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Friday, December 24, 2004


Happy Holidays
I think that's the first time I've said or written that line, but I hope I'm angering some evangelicals somewhere. Israel has decided to spread a bit of holiday joy by entrusting security in Bethlehem to the Palestinian Authority and opening its roadblocks and security wall. More likely than a bomb in Bethlehem, though, is some sort of Christmas terrorist attack in Indonesia, whose authorities are posting extra security outside churches through the country. At least one group of terrorists, however, has promised a peaceful christmas. Hizbollah apparently sent out a Hallmark-esque card with an AK-47 (their logo) stamped in the corner. Sounding a great deal like a Macy's spokesperson, the organization's press officer explained the proccess of developing the Christmas card:
"It took us three weeks to design the card, we didn't want to just buy a random card, sign it and send it out, we wanted something that was respectful of everybody. We always send cards, but this year we got a lot of compliments for our design... We sent it to everybody, Christians and Muslims alike, because this is a holiday that we all have in common, Jesus is also our prophet, prophet Issa, so we celebrate his birth. It's a beautiful holiday, full of love."
Another very unlikely envoy of love and holiday cheer arrived in Mosul. And, of course, the U.S. is being childish and Cuba is being offensive:


Posted by Nikhil, 1:16 AM -

Thursday, December 23, 2004


Victor Davis Hanson
Nathaniel Ward over on Dartlog notes that V.D. Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture, a book that should be familiar to many History majors, will be debating Professor Ronald Edsforth early this February on the subject of "America's role in promoting free societies." I have a great many problems with Hanson and I was thorougly unconvinced by his book for reasons that are well described by the Independent's Frank McLynn.:
The faults of this book are legion, so there is space to concentrate only on the most egregious. In the first place, the West did not enjoy military superiority for 2,500 years. For over 1000 years from the career of Mohammed to the Siege of Vienna in 1683, Europe was on the defensive against Islam and sustained many disastrous defeats. From the battle of the Kalka River in 1223 until the death of Tamerlane in 1405, the Mongols defeated European armies and annihilated the flower of European chivalry in two battles (Liegnitz and Mohi) in one year, 1241... Hanson is as poor a global historian as he is a prophet. In his final overview, he fails to envisage the possibility of war between the West and stateless terrorists. Not many authors end up being refuted by both the past and the future.
Hanson is a great supporter of the War on Terror and, at least from the impression I've got, of war in general. A classicist by training (and apparently a good one at that), Hanson lives in California, or Mexifornia as he likes to call it.

A couple of his better known books for those interested...


Posted by Nikhil, 5:14 AM -

Barack Obama
Obama makes Newsweek's "Who's Next" cover for their Christmas/New Year double issue.
Grace [of "Will and Grace"] said in a fall episode that she dreamed she was in the shower with Obama, who was "Ba-racking my world!"
Oh my. Women who identify with Grace should download this wallpaper.


Posted by Nikhil, 4:14 AM -

Wednesday, December 22, 2004


Bush's Weaknesses
Two bloggers comment on GW's weaknesses (and those of the Republican Party) as the year comes to a close. A post on Andrew Sullivan suggests that Americans aren't actually conservative:
This is why conservative politicians are often forced to resort to deception to advance conservative policy proposals. Take tax cuts, the heart and soul of President Bush’s meager domestic policy. When Bush first came to office, tax cuts were not a particularly high priority for the public. Nevertheless, Bush pressed ahead, and the size and distribution of the tax cuts he proposed were, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have argued, “radically at odds with majority views.” “Crafted language” does the work that ought to be done by argument and persuasion.
Meanwhile, Kos writes that Bush's latest approval numbers are historically very low for a newly reelected President. As Kos argues, what's worrying about the situation is that the Democrats were unable to take advantage of any of this dissatisfaction. In the post quoted above, Sullivan goes on to worry that Republicans are "over-reaching" and that many in the American public may not fully like what they see in the next four years. Indeed, yesterday's Washington Post gives a similar impression with their description of the incoming Congress and how they may behave with a lame-duck President:

Bush will face a new, and in some ways less predictable, congressional environment in his second term. There will be 55 Republican senators, four more than during most of the first term, which should strengthen Bush's hand. But the new crop includes a few such as former representative Tom Coburn (Okla.) who are more conservative than Bush and have reputations for independence.

There will be 232 House Republicans, three more than this term. But House Republicans such as DeLay are telling colleagues that they, too, have accumulated considerable political capital by holding the House majority for a decade and picking up seats in back-to-back elections. The bigger a party's majority, often the harder it is to impose party discipline, several GOP observers said.

