Ever since Budapest became the new Prague, I've been wondering where the new Budapest (or, perhaps, new new Prague) would be. The answer turns out to be Krakow. This, in turn, is sort of too bad because I'm pretty sure that in the past I've pretended to have visited Krakow and if more Westerners start going, that's going to be hard to pull off plausibly.
One frustrating aspect of the American health care debate is that policy arguments center almost entirely on ways to change the health care financing system, when all the evidence suggests that the provision of health care isn't actually a very effective way of improving health outcomes. Which isn't to say that health care finance isn't an important issue; it's hugely important to people's finances and somewhat important to their actual health. It would, however, make a ton of sense to find time to focus more attention on more effective sorts of public health measures than helping sick people go to the doctor.
The books are "interesting and perhaps illuminating, but they didn't drop any new revelations into the campaign," said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who headed up public opinion surveys for Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004.
Even some Republicans saw no reason for Clinton to be concerned about the books' fallout. "It doesn't strike me that there was anything new in either of these books that I didn't already know about Hillary Clinton," said Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican pollster and strategist.
The Clinton campaign heartily agreed, pouncing on an early wave of ho-hum reviews from political bloggers. "The biggest news here is three reporters have spent the last 10 years combined looking at Sen. Clinton's life and finding nothing new to report," said Howard Wolfson, the campaign's communications director. "They've got zero."
The only reason anyone's talking about these books at all is that newspapers keep writing stories on them. The LAT's reporter, Stephen Braun, at least had the good sense to report how pointless this all was. But then along comes the headline writer to say it's the talk of the town. Obviously, Memorial Day Weekend is tough for everyone in the news biz, but this is really pathetic.
I got to meet Corey Booker last week. He seemed like a nice guy. People should help him out and cooperate with the police.
Actually, I really was quite surprised that I met him at a UNITE-HERE event. I didn't actually know anything about the man, but judging by his fan base I had formed this impression of him as a wanker who wouldn't be attending somewhat obscure union functions.
As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.
This, of course, is exactly the sort of thing one would point to as an example of the moral superiority enjoyed by a liberal democracy when fighting a group of murderous fanatics -- we treat people in accordance with domestic and international law in a manner consistent with the basic principles of human rights and human dignity; they do not. But in Dick Cheney's America our delicate sensibilities fall away too.
Oh man. I don't think I've seen anyone make a serious effort to argue that ongoing school construction endeavors in Iraq outweigh the fact that we aren't achieving any of our mission objectives, but apparently Chris Muir didn't get the memo that these talking points are inoperative:
I'm pretty sure that these reconstruction projects have, in fact, largely been halted. And, of course, a lot of the refurbishing of public buildings is necessary precisely because the war has been so destructive. But all that aside, the level of bad faith here is really mind-boggling. If I proposed that the United States appropriate $87 billion to build 306 schools and refurbish 364 additional schools in Ecuador, would conservatives be applauding that? But that's what congress appropriated in its 2003 supplemental for Iraq. The bill the president just signed appropriates $95 billion for just the next six months. Does Chris Muir intend to get behind a $95 billion disease eradication program? It only costs $1 to give someone a measles vaccine and "approximately 410,000 children under the age of five die globally of measles each year."
But, of course not; take the value as a talking point away and conservatives don't care about education in the developing world or global public health at all.
It turns out that training soldiers isn't very helpful unless you're sure the trained soldiers aren't going to turn around and shoot at you once the training's done:
But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.
Of course the media refuses to report the good news -- many of the people we're training don't attack us!
Over the past season, I'd sort of come to like Kobe Bryant. Then you read something like this:
The Lakers who were seen at the end of the season might look a lot like those that return for the start of 2007-08, with some minor additions here and there. It isn't sitting well with Kobe Bryant.
"I want to see us get to a contending level," he said Saturday with firmness in his voice. "I want to see us become a championship contender. It's been a frustrating process for me and I'm sure it's been a frustrating process for all Laker fans. I'm just hoping we can get to that level. I'm still frustrated. I'm waiting for them to make some changes."
Look, I feel his pain. But unlike a lot of players facing this sort of situation, Kobe actually was in a situation where he had the sort of teammates he needed to compete at a top level. He just couldn't get along with Shaq.
Happy Memorial Day! I'm at the beach in North Carolina.
Sara turns out to own a ridiculous amount of DLC swag which I thought it made sense to wear since vacationing down here in the south one needs to distance oneself from the national party.
I'd always wondered about Rudy Giuliani's switch during the 1980s from Associate Attorney General to US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The latter job clearly has certain advantages if you're looking to run for mayor, but at the same time it seems like a demotion. Mark Kleiman explains that part of the issue is that Giuliani's signature policy initiative at Justice was failing. "The speculation when Giuliani took what was at best a lateral transfer (Associate AG is the #3 job in the Department) was that he'd figured out that his counter-drug efforts had been a disaster and wanted to be out of the way when the fecal material hit the air-moving equipment." Team Giuliani notes in its defense that, sure, Reagan may have thought Rudy was crazy, but at least he passed along a form letter praising Rudy when he nominated him for his demotion to the US Attorney job.
The idea that John Edwards' 2008-vintage lefty political persona "carries risks" strikes me as pretty odd. To be sure, the stands he's taken carry some level of risk in a general election, but to run in a general election you need win a primary first. And in primary terms, Edwards' move to the left has been all upside -- it was and is the only strategy by which he could possibly win.
This comes up in the context of Arnold Kling's question "would immortals be libertarian?" I have a certain number of un-libertarian views about regulations aimed at saving people from death that I would, of course, be happy to drop in a world of immortals. But if immortality doesn't render the concept of "health" or "quality of life" meaningless, then I still see room for healthy doses of paternalism and public provision of health-related goods.
