So I caught up with the blogs last night, after seeing our friend’s short movie (which was better on a big screen!), and see that I’ve triggered a small squall.

Let’s discuss.

On Friday, after the Good News embargo (yes, we have one – I tend to stop non-Good News posts after about 4pm Pacific. And yes, I do get twitchy about it sometimes, but since I think it’s a great idea – even though we don’t emphasize publishing the good news enough – I’m happy to do it), I read Matt’s post on the horrible attack in Baslem, which I’ll reproduce in its entirety here:

Not Good…

… busy as I’ve been with the convention, I haven’t been following the story of the Russian kids held hostage that’s now reached its awful conclusion. Worse, even, than the reality of the crime is the knowledge that things will get worse. The situation, clearly, can only be resolved by Russian concessions on the underlying political issue in Chechnya. At the same time, in the wake of this sort of outrage there will not only be no mood for concessions, but an amply justified fear that such concessions would only encourage further attacks and a further escalation of demands. I don’t see any way out for Russian policymakers nor any particularly good options for US policymakers. Partisanship and complaints about Bush’s handling of counterterrorism aside, this business is a reminder not only of the horrors out there, but also that terrorism is a genuinely difficult problem — I think we’ve been doing many of the wrong things lately, but no one should claim it’s obvious what the right way to proceed is.

Now I think it’s a dumb post, badly thought through and worse written, and I started to write a post that went something like this: “Does Yglesias even read what he writes before he hits ‘post’ anymore?” but the embargo was approaching, I tend to hammer on Yglesias too much anyway – and to be honest, I’m getting tired of it.I also thought this was an important post, because it profoundly misunderstands the issue with terrorist movements worldwide, and that misunderstanding lies at the heart of the policy difference between me and Matthew and his peers. Matt believes that there’s really no difference – to make a broad example – between Gandhi’s National Party and the Sepoy mutineers. They’re just different manifestations of the same political goals, and the way to respond to each would be to understand and deal with those goals.

He’s smart enough to undercut his absolute point (made in “The situation, clearly, can only be resolved by Russian concessions on the underlying political issue in Chechnya.” with what comes next: “At the same time, in the wake of this sort of outrage there will not only be no mood for concessions, but an amply justified fear that such concessions would only encourage further attacks and a further escalation of demands. I don’t see any way out for Russian policymakers nor any particularly good options for US policymakers.”

Now “Wow, we’re screwed.” is certainly one response to these issues, and it’s one that’s certainly appropriate to a personal website like the ones Matthew and I keep. But one of Matthew’s core points – one that believes that terror can only be resolved by granting political concessions to terrormasters is so wrong in my view that I thought it should get some attention.

So I forwarded the entire post to a few people, with the followon comment of

“…can only be resolved by Russian concessions on the underlying political issue in Chechnya.”

Right.

It fit neatly into Glenn’s highlight of the sarcastic post by David Kaspar, which lists the appropriate response to this act of terror as including:

1. We may not condone their killings – if there were any at all -, but we have to look for the root causes for a better understanding of their behavior. Were they inconvenienced in practicing their religion? Delays during rush hour in Chechnya? Election losses? Only if we know exactly what drove these young men and women to their somewhat regrettable actions can we make a final judgment.

2. Avoid the term “terrorists” for the hostage takers by all means. They have families with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and it would be a great disservice for them to have their relatives labeled with derogative terms.

3. The hostage takers have full rights for proper legal procedure. They should be assigned the best lawyers available, preferably from France or Germany. Both countries have a proud tradition of setting proven terrorists free, either as a result of faulty court hearings or by giving in to blackmail.

4. It must be investigated in full detail if Putin is behind the hostage taking. He has every interest in the world to appear as a hardliner, and he desperately needed another victory over Chechnyan freedom fighters. While this is only a non-confirmed hypothesis so far, we have not heard any rejection of it from official Russian government sources – which is quite telling in itself, of course.

5. There can be no – repeat: NO – capital punishment for the hostage takers. Capital punishment is a cruel and inhuman act that violates the human rights of the accused.

