All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

Fresh new faces at The First Casualty

Miscellaneous,

One of the most important aspects of blogging successfully is keeping current. Lately, I’ve found this increasingly hard to do, as school-related and other extracurricular projects have eaten away steadily at my rapidly diminishing free time.

Paradoxically, even while posting less, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about the blog recently than I used to in the past, however. And I think I may have discovered a partial antidote to the large periods of silence between blog posts: guest contributions.

The great thing about inviting others to join me on this blog from time to time is that it accomplishes several objectives at once: 1) it adds valuable new perspectives (and even ideologies) in a wide array of fields and niches to a site that tends towards one-dimensionalism, 2) it relieves some of the pressure on me to post ever more frequently, and 3) it keeps the blog current.

I’m not yet entirely certain what form the guest posts will take, but a few general guidelines are already taking form in my head. Although I cannot guarantee any regularity to the posts, as this depends on my schedule and theirs, the general idea will be for each guest blogger to specialize in something they have studied (or are studying) at an advanced level, worked on professionally, or otherwise engaged in on an academic or professional (or comparably rigorous) level.

Over the next several weeks to a month, expect to see some really interesting topics (ones I am neither qualified nor courageous enough to write about myself) written by some truly fascinating people. At present, this group is limited to a small handful, but I fully anticipate adding to this team as we go forward. Tell your friends!

Was that noise we just heard the last nail in Romney’s coffin?

Politics,

Probably not. But these comments — spoken at a private event and captured secretly on camera — will certainly bring him closer to the brink:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax…[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XnB0NZzl5HA]

Barney Frank: always good for a pithy quote

Humor, Politics, , ,

From Alec MacGillis’ fascinating piece for The New Republic, “How Paul Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius:”

“I’ve literally never heard or read anything from [Ryan] that’s surprising or new,” Barney Frank told me late this summer. So why the big-thinker reputation? “Because he is being graded on a curve with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God.”

The New York Times’ credibility takes another blow

Media, Politics, , , , , , , , ,

The new New York Times public editor has already stepped in it, it would seem. From Margaret Sullivan’s column yesterday:

Readers are quick to cite examples. Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression — hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

It’s shocking to read a national reporter so casually dismiss the central point of his own article:

In the last few weeks, nearly a dozen decisions in federal and state courts on early voting, provisional ballots and voter identification requirements have driven the rules in conflicting directions, some favoring Republicans demanding that voters show more identification to guard against fraud and others backing Democrats who want to make voting as easy as possible.

The most closely watched cases — in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — will see court arguments again this week, with the Ohio dispute possibly headed for a request for emergency review by the Supreme Court.

But this is the New York Times, after all. Even a column ostensibly criticizing the use of false equivalence manages to boldly reassert the practice by the bottom of the page.

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Netanyahu’s bullying, and the pushback

Politics, , , , , , ,

Yesterday’s New York Times editorialized against Benjamin Netanyahu’s serial arrogance and undermining of American policy:

Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is trying to browbeat President Obama into a pre-emptive strike. OnTuesday, he demanded that the United States set a red line for military action and said those who refuse “don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.” Later, Mr. Obama telephoned him and rejected the appeal. On Friday, Mr. Netanyahu suggested in an interview that Israel cannot entirely rely on the United States to act against Iran’s program.

Leaders need flexibility and ambiguity, not just hard and fast red lines. And it is dangerous for Mr. Netanyahu to try to push the president into a corner publicly and raise questions about Washington. Is that really the message he wants to send to Tehran?

Yet here was the sentence that stood out to me the most:

But 70 percent of Americans oppose a unilateral strike on Iran, according to a new poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and 59 percent said if Israel bombs Iran and ignites a war, the United States should not come to its ally’s defense.

That second half is truly remarkable. I took a look at the study, which had several interesting nuggets:

In addition, there is no clear majority support for using U.S. troops to defend Israel if it were attacked by its neighbors: as in 2010, Americans are essentially split down the middle…

In the hypothetical situation in which Israel were to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran were to retaliate against Israel, and the two were to go to war, only 38 percent say the United States should bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel. A majority (59%) says it should not.

Color me surprised that, since 2010, Americans were only split on whether to militarily support Israel even if it were attacked first. Perhaps we’re less of a warmongering population than our Republican elected officials would have us believe. Which, well, we kinda already knew anyway.

Equally interesting is that, finally (it certainly took long enough), the administration is pushing back. Not only has Obama decided not to meet with Netanyahu this month when he visits the U.S. for the UN General Assembly meetings, but — in a very rare turn of events — a U.S. senator (Barbara Boxer, D-CA) has authored an open letter harshly condemning Netanyahu’s meddling in American foreign policy:

In light of this, I am stunned by the remarks that you made this week regarding U.S. support for Israel. Are you suggesting that the United States is not Israel’s closest ally and does not stand by Israel? Are you saying that Israel, under President Obama, has not received more in annual security assistance from the United States than at any time in its history, including for the Iron Dome Missile Defense System?

As other Israelis have said, it appears that you have injected politics into one of the most profound security challenges of our time – Iran’s illicit pursuit of nuclear weapons.

