Robert Farley reports on a visit to an Army training facility at Fort Knox and observes, "one thing that I found particularly interesting is that in this discussion of transformation and training revision NO ONE mentioned FM 3-24; indeed, while the captains we spoke to later in the afternoon knew about it, none we spoke to had read it."
FM 3-24 is, of course, the famous counterinsurgency field manual written by General David Petraeus before he was posted to Iraq, a document that's been much chewed-over by national security reporters and pundits. Of course, I suppose it's possible that the manual is having a large impact on training through second-order effects even though it doesn't seem to be widely read, but this does call into question how much has really changed since its completion.
Via Paul Krugman, a chart and article by Floyd Norris contrasting the long-term trend in the unemployment rate (up and down) with the long-term trend in the proportion of prime-age men who don't have jobs (up and up). Naturally, this raises the question of what everyone's doing. One assumes that some portion of this is men taking on traditionally female roles as the personal primarily responsible for family care tasks. It also is my impression that there are more over-25 students than there used to be (certainly I know more than one person who was or is in law school at age 26 or higher). And the average age of retirement has tended to drop over time, so that must mean more men in their early fifties retiring.
On the other hand, for an older person the line between retirement and unemployment can be a fine one -- there are doubtless various retired people out there who would, in fact, be willing to work if there were more appealing job opportunities out there. But those kinds of thing aside, maybe there's been an increase in the number of people doing black market work at least part time? One trouble with official statistics is that trends are always ambiguous between whether or not something is actually not happening, or whether it's just not getting counted. Even during the very tight labor market of the 1990s, the jobless rate was way higher than it was in 1960 and it's a bit hard to believe that all those people were just doing nothing, and while the run-up since then very plausibly represents deteriorating labor market conditions, the job market was extremely strong back then.
Theda Skocpol makes a variety of good points on "bittergate" in an email to Josh Marshall. If only she hadn't given me such a bad grade in "American Society and Public Policy" way back when....
It seems they're now arresting people for dancing around midnight at the Jefferson Memorial. Offhand, one might think the legal issue here is that the Memorial is supposed to be closed to the public at that hour, but that's not the case, instead it's a vague disorderly conduct charge.
In honor of Barack Obama, Tyler Cowen says "If I think about what makes me bitter, it is highway and roadway construction and bad airports and the attendant delays." What makes you bitter? I'm bitter about the way Meridian Hill Park and the street design in Adams Morgan makes it so difficult to get from my house to the Amsterdam Falafel Shop even though it'd be really close if i could fly.
UPDATE: NB, the map here assumes I'm driving, but since I don't have a car I would actually be walking but this is more-or-less the route I need to take even on foot.
I'm going to count myself as bitter about this new not-really-legal spying initiative as well: "Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office's operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate."
At the end of the day, Jane Harman is a pretty hawkish Democrat -- usually a bit too hawkish for my taste -- but she's saying once bitter twice shy about what she calls her "firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration" and wants a fuller account. Seems like a good idea.
We shouldn't, in my view, be complacent about either of those statistics. Not only do most other rich nations not face our kind of levels of lack of health insurance, they don't have our levels of violent crime either.
Photo by Flickr user ernstl used under a Creative Commons license
John Quiggin notes that despite mutually re-enforcing arguments from extreme environmentalists ("deep greens") and dead-ender polluters ("dark browns") that reducing carbon emissions to a sustainable level would be incompatible with maintaining high and growing material standards of living, the actual economics suggests that we can cut emissions and keep getting richer without that much trouble at all if we implement the right policies in a timely manner.
Like Atrios, I recently concluded that while the professional blogger lifestyle affords many benefits, I was also driving myself crazy hunting for wifi networks I could hop on. The better alternative was to sign up for a Verizon wireless broadband account and get a nifty USB modem. The per month cost strikes me as more than would be worth paying for most people, but if Verizon wants to give me a corporate sponsorship and pick up the tab for mine I'm happy to revise my opinion on that and recommend that folks who don't blog for a living sign up as well.
At the beginning of this web video, Michael O'Hanlon explains that the current pace of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't sustainable. He also notes that the situation in Iraq is "nowhere near an acceptable or sustainable outcome." Under the circumstances, one might think that giving up on the Iraq operation in order to focus on Afghanistan in a sustainable way would be a good idea. But, of course, O'Hanlon believes we need to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely, even though he knows that such a policy isn't sustainable.
