It seems to me that as of one day before Election Day 2006, progressives had a solid grasp of what good things would flow from winning congressional majorities. In brief:
No more domestic agenda for George W. Bush.
Oversight hearings.
Control of the agenda to rame issues in ways favorable to the Democrats for 2008.
Sometime in December, however, people seem to have gotten it into their head that something else would happen. That narrow congressional majorities were actually going to seize control of American national security policy in the face of determined opposition from the President of the United States supported nearly uniformly by his copartisans in congress. Thus, Matt Stoller includes on his list of "groups and individuals" who are "blocking real progress on Iraq," "Harry Reid, who failed to get a vote on a non-binding resolution in the Senate, and doesn't think his original war vote was wrong. It's Bush's fault apparently that Reid voted for the war. Like with his stance on Alito, Reid is giving the impression of action, but not the teeth."
Well, no. Look, Matt Yglesias leading a caucus of 51 Democratic Senators that includes Joe Lieberman, Bill Nelson, and Tim Johnson couldn't get much done in these circumstances either. Nor could Matt Stoller. It's not Reid's fault that there aren't 60 votes for a non-binding resolution on Iraq in the Senate (except in the sense that the "nuclear option" fight was mishandled way back in the day, and Democrats should have tried to abolish filibusters altogether). Blame Lieberman. Blame Jeff Sessions. And, again, ask yourself: If Reid's resolution is so useless, why is the GOP so determined to defeat it? And if it's so difficult to get 60 votes for this measure, what would the point be in proposing something more far-reaching that would only fail by a larger margin? The sad reality is that what Matt and I would like to see the Democrats accomplish is, under the circumstances, very difficult to achieve. Progressives should keep the pressure on for action, but we need to understand that objective circumstances matter. This is a slow boring of hard boards kind of situation, and it's extremely frustrating, but it's also George W. Bush's fault, not Reid's.
As you may have read in Jamie Kirchick's column, it's never the case that Israel's critics get smeared as anti-semites. Or, as Kirchick's boss, New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz put it, either "Carter is actually batty" or else "he is animated by a very strong animus towards Jews."
Here on the CDC's website you can read about dracunculiasis, Guinea Worm Disease, an ailment found in Africa where contaminated water leads to worm larvae getting inside your body. "During the next 10-14 months, the female Guinea worm grows to a full size adult 60-100 centimeters (2-3 feet) long and as wide as a cooked spaghetti noodle," at which point "a blister develops on the skin at the site where the worm will emerge" that "causes a very painful burning sensation." After a day or two, it ruptures and the worm emerges after which time you "may be unable to work or resume daily activities for an average of 3 months." What's more, "Almost invariably the skin lesions caused by the worm develop secondary bacterial infections, which exacerbate the pain, and extend the period of incapacitation to weeks or months-causing in some cases disabling complications, such as locked joints and even permanent crippling."
The good news, is that, as Nicholas Kristof reports, "because of [Jimmy] Carter’s two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977." The point is that there's a real cost to these smear campaigns. Carter does many good works around the world through his leadership of the Carter Center. Obviously, though, if the idea gets out there that Carter is motivated by hatred of Jews, then people aren't going to want to be associated with Carter or the Carter Center which would be a very bad thing for, for examples, victims of horrifying parasite infections.
The view that only a "person of faith" is qualified to serve in high political office that I don't know if there's any point in criticizing Mitt Romey for expressing it. I recall when Joe Lieberman was running on the ticket with Al Gore and said all atheists are immoral . It seems pretty clear that political consultants think the smart play for non-Christian candidates is to try and whip up anti-atheist sentiment to bridge the gap. This is why Romney's going to wind up getting a lot of odd questions about the details of his approach to Mormonism.
Christian candidates usually just let the whole issue go unsaid, trusting in the occassional "God Bless America" to express solidarity with Christian sentiment in the electorate. The Romney/Lieberman approach, however, requires the non-Christian candidate to explicitly cite the fact of his deep religious faith as a qualification for office. In Lieberman's case, he had the advantage of his deep faith being more obviously sincere than in Romney's case and the fact that though Judaism denies the truth of Christianity it doesn't try to replace it in the way that Mormonism does.
Not working, obviously: "Two car bombs exploded in an outdoor market in Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 56 people and injuring scores in the deadliest attack since U.S. and Iraqi forces began a major security push around the capital last week." Note that this, like the vast majority of bombing attacks, came in a Shiite neighborhood (as did a less deadly attack in Sadr City) which raises the question of why driving Muqtada al-Sadr temporarily out of the country and screaming about Iranian support of Shiite militias is supposed to help stabilize Iraq.
"Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today," reports the Associated Press, "claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers." Mickey Kaus approves and says he wishes Barack Obama had talked about getting "rid of people" rather than offering a vaguer call for "accountability."
