December 4, 2009

Are the oceans the future of food?

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A geodesic cage used by Open Blue Sea Farms

If the the future of food is hazy right now due to overconsumption, globalization, and climate change, the future of seafood is even murkier. The global fish catch topped out sometime in the 1990s, leaving many fish populations more or less permanently overstressed. Aquaculture has grown to satisfy rising global demand – but fish farms have brought environmental devastation to many a coastal zone.

Is the answer to pack up those coastal operations and move fish farming offshore? That’s the question I attempt to answer in this Yale Environment 360 piece. I started out with the assumption that, whatever the environmental hazards, a big move into deeper waters is inevitable someday – the economic and political pressures pointing in that direction, now weak in the United States and elsewhere, are only going to rise as the world’s demand for protein goes up.

And, on the surface anyway, offshore aquaculture is promising. The entrepreneurs and advocates I talked to seemed environmentally responsible and thoughtful. If you locate a fish farm in deep water (employing large pens or cages designed to withstand the stress of the open ocean), many of the problems endemic to coastal fish farming – accumulating waste, nutrients, et al and the attendant ecosystem damage – are minimized.

On the other hand, as I note in the piece:

The example of the lone, tiny fish farm surrounded by miles of open water is not an ideal indicator, though. O’Hanlon and other fish farmers say that to be profitable they’ll need to scale up.

“It’s an industry that will achieve better economics as it scales,” says Neil Sims, the co-founder and CEO of Kona Blue Farms, an offshore operation in Hawaii that farms a local species of yellowtail it calls Kona kampachi. “We need to grow this industry. Larger pens are going to be more efficient than smaller ones. Better technology, more automation is going to be better than using manpower. We need to locate closer to the market or find ways to get product to market more inexpensively.”

Indeed, if deep-sea fish farming is to have any impact on the seafood marketplace, not to mention global food supplies, it will have to get much, much bigger. That prospect alarms environmental groups that have spent years fighting poorly managed industrial fish farms.

As fish farming migrates offshore, we’re going to have to confront these problems. Right now, though, there’s basically no federal U.S. aquaculture policy. And the longer we go without one, the greater the risks.

 

November 26, 2009

Let us now give thanks for Joe Lieberman

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Thanksgiving is a time for taking a deep breath and appreciating the under-appreciated. So I thought I would challenge myself this year. Let’s take a moment, reflect, and give thanks that Joe Lieberman is in the Senate.

Bear with me here. In the 1990s, I liked Lieberman. Most of his policy positions were reasonable. He was sometimes sanctimonious, but he also pushed Democrats to speak on moral issues important to Americans that many in his party reflexively considered out-of-bounds. (Today, President Obama can freely, eloquently address religion and morality in politics, in part because Lieberman paved the way.)

Lately, though, like many others I puzzle over what brought Lieberman to his current pass: standing alone, outside a party structure, antagonizing Democrats seemingly just because that’s what he does – and, of course, now threatening to bring down the whole health care reform effort.

I’m not a fan of psychoanalyzing politicians, but Lieberman is a special case. He appears to be motivated in part by pure self-regard, uncontaminated even by loyalty to constituents, interest groups or (of course) party. His drift from hawkishness into full-on neoconservatism, for example, clearly has a strong personal dimension: Lieberman views himself as the one man who sees the truth on national security in a party of cautious temporizers. This has some political advantages (except the most important one, getting re-elected) that also play to his ego: In the Republican Party, he’d be unexceptional. As an Independent caucusing with Democrats, Lieberman stands out.

On health care as well, Lieberman’s self-regard looks to be a strong motivating factor. Yes, he’s protecting the Connecticut insurance industry by threatening to filibuster any bill containing a public option. But there are probably more effective ways to get what he wants, and he clearly relishes being a holdout. The fact that his stance probably hurts his reelection prospects (unlike other Democratic holdouts with more conservative constituencies) only seems to encourage him. As Peter Beinart notes in The Daily Beast, Lieberman is bitter about a series of losses and slights by Democrats – his disastrous showing in the 2004 presidential campaign, the lack of robust party support two years later when he ran for reelection as an independent:

Gradually, this personal alienation has eaten away at his liberal domestic views. His staff has grown markedly more conservative in recent years, and his closest friends in Congress are now Republicans John McCain and Lindsey Graham. For Lieberman, the personal has become political, and it has pushed him further to the right.

