Eric Martin reviews the latest out of Sadr City and waxes indignant:
So let's recap the scene: the US military and its Iraqi "allies" are laying siege to a sprawling neighborhood in Baghdad housing roughly 2.5 million Iraqis, launching air strikes, artillery attacks, tank shells and other assorted ordnance, shutting down hospitals and bombing others, cutting off the supply of food and walling off entire sectors of the embattled region, causing a refugee crisis by their actions - and now actually pursuing a policy with the intent of creating a larger refugee crisis!
For what reason: because a majority of residents in these regions support a political movement, and militia, that oppose our presence. Can't have that. Because we have to keep 150,000 troops in Iraq to safeguard the Iraqi people. After all, whose gonna set up the tents in the refugee catch basins we so magnanimously helped set up to receive the overflow from our relentless assault on political movements that would make it harder for us to stay in Iraq. To safeguard the Iraqi people.
Indeed. One of several perverse elements of the U.S. presence in Iraq is that the presence itself is, at least in part, a cause of violent conflict in Iraq. The big achievement of the past 18 months, after all, has been to convince many Sunni insurgents to stop allying with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. But the alliance with AQI only commenced in the first place because Sunni Arab groups wanted to take up arms against the American occupation and were seeking allies in that cause. Now our guns are aimed at the Sadrists because they want us to leave. And naturally, we can't leave until we've achieved "victory" defined as killing everyone who wants us to leave.
I donated a small amount and supplied my work contact information below before the California primary. A few days later, I get a message on my home answering machine – not the numbers below and _not_ a listed number – thanking me for my support and inviting me to an event “at a neighbor’s house” two blocks from my house (miles away from the information I supplied below). I was not contacted at my work address. So they took my name from the donation and then located my unlisted home phone number and unprovided home address and put it in their database so they could contact me for a neighborhood meet up.
Not sure we need to give this team access to even the NSA's legal powers, much less it's new Bush-era unrestrained spying power. Just saying.
Jeffrey Goldberg says Hezbollah "is simultaneously doing effective work undermining its apologists in the West. We've heard the arguments over and over again: Hezbollah is social service agency; Hezbollah wants to join the Lebanese political process; Hezbollah is not in fact dominated by murderous Jew-haters. And so on."
I find the idea that people who disagree with Goldberg's take on Hezbollah are, as such, apologists for the group is pretty offensive. Given that the policies that folks like me have been opposing have turned out to massively empower Hezbollah, I think you might as well say that the folks on the other side in the West are the "apologists" -- they're the ones who keep making Hezbollah more and more powerful.
Meanwhile, on the substantive point I would say that those of us who characterize Hezbollah as primarily a Lebanon-focused political movement that's primarily interested in gaining power inside Lebanon (rather than one primarily motivated by anti-semitic or anti-Israel sentiments) have been vindicated by this turn of events. Hezbollah's not fighting killing right now, and it's not fighting to destroy Israel -- they're fighting Lebanese people to try to secure more power in Lebanon.
Fundamentally, to avoid catastrophic climate change we're going to need to reduce fossil fuel consumption. But it's also going to be necessary to look at other things we can do, so this bury trees to sequester their carbon scheme is probably worth exploring.
Cameron describes a new global movement, with rising center-right parties in Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, California and New York (he admires Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg). American conservatives won’t simply import this model. But there’s a lot to learn from it. The only question is whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.
Ultimately, my hope would be to see the GOP reposition sooner rather than later. The way American political institutions work, it's very difficult to govern on a pure party line basis. I would prefer European-style institutions, but we don't have them. Consequently, a hard-right GOP -- even a hard-right GOP minority -- can make progressive change extremely difficult, whereas a more moderate GOP would make it easier to do things, even if that more moderate GOP were more electorally successful. Many conservatives will, I assume, agree with me about this and therefore want to resist the sort of changes Brooks favors.
