"The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt," reports Petula Dvorak for The Washington Post, "When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects."
Obviously, they just didn't understand the stakes. Or perhaps lacked moral clarity.
Via Jim Henley, a fun website that gives you a demographic profile of your ZIP code. Here's 20009 where I live, though in some ways my block strikes me as more typical of the neighboring 20001 ZIP code where my previous house (just three blocks away) was.
Tyler Cowen says "I'm still wondering what -- de facto -- will be done against those poor people who are required to buy health insurance but don't do so." Tyler comes at this from the perspective of a bad right-winger, an opponent of universal health insurance, but I wonder, too. To me, this problem seems like a significant disadvantage of the current vogue for mandate-and-subsidize over a more traditional set-up wherein the government pays for all or some of people's health expenses and collects taxes from people in order to do so. We already have a mechanism in place for enforcing payment of taxes.
This is a subject I've written about several times before, but it continues to be mind-boggling that even our new Petreausified, hip-to-COIN version of MNF-Iraq keeps relying so heavily on air power as a combat tactic. This simply won't work. But it's also a key signal that "surge" or no "surge" there are nowhere near enough American soldiers in Iraq to make anything like a proper counterinsurgency strategy viable. Nor are there enough such soldiers anywhere in the US military. And on the list of things not worth doing unless you're able to do them right, fighting wars ranks pretty high.
Chris Bowers discusses the implications of the chart above, which appears to show the price of gasoline (mapped inversely so that the line goes down when the price of gas goes up) exerting a dominant influence on George W. Bush's popularity. I was super-impressed the first time I saw that chart, but now I'm not so sure. Aside from the fact that gasoline has generally gotten more expensive and Bush generally gotten less popular, are we really seeing a correlation here? There must be any number of quantities that have also generally moved in one direction during the relevant time period.
Consider the quality of the basketball teams fielded by the New Jersey Nets. Like Bush, they were at their best in the season immediately following 9/11 and have been in slow but steady decline since then. But the Nets aren't exercising a causal influence on Bush's popularity. What's more, I think the price of gas is being demarcated in nominal terms here, which is clearly the wrong way to do it.
I broke with habit and watched Tim Russert's show today. After he finished his interview with John Edwards he brought on a panel of pundits since who wants to hear from presidential candidates when you could listen to journalists talking to each other. We had Russert, David Broder, Margaret Carlson, Ted Koppel, and David Brody -- not bad as far as these things go. Eventually, someone -- either Russert or Koppel -- noted that the New York City press, which knows Rudy Giuliani much better than the national press corps, has been full in recent months of hard-hitting coverage that substantially undermines the narrative Giuliani is trying to create about his own campaign.
This, it seemed to me, was an interesting topic for a national broadcast television show. Maybe these worthy panelists would inform their audience of these pieces of information known to New Yorkers, and resolve to bring this information to their audiences at Time, The Washington Post, NPR, CBN, and the various General Electric-owned media properties.
Sorry, just kidding. It didn't occur to me for a minute that they would do this. And, indeed, they didn't. Instead, they went meta and had a brief discussion of why it is that these accurate accounts of Giuliani's record and personal behavior "don't penetrate." And, of course, they never considered the possibility that their own failure to report on these accurate portrayal's of Giuliani's record and personal behavior might play any role in it. Instead, they concluded that his Powers of 9/11 Awesomeness must just be too great for the truth the penetrate. They were, however, willing to be scathingly critical of Fred Thompson for saying "Soviet Union" went he meant "Russia."
Hooman Majd's account of the Iftar feast president Mahmoud Ahmadenijad threw while in New York for Iranian-Americans to break the Ramadan fast with him is pretty fascinating. Among other things, it drives home the extent to which whatever it is we're dealing with when it comes to hardline views on the nuclear issue is really basic Iranian nationalism and nothing to do with any religious views or Islamism as such.
In the ZIP code demographics thread, DivGuy noticed something that I wondered about, too: "The thing that struck me is the huge gap between the '% unemployed' and the '% below poverty line.'"
Thinking about this, a few factors occurred to me over and above the obviously real phenomenon of people who have full-time jobs and still find themselves below the poverty line. Basically, children and retired people aren't counted in the unemployment rate but they can be poor. Indeed, in my neighborhood -- like many other gentrifying neighborhoods around the country -- the children are overwhelmingly concentrated in the more economically downscale households.
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.”
Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!
More dispatches from the continuing conservative war on adorable children (as depicted above) as Glenn Reynolds joins with other rightwingers to sputter with rage at the idea of middle class children having health insurance. We're supposed to believe, I suppose, that whenever Instapundit isn't apologizing for torture or pimping for destructive wars that he's a dedicated activist on behalf of working class Americans and that he speaks up against the outrage of a small business owner's family getting coverage only to further his tireless crusade for the underclass. Or something.
Kevin Drum, meanwhile, thinks we should take Bush seriously when he says he wants poor children to go without health insurance because he fears that Democratic efforts to provide medicine to sick kids will push us down a slippery slope to the dystopian nightmare in which everyone enjoys a universal guarantee of access to health care. I don't really buy it, though; we started slipping down that slope decades ago with Medicare and Medicaid.
Photo by Flickr user Wurzle used under a Creative Commons license
Kerry Howley argues that the PRC has less influence over the ruling junta in Burma than a lot of people would like to think, and cites a variety of experts to that effect. Burma is, in her telling, something of a DPRK-lite whose rulers have deliberately courted isoloation in order to avoid being subject to foreign pressures. See more on the general theme of Burma-related China-bashing from James Fallows and Steve Clemons. To make a long story short, the notion that the US can productively bully China into bullying the Burmese generals into turning their country into a democracy seems like one of these pieces of foreign policy wishful thinking that the country's had quite enough of already.
As you'll recall, when the "surge" was announced in January, its stated purpose was to create the conditions for progress toward the goal of national reconciliation. We were promised a report in September on the surge's results. What we got in September was a very, very, very quiet admission that, in terms of its stated goals, the surge had completely and utterly failed. This combined with a loud insistence that the surge was succeeding in terms of some other goals, and that reconciliation was around the corner so why do you hate the troops and want al-Qaediranians to kill little children?
Now we read this morning that top Iraqi politicians want to abandon national reconciliation as a goal. They're not missing benchmarks or running behind schedule, they're just saying it's not going to happen. The surge hasn't worked, isn't working, and won't, according to Iraqis, ever work.
I liked this Tony Judt op-ed quite a bit, but given that it's rather obviously a response to the Roger Cohen column from last week isn't it bizarre that the conventions of op-ed writing prevent him from so much as mentioning Cohen's name? Instead, we get a vague allusion to the idea that "The 'liberal hawks' are back . . . [a]nd they are in a decidedly self-righteous mood." And indeed they are, but there's no better example than a certain NYT columnist who can't be mentioned.
I keep meaning to post on the GOP's 2008 convention logo featuring an elephant adopting a "wide stance" and attempting to mount the numerals. All joking aside, it seems to me that this ought to put to bed the notion that Republicans are just inherently better at the trivial and symbolic elements of the political world since this one doesn't really pass the laugh test.
I also have to wonder on behalf of the good people of St. Paul, Minnesota if they're not taking offense at the idea that this convention is being held in a mythic place known as "Minneapolis - St. Paul." There's an arena in Minneapolis -- the Target Center where the Timberwolves play -- and that's not where the convention is. Instead, it's going to be at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. I don't know the region, though, and maybe St. Paulers don't mind this sort of thing.
One of several unfortunate elements of the global warming debate is that it's my sense that the public generally overestimates the degree of sacrifice involved in heading off catastrophic climate change. For a corrective, Ezra Klein quotes this piece by Bill McKibben:
the IPCC team made it clear in their May report that it was not only feasible to make these changes but economically possible as well. They calculated that if we made this energy transition, the economy would grow very slightly more slowly than before -- about 0.12 percent more slowly annually, or 3 percent total by 2030. In other words, our children would have to wait until Thanksgiving 2030 to be as rich as they would otherwise have been on New Year's Day of that year.
The trouble is that people generally underestimate the power of economic growth. They look around and see things that use energy -- their car, heating their house, factories where things are manufactured -- and then imagine a world very like the world of today except missing some of that stuff. That, they think, represents the economic cost of pricing carbon adequately to reduce carbon emissions in time to head off catastrophic climate change. In fact, the cost to economic growth comes not in the form of reduced output but a reduced rate of growth. The people of 2030 will still be richer than the people of 2007, and the people of 2050 will be richer still.
The only prospect for people actually becoming poorer -- as opposed to growing richer somewhat less rapidly -- is for some kind of disaster to strike. These things do happen to countries and happen all-too-frequently. They don't, however, happen as a result of increased energy taxes. They might occur, however, under some of the worst case climate change outcomes. More plausibly, unchecked climate change would have a negative impact on growth anyway (even if the changes prove mild enough to adapt to, the costs of adapting -- relocating tons of people, infrastructure, agricultural activity, etc. -- would be high) so it's by no means clear that there's an economic tradeoff here at all. But even if there is, the tradeoff isn't a question of building a less prosperous tomorrow -- a world like today, except with somewhat less -- it's a question of building a tomorrow that, while more environmentally sound, is a bit less additionally rich than it otherwise might have been.
You know, I'd been saying to myself "Michael O'Hanlon doesn't have enough media exposure on a sufficiently wide range of topics." Fortunately, it looks like last week the Examiner treated us to an O'Hanlon op-ed on health care so I can now feel okay about that.
I'm with Ambinder on this -- I think it's very strange of Barack Obama to be running a campaign against a shadowy "some" who have a lot of opinions that hard-core political junkies understand to be Hillary Clinton's, but that the voters to whom he's supposed to be appealing probably don't recognize. After all, in order to even understand that these lines are supposed to be attacks on Clinton you need to already realize that she has the characteristics Obama is trying to convince people she has.
Did you know that in Afghanistan the US government is pushing a poppy-spraying plan that just so happens to be opposed by such trivial figures as Hamid Karzai and "American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan." Mark Kleiman, a drug policy specialists, notes that not only is this daft national security policymaking, but it's not useful as drug control policy either.
Meanwhile, take note of the broader context. Our first post-war chargé d'affairs in Afghanistan was Ryan Crocker, a diplomat with previous experience in Iran, Qatar, Iraq, Lebanon, and Middle East policy in DC. Next we got Robert Finn who has a PhD. in Near Eastern studies and had worked in Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Turkey. Then came Zalmay Khalilzad, also a specialist in the region and, indeed, someone who was born in Afghanistan. Then Ronald Neumann, also a near east specialist with experience all throughout the Muslim world.
Now, though, our man in Kabul is William Wood someone who, though certainly qualified to be an ambassador, has no experience or expertise in the region. Instead, our top political official in the key battleground against al-Qaeda's main qualification seems to be that his previous post was as ambassador to Colombia. Implicitly, then, the decision is being made to view Afghanistan primarily as a drug control problem rather than as a Taliban-and-al-Qaeda problem. That's just crazy.
