AFF's Doublethink

Don’t go. It’s a set up!

Apologies to The Doors, but I’ve always loved that line. And now, finally, a time to use it.

I have accepted a new job and, as part of the bargain struck, I must relinquish my regular freelance gigs. So you shall see no more of me around these parts — though I might pop by the comments occasionally. Mr. Adesnik will soldier on without me, so make sure to continue stopping by.

The various permutations of this blog have made it an interesting couple of years. I wish I had some sort of grand thesis about what blogging is or what it means or how it has changed the world (or even just my world) but I don’t know that I do. It has fundamentally changed how I consume the news, that’s for sure: Google Reader has replaced newspapers and cable TV as my aggregation method of choice.

I do wonder what the future holds for blogs and the media in general. Nothing good, I’m sure. Or maybe a bright new future of hyperlocals surrounded by three or four national papers strong enough to charge for content and advertisements. I’m not a fortune teller. What do I know?

I just wanted to give you guys the heads up and say thanks to my dozens of loyal readers (thousands, if we’re being honest; dozens has always struck me as a funnier quantification, though). Hopefully you’ve gotten something out of this little space. I know I have, and I’m sad to give it up. C’est la vie. It’s been fun.

It’s a pretty interesting back and forth. Kevin Carey stops being polite and starts getting real:

The problem is that your distaste for faddism and naiveté can be overwhelming–you see these sins in everyone you happen to disagree with about anything.

For example (there are many), the book concludes: “Reformers imagine that is easy to create a successful school. It is not.” This is complete nonsense. Nobody thinks it’s easy to create a successful school, particularly when at-risk children are involved. I have heard dozens of reformers go on about this subject over the years. They’re obsessed with the difficulty of building good schools, to the point, frankly, of being pretty hard to shut up about it.

Throughout the book, you accuse those you newly disagree with of believing in, variously, silver bullets, magic feathers, panaceas, quick fixes, and miracle cures. Can we please retire the insulting declaration that “there are no silver bullets”? You may have believed in them once, but that doesn’t mean everyone else made the same mistake.

Burn! That is some #realkeeping. To be fair, I believed in them once as well (and still do, to a certain extent — there is certainly a place for standardized testing and teacher accountability in education reform, perhaps even a preeminent one). Anyway, you should check out the whole symposium. It’s interesting.

When did Baltimore turn from a haven for drug dealers into a haven for hipsters on food stamps?

The two friends weren’t tabulating the cash in their wallets but what remained of the monthly allotment on their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program debit cards, the official new term for what are still known colloquially as food stamps.

Magida, a 30-year-old art school graduate, had been installing museum exhibits for a living until the recession caused arts funding — and her usual gigs — to dry up. She applied for food stamps last summer, and since then she’s used her $150 in monthly benefits for things like fresh produce, raw honey and fresh-squeezed juices from markets near her house in the neighborhood of Hampden, and soy meat alternatives and gourmet ice cream from a Whole Foods a few miles away.

Every time I read a story like this I mutter “hipsters!” under my breath and curl my lips into a snarl a la Seinfeld reacting to Newman. Is this really what we want our tax money going to subsidize? Out of work “artists” whose funding dried up when the economy went south? I’m all for unemployment benefits (even if I have eschewed them during my own recent leave of absence from the work force), but there’s a point at which things get ridiculous.

(h/t)

Kevin Drum, on deem and pass:

If you have a life, you don’t care about the subject of this post and have never heard of it.

Damn it. I heard about “deem and pass” and I even sort of care about it. And I’m annoyed with Kevin for letting people know I don’t have a life. (Well, I have a wife, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyhow, here’s Kevin’s bottom line:

Like it or not, process has become a big issue as healthcare has dragged along into its second year, and the public really does seem to have grown weary of endless procedural wankery. What’s more, there’s no benefit…

In fact, it will probably just make things worse. They still will have voted for the Senate bill, but it’ll look like they’re trying to hide the fact.

You might say they voted for it at the same time they voted against it.

Did someone forget to give Jim Clyburn (D-SC) his talking points? Rewind to Sunday morning:

MR. [TOM] BROKAW: Joining us now, let’s turn to two men whose job it is to count the votes in their respective chambers–the Democratic House Whip, Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina; the Democratic Senate Whip, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Welcome both. They’re back in their respective states. You just heard Mr. Axelrod say that he is confident, Congressman Clyburn, that the bill will be passed. As of this morning, do you have the votes that you need?

REP. CLYBURN: No, we don’t have them as of this morning. But we’ve been working this thing all weekend, we’ll be working it going into the week. I am also very confident that we’ll get this done.

Hello? Hello? We do not admit that we don’t have the votes! We must create a sense of inevitability!

I guess I should praise Clyburn for his unusual candor. But it has been surreal to hear so many advocates of the healthcare bill proclaim their forced optimism about its chances to pass. Sure, both sides play this game. It may even be necessary. But it sure makes audiences cynical.

You wouldn’t expect it from such a moderate guy, but consider this, from Meet The Press:

MR. [TOM] BROKAW: Let’s begin with you, if we can, David. There are lots of declarations that are being made in Washington this week, either apocalyptic, that this is the end of the Obama presidency, or it’s the deliverance of the Obama presidency. Are they both exaggerated?

