The old CW was that as China got richer, it would grow more democratic. The new CW seems to be that China will get richer, but not more democratic. The inside pages of your newspaper, however, keep being filled with stories like this one where "2,000 people mobbed and ransacked a hospital in southwestern China on Friday in a dispute over medical fees and shoddy health care practices, a human rights group said today." To me, it always seems more likely that the whole place will collapse into chaos.
Russ Feingold won't be running for president. Personally, I'm glad he's not because this allows me to avoid making up my mind about what to say about a Feingold presidential campaign. On the one hand, I'm very substantively enthusiastic about Feingold and what he stands for, and thus would be disinclined to say bad things about his candidacy. On the other hand, it seems to me that he would have been a terrible messenger for a Feingold-style message and that nominating him as a presidential candidate would be a pretty poor tactical decision.
Mark Kleiman says he hopes to see it from the new congress. I hope so, too, but I'm not super-optimistic. As you'll recall, the new Democratic majorities are quite narrow and plenty of Democrats -- including soon-to-be majority leader Steny Hoyer -- voted for the bakruptcy bill. A whole bloc of centrist Democrats even wound up demanding an apology from Nancy Pelosi for turning that into a whipped issue.
In the course of a great op-ed on the new congress, Old Boss Mike Tomasky notes that splits inside the caucus on cultural issues are unlikely to be important because "there will be no votes in the next two years on any divisive social issues." Quite so. It doesn't really matter what, say, Heath Shuler thinks about marriage equality or flag burning because Nancy Pelosi isn't going to push these topics to the floor -- they used to come up all the time as a deliberate GOP legislative tactic.
This, however, is also the reason why groups seeking progressive social change can ill-afford to abandon the judicial process in favor of a single-minded focus on electoral politics. Even if some future scenario arises in which, say, 52 percent of the public favors gay marriage, the Democrats have a majority in the House, and a majority of House members favor gay marriage there still very little chance of a marriage equality bill passing. Even under those cirsumstances, some Democratic members will come from marginal districts where gay marriage is likely to be unpopular. Forcing a vote on gay marriage would imperil those members (even if they voted "no" it would be a problem for them) and protecting marginal members would be a high priority for the leadership. Unless gay rights groups could put a lot of financial clout behind a gay marriage push, it simply wouldn't be worthwhile to pick a big fight over a controversial topic. What's more, given the Senate's massive overrepresentation of culturally conservative voters, it would always be extremely difficult to secure the 60 votes necessary to actually pass a gay marriage bill.
Recall that desegregation was a majority supported position long before the federal government actually did anything about Civil Rights. This was for roughly the same reason -- civil rights was bad coalitional politics and the Senate provided ample room for a conservative minority to obstruct progress. Legislative action came eventually because judicial decisions provoked a series of crises that it was impossible for the elected branches in Washington to ignore. This reality doesn't especially fit one's intuitive notion of how democracy "ought to work" but it reflects the reality of democracy as actually practiced in the United States.
If you're looking for evidence that Democrats should get more serious about gerrymandering, you need look no further than Illinois. Check out these results. One Democrat ran unopposed. Four Democrats won with over 80 percent of the vote. Three more had over 70 percent of the vote. Phil Hare won with 57 percent. Melissa Bean won with just 51 percent. That's ten Democrats. Of the nine Republicans, all drew opponents, one secured just 51 percent of the vote and and five more won sixty percent of the vote or fewer.
You could transfer voters out of the Democrats 6-7 safest seats in a way that kept those seats safe but turned all six of the least-safe GOP districts into ones that were very friendly to Democratic challengers. It would require you to create some "funny looking" districts that start out in Chicago with super-Democratic precincts and then reach out into the suburbs rather than having very compact all-urban districts where Democrats get 70-90 percent of the vote, but lots of states work like that.
One of the ironies of American politics goes a bit like this: Before the midterm elections, the President of the United States was pushing an unpopular plan for "comperehensive immigration reform." He was also pushing several other unpopular policies. Largely as a result of his habit of pushing unpopular policies, voters delivered a stunning rebuke to his party at the midterm elections. Most of the newly elected Democrats oppose the president's unpopular plan for comperehensive reform. And yet the upshot of Democrats taking control of congress is to make comprehensive immigration reform . . . much more likely!
Kevin Drum seems to have some doubts as to whether it would make sense for the Democratic leadership to actually move forward with an immigration bill. I think it does. The votes for a comprehensive reform will be there, even if whichever Democrats inclined to take a restrictionist line want to hew to that line. What's more, Bush is in a weakened state and could really use a good bipartisan compromise. That means the odds are good he can be forced into a liberal-style comprehensive reform -- one that's long on amnesty earned legalization and short on guest workers. A bill like that would be good policies and would also help with Democratic coalition-building since more Latino citizens = more Democratic voters over the long term.
The current vogue for immigration restrictions, meanwhile, is pretty clearly a consequence of the generally weak job market. Said weak job market, meanwhile, is a political asset for Democrats all things considered. So by 2008 either immigration will have lost its salience because the job market improves, or else it'll still be salient but the negative impact it might have on Democrats would be swamped by general economic factors. What's more, John McCain is an earned legalization supporter, and putting a reform bill with his name on it through the congress will infuriate the GOP base and weaken his odds of winning the nomination. The only thing I would really say about all of this is that the election result should make Democrats irreconciliably opposed to any guest worker program -- that's too high a price to pay. What's more, if I may add an idiosyncratic opinion, I think Tom Tancredo's 2008 primary bid stands a good chance of surprising people with its strength.