Of course it would be one thing if our key allies in Afghanistan were telling us that drug eradication is the number one thing they need help with and could we please send them a specialist in the field. Obviously, though, that's not what's happening. The number one thing they need help with is securing the loyalty of southern Afghanistan's population, and they feel that spraying the country with chemicals that kill poppies and other agricultural products alike is going to alienate people and make their problems worse.
Photo by Flickr user ny156uk used under a Creative Commons license
Always Trust Foreigners Talking to Newspaper Columnists
If Lebanese factional leader Saad Hariri tells Jackson Diehl the US should isolate Syria then I guess the only thing to do is follow Diehl in uncritically endorsing the idea that Hariri has America's best interests at heart here. I mean, surely it's not possible that Hariri is trying to push an agenda that he thinks serves Hariri's interests or those of his faction inside Lebanon rather than America's.
It's good to know that when the national press corps was seized with a sudden desire to start talking about Hillary Clinton's laugh, it wasn't as if they were taking their cues from the RNC. Rather, Rick Hertzberg points out, they were literally taking their cues from the RNC:
The sound of Hillary’s laughter, accompanied by urgent analyses thereof, has since been echoing from the tar pits of the Internet to the lofty peaks of the major mainstream media. It began with surprising amiability, on none other than “Fox News Sunday,” just after that program’s contribution to the Ginsburg. Chatting with the interviewer, Chris Wallace, about the way Clinton had burst out laughing at the opening question (which was about why she has “a hyper-partisan view of politics”), Wallace’s colleague Brit Hume remarked that her laugh “is always disarming, always engaging, and always attractive.”
By midafternoon, the Republican National Committee had rushed out a corrective to Hume’s lapse into graciousness: an electronic “research briefing” titled “Hillary: No Laughing Matter.” It was studded with subheads like “When Asked Whether Her Plan Is a Step Toward Socialized Medicine, Hillary Giggles Uncontrollably” and festooned with video clips of the former First Lady engaged in giggle-related activities. From then on, the commentary alternated between judgments of the quality of the candidate’s laughter and assessments of its hidden meaning.
Krugman acknowledges that critics-from-the-left of the current Democratic consensus in favor of the "regulate, mandate, subsidize" approach to universal health care have a point, but says that given the political undoability of the single-payer approach that this is the best available alternative.
Maybe so, but I'm not sure people have given enough thought to alternatives. One possibility involves the default rule. What if instead of "mandating" that the uninsured go get themselves some insurance (community rated and, for the poor, subsidized insurance, to be sure) and creating a public sector option that they might sign up for you instead automatically signed the uninsured up for the public sector option and allowed them to opt-out of it in favor a private plan if they so desired. That would solve the enforcement problem facing mandate schemes which, as best I can tell, mandate advocates haven't seriously grappled with.
Now, a plan like this would probably be harder to pass since it would more deeply damage the interests of insurance companies. At a minimum, though, I'd like to see a progressive president ask for this default rule in his or her proposal. That would put the onus for constructing an alternative enforcement mechanism for the mandate on the insurance industry lobbyists whose job it will be to eliminate this provision.
I seem to be the only liberal who thinks that James Dobson et. al. will probably follow through on their threat to sink Rudy Giuliani if he becomes the Republican nominee, but now we have Richard Viguerie chiming in with a similar threat. I think this business is real. If Giuliani wins the White House, the pro-life lobby will wind up looking like a paper tiger and nobody will pay them any mind in the future. The mere fact of a Democrat in the White House doesn't threaten their power nearly as much as a pro-choice Republican would.
I keep kinda sorta forgetting that today is Columbus Day. One of the United States' niftier quirks is that Columbus has been adopted as the Italian-American national hero, so in cities with large historic Italian immigrant populations you see some Columbus Day celebrations, but in places like DC there's nothing. This, in my view, is how you can tell that Baltimore -- with its Columbus Day parade -- is the southernmost of Northeastern cities whereas parade-less DC is the northernmost city of the southeast (if you doubt me, note that the original lyrics of "Hail to the Redskins" enjoined the team to "fight for old Dixie").
We all know that correlation doesn't prove causation anyway, but the issue I'd like to raise about the purported tight link between the price of gasoline and George W. Bush's approval rating is that it's hardly clear to me that there's even a correlation here beyond the basic fact that Bush's approval rating has generally gone down since 9/11 and oil prices have generally gone up.
Consider, if you will, the detail to the left. This shows the data from September of 2005 to September of 2007, a period during which the final price of gas was very close to the initial price, but Bush's approval rating fell by a small but clear amount. Nothing about eyeballing this chart would lead you to conclude that gas prices were driving changes in Bush's approval rating. Sometimes the two indexes move in the same direction and sometimes they move in different directions. But since each index can only go in one of two directions, one would expect totally unrelated quantities to move in the same general directions about half the time.
All that said, obviously we do know that economic conditions are one of several factors that impact presidential approval ratings and that gasoline prices are an important determinant of people's assessments of their economic well-being. We also know that sometimes gas prices go up because of events (Katrina, for example) that independent make the president look bad. But the initial formulation of the gas-approval chart is meant to show a very tight link between the two quantities and it seems to me that the link just isn't there.
A little glance back at the 2002-vintage thoughts of Bernard Lewis, every conservative's favorite Middle East expert. Speaking before the invasion of Iraq, he notes that "Parallels to the Iraq quandary can be found by looking at post-World War II Germany and Japan" which were turned into successful liberal democracies. And then:
I am particularly optimistic that the same can be done in Iraq, which has many positive features upon which it can build. For example, of all the oil-producing countries, Iraq made the best use of its oil revenues in terms of creating a real infrastructure, including a good secondary and university education system. Here I speak from personal knowledge. Earlier in my career, when I was teaching at the University of London, the overwhelming majority of my graduate students came from the Middle East. All of these Middle Eastern students were graduates of Arab universities and, before that, of Arab high school systems. I got to evaluate them well enough to know what sort of education and training they had received and, more particularly, whether their credentials really meant something. In the case of Iraqi students, their degrees were more reliable than those of students from other countries; the students from Iraq had received better training under more rigorous standards.
For this and other reasons, there is genuine hope. The main task is not creating opportunities, but removing obstacles.
Pretty much everyone, including those of us who don't think she would be the best Democratic nominee, are pretty impressed with how tight a campaign Hillary Clinton's run. MSNBC's first read, The New York Times, and Larry Sabato, however, see a hint of weakness:
Her $5,000 “baby bonds” proposal may have given fodder to Republicans. “The baby bonds proposal is one of the few mistakes Hillary Clinton has made in her campaign,” said University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato per the New York Times. ‘Should Clinton become the Democratic nominee, she may have handed a powerful issue to the Republican candidate.”
But of course any proposal from a Democrat is going to be "fodder" for Republicans. The idea deserves to be considered on its merits. Nick Beaudrot, baby bonds fan and John Edwards fan, notes that his idol "has said good things about these sorts of plans before." Tony Blair and Gordon Brown pioneered a similar policy in the United Kingdom several years ago. Ray Boshara at the New America Foundation is also a longtime advocate of these measures, and it goes even further back to Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott's book, The Stakeholder Society.
One of the main policies that made the United States we know and love was the Homestead Act of the 19th century. The question this was intended to address was how to dispose of the vast land mass that the country was in the process of stealing from its native inhabitants. One way to do this would have been to auction it off to the highest bidder. Wealthy investors would have bought large estates and hired overseers and tenants to farm the land while living back home in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, wherever. Instead, the congress guaranteed a small farm to anyone willing to move west and live and work on the land, building a property owning democracy of smallholders wherein ownership of the means of production (viz. land) was widely distributed.
Baby bonds could and should be a step toward creating a 21st century version of a society lack that -- one in which every citizen who works hard and obeys the law gets to share in the prosperity that's created by everyone's labor together.
Over on the blog-I-didn't-know-he-had, Roger Cohen shows us all that he's actually the kind of liberal hawk who likes going in for a little McCarthyite red baiting now and again, analogizing my former colleague Mike Tomasky to a Stalin apologist. He doesn't cite any actual examples of Tomasky excusing or denying Saddam Hussein's depredations and, indeed, he has to concede that Mike did, in fact, acknowledge Saddam's crimes.
As Chris Hayes points out, Cohen's logic seems to be that anyone who didn't favor launching an unprovoked war with the USSR was, as such, an apologist for Stalinism.
And here we see the basic point that the I-was-wrong-but-I-was-right-anyway crowd on Iraq doesn't really think they were wrong at all. They regret nothing! Sure, spending over a trillion bucks on an operation that's led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis while leading hundreds of thousands -- if not millions -- to become refugees doesn't seem like a very sound humanitarian position but the point is that they took a stand, damnit. And against Saddam Hussein. So there. In "Politics as a Vocation", Max Weber calls this sort of thing the "ethic of ultimate ends" and contrasts it with an "ethic of responsibility":
You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent--and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels 'responsible' only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order. To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have only exemplary value.
And that's what this is all ultimately about -- an effort to evade responsibility by suggesting that what's really at issue here is a controversy over ends. The hawks must have felt Saddam's evil more intensely, must have been more moved by Kenan Makiya's pleas, been more attuned to the gulag, whatever. But no. Everyone knows and everyone knew that Saddam was a bad man. What some also knew was that invading Iraq was unlikely to have beneficial consequences. Cohen considered this possibility and rejected it. Or perhaps he failed to consider it. But either way, he was wrong.
It's extremely good. Exceptional in some places, slightly nebulous in others, perfectly in line with expectations in yet more, but perfectly in line what we should expect from good public servants at this point, and certainly more than I expected from Obama.
Overall, I'm pleasantly surprised -- even shocked -- at its quality. It's a deft mix of good politics and strong, substantive policy.
The basic framework is a cap-and-trade system wherein the emissions credits are sold by the government rather than given away (à la Joe Lieberman's plan). I've come to the view that this is actually preferable to a carbon tax on substance since it asks bureaucrats to perform the hard-but-doable task of setting an appropriate carbon goal and then letting the market sort out what implicit price that sets on carbon emissions rather than the so-hard-it-might-be-impossible task of guestimating what price will get emissions under control.
The revenue thereby raised -- and it promises to be a lot of money -- would be spent on a bunch of stuff aimed at easing the transition to a less carbony economy. To wit:
Some of the revenue generated by auctioning allowances will be used to support the development and deployment of clean energy, invest in energy efficiency improvements and address transition costs, including helping American workers affected by this economic transition and helping lower-income Americans afford their energy bills by expanding the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, expanding weatherization grants for low-income individuals to make their homes more energy efficient, and establishing a dedicated fund to assist low-income Americans afford higher electricity and energy bills.
Then there's a bunch of stuff about efficiency that I don't really understand, but which other people seem to think is good. It does seem to me, though, that Ryan Avent is right that it would make more sense to have a bit less in the way of subsidies for pie-in-the-sky R&D efforts and more in the way of subsidies for proven technologies like rail transportation.
