But He's Hopeful That He Can Talk Them Out Of It.

Carter Says Hamas May Accept Right of Israel to Exist (Alisa Odenheimer, Bloomberg, 4/21/08)

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who helped broker peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978, said that Israel's enemy Hamas may accept, under certain circumstances, the Jewish state's right to exist.

Hamas leaders told Carter that the group would accept a peace agreement negotiated by the leader of the rival Fatah group, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on condition that the agreement is submitted to the Palestinian people for approval, the former president said in a speech in Jerusalem.

"Hamas leaders said they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 border and the right of Israel to live as a neighbor, provided the agreement was submitted to the Palestinian people for overall approval," Carter said.

The odd thing about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is that everyone knows what the peace would look like, it's just that no one wants it. Because of that, the standard negotiator's tactic of getting people to dicker over the small questions until they get so emotionally invested in the process that they compromise the big questions, won't work.

Tony Who?

Not to keep harping on this, but ... I've seen zero blowback on Senator Obama's admission of his closer ties with Rezko while everyone has been distracted by Rev. Wright. I didn't watch his speech yesterday, but people seem to accept his explanation that, I gather, its ok for blacks to hate America. (His message might have lost something in translation.)

Now, its a terrible mistake for supporters and opponents to assume that "everything happens for a reason" and there is some [malign] genius behind everything that happens in politics (the way that both Republicans and Democrats assuming that Karl Rove is behind everything bad that happens to the Dems and everything good that happens to the Reps). But I note that Senator Obama chose to let two different stories slip out on the same day, one of which has overshadowed the other. The one that has gotten all the attention is one that is good to get out of the way now and one that he had an answer for. If anyone has the bad taste to bring up the other story now, well that's old news and this campaign is about moving America forward.

The Wright Stuff

Everyone (and by "everyone" I mean those strange bedfellows, Hillary Clinton and the conservative commentariat) seems to think that the various extreme claims made by Senator Obama's pastor, the Rev. Wright, hurt Obama. I'm not sure I see that. The fight right now, and probably in the general election, is for the moderate middle. If I'm right that the entire justification for the Obama candidacy is racial reconciliation ("A black president will help heal our racial divide, and I'm the only candidate who can deliver that promise"), doesn't Rev. Wright's extremism help Obama with the moderate middle?

When moderates contemplate reconciling radical and alienated blacks with the majority culture, what they want is for blacks to come to the middle -- for Rev. Wright to become (in tone and temperament) more like Senator Obama. They certainly don't contemplate changing themselves. In other words, for moderates Wright's extremism makes the work President Obama would do, just by being president, that much more urgent.

I understand that mine is a minority view, but it might be shared by the Obama campaign. OJ comes close to the truth by (almost) noting that the campaign is using the Wright kerfluffle as cover for what could be truly damaging admissions about his relationship with Tony Rezko.

Will His Walking On Water Make It Hard To Bathe?

Will Obama's Vow to Fight Clean Hurt Him? Barack Obama's Promise to Take the High Road Could Leave Him With One Hand Tied Behind His Back (Marcus Baram, ABC News, 3/7/08)

"For him, the trick is going to be to find a way to make a contrast [between Obama and Clinton] in a way that is grounded in hope," says Democratic strategist Steve McMahon.

It's going to be such a pity when this contest is over.

Now, That's Speaking Truth To The (Temporarily) Powerful

Obama Camp Rejects Adviser's Comments (Nedra Pickler, 3/8/08, AP)

A former adviser to Barack Obama, who resigned Friday after calling rival Hillary Rodham Clinton "a monster," said Obama may not be able to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within a year as he has promised on the campaign trail.

Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winner author, made the comments in two separate interviews with foreign media while promoting her latest book. The comment that led to her resignation came in an interview with The Scotsman, and she immediately tried to keep it from appearing in print.

"She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything," The Scotsman quoted her as saying. A few hours after the comments were published, Power, an unpaid adviser and Harvard professor, announced her resignation in a statement distributed by the Obama campaign.

This almost got a "can't anyone play this game?" headline. Everyone knows that he's lying to his base. That's what candidates do in the primaries. Then, in the general, they tell completely different lies to the American people as a whole.

And All We Got You Was This Moderate War Hero

We really owe thanks to the Democrats for giving us such an entertaining primary season. It's been great fun to watch them try all the same tricks on each other that they usually try on the Republicans, and to watch their shock -- shock I tell you -- that it's not just the evil Republicans that try to win. What I'm looking forward to now is what anti-democratic back-room deal the party will use to select -- not elect -- its nominee.

I'd Call Them Larry, Moe and Curly, But They Wouldn't Get The Reference

The occasion of Bill Buckley's death, about which I have nothing useful to add, has brought to the fore again the weird trio of English immigrant anti-immigrationists who found their way to the National Review.

John O'Sullivan, John Derbyshire and Peter Brimelow (who can't apparently let go of the English habit of vicious obituarying) show us, once again, that the last one into the life-boat always wants to be the last one into the life-boat. Odd that National Review collected the entire set.

Darkens? Is That Supposed To Be Funny?

Today's New York Times report from the Clinton campaign is entitled Soldiering On, but Somber as the Horizon Darkens.

Sunstein Goes From Chicago To Harvard...

... both schools get more conservative.