Ed Kilgore says Steny Hoyer should no more be purged from the congressional leadership than Howard Dean should be dumped as DNC Chair. I must confess that my instinctive sympathies lie with Hoyer's opponent, John Murtha. Ed also comments that, Murtha's recent strong anti-war stance aside, he's "been a bit to the right of Jimmy Dean Sausage on a host of issues over the years." Worth looking into, I would say. One interesting perspective on such questions is Keith Poole's DW Nominate dataset which eliminates the subjectivity inherent in interest-group rankings in favor of a "best fit" quantitative analysis of all congressional votes. Here's what I found.
Everyone knows the "Vietnam Syndrome." And then Spencer Ackerman identified the Other Vietnam Syndrome -- the right's obsession with blaming the opponents of misguided wars for the wars' failures, rather than the people who launched them. There's also, however, what I'll call the Other Other Vietnam Syndrome -- the deep, dark, fear lurking in the hearts of all too many progressive leaders that opposing any war, anywhere, anytime will doom you to political oblivion. To wit: PPI President Will Marshall:
Mark Schmitt notes a few instances of districts featuring vulnerable Republicans where the "wrong" Democratic candidate prevailed in the primaries against an establishment-backed moderate, only to have the establishment write the seat off (at least temporarily), and then the Democrats won the seat anyway. "Is there a lesson here? It's not a big sample size, but it suggests that in a district where a Republican was vulnerable to defeat, a plain-spoken progressive could do it at least as easily as a focus-grouped moderate. Perhaps even better."
Maybe that's the lesson. I'm inclined, however, to see a different lesson. Consider once again Carol Shea-Porter. Mark observes that she "won a four-way primary, defeating a veteran state legislator who had the support of the DCCC, got a campaign visit from Tom Daschle, and out-raised Shea-Porter 10 to 1." My guess would be that the real lesson here is that a candidate who manages to win a four-way primary against, among others, a veteran state legislator who had the support of the DCCC, got a campaign visit from Tom Daschle, and out-raised Shea-Porter 10 to 1 probably just had strengths as a candidate that weren't obviously there on paper. As everyone knows, actual issues and policy views have only a limited impact on voting behavior -- there are a lot of intangible factors in play, and primaries put those intangibles to the test.
One of the oddities of 2004 was that because Dean and Gephardt focused so much of their fire on (successfully!) bringing each other down, and then John Edwards waged a "nice guy" campaign aimed at securing the Vice Presidency, Kerry emerged victorious without really being tested. It's better, I think, to have real races insofar as their are real disagreements between the candidates. In a way, this is especially true for more moderate candidates who'll have a better chance at getting credit for their moderation if, like Bill Clinton, they actually succeed in facing-down alternatives and securing a mandate for re-positioning the party.
Okay, it's wanky and off-message, but having been raised with, if not San Francisco values, then at least West Village values, I have to say this sketch is pretty funny:
About a year ago, I seem to recall that the CW had sort of settled on the idea that Yao Ming was "overrated." Not that he was actually overrated as such, but he was super-famous and people felt his game didn't live up to that hype or to his high draft status. In fact, at the time he was already a very good player. But since then he has, without a lot of attention, become, well, totally awesome. In the 25 games he played after the All-Star break last season he averaged 25.7 points (on 53.7 field goal shooting), 11.6 rebounds, and 1.8 blocks. So far this year, he's averaging 27.3 points, 10 rebounds, 2 blocks, and 1.9 assists on 59 percent field goal shooting with a 88 percent free throw shooting. And unlike a lot of guys who've been great out-of-the-gate this year, based on his performance in the second half of last season there's very good reason to think he can sustain it season-long.
Thanks to the way he dominated Shaq (who, to be fair, has been a shadow of his former self for some time now) last night, I don't think this is going to be going unnoticed much longer.
In a series of events predicted by virtually nobody allowed access to high-profile media positions, but virtually everyone who knows anything about Lebanon, the upshot of Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah has been to strengthen Hezbollah's political position and throw Lebanon's relatively Israel-friendly into crisis, possibly setting the stage for a return to power of pro-Syrian elements or else for a re-meltdown of the Lebanese state. One wrinkle here that seems to go perennial unmentioned is that had the Cedar Revolution actually brought democracy to Lebanon (as opposed to the takeover of government by an anti-Syrian political coalution) victory for Hezbollah and its allies would be all but assured. The Taif Accords, among other things, implemented an odd electoral system that structurally overrepresents Christians and underrepresents Shiites. That's not necessary a bad thing, under the circumstances, but a more normal and more democratic system would significantly enhance Hezbollah's political power.
This seems like as good a time as any to mention George W. Bush's recent decision to bestow a National Humanities Award on Lebanese emigré Fouad Ajami. As Martin Peretz points out, Ajami has probably been the single largest influence on American understanding of the Arab world; his books have been very influential and his writings have appeared widely in major publications. The non-Peretzian notion I would interject into this stream of praise is that America's understanding of the Arab world, as evidenced by years of recent policy fiascos, is . . . extremely bad. Ajami has, in essence, become prominent by being a seemingly credible voice willing to tell American elites what they want to hear, offering an interpretation of Arab affairs that's significantly more palatable than the analysis provided by the scholarly mainstream.
