David Ignatius must have never observed a presidential campaign before if he thinks that eliminating the current system of primary debates with one in which we "Organize a series of one-on-one face-offs in which leading Democratic candidates debate not each other but leading Republicans" would force candidates to "talk these issues through, beyond the usual slogans and sound bites."
We have Democrat versus Republic debates during the general elections and you get precisely the "usual slogans" and "sound bits." And, of course, the candidates aren't mistaken for thinking that a focus on shallow trivialities is what wins elections. We all recall that when Bush lied constantly and Gore sighed and rolled his eyes in frustration the press . . . murdered Gore for being visibly frustrated rather than Bush for, say, completely misportraying his tax proposals.
We seem to be losing ever more ground in the "other" war. The one that had, you know, actual justification but where the idea that the war would accomplish some of its objectives was important to the widespread support it garnered.
Zach Phillips at Government Executive reports on efforts to guard American airplanes from MANPADS -- shoulder launched missiles originally conceived to allow infantry to gain protection against air strikes, but that pose extreme threats to civilian aircraft that are "relatively slow and fly predictable routes, emit large heat signatures and descend to low altitudes miles away from the airport."
The whole concept, however, seems fundamentally misguided. "The government requires a price tag of less than $1 million per unit in quantities of 1,000 units, . . . but even a price below $1 million per unit adds up to a lot of money when installed on hundreds or thousands of airplanes, and neither DHS nor Congress has said who would pay for the technology, a key issue for the financially struggling airline industry." You need to think that through. We're talking about spending billions of dollars to protect airplanes against a threat that, so far in human history, has taken down zero civilian aircraft (once two missiles "narrowly missed an Arkia Israeli Airlines flight taking off from Mombasa, Kenya.") What's more, not only does the price seem high relative to the risk, but the payoff sounds minimal.
A shoulder launched missile is a highly lethal device that an imaginative terrorist in possession of one could sure use to blow a bunch of stuff up even if security measures made it completely impractical to fire them at airplanes. I don't want missiles crashing into office towers or Amtrak passenger trains or what have you. Insofar as there's a real MANPAD problem out there, it seems like it needs to be addressed by preventing the flow of unauthorized missiles into the US, not by equipping planes with inordinately expensive countermeasures.
To all the fathers in the house. I saw on television the other day that Tim Russert has actually written (or something) a second book about why dads are awesome. Not, to be clear, a book about the phenomenon of family breakdown in the inner-city and its dire consequences. Just, you know, fond remembrances of dad as a follow up to his book of fond remembrances of his dad.
The whole thing makes me feel a little less ridiculous about the idea that I'll have a book coming out soon. But it also strikes me that if I had as much money as Russert, and as big a platform as Russert, I'd really want to use it to say something about something important in the world.
A commenter on yesterday's post on the subject drew my attention to both Charles Haney's AP story "US Forces Step Up Air War: Bombing runs more than double from '06" and William S. Lind's comment upon it: "Nothing could testify more powerfully to the failure of U.S. efforts on the ground in Iraq than a ramp-up in airstrikes. Calling in air is the last, desperate, and usually futile action of an army that is losing. If anyone still wonders whether the 'surge' is working, the increase in air strikes offers a definitive answer: it isn't."
This seems right to me. Lind goes on to say further smart things.
There's a pretty great New York Times Magazine article about Chinese World of Warcraft "gold farmers" out today. If you don't know what that means, you really have to read the piece, though everyone should check it out. This made me wonder:
At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.
One interesting thing is that as best I can tell the only reason the online retailer is making so much money is that the gold farming is against the rules of the game. If you're able to sell gold at $20 then it would make sense to offer more than $3 for the sake of increasing your volume; the retailers should be competing against each other and bidding the price up. But since the farmers need to be wary of drawing too much attention to themselves, they have a limited ability to switch retailers. At the intersection of this reality and cheap Chinese labor, the most valuable commodity in the whole process is knowledge of the supply chain, rather than the gold itself.
Incidentally, a good friend of mine is working this from a different angle -- a basement full of computer playing the game automatically according to some kind of program he's written, rather than relying on outsourced labor.
Ace of Spades cranks out a compelling critique of Glenn Greenwald's work on media representations of masculinity: "I really think that questioning others' masculinity is a game probably better left to people who haven't had more cock in and out of them than a Tyson Chicken regional distribution center." Hm. He continues:
Not that I'm saying homosexuality is incompatible with masculinity, of course. Consenting biweekly to having one's duodenum battered with the manic hydraulic fury of a tricked-out V-12 jackhammer manned by an epileptic Con-Ed worker with an ancestral oath of vengeance against asphalt would, I think, tend to butch one up, at least as regards one's pain threshold.
Naturally this garners the old approving link from Glen Reynolds, law professor and erstwhile libertarian.
Via Ann Friedman, Barbara Ellen makes the case against pink stuff (cell phones, clothes, etc.), which she says "infantilizes" women. To me, this seems a bit backwards; a feminist should object to the association of womanness with immaturity, not object to women associating themselves with a female-identified color.
The French right wins a parliamentary majority, but winds up losing seats relative to its pre-election position of strength. This tends to bolster my sense that the dawn of the Sarkozy Era will ultimately be less consequential than many seem to hope or fear.
Let me say at the outset that despite my various criticisms of Israeli policy and of US policy toward Israel, I think efforts by professional associations to organize boycotts of comparable Israeli professional associations or products are essentially wrongheaded and counterproductive. That said, I've been very uncomfortable with some of the Anti-Defamation League's advertising on this point, especially one ad that's run on this site and says "400,000 murdered in DARFUR and British journalists are boycotting ISRAEL?" Now I see via Brian Beutler that Thomas Friedman's on the same kick:
So to single out Israeli universities alone for a punitive boycott is rank anti-Semitism. Let’s see, Syria is being investigated by the United Nations for murdering Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Syrian agents are suspected of killing the finest freedom-loving Lebanese journalists, Gibran Tueni and Samir Kassir. But none of that moves the far left to call for a boycott of Syrian universities. Why? Sudan is engaged in genocide in Darfur. Why no boycott of Sudan? Why?
Brian points out that many of these countries already are sanctioned, but I see a much larger kind of problem here. One issue is that it's really sad to see American Jews' longstanding interest in human rights issues turned here into a crude tool to deflect away criticism from Israel. The American Jewish World Service Darfur campaign is about trying to help people in Darfur. ADL's interest in the atrocities there seems limited to the argument that as long as conditions in the Palestinian territories don't devolve to that level, then things must all be on the up-and-up.
More broadly, though, people complaining about double-standards seem to me to be straightforwardly misreading a kind of compliment as a sign of anti-semitism. To me it's reasonably clear that you get this sort of agitation about Israeli actions precisely because people believe the Israeli government and electorate may be amenable to efforts at moral and political suasion. That Ehud Olmert is no Bashar Asad or Kim Jong Il is precisely the point.
Atrios nails the problem with a residual force with his customary pith: "What drives me nuts about this residual force stuff, aside from how arbitrary it is, is that there's never any thought to exactly what these 50,000 should do. Basically, as the violence rages around them they're supposed to sit there to ensure that... there isn't even more violence raging around them. But it isn't really enough people to actually intervene, especially given that not even close to that many would be combat troops."
Quite so. Unfortunately, in another customary attribute that I'm less enthusiastic about, the target of Atrios' ire is International Herald Tribune columnist Roher Cohen. Cohen is appropriately mocked as a "Very Serious Person." But while media criticism certainly has its place, the reality is that the prime advocates of a residual force in Iraq aren't Cohen or other "wankers" in the press, but Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and much of the Democratic congressional leadership. That we can be in the midst of a primary campaign during which the candidates are supposedly looking to "pander" to the dread damn dirty hippies of the base and yet none of the front-running candidates will make a clear promise to leave Iraq and attack his or her rivals for failing to do the same is rather astounding.