Via Lang at OpenLeft, here's a roundup of public opinion on the Supreme Court which shows that a plurality of people like the Court fine as is, but the number of people who think it's too conservative is substantially larger than the number of people who think it's too liberal.
I missed the fact that a couple of days ago Cindy McCain reiterated that there would be no disclosure whatsoever of her tax returns, the very same returns on which all of her husband's wealth has been stashed as well in order to avoid disclosure. Personally, I'm happy with that outcome. Normally, you want to know about the finances of your would-be presidents. But John McCain has such a sterling reputation as a reformer, that I'm sure they're hiding all this not because they have anything to hide, but purely out of a principled concern for the privacy of their children.
Certainly, I see no reason for the press to keep dogging the McCains about this.
What happens to Joe Lieberman if the Democrats take the White House and expand their Senate majority to 56 or 57 seats? Despite his support for McCain, I think Democrats will want his vote on non-war-related issues, so they'll hold their nose and let him keep his seniority in the caucus. Others say he'll be stripped of his seniority, lose his chairmanship of the government affairs committee, and then leave the party to become a Republican.
I have no idea what will happen, but there's very little logic to keeping him in the party. If you had a Democratic Senator who was aggressively campaigning for the GOP presidential nominee, Exhibit A for the case for letting him keep his chairmanship would be "well, he won the Democratic nomination for his seat." But Lieberman didn't win the Democratic nomination. Naturally, under the circumstances he didn't endorse the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senator from Connecticut nor has he endorsed the Democratic candidate for U.S. President. So you've got a guy who doesn't have the Democratic Party nomination, and doesn't support Democratic nominees for federal office. That would seem to make his case for being a Democrat look pretty tenuous.
Ezra Klein draws my attention to this chart which Business Week's Michael Mandel calls "the world's scariest chart." It's certainly a bit scary, but I'm not really sure how scared of it we should be.
I imagine, for example, that you could make some kind of chart plotting the ratio of iPod/iPhone expenses to GDP over time. You'd see that after decades of virtuous zero, the ratio has been steadily climbing at a clearly unsustainable rate. You'd see a similar trend in other countries, but with the U.S. far ahead of the pack. Now that's a scary chart. But of course all it would show is that Apple has succeeded in introducing some new products that people like to buy. Likable new products = growing share of GDP going to the products. And that's not scary at all, it's a good thing.
Loans, meanwhile, are, like iPods, a kind of product. And when new debt products are invented, the total amount of debt goes up. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The ability to take on debt from time to time is very useful for individuals and institutions alike. And certainly I think most people believe the invention of the 30 year mortgage was a good thing. And while it's of course better not to be carrying massive credit card debts, the whole existence of credit card debt is a consequence of the existence of credit cards and credit cards are, on the whole, useful things to have around. That's why they're so popular, and that's why there's credit card debt.
Which isn't to say that there's nothing to worry about in household debt figures, only that to see what, if anything, we should be worried about we need to know more than the bare fact that debt is on the rise. There are, moreover, some reasons to think that the savings rate in the country is being understated by the fact that things like expenditures on education are counted as consumption when they probably should be looked at as a kind of investment in human capital. After all, a 22 year-old college graduate who paid for school with some loans will be more indebted than a 22 year-old who's been working full-time for the past four years, but the one with the college degree probably has the better financial outlook.
Several of the smartest younger minds on the right have come together to launch a new initiative called "The Next Right" focusing on making conservatism more viable in the online space. It's supposed to be "something new on the right side of the blogosphere: an online community for change-minded activists and hardcore political junkies in the conservative movement."
It'll be interesting to see how it goes. I think that sometimes people underestimate the extent to which the left's edge in online media just follows straightforwardly from the demographic profile of the potential online audience (I think much the same can be said about the right's dominance of talk radio) and doesn't have anything to do with conservatives doing anything "wrong" as such.
