As part of my outrageous out-of-touchness with real America, until a meal consumed after trap shooting yesterday, I'd never been to an Olive Garden. Generally speaking, my exposure to the realm of table-service chain restaurants has been pretty limited, and my early exposures were primarily to Applebee's and Chili's (which, somewhat oddly, has a branch right near Harvard Square) and so those are the places I've always sought out in the rare instances when looking for such a thing. Be that as it may, now I've been there, and I have to say that the $8.95 never-ending pasta bowl really does explain a lot about America's obesity problem.
At the same time, there really is something incredibly impressive about the idea of an economy that's efficient enough to provide such a cornucopia of food in exchange for such a trivial portion of the average person's income. Still, a bit more progress like this and none of us are going to have any arteries left.
In the Republican primary, ideology and partisan affiliation are major dividing lines that alter the dynamics of the race. Giuliani and Thompson are basically tied among Republican primary voters who describe themselves as strong Republicans, as well as among conservative leaning Republicans. McCain and Giuliani are close among independents who vote in the Republican primary. Additionally, the Thompson gender gap (widely reported) is worth keeping an eye on. In this omnibus survey, it is slightly larger than the Clinton gender gap, and in a recent ARG poll it was up to 30 points. It is bouncing around a lot, but I think Thompson will probably be in trouble in the general election if he can't even convince Republican women to vote for him.
Once again we see that actual women seem unmoved by Fred Thompson's alleged manly charms. Of course, with the Republican field it's still very hard to know how seriously to take levels of support Giuliani's getting from people who don't necessarily seem to be aware of his positions on the issue. The early primaries aren't so far away anymore, but something like "Rudy loves baby killers" is the kind of piece of information that can be disseminated pretty quickly.
Tyler Cowen gives his jaundiced view of what caused the great compression of the American income distribution in the 1937-47 period:
Crush the incomes at the top and then make the fat cats pay much higher wages to protect the world and become a superpower. Impose wage and price controls as well. See how long it takes before these distributional effects -- which don't exactly match the distribution of economic talent-- reverse themselves in the aggregate.
I don't really buy that, but it does seem that whatever elements of the World War II era policy climate laid the groundwork for the relatively egalitarian thirty postwar years are unlikely to be repeatable short of some comparably scaled world-historical calamity. On the other hand, the more important issue analytically may really be the post-war policy climate, which was much more catastrophe-free, that sustained the compressed distribution.
The LA Times's Mark Babarak takes a look at the shoe that hasn't dropped in the campaign yet: attack ads on television. The candidates don't like to bust these out, because in a multiple-person race negative ads can easily backfire and mainly serve to benefit a third candidate. At some point, though, someone's going to decide he (or, in principle, she, but Clinton almost certainly won't shoot first) needs to go for it.
That kind of thing can transform a race. Most people who follow politics closely have already gotten a little bored with this super-long fight, but most voters still have only very hazy notions about the campaign and the evidence is that attack ads really do make a big difference -- I expect this to especially be a problem for Giuliani. What's more, even relatively small ad-induced changes in the polls would inject dynamism into the competition and bring renewed attention and enthusiasm from the junkies.
I'm not sure I really ever gave my diavlog with Daniel Drezner a proper plug. I tend to think Dan and I have reasonably different political views, but we wound up with disappointingly little to disagree about. The crux of the problem came when we were discussing the fact that essentially everyone who went to work for Bush wound up with a worse reputation than he had going in. Maybe a few second-tier people (Zelikow, e.g.) have so far escaped unscathed, but the only people to enhance their reputations have been whistle blowers.
Dan called this the "ultimate indictment of Bush," which it really is, but now that we're at a point where most all reasonable people see things this way, what's left to argue about. The best we could really up with was me not buying Alan Greenspan's attempt at an exculpatory confession for his role in the Bush tax cuts rather than a straightforwardly confessional one.
So what to do? Remember that Kristol's loyalty to the Republicans often trumps national security. How else to explain his support for the GOP last November, even though a Republican victory would have prevented the surge in the first place and kept Rumsfeld in the Pentagon? One option: Change the subject by launching wars against Syria and Iran, and so polarize the country that the choice is framed as: MoveOn or America? That's much better than having, you know, an actual debate about the merits of the war in Iraq and the war against Islamist terror. On that, Republicans lose. If the war is far wider and more terrifying, if the enemies can be multiplied and amplified, then the dynamic plays to the advantage of the GOP. It's for us or against us again.
I really think that's wrong. Kristol wants military action against Syria and Iran because Syria and Iran are both countries in the news and Kristol's only idea about foreign policy is that the United States should deploy more military force. He's also, clearly, a committed partisan Republican, but I think any fair reading of the record shows that his commitment to maximum military action all the time trumps petty considerations of partisanship. Recall that back in April 2001 Bush disappointed Kristol by not launching a war with China and got this treatment:
The profound national humiliation that President Bush has brought upon the United States may be forgotten temporarily when the American aircrew, held captive in China as this magazine goes to press, return home. But when we finish celebrating, it will be time to assess the damage done, and the dangers invited, by the administration's behavior.
Now, that was idiotic. Our temporary forgetting of this "profound" humiliation will extend until the end of time because Bush, listening to Colin Powell and other sensible members of his administration, handled a sticky situation rather well and advanced our key interests at basically no cost. Kristol, by contrast, wanted to engage in a risky game of brinksmanship over nothing because, basically, he thinks war is great. Which, again, is profoundly dumb, but not in a partisan way. He's just a one-trick pony.
So Joe Biden's pollster, Celinda Lake, did some push polling about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, then leaked it to The Washington Post which produced this story:
Conventional wisdom dictates that Democratic voters are thrilled with their choices for president, bursting at the seams to rally behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) or whoever gets the party's nod next year.
A recent survey by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, however, showed Clinton and Obama trailing former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani (R) in the 31 Democratic-held House districts regarded as most imperiled in 2008, and even potentially serving as a drag on those lawmakers' reelection chances. [...]
"Some people say [your Democratic incumbent] is a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton and will support her liberal agenda of big government and higher taxes if she becomes president," the poll stated, before asking respondents whether they would still vote for their incumbent or choose a Republican candidate.
Whether the question named Clinton or Obama, the Democratic incumbent's lead shrank to an average of six points: 47 percent to 41 percent with Clinton leading the ticket, 44 percent to 38 percent with Obama as the nominee.
But now here's the catch: the Post writers don't identify Lake as Biden's pollster, or even characterize the poll as the push-poll it was. This prompts some of the usual media criticism from Atrios, which is spot-on, but also limited in perspective.
After all, Washington Post aside, why did Lake do this? Surely she didn't do it because she thinks she's going to put Joe Biden in the White House. Surely she knows she'll lose, and she'll continue to make a living as a public opinion consultant for Democratic candidates and progressive non-profit groups. Thus, she must realize that her future depends, in large part, on obtaining good will from progressive circles. Under the circumstances, her willingness to engage in dirty pool against the front-runners is remarkable. You have tons of reports of unions who favor John Edwards on the merits but who don't want to alienate Hillary Clinton by saying so publicly. But then you have -- frequently -- pollsters and other sorts of consultants who don't seem to fear the wrath of elected officials at all.
It tells you a lot about the actual structure of power in Washington. Above a certain level, the consultants aren't afraid of anyone.
Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji is circulating an open letter on the occasion of the UN session starting this week regarding the situation facing his country. It comes with key endorsements (Saad Eddin Ibrahim! Kwame Anthony Appiah! Henry Louis Gates, Jr! Michael Lerner! Juan Cole!) and seems very compelling to me. Here's the beginning:
To His Excellency Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations,
The people of Iran are experiencing difficult times both internationally and domestically. Internationally, they face the threat of a military attack from the US and the imposition of extensive sanctions by the UN Security Council. Domestically, a despotic state has – through constant and organized repression – imprisoned them in a life and death situation.
Far from helping the development of democracy, US policy over the past 50 years has consistently been to the detriment of the proponents of freedom and democracy in Iran. The 1953 coup against the nationalist government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq and the unwavering support for the despotic regime of the Shah, who acted as America's gendarme in the Persian Gulf, are just two examples of these flawed policies. More recently the confrontation between various US Administrations and the Iranian state over the past three decades has made internal conditions very difficult for the proponents of freedom and human rights in Iran. Exploiting the danger posed by the US, the Iranian regime has put military-security forces in charge of the government, shut down all independent domestic media, and is imprisoning human rights activists on the pretext that they are all agents of a foreign enemy. The Bush Administration, for its part, by approving a fund for democracy assistance in Iran, which has in fact being largely spent on official institutions and media affiliated with the US government, has made it easy for the Iranian regime to describe its opponents as mercenaries of the US and to crush them with impunity. At the same time, even speaking about "the possibility" of a military attack on Iran makes things extremely difficult for human rights and pro-democracy activists in Iran. No Iranian wants to see what happened to Iraq or Afghanistan repeated in Iran. Iranian democrats also watch with deep concern the support in some American circles for separatist movements in Iran. Preserving Iran's territorial integrity is important to all those who struggle for democracy and human rights in Iran. We want democracy for Iran and for all Iranians. We also believe that the dismemberment of Middle Eastern countries will fuel widespread and prolonged conflict in the region. In order to help the process of democratization in the Middle East, the US can best help by promoting a just peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, and pave the way for the creation of a truly independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. A just resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the establishment of a Palestinian state would inflict the heaviest blow on the forces of fundamentalism and terrorism in the Middle East.
Howard's Alan McPherson says we should locate the precedents for Iraq in past American imperial ventures in Latin America:
Unfortunately, that ancient lesson has evidently been completely forgotten — even though it is most salient. What is Iraq now was Latin America then, a time and place where the force of the United States as an invading power was considered at least as powerful as it is today.
Whether in Haiti or elsewhere, Americans back then believed that they were top dog — and, after invading, could fix up a place like that rather quickly. Little did they know then… Little do we know now…
I'm at UN Headquarters in New York for the High-Level Event on Climate Change (reporting!). So far, nothing's actually happened. This sign, however, is in the press room:
Since I guess US law isn't enforced inside the building, Bloomberg can't stop people from smoking.
