Sunday, August 31, 2008

Browse Alert: VP

Matthew Yglesias: Killing the Brand. This strikes me as the most astute piece I've seen on the McCain-Palin ticket. It also has a theory about why McCain manages to keep so close to Obama, despite the fact that there is no remotely plausible reason why virtually anyone in the US of A should prefer McCain. It's that Obama is running a methodical turtle race, while McCain is playing the hare, jumping on every opportunity to edge a bit ahead, even at the expense of his credibility come November.

Most fundamentally, I think this pick violates the contemporary understanding of the role of the Vice Presidency. With the exception of the four Bush-Quayle years, ever since 1977 we've had a POTUS-VPOTUS team that features a charismatic outsider at the top of the ticket (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II) backed by a seasoned Washington hand (Mondale, Bush I, Gore, Cheney) with "charismatic outsiderishness" generally being an asset, but an asset whose value is enhanced by showing some humility and good sense by bringing a veteran on board.

Seems less like a crazy pick to me than a cute one. That's not just a comment on her looks, but on the superficial level McCain and most Republicans campaign on. After all, they don't really have to understand issues -- when the time comes their masters will tell them what to think. Meanwhile, they gladhand the press and spout their daily talking points. It's only Democrats that have to have experience, smarts, people skills, and common sense, because once they get elected they're on their own.

Palin's political record seems to indicate she's a person who'll do what she's told, and be personable along the way. She's earned her cred with the far right -- like the bit about giving birth to a mutant to show off her opposition to abortion. Given her state's history, I doubt that hardly anyone in the nation would go as far out on a limb to trash the environment in order to extract mineral resources. If McCain has his way, the only economic issue that will register this fall is the need to slice gas prices by drilling and polluting everywhere. Palin will not only support him in that; she's practically Exhibit A.

On the other hand, even if cute makes a nice first impression, it can wear thin over the long haul -- like between now and November. If Obama can get people to realize that the election is about something serious -- not a proposition I have a lot of faith in, but if things get worse voters may start moving that direction on their own -- McCain's superficiality will fall hard.

Andrew Leonard: Sarah Palin: Drill, drill, drill -- all the way. Some background on Palin and the oil industry.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, Obama's popular vote margin has shrunk again, down to 0.2%, although something weird is going on with their "SuperTracker" thingy, with the Trend Line jumping up 6 points and the Projection dropping.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Browse Alert: Democrats

Dennis Perrin: O, Bomb It On the Mountain. One more little thing on the author of Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War. He mentioned this in the Greenwald interview, but more in passing:

I've repeatedly said that I want Obama to be elected so that liberals can show their true colors, and we can dispense with their supposed "antiwar" personas. That still holds. A McCain presidency will only delay what needs to opened and dealt with, to the degree that it can be dealt with. But watching Obama last night gave me another thought, that of driving American reactionaries even crazier, which will happen should the president be of color and have that last name. Obama in the White House will seriously fuck with their fat heads. Good. I can definitely live with that.

I don't buy this argument. I, too, worry about Obama's postures toward Iran and (especially) Pakistan, and I don't trust him to get out of Iraq, let alone Afghanistan, as gracefully as he should. And let's not get started in Israel/Palestine. And then there's the crises we don't know about yet, the ones that have been smoldering over the last 8, 16, 60 years that haven't engulfed us in flames yet: how's he going to react to those, given his political sense, the foibles of his hundreds of advisors, and the state aparatus he'll inherit from Bush's deliberate politicization of everything. All these things considered, it's certainly possible that Obama's administration will be bellicose and reckless enough to fill out another chapter in the second edition of Perrin's book. I hope that's not the case, and I can think of some good reasons why it may not be the case, but right now you got to grant the possibility.

On the other hand, where Perrin's argument falls flat is in his naïve idea that Obama's belligerence will be so aggressive and so dysfunctional that it will finally drive Americans to an antiwar stance so firm that it rejects the Democratic as well as Republican parties. Short of nuclear war I don't see that reaction. No matter how belligerent Obama becomes, the Republicans will demand more, because that's their brand identity; and the Democrats will split, with the hawks shaming the doves into knuckling under otherwise it will be their fault if the Republicans get back in. We already had a dry run for this with Clinton. Nor did the argument that by outdoing their wettest dreams Clinton would fuck with Republicans heads amount to much: by then the Republicans were so divorced from reality and wrapped up in their own rhetoric that they scarcely noticed when Clinton did their bidding. Indeed, hardly anyone noticed, except for the Naderite fringe.

The reason for supporting Obama and the Democrats in 2008 is the old sad one: they represent the lesser evil, and confused as they were they are still far less culpable for the last eight years than the Republicans. Actually, I'm a bit less pessimistic than that. I see a few things in Obama's political approach that I like, plus I see an intellectually flexible realism that gives me some hope that Obama will try to respond to new problems in ways that actually address them, rather than kick them into an ideologically cocked hat. Where I am pessimistic is that I think many of our problems, if not exacerbated at least neglected for 8 (or 16, or 28) years may be approaching catastrophic shifts, that will prove too much for anyone acclimated to our political culture.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Browse Alert: Democrats

Dennis Perrin: Demver -- Day Three. Looking at Glen Greenwald's blog last night, I noticed that he did a "radio" interview with Dennis Perrin, author of a short book called Savage Mules: The Democrats and Endless War. I can't recommend the interview, which mostly consisted of Greenwald trying to browbeat Perrin into admitting that Obama isn't as bad as McCain, and for that matter Gore wouldn't have been as bad as Bush, and Perrin trying his best to resist. If the art of the interviewer is to make the guest look good, Greenwald has a lot to learn, but Perrin could have made some useful points but didn't. Two probable differences between Bush and Gore are that Gore would have factored more reconstruction into war cost estimates and Gore would have been more realistic about what the US could afford. Bush handwaved the whole postwar expense in order to rig the balance sheet, not that he ever had a clue how to rebuild a country anyway -- indeed, where he got caught was in his administration's failure to handle Hurricane Katrina. Whether those factors would have made much difference in Afghanistan is something one can argue many ways about: Gore would certainly have launched that war; the initial war itself would likely have been the same, given institutional constraints; Gore probably would have made a more concerted rebuilding effort, but many of the reasons "nation building" failed were deeply structured; it's impossible to say whether Gore would have done a better job of handling the critical diplomatic relationships with Pakistan, Iran, India, and Russia. Gore might have done better in Afghanistan if he had been able to defuse the major festering sores in the middle east -- Israel and Iraq -- but his whole past history was aligned with keeping those sores festering. Again, the only good reason for thinking Gore might have done better is how badly Bush actually did. Remember, though, that before Bush invaded Iraq, the sanctions and bombing programs under Clinton-Gore had undermined Iraqi living standards possibly with a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Doing nothing in that context may have been better than doing what Bush did, but not much. But to do anything else would have required a mindset adjustment and political will that Gore (for instance) had never shown any proclivity towards. (Only by losing did he manage to free himself up to the point where now such a change seems plausible.)

On the other hand, Perrin's convention reporting takes some amusing digs at the Democrats, not least the donkey pics. The times mean that we're all Democrats now, but some sense of critical distance is still necessary. Greenwald kept pressing Perrin to admit that we would have been better off had Gore won over Bush in 2000. The obvious response is that we would have been better off still had Ralph Nader won. I watched the Bush-Gore foreign policy debate in 2000, and the only military intervention they disagreed on was Haiti -- which, by the way, Bush wound up invading to overthrow the president that Clinton had re-installed after a right-wing coup resulted in tens of thousands of refugees heading towards the US. Most of those policies Bush and Gore agreed on were dangerous and despicable and, significantly, were opposed by Nader. In foreign policy, at least, Nader was the only candidate in 2000 who offered an alternative to America's increasingly hapless imperial stance. If Gore really was a "lesser evil" than Bush, he should have made an effort to win back the Nader voters, either by showing some concern and respect for Nader's positions, or by showing that Bush was far worse than anyone imagined. He did neither, preferring to build his majority on the right, against the left. He lost his gamble, then went meekly into retirement, quickly forgetting anything he had said about fighting for his voters.

I don't mean to rub this in, but I don't see much value in backing down either. Clearly we underestimated the Bush threat. Clearly, so did the Democrats. The difference is that most Nader voters recognized what Bush was doing in real time, whereas the Democrats kept playing along, making things worse. Even now they aren't all that sure what happened to them, why, what their role in it was, let alone what to do about it. How pathetic is that? Pathetic enough that they keep blaming the people who were right all along for their half-hearted losses in 2000 and 2004.

Glen Greenwald: What's missing from the Democratic convention? Once again, the Democrats have failed to use their opportunity to educate the electorate to fully take the Republicans to task for "the sheer radicalism and extremism of the last eight years." Greenwald has a list, which starts with the trampling of the very fundamentals of American law and civil liberties that woke him from political apathy and drove him to write his little broadside, How Would a Patriot Act? One could add a long book to that list. Instead, Greenwald provides quotes from Republican speakers back in 2004, showing how pros use their convention to hack to shreds a candidate like John Kerry. The point is especially well taken given how parallel Kerry's and McCain's weaknesses are. As Greenwald points out, the Republicans are unlikely to miss their opportunity to do the same to Obama.

Looks like Gallup is showing about a 6-point bounce for Obama from the convention. Thus far that's netted a 0.7% gain over at FiveThirtyEight, nudging Nevada into Obama's column, while Ohio and Virginia are still narrowly leaning McCain (1.1% and 0.6% respectively).

I hear Al Gore gave a good speech tonight. I remember pundits going on and on about how obsessed Gore is with becoming president -- how if he lost he'd lose all purpose in life. This, of course, was from the same people who told us that Bush was so secure in himself that he'd just shrug off defeat -- the same people who told us that Bush would be a fun guy to have a [non-alcoholic] beer with.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

McCain's Challenge

I've seen a number of reports that Iraqi PM Maliki is insisting that all foreign troops, which these days are virtually all American troops, leave Iraq by 2011. I saw another report that Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, evidently still in a bad mood after the latest US air action that left 90 civilians (read: mostly women and children) dead, wants to get in on that deal. Given the growing pressure from the socalled legitimate governments of the nations Bush invaded and occupied, John McCain may be hard pressed to fulfill his campaign promise of keeping those wars going another hundred years. At least he has Georgia, Russia, and WWIII to fall back on.

Given Bush's record even before 9/11, few people remember that in the 2000 Republican primaries it was McCain who was the neocon darling, while Bush was calling for a "more modest" foreign policy with fewer or none of those "nation building" adventures Clinton kept getting into. Of course, now we can go back and parse Bush's pre-election statements more carefully, where we find occasional hints of later policy. We can track how McCain's neocon legions infiltrated the Bush administration, settling into strategic cells waiting for opportunities to offer heavy stick solutions to any and all problems that may arise -- or would inevitably arise: if war and the threat of force is your only tool for solving conflicts, no effort need be made to defuse conflicts short of war.

Some people remember how in 1964 Johnson had painted Goldwater as a dangerous crackpot warmonger -- a view that wasn't falsified but at least took on an ironic hue as Johnson spent his presidency ever more deeply mired in Vietnam. I suppose Democrats have some reluctance to do the same to McCain, but the latter's track record is even worse than Goldwater's.