So here’s why we should offer a smidgen of thanks he’s around. Lieberman offers a window into how the Senate really works, and in some sense only Lieberman allows us to see the true capriciousness of those crazy, arbitrary rules on holds and filibusters. Other Senators routinely block and delay legislation on on behalf of party or special interests. That’s just politics. Lieberman shows us how one man’s quirks can hijack an entire national agenda.

 

November 25, 2009

Now blogging at True/Slant

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I’ve just joined True/Slant, a blogging and journalism platform started earlier this year. I’m still exploring the site myself, but it looks to be an interesting and lively community. You can join and, as on other social media sites, follow the contributors you like, chime in on comments and discussions, et al.

At least for the moment, I’m going to be doing most, but not all, of my blogging over there. I’ll still be posting here, though more intermittently, and continuing to contribute to the HuffPost and Guardian.

 

November 4, 2009

Obama was never a revolutionary

Posted by johnmcquaid under 2008 campaign, George W. Bush, government, politics | Tags: |
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As Jon Stewart put it, “so when does ‘hope’ turn into ‘change’?” As Arianna Huffington points out, we still don’t know. To any outside observer it sure looks like Obama has lost his campaign mojo and gotten crushed in the whinging gears of Washington’s political apparatus. But I’m not so sure.

I’ve been in Washington since the early 1990s. During that time, let’s face it: very little happened. Well, that’s not quite right: a lot of things happened, many of them consequential. There was a presidential impeachment, a government shutdown, and several military campaigns and wars. But when you get right down to it, what did all that mean in terms of the way the government ran and its basic priorities? Very little.

The basic structure of American politics – the array of interest groups and party structures, the government’s basic assumptions about what was politically possible and desirable – didn’t change much at all. Mainly, well, it got stupider. Media coverage got stupider. Electoral politics got stupider. And, especially during the Bush administration, government itself got stupider, or at least prone to spectacular breakdowns. With the assent and encouragement of the White House, large swaths of the federal government became hostage to narrow-minded interest groups of one kind or another that simply didn’t have a stake in making it work.

Meanwhile, the world was changing. Fast. Big problems such as global warming and collateralized debt obligations emerged. They were catastrophic and just plain weird, and they didn’t fit any of our usual political paradigms. When the government can’t respond effectively to the real world, it’s going to pile one disaster on another.

Obama clearly recognized this problem – a government adrift in a revolutionary age, with all its constituent parts hardwired to stay that way – and set out to change it.

But there was never going to be a revolution. Obama ran on change, but he also made clear that he is a centrist and an institutionalist. He believes in making things work, in practical results – not in blowing things up and starting from scratch.

As a result, the poetry of the Obama campaign has been transformed into the software users manual of the Obama White House.

Most of the work of actually reforming government is a) politically very, very hard and b) not especially inspiring or even interesting to the media or the public. That includes big stuff like guiding health care reform through Congress. Or lower-profile stuff like staffing scientific agencies with scientists rather than hacks. At every turn, there are obstacles large and small that have been in place for decades and can’t easily be dislodged.

I’m willing to cut Obama some slack. I think his approach is substantive where those of some of his immediate predecessors were variously incremental, empty or dangerous. But I’m still wondering: Can someone who is temperamentally conservative and pragmatic, and who clearly doesn’t relish political combat, ever make truly revolutionary changes? Or in our system, is this the only kind of president who can? That’s the riddle we’re all facing right now.

 

October 13, 2009

Is Obama a “narcissist”?

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Conservatives are still wandering stunned through the wreckage of the Bush presidency and have absented themselves from the policy debate. GOP politicians are hunkered down waiting for an anti-Obama backlash that may or may not materialize. Instead, as Rick Hertzberg wrote recently, the media personalities are running the show. And what a show:

The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

As a group, politicians have incentives to be cautious – you know, politic – in their public statements. (There are, of course, exceptions.) But for media personalities, all the incentives point in the opposite direction. The more outrageous Limbaugh is, the more buttons he pushes, the higher the ratings and the more money he makes. In a Today Show interview, Limbaugh forswore any leadership role with the GOP while boasting of his ability to monopolize media coverage for days on end. During which, it should be noted, the media isn’t going to be paying much attention to John Boehner.

