Along with financial crises, another important issue about which I know nothing is India. Tyler Cowen strongly recommendsIndia After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, "a truly excellent book by Ramachandra Guha, well over 800 pages and yes it will be finished." Sounds like a good introduction to the subject. Reihan Salam, however, says he picked the book up on Cowen's recommendation "And it's bad. Really, really bad."
Reihan, however, concedes that "At present, there is embarrassingly little to choose from, which is perhaps the only good reason to recommend Guha's profoundly lackluster effort." Isaac Chotiner seems to be somewhere in the middle but closer to Cowen's view. Thinking about the depths of my ignorance on this subject, I realize that I don't even have any idea what the controversial issues in a history of India might be, so I'm really lost at sea.
I actually watched some of the US Senior Men's Basketball team demolishing Canada yesterday afternoon, and I have to say that that was some boring, boring stuff. I'm all for the US fielding better teams than what we had in '04 and '06 but the kind of dominance that seems on display in this FIBA Americas tournament is just profoundly dull. The good news is that NFL is just around the corner and the long, dark sports desert of the summer is coming to an end.
I was gone all day yesterday, but when I got home I saw my copy of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt and I'm eager to give it a read. The originally essay certainly had its flaws, but it was much better than the demagogic counter-campaign it unleashed.
When you look at something like, say, Cuba policy it's unfortunate for our policy options to be circumscribed by the extreme views of a small domestic lobby, but it's not obvious that this has any fundamental significance. America's policies in Israel's neighborhood have, by contrast, taken on dramatically higher levels of significance over the past six years or so. The original essay prompted a little debate on this but, frankly, too little -- and I'm very eager to see what the authors have been able to do with some greater length at their disposal.
I want to just reiterate how crazy the idea that we're ten years from victory in Iraq by briefly recollecting America's attempted intervention in Lebanon's 1980s-vintage civil war. We went in, you'll recall, in 1982, about six years into the fighting, and really expanded our mandate in 1983. This led to the bombing of the Marine barracks later in '83, and US forces were withdrawn in early 1984.
Some people think the Reagan administration made the right call by withdrawing; others think it did the wrong thing. Nobody, however, regard the intervention as a great success. Nevertheless, the civil war ended just five years later with the 1989 Taif Agreement. To say that our current policy is working and needs just ten more years to stabilize Iraq is lunacy -- just leaving stands a perfectly good chance of working just as quickly at radically lower cost.
UPDATE: Yes, I know that the total duration of the Lebanese Civil War was longer than that. The point is to put the ten years time horizon into some perspective. Even an effort to stabilize a country that everyone agrees was a failure, like America's 1983 peacekeeping efforts in Lebanon, can come fewer than ten years away from the dawn of stability. By a similar token, the American Civil War ended fewer than ten years after James Buchanan's blunders. Ten years isn't just longer than America has political will to sustain, it's genuinely too long. Policies that work accomplish their goals faster than that, something that's supposed to unfold at the speed Petraeus is talking about isn't working at all.
In "back to the future" mode, the name being mentioned these days is Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist who was interim prime minister and has strong support among Sunnis, even though he's a secular Shiite. Allawi has bundles of money to help buy political support, but it comes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, rather than the United States.
Being mentioned by whom? And why? Might Allawi have published any op-eds in prominent newspapers that Ignatius works for? Mightn't there have been some reporting recently on this "money to help buy political support" going to a powerful Republican lobbyist and communications operation here in DC? Meanwhile, this description of where the money comes from seems pretty misleading. A good friend of his runs a CIA-funded "Iraqi" intelligence service that doesn't report to Iraq's government. Another friend stole a billion dollars (much of it presumably from the US Treasury originally) from the Iraqi government.
If only the progressive blogosphere weren't so full of extremist views, profanity, and personal attacks:
I was in Chicago last week, I said, "Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk!" Obama, he’s a piece of sh*t and I told him to suck on my machine gun! Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, "Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch. And since I'm in California, how about Barbara Boxer? She might want to suck on my machine gun! Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these, you worthless whore!"
Naturally, I find myself in agreement with Steve Benen's take on David Broder's latest outburst of third party enthusiasm. I feel like it's worth mentioning here how little time third party enthusiasts ever seem to spend thinking about the rise of the Republican Party -- the only actual precedent for anything of the sort. They often seem to talk as if Abraham Lincoln was just some kind of somewhat disaffected dude sitting around somewhere with this really insightful speech about a how divided against itself, threw his hat in the ring, and -- bam! -- tired old Whig and Democrat ideologies are shunted aside in favor of a bold new era of pragmatism and bloody civil war.
One can't do justice to the actual origins of the Republican Party in a blog post, but suffice it to say that it didn't work like that. The history of meaningful third party anti-slavery politics goes back to the abolitionists' Liberty Party in 1840. They later moderated their agenda somewhat, added the support of many breakaway anti-slavery Democrats, and became the Free Soil Party starting in 1848. This party had some very substantial adherents, but still didn't do very well. Then, as the national debate over slavery grew ever-more-intense, breakaway anti-slavery Whigs joined the movement that was now further reconfigured as the Republican Party. This new party did well enough to become a "second party," polling 33 percent while the Whigs got just 21.5 percent. With the Whigs on the wane, more support flowed to the surging Republicans this time around, but even so Lincoln only got 39 percent of the vote in 1860 and won only because the Democratic Party fell apart with 30 percent of the population supporting its northern faction and 18 percent supporting its southern faction.
It's very hard to imagine something like that happening in the United States, but more to the point it just can't happen overnight or in a top-down way. The Republican Party had senators, members of the house, governors, etc. in its ranks before it won the presidency -- it was a real political party put together with much effort over a couple of decades.
There's an awful lot wrong with this Moshe Ya'alon op-ed in today's LA Times and I don't have the time to go through the whole thing right now, but just note the first sentence: "After a few years of benign neglect, Israel is back on the itineraries of well-meaning foreign emissaries."
Israel was hardly being neglected by the United States during the years before Condoleezza Rice semi-rediscovered the Arab-Israeli peace process -- it was, then as now, our country's largest recipient of taxpayer dollars. Less quantifiably, but also significantly, Israel continued to receive a very large quantity of American diplomatic support. One can sympathize to some extent with Israeli officials feeling like their country attracts a disproportionate quantity of busybodies pushing peace plans, but while it would be one thing for Ya'alon to genuinely argue that Israel should be left to its own devices, it's another thing entirely to say that the United States should just be totally indifferent to how our most generously subsidized client state relates to its neighbors and to the millions of stateless Arabs over which it rules.
Didn't Kevin Drum and other leftish bloggers sneer when I suggested that rising unskilled wages were in the offing? I think they did! ... How much do the people who serve crow make?
The only trouble is that Kaus hasn't provided any evidence of any unusual increase in wages for the unskilled driven by a recent immigration crackdown. The fact that states featuring high levels of job growth are seeing wages go up seems utterly unremarkable. Jared Bernstein's review of the most recent BLS data -- not designed to prove any particular point about immigration -- indicates that nothing in particular is happening: "Hourly wages continue to grow around 4.0% per year—up 3.9% in July compared to last year — and the jobless rate has hovered between 4.4% and 4.6% since last September. Thus, underlying conditions in the job market do not appear to have changed markedly this year."