Andrew Sullivan: America Against the World. I don't normally read Sullivan, but TPM quoted this, referring back to a WSJ op-ed by Lieberman and Graham. This resonated a bit more because another conservative, "Crunchy Con" Rod Dreher, had an op-ed in the Wichita Eagle this morning expressing horror at McCain's "We are all Georgians" bluster. (See below.) Sullivan: "In my view, the fear card has only one truly compelling target this election: McCain."

Rod Dreher: Sorry, We Are Not All Georgians. Quotes McCain, then scratches his head:

We are? Spare me. You couldn't find one American in a thousand who could locate Georgia on a map, but the Republican hothead who would be president is ready to bind America's sacred honor to the place. And more than our sacred honor, our military might, too.

McCain, a tempestuous Russophobe to the marrow, demanded that the United States accelerate efforts to bring Georgia into NATO, thus extending a trip wire for war with Russia to Moscow's southern border. Because, you know, having conquered Iraq and Afghanistan while barely breaking a sweat, we're rested and ready to let an adventurous Caucasus nation led by a nut drag us into World War III.

Then he takes a swing at Obama:

One would have hoped Barack Obama would meet Russia's aggression with a more balanced, realistic response. Instead, Obama worked his way into McCain's shadow, joining the call for Georgia's NATO membership to go forward. Thus did Obama prove himself to be about as useful as the congressional Democrats who, having come to power in 2006 promising to bring the unpopular Iraq war to a close, went on to give President Bush all the money he asked for to fight it.

What is it with the Democrats? Are they so afraid of being baited by the Republicans as cowards that they sign on to any foolish policy proposed by GOP jingoes?

Well, of course they are. Personally, I think Obama and Biden could have drawn a line against McCain over Georgia which would have gone far toward painting McCain as the war psycho he is, but they ducked the issue instead. Dreher goes on to quote Bacevich about no differences hetween the party standard bearers, which is comforting for the few war-weary conservatives out there. I took a look through Dreher's blog, and didn't find anything of value there. In fact, I had to dig further to convince myself that there aren't two Rod Drehers.

Glenn Greenwald: Warnings to Russia from Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. Another reaction to the Lieberman-Graham war council op-ed, with more background. One thing worth noting is that the people who keep getting identified as McCain's foreign policy team are way outside even the Republican mainstream. Speaking of which:

ThinkProgress: John McCain's War Cabinet. This probably isn't a complete listing, but it's quite a rogues gallery. Wonder where Michael Ledeen is.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Rhapsody Notes

Post filed here.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Music Week

Music: Current count 14751 [14731] rated (+20), 746 [758] unrated (-12). Not a happy music week. I've been distracted by appliance shopping, and by reading, and I did a fair amount of blogging, but didn't much feel like writing about, or even listening to, music. When I did listen, I mostly picked easy ones, piling up more than the usual Recycled Goods, plus some Rhapsody things. Probably have enough of those to post now. Didn't get my incoming unpacked, not that there was much of it.

• The Rough Guide to West African Gold (1950s-1970s [2006], World Music Network): Compiling West Africa is trickier than compiling Congo because it's so much more diverse, and the rhythms are so much more improbable; from Ghana's genteel E.T. Mensah to Senegal's afro-salsa Orchestra Baobab, with jumps to lush Nigeria and Guinea and arid Mali, another random sample of unlimited bounty. A- [Rhapsody]

Jazz Prospecting (CG #18, Part 3)

Hit the wall on jazz prospecting this week. Thought I would start with the older music, which still mostly gets shunted off to the abbreviated Recycled Goods, and that went OK. But I didn't get into the new stuff, and by the time the week was over didn't much feel like listening to anything. Wound up pulling some new non-jazz from Rhapsody, which will be good for another post. Enough here for a post, especially since I found some junk I had misfiled last week. In the malaise, didn't get the lists updated with new mail. Didn't get much, but some of it looks promising.

Tito Puente & His Orchestra: Live at the 1977 Monterey Jazz Festival (1977 [2008], MJF): A typical set by the great timbalero and his venerable orchestra, featuring signature tunes like "Oye Como Va" and "El Rey del Timbal," rhumbas and mambos, a dash of riskier Afro-Cuban jazz, and a cha cha take on Stevie Wonder. B+(*)

Cal Tjader: The Best of Cal Tjader: Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980 (1958-80 [2008], MJF): A short set from 1958 with Buddy DeFranco bebop over the vibraphonist's Latin stew, and four choice 1972-80 shots, starting with Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry teaching him how to play "Manteca." I remember going through my database once and deciding that Tjader was the most accomplished jazz musician on the list that I hadn't heard yet, so I'm far from an expert, but these cuts strike me as a well chosen primer. B+(**)

Jimmy Witherspoon: Live at the 1972 Monterey Jazz Festival (1959-72 [2008], MJF): The last of the Kansas City blues shouters, in a surly mood that could pass for spirit if you cut him some slack; his Jimmy Rushing tribute is heartfelt but not up to snuff; his praise for guitarist Robben Ford is earned but not such a big deal; the bonus track from 1959 towers above the later performance, not just because Messrs. Hines, Herman, Hawkins, Webster, and Eldridge are in the band, but they sure help. B

Shirley Horn: Live at the 1994 Monterey Jazz Festival (1994 [2008], MJF): Very cost-effective: a singer with such voice and poise a piano trio suits her best, plus she plays a pretty mean piano; just turned 60, at the peak of her fame coming off a series of well-regarded albums on Verve, she nails her whole range here -- "The Look of Love," "A Song for You," "I've Got the World on a String," "Hard Hearted Hannah." B+(***)

Dave Brubeck: 50 Years of Dave Brubeck: Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-2007 (1958-2007 [2008], MJF): Starts with Paul Desmond for three 1958-66 quartet cuts and closes with three 2002-07 quartets with Bobby Militello on alto sax -- a sense of continuity and balance unlikely in any 50-year span. Gerry Mulligan figures in between, and only one cut lacks a horn, but the unique pacing of the pianist comes through again and again. A-

Art Blakey and the Giants of Jazz: Live at the 1972 Monterey Jazz Festival (1972 [2008], MJF): Not a happy period in the drummer's career, but he plays with great physicality here, leading a ragtag crew of superstars in what could pass as a Jazz at the Philharmonic blowout; Roy Eldridge, Clark Terry, Sonny Stitt, and Kai Winding are natural jousters who offers great excitement but no surprises; the mystery is left to the troubled pianist in one of his last performances, but Thelonious Monk comps engagingly and takes a nice feature on "'Round Midnight." B+(***)

The Soprano Summit in 1975 and More (1975-79 [2008], Arbors, 2CD): Clarinetist Kenny Davern and saxophonist Bob Wilber, two impeccably backward-looking players, ran into each other in Colorado in 1972, finding common ground as a soprano sax duo dedicated to Sidney Bechet. Their summits continued through the 1970s, with occasional reunions into 2001, sometimes with pianist Dick Hyman and other kindred souls -- guitarist Marty Grosz is prominent here, but Bucky Pizzarelli also played. Dan Morgenstern picked these sessions from the archives, including one from April 1975 focusing on Jelly Roll Morton, and two non-Summit sets: a Davern trio with pianist Dick Wellstood from 1979, and a 1976 Wilber group with Ruby Braff. The album never strays from the soprano range, but lively rhythm sections make up for the lack of contrasting horns. Superb trad jazz. A-

Gene Harris Quartet: Live in London (1996 [2008], Resonance): A popular pianist in the Oscar Peterson mode with an occasional nod to Erroll Garner, not as well known in large part because he spent most of his career recording first as the Three Sounds, then in bassist Ray Brown's trio. Jim Mullen's sinuous guitar enlarges this from trio to quartet. Standards like "Blue Monk" and "In a Mellow Tone" stretch out past ten minutes because they're enjoying themselves. B+(***)

Lionel Hampton Orchestra: Mustermesse Basel 1953 Part 2 (1953 [2008], TCB): Another Swiss radio shot, with the vibraphonist's big band -- names include Art Farmer, Clifford Brown, Jimmy Cleveland, Gigi Gryce, and Quincy Jones -- doing their usual "Hey-Ba-Ba-Re-Bop": "Setting the Pace," "Flying Home," "Drinking Wine," always "On the Sunny Side of the Street." B+(*)

Dianne Reeves: When You Know (2008, Blue Note): Love songs -- "Lovin' You," "I'm in Love Again," "Once I Loved," including some treacly pop tunes and one piece of Jon Hendricks vocalese. "Over the Weekend" is probably the melodramatic worst. Two cuts flow the violins, but most are just guitar, keyb, bass, drums. George Duke produced. The exception to all the above is the finale, called "Today Will Be a Good Day" -- the only cut Reeves wrote, citing her monther for inspiration; it marches to a different beat, with Russell Malone's guitar rockish, a choice cut. B-

Rebecca Martin: The Growing Season (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): Singer-songwriter, classified as a jazz singer based on her labels, but the thin voice, light guitar, straightforward songs, and primitive arrangements all better fit the folk genre. Band here has impeccable jazz credentials -- Kurt Rosenwinkel, Larry Grenadier, Brian Blade -- but don't really do much. B

Andy Pratt: Masters of War (2008, It's About Music): Singer-songwriter, plays piano, cut his first record in 1969; had something of a breakthrough on his third album, Resolution, in 1976: Stephen Holden gave the record an incredible hype review in Rolling Stone. I got suckered into buying a copy; hated the overweening popcraft and sententious, witless songs. 32 years and maybe 15 albums later, he's still quoting Holden's review. I haven't heard any of the others, but I have to admit I recall the voice -- pretty distinctive. The arrangements are simpler here, with rhythm and voice differentiating three covers -- including a slowed down, shaded Beatles song ("And I Love Her") and a hepped up, choppy Dylan (the title cut). His originals don't stick, but they fit the flow. B+(*)

Cynthia Felton: Afro Blue: The Music of Oscar Brown Jr. (2008, Felton Entertainment): Young singer, certified with: bachelor of music from Berklee, master of arts in jazz performance from New York University, doctorate in jazz studies from University of Southern California. Based in Los Angeles. First album. Long list of musicians includes Ernie Watts, Jeff Clayton, Wallace Roney, Cyrus Chestnut, Donald Brown, Jeff "Tain" Watts, Terri Lyne Carrington; also uses vibes, harp, and violin. Bookends 12 Oscar Brown Jr. songs with two short takes of "Motherless Child." I don't think the album works. It has something to do with the chemistry between singer, song, and band, but I haven't isolated just what it is. Brown was a unique case: he followed up on the basic vocalese idea but mostly aimed at writing novelty songs, which were inevitably hit-and-miss and often even when they worked didn't fit together, novelties being what they are. Perhaps the songs can't support this much seriousness. B-

Mathias Eick: The Door (2007 [2008], ECM): Norwegian trumpet player, b. 1979, also plays guitar and vibraphone here, in a quartet with Jon Balke (piano, Fender Rhodes), Audun Erlien (electric bass, guitar), Audun Kleive (drums, percussion), plus Stian Carstensen (pedal steel guitar) on 3 of 8 cuts. First album, although he's had a lot of side credits since 2001, notably on Jacob Young's two albums. Slow, somber ambient jazz, sometimes sumptuously gorgeous, but mostly just plods along, which is fine with me. Balke makes a particularly good showing. B+(**)

Wolfert Brederode: Currents (2006 [2008], ECM): Dutch pianist, b. 1974. AMG lists one previous album. This one adds clarinets (Claudio Puntin) to piano trio. Starts with an easy-flowing rhythmic piece, a mode he returns to now and then. In between are tone poem things, where the clarinet leads. Seems simple, and probably is, but as it sinks it it's very attractive. B+(***)

