You know, I actually think the Governator (California Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger) is doing much a better job than he’s often credited for in the media. But he’s stepped in something squishy and foul-smelling, and he’d better get his shoes cleaned up before he tracks it into the house.

Two days before he was sworn into office, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted a consulting job paying an estimated $8 million over five years to “further the business objectives” of a national publisher of health and bodybuilding magazines.

The contract pays Schwarzenegger 1% of the magazines’ advertising revenue, much of which comes from makers of nutritional supplements. Last year, the governor vetoed legislation that would have imposed government regulations on the supplement industry.

According to records filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Schwarzenegger entered into the agreement with a subsidiary of American Media Inc. on Nov. 15, 2003. The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company publishes Muscle & Fitness and Flex magazines, among others.

Now it gets worse, because the parent of these magazines, American Media, also published the National Enquirer and other tabloids.

I remember reading an oped in the LA Times suggesting that the tabloids had deliberately laid off of Arnie because of a business arrangement between him and their publisher , and dismissing it as implausible.

It’s not so implausible now, and the Gov. had better get his shoes cleaned quickly.

I’ve had my eye on this book for a while – “Dying to Win: The Logic of Suicide Terrorism” by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Kevin Drum linked to an interview with Professor Pape in the American Conservative.

He makes some statements sure to raise the hackles on some of our readers…but I’d want to read his research before responding, and to be honest, an exhaustive review of suicide bombing is worth going over, regardless of whether the ideology expressed by the author agrees with your or not. I think hackle-raising is good, and that it’s important to challenge your assumptions to see how well they stand up.

In the interview, he says:

TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Since 1990, the United States has stationed tens of thousands of ground troops on the Arabian Peninsula, and that is the main mobilization appeal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. People who make the argument that it is a good thing to have them attacking us over there are missing that suicide terrorism is not a supply-limited phenomenon where there are just a few hundred around the world willing to do it because they are religious fanatics. It is a demand-driven phenomenon. That is, it is driven by the presence of foreign forces on the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. The operation in Iraq has stimulated suicide terrorism and has given suicide terrorism a new lease on life.

Now this is an interesting statement on a number of levels, and one I want to think hard about. He ties suicide bombing closely to nationalist (i.e. territorial) aspirations, not to cultural ones.

This seems like one of those “cleavage” notions; your perceptions on this issue will drive you to one side or the other of a deep political divide. If you believe this is relatively tightly tied to nationalist aspirations, then the terrorists become part and parcel of the admirable line of those fighting for their homelands. If not, it’s the Clash of Cultures, and a global war.

I’ve suggested for a while that there are some fuzzy bridges between the two; that Franz Fanon and Che Guevera are connected to Qutb and Osama bin Laden.

I’ll also suggest that – since I now take the words of our enemies very seriously – you go look at Bin Laden’s original 1998 fatwa; which was based largely on his outrage at the US war against Iraq in the first Gulf War, and on the presence of U.S. military on the Arabian Peninsula.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that there would have been another causus belli for the Islamists had it not been this. But I think this is an interesting question, and look forward to reading the book.

It’s late, and I just got home and am squeezing in a few minutes at the computer.

There are a lot of things I want to blog about (the backlog is big) but I couldn’t let today pass without mentioning the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre; the most prominent, but not the only, failure of the ‘peacekeeping’ model.

Much of what I do for a living involves negotiation, and one thing that has been clear to me is that there are people for whom a successful negotiation is the single most important outcome – they cannot accept that negotiations are episodic, and that if one side ‘s desired outcome is a successful negotiation, and the other’s is – anything at all – that it’s often the case that both sides will get when they want.

Churchill famously said “jaw jaw jaw is better than war war war,” and he was right. Talking is better than fighting.

As long as talking is all that is going on, and as long as it simply isn’t a matter of the other side buying time saying “nice doggie” while finding the appropriate stick, or worse, buying time while busily erasing the living evidence of their crimes.

The L.A. Times had an excellent article about Srebrenica today, as did the New York Times, who focused in part on the trauma the events presented to the Dutch soldiers guarding the Muslim enclave.

Mandated to defend the U.N.-declared ”safe haven,” the Dutch battalion stood by as the carnage unfolded, and has been accused by some of sharing responsibility for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

Nearly 8,000 people died after Bosnian Serbs overran the enclave 10 years ago Monday. While the Dutch watched, the Serbs separated Muslim men and boys from their families, loaded them into trucks and took them away for execution. The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague has ruled it was genocide.

Official inquiries have cleared the 370 troops of blame. Overwhelmed, undermanned, under-armed and with orders to shoot only in self defense, they were helpless to stop the onslaught, independent investigators have concluded.

The false appearance of strength and the structures of negotiation are not a useful defense against evil.

He suggests that today’s not a day to score political points. It’s a day to comfort, study, and contemplate.