MR. DAVID BROOKS: No. No. The, the White House has said, “We’re all in.” They’re betting their whole presidency on getting this thing passed, or at least the first year of the presidency.

Tom Friedman agreed, saying, “I think if he doesn’t get this through, I really don’t know what the rest of his presidency is going to be about.”

Come on, people. Warning darkly of the end of a presidency is one of the biggest cliches in political journalism. I say this as a Republican, who wouldn’t exactly mind if Obama were a lame duck. Remember how people asked if Bill Clinton was still relevant after the Republican Revolution in 1994? Or whether Bush was a lame duck after the failure of Social Security reform, then again after the 2006 election? Or going way back, how about the NY Times famous declaration in 1983 that the Reagan presidency was a manifest failure?

Never underestimate the power of the presidency. Obama will have almost three, and very possibly seven more years in office. We barely know what the political landscape will look like next year, let alone five years from now.

As for David Brooks, I’m only being hard on him because I like him so much.

I’d like to second something Rod says in response to this review of Diane Ravitch’s new book on the effects of No Child Left Behind:

I don’t want to defend lousy schools and bad teachers, and won’t do that. But the idea that even the best teachers and the most brilliantly run schools can educate kids who come from badly broken families and badly screwed up cultures is grossly unfair to teachers and educators.

I can’t disagree too much with that: People from broken homes and homes that don’t value education are likely to not care too much about their schooling, fail tests, not go on to college, etc. Tackling these root causes are incredibly tricky, however, because we’re recalcitrant to even discuss them. It’s unfair to say “certain cultures” don’t value education. Which cultures? Why are you painting with such a broad brush? Why are you tarnishing the hardworking few? Et cetera, ad nauseam.

Still, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for teachers to be able to impart basic literacy and mathematical understanding in their students. It’s unreasonable to think that even the greatest teacher could guide everyone to a 5 on a battery of Advanced Placement tests; it’s not unreasonable to think that every high school could get their students reading at a high school level and able to do basic calculus and geometry. And I don’t think it’s too much to weed out poorly performing teachers or those who are guilty of gross misconduct. There’s a balance to be struck, for sure, but that balance will be harder to achieve as long as unions are going to the mat and dragging out arbitration proceedings for years while students get the shaft.

I’m glad I never wrote anything about how Rielle Hunter was being a stand-up gal by saying nothing during the recent Edwards debacle. Because, hey, look: She’s talking to GQ! And doing a photo shoot for GQ wearing a shirt and no pants! And holding her daughter in the next photo! Very dignified. A summary, from the Reliable Source:

Hunter says she’s still in love with “Johnny” and believes he loves her. That they went to bed together the day they met. That his marriage was “toxic,” that he feared “the wrath of Elizabeth.” That it was Young’s idea for the coverup in which he claimed paternity. That she had no idea how much money — now the subject of a grand jury inquiry — was being funneled to her from top campaign donors.

It really is too bad Edwards didn’t win the Democratic nomination or sucker Obama into giving him the VP slot. This would’ve been fun.

The first episode of HBO’s sequel to Band of Brothers, The Pacific, premiered last night. It was pretty solid, though a little slow in the offing. If it’s half as good as Band of Brothers — a miniseries I find to be the single most moving portrait of troops in combat ever — it’ll be pretty amazing. I am a little worried that unlike its predecessor The Pacific doesn’t start in boot camp and really introduce us to all of the men in the unit. One of the reasons that Band of Brothers was so successful is that we really grew to know and love the guys we were following around, and we grew to know and love them because we saw them come together at basic and then travel across Europe. Joining the Marines as they’re on the seas to Guadalcanal skips some of that. We’ll see if it affects the series.

I would like to comment briefly on executive producer Tom Hanks’ ridiculous recent comments. While talking about the series, he told Time

Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as ‘yellow, slant-eyed dogs’ that believed in different gods. They were out to kill us because our way of living was different. We, in turn, wanted to annihilate them because they were different. Does that sound familiar, by any chance, to what’s going on today?”

Hm. Now, I don’t think we can deny that there was a fair amount of “otherizing” of the Japanese during the Second World War. But I also think it’s insane to suggest that America “wanted to annihilate them because they were different.” America wanted to annihilate the Japanese because of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and imperial aggression in the Pacific that drug us into World War Two. American troops wanted to annihilate the Japanese because of the atrocities they committed during the war — in the very first episode of The Pacific you see a trio of troops who have been mutilated by Japanese soldiers. Somebody made this point earlier in the week, but World War Two was a war in which Americans were allied with the Chinese and the Filipinos and fighting against German and Italian foes — nations that, aside from Great Britain and Ireland, provided the highest levels of immigration to this country in the preceding decades. Is there any real doubt that America wanted to annihilate the Nazis? What was the policy of unconditional surrender in both Europe and Japan if not a wish to annihilate the enemy? It had nothing to do with skin color.

And that’s leaving aside entirely the idea that we want to annihilate Muslims, which is equally insane. American military action in the current conflict has gone out of its way — even so far as putting American troops at risk — to avoid killing innocent Muslims. During his entire post-9/11 presidency George W. Bush went out of his way to say that Muslims in general weren’t the enemy. After 9/11 there were incredibly few hate crimes on Muslims in the United States. To say that the war on terror is a war designed to eliminate Muslims is something you’d expect to hear out of an al Qaeda press shop, not from one of the elder statesmen of American cinema.