6. We request that an internationally reputable organization such as the Red Cross be permitted to monitor conditions and report cases of abuse and torture in the prison where the hostage takers are held.

7. Free flow of information between the imprisoned hostage takers and their peers from Al Qaida must be permitted at all times. Access to telecommunications and the internet must be guaranteed.

8. The search for a political solution of the conflict is imperative. Meetings between representatives of the Russian government and the hostage takers, under the supervision of the United Nations, are the only way out of the crisis. The cycle of violence has got to stop!

Matthew took offense at Glenn’s link, and replied somewhat colorfully:

Fuck you, Glenn. The entire item I wrote was one goddamn paragraph long would it have killed you to accurately reproduce what I wrote?

UPDATE: Via e-mail:

Misquote you? I cut and pasted. And it seemed like what you meant, judging by the post and your comments. If it’s not what you meant, I’ll happily mention that — but it was Armed Liberal who sent me the link, and *he* certainly read it that way, too.

I’ll reproduce the post in question, this time with italics for added emphasis:

[snipped – you read it above]

What I was saying, in case this is for some reason genuinely unclear, is that to get Chechens to stop making war on Russia requires Russia to do something to resolve the underlying grievance — Russia’s mistreatment of Chechnya. At the same time, taking steps to resolve the underlying grievance would, under the circumstances, be just the sort of appeasement that would invite further attacks. Therefore, it’s not clear what the Russian government can or should do in order to prevent future massacres like this.

Yeah, Matthew, what you were saying was unclear – both times. And big points for responding with “you’re a moron” instead of “I should have been clearer.” Way to take responsibility Matthew!!

Now let me put Matthew aside (literally; I’m going to have to find a new liberal for the blogroll, because I’m done with him. Suggestion in comments, please) and go to the core point that he’s missing.

Geopolitical conflicts are not new. Religious and ethnic groups and nations have fought for control of populations, territory, and resources for quite a long time.

The Chechens mounted an army against the Russian Federation; they lost. They are engaging in guerilla war (which I’ll define as ‘terrorist tactics’ like fighting in civilian clothes, suicide and other bombing, etc. – targeted with some precision at the military of one’s opponents). And they are engaging in terrorism against the civilian population of the Russian Federation, as we saw yesterday.

I would support negotiating a political settlement with any country that was overtly at war with us, given that such a settlement was reasonably in our interest. I would not even object to a political settlement with a country that engaged in guerilla warfare against our forces.

But I am – violently – opposed to negotiating political settlements with groups that practice terrorism as a core tactic (note that in conflicts, all sides typically do some things that could be classified as ‘terroristic’) – because there is fundamentally no one home to negotiate with.

Like the legendary pirates who made their crews eat human flesh so that they could never again live in ‘civilized’ society, groups that adopt terror as the core tactic of their struggle cross a line which makes it impossible for them to live among us as members of the world ‘society of civil societies’.

Note that I am not calling for the death or imprisonment of all the individuals who are part of those groups.

But the groups themselves must, I believe, be reconstituted.

I say this because I believe that there is a simple proposition that we should keep in mind:

If terrorism is about ‘liberation’ – about birthing new states, like Chechnya or Palestine, or about ‘freeing’ states like Iraq – we have to ask ourselves what kind of states will be born or won through that process.

Take Mandela, Gandhi, Havel – the tools they used to free their people resulted in states that could act like states ready to participate in the world of civilized society.

What kind of states would be born if they were led by bin Laden, Arafat or the terror masters of Chechnya? Do we want to grant statehood or political power to people whose vision is so clouded in rage and blood?

In my post below, I mentioned that a co-worker of Tenacious G’s is showing a short film this weekend in West Hollywood.

Well, here’s an invitation to meet me and Tenacious G, and see a great short film (I can say it’s great, we saw a tape already) and support someone who Matthew Yglesias may someday allow to make a movie.

The movie, “What’re You Having” is a great short film that nails our common human experience – being alone, seeing that someone, and trying to figure out what to do next.

It’s playing Saturday at the Laemmle Sunset 5 at 8000 Sunset Blvd. (Sunset & Crescent Heights) in West Hollywood at 11:40 and 11:55 to qualify for an Oscar, and we’ll be there at 11:40.

