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Alex Knapp | Wednesday, July 9, 2008 |
“What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing.”
– Robert A. Heinlein
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Google Walking Directions
Since I wasn’t among those selected, I was a bit dubious since I was unable to personally verify, let alone test, said service. A quick search of another of Google’s products, its ubiquitous search service, revealed that Caroline McCarthy couldn’t, either. Doug Caverly, though, posts a screenshot. The Inquisitr claims to have talked to people at Google and was told that “A random portion of users may see [the] walking directions experiment in Google Maps.” For those living in the suburbs, the concept of “walking directions” is amusing. If it’s close enough to walk to, you probably know how to get there. Now that I’m working in DC, however, I’ve actually had several occasions where I needed to go somewhere in town where driving and parking would have been either frivolous or more trouble than it was worth, using Metro was slower than walking, and where the “Google Driving Directions” were certainly sending me along a circuitous route. The prevalence of one-way streets and traffic circles adds substantial distance to a car trip that becomes a noticeable inconvenience when walking the same route. via Techmeme Show comments here » Educating the Masses
Arnold Kling fears that this is just a caste system at work, observing, “I don’t think we have a recipe that says, Take a child of two non-college educated parents, add primary education ingredient X, bake, and out comes a college-capable high school graduate.“ Tyler Cowen tends to agree but thinks adopting an Asian-style culture involving “total parental commitment to the educational ideal and a willingness to enforce the notion that a non-educated child is shaming the entire family, not just the child” may be a key. I’m not persuaded that there’s a problem here. First off, while I’m having surprising difficulty finding the number of Americans in the 30-34 and 55-59 age cohorts so that we can see exactly what comparisons we’re making, it’s hardly shocking that more people in the latter cohort than the former have advanced degrees. After all, many people who get advanced degrees do so in their mid-30s and later. This is especially true for MBAs, masters in education, journalism, and other mid-career credentialing degrees. Further, there’s relatively little expected mortality between ages 30 and 59, so there’s a cumulative effect. Second, it’s not at all clear that having a masters or professional degree necessarily correlates to “human capital,” the thing Crook believes is being “tested.” How much worse off as a country would we be, really, if we suffered a decline in people with graduate degrees from colleges of education? All things being equal, it’s likely true that children of college educated parents are more likely to go on to college and that offspring of those with graduate degrees are more likely to pursue graduate degrees. After all, they’re not only more likely to see those things as worthwhile goals but they’re likelier to have the intellectual aptitude for school and the money to afford it. Not to mention having good nutrition, books in the house, be surrounded by people with good vocabularies, and so forth. So what? It’s not as if the existence of this thing called “college” is a big secret. Nor is there much evidence that potential top drawer students are being shut out of the system. More troubling is the apparent fact, cited by Crook, that the high school graduation rate “has been falling for 40 years.” There just aren’t many jobs left that one can get without that level of schooling and still support yourself, let alone a family. What the cause of this decline are, let alone what the solutions might be, is beyond my reckoning. Photo: AP /Magnus Johansson-MaanIm via Sydney Morning Herald Show comments here » John McCain ‘Love’ Ad
John McCain’s latest ad, “Love,” contrasts himself with those dirty hippies who spent the summer of 1968 on sex, drugs, and rock and roll rather than being tortured for their country. The voiceover:
The response I’ve seen so far has been positive.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (not to mention angering Jim Geraghty) I continue to believe McCain is banging the war hero drum too loudly. He’s quickly getting into Rudy Giuliani a noun, a verb, and 9/11 territory. That he was a grown man dealing with the worst the world has to offer while Obama was in grade school is a point worth making. But it won’t be — nor should it be — enough to get him elected. Elections are about the future, not the distant past. Show comments here » By Any Other Name…
Jonah Goldberg has sparked a minor blogospheric furor for a recent column in which he castigated Barack Obama, John McCain, and others for promoting a compulsory national service program, which he compared to slavery.
