Month: September 2010

Twilight of the Bombs

How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix—all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use—all of the Cold War players, major and minor […]. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear “ahead,” even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.

Twilight of the Bombs

The Awlaki case speaks to something even more fundamental than law: Decent nations do not permit their governments to assassinate their own citizens. I am willing to give the intelligence community, the covert-operations guys, and the military proper a pretty free hand when it comes to dealing with dispersed terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and its affiliates. But citizenship, even when applied to a Grade-A certified rat like Awlaki, presents an important demarcation, a bright-line distinction in our politics.
If Awlaki were to be killed on a battlefield, I’d shed no tears. But ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in Yemen or Pakistan is no different from ordering the premeditated, extrajudicial killing of an American citizen in New York or Washington or Topeka — American citizens are American citizens, wherever they go. I’m an old-fashioned limited-government guy, and I am not willing to grant Washington the power to assassinate U.S. citizens, even rotten ones.

Kevin D. Williamson, writing for The National Review Online.
Yes, that’s right: I just gave the NRO a yep. That’s where we are. It is beyond belief that Obama, who the NRO folk would very likely identify as “Barack Hussein Obama, lately of Kenya: prove he’s not!!!,” is to the right of the very same NRO on this issue, and is making them uncomfortable with his administration’s aggressive stance on extra-judicial powers of the President. This is who we are. Unbelievable.
(via Peter Daou)

Fox has lost 21% of their total viewers, and 26% of their younger viewers.

jonathan-cunningham:

The biggest loser on the network was Bill O’Reilly who saw his program The O’Reilly Factor lose 12% of its total viewers and 21% of its young viewers. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bret Baier, and Greta Van Susteren rounded out the top five cable news shows, and they each posted double digit declines.

My initial thought was “people are just sick of ‘The News’” but uff-da these numbers hurt, and are specific:

Fox News is now averaging 1.831 million prime time viewers a day, and only 443,000 viewers age 25-54.

[…]

While Glenn Beck suffered double digit losses at 5PM, Chris Matthews posted modest gains of 1% overall and 8% in the demo. While Bret Baier declined, Ed Schultz has seen his viewership skyrocket at 6 PM. The Ed Show is up 24% over last year in total viewers and 8% in the demo. Keith Olbermann’s Countdown was down over last year by 6% in total viewers and 19% in the demo, but Olbermann’s was the only cable news show to gain audience since the second quarter. Rachel Maddow gained 6% in total views, but lost 1% with the demo.

Now, obviously, some of that is that msnbc has more room to grow (an odd converse to the situation The Democrat faces in the Congress, actually)…but still. The line item that’s got to shiver the timbers of one Rupert Murdoch (who, far from being any sort of true believer, simply puts up with whatever the message is so long as it makes a nice bottom line) is that demo analysis…only ~25% of your viewership is under 55? That’s what you’re selling to advertisers? Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph I may yet live to see the end of that particular brand of “discourse”…

Fox has lost 21% of their total viewers, and 26% of their younger viewers.

Obama and National Security

This excerpt from Woodward’s (sigh) new book is precisely the sort of thing I was talking about earlier:

In Woodward’s account, even after Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving 40,000. Even after he decided not to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency campaign, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving just that.

Obama also kept asking his generals for more options to consider. They were playing the old trick of giving the president three pseudo-options — two that were clearly unacceptable (in this case, 80,000 more troops for full counterinsurgency and 10,000 troops just to train Afghan soldiers) and the one in the middle that they wanted (40,000 more troops). They never gave him another option. When Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew up a compromise plan involving 20,000 troops (believing the president had a right to see a wide span of options, even if the military didn’t agree with them), Mullen forbade him from taking it outside the Pentagon. Obama never saw it.

In the end, Woodward reveals, Obama devised his own alternative strategy and personally wrote out its terms in a six-page, single-spaced memo that he made his top civilian and military advisers read and sign on to.

Recall that this same group of generals and their proxies were simultaneously waging a press-based war using damaging leaks against the President in the hopes of forcing his hand towards their preferred outcome(s).
Now flip that to an entity that you can’t engage publicly in any way. That only the smallest subset of your advisers can even know about. And that issues you memos each and every day telling you “They’re coming!”, any one of which may turn out to be your “bin Laden determined to strike in US,” so you can’t just shut these folks out, distrustful though you may be of both them and their data, spiteful as you are of their heavy handed and blowback-inducing approaches: they own your ass. That’s what it is to be President. Even when you’re one who knows his Constitution well enough to recoil at the thought of the very extra-judicial extermination of inconvenient citizens these folks are pitching.

The only real option seems to be to contain this apparatus everywhere you can, wait for the excess and overuse to explode, and then try to ratchet this thing down. Or another large-scale attack occurs that ratchets it up even further. Or a military coup when the economy utterly collapses. Whichever.

The “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Effect
Plotted in what is, perhaps, my favorite graph ever.

Jimmy “History’s Greatest Monster” Carter recalls it a little differently:

“I dropped 15 percentage points, and I almost lost the election. It was the most copies of Playboy ever sold.”

Wikipedia informs us:

The best-selling Playboy edition was the November 1972 edition, which sold 7,161,561 copies

Jimmy Carter: WRONG on his pre-election tracking polls and WRONG on Playboy circulation. We can’t trust Jimmy Carter in 2012. This message paid for by the Campaign to Reelect Barack Obama President.

What business should want, in theory, is a Republican Party that advocates for its interests. That is to say, a Republican Party willing to send 20 senators and 50 House members to the table when Democrats are writing a huge health-care bill that has the votes to pass. The Democrats would’ve given anything for some votes from across the aisle, and whatever it is that business wanted, it could’ve gotten. But since the Republican Party wasn’t interested in governing or negotiating, business didn’t have that leverage. Insofar as the GOP is the party of business, they failed their constituents: They neither stopped the bill nor – with the exception of Olympia Snowe – fully participated in the process behind it. Or take the stimulus bill, which major business groups like the Chamber of Commerce supported, but which the Republicans abandoned.

Ezra Klein describing some mythical GOP that’s actually interested in governing; the one we haven’t seen in this country in a decade or two.

BBC Reports, You Decide

David Miliband quits frontline politics

David Miliband says he is to quit frontline politics after being pipped for the Labour leadership by younger brother Ed.

Just when you think you’ve made it, somebody comes along and pips you.

pip (5) Brit., informal
verb ( pipped , pipping ) [ trans. ] (usu. be pipped)
defeat by a small margin or at the last moment : you were just pipped for the prize.
• dated: hit or wound (someone) with a gunshot.

I see. Well, one or the other, then. Jolly well played, old sport.

Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’ A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage… comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves… That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise.

President Obama, about meeting Bob Dylan when he did a performance at the White House to celebrate the civil rights movement. (via warispeace)
He must be talking about some other, Gangsta Rap associated “Dylan” here. Perhaps Dyllan, with two Ls, the well known Dutch gangsta rapper?