It often seems to me that the pollster more-or-less plays the role of witchdoctor in American politics. Ezra, for example, reflects on yesterday's business with Celinda Lake:
This poll wanted a result. It got it. It also could have gotten the opposite result. This happens all the time. It just depends on who's paying, and what they want to show. It's certainly true that good polling can be and often is, conducted, but far too much of it is of this type, and nether the polling industry nor the media polices these practices.
Right. For some reason, every advocacy group in town now-and-again stages an event where it commissions a poll with a reputable firm, the firm asks some questions designed to generate the result that the group's agenda is popular, and then it gets written up as a press release. All we learn from an exercise like this is that with proper framing you can get a poll to say just about anything. And everyone knows that. And given that the whole thing is fundamentally bogus, there's really no reason one should need to bother with the expense of hiring a reputable polling firm. You could just give me fifty bucks to make something up instead. A good pollster would be worth hiring if you really wanted an accurate read on public opinion, but that's not really the point in these situations. It's just a kind of ritual laying-on of hands.
Klein and Beutler express some skepticism about the significance of the High-Level Meeting happening today, and they make some good points. What's happening is basically a form of kabuki. But I talked to a UN official yesterday who was able to explain the significance of the kabuki, and it's a pretty important thing.
The basic shape of the issue goes back to Kyoto and the late 1990s. Everyone knew that that agreement wasn't nearly tough enough to take care of the problem. But the thinking was that if you could get everyone to commit to the principle "reduce carbon emissions to halt global warming" that when the initial measures agreed to proved inadequate, governments would be compelled to step things up. Then came George W. Bush and his decision to "un-sign" Kyoto. Not only did that prevent the USA from moving forward, but it essentially got all the other governments of the world off the hook. With Bush so intransigent of course nothing was going to work.
Meanwhile, there's a need for a successor treaty to Kyoto to govern the world after 2012. The thinking is that it takes two years to negotiate a treaty, and then two years to get it ratified. Thus, we need to start next year at a scheduled meeting in Bali, Indonesia. But if the world's governments sit down in Bali next year cold after years of inactivity, then nothing's going to happen. So there's a kind of kabuki meeting happening this year to get things rolling. Since nothing's going to happen, Bush is willing to participate -- Condi Rice will be at the formal meeting, and Bush himself at an informal one with other heads of government this evening -- but that itself signifies that the process is getting rolling again. The idea, then, is that the next administration will be able to hit the ground running, stepping into a process that's already under way.
Excellent deadpan from Matt Stoller: "I'm a little worried about upcoming fights over funding for Iraq, inasmuch as they might distract us from discussing the Moveon ad."
At the plenary sessions, UN delegates sit around broad semi-circular desks behind the iconic name plates to identify the country they represent. The countries are seated in alphabetical order, so, as an Yglesias, I naturally sympathize with poor Zambia and Zimbabwe in the back of the bus so I cast my eye in their direction only to discover that Palestine, not being a real country, needs to go even after lowly Zimbabwe.
One of the odder things about recent American politics and political journalism is that a lot of people seem to have convinced themselves that working class Americans typically vote Republican, and the Democratic base is just composed of screenwriters in the Village and their kids. Paul Krugman notes the reality:
What this reflects, in turn, is the odd fact that income levels seem to matter much more for voting in the South. Contrary to what you may have read, the old-fashioned notion that rich people vote Republican, while poorer people vote Democratic, is as true as ever – in fact, more true than it was a generation ago. But in rich states like New Jersey or Connecticut, the relationship is weak; even the very well off tend to be only slightly more Republican than working-class voters. In the poorer South, however, the relationship is very strong indeed.
Now what is true that things look different if you use education rather than income as your measure of class, so the idea of the upscale liberal wasn't just concocted out of thin air. And there are some compelling reasons to look at education rather than income. However, as I point out in this article on the subject, insofar as people want "working class" to mean "no college degree" that the median income for non-college whites is higher than the national median income.
All I really know about Nicholas Sarkozy is that American conservatives seem to really enjoy talking him up. Well, now I also know what I'm watching him say about climate change -- stuff about points of no return, and the need for urgent action. Stuff about how we should reject the false choice between stewardship of the planet and economic growth; how in a policy atmosphere designed to reduce emissions we'll create new jobs and new opportunities in new sectors of the economy. It's good stuff, and being said with a great deal of passion and charisma.
So I hope the right talks this up, too. He even likes civilian nuclear power (I, personally, am sort of nuclear agnostic but certainly open to the idea that a proper price on carbon emissions might lead to more nuclear plants), so insofar as conservatives still want to hate environmentalists they can just get on board for Sarkozyism.
UPDATE: It's been suggested in comments that "You know, if you wanted to, you could actually do some reading on this issue and come to a conclusion on whether or not nuclear power is a worthwhile investment. But I know that's not the Yglesias way." Sure, sure, I never read. Meanwhile, in the main influence on my nuclear thinking is this MIT study on the future of nuclear power.
Hot on the heels of yesterday's Olive Garden blogging, check out this pasta deal in the UN's in-house cafeteria. At 37 cents an ounce, you could get over two pounds of pasta for the price of an Olive Garden never ending pasta bowl. Impressive.
Saudi Arabia's presentation was pretty hilarious. Their delegate, whose name I didn't catch, starts off by saying all the usual stuff about the need for urgent action and the need to be guided by a principle of division of responsibility, wherein we understand that the poorer countries have done very little to contribute to this problem and shouldn't be expected to bear the burden of fixing it. Saudi Arabia "looks forward to beginning negotiations" on these topics.
But then comes the pivot!
We need to also abide by "the principle of non-bias against specific goods in addressing climate change" and Saudi Arabia must object to the "selective nature of some policies and measures." Specifically, "market interventions are being made with a view to impacting the relative costs of energy sources" which is outrageous. He actually managed to keep talking in this vein without saying the word "oil." I'm told that at the same time Evo Morales was saying that "capitalism is the greatest enemy of humanity."
Unrelated to climate change, Israeli and Palestinians just completed a meeting, chaired by the foreign minister of Norway, aimed at re-starting the foreign aid process to the Palestinian Authority in a post-Hamas era. At the post-game press conference, there's a remarkably nineties-esque spirit of cooperation. The Palestinian prime minister says the meeting was "quite successful," and Tzipi Livni used her opening statement to say she "would like to make it clear on the opening that the creation of a Palestinian state is in the Israeli interest" and that while the specific subject at hand had been improving day-to-day life among the Palestinians, but that Israel wants "also to help in building the foundation for the future Palestinian state."
Naturally, I agree. It's actually fairly remarkable, given the depth, duration, and intensity of the conflict, that there's very little in the way of objective conflict of interests between the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
You've perhaps heard of Bill O'Reilly's trip to Sylvia's in Harlem after which he informed people that he "couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship." Indeed. Ben Wasserstein has some other similarities O'Reilly might have noticed between white- and black-owned dining establishments.
McMegan says "Despite what Matt says, I fail to see how Bush made any difference, given that the Senate had rejected the treaty 99-0 with one abstainer."
This is silly (about as silly as the view, sometimes expressed in comments, that I should avoid criticizing Megan when she writes things that are wrong on the theory that conservative views would somehow vanish if I ignored them) -- Clinton signed the treaty, knowing he couldn't get it ratified, and Bush un-signed it, knowing that there was no threat of ratification. Neither administration did what they did for no reason. Rather, they did it because of the impact on the political momentum, precisely the factor UN officials have cited to me as the relevant mechanism.
Meanwhile, let me also just say that I find there to be something incredibly wearing about this worldly-wise pose where one combines fatalism with nitpicking attacks on straw environmentalists instead of just forthrightly taking the view that the United States government ought to be indifferent to the problem of climate change. Maybe we'll do the right thing, and maybe we won't -- the future isn't written yet. One factor determining whether or not we do the right thing is whether or not right-of-center elites -- yes, including political bloggers at the Atlantic -- put emphasis on the idea that it's important for us to do the right thing.
Time for an intra-Atlantic link-fest! Ambinder reports:
In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America's original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and ... you get the idea.
Ross says "this is ridiculous and overblown and self-serving, but ... it isn't totally wrong." Be that as it may, I don't see what about this would resemble Reagan. I think most foreigners greeted Reagan's election with alarm that it would lead to nuclear war.
Paul Starr, bona fide health care expert, gives his review of Hillary Clinton's health care plan. Paul's extremely positive though his view, like that of most everyone who's looked at it, is that the Democrats' plans are all pretty similar. Dare I point out that some of this similarity comes from the fact that their plans are all a bit vague? After all, the difference between more and less generous subsidies could, in this context, be hugely important. I understand (and even to some extent embrace) why the candidates don't want to get hyper-specific on these points, but the upshot is that all the emphasis on "plans" of various sorts hasn't actually rendered things as clear as you might think.
I haven't seen this get much attention, but it seems that on Friday John Edwards unveiled a major set of education reform proposals. We have an integrated approach here, starting with an ambitious preschool plan (something Hillary Clinton's also done) through a K-12 reform, and on to his "College for Everyone" initiative.
On K-12, I think he pulls the nice political trick of loudly denouncing No Child Left Behind ("George Bush's No Child Left Behind law is not working") while actually proposing further reforms that are fairly consistent with the spirit of the law, aimed at improving a flawed-but-worthy effort rather than backsliding away from the concept of accountability.
I'm a little confused by the framing of the decision to extend an invitation for Mahmoud Ahmadenijad to speak at Columbia University as "free speech." Everyone, including Ahmadenijad, has a right to speak his mind in this country, but nobody has a right to a specific platform at a major university. I, after all, haven't been granted such an invitation and there's no particular reason he should have gotten one either. For all the reasons Ross cites a lot of the right's reaction to this has been overheated, but it's still fundamentally odd to decide that a maniac should participate in a debate with a university president as part of a bizarre publicity stunt whose main purpose is to exaggerate the importance of both men.
Conversely, though, things like Duncan Hunter's new plan to cut off funding to Columbia University is a real free speech issue. The university really has the right to stage an asinine publicity stunt if it wants to without the federal government stepping in.