If a pollster called me tomorrow and asked who I was supporting, I would say "Bill Richardson" out of a hope that perhaps a smallish Richardson surge would convince someone else to adopt his position on Iraq -- we should leave.
Carping about Iraq aside, it's still good to see the good guys in charge of the congress: "Senate Democrats are seeking a major reversal of energy tax policies that would take billions of dollars in tax breaks and other benefits from the oil industry to underwrite renewable fuels." Indeed. Part of the madness of the current climate change debate is that there often seems to be little awareness of how much good we could do by simply ending our subsidies for fossil fuels and directing those subsidies to renewables at no net cost whatsoever. Moves of this nature won't be enough, but they do help, and it's a total no-brainer that we should do them.
"During the close air support, at least 20 terrorists were killed and six suspected terrorists were assessed to be wounded by the strafing," the military said. "A vehicle being used by the terrorists as a fighting position was also destroyed by the close air support."
This is a somewhat delicate issue to raise, but the war in Iraq seems to have spawned a wholly abusive use of the term "terrorist." The battle came about because "Coalition aircraft were called in to strafe fighters who attacked Coalition troops in Amarah and Majjar al-Kabir, two Shiite cities in the Mayson province bordering Iran, the military said." Surely, though, people who use force against soldiers are paradigmatic examples of people who aren't terrorists -- with terrorism being defined by the use of force against civilians.
The Bulls would send Gordon, Tyrus Thomas and P.J. Brown (sign-and-trade) to Washington, and the No. 9 pick to L.A.
The Lakers would send Bryant to Chicago.
The Wizards would send Arenas and Etan Thomas to L.A.
Chris Orr at the Plank (glad to see other major pundit sites getting into the NBA blogging) denounces this as the "worst trade ever" for the Wizards. I'm not so sure. Given that Eddie Jordan hates Brendan Haywood and vice versa, I think you'd need to include him in the trade rather than Etan Thomas, but if I were Ernie Grunfeld I'd entertain this offer. The results of this are so good for Chicago, that I'd try to hold out for the inclusion of Thabo Sefolosha or the Bulls 2008 first round pick, but I think the combination of Gordon, Thomas, and cap room is probably better than giving Arenas a max deal.
Under his current deal, Agent Zero's an enormous asset, but he's managed to go from underrated to overrated with frightening speed.
New York Times tool lets you compare your income to that of demographically similar people. I turn out to be pretty typical for a person like me, which, I guess, is itself pretty typical.
Ed Kilgore, formerly of the New Donkey blog, is taking over as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist with a mandate to (among other things) enliven TDS's blog. His debut post observes that whether or not the immigration compromise passes, the GOP seems to be throwing away all hope of increasing its share of the Hispanic vote even as the Hispanic vote will grow whether or not there's an amnesty.
Back in December the wingnut party line was that Ethiopia would be untroubled ("There may be lessons for the United States in Ethiopia’s success") in its conquest of Somalia thanks to their affinity for brutal tactics ("Ethiopia has less concern than the U.S. about civilian casualties") and the absence of a troublesome press corps ("The Ethiopian government is generally less sensitive to media criticism than the U.S. government—and is likely to encounter far less criticism in the first place, since the press traditionally gives short shrift to coverage of Africa") thus guaranteeing success. It turns out, though, that you can have an insurgency anyway just about any time your country invades another one and tries to use its military to prop up a friendly regime on the conquered country's soil.
Photo by Flickr user ctsnow used under a Creative Commons license.
Always a timely question. While pondering it, you can also chew over his assessment of the Marty Peretz era. Amusingly, it closes with a quote from our very own Petey. It's also surprisingly favorable; in particular, Eric is very taken with Leon Wieseltier's back of the book.
According to Henry Abbott, Portland's making noises about possibly picking Kevin Durant. That doesn't sound very smart to me. On the other hand, if I were the Trailblazers I would at least want to try and see what Seattle's prepared to offer as part of a pick swap. Either guy would be a big plus for Portland, but I think Oden has much more value than does Durant in Seattle so it's possible the Sonics would make an offer that's worth taking.
Max Blumenthal's short documentary based on his visit to CPAC 2007 was shown at the opening of a panel I'm attending here at Take Back America and whaddaya know but it's on YouTube.
Funny! I need to find a way to make some decent multimedia one day.
That surge architect Fred Kagan thinks the surge's failure to deliver results merely proves the need to take more time with the surge is unsurprising. The end of the article, however, is striking. Kagan, according to Time's Michael Duffy, "fears a significant increase in Iranian support for those fighting U.S. forces. Finally, he noted that the shaky government of Nouri al-Maliki could just implode."
While that might not end the cause of progress in Iraq, Kagan said, it could lead to something worse for those who believed a surge would lead to a stabilization of Iraq: a breakdown in political support for the war effort in Washington.
In other words, according to Kagan even the total collapse of the Iraqi government wouldn't, in his mind, demonstrate that the war had failed. Even under those circumstances he's going to stick to the stab in the back story that the only problem is the collapse of political support for the war here in DC.
Jessica Valenti notes in particular "the creepy pseudo-incestuous dad" and "the girls offering themselves 'as a priceless gift' in the purity pledge" as particular highlights. Personally, my favorite was a part where someone suggested that "purity" was the way to go because if you get involved in sex and dating and so forth there's a risk of broken hearts. Tennyson sheds a tear.
My recollection is that, for better or for worse, studies indicate that this sort of thing doesn't actually result in the women who make the "purity" pledges actually saving it for marriage.
“General Petraeus’ comments are just the latest example of the Bush Administration’s disconnect from the reality on the ground. In order to get the Iraqi people to take responsibility for their country, we must show them that we are serious about leaving, and the best way to do that is to actually start leaving. Instead of talking about keeping our troops in Iraq for another decade, the Administration should begin bringing our troops home to the hero’s welcome they deserve.
I'm not entirely sure how this fits into the residual forces debate but Edwards does seem to be at least playing footsie with the idea of differentiating himself on this issue.
Marc Ambinder has the information and it may well even be true. John Edwards with $15 million on hand is expected to have way less money than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, but almost as much as the wealthiest Republican, Mitt Romney, who Mark's projecting at $18 million. Long story short, the combined Democratic fundraising is absolutely crushing the GOP side. Clinton is projected to have somewhat more cash on hand than Romney and Giuliani combined.
Fred Thompson's decision to voyage to England in order to court Margarat Thatcher "which his advisers hope will enhance his support among devotees of former President Ronald Reagan" sure does seem a bit strange. Did word not get to him about the Revolution?
It all points to a weird quandry fro the follow-the-leader party. Bush is too unpopular to be the ring everybody wants to kiss, Reagan is dead, and H.W. Bush is the incumbent's father. Newt Gingrich, of course, steadfastly refuses to fade away and play the elder statesman role. So you've got Thatcher serving as a kind of ersatz symbolic leader of American conservatism. And, of course, if the USA circa 2007 actually exhibited the problems associated with British statism circa 1977 rather than, you know, the actual problems we actually have, I, too, might be tempted by the idea that we need a dose of Thatcherism.
A classic in the Iran hawk literature in the form of a National Review editorial. It leads with the stunning hypocrisy of charging another country with interfering in Iraqi affairs:
When one country trains a force to infiltrate and destabilize its neighbor, it has committed an act of war. And by now, it is hardly a secret that Iran has been funding, arming, and training radical factions of the Mahdi army. Still, most American politicians have been reluctant to call Iran’s behavior exactly what it is: an act of war against Iraq, and against the United States.
Then come seven additional grafs of bloviating, followed by the necessarily vacuous conclusion: "Iran won’t stop so long as there is no price to its acts of war. The controversy over Lieberman’s remark shows how we aren’t prepared to make it pay one." What price should Iran be made to pay? Are the likely consequences of extracting said payment really that Iran will back down? Or will this launch a spiral of escalation? It's hard to say since National Review won't even say which policy they're advocating. But they want to widen the war, in some sense, to somehow include Iran, even though they have no particular measures in mind or sense of the overall strategy thereby served.
