the washington monthly

the washington monthly rudy awakening as president, giuliani would grab even more executive power than bush and cheney. his mayoralty tells the story. by rachel morris publish and perish the mysterious death of lyndon larouche’s printer. by avi klein the monthly interview: tom tancredo washington monthly on the radio hosts markos kounalakis and peter laufer interview colorado congressman tom tancredo. by washington monthly on the radio email address powered by: messagebot walter shapiro: obama goes for the capillaries 11/12/2007 jonathan alter: a gender fender bender 11/05/2007 jon meacham: the revolutionary 11/04/2007 walter shapiro: the democratic duel of the race 10/31/2007 t.a. frank: jenna vs. chelsea 10/29/2007 benjamin wallace-wells: giuliani's policy professor 10/26/2007 amy sullivan: huckabee's bid for the christian right 10/22/2007 joshua green: the colbert notion 10/19/2007 michael kinsley: receiving psychotic dictators: an etiquette guide 10/12/2007 michelle cottle: the machinations of jeri thompson 10/12/2007 matt cooper: fred thompson's big flop 10/12/2007 art levine: the gop's socialized medicine 10/12/2007 david segal: mitt romney's ideological turnabout 10/10/2007 jonathan alter: a schmoozer shares all 10/08/2007 jon meacham: a nation of christians is not a christian nation 10/07/2007 walter shapiro: rudy, mitt, fred or john 10/05/2007 stephanie mencimer: detainee rights on the docket 09/27/2007 art levine: unionbusting confidential 09/07/2007 mickey kaus: is the gq man a wuss? 09/07/2007 joe nocera: this climate is surely full of hot air 09/07/2007 michael kinsley: how dare you 09/07/2007 michelle cottle: hillary's consigliere speaks 09/07/2007 matt cooper: a dicey proposition 09/07/2007 walter shapiro: killing her softly with his song 09/07/2007 michael kinsley: god as their running mate 09/06/2007 david segal: bill clinton has what it takes for giving 09/05/2007 timothy noah: o.j. is still beating his wife 08/30/2007 matt cooper: ted olson for attorney general 08/27/2007 nicholas lemann: rovian wars 08/27/2007 michael kinsley: bush and his unreliable speechwriters 08/24/2007 walter shapiro: fred thompson has a revealing back story 08/23/2007 jonathan meacham: the hardest of calls 08/20/2007 jonathan alter: i know what you did last summer 08/20/2007 joshua green: a great society conservative 08/14/2007 benjamin wallace-wells: what is wrong with alaska? 08/13/2007 timothy noah: is mike gerson a glory hog?....or is his accuser just unhinged? 08/11/2007 matt miller: callous about health care? 08/09/2007 michelle cottle: hillary control 08/13/2007 issue jonathan alter: a red play for the golden state 08/13/2007 issue timothy noah: how to avoid the new ethics bill...and why it should become law anyway 08/07/2007 gregg easterbrook: road kill 08/05/2007 november 13, 2007 the cost of the war....milton friedman said that borrowing and taxing were the same thing. with that in mind, here's the tax bill bequeathed to all of us by george bush:the economic costs to the united states of the wars in iraq and afghanistan so far total approximately $1.5 trillion, according to a new study by congressional democrats....[the] report, titled "the hidden costs of the iraq war," estimates that the wars in iraq and afghanistan have thus far cost the average u.s. family of four more than $20,000.are we getting our money's worth? —kevin drum 2:05 am permalink | trackbacks | comments (5) reagan and neshoba....in the latest go-around on whether ronald reagan was deliberately appealing to racist sentiment in 1980 when he included a statement of support for "states' rights" in a speech at mississippi's neshoba county fair, bob herbert says, "everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what reagan was signaling at the fair. whites and blacks, democrats and republicans — they all knew. the news media knew. the race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. and reagan knew." actually, though, it's joseph crespino, a history professor at emory university, who provides the smoking gun:reagan's states rights line was prepared beforehand and reporters covering the event could not recall him using the term before the neshoba county appearance.if this is true it wraps up this argument on pretty much every level, both substantive and semantic. anybody care to weigh in on this? is it true that reagan had never (or virtually never) used the phrase "states's rights" before this speech? —kevin drum 1:50 am permalink | trackbacks | comments (2)   november 12, 2007 another thousand emails, please.....well, since you asked, the reason i think ron paul is a crank is because he wants to repeal the 16th amendment, eliminate the personal income tax, abolish the minimum wage, deep six the