Rob Garver on what to expect from the media coverage of tonight’s debate:

Sadly, this is how it begins: By preemptively declaring the debates to be meaningless political theater, the television news networks are giving themselves permission to cover them not as a battle of ideas but as a spectacle. Ditto in the print media. Writing for The Washington Post on Tuesday, media critic Howard Kurtz derided the debates as “structured parallel press conferences.” (“Not that I want to give up a chance to go to Miami,” he added.) Clearly, if he has already decided that the whole thing is pointless, Kurtz isn’t headed for Florida to assess the candidates’ positions on the issues. He must be looking for something else. Here’s a guess: Cafferty, Kurtz, and company will be watching Thursday night’s exchange hoping that John Kerry displays some annoying personality tic or that George W. Bush makes one of his more egregious malapropisms, either of which they will replay as a laugh line for the next five weeks, all the while bemoaning the lack of substance in the candidates’ discussion. This, of course, is exactly what the mainstream media did in 2000, when it supplied exhaustive coverage of Al Gore’s sighs and his tone of voice, hammering trivial points home so thoroughly that viewers who originally thought Gore had won the debates began to accept the media’s alternate verdict of disaster for the vice president.

Sofie Fenner calls for a real discussion on financial aid:

For the first time, my financial situation cast a shadow not only on my term-time schedule, my daily expenses, and my summer plans, but also on my life after college. Most agonizingly, it was all my choice — compromise my academic experience now or my post-graduation financial freedom? I thought of my friends at less expensive public institutions, receiving a fine education for a fraction of the price I pay. Would Yale be worth summers of working minimum-wage jobs just to buy a plane ticket back to New Haven? Would it be worth the months or years I’ll spend paying off my student loans?

Yet even as I deliberated, I was keenly aware of how lucky I am. Though the family contribution amounts to a considerable fraction of their annual income, my parents are willing to pay it. I have never been forced to miss out on a class because the books were too expensive. I even have enough money to go home for most breaks. If I find myself wondering whether Yale is worth the compromises I have to make to stay here, others must be wrestling with even more serious compromises and more difficult decisions. I wonder what they’re thinking, how they manage their responsibilities, and what impact their financial aid packages affect their lives. I felt unusually alone while signing my loan application; I knew many others at Yale were in similar situations, but had heard little from them. For many reasons, such issues tend to go unmentioned; these challenges and students’ responses to them go largely unshared.

McPlunk on worker’s comp – or lack thereof – for grad students:

And here at Yale? After a long period where students who had to take a medical leave of absence not only lost their pay, but also their health insurance, the university finally agreed, like last year or something, that a registered student would be able to keep their health insurance through the end of the semester. As for any workers’ comp type of benefits, I don’t think so.

Who is it that was guessing again?

A few hours after George W. Bush dismissed a pessimistic CIA report on Iraq as “just guessing,” the analyst who identified himself as its author told a private dinner last week of secret, unheeded warnings years ago about going to war in Iraq. This exchange leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the president of the United States and the Central Intelligence Agency are at war with each other. Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, sat down Tuesday night in a large West Coast city with a select group of private citizens. He was not talking off the cuff. Relying on a multi-paged, single-spaced memorandum, Pillar said he and his colleagues concluded early in the Bush administration that military intervention in Iraq would intensify anti-American hostility throughout Islam. This was not from a CIA retiree but an active senior official. (Pillar, no covert operative, is listed openly in the Federal Staff Directory.) For President Bush to publicly write off a CIA paper as just guessing is without precedent. For the agency to go semi-public is not only unprecedented but shocking…

Rapture on earth:

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked sinisterly like Strom Thurmond’s version of the Rapture. Affluent white people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less – mainly Black – were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging tenements to face the watery wrath. New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city’s poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean’s daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about the “large group. . . mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods” who wanted to evacuate but couldn’t. Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees might damage or graffiti the Superdome…

A disgrace to the social-democratic values of the early Zionists:

Forty-five percent of Arab families in Israel are defined as poor, compared to 15 percent of families in the Jewish sector, according to statistics published on Monday by Sikui, an Israeli Arab association for social equality in Israel. In its report, the association claimed that “the government has not yet taken concrete and substantial steps toward correcting the continuing historical injustice caused to the Arab citizens.” The Sikui report is largely based on information from the Central Bureau of Statistics, gathered between 2000 and 2001. The report contrasts with the recommendations for the improvement of the Israeli Arab’s social conditions, as put forward by the Or Committee, which probed the clashes between security forces and rioters at the end of September 2000 that left 13 Israeli Arabs dead. According to the association, welfare allowances in Israel do not considerably alleviate the economic conditions of Israeli Arabs. It also claims that income supplements lift around 50 percent of poor Jews above the poverty line, whereas only one fifth of poor Arabs manage to cross the line.

Jimmy Carter puts Florida in perspective:

Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet “basic international requirements” and could undermine the US election, former US President Jimmy Carter says. He said a repeat of the irregularities of the much-disputed 2000 election – which gave President George W Bush the narrowest of wins – “seems likely”. Mr Carter, a veteran observer of polls worldwide, also accused Florida’s top election official of “bias”…In an article in the Washington Post newspaper, Mr Carter, a Democrat, said that he and ex-President Gerald Ford, a Republican, had been asked to draw up recommendations for changes after the last vote in Florida was marred by arguments over the counting of ballots. Mr Carter said the reforms they came up with had still not been implemented. He accused Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood, a Republican, of trying to get the name of independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader included on the state ballot, knowing he might divert Democrat votes. He also said: “A fumbling attempt has been made recently to disqualify 22,000 African Americans (likely Democrats), but only 61 Hispanics (likely Republicans), as alleged felons.” Mr Carter said Florida Governor Jeb Bush – brother of the president – had “taken no steps to correct these departures from principles of fair and equal treatment or to prevent them in the future”.

My brother on what it really means to say all Jews are responsible for each other:

Inherent in our responsibility to fellows Jews is an obligation to cry out when Israel’s policies are self-destructive or contradict fundamental Jewish values. I was often taught that, “If we don’t support Israel, nobody will.” But if we Jews don’t also criticize Israel, too few will—and what criticism remains will too easily be discredited with often hollow allegations of anti-Semitism. Because non-Jews who criticize Israel are written off as anti-Semites, the bulk of the obligation to admonish the Israeli government falls on us. Many Jews who take a critical perspective on Israeli policy are attacked as disloyal. But vocal advocates of change in Israeli attitudes and policies are no more anti-Israel or “self-hating” than anti-war activists in the 1960’s were anti-American. We see retrospectively that the Vietnam era anti-war movement was one of the most fundamentally American undertakings in our history, but we should also take note of the fact that, at the time, participants were condemned in much the same way that Jewish critics of Israel now are.