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September 16, 2007 - September 22, 2007 Archives
September 16, 2007
The Truth About Anbar
Andrew links to a great piece in The New York Times looking at public opinion in Anbar. It turns out that accounts of a dramatic political transformation left out such details as "In a survey conducted Aug. 17-24 for ABC News, the BBC and NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, among a random national sample of 2,212 Iraqis, 72 percent in Anbar expressed no confidence whatsoever in United States forces [. . .] Every Anbar respondent called attacks on coalition forces “acceptable,” far more than anywhere else in the country."
But why is this article on the op-ed page? All credit to the Times opinion people for running it, but these are just facts -- facts that ought to be incorporated into papers' news reporting.
Arab Spring
Ezra Klein wonders of anyone still remembers it. I still like my November 2006 article wondering the same thing.
Transmission
I should be on the Sam Seder show this afternoon at 5PM easter time (do the math if you live elsewhere).
Oil
Alan Greenspan says he is "saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." I'm saddened, too. The argument on this point never seems to go anywhere. I mean, alternative to it being "about oil" is that it was "about" Saddam's threat to the wider region and it happens to be a region that's . . . full of oil so it all comes around the same anyway.
The real question worth debating is whether the policies we've enacted in this regard are, in fact, necessary or even useful to securing the energy supply the world needs. It seems to me that they are, in fact, much more driven by paranoia and inability to do cost-benefit analysis (like would the economic damage of marginally more expensive oil really exceed the economic costs of the giant US military presence in the Gulf?) than from sober-minded calculation of what the world needs from its oil-producing regions. When there was a Soviet Union around that might plausible dominate the military east if the US didn't push back, it may have made sense to adopt such an aggressive posture there, but instead of relaxing following the retreat of Communism we've tightened our grip in a way that seems to have achieved nothing.
Electronic Records
Phillip Longman sings the praises of electronic record keeping at VA hospitals. Tyler Cowen, meanwhile, praises Shannon Brownlee's new book on the grounds that:
The (favorable) discussion of VHA is more insightful and more subtle than the usual treatments. For instance we learn that the much-heralded computerization of VA records was created in direct violation of government law.
Ah, the dread "government law."
Charting Iraqi Mortality
This is James Wimberley's chart of efforts to estimate the death toll on Iraq. You can read here for a fuller explanation of what the chart means, and click on the image to see a larger version. He writes:
We now have four survey estimates from three independent teams of professionals using two different good-practice methods. They all say that the excess deaths in Iraq are hugely greater than the IBC body count, let alone the numbers from the MNF or the Iraqi government. The mean estimate, combining the ORB result with my extrapolations from the three older ones, is 782,000.
Sad. Maddening. I don't really know what to say.
Hiding Behind the General
Joe Klein is on the money about Bush, Crocker, and Petraeus.
An Inconvenient Truth
Neil the Ethical Werewolf observes:
The silver lining behind Democratic capitulation on Iraq, to talk like a mathematician, is that it reduces the 2008 election to a problem previously solved. 2006 showed us that we can destroy the GOP in an election where public anger about the continuing Iraq War is the big issue, and in 2008 we'll be replaying that scenario with 7 more GOP Senators up for re-election than last time.
Nobody seems to want to mention it because it's impolite, but I think this is almost certainly a factor in the congressional politics of Iraq. Not only are Democrats afraid of taking certain kinds of political risks to end the war, but they see no prospect of a political upside to ending it. There was a fairly overwhelming belief in Washington in mid-to-late November 2006 that Republicans would start moving to end the war in January. It didn't happen, but then came the belief that they would start to abandon ship in September 2007, which also didn't happen. But given that Republicans aren't doing what everyone expected them to do and reducing their political exposure on Iraq by winding the war down, Democrats are disinclined to go out on a limb to do it for them.
Sunday Art Blogging
Well, hardly, but too much living in Washington, DC seems to have gotten to my friend the painter Ian Whitmore's head and his new show that opened yesterday Honi soit qui mal y pense includes some political work, specifically the Monomania Portraits series, that may be of interest to readers. Also this one is super-awesome, though I can't think of anything to say about it.
Your Moment of Zen
There's a longstanding Keith Van Horn obsession in my household, so I was thrilled to learn that someone put this highlight reel together:
He is missed.
The End of Straight Culture
The Redskins are on Monday Night Football tomorrow night, so some friends and I are planning on going to a bar to hang out and watch the game. The logical candidate would seem to be Nellie's, a newish sports bar that just opened up this summer. Nellie's is, however, not just a sports bar, but a gay sports bar.
Now, all else being equal, I guess my inclination would be to avoid the local gay sports bar and head for the local conventional sports bar, except . . . Nellie's is the only sports bar in the neighborhood. So what I'm wondering is what does one do under the circumstances to keep the gay sports bar gay? After all, breeders like sports, too, and it (a) sounds like a great place to watch a game and (b) has a"somewhat remote location from the vortex of DC's urban gay culture" so isn't going to just turn into a heterosexual sports bar?
A Surge of Coherence
John Holbo discusses the difference between television and foreign policy: "Last but not least, there is what we might call the “Lost” factor. Regarding a TV show, it is very charming to learn: what, you had no plan at all?"
Mukasey
This is already dull conventional wisdom, but it seems to me that the rumored new guy at the Justice Department, Michael Mukasey, stands a good chance of rescuing the DOJ from its Gonzalez-era status as a cesspool of depravity and incompetence and bringing us back to the glory days of John Ashcroft when one primarily worried about the Attorney-General's ludicrously wrongheaded ideology.
On a less banal note, though, a confirmation hearing isn't just about the nominee, it's also an opportunity to really force a would-be high official to sit in a chair and give some reasonable answers to questions from the Senate. Once someone has a job, it turns out to be remarkably easy to show up, say a bunch of stuff that's not really true, and then apologize a couple of days later. Just ask Mike McConnell. Which is just to say that, in general, it doesn't make sense to prejudge these things. Given what's gone down over the past few years, any appointee to this job deserves to be asked some tough questions about his views on whether torture is illegal, whether US Attorneys should be sacked for failing to mount partisan prosecutions, etc., etc., etc., and the confirmation issue shouldn't be prejudged until one sees whether or not satisfactory answers are forthcoming. Guys like Don Rumsfeld had good reputations before they joined this administration.
September 17, 2007
Think of the Children
Kevin Carey reads Jonathan Chait's The Big Con and ponders the ways anti-tax mania frustrates efforts at improving education.
Censoring the Emmys
The talk of the coffee shop this morning is that last night at the Emmy's several speakers started saying something against the war or against the administration and, when they did, Fox just went to black rather than exposing the public to the treasonous words. Did this really happen? I'm not a big fan of celebrity political statements, but that's an impressive combination of creepy and ridiculous.
UPDATE: This doesn't sound quite as bad as what was described to me: "Sally Field got bleeped, for heaven's sake, at the end of her antiwar, pro-motherhood acceptance speech." Did she get bleeped for saying something profane?
UPDATE II: Here's a clearer explanation:
"If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn't be any god -" she said when the sound went dead and the camera suddenly turned away from the stage so viewers would be distracted. Chopped off were the words "god-damned wars in the first place." (The phrase was not censored in the Canadian telecast.) [...]
