Centerfield

North Korea Thread

Ike got North Korea to agree only to a cease-fire, and only got that far by threatening to use nuclear weapons.

There are reasons to believe Kim Jong-Il was lied to about the missile test failure. Maybe the same thing happened with the nuclear test, and he wrongly believes he was working nuclear missiles. That'd explain why he wants out from under the cease-fre. Except, surely he hasn't thought out other possible consequences of being out from under said cease-fire.

We can only hope somebody, somewhere is givingi Kim Jong Il a quick course on nuclear and mutually assured deterrence. My guess is he is - he's not a rogue dictator, but has to work with certain other powerful elements in the country.

There's an American version of the quick course for slow learners - that's why there's been a turbo-leak on steroids of a nuclear launching plan on North Korea. That's surely not near the top of the list of actual options Obama would follow, as we have pleny of conventional capacity. unless they went nuclear first (an option they might not have)

This time there's no chance atall China'd help them, unlike the Cold War, because China today clearly sees its interests in peace within its current limits, or they woulda nipped off Myanmar/Burma by now, and note that same article includes a rumor of Chinese horror rather than happiness with Pyongyang. And, I'd bet his threats on Seoul are about as half-real as his nuclear missiles. Surely Seoul would suffer horribly in an invasion, but IMHO, not to the extent Pyongyang claims. His regime has a long history of propaganda and even Pyongyang thinks it has is likely to be undermaintained and undertested....

Unlike his Daddy, Jong-Il always struck me as preferring comforts to war, especially war that might lead to his rem oval or death. I'm betting he just revels in his new, er, "nuclear"" power a bit, and then calms down instead of going hot.

Open Thread: Off To Houston

We're planning on spending the weekend in Houston.

I hope you enjoy yours.

Won't Somebody Please, Please Think Of The Fish?

After all, that's whom any nuclear missile N Korea launches is likely to hit - they're 0/3 so far. And, not even so many fish need to worry, as they seem to be two fizzles for two on the nuclear test front.

That's what'll happen when you make your regime too nasty to get many good engineers....

It's so sad, so sad, that no number of invocations of Dear Leader or even sonny-boy's personal attention seem to make those rockets and nuclear weapons work.

Sotomayor Blogifact

I think the Sotomayor pick's a good one; she looks well up to the job to me, and is a woman who overcame hard circumstances to get there, like so many of our best.

A commenter on a Ta-Nehisi Coates thread about the pick points out, I think rightly, that this' partly a political sandtrap for the GOP. It's a good opportunity for them to look like bigots of one sort or another, something they've been making no effort to avoid recently.

Rightie opinion seems divided, largely by generation. Most rightie Xers and younger are grumbling for the nonracist reasons that she's liberal, though there're also grumbles that she's less distinguished than Alito and Roberts (what do you need to be as distinguished? Be a man? Rich? Wear flashy robes? Not have read any annoying lefty history like Blackwell that might undermine your support of Bush' dictatorial powers?). And, for once this week, the RNC managed nonstereotyping talking points about issues (albeit IMHO mistaken ones), their error this time having been the comparatively minor one of having released them direct to the media.... Here's a good article on why the RNC is being careful about this.

But plenty of less fair, mostly older rightie voices are out there, too, with too much credulence of Rosen's thuggish New Republic article about her.

Your Axil Of Evil Was Small Fry Compared To the Real Axis, Lady

It just bugs the hell out of me that somebody so smart and well-educated as Rice could make the kind of mistake of thinking the post-9/11 situation was more dangerous to the US than the Nazis. Yeah, I know it's old news, but I was hopelessly busy when it and it bugs me so much I gotta get my grumble in. I'm guessing she's in a kind of denial to keep herself from having to blame herself for the wrong things her bosses did without her grumbling, but I'm about as ready to accept her excuse as the Profesora is of dogs eating homework.