The solution, naturally enough, is foreign mercenaries. As he puts it, we need to go into "countries that have a fairly strong pro-American tendency and a very minimal al-Qaeda presence" and try to get their citizens to sign up, with the lure of U.S. citizenship offered as the bait. He gave the Philippines as an example (indeed, as many as 41 percent of Filipinos regard our military presence in the Middle East as bolstering stability, which is unusually high), and said that Donald Rumsfeld would go down in history as a bad Secretary of Defense specifically for his failure to implement a program of this sort. My feeling is that when it comes to this is when we can officially say that the American imperial project in Iraq has reached its decadent phase.
I mean, isn't this almost a self-refuting argument? According to Michael O'Hanlon, the only way to have any chance at accomplishing our mission in Iraq is to bolster our military by recruiting large numbers of foreigners into our armed services and this becomes an argument for recruiting the foreigners rather than ending the war. Really?
Don't miss Blake Hounshell on why the surge is beside the point because Iraq is just an extremely poor candidate country for the kind of maximalist goals that Bush and McCain cite in defense of the endeavor:
We must not forget that even a perfect surge would still have left the United States chasing an expected strategic payoff—a stable, democratic Iraq—that is extremely unlikely to be realized for decades, if at all. It’s one thing to ask American soldiers to lay their lives on the line for freedom and democracy, or to safeguard their country from weapons of mass destruction. But who wants to be the last man to die for Nuri al-Maliki?
I certainly don't. And while the unfortunate reality is that more Americans certainly will die in this dubious cause I'd like to see that number brought as low as possible through a speedy withdrawal of our forces.
Check it out: Attackerman, a joint venture of Spencer Ackerman and the Center for American Progress. I, for one, welcome the ThinkProgress crew's move into franchising. I only hope that their long-range plan for world domination involves coopting/assimilating me rather than destroying me.
Douglas Massey writing in the new Miller-McCune magazine says that if we want people to stop coming here from Mexico then we need to do for Mexico what the EU did for Spain as that country was brought into the European Union -- full economic integration complete with generous payments and other assistance aimed at upgrading the poorer country's institutions.
An alternative immigration model from Europe -- the long Finnish-Russian border where "enforcement first" plus bad weather seems to keep the immigrants out across a sharp economic gradient -- is profiled by Elna Nykänen in Monocle, though you need to subscribe to read the article. Long story short, Finland invests a lot in its border patrol (they don't, after all, have global power projection ambitions), Finland's high level of homogeny makes Russian illegal immigrants stand out in tiny border towns, and if you try to cross the border too far from an official border crossing you find yourself truly in the middle of nowhere with no roads and many wolves.
The idea that people are scolding this woman for letting her nine year-old ride the subway home alone when that's what he wanted to do is absurd. Manhattan is a very safe place and he was taking a route he knew and understood. The city was a substantially more dangerous place back in 1990 when I was nine, so I think I was older by the time I was allowed to roam the streets.
Still, this is one of the major advantages of raising children in a city -- your kids can get places on their own! A teenager driving a car is way more likely to get hurt than a nine-year old riding the subway.
Given that coal and oil companies aren't run by idiots, it's clear that they're not going to make arguments of the form "we shouldn't act to ward off preventable environmental disaster because that would be bad for our shareholders and executives." Instead, polluting energy firms are going to ride on to the scene as apostles of class warfare, condemning carbon pricing, congestion fees, energy efficiency mandates, and everything else under the sun as an undue burden on the poor.
As readers know, I think that argument is often factual off-base. But at other times it has some real truth to it. If you make energy more expensive to use, this will inconvenience everyone to some extent, but it'll be much less of a problem for more prosperous people. But what this analysis leaves out is that the price of inaction will also fall hardest on people of modest means. If changing weather patterns make food more expensive, then burden falls hardest on the poor. If natural disasters destroy people's homes, then it'll be hardest for the poor to rebuild. If water shortages lead to scarcity and black markets, it's the rich who'll be able to get what they need. This is the general virtue of having a lot of money -- it can be exchanged for tangible items of value. Consequently, the downside impact of any widespread change will be hardest on those who have little of it. But that's not a reason to never change our policies if the status quo is going to lead to even worse outcomes. You're not ultimately doing the poor any good by condemning them to live in a world of climate catastrophe.
The Iraqi government has dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen who deserted or refused to fight during last month’s Shiite-on-Shiite battles in Basra, it said Sunday.
How do you fire a deserter? It seems that someone named Paul Jane Pilzer wrote a book called Should You Quit Before You're Fired that may be relevant to this issue, but I'd recommend buying my book instead.
