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November 26, 2006 - December 2, 2006 Archives
Defeat From the Jaws of Victory
As you may recall, back when George W. Bush was freshly re-elected and fairly popular, backed by Republican majorities in the House and Senate, he wanted to partially privatize Social Security. Well, it didn't work, and his effort to do so contributed to his current massive unpopularity. In the meantime, the GOP lost control of the House of Representatives and lost control of the US Senate. This, via Brad DeLong, is said by The Economist to lay the groundwork for a "grand bargain" on Social Security since though "Stonewalling is a plausible political tactic when you are in opposition" "It doesn't work so well if you are actually in charge on Capitol Hill."
Well, there's sort of no telling what sort of foolish things the Democrats will agree to, but I say no, no, no to this. For one thing, while stonewalling on administration priorities may work out okay if you're in opposition, it actually works way better if you're actually in charge on the Hill. In the minority, you don't need to agree with administration proposals, but you do need to deal with them on some level. In opposition, administration proposals can simply be dismissed out of hand. And, indeed, any proposal that involves "carve out" private accounts should be rejected out of hand. Such accounts are poor public policy (increasing the riskiness of retirement at a time of generally growing riskiness, increasing inequality at a time of generally growing inequality) and the political proof is in the pudding -- opposing them wins elections, proposing them loses elections.
The starting point for a responsible approach to the federal budget is, in the short term, brining the ruinously costly Iraq War to as speedy a conclusion as possible. Next is rescinding the bulk of Bush's tax cuts. Next would be looking toward some increase in taxes on gasoline or carbon emissions. Reform of the country's wildly inadequate health care system (implicating, among other things, Medicare and Medicaid) should always be a priority. Minor adjustments to the Social Security tax and payout formula could prove necessary in the future depending on what happens to immigration and productivity, but needn't be a high-level priority. Carving private accounts out of the system should remain off the table and certainly Democrats have no business collaborating in any such endeavor.
I Only Listen to Sad, Sad Songs
I mentioned the other day that, unlike most people I know, song lyrics are important to me. One reason is that if you don't pay attention to lyrics, you miss the awesome phenomenon of peppy-sounding songs on depressing subjects. Catherine mentions Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945" ("The only girl I've ever loved / Was born with roses in her eyes / But then they buried her alive / One evening 1945 / With just her sister at her side / And only weeks before the guns / All came and rained on everyone") in this regard. The best example, however, continues to be Nena's "99 Red Balloons", a cheery pop ditty about the nuclear destruction of the world.
Baker-Hamilton
The more I read about this commission the less I like it. The news that the commission deliberate excluded "extreme" views even though the "extreme" left view has majority support is pretty maddening. The real problem, though, is that as best I can tell the Commission has the wrong mandate. Rather than a group charged with finding an optimal Iraq policy for the United States of America, it's charged with finding a formula that suits the interests of the American political establishment -- of Democrats who backed the war, and of Republicans who'd like to see their political party survive the disaster of George W. Bush. So while they'd like a policy that makes things better, what they need is a policy that can espoused while minimizing embarassment to said establishment. Unfortunately, the latter goal makes the former substantially impossible.
McCain The Hawk
Great op-ed by Matt Welch on what John McCain actually thinks about the world -- roughly, that George W. Bush has been overly disinclined to threaten the use of military force or to actually use it; that in the wake of Iraq, the country needs to become more militaristic in its approach to the world. As Kevin Drum says on this issue, at least, McCain is neither a centrist nor a standard-issue Republican -- he's the single furthest-right figure on the American political scene.
And, yes, he'll combine his more-hawkish-than-Bush approach to the world with a greater level of frankness and intellectual engagement, but at the end of the day I'm not actually sure how that's supposed to help.
But Why?
All else being equal, Alcee Hastings isn't reallly the dovish congressman I want to go to interfactional war with. That said, Josh Marshall's quick conclusion that "it's not about Jane Harman. It's about Alcee Hastings" and "I just think it's a bad idea to have someone chair the intel committee who has previously been impeached and convicted by Congress for corrupt acts" seems far too simplistic for me.
Let's just set these things aside. Based on TPM Muckraker roundups, the case against Hastings is that, on the one hand, he "and a friend tried to shake down a defendant facing trial in Hastings' courtroom for $150,000. In exchange, the two promised a reduced jail sentence and the return of over $800,000 in confiscated property." What's more "in 1985, he leaked secret government information that ruined three FBI probes." Now, the US Senate rejected those leak charges during the Hastings impeachment process, and though Hastings was removed from office over the bribe matter, he was also found not guilty in a criminal trial.
But let's assume it's true. Hastings shook some dudes down for $150,000 and ruined three FBI investigations. Jane Harman, by contrast, supported an invasion of Iraq based on bogus intelligence that's costs hundreds of billions of dollars and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Who do I have more doubts about? Rush Holt, the new potential compromise figure, seems like a far better choice than either. No bribery allegations and, what's more, he "voted against the Congressional resolution authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, primarily because there was no evidence of an Iraq connection to 9/11, because there was no evidence that Saddam posed an immediate threat to us with WMD, and because I believed the President's new-found enthusiasm for a "preemptive war" doctrine was both unconstitutional and dangerous."