The Obama campaign's moronic "D-Punjab" memo isn't a very interesting issue, but it prompts Karen Tumulty to bring up one with a bit more meat:
The answer to this is, campaigns should not be allowed to distribute things on a NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION basis. Both NOT FOR ATTRIBUTION and OFF THE RECORD (and their cousins, BACKGROUND and DEEP BACKGROUND) are understandings that are agreed to mutually by a source and a reporter. What I've noticed about this cycle is that campaigns (and not just Obama's) are falling into a bad and sloppy habit of sending out mass hit pieces by e-mail and demanding anonymity. As far as I am concerned, unless I have agreed in advance to accept a specific piece of material from a source on a limited or not for attribution basis, these unilateral declarations of anonymity mean nothing.
I agree. What's more, all it takes to put a stop to this kind of thing is a little media solidarity. Nobody really wants to be the first reporter to burn a unilateral declaration of anonymity out of fear of being taken off distribution lists, thus giving the competition a leg up. All it would take, however, is for a smallish critical mass of journalists to stop respecting unilateral declarations and the whole practice would fall apart. So, for the record, I concur; unless I agree in advance not to identify the source of something (for which I would expect something approaching a good reason), then the truth will be told.
Fred Thompson on Harry Reid: "Whether he means to or not, he’s encouraging our enemies to believe that they are winning the critical war of will." Needless to say, K-Lo loved it. The guys kind of smells like a primary winner to me and while he's a buffoon, if the Bush years have taught us anything it's that being a buffoon is no obstacle to also being a successful nationwide politician.
Marc Lynch, author of such classics of Middle East commentary as "No Jordan Option", says things may have changed. Since King Abdullah "put an end to the political crisis of 2004-2005, he has overseen a steady de-liberalization of the Kingdom, cracking down on public freedoms and going after the Islamist movement aggressively, with nary a peep from the Bush administration," which transforms the larger political context and makes Jordan re-involving itself in the West Bank imaginable again.
The question, however, is why Jordan would want to do any such thing. If the West Bank in question included East Jerusalem you could see it, but the relevant "West Bank" for these purposes would include much more headaches than upside for Jordan. Presumably, this option would only come into play if Abdullah saw a big political payoff in terms of his relationship with Washington.
One thing you can do with the New York Times salary comparison calculator I linked to yesterday is take a look at certain kinds of pay gap issues in America. The graph above, for example, shows us that 24 year-old college educated white men earn substantially more money than do 24 year-old college educated white women and this pattern has held pretty constantly over the years. Since I believe only a small -- and decreasing over time -- number of 24 year-old college educated women have children, this ought to be a pretty apples-to-apples comparison in that sense. Most of these people are just starting out, and the men are already earning substantially more.
Barack Obama makes a play for a Christian Democratic synthesis, appearing at a United Church of Christ event, telling "the crowd it was a UCC member who had inspired the Boston Tea Party which helped bring about the country's independence, and Obama said through the succeeding decades people of faith have helped make America more decent and more just." He elaborated that "My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the lord’s work."
Obama identified the war in Iraq, poverty and the plight of uninsured Americans as the primary "moral" issues facing the U.S.
Obama attacked leaders of the "Christian Right" who he accused of exploiting issues like abortion and gay marriage to divide Evangelical Christians from those who attend so-called "mainline" churches. "Of course, it goes a little further than that. There was a period of time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich...I don't know what Bible they are reading," Obama said, as the crowd applauded. "Didn't jive with my version."
This comes via Andrew Sullivan who sees Obama as deploying the "Christianist" approach he's come to deplore in the GOP to big government ends. That's probably not false. One big question is whether it will play with a nationwide electorate. Judis & Teixeira write that "Obama, a black man from Chicago, will also likely be seen as a cultural liberal; in addition, he could be at a disadvantage among many white voters in the South, lower Midwest, and interior West because of his race."
This strikes me as a question worthy of further research. African-Americans tend to be much more adept than white liberals at the brand of heavily religioned-up politics (or politicsed-up religion) that a certain segment of the electorate seems to enjoy and are also better at getting a pass from white seculars about doing it than are devout white people. It also seems to me that one shouldn't underestimate the extent to which Americans appear to me to be perfectly willing to embrace black men who fit a certain "non-threatening black man" mode. Certainly while early general election polling has very limited probative value, if there's anything at all that people know about Obama it's that he's black, and he still polls well. And, yes, the "Wilder effect" doesn't seem to exist any more if it ever did.
Brian Beutler reports on a GAO inquiry into Bush's signing statements which confirms that his deployment of the practice has been genuinely unprecedented: "Though the GAO report makes no claims about the legitimacy of Bush's statements or of the use of statements in general, it indicates that, in practice, the statements have the effect of nullifying the law in question in about 30 percent of cases."
Zack Phillips, author of the article on MANPAD countermeasures I blogged about over the weekend emails to note that the State Department does have an initiative geared to locating and destroying MANPADs in the field. Apparently this has been a pretty modest program ($7 million in FY '07) but there's a request out for a big increase to $41 million for FY '08.
Obviously, the devil's in the details here -- does the State Department's program work? -- but on the face of things this is a much smarter area in which to invest money than on R&D for $1 million a pop plane-based countermeasures.
Taliban leaders warn the South Waziristan food services industry to stop playing CDs and televisions or else "their establishments will be demolished." This via Brian Ulrich who adds a bit of context.
Following a very strong speech from Barack Obama at Take Back America, he walked away from the podium toward stage right only to realize that was the wrong direction and then exit left.
In the nature of things, the speech didn't actually break any new ground, but the charisma was on display and the material seemed much better integrated than it had in the debates. I assume the campaign will be working on getting transcripts and video up; I'll be watching John Edwards' speech.
Back in February, Justin Logan pointed out that predictions of DOOM following an American departure from Iraq echo essentially similar predictions being made about Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now via Justin I see that Kurt Campbell and Shawn Brimley have a Foreign Policy article making the same point.
The difference, however, is that as best I can tell Campbell and Brimley read the lesson in the opposite direction. Brimley's one of the coathors, for Campbell's new think tank, of a memo (PDF) arguing we can't afford to leave Iraq. These guys are part of the "residual force" consensus to which the Democratic Party seems weirdly hostage.
Obama was a really hard act to follow, but John Edwards is doing a fantastic job of it. He's way stronger on foreign policy issues than I've seen him before. He's putting meat on the bones of the "exemplarism" concept and hitting, to me, a key point that's been all-too-absent from our politics, the need to think about how US foreign policy decisions look to the rest of the world. He directly made the contrast between the vast expenditures on Iraq and the good that kind of money could do -- both to the world and for America's image -- if that kind of commitment were made instead to real humanitarian causes.
Now he's moving on to global warming where he's always been good -- and, indeed, is just now getting huge applause -- so I'm gonna stop the post since I trust he'll be excellent again.
UPDATE: Okay, wait, now he's tacked back from climate change to the idea that major energy reform would create political reform in the Middle East. Then he links it up to a vision of development in Africa. You really need to hear it to believe it, because if I try to summarize it'll sound dumb, but Edwards talks about it very persuasively.
This, via Tom Lee is pretty amusing. I'd actually be extremely interested in playing a similar game that was based around actual state level data. I bet something like that would also have a much clearer emotional impact.
Michael O'Hanlon, Very Serious Person, decides to write a Washington Times op-ed attacking Harry Reid. I joke from time to time that I'm ready to endorse the first Democrat who's willing to publicly rule out giving O'Hanlon a high-level job in his administration. The more I think about it, the less it sounds like a joke.
