat evil, not talk to it. The result was that Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon and Iran's uranium program continued unfettered. (By contrast, when the administration negotiated with Libya -- an act that its chief arms controller, John Bolton, had previously derided as, yes, "appeasement" -- it succeeded in eliminating Tripoli's nuclear program.)

But nooooo, can't talk to Iran. What ignorance.

more millennials - the smackdown finally comes

Finally, someone says what I've been thinking about all the millenial praise going on right now. (Robert Landham, "Generation Slap" in Radar Online) It's those Boomers again, praising the Ys as much as they buried the Xs:

The boomers' decades-long spin campaign against Generation X has entered a new phase as they've begun to promote Millennials at our expense. Lest you think I'm paranoid, the proof of their plot to elevate the so-called "Internet generation" can be discovered by anyone who knows how to use Google. As it turns out, my generation founded the company. So, to prove my point, let's Google back in time to provide a little context.

On Monday, July 16, 1990, the largely baby boomer–run Time published a cover story called "Twentysomething." It was the one of the magazine's best-selling covers in history, and introduced Generation X—we were known as the baby busters then—to the public, largely defining how we were perceived as a generation. Those who read it will recall that the piece possessed the journalistic muster of a Dateline story on poisonous dog food imports from China. In short, "Twentysomething" was meant to alarm the public into believing they'd raised a generation of stoic nihilists who, as one interviewee stated, were destined to be America's "carpenters and janitors." The only thing preventing us from flushing America's future down the toilet was our lack of initiative. We were too slack to flush.

Reminds me of a statement by Michael Hais in the FDL Book Salon thread on Millennial Makeover (comment 197):

In our PPT presentation, Morley and I show Time and Newsweek magazine covers taken from issues ten years apart–the former when Gen-Xers were teens and the latter when Millennials were teens. In the older picture, all of the Gen-X teens were dressed in black, none were smiling, and none were looking at any of the others in the pictures. In the newer cover, all of the Millennials were dressed in bright colors, smiling, and toching one another. It surely captured the individualism and pessimism of the X’ers and the optimism and unity of the Millennials.

What a dumb statement. Those covers are STAGED images. Boomer-constructed stereotypes of the generations after theirs. It's like Reality Bites, where the footage the Xers shot the whole film is re-cut into an acerbic, nihilistic hit job on their generation. (Done, as Lanham notes, by a few sellout Gen-X traitors catering to corporate Boomer types.)

more appeasement

Yglesias links a study from the Army War College - Jeffrey Record's "Appeasement Reconsidered." Very cool report on how the events of 1938 have been utilized in postwar America to justify aggressive reactions to possible foreign policy challenges.

From the conclusion:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of overestimating a security threat.

Assign this as an optional reading during Hitler week, to remind how history is used in public discourse.

Fatherhood at Christian retreats

PZ Myers linked this Matt Tiabbi story from Rolling Stone ("Jesus Made Me Puke"), wherein the writer infiltrates a Ted Hagee weekend retreat. To get a look at the unbridled craziness. And it worked, of course.

Really good and entertaining writing, and also some fatherhood issues worth keeping track of. First, the main pastor himself was - of course - abandoned by his dad. This is all part of "the wound":

The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.

In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his "normal."

"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"

The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.

Then, the writer has to make up his own story:

"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."

....

I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought — after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.

It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.

It gets even more hiliarious from there, as the writer realizes that this might not have been the most productive lie -- since he has to now spend a weekend writing his autobiography....

"I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands."

Awesome. But it gets serious again with the father issues at hand...

Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family — your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.

Of course, the writer soon discovers that his hosts view all this as an eternal struggle, a "generational curse." And worse, he starts to see how effective these rituals are in transforming inner personalities of even a jaded writer like himself:

by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

Overall, a very good piece worth assigning. Or, his forthcoming book.

Washington in 17 years

WaPo presents some futurology projected at 17 years out. So, 2025. ("Washington's Future, A History") Some interesting ideas... who knows if any of it pans out, but could be useful to assign in last class along with World Without Us.

Achilles' Shield

From Atrios, a W.H. Auden poem that I'd never heard. And it. is. TEH. AWESOME! Seems to be a reversal of the Achilles' Shield image in Book 18 - instead of depicting on the shield a tableau of Greek society, this image reveals the destruction of society and morality when it turns its energies to war. The stanzas with shorter lines are Thetis looking over Hephaestus' shoulder expecting the images Homer described, but the longer lines describe what H. placed there -- images of war. She weeps at the end.

The opening:

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
 And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
 His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
 And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
 No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
 Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Assign this next Iliad class.

FISA history

Link from Glen about the FISA court and its history. (source: Electronic Privacy Information Center - EPIC! No, not that one.) Before 2003 it had NEVER denied the application. As Glen notes, it's crazy that the leftmost position in this debate is the defense of an institution even conservatives suspected as a danger to democracy. It

was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function. The FISA court was long the symbol of how severe are the incursions we've allowed into basic civil liberties and open government.

Glen goes on to describe the series of newspapers and public figures to cast doubt on it over the years. Good piece with broad context of current debate.

Assassins!

Kevin Drum asks whether assassins really succeed in their goals, or whether they set them back. I had always assumed the latter... my historical studies have shown that violence begets violence.

But Henry Farrell chimes in with a link to a new study "Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War" (pdf here) that says "on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy". Interesting.

HF also links to another study (Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, "The Political Consequences of Assassination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, forthcoming) whose findings

support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations’ effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated

Interesting pair of articles.

Who Hates Whom

It's an interesting primer on current ethnic/sectarian conflicts, AND it contains a grammar lesson in its title! What's not to like?

And he's putting up bonus chapters for conflicts that couldn't make the book due to space considerations. Here's the first one, on Senegal. Funny/sad quote to end it:

Finally, Dakar residents also harbor a much more recent resentment -- toward George W. Bush, who made a televised speech from Gorée Island in 2003.

Other high-profile figures ranging from the Pope to President Clinton to Nelson Mandela have made similar stops with minimal incident. However, according to Reuters (in a widely-published article no longer on their own site), before Bush’s arrival, Senegal’s national capital was shut down, over 1000 residents were taken off the streets, and the roads in and out of the capital were closed. (More from a local witness here.) Then, on the morning of Bush’s speech, the residents of Gorée Island itself were rounded up and herded onto a soccer field, out of sight of the cameras, where they were forcibly held for six hours until the event was finished.

The US president then spoke of his deep belief in liberty and equality, with no hint of irony.

The Senegalese president was instructed not to speak.