a medal for Borat?

BORAT!!!
Originally uploaded by Rude Lovers©.

Borat’s hard work on behalf of his countrymen to promote Kazakh culture abroad is already paying dividends with the U.S. government, over a month before his new movie comes out.

The NY Times reported on Friday:

[President Bush] also discussed Afghanistan in an Oval Office meeting with President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, a Central Asian ally and important oil supplier. The former Soviet republic borders Afghanistan.

Bush thanked Nazarbayev for supporting the war in Iraq and for helping Afghanistan become a stable democracy.
''I have watched very carefully the development of this important country from one that was in the Soviet sphere to one that now is a free nation,'' Bush said as the two sat side by side. Bush offered support for Kazakhstan's desire to join the World Trade Organization.

No mention was made of criticism of Kazakhstan for human rights abuses, corruption and heavily restricted political and civil freedoms.

During their private meeting, however, ''there was encouragement for the government of Kazakhstan to pursue a democratic path,'' said Bush spokesman Snow.

I guess Bush must have been treated to an advance screening of the new movie. How else to explain his willingness to overlook President Nazarbayev’s documented efforts to restrict freedom of the press, conduct sham elections, and enrich his own family at the expense of the Kazakh public.

Human Rights Watch had this to say in its most recent annual report:

An annual report on human rights released by the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in February said the Kazakh government “severely limited citizens’ right to change their government.”

More facts from the 2005 State Department Human Rights Report:

The law prohibits such practices, but police and prison officials at times tortured, beat, and otherwise abused detainees, often to obtain confessions.
. . .
The law does not adequately provide for an independent judiciary. The executive branch limited judicial independence. . . . Corruption was evident at every stage and level of the judicial process.
. . .
The law provides for freedom of speech and of the press; however, the government used a variety of means, including criminal and administrative charges, to control the media and limit freedom of expression.

From the Human Rights Watch report again:

In September, members of the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe voiced doubts about Kazakhstan’s bid for chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The senators pointed to the upcoming presidential election as a test of Kazakhstan’s commitment to democracy. In October 2005, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice visited Kazakhstan on a tour of Central Asian states and praised the republic as an “island of stability.”

A stable source of oil, that is, provided by a stable autocracy. The election the Senators were talking about would be the one Nazarbayev moved up a year to stymie any chance of success by opposition parties. As we know from Iraq under Saddam, stability has little to do with how democratic a society is or what types of freedoms people enjoy.

The BBC has more here

Borat, your fellow Kazakhs salute you!

ROTFLOL

My inner nerd (as in Gen. JC Christian, Patriot’s Inner Frenchman) thrilled to Weird Al’s new White and Nerdy video. Glad to see he’s still making music after all these years. And yes, that is Donny Osmond dancing in the background.

The definitive deconstruction of the video is here, where we find several errors that slipped past Weird Al’s production team:

Yankovic erroneously claims that his pocket protector is protecting his pens.

The equation in the background of the chorus is Schrödinger's wave equation for the hydrogen atom; however, there is an error in that Planck's constant is displayed in place of Dirac's constant.

The scene with him playing Minesweeper (a game included with the Microsoft Windows operating system dating back to v3.1) is actually being played on a Macintosh. The logged in user is listed as "whitenerdy". The reason that Finder is the currently active application listed in the menu bar is because Minesweeper is running as a Dashboard widget. He incorrectly is shown using the keyboard to play this mouse-controlled game.

Yankovic claims that he graduated "first in [his] class here at MIT"; however, MIT does not assign class rankings nor does it confer traditional Latin honors upon its graduates.

Now that’s nerdy.

torture bill breakdown

NY Times editorializes against the torture bill. This is a good explanation of the likely consequences of the bill.

Andrew Sullivan, former Republican voter, summarizes:

The only response is for the public to send a message this fall. In congressional races, your decision should always take into account the quality of the individual candidates. But this November, the stakes are higher. If this Republican party maintains control of all branches of government, the danger to individual liberty is extremely grave. Put aside all your concerns about the Democratic leadership. What matters now is that this juggernaut against individual liberty and constitutional rights be stopped. The court has failed to stop it; the legislature has failed to stop it; only the voters can stop it now. If they don't, they will at least have been warned.

Senate tramples constitution, torture bill passes

I knew it would happen but it still hurts. The Military Commissions Act has been passed by the Senate 65-34, with 12 Democrats voting in support. From the NY Times:

The bill was a compromise between the White House and three Republican senators . . . .

I think I’ve found the problem right there.

Republicans argued that the new rules would provide the necessary tools to fight a new kind of enemy. “Our prior concept of war has been completely altered, as we learned so tragically on September 11th, 2001,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia. “And we must address threats in a different way.”

The threat since 9/11, then, is apparently greater than those we faced in World Wars I and II and the duration of the Cold War when the world sat on the brink of mutually assured nuclear destruction for 40 years. Or at least scary enough to cause those entrusted with our defense to wet their pants continuously for 5 years.

Mr. Bush attacked Democrats for voting against the legislation even before the vote began, signaling Republicans’ intention to use it as a hammer in their efforts to portray themselves as the party of strength on national security.

Bush showing his true colors here . . . is there any reason this bill couldn’t have been debated 3 months ago or 3 months from now? This was pure politics of the most debased and shameful kind. Exactly what we’ve come to expect from the modern Republican Party.

And even some Republicans who said [they] voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the habeas corpus provision, ultimately sending the legislation right back to Congress.

“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, who had voted to strike the habeas corpus provision, yet supported the bill.

A nice sentiment, Senator Smith, but a bit irrelevant since you dishonor the principles of your faith by voting for this abomination. Likewise Senators Hatch and Bennett. I won’t speak to the other religions represented in the Senate with which I am not as familiar. But I don’t know where in the New Testament these Senators thought they would find support for waterboarding and other “coercive examination” techniques perfected by Stalin.

However, Smith is correct that this sets up a direct confrontation with the Supreme Court.

The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.

This means that, should the President, in his sole and unbridled discretion, determine the threat to be great enough, you or I could be strapped to the table with plastic wrap and water over our faces next.
From the WaPo:

Senators voted 51 to 48 against [an amendment] which called for deleting from the bill a provision that rules out habeas corpus petitions for foreigners held in the war on terrorism. The writ of habeas corpus, which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, allows people to challenge in court the legality of their detention, essentially meaning that they cannot be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The issue was one of the most contentious in the bill, which authorizes the president "to establish military commissions for the trial of alien unlawful enemy combatants engaged in hostilities against the United States for violations of the law of war and other offenses. . . ." Under the rules in the bill, statements obtained from a detainee by torture would not be admissible as evidence, but information extracted using harsh interrogation methods that violate a ban on "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" would be allowed if they were obtained before the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 went into effect on Dec. 30 and if a judge found them to be reliable and in the interests of justice.

So if the government decides someone is an “enemy combatant” then that is the end of legal recourse for that person. This I would expect from China, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea, and Iran. I did not expect this from the U.S. Senate.

The WaPo article quotes Senator Specter, who had this to say:

He charged that by striking habeas corpus rights for terrorism suspects, the bill "would take our civilized society back some 900 years" to a time before the Magna Carta was adopted. He said this was "unthinkable."

But he went ahead and voted for the bill anyway! This tells you all you need to know about the “moderate” Republicans in Congress today. I was considering at one point voting for McCain over Gore in 2000. There is literally nothing he could do now to regain my respect. He, more than anyone else in the Senate, knows the corrosive influence torture has on both victims and perpetrators, and for this reason, there is a special place reserved for him now in hell.

At least one Democrat still has a sense of dignity (from the WaPo again):

"We are about to put the darkest blot possible on the nation's conscience," Leahy said. "This is so wrong. . . . It is unconstitutional. It is un-American."

The provision "makes a mockery of the Bush-Cheney lofty rhetoric about exporting freedom across the globe," Leahy said. "What hypocrisy!"

Today’s Republicans are simply unfit to govern. I sincerely hope that the fact that many/most Americans support this bill means they don’t really know what is in it. But I fear otherwise.

Bush’s legacy is right here, for later generations to judge him by. He will take his place next to Justice Taney , Senator McCarthy, and Richard Nixon in the halls of infamy and moral decrepitude.

History will not be kind.

lukewarm

Marty Lederman on the torture bill that seems certain to pass this week:

[T]he really breathtaking subsection is subsection (ii), which would provide that UEC is defined to include any person "who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."