The logic of trying to strengthen Abbas and Fatah and improve living conditions in the West Bank seems clear enough to me, but does having George Bush and Ehud Olmert explicitly praise Abbas really help that cause? It seems to me that if I'm Abbas, I want improvements in Palestinian quality of life to be framed as concessions I succeeded in wringing out of the clutches of the Zionists, not favors that are being done for me because Israel and the USA thing I'm super-neat.
Photo by Flickr user Jordan Klein used under a Creative Commons license.
Stepping back a tad, the bottom line from todays Edwards and Obama speeches is that they were both really, really good qua rhetoric. If either of those guys is the nominee, Democrats can at least sleep soundly at night knowing that their party's general election speeches are going to be delivered by people who can deliver speeches very, very well and who have good speechwriters.
I'm not sure I'd really agree with Brian Beutler that Edwards' speech was "more substantive" -- what it was was more policy-oriented. The point of Edwards' speech was "I have these seven policy ideas that you'll think are really great and therefore you should infer that I'm a good guy." Obama's speech, by contrast, is aimed at convincing you that "I'm a really good guy who has a good approach to politics and legislating and therefore you should infer that I'll implement good policies." Thus, Obama spends less time on the details of his program and more time on his theory of political change.
All of which, I think, is fine, but it does make his campaign the much more conventional one, which is slightly ironic in light of his greater pretense to be running a different kind of campaign which is, itself, a very conventional kind of claim to make. All that said, they're both very impressive, and I wish both of them (or, indeed, Hillary Clinton who I suppose is most likely to win) -- or at least one -- would adopt my view of Iraq and the residual forces issue.
My own views on this remain a bit of a work in progress, but I think I agree with John Edwards. It's fascinating that there's been so little pressure on the Democratic candidates to address this issue and so much on the Republicans. It seems to me to be a topic that divides both parties, but where Republicans simply have much stronger feelings than do Democrats.
Meanwhile Kaus notes that near the end of their most recent polling memo (PDF) Carville & Greenberg aren't finding a ton of enthusiasm for the Senate compromise. It should be said, though, that the compromise with a description pulls about even. Without the description, it's horribly unpopular.
Ezra Klein, talking about John Edwards' speech, made reference to John Edwards' "focus on humanitarian works as a centerpiece of foreign policy." I've sniffed around this subject a bit, and I think it's worth saying that this isn't quite what Edwards is talking about. The thing on his website about "restoring America's moral leadership" isn't just a throwaway line; there's a substantive idea there.
Michael Bloomberg, evidently seeking to further open the door to a 2008 campaign bid, is formally disaffiliating himself from the GOP. I wonder whether Bloomberg's partisan wanderings -- from D to R to I -- would hurt him in a presidential bid. On the one hand, voters hate "opportunist." On the other hand, they love "independence." Which Bloomberg is displaying here kind of depends on how you squint at things.
Speaking purely as someone who's going to have a professional obligation to write about the presidential campaign whether or not I get bored with it, I think the world is a more interesting place if Bloomberg runs simply because the map gets more complicated. One has to assume, however, that his choice will depend in part on the matchups. If, say, Rudy Giuliani is the GOP nominee it's a bit hard to see what political space Bloomberg's supposed to occupy.
I, like everyone in theory, want to accomplish Iran's disarmament by peaceful means. And, although I'm not as convinced as Erza, I'm beginning to be persuaded by the case that a U.S.-led attack on Iran could have more dire consequences than a nuclear Iran. But I think it's crazy to take the use of force off the table--and it's unfair to accuse those who refuse to do so as warmongers, as Ezra does. Without the threat of force looming in the background, I don't think the diplomatic approach has much of a prayer. Carrots, sticks, etc.
I fear there's a risk of a looming consensus somewhere in this neighborhood, so it's worth asking what the content of a preference for achieving "Iran's disarmament" by peaceful means is, thus kicking off a long post on Iran:
At first I thought it strange that they host their site on blogspot, which all good people agree is inferior blogging software. But then I realized that, duh, Google OWNS blogspot and it would be a significant heresy if they were on typepad or wordpress or a standalone domain. But THEN I though, well, why doesn't Google just buy a better hosting company, which would allow them to both run their blog on a decent platform and have the added bonus of letting them advertise for themselves
Quite so. I wonder what impact this will have. Google has a wildly better reputation among American elites than do most major companies, so a blog about what Google thinks about policy issues (here, for example is the company's take on net neutrality) has a much better chance of being taken seriously than would, say, an ExxonMobil blog. The availability of these kinds of methods of communication might undercut some of the efficacy of "astroturf" organizing tactics and advantage interest groups and companies that have good enough reputations to try to energize people under their own names.
"Is today the right moment to get excited about a third-party presidential run?" If you answer "yes," you need to find some other line of work.
That said, people do mount independent campaigns, and though they never win, they do influence political outcomes. Thus, the prospect of a Bloomberg bid is worth discussing.
To me, it seems to be all about the matchups. Against Barack Obama's length and "fresh face" appeal, there's little rationale for a Bloomberg bid. Similarly, John McCain's "maverick" branding and Rudy Giuliani's somewhat similar political profile make this hard to pull off. On the GOP side, though, Mitt Romney and (especially) Fred Thompson are positioning themselves as the candidates of tired, old-school conservatism thus creating an opening. On the Democratic side, it's obvious that the best nominee to run against as a third party is Hillary Clinton, who has by the least appeal outside the party's base.
Unfortunately for Bloomberg, the potential Democratic voters likely to be unenthusiastic about Clinton -- working class white men, primarily -- aren't a great constituency for a culturally liberal Jewish mayor of New York City, either. That leaves Bloomberg hoping for a Fred Thompson versus John Edwards matchup in which he tries to get voters in the top-right corner of the Nolan Chart. A campaign like that -- balanced budgets, free trade, vaguely progressive on cultural issues, entitlement reform, mildly environmentalist, progressive on some small-bore economic topics -- is ideally positioned to get a ton of positive coverage from the elite press (and elites generally) plus maybe even 10-15 percent of the electorate depending on how much cash Bloomberg's willing to spend and how effective he is as a campaigner.
Photo by Flickr user ceonyc used under a Creative Commons license
I have a Guardian item up about our reliance on airstrikes in counterinsurgency situations. Meanwhile, with regard to the new American offensive in Iraq, Robert Farley observes that we're witnessing a return "to pointless and destructive sweep operations" that may represent a recognition within the command structure that the conditions in Iraq aren't actually appropriate (in particular, we have neither the appropriate number of forces nor the appropriate sort of local ally) to conduct a textbook counterinsurgency -- even according to the US Army's brand new textbook.
As Farley says, these sweep "operations are emotionally satisfying, but by and large have never worked, and almost inevitably cause more damage than they prevent."
As third party mania continues to take my blog by storm, check out my friend Dave Weigel interviewing Ralph Nader about Michael Bloomberg:
From a Reason magazine perspective, it seems to me that a Bloomberg Administration is likely to be substantially more libertarian than either a Democratic or a Republican one would be. Bloomberg, however, is specifically identified with a brand of trivial nanny-stating -- indoor smoking ban, trans fat ban -- that seems to be to aggravate libertarians in a manner that's out of proportion to the actual significance of the policy issues.
Today is World Refugee Day and for the first time in years the number of refugees is going up: "the dramatic increase is largely due to the war in Iraq, where an estimated 1.5 million people have been forced to find refuge in neighboring Jordan and Syria."
The general decline in refugee population is a side-benefit of the underappreciated fact that the world became a much less war-torn place after the end of the Cold War. Media reporting tended to obscure this, but the absence of USA-USSR competition led to a sharp reduction in the funding stream available for the would-be prosecutors of proxy wars in the third world. There turn out, in short, to have been major humanitarian benefits to reduction in tensions between the major powers. More recently, by contrast, US-Iranian tensions are contributing to civil strife in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territories (obviously, these conflicts have their own local roots and dynamics, but the US-Iranian conflict helps pour gasoline on the fire). And, of course, it's at least possible that future decades will see US-China competition on a grand scale in a manner that would have very dire consequences for this sort of thing.
