Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 15

March Madness time for the Davids and Goliaths of college basketball | Michael Tomasky

NCAA basketball's major tournament pits poodles against rottweilers, with the poodles often sneaking off with the booty
• Download our March Madness bracket

Let's start with the most basic question: why are Americans obsessed with college sports in the first place? It started with football, American football of course, although the event that we generally agree was the first college football game – Rutgers v Princeton, 1869, won 6-4 by the Scarlet Knights of Rutgers – more closely resembled rugby than the game Americans worship today.

As so-called "land-grant" universities expanded during that era, nearly every school raised a football team. By the 1920s, there were powerhouses, some of the same schools that still dominate today: Southern California, Texas, Nebraska, Michigan in a good year. By the 1940s, the NFL existed but was an afterthought. The four biggest sports in America were baseball, boxing, horse racing and college football. Not necessarily in that order.

College basketball didn't take, really, until ... well, until black people were allowed to play: Bill Russell, who became the emblematic Boston Celtic (work ethic plus intelligence), at the University of San Francisco in the 1950s. Wilt Chamberlain at Kansas right after him. Then the epochal victory in 1966 by the all-black Texas Western over the all-white (extremely and aggressively all-white) University of Kentucky. And the integrated teams of the great coach John Wooden of UCLA, who won an ungodly 10 championships in 12 years up through the mid-1970s.

The Wooden era coincided perfectly with the television era. The game exploded. Then came cable in the 1980s: now, for the first time, a fan in Alabama could watch on an otherwise listless Tuesday evening Villanova play Georgetown, and his counterpart in Ohio could watch Arizona play Gonzaga. The nation became wired for hoops.

And that's when March Madness first went stratospheric in the public imagination. The largest major sports tournament in America. The only tournament we have in which the small poodles have their chance at the rottweilers, in the early rounds, and the poodles pull off wins with amazing frequency, which is the source of the excitement. There are four brackets of 16 teams each, in which #1 plays #16, #2 plays #15, and so on. A 16 has never beaten a one, but 13s beat fours and 12s beat fives with startling proficiency. If you decide to pay attention, pay the most this Thursday and Friday, when these David-Goliath match-ups take place.

This is where the office pools, which have become so ubiquitous in the United States these past 15 years (helped by the internet, which makes nationwide pools possible), are made or broken. If you pick the right early upset, you get major points. And it's all about the early choices, because upsets become less likely as the rounds wear on. Last year's "Final Four", the great climactic weekend in late March-early April, featured two No5s (Butler, Michigan State), a two (West Virginia), and a one (Duke, who won). Having two fives in the Final Four means the tournament has worked its intoxicating magic.

This year? What, you expect me to describe 140 years of sporting history and give you the hot picks, all in 700 words? The overlooked team are clearly the San Diego State Aztecs, who stand at 32-2 right now but get no respect because no good basketball has ever come out of San Diego. The overvalued team appears to be Florida, but they're so overvalued that the experts are all saying stay away. Eggheads will be happy to note that the experts like Princeton to travel through a round or two – Princeton, its role in that first football game notwithstanding, possesses a decent basketball tradition.

Gun to my head? OK then. Louisville, a four seed, in the South-west region. The Aztecs, a two, in the West. Pitt and Ohio State, No1 seeds in the South-east and East, respectively. Ohio State beats Louisville in the championship. Oh – and you have to pick the total points in the final game as a tie-breaker, so I'll go with 151. But trust me: you could as easily have never seen a college basketball game in your life, throw darts or choose on the basis of the uniforms or nicknames, and do better than I just did. And that is the precise reason why it's such a great thing.

• Download our March Madness bracket

US sportMichael Tomasky
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Arrogant stupidity is the best kind | Michael Tomasky

I'm sure you read about presidential candidate (all but declared) Michele Bachmann's recent New Hampshire speech:

A blunder of historical fact - not proportions - tainted Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's first visit to New Hampshire this weekend. Speaking to students and conservative activists in Manchester, the Tea Party activist encouraged the Granite state to be proud of its role in the Revolutionary War.