Photo by Flickr user Asterix used under a Creative Commons license
Rudy Giuliani's law firm gets sued by Virgil Waggoner over allegations that Giuliani's partner, Kenneth Caruso, "conspired with Waggoner’s investment adviser to cover up the disappearance of $10 million Waggoner invested through a Caribbean bank, the British Trade & Commerce Bank." Obviously, though, Giuliani would never associate with folks involved in shady dealings. Well, sure, there was the case of mobbed up Bernard Kerik who Giuliani installed as chief of the NYPD and tried to get put in charge of the country's homeland security, but beyond that and this one priest involved in child abuse how many other shady associates does the man have?
Via Ilan Goldenberg, I see Andrew Bacevich's assessment of General Petraeus' testimony. I think the word is "trenchant":
Petraeus has now given this charade a further lease on life. In effect, he is allowing the president and the Congress to continue dodging the main issue, which comes down to this: if the civilian leadership wants to wage a global war on terror and if that war entails pacifying Iraq, then let’s get serious about providing what’s needed to complete the mission—starting with lots more soldiers. Rather than curtailing the ostensibly successful surge, Petraeus should broaden and deepen it. That means sending more troops to Iraq, not bringing them home. And that probably implies doubling or tripling the size of the United States Army on a crash basis.
If the civilian leadership is unwilling to provide what’s needed, then all of the talk about waging a global war on terror—talk heard not only from the president but from most of those jockeying to replace him—amounts to so much hot air. Critics who think the concept of the global war on terror is fundamentally flawed will see this as a positive development. Once we recognize the global war on terror for the fraudulent enterprise that it has become, then we can get serious about designing a strategy to address the threat that we actually face, which is not terrorism but violent Islamic radicalism. The antidote to Islamic radicalism, if there is one, won’t involve invading and occupying places like Iraq.
Bacevich's point is that if succeeding in Iraq is really very important, and if Petraeus really thinks the US has found effective tactics that are helping to build toward success, then why isn't he demanding more troops so that we could actually surge up to the sort of force levels that history suggests are necessary for this sort of thing. The answer is that "if he had done otherwise—if he had asked, say, to expand the surge by adding yet another 50,000 troops—he would have distressed just about everyone back in Washington." Petraeus' job, however, was to do precisely the reverse -- to shore up congressional Republican support for George W. Bush's efforts to ensure that a large US military presence in Iraq is there when his successor takes office.
GOP combines with a handful of corrupt Democrats to stand tall in defense of the right of uber-rich private equity managers to pay a lower tax rate than you or I. It makes one proud to be an American, doesn't it?
Via Marc Ambinder, the McCain Blogette brought to you by "Meghan McCain, daughter of presidential candidate John McCain; La-Toria Haven, political fashionista; and Heather Brand, professional photographer." This seems a bit like the political version of "math is hard, let's go shopping" to me.
Michael Hirsch writes for Newsweek about the ways Rudy Giuliani has put together a team of advisors that makes him look like a dangerous lunatic. His behavior while in City Hall was kind of lovably wacky, but it also suggested the temperament of a lunatic who, in the White House, would be dangerous, so bringing a "dangerous lunatic" policy team on board is not comforting. And this is dangerous lunatic by contemporary Republican standards so be afraid. And there are structural factors in play -- it's not clear that Rudy can afford to be less than insane:
He also knows, however, that painting the War on Terror as a broad moral crusade—the basic neocon approach—is probably the only way he can win over a conservative Republican base that doesn't like his squishiness on values issues like abortion or his marriages. Giuliani has succeeded by casting the War on Terror as the "defense of Western civilization, and for many [conservative] voters that is a moral issue" that may be as important as abortion, says Gary Bauer of American Values, an advocacy group that promotes traditional marriage and pro-life views, among other conservative issues.
On top of that, Giuliani cut his teeth in New York City politics (obviously) where what passes for foreign policy is picking fights with UN officials over parking fines.
Photo by VictoryNH used under a Creative Commons license
Tonight John McCain will once again take the stage with his Republican opponents and face off on the issues important to America. If the past debates are any indication, this debate will be another decisive night in which John McCain will stand head and shoulders above his opponents and prove that he is the only one who is ready to lead our country on day one.
How many more decisive nights are there going to be?
He goes into reverse and starts screaming at me. I can’t really hear it except for a lot of f-bombs until he gets close. I yell back, “Why were you tailgating me like that? I was already going well over the speed limit!”
He’s now right in front of my driveway. Older guy–55? 60? Big walrus mustache, grey hair, relatively slight build, but kind of tough-looking.
“BECAUSE YOU’RE A FUCKING FAGGOT, FUCKER! YOU FUCK! I SHOULD HAVE FUCKING HIT YOU! I SHOULD HIT YOU NOW!” He goes on in that vein for a bit. [. . .]
I yell back when he stops for air, “What is your FUCKING problem? What did I do to you?”
He leans out to point at my car bumper. Which is entirely unadorned except for a Kerry-Edwards sticker from 2004.
“YOU FAGGOT YOU VOTED FOR THAT WAR CRIMINAL. I’M GOING TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU.” Guy is turning a shade of purple. I don’t think he’s just putting on a show. He actually sped up, nearly rammed with his car at high speed and is now seriously contemplating attacking me over a bumper sticker. I’m so astonished that I’m speechless. He looks at me, looks at the house, and I think he’s noticing that there’s another car there and therefore maybe someone who is going to call the cops if something happens. Plus, I’m thinking the same thing myself, and getting out my cell phone. Machismo be damned: we just entered psycho territory. He pulls away and speeds off, yelling all the while. I spend about ten minutes kind of trembling as the adrenaline drains away.
Meanwhile, the wingnutsphere is busy lying about the Frost family, showing up at their workplace, etc. in an effort to intimidate them.
Torture advocate Bret Stephens makes the case in The Wall Street Journal for pretending that waterboarding isn't torture:
For the record, count me as one who does not object to the interrogation to which KSM was reportedly subjected, including waterboarding. This is not because I take the use of waterboarding lightly (although I have a hard time concluding that a technique, however terrifying, to which CIA officers are willing to subject themselves experimentally can properly be counted as torture). It's because I take the threat posed by KSM seriously.
As Matthew Duss points out "CIA officers subject themselves to this torture as part of their training to withstand torture." Stephens would have us believe, I guess, that the CIA does it for fun. Or maybe that since members of the military volunteer for duty that involves being shot at that guns aren't really weapons.
Jon Chait points out in a New York Times op-ed that tonight's GOP debate on economic issues is unlikely to feature any real debate -- the GOP demands slavish orthodoxy to tax cutting as the solution to all problems:
Mr. McCain is not alone. Every major Republican contender — Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney — has said that the Bush tax cuts have caused government revenues to rise. No prominent Republican office-seeker dare challenge this dogma for fear of offending the economic far right.[...]
No Republican candidate can risk committing heresy by acknowledging this bipartisan consensus among economists. On social issues, however, Republicans actually tolerate diversity of thought. For example, Mr. McCain, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Thompson all oppose, on federalist grounds, a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. [...]
The most recent Pew survey of the electorate, which came out two years ago, revealed that Republicans find common ground on social issues like discouraging homosexuality and teaching creationism alongside evolution in the public schools. They disagree on economic policy. In the survey, most members of the Republican coalition preferred deficit reduction to tax cuts. [...]
A handful of fanatical ideologues, along with a somewhat larger number of money men who stand to gain a fortune from supply-side policies, relentlessly enforce the faith. They do so with far more success than the religious right, and they receive far less mockery for their efforts.
Indeed. Coincidentally enough, Jon has a whole book about this stuff that you can buy.
I'd somehow gotten it into my head that the season premiere of Friday Night Lights, the official Best Show on Network Television, was this Friday rather than last Friday. Fortunately, NBC streams the old episodes online so I was able to watch it from the comfort of my office earlier today.
I'd been fully prepared to be massively disappointed by the second season, so I found the first episode to be a delightful -- and welcome -- surprise as the show seemed to hold together very nicely. Alan Sepinwall, however, notes that despite the general strength of the episode, it contained one scene that appears to lay the groundwork (spoilers!) for the series' ultimate destruction as quality television. Too bad.
It seems that last week, the House of Representatives passed on of those meaningless resolutions that congress is inclined to pass every so often -- this time one in recognition of Ramadan. Inoffensive, right? Well, hundreds of members of congress thought so, but 41 Republicans and 1 Democrat decided register their protest by voting "present." Rep Tim Walberg, pictured above, argued:
To offer respect for a major religion is one thing, but to offer respect for a major religion that has been behind the Islamic jihad, the radical jihad, that has sworn war upon the United States, its free allies and freedom in Iraq, is another thing.
And I'm sure the people of Iraq really appreciate Rep. Walberg's thinking on this subject. No doubt the view that Islam is the enemy in Iraq is going to win us a ton of popular support. Oh well.
This line from The Washington Post's account of the Democrats' impending FISA surrender really brings it all home:
Democrats are wary of being called weak on national security. That concern is exacerbated by the government's withholding of details on its surveillance activities that would enable Congress to gauge whether expanded powers are needed, said Mark Agrast, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Yes, indeed, the fact that the government is withholding details on its surveillance activities that would enable Congress to gauge whether expanded powers are needed certainly makes me more inclined to give the executive branch more discretionary power. What a nightmare. I guess the silver lining (of sorts) is that the administration has given every indication over the years that it doesn't consider itself bound by the law anyway, so in practice even a better law probably wouldn't accomplish anything.
One thing we could do as a country that could help reduce carbon emissions in a relatively pain-free way would be to ease regulations around what you're allowed to build where. This would reduce emissions because people living in high-density areas tend to drive less and have lower home energy usage. It would be relatively pain free because we wouldn't be talking about taking people's cars away or forcing anyone to live in densely built cities who doesn't want to. Instead, we'd be talking about letting people build denser structures if they can find people who want to live inside them.
If you go up to the Columbia Heights Metro station and then walk east just a block east you'll be struck by the hard transition from the large-for-DC new apartments on 14th street and the low density structures right around them. What's going on, you'll wonder. What's happened, simply put, is that you've moved out of an area zoned C-2-B and into an area zoned R-4. In R-4 areas, (including almost everything north of Euclid between 14th Street and Georgia Ave, pretty much the entire square between P, U, 14th, and 7th and many other parts of the city) you can't build a house taller than 3 stories (or 40 feet), you can't occupy more than 60 percent of your lot, and you can't build apartments smaller than 900 square feet per bedroom.
As a result, even though these places have become much more desirable places to live, they simply aren't allowed to accommodate very many additional residents. Instead of seeing new, denser construction to allow more and more people to live where they'd like, we see zero sum battles over "gentrification" as working class residents can't afford new, higher rents. Meanwhile, the central city's inability to accommodate all the people who'd like to live there puts enormous price pressure on the closer-in suburbs, pushing people who want the suburban lifestyle ever-further from the city center in search of affordable housing.
