To revise and extend my remarks on the "Hussein" factor from yesterday, I think part of my point would be that there's really no use in deploring somewhat underhanded attacks in the course of a primary campaign. Part of the idea of a primary is for the eventual winner to be someone who's tested. In those terms, I actually think the race thus far has been too nice in a lot of ways. There's a lot more stuff about Barack Obama's Afrocentric church that the Republican Party is virtually certain to use against him if he becomes the nominee, so under the circumstances I'd sort of prefer to have Hillary Clinton's people bring it up and see if Obama can perform well in the midst of the "freak show".
Similarly, I've heard it said that so much shit's already been slung in Hillary Clinton's direction that the American people have already heard it all and won't be further impressed by anything they hear. I think that's a bit naive. Relatively few people remember, for example, when Bill Clinton pardoned some Puerto Rican terrorists in the midst of her 2000 Senate campaign, but I'm pretty damn sure the RNC research team remembers. I don't want to dwell on this sort of thing, personally, but insofar as I think it's bound to get dwelled on sooner or later, I'd tend to vote for "sooner" as the best time to hear about it all.
Part of the dynamics of the primary campaign has been a certain tendency of foreign policy issues to go into eclipse as the leading contenders from each side compete with one another for the affections of base voters who tend to be motivated by each coalition's core economic and cultural interests. But Tom Edsall wisely points out that even if the economic situation worsens, a general election campaign is bound to have a hefty focus on terrorism and security if for no other reason than that the GOP doesn't really have any other good options. Brian Katulis says some smart things about this deeper into the piece:
The most nuanced analysis of the politics of terror was provided by Brian Katulis, a less well known figure in the Democratic foreign policy establishment who is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress where he is a Senior Advisor to the Center's Middle East Progress project.
"I wouldn't say that Democrats have avoided national security as much as they have not yet developed a coherent narrative that simply goes beyond 'Bush screwed things up.'....Conservatives have an overarching story when it comes to talking about national security - it's not dissimilar to Bush's narrative: there are bad people out there, we need to go out there and try to kill them ourselves before they get us. Simplistic, and applied to many different threats, but it's kind of an easy story line....
"It's those political consulting classes on the Democratic side who are particularly wounded and still operating on the defensive when it comes to national security - which is truly a stunning thing when you think about it, given all of the strategic errors conservatism is responsible for on the national security front the last seven years.
"So I think there's a sweet spot for Democrats to actually say something that connects the dots on the national security and terrorism front - one that actually responds to a need from the American people to hear a viable alternative - but we're just not hearing it yet at that political communications level. We're seeing and hearing tick lists that make the broader public's eyes glaze over. On the conservative side, we hear a story line - a batshit crazy one for the most part that got us in the predicament that we're in now, but hey, it's a story. Most people would rather go to a movie that has a plot."
I would add that one thing I still don't see from Democrats on these issues is the correct atmospherics of confidence. When the candidates talk about most things, they talk about them with an apparent air that they believe everything they're saying. But when they talk about terrorism or Iraq they have a tendency, in my view, to often sound like they're stuck in 2002 -- nervous, defensive, cautious. They don't sound like a political party that believes that the evident failures of Bush's policies throughout 2005 and 2006 played a major role in boosting their party's political fortunes. And they don't sound to me as if they're eager to engage with these issues. But while confidence alone is no guarantee of success, going into a fight believing your going to lose is a recipe for trouble.
As promised earlier, here's Jacob Hacker's response to the CBO study calling into question his finding of an increase in economic volatility in America. Given that it's Sunday morning, I can't say that I've thoroughly looked into what he has to say, but I thought it made sense to put the link up at the earliest possible time since I'm going to have to see what others make of this as I don't necessarily have the relevant skills.
Who would you like to be in the White House if Pakistan fell to al Qaeda and the Islamists gained control of its nuclear arsenal?
Answer that question and you will know your candidate. All the rest, as they say, is commentary.
One issue here is that this is a pretty outlandish hypothetical. The odds of the Pakistani government collapsing and al-Qaeda taking over are low. But more to the point, much more than a president who'll respond effectively when al-Qaeda seizes control of a nuclear arsenal you want a president who'll make it unlikely that al-Qaeda seizes a nuclear arsenal. There's an unfortunately tendency to look at crisis-response as the essence of statesmanship when in reality it's avoiding crises that is most important. I think, for example, that George H.W. Bush did the right thing in prosecuting the first Gulf War and, indeed, that he did a good job of waging the war. But an even better president might have been able ot avoid the whole thing in the first place by dissuading Saddam from invading Kuwait.
My hope, in short, isn't that the next president will be better than Bush at reacting than disaster strikes, but that he (or, more likely, she) will be better than Bush at forestalling disaster.
There's lots of reporting out there on Hillary Clinton's strong win -- 64-26 -- over Barack Obama among Latino voters in Nevada. One thing I would add to this is that Clinton did pretty well with whites, too -- beating Obama 52-34. What's more, we've seen over and over again that Obama does better with more affluent voters and with better-educated voters. And, of course, the pool of non-hispanic whites is more affluent and better-educated than is the pool of Latinos.
Long story short, I'd be interested in seeing how different hispanics and non-hispanic whites really look once you control for non-ethnic demographic factors. Or, in other words, does Obama really have a specific problem with Latino voters, or is this more of a class phenomenon?
Patrick Ruffini makes a lot of sense on the state of the Republican race, and Matt Stoller observes Barack Obama bleeding support among self-identified liberals. I doubt one can really attribute Obama's problems in this regard specifically to his remarks about Ronald Reagan, but the overall tendency has been for Obama to find himself positioned to HRC's right which isn't where you want to be in a primary.
New England and Green Bay are favored to win, and I think I have nothing to add to the conventional wisdom on this score. But make your case for the Chargers or Giants if you're so inclined.
Look beyond the spin, the wishful thinking, the intellectual bullying and the myth-making. The real legacy of the surge is that it will enable Bush to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor -- no doubt cause for celebration at AEI, although perhaps less so for the families of U.S. troops. Yet the stubborn insistence that the war must continue also ensures that Bush's successor will, upon taking office, discover that the post-9/11 United States is strategically adrift. Washington no longer has a coherent approach to dealing with Islamic radicalism. Certainly, the next president will not find in Iraq a useful template to be applied in Iran or Syria or Pakistan.