federal reserve, and return the united states to some kind of weird quasi-gold standard. in addition, he's fond of referring to paper currency as "fiat money" — a term pregnant with conspiratorial meaning among goldbugs — and apparently believes that we invaded iraq largely because they wanted to price their oil in euros. and these aren't just peculiar but harmless idiosyncracies. paul is obsessed with "fiat money" and talks about it every chance he gets. now, your mileage may vary. maybe you think paul is onto something. but in my book, paul's economic views are more than enough to earn him a spot in the crankery hall of fame. still, if i had to choose between ron paul and, say, rudy giuliani for president, would i vote for paul? you bet. there are worse things than being a crank. —kevin drum 8:58 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (103) reconciliation watch....compare and contrast. the washington post reports that the iraqi government is resisting efforts to organize sunni security forces:although u.s. commanders stress that the coalition is not forming a sunni militia, iraqi leaders complain that paying the fighters is tantamount to arming them. the iraqi government so far has balked at permanently hiring large numbers of the volunteers, resisting pressure from u.s. commanders to lift caps on the number of police in anbar and diyala provinces. only about 1,600 of the volunteers have been trained and sworn in to the iraqi security forces, primarily with the police.but juan cole reports that recruiting shiite security forces is another matter entirely:al-zaman reports in arabic that pm al-maliki has taken the controversial decision to recruit 18,000 members of shiite militias into the iraqi government security forces. (in fact, the iraqi military has de facto been recruiting a lot of shiite militiamen anyway). you have to wonder if this step is intended to offset the american military's pressure to recruit sunni tribesmen and neighborhood volunteers into the security forces.one might wonder indeed. cole suggests that something needs to be done with shiite militiamen, but a better idea would be to put them in "civilian desk jobs in some department where they can't do much mischief." unfortunately, that would likely defeat the whole purpose of recruiting them, wouldn't it? —kevin drum 1:04 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (11) cds....question of the day: why is andrew sullivan reduced to a state of semi-coherent frothing when the subject of bill and hillary clinton comes up? i wouldn't bother asking except that over the past week or so this question has been the subject of numerous emails, listserv conversations, and even on andrew's blog itself. it is a mystery. i don't know the answer, but here's what seems most mysterious to me. obviously lots of people suffer from clinton derangement syndrome. that's not news. but over the past couple of years andrew has practically scourged himself senseless over the fact that he got sucked into the hubristic and self-absorbed neocon dream of revolution in the middle east. he plainly recognizes the danger of being dragged down into that particular fever swamp. what's more, over the past few months he's argued that one of the biggest problems facing the country is the "christianist right" and its interminable inflaming of 60s-era culture war politics. and yet, he's somehow unable to see that his own visceral loathing of the clintons — who are in truth fairly ordinary politicians — is the product of precisely the same two things that he so reviles in present circumstances. he can see how the toxic stew they bred warped his thinking over the past few years, but not how the exact same pair of pathologies so obviously warped his thinking during the 90s. but i don't know. disliking the clintons for one reason or another: sure, that's easy to grasp. but during the 90s i never got cds. i just flat never got it. obviously i understand the explanations that i've read since then, but on a pure gut level it left me mystified then and it leaves me mystified still. for my money, the problem with the clintons is that they're too pragmatic, too centrist, and too accomodating. where the white-hot hatred emanates from remains an enigma. —kevin drum 12:27 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (124) speaking softly....admiral william fallon thinks that the war party needs to ratchet down its iran rhetoric, and today david ignatius reports that efraim halevy, the former head of the israeli intelligence agency mossad, agrees:now that he's out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about iran and syria. the gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the united states and israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries. ....halevy