I wouldn't quite say I'm boycotting the CNN brand, since I did watch the CNN/YouTube debate. However, I generally speaking prefer to get my rightwing propaganda from Rupert Murdoch, who's a bona fide professional and has been doing that sort of thing for years. The CNN-based alternative is amateurish and absurd. For example, Rick Perlstein describes a recent broadcast from Glenn Beck of CNN's Headline News franchise:
Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government." He continued: "You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler's plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore's enemy, the U.N.'s enemy: global warming." Beck added: "Then you get the scientists -- eugenics. You get the scientists -- global warming. Then you have to discredit the scientists who say, 'That's not right.' And you must silence all dissenting voices. That's what Hitler did.
When Charles Krauthammer wrote a column praising Hillary Clinton's foreign policy views, I thought that probably wasn't the sort of backup her campaign was looking for. It turns out, though, that HillaryHub.com, an official product of the campaign, is linking to Krauthammer's articles. So, yes, congratulations, she's official won the Chalres Krauthammer Primary.
Public opinion of the Supreme Court remains quite positive, all things considered, but it seems that the number of people who think it's too far right has taken a big jump since Roberts and Alito signed on -- 31 percent now say the court is too conservative as opposed to just 19 percent before Bush made his nomination. The number who say it's just right has declined from 55 percent to 47 percent.
This is, I think, basically grist for the mill that says the public cares about the outcomes of SCOTUS rulings and not, as Roe-backlash theorists often posit, the legal craftsmanship. I've never heard anyone try to seriously maintain that John Roberts is a worse drafted of legal opinions than was Sandra Day O'Connor, he's just further right in his views, and so public opinion moves.
If you ignore all the shots he missed, he sure put together an impressive summer league performance:
In the real world a .333 field goal percentage isn't what you're looking for. Sadly, though, these games seem to have zero predictive value, so there's really no speculation worth having.
David Ignatius assures us that the real question in Iraq is "How to extricate ourselves in a way that minimizes the damage to the United States, its allies and Iraq?" That is a good question. Ignatius' not-so-good answer is that "A good start would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume, so that the process of talking and fighting that must accompany a gradual U.S. withdrawal can work."
In short, we're supposed to believe that the Bush administration is eager to commence a sensible withdrawal plan but the main obstacle standing in their way is congressional Democrats' stubborn insistance that Bush . . . commence a withdrawal plan from Iraq. Brilliant. Sure. Have we really not yet figured out that George W. Bush wants to stay in Iraq in full force through the end of his term and is also a kinda stubborn guy?
I'm beginning to think Bill Richardson possesses some sort of Jedi-mind trick capability, which would explain not only why he's been able to convince vicious dictators to do his bidding but also why he continues to rise in the polls despite some sub par debate performances and an incoherent appearance on Meet the Press that might have derailed other candidates.
Richardson's latest knee-slapper was his assertion yesterday that Iowa is one of the Top 10 states in the country at risk of a terrorist attack.
And, indeed, everyone I know in DC medialand, no matter how liberal or how conservative, views Richardson as ridiculous. And I think it turns out that Richardson is a pretty problematic candidate in a bunch of ways. That said, I don't think he's using Jedi mind tricks to build support for his candidacy, I think he's using the fact that he's promising to actually end the war in Iraq without "residual forces."
The Clinton/Obama/Edwards troika have all, though to various extents, softened their backing for the residuum over the past couple of months, but they could still all go further in this direction -- to where Richardson is, for example -- and at a minimum I hope Richardson keeps gaining support until one of them does. It's obvious that the first instinct of the three other candidates' political consultants was that Democratic primary voters don't really care about the war and can be easily bought off with some Bush-bashing applause lines and misleading rhetoric.
Doyle McManus, card-carrying member of your liberal media. doing some "news analysis" for The Los Angeles Times. points out that if you vote for Democrats, terrorists will kill your children:
Although fireworks erupted last week among the leading Democratic candidates, those differences are narrow compared with the chasm between the two parties' worldviews, one focused on battling the threat of radical Islam, the other on ending the war.
The point, of course, is that ending the war in Iraq isn't something contrary to improving the country's ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, nor is it something other than improving the country's ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism, rather, it's a constitutive part of improving the country's ability to reduce its vulnerability to terrorism. If someone had given me a bunch of money to start a Democratic-oriented national security think tank and an LA Times writer had called me up to discuss this issue, that's the point I would have made. Instead, the powers that be decided that Kurt Campbell should start a think tank instead:
Foreign policy is playing a role in this campaign unlike any election since the Cold War," said Kurt Campbell, a former Clinton administration official who heads a new centrist think tank in Washington, the Center for New American Security. "The debate so far has made the two parties' positions appear polarized, more than they need to be…. The election may well be decided on foreign policy and national security, but it's all about just two issues: Iraq and the war on terror."
What John Quiggin said. Obviously, it may turn out to be the case that some details of Scott Beauchamp's story don't check out, and equally obviously no political issue of consequence turns on whether or not his tale of fraternity-style pranks is 100 percent accurate. What does have significance is this genre of right-wing press criticism. Basically, a story comes out that conservative bloggers don't like, someone -- without evidence -- proclaims it bogus. Then all kinds of people who may or may not know what they're talking about put forward theories about why X or Y must be false. Then those theories are all uncritically endorsed by key conservative bloggers.
Then if it turns out that any of the dozens of claims made by the blog swarm end up vindicated, the horde proclaims "advantage: blogosphere" and decides that all war-related news reporting it doesn't approve of must be made up. It's as if you had a guy batting .134 who hit a home run once, years ago, and fancies himself a slugger.
So as we redeploy our troops from Iraq, I will not let down my guard against terrorism. I will devote the resources we need to fight it and fight it smartly. I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region.
They will also provide security for U.S. troops and personnel and train and equip Iraqi security services to keep order and promote stability in the country, but only to the extent we believe such training is actually working. I would also consider, as I have said before, leaving some forces in the Kurdish area to protect the fragile but real democracy and relative peace and security that has developed there.
Nick focuses on the fact that this plan to bring the troops home from Iraq seems to involve leaving a lot of troops in Iraq. That sort of thing, though, has gotten a lot of blog coverage (the proviso that training must be "actually working" seems like a step in the right direction). Now I'm curious as to which "other terrorist organizations in the region" she thinks our troops need to be fighting. Hamas? Hezbollah? Or is that just a throwaway line to cover all the semantic bases?
Now that I'm in the car on the way back from Harper's Ferry I can now add West Virginia to the list of states I've visited I'd never realized that DC was so close to parts of WV, probably because until today I'd been under the impression that Harpers Ferry was in plain-vanilla Virginia.
The trick, it turns out, is that back when historical events were happening, Harpers Ferry was in regular Virginia. Then, during the Civil War, they made West Virginia and Harpers Ferry was part of it.
There are statistics to back up every point in that sad litany, but I also found people eager to flay nearly every statistic. For instance: Is it bad that more boys are in special education, or should we be pleased that they are getting extra help from specially trained teachers? And haven't boys always tended to be more restless than girls under the discipline of high school and more likely to wind up in jail? A growing congregation of writers have begun to argue that the trouble with boys is mostly a myth. Sara Mead is one; she was until recently a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington think tank largely funded by the Gates Foundation. Intrigued by the wave of books and articles about failing boys, Mead crunched some numbers, focusing narrowly on the question of school performance. The former Clinton Administration official concluded that "with a few exceptions, American boys are scoring higher and achieving more than they ever have before."
In particular, Mead decided that boys from middle- and upper-income families--especially white families--are doing just fine. "The biggest issue is not a gender gap. It is these gaps for minority and disadvantaged boys," she told me recently in the think tank's conference room. Boys overall are holding their own or even improving on standardized tests, she said; they're just not improving as quickly as girls. And their total numbers in college are rising, albeit not as sharply as the numbers of girls. To Mead, a good-news story about the achievements of girls and young women has been turned into a bad-news story about laggard boys and young men.
Before there was Digby, or before The Assault on Reason, there was James Fallows. When you've got half an hour, read his 1996 piece "Why Americans Hate the Media", wherein you will discover that everything old is new again. If I ran the Washington Post newsroom, I'd make every political reporter read this during their first day on the job, and again annually thereafter.
I took Nick's advice, and it's good advice. My initial plan was to read the piece and excerpt some good parts if I liked it, but as I was reading I would up marking up way too many "key" paragraphs and "crucial" insights (this is, perhaps, the sign of a really great article -- a blogger can't write a good post about it) to bother picking. This story by Fallows, also on the media, though looking specifically at the coverage of Monica Lewinksy and impeachment, is also great.
PS, he mentions a discussion in the article that can be seen here.
UPDATE: Jim emails to say that even though the date on the linked American Prospect article here says 2002, it was actually published in March 1999.
On one level, sure, it's nice to hear that no Republican Senators were willing to go on Chris Wallace's Fox News show, but on another level one needs to ask yourself why did Chris Wallace report that? Maybe he did it even thought it reflects poorly on the Bush administration just because, as a reporter, Wallace is in the business of reporting the facts.
Sorry, bad joke.
Presumably, the idea here is that we're supposed to believe that Republicans are shocked, shocked to find out that there's perjury happening in this attorney-general's office. Just as the fact that George W. Bush is a horrible president is supposed to be no reflection on conservatism, we, too, are supposed to believe that the fact that the Republican Party, with the complete and utter backing of every significant conservative institution in the country, fought tooth and nail, day after day, week after week, month after month to ensure that there was absolutely no oversight of the executive branch whatsoever is just totally unrelated to Gonzalez' unraveling.
I'm somehow always forgetting to check and see if my favorite artists are making music videos and then wind up stumbling across things randomly after they've been out for months. Here's Feist, "My Moon, My Man":
Ever since I read The Caves of Steel when I was a kid, I'm always feeling that the world needs more moving walkways -- moving walkways with multiple lanes and higher and higher speeds. It could be awesome (and, yes, many practical problems, blah, blah, blah).