This sounds commonsensical, but my understanding is that the reason politicians rarely push for it is that the actual payoff is very, very low. The issue is that there isn't this vast pool of highly effective potential hires out there. The schools with serious teacher-quality problems tend to have them because the better teachers, by and large, don't want to work there and schools have problems filling all the slots with minimally qualified people. The real action (also disliked by teacher unions, if pissing off unions is your goal) is in the certification process, who counts as a qualified teacher, and what counts as an effective teacher (here's where the accountability comes in). If in the future that created a situation where there were tons of people looking to break into the teaching field then it might make sense to expend political capital on making it easier to fire people.
This is pretty sweet. Stephen H. Miller on the Independent Gay Forum denounces the Human Rights Campaign for refusing to endorse Rudy Giuliani in the GOP primary even though . . . they haven't actually done that. He's just so sure they will that he's decided to issue a pre-emptive denunciation.
The real issue is whether the Giuliani camp would even want HRC's endorsement. Presumably, he's going to spend the next year running as far away from his pro-gay record as possible, which would probably preclude seriously courting the leadership of a major gay rights organization or endorsing their legislative agenda.
t is hard to explain to a younger generation that such delightful countries as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Poland and Czechoslovakia (to name only a few) were run in those days by fascist generals, avowed racists or one-party totalitarian regimes. I am ancient enough to remember the long list of countries I would not visit for summer holidays; old enough to recall how creepy it was to enter Walter Ulbricht's East German prison house of a state via Checkpoint Charlie in the late 1960s. Ugh.
This matters, because I think people sometimes underestimate exactly how horrible it would be in humanitarian terms to return to Cold War-style conditions of global competition between the United States and some other power (presumably China ). People often -- and correctly -- see that the UN Security Council process is often going to be an impediment to certain kinds of humanitarian military ventures and want to just let it all drop. And it's true that this sort of thing can be frustrating. Ultimately, however, a world where the major powers have cordial, mostly cooperative relations with one another is a much, much better world to live in.
I've been beating this drum for a long time, but let me recommend Jonathan Chait's column on Rudy Giuliani's alleged national security expertise, which apparently consists of his ability to act like a tough guy:
f having a macho swagger and talking tough about bad guys were enough to make a good commander in chief, we wouldn't have the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history on our hands right now in Iraq. And, need I remind anybody, one of the reasons Giuliani hasn't been able to fulfill his Bin Laden execution fantasy is that Bush allowed the Al Qaeda leader to escape at Tora Bora by using Afghan proxies instead of U.S. ground troops.
As I noted in this space last week, conservative foreign policy consists increasingly of abstract notions divorced from reality. In preparing for last week's House debate over the Iraq troop surge, the Republican leadership instructed its members in a memo: "The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose."
Right. Republican national security policy looks great, except when they need to discuss their actual policies, the results of such policies, the likely consequences of continuing the policies, etc. Giuliani fits perfectly into the mold.
Everyone is quoting this example of Bush getting naughty:
Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"
To try and make a novel point about this, why wouldn't Bush say he wants to "fuck" OBL in the ass? It strikes me as strange to get fastidious about the terminology used to express the rape fantasy as long as you're going to express the fantasy. I had a similar thought yesterday's watching Cradle 2 The Grave (truly the poor man's Romeo Must Die) on TNT where it was okay to show giant gun battles, a woman performing a striptease to distract a guy while her colleagues break into his office, etc., but everyone had to say "freak" instead of "fuck." What does this accomplish? Meanwhile, there were an awful lot of ads for K-Y Jelly running during commercial breaks which seem much more likely to me to generate a situation that will make parents uncomfortable ("daddy, what's a lubricant for?") than would the occassional dirty word.
Speaking in South Carolina, Hillary Clinton expresses the oft-heard view that "I believe one of the great things about America is, anyone can be president, and what it depends upon is the individual."
If only it were true!
People constantly seem to be forgetting about this, but the foreign-born are systematically excluded from the presidency for no real reason. Like a kid who immigrated to this country from Mexico at the age of two is seriously at risk of disloyalty, or we're all haunted by a deep, dark suspicion that Madeleine Albright may be a sleeper agent run by Czech intelligence. Thus, the popular moderate Republican governor of the country's largest state isn't considered a potential contender in 2008 and won't be a contender in 2012, either, because he was born in Austria.
Hillary Clinton: "Some people may be running who may tell you that we don't face a real threat from terrorism. I am not one of those." That comes to us via Matt Stoller who, quite rightly, would like to hear Clinton explain who she means.
Meanwhile, I'd also like to hear someone in the press corps ask George W. Bush when, exactly, he made the determination that Iran is a more serious threat to American interests than is al-Qaeda and why he did so. This is the sort of issue we ought to have out in the open.