Make Yglesias mad, come support amateur film!

(originally posted Sept. 3)

Over at Volokh, Eric Muller is discussing the standards that the mass media use when they select what works of history to cover and who to have as commentators. I’ve always assumed that they used the same standards they use in selecting what show to put on, which is – what will draw ratings without getting me in trouble?

That’s not enough for Muller (and possibly not for Timothy Burke, the historian whose post on HNN analyzing the same issue Muller riffs from). In both cases – more in Muller’s case than Burke’s, I think – the argument I read is that there is an ‘ought’ involved; i.e. that it is more than a question of

How does the mass media decide what’s worth their attention, what authors belong on talk shows and op-ed pages? This is what I take the Historians’ Committee on Fairness to have been asking about Michelle Malkin. I may have been harsh about the clumsy way they rhetorically invoked the norms of historical scholarship, but the basic question is a fair one. Why Michelle Malkin and not many other authors of readable, interesting works of history, or for that matter, authors of dense, scholarly works of history?

but that somehow, professionally legitimated works should have priority. Burke says:

If this is true, the question becomes potent: why is Michelle Malkin on the air now? Because if talk show producers consult experts on internment, they’d certainly find that almost everyone thinks Malkin’s work is shoddy and inaccurate, quite aside from its ethical character. If talk show hosts read and assess work independently to decide whether it is worth covering, then I’m hard-pressed to understand why they think Malkin’s is legitimate.

One thing that I will take away from my experience as a blogger (and no, I’m not quitting today or anything) is a profound change in how I read the newspapers and (when I do) watch the news. I am more aware of the ‘sociology’ of the media than I was before.

But as critical as I often am about the media, I’m not quite ready to write prescriptions just yet. And I’m certainly not ready to write a prescription, as Muller suggests in his letter, for ‘expert’ filtering of what we should see.

Somehow my response – that we need to be careful about filtering experience through our beliefs, no matter how legitimately held – brings up an old Latin phrase I read once in a biography of Galileo…

Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. – which means “For neither do I seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order that I may understand.” –Anselm of Canterbury

I’ve argued for a while on the blog and to my friends that the election wasn’t likely to be as close as the CW has showed it to be. I’ve been hard-pressed to explain exactly why, except for my total acceptance of Mickey Kaus’ “Cocoon” theory, and my own subjective impression that the media in 2004 is treating Kerry like they did Gray Davis in 2003.

That’s not a service to Kerry, as it wasn’t to Davis.

So Instapundit and Kevin Drum, link, with varying emotional responses, to the latest Time Magazine poll, showing an 11 percent lead for President Bush.

I have the feeling that it’s probably too late – the tires have lost traction and now we are just waiting for physics and gravity to do their job.

But it’d be nice to see Kerry go down fighting.And I don’t mean the kind of silly flailing he did last night.

Here are three clues I’ll offer the Senator and his staff for free; if they want more, they will have to rent them somewhere, since they seem clue-deficient themselves.

* No one who matters cares about Bush of Cheney’s Vietnam service or lack thereof. Dedicated Kerry supporters are waxing wroth about it, but they’ll vote for you anyway.

* We know you went to Vietnam, and we’re pretty darn sure you acted bravely while you were there. But we also know that you opposed the war before you went over, left early after being slightly injured, met with the North Vietnamese while a member of the Naval Reserve, and were a leader in an antiwar organization that can charitably be called ‘colorful.’ Every time you bring up your service in Vietnam without framing your complex history (and here’s the text of a free speech that might do it for you), you make people trust you less, not more.

* You’ve said a number of things that you need to explain. So has Bush, but unlike Bush, who is running on his character and personality (you wish!!), you’re running on your ideas. So every time you try and zing Bush for something he said, he just gives that Gary Cooper look to the audience and their hearts melt. (Remember the scene in ‘Blazing Saddles’ where Cleavon Little says “You’d do it for Randolph Scott…“??) Sadly, you come across – no matter how much you try and loosen up on your Serotta or snowboard – as the stiff rich guy who is the stock villain in most modern comedies. Trust me, you’re going to have to win with ideas.