Chuck Schumer's mostly a good guy, but his willingness to go to bat for the poor, put-upon multi-millionaire hedge fund manager certainly isn't part of that overall goodness. To reiterate, my basic view is that we shouldn't just make hedge fund managers switch from paying capital gains tax to income tax, but should actually just eliminate the differential treatment of capital income and labor income
Here's one proposal along those lines from Ron Wyden and here's a somewhat similar plan from the Center for American Progress. John Edwards' recently released tax plan is along these lines as well in terms of trying to give us more tax fairness. Schumer's bad behavior -- like John Dingell's climate change antics -- is a good reminder of how the political system works, when it comes to defending the interests of powerful, entrenched local groups, Democrats are usually about as bad as Republicans.
I just want to make clear that if, as Marc Stein is reporting, the main sticking point preventing a Timberwolves-Celtics trade for Boston to acquire Kevin Garnett is the big ticket's "well-chronicled unwillingness to play in Boston," that though this blog likes to engage in some Boston-bashing now and again it's hardly that bad a town.
The NBA desperately needs Kevin Garnett to be playing on a contending team and, frankly, he and his sad Minnesota crew just might contend in the East. Garnett plus Paul Pierce plus Ray Allen is, on this coast at least, a powerhouse. It does seem, though, that the real stumbling block here should be less a question of where Garnett wants to play than the simple fact that beyond Pierce and Allen, the only asset Boston has is Al Jefferson. Jefferson's a good prospect, sure, but you'd want more than that if you're Minnesota. Can they ask for every first round draft pick until the end of time?
Unless Bob Novak is just making things up, his congressional sources are telling him that key members have congress have been briefed on a Pentagon plan under which "U.S. Special Forces are to work with the Turkish Army to suppress the Kurds' guerrilla campaign" against Turkey. The strategic pretzel thus acquires another twist. We're giving Israel billions of additional dollars to get them to not object to us selling advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia. We're selling the Saudis the weapons to check Iranian influence.
Meanwhile, we're complaining that the Saudis are undermining Maliki's government in Iraq. The Saudis are doing that in order to check what they see as Iranian influence. Maliki wants us to sack our commanding general in Iraq or, at least, to stop arming what he sees as anti-government Sunni rebels. We think we need to arm those rebels to check al-Qaeda influence. And now our special forces are going to attack Kurds -- along with Israelis, the one group in the region that seems to genuinely welcome American influence -- ostensibly in order to head off a more dramatic Turkish intervention.
Is the intersection of these trends -- the logical extension of these colliding agendas -- really more frightening than the prospect of just leaving?
I'm shocked, shocked to discover that Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack think the surge is great and should be extended "at least into 2008" (another Freidman unit!) -- who could have guessed? As Greg Sargent notes, the twosome actually tries to present this as a counterintuitive statement by administration critics, though O'Hanlon's been way out in front as a surge booster since it first started (I'm told he's good friends, personally, with General Petraeus, from back in grad school or something) and Pollack, obviously, has been synonymous with the war for years.
I'm going to repeat my desire to see an O'Hanlon Primary -- Democratic contenders can gain my support by providing assurances that Michael O'Hanlon won't be serving in your administration.
I'm glad to see the crucial FCC decision on 700 megahertz spectrum getting some front page coverage, but wouldn't it have been nice to try to inform people about this a little while back while it might have made a difference? It's true that the decision, as such, won't come until tomorrow but obviously all the crucial jostling and lobbying has already happened at this point.
Commentary "Harry" challenges me to "address the substance" of the Pollack/O'Hanlon op-ed. Okay, here goes. The critique of US occupation policy since, say, the fall of 2003 has been that US policy in Iraq has focused overwhelmingly on military goals and ignored the fact that the essential problems in Iraq are political. That was true in 2003. It was true in 2004. Interestingly, it was also true in 2005. And, indeed, it was true in 2006. How about 2007? Well, here's Pollack and O'Hanlon:
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. [...] In the end, the situation in Iraq remains grave. In particular, we still face huge hurdles on the political front.
In short, according to the people who think the surge is working, the surge has, in fact, done nothing whatsoever to address the crucial problems in Iraq.
I was all prepared to proclaim this a valuable resource for anyone interested in professional basketball statistics, but I actually have no idea what I would do with all that information presented as hard-to-read text files. No doubt it's useful for someone, who could import the data into some other kind of program or something, but I'll stick with basketball-reference.
Now, why should Mr. Bush fear that insuring uninsured children would lead to a further “federalization” of health care, even though nothing like that is actually in either the Senate plan or the House plan? It’s not because he thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.
The subject, of course, is the proposed addition of funding for S-CHIP so that the program can, in practice, expand coverage to all the currently eligible children. As Brian Beutler explains, "the SCHIP extension will be paid for with revenue from increased tobacco taxes. The fear for conservatives is that it'll work so well that people will begin to realize that it might be worth paying for broader reforms with broader taxes." Unfortunately, the public opinion data does tend to suggest that Bush's staggering achievements in the field of maladministration have, in fact, boosted public skepticism of government capacity to do anything at all to some extent.
One way of thinking about what the country's experienced since the fall of 2001 is just large-scale consequences of perverse incentives. We have a president whose ideological goals on the domestic front are, on some level, advanced every time he screws up, with his own failures, his own corruption, providing evidence for the correctness of his ideology. Meanwhile, on the security front, his own inability to tackle the al-Qaeda problem -- and, indeed, the fact that his policies are making the problem worse -- serve to heighten a climate of fear that his advisers regard as political useful.
Every now and again some kind of significant political event happens in Japan, I read about it, and am reminded that I don't understand Japanese politics at all. The same party, it seems, always wins. And that party is called the Liberal Democratic Party. And then there's the opposition Democratic Party which was formed from a merger of the old Democratic Party and the old Liberal Party. They couldn't, it seems, just call the merged party the Liberal Democratic Party because that was already the name of the other party -- the one that always wins.
And, as best as I can tell, neither party has any actual ideology; both are comprised of competing factions with widely varied agendas. There's also this smaller New Komeito Party which does seem to have an ideology, namely pacificism, and which is in coalition with the ruling LDP even though the current LDP Prime Minister has taken a lot of steps toward remilitarization. I even took a class in college that was supposed to be on modern Japan, but where the professor somewhat mysteriously stopped talking about political events once we got to the post-MacArthur period, though he did specifically note that it was "confusing." So, all that said, the implication of this election result would seem to be a setback for the Japanese remilitarization that the Bush administration has been trying to encourage.
Sam Boyd notes the media's bizarre flip-flops and double-reversals on the subject of the Obama-Clinton debate spat. The pathology he's identifying is the exact one James Fallows focuses on in the piece I plugged this morning -- a pathological aversion to talk about the substance of things. A decision was made to say that Obama "lost" the initial exchange not because people wanted to say Obama was wrong on the merits, but because they wanted to say he was wrong on the politics. When that turned out not to be the case, the whole machine froze up -- it was like asking the punditocracy to divide by zero.
It's John Edwards' hair all over again. The first votes won't be cast until months from now. Why not cover what the candidates are saying about things and whether or not those things make sense? Why not let the issues play out a little bit and just wait and see who gains the advantage? Whether or not either Clinton or Obama ever intended to establish a sharp policy disagreement, there is an interesting issue here -- should the United States abandon its policy of seeking to "isolate" countries we don't like by refusing to talk to them unless they first meet a series of preconditions? I would say that the overwhelming evidence of history is that this sort of isolation -- as opposed to multilateral economic sanctions, which have had a few successes -- accomplishes almost nothing, and the policy should be abandoned. But it's an important issue and it deserves some coverage.
Photo by Flickr user Allison Harger used under a Creative Commons license
It seems that at least part of the explanation for the Liberal Democratic Party's curious ability to almost always win in Japan is that the CIA set things up to work that way. The story seems a bit similar to how the old Christian Democratic Party dominated postwar Italy, before falling apart in the Tangentopoli scandal.
Someone's charging $400,000 for a mobile home, surely a sign of the end times. That comes via Sara Mead who offers the education policy angle, but another friend assures me that the trailer park in question has fantastic views.
I think it's a little unfortunate that Will Marshall's response to my critique of his case for residual forces in Iraq doesn't really grapple with the arguments I made. Instead, he accuses me of not addressing some other things. And fair enough, I'll try to address some of Marshall's concerns. But I would like to see what he has to say about the problems that I think exist with his argument:
And wouldn’t al Qaeda in Iraq be emboldened by a swift U.S. departure? Wouldn’t more foreign jihadists come to celebrate their victory in driving America out of Iraq? Wouldn’t Sunni shieks who have turned on al Qaeda switch back without us there to tip the scales? Yglesias doesn’t say.
Obviously, if US forces aren't in Iraq on Day X, al-Qaeda will use that fact for propaganda and recruiting purposes. By the same token, however, if US forces are in Iraq on Day X, al-Qaeda will use that fact for propaganda and recruiting purposes. There's not some course of action we can take such that al-Qaeda's response will be "fair enough" and then they shuffle off quietly into the sunset.
I really don't think, however, that "more foreign jihadists" would actually go to Iraq in order to "celebrate their victory." People interested in fighting infidels occupying Muslim lands are going to go somewhere (Kashmir, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine, I dunno) where that's plausibly what's happening. The US military presence is what's attracting foreign fighters to Iraq, it's not a prophylactic against foreign fighters coming into the country. Would Sunni Sheikhs flip-flop and side with al-Qaeda? There are no guarantees, but I don't see why they would. The consistent Sunni Sheikh agenda in western Iraq has been to maximize the power of Sunni Sheikhs in western Iraq vis-a-vis American occupiers, al-Qaeda interlopers, and Shiites in Baghdad. That'll continue to be their agenda. If we stay, by contrast, we do take the risk that our tactical alliance with the local notables will outlive its usefulness and they'll turn around and start shooting at our troops again.
