Indeed.

(This is probably unfair; as Dead Parrots notes, USA Next cares as little for copyright as they do for their own dignity. It is funny, though.)

Good point from Mark Schmitt:

Back when the Medicare bill was on the floor and I was just starting this blog, I argued that the Democrats, rather than proposing a $1 trillion prescription drug benefit, should have proposed something that cost less and did much more, such as the Clinton bill of 2000, which at the time cost $253 billion and even three years later would certainly not have cost more than the $400 billion claimed cost of the Bush bill, while doing much more. Such an alternative would have put the handful of real conservatives, who were being told by their leaders that if they didn’t vote for the Republican bill, the Democrats would sweep in with something even bigger, in a very awkward position. But now that the real cost of the Bush bill is $1.2 trillion, I realize that I was wrong: the Democrats were perfectly responsible, and did propose a bill that cost less and did more than the Bush bill. And because it contained some real cost controls, its cost was not likely to escalate much beyond that.

(Background on the $253 billion bill here.) And I haven’t excerpted any of the David Brooks-bashing! Come on, you’ve got to click over for that!

As Dan Drezner and I noted in our “Foreign Policy article”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/files/story2707.php, the blogosphere is surprisingly bad at providing information on politics outside the US. Ethan Zuckerman’s “research”:http://h2odev.law.harvard.edu/ezuckerman/paper.pdf provides evidence that the blogosphere’s interests track those of traditional media, and that in some ways it does a worse job than traditional media in covering world politics. Some argue that right wing blogs do a better job than left wing ones in taking account of international politics – I doubt that it’s true. With a few prominent exceptions (such as Greg Djerejian’s “Belgravia Dispatch”:http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/), right wing blogs, like most of their left wing equivalents, tend to focus almost exclusively on prominent stories that support their domestic political preferences.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that blogs like the newly created “UN Dispatch”:http://undispatch.com/ can fill an unmet need, giving us a take on the UN that isn’t limited to cheap gotchas about corruption and sex scandals. It’s being run by Peter Daou, whose “Daou report”:http://daoureport.salon.com/entry.aspx has just moved to Salon, and it looks to be a very interesting and useful resource. _UN Dispatch_ is run out of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation, so it can be expected to take a broadly pro-UN line – but on first glance, it appears to be rather stronger on actual factual information about the strengths and weaknesses of the UN than any of the other blogs opining on UN-related issues. One that I’ll be reading.

Two interesting articles in the _Financial Times_ about how changes in internal EU politics are likely to affect the transatlantic relationship. First, “Wolfgang Munchau”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/633ac7ae-836a-11d9-bee3-00000e2511c8.html (sub required) talks about how US policy towards Europe can’t just consist of “picking your favourite partner for your favourite mission, and playing one country off against another” as it used to. As Munchau says, there’s a real sense in the capitals of Europe that the EU is becoming a more coherent foreign policy actor – and that the US needs to wake up to this. Stefan Wagstyl’s “article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f8f9cfea-83ad-11d9-bee3-00000e2511c8.html on how the countries of central and eastern Europe are adapting to EU membership should be of even greater concern to the divide and conquer school of US policy towards Europe. As Wagstyl says, not only do mass publics in former Warsaw Pact countries seem much keener on EU membership than anyone would have anticipated a year ago – membership is substantially affecting these countries’ foreign policy outlook. Countries like Poland, which many expected to act as an advocate for US interests within the EU, are going native.

bq. The best defence is closer integration with the EU, including on foreign policy and security issues, central Europeans are concluding. Officials say Nato, as a military alliance with an increasingly global responsibility, may be less useful than the EU in confronting non-military threats in Europe. That could imply less reliance on the US as a security partner and more on EU states – even in Poland, often seen as Washington’s strongest central European ally.

bq. Polish officials consider the country received little in return for its support of America in the Iraq war. Warsaw is to bring its peacekeeping unit home from Iraq this year. Marcin Zaborowski, a Polish foreign policy expert, recently published a paper for the EU’s Institute for Security Studies, arguing that “Poland’s Atlanticism is likely to be toned down in future”.