suggests that israel should stop its jeremiads that iran poses an existential threat to the jewish state. the rhetoric is wrong, he contends, and it gets in the way of finding a peaceful solution to the iranian nuclear problem.this is, though hardly a majority view in israel, not an uncommon one either. there are plenty of people, both there and in the u.s., who understand that bellicose rhetoric is a display of weakness, not strength, a fact that that we recognize easily enough when other people engage in it but not so easily when we do it ourselves. ratcheting down the "war of civilizations" talk isn't some magic bullet that will suddenly make the iranian regime feel secure enough to give up their nuclear program. but it's one step in that direction, and smart foreign policy is all about putting together lots of little steps and pushing on lots of little levers to get what you want. obviously this isn't george bush's style — or dick cheney's — but they won't be in office forever. the question is: what are they going to do in the time they have left? —kevin drum 11:31 am permalink | trackbacks | comments (53) quote of the day....from admiral william fallon, head of central command, on the challenge of trying to deal effectively with iran:none of this is helped by the continuing stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war which is just not where we want to go. getting iranian behaviour to change and finding ways to get them to come to their senses and do that is the real objective. attacking them as a means to get to that spot strikes me as being not the first choice in my book. —kevin drum 1:27 am permalink | trackbacks | comments (32)   november 11, 2007 gotcha....i'll second matt yglesias's takedown today of tim russert's stale and clownish version of gotcha journalism. russert is a one trick pony whose act got stale a long, long time ago. i'll just add two things. first, this is not a partisan issue. the gotcha routine, no matter who it comes from, is bad for everyone, both republicans and democrats. second, russert's schtick perpetuates the idea that the worst possible sin in a politician is displaying even a hint of inconsistency. but you know what? it turns out there are worse things. obviously politicians should be held accountable for their words, but russert and his colleagues ought to focus a little more on what's really important and a little less on what somebody said in 1998. —kevin drum 10:49 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (48) instinctive physics....thoreau, whose physics conference is not electrifying him at the moment, asks:would intelligent aquatic creatures with opposable thumbs ever develop newtonian mechanics?answer: sure, but they wouldn't have anything to write it down on, so they'd soon forget. in any case, thoreau brings up this momentous topic as an excuse to observe that our natural surroundings influence our instinctive view of physics. for example:with air resistance it's not at all obvious that gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate. it took a long time for these things to be figured out, after careful experiments in which different phenomena were separately quantified and/or minimized.this is something that's puzzled me for a while. if you drop a rock and an olive leaf over a cliff, then sure, the rock will hit the ground first. and that might lead to confusion. but if you toss a big rock and a somewhat smaller rock over a cliff, they'll both hit the ground at about the same time. and frankly, the greeks were plenty smart enough to have tried this. so why didn't they? and that's not to mention the jillions of folks in between aristotle and galileo who apparently didn't try it either. or even galileo himself, who didn't drop cannonballs off the leaning tower of pisa, which would have been simple and easy, but instead used the cockamamie pendulum route to figure out how things worked. and what about avicenna and his contemporaries? they rooted around in territory that was close to newtonian mechanics, but did they ever figure out that heavier objects don't fall faster than lighter ones? or the chinese? supposedly they invented everything, but did they ever try dropping a pair of printing presses off the great wall? any historians of science out there? what's the deal with the apparent failure to perform such a butt simple experiment over the course of 20 centuries? —kevin drum 5:49 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (111) collapse....i don't watch much pro football, but today i tuned into the end of the redskins-eagles game to give me something to do while i ate lunch. sheesh. what an epic collapse. suddenly i understand why the skins drive jim henley into such despair. —kevin