So it would be nice if you had some. I’ve explicitly criticized a lot of what you’ve said about foreign policy, for example, as a combination of empty rhetoric (more internationalism!) and impractical ideas (send the Saudi money back!). Get smart and get specific. Tell us what you’d do in Iraq in the next 90 days, exactly, that’s different than what Bush has done. Tell us what international forces will come in and augment ours, and what you’ll give up to get them there.

What would be nice would be a different candidate, sadly. Is it too soon to talk about rebuilding the Democratic Party into an effective force for some progressive values that might actually make a difference?

I saw this over at Gerard Vanderleun’s (welcome back, BTW), and then at the Mailbox place near our house where I was shipping a package.

It was a short clip of the large soldier, in his urban camouflage and carrying what appeared to be a gun over his shoulder (I just got a glimpse) cradling the infant in his hands and handing the baby into someone waiting in a car.

Today, we don’t have to fear that it will be one of our children.

Today.

I am not a one-issue voter, but at the end of the day whoever gets my vote will have to explain to me what he’s going to do about this image. Bush or Kerry?

My child or yours?

A few days ago, I decided not to reply to one of Matt Yglesias’ sillier posts (hey, it happens to everyone – I just seem to find them on his site more often than others), in which he suggests that the mass of American people are sheep; idiots fit only to be led by anointed experts. In his own words:

The reality, of course, is that any major party presidential candidate attracts the votes of millions and millions of people. The overwhelming majority of these people have no idea what they’re talking about. Public ignorance in the United States is massive — and exists on both sides. Ideology aside, the base of either party would be an absolute disaster if put in charge of the country — they wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do. That’s why the government is run by professional politicians, professional political operatives, and professional policy analysts, not by random members of the public. It’s like how movies are made by professional filmmakers, not by movie fans.

Now, for some reason, the first thing I thought about when I read that was Clerks. Or the short film “What Are You Having?” that a co-worker of TG’s is showing in West Hollywood this weekend – selected in order to qualify for the Oscars as a short. But don’t go see it – he’s only a temp worker at a nonprofit, not a ‘professional,’ so of course we have to treat his work as suspect. Actually, the worst movies I’ve ever seen – and I’ve seen a lot of bad self-produced drek – were mindless Hollywood fare, made with the utmost in professionalism. Like Torque, Baby Genuises 2, and, of course, Battlefield Earth.

But I felt that I’ve already killed too many electrons dinging Yglesias for the unwise things he says, and was going to let it go.

Until I read this gobsmacking bit of nonsense (via Volokh):

We represent the Historians’ Committee for Fairness, an organization of scholars and professional researchers. Michelle Malkin’s appearance on numerous television and radio shows and her comments during these appearances regarding her book IN DEFENSE OF INTERNMENT represent a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity and fairness. Malkin is not a historian, and she states that she relied almost exclusively on research conducted or collected by others. Her book, which purports to defend the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans, did not go through peer review before publication.

…

It is irresponsible of your producers to permit Michelle Malkin’s biased presentation of events to go unchallenged as a factual historical presentation. We therefore respectfully demand that you formally apologize to the Japanese Americans who have been slandered by Ms. Malkin’s reckless presentation and invite a reputable historian to present a more even-handed view of the evidence.

Wow. There are just so many things wrong with this, I’m hard-pressed to figure out how to begin.

First, as a disclaimer, let me mention that I think that Malkin’s thesis in her book is a) historically inaccurate as to the threat posed by the Japanese community; b) mistaken in promoting racial profiling as a sound tactic in the defense against terrorism; and c) mistaken in her interpretation of the social context involved in the decision to intern the Japanese.

But as wrong as I think her book may be, I think that the free and open response which her book has garnered – including responses by Eric Muller, blogger at ‘Is That Legal?‘ and one of the signatories of the letter who ought to know better – is the answer to any ‘harm’ which may come from allowing a book written by a non-academic historian to open a discussion of history.

I think that using their professional stature to attempt to coerce media outlets – and, one would assume, readers – into either passing Malkin’s book by or granting equal time to an ‘approved’ responder is the most pernicious kind of nonsense.