And when loudmouthed demagogues dominate the political discussion, it drives politicians further away from substantive debate, as they may be forced to pander to the most impassioned, red meat-devouring segments of the electorate.

All of this is to say, on the right there’s an inordinate focus on emotion and personalities that makes a real political debate impossible. One symptom of this is the right’s peculiar fixation on Obama’s personality and motivations – or rather, their imaginary versions of those things. To the conservosphere, Obama is a smug, preening narcissist, a character in a right-wing morality play, full of hubris and headed for a fall – any fall will do. When that happens the whole moral universe momentarily aligns itself with what is right and good.

Hence conservatives’ bizarre jubilation when Chicago lost its Olympic bid after Obama flew to Copenhagen and personally lobbied for it, and the view that Obama’s self-regard had finally done him in. George Will claimed – incorrectly, it turns out – that Obama’s Olympic speech contained an inordinate number of first-person pronouns and snarked about narcissism as “an Olympic sport.”

Then last week, the Nobel Peace Prize spawned a thousand “narcissist” blog posts. conservative pundit Lisa Schiffren wrote: “Aides owe the president a dose of reality. Otherwise, the prize may exacerbate his vanity and narcissism, which are his most visible flaws, and inflate his cult of personality, which won’t create jobs or end wars.” At the Corner, Yuval Levin called it a Nobel Prize for Narcissism.

The problem with the Obama-the-narcissist idea is that Obama is not a narcissist. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is defined as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.” But there’s very little evidence for this, at least in the public face Obama presents.

All presidents have big egos – and they’re entitled, right? But that’s not the same as narcissism. I’m not a psychologist, but Obama seems like a pretty mature individual – certainly more psychologically “together” than many of his immediate predecessors. And his policies are ambitious, certainly, but not grandiose. Many presidents have attempted health care reform, for example, and Obama’s approach – to build on and alter the current system rather than setting up a new one – may not be ambitious enough. Levin and other conservatives say it’s grandiose to try to leverage Obama’s global popularity with speeches such as his Cairo address. But the White House would be crazy not to try this. It doesn’t mean they think those words will change the world all by themselves.

Nor is there an Obama “cult of personality.” Obama has done a lot to anger those on his left flank. They’re disillusioned at his “isms” – his centrism, pragmatism, incrementalism, and institutionalism. And those in the political center, who should most identify with his program, aren’t too pleased with him either. Nobody’s worshipping Obama anymore, if they ever did. Rather, polls show a majority of Americans personally like Obama. Last month, the WSJ-NBC poll put that figure at 71%, regardless of whether respondents approved or disapproved of his policies.

But conservatives personally dislike him. So they have ginned up an ex-post facto reason for that – if we don’t like him, he must be psychologically flawed. This is oddly reminiscent of Maureen Dowd’s trivializing approach to politics – pretend to know a politician intimately, take a few personality tics and spin them into a unified theory of psycho-political dysfunction that has at best a tenuous correspondence to reality. This is silly. If conservatives want to win back power, they should focus on issues. They could start by kicking Obama off the analyst’s couch and taking a spin on it themselves.

 

October 9, 2009

The era of objectivity is over

Posted by johnmcquaid under media | Tags: , , , , |
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The ongoing debate about journalism, bias and objectivity erupted recently with the Washington Post’s release of new rules for social media. The rules themselves were mostly commonsensical, but the way they were written and promulgated suggested that Washington Post journalists employ social media such as Twitter and Facebook at their own peril – exactly the wrong message to be sending. If I were employed by the Post, how could I possibly be reassured by the prospect of “many, many discussions” with top editors about what I could and couldn’t say?

“Neutrality” of the kind sought by traditional media outlets such as the Post is supposed to emulate the scientific method – a cool elucidation of facts from a messy reality.

Here’s how the “neutral” stance theoretically works: There’s a political process between competing interests in society; journalists play an important role in that by explaining what’s happening, exposing wrongdoing, hypocrisy, etc.  So far so good. The foundation of this approach is the civics-book idea that on some level, we’ll remember that we’re all in this crazy democratic experiment together, we share the same values, and thus will look for honest brokers – journalists – to help us understand what’s happening.

But it’s been clear for a while that this goal is illusory. The era of the media-as-honest broker is over. The Washington Post and other establishment organs just haven’t realized it yet.