Part of the tragedy here is that the American public really ought to know more about the Iranian government's perspective on the issues of the day. The US and Iran have outstanding conflicts over nuclear issues, Iraq, and Afghanistan but also some potential for common interests on some of these topics. And most of the Iranian officials -- Ali Larijani from the National Security Council, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from the Assembly of Experts, foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki -- aren't prone to rants about the non-existence of the Holocaust and all the rest. They're not nice men as such, but they really are people such that it's worth hearing what they have to say about the various issues in play. Unfortunately, both Ahmadenijad and America's Iran hawks have an interest in pretending that Ahmadenijad's a key actor and his goofier ideas are the center of the dispute. Why Bollinger wants to re-enforce this I couldn't say. For attention, I guess.
UPDATE II: By contrast, the idea of forbidding Ahmadenijad from going to Ground Zero was crazy and closer to a real free speech issue. Moreover, it seems to me that the desire to visit the site was driven by a desire to underline the idea that the US and Iran face a common enemy in Iran, and the move to block him driven by a desire to obscure that point.
UPDATE III: One last point. I should be clear that it's not just that "I, after all, haven't been granted such an invitation and there's no particular reason he should have gotten one either," but that there are tons and tons of other heads of state and heads of government in New York for UN-related things at the moment and they're obviously not all speaking at Columbia so it's not as if Ahmadenijad is just getting some kind of automatic "foreign leader's in town, let's have a chat" treatment. What's more, the vast majority of the heads of government hanging around the city have much more practical influence in their regimes than does Ahmadenijad. Sarkozy really runs France, etc.
The Washington Post has a decent rundown of controversies of casualty statistics in Iraq, that includes this nugget:
The charts are difficult to compare: Petraeus used monthly figures on a line graph, while the Pentagon computed "Average Daily Casualties" on a bar chart, and neither included actual numbers. But the numerical differences are still stark, and the reasons offered can be hard to parse. The Pentagon, in a written clarification, said that "Gen. Petraeus reported civilian deaths based on incidents reported by Coalition forces plus Iraqi government data. The [Pentagon] report only includes incidents reported by Coalition forces for civilian causality data."
I noticed this absence of actual numbers, too, and all I can say is . . . what's the deal? When I saw Petraeus not including the numbers, I suspected something nefarious. But the Pentagon numbers that contradict Petraeus don't show them either, so it probably isn't nefarious. But it is damned odd.
I see David Brooks has decided to celebrate his liberation from TimesSelect by penning a column seemingly designed to get tons of liberal bloggers to link to him by pissing us off. So, mission accomplished. Almost everything Brooks says is true (though more on this later), but this is very misleading:
Third, Clinton has established this lead by repudiating the netroots theory of politics. As the journalist Matt Bai makes clear in his superb book, “The Argument,” the netroots emerged in part in rebellion against Clintonian politics. They wanted bold colors and slashing attacks. They didn’t want their politicians catering to what Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos calls “the mythical middle.”
But Clinton has relied on Mark Penn, the epitome of the sort of consultant the netroots reject, and Penn’s approach has been entirely vindicated by the results so far.
Now that's just wrong. Clinton may or may not implement a Penn-style strategy of triangulation if she becomes the nominee, but neither she nor Penn are nearly dumb enough to be trying this in the primary. Rather, Clinton is garnering high-levels of support from less-educated Democrats (as Brooks notes) through a campaign heavily focused on the theme of partisanship -- on her years of cut-throat battles with the right, on the idea that the Clintons know how to kick GOP ass, and implicitly on the notion that there aren't big ideological differences between the different Democrats in the race.
The bigger problem with Brooks' column, though, isn't so much that it says things that are wrong as that it leaves things out. He says Clinton is "hawkish" compared to what the netroots want to see and that "Democratic domestic policy is now being driven by old Clinton hands like Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed." Both are true, but it's still also true that all of the Democrats are calling for substantial reductions of troop levels in Iraq, which none of the candidates (including Howard Dean) were doing in 2004. They're all calling for diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. They're also all calling for universal health care, which John Kerry didn't do, Al Gore didn't do, and Bill Clinton didn't do in 1996. And they all support serious reductions in CO2 emissions, which, again, neither Kerry nor Gore nor Clinton did.
And that, generally, is the shape of things. "The left" has only been empowered to a pretty minor degree, but the "centrist" wing of the party is . . . way further left on the merits than where it was in the late 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. That, in turn, is largely a reflection of a renewed vibrancy on the left that's both pressured elected officials and expanded the boundaries of conversation. When the centrist strand in Democratic thinking came to represent school uniforms, promises to balance the budget each and every year of the Gore administration, and backing the invasion of Iraq that was one thing. If, instead, we're going to get universal health care, action to halt global warming, and diplomatic engagement with rival powers in the Middle East, that's a very different thing. If Brooks wants to call that latter thing a defeat for the netroots because dKos diarists sometimes find themselves disappointed, well, then I think that's a kind of defeat people can live with.
I may not have been thrilled by the Bollinger/Ahmadenijad debate, but Columbia's president seems to have won overThe New York Sun, which is interesting.
Marc Ambinder notes that a majority of SEIU members prefer John Edwards, but as Steven Greenhouse reports he looks like he'll have a lot of trouble picking up an SEIU endorsement for the familiar reason that the union doesn't want to back a loser.
In that context, though, it's worth noting that SEIU's already found a way to be extremely influential in this race that further cements its status as probably the most forward-looking major union. Everyone's noted the similarity of the major candidates' health care plans and the fact that Edwards led the way in this regard. But it's worth saying that before there was Edwards, there was SEIU saying it would only consider endorsing candidates who devised a specific plan for universal health insurance. That's what created the conditions for Edwards' bold stroke and also what made it necessary for the other candidates to play catch-up once Edwards' plan was unveiled. So now we're at a point where no matter who wins, SEIU will have made a major advance on one of its key issues, and where by taking up a slightly broader perspective than raw self-interest the union builds further support in the wider progressive movement.
Photo by Flickr user SEIU International used under a Creative Commons license
I have, in the past, been known to argue that the role of race per se in the GOP "southern strategy" has often been overstated by liberals. Bob Herbert disagrees and would seem to have the proverbial telling quote:
In 1981, during the first year of Mr. Reagan’s presidency, the late Lee Atwater gave an interview to a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University, explaining the evolution of the Southern strategy:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
Now that said, Herbert's more recent examples of "sustained mistreatment by the Republican Party" of black people mostly involve efforts to prevent black people from voting, which I'm fairly sure they do for purely partisan reasons than out of racism as such.
Kriston Capps contemplates the larger meaning of Soulja Boy: "To what end does Soulja Boy crank? Can the interests of a declining American Empire withstand a coalition of crank-datted superheroes and beloved cartoons? Soulja Boy wants to crank dat over here and over there—what will be the price we pay?"
When I said that further examination seems to reveal a lack of nefariousness in General Petraeus' non-inclusion of actual numbers alongside his graphical representation of the numbers, I didn't mean to imply that there's nothing nefarious at all about his presentation. As numbers-maestro Ilan Goldenberg points out one major source of difference between the Petraeus numbers and the Pentagon numbers is that Petraeus has taken the US casualty data that, according to Petraeus, is the best available and blended it with Iraqi data that everyone regards as unreliable.
Why would you want to do that? Well, because it helps bolster the argument Petraeus is trying to make.
Matt Stoller: Can we handle a nuclear Iran? Can we live with that?
Wes Clark: I don't think so. The reason is, there are three reasons. Number one is that I think a nuclear armed Iran would use its clear deterrent to promote conventional or unconventional aggression against other states in the region and believe it could sit back with its nuclear power and not be threatened in return. I think the second reason is you never know how these nuclear capabilities might be smuggled abroad or used in some way. Maybe the way we saw the Israelis strike at this nuclear depot in Syria is an indication of that and apparently that came from North Korea. And the third reason is that once Iran gets a nuclear weapon lots of other countries will want them and the more countries that have them the greater chance a nuke will be used and kill hundreds of thousands of people and so no I don't think you can tolerate a nuclear armed Iran. But I think the right course of dealing with it is to directly engage Iran in dialogue.
The weird thing here is that I totally agree with Clark's analysis of what would be problematic about an Iranian nuclear weapon. This just seems like a strange conception of something we can't live with. The prospect of the Red Army overrunning Western Europe was something we couldn't live with. We formed NATO, provided explicit defense guarantees to our allies in the region, stationed troops in Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Britain and were prepared to wage warfare on a truly massive scale -- just as we had during World War II -- to prevent the domination of Europe by a hostile totalitarian power.
Iran having a nuclear weapon would be bad, for the reasons Clark adduces, and it's worth trying to prevent in just the way he suggests. But one shouldn't suggest that it's some kind of intolerable threat to American security or that we'd have no way to cope with the consequences of an Iranian nuclear weapon. It's just a scenario we'd prefer to avoid.
Let me share Ryan Avent's puzzlement at Ezra Klein's apparent belief that black people don't like coffee shops. On U Street where we have a ton of coffee shops and a healthy number of African-American residents you see . . . lots of black people in coffee shops. Check out Mocha Hut, for example. Also the idea that "You don’t move to DC because it’s awesome, you move because it’s where your work is" meaning that "there’s little need to construct an affirmative agenda to attract residents" is badly wrong.
This analysis seems to, among other things, leave the existence of the suburbs out of the picture. There's no reason anyone has to live in DC as opposed to Arlington or Silver Spring. And, indeed, when the city was at its nadir of malgovernment and crime that's exactly what everyone did. Just like anyplace else DC needs to make itself an attractive place for people to live, and the past few years of DC repopulating itself (it's still way lower than its peak population) are driven by just that -- lower crime rates, more retail opportunities, more intense development around the newer Metro stations, etc.
Better education unleashes the talent and potential of its citizens, and adds to the prosperity of all of us. Better education promotes better health and greater independence. Better education increases the strength of democracy, and weakens the appeal of violent ideologies. So the United States is joining with nations around the world to help them provide a better education for their people.
