Stability

Fred Kaplan has a good column on Pentagon budget priorities:

Earlier this month, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England signed a directive declaring, “Stability operations are a core U.S. military mission. … They should be given priority comparable to combat operations” in all Defense Department activities, “including doctrine, organizations, training, education, exercises, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and planning.”

At the very least, this directive—which amounts to an official acknowledgement of the Iraq war’s mistakes—will require more military manpower if it’s to be a statement of policy and not just a smattering of nice words.

And yet, according to a story by Tom Bowman in the Dec. 21 Baltimore Sun, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is planning to cut the Army’s forces by 34,000 troops. That would entail eliminating one active-duty brigade and six National Guard brigades. (The latter aren’t trivial; nearly half the U.S. combat units in Iraq come from the National Guard.)

Budget pressures are forcing Rumsfeld to cut Pentagon spending by $32 billion over the next five years. But why is he taking his biggest whacks against the tokens of combat power—boots on the ground—that are, by his own admission, most vital? The Sun reports:

The manpower cuts stem from a decision by top Army leaders to sacrifice troop strength in order to provide money for new weapons systems and other new equipment, said defense officials, who requested anonymity.

So, not much has changed after all. We’ve been fighting a war that’s costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The Pentagon’s upper management at least says it realizes that “stabilization operations” (read: low-tech, high-manpower ops) are extremely important. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, leans toward this sentiment as well, having risen through the ranks in the Special Forces command. And yet, when it comes to setting priorities on how to spend money, the procurement chiefs—with their eyes on big-ticket weapons systems—still rule.

At this point, changing the shares that each service gets of the Pentagon budget is pretty much a non-starter. While it’s true that cutting a few F-22s and the DD(X) could help pay for additional Army personnel, to do so would break the back-scratching arrangement that the three services have constructed since the 1960s. The degree of political will necessary to make that happen exceeds what most administrations can bring, and, frankly, if the Bush administration couldn’t dent it, I doubt that anyone can.

That said, the position of the Army itself seems indefensible to me. Yes, I know that they really, really want FCS, and for some reason seem to think that it will help them in low-intensity operations. I can’t see how, but they seem to believe it. In the service of achieving this dubious goal, they’re willing to cut our capabilities for fighting a low-intensity conflict now, when we are, after all, in the middle of a low-intensity conflict.

Rumsfeld isn’t the only one to blame in this fiasco. The Army brass will also be responsible for the problems that these decisions create.

What We Already Know

In one of the least surprising developments is history, an Alito memo in which he argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned has been released:

Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito wrote in a June 1985 memo that the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion should be overturned, a finding certain to enliven January’s confirmation hearings.

In a recommendation to the solicitor general on filing a friend-of-court brief, Alito said that the government ”should make clear that we disagree with Roe v. Wade and would welcome the opportunity to brief the issue of whether, and if so to what extent, that decision should be overruled.”

The June 3, 1985 document was one of 45 released by the National Archives on Friday. A total of 744 pages were made public.

[...]

Consistent with his previous writings, Alito said these arguments would be preferable to a ”frontal assault on Roe v. Wade.”

”It has most of the advantage of a brief devoted to the overruling of Roe v. Wade; it makes our position clear, does not even tacitly concede Roe’s legitimacy, and signals that we regard the question as live and open,” Alito wrote.

To address one of the spin-points we’ll be hearing as part of the Alito Kabuki, this is his personal before-the-fact analysis, not a brief where he was just putting the government’s position forward.

But it should be noted, of course, that this isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. Alito’s personal hostility to legal abortion rights is well-known and unambiguous. As an appeals court judge, in the only abortion case not decided on technical grounds or in which he was not bound by a clear upper-court precedent he ruled in a way that would maximize state power, and used a legal rationale that would not only increase the regulatory power of the state but would make challenging the regulations in court far more ornerous. His hostility to abortion rights couldn’t be clearer; it’s only people who want to maintain their bullshit-libertarian credentials or need to ram Alito through the Senate despite his unpopular views who are trying to pretend that there’s any serious doubt about his stance. This is one more piece of evidence added to a case that was already utterly clear-cut. If you support Alito, you either oppose or don’t care about reproductive rights, period.

Yet More!

One of the things about writing for one of the 10,000 most popular blogs on the intarweb is that–in addition to the predictable crates of panties, requests for autographs, marriage proposals, and the like–is that one is burdened with requests to write about topics sadly neglected by the author but of intense interest to the audience. If I’ve gotten this email once, I’ve gotten it a million times: “Why can’t you blog more about hockey? You do it so rarely, and the comments threads get so long I feel lost! And would it hurt you to fire off the occasional post about abortion or unprincipled faux-libertarians?”

Well, who am I to ignore my readers? So you can see me lowbrowing Michael Berube’s place up, discussing the New NHL. I’m afraid my need to fill the space that would otherwise be consumed by doing something useful has trumped my labor solidarity.

