How is it that a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran wound up getting released when it was (a) made the administration look ridiculous, (b) pissed off the administration's key pyschotic warmonger allies, and (c) the administration has stated earlier that NIEs weren't going to be released in the future? Well, Pat Lang has some rumor-mongering that aligns perfectly with my armchair speculation:
The "jungle telegraph" in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that "intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary" if the document's gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media "on the record" to disclose its contents.
Did that really happen? Who knows. But it certainly seems to me that this is the correct and honorable way to behave for people who find themselves in possession of important information that's being kept classified for illegitimate reasons. The motives of the "leaker" can always be called into question, but a person willing to take a stand -- or as we may be seeing here, even a person willing to say he or she is willing to take a stand -- publicly and bear the consequences carries a lot more weight.
If there's one thing that Republican politicians agree on, it's that slashing taxes brings the government more money. "You cut taxes, and the tax revenues increase," President Bush said in a speech last year. Keeping taxes low, Vice President Dick Cheney explained in a recent interview, "does produce more revenue for the Federal Government." Presidential candidate John McCain declared in March that "tax cuts ... as we all know, increase revenues." His rival Rudy Giuliani couldn't agree more. "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenues," he intones in a new TV ad.
If there's one thing that economists agree on, it's that these claims are false.
Of course, what the world needs is something more than the occasional spot-on feature. What's needed is a world in which this information filters into daily coverage. If a politician gives a talk about economic policy whose central premise is false, this should be the story of the day. If a politician persists in saying things that aren't true, he should be branded a liar -- a "serial exaggerator," whatever -- a person possessed of a political strategy dependent on making false claims, and blessed or cursed with a character that lets him keep on doing it.
Greg Miller for The Los Angeles Times has a seemingly important scoop about a "previously undisclosed program" run by the CIA and called "Brain Drain" that was "designed to degrade Iran's nuclear weapons program by persuading key officials to defect." Naturally, the CIA doesn't want to talk about it:
A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the effort to cultivate defectors, saying "the agency does not comment on these kinds of allegations as a matter of course."
Some sources were, however, willing to speak off the record about the awesomeness of this program:
The defector program was put in place under CIA Director Porter J. Goss, who has since left. The agency compiled a list of dozens of people to target as potential defectors based on a single criterion, according to a former official involved in the operation: "Who, if removed from the program, would have the biggest impact on slowing or stopping their progress?"
"Did they have replacements for these people? Any country would have," the former official involved in the operation said. "But we did slow the program."
But as Isaac Chotiner points out, the lede is that "The CIA launched a secret program in 2005 designed to degrade Iran's nuclear weapons program" and the National Intelligence Estimate's new conclusion is that Iran's nuclear weapons program was mothballed in 2003. How could the CIA's activities have slowed an Iranian program that had already been put on hold?
She also seems to have coined a term, "MSB" or "mainstream blogosphere," for those of us doing this professionally for established media organizations.
One day, someone may look back and ask: At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, how did so many take up financial careers on Wall Street that were of such little social value? Just now, the markets are roiling, money managers and investment banks are reporting disappointing returns, and people are beginning to wonder if they chose the wrong guy in Greenwich, Connecticut, to take 2 percent of their assets and 20 percent of profits. But what if the problem isn’t the guy in Greenwich but the idea that makes him possible: the belief that the best way to invest capital is to hand it to an expert? As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more. Twenty-five years ago, the most successful among them took home a few million dollars a year; in 2006, more than 100 money managers made more than $100 million, and a handful made more than $1 billion. A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients’ money on to people who, as a group, cannot possibly outperform the market.
The whole piece is great. A related issue is what are the barriers to entry here. Sometimes unimpressive-looking NBA players make a ton of money because very, very, very few people could play as well as a middling NBA player. But how hard can it be to do the job of a middling financial manager? You could just flip coins.
I don’t think the issue’s about being against gay marriage. It’s about being for traditional marriage and articulating the reason that’s important. You have to have a basic family structure. There’s never been a civilization that has rewritten what marriage and family means and survived. So there is a sense in which, you know, it’s one thing to say if people want to live a different way, that’s their business.
So I suppose Blackstone-era family law must still be intact here in the West, because otherwise our civilization would have perished long ago. Or maybe conceptions of marriage and family structure are constantly shifting and this idea that they never change is just a cop-out effort to avoid squarely making the case for discrimination against gays and lesbians. My money's going on number two.
Photo by Flickr user Rneches used under a Creative Commons license
I'd say, though, that this little ditty recapitulates one of the oft-criticized flaws in Kant's thinking, namely the surface non-equivalance of different formulations of the key moral principle.
You've probably already read the news that key members of congress -- including Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi, Bob Graham, and Jay Rockefeller -- were briefed about the CIA's "harsh" interrogation methods back in 2002. Harman, who I've oft had occasion to criticize, seems to have acquitted herself the best; lodging a letter of protest, albeit a letter whose text it seems that none of us can see in even redacted form. Pelosi, Graham, and Rockefeller don't seem to have said or done anything.
Andrew's right to note that there's something of a pattern here. John Kerry certainly didn't feel like this was something he wanted to talk about during the 2004 campaign. One question is how much of this is cowardice and how much conviction; would Democrats actually act to roll this stuff back even if they won't take a stand against it? The evidence from the legislative history suggests mostly cowardice, as Pelosi has certainly helped move anti-torture bills through congress, though how she thought she could keep today's revelations under wraps indefinitely is a bit beyond me.
Wall Street Journal: Intel Insufficiently Politicized
Brilliant: "But the ultimate responsibility for this fiasco lies with Mr. Bush. Too often he has appointed, or tolerated, officials who oppose his agenda, and failed to discipline them even when they have worked against his policies."
Here's a graph I made off some Pew data that Paul Rosenberg pulled. On the one hand, you see that the GOP collapse over the past couple of years has been truly dramatic. On the other hand, you see that these party ID numbers are pretty volatile and can change a lot in response to events, so it's not totally clear what this signifies for the long run. The short-term opportunity for Democrats, however, is hard to miss.
Chris Hayes' brief Nationpiece on the Ron Paul campaign is excellent at illustrating the limited relevance of ideology in politics:
Self-identified libertarians may be a tiny portion of the electorate, but small numbers have never stood in the way of bitter intramural sectarian disputes. When Lindsey says that Paul "comes from a different part of the libertarian universe than I do," he's referring to the libertarian version of the Trotsky/Lenin split, which opened up in the early 1980s and continues to echo through libertarianism today.
Assuming he meant the Trotsky/Stalin split, the interesting thing about the way Hayes spells this out is that it ends up being an almost entirely sociological divide between populist types in the provinces and elites in the nation's capital. There are, of course, disagreements about politics and policy within the libertarian camp (like all camps) but it's hard to pinpoint a systematic disagreement about ideas here, it's more a question of different kinds of people.
I saw a poster advertising Bring It On: In It To Win It while shopping yesterday, and it seemed odd since I've never really heard this phrased used outside the context of Hillary Clinton or people making fun of Hillary Clinton. But apparently someone in the world of B movies was into it, so here we go.
Like all decent people, I think the original Bring It On is a surprisingly good film. I was also dimply aware of the 2003 direct-to-video sequel, Bring It On Again. I hadn't, however, realized that a third film, Bring It On: All Or Nothing had been released last year and thus was totally unprepared for this release. Intriguingly, it seems that these "sequels" not only don't share actors with earlier films in the "series" but don't share any of the characters or plot development, either -- it's just a pure branding exercise.
Michael Froomin says I was wrong to say that it would require an act of civil disobedience for a member of congress in possession of secret information about illegal activity to disclose it, since a member in such a position could use the privilege contained in the "speech and debate" clause to disclose what needed disclosing. My general sense is that the speech and debate clause is one of those things prone to misinterpretation by laypeople, but Froomkin's a law professor so presumably he knows what he's talking about.
In a larger ethico-political sense, presumably the purpose of congressional briefings on classified matters is precisely that if the veil of classification is being used to obscure illegal conduct the briefed member will act to disclose and/or halt the conduct. In practice, the function of the briefings seems to have become ensnaring members in complicity while granting them a pretext for not doing their job ("I knew, but it was secret!). But this makes no logical sense. If members of congress aren't supposed to speak up when they become aware of secret crimes and abuses of power, what's the point of them having them in the loop in the first place?
Via Paul Waldman, Eric Black notes that the shift in Bush's rhetoric from warning about Iranian nuclear weapons to warning about Iranian nuclear knowledge happened back in August, suggesting that this is around the time at which the White House became aware of the Intelligence Community's view that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program.
That's plausible, though one can also imagine a more multifaceted process. Under this theory, Bush would have been informed of IC views some time before August, at which point they just got ignored. Then there may have been some moment when Mike McConnell or someone else important within the intelligence world got upset and said "you can't have people saying blah blah blah" and thus begins the era of what Black calls "Clintonian parsing," language designed to obscure the new facts while technically staying within the bounds of what the new information says. But eventually even this got to be too much and pressure was obviously brought to bear from inside the executive branch to release the NIE to the public, thus depriving the parsing strategy of much of its utility.
It's worth keeping front and center the basic point that Mike Huckabee's policy platform, if enacted, would be a disaster for working class Americans. His views about the viability of replacing the income tax with a retail sales tax betray both an indifference to the distributive implications of tax policy, and also a frightening ignorance of economic policy similar to the ignorance of foreign policy exposed by his comments on the NIE last week. That said, Frank Rich's take on the appeal of a kindler, gentler form of conservatism seems right:
Attacked by Mr. Romney for supporting an Arkansas program aiding the children of illegal immigrants, he replied, “In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.” [...] As governor, he decried a bill denying health services to illegal immigrants as “race-baiting” even though its legislator sponsor was a fellow Baptist preacher. [...] Unlike Rudy-Romney, Mr. Huckabee showed up for the PBS presidential debate held at the historically black Morgan State University in September. [...] The real reason for Mr. Huckabee’s ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting — and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian — than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate.
Yes indeed. A lot of us non-Christian liberals have been wondering for some time when if ever the elements of Christian ethics that don't relate to sex were going to rear their heads in the Christian political mobilization. In an era where regular churchgoers are the main electoral prop of the party of aggressive war and institutionalized torture, we're still a long way from that moment. But Huckabee's rhetoric on a few key points seems to nod in the direction of the possibility of something better. It'd take someone else -- someone better-informed , with a better grasp of policy and without the record of setting serial rapists free -- to actually deliver on that promise, but I think there's no denying that it's promising.
Ezra Klein reads Roger Cohen's interview/column with Barack Obama and hears shades of John Ikenberry in Obama's thought. Due to the nature of the format it's a little hard for me to know exactly what Obama was trying to say, since it's impossible to see what Cohen was asking. But there really are some resonances with Ikenberry's concept of "strategic restraint." If you don't want to slog through After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars, you might want to check out something shorter like Ikenberry's brief rejoinder to Barry Posen in The National Interest or his Democracy article on the "Security Trap".
The basic point of all of this is that it won't really do for the United States to simply "do less" in the world. But as we've seen during the Bush years, the manic pursuit of "doing more" not only carries enormous costs, it actually fails to do any of the things it was supposed to do. The reason is that as we claim a wider-and-wider scope for unilateral action, efficacious American power becomes more and more threatening to more and more people. What's needed is a way to make American power something a critical mass of foreigners can welcome, and that means strategic restraint -- especially in the form of institutions that can become foci for international cooperation.
