Friday, April 13, 2007

Why I’ve Been Nice to the Daily Lately

Brooke McKean and Hanady Kader found my short response to the former’s editorial on multicultural etiquette, and suggested I submit to Free Speech Friday. I was flattered. And here it is, though I like the longer version better.

The Daily has some good sports working on its Opinion section. But the criticism will come back soon, I promise.

Parties are the Biggest Problem?

Like I said in this post, the concern of the legislature and the administration seems a tad misplaced. I dislike using the unfortunate experiences of other people to make a political point, but there is a serious crime and violence problem in the U-District and, by and large, UW students tend to be the victims. Case in point, courtesy of the Daily:

According to a press release by the SPD, two individuals — one of whom is a UW student — were walking on 18th Avenue. Northeast approaching Northeast 50th Street at about 2 a.m. Sunday morning. They were accosted by three men, described in the report as being about 20 years old with medium builds.

According to the victims’ testimony, one of the suspects displayed a small, semi-automatic handgun, which he pointed at the victims. The suspects instructed the victims to empty their pockets and then walk away quietly. The victims complied and left the scene unharmed.

I’m no huge fan of the Greek system. But how many Greeks do you think are packing at two in the morning? I heartily encourage the legislature and administration to address this neighborhood's unique issues and start protecting us.

Student Conduct Code, Continuing Coverage

I’ve been behind this week, but we continue our coverage of the fatuous attempt of some of UW's neighbors to get the kids to turn that damn devil's music down. On Wednesday, the Daily featured a detailed report on the proposed Student Conduct Code, which the legislature managed to strongarm the ASUW into endorsing. The basic idea behind the SCC:

Under the proposed change, students living between Northeast 45th Street and Northeast Ravenna Boulevard and 15th Avenue Northeast and 22nd Avenue Northeast who receive citations for incidents, such as noise violations, property destruction or public lewdness, could be subject to university disciplinary actions.

I don’t know how this affects me – I live on 15th, but on the Ave side of 15th. And that’s a very important problem for the proponents of this childish exercise in busybody civics, isn’t it? The University Park Community Clubs, whom both the legislative delegation of the 43rd district and the UW administration seem eager to placate, wish to carve out this tiny swath of Seattle (representing only a fraction of the actual student population) and designate it as a sacred plot of quiet. It’s as if the map was conceived to underscore the arbitrary quality of the whole enterprise – only the disruptive students in this little square should be subject to citation? The sheer caprice with which the boundaries of this new project were drawn up should be its knell. Do we even need to move on to the timeworn debate over redundant jurisdictions?

And for some ungodly reason, the university still feels the need to say that it does not endorse thuggish behavior among its students:

The proposal also gives the UW the authority to take disciplinary action against students convicted of violent crimes regardless of where the crime might occur.

Otherwise, I suppose, one of the premier research institutions in the world might get a reputation for bangin’.

Stay tuned for new developments in this story, complete with snarky eye-rolling.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

"What I've Learned"

Esquire boasts one of the best regular features of any American magazine. This one is authored by 11-year-old Hunter Clevons of Apex, North Carolina:
Once a teacher tried to force me to do something I didn't want to do and then walked away. I got angry, and the teacher turned around just as I was doing a movement that showed I was angry. You never think they're gonna turn around just at that moment.

Someone Who Agrees...

...that Edwards will win the Democratic nomination. Matthew Yglesias makes the point that no one seems to take seriously when I make it:

I'd like to go on record early as saying I think John Edwards is probably going to win the nomination. If I had a choice between leading in national polls (Clinton), leading in fundraising (Obama), or leading in Iowa (Edwards) I'd take leading in Iowa. Money has diminishing marginal returns and Edwards has "enough" fundraising to keep running a major campaign. National polls, meanwhile, can move a lot in response to what happens in Iowa, whereas Iowa doesn't move in response to what happens nationwide.

Last, the emerging Obama-Clinton dynamic is making it very likely that Edwards can keep plugging away for the next six months and become everyone's second choice.

Not to mention, of course, that Edwards is the candidate best able to face down the Republicans. The radical right is serious (insane, obsessed, and paranoid, but serious) when it says it will not under any circumstances permit Hillary Clinton to be president. Likewise, an Obama general election candidacy will lose every southern state – remember what happened to Harold Ford the last time around. John Edwards is my second choice among the Dems, but a white male who campaigns on peace, responsibility, and equality is preferable to the white male who campaigns on aggression and wild-eyed tax cuts.

Colbert and My Favorite Animal



Visit the Great Turtle Race website and check up on Stephanie Colbertle's progress. Donate if you can - these are amazing (and adorable) creatures.

Iraqi Parliament Bombed

They managed to get inside the Green Zone again, and at least one Iraqi MP was killed. The New York Times reports:

The blast appeared to be caused by a bomb, although it was not clear if the explosive was detonated by a suicide bomber or had been planted. The attack would appear to be one of the most serious breaches of security of Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, where the parliament is located.