That some view represents that scholarly consensus is, of course, no guarantee that it's correct -- dissidents are sometimes right. Nevertheless, we've been using Ajami and Ajami-ism as our guide to the region for quite some time now and it keeps working out very, very badly.
William Stuntz in The Weekly Standard offers us a classic Green Lantern Theory account of Iraq, urging us to merely try harder in Iraq and demonstrate our implacable resolve to win. D at Lawyers, Guns, and Money takes some of this apart, but perhaps we can dig deeper.
I had some doubts about The Wire's mojo after Episode 8, but Episode 9 has me completely back on track. For a while now I've been a little puzzled by political debates about "teaching to the test" when school systems implement test-based accountability metrics. Number 8 handled this question in a way that I found dramatically clumsy. Episode 9, however, by hewing to the time-honored "show me, don't tell me" dictum made for better television and even has me semi-convinced of its political point, so kudos. The scene with the kids at Ruth's Chris was fantastic (as was the dice) and, in a typically Wireish fashion served to nicely underscore the point Prop Joe was making about Baltimore players' dubious notions of what "running away" would entail -- lots of people are conceptually trapped by the Charm City Game, almost literally incapable of imagining what it would mean to get out of a bad situation even when they recognize that the game is likely to kill them. I continued to be a bit puzzled by the action in the Hall -- discussion of which will get spoiler-y and I know some friends of mine haven't seen the episode so it goes below the fold.
Talking Wirebelow I mentioned that I'd always found the "teaching to the test" critique of No Child Left Behind to be fairly unpersuasive. In one of his rare bits of persuasive-to-me rhetoric, George W. Bush observed "I've heard people say you're teaching the test; if you teach a child to read, they'll pass the test." That seemed right to me. In some subjects -- history comes to mind -- I can imagine an effective "teach the test" method that doesn't actually impart any historical knowledge. For reading and basic math skills, however, the easiest way to teach kids to pass a test seemed to me to be teaching reading and basic math. Indeed, I recall that my AP Physics class involved a hefty test-prep element, but fundamentally this was accomplished by . . . teaching me Newtonian Mechanics.
That said, I thought Episode 9 of The Wire did, in fact, successfully dramatize an example of "teaching the test" in a plausible way. Craig Jerald at Education Sector steps up to the plate to try and un-worry me. He's only semi-convincing. He brings good evidence to bear that real teaching is a more effective way of improving test scores than is simple test prep. That, however, isn't evidence that schools are not, in fact, doing what The Wire portrays them as doing. What's more, the presumption behind the whole fix-the-schools drive is that the schools were doing a bad job ex ante of teaching reading and math. So you have a bunch of people who have not, historically, hit upon good methods of imparting reading and math scores to their kids. Now you tell them there will be consequences unless test scores go up. Sure, the best way to get them to go up would be to start teaching reading and math better. But if you're talking about a bad school, then presumably the teachers and administrators haven't found a way to get this done. So, instead they adopting the semi-effective method of doing narrow test prep. And the scores go up -- at least somewhat. Then we proclaim ourselves cured of the bad schools problem. And yet, nobody's learned.
Now, on the other hand, as true as that might be, it's not clear how not testing would make things any better.
In a move that surprises me as much as Sam and Josh, there's a story out there that Nancy Pelosi is now guaranteeing victory for John Murtha in his race against Steny Hoyer. My impression had been that Murtha's cause was somewhat hopeless, but I guess not. I'm not really enthusiastic about either of these dudes, but at the end of the day I am a big Pelosi fan and it seems to me that it would be a good idea for the leadership to be more-or-less on the same page.
In other leadership news -- Trent Lott (R-CSA) is trying to get back into a high-level post within the GOP Senate caucus. I'm confused. My recollection was that after Lott was exposed as a die-hard segregationist, the American conservative movement washed their hands of him and made him a committee chair banished him from the realm as a token of their commitment to the new rightwingery with twice the homophobia and half the racism. Now they're going back on all that? Didn't everyone love Michael Steele.
Sessions was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama. The year before his nomination to federal court, he had unsuccessfully prosecuted three civil rights workers--including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.--on a tenuous case of voter fraud. The three had been working in the "Black Belt" counties of Alabama, which, after years of voting white, had begun to swing toward black candidates as voter registration drives brought in more black voters. Sessions's focus on these counties to the exclusion of others caused an uproar among civil rights leaders, especially after hours of interrogating black absentee voters produced only 14 allegedly tampered ballots out of more than 1.7 million cast in the state in the 1984 election. . . .
On its own, the case might not have been enough to stain Sessions with the taint of racism, but there was more. Senate Democrats tracked down a career Justice Department employee named J. Gerald Hebert, who testified, albeit reluctantly, that in a conversation between the two men Sessions had labeled the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) "un-American" and "Communist-inspired." Hebert said Sessions had claimed these groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people." . . .
Another damaging witness--a black former assistant U.S. Attorney in Alabama named Thomas Figures--testified that, during a 1981 murder investigation involving the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he "used to think they [the Klan] were OK" until he found out some of them were "pot smokers." . . .