Brian Beutler describes efforts to hold US-Iranian talks strictly limited to the Iraq issue to be a "charade" since "as long as America and Iran are so bitterly at odds, the countries' strategic objectives in Iraq will run counter to each other." Exactly right. US-Iranian enmity isn't rooted in disagreements about Iraq. Rather, we find it difficult to cooperate with the Iranians with regard to Iraq precisely because the overall state of US-Iranian relations is so poor.
Insofar as our goals in the Middle East include overthrowing the regime in Teheran and, short of regime change, doing everything possible to destroy the Iranian economy then, naturally enough, the Iranians are going to seek to thwart our goals. After all, they hardly have any choice of the matter.
John McCain has such a complete and total record of hawkishness, that I think it's safe to assume that this answer for The Jerusalem Post is more than just pandering:
Long considered a dear friend to America, today Israel is our natural ally in what is a titanic struggle against Islamic extremists - an enemy whose sinister nature I need not explain to the people of Israel. . . .
As President, I will pursue every option at my disposal to neutralize that threat. We cannot and must not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. I will make sure the American people understand that if we are to defeat the extremists that threaten our way of life, Israel's security cannot be compromised.
Some followup is owed here from reporters. We need to get a better understanding of McCain's understanding of who, exactly, the "Islamist extremists" are that we're in a "titanic struggle" against. One assumes that Osama bin Laden doesn't harbor warm feelings toward Israel. Still, in practice, when one thinks of Israel's foes, ones thoughts turn to Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Iran, etc., rather than al-Qaeda. McCain wants to say, it seems, that all of these groups are part of the enemy. People ought to ask McCain what other sort of groups around the world he would also lump together in this manner. They should also ask him why he thinks the lumping is warranted. Does he see centralized coordination between all these entities? I think I could guess at the answers based on having read years worth of hawkish punditry, but the candidate himself should spell out his thinking on these points and be challenged on it.
People who need to run for office like to frame the trouble with America's oil consumption as not just part of the global warming puzzle, but part of a larger "energy security" problem whose solution is "energy independence." If framing the question this way helps win the climate change argument, I don't have a problem with that, but as Brad Plumer points out that's unlikely to be the case:
The coal industry has lately latched on to the "energy security" craze by billing itself as the answer to our oil-dependency woes. Specifically, Big Coal is teaming up with an array of Republicans and Democrats to tout liquefied coal as a substitute for gasoline in U.S. vehicles. The country is sitting on vast coal reserves, they reason, so why not use those instead of tossing money at the House of Saud? There's just one catch: Liquefied coal would do little to reduce carbon emissions and, in all likelihood, would make things worse. Nevertheless, the idea continues to gain currency in Congress, in part because "energy security" is a sales pitch few politicians can resist. [...]
Unfortunately for them, a recent analysis by the Energy Department found that coal-to-liquid fuel could generate roughly twice the carbon emissions that regular gasoline does. Coal backers counter that, if the carbon released during liquefication could be captured and permanently stored underground, the fuel would be comparable in carbon impact to gasoline--that is, the status quo. But the technology for storing carbon underground remains unproved [...]
It's ugly out there. But for a political party to position itself squarely as the party that's against coal is seen as too politically crazy for anyone to embrace.
There's a lot to be said about David Patten's Middle East Quarterly article denying that Iraq is in a civil war, but let's just quote this for now: "However, it does not follow that Iraq is in a civil war. While the government is weak, there is no political force presenting it with a serious challenge. Iraq is, indeed, an unstable nation, but there is little danger of regime change, the ultimate purpose of a civil war."
While current conditions in Iraq don't otherwise resemble the American Civil War, it should give Patten cause that he could have been standing in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July 1863 saying "there is little danger of regime change, the ultimate purpose of a civil war" and concluded that only unpatriotic and ill-informed elements in the news media would want to say the USA was in a civil war.
Ezra Klein has his doubts about using public policy to try to improve the healthiness of American lifestyle:
Meanwhile, the reason doctors are constantly prescribing statins along with admonitions to exercise and eat better is because using public policy to change diet and exercise habits is really, really, really hard, unless you're prepared to be very heavy-handed (i.e, outlawing trans fats in restaurants, setting portion limits, etc).
I'm not so sure about that. The sense that public policy won't work here seems to me to be driven by a failure to look at things at the margin. I have absolutely no idea what kind of reasonable policy measure would get 90 percent of Americans to engage in 30 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise per day, but I think it's pretty easy to think of policy measures that would somewhat increase people's propensity to walk or ride a bike rather than drive their car. These things -- a carbon tax, say -- would be politically difficult to achieve, but so would comprehensive reform of the American system of health care finance. They would also achieve important goals related to climate change.
What's more, while I don't have a good twenty point plan to link to off the top of my head, that's in large part because there isn't this army of diet-and-exercise policy wonks at DC's think tanks churning out the policy papers. The progressive policy community is awash in health care finance ideas because that's what donors have decided to fund. At some points years ago, someone or other decided to put a lot of emphasis on getting people to stop smoking, and they've proven over the years to be quite creative about dreaming up and endless series of ever-more-restrictive policies to push for, each of which is sufficiently mild on its own terms as to be capable of securing political support.
Everything You Wanted To Know About Carbon Emissions Regulations But Were Afraid to Ask
This superb editorial from The Los Angeles Times laying out different forms of cap-and-trade and carbon tax schemes ran yesterday, but I'm not sure if anyone reads blogs (or, indeed, The Los Angeles Times) on Memorial Day, so I thought I'd link to it this morning.
I think it's possible that non-Jewish readers won't be as taken with this book as I was, but I think it's really an extraordinary work. It also seemed both more and less "political" than I'd been anticipating; there are lots of significant similarities and differences between Sitka and Israel, between our world and Chabon's, but everything's so richly and totally done that it doesn't leave you with an obvious take away "point" as such.
Recently, we've been facing the collision of the following truths:
A. GOP members say they can't keep supporting the war unless the surge shows signs of success by September. B. Conditions in Iraq never improve. C. Republicans will never stop supporting the war.
