Jezebel In Hell»

It’s hard to express how non-stop awful this week has been, so I’m not going to bother. Instead, I’m getting on a plane and flying to Austin. See, almost ten years ago this weekend, when I was in high school, me and two of my best friends put on a 30-band hardcore festival in New Jersey. Headlining the second night was one of the best punk bands of the 1990s: Chicago’s Los Crudos, who broke up shortly thereafter. Tomorrow, they’re reforming to play Prank’s Chaos In Tejas festival.

Seriously, if you read this blog and are in Austin, email sackerman-at-washingtonindependent-dot-com. Let’s have a beer. Especially if you can tell me where is/isn’t a good place to collect at least one new tattoo. (When I’m sober.)

I may blog a little this weekend. Not exactly sure. But I’m not leaving you guys high and dry! I raided the Jezebel comment threads and convinced three of my favorite commenters. This blog has too much testosterone, so welcome to the stage: Hicks (a/k/a Parasol), Charlotte Corday (a/k/a Charlotte Corday) and Erica (a/k/a JaneSays). Charlotte and Erica are IRL friends of mine, and I hold out hope that Hicks will be as well when we finally meet. You’ll get along. But if I see any sexist nonsense in the comment threads I will rip your throats out. After my guestbloggers castrate you.

Otherwise, have fun!

Now You’re Messing With A Son Of A Bitch»

Read this and see if you regret not living in New York. Moe, why the f*ck are you wasting your time writing this b*llsh*t? And why do I continue to c*rse in my p*sts if I have to use aster*sks? The fact that I do is probably the most eloquent contribution I could offer to this odd Gawkercentric gender-literary “conversation.”

Spending the last couple days in New York has caused severe emotional retrogression. I mean, every time I walk from the IRT to the Q train platform at Atlantic Avenue I’ll always feel like a ninth grader. Seeing high school friends — under the worst circumstances, no less — doesn’t help. But that doesn’t mean I have to spend my time listening to Smashing Pumpkins, Temple Of The Dog, Teenage Fanclub and, now, finally, Guns N Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident? covers record.

Thank You For Being A Friend»

Best IM of the day. To set the scene, my status message indicated I was in New York.

Pete
4:08
u in my town?

Spencer Ackerman
4:08
for like the next 10 minutes

Pete
4:08
haha
awesome
glad to have u

Spencer Ackerman
4:09
i f**kd up, i should have emailed you
next time

Pete
4:09
you suck at life
youre dead to me

So Who Will Help Me Bake This Bread?»

This blog initially promised you foodblogging. And I’ve really fallen off, largely due to my inability to keep up with Top Chef. But here’s something that, if you’re in New York tonight, you really should come to.

Tonight at Roseland is a Share Our Strength fundraiser against childhood hunger. It ain’t cheap. But it benefits such worthy organizations as City Harvest, which I worked for in high school (and which fired my mom, but I’m letting bygones be bygones), the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, and JustFood.

Again: not cheap at all. But in exchange for your contribution to social justice, you’ll be sampling the wares of, oh, among others, Mario Batali’s Casa Mono, Oceana, David Burke, John-Georges Vongerichten, and… and… and… Tom Colicchio’s Craft empire. Like Soulja Boy said: We don’t Superman no mo’, we jus’ Tom Colicchio.*

*Apologies to Kriston Capps.

Stacks So Fat Rubber Bands Can’t Hold ‘Em»

My memory of Erica is always going to be this: the queen bee of the St. Marks Place chaos-punk scene circa 1995, with a red tri-hawk, a cigarette and too much eyeliner. But, God help us, we can’t be 15 forever. Now the lady cleans up real good and writes insightfully for the Los Angeles Times about being crushed by debt.

Recession got you down? Not to worry. Any day now, everyone who filed a tax return and earned less than $75,000 last year can look forward to some extra cash. The Bush administration put the first recession-special tax rebate checks in the mail, just in time to save our failing economy.

Or not. Food and gasoline prices are on the rise. Home prices are crashing. Our economy has been shedding jobs consistently since January. Not surprisingly, the Federal Reserve came out with a study last week showing that personal debt — that is, not including mortgages — rose a sharp $15.3 billion in March, hitting an all-time high of $2.6 trillion.

Given all this, Bush’s rebate consolation prize isn’t doing much to console me or, I doubt, anyone else of my generation. I’m a gainfully employed 27-year-old, and I use my credit card to buy food because I only have $12 in my bank account. I fear getting sick — not because I don’t have insurance but because I couldn’t afford the co-pays and deductible. It’s hard for me to see how an extra $300 or $600 is really going to be, as Bush promised, “a shot in the arm to keep a fundamentally strong economy healthy.”

Someone please tell me, are these rebates going to do anything more than help us pay off our credit card bills? …

Trust me, working three jobs without benefits is only romantic for a year or two. After that it’s scary. And it’s not just me charging my milk and eggs; 45% of Americans 34 and under use a credit card for basic necessities such as rent and groceries.

Real talk. I’m proud of you. St. Marks Class of 1995: We made it.

We All Need Somebody To Lean On»

Did these guys hold it down or what? Eric, Ilan, Cernig and Fester: thank you guys. Everyone’s reading their blogs, right?

In other, more-self promotional news, my latest Windy piece is the sixth installment of my “Rise of the Counterinsurgents” series. It’s about why the civilian component of the government has faced a steeper COIN learning curve than the military has:

As the structure of the nation’s wars changes, so, too, must the organization of the U.S. government, argues the new generation of counterinsurgency theorists. They say that diplomats, reconstruction experts, governance advisers, economists, lawyers and even agronomists must be as easily inserted into a theater of battle as troops are — and must work with the warfighters in the effort to convince a population not to ally with insurgents.

