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Showing posts from June, 2012

Who Is John Roberts?

We'll never know. (Let me say first that I called this one wrong. I though the mandate at least was going down. Rarely so glad to be wrong.) But here's a negative look : By voting with the liberals to uphold the Affordable Care Act, Roberts has put himself above partisan reproach. No one can accuse Roberts of ruling as a movement conservative. He’s made himself bulletproof against insinuations that he’s animated by party allegiances. But by voting with the conservatives on every major legal question before the court, he nevertheless furthered the major conservative projects before the court — namely, imposing limits on federal power. And by securing his own reputation for impartiality, he made his own advocacy in those areas much more effective. If, in the future, Roberts leads the court in cases that more radically constrain the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce, today’s decision will help insulate him from criticism. And he did it while rendering a

Two Short Takes

Two things. First, an encouraging court result, where the DC Appeals Circuit upheld the responsibility of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Garrett Epps has the goods . The weirdest part of the case was where the industry group did one of those broken borrowed kettle-type arguments, where you say (1) the kettle isn't broken, (2) it was broken when I borrowed it, and besides (3) I never borrowed that kettle in the first place: A group of state governments, and a number of industry groups, immediately challenged the new rules in federal court. Their arguments, essentially, were three. First, they said, we don’t really know whether global warming is occurring or if it is caused by humans. Second, even if it is a real phenomenon, the courts should require agencies to pretend it isn’t, because believing in global warming would cost too much. Finally, and remarkably, they argued that the new permit requirements were illegal because they did not regulate greenhouse gases strictly

New Tunes

I've been making an effort to discover some new music, the way I used to do in South Africa. Here's my latest find, "Breezeblocks" by alt-J:

Quote for the Day

"With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility." From the NYRB , in a masterful review by John Gray.

A Hack Supreme Court Is Bad News

With the Supreme Court decision about the fate of Obamacare coming down Thursday, there is a lot of hand-wringing on the left about the state of American institutions. James Fallows says looking at the last decade-plus of jurisprudence, this represents a " long-term coup :" It's a simple game you can try at home. Pick a country and describe a sequence in which: First, a presidential election is decided by five people, who don't even try to explain their choice in normal legal terms. Then the beneficiary of that decision appoints the next two members of the court, who present themselves for consideration as restrained, humble figures who care only about law rather than ideology. Once on the bench, for life, those two actively second-guess and re-do existing law, to advance the interests of the party that appointed them. Meanwhile their party's representatives in the Senate abuse procedural rules to an extent  never previously seen  to block legislation

Why I Hope iPads Are Not The Future of Computing

Farhad Majoo, in a couple  Slate  pieces on the new Apple laptop and the new Windows 8 tablet , has an bizarre conceit running through both of them: that tablet computers are going to kill the PC: At the same time that it is killing the PC, Apple keeps extending the life of the personal computer with notebooks like the Air. That the same company is doing both these things is quite strange and spectacular—imagine if, in addition to building the Model-T, Henry Ford was also working on a way to breed faster, less smelly horses. Is the iPad really killing the PC? Personally, every single person I know that has an iPad also has at least one PC, and it's not really a replacement. Rather, it's for gadget nuts or for people who like consuming media on a handy and portable device. But when it comes to doing something serious on the iPad, it sucks. Manage a spreadsheet, or type a long document? Even just upload a single file without going through iTunes? (You can do that with Linux,

Quote for the Day

"So on the one hand, the Washington Post believes that the notion that the US has an ‘empire’ is self-evidently ridiculous. On the other hand, it suggests that if Ecuador is impertinent enough to host an individual whom the US doesn’t like (but would have a hard time pressing charges against), it should and will express its displeasure by crippling Ecuador’s economy and threatening the livelihood of 400,000 of its citizens. These few sentences are rather useful, despite themselves, in talking to the nature of the American imperium, the doublethink that maintains it, and the usefulness of providing/withholding market access as a means of imperial coercion." -- Henry Farrell , responding to this WaPo op-ed .

The Latest From Die Antwoord

Music from South Africa. Weird, disturbing, and a little violent. As per usual.

A Bloody Economic Analogy

I was holding down the table for the Monthly  at the Take Back the American Dream conference on Tuesday, and got to see Chris Hayes do a live interview of Paul Krugman. It was a good chat, but they talked for awhile about an economic metaphor that got me thinking: "the economy has magneto trouble," Krugman said, quoting Keynes. This was to spark (groan) the idea that the catastrophic effects of a depression are of a simple and mostly technical sort—a magneto being an old-timey word for part of the electrical system of a car (today we'd call it an alternator) which provides power to the spark plugs. It's cheap and easy to replace, but if yours is broke, your car won't start. Realizing that when people hear "magneto," they probably think of the X-Men villain, Krugman came up with a different metaphor, saying right now the economy is like a car missing a battery. Nothing fundamentally wrong with the car, just pony up the cash to replace the battery and ev

Why You Should Read Chris Hayes' Book

As regular readers are aware, I'm a huge fan of Chris Hayes. Accordingly, I went to his event at Politics and Prose last night (an hour early to get a good seat), and for the first time in I can't remember how long, bought a new, hardcover copy of a book I've already read for solidarity reasons. I wasn't disappointed. Hayes, as you might expect from a TV man, is very good at talking, and gave a good talk. I've already written a lot about his book, so I won't rehash the content, but it was well done. Somewhat more surprisingly, he was also very good at working the microphone, even leaning into it and dropping his voice to make a punchline standup comedian-style. And he was very kind and gracious at the signing, remembering my review of his book and complimenting my writing, which caused my brain to seize up like a flash-frozen halibut. Anyway, listening to one of the fans ahead of me in line last night I was reminded of the reason why I liked it so much. Not

End the Senate!

