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Insiders can read the whole explanation, but basically John Hollinger used his power rankings formula, then looked at the playoff seedings, and came up with the following odds of taking home the rings:
The field -- and, yes, this includes Miami -- has very low odds according to Hollinger.
Maybe a week ago when talking Nirvana covers was all the rage, Spencer pointed out to me that "Love Buzz" off Bleach is actually a cover. A bit of internet sleuthing discovered a copy of the original, released by a Dutch band called Shocking Blue in the late sixties. It's bad. Really bad. Really. It's hard to believe anyone would listen to it and think to himself, "man, I should do a version of that."
I don't think I or anyone else thinks this round of discussions in China about political reform is going to lead to the near-term blossoming of democracy. Still, I think it's striking the extent to which there really is politics conducted in China in a meaningful sense with some measure of public debate, disagreements, factions, people speaking, etc.
“What we’re seeing is a repudiation of Deng Xiaoping’s edict that the party should focus exclusively on economic development,” said Lu De, an influential economist who has pushed for greater political pluralism. . . .“They want democracy to belong to the party, not to belong to people who oppose the party,” said one retired party official who declined to be identified because top leaders sometimes punish people for discussing elite politics. “If the party can define what democracy is, then it will not be as dangerous.” . . .
Lu Dingyi argued that the party should embrace democracy and freedom because intellectuals favored those ideas and the party needed the support of intellectuals. He said people in the sciences and the arts must be allowed broad latitude to express themselves as they saw fit, provided they did not contest the party’s political leadership.
There more like that. This isn't, obviously, democracy in action. At the time time, it's not North Korea or the pre-Glasnost USSR, or Saddam-era Iraq. Indeed, despite "Deng Xiaoping’s edict that the party should focus exclusively on economic development" it's clear that Xiaoping’s reforms have led to meaningful, albeit circumscribed, political changes relative to the Mao era.
I caught some MSNBC earlier this afternoon, and it was really just pathetic. The topic under discussion was that Harry Reid apparently said the Iraq War was lost. Since Reid's an important legislative leader, this did seem like a good subject for a story. But, of course, instead of using it as an opportunity to bring some knowledgeable people on and discuss whether or not Reid was right about the war, they used it as an opportunity to bring on a "Democratic strategist" and a "Republican strategist" neither of whom seemed like especially prominent strategists, to talk about the political fallout from the statement.
It's not, you know, surprising exactly, but if you go a little while without watching cable news coverage of a political issue it is always a bit shocking to be exposed to just how dumb and uninformative it is. The worst of it is that while I was very unhappy with it, I imagine any serious-minded conservatives out there watching would also have been unhappy. Then the folks in charge probably reach the conclusion that "if liberals and conservatives both complain, we must be doing something right!" Soon enough, they moved on to more Anna Nicole Smith coverage.
Via Tom Lee, a clip from what's apparently an even longer CGI-produced drama, made on an amateur basis by an Italian group called Cee-Gee.
I'm coming around to Tom's view that cinema can and will be made on an amateur peer-production basis and that at some point the sort of obviously competent techies who did this will hook up with some less-inept actor and writer types and produce something with more merit. One obstacle to hobbyist production of this sort, however, is that you need a confluence of interests to put it together. Commerical cinema is driven by the interaction of cost and consumer demand. Amateur cinema would be driven by producer interests. Your stereotypical techie interests -- Star Wars sequels, giant robots, etc. -- aren't the kind of projects that are likely to attract a ton of skilled actors sufficiently passionate about the endeavor to work for free.
Bethlehem Shoals observes: "Duncan's deviousness has been obscured because his game is all old-school fundamentals, causing the media to inaccurately label Duncan the individual as stoic and wholesome. Indeed, his Chinese fans call him the 'Stone Buddha'. In reality, Duncan is more similar to Sun Wukong, the Chinese Monkey King, who liked to play pranks and acheived greatness through craftiness." Indeed. Which seems like as good a time as any to mention Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book which, unfortunately, I was first assigned to read as part of a tedious "let's read books by minority authors" course and toward which I therefore adopted the knee-jerk hostile attitude of the 19 year-old white dude.
In fact, it's a great book that, yes, is about the perplexities of Chinese-American identity but also so much more. The motif of Sun Wukong the Monkey God-King is, suffice it to say, important to the narrative. As is Vertigo. Googling around I see that there's a website with the funny name: "Tripmaster Monkey: Home of Yellow Journalism." It's a "cheeky news site for the Asia-savvy" and I'm not sure I really qualify as Asia-savvy.