UPDATE: PS, Ezra's blog has a new URL as an official TAP Online product.
Before the season started, I thought the weakness of the Boston Celtics was going to be defense. Ray Allen seemed like a clear liability, Paul Pierce is unimpressive, and look beyond the "big three" I didn't see much of anything to help out on this end. Kevin Garnett, obviously, is brilliant defensively, but it's a team game. Boy oh boy was I wrong about that. Boston's defense is not only the best in the league, they're by far the best in the league, a fact that may be somewhat obscured by the fact that they play a middling pace whereas San Antonio and Detroit go at a crawl.
The chart plots points allowed per hundred possessions relative to the league median. The very worst teams in the league -- New York and Minnesota -- both allow 5.7 more points per hundred than the median. Boston, by contrast, allows 5.5 fewer points per hundred than does the next best team. In short, not only is Boston the best, but the gap between the best and the second best is enormous. They're leaving everyone else dead in the water.
Brendan Nyhan made a chart out of Tim Russert's interview with Rudy Giuliani which helps illustrate why liberals and conservatives alike often find watching Meet the Press to be a frustrating experience. Here's Rudy bringing some new notions to the table about foreign policy -- namely that the country needs to double-down on the High Bush Doctrine policies of 2002-2003 -- and all Russert wants to talk about are scandals.
If you think Giuliani is a profound and original thinker on national security issues and that his decision to associate himself with Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Norm Podhoretz, etc. reflects well on him, Russert seems to be denying Rudy his chance at a fair hearing.
If, by contrast, you see the Giuliani campaign as chock-a-block with lunatic fringe ideas, Russert is allowing the true danger here to go essentially unexamined. As Brendan puts it, "there are certainly serious ethical questions about Guiliani. But these pale in comparison to questions about how he would conduct himself in office, particularly when it comes to foreign policy." He has no experience with foreign policy whatsoever, and has surrounded himself with an advisory team that contains almost no experience as practitioners and whose ideas are far outside of the mainstream and were overwhelmingly discredited by events in Bush's first term.
Putin picks non-FSB technocrat Dmitri Medvedev to be his appointed successor, over the somewhat better-known Sergei Ivanov who has more of a Putin-style background in the security services. Much baseless speculation as to the meaning of this can be found in the newspapers. Rather than engage in more of it myself, I thought I might look at the New York Times's coverage of when Boris Yeltsin first picked Putin to be his designated successor:
''I don't think we should blow this out of proportion,'' said James P. Rubin, the State Department spokesman. ''We have focused our policy on the policies of Russian reform and the policies of the Russian Government, not the personalities.'' But he added, ''We do have some experience with Mr. Putin and have a constructive relationship with him.'' [...]
Even if he proves to be more effective political player, few observers today gave Mr. Putin a real chance to become a viable presidential candidate, given the depth of popular antipathy to his mentor. For more than a year, Mr. Yeltsin's popularity rating has been in the single digits, as broad swathes of the Russian population -- from disgruntled pensioners to disgusted entrepreneurs -- blame him for economic stagnation and rampant corruption. [...]
As he demonstrated today, Mr. Yeltsin is still willing to wield the considerable power vested in his office to try to turn the political tide. As in the hard-fought election campaign of 1996, he and his administration can still use or withhold money from the federal budget to reward or punish wayward regional leaders. [...]
Analysts here are divided over Mr. Yeltsin's motives. Some argue that he is intent on bequeathing to Russia, as his parting legacy, a Government and a President who are committed to completing the country's transformation into a functioning democracy, with a market-based economy. The rise of a Primakov-Luzhkov team, backed by a coalition of Soviet-era industrial directors and some of Russia's more autocratic governors, is seen by Mr. Yeltsin's circle as a threat to those goals.
That fairly unprescient article did end on an important note of caution: "a year is a long time in Russian politics, in which alliances and promises can evaporate as quickly as they are made." Basically, though, American analysis of Russian politics seems to be like the old adage about Hollywood's understanding of how to make hit movies: Nobody knows anything.
When you read something like this your stomach just turns:
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.
And, of course, while people who favor an open-ended American military commitment in Iraq probably don't specifically believe that instances of rape and kidnapping ought to be papered over in silence, I think we can all predict that this is a story that will be widely covered on anti-war websites, and basically ignored on pro-war ones. Meanwhile, Megan McArdle says doves need to acknowledge the improving nature of the situation in Iraq where it does indeed seem that those who managed not to die in 2007 or 2006 can look forward to enjoying 2005 levels of violence in 2008 (but in segregated neighborhoods) after they're forcibly repatriated from their refugee camps.
Which is perhaps as good a time as any to restate the basic point that while anecdotes hither and there can make people feel good or bad about the war, the basic strategic questions are fairly indifferent to the ebbing and flowing of news. Back in 2003 and 2004 I thought, as I think most people thought, that keeping US forces in Iraq until a new government could be organized was a reasonable thing to do despite the costs. It seemed to me that the elections in early 2005 were a good time to announce a mutually agreed-upon schedule for the withdrawal of American troops. It didn't happen. Many argued throughout 2005 that the chances of preventing the sort of ethnic cleansing and civil violence that we saw in 2006 was a good reason to keep troops there. I disagreed, but the troops stayed and the violence came. Then many argued that the chances of preventing the sort of worsening of the violence that we saw in 2007 was a good reason to keep troops there. I disagreed, but the troops stayed and the violence worsened.
Now the violence seems to be ebbing, which is good. The US also, sensibly, seems to have started taking the more conciliatory line toward anti-government Sunni Arab rebel groups that doves had generally been advocating as far back as 2004, which is also good. But the question of what it is our military presence in Iraq is for and why it's worth the considerable direct financial costs, opportunity costs, and the so-called "human costs" (rape victims held under guard in shipping containers, that sort of thing) is, if anything, more acute than ever. How many casualties is the right price to pay for permanent basing rights in Iraq? How much money should we spend for war advocates to be able to maintain that they weren't wrong, that Bush just used bad tactics for a while, and that it all turned out for the best in the end? How much damage should be done to our posture in Central Asia for the sake of giving counterinsurgency theorists a chance to show their stuff in a theater where they government is prepared to provide a lot of resources?
Meanwhile, in Iraq violence is down unless you're one of the nine people killed today and as long as the political situation remains unsettled things could always get worse again (except this time with better trained and better equipped forces on all sides) but maybe they won't and either way the question about American strategy remains.
Does the Politico really think Barack Obama should mention that he's black more explicitly. You can really kinda tell by looking at him; it's not as if this is something he's keeping under wraps.
I know that to some liberals, Barack Obama's rhetorical style bespeaks a lack of commitment to progressive values. I don't see it that way. I've always seen it as a pretty transparent trick. He says he's not one of those liberals, he doesn't call people "wingnuts," he understands the conservative point of view, blah blah blah, and then here comes his agenda of tax hikes, tons of new spending, ambitious carbon emissions curbs, less invading of other countries for no reason, gay equality, etc. And, remarkably, you keep seeing conservatives eat it up, discerning something incredibly "new" and "exciting" in a combination of conventional liberal policy views with vaguely conciliatory rhetoric.
[W]hile Obama eventually settles on the mainstream liberal position--path to citizenship, crack down on employers, don't punish the workers--he does so only after acknowledging (and in some cases, embracing) the concerns of conservatives. He begins by criticizing George W. Bush on immigration from the right and says that his first priority in ending illegal immigration would be securing the borders. (Ask John McCain if it's important to list border security first when detailing your solution.) [...]
This is the Obama trick, and it explains why, despite his very liberal voting record in the Senate (and in the Illinois Senate before that), he is not viewed as a left-wing ideologue. When a student asks Obama for his views on the Second Amendment, he reminds his audience that he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago and is thus familiar with the arguments regarding the right to bear arms. He acknowledges "a tradition of gun ownership in this country that can be respected," and says that his academic studies convinced him gun ownership "is an individual right and not just the right of a militia."
As Jason notes, the striking thing here is "that Hayes recognizes this as a trick--and he still falls for it!" And also that it's Steve Hayes who seems like a pretty hard-core hatchet man, "he's an ideological water carrier of the first order. Is there any conservative writer able to withstand Obama's charms? A nation turns its lonely eyes to Charles Krauthammer." A quick Google reveals that back in July when Obama and Hillary Clinton were in their spat about talking to "bad guys" without preconditions, Krauthammer slammed Obama so, yes, he's immune.
As you'll recall, back when Michael Mukasey was nominated to be Attorney-General, some Democrats wanted him to acknowledge first that waterboarding is torture. He took the somewhat preposterous line that he couldn't answer the question until he'd been confirmed. Convenient! Well, now it seems Russ Feingold hasn't forgotten and is formally requesting a legal opinion from Mukasey.
If he finds the techniques used by the CIA to have been torture, which he said is illegal, then he will come under tremendous pressure to prosecute the interrogators and possibly even the administration officials who approved the illegal behavior. If he doesn't conclude that they're torture, he'll be embracing a politically convenient and euphemistic definition of the law.
When you think about it, though, this isn't a very hard choice to make. He's going to embrace the politically convenient, euphemistic definition of the law. When Mukasey was up for the job, there was some sentiment that he should be confirmed because he's a basically honest, ethical, competent guy. Realistically, though, there's just no way a person in Mukasey's position could do his job in an honest, ethical, and competent fashion. He's not going to prosecute people for performing interrogation techniques the president authorized. And yet, those techniques are illegal. You need to either prosecute the interrogators or else (much better) immunize them for the purposes of prosecuting their superiors. But it's not going to happen.
The nature of the job, now as well as at the time it was offered to Mukasey, is that carrying water for the criminal acts of current and former senior officials is a core responsibility. There isn't -- and wasn't -- any sense looking for an honest and ethical nominee because no honest and ethical person could possibly do the job. Mukasey may well have been a saint the day before he accepted the offer, but putting yourself in a senior position in the Justice Department these days is inherently a bargain with the devil.
How is it exactly that a letter Jane Harman writes to the CIA manages to be classified? Harman doesn't work for the CIA, after all. Spencer Ackerman gets the answer: a legal called "derivative classification." This seems like an odd legal principle to me, but it seems well-established.
The ONE Campaign's put together a useful website, on the record that lets you see what the various presidential candidates have committed to in terms of extreme global poverty and disease. It's got a comparison feature which reveals that the three major Democrats all have pretty similar positions. And sound ones at that, which is very good news, though with something like promises to spend billions on improving developing world access to education, the crux of the matter is not so much the difference between Clinton and Obama promising $2 billion a year and Edwards promising $3 billion a year as it is the question of what congress is willing to pony up.
On the Republican side you see some bigger difference. Here's Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani, for example, where you'll see that Huckabee's committed to doing the most whereas Giuliani's never so much as publicly addressed most of these issues. That should tell you a thing or two about hizzoner's depth of understanding of world affairs -- he hasn't rejected a particular approach to global poverty and development issue, he just hasn't devoted any thought or attention to the issue whatsoever since if it doesn't involve killing people or grandstanding, I guess he's not interested.