It's not clear to me what the federal government can really do about this since zoning is handled very, very locally in America. Maybe there's some way to create incentives for cities and inner suburbs to deregulate? I'm not sure. But it would be a good idea. If you took any particular restrictively zoned neighborhood and deregulated it, the resulting changes and dislocations might be very bothersome to people. But if you did it systematically, the impact in most places would probably be reasonably light and at the end of the process almost everyone would be better off -- you'd still be able to find housing in low-density areas if you wanted it, and you'd be closer to stuff than people who live in fringe exurbs are these days.
At any rate, as I was working away on this post I saw that Virginia Postrel has an Atlantic column on much the same subject, though she eventually veers off in a different direction from where I would have gone.
I wouldn't be nearly so quick as Ezra to blame the lamentable state of television news coverage to the dread profit motive. The truth of the matter is that the cable news audience, after enjoying strong growth as Fox News broke onto the scene, is in the dolldrums. Here's the daytime viewership figures -- the period dominated by the fake events Atrios was complaining about:
Given that the country adds over two million people a year to its population, the fact that the audience seems to have stalled for years at around 1.5 million hardly suggests a wildly successful programming model. Indeed, it seems to me that in some ways the worst damage financial pressures have done to journalism is to let so many people get off the hook by using it as an excuse. It's considered sacrilege in the business to suggest that low quality might be a cause of declining circulation for newspapers or audience for network news broadcasts. Instead, we're supposed to believe that it's the reverse -- problems are all caused by cutbacks which, in turn, are caused by the audience's stubborn unwillingness to cooperate and subscribe.
I don't really buy it. CNN got its audience in the first place because a 24 hour cable news network was a good idea. Fox got its audience because it, too, had a good idea -- a cable network full of conservative political commentary. Then MSNBC and CNN seemed to both hit upon the very bad idea that the market wanted more networks full of conservative political commentary and gave us Glenn Beck, etc. There's an obvious alternative possibility.
Dean Baker notes Fred Thompson misestimating by about $62 trillion . Naturally, the Wall Street Journal reporter who had the quote doesn't notice the error. Felix Salmon wonders "Why is it that Saturday Night Live applies more critical judgment to Fred Thompson's statements than the Wall Street Journal does?"
I've come, eventually, after many conversations, to believe the daily newspaper political reporters who swear to me that they're doing the best they can. But if that's right, the whole enterprise clearly needs to be radically rethought. Most people probably don't know how much the infinite horizon cost projection for Medicare Part D is, and they probably know they don't know it. But if they read this in the newspaper, they come to have beliefs on the subject:
"I know this probably isn't a real popular thing to say, but we couldn't afford this prescription-drug bill," Mr. Thompson said last week on a swing through Iowa, home of Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, who helped push the program through Congress. "We basically put a $72 trillion commitment on top of an already-broken entitlement system. Not a responsible thing to do."
Now you're walking around thinking a $72 trillion commitment was made. You read it in the newspaper, after all. Except it's wrong! But you shouldn't be un-learning things when you read the paper.
John McCain's talking about how American workers are the "most productive in the world." It's true that American workers produce the most, but that's because we work longer hours. By contrast, "measured as value added per hour worked, American workers dropped behind those in Norway where workers produced $37.99 per hour, compared to $35.63 in the United States and $35.08 in France."
Like Bush, But Without the Deep Understanding of the Issues
Rudy Giuliani on whether or not it's a problem that China owns so much of our federal debt: "the way to balance to books is to sell more overseas -- sell energy independence, sell health care."
John McCain on monetary policy: "I'm glad whenever they cut interest rates, I wish interest rates were zero."
We learned nothing new about the candidates during this debate, but it was a lot funnier than any of the previous Republican or Democratic debates. The candidates seem to have gotten some good joke-writers or something. The best part was when Romney said something like "this campaign is a lot like Law & Order -- it's got a huge cast, it seems to go on forever, and Fred Thompson shows up at the end" and then Thompson fired back: "I thought I was gonna be the best actor on this stage." Laughs all around. Plus: I agree with both of them, Thompson is an empty suit and Romney is a pathetic liar.
I'd forgotten about it, but M.J. Rosenberg's post here reminded me of the existence of Michael Kinsley's hilarious 2003 tour of anti-semitism on the AIPAC website:
It is my sad duty to report that this form of anti-Semitism seems to have infected one of the most prominent and respected—one might even say influential—organizations in Washington. This organization claims that "America's pro-Israel lobby"—and we all know what "pro-Israel" is a euphemism for—has tentacles at every level of government and society. On its Web site, this organization paints a lurid picture of Zionists spreading their party line and even indoctrinating children. And yes, this organization claims that the influence of the Zionist lobby is essential to explaining the pro-Israel tilt of U.S. policy in the Middle East. It asserts that the top item on the Zionist "agenda" is curbing the power of Saddam Hussein.
On a more serious note, it occurs to me that some of these disputes about how powerful some lobby is or isn't in DC get a little hard to resolve because the perception of power is, itself, an important source of power which creates a lot of ambiguity as to what it even means to ask how powerful a group "really" is.
Steve Benen echoes my thoughts on why religious right leaders are likely to mount a third party bid if Rudy Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee. Kevin Drum says:
This sounds right to me, though there's a good counterargument: judges. Dobson might be pissed, but what he really cares about is judicial appointments, and he knows that even Giuliani will appoint judges that he likes. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, by contrast, certainly won't. So in the end, even if Rudy gets the GOP nomination, he'll swallow hard and endorse him.
It's important to distinguish between two cases here. One is that Giuliani is going to be looking for judges who'll uphold unlimited executive power, unrestrained corporate greed, and be unsympathetic to criminal defendants and that judges who hold their views are, statistically speaking, likely to issue more Dobson-friendly rulings on sex-and-death issues than are Clinton or Obama judges. I think that's clearly true, but key religious right leaders can't afford to be persuaded by it. A power broker needs to be seen to have power, and vague promises to appoint strict constructionists coming from a pro-choice, pro-gay, twice divorces lapsed catholic don't seem to me to demonstrate any particular clout on the part of religious right leaders.
Now Rudy has flirted with something more drastic, namely an explicit promise to only appoint justices who'll vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. Rudy could point out that pro-lifers have never gotten a promise like that from their pro-life GOP nominees, and could note that Ronald Reagan (Kennedy, O'Connor), George H.W. Bush (Souter), and George W. Bush (Harriet Miers) have all tried to put unreliable votes on the bench.
That, it seems to me, would have to be good enough for Dobson or anyone else. Rudy would be blatantly kowtowing, all the other candidates would need to follow suit, and the pro-life movement would have demonstrated its clout. That would create problems for Giuliani in a general election, but nothing like the nightmare of a third party challenge. So why doesn't Rudy do it? My guess is he's ornery and doesn't like the idea of kowtowing. But from the perspective of a Dobson, that's precisely the problem.
Business groups and lobbyists taking more of an interest in the Virginia Democratic Party. If you're a liberal, you can't help but be excited when the smart money switches to less conservative politicians. On the other hand, as we saw when Democrats decided to defend the rights of hedge fund managers to preferential tax treatment the depressing reality is that this sort of campaign cash switcheroo seems to work pretty well. Democrats aren't nearly as willing to sell out to wealthy interests as the GOP is, but they're pretty willing.
Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore both thought John McCain was the winner of last night's debate. I'm not sure that's true and given that Kudlow and Moore are both crazy people, I'm not sure I should take their judgment seriously. On the other hand, the purpose of Republican primary debates is to make yourself look good to an audience of crazy people, so maybe I should take Kudlow and Moore very seriously.
At any rate, in the event that a McCain surge does materialize, the antidote is Matt Welch's new book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, a comprehensive dissection of the man who for a long time held the title of America's most overrated politician and who still in many circles is viewed as something of a sympathetic, tragic figure.
In the book, Matt builds upon some earlier writing of his on McCain through the revolutionary (given the subject matter) method of actually examining McCain record and views than the more traditional approach of wishful thinking and ideological projection. In essence, it's the story of a man who succeeded in turning his own life around through embracing hard-line American nationalism and then decided to adopt this as a governing philosophy before becoming a media darling in a way that left him simultaneously overexposed and underanalyzed.
Andrew Sullivan's interested in the question of Sandy Berger's role in the Clinton campaign and flags this bit from USA Today:
"He has no official role in my campaign. He's been a friend for more than 30 years. But he doesn't have any official role," Clinton said.
But he's an unofficial adviser, Susan asked?
"I have thousands of unofficial advisers," said Clinton, "and, you know, I appreciate all of that. But he has no official role in my campaign."
I have no idea whether or not this exhausts Berger's informal role as part of Team Clinton, but what you hear if you talk to people in left-of-center national security circles in Washington is that one of Berger's informal responsibilities is basically to get in touch with former Clinton administration foreign policy hands and warn them in no uncertain terms that if they back Barack Obama, Clinton will win anyway and those who supported her rivals will pay the price. My sense is that everyone, probably including Berger himself, understands that he can't actually be given a job in a Clinton administration one way or another.
A reader emails this International Herald Tribune account of the flipside of the bizarre scenario by which American Jewish groups found themselves denying that there was any Armenian Genocide during World War One. The point is to refocus the lines of causation back on the Turkish government which took it upon itself to lean very heavily on diaspora groups and, in effect, blackmail them with the idea that Israel would be made to bare the consequences of their failure to step into line.
Daniel Gross makes the case against DIYorchards. Ezra Klein agrees. Kay Steiger, who went on the apple-picking trip Sara (pictured above, at the orchard) organized last weekend and that I attended under the time-honored principle "go apple-picking when your girlfriend tells you to," retorts that apple picking's not inefficient, it's "a form of entertainment." This would be a lot more convincing were agricultural labor entertaining. In reality, these are the jobs Americans won't do.
At any rate, it seems to me that there's a clear gender divide on this issue. Basically, ever since the era of Adam and Eve woman has sought to ensnare man in her apple-related ventures, while man has endeavored to uphold the division of labor and buy his apples at the store. And this, ultimately, is what Gross leaves out of the picture: apple-picking isn't just inefficient, it's actually evil.
The Republican Party hasn't really had a competitive race for the nomination since 1980 or so, so everyone's a bit rusty on how this works. Marc Ambinder explains the process and potential sources of strength for the different candidates. Helping Fred Thompson is the "bonus delegates" rule:
Thanks to a quirk in the Republican delegate allocation schema, conservative, Republican candidates have an edge. The Republican National Committee awards bonus delegates to states based on their performance in general elections. States that always vote Republican get additional delegates; states like New York that vote Democratic do not. Bonus delegates account for about 20 of the total number.