Technically, Field's censored words are not profane. A 2004 FCC ruling specifically stated no objection to the use of "god damn" on TV when making a judgment on the uproar over Bono swearing at the Golden Globes in 2003 where he used more colorful language.
Here's the ruling. This sounds very plausibly like an innocent error.
Compromise
This "news analysis" from Peter Baker and Jonathan Weisman in yesterday's Washington Post was so ridiculous that I couldn't bring myself to complain about it on a low traffic Tuesday. As many people as possible need to slam their collective heads against the wall and ask themselves why. Why people would actually be paid money to write this lead:
When Army Gen. David H. Petraeus last week proposed withdrawing more than 20,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, some congressional Democrats nodded their heads and saw it as a positive, if insufficient, step forward. Some wanted to take credit. After all, they reasoned, the drawdown, the benchmarks report, even Petraeus's Capitol Hill testimony came about only because of Democratic pressure.
Within hours, that idea was shot down. When House Democratic leaders convened in the office of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) at 5:30 p.m. Monday, strategists concluded they were already getting credit for what was happening but that voters wanted much more. So Pelosi, according to aides at the meeting, insisted that Democrats coordinate their message and dictated what that message would be: The general's plan meant 10 more years of war, or even "endless war."
Yes, yes, Pelosi is the one to blame for the failure of a compromise to emerge, even though what Bush (pardon me, "Petraeus") proposed wasn't a compromise at all, unless "keep as many troops in Iraq as possible for as long as possible" now counts as a compromise. And it keeps going on like that. They warn that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton may be unable to bring the congress together because "Even if they could find a compromise that enough Republicans would accept, it is not clear that the candidates would agree to anything but a hard-line position given the antiwar fervor in the party base." This fervent party base would, I take it, be the 60-70 percent of the American public who wants to see drawdowns in Iraq and these base-beholden presidential candidates would, I guess, be the ones who are sticking to their base-displeasing stances in favor of residual forces in Iraq.
In contrast to these intransigent Democrats, Baker and Weisman suggest that Bush "has signaled that he is starting to shift." Really? I guess so:
In fact, although senior officials did not use the term "exit strategy," the outlines of one emerged from the various statements and speeches they made last week. Petraeus plans to begin redefining his mission in December from leading combat operations to partnering with Iraqi security units and eventually to supporting them. At least 21,700 troops, and perhaps more from the buildup, will be pulled out by July. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told reporters he hopes to bring the overall force, now at 168,000, down to 100,000 by the end of next year. And Petraeus told The Washington Post that he foresees "sustainable security" in Iraq by June 2009, a point at which the U.S. presence could be scaled back even more.
Now, again, what happened here is that Petraeus said that some troops will be withdrawn when it is no longer possible to avoid withdrawing that. At that point, we'll have as many troops in Iraq as we did a year ago. After that, Petraeus gave us a chart that contained no dates and where the final point still had tens of thousands of American soldiers in Iraq. That's not an exit strategy. And, indeed, a couple of paragraphs later they note that Bush "made no commitment to do anything beyond the initial drawdown of forces sent for the buildup." But this is the key point -- there was no compromise! They then go to Peter Rodman, a former Don Rumsfeld aide now cooling his heels at Brookings, and who "said he was particularly surprised at how Democratic presidential candidates reacted to Bush because they have a vested interest should they win the White House."
I'm ready to explode. The goal, in article-writing, should be that a person who reads your article comes away from it with a better understanding of the subject -- this does the reverse.
U.S. Army photo by Spc. Charles W. Gill
Fair and Balanced
Coming Wednesday, another national security discussion from the liberal Brookings Institution:
Participants include Anthony Blinken, staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an advisor to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D-Del.); Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and an advisor to former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.); and Randy Scheunemann, a foreign policy and national security analyst who has been a long-time advisor to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.). They will examine how the politically charged issues of extremism and terrorism can—and should—affect next year's election.
Hawkish Democrat on the left, conservative Republican on the right, and another conservative Republican in the center. Sounds great. Michael O'Hanlon, naturally, will moderate.
Obama: Fund Only Withdrawal
Barack Obama shifts toward the Edwards/Dodd position on Iraq funding.
CORRECTION: Obama campaign notes that he voted against the last supplemental, so there's no shift in position here. Apologies for the error.
Monday Obscure Constitutional Provision Blogging
My ace reporting reveals that one element of the health reform strategy Edwards will announce today is a bill, to be submitted on his first day in office, ending health care coverage for the president, the Congress, and all political appointees on July 20th, 2009, unless they've passed health reform that accords with four non-negotiable principles Edwards will detail in the speech. If they don't pass comprehensive health reform, they lose their coverage until they do.
Not to get too wanky here, but I'm pretty sure this violates the 27th Amendment to the constitution.
Clinton Care
For the sake of completeness, I should note that according to everyone the health care plan Hillary Clinton will be outlining in about half an hour will, like Edwards' but unlike Obama's, be a universal coverage program along mandate-and-subsidy lines. What's not clear to me is whether she will, like Edwards and Obama, be offering a new public sector program to compete with private firms.
Greenspan and Tax Cuts
I agree with Atrios and Krugman that Alan Greenspan's behavior relative to the 2001 Bush tax cuts was irresponsible and that his efforts at self-exculpation are unconvincing (BDL is too kind here). On the other hand, I don't think it makes a ton of sense to attribute vast causal powers to Greenspan's testimony on this regard.
The tax cuts passed because (a) the GOP was monomaniacally focused on reducing income tax rates for rich people, and (b) a shocking number of Democrats from red America seem to have felt that this, rather than some symbolic cultural issue, was a good topic on which to surrender. Obviously, if Greenspan had transformed himself into a technocracy-oriented social democrat and denounced the Bush economic agenda from the rooftops, that might have made a difference, but piping up more clearly as a small-government advocate of spending cuts and balanced budgets wasn't going to swing this thing around.
The Clinton Plan
Here it is in brief. You've got your individual mandate, you've got your pay-or-play for larger employers, you've got your subsidies, you've got your community rating, you've got your "choices offered in the Menu will provide benefits at least as good as the typical plan offered to Members of Congress," etc.
My record of political prognostication is terrible, but given that Clinton already has a sizable lead and that what Team Obama is telling Marc Ambinder doesn't sound very convincing, I feel like Clinton is drawing close to checkmating her opponents. I'll have to wait and see what more expertish people have to say about this proposal, but it certainly has the look and feel of a decently ambitious proposal (indeed, probably too ambitious to be enacted, but we'll have to see how the Senate looks after the election) in a way that really undercuts some of the main arguments that have been made (including by me) against her.
Betrayal
I know a lot of folks who are upset at MoveOn for the General Betrayus thing, but via Matt Stoller here comes a different use of the "Betrayal of Trust" theme that I think Democrats will be pretty happy with:
Here's some background from Fred Kaplan on Giuliani's deciding he'd rather cash in than try to serve his country on the Baker-Hamilton Commission.
