Is That Kashmir on Sale?

Which brings us to the enormous kryptonite wall. Any urban center will have sections of streetscape that just don’t care about us. A hundred years ago, Georg Simmel thought it was one of the great achievements of modernity that we no longer cared back. It seems, though, that the lures of sentimentalized flanerie are too much for WR. Too bad. The new MoMA is economical in its concern and its indifference. That’s a real achievement these days.

They did some of the best work that this nation has yet to see, and they did it all over the place, for all sorts of clients…

Who doesn’t yearn for the return of the old Penn Station? Who hasn’t admired the various buildings around Boston and Cambridge of their design? And the post office? The university club?

Why can’t we manage to get a few architects today who are similarly humble yet brilliant? Is it a problem of not having the right craftsmen and materials anymore? Are budgets too small for the sumptuous use of stone and wood? Is code too tight, technology in the wrong place?

Is it that architects want more of the profits and thus leave less for the building? Are we more demanding of our buildings and thus the old techniques won’t hold up anymore?

Or are minds too small, to focused on ‘next great thing’ and unwilling to cope with the rigors of doing things in some proven styles… do architects yearn so much for fame that they produce worthless crap… do clients overlook the successes of the past in an attempt to own something iconoclastic?

Where is the problem, and how can we solve it?

the F-16s are required in Pakistan for the same reason that missile defense is required in the US: to fulfill a domestic political agenda that requires a lot of toys for the military.

Musharraf needs to keep his good ol’ boys happy. Perhaps the US is being set up, but it’s a lot easier to try to defraud the US than to actually do it. If Osama bin Laden is “suddenly” found, say a few months after the first plane is delivered, would the price be worth it?

Finally, India wants to build its own fighter planes. As the world’s largest democracy, it’s appropriate that the US help turn them into a superpower. It would be hard to help the Indians, without tossing a few crumbs to Pakistan.

At any rate, this is a hard question over which reasonable people can disagree; very much unlike the Bushies social security, missile defense, and Iraq plans. The F-16 sale might actually be the right decision.

One more point worth pondering is who will end up with these (nuclear equipped) F-16 Fighting Falcons. It is fairly well established that the reason Pakistan has so much trouble fighting Al-Quida is that members of their internal security forces are openly allied with them. Again it worth noting that Pakistan is a military dictatorship and that these security forces are no minor influence on not only the government but also all of society.

The real trouble is what happens if the Musharaff government falls. The man has had at least three assassination attempts in the same number of years. What is the government’s plan of succession? Probably the guys who can command these F-16’s. Who may that be? I have no idea. However remember that this is THE country where bin laden is probably hiding, and doing a pretty good job of it. Fair to say large segments of the population are Al-Quida sympathizers. This scenario might not happen but is it worth the risk?

Another question is why a country that is so poverty stricken as Pakistan doing spending billions on weapons? Again they are a military dictatorship so I’m answering my own question, but this kind of unbeneficial financial spending only increases poverty and increases resultant political instability.

Of McCain, Chafee and the two Senators from Maine Collins and Snowe do some useful work in a few specific areas of policy, while Chafee is frankly not anyone’s go-to guy on anything.

Only McCain ever showed any promise of being able to fight battles for traditional Republican values on big issues.

…the fight he led for campaign finance reform in 2001 was the last real fight he signed up for.

…It seems clear that he likes staking out contrarian positions and having the image of someone who angers his colleagues – but he takes no real risks on behalf of his positions and has not couched his opposition to Republican bills in the form of challenges to President Bush. McCain spends a lot of time getting press, particularly interviews on television. These can be a great means of getting points across, provided one has things in mind to say and is not just getting on TV for its own sake. He does a lot of TV for its own sake.

Finally, McCain does not seem to have gathered around him a heavyweight staff able to coordinate his policy positions into something that looks like a platform, as opposed to a random group of positions on issues that happened to show up in the newspapers…McCain, in short, acts like a man who played the last act of his political life in early 2000 and found the stage lights still on and the crowd still applauding. But after the Presidential campaign and the passage of campaign finance reform he had no lines, no objectives, no strategy, so he mostly made things up along the way. He’s still doing it. He is a voice, but not a force.