UPDATE: That's Brown Recluse I'm quoting, not Shoals. Apologies for the error.
Brian Beutler: "It occurs to em that if an Iranian leader with great visibility--say, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad--had been videotaped singing 'Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb America,' (which, yes, sounds foolish but you get the idea) it wouldn't be taken lightly here. Fox News would treat it as a sign that the regime was unstable and dangerous and, voila, we'd allow it to bring us a step closer to war." This is probably the single largest foreign policy-related failing among American politicians and members of the policy and media elites: A failure to make a serious effort to ask how things look from the perspective of other countries.
My friends Brian Beutler and Ezra Klein both lavish praise on Supreme Commander Harold Meyerson's column on the shape of the race. I agree with much of it, but I think this pearl of wisdom is fast become an overly entrenched bit of not-really-accurate CW:
For the Democrats, the contest is settling into a pattern set four decades ago: primary-season class conflict, in which one candidate appeals to a younger and more upscale electorate by talking about political reform and other chiefly noneconomic concerns, while another emphasizes pocketbook issues to the party's working-class voters. In primaries past, the upscale-reformer role has been embraced by Eugene McCarthy, Morris Udall, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley and Howard Dean, while the part of the more populist bread-and-butter battler has been played by Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Richard Gephardt and John Edwards, among others. This year's upscale reformer, as Ronald Brownstein keenly noted in his Los Angeles Times column last month, is Barack Obama.So far, Obama is observing all the upscale conventions. Unlike Edwards, Obama is not campaigning against financiers who profit from outsourcing American jobs or drug companies that drive the price of medications to unregulated heights. Rather, he campaigns against the compromises, the shallowness, the corruptions inherent in our political and legislative processes. To create universal health coverage, Edwards prescribes taxing the rich, while Obama prescribes an open discussion, free from the taint of campaign contributions, that ultimately may lead us to embrace Edwards's prescription -- or not.
That's not wrong per se, but it's odd to think of Eugene McCarthy and Howard Dean as primarily "reform" candidates, and I think it's wrong to see Barack Obama in that light as well. These are all candidates whose primary base is, yes, with the upscale liberal demographic and therefore they tend to embrace reform issues that are important to that demographic slice. The three candidates I've singled out -- along with George McGovern, the one candidate from this lineage to actually secure the nomination -- are all foreign policy candidates as well. Specifically, opponents of seriously misguided wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These weren't -- and aren't -- trivial questions.
John Edwards is a sufficiently appealing figure that I greatly sympathize with the impulse among folks of a labor-liberal orientation to just accept his apology, decide there are no foreign policy issues at play, and construct this as a clash between the elite reformer and the dynamic populist. In my view, though, I need to hear more from Edwards about this other than that he shouldn't have been duped by Bush's WMD claims.
Bad books fall into a few categories, with Jerry Bowyer's The Bush Boom fitting well into the "so transparently stupid it wouldn't even be amusing to scan through looking for the funny parts" section of my catalogue of recent American political commentary. This opinion piece for Fox News, by contrast, belongs firmly on the "not sure whether to laugh or cry" shelf.
"Do I blame Islam for Cho Seung-Hui?" Bowyer asks, before wisely replying "No." He does, however, note a certainly dhimmitude to Cho's approach. "he took a Muslim name to register his discontent — Ismail, the preferred Arab spelling of 'Ishmael,' Abraham’s first son, the disinherited son who took second place to the wealthy Isaac." Robert Farley wonders if the objectively pro terror Herman Melville might be to blame. Bowyer goes on, however, to note the role of liberal tax raisers in prompting this spree killing:
There is a rising tide of resentment in our country against the so-called “rich,” and Christianity, and a Big Mac with fries. Talk-show hosts, op-ed writers, documentarians, and authors of all stripes take part in it. They speak to psychologically healthy audiences, although the bent and wicked are listening in too.
Classy!
Ross Douthat wants to disputate about whether the unconstitutionality of abortion bans really does follow straightforwardly from the premise that a fetus lacks the legal status of a person:
But there are all sorts of laws that regulate "conduct that takes place inside the body of a right-bearing citizen" - particularly when another party (like, say, an abortionist) performs said conduct. For instance, we have laws against selling your organs, laws against prostitution, laws against assisted suicide, laws that prohibit the sale of drugs and restrict the sale of alcohol, and so on and so forth. Some of these may be bad laws, but it seems like quite a stretch to say that they're all unconstitutional.
