Robert Farley says that the more we understand about Israel's recent air strikes in Syria, the more it looks like Bush and co. have succeeded in killing the Non-Proliferation Treaty:
The strike, and especially the apparent acquiesence of the United States in its planning and execution, means that the NPT is pretty much a dead letter. The treaty has always been open to charges of unfairness, since it legitimized the nuclear programs of a select number of states while delegitimizing similar programs in other states. This was a deal worth upholding, based on the principle that fewer nuclear states is better than more nuclear states. The deal also ensured that signatories would have the capability to engage in peaceful nuclear activity, some of which is indistiguishable from the opening steps of a long term weapons program. American complicity in this strike means that the deal is as good as dead, and has been replaced by a de facto arrangement in which states that the US approves of are allowed to have nuclear power, while states we dislike get airstrikes. I think this is a tragedy; the NPT has, in my view, worked to minimize the spread of nuclear weapons across the international system through a combination of moral suasion and legal inspection for the last forty years. It only works if the states involved agree that it's legitimate and of some benefit to all; as I said before, that concept is pretty much dead now. Combine this with the recent nuclear deal with India, and I'd have to say that the Bush administration's effort to kill a legal cornerstone of international stability have been remarkably successful.
The upshot of this is going to be more nuclear proliferation over the long run. Iraq was the neocons' big chance to show that the approach to WMD policy they prefer -- basically an ad hoc regime enforced by American military power and undergirded by nothing more principled than American whim -- was workable. To make it work, they needed to show that we could successful topple a regime we didn't like and replace it with one we liked better cheaply and easily enough to make it credible that we'd go and do it again. But it failed. The low-cost airstrike approach isn't going to succeed against any kind of determined adversary, and the more we act like a rogue superpower the harder it will be to get our way.
So the fact that the CIA is investigating their own IG is, um, just not ok. But as any IG will tell you, one time is an “incident” but three is a “pattern.” Recently, Democrats have released evidence demonstrating the Republican hackery of the State Department’s latest IG, and Administration officials have sought to stop Congressional efforts to strengthen the positions of IGs after several had been removed for <<gasp>> being critical of the Bush Administration. Clearly there should be an investigation into how investigators are being handled.
Once again we see the perils of being governed by a political movement that believes that instances of malgovernment demonstrate the correctness of their ideology. They believe, falsely, that it's not possible to make public sector institutions function properly and once given the keys to power have set about trying to make their theory true in practice.
Al Gore wins a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, so National Review's Iain Murphy decides that maybe Osama bin Laden should get a Nobel too since he "implicitly endorsed Gore's stance — and that of the Nobel committee — in his September rant from the cave." At first blush, this would appear to belong to the Hitler was a vegetarian line of argumentation, but even that's going to far. Hitler, after all, as best one can tell was sincere in his desire to reduce cruelty to animals. OBL as climate change activist seems about on a par with the idea that Josef Stalin was driven a principled opposition to European colonialism, and that in order to spite him we ought to encourage its perpetual continuation.
Which, come to think of it, actually was the view of National Review and the American conservative movement of the time. Brad DeLong celebrates this occasion by pointing me to National Review's contemporaneous attacks on Martin Luther King, Jr. who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Generally speaking, the list of past winners isn't one the American right can have much enthusiasm about.
There are a few choices that look fishy in retrospect. (Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho in 1973??? Arafat as co-winner with Peres and Rabin in 1994?) But the great majority stand up very well. Desmond Tutu, and then Mandela and deKlerk. Albert Schweitzer. George C. Marshall. Lech Walesa, Willy Brandt, and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi. The Norwegian Nobel Institute has earned the benefit of the doubt for choosing people whose achievements will stand up over time.
I don't really know what the state of play was in 1973, but even though the '94 Nobel looks bad in retrospect, it doesn't seem like that bad a mistake. Rabin was murdered, Peres lost the election, we had the bad faith of the Netanyahu years, and then Arafat walked away from the table in 2000 but that sequence of events wasn't inevitable; rather, Israel-Palestine in the 1990s brought forward several good candidates for the hypothetical war prize for scuttling a once-promising peace process.
There is one major area of disagreement between the administration and House Democrats where we think the administration has the better of the argument: the question of whether telecommunications companies that provided information to the government without court orders should be given retroactive immunity from being sued. House Democrats are understandably reluctant to grant that wholesale protection without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding, and the administration has balked at providing such information. But the telecommunications providers seem to us to have been acting as patriotic corporate citizens in a difficult and uncharted environment.
This is ludicrous. Democrats are "understandable reluctant" to hand out retrospective immunity "without understanding exactly what conduct they are shielding." But, according to the Post, since based on the limited information the administration has agreed to release immunity seems justified, Democrats should hand it out without asking harder what information the administration isn't releasing. Even better, the Post refers to the "difficult and uncharted environment" during which the conduct-whose-nature-we're-still-not-sure-about took place, bolstering the false impression the administration has started to give that this justified-and-no-we-won't-tell-you-what-it-was conduct took place only after 9/11, when in fact it began in early 2001.
It's reminiscent, I suppose, of the argument that since Scooter Libby, by committing perjury, had successfully blocked investigation of the Plame leak case, that Libby was entitled to be left off the hook for perjury. Call it the "it's not the crime, it's the fact that the coverup succeeeded" defense.
Via Ramesh Ponnuru, a solid look at Rudy Giuliani's not-at-all-ambiguous record on abortion issues:
Mary Alice Carr, vice president for Communications at NARAL Pro-Choice New York, still has a proclamation signed by Giuliani that made Jan. 22, 1998 "Roe v. Wade Anniversary Day" in the city. She also provided a copy of a NARAL questionnaire from 1997, signed by Giuliani.
Would he support unrestricted Medicaid funding for abortions? Would he oppose legislation that made minors get parental or court approval before getting an abortion? Did he agree with the Roe v. Wade decision?
Giuliani circled Yes, Yes and Yes.
Obviously, with things like his promise this weekend to veto any effort to repeal the Hyde Amendment, Giuliani's trying to flip-flop to a less pro-choice posture, but that seems likely to expose him to (accurate, it seems to me) charges of lack of principle without really assuaging pro-lifers' doubts.
Why are the characters uniformly white, with old-money names like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen that hark back to a time when high society was not integrated? Why are there no Jewish characters? It’s interesting, because on “The O.C.” I went out of my way to make those characters Jewish, not what you would expect to find in Orange County. But in New York, weirdly, I failed. I was working off of the source material.
Fair enough, but if accurate this just seems like a serious flaw in the source material. Asking for Jewish characters in a depiction of rich people in New York City isn't a plea for diversity for diversity's sake, it's just that New York day schools are full of Jews.
Mickey Kaus' long post here about John Edwards' alleged affair with Rielle Hunter is almost self-refuting. Basically, we have an anonymous source saying Hunter said she had an affair with Edwards, versus Hunter, on the record, saying that's not the case. Then there's Edwards, also saying it's not the case. But Kaus initially deems Edwards' denial too vague and non-specific. But then:
Update: The AP has Edwards adding "It's completely untrue, ridiculous" and saying the story was "made up." By the Enquirer? Or by one of the people the Enquirer cites? Either way, it's a direct attack on the integrity of someone (not necessarily a smart move for a politician in Edwards' position). ...