As of July (i.e., before the recent problems in the world of high finance), in other words, the economy had been growing moderately in 2007 just as it was in 2006, and so wages were growing at a moderate pace.
Alberto Gonzales, the president's unloved Attorney-General, seems to have resigned. Conventional wisdom started to congeal over the weekend that for a replacement Bush was going to try to find a relatively uncontroversial figure who'd have an easy time getting confirmed.
That might happen, but my best guess is that Bush will go out of his way to pick somebody fairly controversial -- someone whose confirmation liberals will find outrageous -- and then start loudly and immediately declaring that each hour's delay in confirming his nominee is putting thousands of lives at risk. The hope would be to generate one of these situations where all the Republicans plus maybe a dozen Democrats vote to confirm, and then progressives spend the next month arguing with themselves over it, and even the Democrats who reliable agree to surrender on anything terror-related get criticized in fall '08 for being soft on terror.
This is, perhaps, the achilles heel of Chinese authoritarianism. The Soviet Union was full of just astounding things, like the incredible shrinking Aral Sea pictured above. China, by contrast, used to be too poor for anything truly awful to happen on the environmental front, but capitalism has set the table for nightmare scenarios. Democracies have, obviously, our share of environmental problems, but this really is one of those situations where it's the worst form of government except for all the others.
A skeptical Ann Friedman links to a Guardian article proclaiming the "feminization" of the internet:
Forget the 20-something man playing online fantasy football and selling motorbike parts on eBay. The internet has a new user.
When a British newspaper writes "football" they mean "soccer," right? But do people really put together fantasy soccer teams? The whole fantasy sports concept seems heavily dependent on the availability of statistics, and soccer doesn't seem to me to have enough.
This debate (one, two, three) about Barack Obama and genocide between Hilzoy and Jamie Kirchick over at Andrew's site reminds me of a broader point I've been meaning to make forever.
When you look at different takes on the Darfur situation, you see them divided into two main camps. On the one hand, you have people who are interested in Darfur who don't normally write about humanitarian issues or Africa, but who do frequently write in support of militarism and in derogation of the UN. In this camp you have Kirchick, The Weekly Standard, Leon Wieseltier, Marty Peretz, etc. These people believe, naturally enough, that unilateral American military intervention in Darfur is the only responsible option. On the other hand, you have people whose interest in Darfur stems from a larger interest in humanitarian issues and in Africa. I'd take the International Crisis Group, the Enough Project, and Africa Action as typical of the latter. If you follow the links, you'll see that none of these organizations think that what Kirchick is saying about this is correct.
Meanwhile, as Kirchick himself notes, Obama is pretty close to Samantha Power who wrote the book on genocide. Like the people in the second camp, she's a skeptic about unilateral military intervention as the prime tool of fighting genocide. Indeed, she explains in the book that she thinks this kind of Kirchick-style thinking is counterproductive; sending people the message that if you care about this issue you need to sign on for a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention leads far more people to say "I should stop caring about this issue" than it leads to say "I should support a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention." Thus, they favor thinking pragmatically about actions that might realistically be implemented.
The difference, though, is that if you're more interested in wielding Darfur as a bludgeon against liberals, the UN, Arabs, etc. than you are in saving people's lives, this kind of pragmatism becomes less appealing.
Officers are trained to work on the "how" of a problem and they never are allowed to question the judgment of the decision itself. The administration called on generals to plan a war, but it was never their role to think about whether going to war was a good decision. Is this a good way to train the highest level of advisers to the commander in chief? Probably not.
This is inspired by Fred Kaplan who takes the view that the officer's corps is repeating the mistakes condemned in H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty where he argues that the Vietnam-era military "betrayed their professional obligations by failing to provide unvarnished military advice to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara as they plunged into the Southeast Asian quagmire."
I'm not 100 percent sure about this. It seems to me that insofar as the generals are going to disagree with civilian officials, it makes sense for them to be somewhat subtle about it. At the end of the day, it's up to civilians to decide whether or not to start a war, and with good reason officers want to avoid actions that will render the chain of command unworkable. The trouble is that when officers try to be duly discreet, they just get ignored if people don't want to listen.
An excellent example is the case of General Eric Shinseki. He testified in public, before congress, that it would require "on the order of several hundred thousand" soldiers to secure Iraq. To an uninformed member of the public (as I was at the time) this sounds like professional military advice on a technical military question. As we can now see in this era of "surge," however, the Pentagon can't deploy several hundred thousand troops to Iraq -- there just aren't enough people in the whole Army. One has to assume that, as Chief of Staff of the Army, Shinseki knew perfectly well how many soldiers the Army contains. He was saying, in other words, that it was his opinion that stabilizing Iraq would be impossible.
His message was just ignored. And to a substantial extent, it continues to be ignored, as one still hears this frequently cited as an example of Bush and Rumsfeld mishandling the invasion. But unless you assume that Shinseki was just totally unaware of Army logistics, it's pretty clear that he was trying to send a message that we shouldn't invade Iraq without doing anything insubordinate. Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or John Warner or Richard Lugar or Tom Lantos could have asked their staff "hundreds of thousands of troops: can we do that?" and they would have heard back "no." But the politicians who wanted to back the war didn't want to hear such things.
Besides which, it wasn't actually a secret in elite quarters that the professional military thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq, anymore than it was a secret that diplomats and intelligence professionals (to say nothing of international relations academics and middle east studies specialists) thought it was a bad idea to invade Iraq. As this classic June 10, 2002 New Republic editorial sneered "That the military brass opposes going to war shouldn't surprise anyone not frozen in amber."
Last week, as thousands of Europeans took to the streets to protest American plans to topple Saddam Hussein, a similar cry went up along the Potomac. It didn't come from liberal editorial writers; and it didn't come from Democratic members of Congress. No, the opposition to invading Iraq came from the very force that would be doing the invading: the U.S. military. We know this because high-ranking officers have been leaking like sieves--to The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and others--about how silly they consider the whole enterprise to be. In the Post, for instance, "one top general" told reporter Thomas Ricks that "the 'Iraq hysteria' he detected last winter in some senior Bush administration officials has been diffused." And indeed, over the past week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush himself have gone to unusual lengths to downplay the possibility of military action against Saddam. We find that disappointing and hope that in the coming months the president will remember what he seemed to understand so well in the searing weeks after September 11: The case for taking on Saddam doesn't require believing that an invasion carries no risks, but merely that they pale beside the risk of allowing his regime to remain in power. But in the meantime, the president needs to make another decision: He needs to fire some of his generals. Not because they oppose going to war with Iraq, but because they have been advertising their opposition in the nation's newspapers.
Under the circumstances, I really don't think that generals speaking out more loudly would have done any good. Sure, if they spoke out more forcefully Bush might have come under more attack in the press from folks like TNR for his famous habit of being overly-tolerant of dissent and hyper-deferential to expert advice, but it wouldn't have stopped the march to war.