Ilan Goldenberg and Max Bergmann take a closer look at John McCain's alleged desire to break with Bush on the subject of alliances and multilateralism and finds that there's no real there there.
Judith Rodin has an insightful op-ed about the transportation policy crossroads the country faces next year as it comes time for congress to reauthorize the main federal transportation funding legislation. Will the next administration show the vision of a Dwight Eisenhower and give us the fundamental rethink of infrastructure policy we need:
Another critical danger is environmental. Today, the transportation sector consumes 90 percent of the United States' imported oil while producing one-third of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions -- and one-twelfth of the world's. Yet the federal government clings to a backward funding formula: The more a state's residents drive, the more money that state receives. In fact, projected increases in automotive travel will release so much greenhouse gas by 2020 that environmental protections achieved through higher gas-mileage requirements and anticipated advances in low-emissions fuels will be completely negated.
A less visible danger is economic. Transportation costs, now the second-highest household expense, are pricing families out of the American dream -- preventing them from saving, buying homes or investing in their children's educations. A 2006 Center for Housing Policy report indicated that working families in large metropolitan areas spend nearly a third of their incomes on transportation. A study by the American Public Transportation Association clarifies the connection between these challenges and the country's critical need for investment in mass transit: Two of every three regular users of public transportation earn less than $50,000 a year. The federal government, meanwhile, directs only one of every five gas-tax dollars to automobile alternatives.
As we look to the future, we must expand affordable, accessible and environmentally sustainable transportation options: high-speed and light rail, rapid and mass transit, and walkable, bikeable streets. Washington must provide new incentives for states and cities to promote greener land use, cleaner cars and decreased automotive dependence.
Her op-ed seems designed to promote the America 2050 project which I'll confess to not being familiar with, but she's succeeding in piquing my interest and hopefully yours as well.
Photo by Flickr user paulkimo9 used under a Creative Commons license
I just took my first-ever ride in a meter-equipped DC cab. It wound up costing almost precisely what it would have cost under the old zone system. But if I'd want to travel a bit further, it would have cost marginally more. Similarly, if I'd wanted to take a slightly shorter trip, it would have cost slightly less money. Crazy idea.
I'm not really sure that an offer to retire Hillary Clinton's campaign debts would have a ton of appeal to Clinton. It seems to me that once she's out of the presidential race, she'll still be a fairly influential U.S. Senator who shouldn't have much trouble raising funds from folks looking to curry favor with her, and she's unlikely to face a serious 2012 challenge so her re-election fundraising can just go to pay off presidential campaign debt.
Paying some ridiculously large sum of money to Mike D'Antoni does seem like the kind of expensive, won't-work quick fix that would appeal to the New York Knicks management, so I kind of hope that happens. Remember when Larry Brown was going to cure what ails the team? Well that didn't work, and helping a listing team learn how to play defense is the sort of thing Brown has done well in the past.
D'Antoni's a good coach in my view, but what the Knicks really need to do is focus on the fact that their roster doesn't have enough good players. Absent canny draft choices, good free agent signings, or a lucky trade the team is just bound to be terrible. Under the circumstances, they may as well save money and hire a caretaker coach while trying to rebuild the team.
Leila Fadel reports on the latest success of the surge: "Iraqi security forces, after more than of 40 days of intense fighting, on Thursday told residents to evacuate their homes in the northeast Shiite slum of Sadr City and to move to temporary shelters on two soccer fields."
Hezbollah stages what looked like the opening blows in a coup in Lebanon but then seem to have stopped short of that and "the Lebanese capital had mostly returned to calm on Friday morning" though Hezbollah and its allies still "closed down the television station and newspaper and political offices of Mr. Hariri, the leader of the largest bloc in Parliament, and handed them over to the Lebanese army."
Over the past year or so I've heard various voices try to propagate revisionist accounts of Israel's short-lived effort to crush Hezbollah in Lebanon where people tried to argue that the mission was only an apparent failure, but actually succeeded in some sense. I think we can see from events like this that that's total nonsense -- Hezbollah is very much not crushed.