Unfortunately, as Kay Steiger points out, "it's been pretty well documented that the most effective terrorists are the highly educated ones." Indeed, while there are lots of good reasons to want to improve school around the world, preventing people from becoming terrorists isn't a good one at all. Check out Peter Bergen and Michael Lind on what actually motivates terrorists, or the 2005 op-ed on "The Madrassa Myth" that he co-wrote with Swati Pandey taking on a variant of the education story which holds that terrorists come from madrassas and that madrassas could be crowded out with better schools.
Throughout history, really, there's no reason to think that education weakens the appeal of violent ideologies. Pol Pot went to EFR in Paris and Lenin went to Kazan State University. When Marc Sageman looked at al-Qaeda biographies he found that "Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion."
Via Ilan Goldenberg, Karen DeYoung reports that "Civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has 'ceased to exist,' Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday."
One hesitates to call this yet another data point to suggest that it doesn't really make sense for our young men and women to be risking their lives in order that the US government might be able to continue spending vast sums of money to build up the armed forces under Maliki's control. After all, that conclusion might simply bolster the idea that it does make sense for our young men and women to be risking their lives in order that the US government might be able to continue spending vast sums of money to build up the armed forces under the control of rebels trying to overthrow Maliki's government. Since Bush now has us on both sides of the conflict, after all, Maliki looking unimpressive just cuts both ways -- just another awesome aspect of our endless war.
Climate Change Alarmism: Not Just For Hippies Anymore
Lehman Brothers has a new-ish report out titled "The Business of Climate Change II". It includes, among other things, an estimate of the true "social" cost of carbon:
Given these studies, we currently take as a central working estimate of the 'social' cost of carbon a figure of $50 per tonne today (€40), rising to perhaps $100 per tonne by 2050.
They also say that the way uncertainty plays out in this regard, "society might want to pay an insurance premium, to reduce the risk of an unforeseeable non-linearity, discontinuity, or catastrophe" since there's some chance that the impact of large-scale warming will be much worse than current science deems likely.
Matt's argument about Mocha Hut actually hurts his case, because Mocha Hut, along with Busboys and Poets and 14U, are new businesses that have only entered the U Street corridor as it became...whiter. Indeed, as people like Matt, who now hangs out at those coffee shops, moved there. In this case, white is actually standing in for affluent, because the sort of people who spend $4 on a latte and demand wireless internet for their laptops tend to have money in the bank, whatever their race.
Well, okay, Ezra was using race to stand in for change in economic status but he, um, shouldn't treat the two as interchangeable. I picked Mocha Hut as my example precisely because it has a primarily black client base. It seems to mostly be educated African-American professionals, but that's just the point: Ezra's econo-racial conflation gambit obscures the existence of such people, but there are tons of them -- especially in majority black places like DC.
Given that progressive bloggers have thus far mostly failed to inject the "residual forces" issue into the Democratic primary campaign, I'm not sure why Bill Richardson thinks putting netroots activists in his ad attempting to raise the issue will help him, but I'm glad he's raising the issue:
One fears that Richardson may have committed too many gaffes at this point to gain traction, but I hope this ad helps him and forces the other candidates to start addressing this issue.
Brad DeLong says he's not sure "if this is a very good or very bad end-of-lecture sentence":
Next time, I'll talk about Adolf Hitler, whose big problem--besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is--is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.
Seems good to me. The answer, I think, is (a). Hitler suffered from, among other things, a Malthus-esque belief that "the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man" for sharply limited and that the acquisition of land -- lebensraum -- was crucial to national prosperity. Thus, he decided to invest a massive proportion of the German economy in a fruitless effort to greatly expand Germany's land area. But instead of a larger land area, Hitler's policies wound up making Germany smaller. And in destroying a huge proportion of Germany's capital infrastructure. And in subjecting a substantial portion of Germany to decades of Communist rule. And at the end of the process, Germany does, indeed, have a higher population density than Italy or France or Spain.
And yet: Germany is a really rich country in the scheme of things, especially the Western part. Because Hitler was wrong. German prosperity doesn't depend on acquiring more land and never did.
Test scores up according to the latest NAEP, which newspaper articles all claim is known as "the nation's report card" even though no actual human beings say this. Drawing sweeping conclusions from this data sounds fun, but Margie Yeager says not to:
Whether the gains are directly attributable to NCLB is another question, and NCLB foes FairTest and the AFT make a reasonable point that scores rose fastest from 2000 to 2003 in most areas. It's important to remember that NAEP is a blunt measurement tool that tests discrete groups of students (as opposed to tracking individual student growth over time), and tying progress on the test directly to any specific reform is at best, educated guesswork.
That, though, is really boring so just take it for granted that these results absolutely confirm the rightness of all my beliefs about education policy.
I've been a bit behind the curve on this, but it's worth listening to Jim Webb's warnings that the Lieberman-Kyle Amendment on Iran could well be a sub rosa authorization of the use of force masquerading as a meaningless sense of the senate resolution. It's also worth noting that this crew has been at this game for a long time. Let me quote myself from the February 2002 [CORRECTION: should be 2006] American Prospect:
The atmosphere on the morning of Monday, January 23, was more of a bad dream than a press conference. I was in a small room in the basement of the U.S. Capitol; sitting directly behind me amid the rows of cheap folding chairs was a young man from the National Union for Democracy in Iran, an obscure California-based exile group I'd never heard of seeking, yes, regime change in Tehran.
The walls were overcrowded with reproductions of John Audubon's brightly colored bird prints. At the front of the room was an American flag, a podium, a projection screen, and R. James Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence who went more-than-a-little around the bend sometime after leaving the Clinton administration. He was one of the very first prominent commentators to finger Saddam Hussein as the likely culprit for the 9-11 attacks, doing so just after the strikes when no empirical evidence could possibly support the contention, and maintaining his view steadfastly even as evidence continued to be non-existent.
Needless to say, such loyalty to his own imagination has done nothing to diminish his standing in the neoconservative world or his access to mass audiences on cable television. On that January day at the Capitol, he was speaking on behalf of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a think tank he founded in the summer of 2004 with various neocon B-listers under the nominal auspices of Senators Jon Kyl and Joe Lieberman. The occasion was the release of a six-page policy paper on Iran, which to no one's surprise reached the conclusion that “the United States' policy objective must be regime change in Iran.”
At some point, the madness has to stop, right? Right?
I'm off to the 8:30 AM "mandatory logistics briefing" for press covering the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, so what better way for you to kick-start your day than by reading Jonathan Rauch's Atlantic cover story on CGI.
Rick Perlstein takes a look at Nikiti Khruschev's 1959 trip to the United States:
Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.
Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?
The answer, obviously, is no. Rather, as Rick says, Khruschev visited a country that had some level of maturity in its dealings with other powers around the world.
Turns out that Ann Veneman is now the head of UNICEF. I'm learning at this event already. Mel Martinez was able to parlay his second-rate cabinet appointment into a US Senate seat, so she seems to me to have gotten the short end of the stick.
I still don't really know anything about Burma, but what I'd come up with in the way of an opinion is that the key actor here is China, and that aside from ineffectual posturing the most useful thing to be done is to try to influence China which, in turn, is actually in a position to restrain the Burmese military. According to Josh Kurlantzick, either many people who know what they're talking about agree with me, or else the leading western officials are no better informed than I am:
Many Western powers believe that China, the most important foreign actor in Burma, can be convinced to withdraw its blanket backing for the junta. In a British cable earlier this year obtained by THE NEW REPUBLIC, British diplomats argue "China is closer than any other country to Burma's military regime ... China's interests had changed in Burma. They [are] investing heavily and want to see a return on their investment ... There may be an opportunity to persuade China that it is in their interest to see a stable and developing Burma." Indeed, some of this week's Burma protests have signaled popular anger at China as well, with demonstrators pointedly going by the Chinese embassy; several Burmese previously told me of kidnappings of Chinese businesspeople in the north of the country. Recently, according to AFP, senior Chinese official Tang Jiaxuan offered a gentle rebuke to the Burmese junta, telling its foreign minister that "China sincerely hopes that Myanmar can bring stability back to its domestic situation."
Kurlantzick, though, is skeptical this will work and says that "placing so much trust in China conceals the fact that there are still steps other nations can take on Burma." His analysis, though, mostly comes down to the fact that there's are still steps other nations can take that might increase China's level of concern with the situation.
Bill Clinton, at the opening ceremony for his meeting, defined the purpose of the Clinton global initiative as to tackle problems that "government won't solve, or that government alone can't solve." A worthy purpose, indeed, for a charity. And I really think there are things that fit that category. Direct government sponsorship of the arts, for example, is a great way to preserve classic works and make them available to a broad audience. But if you want to encourage new, innovative works of art it makes much more sense to rely on a vigorous philanthropic sector that won't face political pressure to avoid anything that offends the sensibilities of anyone.
That, though, isn't what this event is about. Instead, it's really about political issues: education, poverty alleviation, global public health, and climate change.
In those fields, it really seems to me that Bill Clinton could do much more good using his charisma and standing to try to convince rich guys and executives at big companies to take a more enlightened attitude toward the political process, to return to the sort of public-spirited involvement in public affairs that characterized the business class in the 1950s and 60s. Realistically, you can't resolve climate change if the United States of America is in the grips of a fanatic ideological aversion to taxes and regulation, an ideological aversion that American business has spent -- and continues to spend -- tons of money propagating and re-enforcing. Similarly, you could do a ton of poverty alleviation if you worked through the political process to reorient America's global engagement away from such a lopsided reliance on the military. But somebody other than defense contractors and Israeli nationalists would need to invest serious money in foreign policy ideas.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton doesn't seem to have made much of a priority out of climate change or global poverty issues relative to some of the other candidates in the race. She's also the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in what looks to be a very pro-Democrat election cycle. Maybe he should talk to his wife?
Meanwhile, griping aside Clinton still has that weird charisma whereby he can make a somewhat rambling disquisition on the technical hurdles in establishing commercially viable solar power initiatives seem very compelling.