I was thinking about the tenor of the European debate over immigration issues and how it differs from our own, and one thing I came up with is that it's more similar to an older American debate, focused on the first wave of Catholic immigrants, in which people were troubled by the notion that Catholicism (a religion with hierarchy and authority at its very core) might be incompatible with democracy. Unfortunately, I knew very little about that debate except for half-remembered snatches of Stephen Macedo's Diversity and Distrust. But Ross pointed to this gem from The Atlantic's archives, a 1927 exchange on Al Smith's presidential candidacy which takes this subject up at length in the second half of Smith's contribution.
I know Eddie Jordan doesn't like Brendan Haywood, but every time I watch the Wizards play this season he starts the game, he plays pretty well, and then he winds up playing unaccountably few minutes. He's got the best rebound rate on the team (16.5), and he's shooting a good percentage (.556) so even if he's not a serious offensive threat it's not like you're accepting a huge liability in exchange for that rebounding. And yet he only gets 26 minutes per game even though the Wizards don't have a real backup center on the roster. Maybe his conditioning's just bad.
Photo by Flickr user Compujeramey used under a Creative Commons license
Brian Katulis is a man worth listening to and he says that when assessing Pakistan's upcoming elections, we should watch what happens with the judiciary:
As Americans know all too well from their own 2000 presidential elections, courts can often play a decisive role in hotly contested elections. And as President Musharraf has probably learned from events in Egypt last year, reining in independent-minded judges is a key ingredient for holding back real democratic progress. A month before the elections, Pakistan’s Election Commission – a key body that overseas and manages the elections usually filled by judges – was incomplete because of the shortage of judges that has resulted from the actions taken last month. Prominent lawyers and judges remain under arrest.
I would say, though, that worrying too much about the nature of Pakistani election procedures is unlikely to get us anywhere in the long run. What's needed is to articulate what, exactly, we think our main interests are in Pakistan and what we're prepared to do to see them advanced. With that in place, we should be prepared to work with whatever Pakistani leadership emerges or may emerge in the future. A policy based around trying to identify the "good guys" and then back them hasn't served us especially well in Pakistan or anyplace else.
CIA interrogator says he tortured Abu Zubaydah with the approval of higher-ups. He also says the information derived from the torture was useful, contrary to what's been reported elsewhere. Last, he says that we shouldn't be torturing people: ""We're Americans, and we're better than this. And we shouldn't be doing this kinda thing."
Mitchell Cohen notices some signs that rationality may be creeping back into our politics as even conservatives are now back to citing deterrence as an effective method of dealing with rogue actors, in contradiction to the crazy markers laid down by the Bush administration in 2002.
Ross is right, The Weekly Standard's parody early draft of the rainbow of faiths section of Mitt Romney's speech is pretty brilliant.
On the other hand, Kate Sheppard is right to see something a bit underhanded in the respectable right "joking" about Barack Obama being a secret Muslim while the non-respectable right keeps circuating email smears making the same point.
Robin Wright reports that new sanctions on Iran are still rolling through the UN process: "The proposal indicates that there is still an appetite for significant new punitive measures against Iran even after the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last week concluded that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, according to officials from several countries." Kevin Drum remarks:
"The international community is not being dissuaded by the NIE," says an unnamed European diplomat. Perhaps so. Or perhaps the NIE is actually making things easier?
I'd say probably easier. The fact of the NIE's release seems like a decisive signal that the really nutty war faction inside the Bush administration has been defeated and that policy is being driven by people who are worried about Iranian nuclear activities, but who also have a basic grip on reality. American officials like that are the sort of officials that diplomats around the world are prepared to work with. Foreign officials weren't, however, interested in being used as dupes who were supposed to provide a veneer of cover for an insane military adventure. I bet that if you saw a new administration with a clearer commitment to laying out a path for improved US-Iranian relations, you'd see even more willingness on the part of the international communtiy to contemplate punitive measures if Iran is unresponsive.
The underlying principle is simple enough: the US secures more international cooperation when people see us as acting rationally and responding in a reasonable manner to events around the world. Acting frightening and erratic, or paranoid and hysterical, isn't helpful.
It's difficult to know how to maintain one's sense of outrage these days. Am I surprised to learn that the House Govern Reform Committee says that its "16-month investigation reveals a systematic White House effort to censor climate scientists by controlling their access to the press and editing testimony to Congress." Well, no, I'm not surprised. So am I shocked by the revelation? I guess I'm not. But is it shocking that this sort of thing has become par for the course? Well, yes it is. After all, this isn't some trivial little thing being kept under the rug; it's probably the most important issue facing the country.
Paul Krugman points to a revealing chart courtesy of Barry Ritholtz. Some of this is low interest rates making homeownership legitimately cheaper than the price of the house as such would indicate, but there's clearly something way out of line here.
Speaking of real estate, it's always good to see advertisers coming up with innovative new names for neighborhoods. 11th and V is apparently "Logan North" now.
In the one successful counterinsurgency campaign, in the northern town of Tal Afar, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment surrounded the town with a 9-foot-high wall to isolate the city. This was in addition to other counterinsurgency techniques—maintaining a high troop-to-population ratio, dealing in a civilized manner with local authorities, and so forth. (Tal Afar slid back into chaos when the 3rd A.C.R. was redeployed to another hot spot—another indication that clear and hold, much less clear, hold, and build, requires a lot more troops than the United States has ever had in Iraq.)
Will Petraeus wall off neighborhoods in Baghdad? (The U.S. Army in Iraq does have a lot of concrete.) Is such a strategy feasible in a city of 6 million, as opposed to a town of 60,000 like Tal Afar? Moving in the bulldozers and the berms may be a dramatic first step. But then what?
This is about what I took from George Packer's article on the "Lesson of Tal Afar" as well -- you couldn't possibly scale-up what Colonel H.R. McMaster and the 3rd ACR did there. But according to one of Andrew's letter-writers that's exactly what they've done:
No one ever mentions the fact that we have literally built walls around each neighborhood and along every highway as the reason the violence is down here. The place looks like an Orwell novel gone wrong. The people cannot shoot each other through walls and the insurgents cannot move around to plant their bombs. A society cannot function walled off form each other.
I think one has to reply to this that while a society cannot function all walled off like this, it can't function in the midst of constant anarchy either. I believe this technique comes to the US Army's counterinsurgency theorists via Belfast, where I believe they have been effective in helping the British maintain a degree of order.
To some extent, this brings us back to the question of strategy. If tactics employed in Northern Ireland can be made to work in Iraq (and maybe they can) even though Iraq has ten times as many people as Northern Ireland does and even though Iraqis don't speak English and even though the sectarian violence in Iraq is undergirded by concrete fighting over valuable resources, then does this really seem like a wise strategic undertaking? It doesn't seem that way to me. It's been decades since "the Troubles," after all, and while Northern Ireland is now in a situation that there's reason to be optimistic about, you could imagine it all going to shit. All things considered, it seems like the British position there is one we ought to avoid getting ourselves stuck into. Emulating the UK's more successful tactics from that theater makes sense if we're going to adopt that kind of mission, but there mere fact that the tactics can maybe kinda sorta work if we give them a few dozen years is no reason to actually do it.
Kevin Carey wonders what's the point in Harvard extending so much tuition assistance to students from low- and middle-income families if they barely admit anyone from such families in the first place? It's a good question. More generally, discussion of college's role in social mobility and how we might broaden access tend to proceed from the badly flawed assumption that the dollar cost is the main barrier. In fact, admissions policies are structured so as to have a large class bias (both in the way merit is defined and in the nature of the departures from a strict merit regime) and then students from economically struggling families often have money-related difficulties staying in school that relate less to inability to pay tuition as such than they do to the opportunity costs of being in school.
Mitt Romney takes to the airwaves with an add blasting Mike Huckabee as soft on immigration:
But will this matter with Huckabee picking up the endorsement of Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist? I feel like a preacher flanked with an anti-immigrant vigilante on one side and Chuck Norris on the other is sort of the ultimate Republican primary candidate. If he just had pockets full of fossil fuel money like Rudy so he could run more ads, he'd be golden.
I'd be a poor book-blurber indeed if I didn't take the opportunity to urge you to check out Netroots Rising by Lowell Field and Nate Wilcox now that it's available for pre-order. Field's one of the main movers behind the RaisingKaine blog and community that's done so much to help push Virginia in a progressive direction over the past few years, and Wilcox has extensive experience at the intersection of politics and new media. The book takes you through several case studies of races in which innovative forms of online activism seem to have given one side or another a decisive edge and the bottom-up perspective is a useful corrective to the sometimes airy mass of speculation you sometimes get on this topic.
I guess Politico was looking for a way to endear Barack Obama to Democratic primary voters by revealing that he has liberal views on some issues. Or, as they put it, "Liberal Views Could Haunt Obama." This answer on health care seems, for example, totally sensible:
Will you support a single-payer health plan for Illinois? How would Medicaid be incorporated into the program you support?
Yes in principle, although such a program will probably have to be instituted at the federal level; the long-term objective would be a universal care system that does not differentiate between the unemployed, the disabled, and so on. The state can move more aggressively to expand coverage to the currently uninsured, perhaps through a managed care system with a sliding scale of premiums and copayments.
Shudder! Longtime readers will know that I'm not a proponent of gun control. Obama, like essentially all politicians from big cities, was a proponent of very strict gun control and, again like all politicians who move to start representing broader constituencies, has now softened his view (see, e.g., Rudy Giuliani's similar evolutioN).
Tyler Cowen points to Melinda Miller's interesting research into whether following through on plans to give freed slaves some land would have made a difference in long-term racial gaps. In this paper (PDF) she looks at a unique population of former slaves held by the Cherokee Nation, which "was forced during post-war negotiations to allow its former slaves to claim and improve any unused land in the Nation’s public domain," and finds some substantial effects.
I couldn't say I want to see the Patriots go 16-0, but I'd certainly like to see them try their best to do it -- no resting of starters, no saving it for the playoffs, etc. In short, what Henley said:
Idiot sports radio personalities - and I apologize for the redundancy - constantly ring variations on The Patriots realize that the real prize isn’t going undefeated, it’s winning the Super Bowl. Nonsense. Somebody wins the Super Bowl every year. The NFL has had 41 of the things and they don’t look like they’re going to stop staging them any time soon. There are plenty of Super Bowl champions. There’s only one post-merger, undefeated champion. Why pass up a chance to make history?
Quite so, quite so. Besides which, everyone knows the Super Bowl become a bit of a joke, a meta-event above and beyond everything and everyone that, at this point, feels only vaguely football-related. A 15-0 team playing its last game, by contrast, is something every football fan in the country will want to see.
Dahlia Lithwick on the broader implications of Jamie Leigh Jones: "If Jones’ allegations are true, the lesson is that this government's convenient little 'law free zones' at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world don't discriminate between 'us' and 'them.' If an innocent American finds herself in such a law-free zone, she’s as unlikely as any alleged terrorist to find her day in court."
And how could it not? Over time, the mechanisms of imperial governance abroad are bound to erode democracy at home. You see it from the top down in the ways in which prominent military commanders have been inserted into partisan politics, and you see it from the bottom-up in the erosion of the rule of law.
Petey pointed out that the latest CNN poll (PDF) shows some very clear patterns in the head-to-head presidential matchups. In particular, John Edwards polls as the strongest Democratic candidates whereas John McCain polls as the strongest Republican.