And it ties neatly into Yglesias’ naked elitism.

They suggest that “We, the anointed, will tell you – how to run the country, how to live, what to watch, what to read.”

I’ve got a simple response to that: “Fuck Off“.

I made a slightly more complex one a while ago:

The most important thing is actually the simplest, which is that the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration). And that’s a good thing, in fact, it’s a damn good thing.

It is a good thing because the unique power of the United States comes from our willingness to diffuse power down into the ranks – to act in ways outside what a small cadre of mandarins sitting at a capital can envision.

Now Yglesias will reply “but those politicians are professionals! I think it’s OK to give them power!”

And I’ll remind him that they have that power on loan from the women and men of this country who choose to give it to them, and whose choices must be respected.

American politicians don’t go to Little League games or Rotary breakfasts because they like dropped flies or because they miss rubber pancakes and cold sausage. They go because that’s how they show respect for the people who elect them. French politicians preside over parades and large ceremonies; they don’t need to show that respect because they rule without it.

There’s a long discussion to have about how we’re slowly slipping in that direction; I’ll leave it for others for now. But we’re not there yet, and I’ll even provide a theoretical base for my argument. I’ll suggest that formal expertise – proven in solutions to tame problems – is often outweighed by wisdom and judgment in solving wicked ones.

Or have we all forgotten the lesson of Robert McNamara so soon?

[Update: Go check out the self-correcting nature of ‘non peer reviewed’ systems over at Alex Halavais’ place. He tagged Wikipedia with twelve errors; they were corrected within hours.

I can think of three or four history texts that didn’t fare so well…]

An acquaintance runs a strategic advisory and investment group – ‘The Atlantic Advisory Group‘ – here in L.A., and has a newsletter that he sends me. In light of the discussion below, the underlined parts in this portion of their recent issue seemed relevent.

Three Rules of the Modern Market

Demographics, demographics and demographics. This is one of our favorites because large-scale shifts in age cohorts drive many markets. For this reason also it gets a little complicated, but here are a few important, and long-term, trends to consider:

The leading edge of the Baby Boomlets…children of Baby Boomers…are now graduating from college. They are thoroughly versed in technology, especially the Internet. They have money. They will soon start to look for careers. They are starting to get married. They will soon start to spend a lot more money on eating out, drinking, buying cars, buying furniture. They like big movies (Lord of The Rings). They like eco-tourism and extreme sports. They have never worn suits.

The Baby Boom folks are being financially squeezed by their postponement of child-bearing, which means that money to fund retirement is being used to college bills for their kids. This is happening at a time when many of the Boomers are unemployed (and do not show up in the labor statistics because they are out of the labor force or underemployed). They are also getting sick, whether bad knees or the consequences of bad living.

The Boomers’ Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad are getting sick but they will live a long, long time and they will not have enough health insurance to cover the costs of extended or merely chronic illnesses. Their inevitable demise will mean a very large transfer of wealth, assuming that things like the Medicare spend-down requirements do not wipe it out.

The Middle Classes of the Developing World. At the same time, a middle (and upper middle) class has now emerged in developing countries…people with incomes, lifestyles and aspirations roughly equivalent to the American upper middle class. For example, there are now more people in India who can afford Mercedes Benz higher-end models than there are in the United States.

The Entrepreneurs Live Elsewhere. Whatever you can do to increase your business, entrepreneurs in India, China and elsewhere can do just as well and at a lower cost. With access to capital (look at China), they are even more potent. They are export-oriented or, rather, they happily understand that their markets will be elsewhere, such as the US and Europe.

The Wired World is Going Overseas. Depending upon who is counting, somewhere between 40 and 60% of Internet users are now outside of North America and most of them are non-English speaking.

Talk amongst yourselves…

Nick Confessore, over at TAPPED, launches on the McCain speech that TG and I liked so much. His arguments are – to put it mildly – self contradictory and ahistorical. He may not be happy that McCain spoke, but his attempted deflation of McCain’s argument grounding the war in Iraq in domestic security issues is far from connvincing, and doesn’t hold up to ten minutes worth of Googling.