[Banging my head against the wall] Basically what we have here is that if we assume the anonymous hearsay is true and the on-the-record first-hand denial is false, then Edwards is either mishandling the story by denying it too vaguely ("the story is false") or else is mishandling it by denying it too directly ("made up") but what if the story's not true? No doubt by now we've had all the legitimate news organizations in the country looking into it and it seems that . . . nobody can come up with any evidence. As we saw with Scott Beauchamp, and the fake John Kerry intern affair story, if you just operate from within an assumption of guilt it's very hard for someone to prove his innocence but that's why we . . . don't operate with an assumption of guilt!
This interesting Newsweek profile of Mitt Romney gives a couple of great examples of exactly how hesitant he is to discuss his Mormon background in an honest way:
Nothing is more politically vexing or personally crucial for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney than the story of his faith. Raised in a devout Mormon family by parents who were both principled and powerful, Romney has downplayed both his religion and his own family history. Instead, he has talked up his résumé as a private-sector "turnaround artist" who reversed the fortunes of troubled companies and the faltering Salt Lake City Olympics and now can come to his party's—and country's—rescue. Mindful of the sway of evangelical Christians over the GOP base, he has positioned himself as the candidate with conservative principles and strong faith, even adopting evangelical language in calling Jesus Christ his "personal savior" (vernacular not generally used by members of the Mormon Church). But when he's pressed on the particulars of his own religious practice, his answers grow terse and he is quick to repeat that his values are rooted in "the Judeo-Christian tradition." [. . .]
Romney's biography is fully Mormon. When asked by NEWSWEEK if he has done baptisms for the dead—in which Mormons find the names of dead people of all faiths and baptize them, as an LDS spokesperson says, to "open the door" to the highest heaven—he looked slightly startled and answered, "I have in my life, but I haven't recently."
I'm not sure this is really such a sound approach. I always felt that Joe Lieberman (despite whatever else one might say about him) made a good run at being the first non-Christian on a national ticket precisely because he was so very clearly a practicing Orthodox Jew that it cleared the air. Romney, by acting weird and secretive, seems to be re-enforcing the idea that his faith is weird.
I know that a lot of liberals are fond of trying to draw linkages between the need for energy policy reform and national security issues, but I worry when I read things like this from Thomas Friedman:
Yes, Iraq was always going to be hugely difficult, but the potential payoff of erecting a decent, democratizing government in the heart of the Arab world was also enormous. Yet Mr. Bush, in his signature issue, never mobilized the country, never punished incompetence, never made the bad guys “fight all of us,” as Bill Maher put it, by at least pushing through a real energy policy to reduce the resources of the very people we were fighting. He thought he could change the world with 50.1 percent of the country, and he couldn’t.
It's true, obviously, that the government of Saudi Arabia is not run along incredibly admirable lines. Nor is the Al-Sabah family of Kuwait a crew I'm enthusiastic about. And, again, much the same can be said about the regime in Teheran. Nevertheless, none of these are the very people we were fighting unless you think we're just fighting "Muslims" or "Arabs" writ large.
I kept wondering when contemporary rightwingers would recognize that they're not, at the end of the day, the heirs to the mainstream anti-communist tradition at all. Rather, they're the heirs to the "rollback" fantasists whose counsels Dwight Eisenhower wisely rejected and pushed to the margins of the American political debate. Orrin Judd t the rescue:
Unfortunately for the hundreds of millions of victims of Communism, our willingness to follow the Kennan model meant that the Cold War lasted for decades, during which we stood by as tens of millions were murdered and the rest lived in near slavery. To the extent that Kennan was responsible for our not settling Soviet hash in the late 40s, he (and we) enabled the repression and mass murder of a significant portion of the human population for a disturbingly extended period of time. The cost of his accuracy was catastrophic to them and morally disabling to us. Four decades of compromising with evil led directly to the spiritual malaise that even Jimmy Carter could diagnose and lament — though, having bought into the Kennanesque status quo, he was incapable of snapping us out of it.
Ah, yes, settling Soviet hash through a massive war during which, one assumes, no bloodshed or suffering or any other unpleasantness would have taken place. Too bad we listened to weak-kneed Harry Truman. Peter Robinson proves that not all conservatives have lost their marbles on this one.
What could justify military action against Iran? Under international law, governments have the right to take military action to repel an armed attack and to preempt a certain and imminent attack. But the United States has not been attacked by Iran, and is clearly not in any imminent danger of armed attack. [. . .] Setting aside the sensationalist rhetoric of Iranian leaders, any realistic look at the Middle East and Iran must conclude that Iran’s military activities are primarily driven by fear and designed to preserve the regime. [. . .] The voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment by the Iranian government will only yield lasting results, however, if it is a part of a broad set of initiatives that guarantee security, peace, and economic development in Iran and the Middle East. Unilateral action against Iran in the absence of an overall plan for regional peace and security will be seen by most of the people of the region as aimed at safeguarding Israel’s supremacy and imposing an unjust peace on Palestinians and the broader Muslim world.
See also this account of a Norman Podhoretz book reading at a Barnes & Noble: "a lady stood to say that she had over a hundred relatives in Iran: Why do you want to kill them?!" Basically, Iranians aren't enthusiastic about the prospect of their country being attacked by the United States of America and this sentiments seems to hold more-or-less entirely across the Iranian political spectrum. Which, of course, is about what you'd expect given that Iran is a country populated by human beings. But if you'd like to unite the population of Iran around the only national government it's got, and push its regime toward firmer alliance with whichever enemies of the United States it can find, then war sounds like a great option.
The latest Washington Postpoll of political sentiments in Virginia is almost shockingly favorable for the Democrats. Not only does Mark Warner have a sky-high approval rating and a clear advantage over either of his likely opponents, but the state seems to be leaning toward the Democrats in presidential politics as well:
Long time left things change etc. but Republicans haven't started out on the defensive in Virginia for decades. Since Truman, Virginia has gone Democratic exactly once, in 1964. Democrats who ran competitively in the South like JFK in 1960, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1996 still all lost Virginia.
Choosing to "contain" the Soviet Empire over four decades did enormous damage not just in terms of the vassel populations and the millions of ruined lives ("stability" looks a lot better from the western side of the Iron Curtain than if you're stuck on the eastern side) and the difficulties those societies are having in recovering (not least demographically) from half-a-century as a prison state, but also in the enervation of the free world and its decay into relativist mush. That's one reason our "victory" in the Cold War is not felt as a victory by the populations of almost every Nato member state, although technically they "won" it. And it's part of the reason why we're disinclined to rouse ourselves for what the Administration calls another "long war".
This is preposterous. Of course Cold War stability looks better from west of the Berlin wall than east of it. But the prospect of a massive war between the United States and the Soviet Union likewise looks a lot better from Mark Steyn's armchair than it would have to anyone who would have been asked to fight in such a thing, or have his hometown turned into a battleground for it. The implication that the population of Eastern Europe just spent those decades praying for a snap American invasion is insane, but also reflective of the sort of mentality in which one needs to bother pointing out that few Iranians want the United States to attack their country.