"You're the state where the shot was heard 'round the world at Lexington and Concord," Bachmann said at an event organized by the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire.

The Lexington and Concord in question are in Massachusetts. Marxist Kenyan empath though I may be, I've actually been there to pay homage, right at the very bridge.

But I guess to Bachmann, the fact that I've done that merely proves that I hang around with liberals in Massachusetts, which I admit does happen to be true. She showed over the weekend that she knows her stuff. I mean, not about history, about which she obviously knows very little, as she evinced a few weeks ago in a comment that I decided to let pass at the time:

Speaking at an event sponsored by Iowans For Tax Relief, Bachmann hailed the "different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions" of the early European settlers in America, adding that the "color of their skin" or "language" or "economic status" didn't preclude them from seeking happiness.

"Once you got here, we were all the same," she said. "Isn't that remarkable? It is absolutely remarkable."

The Minnesota Republican called slavery an "evil" and "scourge" and "stain on our history."

"But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States," Bachmann added, claiming "men like John Quincy Adams... would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

Slavery was an institution in the United States for generations after its founding in 1776, largely due to a compromise between the founders that established African-Americans as three-fifths of a person. Several of the founding fathers themselves held slaves.

The interesting thing about that "error" was the indication that Bachmann has probably convinced herself of a sunny narrative that acknowledges that slavery was a "scourge" but minimizes its effects by slapping a Hollywood ending on it. That's more offensive in its way than the mere fact that she was historically inaccurate.

Now, with this inaccuracy, as I said above, she knows her stuff; knows how to play the game. The surefire remedy for historical ignorance is to insult liberals, to wit:

Soon after the gaffe, Bachmann, who is seriously exploring a 2012 presidential bid, responded on her Facebook page saying, "So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!"

Really? But New Hampshire voted for the Kenyan too. Anyway, she understands right-wing grievance politics very acutely. She's better at it than *, because with *, the movement grievances get too tangled up with her own grievances. With *, it's always about her. With Bachmann, it's never personal. And to her constituencies, historical ignorance actually helps, because it merely "proves" that she doesn't accept history as put down by those America-hating you-know-whats. Alas, she's going far. It's conceivable - conceivable, he said - she could win the nomination, I think.

Michele BachmannUS elections 2012Michael Tomasky
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God bless the United States of Kardashica | Michael Tomasky

I read over the weekend that the Kardashian family, famous chiefly for the sex tape of the one of its number pictured above, made $65 million in 2010.

Now, this is what's going on in the United States. For all I know, the Kardashians are lovely people and give two-thirds of their income away. And I'll leave the moral distemper about what it says about our society (and this should bother conservatives who are already preparing to defend her on free-market grounds) that a person can parlay a graphic sex tape into untold riches to others to whom that argument is more suited.

My only argument is that $65 million is way out of whack. Sure, let them get rich. Give them $6.5 million, or even $10 million, or a little more (remember, we're talking last year, not net wealth, so ten mil sounds like plenty to me). I'm aware that there are about eight of them, so they have to divvy it up. But honestly...$65 million?

I'm not against them per se. I am against a free market that pays people that amount of money for practically anything. And this is a new thing in society - the last 25 years or so. Look at how out of whack things have become:

· Percentage of U.S. total income in 1976 that went to the top 1% of American households: 8.9.
· Percentage in 2007: 23.5.
· Only other year since 1913 that the top 1 percent's share was that high: 1928.
· Combined net worth of the Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans in 2007: $1.5 trillion.
· Combined net worth of the poorest 50% of American households: $1.6 trillion.
· U.S. minimum wage, per hour: $7.25.
· Hourly pay of Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, for an 80-hour week: $27,034.74.
· Average hourly wage in 1972, adjusted for inflation: $20.06.
· In 2008: $18.52.

That's just a little taste. There's a lot more if you click through to the site, extremeinequality.org. For example: "data from tax returns show that the top 1% of households received 8.9% of all pre-tax income in 1976. In 2007, the top 1% share had more than doubled to 23.5%." I'd call that "nearly tripled," but whatever.