So, what the worst case Al'Qaeda attack? Maybe we've seen it already - getting in on a President without the kind of inner resources FDR showed when Japan pearled our harbor, and with a tinge toward authoritarianism. But, the worst case is that they can hurt cities or special spots badly, but not so often, and not end our democracy, or our freedoms over the long term. The Nazi worst case was they could conquer your counry, commit genocide in it as they pleased, and end anything like liberty. I'm not seeing how the Al'Qaeda case is anything like as bad. That actual thing happened to France, and I think any Frenchman of the day would've laughed bitterly at Rice's idea of even many terror attacks being worse than what was done to his country. Surely any would've traded life in today's Israel over life in occupied France in a second. If we'd lain down and let our friends fall, or been less lucky, the Axis surely would've come for us as soon as they conquered or allied with enough intervening turf to make it practical.

And, unlike todays' Axil of Evil made up by a speechwriter, the Axis was given form by actual treaties of alliance, a joint wish for more turf in the world, tanks and airplanes by the ton, advanced tactics and training, and no nuclear weapons yet to make conquerors give the Allies a pass. The Axis of Evil was joined by, well, they were all countries we didn't like, all pretty minor-league, and separately don't like us so much either, but have no alliances, much less ability to affect our affairs unless we're stupid enough to invade them stupid.

Lincoln's situation was even more dangerous. He had a dangerous enemy army not far away atall for most of the war. And he, unlike some Presidents we can mention, had a good reason for suspending habeas corpus - all of a sudden, half the Federal bureaucracy was on the other side.

Open Auto-Fire ON Thread

The RNC came out for Constitution's support for slavery yesterday. Yep!

They did that by coming out against Obama's quite right attack on the slavery-accommodating bits of the Constitution.

On that same DeLong thread, Jonathan Versen commented on this, "Can't we just agree to disagree three-fifths of the time?"

This all reminds me of a couple of games I used to play where the best thing to do is to leave the mouse button pressed to keep firing indefinitely while always repositioning to make your fire count most. You know, you gotta play politics and PR a little differently, boys....

I hope your weekend goes better than the RNC's. We've been to Borders, and I got a copy of Barnett's new Great Powers, that so far I'm liking. I'm certainly not in danger of agreeing with every word, especially on the Bush Administration, but it does bring plenty to think about. The Profesora's making a Spanish tortilla, and I'm planning to make some chili. What's up with you guys?

What If Terrorists Are Supervillains?

Oh, oh! Even launching them into space won't work!! Oh, NO!

Thanks, hilzoy, bringing this threat to our attention!

Limbaugh Party Not Doing So Well

The problem with having Limbaugh be your party boss is that, well, his goal's selling ears, not getting votes. And he's succeeding well in his goal. The GOP, though, not so well.

Here's the Gallup report with the numbers, and here's a long talkingpointsmemo thread, Ta-Nehisi Coates thread here, and a centrist-rightie Larison thread here.

And, as more on the no coalition here part of this, here's an article on one reason why Gov Hunstman's taking the job in China - he wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms in first campaigning stop, in Michigan, because of a moderate position on gays.

You know, I think we lefties've maybe been overusing the term "GOP base", which implies a certain solidity that just doesn't seem to be there, really. No, for now, it's all a bunch of effectively separate groups grumbling at each other and at Dems. Many aren't even calling themseles Republicans just now - hence the low GOP ID numbers. Many are calling themselves independents, some teabaggers, some libertarians, and some Modern Whigs (as the GOP's now pretty much the opposite coalition of the Old Whigs, this stretches my brain a bit).

Wolfram Alpha Useless For Me and Oversold

One Steve Wolfram, as is his custom, overhyped a new service, trying to build up the ring of a Google-killer.

Contrary to his claims, it in fact does nothing that hasn't been done before. What is new is hooking up Mathematica up to a traditional query engine. To give him some credit, it might be the most complicated calculator yet; it might've been some use doing physics homework long ago, in exactly the role I used an earlier Wolfram product, Mathematica, and used it more conveniently than with a special Mathematica-enabled account I had. I suppose Wolfram deserves some gratitude for effectively having made much of Mathematica free.

But now, I have no use for this thing. It knows nothing about my field, computer networking; I've tried several queries. Python scripts and open source graphing tools are now a much more convenient, secure, and flexible way of analyzing data. For my business work, a local spreadsheet's what I want.