On Marshall's other points -- yes, as I said, preventing a wider regional war is desirable. I don't, however, see how a residual US military presence in Iraq helps accomplish that goal. On genocide, Marshall accuses me of being callous offering the old "Not our problem, apparently." Here's my point. Marshall says we need to "get U.S. troops out of the business of mediating Iraq’s sectarian conflicts." I agree. Marshall also wants us to prevent a hypothetical genocide in Iraq. Given the choice, obviously, I, too, would like to prevent this hypothetical genocide. There isn't, however, any way to prevent the possibility that Iraq's sectarian conflicts will result in genocide or ethnic cleansing other than to mediate Iraq's sectarian conflicts. If we're going to abandon the goal of mediating Iraq's sectarian conflicts, then we need to admit to ourselves that that means the sectarian conflicts might get really, really, really nasty and we're . . . not going to mediate them.
More whining about this same issue of the media and an inability to think about the issues. Adam Nagourney is talking about debates. He's covered a lot of presidential debates. "And without exception, I have covered them the same way: Watching the proceedings on a television screen, and never mind that the candidates may be standing on a stage 30 feet away." That's because he sees his job as guessing how the exchange looked to voters at home ("the best way to report on a televised presidential debate is to write about what is shown on television . . .because that is how voters see it") rather than to use his skills as a journalist to provide readers with additional context and information.
The most recent Democratic debate, though, "was written up for The Times, off television sets, byPatrick Healy in New York and Jeff Zeleny in Charleston" giving Nagourney an opportunity to do something other than play the role of amateur television critic. What did he do? Analysis of the issues? Research into the meaning of the Edwards-Obama exchange on health care mandates? Catch up on his favorite TV shows? Take a nap? Read a book? No! He, watched the debate live and in person. And what did he glean from this experience? A whole different set of trivial observations that even he refers to as "fluff." You'll be glad to learn, for example, that Hillary Clinton "DID stand out in that sea of dark suits wearing that (sorry) eye-catching coral jacket." Fascinating.
Meanwhile, it's worth noting the incentives that O'Hanlon and Pollack face. If they bow to reality and say the US should move rapidly to start cutting our losses in Iraq, then they're people who advocated in favor of a disastrous policy and this'll be bad for their careers. If, by contrast, they say the surge is looking good, and then work together with Bush administration officials and The Weekly Standard to construct a stab in the back narrative about Iraq, then they can hope to salvage their professional reputations at the expense of liberals.
(of course, haha, that's to imply that the policy analysis put forward by Brookings Institution foreign policy program people might be influenced by crass careerism rather than Very Serious Expertise but that's absurd, right, after all Very Serious People are above such things)
I'm really curious as to what Stanley Kurtz could be thinking here about the need for "a serious campaign to eliminate academic tenure" starting with "a fairly conservative-leaning legislature, in a state with its own university system." Suppose we started with Texas, a conservative state with a major public university. And suppose the University of Texas abolished tenure because National Review writers and the Texas state legislature wanted to subject Longhorn professors to more direct political supervision. What would happen?
Texas would just rapidly become a much, much worse university -- one with huge problems recruiting faculty and students. Even your more talented conservative and conservative-sympathetic professors wouldn't want to teach there. The school would rapidly become a backwater, and this would have potentially devastating effects on the local economy.
I still think Ross Douthat and Jon Chait are wrong about the professional incentives facing Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, but I'll concede to them both that I wasn't right either. The smart play for the job-seeker is probably to just not say anything. More broadly, I really shouldn't be speculating about their motives, because it's all neither here not that.
That leaves us with the small matter of the war itself. I think the evidence that O'Hanlon and Pollack are wrong here is fairly overwhelming. Statistics don't really corroborate what O'Hanlon and Pollack say, there's no particular reason to privilege "on the ground" knowledge if it was just fed to them by official sources (which appears to be the case), and, most of all, the point of the surge was to change the political situation in Iraq, and they concede it hasn't done that. I'd be interested to know what Jon, in particular, thinks about all that.
Politically, I had some problems with this film which appears to suggest at times that if we'd only not disbanded the Iraqi Army or just listened to Richard Armitage more that everything in Iraq would have turned out roses. It also doesn't offer any hint that Iraq occurred in a wider context of a mad scheme for regional domination and that this scheme compelled some of the otherwise inexplicable choices. That said, it's a stunning film and will remind many and teacher others for the first time about the depth and breadth of the madcap ignorance and incompetence with which the administration plunged into Iraq. Go see it, and bring your less-political friends.
Brad Plumer quoting William Arkin and Tariq Ali notes an interesting wrinkle in the Saudi arms sale deal -- both sources say the reason the Saudi military is so terrible despite buying so much expensive US military equipment is that the house of Saud doesn't want a competent military. After all, a competent, independent military might stage a coup. Similarly, it seems clear enough to me that US policy in the Persian Gulf is centered around Dissuading the Gulf Cooperation Council states from developing the capacity to defend themselves against Iran (or, back in the day, Iraq), the better to leave them as dependent clients of the United States.
Photo by Flickr user John Rawlinson used under a Creative Commons license
I think there's a fairly compelling abstract logic that given the pressing nature of the climate change issue, it'd be a good thing to have more electricity generated by nuclear power plants despite the waste issue. The concrete reality of the matter, though, is that the nuclear power industry is basically looking for handouts and I see no reason why they should get them. A sensible energy policy would, through caps or taxes, effectively penalize energy sources that emit large amounts of carbon thereby de facto advantaging nuclear power along with wind, solar, hydro, etc. and I don't have a problem with that. But if we're going to be handing out additional subsidies (and I'm really not sure we should be) they should be directed at the very cleanest things available, which nuclear certainly isn't.
It looks like yesterday's rumored Kevin Garnett trade has come to pass and the Big Ticket is heading to Boston in exchange for "a package of players that reportedly includes Al Jefferson, Gerald Green, Ryan Gomes, Sebastian Telfair, Theo Ratliff and at least one first-round pick." Reactions:
Due to the utter lack of depth, this is going to be a less-than-overwhelming team despite the starpower -- maybe 45-50 wins.
Since it's the Eastern Conference, 45-50 wins could easily make for a Finals-caliber team.
And of course this makes Boston an attractive destination for free agents still on the market.
Most of all, though, the fact that Minnesota put itself in a position where this rather sad offer was the best they could do is just terrible, terrible general management. In particular, it's pretty astounding that no Wolves-Bulls trade came together back when PJ Brown's expiring deal was still on the table.
Fortunately, here in the land of the free a 108 year-old woman has Medicare, not one of these big government boondoggle like they have across the pond. Oh, wait.
As of a few weeks ago, O’Hanlon advocated a partition of Iraq and Pollack was talking about containing the civil war within Iraq’s borders. Neither of them had much faith that the Administration’s strategy could succeed. Have they changed their minds? If so, what’s their political strategy for sustaining the surge into 2008?
If you're inviting, say, Ezra Klein to fun YearlyKos-related parties and have been leaving me off your lists out of a misguided belief that I must have better things to do, consider yourself corrected, I'll be in Chicago and am eager to attend your function! Otherwise, you'll find me crying myself to sleep blogging after hours in my hotel room.
My colleague Marc Ambinder and his partner in crime Chuck Todd rate Rudy Giuliani most likely to win the Republican nomination. I don't really see it. There's the whole abortion thing. And also his record on immigration, which he won't be able to keep weaseling away from forever. But what's more, the dude's campaign doesn't even own RudyGiuliani.com -- it's like he's not even trying.
Ruth Marcus, driving hard for the wanker of the day prize, decides that though Al Gonzalez "dissembled and misled" and he didn't commit perjury and so rather than "trying to incite criminal a prosecution that won't happen of an attorney general who should have been gone long ago," Democrats "need to concentrate on determining what the administration did -- and under what claimed legal authority -- that produced the hospital room showdown. They need to satisfy themselves that the administration has since been operating within the law; to see what changes might guard against a repetition of the early, apparently unlawful activities; and to determine where the foreign intelligence wiretapping statute might need fixes."
The possibility that if the administration continues to dissemble and mislead congress, and is told in advance that it can get off the hook for doing so, it might be difficult to get to the bottom of this matter doesn't seem to have occurred to her. Oh, well.
So far surge architecht keane and the top GOP member have both praised o'hanlon. Keane says we need to stay in Iraq even if there's no reconciliation and wants two or three permanent bases. He also asserts -- contrary to reality -- that sunnis are moving toward reconciliation.
Update: General newbold seems cranky -- very cranky -- about antiwar sentiment but ultimately endorses the idea that we should 'indicate a start date' for withdrawal in spring of 2008.
Update 2: General McCaffrey says we shouldn't even bother to ask whether or not the surge os working until petraeus -- 'the most talented person I have ever met' -- has had a year. He also says we need to give the iraq security forces many more resources. But he says we need to reduce the number of troops we have in iraq or the army will start unraveling in april. He says we can achieve that by leaving the cities. Acknowledges that this is inconsistent with pet's strategy.
Totally backed down. Said the progress has only been against aqi, that sectarian violence and the civil war is as bad as ever, and that the current strategy will probably fail. He thinks we should partition the country. Why the turnabout from the optimistic op-ed? He didn't say.
Daniel Benjamin, by contrast, is pretty great.
UPDATE: Sorry for the confusion this engendered in some. As you'll see if you read the posts below, that's my note-taking of Michael O'Hanlon's testimony earlier this afternoon before a House Subcommittee.
Unfortuately, just as a Wifi signal from George Miller's office started to enter the room, the committee declared an hour-long recess to cast some votes. I can't stick around that long, so I'm heading out. One bit of takeaway, though, is that is the Democratic members of the subcommittee are way, way, way more conservative on average than your average House Democrats. There are tons of white southerners in the group, and very few in the caucus as a whole.
This is a bad pattern for the party and the country. With more progressive members sitting on the relevant committees, you'd have an entry point to get better experts on the testimony lists and a place to try and launch them into more prominent positions in the media. For now, take solace in the fact that the O'Hanlon seems to be edging back left in response to the criticisms he's taken for his op-ed.