The Atlantic's website has a kind of review essay by Robert Kaplan about the "forgotten" Vietnam literature that provides a kind of user's guide to the revisionist accounts of the war that the president has decided to endorse. To me, the noteworthy thing about this case is how hollow it is even on its own terms. For contemporary political purposes, here's the key point:
While historians cite 1968 as a turning point because of the home front's reaction to the Tet offensive, the My Lai massacre, and the protests at the Democratic party convention in Chicago, on the ground in Vietnam, 1968 marked a different trend: William Westmoreland was replaced by Creighton Abrams, population security rather than enemy body counts became the measure of merit, "clear and hold" territory replaced the dictum of "search and destroy," and building up the South Vietnamese Army became the top priority. "There came a time when the war was won," even if the "fighting wasn't over," writes Lewis Sorley, a West Point graduate and career Army officer, in A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999). By the end of 1972, Sorley goes on, one could travel almost anywhere in South Vietnam in relative security, even as American ground forces were almost gone. [...] Sorley told me he isn't sure what would have happened had Congress not cut off aid to South Vietnam at about the time the ground situation was at its most hopeful. He felt that a respectable case might be made that it would have survived.
The question naturally arises that even if one accepts all of this, what would the point have been? Propping up the South Vietnamese government was an expensive and diplomatically costly proposition. The initial strategic rational for propping up the South Vietnamese government was that preventing South Vietnam from going Communist was necessary to prevent the triumph of Communism worldwide. In retrospect, however, while "a respectable case might be made" that South Vietnam could have been saved, we know conclusively that the strategic case in favor of saving it was mistaken.
Recently, an indefinite military commitment to South Vietnam has been repackaged as some kind of humanitarian gesture, but that boat won't float. The Saigon regime was a dictatorship like the northern one, and Abrams-era US military actions like the Christmas Bombings killed thousands of people. Insofar as the point of a military activity is to accomplish something worthwhile at some kind of reasonable cost, Abrams/Kissinger/Nixon never did anything of the sort. Now, it's not Creighton Abrams' fault that there was no good reason to expend vast resources propping up the shaky South Vietnamese government indefinitely, but it's still the case that whatever tactical accomplishments the forces under his command may or may not have achieved that nothing he did actually vindicates the political agenda of indefinitely continuing the war.
As best I can tell, David Petraeus' doctoral dissertation on learning the lessons of Vietnam is, as Brian Beutler says, an exercise in saying nothing at extraordinary length. Check out the thesis paragraph of his conclusions section:
History in general, and the American experience in Vietnam in particular, have much to teach us, but both must be used with discretion and neither should be pushed too far. The Vietnam analogy, for all its value as the most recent large-scale use of American force abroad, has limits. Most importantly, the applicability of the lessons drawn from Vietnam, just like the applicability of lessons taken from any other past event, always will depend on the circumstances of the particular situation at hand.
That's his conclusion. I even agree, but one would really hope for something firmer....
A colleague reminded me of this November 2003 column by Council on Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot:
Other statistics add to the context. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, 114 U.S. police officers died in the line of duty this year, almost exactly the number of service people who have been killed by Iraqi insurgents since May 1. And more than 41,000 people are killed on U.S. highways every year, according to the Department of Transportation. So during the last six months, while more than 300 Americans were dying in Iraq, more than 20,000 were dying on the roads at home.
Of course to "add to the context" one might have wanted to compare the number of soldiers in Iraq to the total population of the United States and one would have realized that, yes, serving in a war is more dangerous than driving a car. Boot did, however, presciently note that "the myopic media are focusing far too much on counting casualties and not enough on assessing the larger state of the campaign." Less presciently, he argued that the larger state of the campaign was very solid.
I'm trying to come up with clever suggestions for people Bush could nominate to be the new AG who could expect swift confirmations. Jim Comey seems like a solid choice. Alternatively, Olympia Snow, Arlen Spector or, more generally, any Republican Senator representing a state with a Democratic governor. Any other ideas? Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke?
There are few things that irk me more than when conservatives advocate for increased immigration for low wage workers by saying that immigrants do jobs that Americans don’t want. I don’t want to buy a slice of pizza for $45. It doesn’t mean I don’t like pizza! I’m not particularly interested in writing a book for the total payment of $9. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to write a book!
Raise. The. Wages. You’ll find plenty of workers. I promise.
There are, however, two sides to this. You oftentimes find immigrants working in low margin businesses where the business itself would be non-viable if the wages were substantially higher. All the people who serve pizza in my neighborhood are immigrants. That's not because no native-born people are "willing" to work serving slices of pizza. As Chris says, pay them enough and people will apply for the jobs. But on the other hand, if you're going to have to compensate your work force generously, it doesn't really make sense to have them selling something as cheap as a slice of pizza. You could raise prices but, as Chris says, nobody wants to pay a ton for a pizza. More likely, you're going to want to get into a higher margin business.
In a very intuitive sense, if you raise wages by restricting the labor supply, you're going to wind up reducing the total amount of work that gets done in the economy. It's not that each and every low-skill job that currently exists will become better-compensated. Rather, a number of those jobs proportional to the number of people who've been removed from the labor force -- most likely the ones where labor costs are the largest proportion of the total cost of the product -- will disappear. The remaining ones will then pay higher wages than they used to, and consumers will consume fewer labor-intensive goods
I say this as a confirmed meat-eater, but I'm pretty certain that when people look back on our era from 150-200 years in the future, they're going to find the widespread habit of consuming the seared flesh of mammals raised for the slaughter to have been a bizarre and barbaric practice. Thus, I've been reading with interest some posts kicking around on the subject of animal cruelty laws.
The conversation's been noteworthy for mostly playing out on libertarian blogs, which has, I think, closed off some possible avenues of conversation. It seems to me, for example, that one main reason we forbid cruelty to animals isn't because we're against cruelty to animals but because we want to discourage cruelty. If your friend liked to lobsters for fun, you'd worry. And not just for the sake of the lobster (I don't think arthropods have real nervous systems) but because people who get their jollies from torture seem dangerous. You'd worry more if he was torturing mice, and even more if he was torturing chimps. Maybe this is why we tend to come down much harder on cruelty per se -- hurting animals for the sake of hurting them -- than we do for instrumental meanness, subjecting them to bad conditions for the sake of making meat cheaper at the supermarket.
I don't think that line of reasoning works on libertarian terms, but since most people don't adhere to lunatic fringe ideologies, that's probably what's motivated a lot of people.
Here's my chosen excerpt from Evan Thomas' Newsweek cover story on the hunt for bin Laden:
When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war. By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan.
At any rate, you're welcome to pick your own paragraph, but that's my favorite. Certainly, it's a point that I think Democrats are going to want to emphasize in the 2008 election, which is why I think it would be smart for Democrats to, insofar as possible, not nominate people who think authorizing the invasion of Iraq was a good idea.
Tyler Cowen makes the case that it may be a good idea. How convincing this case is depends, I think, on how much faith you put in the marketing people working for book publishers. It's clear that their cover designs do provide some level of effective signals -- you can identify a book as "chick lit" that's unlikely to appeal to a male 26 year-old based on the cover -- but one has to wonder on how fine-grained a level this is going to work.
Hilarious as it is to learn that Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) got arrested in June in Minneapolis for "lewd conduct," I'm actually pretty puzzled by the legal issues in play here:
“At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moves his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present. I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area,” the report states.
Craig then proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times, and Karsnia noted in his report that “I could ... see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.”
