I'm always a bit surprised by the depth of anti-Economist sentiment lurking out there in certain corners. I wouldn't (and don't) rely on it as my go-to source of information about what's happening on the issues I care most about, but when looking for something to read on a plane or train ride or whatever it's a decent choice. Think of it this way -- suppose you had a well-traveled, reasonably witty cousin who voyaged around the world with a good eye for detail and a personality marred by a strange obsession with labor market deregulation and pension privatization (or, as he calls it, "privatisation").
You'd be happy to grab a beer with him every few months when he's in town and hear the occasional wacky anecdote about monarchists in the Caribbean or African dictators railing against apprentice sorcerers. Sure, the fact that the entire "Europe" section could be replaced most weeks by LIBERALISE YOUR LABOUR MARKETS DAMNIT gets a bit annoying, but still you can make a kind of sport out of it. This article on economic problems in Poland, for example, argues that "the urgent need is to raise productivity by liberalising the labour market" in the third graf, whereas this article on economic problems in Spain doesn't fret about "Spain's lack of structural reforms to [...] free up the labour market" until the very last graf. Does that make the need more urgent in Poland or more emphatic in Spain? No other magazine gives you those kind of delights.
Plus, labor market liberalization (or sation) aside, you genuinely don't get insightful coverage of the ongoing war in Somalia and America's role in that mess in any other magazine I'm familiar with.
I'd say this gets it about right, though I'm not quite this bullish on the Eastern Europe coverage which seems to me to have an awful of "LIBERALISE YOUR LABOUR MARKETS DAMNIT" stuff in it. Basically, you want to stay far away from any article that threatens to turn to the subject of pensions or labor market regulations.
Whatever you think of the initial decision to form the band, the success of The Surge last night was undeniable and those who can't see it desperately need to remove their ideological blinders.
Gilbert Arenas seems to be getting close to returning to the Wizards lineup. Sara maintains that you can tell by his off-kilter play during those few games at the start of the season that Gilbert was psychologically shattered by the initial injury and is never going to be the same player again. I've never heard her use the term "swag" in regard to this theory, but to students of Gilbertology I think the relevance should be clear.
I'm not, however, really sure I buy it. What's more, Gilbert wouldn't need to be all that good for reallocating minutes away from the likes of DeShawn Stevenson and Roger Mason, Jr. to constitute a net improvement for the team. The real issue is that the Wizards have survived Gilbert's loss by becoming a much better team defensively. I'm not sure exactly what caused that (defense is, as ever, under-analyzed and under-discussed so I have no real idea what could cause it to improve) but the trick will be to not let it go away when he comes back.
Yep . . . John McCain really ought to be pressured to release his tax returns, just like Hillary Clinton is getting pressure. And for that matter, Clinton ought to actually release her tax returns rather than just get criticized for not doing so, and McCain, too, ought to release his returns.
One line of inquiry concerned a bank branch in Amiriya, a Sunni Arab neighborhood on the west side of the capital that the American military said was one of Al Qaeda in Iraq's most important strongholds last year. [...] "The bank is probably one of the most important things in the neighborhood. Opening it told people the government still cares about you," Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl said when I called him shortly after he returned to the U.S. [...] Within weeks, I heard back from the military regarding Amiriya. The bank was no longer something the military was willing to highlight.
Also:
Meanwhile, I learned of another possible story: about a Chinese restaurant that had been opened in Baghdad's Karada districtby three laid-off steelworkers from China's Hubei province -- the first eatery here to be owned and operated by someone from outside the Middle East in years. [...] A few days later, the restaurant employees said they had changed their minds about the interview. They were too scared to raise their profile through a news story. And a Chinese Embassy spokesman said his office had persuaded them to return home, although they were still operating in recent days. "The situation is far too dangerous for them to work here," the spokesman said.
No doubt the Chinese embassy is just trying to undermine John McCain's Presidential campaign as part of the PRC's long-range plot to secure world domination for the reanimated corpse of Vince Foster.
Ilan Goldenberg's right to be troubled by this New York Timesretrospective on Iraq. There are some good pieces in here, but it's striking that they're all focuses on the execution of the war and none treat the strategic issue of Iraq.
But Iraq has been, first and foremost, a strategic miscalculation based on a disastrously wrongheaded conception of the strategic challenge revealed on 9/11/01. The United States had a chance to implement a focused, disciplined effort to go after al-Qaeda and remove the threat but instead George W. Bush, aided and abetted by a wide swathe of elites, chose to go in for a broad-brush vision of a "war on terror" whose centerpiece would be the invasion and occupation of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and no meaningful relationship with al-Qaeda. The costs of that decision have been enormous, not just in terms of the tragedy that's played out for American soldiers and Iraqis of all stripes, but in terms of the opportunity cost of totally reorienting America's foreign policy and defense priorities away from useful things and toward Iraq instead.
Today, America faces not just political choices about the future of our Iraq policy, but also choices about whether future policy in other areas will continue to be guided by the strategic vision that led us into Iraq, or whether we'll return to something sounder. To just take the invasion for granted and argue about the handling of the occupation obscures much more than it reveals. Warren Strobel for McClatchy does a much better job of highlighting the big picture.
Jonathan Weisman has an excellent rundown of the horserace as it pertains to congressional elections. Beyond the broad point that big picture trends look bad for Republicans, he shows that these bad trends have already manifested themselves in a series of candidate-recruitment failures -- only Mary Landrieux in the Senate is facing is a serious GOP challenge and "Republicans have largely failed to recruit credible candidates for the swing-district seat of retiring Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.) or to challenge several Democratic freshmen who took GOP seats in 2006. They include Zack Space of Ohio, Joe Courtney of Connecticut, Chris Carney and Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania, John Hall of New York, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heath Shuler of North Carolina."
Consequently, whatever happens between now and November, the Republicans are basically condemned to be playing defense. The question becomes how many seats will they lose, not whether they will lose one. That's a pretty bad situation for a minority party to be in since, by definition, a majority party can only make further gains by pushing into not-incredibly-favorable geography. At any rate, if I've said it once I've said it a thousand times, but in the event a Democrat is in the White House in 2009, the trajectory of domestic policy in the next administration is going to have more to do with the outcome of the congressional elections (especially in the Senate) than with the outcome of the Democratic primary.
Every now and again, and then increasingly as things start looking worse, I get a comment like "how can you write about [thing that's not earth-shatteringly important] when the economy is [something terrible happening in the economy]." The twofold answer is, of course, that nobody can write exclusively about the most objectively important things all the time and secondarily that I try to focus write blog posts that I think are going to be good posts rather than just posts on objectively important topics. I don't, in general, have any opinions about the problems in the financial markets that go beyond the utterly obvious -- bad things seem to be afoot and I'm worried.
If you want non-stop coverage of the financial crisis from a center-left perspective, I'd recommend Delong and Krugman; from a more libertarian perspective there's Marginal Revolution and The Atlantic's own team of Megan McArdle and Clive Crook.
But speaking strictly as an ideologue, I don't necessarily have a problem with the government intervening to bail a bunch of rich guys out when their own bad decisions blow up in their faces if that's what's needed for the health of the overall economy, but this sort of thing is one of several reasons why I think the very rich should pay high tax rates and we shouldn't be happy about the prospect of ever-growing inequality. At a certain level, the game is rigged and you're not really bearing any risk.
UPDATE: Also the widely recommended Calculated Risk. Don't take the remarks here as intended to disparage the quality of analysis offered elsewhere. There are a lot of good economics blogs out there -- along with legal issues it's one of the best-covered issue niches of the blogosphere.
The Houston Rockets just got their 22nd straight victory and uncontested posession of first place in the Western Conference. Both teams saw disappointing shooting from their stars (33 percent for Kobe, 25 percent for T-Mac) but the difference is that Kobe took over a third of the Lakers' shot attempts while McGrady for more like a fifth of the Rockets'. There's that, and Houston's continued ability to pull quality role players out of thin air. First there was Carl Landry, then he went down with injury, and now Mike Harris, who was playing in China as of 10 days ago, delivered six points and six rebounds in ten minutes.
It’s just been announced that JP Morgan will buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, implying a value of about $250 million. Given that the company headquarters is said to be worth about $1.2 billion, that gives the BS banking business a value of negative $1 billion. And that’s only after the Fed agreed to take on $30 billion worth of toxic waste from the BS portfolio, politely described as “less-liquid assets.”