That sounds like the kind of thing I'm looking for in an Intel Chair. I think people should take the fact that Harman was sitting on that committee and didn't reach Holt's conclusion more seriously. What was she doing? What intelligence was she looking at? I was looking in part at the fact that all these Democratic leaders -- people like Harman -- were for the war, and assumed they wouldn't be doing so without good reason. But, obviously, they were. So why were they? Why was she?
Maybe a Coup Would Work
Honestly, it's no wonder Chavez-friendly populists keep winning elections in Latin America; the south-of-the-border right seems to be comprised almost entirely of morons. Did they seriously nominate a "banana magnate" who "had promised closer U.S. ties" and happens to have been Ecuador's richest man? How hard could it have been to paint this dude as an American puppet who would only serve the interests of a narrow elite?
DeLong Delivers
On previously made promises. Here at the Flophouse, we're all willing to accept donations. I've even got a handy PayPal account if you happen to be feeling especially thankful.
At any rate, I don't know how many people keep up with Spencer's blog (I could, I suppose, ask him...) but you should be. This post on James Kurth is great, though I'm not sure I can embrace his burgeoning Vince Young fandom. Just because you live with a Longhorn is no reason to hop on the bandwagon, especially in light of the surprisingly strong performance his alma mater turned in this year.
The Numbers Game
A.M. sees Wire-like resonances in incoming DC Police Chief Lanier's promises of a new regime for the DC Police Department. Meanwhile, Episode 48 leaves me wondering how there could possibly be enough time left in just two episodes to wrap up the existing plot threads. In many ways, last night's offering felt to me like a mid-point of a story rather than a "the beginning of the end" one that the schedule would seem to suggest. Freamon's figured out that the bodies are stashed in vacant buildings. The Major Crimes Unit is going to be reassembled. But surely you can't build a case against Marlo in a two episode arc. Perhaps that'll all be saved for Season Five.
One way or another, I think what we're going to see in Charm City is the difficulty of trying to extricate policing from the numbers game. Over three plus seasons now we've seen the perils of living and dying by the stats. Focusing on the quantity of arrests detracts attention from their quality. Focusing on the statistical manifestations of crime generates incentives to "juke" the numbers. Carcetti, Daniels, Carver, and the "good guys" generally want to move beyond this. But without the statistics, without the metrics, how is anyone supposed to be accountable? This season in particular has emphasized that the narrative of "good police" hampered by corrupt and inept "bosses" is unduly simplistic. Lots of police aren't good police. Not only is there the example of the malign Bad Cop who got tagged with paint, but there's a morass of mediocrity, the semi-anonymous patrol officers who smile broadly every time they get an opportunity to crack heads "the Western District Way." Tell them their new mandate is to build relationships with the community and make high-quality felony arrests and what are they going to do? How are you going to tell if they're doing it without stats and metrics? If bureacracies were composed entirely of saints, you could just let everyone do their thing, but in the real world for all the flaws of the numbers game politicians are going to want something to judge the performance of cops, teachers, and whoever else seems important.
What's more, as the scene cutting from Freamon to the fundraiser and part of the preview indicated, there's only so far even a good mayor's going to want to go. Carcetti wants to reduce crime. He also wants his reduction in crime to the be the centerpiece of a run at Anapolis. So why would he want the Baltimore Police Department running around exhuming old corpses and, in effect, pushing the statistical crime rate up even higher? Why would he want to follow the money up to connected local politicians and connected local businessmen? This was the essential dilemma from way back in seasons one and two. "High-end enforcement" sounds good, but the Stringers and Marlos of the world aren't, at the end of the day, all that high end. The pyramid reaches up to the Greek with his friends in the Bureau, to Clay Davis, to prominent developers, to mysterious New York connections, to all kinds of places nobody really wants to go.
Both/And Not Either/Or
With regard to the split between the Economic Policy Institute's populists and the Hamilton Project's centrists, I would hope that both sides of this debate would see that they need each other. On issue after issue, there's simply no way you're going to build a constituency, politically speaking, for Hamilton-style technocratic tinkering unless moderate Republicans and the business community see a credible risk of something more far-reaching happening. On trade, for example, if folks thing anger at the downside of these agreements really may cause the agreements to fall apart then suddenly you'll find its possible to do lots of stuff to mitigate downsides.
Conversely, it's useful to populists for there to be a moderate left out there offering non-sweeping proposals for progressive change. Absent some kind of giant crisis, the odds of congress finding itself inspired to make a giant leap to social democracy are just incredibly tiny. I'm all for universal health care and most of the rest of this agenda, but while some folks are off building support for sweeping reform, it's good to have other people around slicing the salami thinner such that something could actually be achieved in the short run.
One area where the rubber really does hit the road here is the deficit. If Democrats take the view that first we must balance the budget, then we must bring the budget into surplus, and then we can institute new programs, the country is going to be stuck forever in the Reagan-Clinton-Bush loop where the time for new programs never comes. On fiscal responsibility, it takes two to tango, and insofar as the GOP doesn't want to dance, Democrats can't afford to take sole responsibility.
