A Year of Fundamentals

I feel like this is going to be an interesting election year. On the one hand, all the fundamentals favor the GOP. The economy is down. The Presidential Party normally loses off-year elections. The Democratic Party won a ton of marginal seats in the 2006 and 2008 wave elections, and those seats would be difficult to hang onto under any circumstances. The terrain is very Republican-friendly.

Political scientists are generally rather sneering about the idea that the daily political play-by-play actually effects election results all that much. It's fundamental, macro issues (most notably the economy) which drive results.

Yet, this year, we might see a test of that hypothesis, given just how far to the right the Republican Party has decided to drift. It's not quite like the Republican Party decided to run a whole slate of Alvin Greenes, but it's close.

In state after state -- Kentucky, Nevada, Florida, and most recently Alaska -- GOP primary voters have spurned mainstream, electable candidates for folks on the furthest of the right-ward fringe. And it's turning states that should have been easy wins for the GOP into bona fide targets for the Democratic Party. Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) should be dead in the water, but for the fact that 66% of Sharron Angle's own supporters regret having nominated her. Joe Miller's apparent knock-off of incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has possibly put that Senate seat into play. In the Florida gubernatorial race, former prohibitive favorite Bill McCollum couldn't get past Rick Scott in the primary, and Democratic nominee Alex Sink has to be smiling given that McCollum apparently won't endorse Scott. A similar story prevails in the Florida Senate race, as Charlie Crist's independent bid after getting forced out of the GOP primary by Marco Rubio has thrown the entire race into flux (for the record, I'm a Charlie Crist fan, and have been since well before he dropped the GOP label). And so on and so forth.

So this is an interesting year. It really tests the question -- are fundamentals everything? Are there candidates so extreme that they can -- not just on a case-by-case basis, but systemwide -- check against the natural political gravity which is pulling hard against the Democrats this year?

It'll be interesting to find out. (Although I can't say I'm excited. Call me risk-averse, but I'd prefer a strong chance of mainstream Republicans winning than even a 50-50 chance of some of the nuts we're talking about getting their hands on the levers of power. Sharron Angle may have given Harry Reid a breath of life, but it also means we have a non-negligible prospect of Senator Sharron Angle. Scary.).

Filling the Gap

Kevin Drum has two good posts up: one on the obsession with raising the retirement age, and another on the rise of the "Obama is a Muslim" falsehood.

It's been a busy day for me, and a quiet day on the web.

Ground Zero: It's Not Just Staten Island Anymore

No, the title is not a typo. In the meantime, opponents of the Park 51 community center don't know exactly where "Ground Zero" ends and Muslims should be allowed to build things. 10 blocks away? 100 blocks away? The entire island of Manhattan? Who knows! We ought to just throw up our hands like the American Family Association, and just ban Mosques nationwide!

This sudden escalation of hate and prejudice is reflected by the nearly one-third of Americans think Muslims shouldn't be allowed to run for President. As Dan Filler accurately notes, "anti-Muslim sentiments are beginning to jump the levees, spreading out across Village Americana." We are teetering on the precipice of this becoming mainstream -- part of "normal politics", rather than banished to the fringes where it belongs. It's scary. It's very, very scary.

When Did We Suddenly Have To "Pay For" Things?

I feel like there is no greater illustration of the hollow GOP concern for the deficit than this exchange between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and David Gregory:

GREGORY: For a final time, I’ll go back to my question which is, the extension of the tax cuts would cost $3.2 trillion. That’s borrowed money, that adds to the deficit. Do you have a plan to pay for that extension?

MCCONNELL: You’re talking about current tax policy. Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, ‘pay for’?

Senator McConnell may have once again darted across the McConnell Line.

....FORMER ROOMATE!

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's book What's Right with Islam is What's Right with America, was published in America by a press owned by none other than Fox News' Rupert Murdoch. Which, under the Spaceballs criterion of guilt that the Cordoba Initiative is being forced to play under, makes Fox News a terrorist affiliate (and the Cordoba Initiative a conservative hack outfit, I guess).

The Dark Side

This article, on how to keep the trapped Chilean miners sane as they await what might be a four-month long wait for rescue, is very interesting. But my favorite part was the inverse-Yoda advice given about the perils of darkness:

The men used tools they have underground to establish a light source and to power their head lamps – after food and water sources, establishing reliable access to light is critical to staving off psychological deterioration.

“The most important thing, aside from keeping physical needs satisfied, is to help them keep a positive frame of mind,” Dr. Suedfeld said. “Darkness is disorienting. It leads to uncertainty. That leads to anxiety and fear.”

And that leads to the dark side! Wait -- that's circular.

Anyway, hopefully the officials down in Chile have some good consultants available to advise them on how to keep tensions to a minimum amongst the trapped miners. Their situation is precarious enough without them fighting all the time.