I'm not exactly sure why Ryan Lizza's made it his mission in life to destroy Bill Richardson's already-destined-to-fail presidential campaign, but he's certainly good at it.
I think John Judis is being a little too hard on Harry Reid insofar as the dynamic he's pointing to strikes me as 85 percent composed of Reid being hostage to events outside his control, but the basic point is still sound. What congressional Democrats need to be doing is coming up with bills that will secure near-universal Democratic support, plus pick up a few Republicans, and then garner a Bush veto. Instead, congress -- and the Senate in particular -- has gotten bogged down in issues that divide Democrats and don't really help the party position itself for 2008.
Marc Stein and Henry Abbott both see LeBron envy as motivating Kobe Bryant's trade demands. He wants, in Abbott's words, "to get himself traded to the East, where a star perimeter player and some role playing teammates gets you to the NBA Finals."
Whether or not that accurately reflects Kobe's motives, there's clearly some truth to the idea that one's odds of reaching the Finals are much better out of the East. It should be said, though, that LeBron's teammates tend to be somewhat underrated. King James plus some role playing teammates actually produces precisely the ineffective offense you would expect -- 105.5 points per hundred possessions, good for 18th in the league. Where Cleveland shined was on defense, where they were fourth best in the league. LeBron's not playing that defense by himself. To be effective offensively -- even in the East -- you need multiple threats even if you're LeBron James, and to be effective without an effective offense you need great defense.
Photo by Flickr user Compujeramey used under a Creative Commons license
Here's Hillary Clinton at the Take Back America conference this morning:
Watching it is a reminder of something that came up over dinner last night, namely that it's important to keep this primary campaign in perspective. For all that Hillary Clinton's campaign has positioned her to the right of where Barack Obama or John Edwards are, she's running on an emerging platform that's more progressive than what John Kerry (or, for that matter, Edwards) was putting on the table in 2004. For a couple of years after 9/11, the whole American political discourse swung sharply to the right ("de-arrangement" Judis & Teixeira call it; see Kilgore for more) and now things are swaying the other way.
I didn't blog yesterday about Rudy Giuliani skipping out on the invitation to join the Iraq Study Group so he could spend more time coasting on his reputation and earning money because I figured I didn't have anything of great analytic import to add to the story, but if the press is really ignoring the story as completely as Kevin Drum suggests, I figure I'd better throw my two cents in -- this is the perfect example of how hollow Giuliani's claim to be a national security candidate is. He doesn't know anything about military policy or foreign policy and he doesn't even care about these topics.
But why, inquiring minds want to know, do campaigns release opposition research "not for attribution?" Ana Marie Cox has some discussion but I think it can actually be boiled down pretty simply. Roughly speaking, "Hillary Clinton Sucks" is a good story for Barack Obama whereas "Obama: Clinton Sucks" is a good story for John Edwards.
Negative campaigning is difficult in the context of a primary campaign, since your only rivals dangerous enough to be worth attacking are people who are generally well-liked by the target audience of the electorate. You want negative stories about your rivals to get written, but you don't want stories to be written about your negative attacks on your rivals.
For eons, liberals have dreamed of a straw poll whose meaninglessness could equal that achieved by the Ames Straw Poll on the GOP side. The Politico/Take Back America straw poll doesn't quite reach those lofty heights, but it's the best we've got. At any rate, Barack Obama eked out a narrow victory, though it would be interesting to know how many people got tickets through Obama's TBA Facebook giveaway.
I'd also like to know what proportion of registrants actually voted in the straw poll. Nobody I spoke to at the event seemed to actually be voting, so I think the survey may be meaningless even as a sample of people who attended the conference.
It's two days old, but this whole article warning that Democrats are DOOMED because they've become too liberal is a genuine classic of middlebrow political journalism. The paucity of imagination on display in this graf, in particular, is striking:
Some party strategists note that the Democratic candidates are not embracing the extreme left. No major Democratic candidate is endorsing gay marriage, single-payer health care, or an immediate and total withdrawal from Iraq -- positions that have sizeable, if not overwhelming, support among Democratic primary voters.
As far as extremism goes, this is pretty pathetic. Are our political reporters truly incapable of even describing a policy position with a whiff of radicalism about it? Check out the Maoist International Movement if you want to see the extreme left. The inability to conceptualize a point of view on national security more radical than a desire to see the occupation of Iraq end very rapidly is truly benighted. I guess I'm an "extremist" by ABC News standards, but I know all these people with views to my left. Read Sawicky, check out the Project on Defense Alternatives.
All of us left of the center would benefit from somewhat demarginalizing further-left views. Insofar as the most extreme right-wing views of national security imaginable -- Bill Kristol's apparent belief that the USA should be perpetually at war with whichever country he was asked about most recently -- are treated as respectable elements of the discourse, while the most mild deviations from establishment conventional wisdom are branded as "extremism" then bleating about the need to build bipartisanship in foreign policy only leads us in ever-more-militaristic directions.
It seems the USA currently has high tarrifs on shoe and sneaker imports even though we don't really have a shoe and sneaker making industry to protect. Who knew? But according to the DLC press release lauding the initiative, it'll cost the government $2 billion a year (this all via Mike Crowley) which seems to be of remarkably little concern to the erstwhile budget balancers over there.
Dave Weigel tells me the Take Back America conference straw poll's 727 respondents represents about 37 percent of the conference's total number of attendees.
The new McClatchey website looks great. Through it I found Hannah Allam's Middle East blog written from Cairo and elsewhere in the region, featuring this post where she discovers that she may have been accidentally using terrorist code words ("picnic," apparently) -- in Arabic, no less. Another McClatchey article, this one by Dion Nissenbaum, inquires into why Fatah put up so little fight.
You may have seen Spencer Ackerman report that only 10 out of 200 foreign service officers in our giant Baghdad embassy can speak Arabic. The truth is actually somewhat worse than that, though, because the technical factoid is that they have ten officers at our above "the 3 reading / 3 speaking level in Arabic." This 3/3 comes from the Interagency Language Roundtable scale which is actually a five point scale so at least some of the embassy's rather paltry contingent of Arabic speakers don't necessarily know the language all that well.
UPDATE: I'm getting substantial pushback on this point from knowledgeable quarters. People say that a 3/3 maybe is a perfectly fine level of competency to do work in the foreign language without the help of an interpreter.
One curious tick the Bush administration has developed is the habit of deflecting questions about its actual policies toward large-scale musings about the grand sweep of history. It's a fairly pathetic dodge in a fairly obvious way, but George Packer hits the key points with perfect pitch in this week's New Yorker: "By this light, Bush’s habit of declaring A to be B—for example, claiming that the surge reflects the public’s desire for a change in war policy, or interpreting increased violence in Iraq as a token of the enemy’s frustration with American success—becomes a sign of clarity and resolve, not delusional thinking."
Fascinating. When I followed Andrew's link to Maxim's odd women of the Israel Defense Forces feature I assumed this was just a wacky lad mag concept the Maxim staff had devised all on their own.
It seems that some woman MKs are pissed off, which is about what you'd expect. Generally speaking, this seems like a baffling decision to me; Israel's existing techniques of influencing the US political system are very effective, why rock the boat like this? It seems like there's moderate risk and little reward in a patently offensive scheme like this.
UPDATE: Things I didn't know: "Patently offensive is a defined legal term typically reserved for hardcore pornography; applying it to this admittedly weird material dilutes its already somewhat nebulous meaning." Fair enough.