Wolfram Alpha sure looks oversold to me. I think this' far less useful than Google, since you can learn how things work via Google, and this'll only help you with certain kinds of questions, and on a far, far, smaller db. Goog, for example, returned useful answers to all my networking queries. Farhad Manjoo of Slate agrees. So, Wolfram, thanks, but no thanks for me.

Obama and Netanyahu

On Monday, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, will have his first face-to-face meeting with Barack Obama since he became president. When these two leaders meet at the White House, there's likely to be some head-knocking, at least behind closed doors.

President Obama's policies regarding Israel and the Middle East are thin and contradictory. The first red flag waved during the campaign, when Obama said in a speech to a pro-Israel group, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." That was an absurd statement, given that the status of Jerusalem is one of the more contentious issues between Israel and the Palestinians. Following vigorous negative responses from the Palestinians and Arab leaders, Obama and his campaign quickly backtracked.

This faux pas was a clear early indication that Obama and his staff didn't have a good understanding of Middle East issues. From that point on, his clear sympathy for Muslim concerns and Palestinian positions, plus a low-key if not distant attitude toward support for Israel, have been a cause of concern for the Israeli leadership.

One important reason for the disconnect between Israel and the U.S. is differing priorities. The U.S., under President Obama, seems to be most concerned about the plight of the Palestinians and how to reconcile their differences with Israel to reach a two-state solution. Israel places a higher priority on Iran and its apparent determination to become a nuclear power. Obama's comments in the campaign about meeting with Iran's leader without pre-conditions and subsequent events have led Israel to believe that Obama is a naif who doesn't understand the existential threat Iran presents for Israel.

All things considered, it's understandable that Israel might question the sincerity of Obama's expressed support for Israel and might be worried about his apparent affinity for those who are sworn to destroy them.

The bellwether issue at this point is support for a two-state solution, in which Israel would be able to live in peace and security with a neighboring Palestinian state. Superficially, this seems to be the ideal solution. But, as they say, the devil is in the details.

Israel cannot accept a two-state solution that does not resolve the question of security. Its greatest nightmare would be an independent Palestinian state bent on its destruction through continued terrorism, but with a new ability to import heavy weapons and train them on Israel's cities and its major airport. Given the history of the region, it's hard to envision a diplomatic solution that would leave Israel confident that it could have a future of peace and security.

Another major issue is the so-called "right of return." This concept involves the return of Palestinians, mostly their generational descendants, to land they once occupied, but usually didn't legally own, in what is now Israel. As Israelis and their opponents both understand, this would swamp Israel with Palestinians claiming land, rip the political and economic fabric of the country apart, and render the Jews of Israel a minority within their own country. Israel will never permit this to happen, and any attempt to include a "right of return" in a negotiated two-state solution will be dead on arrival.

A third issue, more manageable but still very difficult, is the status of Israeli settlements on land that is perceived by some to belong to the Palestinians. It's hard to imagine a two-state solution that would be acceptable to the Palestinians without including a requirement for Israel to completely remove these settlements. In Israel, removal of the settlements is an issue so sensitive that any prime minister who tried it would probably lose his job. In any case, Netanyahu has taken the position that he intends to expand the settlements, which makes a two-state solution seem even more unlikely.

Finally, there's the Iranian threat. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made it crystal clear that Iran's goal is the destruction of Israel, which dovetails with the objective of their Arab neighbors. Today, Iran's ability to further that goal isn't significant. If they succeed in developing nuclear weapons, however, they will suddenly be far more threatening to Israel than all the Arab states put together. Israel assumes, probably correctly, that Iran would use nuclear weapons against Israel if it had the chance. This may not be an issue that directly militates against a two-state solution, but Israel is unlikely to focus its attention in that direction until the threat of Iran is dealt with.

Obama seems to strongly support a two-state solution, and Netanyahu does not, at least not until the most difficult issues are resolved. Signals are being sent from high political levels in Israel that Netanyahu will tell Obama that he now supports a two-state solution. However, it's difficult to see how that will mean much, given the intractable issues involved.