This can also be traced back to the EU’s successful role in supporting democracy in the Ukraine – and the realization by countries like Poland that their membership of the EU is a valuable foreign policy resource.

bq. the Ukrainian crisis was a lesson in the EU’s political clout, as national leaders from the newly expanded club persuaded Mr Kuchma’s side to accept defeat. Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski and Valdas Adamkus, his Lithuanian counterpart, worked with Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, to secure that outcome. But Polish and Lithuanian officials are the first to acknowledge that their presidents’ influence was based primarily on their roles not as local national leaders but as representatives of the whole EU.

None of this is exactly surprising to scholars of the EU, who are acutely aware that it’s more than a traditional international organization, if less than a state. But the ways in which member states become socialized into the “EU club” are poorly understood in the US, where foreign policy experts usually see the EU as just another multilateral institution like NATO. This may have interesting long term consequences. Part of the reason that the US has advocated Turkish membership of the EU is its hope that Turkey will help pull the EU in a more Atlanticist direction. If Poland’s example is anything to go by, the pull may well go the other way – as Turkey becomes more enmeshed in the EU, it’s likely to start identifying more with the European project than with its trans-Atlantic ties.

Just to note that the Ken Livingstone Nazi comparison apology scandal has now reached day fourteen and is therefore across the Campbell Threshold (Alastair Campbell’s rule of thumb that a story which stays in the headlines for more than thirteen days will begin to have some effect on the voters; usually used for deciding to sack Labour ministers). However, Red Ken currently has a Galbraith score (based on JK Galbraith’s observation that anyone who says four times that he will not resign, will) of zero. His Galbraith score with respect to refusing to apologise is four by my count, however, so I’m guessing that in the next couple of days he will do so.

More correspondence, this time from a soldier stationed in Iraq who saw my “recent post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003185.html about the terrible shooting in Tal Afar. I reproduce the post below the fold. I should say that I can’t verify the identify of my correspondent, but I have no reason to doubt what he says about himself.

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A correspondent writes that “my complaints”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003260.html about the “Summers controversy”:http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html are unfair to Larry Summers. If you’re interested, his case and my reply are below the fold.

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Karen Bennett (Philosophy, Princeton) reports that Harry Frankfurt is scheduled to be on _The Daily Show_, presumably promoting his book “On Bullshit”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691122946/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20. The date is now set to be March 14, though that doesn’t seem to be absolutely certain. Non-philosophers should feel free to be less overjoyed with excitement at a philosopher getting this much attention, but I think it’s rather fun, and that episode won’t end up being one of the _Daily Shows_ that I miss – or fastforward through the interview.

UPDATE: Scott McLemee has a nice review of “On Bullshit”:http://insidehighered.com/index.php/mla/views/intellectual_affairs__4, together with a discussion of Gerry Cohen’s reply, at Inside Higher Ed.

Chris Brooke provides some anecdotal evidence that the Atkins diet may not be all it is cracked up to be. Pollard is not much thinner than before the diet and looks… well, considerably less cheerful. Or maybe, as Chris hints in a comment, this testimony followed his incredibly disappointing evening at a local restaraunt.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case which could decide the limits of the power of eminent domain. The question in the case is whether the government of New London, CT can seize homeowners’ property and give it to private developers in a bid to “revitalize” the town. (Link to AP story).

Fort Trumbull is not besieged by blight, poverty or crime and New London is not building a highway or government building, and the residents’ appeal asks if “public use” allows governments to seize unblighted taxpayer property solely to encourage private development.

…New London officials say the taxes generated by redeveloping Fort Trumbull ultimately will benefit the public, and the state Supreme Court ruled that was enough to justify the condemnation.

That line of reasoning seems incredibly weak, and the potential for abuse, enormous. The Connecticut Supremes also relied on a rather dubious (and notorious) precedent:

The state Supreme Court majority in Kelo relied heavily on a 1981 Michigan Supreme Court ruling – Poletown Neighborhood Council vs. City of Detroit – which it cited as a “landmark” eminent domain case. But several months after the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its ruling in Kelo, the Michigan Supreme Court reversed its Poletown ruling. (Link to Hartford Courant article)

The Reason Foundation is assisting the plaintiffs. I think it’s obvious the Supreme Court should reverse the state Supreme Court, but I’m curious to see how the justices decide. Am I rooting for Scalia on this? Does anyone know how the justices are predicted to vote? (I seem to remember Eugene Volokh had a betting pool for Supreme Court decisions…)