He was elected attorney general in 1994. Once in office, he was linked with a second instance of investigating absentee ballots and fraud that directly impacted the black community. He was also accused of not investigating the church burnings that swept the state of Alabama the year he became attorney general.
He got to the US Senate after that (Alabama, you know) and you'll be shocked to know he's racked up a voting record that's not especially solicitous of the interests of black people.
I love me my Wire, and I've been enjoying the Kotlowitz/James dialogues on the show in Slate but these praise of Kima as a favorite character on the show cannot stand:
Yes, she's beautiful and has that sexy, smoky voice. But she's also another great character who defies stereotypes. A gay detective who loves "men's work" to the detriment of her home life, but who also has to weather the fact that she's a woman in a man's world. She does it with humor and a take-no-prisoners toughness.
Kima, in my opinion, only defies stereotypes insofar as the writers have a weak grasp on what it is stereotypical lesbians would be like. It's almost as if they decided this major character should be a woman, then realized none of the main writers knew how to write a textured woman character, then decided not to add anyone to the staff who was up to the job, then decided the best way to handle the situation would be to write her just like a man, then hit upon the genius idea that they could justify this by making her a lesbian since, after all, lesbians are into chicks too!
Because they're actually brilliant writers, the people in charge manage to actually pull this gambit off without detracting from the show in an especially obvious way, but it's a pretty sorry effort. The other women on the show, meanwhile, tend strongly to either be total ciphers or else (Brianna, De'Londa) these crudely demonic sorts in a way that's badly out of step with the portrayal of the male criminal element. And then there's Snoop, about whom I guess I should think more.
Rarely is the question asked: Has Glenn Reynolds lost his mind? -- "my speculation that Iran has some method -- nuclear or otherwise -- that has deterred us from taking the kind of action that both Bill Quick and I expected in 2004 is seeming better-founded."
What's the "otherwise" here? Rick Santorum's Venezuelan space terrorists, perhaps? And what "kind of action" did he and master strategist Bill Quick expect?
One of the odder NBA dynamics around the end of last season was that lots of people were simultaneously talking about the unique awesomeness of Steve Nash and advocating that other teams adopt a Phoenix-style high-paced offense. Seemingly, though, those can't both be right. Either Nash is a brilliant talent, capable of quarterbacking an unorthodox style of play effectively, or else the unorthodox style is just better and anyone would put up Suns-esque numbers by pushing the pace.
Well . . . score one for Nash, even though the Suns aren't doing very well. John Hollinger points out that the Denver Nuggets have managed to actually exceed Phoenix's pace this year and for their trouble they rank 22nd in offensive efficiency. Meanwhile "this is still better than Toronto and Charlotte, which rank third and fourth in pace but 23rd and 28th in offensive efficiency." Boston, I might add, is fifth in pace and 25th in efficiency. Phoenix itself, however, is managing a respectable sixth in efficiency while maintaining the league's second-fastest offense. It's not good enough, in other words, to just run; you need players who can actually make it work. Charlotte, in particular, is just turning the ball over like crazy.
Max Sawicky, still fretting about the future of the nation, laments that during the election "On the war, the argument was basically there were no WMDs so the invasion was unjustified. In other words, if there were WMDs, it would have been. Might have been, with a 'competent' Administration." Everyone knows where I stand on the competence issue. The WMD one, is, I think, interesting and complicated. In particular, one of the paradoxes of the Iraq War is that though it was sold with reference to an advanced Iraqi nuclear program, had there actually been both an advanced Iraqi nuclear program and a US administration genuinely concerned about it, there almost certainly wouldn't have been a war.
Okay. All day I've been pondering what to say about the Jane Harman versus Alcee Hastings controversy. The first thing of it is that I'd really prefer Harman not get the job. There's lots of good content in The New Republic. Nevertheless, when the magazine publishes a special web-only editorial urging Democrats to do something on a question of national security, a good ex ante bet is that you should do the reverse.
With Democrats back in the majority, K Street is now looking to hire Democrats. It's good to see some cash getting in the hands of folks who, even when bad, are distinctly less bad than the folks on the other team. Ever better, it's good to know that at least some of our newly unemployed GOP congressfolks and staffers probably won't be able to secure lucrative lobbying gigs as their reward for ruining the country.
On the other hand, you obviously don't want to see ties between big business and the Democrats ruin the party's substantive agenda. The election, obviously, was primarily a referendum on crappy Republican performance. Neverthless, the Dems do have a positive agenda, including a proposed reform to the Medicare prescription drug benefit that's a very good idea, but hardly something drug companies are enthusiastic about. In this case, progressive reform can't be beaten in the voting booth, but can it be beaten on K Street? As the article says "Even before Election Day, the pharmaceutical industry hired Democrats to bolster its public relations efforts, hoping to ease the blow if Republicans lost their majority and Democrats followed through on pledges to let the government negotiate prescription drug prices."
More broadly, as Kevin Drum argues here if there's ever going to be serious health care reform in this country, it's just going to be all-out war with insurance companies and that means would-be reformers will have to reconcile themselves to not getting insurance industry money.