According to the war's most fervent proponents, Bush's critics have become so "invested in defeat" that they cannot see the progress being made on the ground. Yet something similar might be said of those who remain so passionately invested in a futile war's perpetuation. They are unable to see that, surge or no surge, the Iraq war remains an egregious strategic blunder that persistence will only compound.
The case for the surge, and the war more generally, has long been bound up in a failure to think coherently about purposes and objectives. If, instead, you throw a bunch of troops into the mix, have them do a bunch of stuff, see what happens, and then define in retrospect whatever it is they're accomplishing as the purpose of the mission, then, sure, new tactics are working. When our old tactics were aimed at having our troops wander around the desert and kill armed Sunni Arabs, we succeeded in doing that. Switch tactics to helping to train and equip these very same people, and now we're succeeding at doing that. But what are we trying to accompish?
When corruption ruled, he challenged it. When welfare failed, he changed it. When crime thrived, he fought it. When government broke, he fixed it. And when the world wavered. And history hesitated. He never did. Rudy Giuliani. Leadership. When it matters most.
When history hesitated? What's that supposed to mean? There's been a lot of mockery of the frequency of Rudy Giuliani's invocations of 9/11, but for my money its the vacuity of the invocations that's really striking.
Barack Obama's MLK speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church is extremely good. It should remind Obama fans of what they like best about him. For campaign purposes, though, I think nobody's ever doubted that he's a great orator. The difficulty is that he hasn't established a policy argument on his behalf that people find compelling. With little differentiation between the candidates in terms of issues, things are breaking down on demographic lines and women outnumber men, old people outnumber young people, nonblacks outnumber blacks, and working-class people outnumber college graduates among the target audience on the primaries.
Well, nobody thought the Giants would win tonight, but nobody thought they would win last week either. Or the week before that. I remember that after the Giants won their first game of this season my dad was worrying that if they won too many Tom Coughlin might not get fired. And now the hopes of a whole nation of haters rest on their shoulders.
One of the odd manifestations of America's new enthusiasm for imperialism is, I suppose, that the capital is now full of gossip and intrigue regarding which generals will be assigned to which posts.
Meanwhile, because of the way these terms play out it's worth noting that dealing with the inherited brass is would be a substantial challenge for a new Democratic president. Since these are theoretically apolitical jobs, a new president can't just come in and clean house. But since the Bush administration will have been in charge for eight years most of which have been occupied by a politically controversial war, many top generals are now de facto political figures. If whoever's running CENTCOM (and this may well be General Petraeus) of MNF-Iraq (or both) in January 2009 disagrees with the new president's preferred Iraq policy, those people will be in a position to make life awkward for the new president. This is a concrete area where I do put some stock in the Clinton/experience argument, as she seems less likely to get rolled, though at the same time I have more doubts that her policy judgment would be the same as mine.
Are people aware of this gesture? It's apparently a hand gesture the kids make these days during an awkward moment. Here's an example of the awkward turtle in action:
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or. unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides-and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.
I feel as if the issue of King's commitment to non-violence tends to get obscured on these occasions. How many politicians who pay homage to King today will tomorrow be preaching the necessity of keeping preventive war "on the table" as a tool of non-proliferation policy?
As you can read here in The New York Times, starting tomorrow articles from The Atlantic will all be available for free online. That'll be a boon to bloggers and the Web in general in at least two ways. First, it'll let us link to and discuss new magazine content as it comes out with a free and clear conscience. Second, and in some ways even more exciting, it means that I'll be able to mine the magazine's extensive 150+ years of archives willy-nilly for interesting tidbits and noteworthy perspectives on events.
That said, a subscription is still a great bargain at less than $25 a year. You can read it on a plane or a train, you can see the visual elements of the magazine in all their intended glory, and you can leave recent issues scattered about your house so as to suggest to your friends that you're the sort of intelligent person who reads highbrow magazines.
I think this is getting a bit silly. In his column, Paul Krugman seems to suggest that the main reason the Clinton administration failed to bring about major progressive change in the 1990s is that they didn't talk enough smack about Ronald Reagan. And now on the blog we learn that Clinton is clearly the more progressive alternative to Obama because here's one quote of Clinton saying something lefty sounding and here's one quote which Krugman insists on willfully misconstruing.
Whatever happened to the Krugman who used to urge journalists to worry less about what rhetorical style politicians adopt and more looking at their policies? Didn't this all start because Krugman thought Obama's health care plan, while constituting an improvement over the status quo, isn't as good as Hillary Clinton's? That's what I remember. And I think it was a fair point. But now we're supposed to believe that Obama's the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Or something. Meanwhile, I wish Krugman would at least acknowledge that there are foreign policy issues facing the country and some of us think they're important. I don't think "that Candidate B [i.e, Hillary Clinton], despite the progressive talk, is just Bush the third" but at times she's shown a disturbing amount of common ground with Bush's foreign policy views. At other times, she's seemed quite good, but her record on Iraq is bad.
Back to the beginning, I think it's extremely clear that the meager results of the Clinton administration relate, in the first instance, to the large number of conservatives in congress when Clinton was president, and in the second instance to the moderate views of Clinton administration figures. An inability to upend narratives about Reagan was neither here nor there. In terms of congress, again, one thing a lot of people like about Obama is that Democratic politicians running in marginal areas overwhelmingly seem to believe that they would do better with Obama at the head of the ticket.
That said, I'll freely grant that I'm getting a bit tired of defending Obama and his campaign. Stuff like this from Krugman clearly hurts them, but the easiest way to deflect claims that Obama is the more conservative choice would be for Obama to say so himself in a clear and direct way. Given that Clinton is very much running as her husband's wife, it should hardly be impossible to make the case that establishing continuity with the moderate Clinton administration is the moderate choice.
Live on YouTube, sundry pundits discuss the fact that Barack Obama would be a stronger general election candidate matched up against John McCain. As readers know, that's certainly my view. And it's certainly the view of Democrats running in "red" states who feel he'd be better for down-ballot candidates than would Hillary Clinton.
It's been my experience, though, that it's basically impossible to convince people on this score. At the end of the day, there's a ton of uncertainty surrounding this question and there's nothing one could do to prove things one way or another. Given the uncertainty, it's open to people who like Clinton to just insist that, well, sure, Obama's more popular now but things would look different after a campaign.
In recent months, some emerging market investors have preached the idea that fast-growing areas like most of Asia have “decoupled” from developed markets, meaning the economies of the two groups no longer move in tandem. The investing adage “When the United States sneezes, Asia catches a cold” no longer applies, the proponents of decoupling argue.