Thinking back on what is probably Caro's best book so far about Johnson, Master of the Senate , I'm struck again and again at how strange the institution of the Senate looked compared to today. Everyone knows that the parties back then had little in the way of coherent political ideology; both had liberal and conservative wings and bills were routinely passed on a bipartisan basis. Probably the most striking example of this was during the Eisenhower administration, where the Democrats were if anything more supportive of the president (particularly when it came to foreign policy) than the Republicans, who had significant isolationist and crazed anti-communist wings. Before Johnson, Senate was a muddled tangle. Its committees were mostly controlled with an iron grip by Southerners (who abused the filibuster to stymie civil rights), its rules were a massive, illogical snarl of anachronisms, and its system of advancement was based on seniority, making many of its most powerful me

Drones Are Defensible, but They Are Not Being Used Defensibly

Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and Conor Friedersdorf have been in a bit of a spat over drones. Greenwald and Friedersdorf argue, in essence, that the drone campaign is doing more harm than good. Here's a representative quote from the latter: Despite all these misgivings, it's the drone aided kill-stats to which Sullivan always comes back, as if our president's cool competence has allowed him to end the terrorist threat by remote controlled aircraft. But it really doesn't make sense to extol Obama every time a drone kills an Al Qaeda operative. There's no shortage of politicians who, if elected president, will give the CIA permission to fire on suspected terrorists in various foreign countries. Herman Cain would give that order. So would Rick Perry. Sarah Palin might even let drone operators practice on wolves. Would they be serving America's best interests in doing so? I don't think so. Neither does Jane Mayer . Nor Jeremy Scahill . Nor various anony

Internet Culture of the Day

On Reddit : I've been playing the same game of Civ II for 10 years. Though long outdated, I grew fascinated with this particular game because by the time Civ III was released, I was already well into the distant future. I then thought that it might be interesting to see just how far into the future I could get and see what the ramifications would be. Naturally I play other games and have a life, but I often return to this game when I'm not doing anything and carry on. The results are as follows. -The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation. -There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands. Wow. Really, really interesting.

Whew

Well, I'm finally done for the time being filling in for Ed Kilgore. I kept meaning to put something up here but full-time blogging really wrings out my brain and I couldn't muster the energy. So, for now, here is a selection of the best posts I did over the last week or so: 1. Science Denial Is a Large and Growing Problem . This one blew up a little on Twitter. 2. Concern Trolling in the Times . Bill Keller recommended this one. Turns out, he is a remarkably terrible columnist. 3. Mitt Romney and Firefighters . The future holds more wildfire, bet on it. 4. Remember When Breaking the Law Used to Mean Something?  Nixon was a criminal, sure, but Bush was  every bit as lawless. Plus, nobody cares, which is way worse. 5. The Liberal Path to Power . Summing up a lot of my recent thinking. 6. Jon Stewart and False Equivalence . Constant vigilance. 7. Poor Understanding of Monetary Policy Is Killing the Democrats . We need a crash course, children's book, something.

Graveyard of the Colorado, Part III

Upheaval Dome, via [ This is Part III of my dad's story about Cataract Canyon. Part I is here , and Part II is here . ] We begin to shuttle the people down to the beach at Ten Cent Rapid, the last one above the lake. Doug flies the people on a short detour round the field of spires and pinnacles known as the Doll’s House by way of accumulating actual vacationing points. We’re still having fun, right? Then he’s ready to take the gear and kitchen down to camp, only he doesn’t have a sling and it would take dozen trips to haul it all in the cockpit. “Throw it all on one of those boats,” he says, “I’ll just tie on to that.”  “Are you sure?” I ask him right out, “We haven’t had the best luck trying to fly these things.”  He fixes me with a cool eye. “Throw it on,” he says. We use my boat, the “ Tuolumne ,” as the flying cargo container. There’s the kitchen full of cast iron cookware, stoves, food, tables; the toilet set-up goes in a hatch by itself.  I cram personal b

Elites and Intellectual Failure

I agree mostly with Matt Yglesias' diagnosis of the scariness of American political institutions, and the even greater uneasiness that European institutions inspire. I want to quibble with this graf however: Think seriously about it and you'll see that it just can't be that everyone in Frankfurt and Brussels and Berlin and Madrid and Athens is incredibly stupid. Rather, the eurozone has blundered into a set of institutional arrangements that can't process the issues correctly and the rest of us can just stand and watch the wreckage unfold. Our problems are completely different in origin but similar in some important respects. Luce's book is the story of a United States that's suffering from a variety of fairly well-known problems that intellectually seem far from unsolvable. And yet our political system, for some fairly profound reasons, just isn't working on solving the problems. Instead, it's leaping toward another terrifying and pointless debt ceil