A Politician, A CEO, and an Archbishop Walk Into a Hotel Ballroom
Meanwhile, the events here mostly sound like the opening to weird jokes. Right now, for example, we have Al Gore, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Archbiship Desmond Tutu, Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott, Filipino president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and World Bank chief Robert Zoellick up on a podium to discuss "the need for global action." Clinton moderates, and leads by asking Karzai to make the case that Afghanistan is a good investment opportunity. I, for one, look forward to WalMart Kandahar. Maybe they could turn their union-busting expertise against the Taliban.
A Flickr user going by the name Racoles has a very nice collection of photos from the protests in Burma that are both worth a look and usable under a Creative Commons license for your blogging pleasure.
There are 1300 Clinton Global Initiative members here today. Each has paid more than $15,000 just to get in the door -- which is only the beginning of other substantial financial "do good" projects a member must commit to.
So far, there have been more than 600 commitments made at previous CGI meetings -- and now, the Clinton Global Initiative has launched a new site for people not at this meeting to propose and declare their commitments. The site is called MyCommitment.org. Interesting idea actually. Inspirational for those looking to feel connected to a larger network of socially concerned people and groups.
Now, obviously, despite my somewhat jaundiced views about charity as an approach to tackling big issues, this is a good thing. And, indeed, it seems to me that it's an especially good thing in that the "commitments" go beyond the merely financial. One of the best things about engagement in charitable activities -- especially if it's real engagement rather than mere check-writing -- is that it can get people emotionally invested in the issues they're working on which can, over time, help broaden perspectives and get people more involved with the need for systemic remedies. In principle, there's a possibility for conflict between allocating resources toward charitable giving and toward political advocacy, but in practice I'm not sure that conflict really arises -- if you build social capital and a sense of engagement, you tend to get both.
At the Clinton Global Initiative today, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was invited to represent her country and talk about green investment in the Philippines. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in an attempt to flatter her, said that she was his only "pin-up" in his office.
Naturally, Macapagal-Arroyo, not wanting to ruin the panel by acting like one of those humorless feminists, gave a little smile and chuckle and the bulk of the audience laughed at the joke. Tutu and the other men on the panel thus came away with their belief that this is an appropriate way to treat a woman head of government. And the circle of life continues.
I should say that notwithstanding my considerable skepticism that improved education in the developing world is the key to fighting terrorism, it still really is a very good thing to do. I caught a bit of Gene Sperling talking about the Global Campaign for Education before ducking out on the grounds that I attended a Sperling/GCE panel at YearlyKos so I didn't need to hear it again. But you the reader may need to read about it again.
So in short here are some good reasons to think this could be very useful. The legislation in the United States is aimed at getting us to contribute $3 billion to meeting the UN Millennium Goals in education, and there's a lot of bang for the buck to be found here since in a lot of cases you're starting from close to zero.
Via Spencer Ackerman, the new world corruption rankings. Haiti has surged from most-corrupt down to a respectable fourth-most-corrupt. Iraq is in third-from-last place, ahead of Burma and Somalia (this must be the good news the MSM is trying to hide from you).
As usual, the Nordics are squeaky clean with Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and Norway all in the top ten. The US is basically more corrupt than a northern European country, but less corrupt than a southern European one.
American right-wingers should probably give some thought to the fact that even Americaphilic conservative politicians from Anglophone countries don't seem to share their perspective on world affairs. Here, for example, is Canadian Prime Minister Stephan Harper:
Unlike the U.S., Harper said, "Canada has no history anywhere in the world of conquest or domination. It's probably hard to perceive of Canada being in that type of a position."
In contrast, Canada is seen in the world as a "positive and non-threatening force," he said. "What my government is trying to do is to use those values to promote positive change in concert with our allies."
At the end of the day, this stuff isn't brain surgery. Use America's leading position in the world to contribute in a positive way to problems that people worry about around the world and you'll be liked. Use it to pursue a policy of conquest and domination -- not so much.
To my way of thinking, the recent surge of commentary suggesting that Hillary Clinton now has an unbreakable lock on the Democratic nomination strongly suggests that she's not as well-positioned as I'd thought. After all, isn't this the sort of thing everyone's always wrong about? And isn't three months actually 3 million years in news-cycle terms. Then I see Marc report that "political prognosticators and many Iowa Democrats are buzzing about a coming Biden surge."
Now, there are only two possible explanations for that. One is that political prognosticators are totally crazy and ignorant, in which case we should discount growing prognostication of a Clinton win, or else the prognosticators are correct, and totally crazy and ridiculous things are likely to happen, in which case Clinton's apparently solid grip on the nomination as of today is probably worthless.
Via Henry Farrell, David Frum takes to BloggingHeads to analogize Mark Schmitt to Charles Lindberg. As a victim of this particular smear in the past, I can only say I'm always glad to be placed in Mark's company.
China has interests and involvements in Burma, but limited leverage. Burma is not some kind of client state of China. It is a xenophobic, divided, tribalized country with a nationalistic government; it bears more resemblance to one of the less coherent sub-Saharan African states than to most other East Asian countries. It’s not an easy place to influence. Through most of the 1980s there was a Burmese Communist Party, which consisted primarily of the Wa tribe plus Chinese leadership. When the Wa decided to turn anti-communist in the late 1980s and chased the Chinese leadership into China, China’s influence in the country was drastically reduced but there was little China could do without military intervention. So Beijing basically sat by passively when it happened.
Unfortunately, I was only able to see the Democratic debate somewhat sporadically. I did notice, however, one fairly extended serious of answers related to Israel's recent airstrike in Syria. This was a strange subject to be asking questions about -- roughly, would Israel have the right to do something similar in Iran -- given that as best I can tell neither Tim Russert nor you nor I nor any of the candidates actually know what happened.
The other things that caught my attention were John Edwards speaking eloquently about Iraq early in the debate, and Clinton pushing back against an inane ticking time-bomb scenario question.
The NRCC is looking broke these days, and the NRSC isn't doing well either. I have to believe that GOP fundraising woes actually will turn around at some point -- or else that we'll see large pseudo-independent expenditures on behalf of Republican candidates -- since the stakes are just too high for corporate America to let its allies go begging just because they're awful and obsessively focused on trivia. So far, though, things look really terrible for them.
Chris Bowers has a good roundup of the vote that, embarrassingly went 76-22 for the bad guys with Hillary Clinton on the dark side. Biden and Dodd were part of the slightly odd legislative coalition against the bill. Lugar and Hagel decided to, for once, actually try to cast a useful vote and came out against it. Obama didn't vote because he was on the campaign trail and it wasn't close, but his office released a statement:
Senator Obama clearly recognizes the serious threat posed by Iran. However, he does not agree with the President that the best way to counter that threat is to keep large numbers of troops in Iraq, and he does not think that now is the time for saber-rattling towards Iran. In fact, he thinks that our large troop presence in Iraq has served to strengthen Iran -- not weaken it. He believes that diplomacy and economic pressure, such as the divestment bill that he has proposed, is the right way to pressure the Iranian regime. Accordingly, he would have opposed the Kyl-Lieberman amendment had he been able to vote today.
The good news is that the language was substantially weakened before passage.
Yesterday, Ezra Klein and I were moaning that Bill Clinton's charity model seemed inappropriate to the climate change issue which, fundamentally, requires action by national governments and, indeed, the international community writ large. Brian Beutler cautioned that "the CGI actually encourages both philanthropy and political involvement, even if the focus is on the former."
And, indeed, this morning Clinton was talking about Ted Turner, the UN Foundation and its work on the vital and necessary task of creating a post-Kyoto agreement that will include the United States, and the work that Prince Albert of Monaco (an impressive speaker in French to my ear based on my recollection of what I saw him say on Monday, though of course I may not have really understood him) is doing in support of that mission. So . . . good for him.
Tom Brokaw leading in to a question to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, started by talking about how he knows that Hank and his wife are ardent conservationists: "I've been on bird-watching expeditions with them that are also marathons; it's a death-march from 4AM to midnight."
Now, obviously, there's be no way to enforce a rule like "important media people aren't allowed to be bird-watching buddies with high government officials" but it is striking that you tend not to hear about this sort of coziness between the media and political elites when said media elites are busy posturing as a vast brigade of Woodward and Bernsteins eagerly digging to the truth. Meanwhile, Paulson, representing an administration that's worked tirelessly to block action on climate change at a climate change event, just sat around and said a bunch of misleading stuff designed to make you think that the Bush administration has been contributing constructively to this matter. Brokaw, who's probably not an idiot, doesn't want to give his friend the bird watcher a hard time, and just smiles before moving on.
Likewise, U.A.W. members, assured of health care benefits that were the envy of the labor movement, had little incentive to take better care of their health, since their generous coverage would pay for most any ailment.
By contrast, Toyota, which pays premiums only for workers, not their families, has fitness centers at its factories and requires newly hired workers to exercise two hours a day during their training period.
The idea that people with generous health insurance have "little incentive to take better care of their health" seems ridiculous. One problem with getting cancer is that even people with excellent health insurance coverage often die. And even people who survive tend to find it an unpleasant experience. Similarly, I'd really, really, really prefer not to have a heart attack for tons of reasons unrelated to the financial cost of obtaining treatment for it.
Which isn't to say that the non-menacing element of what Toyota's doing here -- making exercise facilities more widely available -- couldn't do a lot to improve people's health. Most all of us don't really exercise as much as we should, and I at least am really good at coming up with excuses as to why today's a good day to skip the gym. Anything that's done to make it more convenient to get in a healthy amount of vigorous activity is good. And, indeed, finding policies to encourage healthy lifestyles is probably more effective than finding policies to deliver more medical care. Nevertheless, it's very hard to imagine that requiring "newly hired workers to exercise two hours a day during their training period" is going to accomplish very much except make your company look bizarre.
My official position is still that Tony Blair is a very bad man who deployed his considerable political skills on behalf of an addled policy in Iraq, but watching him talk one remembers that a good deal of the bitterness stems from the fact that he's so damned charming and, thus, was able to convince a lot of left-of-center Americans that the policy wasn't nearly as addled as it was.