Speedy Denver?
I know the Nuggets are fast-paced, but after last night's game I wanted to see exactly how fast-paced. What I saw here on ESPN.com reads like a mistake. Median league pace is 95.15 possessions per 48 minutes. The second-fastest team, Golden State, plays 4.55 more possessions than that -- 99.7 per 48 minutes. But Denver plays 104.3 -- making the gap between the number one team and the number two team bigger than the gap between the number two team and the league median. Is that really true? If it is, then no wonder Carmelo's leading the league in scoring.
Punditry 101
The primary question facing America's pundit class today is how to avoid responsibility for the situation in Iraq, which is almost certain to get much worse over the next two or three years. As Jon Chait observes "Every self-respecting foreign policy analyst has his own plan for Iraq. The trouble is that these tracts are inevitably unconvincing, except when they argue why all the other plans would fail. It's all terribly grim." This is, I think, the best context in which to understand things like Frederick Kagan's argument that we can and should send many more troops to Iraq. I doubt that this would be possible, and I'm quite certain it wouldn't work. Its great virtue as a plan, however, is that we're entirely certain not to try it.
Anyone who defends Bush's strategy is going to wind up looking bad, because after continuing to fail for a while it will be abandonned in favor of withdrawal. Anyone who advocates withdrawal is going to wind up looking bad, because eventually it will be implemented and bad stuff will happen down the road. Consequently, what you need to go is suggest a pony hunt in some territory where you're sure the administration won't go looking (calls for a regional conference are the center-left version of this) that way when the stay-the-course-until-eventually-you-leave cycle plays out, you get to claim that if only they'd followed my advice the war would have been won. Meanwhile, blame for defeat will be located primarily not on George W. Bush, but on the stab-in-the-back crowd on the left who made it politically impossible for Bush to find the pony.
Fund Us Instead!
There's really nothing less convincing than the argument that some rich dudes should give money to people who share your interests, but Brad Plumer's post over here opens the door. He notes that Ike Skelton, slated to take over the House Armed Services Committee, "will be just as addicted to feeding the already-overfed defense budget and spending billions on utterly worthless projects like the B-2 bomber as his predecessor was." As Ken Silverstein writes "Skelton's entire political career has been funded by the same assortment of defense contractors that footed the bill for outgoing chairman Duncan Hunter." Much the same could be said of John Murtha who'll be running the defense subcommittee of House Appropriations.
The problem, however, scatters much more broadly than committee chairs. If you want to know why US foreign policy is the way it is, a big part of the reason is that the overwhelming majority of the financial support for people doing policy-and-politics relevant stuff is defense contractors. Then there's some money to be raised from people with right-wing views about Israel. Beyond that . . . almost nothing.
Obviously, it's hard out there for everyone in the progressive coalition, and large business enterprises and the people who own and manage them are always going to have the preponderance of funds. Nevertheless, the extent of civil society pushback on defense issues is tiny compared to what you see on, say, education, the environment, gay rights, reproductive freedom, etc. and there's nothing comparable to the labor unions who provide some kind of permanent infrastructure for populist economics. Thanks to the war, you have seen some uptick in rich-dude and foundation interest in national security issues but it's all very embryonic at this point. In their new book, Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security Michael O'Hanlon and Kurt Campbell write "there is no case for cuts to the defense budget" indeed "added capabilities are needed . . . which will probably require slight increases in the inflation-adjusted defense budget." There's something a bit off with a world in which this represents the left-most bounds of respectable opinion.
Hoist!
A chatter wonders if Agent Zero shouldn't reign it in: "it seems like if the Wizards had someone like Nellie to ream out Arenas every time he jacked up a 3-pointer from 30 feet out with 20 seconds left on the shot clock, the Wizards would be a pretty good team right now." John Hollinger responds with the accurate observation that the Wizards problems are much more on the offensive than the defensive end. I would also note that though Gilbertology appears to involve a lot of questionable shot-selection, he's actually a very accurate long-range shooter -- career .365 from beyond the arc. This season, he's been especially accurate at .391 -- that's 1.17 points per shot, well above the Wizards' general offensive efficiency or, indeed, the efficiency of the league's best offense.
Arguably, he should be shooting hoisting more random three pointers. I'd be an advocate of just about anything that resulted in fewer shots for Jarvis Hayes.
Who Knew?
I think it may be a condition of employment at The American Prospect to say only bad things about The Hamilton Project, but this business about Summer Opportunity Scholarships sure is interesting. They note that schoolkids' academic skills deteriorate over America's lengthy summer vacations, which makes sense once you think about it. They also note that the impact of this deterioration is especially large on low-SES kids, which I suppose also makes sense once you think about it. So they propose "the creation of Summer Opportunity Scholarships (SOS) to finance summer school or other summer enrichment programs" for poor kids which, once again, makes sense to me.