Well, Julian Barnes reports that "U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success." Success has, however, already been redefined plenty. If you'd predicted back in February 2003 that the US would be in the mess we're in by May 2007 you would, rightly, have been viewed as someone who was predicting failure.
I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I'll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma's Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I'm more likely to take Buruma's word for it than Berman's.
That said, the very fact that Berman wrote such a thing reminded me of Josh Marshall's years-old essay on Berman and "the Orwell Temptation". Josh described the temptation primarily in terms of a tendency to overblow the world-historical significance of Islamist terrorism in order to make intellectuals feel more important, like they're living at really important times. In Berman's case, though, this impulse also exhibits itself in a pretty weird conception of the role of the intellectual in world-historical times. Way back in his March 2003 essay on Sayyid Qutb Berman was saying things like this:
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.
As Brian Weatherson argued at the time there was something very strange about this. 9/11 certainly made the philosophy of Sayyid Qutb a more interesting topic for the intellectually inclined, a more valid subject for New York Times Magazine articles. Nevertheless, it takes a curious frame of mind to believe -- as Berman appears to believe in complete earnestness -- that defeating al-Qaeda requires us to first engage in close reading of the works of a man who died forty years ago, and then for us to muster an army of intellectuals to refute his philosophy.
Here, again, implicit in the essay on Ramadan is the notion that, on some level, for al-Qaeda to be defeated it's necessary for hawkish western left-wing intellectuals to win an internecine argument with other western left-wing intellectuals about the merits of Tariq Ramadan's work. It's just a bizarre idea, a weird picture of how the world works; as if Soviet Communism collapsed because books about the superiority of free markets were really convincing rather than because books about the superiority of free markets were true and therefore societies featuring free markets outperformed the Soviet bloc.
I suppose I'm just an optimist at hear, but reading about how the People's Republic of China is going to execute to former head of the PRC food and drug regulatory agency tends to confirm my belief that China's going to find it extremely difficult to continue on the path of prosperity and autocracy.
You reach for these kind of extremely harsh punishments when you recognize that you have a lot of people getting away with a brand of crime that you think it's very important to curb. China, in short, has a large corruption problem, and very little success at catching corrupt officials. Thus, executions. But this sort of law enforcement strategy rarely works. It's much better to catch a large proportion of violators and mete out a moderate punishment than to catch only a small proportion of violators and then clamp down super harshly. But the only even vaguely effective means of clamping down on public corruption is to allow for a free press and competitive politics; the things that create institutions with incentives to expose corruption.
Without strong secular parties, political competition in the Arab world could be reduced to a dangerous head-on confrontation between Islamist parties and the incumbent governments. Yet secular parties—a broad term referring to organizations that do not embrace a political platform inspired by religious ideals—are clearly facing a crisis in the Arab world as they struggle for influence, relevance, and in some cases, survival. . . .
Voters see little reason to support secular parties that offer neither the patronage of government parties, nor the vision and social services of Islamist movements. As a result, they have become second-tier actors who cannot compete successfully for voter support. Their leaders, in turn, feel victimized by authoritarian governments that allow little legal space for free political activity and believe they cannot compete with the grassroots mobilization by the Islamist movements. . . .
The crisis of secular parties is emerging as a major obstacle to democratic reform in the Arab world. “The weakness of secular parties is leading to a curious blurring of the lines between government and opposition, with many secular parties looking to the government for protection against the rise of Islamists, even as they try to curb the power of those governments.”
Trying to think in a bit of a comparative context, the question is what the social and ideological basis of an Arab secular democratic political party would be. The answer, typically, is "labor unions and socialism" or else in the case of the US Democratic Party "labor unions and a high level of religious pluralism." Nationalism could also plausibly work. And, of course, the Arab world used to be shot through with secular socialist and nationalist parties -- Nasserism and Baathism and the like -- but the US didn't like it very much at the time. And there's the rub.
Neither Islamism nor Arab nationalism nor aggressive socialism are the sort of things the US government is likely to be enthusiastic about, but it's very hard to imagine what the social basis of support for the sort of political parties Americans usually say they want to see in the Arab world would be.
As you'll see if you read the Official Ezra Klein Analysis of the Obama health care plan, he's managed to transcend the division between those who favor the release of specific health care plans during the campaign and those who oppose it. The plan has tons of details, but on the two most important points -- how does the National Health Insurance Exchange (like Edwards' "Health Markets") work, and what is the scale of the new public option -- he's pleasingly vague.
I decided to skip to the end of Paul Berman's monster essay and I see he winds up talking about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She, of course, is every western secularist's favorite Muslim precisely because she's, well, not a Muslim. And, of course, from the point of view of western secularists it would be great if we could just partner up with secularists born in Muslim countries and together quash the menace of radical Islamist terrorism.
The trouble, of course, is that politics is the art of the possible, and history shows that it's frequently not possible to do very much of anything with secularist politics. That's why, for example, seeking arguments against Female Genital Mutilation in the Koran seems like an obviously smart move. In countries where large numbers of people believe FGM is required by Islam, arguments of the form "Islam requires FGM, FGM bad for women, therefore Islam should be abandoned" aren't going to get off the ground. Arguments of the form "FGM is not required by Islam" or, even better, "FGM is condemned by Islam" are, pragmatically speaking, much more useful. But an argument like that is only going to be credible coming from a serious Muslim, probably one whose general beliefs are wildly too culturally conservative for my taste or that of any western feminist.
Over the long weekend, Emily and I got into a dispute about who had the most knowledge of Dune trivia, so it was like a gift from heaven when Chris Bowers plopped this terrible analogy down:
In order to win the nomination, a non-Clinton candidate needs to be something of a Democratic Kwisatz Haderach who can tap into something so deep inside the collective Democratic unconscious that he can trasmute our rank and file's version of the water of life in a way that a Bene Gesserit like Clinton simply cannot.
I seriously doubt that this will help anyone's understanding of the race. It's too bad, too, because it comes at the end of a very informative discussion of "hard" and "soft" supporters.
