Brice Family Values

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2006 at 11:49 pm

I haven’t mentioned this yet, but all the scenes featuring Namond getting pressure from his parents to stop goofing off and start buckling down to get serious about his career as a drug dealer have been absolutely priceless. I wonder, though, if anyone actually finds those conversations believable? I suppose I have no idea what incarcerated drug gang soldiers say to their teenaged sons, but a priori I don’t really buy it. At the same time, I don’t really care. Precisely what makes the so brilliant is the direct symmetry between what Wee-Bay and De’Londa tell their son and the way parents of The Wire target demographic’s socioeconomic class act.

Those kind of symmetries and resonances, both external and internal (as in the migration of the phrase “it’s all in the game” to Carcetti) to the show are at the core of its appeal and what makes grandiose claims about it plausible.

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Yglesias

What About The Bad News?

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2006 at 11:39 pm

The shoe that hasn’t really dropped so far in Iraq is the continuing unresolved status and borders of Kurdistan. As sectarian violence spreads into northern Iraq, including Kirkuk, you’ve got to figure we’re getting closer to the dropping of that shoe. It’s not clear to me from the article whether there was a specifically Kurdish angle to the Kirkuk incidents here, but one way or another nothing’s going to go down in that town without Kurdish forces ending up involved.

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Politics

53.

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 15, 2006 at 9:34 pm

Total number of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq this month, “an extraordinarily high midmonth tally.” At the current rate of American deaths, “October is on track to be the third deadliest month of the entire Iraq war for American forces.”

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Climate Progress

The Trillion-Dollar Cost of Climate Inaction

By Joe Romm on Oct 15, 2006 at 8:05 pm

Quick hit: Here is the link for a study that is now getting a lot of media attention: “Climate Change – the Costs of Inaction,” by leading economists at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University in the U.S. for The Big Ask, Friends of the Earth’s climate campaign.

You can read the press release, “ECONOMISTS WARN CLIMATE CHANGE WILL COST WORLD TRILLIONS IF GOVERNMENTS FAIL TO ACT,” here.

I just wanted to do a quick post because I had trouble finding the actual study, and wanted to save CP readers some time. The study makes clear that the cost of inaction is far, far, far higher than the cost of action, a major point of Climate Progress.

Security

Hagel: ‘We Need To Find A New Strategy, A Way Out Of Iraq’

By Judd Legum on Oct 15, 2006 at 6:51 pm

Today on CNN’s Late Edition, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) delivered a blistering critique of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.

Hagel said, “The American people are not going to continue to support, sustain a policy that puts American troops in the middle of a civil war.” He added, “So we need to find a new strategy, a way out of Iraq, because the entire Middle East, Wolf, is more combustible than it’s been probably since 1948, and more dangerous, and we’re in the middle of it.” Watch it:

If Hagel is looking for a responsible way out of Iraq, he should take a look at the American Progress plan, Strategic Redeployment.

Transcript: Read more

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Culture

More Puntmania

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2006 at 5:42 pm

Losing to Tennessee is bad enough, but am I reading this drive chart correctly to say that Washington got the ball on the Redskins’ 40, advanced 25 yards to the Tennessee 35 and then . . . punted while losing in the second half? And that for their trouble Tennessee wound up with the ball on their 27 yard line?

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Security

Warner: Since I Said ˜Things Are Going Sideways In Iraq, There’s Been An ‘Exponential Increase’ In Violence

By Payson Schwin on Oct 15, 2006 at 12:05 pm

After visiting Iraq earlier this month, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner said the country is “drifting sideways” and several parts of Iraq have taken “steps backwards.” “In two or three months if this thing hasn’t come to fruition and this level of violence is not under control,” Warner said, “I think it’s a responsibility of our government to determine: Is there a change of course we should take?”

Today, Warner said he stands by his previous statements, and he added that “one week out” from his trip, there has been an “exponential increase in the killings and the savagery that’s going on over there.”

Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

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Security

Bolton Refuses To Rule Out Military Action Against North Korea

By Amanda Terkel on Oct 15, 2006 at 11:25 am

Last week in response to North Korea’s nuclear test, President Bush stated:

The transfer of nuclear weapons by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action.

Today on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked U.N. Ambassador John Bolton if Bush’s statement meant the United States would use military force against North Korea. Bolton replied, “No.”

But Bolton quickly backtracked on his answer. Bush has referred to another country as a “grave threat” just one other time during his presidency. In Jan. 2003 he called Iraq a “grave threat to peace.” Shortly after that statement, the Bush administration invaded Iraq. When Stephanopoulos pointed out this fact, Bolton retracted his earlier answer and said, “Well, I’m not going to speculate on what our response might be to something like that.”

Watch it:

Full transcript below: Read more

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Politics

Alternations

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 15, 2006 at 11:00 am

I’m a little suspicious of most generational analyses, but leaving generic doubts aside there certainly is an interesting pattern in the data shown in the chart accompanying David Kirkpatrick’s Times Week in Review article. You see a kind of cyclical pattern where an age cohort with lots of Democrats is replaced by a cohort with few Democrats. The interesting thing is that this isn’t the sort of pattern where you have kids rejecting their parents’ fashions. Instead, it looks like twentysomethings, our fiftysomething parents, and their parents are all unusually Democratic while the interstitial cohorts are the unusually Republican ones.

On the other hand, one thing the chart pretty clearly shows is that party identification doesn’t actually tell us very much. Absolutely every age group except 35 and 36 year-olds contains more soi disant Democrats than Republicans. Nevertheless, Republicans clearly win plenty of elections.