But a recent slump in emerging markets, capped by Monday’s slide, means investor sentiment is changing.
Indeed, this seems doubly wrong. The big hope for avoiding a recession, or for keeping a recession relatively short and painless, is that a pickupin exports tied to the declining dollar will cushion the employment situation even as the building sector collapses. That, however, means that a sharp decline in US imports from Asia is all-but-inevitable. That's what would happen in a recession, but it's also what would happen in the most-plausible non-recession scenario.
Dan Balz writes of Florida for The Washington Post that it "looms as a potential showdown in the GOP nomination battle not only because of its size and importance but because it will be the first place this year where all the leading candidates are competing." Perhaps. On the other hand, Pollster.com currently has things as Rudy 21.7 percent, McCain 20 percent, Huckabee 18.3 percent, Romney 17.9 percent, Thompson 8 percent, and Paul 5 percent.
Now Florida's a winner-take-all state, so if Rudy really does sneak ahead of McCain he'll end up with a nice parcel full of delegates. That's real and that matters. Still, as a test of strength Rudy's ability to secure 21.7 percent of the vote against a badly divided field wouldn't be particular impressive. Similarly, if Rudy's slide continues and McCain gets a boost and he wins with 22-23 percent, that wouldn't be particularly impressive. The very depth of the field makes it all-but-certain that the winner will be pulling in a pretty pathetic plurality which, in turn, makes it hard to see this as a decisive test. Simply put, there are too many candidates in the race.
Photo by Flickr user Bryan Sereny used under a Creative Commons license
From The New York Times archives, David Frum writes on July 7, 1999 that the country needs to be more fiscally prudent:
It's time to blow the froth off the latte and make some prudent plans. Otherwise, the Government is going to find itself three or four years from now in the same jam as its citizens: pacing fretfully at 2 o'clock in the morning through a $100,000 kitchen renovation, wondering how on earth it talked itself into the delusion that it was going to finance its obligations with a big, soggy mass of Surplus.com shares.
Later, of course, Frum went on to work for the Bush administration where, in lieu of prudent plans, the decision was made to squander all the money in question on a set of giant tax cuts for rich people. Then to squander more money in a giant giveaway to drug and insurance companies. And to squander more money on a pointless and destructive war in Iraq. And more tax cuts! Always, always more tax cuts.
I'm going to try as hard as I can to resist the temptation to write further about the electability question but what Jon Chait said. I'd only add that the McCain/Romney gap seems much bigger than the Obama/Clinton gap to me; the generally unfavorable political climate for Republicans makes the specific choice of nominee unusually important.
I continue to march in lockstep with my comrades-of-convenience National Review against the attempted coronation of John McCain. For example, did you know what Michael Graham notes:
In 2000, running against George W. Bush and the entire Carroll Campbell machine in South Carolina, John McCain got 42% of the vote, and 240,000 votes out of 573,000 or so cast.
Tonight, he got 33% of the vote in a field where his top challengers—Romney and Giuliani—aren't even running, and 135,000 actual votes. If just the same people who voted for McCain in 2000 had voted for him today, he would have won 50+% of the South Carolina vote. That would have been truly impressive.
Go, Mitt, go! (I'd also note that the open cheerleading for Romney in progressive circles seems to me to have gotten shockingly little play in the world of conservative commentary)
UPDATE: Let me note that while I do think Romney is a weak general election candidate, one shouldn't exaggerate this to much. In the modern era, I think we can expect all presidential elections to be relatively close and Romney does have a certain "I know what I'm doing" appeal that I think the American people mostly haven't seen yet.
This is pretty neat. According to Howard Wolfson, pointing out that Bill Clinton is lying is a "right-wing talking point" and thus all good liberals have a duty to grant Clinton a blanket license to fib. So when Clinton said he opposed the Iraq War, that must have been true, because I'm a liberal. And when Clinton said Barack Obama didn't oppose the Iraq War, that must have been true too, because I'm a liberal.
Look, obviously Bill's in an odd position because we've never had an ex-president's wife run for president before. But if he wants to be treated as an elder statesman figure for fellow progressives, he needs to act like one. If he wants to be Hillary Clinton's attack dog in a primary campaign, then he's going to be treated as one. Certainly he's not above criticism.
I think the fact that John McCain is very old and very much looks his age is probably going to be a problem for him in electoral terms. Still, there's a question in my mind of why one could raise this issue in a reasonable way. Chuck Norris seems a bit crude here:
I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency.
Naturally enough, Mike Huckabee just wound up needing to distance himself from those sentiments. The issue here is probably that Norris is too closely identified with Huckabee at this point. You want the issue raised by by people who aren't just seen as part of your campaign.
The Washington Post that one important feature of the current weakness in the economy is an increase in the number of long-term unemployed. The economy as an issue is normally seen as competing with the war for attention, but I can't help but wonder if economy wouldn't be stronger if all this money that's been squandered in Iraq over the years had been invested (by public or private actors) in productive ways.
Now, let me make it clear in the beginning, that I see this war as an unjust, evil, and futile war. I preach to you today on the war in Vietnam because my conscience leaves me with no other choice. The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. "Ye shall know the truth," says Jesus, "and the truth shall set you free." Now, I've chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
It's a searing moment because the silence in the face of moral crisis of which King speaks is no mere cowardice or opportunism. King's life and career have been dedicated to the Civil Rights movement -- to the cause of bettering the well-being of African-Americans. And from the death of Abraham Lincoln until the present day, that cause's most crucial ally has been Lyndon Johnson who in a monumental act of political courage chose finally to decisively align the Democratic Party with the cause of Civil Rights dooming its political coalition to oblivion.
And yet here in Vietnam was Johnson's war. A Johnson increasingly in political trouble from his left. A Johnson who could very much use the support of a Martin Luther King. Indeed, a Johnson who in many ways deserves the support of a Martin Luther King. To ask a man to publicly defend a war he deplores would be too much. But would it really be so much to ask King to simply stay quiet -- to focus on his core issues, and praise Johnson on those terms -- not for King's own sake but for the sake of his movement? Who then or now would blame the great Civil RIghts leader for standing behind the great Civil Rights president? But he came to believe that it couldn't be done. That wrong was wrong and someone had to say so.
Um...forgot this debate was happening until a quarter to ten. I hear there's been a lot of rough stuff out there so far. The two minutes I've watched thus far involve Barack Obama seeming fairly cogent.
UPDATE: I don't like John Edwards' defeatism talking about taking on John McCain. Don't give up hope for Mitt Romney!