Regarding Russian (though possibly grassroots rather than state-sponsored) virtual attacks on Estonian web infrastructure, Robert Farley remarks that "lots of work has been done on "cyber war", the promise and vulnerability of networked military organizations" but:
Less attention has been paid to the economic prospects of cyber warfare, and to the ability of states to exert power and coercion through a new set of tools. When Russia tries to coerce its neigbors through threatening to destroy their economic and governmental activity, it becomes a problem for NATO and consequently the United States.
Of course, like many things all this could be anticipated by close readers of William Gibson's sprawl trilogy which clearly has just such a clash (between the US and Russia, even) as part of its backstory. I'm fairly confident that if this Neuromancer movie ever happens it's going to suck, though.
Michael Novak, theologian to the business class, has a heck of a post up arguing that we shouldn't care if carbon dioxide is making the earth warmer because, hey, when the earth was warmer hundreds of years ago Vikings established a colony in Greenland that later died off when the world got cold again.
Which is all great, I suppose, if you own waterfront property in Greenland (or, more to the point, property that will be on the waterfront once ice melts and sea levels rise) but is probably not going to be much consolation to drowning Bangladeshis or hurrican-ravaged residents of the Caribbean or Gulf coasts.
More to the point, what this sort of analysis misses is that thanks to carbon-generated warming the earth is going to warm up and then keep getting warmer. Something like a one-off increase in temperature of several degrees would be very disruptive, but it's certainly possible that it would be cheaper to simply adapt to the change rather than prevent it from happening. But that's not what's on the table. We're looking at a scenario where the earth gets warmer and then it gets . . . even warmer and where things get worse and worse and worse until maybe they get bad enough to precipitate an economic collapse bad enough to significantly reduce emissions.
"The onslaught of porn," writes Naomi Wolf, "is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women." An interesting claim, I thought. To make it responsibly in a journalistic context, one would want to see both convincing evidence that male libido in relation to real women has, in fact, deadened in recent years and then some kind of argument that porn is responsible. The article appeared in New York so I didn't really expect statistical proof, but anecdotal evidence, sure. Wolf doesn't have it. Instead she has this:
Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?
Now, if such feelings are genuinely widespread, this is a legitimate topic for concern. But it's worth noting that it's not actually the same problem. That college women may feel insecure about their ability to "compete" with pornography seems plausible to me. That college men have lost interest in having sex with real women because they could watch porn instead strikes me as wildly implausible. No doubt things have changed on campus since I graduated (more WIFI networks, etc.) but I'd be shocked if things had changed that much.
Link courtsey of Vaness at Feministing who raises some additional objections.
The upshot is that it would be radically better for the environment to just build more coal power plants (normally the gold standard for bad environmental policy) and spend the money on subsidizing plug-in hybrids. This is to say nothing of the potential environmental benefit of targeting our subsidies away from things that are harmful and toward things that are helpful.
Robert Zoellick, who doesn't seem to have done the country any good as US Trade Representative or as Deputy Secretary of State, but who also has the rare distinction of having served at a high level of the Bush administration without directly causing any major fiascos is set to head the World Bank.
A record of solid mediocrity and basic lack of distinction seems like the best we can reasonably hope for from this president, so I'll consider it a reasonably strong pick. Zoellick even has some background in financial and economic issues, unlike his predecessor. Nevertheless, I still feel that Bush should consider appointing Jim Leach to some kind of job at some point rather than endlessly relying on the team of Khalilzad and Zoellick when called upon to give a position to a non-discredited person.
So coal liquification is very bad policy but this April headline still seems a little harsh. Still, were I a consequences-oriented advocate rather than a truth-seeking journalist, I would say that trying to brand liquid coal as "Hitler's Fuel" might be a good idea.
If anybody is interested, Richard Cohen could have discovered in less than two minutes that the term "neoliberalism" was coined to describe the Washington Monthly's Charlie Peters and his posse, who wanted a reality-based liberalism, an effective liberalism, a liberalism that sought truth from facts and that proposed policies not because they resonated with a liberal interest group but because they were good for the country and the world.
Now, look; the truth of the matter is that "neoliberalism" is a confusing term. Certainly, this is one neoliberalism -- Peters-style efforts to reformulate American liberalism after the disappointments of the 1970s. This neoliberalism is, however, a different thing from the Washington Consensus of the IMF and the World Bank that also goes by the name "neoliberalism." Even worse, these two ideas aren't completely distinct. And out of the points of overlap plus the realities of money, power, and politics comes the third neoliberalism -- the neoliberalism of the "business-friendly" Democratic Party politician. In recent years, to make things even worse, a substantial number of people who want to see major change in US foreign policy have started referring to liberal hawks as "neoliberal" based both on the "neoconservative" appellation and also the general sense of the "neoliberal" as being to the right of the standard liberal.
In short, it's a legitimately confusing term, and while one can (and should!) condemn Richard Cohen for many things, I think he's allowed to find it somewhat confusing.
What does Dugard mean by that? If the Palestinians aim eight untargeted rockets vaguely at Sderot and kill one person the Israelis should do the same. No more, maybe to a standstill. The aim of any society under assault is to use as much force--yes, within the rules of war--to stop the enemy's attack. My guess is that Israel will soon respond to the addiction of Hamas to random rocket fire with very much more force, and it will be justified in doing so.
The implicit assumption here is that Hamas is a highly pragmatic institutional actor that's deeply concerned about Palestinian civilian casualties. In the Peretz worldview, if a Hamas rocket that kills 8 Israelis is responded to with an Israeli bomb that kills 8 Palestinians, Hamas will say "let's go another round." But if Israel kills 16 Palestinians in response, maybe Hamas will say "we've had enough." Or maybe 16 isn't enough and it needs to be 64. Or 160. Or 800. Who knows?