Photo by Flickr user Edwin11 used under a Creative Commons license
Via Chris Bertram, a fascinating Reason interview with Ayan Hirsi Ali in which we see clearly that while people certainly shouldn't be killed or threatened with physical harm on account of their ridiculous views, nor should we simply valorize the views of anyone -- no matter how ridiculous those views may be -- merely because they've been threatened with harm on account of them:
Reason: Should we acknowledge that organized religion has sometimes sparked precisely the kinds of emancipation movements that could lift Islam into modern times? Slavery in the United States ended in part because of opposition by prominent church members and the communities they galvanized. The Polish Catholic Church helped defeat the Jaruzelski puppet regime. Do you think Islam could bring about similar social and political changes?
Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.
Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.
Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?
Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.
This is crazy stuff, and it's frightening that AEI has gone so far 'round the bend that they've decided these are the kind of views they want their institution to be promoting. I know Norm Ornstein doesn't like it when people think he must be a hysteric promoting a violent clash of civilizations just because he works with a bunch of colleagues who busy themselves trying to promote a violent clash of civilizations, but that's kind of what you get when these are your colleagues.
If you'd like to learn more about today's Nobel Prize winners in economics (except it's not a real Nobel Prize, right?) I'd recommend Alex Tabarrok's post here which at least gave me a taste of what "mechanism design" might be.
If you're reading this blog, you're no doubt familiar with the basic outline of Peter Bergen's argument in this new piece on how Bush blew the fight against al-Qaeda, but Bergen does an excellent job of highlighting one important but often neglected aspect of this, namely the extent to which al-Qaeda was really on the ropes in early 2002. Al-Qaeda was never that big, had been dealt a major blow with the Taliban booted from power, and hadn't a friend in the world. One can't know for sure, but there appears to be every reason to think that a focused, determined, responsible effort to stabilize and secure Afghanistan while simultaneously deploying the dread "law enforcement and intelligence" against whoever might be hiding elsewhere could have crushed the organization.
Obviously, that wouldn't have been an end to the troubles of the Muslim world or to have America's problems vis-à-vis the broader Middle East. But it really might have been an end to al-Qaeda.
Instead, for reasons that remain murky, the administration decided even before Tora Bora to start focusing its resources (not just money and personnel and equipment but also diplomatic capital and perhaps the scarcest resource of all: attention) on Iraq, resulting in what James Fallows has brilliantly dubbed "Bush's Lost Year". Everything seems to flow from the fact that the Bush administration didn't and doesn't really take al-Qaeda in particular or transnational terrorism in general all that seriously as a problem. The administration campaigned on the idea that the Clinton administration lacked focus and didn't mention terrorism as a priority that Bush intended to focus on. After the election, incoming Bush officials were briefed about the level of attention the outgoing Clinton team was giving to al-Qaeda from which they concluded that the Clintonites were too obsessed with terrorism. The Bush administration slow-walked Richard Clarke's proposals to step-up activities against al-Qaeda.
And then after 9/11, it's all been the same thing. Al-Qaeda is a super-important threat when the priority that has to give way to counterterrorism is something like the fourth amendment (warrantless wiretapping) or the sixth amendment (indefinite detention) or the eighth amendment (torture) or international or domestic law more generally, but when the competing priority is picking fights with Iraq or Iran or missile defense or Virginia Class submarines or tax cuts or West Bank settlers well then that's a different story.
There's really nothing to this post except a pointless blogger inside joke, but I just learned earlier today for the first time that there's actually a 2006 movie called A Very Serious Person. Sadly, it's not about Michael O'Hanlon. Instead:
Jan (Charles Busch), an itinerant male nurse from Denmark, takes a new job with Mrs. A (Polly Bergen), a terminally ill Manhattan woman raising her parentless thirteen-year-old grandson, Gil (PJ Verhoest). Spending the summer by the shore, the emotionally reserved Jan finds himself oddly cast as a mentor to Gil in having to prepare the sensitive boy for life with his cousins in Florida after his grandmother’s death. A deep friendship grows between these two solitary people. By the end of the summer, Gil has developed a new maturity and independence, while the enigmatic Jan has revealed his own vulnerability.
If that doesn't sound good to you, though, you can always check out A War Like No Other. James Steinberg calls it "A supremely thoughtful, sober assessment of what is one of the most dangerous fault lines in the world today."
Caroline Wadhams and Lawrence Korb say all's not lost (yet) in Afghanistan and propose a variety of steps the U.S. should take before we totally blow it there.
He invokes the Time magazine cover headline in 1990 that most New York City residents would just as soon forget — “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” And Mr. Giuliani recalls the days when, as he remembers them, a New Yorker couldn’t walk up Third Avenue without being on the lookout for muggers, of the blocks of dirty book stores and prostitutes, of public urination and pot-smoking.
I've been known to remark on how formerly no-good spots like Avenue B have become hip, but I can't ever remember a time when 3rd Avenue was particularly dangerous.
More seriously, contemplating the main thing that one might give Giuliani credit for -- New York City's larger-than-average crime drop in the 1990s -- just makes you realize that no matter how much credit you think he deserves for it, it has nothing to do with running for president. The president can't reform local departments' policing procedures. Meanwhile, crime is down and has lost a lot of salience as a political issue. Bill Bratton, having been fired by Giuliani for getting too much credit for the good job he was doing, seems to be doing a good job in LA. Maybe Rudy should go back to giving speeches, but mix some stuff in about how more cities should use Compstat and put more cops on the beat along with his corporate gigs. But make him president? No way.
I've noted this before, but reading Hillary Clinton's foreign policy manifesto in Foreign Affairs is once again a reminder of how nice it would be for politicians to give us some idea of what they mean by terms like "vital interests." When, for example, Clinton says that she will "use force to protect . . . our vital interests" she's not telling me very much. I'm pretty sure all the candidates would use force to protect the interests that they consider vital. The thing they're going to disagree about is which interests those are.
Beyond that, though Clinton's essay is similar to her Democratic rivals' in most respects, she gives a couple of hints that she'll take a more hawkish approach than some. One such hint is her odd way of joining John Edwards and Barack Obama in their endorsement of the Kissinger/Perry/Shultz/Nunn call for the United States to commit itself to verifiable worldwide nuclear abolition as a goal:
Neither North Korea nor Iran will change course as a result of what we do with our own nuclear weapons, but taking dramatic steps to reduce our nuclear arsenal would build support for the coalitions we need to address the threat of nuclear proliferation and help the United States regain the moral high ground. Former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn have called on the United States to "rekindle the vision," shared by every president from Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons.
Given that the op-ed actually called on us to "rekindle the vision shared by Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev," namely "an agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons." I'm not sure exactly what she's trying to signal by means of this characterization, but I'm not thrilled with it. On Iran, instead of offering normalization of relations in exchange for better behavior, she says that "if Iran is in fact willing to end its nuclear weapons program, renounce sponsorship of terrorism, support Middle East peace, and play a constructive role in stabilizing Iraq" then in exchange we "should be prepared to offer Iran a carefully calibrated package of incentives." Again, I'm not exactly sure in what way (if any) that differs from I would have liked her to say, but the intent seems to have been to shade the position in a slightly-more-hawkish direction. Similarly, while she takes a generally praiseworthy line on multilateral institutions, she seemed to me to be straining to work in a swipe about Sudan being on the UN Commission on Human Rights. I was very glad to read this:
Getting out of Iraq will enable us to play a constructive role in a renewed Middle East peace process that would mean security and normal relations for Israel and the Palestinians. The fundamental elements of a final agreement have been clear since 2000: a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank in return for a declaration that the conflict is over, recognition of Israel's right to exist, guarantees of Israeli security, diplomatic recognition of Israel, and normalization of its relations with Arab states. U.S. diplomacy is critical in helping to resolve this conflict. In addition to facilitating negotiations, we must engage in regional diplomacy to gain Arab support for a Palestinian leadership that is committed to peace and willing to engage in a dialogue with the Israelis. Whether or not the United States makes progress in helping to broker a final agreement, consistent U.S. involvement can lower the level of violence and restore our credibility in the region.