I think this Obama-Netanyahu meeting will produce the normal upbeat public statements and press conference smiles, handshakes, and back slaps. Behind closed doors, I suspect that Netanyahu will instruct Obama on some of the realities of politics and diplomacy in the Middle East. He will make it clear that Israel will not permit Iran to develop nuclear weapons, with or without U.S. support, any more than it permitted Iraq to do so in 1981. He may also succeed in giving Obama a better understanding of the difficulty of resolving the other issues they both face, from a perspective not often heard in the circles in which Obama travels.

It's unlikely that significant agreements will result from this meeting. It's doubtful that Netanyahu will be able to change Obama's mind on the key issues, considering his predilections and the advice he gets from other quarters. On the most explosive issue, Obama may give Netanyahu a wink and a nod on direct Israeli action against Iran, but Netanyahu would be wise to take it with a grain of salt. When the stuff hits the fan after an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Obama will cut and run.

For more information:

World Watches for U.S. Shift on Mideast, The New York Times
Obama, Netanyahu to Meet at White House, The Washington Post
At odds with Obama, Netanyahu heads to U.S., Reuters

(This article was also posted at Opinion Forum.)

The Politics of Torture

This issue of "torture" has become so political that it's virtually impossible to have a rational discussion. As with so many other issues in today's highly-charged partisan environment, most of those on the left are against it, and most of those on the right are for it. What utter nonsense.

Despite the glib, throw-away pronouncements of those who don't know any better, aggressive interrogation does sometimes yield highly valuable information. If an average person snatches someone off the street and starts pulling out his fingernails, of course the victim will say anything his tormentor wants to hear.

However, a prisoner in the charge of a trained interrogator is another matter entirely. The interrogator already knows that the prisoner has certain information, and he knows enough to be able to judge when the prisoner is lying. He then increases the pressure and stress the prisoner is enduring until the prisoner understands what his best interests are and reveals the information required.

Not understanding the difference between those two scenarios is about the same as equating a serial killer's dismemberment of a victim with a surgeon's life-saving surgery.

Another article of faith among those who don't know any better is that if we do it to our prisoners, then our enemies will do it to American soldiers when they are captured. More nonsense. Historically, American soldiers have suffered terribly in captivity, typically facing gratuitous violence, enslavement, neglect, and execution. The fact the we didn't treat prisoners the same way didn't make any difference, and neither did treaties and international conventions.

The Obama Administration has not acted wisely in selectively releasing some information, while holding back other information that might run counter to their policy preferences. Democrats in Congress have acted very irresponsibly, first supporting or at least acquiescing, then denying any knowledge and clamoring to criminalize their opponents. In the process of these political machinations, our national security has been damaged, the world has been turned further against us, and our enemies have benefited.

Should the United States engage in aggressive interrogations, using techniques that some consider "torture?" No decent person, including me, wants that to happen. John McCain, an honorable man for whom I have tremendous respect, is against it. However, it should be pointed out that McCain suffered extreme treatment that was gratuitous or used as punishment. His captors were not trying to extract critical, time-sensitive information essential to their national defense.

Here's what is going to happen: President Obama will someday authorize enhanced interrogation techniques to be used against a specific person or group. McCain, had he become president, would have done the same thing. In the continuing struggle against terrorism, even if the President isn't ideologically inclined to call it a war, this is going to be necessary. And we should never know about it.

In the final analysis, if President Obama doesn't do everything possible to prevent the deaths of large numbers of American citizens, then he will be the one who deserves to be impeached and removed from office.

* * *

There's a very good, reasonably balanced discussion of these issues in Did Torture Save Lives? by Stuart Taylor Jr. in National Journal Magazine. Here's part of it:

The fashionable assumption that coercive interrogation (up to and including torture) never saved a single life makes it easy to resolve what otherwise would be an agonizing moral quandary.

The same assumption makes it even easier for congressional Democrats, human-rights activists, and George W. Bush-hating avengers to call for prosecuting and imprisoning the former president and his entire national security team, including their lawyers. The charge: approving brutal methods---seen by many as illegal torture---that were also blessed, at least implicitly, by Nancy Pelosi, now the House speaker, and other Intelligence Committee members in and after 2002.

But there is a body of evidence suggesting that brutal interrogation methods may indeed have saved lives, perhaps a great many lives---and that renouncing those methods may someday end up costing many, many more.