Tyler Cowen notes some evidence that astronomers have been underestimating the frequency of catastrophic asteroid impact events here on the planet earth. Depending on how you interpret a certain set of deposits, it's possible that super-huge impacts occur once every few thousand years instead of once every 500,000 years or so.
At any rate, it sounds dumb, but I really do think the world's major governments should pony up the money that would be required to better track the paths of asteroids and the like. Right now, we don't really have a good sense of where everything is all the time. Building the necessary monitoring capacity would be pretty cheap if you put it aside other kinds of national defense expenditures, and it would be something all the big players and wannabe players (USA, EU, Japan, Russia, Brazil, India, China, whomever else) could do cooperatively. Whatever the exact frequency, the question of an extremely destructive collision with an object in outer space is very literally a "when not if" sort of thing. Given ample warning, though, people could probably figure out some countermeasures. Keep in mind that beyond the truly catastrophic impact events, there are things like the Tunguska Event that could kill hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- if they happened in a big city.
Colin Meloy's epic ornithophiliac triptych gets off to a rockin' start. But it drags, it's pretentiously out-of-order (in addition the normal baseline of Decemberists pretension), and what's up with combining parts one and two into a single track? Do the Decemberists really think they're going to single-handedly turn the tide against the ipodification of their industry? Cause, uh, they won't, regardless of how many Japanese birdfucking myths they reference. And given that, I'd prefer that they stop screwing up my meticulous playlist management.
This is totally true, but it's also bullshit. It is the very ipodification of the music realm that prevents the album's flaws from being a real problem. I find the 12:26, three song second track really annoying so I skip it when it comes on. The rest of the album is all very good and, thanks to "Sons & Daughters," I now really want to go build an aluminum house somewhere with plenty of room for my cinnamon storage. If you find yourself in the position of a Tom or a Catherine who can't find any new albums you like these days, you ought to consider the possibility that you're getting old and cranky.
Joe Courtney wins and Chris Shays is now the last Republican in New England. The good thing about pickups in places like Connecticut is that though these races were super-tight this time around, once in Democratic hands these become pretty safe seats that a competent Democrats should be able to hold on to for a long time.
Meanwhile, it'll be interested to see how Shays responds to his newfound isolation. If he could somehow be persuaded to play the "Fox New Democrat" role in reverse, spend tons of time bitching about how GOP conservatism is killing the party in his region of the country -- naturally the Most Important Region Ever -- and offering bipartisan cover to some Democratic initiatives, that could, in many ways, be more valuable than the seat itself.
If I were a Republican, I wouldn't be especially optimistic about putting Mel Martinez in as RNC Chair as a strategy "intended to appeal to disaffected Latino voters." The thing about "Latino voters" is that this isn't a very meaningful category. Republicans don't have a problem with Cuban-Americans, and Martinez is from Cuba. Now, it's true that Martinez favors liberalized immigration rules, which really might help the GOP with more problematic ethnic groups. But, of course, what got the GOP in trouble was that the party, notwithstanding George W. Bush's sentiments, in fact does not favor liberalizing immigration rules. That's not a something voters concerned with this issue are confused about, it's actually the case that while Bush and some other Republicans have lax immigration views, the bulk of the party follows a restrictionist line.
The big picture issues aside, though, this does still leave me wondering about the pure ethnic pandering issue here. Do they really not see that you can't give jobs to Cubans as a way of appealing to Mexican-Americans? That the two political communities are completely different in terms of demographics, voting behavior, issue concerns, etc. I thought there was a crack political machine lurking somewhere in the White House.
Out-of-the-closet David Kurtz has some choice words on hopes for a big Iraq turnaround:
That Bob Gates is going to make a dramatic difference over the next two years. First, I remember the last time we were promised wisdom, experience, and a steady hand from a member of Bush 41's old team. That was Dick Cheney.
Right. The purported dichotomy between 41 people (good!) and 43 people (bad!) is dramatically overstated. And it's not just Cheney. Paul Wolfowitz was on the Bush 41 team. So was Condoleezza Rice. And, of course, so was Colin Powell. Don Rumsfeld, meanwhile, wasn't. The reality is that presidents almost always -- especially in the first terms of their administrations -- appoint reasonably diverse groups of people to national security positions. They proceed to disagree with each other. The President of the United States then decides what he wants to do. Bush 41 had some real nutters working for him who pushed some nutty ideas inside his administration. Bush 43 had some reasonably sensible people working for him who pushed some reasonably sensible ideas inside his administration. The difference wasn't in the advisors, it was in the presidents. More often than not, Bush 41 made reasonable choices while Bush 43 made bad ones.
There's no mystical Team Kennebunkport that can save the country from the fact that our president has some very wrongheaded ideas about the world and a habit of making very bad decisions.
So let's say you're a retail store. You're planning some kind of post-holiday sale. You don't, however, want the details of the sale to become public knowledge too soon. But your ad copy and other elements of planning need to be worked out in advance. Because your store is imperfectly managed, information about the sale leaks onto a website. You're pissed off. What do you do? Wield copyright law as a fearsome bludgeon:
Deal site BlackFriday.info yesterday removed the Best Buy "Black Friday" sales price list after the big box retailer threatened to deliver a DMCA takedown notice to Black Friday's ISP. In a brief posting, Black Friday said, "While we believe that sale prices are facts and not copyrightable, we do not want to risk having this website shut down due to a DMCA take down notice."