Ed Kilgore's case for an Obama-Clinton ticket has made me like the idea even less. He canvasses various things Clinton would allegedly bring to the ticket, but in almost every case I can think of better people to bring the quality in question. Then there's this -- "She would also bring some national security street cred to the ticket, which is an Obama vulnerability that I suspect is being underappreciated at the moment."
This reflects, I believe, an incredibly damaging mindset that's been crippling the Democratic Party for years and the prospect of excising this mindset is the single most appealing thing about the prospect of Obama being the nominee. Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.
I say good riddance to that. I got the war wrong, and I think that gives me less "cred" than I would have had had I gotten the war right and I think that, politically speaking, it makes sense to put people forward who aren't tainted by the war. But most of all we need to ditch the mindset that says "cred" on national security is composed of being hawkish even when that means being wrong.
None of which is to deny that Clinton would bring some very real strengths to the ticket. But it seems to me that, for example, Janet Napolitano brings just as much in terms of experience, ovaries, and a record of building political coalitions based on working class white and Latino voters.
Ambinder says that Barack Obama's fifty state voting drive is more than a voting drive: "On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC."
One incredibly interesting question is to what extent the organizing tools Obama has put to good use thus far in the campaign can be made to work as tools of governance that put pressure on congress and so forth.
After Tuesday's results, I kind of expected a Wednesday superdelegate flood to Barack Obama. It didn't really materialize, though he did pick up some ground. And Thursday was the same way. And now looking at my inbox, it seems like more of the same as Rep. Peter DeFazio endorses Obama while Rep. Donald Payne switches from Clinton to Obama. Stuff on this scale doesn't -- and can't -- lead to a knockout blow, it's more of a death by a thousand cuts thing with the handful of superdelegate defections being especially damaging.
Watch in amazement along with Justin Logan as The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb says Americans ought to be indifferent to the impact U.S. policy has on al-Qaeda recruiting.
Well, just for the record, it turns out that last year the library was transferred into the federal system and a new director, Tim Naftali of the University of Virginia, was named director. The old private foundation still controls a couple of buildings, but basically it's now a nonpartisan institution under federal control. Naftali told me that they're busily updating the displays and that Nixon's presidential papers, kept in Washington until now, will be shipped to California as soon as a new archive building is constructed. It is, one might say, the New Nixon Library.
If you read, say, this you'll get a sense of where Tim's coming from politically.
I have no idea whether or not S.V. Date's analysis of whether or not Barack Obama can get Florida Jews to vote for him is correct (makes for an interesting read, though) but I was interested to see that according to his byline he wrote a book called Jeb: America's Next Bush. Isn't that a great title? I wish I'd thought of that.
I'm sure the Metropole condo will be lovely, and I do like the location at 15th and P, but who's really going to want to spend $6 million on a five bedroom Logan Circle condo? It just doesn't seem plausible to me; DC doesn't really have the young rich hedge fund demographic that might buy something like that.
An odd bit from an article on the housing bust in Maricopa, AZ (via Atrios):
Many people blame the bubble and bust on investors — both amateur and professional — who speculated in new homes. "I think that was part of the mistake that the builders made, was that they allowed investors to come in and buy," Abdullah said. "Allowed them to buy tracts of homes, you know, five, six, 10 houses, and they bought them on speculation."
What's the mistake here. Builders bought a bunch of cheap land, then built houses on it, then resold the houses to speculators willing to pay a premium above construction costs despite the lack of objective supply constraints. That's a savvy business strategy, not a mistake. The people who made the mistake were the ones who bought the houses, not the ones who sold them.
It's the biggest hack trick in the book, but my cab driver remarked as we cruised toward LAX that there'd been less congestion in Orange County recently. He attributed this to the high price of gasoline, and said that people were car pooling more on the way to work, having one friend pick up another en route to socializing rather than everyone taking separate vehicles, and even taking the bus (though he limited this option to "poor Latinos") in order to save money.