On another level, of course, it would make sense to revisit our national commitment to very long summer vacations, a policy which as best I can tell is grounded in the belief that kids' labor is needed on the farm during those months. Budget constraints are obviously backing up blind adherence to tradition here, and I really loved my time at Camp Winnebago, but along with being dubious education policy this has to be a huge pain-in-the-ass to single parents and dual-income families, especially those of modest means. Certainly combining the world's shortest vacations for adults with the world's longest vacations for kids doesn't seem reasonable at all. Does crime go up during the summer months? It must, right. Google's not giving me a quick answer to that question.
Wal-Mart Bashing Run Amok
It doesn't seem totally fair to pick on what may be the first professionally published work by an intern, but I feel like with Max Fraser's lamenting the end of Tower Records in The Nation, anti-Wal-Mart sentiment has truly gotten out of control. The problem here, apparently, is that the relative decline of Tower Records vis-a-vis "big box" retailers like Wal-Mart and Target is bad for independent music, since said stores stock fewer unique albums than did Tower. To which I say, fair enough, but as Fraser himself notes the other side of the story is the rise of internet distribution of music. It's impossible for me to imagine anything that will be more aided by online sales than independent music.
A place like EMusic that doesn't require a physical inventory has every incentive to stock (virtually) any album whatsoever that a record label is interesting in having them stock, something that no brick-and-mortar record store could ever claim. Meanwhile, "discovering new musical acts while browsing the stacks and interacting with a knowledgeable staff" doesn't seem like an especially optimal method. The online world features a number of useful discovery tools. At its most basic, lots of website will "recommend" albums purchased by other people who bought the same ones you bought. On a more sophisticated level, Pandora will recommend new things based on formal analysis of bands' musical styles -- it tells me, for example, that "Ode to Rock" by Manda and the Marbles features "meandering melodic phrasing, major key tonalities, and many other similarities" with The New Pornographers.
Last.FM also does recommendations, this time through a social-affinity analysis and lets you filter for obscurity when searching out similar bands according to what, exactly, you're trying to accomplish. There may be much to fear in the bold new digital future, but this isn't it. All that's offered on the other side is "As Russ Solomon, the 81-year-old progenitor of Tower Records, remarked to Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle recently, 'Who's going to download an opera?'" Opera fans, I would assume. Why wouldn't they?
Québec Libre
I don't follow Canadian affairs like it used to, but it seems the parliament passed a motion recognizing the Québécois as a distinct nation, a proposal that's long been kicked around in Canadian circles and was regarded as very controversial. Michael Chong, minister for intergovernmental affairs, resigned over his refusal to support the measure.
We Speak American Here
| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak. | | Philadelphia | | | The Inland North | | | The Midland | | | The South | | | Boston | | | The West | | | North Central | | What American accent do you have?
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The quiz speaks the truth. I am, indeed, from the Northeast and even specifically from New York as they specify. Of course the northeast, at least to this northeasterner's ear, comes with a variety of sub-accents. At least among older and less educated people minimally impacted by the ongoing homogenization of American speech you can detect distinct North Jersey, Long Island, Rhode Island, etc. variations of the accent. A few of the characters on The Wire (Colvin's Deputy Commander in the Western District, the Assistant Principal at Edward Tilgman Middle) have opened our ears to the traditional speech patterns of Baltimore's white ethnic types.
This comes via Jim Henley. In terms of American accents, the thing I find really weird are the people who pronounce "bag" like it rhymes with "vague." I used to think this was just how Canadians talk, but it seems to be widespread in our northern midwest and so forth as well.
Do Americans Overparent?
Kevin Carey ably summarizes the policy upshot of this etremely long article from Paul Tough (awesome name) on the "achievement gap" in public education, sparing you the need to read the whole thing. If you do read it all, however, you'll find some material on pages three and four that I'd be interested in seeing taken in a different direction:
Continue reading "Do Americans Overparent?" »
You Go to War With the Militia You Have
Dafna Linzer and Thomas Ricks get a leak of a classified Marine Corps memo on Anbar Province. It notes that "The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda's rising popularity there." The problem, meanwhile, isn't one that "surging" troops will solve. Rather, "The report describes Iraq's Sunni minority as 'embroiled in a daily fight for survival,' fearful of 'pogroms' by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital." And, of course, this makes perfect sense. If I were a Sunni Arab Iraqi, and an al-Qaeda dude stopped by my house I would greet him warmly, offer a cup of coffee and my thanks, agree to help him out in any way he asked, etc. The fact that I might be, by conviction, an atheist and a believer in social democracy wouldn't change this at all. Why wouldn't I support al-Qaeda? Because they're the bad guys? Don't be naive -- they're the guys with guns trying to kill the other guys with guns who are trying to kill me. And if pretending to be a devout Sunni Muslim is the price I need to pay for protection, then why not.
Much the same could be said of Shiite Arabs' attitudes toward Muqtada al-Sadr. Shadi Hamid's complaints about "the utter incompetence of Nouri al-Maliki government and its continued willingness to turn a blind eye to the increasingly brutal, roving death squads of its Sadrist coalition partners" might as well come from Mars. Why wouldn't you support Sadr? He has a fairly effective armed force at his disposal that's willing to protect Shiites who show their loyalty. Wouldn't you want to work with such a force? Maliki would be insane to side with Iraq's American occupiers, its Sunni population, and foreign al-Qaeda types in fighting the Mahdi Army, the Shiites' own self-protection service.