UPDATE II: Glad to see Barack Obama taking HRC on on her claim that her record of backing catastrophic invasions of Iraq makes her uniquely qualified to battle Republicans on national security issues.
UPDATE III: I think Wolf Blitzer's question about who Martin Luther King would endorse if he were alive today is possibly a new low for inane debate questions. It almost makes me feel bad I ever spoke ill of Tim Russert.
Commenter Ryan sums up my feelings about the debate based on the clips I saw:
It's really strange... each time Hillary really goes for the jugular (fairly or unfairly), I am repulsed. And then 30 seconds later, I realize that that's the whole rationale for her candidacy! She (and Bill) will simply do whatever it takes to win. And she's really whip smart, and was quicker than Obama in this debate. I think it will come down to whoever the media spins as the "winner" of the early flare-up -- otherwise, another draw.
It's an uncomfortable truth, but there you have it -- the very tendentiousness of some of her attacks on Barack Obama is sort of the point. Those of us who remember Florida 2000 from the butterfly ballot to the "bourgeois riot" to the rigged Supreme Court ruling appreciate that the other side plays to win and there's no real honor in letting the country fall under a spell of catastrophic malgovernance. But still, if voters are considering being persuaded by the merits of Clinton's arguments about Obama and the war, or about the "present" votes or whatever else they ought to be aware that this is all basically bogus. What's more, I think it's worth pointing out that Clinton seems to have gotten herself firmly into "flip-flop" territory on the war at this point; hawk was bad, substantively and politically, but this may be worse.
The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.
Ah, those sad, sad, Democrats. So unaware that the war's over. The dude who killed at least fourteen and wounded seventeen in Tikrit must, like the Democrats, have been wearing partisan blinders when he failed to acknowledge the surge's success in bringing the war to an end. Similarly, the US military has these newish Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles known as MRAPs. As you can tell from the name, the vehicles are designed to be resistant to roadside bombs. Only trouble is insurgents seems to have figured out how to foil them, since we had our first instance of a roadside bomb blowing up an MRAP just on Saturday.
Obviously, though, this improvement in the tactics and doctrine of anti-American fighters in Iraq can't be a big deal since the war is largely over. If the war were still happening, this kind of thing might illustrate the illusory nature of tactical improvements in the face of a bleak strategic situation. But since the war is "largely" over already there's probably no problem here.
I think Ross must be forgetting the context if he really thinks Democrats would have been better off had they pressured Bill Clinton to resign when Monicagate broke. Recall that Ken Starr was, at the time, engaged in an investigation of the Clintons that had no defined legal scope an unlimited budget, and an indefinite period of time. And he wasn't the only such independent counsel operating at the time. Had that farce been legitimated by Democratic acquiescence in the cynical manipulation of the law to hound Clinton from office, there would have been no end to the investigations of President Gore or into whoever Gore wound up nominating for Vice President.
At the worst, while VP-designate Lieberman was tied up in confirmation hearings new articles of impeachment would have been drawn up against Gore referring to something or other (most likely something related to '96 campaign fundraising) aimed at putting Newt Gingrich in the White House. But even under more likely scenarios, we would have been plunged into an endless nightmare of prosecutions. Recall that the members of congress we perpetrated the inquisition were basically the exact same people who from 2001-2006 sat on their hands and launched not a single serious inquiry into anything the Bush administration did -- from routinized torture to casual lying to congress about Medicaid reforms to destruction of videotaped evidence to politicization of the US Attorneys' offices to corruption in contracting all the rest.
Ultimately, the whole thing was a political matter and the only viable remedy to it was politics. The Democrats stood tall, called bullshit on the Republicans' bullshit, and picked up seats in 1998. Their problems started when people started seeking the ex post facto approval of the Quinn-Broder axis
As I said yesterday, The Atlantic's print content is now available for all to read on the website, including not just the current issue but also tons of archival stuff. Check out Rene Chun's "Bobby Fischer’s Pathetic Endgame" from 2002, for example.
Obviously, if I thought I had any real insight into the movements of the stock market I'd be keeping those insights private and using them to get rich. But the fact that stock markets worldwide seem to be melting down does seem noteworthy. Idle speculation? Investment tips?
You've probably heard about the Democrats' fundraising edge thus far in terms of congressional campaign committee fundraising. Well, Brad Plumer notes that that edge will be blown way out of the water if Sheldon Adelson's "Freedom's Watch" outfit really spends $250 million on the 2008 elections.
It's always worth keeping in mind that inequality in the United States has allowed certain concentrations of wealth to exist that, in principle, mean things could get really crazy. Adelson could decide that $250 million is chump change and that he actually wants to spend five billion dollars on the 2008 election, and then give $1 billion to each of his five children, and then then live very comfortably for the rest of his life on his remaining $1.5 billion. Now I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it could. And Adelson's only #15 on the Forbes 400 list.
Here's a screen shot from yesterday's National Review Online. Not even a token actual remembrance of Martin Luther King, JR. or a nod in the direction of the civil rights movement. Nope, to the editors of NRO MLK Day stands purely as a good opportunity to discuss the thesis that one important source of injustice in the United States is that black people have things too easy thanks to "preferences." Of course, I suppose it is a step forward from Will Herberg's September 7, 1965 National Review article, "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" (note the scare quotes around civil rights):
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.
The lawlessness of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation didn't , of course, much bother National Review. Nor did the lawlessness of widespread efforts throughout the South to deny African-Americans their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. But civil disobedience? Affirmative action? That stuff stirs the heart to protest -- something must be done!
Via Brendan Nyhan, some evidence that Barack Obama has a ceiling of around 35 percent of the white vote in any given primary.
To me, the "ceiling" metaphor seems misleading in this instance. It's plain from the polling on Obama's favorable/unfavorable ratings that way more than 35 percent of white Democrats are well-disposed toward Obama. Since the knock on Hillary Clinton has tended to be that she's "polarizing" people forget that that's a two-way street -- lots and lots of people really really like Hillary Clinton which makes her hard to beat in a primary.