Hitchens Is Making Sense
Well, not really. But I'll say this for his contrarian take on disbanding Iraq's army -- I bet he's right that if Bremer had kept the army in place, I bet that would have led to a bloody fiasco in much the way that disbanding it led to, well, a bloody fiasco. The point is: Bloody fiasco either way. If Hitchens (or, for that matter, Paul Bremer) would just admit that the whole enterprise of the war was incredibly ill-advised then they'd be much better-positioned to question the judgment of the second-guessers on this particular point.
Best Sellers
I was a bit distressed to learn from Justin Logan that World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz is Amazon.com best-selling book in the Islamic section. It's also the number two book in world history (number one is by Naomi Klein which I'm not too thrilled with either, but I doubt her ideas would lead to nearly the sort of bloodshed of a Podhoretz).
Even more disturbing, though, is what follows Podhoretz on the Islamic history list. Number two is Robert Spencer's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, number three is The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion, and number four is The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World.
Reza Aslan's book eventually checks in at number five, but it seems that insofar as Americans are interested in Islam what they want is some good, old-fashioned Muslim-bashing. That can't bode well for the future of our foreign policy.
Comparative Advantage
Advocates of international trade agreements frequently express wonderment at their adversaries' alleged inability to understand the basic principles of the economics of international trade (see, e.g., Clive Crook's latest column in the print Atlantic) but what's truly baffling is the tendency of the proponents of such agreements to totally mangle the theoretical basis for their policies. Check out this McClatchey account of wrangling over proposed trade deals with Peru and other Latin American countries:
"Members of Congress need to understand that a 'no' vote on any one of these (free-trade agreements) will not create a single job in the United States or sell a single pound of meat or a single piece of medical equipment or software," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told an "FTA rally" last Monday on Capitol Hill. [...]
"This is a time to step it up," said Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, who took a delegation of nine lawmakers to Peru, Colombia and Panama last week. "It's good for exports, good for the economy and good for leaving a solid record for the future as to how we treat our friends and how we treat our allies."
Gutierrez argues that U.S. exports have risen faster to countries that have signed free-trade agreements with the United States. He points out that the United States is running a trade surplus with five Central American nations and the Dominican Republic after enacting CAFTA, as the free-trade agreement with those nations is called.
This is very odd stuff. Schwab and, especially, Gutierrez appear to be arguing that the purpose of these agreements is to generate trade surpluses. This, of course, is mercantilism, precisely the approach to policy that trade advocates have traditionally disparaged. And they've disparaged it with good reason. If Schwab and Gutierrez really want to run trade surpluses, signing these deals is a terrible idea. Instead, we should erect really high barriers to imports and try to use our non-trade forms of geopolitical leverage to force other countries to be more open to US exports than we are to their products.
Not that I'm saying we should implement those policies -- we shouldn't -- but that'd be the way to maximize our trade surplus.
And, of course, Schwab and Gutierrez aren't really confused about this. Rather, they think, as apparently all politicians do, that the American people aren't grown-up enough to hear the actual case for lowering trade barriers. But given the public's apparently diminishing tolerance for these agreements, it seems to me that one potentially promising approach to rebuilding support would be for the advocates of diminished barriers to start putting the real argument on the table.
What To Do About Iran
Unfortunately, while it's very easy to describe incredibly wrongheaded approaches to non-proliferation policy ("bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran," for example, or "faster, please"), outlining a sounder course tends to be a more complicated undertaking. To get a flavor for what a serious (as opposed to "serious") might look like, though, take a gander at Jessica Matthews:
As she says near the beginning, this really needs to be put into a broader context. If we really want the international community to hold Iran to its NPT commitments, we need to demonstrate some real commitment to the arms control process. That means ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and starting to work in a cooperative way with Russia. In principle, all of the existing nuclear powers have a pretty clear interest in there not being any more nuclear powers, so it should be possible to work with Moscow on the Iran front. But that would mean not picking fights with Russia on other strategic issues.
Blackwater Banned
I missed the news earlier today that Blackwater's security contractors have now been banned in Iraq. This will probably serve to make American policy in Iraq even less sustainable if the ban is enforced, but it's a no-brainer on the merits. As Mark Kleiman explains: "Blackwater's fighters-for-hire aren't subject to military discipline, which excludes them from the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They're exempt from prosecution in Iraq under rules left over from CPA days. And recklessly killing people in Iraq violates no U.S. domestic law."
Letting people like that wander around the country was a kind of criminal negligence on the part of the Iraqi government and the fact that it took years for this measure to get enacted is fairly shocking. Nevertheless, though Blackwater is the highest-profile contracting firm involved in Iraq, I don't think they're the only one and such unaccountable mercenaries haven't been banned in toto. That that hasn't happened, and that the CPA-era immunity hasn't been repealed, tells you a lot about the imperial character of this venture.
September 18, 2007
In-House News
Once upon a time, whilst indulging a youthful taste for overstatement, I tried to maintain that if you paid Ron Brownstein to leave the LA Times and start a reported blog instead, that you'd destroy about 50 percent of the Times' value as a news source. That may have been going to far, and I don't think he's going to be writing a blog, but I introduce this idea by way of noting that I'm pretty psyched that Brownstein's going to be joining the Atlantic Media Company mini-empire as political director.
Meanwhile, in other corporate news, the National Journal Political Stock Exchange is now up and running. I'm not totally sure I understand why "prediction markets" aren't the same as illegal gambling (I'm "predicting" that the roulette wheel will land on a red square, right?) but they're pretty fun to watch.
More and Better Think Tanks
Readers have no doubt noticed that I've gotten in the habit of throwing brickbats in the direction of the Brookings Institution's work on Iraq and the Middle East (it's a very big institution and I don't want to over-generalize since the dynamics of different programs seem very different to me) but as Ilan Goldenberg points out in a well-argued post, while this stuff makes for good blog-fodder it doesn't ultimate change anything. Rather, as he says:
Ultimately, the problem with the liberal VSP community has less to do with being “serious” and more to do with institutions On the right, groups such as AEI and Heritage act as a conservative VSP machine that systematically nurtures and promotes its experts. On the left, there are not enough mechanisms for picking out the best scholars, elevating their work and increasing their media profile. We all assume that because so many liberal experts sit inside CFR and Brookings, these institutions should play that role, but it’s not what they were set up to do. Heritage and AEI are there to push an agenda. Brookings and CFR are meant to be purely idea factories, without a coherent advocacy strategy.
Right. We now have a couple of institutions, most notably the Center for American Progress, but also the smaller National Security Network where Ilan works and some extent the things Steve Clemons has done at the New America Foundation that are capable of pushing a coherent progressive approach to national security issues (the newish Center for a New American Security is also potentially promising, though I'm a bit skeptical). What we need, in essence, are more institutions like that, and more capacity at the institutions we have. Meanwhile, there are plenty of good people lurking inside the corridors of Brookings and other shops and, in a world with a bigger and better progressive ideas infrastructure, those people might be situated inside places where they can work more effectively.
At any rate, there's been a great deal of progressive infrastructure building in Washington and around the country over the past five years or so, but considering that 9/11 and Iraq have been the defining political events of the current era, remarkably little of it has gone into national security issues.