Of course, it's hard to know what to make of this sort of polling (except that as a white man, I'm patting myself on the back) since the events of the campaign really do change things. How much does Edwards' relative cash shortfall matter as an electability issue? And I bet most of the respondents to this poll don't know (yet) about Rudy Giuliani's criminal associates -- a series of charges that's probably more damaging than any muck that'll ever get dredged up on Romney. But despite the uncertainty, I think you do need to count this as a serious point in Edwards' favor when you combine it with the considerable merits of the policy positions he's staked out. Meanwhile, for the GOP I think nominating McCain is clearly the right across a whole variety of considerations, but I guess if you really, really, really hate immigrants it doesn't look that way.
One point people have tried to make over the past few years is that the Bush administration needs to stop thinking of public diplomacy as simply a need to put a better sales pitch on the same American policies. Our pitch is actually fine and people understand what we're saying -- they just don't like it.
Relatedly, someone told me earlier today that Jim "Dow 36,000" Glassman was replacing Karen Hughes. I laughed at this pretty funny out-of-left-field joke. Obviously, the same George W. Bush who thinks public diplomacy is just about salesmanship wouldn't give the job to one of the least credible salespeople on the planet. Funny stuff. And imaginative! But no, this is really happening.
Nothing is over!!! Nothing!!! You just don't turn it off! It wasn't my war! You asked me, I didn't ask you!
--Rambo: First Blood
The juxtaposition of David Brooks and Peter Beinart both opining that nobody cares about Iraq any more right before a New York Timespoll came out revealing that "more people cite the Iraq war as the most important issue facing the country than cite any other matter" sure is odd. Equally odd, in many respects, is the logic Beinart used to reach his conclusion:
Last month, Katharine Q. Seelye of the New York Times live-blogged the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. As the discussion bounced from subject to subject, she marked the topic and the time, then gave her thoughts. At 8:34 p.m., it was driver’s licenses; 8:55, Pakistan; 9:57, the Supreme Court. By night’s end she had 17 entries totaling almost 1,500 words. And she hadn’t typed “Iraq” once.
Basically, the evidence for Beinart's side is that media elites who control the debate questioning process don't want to talk about the war. Conversely, the public does seem to think the war is very important. This is particularly interesting since historically elites care a lot more about foreign policy questions than does the public at large, which tends to be more focused on so-called "bread and butter" issues.
This seems akin to what I wrote about over the summer in the LA Times when we had a spurt of calls for a lowering of the partisan temperature over the Iraq issue. And, of course, we saw something similar about a year ago when all the little people were supposed to hush up and let the Iraq Study Group sort things out for us.
There is, in essence, a powerful desire to avoid an "accountability moment" in which the people who played a role in bamboozling a large swathe of the public into backing the war are called onto the carpet. There's a desire to believe that there's only one strategy the United States could possibly be pursuing in the world and that, therefore, the only debates to be had are boring tactical ones that couldn't possibly engage the public mind. Invading Iraq was, perhaps, an error -- but an unavoidable one, something that just happened. Then mistakes were made in the implementation, but now better implementation is at hand, so the debate is over. After all, if Bush has now largely adopted the tactics the liberal hawks once criticized him for not adopting, what could there possibly be to argue about? And so how could the public possibly care? After all, there aren't any questions about it in Kit Seelye's notebook?
Obviously, though, this is a big deal. To observe that monthly casualty rates for American soldiers are now lower than they once were (2007 is still the deadliest year) s neither here nor there -- one big, obvious virtue of the "let's leave" alternative is that it gets our troops' fatalities down to nothing. Meanwhile, the small mercy of this war has always been that fatalities among our soldiers have been pretty low by historical standards. But despite that there's the small issue of whether or not we should really be proceeding on this course. Of course it's a big deal!
Ambinder talks to Mitt Romney who has some tough words for Mike Huckabee beyond the immigration issue:
Given the widespread hostility to Huckabee among conservative elites and institutions, it seems to me that there's a decent possibility there's still enough time between now and the Iowa caucuses that they can beat his insurgency back. The fact that Huckabee hasn't made a real effort to defend his brand of big government conservatism on the merits leaves his very vulnerable to allegations of being a tax hiker, etc.
The latest Washington Post poll does give some support to those who think the significance of the Iraq issue is in decline. Still, it's pretty scant support. This poll still has Iraq essentially tied with "economy/jobs" as the most important issue in the public's mind. I think what we see here is that if the economy keeps getting worse, that really might push Iraq off the front burner.
Still, according to the Post Iraq has way more salience as an issue than does immigration, even though the press have been pestering candidates with non-stop immigration questions and downplaying the war.
Meanwhile, re-reading Beinart and Brooks I think I have a clearer sense of what they're trying to do. Both peg the declining fortunes of Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton (though in her case, I'm not really convinced her fortunes actually are declining) to this alleged decline in public concern about Iraq. One might more parsimoniously attribute the declining fortunes of each party's most hawkish candidate to either coincidence or else to the declining public appeal of hawkish policies, but that wouldn't do. Instead, the hawks suffer because people don't care as much about national security. Because caring about national security is identical to being hawkish. Very Serious Stuff.
Some of us have been wondering where Rudy Giuliani was planning on getting the manpower to staff his foreign policy of endless war. It turns out that the plan is school vouchers:
Rudy proposes establishing a pilot program to offer scholarships to children of all active-duty military personnel living on or off base to attend private schools or to pay for the costs of attending public schools to which they are not assigned. This is a critical concern for America’s military families because it affects reenlistment decisions.
This is a bit bizarre, since America's military base schools are really good and the recruiting issues in the military are clearly driven in the first instance by the prospect of arduous service in a futile war rather than by these kinds of considerations. But what you have here is a classic example of a solution in search of a problem. As Kate Sheppard points out, Giuliani's "all choice, all the time" education policy initiatives say nothing whatsoever about the vast majority of children who are going to be in traditional public schools come what may.
The problem here is that vouchers are the only solution Rudy has to sell, but there's really very little the federal government can do to induce towns and cities around the country to privatize their school systems. Giuliani could take the path of conservative purity and just argue that the federal government should withdraw from education policy entirely, but he doesn't want to say that. So instead, he's looking around for things the federal government can voucherize. And one of the main things he came up with was military schools. So who cares if this is a bad idea; it shows his commitment to conservative orthodoxy, and that's the important thing.
As you may have heard, we've had a bit of a scandal here in DC where it turns out that some officials with the District's tax authority have been ripping the city off for years to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Or as the DC Examiner sees it, we've learned that women like to shop (men, of course, don't shop with our money; we just spend it buying things). Maybe if the mayor had just invested in one of these "control a woman" remote controls we wouldn't have these problems?
Kevin Drum quotes the LA Times' analysis: "More than any other question, Republican presidential candidates are asking voters to consider a single issue in the weeks before primary voting begins: Who detests illegal immigration the most?" Indeed, but what's a bit hard to see is why they're doing this? I know there are some people here in DC who seem convinced that the Republicans can ride the immigration issue to victory in 2008, even though this is exactly the strategy they tried in 2006, and the evidence suggests that people don't care very much about immigration:
That's from the latest Washington Post poll where they asked people to name the two issues they thought were most important. It's clear that the public's main priorities are national security (to wit: Iraq and terrorism) and the deteriorating economic situation. Only ten percent see immigration as one of the two most important issues. Now if you assume that about 33 percent of the population are Republicans, and also that all ten percent of the people who are naming immigration are restrictionist Republicans (and this is clearly an overestimate -- some restrictionists are Democrats, and some people who think immigration is important aren't restrictionists) that's still only thirty percent of Republicans putting a high priority on immigration restrictionism as an issue. As the Post puts it, "Overall, five issues, including immigration and health care, reach double digits as top one or two concerns among Republicans" but they barely say anything about these other issues -- instead they quibble about who's a real conservative, they talk smack about Hillary Clinton, and they brag about how much they hate immigrants. It's bizarre.
E.J. Dionne's right that "a backlash against illegal immigration could help some Republicans running for Congress" but could help some people running for congress seems like a thin rationale for making an impractical and inhumane stand on an issue of secondary concern to the public the centerpiece of your party's political strategy.
Not only is the news of 27 dead and around a hundred wounded in a triple car bomb attack in Iraq that ranks as the deadliest in months a tragic turn in its own terms, but the apparent cause and location of the attacks highlights the extreme complexity of the situation: "At least 27 people died and about 100 were wounded Wednesday when three car bombs ripped through a southern Iraqi city where rival Shiite groups have been battling for control of oil and power."
George Packer reported the other day about a conversation with two of the soldiers who penned this brave August 2007 op-ed. According to Packer, "They hope to write, with other soldiers, a book about counterinsurgency that would examine the Army’s new field manual against their experience fighting the complex array of warring factions in Iraq—not to refute it but to improve it."
One point that keeps striking me in this regard is that the counterinsurgency manual mostly contemplates a much simpler dynamic than the one in Iraq: a government challenged by an insurgency, with a population stuck in the middle. The task is to judiciously apply military, political, and economic levers to ensure that the government wins the loyalty of the public, and then squeeze the remaining isolated insurgents. Iraq appears to be like that in some places and on a local scale, but it doesn't correctly describe the overall dynamic -- the sundry local conflicts don't "add up" to one insurgency challenging one legitimately constituted authority. I know the folks running MNF-Iraq realize this, and think they've come up with an answer to it, but it seems to me that the differences between this kind of situation and the kind of textbook insurgency that the field manual deals with are extremely large and quite significant, whereas the official plan to cope with these challenges involves a large degree of hand-waving and wishing-for-the-best.
I completely agree with Tom Friedman that merely because Iran doesn't have an active nuclear weapons program doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned with their enrichment activities. Friedman focuses this on the issues surrounding enrichment itself, but I'd say a better way of putting it is that there's a big difference between a nuclear weapons program that's on ice (what we think Iran has) and a nuclear weapons program that's verifiably shut down (what would give Gulf Arabs and Israelis peace of mind) and that it's well worth continuing to work toward getting ourselves where we want to be. That said, Friedman's notion that it makes sense to condemn the Intelligence Community for releasing accurate information is ridiculous.
Friedman offers two concerns. One is that people may misunderstand the significance of these findings. That's true -- misunderstanding happens. That's why I try on my blog to clarify the meaning of things for readers. If I had a New York Times column, I'd do the same. Still, for the Intelligence Community to not use the proper analytic categories would be perverse -- we in the press just need to explain what they mean. His second concern is that he quotes Gary Samore as saying that the NIE "has given the Russians and Chinese a good excuse to make sanctions even weaker."
The implicit model of international relations here is pretty odd. Russia's not a seven year-old. China's not a wayward dog. These are countries. Countries that have people who understand the technical meaning of American intelligence assessments and countries that have intelligence assessments of their own. Their Iran policy is going to be guided by their assessments of the objective situation and what it is they want to do about it. Sure, they might come up with an excuse or two to do something, but the availability of excuses isn't the core consideration. By contrast, their assessment of what American policy is all about might effect their decision-making. If we look like a country whose concerns about Iranian nuclear activities are grounded in honest assessments of the facts -- a country governed by rational people in touch with the world around them -- then that makes cooperation more likely. Inevitable? No. But more likely.
If, by contrast, we seem (as we did seem to many just a few months ago) like a country whose leadership was invested in offering a distorted view of the situation in pursuit of an unsound agenda, then cooperation becomes less likely. The idea that we could somehow trick Russia into adopting policies it doesn't want to adopt by refusing to release accurate information or by insisting on the use of improper analytic categories is silly.