Five Play: What the World Needs Now (2007 [2008], Arbors): Drummer Sherrie Maricle's small band, a quintet, contrasts with her big band, DIVA Jazz Orchestra. Both groups are all-female, more/less swing oriented. (DIVA's latest album was a Tommy Newsom tribute.) The Burt Bacharach title cut is a bit yucky but helplessly catchy. Other songs include "Slipped Disc" (Benny Goodman), "Jo-House Blues" (Toshiko Akiyoshi), "I Am Woman" (Helen Reddy). Musicians are: Jami Dauber (trumpet, flugelhorn, cornet), Janelle Reichman (tenor sax, clarinet), Tomoko Ohno (piano), Noriko Ueda (bass). The piano shines in solo spaces, the rhythm section swings, and the horns take some chances. B+(*)

Rosa Passos: Romance (2008, Telarc): Brazilian singer, has recorded more than a dozen albums since 1994, though she may be older than that -- I've heard tell of a 1979 debut album. Grew up in Salvador, Bahia. Gary Giddins, who wrote the liner notes, places her in the bossa nova tradition. Sounds a bit slower and more thoughtful to me -- no matter how slow she goes she still gets traction. Brazilian band, nobody I know, but the sax and piano stand out among the solos, and drummer Celso de Almeida plays with the subtle shiftiness you hope for in Brazilian jazz. B+(***)

Dominique Di Piazza Trio: Princess Sita (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): French bassist, primarily electric, b. 1959 in Lyon. First album, but appeared on a Gil Evans album in 1987, in John McLaughlin's trio since 1991, with Bireli Lagrene, and a few others. Trio includes Nelson Veras on guitar, Manhu Roche on drums. Di Piazza wrote 8 of 12 pieces; Roche one; the others include "Nuages." Sounds to me like the guitarist has the upper hand, with the bass woven craftily into the background, but I'm having trouble unpacking it. Veras has one album on his own. He's an attractive player. B+(*)

Bennett Paster & Gregory Ryan: Grupo Yanqui Rides Again (2006 [2008], Miles High): Paster plays piano; Ryan bass. They met in 1993 as faculty members of the Stanford Jazz Workshop, found a common interest in Latin jazz, and put out their first Grupo Yanqui album in 2001. Current group is a NYC-based sextet, with trumpet (Alex Norris), sax (Chris Cheek), drums (Keith Hall), and percussion (Gilad). This makes all the basic moves, but little of special interest emerges. B

Warren Hill: La Dolce Vita (2008, Koch): Pop jazz saxophonist, plays alto mostly, also soprano. Has ten or so albums since 1991. Plays alto with some authority. Hill also programs drum lines, plays some keyboards, and sings two cuts. The vocals are a waste, and the grooves are standard issue, bright and bouncy. B-

Emily Bezar: Exchange (2008, DemiVox): Singer, keyboardist, from San Francisco or Berkeley, has 5 albums since 1993, maybe more. AMG has her as Alt Pop/Rock, likening her to Kate Bush -- the vocal resemblance is obvious, although I find Bezar a little more idiosyncratic at times, more arch at others, and overall much less interesting. C

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

Some corrections and further notes on recent prospecting:

I erroneously identified Eri Yamamoto's Cobalt Blue as on AUM Fidelity. It was released on Thirsty Ear.

I got a couple of letters from musicians with B records -- explaining, cajoling, teasing, hoping I'll give their records another spin. Fat chance. While there are many combinations of good and bad that can sort out to B, one thing the grade notes is that I don't feel any need or reason to listen to the album again. Lack of time factors in -- especially the sense that putting more time into the record isn't going to return enough to write about. That, of course, is a guess. In JCG history, I can think of one record that I originally graded [B] that turned out A-, but there I was tentative for good reason. I can also recall one record Christgau originally graded B then returned to at year-end and re-reviewed as A-. (I had that particular record in my year-end top ten.) That that sort of thing can happen shows our fallibility, but it doesn't happen often. Most of my tentative grades wind up on target, and few shift more than one notch. On the other hand, I recognize that many records improve with familiarity. If I could really focus on records that I quickly dismiss I'd no doubt learn to like some quite a bit. But that's not how I work. What I do is more like triage, where we quickly and somewhat arbitrarily sort out who can survive and who can't. Stakes are lower. Anyone with a B record will probably get a chance to make a better one, and that's the one I'll take time to hear.

A few weeks back, I wrote a rant about Dynamod's Flash websites, which are pretty popular with musicians. They used to have a HTML mode, and still do if you follow the URL with /html/. What changed recently was that their no_flash.php redirect page didn't give you the option to view the site. I just rechecked and they've fixed that problem, offering you a link to see the HTML version. As much as I hate Flash, I don't grade records based on the artist websites. I try to put my irritations aside and say something about the music, at least in the grade.

For this cycle's collected Jazz Prospecting notes, look here.

Unpacking: Didn't get this done this week.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Browse Alert: Obama/McCain

Andrew Leonard: Obama: The big-spending fiscal conservative. Basically an intro to David Leonhardt's New York Times Magazine essay on Obama's economic programs. I bring it up again because I wanted to add a couple more comments. One is that a lot of people have become confused over markets and capitalism, especially since the Communist collapse c. 1990. Markets enable the exchange of goods and services among large numbers of uncoordinated participants with price adjustments resolving differences between supply and demand. Markets work better in theory than in practice, mostly because in theory you can assume things like perfect information and rational behavior that do not exist in the real world. The failure of Soviet command economies, along with the conservative critique of distorted and inefficient effects in our own regulated markets, has led many people to market approaches to problems that had traditionally been subjected to bureaucratic regulation -- good examples of this are the cap-and-trade schemes for managing pollution externalities and auctions for divvying up commons resources like broadcast bandwidth. These schemes wind up being attractive both to the left and to the right, at least to segments of both that are not in thrall to moral absolutes.

One reason these schemes are attractive to (at least some of us on) the left is that markets are largely separable from capitalism. If you look at pro-capitalist propaganda over the last few decades, you'll see that much of what they're saying is really just pro-market, and nowadays that's relatively uncontroversial. Capitalism itself is fundamentally about the private ownership of capital, and if you look at that carefully you'll see that capitalists more often than not are at odds with free markets: capitalists seek to limit competition, to fix prices, to obscure and bias information, to maximize rents due to ownership. You'll also notice that many capitalists have invested heavily in lobbying, using their political influence to subsidize and distort markets. Given all this, it's possible for leftists to see markets as a means to undermine the worst aspects of capitalism. One more attractive thing about markets is that they limit the overshoot problems associated with seizing political power.

For various reasons, including his University of Chicago environs, Obama is hipper on markets than any other politician I can think of. He may be too much of a believer -- Robert Kuttner and others have done important work in showing cases where markets are dysfunctional, most obviously in health care -- but he is coming closer to promising economic solutions than anyone else I can think of. This also means he's way out in front of the masses in his thinking, which is going to make it difficult to explain and sell. Just to pick one example, much of the campaign to date has revolved around gas prices. McCain has a nice, simple story: cut consumer taxes, drill more wells, build more refineries, cut back on environmental regulations, get government out of the way and let the industry and the market bring prices back to normal. Problem is, none of these things will work, for reasons it would take a couple thousands of words to explain, but so far McCain's narrative is winning, partly because it sounds plausible, and partly because it's what people want to hear. Politically, Obama has to fit his more complex, more sophisticated, more nuanced narrative into a McCain-sized sound bite. Whether he can do so or not will be the real test of his skills as a politician, but he's operating under a major handicap: clearly, he knows better.

The only real political hope I have in this debate is that, while most Americans won't be able to grasp Obama's understanding of what needs to be done, they will at least shy away from McCain's canned cluelessness. They do, after all, have Bush's example of eight years of simplistic, flattering, market-tested bullshit assertions, and all the trouble they have caused.

Jacob Weisberg: If Obama Loses. Subhead: "Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him." That's probably true, although I for one am still worried about stupidity -- a more general, but not unrelated, ailment. At FiveThirtyEight, the popular vote poll projection currently favors Obama by a mere 0.1%, a fairly steady erosion from a peak lead of about 3% in mid-June. The peak occurred shortly after Obama clinched the nomination, so he picked up a bit of the shine that winners enjoy. Since then he's been subjected to a steady drip of innuendo, especially as the right wing noise machine has coalesced around a candidate they weren't all that fond of in the first place. You can argue that Obama is either under or over expectations -- that a black Democrat is doing as well as Obama is doing wasn't necessarily something you'd predict a year or two ago. One thing that's certain is that this will get nastier. I'm reminded of the two Jesse Helms-Harvey Gantt races, which both went to the white guy by narrow margins even though Helms by then was widely regarded as an embarrassment. On the other hand, Helms didn't carry North Carolina by much -- about the same edge McCain has in the polls now.

Glenn Greenwald: The right and men who live off their second wives' inherited wealth. John McCain and John Kerry have so much in common. They were both born into established and well-connected but not-especially-wealthy families. They both enlisted into the Vietnam War, both distinguishing themselves well enough to parlay their experiences into political careers. They both went on to marry very rich second wives. They both have checkered careers of principled demagoguery combined with flip-flops on nearly every issue they were once noted for. Both managed to be nominated by their parties for president. Hopefully, McCain will join Kerry in the loser's column. Kerry was excoriated for all of these traits during his 2004 run. McCain is due the same treatment. The media has lagged way behind on McCain -- I saw one survey recently showing that McCain had received favorable treatment in 47% of newspaper articles, compared to 28% favorable treatment of Obama -- but Greenwald has dug up a set of things that right-wing pundits said about Kerry's numerous houses and outrageous wealth, on the theory that one could and should offer McCain the same treatment. Greenwald's latest book is called Great American Hypocrites, so this seems to be right up his alley.

In fairness, we should note one difference between McCain and Kerry. While Kerry has often been eager to sign up for a war, he's also been known to change his mind once his war turns into a giant fiasco. On the other hand, McCain has never seen a war he didn't lust for, and he's never changed his mind about a war no matter how badly it turned out. Kerry has at least has shown some capacity to learn from his mistakes. As his flip-flops suggest, McCain is also adaptable, but he's got a blind love for war.

Andrew J Bacevich: The next president will disappoint you. That's more than likely, of course, especially in the foreign policy realm, which has been dominated by an enduring (to use a popular DOD euphemism for permanent) bipartisan clique that seem more dedicated to each other than any actual interests most Americans share.

To judge by the cadre of advisors they've recruited, neither candidate holds much affinity for outside-the-box thinkers. Obama's "national security working group," for example, consists chiefly of Democratic war horses, including former secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher and former national security advisor Anthony Lake -- a group that is not young, not charismatic and not known for innovative thinking.

McCain's national security team features a strong neoconservative presence, including pundits such as Max Boot and Robert Kagan, along with hawkish Washington insiders such as Randy Scheunemann and James Woolsey. All figured prominently among advocates of invading Iraq; none has yet to repent. Agents of change? Not likely, unless having a go at Iran qualifies as creative thinking.

But even among Bacevich's names, there are real partisan differences. The Obama (actually Clinton) list reads "same old, same old." The McCain list, on the other hand, are not just people who followed Bush into Iraq; they're people who tried hard to lead Bush into even more wars, people who grow even scarier advising the trigger-happy McCain. Bacevich is right that the Washington establishment limits what a president can do, and he's right that structural problems like "a looming crisis of debt and dependency" undermine American power. Under these circumstances, we could do far worse than see a return to the "same old, same old" Clinton regime.