I think it's obvious that things don't work that way. Indeed, it's pretty obvious that Hamas doesn't really fear Israeli retaliation at all. Not because Israeli retaliation is insufficiently fearsome, but because Hamas' institutional incentives are to favor death, disorder, and disruption in the Occupied Territories as this increases the political appeal of their rejectionist agenda. Part of the reason that Israel could use a less "pro-Israel" policy from the United States of America is that refusing to respond to provocations is one of the absolute hardest things for a democratic government to do. When something bad is happening to your citizens, the pressure to "do something" in response, whether or not that something will actually make things worse, is hard to withstand. A foreign patron leaning on you to resist the pressure can be very helpful.
It says so right here. Of course, this was obvious all along, so I don't think that making it additionally obvious will change the behavior of anyone in the conservative parallel universe.
In ongoing discussions about health care and the like, I feel like the conversation tends to trip over alternate conceptions of what it would mean to have a "left" versus a "center" view on these issues. For my part, in the abstract my views on health care are way to the left of what the major presidential candidates are putting out there. I'd reduce private insurers to a minor role around the margins, and would even try to do some experimenting with direct public provision of health care services along with the public provision of health insurance.
But then back in the world of sound political strategies for the immediate future, my view is to the right of what John Edwards has put out there, to the right of what Barack Obama put out yesterday, and quite possibly to the right of what Hillary Clinton will put out in the weeks to come. I don't think the political circumstances are ripe for dramatic alteration of the American health care system, and I don't want to see the next Democratic president's first term wracked on the shoals of health care reform. I'd like to see that box checked with a handful of small-or-medium sized initiatives that will make things better and, if successful, may build support for further public action down the road.
Fred Thompson throws his hat in the ring. Well, sort of. There's an interesting issue about the status of the speech act consisting of an announcement that an announcement of a presidential campaign will be forthcoming. Is announcing the announcement equivalent to announcing?
One of the mysteries of the current discussion of how best to get out of Iraq is that so many otherwise clear-eyed critics of administration policy say we should withdraw our combat troops but leave units behind to train Iraqi forces. As rational policy, it's vastly preferable to leaving combat forces there as well, but it leaves unanswered the question of which Iraqi forces, exactly, we should train. Those of the current Shiite-dominated Nouri al-Maliki government, which has employed Shiite forces to terrorize Sunni areas? What exactly would we train these forces to do? Be more tolerant of the Sunnis? Would that we could, and would that we could train Sunnis to be more tolerant of the Shiites, but these are matters not subject to training.
I think there's a kind of remarkable derangement among the sort of people -- in both parties -- who imagine themselves running the country's foreign policy that makes it impossible for them to ever just admit that situations arise where the United States can't be involved in a useful way. It's vanity, maybe, or just timidity -- perhaps a desire to distance oneself from the damn dirty hippies -- but while this is merely an annoying trait in a opposition party, it's going to be potentially deadly if the Democrats actually find themselves in the White House.
David Boaz makes the libertarian case against Rudy Giuliani. Unfortunately for Boaz, I think the libertarian case against Rudy also undermines Boaz's case (with David Kirby) that there's a large libertarian vote out there. What Boaz's study actually showed was that there's a medium-sized constituency for lower taxes plus less government regulation of sex.
Giuliani just happens to be the candidate who best represents that constellation of views. He's also in many ways probably the least libertarian candidate in the race -- someone who pretty clearly doesn't believe in any kind of principled restrictions on the power of the state, and someone who's extremely eager to see the state deploy extreme violence as the preferred means of achieving policy goals.
My three cents on the rumble in the econ department touched off by Chris Hayes' article on heterodox economics. My first thought when I heard the contention that the neoclassical consensus behaves like a mafia was to remember my Thomas Kuhn. One hears tell of mafia-like behavior among purported social scientists and thinks to oneself "this isn't how a real science behaves." Kuhn reminds us that, in fact, that's exactly how a real science behaves -- it's just not what a rational reconstruction of a successful line of research looks like.
Delving deeper into it, though, the main point I'm taking away from this debate is the extent to which heterodox economics doesn't call the neoclassical paradigm into question. Various heterodox sorts cast doubt on various specific contentions of the neoclassical paradigm into question but, as Hayes documents, the neoclassical paradigm is perfectly willing to incorporate such things into the doctrine when they prove convincing over time. What heterodox economists are really challenging isn't neoclassical economics but the political behavior of neoclassical economists.
The recent Alan Blinder fracas is a case in point. He didn't call any of the standard neoliberal case for free trade into question, and, indeed, didn't argue against free trade at all. He just said something that he thought would be helpful in spurring the creation of the sort of social democratic society with an open market that he favors, while many economists saw his statements as giving aide and comfort to people who have a political agenda (blocking new trade agreements) that they don't like. Even people who challenge free trade orthodoxy more directly -- Dean Baker, say, or the guys who write EPI's stuff about why we shouldn't sign new trade agreements unless they have much tougher labor rules -- aren't challenging the economic models underlying the case for free trade. They're having a political disagreement about the desirability of, say, passing CAFTA that has basically nothing to do with any deep disagreements about economic theory.
Experts note that the Bush administration's reliance on "enhanced interrogation methods" hasn't worked: "a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable."
And of course they are. These are the methods that have historically been deployed by authoritarian regimes looking to generate false confessions (think the Spanish Inquisition or Stalin) for the purpose of cowing the population into submission, they're not real investigative techniques.
Cato's Daniel Griswold sings the praises of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine:
In an interview with Bloomberg News that was published this morning, Kaine said he disagreed with members of his party who criticize globalization and trade agreements such as NAFTA. Their attitude displays a “loser’s mentality,” Kaine countered, adding that, “The only way you’ll succeed [in the global economy] is by being an aggressive competitor rather than trying to hoard your dwindling assets.”
