digamma.net - notes

Atrios can’t come home soon enough.

Filling in for him at Eschaton, Leah completely misquotes Eric Alterman:

If you missed Altercation yesterday, Eric has fun, (and so will you) assaulting a NYTimes article on “white studies,” which he rightly deems “.the most profoundly content-less article in a major newspaper this year.”

Well, as it happens, I DIDN’T miss Altercation on Monday - in fact, I paid a lot more attention to it than Leah did. Here’s what Alterman actually wrote (since MSNBC’s permalinks are good for nothing:

The front-page editors of The Washington Post discover “whiteness studies” about decade after the field gets going.

Then, two paragraphs down:

But seriously, congrats to Joe Lelyveld and The New York Times for publishing what may be the most profoundly content-less article in a major newspaper this year.

Anyone capable of using a web browser can see that the “content-less” article to which Alterman was referring was completely different from the “whiteness studies” article. Leah also omitted the qualification “may be” from Alterman’s accusation.

So, to recap, Leah quotes Alterman as saying something he didn’t say about an article he didn’t say it about. I emailed the blog 24 hours ago asking them to fix it, and it hasn’t been done yet. (Their blog comments are currently broken too.)

Atrios, come home.

Every Sunday, I buy the New York Times. Where I live, the Sunday Times costs $4.50, a price compounded by the gas station clerk’s look that says “Dang ol’ rich liberals and their expensive papers.”

I consider the price fair, in part because the paper is always chock-full of good reporting and commentary, and in part because six days a week I enjoy the paper online for exactly $0.00. But every week, there’s one op-ed that makes me want to go back to the gas station, apologize to the clerk for my high-falutin’ ways, and get a refund.

Matt Bai writes on the state budget crises, mixing honest analysis with ridiculous jumps in logic.

To conservatives like Stephen Moore, the influential president of the Club for Growth, this is the best kind of democracy in action. ‘’A lot of people in local towns or cities are going to say: ‘Hell, no! You’re not going to raise my taxes,’ ‘’ Moore says triumphantly. ‘’ ‘Get rid of the welfare programs!’ ‘’

But it’s hard to imagine a more basic abdication of leadership than to leave state and local spending decisions to the mercy of the majority. It’s fair to have arguments about what kind of services to provide, but that’s different from asking the voters themselves to figure out which programs are essential and how much revenue is needed to run them. That’s the whole reason we elect people to govern – even if, at times, they wish we hadn’t.

Huh? The Constitution has many provisions mandating that certain things not be “left to the mercy of the majority” - speech and religion are the two best-known examples. And I’m all for safeguarding those rights against the power of majorities. But Bai seems to be proposing that citizens should not be permitted to eliminate their own government spending programs.

It’s more accurate to say that Bai wants those programs to be funded at the federal level, causing people to support them in the hopes that the money will come from “somewhere else". But federal money is still real money - it has to come from somewhere. To support federal programs because people don’t understand how they’re funded seems pretty dishonest to me.

Here’s the next part I don’t get:

Conservatives like Moore and Grover Norquist, the strategist who talks often with Karl Rove, say it would be insane for Washington to help states that won’t help themselves. What governors really need, they argue, is the spine to cut back sprawling government programs. Norquist says governors should kick more people off Medicaid, for instance. To ensure that only the truly needy qualify, he advises governors to say, ‘'’We’re not going to be doing hair transplants or sex-change operations and all the other things we’ve been doing.”’

…. Just as conservatives going back to Barry Goldwater have pushed to shrink the federal government and return the responsibility for social services to the states, so are these same Republican activists now declaring war on the state bureaucracies that deliver those services.

Bai quotes people opposing bailouts and making suggestions to the governors - suggestions which have no bearing on federal policy - and he turns this into a declaration of war. If I go into debt, and Matt Bai doesn’t help me pay them off, but makes some suggestions as to how I can help myself, has he declared war on me?

In a sense, Republicans are using the very same tactic against the states that Reagan employed to win the cold war against the Soviet empire: force your enemy to spend himself into poverty until, at some point, the infrastructure on which he stands gives way and topples.

I would love to know Bai’s definition of “force". The only way the federal government is “forcing” the states to spend anything is by the Medicaid mandates. Nowhere in the article does Bai specifically allege that Washington has failed to meet its share of Medicaid costs, so I can only assume that that is not the case. Even if it were the case, Bai carefully glosses over the origin of said mandates - do these sound like Democratic laws, or Republican laws?

And so the nation’s governors find that they are not only governors in the traditional sense, but advocates, too. Under an ever-darkening economic sky, they’re forced to play the role of civics teachers, trying to make people in their communities (not to mention those in their own parties) understand that you can’t get everything for nothing.

And yet Mr. Bai seems to think that, if you only put the federal government in charge of entitlement programs, you CAN get everything for nothing. Any governor can be counted on to support more federal spending - who among us doesn’t want someone else to do our job for us?

At this point, I’m against this round of tax cuts. The Bush administration has shown it doesn’t have the guts to make any real cuts in federal pork, and without cuts in spending, a tax cut isn’t a tax cut - it’s a tax deferral. (This point was made in the same New York Times magazine in Peter G. Peterson’s much better article.) But I have no sympathy for the state governments who blew their 90’s surpluses, and now want to punish the other states for their fiscal responsibility.

Elsewhere in Blogistan, Jacob Levy discusses Bai’s neglect of the difference between “Hobson’s Choice” and “Hobbesian choices", and Ramesh Ponnuru handles Bai’s numbers.