That's quite the bargain, though of course one needs to wonder if the headquarters building at 383 Madison Avenue could really sell for $1.2 billion in the current real estate market. According to The Wall Street Journal about a third of BS is owned by its employees, at least some of whom have presumably seen a very healthy chunk of their savings wiped out as BS shares declined from $170 in January '07 to $2 today. Looks like they probably won't be the last big firm to go under in this mess.
My friend Julian Sanchez had a great op-ed in yesterday's Los Angeles Times about the history of wiretap abuse in the United States before the adoption of FISA and its relevance to the current debate. As Julian says, the issue isn't just the privacy of the ordinary citizen, but the ability of the President of the United States to use wiretaps against his political opponents. What's more, this isn't a theoretical problem, it's the precisely reason the rules were adopted in the first place:
Political abuse of electronic surveillance goes back at least as far as the Teapot Dome scandal that roiled the Warren G. Harding administration in the early 1920s. When Atty. Gen. Harry Daugherty stood accused of shielding corrupt Cabinet officials, his friend FBI Director William Burns went after Sen. Burton Wheeler, the fiery Montana progressive who helped spearhead the investigation of the scandal. FBI agents tapped Wheeler's phone, read his mail and broke into his office. Wheeler was indicted on trumped-up charges by a Montana grand jury, and though he was ultimately cleared, the FBI became more adept in later years at exploiting private information to blackmail or ruin troublesome public figures.
FDR and Harry Truman did some dirt, LBJ did more, and then Richard Nixon took things to such extravagant extremes that he got caught, people got outraged, and restrictions were put in place. But the stuff that had been going on for decades before Nixon was really bad on its own on its own terms. Given the long bipartisan record of wiretap abuse, and given the greater range of possible abuses under modern technological circumstances, it's all-but-inevitable that if we further weaken the restrictions on the White House's ability to act, that abuses will happen.
It's really baffling to me that Republican members of congress -- and all-too-many Senate Democrats -- don't see it this way. Unlimited, unaccountable power will be abused, and not always in ways that Republicans like.
But whatever one thinks of legalizing prostitution, let’s face reality: The big problem out there is the teenage girls who are battered by their pimps, who will have to meet their quotas tonight and every night, who are locked in car trunks or in basements, who have guns shoved in their mouths if they hint of quitting. If the Spitzer affair causes us to lose sight of that, then the biggest loser will be those innumerable girls, far more typical than “Kristen,” for whom selling sex isn’t a choice but a nightmare.
I don't really think you can preface this insight with a "whatever one thinks of legalizing prostitution." After all, you have to ask yourself why coerced labor and the other ills associated with pimping and trafficking are so prevalent in this particular line of work. It seems like part of the answer has to be that a prostitute, as a criminal, has no real legal recourse against maltreatment. As with the drug trade, markets in illegal goods wind up characterized by more violence and threats of violence than you see in a legal market. That's not to say we should welcome a totally free market in hookers, but you also can't just sweep policy questions aside in a fit of indignation -- indignation is good, but you need to look for practical solutions.
Who would have imagined that a substantial factual error would work its way into Bill Kristol's latest Obama-bashing column? It's almost as if Kristol's a hatchet-man rather than a real journalist.
UPDATE: Note that as of 10:15 AM eastern time, Kristol's column is still featured on the front page of NYTimes.com and there's no correction. Marc Ambinder's item above pointing out the error has circulated all throughout the internet already -- surely the Times could decide to stop misleading its readers.
As I said before, I don't necessarily have a problem with the government intervening to help stabilize the financial markets if that's what's necessary for the economy. There's no sense letting a sense of spite directed at the wizards of high finance get in the way of doing what needs to be done. But surely Democrats could seize this opportunity to make the case for the rest of the social contract. After all, it was just a couple of months ago that the GOP was blocking efforts to temporarily increase food stamp benefits and extend unemployment insurance and doing so in the name of free markets and moral hazards.
It's preposterous. This is the time to be making the case for progressive taxation and for a safety net that works for the broad mass of people, not just a selective one for people who reap the windfall during boom times and then walk away from losses when things go bust.
You need to scroll down a bit to read it, but Colin Kahl has a letter to the editor in USA Today about Michael O'Hanlon mischaracterizing Barack Obama's views on Iraq.
An interesting LA Times article takes a look at John McCain's record and circle of advisors and tries to determine what his foreign policy would look like. Ultimately, I think Paul Richter winds up massively overcomplicating the issue. There's no way to say for sure since this kind of thing is inherently a little unpredictable, but all the available evidence suggests that a McCain administration would represent an intensification of the main attributes of the Bush administration's approach to things.
When considering a basketball player's quality, you obviously need to consider position. But still, certain kinds of crude position adjustments seem to me to produce perverse results. For example, see Dave Berri's comment on Rashard Lewis:
Lewis is listed at 6'10" and Hedo Turkoglu, the Magic's starting small forward, is listed at the exact same height. What's more, Turkoglu is a somewhat better rebounder than is Lewis. But it can't be right to say that if the Magic were to start calling Turkoglu the power forward and Lewis the small forward that Lewis would suddenly become worth paying more than he is now. The ability to guard multiple positions is an asset. If Lewis couldn't hack it at the four and had to be played strictly as a small forward, he'd be a less valuable player, not a more valuable one.
Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith discuss the McCain campaign's relationship to the inevitable (and, indeed, already underway) smears against Barack Obama. Basically the view is that McCain will disavow this stuff, and fairly sincerely, but that won't stop it from happening and won't stop him from benefitting:
The only thing I would add is that I actually doubt there are a substantial number of people who are going to find Obama's positions on Iraq, climate change, health care, taxes reproductive rights, gay rights, etc. compelling but then be turned off the campaign by some beyond-the-pale racial smears. People inclined to believe that any black guy is secretly out to get whitey are going to believe that no matter what anyone says or does and vice vera. And the same thing, more or less, goes for Clinton -- sexist assumptions are a problem for totally irrespective of what anyone says or does. That doesn't justify racist or misogynistic attacks on either, but it's not as if it's going to take racist comments for racists to notice that Obama's black.
As the DC gun ban heads off the court let me proclaim myself someone who would like to see law-abiding individuals be permitted to own handguns but doesn't at all think it's clear that this is the correct interpretation of the second amendment. Certainly it seems like a defensible reading, but this is just one of several points on which despite the table-pounding from both sides I think you have to say that there's not really a "correct" answer.
In policy terms, I think recognition of an individual right to gun ownership would do no harm (I don't believe that DC's near-blanket ban is doing anything useful to ameliorate the crime rate) but might clear the path for some more sensible forms of gun regulation. Identifying guns used in crimes and tracking them down, and creating strong incentives for people not to sell guns to criminals are both things that would, I think, be useful tools for law enforcement to have. But voters in jurisdictions featuring a strong culture of gun ownership and relatively little concern about violent crime tend to be extremely hostile to any such measures, seeing them as little more than stalking horses for a liberal plot to take everyone's guns away. Recognition of a limited individual right to gun ownership might allow us to move to a more productive regulatory equilibrium than the one in which urban areas enact super-stringent gun regulations that are then completely undermined by the much laxer rules elsewhere.
Brad DeLong discusses the factors that led to the late housing boom and includes factor number four "The filling-up of America so that you can no longer build a detached single-family house within half-an-hour's driving time of the interesting places people want to be, and the consequent rise both in current location premia and expected future location premia." It seems to me that if you look at escalating prices for apartments and row houses in New York City or Washington, DC it's not reasonable to see this "filling-up" phenomenon as limited to the issue of detached single-family houses. The problem issue the traffic which is bad everywhere anyone wants to be.
Part of the rah-rah media atmosphere of the boom years was that price increases were defined as "good," which meant that anything that led to price increases, including a tightening supply of places where one could live and then swiftly get around to interesting spots, was also defined as good. In the real world, though, a shortage of desirably located dwellings is no more a good thing than is any other kind of shortage. The question is what can be done about it?
John McCain brought the straight talk on a CNN interview earlier today:
Well, all I can say is that [Hillary Clinton] obviously does not understand nor appreciate the progress that has been made on the ground. She told General Petraeus last year when he testified that she would have to suspend disbelief in order to believe that the surge is working. Well, the surge is working.
So I just think what that means is al Qaeda wins. They tell the world that. And we fight here again and around the Middle East. And their dedication is to follow us home. All I can say is that this will be a big issue in the election as we approach November because at least a growing number of Americans, though still frustrated and understandably so, believe that this strategy has succeeded.