Most of the outrage directed at this column deals directly with these two paragraphs. And, frankly, I do think that Goldberg did employ some bad rhetoric here. But it’s bad rhetoric used to make an excellent point. Namely, that there’s something un-American about compulsory national service. As Goldberg points out:
Now, Obama’s plan, like most plans of this type, doesn’t outright mandate that all students perform national service. It merely makes such service a condition for federal education dollars. So in a technical sense, these types of plans probably don’t run afoul of the 13th Amendment. But they’re still pretty appalling, and I think that Goldberg does make an excellent point here:
I agree with this sentence wholeheartedly. Both Obama and McCain’s service plans serve the nefarious idea that people ought to be forced to help somebody else, which is something that is anathema to the rights of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” that this country was ostensibly founded upon. I can’t be the only one who shook his head in disbelief at John McCain’s essay about ‘patriotism, in which he said:
Yes, in John McCain’s worldview, country reigns supreme. Above religion. Above conscience. Above the human race as a whole. At least, that’s the conclusion you have to reach if you take his words at face value. But that’s the very ideology that drives the clamor for compulsory service–the idea that the lives of young people are not their own. That their dreams and their ambitions should be shunted aside in the name of some vaguely defined “greater good.” Look, if a kid wants to spend 50 hours a year volunteering at a soup kitchen or building a house for habitat for humanity, then more power to him. If she wants to spend that time playing video games or basketball, or even *gasp!* holding down a part-time job well, that’s her choice, too. The point of America is that you got to make the choice about what you want to do with your life, not have some bureaucrat decide for you. Clunky prose aside, I think that Goldberg was dead on in condemning compulsory service. It’s an antiquated, un-American notion that should by no means make its way into federal law.
Obama’s Spending Wish List
This just in: Politicians promise lots of things they won’t be able to deliver if they get elected. Yesterday, we had the hilarity of John McCain’s promise to balance the budget in four years without raising taxes or cutting anything but “wasteful” spending. Today, we’ve got an analysis from the Los Angeles Times showing that Barack Obama is promising things we can’t afford and almost certainly won’t make it through Congress. 
Leon Panetta, former chief of staff for Bill Clinton, says this is all par for the course.
Or not. The preferred solution in recent decades has been to simply spend the money and borrow the difference. I’m skeptical, given the incentives, that that will change come January. Iraqi Government Demands Timetable For Troop Withdrawl
Iraq’s national security advisor announced today that the Iraqi government will be demanding a hard timetable for American troop withdrawl: Iraq will not accept any security agreement with the United States unless it includes dates for the withdrawal of foreign forces, the government’s national security adviser said on Tuesday. Presented without comment. Show comments here »Why Rush Limbaugh is So Popular
2. Establish a 17 percent flat tax. 3. Privatize Social Security. 4. Give parents school vouchers to break the monopoly of public education. 5. Revoke Jimmy Carter’s passport while he is out of the country. 6. Abandon all government policies based on the hoax of man-made global warming. Ezra’s analysis:
I was an avid listener to Rush’s show once upon a time but hardly ever catch it these days owing to a combination of scheduling and the fact that I grew tired of the schtick some years back. Still, this “platform” shows quite well why Rush is so popular with middle America. And, no, it’s no ressentiment. #1 and #6 have nothing to do with poking liberals in general or Al Gore in particular in the eye. Rather, it’s a much more basic populist appeal: “You’re paying four bucks a gallon for gas and these liberal do-gooders are more worried about the spotted owl than your ability to take care of your family!” #2 and #3 aren’t about making the rich richer. Frankly, while that would be great for Rush, he of the recent $400 million contract extension, you don’t get 20 million listeners by appealing to the top one percent of income earners. Most Americans hate the tax code and, especially, the burden of keeping records and filing their taxes every year. Pretty much everyone thinks it’s way too complicated and nobody knows whether they’re paying “their fair share” or not. Indeed, most everyone suspects People like me are getting screwed while everyone who makes less or more than they do is getting over. Social Security? Most people support the idea behind the system — making sure granny can feed herself and keep the lights on — but they resent the huge amount withheld from their paycheck combined with a growing (if almost certainly incorrect) sense that they’ll never actually see any retirement dividends from the system. #4 is about culture more than about education. Middle America thinks the schools are brainwashing their kids to reject parental values rather than teaching the so-called “Three R’s.” Beyond that, there’s a real sense that schools aren’t very good and that having to teach to the lowest common denominator is robbing their own kids (all of whom are above average) of a decent education. #5 is a joke. Rush doesn’t actually want to deport Jimmy Carter, he just enjoys poking fun at him. Republicans of a certain age find Jimmy Carter very funny. Limbaugh’s appeal is that he’s simultaneously Everyman, expressing the values and frustrations of Regular People who believe their values and way of life are under assault from elites in Hollywood, the news media, higher education, and inside the dreaded Beltway as well as a very bright, humorous, entertaining fellow. People enjoy spending parts of the three hours a day he’s on listening to him. Whether they are giving him mega-dittos, shaking their head in disbelief, or screaming at the radio, they’re not bored. Rush is more engaging than Sean Hannity, more comfortable than Michael Savage, funnier than Gordon Liddy, and less preachy than Laura Schlessinger. His act wears thin if you’re an intellectual. But he can afford to lose a few hundred people. Photo: Nigel Parry for The New York Times
Blog Linking Less Important?
