Here's a bit of advice when considering Barack Obama second inaugural address on January 21: Don't take anything he says very seriously. For all the hype they receive, inaugural addresses rarely foretell what a president will accomplish in office. In fact, the men who utter grand principles and make big promises every four years often contradict them, willingly or not, soon after they begin their terms. Take a few of the more celebrated quotations: READ MORE >>
There's a War in Cyberspace over Icons vs. Text
In the physical world, icons are always telling us what to do. No smoking on the airplane. Beware of the road crew ahead. Crap here if you’re a man, and there if you’re a woman. There’s even an icon that says, essentially, “Yes, when I die in a car wreck, you may take my organs and put them in another human body.” And these icons, for the most part, tell us these things without so much as a word. They’re feats of human efficiency: Why force someone to read tedious text when the image of a crossed-out cigarette will do?The digital world, however, is a different story. On the Internet, warnings and directions are often much more complex. How can an icon summarize, for instance, whether to allow Facebook to share your user history or to allow your iPhone to know where you are at all times? You’ll probably understand a website’s terms of service better if you sit down to read them, but you probably don’t have the time or patience for that, instead signing away vast swaths of your personal information without a second thought.The White House thinks this is a problem. Last February, it promulgated a Privacy Bill of Rights decreeing that consumers shall get a clearer idea of what, exactly, a mobile app does with your data (California, meanwhile, has already made its own rules). The app industry, desperate to avoid clunky regulations from Congress, promised to work with privacy advocates to come up with their own standard practice for privacy notifications. Get all the players in a room, the thinking went, and they should be able to hash out an approach that works for everybody. READ MORE >>
David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is in a bind. Not because recent opinion polls put his party a dozen points behind Labour and not even, really, because the British economy continues to splutter along in search of a long overdue recovery. The second of these factors accounts for the first and Cameron trusts that his economic policies will, in time, pay a dividend. READ MORE >>
Disturbia—Will Self’s Experiment
INCREASINGLY, ARTISTS OF all stripes are expected not only to create original work but also to provide some explanation of their intentions. Consumers, especially of art that is not straightforward, want proof that it hasn’t been created merely to confound or bamboozle them. Artists want to stave off accusations of obscurity, pointlessness, and technical incompetence (“My kid could do that!”) by situating their work within a larger context. READ MORE >>
An "Enlightened" Mike White Wants to Change TV
It's Not a Fever! How Obama Can Break the House Republicans
Earlier this week Politico ran a piece about the mood of the House GOP that was highly revealing, if not quite the way the authors intended. The supposed take-away was that conservatives are so amped up and ornery they won’t think twice about leaving the debt ceiling where it is, consequences be damned. “GOP officials said more than half of their members are prepared to allow default unless Obama agrees to dramatic cuts he has repeatedly said he opposes,” the piece warned. Which is to say, pretty much the standard meshugas we’ve come to expect from John Boehner's nuthouse.But when you read between the lines of the Politico piece, the thinking of House Republicans looked a lot more rational. The upshot seemed to be that Boehner won’t let the government default on its liabilities, and that his members will settle for something much less damaging – a government shutdown – if they don’t get the cuts they want. (They will have the opportunity to engineer this a few weeks after the likely debt ceiling vote, when Congress has to pass a bill funding the government for the rest of the year.) “[Boehner] may need a shutdown just to get it out of their system,” a GOP leadership adviser told Politico, “so they have an endgame and can show their constituents they’re fighting.” The quote was meant to be ominous but was actually quite reassuring. Ever since November, Washington has marveled at the “fever” the president hoped his re-election would break. House Republicans announced it was emphatically not broken when they resisted tax hikes until the grisly end of the fiscal cliff negotiations. But the fact that the deal got done at all suggests “fever” isn’t quite the right metaphor, at least not for most of the party. Yes, there are lunatics in the House of Representatives. And, yes, their lunacy isn’t likely to fade anytime soon. But the good news is that it doesn’t have to in order for the government to function. READ MORE >>
Benjamin Netanyahu's Not Worried About an Agenda. He's Worried About His Coalition.
Anyone waiting to know the agenda of Israel’s new government on the morning of January 23 is likely to be sorely disappointed, and not only because it will likely take weeks before we know the coalition's composition. Few overarching debates on policy have materialized during this election campaign. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not seem to be seeking any new mandate for action, despite being widely expected to win in most surveys with his right-of-center bloc retaining 65 of 120 seats, a slight drop from previous polls. It is curious that an incumbent, who understands the rough and tumble of policy fights, is not seeking a public mandate for specific policies. In the past decade Israel has had several consequential elections. In 1992, Yitzhak Rabin called for a reallocating funds away from constructing West Bank settlements for the purpose of peace with the Palestinians. In 1999, his protégé Ehud Barak campaigned on the platform of a final status agreement with the Palestinians. In 2001, after the outbreak of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon made clear that he would end the terror and violence. In 2006, Ehud Olmert explicitly campaigned on the idea of an Israeli pullback in the West Bank.By contrast, this election has seen no great debate. In part this is because between the five larger parties, only one – Likud Beitenu – is likely to get more than a quarter of the votes and even the Likud will not get much more than that. This is certainly not the stuff of great mandates. Even more critical perhaps is the lack of a common agenda between the parties: one seems to play soccer while another plays football, even as a third plays basketball. Labor, for instance, has focused on income inequality. Yair Lapid’s “There Is a Future” party has advocated for greater educational opportunities among the middle class and rejects exemption of the ultra-orthodox from military service. Meanwhile, Tzipi Livni’s party has sought to revive the peace process with the Palestinians.Unlike the other parties, Netanyahu has avoided largely specifics. It is striking how few critical issues he has raised in the course of the campaign. This is the first election in Israel since the Arab upheaval began, but he has mentioned neither the shifting regional landscape nor future relations with Egypt in the post-Mubarak era. He has not raised Israel becoming a de facto bilateral state in absence of peace talks with the Palestinians, even when Israeli President Shimon Peres makes statements that the absence of negotiations will lead to a return to Palestinian terror. Surprisingly, he has not even mentioned the Iranian nuclear threat—his signature issue during his current tenure as prime minister. READ MORE >>
Today President Obama will unveil a gun-control platform that is expected to include a reinstatement of the long-expired assault weapon ban. READ MORE >>