More Obama

I wish I had time to write more, but I don't. So, telegraphically, I think that people who dismiss Senator Obama as an empty suit without message, who can be easily beaten by an opponent willing to define him, are missing two things:

1. It appears that he's beaten the Clinton machine, or at least come closer than the Republicans ever managed.

2. "There ought to be a black president" is a perfectly valid campaign platform. It's even, in contradistinction to many good platforms, true. There ought to be a black president. Lots of good things could come of that, including things that conservatives would recognized as unalloyed good. It might, for example, be a little harder to argue that ours is an inherently racist society. I'm not willing to give up other policy preferences that Obama would trash (strong defense, a rational economic policy, lower taxes, etc.) to get a black president, but other people have different policy preferences and weight them differently. That is, after all, why we have to have elections in the first place. To deny that this is a real policy position on which Senator Obama can't be beaten is to close our eyes to reality.

Congratulations Sweetheart

Today was my daughter's bat mitzvah. She did an excellent job. That is not only my entirely objective opinion, but the expressed opinion of everyone there and they are a very reliable group.

I mention this not to boast about my very talented daughter, but to pass along her request that, when you next consider making a charitable contribution, you consider SOS Children's Villages, which provides a home and education to street children around the world.

Even When They Know The Words, They Don't Hear The Music

The AP, reporting on Super Tuesday, says:

Preliminary exit polls of voters in primary states showed Obama encroaching on Clinton's traditional support.

That would be the "traditions" of ... last month.

If You Think Obama Will Be Easy To Beat

Watch this:

Afterwards, you might not want to see him lose.

While We're On The Subject

I highly recommend the Fiscal Year 2006 Financial Report of the United States Government, released last month, which has a lot of good information on federal government finances.

A Budgetary Experiment

We've been discussing government spending over at the Daily Duck and so I thought I'd grab some data from the NIPA accounts over at the Bureau of Economic Analysis and then calculate and graph government expenditures and receipts, federal expenditures and receipts and national defense expenditures as percentages of GDP. The data starts in 1929, but because of limitations and changes in the data, this chart starts in 1960.

Because I wanted to play around with Excel a little bit, I've posted the original chart and data on the web. Feel free to play around with it. (This will likely only work if you have Excel and IE, and maybe not even then.)


Ask and ye shall receive. This gives us some historical perspective, but I don't know that this is a particularly useful statistic. Comparing national debt to GDP is something like comparing the total amount of your mortgage to your annual income. For that reason, I threw in interest paid as a percent of GDP.


I've also added OECD data for governmental debt as a percentage of GDP.

Send Your Complaints To Toni Morrison

In the comments below, Skipper asks why Bill Clinton is called our first black president. The answer is, unfortunately, because of his disfunctions. The phrase comes from a Toni Morrison piece in the New Yorker:

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

Other Stuff?

Hillary and Barack at the debate, from the AP:

Obama even allowed that former President Clinton had earned his enormous affinity in the black community when he was asked if Clinton deserved his title as the "first black president."

"I have to say that, I would have to investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother," Obama said.

"Well, I'm sure that can be arranged," Clinton responded.

It's not worth, at this late date, complaining about the double standard. But what "other stuff" would Senator Obama have to investigate? And how would Hillary arrange it?

Why We're Going To Miss W

The most difficult trait for a leader is to be reliably right ex post. Any idiot can be right ex ante. After all, all the relevant data is at least knowable. That so many are so wrong ex ante just demonstrates what fundamentally stupid and irrational creatures we really are.

But being right ex post is genuinely hard. The most important facts -- what's going to happen between the decision and the result -- can't be known. From the point of view of the future, every decision is a gamble and in this game not even the true odds are known.

It is, therefore, remarkable that President Bush is right as often as he is. I'm thinking here, in particular, of his decision on funding research into embryonic stem cells. Given what we've discovered since, his decision that the federal government would fund primarily research into adult stem cells turned out to be the right decision scientifically. The world doesn't usually work like that: morality doesn't necessarily translate into doing what best from a purely utilitarian view point. Not torturing terrorists is the right decision, but pretending that there's no cost in the form of dead Americans because "torture doesn't work" is simply ignoring the cost of our decision.

A president who makes decisions that turn out for the best in the long run is invaluable. It might also be unknowable until the person actually becomes president. There was, for example, no way to know that Jimmy Carter would be the anti-W, a president who's every important decision turned out to be wrong. This does show, though, that democracy has no special talent for being right ex post.

If It Were True

First, such words can do direct injury to viewers. Words are animate things, with lives and desires of their own, and unproven statements such as CNN's "best political team on television" corrode the ear canal and eat away at the brain pan.

These words would have risen up off the page and beat him silly.

At the bottom of the page, the author, in "Related in Slate," uses "essays" as a verb and gets it wrong.

Assume A Can Opener

Let's assume that computer programs can reach a level of consciousness indistinguishable from human consciousness.

Then, clearly, computers could run multiple consciousnesses.

Those consciousnesses would receive all of their "sensory" inputs from their programming.

The number of consciousnesses that could be run at any one time would be purely a function of computing power.

Any civilization that could do this would do this.

Any civilization that could do this would be able to run social science experiments, in which the computer consciousnesses would be subject to various beginning states, requiring multiple massive multi-consciousness programs.

Necessarily, the software consciousnesses in such an experiment would not know that they are software.

With each instance of a massive multi-consciousness program, the ex ante likelihood that any given consciousness is "real" rather than software decreases arithmetically.