I, too, wonder why banks seem so interested in securing so many prime retail locations: "I understand that the sense of respectability and solidity conferred by brick-and-mortar is an advantage when your whole job depends on making people trust you with all their money EVER, but aren't they taking it a little too far?"
Somewhat similarly, I feel like a ridiculously high proportion of stores in DC are selling cell phones. The implication seems to be that this is a big impulse purchase so you need to have tons of locations everywhere to capture all the customers. But in my experience, people seem to buy phones pretty rarely -- after all, everyone's locked in to these restrictive contracts.
Photo by Flickr user OmarOmar used under a Creative Commons license
Mike Huckabee's views on global warming seem to be firmly in the good-for-a-Republican camp, so it's too bad that he (once again) doesn't appear to have any understanding of the policy issues and says things like: "we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is."
That is bold. Visionary, almost. Kind of like Curtis LeMay's plan to bomb 'em into the stone age, but in reverse.
Alex Massie has some very interesting thoughts on the light Northern Ireland's recent history sheds on the situation in Iraq. The bottom line, to me, is that if achieving a decent outcome in Iraq is possible, the path to that outcome involves what I would consider unacceptable costs for an unacceptably large amount of time. I'd say there's a reason the Iraq War is always sold as something that'll end in just another Friedman Unit or two -- if people had a sense of the duration being contemplated to execute our policies there, they'd have a fit. And rightly so.
In earlier Iraq/Ireland analogy blogging, I'd recommend this (it's at the end) and especially this from Kieran Healy.
Demand in those days was driven by the expectation of rising prices--the dynamic that fuels most asset-price bubbles. If low adjustable-rate financing had not been available, most of the demand would have been financed with fixed rate, long-term mortgages. In fact, home prices continued to rise for two years subsequent to the peak of ARM originations (seasonally adjusted).
Felix Salmon critiques this on the grounds that "the main reason why the housing bust seems to be much worse in the US than elsewhere is surely those ARMs – which, as Greenspan concedes, were a function of low short-term interest rates." There seems to me to be a more fundamental problem here. Greenspan had what he thought were good reasons to put interest rates very low. One consequence of that was to make ARMs look more appealing to a lot of people. Greenspan could have responded to that in one of three ways. He could have ignored the ARM issue. He didn't do that. He could have tried to warn people about the risks of ARMs. He didn't do that. Instead, Greenspan encouraged people to get ARMs. I think it's never really been clear why he did that, but it was pretty bad advice and he just doesn't mention it at all during his retrospective.
During the offseason, John Hollinger's Caron Butler forecast argued that "Although his trend line says the jumper is becoming more of a weapon each year, I'm not sure Butler can keep stroking those 20 footers at quite the clip he did last season." I'm not sure I understand why Hollinger chose to go against his own projections formula, which saw Butler's field goal percentage going up, but as you can see above, Hollinger was dead wrong. Butler's shot's become more accurate and his true shooting percentage has skyrocketed to above Kobe Bryant or LeBron James.
It's tempting, in a narrative sense, to attribute Butler's emergence to the Gilbert Arenas injury that it's done a lot to offset. The reality, though, seems to be simply that Butler's learned to shoot from beyond the three point arc. As you can see, his percentage on the longball was formerly in the "he really can't hit that shot" range and now he's a good three point shooter. The move from average 1.1 treys per game and making 25 percent of them, to hitting 47 percent of 2.5 per game is worth substantial scoring efficiency on its own terms. And, of course, the ability to hit that shot opens up other aspects of your offensive game.
In my view, he's probably playing better this season than Arenas was last year, but even with Gilbert injured he's still the clear focal point of the Wizards' marketing and the branding inside the Verizon Center.
I think the hypotheticals and speculation in the second half of the article get a bit out of control, but Douglas MacGregor's basic concerns about where we're really heading with our "sheikhs for sale" approach to relations with Iraq's Sunni Arab community are sensible, and it's interesting to hear from some officers with experience in Iraq who share concerns I've heard from a lot of outside analysts. The basic issue is that it seems likely that sooner or later our new friends will decide that it's time to once again step up activities -- maybe against the Shiite government, maybe against US forces, maybe against the Kurds in Kirkuk or Mosul -- that will create problems for us.
MacGregor spins out a scenario where things get totally out of hand and the American position becomes unsustainable. And that could happen. But I think it should be acknowledged that the military's been pretty savvy about always managing to pivot pragmatically to avoid that outcome, even though it's seemed to be approaching several times (most famously, during the dual Falluja and Najaf insurgencies). That pattern could break down in the future, but it could also hold up. The trouble is that the war's rationale has become circular -- "success" means success at putting the military engagement on a sustainable basis. We're fighting for the ability to keep on fighting. But sustaining that posture keeps making the United States and our position in the world as a whole weaker and weaker.
Still, MacGregor's specific concerns is one of the ways in which that's the case. We're strengthening groups that don't share any particular loyalty to the United States and with whom we don't have any particular deep bonds of culture, values, or interests. That strength could just as easily be directed against us or our friends tomorrow.
The unwillingness of the mainstream GOP candidates in this debate to confront Huckabee's fair tax snake oil is striking. Similarly, Romney is careful to neither repeat the Lafferite nonsense of his opponents nor explicitly contradict it. The facts are on his side but he's afraid to use them.
Ryan Avent pleads "Can we all agree that however one feels about the merits of gun-control, the District’s tightest-in-the-nation gun laws are unlikely to tell us much about the actual costs and benefits of gun control, seeing as we share a border with Virginia?" Well, yes and no. I don't think you can infer anything about the merits of adopting DC-style rules as a national gun regulation regime from the effects of the DC gun ban in DC. But the vast majority of gun control regulations take place at the city or state level, for which purposes the DC case is an illustrative example. The slogan "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" is obviously an oversimplification, but DC is close to a pure instance of the principle. There's little practical impediment to handgun ownership in DC save a self-image as a law-abiding person.
And this is a not-infrequent scenario. Strict gun control regimes are popular in many urban areas, but it's precisely such areas that are in no position to enforce these regulations in a productive and effective manner. That, in turn, tells you something about the psychology and politics of the issue -- that on both sides its a form of identity politics; on the controller side, a means of expressing dislike of gun culture and various aspects of American folkways, a kind of liberal version of sundry ineffective "tough on crime" nostrums from the right.
Anti-immigrant passion also owes much to the disproportionate influence of a few small states in the nominating process. National polls show that, as an issue, immigration is far behind the Iraq war, terrorism, the economy, and health care as a concern to most Americans; a recent Pew poll shows that, nationally, only six per cent of voters offer immigration as the most important issue facing the country. But in Iowa and South Carolina, two of the three most important early states, it is a top concern for the Republicans who are most likely to vote.
And there you have it, yet another tribute to America's bizarre system of selecting presidential nominees. Of course one assumes that the larger national audience of Hispanics who Republicans were so actively courting just a couple of years ago hasn't missed how quickly everyone -- even Saint John McCain, Man of Principle -- has been willing to toss them overboard.
Ross is dead right if the biggest thing people remember about Mike Huckabee from Zev Chafetz' New York Times Magazine profile is the business about Mormons believing Jesus and Satan are brothers (it seems this is real Mormon doctrine) then Huckabee's getting off easy. What really comes away is that he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has no record on foreign policy issues, says his thinking is a mélange of Frank Gaffney, Tom Friedman, Duncan Hunter, and he once chatted with Richard Haas. So it'll be run-amok militarism, plus Friedman-style moralism, plus realpolitik.
Except, obviously, it won't. Huckabee's just kind of making stuff up.
Oddly, as Ross says, Huckabee actually seems perfectly qualified to be president by current standards: we elected a governor of Arkansas President as recently as 1992, and his tenure in office compares favorably with many of the major candidates. But "it's worth making a distinction between being qualified and being prepared" and Huckabee is woefully unprepared. It's not just that he lacks staff, though he does. Lots of people who don't have staffs have a better handle on this stuff than Huckabee does. He just clearly hasn't put any effort into preparing himself to answer serious questions about a whole range of areas of national policy. He's clearly not going to be elected president, so I won't call it a "frightening" lack of preparation, but it is kind of insulting to us, the American people, that he's done so little due diligence.
A couple of days ago, I observed that Barack Obama has a little trick where he makes conservatives like him by summarizing their point of view before rejecting it. Ross Douthat and I talk that over and Ross says it makes him a dangerous, dangerous figure. See also what I think Iran is up to.
The agreement signaled that congressional Democrats are ready to give in to many of the White House's demands as they try to finish the session before they break for Christmas -- a political victory for the president, who has refused to compromise on the spending measures.
The whole thing actually gets more depressing in the details. But to make a long story short, a combination of Senate filibusters, White House veto threats, and Democratic unwillingness to push the envelop of confrontation, has the Republican minority getting its way on overall domestic spending levels, on war funding, on AMT offsets, and basically on everything else.
The New York Times reports that the situation in Congo, which had been looking tentatively more stable for a few years, is heading back down the drain as a result of conflict between the central government and forces loyal to Laurent Nkunda. Looking for background, I went to the International Crisis Group's website, where there most recent Congo report was this from October recommending, among other things, that "[t]he international community should encourage Kabila to suspend his military offensive and launch a comprehensive peace initiative for North Kivu, aimed first at de-escalating the conflict and improving the general security environment in the province, then addressing the core issues related to restoration of state authority such as regulation of the exploitation of natural resources, return of refugees and a transitional justice process facilitating community reconciliation."
It didn't happen. Instead, the offensive went forward, and now according to the Times's Lydia Polgreen "General Nkunda’s forces routed army troops in towns they had taken just days before and threatened to take Sake as well." I can't really add anything to the reporting I read, just think it's sometimes worth trying to raise the profile of these stories that tend not to get much play in the U.S.
Brad Plumer takes a look at this chart of patents for sulfur dioxide-control technologies for electric power plants. Basically, despite years of R&D funding, what it took to really get the innovation train rolling was congressional regulations. Point being that, yes, it will require technological innovation to reduce carbon emissions enough to keep climate change under control, but you get that innovation by imposing the regulatory mandate. In short, cap and trade it and they will come.
I really liked Roger Cohen's line about Mitt Romney's "Wikipedia-level appreciation of other religions, admiring 'the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims' and 'the ancient traditions of the Jews'" but I think he makes the wrong point about Romney's condemnation of Europe's empty cathedrals. To me, the point to be made is that this worry about the US becoming like Europe is in stark tension with the oft-expressed conservative worry that religion is being pushed "out of the public square." For whatever you may say about Europe's relative lack of religiosity, it's not a lack of entanglement of religion in public life that led to it.
In the United Kingdom from which Cohen is writing there is, after all, an established church. And so it goes across northern Europe where each country traditionally had its own established Protestant church. And then across southern Europe, the Catholic Church always had official or quasi-official status. There was no question of pushing the church out of the public square. It's just that many people (the image of Europe as an all-atheist land tends to be overblown, there are churchgoers there, just not as many as in the US) wound up turning their backs on the church. This development most likely seems specifically related to the undue public-ification of religion in Europe. American religious groups, by contrast, have traditionally had to compete in a market of sorts for congregants. A church nobody wants to attend winds up shutting down, a popular church grows. Consequently, people have found ways to keep bringing people into the pews. Trying to make the United States a more officially "religious" country seems likely to accomplish the reverse. At the end of the day, the mast majority of people hate politicians and politics and respect religious leaders and religion -- getting the latter involved in the former is unlikely, at the end of the day, to enhance the esteem in which it's held.