The new TNR contains a great piece by Eliza Griswold on the situation in the Horn of Africa "Occupational Hazard: The Other Failed Invasion."
And so, last Christmas Eve, the Christian-led government of Ethiopia invaded and--supported, later, by U.S. air strikes--successfully dislodged the Islamist UIC, largely because it believed (correctly) that rebels backed by its enemy, Eritrea, were using Somalia as a staging area for attacks. The result is an occupation by Ethiopian soldiers that fuels the local insurgency, threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa, and offers Al Qaeda an additional talking point in its campaign to persuade Muslims that the West has declared war upon them. Many of the region's Muslims saw the Ethiopian invasion as a Christmas present from Ethiopia's leaders to America's. "When the Americans started backing the Ethiopians around Christmas," one woman who supported the courts said, "we started calling the Ethiopians kafir, or infidels." [...]
This is certainly how Al Qaeda would like the world's 1.3 billion Muslims to view what's happening in Somalia. In early 2007, Ayman Al Zawahiri called for attacks against the occupying Ethiopian soldiers using "ambushes, mines, raids, and martyrdom-seeking campaigns to devour them as the lions devour their prey." But his message wasn't meant merely for Somali ears; it was also intended to inflame Muslims worldwide by suggesting, once again, that the Christian West is at war with Islam.
In the end, though, resentment toward the U.S.-backed occupation may prove to be a greater destabilizing force for the entire region than Al Qaeda ever was, especially in Kenya, where the war on terrorism is directly linked to the rise of radical Islamic identity. In the name of chasing a few bad men, the Christmas invasion played into millennia of distrust between predominantly Christian Ethiopia (4050 percent of the population is Muslim) and Somalia, which is almost 100 percent Muslim. "The popular perception is that Christian soldiers are occupying a Muslim land," says Roland Marchal, a senior research fellow at Sciences-Po in Paris.
There is a lesson to be learned here by advocates of an American troop drawdown. Even if the drawdown were to be only partial, it could easily get out of hand by creating the perception that we’re on the way out and can be attacked with impunity. As Napoleon said, “In war, moral considerations account for three-quarters, the actual balance of forces only for the other quarter.” If we set a withdrawal timetable, the moral balance will tip against us even faster than the actual balance of forces—with deadly consequences.
Mona at Unqualified Offerings notes the potentially salient point that Napoleon lost the war. Moral factors, it turns out, couldn't compensate for the fact that Russia is very big, extremely cold in the wintertime, and pretty far from France. The Emperor could, presumably, console himself with the thought that his forces weren't so much defeated on the battlefield as that their supply-lines became untenable, but these kind of hair-splitting distinctions are of limited comfort when you're in retreat.
Boot, though, takes the analogy in another direction, citing the O'Pollahan op-ed from yesterday and hailing it as "pretty significant coming from two Democratic analysts" when it was more like drearily predictable.
David Ignatius must have some kind of magical powers of mesmerism since he managed to provoke a remarkable quantity of serious commentary on Tapped about a column that proposes that the CIA mount a covert program to "install windmills and solar panels to generate electricity" in Waziristan.
Surely that doesn't pass the laugh test.
As long as we're allowed to play make-believe, why don't we just have Treadstone take care of things? It's completely preposterous. If you want to bribe people, just give them money. The desire to transform a simple exchange of money for favors into an eco-friendly global development scheme is, I think, a tip-off we're not meant to take this too seriously. Meanwhile, Brian Ulrich notes that the alarming report Ignatius uses to motivate Operation Windmill is actually out of date. Oh, well.
I can't believe this CNN segment ever aired, but I think Ann Friedman does an excellent job:
In all seriousness, though, enough is enough. One has to assume, though, that this kind of thing is pretty great for Hillary Clinton's primary campaign, since it certainly does make me feel like, hey, maybe if we had a woman actually serve as president for a term or two the press would get over their case of the sillies.
Hendrick Hertzberg reports on a truly devious plot. It seems the California GOP has got a measure on the ballot that would switch the state to a Maine/Nebraska-style method of allocating electoral votes, giving one vote to the winner of each congressional district, thus providing a bonanza for the Republicans. This is going to be voted on during a very sleepy June 3 primary that won't include any presidential candidates.
The amount of money spent annually on medical care for individuals in the United States is estimated at about $4,000,000,000. Those who have studied the possibilities believe that this sum is sufficient to provide good individual care for all the people and to reimburse the physicians adequately.
$4 billion in 1947 dollars is about $37.4 billion in 2007 dollars according to the inflation calculator. Present day US health care spending, meanwhile, runs to about $2,000 billion a year. Obviously, you're getting more advanced technology these days and people live longer, but actually not that much longer -- life expectancy in 1947 was 66.8 years -- since our lifestyles seem to have become less healthy in many ways.
Robert Post and Reva Siegel of Yale Law School take a look at "Roe Rage" and judicial backlash theory, and conclude that there's little to it. Roe is controversial because abortion is controversial and is embedded in a larger set of controversial issues about sex and gender roles.
I suppose it'll please Ross on some level to know that insofar as one is prepared to try to expand the concept of "eugenics" to include a world, like the one depicted in Gattaca, where "there is no state coercion of reproduction or forced sterilizations of minority groups" then, sure, the predominant principles of the mainstream American left favor that sort of thing (Ross suggests that, maybe, we call it "Gattagenics.")
The issue here is precisely that a certain strain of back-in-the-day progressivism was extremely hostile to civil liberties. You saw that in Woodrow Wilson's administration where Attorney-General Palmer led a domestic crackdown that made Al Gonzales and John Ashcroft look like ACLU members. And, indeed, it was former political allies of Wilson's who became horrified by what progressive politics turned into during that period who founded the ACLU (Paul Starr tells this story well in his Freedom's Power). Along the same lines, liberal turned against the eugenicist strain of progressive thought for reasons of individual liberty and autonomy, rightly rejecting the eugenicist movement's vision of society as horribly authoritarian and intrusive.
Flash forward through the decades and what you have are a lot of liberals who, precisely because we, like the opponents of eugenics back in the day, believe in individual liberty in the matter of reproduction, are willing to let individuals freely choose to do certain things that resemble things eugenics proponents may have wanted to force people to do. That coercion or lack thereof, however, is a crucial distinction. In the film Gattaca, meanwhile, they cheat because even though there isn't coercion around reproduction per se, you're watching a movie about a highly illiberal society where people seem to have no privacy rights, etc., and the results naturally raise hackles.
Back in February of 2004, Frank Foer did a great piece for TNR looking at the few members of the foreign policy establishment who had the temerity to work with Howard Dean and then the wave of retribution launched against them when he lost:
By the time Dean began assembling his national security team, though, most of the Democratic foreign policy establishment--which is now heavily clustered at the Brookings Institution--was already quietly committed to the Kerry, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards campaigns (in the case of some wonks, all three at once). Without the party's A-list names, the Dean campaign began searching for advisers in less glamorous quarters. For their foreign policy rollout, they signed up former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and former national security adviser Tony Lake--veterans of Clinton's first term. But, in Democratic circles, Clinton's first term is widely considered a low point in the party's foreign policy, and, in any case, Christopher and Lake weren't substantive advisers. So, last fall, Dean recruited two mid-level Clintonites from Brookings for his day-to-day needs, former Director of European Affairs at the National Security Council Ivo Daalder and former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice.
For many in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, Dean was seen as dangerous. They worried that his strident opposition to the Iraq war would revive old clichés about the party's pacifism and that his claim that Saddam Hussein's capture did nothing to enhance U.S. security would prove fodder for countless GOP ads. No one was more concerned on this score than Daalder's Brookings colleague and occasional co-author, Michael O'Hanlon, who penned scathing op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times attacking Dean. O'Hanlon, who advises several of the candidates--including Kerry--told me, "More Democrats should have recognized [Dean's] danger and spoken out against him." Within Brookings, O'Hanlon's pieces were seen as a direct assault on Daalder and Rice and a break with the institution's genteel mores. One Brookings fellow describes them as "just bizarre. Forgive me, but that was personal, not professional." Others at the think tank reported witnessing loud, uncomfortable hallway arguments between Daalder and O'Hanlon over Dean.
At the time, Dean was still riding high, and--O'Hanlon's attacks notwithstanding--so were Daalder and Rice. But now that Dean is done, Rice and especially Daalder may find their career prospects also dimmed. When I spoke with the foreign policy gurus who would likely stock a Democratic administration, they seemed to regard the Dean campaign as a debilitating black mark on one's resumé. It doesn't help Daalder that he took an aggressive posture during Dean's glory days. Instead of privately conceding his candidate's foreign policy shortcomings, Daalder defended him to the hilt. "After Dean delivered the line about Saddam's capture, Ivo was quite animated in defending that sentence," says one Brookings fellow. And, as a former Clinton administration official told me, "If you're a policy adviser, you exist to stop lines like that from being delivered. And, if it gets delivered over your objections, you have an obligation to fall on your sword. This whole campaign causes me to question [Daalder's and Rice's] judgment."
That's something people who realize that Dean was right about the war and right about Saddam's capture might want to keep in mind. This year, clearly, you don't have distinctions that are as clear cut as the ones prompted by the 2004 primary but you still do have echoes of this same clash inside the establishment.
Read it here. It seemed pretty good to me, although nothing extraordinary. On the business of the "tough" and "provocative" bits about Pakistan, I think the devil is obviously in the details. One could imagine a situation in which a special forces raid against a terrorist base inside Pakistan would be a good idea even if the Pakistani government didn't approve, but one could also imagine a situation in which it would be a terrible idea. This is basically the sort of question that I think looks a lot simpler from outside the White House than from inside the Oval Office.
I liked that Obama put his critique of starting the Iraq War and his argument in favor of ending the Iraq War firmly inside his argument about terrorism.