I wonder if John McCain feels mildly ashamed for the obfuscating and dishonest speech he delivered last night. I only heard it on the radio, so perhaps I was imagining the whiff of resignation and unenthusiasm in his tone. But McCain has certainly hitched his wagon back to George W. Bush’s train (albeit probably for self-interested and tactical reasons). No doubt he will continue to have enormous appeal among independents. I wonder, though, how many Democrats will continue to have stars in their eyes. He makes spin sound very good — but it’s still spin.

I’ll leave aside McCain’s elevation of the fight against terrorism with World War II, an oratorical and intellectual error he shares with many people, including many Democrats.

Well, let’s start. Obviously this war is one that’s different than World War II. Nothing, except World War II will be the same as World War II. But to compare the current war – in seriousness – that one is not, to me, farfetched. If Confessore doesn’t think this is that serious how serious does he think it is? Is it more serious than, say, organized crime? Bad Olympic judging?

The worst of his offenses against the truth came, predictably, with regards to Iraq:

[snip McCain speech]

The only reason Michael Moore makes an appearance in McCain’s speech is to provide the senator with the requisite straw man — someone who believes Iraq is an “oasis of peace” to go along with the unnamed people, presumably Democratic peaceniks, who supposedly supported freeing Saddam Hussein from the box of sanctions and the threat of military force.

Well, let’s examine that. Did the 70 Members of Congress who signed a letter that said:

In February, seventy members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to President Clinton asking that the Administration “delink” economic sanctions from the military sanctions against Iraq.

“More than nine years of the most comprehensive economic embargo imposed in modern history has failed to remove Saddam Hussein from power or even ensured his compliance with international obligations, while the economy and people of Iraq continue to suffer,” the letter states. “Morally, it is wrong to hold the Iraqi people responsible for the actions of a brutal and reckless government.”

count? It’s not hard, if you have any kind of a memory at all – it’s only four or five years ago, remember, and I’m the one who went to Santa Cruz in the 70’s – to recall that there was a large body of opinion that held that the sanctions were immoral, were killing 500,000 Iraqi children a year, and that they should be narrowed or better still, eliminated.

This is not to say that McCain’s argument is entirely poppycock. Many smart analysts on both the right and the left believed that the costs of keeping Saddam boxed in were so high relative to the costs to Saddam of being boxed that, over time, the status quo would erode and war might someday be necessary to prevent his resurgence.

But no credible voice in the Democratic foreign policy establishment was calling for an end to sanctions or backing down from our deployments in the Persian Gulf, nor considered Saddam an angel.

So here be moves the goalpost, and suggests that far from ‘presum[ed] Democratic peacenicks’ we need to be concerned with ‘credible voices.’

The bottom line is that the choice McCain posited last night was a false one. It was not a choice between knocking Saddam off on the one hand, and letting him acquire nukes on the other. On the central justification for the Iraq War — preventing a dictator from developing a WMD capability — the inspections regime worked, showing before the invasion what is now undeniable: Saddam didn’t pose a threat to us at the time.

And here, I’ll pose the simple problem that while the sanctions regime may well have worked, it was obvious – and I think it was obvious, but will try and document my case a bit more when I get a moment – that sanctions were beginning to fail.

Anyone else remember the North Koreans $10 Million ripoff?

For two years before the American invasion of Iraq, Saddam’s sons, generals and front companies were engaged in lengthy negotiations with North Korea.

So, given the amount of cash Saddam was siphoning off under the gaze of those who controlled the sanctions, how long, exactly, were they supposed to hold up? And what would have happened next?

There’s probably an argument to make somewhere that sanctions could have collapsed and all would have been OK. I think it would have been a wrong and stupid one, but it would have been an argument.

Confessore’s whole post was just a dodge of McCain’s central point, which was that the choice wasn’t a binary one between war and peace, and that those who argued for peace need to understand that the status quo ante wasn’t sustainable.

When the Democrats come up with an argument, as opposed to a dodge, on this issue we’ll have a much more interesting election.