If the Times interview is what Petraeus is telling Bush and Cheney, then they have only begun to ramp up this war in Iraq. My bet is they will try to extend the war into Iran if they can, and are obviously looking for a trigger to do so. But until then, they have no intention of changing a thing, except perhaps putting even more troops on the line. From everything we know about Bush, he will continue on, even if a majority of both Houses oppose war-funding. He doesn't need his party any more. Only a veto-proof margin will suffice, and if that happens, expect a massive Rudy-driven, Romney-approved "stab-in-the-back" campaign, accusing all critics of being supporters of Iran or al Qaeda. Or Bush will force the Congress to cut off all funds, and then declare the troops abandoned and betrayed by the "enemy within".
Woo! Okay, for my part, I'd actually reel that back somewhat. This pretty clearly reflects the thinking of some people inside the administration ("Cheney" is a good shorthand, though I obviously have no idea what's going on inside various people's heads); for some, a wider war's been in the cards from the get-go, and the Podhoretz's of the world wouldn't be warmongering unless they were getting some kind of signal that such mongering might succeed.
That said, if Bush himself were determined to expand the war to Iran, you have to imagine it would have happened already. The administration's actions vis-a-vis Iran over the past 18 months have been rather contradictory. Had this president a long record of foreign policy success and diplomatic masterstrokes, one might assume he was cooking up something inspired and brilliant. Given the actual record, one has no such confidence.
I really don't think Mike Steinberger should have been allowed to write an article about whether or not he's a supertaster without at least mentioning They Might Be Giants' 2002 classic "John Lee: Supertaster".
Nina and Tim Zagat suggest that immigration restrictions are preventing Americans from enjoying more authentic Chinese cooking, rather than sweet Chinese American dishes. Dan Drezner questions the immigration hypothesis on the grounds that the Zagats specifically contrast the Chinese food situation with that affecting other Asian cuisines. Tyler Cowen, likewise, is dubious:
Dan Drezner poses the query, and considers immigration restrictions as a factor, though without endorsing that hypothesis. Immigration can't be the key reason, since I can learn to cook the stuff (really), there is plenty of excellent Chinese food in Tanzania (really), and most French food in America is cooked by Mexicans (that you already knew), albeit with instructions.
I'm going to have to agree with Tyler. The key point, for both of us, is that if you go somewhere in the United States where the restaurants are primarily catering to a Chinese ancestry clientel -- Flushing, Queens (pictured above; the homeland of my mother's side of the family and the spiritual homeland of Mets fans everywhere, now a vast see of immigration) is the salient example in my life -- all of a sudden things get very different. Hence Tyler's contention that "consumer demand" is the strongest factor.
Photo by Flickr user Barry Wallis used under a Creative Commons license
Continuing the "super" theme from below, Sara refers to The New Pornographers as a "supergroup." Wikipedia agrees with that assessment, but Carl Newman doesn't: "I'm really tired of that supergroup label, and I wish people would stop using it. None of us were known at all outside of Canada—I just don't think it's accurate."
I think I agree with Newman. I'd restrict the "supergroup" concept to entities like The Traveling Wilburys where the members were independently famous before the group was formed.
“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” US President George W. Bush said yesterday “a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred.” That, of course, came during his address on the need to ban embryonic stem cell research.
Except that it didn't. Rather, it came during his address on the need to veto a bill permitting the use of federal funds to undertake embryonic stem cell research. The conclusion, however, seems unrelated to Bush's line of reasoning. If the cells are sacred human life, then surely it's not okay to kill them in a privately financed manner. The nonsensical nature of Bush's position on this issue is old news, but continues, in my view, to be under-remarked upon in mainstream coverage of the issue. Years ago, he hit upon a goofy split-the-difference compromise and ever since then he's been wandering the country insisting that he's taking a bold stand of principle.
Anderson provided the margin of victory for Reagan in eleven states. Some of these were Southern states where Carter was strong, and Anderson got just a few percent, but others were the same kind of states where Democrats, with Independent votes, now win majorities. In these states Anderson got between 9 and 15 percent. They included Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Wisconsin. In addition, Anderson racked up large votes in Colorado, Arizona, Montana, New Hampshire, Hawaii, and Maine. Most of these are states that a Democrat needs to win to win the presidency. That's why the Democrats have more to fear from a Bloomberg candidacy than the Republicans.
I think this is true, but also potentially misleading. Jimmy Carter was an incumbent president widely judged to have failed in office (recall Ted Kennedy's very strong showing against him in the 1980 primaries). This created a large pool of people ideologically inclined to pick Carter over Reagan, but who also really didn't want to vote for Carter. Much the same could be said about people who defected from George H.W. Bush to Ross Perot; in both cases actual incumbent performance drove disaffection and a proclivity for third party voting.
It seems to me that this kind of dynamic is pretty uniquely associated with incumbency, and probably doesn't apply at all to the 2008 election and certainly doesn't apply to the Democrats in 2004.
This effort at ginning up controversy by revealing political contributions made by employees of media organizations seems fundamentally misguided. For one thing, no effort is being made to see if the people named have any ability to impact coverage of national politics. They have, for example, a former copy editor here at The Atlantic on their list, but what nefarious influence is she supposed to have had on the magazine's coverage?
More to the point, for any given journalist, one either does or does not have legitimate complaints with the work. If you do, the complaint itself is sufficient. If you don't, the revelation that the author of some excellent piece of work also gave $250 to the DSCC in 2005 is neither here nor there. Meanwhile, to offer the standard liberal counter to this sort of thing, where's MSNBC's report on the political giving of executives at General Electric?
Well, I can tell you that in 2006, GE's PAC gave $807,282 to Republicans and just $474,118 to Democrats. In 2004 there was a similar division of funds, in 2002 "only" 60 percent of it went to the GOP. Indeed, as you can see here essentially every PAC in the media sector backed the GOP over the Democrats.
I feel like Tony Blair would have to be insane to take a job as special envoy for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Obviously, bringing about a peace agreement there would assure Blair's legacy, but the odds are not only dim, but would to a large extent be left hostage to George W. Bush. Unless Blair is completely addled he surely must have learned the lesson that putting himself in the middle of risky, speculative endeavors involving Bush in a crucial role isn't a good idea.
What Blair needs to do is find himself a nice, fairly uncontroversial issue to work on. HIV/AIDS is always a solid choice, but I think Bill Clinton's cornered that market. Access to safe drinking water would probably be a good idea.
I'm not by any means fanatically opposed to reducing greenhouse emissions through non-tax methods, especially if -- as seems likely -- this is more politically feasible since it conveniently hides hosts, but I remain persistently unconvinced by arguments that non-tax approaches are superior on the merits to simply implementing a carbon tax. Kevin Drum, on the other side, notes that the price elasticity of gasoline consumption is low (people use about one percent less gas when prices go up ten percent) so even a hefty carbon tax is unlikely to produces substantial reductions in transportation-related emissions.
The problem here is that we need to ask ourselves why that is. The answer -- it seems clear to me -- is that there aren't a lot of ways, in the short run, for people to reduce gasoline use and the people most able to reduce their usage (car owners living in walkable urban areas) don't use much gas in the first place. But what alternative do we have? Kevin gets his stat from Daniel Sperling who argues instead that we should "require oil companies and other fuel providers to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions of transportation fuels by at least 10% by 2020." But here's the thing. Sperling himself notes that a carbon tax "would not induce drivers to switch to low-carbon alternative fuels because virtually none are available." But, of course, were such an alternative available, taxes would induce switching. And a carbon tax would make the development of such a fuel potentially quite lucrative.
It goes like this across the board. It takes years for higher CAFE standards to really make an impact since the newer, more efficient cars only displace the older ones over time. But by the same token, a high carbon tax would over time cause people to consider investing in more fuel efficient engines. Most of all, though I know people from southern California don't like to hear about it, it's totally crazy to put forward a plan to reduce carbon emissions that doesn't do anything at all to encourage people to drive their cars less at the margin over time.
