Why TNC rules all...

Quote:

Hitler rooted for Max Schmeling. But Max Schmeling was so much more than that.

We knew Newt was toast, but...

...this makes it as close to official until a majority of delegates have been assigned.

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino executive keeping Newt Gingrich’s presidential hopes alive, has relayed assurances to Mitt Romney that he will provide even more generous support to his candidacy if he becomes the Republican nominee, several associates said in interviews here.The signals from Mr. Adelson, whose politics are shaped in large part by his support for Israel, reflect what the associates said was his deep investment in defeating President Obama and his willingness to play a more prominent role in the Republican Party and conservative causes. The assurances have been conveyed in response to a highly delicate campaign by Mr. Romney and his top Jewish financial supporters to dissuade Mr. Adelson from adding to the $10 million that he and his wife have given to a pro-Gingrich “super PAC,” Winning Our Future, that has been tearing into Mr. Romney through television advertising.

Also, can anyone read this article and not come away with the impression of sustained coordination between the campaigns and the PACs? 

I've been under the impression since Newt's surge that this was really about Adelson flexing his muscles in the GOP. Newt was a pawn in Adelson's game; this is Adelson signaling to Romney what he wants in order to clear the field.

Civilization and its discontents...

I know this is tired and played, but man does it still get my goat.

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

Good lord. Damnable civilized values, deceiving him into the trap of drugging and raping a child (sodomy, because he couldn't get assurances from her that she was on the pill).

The 20th century was brutal; many people, however, managed to enjoy their newfound sense of freedom without doing what Polanski did.

p.s: There is a complete effacement of agency here: exactly the type of effacement that conservatives accuse liberals of whenever liberals say "statistical correlates of crime include poverty" and that liberals enable when they respond by attack conservatives for saying "statistical correlates of crime include broken homes." The "newfound sense of freedom" is not some Pied Piper. I am as willing as anyone to efface agency, which is both excessively mystified and black boxed in a causal sense and exaggeratedly liberal. But even I have my limits.

Michele Bachmann's district is taking care of business

I want to give all my money to Tammy Aaberg. I want to give her money, time, and anything she might need in this world, the next, or the last. No quotes. Read the whole thing. And then remember they have declared war on our kids, our friends, ourselves.

An excellent article. Only critique: who was #2 or #1?

Underbelly is always good

But is he really keeping the edited diary of George Templeton Strong sitting around so that he can see what Strong was thinking 150 years ago today? Strong on Lincoln:

He is a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla, in respect of outside polish (for example, he uses "humans" as English for homines), but a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger.  The best President we have had since old Jackson's time, at least, as I believe; for Zachary Taylor's few days of official life can hardly be counted as a presidential term.  His evident integrity and simplicity of purpose would compensate for worse grammar than his, and for even more intense provincialism and rusticity.

The bolded part is, of course, Strong being an asshole. But this is how the Republican coalition was forged: the committed egalitarians had to win power, and so they had to embrace to some extent the white supremacy of the time, even more than the white supremacy they had been unable to avoid imbuing and taking into their worldview. That meant winning over people like Strong, who saw reference to blacks as humans to be a stretch.

More voter fraud

This is interesting, as here there seems to be some evidence that the non-citizen registered to vote actually did so. That, unlike faulty registry lists, actually constitutes fraud.

Naples resident Yvonne Wigglesworth is also a not a citizen, but is registered to vote. She claims she doesn't know how she got registered. "I have no idea. I mean, how am I supposed to know."

Records show Wigglesworth voted six times in elections dating back eleven years

The Wire: dumbest show to be considered smart, or fakest show to be considered real?

Reading up on Elijah Anderson, I found his thoughts on 'The Wire':

“I am struck by how dark the show is,” says Elijah Anderson, the Yale sociologist whose classic works Code of the Streets, Streetwise, and A Place on the Corner document black inner-city life with noted clarity and sympathy. Anderson would be the last person to gloss over the severe problems of the urban poor, but in The Wire he sees “a bottom-line cynicism” that is at odds with his own perception of real life. “The show is very good,” he says. “It resonates. It is powerful in its depiction of the codes of the streets, but it is an exaggeration. I get frustrated watching it, because it gives such a powerful appearance of reality, but it always seems to leave something important out. What they have left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

Had he pretty much stopped at "what they have left out are the decent people," that would have been fine.[1] But of the four adjectives he gives to describe the 'decent people'--themselves apparently a discrete category--do two of them really need to be "God-fearing, churchgoing"? Not necessarily redundant, but nothing to do with decency either.

I believe I am the only person I know with similar interests who found the show to be ludicrously bad. It didn't resonate, nor was it at all powerful in its "depiction of the code of the streets." It was organizational theory (good) and 7th grade dialogue (terribly bad). The overall result was silly. What it got right--the geography of the drug trade[2], the ongoing and antagonistic relationship between individual cops and individual young men, the attention to political constituency service--is pretty much swamped by what it gets wrong, namely, everything else.

And a pet peeve: writers in love with their own damned words. Many people, myself included,  begin papers/book chapters with a quote from one of the principals that succinctly states the argument, the puzzle, or the basic problematic that the paper is going to worth through. Would you ever consider starting, or would you take seriously a paper that started with an indented quote from your own damned writing. And yet every episode, this is what the egos behind 'The Wire' would do. And especially obnoxious: these were never thematically tied to what was going to come. They were pretentious filler, which didn't even have the merit of remotely resembling the way anybody actually talks, ever, anywhere.

[1] He could also have said "what they left out are the decent actors" of "what they left out are the decent writers." The only few characters with any charisma or presence, the only ones you actually believed or at the very least liked to see on screen, were Omar, Stringer Bell, and... I don't know, maybe Avon, once in a while.
[2] But not the ludicrous volume. Pay attention to the amount of coming/going in the high rises and projects, and then on the corners, in the first and third season. More than half of Baltimore would have to be buying from these three places in order to get that level of foot traffic.

About not much of anything

I always find the disconnect between different disciplines and areas of study to be fascinating. Close friends are working on congressional oversight of the bureaucracy, and the executive branch more broadly, and they would in no way characterize Congress' role as micromanaging. More often, they would suggest that it was excessive delegation with overly broad mandates. Fukuyama is coming from a different angle, at a slightly different problem. I wonder how often these two discourses intersect.

Conversely, I would argue that the quality of governance in the US tends to be low precisely because of a continuing tradition of Jacksonian populism. Americans with their democratic roots generally do not trust elite bureaucrats to the extent that the French, Germans, British, or Japanese have in years past. This distrust leads to micromanagement by Congress through proliferating rules and complex, self-contradictory legislative mandates which make poor quality governance a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US is thus caught in a low-level equilibrium trap, in which a hobbled bureaucracy validates everyone’s view that the government can’t do anything competently. The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes.

The "democracy came too quickly" argument is employed in many different contexts: why the US did not (supposedly) have as robust a tradition of class conflict and class consciousness, why we have a much more fragmented institutional structure of governance, why we elect judges. There is considerable force to these arguments, although sometimes they do seem to fall into the rhetoric of reaction/academic goldmine category of perverse consequences of good things/noble consequences of bad things.

This is via Marginal Revolution, which is always good--although, in my mind, rarely right--and for which my frequent links should not be read as a cheap distraction of the "Some of my best RSS feeds are conservative..." variety.