Chris Bowers draws my attention to John Edwards' most specific statement yet, at yesterday's debate, of his view on the question of residual forces in Iraq:
I can tell you what i would do as president. When I'm sworn into office, come January of 2009, if there are, in fact, as General Petraeus suggests, 100,000 American troops on the ground in Iraq, I will immediately draw down 40,000 to 50,000 troops; and over the course of the next several months, continue to bring our combat out of Iraq until all of our combat are, in fact, out of Iraq.
I think the problem is -- and it's what you just heard discussed -- is we will maintain an embassy in Baghdad. That embassy has to be protected. We will probably have humanitarian workers in Iraq. Those humanitarian workers have to be protected. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of a brigade of troops will be necessary to accomplish that, 3,500 to 5,000 troops.
To me, this is clearly preferable to more ambitious plans involving tends of thousands of soldiers. I wonder, though, if it's really possible. My guess is that deploying such a small force into such a chaotic country as Iraq would be too dangerous for the troops themselves. I'm not in a position to make a category statement to that effect, but I have a really hard time envisioning this as workable (think of the supply lines). The logic of the situation is that either you stay in Iraq in force, or else you give up on trying to use the US military as a tool for influencing political developments in Iraq and you leave.
The good news, however, as Ilan Goldenberg notes is that all of the major Democrats have been subtly shifting away from their previous commitment to an ill-defined and counter-productive "training" mission in Iraq.
Chinese Foreign Minister Yang gave a little talk yesterday on his government's view of the climate change issue. You can find it in the midst of this longer transcript but here was what I think is the key part:
Ladies and gentlemen, as the impact of climate change is global in nature and concerns the interests of all countries, this issue can only be addressed through extensive international cooperation. Developed countries should face up to their historical responsibility and the reality of their high per capita emissions. They should follow the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, which is embodied in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol and take the lead in emission reduction.
They should help developing countries improve their capacity to tackle climate change and take the path of sustainable development by providing financial assistance, transferring technologies, and assisting them in capacity building and adopting to climate change.
I think that's about what I'd say if I were China's foreign minister.
Watching the primary campaign, it keeps seeming to me as if Barack Obama is making arguments that, while fairly clear to me, must go over the heads of at least half of political junkies, to say nothing of normal people going about their lives. Noam Scheiber, meanwhile, remarks on Obama's thinking:
At this point, the thinking in the Obama camp seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that the press will do the work of deciphering his overly-subtle jabs at Clinton. The second is that Edwards, in moving aggressively to take on Clinton, will drive up his own negatives in addition to hers. But, after tonight, at least one of those assumptions may need revising. Edwards looks perfectly capable of firing shots without suffering much blowback. Elizabeth Edwards maybe onto something yet.
That just seems crazy to me. Readers have no doubt noticed that I like Obama and I like what I think his campaign stands for. But it's ridiculous to expect members of the press -- even sympathetic ones -- to make his arguments for him. If he wants people to vote for him rather than for Hillary Clinton, he needs to spell out some reasons why. Months ago, the subtly hinting seemed like a clever effort to lay the groundwork for the campaign to come. But now the time has come. Even hard-core observers of the scene are, under the current strategy, essentially put in the position of trying to guess what Team Obama is trying to say.
More on the Demolition Man-ification of America, as Marc Ambinder picks up burgeoning support among Democratic presidential candidates for the sort of comprehensive bans on indoor smoking that we have in California, DC, New York, and many other blue areas.
Speaking personally, the idea of such a ban seemed like a terrible idea when I was a smoker. Then, in late 2006 with the 2 January 2007 implementation date (to let people finish off their New Year's Eve partying) looming, I decided I should take advantage of the legal switch to quit smoking. Now that I've been smoke-free for nearly ten months, I naturally wish to persecute smokers as vigorously possible with every legal tool available.
Foreign Policy magazine teams up with Durex condoms to bring sexy back in the form of a global survey of sexual behaviors. As you can see here, it's more fun to live in a rich country. This seems like one of those times when it would make sense to mention Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Kate Sheppard notes that "Icelanders and Germans lose their virginity earliest" but to me there's surprisingly little variance in this metric, with essentially all countries falling within the 16-19 range.
One interesting point, though, is that South Africa has the sexual profile of a developed country. Unfortunately, the graphic doesn't include any other African countries, so one can't tell if South Africa is typical of its region or else if this relates to the country's unusual history with apartheid.
Verizon blocks pro-choice text messages on the grounds that they're "controversial or unsavory." I, for one, eagerly look forward to the non-neutral internet future when Verizon DSL and FIOS users can get cut off from such unsavory matter.
Watch as Richard Just expends a staggering number of words on not getting the difference between liberal opposition to criticizing Iran's record on human rights (fine by me) and liberal opposition to freaking out at the idea of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad being physically present in the United States (not at all fine) or liberal opposition to persistent efforts by the hawkish right in the United States to wildly overstate Ahmadenijad's role in the Iranian government (also not fine).
The bed-wetters aren't people who criticize the Iranian government. The bed-wetters are the hysterics who seem to think that the basic acts of diplomacy are a clear and present danger to the United States. Meanwhile, despite Just's best efforts to portray the recent outburst of Ahmedenijad-related hysteria as driven by human rights concerns, the freak-out movement wasn't driven by human rights groups, it was driven by the warmongering elements of the press -- The New York Sun and The New York Post plus the magazines and radio and television shows. The Human Rights Watch Iran page is dominated by actual human rights issues in Iran, not by random screechings about Ahmadenijad's sightseeing schedule.
Meanwhile, one of the things you need to do in journalism is come up with novel terms for phenomena and groups of people. For example, there's a set of people, including Just, who say they don't think we should start a war with Iran but who only seem to comment on Iran-related issues when they want to criticize opponents of going to war with Iran. They're against starting a war, but never raise a peep against the warmonger chorus, but do speak up to police the bounds of acceptable opposition to the warmongers. Call them the Something Somethings. But I need a better word.
In retrospect, it's not really clear to me why I thought it would be a good idea to snap this photo of Bill Clinton with my phone. There are, after all, tons and tons of photos of Clinton available on the internet and the odds of this shot being any good were terrible. Indeed, I took it sitting in a room featuring many professional photographers (who seem obsessed with capturing a signature hand gesture) using high-quality equipment. But I guess that's the nature of charisma and celebrity. He was in the room. I had a device that can take pictures. It seemed like the thing to do.
Former Central Commander John Abizaid, probably the military officer with the most specific knowledge of the region and its cultural and political dynamics, says war with Iran would be a disaster and that we could live with a nuclear Iran if we needed to. As Ezra Klein points out there's been a large effort to convince people that all "serious" observers know that "all options are on the table" is the only viable strategy, but when you get down to it it turns out that almost nobody with expertise in the region or in the field of non-proliferation actually agrees with the conventional wisdom about this.
The issue, of course, is that there's actually nothing conventional about the CW on Iran. Instead it's a product of interest-group pressure, political cowardice, and general public ignorance. If anything, the hair-trigger posture and general atmosphere of tensions is making it harder to find a real resolution of the situation.
You know the plot. Young, idealistic teacher goes to inner-city high school. Said idealistic teacher is shocked by students who don't know the basics and who are too preoccupied with the burdens of violence, poverty and indifference to want to learn. But the hero perseveres and at great personal sacrifice wins over the students using innovative teaching methods and heart. The kids go on to win the state spelling/chess/mathematics championship. c.f. Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds etc.
As he says, the problem is that it's just not realistic to build an entire system composed of teachers like that. What you need are methods, structures, and institutions that can work for disadvantaged kids that don't rely on Stakhanovite efforts by the teachers. He recommends Direct Instruction (see here and here) as something that's both workable and scaleable.
Matt Stoller has crucial background on Verizon's puzzling decision to block pro-choice text messages (and, yes, they eventually flip-flopped but that merely shows the vital role of public criticism). Specifically, Verizon policy chief Tom Tauke's "was a right-wing anti-choice Congressman from Iowa until 1990, when NARAL spent $100,000 to successfully defeat him as he tried to jump to the Senate." Under the circumstances, it makes perfect sense that he'd view pro-choice messages as unsavory.
Rush Limbaugh calls anti-war troops "phony soldiers." One wonders if he's literally doubting the existence of such people, and thus proving himself to be an idiot, or metaphorically doubting their authenticity as soldiers, thus proving himself to be morally contemptible. Both are, obviously, plausible end-states for Rush.
Rush Limbaugh calls anti-war troops "phony soldiers." One wonders if he's literally doubting the existence of such people, and thus proving himself to be an idiot, or metaphorically doubting their authenticity as soldiers, thus proving himself to be morally contemptible. Both are, obviously, plausible end-states for Rush.
To give an example of the Subtle Obama Dynamic I talked about yesterday, I wound up yesterday evening covering my first ever Obama mega-rally in Washington Square Park. At some point during his address, he starts talking about experience. First he notes that he actually has a lot of experience of various sorts. So then he says that people who say he doesn't have experience (but he never says who these people are) must mean experience in Washington. But, he notes, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had great resumés before taking jobs in the Bush administration. "Experience," he says, "is no guarantee of good judgment."
At this point I heard one television reporter remark to a confused camera operator "that's a dig at Hillary." He then moves on to recounting the dispute with Hillary about talking with foreign dictators.
And there's the rub. The camera operator was watching the speech. If Obama wants to make a dig at Hillary, the camera operator ought to realize that without someone else pointing it out to him.
Translated from the Obamaese, he's first noting that Obama actually has more experience than Clinton in elective office and in activism -- Clinton's experience is mostly being Bill Clinton's wife and thus being in the vicinity of powerful people. Second, he's noting that Clinton, who likes to tout her experience, joined the also very experienced Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in advocating for the invasion of Iraq. He's arguing that this wasn't a one-off, that it suggests Clinton is the kind of person likely to make poor judgments in the future, possibly including decisions relating to Iran. Obama will try diplomacy; Clinton may once again show poor judgment by rushing to war.
That, I think, is what he's trying to say. But he's not really saying it and I'm not quite sure why.