To be sure, the evidence in the public record is not conclusive. It comes mainly from Bush appointees and Central Intelligence Agency officials with records to defend and axes to grind. There is plenty of countervailing evidence coming from critics who have less access to the classified information that tells much of the story and have their own axes to grind. There are also plausible arguments for renouncing coercive interrogation even if it does save some lives.

But it would be an abdication for the president to proceed on the facile assumption that his no-coercion executive order is cost-free. Instead, he should commission an expert review of what interrogators learned from the high-value detainees both before and after using brutal methods and whether those methods appear to have saved lives. He should also foster a better-informed public debate by declassifying as much of the relevant evidence as possible, as former Vice President Cheney and other Republicans have urged. ...

Should people suspected of plotting mass death really be treated more punctiliously than people suspected of burglary?

Not in the view of a veteran prosecutor who suggested somewhat ambiguously in 2002 that terrorists are not "entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention" and that we need to "find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located."

That was Eric Holder, whose policy now, as Obama's attorney general, is to give full Geneva Convention protection to terrorists who may be plotting mass murders while considering whether to prosecute Bush appointees for going too far in their desperate zeal to save lives.

The CIA's Questioning Worked by Marc A. Thiessen, The Washington Post
Geneva Convention Common Article 3, Center for Defense Information

(This article was also posted at Opinion Forum.)

Bush-Admin Broadband Failures

Interesting broadband pointer, article, AND thread here.

I give Bush an 'F' on Internet policy for letting telcos out of the competitive environment his Republican predecessor, Reagan, had started, and the bipartisan Telco Act had strengthened. Don't believe for a second that it's a coincidence that decent bandwidth on Internet backbones came AFTER Ma Bell was broken up, because it wasn't.

Libertarian Intentional Community?

More evidence that Libertarianisms's the Communism of our time - it's gotten to the voluntary community-formation phase. Now, it's true that our democracy's hardly been healthy in recent yeas, as too much of the senior generation of politicians have, I think, grown authoritarian and/or corrupt (notice that there's evidence Pelosi supported torture). But history shows clearly that the alternatives to democracy are even worse.

What's more, history also shows that, at best, as Will Wilkinson points out, they'll get no farther than the second generation, who'll mostly think their parents are daft and want out, just like every politically extreme, egalitarian community in the past.

As I've said before, I think libertarianism is in reality as good for liberty as Communism was good for communities. Libertarian Party leaders, elected with clear majorities of libertarians, consistenty oppose freedoms of the bedroom and immigration, and seem to want to impose on the dollar an obsolete economic system that's decidedly less stable than what we have today. They also want to cut down protections for the little guy, which'd hardly help with their freedom, either.

Friedman's blog suggests to me he'll be about as helpful to his cause as W, and for the same reasons - yet another man with a big name who's ridden to the top without having to be curious. I'm not seeing any evidence on his site he's at even googled for the way the zilliions of past intentional communities have gone down. One of my wife's research threads, by the way, is on literature inspired by such a series of Japanese Communist settlements in Latin America. It's a big pity there's little chance grandson-boy Friedman won't read any of it...

And thus, we get the following, er, interesting quote: "Piracy is still a problem on the high seas, but does not seem particularly worrisome for a seastead." Whatever you say, Friedman. Did you know, Friedman, that they can read the Internet in Liberia, and this will seem like nice, rich-boy, undefended bait to them? Enjoy your pirate encounter, bwahaha...

Disc Drive Problems

An ancient Linux harddrive died Wednesday. My posting will be slow, if atall, for awhile.

So, what are your weekend plans? Mine seem to involve Frys' Electronics...

The Economy: IMHO, a Change We Can Believe In

For the first time in years, I'm hopeful on the economy. Geithner's proposed ideas finally address one of the key problem areas that 'til now's gotten little mention or looks on fixing, the problems of valuing stock of currently-toxic assets.