As an addendum to my point about attendance, I’m not sure what the averages are; versus the previous year, the median attendance is down, but the median capacity filled is up. (Considering that there was a labor stoppage that killed a whole season, that’s pretty amazing.) The really interesting comparison is with the NBA: the NHL has a median attendance of 16, 820 and 94.5% capacity, compared with 16,925 and 87.5% for the NBA [whoops--edited!]. And this has generally been true: the NHL more or less has the attendance figures of the NBA–which I think would surprise most people–but can’t get Americans to watch on TV at all.

Hitchens

Around these parts you’ll see very little positive press given to Christopher Hitchens, and for damn good reason. He can still write when he wants to, and can occasionally amuse. Granted, MSNBC/Scarborough mockery is like shooting fish in a barrel, but that doesn’t mean mean we can’t appreciate standouts of the genre such as this.

Disgrace

For a hockey fan, the Olympics can actually provide something useful: an equivalent to soccer’s World Cup. The level of hockey in Salt Lake in 2002 was incredible, showing what a game that had grown logy could be, and culminated in a terrific final game, with the good guys winning. (It was also beneficial for my parochial interests, as the final game demonstrated Jarome Iginla having made the transition from very good player to player good enough to drag the Flames within a goal of the Stanley Cup.) I’ve been looking forward to the 2006 tournament for a long time.

Unfortunately, the experience–particularly for a fan of Team Canada–will be sullied by the inclusion of Vancouver Horsefuckers Canucks thug Todd Bertuzzi, who at the culmination of a series of brawling initiated by the Canucks in response to a (perfectly legal) hit in a previous game, grabbed onto the jersey of Avs forward Steve Moore and then sucker punched-him in the back of the head, and tried to continue to pummel Moore as he laid on the ice with a broken neck. (Had players intervened a second later, Moore might not be alive right now.) Inexcusably, Gary Bettman allowed him to return this year, although he missed only the tail end of the ’04 season and the Canucks’ glorious 7-game upset playoff defeat. His inclusion in the Olympic Team is even worse. What’s particularly bad is that the selection is borderline at best on the merits; in the high-tempo, large ice surface Olympic game younger, better, faster and more disciplined young players like Spezza, Staal and Crosby would be far more useful. And there’s also some serious nepotism going on here with Canada’s 3-man management team: Hockey Canada’s Steve Tambellini is a longtime Canucks executive, and the other marginal picks (Ryan Smyth, Shane Doan, and Kris Draper) have some connection to Gretzky, Lowe, or both. But to have Bertuzzi represent Team Canada would be indefensible even if he actually deserved to be selected.

Hopefully they will be overruled by the Olympic Committee. If not, there’s always the women’s team to cheer for unequivocally…

NR–Fifteenth Amendment: Views Differ

Brad DeLong notes that the National Review now has an online archive, which is going to do some serious damage to the “conservatives have always been liberals” narrative favored by the National Review as well as the Sean Hannitys of the world. (After all, some liberal Republicans thoroughly despised by movement conservatives voted for the Civil Rights Act, so really, it’s liberals that opposed civil rights!) I think I may have to shell out 5 bucks for a 4-pack myself–1964 and 1965 should be amusing. Anything else I should be looking up?

Kong

I share Matt’s impression of King Kong. I enjoyed the film, but it was clearly a mess. Easily 45 minutes should have found its way onto the cutting room floor. People too often seem to think that directors have a perfect vision for their films, one that is somehow more genuine or authentic than that of producers or studio execs. To some extent this is true, but a producer can and should force a director to exercise some discipline.

That said, the story remains compelling, and there are some interesting elements. Jack Black’s performance has been treated as an Orson Welles impression, but I felt that Black was playing Peter Jackson. He seemed, to me, to embody Jackson’s quest to put Kong back on the big screen, from the clearly laudable elements to the very troubling. The least necessary addition to the story was the inclusion of a friendship between two members of the crew. The relationship took up a lot of time, but was not well fleshed out, and its meaning was unclear. Perhaps most awkward was the discussion of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which fell completely flat.

This last is somewhat interesting, because I think that a comparison of Kong and Conrad could prove productive. The represent very different interpretations of the collision of the West with the colonial other, both of which are subversive in their own way. However, it’s painfully obvious that the flick was not the place to play this conversation out.

Stark Raving Terror

A tale of horror and redemption from the Washington Post:

When Linda Cerniglia went back to school, it took her almost seven years to get through all the prerequisites, the labs, the research. And it took a thief just moments to grab her purse, with the only copy of her master’s thesis stored on a tiny jump drive inside.

Hold the snide remarks about not backing up your thesis, and consider the true horror of this. Your thesis is gone. Gone. Gone. All that work, gone. I might have just had a heart attack at that point. Read on…

She designed an experiment, analyzed CT scans, ran statistics, studied research and — slowly — began to write her thesis.