Bracketing the entire issue of whether or not the surge is succeeding, to portray what the U.S. military is doing in Iraq as primarily a matter of fighting al-Qaeda is breathtakingly dishonest. At least I hope it's dishonest, because if McCain is really that clueless about what's happening, then we're in more trouble than I thought. Meanwhile, this business about al-Qaeda following us home from Iraq is ludicrous. The American deployment in Iraq isn't a physical barrier preventing people from coming to the United States. Obviously, preventing would-be terrorists from getting into the country is an important priority, but sending 160,000 soldiers to Iraq doesn't accomplish that.
Meanwhile, as John Brennan told me a few weeks ago, McCain "says that al-Qaeda has said it will be a defeat if we leave, I think it is most inappropriate to concede to al-Qaeda the ability to define what constitutes success." After all, "al-Qaeda's strategy has been to bleed the U.S. into bankruptcy and to continue with the same approach will have severe consequences for U.S. national security." I think that's exactly right. To reason, as McCain does, that because al-Qaeda will boast if we leave Iraq that we therefore most make an unlimited commitment to indefinite warfare there is crazy; we'd be letting a small group of fanatics pin down a huge swathe of the American military with nothing more than the threat to release a gloating videotape.
When I was in the green room earlier today at NBC's studio in DC, I was watching CNBC curious to see how the variance finance talking heads would be covering the unfolding drama. The party line was pretty uniform, and a bit bizarre -- basically, the Fed was obviously right to act to prevent Bear Stearns from falling into bankruptcy because the entire global economy is teetering on the brink of collapse and utter doom would strike if they'd done otherwise. But all's well now, thanks! No need to worry, nothing to see here, worst is behind us, etc.
I mean, I suppose that could be right, but common sense indicates that if over the weekend drastic measures were needed to stop everything from unraveling that this week we continue to be in a pretty precarious situation. At a minimum, it seems like the best hope for a turnaround in the "real" economy is for the dollar to fall even farther, providing jobs in exporting and tourism, and as far as best-case scenarios go that doesn't seem like a particularly awesome one.
Here's Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-CA) explaining why folks like Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) who are trying to help Iraqi refugees are wrong:
They’re wonderful people who’d like to live here, especially the ones who have helped us, but the last thing we want to do is to have people who are friendly to democracy . . . moving here in large numbers at a time when they’re needed to build a new, thriving Iraq.
That comes to me via Justin Logan who remarks: "So Rep. Rohrabacher knows better than these Arabic-speaking, living-in-Iraq Iraqis what’s best for them. And, as it happens, what’s best for them is to stay in the hellish maelstrom of violence that is Iraq, despite the stated views of these folks themselves." But of course that's the point, right? To admit that we ought to be helping refugees would be to admit that even post-surge Iraq is pretty terrible so Iraqis who cooperated with Coalition forces will just have to suffer in order to maintain the pretense that all is hunky-dory.
With Elliot Spitzer out, what about the Senate's number one hooker-lover, David Vitter? Well:
Anybody who looks at the two cases will see there is an enormous difference between the two of them. The people that are trying to draw comparisons to the two cases are people who've never agreed with me on important issues like immigration and other things.
It's true that I don't agree with Vitter about much, so maybe my opinion doesn't count, but the difference isn't at all clear to me.
How is it that John McCain couldn't be bothered to personally issue a statement on the financial markets situation and found himself letting Doug Holtz-Eakin do it for him? He does understand that if he's elected president he needs to do all the parts of the president's job and not just the "let's start some more wars" stuff he happens to be most interested in, right?
Darcy Burner and a group of other congressional challengers have done the official release of their responsible plan to end the war in Iraq. I had the chance to read it before the official release, and it's good. And good for them for seizing this issue by the horns in the context of their campaigns.
Let me second Brendan Nyhan's recommendation of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable as providing useful context for understanding the ongoing financial crisis that, on some level, was caused by people being overconfident in their ability to asses risk.
The main point is that people tend to neglect the possibility of something highly improbable happening because it is, after all, highly improbable. But the odds that something or other that's highly improbable will happen are actually pretty good. And these highly improbable events can have huge impacts. The book's wide-ranging but the author's background is in finance and he illustrates with plenty of examples from that world.
What's the deal with "basis points"? Like if the Fed lowers interest rates from 4.5% to 4.25% why is that called a cut of 25 "basis points" instead of percentage points?
I've got some bad flu today; blog content will continue to go up, but I'm probably not going to be able to muster the ability to wade into the Jeremiah Wright speech today as my head hurts badly enough as is.
Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives “taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”
Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.” A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”
The mistake threatened to undermine McCain's argument that his decades of foreign policy experience make him the natural choice to lead a country at war with terrorists. In recent days, McCain has repeatedly said his intimate knowledge of foreign policy make him the best equipped to answer a phone ringing in the White House late at night.
Of course this isn't just an issue of McCain blowing some trivia answer, it seems to call into question whether he's really been paying attention to the Iraq issue over the past couple of years. He's very sure that the surge is working, but doesn't understand the basic contours of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq? Seems strange.
Here's a little graphic I stole from the National Security Network. Even once we're done surging we're still going to be at a high level of troops by the historical standards of this fiasco.
Via Spencer Ackerman, a DOD press release in which Capt. David Stewart, commander of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 3-7th Infantry Regiment, says "This is an absolute success story." What's the story? Well, chicken farming in Iraq is almost back up to Saddam-era levels. I feel better about the whole thing now.
I think Obama's speech was pretty brilliant, if a bit long. Of course, at the end of the day the formal speech is the area of politics in which he most excels so channelling the Jeremiah Wright controversy into a "major speech on race" was a savvy move. I think this was the most significant part:
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
The kind of white resentment Obama is talking about here has been a problem for the Democratic Party for decades now notwithstanding the fact that you rarely see the party nominating African-Americans to run in majority white constituencies. What Obama is showing us here is that precisely because he's black, he's able to acknowledge and validate these resentments in a way that would be very difficult for a white liberal politician.
At any rate, I'd say things are back on track. The Wright business had opened up a vague sliver of hope for Hillary Clinton's campaign -- if they could produce a result in Pennsylvania that looked like a Wright-induced collapse in Obama's white support, maybe they could convince superdelegates that he's unelectable. After this speech, I don't see it happening.
It's fascinating how unhinged a lot of the reactions to Obama's speech are over at the Corner. Here's Charlotte Hays just flat-out denying that it makes sense to try to understand things in context:
Obama says that we shouldn’t “condemn without understanding the roots” of remarks like those Wright made. Whatever the roots, these remarks are to be condemned. Within what context is it correct for the Rev. Wright to say “God damn America?”
There's some kind of reading comprehension problem here if Hays can't see that Obama's not saying it was correct of Wright to say that. Roger Clegg sees the speech as "politics as usual" which makes me think he must have been watching a very different usual politics from me up until now. K-Lo says "Any hopes anyone had that Barack Obama would be a gift to civil rights in America — that he would shake hands with Ward Connerly and really be a change died today, I think." In the speech John Derbyshire heard, "blame whitey, and raise high the red flag of socialism" was the essence of Obama's message.
Someone in comments asked me what, in light of my enthusiasm for congestion pricing, I thought about this long Washington Postprofile of Tyler Duvall, a toll enthusiast and Bush administration DOT official. Mostly I think what Ryan Avent thinks namely that what you want is congestion pricing and investment in mass transit (after all, you have to give people some way to get around) not the Duvall synthesis of toll roads and blocking transit projects willy-nilly.
Combine his anti-transit views with his enthusiasm for road privatization and this sounds more like a (fairly typical for the Bush administration) case of an agency being run for the sake of the private firms it does business with than it does like a visionary new approach to transportation policy.
Death squads are no laughing matter, and yet you can't be a member of my generation and not find this lead anecdote from a Washington Post article on death squads in Brazil a bit amusing:
"What do they call the death squad here?"
Five middle-aged women, all of whom were visiting a church in their neighborhood's central square, answered in imperfect unison: "The Thundercats."
Is that a Brazilian idiom of some kind, or are they really referencing the show?
They did so with the approval of their chain of command. "It was encouraged, almost with a wink and a nudge, to carry drop weapons and shovels with us," said Jason Washborn, a Marine corporal who served three tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. "In case we accidentally did shoot a civilian, so we could toss weapon on the body to make [him] look like an insurgent. I was told… that if [the Iraqis] carried a shovel, or if they dig anywhere, especially near roads], then we could shoot them [on suspicion of planting roadside bombs]. So we actually carried tools in our vehicles."