To be an honest broker, people must view you as trustworthy. But the traditional media long ago lost the trust of large swaths of the public. Why? Well, that’s a whole Ph.D. thesis. But look at some of the events of the past 40 years – Watergate, Vietnam, 9/11, Katrina. Political institutions lost public trust. The media were and are part of the political ecosystem and played a role in that loss. They enabled massive screwups and trafficked in cynicism (see the runup to the Iraq war and all political coverage from 1988 on). Moreover, Tom Edsall argues in CJR that the increasingly educated and liberal demographics of media employees skewed coverage away from, and at times against, the concerns of conservative, working class Americans. And Steve Buttry writes about how the elevation of neutrality came at the expense of other important journalistic values.

Unlike the political system, which kicks people and parties out of office from time to time, the media didn’t self-correct. It doubled down on neutrality – not just as a journalism methodology but as a cocoon: we stand outside and above what’s going on, and thus don’t have to seriously examine our role in it.

Without trust, an honest broker is just a broker, with no privileged claim on the truth.

But this is actually a good thing. It means you have to compete in a vast, ever-growing marketplace with a lot of other “truths” – some of them lies. Contending in that marketplace is one of the basic functions of journalism. If media outlets insist on trying to be neutral arbiters between political interests – without examining who and what those interests represent or if their arguments are credible – they’ll continue to inch toward irrelevance.

But what does a post-neutral world look like? Edsall’s solution – “We’re liberal – but objective!” – doesn’t sound promising. Nor do I buy the “slippery slope” argument: that all journalists end up wearing their opinions on their sleeves, that their work devolves into advocacy, that we all end up screaming at each other (that is, more than we do already).

There is room for all kinds of journalism. Talking Points Memo seems to do well enough combining smart reporting with a liberal perspective. That said, I don’t think the Washington Post or New York Times should become TPM – or, to cite a more apt example, the Guardian. Such an abrupt change would be jarring and out of character.

Rather, it would help simply to back off and see what happens. You know, evolve. Stop loudly proclaiming and enforcing neutrality and let the work speak for itself. Allow more, not less, flexibility in how journalists can express themselves. As a journalist, I don’t think my opinions about political issues are particularly interesting – unless I have knowledge or have done research about a topic and actually have something material to say about it. In that case, being able to comment on it and engage the public makes for better journalism. And good journalism that asks and answers important questions should be able to withstand partisan or ideological criticism.

 

September 28, 2009

The problem with conservatives’ cynicism

Posted by johnmcquaid under government, politics | Tags: , |
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Conor Friedersdorf has been tireless in pointing out the various hypocrises among conservatives in countenancing rhetoric that is either offensive or just plain stupid. Here he picks apart the odd relationship that many conservatives have with Glenn Beck, who has a lot of nominally conservative opinions, but is not an establishment or movement figure:

On reading Mr. Beck’s defenders, I can’t help but think that their judgment and integrity are being corroded by politics. The ideological battle between conservatives and liberals has become for them the most important struggle in American life — in order to win it, they are willing to defend and count as allies anyone in their insular world who advances the appropriate side in what they regard as a two-sided battle for the country’s soul. The most honest among them are explicit in arguing that their ends justify whatever rhetorical means it takes to achieve them. Even worse, they are using this total political warfare as a litmus test — temperament and political philosophy are insufficient to be a conservative in their minds, because they’ve redefined the term such that it demands loyalty to a political coalition and even the particular tactics it employs.

But shouldn’t this be a “shocked, shocked” kind of situation? People in politics, whether they’re politicians or activists like David Horowitz who are devoted to advancing a particular movement, are often ready to test the outer limits of sense and credibility to advance their goals. For them, the stakes are simply too high, perhaps in the ideological or the wheeling-and-dealing sense, and/or because their livelihoods, reputations, and self-images depend on the fight. And politics is all about ends – hashing out interests, apportioning tax and regulatory burdens and benefits. In some sense the ends are, frankly, all that there is.

This is why politicians and pundits (at least, the partisan ones, which is to say, most of them) lie all the time. That’s what they do, because they must, because it’s a proven method for getting what you want. Thus, Jonah Goldberg and David Horowitz supporting Glenn Beck’s craziness because it supposedly advances conservative interests in the long, twilight struggle against American liberalism strikes me as unremarkable. What else are they going to do?