In particular, that last sentence shows a healthy awareness of the reality that too many people are inclined to ignore -- that America's attitude toward the Palestinians is central to how we're going to be viewed in the Middle East. That's not the kind of statement Democrats have been incredibly inclined to make, but it's very true.
Broadly construed, I think Clinton accomplished her goals here: She's laid something out that I think most people will regard as indistinguishable from what her rivals have put on the table but that contains subtle signals to people paying close attention that she'll probably govern more hawkishly than they will. That said, I keep meaning to write a post noting that campaign rhetoric has, historically speaking, been a terrible guide to how presidents actually conduct foreign policy so I sometimes have my doubts as to whether or not close readings of these kind of texts are actually worth anything.
Margaret Talbot's New Yorker article about David Simon and The Wire is must-reading for any Wire fan. The second page even lets us know what the politically relevant successor to WMD and pandemic will be.
This new initiative in which Paul Steiger and a couple of wealthy journalists are "assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets" sounds to me like a wonderful idea. What's more, in echoes in some ways what my friend Brian Beutler is doing for the Media Consortium and what Mother Jones is doing with its new scaled-up seven person Washington Bureau.
The bad news about the changing landscape of the media business over the past few years has been a declining budget available for investigative projects. The good news, however, is that the internet makes it possible to disseminate a worthwhile piece of investigative journalism for a tiny fraction of the costs that you once would have seen. Basically, the non-journalism costs (paper, ink, trunks full of stacks of paper) of doing investigative journalism are falling in a way that I hope makes this kind of philanthropic investment in investigative work more viable.
Via Dave Weigel my "I can't believe this is real" website of the day -- One Last Mission.org, dedicated to launching a Draft General Peter Pace movement. Draft him for what? To lose to Mark Warner in the Virginia senate race next fall, of course. What about the fact that he's shown no inclination to run? Well, "It is, however, your reluctance to serve that suggests to us that you must serve." Indeed.
Dave points out that there's a growing trend here as we've also seen conservatives pushing Tommy Franks and David Petraeus as political candidates.
Now of course there's a long tradition of generals (but not, I think, admirals) entering politics in the United States, starting with George Washington. Contemporary conservatives, however, seem to be misunderstanding the tradition in crucial respects. The idea, normally, is to nominate flag officers who are associated with noteworthy victories -- from Andrew Jackson to Wesley Clark -- or else for a junior officer who showed noteworthy courage in battle (John Kerry, John Kennedy) to run for a lower office. Neither Franks, nor Petraeus, nor Pace is actually popular, probably because insofar as anyone knows who these guys are it's from their association with a giant unpopular fiasco in Iraq. What the Republicans need to do is find candidates who can distance themselves from this war, not embrace it more closely.
Andy McCarthy reads about factional divisions within Hezbollah, reflecting in part differences in priorities between Syria and Iran, as well as tensions between Hezbollah's desire for autonomy and its Iranian sponsors' desire for tighter control, and then offers this pearl of wisdom:
I'm not sure this apparent dispute among our enemies about priorities makes a great deal of difference to us. Their entire agenda, after all, is nothing but trouble. But it's interesting to see dissension in the ranks.
Sigh. I'm once again astounded by the contemporary world's ability to make me nostalgic for Richard Nixon when people on the right understood that disputes between enemies most definitely made a difference.
It looks like the first Washington Post reporter killed in Iraq may have been killed by a member of the "Anbar Awakening," the group of Sunni insurgents who we're now paying to stop attacking American soldiers. It's a poignant reminder of how crazy the current version of our policy -- basically help equip anyone who'll accept our help and kind of hope for the best -- has become. Since the "surge" failed to produce the kind of political reconciliation that was its goal, reconciliation and political objectives more generally have just been defined out of sight.
But a military campaign with no coherent political objectives is just a slow-motion disaster. It's not saying anything against our troops to observe that when their orders don't have any larger purpose beyond keeping the them deployed in Iraq that they can't possibly succeed. After all, what could they be succeeding at? Note the fundamentally paradoxical character of administration claims to have crushed al-Qaeda in Iraq. Since AQI was only ever a small group of people whose importance existed primarily in administration rhetoric, why shouldn't we be able to crush them? But at the same time, while Bush would like to claim a success on this front, officials are quick not to claim too much success, lest that success suggest that it's time to pack our bags and go home.
Basically, if the policy's failing, that means we must continue it. And if it's succeeding, that means we must continue it. Meanwhile, GOP politicians are all running in terror of Freedom's Watch where they want us to believe that "victory is possible." But what victory? For whom? For the insurgents who kill Post reporters? For the Shiite militias who are pushing Sunnis out of Baghdad? For the PKK?
I was glad to see this Washington Post story confirming my suspicion that a large and growing quantity of retail establishments in our fair District are bank branches, and also to learn that I'm not the only one annoyed by this development since there's really nothing less fun or interesting that could populate your retail corridor than a bank branch. And it seems that DC is not alone: "The branch boom has prompted District officials to mull ways to control the growth, a strategy at work in Chicago, where branches have increased by 50 percent since 2002, and New York, where Manhattan has experienced a 41 percent rise."
Still, the underlying dynamics here escape me. According to the Post "industry studies showed that customers wanted personal contact when managing their money, and banks began opening more branches in a surge fueled by new players such as Commerce, which models itself as a retail store." Be that as it may, it seems like operating a bank branch has to be an expensive proposition. And what is the personal contact that people are looking for? I go into a bank about once a month to deposit rent checks that my roommates write me. Were I not the designated writer of The Check that goes to the landlord every month, or had I no roommates, I don't think I would ever go. My intuition is that the real story here has something to do with the semi-mysterious fact that one almost never sees a bank-affiliated ATM without it being co-located with an actual branch of the bank.
The latest exploration of George W. Bush's fanatical opposition to children's health care comes to us in this video, telling the story of one Bethany, a small child who, it seems, would be dead without the S-CHIP program Bush is busy vetoing:
I'll be fascinated to see what kind of pseudo-dirt they dig up on her.
Jezebel takes a look into the weird world of one Republican Senate office's dress code policy:
Basically, pantyhose must be worn every day, she was told. Even in the summertime? Oh yes, and "no exceptions." Well, what about pantsuits? "Well, I suppose you can wear them," the supervisor sighed, "But you are going to need to check with the Senator herself whether or not you will need to wear hose under pants, as well. I'm not entirely sure of the Senator's stance on pantsuits at this time."
Normal practice in Democratic offices I'm familiar with is to let staffer go pretty casual when the congress is out of session.
