May 30, 2009
The Wages of Falsity
With his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court at least one thing has become clear: Mr. Obama is not now by any stretch of the imagination a liberal, but someone of the conservative leaning center-right. That's better than having an ultra-rightwing ideologue as President, but by how much? It's also worth noting that of the Catholics now on the Court, four — Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito — are ultra-rightwingers, and the fifth, Kennedy (who, let's not forget, was Reagan's back-up for Bork), as a sometimes swing vote obviously disappoints his original constituency. Setting aside the, to me, tremendously interesting question why in theory Catholic jurists would tend to be conservatives, in practice the Catholic Supremes have repeatedly demonstrated that they are mainly interested in two things: "how do we figure out what the rule is?" and "how do we get around the rule?" They have little to no interest in using notions about justice to determine what the rule of law should be.
May 29, 2009
Pneumonia
I'm just back from the Sibley Hospital emergency room. Seems I've got pneumonia. I knew something wasn't right. In fact, yesterday I had a couple serious scares that I was about to suffocate when I couldn't draw a breath. After X-rays and blood work (the latter was fine, the former showed fluid in my right lung) Sibley wanted to admit me but I promised to take it easy and rest so they just gave me some prescriptions and sent me home. Haven't had pneumonia before. Most unpleasant.
May 25, 2009
Ray's Hell Burger
A couple weeks ago Barack Obama and Joe Biden dropped in at Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington to get lunch. Which automatically made the place super famous. In the current issue of Washingtonian magazine, cover story top cheap eats in the area, Ray's shows up again, though the magazine says explicitly it's not because of the presidential visit. I figured I should give Ray's a try. I went Saturday, with Sharon, and it's damn good. The owner has put all the money into the food and the staff. There's not even a sign outside, the tables are cheap, covered by even cheaper plastic film, and it's definitely not a place to loiter with company. It's a place to eat. The ten ounce burgers, from hand-trimmed aged prime beef, are simply outstanding. As are the toppings. (You would not believe the toppings.) Figure $10-20 per person, a real deal. You can spend more if you want to splurge. The only better burger I know of in the area is from Palena's, at about $15 (though you'd be lucky to get out of Palena, for two, under a hundred bucks, including salad, french fries, drinks and dessert). If you're in or around DC, and like burgers, go to Ray's. You can thank me later.
May-June Partial Schedule Reordering
A slight modification from last week's podcast announcement. This Friday, May 29th, my guest will be Rolf Mowatt-Larsson, talking about nuclear terrorism (recorded Monday). It's timely, given North Korea's second nuclear bomb test. Following Rolf, on June 5th my guest will be Roger Morris in a return visit to EP, and on June 12th, Graham E. Fuller, a former senior CIA analyst and former Chief of Station Kabul, talking about various things.
Happy Memorial Day
Sometimes I visit the Vietnam Memorial over Memorial Day — it's fun to watch the Rolling Thunder cavalcade — but I'm always bothered by the fact that there's no mention of either the Vietnamese we killed, or those that died fighting on our side. Once I pointed this out to a Park Ranger and for a moment I thought he might arrest me. Ah well... To help get past the saccharine spirit of the holiday, I commend to you a classic war movie: A Bridge Too Far
May 23, 2009
Kurt Wallander
The writer Henning Mankell has sold a lot of books. Some of them are actually very, very good. Some of them aren't. Mankell is erratic in a way that, for example, Dashiell Hammett never is — even Hammett's lesser works are well worth reading whereas Mankell's can easily be abandoned half-way through — and even at his best Mankell tends to plod where Hammett soars
May 22, 2009
Cheney Attacks
It's difficult not to notice Dick Cheney defending torture. Just last night, for example, Keith Olbermann asked his guest, Larry Wilkerson, why Cheney is on the warpath. Lots of people are asking. And it's interesting to speculate. My take is that Cheney has figured out that Mr. Obama isn't capable of fighting back, so he's pushing him around simply because he can. Part of it, of course, is logical self-protection: Cheney sees that Mr. Obama caves before any and every establishment interest, and while Cheney knows that the U.S. establishment isn't going anywhere soon on the torture question (indeed, Mr. Obama seems quite happy to retain most Bush administration policies regarding detainees and to conveniently forget about the laws that have been broken), Cheney also knows that an international consensus is brewing to the effect that some kind of punishment for past misdeeds may well be appropriate and that this is exactly the sort of process with which Mr. Obama is likely to compromise. To fend off the bad news it makes sense to go on the offense. But more than that, clearly Cheney enjoys jabbing at an inert — and quite possibly empty — suit.