UPDATE: A colleague notes that John Kerry has said terrorism isn't as big a threat as many people think, and (ironically) Bill Clinton has said global warming is worse than terrorism. The difference between "the threat of X has been overblown" and "the threat of X is not real" will be left as an exercize for the reader.
J-Pod thinks it's obviously absurd to worry that American democracy will collapse and the country will adopt an authoritarian mode of government. Meanwhile, his colleague Mark Steyn explains that though he doesn't approve of fascism, he thinks Europe will probably turn fascist soon in response to the onrushing Muslim Hordes: "Indeed, Ralph Peters and I have already argued about this: the difference between us, as I explain here, is that I think any descent into neo-Fascism will be ineffectual and therefore merely a temporary blip in the remorseless transformation of the Continent."
My take: You really never know what will happen. It is, however, striking that the contemporary right has widely committed itself to the view that (a) presidential war powers during an undeclared, semi-permament war are essentially without limit, (b) political efforts aimed at curtailing and rolling back presidential war policy are essentially treasonous (see, e.g., Don Young's remarks about hanging members of congress), and (c) media reports that serve to undermine the popularity of presidential war policy are, similarly, treasonous. To discern the significance of all this in historical terms, I would need to know more about the history of the right-wing popular press. It's worth noting that as recently as the 1960s, African-Americans certainly wouldn't view the notion of an authoritarian form of government as outlandish.
If The New York Times says a Sirius-XM merger is "sure to raise antitrust issues" then I'm happy to believe them. I have a hard time seeing a serious issue here, however. As is typical in these cases, the relevant think is the definition of the market. If you think there's a discrete "satellite radio" market then, yes, a combined Sirius-XM entity would clearly have monopoly power in that market. Realistically, though, the product both Sirius and XM are selling -- audio broadcasts -- is one for which there's a great deal of competition. Cable and satellite television providers are capable of delivering similar content, though in not as convenient-to-use a manner. People can listen to CDs, buy internet music subcription services, subscribe to "podcasts," and, of course, satellite radio needs to compete with its freely available terrestrial radio counterpart.
After all, at the moment I -- like most Americans -- don't have a satellite radio subscription even though I'm pretty gadget inclined. The logic of the business is that the merged entity needs to grow, which is to say continue trying to offer a deal that people find appealing compared to our many other entertainment options, not our satellite radio options.
As we see the anti-Ethiopian Islamist insurgency in Somalia continue to pick up steam, even prompting Ethiopian troops to deploy the legendarily successful counterinsurgency tactic of "return[ing] fire with artillery and heavy machine-gun fire throughout the night," can we ask once again what the United States policy in the Horn of Africa has accomplished. None of the terrorists allegedly being harbored by the Islamic Courts Movement have been captured. The Ethiopians cannot (of course) effectively control the country. It seems that hundreds of Somali civilians have died in various kinds of fighting. And we've effectively opened up another branch campus of Jihad University.
Nicholas Kristof has more on Jimmy Carter's efforts to combat parasitic infections in Africa, including campaigns against river blindness (caused by a different worm from the one responsible for Guinea Disease), elephantitis and malaria, intestinal worms, etc. Then comes the policy point:
Mr. Carter’s private campaign against the diseases of poverty, put together with pennies and duct tape, is a model of what our government could do. Imagine if the U.S. resolved that it would wipe out malaria and elephantiasis (both are spread by mosquitoes, so a combined campaign makes sense). What if we celebrated science not by trying to go to Mars but by extinguishing malaria? What if we tried to burnish America’s image abroad not only with press releases and propaganda broadcasts, but also with a bold campaign against disease?
So I wish that President Bush could visit villages like this and see what Mr. Carter has accomplished as a private individual. Mr. Bush, to his great credit, has financed a major campaign against AIDS that will save nine million lives, and he is also increasing spending against malaria — but not nearly as energetically as he is increasing the number of troops in Iraq. So I asked Mr. Carter whether President Bush should be pushing not for a possible war with Iran, but for a war on malaria.
I would hardly bother to criticize Bush on this point. Compared to other aspects of his administration, Bush's "let's try to cure diseases in Africa" policy has been pretty good (as Kristof said, involving some meaningful increases in some areas). Obviously, he should do more, but we're talking about a really, really bad president so I don't expect anything better from him. But for the next administration and peoples' edification, these points are well worth considering. The marginal value of additional resources spent on these sorts of problems is pretty giant at this point, and it's a lot clearer in a technical sense how you would go about helping people through public health measures than how you would go about building democracy or spurring economic development.
