Our victory in Iraq

Here are Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan -- Iraq war boosters if there ever were -- reporting on current goings-on there. I'll skip to the important part, about the unresolved Iraqi election:

If upheld, these decisions would give Maliki's bloc more seats than Allawi's. If Maliki's list gained four seats, it could potentially form a government with the other major Shiite bloc, the Iraqi National Alliance, excluding both the Kurds and Sunnis. That result -- surely disastrous for U.S. interests -- would position Maliki as a potential authoritarian ruler, empower the anti-American Sadrists and their Iranian-backed militias and alienate Sunnis while marginalizing the Kurds. If Sunni seats are transferred to Maliki's Shiite list this way, Sunni Arabs would justifiably feel that Shiites had stolen the election.

No WMDs in Iraq, remember. But at least we planted the seeds of democracy in the Middle East!

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What I got in my first issue of the Philadelphia Daily News

As expected, my first issue of the Philadelphia Daily News landed with a startle-me-out-of-my-sleep SMACK on the front steps this morning. After checking my e-mail on my iPhone, I decided to forgo electronic stimulation for a little while and spend some time with my new newspaper.

And time I spent. It takes me five-to-10 minutes most mornings to blaze through Philly headlines on my Google Reader. But that's only the "local news" headlines. There's a lot more stuff in the paper, obviously, but there's something about the physical medium of paper that slows. you. down.

Or maybe that's just me.

In any case, I spent about an hour with the Daily News this morning -- probably aided by the fact that the Friday edition is a little fatter with weekend "things to do around town" news than its sister issues the rest of the week. Here's what I found:

* CRIME: Actually, I was always getting the crime news on my RSS feed from Philly.com, but I usually raced past it. For whatever reason, I spent more time with it. There's a lot of crime in Philly! But you knew that.

* ADS: You forget how relatively ad-free most news websites are -- how the hell are they making money, anyway? -- until you dip back into a print newspaper and face an onslaught of commerce. Oh yeah, that's why news organizations are still printing newspapers. Ads for cars, ads for services, ads for apartments, ads for nudie bars. I, uh, won't make use of the last one.

* COMICS: Garfield still sucks. Still, it was the comics page that started my newspaper addiction when I was five years old. I wonder how -- or if -- today's young people might find their first connection to their local news organizations. Maybe through...

* SPORTS: Philly's a huge sports town. I've kind of not engaged that directly. But I know today that Eagles QB Kevin Kolb signed a one-year contract extension, and that Brad Lidge is coming off the DL for the Phillies series with the (boooo!) Mets. So I know way more about that kind of stuff than I did yesterday. Which means I might be able to have coherent conversations with other dudes around town.

* ATTYTOOD: No, not Will Bunch. (Though he was there, with an article about the new CEO of the Daily News, Inky and Philly.com.) I mean a tabloid sensibility to its news coverage that the staid and stuffy folks at broadsheets around the country would surely disdain. Maybe I'm staid and stuffy: I have to read past that stuff to get to the news. But a little verve probably doesn't hurt your engagement with readers.

* LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: It's like online comments. Only culled for the best ones. And with real names attached! It's actually kind of nice.

* USA WEEKEND: I didn't really need that, actually. But maybe that's just me.

It was, overall, a good time. Not perfect: There were some questionable typographic and layout choices -- but weirdly, that was also part of the charm. It's hard to screw up a web page, because most news sites are formatted to give you the same design for every single story. Trying to make the news fit around ads is a somewhat more complicated endeavor, with increased chances to screw up the look of things. It's a little more ... human.

Print newspapers aren't going to replace online news in my media diet. I'll spend some time with the New York Times and Washington Post later this morning, completely contained in the land of pixels. Maybe, though, there's still room for a bit of print in my life. Certainly, the best way for me to financially support local newsgathering is to buy a subscription to the print newspaper. And as you can see, there are benefits and charms to doing so.

The Arizona immigration law

Ben Boychuk and I debate the issue in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:

When immigration is outlawed, only outlaws will be immigrants.

That's the real problem in Arizona. There's obviously a great demand for the services of immigrant workers, or the supply wouldn't keep pouring over U.S. borders. If America would allow more legal immigration -- and more guest worker visas -- more of those workers could come in through the country's front door instead of over the back fence. There would be less need for the coyotes and traffickers who bring them into the country, and less opportunity for American employers to exploit their legal, documented employees.

Many of the ills we associate with illegal immigration would be reduced if only we had a sane immigration policy.

But that's Washington's job to solve. It's not doing that job. So you can't blame Arizonans for wanting to do everything in their power to fix their own problems. You can, however, blame them for the approach they've decided to take.

Sure, Americans are asked every day to produce identification. But we don't ask only Hispanic residents to provide their ID when boarding a plane, buying booze, applying for a job or for government benefits. Police enforcing the new law will surely single out Latinos -- legal or not, born here or not -- for such treatment. It's a demeaning, hostile act that will alienate and intimidate many Latino citizens, folks as American as you or I. It's treatment that the white majority would never stand for, but is willing to inflict on others.

Yes, America's immigration policy is a mess. Trying to fix its ills with a bad law will only make things worse. Doing so in a racially divisive and demeaning manner is unconscionable. The Republican Party that passed this law will pay the price as Hispanics become a larger part of the electorate. And Arizona will have to live with the self-inflicted smear on the state's good name.

Ben's got a cautious defense of the law. Read the whole thing!

Why I subscribed to the Philadelphia Daily News today

We moved to Philadelphia nearly two years ago, and for the first time in my adult life I've gone without a subscription to a local daily newspaper. Why? Easy: It's the 21st century! Why spend money on getting a printed product when you can just go to Philly.com and select the RSS feeds you want to follow?