Iraqis of either stripe are right now caught between a guy with a gun trying to kill them and another guy with another gun trying to kill that first guy. Choosing sides isn't going to be difficult.
From Russia, With Great Power Competition
People have interestingly different views of Russia policy. Eve Fairbanks, for example, is outraged by the Bush administration's coddling of Vladimir Putin. The Washington Post op-ed page has been known to express the same sentiment. Frankly, I used to say this, too. And I believe I've heard similar sentiments from friends who work on post-Soviet issues. These days, I tend to see things differently. Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal says we should return to treating Russia as an enemy of the United States. Mario Loyola agrees. And, obviously, any liberal who thinks Bush should get tougher on Putin is going to have to grapple with the fact that they find themselves agreeing with Mario Loyola . . . a pretty damning critique of any position.
In both instances, the complaints naturally blend concerns about Putin's authoritarian tendencies with complaints about his geopolitical views -- in particular, willingness to sell stuff to Iran and Venezuela and so forth. Anatol Lieven's convinced me that this needs to be put into the context of America's policy toward Russia. This started out with expansion of NATO into Central Europe. It continued with NATO expansion into the Baltics -- former Soviet Republics that have been in the Russian sphere of influence since the 18th century or some such. Then we helped sponsor the overthrow of Russia-friendly governments in Ukraine and Georgia and started talking about adding those countries to NATO.
Now I won't deny that there's something to be said on behalf of all of these policies. They do, however, come with a price. If you want to pry countries out of Russia's sphere of influence and make them formal military allies of the United States, any responsible and patriotic Russian government is going to take alarm and seek countermeasures, including an uncooperative attitude toward Iran. We're then faced with a question of priorities: Do we care more about Iran, or do we care more about Ukraine? Do we care more about nuclear proliferation, or do we care more about anti-Putin Russians? There's an obvious deal to be cut here -- NATO membership for the Baltics is a done deal, but we can return Russia's "near abroad" to Russia in exchange for Russian cooperation on Iran and North Korea, or else we can have a series of standoffs across a wide Eurasian arc. Some would call this appeasement and, frankly, the shoe fits decently. It strikes me, however, as preferable to either going to war with Iran or to having Iran build a nuclear bomb.
Neither/Nor
Alcee Hastings drops out of the race for Intel Committee Chair, while Pelosi is still said to be very unlikely to pick Jane Harman. Sounds like a win-win to me. And, frankly, good for Hastings who seems to me to be doing the right thing here rather than allowing questions about him to cloud the broader question.
Better Readers Needed
Jonah Goldberg receives (and republishes) email from some real morons:
1. The toppling of a regime that was a constant threat to its neighbors and, potentially at least, to us.
2. Removing the Iraqi threat allowed us to move our troops out of Saudi Arabia. The US presence in the Kingdom was the #1 motivator for Bin Ladenism, and the long term benefits this will have after Iraq are hard to calculate but will no doubt be significant.
3. Worst possible case scenario, we retreat to Kurdistan. No matter what happens in Greater Iraq, the liberation of the Kurds and the implantation of a nascent democracy there is a genuine success.
4. Also in the worst case scenario, we retreat not only to Kurdistan, but also to Kuwait. The virtual military encirclement of Iran will remain, and that is important. An encircled Iran, even with a nuke, is a far different scenario than the opposite.
Toppling a regime that was a potential threat to its neighbors and to the USA is an accomplishment if and only if it's not replaced with a more threatening situation like, say, pervasive chaos.
The other points all seem to involve misunderstanding the pre-war status quo. Kurdistan enjoyed de facto autonomy from Baath Iraq before the war. Our troops could have been moved out of Saudi Arabia and into Kuwait and Kurdistan before the war. Iran was "encircled" before the war. And what does encircling Iran accomplish, anyway? This seems like the kind of thing someone who's been playing too much Diplomacy would care about.
Mirror Image
Suppose you were a US government official and you read the following in a Russian or Chinese state-owned newspaper op-ed page:
One of the most intriguing ideas is the creation of a treaty-based "Concert of Autocracies" that, like COMECON or the Warsaw Pact, would admit members only if they met strict requirements. The new institution would allow the authoritarian states to work together as a concerted force within such institutions as the United Nations and could eventually replace the United Nations as a forum for legitimizing international security actions if the United Nations itself proved resistant to reform.
Holy shit, right? New Cold War! Right there in the newspaper. So how are Russian and Chinese officials supposed to react to Jackson Diehl's op-ed in The Washington Post?
Polonium 210
Newspaper reports suggest it is hard to come by and traceable - not so sure, the dose might have been as small as a millicurie or two, and you could buy that for about half a million dollars - it is $690 per microcurie retail.
This from Steinn Sigurðsson who would seem to know what he's talking about. At first glance I thought -- hey, maybe you shouldn't be able to buy this stuff from a website that proudly proclaims "No NRC license required! All our radioactive isotopes are legal to purchase & own by the general public." But then again, sure you could kill someone by buying $500 grand worth of Polonium 210 and using it as a poison but why would you? Put this together with the Yuschenko incident and it certainly looks like someone in Russian intelligence circles really enjoys showing off their ability to find obscure ways of trying to kill people.