And then there was Christine Todd Whitman, now going around promoting her book. Wanting to take back the Republican party. Oh, I feel their pain. Imagine being born with wealth, going to all the right schools and actually attending classes, keeping up the noblesse oblige, and then losing everything to the Bushniks.

All extreme political views are complete and utter nonsense. Conservative right and liberal left.

You are all fucking kooks. With the right trying to make this country Jesusland and the left trying to turn it into a commune, you have both the lack of clue I’ve come to expect from mouth-breathers…the misanthropic social engineers with a bug up your ass like you all are…And we, the moderates and centrists in this country, whose views are a little more complex than what can fit on a Post-It, can get back to the principle upon which this country was founded…

I can’t excuse it because the central, dominating beef of hip hop did not stop at verbal salvos. It ended up, either directly or indirectly, in the deaths of Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. I can’t excuse it because nearly every friggin’ rapper on this planet, including those participating in very public beefery, has name-checked either Tupac or Biggie with the popular martyr, ‘died too young’ tragedy theme. You think Biggie and Tupac’s deaths were tragedy? Here’s an idea: stop being a hypocritical, manipulative testicle-jockey by mourning out of one side of the mouth while fronting from the other. Yeah, you’re all carrying on Tupac and Biggie’s torches while propogating limp opportunistic beefs from the widow’s walks of you Connecticut mansions. And try to keep in mind that their beef was unfortunately real, their beef was a colossal mistake that robbed hip-hop of two of its brightest talents (far brighter than any of these new found beefites- Jay-Z and Nas maybe excepted), and their beef tainted hip hop in the public realm for years. I don’t mind beef in general; I do mind when cliched crocodile tears are shed for Rap’s convenient martyrs while riding your Escalade all the way to the bank. You Tupac/Biggie-lovin’ rappers don’t have to eat crow, but lay off the friggin beef.

he has already succeeded in having his preposterous idea that Social Security is in grave risk of total collapse get traction. This is taken as gospel among his followers, and the “debate” about Social Security’s impending disaster has been picked up in the mainstream media.

The Bush administration loses nothing by continuing to put out social security trial balloons and hoping that one of them sticks. By throwing out the trial balloons, they keep providing material for conservative talk radio and right-wing television and keeping their conservative electoral base mobilized for the 2008 “Bush legacy” election. If the political wind doesn’t shift in their direction, Bush then can take the air out of the issue by appoint a blue-ribbon study commission. And that would be the end of it. The Bush administration wouldn’t have gained much by floating social security “reform,” but they wouldn’t have lost anything either.

Despite receiving a minority of the popular vote in 2000, he nonetheless managed to win the Presidency in the Electoral College. Despite controversy and skepticism prior to invasion, the embarrassment of no WMDs found there, and the ongoing morass of insurgent attacks that continue sapping coalition lives, he nonetheless managed to turn public, and perhaps historical, perceptions of Iraq as that of a triumph for U.S. national security and a springboard for the democratization of the Middle East. Despite his first term Cabinet appointments being derided by Democrats as short-sighted partisan loyalists, he nonetheless managed to replace every senior official who left his service with even more rabidly ideological insiders.

When Islamic terrorists crashed planes into skyscrapers, his popularity skyrocketed. When early exit polls on Election Day 2004 almost uniformly showed him losing to John Kerry, he wound up with a fairly impressive Electoral College victory instead and even won the popular vote outright this time around. It is almost paradoxical – the worst things get for the man, the more he prospers.

Part of his self-image is that his battles are uphill, but ultimately necessary, right, and just. So adversity won’t prompt him to move to a different topic; adversity will confirm his sense that he is engaged in an historic struggle.

Any president that doesn’t suffer at least one big policy defeat over two terms isn’t trying hard enough.

It probably won’t have much influence at all. There are plenty of conservatives in Washington think tanks who are passionate about private retirement accounts and all the ideological baggage that goes with them, but outside of Washington (and, perhaps, the boardrooms of some companies that handle mutual funds and other financial instruments) this is an idea without a dedicated constituency. Private accounts had daylight in 1999, when it appeared that their transition costs could easily be funded out of projected federal budget surpluses. That’s why they got on then-Governor Bush’s campaign agenda; the reason he is pushing for them now is because they were on the agenda then, and the items ahead of private accounts – tax cuts, education reform – have mostly been done already.