As a result, southern states where Thompson is likely to be strong are overrepresented. New York has only 30 percent more delegates than Georgia, despite the former's much larger population. The flipside, however, is that Team Giuliani has persuaded most of the states he thinks he can win to adopt winner-take-all delegate allocation rules "So if the race is down to two candidates -- Thompson and Giuliani -- Giuliani would come in second in the Southern states and receive enough delegates to maintain his advantage." The upshot of all of this is that I think you can imagine scenarios in which a minority viewpoint, like Giuliani's seamless culture of death and warmongering, could wind up securing a majority of delegates.
It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.
Have people not read this book? It's a good one. They even made it into a pretty good movie if you don't have the time to read the book.
Perhaps Barack Obama's efforts to goad others into spelling out what his campaign is trying to say are paying off. Here's Harold Meyerson:
Many of Hillary Clinton's foreign and military policy advisers, such as Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, supported the war at first, then criticized its conduct, then supported the surge. On the war, at least, they could as easily be providing advice to John McCain. The same cannot be said of the majority of foreign and military policy mavens aligned with her two chief rivals.
Recently, Clinton herself resurrected old doubts about her foreign policy judgment that she had managed to tamp down over the past half-year by favoring a timeline for the withdrawal of most U.S. forces. In voting for the Lieberman-Kyl legislation that deemed Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, she opened the door for Bush and Vice President Cheney to charge into Iran, or its airspace, with what they would claim to be congressional permission.
When Hillary voted to let W. use force in Iraq, she didn’t even read the intelligence estimate. She wasn’t trying to do the right thing. She was trying to do the opportunistic thing. She felt she could not run for president, as a woman, if she played the peacenik.
By throwing in with Joe Lieberman and the conservative hawks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard issue, she once more overcompensated in a cynical way. She’d like to paint Obama as the weak reed who wants to cozy up to dictators, while she’s the one who will play tough. It was odd, given her success in the debates conveying the sense that she is the manliest candidate among the Democrats, that she felt the need to man-up on Iran.
In some ways, it's the point Dowd raises here -- about political strategy -- that worries me the most. I don't think it's really going to be possible for Democrats to address the big problems facing American foreign policy unless they're willing to try to break out of the long post-9/11 defensive crouch they've been in for years. John Edwards, as has often been the case, led the way here with a bold move to repudiate the "war on terror" conceptual scheme. Barack Obama, having opposed the war from the beginning, wound up mostly attracting to his banner the substantive advisors who were less invested in the crouch and doesn't seem to have those instincts personally, and wound up essentially forced out of the crouch for his position that we should be willing to conduct diplomatic talks without preconditions.
Clinton's team isn't all bad nor is her record, but she seems the least inclined to make a bold, self-confident big-picture challenge to the conservative conception of how we ought to conduct ourselves in the world.
I keep not blogging on Israel's strike of what we're supposed to believe were North Korean components for a Syrian nuclear weapons program, because the whole thing seemed murky and shrouded in mystery, but after today's story in The New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, it looks a lot less murky.
Basically, there's a "sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration about the significance of the Israeli intelligence that led to last month’s Israeli strike inside Syria" and it "has fractured along now-familiar fault lines, with Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative hawks in the administration portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and arguing that it should cause the United States to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea." As Eric Martin says it's a no-brainer to conclude here that the crazy-and-always-wrong faction of the administration is wrong here.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies and financial reporter Michael Brush, CEOs at top defense contractors have seen annual pay raises of 200 to 688 percent since 9/11. The average annual salary for a CEO at a top defense contracting firm is now more than $12 million.
On one level, this is easy to understand. Defense contractors must have made a ton of money since 9/11 thanks to the massive hikes in defense spending. On another level, though, it's baffling. Defense contractors are making more money because of the war in Iraq and the "war on terror" not because they have super-smart CEOs. Why does their pay need to be tripled or more? Meanwhile, if the political situation ever changes and military spending goes down, lots of workers in defense-related industries will get laid off, but the executives will doubtless evade the sting of the downside even as the cleaned up during the fat years.
Paul Schroeder's article on why we need to leave Iraq takes an annoying detrour through Habsburg policy in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century before returning to its extremely valuable point:
Why should retreat, indirection, and self-restraint help the U.S. concretely in the Middle East now? First, basic conditions favor it. It is clear that the potential dangers from the spread of war, ethnic-religious conflict, and terrorism beyond Iraq menace its neighbors and adjacent regions more directly and dangerously than they do the United States. While Iran now enjoys more security from and influence in Iraq than before, thanks to the American invasion, it would be seriously endangered by all-out civil war in Iraq, with the Shi’ites appealing to Iran for help and the Sunnis calling on other Sunni states and the U.S. to help stop them. Turkey has a similar problem with regard to the Kurds, shared to a degree by Iran and Syria. The immediate dangers of wider unrest and Islamic radicalism for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the U.A.E., Lebanon, and Jordan need no discussion. Even Israel and Egypt are menaced, along with the wider Arab and Muslim worlds and Europe. The very dangers that Bush and Co. claim require the U.S. to stay in Iraq could, if used wisely, pave the way for getting out and inducing others to help fight them.
Why should one suppose that they will? Because it is in their interest to do so and because, unlike Americans, they possess both the cultural links, ties, and skills to be effective at it and legitimate standing and authorization for intervening. A major reason that America’s appeals to other states in the region to do more to help fight terrorism and pacify Iraq have been ineffective is that the overwhelmingly unpopular American military presence in Iraq negates them. Any actions taken under U.S. control automatically become illegitimate in the eyes of the Arab street and many governments.
Right. As you can see from the fact that the United States invaded Iraq, it's certainly possible for countries to decide to act in an utterly atavistic way that's completely contrary to their national interests. Nevertheless, it's noteworthy that the more dire gloom-and-doom scenarios for an American departure from Iraq seem to assume that this is what will happen -- even though every single one of Iraq's neighbors has an interest in Iraq being stable and, failing that, has an interest in containing the chaos, we're supposed to believe that they would all act incredibly irresponsibly and disaster would strike. But while that could happen (anything's possible) there's no reason to regard it as likely.
For a lot of the proponents (and yes this includes Democrats, too) of perpetual military engagement in Iraq, I think the real risk isn't that there will be a regional conflagration but that there won't be one, and that this will damage their notions of America as the "indispensable nation." Meanwhile, neither Syria nor Iran can very well afford to play a constructive role in Iraq as long as US policy continues to be to try to use Iraq as a lever for toppling the regimes in Damascus and Iran.
On the anniversary of the vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, John Edwards releases a statement laying out some of what he thinks he's learned from his mistake and going after Hillary Clinton on Iraq and Iran on someone who hasn't learned the right things. Statement below the fold:
I'm with Beutler and DeLong that raising CAFE standards would be better than not raising CAFE standards because it would be better to have higher gas taxes, and then not having higher gas taxes either because it's too unpopular, but I don't think CAFE fans should go as far as Brian does in obscuring CAFE's limits as a policy option. It's true that driving habits aren't incredibly responsive to short-term changes in the price of gas, but they're not completely inelastic and their may well be more long-term sensitivity.
CAFE, meanwhile, relies entirely on the fuel efficiency lever as a means of reducing gasoline consumption even though the total amount of driving is clearly an important determinant of how much gas gets used.
Most of all, though, gasoline taxes, apart from their impact on carbon emissions (and emissions of other things), raise revenue which is useful in a number of ways. I feel like something green types tend to overlook when citing political feasibility as the reason for preferring certain kinds of regulatory measures to tax-oriented ones is that from the point of view of progressive politics more broadly the politically difficult task of raising taxes just can't be postponed forever. Raising the gasoline tax would be politically difficult. But so would instituting a VAT. And so would an across the board income tax rate increase. And so would everything else. Just getting the Bush tax cuts to expire will be a non-trivially difficult task, but implementing progressive priorities on health care, education, etc. will require even more revenue than their cancellation would raise.
It seems to me that there's a case to be made for going bigger -- for taking on a task that, while more politically difficult, also helps a broader coalition of people accomplish their goals.
(NB: needless to say, higher gas taxes and tighter CAFE standards aren't mutually exclusive policy options)
Like a lot of liberals, I find Mike Huckabee to be an intriguing figure. He seems, from his rhetoric, like an interesting politician; the kind of guy who would like to give the notion of "compassionate conservatism" a real try -- very traditionalist positions on "cultural" issues, combined with a dose of pragmatism on the economic front and some effort at showing a real concern for the least among us. A kind of right-populism, perhaps, but with less of the hard-edged anger and racial demagoguery that suggests. The trouble is that, as Ed Kilgore points out, Huckabee doesn't really bring the beef. He "likes to talk about economic inequality" but his only proposal in this area is "a highly regressive national sales tax."
Similarly, during the debate he got a question about unions and delivered a reply about how a revival of interest in unionism was a natural response to runaway inequality. But he didn't really say whether or not he thought that was a good thing and people should join unions. He noted that Arkansas is a right to work state, and appeared to endorse hard-right anti-union orthodoxy to the effect that it would be good to take such policies nationwide. Certainly he didn't come out in favor of pro-unionization measures like EFCA.
I'd naively assumed that Paul Krugman's book must not be available yet, since I haven't even gotten a free copy yet. Instead, it seems that his publisher arrogantly assumes that sales will do well even if I just ignore it. Or, perhaps, that I won't ignore it even if they don't send me a free copy. Indeed, following this fairly positive review from the ideologically unsympathetic Tyler Cowen, I think I may need to buy a copy for myself. Meantime, Cowen ends with a question:
Is Paul Krugman willing to come out and simply pronounce: "Margaret Thatcher turned the UK around and for the better"? If so, how does this square with his broader narrative? And if not, why not?
With the proviso that I don't know much about UK economic history, it's clearly the case that despite the personal and ideological linkages between Thatcher and Reagan they were operating from very different baselines. It can easily both be the case that the UK in the late 1970s was too far left on the main issues being debated at that time and that the United States in the late 2000s is too far right on the main issues being debated at the moment. After all, even after Thatcher Britain has a health care system that's so statist virtually nobody on the American left will defend it.
Since I don't like Radiohead very much, I think we can pretty safely say that without the "name your own price" gimmick I wouldn't have bought In Rainbows. But given the gimmick I did buy it and I . . . still think they're "okay" at best. Which would be fine, except they have this legion of super-devoted fans who sometimes make me want to stake out bolder "Radiohead Sucks!" kind of claims. But that would be wrong, it's not Radiohead's fault that Radiohead's fan-base is too rabid, and we all owe them a debt for expanding the frontiers of digital music distribution.
"It is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn't doing. We're getting all kinds of mixed messages," Clinton said. "I don't think we'll know the truth until we have a new president. I think [until] you can get in there and actually bore into what's been going on, you're not going to know."
Well I think I’ve been very clear about that too, we should not conduct or condone torture and it is not clear yet exactly what this administration is or isn’t doing, we’re getting all kinds of mixed messages. I don’t think we’ll know the truth until we have a new President. I think once you can get in there and actually bore into what’s been going on, you’re not going to know. I was very touched by the story you guys had on the front page the other day about the WWII interrogators. I mean it's not the same situation but it was a very clear rejection of what we think we know about what is going on right now but I want to know everything, and so I think we have to draw a bright line and say ‘No torture – abide by the Geneva conventions, abide by the laws we have passed,' and then try to make sure we implement that.