Something that I think isn't asked often enough is whether the level of discipline and good behavior necessary for by-the-books counterinsurgency operations is organizationally or psychologically realistic. The whole essence of the military is that you're following orders, and you're trusting your fellow soldiers with your life. Those are principles honed over the centuries for combat, but they're not conducive to maintaining strict obedience to rules of engagement over the course of a long occupation. It's natural that American soldiers in Iraq are going to put the needs of their fellow soldiers over the needs of Iraqis, but it's also completely contrary to the idea that our occupying army is going to be some kind of humanitarian boon to the Iraqi people.
I read the various posts here on "The Corner," mostly pretty ho-hum or critical about Obama's speech. Then I figured I'd better read the text (I tried to find a video of it, but couldn't). I've just finished. Has any other major American politician ever made a speech on race that comes even close to this one? As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols.... But you know me. Starry-eyed Obama groupie.
For James E. Cayne, the firm’s chairman and former chief executive, holding on to his Bear stock was a point of pride, and he rarely, if ever, sold. A billionaire just over a year ago when Bear’s stock soared past $160, his 5.8 million shares are now worth about $28 million at Monday’s closing price of $4.81.
Well, I'd take $28 million. More to the point, keeping such a huge proportion of your savings in stock of a single firm is obviously bad investment practice. Very bad, in fact. Strange that a big-time financial wizard wouldn't know the first thing about the need to diversify.
It sometimes occurs to me that I should probably try to move to a nice country with a cheap currency, blog from there, draw a salary in dollars, and be rich. Maybe Argentina? Indeed, The New York Timesreports that "Drawn by the city’s cheap prices and Paris-like elegance, legions of foreign artists are colonizing Buenos Aires and transforming this sprawling metropolis into a throbbing hothouse of cool."
You can sort of see this as one possible future for America's cities if the dollar keeps declining. Barely any Americans can afford to live in Manhattan or San Francisco anyway at this point -- maybe it'll all be taken over by expatriate Europeans looking to take their precious euros someplace where the taxes are low.
Photo by Flickr user Astroman used under a Creative Commons license
The Washington Monthly's put together a special issue on torture and why it's bad. Well worth reading on its own terms, and also the subject of an event tomorrow at the New America Foundation for those of you who are in DC.
From the annals of silly sports punditry, I just heard Doug Collins explain that the Rockets are doing better because the team added "high-energy players" who've "revitalized Tracy McGrady." T-Mac's clearly an excellent player, but if you look at the numbers there's just no denying that he's performing below the peak he established during his first three seasons in Orlando. Houston didn't add players who revitalized McGrady; they've got a bunch of role players who are playing well so the team's winning more games than it did at the beginning of the season. McGrady, however, is playing just the same.
Dan Kurtzer and Ann Lews go to a UJC meeting to act as surrogates for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, respectively:
Next question to Kurtzer: Obama's assertion that he needn't have a "Likud view" -- that of Israel's right-wing party -- to be pro-Israel. Kurtzer explained that Obama wanted to see a "plurality of views." Silence in the room.
To that, Lewis retorted: "The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties." The audience members applauded.
That's really pretty absurd. For one thing, it's totally off the subject of what Obama said. And does it really need to be pointed out that the role of the President of the United States isn't "to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel" but to adopt the right policies for the United States?
I think it's hard not to look at John McCain's surge to a 67 percent favorable rating and conclude that Democrats are paying a pretty steep price for the never-ending nature of the Obama-Clinton race. It's just impossible for attacks on McCain to gain any real traction without McCain having an official opponent who can press those attacks.
Allen Pizzey is unimpressed with the success of the surge or with Dick Cheney's description of the overall package as "a successful endeavor." But what does Pizzey know? He's just a long-time veteran of the Iraq reporting game who's traveled many times to Baghdad over an eighteen year period. Why trust him when we could listen to John "I don't know the difference between Iran and al-Qaeda" McCain?
Max Bergmann says of John McCain's al-Qaeda/Iran mix-up:
That is not a gaffe. That is called believing something that isn't true. It is called being confused. And being confused about the differences between Shia and Sunni when claiming that you should be elected president of the United States on your foreign policy knowledge and experience, is simply not okay. This is a big deal.
Yes, it is a big deal, especially because, as Ezra Klein notes, "McCain has a fairly aggressive policy take on Iran and the long-time belief that they were an al Qaeda safeground may have contributed to his thinking." Quite so. Certainly the Iranian nuclear issue would look very different if I thought the Iranian government were training al-Qaeda operatives on a regular basis and working hand-in-glove with them in Iraq.
I’m here to urge you not to feel sheepish. This may not be entirely comforting, but your confusion is shared by many people who are in the middle of the crisis.
“We’re exposing parts of the capital markets that most of us had never heard of,” Ethan Harris, a top Lehman Brothers economist, said last week. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and current Citigroup executive, has said that he hadn’t heard of “liquidity puts,” an obscure kind of financial contract, until they started causing big problems for Citigroup.
Evidently, the very obscurity of the nature of the problem is part of the problem; there's little understanding of exactly how much bad debt is out there or who's on the hook for it.
It's always such a shame to read about local governments cutting spending and raising taxes to make ends meet in the midst of an economic downturn. This sort of thing only does further harm to the economy. What you ought to have is a situation where surpluses are built-up during the fat years and spent-down during the lean ones. Obviously you can see why practical politicians in the real world don't behave that way, but states could presumably adopt rules requiring local governments to do that.
Delivering a speech on Iraq to mark the fifth anniversary of the war, Barack Obama returns to the fundamental issue argument of his campaign:
History will catalog the reasons why we waged a war that didn’t need to be fought, but two stand out. In 2002, when the fateful decisions about Iraq were made, there was a President for whom ideology overrode pragmatism, and there were too many politicians in Washington who spent too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion. The lesson of Iraq is that when we are making decisions about matters as grave as war, we need a policy rooted in reason and facts, not ideology and politics.
Now we are debating who should be our next Commander in Chief. And I am running for President because it’s time to turn the page on a failed ideology and a fundamentally flawed political strategy, so that we can make pragmatic judgments to keep our country safe. That’s what I did when I stood up and opposed this war from the start, and said that we needed to finish the fight against al Qaeda. And that’s what I’ll do as President of the United States.
On the question of "too little time reading the intelligence reports, and too much time reading public opinion" I often wonder what public opinion might have looked like had the war met with more vigorous opposition. Certainly to me the fact that Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, etc. were supporting the war was an important consideration. If Bush was lying about the intelligence, I figured that those people, who had access to classified data, would be exposing the lies not going along with them. Obviously that doesn't look like very smart reasoning in retrospect, but I can't have been the only one who was swayed, in part, by the very fact of bipartisan support for the war. If Democratic leaders had opposed it, I imagine the war would have been much less popular.
Peter Feaver has a fascinating article in The Weekly Standard arguing that to win in November, John McCain needs to grab the bull by the horns and make the case on the merits that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. Feaver goes on to say various things I disagree with (from arguing that the case can be persuasively made to calling it a "myth" that administration officials intentionally misled the public), but he's persuasive on the idea that simply bracketing the decision to launch the war won't work.
DoD photo by Lance Cpl. Albert F. Hunt, U.S. Marine Corps
If a cab driver refused to take me somewhere, it never in a million years would have occurred to me to actually call the city's taxi regulatory agency (I'm a non-confrontational personal and there's always another cab), but apparently doing so gets results.
Jared Bernstein takes a look. Basically, it involves giant cuts in Social Security and Medicare under guise of terms like "reform," "rethink," and "making tough choices."
Robert Farley posted this old scaremongering video yesterday:
He made the point that nothing in it was true, that "No one, whether in uniform or no, who was part of the project to make the documentary or who appeared on the video is stupid enough to believe any of the things that it argues." This by way of building up to the point that "there was nothing new or unusual about the body of deception associated with the Iraq War."
That's the depressing truth about Iraq -- it wasn't the first time a bundle of made-up scare stories was used to sell the public on some dumb venture and it won't be the last. Indeed, even presidents trying to sell foreign policies I approve of (FDR before Pearl Harbor, say) aren't always winning gold stars in the honesty sweepstakes.
For quite some time now a very large parcel of land between 9th street, 11th street, New York Avenue, and H Street where the city's former convention center used to stand has stood essentially vacant as an open-air parking lot in the middle of the city. Naturally, I've more than once wondered what, if anything, is supposed to go there. And now we know. The project looks pretty cool, though it does seem that skybridges are a bad ideas.