Karsnia then held his police identification down by the floor so that Craig could see it.
Now, common sense indicates that the officer in question is correct and Craig's foot-tapping was a cruising signal, but surely tapping one's foot isn't a crime in Minnesota. Whatever Craig intended to do here, he doesn't seem, in fact, to have done anything lewd. I suppose that Craig, wanting to keep this whole thing hushed up, wouldn't have wanted to fight the charges, but it's still hard to see how he could have imagined that it wouldn't come out sooner or later.
Important followup quasi-reporting on the Larry Craig story below: According to Travelocity, you can't fly direct from DC to Boise. Connections are available via Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, or Denver, but the Minneapolis connections are faster than the alternatives. So it's not like Senator Craig was going to the Minneapolis airport just for the purpose of "lewd conduct."
As summer winds down, it becomes time to shift away from the commercial theater at Gallery Place and start spending more time at the Landmark Theater a few blocks away. First up was Interview based on a Dutch movie by the late Theo Van Gogh and man-oh-man is it bad. The film serves primarily as a reminder of why nobody likes actors, since the whole thing is obviously a couple of actors' notion of what a really good movie would be like -- totally contrived, meandering uninteresting story full of pointless twists and turns in the plot designed to let the performers show off. Nothing anyone does in this film makes any sense, at any point, on any level.
Rocket Science, written and directed by Jeffrey Blitz who made the popular documentary Spellbound, is much better. Still, it's pretty disappointing. There's a lot of good material here, certainly enough that I hope he writes and directs another movie down the road, but the story totally runs out of gas near the end.
The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, on the other hand, is really great. This is a documentary about Steve Wiebe's efforts to beat the Donkey Kong world record -- a quest wherein his greatest foe turns out to be not an animated gorilla, but the corrupt competitive classic video gaming establishment. You'll laugh, you'll cry, etc., and the film is surprisingly effective at moving beyond just mocking its protagonists. The title, however, is a little unfortunate. Either joke would be pretty fun, but making both simultaneously is tacky. But when a tacky title is the worst thing about your movie, you're in pretty solid shape.
It seems that a Frank Gaffney front organization published an article calling on President Bush to engineer a coup to make himself president for life, while Martin Lewis at the Huffington Post put out the call for General Pace and the Joint Chiefs to engineer a coup against the Bush administration.
I'm gonna go way out on a limb and say that neither of these are very good ideas. Meanwhile, Jamie Malanowki's new novel The Coup, involves a more clever (and funnier) method of toppling the incumbent. I do wonder sometimes what would happen if Bush did something really crazy like just call up the Joint Chiefs one day and order a preventive nuclear first strike (all the GOP contenders say it should be considered) on Iran without congressional authorization. Does the military follow that order?
Should they? My best understanding is that it's completely within the president's legal authority to order a nuclear attack on a whim, but that's a pretty disturbing idea.
James Fallows reminds us of his fall 2004 piece on Bush's lost year -- the twelve month period during which we could have been putting al-Qaeda out of business, but instead found key resources (most of all, the precious resource of attention) diverted to gearing up for war with Saddam. He remarks:
It is an old story, and it is the fundamental case against Iraq. Not that it was a good idea, poorly executed, that in the right circumstances might have made us safer. Rather, that it was exactly the wrong idea, from the start, because it distracted us from the enemy who had really harmed us, and whom we had a reasonable chance of containing and crushing, and toward an unnecessary fight guaranteed to multiply the number of enemies we faced worldwide. It should be possible to make the case that clearly.
Then again, it should have been possible to make the case in 2004.
I think it's worth saying that it wasn't magically "impossible" to make this case in '04. Indeed, from time to time John Kerry made it. And those tended the most effective moments of his campaign. As in the first debate:
Jim, the president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important in this debate. In answer to your question about Iraq and sending people into Iraq, he just said, "The enemy attacked us."
Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us. Al Qaida attacked us. And when we had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora, 1,000 of his cohorts with him in those mountains. With the American military forces nearby and in the field, we didn't use the best trained troops in the world to go kill the world's number one criminal and terrorist.
They outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, who only a week earlier had been on the other side fighting against us, neither of whom trusted each other.
That's the enemy that attacked us. That's the enemy that was allowed to walk out of those mountains. That's the enemy that is now in 60 countries, with stronger recruits.
The problem was that this line of attack, though accurate, politically effective, and reflecting the thinking of some of the people in Kerry's circle wasn't clearly the position Kerry had actually taken back in late 2002 and early 2003. Thus, this point got tangled up in the song and dance about flip-flopping and for it before he was against it and the point couldn't consistently be placed at the center of Kerry's critique.
Be amused as Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho) praises Mitt Romney on a variety of fronts, including -- at about 1:09 -- as a person who "first and foremost has very strong family values":
Laugher aside, it's also pretty sad. It seems likely, based on Mitt Romney's record of attacking Ted Kennedy as insufficiently pro-gay back in 1994 and running as a cultural moderate in 2002, that he knows on some level that there's nothing wrong with being gay and nothing right about persecuting people for being gay. And yet, in order to try to secure the Republican presidential nomination, he's been willing to come around on this and embrace the farce of conservative anti-gay politics, the very mass movement that's kept Craig in the closet and reduced to the sort of humiliating spectacle that it now appears will be his downfall.
Meanwhile, as best I can tell Craig didn't actually do anything wrong in Minneapolis (see Garance Franke-Ruta for more on this) and even if the cops did manage to enmesh him in some technical legal violation it's beyond my comprehension that they would consider this a reasonable use of police resources. But Craig is so invested in denial about who he is that he won't defend himself.
Probably. But here's the thing. For the past 24 hours or so, every embedded YouTube video I read with my Google Reader turns out to be this Darcy Burner ad. Now I don't mind some Darcy Burner, but oftentimes the context clearly indicates that this isn't the right video. And, indeed, if I navigate out of Google Reader and to the "real" website in question everything turns out fine. But according to Google Reader, all YouTube videos are Darcy Burner ads.
Is this the kind of thing that happens when the netroots really, really love a candidate? More likely, I suppose, this is a problem with the Safari 3 Public Beta I downloaded the other day.
Via Ezra Klein, Dennis Ross' plan for Iraq includes the following bright idea: "Second, we should set a date for the convening of a national reconciliation conference. Unlike previous such conferences, it should not be permitted to disband until agreement has been reached."
How come the Bush administration never thought of that? Previous efforts at reconciliation have failed because nobody ever demanded that the participants not fail. I feel like people who used to be in government service sometimes feel that they had access to some magical diplomatic pixie dust that Robert Blackwill, John Negroponte, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ryan Crocker unaccountably keep failing to apply. More likely, these people have just been tasked with a series of increasingly-impossible jobs that Dennis Ross would fail at just as badly as anyone else. The real failing in all of this is hubris, an unwillingness to admit that the best thing to do is face up to failure and start trying to make the best of that.
This is stereotypically shrill blogger of me, but I think Brian Beutler's right that there's no sense in writing about how Bush "should" appoint a widely respected Attorney-General who'll restore the nation's confidence in the neutral administration of justice. At this stage in the game, one knows that the leopard doesn't change its stripes. Besides which, I'm still fairly convinced that the White House is going to be looking for a fight over its nominee's confirmation believing that, at this point, the most important political task for Bush is to continue the post-immigration efforts to reconsolidate his base.