So for the last three weeks, I’ve been dealing with a very depressed Tenacious G. We went away over the Father’s Day weekend, and came back to discover that our last remaining cat – the feral kitten Biggest Guy had brought home and – imaginatively – named Kit had gone out and not come back.

For the last three weeks, we flyered the neighborhood, visited local vets and shelters, and walked around bothering our neighbors to no effect.

This morning, as I got up to make coffee, tea, and cocoa for the house, I heard a familiar mewing sound from the back door.

A healthy but skinnier Kit was there, wondering what I was making her for breakfast.

She got AIMS and pumpkin.

Happiness reigns in small things, indeed…

One of my favorite books is by an old professor from my alma mater – one who I sadly never took a class from.

Page Smith wrote the out-of-print “A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American Revolution.” It’s no puerile Marxist reimagining, a la Howard Zinn, but a peoples’-eye view of the events around our Founding.

One thing you get from it – clearly – is the incredible level of change and risk that the Founders took, and took with a clear and open eye.

He talks about the events of July 2 and 3, as the Congress debates the resolution that would finally make the United States independent.

After all these bargainings and maneuvers it seemed that Congress would at last, pressed and cajoled, vote with great reluctance to declare the colonies “free and independent” when the delegates met the next day. But John Adams, weary from a day of feverish politicking and chagrined that his oratory had failed of its purpose, wrote to Samuel Chance that the “great debate” that was to have terminated in a unanimous vote had been instead “an idle dispense of time.” He was confident that with the hoped-for arrival of Rodney the next day, the resolution would pass “perhaps almost with unanimity.” But, he added with his characteristic realism. “If you imagine that I expect this declaration will ward off calamities from this country, you are much mistaken. A bloody conflict we are destined to endure. This has been my opinion from the beginning…If you imagine that I flatter myself with happiness and halcyon days after a separation from Great Britain, you are mistaken again. I do not expect that our new government will be as quiet as I could wish, nor that happy harmony, confidence and affection between the colonies that every good American ought to study, labor, and pray for, will come for a long time. But freedom is a counterbalance for poverty, discord and war, and more. It is your hard lot and mine to be called into life at such a time. Yet,” he added, “even these times have their pleasures.”

I’ll leave you with those words, and one of my own:

Happy Independence Day to everyone.

It would be funny if it weren’t so predictable; Duncan Black (Atrios) has been waving the “chickenhawk” meme again.

I thought I’d beaten this to death and put a stake in it. It’s an immoral position, a politically naive position, and one that undermines our polity. Plus it’s just plain rude.

But let’s play the hand out a bit. As I noted before, as a fellow liberal, I’ll bet he supports higher taxes on the rich (see this Google search).

When Duncan asks his paymaster, George Soros, or his candidate John Kerry, to voluntarily pay higher taxes – because it’s a policy he supports – he can open his mouth try and intimidate a bunch of GOP kids into silence without being such an obvious hypocrite.

I’m sure Soros could easily write a check for $10 – $20 million, and in seriously encouraging him doing that, Duncan could provide leadership that might actually crack open the taxes issue.

I won’t be holding my breath.

I’ve been remiss in acting – both personally and as a blogger – to assist some of the great charities helping our wounded soldiers.

Today, Emily Cochran emailed Joe and me, and asked for our help in putting out the word on ‘Helping Our Heroes Foundation‘ a 501c3 charity that makes small cash grants to needy families of injured troops. They also undertake morale programs for the patients and staff at Walter Reed hospital. It’s a great cause, and I just PayPal’d $50.00 – my lunch budget for the week. I’ll do this every other week for a while.

I can brownbag for a week, and so can you.

Today was the traditional time-trial (solo ride against the clock) prolog to the Tour de France, where media darling (and damn good cyclist) Lance Armstrong will be going for #7.

Over the next three weeks, the peleton will be riding over 2,100 miles at race pace on a high-stakes trip around Europe.

Check out this post and photo, showing Lance catching (and then passing) one of his major rivals, Jan Ullrich – who started the course one minute before him.

Lance finished second by two seconds to US phenom (and ex-teammate) Dave Zabriskie, with Lance’s main defender George Hincapie in 4th.

It’s going to be a great three weeks…check out the great TDF blog for frequent updates and be cooler than everyone else at the office.

Allez, Lance!

Law professor – and apparently legend in his own mind – Brian Leiter has a post up rationalizing his lack of civility in blog discourse.

There’s not a lot new here – it’s a well-picked over field. But I want to take a moment and add my own spin to the well-deserved criticism he’s getting.

And note if you will that it applies to Duncan Black, Tbogg, Yglesias (all too often) and others on the left…it’s a variant of “I just can’t believe you aren’t bowing the ineffable rightness of my positions” that we’re used to seeing from the smart fat guy in the isolated cubicle – the one who knows more than anyone else about the fine points of the interactions between the Venice Specific Plan, the California Coastal Act, and Los Angeles planning law, or multi-threaded processing on early x86 chips, or the student films of George Lucas, or prewar Hegelian theory in the works of Lukacs.