Richard Florida says the future of the economy is in "mega-regions" -- linked up networks of cities. Paul Krugman is a skeptic, but Florida responds to some of his criticisms here. When titans clash, I think of a more trivial point to raise (non-trivial point -- environmental sustainability should be considered here), namely that I don't understand why Florida calls these things mega-regions.
The so-called "mega-region" in which I live -- Florida calls it BosNyWash, I think, while Krugman uses the more felicitous term Acelaland -- is geographically smaller than a traditional "region" like New England or the Pacific Northwest. The true mega-regions of the United States are longstanding geographic and cultural concepts like "the South" that are composed of distinct sub-regions and are much, much larger than Florida's multi-focal urban clusters.
I get the sense that a lot of folks are letting the thrilling nature of the Western Conference race blind them to the fact that no matter what happens out there, you'd have to judge the Celtics to be pretty serious favorites against any of these teams. Note, for example, that their superior record isn't a result of weaker competition -- they're 25 and 5 against the West which is much better than any of the Western Conference teams. To be sure, if Andrew Bynum makes some kind of miraculous recovery that could be a different story, but otherwise I'd rate them as a definite "buy" with their contract currently available on Tradesports for less than $30.
Photo by Flickr user Terren in Virginia used under a Creative Commons license
Kevin Drum and Phil Carter discuss length of combat tours and counterinsurgency, and conclude that there's no answer. As Kevin says "Short tours don't give you enough time to learn the ground and the people, but long tours eat up the troops. There's no good middle ground."
Carter's suggestion to try to make sure to re-deploy people back to the same place they'd deployed to previously does seem like one step in the direction of a middle ground. Another necessary step would, I think, be to make sure that we're very leery as a matter of national strategy from getting involved in these kind of situations rather than deluded ourselves into thinking that some doctrinal improvements suddenly make the impossible possible. Last simply a sense of scale -- there's a whole lot of different kinds of things that can fall under the counterinsurgency or stability operations heading many of which are much less giant, manpower intensive, and infeasible than what's happening in Iraq. I hear different things, for example, about the merits of our ongoing counterinsurgency assistance to Colombia but it's certainly not creating some unbearable strain on our military. Simply avoiding situations that require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers for a years-long mission seems like the most important piece of the puzzle.
What, in effect, do we want from the Middle East? Any answer must be tentative and subject to revision periodically. At the present, the answer seems to me to be sufficient peace to prevent a world war and a sufficient flow of oil to maintain the European economy. The first is the common interest of most Arabs, who are in earnest when they insist on "positive neutralism." Of the second, two points must be made: on the one hand, Europe now depends for 80 per cent of her oil on the Middle East, but she could be supplied, admittedly at greater cost, from other sources. On the other hand, the sale of oil is the major source of revenue for many of the Arab countries and is the only hope for those who plan, as does the new generation of nationalists, large-scale development programs—and the only customer for all of the Middle Eastern oil is Europe. Let us not forget that our essential policy interests are identical with those of the Arabs.
I think that this continues to contain a lot of wisdom. Certainly, to follow one of the main themes of the piece, our efforts to micro-manage domestic political outcomes in the Arab world haven't had a ton of success.
Photo by Flickr user skampy used under a Creative Commons license
Dan Froomkin observes that Bernard Lewis "hinted in an Aug. 8, 2006, Wall Street Journal op-ed that Ahmadinejad might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel just two weeks later, on the date in the Islamic calendar when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to Jerusalem." But so what? There's a lot of garbage printed in the WSJ opinion pages.
Well, it just so happens that Vice President Dick Cheney went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show last week and explained that this kind of forecasting is guiding his approach to Iran policy:
I mean, if I look at what [Ahmadenijad's] beliefs supposedly are, the allegation that the return of the 12th Imam is something to be much desired, and that the best contribution that a man can make is to die a martyr facilitating that return, and all that goes with it, I always think of Bernard Lewis, who has said that mutual assured destruction during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviets meant peace and stability and deterrence. But mutual assured destruction in the hands of Ahmadinejad may just be an incentive.
Matt Duss notes that there are some other respects in which Lewis' foreign policy advice seems to have gone awry, but at a minimum one would think that this particular prediction would have caused some to doubt the wisdom of relying on his forecasting of the role Shi'a mysticism plays in Iranian foreign policy. The specifics of Lewis aside, I always find it odd that hawks prefer to rely on this kind of a priori analysis of likely Iranian behavior when the regime in question came into being over two decades ago and has never previously shown any proclivity for deliberately seeking its own destruction.