Ogged fires back in defense of the theory that we should fear President Granholm selling us down the river to the Canadians:
Yglesias and his commenters seem to be of one mind that the exclusion of naturalized citizens from the presidency is self-evidently anachronistic. It's always seemed like a good idea to me. Nationalism is real, and even for immigrants like me, who have very few memories of the country of their birth, the old country retains a special tug, and you don't want a president with special feelings for any country other than the one he's elected to serve.
I don't think this will wash at all. We don't systematically exclude non-"natural born" citizens from any other government posting even though loyalty to the United States is presumably something you're looking for in a Secretary of State, a general, a National Security Advisor, etc. But more to the point, this is why we have elections. There are a lot of characteristics I consider generally undesirable in a president, but we don't constitutionally exclude people from office on the basis of anything other than birth nationality and age. What's more, for a range of possible countries to have affections for, would we actually care if the president had dual loyalties? What would the problem with an emotional attachment to Austria or Denmark be? And why would your birth nationality matter more for these purposes than the issue of where you were raised?
I continue to think the San Antonio Spurs are being oddly underestimated. Yes, yes, they're "only" at a .660 winning percentage. Yes, they're scheduled for the fourth seed behind Dallas, Phoenix, and Utah. Yes, it's even true that "With Yao, Houston could potentially bump San Antonio down to No. 3 in the All-Texas Standings, stunning as that sounds." That said, look at the point differentials. Dallas is 7.4, Phoenix and San Antonio are both 7.3, Houston is 5.6, is 2.9.
Obviously, that's a classic quant argument and I do expect sportswriters to ignore point differential in favor of crude W-L. The weird thing is that all the other sportswriterly considerations also point in favor of adopting a forgiving attitude toward San Antonio's record; this is a classic curmudgeon's team, full of Veteran Leadership, featuring an NBA Legend, a the Best Coach, the Defense, Robert Horry, etc. Plus, it's an odd numbered year which, on its own terms, overwhelmingly favors the Spurs. I'm not saying I'd take an even-odds bet that San Antonio will win it all (odds are they'll need to beat Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix to get to the Finals, which is, um, hard to do) but I don't understand writing them off, either. People remember the way the Suns ran away with the 2004-2005 regular season (Joe Johnson was the fourth guy on that team), right?
Like Mark Schmitt, I've been reading the Third Way's strategy paper on the economy, especially it's attack on the "myths of neopopulism," and like him I'm not totally thrilled with it. I continue, however, to have the same basic puzzlement as to why the "optimism versus pessimism" argument is thought to be so central to disputes and why the Third Way thinks it should be able to sell its policy agenda with so little discussion of, um, the policies.
It turns out that the cable I use to connect my digital camera to my computer can also be used to recharge my Razr by using it to connect the phone to my laptop. So if that works, then how come Canon doesn't make it so that the Camera battery can be recharged this way as well? When traveling, it's always nice to minimize the number of discreet power items you need to take with you and risk losing.
Realistically, I imagine I'll end up backing Barack Obama or John Edwards for president since you need to lend your support to someone who might win, but today's column wonders why Bill Richardson can't get no respect.
As in this article($) in today's Wall Street Journal, which tells the story of a husband and wife who found the perfect private school for their high schools daughters, a tony prep school near Boston. Unfortunately, they lived in Los Angeles. So, naturally, the husband quit his job, they sold their house, and they moved to small apartment in Boston. It took him three months to find a new job, so they had to run through most of their savings and the money they made on the home sale in order to live and pay the $56,000 school tuition. Their furniture is still in L.A., because they can't afford to move it, and the wife, who used to stay home, is now looking for work. But it was all worth it, because their daughters are learning Greek.
"I hope it was at least Winsor," I thought, before clicking the link to see that it was, indeed, Winsor, a piece of information that fortunately was available in the free preview section. Since I haven't read the whole thing, I don't know what was wrong with LA's own tony prep schools (I believe Harvard-Westlake is the one to go to), but it seems clear to me that if you live in California and want to send your kids to school in New England the thing to do is take advantage of the area's many fine boarding schools. Are there no Grotons? What price Milton?
When your chief executive becomes unpopular due to the catastrophic failure of his policymaking and leadership, it's always good to read that he's increasingly surrounding himself with an insular group of long-time loyalists: "Six years into Mr. Bush’s presidency, the corps of loyal Texans who accompanied him to Washington from Austin remains a powerful force inside the administration, a steady source of comfort for an increasingly isolated president." Good times. I found this part especially hilarious: "Mr. Johnson says the most painful accusation is hearing Mr. Bush called a liar."
For me, the most painful thing is the way Bush is constantly trying to mislead people.