The good news about John McCain's Foreign Affairs manifesto is that it lacks the tone of demagoguery and hysteria that you saw in Rudy Giuliani's contribution to that forum and, to a lesser extent, in Mitt Romney's as well. Unlike the others, who seem to want to be regarded as crazy, McCain clearly wants to seem pragmatic and reasonable. Unfortunately, appearance and reality aren't quite the same thing. He starts off determined to keep our troops in Iraq indefinitely. Next he starts talking about Afghanistan where he sensibly feels more troops are needed. But sending more troops to Afghanistan is incompatible with his vision of an endless occupation of Iraq. So what do we get?
Our recommitment to Afghanistan must include increasing NATO forces, suspending the debilitating restrictions on when and how those forces can fight, expanding the training and equipping of the Afghan National Army through a long-term partnership with NATO to make it more professional and multiethnic, and deploying significantly more foreign police trainers. It must also address the current political deficiencies in judicial reform, reconstruction, governance, and anticorruption efforts.
Basically: wishful thinking. McCain wants us to stay distracted in Iraq, and then hope our NATO partners decide to pick up the slack by committing extra troops and more aggressive rules of engagement to a theater that he'll be assigning second priority to even though it's clearly more important.
This kind of wishful thinking pervades the article -- at every junctures there are no tradeoffs and the impossible can be achieved just by wishing it were so. McCain envisions a vague-but-massive military buildup, writing that "we can also afford to spend more on national defense, which currently consumes less than four cents of every dollar that our economy generates -- far less than what we spent during the Cold War." Of course, spending is considerably higher than that when you take the war supplemental appropriations into account. And of course the country is already in deficit, a deficit McCain's tax policies will deepen. And of course while we spend less as a percentage of GDP than we did at the height of the Cold War, there's no Soviet Union anymore -- we already account for half of the world's defense expenditures. He recognizes the need to avoid alienating the next generation of the world's Muslims, but his ideas for doing so are shallow and ill-considered:
important is preventing a new generation of them from joining the fight. As president, I will employ every economic, diplomatic, political, legal, and ideological tool at our disposal to aid moderate Muslims -- women's rights campaigners, labor leaders, lawyers, journalists, teachers, tolerant imams, and many others -- who are resisting the well-financed campaign of extremism that is tearing Muslim societies apart. My administration, with its partners, will help friendly Muslim states establish the building blocks of open and tolerant societies. And we will nurture a culture of hope and economic opportunity by establishing a free-trade area from Morocco to Afghanistan, open to all who do not sponsor terrorism.
Located in the context of an agenda of unrestrained American military power, perpetual occupation of Iraq, preventive war with Iran ("military action, although not the preferred option, must remain on the table"), and the re-orientation of world politics around a League of Democracies from which all Arab states will be excluded, efforts to provide direct American support to moderate Muslims are just going to backfire, as we've seen in Iran. Meanwhile, I'm all for reduced trade barriers, but a free trade area "from Morocco to Afghanistan" is obviously something for the countries located between Morocco and Afghanistan to negotiate, not something the US can productively impose.
Nor is there any evidence that the hypothetical members of the League of Democracies would actually be interested in McCain's agenda of "bringing concerted pressure to bear on tyrants in Burma (renamed Myanmar by its military government in 1989) or Zimbabwe, uniting to impose sanctions on Iran, and providing support to struggling democracies in Serbia and Ukraine, the League of Democracies would serve as a unique handmaiden of freedom." Will South Africa suddenly flip-flop on the Zimbabwe issue? Is India really going to become a leading opponent of nuclear proliferation? Brazil a fan of American hegemony?
Meanwhile, conflict with China is on the horizon. Despite McCain's proposed US defense build-up, "When China builds new submarines, adds hundreds of new jet fighters, modernizes its arsenal of strategic ballistic missiles, and tests antisatellite weapons, the United States legitimately must question the intent of such provocative acts." And despite McCain's proposal of a new multilateral institution from which China would be excluded, "When China proposes regional forums and economic arrangements designed to exclude America from Asia, the United States will react." Nevertheless, he wants us to believe that "China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries." But if McCain thinks that Chinese actions that are exactly the same as the actions he proposes for the United States should be viewed as hostile, then how are we going to avoid becoming adversaries? To cap it off, we have a proposal for NPT revision that other countries will never agree to:
First, the notion that non-nuclear-weapons states have a right to nuclear technology must be revisited. Second, the burden of proof for suspected violators of the NPT must be reversed. Instead of requiring the International Atomic Energy Agency board to reach unanimous agreement in order to act, as is the case today, there should be an automatic suspension of nuclear assistance to states that the agency cannot guarantee are in full compliance with safeguard agreements.
This is great if you're a nuclear weapons state, but goes precisely against the core bargain of the NPT between the weapons and non-weapons states. Who's going to agree to give up their right to peaceful nuclear energy programs in exchange for nothing whatsoever from the weapons states? Nobody, that's who. Near the end, he mentions his global warming plan, which is the same thing all over again. To his credit, unlike your average Republican he acknowledges that there's a problem. And he acknowledges that carbon emissions reductions are the solution. But then the plan just . . . fails to produce adequate emissions reductions. But the climate isn't going to hand out bonus points for good intentions -- if you want to deal with the problem you need to deal with its actual scope. And over and over again that's the story here, diagnoses that are at least somewhat tethered to reality matched to solutions that don't solve anything.
Twelve more phony soldiers, former Captains who served in Iraq, write in The Washington Post that we have two viable options in Iraq, either "abandon our volunteer military for compulsory service" which will put us in a position where "we might be able to succeed in Iraq." Alternatively, and in the option they clearly favor, "our best option is to leave Iraq immediately."
Their point is that while plans to withdraw very, very slowly may help politicians who don't want to admit defeat, that such protracted phase-downs do nothing to actually help Iraq and a great deal to endanger the troops left behind. These are schemes that amount to asking soldiers to risk their lives not to achieve any strategic objectives of national importance, but for the vainglory of politicians whose egos are salved by anything that lets them avoid admitting error or the need for dramatic change.
David Shorr has more on the simple point that one wants to discern and exploit disagreements among hostile forces, not brush past and ignore them:
In a speech last year, Zbigniew Brzezinski came up with one of the great summaries of our predicament: that instead of uniting our friends and dividing our enemies, we have been uniting our enemies and dividing our friends. One of the many problems with pumping up Jihadism as the contemporary equivalent of the East Bloc is that it defines our adversaries as monolithic. Matt's absolutely right that infighting among our adversaries could be very significant, and useful. But don't take my word for it, West Point's Combating Terrorism Center has done a serious study of disputes among terrorists over tactics and strategy. [Hat tip to Lorelei for highlighting this work last year.]
During the Cold War, almost all of the big American wins came in part from a recognition of differences. We embraced democratic socialist parties in post-war Germany and France, the better to divide them from the Communists. Nixon made a deft opening toward China. And in our better moments, we sought to embrace third world aspirations for nationhood and independence. When we did the reverse and conflated everything together we got fiascos like Vietnam or the pathetic failure of our past fifty years' worth of Cuba policy.
One area in which I suppose Mitt Romney is less hesitant to identify as a proud Mormon is when it comes to fundraising. This neat little tool lets you get maps of where the different contenders are raising money, and you can see Romney's below:
Click around on the original site and you'll see that he's clearly the only candidate who's raking in significant funds from Utah and it looks like an important source of money for him. Meanwhile, though, he's also just nabbed an endorsement from a key official at Bob Jones University and if a Mormon's good enough for BJU then why shouldn't he be good enough for the rest of the evangelical community?