drum 4:13 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (26) assassinations....in a comment responding to m.j. rosenberg's post about right-wing israeli extremists who venerate yitzhak rabin's assassin, matt yglesias says:it's hardly an original-to-me observation, but amir really does seem like the rare assassin who actually managed to be quite effective at advancing his agenda.i've heard that frequently myself, but is it true? john wilkes booth may not have saved the confederacy, but in the longer term he was probably pretty effective — though i suppose you can always make the argument that things would eventually have turned out the same regardless of whether or not lincoln had served out his second term. but that's cheating: if you take that view of history, then assassins are ineffective by definition and the game is over before it begins. part of the problem is that too often we don't even know assassins' motivations in the first place. lee harvey oswald and sirhan sirhan are ciphers. ditto for james earl ray and arthur bremer, and charles guiteau had nothing more than a personal beef. among famous american assassins, that leaves only leon czolgosz, who did have a motivation (justice for the working class) and pretty thoroughly failed to do anything about it. [update: in comments, will divide points out that teddy roosevelt, though obviously no anarchist, was friendlier to business reform than mckinley. so czolgosz may have done his cause some good after all.] gavrilo princip? serbia certainly didn't do well in the aftermath of wwi, but then again, neither did austria-hungary. brutus? that didn't turn out as planned, did it? ditto for nikolai rysakov et. al., though i suppose one might argue that in the long run they got what they wanted. nathuram godse? hard to say. if his goal was eternal enmity between india and pakistan, i suppose he got it. christer pettersson? apparently there was no motivation at all. so: who's the most successful assassin in history? that is, the one who most effectively advanced his stated goals? is it yigal amir, or does someone have a good case to make for someone else? update: henry farrell alerts me to what the heavy hitters in the academy have to say about this. first, jones and olken:using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004....we find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. we also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts.second, iqbal and zorn:[a]n analysis of all assassinations of heads of state between 1952 and 1997....our 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.so there you have it. —kevin drum 1:18 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (57) go home....who says america has lost its power to influence the rest of the world?the japanese government has created new immigration procedures for foreign visitors — rules that critics say are all too revealing about official attitudes toward foreigners. on nov. 20, japan will begin fingerprinting and photographing non-japanese travelers as they pass through immigration at air and sea ports. the government says the controls are a necessary security measure aimed at preventing a terrorist attack in japan. the new system is modeled on the u.s. program instituted in 2004 that takes digital photos and fingerprints of travelers entering the united states on visas. but the japanese system goes further by requiring foreign residents — in addition to visitors — to be photographed and fingerprinted.i wonder if the ongoing arms race to treat every tourist like a potential terrorist is the 21st century version of smoot-hawley? —kevin drum 11:54 am permalink | trackbacks | comments (36)   november 10, 2007 penmanship....the headline on this newsweek article talks about "good penmanship," but the text tells a subtly different story:beauty seems to be less important than fluidity and speed. [vanderbilt university professor steve] graham's work, and others', has shown that from kindergarten through fourth grade, kids think and write at the same time. (only later is mental composition divorced from the physical process of handwriting.)...."measures of speed among elementary-school students are good predictors of the quality and quantity of their writing in middle school," says stephen peverly, a professor of psychology and education at columbia university's teachers college. "i don't care about legibility."hah! take that, mom. i may have been the despair of my elementary school teachers in the penmanship department, but now science™ tells us that "beauty seems to be less important than fluidity and speed," just like i always thought. though, in fairness, i have to admit that not only is my handwriting not very legible, it's not really very fluid or speedy either, so it's not like i come out of this smelling like a rose. a good part of the reason, i suppose, is the peculiar way i hold a pen, which my mother and my teachers spent years kvetching about to no avail. and i have to admit, looking at it in a photo, it looks hellishly awkward, doesn't it? but i've tried the "correct" way of holding a pen, and i've just never been able to get used to it. and now it's too late. the only think i care about is the quality of my keyboard, not the quality of my handwriting. and soon we'll all have bionic arms and direct neural connections to digital paper anyway, right? to go along with our flying cars. or so i've been told. —kevin drum 2:03 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (58) nuclear....john mccain offered up some criticism of bernie kerik yesterday for bailing out on his job training the iraqi police, and the giuliani campaign naturally went ballistic in response. rich lowry is perturbed:i admire the fighting spirit of the rudy folks, but gee whiz. he's the front-runner! (according to the national polls.) there's no need to come off so defensively, and not every attack requires a nuclear response. doing it to joe biden is one thing, but to fellow republicans who aren't even a threat at the moment is probably ill-advised.but this is just the package you get with rudy. his only instinct is to attack at full throttle no matter what. someone wants to change the law about ferret ownership? go nuclear. a magazine runs an ad you don't like on city buses? go nuclear. his police chief gets some credit for reducing crime? go nuclear. this is not a guy with multiple gears or multiple ways of dealing with the world. attacking is all he knows how to do. if he's elected president, there's no reason to think that will change. —kevin drum 12:43 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (41)   november 9, 2007 procrustean quoting....yeah, this is pretty shameless. usually you have to go to freerepublic to find editing this creative, not cnn. —kevin drum 8:01 pm permalink | trackbacks | comments (36)   abu aardvark alas, a blog alicublog american footprints eric alterman americablog ann althouse asymmetrical information atlanticblog atrios brian beutler beautiful horizons begging to differ belgravia dispatch busy, busy, busy carpetbagger report cliopatria juan cole the corner (nro) corrente crooked timber crooks and liars daily howler daily kos danger room brad delong democracy arsenal democratic strategist dohiyi mir daniel drezner donkey rising econospeak eduwonk electrolite firedoglake fiat lux grits for breakfast the hamster hullabaloo instapundit intel dump jesus' general joanne jacobs just one minute kausfiles ezra klein charles kuffner kung fu monkey (john rogers) l.a. observed land of black gold liberalism without cynicism majikthise marginal revolution mahablog making light chris mooney mother jones mydd mystery pollster nathan newman newshoggers brendan nyhan obsidian wings the oil drum open source politics outside the beltway out of iraq oxblog pacific views pandagon brad plumer virginia postrel professor bainbridge qando john quiggin realclear politics the reality-based community red state bruce reed elayne riggs road to surfdom ruminate this sadly, no! julian sanchez shakespeare's sister the sideshow skippy the bush kangaroo spot-on suburban guerrilla swampland the talent show talking points memo tpmcafe talkleft tapped tbogg tnr - the plank andrew tobias uncertain principles unfogged unqualified offerings volokh conspiracy wampum war and piece washington note watching those we chose matt welch oliver willis watching those we chose winds of change trish wilson wonkette matthew yglesias november 2007 october 2007 september 2007 august 2007 july 2007 june 2007 may 2007 april 2007 march 2007 february 2007 january 2007 december 2006 november 2006 october 2006 september 2006 august 2006 july 2006 june 2006 may 2006 april 2006 march 2006 february 2006 january 2006 december 2005 november 2005 october 2005 september 2005 august 2005 july 2005 june 2005 may 2005 april 2005 march 2005 february 2005 january 2005 december 2004 november 2004 october 2004 september 2004 august 2004 july 2004 june 2004 may 2004 april 2004 march 2004 february 2004 january 2004 december 2003 november 2003 october 2003 september 2003 august 2003 july 2003 june 2003 may 2003 april 2003 march 2003 february 2003 january 2003 december 2002   ------ advertisements ------ search now: place your link here ---paid advertisements--- vacation rentals addiction treatment programs bad credit personal loans green card       subscribe | donate | mission statement | masthead | contact us | careers | rss feed | send letters to the editor

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