« November 25, 2007 - December 1, 2007 | Main | December 9, 2007 - December 15, 2007 » December 2, 2007 - December 8, 2007 ArchivesDecember 2, 2007The Case Against PuntingAs Jim Henley says, just because Gregg Easterbrook believes something doesn't make it false. Football teams are way more eager to punt than reputable statistical analyses of the situation suggest they should and Arkansas' Pulaski High School, where the coach was so impressed by the statistical case against punting that he abandoned punting altogether, is having success with their new strategy. Before the FallFascinating report on business lobby efforts to scramble as quickly as possible to get the government to improve new rules designed to let them pollute more, and screw over workers and consumers more, in advance of what they expect will be a new Democratic administration. They're also beefing up on the number of Democratic lobbyists in their employ. I'm hoping someone's making a list of these new regulatory initiatives to make sure whoever secures the GOP nomination (though it looks increasingly like none of the candidates could possibly win) needs to take ownership of this sort of muck. The Norris FactorThe LA Times deploys its considerable experience in the field of celebrity journalism to offer up the ultimate account of Chuck Norris' political impact. Travel DayOkay, it's a Sunday and I'm flying back to the states today, so probably not much blogging until later, but starting Monday morning things'll be back to normal. US-VISIT
I suppose I'd heard about this new initiative, dubbed US-VISIT, whereby foreigners traveling to the United States need to be fingerprinted and photographed upon entry, but I hadn't really grasped the reality of it until I saw it in action at Dulles Airport earlier this afternoon. There's so much that's crazy about airport security these days that I suppose the whole thing must be beyond rational discussion, but this really seems like a terrible policy that's likely to have a very adverse affect on our tourism and also on visitors' impression of the country. And of course at some point I assume more countries will start retaliating with policies designed to hassle Americans. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but it seems to me to typify the thoughtless and paranoid manner in which we've been making a lot of decisions for the past six years. Falling DollarIf you're traveling to Western Europe, the falling dollar is definitely a bad thing, but as Tyler Cowen says a weaker dollar probably isn't a bad thing at all as a general matter. After all, the distributive implications of something that's bad for American tourists and purchasers of European products but good for Americans who work in the tourist industry or manufacturing are predominantly egalitarian. The trouble, though, is that "falling dollar," like invocations of the term "subprime," is just a vague way of referring to a broader sense of big trouble in the financial markets and a looking period of bad times. Easy credit and a big trade deficit have both let people keep up very robust levels of consumption even at a time when the average person hasn't seen his wages go up much or at all. December 3, 2007Bad News JournalismFrank Foer offers his take on the Scott Beauchamp mess. This whole doesn't seem to me to reflect very well on Beauchamp, on TNR, or on the crazed hawks who went after this story with guns blazing. Whatever the magazine's sins here may have been, though, one could hardly deem them especially significant in the broader scheme of things. More to the point, the magazine's response to allegations that it had printed something false is emblematic of how serious journalists respond to such matters -- seriously -- with a real effort to the discern the truth and with the belief that it's a seriously bad thing to publish something that wasn't true. This is a sense of conscience and responsibility that seems almost entirely absent from the journals of the conservative movement. One could point to the way W. Thomas Smith appears to have written a bunch of made-up stuff about Lebanon for National Review Online, but to be fair to Smith I can easily imagine a person coming to the conclusion that NRO doesn't see inaccuracy as a bar to publication. Brad DeLong reminded us recently that National Review regularly publishes Donald Luskin included such pearls of wisdom as the following critique of studies showing rising inequality in the United States: But none of this is reliable anyway: A footnote reveals that the statistics are derived from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics database, an ongoing survey that tracks only 8,000 families out of a U.S. population of 295 million individuals. Yes, that's right, Donald Luskin, contributing editor to NRO Financial, doesn't believe in the validity of statistical sampling. But of course since we're talking about a publication that frequently publishes intelligent designers on scientific topics why shouldn't it publish people who don't believe in statistics on economic tactics? And following on that, why not let Smith fabricate his dispatches from Lebanon? After all, climate change denialism gets a fair hearing at National Review on a regular basis. Some people will probably find K-Lo's apology about how "NRO should have provided readers with more context and caveats in some posts from Lebanon this fall" to be a laughably inadequate response to having completely fabricated an invasion of East Beirut by thousands of Hezbollah fighters. To me, though, it seems like rank hypocrisy for NRO to hold a particular writer out to dry like this -- Smith was just working to the long-established NRO standards. Venezuelan Dictatorship WatchI guess if Hugo Chávez can't even get majority support in a referendum for proposed changes to the constitution that he can't be much of an aspiring dictator, can he? On the merits, I'm obviously not an expert in such things but Chávez's proposals -- an end to presidential term limits plus concentration of more power in the president's office -- are probably a bad idea for a country like Venezuela and it's probably a good thing that they were defeated. Still, the level of pious screeching about Chávez's authoritarianism from people who think the dictators ("emirs," etc.) of Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, etc. should be treated with nothing but the utmost respect has always chafed. Quotes First, Facts Second
The other day, Karl Rove went on television and stated falsely that it was congressional Democrats, rather than the Bush administration, that pushed for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force in Iraq vote to happen before the 2002 midterms. Either the story here is "former Bush advisor says things on television that aren't true" or else there's just no story. Merely restating the misstatements of prominent officials without flagging them as misstatements doesn't inform readers. Instead, as Robert Waldman notes (via DeLong) Peter Baker of The Washington Post did a story comprised of seven paragraphs about the "controversy" over why was responsible for the war vote, followed eventually by some indication that there's a truth of the matter here: News accounts and transcripts at the time show Bush arguing against delay. Asked on Sept. 13, 2002, about Democrats who did not want to vote until after the U.N. Security Council acted, Bush said, "If I were running for office, I'm not sure how I'd explain to the American people -- say, 'Vote for me, and, oh, by the way, on a matter of national security, I think I'm going to wait for somebody else to act.' " And of course one must keep in mind that Baker did a better job here than what we've often seen -- if you read to paragraph eight, Baker lets you know the truth. But of course this is why people go on television and lie. People who read just the headline attached to Baker's article will come away believing there's a controversy. People who scan a few grafs will come away believing there's a controversy. And even people who read all the way through won't read "shrill" words like "liar. So why not lie? Illiteracy WatchWashington Post editorial board writes an editorial in praise of NAFTA that cites Mexico's rapid growth in nominal terms, which is just silly. I think there's a large problem -- almost entirely unappreciated in this profession -- of journalists completely lacking the quantitative competence necessary to write about the issues that they cover. More ChavezRandy Paul, better-informed-than-I, has a more in-depth take on the referendum in Venezuela, saying that "[w]hile there are some good ideas" in the referendum package, it was a bad idea all things considered. Today in Racism
Katherine Jean-Lopez explains that National Review Online publishes Thomas Smith's bogus reporting because Arabs are liars: That’s why I wrote, in my first editor’s note on the subject, that we “should have provided readers with more context and caveats” – the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn’t always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance. Well, what can you say about that? Consider the "caveats" that she's saying the piece should have contained. Something like "this is all unverified information coming from a source I regard as unreliable" would be a mighty odd caveat to add to a story. If the information is unverifiable and the source is afflicted by the "Arab tendency to lie" (European-descended people are well-known for never lying) then why are you printing it? And how is it that all these other Lebanon-based reporters are capable of operating in an environment filled with lying Arabs without falling for stories about made-up Hezbollah invasions? Photo courtesy of PING News Human Development
According to the UN Development Program's Human Development Index, the best place in the world is Iceland. Or, at least, it's the place with the best human development. People who love warm weather wouldn't actually enjoy Iceland very much. I'm not one of those people and I had tons of fun during my stay in Iceland (see my many photosets of the trip up on my Flickr) and they certainly seemed to enjoy a very high level of human development. As a general matter, I would recommend to all countries that they locate themselves near a limitless supply of geothermal energy since this makes it pretty easy to combine prosperity with environmental soundness. In general, though, the combination of a fairly open economy and a fairly flexible labor market with a strong welfare state and a commitment to high-quality public services works very well in Iceland, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands and I think we'll see both the US and countries like France and German move closer to that model in years to come. \ Kate Sheppard, meanwhile, points out that the Nordics also dominate the Humanitarian Response Index. Since the world does need military power to provide certain kinds of global public goods and militaries show real economies of scale, I don't think the US should aspire to actually match the smaller European countries' commitment to aid in share of GDP terms (it's also plausible that small countries' aid programs are more effective since they're less geopolitically fraught; nobody worries about Denmark's efforts to rule the world), but we do need to rebalance our priorities somewhat. Photo by me, available under Creative Commons license AT&T Will Pay MeApproximately zero percent of the population seems to understand what AT&T is trying to say with its bizarre ad campaign about how "I need a phone that works where I live, a place called Bizarreportmanteauplacename," probably because the ads are really dumb. What they mean, for the record, is that AT&T's phones operate on the GSM standard which is much more widely used outside the US. Thus, an AT&T phone will (for an appropriate fee) work pretty much wherever you want to go. A Verizon phone, by contrast, will not. Given that most Americans don't do much international travel, this probably isn't a compelling consideration for all that many people, but if you do go abroad regularly it's a big difference. Cuteness StrikePets refusing to be adorable until the studios accede to the Writer's Guild's demands that writers get a fair share of the profits from digital distribution. That's solidarity. New York Times, US Intelligence Community, Now Run by IslamofascistsEveryone lets please ignore Mark Mazzetti's reporting: A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains on hold, contradicting an assessment two years ago that Tehran was working inexorably toward building a bomb. [...] The only appropriate response to this is to do what we've done already with IAEA information on Iran, with IAEA information on Iraq, and with Intelligence and Research Bureau information on Iran: ignore it. Note, after all, that this assessment of the Iranian political system is in line with what the overwhelming majority of experts on Iran think, so we should do what we've been doing with regional experts for the past six years: ignore them. Islamofascism is on the march. Deniers and appears must be ignored. I, for one, am confident that we can pull Operation Ignore off with sufficient hope not only from the Bush administration but also from the Washington Post editorial page which, I trust, can treat us to more sermons on how the people generating the alarmism are the ones really trying to stave off war. Iran NIEHere's the declassified portions of the New Iran NIE about how the Iranian nuclear hype is mostly hype. National Review Standards UpdateKevin Drum catches David Freddoso blaming Democrats for something Democrats tried to prevent until they were blocked by the GOP. This kind of things goes on all the time at National Review and The Weekly Standard which is why I think Thomas Smith is getting a bad rap as a "fabulist." It's true that he wrote things for National Review Online that weren't true, but this happens all the time. It's not a publication that cares, in general, about the accuracy of the claims its writers make so why shouldn't Smith make up a fake Hezbollah invasion of East Beirut? Kindergarden CopsUm, seriously, the Clinton administration is attacking Barack Obama based on an essay he wrote in kindergarden. They follow up with an account of something he did in third grade! I suppose you have to respect the commitment to counterpunching and oppo research (Obama says he wants a new kind of politics, but wouldn't share his toy truck with little Jimmy when they were five — how can we trust him now?) but surely someone must have said "won't this look dumb?" when it was suggested. I'll be very happy when primary season is over. UPDATE: That'd be the "Clinton campaign" -- it's not an administration yet! The Decline of the Coffeeshop
One thing I noticed by eyeball during the trip to Amsterdam was that there seemed to be many fewer coffee shops in town than I'd remembered from ten years ago. According to Dutch political sources, this is actually the case. The change stems from two things, one being that they made it much more difficult for institutions licensed to sell marijuana to also sell beer (thus wrecking the business model, though I should note that I did see a whole bunch of people smoking weed they'd presumably bought elsewhere in one bar) and the other being a simple change toward a giving out fewer licenses. The political reason for the change is the rise of the smallish Christian Union Party, which combines some egalitarian ideas on economics with cultural conservatism. Cultural conservatism by Dutch standards is pretty mild by American standards -- they pushed for it to be the case that civil servants with objections to gay marriage can be allowed to refuse to perform them personally; actually getting rid of gay marriage is unthinkable -- but apparently includes some skepticism about tolerance of soft drugs. The policy reason is that the soft drugs for sale in the Netherlands had been getting stronger-and-stronger leading to a lot of problems with "drug tourists" unaccustomed to the Dutch product finding themselves in various kinds of trouble. This seems like a sensible enough concern to me. The legitimate concern about marijuana legalization, in my view, is that the creation of a big marijuana industry could have some real deleterious effects, which I guess is what you were seeing in embryonic form with competition leading to an increasingly intense product. The Dutch policy has been aimed at the sensible goal of preventing the emergence of such an industry -- no advertising, no large scale cultivation, etc. -- while still letting consumers do what they want in private, and some cutback in the number of coffee shops in central Amsterdam (it's still no hard to find one) seems consistent with that. Rudy: Best Candidate to Have an Affair WithGood ad: I can also see the Giuliani camp making the argument that his facility with creative accounting, as demonstrated by his ability to gin up a slush fund with which to pay for his mistress' chauffeur, makes him uniquely qualified to handle the financial shenanigans associated with the proverbial Big Shitpile. 2003I think it's important to put the revelations that Iran halted its nuclear "program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure" in the context of the broader trends in US-Iranian relations that Gareth Porter (among others) have reported on. Specifically, in 2003 we know that the Iranians attempted a diplomatic opening to the United States. Porter reported that in exchange for actually getting something, Iran was prepared to abandon its nuclear program in a hard-to-reverse way: To meet the U.S. concern about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, the document offered to accept much tighter controls by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange for "full access to peaceful nuclear technology." It proposed "full transparency for security [assurance] that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD" and "full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols)." There have been some efforts to discredit what Porter, Flynt Leverret, and others have said about this attempted opening, but the NIE's conclusions about Iran's nuclear program seem to strongly support it. With their secret enrichment activities exposed, the Iranian regime was reconsidering the utility of continuing such efforts in the face of international awareness and disapproval of them. The Bush administration then decided to squander this opportunity and focus on saber-rattling and dreams of regime change. But the thing about pressure is that you've got to be willing to take yes for an answer instead of just blundering around. Meanwhile, how outrageous is it that the best twelve months of alarmism from Bush & Cheney have come in the context of an environment where they've long had access to the intelligence community's assessment? Answer: Very outrageous. Ehud Olmert, Jew-haterVia Steve Clemons, whatever his other flaws may be, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seems to understand the basic shape of the Israeli dilemma: Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said failure to negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians would spell the end of the State of Israel. We remember, of course, that people threw a fit when Jimmy Carter said this, but it's true whether or not people like to hear it. If Israel insists on governing millions of Palestinians forever and ever, those Palestinians are going to demand citizenship in the state that governs them. Oh, well. Meanwhile, Commentary decides to be more Zionist than the PM and condemn Olmert. Drug War Optimism
To try to bolster Brad Plumer's modest optimism that we really might adopt more sensible drug policy options, let me note that the best available alternative to the "war on drugs" mentality is actually pretty "tough." The main alternative Brad discusses, based on David Kennedy's work, has to dow with strictly targeting violent crime and the kind of over open-air drug markets that are associated with violence. A tighter focus of crime control resources on violent murderers and people who destroy neighborhoods with their drug dealing doesn't strike me as something that's particularly "soft" or that politicians need to be afraid of. Meanwhile, in political terms it's sometimes useful to do things that work. If you're a mayor and you implement a somewhat controversial new policing strategy at the start of your term, and then three years later the murder rate's gone way down, you're in pretty good shape. It often seems to me that there's a general tendency to underrate the political benefits of implementing policies that work. On some issues, of course, the incentives really are perverse because the payoff is very long term, but policing issues aren't really like that -- if you do things that reduce crime, people will be happy. Smarter drug control policies will reduce crime, so politicians have good reason to seek out smarter policies. Photo by Flickr user kissthis used under a Creative Commons license Monday Reformation-BloggingI read the first two sentences of this Mark Steyn post and had a sinking feeling that he was writing something sensible and important about the Muslim world: Lisa, your second post is really the answer to your first one. What if we've already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it? Fortunately, he turned out not to be going in the direction I feared at all. Where he should have gone, however, is this: People who call for a "Muslim reformation" seem to have completely forgotten what happened during the Protestant Reformation. The dime-store version, though, is massive religious wars in which huge numbers of people died. This happened on the European continent and also in the British Isles. It's true that in the long-run the Reformation led to the development of doctrines about religious tolerance and liberalism, but it took a good long time. Martin Luther's 95 Theses were written in 1517 whereas John Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration was written in 1689. In between came an awful lot of wars, witch-burning, fanaticism, etc. Clearly, any analogy between present-day circumstances and 16th and 17th century Europe is going to be very, very, very imperfect but this seems to me to be the direction an appropriate analogy would take: the Islamism-related violence we're seeing is in some ways reminiscent of the violence associated with the Reformation and Counterreformation rather than something that would be solved by something Reformation-esque. December 4, 2007Has Bush Not Gone Far EnoughThe Bush administration has proclaimed a doctrine of unilateral preemption as a core part of its National Security Strategy. The limits of this approach are demonstrated daily in Iraq, where the United States is bearing the burden for security, reconstruction, and reform essentially on its own. Yet the world cannot afford to look the other way when faced with the prospect, as in Iraq, of a brutal ruler acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Addressing this danger requires a different strategy, one that maximizes the chances of early and effective collective action. In this regard, and in comparison to the changes that are taking place in the area of intervention for the purposes of humanitarian protection, the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough. It's not the most scintillating paragraph ever written, but it sure is a provocative claim. And, indeed, it's all the more provocative for the fact that one author was the highly-regarded Anne-Marie Slaughter and the other was Lee Feinstein, currently heading the Hillary Clinton campaign's foreign policy shop and certainly in line for a fairly important post in a Hillary Clinton administration. The article in question appeared in the January/February 2004 issue of Foreign Affairs and I hope people will be able to convince the magazine to make the article available for free online since it's of considerable public interest in light of Feinstein's role. Thus far, the other Presidential contenders haven't seen fit to agree with John Edwards that unilateral preventive war should be discarded as a tool of non-proliferation policy, but they haven't seen fit to agree with him, either. Hillary and (especially) Bill Clinton have been attempting to muddy the waters on the question of what they thought about Iraq back in 2003, but the best evidence available from their conduct back then would be that they are supporters of unilateral prevention. Feinstein's views as expressed in this article seem to offer further confirmation of that. Particularly telling are his ideas of how international institutions and international law fit into the picture: The contentious issue is who decides when and how to use force. No one nation can or should shoulder alone the obligation to prevent a repressive regime from acquiring WMD. Although the Security Council, still reeling from the Iraq crisis last March, now seems more interested in papering over its differences than in tackling these questions, it remains the preferred enforcer of collective measures. The unmatched legitimacy that the un lends to Security Council actions makes it easier for member states to carry them out and harder for targeted governments to evade them by playing political games. On the other hand, rifts within the council allow states to pursue WMD to advance their programs, leaving individual nations to take matters into their own hands, which further erodes the stature and credibility of the United Nations. This seems like a longwinded way of saying nothing. International organizations are very important and we should always work through them except in those instances when doing so might require us to do anything other than exactly what we wanted to do in the first place. For all the words, their guidelines turn out to be no guidelines at all. Force should only be used under such and such occasions and the appropriate group to decide whether or not the conditions apply is either the UN or a local security organization or an out-of-area organization or else unilateral action. Nice work if you can get it, but if applied universally it's just a recipe for endless war and universal chaos. But one assumes that like Bush-style prevention, this isn't meant to be applied universally, it's supposed to be a For America Only license to attack other countries. That, however, isn't an international non-proliferation regime that's going to secure broad loyalty around the world. And without active cooperation from officials all around the world, it's very difficult in practice to make a non-proliferation regime work. Which is going to mean more nuclear programs and ultimately more nuclear weapons -- the precise reverse of what the policy is supposed to achieve. It's a seriously flawed vision: One that's phrased calmly in the language of international law and pragmatism but that's lacks substantive differences with the way the Bush administration has been conducting itself. Iran NIE ReaxBarack Obama says: By reporting that Iran halted its nuclear weapon development program four years ago because of international pressure, the new National Intelligence Estimate makes a compelling case for less saber-rattling and more direct diplomacy. The juxtaposition of this NIE with the president's suggestion of World War III serves as an important reminder of what we learned with the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: members of Congress must carefully read the intelligence before giving the President any justification to use military force. There's a very subtle dig here at Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, noting that both of them, unlike you or I or Barack Obama, had access to the classified version of the 2002 NIE on Iraq, a document that debunked substantial elements of the administration's case for war, but which neither Clinton nor Edwards (nor a great many other members of congress) bothered to read before voting to authorize the use of force. Meanwhile, the John Edwards says: The new National Intelligence Estimate shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney's rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war. The new NIE finds that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that Iran can be dissuaded from pursuing a nuclear weapon through diplomacy. This is exactly the reason that we must avoid radical steps like the Kyl-Lieberman bill declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war. And it’s why I have proposed that we pursue a comprehensive diplomatic approach instead. Typically, the dig here is less subtle. What's more, it seems appropriate. Keep in mind that the contents of this NIE have been known to the Bush administration for over a year. Under the circumstances, the push for Kyl-Lieberman and similar measures looks an awful lot like a deliberate effort to change the subject away from Iran's alleged nuclear program specifically because the main actors in the administration knew their case on this point was about to collapse. Democrats who voted for Kyl-Lieberman look, under the circumstances, likes dupes at best. Watching the Fact CheckersRudy Giuliani runs an ad in which he explains "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues," which is an impossible thing for Giuliani to "know" since it's false: Fortunately, The Washington Post and The New York Times both have ad fact check features designed to set the record straight. But the Times doesn't notice what Rudy said, and the Post further misleads, saying "a matter of fierce dispute among economists." Brendan Nyhan asks "What's the point of fact-checking if you're not going to call Rudy on that claim?" I think you'd have to say that the point is pretty clear. If a candidate puts out an ad that says things that aren't true and newspapers ignore it, then maybe the claim is true and maybe it's false. By contrast, if the papers "fact check" the ad and don't call the claim false, then you, the reader, can be confident that the claim isn't false! Why would a newspaper do that? Well, Bob Somerby could probably give you a theory or two. At the end of the day, there's no denying that Giuliani is (a) "tough" and (b) a Republican, both things beloved by the national political press. More broadly, to an almost unique extent the entire Giuliani campaign is a pure creature of positive press coverage — I liked his speeches on 9/11 and the days immediately following, too, but nothing about them suggested to me "this is a man with a sound understanding of the national security challenges facing America." It was just an awestruck press corps that started in with the "America's Mayor" business, giving him the "Man of the Year" award, suggesting he should be taken seriously as a thinker on topics way outside his area of expertise, etc., etc., ec. Red HandedEvery time I think nothing will surprise me anymore, the Bush administration manages to take my breath away all over again. Consider the staggering dishonesty with which Dick Cheney has been trying to mislead the American people about our knowledge of the alleged Iranian nuclear program. Here's Dick Cheney six weeks ago: We have the inescapable reality of Iran's nuclear program; a program they claim is strictly for energy purposes, but which they have worked hard to conceal; a program carried out in complete defiance of the international community and resolutions of the U.N. Security Council. Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. The world knows this. The Security Council has twice imposed sanctions on Iran and called on the regime to cease enriching uranium. Yet the regime continues to do so, and continues to practice delay and deception in an obvious attempt to buy time. As Michael Cohen says "if one looks at the language of the NIE, one could theoretically argue that Cheney didn't directly lie here. For example, Iran's "civilian" nuclear program continues and yes Iraq was pursuing technology that could be used to develop nukes . . . but of course wasn't." Indeed, the striking thing about this is the extent to which looking back at Cheney's statement he's tried very carefully to avoid directly contradicting the NIE while crafting phrases that are clearly designed to cause the listener to draw the precise wrong conclusion. It's not as if Cheney read the NIE and decided he had some reason to believe it was incorrect. Rather, he read it, decided he'd better not contradict it, but also decided that bottom line conclusions about how Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program were inconvenient, and thus decided to talk around that minor point and try to get the American people confused about what's happening. Stunningly cynical and yes I'm resolving once again to never be stunned. More NIE ReaxFrom Rand Beers and Jon Wolfsthal, people worth listening to. Metcalf Strikes BackStephen Metcalf offers up a great rejoinder to Will Saletan on race and IQ. Read the whole thing. But seriously, read it -- I wound up learning a lot. In particular, I hadn't realized the full extent of the problems with the famous Minnesota twin study. His piece on Jens Lekman is good, too. A Quick PointOne more quick point on the Iran NIE. There's much less new material here than the media reaction would suggest. In particular, the International Atomic Energy Agency has been making the point that there's no evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program for some time. They've just been subject to a lot of derision and getting ignored. In general, the entire framing of the Iranian issue has been centered on people ignoring the difference between a country pursuing a nuclear energy research program that would generate information that would be useful in building a nuclear weapon, and a country pursuing a nuclear weapons program. When the Bush administration launched Operation Ivy and decided that the issue was Iranian "knowledge," the White House was in effect acknowledging that there was no weapons program on hand to complain about. At any rate, it seems to have been considered okay to ignore the IAEA's reports on the grounds that the UN is icky or the head of the IAEA is an Arab or both, so maybe now that the US Intelligence Community is saying it too, people will listen. UPDATE: Okay. On reflection, there is a difference between "no evidence" of a nuclear program and an affirmative conclusion of no nuclear program. My point is just that if last week someone had been going on about "the Iranian nuclear program" and you'd asked that person why he was so sure there even was an Iranian nuclear program, you'd have been dismissed as a fringy DFH, even though the IAEA had been trying to publicize its findings for some time. Nannies: They're Good at Taking Care of KidsI'm going to have to agree with Ezra that I find Andrew's opposition to congressional efforts to get healthier foods in public school snack machines a bit puzzling. Andrew headlines his item "Nanny-State Watch," and is citing a post from Cato's Daniel Mitchell called "More Nanny-State Foolishness." Think about that language for a minute. Nobody likes a nanny state because nannies are people appointed to take care of children while their parents are busy. Andrew and Daniel Mitchell and Ezra and I, however, are grownups so to have the state step in and act like our nanny is offensive and annoying: we're being treated like children. But guess who should be treated like children? Children! Parents, nannies, and -- yes! -- school officials are supposed to place paternalistic rules on children's behavior to prevent them from doing things (like eating too much junk food) that seems appealing in the short run but that they'll come to regret. A Mind is a Terrible Thing to ChangeBush on the NIE: " I have said Iran is dangerous, and the NIE doesn't do anything to change my opinion about the danger Iran poses to the world." Indeed.
Hyping IranIt should be kept in mind, of course, that George Bush and Dick Cheney weren't the only ones running around hyping the Iranian nuclear threat all out of proportion to reality. I recall, for example, the March 13, 2007 "New Dem Dispatch" scolding those of us who were too enthusiastic about the idea of diplomacy with Iran: But let's not get carried away. Iran still poses a major threat to global stability, regional peace, and U.S. interests. Tehran's serial defiance of U.N. mandates to stop developing nuclear weapons capabilities is a major challenge to the world's nonproliferation system. And its strong financial and material support for Hezbollah and Hamas makes it the number one state sponsor of Middle East terrorism. Oh, well. And of course there were Ken Baer's antics over the summer. Wither Missile Defense?
Robert Farley observes: For the last two years, we have justified putting a missile defense system in Eastern Europe explicitly around the threat of Iranian ballistic missiles. In addition to the extraordinary financial costs, this project has resulted in increased Russian hostility to the United States and to Russia's neighbors. And are we now to believe that this expensive and unpopular system is justified by the need to protect Poland from Iranian ballistic missiles armed with conventional warheads? Naturally, though, the exorbitant financial cost of the program counts as a point in its favor. The US would never want to build something cheap, useless, and incredibly damaging to our relationship with Russia. But since the missile defense initiatives are so damn costly, they're also incredibly profitable to the people who build them, and thus to the members of congress who get their campaign contributions and to the think tankers who they support. The best way to kill this initiative would be a scientific breakthrough that allowed its goals to be achieved cheaply and with some efficacy. If that was on hand, diplomatic considerations just might win out. Romney = ScrewedI thought Ross was mostly right in his critique of Ed Kilgore's take on Mitt Romney's impending speech on Mormonism. But Ed rallies with this followup: If, on the other hand, I'm "exactly wrong" and Douthat is "exactly right," then Mitt Romney is truly screwed. What is he supposed to say about his religion? He can't do the JFK separation-of-church-and-state bit; he's in the wrong party at the wrong time of history for that approach. He can't educate evangelicals about the tenets of the LDS church; aside from being a complex endeavor, that would probably alarm listeners even more than their current vague suspicions about the Mormon "cult." So if he also can't even appeal to the deep cultural conservative consanguinity of Mormons with evangelicals, he might as well cancel the speech and hope for the best. And, indeed, Romney does seem truly screwed. There's just no way to do what he's doing. Mitt Romney, Mormon, worked back when "Mitt Romney" denoted a culturally moderate politician. But he decided that a culturally moderate politician couldn't win a Republican Party presidential nomination, so he remade himself as a cultural conservative. But a culturally conservative Mormon is screwed outside of the Mormonism-heavy states of the West. And, obviously, the main driving force of his candidacy has always been the absence of alternatives who appeal to Christian conservatives anyway. He still has that going for him to some extent, so maybe he'll somehow manage to muddle through. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for pro-life voters to remember this guy named John McCain. Exchange Rate Blogging
Is the dollar undervalued? Evidence from the Apple Store's MacBook pricing policies. The cheapest configuration available in the US will run you $1,099. In Japan, the same thing costs 139,800 yen, which at current exchange rates is $1,275 or so. But in the Netherlands it costs 1,049 euros — $1,546. On most other products, the price in dollars is same as the price in Euros. In other words, you can get a Mac Mini for $599 or you can pay 599 euros for the same thing. Except 599 euros is almost $900 at current exchange rates. At any rate, I started doing the research and typing up the basic facts for this post this morning without really knowing what direction I wanted to take or what conclusions I was reaching. So it sat around as a draft, and then today I was in the Apple store and I saw a group of dudes from Italy roll in with a bit less than $3,000 in crisp $100 bills buy up a bunch of stuff. Holiday shopping in the era of the cheap dollar, I guess. EDIT: I corrected a typo wherein I'd written "almost $600" when it should have been "almost $900." December 5, 2007Taking Huckabee Seriously
Now that we're seeing national polls featuring Mike Huckabee surging all the way into second place, it's worth saying that I predicted a Huckabee win in the GOP primary months and months ago at an American Prospect editorial meeting and then stupidly failed to write it down. But other people were there, and I expect them to speak up and back up my story. All of which is to say that at this point I do think we need to start seriously considering the possibility that winning Iowa would not only collapse the Romney campaign but actually turn Huckabee into a real contender. The Israeli ViewSteve Clemons says Israeli Labor Party MK Ephraim Sneh told him he doesn't believe the new Iran NIE, sees the release of this report as an abdication of American responsibilities, and concluded by saying "When I get back, I will call together our intelligence establishment, and I will do all I can to begin seriously preparing the 'Israel option.'" Sneh's not a hugely influential politician at this juncture, but he's also not someone with a particularly hawkish record. Meanwhile, based on this Haaretz article, Ehud Olmert seems to be trying to respond in a reasonably responsible and restrained manner, but Labor ministers like Ehud Barak and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer are trying to call the credibility of the NIE into question. The Federalism IssueJulian Sanchez concedes the point regarding "nanny state" activity being perfectly reasonable when the people being nannied are children. Instead, he's upset on federalist grounds about the idea of congress making snack regulations for public schools. To which I say . . . eh. In practice, arguments about federalism are almost universally made opportunistically. People favor devolving power to the states when they think doing so will produce policies they approve of, and people favor concentrating power in Washington when they think doing so will produce policies they approve of. Everyone knows this. And while one might condemn the hypocrisy of it all, this always strikes me as a good thing to be hypocritical about. I don't really have a principled view about the appropriate division of powers between states and the federal government and don't really intend to develop one. The congressional policy being enacted here seems to me to be a good one, so that's good enough for me. Lukewarm on RadioheadWhen I outlined my lukewarm-at-best feelings about Radiohead, I did so with some trepidation, afraid that their legions of cult-like fans (or, really, just Catherine) would rip me to shreds, but since Carrie Brownstein seems to agree, I'll just consider myself in good company. O'Hanlon Primary UpdateHere's an interesting nugget: None of the leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination is likely to embrace that, said [Michael] O'Hanlon, who suspended his ties to the campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) after he wrote that Bush's troop buildup was yielding positive results. Since O'Hanlon was still being quoted in the media as a Clinton supporter a few weeks ago, I have to imagine the campaign (finally) got sick of him and got him to buzz off. But of course things can change when one shifts from "primary mode" to "general election mode" and I'm not sure what "suspended his ties" is really supposed to mean. What's more, O'Hanlon's always got Opportunity '08 to play around with. Asked and AnsweredI wanted to know whether or not there was any meaningful correlation between pace and offensive or defensive efficiency and Dave Berri kindly ran the numbers for me and came up with the answer "no". Obviously, teams that choose to play fast will end up in a lot of high-scoring games while teams that play slow will end up in a lot of low-scoring ones, but playing fast doesn't actually compromise the quality of your defense and shifting to a run-and-gun doesn't promise to help your team score. The Only Show That Matters
Season four of The Wire is now available on DVD and it's the perfect gift for any decent person out there. Of course, you won't want to run out and buy season four unless you've seen seasons one, two, and three, so keep that in mind. But if you've never seen the show, you have to see the show. You have to stop reading this post right now, open up your Netflix queue, and sign yourself for disc one of season one and then come back. Okay, back? It's the best show on television. The best show in the history of television. And with season five ready to start airing in about a month, it's by far the best show that's currently still on. So you need to watch it. Okay? Okay. Not Totally Out of the Iran WoodsIt does bear reiterating that as Headline Junkie says even if Iran doesn't have an active nuclear weapons program there's still ample reason to be concerned about Iran's behavior with regard to nuclear issues. The hope should be that this report will help put a dagger through the heart of loose talk about preventive military strikes and regime change -- talk that had become part of the problem -- and lay the groundwork for a more rational approach to the Iran issue. It continues to be clear that there are things the Iranians are more interested in than nuclear research, and it also continues to be clear that the decades of animosity between the United States and the Islamic Republic aren't serving the interests of either party very well. Bush seems too deeply invested in his BS to make any bold strokes at this point, but it's always worth pointing out that it was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who co-chaired the CFR task force proposing a "grand bargain" with Iran, working alongside Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security advisor and now in some sense affiliated with the Obama campaign. The wisdom of this approach, not just "diplomacy" but specifically diplomacy aimed at ending the conflict through mutual concessions, is pretty clear even if the US politico-media system often seems too screwed up for anyone to articulate it. The Trouble With OpportunismSome of the people supporting Hillary Clinton's campaign seem to me to be doing it because they agree with her relatively hawkish approach to foreign policy issues. Others are supporting her for careerist reasons. Others are supporting her because they think she has other virtues that outweigh problems with her relatively hawkish approach. And some people are just poorly informed. But there's a curious fifth faction in town whispering in peoples' ears in a manner that (intentionally) makes it difficult to do proper journalism on the subject. This group has an approach to foreign policy that's very similar to my own and insists that Hillary secretly agrees with us but needs to play the hawk in order to be politically viable as a woman. I don't really believe she's only acting, nor do I really believe that such an act would be necessary, but either way James Fallows who's obviously heard this line as well makes the important rejoinder that this is basically irrelevant. If Clinton believes she needs to act like a hawk on the campaign trail, she'll believe the same thing while in office so either way it's trouble. Better Health Care QuestionsThe ongoing debate over how many people would wind up without health insurance under Barack Obama's proposals is interesting, but by its nature it's bound to be inconclusive. What I'd like to see a clearer explanation of from the Jon Cohns and Ezra Kleins and Paul Krugmans and so forth of the world is a more detailed account of who's supposed to worse off under Obama's plan. After all, I could unveil the following Matt Yglesias Health Care Plan -- let's make an individual mandate to buy health insurance at least as good as what congress gets -- and then run around town slamming Barack Obama as a foe of the uninsured for leaving millions without coverage. But that'd be dumb. My hypothetical plan is only a "universal health care plan" in a vacuous sense. It wouldn't do anything to actually help people who currently lack insurance. Clinton's plan isn't like that. It does do things to help people buy insurance. As a general matter, though, the things it does are the same -- subsidies for those of modest means, regulations preventing insurance companies from discriminating against those with pre-existing conditions, etc. -- as the things Obama's plan does to help people buy insurance. In terms of specific details, neither campaign has released much in the way of specific details. And what's more, everyone acknowledges that any specific details the campaigns might release will likely be changed during the legislative process anyway. So what's the deal? Instead of guessing how many people might or might not buy insurance in Obamaland, I'd like to know what kind of people will wind up uninsured in Obamaland and how they'd be differently situated in Hillaryworld. In particularly, would they actually be better off in Hillaryworld? My sense is that mandate advocates are trying to obscure the fact that most of the people who wouldn't have comprehensive insurance after the proposed Obama reforms are people who'd be screwed-over by a mandate. UPDATE: I should have added that these are people who arguably should be screwed over. The goal of national health care policy should be to support the needs of the poor and the sick, and the individual mandate is a clumsy way of doing that by making the prosperous and healthy cross-subsidize their insurance premiums. Dumond DocsMurray Waas has a heck of a scoop demolishing Mike Huckabee's line on Wayne Dumond, the rapist he let out of jail who went on to graduate to murder: Confidential Arkansas state government records, including letters from these women, obtained by the Huffington Post and revealed publicly for the first time, directly contradict the version of events now being put forward by Huckabee. [...] A stark reminder both of how crazy the craziness was in anti-Clinton circles and also of how influential it was. This is a giant country, so there'll always be a certain number of nutters out there. But in the 1990s, the Clinton conspiracy theorists were in the driver's seat, getting governors to release rapists and people died. Appalling stuff. Assimilating to Secularism
One thing that I guess I could have learned just pondering the world from my chair but that I don't think I really understood until I went to the Netherlands and talked to people involved in politics there is the extent to which the "new atheism" -- which is mostly like the old atheism but involves people acting like jerks -- is specifically bound up with some problematic anti-Muslim sentiments. Previously, things like this Christopher Hitchens column bashing Hanukkah had struck me as merely weird; something along the lines of the contrarian tick that led Will Saletan to proclaim the truth of white supremacy only to be embarrassed when the thesis turned out to be primarily backed by white supremacists, except taking on a much less harmful form. That's because here in the states, we understand "religion" to mean "Christianity" (and predominantly Protestant Christianity at that) and in public life the "secular" alternative is understoo- as encompassing a vague pluralism that's friendly to minority religious groups, not the strident anti-religious sentiments of a Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins. In Europe, though, the face of "religion" is increasingly Islam whereas elements of the secular consensus are part of a national identity that elements of the right can embrace. It was explained to me, for example, that one thing Dutch people worry about when they worry about Muslim immigrants is that socially conservative Muslim immigrants might spoil their same-sex partnership law. I joked that conservatives should love immigration, then. But in reality the forces of indigenous religious conservatism are way too weak for anything like that to happen. So instead of a system of cross-currents, where both a cosmopolitan left and a traditionalist right find something to admire about growing diversity, you get a substantial block of people pushing against Muslim immigrants from both a secularist and a nationalist perspective. From the point of view of an American liberal, it's an awkward situation. One doesn't want to say "you guys should get rid of your progressive views on gender roles because it would make it easier for Muslims to assimilate" but at the end of the day it is much easier for Muslims to go along get along in a country like the US where traditionalist attitudes have more political clout. Of course, if more American conservative Christians decide to go the Pat Robertson route and decide to support Rudy Giuliani on the grounds that fighting Muslims is the ultimate expression of Christian values, then our advantage here will rapidly erode. Ignorance is BlissAt a minimum, I sincerely hope it is, because there's an awful lot of it on display: I wonder if there were Christian missionaries among the dinosaurs. CautionJonah Goldberg's not happy that people are happy with the new National Intelligence Estimate: The attitude among many people — like say, John Edwards — is that we dodged a bullet with this NIE. But that's only true if this NIE is right. Indeed, as a matter of national security, it seems to me one could make the case that it would be better for the NIE to be wrong the other way. That is to say, if the NIE is wrong, better it be wrong on the side of caution. Which would you rather: An NIE that says Iran isn't pursuing nuclear weapons when it really is? Or, an NIE that says Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons when it really isn't? How you answer that question probably says a lot about how you view foreign policy generally. I think this kind of thinking was quite prevalent before the invasion of Iraq. Before 9/11, when contemplating starting wars with other countries, most people were inclined to err on the side of caution -- which is to say not starting wars. After 9/11, things looked different. Maybe the Iraq situation was a bit unclear, but best to err on the side of caution -- which was to say starting a war. It's easy to understand how that happened, but surely the notion that alarmism is a form of caution should have died in the sands of Iraq. Wide OpenThe Democratic race has gotten a bit tedious to think about since the arguments are all so well-trod, but Rasmussen's national daily tracking poll shows the Republican race in all its fascination:
In essence, the candidates all seem to be close enough in national polling -- and the situation sufficientlly fast-changing -- that nobody's far enough ahead to have a meaningful advantage and nobody's so far down as to be out of it. It seems to me that if Huckabee wins Iowa, that still would leave ample time for an establishment rally around John McCain if they want to go in that direction. Conversion
Via Ross Douthat, Noah Millman and Russell Arben Fox offer their views of what Mitt Romney ought to say in his big speech about religion. Probably he should stay in keeping with his main campaign themes and just tell Republican primary voters that he's willing to say whatever they want him to say about Mormonism and explain that he's only had trouble with this issue because it's not clear what people want from him. For that matter, if you could just replay this whole primary campaign, it seems to me that Romney's big mistake was failing to flip-flop on the question of his faith. Back when he was a culturally moderate Bay Stater, religion wasn't especially central to Romney's political identity. And while flip-flopping on "the issues" is generally held in low esteem, flip-flopping on religion -- converting, in short -- is usually celebrated as long as people like your new religion. So why not find Jesus? Back when he was considering that stem cell bill, Romney could have consulted with a wide array of religious leaders including, say, a baptist minister. And maybe the minister in question is really convincing and Romney decides to abandon the faith into which he was born. Religious right types have to be prepared to believe conversion stories, and the experience of being "born again" would be the perfect opportunity to flip-flip on an array of issues, lending the flops a pseudo-plausible veneer of respectability. And who, then, would speak of Mike Huckabee? Am I A Bigot?Marc Ambinder asks some good questions about Mormonism and politics, including number two "Are those who object to Mormonism on theological and doctrinal grounds religious bigots?" I think the answer there needs to be a clear "no." Obviously, people are going to disagree about theological matters and there's nothing wrong with that. The question of bigotry concerns the possibility of irrational prejudice against people who subscribe to the tenets of Mormonism. Clearly, an aversion to the idea of a Mormon president exists out there. Some of this, perhaps, is bigotry. But some isn't. For example, Marc asks "Is Mormonism objectively similar to widely accepted variants of evangelical Christian theology?" In other words: Is Mormonism a kind of Christianity? In some ways, it's not really my place to judge. But obviously a lot of Christians think it isn't. And I think they have a plausible case. (Not just Evangelicals, either, the Catholic Church says Mormon baptisms are invalid). Nothing wrong with not being a Christian, but the fly in the ointment is that Mormons say they are Christians. To me, this isn't a big deal. But that's because, not being a Christian, I don't really care about the integrity of Christianity. But I'll say this: Like most Jewish Americans, I'm perfectly reconciled to the fact that there are all these Christians running around and I think I harbor no prejudice against them. But I really don't care for "Jews for Jesus." The problem isn't that Jews for Jesus aren't real Jews; the problem is that they aren't real Jews but insist on saying they are. Now if faced with the choice between a Democratic Jew for Jesus promising universal health care (yes! even via a mandate), fully auctioned carbon permits, an end to the war in Iraq, a grand bargain with Iran, etc. and a conservative Republican or Joe Lieberman or what have you, sure, I'd cast a ballot for someone who's religious views bug me. But given the choice between a Jew for Jesus and a plausible alternative candidate, I think I'd go for the plausible alternative. Insofar as there are orthodox Christians out there thinking they'd rather not vote for a Mormon along similar lines, I can certainly sympathize with that, especially since the best case one can make for Romney on the merits is that maybe he doesn't believe any of the things he's saying. CDO's ExplainedThis here from Portfolio is probably the best brief explanation I've seen yet of what a "collateralized debt obligation" is and why it matters to you. It's also just a nifty application of web technology. I'll Drink to That
Happy Repeal Day, folks. Meanwhile, I have to say that the state liquor monopolies phenomenon seems baffling. Straightforward taxes on booze seem like an infinitely better way to raise revenue. And don't get me started on the evils of the state lottery. Photo by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik used under a Creative Commons license December 6, 2007Unbuying CondosThere's this condo under construction a little ways from my house. One afternoon, I stopped by the sales office curious as to what the units were selling for. Long story short: More than they were worth. But they finagled my email address out of me in exchange for some refreshments. So now I get this ALL-CAPS EMAIL from them yesterday: SAVE THE DATE -- THURSDAY, DECEMBER 13 -- 5:00-8:00 PM -- REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED This all kind of smacks of desperation, eh? Meanwhile, I hadn't realized you could unbuy a condo you'd already bought from a developer, but the only sense I can make out of the claim that "if you visited our sales center in the past and the unit you wanted was sold, then this is your chance" is that people have done just that. My understanding of the data is that central city areas have been weathering the shitpile's collapse much better than have the fringes (basically, when prices fall, the demand pattern collapses inward toward the center and its people who owned in the rim who are really left holding the bag) but it's hard for new developments everywhere, especially ones like this one that are too far along to convert into rentals. Either way, there's no call for this much capitalization. This Has Gone Too FarSeriously, Peter Orszag is writing a CBO blog now? And you can tell he's really doing it since he doesn't seem to understand how to write text with links: Marty Feldstein (http://www.nber.org/feldstein/) and Fred Bergsten (http://www.iie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=33) are also on this morning’s panel. You can view the hearing through the House Budget Committee website, at http://budget.house.gov/ It's come to be a strange world we live in. Media BiasVia Brendan Nyhan, former Bush communications director Dan Bartlett gives his views on the political press: TM: Do you think the press corps is responsible for putting that word out—that the president was lying [about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq]? This seems like a shockingly reasonable assessment of the situation. One might add that a huge amount of the problem is lock-in. If the incentives facing the people who do this kind of coverage point in the direction of pointless, dumb stories then people who are strongly averse to doing that kind of work tend to get out of the business. Those who succeed are the ones who not only understand the incentive structure but who embrace it, thus further re-inscribing it. When Inaccuracy HurtsKevin Drum points out that for a guy who's super-concerned about global warming, Tom Friedman doesn't seem to follow the issue at all, writing the following in a fake memo representing Iran's take on the United States: True, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congress decided to increase the miles per gallon required of U.S. car fleets by the year 2020 — which took us by surprise — but we nevertheless "strongly believe" this will not lead to any definitive breaking of America's oil addiction, since none of the leading presidential candidates has offered an energy policy that would include a tax on oil or carbon that could trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels. Sure, sure, none of the leading presidential candidates have done that. Except that Friedman might have wanted to note that John Edwards came out with a proposal to fully-auction carbon permits in the context of a cap-and-trade scheme aimed at aggressive emissions reductions, which is the same thing. For that matter, Barack Obama came out with the same proposal. And, um, Hillary Clinton. So rather than "none" of the leading presidential candidates favoring such measures all of the Democrats have proposals that would do this. To me, this kind of pundit fuck-up -- declining to give credit to people who deserve it -- is probably the most damaging kind. For better or for worse, Friedman's become one of the leading voices on climate change and energy issues. And he's a very influential columnist. People probably read him hoping to see which politicians, if any, someone who finds his columns convincing should be supporting. In this case, they should be strongly favoring whoever wins the Democratic nomination. But Friedman won't say so. Instead, in order to reach a pox on both houses conclusion he finds himself ignoring the very strong similarity between auctioned permit plans and carbon tax plans. But if this is the treatment candidates stake out bold eco-friendly positions are going to get from prominent advocates, then who's going to bother. You can be sure the fossil fuel industry knows which politicians are their friends and which aren't. The ones who aren't need people to have their backs, not to just get slandered coming and going. ResultsThe data is in, and we can see abstinence-only sex education having its impact as teenage birthrates rise. The War on Intellectual Property ViolationsKerry Howley discovers the industry advocates who say buying knock-off designer goods fuels terrorism and the journalists gullible enough to swallow it. There's something really pathetic about the extent to which America has been willing to lie down for a lot of obviously farcical "terror, terror, terror" business. I try to take the whole al-Qaeda thing seriously; I recommend Daniel Byman's book on fighting violent jihad. But then you get something preposterous like the "no liquids on a plane" rule but, hey, this turns out to be good news for the guys who sell overpriced water and soda past the security checkpoints so why not leave the rule in place and let's all agree to pretend its about security and not money. Comprehensive Reform: Still Popular
For all the demagoguery and recent panic in Democratic circles, it turns out according to a new LAT/Bloomberg poll that the basic principles of comprehensive reform are still popular: "About 60% of Democrats, Republicans and independents support 'a path to citizenship by registering, paying a fine, getting fingerprinted, and learning English, among other requirements.'" As Marc Ambinder points out this is the thing that opponents call "amnesty" so even if "amnesty" is unpopular, the thing that "amnesty" denotes is popular. The public continues, however, to be hostile to the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to avail themselves of public services. That underscores the central need to place specific immigration issues in the context of broad immigration policy -- even if Tim Russert and Wolf Blitzer don't like it. Everyone agrees, at the end of the day, that it's dumb to have a big population of people availing themselves of social services who aren't even allowed to be in the country. But comprehensive reform featuring a path to citizen is a practical, economically viable, humane way of accomplishing that and despite a lack of public leadership for the past few months the public still seems to recognize it as such. Photo by Flickr user Skunks used under a Creative Commons license Like Rain on Your Wedding DayDid I just watch Mitt Romney explain that voters wouldn't respect a politician who changes his beliefs when it's politically convenient? Hilarious. He really should have just become a Baptist. LDS and Civil RightsSo Mitt Romney cited the civil rights movement as an example of the sort of common faith-based moral causes that bring people of all faiths together. Maybe he needs to re-read about church history. Here's the April 13, 1959 Time: Whatever they may do or leave undone about their Negro brethren, most U.S. churches hold that all men are equal before God. One notable exception: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Book of Mormon teaches that the colored races are descendants of the evil children of Laman and Lemuel, who impiously warred against the good children of Nephi and received their pigmented skin as punishment. Last week a Utah State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights drew on this Mormon scripture in a scathing report on the state of the tiny nonwhite minority in Utah. Now, obviously, they've jettisoned that these days and that's not what Mitt Romney believes. But it highlights out vacuous this notion of an all-encompassing universal faith-and-goodness is. Most major religions do espouse a mostly-admirable moral creed. But old-style Mormon teaching on "the evil children of Laman and Lemuel" isn't admirable. Arresting people for naming a teddy bear "Mohammed" isn't admirable. Settlers who believe the entire West Bank is God's gift to the Jewish people aren't admirable. Should Huckabee Read Karl Marx?Ed Kilgore recommends Rich Lowry's take on Mike Huckabee as "a useful reminder of the source of Huckabee's core vote for those progressives who view him as some sort of economic populist. In Iowa, at least, and probably nationally, Mike Huckabee's 'surge' is primarily a product of his success in remobilizing--and de-marginalizing--the Christian Right." True enough, but I think it's important to understand that Huckabee really is some sort of economic populist. After all, as Jonathan Chait points out: Mike Huckabee has been scaring the bejesus out of the Republican establishment with his scorching populist invective. In one recent interview, the former Arkansas governor declared, "I am like a lot of folks who are tired of thinking the Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street." He has denounced "immoral" CEO salaries, and warned, "People will only endure this for so many years before there is a revolt." The terrified anti-tax Club for Growth is waging jihad against Huckabee, and Robert Novak has called him an advocate of "class struggle." Populism is a political style, and that right there is the populist style as applied to economics. The problem is that his policy thinking is alternately vapid, confused, naive, or insane: At the broadest ideological level, Huckabee is a conservative, happily paying tribute to the genius of the marketplace, the need for self-reliance, and other conservative standbys. Brilliant article, read the whole thing. To be fair to Marx, though, I'm not sure Capital really contains much in the way of policy recommendations. The Communist Manifesto's policy platform, by contrast, contains some pretty good ideas:
Number two and number ten are pretty much conventional wisdom these days. Point nine is essentially suburbanization, which I think has gone too far, but that certainly counts as a mainstream idea. One could construe point five as something akin to the current federal reserve system. With regard to six, our transportation system is overwhelmingly in public hands (i.e., the roads and mass-transit are government-owned, the airlines and intercity buses are not) while the communications infrastructure is privately owned by subject to much regulation. I have no idea what eight means, point four seems like a good idea but not applicable to present circumstances. Point seven seems to conflate a good idea (bring wasteland into cultivation) with a bad one (state-owned factories). Point three probably goes too far, but heavy taxation of large estates is certainly a good idea. All things considered, I think Marx's ideas here are considerably better thought-out than Huckabees. "The Religion Question"
In honor of Mitt Romney, The Washington Post gone into the archives to excavate some of the then-contemporary coverage of John F. Kennedy's religion speech. As always, peering back in time is fascinating. At the end of the day, though, it seems to keep circling back to the very different context of Kennedy's times: And the Post editorial board, even as it praised Nixon, seemed ready to embrace a Catholic president: These days, it's considered de rigeur for politicians to loudly proclaim that their views are driven by faith. A candidate who runs for office by promising to treat his religious heritage as a meaningless quirk of ancestry would have a very hard time. But that means it can be very difficult to dispel worries about a "weird" religion. Indeed, since the Post brought it up, it's worth wondering whether a Quaker like Richard Nixon could be elected today. I can't imagine the voters going for an avowed pacifist, but it also seems that you'd have a lot of trouble portraying youself as someone who doesn't really care about "faith." Indeed, we even saw a lot of the Catholic hierarchy basically trying to sabotage John Kerry's presidential campaign in a way that suggests that even Catholics may have more difficulties today than they did in 1960. Who You Gonna CallClintonite spinmeisters Lehane & Fabiani go to work for Big Media to help them try to weather the Writer's Guild strike. Presumably, Mark Penn's union-busting practice was unavailable. MassachusettsEzra Klein posts a missive from MIT's Jonathan Gruber that, among other things, goes into some detail about what's happening in Massachusetts: [Kit Seelye] then cites the experience of Massachusetts, where I serve on the Connector Board that is implementing our ambitious health reform passed in 2006. She correctly points out that, as part of a compromise last year, we exempted almost 20% of uninsured adults from mandated coverage. But half of these are low income individuals offered employer insurance who can be covered as part of the law, but for whom we have not yet had time to design an appropriate subsidy program. The other half are individuals above three times the poverty line who are excluded from subsidies through a compromise between then Governor Romney and our legislature. If subsidies were extended further, exemptions would have been unnecessary. Candidates Clinton and Edwards have said that under their plans all individuals would be subsidized so that no one has to pay an unaffordable amount for insurance. She has laid out no specific plans for mandate exemptions, and there is no reason why she should be tarred by what we have done under the constraints of our Massachusetts law. This is a good double-corrective. On the one hand, the problems with the system in Massachusetts aren't as clear an indictment of the mandate-regulate-subsidize approach as I might have thought. on the other hand, this seems to me to emphasize the idea that the as-yet-undefined parts of the health care plans -- the scale of subsidies -- are very, very, very important to knowing what they look like in practice. The candidates are correct not to have attached meaningless numbers to their plans that'll just get washed away in congressional bargaining, but it's still worth recalling that this could go in any number of ways in practice depending on the balance of power in the congress. And There's That CatchI haven't posted yet on Bush's mortgage rate freeze plan because it seemed at first glance like a pretty good idea that was, if anything, too generous to people in need. That, though, didn't sound right at all, so I figured I must be misunderstanding. And, indeed, it turns out that Bush has devised a bailout that doesn't help low-income people. That's more typically Bushian and absurd. Bailouts are always a tricky thing, because you don't necessarily want to insulate people from the consequences of bad decision-making. On the other hand, when there's objective hardship and the ability to help out, it can make a lot of sense to step in. Excluding the worst-off people stands the moral logic of the enterprise on its head. Edwards on Lieberman-Warner
I'm not entirely sure what I think about the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill that made its way out of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday. John Edwards says: Addressing global warming is one of the great moral tests of our generation, and it’s time for bold action and leadership to address this crisis that threatens the globe. While I’m glad to see that global warming legislation is finally moving in the Senate, unfortunately the Lieberman-Warner bill doesn’t go far enough to address the crisis of global warming. We cannot be limited in our approach by the armies of lobbyists from big oil companies and other special interests. This bill gives away pollution permits to industry for free – a massive corporate windfall – instead of doing what is right and selling them so that we can use these resources to invest in clean energy research, create a new economy of green jobs, and help regular families and business go green. That's all true, but still is it better to pass the half measure now than to do nothing? The fear is that if Lieberman-Warner becomes law, everyone kind of convinces themselves that we've done "something" and that since "something" needed to be done, we're now done, and can all just kind of not pay attention as the climate degrades at a somewhat-slower rate. Another way of looking at it, though, is that even inadequate steps might strengthen the hand of the good guys. Lieberman-Warner would do something to help spur alternative energy sources, which could grow the power of the alternative energy lobby and thus spur further change. And of course one also needs to take George W. Bush into consideration. My sense of this is that in some ways the best possible outcome would be for the bill to pass, and then for Bush to veto it. That would mean that "something" still needs to be done, but it would also set Lieberman-Warner as the minimum, thus making it obvious that a 2009 bill -- most likely in a context of a Democratic administration and with more Democrats in congress -- needs to be more ambitious. Photo by Flickr user Chisvick used under a Creative Commons license DiversityOh that whacky, whacky Washington Post opinion section: The famously liberal Washington Post op-ed page displays its commitment to ideological diversity today. The contributors, in full: And of course it seems like only yesterday that they were upset that new, less alarmist intelligence on Iran might make the people who were right about Iran feel vindicated. Or something. These Guys Should Really Acknowledge the ProgressSince the Clinton campaign seems to be succeeding in its strategy to refocus the debate onto domestic issues, the whole question of what the candidates are planning to do about Iraq seems to have faded increasingly into the background. Still, it continues to be my view that this talk of continuing an open-ended training mission in Iraq is a bad idea. This isn't doesn't really get to the core of the problem with the training concept, but it's amusing to know that when we take Iraqis out of the country for training they tend to not want to go back. Along those lines, it seems that the main reason refugees are going back to Iraq from Syria is that Syria's kicking them out. One Year LaterRand Beers and Max Bergmann take a look at what's been accomplished since the Iraq Study Group released its recommendations: Not much. December 7, 2007Romney's Terrible SpeechThe editors of National Review proclaim that "we suspect that most people who watched the speech were impressed, sympathetic, and sometimes moved." I had an instinct to respond in time, saying that I suspect the speech will fall flat, backfire, etc., etc., etc. But why go meta? In a first-order sense, I thought the speech was dumb, and made Romney look like a deeply dishonest, somewhat foolish person. Romney rejected the counsel of those who "would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines." But he couldn't actually stick to that line. He felt he desperately needed to reassure Christians worried about his relationship with Christ: There is one fundamental question about which I often am asked. What do I believe about Jesus Christ? I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. My church's beliefs about Christ may not all be the same as those of other faiths. Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree. It's hard to see this as anything other than an effort to trick people; the Mormon emphasis on Gethsemane rather than the crucification is not a trivial theological difference, nor is the fact that Mormons believe in "another," more important, Testament of Jesus Christ in addition to the Christian Bible. I don't personally have a stake in that quarrel but I paid enough attention in Bible class at Grace Church School to know that this isn't some nothing to be papered over. Now if Romney had wanted to say that the nature of his beliefs about Jesus are irrelevant to the campaign, fine. Similarly, if he'd actually wanted to avoid discussing Mormon theology, fine. But he didn't stick to it. Instead, what he wanted to do was discuss just enough about Mormon theology to make it seem as similar as possible to orthodox Christianity while underscoring the idea that the nature of his belief in Christ is relevant to the campaign just insofar as his beliefs overlap with those of the Evangelical Protestants whose votes he's courting. All of this meshes with Romney's disgusting efforts to unite all people of faith under the banner of excluding atheists entirely from his account of virtue. And this, in turn, combines with his ludicrous "say something nice about everyone" paragraph: I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims. For a passage in a speech dedicated to underscore the centrality and importance of religion, this seems like a pretty superficial understanding of what's going on. What's more "unchanged through the ages" isn't a notably accurate description of the "ancient traditions of the Jews," but I guess he couldn't think of anything else to admire about Judaism. At least it's not as dumb as commending Muslims for their "commitment to frequent prayer," which is just silly. I've previously taken the view that Mitt Romney would be the least pernicious Republican were he to take the White House, but his entire campaign has been an insult to the collective intelligence of the American people (remember the Reagan Zone of Economic Freedom?) and with this speech he's just taking the trend one step further. Robert Samuelson is a Heartless Monster
I'm surprised yesterday's Robert Samuelson column hasn't come in for more derision: We need to have a candid debate about health care in 2008, but the odds are against it. The fact that covering the 47 million uninsured already looms as the centerpiece of this debate is a warning sign that it won't be serious. We're told that the uninsured are our biggest health-care problem, but they aren't. Runaway health spending is. Yowza. It seems to me that what "our" biggest health-care problem is probably has a little something to do with who we are. Evidently the plight of the uninsured isn't a big problem for Robert Samuelson, but it's a problem for an awful lot of the uninsured people. Similarly, the risk of losing insurance is a problem for an awful lot of people. Maybe if we all got paid Samuelson's salary to churn out inane columns, everyone would share his perspective on the world. But it's really a bizarre perspective. He moans: "These proposals would inflict 'pain,' and candidates who embraced them would invite political ruin." Pain would invite ruin because people don't like policies that will make them worse off. It's a perfectly reasonable thing for voters to want to avoid. Photo by Flickr user PPDigital used under a Creative Commons license Coverup and CrimeObviously, you can't miss Mark Mazzetti's story on the CIA's destruction of tapes that would have provided evidence of torture being carried out by American personnel. Spencer's commentary seems apt: Of course, Hayden just inherited this whirlwind. His predecessors, George Tenet and Porter Goss, sowed it. And to a greater degree, it's the fault of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo and John Rizzo, who created a blatantly illegal interrogation program for the CIA to implement. Those on the tapes torturing Abu Zubaydah and Detainee #2 were, loyally, doing what those men wanted. But Tenet must have known that what's on those tapes is evidence of criminal activity. That's a much more plausible explanation for why he stopped taping interrogations. And it's also probably why Rodriguez, with Goss' tacit or explicit consent, destroyed them. If Michael Mukasey is the same man of integrity he was before he became attorney general, he'd call that criminal conspiracy or deliberate obstruction of justice. Michael Hayden as the current front-man is obviously going to wind up bearing a lot of the heat for the coverup, but it's Jose Rodriguez, CIA operations chief at the time, who was the actual actor here -- unless he's willing to fess up and implicate superiors in the conspiracy. And then there's the underlying crime, the culpability for which goes all the way up the chain. Speaking of which, I saw a screening of Taxi to the Dark Side the other evening and had planned on holding off on blogging about it until the film was out in theaters, but I'll just observe that its dissection of the ways in which "command responsibility" implicates top officials in the crimes committed on the front lines of the torture trade is really brilliant. The film also makes the point that for all the flaws of the political press (the guys who cover campaigns, file dispatches from congress, follow the president around and take notes on what he says, etc.), quite a lot of excellent work has been done on these issues by reporters in the field and investigative correspondents based here in Washington. Going Green (Line)
Rob Goodspeed posts several charts regarding Metro ridership here in the Washington DC area. This one illustrates the growth in ridership at the relatively new Green Line stations around where I live. The steady growth is impressive and tends to illustrate the point that if you build it, they will come; especially if you build it properly, which is what's happened here. The way Columbia Heights' ridership started out slightly lower than Petworth's but is now rocketing ahead also shows the virtues of allowing intensive development, something I'd like too see even more of in that area where right now it's basically restricted (by law, not by lack of demand) to 14th Street. A New HopeVia Brad DeLong, Tanta's detailed explanation of the Bush mortgage adjustment plan suggests that there's less to it than meets the eye: From what I have seen about the plan to date, it is clear to me that it is in fact structured with the overarching goal of making sure that it stays on the allowable side of the existing contracts. I proceed from the assumption that nobody could write such a convoluted and counter-intuitive plan if that wasn’t the goal. So everyone who is thinking, “Gee, we’re violating contracts and we still don’t get much out of it!” is thinking the wrong thing, in my view. It’s more like “Gee, we don’t get much out of it when we don’t violate contracts.” Meanwhile, Felx Salmon explains why lenders love the mortgage freeze plan, so it seems that the administration has its priorities straight as usual (that's sarcasm). Pining Away for the FjordsFred Thompson's "not just, just sleeping" presidential campaign shows some vague signs of life with anti-Huckabee leafletting:
Yes, Mike Huckabee governed the same state as Bill Clinton! Shocking stuff. No, the actual argument seems to be that Huckabee is a tax-raiser. This tells you about what you need to know about the modern GOP: As governor, Huckabee cut some taxes and raised some taxes, dealing with the vicissitudes of highly volatile state budgets during a very long time as governor. As a presidential candidate, he's espousing a lunatic regressive tax scheme. His rivals attack him for the former signs signs of pragmatism and reasonableness are poison to the GOP base, whereas signs of fanaticism and ignorance don't really trouble anyone.
The Good BrooksVia Mark Kleiman, the good David Brooks delivers an excellent column on Mitt Romney and "The Speech": The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press. Yessiree. Meanwhile, from the point of view of a basically secular person who nonetheless holds to certain retrograde notions about human dignity, there continues to be something staggering about the extent to which the politicized "faith" crowd believes that it is a right and just thing to do to, say, keep a man shackled naked in a standing posture in a freezing room and then, later, strap him to a board and force water down his throat so as to induce a sensation of drowning before using evidence obtained by such methods as perhaps a basis for detaining further individuals and treating them likewise. Big StickDick Cheney disparages House Democrats like John Murtha and John Dingell for "march[ing] to the tune of Nancy Pelosi" rather than "carrying the big stick" in the manner Cheney expected. He describes himself as "trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion" and comes up with the sniffy observation that in "the Congress I served in, that wouldn't have happened." Because, it seems, the sort of congress where you can cast votes in favor of keeping Nelson Mandela imprisoned isn't the sort of congress where stick-wielding men take their marching order from girls. No word yet on whether John Conyers has contracted cooties. Insulting AllrightThe New Republic, in an apparent effort to embarrass anyone who defended them over Scott Beauchamp, busts out some truly irresponsible coverage with Yossi Klein Halevi's "An Insult to Intelligence: The Israeli defense community responds to the NIE". The article basically consists of an extended, evidence-free slander of the American Intelligence Community that asserts over and over again with no basis that the NIE's conclusions are not just mistaken, but deliberately dishonest, "an expression of political machination and cowardice." Not only does Halevi have no basis for these assertions, but the overwhelming bulk of his disagreement with the NIE is based on a kind of sleight of hand. The conclusion that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program is based, one assumes, on evidence for the proposition that Iran doesn't have an active nuclear weapons program. To Halevi -- who throughout the piece simply claims to speak for the entire Eretz Yisroel, despite appearing to rely almost entirely on the say-so of one former official -- the key point is something else entirely. Rather that concern about an active nuclear weapons program "Israel's point of no return is when Iran attains the potential to produce sufficient fissile material for making a bomb." This standard, frequently applied by hawks in Israel, simply has no meaning either under relevant international law or in the world of science and engineering. But if Halevi wants to have an honest argument about thresholds -- saying the United States should hold Iran to an arbitrary and unrealistic standard -- then fair enough. But hard-working, patriotic people put this NIE together designed to answer a real question about the state, if any, of an active Iranian nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency had looked at this question previously and found no evidence of such a program, and now the American Intelligence Community assess that this is because there is no such program. According to Halevi, this is a "betrayal" of Israel, but the only thing that's been betrayed is a sense of hysteria that Halevi seems determined to foster. Team BIlan Goldberg correctly notes that the sort of funny business on the NIE that I attributed to Yossi Klein Halevi below is popping up all around the conservosphere. He also rightly notes that this should be connected to the long "Team B" legacy on the right, where conservatives look at intelligence reports then jump up and down screaming that they're insufficiently alarmist. Most of the time, this kind of Team Bing succeeds in bringing political pressure to bear to gin up more alarmist reports, which then turn out to be false, and then in typical up-is-downist manner this becomes adduced as evidence in favor of the unreliability of conventional intelligence methods the next time around. Laura Rozen's 2003 Washington Monthly article about "an obscure essay, 'Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean Nous),' published a few years ago by Gary Schmitt and Abram Shulsky" remains a vital explanation of the higher theoretical basis for behaving in this manner. But suffice it to say that there are no accidents here, there's a deeply flawed method that almost invariably produces unduly alarmist conclusions. Torture BanReps. Delahunt and Nadler sent me a press release hailing the decision to include their legislative language extending the congressional prohibition on torture to the CIA in the House and Senate Conference Report on the Intelligence Authorization bill for 2008: “We need policies that reflect our respect for basic human rights. Waterboarding and other acts of torture are not only ineffective interrogation techniques but are contrary to American core values,” Rep. Delahunt said. “We must make it clear that the use of torture is wrong and will not be condoned.” I agree. Both Representatives have done excellent work on this issue, and the leadership is to be congratulated on moving forward with it. A presidential veto is all-but-certain and we'll see where Bush's values lie when he blocks intelligence funding in order to preserve his legal right to order people tortured. Start Snitchin'
How, you wonder, does the CIA get away with something like destroying video evidence of illegal activity? Surely there's some congressional oversight. Well, as it turns out, there sort of is: Senator Jay Rockefeller and Rep. Jane Harman knew some of what was going on and were maybe kinda sorta upset about it, but they didn't take any public action of the sort that might have actually prevented the evidence from being destroyed. As Marty Lederman observes, "Jay Rockefeller is constantly learning of legally dubious (at best) CIA intelligence activities, and then saying nothing about them publicly until they are leaked to the press, at which point he expresses outrage and incredulity -- but reveals nothing." The Democratic leadership really needs to start taking these Intel Committee postings more seriously. These are jobs that require smart, savvy, credible people who are prepared to wield the authority of their offices effectively. The country, by necessity, is going to have intelligence services who do a lot of things in the dark with someone minimal oversight. The burden of doing that oversight falls on the intelligence committees, and it's an extremely important job. Time and again Rockefeller looks not ready for prime time. More SnitchSo according to Jane Harman: In early 2003, in my capacity at Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, I received a highly classified briefing on CIA interrogation practices from the agency’s General Counsel. The briefing raised a number of serious concerns and led me to send a letter to the General Counsel. Both the briefing and my letter are classified so I cannot reveal specifics, but I did caution against destruction of any videotapes. On some level, obviously, one needs to sympathize with a member of congress who's being stymied by abuse of the classification procedure. At the same time, this is hardly a one-off. The clearest example, at this point, is probably the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, where the Bush administration released a declassified version that had different bottom-line conclusions than did the classified version. Obviously, while it's perfectly appropriate to classify substantial portions of an NIE, the conclusions themselves don't contain sources and methods, and there was no justification for them ever to be classified. What members who find themselves in the position Harman says she's in -- and the position that Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, and others found themselves in regarding the 2002 NIE -- need to realize is that on some level acquiescence in these kind of abuses winds up legitimizing them. A member who believes he or she is in possession of evidence of crimes being committed and covered-up through illegitmate classification ought to seriously consider civil disobedience: calling a press conference, stating the facts, and accepting responsibility for the consequences. The White House could, of course, then turn around and seek to prosecute a member for violating classification laws, and the member could argue justification and we'd have it out. That's a tough call to make, clearly. But our political leaders have responsibilities to the country and to the constitution and I've never seen a candidate for office say something like "I'm the one who likes to abdicate responsibility, decline to make the tough calls, and then when someone else gets to the bottom of things try to make sure that my ass was covered." Garbage In, Double-Garbage OutESPN.com's John Hollinger playoff predictor seems like an uncommonly dumb feature. It starts by using his interesting but flawed PowerRankings formula and then "Based on those rankings, each day the computer plays out the remainder of the season 5,000 times to see the potential range of projected outcomes. The results reveal the most likely win-loss record for each team -- and how likely it is for each team to make the playoffs, win the NBA title, win the lottery, and so on." All this serves to do, however, is exaggerate flaws in the original model by compounding them over and over again. HostagesRudy Giuliani's latest ad is really one of the most breathtakingly dishonest things I've seen in quite some time. Here's the text: I remember back to the 1970s and the early 1980s. Iranian mullahs took American hostages, and they held the American hostages for 444 days. And they released the American hostages in one hour, and that should tell us a lot about these Islamic terrorists that we’re facing. The one hour in which they released them was the one hour in which Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office as president of the United States. The best way you deal with dictators, the best way you deal with tyrants and terrorists, you stand up to them. You don’t back down. I’m Rudy Giuliani, and I approve this message. That's not what happened. At all. Rather, as the New York Times notes "the complex deal that led to their release was brokered by President Jimmy Carter’s administration. The hostages were released because the United States agreed to return nearly $8 billion in frozen assets to Iran, most of which Iran used to pay off foreign creditors." This then laid the groundwork for the Reagan administration's later policy of selling weapons to Iran in exchange for their assistance in getting hostages freed. This thing where Reagan's steely determination scared the Iranians into backing down never happened. Rockefeller: Actually, I Didn't KnowNow Jay Rockefeller says he didn't know the tapes were destroyed after all. He says he knew there were tapes, and he once wrote a letter asking to see the CIA Inspector General's report on the tapes (but not, it seems, the tapes themselves) then got turned down, then did nothing. The Failure of the SurgeHere on the CENTCOM website is Sgt. Sara Wood's report on General Petraeus' confirmation hearings, "Petraeus Supports Troop Increase in Confirmation Hearing," January 23, 2007, American Forces Press Service: “The objective will be to achieve sufficient security to provide the space and time for the Iraqi government to come to grips with the tough decisions its members must make to enable Iraq to move forward,” Petraeus said. “In short, it is not just that there will be additional forces in Baghdad; it is what they will do and how they will do it that is important.” And it hasn't happened. December 8, 2007Death SpiralJonathan Cohn has a very informative article on the Obama health care plan and the mandate debate. He sums up the case for mandates thusly: Still, the most important rationale for a mandate may be a more practical one: It's necessary to keep other reforms from unraveling. If you make insurers sell to everybody, even people with pre-existing conditions, but let people choose whether or not to buy it, people in good health will be more likely to wait until they're sick before buying coverage, figuring there's no point in forking over premiums while their chances of needing care are so low. This will cause a chain reaction. As healthy people opt out, insurance programs will be left dealing with a population of sicker and sicker people. Since insurance relies on contributions from healthy people to offset costs from sick, it will become more expensive--which will cause even more healthy people to opt out. The cycle will repeat over and over again, with the cost of insurance going up and enrollment going down. Wonks call this the "adverse selection death spiral." And it's hardly theoretical. By the late 20th Century, most of the nation's Blue Cross plans had stopped offering insurance to all comers, regardless of pre-existing condition, because their competitors--who didn't make the same generous offer--had stolen away all the healthy patients. Now in my view promoting a death spiral among private sector insurance companies could be a good thing if the intention was to kill 'em off and move people into an alternative public mechanism, but unfortunately I'm pretty sure this isn't what Obama's driving at. And there's the rub. I like Obama and I don't really like the mandate fad. And Obama doesn't like it either. But all indications are that his team doesn't come to this conclusion from the same direction I do, and his proposals are as bad as Clinton's in terms of a misguided focus on taming private insurance firms rather than destroying them. John Edwards, who's publicly hinted around about his plan as designed to put us on a slippery slope to the bountiful world of socialized medicine, is a clear winner here in my view. Moving On OutIt's clear that, roughly speaking, when you move farther away from an urban core your housing costs go down but your transportation costs go up. But that still leaves the question as to whether or not it all balances out in the end. Well, via Ryan Avent it turns out that it more or less does:
That graph's taken from this National Housing Center report arguing that we need to think of affordable housing issues as much more tightly linked with transport/congestion issues than has traditionally been the case. PreemptionI've got an op-ed in today's LA Times noting that though it's certainly good news that Iran seems to not have a nuclear weapons program, I'd still like to know what our Democratic candidates would have done had things gone the other way. I'd like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in short, to follow Bush's lead and repudiate unilateral preventive military action as a plank of nonproliferation policy. No One Can WinAs Ross argues at this point it would clearly be impossible for any of the Republican contenders to win the nomination. And yet, someone has to win the nomination, right? What The Tapes Would Have ShownKevin Drum on what the destroyed evidence would show us: So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel. I was thinking of this the other day when once again pondering the "does torture work" question. It's a reminder that the right issue isn't "could there be times when torture produces useful information?" it's "is torture as a policy a good way of obtaining useful information?" In other words: Does the time wasted on obtaining bad information, or -- worse -- acting on it, outweigh the good it is. From what we've been able to see peeking out of the shadows of the Bush torture regime, the answer looks like a very resounding "no." In addition to the time wasted and the innocent people killed, the administration was able to confirm a lot of its wrong preconceptions about Iraq, and in the battlefield scenarios at Bagram and Abu Ghraib set the stabilization missions backwards by turning our forces into hated occupiers. Even if some operationally useful intel has come out of this (and with so much garbage sloshing around, how could you even tell?) the systemic impact has been to flood the system with nonsense and brutality. The Case Against KantHilarious. Via Chris Betram. I was never properly taught anything about Kant's aesthetics in school, but it always sounded absurd. Rent ControlLike all informed people, I've always taken it for granted that rent control laws, while obviously nice for the occupants and rent controlled apartments, are ultimately quite inefficient and harmful to the overall housing situation in an area. But Tyler Cowen's evil twin Tyrone turns out to be able to mount a pretty decent case for rent control. At the end of the day, this still probably isn't very good policy, but the proposition that if we can get "everyone into a lower price, lower quality equilibrium for residences, that's for the better" is certainly something I can endorse. Of course before we go around trying to accomplish that by means of rent control, the simplest thing would be to scale back (or eliminate) the mortgage interest tax deduction which has everyone in a higher-price, higher-quality equilibrium than they'd otherwise be in. Payola
One big strength of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is that he has a lot of institutional support from establishment-minded social conservatives. One big weakness of Romney's presidential campaign is that he seems like a great big phony all the time. To liberals, he looks like a phony. But to the socially conservative rank and file he . . . also looks like a phony. So why all the love from elites? Tom Edsall and Ethan Hova have the story: Bribery! Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is distributing numerous payments, primarily to religious and social conservatives, most of them in Iowa, for what he calls "GOTV Consulting." "GOTV" is political shorthand for get-out-the-vote - just what walk-around payments financed. [...] The payments start at $500 a month, the base rate for student leaders, many of whom are chairs in the "Iowa Students for Romney" campaign organization. At a higher level, Joe Earle, former director of the Iowa Christian Alliance (the successor to the Iowa Christian Coalition) gets $4,000 a month, and Gary Marx, a top-level member on the Romney for President National Faith And Values Steering Committee, gets $8,000 a month. Well, that explains it. Energy BillI think I haven't given the landmark energy legislation passed by the House its due, but Dave Roberts lays it all out for you. This is good, good stuff. And the even better news is that there's majority support in the US Senate for passing it as well. But of course as we all know just because something's a good idea and most Senators want to pass it doesn't mean it'll pass. Indeed, just the reverse! But the margins on this one are pretty close, so if the Democrats win some Senate seats in 2008 the dynamic stands a very good chance of changing, and even passing the Senate at this point probably woudn't do any good since Bush would veto it. Meanwhile, I thought I would highlight this one piece of analysis because I think liberals tend not to give enough credit to the most powerful genuinely progressive politician in America: "Nonetheless, what came out of the house was stronger than almost anyone expected, a fact that can be attributed in large part to the tenacity of one woman: Speaker Nancy Pelosi." |
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