Living With a Nuclear Iran
Retired General and former CENTCOM CINC John Abizaid argues that we could live with a nuclear Iran. And, indeed, we could. Iran getting a nuclear bomb wouldn't be a threat to the United States and wouldn't even be an especially serious problem for Israel or any aspects of American power projections in the region.
Somewhat ironically, I think getting clearer about this might make it easier to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. Acting in an unduly paranoid manner about the Iranian nuclear program suggests to Iranians that there are some large gains that might accrue to their country from developing nuclear weapons. In fact, a nuclear weapons program would be a largely useless waste of money. The United States has good reason to worry about nuclear proliferation in general and, therefore, to worry about the Iranian program as an instance of the general phenomenon. But Iranian nuclear weapons, as such, aren't a big problem for us.
Photo by Flickr user Hamed Saber used under a Creative Commons license
Thanks, Coach
So during last night's Redskins-Eagles game, we all remember the moment when the Skins had the ball on the 11 with 14 seconds left to play in the half, right? They were down 6-3 and the right thing to do, clearly, was take a shot at the end zone and if the pass went incomplete, go kick a field goal. But instead Joe Gibbs . . . sent in the field goal team. Fortunately, Eagles coach Andy Reid noted that this was a ridiculous play and called a timeout, giving Gibbs a chance to reconsider, call a pass, score a touchdown, and go on to win the game. Wasn't that a bit odd? Who changes their mind in a situation like that? And what was Gibbs thinking the first time around?
Counterinsurgency Skepticism
We seem to be witnessing a bit of a harmonic convergence of counterinsurgency skepticism as Andrew links to Edward Luttwak's skeptical take in the February Harper's and Josh Marshall asks the ever-salient question: "At the risk of asking a really silly question, can we list off the successful counterinsurgency operations in history?"
And, indeed, it turns out that there are really, really few. What's more, those that do exist mostly seem to have lacked the counterinsurgent-as-foreigner dynamic that would be involved in essentially any US counterinsurgency campaign. I would recommend Jeffrey Record's book for even more counterinsurgency skepticism.
Bizarre Poll Result of the Day
I've been known to engage in some Mark Penn-bashing in my day, but this passage from Microtrends is easily worth the price of admission:
My friend and colleague Sergio Bendixen, president of Bendixen and Associates in Miami and a preeminent expert in Hispanic public opinion research, conducted a cell phone poll of 600 Californians, aged 16-22, and asked them (innocuously enough), "what do you think you will most likely be doing in ten years?" It was a open-ended question, meaning that the respondents could give any answer they wanted (rather than being guided by a list of possible answers). As expected, almost 70 percent of the young folks said they'd be working, some in a specific career or running their own businesses. Twelve percent said they'd be in college, and 12percent said they'd be raising a family. One percent said they'd be in the military. And then, like a bolt from the blue, another 1 percent of California's young respondents volunteered that, in ten years, they would most likely be snipers.
Now, fascinatingly, rather than presenting any additional research or taking the opportunity to inform people about the possibility of polling error, Penn just launches into several pages worth of explaining the causes of the rise of this "new ambition of the younger generation."
Simple
David Brooks, in the waning days of TimesSelect, offers up a fairly positive take of Hillary Clinton's new health care plan. Still this gives me pause:
As she spoke, memories of the Clinton years wafted through my head — government by seminar running into the late hours. But as she will tell you (before you even have a chance to ask), she has learned a lot since the early 1990s, and while the conversations may still be endless, they are also more restrained.
And it’s true. The plan she unveiled yesterday is much simpler than the one she came up with 14 years ago. Back then, she and her staff were like technocratic engineers, one of her advisers told me, trying to patch every last gap in their edifice. This time they were content to leave the details of the plan to Congress.
That all seems smart, but in terms of actually enacting a health care reform, this sort of ducking of the complexity issue isn't going to fly. The "plan" she released yesterday is, like the plans from Edwards and Obama, much simpler than what her task force came up with back in the day precisely because a "plan" of this sort isn't legislation. Nevertheless, at some point before it becomes law, a plan is going to need to be fleshed out. And when it is it's going to be very complicated.
And not because of some flaw in the program, but just because health care is a fundamentally complicated topic. The "complexity" objection to the old Clinton plan, meanwhile, was fundamentally bogus. It was a complicated plan, but existing health care finance and regulations are extremely complicated. The ins-and-outs of your private plan are complicated. Everything about health care is complicated.
Which means that, fundamentally, complexity will always be out there as something folks determined to find a pretext with which to bash a proposal can use. And since there will always be folks out there looking for pretexts, that means that at some point the politics of the complexity issue need to be confronted head-on, rather than through measures to devise a non-complicated plan.
Photo by Flickr user Ernstl used under a Creative Commons license
Be Afraid
Even arch-imperialist Nial Ferguson is afraid of the prospect of Rudy Giuliani in the White House. And rightly so.
Greenstein Versus Samuelson
I'm shocked, shocked to discover that Robert Samuelson doesn't know what he's talking about.
Divide and Rule
Noah Schactman reports on Bush administration efforts to lay the groundwork for massive bloodshed in Iraq:
Sunni political and tribal leaders are increasingly throwing in their lot with U.S. forces here against Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent types. But, to get them to come over to our side, the American military has fed them a steady diet of anti-Shi'ite propaganda.
Arrests and killings of Shi'ite militants are announced from loudspeaker blasts; President Bush's bellicose rhetoric towards Shi'a Iran is reported on friendly radio programs. But the majority of this country is Shi'ite. Are we setting ourselves up as the enemies of the majority here? Are we priming the pump for an all-in sectarian battle royale? It seems like a possibility.
Robert Farley and Kevin Drum make some smart comments. I think this supports my view that our policy may, on some level, be deliberately aimed at fostering sectarian conflict in order to keep both sides friendly to the idea of an open-ended American military presence. Eric Martin has his doubts about that.
I'm reminded, however, of Alex Cooley's commentary on Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright (PDF) "What's at Stake in the American Empire Debate?" from the May issue of The American Political Science Review:
In fact, the extreme implication of the Nexon/Wright model for U.S. policymakers would be to more vigorously pursue “divide-and-rule” policies in Iraq instead of its contradictory nation-building policies of “unite and rule.”
I don't think one need necessarily see this as an incredibly deliberate development. Rather, the top political leadership in the country, from Bush and Cheney on down, has consistently failed to articulate meaningful objectives in Iraq beyond a stubborn refusal to answer calls for withdrawal. Under the circumstances, we shouldn't be surprised that this priority filtered down over time and has, increasingly, led our strategy to evolve in a divide and rule direction rather than a nation-building one.
A Surge of Weird Data
You'd think that General Petraeus' civilian casualties data and the Defense Department's civilian casualties data would at least show the same trend lines. You'd be wrong.
Eastern Promises
Sometime after The Departed came out, I found myself wondering why we don't see more films about non-Italian organized crime, especially the Russian mob which seems to be the up and coming thing. Then I saw a preview for Eastern Promises, a film about Russian gangsters (and to some extent their Chechen rivals) in London, and I thought it looked terrible. But Chris Orr said it was good and I went to see it and . . . it's good! It contains a lot of what people liked about David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, but I thought it added a deeper sense of place and rootedness reminiscent of screenwriter Steven Knight's fantastic Dirty Pretty Things from a few years back.