The BBC reports that violent suppression of protests in Burma has begun and according to official Burmese media "nine people were killed on Thursday as troops fired tear gas and bullets to clear large crowds of protesters off Rangoon's streets" though western diplomats think that's an underestimate. Yesterday, Kerry Howley, who's lived in Burma, observed that "while the world may be watching, I doubt most Burmese are."
The country’s communications infrastructure is incredibly limited. Seven people out of 1,000 own televisions, and they’re not getting BBC. They’re watching MRTV-3: all government propaganda, all the time. It’s difficult to get a license for a satellite or an internet connection. Cell phones cost thousands of dollars; even most expats don’t carry them. I worked in relatively cosmopolitan Yangon, but a friend who worked in upper Burma once told me the villagers he worked with had never heard of Aung San Suu Kyi. The land lines rarely work, and when they do, sane people do not discuss political matters over them. It’s probably safe to assume you know more about what’s going down on Sule Pagoda Road than much of Burma does.
In these kind of situations, it seems to me that the key variable tends to be the loyalty of the security services. It often turns out to be difficult to get rank and file soldiers to shoot at unarmed countrymen protesting in the streets against a corrupt regime. But when they're willing to follow orders, there's ultimately nothing the protesters can do to ensure success.
I don't really share the objections that people frequently raise to celebrities getting involved in political causes. Donating what one can donate to good causes is a good thing to do. And as Tyler Cowen has observed, in the developed world one of the scarcer commodities out there is attention is grabbing people's attention is something movie stars are very good at doing. Watch this video of Angelina Jolie talking about refugees living in Syria and you'll see:
This is an issue a lot of people have tried to write about and raise awareness of, but the level of action has thus far been pretty tiny. But this is a hell of a powerful anecdote, and Jolie's able to tell it in a way that gets more people's attention than if it was just another article in a highbrow magazine somewhere.
CQhas the rundown here. Of course, these things are inherently a little fuzzy. Parties experience waves of support now and again driven by large macro-political events. And good candidates waging good campaigns can win "unwinnable" races against representatives of an unpopular national party. I've seen a lot of analysis over the past year and a half indicating that Democrats underplayed their hand in the 2006 House races. There were a few dozen races, basically, where had there been enough funds for an adequate final-week push, you'd have won a couple handsful of 'em.
The overall political climate for 2008, meanwhile, shows overall signs of being just as bad for Republicans as you saw in 2006. The one fly in the ointment is that the existence of a presidential race alongside the congressional ones could prompt people's most partisan pro-Republican instincts no matter how disgruntled they may be. At any rate, all this is by way of mentioning that I saw Dan Grant yesterday again, a great guy and a veteran of civilian-side operations in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan who's running for congress in the Texas 10 against an undistinguished incumbent opponent. It's not a CQ-certified competitive district and probably shouldn't be. But these are the kind of races you can win if there's a wave, and they're also the kind of races of which a wave of victories is made.
Jonathan Martin at the Politicoobserves that Fred Thompson's efforts to secure support from a broad social conservative network group have been hampered by the fact that he's "confirmed that, because of his federalist views, he would not back the [federal marriage] amendment." Jon Chait remarks:
Why not? In the absence of any motive for this otherwise-baffling decision, the answer seems to be that Thompson actually has some principles, and is unwilling to sacrifice them in order to become president. Frankly, I never anticipated this possibility.
Me neither. It's really odd. But good for him. Although "federalist principles" has always struck me a pretty weak reason for opposing this measure. I mean, if I really thought Andrew's wedding was a clear and present danger to other people's families, I'm not sure I could make the case for why federalism should trump that.
In case Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent odd commentary about gays in Iran has sparked your interest about the broader question of queer life under repressive Islamic theocracies, it's lucky for you that the May 2007 Atlantic had this great piece from Nadya Labi about gay life in Saudi Arabia. This section even includes a hint as to what Ahmadenijad may have been talking about if you want to give his words a generous construction:
This is surprising enough. But what seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men don’t consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with “gayness.” The act may fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn’t constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the “top,” or active, role. This attitude gives Saudi men who engage in homosexual behavior a degree of freedom. But as a more Westernized notion of gayness—a notion that stresses orientation over acts—takes hold in the country, will this delicate balance survive?
This is, I think, a not uncommon pattern around the world and throughout history -- with participation in same-sex acts much more divorced from concepts of "gayness" as an identity than it is in the contemporary west.
During the ensuing week, as Crocker and Petraeus told Congress that the surge of more U.S. troops to Iraq was beginning to work and President Bush gave a televised address in which he said "ordinary life was beginning to return" to Baghdad, Blackwater security guards shot at least 43 people on crowded Baghdad streets. At least 16 of those people died.
Now, obviously, Blackwater is operating in a legitimately deadly environment so some of this violence was probably justified. But "interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors of each incident describe similar circumstances in which Blackwater guards took aggressive action against civilians who seemed to pose no threat." And of course the system under which Blackwater is operating -- a system in which neither US military justice nor Iraqi law applies to Blackwater personnel -- is an open invitation to abuse. No government, be in headquartered in Washington or Baghdad, that was genuinely concerned with the well-being of the Iraqi people could possibly let an organization operate under those terms.
As he addresses a conference on climate change this morning, President Bush will face not only a crowd of skeptics but the press of time. For nearly seven years, he invested little personal energy in the challenge of global warming. Now, with the end in sight, he has called the biggest nations of the world together to press for a plan by the end of next year.
This turnaround just didn't happen. The UN had a meeting on Monday aimed at building political momentum for a meeting to happen later in Bali aimed at kicking off negotiations toward an international treaty that will commit the world's countries to binding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Bush didn't attend that meeting. Instead, he called this other meeting in an effort to subvert action on climate change. He hasn't in the past "invested little personal energy in the challenge of global warming." Rather, he's invested plenty of energy in undermining efforts to respond to the challenge of global warming and continues to do so by continuing to oppose mandatory emissions reductions.
This isn't brain science (it's climate science -- ha!) to move to address the challenge of global warming you need to move to address the challenge not just say you're addressing it while not doing anything. You need to, that is, unless all you really want is for Peter Baker to publish a misleading article about what you're doing in The Washington Post.
I know this is what a lot of people have been waiting for. For all the shoeheads out there, allow me to introduce you to the adidas GilIIZero. I was calling them the Gil 20s, because that’s how it’s pronounced, but when you go to buy them in the store (which I know you will) it will say GilIIZero on the box. I just wanted to clear that up so you don’t get confused and think Boyz II Men has a shoe or something.
This just seems like a terrible idea. In many fonts, the capital "I" looks so close to a lower-case "l" that the shoes appear to be the GilllZeros with three "l"s.
Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnel's statements about FISA delays and the need for sweeping new powers continue to be fact-challenged, as Spencer Ackerman and Pamela Hess at the AP confirm.
Tim Wu explains why municipal wifi projects are flopping all over the place. In essence, the idea it's never really been tried. Or, rather, the cities doing muni wifi haven't done what they ought to try to do and make wireless broadband internet a freely available public service. Instead, not wanting to invest any money in their wifi network, they tried to contract with private firms who would build networks that the companies would then charge people for.
This hasn't worked very well, and it's also contrary to the whole underlying purpose of the enterprise which was to make wireless broadband internet access into a freely available public service.
I'm not 100 percent sure the public service model would be a great idea, or under what circumstances it'd be a great idea, but we have all sorts of different towns and cities here in the United States and it sure would be nice to see someplace try this out in a real way.
John Quiggin and Kevin Drum ponder the possibly apocryphal origins of America's idiosyncratic habit of voting on Tuesdays. Whatever the reason for that choice of day, it's clear that the reason wasn't "this day will maximize voter participation in 21st century post-industrial America." We should change it and vote on Saturdays. The vote-by-mail option also has promise.
Distributing a petition is an excellent protest tactic for several reasons. First, it is a very easy and cost-effective way to draw attention to the issues at hand. Second, a petition can serve as an advertisement for other events, such as film screenings and panel discussions (when you ask students to sign the petition, hand them a flyer about the other activities you have planned throughout the week). Perhaps most importantly, a petition forces students and faculty to declare their allegiances: either to fighting our terrorist adversaries or failing to take action to stop our enemies. For this reason, we encourage you to make a special effort to bring this petition to those groups who might be least likely to sign it, for example to campus administrators, student government officers, and the Muslim Students’ Association.
In short, the main goal of the "David Horowitz Freedom Center" here is to write up a petition deliberately designed to be unlikely for Muslim groups to sign and then to use Muslim groups' failure to sign the petition as evidence that they're on the side of "our terrorist adversaries." This is a great way to go about things if you want to (a) be a campus troublemaker, (b) over the long run turn hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world into hardened enemies of the United States, and (c) create a large group of disaffected Muslims inside the United States who've been made to feel that adherence to their faith is unwelcome in America and fundamentally incompatible with loyalty to this country.
Back in saneville, what we'd like to do is build as broad a coalition as possible of people opposed to bin Laden-style acts of terrorist violence against civilians. We'd like to frame our opposition to this kind of terrorism in a manner calculated to gain allies rather than alienate them in order to score points in endless and pointless campus political battles. We'd like to empower mainstream Islamic groups so that Muslims around the world can feel that their concerns can be addressed through legitimate political mechanisms rather than violent holy wars, and so that mainstream Muslims have a platform from which to fight back against extremism.
For the Guardian I try to put the story of Bush rejecting exile options for Saddam Hussein into the broader context of his administration's approach to nuclear proliferation. Rejecting the rule-based framework of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Bush sought another way outside the bounds of international law:
That way, known as "counterproliferation" by its advocates, was, in essence, brute force. The US would break its non-proliferation treaty commitments by building a new generation of "bunker buster" nukes, turn a blind eye to nuclear activities by friendly states, and restrain WMD acquisition by hostile states through intimidation rather than a legitimate international process. Iraq was targeted not merely on its own terms but in order that Bush might make an example out of Saddam and send a message to the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea and other states. Cutting a deal with Saddam wasn't an option.
Unfortunately, as a result of the same thinking, neither were any number of other moves that could have improved American policy. In particular, the invasion force needed to be small enough, and the reconstruction plan fast and cheap enough, that the US could credibly threaten to do it again if other countries didn't get the message.