Initial estimates by the Congressional Budget Office project that an economy-wide cap-and-trade program would generate at least $50 billion per year, but could reach up to $300 billion. Approximately 10 percent of this revenue should be allocated to help offset costs to businesses and shareholders of affected industries. Of the remaining revenue, approximately half should be devoted to help offset any energy price increases for low- and middle-income Americans that may occur as a result of the transition to more efficient energy sources. The other half of the remaining revenue should be used to invest in renewable energy, efficiency, low-carbon transportation technologies, green-collar job training, and the transition to a low-carbon economy. Some resources should also be invested in the energy, environment, and infrastructure sectors in developing nations to alleviate energy poverty with low-carbon energy systems and help these nations adapt to the inevitable effects of global warming. Revenues from the permit auction would essentially be “recycled” back into the economy to facilitate the transition to an efficient, low-carbon energy economy and ensure that consumers are not unduly burdened by potentially higher energy costs.
That sounds about right to me. I'm not sure that as a matter of abstract morality I really agree that it makes sense to set aside a chunk of the funds to defray "costs to businesses and shareholders of affected industries" but one can imagine putting something like that on the table as being crucial to actually getting anything done, and it's probably not worth being too fastidious about the precise ins and outs.
Photo by Flickr user Joi used under a Creative Commons license
Tyler Cowen says he agrees that market operations will be flawed due to the irrationality of the participants, but "relative to social democrats, I tend to think that politicians are irrational actors trying to pander to irrational voters and that it can't be any other way. I am much less optimistic about democracy as an instrument for fine-tuning good policy or for that matter as a medium for enforcing progressive sentiments." This is similar to Bryan Caplan's argument for libertarianism in The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Libertarians have always been against democracy (the rapprochement with democracy being one of the key steps in the transition from classical to modern liberalism) but this new vintage of arguments is a curious inversion of the traditional line of attack. The main problem used to be the fear that voters were too rational and that the unlimited prerogatives of property had to be protected through a lack of democracy. Now the fear is that the dire consequences of democracy can best be preserved through the unlimited prerogatives of property.
Needless to say I think this is wrong along several dimensions. One point of dispute, though, is that to me the idea of state committed to neutral and effective administration of justice around laissez faire lines seems like an illusion. The alternative to reasonably effective democratic institutions and a viable left-wing political movement isn't free markets but the capture of the state by large economic interests as during the Gilded Age or, indeed, the Bush administration.
Hillary Clinton's campaign emailed this video clip to me, so in hopes that they'll make me an Assistant Secretary of something or other if I post it, here it is:
I don't find the thought that Obama secretly harbors dreams of a single-payer health care system all that damning, but obviously he was shading his somewhat nuanced view left back in the day and right a the moment.
My brief is really to write about national issues here, but since one big problem with urban governance is that there's a fairly impoverished public sphere for discussion of local politics with the consequence that there's a tendency for squeaky wheels to dominate things. Thus, I might note that DC Mayor Adrian Fenty seemed completely justified in his decision to fire these six social workers whose screwups contributed to the murder of four girls. That other civil servants are pissed off about that accountability moment is understandable, but it's simply vital that this city demand a higher quality of public services.
Similarly, this school closure plan seems mostly spot-on (the families who don't want their kids to need to cross a highway on foot en route to school seem to have a good point so the aspect of the plan affecting those people needs to be rethought). The District's school population has fallen dramatically from its current peak, and closing especially under-utilized schools is a no-brainer response. Right now we have underpopulated yet poorly maintained buildings. With some closures and rationalizations, kids could attend properly maintained schools.
Max Bergmann's polite explanation of why there's no viable "middle way" in Iraq between an indefinite military presence and an expeditious withdrawal is recommended to all and sundry. Or, rather, there is a middle way but that way simply consists of adopting the logic of indefinite engagement and then adding hope that things will just work out very nicely and we'll be done in five more years' time.
This, though, is just what the Bush administration has been doing all this time. The proponents of the tactical policy framework du jour never explicitly outline their favored policy as likely to fail and require the war to continue indefinitely. Rather, each gambit from the transfer of sovereignty in June 2004 to the first, second, and third Baghdad security plans to the rise of Ibrahim al-Jafari to the fall of Jafari to the rise of Maliki to the surge and beyond were supposed to succeed, it's just that they all failed. One needs to answer the strategic question at some point of whether this is all worth it. I think the answer is clearly "no." There are pressing, fairly urgent reasons to disengage from Iraq not least of which is the continued piling-on of the death toll. Meanwhile, there aren't good odds of accomplishing anything especially worthwhile there within a reasonable time frame.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s son, MLK III, endorses John Edwards and urges him to stay in the race. Certainly, I think he should. Thus far, Edwards' impact on the primary has been overwhelmingly positive and I see no reason to think that will cease to be the case in the future. Obviously the odds are strongly against Edwards winning the nomination, but the odds don't get better if he drops out, and he's doing more to advance his issues and his causes by staying in and hoping for the best than he would be dropping out and endorsing someone.
John McCain's unquestionably a popular figure, but David Kusnet is also surely right that it's hard to see him winning in bleak economic times if he keeps talking the way he was talking at his South Carolina victory speech. There's just nothing in there whatsoever to suggest that McCain has any awareness of anyone experiencing any kind of financial difficulties. What's more, I think it'll actually be quite hard for him to pivot in a more sympathetic direction. After all, throughout all his flipping and flopping and back again of the past ten years, the "cares about people in economic pain" persona is one he's never tried on. And I think he's never tried it on because it runs contrary to his entire schtick, which is all about finding causes greater than ourselves, salvation through nationalism, etc., etc. On some emotional level, he probably thinks a woman who needs to declare bankruptcy because the racked up massive credit card bills while her uninsured husband was dying of cancer should just grin and bear it the way he did as a POW.
After what he's been through, it's probably hard to muster a ton of sympathy for workaday problems. And yet that's what politics is all about. By the same token, though, I think it would be foolish to confidently predict economic conditions eleven months from now. Maybe things will get worse . . . maybe they'll turn around. But if they don't turn around, it does seem like potentially big trouble for McCain.
From The Atlantic's incomparable archives and in honor of the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade let me give you August of 1965's "One Woman's Abortion" by the mysterious Mrs. X:
I set out recently to find an abortionist in the large Eastern city where I live. My husband and I are in our mid-forties and have three children. When I discovered that I was pregnant for the fourth time, my husband and I considered the situation as honestly as we could. We both admitted that we lacked the physical resources to face 2 A.M. feedings, diapers, and the seemingly endless cycle of measles, mumps, and concussions of another child. Years of keeping a wary eye on expenditures (a new suit for my husband every two years and one for me every five) had allowed us to set up a fund which we felt would enable the children to attend reasonably good colleges away from home if some financial assistance in the form of grants or scholarships could be obtained. Since my husband's income has reached its zenith, it was plain that one of the four would have to forgo all or part of a chance at higher education. The part-time secretarial work which I had been doing for some years to augment our income would have to stop since the revenue it produces would not cover baby-sitting fees. We have no rich uncles likely to make our children their beneficiaries. We have also had sufficient experience living to acknowledge that while the Lord will sometimes provide, He may be busy looking after somebody else when you need Him most.