As Mark Kleiman says, this doesn't really wash and seems to indicate that she accepts the view that, for example, waterboarding which we definitely do know is happening maybe doesn't count as torture.
At any rate, Clinton has long distinguished herself as unusually friendly to executive power for an opposition party legislator, so there's little reason to believe that if she becomes president she'll be eagerly rolling the boundaries back from where Bush pushed them. I wonder if conservatives will be happy about the idea of HRC-administered torture, on the grounds that they just really love torture, or, maybe, once it's being done by a politician they don't admire they'll start to see that there's a problem here.
I can tell I'm out of touch with mainstream sentiments, because this ad against the Law of the Sea Treaty makes it seem like a good idea to me:
I mean, what's not to like? -- you've got the UN, Jimmy Carter, higher taxes, and making Ronald Reagan's ghost mad. I like all of those things. Unfortunately, I don't have any other information about the Treaty, so my support will need to remain somewhat provisional.
One of the commenters to an idiotic Winds of Change post about me raises a good question about the disaster of Iraq:
If it was all so foreseeable, why didn't Yglesias foresee it? The truth is, he was pro-war when that was fashionable, and now he's antiwar when that is fashionable.
I plead not guilty to the charge of fashionability since you'll see I turned against the war before it was fashionable to do so. I could give a long answer detailing my naiveté about the war, but the truth of the matter is that in an irresponsible-but-probably-typical manner I just took my cues from the fact that almost all of the leading Democrats seemed to be backing Bush on this and so I did, too. It was only after the invasion that I bothered to read Charles Tripp's A History of Iraq and begin to get any information about Iraq that wasn't specifically designed as a polemic about the war.
Well, my heart sunk like a stone. Between reading that book and once I bothered to notice that the nuclear weapons intelligence was all wrong (I'm always baffled by how few hawks changed their mind after this, seeing as it was the centerpiece of the argument for war and all), it looked pretty clear that I'd gotten this wrong. In retrospect, I think it was all foreseeable enough, but like a lot of people I said a lot about this issue without knowing anything about it and it's hard to make forecasts from a perspective of total ignorance.
But that goes back to the point I was making about Weber (Justin Logan busts out a similar point against Michael Gerson) and Roger Cohen -- you need to take responsibility for these things. Glancing around and noticing that Saddam Hussein is bad and spreading liberty is good are easy. But there's nothing moral about carelessly supporting careless endeavors that, though draped in good intentions and lofty statements of purpose, in fact turn out to be bloody disasters.
After my husband quit his job earlier this year (to become a full-time stay-at-home dad), we had a choice. We could either buy health insurance from his former employer through a program called COBRA at a cost of more than $1,000 per month(!) or we could go it alone in Maryland’s individual market. Given our financial circumstances, that “choice” wasn’t much of a choice at all. We had to go on our own.
We discovered that the most generous plans in Maryland’s individual market cost $700 per month yet provide no more than $1,500 per year of prescription drug coverage–a drop in the bucket if someone in our family were to be diagnosed with a serious illness.
No doubt in some sense like the Frosts, the Malkins clearly aren't a "poor" family. Nevertheless, they can't afford any meaningful insurance against health care risk on the individual market. And yet, many people -- including people who aren't poor -- don't necessarily have jobs that provide health insurance. Or maybe they do have jobs that provide health insurance but might like to leave them in order to become successful right-wing pundits or stay-at-home dads or start small businesses but in many cases they can't do that. This is especially true if you've had health problems in the past, in which case you daren't go without insurance for even the smallest amount of time lest you become uninsurable in the future. And if you do have good insurance and become sick, your insurance company will then send its minions to work as hard as they possibly can -- deploying every bit of energy and ingenuity the private sector can muster -- to find a reason to deny your claim.
At long last, a dating site designed for men who don't understand the concept of a male:female ratio -- Trekpassions.com:
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Then you can get married here. That said, I'm looking forward to the movie next year so maybe I have no right to laugh.
Photo by Flickr user Greg O'Connell used under a Creative Commons license
The lead item in today's CongressDaily (subscribers only, sorry) is "Republicans Blast Democrats For Not Negotiating Further On SCHIP Legislation." Basically what we're seeing here is exactly how deeply ingrained the Republican Party's loathing of cute children is. Representative Deborah Pryce (R-OH) is the ringleader of a group of 45 House Republicans sufficiently vulnerable to electoral defeat, that they decided to vote to spend some money to help sick kids get medical care. The George W. Bush, driven by the same small government principles that have led him to lavish hundreds of billions of dollars on failed wars and tens of billions more on corporate subsidies, decided to veto the plan.
Pryce and her colleagues then decided to turn around and blame not George W. Bush who vetoed the bill and not the congressional Republicans who prevented the bill's bipartisan supporters from overriding the veto but instead . . . House Democratic leaders for their unwillingness to water the plan down further. Thus Pryce et. al. get to signal to their child-hating paymasters that, despite their vote, they have big businesses back and are doing the very most they can within the confines of objective political constraints to make sure that working and middle class families get no help with their health care. Pryce wants them to realize that she isn't a less fanatic supporter of this child-bankrupting agenda. If anything, she's working harder on behalf of America's tobacco companies and insurance firms since she's out there running real risks on their behalf.
Photo by Flickr user Betsssssy used under a Creative Commons license
The New America Foundation, the International Crisis Group, and the U.S./Middle East Project, Inc. got an impressive group of bipartisan "wise men" (some of whom are women) together to issue this letter on the upcoming Middle East peace conference in Annapolis. They make a variety of points about what needs to be done for the conference to succeed, and also try to underline the very high costs of failure.
Unfortunately, my sense, much like this account from the Russian ambassador, is that almost nothing has been done on the US side to seriously prepare for this. In this country, at least, no real groundwork has been prepared. Indeed, nobody's quite sure what the Bush administration is even hoping to achieve here. One holds out hope that the preparations and agenda are happening, but in some kind of double super-secret lockdown that nobody I talk to can penetrate, but it seems unlikely.
We know that people with modest incomes are having a harder time paying their medical bills, because insurance is getting so pricey and--increasingly--the benefits available leave them exposed to high out-of-pocket expenses. We also know this is particularly true of people who can't get coverage through large employers--a class of people that is expanding as the business community slowly extricates itself from the mess of providing workers with insurance.
In other words, it's not just the most destitute Americans who need assistance getting health insurance. It's people who have jobs, make a decent living, and own their homes. And when medical crisis hits, they're forced to take drastic steps--like selling their homes, depleting life savings, declaring bankruptcy, or simply going without the care they and their loved ones need. Unless, of course, the government provides them with insurance at affordable rates.
And, of course, that this is a problem afflicting the non-destitute just is the case for health care reform. The market is structurally screwed up in a way that has nothing in particular to do with income. It's true, of course, that if you're rich enough you can spend your way around the system's flaws, but even non-poor people often can't afford insurance, and even people who can afford insurance and have it still find dealing with the system to be hellish.
Mark Goldberg has some further background and information on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Meanwhile, Cato's Chris Preble points to a debate between Doug Bandow (last seen in a cash-for-comment scandal) and Raj Purohit from Citizens for Global Solutions over at the Partnership for a Secure America.
Frank Gaffney's also against this treaty, so I think you could say this treaty has all the right enemies. Basically, internationalists and establishmenty business types seem to be for it, and really paranoid UN-haters are against it.
Photo by me; available under a Creative Commons license
Dean Baker on intellectual property policy is always worth reading. My guess is that his proposals would go too far, but this is a discussion where the boundaries of the possible need to be made much, much, much wider.
Michelle Malkin said that liberals who disagree with her about SCHIP "wouldn't know a good-faith argument if it bit them in the lip." So Ezra Klein said he'd be willing to step up and argue the SCHIP policy merits with Malkin. So she said: "'Debate' Ezra Klein? What a perverse distraction and a laughable waste of time that would be. And that's what they really want, isn't it? To distract and waste time so they can foist their agenda on the country unimpeded." Which is a long-winded set-up for Jon Chait's joke:
Yes, that was the plan. And now that she's on to it, I might as well confess our scheme: Dispatch Klein to tie up Malkin for an hour or so, and while she's distracted, push universal health insurance through Congress. Indeed, we've used similar tactics in the past, such as 1993, when we passed the Clinton tax hike after luring Rush Limbaugh to an all-you-can-eat buffet for much of the afternoon. Next time we'll have to be even smarter.
It's a little-known fact, but the entire New Deal was passed into law because the conservative coalition in congress was distracted by Will Rogers cracking a bunch of jokes.
It doesn't speak directly to the UNCLOS issue but the September 2003 issue of The Atlantic contained a William Langewiesche article called "Anarchy at Sea" that, for some reason or other, just doesn't exist on the magazine's website. Not for subscribers, not for employees, not for anyone. But the whole text is available here.
This is an uncomfortable thing for Jewish people to think about, but isn't that actually a very banal baseline belief of all Christians and Muslims everywhere? Jews don't evangelize like this, and I don't think Hindus do either, but our world's great crusading faiths certainly do and converting everyone is . . . the whole point! This is one reason -- probably the reason -- that whatever the electoral politics of the matter, it's probably not a great idea to encourage politicians to "talk about faith" more. For America to work as an enterprise you need people with deeply held but mutually inconsistent religious beliefs to all work and live together peacefully. Rubbing everyone's noses in the precise implications of other people's beliefs (Christians think Jews shouldn't exist, Jews think Christians are worshipping a false messiah, Protestants think Catholics worship idols, etc.) isn't really helpful.
Wizards center Etan Thomas is undergoing heart surgery today and will miss the season. One's heart goes out to one of the NBA's real good guys, but as a Wizards fan I also hope this will help Eddie Jordan get over his irrational dislike of Brendan Haywood.
As everyone knows, the Wizards are very good offensively on very bad on defense. To improve as a team, the best thing to do is to pick the low-hanging fruit and try to get the defense up to "below average" rather than "incredibly awful." And the easiest way to do that is to give Haywood more minutes. As you can see from the on court / off court numbers, the team is very slightly better on offense with Haywood in but substantially better on defense. Big Brendan's no great defender, but that's precisely the point -- the team's in a position where merely having an average interior defensive presence on the floor makes a big difference.
No doubt the need to start offering bonuses of up to $35,000 to retain young officers merely reflects the booming economy in the civilian sector. All those lieutenants are passing up their chance of promotion to become hedge fund managers or real estate speculators. Or something:
Army officials said that lengthy and repeated war-zone tours -- the top reason younger officers leave the service -- plus the need for thousands of new officers as the Army moves forward with expansion plans have contributed to a projected shortfall of about 3,000 captains and majors for every year through 2013.