Via Eve Fairbanks, here's hot video of Mitt Romney debating Shannon O'Brien in 2002 and elaborating on his strong pro-choice convictions:
For a bit of background here, let me just say that I was living in Massachusetts during this election, and when Romney said he supported a woman's right to choose I believed him. Watch the video, and I think you'll see that Romney is acting a little indignant. And, at the time, I thought rightly so. His opponent's camp tried now and again to insert the choice issue into the race even though Romney had a perfectly consistent pro-choice record going back to his 1994 campaign against Ted Kennedy. Why shouldn't he have been indignant? Well, the dude turns out to be a decent liar; though it's hard to say which position, if any, is the one he ever really believed in. You get the sense he'd say babies come from storks if he thought that was the way to advance his political career.
Dennis O'Neil, who has written actual Green Lantern stories, references my orginal Green Lantern Theory post and writes a bit about the politics of the character:
Green Lantern's proclivity for that ol' action wasn't my biggest problem with the character when I began writing monthly stories about him way, way back in the last century. We were just past the fabled Sixties, the era of peace and civil rights activism, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, love-ins, be-ins, the march on the Pentagon, the Chicago Seven...(You can add your own examples, or consult one of the remaining hippies; look for tie-dye and a grey ponytail.) The rebel-activists weren't right about everything, far from it, but I think they were right when they advised their contemporaries not to trust anyone over 30. Translation: be wary of authority figures. I don't know when you're reading this, but I'll bet your current newspaper has evidence that mistrusting authority figures is an excellent life strategy.
Which brings us to Green Lantern: here's this guy, a human living on Earth, who takes his orders from a bunch of high-and-mighty blue extraterrestrials and is expected to act on their commands without questioning them. We might assume him to be George Bush's idea of a hero, if we recall that Mr. Bush and cohorts discouraged questioning by keeping as much information as possible secret, and stage-managing what were supposed to be public events, but he isn't my idea of a hero and I hope he isn't yours. Our heroes, yours and mine, are warrior-philosophers, who make their own decisions, do their own thinking and question the hell out of everything.
My tendency is to look at the Guardians as a kind of awesome interstellar United Nations. It's true, however, that they aren't actually an interplanetary organization in the way that the UN is an international organization. Nobody's represented in the decision-making process except the Guardians themselves who have no source of legitimacy except their own sense of rectitude and their practical power. The Guardians, in a sense, are like a "benevolent hegemony" vision of the American hyperpower.
Stop Iran War.com, from Wesley Clark and Vote Vets.org, "a one-stop resource for all Americans to help stop the looming conflict with Iran." Fellow monomaniacs should enjoy it.
"We Marines," writes Mackubin Thomas Owens on The Corner, "maintain that except for Lee Harvey Oswald, there is no such thing as an 'ex-Marine.' I believe that John Murtha has just joined that small club."
It's really striking how casual mainstream elements of the right have become about tossing off accusations of treason about Democratic Party members of congress with whom they have policy disagreements. How long before some Jack Ruby decides that Rep. Don Young's musing about the desirability of killing congressional Democrats should be taken literally?
"Contrary to popular belief, international relations scholars are not doves," according to a new survey of IR scholars (Foreign Policy article here; full results here; hat-tip Daniel Drezner), "most believe that military force is warranted under the right conditions."
What do the others believe? That it's warranted under the wrong conditions? Unwarranted even when the conditions are right?
As Dan remarks, the really interesting result has to do with this bit of realist convergence with liberal thinking: "we found realists to be much more supportive of military intervention with a U.N. imprimatur than they are of action without such backing. Among realists, in fact, the gap between support for multilateral and unilateral intervention in North Korea is identical to the gap among scholars of the liberal tradition, whose theories explicitly favor cooperation." Dan Nexon comments, "I don't believe this is because realists have suddenly turned into Wilsonsians; rather, I suspect the data reflects how a broad cross-section of realist scholars have come to the conclusion that international legitimacy greases the wheels of power and makes counterbalancing less likely." I'm no professor, but it seems to me that reaching that conclusion substantially constitutes turning into a Wilsonian.
Conveniently enough, the Wizards played the Timberwolves the very week of the trade deadline, serving to drive home to the extent to which the basketball universe must demand a Garnett-to-Chicago trade. Garnett is a historic figure, not only one of the best players but literally an integral element of turn-of-the-century Association history; the prime mover in the death of positionality, the return of the high schooler and the subsequent Age Limit Era, the Contract Explosiion and subsequent max salary rule, etc. A guy like that deserves to be on a good team, one that pushes into the playoffs and (who knows?) could play for it all. As of now, all we have was the 2003-2004 run, and -- forgetting for a moment what Garnett deserves -- we deserve more. This is especially true given that there are a number of perfectly logical Minnesota-Chicago trade scenarios.