Hugh Hewitt has a weird post up drawing attention to his own hypocrisy: "I realize that I did not say this about Senator Vitter, but Craig's behavior is so reckless and repulsive that an immediate exit is required." Radley Balko remarks "Guess there's some sort moral distinction between cheating on your wife via anonymous gay sex and cheating on your wife by paying for hetero sex with a prostitute."
I can imagine distinguishing between these cases, but I would think that any difference would tend to cut in favor of Craig rather than against him, since paying prostitutes for sex is a real crime and it's still unclear to me what it is Craig's guilty of -- he mostly seems to have been brought up on charges of "being gay in the Midwest." Either way, Hewitt seems to be drawing the distinction based on pure homophobia.
if I were Craig's wife, I'd be far more worried about my husband trolling random bathrooms for anonymous men, than by his sleeping with prostitutes. Given the relative risks of male-to-male and female-to-male HIV transmission, I'd be crazy not to worry more. Should that matter to the public, if not the police?
That I suppose I can see that from the wife's perspective, but I still don't see any case that Craig needs to resign but Vitter doesn't. Scott Lemieux notes that the real source of Hewitt's double standard may be partisanship rather than homophobia since Louisiana has a Democratic governor.
I keep forgetting to link to something about Zbigniew Brzezinski's endorsement of Barack Obama. I see this as a significant development. Brzezinski is one of the leading members of what you might call the foreign policy counterestablishment that's slowly emerged over the past four years. This all dates back, in my experience, to his electrifying October 2003 speech at the New American Strategies conference that was organized in DC by progressives looking to formulate a meaningful challenge to neoconservatism.
Brzezinski fears (and I think it's a reasonable fear) that Hillary Clinton and her circle is dominated by the kind of people and thinking who played the dominant role in shaping Democratic policies between 9/11 and Kerry's defeat in 2004 -- Ari Berman's "strategic class" in short.
Kevin Drum and Ilan Goldenberg raise some doubts as to how trustworthy David Petraeus' much-anticipated September report on the "surge" is really going to be. And, of course, they're right to. I'm not sure what else one would expect -- when people self-evaluate, they usually come up with positive accounts of themselves. Besides which, as long as Petraeus thinks what he's doing is working on any level, he's going to decide that he ought to exaggerate how well it's working in hopes of bolstering support. And, of course, if the war ever does end Petraeus is going to want it to be because politicians decided to end it despite his brilliant successes rather than because he failed.
At any rate, it seems safe to assume that the most recent round of congressional junkets has adequately previewed what we're going to hear in DC, namely some misleading spinning of the Anbar Awakening plus some unconvincing data about declining civilian casualties plus the usual screwed up political situation.
One often hears it said that the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't really about Israeli occupation of the territories conquered in the 1967 war. That Israel is prepared to withdraw from these territories in order to make a secure peace but that, unfortunately, the Palestinians won't agree. The New Republic's editor in chief, Martin Peretz, had one of his occasional posts in which he usefully points out that this isn't actually the case a couple of days ago:
Greater Jerusalem is still a vague concept and a vaguer reality. But its outlines are clear. There are some contiguous Jewish neighborhoods east of the city proper, big neighborhoods. There is no way these will be forfeited from Israeli under any agreement. Basta! Finito! Gemacht! Dayenu!
These "neighborhoods" are, of course, settlements built on conquered land. Somewhat similarly, although this time not presuming to speak for the Israeli government, Peretz wrote of his desire to maintain Israeli occupation of the Jordan River Valley and to see the population of 10,000 Israeli settlers living there grow.
There's always tons of interesting stuff in The Atlantic's "primary sources" section in the front of the book. It's kind of like a blog, but in a magazine. Except now, it's also on a website. At any rate, I thought this was a neat finding:
Alumni contributed $7.1 billion to higher education in 2004–05. The study reveals that graduates with children are about 13 percent more likely to give back to their schools and that they tend to give more as their children approach college age. But donations among this group decline after an admissions decision has been made—and plummet if their kids aren’t accepted. Though the authors note that alumni without a stake in the cycle still often give generously, many alums who are parents “believe that donations buy them entrance into a lottery whose prize is admissions for their children.”
It's completely intuitive, of course, but there's still need for proper research to confirm one's guesses about such things. Here's a link to the original paper “Altruism and the Child-Cycle of Alumni Giving,” by Jonathan Meer and Harvey S. Rosen.
A correspondent makes the same point as Mark Kleiman here. One way in which Larry Craig's behavior was worse than Vitter's is that Craig "handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, 'What do you think about that?'"
You have here a pretty clear-cut case of Craig trying to use his official position to intimidate the officer and get special treatment. That's true, and it's certainly inappropriate. On the other hand, I do regard this as somewhat mitigated by the fact that I continue to regard Craig's arrest as fundamentally unjustified. The problem, as Josh Marshall points out, is that there was no way Craig could beat the rap without publicly admitting to being gay, which would have been politically (and perhaps personally) untenable. So first he tried to weasel out of the charge, and then he figured maybe he could plead guilty and keep it hushed up. Now he's in an absurd denial pattern.
Fundamentally, though, for me this seems like a sad story about a bad Senator who's going to go down for no particularly good reason only to be replaced by another conservative Republican who's just as bad.
I'm not sure I quite understand where Josef Joffe comes from. Or, rather, why it is that a certain number of editors seem to feel that North America can't supply a sufficient supply of wingnutty commentary on foreign policy without importing additional labor from Germany. But for whatever reason, Joffe has firmly established himself on the post-9/11 scene as Europe's premiere purveyor of ludicrous neoconservative arguments. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal he offered a forecast of the things that would happen if the US were to withdraw from Iraq:
"Iran advances to No. 1, completing its nuclear-arms program undeterred and unhindered."
The Sunni Arab states "are drawn into the Khomeinist orbit."
"[E]mboldened jihadi forces shift to Afghanistan and turn it again into a bastion of Terror International"
"Syria reclaims Lebanon"
"Hezbollah and Hamas . . . resume their war against Israel"
"Russia . . . rebuilds its anti-Western alliances"
One might note that Joffe's thinking about this essentially parallels the paranoid fantasies of the domino theorists, but Joffe actually acknowledges as much but just insists that this time things are different. But this is crazy. Iran may or may not build a nuclear bomb, but our ability to prevent this won't be seriously impacted by our presence or absence in Iraq. Similarly, anti-Israel violence from Hamas and Hezbollah wax and wane according to those groups' own imperatives, it has nothing to do with Iraq. And, again, anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon either can or can't resist Syrian efforts to impose its will. Outside powers like the United States and France may or may not be able to help sympathetic groups in Lebanon. Having tens of thousands of American countries engaged, at great expense, in an unpopular occupation of a nearby country is neither here nor there.