They say you should remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes" but in journalism school you learn that there's a cab driver exception to this rule. This is especially the case when cab-based anecdotes fit the writer's preconceived political views. Ergo, people actually have somewhat more flexibility in terms of how much they drive than is often realized. So let's hear it for higher gas taxes, and for Orange County to spend money building bike lanes and providing more frequent bus service.
You read stuff like this and really feel sorry for University of Tennessee students (see also). It's fine for Glenn Reynolds to have as low an opinion of Barack Obama as he likes, but it seems to me that law professors should have some idea of what a "socialist view of government" consists of. I'm pretty sure Reynolds knows that Obama's not proposing the nationalization of industry or collective ownership of the means of production, so he must be confused about socialism.
Michael Calderone and Avi Zenilman: "'Deafening silence' from networks on military analysts". It's as if The New York Times' famous ability to set the agenda for TV news magically evaporates when wholesale corruption on the part of TV news becomes the story. They were complicit in lying to the public, they got caught, and they're not even slightly embarrassed or ashamed.
John McCain wants Hispanic America to remember that he's not from the "I hate you and blame you for all the country's problems" wing of the GOP:
I think it's a pretty shrewd ad. Unlike white or black Anglos, Latino voters tend to eschew culture-based voting and instead act the way Thomas Frank thinks everyone should act with the poorer ones being Democrats and the richer ones being Republicans, and so the overall edge going Democratic given the income distribution. The risk for Republicans is that the orgy of hate we saw from their side in 2006-2007 will push many more prosperous Hispanics over to the Democratic side. McCain's mission is to communicate "I'm not a racist" to his most likely Hispanic supporters, and given the tendency of small business owners everywhere to love the GOP a specific focus on small business seems smart.
Barack Obama gets fake in touch with the working man:
At the Raleigh Times bar in downtown Raleigh yesterday, Mr Obama arrived in the late afternoon with his wife Michelle only to find himself momentarily beerless.
"Where's my beer?" he asked, loud enough for the reporters to hear.
"PBR," he said, choosing Pabst Blue Ribbon, an inexpensive lager, before working the crowd.
Zeroed in, that is, on the inexpensive mass market lager of . . . elitist hipsters. Jonathan Kulick calls our attention to this relevant clip:
Now what's fascinating and terrifying about the country we live in is that were it to happen to be the case that Barack Obama had tasted amber Maharaja IPA in the past, really loved amber Maharaja IPA, and therefore decided to order an amber Maharaja IPA that fact would have featured prominently in cable news coverage for days and doubtless been the subject of at least one Maureen Dowd column.
John McCain's "spiritual guide" explains that we need to understand America's purpose as waging a broad-brush campaign against Islam:
A certain number of clueless liberals are going to wonder why this isn't nearly as big a deal as Reverend Wright, so in case you don't get it the difference is that anti-Muslim bigotry is a fairly mainstream and popular sentiment in the United States so associating with the Daniel Pipes' and Rod Parsley's of the world is only a problem in the actual, substantive sense of indicating that McCain's foreign policy views are bad and dangerous, not in the freak show "this'll hurt in November in Pennsylvania" sense.
I think the waves of outrage washing throughout the Obamasphere over this remark from Hillary Clinton reflect an echo chamber mentality more than anyone else. Here's what Clinton's quoted as saying:
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
As quoted, that's a dumb thing to say which seems to imply that non-white voters or perhaps all Obama supporters are lazy. But add a pinch of charitable interpretation into the dynamic, and I think Clinton's meaning is perfectly clear -- she really does do better than Obama among white working class voters in Democratic primary elections. I don't buy the argument, often made by Clinton supporters, that this edge among white working class Democratic primary voters indicates a substantial Clinton electability edge in the general election (it's one part fallacy, two parts baseless speculation, and then a grain of truth) but it's a common argument and not an offensive one.