The other big name possibility is Jason Kidd going to the Los Angeles. Obviously, if the Lakers really do somehow manage to snag Kidd without giving up Odom or Bynum, they've got to pull the trigger on that, but as a fan, I don't really want to see it. For five season the Lakers were a delightful Evil Empire, the team I Loved to Hate. And, like many people, I found Kobe more loathsome than Shaq, and though the Lakers per se became less loathsome following the Shaq trade (how could you hate such a devastated squad) the Black Mamba became even more so. In the 2004-2005 season, however, Kobe voyaged to the underworld and appeared to re-emerge the stronger for it in his 2005-2006 campaign. Now, from the vantage point of this year, I actually believe Kobe might win another championship at some point. Not this spring, to be sure. But next year or the year after? If Bynum keeps developing? If everyone stays healthy? It would be . . . redemption. I'm not sure I could root for him, but (barring an Eastern Conference Championship for the Wizards, of course) I certainly couldn't root against him.
A return to contention through the deus ex machina of a one-sided trade for aging star Jason Kidd, however, is not the path of redemption. What makes the emerging Kobe Bryant story so unlikely is the way the Lakers dependence on development-from-within depends on precisely what we Kobe-haters never thought he could do -- become a leader, a teacher, a mentor -- and lucking into Kidd would rob what we're seeing of all its appealing qualities. The trade I'd like to see would be Andre Miller for Kwame Brown or something.
I don't like to trust paraphrases, but Jonathan Singer summary of Tom Vilsack's appearance at the Democratic candidates' forum in Nevada says "Final question covers Social Security and Medicare. Vilsack talks about balancing the budget of these programs by reindexing the program to prices, not prices and wages." Did Vilsack really say that? It's kind of technical, so people could easily miss it, but that means, over time, very large cuts in Social Security benefits.
UPDATE: Also -- I forgot to mention this, but it strikes me as a somewhat bad idea for the Democratic primary calendar to be literally organized around a series of interest group-sponsored dog-and-pony shows (I believe that after this AFSCME forum later in the year we're going to have an SEIU forum and doubtless more will be coming down the road). It presents a somewhat caricatured view of the Democratic Party and progressive politics. Either the DNC or the state parties should take the lead in organizing a reasonable number of events.
Hilzoy has the goods on Tom Vilsack's Social Security destroying ways. The Iowan's words:
First and foremost, you're going to have to take a look at the way in which Social Security is indexed. Currently, it's indexed based on wages and price; we can index it on price and still maintain the stability of Social Security and maintain the purchasing power of Social Security without necessarily jeopardizing the future of Social Security
So, yeah, screw him. Hilzoy also has him dressed as a crocodile. Maybe he'll get to be deputy agriculture secretary in the Clinton/Obama/Edwards administration.
If I may say something nice about Hillary Clinton for a minute, I think things like this attack from Will Saletan are kind of unfair:
Five years ago, Hillary Clinton supported a Senate resolution authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. So did I. It took me four years to admit this was a mistake. I've been wondering when Clinton would admit it. Now, from campaign insiders quoted in the New York Times, comes the answer: never. As she told voters a few days ago: "If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."
This is an amazingly stupid and arrogant position. If she sticks to it, it will probably kill her candidacy. And it should.
From where I sit, the issue here isn't that Clinton, unlike Saletan (or me) isn't willing to "admit" that supporting the war resolution was a mistake. The issue is that she doesn't think it was a mistake and she doesn't want to pretend otherwise. Clinton's executive power theory of why she votes the right way ("She believes in executive authority and Congressional deference, her advisers say, and is careful about suggesting that Congress can overrule a commander in chief") seems very plausible to me. When liberals are trying to get conservatives to worry about executive power one line a lot of us use is you realize Hillary Clinton may be president some day, right? But from Clinton's point of view, she may be president some day. What's more, as someone who was First Lady for much longer than she'd been a Senator at the time of the vote, it's natural that she would have a great deal of appreciation for the president's-eye-view take on the matter.
This isn't to say that voting for the war was the right thing to do. But there's every reason to think she thinks it was the right thing to do. She's not refusing to "admit" anything; she's just saying what she thinks.
I don't really have anything to say on the Clinton-Geffen-Obama spat from yesterday, except to observe that I was becoming so overtaken with Obama-mania (he's dreamy) that I was finding myself kinda sorta hoping he would decide that the time had come to position himself as the candidate of intellectual property law reform. Well, with David Geffen as his finance chair, probably not.
UPDATE: As you'll see in comments, Geffen hosted a big Obama fundraiser but isn't actually the finance chair. His real finance chair is Penny Pritzger, a Chicago billionaire who also happens to be the 89th most powerful woman in the world. Or at least she was in 2006. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is 18th, just above Ann Livermore of Hewlett Packard and just below Chilean president Michelle Bachelet.