Now, obviously, the "lengthy and repeated war-zone tours" are a hardship, but not more of a hardship than what was endured during the world wars or the Civil War or what have you. What you're seeing with these shortfalls, however, is officers responding to the fact that unlike in those previous grand conflicts the political class in the United States clearly doesn't actually regard the war in Iraq as a key battlefield in an existential conflict for the ScaryIslamoBoogieFascists. There's no mobilization on the home front that remotely suggests that George W. Bush or Michael O'Hanlon or anyone else really sees this mission as worth giving up anything for. So officers are responding in the same way.
And, of course, they're right -- the more soberminded advocates of endless war don't really think we can accomplish much of anything in Iraq, they basically just want us to hang on indefinitely and vaguely hope for the best. Which seems like an okay option, I suppose, if you're not personally supposed to be doing the hanging on and the vaguely hoping. But it's easy to see why someone might not want to volunteer for that mission.
Looks like George W. Bush was against the Armenian genocide before he became a denialist. It's too bad this sensitivity to Turkish sentiments wasn't on display back when Paul Wolfowitz was running around urging the Turkish military to overrule the parliament and insist that Turkey back the invasion of Iraq.
Andrew notes that Randall Terry of "Operation Rescue" fame says that "we must deny him the White House at all costs - even if it means Hillary becomes President." His analysis tracks mine:
As President Giuliani would be the de-facto head of the GOP; he would systematically destroy the political power of the pro-life movement within the GOP; he would pressure the party to take the pro-life plank out of the party platform; he would declare the "abortion issue" is divisive, and should not be part of federal races; he would make the GOP the mirror image of the DNC regarding child-killing, thus insuring that there is no pro-life party.
This seems about right to me. Giuliani's fine if you're just someone who deems abortion vaguely icky and wants it a bit more restricted, since judges he appoints will probably be fairly unfriendly to reproductive rights, but if you want a serious nationwide abortion ban you can't let the pro-life movement's control over the GOP slip away.
I, too, saw this on The Daily Show but it took Tim Lee to make me realize the blog post potential. You'll see below the satellite image of Dick Cheney's house that's available on Google Maps:
As you can see, he's used his powers of office to mandate that the photo be blurred precisely where he lives. Tim snarks: "He's obviously very concerned about protecting his home from prying eyes. I'm sure he's equally zealous in his defense of the privacy rights of ordinary Americans." And there's the rub. Clearly, the sort of all-pervasive surveillance Bush and Cheney favor seems a lot more appealing when you have the kind of power that's on display here. Those of us lacking such clout may have reason to worry.
Incidentally, service at the Social Security Administration office at 2100 M Street was very prompt. I'd sort of been expecting an interminable wait during which I could make a serious dent in The Conscience of a Liberal but my number got called almost as soon as I was finished filling out the brief form. The employees working at the office were polite and helpful. Bureaucracy works!
As further background for my vague notions about Margaret Thatcher yesterday, Alex Massie chimes in with a bit more on the state of things in pre-Thatcher Britain which were, as you'll see, quite a bit different than in the US.
There was also a difference in the employee-employer relationship, at least as I observed it growing up in a working class family (my dad worked at a parts counter at a tractor store at that time). There seemed to be an understanding that workers had families to raise. Somehow, my parents - a worker at a parts counter and a peach factory worker - owned a house in a decent neighborhood and while it was tough some months, we had health care through my dad's job and most of the middle class trappings (even if we did get a color TV much later than the neighbors). He didn't work at a great big place or anything, probably ten to twenty employees total, but they still had health care, etc. It's hard to imagine two workers my parents age (in their later 20s) working at those jobs and being able to afford those things today.
Now like all liberals these days, I agree with the broad spirit of this message. From 1947 to 1973 or so, economic gains were broadly distributed. During the past 25 years, however, economic gains have gone disproportionately to a small elite. We should change that. Etc. Wages rates and social welfare aside, however, it's worth thinking a bit about the "cost" side of the economics of yore. I learned recently, for example, that "The Levitt ranch measured 32' by 25' and came in five different models," i.e., the house was only 800 square feet, and it would actually be illegal to build an apartment that small in my neighborhood. Meanwhile, part of a neighborhood being "decent" means that it's safe from crime, and despite the crime drop of the 1990s, the violent crime index of 2005 was more than twice as high as in 1965.
In short, there are factors beyond wages that are conspiring to make middle class homeownership more difficult than before.
Josh Marshall has some apposite remarks of the announcement that Rudy Giuliani has signed Michael Rubin on as an advisor. I must say, though, that I think remarks like "You really might as well put Ahmed Chalabi as your top Mideast or Iran advisor" do a disservice to Chalabi. After all, even though at the end of the day Chalabi didn't succeed in getting the United States to install him as President for Life of Iraq, he did come damn close.
If you look at where Chalabi was in, say, 1993 and where he wound up in 2003, you've got to admit that you're looking at a shrewd and effective operator. His American allies -- guys like Rubin, in short -- just look like dupes or maniacs or whatever.
Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change share Nobel Peace Prize honors for their work in raising the salience of climate change as an issue. This seems a bit like a move designed to ensure that American conservatives bury themselves even deeper into denialist holes, but congratulations to Gore anyway.
The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.
The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000. [. . .]
The IRS data go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s. [. . .]
One study by University of Chicago academics Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh concludes that in 2004 there were more than twice as many such Wall Street professionals in the top 0.5% of all earners as there are executives from nonfinancial companies.
Mr. Rauh said "it's hard to escape the notion" that the rising share of income going to the very richest is, in part, "a Wall Street, financial industry-based story." The study shows that the highest-earning hedge-fund manager earned double in 2005 what the top earner made in 2003, and top 25 hedge-fund managers earned more in 2004 than the chief executives of all the companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, combined. It also shows profits per equity partner at the top 100 law firms doubling between 1994 and 2004, to over $1 million in 2004 dollars.
Thank God congress stepped in to save that tax break for hedge fund managers. In a little sidebar, the article notes that "The data pose a potential challenge for President Bush and the Republican presidential field" but I actually think it's striking how little Democratic Party politicians talk about inequality.
Related to the inequality post below, one thing that bugs me about the way liberals often approach these issues is a tendency to get bogged down into picayune controversies about exactly why inequality has exploded. Was it the skill-biased technological change? Were CEOs underpaid in the past? Can we blame globalization? In truth, while these are all interesting questions, in terms of politics and policy they take a back seat to debates over remedies which often lack a tight relationship to the debates over causes.
Oftentimes, though, liberals act as if the thing that needs to be done is to prove somehow that inequality has exploded because people are in some sense "cheating" -- so you get these long stories about corporate governance and corrupt compensation committees, etc. The problem here, though, is that even if this is true, it could still also be true that the cure -- policy interventions into the operation of the market -- would be worse than the disease. And, conversely, if you could prove that the rise in inequality was all above board -- really was driven entirely by globalization and technological change -- nothing about that causal analysis would debunk the idea that we ought to make our tax system more progressive.
The relevant debate isn't about how we got here, it's about what would happen if we tried to change things. Some people, of course, think changing things would be immoral. Indeed, there are some people I know who adhere to the bizarre view that one source of injustice in the contemporary United States is that our richest citizens aren't rich enough. But beyond those people, you have a lot of people who take the view that raising taxes would have dire economic consequences, whereas lowering them would have large benefits. That's the only debate that really matters in this regard. If the costs to the non-rich of higher taxes on the rich would be small (as I believe), then higher taxes on the rich to provide more benefits to the non-rich makes sense irrespective of why inequality has grown so much whereas if the costs would be high then it doesn't make sense -- again, completely apart from the causal issue.
Jack Hitt had an excellent article in the previous issue of Rolling Stone about the farce and the fraud of national missile defense. Robert Farley, commenting on the piece, notes the apparent lack of a real strategic rationale for this system-that-doesn't-work:
The utility of a missile defense system has to be evaluated based on its value added over a basic deterrent posture. At least one reason (and not the only reason) that nobody launches missiles at us now is that we would respond by destroying the offending state. The missile defense assumes that deterrence will fail, but its advocates offer no compelling reason for why it would fail; apart from indefensible claims about the suicidal tendencies of the North Korean or Iranian leadership, or very tendentious arguments about terrorists acquiring ICBMs (seriously, if Al Qaeda had a nuke, why would they bother to put it on an ICBM?), there's just not much there. The most sensible case is the "hostage" argument; North Korea might invade the South, then attempt to deter US intervention by aiming a nuke at the West Coast. It's the best argument they have, but it doesn't amount to much; it still requires the North Korean (or Iranian, or whomever) leadership to be suicidal. But even if the argument were compelling, the missile defense would have to be 100% effective; what President would act if she seriously believed that there was a 10% chance an American city would be destroyed?
Unfortunately, I think Farley's thinking on this may lack imagination. Nobody will quite articulate it in this manner, but the purpose of NMD, it seems to me, is to facilitate American first strikes -- either nuclear or conventional depending on the adversary. The basic logic of the right's hegemonist worldview is that the United States needs to maintain the ability to effectuate "regime change" anytime and anywhere. Only NMD can really make that possible.
I think there's pretty good reason to believe that Mitt Romney's conduct of foreign policy would be better than Rudy Giuliani's, which is precisely what makes the kind of rank ignorance on display here so frightening:
The idea that we should be laying awake at night afraid that a group of at most several thousand people who control almost no territory or valuable military equipment might establish a universal caliphate or "collapse freedom loving nations like us" is ridiculous. Al-Qaeda's goals are absurd, and obviously so, and one ought to say so confidently. The fact that a relatively small group of people with lunatic goals can nevertheless knock down giant office buildings and murder a huge number of people is, indeed, something to be afraid of but not nearly on the grand geopolitical level Romney is postulating here.
On top of that what does this have to do with Iran?
One can always quibble with a conservative columnist, but the Good Brooks is out in force today:
When Hamilton was alive, big landowners stifled competition and economic dynamism. Hamilton created national capital markets to smash local oligarchies. When Lincoln was rising, vast distances retarded trade. The Whigs, and later Republicans, championed internal improvements to build national markets. Today, the global information economy makes it hard for people without human capital to prosper and participate.
There are potential Republican responses to this. But right now the message is: Proposals? We don’t need no stinkin’ proposals!
In a really boring structural way, I'd say that the problem here is caused by growing inequality. The Whig-Republican tradition has always been identified with the interests of the owners and managers of large business enterprises. During relatively egalitarian periods, however, the interests of the business elite and of the middle class don't objectively diverge all that much, so it's easy to devise a pro-business agenda that's still relevant to the concerns of a broad mass of people. When the elite pulls away, however, this becomes much harder to do. The Republicans, after all, do all have economic plans -- it's just that their plans all involve changes to the tax code whose benefits would overwhelmingly accrue to a tiny minority of the population.
Meanwhile, tax cut mania renders the brand of Hamiltonian governance that Brooks hankers for impossible by the simple fact that there's no money available. In principle, something like the Shellenberger/Nordhaus view of climate change would be a good initiative for a Hamiltonian political party. But it would cost a ton of money. So a party whose DNA is now 40 percent Muslim-killing and 45 percent tax-cutting just can't do it.