I thought it might be worth saying a bit more about the popularity of this notion of raising an army of foreigners to fight the Iraq War for us. I think this is a problematic concept on its own merits, but beyond that it's illustrative of the unseriousness of a lot of hawkish commentary these days. We all understand why a draft is politically unfeasible and regarded by the military brass as undesirable anyway. But what about a more serious effort by the big minds behind the endless war policy to get people to sign up?
Michael O'Hanlon is slightly too old for the army, but I bet he's got some fighting-age research associates and interns over there at Brookings. Barbara and Jenna Bush could sign up, and so could the seemingly unemployed Meghan McCain. Fred Kagan's eligible to serve at 38 as are various other AEI fellows. But beyond individual people, the institutions of the conservative movement writ large could be encouraging young conservatives to go sign up. They could be selflessly offering to wage the battle of ideas purely with the too old, the disabled, and the openly gay as their comrades in arms, while urging young and healthy rightwingers to go sign up. Not only would that have some direct impact on the manpower situation, but the demonstration effect on the remaining pro-war 30-35 percent of the country could be large. Meanwhile, if it worked it would be a significant rejoinder to criticisms from Democrats and others that the force is being unduly strained.
But it's not happening and it's not going to happen. And the significance of that observation isn't to call the people who aren't making it happen "chicken." The point is just that if, chicken or not, you really thought Iraq was the central front in a world-historical struggle against Islamofascism you'd be leading recruiting drives. You'd be signing up yourself if eligible to serve, and you'd be encouraging young people over whom you have some sway or influence to do the same. But though a lot of people say all kinds of things about the enormously high stakes in Iraq, few people's revealed preferences indicate that they believe it. I don't think it makes sense to say that everyone who favors some given military operation has an obligation to join the service (among other things, I'm familiar with more than one person who decided to enlist after 9/11 in order to fight al-Qaeda and wound up in Iraq) but in light of the fact that there are very real recruiting problems it seems like something that ought to be taken more seriously. But at a minimum, it seems to me that people ought to bring their war-related rhetoric more in line with their actual war-related behavior.
UPDATE: Important factual error-like thing in the post, Jason Zengerle notes that McCain has a son in the Marines and another in the naval academy. I didn't know that McCain even had sons. That obviously puts the point about Meghan McCain in a very different context.
I don't come into the office every day, but perhaps I should, for if I hadn't come in today I wouldn't have been turned on to the obscene URLs concept. Basically, some organizations have names that, while totally vanilla and inoffensive, don't translate well to the space-free domain of the URL. Consider, for example, Pen Island "the best pens on the internet" and available at penisland.net which if you, like me, have the emotional age of a twelve year-old will find hilarious.
Blogger, economist, foodie, and author Tyler Cowen says:
Everyone who reads books on foreign policy should read this book. It is well-argued throughout and gets at fundamentals, rather than just slinging the latest epithets over our latest blunders in Iraq. I don't in every way agree with the author's recipe for liberal internationalism but overall this is a smarter book than whichever other tome you are likely to pick up on foreign policy.
I, however, am somewhat indifferent as to whether or not you read the book, the main point is that you should buy it. Reading, though nice, is strictly optional.
With the announcement of John Peschong as John McCain's regional campaign manager for California (McCain has a weird notion of splitting his campaign out among a bunch of different regional managers) I can only assume he's throwing the state:
Peschong has been a campaign adviser since 2007. He has a large amount of experience in California, having served as GOP executive director there in the 1990s and recently as Northwestern political director for the Republican National Committee in 2004. He was also executive director of Dan Quayle's political action committee.
What kind of record is that? He went from Dan Quayle's pack to presiding over the destruction of the once-dominant California Republican Party! Or did he do it in the other order? Either way, this seems like failing upward. Or maybe he's just failing sideways.
One thing I wonder about is how much do "campaign gaffes" really matter? My guess is that their perceived importance is mostly an illusion. I mean, people point to plenty of examples of campaigns that lost, in large part, "because of" this or that gaffe or damaging random thing dredged out of the record but you never see an example of a campaign that won because it successfully avoided gaffes.
As talk resurfaces of a male birth control pill, Dana Goldstein asks " men out there: Would you take birth control pills if you knew they were safe and their effects were reversible? Would you trust yourself to remember to take them at the very same time every day?"