The Problem

Forgetting about CDS', and just not trading in them anymore won't work because modern companies, banks, and financial institutions have to have a good idea of how much the whole company's worth to do much atall. If a company has of investments in CDS', that's part of the worth of the company. They need total value numbers to qualify for money with other investors, to give to the SEC, and to feed to internal programs to figure out what they can and can't afford to do. That might sound like a familiar situation - many CAN'T do much atall. And they don't know because the valuation model they had turned out to be stupidly simplistic and now they have literally no real value atall. Nor can they just be zeroed, because alot of money was in them, and that'd just shrink our economy ALOT, suddenly, a pretty bad thing; we will live with a serious shrinkage, but a smaller one, and hopefully a more gradual one.

How'd we get into this state? A dismayingly widespread due-diligence failure; company after company's top executives neglected to think carefully about or commission much independent thinking about CDS valuation models. A good Economist article wrote, IMHO rightly, "this was modelling at its most feeble." This doesn't mean computer modelling's hopeless, as some seem to fel, but rather a good demonstration of garbage algorithm in, garbage results out.

That means that to get out of this crisis, new, more reasonable models need to be developed by the market and actually used.

You'd expect that with the urgency of that problem for doing positive business flow and all the high-priced brains on Wall Street, this would be triv, maybe taking a month or three, and they'd have their best guys on it. And you'd seem to be so wrong. Not so many of the major actors seem to be facing up to their responsibilities and working it out with the market, maybe because the bosses know in their tummies it'll involve pretty serious losses.

A Fix?

At long last, Tim Geithner has come up with a pretty IMHO promising-looking approach for dealing with the mortgage insurance security problem that's really at the heart of this.

From the linked Economist article:

His solution, a "public-private investment programme", or PPIP, relies on investors to negotiate a price with banks, although they will be subsidised by government-backed loans.

So why's this so promising? Well, because, by offering government subsidy, it gives an incentive for more enterprising actors to get involved and start getting real valuations for so many of these fuzzy assets. More important still, these actors' work are likely to create a new, better valuation basis for them. And then, I think these financial institutions will be encouraged and/or forced to mark their currently-unvalued assets to values based on the new model. After all, there will now be a market in them, and everybody's expected to mark-to-market, right? Of course, it won't be that simple, but eventually, by hook or by crook, that should clear up that phase of the crisis, institution by institution.

Notice that we don't really want the gummint owning all CDS', as that contributes little and would cost a headachingly huge sum, but rather want 99% of them to have associated values, so virtually all banks and financial institutions in turn have believable total values themselves and be able to do business on reasonable terms. That value will be alot smaller than the pre-crisis valuation, and that'll hurt, BUT, now more and more of the economy'll be able to resume to growth mode, as institution after institution return to having reasonable book values. Of course, some institutions will be exposed as overleveraged again and need help, but at least now we'll know who those are and what the true dimensions of the crisis is and be able to move forward more effectively to deal with those problems, something alot harder when you don't even have a $ value for a big chunk of investment money like that.

I'm finally feeling like we're probably seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, here. We still probably have year or two to go, but now it gets clearer we're probably headed in the right direction.

Criticism

There's no shortage of criticism of the plan. One source of criticism comes from the limits on the numbers of journalists and bloggers that've run their own businesses, and a failure to understand how basic to operation good valuation numbers are. But Geithner's right. Mgt can't know what risks they can run, and it's virtually impossible to get funds if nobody believes your books, and public companies are required to have value numbers under strict standards for that reason. This crisis undercuts investor confidence have in the corporate books, though.

Here's a more sophisticated criticism. But he's missing that a market has to exist in CDS' before a market value of CDS' exists. He thinks a consolidated 'bad bank' would be better; the problems with that are that then the economy'd be out the entire value of CDS', and the taxpayer'd probably be on the dime for almost all that loss. I mean, how's the gummint supposed to sell something nobody wanted to buy?

So, to me, Geithner's PPIP's likely to eventually fix a big branch of the crisis that had gone unaddressed awhile.

Austin Mayor and Council Results

The guys we voted for all came on top, but our Mayoral choice faces a runoff in a month; since he had a pretty good margin, it's looking good. He won the debate, most thought, and he had the best campaign organization, which bodes well for a mayor, of course.

Much more here.