Why would the Sunni Arab states be drawn into the Khomeinist orbit? What would this even mean? Will Hosni Mubarak convert to Shiism? Will the UAE just hand its oil over to Teheran? It's very hard to imagine any of our friends in the region deciding that Russia would be a more useful ally than the United States, and if Iran already dominates the whole region then it's hard to believe Russia will be able to dominate it too. By the end, Joffe has the whole world collapsing into anarchy as American hegemony collapses:
For all the damage to Washington's reputation, nothing of great import can be achieved without, let alone against, the U.S. Can Moscow and Beijing bring peace to Palestine? Or mend a global financial system battered by the subprime crisis? Where are the central banks of Russia and China?
These are good questions, but the answer is, of course, that the United States will still be the world's primary economic and military power no matter what happens in Iraq. The United States is, simply put, not nearly so fragile as Joffe imagines. We'll still have our 300 million people and our $13 trillion GDP and our aircraft carriers, universities, etc. All that stuff that made us an important and powerful country in the first place is still here. We've been seeing in Iraq that it doesn't make us omnipotent. Joffe is acting like facing up to that reality in Mesopotamia would somehow reveal all the rest as just a mirage, but it's all real. America and the world will survive.
GFR brings you everything you wanted to know about cruising in Minnesota men's rooms, reaching the conclusion that it seems to be perfectly legal.
UPDATE: Weisberg & Plotz are also making sense here. The idea that the real crime was the peering into the cop's stall doesn't make sense. The cop was in the bathroom specifically to try to arrest cruisers. He arrested Craig not after the alleged peeping, but after this foot-tap-signal business.
A.J. Rossmiller (who, for the record, used to do political intelligence in Iraq for the defense department, so he's not just bullshitting around) has a great post about the myriad problems with the Allawi Gambit, noting such salient facts as how we already installed Allawi as Prime Minister of Iraq once, he performed horribly in office, and he was overwhelmingly booted out in an election. I like A.J.'s conceit that Allawi-love is a kind of Iraqi corollary to Broderism here at home, with both sides suffering the same problem: "Like Americans, Iraqis have preferences about issues."
I still find it mystifying that Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin decided to get out in front of this thing by calling for the removal of Maliki. The danger of winding up once again in a “you broke it, you bought it” situation seem pretty extreme.
I put this alongside the Department of Homeland Security in my "too clever by half" file. The Democrats' basic feeling seems to be that erring on the side of overly castigating Iraqi political leaders is the smart move since it helps evade charges that you're Criticizing The Troops when pointing to lack of success in our Iraq policies. Just keep punching Maliki while walking backwards, and maybe everything'll be okay. But as Hamsher says, there's a danger here of Levin getting what he asked for and Democrats finding themselves re-entrapped into support for a doomed policy.
One sees this mentioned now and again in the blogosphere, but in these dark days of FISA-ignoring surveillance and so forth, one can always console oneself with the thought that things aren't as bad as they were during the Palmer Raids of the waning days of Woodrow Wilson's administration. Robert Farley's review of Kenneth Ackerman's Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, contains a good description of what went down. It should be appreciated, moreover, that these elements of the late Wilson administration have considerable continuity with the policies Wilson himself pursued when he was healthier and the country was coping with world war and the great influenza.
On the other hand, even at what was the peak (especially in terms of the breadth of violations) of civil unlibertarinism in America, I don't think you had top government officials arguing that what the country needed was the systematic application of torture.
Now that's what I call television -- Bill Kristol versus military wife on C-SPAN:
Speaking of C-SPAN, tomorrow at 10:30 AM on C-SPAN 2 you can check out official Friends of Mine Julian Sanchez and Spencer Ackerman along with Nita Chaudhary from MoveOn and Caroline Fredrickson from the ACLU talking FISA.
The McClatchey newspapers Iraq team did a lengthy interview with Nouri al-Maliki. You can see their writeup here. Not surprisingly, he doesn't agree with his critics in the US and also doesn't think he should be removed by a coup. Near the end, though, comes something a bit more interesting as Leila Fadel is asking him why he doesn't meet with Muqtada al-Sadr anymore:
FADEL: Why not, at this time, when there are troubled relations, and the Mahdi Army is being accused of killing governors and running astray?
MALIKI: I have no problem with meeting him. But he withdrew from the challenges to a large degree and he has big problems within the movement. That is why I have meetings with leaders from the movement but not with Muqtada and I have many efforts for reform and to bridge the mistakes through bilateral or more dialogue. Perhaps what is holding back our talks is my firm rejection of the policies adopted by the movement. And I believe some leaders have begun to understand my position and accept it as the correct position in spite of my firmness. Indeed now is the time for meetings but I believe that meeting the leaders who actually represent the movement is more to the point and more effective in quelling the situation and in isolating the gangs from the good elements and cadres in the movement.
If I read him right, Maliki is contending that Sadr himself doesn't really control the movement at this point, so there's no reason to meet with him and Maliki can just meet with faction leaders instead.
The Corner's Andy McCarthy writes that "At the Weekly Standard Kim Kagan's account demonstrates in detail that Iran's war against the U.S. in Iraq goes back some five years." Just yesterday, Jamie Kirchick scolded readers that "it's not 'warmongering' to simply state the fact that two rogue states are themselves complicit in unwarranted acts of warmongering against the United States and a nascent democracy in the Middle East."
I'm not sure if Kirchick is entirely clear on what the concept of "warmongering" means, but I'm pretty sure that this is, in fact, warmongering. But rather than quibble over semantics, the basic point is that these writers for America's top conservative publications would like to see the United States take military action against Iran (and possibly Syria) and to that end they're trying to convince the public that those countries are already at war with us. They started it, you see. I mean, arming and supporting Iraqi factions! What meddlers! Where do they get the nerve!
It's hard in many ways to express exactly how deeply crackpottery has bored into America's discourse over national security. Take, for example, Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy. The good news is that most of the stuff they publish isn't nearly as crazy as the column calling for the nuclear destruction of Iraq followed by Bush installing himself as a military dictator. That said, a good deal of it isn't that much less unhinged. Caroline Glick, for example, wrote yesterday not merely that she disagrees with Mohammed ElBarredei's approach to non-proliferation policy, but that he has deliberately "used his power to facilitate the proliferation of nuclear energy for military purposes." Her key piece of evidence for this claim was a breathtaking bit of up-is-downism:
Take Iraq for example. Right up to the US-British invasion of Iraq in March 2003, ElBaradei consistently maintained that he either couldn't tell if Iraq was or was not pursuing nuclear weapons, or that he could see no evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons. Indeed, just before the war, in an effort to scuttle US-British efforts to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution approving the use of force against Saddam Hussein's regime, ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that Iraq had abandoned its nuclear weapons program.
Needless to say, the reason ElBarredei shifted over time from "it's uncertain" to "there's no evidence" to "there's no program" is that there was no program, as became clear the more the IAEA learned about the situation in Iraq. This appeared not on some random person's website, but in a daily newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, written by the senior fellow for Middle East affairs of a think tank that boasts an endorsement from the Vice President of the United States.
Via Brian Beutler. I wonder how the term "douche" came to have its present meaning. Apparently, the OED's 1967 reference has it meaning "an unattractive co-ed. By extension, any individual whom the speaker desires to deprecate."
Looks like the diplomatic mission to Hong Kong spearheaded by Senator Herb Kohl (D-Bucks) has paid off, and Yi Jianlian is going to play for Milwaukee after all. Will he be any good? Hollinger (subscribers only) says it all depends on Yi's real age. If he's actually 19, he's a promising prospect. If he's actually 23, this is guaranteed bust territory.