For further discussion, let me just note that I think the effort to convince even pro-choice people that there's something legally dodgy about Roe ought to be resisted.
Fred Thompson is dropping out. Marc Ambinder offers a Thompson campaign retrospective. He says "in many ways, he tried to occupy a space that John McCain more credibly occupied; national security strength, straight talk on the economic challenges facing the country and resiliency." Maybe. Certainly I'd assume that Thompson, who's pals with McCain, hopes that's right and his pool of supporters drifts that way. But in most regards I'd say Thompson tried to occupy a space that Mitt Romney less credibly but more effectively occupied -- plain-vanilla conservative.
As a human being, I'm obviously glad that Etan Thomas seems to be well on the road to recovery. As a Wizards fan, I'm worried. Brendan Haywood is playing his best basketball ever and playing a big role in keeping the Wizards good even with Gilbert Arenas out, and Andray Blatche and Oleksiy Pecherov both look like reasonably promising guys who deserve a chance to develop. Thomas' return just promises to throw a good situation into disarray.
Economic model of the day, that is. Ryan Avent excerpts a bit from an interesting paper by Edward Glaeser, Matthew Kahn, and Jordan Rappaport. Let WRich be a rich person's opportunity cost of time, F be the fixed time cost of public transportation, and C be the fixed time cost of driving you get:
Alternatively, if WRichF < C then some rich people will take public transportation. In this case, a four ring city can be one outcome. In the inner ring, the rich take public transportation. In the next ring, the poor take public transportation. In the third ring, the rich drive and there may be a fourth ring where the poor drive.
That seems about right for some of our larger metro areas.
I'm not going to say that they're my four favorite films of the year, but the four best picture nominees I've seen are all good movies! What were they thinking? The only possibility is that Atonement is both terrible and destined to win.
I wouldn't say I agree with him in every last detail, but I would recommend Scott Lemieux's three part series of posts arguing that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided as well as his American Prospect article arguing against those who think it would somehow be no big deal were Roe overturned.
When I was over in the Netherlands I caught wind of this big controversy about whether or not to cut down this big tree near the Anne Frank house that's mentioned in her diaries but that's become a threat to the structure. In a small country without a lot of really big social problems, public controversy seemed to consist of fighting about immigration and then fighting about the tree. But now the spirit of compromise has prevailed with regard to the tree: "city authorities, residents, the Anne Frank museum and conservationists said they had agreed to build a frame around the 150-year-old tree before the end of May."
Immigration, though, I imagine will stay controversial.
Remember the de-Baathification law the Iraqi government passed that kinda sorta seemed like maybe it did the reverse of what the Bush administration said it did? Turns out it does the reverse of what the Bush administration said it did: "More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation."
Amit Paley and Joshua Partlow have put together an admirably straightforward and well-reported article for The Washington Post so I won't get too upset that they write "the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation" rather than "the opposite of Bush administration claims for the legislation." Still, it's noteworthy that not only has this gone awry, but the Bush administration just spent last week telling us it hadn't gone awry.
I've been poking around in our newly liberated archives for interesting things to link to, and it's just such an incredibly rich source. The December 1866 issue had, for example, a Frederick Douglass essay setting forth his view of what was needed to make Reconstruction successful:
The plain, common-sense way of doing this work is simply to establish in the South one law, one government, one administration of justice, one condition to the exercise of the elective franchise, for men of all races and colors alike. This great measure is sought as earnestly by loyal white men as by loyal blacks, and is needed alike by both. Let sound political prescience but take the place of an unreasoning prejudice, and this will be done.
The Better World Campaign asks what do you think the next president should do on his or her first day in office. Putting my "let's think about this overly literally" hat for a moment, what you probably want to do on day one is focus on a bunch of below-the-radar executive order type stuff that it'll be easy to make sure gets buried in the news because you also made a few important personnel announcements that the papers are obligated to cover.
Closer to the spirit of the question, I'd like to see an announcement disavowing the preventive war doctrine outlined by the Bush administration coupled with a statement outlining a vision for re-invigorating the global non-proliferation regime.
The Bush administration's ability not just to outrage, but to so frequently surpass and resurpass one's capacity for outrage is striking. All that's left now is a cold, callous, cynicism. My understanding is that the country was genuinely shocked to learn about 18 missing minutes on the Watergate tapes. Now what can one say about the hundreds of days of missing White House emails and all manner of dissembling and mumbo-jumbo lurking around the question of what's gone missing.
Elana Schorr looks at the voting records of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in the US Senate. They're similar records, but Obama's a bit too fond of coal and Clinton's a bit too fond of war. Brian Beutler says:
My sense of it is that Obama has been somewhat reconstructed from his early, coal-driven, anti-environmental days, while Hillary Clinton remains a largely unreformed liberal hawk. But I suppose it'll be hard to say how true that is until at least one of them is off the campaign trail.
I think what we see on the campaign trail actually does shed some light. Illinois has a coal industry, so Obama started out as a soft on coal guy (though hardly as the worst offender in this regard), but as soon as Obama moved toward running a national campaign, he began steadily moving to a less coal-friendly position. This doesn't do wonders for Obama's reputation as the Golden Man of Principle (see also that he used to talk more lefty on health care) or whatever, but it also doesn't suggest a deep-seated desire to see the country dotted with coal plants. By contrast, to whatever extent Clinton was driven by political expediency rather than conviction to authorize the Iraq War, it was a vision of national politics and her presidential campaign.
As recently as Monday night, after all, she was bragging to a Democratic audience that her status as a relatively hawkish Democrat makes her uniquely well-suited to taking on John McCain, whereas I'm pretty sure I've never heard Barack Obama make a parallel claim regarding the environment.
Photo by Flickr user MRE 770 used under a Creative Commons license
Matt Stoller points out that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could be using their platforms to highlight the legislative fight over FISA issues in a way that would likely be very effective. But time and again they've declined to do so and there's little indication they'll change their minds now.
Like Kevin Drum, I've been pretty pessimistic for a while that a good health care bill will be signed into law in 2009-10 as so many seem to hope. And I agree with him that Ezra Klein's new American Prospect article does a reasonable amount to temper that pessimism. That said, the way the article is framed explicitly as a look back at the "lessons of '94" winds up leaving some of my concerns unaddressed.