Traffic
DC pulls into a two-way tie with Atlanta for third-most-traffic-jam-plagued metro area behind perennial leader Los Angeles. Ryan Avent helps us understand why.
International Aspects of Carbon Taxation
Brought to you by Dave Roberts and Greg Mankiw. Indeed, a carbon tax used to fund offsetting reductions in other forms of revenue acquisition, actually ought to be conducive to the understandable emphasis on growth uber alles that you see in places like India and China (less deadweight loss) and would just help ensure that as Asia's developing giants become richer they do so in ways that are less carbon-intensive than what you see in the existing rich countries.
"Stronger"
You know what this blog needs? More hip-hop videos. "Stonger" by Kanye West:
I don't think that's what Japan's really like.
Comment is Free
I'm glad to see the TimesSelect paywall coming down, but I think I've got to disagree with Tim Lee's view that the failure of this gambit heralds the imminent demise of the subscription-only model for The Wall Street Journal. Rather, like Megan I think the basic problem was that The New York Times opinion pages just weren't worth paying for. I don't even think this is especially because of any failings on the part of the Times' columnists. Rather, it's just that unless your political commentators are adhering to completely marginal viewpoints there are always going to be plenty of close substitutes available for free.
To charge money for something on the web, you need to be providing content that's not only good, but also reasonably unique.
Strange Defeat
James Vega has a provocative post up about how Democrats can do better next time they face a high-profile political confrontation with a military man. I have to say, though, that I think it's important to reject the premise that the Petraeus/Crocker hearings were some kind of political setback for Democrats. Here's the sequence of events as I recall them:
- [in the murky past]: War in Iraq becomes unpopular.
- [November 2006] Republicans lose tons of congressional seats.
- [December 2006] Baker-Hamilton commission attempts to frame a proposal for gradual withdrawal in a way that would be politically possible for Bush to embrace.
- [January 2007] Bush rejects Baker-Hamilton out of hand, says unpopular war will continue indefinitely and be escalated via unpopular surge.
- [Spring 2007] Nervous Republicans back Bush in legislative showdown, but are afraid to endorse his proposal for endless war, say instead that nothing should be decided until Petraeus reports in September.
- [June 2007] War is unpopular.
- [July 2007] War is unpopular.
- [August 2007] war is unpopular.
- [Early September 2007] Petraeus and Crocker testify that despite the surge's failure to accomplish its stated goals, progress is being made, and the surge should continue for six more months.
- [Mid-September 2007] War is still unpopular.
Basically, a whole lot of nothing has been happening . . . the war keeps being unpopular and the Republicans keep being intransigent.
Alex Debat's Pentagon Connections
Brought to you by Laura Rozen.
September 19, 2007
Peter King (R-NY): "Too Many Mosques in This Country"
The Politico ran a story about how Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said that there are "too many mosques in this country." Eventually, they updated the post with this:
The quote was taken entirely out of context by Politico. My position in this interview, as it has been for many years, is that too many mosques in this country do not cooperate with law enforcement. Unfortunately, Politico was incapable of making this distinction.
They also posted a video that lets you see the context:
We have too many mosques in this country, we have too many people who are sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully, we should be looking at how we can infiltrate . . . we should be much more aggressive with law enforcement.
That really doesn't sound any better to me. On a policy level, though, in context we can see that King isn't really calling for a reduction in the quantity of mosques. Rather, his proposal seems to be that Muslims should be treated to a presumption of guilt and their religious institutions treated as criminal conspiracies to be infiltrated. I was going to try to construct an analogy about how King probably wouldn't be happy with a presumption of guilt being placed on Irish-American institutions, but it turns out King's actually a longtime IRA supporter (though, it seems, not since 9/11) so he must understand this dynamic on some level. And, of course, King turns out to have some history here:
King, who has said that all Muslims aren't terrorists but that all recent terrorists are Muslim, favors an ethnic and religious profiling scheme that would include foreign and American-born travelers. "I would give the investigators and screeners a lot of discretion as to where it ends," he said.
Despite King's endorsement of such a process, it is a technique that has been widely dismissed as a legitimate law enforcement tool.
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, a childhood friend of King's whom the congressman calls one of the nation's leading counter-terrorism officials, has previously called racial profiling "nuts" and "ineffective," and eliminated the practice when he oversaw the U.S. Customs Service.
And, of course, King's belief that Muslim religious institutions should be treated as if they're criminal conspiracies makes more sense in light of his view that 85 percent of American mosques have extremist leadership, a delightfully made up fact that seems to undergird his thinking on this issue.
HRC on Jerusalem
It seems that Hillary Clinton has a position paper on Israel and Israel-related issues coming out that says she "believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned." This is, obviously, a disaster. No division of Jerusalem is fine as an Israeli negotiating posture, but it's absurd for the President of the United States to make this a baseline commitment. Simply put, it doesn't matter to Americans exactly how the Jerusalem issue is resolved, and our emphasis needs to be on supporting whatever kind of compromise the parties to the conflict can agree upon.
Now, needless to say, I don't think anyone thinks Clinton really believes this. As M.J. Rosenberg points out, her husband's parameters involved sharing Jerusalem as would any realistic plan. She's not a crazy person, and surely she realizes this. But, of course, the odds of actually achieving a settlement go down when leading American figures make these kind of statements that wreck their credibility as honest brokers. Similarly, Palestinian moderates are left hanging out to dry when American leaders give the impression that they have no intention of acting in a reasonable and impartial manner even if Palestinians change their behavior. And last, of course, the sort of addiction to the politics of pandering to You Know Who that this reflects doesn't bode well for Clinton's approach to this issue in practice no matter how sound her instincts may be in principle.
Photo by Flickr user Bernie CB used under a Creative Commons license
Krugblog
As part of the new, post-Select era, here's a Paul Krugman blog of sorts.
Obama Tax Plan
The good news about yesterday's Barack Obama speech on tax policy is that it's a good speech. The basic theme of the speech is that the tax code should be made simpler, fairer, and more progressive. I agree! Unfortunately, the policy followthrough is a little lacking:
- Cutting taxes for 150 million Americans and their families, allowing them to get a tax cut of up to $1000.
- Easing the burden on the middle class by providing a universal homeowner’s tax credit to those who do not itemize their deductions, immediately benefiting 10 million homeowners, the majority of whom make under $50,000 per year.
- Eliminating the income tax for any American senior making less than $50,000 per year, eliminating income taxes for about 7 million American seniors.
- Simplifying tax filings so millions of Americans can do their taxes in less than 5 minutes.
Andrew doesn't like that last part, under which "The IRS would send prefilled tax forms to 40 million workers who take the standard deduction and have a bank account." That, though, is a perfectly good idea that, though not original to Obama, he is just now injecting into the present campaign.