Heather Havrilesky: I Like to Watch. Part of the column concerns HBO's Generation Kill:

But the most informative and unnerving aspect of Generation Kill may be its portrayal of the ways that civilians in Iraq have been thoroughly, heavily, repeatedly screwed by our invasion. The Marines can't help those who took up arms and joined the insurrection or keep them from being assassinated by Iraqi troops, despite pamphlets that promised the U.S. would protect them. They can't help the farmers who were robbed and stripped naked (some assassinated) by Iraqi soldiers. They can't help the crowds of civilians fleeing Baghdad as the bombs are falling, and they don't help the people in neighborhoods in Baghdad who need protection from bandits robbing them at night. It's no wonder this miniseries isn't a massive hit for HBO; watching it pounds home just how impossible Iraq was from the start, and just how difficult it's going to be for us to extract ourselves from that country without leaving its people high and dry in the middle of a raging civil war.

There are many such examples. Colbert makes a big point about using non-lethal force (smoke grenades as warning shots) at a roadblock, but a few moments later a soldier panics and kills an approaching driver. Colbert's reaction is to comfort and defend the soldier. Nor is that the first time. Nearly every attempt at scrupulous restraint is screwed up by someone up or down the line, and nobody is held accountable for anything. The effect is that the de facto Rules of Engagement is made by the lowest denominator. The mentality is inevitably colonial: the worst of us is always held above the best of them.

What this proves is what I've been saying all along: Americans, or for that matter anyone else, can't go to war without producing atrocities. That much is guaranteed by the training, the camaraderie, the weapons, the pecking order, the promotion system. To enter into a war without expecting the worse is purest negligence. It is one of the things most Americans understand least about themselves.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Browse Alert

Sean Wilentz: How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party. I wish I could buy this, but with McCain virtually tied in the polls, the Republicans don't look anywhere near dead enough for me. One no doubt small but voluble segment of Bush's defectors are those who claim he lost faith with true conservatism. A larger segment think he had the right idea but just executed badly. Neither shows any evidence of learning, and both are willing to give it another go with McCain, even if they trust him less now than they did Bush in 2000. But as McCain's steady rise in the polls shows, Republicans are still able to sway voters with some of the most hypocritical nonsense imaginable.

Historian that he is, Wilentz pulls out various examples of past debacles, including the collapse of the Federalists after 1800 and the demise of the Whigs in 1854 -- obscure examples today, but right in Wilentz's prime period. In those cases the parties actually died, but for the Democrats in 1896 and 1980 and for the Republicans in 1932 the parties merely struggled on in a lesser role, preserved in their geographical redoubts. That at most is what may still happen in 2008. The Republicans will still hang on to their hard core, because the hard core hasn't learned any better.

Wilentz isn't much of a political theorist, but he does touch on some important history:

Shortly after the attacks of September 11th, Rove informed a meeting of the Republican National Committee that he fully intended to make the War on Terror a partisan issue, charging that the Democrats could not be trusted to keep the nation safe. The White House's thorough politicization of a war crisis -- without parallel in modern American history -- would continue over the weeks and months to come, from Republican campaign ads to sudden announcements of elevated terrorist alerts by Homeland Scurity, seemingly whenever the president's poll ratings began to dip. In the midterm elections of 2002, barely a year after September 11th, public anxieties helped the Republicans win back the Senate and expand their majority in the House by eight years.

This worked even more improbably in 2004, mostly through the trick of keeping the war going, and continuously taunting the Democrats with their lukewarm support/opposition.

Despite his disastrous mismanagement in Iraq and his attacks on civil liberties at home, Bush finally managed to win the popular vote [in 2004]. Although his margin in the final tally was the slightest ever for a successful presidential re-election, he immediately announced that he had gained the political capital he needed to pursue his radical agenda. In only a matter of months, however, the bottom began to fall out.

Nothing fails like failure. The deepening quagmire in Iraq, coupled with reports that the administration had relied upon false as well as questionable evidence to justify the original invasion, soured the public's mood -- and led a few commentators, including some high-profile conservatives, to dissent from the conventional wisdom. According to George Will, the Bush presidency's crusade in Iraq had produced "a torrent of acrimony about the dubious inception and incompetent conduct of a war that ecame perhaps the worst foreign-policy debacle in the nation's history."

Bush's failures were well in evidence by 2004, but his supporters rallied to the cause anyway, a case of willful self-delusion the likes of which we hadn't seen since Nixon's 1972 rout. Republican interests held firm in 2004 because facing what Bush had done honestly would have cost them everything. The same interests are rallying around McCain for the same reasons -- money, political careers, ideological quirks.

Under DeLay's leadership, Congress became a virtual political extension of the White House. Until 2006, there was barely a peep of criticism from either Republican caucus as the Bush administration passed regressive tax cuts, invaded Iraq, mismanaged the occupation and vastly augmented executive authority on shaky legal grounds. DeLay also happily pursued numerous financial as well as political adventures. Chief among them was the K Street Project, designed to enforce absolute deference from Washington lobbying firms to the Republican regime by compelling them to hire party activists in exchange for favorable legislation and loosened regulatory oversight for major corporate clients. By systematically replacing the bipartisan lobbying ranks with GOP hardliners, DeLay attempted to make Republicans the only party with whom corporate America would be allowed to do business -- a partisan power grab of breathtaking audacity.

While DeLay is out of Congress now, it isn't clear that his (and Rove's, and many others') projects to bias non-governmental groups -- lobbyists, corporations, media, etc. -- to perpetuate Republican power have failed. As the Democrats gain power, the lobbies will become more bipartisan, but they may also grow mostalgic for the culture of corruption the Republicans thrived in.

David Leonhardt: How Obama Reconciles Dueling Views on Economy. Before getting into Obama's curious sense of economics, a little preliminary background worth quoting:

The fact that the economy grows -- that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one -- no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems to have ended without family income having risen substantially. Most families are still making less, after accounting for inflation, than they were in 2000. For these workers, roughly the bottom 60 percent of the income ladder, economic growth has become a theoretical concept rather than the wellspring of better medical care, a new car, a nicer house -- a better life than their parents had.

This runs against the fundamental American religion: the notion that things are getting better, especially from each generation to to the next. This has happened because Republicans have made no effort to check against growing inequality -- indeed, deliberately or not, they've promoted growth inequality. Obama intends to nudge against inequality by raising income taxes on incomes over $250K while reducing income taxes on everyone else. That hardly qualifies as redistributionist, but it starts to make the point.

Leonhardt quotes Obama: "Reagan's central insight -- that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing that pie -- contained a good deal of truth." I agree with that, but don't give Reagan any credit for it because he didn't do anything with the insight. For Obama, it seems to be a way of rebaselining Democratic politics, which isn't exactly how Leonhardt puts it:

Today's Democratic consensus has moved the party to the left, and on issues like inequality and climate change, Obama appears willing to be even more aggressive than many fellow Democrats. From this standpoint, he's a true liberal. Yet he also says he believes that there are significant parts of Reaganism worth preserving. So his policies often involve setting up a government program to address a market failure but then trying to harness the power of the market within that program. This, at times, makes him look like a conservative Democrat.

There is some gimmickry in Obama's market propositions, but they offer a way around the bureaucratic inefficiencies derided by Reagan, and also around the corruption and dysfunction Reagan favored.

When Reagan was elected, in 1980, tax rates on top incomes were so high that even liberal economists now say the economy was suffering. There simply wasn't enough of an incentive for rich people to start new companies or expand existing ones, because so much of their profits would have gone to the federal government. Someone making the equivalent of $5 million in 1980 -- in inflation-adjusted terms -- would have paid a combined federal tax rate of almost 60 percent, according to research by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, two academic economists.

I can't speak for "even liberal economists" but this argument is patent bullshit. If true, nobody would have started a business in the US between 1935 and 1980 -- obviously, many businesses were started in that period. Where tax policy may have had an effect, it was because capital gains were taxed much less than income, so it made more sense to build long-term value in business. With Reagan there was less long-term incentive, which resulted in much profiteering as companies were plundered through LBO and similar deals. While such deals made some people extremely rich, they added virtually nothing to the productive economy.

I don't advocate restoring New Deal marginal income tax rates, but I also don't find them much of a disincentive for the rich to get richer. What I would do is make unearned income tax (capital gains, interest, dividends, profits, gifts, inheritance) steeply progressive over an individual's lifetime: it would be easier to get that first million, but extra millions would be taxed more and more heavily, with an especially stiff inheritance tax at the end -- it is, after all, the one tax that never incentivizes anyone. (E.g., people don't become more death-prone when estate taxes drop, or less when they rise.)

There is a good deal more in this piece. One thing that is clear is that Obama has a more nuanced understanding of economics than almost any politician I can think of. I doubt that will help him much during the campaign, since nuance (or for that matter logic) isn't something that people seem to want in their leaders. Whether it helps him as president isn't totally clear either. The two presidents who, at least relative to their time, seemed to understand economics best were probably Hoover and Carter, neither of whom was judged much of a success. On the other hand, Obama is much closer to the right answers here -- and not just much closer than McCain, who's only clue is that rich people seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

A lot of people are saying nice things about Joe Biden today. He seems to be pretty well regarded by just about everyone who finds themselves to the left of McCain and to the right of Noam Chomsky. For example, David Brooks, who's unlikely to wind up supporting Obama, endorsed Biden. Chuck Hagel said nice things about him. So did Hillary Clinton. But also most of the leftish bloggers I read had a good word for him. I don't have anything to add in that vein. I found his handling of the Georgia war to be irresponsible and provocative, by any standards other than those set by John McCain. The best I can say for his advocacy for partitioning Iraq is that it was unhelpful. I don't exactly know where he stands on Israel/Palestine, but one guess should suffice. Still, I don't think he's on the ticket to consult on policy. Hopefully he's there to chew up McCain's ass. How well he succeeds will make a lot of difference.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Browse Alert: Limits of Power

Alex Kingsburg interviews Andrew Bacevich: How America Is Squandering Its Wealth and Power. Andrew Bacevich is getting a lot of press for his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Excpetionalism, and it looks like it's turned into a surprise bestseller. When I looked last night, it was #6 on Amazon's bestseller list, but it was also out of stock, with more copies promised for delivery Sept. 6. One thing that I think is driving these sales is that with his conservative credibity intact, he's willing and able to slam both McCain and Obama for continuing the mindset that got us into this mess. Most of the interviews I've seen or read he's pretty even-handed about this, which is unfair in the sense that McCain's way off the scale, but it does say something that hardly anyone -- with a major league soapbox, anyway -- is willing to say, which is that Afghanistan has gone as bad as Iraq and isn't any more amenable to fixing with our imperial war machine. I'm not sure how far he goes with this -- his attachment to the military gets him arguing that we don't have enough soldiers to deal with such problems, not that no number of soldiers would make a difference because the way US soldiers train and operate is itself dysfunctional. But it's good to remind Obama that the bad-Iraq/good-Afghanistan war isn't a clean or valid analysis. (Given that Kerry, in particular, argued the same thing in 2004 doesn't give it much of a track record, either.)