I say sure, why not, though it seems to me that most women are skeptical of the idea of offloading the responsibility to someone else, since a man can't promise to become pregnant if he screws up. But for me (and probably for most people) it would all come down to whether or not there are some terrible pill-related side effects.
Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), said on Saturday of Barack Obama "That boy's finger does not need to be on the button." Referring to adult African-American men as "boys" is, of course, a well-known trope of white supremacist discourse in the American south. Naturally, Davis came under criticism for being a racist. Equally naturally, Davis has now issued an apology. But As Marc Ambinder observes Davis can't seem to apologize for what he actually did wrong:
My poor choice of words is regrettable and was in no way meant to impugn you or your integrity. I offer my sincere apology to you and ask for your forgiveness.
Though we may disagree on many issues, I know that we share the goal of a prosperous, secure future for our nation. My comment has detracted from the dialogue that we should all be having on legitimate policy differences and in no way reflects the personal and professional respect I have for you.
But nobody impugned Obama's integrity here, the issue is that only racist white people refer to grown-up black men as "boy." Obama and Davis are both in their fourties so it's not even as if some much older member of congress engaged in the "poor choice of words" here. Meanwhile, it's very difficult to infer anything about a person's motives or general sentiments from a single incident, but it's certainly not reassuring that Davis seems unwilling to grasp what the nature of the problem is here. You would think that a decent person who accidentally stumbled into a problem here would be more genuinely contrite.
Commenting on John Yoo's tenure at Berkeley, Mark Kleiman remarks: "So, strange as it seems, I’m inclined to think that John Yoo belongs in prison (along with his client) but not to think that in the absence of a conviction he ought to be stripped of tenure."
That strikes me as a little too strange. Either Yoo's legal advice to President George W. Bush -- i.e. that he has under the constitution an unlimited right to, for example, order his subordinates to "crush the testicles of a child" -- falls in that category of things reasonable people can agree to disagree about, or else it amounts to participating in the war crimes of the Bush administration. If the former, then he clearly doesn't belong in prison. But if the latter, then how can he teach law students? The proposition, after all, isn't that Yoo is a guy who knows something about the law and then also commits serious crimes. Rather, the proposition at hand is that what Yoo purports to have been legal advice was, as such, a crime. This seems about on a par with keeping Jack the Ripper on your medical faculty teaching people surgical techniques.
It's worth saying that the sort of internationalist approach advocated in, say, Heads in the Sand (buy the damn book already, you read so much blog and never pay a dime) isn't just about things like taking the U.N. Security Council mechanism more seriously. As Spencer Boyer points out for the Center for American Progress there's a whole raft of treaties that the vast majority of countries have signed on to but that Republicans are keeping us out of: "In particular, the Senate should ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty."
As he says, none of these things are perfect (what can you expect from a highly multinational negotiating process) but they're all in our interests on balance, and they're being opposed primarily because of ideological hostility to the whole idea of international treaties and efforts to create a world organized in a cooperative, positive-sum manner.
Photo by Flickr user Hober used under a Creative Commons license
It looks like sky-high oil prices and solid evidence of growing future demand from Asia aren't spurring new oil production. Instead, non-OPEC production has been flat with some countries slipping, and even the Saudis are turning cautious in their statements about future production. It's almost as if a prudent country would be taking steps to try to reduce the extent to which so many of its citizens rely on so much driving to go about their daily business. After all, as people are very aware it can be incredibly inconvenient -- or even impossible -- to change these kind of habits over the short-run, which makes it vitally necessary to start laying the groundwork for alternative ways of getting around and relating to your surroundings as soon as possible.
Alternatively, we could hope that biofuels somehow ride to the rescue and try not to worry too much about the food riots.
Photo by Flickr user Marine Photo Bank used under a Creative Commons license
This is the first add from Progressive Media, the David Brock-helmed independent expenditure group that's supposed to whack John McCain while Clinton and Obama continue to duke it out:
When you think about how potentially damaging something as basic as "John McCain agrees with George W. Bush about important issues" could be as an attack, it's a stark reminder of how bad the fundamentals are for the Republicans. I would, however, somewhat prefer to see early attacks focus on McCain's disastrous thinking on national security issues -- the economy argument is very easy to make, so it's more important to get started on the more difficult task of making the case that for all the honor of McCain's military service, it's left him with a reckless and absurd strategic vision.