Read literally, this means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to "hostilities" at all.

This definition is not limited to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It's not limited to aliens -- it covers U.S. citizens as well. It's not limited to persons captured or detained overseas. And it is not even limited to the armed conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, authorized by Congress on September 18, 2001. Indeed, on the face of it, it's not even limited to a time of war or armed conflict; it could apply in peacetime.

I’m not a religious man, but please, God, please keep Justice Stevens alive for two more years.

Jack Balkin:

I am puzzled by and ashamed of the Democrats' moral cowardice on this bill. The latest version of the bill blesses detainee abuse and looks the other way on forms of detainee torture; it immunizes terrible acts; it abridges the writ of habeas corpus-- in the last, most egregious draft, it strips the writ for alleged enemy combatants whether proved to be so or not, whether citizens or not, and whether found in the U.S. or overseas.

This bill is simply outrageous. I doubt whether many Democratic Senators or staffs have read the bill or understand what is in it. Instead, they seem to be scrambling over themselves to vote for it out of a fear that the American public will think them weak and soft on terror.

The reason why the Democrats have not been doing very well on these issues, however, is that the public does not believe that they stand for anything other than echoing what the Republicans have been doing with a bit less conviction. If the Republicans are now the Party of Torture, the Democrats are now the Party of "Torture? Yeah, I guess so." Not exactly the moral high ground from which to seek office.

The Democrats may think that if they let this pass, they are guaranteed to pick up more seats in the House and Senate. But they will actually win less seats this way. For they will have proved to the American people that they are spineless and opportunistic-- that, when faced with a genuine choice and a genuine challenge, they can keep neither our country nor our values safe.

The current bill, if passed, will give the Executive far more dictatorial powers to detain, prosecute, judge and punish than it ever enjoyed before. Over the last 48 hours, it has been modified in a hundred different ways to increase executive power at the expense of judicial review, due process, and oversight. And what is more, the bill's most outrageous provisions on torture, definition of enemy combatants, secret procedures, and habeas stripping, are completely unnecessary to keep Americans safe. Rather, they are the work of an Executive branch that has proven itself as untrustworthy as it is greedy: always pushing the legal and constitutional envelope, always seeking more power and less accountability.

If the Democrats do not stand up to the President on this bill, if they refuse to filibuster it or even threaten to filibuster it, they do not deserve to win any additional seats in the House or in the Senate. They will have delivered a grievous blow to our system of checks and balances, stained America's reputation around the world, and allowed an obscenity to disfigure the American system of law and justice. Far worse than a misguided zealot is the moral coward who says nothing and allows that zealotry to do real harm.

There are times for those on the left to criticize Democrats and times to circle the wagons. This is certainly a time to rage against the spineless, sycophantic, morally deficient, purportedly progressive legislators who would vote for this bill.

The Republicans sold their souls long ago for power and a false sense of security. Now the Democrats seem hellbent on collecting their 30 pieces of silver.

"So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth." Rev 3:16

a brief history of torture

How to contact Congress.

Courtesy of Karla, a.k.a. "Mom".

Shrilliam H. McShrillerton

One libertarian is shrill.

I feel about this torture bill the way I remember feeling about the Iraq invasion. The government is about to do something terrible, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it except watch in slow motion.

Remember when the U.S. government observed and promoted human rights laws? It is only a memory now.

Bush gets his way on torture

Publius calls the torture fight a Bush win.

The three republican Senators and the President reached a compromise last week on the detainee bill that seems to have formally maintained the language of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions while giving the executive branch leeway to keep torturing detainees if it so chooses. Habeas corpus (the right of a detainee to challenge the legality of his detention) is gone. The whole thing is shadily ambiguous, providing just the right kind of legal grey area in which Addington and Cheney like to operate.

The White House hopes to push this mess of a bill through before the current legislative session ends to get the Democrats on record against it and use it as an election issue against them.

Harry Reid doesn’t seem to understand what is happening.

A handful of principled Republican Senators have forced the White House to back down from the worst elements of its extreme proposal for new interrogation rules,” said Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

Which is technically true but completely misses the point. One reason the Democrats should not have been sitting out this fight so far (besides not doing the right thing, losing any early possibility to influence the process, and missing out on potential political benefits from standing up to torture) was that they were completely at the mercy of Republican “moderate” hawks who have a near-perfect record of being rolled over by the White House. I didn’t address in my earlier posts the motives or intentions of the Republican 3. They seemed to be acting in good faith to prevent the legalization of torture . . . why else would they cause this intraparty ruckus just before the elections? I thought maybe McCain could see some political gain out of standing up to Bush, and that, having been tortured himself by the Vietnamese, he was actually acting out of principal. The more convincing explanation now is that they opposed the first draft of the bill so they could get the headlines “McCain Opposes Torture”, Bush could claim to have done his utmost to defend the country again, and Democrats would be shut out of the whole process, having ceded their voice in this matter to the “moderate” Republicans. Meanwhile the bill itself is so convoluted and ambiguous that both sides get to claim victory and Washington reporters—who’ve proved time and again their inability to grasp either the legal subtleties or the substance of national security legislation—parrot what the politicians tell them.

Maybe, as a TPM reader speculates, Reid has been keeping the Democrats’ powder dry while allowing the Republicans to make a mess of the bill and fix their positions, waiting to enter the debate until now in order to slow the bill down so it can’t be passed during the current session of Congress. But things look bleak now. I wish I’d seen Feingold, Dean, Reid, Obama, or Clinton up there holding forth against the President on this bill. But they haven’t been (as far as I’ve seen), and I wonder if they ever will.

Again I’ll turn to a conservative pundit to say what no Democratic politician has dared:

Two days after the Senate compromise, it appears pretty clear that few know exactly what it prohibits, allows or changes. Some of this is inevitable. It's a very complicated legal balancing act. But some of it is deliberate: obfuscation as a way to give the executive complete lee-way. Under these circumstances, it seems clear to me that, barring absolute clarity from both sides, this bill should be shelved till the next session. No bill this complex and this unclear and this important should be rushed into law.

I might add that this position, regardless of your take on the underlying issue of torture, is the politically conservative one. The quintessential conservative virtues are not moral certainty and instant legislation but prudence and deliberation, not faith but doubt, not a rush-to-legislate but careful checks and balances. Yes, I know we're told national security is at stake. We always are. But national integrity is also at stake. And that is not something you cram down the Senate's throat in 24-hour sessions, when no one is quite sure what is being made into law. This should be the Democrats' position. It should be the Republicans' position. Why do I fear it won't be?

(Meanwhile, so far not a peep out of the so-called libertarians at Volokh. Pathetic.)

There's lots about this at Balkinization, and more here about why the “interrogation techniques” should simply be called what they are, torture.

denied

Ezra Klein yesterday on retroactive cancellations of policies by health insurers:

In practice, the scam works like this: Selah Shaeffer, age four, was diagnosed with an aggressive, cancerous tumor in her jaw. The family had been with Blue Cross for about a year, and the bump was ex[a]mined and biopsied after they'd begun insurance. But because it was growing before, Blue Cross cut off reimbursement for surgeries it had already authorized, and is now trying to recover $20,000 from the Shaeffers. Or take the Nazertyans, who had premature twins. They were covered by Blue Shield all throughout, and disclosed all facets of the birth and operations. Blue Shield not only dropped, them, but was trying to get back $98,000 they'd already paid under the rationale that the Nazertyans hadn't disclosed an early miscarriage. After the LA Times reported the st[or]y, Blue Shield called off the debt collectors.

What's so remarkable about all this is what it exposes about how health insurance in this country works: We rely almost exclusively on private insurers whose primary business imperative is not to pay when we get sick. They do that by seeking to deny coverage before the fact, or reject claims afterwards. They pay for platoons of employees who have no job other than scrutiniz[ing] thousands of policies a week to find sufficient cause for cancellation. Say what you will about the inefficiencies of the public sector, but can it really match the ruthlessness and absurdity of insurers spending large amounts of money so they don't have to insure? Is that sort of profit motive really what you want underlying your health care coverage?

Nothing to add here. Seems pretty messed up to me.

WWGD?

What Would Goldwater Do? Asking this question is an, in its own way, admirable way for contemporary moderate conservatives, marginalized of late but now hopefully on the rise, to "get back to the roots" of conservatism in an effort to salvage something from the debacle that is the Republican Party today.