For example, mightn't we see something analogous to the Medicare prescription drug fiasco where a reasonably sound proposal to help some people out with some health care problems turned into a feeding fest for pharmaceutical and insurance company lobbyists?
Speaking of which, one thing that's bothered me about the health care conversation as it's tended to play out among progressives over the past year has been a tendency to equate determination to achieve universal health care with determination to fight the entrenched power of the insurance companies. In reality, the main measures by which people are proposing to achieve universality -- forcing people to purchase health insurance and providing government subsidies to help people buy insurance -- aren't contrary to the interests of insurance companies at all. Similarly, the main measures on the table that are contrary to the interests of health insurance companies -- community rating, guaranteed issue, and public-private competition -- don't achieve universality (as Barack Obama's critics will hasten to tell you). Under the circumstances, the easiest way to get universal health care may be to not fight the insurance companies at all: just give them the mandates and subsidies they crave with none of the regulation.
Now go too far in that direction and the overall price tag gets so high that the whole thing collapses. But it's quite possible to imagine congress constructing a bill that throws public-private competition overboard and then is structured so as to both increase health insurance firms' profitability and to give everyone health insurance. Again, the 2003 Medicare reform bill would be the model. Depending on the details, a bill like that might even be an improvement over the status quo (though I kind of doubt it). After all, a program for "universal car ownership" isn't something you'd expect to achieve by fighting the car companies.
One obvious question surrounding the new policy in Iraq of paying groups of former Sunni Arab insurgents to start calling themselves Concerned Local Citizens and helping us fight al-Qaeda in Iraq is how do we know that the people they're fighting are really AQI? After all, the main thing the CLCs give us is information not firepower, but if we depend on them for our information then we have no way of knowing that it's good. Or maybe we do. Spencer Ackerman asked MNF-Iraq spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith about this and revealed that MNF-Iraq needs to come up with some better spin:
"The sense is, as we partner with tribal chiefs, the chief knows who’s working for him," Smith said when I asked him about the reliability of these bands on a blogger conference call this morning. "You’ve got to put some trust and confidence in these people." That trust, he said, isn’t built overnight, and the U.S. will have a "relationship" with a tribal leader before committing resources to him or including him in a program.
But is that all it amounts to? Trust?
"It boils down to trust," Smith confirmed. "And over time, you can earn it or lose it." In response to a follow-up from Cogitamus’s Nicholas Beaudrot, Smith reminded that in Diyala Province, Colonel David Sutherland, commander of the 3rd Brigade of the 1st Cavalry Division, had to fire and even arrest some CLC members. (Sutherland confirmed that to me in an October conference call.) He meant that as a defense of the U.S. military’s vetting process, but it also gives a sense of the trustworthiness of these so-called allies.
But look: If you can't trust the militiaman who was shooting at you a year ago until you started bribing him, then who can you trust? Honestly, it's almost enough to make me nostalgic for the days when we were using The Arab Mind as a guide to understanding Iraq. Sometimes people lie!
Of the three basic types of campaign coverage -- horserace/process stories; "outrage of the day" hyperventilating; and actual policy coverage -- I'd peg the blogosphere's overall percentages at about 40/50/10. That's probably better than Chris Matthews, but not that much better.
I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I don't think I wrote any posts yesterday covering substantive policy issues in the Democratic primary campaign because nothing new happened in terms of substantive policy issues. And so it goes. It's hardly MSNBC's fault that in the midst of an interesting primary campaign it has some days where its campaign coverage is all horse race -- some days nothing happens except the horses go racing; after all the campaigns are long and you can't release new policy ideas every day. The trouble is what the press does on the days when policy news does happen -- the tendency is to cover the policy news as a kind of horse race story rather than doing some coverage of the policy question and accepting the reality that there'll be plenty of days down the road when there's nothing to cover but the horse race.
My friend Jeff pointed out to me that the obvious solution to the Wizards' Etan Thomas problem is for Ernie Grunfeld to work out a trade for him before he gets healthy enough for Eddie Jordan to put him back in the rotation and ruin things. Given that the team is basically fine with Thomas injured, I'd be willing to trade him for just about anything but we need $6 million in salary to match so it's a bit trickier than just dumping him off for a couple of undesirable draft picks or something.
Looks like the government of Saudi Arabia is poised to start letting women drive. I think it's safe to say that the case here is pretty unassailable, though I suppose there's some reason to believe that the public safety gains from a ban on male drivers would be large.
I missed Holly Yeager's January 11 column on the thin "bench" of potential female presidential candidates behind Hillary Clinton, but it's still all true two weeks later and worth reading. I found it, meanwhile, while reading this excellent post by Mark Schmitt (aka Holly Yeager's husband) taking note of the incredible run of bad luck that struck down a whole string of promising 1970s-vintage New York political women.
The next very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made before with such care or in such detail is ready to hit the shelves soon:
He also wheels out the novel claim that he's being attacked because he's "hit something real," a defensive gesture I'll be sure to remember when my new project, Freemasons Rule the World, hits bookstores next month. I expect to take some knocks for my argument -- which essentially exposes the fact that Freemasons control the world -- but I'm pretty sure my anti-Masonic friends will understand that I'm actually making a very cautious, thoughtful argument. In spite of what the title suggests -- it comes from an episode of The Simpsons, an allusion my Masonic critics are bound to miss -- I don't argue that contemporary Freemasons actually control the world. Instead, I'm interested in the ways that important Freemasons around the world exert control over lots of things that are in the world, like governments, the global economy, science, and those sorts of things. It's a work of political theory.
Sounds provocative! (I actually live near a Masonic temple on 10th and U which a few months ago started renting out its first floor to CVS, a company that I think really might control the world)
House Democrats once again postpone a vote on holding Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers in contempt of congress for refusing to testify in the US Attorneys matter. There's some kind of nominal rationale for this, but an anonymous "top Democratic insider" says:
When we have the votes, we’ll go ahead with this. Right now, the votes are just not there.
Basically, we seem to have some fraidy-cat Dems out there who for some reason don't think picking a fight with the White House over their gross distortions of the rule of law would be a smart idea and then we have a weak leadership that for some reason doesn't want to bring them into line.