In recent years, information on the post-Thanksgiving sales has become a highly prized commodity, with a number of sites featuring copies of major retailers' ads. Consumers looking for the best prices and wanting to streamline their shopping are responsible for the sites' popularity.
This is absurd. We're inching toward companies being able to prevent newspapers from publishing any sort of adverse information just all on vague copyright grounds. Facts are facts and people are entitled to circulate them.
I didn't take intro economics in college, but thanks to the distributed intelligence of the internet I can gain pearls of insight into what I missed by reading Greg Mankiw's blog on which we see the advice he would give to a politician interested in curbing inequality:
The tax system is probably the best vehicle to accomplish the Dems' goal. One possibility would be to reduce the payroll tax rate and to make up the lost revenue by increasing, or perhaps even eliminating, the cap on taxable payroll. That would benefit, approximately, the bottom 90 percent of the income distribution.
Fair enough. He also remarks that "This policy change would, of course, have an efficiency cost." How so? "By raising taxes on taxpayers who already face the highest tax rates, the deadweight losses of the tax system would surely rise." In other words, to maximize equality, we should make taxes on the wealthiest people as high as possible. By contrast, to maximize efficiency, we should make the highest tax rate as low as possible. He doesn't spell out the reasoning behind that view, but presumably that's why I should have taken the class. He also says earlier in the post that free-market economists like him typically don't care about inequality. He doesn't spell out the reasoning behind that view either, but my guess is it's because he thinks maximizing efficiency is the most important thing.
I think the implication of the combination of these views is that we should just divide federal spending (about $2.8 trillion) by the population (about 300 million) and then charge every person a $9,333 (or thereabouts) head tax. Is that right?
As I was reading this David Ignatius column on the US and Iran, I kept waiting for the moment -- I thought it was inevitable -- that he would say something I strongly disagreed with. But it didn't happen! It's a great column. He's totally right. We should talk to Iran. Past history suggests a mutually beneficial deal was on the table as recently as 2003; a mutual beneficial deal the administration rejected "largely because of an Iranian demand for 'pursuit of anti-Iranian terrorists' from the Mujaheddin-e Khalq organization who were in Iraq. Absurdly, the Pentagon balked because of a fantasy that the group could help foment revolution in Iran." We should try again.
Via Jim Henley, a Guardian story shows once again that Democrats can't count on James Baker to solve the Iraq issue: "Mr Bush’s refusal to give ground, coming in the teeth of growing calls in the US and Britain for a radical rethink or a swift exit, is having a decisive impact on the policy review being conducted by the Iraq Study Group chaired by Bush family loyalist James Baker, the sources said."
The Commission, in other words, not only won't change Bush's mind, but is changing its own mind to suit Bush's blinkered worldview. The idea that the enforcer sent down to Florida to help finesse the will of the electorate away in 2000 was going to be a big help to the Democratic Party always seemed like something to be skeptical about.
Tyler Cowen labels this paper by Shu Kahn the "politically incorrect paper of the month." It's about the promotion and tenure prospects of women and men working in the sciences. Given the label, I was expecting it to conclude that women didn't get promoted because "math is hard!" In fact, it says:
We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.
I don't know whether that conclusion's right, but I certainly don't think it's especially politically incorrect. You say the gap is explained by "fertility decisions" I say it's explained by "structural sexism." Here, as in much of life, women and men are now allowed to compete on "equal" terms. The terms, however, were set up long ago -- by men -- before that was the case, operating under the implicit assumption that the competitors would be men who, if they had children, would have wives at home to take care of the children. So things work out nicely if you're a man, or if you're a single woman, but not so well if you're a woman who -- like most women -- has children at some point. You can't just pin this problem on science departments and university administrators, since obviously larger social forces are at work, but it's hardly fair. And university administration genuinely concerned with the situation could do things to mitigate the situation, though probably they couldn't solve it all on their own.
As an alternative, they could spin stories about how their daughter didn't want to play with trucks as a way of displacing concern away from this phenomenon. You know, whatever.
Laura Rozen reports that figures inside the administration are considering a quasi-new approach to Iraq tilt toward the Shiite side of the burgeoning civil war and help them crush their adversaries. Let me merely point out that our occupation of Iraq has now gone on for so long that this, like essentially every other idea, has already had its moment in the sun. After the heady days of the Early Bremer period, we attempted a Sunni Placation Strategy during Iyad Allawi's administration. Then, at some point during the Ibrahim Jafari Era the decision was made that we needed to be backing the forces of "democracy" in Iraq (i.e., the Shiites) against their adversaries. We eventually wound up backtracking on that, and have spent much of Nouri al-Maliki's administration attempting a return to the Sunni Placation Strategy, complete with the resumption of on-again, off-again warfare against Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers.
And so, sure, why not tilt back again? Then again, why not leave? Alternatively, here's The New Republic's take:
This magazine has long advocated deploying U.S. power to halt the mass slaughter of innocents. Saddam Hussein distinguished himself at the mass slaughter of innocents: About this, there can be no dispute. Yet, in this case, we supported an invasion that has led to the same savage result. Without an occupying power--and, perhaps, with one--Iraq could soon witness refugee crises, the sectarian mêlée spilling into neighboring countries, Al Qaeda bases sprouting across the Sunni Triangle, and massacres still greater than those that have already transpired. . . .