Sample quote:

Now we're seven years into a war that our country supposedly supports and yet we are running out of soldiers. Why is that? The nation refuses to correct our domestic dysfunction on energy, consumption, entitlements, and endless credit. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said something like, "We need to change the way we live, which is unacceptable, or we can change the way they live." That reflects a very familiar strand of thought in American foreign policy back to the Native Americans, which says that "they" will always have to change to accommodate our way of living.

Note that his laundry list of dysfunctions doesn't include the US military itself. One problem with blaming all this stuff on domestic consumption is that it implicitly assumes that there is a rational economic case for imperial domination: that fighting is necessary to sustain out standard of living. Bacevich argues something else: that our standard of living's not worth the fight, and he's not wrong in that regard. Someone like Joseph Stiglitz should take a look at the overall balance sheet for our military empire abroad. I think there's very little that would show up on the top line.

Simon Jenkins: In Europe, as in Asia, Nato leaves a trail of catastrophe. Glad someone said this:

Nato is useless. It has failed to bring stability to Afghanistan, as it failed to bring it to Serbia. It just breaks crockery. Nato has proved a rotten fighting force, which in Kabul is on the brink of being sidelined by exasperated Americans. Nor is it any better at diplomacy: witness its hamfisted handling of east Europe.

Helena Cobban: NATO's Supply Lines in Afghanistan. Pop quiz: how does NATO deliver basic supplies like gasoline to the troops in Afghanistan? They can airlift them, but most things are a lot cheaper by ground transport, if you have a safe route. For Afghanistan, that means: 1) Pakistan; 2) Iran; 3) Russia and Uzbekistan. Given that (1) is problematical and (2) is out of the question, this doesn't seem like a good time to burn your bridges on (3) over a tin-pot dictator in the Caucasus. Pakistan isn't just a matter of iffy politics in the post-Musharraf era. All the Pakistan routes run through Taliban strongholds:

Peter Marton of the [My] State Failure Blog gave some important background as to why NATO felt the need to reach out to Russia for the supply line agreement back in March. Basically, the Taliban had just torched a convoy of 100 ISAF-bound fuel tankers as they waited at the border-crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Between 40 and 50 of the tankers were reported destroyed and several people killed.

In another post, Cobban points out:

NATO succeeded precisely because it succeeded at deterring. It didn't succeed at fighting, because thanks to the success of the deterrence it never had to fight.

Of course, deterrence works best against foes who didn't intend to attack you in the first place, which turns out to be a better explanation of NATO's success.

A third post (actually, the first in sequence) goes deeper into why NATO has no practical reason to exist any more.

Helena Cobban: The Outlook on a Triple-Superpower World. And this is Cobban's summary of the no-longer-unipolar world. This all ties back to Bacevich's book, which while presumably focused on the decline of US power is fortunately less specific. One thing we've found more and more over the past few decades is that power in itself doesn't get you very far.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Browse Alert: Anthrax

Tom Engelhardt: Six Questions About the Anthrax Attacks. The revelation that Bruce Ivins, conveniently suicided, was the lone anthrax terrorist ties up another loose end before the clock runs out on the Bush administration. Or does it? One thing is that it reminds us of a set of events that had a powerful effect at the time, but have been largely forgotten since. I clearly remember some talking head on TV shortly after 9/11 but before the first anthrax attacks arguing that it was not a question of if but only of when the first bioterror attacks would occur. In the 7 years since then, the only such attacks occurred a few days later, almost on cue. Moreover, we now know that they weren't done by the people who did 9/11; rather, they originated from within the US military.

Today, it's hard even to recall just how terrifying those anthrax attacks were. According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That's the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror -- and from those attacks would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war, lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, fall into the hands of terrorists.

And yet, by the end of 2001, it had become clear that, despite the accompanying letters, the anthrax in those envelopes was from a domestically produced strain. It was neither from the backlands of Afghanistan nor from Baghdad, but -- almost certainly -- from our own military bio-weapons labs. At that point, the anthrax killings essentially vanished . . . . Poof! . . . while 9/11 only gained traction as the singular event of our times.

The six questions:

1. Why wasn't the Bush administration's War on Terror modus operandi applied to the anthrax case? I.e., why didn't "the gloves come off"; why weren't the suspects rounded up, tortured, etc.

2. Why wasn't the U.S. military sent in? Terrorism is an act of war, isn't it?

3. Once the anthrax threat was identified as coming from U.S. military labs, why did the administration, the FBI, and the media assume that only a single individual was responsible?

4. What of those military labs? Why does their history continue to play little or no part in the story of the anthrax attacks? After all, the anthrax attacks would not have been possible except for all those taxpayer dollars investing in making weapons-grade anthrax.

5. Were the anthrax attacks the less important ones of 2001? They killed fewer people than 9/11 and didn't have the visual impact, but they were far more repeatable and scalable, and they could have easily been directed at anyone anywhere in the country.

6. Who is winning the Global War on Terror? Well, for one thing, US bio-defense laboratories -- the source of the anthrax attacks -- have swelled from a few hundred people to some 14,000.

I have another question here: why did the attacks stop? One reason would be that they had done their job, in which case their purpose would have been limited by their effects. The lone madman theory doesn't fit very well with the discipline to halt an operation that had been successful but would have gained risk for diminishing returns.

I don't think much of any 9/11 conspiracy theories, but this anthrax matter sure smells.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Browse Alert

Paul Krugman: The Great Illusion. A gloomy take on the Georgia war, arguing that we take the threat of nationalism and war too lightly, as did cosmopolitan Europeans up to the eve of World War I -- a period like our own where globalization was more prominent and productive than during the following decades of depression and nationalist protectionism. Krugman writes: "And today's high degree of global economic interdependence, which can be sustained only if all major governments act sensibly, is more fragile than we imagine." As much as one would like to, one can't argue that the Bush administration has been acting very sensibly, at least in the lead-up to the war and the kneejerk propagandizing that has followed. In this regard, the most dangerous trend has been to treat oil supplies as imperial spoils, which in turn sets a bad example for Russia and China, much as Britain's and France's colonial possessions set a bad example for Germany and Japan.

Billmon: Anatomy of A(nother) Fiasco. Not on the Georgia war itself so much as the political maneuvering in the US that set Georgia up for the fall. In particular, shows how a succession of undebated, unreasoned, clandestinely approved Congressional bills set out to expand NATO all the way to Russia's border. And the list of names on those bills not only includes the usual McCain-Lieberman suspects but names like Biden and Obama.

Personally, I see it more as a case of the bureaucratic imperative run amok: The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War -- the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it's simply an afterthought -- a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.

I see now that Biden has returned from his myth-finding trip to Georgia with the recommendation that we salve their wounds with a cool billion dollars in aid. Don't have the details, but Georgia had spent almost a billion on US and Israeli military gear that the Russians have just turned into smoldering junkheaps. I don't mind sending aid, but it's hard to imagine any investment in the world that would be more counterproductive than rearming Georgia. I'd also make any aid contingent on Georgia recognizing and setting up normal diplomatic relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, so it is clear where Georgia's borders are and that the grudges and ambitions are behind them. Unfortunately, the bipartisan line in the US is wedged in the Cold War.

Anatol Lieven: The West Shares the Blame for Georgia. As I was just saying.

Tony Karon: Russia Has Stopped Retreating: That's the Message for America. Sums up:

The Russian campaign was designed to signal an end to what Moscow sees as the humiliation of the post-Soviet period and the onset of a new strategic balance, which makes some of the threats brandished by Bush and Rice sound almost comical. Russia's action had jeopardised its relationship with the US, Mr Bush warned, and Ms Rice added that they would have "profound implications" for the relationship. Well, yes, that was exactly what Moscow was trying to do -- break the mould of a relationship that Russia no longer sees good reason to continue because it has required Moscow to accept being treated as a second-rate power that can be ridden over roughshod.

Andrew Bacevich: The Lessons of Endless War. A second piece excerpted from Bacevich's new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. I've ordered a copy of the book, so we'll see. I watched Bacevich interviewed by Bill Moyers the other night, and there were a couple of things I didn't like. One is that Bacevich still sees a lot more value and need for the military than I do -- he's a military man, and still thinks of himself as a conservative, where I despised the military way before I started thinking of myself as a pacifist. The other issue is more technical: he makes a big point of criticizing America's materialistic way of life, arguing that we have to effect a change of lifestyle before the big political problems can be dealt with. That may be true, but he also argued that we weren't always like that, that before the Vietnam era the American economy wasn't built on domestic consumption. The latter point is untrue: the US economy from 1900 on, but especially in the 1950s and 1960s, was spectacularly driven by domestic consumption: single-family houses, cars, appliances. The difference was that before 1970 Americans were buying American products, including gasoline. After 1970 all that changes, except for the consumption habits.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Music Week

Music: Current count 14731 [14703] rated (+28), 758 [769] unrated (-11).

• Jean Grae: Jeanius (2008, Blacksmith): Not sure how much of this I got -- what, e.g., the details are on the abortion lament, which I would just as soon she hadn't brought up in the first place. So I'm reacting more to the overall vibe. She's smart and tight, although this is a bit overwound. Also plagued with guests, who start to get on my nerves. B+(**)
• K'Naan: The Dusty Foot Philosopher (2003-05 [2008], IM Culture): Rapper, from Somalia via Canada; b. 1978, got out of Mogadishu in 1991 as the country was falling apart -- explains his childhood ended in gunfire at age 10. Most pieces hook first with the music, some of which is identifiably African, most not. Could be the record of the year. A
• Bill Medley: Damn Near Righteous (2007, Westlake): The surviving Righteous Brother gets big projection support, lines up a set of unlikely covers -- "Lonely Avenue," "In My Room," "Just Like a Woman," "Rock My Baby" -- and lets them boil over. Still has a voice, but it's rougher, and alone. B-
• Nigeria 70: The Definitive Story of 1970's Funky Lagos (1964-80 [2001], AfroStrut, 3CD): Not exactly too much, but it is a lot to digest: two music CDs are built around stars Fela Anikulapo Kuti and King Sunny Adé but they also pack in less than extraordinary funk tracks, the sort of thing you might find on US obscurities comps -- the sort of thing you wouldn't have given a second thought to back in the day but now that those days are gone brings them back, albeit with a twist. Third CD is make or break: the soundtrack to Nigeria 70: The Documentary, mostly snatches of interviews -- Ginger Baker figures prominently -- with short history lessons, snatches of music, and a poem. Obviously, they should have included the DVD, but having complained about most of the DVDs I've seen included, I can't see penalizing them for that. A-
• Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump: Original Heavyweight Afrobeat Highlife & Afro-Funk (1970s [2008], Strut): Back in the 1970s Nigeria seemed like the cradle of Afropop, with highlife bands maturing into complex juju and all sorts of hybridized beats, ranging from mundanely funky to hypnotically transcendental, but the largest country in Africa since fell into obscurity; how rich the 1970s were is attested by how easy it seems to be to assemble a seductive compilation from obscurities -- they don't even sound like lost gems, just everyday relics of a golden age. A- [Rhapsody]
• Putumayo Presents: Acoustic France (1994-2007 [2008], Putumayo World Music): Singer-songwriters working in the low-key folkie idiom, strumming guitars, spieling chansons; the best known is first lady Carla Bruni, who makes little impression and is immediately eclipsed by Keren Meloul, who does business as Rose. B
• Putumayo Presents: Quebec (1993-2007 [2008], Putumayo World Music): More mild French-language folk-pop, mostly from the ranks of unknown newcomers this label regularly taps, with one token cut from La Bottine Souriante, a 1990s group that got some notice, and stands way ahead of this pack. B

Jazz Prospecting (CG #18, Part 2)

Something of a letdown this week, but not as big a drop as my usual post-column break. Probably listened to as much non-jazz as jazz, but certainly not a big edge. Record of the week (possibly year) is K'Naan: The Dusty Foot Philosopher -- Canadian hip-hop artist, originally from Somalia; been through more than I can imagine, coming out much better than I'd expect. Maybe there is hope for the world after all.