UPDATE: Wait, sorry. The other thing is that a carbon tax (or something similar where you auction emissions permits) does do one thing in the short run, namely generate revenue. That revenue can then be spent on supplementary measures -- subsidies for hybrid trade-in programs, mass transit construction, alternative fuel development, renewable electricity generation -- of the sort Kevin's talking about.
Photo by Flickr user Bear69Designs used under a Creative Commons license.
Joe Courtney, freshman Democratic representative and all-around good guy, has become a China hawk, ginning up baseless fears of Beijing's submarine fleet and demagogically helping to launch a new, needless arms race. After all, his district contains 6,000 jobs in the nuclear submarine business and the whole Democratic caucus is really, really eager to help him get re-elected. Brad Plumer has the story.
Photo by Flickr user Wandering Thinker used under a Creative Commons license
Geoffrey Wheatcroft observes that Salman Rushdie "man can unite Muslims, conservative nationalists, and the fashionable academic-intellectual left in hatred of him." Robert Farley counterobserves that Wheatcroft doesn't cite any examples of the fashionable academic-intellectual left hating Rushdie. I thought I might take a look at the Amazon page for Shalimar the Clown, which I believe is his most recent book. Rushdie fans turn out to also be heavy purchasers of Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and E.L. Doctorow's The March. What's more, about two percent of the people who visit Shalimar's Amazon page actually wind up purchasing Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. Arundhati Roy shows up on the "similar items" page.
Not to say anything against Roy or Smith or Marquez, but this is hardly salt-of-the-earth fare. Indeed, some might say that Rushdie seems to fall in with a circle of well-known literary fiction writers who are primarily admired by fashionable intellectuals.
I found Boston to be a thoroughly unenjoyable place to live, but I'm not quite sure I understand why Kevin Garnett's unwilling to be traded there. The horrible, horrible Boston winters are, I believe, somewhat less horrible than the Minneapolis ones. What's more, I'm pretty sure Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and some guys you in a decent pickup game could be contenders in the East at this point. On the other hand, Chicago really, really, really seems like the team to be traded to, so maybe it's worth trying to veto all non-Chicago deals.
Speaking of which. The Bulls took a lot of crap for not acquiring Pau Gasol during the season thanks to their refusal to part with Luol Deng. If they wind up in a situation where both the Lakers and the Timberwolves are bidding against each other to put together a deal with Chicago, then the crap gets retracted, right?
A little while back, I proclaimed the Victory Caucus website slightly less dumb than the We Win, They Lose concept. Reason's Dave Weigel has done some investigating, however, and may tilt the scales back in favor of the Caucus.
It seems to me that calls for a "new Marshall plan" of some sort or another are frequent enough that it's a bit odd for John Edwards' campaign to be implying that Mitt Romney's ripping them off when he calls for "a new type of Marshall plan” that "“ould assemble resources from developed nations to work to assure that threatened Islamic states had public schools, not Wahhabi madrassas, micro-credit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic healthcare, and competitive economic policies."
On another level, Team Edwards is even selling itself short. Their proposal for a "Marshall Corps" -- at least as it was explained to me as a group of civilian experts who the president would be able to deploy where needed -- is significantly more interesting (albeit at this point still somewhat vague) than Romney's rather banal and totally undefined proposal for some new foreign aid program.
But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government.
It was the midlevel intelligence professionals in the CIA whose expertise led them to argue that Iraq had no means of acquiring nuclear material; it was the planners and country experts at the State Department who prepared a 1,200-page document about postwar Iraq outlining in depressing detail the many challenges and brutalizing exigencies our occupying forces now face. It was professional scientists in the bowels of the Environmental Protection Agency who pushed their reports warning of the effects of climate change, only to have them censored and purged. It was concerned and conscientious spooks and cryptographers at the National Security Agency who contacted reporters to raise alarms about the warrantless wiretapping of Americans. It was a midlevel career bureaucrat at the Department of Education named Jon Oberg who spent his own time--nights and weekends--studying the student loan program and discovered that taxpayers were being ripped off by private lenders to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite warnings from his (appointed) superiors, he published his results in an internal memo sent to the entire department. He retired shortly thereafter.
Needless to say, this is actually why bureaucracies are so damn bureaucratic. Important public functions should be conducted by the book, according to the rules. The alternative is less a snazzy flood of innovation than, well, the Bush administration.
It's time for me to reposition toward the center by condemning the Great Satan Michael Moore. Not only does Moore engage whatever it is all Decent People are supposed to condemn him for (it can't be because some portions of his films are inaccurate, because nobody shuns Tony Snow or Charles Krauthammer) but he's screwing around with capitalization. I mean SiCKO, really? All-caps with a little "i"? The world doesn't need this. It was bad enough when big business started in with the AstraZeneca and so forth, we don't need it on the left as well.
Photo by Flickr user Tim Snell used under a Creative Commons license
There's been some dispute on an email list a belong to about this, but hereNew Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz contemplates the possibility that Palestinians should "be given autonomy rather than independence" before deciding that he is "actually not sure that they are ready even for this truncated form of self-determination" and proposes that the King of Jordan just colonize the bits of the West Bank that Israel doesn't feel like taking.
Fred Kaplan discusses Rudy Giuliani's decision to go for the big bucks rather than help his country out with the Iraq War, and then segues into the larger point that Giuliani has no idea what he's talking about with regard to national security and terrorism, his alleged area of expertise. Why, I recall back in August '04 writing:
What business, exactly, does Giuliani have being the featured speaker on the convention night that's supposed to be especially dedicated to security concerns? We're threatened, after all, not by squeegie men (people who try to clean your windshield when you're stopped at a traffic light in New York, demanding money for their services) but by Islamist terrorists, a subject Giuliani would seem to know no more about than anyone else who watched events unfold that fateful morning almost three years ago.
Note that this is essentially true across the board. Consider, if you will, this slide from Mitt Romney's PowerPoint of Terror:
Considering that "fundamentalist Islam" as understood by a Sunni and as understood by a Shia are going to be incompatible, it's hard to see this as a common goal. Nor does asserting that Islamism writ large represents an attempt to "defeat the Modernity" seem like an especially cool, calm effort to face reality. Indeed, if we were faced with a genuinely anti-modern movement -- an Islamic version of the Amish, say -- we presumably wouldn't need to have any quarrel with people like that or anything in particular to fear from them.
His next slide is a picture of a bumper sticker bearing the slogan "The Global War on Terror is NOT a Bumper Sticker" as if to perfectly illustrate the point that "war on terror" has become a vapid exercise in sloganeering.
Photo by Bill Fish used under a Creative Commons license
I'm trying to remember whether or not I was invited to this screening that seems to have featured 70 percent of the people I know in town. At any rate, the reviews seem to indicate that the film's main point is that US health care sucks, which is true, and that French health care is particularly nice, which is also true.
The Hill's Elana Shor on Barack Obama's earmarks: "Obama’s earmark requests range from the general, such as $65 million for service improvements to his state’s Metra commuter rail, to the quirky, such as $8.5 million for an Army Corps of Engineers barrier intended to keep Asian carp fish from entering the Great Lakes." Quirky! But wait, I thought, why does Obama want to keep these carp out?
Well, it turns out that Asian carp populations have been growing extremely rapidly of late in the Mississippi River basin. As indicated by the name, these carp are indigenous to Asia rather than to North America and are exhibited one of these "invasive species"-type growth patters where they're so well-adapted to an ecological niche that isn't adapted to them, that the population booms and there's risk of substantial problems for the rest of the local ecosystem. In a November 2000 report the USGS concluded that "On the basis of past experiences (e.g., with common carp), a failure to address the exotic species problem will likely result in more introductions and potential harmful effects to native biota."
The EPA reports that "researchers expect that Asian carp would disrupt the food chain that supports the native fish of the Great Lakes" and "could pose a significant risk to the Great Lakes Ecosystem." So, yes, appropriating funds for the Army Corps of Engineers to keep carp out of the Great Lakes sounds a little silly, but a preliminary effort to research the issue seems to indicate that it's a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing.