It's untenable. It's a scandal. The American people would think so if only someone told them. Yes, they would. Remember this survey from last fall, which was not yet another poll but an academic study of more than 5,000 American's attitudes. This is the one showing that the top 20% own 85% of the country's wealth; that on average, survey participants thought the top 20% owned 58% of the country's wealth; and as for the percentage the top 20% should hold, people felt it should be around 33%. Even Republicans said 35%, and added that the lowest 20% deserved about 9% of the wealth (this quintile actually owns about 1/30th of that, or .3%).

It's pretty sickening. And we have one political party pushing as hard as it can every day to make things worse, and another political party that kindasorta pushes back on this but not really very hard, and a media that have failed completely to make Americans know the facts.

US domestic policyMichael Tomasky
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The editing of that NPR video | Michael Tomasky

I am kind of ashamed of myself in retrospect that I took the James O'Keefe NPR video at face value last week and wrote a post without thinking to myself, hey, let's hold off here for a minute until we have a chance to see what the full context is, how this thing was edited. We know O'Keefe and his confederates have a track record in that regard.

Sure enough, it emerged last week that the editing on that video of former NPR exec Ron Schiller talking with fake representatives of a fake Muslim nonprofit was not only misleading but in journalistic terms outright corrupt. A web site called the Blaze did the chapter and verse on this, and you can read it here.

It's interesting that The Blaze was founded by Glenn Beck in 2010. I don't know what to make of that. That they're honest conservatives, maybe?

Anyway, I wouldn't say the fuller, unedited video completely and totally exonerates Schiller. He still says several things a representative of a straight news outfit should not say to people he doesn't know. And after all, he didn't bother to fight for his job, or even his new job at the Aspen Institute, which evidently fell apart last week.

However, it can be true that Schiller spoke somewhat out of school and that O'Keefe's doctoring of the tape was completely corrupt and unethical. The most startling thing to me: when Schiller called the tea party "seriously, seriously racist," he was very clearly describing the views of two high-level Republicans he'd spoken to who voted for Obama. Very clearly. You can say well, he was endorsing those views, and maybe he was, but that doesn't change the fact that the person who edited this tape was completely without scruple.

Yes, yes, this doesn't change the fact that NPR acted stupidly here, in case you think it makes you a genius to point that out. But let's hold our horses every time these right-wing sting videos come out. I vow not to stroll into those propellers again, folks, and if somehow I do, please call me out. And NPR is still 20 times the news-gathering outfit that any conservative outlet I can think of is.

NPRMichael Tomasky
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Wisconsin: a pivotal moment for American unions | Michael Tomasky

With the Republicans' dodge to deprive public employees of collective bargaining rights, the dispute enters a critical phase

Now, that's some kind of hardball out of the Wisconsin state senate last night. After weeks during which the governor said the collective bargaining bill was needed for the sake of getting the budget on track, the Republicans passed it under a rule stipulating that it could have no budgetary implications, just so they could get around the requirement for a quorum.

Which means they were able to pass it without any Democrats – but in doing so, exposed their true motivation, which is to weaken unions.

Does the bill as passed, in fact, have no budgetary implications? That seems like a tough case to make from what I've read. The version the state senate passed Wednesday night has the following provisions:

• changes to the earned income tax credit;
• a $79m reduction in the lapses required from the DOA secretary;
• $165m in debt restructuring;
• increasing funding for MA programmes to close funding gap through end of fiscal year;
• the sale of state power plants;
• increasing funding for Corrections to close gap through end of fiscal year;
• reallocation of group health and pharmacy benefit reserves;
• audit of dependent eligibility under benefit programmes

Those sound pretty fiscal to me. A friendly judge could well rule that since none of the above constitutes a net negative impact, it's all right. We will have to see.