Indeed, I found his piece on Techmeme and had never heard of Gray before, despite his being a relatively big player in the tech-social media space. Gray rank ordered his referrals from the last six months and, sure enough, search engines, social media sites, and aggregators delivered much more traffic than links from very popular blogs such as Scobleizer, TechCrunch, and Micro Persuasion. None delivered more than 500 visitors! My experience in the politics niche is quite different. Yes, without question, Google and other search engines provide a significant share of OTB’s traffic. For June, Google brought in 118,236 visits; Yahoo 10,574; MSN 4764; Google Images 2522; Ask 2147; and Windows Live 1914. Aggregators memeorandum and RealClearPolitics brought in 1722 and 3635, respectively. Social media sites brought in negligible traffic: Fark 1891, Digg 153, and StumbleUpon 129. Still, blog linkage accounts for significant traffic and can bring in nice surges. In June, links from InstaPundit brought in 7502 visits, Balloon Juice 3812, Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish 2371, and Matthew Yglesias 1495. And that’s only counting top-level referrals, as I’m not ambitious enough to add up referrals from individual URLs within those sites or www/non-www variants. Certainly, though, plenty of them brought in more than 500 visits. And that’s in a single month, not a six-month period. Indeed, links from any of those sites and many more can bring in more than 500 visitors in a single hour. The key variable there is the nature of the link. One that (Like this post, I’m afraid. Sorry, Louis.) provides significant excerpts of a post and provides extensive original analysis tend to send much less traffic to linked sites than posts that provide only a teaser. It may well be that the ethics of linking and the reader habit of clicking through is more engrained on the political blogs than other sectors of the blogosphere. In the celebrity gossip space, where I’ve also got a presence (albeit mainly an ownership/management one) there is relatively little linking to other blogs and, indeed, outright theft of content without even a nod in the direction of attribution is the norm. I suspect, too, that the reading habits of tech and politics bloggers are simply different. The handful of the former I read, for example, seem to be much more engaged with Twitter and various other social media outlets than most of us in the political space.
War Powers Consultation Act
Former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher take to the op-ed pages of the NYT to call for a new War Powers Act.
It should be noted at the outset that, were such a law on the books in 2002, the Iraq War would almost certainly have proceeded exactly as it did. President Bush in fact not only consulted with Congress but got authorization to commence military operations in Iraq at his sole discretion by rather wide margins from both Houses. In terms of preventing “bad” wars, I’m dubious as well. A determined president can, as has been repeatedly been demonstrated, get legal advice showing him how to navigate the loopholes in the law. And, goodness, this one sounds to have loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Sorry, I couldn’t consult with you guys. Otherwise, the operation wouldn’t be covert, now would it?” “This mission was necessary for protecting Americans abroad. I mean, if Ayatollah Nutsojihad got WMD, American tourists in Israel wouldn’t have been safe at all.” Once hostilities are commenced and American troops are in harm’s way, a Rally ‘Round the Flag effect invariably happens and Congress would be hard pressed to then vote No. Those rather large caveats notwithstanding, these reforms sound like good ones. First, even if we only established the Super Duper Joint Select Committee on Foreign Policy Stuff and ignored everything else, it would be a major step forward. Now, a dozen preening Committee chairman can easily claim that any given activity falls within their purview and then stage photo-op “hearings” to get their faces on teevee. A consolidated, bipartisan group might actually provide serious advice and gain the trust of the executive to make consultation more attractive. Second, forcing Congress to vote Yay or Nay would give them skin in the game. As it stands, they can claim they supported a war if it’s popular and distance themselves from it the moment things start to go south. Or they can vote to support the war and then pull a Hillary, claiming that they were only supporting the authority to go to war, not going to war itself. It’s worth remembering that the 1973 War Powers Act was vetoed by President Nixon and required a two-thirds override to pass. One imagines that the same will be true of this War Powers Consultation Act. Getting that degree of consensus for much of anything is going to be incredibly difficult in the current political climate. Show comments here »Joe Dwyer, Medic Hero, Dead
Joe Dwyer, made famous in a March 2003 Warren Zinn photo for his heroic service in Iraq, has died, apparently a casualty of that service. 