The homeowner's tax credit idea is directed at a real problem -- the bad distributive effects of our current tax treatment of homeownership -- but addresses it from the wrong side. Having the tax code show favoritism toward homeownership over other kinds of investing makes no real sense. Eliminating the favoritism isn't feasible, but a good incremental step to making it more progressive would be to limit the favoritism more at the top, and give people near the bottom either some other form of tax relief or else more services.
Having seniors who make less than $50k pay no income tax just seems to totally lack rationale.
The first plank, which would be a new kind of refundable tax credit, has a worthy impulse but seems poorly designed. The tax credit situation is already very complicated. The right thing to be doing is streamlining it, as in the EPI's proposal for a SImplified Family Credit, not further complicating it with an additional credit.
Coleman Tries to Blur
Here's some video of Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) talking to anti-war constituents and giving a preview of the political strategy I think we'll be seeing more of from Republicans representing moderate areas:
As observed by the Uptake, Coleman repeatedly says that "we shouldn’t be in the middle of a civil war" even though in his role as a United States Senator he's consistently cast votes designed to ensure that we do just that. His hope seems to be that triangulating rhetoric combined with steadfast support for Bush when it comes time to vote can shield him from the wrath of the pro-war base and the anti-war middle alike.
"After The Surge"
Thanks to the Project on Defense Alternative's compilation of exit plans for Iraq, I've just now been reading Steven Simon's booklet "After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq" for the Council on Foreign Relations that contains what is, I think, one of the best diagnoses of the problem:
Leaving U.S. forces in Iraq under today’s circumstances means the United States is culpable but not capable—that is, Washington bears substantial responsibility for developments within Iraq without the ability to shape those developments in a positive direction. In consequence, Iraqi support for the U.S. presence has collapsed. Polls indicate that most Iraqis want the United States to pull out. Moreover, the Iraq war has fueled the jihad and apparently been a godsend to jihadi recruiters—and the process of self-recruitment—as indicated by the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the global war on terror. More broadly, the Iraq war has had a very damaging effect on the U.S. reputation in the Arab and wider Islamic world. Authoritative opinion surveys show this as well. The continued presence of U.S. forces is thus a severe setback in the canonical war of ideas, which the Bush administration has correctly assessed as crucial to American interests. [...]
In 2004, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy to Osama bin Laden, said of the U.S. intervention: “America is between two fires. If it stays in Iraq, it will bleed to death; if it leaves, it will lose everything.” His forecast comes disturbingly close to describing current circumstances. It need not, however, be prophecy. More than three years after the intervention began, to be sure, the United States finds itself in an agonizing strategic position. The time has come to acknowledge that the United States must fundamentally recast its commitment to Iraq. It must do so without any illusions that there are unexplored or magic fixes, whether diplomatic or military. Some disasters are irretrievable. Having staked its prestige on the intervention and failed to achieve many of its objectives, the United States will certainly pay a price for military disengagement from Iraq. But if the United States manages its departure from Iraq carefully, it will not have lost everything. Rather, the United States will have preserved the opportunity to recover vital assets that its campaign in Iraq has imperiled: diplomatic initiative, global reputation, and the well-being and political utility of its ground forces. [...]
But raising the prospect of desperate deterioration in Iraq and its environs after an American military disengagement necessarily tends to obscure two things. First, the presence of U.S. forces has not stabilized Iraq thus far. Second, conditions for instability have become structural elements of Iraqi politics. Given these facts, how long should the U.S. keep troops in Iraq, when its military presence only delays an inevitable escalation of intra-Iraqi fighting?
I still hear it often said, including by liberal-minded people, that all serious experts agree that we need to stay in Iraq, or even that the consensus on this score is so overwhelming that it's inevitable that we'll stay. Neither is true. Quite a lot of who've thought deeply about this problem have concluded that the best thing to do is simply to cut our losses and leave, focusing our remaining Iraq-related energies on doing what we can for refugees and to improve the broader regional diplomatic situation.
Let The Poor Save
Asset tests for programs aimed at helping low-income people have a certain obvious logic to them. The idea is to target assistance to the genuinely needy. But as Rourke O'Brien points out they also create some terrible incentives: "Yet, while policymakers created an asset test to keep hypothetical, unemployed trust fund brats from collecting government checks, these rules are sending a dangerous message to low-income families: Do not save."
Of course, the real issue here is a larger one of political context. Much of America's public assistance policy is driven by a deep, lurking fear that someone, somewhere may be getting benefits he or she doesn't deserve. An alternative way of doing business would be to design policy in a way that's best suited to the genuine needs of the genuinely needy. That would mean making it relatively easy for people to obtain the benefits for which they're eligible, and relatively generous about phase-outs and wealth-tests so that the provided benefits can be a stepping-stone to greater prosperity rather than a ceiling. But relaxed, generous policies like that really do leave the door open to some measure of fraud and conservatives have succeeded in elevating the evasion of this fraud to an absurdly high level. Thus, there's tons of emphasis on trying to detect EITC fraud even though the amount of money involved here is minor compared to tax evasion by the wealthy, but the damage done to an otherwise successful program aimed at making work pay is severe.
At any rate, Rourke's op-ed is aimed at building support for a John Conyers bill aimed specifically at this asset test business, and it seems like a worthy proposal to me.
Bad Max
One of the first articles I ever wrote for The American Prospect was about Max Baucus, who's both a strikingly terrible Democrat and takes strikingly little heat for it since he's not really much of a grandstander. At any rate, his suckitude continues as yesterday he helped vote against a plan to give the District of Columbia a vote in the House of Representatives. His reason?
Baucus said in a written statement that he opposed the bill because Montana has only one House vote. "If we were to expand the House, Montana's voice would become less influential," he said.
Chris Orr brings the math:
Now, my back-of-the-envelope calculation--and I hope readers will feel free to correct it if it's wrong--finds that Montana's single House vote currently makes up 0.2299 percent of the total House vote. If the House were expanded from 435 members to 437, Montana's share would drop to 0.2288 percent. Yes, Baucus felt obligated to vote against any federal representation for residents of the District of Columbia, because it would reduce the relative clout of his states' residents (in the House only, the Senate would be unaffected) by one-thousandth of one percent.
And, of course, Montana would be ludicrously overrepresented in congress whether or not DC got a vote.
Boring Pundits
Everyone's talking about T.A. Frank's article exploring the question of why people find Bob Herbert dull. More interesting, who is it, exactly, who has the stomach to read Robert Samuelson's columns? Today, he's writing the country's strong economic performance during Alan Greenspan's tenure at the fed: "Was this luck -- or Greenspan's skill? The answer: some of both."
Some of both! Fascinating.
The Case for 1997
Ah, to be sixteen again. Well, not really. But I've got to support The Onion AV Club's efforts to convince us that 1997 is the new 1967:
1967 is rightfully—though overly, especially during its 40th anniversary—revered as a watershed year for pop music: It saw the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, Are You Experienced?, The Velvet Underground & Nico, Forever Changes, and many other incredible and/or important albums. 1997, though lacking the benefit of as much hindsight, packed a pretty earth-shaking musical punch, too, clearly led by Radiohead's already-canonized OK Computer.