The parliament had ended its session about half an hour before the explosion. Many legislators had left the Iraqi Convention Center, where the parliament is based, but some were eating lunch in the cafeteria near the parliament chamber when the explosion struck.

Meanwhile, both the Maliki and Bush governments are preparing to shrink the Green Zone. The siege has been brought to a whole new level.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

McCain on Offense

I stopped buying John McCain’s moderate image when he stopped trying to sell it back in 2004. But he is driven by a stubborn commitment to what he thinks is right, and his latest verbal assaults against Democratic political opponents have proved the truism that George W. Bush has spent the last six years demonstrating – when you’re convinced that you’re right and everyone else is wrong, you wind up behaving badly. John Dickerson of Slate muses on McCain’s aggressive new stance:

What's new here is obviously not McCain's unhedged support for the war. He's talked about that at length. What makes this speech different is the full-force, no-caveats attack on his opponents. It went beyond attacking policy inconsistencies—such as the fact that Democrats voted to confirm Gen. David Petraeus as Iraqi commander but against his plan for action—or raising questions about how opponents of the war would deal with the chaos following an American withdrawal. It repeatedly questioned not just their views but their motives, ending with a moving story about a heroic Navy SEAL officer whose bravery McCain juxtaposes with those seeking "temporary political advantage."

There’s a chance, of course – a long, drawn-out, über-bloody chance, rife with tragedy and sacrifice and another generation of diffidence and loathing in our political culture – that the U.S. could eventually restore order to Iraq. God knows at the price of how many more billions, or how many more American lives, or how much more American prestige – not to mention the catastrophic cost an indefinite U.S. military tie-down would have upon global stability. If John McCain wins the Republican nomination, the 2008 election will be a referendum on how much Americans are willing to pay for victory.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Imus

When a “firestorm” like this surrounds a major columnist or broadcaster, I normally regard it as another instance of the media gratuitously stroking its collective ego, managing to make itself the subject of the day’s news. But the Imus controversy – and by controversy I mean debate among pundits who espouse varying degrees of vitriol in their denunciations – conjures up dreaded identity politics. It’s important to note, as Timothy Noah at Slate does here, that the guttural old wanker has been in the business of insulting ethnic and gender identities for some time. A few samples:

On blacks:

"William Cohen, the Mandingo deal." (Former Defense Secretary Cohen's wife is African-American.)

"We all have 12-inch penises." (After being asked what he has in common with Nat Turner, Malcolm X, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Latrell Sprewell from the New York Knicks, and Al Sharpton.)

On Jews:

"Boner-nosed … beanie-wearing Jewboy." (Description of Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, a frequent guest.)

On gays:

"I didn't know that Allan Bloom was coming in from the back end." (The homosexuality of the author of The Closing of the American Mind became widely known when Saul Bellow published Ravelstein, a novel whose protagonist was based on Bloom, who by then was deceased.)

George Allen, Scholar

On the rebound after a reference to a Democratic campaign worker as “macaca” delivered his Virginia Senate seat to Jim Webb, George Allen has been named the Young America’s Foundation “Reagan Ranch Presidential Scholar.” Personally, I admire the bold generosity of the Y.A.F. – the intellectual and policy talents of Mr. Allen have never been fully appreciated. His skills can now be employed where they are most needed and best suited – on the Board of Directors that oversees the management of a “Ranch.”

The Perennial “Win-By-Losing” Strategy

Just nice to see that the right-wing has to endure these asinine, humiliating thought experiments from its punditry for a change. Mickey Kaus suggests that Jonah Goldberg might be wrong to insist that congressional Republicans should roll over and let the Dems pass “a sweeping semi-amnesty immigration bill” because it would make a fine wedge issue in ’08:

'Waterloo went badly for Napoleon--but hey, it gave him a great issue!'

I say we pass it just to observe the effects on Bill O’Reilly’s anatomy.

Medical Marijuana “Measure” Passes in Olympia

The legislature has managed to screw patients who are too weak to grow the plant themselves. The police now have the option of arresting caregivers that helped to grow marijuana plants and seizing the plants themselves. The Seattle Times reports:

Smith, for one, said the bill's failure to allow collective growing penalizes patients and caregivers who need to group together to afford the expenses involved in growing marijuana. Smith suffers from a host of medical problems, including AIDS, a stroke, colon cancer and kidney failure. He shares a "grow" but now worries about his caregiver being arrested.

Unbelievable. Sen. Kohl-Welles says she’s going to "keep working on it." She damned well better.

Chavez vs. Big Oil

The New York Times reports on the clash of some of the most repellent titans in the world, and I don’t know where I stand. I somehow doubt that Chavez’s program would be quite so radical if the Bush Administration hadn’t idiotically offered its tacit support to the 2002 coup attempt, but it did and today we have another regional agitator to deal with.