Tragic. John Cole, Logan Murphy, and Scarecrow make the perfectly reasonable point that such deaths are an inevitable price of war and that we must therefore fight only when doing so is unavoidable. That is, of course, true. And, yes, of course, let’s do more to ensure we have the infrastructure in place to deal with those whose wounds are psychological rather than physical. We’ve made enormous strides in that regard in recent years, although not enough to deal with the enormity of the numbers we’ve sustained owing to our long-term involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, let’s recall that men like Dwyer volunteer for military service and most see themselves as honorable men who performed their duty knowing the risks, not helpless victims. Let’s not dishonor them by pretending otherwise. Show comments here »Supreme Court as a Voting Issue
Dahlia Lithwick takes to the pages of FireDogLake to explain why, in her view, liberals are much less excited about the Supreme Court than conservatives:
That strikes me as more-or-less right. I’d add, though, that while the Court might be getting more ideologically conservative, the law and society isn’t. Beyond that, while Anthony Kennedy, the current “swing Justice,” is more conservative than his predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor, centrist conservative judges tend to be extremely deferential to precedent. There’s simply no analog to the great civil rights controversies of the 1950s and 1960s where the Supreme Court can force the hand of the culture. The closest thing is probably gay rights which, frankly, just isn’t that close. Arguably, the most salient judicial “voting issue” for liberals is abortion. That issue reflects both the above trends well. Whatever Kennedy’s views on the merits of the Roe precedent, he now views it as settled law, meaning the arguments are now on the very margins of the debate (late term abortion, the precise point of “viability,” and the like). Further, even if, say, a John Paul Stevens were replaced by a Samuel Alito type — the furthest right Justice one can imagine a very Democratic Senate confirming — and they somehow decided to overturn Roe’s Constitutional right to abortion, we wouldn’t return to anything like a pre-Roe status quo.
Caption Contest
One more OTB Caption ContestTM from me before Mr. Dill returns on Bastille Day. Get into the swing of things with this one:  REUTERS/Vincent West (SPAIN) Winners will be announced Saturday PM. Show comments here »Racist Toddlers
A bizarre story in the London Telegraph, “Toddlers who dislike spicy food ‘racist,’” is getting some play, thus far only from conservative blogs.
Debbie Schlussel scoffs, “If me no likey da spicy food, then I’m a racist.” Which is funny on many levels, most presumably unintentional. But, not to worry, she’s enjoyed “spicy falafel and Plochman’s Spicy Kosciusko Mustard” since childhood, clearly proving she’s no racist. Jonah Goldberg wonders if his own daughter is now a racist, given her occasional aversion to salsa. Jimmie @ Sundries Shack has the most intentionally-funny reaction:
Van Helsing (which, I’m guessing, is a pseudonym) observes, “Monte Python in its prime would have been at a loss to outdo the self-parody into which Britain’s totalitarian political correctness has descended.” I tend to share the consensus reaction that this is an absurd proposal. It should be noted, however, that the NCB is merely an activist group, not an arm of the British government, and that the Telegraph has a reputation for sensationalism. The extent to which this book should be taken seriously is far from clear. Unfortunately, all the news accounts I’ve been able to locate on it thus far have been regurgitations of the same wire report. NCB is distancing itself from the more outlandish aspects of the book:
They also emphasize:
Or that it’s outlandish and controversial. UPDATE: Bruce McQuain identifies, as I neglected to, the real outrage here: defining racism down. If saying “Yuk” to food that doesn’t suit one’s palette qualifies, then the concept loses all meaning. Show comments here »
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