I hope this nineties rock renaissance really takes off because I've been ahead of the curve on this one. Here's "Why Did We Ever Meet" by The Promise Ring:
Indeed.
How're We Doing
Via Ezra Klein, Gallup's graphic representation of their polling data on the state of America's policy in Iraq.
It's interesting to consider how the goalposts have shifted over the years. In the summer of 2004, most Americans thought things were going poorly in Iraq, and that was certainly the general sense one got of elite beliefs as well. Today, meanwhile, despite disagreement about the "surge" I think just about everyone thinks conditions have deteriorated from where they were three years ago.
Attacking Iran
Salon publishes Steve Clemons' "Why Bush Won't Attack Iran". It's an interesting piece, but as Brian Beutler points out the conclusion is actually that we should . . . worry about a war with Iran! Specifically, "an engineered provocation" that "would most likely be triggered by one or both of the two people who would see their political fortunes rise through a new conflict -- Cheney and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
That said, I've become a bit of a skeptic about the short-term prospects for war. I see very little political interest in such a war from anyone. At the same time, the Iran hawks have succeeded in getting every major political figure to agree that all options, including war, must be "on the table" and that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. And they've also succeeded in preventing everyone in practical politics from talking about the sort of things that would go into a serious diplomatic settlement. Under the circumstances, the medium-term prospects for war seem to me to remain decent, and from an Iran hawks' point of view it'd probably be better to have any military strikes happen under a less discredited future president than under the unpopular incumbent.
Along those lines, Moira Whelan observes:
Bushies know Democrats want to look tough on terrorism—so if Iran is helping the Taliban, why are they being allowed to get away with supporting it? They know the progressive commitment to non-proliferation, so why is Iran escaping scrutiny? Then, of course, there’s their drum beat on Iran’s involvement in Iraq.
All of these arguments will be part of the neocons attempt to tie the hands of the next President. This benefits them in two ways. First, they use it as a domestic political issue to attempt to make Democrats look weak on critical national security issues if there is no action. Second, they attempt to get what they want--an attack on Iran—without the resulting mess on their hands. Either way, they spend some time driving the debate and acting as “deciders” of handling Iran being right or wrong (newsflash: it will be wrong). In the meantime, the Democratic administration will say things like “its complicated” and “we’re working it diplomatically”—a position that may be right, but is always a tough sell.
And, of course, there are some fairly committed Iran hawks on the merits inside the broad Democratic coalition.
Retrocession
Ross points me to National Review's editorial against a vote for DC's House member, that argues instead for retrocession:
Finally, there is retrocession — i.e., ceding the bulk of the district to Maryland, much as a portion of D.C. was ceded to Virginia in 1846. A federal district would survive, but as a much-reduced core that contains the Capitol, the White House, and the National Mall. In some ways, this is the most attractive option. Maryland, of course, would have to agree to the transfer.
This probably is the best choice, albeit something Maryland has traditionally not been interested in. It would, however, make a certain amount of sense for Maryland's Democratic establishment to want to embrace a measure that would entrench their power.
In Uniform
Andrew links to K-Lo's account of "a meeting with the president in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for a small group of conservative journalists."
President Bush may have been most emphatic though when it came to the topic of “those left wing ads” attacking General Petraeus. The president brought the infamous New York Times MoveOn ad up without prompting, saying of his reaction to it: “I was incredulous at first and then became mad.”
“It is one thing to attack me — which is fine,” the president said. But the president's view the attack on Petraeus as “an attack on men and women in uniform.”
The ad really did make me wonder about the intelligence of the folks behind it, but that was nothing compared to the baffling stupidity displayed by Bush in saying this and Lopez in just passing the remark on without comment. The ad was, very clearly, on attack on General Petraeus and there's just no possible way a reasonable person could construe it as some kind of generalized slander against the troops.
Meanwhile, Bush's disingenuousness in saying "It is one thing to attack me — which is fine" is just staggering. For years, the man took the view that criticism of his policies amount to criticism of the idea of freedom, that to disagree with his Iraq policy was racist and unpatriotic, and all the rest. Eventually, years and years of fruitless, bungled, unnecessary warfare caused him to become so unpopular that this line of counterattack became unviable. Thus, he hit on the strategy of finding a well-regarded media-savvy general and, in essence, appointing him front man for administration. For months and months and months the administration indicated that to question its policy was to question the Great Man Petraeus. So, naturally, people came to criticize Petraeus.
If he doesn't like seeing a politicized officer's corps, he shouldn't have been hiding behind the generals in the first place.
Self-Determination
Now here I was thinking to myself that there's really just no way you could turn a discussion of Taiwan-PRC relations into a pretext for talking about the perfidy of the Palestinians. Obviously, I hadn't taken Peretz-power into consideration. He's talking about Taiwan's quest for UN membership:
I have a suggestion--giving up the fight is not my way--and here it is: Without giving up its ultimate ambitions for U.N. membership, it should apply for observer status in the world organization. Like the Palestine Liberation Organization which, unlike Taiwan, rules no territory, commands no popular consensus, represents no coherent principles, has no economy, but struts around the world with embassies and ambassadors and plenipotentiaries and the usual bull-shit of diplomacy. Moreover, it actually speaks before the General Assembly and the Security Council and is represented here, there and everywhere in international organizations.
It is actually a lie that the P.L.O. has all these rights, none of which is passed onto the dazed people it purports to represent.
At any rate, it's fortunate for Peretz that he was able to make this pivot, because the consideration of the issue earlier in the post ("What this movement wants is recognition that 23 million people cannot be represented by a government which is historically alien and politically hostile") was veering dangerously close to endorsing a principle of self-determination that might have applicability to a certain stateless people somewhere.
DCPS's Vanishing Students
Catherine's link to Washingtonian's profile of DC's new and much-hyped schools chancellor Michelle Rhee reminded me that I only recently learned about one of the odder issues with the DC school system -- what you could only call undercrowding of the schools.
Catty-corner from our house, for example, is Cardozo High School (home, hilariously, of the Clerks) and it's extremely imposing multi-story building. The school grounds as a whole are enormous, and the building itself is several standard city blocks. I'd lived in its shadow for years, but only last week learned that the school only has 749 students. And that's very typical. The student population served by DC public schools is way down from its peak, so the system's oldish buildings are too big for their current populations. This, in turn, makes the system's facilities inefficient to maintain and adds another problem onto an already very troubled system.
Indeed, despite Rhee's popularity and good press coverage, one has to wonder on some level if DCPS isn't in a death spiral. The basic demographic trends in the city point in the direction of declining public school enrollment, and the system is legendarily crappy which has led to burgeoning interest in charter schools and very rapid declines in enrollment which, as it leads to school closures, can open up more facilities to be used for charters. You could easily imagine the city transitioning to an Andrei Cherny-style model where all the schools are charter schools.
At Long Last
Some say the campaign season has become too long, but I say that it's just now gotten long enough to treat us to the spectacle of John Edwards and Gideon Yago on camera together, discussing the issues.