New refinement technology has the potential to make Venezuela’s “dirty” crude oil reserves as valuable as the Saudis’, and naturally the petroleum giants are willing to tolerate any rabble-rouser if they can just get a piece of the action. Chavez dreams big, though, and Caracas and Houston are having trouble seeing eye to eye:

Consider the quandary facing Exxon Mobil after its chairman, Rex W. Tillerson, recently suggested that Exxon might be forced to abandon a major Venezuelan oil project because of its growing troubles with Mr. Chávez.

The energy world took notice. So did Mr. Chávez’s government.

Only a day later, Venezuelan agents raided Exxon’s offices here in the San Ignacio towers, a bastion for this country’s business elite. The government said that the raid was part of a tax investigation, but energy analysts said the exchange of threat and counterthreat was all too clear.

Boys will be boys.

There’s a reason to support Exxon and Chevron in all this, and strangely enough it has to do with the survival of the remaining threads of democracy in Venezuela. The Middle Eastern oil dictators defend their despotism by pointing out that state oil companies pay for the entire government apparatus – no representation without taxation, they say. Better to keep U.S. oil companies in place than to abandon the country to Chavez’s proletarian thug state indefinitely, no?

Speaking of oil states, what have you read about Sao Tome and Principe lately? Give a country a leadership that hasn’t made a career of trying to kill its problems, and there’s a possibility that even a tiny, impoverished African island state can transform itself into a free and prosperous society.

Yokozuna

Lately I've been accusing Spencer of having a secret man-crush on Ann Coulter. I deserved it. Plus, this is why I think Spencer Baldwin is such a great guy:

Just keep this in mind Chris, I have an ass, and you have a face... If you don't think that that is a threat, which I think that you should, I would advise you to look up the definition of yokozuna.

Monday, April 9, 2007

Victory for Democracy?

This scene makes me queasy.

President Bush et. all keep telling us that democracy is messy, but Iraq is not a democracy and by all accounts, this was not messy. The protest in Najaf was remarkably well-orchestrated by Moqtada al-Sadr’s thugs, but the sheer size of the crowd should be quite enough to convince anyone that this wasn’t simply the pathetic machination of a few unemployed Shiite Kalashnikov-toters. The people of Iraq want us out.

I’m convinced that this wasn’t a just a hopeless exercise in (pure) hubris from the start. There was – and is – something to the neocons’ assertion that the reactionary thugocracies of the Middle East are primarily responsible for the stultifying life that the Muslim oil states are able to provide for their citizens; and the tiny successes that the “surge” has garnered so far suggest that if Shinseki had been listened to in the beginning, Iraq wouldn’t be the jungle of chaotic backstabbing that it’s become. Another mistake – permitting al-Sadr to run free. And now what do we do with him? The New York Times reports:

Mr. Sadr used the protest to try to reassert his image as a nationalist rebel who appeals to both anti-American Shiites and Sunni Arabs. He established that reputation in 2004, when he publicly supported Sunni insurgents in Falluja who were battling United States marines, and quickly gained popularity among Sunnis across Iraq and the region. But his nationalist credentials have been tarnished in the last year, as Sunni Arabs have accused Mr. Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, of torturing and killing Sunnis.

If you pull out one grey hair, three more grow in its place – this is the War on Terror lesson that we never learn, because there’s just no solution to the problem. If he can regain control of the Mahdi Army, maybe he can be dealt with. Killing, exiling, or otherwise eliminating him now will free the pit vipers of the master that kept them (loosely) together. Unleash that nightmare, and you just might need another surge to walk through the streets of Baghdad surrounded by Special Ops.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Perils of the Echo Chamber

Andrew Sullivan and Charles Krauthammer have me confused. It seems I’ve accidentally slipped into a parallel universe in which Ahmadinejad won the struggle over the captive British sailors, Blair and the U.K. were completely humiliated, and the whole ordeal only served to magnify the moral shortcomings of the West. The paradox: Ahmadinejad schedules of day of childish photo ops in order to make it look like he’s won, and because he’s trying so hard to make it look like he’s won, he’s won? The media, even the new media, have an irritating habit of conflating “looks like it” with “it is.” I stand by my previous assertion that Blair handled the situation soberly and skillfully. New revelations from the Guardian back me up:

In the first few days after the captives were seized and British diplomats were getting no news from Tehran on their whereabouts, Pentagon officials asked their British counterparts: what do you want us to do? They offered a series of military options, a list which remains top secret given the mounting risk of war between the US and Iran. But one of the options was for US combat aircraft to mount aggressive patrols over Iranian Revolutionary Guard bases in Iran, to underline the seriousness of the situation. […]

The British declined the offer and said the US could calm the situation by staying out of it. London also asked the US to tone down military exercises that were already under way in the Gulf. […]

At the request of the British, the two US carrier groups, totalling 40 ships plus aircraft, modified their exercises to make them less confrontational.

The British government also asked the US administration from Mr Bush down to be cautious in its use of rhetoric, which was relatively restrained throughout.