If you live in the UK, you can watch the first episode of The Wire streaming courtesy of The Guardian. If you live outside the UK, instead of watching the episode (you can’t!), maybe you can explain to me how the internet knows where I am (or maybe I’ll see if Google can tell me).
UPDATE: It’s in the IP address, of course….
Harriet Rubin’s profile of CEO book collections includes the notion that “it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.” She also informs us with great reverence that “Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.” Not to disparage the wisdom of the ancients, but the complete works of Aristotle are available as a two volume set from Princeton University Press that costs $80.75 at Amazon and is eligible for free SuperSaver Shipping.
It’s not that impressive a collection. Indeed, it appears that you can secure the entire Loeb Classical Library for less than $10,000. This is, admittedly, a lot of money, but it’s an awful lot less than “several hundred thousand dollars” and it would certainly constitute a serious library on a subject — indeed, on several subjects.
This chart is by far the most interesting thing about the New York Times article it accompanies. It not only makes the obvious point that Rudy Giuliani was considerably better-liked by white New Yorkers than by black ones, but also the less obvious point that opinion trendlines among these two groups actually diverged quite a bit.
Throughout Giuliani’s first term, his popularity with white New Yorkers tended to decline slightly — the results, one supposes, of inevitable disillusionment. Giuliani’s African-American constituents, by contrast, were warming toward him considerably. He was never a popular figure among black New Yorkers, but did go way, way up in the opinion ratings as crime went down. Which leads to under-considered subject of the period between Giuliani’s second inauguration and 9/11 — during his first term, he turned around a lot of skeptics and cruised to re-election in 1997, but by 9/11 he’d managed to re-alienate a huge number of people. Notably, it sort of seemed as if he couldn’t handle the idea of liberals and blacks warming to him and was actually casting about for stupid controversies to wade into in order to get back in touch with his combative persona.
Today on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol attacked the Democratic presidential candidates for their decision to attend the YearlyKos blogger convention. He held it up as evidence that the presidential candidates have “gone left.”
“Every Democratic presidential nominee is going to the DailyKos convention,” said Kristol. “That’s the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. The Howard Dean kind of sponsor. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left wing blogs.” Watch it:
The YearlyKos convention is independent of the blog DailyKos. So the candidates are not going to simply “pay court” to the head of DailyKos, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Approximately 1,500 “people from all walks of life who belong to the Netroots community” are expected at the convention this year.
Moreover, as NPR’s Juan Williams points out, what Kristol describes “as left is now center.” “The majority of the American people, 70 percent, want us out of Iraq,” noted Williams. “In fact, if you asked Iraqis, 60 some percent of Iraqis say we’re doing more harm than good in Iraq.” In a survey conducted by Pew Internet and American Life after the 2006 mid-term election, “online political activists” were said to “mirror the general population of those who are civically active.” Like the progressive blogosphere, a solid majority of Americans believe President Bush should not have commuted the sentence of his former aide, Scooter Libby.
The attendees of the YearlyKos convention haven’t “gone left.” Kristol just doesn’t understand how radically right wing he is.
Transcript: Read more
Via Tyler Cowen, a paper attempts to see who’s earning the big bucks:
We consider how much of the top end of the income distribution can be attributed to four sectors – top executives of non-financial firms (Main Street); financial service sector employees from investment banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, and mutual funds (Wall Street); corporate lawyers; and professional athletes and celebrities.
Their analysis suggests that “Main Street” CEOs — the heads of firms outside the financial sector — comprise a relatively small proportion of the super-rich (obviously, CEOs earn a good deal of money) citing such factoids as “the top 25 hedge fund managers combined appear to have earned more than all 500 S&P 500 CEOs combined (both realized and estimated).”
Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) announced today that he will “introduce two censure resolutions condemning the President, Vice President and other administration officials for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq and for their repeated assaults on the rule of law.” In March 2006, Feingold introduced a censure resolution against Bush over the NSA wiretapping program. In a statement released today, Feingold said:
At my town hall meetings, online, and everywhere I go, I hear the American people demanding that the President and his administration be held accountable for their misconduct, both with regard to the disastrous war in Iraq and their flagrant abuse of the rule of law. Censure is a relatively modest response, but one that puts Congress on record condemning their actions, both for the American people today and for future generations.
Read the full statement.
UPDATE: Feingold discusses his censure resolution on Meet the Press. Watch it:
UPDATE II: Responding to the censure resolutions on CBS’s Face the Nation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said the Senate should keep its focus on other priorities:
REID: I’m sure Russ Feingold will try to find a way to offer that amendment. The Republicans won’t let us vote on it. They’ll block it.
SCHIEFFER: So would you go along with it if they let you vote on it?
REID: Bob, frankly, we have so many other things to do. The president already has the mark of the American people that he’s the worst president we’ve ever had, and I don’t think we need a censure resolution in the Senate to prove that. We have to do…
SCHIEFFER: So you’re not going along with it?