"So," people ask me, "what's the book called?" "Good question," I tell them. But now: HEADS IN THE SAND: How Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats.
Unfortunately, HASC doesn't seem to have a transcript of yesterday's hearing ready, but Avi Zenilman's Politico article captures the key element of O'Hanlon's weird flip-flop:
"We have seized the initiative," Keane said. "Michael O'Hanlon's article lays that out."
"I agree with General Keane that trendlines are improving on the military, tactical level" O'Hanlon told the subcommittee. But of the surge strategy, he said: "I'm dubious, despite my generally inspiring visit last week."
In other words, while Jon Chait may feel that the argument of the O'Hanlon/Pollack essay "has some weight," it seems that O'Hanlon himself doesn't put that much weight on it.
So I feel like the fact that the centerpiece of Rudy Giuliani's health care plan is absolutely terrible hasn't quite gotten the coverage it deserves: "Under Giuliani's plan, up to $15,000 of a family's health care spending would be excluded from taxes."
The way this works is that the level of help this gives you with your health care costs is inversely proportional to your objective level of financial need. If you're a millionaire, a $15,000 exclusion is worth over $5,000 but a working class person in the 10 percent bracket only gets $1,500. This is, in short, just another way of saying "we need a giant tax cut primarily focused at rich people" except now health care is the pretext.
Thanks to the miracle of pre-scheduled blog posts, this is being posted at 10:30 in the morning even though, with any luck, I'm actually on a plane to Chicago right now. And why am I going to Chicago? Ostensibly, because of the YearlyKos convention. The real truth, however, is more complicated and more delicious.
A little while back, you see, I was flying to DC from Albuquerque and had a layover in Midway Airport. Looking for something to eat, I came across a place selling what looked like a delicious pastrami sandwich like from the lost Jewish delis of my youth. I ordered one and . . . it was improbably great for airport food. Turned out to be an airport branch of a real Chicago delicatessen -- Manny's. Well, I thought to myself, if only I had a pretext to get work to send me to Chicago at some point. And then the solution emerged: YearlyKos. I do, however, take my work seriously and promise to provide top-notch coverage of non-sandwich aspects of the convention.
UPDATE: Oh, I -- I screwed up and accidentally hit the "publish" button. I'm not leaving for Chicago until tomorrow morning. Bad day. Oy.
Mark Thoma makes the basic case against Robert Samuelson. Brendan Nyhan adds in the point that Samuelson's column is extremely long-lived, he's been writing it for the past thirty years. I really wonder about this kind of thing. There are plenty of columnists I don't like, but normally they're at least good at generating buzz and discussion. But what's Samuelson's value to the Post? Are there people who, at the margin, are ready to drop their Washington Post subscriptions if they don't get to read about how we should cut Social Security benefits for the nine millionth time?
And here's what you need to know about the surge. The point of the surge was to create conditions on the ground that might help boost political reconciliation. Instead, Iraqis are less reconciled than ever. But don't call it a failure of the surge, it's not that a better surge would have worked. The issue is that it was the whole wrong diagnosis. Political problems were -- and are -- driving military problems and not the other way 'round.
Mark Kleiman, meanwhile, has a good suggestion based on Ambassador Ryan Crocker's view that "We are buying time at a cost of the lives of our soldiers." Just ask how many soldiers Bush really wants to see die in order to buy more time for Iraqi politicians.
For a couple of years now, I've been puzzled by the standard copyright notice Major League Baseball offers during its games. "Any rebroadcast, reproduction or other use of the pictures and accounts of this game without the express written consent of Major League Baseball is prohibited," they say, and other leagues do something similar. Can they really require express written consent before anyone reproduces an "account" of a baseball game? Surely not -- you can't copyright the facts. But, I guess they figure there's no harm in making an absurdly broad assertion of their rights.
Normally, one only writes about politicians when one is saying something mean about them, but Harold Meyerson's column on Nancy Pelosi reminds me that I think she's a really underrated political leader. Not flawless, of course, and anyone in her position is going to come in for some deserved criticism. But still, she's someone who basically shares my values and has vastly exceeded CW expectations.
You may recall that when she first became Democratic leader, everyone said she was doomed to fail -- too liberal. Then, throughout most of 2005-2006, all anyone did was heap scorn on the Democratic leadership. Then, immediately after the 2006 election, we were again warned of a dread Pelosi Backlash -- too liberal. But guess what? She seems plenty popular and is doing a good job of moving liberal legislation through the House. Admittedly, it just dies either at the hands of the Senate GOP or by Bush's veto pen, but that's not her fault.
Politico's Ben Smith with a key observation on Barack Obama's terrorism speech:
Also absent from the speech is any reference to "Islamic terrorism," "Islamism," or "Islamofacism" -- the buzzwords of those who see a global conflict between the West and a specifically Muslim insurgency.
Right. Smith also notes (as does an aggrevied Katherine Jean-Lopez) that Obama didn't use the phrase "war on terror." Obviously, on this score it's John Edwards who got the ball rolling and deserve credit for breaking the taboo, but it's good to see further forward progress on this front, especially since Obama gave a speech that could hardly be accused of ignoring the reality of terrorism, as opposed to the right's conceptual terrorism-related mirages.
Ron Brownstein seems really mad that Bush is blocking this S-CHIP expansion. I'll even defend Bush a little. Brownstein writes that Bush is "portraying it as the first step on a slippery slope toward 'government-run healthcare,' as if senior senators in both parties were conspiring with Michael Moore to import Cuban doctors to inoculate and indoctrinate American children," which seems to harsh.
Bush, more realistically, is just worried that expanding S-CHIP will make the country a much better place, and build political support for further expansions of S-CHIP and similar programs. He's worried that people won't think it's just bad for kids under 18 to have no health insurance, but probably bad for young adults, middle aged people, and, indeed, everyone.
It's well known that NBA stars don't like to take on political topics lest it hurt them with their sponsors. The really clever ones, though, like Gilbert Arenas just slip their commentary under the radar screen through the use of analogy and metaphor. Here, for example, are Agent Zero's thoughts on Iran:
There are these things called shark attacks, but there is no such thing as a shark attack. I have never seen a real shark attack.
I know you’re making a weird face as you’re reading this. OK people, a shark attack is not what we see on TV and what people portray it as.
We’re humans. We live on land.
Sharks live in water.
So if you’re swimming in the water and a shark bites you, that’s called trespassing. That is called trespassing. That is not a shark attack.
A shark attack is if you’re chilling at home, sitting on your couch, and a shark comes in and bites you; now that’s a shark attack. Now, if you’re chilling in the water, that is called invasion of space. So I have never heard of a shark attack.
Per Ambinder, Hillary Clinton says "If we had actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden or other high-value targets were in Pakistan I would ensure that they were targeted and killed or captured" while Edwards says "My belief is that we have a responsibility to find bin Laden and al Qaeda wherever they operate. I think we need to maximize pressure on Musharraf and the Pakistani government. If they can't do the job, then we have to do it."
I hope this'll be the last we hear of this issue, though fear that it may somehow become a staple of ever-more-fine-grained questions. The more you think about it, though, the more this just seems like a totally pointless hypothetical. If you had a situation where you had firm intelligence that a key al-Qaeda target could be taken out with a discrete special forces mission or a well-placed missile, the Pakistani government would no doubt give the okay. Conversely, posturing aside, nobody's going to send a giant invasion force into the Pakistani mountains contrary to the will of the government. Bringing this scenario up in the first place was a pretty silly gambit on Obama's part (what if Osama was on the Moon? in New Brunswick?), though it arguably worked. Anyways, for The Guardian what I found more important about Obama's speech.
On Iraq, this senator said he expects that, come September and the Petraeus-Crocker report, the White House will announce "a transition to a new approach." He thinks that will involve a non-trivial drawdown of troops, and a returned emphasis to training Iraqi forces, though he wasn't too clear beyond that. He also said such a shift would head off any possible collapse in congressional GOP support for the war.
I say: Eh. I feel like I've heard about this imminent drawdown before. My sense is that it was going to be executed around mid-2004 in order to shore up the GOP position before the fall elections. And, sure, their position is worse now than it was then. But Bush was actually on the ballot. Kevin Drum seems to be a believer on the somewhat odd grounds that "Petraeus and Crocker plainly won't be able to report any political progress in Iraq. After all, there hasn't been any yet, and the Iraqi parliament is on vacation for the next month. What's more, even on the military front Petraeus will be unable to claim anything but the slimmest progress."
That seems clearly wrong to me. The genius thing about the facts is that they can support almost anything. You can say. "We've seen exciting signs of progress in Iraq. Describe one tactical military success, describe another, do so in great detail, here's a third, etc. Follow Pollack and O'Hanlon in discussing morale and subject factors. Describe another tactical military success in some detail. Talk about your hopes and dreams for the future. This part goes on and on for pages. On the political front, progress has been more limited, but there are some signs of progress and I'm going to list two of them right now." Bam! Optimistic report, why do you hate America? Or, you could look at the same facts and dwell on the ways in which tactical military successes are irrelevant and the political situation is worse than ever. So far, every time the Bush administration has reported on Iraq it's been with relentlessly upbeat spin and I see no reason to think that'll change.
Isaac Chotiner steps in with a timely intervention in my debate on Somalia with James Kirchick, correctly pointing out that a lot of military might be "justified" in the sense that if you could pull them off in a reasonably non-fiascoish manner they seem like reasonable things to do, "but this is leaps and bounds away from saying that armed reprisal is the right or proper course of action." Indeed. What's more, it's traditionally been recognized that this sort of pragmatic calculus isn't merely a pragmatic issue, but is actually constitutive of engaging in a just use of force -- you can't inflict the suffering and death and destruction that war always causes on a whim, or even out of justified pique, you need to have some decent prospects of success.