The Stephen Anderson Trio: Forget Not (2008, Summit): No recording date. AMG thinks this was released in 2004, but booklet refers to later events, and cover is copyright 2008. A lot of google noise on Anderson's name, but as best I can figure he studied at UNT, got a Ph.D., and teaches at UNC-Charlotte. Plays piano. This is his first album, although he plays on a couple of albums under bassist Lynn Seaton and one with drummer Joel Fountain. Wrote 7 of 8 songs here, the exception "For Sentimental Reasons." Jeff Eckels plays bass, Fountain drums. Solid stuff, thoughtful, logical, forceful -- he's not shy about power chords. Extensive liner notes, with lots of references to clasical composers. B+(**)

Chip Shelton & Peacetime: Imbued With Memories (2007 [2008], Summit): No birth date given, but if he was in high school and college (Howard, studying dentistry) in the 1960s, he must be close to 60 now. Recording career starts in the 1980s. Mostly plays flute, along with piccolo and a little sax. Band relies on guitar (Lou Volpe, sweet and tasty), keyboards, and extra percussion, with a persistent groove. In other words, this is smooth jazz, maybe with a little higher aims and less cash in prospect. Jann Parker guests on the obligatory radio vocal cut. C+

Jim Shearer & Charlie Wood: The Memphis Hang (2008, Summit): Shearer is based in New Mexico, where he teaches his instrument: tuba. I've seen references to a "tuba jazz" deal with Jim Self, but AMG doesn't credit him with any records other than this one. He cites Sam Pilafian ahead of Howard Johnson and Bob Stewart on his MySpace influences list, so figure he likes old timey jazz. Also dabbles in some classical, playing with the Roswell Symphony Orchestra. Wood is a Memphis guy, filed under blues by AMG. He plays organ and sings; has a group he calls New Memphis Underground. Strikes me as a possible Memphis answer to Dr. John. Harmonica player Billy Gibson gets a "special guest" credit on the front cover. Some surprises in the song set here, starting with a vocalized version of Monk's "Well, You Needn't"; a couple of Andy Razaf lyrics; Joni Mitchell's words to "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat"; some other oddities. Need to play it again. [B+(**)]

The David Leonhardt Trio: Explorations (2008, Big Bang): Pianist, from Louisville, spent time in New York, based now in Easton, PA. Claims 35 years experience; has 12 self-released records out since 1991, including Jazz for Kids and an Xmas album. This is a trio with Matthew Parrish on bass, Alvester Garnett on drums. Half originals, half covers: four rock songs from the late '60s (or maybe 1970), one each from Jerome Kern and Horace Silver. The rockers, especially "Sunshine of Your Love," come off like crufty old metal, loud and clunky. The originals don't offer a lot more. B

Eri Yamamoto Trio: Redwoods (2008, AUM Fidelity): Pianist, from Osaka, Japan, arrived in New York in 1995; cut three trio albums on Jane Street (presumably her own label) 2001-04, then fell in with bassist William Parker, recording his excellent album of piano trio music Luc's Lantern and joining his Raining on the Moon group for Corn Meal Dance. Meanwhile, she now has three more albums on AUM Fidelity, a 2006 trio called Cobalt Blue, and two records this year -- this new trio and a set of duets called Duologue. The trio here repeats from Cobalt Blue: bassist David Ambrosio and drummer Ikuo Takeuichi (also on her three Jane Street albums). All original pieces. It all seems very measured and sensible, nothing that really sweeps you away, but each cut with its own bit of interest. Choice cut: "Dear Friends." B+(**) [Sept. 9]

George Colligan: Runaway (2007 [2008], Sunnyside): Pianist, mainstream to postbop, although he's developed a sideline on Fender Rhodes that qualifies as semi-fusion. Is still under 40, but has nearly 20 albums since 1996: prodigious, very talented, has dazzling speed and dynamics ("Ghostland" is a good example here), a lot of range. Don't think he's every made a weak record, but this one wanders more than I'd like: four cuts on Fender Rhodes and/or synths, five cuts with guitarist Tom Guarna, two with Kerry Politzer vocals, one with Politzer taking over piano while Colligan plays trumpet. (He previously played drums on Politzer's piano trio album.) B+(*)

Aaron Parks: Invisible Cinema (2008, Blue Note): Pianist, from Seattle, reportedly 24, first album, although he has a number of side credits since 2003: Terence Blanchard, Christian Scott, Kendrick Scott, Ferenc Nemeth, Tim Collins, Nick Vayenas, Mike Moreno, 3 or 4 more I don't recognize. Obviously, some folks think he's a comer. After two plays I don't think much one way or the other. Most of the cuts are quartet with Moreno on guitar, Matt Penman on bass, and Eric Harland on drums, with the guitar wrapping it all together, the piano largely reduced to a rhythm role. (Some guitar-piano combos work the other way around, which is more usual on pianists' albums.) [B+(*)]

Jeff Barone: Open Up (2008, Jazzed Media): Guitarist, b. 1970 Syracuse, NY; studied at Ithaca College and Manhattan School of Music; based in NYC; second album. Most of the cuts here are in a group with Ron Oswanski on organ and Rudy Petschauer on drums, so much so that the record often falls into a slick groove bordering on smooth. There are horns, too, which ultimately prove superfluous, although Joe Magnarelli opens on trumpet like it's his own album. I like the exceptions better, including a solo piece called "Quiet Now." Ends with an alternate take of "Falling in Love With Love" which holds up better than the main take, possibly because it's set off from the flow, or maybe because it comes off less cluttered. B

Todd Herbert: The Tree of Life (2007 [2008], Metropolitan): Tenor saxophonist, Flash-only website and not much else, so I'm short on background. Mainstream player -- label website says he "takes John Coltrane as a point of departure" but he sounds more like Dexter Gordon to me. Leads a quartet with Anthony Wonsey (piano), Dwayne Burno (bass), Jason Brown (drums) -- Wonsey gets a lot of space and makes good use of it. First album was pretty good, and this one is better. B+(**)

Willie Nelson/Wynton Marsalis: Two Men With the Blues (2007 [2008], Blue Note): Recorded live under from two dates organized by Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center empire. Neither man has any real claim to the blues, but it was only an organizing idea in the first place; in any case, the album reverted to Nelson's songbook, with two originals ("Night Life" and "Rainy Day Blues"), two Hoagy Carmichael standards Nelson has done before ("Stardust" and "Georgia on My Mind"), "Bright Lights Big City," "Caldonia," "Basin Street Blues," "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It," "Ain't Nobody's Business," and a Merle Travis joke called "That's All" -- not sure how many of those Nelson has recorded before, but the answer could be all ten. Marsalis provided the band, framing Nelson's silky voice with polished brass. A quickie, the sort of trivia that Nelson routinely tosses off as proof of his genius. B+(***)

Curlew: 1st Album/Live at CBGB (1980-81 [2008], DMG/ARC, 2CD): NYC group, founded in 1979 by saxophonist George Cartwright, with Tom Cora (cello, indingiti), Nicky Skopelitis (guitar), Bill Laswell (Fender bass), and Bill Bacon (drums), who gives way to Denardo Coleman for the CBGB disc. Cartwright plays alto, tenor, and soprano (listed in that order). The group has gone on to record 6-8 more albums, mostly on Cuneiform. AMG styles them as: experimental rock, experimental, avant-prog, avant-garde, modern creative, jazz-rock, avant-garde jazz. I don't hear anything particularly rock-ish, but haven't heard their later albums. The more obvious reference is Ornette, who had started working with electric guitar a bit earlier, but when my wife walked in on this, she speculated that it was Anthony Braxton -- her general-purpose definition for ugly sax, but not inappropriate here. Will look into this further. [B+(***)]

Bill Cole's Untempered Ensemble: Proverbs for Sam (2001 [2008], Boxholder): Another live recording from the Vision Festival, belatedly recycled for the rest of us. Sam is alto saxophonist Sam Furnace, present here, but deceased in 2003. The Proverbs are from the Yoruba of Nigeria. Cole was born 1937 in Pittsburgh, where he got BA and MA degrees; got his Ph.D. at Wesleyan, writing his dissertation on John Coltrane, and taught from 1974 until retiring in the 1990s at Dartmouth. He's written books on Coltrane and Miles Davis. His first album under his own name appeared in 2000; AMG lists 3 prior side credits: Jayne Cortez, Blaise Siwula, and Ken Colyer. Cole plays exotic wind instruments, mostly squeaky double reeds from Asia -- Chinese sona, Indian shenai and nagaswarm, Ghanaian flute, didgeridoo. He has a half-dozen albums, either duos or Untempered Ensemble. The latter, as well as many of the duos, include William Parker, who most likely developed his own taste in exotics from Cole. Also present here: Furnace (alto sax, flute), Joseph Daley (baritone horn, tuba, trombone), Cooper-Moore (diddly bow, rim drums, flute), Warren Smith (percussion), Atticus Cole (more percussion). A-

Mauger: The Beautiful Enabler (2006 [2008], Clean Feed): I have no idea where the group name comes from. The group is an alto sax trio, led by Rudresh Mahanthappa, with Mark Dresser on bass and Gerry Hemingway on drums. The latter have played much together, not least in Anthony Braxton's 1980s quartet. All three write. And while the young saxophonist shows poise in navigating this tricky material, it's worth concentrating on the mastery in the rhythm section. B+(***)

Mark Dresser/Ed Harkins/Steven Schick: House of Mirrors (2006 [2008], Clean Feed): Bassist Dresser is by far the best known of the three, but Harkins, who plays various trumpets and mellophone, is co-author of the eight pieces. Harkins has a previous album on Vinny Golia's 9 Winds label, although may far understate his experience. Schick plays "multiple percussion." Trumpet always appears somewhat muddled here, never bright or brassy. One result is that the record has little sonic presence. Knowing Dresser, that's probably not the only one. B

California Guitar Trio: Echoes (2007 [2008], Inner Knot): Three guitarists, none from California except in their minds: Hideyo Moriya (Tokyo, Japan), Paul Richards (Salt Lake City, UT), Bert Lams (Brussels, Belgium). Started playing together in 1991 and have a dozen albums now. This is the first I've heard. All covers, with Pink Floyd providing the title cut, and someone named Ludwig Van Beethoven raided twice. Most of the songs sound tolerably New Agey, with little variation from "Bohemian Rhapsody" to "Tubular Bells." Two come with vocals, a mistake. C+

No final grades/notes this week on records put back for further listening the first time around.

For this cycle's collected Jazz Prospecting notes, look here.