May 16, 2009
The Ringer
All the top lawyers representing defendants in Agent Orange litigation are still busy fighting off crippled Vietnam veterans, it seems, so Mr. Obama nominated instead a top lawyer who represents the largest superfund toxic polluter to head the Department of Justice's environment division. Before being sworn in as President it was the (so-called) little things that gave concern: nominee after nominee from the center or center-right for key positions. As President, the troubling decisions have turned from a trickle, into a stream, and then a flood. It's perfectly fair at this point to say that Mr. Obama owns the Great Recession; he owns the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; he owns Guantanamo and the entire, continuing cover-up of past criminal activity, including torture; he owns the burgeoning apparatus of illegal state surveillance; he owns the health care crisis; and now he owns the give-aways to environmental predators. The list goes on. It's true that the left gets a few crumbs, certainly more than under the previous criminal regime, but it would be a critical error to be grateful. I'm not.
May 9, 2009
Holbrooke Moves
So this is just gossip. But I wonder what it means? From multiple sources of extremely high reliability. Soon after Hillary takes office she's getting briefed by senior staff. Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, which includes India and Pakistan, is giving his presentation. Holbrooke, not expected to be in the meeting, storms in, sits down, and listens to Boucher. Bear in mind that Boucher has been around the block; he was Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in my time, is a long serving, very high-ranking senior career diplomat, a real apparatchik. After a few minutes Holbrooke interrupts Boucher, reams him out thoroughly. Very thoroughly. "Either you get on the bus or you'll be under the bus." Hillary says nothing. A couple minutes later Holbrooke storms out, slamming the door. I haven't heard what, in a substantive sense, set Holbrooke off. This puzzles me.
May 8, 2009
Fan Movies
If, like me, you are a J.R.R. Tolkien reader, and if you were glad to see movie versions of the trilogy, you may be interested to know about a recent fan-produced movie, The Hunt for Gollum. On a micro-budget a large group of volunteers, on a not-for-profit basis, created a really professional, high-definition, thirty five minute film. I enjoyed both the film and, probably just as much, the associated documentary about how it was made. Recommended!
May 5, 2009
Pakistan Lost
We're seeing conflicting signals regarding what to do about Pakistan. On the one side there's Ahmed Rashid, pleading in today's Washington Post for more money, lots of it, and fast. That's panic. On the other side various reports suggest that the U.S. wants to enlist outside countries in a push-back against Pakistan's Taliban. RAND analyst Christine Fair coyly writes in the current issue of the Washington Quarterly about how bare-knuckle pressure on Islamabad works. My guess is she's echoing administration thinking. The thing that's wrong with both extremes is that neither considers what really matters to Pakistanis: monstrous income inequality. A landed aristocracy and the military control the economy; most people barely survive, have few rights, and fewer social services. There's no safety net. If the U.S. writes big checks to Pakistan it'll almost all go to the top. Similarly, U.S. pressure on Islamabad registers one way with the elite, another way entirely with the people.
May 3, 2009
Site ½ Down
At noon today I noticed that the site was loading very slowly. After a couple calls to BlueHost we did something that busted a script such that the podcast column at EP temporarily disappeared.
Now it's fixed. Praises be to BlueHost technical support who figured out exactly what happened!
PS If you'd left a comment sometime between the 27th and today it's lost, but I should have a record of them here at home and will try to restore them.