One thing I'm wrestling with is finding a way to convey how terrified I am of the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy. The Bush administration has been so bad, and characters like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson so absurd, that I think it's hard for a lot of people to seriously credit the notion that Giuliani would represent a quantum leap of lunacy and just the time when the country desperately needs a clean break and a lurch in the other direction. Josh Marshall tries to get at some of this here:
But the danger of phoniness, aesthetic or otherwise, cannot hold a candle to the truly catastrophic foreign policy Giuliani would likely pursue if he got anywhere near the Oval Office. Watching him campaign it's pretty clear that the guy has no real sense that posturing and pandering to ethnic paranoia in New York City simply isn't the same as running a national foreign policy. The people he's coalescing around himself as his foreign policy advisors are the ones who are going to help him learn as he goes. And they are simply the most dangerous, deranged and deluded folks you can find in American political and foreign policy circles today.
That's right. And, of course, there's a nexus here as a disproportionately large quantity of Giuliani's advisors spent years before 9/11 toiling away in semi-obscurity with their stock-in-trade being precisely fostering a climate of ethnic paranoia and then exploiting it -- offering up lurid tales of the perfidy of the Arab and of Muslim infiltration of American society. Another way of thinking about it is that the "a squad" of neoconservative foreign policymaking has basically been discredited by their conduct inside the Bush administration, so Giuliani, in reaching for the non-discredited, has wound up just reaching into the deep bench rather than trying to find anyone with sounder views. It seems to me that he almost certainly won't win, but if he does I think we may all wind up nostalgic for the Doug Feith Era.
UPDATE: Check out the latest TPM TV epsidode that runs down Giuliani's advisory team. The part where Daniel Pipes calls on Israel to raize more Palestinian villages is especially sweet.
Now that he's secured the support of retired major general James "Spider" Marks, I think Mitt Romney can add "best surrogate nickname" to good poll numbers in the early states and a Mormon fundraising network in terms of key campaign strengths. Any other contenders in the cool surrogate nickname field?
Vladimir Putin's warnings against military action against Iran deserve to be taken very seriously. Since we're not contemplating actually conquering Iran and trying to occupy its territory, people need to understand that the post-strike diplomatic environment is going to be much more important to the future of the Iranian nuclear program than is any damage that bombing Iran with our on-the-table options might or might not do. If Russia decides to just send some scientists with schematics and materiel over to Iran and show them how to build a nuclear bomb, then -- bam -- nuclear bomb.
Conversely, at the moment not only is Iran under some diplomatic pressure to stop short of weaponizing, many countries around the world are taking direct measures to prevent the Iranians from just easily going and buying the stuff they need. Insofar as an unprovoked American military attack convinces other countries that the real dangerous lunatics live in DC rather than Teheran, countries around the world could cut back on their vigilance and make it much easier for an Iranian nuclear program to succeed.
The point is that when people talking about the Iranians being such-and-such time period away, or some bombing effort taking them back x number of years, they're talking as if progress toward a nuclear weapon proceeds at a constant pace. In practice, one of the factors that determines how quickly you can proceed is the international context. Right now, things are pretty tricky for Iranian nuclear scientists. Military action that doesn't reflect a firm, UN-backed consensus grounded in some reasonable interpretation of international law (military action that does reflect such a consensus seems very, very unlikely but in principle it could happen) could dramatically alter that.
Married Man Ross Douthat questions the relevance of Jonah Goldberg's view that we should emphasize that the Cold War was bad even though there was no real alternative to containment. Well, I can conceive of one possible use to which to put this insight, though I think not one Jonah would approve of, namely that insofar as possible we ought to try really hard to avoid getting into a New Cold War dynamic with China.
Oftentimes, I see people look at China's poor human rights record and its even worse record of diplomatic support for regimes with appalling human rights records. Then they look at China's veto on the UN Security Council. And then they conclude that it's an imperative -- in humanitarian terms -- not to bind ourselves to follow the UN.
One thing missing from this is how it's going to look from the perspective of Beijing if the US decides that it has the right to invade any country, anywhere, at any time because we've decided we don't approve of its government's internal policies. The answer is: not good. Expanding the ambit of decision-makers to something like a "Global NATO" or a "League of Democracies" -- groups that would exclude China -- doesn't change the basic dynamic. What you'd have is a situation where the United States was proposing a set of rules to govern the international road that the primary rising power couldn't possibly agree to. In short: Sino-American conflict and tensions. Even if that didn't erupt into something disastrous like an actual Sino-American war, it very well could mean a return to Cold War-style proxy wars and constant paralysis of global institutions and people need to understand that that would be an utter humanitarian catastrophe.
As horrible as Rwanda or Bosnia were or Darfur may be, one ought to recognize that on the whole the post-Cold War world has been much more peaceful than were comparable-duration periods of the Cold War (see the Human Security Report for a bunch of data on this) thanks to the existence of fewer proxy conflicts and the tendency for conflicts to be conducted with less money and weapons. Basically, one of the very most important things we can do in humanitarian terms in try to preserve a generally peaceful big-picture international environment, even though this may, indeed, mean exercising restraint vis-à-vis some specific humanitarian emergencies. This becomes even more true when we start to think about issues like climate change where there's obviously no hope of a solution unless the US, India, China, Europe, Russia, Japan, Brazil, and Indonesia can all work together.
I've only seen two episodes, but I can tell you already that I'm loving Dexter and should have listened sooner to the people who were recommending it to me. I almost hesitate to describe the premise, since it's absurd, and hearing about other people describe it is what made me skeptical.
But that said, what you have is a show about a sociopathic serial killer who also happens to be a forensic analyst for the Miami Police Department. But he's a sociopathic serial killer with a conscience (except not really -- he's a sociopath!) who only kills other killers. Woo!
It's pretty ridiculous, but so far at least it's pulled off extremely well to generate an alternatively funny/creepy/gross story that also includes a reasonably compelling mystery (another serial killer seems to be toying with our friend Dexter) plot thread running throughout the season, and all-in-all it's pretty great -- I like it more than anything I see running currently on television.
Obviously, the mere fact that the ACLU was able to commission a poll (that's via Matt Stoller) showing public support for its positions on surveillance has limited probative value. Advocacy groups can always pull that off. The question is, how did they need to frame the question to get their result:
It turns out that a fairly anodyne wording gets the civil libertarian result:
Traditionally, the law has required a warrant from a court for each individual the government wants to wiretap. Some people want to permanently change this law to allow courts to issue blanket warrants for wiretapping American citizens that would not have to name any specific individual. Do you favor or oppose allowing courts to issue these blanket warrants?
This probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise. A lot of people seem to have the idea that the American electorate is ruthlessly authoritarian and will punish any candidate who stands up for civil liberties. In reality, it seems to me that the reverse is true -- this is the country where you can't even do something sensible let have a national ID card or a national gun registration system without people freaking out. Combine that with the fact that the specific president who would be empowered with all this discretion is wildly unpopular, and I don't see any reason to think there's an unstoppable public opinion juggernaut here.
Noam Scheiber notes some evidence that Mitt Romney's not a real Red Sox fan and asks "What is it with these presidential candidates and their baseball loyalties?" The thing of it is that it's hard out there for a politician. I remember when I was an intern in Chuck Schumer's office and for some reason the question arose of Schumer's favorite football team. The staff took the view that it would be impossible for him to ever express a view on the subject, because given that he'd spent his whole life living in the city he wouldn't be credible for him to be anything other than a Giants or Jets fan, but since the Bills play in New York State and the Giants and Jets don't, he couldn't very well root for anyone other than the Bills. Thus, he had no favorite football team.
Andrew says that "There is only one person who can rescue Republican fundraising, reunite the party, rally the base and win the presidency for the GOP. And you know who she is." This is certainly what Republicans are hoping, and I certainly agree that she has the best chance of losing, but I wouldn't bet too heavily on this if I were a conservative. After all (Bill) Clinton-hatred was a plenty strong political force in the 1990s, but Bob Dole got a bit less than 41 percent of the vote and Clinton left office with sky-high approval ratings even before the country got a taste of how bad the alternative might be.
Speaking as an admirer of both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, I sincerely doubt that the GOP wound up in its current predicament because the American people were bowled over by the Pelosi/Reid charisma or their inspiring rhetoric. Rather, the Republicans, having consolidated power in 2002 and 2004 proceeded to unveil a governing agenda whose consequences have been bad for everyone outside a narrow economic elite. The Republican Party needs a nominee who can distance himself from that agenda, but that person needs to run a primary gauntlet dominated by the smallish minority of people (and donors -- just look at Mike Huckabee's fundraising) who think Bush is great and everything would be fine if the president had just vetoed some popular spending initiatives. All of the leading candidates have stood up on stage and pledged support for endless war in Iraq, vetoing bipartisan childrens' health care bills, and sworn that the economy is performing fantastically.
Come November, that's going to be a problem and it's not one Hillary Clinton is going to solve.
The current crop of right-wingers is too close to the Iraq war to accept Sanchez's vituperation, since it contains an attack on Bush. But as the war recedes and the need for scapegoating expands -- particularly if conservatives lose the White House next year -- Sanchez's speech reads like a foundational text for an aggrieved conservative worldview that the war was too virtuous for the country that fought it. And it makes a lot of sense that it's Sanchez, the most disgraced general of the entire war, who issued this j'accuse.
This is something that I think liberals, especially ones like me who work in the ideas business, are going to need to be vigilant about for years to come. It took quite a while for the Rambo theory of Vietnam to go mainstream and I'm sure at the time it didn't strike people as necessarily a big deal if Ronald Reagan wanted to perpetuate a mythical account of the past while, in his actual role as president, being quite cautious about putting American boots on the ground. Today, though, we've all lived to see the damage done by unlearning too many of those lessons. I can only hope it doesn't wind up all happening again.
I'd like to associate myself with Dana Goldstein's remarks onThe Trap. What's more, I'm reminded by this debate of a column that I think I kept meaning to write for the college paper when I was in school and never got around to, namely that a lot of people heading into careers in investment banking or management consulting had a bizarre habit of appropriating the language of "selling out" even though it was far from clear that they had anything to sell.
If you ruin your band's sound in an effort to write more radio-friendly songs, you're selling out. If you quit your job on the Hill to start shilling for health insurance companies, you're selling out. When you dumb Veronica Mars down after season two in a desperate bid to gain a bigger audience, you're selling out. But if you just decide at the age of 22 or 23 that there's nothing you're sufficiently passionate about to make you want to give up the stability and prosperity that comes with a corporate career, you're not selling anything out, you're just applying to law school.
And there's really nothing wrong with that. But the nominal self-critique involved in dubbing such activity "selling out" is really a form of self-dramatization and self-praise, carrying with it the implication that of course you could have written the Great American Novel or turned around and inner-city school if only you hadn't been so damn selfish.
By the way: A wag working for a rival campaign picked up on Giuliani's criticism of George Soros today: “I think that George Soros and MoveOn.org is kind of a new low in vicious, politics of personal destruction…Every campaign I’ve ever seen from them has been about personally destroying the Republican".... and points out that Giuliani appointed Soros to a coalition opposing "Anti-Immigrant Forces" in DC.
Question: Which do conservatives hate more, Soros or immigrants?
As we redeploy our troops from Iraq, we must not let down our guard against terrorism. I will order specialized units to engage in targeted operations against al Qaeda in Iraq and other terrorist organizations in the region.
Other terrorist organizations in the region? Ilan generously suggests that Clinton may mean the PKK. On the other hand, in light of her vote on the Lieberman-Kyl resolution, maybe she means the IRGC. Or maybe Hezbollah. Certainly some clarification seems to be in order.
Hendrick Hertzberg has a strange-but-true post on a new Navy sonar program that's going to have potentially devastating consequences for the world's whale population: "The study will take at least two years, during which our Navy—and the Russian and Chinese navies, too, among others—will continue to drive many of these sublime, highly intelligent animals to their deaths. And, no matter what the findings, it does not seem likely that the Navy will go all PETA on us and decide to get along without its way cool gadgets."
He suggests that this might be a good time for the US, Russia, and China to try to negotiate some submarine-related arms control agreements rather than spending money on new whale-killing ways for us to track each other's subs. Obviously, an issue like that's embedded in larger questions, but if you read my posts from yesterday on Russia and China you'll be able to guess that I agree. The biggest threats we face -- climate change, nuclear proliferation, transnational terrorism -- are all things that can only be tackled through cooperation among the major powers. The good news is that the major powers have good reason to want to cooperate on those issues. The bad news is that all of those countries have internal constituencies invested in legacy conflicts and the legacy budgets they fuel.
Photo by Flickr user Hisgett used under a Creative Commons license
The New York Sunproduces an editorial featuring a bullet-point list of things that define being a Republican. Number one on the list:
Reductions in top marginal tax rates provide incentives for growth and lead to greater government revenues in the long run. That is not always the case. There is a point on the Laffer Curve at which tax cuts on the top margin stop generating increased income, but we are nowhere near that point now.
Ramesh Ponnuru unleashes what I hope is a dry wit and pretends to be puzzled by this:
Presumably what they mean is that the top income tax rate is higher than the revenue-maximizing rate, but I'm not sure why they think that it is. Bush's tax cuts appear to have caused revenue to be lower than it would otherwise have been, which suggests that we're already below the revenue-maximizing tax rate.
Meanwhile, McArdle has a book review spiked from a conservative publication for failure to conform to supply-side dogma.
Incidentally, Megan's post about the gross ignorance or dishonesty of her ideological comrades in arms ends up in one of her signature bizarre overstatements of the influence of teacher's unions on progressive politics in America: "The Laffer Curve and the supply siders pushing it seem to be the teacher's unions of the right."
Obviously, teacher's unions are an influential group. That said, the No Child Left Behind education reform that AFT and the NEA very much don't like was primarily written by Ted Kennedy and George Miller, who aren't just Democrats, but actually chair the education committees of the House and Senate. The American Prospect tends, in my view, to bend over backwards to be friendly to the teacher's unions, but never spiked any writing I did that went against the union line. The liberal Washington Monthly ran a 2004 article lauding John Kerry (at the time, an influential Democrat) for bucking the unions on key reforms:
Many liberals had hoped that Kerry would attack the testing requirement set forth in Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which has become increasingly unpopular, especially among teachers' unions. But Kerry, who had voted for NCLB, instead challenged two longstanding, and fiercely defended, union prerogatives: seniority-based pay increases and rules virtually guaranteeing veteran teachers tenure. The candidate proposed a "new bargain"--a $30 billion, 10-year plan of federal grants which would allow districts to raise the pay of teachers whose students consistently test above average, while at the same time making it easier for schools to fire bad teachers. "Greater achievement ought to be a goal," Kerry said, "and it should be able to command greater pay, just the way it does in every other sector of professional employment."