I must have heard orthodox free trader economists bemoan the public's lack of understanding of trade issues -- the inability to see that trade is a positive-sum enterprise, not one that pits countries against each other in competition -- but one rarely sees it acknowledged that one reason people don't understand this is that free traders don't state their own case correctly. What Kaine is saying here is nonsense -- mercantalism plus optimism -- not anything that improves the public discourse. Once Kaine calls trade skeptics losers, the next move is to accuse China of "cheating," and around and around we go trapped in the assumption that trade is a game with nation-level winners and losers, as opposed to individual beneficiaries and sufferers.
Via Ross Douthat an old Nixon campaign ad from 1968:
Brink Lindsey remarks: "Today’s presidential TV spot is a Nixon ad from 1968. Change 'Vietnam' to 'Iraq' and the script could be repeated verbatim by the 2008 Democratic nominee."
It's true, as David Leonhardt says, that Lou Dobbs is a liar. On the other hand, why is this news? Is Glenn Beck not a liar? Rush Limbaugh? Sean Hannity? Charles Krauthammer? Why is it suddenly a problem? I don't want to defend Dobbs -- he's scum -- but it seems to me that it's probably not a coincidence that Dobbs has some inclinations toward genuine advocacy for working class interests in there along with the rancid racism, demagoguery, lying, etc. After all, the people who provide the rest of that stuff straight-up don't seem to produce nearly the same volume of disquiet.
"Given Obama's racial background," writes Brendan Nyhan, "the danger is that these attacks will be used to trigger ugly racial stereotypes about him, particularly once Republicans shift from bong jokes to talking about cocaine, which Obama admitted to trying in his first book."
I dunno about this. It seems to me that if you have an African-American candidate whose admitted to past cocaine use, that attacking him for past cocaine use is less an appeal to ugly racial stereotypes than a straightforward attack on his past drug use. An appeal to ugly racial stereotypes would be implying that a black candidate must have used cocaine in the past because, hey, that's what those people do. I don't personally have any problem with the idea that of a president who used cocaine in the past (though, admittedly, the George W. Bush experience hasn't been very pleasant) but insofar as some voters do have a problem with it, they're entitled to have a problem with it irrespective of the candidate's race.
One of the oddities about the center-right consensus that we need to make public policy less generous to old people is that the purveyors of said consensus are presumably more familiar than I with the logic that makes corporate America so reluctant to hire old people.
Jon Chait says he thinks Fred Thompson will "be formidable both as a primary contender and as a potential nominee." In a general election, I think Thompson is going to end up as a case study in why governors have an easier time winning the White House than do Senators. If you combined Thompson's persona and TV skills with a few token gubernatorial accomplishments (cut taxes eleventeen times, tripled awesomeness, etc.) you'd have a bitchin' presidential contender.
Instead, as a 1990s-vintage GOP Senator he has no real accomplishments to his name and a voting record ready to be mined for attacks (voted for three zillion dollars in Medicare cuts, helped Newt Gingrich make adorable children cry) in a way that will help undermine his considerable assets as a candidate. It's not an insurmountable burden by any means but it does leave him weaker than he might be.
Ezra Klein and Jason Zengerle agree that "Fred Thompson is to the Republicans in '08 as Wes Clark was to the Democrats in '04. In other words, the highpoint of his campaign will be the day he gets in the race, because once he's a serious candidate--and not just the fevered daydream of a dissatisfied base--voters will realize he's not all that."
I agree that Thompson's luster is likely to fade. But what happened with Clark is that it seemed like he'd be a strong candidate -- military background, southerner, etc. -- but then it turned out he was really bad at campaigning. Thompson's actually campaigned before and it seems he was pretty good at it. If he stumbles, it'll be for some other, not-especially-Clark-like reasons.
I spent a healthy proportion of the regular season wondering why people seemed to be writing the Spurs off, and now I think everyone's going to be favoring them to win yet another championship. That said, their brilliant performance in Game 5 did leave me disappointed that San Antonio didn't attempt to unveil the brutal Bonner-Oberto-Barry-Ginobili-Udrih all-white lineup.
Watching conservatives find themselves staring at the pointy end of the Bush propaganda machine sure is fun. Here Rich Lowry is shocked to see that the White House is sometimes less than honest in its characterization of its own initiatives.
Bush's decision to analogize the US presence in Iraq to the one in South Korea is truly telling. The two situations could hardly resemble each other less. If we take Nouri al-Maliki's government to be something like Syngman Rhee's dictatorship at the core of the analogy, then who plays the role of the North Koreans? How do the Kurds and the Sunnis fit into the picture? Where's the USSR? Approve of it or not, the decades-long American military presence in South Korea has a very clear-cut rationale -- it was there to defend America's South Korean client regime from the USSR's North Korean client regime and now inertia keeps it there because the DPRK still exists even if the ROK doesn't really need outside protection.
In Iraq, none of this stands up at all. It's just a raw expression of a desire to keep our troops in Iraq more-or-less forever. For no real reason. In a country where they're clearly not wanted by either the Sunni Arabs or the Shiites, and where our "allies" in the government are as much Iran's proxies as ours.
New blog from the excellent Daniel Levy (Century Foundation, New America, etc.) includes much more coverage of the Israeli Labour Party leadership race than any sane person would want to read.
Joe Lieberman visits with the troops in Baghdad, and McClatchy Newspapers' Leila Fadel is on hand to see what the troops weren't willing to say to Lieberman's face. Things like "We're not making any progress. It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at."
Lieberman himself endorses the Green Lantern theory. "I think it's important we don't lose our will. To pull out would be a disaster." I hear willpower cures gunshot wounds these days.
David Ignatius says the White House is adopting the ISG recommendations after all, and it's a case of "better late than never." But is it, really? It seems to me that to a very large extent we've gotten to the sorry position we're in precisely through the Bush administration's longtime habit of doing the right thing 6-12 months too late.
Sometimes, things just can't be done too late. I keep trying to construct an analogy involving boats going over waterfalls, but the point is this. At each phase of the venture, suggests have been made of ways the US could lower our goals in the hopes of achieving something rather than just letting things get worse and worse and worse forever. The Bush administration then dismisses these critics as unduly pessimistic and things further deteriorate. Then, critics step-up their level of pessimism in response to the deterioration. At that point, the administration says the critics are being too pessimistic and adopts the policy recommendations they rejected months ago. But thanks to the continued deterioration of the situation, those old recommendations don't work anymore.