I Hear That Book Covers Almost as Much Terrain as Richard Posner in a Year

An amusing legal research anecdote shared by Eugene Volokh.

Direct Talks Beginning

It took some severe arm-twisting and more than a few tense moments, but the US has announced that direct talks will commence between Israel and the PA this September. The word out of Washington (and this strikes me as quite optimistic) is that all issues can be resolved within a year.

Well, good luck!

Nobody Reads Literature Anymore

The New York Times had a fascinating account over a townhall meeting designed to assuage concerns over a new mosque being built on Staten Island (which, as we know, is only 11 miles from the WTC site). The meeting was quite fiery, and tensions were running high. But then,

as Bill Finnegan stood at the microphone, came the meeting’s single moment of hushed silence. Mr. Finnegan said he was a Marine lance corporal, home from Afghanistan, where he had worked as a mediator with warring tribes.

After the sustained standing ovation that followed his introduction, he turned to the Muslims on the panel: “My question to you is, will you work to form a cohesive bond with the people of this community?” The men said yes.

Then he turned to the crowd. “And will you work to form a cohesive bond with these people — your new neighbors?”

And we all know how this story ends, right? We all know what happens next?

The crowd erupted in boos. “No!” someone shouted.

Sigh.

In Southern Manhattan, I am a Muslim

Early this year, I declared myself "Seismic Shock" in solidarity with a blogger faced with threats of legal retaliation for daring to expose the links between a prominent pastor and anti-Semitic thugs.

The "controversy" over the proposed Southern Manhattan Muslim community center continues to grow, and folks stretch to ever deeper contortions to justify passive-aggressions "questions must be asked" formulations about whether the Imam is a closet Islamist. In that light, we read Jeffrey Goldberg's account of that Imam's sermon at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, and bow our heads in shame:

We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths. If to be a Jew means to say with all one's heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.

As Mr. Goldberg correctly notes:

There are those who would argue that these represent mere words, chosen carefully to appease a potentially suspicious audience. I would argue something different: That any Muslim imam who stands before a Jewish congregation and says, "I am a Jew," is placing his life in danger. Remember, Islamists hate the people they consider apostates even more than they hate Christians and Jews. In other words, the man many commentators on the right assert is a terrorist-sympathizer placed himself in mortal peril in order to identify himself with Christians and Jews, and specifically with the most famous Jewish victim of Islamism.

I noted very early on that the demagogues who have created this controversy were taking the oppression of Jews in the Arab world not as a violation to be condemned, but as a model to emulate. The religious bigotry and hatred they are promoting is one that threatens me too. The experience of not being able to worship freely, of being seen as a permanent outsider, of constantly having to prove one's loyalty to country and community, these are all quite familiar to me. And in that sense, just as I am a Jew, I am a Muslim -- and always have been.

Barack Obama Went to Carleton?!?!

Goldberg:

Such a ridiculous question, is Obama a Muslim? Of course he's not. He's a Druid. But a Reform Druid. Meaning he only worships shrubbery.

(See here).

Flying Back to Chicago

Going back to Chicago today. Lot's of stuff is going down right now, and my patience is very thin. Looking forward to seeing Jill.

Seal the Chamber

In the wake of harsh criticism over her repeated use of the "n-word" on radio, Dr. Laura is ending her radio career:

Embattled radio talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger announced Tuesday she will not renew her contract that is up at the end of the year, telling CNN's "Larry King Live" she wants to "regain my First Amendment rights."
[...]
In announcing her decision "not to do radio anymore" after being in the business for more than 30 years, Schlessinger said, "I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry or some special-interest group deciding this is a time to silence a voice of dissent."

While Dr. Laura still claims to "regret" the incident, I'm a little dubious, not the least because the "n-word" was among the least offensive elements of the tirade she went off on.

In any event, as is so often the case, "First Amendment rights" translates to the right not to be criticized by private parties. In fact, we can translate this entire whine as abject fury that Dr. Laura's professional position forced her to actually listen to Black people's "special-interest group's" opinions. Dr. Laura's real complaint here isn't about the First Amendment. It's that her echo chamber wasn't as secure as she thought it was.

Buchanan Says Gingrich Went Too Far

Pat Buchanan told off Newt Gingrich for comparing the planned Muslim community center in southern Manhattan to putting up a swastika near the Holocaust museum. Though, it being Buchanan, one can't be precisely sure if he was speaking up in defense of the Muslims, or the Nazis.

You Can Argue But You'd Be Wrong

In spite of grave misgivings, I started to read this post by Efraim Karsh, figuring that hey, it's important to educate myself on the views of others -- even if they do say ridiculous things like that Obama has "distinguished himself, in his short term in office, as the most anti-Israeli U.S. president in living memory."