I took this photo in a touristy ice cream shop in Harper's Ferry last weekend and it seems a bit puzzling. West Virginia, after all, isn't rebel country. Indeed, that's kind of the point of the whole state. Obviously, you see Confederate iconography outside of CSA territory (the young George Allen in California, obviously) but this really doesn't seem intended in a white supremacist kind of way. But there it is in a state whose entire existence is owed to the fact that West Virginians didn't want to commit treason in defense of slavery.
This Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis is technically of Bush administration health care proposals, but as best as anyone can tell, Rudy Giuliani's proposal amounts to endorsing Bush's plan (his campaign staff is a bit vague as to what, exactly, he's putting on the table) and Bush's plan is totally terrible as you can see.
A year ago, after Bush first floated an embryonic version of his proposal, economist Jason Furman wrote in the National Tax Journal that "Empirical estimates show that eliminating the tax incentive for employer-provided insurance, without creating another pooling arrangement, could increase the number of people without insurance--even in a relatively limited proposal like that of President Bush." What's more, research has suggested that those getting insurance will probably be relatively healthy, while those losing it will be relatively unhealthy.
I'm not a regular National Tax Journal reader myself, and Google unfortunately doesn't turn up a copy of that paper, but the result is pretty intuitive -- giving even a small incentive for the relatively healthy to drop out of pooling mechanisms you could have a very large effect since every time a health person drops out of the pool, the pool becomes a worse deal for the next-healthiest people. Next thing you know, pools start falling apart.
Via Jerome Armstrong, Charles Franklin makes a chart, comparing the number of people who tell Pew they're following the president campaign "very closely" to what's been seen in earlier cycles.
As you can see, the level of interest in the 2008 race is unprecedentedly high. I note that while public interest in politics seems like a good thing, it's probably an indicator of bad conditions in the country. Citizens seemed bored by the 1996 and 2000 campaigns that, not coincidentally, occurred during times of peace, prosperity, and good government. Bush's terribleness, by contrast, seems to be sparking a resurgence of interest in democracy greater even than what the poor economic conditions of the '92 campaign could achieve.
You may recall The Wall Street Journal's July 13 editorial which proved that the Laffer Curve is real if you restrict your attention to corporate tax rates, mis-code Norway, and draw your line wrong. Thanks to Kevin Hassett's efforts to spell this argument out in more detail, Brendan Nyhan was able to look at the exact same data and draw the line correctly:
If you exclude Norway, who's oil tax revenue shouldn't really be lumped in with corporate income taxes in general (it's more like a royalty), things look even less like the WSJ version of reality.
Democracy Corps reports (PDF via Ed Kilgore) that the public, unlike some pundits, understands what's happening in the country just fine and combines a dislike of gridlock with an appreciation that the cause of gridlock is that the Republican Party is obstructing popular elements of the Democratic majority's agenda: "Right now, Republicans own everything, including the gridlock, the direction of the country and Iraq. There is no other way to understand the rock solid stability of the Democrats’ current leads."
I would be remiss if I didn't link to my op-ed in today'sLos Angeles Times:
The United States is now well into the fifth year of a war in Iraq that has, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, managed to get more Americans killed than 9/11 while alienating global opinion, undermining our strategic posture around the world, arguably speeding nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran and detracting from American efforts against Al Qaeda. The nation's elites, ever vigilant, have located the source of the problem: Public outrage over the sorry situation.
As I hope I've made clear, I wasn't a huge fan of Barack Obama's Pakistan gambit. Nor, though, do I think much of Jerome Armstrong's somewhat unhinged reaction to the same: "Adding Pakistan to the list of countries that the US does unilateral military action in isn't going to solve a damn thing. The only real solution for our role in their region is to get off their oil, get out of their countries, and work with other nations to promote global accord."
I'm quite sympathetic to Armstrong's overall diagnosis of the strategic situation, in that I regard de-imperializing our role in the Middle East as vital. Nevertheless, though killing or capturing high-value al-Qaeda targets isn't sufficient as the be-all and end-all of American foreign policy, it's surely worth doing all the same. Helpful, even! Letting Osama bin Laden get away really was a giant Bush administration screw up, and nailing him and his colleagues really should be an important priority.
Jason Zengerle, in a related post, refers to Armstrong as a "netroots grand poobah," which reminds me that one big question I want to write on during YearlyKos is the issue of to what extent the erstwhile netroots leadership really commands any troops. Obviously, I think, the views of online political junkies and activists have some weight, but when Armstrong takes an against-the-grain view like that only Chris Dodd has an acceptably pacifistic view of al-Qaeda, does that move anything? I'm pretty skeptical.
That's Why They Call Them Useful Something Somethings
From a Democratic staffer on the Hill:
Just about every Republican in the Iraq debate on the House floor today has cited and read from the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed to argue that we are making significant progress in iraq. Many Republicans have called them "left-wing scholars", as in "even lefties O'Hanlon and Pollack say we are winning."
Just sayin'......that is the political effect of that op-ed......which makes it even more infuriating given that both O'Hanlon and Pollack have walked it back since it was published.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. O’Hanlon said the article was intended to point out that the security situation was currently far better than it was in 2006. What the American military cannot solve, he said, are problems caused by the inability of Iraqis to forge political solutions. “Ultimately, politics trumps all else,” Mr. O’Hanlon said. “If the political stalemate goes on, even if the military progress continued, I don’t see how I could write another Op-Ed saying the same thing.”
To reiterate something that may have gotten lost, O'Hanlon's not just a guy who writes op-eds, he's a job seeker regarded as having a good chance of securing a major post in the next Democratic administration.
I'm hear in room 401a-c of Chicago's McCormick Place Convention Center listening to a FCC Commissioner Michael Copps deliver a lecture on "A View from Washington: Winning a Better Media for Everyone" and it occurs to me that I'm by no means alone.
People -- lots of people -- want to hear Copps talk about telecommunications regulation and what they can do to help fight for a better regulatory environment. And the people aren't lobbyists for phone companies or cable companies or television networks or anything. They're ordinary citizens (relatively speaking) who've gotten interested in telecom regulation and doing public interest activism on that topic.
This is, in my view, one of the aspects of the netroots that gets most overlooked in the media coverage I tend to see. This nexus of issues is an area where until very recently the conversation was entirely dominated by interested corporations. There was no equivalent to labor unions or environmental groups to anything else in civil society to way in. And now there is! It gets much less attention than anti-war activism or sending mean emails to journalists, but these telecom and media regulation issues are a very big deal to the netroots. People didn't just show up to hear Copps speak (and he's not a very good speaker), but gave him a standing ovation when he took the podium and are laughing at his broadband policy jokes (which aren't, in my view, especially funny). And it's not just an audience of obsessives, either, of the dozen or so people I recognize here none of them are specialists in this area as such.
Apologies for the bad photo, I should really invest in a digital SLR like the guy sitting next to me has.
Well, it looks like The Weekly Standard and the right-wing blogosphere really had the goodsturn out to be full of shit, though it does turn out that the incident with the soldiers making fun of the injured woman happened in a base in Kuwait rather than a base in Iraq. Nevertheless, despite being totally wrong, it's arguably mission accomplished for the right:
Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters. If further substantive information comes to light, TNR will, of course, share it with you.
And there you have it -- if the troops say things the right doesn't like, they get mau-maued into silence. Meanwhile, anyone who says the war may not be so fantastic hates the troops.
If you've ever read progressive blogs then no doubt you, like me, have heard complaints about the netroots being stereotyped as all full of Matt Yglesias types: young, male, persons. The complaints are always backed up with statistics, but actually attending the conference really brings it home. By eyeball, the attendee pool here is whiter than the United States as a whole (and certainly whiter than the Democratic Party voting base as a whole) and does seem to include fewer genuinely old people, but it's a very, very, very mixed-aged group of very normal looking people.
The panelists at the FCC discussion told a story about a teenage girl getting arrested for filming a 20 second clip of Transformers in order to encourage her brother to go see the movie. I almost didn't believe it, or at least felt like the anecdote must have been exaggerated in some way, but Dave Weigel looked it up and it all checks out: "Sejas faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month in the July 17 incident."
Brian Beutler explains why there are so few outlets available here at YearlyKos:
The McCormick Convention Center is, unsurprisingly, operated by a series of labor groups who, working hand in hand, rip apart the building and put it back together to fit the needs of whichever group happens to be renting space here. So for YearlyKos, the teamsters, and the plumbers, and the electricians all come in to haul partitions, and divert piping, and... lay wiring. One catch is, of course, that the more wiring you need, the more you have to pay. The other, less obvious catch, is that any wiring you try to do yourself--running extension chords and power strips across the room--might well violate your contract and cost you a big fine. So the result is a lot of dead laptop batteries. At a frickin' blogger convention.
But now here's the catch. At his booth, John Edwards has three seemingly unauthorized power strips (one of which is pictured above) and Barack Obama has one. Hillary Clinton's booth, by contrast, is clean, proving once again that experience makes a difference.
Looks like young Wizards forward Andray Blatche got himself "arrested Thursday on sexual solicitation charges."
This is what I feel like went mysteriously missing from the Beltway conversation about David Vitter showing up on the DC madam's list. We don't know exactly what went down, but it certainly appears that Vitter did things that get people arrested. I don't, personally, think people should be arrested for what Vitter and Blatche both seem to have done. But one way or another, the only way to have any kind of sensible vice laws is for the laws to applied with a modicum of fairness.
I spent a decent portion of the afternoon wandering the halls, slightly dazed at the notion that out there in the MSM a controversy was raging over Barack Obama saying he could rule out the idea of using nuclear weapons to fight al-Qaeda. Hillary Clinton, it seems, disagrees. But why on earth would you use nuclear weapons to fight al-Qaeda? You use nukes to destroy large portions of cities. Remember counterinsurgency?
I ran into the Great Orange Satan himself (pictured) yesterday in the early evening, and he was at pains to point out that the YearlyKos Convention has only a loose association with the DailyKos blog (YearlyKos Executive Director Gina Cooper is also a DailyKos fellos) and nothing in particular to do with Markos himself.