At a recent GOP leadership retreat, two participants said DeLay appeared to irritate White House political chief Karl Rove by signaling a more aggressive role in the new Congress.

As much as I'd like to be encouraged, none of this negates last month's election results and the fact that Democrats have ceded a great deal of ground on national security issues which, with the help of fundamentalists everywhere, seem destined to remain a central issue for the next few years.



Posted by Nikhil, 4:05 AM -

Tuesday, December 21, 2004


Bank of America's Anti-Bush Executive
Apparently, Bank of America is going to fit in quite well in New England. According to Bloomberg's William Pesek Jr., the chief market strategist in BoA's capital markets division blames bad foreign policy for the dollar's decline:
``The message from the foreign exchange markets'' of late ``seems to be simply this: The free ride for the rogue nation is over,'' Quinlan argues. ``No more guns and butter, or wads of foreign cash for a nation deeply enmeshed in the Middle East, heavily indebted at home and seemingly disengaged -- some might say -- from the rest of the world.''

The sinking dollar, Quinlan says, ``could be a sign that the world is no longer willing to underwrite the designs of U.S. foreign policy. To a large extent, we believe a rebound in the U.S. dollar could hinge on a revamped foreign policy.''
The evidence is rather anecdotal and there are plenty of more conventional explanations for the dollars decline. The article mentions that certain leaders, including Mahatir Mohammed, have been advocating that Asian and Muslim countries and businesses should stop buying the dollar and use the Yen, Euro or local currencies as a standard in order to hurt the US.

NOTE: I have fixed the link to Pesek's column. Despite a comment to the contrary, I haven't found broken links in any of my other posts.


Posted by Nikhil, 2:09 AM -

Monday, December 20, 2004


Civil Liberties for Muslims
A Cornell University poll found that approximately 44% of Americans favor curtailing the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, compared to 48% who oppose such restrictions (3.6% error margin). 26% believed that mosques and religious organizations should be placed under surveillance or infiltrated by FBI agents. Not surprisingly, republicans and those who identified themselves as highly religious were the most likely to support the targeting of Muslims. More interesting was that the researchers found a correlation between respondents who used the TV news as their primary source of news and those that favored restrictions on Muslims:

Respondents who paid a lot of attention to television news were more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties, such as greater power for the government to monitor the Internet. Respondents who paid less attention to television news were less likely to support such measures. "The more attention paid to television news, the more you fear terrorism, and you are more likely to favor restrictions on civil liberties."
According to a report released by Amnesty International last week, racial profiling against Arabs has already increased substantially in the United States. Amnesty argues that this doesn't simply result in ridiculous actions by the police and other security officials throughout the country (dismantling a young Muslim boy's Boy Scout pinewood derby car) but also allows assailants like the African American D.C. snipers to evade capture for a longer period of time.



Posted by Nikhil, 8:26 AM -

Sunday, December 19, 2004


The Economist Meets TDR
I'm catching up with old issues of the economist while home for the break, and I just came across an editorial in the Dec 2nd issue (here for premium subscribers) calling for increased "intellectual diversity," i.e. more conservatives in academia. The writer also seems to think that Tom Wolfe's vision of Ivy League life in I Am Charlotte Simmons is fairly accurate.

A recent article by Jonathan Chait seems to provide a better explanation for the dearth of conservatives in academia than the liberal conspiracies proposed by many conservatives: Republican anti-intellectualism:

Second, professors don't particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism. Remember how Bush in 2000 ridiculed Al Gore for using all them big numbers?

That's not just a campaign ploy. It’s how Republicans govern these days. Last summer, my colleague Frank Foer wrote a cover story in the New Republic detailing the way the Bush administration had disdained the advice of experts. And not liberal experts, either. These were Republican-appointed wonks whose know-how on topics such as global warming, the national debt and occupying Iraq were systematically ignored. Bush prefers to follow his gut.
Chait notes that while NYT columnist complains about the dearth of conservative intellectuals, he takes pride in the fact that "Republicans, from Reagan to Bush, admire leaders who are straight-talking men of faith. The Republican leader doesn't have to be book smart."

Universities are supposed to offer the cutting edge in thought; conservatives, by definition, resist this. Of course, right wing ideas are continually advancing in economics and certain other areas, but there is a reason that graduates of universities like Bob Jones that teach conservative ideas in the physical or social sciences don't get hired by Republican Wall Street bosses.



Posted by Nikhil, 3:09 AM -
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