And we will see. The constitutionality of this bill will surely be challenged up to the Wisconsin supreme court. And lo and behold, guess what's going on there? From David Dayen of Firedoglake:

"[All this] makes the election for a supreme court justice slot on 5 April very interesting. They are basically partisan elections in Wisconsin. Republicans currently have a 4-3 edge on the court, and one of the incumbent Republicans, David Prosser, a former speaker of the Wisconsin state assembly, is the one up for re-election. His opponent is a deputy US attorney, JoAnn Kloppenburg. So a win for Kloppenburg would shift the balance of power on the court. This goes down in less than four weeks. In addition to essentially being a vote of no-confidence in Scott Walker and his party, that vote on 5 April could go a long way to deciding if this bill gets overturned in court."

Imagine the money and ground troops pouring into that election over the next three weeks.

And outside of the courtroom, there's public opinion. There seems little doubt that Walker and his party will take a short-term hit in the polls, given the broad majorities in previous polls that wanted him to negotiate a compromise with the Democrats. But it still may be tricky for the unions to win this battle over the long term.

There is much discussion now in the state of strikes. A strike is always a last-resort, high-risk tactic. I was on a union negotiating committee once. We and management were pretty far apart until the eleventh-and-a-half hour. It looked bad. But no one wanted a strike. You're giving up your paycheck, and you just never know which side the affected populace is going to blame. This might be especially so with regard to teachers, since parents tend to have rather strong feelings about anything involving their kids.

Strikes would be a huge roll of the dice. They might be better-off loading up on Kloppenburg and hoping for the best from the courts. There are several grounds on which the new budget bill might be nullified, according to the Firedoglake report.

This is class warfare of a sort we haven't seen in the US in a long time. Walker and his party have gone too far. Polls will affirm this in the next few days. This could be a pivotal moment in trade union history in the US. No, it is a pivotal moment.

Which way will the pendulum swing? The union movement has a great opportunity here: it will never look more sympathetic to your average person than it does right now. The goal must be to keep it that way.

WisconsinUS unionsRepublicansUnited StatesUS politicsMichael Tomasky
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David Broder's faith | Michael Tomasky

It's been fashionable in liberal circles for a number of years now to snark at David Broder, the Washington Post political journalist who just died at 81. The case came down to the idea that blame for America's increasingly livid and polarized political climate could and properly should be apportioned to both sides. Liberals, your correspondent included, object strenuously to this idea. I read many a Broder column thinking: yes, you are correct that things have become toxic, and this is lamentable, but how can you really think...

But I have also always been aware that Broder is a giant of the trade. He did something few people ever do: he changed the field he worked in. He redefined the scope of what it meant to be a political journalist. He covered Washington, to be sure, but he went outside Washington all the time. He cared deeply about state and local governance and showed his audience why it was important to do so. He attended meetings of the American Political Science Association to keep up with the latest literature, and he attended county fairs to hear regular people talk.

When Broder came into the game in the 1950s, most political journalism wasn't much to crow about. It may not be today, but it's better: it's more professional, and standards are at least acknowledged, even if often breached. In addition to that, politics was a very different beast. There were hardly any presidential primaries to speak of when Broder started. Women and blacks and others had no voice. As politics opened up, political journalism did too. Broder was part of a cadre of journalists, Jack Germond notably among them, who documented these changes, and they most certainly made journalism better and more rigorous while they were doing it.

So there was the pre-Broder era, and the Broder era. We've been in the post-Broder era for some time now in the sense that figures like Broder do not enjoy the unquestioned authority that they once did, back when The Washington Post op-ed page had few competitors or critics. Anybody who did something for nearly six decades made some mistakes. Broder's errors were mostly errors of faith. As the Post's Bob Kaiser gracefully notes in the piece linked to above, Broder confessed after Nixon's resignation that he "had failed earlier to appreciate what Nixon had done - failed even to accept that he could have committed those crimes."

He just didn't want to believe that about a president. That's naive, but it's kind of touching. Fast forward to Bill Clinton, whom Broder famously disparaged for having...well, here' s the quote: "He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place." I was plenty mad when I read that at the time, but in retrospect I can see how that, too, was about an ideal, about faith in the presidency and the men who occupy that office.