“It was so painful,” she said. “I would rather go outside and dig a hole all day long than write.”

She tried to trick herself into working on it, by going to a coffee shop or finding a sunny picnic table in the park. She could use a computer anywhere, because she had all the research on a jump drive, a tiny, portable memory-storage device about the size of a cigarette lighter.

Heh. How true. I wonder if it would be easier re-writing the thesis, given that you’ve already broken down the mental barriers necessary to put something into words. My guess is no; from my experience of losing posts on Blogger or long e-mails, I can report that I usually just get bitter and angry, sometimes returning to an idea, sometimes not. For a whole thesis, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to say that I’d bag the whole thing after losing a hundred pages or so, but it would be really, really difficult for me to go on. Anyway…

That night she couldn’t sleep, tortured by visions of her lost jump drive. The next morning, Cerniglia began to think about what she would do if she were the thief. Get out of there fast, speed out on the Beltway, then dump the purse.

There was a chance, just a chance.

She was going to retrace his steps, go to every store he hit. She would talk to security guards, check lost-and-found, scour the parking lots.

So that day, she drove to Greenbelt, and as soon as she parked she saw a big trash bin behind a Wendy’s, like a beacon. It was perfect. “It was open. It was hidden. I thought, ‘That’s it — if it’s going to be anywhere, it’s going to be there.’ “

She started pulling out broken-down boxes. She didn’t care about the trash, even if it was greasy slop from a fast-food place. “No cockroach, no rat, no creature from the dark was going to keep me from my jump drive,” she said. “Nothing is as bad as the thought of rewriting that thesis.”

She saw a flash of aqua cloth. Her heart pounded — it looked like her workout pants. “Then I see my gym bag. I jumped into the dumpster. I’m throwing things out of the way. I see my driver’s license.”

And there, at the bottom, was her black leather purse. She unzipped it, reached in, and felt her fingers close around — her jump drive.

People driving by stared: A 5-foot-4 43-year-old woman jumping up and down in a trash bin, screaming.

The obvious lesson is to back up early and often. All of my relevant files are on my home desktop, my laptop, my work desktop, and in cyberspace. The second lesson is that the proper response to having the only copy of your thesis stolen is not a two week bender, which would have been my solution, but rather a carefully thought out and efficiently executed recovery plan.

Strike Advance

According to the press conference being held now by the mediator, if I understand it correctly, the union leadership in the NYC transit strike will recommend a return to work for later today. This doesn’t guarantee an end to the strike, but the affirmative recommendation from leadership makes it likely. Hopefully there will be a fair deal, and Mayor Rich will stop his disgraceful rhetoric.

One more point I think should be made. One of the key conservative talking points about this strike is that it hurts working people the most. This is, of course, correct. A transit strike does indeed hurt poor people the most (although in NYC the pain is far more broadly felt than in any other American city; I work in a middle-class profession, and not a single one of my colleagues commutes by car.) But it’s also neither here not there; to blame the union for these effects is just begging the question. The predictable effects of the strike are the responsibility of those who are responsible for the strike, and given their last-minute sabotage of the negotiations I believe the bulk of the responsibility of the MTA. Moreover, the class effects of a transit strike are true of pretty much every strike; if you can only strike in contexts where there are completely neutral effects, strikes will be rare indeed. If grocery workers go on strike, wealthy people can better afford to order groceries by delivery, to eat out, to drive to the Whole Foods that isn’t on strike. etc. etc. etc. Having money makes life more convenient; it’s pretty straightforward. But the class effects of a strike are not an argument against a strike unless you’re opposed to it in the first place.

…Greenhouse has the story.

…this is a great point by Atrios:

There’s a really weird class resentment going on. White collar workers “know” they deserve more money than blue collar workers. Some blue collar workers, ones in unions and skilled workers, can make decent money. Since a lot of white collar workers actually don’t get paid very well, they resent the hell out of the fact that some uneducated lout gets to buy a nicer house than they do. And, thus, we get the out of touch media coverage of the NYC transit strike.

Yep. And in addition, a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that there are other important things about a job aside from the pay. It’s true that many journalists (and academics) don’t get paid exceptionally well. But it’s also true that these jobs are considerably more pleasant than, say, picking dead rats off of subway tracks. People in physically demanding blue collar jobs should be paid well. When you have a job that you actually enjoy doing, that’s both a rare privelege and a significant utility beyond your salary. Quit sneering at blue collar workers who have the middle class incomes they deserve.