But very few of them have much to say about how things are actually run.

They do coalesce into groups, sometimes – in my own experience I’ve run into them acting in concert primarily in evangelical religion, and in the net-based Randian community. It’s virtually impossible to have dialog, in the traditional sense, with many members of either group, because once you point out that you don’t accept the basic premises their worldview is crafted from, you’re simply not worth talking to. It’s a colloquial version of the Stalinist “if you don’t support us, you must be crazy” model. Lately, I’m seeing them coalesce more and more into the Opposition to Bush.

Leiter stands foursquare in the middle of that intellectual style:

These questions, and many others, are easily addressed in the blogosphere, since there is no serious–or at least no honest or intelligent–dispute about the epistemic merits of the possible answers. Where I get into “trouble,” of course, is with those who can’t tell the difference between the two kinds of questions, the ones who think that the dialectical care, caution, and intellectual humility required for the genuinely “hard” questions ought to apply to the easy questions as well. These folks are a bit miffed when I dismiss their positions out of hand. But that is what their positions usually deserve.

Boy, there are so many problems here.

Let me suggest three, two of which are grounded in my own intellectual history, and cite thinkers I’ll happily hold up against Professor Leiter on their worst days, and one which is based in reality.

Leiter explains that the following are “easy” questions, which have yielded to his towering intellect the only true and correct answer possible:

Was the U.S. justified in invading Iraq?

Are Bush’s economic policies in the interests of most people?

Is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection a well-confirmed scientific theory?

Is there a social security “crisis”?

All of these – based as they are in complex questions of history, economics, sociology, and history of science are what Horst Rittel meant when he talked about “wicked problems.” I’ve blogged about these before, but let me touch on a few highlights. They set out ten rules for defining wicked problems:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good-or-bad.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy in representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner (designer) has no right to be wrong.

Other than #10 and the question of Darwin, these rules seem to apply fairly well to all of Prof. Leiter’s “easy questions,” making them all, in my mind, pretty clearly wicked problems. What do Rittel and Weber suggest is the solution to wicked problem in the real world? In a gross simplification, dialog.

Before I studied with Rittel, I studied American political theory with John Schaar.

Prof Schaar wrote a lot about the failure of progressives in the 60’s to capitalize on their success and radicalize the American population. He harped on one these:

“Finally, if political education is to effective it must grow from a spirit of humility on the part of the teachers, and they must overcome the tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-pity which set the tone of youth and student politics in the 1960’s. The teachers must acknowledge common origins and common burdens with the taught, stressing connection and membership, rather than distance and superiority. Only from these roots can trust and hopeful common action grow.”

I’m interested in advancing progressive ideals – which I see in large part as using the power of government in favor of the less- rather than more-powerful. While I don’t spend a lot of bandwidth gnashing my teeth over what I see as Republican policies that favor the wealthy and powerful – as an institutionalized value – when it comes to applying the power of the law, it’s something that causes me a lot of distress.

I want to see a viable, powerful progressive movement in this country. I want this because those are my core values, and in part because we need the kind of back-and-forth dialectic that comes from two strong political wings to keep refreshing our politics. In large part it’s because I’m afraid of what politics a class-stratified America might tilt toward.

And, to point out a small fact to Professor Leiter, the Democrats are getting their ass handed to them. The latest Democracy Corps poll shows a downturn in public regard for the Republicans, matched by a bigger downturn in regard for the Democrats.

With all due respect, I’ll suggest that one of President Bush’s – and the Republican Party’s – greatest assets is their ability to relate to the “folks.” Whatever innate feelings of superiority they may hold, their affect is lacking the obnoxious certainty that’s displayed by Professor Leiter or the air of superiority and entitlement shown by both the Professor and his candidate, Senator Kerry.

Which beings us to the title of this piece.

I said a long time ago that the current Democratic leadership was actively harming the poor by failing to become an effective force in arguing for their interests. The wealthy and comfortable apparachniks of the Party, and the tenured supporters of the party like Leiter, live well while the poor and near-poor struggle.

If they were doing their jobs – if they were building a powerful and effective force for progressive values in this country – no one would mind that they were doing well by doing good. But the reality is that they are marching the Democratic Party off a cliff, and their arrogant blindness – and the fact that they revel in their arrogance – is one of the main reasons. Not only does it drive away what Leiter calls the “brainwashed” “cowed” and “fooled” by it’s affect, but it leads to a myopia and unwillingness to change, react, and cope with the reality that is far from “easy.” So we get bad people expounding bad politics.

But they have tenure, and high self-esteem.

The fact that they are losing – and worse, harming the people who depend on them winning to survive by losing – is something they can talk about on their blogs, in the therapist’s office, or over a nice Viognier.

Have one for me, Professor Leiter. Drink to another decade of corporatist Republican power – brought to us by you and your arrogant, immature, and foolish colleagues on the Left.

Update: Here’s an image that pretty much sums up my view:

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