Most people, and most reporters, don't have that faith anymore. For all the times Broder got X or Y wrong, it's still a shame in many ways that this is no longer the case. The post-Broder era has its downsides, too.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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The NPR fiasco | Michael Tomasky

Let me start off here by stipulating that Ronald Schiller, the ex-NPR executive whom James O'Keefe conned in the now-famous episode that came to light yesterday, sounds like a sanctimonious fellow.

The line I try to walk, and I'm sure our conservative commenters will thunder that I fail at this on a daily basis, is this. While I think conservative ideas are really terrible for the country and I have a good go at the leaders who espouse them, what I try hard not to do is say condescending things about regular rank-and-file people. Believe it or not, I hate the sound of that liberal condescension, and I see why it gives liberalism a bad name. I sneer at She Who Must Not Be Named and at others. But they're leaders. I try not to cast judgmental aspersions on regular people.

So this guy Schiller sounded pretty annoying, to say nothing of the fact that one should certainly be more circumspect around people you've never met. And for criminy's sakes, can't the NPR people Google a so-called "group" that wants to give them $5 million to determine whether they're real and legitimate?

However, in Schiller's behalf, it should be said that he and NPR refused the money. Shouldn't that be sort of the bottom line here?

Now NPR has, ah, accepted the resignation of the other Schiller, Vivian, no relation, who was the CEO. So O'Keefe, who pled guilty to felony charges in Louisiana, remember, gets another liberal scalp.

I'll just caution conservatives here against concluding that Mr. Schiller's personal views surely reflect those of everyone at NPR. As I've written before, I know some folks who work there, and they are to a person very careful about expressing views of any sort. My own view of the network ("the system," I think they call it) is based on a distinction between social-cultural liberalism and political liberalism. NPR's presentation is pretty well shot through with the former - they'll do sympathetic stories about gay soldiers or what have you til the cows come home, and the cultural coverage and even sports coverage assumes a broad-minded and non-judgmental listenership. But when covering hard-core politics, I think they play it pretty straight and indeed sometimes bend over backwards to be Not Liberal. Conservatives will find this hard to believe, but in the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, NPR could make liberals tear their hair out.

Finally, if the funding is cut, it's the small stations that will go, and it's precisely there that NPR provides its most invaluable service. I'm pretty familiar with West Virginia Public Radio. The news reporting done by WVPR journalists is very high quality and serves the state well. They report stories that wouldn't be covered if they weren't there. And West Virginia still has, surprisingly, a pretty vibrant media culture: Charleston, a town of just 200,000 or so, still has two daily newspapers. States where that doesn't exist that lose their public radio operations would lose something valuable if state affiliates took a big hit.

United StatesNPRMichael Tomasky
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Peter King's pro-terrorist past | Michael Tomasky

Peter King's hearings on extremism in the American Muslim community start tomorrow, and today, the New York Times reminds us of a part of King's past that he'd rather not have seen on the front page of his newspaper today:

Long before [King] became an outspoken voice in Congress about the threat from terrorism, he was a fervent supporter of a terrorist group, the Irish Republican Army.

"We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry," Mr. King told a pro-I.R.A. rally on Long Island, where he was serving as Nassau County comptroller, in 1982. Three years later he declared, "If civilians are killed in an attack on a military installation, it is certainly regrettable, but I will not morally blame the I.R.A. for it."

As Mr. King, a Republican, rose as a Long Island politician in the 1980s, benefiting from strong Irish-American support, the I.R.A. was carrying out a bloody campaign of bombing and sniping, targeting the British Army, Protestant paramilitaries and sometimes pubs and other civilian gathering spots. His statements, along with his close ties to key figures in the military and political wings of the I.R.A., drew the attention of British and American authorities.

A judge in Belfast threw him out of an I.R.A. murder trial, calling him an "obvious collaborator," said Ed Moloney, an Irish journalist and author of "A Secret History of the I.R.A." In 1984, Mr. King complained that the Secret Service had investigated him as a "security risk," Mr. Moloney said.

Questioned by the paper's Scott Shane, King says that, well, that was different. He likens the IRA to the African National Congress and the Irgun (not, interestingly, the PLO). "I understand why people who are misinformed might see a parallel," he said. "The fact is, the I.R.A. never attacked the United States. And my loyalty is to the United States."