And then we got here:

James Zogby himself, among others, felt compelled to attempt to rebut my article. "There are bad polls, and then there are bad interpretations of polls," he wrote in the Huffington Post. "Putting them together (i.e. a bad interpretation of a bad poll) can create a mess of misinformation."

The "bad poll" in question is a recent survey for the al-Arabiya television network, noted in my article, which found a staggering 71 percent of Arab respondents had no interest in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks. And the "bad interpretation" is my presumed failure to recognize that this was not a fully scientific poll but rather an "online vote," which didn't refer to the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks but rather to the "Middle East peace process."

It is arguable of course that an "online-vote" by 8844 respondents (more than twice the size of the Brookings/Zogby poll), answering one straightforward question, might be more accurate and less susceptible to manipulation than "scientifically" crafted surveys purposively choosing their target audiences; or that ordinary Arabs, living as they do in one of the least democratic parts of the world, will be more candid in the relative obscurity of the web than in the presence of a pollster knocking on their front door or contacting them by phone.

And ... we're done here.

Because even I, B+ student in Statistics for Half-Witted Morons that I was, know that it is not, in fact, arguable that online polls (no matter how many people respond) are more accurate than a scientific poll. In fact, the entire polling industry got its start because George Gallup proved that scientific polling was far more accurate than even data drawn from a giant, non-random response pool (in his case, the Reader's Digest polls).

Anybody who is more statistically illiterate than I am really can't be trusted on any topic that involves gauging public opinion. Moving on.

Oh, I Think You'd Be Surprised

Proposing to create a new tax bracket for the ultra-rich (annual income of $1 million and above), James Surowiecki writes:

There would be political advantages, too: the reform could actually make tax hikes on top earners more popular. Critics like to describe tax hikes as hurting small business, because small-business owners make up a sizable percentage of people in the top two brackets and because small-business owners, unlike Wall Street traders, are popular on Main Street. It would be harder to mount a defense of millionaires, which may be why this year a Quinnipiac poll found overwhelming support, even among Republicans, for a millionaire tax.

I think you drastically underestimate the ability of the political classes to mount defenses of policies benefiting the hyper-rich.

It All Makes Sense Now

I've finally figured out why folks are so worked up about the Cordoba Center mosque near the WTC site.



To be fair, that "I [bomb] NY" in shrubbery is pretty impressive.

Obama Walks Back Religious Freedom Remarks

After issuing a strong statement in favor of the right of Muslims to build a mosque/community center several blocks from the WTC site, the President trimmed his sails slightly, saying that he meant to support only the "legal" right of Muslims to build there (or anywhere). He was not, he said, making any statement about whether he supported the particular decision of the local Muslim community to situate their mosque at that location.

How unfortunate. Nobody is going to give credit to the President for trying to slide on through the middle here. The folks who oppose the mosque still will view him as an enemy, and the folks who support the mosque now can effectively lump in the President with the ADL. And all of this comes after the President looked to actually be showing leadership on the matter.

The issues here are very clear. People have the right to build religious buildings to serve their local community. There should not be a mosque-exclusion-zone of indeterminate radius in south Manhattan. Asking the community to relocate is not just patronizing, it's idiotic -- the community center is designed to serve the Muslim community that already exists in southern Manhattan -- it doesn't do them any good to build out in Queens.

Calvin & Hobbes Search Engine

No joke, I've been wanting something like this to exist for years.

Leveraging Experience

Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excellent post up on Pankaj Mishra's essay about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Tariq Ramadan and Paul Berman. Mishra recalled the following anecdote from Arendt:

During the Vietnam War, Hannah Arendt noted that members of the Democratic Administration had frequent recourse to phrases like "monolithic communism," and "second Munich," and deduced from this an inability "to confront reality on its own terms because they had always some parallels in mind that 'helped' them to understand those terms."

Coates adds:

When I was college, it was common for student activists to call slavery "the Black Holocaust" or "The Real Holocaust." There's an argument to be made about America, and the stories we tell ourselves when we see ourselves as heroic, and when we don't. But most of these activists--some of them anti-Semites--knew very little about Jews, Europe, Nazism nor, frankly, slavery. And they didn't much care. They were not interested in specifics. They were interested in leveraging the moral power of other people's experience, in order to bolster the moral power of their own. It was narcissism, laziness, and basic lack of respect--not simply for the Jewish experience--but for the specifics of the African-American experience.

I've stated my distaste for the appropriation of "Holocaust" to other contexts in general. And I think that Coates is right both that such a move is both demonstrative of a lack of imagination, and represents an astoundingly disrespectful attempt to leverage one group's experience on behalf of another (often without that group's consent, and often -- as Jews well know -- against the group itself).