Andrew links to this map, observing it's "one reason we're not leaving Iraq." Ezra remarks that it "helps explain, for one thing, why the Middle East always dominates the foreign policy agenda." It is, however, worth being precise about this. One dove's "it's all about the oil" complaint is another hawk's "we need to keep invading these countries because our economy depends on it."
One observation is that the high concentration of oil in the Middle East makes the region unusually war-prone. Brazilians wouldn't really gain very much from having their government conquer Surinam. But Saddam Hussein or any other Iraqi dictator stood to gain a lot from controlling the Gulf States like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE where the population is low but the oil wealth is high. Meanwhile, a country like Iraq or Iran that has a sizable population plus a ton of oil is in a position to build a pretty large military establishment. Hence the Gulf War-era worry that if Saddam was allowed to conquer Kuwait, he'd move on into Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf, thus putting together a country with truly enormous oil revenues and an enormous amount of market power. That's why we stepped in as leaders of an international coalition aimed at rolling back his conquest.
At the end of the day, though, helping small countries resist conquest by larger countries is a perfectly sound principle to uphold. It's true that we might well not have been so eager to save Kuwait had it not had the oil, but it's also unlikely that anyone would have wanted to conquer Kuwait had it not had the oil. Meanwhile, it's one thing to help small countries avoid conquest and thus try to prevent someone like Saddam from gaining hegemony over the whole region. It's another thing to say that we should start conquering countries in order to establish our own hegemony.
I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two African American men at the local coffee shop regarding Martin Luther King, Jr. and one observed "Once he started speaking out against the Vietnam War, he had to go." The other agreed: "he had to go." I hear this theory every now and again (see, e.g., Rage Against the Machine "You know they went after King / When he spoke out on Vietnam /He turned the power to the have-nots / And then came the shot") and wonder how prevalent it is. Given the history of racist violence in the United States, the "cover story" that he was assassinated by a white supremacist seems pretty plausible.
As a counterpoint to the woes of Congo, Drake Bennett (via Jim Henley) says much of Africa is doing better than it has in decades. And it's not just a resource-driven boom: "plenty of Sub-Saharan African countries that don't boast oil or mineral wealth are also growing, the new World Bank numbers show, and they're doing it either by finding better ways to make money from traditional exports or by expanding into new sectors."
One important point in this is that the waning of Cold War tensions open up more space in which good things might happen. Bennett observes that "during the Cold War, African leaders were able to play the United States and Soviet Union off each other, threatening to switch their allegiance if they were pushed too hard to reform." It's worse than that, though. During the Cold War, even if you had a good regime in place somewhere, anyone who happened to feel like getting financial and logistical support for his rebellion would only need to turn to the rival superpower. In general, the removal of Cold War tensions seems to have reduced armed conflict all around the world. Clearly, that doesn't cure problems all on its own, but it creates circumstances in which sound political leadership has a chance to survive, and in which individuals have a little more insulation from political events.
All of which is, to me, one more on the longish list of reasons why it's important not to let China's growing prosperity turn into a new superpower rivalry as, for example, Fred Thompson seemed to want to do at yesterday's debate.
National Review's endorsement of Mitt Romney is somewhat fascinating. Pretty much everyone agrees that from the point of view of orthodox conservatism, the current GOP field is a bit of a problem. Since someone has to win, I can imagine plausibly arguing that, all things considered, Romney should be the first choice of National Review readers. But the magazine seems determined to just deny that there's any problem:
Some conservatives question his sincerity. It is true that he has reversed some of his positions. But we should be careful not to overstate how much he has changed. In 1994, when he tried to unseat Ted Kennedy, he ran against higher taxes and government-run health care, and for school choice, a balanced budget amendment, welfare reform, and “tougher measures to stop illegal immigration.” He was no Rockefeller Republican even then.
They also kindly concede that "He may not have thought deeply about the political dimensions of social issues until, as governor, he was confronted with the cutting edge of social liberalism." The notion that he hadn't thought about the "political dimensions" of these issues is ridiculous. I lived in Massachusetts during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and I well-remember that Shannon O'Brien tried to use the abortion issue against Romney. It was a big problem for him as a Mormon and a Republican to convince people that he was really every bit as pro-choice as the Democratic alternative. As you can see, he got a bit indignant about it:
He still might be the best candidate for conservatives, but he's also plainly someone whose positions on these topics isn't driven by conviction and it seems to me to be a disservice to readers to try to sweep that under the rug rather than concede the point and argue that it should be ignored.
I got an email from the Obama campaign noting that "This race took a sharply negative turn yesterday" and trying to do a little jujitsu with some of the attacks from the Clinton campaign. It's still the case, though, that if you want to see a real sharp negative turn, you need to look to Republicans. Check this out:
Utterly devastating. And best of all nobody really knows what HuckabeeFacts.com is or who's behind it.
UPDATE: Okay, via Jason Zengerle, the Arkansas Timessays the video is by Keith Emis, 29, who "grew up in Fayetteville and works in his family's Data Forms business in Greenland. He said he incurred no expenses, save gas and video tapes, and used friends as volunteer help, including one with video production experience." I'd put the odds of that not being the whole story as pretty darn high.
Rep. Ike Skelton's office sent me this smart statement on Afghanistan the other day:
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the House Armed Services Committee today that ‘In Afghanistan, we do what we can; in Iraq, we do what we must.’
This striking statement highlights the strain Iraq is placing on our force and how this affects our ability to achieve strategic victory in Afghanistan, the primary front of the fight against Islamic extremism. I find it troubling that our ongoing commitment in Iraq prevents us from dedicating resources in Afghanistan beyond what is necessary to prevent setbacks, as opposed to what is required to realize success.
I have often said that Afghanistan seems like the forgotten war. I was assured by our witnesses today that the war in Afghanistan isn’t forgotten, but it’s clear that the stress on our military elsewhere has limited our ability to succeed in Afghanistan and has taken our attention away from this critical operation.
All true. The Iraq debate often proceeds as if Iraq just exists in a universe all its own, hermetically sealed off from events inside the United States and around the world. Thus, while the specific structure of the Iraq debate whirls this way and that with the course of events, the basic thrust is that we always need to try one more thing or just wait a few more months and hope something better's around the corner. In the real world, though, this endless patience with Iraq has real costs. I liked Matt Stoller's observation that there's something odd about this: "After going over thirty pages of polling data at Polling Report on Iraq, I noticed that the lines of questioning are mostly organized around military tactics and strategy - are we winning, should we pull out troops, is Bush doing a good job.
Here's an odd addendum to the story about Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Mormons, and the question of Jesus and Lucifer being brothers. The LDS church sent out a spokesperson to complain:
"We believe, as other Christians believe and as Paul wrote, that God is the father of all," said the spokeswoman, Kim Farah. "That means that all beings were created by God and are his spirit children. Christ, on the other hand, was the only begotten in the flesh and we worship him as the son of God and the savior of mankind. Satan is the exact opposite of who Christ is and what he stands for."
On first hearing, the doctrine that Lucifer and our Lord, Jesus Christ, are brothers may seem surprising to some—especially to those unacquainted with latter-day revelations. But both the scriptures and the prophets affirm that Jesus Christ and Lucifer are indeed offspring of our Heavenly Father and, therefore, spirit brothers. Jesus Christ was with the Father from the beginning. Lucifer, too, was an angel “who was in authority in the presence of God,” a “son of the morning.” (See Isa. 14:12; D&C 76:25–27.) Both Jesus and Lucifer were strong leaders with great knowledge and influence. But as the Firstborn of the Father, Jesus was Lucifer’s older brother. (See Col. 1:15; D&C 93:21.)
That's from a 1986 Q&A with Jess L. Christensen, the Institute of Religion director at Utah State University, Logan, Utah. He clearly seems to think Mormons have some distinctive doctrine on this point. Kim Farah, while not quite contradicting anything in the latter excerpt, is clearly trying to give the reverse impression that -- that Mormons just believe what "other Christians believe." From where I sit, this particular doctrine doesn't sound especially odd (two brothers: one good, one evil, destined to eternal struggle for the souls of men -- what's wrong with that?) so I don't really know why the church would be weird about it.
Speaking of John Edwards, I don't think you should consider this a series criticism of Edwards or his campaign, but Sanford Levinson is right to say that the problems with our "broken system" actually run considerably deeper than Edwards' money-and-lobbyists rhetoric would suggest.
Chris Bowers says he'll vote for John Edwards. Markos says it's Barack Obama. I agree with both of them. The difference is that while both of them are unenthusiastic about their choices, I'd be pretty enthusiastic with either. The trouble is that I think a lot of people set their expectations for politicians too high, and then wind up unduly disappointed when reality strikes home. To me, one of the signal characteristics of this race is that thanks to the competition she's faced and to her own political skill, Hillary Clinton has really raised her game and become a much more progressive figure than I'd expected she would be at the beginning of this process. Her platform compares favorably to John Kerry's in 2004 or Al Gore's in 2000 in almost every way.
Still, I think we could do better with Edwards or with Obama. If I got to vote in the Iowa Caucus, I'd probably try to first improve my understanding of caucus mechanics, and second vote tactically. And in principle, of course, events -- including the debate that I'll be watching soon -- could change my mind. It's a close-run thing. But if you made me choose, I'd agree with Chris that Edwards' willingness to embrace progressives and the progressive movement deserves to be rewarded over Obama's aloofness.
Photo by Flickr user alexdecarvalho used under a Creative Commons license
Andrew labels this tale of Clinton campaign infighting "the Clinton Unraveling." That seems like reading too much into events, but obviously her people expected to win and now it looks like they might lose. To me, the more interesting element is that while Bill Clinton apparently wants more savage attacks on Barack Obama, "Penn, sources say, has counseled moderation, believing an attack would elevate her already-high negatives and drive her too far to the left to win a general election."
At the end of the day, I'd strongly prefer that the Democrats not nominate someone whose top political strategist's thinking is so single-mindedly focused on fear of going "too far to the left."
Don't miss this beautiful slideshow of Afghanistan on The Atlantic's website, based off of Sarah Chayes's feature story on "How the author helped Afghans build a thriving soap and body-oil business—and overcame the incompetence of America’s aid establishment" in the current issue.
Watching the Mitchell Report press conference now. I'm left once again to wonder if the NBA has a performance enhancing drug problem lurking beneath the service. Why would it only be baseball? There's no test for HGH, right? Here's what David Stern had to say to congress about the NBA's drug policy.
If for some reason yesterday's link to my BloggingHeads.TV appearance with Ross didn't entire you, you can check out this excerpt that got picked up by The New York Times.
I just can't believe that Roger Clemons was implicated in the Mitchell Report. His post-40 career renaissance and massive increase in muscle mass just screamed out "here's a clean guy." Shocking stuff.
An amendment by Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to make our crazy farm subsidy policies somewhat less crazy got 56 votes in the Senate. There are, of course, 100. So, naturally, the amendment failed.
Similarly, one good low-cost way to start moving toward addressing global warming would be to take back some tax subsidies for oil companies. Fortunately, the Senate had a bill like that. Equally fortunately, the bill got 59 votes. So, naturally, it went down to defeat.
CNN's Mary Snow reported after the debate: "Twenty-three registered Democrats came in here undecided. We asked them who they felt performed the best in this debate and they concluded they felt that John Edwards performed the best, with Senator Clinton right behind him. Now of course, this is unscientific, but also the other question posed to them. If the election were held today, who would you vote for? And in that question, John Edwards came in first, Senator Barack Obama second, and Senator Clinton came in third." The Fox News focus group felt the same way. That's not how I felt watching the debate. For me, the best cure for developing pro-Edwards leanings is always to actually watch him in action: I find his persona self-righteous and a bit annoying, but the evidence has consistently been that most people don't feel that way, and this afternoon's focus groups are no exception.
Incidentally, I wonder about the mid-afternoon debate. This is very convenient for professional political journalists, since it allows us to discharge a work obligation during regular business hours, but it seems awfully inconvenient for the average people who are nominally the audience for these things. I wonder if the scheduling is just a slight post-modern nod at the reality that the chattering class is, in fact, the real audience for these things.
The stories that have come out about Huckabee paint a portrait of him not just as somebody not ready for prime-time--a fault he can overcome with his I-never-said-I-was-perfect bit on the stump--but as a real narcissist. The idea that one's past policies (the AIDS position) or actions (the R.J. Reynolds deal) could turn out to have been bad ideas, and require apologies or explanations, doesn't appear to touch him. And the idea that gathering more information on issues (like the NIE, criminals' records, immigration details, or tax policy) could improve his leadership doesn't seem to register, either. The Huckabee credo appears to be this: Feeling moved, Huckabee creates, and God sees that it is good.
"You know, the Gore-leone crime family is now the number one crime family in the world, when you think about it. He's about to pull off the biggest scam in the history of the world. It's bigger than any bank heist, bigger than any drug deal. It's bigger than any counterfeiting scheme, and he's doing it all nice and natural with a little help from the socialist perverts in Norway, who gave him a Nobel Prize. Why do I call them socialist perverts? Answer: because they are. By and large, 90 percent of the people on the Nobel Committee are into child pornography and molestation, according to the latest scientific studies."
And, yes, he's nationally syndicated. That's via Dave Roberts.
It seems that the powers that be have decreed that this little joking exchange was The Moment of yesterday's debate:
Like Ed Kilgore, though, I felt that this wound up sort of missing the point. "In asking why Obama had so many Clinton administration advisors, she was presumably trying to say: Doesn't this show your inexperience?" I don't think that's right either, though. I think the question was actually meant to ask precisely what was asked -- superficially, there doesn't seem to be a lot to choose from between Bill Clinton's wife, with a team packed full of ex-Clinton people, and between a young Senator from Illinois with a team packed full of ex-Clinton people.
Obama chose to parry this with a solid joke, but as Brian Beutler says the real answer to the question is interesting and important. Bill Clinton was president for eight years and a ton of people worked for him over those years so it's no surprise at the end of the day that both campaigns have ex-Clinton people associated with them. But though there are various exceptions and ins-and-outs to this, the basic shape of things is that Hillary's team is weighted toward people who, like her, backed the war whereas Obama's team is weighted toward people who, like him, opposed it. Obama's standard has also attracted some prominent people like Zbigniew Brzezinksi and Samantha Power (both of whom opposed the war) who weren't in the Clinton administration.
Neither candidate has really tried to open up a broad doctrinal argument, but within the wonk world, in short, there's a significant divide that's reflected in the Clinton versus Obama race. And while this was most notably operationalized over the Iraq question, it reflects some broader differences -- Obama people are more likely to value international law, strategic restraint, and a narrow focus on al-Qaeda whereas Clinton people are more likely to take a pragmatic/instrumental view of international institutions, worry that nothing will happen without American leadership, and to have more sympathy for the Bushian idea that you need broad confrontation with rogue regimes. What's more, you can see this reflected in the differences between the campaigns to some extent in things like Obama's promise to try for a "grand bargain" with Iran and a recommitment of the United States to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide versus Clinton's tendency to gesture in those directions much more modestly.
Timothy Taylor, who Brad DeLong describes as the best intro economics teacher he knows has a new basic econ textbook out. And it's available for free!
The publisher, Freeload Press, will earn revenue by selling advertising on the website where the book is distributed. Also, when you download chapters (as PDF files), the first couple of pages might be advertisements. There is a short registration form, but downloads are free. If someone wants an advertising-free, black-and-white paper copy, it's available for $30 at the website ($20 for a micro or a macro split). There will soon be a workbook up on the website to accompany the text, and a test bank is already available for instructors. The website for Freeload Press is http://www.freeloadpress.com.
Is an advertising supported approach a sustainable business model for a textbook company?
I kind of suspect that it may not. On the other hand, as a K-12 endeavor I think things like the California Open Source Textbook Project have a lot of promise. As they observe, "California currently spends more than $400M annually — and rising — for K-12 textbooks" and of course California's not the only state in the country. If any substantial chunk of national K-12 textbook spending by public institutions could be redirected toward open source textbooks, I think you'd do a lot of good.
Lots of frustrated people who aren't US Senators are calling on the Senate Democrats to force the Republicans to engage in some annoying "real" filibusters if they're going to insist on blocking all legislation. But would that work? Karen Tumulty from Timedecided to consult some experts:
Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution calls this idea impractical. Given the fact that Republicans could muster 41 people on most things to hold the floor, a real filibuster could go on interminably....But Norm Ornstein at the American Enterprise Insitute thinks Reid should call the Republicans' bluff, starting with holding the Senate in session five long days a week. "You have a different Senate now. Frankly, they're soft," says Ornstein. "If they had the backbone and the discipline to do it, it would work."
Kevin Drum remarks that "if Mann and Ornstein disagree, then yes, this question is more complicated than we think."
I sort of disagree. There's an ambiguous sense of "work" here. Obviously, in a literal sense it's not in Harry Reid's power to prevent the GOP from behaving in a highly unified manner with at least 41 Senators sticking together on all issues. No amount of theater can, through magic, "work" to break down the bonds of solidarity. But there's going to be an election in 2008. If Democrats can drum home the message "obstructionist Republican Senators block all good things under the sun" that will tend to cause the Republicans to lose seats, which might change things. Conversely, if Republicans can drive home the message "ineffectual Democratic congress can't accomplish anything" they might be able to skate away. The current strategy definitely is driving home the second narrative, and timely political theater -- if done not once, but over and over and over and over again in the manner of something calculated to drive home a "message" -- could help switch the storyline.
That said, there's clearly a simple answer to this. Back during the "nuclear option" debate, the Republicans rolled out a method of eliminating the possibility of filibustering judicial nominees. At that time, Democrats should have raised the ante and said they would agree if we could just end all filibusters on everything. Having missed that opportunity then, Democrats would look like huge hypocrites if they did it now, but it's still the right thing to do: the filibuster's always been a bad rule and eliminating it would eliminate decades of further conversations like this about legislative gamesmanship.
I know some netroots types are frustrated that the Democratic field hasn't yielded The Perfect Nominee, but I think it's a pretty solid set of choices all things considered. This is what a weak field looks like:
I keep meaning to recommend Noah Millman's post on this pointing out that there's no reason a field full of somewhat heterodox candidates needs to be weak. The Republicans could be having an interesting debate about the nature of conservatism and the direction of their party. But they're not:
In fact, there is no ideological fighting going on, except between Ron Paul and the rest of the field. Instead, the GOP is engaged in an identity-politics-driven contest. The GOP is not debating what it stands for, nor is it a party that knows what it stands for and is looking for the best candidate to win a general election and/or to effectively carry out the party’s program. The GOP is not trying to find a leader for the party. It is looking for a candidate who is the incarnation of the party. No wonder they’re having a tough time.
It's as if the heterodox candidates arrived four or right years too early, before the party was ready to hear that the old strategy isn't working any more.
Here's a chart based on Paul Krugman's writeup of data from the CBO's new "Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates" report. Naturally, the only solution is tax cuts.
Avi Zenilman and the dread Politico put out a solid piece making the point that the central plank of Rudy Giuliani's economic policy outlook is hokum: Tax cuts do not, in fact, increase revenues no matter how many times Giuliani says they do.
Michael Hirsch says Al Gore should run for president. I think it's really too late for that, and clear enough that he doesn't want to do it that there's really no point in urging him. A successful presidential candidate, after all, has to really want to win. That said, I agree with the basic sentiment: Gore hits the sweet spot of experience and vision in a way that nobody else can. What's more, a person who's in a position to be a viable presidential candidate and who believes the things Gore says he believes almost has a duty to run, a duty that I'm sad he hasn't seen fit to take up.
Photo by Flickr user Kangotraveler used under a Creative Commons license
House GOP voted unanimously yesterday to keep on torturing. The Democrats are clearly against torture. Like all else that's good in the world, this anti-torture bill will presumably suffer death by filibuster at the hands of Senate Republicans.
In other words, a chasm separates Republicans and Democrats on the issue of what to do about the U.S. health care system. And very little separates the major candidates within each party.
In this situation, what should Democratic primary election voters make of the dueling press releases and expert statements that each side has invoked on the desirability of an individual mandate? The answer, I believe, is close to nothing. Here's why. First, the positions of the candidates are barely distinguishable. Second, if elected, no Democrat will be able to shove a health care reform plan through Congress without major modification. Third, all would call on a similar set of advisors with broadly similar views. (Do not doubt that most analysts advising each Democratic candidate would gladly serve in the administrations of their current rivals!) Primary voters should not base their votes on the negligible differences that distinguish the campaign statements of the candidates on health care. Rather, they should base their votes on their judgments regarding the capacity of each candidate, if elected, to unify their own party and to reach across the aisle to achieve the bipartisan cooperation that will be necessary to enact major health care reform. The current analytical squabble is a diversion. As a certified policy wonk, I fully understand the seductions of these debates. Models. Statistics. Oh, boy! But having lived through way too many of these arguments, I also understand that winning them has nothing to do with getting elected and governing effectively. Let's keep our eye on the ball.
Because these campaigns go on for so long, and because so many relevant issues are hard to know the answer to (who would do the best job of responding to third-party anonymous smears? who will hire the smartest ad-making dude?), I think there's a tendency to over-interpret the information that is available. Thus one can, if one chooses, spin out a narrative about the important revelations about the character and savvy of the nominees that are encapsulated in their health care plans. In truth, the outcome of Tom Allen's Senate campaign is probably more important to the prospects for health care reform than is the choice of Democratic Party nominee.
Everyone new that the new Boston Celtics were going to be a good team. But I think a lot of people -- myself included -- have been surprised by just how good they've been. Certainly, I wasn't envisioning this level of defensive domination. One person who's not surprised, though, is schtevie at the APBRmetrics forum who noted on August 3 that if you believe in the adjusted +/- stat that it predicted "that the Celtics will outscore their opponents by between 10 and 13 points per 100 possessions, which would put them in the same league as the greatest Bulls team, which had the highest margin of all time (around 12, if I recall correctly)." He also noted that the estimate might be biased downward because "there is no reason to believe that the Celtics will fill out its roster with replacement level players as there will be an incentive for decent veterans, looking for a ring, to come along for the ride. Also, it was assumed that the current remaining youngsters only had replacement value, and I suspect (at least in the case of Rajon Rondo's) that this isn't the case."
And, well, it's all true. Their efficiency differential is a ridiculous 16 points per hundred possessions. Boston opponents should consider themselves lucky that the Celtics only play 93.6 possessions per game, thus keeping their margin of victory to only 13.8.
I assume the greater accuracy of the adjusted +/- relative to other ways of looking at the situation has something to do with the fact that it can, in principle, do a much better job of capturing the defensive half of the game, which is really where Boston has distinguished itself.
HGTV is running a neat contest where they're promising to do a little "neighborhood revitalization" of a depressed area somewhere in the country. You can vote here. I picked DC, naturally.
Like a lot of people, I found Knocked Up to be both funny, and somewhat disquieting in its apparent message. These issues got discussed a bit and then the whole thing was forgotten in our fast-paced internet-age culture. But Jessica Valenti points out a really good new Meghan O'Rourke essay on the film inspired by Katherine Heigl's recent remark that the movie was "a little sexist."
I was glad during yesterday's debate to see Bill Richardson mention the idea that getting serious about global warming "means being sensitive to mass transit, to air-conditioning, to the way we live." But of course mass transit isn't a great subject to talk about in Iowa. And thus Clyde Haberman's lament that urban issues haven't been discussed at all will be repeated every four or eight years until we adopt a nominating process that's not so heavily dependent on Iowa and New Hampshire, whose combined population is a good deal smaller than New York City's.
It does occur to me, though, that one nice thing about a Barack Obama presidency (or, though I shudder to say it, Rudy Giuliani) is that it'd be the first time since JFK that we had a president with a background in city politics.
I have to say that I find the idea that Hillary Clinton has been "vetted" and thus we can expect "no surprises" in terms of damaging campaign information to be pretty unconvincing. For one thing, public opinion of HIllary Clinton has bounced around a fair amount over the past ten years and it could keep on bouncing.
But more to the point, this almost seems like a calculated effort to bait me in bringing up things I really don't want to bring up. Are we, after all, sure that there are no more "surprises" lurking in Bill Clinton's sex life? That everyone in America remembers the full details of Clinton's midnight pardons? There's tawdry BS to be dragged up on everyone -- she's no exception and shouldn't be pretending that she is.
Commenter Otto asked with regard to my post on the difference between the Clinton and Obama groups of national security advisors, "And how does MY-annointed Edwards fit into this discussion? Can we meaningfully characterise his foreign policy staff on the same criteria?"
This is tougher. The bulk of national security people have viewed this as a Clinton-Obama race and affiliated either with one of those campaigns or else with no campaign and a lot of the people who Edwards has signed on don't have very large public profiles. Two people in Edwards' circle whose work I am familiar with are Michael Signer and Derek Chollet whose views I've disagreed with in the past and who -- combined with Edwards' very hawkish positioning in 2004 -- made me kind of skeptical of Edwards' foreign policy at the get-go. Now, either they've changed their minds since then, or else I misunderstood what they were saying previously, or else Edwards is listening to someone else, because he's eventually rolled out a foreign policy agenda that seems great. On every point where he's said something different from the competition -- mostly notably on the question of a "war on terror" -- he's differentiated himself in a good way.
Now, I think it's pretty clear that these issues are not at the heart of what John Edwards is all about, either emotionally or intellectually. He likes to talk about how he's spent his whole life fighting powerful corporations, his service on the Intelligence Committee wasn't especially distinguished, etc. This is what keeps drawing me back to Obama who has a more impressive team and more engagement with these issues, but he's never sealed the deal and as Edwards keeps saying things I agree with, it feels dumb to object at a certain point.
Here's another look at the income inequality picture that has nothing in particular to do with George W. Bush. Here we see the share of national income going to the 90-95th percentiles, to the 96-99th percentiles, and to the top one percent. During this time period, the share going to each of the bottom four quartiles declined, and the share going to the 80th to 89th percentiles also declined. The 91st to 95th percentiles stayed basically the same. Those relative losses across the entire bottom 90 percent of the distribution accrued to the top five percent.
And as you can see here, the vast bulk of the action is within the top one percent. The top one's share, clearly, is pretty volatile and seems to be pretty closely tied to the waxing and waning fortunes of the stock market in a way that the rest of the top five percent's income isn't. That's something to keep in mind the next time you're pondering whether or not it makes sense for economic news coverage to be so focused on stock issues -- this seems to be much more important to the top one percent than to everyone else.
The terrible New York Knicks and the awesomely feisty local media environment in New York City is truly a match made in heaven. It's mighty hard, after all, to imagine anything prompting this lede from a DC paper:
NO BULL, KNICKS CAN'T TAKE CHICAGO LIGHTLY By MIKE PUMA December 14, 2007 -- Isiah Thomas wears rose colored glasses to protect his eyes from permanent damage. As president and coach of this catastrophe, it's safer to stare into the sun and count to a thousand than watch the Knicks without those glasses.
Right on. People used to hearing about the Knicks being bad may be overlooking the fact that they're actually considerably worse this season. Last year, they were 17th in offense and 24th in defense (in efficiency terms). The year before that, they were 25th in offense and 26th in defense. This year they're 26th in offense -- a new low! But they're also dead last in defense -- another new low! In short, they're really, really, really terrible and there's essentially no end in sight.
I'd also point to pre-war Europe, whose loss of religious faith (it's not like it started in 1960 — try 1660) had ghastly ideological consequences — Communism, German National Socialism — that led to countless deaths.
Basically, the decline in religious fanaticism represented by the English Restoration in 1660 and the end of Oliver Cromwell's theocratic regime led directly to Nazism.
Screwing around with my iTunes looking to call up some Stars songs, I noticed that an awful lot of songs have the word "stars" in the title. To wit:
"Stars," Hum.
"Stars," The Cranberries
"Stars," The Dandy Warhols
"Stars," Hum
"The Stars," Better Than Ezra
"The Stars of Track and Field," Belle & Sebastian
"The Stars are Projectors," Modest Mouse
"7 Stars," Apples in Stereo
"Stars and Sons," Broken Social Scene
"Stars and Stripes," Anti-Flag
"Stars and Stripes of Corruption," Dead Kennedys
It seems to me that Anti-Flag got the better of the Dead Kennedys here in pure titling terms. As usual, the DKs let their heavy-handed didacticism get in the way. I'm not really sure how I feel about the songs as such. Hum's "Stars" is an unfairly neglected nineties alt-rock masterpiece.
UPDATE: Yes, some of these songs are very bad. Disk space, however, is cheap so I don't erase something just because it sucks.
Sure is good the Senate confirmed Michael Mukasey without him giving a straight answer about torture. As The Washington Posteditorialized that his opponents were "working against the last, best hope to see the rule of law reemerge in this administration." Damn opponents. They were probably worried that if people were caught destroying evidence, he would help block inquiries into the obstruction of justice or something crazy like that. But that couldn't happen. After all, the Post said "Mukasey has demonstrated the ethical fortitude required of an independent attorney general" and Fred Hiatt is never wrong.
At sixty-two, Biden has a cheerful vanity and an exuberant restlessness that make him seem far younger. Since the election, he has become a leader of a modest-sized faction—“the national-security Democrats,” in the words of Richard Holbrooke, an ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton—that includes the most hawkish members in the Democratic Party.
Because, obviously, those Democrats who thought it would be a bad idea to launch a years-long bloody, expensive, and futile military operation in Iraq don't care about national security. Those who were totally wrong may have gotten tons of people killed, but at least they're not dirty fucking hippies. That seems to be the general idea. Anyways this kind of thing is why I think we can do better than President Hillary Clinton:
“She is probably more assertive and willing to use force than her husband,” says Richard Holbrooke, the former envoy for Bill Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is a classic national-security Democrat. She is better at framing national-security issues for the current era than her husband was at a common point in his career.”
I mean, if those were just the words of some guy you could discount them, but he's one of her top people.
This story by Ellen Barry for The New York Times is just fantastic. It's about a Liberian-born woman raising her family in a rough neighborhood on Staten Island who decided that the best thing for her teenaged son would be to get off the streets by . . . being sent to live in war-torn West Africa.
I don't have much to say in an analytical vein, but I'll note that some of the issues raised seem similar to the questions Mary Waters writes about in Black Identities.
Lane Kenworthy, a scholar of inequality issues, has started a new blog called consider the evidence. This post considers some of the evidence on the alleged link between high levels of inequality and economic growth: not much evidence for it.
The main thing an Attorney-General is supposed to get done these days, however, is to help members of the Bush administration avoid legal accountability for criminal actions undertaken in years passed. He doesn't need any cooperation to do that job.
It seems obvious enough to me that liberals have no real reason to feel warmly about either Ron Paul or Mike Huckabee. Neither man is someone who would make a good President of the United States and neither man is someone who shares my values in any serious way.
That said, I do think liberals have pretty good reason to at least cheer them on a bit from the sidelines as their success represents the flying apart of the conservative coalition that's been dominating American politics for decades. Ronald Reagan wielded a truly formidable political coalition that reached from the Deep South all across the West and into the suburbs of New Jersey and Illinois. George Bush has presided over a much-diminished version of that coalition -- a political bloc that left little margin for error. And then he proceeded to presided over a great deal of error -- massive, enormous errors -- that's left the Republican Party looking adrift and meandering and has evidently sent large segments of the conservative base to start taking a rose-colored view of these two kookie political figures and their fringy opinions.
The conservative establishment is now flailing wildly to regain control and I'm almost certain they'll ultimately succeed in delivering the nomination to an establishment-approved figure. But the movement as a whole is clearly sputtering and sick and the better the outsider candidates do the more it frays.
I recommend that you read the entirety of John Quiggin's post on achieving emissions reductions in the tourism sector. Also this post. But for the short term, I'd like to draw attention to one of its more trivial aspects: "BTW, what is the plural of Prius?" Inquiriting minds want to know.
Photo by Flickr user Mstorz used under a Creative Commons license
Repeatedly dismissive of Obama -- which could come back to haunt the Clinton campaign -- the former president at one point said that voters were, of course, free to pick someone with little experience, even "a gifted television commentator" who would have just "one year less" experience in national service than Obama. He had earlier pointed out that Obama had started to run for president just one year into his first term in the U.S. Senate. [...]
[Clinton] also hit back at the charge that experienced politicians had helped get us into the Iraq war, saying that this was "like saying that because 100 percent of the malpractice cases are committed by doctors, the next time I need surgery I'll get a chef or a plumber to do it."
This is pretty aggravating. Hillary Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, before which she'd never held elective office. Barack Obama was elected to Illinois Senate in 1996, and to the United States Senate in 2004. It's true that Obama doesn't have a ton of experience in elective office compared to Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd or Joe Biden, but there's a perfectly reasonable case to be made that he has more experience than Hillary Clinton does.
Meanwhile, this line on the war seems like a pretty pathetic dodge. Nobody's actually suggesting that because many members of congress voted the wrong way on the war we should elect a television commentator instead. Indeed, almost no television commentators were right about the war. By contrast, a lot of politicians were right about the war. Nancy Pelosi was right. Russ Feingold was right. Carl Levin was right. Howard Dean was right. And Barack Obama was right. If Clinton's going to run on her alleged greater experience, surely it's fair to point to the content of that experience and ask whether or not it's all good experience.
In honor of December 15, Bill of Rights Day, a little bit of fun. If only the amendments banning detention without due process and torture (it's cruel, it's unusual) were in such good shape.
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Heads in the Sand