The ISG, meanwhile, was already several shades too timid back in December. It was, however, at least cleared-eyed about the situation in Iraq. Months later, we're further than ever from sectarian reconciliation, and the other points are essentially moot.
I still recommend Daniel Levy if you're looking for analysis of the Labour Party leadership fight in Israel, but only The Spine offers discussion of former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon's "taut body."
Fred Kaplan and Price Floyd discuss the Bush administration's catastrophic misunderstanding of how public diplomacy should work. In Floyd's words, he resigned as head of media relations at the State Department because he got tired of trying to convince people "that we should not be judged by our actions, only our words."
In essence, the Bush administration has tried to employ the same approach abroad as it has at home -- ignore peoples' real concerns and hope aggressive spin can check them. The trouble is that these tactics don't work nearly as well abroad as they do at home, since the foreign press isn't cowed by the American conservative movement, and foreigners don't have Americans' instinctive impulse to want to believe the best about the US government. Even at home, meanwhile, the White House's positition has eventually collapsed in the face of overwhelming reality.
Over the past 48 hours, I've spent an unwise amount of time trying to earn 1,000 skill points -- and with it, Pro status -- on Wii Tennis. Well, now I've succeeded and suffice it to say that nothing cool happens when you become a pro. Learn from my mistakes, kids. It's just not worth it.
It's worth saying that it's also too counterintuitive for Jonathan Cohn. He says right there in the text that he thinks a single-payer system would be better than the one Clinton proposed. The thing Clinton's plan was supposed to have going for it that single-payer didn't it that it was more politically realistic. But not realistic enough to say, be passed into law and avoid contributing to the 1994 debacle. So there are real limits to how right she was -- it doesn't make a ton of sense to say "politics aside, she had a good plan" when the plan itself was supposed to be a politically motivated compromise.
That said, Cohn raises the interesting point that while Clinton doesn't think she was wrong about Iraq, she does claim to think she was wrong about health care. But what does she think she was wrong about? Just about the political calculations, or were there some substantive problems? It seems like an obvious set of questions to ask.
Reihan Salam makes some sound critiques of this Patrick Ruffini piece on where the GOP went astray, but I think he's missing perhaps the biggest problem with Ruffini's piece. He writes, for example, that "being sympathetic to the needs of seniors became a $400 billion prescription drug plan."
Back in the real world, a desire to appear more sympathetic to the needs of seniors played only a small role in producing the "$400 billion" (I believe it's closer to $600 billion than to $400 billion) prescription drug plan. What happened was that the Democrats had a $200+ billion prescription drug plan that was sympathetic to the needs of seniors. The GOP could have decided to demonstrate sympathy for seniors by supporting that plan. Or they could have decided to stand up for small government ideology and opposed it. Or they could have split the difference and devised a cheaper, less generous plan than the Democratic one that still gave seniors some help (perhaps something narrowly targeted at the poorest seniors), combining generosity with fiscal discipline.
Instead, they produced a more expensive plan. Not because they wanted to be more generous to seniors, but because they wanted to be more generous to pharmaceutical and insurance companies than did the Democrats. The trouble is that there's simply a mismatch between conservatism's ideological agenda and the agenda of its financial and institutional base. Jon Chait, for example, finds a new conservative magazine primping for more lenient treatment of white collar criminals. One could interpret this as a sign of a growing spirit of soft on crime humanitarianism on the right. The correct way to interpret it, however, is the same as the correct way to interpret the Medicare bill -- ideological conservative dogma has been abandoned not in favor of moderation, but in favor of even more extreme advocacy of the interests of rich people.
Not to just be all Jon Cohn, all the time here, but his article on Barack Obama's health care plan says it would be change for the better, but criticizes Obama for being too timid:
Good stuff. His letter even offers a solid brief description of the issue:
As you know, the Federal Communications Commission is now preparing to auction the 700 megahertz slice of the spectrum. This "beachfront" band is particularly well suited to wireless broadband because it has wide coverage and can easily pass through walls.
By setting bid and service rules that unleash the potential of smaller new entrants, you can transform information opportunity for people across America -- rural and urban, wealthy and not. As much as half of the spectrum should be set aside for wholesalers who can lease access to smaller start-ups, which has the potential to improve service to rural and underserved areas. Additionally, anyone winning rights to this valuable public resource should be required not to discriminate among data and services and to allow any device to be attached to their service. Finally, bidding should be anonymous to avoid collusion and retaliatory bids.
This is the kind of thing where the president winds up with a ton of latitude, so it's definitely nice to see a major candidate committing himself to sound views on this issue -- the business interest pressure pushing in bad directions here is intense.
Joe Klein writes about Mitt Romney's weird campaign. The strangest thing is that thanks to GOP primary politics, he's afraid of talking about what in a sane world would be the centerpiece of his campaign -- the universal health care plan he signed into law in Massachusetts and Romney's vision of using that plan as the basis for a federal-level plan. Instead, you get this health care page with a heading that promises universal care, a couple of very vague allusions to the Massachusetts initiative, and no policy proposals whatsoever.
Well, not really, but Josh Marshall has one and it's damn good. I wish he would write them more frequently. There seems to be a post-Memorial Day lull in the volume of scandals to cover.
Sgt. Tierney Nowland teaches the Macarena dance with an Iraqi soldier of 2nd Battalion, 1st Brigade during a break with Soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division out of Fort Lewis, Wash., on a cordon and search mission in Ameriyah, Iraq, May 16. Nowland is combat camera with the 982nd Signal Company, Wilson, N.C. U.S. Army photo by Spc. Elisha Dawkins.
Kevin Carey manages to spin a trip to a Canadian music store into an extremely long analogy in favor of more heavy-handed curricular guidance on the part of college administrators:
This doesn't mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment and taste in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.