Indeed, it's not even totally clear to me that's there's an especially logical or organic connection to bloggers and blogging in play here. Obviously, that's the causal origin of the gathering. But bloggers are interested in the issues, and an awful lot of what's going on here is just around issues -- foreign policy, telecom policy, education, church/state issues, whatever -- issues that activists care about whether on- or off-line. It seems to me that this confab is probably going to evolve over time in a more generic direction and be something like an inverse CPAC rather than something closely linked with a particular subculture.
Gregory Djerejian (himself a right-leaning former war supporter!) has an excellent takedown of the O'Hanlon/Pollack op-ed that one might deem a "fisking" were the term not so gauche. Meanwhile, this morning I saw Fox News still hyping the op-ed and hyping the upcoming O'Hanlon/Pollack appearance on Fox News Sunday (Democrats who appear on GOP propganda outlets to attack fellow Democrats are everyone's favorite kind of Democrats) with a heavy emphasis on the idea that the inconsistency between the tone of the op-ed and other recent analysis by the dynamic duo should add credibility to the analysis since they changed their minds after seeing firsthand what was really happening in Iraq.
The privileging of firsthand information is, in this case, totally unwarranted. Obviously, firsthand knowledge of conditions in Iraq would be a good thing to have. But as best as one can tell, the two Brookings fellows didn't really get that. Instead, they took a week-long guided tour organized by official sources. And they did this not because they're lazy but because it's too dangerous for people to walk around Iraq without a military escort. Under those circumstances, assertions about troops' morale need to be taken with a grain of salt (outside analysts are probably steered toward the peppiest troops) and assertions about an improved security situation need to be firmly located int eh context of it being too dangerous for people to walk around Iraq without a military escort.
Powerstrip issues aside, John Edwards wins the "best info booth at YearlyKos 2007" primary in a landslide thanks to his inflatable furniture. Garrett Graff (pictured above), of Washingtonian magazine and formerly of Howard Dean's presidential campaign, agreed that if Joe Trippi had thought of the inflatable furniture gambit back during the 2004 cycle that might have been enough to put Dean over the top. Graff reports that People Powered Howard was unduly dependent on beanbag chairs (the Vermont hippie influence?) and that Edwards seems to be learning from his mistakes.
I've been to a lot of foreign policy panels in my day, and the composition of the panels tends to skew even more male-dominated than is true for other kinds of political panels. The audience, too, for such events tends to be overwhelmingly male. Right now, though, I'm at a panel where three of the four panelists -- Amira al Hussaini (left), Amanda Michel (center), and Suzanne Nossel (right) -- are women (the one dude, Ari Melber, is hidden behind the podium). It serves as a reminder of how rare it is to see a mostly-women panel unless the topic at hand is specifically "women's issues" or something similar.
And though I guess it might be a coincidence, it's striking that there seem to be a lot more women in the audience than you normally see at a foreign policy event.
I was a little frightened when I heard that Hendrick Hertzberg was going to be blogging the YearlyKos Convention for The New Yorker. He's a much better writer than I am, and what better way for America's most prestigious weekly to wreak vengeance on The Atlantic for poaching Jeffrey Goldberg than to show me up.
But check out the results: a lousy two posts so far -- that's barely a blog! And that's my commitment to you, the reader. This site's writing may not be the best or the best spelled, but there will always be a lot of it.
Did Mitt Romney really say that the U.S. should emulate Hezbollah in using medical clinics and other health care goodies as part of a diplomatic outreach in the Third World, as World Net Daily is reporting? Did he really cite Hezbollah's welfare programs in South Lebanon as a model for U.S. aid to poor nations — what we should do to promote "freedom"? Tell me he did not.
Romney's precisely correct. Obviously, the United States government shouldn't become "like Hezbollah" but it's obvious that one way Hezbollah and Hamas have gained a lot of support is by providing helpful services to people in need. If the U.S. wants to do effective political outreach -- or wants to help democratic forces strengthen their own positions in Muslim-majority countries -- that's going to require people to roll up their sleeves and do some of that kind of work themselves. I know Francis Fukuyama says some smart things about this in his book, but I can't find anything by him on this online.
Number one on my list of "panels I'm bitter I wasn't invited to speak on" is the one I'm attending right now: "The Next Progressive Foreign Policy" featuring Steve Clemons, Ken Baer, and Peter Beinart, which doesn't seem like a particularly netrootsy crew. I'll be interested in what Peter has to say though, because I haven't actually read that much by him on foreign policy since his book, and the book, despite the criticism it took, entailed a substantial turn to the left.
UPDATE: See, for example, I agreed with something like 97 percent of what Beinart said in his opening presentation. The essential fact of the modern world is that the United States wants to worry about problems inside other countries (terrorists in failed states, epidemic disease in countries with bad public health systems, nuclear programs in Iran, etc.) but that to do anything about those problems in an effective way, we need to do it in a legitimate way, which means through rules and institutions that we are willing to obey.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Clemons then correctly adds a dimension that had been missing from what Beinart said about the need to move away from the super-militarized approach to the world where the US spends about half the world's total defense dollars and seems to get less-and-less in terms of beneficial outcomes in exchange.
AND ANOTHER: To be clear, Ken isn't just "on" the panel he's moderating it because he was asked to organize it.
Peter Beinart was just talking about why he came to the view that we need to withdraw from Iraq, essentially without residual forces, and start working on damage control in other parts of the world including a rapprochement with Iran.. His basic argument is very similar to mine and should be familiar to readers, but he mentioned an important source of establishmentarian support for this view, Steven Biddle at the Council on Foreign Relations. Check out, for example, this bit of congressional testimony:
Public support for the President’s surge policy in Iraq is at a very low ebb. Yet many Americans remain reluctant to withdraw from Iraq altogether. The result has been growing interest in a variety of compromise proposals that would reduce US troop levels but stop short of total withdrawal. Are these sound choices for US policy?
The answer is no.
Quite so. I hope the presidential candidates can be made to see this before January 2009. It's depressing to think of the war lasting that long, but even more depressing to imagine it continuing, CNAS-style, for years and years after the election.
Peter Beinart says the essence of liberal foreign policy is to create a situation where the United States works through institutions and does "not need to choose between isolationism and imperialism." I think that's exactly right.
I'd sort of been wondering why the National Education Association was sponsoring a lunch featuring Harold Meyerson and Andy Stern on the global economy. What's the teacher's union angle? Well, they seized the opporunity to give every attendee not only a pretty gross box lunch but also this one-pager (PDF) deriding NCLB as the "No Contractor Left Behind" law responsible for the "Halliburton-ization of America's public schools."
It's, um, not all that convincing. For example, "McGraw Hill - Textbook-maker with documented ties to George Bush. Has the 'lion's share' of contracts in Texas." For one thing, this has nothing to do with NCLB. And, more to the point, that the school system produces revenue for textbook makers is hardly a scandal. Should the kids not have books? And so it goes down the list.
Yes, if people take more standardized tests, then some companies will make money doing test prep, but that, on its own, is hardly a reason to avoid tests. A carbon tax could create big profits for windmill manufacturers, but proponents of curbing global warming aren't part of an insidious plot to "Halliburtonize" the energy system.
As a lead-in to talking about how unionized white men vote very differently from non-union white men, Andy Stern made a joke about how maybe as reparations for not letting women vote for the first 100+ years of the country's existence, perhaps men shouldn't be allowed to vote for a hundred years or so. I had a girlfriend years ago who used to say that, too, and I kind of think it makes sense. Once, I went to see Susan Moller Okin speak (on her multiculturalism is bad for women thing) and wanted to ask her about this, but couldn't get myself called on.
Insofar as Hillary Clinton intends to listen to Gene Sperling on economics and Barack Obama intends to listen to Austan Goolsbee, it doesn't seem that they're going to have a great deal to disagree about. Thus, after Sperling spoke at the panel on the economy I'm sitting in, Goolsbee didn't exactly lay into his analysis. He did, however, rather pointedly include the cost of the Iraq War on his list of "things that have changed" about the economy since the beginning of the Clinton administration, noting that with the $1 trillion+ that were spent on Iraq, one could easily have paid for all the various safety-net enhancements that Sperling had been saying we should adopt.
Pardon the coastal provincialism, but I'd been catching glimpses of this giant body of water that extended all the way out to the horizon and contained sailboats and it just dawned on me that that's not an ocean, it's a really big lake.
Now that the DLC has a blog, I wonder if they'll devote nearly as many posts to being used as a club with which the RNC can bludgeon the Democratic Party as they have to complaining (one, two, three) about Noam Scheiber's op-ed from last Saturday?
There's a great article in today's Washington Post that goes beyond merely noting how dysfunctional the government of Nouri al-Maliki and his party is in Iraq, but tries to help explain why:
At times consumed by conspiracy theories, Maliki and his Dawa party elite operate much as they did when they plotted to overthrow Saddam Hussein -- covertly and concerned more about their community's survival than with building consensus among Iraq's warring groups, say Iraqi politicians and analysts and Western diplomats. [...]
But Dawa members and other Shiites remained suspicious of the motives of the United States and the Sunnis, partly because of the Shiites' history of being oppressed and betrayed, including what they viewed as an American failure to back a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
On the one hand, this makes the leaders of the Shiite parties hesitant to compromise with Sunnis. It also, in a totally understandable way, makes them freak out about things like the U.S. military giving training and support to local armed Sunni groups that we're partnering with to fight al-Qaeda. They have no trust in Iraq's Sunni elites and no trust in the United States. At the same time, trying to work with Sunnis who are willing to cooperate with us against al-Qaeda is the right strategy for us. Except that the real right strategy for us is to recognize that things are far, far, far too screwed up for us to unscrew them at this point.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eli J. Medellin
Atrios, or as we call him in real life, "Duncan," has been wandering around wondering why there's such a thing as a foreign policy community. It's a good question. The consequences of its existence don't seem to be particularly beneficial. Steve Clemons is talking at a panel on foreign policy, blogging, and activism and gives voice to something that I think a lot of us tend to suspect, saying he was one of the few members of said community to go on television and speak against the Iraq War not because he was the only one to think it was a bad idea, but "because everyone else was a coward."