People like Saletan seem to think along these lines: “I certainly wouldn’t want to live under those conditions, so I can’t get too excited about the decision to pull her feeding tube.” I wouldn’t want to live under those conditions either, but that’s not terribly relevant.

[Lithwick] has argued that congress is overstepping its bounds by usurping authority that rightfully belongs to state courts, and transferring it to a federal court. she brays about federalism and state’s rights and “bedrock constitutional principle” but can’t seem to find the specific article of the constitution that congress and the president violated…probably because there isn’t any. they’re perfectly legit as far as the letter of the law goes. and as far as the spirit goes, yes, the spirit of our nation is rule of law, but that law is made by the people through elected officials. that’s what a republic is: self-governance through our representatives.

to suggest, as she and … many others who ought to know better that this legislation transgresses “the rule of law” is simply absurd. She seems to forget what sweeping authority legislatures have to legislate, even where they may act foolishly or make poor judgments. Seeing this line of argument in so many places makes one begin to think that those, like Dahlia, who have come to depend for so long on courts, not legislatures, to make the laws are disturbed that the legislature retains the power to do so.

has been quietly eroding for the last 25 years. Do you have any idea how many instances there are now of “special” enactments to put courts in strait-jackets? In my state, for example, the rules of court now contain at least a dozen controversial amendments forced on the courts. All sorts of evidence is now legislatively admissible; all sorts of executive decisions are now legislatively not reviewable. I assume the experience of courts in other states and in the federal jurisdiction has been comparable. Congress’ action re: Schaivo is merely the same trend writ very large. It didn’t spring out of the blue; it’s been happening for a long time.

waiting on pins and needles for a colorable claim to Constitutionality from Congress. Due process doesn’t cut it, and the other usual suspects (“commerce clause,” etc.) don’t offer a whit of support for this legislation. It’s a baseless law, and the hundreds of lawyers that make up Congress should know better. It’s one thing to pass a law that might not be unconstitutional—let the courts deal with the subtleties of such laws, including concerns about “federalism” and the fringes of the “separation of powers” doctrine—but it’s another thing to pass something so flagrantly beyond Constitutionally enumerated powers that Congress doesn’t even bother offering a meaningful legal justification. Congress sold out, period.

…what’s alarming here is not the violation of states rights – that has been done before and will be done again by both sides of the debate. What is alarming here is that Congress has moved to trump courts ON A SINGLE CASE BASIS, and if they can get away with it this time, we no longer have a court system. …we can expect to see it happen again and again. Next time a court acts to block the death penalty from being applied to some Ted Bundy type, what is to stop Congress from stepping in and authorizing the Attorney General to prosecute him at the federal level with the death penalty on the table. The Constitution, you say?

Injunctive relief is only to be granted when you can show a substantial probability of winning the case on the merits. You don’t get an injunction just to get the chance to win the case on the merits. The status quo is to be maintained unless you can show that you are going to win. As the court stated, “Even under these difficult and time strained circumstances, however, and not withstanding Congress’ expressed interest in the welfare of Theresa Schiavo, this court is constrained to apply the law to the issues before it.” In other words, Congress can be interested all it wants, but it can’t make a federal court grant an injunction.

I agree that Ms. Lithwick’s heated rhetoric and self-righteous indignation don’t help the debate on either side. They don’t persuade, and they certainly inflame the disagreements from Schiavo’s defenders. It’s not what I expected from a legal journalist. And to speak of the rule of law, as Lithwick does, is not that honest. Liberals, including myself, understand that it’s incredibly difficult to have a principled position on federalism. The boundaries separating the states and the federal government are fuzzy. In the end, although Ms. Lithwick is probably right, she’s right for the wrong reasons, or at least she’s not as forthcoming as I’d expect.

I recently read a piece in the National Review equating the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube with torture. The author, I suspect, was hoping to score some cheap points against anti-torture liberals. It symbolized what’s wrong with debate in this country. Ms. Lithwick didn’t go that far, but she didn’t further understanding either.