What’s really striking about the conservative meltdown isn’t the cynicism of right-wing pundits. It’s the degree to which those pundits have become disengaged from the system. When we talk about ends and means in this case, the “means” are of course the American political system itself, which allows for a great deal of crazy behavior. But what if you no longer believe the system is working, that we’re reliving the Weimar Republic, that Obama is a traitor of some kind? These are the kinds of things we’re hearing from Beck and other precincts on the right. If you cynically support that, it’s not just cynicism but a kind of nihilism – you think on some level, the political system has failed and no longer accept its basic premises – i.e., that power changes hands constantly, that policies are crafted by give and take, that the president cannot impose a new system of government by fiat, that your opponents have some claim to legitimacy.

If you don’t believe those things, then you shouldn’t be in politics. Because there can be no politics – at least not in America – without them. If you do believe in them but pretend you don’t to rev up your “base,” well, that’s just as bad, and maybe worse. And on a practical level – again, the ultimate test in politics – this path leads nowhere. In a country where most people don’t pay close attention to politics, behaving like a bunch of nuts isn’t a ticket to electoral or policy success – that is, the normal way that you put your political ideas into effect. And the way political coalitions are built and power is accumulated in a democracy is by engaging the other side. If all you’re able to do is demonize it, you’ll never get anywhere.

 

September 17, 2009

Time magazine and Glenn Beck

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American newsweeklies are at a dangerous pass, treading close to irrelevancy. Like newspapers, they’ve seen their ad revenue and readerships plummet. And even more than newspapers, they don’t know what they want to be. This uncertainty shapes everything they try to do, and makes for a strange reading experience. Once, you knew where they stood – and in the Henry Luce era that was sometimes appalling. Then, you didn’t really know where they stood, but the reporting was pretty solid. Now, you still don’t know where they stand, and the reporting is becoming irrelevant. The latest example of this is the current Time cover story on Glenn Beck, headlined Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? The writer is the talented David Von Drehle, formerly of the Miami Herald and Washington Post.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? Yet on so many levels, this piece disappoints. It has justifiably been criticized because it immediately falls into a false equivalency trap from which it never escapes, attributing the estimates of 70,000 marchers at last weekend’s 9/12 protest to “liberal sources” and much higher, fantastical estimates of “perhaps as many as a million” to “conservative sources.” You see what he’s trying to do – people on the left and right choose to live in hermetic, separate realities constructed by biased media, etc. Except that the 70,000 estimate was almost certainly in the ballpark, and that number wasn’t ginned up by “liberal sources.” It’s nutty to juxtapose it with the “1 million” figure. Liberals and conservatives may live in separate realities, but one of those realities is, at the moment, way out of whack.

All summer long we’ve been treated to the spectacle of the American right seething about … what? The ratio of the federal deficit to GDP in 2013? Incipient communism? A presidential cult of personality? An American Gestapo? I still don’t know exactly, but a lot of people on the right have made it clear they really, really don’t like Barack Obama. There’s a lot of anxiety – economic, social, cultural – loosed on the land right now, and conservatives, so ill-served by the Bush administration, are effectively leaderless and ideologically adrift. Beck fills that void – with a lot of crazy nonsense, but he fills it. How can a story claim give us a thoughtful perspective on Beck without acknowledging that reality? Instead, the piece employs a triangulating, politically agnostic approach so that no one, including Beck, is offended.

With its breezy tone and above-it-all point of view, the piece lacks any discernible analytical bite. It’s all pretty silly, Von Drehle seems to be saying. Those paranoiac Americans on the left and right, they can’t get enough of this stuff, and they buy a lot of books and watch a lot of TV ads, so it’s big money for Beck. But why is Beck popular right now? Why is the right in such a tizzy, and where is this going? These are the core conclusions:

We’re in a flood stage, and who’s to blame? The answer is like the estimates of the size of the crowd in Washington: Whom do you trust? Either the corrupt, communist-loving traitors on the left are causing this, or it’s the racist, greedy warmongers on the right, or maybe the dishonest, incompetent, conniving media, which refuse to tell the truth about whomever you personally happen to despise.
…
We never find out what happens to the people watching [Howard "I'm Mad As Hell"] Beale. Do they stay mad forever? Does their screaming ever lead to something better? Does the rage merely migrate, sending new audiences with new enemies to scream from more windows? And if the time comes when every audience is screaming, who, in the end, is left to listen?