"People like me," he says, "were being fed quite a bit of inside information from people who were every bit as horrified" but very few people said anything. And it's true -- alongside the famously pro-war elements of the establishment, there's a shockingly large number of people at places like Brookings, CSIS, the CFR, etc. where if you try to look up what they said about Iraq it turns out that they said . . . nothing at all.
His perspective, he says, is that Washington is "a corrupt town." From that perspective, he says that "the political-intellectual arenas is essentially a cartel" -- a cartel that's become extremely timid and risk-averse in the face of a neoconservative onslaught -- and "blogs allow smart people to break the cartel." That all seems very true to me, and I'm not sure what I have to add.
For years, Washington’s conventional wisdom has held that candidates for President are judged not by their wisdom, but rather by their adherence to hackneyed rhetoric that make little sense beyond the Beltway. When asked whether he would use nuclear weapons to take out terrorist targets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Barack Obama gave the sensible answer that nuclear force was not necessary, and would kill too many civilians. Conventional wisdom held this up as a sign of inexperience. But if experience leads you to make gratuitous threats about nuclear use – inflaming fears at home and abroad, and signaling nuclear powers and nuclear aspirants that using nuclear weapons is acceptable behavior, it is experience that should not be relied upon.
Barack Obama’s judgment is right. Conventional wisdom is wrong. It is wrong to propose that we would drop nuclear bombs on terrorist training camps in Pakistan, potentially killing tens of thousands of people and sending America’s prestige in the world to a level that not even George Bush could take it. We should judge presidential candidates on their judgment and their plans, not on their ability to recite platitudes.
Now, obviously, the next step would be to develop some clearer actual policy differentiation. Silly as it was for Hillary Clinton's campaign to criticize Obama for being unwilling to launch a nuclear attack on Pakistan, I'm pretty sure President Clinton won't use nuclear weapons in South Asia either. But since both campaigns seem to think that public disagreements about foreign policy serve their interests, maybe I can hold hope open that they'll move on to some broader issues.
John "The Israel Lobby" Mearsheimer isn't shying away from controversy. He says he sees four options for Israel/Palestine -- A two-state solution, a binational solution, the expulsion of the Arab population from a Greater Israel, and the construction of a Greater Israel governed along apartheid lines -- and that he thinks the apartheid outcome is the most likely one. He says Israeli leaders, despite agreeing to the UN partition plan, have never been interested in seeing the creation of a viable Palestinian state and he includes Yitzhak Rabin (though he says the Palestinians got "tantalizingly close" to a viable state at Camp David and Taba) in that category.
To Mearsheimer, the key point is that the mainstream Israeli view would create a Palestinian state that doesn't control its own airspace, its own borders, or its own water supply -- conditions that he says don't create the basis for a viable state. I don't imagine you'll see any of the Democratic politicians stopping by the conference tomorrow endorsing these views or anything like it.
Sources in John Edwards' campaign assure me that the consulted with the relevant union officials before installing power strips in their campaign booths. It was wrong of me to post on the subject without checking with them first, which resulted in an error for which I apologize.
The best possible evidence for the idea that the revolution is, in some sense, over and the gates have been crashed is probably less the politicians who'll be coming later today to court the netroots than it was yesterday's Time Magazine party at Triad Sushi Lounge. It was full of completely establishmentarian people (including once and former key Clinton economic advisor Gene Sperling, pictured above talking to The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza) from the worlds of politics and the MSM chatting happily with people from the several different walks of internetdom: wonkosphere blog-pundit types like me, leading netroots activists, political staffers in charge of new media communications for sundry politicians and non-profits.
Not that anyone didn't know this already on some level, but it really was striking to get the visual of yesterday's gate crashers quite literally mingling with the dread establishment at a cocktail party. The question that nobody seems to know the answer to, though, is whether the revolution ended because the revolutionaries won, or because they sold out? The boring, but probably boring-because-accurate, answer is that it's a little of both.
Somewhat along the lines of the post below, what is one to make of the fact that The New York Timesran an article exclusively dedicated to the fact that Hillary Clinton changed her schedule to be able to attend a smaller "breakout session" with bloggers (each yKos attendee was asked to pick one candidate's session to attend) in a smaller-group format than you'll see at the big presidential forum? I mean, how interesting is a politician's schedule change? Not that interesting, I would think, but the Times may well know its readers much better than I do.
Incidentally, at a panel on public opinion yesterday, Chris Bowers made the point that there's actually nothing particularly surprising about netrootsian dislike of Clinton. Clinton's strongest constituencies -- working class women, Hispanics, etc. -- are grossly under-represented in the blogosphere. One would expect any group of Democrats who are disproportionately prosperous, disproportionately well-educated, disproportionately male, and disproportionately prone to self-ID as liberals to be a group with much less love for Clinton than the party as a whole has.
Looks like this morning's congressional leadership forum has been canceled since too many of the congressional leaders need to stay in DC for votes and such thanks to some procedural wrangling. That's too bad, I was really sort of more interested in their thoughts than in hearing from the presidential candidates, since one has many, many, many opportunities to read presidential candidates' speeches and more than a few chances to see them live. Congressional leaders, by contrast, tend to be shadowy figures granted the occasional sound bite here or there but rarely able to lay out an account of what they think they're doing.
Years ago, Matt Miller introduced me to the concept of "Still True Today" -- the basic point being that a lot of the most important facts in the world rarely get reported because they don't constitute "news." The blogosphere, unfortunately, really hasn't done much to ameliorate this. I could, for example, write a post every single day about how hundreds of millions of people around the world are living in absolutely deplorable conditions and we ave the power to substantially ameliorate that. But I don't, because there's no peg.
This morning, though, I'm attending a ONE Campaign panel on just this, so I do have the opportunity. I don't have any real expertise or analysis to offer on the subject of aid per se, but from a blogging/activist point of view, I'll simply say that this is a topic where a quite broad range of elites are eager to see US policies changed -- it's a very bipartisan group. What's lacking is evidence of a mass constituency that particularly cares, which, I guess, is where the idea of netroots outreach comes in. At any rate, this is probably the most important issue there is.
Last night, over drinks, I wound up in one of those "if liberals like humanitarianism, why don't you want o indefinitely prolong the hopeless and catastrophic war in Iraq?" arguments and I have, naturally enough, a bunch of Iraq-related answers.
When Gene Sperling got to talking this morning about his work with the Global Campaign for Education, aimed at ensuring every child on the planet a chance to go to primary school, though, I got downright anrgy about this sort of humanitarian rationale for Iraq. The crux of the matter is that Sperling's big, longshot legislative dream is this bill sponsored by Senators Hillary Clinton and Gordon Smith "to require the United States to do its fair share -- up to $3 billion dollars by 2012 -- in meeting the Millennium Development Goal promise of universal education by 2015." He was very excited that Senators Obama and Edwards have also committed to spending $2-$3 billion on this.
Meanwhile, for 2008 the White House says we need to spend $5.3 billion on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, making me fairly certain the Iraq share alone is worth more than $3 billion. The National Priorities Project sees about $450 billion as having already been spent on Iraq. If you'd taken that as a lump sum and put it in a safe investment vehicle that secured you a very modest 2 percent real rate of return per year, you'd have about triple what Sperling was looking for.
Now, obviously, you wouldn't actually want to finance global education spending that way, but it's telling as a thought experiment about the bankruptcy of a lot of the "humanitarian" rationales that have been offered for the war.
Ezra Klein just got himself mentioned in a question at the health care forum, namely what is it, exactly, that Hillary Clinton learned from her previous experience with health care. It's a good question. Clinton, in response, hit the ball out of the park. I don't even really remember what she said -- something about evil corporations being evil -- but it was a great answer and right in her sweet spot at the nexus of experience and partisan loyalty.
Oh, man. Bill Richardson just repeated his call for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the constitution. The audience, showing what I think is a pretty impressive level of knowledge of budget policy, erupted in boos. And rightly so. This is a terrible idea. Fortunately, Richardson's not going to be president, but imagine if we'd had such a thing in place during, say, the second world war. I dunno what Richardson thinks he's doing.
Edwards is slaying with every answer. The interesting thing is that his answers aren't any different from what I've heard at previous debates. His style, however, seems to me to work much better with a live audience that's allowed to applaud. His emotiveness gets the crowd roaring, and he's really good at surfing on the applause (In person, at least. I've heard that sometimes applause effects sound different on television).
Meanwhile, crazy Mike Gravel brilliantly answered a question about his "fair tax" scheme by noting "don't worry about the fair tax, it could never pass congress" prompting worthy laughter from the audience.
I wrote this morning that it would make a lot more sense to spend the money we're spending in Iraq on promoting universal education instead, and John Edwards said exactly that in the midst of answering a question about Pakistan.
See here. Does anyone actually pay attention to Bill Kristol? If Rupert Murdoch decided tomorrow that he didn't want to subsidize Kristol's magazine and pay him to appear on his television network, would someone snap him up?
Hillary Clinton got some boos for her defense of lobbyists and, indeed, her initial response -- which amounted to pointing out that some Democratic-leaning interest groups have lobbyists, too -- wasn't very compelling. The second time around, though, she got the right answer, namely that lobbyists do their jobs because they get hired by people and Obama and Edwards take money from the executives and so forth who do the hiring, so the whole distinction is basically meaningless.
As best I can tell, that's totally correct; refusing to take money from lobbyists is just a kind of meaningless grandstanding.
I agree with Brian Beutler. I'm struggling with how to express the fact that Barack Obama was stunningly impressive in . . . a secret off-the-record session with a few bloggers that I can't really talk about since it was off-the-record. It was, to me, much more compelling than what he offered at the debate on the record.
Long story short: Candidates should save their impressive remarks for on the record sessions.
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Heads in the Sand