September 20, 2007
Mark Versus Women
Pitchfork features more reviews by dudes named "Mark" than by persons of a female persuasion. This via Ann Friedman and Amanda Marcotte who provides a much longer commentary, including a list of myths that "run women out of insufferable music snobbery." Here's number one:
Women are born with bad taste and need men to set them straight. Therefore a woman with good taste probably got it from her boyfriend. I’ve mentioned this noxiously specific stereotype before, so now I want to address why it has a lot of staying power: Confirmation bias. Hey, our lovers have influence on our taste. If anyone’s worth dating for any stretch of time, he/she is going to be able to turn you on to new bands and new songs and show you stuff in a new light. And if a guy teaches a woman about some stuff, then that becomes a confirmation of the “women get their taste from men” stereotype. But because there’s no converse stereotype, a man’s acquisition of taste from women doesn’t get noticed—hell, most people probably assume straightaway that he gathered that knowledge himself in a female-free fashion. Women can internalize this, too. It took me awhile to get over feeling weird that my high school boyfriend got me into Bowie, even though I in turn got him into the Pixies, until I realized I was dealing with an internalized stereotype and that it wasn’t as one-sided as I assumed it was. But I’d gone so long with the assumption that I didn’t have native good taste that it was too late to really get into writing record reviews.
Eerily reminiscent of the time I was trying to tell Kathleen Hanna how awesome she is and she bitterly replied, "what, your ex-girlfriend had a lot of Bikini Kill records or something" which I guess was my brief taste of how the other half lives.
Giuliani's Dangerous Ignorance
Obviously, expressing willingness to hold diplomatic discussions with Iran's leaders is a political blunder whereas running around the world threatening to attack them like Rudy Giuliani is politically savvy toughness. That everybody knows. So I suppose that by the same token, promising to expand NATO to include Israel -- thus committing the United States to the armed defense of the borders of a country that lacks internationally recognized borders -- also reflects the politically savvy toughness rather than, say, a dangerous ignorance of what NATO is or how it works or international relations more broadly.
Bringing Sexy Back
GFR tries to set the record straight on this whole "is Fred Thompson sexy?" question. Photos are included.
The Future of Television
Near the end of The New York Times's article on new NBC TV downloads, Jeff Gaspin, NBC TV's president, says "Our research shows that 83 per cent of the viewers would still rather watch on a TV than a PC."
This doesn't necessarily seem relevant to me. I would want to watch shows on as high-quality a display as possible but whether that display is a "monitor" connected to a computer or a "television" connected to a cable box doesn't matter at all. I don't, in practice, connect my TV to my computer but if you made it possible to download files that were worth watching on a large high-definition screen, then I'd do it in a minute.
Meanwhile, he also claims that pricing disputes weren't the main motive for leaving the iTunes Store. Rather, "piracy was and is our No. 1 priority." The piracy obsession from the content industry continues to be depressing. The nature of the internet is that if a single pirate copy lands on the world's peer-to-peer networks, then a pirated version of your content is available. Unless your copy protection scheme is literally impossible to break, the only real safety against piracy is either for your product to be really unpopular or else to try to sell people a product that's superior (in terms of, e.g., convenience) than the one they can get illegally. This quest for "better" anti-piracy measures doesn't lead anywhere. Instead, by crippling their product, content-producers are putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis illicit copies.
Photo by Flickr user Jot Punkt used under a Creative Commons license
Nothing to See Here
Via Mark Thoma and Brendan Nyhan another one of those uninfluential supply-siders carefully kept at the margins of the policy process by the leaders of the Republican Party:
I would also argue that cutting taxes made a significant difference, not only in dealing with a recession and an attack on our country, but it also made a significant difference in dealing with the deficit because the growing economy yielded more tax revenues, which allowed us to shrink the deficit.
No. Wait. That was the President of the United States.
Famous Last Words
"I'll bet he'll find people who want to be Cal Ripken in Pakistan" -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
This comes via Greg Djerejian who notes that, of course, they don't play baseball in Pakistan.
In The Eye of the Beholder
Paul Krugman, blogging up a storm, complains:
In fact, it’s quite strange how the magnitude of the Democratic victory has been downplayed. After the 1994 election, the cover of Time showed a charging elephant, and the headline read “GOP stampede.” Indeed, the GOP had won an impressive victory: in House races, Republicans had a 7 percentage point lead in the two-party vote.
In 2006, Time’s cover was much more subdued; two overlapping circles, and the headline “The center is the new place to be.” You might assume that this was because the Democrats barely eked out a victory. In fact, Democrats had an 8.5 percentage point lead, substantially bigger than the GOP win in 1994. Also, the new Democratic majority in the House isn’t just larger than any the Republicans achieved over their 12-year reign; it’s much more solidly progressive than their pre-1994 majority.
Ezra Klein agrees. But here's the thing, I've heard conservatives complain about this too. When conservatives secure political power, it's all "holy shit: conservatives!" but when liberals secure political power, it's all "don't worry, they're centrists." There's truth to both perspectives here, but I think the right fundamentally has the better of this argument. It wouldn't have been helpful to liberals or to liberalism for Time to greet the 2006 elections with a photo of Nancy Pelosi flanked by Charlie Rangel, Henry Waxman, David Obey, and John Conyers under the headline "THE LIBERAL TAKEOVER."
It's true, however, that what Paul and Ezra are complaining about is very annoying to liberals, but that's not the same thing.
Mobilizing
Sending brief SMS messages turns out to be a cost-effective method of boosting young peoples' likelihood of voting.
Tax Free DC?
Via John J. Miller, one alternative to congressional representation or retrocession for DC:
End Federal Taxation: Given its exclusive power over the District, Congress could abolish federal income taxes on District residents, providing a powerful solution to the city's "taxation without representation" complaint. This is a reasonable compromise and fully within Congress's powers. Other non-voting territories, like Puerto Rico, do not pay federal income taxes for similar reasons.
I bet DC residents would take it. And as Miller remarks, it'd do big things for local property values. Of course, do this and next thing you know people around the country are clamoring for the right to give up their vote in exchange for not paying income taxes. Maybe some of the blogosphere's libertarians can start organizing around that proposal.
Photo by Flickr user Clone of Snake used under a Creative Commons license
Things You Never Read
Tyler Cowen passes on a "defense of employer-linked health insurance," remarking "On net, I do not agree with this opinion, but this perspective is too often neglected in health care debates." It seems to me that this perspective is mostly neglected because it's wrong . . . the argument more-or-less depends on the idea of long-term employment by large firms which, of course, really is the classic model of a workable employer-sponsored health care system but which doesn't fit the reality of a large and growing number of people's lives.
No Big Deal?
A correspondent writes in apropos of my criticism of Paul Krugman's take on the contrast between press coverage of 1994 and 2006 to suggest that it was objectively a bigger deal for the GOP to take control of the House for the first time in decades than it was for Democrats to return to the majority after a twelve year absence. That may well be right.
Much more persuasive than any of this, it seems to me, is Krugman's next post, slamming political journalism as theater criticism. I think this is right on. What's more, I think it's this -- the superficiality and trivial nature of contemporary press coverage of political -- that explains the "so-called liberal media" phenomenon. The dominant approach has an overarching reactionary valence that far outweights the political views of any particular person or set of persons who participate in the system.