The US military in Iraq has put together a profile of the typical AQI foreign fighter. Spencer Ackerman calls him Mr. AQI and reports:
But Iraq wasn't what he thought it would be. Mr. AQI wasn't an infantryman, where he'd bravely stand and fight Americans, he was pressured into being a suicide bomber. Nor were his targets the Americans he wanted to hit -- they were the Iraqis he came to avenge. According to Colonel Bacon, in some cases, Mr. AQI was happy to be in American custody, where he would no longer cause Iraq any more pain.
Let that sink in for a moment. For Mr. AQI has a lesson for us. Counterfactual conditionals are always problematic, but in all likelihood, according to MNF-I's own profile, if the United States. were not in Iraq, Mr. AQI would be back in his taxi in Algiers or Jedda. Were it not for Abu Ghraib -- which, of course, never would have happened had we not invaded -- Mr. AQI would never have felt that it was his religious duty to kill Americans.
Personally, I don't think you should regard counterfactual conditionals as a particularly problematic class of statement -- assertions about causation can be transformed into assertions about counterfactuals and vice versa. Which brings us to the point. People join AQI to fight us in Iraq. Our being in Iraq isn't stopping them from fighting us "over here," it's causing them to fight us "over there." Iraq would still have lots of problems if we left, of course, but there's every reason to believe the al-Qaeda element there would be rapidly wiped out with its supply of new recruits cut off.
I think you've got to respect the tenacity Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is showing with his decision to hang on as mayor despite a 7-1 City Council vote asking him to resign. At issue is the fact that the mayor seems to have lied under oath to help cover up an affair with a subordinate. But the City Council lacks the authority to remove the mayor, and the governor who it seems does have the authority is disinclined to remove him from office. So now we wait to see if he's subjected to criminal charges by the Wayne County prosecutor's office, because a criminal conviction would get him booted.
Kilpatrick was previously best-known to me for such scandals as charging expensive meals to his city credit card including an $85 bottle of Moet & Chandon champagne in Atlanta and an impressive $456 bill at the Capital Grille here in DC.
Matt Compton argues that one of the things we're seeing with the success of Barack Obama's speech on race is the declining significance of the sound bite as we're now in a world where people can watch the whole thing on YouTube or read a complete transcript online.
That seems right to me, though it also seems like the demographic of older working class people who are the main audience that Obama needs to worry will be freaked out by Rev. Wright is also the demographic that's least likely to watch a long YouTube clip.
Some "five years ago" content from colleagues old and new. First, James Fallows' "The Fifty-first State?" which tried to warn people that occupying and rebuilding Iraq wasn't going to be nearly as easy as war-boosters were saying. Second, TAP's editorial "A Reckless Rush to War" arguing that, well, the rush to war was reckless.
Fun with hedge funds: "JWM Partners LLC, the investment firm run by ex-Long-Term Capital Management LP chief John Meriwether, lost 24 percent in its $1 billion fixed-income hedge fund this year through March 14, according to two people with knowledge of the matter."
This reminds me of a parable I'm stealing from someone else but I don't recall who that is. Imagine I find a kind of gambling machine somewhere that works kinda sorta like an enormous roulette wheel. It has 100,000 possible outcomes, and on 99,999 of those outcomes it pays off at a 1:1 ratio. But on the 100,000th outcome, you lose at a 1:300,000 ratio. Obviously, placing a bet on that machine would be foolish. But suppose instead I set myself up as a financial assets manager. People invest money with me, I "invest" it for them by betting on the machine, and then I take 15 percent as my management fee. Well, the odds are that for a while I'll be earning a good return for my investors. I'll get a reputation as a genius. The volume of assets under my control will skyrocket, and with it my management fees. And then one day we hit the whammy and everyone loses everything. Except me -- I've already pocketed all the management fees I need.
I mean, if I did that once, nobody would be crazy enough to help me start up a second hedge fund, right?
UPDATE: I should say that, naturally, to make this work in practice you'd have to come up with something a bit more complicated so that your clients don't understand the risks involved. You need to convince them that there are all these really impressive mathematical models that they don't quite understand but don't really want to admit they don't understand lying underneath the whole thing.
Of course if CNN reporters are going to start talking unprompted about Iranian links to AQI it's hard to imagine John McCain getting the grief he deserves for not knowing what he's talking about. After all, the press doesn't know what it's talking about, either.
Rep. Tom Reynolds from upstate New York is going to announce his retirement which I think brings the total number of retiring House Republicans up to 2 million.
I didn't really notice this the first time around, but I feel like this sentence from Obama's speech hits a dissonant note: "This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit." So instead of worrying that people of a different ethnic group might take my job I'm supposed to worry that people of a different nationality might take my job?
I understand, of course, why Obama's beating the anti-outsourcing drums. But there's an appealing cosmopolitanism to both his discussion of our domestic racial problems and our foreign policy problems that's at odds with this kind of talk. Speaking of which, the Obama campaign seemed very excited that Hillary Clinton's First Lady schedule indicates she attended pro-NAFTA meetings so perhaps the great NAFTA debate, left for dead in Ohio, will be making a comeback.
The column definitely has a more in sorrow than in anger tone to it, but it seems that John McCain's Iraq antics have lost David Broder, who apparently was expecting McCain to indicate that there was some level of Iraqi political dysfunction he wouldn't be prepared to tolerate as president.
In the real world, though, if your goal is an enduring American military presence in Iraq, you need political dysfunction. If Iraq were to emerge as a stable country with a government responsive to its citizens' wishes, they'd tell the Americans to take a hike. Its sectarian tensions and instability that make the continued, unpopular presence of a huge number of American boots on the ground viable.
The entire issue of Pakistan seems to have fallen off the radar once it turned out that Benazir Bhutto's assassination wasn't going to lead to a total breakdown over there. That was a good thing, but the lack of attention to Pakistan isn't a good thing. So it was nice to see Barack Obama offer some remarks on the subject during yesterday's Iraq speech:
The choice is not between Musharraf and Islamic extremists. As the recent legislative elections showed, there is a moderate majority of Pakistanis, and they are the people we need on our side to win the war against al Qaeda. That is why we should dramatically increase our support for the Pakistani people – for education, economic development, and democratic institutions. That child in Pakistan must know that we want a better life for him, that America is on his side, and that his interest in opportunity is our interest as well. That’s the promise that America must stand for.
This seems right to me. Making deals with the Musharrafs of the world, people who put themselves forward as the only alternative to radicalism, is a dangerous business. A dictator like that can't actually afford to see the forces of radicalism go into eclipse; he needs them because they're his whole rationale for attracting foreign support. Ultimately, that's not a path that leads the country anywhere productive.
Seriously though, a bigger story supposedly "uncovered" in the First Lady papers is that Hillary never held or attended any meetings on the Family Medical Leave Act, which was the first piece of legislation President Bill Clinton signed, 10 days after entering office. Having just written a piece about the FMLA for the upcoming print issue of the Prospect, I can tell you that anyone familiar with the law should have already realized Hillary's very limited involvement. The non-profit organization the National Partnership for Women and Families originally drafted the bill, which was then championed in the House by former Colorado Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and in the Senate by Chris Dodd and Ted Kennedy. These three were at work trying to pass the FMLA from the late-1980s on, while the Clintons were in Arkansas and running a national campaign.
The bill reached its final form in 1991, passing both houses of Congress only to be vetoed by Bush, who said the bill would tie the hands of businesses. An attempt to override the veto failed, but Congress re-introduced and passed the bin without any major changes in 1992, at the height of the presidential campaign, knowing Bush would veto the bill again and leave himself open to charges that he was "anti-family."
When Clinton won, the law passed again, and he signed it. Given that history, it's just inconceivable that Hillary could have played a large role. Ezra Klein wonders if Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd are supporting Barack Obama in part out of spite because they don't like Clinton claiming credit for their legislative achievements. I don't think you need spite to factor into it -- the essence of the case for Hillary, according to HIllary, is her experience so of course people in a position ot know how tenuous her claims to experience are don't find the case for Hillary all that compelling.
Here's a good rundown of the scandals engulfing Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpratrick. As many commenters pointed out yesterday there's considerably more going on here than a coverup of an affair.