I have very little to add to your MSM coverage of this story except to note that I've seen Boris Berezovsky's name tossed around in relation to this in a manner that seems to imply he's some sort of heroic dissident rather than, say, a leading member of the circle of horribly corrupt gangsters who robbed Russia blind during the Yeltsin years and just happen to have been run out of town by the new gang.
Empaneled
Gone all morning at an OSI Panel where I and others will be figuring everything out. When I'm back, I'll share the answers with the world.
My Life
This plan floated by Andy Stern sounds like a damn good idea to me. As a health care idea it's really only "okay" -- the real virtue is that it potentially leverages an okay health care policy idea into what could be a fantastic civil society building idea. An effective political system depends, to a large extent, on the existence of meaningful organizations in society that aren't strictly political advocacy groups. Organizations like that -- unions, churches, gun clubs -- have the capacity to take people who aren't "political" sorts and make them see that politics is interested in them even if they aren't interested in politics. The combination of declining unionization rates with the collapse of other sorts of membership organizations (Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs and so forth) has played a large role in bringing about the current state of corporate domination of the political system. This is the sort of thinking that could turn things around.
UPDATE: Stern mentions this in the course of an interview with Campus Progress.
Fun With Google Maps
Look here -- the park where Marlo does business in Season 4.
Via Kottke.
Regional Conference!
Nawaf Obaid, adviser to the Saudi government and managing director of the Saudi National Security Assessment Project in Riyadh and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, speaking strictly for himself says that unless the USA finds a pony in Iraq soon, we'll be looking at Saudi intervention in the civil war: "Options now include providing Sunni military leaders (primarily ex-Baathist members of the former Iraqi officer corps, who make up the backbone of the insurgency) with the same types of assistance -- funding, arms and logistical support -- that Iran has been giving to Shiite armed groups for years."
As GFR notes this would, in essence, entail Saudi Arabia throwing its lot in with al-Qaeda as a means of fighting Iran and various Shiite groups. Meanwhile, the United States -- if we listen to the hawkish right -- will be at war with both sides!
The Political Economy of Education Equity
Andy Rotherham remarks: "I've gotten a slew of emails asking why I haven't written anything about Sunday's NYT mag piece by Paul Tough. Well, what is there to say? Most important education article written this year." I wish he would say more -- I thought the article raised more questions than it answered. In particular, Tough and his admirers mostly seem to read his conclusion as an optimistic one: here's how to make school work for poor kids, while it actually makes me incredibly pessimistic.
Let's take a look at Tough's conclusion:
Continue reading "The Political Economy of Education Equity" »
Classical Music Online
Galen Brown at Sequenza21 has a discussion of the Tower Records issue featuring specific knowledge of the classical music market and, basically, further confirms my lack of concern that classical won't be able to hack it in the internet age.
Hmmm...
Henley seems to have the goods; Fairfax County's move to let the homeless starve rather than expose them to a small risk of food poisoning really does make me want to join Team Libertarian: "residents can no longer donate food prepared in their homes or a church kitchen -- be it a tuna casserole, sandwiches or even a batch of cookies -- unless the kitchen is approved by the county, health officials said yesterday."
Edupessimism Gone Too Far?
Kevin Carey says I'm too pessimistic about the prospects for giving schools the resources they need to implement the sort of reforms discussed by Paul Tough as ways to bring high-poverty schools up to par, citing examples from Massachusetts and Maryland (and possibly soon New York) of school finance reforms.
Jal Mehta, by contrast, is relatively pessimistic, saying "we still know more about creating more good schools than we do about creating good school systems" worrying that "it seems equally likely that the key ingredients that make a place like KIPP work are not easily replicable: strong leadership and teachers who are not only talented, but are willing to work 15-16 hours days plus weekends to bring their students up to standards of proficiency."
To focus on just one central aspect of creating good schools, how could we create 3,000,000 KIPP teachers? This is a complicated and ongoing conversation, but the only obvious answer is pay – people in our society who are attractive job candidates coming out of college and work 15-16 hour days generally command salaries of $80,000 and up, which would mean a radical shift in our national priorities. Perhaps this could be coupled with some form of differentiated pay, which would make it slightly more affordable and more tenable to conservatives, but it is still a utopian enough idea to be outside of the current policy conversation.
On a more optimistic note, this presumably isn't a totally binary conversation and making progress on smaller scales might build political support for doing more.
Better Idealism
I think Peter Beinart's column on the relatively successful UN Peacekeeping mission in the Congo is incredibly important. I would just add the observation that not only does the record show that UN sponsored "nation-building" ventures are much more successful than quasi-imperial American ones, but that one of the things that distinguishes these kind of operations from, say, Iraq is that they're at least largely consensual. You have a war-torn country. You have parties prepared to stop the fighting. You have a peace deal brokered with the assistance of international mediation. And you have, as part of the deal, an agreement to deploy third-party forces to the country to help restore order and build confidence between the parties.