While the administration's defenders claim that it has exhausted diplomatic possibilities, this is true only in the sense that it has conducted grudging and occasional conversations with important regional players. But diplomacy is not just a cozy exercise in endless speech acts. It, too, must be brutal: It must include threats and promises, alliances and coalitions--with the threat of being left out. A new campaign should lay the groundwork for agreements prior to the calling of a peace conference that would include Iraq's parties and its neighbors, as well as the United States, the European Union, and Russia. What kind of agreement could be worked out? Separate states, a loose federation, a unified government? That's not clear--and won't be until the parties involved make their wishes known and negotiations begin.
Smells like . . . Wieseltier. Seriously -- why say "mêlée" when "fighting" works? Why misuse the concept of speech acts? Threaten whom? Threaten to do what?
K-Mart gone for the season. I'm not a huge Carmelo Anthony advocate, but I do have an affection for the Denver Nuggets. You've got to love NBA midgets like Earl Boykins. And Martin and Marcus Camby both deserve hero status for their roles on NYC-era teams that somehow managed to get to the NBA Finals without being, you know, very good at basketball. Plus the whole concept of trying to assemble a professional basketball team not featuring anyone who can shoot is pretty sweet. Every year now for a while, one looks at this Denver squad and says "if Martin and Camby and Nene can stay healthy, these guys could be dangerous." And they could -- dangerous to the very concept of basketball.
After all, if you ever assembled a championship team whose offense consisted entirely of layups, lobs, and tip-ins (see also the Kidd/Martin Nets of 2002 and 2003) the game as we know it might be forever destroyed. But, obviously, it's not to be, they can't stay healthy. What the world really needs is a combo Utah-Denver hospital ward front line -- Anthony, Boozer, Martin, Camby, Kirilenko, Okur, Nene -- they could be awesome . . . if they can stay healthy. Ha! So many rebounds, so few games played.
So now the leadership lineup, in order, is Pelosi-Hoyer-Clyburn-Emanuel -- a fairly fractious crew. One could be of two minds about this. On the one hand, a fairly fractious leadership group might lead to a fractious caucus, creating trouble down the road. More optimistically, the caucus just is diverse in terms of ideologies, constituencies, and personal loyalties. Nevertheless, it's in everyone's interest to try and find ways to hang together, rather than separately. Arguably, a leadership team that reflects cleavages that would exist one way or another will be better able to mediate those cleavages and forge a reasonable path forward. After all, though the Pelosi/Hoyer 1/2 punch didn't look intuitive on paper, it was actually very effective during the minority period.
UPDATE: For a more "sky is falling" take on Pelosi's missteps here, see Crowley, Zengerle, and Orr. Last night, I was very pessimistic about this (foreseeable) outcome, but Rosenfeld sort of talked me out of being so sure about that. For one thing, as Ezra notes more-or-less this exact same thing happened to the GOP after their 1994 win and the Republican caucus survived and prospered.
I guess the question becomes: Apart from Pelosi looking bad, what concrete problematic things are going to follow from this. In the nightmare scenario, Hoyer decides that if Dems face setbacks in 2008, people will blame Pelosi opening the door for her to be dumped and him to take over as the #1 Democrat and so he deliberately engineers political problems for the Democratic caucus. That, however, strikes me as a more-than-a-bit outlandish scenario. It's a lot better to be #2 guy in the majority than the #1 guy in the minority so you'd need to be pretty crazy to deliberately risk electoral defeat. As I said above, the Pelosi-Hoyer relationship was already very tense before the election and, in practice, there didn't seem to be big blowups or obvious problems.
Lots of paens around to the late Milton Friedman, including here from Alex Tabarok who attributes to following to Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom:
President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."... Neither half of that statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society.
Tabarrok remarks "Damn right."
This seems like a straightforward misreading of Kennedy's statement. He didn't say "ask what you can do for your government" he said "ask what you can do for your country." Surely it doesn't follow from libertarianism -- a doctrine about the appropriate scope of state power -- that it's inappropriate for free men in free societies to act exclusively out of selfish intentions. One assumes, for example, that Friedman regarded his efforts to, say, destroy American public education or make heroin more widely available as things he was doing for his country rather than an extremely roundabout method of personally getting his hands on more heroin.
Closer to the context at hand, it seems exceedingly odd for one of the leading proponents of the volunteer military to object so stridently to patriotic appeals from government leaders -- America's recruits, obviously, get tangible compensation for their military service, but it seems pretty clear that the whole thing would be non-viable without the presence of what you might call a fairly large "patriotism externality" being in play.
The Hill reports that while Blue Dogs are demanding Jane Harman, the Congressional Black Caucus is going formally on record for Alcee Hastings. Trouble in Pelosiville:
The dueling letters will likely raise the stakes for the Speaker-to-be. Coming on the heels of a divisive race for majority leader, her decision has the potential to alienate one of two powerful groups: the 44-member Blue Dog Coalition or the 43-member Black Caucus.