This capability is now largely missing. So some counterinsurgents are trying innovative methods to solve the problem. But it is still unclear if they will be sufficient — let alone timely enough to reverse the fortunes of both current wars.

There are many reasons why American civilians working for the government have stayed on the sidelines of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. For one thing, the United States still lacks a corps of civilians ready to deploy into conflict zones. That is unlikely to change. “We’ll never match boots on the ground with wingtips on the ground,” said Eliot A. Cohen, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, using a shorthand term for diplomats that is common among the counterinsurgency community.

Lean On Me»

I’m not going to blog today. Today is the memorial service for an old friend’s father. He had a treatable illness and no health insurance. Think about that for awhile. I intend to think about it at least until November 4.

But you’re in good hands. An all-star cast of blogospheric champions is here to ensure a seamless transition. Ilan Goldenberg of Democracy Arsenal and the National Security Network. And not one, not two, but three Newshoggers: Eric Martin, Fester and Cernig himself!

We’ve also got some good guestbloggers coming up for the near future, including Jezebel people and the world’s smartest 7 year old. But that’s a tale for another day. See you tomorrow.

I Said, This Ain’t No Mecca, Man…»

Earlier today, I was IMing with my friend Bilal, who lives in Iraqi Kurdistan. The conversation turned to the presidential election, and we sort of bounced questions off of each other. Despite being ridiculously young, Bilal teaches English and foreign policy at Irbil’s Salahuddin University, and he said a number of his students had similar thoughts. On the assumption that what foreigners have to say about our elections should matter somewhat in our decisionmaking, here’s the Attackerman version of Crappy Hour.

Bilal Wahab
8:45
you see McCain is the only one I understand from afar

Spencer Ackerman
8:46
because of his Iraq position?

Bilal Wahab
8:46
yes

Spencer Ackerman
8:46
what do you think about him

Bilal Wahab
8:46
we simpoly know it is more of the same, and the same we know

Spencer Ackerman
8:46
right

Bilal Wahab
8:47
I have not developed opinions, but he is the one whose foreign policy I understand a bit. and all I have made out of Clinton and Obama about Iraq is “run”. they differ on how fast!

Spencer Ackerman
8:47
and that worries you?

Bilal Wahab
8:47
and you bet that is troubling.
it does.

Spencer Ackerman
8:48
is “the same” reassuring? or just familiar?

Bilal Wahab
8:48
familiar. There is nothing reassuring about McCain
but it is terrritory we know.
With Clinton and Obama, they are a bit sheepish about Iraq

Read the rest of this entry »

He’s A Different Color But We’re The Same Kid, I’ll Treat Him Like My Brother He’ll Treat Me Like His»

This is outside the lane of my blog, but my friend John Judis has written one of the best pieces you’ll read about the persistence of racism in American political attitudes.

With the help of Harvard doctoral student Scott Winship, I looked at the levels of racial resentment in ANES data from 1988, 1992, and 2000 (the questions were omitted in 1996). What Winship and I found was that resentment was highest among males rather than females, the middle class rather than the wealthy or poor, those lacking a college degree, those who worked in skilled or semi-skilled blue collar jobs or as laborers, and residents of small towns in the Midwest and South. Does that profile sound familiar? It’s more or less a description of the white working-class voters who have spurned Obama and with whom John Kerry and Al Gore had trouble. The only groups that didn’t evince racial animosity toward blacks were voters with post-graduate degrees and, of course, African Americans. Hispanics were nearly as prejudiced as whites, and a group labeled “other” that includes Asian Americans was even more so–a partial explanation, perhaps, for why Obama fared so poorly among these groups in California. Clearly, racial resentment persisted–just in a more nuanced form.

She’s Amazing, Her Words Saved Me»

I just thought I’d write a post about my hero: my mom, Bette Cohen.

Ma is simply the strongest person I know. You try finishing a nursing degree while working a full-time job and, oh yeah, surviving a potentially-fatal illness. You try spending all your time caring for other people’s pain to the point where you ignore your own. And you try to respond with equanimity and class with the unfair hand that life dealt you.

I don’t live up to my mom’s example. It shames me deeply. But the fact that she provides that example when weaker people — me — would have folded is an endless inspiration. Some people don’t have reasons beyond the arbitrary facts of biology and psychology and fate for loving their mothers. I do.

Haters Wanna Hate, Ballers Wanna Ball»

George Will, shut your stupid face:

Do we need another waist-deep wallow in the 1960s, ensconcing us cheek by jowl with Frank Rizzo and Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Yorty and Mark Rudd, Lester Maddox and Herbert Marcuse and other long-forgotten bit players in a period drama? Do we need to be reminded of that era’s gaseous juvenophilia, like Time magazine’s celebration of Americans 25 or younger as 1967’s “Man of the Year”: “This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. … In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery,” today’s youth “stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate.”

Well, this retrospective wallow does increase the public stock of harmless pleasure, as when Perlstein revisits the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern and heard 80 nominations for vice president, including Mao Zedong and Archie Bunker. But Perlstein’s high-energy — sometimes too energetic — romp of a book also serves, inadvertently, a serious need: it corrects the cultural hypochondria to which many Americans, including Perlstein, are prone.

Nixonland is a masterpiece. You need to read every word, including/especially the punk-rock love note Rick wrote to his wife at the end,