This is a true and legitimate point. But it raises some questions about his world view, doesn't it? If the principle is support for the United States rather than taking a stand on terrorism qua terrorism, then we must assume that King supports the ETA, felt all right about the Baader-Meinhof gang, had no real quarrel with the Italian neo-fascist group that bombed the Bologna train station, et cetera.

Yet somehow one doubts that that is really King's position. He defended IRA terrorism because he is intensely Irish and hated the British occupation, period. If in some parallel universe the IRA had committed a terrorist act on American soil, we can wonder what side he would have chosen (it should be noted that quite a few prominent Irish-American politicians, of the right and the left, either defended or failed to denounce IRA violence).

As for the hearings themselves, I actually do not think King is a racist. I knew him a bit in my New York years, and I don't recall hearing him use the kind of code language conservatives often use about, say, black people. I sort of liked him on a personal level. He wasn't a party line automaton, although these last couple of years he says some pretty extreme things on Fox.

Yet one can be non-malevolent and still be wrong. Richard Cohen in yesterday's WashPost challenged King's factual case:

It happens to be an awkward fact that just last month, a University of North Carolina terrorism expert, Charles Kurzman, reported a drop in attempted or actual terrorist activity by American Muslims - 47 perpetrators and suspects in 2009, 20 in 2010. This does not mean that there is no threat, but, when measured against ordinary violent crime, it is slight. In fact, the threat from non-Muslims is much greater, encompassing not only your run-of-the-mill murderers but about 20 domestic terrorist plots, including one in which a plane was flown into an IRS building in Austin...

The findings of the Kurzman study just get more and more awkward. It turns out that in exposing alleged terrorist plots, "the largest single source of initial information (48 of 120 cases) involved tips from the Muslim American community." Not only does this contradict King's implicit charge that the American Muslim community is one vast terrorism enabler, but it suggests that an outcome of his hearings will be the further alienation of this community - and less cooperation with the authorities.

King may not be a bigot himself, but the hearings are, as Cohen put it, fuel for the bigots. To the extent that there's a legitimate question about extremism in Muslim America, and I think there is a legitimate concern there, I think King would do better to recruit a bipartisan group of lawmakers and do outreach to respected Muslim groups. But he couldn't get as much TV time or raise as much money off of that.

US CongressIRAMichael Tomasky
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No-fly zone a "gateway drug" to war | Michael Tomasky

Here you will find an excellent column by Mike Lind in Salon today warning of the likely ramifications of imposing a no-fly zone over Libya:

The implication [of McCain, Lieberman, Kerry et al.] is that the enforcement of "no-fly zones," by the U.S. alone or with NATO allies, would be a moderate, reasonable measure short of war, like a trade embargo. In reality, declaring and enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya would be a radical act of war. It would require the U.S. not only to shoot down Libyan military aircraft but also to bomb Libya in order to destroy anti-aircraft defenses. Under any legal theory, bombing a foreign government's territory and blasting its air force out of the sky is war.

Could America's war in Libya remain limited? The hawks glibly promise that the U.S. could limit its participation in the Libyan civil war to airstrikes, leaving the fighting to Libyan rebels.

These assurances by the hawks are ominously familiar.

Lind then traces us back through the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq, arguing that each of these turned into wars of larger scale than intended (Afghanistan and Iraq were supposed to be quick and easy, remember?). Then he pounds the hammer right on the nail. Can't you just see these phases playing themselves out:

The lesson of these three wars is that the rhetoric of lift-and-strike is a gateway drug that leads to all-out American military invasion and occupation. Once the U.S. has committed itself to using limited military force to depose a foreign regime, the pressure to "stay the course" becomes irresistible. If lift-and-strike were to fail in Libya, the same neocon hawks who promised that it would succeed would not apologize for their mistake. Instead, they would up the ante. They would call for escalating American involvement further, because America's prestige would now be on the line. They would denounce any alternative as a cowardly policy of "cut and run." And as soon as any American soldiers died in Libya, the hawks would claim that we would be betraying their memory, unless we conquered Libya and occupied it for years or decades until it became a functioning, pro-American democracy.