Even if you take this as it’s apparently meant to be taken, as a meditation not on politics but on popular culture, these are just empty generalizations: There’s universal mistrust. Nobody ever stops shouting. What a shame. A piece about anger, politics and mass media ought to show some passion itself. Instead, its Olympian musings are cautious and noncommittal.

Beck is an interesting character. Time could have gone in several directions with a cover story. It could have taken a stand (“Beck Is Bad For America,” no question mark), like it did with Joe McCarthy. Newsmagazine editors keep citing the Economist as a model – this was a perfect opportunity, passed by. Or, without being judgmental, Time could have taken Beck’s influence and the sorry state of political discourse seriously. Why this guy, now?

Time aspires at minimum to be water-cooler fodder, and ideally to help set the nation’s cultural/political tone, as it once did. But it needs to earn that all over again. That requires taking risks.

 

September 14, 2009

Czarist nonsense

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The George W. Bush presidency brought both the Republican Party and the conservative movement low, and it’s distressing to watch the GOP base get whipped into a frenzy by cynical demagogues, while its politicians do the only thing they know how to do – pander to the people making the loudest, most aggrieved noises.

Demagoguery and aggrievement are nothing new in American politics. But what’s strange is the scattershot nature and incoherence of the attacks on Obama. Usually, politicians – even demagogues – summon a sense of history, shared experience, and cultural traditions to move people. But there’s little evidence of those things in most of the critiques of Obama’s policies by Republican politicians or tea party activists, little evident understanding of what the president is doing or how it might be improved upon, changed, or replaced. Scare words and phrases have supplanted arguments. Those words have historical meaning. Once, history gave those words power. But now they’ve been shorn of all context. It’s a communist-fascist-socialist word salad.

Czar Nicholas II

Czar Nicholas II

One of the sillier examples of this is the crusade, by Glenn Beck and others, against Obama administration “czars.” They already got the scalp of “green jobs czar” Van Jones, and now the attacks continue. “Czar” sounds scary, I guess, because it’s a Russian word. Communists are taking over the government! Of course, the last real Russian Czar, Nicholas II, was executed by communists in 1918, so the historical reference is nonsensical. So is the substance of the attack. “Czar” is an informal – and semi-ironic – title that connotes a certain policy portfolio. It has been in use since at least the 1970s. As Dave Weigel noted in the Washington Independent, many “czars” actually occupy pre-existing jobs. Some of them been approved by the Senate. Some are mid-level appointees, and don’t require Senate confirmation. A few have been appointed to new positions, such as “Afghanistan czar” Richard Holbrooke – but most of them are well-credentialed.

So: Obama, the president, is appointing people to government positions that have certain policy coordination responsibilities. That’s what presidents do. There may be questions to be raised about their job performance or past activities, but in that respect they are no different from hundreds of other political appointees. Yet, exploiting the notion that Obama must be up to something sinister, Republicans have seized upon the czar issue. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is running for governor of Texas, attacks the “czars” in today’s Washington Post as an affront to the Constitution. It’s bizarre. (And also sad that the Washington Post provides a forum for a specious argument.)

During the 1980s and 1990s, many conservatives had credible, coherent arguments to make about government policies and the nature of government itself. I sometimes agreed, more often disagreed. But their arguments had some heft: the liberal welfare state actually did have a lot of serious problems in the overlapping realms of policy and politics. Now, if I’m looking for a meaningful critique of Obama’s policies and appointments, (with some exceptions of course) I’m just not going to find it on the right. Conservatism has, effectively, gone AWOL from the policy debate – which is a great boon to Obama, but probably not so good for the American system.

 

September 10, 2009

Correcting the record on Katrina

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I’m a bit slow on the uptake this week: on Sunday, the New York Times Book Review corrected (scroll to the bottom) those factual errors in Timothy Egan’s review of “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers. Instead of incorrectly stating the New Orleans levees were “overtopped,” the review now plainly says that the day after the storm hits, “the levees have failed.” Because of – I’ll say it one more time – the sloppy work of the Army Corps of Engineers.

It took a while, but the record has been set straight – at least in this little corner of the media universe. Props to Egan and his editors.

 

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