I was wandering around the National Mall earlier today, which is a somewhat unusual experience for your typical actual resident of DC, and it's really just an incredibly ill-used public space in the middle of a big city. It reminded me of my colleague Josh Green's old-but-still-totally-true Washington Monthly article calling for National Mall reform.
Marc Ambinder asks the DC question du jour, namely now that he's got a nobel prize, who's Al Gore going to endorse in the Democratic primary:
Two candidates -- John Edwards and Barack Obama -- are working the ref. Gore has met privately with both men, and the two were the first to e-mail congratulatory statements upon the news of Gore's Nobel dropping. (Edwards's campaign hit the trigger at 5:17 a.m.)
Perhaps the bigger question, though, is how much would it really matter. John Edwards' campaign is, at this point, severely hampered by financial constraints and by a perception that he's already lost. Gore can't help Edwards on the former item, since he's already accepted public financing, and I'm not sure his say-so would convince anyone on the latter point. Because unions are well known for not wanting to endorse candidates they feel are doomed, more union endorsements would have been very helpful to Edwards because they would have both helped him directly and bolstered perceptions that he's in the game. I don't think Gore can do that.
Obama has a different problem, namely that a majority of Democrats -- and especially the more economically and educationally downscale ones -- think Hillary Clinton's pretty awesome. Gore saying Obama's awesome, too, isn't really going to change things. Now what really might change things would be if Gore were to endorse Obama and use his standing as a former Clinton administration insider to mount a serious indictment of Hillary's key credential -- her experience in that office. But that assumes that there's some reasonable indictment to make of her tenure as First Lady that we haven't already heard and that Gore would be interested in doing something like that. Neither of those strike me as especially plausible, so under the circumstances I'm hard-pressed to see what kind of difference a Gore endorsement would make.
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We have a longstanding debate in my house on the subject of bears. Specifically, which bear is the cutest. I stand by the panda bear. Kriston Capps is a supporter of the koala bear, which isn't even a bear. Spackerman, however, is a polar bear loyalist and makes a strong case that this video supports his view. For some reason, he's not posting it to TPM Muckraker (surely there's an Alaska scandal here somewhere) but my voracious appetite for content will lead me to post just about anything.
From my far-flung network of people who send me emails: "if you need proof that there's a liberal bias, just note that they have a Nobel Peace Prize, but there is no Nobel War Prize. Outrageous."
When gas prices go up, but not way up, people keep driving. It has, as we've seen, a marginal impact. If, on the other hand, you double CAFE standards, which I think most Democrats would like to see happen, then ceteris paribus you something like halve auto emissions. What actually happens is more complicated, but one it's certainly true that you undo some of the incentives people had to drive less to save money. As we've seen, though, unless the price of gas is really very high, those incentives aren't all that effetive.
I think there's a double-standard here that you see all-too-frequently. It's true, of course, that increases in gasoline prices don't have much short term impact on fuel consumption. That's because the main things one could do to reduce one's fuel consumption are things like "buy a more fuel efficient car" or "live someplace else" that are hard to alter. But in the short-term, doubling CAFE standards doesn't "something like halve auto emissions." Instead it does . . . almost nothing. The new regulations don't make the cars already on the road any more fuel efficient, and they don't create incentives for people to buy new cars.
That's not to say it's a bad policy -- the relevant horizon is the long run. But then that's the standard against which taxes should be judged as well. Under either scenario, you can make the desired long-run outcome occur sooner by offering people financial incentives to trade in older, less efficient cars for newer, more efficient ones. That, though, requires revenue. And a gas tax provides revenue, which CAFE doesn't.
Inequality day continues with a link to Larry Mishel and Richard Rothstein noting that even wages for people with college degrees are lagging way behind average productivity growth. Consequently, while there's no doubt that some good would come from having a higher proportion of the population graduate from college and acquire more skills, there's no reason to think this would seriously impact the inequality situation.
Today in child-hating comes, via Garance, this graphic on the subject of S-CHIP and the Republican Party's merciless war against sick children. Some readers have objected to the shrill nature of my posts on this subject, insisting that George W. Bush and his allies among congressional Republicans aren't, in fact, motivated by a desire to see sick children suffer. And, of course, that's technical true. The real point is that Bush and the GOP want to make sure that sick people in general don't get public sector health care and remain, instead, at the mercies of insurance companies or else are just left to their own devices. The sick kids are, basically, just innocent bystanders -- hostages to Bush's fealty to private health insurance.
Via Greg Djerejian, Robin Wright reports that "More than two dozen Iranian American and human rights groups have launched an appeal to Congress to reduce or eliminate new financial support of up to $75 million aimed at promoting democracy inside Iran." Predictably, the Bush administration's efforts to co-opt the Iranian democracy movement and fold it into the American right's bizarre geopolitical schemes has tended to backfire and displease actual Iranians and human rights advocates.
I'm glad to see a show that tries to dramatize the decadent weirdness of the Upper East Side private school world (and they even added in a doesn't-fit-in character with an aging hipster dad), but where have all the Jews gone? The New York City elite hasn't been that kind of WASP preserve for decades. . . .
Matthew Duss makes a strong case that we should be even more frightened by Daniel Pipes' association with Rudy Giuliani than we are by Norm Podhoretz or Michael Rubin. Duss notes, for example, that Pipes appears to regard the Israel-Egypt peace agreement that's held up for over a quarter century now as some kind of ruse on the part of the perfidious Arabs.
Will Wilkinson, like me a fallen philosophy student, asserts inter alia: "surely Matt understands that the inability of utilitarianism to acknowledge principled constraints on the way people may use one another is the main reason why most moral philosophers believe utilitarianism to be false." Can't talk philosophy without distinguishing between reasons and causes! It's always seemed to me that part of the sociology of the philosophical profession is that a lot of the causation tends to run in the other direction.
If you find yourself drawn to consequentialist views, you probably won't find yourself doing work in the field of normative ethics or political philosophy. Similarly, reductionist views about consciousness seem to imply, among other things, that one oughtn't spend a ton of time doing the philosophy of mind. The fields come to be dominated, numerically, by people who think there's interesting and important work to be done in the field.
(I should say, I wouldn't really accept the utilitarian label as such and I don't think anything about a desire to curb economic inequality hinges fundamentally on whether or not one accepts utilitarianism)
The liberal Boston Globe is good for at least one thing -- showing us how deeply entrenched America-hatred is among the nation's elite. It's even buried into elements of the military:
All of the approaches to interrogation supported by President Bush as "nontorture" (head slapping, freezing temperatures, water boarding) qualify as torture under international law (Bush backs interrogation of suspects," Page A2, Oct. 6).
During my last year in Vietnam, 1968 to '69, I was in charge of US Air Force interrogation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army prisoners. None of what Bush labels as legal was legal under the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is still a signatory. US Army, Marine, and Army of Republic of Vietnam personnel were constantly amazed at the interrogation results produced by the Air Force, and we were never allowed to touch prisoners, let alone head-slap them. Every human being has needs, and we learned those needs and exploited them. Neither Bush's bullying approach in the Mideast nor his unlawful interrogation program has worked. Sophisticated psychological methods are not being used by the Bush people, so the alleged "nontorture" bullying will continue.
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, but systematic torture is not a policy you find associated with polities experiencing crime-fighting success (the FBI's crackdown on the mafia, say) or war-fighting success (the US military during the second world war). Rather, when the ideological needs of the powers that be run in the direction of creating demand for false confessions (Stalin's Russia, witch hunts, the Spanish inquisition) out comes the torturing.
UPDATE: Also see here where Mitt Romney's campaign staff emails Marc Ambinder to brag that their man will be more cavalier in his disregard for Americans' civil liberties than will his GOP rivals.
Retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez is shrill:
The U.S. mission in Iraq is a "nightmare with no end in sight" because of political misjudgments after the fall of Saddam Hussein that continue today, a former chief of U.S.-led forces said Friday. [...]
Sanchez avoided singling out at any specific official. But he did criticize the State Department, the National Security Council, Congress and the senior military leadership during what appeared to be a broad indictment of White House policies and a lack of leadership to oppose them.
Obviously, there's something self-severing about this "blame everyone but the commanding general" approach to the situation. Still, it's very telling that a person in Sanchez's position has decided that the self-serving thing to do is to explain why the disaster is someone else's fault rather than sticking with the right-wing orthodoxy that it's actually all fine and everyone would know it if only the liberal media would report some of the good news.
I went to see the National Gallery's Edward Hopper exhibit yesterday, and it turns out they have some pretty cool multimedia features available on the website.
Other Hopper notes include the observation that he has a real knack for almost exclusively painting places I've been, and that despite earlier mixed feelings about the album, In Rainbows was an excellent soundtrack for walking around the gallery.
Did you know that "Absence of Income Tax is Key to State Competitiveness"? Well, so it is according to the headline of Cato's Daniel Mitchell writing up a report from the anti-tax Tax Foundation's report on which states are best for business.
Of course, according to this metric the best places to do business in the United States are . . . Wyoming and South Dakota. Bringing up the rear, by contrast, are prosperous states full of successful businesses -- California, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware.
Isn't it a bit ridiculous that Feist songs are being used in ads for both the iPod Nano and the LG Chocolate? Surely there's some other artist who can be used to sell gadgets.
Speaking of figuring out who to blame, Elizabeth Bumiller has an interesting piece in the Times where she went to Fort Leavenworth, where the Army does its thinking, and spoke to some mid-career officers:
Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation.
It seems to me that the idea that the military's senior leadership didn't do enough to warn against this looming fiasco is mistaken. The top brass' opposition to Bush's war plans was, after all, sufficiently well-known to prompt this scathing editorial from the liberal New Republic magazine slamming Bush for leading the country headlong into a disaster that would kill hundreds of thousands of people undue hesitancy to fire dissenting officers.
If TNR what was happening, then so did Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. But this debate capped off an era in which it was widely believed by a bipartisan set of powers-that-be that America's professional military officers were unduly hesitant to commit troops to battle. With the hindsight of years, of course, we can see that they hesitate precisely because they're the ones -- not magazine writers -- who wind up bearing the costs when things go south.
Via Mark Kleiman, Jon Rauch: "Some optimists say that in Army Gen. David Petraeus, Bush has finally found his Gen. Grant. That may or may not be true, but it is beside the point. The problem is that Petraeus has not yet found his President Lincoln."
After announcing a forthcoming cartoon show or something, Gilbert Arenas goes on to address the Halo 3 cheating allegations at considerable length on his blog. Tom Lee scrutinizes the charges and the defense and says: "it's true that this isn't as vile as the glitch-based cheating that's also rampant on XBL. So it may not be necessary to call David Stern just yet. Tell you what, Gilbert: bring home a playoff appearance this season and we'll forget the whole thing ever happened." I'll agree with that.
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Heads in the Sand