Meanwhile, just from a tactical posture the closer this thing gets to being over the less point there is in Obama supporters getting super snarky and indignant about everything the Clinton campaign does. At this point, Obama's job is to start making people who find this sort of argument plausible like him more, not to crush Hillary Clinton.
Say what you will about John Bolton, I think he has an admirable tendency to avoid mincing words and just say what he thinks:
Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.
“This is a case where the use of military force against a training camp to show the Iranians we’re not going to tolerate this is really the most prudent thing to do,” he said. “Then the ball would be in Iran’s court to draw the appropriate lesson to stop harming our troops.”
That's about a hundred times better than all the kvetching you hear from certain quarters about Iran -- Bolton wants war and he's not afraid to say it. Nor has he been afraid in months past to say that he loves John McCain because he thinks McCain agrees with him about the need to start a war with Iran. I think Bolton's right about this, but McCain's the kind of guy who'll want to start a war with Iran, and who'll say things that sort of indicate he wants to start a war with Iran, and who'll even joke about how eager he is to start a war with Iran, but then get pissed off if you suggest that's his policy.
Rob Goodspeed analyzes how many words each candidate's website dedicates to each issue. You can see that John McCain has very little to say outside his security/Iraq/veterans comfort zone. To me, that means it's vital for Barack Obama to try to hit McCain early in that comfort zone since that's where it'll be hardest to build an argument that convinces people, but I think Democratic strategists have a bad habit of preferring to stay within their own comfort zone.
I think Ezra's giving short shrift to Barack Obama's housing policy commitments. It's true that, as for every president, affordable housing issues aren't going to be priority number one in the Obama administration. But his support for creating an Affordable Housing Trust Fund isn't just boilerplate, this is actual legislation that's a top priority for affordable housing advocates.
Note, conversely, that programs conservatives claim to believe in like Section 8 housing vouchers suffered a lot under the GOP congress and would suffer much, much, much more under John McCain's proposed cutbacks of domestic discretionary spending.
Yesterday, Marc Ambinder reported "Another strategist, Harold Ickes, has told colleagues that he does not believe that she should think about dropping out until, at the very least, the questions of Florida and Michigan are resolved." It's worth pointing out that this makes no real sense. Nothing would do more to help resolve the Florida and Michigan issue than for Clinton to drop out and endorse Obama. If she did that, the only remaining issue would be to strike a balance between representing FL and MI at the convention and slapping FL and MI on the wrist hard enough that states don't pull this kind of stunt again. That's a needle you can thread any number of ways.
It's the fact that the campaign is continuing that makes the question difficult to resolve because it has both campaigns focused on maximizing their delegate counts rather than dealing with the aforementioned issue. Which, I suppose, is part of what makes it such an appealing pretext for staying in the race -- as a rationale it has a nice circular logic where the campaign can't end 'till MI and FL are resolved, but the issue can't be resolved until the campaign ends, so on and on we go.
Maybe this is just wishful thinking, but it seems to me that the failure of the Hillary Clinton gas tax holiday gambit may prove to be something of a watershed in the politics of climate policy. A lot of thinking by political people over the years has been dominated by the idea that the public is absolutely fixated on cheap gasoline by any means possible. We seem to be seeing, however, that that's not necessarily the case. Obviously, that's not to say that the public is now going to run to embrace Yglesias-esque schemes overnight, but it does show that the boundaries of political possibility may not be quite where most folks thought they were.
Meanwhile, I think it continues to be noteworthy that most of Barack Obama's most impressive moments have been essentially counterattacks to silly gambits from Team Clinton -- not just this gas tax business, but the "naive and irresponsible" diplomacy, etc. -- and I'm not really sure if it's noteworthy in a good way or noteworthy in a bad way.
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Heads in the Sand