Unpacking:

• Wolfert Brederode: Currents (ECM)
• Anat Cohen: Notes From the Village (Anzic): advance, Sept.
• Mathias Eick: The Door (ECM)
• Satoko Fujii Ma-Do: Heat Wave (Not Two)
• Lafayette Gilchrist: Soul Progressin' (Hyena)
• Marshall Gilkes: Lost Words (Alternate Side)
• Scott Hamilton & Friends: Across the Tracks (Concord)
• Nicole Henry: The Very Thought of You (Banister)
• Ava Logan: So Many Stars (Diva Vet Music): Sept. 1
• Bill Moring & Way Out East: Spaces in Time (Owl Studios): Oct. 7
• Milton Nascimento and Jobim Trio: Novas Bossas (Blue Note)
• Adam Niewood & His Rabble Rousers: Epic Journey Volumes I & II (Innova, 2CD)
• The Phil Norman Tentet: "Totally" Live at Catalina Jazz Club (MAMA, 2CD)
• Aaron Parks: Invisible Cinema (Blue Note)
• Putumayo Presents: Acoustic Arabia (Putumayo World Music): advance, Sept. 2
• Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog: Party Intellectuals (Pi)
• David Sánchez: Cultural Survival (Concord Picante)
• South Florida Jazz Orchestra (MAMA)
• The Stryker/Slagle Band: The Scene (Zoho)

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Stuck in Europe

I noticed that in the Recent Reading list over left Geert Mak's In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century is about to slip off. That's a shame for two reasons. One is that I haven't finished the book yet. I got up to page 732, a little more than 100 shy of the end, before I had to put it down to deal with some books that I had picked up on 14-day loan from the library. I'm still in that pile, dealing with them as briskly as I can, and I've just picked up Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which seems likely to be one of the more important books of the year. Also have some things that I bought that I'm itching to get into, like James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, and Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. (Also on order are: Arno J Mayer: Ploughshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel, and Andrew J Bacevich: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. So I have plenty on my plate.

The other reason it's a shame is that I've simply gotten more pure pleasure out of Mak's book than any other book I've read this year. It's a travel book across Europe during the fin de siècle year of 1999 to a series of spots selected for what they reveal of the serial history of Europe from 1900 on. Part of the book consists of interviews with witnesses and actors, as interesting as Studs Terkel. Part is a survey of what survived and what did not. Most is relevant history. It's not purely sequential, especially in the thickly eventful interwar years. And it doesn't get to everywhere -- I would have expected a bit on the pre-1914 Balkan Wars. (Post-Tito Yugoslavia might still be in the last 100 pages.) But it's a magnificent book, revelatory, a real delight. I can hardly wait to get back to it.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Browse Alert

Paul Krugman: Know-Nothing Politics. Been meaning to mention this one, since it's high time someone said this:

And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I've been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the "party of ideas," have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don't mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don't mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism -- the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise -- has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: "Real men don't think things through."

Examples follow, but barely scratch the surface. Another quote:

Let's also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. "Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man," declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. "He's not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world."

Well, he's put that notion pretty definitively to rest. There's more to the Republicans than just dumb; they're also aggravated and belligerent, beneficiaries of what one pundit called "voting to kill." Neither of these traits stand them at all well to cope with much less solve the sort of problems we face -- not least of which are the problems their cults of ignorance and action have put into play.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Browse Alert: Georgia Again

CNN: Georgia signs cease-fire with Russia. Picked this link up from TPM, which headlined it: "Rice Slams Russia, Announces Cease-Fire." Rice flew first to Paris, picked up the cease-fire papers Sarkozy had negotiated with Georgia and Russia, and delivered them to Georgia's president Saakashvili, who had no alternative but to sign them. Evidently not even Rice had the stomach to wait out the birth pangs of a new Caucusus. The consolation prize for their little war was to let Saakashvili and Rice sing a chorus denouncing Russia's vile act in attacking plucky little Georgia. Saakashvili also got in a dig at NATO for turning down Georgian membership in NATO, spoiling his chance to start WWIII. He also said, "Never, ever will Georgia reconcile with the occupation of even one square kilometer of its sovereign territory," to which Rice added, "We support Georgia's sovereignty; we support its independence; we support its territorial integrity; we support its democracy and its democratically elected government." The article includes similar quotes from Bush, including this gem: "bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century." (He should know.)

It should be clear by now that this whole line of posturing is based on a huge and monstrous lie. This war was started by Saakashvili with a nighttime artillery attack on civilian neighborhoods in the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. It is not clear whether this was intended to panic Ossetes into fleeing the country, but can be viewed as an attempt at ethnic cleansing -- Georgia's ability to hold South Ossetia would certainly be helped by having fewer Ossetes living there. Russia responded to Georgia's aggression, quickly driving Georgia's troops out of South Ossetia. Russia also sent troops into Abkhazia, which Georgia still claims, and entered into Georgian territory to attack positions Georgia had used for launching the war, including occupying the nearby town of Gori. As far as I've been able to tell, Russia has not attacked the Georgian capital of Tbilisi or the US-built pipeline that runs across Georgia.

By continuing to characterize this war as Russia's initiative, Bush and Rice are making it harder for both sides to back down and reduce the tension level. In fact, Bush is still adding to the tension, not just by his rhetoric but by announcing agreement with Poland to stage his ridiculous anti-missile system there. That deal had been held up in face of Russia's vehement objections, so one is tempted to argue that provoking Russia has played into Bush's hands, even if it wasn't much help for Georgia.

Michael Dobbs: 'We Are All Georgians'? Not So Fast. The Washington Post finds someone who actually knows something about this subject. He points out the Ossetians' longstanding fear of Georgian rule, and how Russia is their only support for autonomy. However, he also notes: "Playing one ethnic group off against another in the Caucasus has been standard Russian policy ever since czarist times." And he notes that Putin's high regard for South Ossetian autonomy is at odds with his brutal suppression of Chechen autonomy. He also takes a rare critical look at the US:

The Bush administration has been sending mixed messages to its Georgian friends. U.S. officials insist that they did not give the green light to Saakashvili for his attack on South Ossetia. At the same time, however, the United States has championed NATO membership for Georgia, sent military advisers to bolster the Georgian army and demanded the restoration of Georgian territorial integrity. American support might well have emboldened Saakashvili as he was considering how to respond to the "provocations" from South Ossetia. [ . . . ]

In the meantime, American leaders have paid little attention to Russian diplomatic concerns, both inside the former borders of the Soviet Union and farther abroad. The Bush administration unilaterally abrogated the 1972 anti-missile defense treaty and ignored Putin when he objected to Kosovo independence on the grounds that it would set a dangerous precedent. It is difficult to explain why Kosovo should have the right to unilaterally declare its independence from Serbia, while the same right should be denied to places such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

He then points out that the US is virtually powerless in this matter, "overextended militarily, diplomatically and economically [ . . . ] the American policeman has been loudly lecturing the rest of the world while waving an inreasingly unimpressive baton." Actually, I don't think any amount of military power works here: South Ossetia and Abkhazia have revolted every time Georgia came after them, and no further aggression is going to change that. The only way Georgia wins is through genocide, and that's no victory. On the other hand, give them real independence, and see how long they stay in love with Russia. If forever, so be it. If not, Russia would then have no more claim than Georgia does now. What the US lacks here isn't military, diplomatic, or economic power. It's common sense, decency, and respect for others.

Moon of Alabama: War Sells. Bernhard notes that his hit count has more than doubled since the Georgia war started. He wonders, "Is there a human desire to read about inhuman self?" There's certainly nothing like a war to get your attention, especially one as senseless and stupid as this one -- I don't think I've read or written as much in such concentration since the last time Israel invaded Lebanon. Still, Bernhard has earned his hits. The piece includes links to 11 posts he wrote over the last week, and that skips the one attacking Juan Cole's Salon piece. (Pace Cole, before acting militarily, Russia did appeal to the UN, where evidently the US and UK refused to condemn Georgia or demand a cease fire.) His pieces have been refreshingly sharp and informative -- more pro-Russian than I would venture, but there's plenty of counterweight elsewhere (and sometimes, as with Cole's piece, appears to be gratuitous and wrong, something dropped in to provide a false sense of balance).

Mark Almond: Caucasus Conflict. An Oxford historian who evidently has spent a good deal of time in Georgia. He was asked by several UK publications for comments on the conflict, and noted that his views "usually differed from the 'experts' who had not been there." He publishes three such pieces in this post, providing three slightly different takes depending on how you post the question. For instance, on how this fits into the Cold War framework:

The clash between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, which escalated dramatically yesterday, in truth has more in common with the Falklands war of 1982 than it does with a cold war crisis. When the Argentine junta was basking in public approval for its bloodless recovery of Las Malvinas, Henry Kissinger anticipated Britain's widely unexpected military response with the comment: "No great power retreats for ever." Maybe today Russia has stopped the long retreat to Moscow which started under Gorbachev.

On the question of how this could blow up into WWIII, he picks a different historical analogy: Sarajevo, 1914. Little countries can't do much damage, unless big countries let themselves get tangled up in their fights, which properly speaking they shouldn't. He quotes Kissinger again: "Great powers don't commit suicide for their allies." Still, the neocon's blind faith in good-vs-evil is something to worry about.

Worse still, western backing for "equip and train" programmes in Russia's backyard don't contribute to peace and stability if bombastic local leaders such as Saakashvili see them as a guarantee of support even in a crisis provoked by his own actions. He seems to have thought that the valuable oil pipeline passing through his territory, together with the Nato advisers intermingled with his troops, would prevent Russia reacting militarily to an incursion into South Ossetia. That calculation has proved disastrously wrong.

He also has some things to say about Georgia's vaunted democracy, which elected Saakashvili with a suspicious 97% of the vote:

Last November the opposition took a thrashing for demonstrating in the street. Dissidents get locked up in crowded jails rife with torture and tuberculosis. Political opponents are packed in the same cramped cells as hardened criminals -- a Soviet way of punishing dissent.

Almond has written about Georgia before. The following is from a November 2007 post, in a section called "The Ceausescu of the Caucasus?":

Rather like Ceausescu towards the fin-de-regime, Saakashvili's nationalist rhetoric has intensified. The Romanian dictator suddenly demanded Russia return Moldova to its rightful owners in 1989, Abkhazia and South Ossetia have become ever more frequent subjects of provocative statements and sudden visits by helicopter to the border zones.

Saakashvili has made increasingly bizarre statements. At the end of August, he assured the media that the Mother of God had personally intervened in Georgian affairs more than once! For instance, the Virgin had acted to thwart a grenade attack on the equally devout George W. Bush when he was in Tbilisi 2005, and again She had prevented a stray missile from exploding earlier in August.

He also has another post, Caucasian Bloody Circle, where he reprints a piece he wrote in 2004, titled "US Blinded by Love for Saakashvili." It's worth reading, especially for the US's long track record of promoting nationalist discord in Georgia -- and for how completely Democrats as well as Republicans have contributed to it. It's like a death wish -- which right now strikes me as a fair description of McCain's politicking on this issue.

Postscript: Didn't want to get started on yet another Georgia post (there have been 5 in the last week), but couldn't resist passing this one along, on the Charles Krauthammer column I mentioned a while back.

Matthew Yglesias: Krauthammer: Russia Must Leave Georgia by 2014 . . . Or Else!. Just read it. And note that he didn't even use the Charlie Wilson's War bit.

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Browse Alert: Georgia, Again

The Georgia war keeps producing interesting posts. For starters, it gives the US right an excuse to nostalgically rehearse the Cold War and all those old arguments about how expansionism and the desire for world domination is encoded in Russian genes. (Actually, Zbigniew Brzezinski got into that act as well. He had developed into a reasonable critic of Bush's Middle East fiascos, he still reacts viscerally to Russia.) Evidently, such rhetoric still plays well in the echo chambers of the mainstream media, but it isn't as convincing as they think. Moreover, a gaping chasm has opened up between what that rhetoric implies and what any American with a lick of sense -- which remarkably includes Bush, Rice, and Gates -- is willing to do. But most entertaining of all is a wingnut who may (or may not) have helped to start the war, and who certainly thinks it's good news for his campaign: John McCain. Until this week, McCain's intimate ties and obsessive interest in a small country on the Asian side of the Caucusus Mountains was just plain weird, but now it reveals much about his worldview.