Today’s Financial Times has “a remarkable article about the Tulsa riot of 1921”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/20de5fec-821b-11d9-9e19-00000e2511c8.html — essentially a bout of ethnic cleansing — its disappearance from official memory for over fifty years and the long struggle of the survivors and their descendants for recognition and compensation:

bq. Historians call the firestorm that convulsed Tulsa from the evening of May 31 into the afternoon of June 1 the single worst event in the history of American race relations. To most Tulsans it is simply “the riot”. But the carnage had nothing in common with the mass protests of Chicago, Detroit and Newark in the 1960s or the urban violence that laid siege to Los Angeles in 1992 after the white police officers who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted. The 1921 Tulsa race riot owes its name to an older American tradition, to the days when white mobs, with the consent of local authorities, dared to rid themselves of their black neighbours. The endeavour was an opportunity “to run the Negro out of Tulsa”.

The whole thing is worth reading.

I’m running another ‘cash for comment’ appeal, over at my blog. For each comment on this post on my blog I’ll give $1A to Medecins Sans Frontieres, and express a preference for projects related to the The Global Fund to fight against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The appeal closes 6pm Sunday, Queensland time. To be clear, you have to comment on my blog, not on CT to get counted

Now that Larry Summers has begun to live up to his putative commitment to open, freewheeling inquiry by finally releasing a “transcript of his infamous remarks”:http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html, various people are commenting on it. “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/summers_redux.html says

bq. I don’t think you can reasonably expect any given university (or corporation, or person) to singlehandedly shoulder the burden of changing a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period of time. At the same time, you can’t just do nothing about it, either.

“Bitch, PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/02/open-mouth-insert-dick-larry.html addresses this issue pretty well, as does “a correspondent of Mark Kleiman’s”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/_/2005/02/larry_summers_redux.php. The main point is the first step toward addressing what Matt properly calls “a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period” is — contrary to what Summers did in his remarks — to _stop_ treating it as a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preferences. Now, in other social-policy contexts, economists will jump all over you for not properly considering the incentives that shape people’s choices and smugly wheel out one-liners like “People respond to incentives, all else is commentary.” There’s a lot to that observation. But in contexts like gender and the labor market, the emphasis instead gets put on individual preferences as the mainspring of choice, rather than considering the social origins of the incentive structure.

“Here is an old post of mine”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000432.html, written in response to something “Jane Galt”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004361.html (aka Megan McArdle) wrote. It addresses this issue a bit, with some pointers to accessible and practical discussions of it by specialists — some of the literature that Summers just baldly ignored, or was inexcusably ignorant of. As I said “back then”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000432.html,

bq. Jane’s initial question — “Should we [women] stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women” — effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.” … The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. … [They] aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s … Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. … It also has the virtue — as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago — of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.

None of that is particularly original, by the way. It’s a well-developed perspective with plenty of empirical evidence and theoretical elaboration, and even a little bit of reading in this area would make that evident. That’s why Summers’ audience was so ticked off. In fairness to the guy, at this stage his perilous position has little to do with the remarks themselves anymore, and has become an ouster by opponents dissatisfied with his Presidency in general.

“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_02/005684.php takes a break from politics-blogging to opine on the new series of _Survivor_. It’s shaping up to be more fun than last season, because there are new – and unpredictable – rules; Kevin suggests that the show’s designers ought to make the rules more unpredictable still.

bq. The appeal of the show is in the human interaction. How do you keep from being voted off? How do you make and break alliances? Who gets betrayed this week? That’s where they need to throw in a few curveballs. The contestants need to learn that the standard way of forming alliances and screwing competitors is subject to change.

He’s probably right – although one of the fun things about _Survivor_ is that there has usually been a high level of unpredictability, even under stable rules. Last season’s show was the very dull exception that proved the rule – the producers threw together tribes in such a way as to generate stable, gender-based cooperation for most of the game. They later made a rather desperate _post-hoc_ attempt to mix things up and weaken alliances, but it didn’t work very well. This season, they’ve deliberately generated tribes in a way that mixes up the sexes.

Anyway, I talked about some of these issues at greater length in a long post on my old blog about the applicability of sociology and game theory to _Survivor_ a couple of years ago. I reproduce it below the fold, if anyone’s interested.

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