Someone with the rather funny name of James Bopp, Jr. who's "joined the Romney Presidential campaign as a special adviser on life issues, an unpaid position" has an article up making the case for Multiple Choice Mitt. His basic point is that social conservatives shouldn't be worried by Romney's past history as a dogmatic pro-choicer, because we can explain the entire 1994-2002 phase of his politica career (i.e., the majority of his political career) as a giant lie when he was hiding his innermost convictions for the sake of personal advancement.
Daniel Larison is a bit skeptical about this. Let me push the ball further. When you're evaluating politicians, what they really think doesn't really matter. The essence of the matter is what will they do when the going gets tough. Romney, whatever he actually thinks about fetal and embryonic life, is obviously willing to do contradict those beliefs (if any) for the sake of political expedience. Hence, if you're serious about criminalizing abortions or if you're serious about preventing the criminalization of abortions, you can't look at Romney as a serious option.
By contrast, I know social conservatives don't like John McCain, but he's always amassed a consistent record of voting for abortion criminalization whenever possible.
Tom Vilsack has endorsed making Social Security benefits grow with prices, rather than wages—thus stopping them from growing at all, after inflation. He isn't even talking about doing it in a "progressive" way, with low-income workers shielded from the hit, as President Bush has. So on this issue, he's to the right of the president, not to mention every other candidate for the presidency in 2008.
I like his chances of securing the Democratic nomination more and more with every passing day!
I should note for the sake of precision, that once an individual's Social Security benefits are set, the do rise with prices rather than wages. The wage index comes into play when calculating your initial benefit level. It should also be said that while, technically, ending the wage index would massively cut benefits and thus save a bunch of money over the long term it's by no means clear that this would be the actual result. Before the wage index was implemented, what you had was a lot of congressional mucking about, with benefit levels raised at arbitrary points in time by arbitrary amounts according to whatever political strategy the politicians of the time were following. The wage index has served to substantially rationalize the system.
I went to see Breach last night, about the Robert Hanssen case and had a thought that will disqualify me from ever working on a presidential campaign. Namely, the terrible, terrible thing about Hanssen is supposed to be that his treason got people killed. This is emphasized several times in the film. The two people named in the film, however, were . . . Soviet traitors. From a categorical imperative point of view, it's hard to see how it can simultaneously be the case that getting traitors arrested and innocent is a terrible thing to do while identifying traitors and bringing capital charges against them is praiseworthy. This, of course, is why Alasdair MacIntyre thinks liberals can't be patriots.
At any rate, I got to wondering who the third guy Hanssen got killed was, since the movie doesn't mention him. Interestingly, the Justice Department's Inspector General's report doesn't say either, which gives me the impression that the third man's identity must be some kind of classified secret. The IG's report also makes it clear that Hanssen wasn't really all that; he went undetected for decades because the FBI didn't make any real effort to identify moles inside the FBI. As the report concludes "the FBI trusted that its employees would remain loyal throughout their careers. The Hanssen case shows the danger of that approach."
Roger Simon spins a fictional tale of 2008, resulting in John McCain's ascension to the White House. It doesn't, frankly, strike me as a particularly plausible story and that says something about McCain's odds. I do, however, have to complain about this:
[McCain] had left Blair House early that morning to go to church, two churches in fact, Grace Reformed at 15th and O and then New York Avenue Presbyterian near 13th Street. The reporters doing live TV were still trying to figure it out—“I didn’t know McCain was particularly religious, Chris”—when a member of the new White House staff called and helped them out: One was the church of Teddy Roosevelt, and the other was the church of Abraham Lincoln. Two of McCain’s heroes. He had others: Thomas Moore, Lord Nelson, Joan of Arc, Julius Caesar, Colin Powell (his new secretary of State), Charles Darwin (how the creationists had howled about that one), Ted Williams, Mother Antonia, and Aung San Suu Kyi.
McCain and Powell are both Republicans with a strong interest in national security issues who are much-beloved by the national media, but they have different ideas about the subject. Why Powell would want to further ruin his reputation by serving again as Secretary of State for a president who has no intention of listening to him is a bit beyond me. On the other hand, Powell's behavior in office was sufficiently inexplicable that I suppose there's no telling what kind of crazy stuff he might do in the future.
Trade deadline shocker: Juan Dixon for Fred Jones. This is the kind of deal whose consequences may reverberate for decades.
Similarly, I will give Joe Lieberman $50 if he promises to stop hinting around about switching parties and just STFU until the day when he finds what he believes to be an appropriate pretext and then just announces. Personally, I'm looking forward to his book about how the Democratic Party has always stood for blind support of unprovoked invasions until . . . Things Changed and The Party Left Me.