But I have to wonder, WWGD today? At the time of his presidential run in 1964, he was pretty conservative compared to the political mainstream, so much so that many give him credit for jumpstarting the modern conservative movement. But who would he most resemble today if he were still active in politics? Those on the hard right (Allen, Frist, Buchanan) or more moderate conservatives (McCain, Chafee, Lieberman)? In today's political environment, Goldwater would likely have to adapt many of the stances moderates find so laudable merely to have a voice in the party. In another ode to Goldwater, Andrew Sullivan takes this as a given, but doesn't examine the question of whether Goldwater would stand strong or instead modify his positions in the present environment.

At any rate, I think the foolishness of speculating about WWGD today is only slightly more foolish than comparing the political positions of modern conservatives to those of Goldwater which were located in a completely different context. Any rhetorical tactic that is effective at restraining the excesses of the Republican Party from within is probably worth getting behind, but I wonder if this is any more than a tactic.

Romney supports torture

Via Andrew Sullivan, Hotline follows up on a NY Times report that Mitt Romney is "foursquare behind the president" on the torture issue.

I'm glad Romney supports universal health care and all, but this is a bit much.

And I still think the outcome of this debate will be a net political positive for McCain and a net negative for Romney and Bush by 2008.

what's liberal about the liberal arts?

Some inspirational reading for our comrades in the academy.

(Scroll down to the pdf link at the bottom of the post.)

[Forgot to add the obligatory "via Henry at Crooked Timber" to the post. Henry has mastered the multimedia potential of the medium more than I and has added a frame from the file to his post.]

a problem of will

The NY Times today:

Senior Iraqi and American officials are beginning to question whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has the political muscle and decisiveness to hold Iraq together as it hovers on the edge of a full civil war.

Maliki may not be able to manage, but I know who could.

But nobody wants that. There is a problem with expecting someone who has been in office for 4 months in a country that has been "hovering on the edge of a full civil war" for at least that long to have “the political muscle and decisiveness to hold Iraq together.” Especially when that someone replaced as prime minister another someone who was “forced to withdraw his nomination for premiership for the permanent government because of accusations of weak leadership.”

In this situation, strong leadership would certainly be desirable, but I’m not convinced after reading the Times article that it is what is lacking here. Maliki seems to be doing the best he can to manage a fundamentally untenable situation. One might say that constant pressure for results from the Americans and a willingness to shuffle out democratically elected leaders who don’t immediately resolve Iraq’s political problems might be contributing to Maliki’s difficulties more than any supposed weakness of character.

Then again, it could just be that Maliki lacks the will to win . . .

Day for Darfur in Central Park

 

On Sunday I went to the Save Darfur rally organized by the Save Darfur Coalition, Amnesty International USA, and other groups. It was part of a worldwide effort to call attention to the precarious situation in Darfur and encourage world leaders to pressure the government of Sudan to allow a UN force into Darfur.

Last month, the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping force to enter Darfur to enforce the peace agreement signed in May of this year. However, the government of Sudan is not complying with the peace agreement and refuses to allow the UN troops into the region. The African Union force of 7,000 troops that is currently policing the region is set to leave at the end of September. The NY Times says 200,000 have died in the conflict so far; Save Darfur says 400,000. Right now Darfur is on the verge of slipping into chaos.

The rally was held in the East Meadow at Central Park near West 97th Street, also known as the Dustbowl to the frisbee and soccer players who play pick-up games there and kill all the grass. I guessed there were between 10,000 and 20,000 people at the rally, but these things are hard to gauge. The N.Y.P.D. estimated 20,000. There were lots of organized youth groups in matching t-shirts, and probably 80% of the people there were under 25. Many were wearing blue hats or shirts to symbolize the necessity of UN intervention.

 

Citizen Cope, Suzanne Vega, Big & Rich, and OAR played short sets and speakers encouraged the crowd to take action. Speakers included Mira Sorvino, Imam Talib of the Harlem-based Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood, and Simon Deng, a former slave from Sudan.

Chris Smith, a Republican Congressman from New Jersey, called for the African Union and the Security Council to fulfill their obligations to the people of Darfur and for Bush to appoint a special envoy for Darfur and to work to pass a bill on Darfur currently pending in the House. He said, “With Darfur, we can never say we didn’t know. Indifference, especially now, makes us complicit in genocide.”

Several speakers referenced Bush’s words written in the margins of a report on the Rwandan genocide, “Not on My Watch.” “Mr. President, this is your watch!” yelled David Rubenstein of the Save Darfur Coalition.

Speakers and posters in the crowd called out President al-Bashir of Sudan by name, excoriating him for the deaths for which he is responsible. Gloria White-Hammond, who organized a recent campaign to deliver a million postcards to the White House calling for President Bush to take action, called on China to stop protecting the Sudanese government. Mira Sorvino described in graphic detail the murder and mutilation of individual children in the conflict and wondered why, two years after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell labeled the conflict a genocide, more has not been done to stop the killing. “As long as they’re with us in the War on Terror, they can murder their citizens,” she speculated.

 

Big & Rich, a country music group, sang about Jesus in their first two songs to several thousand secular and Jewish East Coast kids, who they encouraged to “fight for life.” “It’s not a political thing,” said singer Big Kenny (in the picture above), “it’s a human thing.”

I left as OAR covered Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’. I have to say the whole thing was kind of amazing. In a time of political polarization, Darfur unites religious conservatives and secular urbanites, the reddest and bluest parts of our country. And while an inexcusable number of people have died while we in the West watched, this level of awareness and mobilization has not occurred with any previous genocide, from Armenia to the Holocaust to Rwanda. Based on what I saw today, I have some hope that western governments will listen to their citizens and respond by pressuring Sudan to stop the killing. And I feel that in this movement are the seeds to a broader foreign policy that can bring Americans together instead of pushing them apart.

 

"Southern Sudanese in Solidarity with Darfur." 

Democrats and torture

To echo Yglesias, the Democrats’ recent political tactic on the military tribunals bill may provide short-term benefits but long-term costs to the party. To recap, Bush is pushing for a bill to bring terrorism suspects to trial that would change the way the U.S. applies the applicable provision of the Geneva Conventions to allow U.S. government officials to continue using the interrogation techniques (waterboarding, extreme sleep deprivation, Soviet-style cold cells) they have been using in recent years. After the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan, the DOJ stopped providing legal cover for the CIA's interrogation techniques. Three Republican senators--McCain, Warner, and Graham--have rejected Bush's proposal, and Colin Powell recently expressed his support for their position.

As far as I can tell, the Democrats as a national party and as individual presidential contenders for 2008 are getting owned by McCain right now on the military tribunals issue. Public opinion has been turning against Bush almost since the 2004 election, but Democratic politicians have been clubbed so many times with national security as a political issue they want to talk about it as little as possible before the election. So they are letting Senators Warner, McCain, and Graham stand up to the President on this (or else they the only ones the media is giving much coverage to), thus ceding to McCain, possibly the highest-visibility politician in the country right now, all the political momentum which will come from Bush’s defeat on this.

McCain can see farther than most and knows that by the time 2008 rolls around, whoever can run most convincingly as not-Bush will be best positioned to win. By taking center stage here, he gets his Bush-battling credentials and strengthens his reputation on national security at the same time. Meanwhile the Democrats are MIA. The point is not that Republicans are divided; we knew that already, although it hadn’t been quite this publicly clear before. The point is who will absorb the political influence that is bleeding from Bush with each passing day. Who will pick up the pieces of the failures of the past four years and build a way forward that addresses Americans’ security concerns without selling our collective soul.

Maybe the Democrats will have to lose another election or three before they get a clue about how this works. They perpetually seem to believe every election will be just like the last one. "We tried to stand up to the administration on foreign policy and that lost us the Senate in 2002 and the presidency in 2004." So they decide not to take a stand against the president’s proposal to change U.S. law to officially sanction torture and instead let prominent Republican hawks do it, one of whom happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2008. There's a groundswell of public opinion against Bush and his failed foreign policy, and Democratic politicians are doing everything they can to disassociate themselves from this movement at the critical moment that the post-Bush political order is being constructed.

An opposing argument might be that the Democratic leadership doesn’t have the military credentials of the Republican Three (+ Powell) and that letting the Republicans fight it out among themselves lets the Democrats avoid any political damage they might sustain if they got involved. But why couldn’t Kerry, Wes Clark, or Hillary Clinton draw on their foreign policy experience on this issue? Or you could argue that it’s more important to not do anything to dampen the Democrats’ recent advantage in the polls just before the election, and then start swinging after the Democrats take the House in November. But the White House has set the agenda, and this debate is happening now, and the Democrats avoid it at their peril.

Update: Via Ezra Klein, John McIntyre at RealClearPolitics points out that the Republican base does not want bipartisanship from its leaders right now, and that by opposing the President on this high-profile issue, McCain is busy destroying his chances at obtaining the Republican nomination in 2008. It doesn't matter how much good it will do him in the general election if he never makes it past the primary. This sounds plausible--if the Republican base hasn't deserted Bush by now, it's hard to imagine under what circumstances they would do so. Unless, as a result of Democratic congressional investigations if the Democrats regain the House or an ill-advised invasion of Iran, Bush ventures into NixonLand and McCain steps forward as the man to salvage the hopes of the party. Although it's hard to envision either of those occurrences making the base like Bush less ...

DADT update

The NYTimes looks at the current state of play on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The official rationale for the policy is that allowing openly gay servicemembers in the military would negatively impact unit morale and cause recruiting problems. But what has happened to the militaries of other countries who have allowed gays to serve openly?

24 foreign armies, most notably those of Britain and Israel, have integrated openly gay people into their ranks with little impact on effectiveness and recruitment. In Britain, where the military was initially forced to accept gay troops by the European Court of Human Rights, gay partners are now afforded full benefits, and the Royal Navy has called on a gay rights group to help recruit gay sailors.

In fact, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell exacerbates existing recruiting problems.

The new debate on “don’t ask, don’t tell” also coincides with multiple deployments that are being required of many American troops by a military that has lowered its standards to allow more high school dropouts and some convicted criminals to enlist.

“Would you rather have a felon than a gay soldier?” said Capt. Scott Stanford, a heterosexual National Guard commander of a headquarters company who returned from Iraq in June. “I wouldn’t.”

Via Yglesias, an article in TNR points out that the Army is still facing severe recruiting problems—it keeps raising the age of enlistment (soon my grandpa will be able to serve again), the percentage of new recruits failing boot camp has been pushed steadily down, “[t]he number of Army recruits who scored below average on its aptitude test doubled in 2005, and the Army has doubled the number of non-high school graduates it can enlist this year. . . . In May . . . the Army signed up an autistic man to become a cavalry scout.”

As a consequence of recruiting problems, often the law is ignored. From the Times piece:

[C]ommanders look the other way when someone is suspected of being gay or even avows it, especially if that service member is valuable. Since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001, discharges of openly gay members have fallen by 40 percent.

So, to sum up, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is morally repugnant, it has no rational policy basis, it’s not being enforced in many cases, and when it is, it’s actively harming military readiness.

Also, not surprisingly given the carnage in the Middle East, the policy is being abused by military members who want to get out of their service commitments.

[T]he policy lets unhappy troops, straight or gay, ditch the military service to which they have committed. About 85 percent of those discharged under the policy had declared a homosexual orientation, according to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a gay rights watchdog; roughly half that number had volunteered the information simply to get out of the military.

“It lets people kind of get out of jail free,” said Aaron Belkin, director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, that has sided with the effort to eliminate “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Where have I seen that before . . .

payback from powell

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell sent a letter to Senator John McCain Wednesday arguing against Bush’s proposal to narrow the scope of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to allow torture of detainees by U.S. personnel. This led the Senate panel considering the issue to break against Bush’s proposal 15-9. The New York Times covered the story:

Mr. Powell, a former four-star Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had a leadership role in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, said in his letter to Mr. McCain that redefining Common Article 3 would only deepen worldwide doubts about America’s moral stature.

“Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk,” Mr. Powell said in his letter to Mr. McCain. Critics of the Bush administration approach have argued that, if the United States is seen to be mistreating captives, Americans who are taken prisoner could be subjected to cruelty.

. . .

In 2002, despite his misgivings about the coming war, Mr. Powell argued the Bush administration’s case before the United Nations, asserting that there was strong evidence that the Baghdad regime had deadly unconventional weapons. When those weapons failed to materialize after Mr. Hussein was deposed, Mr. Powell was said to be hurt and angry.

Powell’s performance at the U.N. is still up on the White House website. I guess the administration doesn’t see any reason to take it down, since they’ve never admitted any wrongdoing in the lead-up to war. The headline says it all: “Iraq: Denial and Deception.”

memories of 9/11

It's a few days late, but I thought I'd post my memories of 9/11. I had moved to New York three weeks before to begin law school and I was living in a crappy apartment on the corner of Thompson and Bleecker in lower Manhattan.

On the morning of September 11th, I woke up around 9 and walked 2 blocks down Bleecker to Coles, the NYU gym. The gym is mostly underground, with about a single story's worth of building above ground. It has a roof where students and alumni can play tennis and jog. I liked jogging there because I could avoid the hassles of traffic and pedestrians on the streets. As soon as I got on top of the roof and started running south, I could see that both of the towers of the World Trade Center were on fire.

There had been a lightning storm the night before and I assumed the fires were somehow related to that. It didn't occur to me to wonder why both towers were burning—the likelihood of even one building catching fire from a lightning strike must be quite low, since I've never heard of this happening ever in NYC or anywhere else. I don't know if the fact that I kept on jogging was attributable to morning grogginess, general naivete and immaturity, my marginal powers of observation, sheer incomprehension, or some combination of the above. There were a couple other diehard idiots like myself jogging, but mostly people were standing, watching or filming with handheld cameras. "Silly tourists," I thought, "haven’t they ever seen a building/mountain on fire before?" thinking back to a couple late-summer fires on the dry mountains around Provo, from where I had come to NYC three weeks earlier to start law school. I assumed the buildings had been evacuated before the fires got to that stage, or that people had just not gone in to work yet if there had been a fire the night before.

Both towers were still standing by the time I finished and went downstairs to exit the building. There are TVs in the lounge area near the entrance at Coles, and I saw the burning towers on the news and went to watch. A girl standing next to me said something like, "Those f#$%ers, I can't believe this." "What do you mean?" I asked. And she said, "They hit them on purpose." I watched for another minute, then went outside to take another look. The streets were crowded with people, many of whom were gathered in the middle of the intersection of Bleecker and Mercer, staring southward, oblivious to traffic. They were upset, anxious, and confused, talking in worried voices. I walked to where they were and looked back. Only one tower was left.

I thought about this as I walked home. How could the building collapse if it had only been on fire near the top? How could a small aircraft do that kind of damage to such a large building? Was there a missile or something? It didn't make any sense. I didn't know what the hell was going on.

People were gathered again where Bleecker crosses LaGuardia. I looked downtown as I passed, then to Thompson and my apartment. My roommate was out of town at the time, later I would sit in his room, glued to the TV for days while he waited in Miami to take a bus back to New York. I tried calling home but couldn't get through. I didn't really have anyone to call in New York yet, but I could tell the phones were useless. I left the windows open so I could hear what was going on in the street. After a little while I heard yells from outside and rushed to the window just in time to see the second tower collapsing in a cloud of dust. I think there was a crashing sound, but I don't really remember since I’ve seen it now on TV so many times.

It occurred to me that my family might be worried, even though I lived about a mile and a half from the towers. I went to the computer lab at the law school and emailed family and friends to let everyone know I was ok. Then I went upstairs to my torts classroom, unsure whether we would have class that day as scheduled at 10:40. Umm, no.

I went back to the apartment to watch the news some more. I don't remember much about the coverage at that point, but at some point a newscaster must have mentioned that people were donating blood at local hospitals. I decided that sounded better than sitting in my apartment feeling helpless. Newspeople were speculating that there would be a mass of wounded people hitting the hospitals soon. I walked over to St. Vincent's Hospital on 7th Avenue and Greenwich, only to find that they had all the donors they needed. I walked uptown to the NYU Medical Center on East 32nd Street and 1st Avenue. On my way up I finally got through to my mom and let her know I was fine. There was no need for donors at NYU either. As it turned out, there were very few wounded—most people in the buildings either made it out ok or were killed.

I have no memory of the rest of the day. I think I watched TV all that day and for the next few days until my roommate got back. I felt a real affinity for Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings—they were trying to make some sense of what had happened and was happening, and I latched on to their authority and compassion. I cried when I saw the vigils broadcast from Moscow, Sydney, London, and elsewhere. I felt alone, but not, somehow, since there was such a feeling of unity and common purpose that was so obvious in the responses from around the world. I saw the footage of some Palestinians celebrating. At first I thought there must be some mistake—how could anyone celebrate such a thing?

At some point either that day or in the ensuing days, they cordoned off everything below 14th Street to non-residents. There were no cars on the streets. They evacuated people below Houston, which was a block south of my apartment. There was a heavy, stinky smoke in the air for days. I shut the windows but it still seeped in. When the trains started up again, I went to Brooklyn to visit a friend I had met a week or two before and saw the smoke rising from Ground Zero into the blue sky. I went to Washington Square at night to look at the candlelit pictures and messages people had put on the chain link fences surrounding the arch, which was under renovation. There were pictures of missing people posted all over, like pictures people put up if a pet runs away, except these were for people. Desperate pleas, “Have you seen _________, please call 917-________,” over pictures of attractive, smiling young women and men. I thought there must be some chance of finding these people, somehow—why else would people put up so many flyers, hundreds of different ones? Most of them came down in the next week or so as people realized they weren’t going to pull anyone else out of the rubble, but some stayed up for weeks.

A few nights after 9/11, I was asleep in bed sometime between 2 and 4 a.m. when something woke me up. I gradually realized there was yelling going on outside my second-story window on Thompson Street. It got louder and I woke up more fully and looked outside just in time to see a firefighter take a swing at a man on the street below. There was a firetruck parked in the middle of the road, and one or two other firefighters surrounding the man. One of the other firefighters managed to pull off the attacking firefighter and break up the fight. They left after awhile and I went back to sleep. I’ll always wonder why the firefighter punched the guy. The firehouse on W. 3rd a couple blocks away had flowers outside it and pictures of the men who had died. I don’t know whether the firefighters on the street were from that firehouse, but I imagine they were pretty stressed out and sad after everything they’d been through.

I worried about another attack, but I thought statistically the chances I would die were slim. Anything seemed possible since what had happened had been so inconceivable. In the weeks after 9/11, a researcher/pundit spoke at the law school about further possible attacks. It was in the middle of the anthrax scare, and he told us about the Cipro he had bought for his children. He talked about how another attack, correctly placed, could cripple the transportation network that brought food into Manhattan. There would be chaos and a complete breakdown of society. People wouldn’t be able to get out, and deaths could be in the tens of thousands or higher. It sounded plausible to me at the time, but I never considered leaving the city. I didn’t feel particularly vulnerable, even living in lower Manhattan. I had lived abroad and I knew how powerful we were relative to other countries. We had the strength and resources to weather a crisis like this and to protect ourselves in the future. I worried more about what we might do to others.

I remember a feeling of intense rage when it became clear we were going to invade Afghanistan. “If we kill even one innocent person there because of this, then we’re no better than the terrorists,” I thought. Now, after absorbing the general consensus in the U.S. that invading Afghanistan was the right thing to do, I don’t feel so sure. But is that consensus justified? Many of the people we killed there were innocent, and they are certainly dead now. Invading Iraq was not justified, and now there are at least 41,000 dead civilians there according to iraqbodycount.net, probably many more given the methodology of the project. In short, some of my worst fears about our response to 9/11 have already been realized; I’m afraid of what may come next.

miasma of insanity

New, shriller Yglesias, now untethered from the Prospect. Look elsewhere for your sensible liberalism.

[T]hink about the quality -- intellectual and moral -- of the men and women who would look at the past several years of American and world history and decide that an outrageous and dishonest report on Iranian nuclear capacities was exactly the sort of thing the US congress should spend its time working on. Simply put, there's a miasma of insanity, dishonesty, and hubris floating around the circles they operate in that makes them grossly unfit to govern.

conrad burns is a funny man

“I can self-destruct in one sentence,” Mr. Burns, a former livestock auctioneer, recently told supporters. “Sometimes in one word.”

Impressive. Would that that were literally true.

a new incompetence dodge?

There was wide support among Israelis for the recent war against Lebanon when it first began. Michael Totten interviews two Israeli peace activists who both supported the war early on. Left-leaning Israeli author David Grossman supported it (his son was killed in the fighting). (Totten, on the other hand, “thought it was a mistake right away.”)

Now the consensus in Israel seems to be that the war was necessary, but turned into a disaster because it was prosecuted badly.

The first activist:

“Here was a golden opportunity,” Yehuda said, “that the whole world and half the Arab world gave us on a silver plate. And we blew it. It had to happen quick."

. . .

"But there is also the realization that the whole ethos of the IDF was the lighting quick strike, boom, and finished. As soon as people saw that it wasn’t getting finished, everyone knew what the consequences were. This is also a major intelligence failure as well.”

The second activist continued:

"I think it had to be done differently and cleverly without causing masses of civilian casualties and civilian destruction.”

“How do you do that with a guerilla army, though?” [Totten] said. “There’s no bad guy bullet that just hits Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah.”

“It’s very very hard to destroy Hezbollah,” Amichai said. “I don’t think you can destroy it without sending in tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers and suffering hundreds and hundreds of casualties. That’s one possibility. And it would last a very very long time. That’s what many people said should have been done from the very beginning. Other people said – and this was a debate in the cabinet – that after one week when you’ve tried all the things that you’ve tried with the bombing in first week and you didn’t succeed you try to achieve a cease-fire that will force the international community to disarm Hezbollah.”

All of this, except the part about a cease-fire enforced by the international community, sounds very familiar. Let's see, blame mishaps on intelligence failure. Check. Assert that the number of forces used were inadequate to the task. Check. Promote the belief that if there'd been more competent leadership in place, things would have worked out better. Check. Fail to examine original rationale for starting the war. Check.

I don't follow the Israeli media closely enough to know whether any commentator there has retooled the "incompetence dodge" put forward by Rosenfeld and Yglesias last year in a different context. But it would seem to apply as well to Israel's war as it does to ours.

shakeup in November?

Josh Marshall at Time.com today on what Lieberman's loss in the Connecticut Democratic primary might mean:

If this were just a matter of Joe Lieberman's hubris and obliviousness, the story of his demise might have a human significance but not a larger political one. But the Lieberman train wreck is also part of the unfolding story of the 2006 election cycle and the dangerous gulf widening between Washington and the country at large.

. . .

The polls tell us the President's approval rating seldom gets out of the 30s. Congress is unpopular. Incumbents are unpopular. Voters prefer Democrats over Republicans by a margin of about 15%. When a once-popular three-term Senator gets bounced in a primary battle with a political unknown, it's a very big deal. Those numbers all add up to a political upheaval this November. The folks in D.C. see the numbers. But they haven't gotten their heads around what they mean. Joe was out of touch. And Washington, D.C., is too.

They didn't see the Joe train wreck coming and they're not ready for what's coming next either.

Well, after November 2004, the fizzling of Fitzmas, and a whole string of demoralizing setbacks for the left since Bush took office, I have learned not to underestimate the power of the Republican political machine. But I sure hope Josh is right …

U.S. TV invading China

An article in the NYTimes today tracks widespread translation and illegal distribution of U.S. TV shows in China.

What is most remarkable about the effort, which involves dozens of people working in teams all over China, is that it is entirely voluntary. Mr. Ding’s group, which goes by the name Fengruan, is locked in fierce competition with a handful of similar outfits that share the same ambition: making American popular culture available in near-real time free to Chinese audiences, dodging Chinese censors and American copyright lawyers.

“We’ve set a goal of producing 40 TV shows a week, which basically means all of the shows produced by Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC,” Mr. Ding said, fairly bubbling about the project.

“What this means,” he said, “is that when the Americans broadcast shows, we will translate them. Our speed surpasses all the other groups in China, and our goal is to be the best American transcription service in the world.”

To a person, the adapters say they are willing to devote long hours to this effort out of a love for American popular culture. Many, including Mr. Ding, say they learned English by obsessively watching American movies and television programs.
Others say they pick up useful knowledge about everything from changing fashion and mores to medical science.

“It provides cultural background relating to every aspect of our lives: politics, history and human culture,” Mr. Ding said. “These are the things that make American TV special. When I first started watching ‘Friends,’ I found the show was full of information about American history and showed how America had rapidly developed. It’s more interesting than textbooks or other ways of learning.”

On an Internet forum about the downloaded television shows, a poster who used the name Plum Blossom put it another way.

“After watching these shows for some time, I felt the attitudes of some of the characters were beginning to influence me,” the poster wrote. “It’s hard to describe, but I think I learned a way of life from some of them. They are good at simplifying complex problems, which I think has something to do with American culture.”

Rendering American slang into Chinese is a special challenge. In an episode of “Sex and the City,” the line “I thought you two would hit it off” became “I thought you two would generate electricity together.”

Well, some of the quotes sound a bit robotic, and I doubt that people are watching TV solely to increase personal knowledge, but in general this seems like a promising development for the U.S. American TV networks are unhappy that people are watching their shows for free. Clearly, in this case, what is bad for the networks is good for the U.S. If young Chinese are enthralled by U.S. culture, they are likely to be more sympathetic to Americans and to U.S. policies in general. Global stability in the coming decades will depend on good relations between the U.S. and China as China's wealth and influence continue to grow.

This is one of the best public diplomacy initiatives the State Department has never promoted. Given Karen Hughes' track record of late, it is probably best that the government take a hands off approach to this. Letting this practice proceed and develop relatively unhindered would be the best thing the U.S. could do to promote U.S. culture and values in China and around the world.

Fortunately, it doesn't look at this point as though there's much the government or the networks can do to stop this. Also, this is a two-way street, since there are programs Americans can download to watch Chinese TV. This came in handy recently when I wanted to watch the World Cup but found that no non-cable networks carried it. Thank you CCTV5!

Bolton cramthrough stymied?

Steve Clemons says "Senator Hagel has stated unambiguously that he is now 'undecided' on John Bolton."

I'm not quite sure how to read this, but it could be that Bush has miscalculated in pushing the Bolton confirmation again precisely when his visibility is heightened due to the mid-east conflagration and Republicans are wary about voter backlash in the upcoming elections. While Hagel isn't facing reelection himself, he is campaigning for Republicans in Nebraska.

taking on the boomers

From what I remember from the days before TimesSelect, this from Ezra Klein is more or less accurate:

Wandering through the nation's op-ed pages is like ambling through a dojo. Each writer has his own particular style, technique, finishing move. There's Tom Friedman, who rushes in with the Implausible Conversational Anecdote, links it to an Off-Topic Invocation Of World Travels, and finishes you with a Confusing Metaphor From Above. Or there's Maureen Dowd, who deploys Unfounded Personal Speculation mixed with Confusing Allegories till she's set up her killing blow: Insinuation of Character Defect. It's impressive stuff.

The deadliest op-ed columnist, however, is unquestionably David Brooks. He's the drunken boxer of the opinion page, luring you into a false sense of security with Banal Observations that comfort through Faux Bipartisanship until you're ready for the Illogical Conservative Conclusion.

Very good. Matt and Ezra have quite a thing going over at Tapped (I also like Garance, but she hasn't been as prolific as the other two). They very nearly convinced me to subscribe to the paper form of the magazine a couple months ago, until I realized I barely read [clarification: have a hard time making it all the way through] the magazines I have already. I think (editor) Tomasky must have taken action to prevent a duopoly, though, because I've been noticing other contributors posting recently, most of whom mysteriously don't appear on the masthead.

that word "democracy"--I do not think it means what you think it means

In the upside-down world of Bush, the word "democracy" has been stripped of all substantive meaning. From Yglesias:

"There's a lot of suffering in the Palestinian Territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy."

As Yglesias points out, this statement would be more true had Hamas not come to power through a democratic initiative which Bush himself spearheaded. I am not sure what idea is present in Bush's brain when he utters the word, but it bears little relation to how the word is generally understood on this planet. My guess is that the word "democracy" is being co-opted to join other code words used to appeal to so-called values voters, like "family", "morality", and "faith". Each of these terms, roughly translated from the new lexicon, means "something we have that the other side doesn't."

contingent vs. universal

Publius has a post that touches on what I discussed here about why much of red America is so passionate about the immigration issue. He chalks it up to parochialism.

Anyway, the fundamental problem with parochialism is that it tends to make people equate the contingent with the universal. The contingent social norms of your part of the world become elevated into universal moral codes. The contingent social practices of your community become the baseline for “the good.”

This is a view that I share in many ways, and one that you would expect former red-staters who moved to big cities and stayed to find appealing (Publius went from Kentucky to DC (I believe), I moved from Utah to NYC).

But this doesn't explain people who have traveled the world, are highly educated, and still come down firmly on the red side of the culture wars. Maybe my views are skewed by the returned Mormon missionaries I know whose time abroad seems to confirm their pre-existing worldview. But this group does not quite fit Publius's theory, and it's an important exception. How, if the parochialism theory is the explanation for the red/blue divide in the culture wars, do you reconcile the fact that virtually all of a certain community's future leaders travel to far-flung corners of the globe for two years with the fact that that community is consistently the most conservative place in the country? Also, no one can characterize many of the leading lights of contemporary conservative thought--I'm thinking of Brooks, the NRO bunch, Douhat, as being insufficiently well-traveled or under-educated.

Does Publius's theory hold water, or is it just a convenient way of making blue-staters feel better about themselves?

does proximity breed comfort or distrust?

This is interesting: Bryan Caplan finds that the more immigrants there are in a given area, the more favorably non-immigrants there view the impact of immigration on the economy.

On average, high-immigration states like California are unusually PRO-immigrant.
. . .
The simplest interpretation of this result is that people who rarely see an immigrant can easily scapegoat them for everything wrong in the world. Personal experience doesn't get in the way of fantasy. But people who actually see immigrants have trouble escaping the fact that immigrants do hard, dirty jobs that few Americans want - at a realistic wage, anyway.

This result held even after removing the effects of immigrants themselves answering the survey.

To me, this makes sense. If you see immigrants every day working hard, treating customers and coworkers courteously, and generally living their lives, you begin to see them as people more like yourself. But I don't think the causes for these results are as simple as Caplan implies, especially since far-flung places are seeing large numbers of new immigrants in recent years. As immigrants settle in every corner of the U.S., anti-immigrant sentiment has reached new heights, which seems to contradict the premise that as people come into greater contact with immigrants, they become more comfortable with the idea of immigration. Paul Glastris references Peter Laufer's work here:

Instead of staying in a handful of big cities and border states, as they used to do, immigrants in recent years have been spreading out, to cities and towns that five years ago seldom if ever saw a Latino face. This is true of the western suburbs of St. Louis, where I grew up. When I go back home I get an earful from people in this strongly-Republican area who are shocked at all the burrito places opening up on Manchester Road and all the Spanish-speaking Mexicans they see shopping at Target. As Laufer's piece shows, this shock is especially keen in the GOP-controlled South. And I suspect it's that shock that is being reflected now in Washington.

I think there's an explanation that can reconcile these two accounts. In areas with a history of immigration like New York and L.A. and Texas, as 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants reap the benefits of their parents' and grandparents' hard work and achieve higher and higher levels of education, descendants of immigrants become fully integrated into mainstream society. At this point, more established members of that society (who may be 4th or 5th generation immigrants themselves, and are part of families who went through this same process in the not-so-distant past) feel more comfortable with newly-arrived immigrants, since people very much like those new immigrants are now their neighbors, friends, and coworkers. And new immigrants often settle in places where their family or friends have settled already. For these reasons, existing centers for immigration attract more immigrants, and produce public sentiment that is generally amenable to immigrants. It's no accident that Bush grew up in Texas and is generally pro-immigrant.

(Sidenote: This is one reason I couldn't stand the movie Crash. It seemed to defy everything I knew about the reality of living in a major U.S. city. Perhaps I see immigration/race relations through rose-colored glasses, or perhaps L.A. really is a racist hellhole. But I think the more optimistic view of contemporary urban life is empirically closer to the truth. And will be even more truthful the more that people come to share that view.)

In places that don't have a history of immigration and are more culturally homogenous, increasing numbers of new brown faces cause great alarm. You would think that, were there something substantive to be feared from immigrants, the people living in places with the most immigrants would express those fears most vocally. But the opposite is true.

It's kind of like the War on Terror—those under the greatest risk of terrorist attack, city-dwellers, are the least supportive of the War on Terror. Now, direction of causality is a bitch with these things—do people who are generally pro-immigrant and anti-war move to the cities because there is a welcoming environment for them there (and conversely, as anti-immigrant, pro-war people move out), or do people living in cities take a look at these issues and decide that immigrants and terrorists aren't going to turn America into a poverty-ridden moral wasteland? As you can see by my awkwardly-framed question, I don't think it's easily explained. However, if Caplan's results hold up to scrutiny, they show that, on average, those with the most personal experience with immigrants, those who are most directly competing with immigrants for jobs and directly receiving community services from and providing community services to immigrants, are the people who are most favorably disposed to immigrants. This suggests to me that fear of the unknown is largely driving our national immigration debate. And judging by the overwhelmingly negative comments to Caplan's post, this is going to be a divisive issue for years to come.

illegals, part II

I'm posting this email I got from my brother, Rob, on his experiences working at a restaurant primarily staffed by illegal immigrants:

My time working at the restaurant taught me a few things about illegal workers, and speaking spanish and portuguese I was able to get more of an inside view of things . . . They truly are treated as second class citizens. They pay taxes but never receive a return. They have a hard time getting medical attention, one of my co-workers was saving all his money (and working another job on top of the restaurant, plus buying, fixing up, and selling cars) for an operation to remove gall stones, with no access to any sort of health insurance . . . they work harder than any americans I've ever worked with, and are expected to learn fast, retain a lot of information, and perform consistantly at a high volume.

Since leaving the restaurant I've been working at an office job where our employers give us a lot of training, ample breaks, and generally don't expect us to work that hard. I make much more money than at the restaurant. Many of my co-workers at the restaurant worked 2 full-time jobs, most of them got up around 5 am to begin their first job, then had lunch in the afternoon to come to their next job which they worked until past midnight on the weekends. Usually they'd get one day off per week, rarely this was a Sunday.

Many of the people on my team had come in legally on tourist visas, but had overstayed their time. They were educated professionals back home, and intended to return to their country of origin once they'd saved enough to buy a decent house, which usually was around $20,000 USD. One such did save up enough money after about five years and has since returned home to Brazil. They were argentines, brazilians, colombians, venezuelans, and mexicans. Only few of them actually intended to stay here in the US. They were required to have a substantial amount of money in the bank in order to get their tourist visas in the first place.

Another type of employee at the restaurant were the cooks and table bussers, who were made up primarily of those who'd crossed the border illegally, be it on foot or hidden in the back of a truck. These didn't make as much money as us servers, and many of them had little to no education back home in mexico. They were made fun of by other workers because of their lack of education and poor spanish grammar. for them this was going to be their life, they had no intention of returning home to Mexico.

All of the illegals, regardless of how they'd gotten here, worked extremely hard, as they were expected to . . .

The only other "gringo" on our team was fired by our team leader (an illegal himself on a tourist visa for the past five years), the reason we were given was that he was lazy and didn't push himself enough. This american was a hard worker, but didn't keep up with the pace the team had set. I struggled to work as hard as they did to keep the job long enough to find other employment.

Many of the illegals were treated badly by other illegals. They were ripped off upon first arriving, there are many scams put together by illegals with more time here to rip off those "mojados" (wetbacks) who have just arrived. As my wife and I left a medicaid office a few months ago in a predominantly latino area, we noticed some hispanic men [with] hospital scrubs standing outside the door with clipboards and forms speaking with latinos as they arrived or left the office. They were obviously not affiliated with medicaid, and I can only imagine they were another scam set up to rip off new arrivals . . .

I'm inclined to think that some sort of worker program is the solution.

illegals

An employer weighs in at NRO's the Corner about illegal immigrants in Texas:

"I've worked with illegals in the 70' to the 80's and I have a few first hand observations.

"Many are young men here for the money, they do not wish to become American citizens. When there are 10-15 young men living in a 1 bedroom apartment they are here for the work, their families are in Mexico. A big roll of cash buys a lot of freedom in Mexico.

"They are not just illiterate in English, they are in Spanish too.

"When you see groups of these guys waiting for work outside Home Depot here is how it works:

"You're a sub-contractor who wants to hire a 5 man framing crew. You talk to your guy (jefe) who is the go between and he knows who the good framers are. Now, you'll get 1-2 guys who know what to do. The others will consist of his worthless cousin and some one's son to whom he owes a favor. You strike a deal for 10 hours at 5 bucks an hour/man.

"The jefe takes a cut from each of the workers for a dollar an hour so they make four. That's how the 'bite' works in Mexico and it's the basis for the
deep corruption, no reason the think it stops here. Maybe you think construction is unskilled labor and you just take a board off the top of the pile and hammer it up. That's what'll happen if you don't supervise. If you have a house built in this part of the country, you need to go by daily and inspect it you'll see cracked, knotty 2x4s and 4x6s used as main supports for example. These guys don't care and besides they're not here next week anyway. If the building inspector doesn't catch it (another story), oh well. Not to mention the other ways thing can go wrong with a bunch of untrained labor doing plumbing, electrical, etc.

"By the way, if you don't get picked you go do what idle young men always do a long way from home: fight, drink, gamble, whore, thieve and generally get into trouble.

"The way to start a voluntary exodus is have the ICE start going around raiding the day labor sites. You only need to start scattering these guys from the sites disrupting their money flow for a short time and they'll go somewhere else, maybe home."

So corruption is present in an underground market for labor--now there's a shocker. Workers who can't be intimidated and threatened with imprisonment and deportation for trying to do their job generally don't feel the need to pay a cut to their boss. Or, alternatively, how different is this from temping, where you pay half your earnings to a temp agency which basically does nothing?

On the post more generally, I fear that many Americans share the views of the employer--that illegal immigrants are lazy (that must be why they sacrificed everything to come work here for peanuts), dishonest, ignorant, and unruly. Never mind the evidence to the contrary that should be plain to anyone who has their lawn mowed, eats at a restaurant, or buys produce at the grocery store. How many 16 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week for $3 an hour has this employer from Texas worked lately? Probably not too many.

Forget about pointing out that we all [correction: most of us] descended from immigrants at some point, the Cornerite who posted the email above was an illegal immigrant himself at one point. His response to charges of hypocrisy: things are different now that I'm a citizen, and besides, I would never have been so presumptuous as to publicly demonstrate for the right to citizenship. Hard to know how to respond to something like that.

On balance, though, I think enough people in this country agree with the employer above to make this a winning issue for the Republicans in the short-term. The more attention the issue gets leading up to November, the more that gains the Democrats would have otherwise reaped will be wiped out. Democrats are newly hopeful that the unexpectedly fervent immigration rallies show the tide is finally turning in their favor on this issue, not realizing that the rallies are only setting the stage for a massive backlash. The only hope, if one can call it that, is that (1) voters will be confused enough about the actual positions of politicians on the issue to not vote overwhelmingly for either party (i.e. Bush supports a guest worker program and higher visa levels, many Democrats are taking the populist line on this--Kaus has a lot on this but he annoyingly doesn't provide links to individual posts) and (2) voters will think Democrats, as the more competent, non-corrupt party at the moment, will better address their concerns on immigration. The problem with (1) is that, under pressure, positions are likely to solidify and become publicized before November. The problem with (2) is that people will realize as we get closer to November that Democratic leaders are unlikely to address concerns about illegal immigration that they do not share with most of the country. My gut tells me Republicans are against illegal immigration more than Democrats, and I suspect lots of voters will feel the same way.

In the long term, of course, the Republicans run a serious risk of alienating Latinos permanently (see on this the Southern strategy, which won Republicans the South but decimated black support for the party, and Proposition 187, which did much the same thing in California with regard to Latinos) and ensuring for themselves minority party status for the next 30 years.

Kirn/Sullivan convergence

I was pleased to find out today that Walter Kirn is guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan (although I'm kind of sad that I'll be deprived for awhile of some of my daily dose of righteous indignation).

Kirn is attempting some sort of serial internet writing experiment on Slate called The Unbinding. I'll add it to the list of things I mean to read but never do.

To digress, I inescapably find myself wondering what Kirn's political inclinations are. It's been pointed out to me that my fixation with where people fall on the political spectrum is annoying and obsessive. But I can't seem to help it. I find that political orientation serves as a useful shorthand for discerning whether I can trust someone on a certain level. That I succumb to this tendency worries me--it goes against everything I believe about not pre-judging people or ideas. But it is nearly impossible to avoid. Just as I was brought up to divide people into two categories: Member (of the LDS Church) and Non-Member, now the important categories are Reasonable and Conservative. My definitions of those groups are highly personal and probably make sense to few others (e.g., to me, Sullivan is Reasonable 60% of the time and Conservative the other 40%).

I think almost everyone makes these pre-judgments on some level. Sorting out "people I can trust" from "people who have to earn my trust" is a universally human aspect of group dynamics. Politics is the relevant calculus for me, having replaced my previous Faith. Or maybe for me, like for so many, politics and Faith are one and the same, and I've now just moved over a bit towards the "Godless commie" end of the spectrum.

I've found that the spectrum is highly contextual and breaks down and reforms itself in unfamiliar ways when you leave your homeland. I find myself accused of exactly what I accused my mother of back in college when I became an adherent of Clinton's mystical Third Way. I couldn't understand why she tied herself down to the outdated duality of Left and Right, which had so clearly (to me then) failed to produce solutions to the intractible problems of poverty, war, and injustice. Now I feel less certain than ever that I've found a politics/Faith which will provide the solutions, and even more trapped in the old combative, counterproductive duality. I still feel that if we were somehow able to redirect our energies away from endless bickering, which seems sharper with each passing month, we'd be much better positioned to solve the eternal problems. But, discouragingly, I feel most passionately about, and I'm least willing to compromise on, the issues on which there is the least agreement: gay marriage and the war in Iraq.

I wonder sometimes whether simply triangulating and navigating the rocky middle is the right answer, but the Clintons and Blairs, the Sullivans and Brooks of the world often invite the most scorn of all, since they are perceived as enemies by one side and as traitors by their own. And being conciliatory does little good if you are objectively wrong. But I guess in searching for a principle to provide some comfort in uncertain times, the best one I've found is that of not judging people to have Stars Upon Thars. Much easier said than done, and I'll probably recant next week as I thunderingly condemn Bush's latest transgression.

for the record ...

... can I just say that I'm bewildered by the firestorm of controversy surrounding Ben Domenech's hiring by the WaPo? Ben Who? Did I spell his name right? Who cares? Do we really need to prove to the MSM that we can be every bit as whiny and irritating as the right just so they'll give us a fair shake?

If he's as unqualified as everyone says, let him write some crap and then gleefully deconstruct it. If anything, his appointment should be a boon to lefty bloggers everywhere, especially since Friedman, Brooks, and Tierney are no longer around.

Update: And what a boon this is turning out to be. Apparently in his pre-WaPo writing career, Ben had a penchant for appropriating other people's work and calling it his own.

my crack at religion

I'm normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan (he harps on gay rights and torture more than anyone else), but he's been getting on my nerves lately with his quest to justify his support of an immoral war. Generally I find he's a thoughtful and compassionate thinker.

But this today was too much:

Today's age of politicized and intolerant Christianism seems to me to be one of those moments when Christianity has estranged itself most thoroughly from the priorities and spirit of its founder.

One of those moments like, oh, the last 2,000 years?

crash

Crash sucked more than I thought a movie could ever suck. I am distraught about Brokeback losing to that POS to the point that I am about to write off the Oscars for good ... let people vote American-Idol style, let film critics decide, whatever, just don't use a system where the WORST MOVIE OF THE YEAR wins best picture.

I don't know, maybe the movie magically redeemed itself after the first 25 minutes when we turned it off. This was one of those rare moments when my girlfriend and I were in complete agreement.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised after some of the crap that's won in years past. Well now it's official, the Oscars are completely meaningless. Finally, an issue I can agree on with Red State America--Hollywood blows!

how to stop the spread of racism

Visiting NRO's Corner is always an education. This today from Mark Krikorian, whom I'll admit I know nothing about:

Mass immigration has all kinds of harmful effects, from bigger government to security vulnerabilities to slowing mechanization in low-tech industries. But perhaps most dangerous is that its the fuel that allows white nationalism to spread, helping deconstruct the American nation.

. . .

[I]n the real world, multiculturalism and mass immigration are inseparable, and the spread of white-identity politics can only be prevented by slowing immigration . . .

[emphasis mine]

This is because

[W]hite nationalism [is] just the logical corrollary [sic] of multiculturalism ("identity politics for white people," as Ramesh wrote in a slightly different context) . . .

Next week from NRO: "the KKK can only be tamed by turning back the clock on civil rights" and "anti-Semitism will only be thwarted by keeping Jews from positions of influence."

UAE - Unusually, Everyone Agrees

For what it's worth, I'm with Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan on the Dubai port brouhaha and not with Atrios, Yglesias, Publius, Malkin, Hannity, and basically every politician in the country right now. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm failing to see the crucial national security implications of this deal. What is more apparent to me is how all the anti-Arab GWOT permanent state-of-fear rhetoric that the administration has been bathing in for the past four years has had a real impact on the national political discourse. The administration has had such success in establishing the spectre of a permanent, Cold-War-like conflict with the Muslim world in the collective mindset that there is now almost no political downside to attacking Bush on the port deal.

This is political opportunism at its finest. Bush kindly handed his political opponents another club with which to bash him (see Katrina, Meiers), especially with his incredible threat yesterday to veto any attempt to block the port deal. Was Rove in the hospital again? Why else would Bush go on the record so quickly and with such gusto the wrong way on a political no-brainer like this? This is an issue that, like Meiers, goes right to one of his supposed strengths. With Meiers it was stocking federal courts with conservatives; here it is national security. But the potential fallout now could extend far beyond his base.

While the port deal dovetails with the perennial Dem concerns of port safety and outsourcing, I don't believe those concerns are particularly legitimate to begin with. And the joyful way that the Dems have joined (or led) the anti-Dubai outcry makes me concerned about the direction the party is taking away from the traditional openness of liberal internationalism. The left should be careful, in the pursuit of short-term political advantage, not to stray too far from the ideas that we are not under a permanent state of siege from abroad and that foreigners are not naturally our enemies. The more that foreign policies around the world begin to resemble those of Iran and the U.S., the more likely it is that imagined conflicts will become real. Each of those two countries (you could add Cuba or North Korea to the list) has assumed the status of permanent victim and has a mindset that approaches a persecution complex ("they're all out to get us"), leading to policies that are at once aggressive and defensive, policies that tend to foster the very reactions these countries are most afraid of. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like Nirvana said, "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Or rather, when fear leads to belligerent action against others, "Just because you're paranoid, now they're coming after you."

Atrios cites Truthout and the NY Daily News for the best critique I've seen of the port deal—that it is another byproduct of Bush cronyism. And there may be legitimate security concerns that have not yet surfaced. But I'm skeptical.

Again, Kevin Drum makes sense when he says:

In the absence of serious evidence of untrustworthiness, though, I'd prefer to walk the liberal internationalism walk instead of jumping ship for short term political gain. I've said before that engaging seriously with the Arab world is the best way of fighting terrorism, and I meant it. This is a chance to do exactly that.

Then,

I just want to make something super clear here. If jumping on the Dubai hysteria bandwagon merely hurt George Bush politically and prompted some additional interest in port security, I'd be all for it. What do I care if the DPW/P&O deal goes through? But the whole thing feeds on a mindless anti-Arab jingoism that's genuinely dangerous, and that's why I'm not joining the fun unless I hear some really good reasons for doing so. As liberals, we're either serious about engaging with the Muslim world in a sensible, non-hysterical way or we're not. Which is it?

(I'll make an effort not to piggyback on Drum in my next post--I'm seeing a pattern here.)

Update: Upon reflection, I probably underestimated the value of better port security. While I do think the threat from terrorism has been hyped for political purposes, there are people out there who would like to blow up stuff in major ports like New York City, where I happen to live. From what I've read it wouldn't be that hard to smuggle in a nuke in a shipping container, if a terrorist happened to get hold of one. So we should take a closer look at making sure that doesn't happen. But I'm still not convinced that port security would be improved by not using Dubai Ports World.

And this has already bounced around the lefty 'sphere, but it's too good not to quote here, from the NYTimes:

If the furor over the port deal should go on, [Deputy Defense Secretary] England said, it would give enemies of the United States aid and comfort: "They want us to become distrustful, they want us to become paranoid and isolationist."

It's hard to respond seriously to a statement like that. "Don't be paranoid, or you will encourage the bad bad men who want to kill us in our sleep. I can hear them coming now ..." [nervously jerks head from side to side] It's like standing in between two mirrors--the paranoia reflects itself into infinity.

Granting that this guy is half right, if not very self-aware, can we trot him out the next time Rove makes a speech accusing liberals of being soft on terrorism? Here's a refresher:

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to submit a petition. ... Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: We will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said: We must understand our enemies.