Today, however, that changed. Money's still tight in the Mathis household -- full-time employment sure would be nice! -- but it seemed like a declaration of values is needed. I subscribed to the Philadelphia Daily News. Our first issue should arrive on Friday or Saturday.

Again, why? Again: Easy. The Daily News has new owners. And I want them to know how important Philadelphia journalism is to me.

To be clear, this isn't passive-aggressive gotcha with Brian Tierney, the would-be media mogul who lost control of the Daily News -- and the Inquirer, and Philly.com -- today. I've been critical of Tierney's seeming cynicism and hucksterism -- but if Tierney possessed those qualities in abundance, one has to give him props for continuing to support good journalism in a challenging era. The Daily News won -- and deserved -- a Pulitzer Prize this year.

Now that he's out, and a group of creditors is taking over, the question will almost certainly be raised: Can the Daily News survive?

Since I've been in town -- and, so I'm told, for years before that -- the tabloid has been spoken of as the weak sister in the city's daily paper constellation. Since the Inquirer is owned by the same company, the thinking went, what were the benefits of having two daily newspapers that robbed each other of circulation? Why not poor all that money into one paper and reap the benefits.

I have my own answer. For me, the Daily News is a real Philadelphia newspaper.

Oh, I could do without its annual "sexiest singles" roundup, and it's self-conscious "People Paper" conceit. But the paper is aggressively local: It covers Philadelphia closely and aggressively. Its Pulitzer was won for a series of articles that exposed corruption on the Philly police force, a good and necessary example of local accountability journalism.

The Inquirer, meanwhile, still seems stuck in an identity crisis. Look at the front page on any given day and you'll see that it's still ruled by the idea that it can be a "paper of record" for events beyond Philly and its environs -- lots of national and international stories, most days, culled from wire services. News that you can (and probably are getting) from other, online sources. It's a pale imitation of the days, 20 and 30 years ago, when the Inky had its own bureaus out around the world.

And even the local news isn't always so local. The Inky's audience -- and thus a huge chunk of its newshole -- is largely out in the suburbs. That's fine. Except I don't really need to read as much about New Jersey politics as the Inquirer wants to sell me. The Daily News, meanwhile, is Philly, Philly and Philly some more.

But the Inky has a bigger circulation. Probably a more lucrative audience base. And so if the decision comes to cut back to one newspaper in this town, well, it's probably the Inky that will survive.

So today I subscribed to the Daily News. It's a statement to the new owners -- small and unconvincing though it might be -- that the DN's journalism is important to me, and (I think) to the community. Even with new ownership in place, it's likely that rough times are still ahead for Philly newspapers, and the industry as a whole. (Don't be surprised if we start hearing about layoffs at both papers, and soon.) If my 30 dollars can keep the Daily News rolling a little bit longer, it's a price I'm happy to pay.

Will the eco-foodie movement starve poor people?

That's Robert Paarlberg's case at Foreign Policy:

In Europe and the United States, a new line of thinking has emerged in elite circles that opposes bringing improved seeds and fertilizers to traditional farmers and opposes linking those farmers more closely to international markets. Influential food writers, advocates, and celebrity restaurant owners are repeating the mantra that "sustainable food" in the future must be organic, local, and slow. But guess what: Rural Africa already has such a system, and it doesn't work. Few smallholder farmers in Africa use any synthetic chemicals, so their food is de facto organic. High transportation costs force them to purchase and sell almost all of their food locally. And food preparation is painfully slow. The result is nothing to celebrate: average income levels of only $1 a day and a one-in-three chance of being malnourished.

If we are going to get serious about solving global hunger, we need to de-romanticize our view of preindustrial food and farming. And that means learning to appreciate the modern, science-intensive, and highly capitalized agricultural system we've developed in the West. Without it, our food would be more expensive and less safe. In other words, a lot like the hunger-plagued rest of the world.

Here's the thing, I'm not sure that Michael Pollan -- author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and thus the high priest of the slow-local-organic food movement -- would disagree entirely with this. He builds a sustained critique against industrial agriculture, against the pollution it creates and the ethically and nutritionally challenged food it delivers us. But he does admit that industrial agriculture has been very, very successful at producing lots of food -- and, perhaps, lots of new eaters: the population of the world has exploded thanks in part to industrial farming methods pioneered here in the United States.

And even though there's plenty I find interesting about Pollan's work, this is the part I find most morally troubling: If an abundance of cheap, quickly produced food has made life on the planet more sustainable, wouldn't a slow-local-organic revolution make food more scarce and expensive -- and thus doom many people now living to a miserable death by starvation? I don't know that I've ever seen Pollan or his ilk address this, really -- I could be wrong -- but it seems a worthy and morally weighty question to hash out before going too far down Pollan's road.

Arlen Specter: 'I might have helped the country more if I'd stayed a Republican'

Dave Weigel flags these comments from Pennsylvania's senior senator:

''Well, I probably shouldn't say this,'' he said over lunch last month. ''But I have thought from time to time that I might have helped the country more if I'd stayed a Republican.''

Specter mused that perhaps if he'd remained in the caucus he could have persuaded one or two of his GOP colleagues to support health care reform.

But joining the Democratic Party was never about "helping the country." It was about preserving Specter's political career. Even if staying with the GOP would've helped the country more, there's little guarantee that Specter would've stayed.

America's victory in Iraq

"Report Details Torture at Secret Baghdad Prison":

“They applied electricity to my penis and sodomized me with a stick,” he told Human Rights Watch. “I was forced to sign a confession that they would not let me read.”

Not Americans this time. Just the people we put in power.