The record of missions of this sort is decidedly mixed, but it's also decidedly more positive than the record of unilateral endeavors and of preponderantly coercive ones. What's more, a lot of the mixed results are determined by the fact that rich countries (especially the USA) tend to be reluctant to pony up the forces that are being asked for. People both inclined to believe that "American power should be used to advance our values" and that the sort of sentiment encapsulated by that phrase seems to have led to a giant disaster in Iraq (people like me, in other words) would be well-advised to try and focus future efforts on getting the United States (and other countries, too) to pitch in more on these kind of missions.
Fighting The Next War
Long and frightening Seymore Hersh article argues that the Rumsfeld/Gates switch doesn't necessarily indicate an administration-wide change of approach to national security. Cheney is still Cheney and still wants to start a war with Iran and Bush just might do it.
Meanwhile, I have to say I sort of hope Baker-Hamilton doesn't recommend negotiations with Syria and Iran. The official hawk line on why we shouldn't do this is that it won't accomplish anything. Meanwhile, it would be the easiest thing in the world for an administration that doesn't want to negotiate with Syria and Iran to "agree" to negotiate, do so in bad faith, walk away having achieved nothing, further poison the diplomatic atmosphere, and thereby "prove" that such negotiations are useless. In fact, they're vital, but to do any good they need to be done in good faith. That means either a genuine change of heart by the president (unlikely) or else a new administration in 2009.
Andrew Biggs
In a somewhat bizarre post, Cato's Michael Cannon complains that "Anyone who thinks that Democrats might be prepared to work in a bipartisan manner to reform Social Security should be quickly disabused by their disgraceful treatment of Andrew Biggs." Follow the link and you'll find:
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare called on incoming Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to block President Bush’s nomination of Andrew Biggs to become the next deputy administrator of the Social Security Administration should he renew the nomination in January, charging that his advocacy for the privatization of the popular entitlement and hostility toward other New Deal-era programs makes him a politically polarizing figure.
In other words, the Democrats have done . . . absolutely nothing to Biggs.
Needless to say, though, I think this would be a great issue on which to pick a confirmation battle. Tanner refers to the "swift boating" of Biggs, but the difference of course is that it's entirely true that Biggs favors privatization of the popular entitlement program and is hostile to other New Deal programs. The Republican Party, however, is usually quite successful at obscuring from public view the fact that a desire to dismantle Social Security (and, indeed, Medicare) is conventional wisdom in their political party. Hearings on Biggs' nomination would be a good place to clarify that (a) the Bush administration wants to destroy Social Security, (b) the overwhelming majority of Republican members of congress want to destroy Social Security, and (c) the only thing keeping Social Security in its existence is the Democratic Party and its elected officials.
What's more, Democrats should be implacably opposed to "reforming" Social Security in a bipartisan manner. Or, for that matter, a partisan one. Privateer interest in handling this in a bipartisan manner is telling; what they want to do is political poison and they're looking for cover. Instead, they should be made to drink their own brew and suffer the consequences.
Ineresting
Rick Perlstein channels Tom Schaller channeling some academics:
Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely--again controlling for racial attitudes--than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller's writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters ... the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."
Interesting stuff. Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg has apparently gotten a lot of email from readers who think the "racist" answers to these questions don't really demonstrate racism. I think that's a bit daft, but however you want to characterize the question, the point is that individuals' attitudes toward race (again, however you want to classify those attitudes) have a large impact on voting behavior.
Nomenclature
Jim Henley hints at a small item from the "what were they thinking" file, the apparent fact that a big assemblage of neoconnish intellectuals that framed the political objectives of the Iraq campaign before the war was named "Bletcheley II." Here's Woodward o the subject:
And Wolfowitz got -- right after 9/11 set up this thing called – Bletchley II. Do you remember that? Chris DeMuth at the AEI -- And they wrote a paper, seven pages, called, "The Delta of Terrorism," meaning the origin of terrorism, and it essentially said we are in a two-generation war with radical Islam, and we have to do something, and we better start with Iraq.
Now why would you call it that? The reference is to the Bletchley Park group during World War II, but they were breaking codes, not dreaming up asinine grand strategies. And, for that matter, if you'd just written an analysis of the origin of terrorism, why would't you title it "The Origin of Terrorism?" Doesn't "delta" mean "change?" In some ways, I think this artless combination of pretension and ignorance nicely sums the whole Iraq venture up.
More Rubble, Less Trouble
Coming soon to a US Iraq policy near you?
What we're seeing here is the "perverse desire to win" of musical fame. Insofar as you want to obtain "victory" in Iraq, it becomes necessary not to devise a strategy to accomplish our goals, which can't be done, but rather to define a set of goals such that they can be accomplished. Hence the appeal of an "80 percent strategy," a.k.a. James Kurth's "Crush the Sunnis" plan. But even if we could make this "work" (which is at least possible though, I would argue, actually pretty unlikely) what would we thereby achieve? Certainly not the Iraqi model of pre-war dreams. Indeed, it seems to me that in this case more rubble would bring more trouble, as the cross-national Sunni Arab majority comes to agree with Osama bin Laden that the United States is waging vicious war against them and theirs and that every good Muslim's duty is to fight back.