LA Times writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar seems to have found himself in an awkward position when assigned by his editors to do a story on how SiCKO means big trouble for the Democratic presidential candidates but then couldn't find any evidence of this. There seem to be precisely zero liberals in the United States who are furious at the major candidates for attempting to develop politically pragmatic proposals even though many of us feel that more dramatic change would -- if possible -- be preferable.
What seems much more likely is that Giuliani joined the ISG because he thought it would help him in his quest for the Presidency, and then dropped off when he figured out that it would hurt him instead. Maybe he was quick enough — I never claimed the man wasn't shrewd — to figure out before the rest of us that the ISG would come down on a position that Bush, and more important the Republican primary voting base, wouldn't swallow. That made him decide to distance himself from the ISG by accepting rival speaking dates. Then when Baker said "Start showing up or quit," Giuliani quit, with a sigh of relief. The Republican base will tolerate someone with no coherent position on Iraq, or someone who doesn't know for Shi'ite about the actual problem of Islamist terrorism, as long as he makes it clear he purely loves killin' him a buncha A-rabs, but if Rudy's signature were on the ISG report Mitt Romney would wrap it around his neck: "my opponent, who seems to think that talking is a good response to terrorism ..."
This has a certain plausibility to it, but I'm not writing off the greed theory just yet.
Grist's Charles Komanoff takes a look at the carbon tax issue we were discussing yesterday and backs up my a priori speculations with some more detailed estimates:
Two widely respected transportation economists at UC Irvine, Ken Small and Kurt Van Dender, looked at pretty much the same gasoline data as Dan and observed the same low (under 10 percent) short-run price elasticity. Unsurprisingly, but importantly, Small and Van Dender found gasoline's long-run price elasticity to be much higher, approximately 40 percent.
Which is to be expected. Another thing that should be said is that consumer response to the rise in gasoline prices over the past seven years is an only imperfect model of likely medium-term response to carbon taxes. A rise in market prices can be construed as temporary -- especially with politicians from both parties promising to take action to make gasoline cheaper -- whereas a sustained commitment to make carbon-intensive modes of transportation more-and-more expensive over time would create a more serious incentive to take carbon intensity into mind when making decisions about which cars to buy, where to live, etc.
Brendan Nyhan uncovers Michael Bloomberg's real core constituency -- political consultants eager to see hundreds of millions of dollars spent on hiring them.
The current issue of The American Prospect is the first one produced in years where I haven't been present at editorial meetings where people discussing upcoming articles, thus ruining the surprise when the issue actually comes out. Thus imagine my shock when I discovered it included not one, but two articles indicating that despite the public's recent leftward turn and the relatively bright prospects for Democratic gains in 2008, that there's a great deal of voter skepticism about large new government programs. First, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira warn that the "Emerging Democratic Majority" requires the support of independent voters whose appetite for big government is limited:
The new Democratic coalition is center-left; independents are more toward the center, especially on fiscal and economic issues, than Democratic identifiers are. In California, independents backed moderate Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in November 2006 by virtually the same margin they had given John Kerry over George W. Bush in 2004. Democrats will continue to attract independents -- and independents will make up a significant ideological segment of the Democratic majority -- so long as Democrats don't forget the "center" part of center-left and so long as Republicans remain on the right, especially on social issues.
The results of a February study we conducted for Democracy Corps that assessed people's attitudes toward government stunned us. By 57 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life instead of helping people. Sixty-two percent in a Pew study said they believe elected officials don't care what people like them think, and the same number believe that whenever something is run by the government it is probably inefficient and wasteful. The Democracy Corps study found that an emphatic 83 percent say that if the government had more money, it would waste it rather than spend it well.
I could imagine finding grounds on which to quibble with these results, but considering the source they're pretty striking and seem pretty firm to me. Ed Kilgore looks at these same article and concludes that Democrats need to embrace a tough reform agenda to rebuild public faith in the possibility of effective government action:
Some Democrats understandably hope that "Happy Days Are Here Again" in terms of progressive public activism, and many may well think of "accountability in government" as a 1990s gimmick or even as an accomodation of conservative anti-government sentiment. But as Greenberg shows and passionately argues, progressive cannot rescue the country from the Bush disaster unless we first clearly re-establish our own, and government's, ability to get things done right.
I don't think we should create false choices here. Something like Barack Obama's just-announced good government agenda strikes me as both a fairly pointless gimmick and a an accommodation of conservative anti-government sentiment. But it's also probably a good gimmick that could help those who embrace it to win elections. A gimmick, after all, isn't necessarily a bad thing to have in a campaign.
Turns out that Townhall's Matt Lewis had the story on Rudy Giuliani's loyalty to Alan Placa, alleged child molesting ex-priest, back in February. These are the kind of associates that tend to bring down a campaign.
There were more than 35,000 pictures of FDR taken. Two show him in a wheelchair. Why? Because the press almost unanimously agreed that — despite the huge news value — depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort. The few dissenting photographers from that consensus were routinely blocked or deliberately jostled by the senior photographers so as to shield FDR from embarrassment and the public from its "right to know."
Okay, this is a subject I know virtually nothing about. I do, however, know that FDR became president in 1933 after winning the 1932 election. The war in Europe didn't begin until 1939, and the United States didn't enter the war until 1941. Under the circumstances, that "depicting FDR as a cripple would be bad for the war effort" can't be the primary reason nobody ever did it.
Strikingly, the big "sweep" against al-Qaeda failed for the exact same reasons that this technique always fails, both in previous iterations in Iraq, and also in other counterinsurgency situations around the world and throughout history.
I see where John Edwards' defenders against yesterday's New York Timesstory on his anti-poverty foundation -- see Ezra Klein and Steven White are coming from -- there's nothing very scandalous here. In particular, there's nothing at all here that's scandalous if you're an even mildly cynical political sophisticate, since it was always clear if you were paying attention that Edwards' outfit existed, in part, to test the viability of a 2008 presidential bid.
The story does, however, highlight that the flipside of the Edwards campaign's heavy focus on policy has been that it's been unusually light on narrative. Edwards standard pitch doesn't much of a story about his personal and political evolution over the past three or four years which is a situation that sets himself up for various charges of being a phony. Most people I know -- myself included -- don't really care about "authenticity" in this sense and are much more interested in the policy agenda Edwards has adopted than the precise question of why he's adopted it. But, of course, politics doesn't work that way and lots of people do want at least a veneer of authenticity. This strikes me as a problem that's pretty easy to address, but it'll have to be addressed.
Jim Henley takes a closer look at Mitt Romney's PowerPoint of Terror and the results aren't very pretty. It turns out, for example, that Switzerland isn't under assault by terror groups looking to restore the Caliphate and "defeat the Modernity."
Johann Hari does what Geoffrey Wheatcroft couldn't manage and identifies a member of the "fashionable academic-intellectual left" who does, indeed, seem to hate Salman Rushdie:
Backing him up, the Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal has jeered that Rushdie thinks "humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally Western ideas."
Even here, though, if you go back to Gopal's original piece in context, his argument isn't an apologia for the fatwa against Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. Rather, Gopal's argument is that that Rushdie, the one who believed "It was necessary to critique tyrannical forces in both west and non-west, to recognise them as twinned and to pronounce a plague on both their houses" has sold out. Now, "Vociferously supporting the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq on "humane" grounds, condemning criticism of the war on terror as 'petulant anti-Americanism' and above all, aligning tyranny and violence solely with Islam, Rushdie has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist's task as 'giving the lie to official facts.'"
On the left, but not fashionable academics, Hari also has the goods on George Galloway and Lord Ahmed.
Glenn Reynolds once again busts out the passive voice stab-in-the-back. Note also the hilarious idea that something might happen "if things go badly in Iraq" as if at the moment everything's going swimmingly.
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Heads in the Sand