I urge you to step back and clarify your remarks so that the world sees that there is no daylight between the United States and Israel. As you personally stated during an appearance with President Obama in March, “We are you, and you are us. We’re together. So if there’s one thing that stands out clearly in the Middle East today, it’s that Israel and America stand together.”

Thank you for that statement. I am hoping to hear that statement again.

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Red Sox on the trading block?

Sports, , , , , ,

I don’t know whether this is a “say it ain’t so” moment or a time to shout “good riddance,” but the speculation is likely to stick around for awhile:

Whether or not Henry, Werner, and team president Larry Lucchino ever want to admit it, they have a credibility problem in this market and they always have. Much of it stems from their inability to honestly and sincerely communicate with the media or the fan base. Nonetheless, the first six or seven years of the Henry era were wildly successful, the Red Sox winning a pair of World Series titles and twice reaching Game 7 of the American League Championship Series.

As angry as Sox fans have been, dating back to September of last year, here’s the question: are the Red Sox owners and operators capable of recreating the operation that existed from roughly 2003 to 2008? Can winning here (and not money-making) ever mean as much to Henry and Werner as it did then? If you believe the answers are yes, then you should not want this group to sell. If the answers are no, then let’s hope Henry and his partners are telling lies and have every intention of unloading the franchise sooner rather than later.

Whatever you choose, be careful what you wish for. Frank McCourt is a native Bostonian and wanted the Red Sox back in 2002 … and he bankrupted the Los Angeles Dodgers several years later. The answer isn’t always inside of 128. The most frustrating part of the Henry era is that the Red Sox had a budding baseball dynasty, then let it slip through their fingers solely because they wanted to move on to new, bigger, and more exciting things.

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What do you do when your prime minister is an extremist?

Politics, , , , , , , ,

From David Remnick at the New Yorker:

It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to eliminate the dwindling possibility of a just settlement with the Palestinians, and to isolate his country on the world diplomatic stage. Now Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election—one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the heads-up.)

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The politics of The Dark Knight Rises, or How Liberals Rule Hollywood

Film/TV, , , , , , , , , ,

Prolific writer-philosopher Slavoj Žižek pontificates on what The Dark Knight Rises means to say about “radical” movements such as Occupy Wall Street:

…It is all too simple to claim that there is no violent potential in [Occupy Wall Street] and similar movements – there IS a violence at work in every authentic emancipatory process: the problem with the film is that it wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror…

Is, then, this all? Should the film just be flatly rejected by those who are engaged in radical emancipatory struggles? Things are more ambiguous, and one has to read the film in the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem: absences and surprising presences count.  Recall the old French story about a wife who complains that her husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her: it takes some time till the surprised friend gets the point – in this twisted way, she is inviting him to seduce her… It is like the Freudian unconscious which knows no negation: what matters is not a negative judgment on something, but the mere fact that this something is mentioned – in The Dark Knight Rises,people’s power IS HERE, staged as an Event, in a key step forward from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).

Here we get the first clue – the prospect of the OWS movement taking power and establishing people’s democracy on Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly non-realist, that one cannot but raise the question: WHY DOES THEN A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER DREAM ABOUT IT, WHY DOES IT EVOKE THIS SPECTER? Why even dream about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer (to smudge OWS with accusations that it harbors a terrorist-totalitarian potential) is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by prospect of “people’s power.” No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent: no details are given about how this people’s power functions, what the mobilized people are doing (remember that Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing on them his own order).

This is why external critique of the film (“its depiction of the OWS reign is a ridiculous caricature”) is not enough – the critique has to be immanent, it has to locate within the film itself a multitude signs which point towards the authentic Event. (Recall, for example, that Bane is not just a brutal terrorist, but a person of deep love and sacrifice.) In short, pure ideology isn’t possible, Bane’s authenticity HAS to leave trace in the film’s texture. This is why the film deserves a close reading: the Event – the “people’s republic of Gotham City”, dictatorship of the proletariat on Manhattan – is immanent to the film, it is its absent center.

Meanwhile, over at New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait zooms out on how the film industry’s leftist politics translates itself into cultural clout as well:

By now, conservatives have almost completely stopped complaining about Hollywood, even as the provocations have intensified. What passes for a right-wing movie these days is The Dark Knight Rises, which submits the rather modest premise that, irritating though the rich may be, actually killing them and taking all their stuff might be excessive. In the course of a generation we have come from a world in which the gentle liberalism of Murphy Brown incited furious right-wing denunciations to one in which the only visible political controversy surrounding Girls—a show that’s basically a 30-minute-long Dan Quayle aneurysm—was its lack of racial diversity…

This capacity to mold the moral premises of large segments of the public, and especially the youngest and most impressionable elements, may or may not be unfair. What it is undoubtedly is a source of cultural (and hence political) power. Liberals like to believe that our strength derives solely from the natural concordance of the people, that we represent what most Americans believe, or would believe if not for the distorting rightward pull of Fox News and the Koch brothers and the rest. Conservatives surely do benefit from these outposts of power, and most would rather indulge their own populist fantasies than admit it. But they do have a point about one thing: We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite.

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