I'm no monetary policy expert, but Clive Crook's point that it seems a bit misguided for the Fed to respond so dramatically to stock market news certainly looks sound to me. After all, interest-rate decisions and forecasts about interest-rate decisions are one of the determinants of stock market prices. Insofar as people get the idea that the Fed will act directly to avoid stock market price declines, that seems like something that will feed back into stock purchasing decisions in a potentially destructive way.
Brendan Nyhan calls me out for too much psychologizing in my last post on John McCain. And it's true. I don't like the guy. He's not the worst politician on the planet, but he's pretty bad, and I'm pretty sure he's the most overrated politician so thinking about him aggravates me. But these would be my sober-minded, non-psychic points about John McCain and the economy:
He has a tendency to flip-flop not on specific economic policies, but on broad economic themes like whether or not inequality is a problem.
His constituents in the elite press are weirdly obsessed with the idea that public policy should force average people to endure economic pain.
All of this leads me to conclude that John McCain would not govern very well on economic policy issues, and would fare poorly in a campaign that focused heavily on economic problems.
I'll admit that I clicked onto Ruth Marcus' column grading candidates' stimulus plans specifically expecting to find something I could object to and thus write a feisty blog post about. But actually it seems about right, except that giving Bush "extra credit" for "not insisting on extending his tax cuts, which made no sense as stimulus and would have doomed its chance of passing" seems silly -- you don't extra credit for not screwing up.
Of course the whole stimulus package issue on the campaign trail is a little bit surreal since clearly the situation will be different twelve months from now when any of these people are president. Consequently, I'm not sure how much we really learn from this except for the somewhat disturbing fact that John McCain doesn't appear to know what a "stimulus package" even is or how to ask someone on his staff to explain the idea to him. There's a certain artificiality to the whole thing in that I assume the Clinton and Obama campaigns each felt pressure to differentiate themselves from each other even though by most accounts there isn't, in fact, any kind of gaping philosophical void between the two of them. Mostly I wish I'd seen something creative like Dean Baker's "green stimulus" concepts thrown in along with the more conventional ideas.
Having let Republican filibusters stymie a frighteningly large proportion of the Democrats congressional agenda, Harry Reid's finally had enough and is going to try to curb abuse of the process . . . to try to stop Chris Dodd from blocking bad FISA legislation.
Reid's office is organizing some kind of progressive media event on Monday and I imagine he'll hear a thing or two about this.
In Washington today, telecom lobbyists have launched a full-court press to win retroactive immunity for their illegal eavesdropping on American citizens. Granting retroactive immunity will let corporate law-breakers off the hook and hamstring efforts to learn the truth about Bush's illegal spying program.
It's time for Senate Democrats to show a little backbone and stand up to George W. Bush and the corporate lobbyists. They should do everything in their power -- including joining Senator Dodd's efforts to filibuster this legislation -- to stop retroactive immunity. The Constitution should not be for sale at any price.
I'll add that I think Edwards is right to see as largely an issue of "corporate lobbyists" with the Democrats using their habitual spinelessness on national security issues as a pretext for the more tawdry business of simply handing out favors to telecom companies. But if the congress -- an opposition party led congress responding to a discovery that pierced a years-long executive branch coverup -- accepts this "it's not a crime if the president asks you to do it" theory of legal liability we may as well not have any laws at all. (Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to Edwards' 2004-vintage enthusiasm for creating a domestic intelligence agency)
The retirement of Rep. Jim Walsh from the New York 25 is big news. Not only is the seat favored to go Democratic now that it's open, but this is one of those congressional districts that's going to become a pretty safe seat for a liberal Democrat rather than bringing in someone who's going to be perpetually looking over his shoulder.
I'll happily admit that I'm not much of a charitable donor one way or the other. Still, I'm always a bit flabbergasted by the fundraising solicitations I get from Harvard. It seems to me that insofar as I give money away, it should be directed at an institution that actually helps people in need. As Kevin Carey puts it:
As Richard Vedder pointed out in the Post over the weekend, Princeton recently built a new residence facility, Whitman College, named after major donor and alumna Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, which cost a staggering $388,571 per unit, roughly what Donald Trump spends building a luxury resort. Here we have a fabulously wealthy person donating money to a fabously wealthy university to built a fabulously expensive facility for the benefit of students who come from, in many cases, very wealthy families. I have no problem with that personally if that's how they want to spend their money, but why am I, as a taxpayer, footing part of the bill?
I'm not 100 percent sure on the best remedy. Tyler Cowen argues fairly persuasively in Good and Plenty that the U.S. tax code's scattershot approach to subsidizing charitable donations is a very effective form of arts subsidy for a diverse society. And I think it would be pretty reductive to say that it would be a good thing if all of our donor supported museums, ballets, symphonies, aquariums, zoos, libraries, classics departments, etc. all shut down and had their funds redirected to soup kitchens and drug treatment programs.
To me, to figure this out we'd need to have some serious estimates about the impact of restricting charitable deductions. How much new tax revenue are we talking about? If we kept the deduction in place for institutions aimed at helping the poor, how much charity would be redirected in their direction? But how difficult would it be to administer a rule like that? How much would giving to cultural institutions decline? It's a lot of thorny policy questions. But it'd certainly be my advice to any super-rich people out there that if you're considering making a large charitable donation in the near future, a big gift to an Ivy League university is one of the least socially useful applications of your cash imaginable.
Photo by Flickr user Mr. Littlehand used under a Creative Commons license
With my 2008 vote still up for grabs, Obama seized the upper hand after I read this New York Times feature and learned his chief speechwriter is a Red Sox fan and a 2003 graduate from the College of the Holy Cross! Let's see, Obama sounds like Cyrus from "The Warriors"; he wears a nicotine patch; he plays hoops; he loves "The Wire"; and now, the guy writing speeches for him went to the Cross. That's pretty tough to top.
I feel like the endorsment Obama really needs, though, is from the Sports Gal (plus her football picks were much better this season IIRC). Meanwhile, I have the reverse reaction to revelations about Red Sox fans from Cross.
My post on the prospect of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson deciding to really dig deep and spend on politics prompted a certain amount of silly partisan responses (yes, there are liberal billionaires, too, but a world in which politics is a contest between competing teams of billionaires is a depressing idea) but also some interesting discussion. In particular, Chicounsel's post:
My question to Matt is "So what?" Are you saying that it should be illegal for him to spend his own money in what amounts to the exercise of his First Amendment rights of free speech, to peacably assemble and petition the government?
Actually, no. One of the many things I don't like about John McCain is that I think his vision of how to fix the campaign finance system is off-base. My answer would be more like