Matthew Yglesias: What Was McCain's Advice to Saakashvili?:

Mark Kleiman wonders: "If McCain has really been talking to Saakashvili 'daily,'" what advice has McCain been giving him? Did he reinforce the urgent advice of the State Department and the White House that Saakashvili avoid allowing himself to be provoked into giving the Russians a pretext for invasion, or was McCain encouraging the imprudence that handed Putin the victory we and the Georgians are now trying to recover from?"

McCain should answer this question directly, but his record strongly suggests the possibility that he was encouraging imprudence. And why shouldn't he? Most pundits seem to think that foreign crises provoked by bad conservative policies are politically beneficial to conservative politicians and, certainly, the McCain campaign sees things that way and is trying to milk the crisis for all it's worth politically. Under the circumstances, doing what he can to promote international instability seems canny.

Media Blindly Accept the Notion That Russia-Georgia Conflict Is Good for John McCain. As Mark Halperin puts it, it "allows him to talk tough on foreign policy." Evidently that's always a winner with the "voting to kill" crowd.

Matthew Yglesias: Overhyping Georgia. Fair summary, pointing out how out of whack the rhetoric in the US has become. The worst case assumption, that Putin is reverting to Tsarist Russia's empire building, is especially unlikely:

Vladimir Putin, unlike the leader of the United States, is apparently shrewd enough to recognize that military occupations of foreign territories have high costs and scarce benefits.

More than a few people, including Putin himself, have pointed out that US rhetoric about the evils of invading other countries is hypocritical. They invariably fail to point out is how much of themselves US Cold Warriors project onto others. No other nation can even contemplate exercising hegemony. The two go hand in hand. What we fear in others is what we in fact are the ones doing, but cannot see because we're so effective at lying about it.

Juan Cole: Putin's War Enablers: Bush and Cheney. This is a shotgun blast of moral equivalences, but is oddly short of specifics. The most important insight is in pointing out how much Russia suffered during the 1990s when communism was replaced, to the bemusement of the west, by racketteering on a massive scale. Those hard times were tolerated by many as the price of liberation from communism, but they were also resented, which left Russia and many other ex-communist lands ripe for nationalist backlash -- the worst example to date being Serbia, which Russians seem to feel an emotional affinity to. Cole is an expert on Iraq, but not on Russia or its environs. Someone more knowledgeable could put a lot more detail into play here: Bush and Cheney enabled this war not just by setting a bad example; they've done many specific things to push Russia into opposition and to provoke Russia to action, and this is what they've got to show for it.

Robert D Kaplan: The Advantage of the First Move. I haven't read Kaplan's two recent books extolling the "imperial grunts" of the US armed forces, but it seems likely that there is something in them on US military support for Georgia since 9/11. Georgia is one of those places Kaplan wanders through in his travel books, and it's just the sort of far=flung imperial outpost that most excites Kaplan. So I dug around and came up with this new piece, where we find a glum Kaplan as much as conceding defeat (unappologetically, of course):

But in the aftermath of Iraq -- a war I supported -- military force is discredited to an extent rare in American history. President George W. Bush and his successor now have no other choice but to play a weak hand well.

Even now, he's too optimistic: they're much more likely to play that weak hand badly.

Moon of Alabama: Pressing Russia? How?. Reviews a column Charles Krauthammer wrote up on "How to Stop Putin." It's the usual package of boycotts and rudeness, including the too subtle suggestion that Bush send Putin a copy of Charlie Wilson's War, to remind the Russians that if they try to occupy Georgia we can "make them bleed." First problem is that there is no actual evidence that Putin wants to occupy Georgia -- the goal there is to defend the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which currently includes busting up Georgia's military so badly they'll shy away from launching another attack. Second, Putin might get a bit too literal and consider arming the resistance against the current occupier of Afghanistan.

One problem I do see is that the more Russia is attacked (verbally) over Georgia, the more they're inclined to villify Saakashvili as a genocidal war criminal, which would ultimately put them into the same prison of rhetoric that the elder Bush got into in likening Saddam Hussein to Hitler. The latter remained a festering sore until another Bush traded it in for something much worse. I don't doubt that you can make a war criminal case against Saakashvili, but Russia would be best off to let the Georgian people and their vaunted democracy take care of him.

Helena Cobban: Sarkozy's Ceasefire Text, Georgia's Future. The latest of a series of good posts on Georgia, including a bit more on the Krauthammer piece. I'll just add that the "humiliating" treaty that Finland signed with the Soviet Union in 1947 worked out very well for Finland. At the time Finland was one of the poorest countries in Europe; now they are one of the richest. They converted a position of being on Russia's border into a credible position of neutrality, which allowed them to avoid the costs of being on either end of the Cold War. Significantly, with Finland posing no threat, the Soviet Union made no further efforts to encroach on its affairs, including trade policy. Such an outcome for Georgia (minus Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which should no longer be considered part of Georgia) would strike me as a good deal.

One more note: There's been a lot of talk about how oil fits into this equation, especially the pipeline through Georgia from Azerbaijan to Turkey, which was built as a way to bypass Russia (and for that matter Iran and Iraq) in shipping Caspian Sea oil to the west. As far as I know, the Russians haven't shown any interest in that pipeline, nor do I expect them to. This strikes me as another case of Americans projecting our own hopes/fears onto others.

I've also seen people blame the whole war on the oil bottleneck, which has certainly done much for Russia's current accounts. Such arguments are neither here nor there. Although it is true that it will be awkward to actually punish the world's largest oil producer, especially given how sensitive our free markets are to changes in oil production levels, or to Russia possibly jiggering their $500 billion in foreign currency reserves (like selling off US treasury debt).

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Browse Alert: Georgia Again

Helene Cooper/Thom Shanker: After Mixed US Messages, a War Erupted in Georgia. George Bush in particular, and the Republican Right in general, are in power largely because of their skills at rhetoric and manipulating public symbols, regardless of their practical consequences and import. This works basically because the media focuses on what people say, not on what they do, and they enforce a debilitating, semi-religious orthodoxy, castigating anyone who says anything out of line. Problem is: what sounds right often isn't right. There are plenty of examples of this. A classic one is how Ronald Reagan ran in 1980 by attacking Carter for signing away the Panama Canal, which the US has famously "stole fair and square." He ran on it. He won. He did nothing at all about it once he won. Even when his VP and successor, George Bush I, invaded and regime changed Panama, he didn't give a second thought to recovering the Canal. Everyone in Washington understood that the Panama Canal issue was nothing but bullshit rhetoric.

Unfortunately, some foreigners don't understand that US politicians don't really mean three-fourths of the crap they say. Take Georgia's demagogic nationalist president Mikheil Saakashvili, for instance. He ran for office on a campaign of taking back Abkhazia and South Ossetia, by force even. He made his pitch to Bush, and Bush loved it: just his kind of rhetoric, plus some troops for Iraq, plus arms business for US and Israel. Only problem was that Saakashvili thought he should do what he kept talking about doing. How foolish was that?

The notable thing about this article is that it highlights the fact that even Condoleezza Rice knew the difference between bullshit rhetoric for public consumption and common sense in the real world -- but, of course, she wouldn't let the latter get in the way of the former. Just a month ago Rice went to Tbilisi to play up the Georgia-US friendship in public, but reportedly also to cool Saakashvili's heels in private:

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice's aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. "She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table," according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

But publicly, Ms. Rice struck a different tone, one of defiant support for Georgia in the face of Russian pressure. "I'm going to visit a friend and I don't expect much comment about the United States going to visit a friend," she told reporters just before arriving in Tbilisi, even as Russian jets were conducting intimidating maneuvers over South Ossetia.

I picked up this link from WarInContext, where the next article linked to was titled "U.S. puts brakes on Israeli plan for attack on Iran nuclear facilities." Hopefully, Israelis will be smarter about keeping rhetoric and reality separate. Still, the only way to be at all sure is to start saying things that we know, especially things that we've learned the hard way, instead of just going on spouting bullshit that makes us feel good assuming nobody it's not intended for will take it seriously anyway.

But then if Bush, McCain, et al., did that they'd have nothing to run on.

I see from TPM that McCain claims he talks to Saakashvili daily, that McCain aide/lobbyist Randy Scheunemann has signed a new deal to represent Georgia as a foreign agent in the US, and that McCain's Senater buddies Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman are off on a junket to Georgia. McCain's crawling pretty far out on this particular limb, maybe to the point of conducting his own unelected foreign policy. That is, of course, something Republicans have less compunction about doing than Democrats -- cf. Reagan's negotiations with Iran to dissuade them from releasing US hostages prior to the 1980 election, or Nixon's use of Henry Kissinger and others to keep LBJ from cutting any peace deal with Vietnam before the 1968 votes were cast. Still, this is pretty brazen, undermining his own party's sitting president, and not even on the eve of an election.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Browse Alert: Georgia

Anatol Lieven: Analysis: Roots of the Conflict between Georgia, South Ossetia and Russia. Good background piece. Lieven first made a name for himself covering the Russian-Chechen war, so this is his turf. Others have noted that Georgia briefly broke free of the Russia in 1918-21 as testimony to their longstanding desire for independence, but this is the first piece I've seen to note that when Georgia did so, South Ossetia tried to break free of Georgia.

Mikhail Gorbachev: A Path to Peace in the Caucasus. This, too, is pretty clear on roots:

The roots of this tragedy lie in the decision of Georgia's separatist leaders in 1991 to abolish South Ossetian autonomy. This turned out to be a time bomb for Georgia's territorial integrity. Each time successive Georgian leaders tried to impose their will by force -- both in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia, where the issues of autonomy are similar -- it only made the situation worse. New wounds aggravated old injuries.

Also, on the current crisis:

Over the past few days, some Western nations have taken positions, particularly in the U.N. Security Council, that have been far from balanced. As a result, the Security Council was not able to act effectively from the very start of this conflict. By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its "national interest," the United States made a serious blunder.

Fred Kaplan: Lonely Night in Georgia. Meanwhile, the hysterical reactions of US pundits and politicians should be called into question.

A few counterquestions for those who rise to compare every nasty leader to Hitler and every act of aggression to the onset of World War III: Do you really believe that Russia's move against Georgia is not an assertion of control over "the near abroad" (as the Russians call their border regions), but rather the first step of a campaign to restore the Warsaw Pact in Eastern Europe and, from there, bring back the Cold War's Continental standoff? [ . . . ]

The same question can be asked of the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly called Saakashvili on Sunday to assure him that "Russian aggression must not go unanswered." We should all be interested to know what answer he is preparing or whether he was just dangling the Georgians on another few inches of string. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security Council, "This is completely unacceptable and crosses a line." Talk like that demands action. What's the plan, and how does he hope to get the Security Council -- on which Russia has veto power -- to approve it?

There's a giant disconnect here on the right: between their rhetoric, conditioned as it is on the fantasy that whatever the world's one and only superduperpower says goes, and America's manifest inability to enforce the right's dumbest and most grandiose ideas.

Josh Marshall: Dangerous an