Photo by Flickr user PhatAlbert used under a Creative Commons license
Ryan Avent on the gap in federal transportation funding: For those keeping track at home, that’s $1.4 billion in annual federal spending on transit versus $42 billion in annual federal spending on highways." Now of course this gets a little chicken-and-eggy -- given how many more people drive than take mass transit, it makes sense for more money to be spent on highways. On the other hand, more people would ride mass transit if there were more mass transit systems or if existing systems ran more frequently, kept longer hours, were cheaper, or were cleaner or more comfortable -- all things that could be easily achieved with more money. Shifting that financial balance somewhat is going to have to be part of a sensible climate change strategy.
They say that when the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When it comes to Afghanistan, though, we actually do have tools available to us besides monomaniacal focus on poppy eradication. Unfortunately, as Sameer Lalwani explains, to the relevant American policymakers, everything related to Afghanistan still looks like monomaniacal focus on poppy eradication when what's needed is a much more pragmatic and comprehensive approach to trying to offer some stability.
The nation’s median household income grew modestly in 2006, the Census Bureau reported yesterday, even as the percentage of people without health insurance hit a high.
Experts said the rise in income was mainly a reflection of an increase in the number of family members entering the workplace or working longer hours. Average wages for men and women actually declined for the third consecutive year.
Sounds like a recession is just what the doctor didn't order....
UPDATE: Republicans are really psyched about this declining wages economy:
Some Republicans seized on the new data as evidence that Bush administration policies had been good for people’s pocketbooks. In a statement, President Bush said the news was a sign that Congress should not raise taxes. The data, he said, confirmed “that more of our citizens are doing better in this economy, with continued rising incomes and more Americans pulling themselves out of poverty.”
The poverty thing, seriously, is good news, but note that "the poverty rate fell in 2006 for the first time this decade." So if Bush wants to be judged by the impact of his policies on the poverty rate he, well, sucks.
This came up in comments so, yes, whenever mentioning the poverty rate, it's worth addressing the fact that though there's tons of disagreement as to how we should measure poverty, pretty much everyone agrees that we shouldn't be using the official poverty rate which is based on some outdated (and possibly never accurate) notions about the composition of household spending. Nevertheless, as is argued at the end of this EPI snapshot there's no particular reason to think these problems detract from its value as an indicator of trends.
Brad DeLong reaches way, way back into The Atlantic's archives to find an article by a pseudonymous college professor, G.H.M., pleading for higher pay for college professors. It turns out, however, that professors in 1905 made about 4 times the average GDP per worker of 1905 -- much more, in relative terms, than do college professors today. Nevertheless, the country was much poorer 100 years ago:
The professor says that his food bills average $55 year-1900 dollars a month--$660 a year, which is once again about average GDP per worker back then. enough to buy 170 pounds of veal cutlets or 500 pounds of pot roast or 1000 pounds of bread. It was hard to economize on food at the start of this century: food and fuel consume almost half of consumer expenditure for the average household in 1885, but only a fifth of consumer expenditure in 1987. G.H.M.: his food bills are roughly a quarter of his annual expenditure, while my non-restaurant food bills are less than a twelfth of mine (and I buy a lot of food at a much more advanced stage of preparation today than G.H.M. could back a century ago). Somebody spending average annual GDP per worker on pot roast today could buy not 500 pounds but instead 25,000 pounds.
Of course, I'm not sure where I'm going to store my 25,000 pounds of pot roast.
Photo by Flickr user imelda used under a Creative Commons license
Justin Logan makes a good, if provocative, point about the president's overblown rhetoric on Iraq has the effect of amplifying Osama bin Laden's propaganda. We shouldn't be sending people the message that al-Qaeda really is on the verge of seizing control over Iraq's oil resources and building a universal Caliphate. The people who blow themselves up for al-Qaeda's sake are murdering people, but they're not accomplishing anything and they're certainly not right around the corner from world domination and people need to know that.
Forbes blogger, apparently unfamiliar with the Democratic Party primary electorate, compared Barack Obama to FDR as a means of insulting him. For that matter, he seems pretty unfamiliar with the broader American electorate as well. I seem to recall no less a figure than George W. Bush feeling the need to try to wrap himself in FDR's mantle while he tried to dismantle Social Security.
As both a map enthusiast and a non-fan of agricultural subsidies, I really liked this graphic. Each red dot represents the address of a recipient of federal farm subsidies. The big red dots represent people getting over $250,000 a year. Given that this is clearly a map of Manhattan, one can safely assume that that these people are not struggling family farmers. It's a neat illustration of an out-of-whack system. It comes to me via Yuval Levin who has the right position on the issue, but naturally glosses it with a misleading partisan spin:
The farm bill passed by House Democrats in July would continue giving millionaires farm subsidies (setting the income threshold for payments at $1 million a year, and keeping loopholes in place that allow some making much more to qualify). The Bush administration has proposed sharply reducing the income threshold to $200,000 a year and ending many of those loopholes.
The real story with farm legislation, of course, is that bad policy comes from a bipartisan group of farm-state legislators. Back when the Republicans were in the majority and the congress passed a bad farm bill, he was all for it. Now that it's a Democratic congress, he's posturing as in favor of sounder policy. But the real dynamics aren't partisan or even ideological -- it's bipartisan sausage-making at its finest.
So how about that political progress in Iraq? Well, Timesays it's actually a fraud. See more from Kevin Drum, Marc Lynch, and Ilan Goldenberg. Basically, the Iraqi cabinet seems to have cobbled something meaningless together so that Ryan Crocker can go before congress and say that just when it looked like the administration was going to need to report (fake) security progress but no political progress -- bam! -- in the nick of time along comes some (fake) political progress.
The difference, one assumes, is that Crocker and Petraeus won't be mentioning the part about how it's all fake. Then whatever they say, Bush will further exaggerate three or four notches, while Dick Cheney goes for five or six and Condoleezza Rice keeps her reasonable rep by leaving it at one or two notches of additional misleadingness. I'm excited. Have I mentioned that Bush wants $50 billio more dollars and that maybe all this cash we've been throwing away on Iraq had instead funding productive investments (be they public or private sector) wages might be going up instead of down?
I posted a while back about the California GOP's plan to basically sneak under the radar screen a ballot initiative that would have the state adopt a Maine-style system for apportioning electoral votes where the winner of each congressional district gets one vote. Adopted nationwide this might be a step in the right direction, but adopted only in California it's just a sweetheart deal for Republicans.
At any rate, after I posted on it various Californians piped up pretty confident that there's nothing to worry about. But Barbara Boxer was apparently worried about it enough to spend some time on a conference call with various bloggers that I participated in, so I'm raising the threat level to orange. Here's a website dedicated to counter-organizing against this scam, and here's the website for National Popular Vote a group moving toward real election reform.
Here's the Barack Obama Financial Times op-ed that got him criticized as FDResque in Forbes. The essence of the matter is that he's proposing "to establish a fund to help people refinance or sell to avoid foreclosure" and that "We can partially pay for this fund by imposing penalties on lenders that acted irresponsibly or committed fraud."