Fake Conservertarianism Ends In Camps

I think it’s worth noting the implications of believing that the President has the inherent authority to trump legal requirements during wartime, and then applying this claim to the unendable “war on terror,” whether this manifests itself in indifference to or active support for effectively superconstitutional presidential powers. If this argument is correct, then it’s not just the Fourth Amendment that’s affected; presumably the president’s authority to work within the “war paradigm” transcends other constitutional limits as well. And as we know from WWII, the Supreme Court argued that this included the Fourteenth Amendment as well:

It should be noted, to begin with, that all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. It is to say that courts must subject them to the most rigid scrutiny. Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.

[...]

It is said that we are dealing here with the case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States. Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers — and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps, with all the ugly connotations that term implies — we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this.

You can recognize in Black’s reasoning here every element of the arguments used by apologists for the illegal wiretaps. The executive should be accorded great deference; Congressional delegations of authority should be interpreted as broadly as possible; and even explicit constitutional provisions don’t really apply to presidential actions in wartime because the war changes the nature of the actions in a fundamental way. Except that there’s one difference: the legal arguments in favor of the internment are stronger. The internment at least took place during a clear-cut military conflict of immense scale between nation-states, rather than an operation of inherently indeterminate length against an ever-changing array of stateless organizations that contains elements of both armed conflict and ordinary police action. And Congress actually did grant the relevant authority in the internment case (although, of course, irrelevant to me, since Congress cannot confer on the President the power to violate the Constitution, although a grant of authority can legitimately compel greater deference to the executive on more ambiguous questions.) If you accept the view of Posner, Goldstein et al., then Korematsu was right. And, therefore, the president has the right to strip a class of people of their property and force them to relocate to camps based solely on their race with no individualized suspicion and scant evidence of a genuine military threat, as long as there’s a war on. And, as Rob and Katherine point out, since unlike WWII a war on a method has no formal endpoint, this would mark a radical and permanent change in our constitutional structure on extraordinarily shaky grounds.

And, of course, my claim that this chain of reasoning ends logically in justifying Korematsu isn’t merely hypothetical, starting of course with Malkin, whose extraordinarily shoddy book was enough to cause Glenn Reynolds to reconsider his purported opposition to the internment. And this logic has–in a sense, to his credit, at least as far as intellectual inetgrity is concerned–been embraced by Posner himself:

This commenter takes issues with a statement that I once made to the effect that I thought the Supreme Court had made the correct decision in the Korematsu case, when it refused to invalidate an army order, approved by President Roosevelt (and by Earl Warren, who at the time was the governor of California), removing persons of Japanese extraction from the west coast in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. In hindsight, it is apparent that the order was erroneous–that the Japanese-Americans did not pose a threat to the nation and that the order was influenced by racism. But the wisdom of hindsight is treacherous. In March of 1942 when the order was issued, just three months after Pearl Harbor, there was not only fear that Japan would attack the continental United States, but also a need to demonstrate resoluteness in a war for which the nation was not prepared.

So let’s be clear about what the logic of this Schmittian position is: in wartime, the President can trump the 14th Amendment rights of American citizens, despite extensive evidence of racism and little evidence of military necessity, merely to “demonstrate resoluteness.” And we’re in a war now, and there’s no conceivable way of ending the war. This is where Bush’s apologists want to take us. I don’t know about you, but I’m not coming along. I prefer to fight to protect constitutional governance from the terrorists rather than capitulating pre-emptively.

Damon to the Yanks

Bleh.

It’s too much money, not that it matters to the Yankees. Damon has been a plus defender in centerfield, although there are some signs of decline. Offensively, he was worse in 2005 than 2004, but he’s been kind of up and down over the course of his career, and I wouldn’t be stunned to see him pull together some good years at the plate with the Yankees. There’s no question that Damon is significantly better than the mess that was Bernie Williams and Bubba Crosby.

My thinking is that it makes the Yankees better for two years, then becomes a problem. Given that the Yankees have a LOT of aging players, it’s not too bad of an idea to try to win right now.

Erasing History

Eric Muller has an interesting finding with respect to Concerned Alumni for Princeton, the group whose concern was that women and minorities would ruin campus life and make it harder for unqualified legacies to be admitted. Ultra-reactionary judge Sam Alito, as most of you know, was still expressing pride in his membership in this racist and sexist organization in 1985. Muller was interested to see a 1984 article in KKKCAP’s newsletter, which drew national attention by revealing a Princeton freshman woman’s name and discussing her sexual history. I suppose what happened isn’t surprising:

I thought it’d be interesting to see what the offending article actually said, so I asked someone at Princeton to track down the magazine in the campus library and send me a copy. It turned out there was a long wait for this obscure publication; not only was it already checked out, but another patron was in the request line ahead of my researcher.

My researcher finally got his hands on the issue yesterday.

The article in question has been cut out.

(Also razored out, incidentally, is an article entitled “Sexuality at Old Nassau” in the March 1975 issue of CAP’s magazine.)

Seems like the right punchline for a story involving Strip Search Sammy and our Royal President.