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Tiger Woods Wins “Hottest Major of All Time”

By Joe Romm on Aug 12, 2007 at 7:16 pm

tiger.jpgAt least that’s what the CBS commentators called this year’s PGA Championship at sweltering Southern Hills in Tulsa.

Don’t worry, Denyers — it’s just a coincidence it was so hot, and I know that CBS is even a less trustworthy record-keeper than NASA, so I’m sure someone will uncover a statistical error that proves a 1934 major was hotter.

But it’s no coincidence the world’s most fit golfer won. He is an all-climate player as I noted when he won “the brown British Open” at drought-stricken Royal Liverpool last year. No doubt he’ll some day win the “wettest major of all time,” too.

If my prediction that he’s going to break Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 majors by 2010 is to come true, though, he’ll need to average two per year for the next three years. An impossible task for anyone — anyone but Tiger Woods, that is.

Yglesias

Waxing Libertarian

By ThinkProgress on Aug 12, 2007 at 6:35 pm

Kevin Drum says those of us who like to complain about the trouble with objectivity need to check ourselves:

The problem with the convention of objectivity isn’t that no one recognizes that it’s a problem. Everyone recognizes that it’s a problem. Entire tank cars of ink have been spilled discussing it. The real problem is that so far no one has come up with a solution €” a practical, functional, real-world solution €” that’s broadly acceptable. Any ideas?

One observation is that I think it’s simply false that everyone recognizes it’s a problem. Everyone pays lip service to the idea of recognizing that there’s a problem here, but I think your average major American news organization believes it is doing an excellent job of covering US politics when it is not, in fact, doing an excellent job.

The solution, at any rate, is pretty clear to me: market competition. There isn’t a procedural rule that will correctly identify the right level of editorializing and the correct person to write the stories. Rather, as we move toward a world where the internet provides consumers with a large degree of choice, managers and reporters who manage to consistently cover the news in a way that people find useful will prosper, while those who fail to do so will suffer. Ask a journalist about the objectivity convention that governs US newspapers and he’ll tell you a story about the vital role a neutral press plays in sustaining a vibrant democracy. It’s an intriguing story, but if you ask an economist about the optimal strategy for a media organization in a market with few competitors, he’ll tell you that the important thing is to be bland and inoffensive, like television before there was cable. Not coincidentally, America’s newspapers have, secure in their possession of local monopolies, gotten really good at being bland and inoffensive. I’m reasonably optimistic that in the emerging, more-competitive world, new approaches will emerge.

Security

O’Hanlon: Iraq Trip Relied On ‘The Itinerary The Defense Department Developed’

By Satyam Khanna on Aug 12, 2007 at 6:08 pm

ohanlon123.jpgIn their now infamous New York Times op-ed, Brookings analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack wrote that “[w]e are finally getting somewhere” in Iraq, based on their eight day trip to the war-torn country.

In the days following the op-ed, the media gushed over the analyst’s opinions, uncritically referring to them as “vocal war critics,” despite their long history of support for the war.

But in a recent interview, Glenn Greenwald elicits the inner details of the trip from O’Hanlon, confirming “rather conclusively what a fraud this Op-Ed was, and even more so, the deceitfulness of the intense news coverage it generated.” Some key points from the interview:

O’Hanlon admits he is a war supporter: “As you rightly reported,” O’Hanlon told Greenwald, “I was not a critic of this war. In the final analysis, I was a supporter.”

A rushed, cherry-picked trip: O’Hanlon admitted that they spent approximately “between 2-4 hours” in every area they visited outside Baghdad, “and much of that was taken up meeting U.S. military commanders, not inspecting the proverbial ‘conditions on the ground.’” “They spent every night ensconced in the Green Zone in Baghdad,” adds Greenwald.

Pentagon “choreographed” the trip: In the op-ed, the analysts boast, “We just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel.” But O’Hanlon admitted: “The predominant majority were people who we came into contact with through the itinerary the D.O.D. developed. … For the most part, the conversations were ones arranged by D.O.D”

Unrepresentative view of Iraq: “If someone wanted to argue that we were not getting a representative view of Iraqis because the ones we spoke with were provided by the military, I would agree that this would be a genuine concern,” said O’Hanlon. “By no means did all of the Iraqis agree with the view of progress in Iraq.”

As Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) last month, the trips to Iraq organized by the U.S. government are aptly characterized as “the dog and pony show” for the superficial, dressed-up view they provide. O’Hanlon and Pollack’s op-ed, however, made no mention of the extent of the Pentagon’s involvement. Nor did O’Hanlon make much mention of it to other media outlets, observes Greenwald.

With the superficiality of their trip revealed, O’Hanlon and Pollack’s op-ed can hardly be considered the “climate-changing” salvo that the right wing would like it to be.

Read the full interview HERE.

Politics

U.S. falls in life expectancy rankings.

By Amanda Terkel on Aug 12, 2007 at 5:13 pm

The AP reports that while Americans are living longer than ever, they are not living as long as people in 41 other countries, including Japan, Guam, Jordan, and most nations in Europe. “A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier.”

capt365626c0779f47feb981e4faab7b995alife_expectancy_gfx439.jpg

A New York Times editorial today writes that the “disturbing truth” is that “by an array of pertinent yardsticks, the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care.”

Media

Halfway

By ThinkProgress on Aug 12, 2007 at 3:27 pm

This is the sort of thing where my utter lack of personal, familial, or social ties to the American intolerance belt makes me a bit useless as a pundit, but I wonder about the Democrats’ efforts to position themselves on the gay marriage issue. They’re against equal civil marriage rights because that’s unpopular. At the same time, they can’t completely alienate their equality-supporting backers, so they’re essentially all in favor of everything else on the gay rights agenda.

Under the circumstances, I can’t help but wonder who it is who’s supposed to be fooled by this. After all, if someone emailed me and said “it’s very important to me that gay and lesbian couples not be allowed to marry — who should I vote for?” it would be malpractice for me to respond by saying “oh, it doesn’t matter, all the candidates have the same view on this.” On the contrary, any of the major Democratic contenders is much more likely to wind up appointing judges who look sympathetically on legal arguments against marriage discrimination, and all support enacting an array of anti-discrimination laws that will undermine the idea that the government has a “rational basis” for marriage discrimination.

Clearly, these points are subtle enough that someone might overlook them. But surely any cultural conservatives who place a lot of emphasis on these questions is aware of the importance of judicial nominations. Similarly, anyone driven by gut-level dislike of gays and lesbians is bound to notice that the Democratic Party is a poor vehicle for such sentiments.

Politics

WaPo: Court twice said Bush wiretapping program was illegal.

By Matt Corley on Aug 12, 2007 at 2:36 pm

Last week, Congress caved to White House pressure, passing an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that moved the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program “out from under any real legal restrictions. Before the vote, House Minority Leader John Boehner revealed a secret opinion by the FISA court that declared part of the administration’s program illegal was central to rush to reform the law. The Washington Post adds more details today about the fight over the law, including the revelation that there were actually two court rulings against the program:

But in a secret ruling in March, a judge on a special court empowered to review the government’s electronic snooping challenged for the first time the government’s ability to collect data from such wires even when they came from foreign terrorist targets. In May, a judge on the same court went further, telling the administration flatly that the law’s wording required the government to get a warrant whenever a fixed wire is involved. [...]

The rulings — which were not disclosed publicly until the congressional debate this month — represented an unusual rift between the court and the U.S. intelligence community. They led top intelligence officials to conclude, a senior official said, that “you can’t tell what this court is going to do” and helped provoke the White House to insist that Congress essentially strip the court of any jurisdiction over U.S. surveillance of communications between foreigners.

Yglesias

Sunday Pastrami Blogging

By ThinkProgress on Aug 12, 2007 at 12:37 pm

Manny's.JPG

For the record, I did get my Manny’s pastrami sandwich while in Chicago. I was, however, a bit disturbed to learn that the place is open on Saturday but closed on Sunday, which is just absurdly un-authentic. The food, however, is great.

Politics

Carlson: Giuliani acts like he kept ‘third tower…from falling.’

By Matt Corley on Aug 12, 2007 at 12:26 pm

On Meet the Press this morning, Bloomberg columnist Margaret Carlson commented on former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s claim that he “was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers.” “Giuliani now believes his own rhetoric,” said Carlson. “That he practically, maybe there was a third tower he kept from falling.” Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

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