A separate FT article covering the plan describes it as "among the most radical yet from a leading Democrat" but it sounds to me like understanding the real nature of this proposal would require us to see more details than seem available from scanning Obama's website.
David Ignatius says that in retrospect we should have done more to cheat on Iyad Allawi's behalf in the January 2005 elections. Atrios seems to think he can debunk this talking point by simply noting that, in fact, the US intervened massively on his behalf, but the Serious point is that we always could have intervened more massively.
That Ignatius feels it makes sense to keep writing about this without any mention of the big lobbying campaign under way on Allawi's behalf at the moment is pretty stunning. Of course, when Nouri al-Maliki first came to power, Ignatius hailed this as brilliant progress. That's because Ignatius seemed, during Zalmay Khalilzad's time in Baghdad, to just write whichever columns Khalilzad wanted. During an earlier period, when Robert Blackwill was running the Iraq desk at the NSC, what we mostly heard from Ignatius was about the transcendent genius of Robert Blackwill. Here's an exemplar of the genre from October 2004:
The paradox of Bush is that when you examine his actual policies in Iraq over the past six months, they appear to reflect precisely the sort of learning from experience that the president refuses publicly to acknowledge. The key architect of Iraq policy today is probably Robert Blackwill, a thoughtful former diplomat who serves on the staff of the National Security Council -- not the neoconservatives in the Pentagon such as Paul Wolfowitz, who urged the president to war. Wolfowitz's idealism has been replaced by Blackwill's calculating pragmatism, at least for the moment.
Today Blackwill is one of Allawi's lobbyists. The point in all of this isn't to be an apologist for Maliki. Back when Allawi first took office in 2004, the Ignatius' of the world hailed this is a brilliant solution. They were wrong. Back when Allawi was booted from power in January 2005 in favor of Ibrahim Jafari, folks proclaimed this a great success and said Bush's Iraq policy had been vindicated. They were wrong. Back when Jafari was ousted in favor of Maliki, people proclaimed this, too, as a crucial step in the right directed. They were wrong. Now Maliki's the problem and Allawi -- again! -- is the solution. But they're still wrong, shuffling the personnel roster in Baghdad in this way isn't helping.
A nice point from Steve Clemons on social conservatives and anonymous gay sex that moves a bit beyond a basic hypocrisy claim: "Andrew Sullivan has much better dexterity with this subject than I do -- but it is disgusting that while so many are now cringing at the thought of gay man having tearoom sex that they are at the same time so obsessive about trying to stop same sex marriage between committed individuals."
Right. There's a real eliminationist strain of thinking in conservative thinking about homosexuality. They want gays in the closet, but they deplore the practices of the closet and the consequences it lead to. What they really want is for gay people to just go away. But they know they can't do that, either. So they whine and they fume. As Ross says, for a long time this was an 80-20 issue for Republican politicians so they had an interest in not thinking too closely about whether or not they were really making sense. But that's increasingly not the case. A reasonable politics of "family values" needs to contain some penalties for heterosexuals with anti-family behavior (see, e.g., Dick Vitter, Rudy Giuliani) and support for gays with pro-family behavior. What they have right now is just loathing of gay people masquerading as defense of the traditional family.
Karen DeYoung and Thomas Ricks in The Washington Post have a great piece about a draft GAO report that says the administration is full of it on progress in Iraq (though not quite in so many words). The report was leaked by officials who (correctly) fear that the administration will water it down or use the classification process to obscure key findings.
As usual with these things, the question is whether the press can not merely break the big story, but then incorporate this information into future reporting about administration claims.
Jessica Valenti reads USA Today's writeup of a study concluding that married women do more housework than do cohabiting women, and concludes that she may have to stay single.
I'm not so sure that the study is really showing a causal connection here. It seems very plausible that the cohabiting sample going to contain people who are less tradition-minded than does the married sample. Married people are also probably more likely to have children than are are cohabiters and one can much more easily understand why the presence or absence of children might cause a shift in the housework burden (which isn't to say that one should endorse this dynamic) than why marriage, as such, should cause a shift.
Photo by Flickr user Rick Takagi used under a Creative Commons license
Kyle Teamey, writing in The Washington Post, laments the existence of political democracy in the United States:
While debate over a war's merits -- and whether to withdraw -- is a sign of a healthy democracy, Iraq unfortunately highlights many of the difficulties a democracy faces in a long-term counterinsurgency or nation-building campaign. Such debate can be detrimental to the battle for perceptions.
Well, maybe he doesn't lament its existence, but he does think it has some regrettable downsides. But is this really true? It seems to me that the truth of the matter is that counterinsurgency is very hard. Democracies have wages successful counterinsurgency campaigns (the British in Malaya is the classic examples) and dictatorships have lost counterinsurgency campaigns. Indeed, the story of modern losing counterinsurgency starts with Napoleonic France fighting and losing in Spain. One could also consider Portugal (then a semi-fascist dictatorship) losing control of its African colonies. Or, of course, the Soviet Union losing in Afghanistan. There is, overall, very little evidence I can see in favor of tyranny as a counterinsurgency strategy.
The main thing is that it helps to not be an alien occupier fighting a native resistance movement. You see some arguably successful counterinsurgencies in Latin America where there wasn't a difference in nationality between the parties, and you see the British succeeding in rallying the mostly Malay population of Malaya against the mostly Chinese insurgents. Now, arguably, genocide works as a counter-insurgency strategy. Even here, though, a very liberal approach to killing people didn't ultimately preserve Hutu Power in Rwanda. The big success stories of genocide-as-counterinsurgency were conducted by democracies -- the United States and Australia against the native inhabitants of those countries (needless to say, conducting genocidal warfare against the population of Iraq would be immoral and I strongly oppose such policies). Either way, the idea that tyranny is a useful counterinsurgency tool seems to be mostly pernicious myth.
This all via Ezra Klein who aptly characterizes one of Teamey's subsidiary points ("the appearance of strength or weakness is often much more important than actual strength or weakness") as arguing that hope is a plan after all.
Dana Goldstein notes that the State of Texas is planning to execute Kenneth Foster today even though everyone agrees that he didn't kill anyone: "Kenneth Foster was driving the getaway car during a teenage robbery spree, and watched his companion kill a man 90 feet away from the car where he sat. All the men involved -- including the killer -- have said murder was not a premeditated part of their evening." In Texas, though, it seems that this is good enough to get you the death penalty. If, that is, you don't have a good lawyer. That the defendant in question is black probably didn't help his case either.
I stopped checking the traffic stats on my independent blog a couple of years ago, and the Prospect looks at Tapped posts more in terms of generating "impact" that can be pitched as important to donors than to traffic as such. Now that I'm working for a genuine for-profit business corporation, however, I'm more aware of traffic spikes and so forth. Yesterday, for example, my post about David Petraeus' dull dissertation got an Instapundit link. It also prompted James Fallows to do a post defending Petraeus from charges of unusual banality. And that post got an Instalink as well.
Advantage: Yglesias, valuable and productive employee. Except, of course, the incentives here seem terrible since the premise of all this traffic is that I was being dumb.
Allow me, however, to engage in some post hoc defense of my dumbness. The point was that I had my hands on a copy of Petraeus' dissertation. It s