I watched John Adams OnDemand yesterday and it was pretty good stuff, but it raised a question in my mind as to in what sense the series is based on David McCullough's book? McCullough didn't acquire ownership over historical facts (defended the perpetrators of the Boston Massacre! delegate to the constitutional convention!) when he wrote his book, and it's not as if he did stunning new original reporting.
When McCain made a foreign policy gaffe in Jordan on Tuesday, it was Sen. Joe Lieberman who quietly pointed out the mistake, giving McCain an opportunity to correct himself in front of the international press corps. In Israel yesterday, NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum reports, Lieberman once again intervened when McCain made an incorrect reference about the Jewish holiday Purim -- by calling the holiday "their version of Halloween here."
Admittedly this falls more in the "haha he doesn't know what he's talking about" category than in the "holy shit he doesn't know what he's talking about" category where the Iran/al-Qaeda confusion belongs.
Perhaps, but coffee and class have merged into political shorthand as commentators, campaign operatives, and bloggers alike try to make sense of this highly caffeinated campaign season. In several primaries and caucuses, Obama has shown strength among white-collar professionals with a college degree - the so-called "Starbucks Demo crats" - while Clinton has won support from blue-collar workers with a high school degree, dubbed "Dunkin' Donuts Democrats."
The trouble here is that I'm pretty sure the real Starbucks/Dunkin' cleavage in the U.S. is based more on region than on class. Dunkin' Donuts is from New England and you see many more outlets there than you see elsewhere. Conversely, there are only five Dunkin' Donuts in Houston compared to bajillions of Starbuckses.
Today's Washington Posteditorial on Iraq dedicated to slamming Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is really baffling. Their big point is that Democratic plans to withdraw troops from Iraq are somehow unrealistic or based on "fantasy" which seems to simply miss the contours of the argument. Expeditious departure of American forces from Iraq isn't some counterintuitive plan to stabilize Iraq; rather, grounded in recognition that an open-ended U.S. military presence isn't stabilizing Iraq either, it's based on the strategic calculation that the nation's resources and manpower should be deployed elsewhere.
That's a point you could dispute, but Hiatt & co. don't even acknowledge that this is the debate we're having. You also get weird assertions like this "U.S. commanders and diplomats in Iraq don't hesitate to say that if American forces withdrew now, sectarian conflict would probably explode in its full fury, causing bloodshed on a far greater scale than ever before and posing grave threats to U.S. security." One gets weary of pointing this out, but over and over again we see withdrawal plans being judged by worst-case scenarios whereas staying scenarios are judged by best-case scenarios. The truth of the matter is that no matter what we do with the American military, the course of events in Iraq will ultimately be determined by decisions made by Iraqis. If we leave, they might choose poorly with disastrous results. But that can happen if we stay, too. Or they could choose well. The purpose of the surge was to use our military power to try to alter the decision-making of Iraqi leaders, but it hasn't worked -- there's little-to-no evidence that us having 150,000 troops in Iraq is fundamentally affecting the political situation in a positive way.
When talking about costs, folks need to distinguish whether they're talking about getting more value for each dollar or reducing total spending. The two might not be the same. Prevention, for instance, gets far more value out of each dollar. But if it keeps people alive a whole lot longer, that's more time for them to contract various illnesses, and when they grow old, to die from something expensive. So though prevention may mean our health dollars are doing a whole lot more good, it may not mean we're spending less as a total percentage of GDP.
Right. Nothing saves money like swift death at a relatively young age. Conversely, if you're healthy and live a long time, you'll likely wind up needing long-term care which is hugely expensive. Everybody gets sick and dies at some point, so any successful medical treatment merely ensures that future treatments will be needed. But even though you sometimes see scary charts, there's really nothing wrong with the share of GDP that goes to health care increasing if we're getting good value for that money in terms of longer, more capable lives.
Photo by Flickr user waldoj used under a Creative Commons license
One of the more absurd parts of America's broken telecom policies is that we've been achieving an internationally respectable level of broadband penetration in part by defining broadband down, such that 200Kbps -- which is far too slow -- qualifies. In a bit of good news, though, the FCC has decided to boost the figure to the not-nearly-as-inadequate 768Kbps. This still leaves us wondering why consumers in Japan and South Korea can get 10+ Mbps service for less than what we pay for much lower speeds.
The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.
The context is a review of Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism, but the paragraph has a kind of freestanding validity.
UPDATE: It's been pointed out that I should have seized the opportunity to plug my book, Heads in the Sand, which explains why we need to understand the Bush administration's policies as imperialism in its newest guise, and why Democrats need to stop giving-in to Bush-style policies and return to espousing the sort of liberal internationalism that's guided the party and the country at its best for decades. Woo book!
Ilan Goldenberg flags Bush talking an unusually strong brand of nonsense:
Out of such chaos in Iraq, the terrorist movement could emerge emboldened -- with new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to dominate the region and harm America. An emboldened al Qaeda with access to Iraq's oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations.
Ilan focused on the implausibility of al-Qaeda gaining control over Iraq's oil fields (they're not in the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq, among other things). I would also note that were this bizarre scenario to unfold, it would be pretty trivial for the U.S. military to capture or control any AQI-held oil fields -- a poorly equipped guerilla force can't defend a fixed position in the open.
On top of that, though, this business about al-Qaeda securing a recruiting boon from us leaving Iraq is bizarre. According to MNF-Iraq, the occupation of Iraq is the main fact driving recruits to join AQI. Absent the occupation, there's no recruiting pitch. Pearl Harbor was a boon to U.S. military recruiting, VJ Day wasn't. And what's this business about them acquiring "an even greater determination to dominate the region and harm America." Does Bush really think they lack determination now?
It's striking how much of conservative thinking about national security these days centers around subjective factors -- determination, emboldening, "claiming victory" -- rather than on objective assessments. Objectively speaking, withdrawing from Iraq would cut off a major line of recruiting for al-Qaeda while simultaneously freeing up vast quantities of American manpower and other resources. How "bold" that makes al-Qaeda leaders feel (and you've got to figure these fuckers were pretty "emboldened' already when they blew up the twin towers, right?) has nothing to do with anything.
Democracy did a thing where they asked a bunch of people to write a short piece about a "big idea" of theirs. There's some good ones in there, but I thought the most intriguing one was Larry Sabato's out-of-left-field idea of expanding the House of Representatives to include maybe 1,000 members.
Sabato points out that smaller districts would be cheaper to run in, making it easier for grassroots challengers to have a shot at unseating incumbents. This seems plausible enough to me, though of course constitution reform is, in practice, impossible to do.
Will be officially unveiled at a campaign event in Oregon. I'm not really sure what the Bill Richardson constituency is, but given that while it's lasted his campaign showed the most leadership on trying to get a clear-cut commitment to really ending the war, maybe he'll help Obama get some further credibility with anti-war activists. For my part, though I didn't disagree with the many valid criticisms of Richardson's campaign, I have always wanted to give him credit for mentioning transit and land use issues as part of his energy/global warming pitch.
Iowa and New Hampshire obviously aren't the best audiences for transit talk, but given that the leading contenders represent Chicago and New York it's a bit sad that it took the guy from New Mexico to bring this up.
I don't see any particular reason to think this business of illicit snooping into Barack Obama's passport records was some kind of administration plot. On the contrary, the fact that we're hearing about it and the perpetrators are being punished suggests it weren't. The administration dirty tricks plot, if there is one, would presumably involve its penchant for illegal electronic surveillance. Turning the spyglass on your political rivals has been the traditional use of oversight-free surveillance power in the United States and now that it's back it wouldn't exactly be shocking if we were to find out that the abuse is back, too.
And yet, nobody seems to want to talk about this aspect of the surveillance issue. It would, I think, be unserious to suggest that the Bush administration might abuse power in this way. To be sure, every administration for the period of four or five decades leading up to the Church Commission engaged in those kind of abuses to one degree or another but that doesn't make it any less outrageous to accuse Bush of harboring those kind of ambitions.
Did you know that one of the world’s best Chinese restaurants can be found in Dubai? That General Tso’s chicken was probably invented in New York City? Or that the Chinese characters outside the Hooters in DC’s Chinatown translate to “Owl Restaurant”?
I actually knew all of those things, but the online chat with Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, that she's introducing with those teasers has even more interesting stuff. For example, "Also amazingly good and unique food (though the Chinese food there is a bit of an acquired taste): Mauritius, island country off the coast of Madagascar, which has a history that produced a cuisine that is a blend of French, Indian, Chinese and island (Curried octopus on French rolls, or adding cheese to the lo mein)." Meanwhile, did you know that the szechuan peppercorn isn't really pepper?
Photo by Flickr user Stu Spivack used under a Creative Commons license
It's been pointed out to me that the size of the House of Representatives is set by statute not by the constitution (which makes sense since 435 would have been a ton of members in the 1790s given the size of the country) so the Sabato Plan may not be as unrealistic as I thought.
I think Barack Obama's speech on Iraq and the economy was just okay, which for Obama is pretty bad. As Chris Bowers says, it was redolent with a kind of narrow-minded transactionalism that kind of misses the point:
The broader point that needs to me made is not that Iraq specifically has prevented money from being funneled directly to your specific demographic group, but that excessive military spending in places like Iraq drains massive amounts of money from our nation as a whole. The Iraq war is our major national project right now, equivalent to the Apollo program or the New Deal. Do we want that as our national project? I don't think many Americans would agree. Do we want a series of transactions to specific demographic groups and issues to be our national project? Even if is vastly preferable to making the Iraq war our national project, the truth is that isn't very appealing either. We need a different framing around what we want our national project to be, and we need a Democratic leader who is willing to make that case to the country as a whole.
I think that's right. Democrats are going to want to be featuring Iraq/economy linkages as we head toward November and the right way to do this is isn't in terms of eleventeen different micro-initiatives that could have been paid for with Iraq-style levels of money. The point to make is that we could be making our "big project" some kind of productive investment in the future of our country -- something that would provide jobs, yes, but also pay off over the long run.
Noam Scheiber, after noting some of Barack Obama's appearances on local sports media outlets, speculates "that younger, edgier sports chatter--most prominently on ESPN, but also on talk-radio stations across the country--seems to be injecting elements of African-American culture into white working-class minds, and in a pretty favorable light. (Who doesn't love Stuart Scott?) I'm guessing it's among the long-term trends that help Obama, if only at the margins." Could be, though I don't even know if that's a sports-specific phenomenon.
But it serves as a reminder that Obama's real problem in Pennsylvania isn't just its large white working-class contingent, it's all the old people "The census ranks this as the nation's second-oldest state, with 15.6 percent of us being 65 or older." That's a deadly demographic reality for Obama in this state.
I think it's a dodge to answer the question about why U.S. broadband is so much worse than Japanese or South Korean broadband by referring to America's lower population density. If the issue were that we have excellent internet service in some places, but it's super-slow in Wyoming then, sure, you'd say it's the density. But the population density of Southern California or, say, New Jersey is pretty high and you don't get Asian-style broadband there, either. For that matter, you don't get Asian-style broadband in Manhattan.
The relevant issues here are regulatory in nature -- Japan has smart regulations that produce quality service, whereas the U.S. has regulations that are good for incumbent telecom firms. It's true that there would still be a real residual issue related to people who live in very low-density areas, but that's a separate issue from why the majority of Americans who live in metro areas can't get decent broadband.
Abu Mook reminds me that it's about time to check in, again, on our Horn of Africa Champion du jour, the brutal Zenawi regime in Ethiopia. Regular readers may recall that in December of 2006, a bevy of conservative pundits were singing the praises of the Ethiopian approach to warfare during its US-backed invasion of neighboring Somalia. This armchair Clausewitz set was asserting, emphatically, that Ethiopia's unchecked brutality, disregard for human rights and contempt for critical media coverage would lead to the swift eradication of any insurgency that might erupt in vanquished Somalia.
This all by way of noting that, fifteen months after the initial US-backed Ethiopian invasion, the Somali insurgency has progressed beyond the roadside bomb phase into the beheadings phase. Long story short, unchecked brutality doesn't work, and our Horn of Africa policy has given the forces of jihad have a new training ground.
Spencer Ackerman critiques Top Chef "Bravo is getting way too predictable with the foreshadowing. Ever notice how whenever you see a contestant working out, s/he's like two episodes at most from elimination? Think about it. Cynthia (though she quit). Betty. Tre. Sandee. The only exception I can think of is Elia. You never saw Hung, Harold or Ilan work out." But maybe the best chefs just don't waste time working out. Maybe they're in a constant meditative state running through possible future challenges and what brilliant dishes they'll bang out in response.
Several good points came up in comments on the Starbucks/Dunkin' Donuts thread, including the point that Starbucks isn't really much of a pointy-headed elitist choice (try an independent shop!) and the fact that Hillary Clinton's base among old women probably doesn't drink a ton of takeout coffee of any sort,
Sunni militias going on strike, feeling miffed that they're not still getting the love they feel they deserve:
But dozens of phone calls to Sahwa leaders reveal bitterness and anger. "We know the Americans are using us to do their dirty work and kill off the resistance for them and then we get nothing for it," said Abu Abdul-Aziz, the head of the council in Abu Ghraib, where 500 men have already quit.
"The Americans got what they wanted. We purged al-Qaida for them and now people are saying why should we have any more deaths for the Americans. They have given us nothing."
There's no way for the U.S. to build a coherent strategy in Iraq without there being a coherent, genuinely national, Iraqi political movement for us to get behind. In the absence of such a genuinely national movement you can't build from localized successes to national ones and anything you accomplish will eventually be undermined.
President Bush said Thursday that Iran has declared that it wants to be a nuclear power with a weapon to "destroy people," including others in the Middle East, contradicting the judgments of a recent U.S. intelligence estimate.
As the article goes on to point out, Iran has not, in fact, ever declared that it wants to be a nuclear power and a fortiori has never declared an intention to use a nuclear weapon to destroy people. The official line from the NSC spokesman is that "the president shorthanded his answer " with "shorthanded" apparently being a new term meaning "lied." This brings me back to something I wrote in 2006:
Some hawks, like Jeffrey Bell, writing in the February 6 Weekly Standard, have adopted a strategy of simply making things up, like claiming that Ahmadinejad not only “says the Jewish Holocaust never happened” (which he did say) but also “muses about the possibility of correcting that Nazi failure by dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel.” This last seems a highly unlikely statement since Iran officially denies that it has a nuclear program, it's hard to imagine -- and there's no evidence -- that Ahmadinejad ever “mused” about dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone.
Bell later explained to me that he was using "poetic license," which I think is somewhat more elegant than the "shorthanded his answer" formulation. Still, the fundamental point is that some folks would really like people to believe that Iranian leaders are running around saying "let's build a nuclear bomb and drop it on Israel!" even though no leaders are, in fact, saying that. It's really not a small difference.
LAT notes that Clinton and Obama are raising tons of money from finance types, "easily surpassing Republican John McCain in campaign contributions from the troubled financial services sector" and that "some Democrats worry that the influx of money will make their candidates less willing to call for increased regulation of financial markets, which have been in turmoil after a wave of foreclosures on sub-prime mortgages." Kevin Drum says "considering that 18 Democratic senators voted in favor of the 2005 bankruptcy bill and that virtually no one in the party was willing to push hard to end the capital gains loophole for hedge fund managers last year, I'd say that will make is in the wrong tense."
Right. The solution here would be for the GOP to pull its head out of its ass and have some members go where the Democratic Party fears to tread. "I believe in low taxes, but also in fair taxes -- hedge fund managers should pay the same rate as everyone else; these kind of inequities only push up tax rates on hard-working middle-class Americans." Is that so hard to say? To go further and say that if non-bank financial firms are going to be bailed-out when they get into trouble just like banks, then they should also be regulated just like banks would seem to me to be an ideal thing for a reformer like John McCain to step up and say, only that would probably have to happen in an alternate universe where McCain has some grasp of public policy. So instead we'll be missing John Edwards.
Photo by Flickr user Bert van Dijk used under a Creative Commons license
I was talking about this while walking to my current location, and I'm glad to see that Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen , Josh Marshall are writing about it, too -- Hillary Clinton's already lost the nomination.
Under the circumstances, I find it maddening that the party leadership isn't acting to push her out of the race. Dragging things out 'till the convention stands a much, much, much higher chance of hurting Barack Obama's chances in the general election than it does of securing Clinton the nomination. I understand the calculation from the point of view of the heart of the Clinton campaign -- McCain beating Obama in the general means the Clintons still control the party, so there's no need to worry about helping McCain and you might as well hold on and hope lightning strikes. But the broader mass of unaffiliated elites and Clinton supporters who aren't literally on her payroll are, in my view, acting in a massively irresponsible manner.
One way of thinking about today's withdrawal debate is to think about yesterday's withdrawal debate. My first draft theory about an exit strategy from Iraq was back in 2004 when it seemed to me that we ought to take advantage of the election scheduled in Iraq for late January 2005. Troops should stay in the country through that date, the election should be organized, and then shortly thereafter we could declare victory and announce our schedule for leaving. People said that if we did that, Iraq could fall into chaos and increasing violence. And those people won the day. So we stayed. Then in 2005, Iraq became more violent and chaotic anyway. Then in 2006, Iraq became even more violent and chaotic. Then in 2007, it became even more violent and chaotic. Then momentum changed, the level of violence fell sharply, and then it plateaued at a level of violence and chaos still well-above where it was in 2004.
In other words, the bad things people worried might happen if we left still happened anyway.
In my view, today is no different. But the defense and foreign policy establishment is programmed, deep in its DNA, to have a kind of morbid fascination with the risks of not being involved. So when we talk about Iraq, the debate is dominated by the fear that if we leave some bad things will happen. And that's not an irrational fear -- it's a bad situation, pregnant with bad possibilities -- but precisely because it's a situation so pregnant with bad possibilities those risks exist either way. We chose not to declare victory in January 2005 and all the bad things that were predicted as a consequence of leaving Iraq happened anyway. There's a lesson to be learned in that.
Let me highlight something from the Politico article:
Clinton’s top supporters, including her husband, have suggested in recent days that amassing more votes than Sen. Barack Obama, while it has no formal meaning, could offer a key rationale for laying claim to the nomination. The theory: Winning the popular vote might give party leaders known as superdelegates a reason to take the nomination away from Obama, who is virtually sure to earn more pledged delegates.
The assumption here is that superdelegates who have not yet endorsed Clinton are actually harboring a secret, unexpressed desire to overturn the outcome of the delegate-selection process and hand the nomination to her. These people are just waiting to be given a reason to do it.
The thing is: That's crazy. Hillary started out with a huge lead in superdelegates because she got a treasure trove of early endorsements. Guess why? Because her husband used to be President and party figures had every reason to offer her early endorsements. Since that time, all the superdelegate momentum's been toward Obama because, guess what, the people who didn't line up behind Clinton early are people who don't want Clinton to win! I know reality gets distorted in the midst of a campaign, but they're really deluded if they can't see that.
Spencer Ackerman notes Michael Kamber's excllent account of what Spencer calls "the new imperial reality":
During the war in Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become American viceroys, officers with large sectors to run and near-autonomy to do it. In military parlance, they are the “ground-owners.” In practice, they are power brokers.
“They give us a chunk of land and say, ‘Fix it,’ ” said Capt. Rich Thompson, 36, who controls an area east of Baghdad.
The Iraqis have learned that these captains, many still in their 20s, can call down devastating American firepower one day and approve multimillion-dollar projects the next. Some have become celebrities in their sectors, men whose names are known even to children.
One is never to speak ill of The Troops, but I don't think you need to be a hard-bitten anti-American to have some doubts about the soundness of this kind of set-up. Suppose we replaced the mayor of your town with a twentysomething foreigner who didn't speak English but did have a ton of firepower at his disposal and no real checks on his power. You'd probably feel that was a step in the wrong direction. And conversely, it's not genuinely reasonable to expect relatively junior Army officers to do this sort of job well. I find there's often an element of fantastical thinking in counterinsurgency doctrine, where if we establish that it would be desirable for things to work in such and such a way, then it also becomes possible for them to work like that.
But it's not an army of mutant superheros we've got, it's an army of soldiers. How's it supposed to suddenly be filled with people well-suited to the task of governing foreign towns? The British had a whole separate civilian agency set up to train and recruit their colonial administrators and make sure they had the right skills. If we're going to want to run foreign countries effectively, we're going to need to do something similar. An alternative, and superior, option would be to back away from running foreign countries.
Via Brad Plumer, a new report which indicates "Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends."
It's worth noting, however, that we obviously have a great deal of control over forward-looking spending. If you believe that General Petraeus is succeeding in Iraq, then you owe it to yourself and to the country to understand General Petraeus' vision of success "Northern Ireland, I think, taught you that very well. My counterparts in your [British] forces really understand this kind of operation... It took a long time, decades." That would obviously be a costly undertaking.
From the point of view of U.S. and global interest, one has to ask oneself if decades -- or according to a more optimistic later Petraeus quote, as few as one decade -- of further war, with future costsly likely exceeding the sums already spent, is really the best use of American resources. I don't think the claim that it is stands up to any kind of cursory scrutiny. There's a time-honored principle of budget politics which holds that defense spending isn't really spending, but in fact it really is spending and there's no prospect of getting a reasonable return on an open-ended commitment to Iraq.
A very strange, repeated trope of the Clinton 2008 campaign has been to attack not Obama but groups of people perceived as likely to vote for Obama. Sometimes this takes the form of dismissing whole states, other times:
The strategist also said Clinton’s agents are making more subtle pitches.
“I’ve heard people start to say: Have you looked at the vote in Ohio really carefully? See how that breaks down for him. What does that portend?” said the strategist. “Then they point to Pennsylvania: In electorally important battleground states, if he is essentially only carrying heavy African-American turnout in high-performing African-American districts and the Starbucks-sipping, Volvo-driving liberal elite, how does he carry a state like Pennsylvania?”
It's a very strange way to behave. Presumably if magic delegates arrive out of heaven and give Hillary Clinton the nomination, she'll be expecting African-Americans and "the Starbucks-supping, Volvo-driving liberal elite" to vote for her, etc. Why would you refer to core Democratic voters in terms literally lifted from a Club for Growth ad?
The past week saw a lot of "what did I get wrong"-type articles about Iraq and they frequently put me in the mind of the incompetence dodge. I note that one frequent way in which people argue for the proposition that poor execution, rather than an underlying flawed concept, are at the root of the Iraq disaster is to simply observe that mistakes were made in Iraq. For example, here's my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg:
What the world is confronting five years after the invasion—the mess that Gen. David Petraeus is attempting to clean up today—was almost entirely preventable. It's not only my encounters, inside Iraq and outside, with senior figures of the Bush administration that have convinced me of this; the investigations conducted by George Packer, Tom Ricks, Bob Woodward, and Michael Gordon, among others, have unearthed thousands—literally thousands—of mistakes made by this administration, most of which were avoidable.
What I wonder is what kind of evidence could disprove this line of reasoning. Suppose we were looking back on some military venture that was doomed to fail. Now suppose some supporter of that venture were arguing to us that, no, it wasn't doomed at all -- the trouble was the incompetence. The supporter can even find all these examples of incompetence -- why here are all these decisions that got made! And the decisions worked out poorly! How inept! How dare you say it was doomed to fail? I mean of course a group of people who set out to do something unreasonable are going to wind up implementing their agenda poorly. What would a flawlessly-executed but doomed-to-failure war look like?
Meanwhile, you need to put Iraq in strategic context. The goal wasn't merely to topple Saddam, but to intimidate other "rogue" regimes by creating a credible threat to take them out too. That meant that something like a 350,000 troop, 15-year commitment wouldn't achieve the goals of the policy. It wasn't "incompetent" for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to have rejected those methods; the rejection followed directly from what they were trying to accomplish.
Did James Carville really compare Bill Richardson to Judas? Why, yes, it seems that he did! Maybe the Clinton camp's inner circle has just totally lost touch with reality and they really think that sort of thing is appropriate. The mindset seems a little bizarre, though. When Richardson accepted the appointment as U.N. Ambassador from Bill Clinton was he supposed to take it for granted that that constituted an implicit promise to endorse Clinton's wife's presidential campaign years in the future? That he'd signed-on for lifetime service to the House of Clinton?
Meanwhile, consider the reverse proposition -- if Clinton's key backers believed the things they're saying about the need for experience then why weren't they supporting Richardson's presidential campaign? He played a more substantive role in the Clinton administration than she did. Plus he had more years in congress and six years as governor. He's just the "former members of the Clinton administration who currently holds statewide office" who happens to have the wrong last name.
UPDATE: Of course from a Christian perspective, there's also a wee problem with comparing Hillary to Jesus.
I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.
I don't recall that sniper incident, but I was only fifteen or so at the time, and now video has surfaced showing contemporary news coverage of the sniper attack on Clinton, and even capturing a portion of that harrowing dash -- including a moment when Clinton uses her body to shield a little girl from danger:
Impressive stuff, I urge everyone to watch the video and see for themselves.
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Heads in the Sand