Fallows: Time for Us to Go
Via GFR, James Fallows on why it's time for us to go. Leaving, he says, will likely lead to very bad events. But "If it is not in our power to prevent these disasters, then it is better to do as little extra damage to ourselves as possible before they occur." And it isn't in our power.
So the choice is between a terrible decision and one that is even worse. The terrible decision is just to begin leaving, knowing that even more innocent civilians will be killed and that we’ll be dealing with agitation out of Iraq for years to come. The worse decision would be to wait another year, or two, or three and then take that terrible course. If we thought a longer commitment and presence would lead to a better outcome, then the extra commitment might be sensible. But nothing occurring in Iraq in the last year has given rise to any hope that things are getting better rather than worse. (This, by the way, is the reason I have changed my mind: the absence of evidence that the chances for a “decent” departure will improve.)
Right. The trendlines are vital here. Staying would make sense if there were any reason to think staying longer would create the conditions for departing in the future under less screwed-up circumstances. All the evidence, however, is the reverse. Things are worse on 1 December 2006 than they were one year ago, worse than they were two years ago, worse than they were three years ago, and there's no reason to think that pattern is going to change.
Pelosi Lied, Thousands Died Benefitted From a Minimum Wage Increase
The hard-hitting reportage of Byron York:
I have a new story up about Nancy's Pelosi's "First 100 Hours" strategy. Do you know what "100 hours" means? Is it real, consecutive hours — in other words, would the Democrats' legislative blitz last, say, from a Monday at 10 a.m. until Friday at 2 p.m. — or is it some sort of loosely-defined "legislative hours"? If you guessed real hours, you're wrong; the "First 100 Hours" could last, well, who knows how long? And if you think Pelosi and her fellow Democrats are going to complete their "Six for '06" agenda in those hours — however they are defined — you're probably wrong again.
Seriously, this is the conservative pushback on the new Democratic ascendancy? The House Democrats lack a clear definition of "100 hours"? I think the other side's going to have to do better than that. I'll actually be interested to see what the Bush administration does with these "Six for '06" items, many of them seem far too popular to veto, but then again a lame-duck president can pretty much veto whatever he likes.
If It's Friday . . .
. . . then I can get my blood pressure raised by reading Charles Krauthammer. It's astounding stuff. First off, he explains that idealistic rhetoric has just been a smokescreen for an agenda of regional hegemony (someone tell George Packer): "We are instead trying to sustain fragile democracies in three strategically important countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon -- that form the geographic parentheses around the principal threat to Western interests in the region, the Syria-Iran axis."
Is it an axis of . . . evil? Nevermind.
Next comes the key phrase, the mind-blowingly obvious error that lurks at the heart of the project. "We are trying to bring democracy to Iraq in particular because a pro-Western government enjoying legitimacy and popular support would have been the most enduring means of securing our interests there." Now ask yourself, what does the fact that a pro-western, popular, and legitimate government in Baghdad would serve our interests have to do with the logic of toppling Saddam and then holding an election? It also makes sense if you simply assume -- for no reason at all -- that an election will bring to power a government eager to support America's regional strategic ambitions. The upshot? "We should nonetheless make a last effort to change the composition of the government and assemble a new one composed of those -- Kurds, moderate Sunnis, secular Shiites and some of the religious Shiites -- who might be capable of reaching a grand political settlement."
You see! We invaded Iraq to build a democracy, but the Iraqis ruined it by voting the wrong way, so we can fix things by dictating to them the terms of a more appropriate parliamentary coalition. After that perhaps we can unleash Chiang!
Oaths of Office
Newly elected congressman Keith Ellison, being a Muslim rather than a Christian, apparently wants to swear his oath of office on a Koran, rather than a Bible. Dennis Prager is having none of it:
Forgive me, but America should not give a hoot what Keith Ellison's favorite book is. Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress. In your personal life, we will fight for your right to prefer any other book. We will even fight for your right to publish cartoons mocking our Bible. But, Mr. Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath.
Seriously this is going to be an issue? What's more, Prager says "for all of American history, Jews elected to public office have taken their oath on the Bible, even though they do not believe in the New Testament, and the many secular elected officials have not believed in the Old Testament either." I actually find that pretty hard to believe. Most Jewish members of congress seem pretty casual about their observance, but does Joe Lieberman really swear on a Christian Bible? It seems to me like that would be a very strange thing to do. Eugene Volokh reports that Hawaii's Jewish governor swore on a Tanakh.
UPDATE: Progress Report says this is all made up:
[T]he swearing-in ceremony for the House of Representatives never includes a religious book. The Office of the House Clerk confirmed to the Progress Report that the swearing-in ceremony consists only of the Members raising their right hands and swearing to uphold the Constitution. The Clerk spokesperson said neither the Christian Bible, nor any other religious text, had ever been used in an official capacity during the ceremony. (Occassionally, Members pose for symbolic photo-ops with their hand on a Bible.) Look at this picture of House Speaker Dennis |