To be sure. As I wrote in my original post, constitutional abortion regulations "would need to be a mother-regarding health-and-safety regulation of some sort which, in the nature of things, is going to leave abortions generally legal as long as they're being performed in a way that's unlikely to seriously injure the mother." That's the difference. The common thread tying together the sort of regulations Ross is citing here is a public health rationale. I don't think anyone would dispute the constitutional right of congress to prohibit or curtail the use of a genuinely dangerous abortion procedure -- regulations aimed at protecting the health of pregnant women. Abortion regulations that lack health exemptions, however, can hardly be said to be public health measures. Alternatively, one could try to see abortion bans as a kind of commercial regulation -- like a rule that you can't have a liquor store next to a school, or zoning in general. But I find it hard to see how this sort of rationale could support banning the provision of a class of medical services throughout an entire state or country.
What's more, anything along these lines would be offered in bad faith. Abortion opponents don't oppose abortion rights because they think such rights are bad for the health of pregnant women. Nor do they oppose legal abortion because they think it's bad land use policy. They oppose it because they think fetuses have moral rights that ought to be instantiated as legal rights. This, however, leads to the conclusion that courts should require abortion bans, just as the SCOTUS wouldn't let a state pass a law saying "murder is illegal unless the person you kill is over 73." Either way, it'll be decided by judges. That, for better and for worse, is the nature of the American constitutional system. A question of what does and does not count as a legal person is a question for the courts and issues of enormous consequence hinge on those decisions.
One long-running on-the-horizon flashpoint in Iraq is the future of Kirkuk. At the insistence of the Kurdish parties, the Iraqi Constitution mandates that there will be a referendum on whether or not the Kirkuk region should be brought under the umbrella of the Kurdistan Regional Government. This has created a lot of incentive for KRG-aligned forced to try to push Arabs out of the area. Scot Maclead notes an International Crisis Group report on Kirkuk:
With every day and each exploding bomb that kills schoolchildren or shoppers, hopes for peaceful resolution of the Kirkuk question recede. The approach favoured by the Kurds, constitution-based steps culminating in a referendum by year’s end, is bitterly opposed by Kirkuk’s other principal communities – Arabs and Turkomans – who see it as a rigged process with predetermined outcome. Their preference, to keep Kirkuk under federal government control, is rejected by the Kurds. With all sides dug in and the Kurds believing Kirkuk is a lost heirloom they are about to regain, the debate should move off outcomes to focus on a fair and acceptable process. For the Kurds, that means postponing the referendum, implementing confidence-building measures and seeking a new mechanism prioritising consensus. The U.S. needs to recognise the risk of an explosion in Kirkuk and press the Kurds, the Baghdad government and Turkey alike to adjust policies and facilitate a peaceful settlement.
My motto is: People should listen to the ICG. They have a much better track-record than do many higher-profile organizations that policymakers and media elites prefer to listen to. In this case, however, while I think they're right about this, I'm far from convinced that it's really possible to implement the IGC's alternatives at this point -- how much leverage do we really have over the Kurds at this point? -- but it would be worth a try. The last thing Iraq needs is a new conflict zone.
Via Tyler Cowen and Kottke, Ladies Home Journal's predictions about 2000 written in 1900:
Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.
Prediction #23 is a curious mix of the prescient and wrong. "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today." This is correct. Prepared food "to go" is now widely available, a concept they didn't really have in 1900 but is well-captured by the idea of being "similar to our bakeries of today." Then things go awry: "They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking." In fact, people are just richer today than they were in 1900 and can afford more costly food-acquisition methods, especially if they save time. Interestingly, the premise here that wholesale purchase will make the food cheaper than home-cooking seems based on the idea that ingredients rather than labor are the main cost of prepared foods. Last, of course, the tubes return: "Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons." The pneumatic tube is a real technology, still in use to some extent today, but it was always more of a niche product than its proponents had hoped.
A wise Kirk Johnson report in The New York Times notes that with the new justices confirmed and unsettling abortion precedents, we're now due for another ugly era of legislative boundary pushing. It's clear that the votes don't exist at this point for a straightforward overturn of Roe or Casey, but also clear that the votes do exist for a substantial narrowing of pre-existing doctrine. What's more, some circuit courts are already very rightwing and no doubt chomping at the bit to push the boundaries, as are legislatures in at least some states. Thus, we can expect a big new tide of legislating, at both the state and federal level, followed by a big tide of litigating, appeals, etc., etc., etc.