I don't really agree with most of this David Brooks column on S-CHIP, and I certainly don't agree with his implication that the S-CHIP expansion bill is a bad thing on net, but this is true:
Third, it creates a fund-raising mechanism cowardly in the extreme. Politicians in Washington like to talk in the abstract about shared sacrifice. They could go to the American people and say: We need to insure more children and to do that we’re going to raise broad-based taxes slightly.
But that’s honest and direct, and therefore impermissible. Instead, this program is funded by raising taxes on smokers, who generally are much poorer than average Americans and much less educated. High school dropouts smoke at roughly three times the rates of college graduates.
Now Brooks tries to deploy this factoid into an effort to convince us, I guess, that the Republicans standing against this expansion are doing so out of earnest concern for the well-being of the American working class. And that, of course, is ridiculous. It is, however, quite true that it's very hard to really make sensible policy in this country within the constraint that everything has to be financed through gimmicks and whatnot rather than through broadish taxes. Now, of course, Brooks has conveniently left out the part of the story where the conservative movement of which he's a part has worked assiduously to try to convince people that it's simply not possible for the benefits of any non-lethal government program to exceed the cost of financing it through taxation, which -- rather than some characterological predilection for dishonesty -- explains why politicians now resort constantly to these sort of tactics.
I'm open to being spun in favor of the position that John Edwards made a savvy move by announcing his intention to accept public financing (and the spending limits that come with it) for his primary campaign, but his staff's official spin-memo isn't very convincing:
Why did we do this? Quite simply, we did it because it is the right thing to do.
I like me a good unrealistic proposal, and this Ryan Avent scheme for better regional planning is a doozy:
In inner suburbs, the population of squished out people grows until infrastructure needs grow and tax rates rise, squishing people farther out still. The end result is a terrible distribution of infrastructure investment, since inner infrastructure is, on the whole, underused while outer infrastructure is overused (example: Prince William County can’t build schools fast enough, while the District has school buildings sitting empty). What ought to happen, what I’d expect to happen in an enlightened area with a strong regional authority, is that tax rates would decline as you moved inward, not outward. In that case, taxpayers would pay more for moves that necessitate outward expansions of infrastructure and reductions in agglomeration externalities.
As he himself notes "That outcome is also practically impossible to imagine." Of course, many of our metro areas have more than enough people to be viable states were one allowed to redraw the map, and were state boundaries to conform better to the contours of the metropolitan areas into which our lives are actually organized, it might be possible to have better planning.
I don't want my skepticism about Barack Obama's messaging strategy to totally obscure the point, driven home by Garance Franke-Ruta's photo shown above and her post here, that these Obama mega-rallies are a hugely impressive phenomenon. They signify both the candidate's considerable personal appeal, the strong appeal of his message has to a certain demographic (one that includes me), and also the broader re-engagement with politics and public life that's been one of the few good consequences of the disaster of 21st century American governance.
One of the things that worries me about the prospect of Mark Penn once again becoming king of the political hill is that his approach to politics seems antithetical to this concept of mass engagement. Instead, it's a model where you break the population down into the smallest possible groups, and assemble a winning coalition of stitched-together wedges of people each engaged through their own micro-initiative. That's not all there is to Hillary Clinton or to the broader case of Clinton-style centrism. Indeed, it's quite different from (in some ways the reverse of) the initial critique of interest-group liberalism with which the DLC launched itself. And in the best moments of her campaign -- the health care plan, the day care plan -- Clinton has completely gone beyond the inane politics of "are archery moms the new soccer moms?" but all that's been in no small part responsive to the new new politics of John Edwards, Andy Stern, and Barack Obama.
Which comes back to the point, I guess, that a whole ton of people stood around a pretty long time yesterday evening in order to get a not necessarily very good view (some people had good views, but it looked like a lot of rally-goers had bad sightlines) of a man talking about politics. There's got to be some significance to that.
Peter Baker at the Post may have totally dropped the ball in his coverage of the fake Bush fake climate change fake conference (it's fake, you see), but The New York Times's John Broder knows how to add value for his readers:
The president’s calls for each country to decide for itself how to rein in pollution, and his refusal to embrace mandatory measures, have set the United States apart from other countries, and this morning’s appearance at the State Department conference probably did not do much to change that situation.
“Smart technology does not just materialize by itself,” John Ashton, a special adviser on climate change to the British foreign secretary, said afterward. Mr. Ashton, who has said that voluntary measures are ineffective, said “smart technology” requires government commitment and investment, and he noted that Mr. Bush did not state a specific goal for reducing carbon emissions.
He also quotes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: "Every country will make its own decisions reflecting its own needs and interests." The trouble, of course, is that we're facing a common problem here. It'd be nice for each country to be able to make an individualized determination of its view of the growth-warming tradeoff and then we all see how it plays out, but that's not the nature of the atmosphere or the climate. Any sensible approach needs to be sensitive to the different needs and circumstances of different countries, but unless it's driven by a common purpose and a common commitment it won't accomplish anything. Which, of course, is the point. As Kate Sheppard says the point of the summit isn't to bolster Bush's legacy, instead, it's all about "fanciful promises, denial of what needs to be done to tackle climate change, and subversion of the efforts of everyone who actually gets it."
Doesn't it seem like Amtrak ought to buy Amtrack.com -- I was really confused there for a minute. And now that I think about it, given that trains travel on tracks, shouldn't Amtrak be called "Amtrack." The name we've got seems more appropriate for Denmark or something.
This is just one hilarious slide in an endlessly hilarious Navy PowerPoint presentation about how to convince the kids these days to join the military. Read Noah Schachtman and Entropic Memes for more. According to their own data, the real issue here actually has nothing to do with MySpace or emoticons and everything to do with the fact that the war in Iraq has -- correctly -- made military service look less appealing to people than it once did.
It's one thing to ask people to sacrifice and risk their lives for a worthy cause, but it becomes another thing entirely when the main mission facing the military is fruitless war that appears to be continuing mostly to salve the egos of politicians.
I should say that I agree with the spirit of Reihan Salam's argument that the egregious problems we've had with private military contractors in Iraq should serve, as such, to discredit the PMC problem. That the PMCs working in Iraq operate in a legal black hole is, in my mind, a huge problem but also an eminently solvable one.
That said, I'm not actually seeing the specific compelling argument in favor of such widespread use of PMCs. The arguments Reihan adduces sound to me like good arguments in favor of a professional military staffed by volunteers which, of course, is what we have.
I do, however, sometimes feel like there may be a decent case for something like the UN hiring PMCs do conduct certain kinds of humanitarian options. It's pretty obvious why a standing UN military force might be a useful thing to have (could deploy quickly into a crisis as soon as the Security Council authorized it, etc.) and also pretty clear why you're not likely to see one created. One could, however, much more easily imagine the Security Council creating a standing budget that could be used to fly a crack team of PMCs in somewhere to guard a refugee camp or impose a no-fly zone. Other times, this seems like a terrible idea: does Africa really need more mercenaries?
Given that each ZIP code in the United States of America specifies a unique state, why do you need to specify a state whenever you're filling out address fields to make a credit card purchase on the internet? Given the vagaries of brick-and-mortar mail delivery, especially in the pre-digital age, providing superfluous information on your envelop no doubt makes things easier for the postal service and provides some chance of rescue in the event of erroneous addressing. But whatever program processes your form after you hit "okay" ought to be able to infer the rest of the information from -- 04616 is Brooklin, ME; 10003 is New York, NY; 20009 is Washington, DC -- from the ZIP code alone rather than giving you an error message and demanding that you fill in the blanks.
Hillary Clinton comes out in favor of a "baby bond" scheme. I like these kind of plans and think the general subject of asset-building is unduly neglected. Achieving a more equitable distribution of capital ownership is going to be key to combatting inequality under 21st century conditions.
The New York Timestakes a look at a problem I'd never considered. The moral of the story, however, is clear: any wealthy readers considering dying without heirs should leave their money to me rather than establishing one of these trusts and ending up posthumously screwed over.
In the past most people didn't much like or listen to most of the music they bought, or in any case most of the value came from their very favorites. A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure. So if people can sample music in advance, and know in advance what they will like, music sales will plummet. This will be a sign of market efficiency, not market failure.
Right. Obviously, from the point of view of a record company executive, a "healthy music business" is one which maximizes his profits. From a more reasonable point of view, the relevant metric is consumption of music. On the one hand, you have declining sales. On the other hand, you have the basic truth that people now have easier access to a wider array of music than ever before, along with better devices on which to listen to it, and much more convenient ways to store it.
Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) returns from a visit to the UN and cosigns a letter with several House colleagues:
In order to achieve a comprehensive international climate regime that includes all major emitting countries after 2012, there is an urgent need to make significant progress in negotiations at the Conference of Parties to the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) being held this December in Indonesia. You have invited representatives from the world’s leading emitting countries to Washington, DC on September 27th and 28th under the auspices of advancing these negotiations.
We are concerned that in announcing the Major Emitters Meeting, and then again in the recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Sydney Declaration, you have focused on reaching long-term “aspirational” goals. Given the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provide clear evidence of global warming impacts on all continents and most of the oceans, we need actual reductions in global warming pollution, not aspirational goals.
Last week, Daniel Drezner and I were wondering what ever happened to the PR rollout for bombing Iran. Don Van Natta reports for The New York Times on Freedom’s Watch, who's Iraq-related ads have already made a stir: "the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy." Sounds fun.
This, incidentally, seems to be one of the main reasons why widespread predictions of Republican disaffection with the Iraq War haven't come true. A bit contrary to what most people thought, a significant segment of the Republican donor class seems to be composed of big-time war enthusiasts. Many of the GOP members of congress who made some gestures toward distancing themselves from the war are now facing primary challenges, and with outfits like Freedom's Watch springing up everyone knows money could be made available for more.
It was back in October 2006 when I first started hearing knowledgeable western analysts suggest that cutting a deal with the Taliban might be the only way to stabilize Afghanistan. Naturally, such talk was not in favor in political circles in the US, but now it looks as if Hamid Karzai himself is thinking along those lines.
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Heads in the Sand