All the more reason to turn to a compromise candidate: Silvestre Reyes. There are already several Blue Dog types set to chair committees and a bunch of CBC members set to chair committees. I don't think there are any Latino members of which the same can be said. Plus, Reyes is qualified, seems to have sound views, and doesn't have any evident red flags about him. Indeed, The Daily Newsreports that "The Congressional Black Caucus is pushing Hastings, but Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas has emerged as the compromise front-runner, several sources said." It'd be a good choice at any rate.
See Noam Scheiber, Michael Crowley and Duncan Black for some "sky is not falling" interpretations of the Pelosi-Hoyer-Murtha fallout. In The Nation Ari Berman offers an excellent, calm rundown of what actually happened, detailing Hoyer's considerable reserves of support among House liberals.
I was around the Prospect offices when word first started circulating that Tommy Thompson was going to run for president. The idea is, of course, absurd. Nevertheless, as Reihan says if you sit back and think about it, Thompson really should have been the GOP nominee in 2000: "Imagine if Republicans, in 2000, had run a reformist Midwestern governor with a long record of accomplishment and a reputation for pragmatism instead of political scion and modest political success George W. Bush." Well, the GOP would be in better shape and the country would be a better place.
Not that this changes anything or Thompson's prospects, but it is worth pointing out that the primary system very much fails to bring the best candidates forward. Thanks to their big 1994 sweep, Republicans had, during the 2000 cycle, any number of governors in their second-term who'd won and been elected in purple or blue states thanks to a combination of political talents, pragmatic conservatism and, simply put, an ability to not fuck things up during the good economic times of the 1990s. Instead, though, we got George W. Bush whose political achievements were very modest (a conservative elected in Texas amidst a national GOP tide -- say it ain't so!) and who held an office with shockingly little in the way of actual power and responsibility.
What it comes down to is that, somewhat perversely, the "more open" primary system -- as opposed to old-school smoke filled rooms -- has in many ways made webs of connections more rather than less important. Power has been taken out of the hands of a small group of geographically dispersed elites who, acting out of self-interest, might choose to elevate a relatively obscure figure in the interests of securing victory and placed less in the hands of a broad mass of people than in the hands of a small geographically concentrated elite that controls the channels of mass communications -- i.e., the Washington political press. This elite, lacking an actual stake in the outcome, can afford to let self-interest essentially dictate a policy of laziness. Hence, we may be doomed to an endless cycle of Senators (who DC political reporters already cover), governors from Virginia and Maryland (whose exploits are detailed in the Metro section of The Washington Post), and scions of famous families.
The counterpoint to this, needless to say, would be the improbable rise to national prominence of Howard Dean, obscure governor former governor of Vermont. The question arises as to how much this highlights the possibility of a "people-powered" "netroots" strategy in elevating someone from obscurity versus how much it simply highlights the political possibilities opened up by the Democratic Party leadership's support of the Iraq War. One hopes for the former, but fears the latter. So far, discussion -- both in the press and on the blogs -- of '08 contenders seems focused almost entirely on current or former Senators and Al Gore. The wide range of second-term governors -- Sebelius, Blagojevic, Granholm, Richardson, Napolitano, Rendell, Henry, Doyle, etc. -- falls almost entirely by the wayside.
Charles Krauthammer says his beautiful invasion of Iraq was ruined by . . . Iraqis. People who want to blame U.S. policymakers for the disastrous consequences of U.S. policy are just engaged in self-flattery. This is what the French call "bullshit." Obviously, the fact that Iraq is populated by Iraqis was a fact that American policymakers and pundits should have been taking into account before invading the war, not some unknowable contingency. And, indeed, even insofar as unknowable contingencies have frustrated our efforts in Iraq, the fact that war is risky was something to take into account in advance.
Ironically, this mentality helps precisely what's gone wrong. The neoconservative approach to Iraq has always been marked by a remarkable combination of overoptimism about social and political conditions in Iraq with a not-so-well-veiled racist contempt for Arabs. Obviously, however, one of the major elements of Iraqi society that's made reconstructing it into a democracy under our tutelage is that Iraqis have not felt that it would be a good idea to surrender supreme power over their lives to a foreign occupying force led by people who, rather transparently, don't give a damn about them.
Before reaching his hilariously predictable conclusion -- the thing to do in Iraq is make sure the Palestinians remain subjected to foreign military occupation for as long as possible -- New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz offers up this striking aperçu:
Give George W. Bush his due. He took down the Taliban. And he also took down the savage Caesar. These are achievements. What he did not grasp--and what, for that matter, Baker and those for whom he speaks also do not grasp--is the sheer and relentless butchery of which both Sunni and Shia are capable. The fiendish barbarism of decapitated heads and mutilated bodies is now a reflex of the warriors and nothing exceptional, a commonplace. Even the bare rudiments of civilization will not soon come back to the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The bare rudiments of civilization, eh? No al-Qaeda recruiting videos -- or, for that matter, written language -- to worry about then. As one wit whose name I'll withhold to protect the innocent observed, the civil war shouldn't get too out of hand since the participants won't have any wheels. Just two sides trying to slug it out with rocks and so forth. Eventually, either Sunni or Shiite will figure out how to crack the stones so as to reveal sharp edges and they'll have an upper hand against their stick-tossing adversaries. Fortunately, in civilized parts of the world there's no history of ethnically motivated killing and mutilation so we can all rest secure in our easy sense of innate moral superiority to the towel heads.