Those who are promoting an American war against Gadhafi must answer the question: "You and whose army?" The term "jingoism" comes from a Victorian British music-hall ditty: "We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do,/ We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too." Unfortunately for 21st-century America's jingoes, we haven't got the ships, the men or the money.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today, on its front page no less, on growing "discord" in Washington on the intervention question. Then it quotes John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. I guess since Kerry added his voice only on Sunday, that counts as growing. The first two would say blow up Canada under the right circumstances, so I hardly see how that's news. But anyway.

Kerry defends his position like this:

What haunts me is the specter of Iraq 1991," when former President George Bush "urged the Shia to rise up, and they did rise up, and tanks and planes were coming at them — and we were nowhere to be seen."

"Tens of thousands were slaughtered," Mr. Kerry said.

Okay. But has Obama now urged the Libyas to rise up? Not like Bush Sr. did back then, remotely. The Times pieces quotes an administration official thus:

"He keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic," the senior official said, quoting the president.

On balance, I'd rather have a president taking that circumspect posture than a more bellicose one (which incidentally raises the question, which Lind also brings up, of how President McCain and Vice President * might be dealing with this).

There may come a time when the regime's outrages against basic humanity become such that the west has to act. But that road is full of risks. And until the Grapeshot Caucus expands beyond three, I'm not sure why this is really and truly front-page news.

Obama administrationUS foreign policyLibyaMichael Tomasky
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If they made me emperor... | Michael Tomasky

We inaugurate a new occasional series with the above headline. "If they made me emperor" will explore the ways in which the world would be improved if...they made me emperor. You all are of course invited to chime in and offer your own ideas on what would happen if they erroneously chose you instead.

If they made me emperor, we'd have a lot more hybrid full-size sedans to choose from. I thought anew of this while reading Jonathan Cohn's post about the Chevy Volt, which is starting out with slow sales (but intentionally so, says GM) and a passel of rave reviews but also a meh from Consumer Reports.

I still don't completely understand the concept of the Volt, I confess. Where does one plug it in? Do these plugs exist in, say, parking lots, and I just haven't noticed it because I don't plug my car in? I see that you Brits have the Vauxhall Ampera, the Chevy Volt equivalent. I've heard or read that there are in fact plug-in sites around London, but I don't know of any around Washington DC.

Anyway I'm eyeing up the Hyundai Sonata Hybrid, coming to this market next month, I am told. Look at this beauty. And 39 mpg city, 37 highway. I'm not really a huge gearhead, but this one actually revs my engine. It's elegant looking but not too showy. It's full of comfort features. And it suits the liberal conscience. I mean, that's me, converted into an automobile.

I'd prefer to buy American, but there just aren't many hybrid sedans. There are two I'm aware of: Ford Fusion and its more elegant brother, the Lincoln MKZ. They frankly don't have nearly as striking a profile as the Sonata. And they're both more expensive. The Sonata tops out around $30,000, while the Fusion can get up to $35,000 and the MKZ more like $44,000. Then of course there's the Camry, but it's not American of course, and Camrys are so boring. And I think that's about it for hybrid sedans.

Chrysler just came out with its new and totally revamped line of cars. Dad drove Chryslers. I'd have considered it for that reason alone. But...no hybrids. And where's the hybrid version of the Buick Lacrosse? I have read that sedan drivers don't want hybrids. Nonsense. Create the market. Americans weren't walking around in 1955 thinking gee, what we need are cars with really big tailfins. But by 1957, that's what people were buying, because that's what Detroit decided people wanted.

I guarantee you massive growth in the hybrid sedan market in five years, and there will be articles saying, yeah, we were slow on this, what were we thinking? Ahead of my time again. But this is why Hyundai is probably getting my business. They think ahead, those folks.

Mind you I doubt this is the first thing I'd do if they made me emperor. That would probably have to do with feeding starving people or something boring like that. But this is more fun to talk about. Discuss.

United StatesGeneral MotorsMichael Tomasky
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