In case anyone wonders why I keep dancing around a decision and just don’t come out for Bush (or so a few correspondents suggest), given my discomfort with Kerry’s security non-policies, here’s a brief explanation from Forbes:

U.S. companies that outsourced the most jobs in 2003 also offered well-above average pay increases to their chief executives, according to a new study released this morning. Companies that made outsized political contributions to either the Democratic or the Republican parties also paid their CEOs unusually well, the study finds.

The average CEO compensation at the 50 firms outsourcing the most service jobs increased by 46% in 2003. That increase compares to an average hike of 9% for CEOs at 365 of the largest U.S. companies, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a non-profit that focuses on progressive research, and United for a Fair Economy, best known for its opposition to the repeal of the federal estate tax.

I’ll comment that the source isn’t exactly unbiased, and I’ll go and read the study and see how solid I believe it to be before I give this total credence.

And I’m not an opponent of the internationalization of business (I’m not an opponent of gravity, either). But when you see that the issue isn’t one of lowering costs to customers, or one of increasing shareholder value – but of nakedly lining the pockets of the managers who make the decisions – it’s hard not to frame this as one in which the managers see the decision to internationalize as one where they can pocket a substantial amount of the salary dollars they save.

But ultra-luxury housing is doing better in Los Angeles than upper-middle priced housing, like mine. See the LA Times article “$10 Million is the new $1 Million“:

Even in the mid-1990s, even among rich folks, $10 million was freakishly big money; only a handful of homes each year sold in that range. Not Madonna, not Cher, not Arnold Schwarzenegger lived in $10-million houses, at least in those days.

Now, however, even with the market momentarily cooling, real estate agents say $10 million is your basic starter mansion. “In the high bracket,” said Beverly Hills real estate broker Cecelia Waeschle, “$10 million is now almost the norm.”

John Edwards’ ‘Two Americas’ may be the tagline to a good joke by Giuliani for the next few months.

But it’s an issue that won’t go away soon.

In April 1961, John Glenn famously said:

“They just beat the pants off us, that’s all, and there’s no use kidding ourselves about that. But now that the space age has begun, there’s going to be plenty of work for everybody.”

TG and I listened to the main speeches at the Republican convention on NPR tonight.McCain had a brilliant speech, delivered somewhat flatly until the end, when the punch line “…We fight for love of freedom and justice–a love that is invincible. Keep that faith! Keep your courage! Stick together! Stay strong! Do not yield! Do not flinch! Stand up! Stand up with our President and fight! We’re Americans! We’re Americans and we’ll never surrender! They will!” was delivered with what sounded like real passion.

Then Giuliani came on. I’ve never heard him speak; just a few sound bites from press conferences seen in airport lounges and hotels. He’s the street version of Mario Cuomo; they both have the knack for being both oratorical and personal. Giuliani gave a major speech as though he was having a conversation with a friend.

TG is a committed Democrat; she adores Edwards (as do I), sees gay marriage as the #1 issue and doesn’t share my misgivings about Kerry’s foreign policy. But she was rattled by the speeches tonight, and the clear line they seemed to draw between Kerry’s policies and Bush’s.

So I surf over to the left blogs – to TAPPED and TalkLeft and read – carping.

“GIULIANI’S SPEECH, 11:20 P.M.: This is unbelievably long.

–Sam Rosenfeld”

Sam, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how it’s going to read in Pennsylvania.

If anyone is the personification of the opposite of freedom, it’s former federal prosecutor and Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Herr Giuliani is a more apt name for him. How could anyone just not want to retch listening to Giuliani tonight as he tried to sell himself and the Republicans as the party that would bring freedom to the world.

Giuliani cleaned up the streets in New York by arresting the poor, the homeless, the squeegee cleaners, the mentally ill and the addicted. Yes, New York became cleaner, but at what price? At the price of freedom….which he now fraudulently pretends to champion. Sickening.

Jeralyn, I don’t think that that’s what is going to help swing votes in Columbus.

Look, I assume that I’m not the only one who would like there to be an election contest here. And what needs to happen if that’s going to be the case is pretty simple isn’t handwaving and denial.

One can only hope that’s not what’s happening behind the doors in the Kerry campaign. We didn’t get to the moon first by denegrating the Soviet space program.