REID: Well, at this stage, Russ is going to have to make his case as to why we should do that rather than do our appropriation bills, finish the defense authorization bill, Homeland Security appropriation bill.
SCHIEFFER: OK.
REID: We have a lot of work to do.
I don’t really know what to say about the controversy various rightwing bloggers and The Weekly Standard are trying to gin up over this TNR diarist article attributed to a soldiers currently serving in Iraq publishing under a pseudonym. Obviously, it’s not beyond the realm of the conceivable that The New Republic would be taken in by a fabulist or else that they would just decide to publish slanders against other people, calling them anti-semites or Nazi collaborators or whatnot.
That said, the specific contentions being made against the piece (most of them can be found by scrolling around the Standard‘s blog) are pretty unconvincing. You have a bunch of nitpicking about the technical details of some of the hardware described, plus some Army public affairs people denying that anything improper would happen in Iraq, plus a lot of huffing and puffing. On the other side, TNR says their editors have spoken to other soldiers who witnessed the key events, and they corroborate the story.
On some level, this is a simple numbers game. If you had any group of people where 95 percent of them behaved extremely well all the time, you’d call that a very upstanding group of people. But if that was a group of 150,000 people, that would still leave you with 7,500 bad apples. Military officers will tell you that they, like supervisors everywhere, probably spend 95 percent of their time worrying about just 5 percent of their subordinates — the troublemakers. And say they generally do a good job of it, and on any given day 95 percent of the 7,500 bad apples are still perfectly in check. Well, that’s still 375 heavily armed people in a strange country far from home where they don’t speak the language and are regularly subjected to stressful, dangerous conditions.
And this situation persists for seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for over four years. Under the circumstances, it would be shocking if there weren’t random acts of cruelty happening in Iraq. Understanding this is crucial to understanding military strategy — in particular, a strategy that depends on every single soldiers doing the right thing all the time is very unlikely to succeed; you just can’t make plans grounded on the premise that you have hundreds of thousands of completely perfect people at your disposal. If Bill Kristol really wants to take the view that all soldiers are flawless and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor, that explains a lot about Kristol’s inability to every reach the correct conclusions about any substantive national security issues.
I was a bit surprised to read my colleague Marc Ambinder write last week that “fairly or unfairly, a healthy chunk of the national political press corps doesn’t like John Edwards [. . .] Fairly or unfairly, there’s also a difference in narrative timing: when the first quarter ended, the press was trying to bury Edwards.” It hasn’t been my experience that the press has a noteworthy special dislike for Edwards. But then you get this especially ridiculous passage from a ridiculous New York Times article:
“You neither want to be seen as somebody who cares too much about appearance or too little,” said Jay Fielden, the editor of Men’s Vogue. His magazine’s July-August cover shows John Edwards looking model-handsome and yet sufficiently populist. He wears, as Mr. Fielden pointed out, a Carhartt field coat from his own closet, presumably in an attempt to deflect scrutiny away from his wealth, his North Carolina McMansion and his costly grooming habits and toward the antipoverty agenda he pursued last week on a sweep through the South.
Edwards’ coat choice was part of a nefarious plot to “deflect scrutiny” from the size of his house and toward his anti-poverty message? And his health care proposal was, I suppose, part of a scheme to distract people from the vital question of what kind of laundry detergent he uses.
That Mitt Romney has some unhinged supporters is no surprise. That the governor himself is sufficiently unhinged to be photographed standing next to his unhinged supporters’ unhinged signs is a bit more surprising. Last, we get the unadulturated buffoonery of campaign spokesman Kevin Madden’s email to Eric Kleefeld: “The governor stopped briefly for a picture with a supporter who just happened to be holding their own sign with an alliterative play on words. I don’t think it was equating or comparing anyone.”
Plug-ins are on the way! We’ve said it many times, but then we aren’t the world’s leading auto maker. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
Toyota’s revelation Tuesday that it will develop a new “plug-in hybrid” – which uses a wall socket at night to charge and relies on an electric motor to go many miles before sipping any gasoline – could presage a major shift in automotive technology, some industry analysts say.
Detroit’s Big Three have each said the technology is being looked at – after years of outright dismissal. But Toyota’s announcement was more significant because the company is presumed to have the technology to actually bring such cars to market, they say….
On Tuesday, the president of Toyota’s North American subsidiary, Jim Press, said the company is looking at developing a plug-in vehicle that can “travel greater distances without using its gas engine.” The technology would “conserve more oil and slice smog and greenhouse gases to nearly imperceptible levels”
The later claim assumes, of course, the electricity is greenhouse-gas free, which it will have to be if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming (though even running on current grid electricity, a plug in is much cleaner than a regular car).
Looks like we may have a race for the first practical, consumer plug-in between Toyota and G.M.
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