You know, I LIKE Instapundit. I really do. No one else is doing better commentary on how the Internet is changing our lives, specifically in the political arena. But this just pisses me off.

Reynolds discusses Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and how we crazy anti-war types are now demanding to know where they are. He quotes a Washington Post column by Robert Kagan citing a litany of evidence that Saddam had WMD’s. Let’s assume everything Kagan writes is correct, and the Bush administration wasn’t lying during the time leading up to the war. That still only deals with half the question.

We went to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein had WMD’s and therefore posed a direct threat to the United States. Implicit in this argument was that forcibly removing Saddam from power would reduce the threat to the United States. So has it reduced that threat? Look at it this way:

June 2002: Weapons of mass destruction are controlled by Saddam Hussein’s iron-fisted dictatorship.
June 2003: The same weapons of mass destruction are missing somewhere in a lawless country divided by warring factions.

At this point, I HOPE Bush lied and Saddam didn’t have WMD’s, not because I want to score political points, but because I don’t want those WMD’s floating around a region where lots of people want to, you know, KILL ME.

After the Kagan quote, Reynolds continues:

Well, [accusing Bush and Blair of lying about the WMD’s is] better than admitting that if you’d had your way, Saddam Hussein would still be shoveling children into mass graves, I suppose. And that’s what this is really all about.

No, that’s not what this is “really all about". This is “really all about” wanting my country to pursue the best foreign policy for itself and for the world. Sometimes the best foreign policy involves leaving a brutal regime in power. (The Bush administration would certainly agree - see Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and god knows what kind of horrors in Africa.)

Having lost the argument about the war, and having had Saddam’s brutality proven beyond any reasonable doubt,

Saddam’s brutality was never in question - the worst moments of it came when he was still our ally. “The argument about the war” was not predicated on Saddam’s brutality - it was predicated on whether forcibly removing him from power was the right thing to do. If brutality were the only prerequisite for forcible regime change, we’d have toppled any number of regimes by now (see above), and Iraq wouldn’t have been first in line.)

the anti-war folks have to do something to regain the moral high ground – because, to them, the moral high ground is theirs by right, regardless of the nature or consequences of their actions.

Perhaps this accusation is true of the Stalinist elements of International ANSWER, but it’s not true of me, or the overwhelming majority of people who want questions about Iraq’s WMD’s answered sooner rather than later.

I wouldn’t really recommend that anyone read Jonah Goldberg’s latest, except for this:

Among the things I had to do Thursday was debate Lanny Davis about Hillary Clinton. The whole thing had a weird, 1998 vibe to it. I half expected Ace of Base’s “Cruel Summer” to play in the background while Bill Clinton blew up aspirin factories.

Despite all the hype over Hillary’s new book, it doesn’t feel like 1998 to me. After all, it’s not like Sugar Ray and Matchbox 20 are touring together or anything….

Creative Voices Say Television Will Suffer in New Climate

Just who are these creative voices, you ask?

Several groups, including unions representing television writers and directors, renewed calls for new limits on how many programs the major networks can own.

Oh, I see. Unionized TV writers.

Writers and producers complained that the move would kill independent production and lead to prime-time blandness.

Prime-time blandness? I can’t think of a better description of most American television before 1987.

“It’s hard to challenge the premise that `All in the Family’ would never be scheduled on a network today,” said Tom Werner, a partner in Carsey-Werner-Mandabach, one of the more prolific independent production companies. “I’m not even sure `Seinfeld’ would get on. It would look too quirky.”

Later in the article, Carsey-Werner-Mandabach is referred to as “independent". Let’s have a look at Tom Werner’s bio. If this company is “independent", I’m Maureen Dowd. The COSBY Show? Wasn’t that the quirky edgy show that lost the ratings battle to the bland mainstream Simpsons? No wonder Werner is scared of Rupert Murdoch.

So let’s say he’s right. Is there anywhere a show as “quirky” as Seinfeld could get aired today? Let’s even rule out HBO, which as the article points out is received by only a third of American households. Let me put the question another way: is there any show “quirkier” than Seinfeld that gets shown today on a network with a greater penetration than HBO?

I think we can all agree that MTV’s Jackass is “quirkier” than Seinfeld. As are Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle and 24. And I haven’t even touched Comedy Central yet.

For decades, sitcom writers and producers churned out week after week of mind-numbing repetitive crap. Over and over the bumbling husband would say “there is absolutely no way I will do this” and then do it, whatever it was. Adding a another cute blond kid to the already-cute blond family was considered groundbreaking innovation. The only thing distinguishing one steaming pile of recycled jokes from another was the family configuration - endless combinations of parents, children, grandparents, and housekeepers. (Before I started this paragraph, I had no idea how much rage I’d been repressing since 1987.)

What kept them employed was the lack of real competition - the three-network oligopoly was job protection. (And don’t talk to me about local independent stations - I still wake up screaming when I think about the shows that used to be on WPHL and WPSG in Philadelphia before they became WB and UPN.) And now that’s being threatened by a market that includes writers who dare to write new jokes - a lot of which are at the expense of the old sitcom cliches. (There was a South Park this season where Cartman tried to pass history by knocking himself into a coma, believing he’d have a flashback to the Constitutional Convention.)

Sorry guys. But hey, your cliches have not been forgotten. Here’s a tribute:

There is absolutely no way I’ll end this blog entry here. No way, no how. This blog entry will not end here.

[Girlfriend’s voice: Digamma, wouldn’t you like to come to bed?]

Yowie!

[Canned laughter.]