Dick Cheney is, to be sure, the Bush administration figure most likely to say something ridiculous in public. Nevertheless, statements like "Last month's anti-satellite test, China's continued fast-paced military buildup are less constructive and are not consistent with China's stated goal of a peaceful rise," are all-too-typical of the American defense establishment as a whole, an apparatus that seems to operate with virtually no self-awareness. The United States has, over the past few years, reiterated its refusal to strengthen the ban on space weapons and released a new national space strategy strengthening our commitment to retaining unilateral military supremacy in space. We've also engaged in an enormous military build-up that started from a position where we were already by far the biggest spending.
Then we turn around and say we view China's efforts to enhance its military as threatening and inconsistent with the idea of a "peaceful rise." What Cheney is doing is conflating two different ideas. One is that China's rise could be peaceful, i.e. respectful of the core interests of other major powers (the US, Russia, Japan, India, the EU, etc.) and avoid a hot or cold war with any or all of them. The other would be the idea that China's rise won't be a rise at all; that the country will get richer but will just be content to be a middle-income country with no geopolitical profile that poses no challenge to American hegemony -- like an enormous Estonia. Obviously, though, if you set that out as America's "goal" for China, then China will fall short of the goal and then we'll find ourselves in conflict. No country is in a practical position right now to in any meaningful way challenge American military supremacy, but increasingly the United States is demanding (you can also see this in reaction to Vladimir Putin's recent speech) that countries actively embrace a vision of perpetual subordinate status. Patriotic Chinese (and Russian, and Indian, etc.) officials aren't going to do that.
In a reversal-of-stereotypes, I read via Kevin Drum the clearest expression yet of information that's been hinted at previously the U.S. government is actively pressing Israel not to negotiate with Syria. That's super-duper crazy.
See more, from M.J. Rosenberg. The episode serves as a reminder that unlike American Middle East hawks, Israelis actually have to live in the middle of the Arab world and are relatively ill-served by the sort of grandiose transformational schemes the administration likes to come up with the justify their increasingly rudderless approach to the region.
Ezra's right, Tom Friedman's got the mother of all incompetence dodges here:
The irony of Iraq is that it’s the one place where Mr. Bush decisively chose regime change, but he then executed it so poorly, with insufficient troops, that Iraq never stood a chance. If Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had spent as much time plotting the toppling of Saddam Hussein as they did the toppling of Colin Powell, Iraq today would be Switzerland.
Switzerland, seriously? To be sure, I assume Friedman means this as some kind of deliberate hyperbole. But while I'm sure there are certain kinds of better management steps that would have either left Iraq less chaotic than it is today, or else left it equally chaotic at lower cost to the United States, there's still a meaningful question here. Would thinking harder about the issues and the resources have given the United States an effective plan to create a peaceful, pluralistic democracy in Iraq or would they just have led to the conclusion that that was a deeply unrealistic goal? The latter, I think. It's an important issue, since while the US doesn't have the ground forces available to invade Syria today, we will have them someday,
Andrew Sullivan highlights General William Odom making the mistake of agreeing to appear on the Hugh Hewitt show and wrestling with one of the media most intellectually dishonest fixtures. I note that one thing Hewitt tries to do is a move I've seen more and more recently; attempt to pin the blame for the Cambodian genocide on the anti-war movement of the 1970s. Nothing, really, could be further from the truth. Benedict Kiernan is director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale. He "is the author of How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (1985, 2004), Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres (1986), The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (1996, 2002), and Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975-1979: Race, idéologie, et pouvoir (1998). He is the co-author of Khmers Rouges ! Matériaux pour l'histoire du communisme au Cambodge (1981), Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942-1981 (1982), and Cambodge: Histoire et enjeux (1986), and has published numerous articles on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide."
What's more, "He was founding Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program (1994-99) and Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project (2000-02). Kiernan's edited collection Conflict and Change in Cambodia won the Critical Asian Studies Prize for 2002. He is also the editor of Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International Community (1993), and Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983 (1986), and co-editor of Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea (1983), Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976-1977 (1988), and The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (2003)." In short, the guy knows a thing or two about Cambodia. Read this article he wrote:
The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed—not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson. The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide. The data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have disastrous consequences. It therefore speaks to contemporary warfare as well, including US operations in Iraq. Despite many differences, a critical similarity links the war in Iraq with the Cambodian conflict: an increasing reliance on air power to battle a heterogeneous, volatile insurgency.
So in short, no, neither the American bombing of Cambodia nor the Vietnam War in general were humanitarian operations well-suited to protecting Cambodian civilians from the Khmer Rouge. But, then again, you knew that already, didn't you? Hewitt's busting this out more in the spirit of "no talking point left behind" than as part of some kind of good-faith effort to understand the origins of political mass killing.
It seems to me that a lot of former Iraq War supporters haven't even seriously attempted to learn any kind of lessons from their/our errors. Peter Beinart is different. Here's what he has to say:
