Obviously, since eliminating malaria doesn't have the kind of humanitarian possibilities we associate with things like invading Iraq, you won't see the kind of journalistic and intellectual mobilization behind this idea as we did around the "liberal hawk" movement. The difference, I suppose, is that fighting malaria neither has potential to make a writer feel tough nor does it seem very promising as a way to bash liberals and/or the UN. It's too bad, though, because we really could save a lot of peoples' lives.
For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.”
A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.
There are a number of ways one could respond to this, but I think the best thing to say is that Kennedy and Krugman are talking at cross-purposes here. Krugman's task isn't to explain why the Republican Party can win elections, it's too explain why a plutocratic political program can succeed. Back during the era of consensus politics, after all, the GOP won big electoral victories in 1952 and 1956 by nominating a popular general, by painting the Democrats as soft as defense, etc. And in 1960 they came very close to winning by arguing that Richard Nixon had the experience necessary to steer the ship of state in troubled times. What they didn't do, however, was advance an economic policy agenda focused on serving the interests of 5 percent of the country at the expense of the interests of 80 percent of the country.
Or to put it another way, what makes America weird isn't that we have a conservative political party (they have 'em everywhere) or that the conservative political party succeeds at winning elections (happens in England, Canada, France, Italy, etc. all the time) but that the conservative political party is so unreconciled to the modern welfare state. That's what's weird. It isn't true of major political parties outside the United States, and for a while it wasn't true of the United States either.
In other words, we could have a politics where the parties disagreed about a lot of stuff -- abortion, gay rights, tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic growth, foreign policy, crime control, paternalistic public health measures, etc. -- while operating from within a broad consensus about the need for a robust public sector commitment to universal social insurance programs and basic public services.
Krugman believes that racial divisions explain that -- the absence of a generous welfare state, the ability of a major political party to remain so relentlessly focused on the interests of a small minority of the population.
And if the flaw in Krugman's book is that he doesn't take the time to respectfully air popular alternative theses and rebut them (and he really doesn't), its virtue is precisely that the book deals with the big picture of American politics over the decades, focusing on broad macro trends in the economy and the political system rather than campaign tactics or the controversies of the day. He puts forth substantial empirical data showing a very tight link between race -- and racial attitudes -- and voting behavior, particularly the willingness of non-poor white southerners (but, crucially, not Dixie's worst-off white folks) to vote very conservatively.
And of course it's easy to do a thought experiment in which blacks and latinos go from being about 10 percent of the electorate each to being about 20 percent each and ask yourself what would happen to the Republican Party. Well, it would lose all the elections. Unless, of course, it could broaden its popularity to minority voters. Such appeals would focus, naturally, on the large traditionalist segments of the black and latino populations. But right now, appeals of that sort largely fall on deaf appears. But perhaps a GOP that wasn't as relentlessly hostile to the economic interests of the non-elite would have much more success.
Indeed, I'd say that's probably where we're going. George W. Bush's efforts to broaden Republican appeal to include minority voters and build an enduring Republican majority failed. He was able, however, to eke out majorities based on mobilizing white Christian identity sentiments (with national security issues playing a large role in helping him do so) combined with generous financial backing from corporate managers and so forth. But the initial analysis that this wouldn't be adequate over the long-run was, of course, correct -- the white Christian share of the electorate is shrinking -- and the post-9/11 boom in nationalist sentiment wasn't bound to last forever. And it turns out that traditionalism alone isn't good enough to make non-whites want to vote Republican. To succeed over the long run, they'll probably need to moderate their economic agenda.
Mike Huckabee waxes populist, he "tells audiences that the only soap his family could afford was the rough Lava soap, and that he was in college before he realized showering didn’t have to hurt. 'There are people paying $150 for an exfoliation,' he jokes. 'I could just hand them a bar of Lava soap.'" David Brooks and I eat it up, but Tom Lee points out the truth: Lava soap is more expensive than regular soap.
As seen below, Krugman really has the goods on me here: "I gather that the press corps really likes Mike Huckabee. This in itself should scare you: in 2000 they really liked George W. Bush, too (and hated Al Gore.)" Indeed. The crux of the matter is that Huckabee 2008, even more so than Bush 2000, talks like someone who wants to build a different kind of Republican Party. And as with Bush, there are even small elements of his tenure as governor on which one can hang that narrative. But in terms of policy proposals, Huckabee's got nothing but a bad, regressive tax plan.
Via Jim Henley, Tom Englehart points out that the vast reams of quasi-legal reasoning the administration's produced designed to explain precisely which kinds of war crimes aren't really war crimes constitutes a kinda sorta confession, a weird paper trail of criminality and rationalization where a cover-up might have been smarter and less morbidly bizarre.
There's something a bit sad about the fact that Ryan Avent had to go through the trouble to write a long, detailed explanation of why Joel Kotkin and Ali Moderres are wrong and residents of dense cities are, in fact, responsible for less carbon emissions than are residents of far-flung exurbs. Smaller houses + shorter distances between things + more alternatives to driving + economies of scale in heating/cooling/etc. large structures = less carbon. Why The Washington Post decided it would be "provocative" (or something) to argue otherwise is a bit beyond me.
It is, however, always worth pointing out that this sort of discussion is a bit useless. What we need to do is put a price on carbon emissions, either through a tax or auctioned emissions permits. Then we can let the miracle of prices and markets do its work and not worry about personally trying to calculate the carbon implications of each and every life choice. Meanwhile, contrary to Kotkin's ceaseless campaign to convince us that people don't want to live in cities, even now it's the case that real estate in big cities is famously expensive. If we price carbon correctly and deregulate, making it easier for people to build and live where they like, I think there's every reason to believe we'll wind up with more city-dwellers.
What I learned about Leavitt in his years as governor is that he is blessed with vision that sees future policy challenges and developments more clearly than most politicians. In this case, he is visualizing a radically different kind of medical marketplace, in which families armed with specific information about the treatment success and prices of hospitals and doctors can shop at will for the best quality and most affordable care.
Maybe there's some situation in which this would be a good thing, but mostly it sounds terrible.
By contrast, here's an anecdote. Some time ago, I noticed that the sole of my foot was incredibly painful to walk on. I took off my shoe and sock and saw some kind of weird grossness bumpy thing down there and could tell that that was the epicenter of the pain. I called my doctor's office describing the problem as best I could and asked for an appointment. I got one about two days in the future (waiting times! even in America!) and hobbled around until then. I went into the office, the doctor looked at my foot, immediately diagnosed it as an abscess and did some incision and drainage and then -- bam! -- it was done. That involved poking me with a sharp object, which seemed like it would be an unpleasant experience, but I trusted that it was the right way to go because he's a doctor and I came to his office to be told what to do with my foot not to do independent research, ask around, start haggling, second-guess everyone, and generally remain in pain while I tried to sort things out according to Magical Market Medicine.
People want to live in a world where, when you have a medical problem, you locate a doctor and that doctor either does what needs doing, or else points you to an appropriate specialist doctor who does what needs doing. Shopping around for gadgets or browsing bookstores is fun for those of us who are into them; others like clothes-shopping or shoes. But nobody wants to shop around for medical treatment. That sucks. Sick people want treatment.
The New York Timestakes a look at the major corporate players in the state lottery game. The key to doing well in this business seems to be bribing state lottery officials. Getting caught doesn't even seem to be a big problem.
If we're going to have lotteries at all (I have mixed feelings about this) doesn't it seem like we really, really, really shouldn't make them state-licensed monopolies? After all, I imagine that if you had a whole bunch of different competing lottery firms they might need to start offering somewhat better odds in order to keep their customers.
Dr. Bernard Lewis explained the terrorists' reasoning this way: "During the Cold War," Dr. Lewis wrote, "two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: 'What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?'" End quote.
I've heard this before, and always thought it was a good reason to decide that whatever the merits of Lewis' academic scholarship, his political judgment is terrible. After all, the Soviet Union was (a) vicious and horrible, and (b) spectacularly unsuccessful. The United States, after all, won the Cold War. Why would you conclude that the United States ought to emulate the Soviet Union? Because our practices have failed to render the country 100 percent immune to terrorist violence? Even from a 9/12 vantage point, as bad as 9/11 was for the United States, the Soviet imperial adventure in Afghanistan was much worse for the Russians. But in keeping with this bizarre mentality, Lewis and his fans like Cheney went on to advocate an imperial adventure in Iraq that, like the Soviet policy initiatives they admire so much, has dealt a more severe blow to the United States than al-Qaeda ever would have been able to pull off on its own.
This is all via Greg Djerejian who aptly notes that "from this premise, use of torture and black-sites and detention without habeas corpus makes all the sense in the world, doesn't it?"
Heaven forbid we would show the sort of cruel indifference to the fate of the Iraqi people that might prevent us from continuing a military operation in which air strikes accidentally kill Iraqi toddlers and other civilians who "were people sleeping on roofs to seek relief from the heat and lack of electricity."
Katherine Seelye notes John McCain's attacks on Mitt Romney: "Mr. McCain goes after down Mr. Romney. He first jabs at Mr. Romney’s line from the last debate that he would consult his lawyers before undertaking a military action. 'Those are the last people I would call in,' Mr. McCain said." McCain is promising us, I guess, that in a McCain Administration military action will be undertaken without regard for the laws and constitution of the United States? How reassuring.
It seems that during tonight's debate, Mike Huckabee worried that were Hillary Clinton to become president we might not have "the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country’s ever faced in Islamofascism." The greatest threat we've ever faced! The astounding thing is that it's barely astounding; at this point, that kind of wild overstatement has become totally banal GOP rhetoric on a par with the random paens to Ronald Reagan.
There's clearly something to what Garance is saying here though to be fair the afflication seems to me to be generalized among male writer/intellectual types rather than Jewish men per se. Still, the main psychological point remains that there's a remarkable tendency to equate advocating that others engage in risky acts of physical violence with the idea of possessing courage and strength as personal characteristics.
I saw this movie yesterday, and wound up liking it quite a bit more than I'd expected. The acting and dialogue is all great, and they only have one clumsily expository scene despite the heavy-handed political theme. Unfortunately, one of the three plot threads the film follows is done in a confusing way for reasons that seem under-motivated, but you don't actually start being confused by it until near the end.
Meanwhile, while making a bunch of other worthy political points in obvious ways, it also did a good job with a subtler point, namely that normal people find the idea of torturing another human being distasteful. And everyone understands that. A normal person isn't going to have the stomach for the torturing job. So, consequently, once you adopt routine torture as a matter of policy you're soon enough going to find that your torturers -- not the Bushes and Cheneys and Yoos but the people who actually need to get their hands dirty -- are going to be people inclined toward sadism. Normal people aren't going to want to be professional torturers, and the ranks of professional torturers are going to be filled with people who like torturing. Like everything about this foul business, of course, that's a terrible way to get accurate information.
Marc Ambinder praises Mitt Romney for finally engaging with his record on health care:
At long last, Romney defended and touted and bragged about the singular political and policy accomplishment of his tenure as Massachusetts governor: the health care system reform that provides every resident there with insurance. Watching him at other debates, it was easy to get the sense that he wasn't sure how to integrate his Massachusetts experience into his campaign narrative. The plan itself was written with the help of Heritage Foundation experts but it did not, in the end, comport with every conservative principle.
But it stands out as an prime example -- perhaps the ultimate example -- of conservative governance. Romney worked hard at health care in Massachusetts; he worked with Democrats; he worked with Republicans; he wound up with a novel program that, while not perfect and not transferable to other states, stands out as a real accomplishment. Romney calls himself an executive and a manager; with health care, he executed and managed in real time.
Sounds intriguing. I was interested to learn more about Romney's plans for health care reform. So I clicked over to the Romney health care issues page where I learned that "The health of our nation can be improved by extending health insurance to all Americans, not through a government program or new taxes, but through market reforms." And that's it. Absolutely no further explanation or elaboration.
Photo by Flickr user ernstl used under a Creative Commons license
Jim Michaels reports for USA Today on the increased use of airpower in Afghanistan and Iraq. Chris Albritton wants it noted that this is not just a strategic disaster, a violation of what we know about counterinsurgency, but also:
Plus, and just as important, they kill civilians, the moral wrongness of which seems to be lost in this story. Yes, it’s good to decrease reasons for locals to hate America, but not killing innocent people is a good unto itself, no? Am I the only one getting tired of seeing civilian casualties as something to be avoided for tactical reasons and not that it’s supposed to be wrong to kill innocent people?
Fred Kaplan had an interesting article last week about ongoing discussions among current and retired military officers as to the best response for military professionals concerned that the country may be moving toward a very unwise war with Iran. The only issue I have with the piece is that it follows its military sources in faulting the conduct of the generals' before the Iraq War. As I've pointed out before, all the relevant policymakers and opinion-leaders were well-aware that most (though by no means all) military officers thought the Bush administration's Iraq policies were misguided -- people just didn't care, there'd been a widespread and successful campaign in the press to convince civilian elites that the career professionals in the military, the foreign service, and the intelligence community were bad sources of advice on policy in the greater Middle East and that we'd be better off relying on the information and analysis provided by conservative think tanks founded by dissidents from the academic and governmental consensus.
All of which is to say that when you read these kind of passages in a newspaper profile of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's views on the world situation, you ought to pay attention and read between the lines a bit:
[Admiral Mike Mullen] rejected the counsel of those who might urge immediate attacks inside Iran to destroy nuclear installations or to stop the flow of explosives that end up as powerful roadside bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan, killing American troops.
With America at war in two Muslim countries, he said, attacking a third Islamic nation in the region “has extraordinary challenges and risks associated with it.” The military option, he said, should be a last resort. [. . .]
“That said, that doesn’t get at the source of it,” he acknowledged. Asked whether the American military should aim at sites inside Iran if intelligence indicated that such interdiction could halt the flow of those bombs, he said “the risks could be very, very high.”
“We’re in a conflict in two countries out there right now,” he added. “We have to be incredibly thoughtful about the potential of in fact getting into a conflict with a third country in that part of the world.”
That's as far as a person in his job can go toward saying publicly "don't let the crazy people inside this administration start a war with Iran!" without seriously violating his constitutional role. So don't say you weren't warned.
Fred Hiatt & Friends, meanwhile, assure us that George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all have the same "centrist and sensible" policies on Iran and it's therefore rude and irresponsible for Obama to suggest that this is an issue voters should consider when voting. Basically, everyone should just calm down and trust the Powers That Be to handle everything properly.
Via Robert Farley it seems that S.S. Bajwa, Deputy Mayor of Delhi, has died as a result of injuries incurred during a monkey attack. It seems that "The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by." They do, however, have a potential solution: One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques."
Photo by Flickr user 13bobby used under a Creative Commons license
"So how many people read your blog?" It's a question I get asked, but it's actually very hard to answer. There's no standard counting method and different traffic-monitoring services give different answers. Of course in some sense it's always been the case that nobody really knows how many people read The Washington Post or watch The Sopranos, but the internet has created an odd combination that provides the illusion of server-derived precision (by one standard, at least, precisely 669 people clicked on the individual page of my "Ghost of Grover Cleveland" post on Friday, generating 844 distinct page views) with the reality that there's simply no widely accepted industry-standard counting method.
The upshot, as Louise Story writes is to substantially retard the development of online advertising and throw the whole future of media into doubt.
My colleague Josh Green has taken a detailed and un-satirical look at campaign tactics Steven Colbert should employ in South Carolina if he really wants to pick up a delegate or three with his PR-stunt presidential campaign:
In the Democratic primary, Colbert’s best bet is the Second District, which encompasses most of the capital city of Columbia, and, more important, has the highest concentration of college students. Though it’s less Democratic than the Sixth District, it has a far higher proportion of white voters, which, in a Democratic primary, is exactly who Colbert needs to target. Even better, Columbia is its own media market. Colbert probably won’t have Obama-like fundraising prowess. But an Internet campaign ought to be able to raise enough cash to run a few well-targeted ads (here again the drunken-college-student demographic could prove valuable).
In this context, though, a Colbert race is probably objectively pro-Hillary, since his most likely supporters are going to be people whose votes Obama needs.
I'll take the path of consistency and say that for the sake of the United States, and the sake of the Kurds, but also for Turkey's sake as well, I hope Turkey doesn't respond to PKK provocations with cross-border military actions that will ultimately fail to solve anything. That said, I do wonder what the apostles of "toughness" and willpower on the right will say about this. Don't they think that the Turks must cross the border in force and show the Kurds what's what? Won't weakness only invite further aggression?
Meanwhile, I recognize that the Kurds are a popular cause in bien pensant Washington while maintaining the viability of the Turkish alliance in the fact of the Armenian Lobby was also a popular cause, but while I think it makes a lot of sense for US diplomats to try to mediate here, I really don't think our troops should be stuck in the crossfire.
Near the top of his Mitt Romney profile, Ryan Lizza gives a good summary of the former governor's many political transformations. A man in New Hampshire introduces himself as a hunter and asks Romney what he's going to do about global warming. Romney notes that "to do that it’s going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we’re going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gases." Lizza comments:
It was a good answer, but also a strange one. Not long ago, Romney released a glossy pamphlet detailing his positions on major issues. He sounded like Al Gore when talking to the environmentalist in New Hampshire, though his policy book’s treatment of global warming reads more like something from ExxonMobil. In it, Romney refers to the “debate” over “how much human activity impacts the environment”—code words for the global-warming-denial crowd. He offers no plan to “dramatically” curtail emissions of CO2, just an aside that “we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse-gas emissions.” As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney, in December, 2005, pulled out of a Northeast-state agreement on carbon reduction—a plan that he had supported the month before.
This is a habit of Romney’s. Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.” He brings a salesman’s bravado and certainty to issues. At a debate in May, when asked how he would respond to a hypothetical situation involving the interrogation of a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, he said, “Some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is that we ought to double Guantánamo.” Elected as a pro-choice governor in 2002—YouTube is flooded with his passionate advocacy of abortion rights—he now presents himself as the most resolute anti-abortion candidate in the Republican field. A Mormon, he sometimes adopts the religious language of Evangelicals when he is addressing conservative Christian groups. To economic conservatives, he pitches himself as the candidate most strongly committed to slashing spending and taxes. (He’s the only major G.O.P. candidate to have signed a formal anti-tax pledge, the sort of move that his spokesman dismissed as “government by gimmickry” in Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.) To national-security conservatives, he is the most hawkish. (He says often that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of Iran, should be indicted under the Genocide Convention, and his campaign has named the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, the vice-chairman of Blackwater, as an adviser.) But, while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the corporate world, it can be costly in politics.
The weird thing is that having flip-flopped and pandered a lot, Romney's campaign seems to feel almost liberated. At this point, it's not worth worrying that any particular thing will earn their candidate a reputation as a liar, a flip-flopper, and a panderer, because his stances on just a few high-profile issues show very clearly that he is a liar, is a flip-flopper, and is a panderer. Thus, they can feel free to pander and flip-flop on everything all the time. This is a stark contrast to, say, Giuliani or McCain who want to try to both trim their sails on some issues, while seeking credit for being straightforward and honest on others. Team Romney, though, always knows that for their guy Expediency Conquers All.
Ilan Goldenberg wonders why the Joint Chiefs, CENTCOM, and the Secretary of Defense all seem to have become the sort of rabid America-haters who would dare disagree with General Petraeus.
Toward the end of a great column on Iran, Fareed Zakaria's references the convenient truth about Iranian senior policymakers -- they want improved relations with the United States, citing the story of James Dobbins, the only person who's ever been actually sent to try to cooperate with Iran: "Dobbins says the Iranians made overtures to have better relations with the United States through him and others in 2001 and later, but got no reply. Even after the Axis of Evil speech, he recalls, they offered to cooperate in Afghanistan. Dobbins took the proposal to a principals meeting in Washington only to have it met with dead silence." Gareth Porter has reported on Iranian overtures from as recently as 2003, and you can read Flynt Leverett on the whole history of this sort of thing.
Unfortunately, even the politicians who do favor more robust diplomacy are so concerned with making themselves sound tough that they wind up obscuring this point. The case for diplomacy, however, isn't that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could use the evil eye on Ayatollah Khameini and make him back down. The case for diplomacy is that US-Iranian conflict is a negative-sum enterprise, that US-Iranian cooperation would be a positive-sum enterprise, and that recent diplomatic history suggests that important elements in Teheran recognize this reality and would welcome a diplomatic opening. Can we be sure that verifiable nuclear disarmament is a price they'd be willing to pay for normalization of relations? We cannot, but it seems likely. And if the US and Iran were settling our differences over the nuclear and regime change issues, then suddenly we'd find that we both share an interest in stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan and checking al-Qaeda. But as long as conflict over nukes and regime change continues, neither side can afford to let the other get the upper hand in either country, probably dooming both to chaos.
I understand that conservatives are eager for a win, and Bobby Jindal's election as governor of Louisiana is a win. What's more, the Louisiana Democrats are no prize pigs, so it's quite possibly even a deserved win. Still, a lot of the crowing from the right seems a bit odd in light of the fact that everyone knows the Louisiana GOP's electoral fortunes have been substantially boosted by demographic changes caused by the destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent failure to rebuild/resettle the displaced people.
Given the large role that the administration's horrifying mishandling of the destruction of a major American city played in the unraveling of Republican popularity, you might expect a little bit more introspection as to how this all came about. I will say, though, that unlike the Ogonowski special election, there very possibly are some broader implications to this result if only because it shows how Louisiana may be a bright spot in the 2008 Senate races as well.
Via Brendan Nyhan, a great Janet Elder article on public misconceptions about Iraq and the manipulation of people's false beliefs for political purposes:
Some conservative political groups, seeking to continue the policies of the Bush Administration, are capitalizing on the murky understanding of some voters about who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and why the United States went to war in Iraq.
One such group, Freedom's Watch, which has ties to the White House, ran television ads in the Philadelphia market and others around the sixth anniversary of the attack — when Gen. David H. Petraeus was also delivering his report to Congress on the progress of the war — suggesting a connection between the war in Iraq and the terrorist attacks. [. . .]
One of the most striking poll findings is the number of people who continue to think Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Depending on how it is asked, more than a third of Americans say Saddam Hussein was personally involved in those attacks. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll in September, 33 percent of the respondents said Saddam Hussein was “personally” involved. In June, when Princeton Survey Research, polling for Newsweek, asked if “Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in planning, financing or carrying out the terrorist attacks,” 41 percent said yes.
There was a time, though, when a majority of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. In a Times/CBS News poll in April 2003, just after the war began, 53 percent of Americans said Saddam Hussein was personally involved. That wide perception didn’t last. By September of that year, 43 percent said Saddam Hussein was involved.
This is a big structural failing of the American elite. It reflects in part the fact that conservative elites have refused to play the role of honest brokers, the preference of the right's main institutions to propagandize their audience rather than seeking to inform them with an honest, factually accurate presentation of the hawkish view of Middle East policy. It also reflects a large failure of our non-ideological institutions, a completely inability of "the establishment" to succeed in setting national discourse on an even keel. And last it reflects the fact that for several years the main opposition institutions in the United States -- most of all the Democratic Party -- failed for years to aggressively push back. For the year months or so after 9/11, "respectable" folks were expected to spend more time and energy worrying about marginal leftists than about the dangerous radicals peddling made-up facts who just so happened to control the institutions of government.
Brian Beutler on the Democrats' bad week. One thing that should be added here is that a lot of Democratic members of congress are unprepared for the new realities of American legislative life because, for the members, those realities basically suck. The days of weak party discipline and relatively low levels of partisan/ideological alignment meant that life as a member of the US House of Representatives was much more pleasant than was life as a member of parliament in Canada or France or what have you. Consequently, a lot of members would like to believe that with the Big Bad DeLay gone they can somehow resuscitate the grand old days of cross-cutting coalitions and free-agent members rather than the dreary business of party discipline and endless legislative trench warfare.
In the real world, though, the causes of partisan polarization are structural and DeLay and Gingrich were just symptoms, or perhaps smart people who understood how to take advantage of the new realities.
I bought this book because I heard it described on the radio (NPR, no less) in a way that made it sound like the dumbest book of the decade. It turns out that it was the summary, and not the book, that was dumb. Indeed, this is a fantastic book by an extremely smart and experienced liberal. It is the first book on the Corruption Required Reading list.
I'm pretty sure I heard that same summary and decided, lacking Lessig's taste for the perverse, that I wanted to avoid this book. Perhaps it's time to reconsider.
These suggestions from Dennis Ross seem mostly on-point and it's nice to see someone with impeccable Serious credentials so totally uninvested in the idea that perpetual occupation is vital to securing American interests. Ezra notes yesterday that Sandy Berger has pretty sound views as well. I think substantial swathes of the Democratic advisor class have evolved their thinking (in a good way) beyond the point where the presidential campaigns are willing to go. That said, the persistence of magical thinking like "basically lock everyone in a room together until they come to an agreement" (from the Ross article) is pretty strange.
Marc Grossman, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey in the mid-1990s, recalled telling his staff to take their own security precautions. After losing embassy employees to attacks, he advised staffers to keep a six-sided die in their glove compartments; to thwart ambushes, they should assign a different route to work to each number, he said, and toss the die as they left home each morning.
Does anyone other than hard-core nerds specify that they're talking about a six-sided die? I feel like normal people don't even realize that they make other kinds.
Photo by Flickr user Colinrego used under a Creative Commons license
Megan O'Rourke summarizes some new research indicating that women may be reluctant to enter some traditionally male-dominated fields in part because they're so . . . male dominated:
A new study published by Psychological Science of undergraduate women majoring in math, science, and engineering found fresh evidence that cues of gender-imbalance negatively affect not only women's performance but their desire to perform. (The study was conducted by Claude Steele and others.) In the study, some women watched a gender-balanced video about an upcoming conference in their field, while others watched a similar video in which male speakers outnumbered female. The participants who watched the latter video "reported a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate in the conference, than did women who viewed the gender-balanced video."
That makes a lot of sense. More at the bottom of this article. Read the original paper (I'll admit that I haven't) in PDF here.
Sam Boyd makes an important point -- just because he was a moderate technocrat before he became a true-blue rightwinger doesn't mean the moderate Mitt is the "real" Mitt. Part of the appeal of his candidacy to conservatives is the plausible notion that he was faking it as a moderate in order to succeed in Massachusetts.
Even more important, it's crucial to recognize that the question of his "real" views has a pretty limited relevance. I'd still prefer him as president to crazy Rudy, and the Moderate Technocrat Era at least gives us reason to think New Model Romney might retain the technocratic competence, but it's not as if once in office Romney is going to blossom into a kind of politician totally different from the one he's currently campaigning as. We're learning about his willingness to adopt whichever views are most politically expedient. And doing something like going back on the reckless "no taxes" pledge he's made on the campaign trail would probably be pretty costly. Obviously, flipping back around on abortion or gay rights would look absurd and there'd be no reason to do it. The Mitt we're gonna get if he wins is substantially the one we're looking at during this campaign season.
Most people realize that the U.S. News and World Reports rankings of America's best colleges are a bit silly. What they tend not to realize is that since a change in rankings has real impact on a college administrator's career, real things happen in higher education in an effort to move up the rankings, and this has real -- and very bad -- consequences. Kevin Carey has one example here, noting that a large proportion of the U.S. News score is based on pure input measures (spending per student, etc.) rather than anything related to educational outcomes:
That tranlsates into incentives that virtually guarantee inefficiency and constantly rising costs. If a university were able to figure out how to reduce its costs by, say, 10 percent, while holding quality constant, and it chose to pass those savings along to its customers in the form of a tuition decrease, its U.S. News rankings would go down. If, on the other hand, it became 10 percent less efficient and passed the cost onto customers in the form a tuition increase (not a hard thing to do if you're a selective college), its ranking would go up.
But nothing's good for magazine sales like a much-discussed list, and so the madness continues.
I agree with Kevin Drum. It’s befuddling that the weekend’s news about the Higazy decision and the FBI’s attempt to censor the details of their conduct in the case out of the judges opinion has gone largely unremarked.
Basically, the FBI coerced an innocent man into confessing by threatening his family with torture, eventually the man's innocence became clear and an appeals court ruled in his favor, but the opinion was swiftly pulled off the web. Then up came a new version:
The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified. Just as the opinion gets interesting, when we are about to learn how an FBI agent named Templeton squeezed the "truth" out of Higazy, the opinion reads at page 7: "This opinion has been redacted because portions of the record are under seal. For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy's statements were coerced."
The new rule of law -- even when your banana republic antics get caught and exposed, you can use the cover of national security secrets to keep the facts obscured. Welcome to America.
It's a little sad that, as a country, we've reached a point where the Center for American Progress feels the need to publish an "Islamofascism Awareness Week" Response Kit, but it led to a funny picture and it's nowhere near as sad as the fact that we live in a country where there's a serious "Islamofascism Awareness Week" campaign under way.
To observe these patterns, and warn against them (including the disastrous consequences of attacking Iran), is not to be anti-Armenian, anti-Orthodox, anti-Cuban, anti-Catholic, or anti-Semitic. Nor is it to deny that members of each lobby claim, and probably believe, that what they're recommending is best for America too. But in these cases they're wrong.
For his trouble, naturally, Commentary's Gabriel Schoenfeld responds by quoting Fallows in a way that elides all reference to Cubans and Armenians and then accuses Fallows of singling out the Jews: "But why is this game played only one way, with America’s Jews the primary target?"
Um....
Fallows says he's becoming "nostalgic for the comparative 'honesty' of the Chinese state media."
Danny Postel takes a look at neoconservative affection for the weird Stalinist/Saddamist terrorist cult MEK. One of the causes of the failure of Iranian peace overtures in the post-9/11 era is that after the fall of Baghdad, Iran proposed a swap whereby we'd gain custody of some al-Qaeda dudes in exchange for us handing some MEK guys we'd found in Iraq over to Teheran, but the powers that be preferred to keep the option of unleashing Saddam's favorite terrorist group against Iran as a policy option for down the road.
I've noted before that while I don't know much about the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, it seems to have all the right enemies. Well, here comes Kate Sheppard with an article that explains it all and why it's important that we ratify it.
Guardian Americalaunches today at last, spearheaded by a great Mike Tomasky interview of Hillary Clinton, in which he bores down and asks her some really good questions. This exchange is particularly noteworthy:
Do you think that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, or do you think they have specific geopolitical objectives?
Well, I believe that terrorism is a tool that has been utilized throughout history to achieve certain objectives. Some have been ideological, others territorial. There are personality-driven terroristic objectives. The bottom line is, you can't lump all terrorists together. And I think we've got to do a much better job of clarifying what are the motivations, the raisons d'être of terrorists. I mean, what the Tamil Tigers are fighting for in Sri Lanka, or the Basque separatists in Spain, or the insurgents in al-Anbar province may only be connected by tactics. They may not share all that much in terms of what is the philosophical or ideological underpinning. And I think one of our mistakes has been painting with such a broad brush, which has not been particularly helpful in understanding what it is we were up against when it comes to those who pursue terrorism for whichever ends they're seeking.
It sounds like you're saying it's not particularly useful when Bush and others say terrorists hate us for our freedoms?
Well, some do. But is that a diagnosis? I don't think it's proven to be an effective one.
She seems to have the right answer here, at the end of the day, but she's very cautious about saying it. I wonder about this. It would be fantastic, of course, to have a president in the White House with a less addled substantive understanding of these issues. At the same time, I think it's necessary at some point to seize the whole conceptual framework that's been dominating debate in this country since 9/11 by the horns and throw it to the ground. Obama and Edwards have both shown far more inclination to do this than has Clinton (in part, obviously, because the exigencies of the campaign have forced them to) which is an important consideration in their favor.
The good news out of Iraq is that "Iraqi officials said today that they would move to halt the activity of Kurdish rebels who have been striking across the border from northern Iraq, a promise delivered amid a flurry of international diplomatic efforts to prevent a widening conflict between the two countries." The bad news, of course, is that Iraqi officials don't have any practical authority over events in Kurdistan so this is all meaningless.
All throughout the article we're hearing about commitments made by Maliki, calls to Maliki, meetings with Maliki, etc., etc., etc. But Maliki's irrelevant!
Jon Chait has a brilliant piece on "entitlement hysteria", noting that despite the pundits' obsession with Social Security, the entitlement problem is really a Medicare problem which, in turn, is really a health care problem:
Since you can't solve the entitlement problem without solving the health care problem, one might think that the entitlement hysterics would have gradually moved on to becoming health care hysterics. (There's also the fact that Social Security is solvent until 2041, but over 40 million Americans lack health insurance right now.) Yet this is another puzzling thing about entitlement hysteria: the sheer persistence of the obsession. It's true we have some large federal programs that are going to have to be shored up. But why do they consider this to be a matter of such unique urgency? Put aside the war in Iraq, for which plenty of people (including me) lack any confident solution. In addition to the health care crisis, there's global warming. There are numerous loosely secured nuclear sites throughout the world, any one of which could some day provide the raw material for a terrorist attack of unprecedented scale. There are numerous diseases threatening the lives of millions of Africans whose deaths could be prevented at relatively modest expense.
These other calamities have one thing in common: The consequences of inaction are permanent. Carbon released into the atmosphere can never be recovered. Africans who die from aids can't be brought back to life. And fissile material captured by terrorists can't very easily be taken back.
Meanwhile, of course, health care is precisely the issue that the candidates are offering plans on. But acknowledging that the current debate is, in fact, presenting important choices on issues of vital importance would put political journalists in an awkward position. Rather than posturing, you'd need to respond to that reality by trying to inform yourself about the issues at hand and the meanings of the rival camps' proposals to deal with them. Instead, it's more comforting to complain that nobody has the courage necessary to talk about cutting Social Security benefits.
As in the Cold War, foreign-policy hawkishness has become the glue holding the fragile GOP coalition together, even as Iraq has made foreign policy a general-election liability for the Right, instead of the asset it was in the Reagan years. Which is one way to explain the weird aftermath of the '06 debacle, in which social conservatives and fiscal conservatives each blamed one another for the defeat, when it was perfectly clear that the Iraq War had more to do the party's degringolade than the corruption of the small-government movement or the excesses of the religious right.
Maybe. But I'll say this. I get the sense that Republicans think that while Iraq may now be a bad issue for their party, that things like unconstitutional surveillance, arbitrary and indefinite detention, and routine torture are big-time winning issues for the GOP. So they like the hawkish posture, even if Iraq's been a problem. That's how it seems to me.
Beyond that, I can also say for a fact that that's how it seems to an awful lot of Democrats. Talk to people on the Hill or people involved in messaging, and there's just no confidence that they could win a big high-profile standoff with Bush on pretty much any issue related to terrorism. There's a critical margin of members who just won't back any position that can't also attract substantial Republican backing to provide "cover."
Reading the Clinton/Tomasky interview, Greg Sargent rather enthusiastically notes that in it "she vows as President to conduct a systematic review of the ways in which the Bush administration has hoarded executive power -- a review, she claims, that could actually cause her to relinquis some of those powers." David Kurtz follows through on the TPM homepage: "Hillary Clinton promises a systematic review of the Bush administration's executive power grab if elected--with an eye toward relinquishing some of those powers."
I think this isn't the best reading of what happened. Mike shrewdly asked her "what specific powers might you relinquish as president, or renegotiate with Congress - for example the power to declare a US citizen an enemy combatant?" and Clinton . . . didn't come up with anything. Instead, she vaguely replied:
Well, I think it is clear that the power grab undertaken by the Bush-Cheney administration has gone much further than any other president and has been sustained for longer. Other presidents, like Lincoln, have had to take on extraordinary powers but would later go to the Congress for either ratification or rejection. But when you take the view that they're not extraordinary powers, but they're inherent powers that reside in the office and therefore you have neither obligation to request permission nor to ask for ratification, we're in a new territory here. And I think that I'm gonna have to review everything they've done because I've been on the receiving end of that. There were a lot of actions which they took that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted or that in my view that was inherent in the constitution. There were other actions they've taken which could have obtained congressional authorization but they deliberately chose not to pursue it as a matter of principle.
Basically, she's telling liberals she'll roll back executive power but she's not committing herself to doing anything in particular. Basically, as Charlie Savage wrote for our October issue, I wouldn't count on any future administration voluntarily relinquishing the powers Bush has seized. Maybe some future congress will take power back, but people don't do that kind of thing voluntarily. That's what Clinton's telling us.
I'd been a little unsure what to think of the Charlotte Bobcats' prospects. It seemed to me that they could, in principle, be a playoff team in the weak east. In practice, though, this is a team that appeared determined to give major minutes to its worst player in order to avoid admitting that they shouldn't have drafted him. But now with Adam Morrison out for the year with a knee injury, there may be some hope for him yet. Then again, any organization that could have given Morrison thirty minutes per game last season can surely find whole new things to screw up.
Hollinger's preseason writeup for Charlotte had said of Morrison "he's either going to get better or he's not going to play, but there's no way he's going to soak up 2,000 minutes and be as abysmally bad as he was last season," but I'm really not sure why he was so optimistic that they would come to their senses had injury not forced their hand.
Like my Atlantic predecessor Henry David Thoreau, I greatly enjoyed the time I spent on Lake Chesuncook and around Mount Katahdin but my prose style's not really up to his standard.
For every word written or spoken about the influence of Cuban-Americans or Armenian-Americans on U.S. politics & policy, (insert gigantic number) are written & spoken about the influence of Jewish Americans. [...] Which is not to say that Jews shouldn't be singled out in this respect. Perhaps they should. (There are certainly valid reasons to think that U.S. policy in the Middle East is more important than the Cuba Embargo or silly resolutions about century-old stuff.) But let's not pretend that they are not singled out. Of course they are, which is why "The Cuba Lobby" and "The Armenia Lobby" are not exactly rocketing up the best-seller lists.
I think this is wrong. The reason The Cuba Lobby and US Foreign Policy isn't flying off the shelves is that it would be so ridiculously banal to write a book with the thesis that the Cuban exile community centered in South Florida is the dominant influence on America's Cuba policy. People say this all the time, in mainstream publications, and nobody bats an eye because it's obviously true. Similarly, all accounts of US policy toward Azerbaijan in the 1990s or congressional attitudes toward the genocide resolution highlight the dominant role played by Armenian-American political pressure in these initiatives. You might write a book or an article about the issue (the Caucuses, Cuba, etc.) but you wouldn't write something with the thesis "there's an influential Cuba Lobby" because that's dull and obvious.
Contrary to what Garance writes here, notwithstanding the irrelevance of the "real" Mitt Romney, I continue to stand by the view that I'd prefer President Romney to President Rudy Giuliani, President Fred Thompson, President John McCain, President Tom Tancredo, etc. A lot of people seem resistant to the basic logical point that one of the Republicans has to be preferable to the other Republicans. And that person is Mitt Romney.
It seems that some of my libertarian friends have been miffed recently by liberal allegations that they're greedy. Insofar as I wanted to make the allegation stick, I would argue that rightwing pundits and so forth are greedy not because they stand to reap enormous personal financial benefits from their pro-rich-people political agenda, but because they stand to reap relatively enormous personal financial benefits from their willingness to argue the pro-rich-people line. There's more money to be made in the field of conservative political activism and propaganda work, because the right's activist institutions are better-financed.
That said, I would strongly, strongly, strongly caution liberals against making non-greediness some kind of core political virtue. There's a certain strand of self-regard, a shortsighted meanness of spirit and neglect of public purpose, that's incompatible with the spirit of modern egalitarian liberalism, but mostly the whole point of the enterprise is to convince people that liberalism will make you better off. It won't, of course, make literally everyone better off, but the pitch is that the vast majority of people would benefit from living in a society with high quality public services, adequate environmental protections, a foreign policy focused on international cooperation, and a healthy regard for individual autonomy.
I briefly considered responding to Christopher Hitchens' defense of "Islamofascism" (the term not the doctrine) via a roundabout discussion of Orwell fetishism, but suffice it to say that I identify with the pragmatist tradition and the thing to ask about a term like this is what does "Islamofascism" do.
And it's pretty clear what it does, namely provide a spurious patina of unity and sameness to diverse phenomena involving Muslims Behaving Badly so that al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Assad, Saddam, Iraqi insurgents, Somali Islamists, plus sundry oppressive folk practices common in portions of the Islamic world like female genital mutilation in parts of Africa, "honor killings" in parts of South Asia, etc. The question to ask ourselves is what, if anything, is accomplished by devising and deploying a term that unites all those phenomena. If you want to use emotional outrage at 9/11 to leverage political support for an invasion of Iraq, then the answer is obviously "yes." Similarly, if you want to leverage outrage at 9/11 into political support for a bombing campaign in Iran then the answer is "yes."
But I don't want to do either of those things, and, indeed, I think the people who do like to do those things are having an immensely detrimental impact on our ability to understand events in the contemporary world and pull the United States out of the foreign policy tailspin we've been in recently. Which is a long way of saying, I'm not buying.
The other thing to observe here is that this "zone" -- the list of countries with which the US has current or pending free trade agreements -- has nothing whatsoever to do with Ronald Reagan and doesn't constitute a zone in any meaningful sense since the agreements differ from country to country and some of them are purely bilateral. Romney may be the least pernicious Republican but he's still quite the buffoon.
I saw Paul Krugman speak last night to a packed house at Temple Sinai at a book event organized by DC's famous Politics & Prose bookstore for his The Conscience of a Liberal. The audience was clearly interested in what Krugman had to say about his book, which focuses almost entirely on the political economy of wealth and income inequality, but by far the biggest moment of the night was when he mentioned offhand in response to a question that he's "very disappointed" in the Democratic congressional majority's inability to end the war.
That prompted enormous applause from the crowd. So enormous, in fact, that I think he felt the need to start walking it back, taking account of the objective difficulty of the math in the House and (especially) Senate and putting the real onus where it belongs -- on the Republicans. And those are, of course, fair points. But still it is hard to shake the sense that a lot of Democratic members and strategists and assorted other hacks basically just don't think there's any wastage of lives and money in Iraq that it's worth taking political risks to prevent.
I was reading the Express on the Metro this morning and it had a whole big (by the standards of the paper) section about how to buy your first home. Nowhere was the worry that one might be buying into a market that's still on its way down so much as considered. I'm not saying anyone who buys a house right now is buying into a downward-trending market (if I thought I could forecast asset price changes accurately, I'd get into another line of work) but it seems like an obvious concern people might have. No more obvious, though, than the fact that the advertising in the section came pretty much exclusively from condo developers who, presumably, aren't so interested in a rigorous look at this issue.
Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY, indeed, my home district) and William Delahunt (D-MA) are circulating a letter to colleagues about their "American Anti-Torture Act of 2007." Time was one would assume an act with that title was some kind of scheme to prevent torture abroad -- some set of measures aimed at sanctioning regimes who practice torture or something like that -- though these days of course we recognize that Nadler and Delahunt are talking about preventing the United States from torturing people. The basic point of the act is to expand the McCain Amendment's prohibition on torture to all government agencies, so that, for example, detainees in CIA custody will also be governed by the interrogation standards called for in the Army Field Manual. Full text below the fold:
A journalist friend of mine saw this story about Alan Placa and assumed that the news that Rudy Giuliani has long employed a known child molester must be breaking news. After all, if that had come out earlier, surely it would have destroyed him by now. I was trying to explain that, no, he'd weathered this unscathed because . . . but I really can't come up with anything. Where are you Fred Thompson? Mitt Romney? Doesn't someone think the GOP needs to be involved in fewer sordid sex scandals?
It's been argued to me that the Reagan Zone of Economic Freedom isn't even the dumbest Reagan-related slide in that Romney slide show. Here we have a chart of the historical determinants of economic progress in America. There turn out to have been only three of them -- the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the GATT agreement, and the election of Ronald Reagan.
There's so much wrong with this chart that I hardly know where to begin, but for starters though Smoot-Hawley was surely a mistake are we really supposed to believe it was the sole cause of the Great Depression?
I remember a time when Marc Lynch was a junior professor blogging pseudonymously as Abu Aardvark at least in part because he feared negative consequences for his career (Campus Watch on other institutions exist for the sole purpose of trying to intimidate Middle East Studies professors out of expressing insufficiently hawkish political opinions) and occasionally having his ideas quoted by liberal bloggers. And now what's in my morning Tom Friedman:
“We have created a real case of moral hazard in Iraq,” said Marc Lynch, a Middle East specialist at George Washington University. “Because all the key players think the Americans are going to bail them out, they have no incentive to make any real concessions to one another.”
In the aftermath of 9/11 there were a lot of people out there in academia and in the government and to some extent in the think tank world as well who had a lot of knowledge to offer the country. Unfortunately, though, those voices mostly weren't heard by people who matter (many of them were, however, featured in the November 2002 Atlantic). Not just by the people running the government, but also by the broader community of opinion leaders including many left-of-center people. That we're seeing voices like Lynch's start to get heard in prominent fora like a Tom Friedman column is a good sign and I like to think the progressive blogosphere's played a role in making it happen.
Heather Hurlburt on Rudy Giuliani's efforts to re-invent himself as a Red Sox fan: "That would be the sports equivalent of, say, wrapping yourself in a major national tragedy for purely political reasons? Getting married three times and then discovering that other people's behavior puts our social fabric at risk?"
Felix Salmon notes some evidence of Chinese openness to a serious effort to reduce carbon emissions, in particular this joint Sino-Brazilian report featuring a forward Lu Yongxiang, president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences which argues that "Concerted efforts should be mounted for improving energy efficiency and reducing the carbon intensity of the world economy, including the worldwide introduction of price signals for carbon emissions with consideration of different economic and energy systems in individual countries."
Not perfect by any means, but better than what we get from the Bush administration.
More play for the weirdly ignored Alan Placa issue from Melinda Henneberger at Slate's newish XX Factor blog (I hope men read the site; it's very good but seems to have been branded in a way that may prevent people from checking it out). To try to put a little more substance behind the simple fact that it's odd that Rudy would choose to surround himself with a child molester, this seems to be part of a broader pattern of questionable personnel decisions in Giuliani's career, going all the way back to firing Bill Bratton for being too successful, the whole Bernard Kerik mess, etc.
One thing we've seen during the Bush years is that these kind of staffing decisions matter. What you want is a president who thinks to himself, "if I mostly populate the government with qualified people who know what they're doing, the government will be run well and that will reflect well on me in ways that serve my interests." What you don't want is someone who thinks that the ability to give out jobs is primarily about building a patronage network of loyalists who owe you big-time because nobody else would touch them with a ten foot pole.
So it was 80 degrees yesterday. Yesterday was also October 23. That's unusual. But it hasn't been unusual for this fall in Washington, DC. When I went apple picking a few weeks ago, it was incredibly hot -- summerish -- not good weather for a classic fall activity. But they said the orchard was going to be closed for further picking after that weekend, because thanks to the massive drought sweeping the southeastern US, the trees were going to be no good after that. The good news, though, was that the bizarre weather meant this might be the best year ever for Virginia wines.
Meanwhile, much of California appears to be on fire as drought conditions and unusual winds make it more difficult than it's usually been to contain the wildfires. Watching displaced people taking shelter in Qualcomm Stadium one wonders if this -- huddled masses of American refugees in NFL stadiums -- won't be the iconic image of the Bush years. One also wonders if it'll be the iconic image of the American future.
No doubt one can't scientifically prove that Katrina wouldn't have been so bad, or that yesterday's weather would have been more pleasant, or that orchards in Maryland would be healthier, or southern Californians safer from fire if only the Kyoto Protocol had been ratified seven or eight years ago. The weather is just too hard to model in detail. But this seems certain to be the kind of thing we can expect more and more of in years to come if the planet keeps getting warmer, a stark reminder that while the price of building a low carbon economy may be high, doing nothing is hardly a cost-free alternative.
The Maher Arar case takes a turn for the preposterous as Condoleeza Rice "admitted on Wednesday the United States had mishandled" his case but "stopped short of an apology." So, what, it was mishandled but she's not sorry it was mishandled? Why not? Meanwhile, if she's suffering from Alzheimer's maybe she ought to resign:
Rice did not apologize in the hearing and avoided directly answering a question from Massachusetts Democrat Rep. William Delahunt who asked if she knew Arar was tortured in Syria.
"You are aware of the fact that he was tortured?" Delahunt asked.
"I am aware of claims that were made," she responded.
But when asked if the United States had received any diplomatic assurances from Syria that Arar would not be tortured, Rice said her memory of the events had faded and she would have to respond later to the question.
Uh huh. It's kind of shocking how this administration ricocheted so quickly between outsourcing torture to Syria to refusing to have any diplomatic relations with Syria. There's a happy middle ground where you show a willingness to conduct diplomacy with "bad guy" regimes but don't actually engage in the practices that make them bad guys.
Eric Martin wonders why if I acknowledge that the greater boldness of the Obama and Edwards campaigns in challenging the conservative meta-narrative about terrorism is driven in part by political considerations that I still consider it an important development.
The biggest reason is that it's wrong to think that politics is something that happens on the campaign trail and then in office the politicians follow their "real" beliefs. If John Edwards campaigns and wins on a strategy of bold economic populism, it's likely he'll govern as someone who believes that bold economic populism is a solid route to a successful presidency. If Barack Obama campaigns as someone who takes on the hawkish Beltway CW on foreign policy, then it's likely he'll govern as someone who believes he has nothing to fear from the Washington Post editorial page. Of course these kind of things can change as somebody governs.
Similarly, even thought I think it was the Clinton campaign's first instinct to offer a timid health care proposal, it was also the Clinton campaign's first instinct to try to neutralize all the key Democratic interest groups, and so a combination of SEIU and Edwards essentially forced Clinton to offer a bold proposal. But now that that proposal is on the table, it doesn't go off the table whether or not it's "real." The proposal will be debated, and if Clinton wins it'll have scored a win. Meanwhile, the people inside Clinton's camp who were advocates of bolder thinking on health care are empowered by the production of a plan and the need to have an argument about it.
At the end of the day, it's not about finding the candidate who "really" has the best views. Instead, insofar as the issues matter to you (and, obviously, there are considerations beyond "the issues" in play) it's about finding the candidate who has the best platform. We can't peer into their souls and we don't really need to.
Apparently The New Yorker now runs web-only articles (who knew?) and one of them is this great James Surowiecki piece about the Laffer acolytes of the world. Since I've sort of blogged this general subject to death already, though, it's worth echoing a point that Hacker and Pierson make in Off Center, namely that this bogus idea about tax cuts and revenue is just one of several arrows in a quiver that's designed to obscure the existence of real tradeoffs when the subject of tax policy gets debated.
At the end of the day, it's just very hard to get people agitated about even the most regressive tax cut imaginable simply because the number of people motivated by pure resentment against the hyper-rich turns out to be pretty small. On top of that, these cuts are usually structured so as to at least throw a bone to the common man. I get $50 while some much richer person gets $50,000 and though I might wish I'd gotten more, at least I'm walking away with $50. But if the proposal on the table were structured explicitly as a choice between that and a different plan wherein the $50,050 goes to guarantee health insurance and a day care subsidy for me and for the rich guy, then suddenly the programs look like a much better deal.
Thus even when spending cuts are put on the table legislatively, it's always done as a separate piece of legislation from the tax cuts. Meanwhile moderate (i.e., vulnerable) Republicans who wouldn't necessarily embrace Lafferite dogma explicitly have a tendency to vote for tax cuts but then against the spending restraint measures required by the logic of tax cutting. Obviously, trying to avoid explicit discussion of tradeoffs is a trick of the trade beloved by politicians of all stripes all around the world, but the Laffer concept is an uncommonly effective tactic since the US press adamantly refuses to treat it as a "gaffe" when a Republican politician goes and puts patently untrue claims at the center of his economic policy.
Stephen Colbert draws 13 percent in hypothetical three-way matchup with Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. Somewhat surprisingly, this doesn't just come from reducing Clinton's vote share. Instead, in the three-way matchup she secures a commanding 45-35 win over Rudy. This is all mostly meaningless, but I think it's evidence that an anti-Giuliani spoiler candidate (Tancredo? Paul? Buchanan?) could find an audience . . . there's an evident disaffection with the Republican options.
Perhaps this is just pointless hairsplitting, but I feel I should say that while I'm not at all happy with the precedents Bush is setting with regard to presidential power, that I think the case for strong executive power as such is actually pretty strong. The trouble comes from the nexus between the strong executive and other aspects of the American constitutional system. A Prime Minister in a multi-party democracy with coalition governments (or something like Japan's factions system) granted broad discretion in terms of his powers could, if that discretion was used in an abusive or inept manner, be removed from office and the broad discretionary power placed in the hands of someone either more wise or more cautious.
In the American system, though, the president serves a fixed term and you're only supposed to remove from office for actual criminality. Simply making bad or even abusive decisions doesn't count. Under the circumstances, then, you need it to be the case that abuses are formally prohibited by law. This doesn't always seem optimally flexible, and it probably isn't, but the system requires inflexibility because fairly tight legal constraint of executive authority is a necessary complement to the post's very broad levels of political discretion. The President of the United States, as we've been seeing the past two years, can basically do what he wants know matter how unpopular he becomes or his specific decisions are.
Which is precisely what makes these theories that there's no legal constraint on the President's freedom of action so frightening -- if there's no legal constraint then there's no constraint whatsoever.
As an addendum to this post, let me note that it's not the case, as what I wrote implied, that the United States doesn't have diplomatic relations with Syria. That's a formal step that we haven't taken. Instead, we're just in a weird state where we don't actually conduct diplomacy with Syria -- nobody takes the Syrian ambassador's calls, our chargé d'affaires in Damascus isn't laying the groundwork for higher level talks, nothing. Apologies for any confusion.
Everyone's talking about this Pew report's demonstration of an inverse correlation between national wealth and national religiosity, complete with a big-time outlier for the USA, but I'm more interested in their findings on globalization. Specifically, check out this chart I made using their data just from rich countries on public attitudes toward "trade" and toward "free markets." Basically, there's no correlation here at all, which is pretty contrary to the tenor of public debate wherein trade skeptics tend to be skeptics about the virtues of the market more generally.
In public opinion, though, the main trend seems to be that smaller countries are more enthusiastic about trade -- presumably because people can see the downsides to reduced trade more clearly in places with smaller internal markets and more classes of goods that would be totally unavailable absent imports.
Stepped-up border enforcement appears to be having some impact, shutting down traditional mom-and-pop people smuggling efforts and driving more clients to larger, more professionalized organized crime operations often involved in the drug smuggling business. And so it goes. I wouldn't say cracking down on illegal immigration is a huge priority for me, but by any standard border enforcement is a relatively ineffective way to go about it. Well-designed systems to make it harder for illegals to get jobs and rent houses would make coming to the United States illegally much less attractive. The strong incentives to cross the border, rather than the physical feasibility of doing it, is why so many people cross.
The conventions of newspaper writing dictate that something like Michael Cooper and Marc Santora doing a The New York Times article about Rudy Giuliani's decision to surround himself with dangerous lunatics can't call them "dangerous lunatics." Instead, you get this kind of deadpan humor:
Mr. Giuliani’s team includes Norman Podhoretz, a prominent neoconservative who advocates bombing Iran “as soon as it is logistically possible”; Daniel Pipes, the director of the Middle East Forum, who has called for profiling Muslims at airports and scrutinizing American Muslims in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps; and Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written in favor of revoking the United States’ ban on assassination.
The campaign says that the foreign policy team, which also includes scholars and experts with different policy approaches, is meant to give Mr. Giuliani a variety of perspectives.
By the end of the piece, I even learn that Giuliani thinks trying to broker a settlement of the Israel-Arab conflict was a "mistake" and even a "debacle" so I guess Rudy is at least consistent in prescribing endless war as a preferred policy for everyone.
Check out Brian Beutler on the state-of-play on the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill. The question I'm pondering about this bill is the role of the president. As best I can tell, Bush is remorselessly opposed to anything that would even be in the neighborhood of an adequate response to climate change. He opposes any mandatory reductions in carbon emissions, and preventing catastrophic climate change requires large mandatory reductions in carbon emissions.
This makes the Lieberman-Warner enterprise of trying to craft a more moderate, more business-friendly climate change plan that can attract broader support look possibly quixotic. We're not really talking about half a loaf today versus holding out for the full loaf tomorrow -- Bush isn't signing any kind of loaf. In essence, it's all kabuki, which is often the case in congress. But I don't understand what kind of kabuki it is and what the different groups are trying to accomplish.
The political cost to progressives and liberals for their inability to properly deal with this tactic is greater than they realize. Just as Newt Gingrich was not truly offended by Bill Clinton's behavior (which mirrored his own) neither were conservative congressmen and Rush Limbaugh truly upset by the Move On ad --- and everyone knew it, which was the point. It is a potent demonstration of pure power to force others to insincerely condemn or apologize for something, particularly when the person who is forcing it is also insincerely outraged. For a political party that suffers from a reputation for weakness, it is extremely damaging to be so publicly cowed over and over again. It separates them from their most ardent supporters and makes them appear guilty and unprincipled to the public at large.
I think there's a passage in one of Milan Kundera's books about how the Communist Party would ask grocers to put up signs saying "I Support the Communist Party" (or something) even though both the party and the customers all knew that the sign was insincere. The point, though, wasn't to trick anyone into thinking that the grocer supported the Communists or that the Communists cared whether or not the grocer supported them. The point was just to demonstrate that they could lean on the grocer to put up the sign, and the grocer would do it. Thus, everyone knew that the grocer was a broken man, not least the grocer himself who thus forth would find it that much harder to take himself and his opinions seriously.
These ritual denunciations are like that.
And of course the trap grows tighter each time it happens. The more the precedent piles up that fake Republican outrage should be met by fake Democratic disavowal, the more it becomes the case that it's politically easier to meet fake outrage with a fake disavowal. But at some point, unless Democrats are happy being the Party That Always Loses (and I think there's good reason to think that the consultants who run the party don't really mind) they need to stop doing this and act like people with some self-respect.
Ed Kilgore offers a mixed review of Mark Penn's ludicrous Microtrends that takes a whack at Penn detractors:
A sprawling book like Microtrends, which purports to identify seventy-five distinct subcategories (sixty-four American, and eleven international) of people who have yet to get noticed by corporate and political marketers, provides plenty of targets for Penn detractors. In a review for In These Times, Ezra Klein cherry-picked some of the sillier and sloppier sections of the book, and constructed a demolition not just of Penn, but of political pollsters generally.
Ed doesn't approve of deploying the book in this way, but it seems like a telling concession to me. Penn, after all, is a political pollster. A highly respected and highly successful political pollster. And yet it's possible to "cherry-pick" several instances of sloppy or mishandled interpretation of survey data from Mark Penn's book. That seems important to me. Sometimes cherry picking is bad. But a person who purports to be a professional collector and analyst of survey data should rarely if ever make elementary analytical mistakes. Certainly he shouldn't make them in a book. It tells you something about the state of the profession that one of its leading practitioners can routinely make mistakes like this:
Not surprisingly, men are more flirtation at work than women (66 versus 52 percent, according to one survey); and substantially more men (45 percent) have had an interoffice romance than women (35 percent). That latter discrepency either means that men are serial Office Romancers; that men are more honest about this; that women more often leave the workplace after having an affair; or that some of those men's affairs are homosexual. I think the first theory is most likely -- the office has become the twenty-first century singles bar. Water is the new gin and tonic, and Muzak the new club beat.
That's dumb. Obviously, of those explanations the one that's "most likely" to be true is that some of those men's affairs are homosexual since we're absolutely sure that some men are gay men and that, therefore, some affairs are gay affairs. What Penn means is that he doesn't believe gay men fully explain the gap, and he's using the wrong words because he doesn't understand what he's talking about.
Another possibility he rejects as unlikely is that this has to do with women leaving the workforce. But, again, we know it's true that women are more likely to drop out of the workforce (after childbirth, for example) and that, therefore, the men in the workforce are older on average than the women and therefore likely to have more experiences in general than are women.
He also rejects the possibility of an honesty gap. And, indeed, anyone who knew anything about survey data (i.e., not professional survey data analyzer Mark Penn) would tell you that a gap between male and female self-reports of sexual activity is typical.
Last, after rejecting as unlikely three things that are definitely true, he homes in on the "most likely" explanation for why a higher proportion of men than women have office affairs -- "men are serial Office Romancers." The only problem here is that Penn's preferred explanation is inconsistent with the data! If (as Penn falsely believes) no gay people have jobs, men and women drop out of the workforce at the same rate, and men and women both accurately self-report their data, then Penn's result could only be explained by women being serial Office Romancers.
And though Ezra stands accusing of "cherry-picking" he didn't fit this into his review, nor did he mention the bizarre snipers poll that Penn uncritically accepts. There's a serious question here about Penn's field that someone who's this sloppy at the handling of his subject matter can be a leading member of the profession.
Check out Corine Hegland's account of the issues in play (PDF) in the Law of the Sea Treaty. She's doing neutral reporting, so she doesn't come out and say that there's little to the opponents' case besides vague paranoia but she also make it clear that there's little to the opponents' case besides vague paranoia.
Kevin Drum wants to know what liberals are whining about exactly:
So here's my question: when we blogosphere types complain about this weak-kneed attitude, are we complaining because (a) we think the centrists are wrong; they could keep their seats in marginal districts even if they toed the progressive line on national security issues. Or (b) because we don't care; they should do the right thing even if it means losing next November?
Here's the thing. I can't guarantee that standing up against a corrupt, unpopular, and incompetent president's right to grant retroactive legal protections to large corporations for their complicity in illegal spying won't lead anyone to electoral defeat. What I can say is that the evidence that it will lead to electoral defeat doesn't seem incredibly compelling. Democratic efforts to hug the GOP on security and fight elections on other issues didn't pay much in the way of dividends when they were tried. The desire to avoid fights on these issues seems to me to largely reflect a kind of laziness. If the people advising the party on how to win elections don't think it's possible to craft compelling speeches, sound bites, advertisements, etc. around liberal views on national security policy, then someone needs to fire all of those people and hire some new people who are willing to give it a shot.
Alternatively, if they want to endorse Bush-like policies -- labeling elements of the Iranian military a terrorist group, saying that we need to keep threatening to launch an unprovoked preventive war on Iran, saying that companies that participate in illegal surveillance should be retroactively immunized from legal responsibility for their lawbreaking, etc. -- they ought to at least find a way to appear that they believe these things. I'm not sure what the political upside is supposed to be to transparently caving. It prevents you from mounting an argument that might convince anyone you're right. It demoralizes the people who agree with you. And people who care passionately about taking the side of authoritarianism and militarism are still going to see the Republicans as the go-to party for that stuff.
Yesterday, Tyler Cowen revealed his Angry Ape Theory of American politics: "Under this theory foreign policy disasters, no matter who caused them, will help the Republican candidate. We will demand An Angrier Ape." That theory may or may not be correct, but the last thing you need is for Democratic political strategy to be framed by people who think it's correct. That just guarantees loss. You need to find people who think they can persuade the public that an Angry Ape isn't the way to go and let those people have a crack at it.
Bernard Sanders introduces the "Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act of 2007" and it's a good idea. Insofar as one wants government action to provide pharmaceutical companies with a profit boost as a means of encouraging R&D efforts, it makes much more sense for the government to do this by giving the company a big pile of cash than to do it by using the law enforcement apparatus to grant the company an exclusive monopoly over the right to the medicine. Obviously, there are some administrative difficulties in involved in organizing something like this properly but aside from all of its other inefficiencies, intellectual property is an incredibly costly way of dealing with life-saving technologies since the value of new drugs to some classes of consumers will fairly frequently exceed their ability to pay.
See Alex Tabarrok for more, though he's too kind to the drug companies.
Photo by Flickr user Rselph used under a Creative Commons license
US officially sanctions the Quds Force, a sub-unit of the IRGC, "the first time that the United States has taken such steps against the armed forces of any sovereign government."
Paul Krugman posts a telling graphic from Gelman, et. al. showing that the correlation between income and voting behavior has generally grown stronger over time (the dot is the correlation, the whiskers are the range of uncertainty):
Krugman comments that "the conventional pundit wisdom about the relationship between class and voting" -- namely that there's less class polarization than there used to be "is, literally, the opposite of the truth." The difficulty is that there's a lot of ambiguity about how we should define class. Fortunately, the best article on this controversy was written by me. Krugman, following Larry Bartels, wants to define the "white working class" as being composed of white people in the bottom third of the income distribution (which, note, is considerably less than one third of all white people). Dissenters from this view make some good points:
Gopoian and Whitehead point out that “only one-third of the Bartels voters were actively doing paid work,” a fact that undermines the “working” half of the working-class label. What's more, “of those who were working, nearly half were under the age of 30,” a category that would include such non-obvious members as several 20-something Ivy League–educated members of the Prospect's staff.
In short, the low-income whites who Bartels finds to be strong backers of the Democratic Party have a marked tendency to be retirees or students and even those who are working tend to be very young. The alternative definition of "white working class" is "white people who don't have a bachelor's degree." Under that definition of white working class, the white working class does, indeed, support the Republican Party. However:
The education-based definition of the working class comes with problems of its own. Using the education criterion, almost two-thirds of white voters, and a significantly larger portion of the overall population, get defined as “working class,” arguably making the group too large to target politically in a meaningful way. The median household income of non– college-educated whites was $47,500 in 2004, slightly above the national median. Consequently, the working-class category of those without four-year college degrees ends up comprising a rather miscellaneous group, lumping together people living below the poverty line with many reasonably well-off people. Indeed, college dropout and richest man in America Bill Gates is considered working class under this standard. One outlier hardly disproves a theory, but according to the NES fully 29 percent of voters have some college education but no degree, slightly outnumbering those with a bachelor's degree or more. The “some college” group was, according to 2004 exit polls, the educational cohort in which Bush achieved his best performance. Thus, the conservative inclinations of the educationally defined working class are largely attributable to the sentiments of its best-educated members.
The moral of the story, in my view, is that we need better data. With a sufficiently large data set and adequate statistical tools, it should be possible to try to prize apart the influence of age, income, and educational attainment on voting as separate factors. But as things stand, the picture looks very murky. One major takeaway, though, is that people need to write and talk more carefully about the oft-neglected "some college" crowd. This is a much larger proportion of the population than educated professionals tend to realize, and it's their conservative political views that mainly drive the right-leaning voting habits of the entire non-college block. Since I feel like most pundits don't realize that "some college" status is so common, they also don't realize what occupations "some college" people are doing, or really have a clear picture in their heads of who these people are even though their political views are the cornerstone of a major trump in contemporary political journalism.
The real reason people of a certain age see everything through the prism of the Baby Boom Youth Experience is, obviously, that there are just so damn many baby boomers that they're able to get away with it. The cohorts right before and right after the baby boomers are just too small to form an insular and self-referential circle. My generation is really big, and someday we'll be as annoying as the boomers are today, but for now too many of us are too young and obscure to inflict it on others.
Max Bergman and Fred Kaplan both note that the Army's increased reliance on air power in Iraq is probably helping to produce the welcome decrease in American casualties. The only problem, as they both note, is that this seems to imply a shift away from a counterinsurgency strategy, which requires more risk-taking on the part of soldiers (i.e., dead Americans) in order to rely less on firepower (i.e., fewer dead Iraqis), back toward the failed force protection policies of 2005-2006.
Not, however, that I think we should go back to high casualty counterinsurgency tactics. Rather, the tendency of our commanders in Iraq to keep shifting back to low casualty strategies reflects politicians' perfectly accurate view that there's nothing left in Iraq such that it's both actually achievable and worth asking lots of people to die for. That, though, means we should adopt the ultimate casualty-reduction strategy of ending the war. Remaining in force while saving lives by adopting immorally destructive and ultimately counterproductive strategies is a very bad idea.
Mark Goldberg runs down some of the major problems afflicting efforts to improve the situation in Darfur, including the fact that the UN is having trouble getting anyone to give them the 24 helicopters they need and that few of the key rebel leaders are planning on attending the upcoming peace conference.
Via Marc Ambinder, Ron Brownstein runs down the new source of Hillary Clinton's strength -- a surge in support from college educated women, previously a block that was split about evenly between her and Obama. What's more, hot on the heels of this morning's Mark Penn-bashing it seems to me that Penn's explanation for the surge adds up:
Penn argues that Clinton's upscale support has grown mostly because the campaign debate has shifted this fall from experience to the candidates' issue agendas, such as the universal health care plan that Clinton unveiled last month.
Indeed. Generalizing from the first person case, I was very skeptical of Clinton initially, then went on to not really buy the "experience" argument that by all accounts non-college voters find persuasive, but was very pleasantly surprised by her health care proposal. And given that her plan is as good or better than her rivals' offering, now the experience argument plays as more compelling. I will say, though, that I keep being surprised that she doesn't seem to have a climate change policy and as I guess is typical of male college educated Democrats I still find myself more drawn to Obama, but I definitely think better of the prospect of a Clinton administration than I once did.
Under scenario one, the number of deployed troops is reduced to 30,000 by 2010. Under scenario two, the number of deployed troops is reduced to 75,000 by 2013. One takeaway here is to keep in mind that the next time you hear someone say the country can't afford to spend an additional $50 billion a year on something (mass transit, day care, schools, whatever) that this is a bit less than the low cost scenario for future military ventures. As my old boss Bob Kuttner likes to say, we have a way of finding out that we can afford the things that our political leaders decide it's important to afford.
On the other hand, puzzling through this I'm left baffled as to why House Budget Committee John Spratt asked for these particular things to be estimated. Running Iraq and Afghanistan together seems to blunt whatever political point it is one was trying to make, and doing so in the context of a discussion of potential troop withdrawals actually leaves it unclear what policy option we're considering. Are our 75,000 troops supposed to be in Iraq or in Afghanistan? It may not make a large financial difference which country you deploy them to, but obviously those are two very different policies. Consequently, the main value of this exercise may be the portion near the end where Orzag compares his methodology to that of the famous Stiglitz & Bilmes paper and argues convincingly that they mishandled the question of the long-term treatment costs for Iraq-related brain injuries.
Dana Goldstein writes about a new report naming DC the "third most unequal" city in America. Here, I think, we've come to the level of analysis at which it stops making sense to care about inequality or even poverty rates as such. DC could, after all, probably reduce its poverty rate by razing public housing, slashing public services, eliminating all jobs programs, and handing out bus tickets. That, though, wouldn't solve anything in particular. Similarly, it would be easy enough to adjust tax policy in such a way as to induce all the rich people to move to Bethesda, thus reducing inequality but also wrecking the city's tax base, eliminating many jobs, and ultimately leading to declining services and well-being for the poor.
Many Americans towns probably have a low poverty rate not because they're doing something awesome to fight poverty, but just because they're too expensive for poor people to live there.
The specific aspect of inequality in the District that should worry people is that our public schools perform poorly (much worse, even, than the average urban district -- one of the very worst if not the worst big city in the country) which makes it an unattractive place for middle class families with children to live. Even so, given that school reform is hard it makes perfect sense for a troubled city (like DC 15 years ago) to focus first on the relatively easy task of turning itself into a place that's appealing to a larger number of prosperous single people thus creating circumstances (more revenue, less crime) and then pivot to the more challenging problem of the school system. That seems to be about the point we've reached as a city, with Mayor Fenty's campaign focused mostly on education-related promises and people seemingly enthusiastic about Michelle Rhee's efforts in tha regard, and that's all to the good.
Still, while a country featuring a huge gap between haves and have-nots is probably a sign of bad national policy in my view, a city having such a gap tells us very little other than (a) some very poor people can afford to live there, and (b) some very rich people deem it a good place to live. It's not clear that making either (a) or (b) cease to be the case would advance the cause of justice in any real way, and the prospects for a municipality trying to undertake wealth redistribution are very bad.
Noam Scheiber has an excellent post on the fairly arbitrary manner in which the press deploys its considerable power over presidential primary campaigns. He notes this particularly with regard to the Huckabee campaign, and it's worth saying that this could start to play an especially large role if, say, Huckabee finishes a reasonably close second to Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucus. Will that be covered as "Romney wins, on to New Hampshire!" or will it be covered as "Huckabee Surging, Chaos on the Religious Right!"? The choice of narratives could have a big impact on the ultimate outcome, and it will be made by a fairly small number of reporters and editors who mostly refuse to even acknowledge that they're actors in the process and not just observers of it.
Chris Hayes has a great piece on the bizarre world of right-wing chain emails, in which all manner of vicious slurs and lies circulate for months or even years without anyone in the MSM noticing. Sometimes they pop up on a sufficiently mainstream place -- Fox News, Rush -- for someone in the real press to bother running an item pointing out that the story in question is false, but then the meme just dives back underground again where it lives on.
French President Nicholas Sarkozy calls for a carbon tax for France. Dave Roberts notes: "U.S. right-wingers like to use Sarkozy as a rhetorical bludgeon, showing that Europe is moving toward the U.S. rather than vice versa. I wonder if this will cause any of their little pea brains to short-circuit." Probably not. The capacity to sustain massive cognitive dissonance is part of the job.
Photo by Flickr user Chasqui used under a Creative Commons license
So you know all these weird Orwellian messages at airports and so forth exhorting people to report suspicious behavior? Does anyone ever actually report anything? What to they report? Future of Journalism Conor Clarke takes a look for Guardian America and reveals:
Of the more than 100 communications reviewed, a large plurality consists of citizens who, like the woman from Islip, arrive at their destinations and feel guilty about a security transgression. Few mention other security threats; when they do, they are largely reports on the ethnicity of fellow travellers.[...]
A traveller passing through Cleveland airport on September 15 reported seeing "two Middle Eastern men" who were "possibly trying to look too casual". "Being aware of racial profiling, I hesitated to do anything, so I watched them," he explains. "I have heard on the news to report suspicious behaviour and they didn't act like people normally do at airports. My first thought was possibly they were doing a test run."
The man pictured above is Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) who you probably haven't heard of, but who's at the center of what's probably the most under-covered political story of the day. Ron Brownstein's taking note:
This ideological inquisition among Republicans isn't confined to the presidential race. The two House Republicans most critical of the Iraq war (Walter Jones of North Carolina and Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland) have drawn serious primary challengers from the right. So had Nebraska's Chuck Hagel, the Senate Republican most critical of the war, before he announced his retirement last month. Virginia Republicans recently decided to choose their next Senate nominee by convention rather than primary -- a move that favors conservative former Gov. Jim Gilmore over moderate Rep. Tom Davis. [...]
On problems ranging from health care to energy, they have retreated to a reflexive denigration of government and praise of unfettered markets aimed squarely at hard-core conservatives. Tellingly, the GOP hopefuls have broken with Bush primarily on the policies -- comprehensive immigration reform and the Medicare drug benefit -- that he consciously formulated to expand the party base.
Arnold Schwarzennegger and perhaps more plausibly Charlie Crist in Florida show there are templates for very successful versions of Republicanism out there, but the GOP's base's bizarre view that defeat in 2006 stemmed from insufficiently dogmatic adherence to the gospel of spending reductions, so that budget cuts plus doubling down on the war will redeem the party, is forcing everyone to walk off the cliff.
Sometimes I wonder, can the Washington Post's editorials get any worse? The answer -- always -- turns out to be "yes." Today we learn not only that the Bush administration's drive toward war with Iran is in fact an effort to avoid war, but also that up is down, ignorance is strength (and Fred Hiatt is a very strong man) and that when the war does come we'll all need to blame war opponents:
If this diplomatic offensive fails, President Bush or his successor is likely to face a choice between accepting Iran's acquisition of the means to build nuclear weapons and ordering military strikes to destroy its facilities. That's why it is senseless and irresponsible for those who say they oppose military action -- including a couple of the second-tier Democratic presidential candidates -- to portray the sanctions initiative as a buildup to war by Mr. Bush. We've seen no evidence that the president has decided on war, and it's clear that many senior administration officials understand the package as the best way to avoid military action. It is not they but those who oppose tougher sanctions who make war with Iran more likely.
Have I mentioned that war is peace?
Completely missing from the Post's analysis of the issue is the idea that the US has any non-coercive tools in our toolkit. Maybe part of our diplomacy with Iran should be a willingness to put them returning to the NPT fold in the context of a broader warming in US-Iranian relations? Maybe part of our diplomacy with Iran should be a willingness to put them returning to the NPT fold in the context of our own willingness to return to the NPT fold? Maybe there's something we could do in terms of our relations with Moscow and Beijing that would make them more amenable to playing a helpful role on the Iran issue? Like maybe pushing a missile shield policy that Russia views as unacceptably threatening isn't a good way to get them to help us on the Iran front?
Meanwhile, the child-like confidence in the good sense, good faith, and competence of the Bush administration is just staggering.
David Brooks really nails an important part of the internet experience:
Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.
Right. I had a weird experience on Monday of playing on a pub trivia trivia team after not having done so for several years. Every time a question got asked that I didn't know the answer to, I felt this overwhelming urge to reach for my iPhone, a device I didn't have back in my earlier quizzing days. The idea of being limited to the information that was actually in my head was very distressing.
Can someone read J. Kirchick's attack on Kay Steiger and explain it to me. Basically, he seems to have seen that a liberal group was running an article about Che Guevera, so he flipped on the Conservative Pundit Autopilot and started attacking her. But Kay's piece isn't favorable to Che! But the Autopilot can't be disengaged so the attack must go on! Bizarre. At any rate, given the quality of work being done at Commentary by the likes of Kirchick and Schoenfeld, the J-Pod Accession will almost certainly improve the average quality of the personnel.
Charlie Rangel floats tax reform proposal and before any serious people even have time to consider its merits House GOP Leader John Boehner explains it will reduce revenues through increasing tax rates: "Imposing higher taxes at this time will doom our economy, put people out of work and cost the federal government revenue that is badly needed, if in fact we're going to balance the budget." I would really like someone to explain to me why the press doesn't treat this kind of thing as a gaffe. I remember when Howard Dean couldn't correctly state the total number of people in the Army and it was like the end of the world.
But the top House Republican (like the president and vice president of the united states and most other Republican Party elected officials) can't correctly state the relationship between tax rates and federal revenues, which seems like a big deal.
For various reasons, some of them even good ones, I haven't blogged about the latest Drudge-related developments in the Scott Beauchamp case but here's TNR's latest statement on the matter which seems about right to me. I continue to be baffled by the way the conservative press and blogosphere, along with some elements of the Army, seem determined to treat TNR as driven by some kind of hardline anti-war ideology. The magazine supported the war, as best I can tell supports continuing the war, and in the one instance where clear and direct evidence has emerged that one aspect of the story was false, they issued a correction promptly.
Via GFR, the HuffPo does us an excellent service and gives us a gender breakdown for presidential campaign staff. Hillary Clinton leads the pack in terms of women in senior positions, and is essentially tied with Mike Huckabee in terms of mid-level positions. Rudy Giuliani, who's entire political persona is machismo, comes in dead last — he has as many child molester priests at his consulting firm than women in senior campaign positions.
As Garance says, these figures can probably "be viewed as proxies for what their administrations would look like" at least as far as White House staff. Indeed, my bet is that one of the most important legacies of a Hillary Clinton administration would be bequeathing to the Democratic Party a network of powerful plugged-in insiders that winds up containing substantially more women in senior roles than we have right now, along with perhaps a higher number of men comfortable working with power female colleagues and superiors. iven that the party's voting base is composed mostly of women, this is a transformation that's going to have to be made sooner or later, and the progressive coalition will definitely be stronger once it's done.
Marc Ambinder has the dueling memos from the Obama and Clinton campaigns on Iran. The Clinton's effort to deny there's a difference between the two when they did, after all, just take different positions on the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment seems weird. Equally weird in its own way, however, is Team Obama's characterization of the difference as "once again, Senator Clinton supported giving President Bush both the benefit of the doubt and a blank check on a critical foreign policy issue. Barack Obama just has a fundamentally different view."
This is a presidential primary after all. Chris Dodd's already won my vote for Senate Majority Leader should the position come open. It seems to me that Obama needs to convince people that he would have a different, better Iran policy were he too become president and not that he has a better view of how he hypothetically would have handled Senate votes were he to have actually been in DC on the day of the vote. At the end of the day, this exchange helps Obama in my eyes, but it's kind of a glancing blow.
I can't believe I haven't used that pun before! At any rate, as part of the GOP's continued march to the lunatic right, Senate Republicans who used to back the Law of the Sea Treaty are now flip-flopping deciding that Frank Gaffney knows more about keeping the country safe than do the combined forces of the military, the State Department, and basically everyone else.
Given that the government needs more revenue than it's currently taking in, which will be hard to achieve, and that tax reform is also hard to achieve, I'm not sure what the point of proposing a revenue-neutral tax reform plan is. That said, Charlie Rangel's plan (PDF) seems pretty good within that constraint. Republicans are deriding it as the "Mother of All Tax Hikes" but many more people would see reductions, either due to AMT repeal or to modifications to several tax credits, than increases. The big revenue enhancements come from a "limitation of benefits of individual AMT repeal" provision that only applied to people making over $200,000 (and possibly even only people richer than that) and from elimination of the "carried interest" loophole for hedge fund and private equity fund managers.
Scott Lemieux makes it. Suffice it to say that torture plays a role. I would add that there are issues here beyond the merely pragmatic one of whether or not Mukasey is really worse than the current Acting AG. For Senators to elicit sworn testimony on the subject of waterboarding, hear the nominee refuse to call it torture, and then confirm him nonetheless would be to give a senatorial imprimateur to the notion. Actually blocking his confirmation seems both futile and unlikely to accomplish anything, but I don't see how any decent person could vote "yes" in good conscience.
Tim Harford on the virtues of urbanism and the ways in which our public policy tends to give them short shrift. Via Ryan Avent who sums up the message, "it’s not about arguing the superiority of individual choices to live or not live in cities, it’s about fixing policy so that we aren’t irrationally undermining valuable resources."
Photo by Flickr user TylerDurden used under a Creative Commons license
This year, though, we're in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.
I dunno. I think it's important to talk specifics here. On a question like health care, all three major Democrats are running on similar platforms that are considerably more ambitious than what John Kerry or Al Gore offered. On the other hand, they're considerably less ambitious than what Bill Clinton proposed in 1993 or what Bob Kerrey proposed during the 1992 primary.
On the use of force, most congressional Democrats opposed the 1991 Persian Gulf War, taking a very skeptical view of the efficacy of American arms even when deployed in what was as close to a textbook instance of liberal internationalist collective security as the world has ever seen. By 1998, most Democrats were prepared to countenance the limited use of force with little-to-know risk to American lives against Serbia with the support of most of the UN Security Council's members but in the face of Chinese and Russian veto threats that made an authorizing resolution impossible. By 2003 you had the bulk of the party leadership prepared to endorse a preventive counter-proliferation war against Iraq that was all-but-uniformly opposed around the world. Here in 2008, things have clearly evolved back in a dovish direction from where they were during the Summer of War but you still don't see anyone ruling out unilateral air strikes against Iran.
What else? To me, that seems to generally be the pattern: Al Gore ran on a very timid platform in 2000, and 9/11 then sent Democrats into a years-long defensive crouch, but the point where the party's gotten back to is pretty similar to where it was when Bill Clinton first got elected. Insofar as the party's to the left of where Clinton was in at the end of his administration, that seems to mostly be because people are envisioning a Democratic congressional majority.
Via Henry Farrell, Gelman et. al. post some interesting maps. First, which states would John Kerry have won were only poor voters allowed to vote:
Basically it seems that here Bush wins only the whitest of states, though not super-white Maine. Next, only people in the middle third of the income distribution:
This looks a lot like the actual election results, though there are a few states Kerry carried in reality despite losing middle income voters. There are no states Bush won without carrying middle income voters. Last, people in the top third:
Basically, rich people love Bush. But not the rich people who live New York, its suburbs in New York or New Jersey, or DC, or the DC suburbs (i.e., Maryland) or those who live in California. Interestingly enough, a huge proportion of political journalists and editors and people who run media companies live in precisely those places. One wonders if this doesn't have a distorting effect on media types' perception of what's going on in politics.
Sarah Stern in The New Republic explains that Israel can't make peace with the Palestinians because of the "maximalist Palestinian position" which I was expecting to see described as the destruction of Israel, but which actually turns out to be reasonably characterized as "an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 borders, which are actually the 1949 armistice lines." So why not make a deal like that? "These boundaries were nine miles wide at their narrowest point, lacking the strategic depth to enable Israel to defend itself, which led the former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban (of the Labour Party) to dub them 'the Auschwitz lines.'"
Okay, but given that the '49 armistice was the result of an actual war, the lines can't have been all that indefensible. What's more, the lines were successfully defending in 1967. And Israel's conventional military superiority vis-a-vis its neighbors has grown larger. And now Israel has nuclear weapons! What's more, Israel now has peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt. If non-nuclear Israel could defend the '67 borders against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria combined surely it can defend them now against Syria alone with the help of its nuclear weapons.
Jonathan Landay has the latest. Obviously, our priority over there should be stopping the Taliban, not stopping poppy growers. If Afghanistan were to become a stable, heroin-exporting country that didn't play host to radical anti-American terrorists that'd be a pretty good outcome in the scheme of things. Heroin use is a real problem, but it's not the biggest problem in the world, and there's no good reason to think that crop eradication programs in Afghanistan are an effect way of tackling the problem anyway.
In an interesting piece for TAP, Shannon Brownlee argues that we shouldn't let the "managed care" debacle of the 1990s discredit the successful HMO model on which it was supposed to be based. She says "There are only a few real HMOs in the U.S.," and "a cousin of the HMO, the salaried group practice, is only a bit more common." I won't try to summarize the analysis, since I think I'd do a bad job. I think, though, that this tends to support the politically unpalatable conclusion that for-profit insurance companies would have very little role to play in a well-functioning health care system. Obviously, people who need to try to make changes in the real world don't want that to be the case, but "saying no" to patients is an important part of a well-functioning system, but when the institution saying no is a profit maximizing firm patients will, with good reason, believe that "no" is being said to protect the bottom line rather than for their own good.
Philip Gordon offered some mostly sensible views on Iran in congressional testimony last week, including the key points that "the United States should also take care to avoid unnecessary clashes with Russia and China, which only make them even less willing to work with issues of importance to Washington." Also:
Fifth and finally, the United States should complement its efforts to increase the price Iran pays for lack of compliance with the will of the international community with incentives for Iran to cooperate. So long as Iranians believe the United States is implacably opposed to their country no matter what they do they are unlikely to compromise on the nuclear issue. But if Iranians can be convinced not only that there are high costs of pursing nuclear weapons but also concrete benefits for not doing so, there is a chance that an agreement can be reached.
Right. It's maddening how many people out there seem to think that stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb is sufficiently important to be worth risking a catastrophic war over, but not important enough to consider worth building a cooperative relationship with the other major powers over, or offering Iran a path to re-normalization of relations with the United States.
Photo by Flickr user Kiapix used under a Creative Commons license
Laura Bush visits the Middle East, wears a headscarf she'd been given as a gift, gets denounced by frothing-at-the-mouth rightwingers. I'd kind of hoped that the mass smear campaign against Nancy Pelosi for doing the same was motivated by crass partisanship and not an actual principled belief in xenophobia over all else.
Not only can you watch Ross & I arguing on BloggingHeadsTV, but BHTV now has a shiny new flash player, and an association with The New York Times. Yes. Click here to see the Times' preferred excerpt in which we puzzle over Rudy's GOP rivals' inability to thus far knock a baby-killing, sanctuary city declaring, cross-dresser and friend to child abusing priests out of the race. Or go over to the BHTV site to see the whole thing or other excerpts like is this immigrant-bashing sealing the GOP's long-term future?
Robert Farley really nails my sentiments precisely. I'll just say it's too bad, because until the movie entered Plot Twist Land it was quite good if not quite as groundbreaking as it seemed to think it was. I think Ben Affleck may have more promise as a director than as an actor. He's just going to need to find himself a story that makes some sense on some level.
Meanwhile, the film also features Michael Williams (i..e, Omar from The Wire) in a small part and I have to say that while I wish him well I think his career's going to be hurt by the fact that he has this giant scar on his face. For the Omar character, of course, that works great. But in his Gone Baby Gone role it implies some dramatic scar-creating backstory that the script doesn't cash out in any way. And why should it? After all, relatively few characters have a giant facial scar as part of their backstory. But it totally dominates his face
In honor of his trip to France, there's been a legal complaint filed against Donald Rumsfeld in French court alleging that he "authorized and ordered crimes of torture to be carried out ... as well as other war crimes." Obviously, this isn't going to result in a prosecution in the near-term, but I hope Rumsfeld and others involved in Bush-era war crimes will find themselves unable to travel to much of the world and maybe someday some of the younger ones will actually face the trials they so richly deserve. Back in the day I think I'm not the only one who didn't adequately consider the hypothesis that Team Bush's opposition to the International Criminal Court might be driven more by self-interest than by ideology per se.
Thirty one percent of Americans say recycling is one of the most important things they can do to avoid catastrophic climate change. Four percent cite reduced consumption of fossil fuels. This kind of thing should, I think, indicate that public opinion on different policy options is probably highly malleable (in both good and bad ways) since people obviously don't understand this issue at all.
Ed Kilgore watches the Virginia Republican Party march off the cliff, adopting an unusual nominating process that would have guaranteed that the relatively moderate Rep. Tom Davis stood no chance of becoming the party's Senate nominee, thus pushing Davis to bow out of the race. Now I suppose from a conservative point of view you could point out that Davis probably would have lost to super-popular Mark Warner anyway, but considering that Virginia was a solidly Republican state as recently as two or three years ago it's pretty absurd for the GOP to be essentially conceding a Senate seat there, leaving the DSCC free to spend its money against Republican incumbents in Maine, Oregon, Minnesota, etc.
Whatever happened to the people being held without charges or due process in a network of "ghost sites" (i.e., secret prisons)? Well it turns out that we're not so sure:
Some have been secretly transferred to their home countries, where they remain in detention and out of public view, according to interviews in Pakistan and Europe with government officials, human rights groups and lawyers for the detainees. Others have disappeared without a trace and may or may not still be under CIA control.
I wonder what Hillary Clinton's review of executive power will say about holding people in illegal secret detention facilities.
I saw this and thought it was pretty clever of The Los Angeles Times to shatter expectations and give us a Naomi Klein sports column instead of the usual stuff about the depredations of multinational corporations:
It turned out, though, to just be a mistake -- the column's by Bob Baker. I agree, though, that it'd be really nice to see the Red Sox improbably lose. I am, however, considering violating my general anti-Boston principles to root for BU in college football, since there'd just be something awesomely bizarre about a team from the northeast winning a national championship. I mean, sure, it used to happen regularly before world war one but that was a long time ago.
There's a lot to chew over in this Washington Post feature on the experiences of 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division in Baghdad's Sadiyah neighborhood. Perhaps the most important is what the story suggests about the declining violence in Baghdad (and perhaps elsewhere in the country), namely that the spike in violence was associated with competing sectarian efforts at ethnic cleansing and the decline in violence represents the success of those efforts:
American soldiers estimate that since violence intensified this year, half of the families in Sadiyah have fled, leaving approximately 100,000 people [...] Shiite militias, particularly the Mahdi Army, went from house to house killing and intimidating Sunni families [...] "It's just a slow, somewhat government-supported sectarian cleansing," said Maj. Eric Timmerman, the battalion's operations officer.
This is the basically fraudulent nature of the American enterprise in Iraq. We're told we can't leave because of the civil war that would break out or intensify or whatever if we do. But our troops aren't really capable of meaningfully impacting the result of the sectarian conflict anyway. Instead, they're just being plopped into the middle of it and exposed to harm, so that when the conflict eventually ends (as conflicts tend to) we can call the results "victory" and stay in Iraq forever. If the violence waxes, that shows the war needs to continue. If it wanes, that shows that we're winning and need to keep on keeping on. Meanwhile, in the real world the civil war and ethnic cleansing we're supposed to be preventing are things that have already happened.
| 
Heads in the Sand