[The point here being that the giant store-full-of-music model was rendered obsolete by the internet, but smaller stores where the staff can offer you judgment and insight still have value]
I've always found these kind of arguments about strict core requirements, laxer ones, etc. to be a bit puzzling. There probably isn't a unique best way to handle this. Which is why it's fortunate that even if you restrict your attention to the relatively small set of elite colleges and universities there are still a whole bunch of 'em. It seems to me that there's a set of defensible approaches to the issue (including no requirements whatsoever) and it's good for some colleges to adopt each of them. I worry that pressure on each individual school to strike the "correct" balance leads ultimately to a kind of bland uniform compromise that serves no good purpose.
Chris Bowers reads Bob Shrum's account of John Edwards' decision to vote for the war (as Shrum tells it, Edwards was dubious, his wife was very opposed, but Shrum and other advisers convinced him it was politically necessary) and concludes:
"[D]oes Yglesias really believe that the GOP won't try to capitalize on Obama's past history with drugs?" he asks. Of course I don't (though I doubt the GOP will do it directly, it's more an "independent expenditure" kind of thing to do), and I don't think that's what I said. What I said was that I don't see anything racist about inevitable attacks on Barack Obama's drug use.
I think there's every reason to believe that a white candidate whose memoir strongly implied a past history of cocaine use would face attacks for it.
Wow. What can you say. 48 points on .61 TS%, 9 boards, 7 rebounds, 2 steals (leading his team in all 4 categories. Most of all, he did what the qualitative crowd always says he didn't do. I'm noturally of the sort inclined to hate on anyone who's gotten this much hype, but he sure dominated that game.
I know you'll be shocked to hear this, but the Bush administration's new climate strategy turns out to be bullshit.
Strange but true.
Politically, though, it's always significant when an issue shifts from the category of things Republicans are willing to admit they don't care about to things they feel compelled to pretend they care about.
As it happens, just last night my friends got into an argument about the proper meaning of the insult "douchebag." Fortunately, earlier yesterday I read Simon Dumenco's Details essay on douchebags and Reihan Salam's discussion of it so I was well prepared.
James Fallows says the news is good. See also this, this, and this from Spencer Ackerman on the hows and whys of Muslim America's relative non-alienation and the ways the post-9/11 political climate is putting that at risk.
Mr. Robinson, now the coach of Brown University’s men’s team, said the 6-foot-2 senator is too skinny to be an imposing presence, but he is fast, with good wind even when he was a smoker. Mr. Obama is left-handed, and his signature move is to fake right and veer left, surprising players used to guarding right-handed competitors.
The potential political analogies there are a little too obvious to be worth pointing out.
Dan Bartlett, probably the lowest-profile of Bush's longtime senior aides, is calling it quits in order to spend more time with his family and, it seems, to try to cash in with a private sector job ("Bartlett said he was open to job opportunities and had retained Washington attorney Bob Barnett to help him in the search") before connections to the Bush administration become worthless. Flashback to the classic chutzpah of when Bartlett denied the administration ever wanted to "stay the course" in Iraq.
I was reading this here from Mark Krikorian and was about to write "I'm skeptical of the immigration compromise bill, but if Fred Siegel's slamming it in Commentary it may be a good idea after all." But then I thought to myself, "eh, Krikorian's also praising a Krauthammer column, I should read it and make fun of it." But then I read what Krauthammer was saying and, um, I agree with Charles Krauthammer:
Until now we've had a special category for highly skilled, world-renowned and indispensable talent. Great musicians, athletes and high-tech managers come in today under the EB-1 visa. This apparently is going to be abolished in the name of an idiotic egalitarianism.
Bush's conservative critics on immigration keep warning that he's destroying the conservative coalition by prompting this fight. I've been a bit skeptical of such claims, since the tendency among people who do politics professionally is always to overblow the everything. But this (via Jonathan Singer) seems real enough: "The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, Ralph Z. Hallow will report Friday in The Washington Times. "
Kevin Drum kindly links to my review of Bob Shrum's memoir. The way he framed the piece makes me want to clarify that I didn't mean the upshot of the review to be that I think Shrum made some particular tactical error in thinking it would be a bad idea for Al Gore to deliver a big speech on global warming during the 2000 campaign (though I do think this was an error). The point is just that Shrum's methods, as reflected in that episode, involve what I guess you'd call a kind of public opinion literalism. First, you identify the three (or five) issues that voters say they care most about. Second, adopt positions that poll well on those three (or five) issues. If there's a topic where your candidate can't in good conscience adopt a popular position, you try not to talk about it.
This is Shrum's method, and it seems to be the method of most of his colleagues in the Democratic consulting game. The only problem with it is that it doesn't work. Indeed, it such a bad method that I don't think anyone would explicitly defend it. Nobody denies that preference intensity matters, that there are threshold criteria, or that elections are primarily decided by low-information voters who tend to vote on character questions and that issues primarily matter because they affect perceptions of character. Nobody denies that stuff, but they keep doing the same thing anyway.
The issue, I think, is that polling is a useful way for the consultants themselves to evade accountability. If Gore took my advice and lost, all you could say about it was that my political judgment had proven to be poor. When candidates take Shrum's advice and lose, by contrast, Shrum gets to point to the polling data as hard proof that his strategy was correct and blame defeat on other factors -- the inevitable gaffes, unfair attacks from the opposition, etc. Admitting that political strategy is more art than science would threaten the position of the strategists, so the strategists rely on the most quantitative tool available, even though on some level (note that political pollsters' findings tend to vary quite a bit according to ideology) they don't really believe in it.
This is mostly boilerplate, as you'd expect given the venue, but choices of emphasis are still interesting. He's very strong on non-proliferation, UN reform, and the role of institutions. The Iran bit is disappointingly conventional. He seems (quietly) to understand the importance of addressing the Israel-Palestine issue. As with Edwards' speech, it's promising but not fantastic.