Failed Evil Emperor Rove Thread

Yesterday, it struck me that a certain Rove goal worked out the opposite of reality; that's his hope for "... a majority that would last for a generation." The reality's been so opposite, in fact, that the Bush/Rove failures've turned into one of the very "opportunities" he suggested taking advantage of in a Texas politics flick we saw. So, how do YOU think it happened?

Some relevant longer quotes:

From a Rove profile in The New Yorker, May 12, 2003: . . . Rove's main goal over the next year and a half is making George W. Bush what his father wasn't, a reelected President -- when I asked if he had mapped out the campaign, he said, 'Don't expect me to answer this question' -- he is too ambitious to want only that. The real prize is creating a Republican majority that would be as solid as, say, the Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt created -- a majority that would last for a generation and that, as it played itself out over time, would wind up profoundly changing the relationship between citizen and state in this country."

From an NPR story: . . . Rove had a special interest in the presidency of William McKinley, and especially the role of his political adviser, Mark Hanna. Rove saw a connection between the McKinley-Hanna era of the 1890s and his own era exactly 100 years later. Both came at the transition point between centuries, with increased trade and immigration, as well as advances in science and communications. In both eras, the national political agenda included questions of progressive taxation and of cooperation between government and big business.

This second list is more to the point. What strikes me about it is how much Rove just wished it'd go that way, and how little he did in practice to help his party take advantage of those similarities. Of course, Hanna's party included both the politically and technologically progressive wings of politics, which, of course, Rove did little to attract. It wasn't Rove's party, but his opposition, that's made clearly better use of the Internet, while one TR innovated on taking advantage of new press networks like AP. It was Hanna's party, also via TR, who delivered on keeping the corporations of the day in limits, and wanted HIGHER taxes and spending as well.

Not only has the, er, generation, only lasted to Bush, but, in fact, Rove and Bush've had the exact opposite effect - their coalition is, as I've seen one Republican write and others agree with, now tribes at war with each other, a historically unusual level of fail. It's normal for the people to be tired of a President after eight years, but seeing their coalitions shatter like dropped light bulbs is something you have to get out the history books to find, and look at Nixon, Hoover, or Buchanan, say. Bush may even push things the other way for that next generation or two Rove hoped for (some supporting evidence in the comments).

Rove, in my judgement, seems to have won by, as much as possible, choosing his opposition instead of the electorate, like his ol' boss Nixon, which just seems wrong to me. My comments for Rove's final paper are that we have no elected dictator position; it's evil in a democracy to choose candidates FOR people; and rightly provokes backlash; he was an idiot to let Bush II get so lazy and nasty on message and rule; and he was weak in giving people positive instead of negative reasons to vote for his guy. F.

So, how do YOU think he managed to do so unimaginably badly?

Open Long Week Thread

It's been a looonnng week here, with slow blogging. The Profesora had her finals and finished grading everything. The Kid, not quite 2, can climb up even the tallest slides at playgrounds. Mothers' Day came on Wednesday. And, we went on a sleep-deprived trip to Houston to submit a visa application to the Brazilian consulate there, for a trip to Rio next month.

Some pork chops just came out well, using a Cook's Illustrated glaze recipe and some nice, thick chops from Costco.

I hope things are going well for you guys as well?

Some Nice Backstabbing

Some good ol' DC-style backstabbing on Sotomayor. Or, as Klein put it THE KNIVES COME OUT -- QUICKLY

Here's what somebody who actually knows Sotomayor well, somebody who clerked for her, has to say.

MUST SELL THOSE PAPERS

Junkfood Science gives a ratio of 1,005 news stories for every case of flu

And, remember, even the worst case projection, pretty unlikely to happen, only projects 1700 cases in the US in a month. That'd give you a whomping 1 in 100,000 change of getting it in that time. That'd mean it won't even make it up the worst flu of the year, being seriously wussy next the winter's flu. BORING, I say....

Open Weekend Thread

The Kid's daycare held a special night-care deal they occasionally have that lets us parents get out and do something more parent-like every once in a while. We were hoping to get out and do some dancing tonight.

But, of course, the Profesora - this being finals time - didn't happen to get any sleep last night. So we simplified the evening alot.

Though, we didn't exactly suffer; we went to our pretty good 'hood Japanese place instead.