That article didn't get spiked and Kerry is still a Democrat in good standing. Robert Gordon, known to pen such things as "That Republicans are fond of making these points--and unions and school officials are not fond of hearing them--does not make them less true" is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and also served as domestic policy director for the Kerry-Edwards campaign.
Basically, the unions, while influential, also see their influence checked by counterbalancing interest groups within the Democratic Party, including the major civil rights organizations, several major charitable foundations, and the proclivity of various wealthy progressives to fund operations like Democrats for Education Reform. There's absolutely no comparison between this and the ways in which supply-side orthodoxy dominates the right. You see prominent Democratic politicians, progressive media outlets, and think tanks all deviating from the union line while you almost never see the right's institutions break publicly with the Lafferites.
A lot of the key strengths come from policy initiatives: government-sponsored pre-work workouts in Japan; extensive, government-funded prenatal and natal care in Iceland as well as three months of paid professional leave for both parents; holistic social care in Sweden, which includes comprehensive health care and safer streets for evening strolls; and a high number of doctors per-capita in Cuba. The biggest threat to the health of three of the five they list: the importation of the American diet.
Kate's takeaway is that "even with a shiny, new, comprehensive, universal health care plan in place sometime soon, it's going to take a lot more to make Americans healthy." Mine is a bit different. Basically, insofar as we want to improve public health we should worry primarily about ways to improve Americans' diet and exercise and so forth. The case for reform of the health care finance system has more to do with the finance than with the health, we're talking about a redistributive reform that would give peace of mind to a broad swathe of the population that they could avoid illness-related financial catastrophe and would encourage labor market flexibility and entrepreneurship. There are ways for health care reform to make people healthier (statins, more aggressive prenatal and preventive care, etc.) but realistically health care systems aren't that important as a determinant of aggregate health outcomes and the case for reform is primarily about other things.
Photo by Flickr user Jeff Kubina used under a Creative Commons license
Well -- this isn't an elite liberal district, as anyone who ever worked for Marty Meehan can tell you. It is insular and provincial and distrusts outsiders; Tsongas lived outside the district before she ran. Though it has stayed in Democratic hands since the 70s, Tsongas still outperformed Gov. Deval Patrick here by two or three points; George H, W. Bush won this congressional district in 1992, as did Mitt Romney in 2002. [. . .] Cole's triumphalism is misplaced. At best -- and this is pretty good -- Ogonowski's run is a blueprint for Republican congressional candidates to run in 2008.
I think this mostly underlines the fact that candidates matter and our House elections aren't like party-list votes in a proportional system. In reality, voters should recognize that party affiliation is by far the most important attribute of a House candidate, but in practice they don't. An energetic candidate with a compelling biography, real local ties, and a veneer of independence from the national party can be competitive anywhere if pitted against someone who's unimpressive.
The other day, Jessica Valenti was touting a questionable bit of statistics:
A new study by the Guttmacher Institute and the World Health Organization shows that abortion rates are similar in different countries whether the procedure is legal or not. Shocking, I know. Of course, what wasn't similar was the risk to women's health.
Scott Lemieux went even stronger to say that "the only thing that criminalizing abortion accomplishes is to ensure that some number of women will be maimed or killed." The trouble with these kinds of cross-national statistics, though, is that there are all kinds of correlating variables and there's no way for the kind of survey we're talking about to isolate the impact of legal change on abortion. In the United States, when abortion was legalized in the 1970s, the number of abortions went up.
What's more, I'm not really sure why one would think that the case for reproductive freedom hinges crucially on the idea that making abortions safer, more affordable, and more convenient to obtain has no impact on the number of abortions people get. After all, if nothing else the very dangerous nature of the abortion procedure in the abortion-banning countries constitutes a sound consideration against getting an abortion in those places. Legal abortions not only allow women determined to terminate their pregnancies do so safely, but they allow women determined to manage their pregnancies safely do so by terminating them. Meanwhile, it seems that legal abortion helps promote relatively more permissive attitudes about sex. But both of those things -- fewer people refraining from sex out of fear of pregnancy and fewer people carrying to term babies they don't really want to have out of fear of the adverse health consequences of illegal abortions are good things not untoward consequences of legal abortion that need to be swept under the rug.
DC mayor Adrian Fenty already won my heart and revolutionized District governance by reorienting the taxi cab zone maps so that north would be up. Like on, you know, maps. And now via Garance I see that he's gone one further and our taxi fares will now be charged by meter rather than by zone. Good for him. GFR calls the old policy "incomprehensible" but it's perfectly comprehensible it was just designed with the interests of out-of-town movers and shakers in mind (basically a trip from one point in the central business district to another point in the central business district is cheap no matter how far you drive) rather than those of actual DC residents.
Conservative bloggers get in a tizzy about Libya getting a rotating seat on the UN Security Council, conservative bloggers don't understand what they're talking about. No surprise there.
Maureen Dowd confounds expectations by following up the hilarious Stephen Colbert guest column with a trenchant and insightful column about what passes for Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy views. Dare I suppose that the demise of TimesSelect is pressing the NYT columnists to dig deeper and find solid, link-worthy column topics?
It's me versus McMegan in the latest episode of BloggingHeadsTV, recorded laboriously via Skype even though we were on the same floor of the same building.
Watch it because you know you want to hear more of my thoughts on Gossip Girl. Alternatively, because you want to watch ex-New Yorkers join hands across the aisle to note that Rudy Giuliani is a dangerous madman who can't be allowed anywhere near the White House.
Are some Republicans really coming around on climate change? Brian Beutler doubts it and Ryan Avent brings more skepticism. What's interesting is that there really has been some stirrings of change in certain sectors of corporate America, but it seems that to be considered viable in Republican presidential politics you need to pay fealty to each and every specific business group priority; just a generally "pro business" posture doesn't seem to be good enough.
That's too bad, because it seems to me that things like a carbon tax whose revenues are plowed into income tax rebates (or something similar) and support for relaxation of zoning rules ought to count as both "green" and "conservative" and even have some support from your more independent-minded conservative intellectuals (though not from the key Movement publications) but seem to be nonstarters for Republican politicians. Generally speaking, for a party that's become incredibly unpopular we're seeing very little interest in policy innovation, not even anything on a par with strong-but-doomed insurgencies like McCain 2000 or Hart 1984.
The people arguing that passing a congressional resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide right at this moment doesn't seem like a particularly sound method of advancing the national interest are, of course, correct. At the same time, though, one ought to recognize that on a realist account these gloom-and-doom predictions of US-Turkish relations in the wake of the resolution are false. Turkey is going to formulate its policy vis-à-vis the United States of America in light of Turkey's interests and not actually radically restructure things in the wake of a symbolic resolution. Things like the strategic partnership with Israel and membership in NATO (and the base-hosting it entails) stand or fall on their own merits and Turkish-US partnership in Iraq is going to be determined by the ability of Turkish and American officials to forge a compromise position on the Kurds that both sides prefer to no compromise at all.