Joe Lieberman says Barack Obama's "got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America." Andrew asks what Lieberman can mean by this. I assume Lieberman is referring to Obama's overwhelmingly majoritarian position on Iraq. After all, it's been the key conceit of "centrists" like McCain and Lieberman ever since 2002 that to be for war in Iraq but somewhat aloof from the Bush administration is the centrist position. After all, it's the view adhered to be John McCain and Joe Lieberman and McCain and Lieberman are well known moderates so their views must be moderate ones and mainstream and anyone to their left is "far left."
That's the central conceit of McCainism and Liebermanism alike, and it's important to both of them to just keep repeating over and over again. After all, if they stop saying it someone might notice that whether or not either or both of them hold centrist views on some issues, they're the two most extreme hawks in the Senate at a time when 60+ percent of the population agrees with the orthodox liberal view that we need to lay down a marker for leaving Iraq.
Something I note in Heads in the Sand is that one impediment to undertaking a reasonable response to 9/11 is that, psychologically speaking, it feels as if the response should somehow be proportionate to the devastating emotional impact of the attacks. And when you contemplate the possibility of something even more horrible, like a nuclear attack on a city, then it seems like the preventive measures taken should, again, be incredibly dramatic. And yet the nitty-gritty of serious non-proliferation policy is deadly dull.
Consider, for example, "Multilateralism as a Dual-Use Technique: Encouraging Nuclear Energy and Avoiding Proliferation", a recent paper done by John Thomson and Geoffrey Forden. They're writing about an incredibly important issue. For the non-proliferation regime to work, the majority of states who are neither "rogue" proliferators nor official Nuclear Weapons States need to be on board with the non-proliferation regime. But designing a regime that adequately safeguards their interest in civilian nuclear technology without opening the door to too much proliferation is difficult to do.
What Jeffrey Lewis has to say on the subject here is kind of a mouthful, and he's deliberately keeping things simple whereas Thomson and Forden are boring deep into the details. And at the end of the day, the result is a paper you probably don't want to read unless you have some kind of professional obligation to follow this issue. Certainly reading and writing about it doesn't help you take out your frustration and anger at the horrible things that terrorists have done, nor does it give you good grounds on which to impugn the masculinity of your political opponents. But it is vitally important to actually stopping the spread of nuclear weapons.
I like to take an interest in my sponsors, so I clicked a link from a Siemens ad I saw on my blog which took me to their sponsor page whence I found this treasure-trove of fake news reports that Siemens put together. Siemens seems to make a lot of infrastructure products, so a lot of their advertorial content relates to stuff I'm interested in. Indeed, at times I'm already totally in the tank for what they're selling, as in this propaganda video for high-speed rail.
That's what I thought of as I read James Fallows' fascinating article on air taxis in the current issue of The Atlantic. Jim's an aviation enthusiast so he's excited about the rise of DayJet, but it sound ecologically problematic to me and -- relatedly -- something that could well be rendered impractical if we adopted sound carbon-pricing policies. Jim takes this on a bit in the piece and we learn that "Bruce Holmes’s response is that most of DayJet’s customers would otherwise have driven, probably alone and in a large car—and the new jets are designed to beat or match such trips in fuel consumption and overall carbon output per passenger mile."
This is fair enough, but of course an even more ecologically sustainable alternative for these kind of shortish intercity trips would be high-speed rail. What's more, at several points in the piece DayJet executives say they think they probably couldn't export their business model to the northeast, the only part of the country where we have decent passenger rail, so the air taxi people themselves seem to think that rail would be a more appealing alternative to short-haul flights if the infrastructure got built. What's more, the Acela is actually pretty crappy when you compare it to the true high-speed rail they have in Europe and Asia. So let's build some trains!
Photo by me, available under a Creative Commons license
Here's an exciting development -- J Street, a new, progressive, Israel- and Mideast-focused organization has launched. The main idea behind the outfit is to address the paradox that most Jewish Americans have liberals views on the issues, including such matters as West Bank settlements and the need for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and yet the most politically influential members of our community take a very hawkish line on US policy throughout the entire region. Meanwhile, neoconservative foreign policy in America has, despite its "pro-Israel" orientation, produced nothing but disastrous results for the United States and Israel alike.
A lot of the traditional peace camp outfits are lending support to this effort, but what sets it aside is the J Street PAC which will do the kind of spadework in terms of fundraising that's traditionally been lacking. Meanwhile, they're also trying to build a MoveOn-style list of supporters that will be able to weigh-in on controversies as they arise, and also make the point to nervous politicians that they shouldn't just assume that ever donor or volunteer they have with a Jewish-sounding name is committed to the Sheldon Adelson political agenda.
Everybody knows that John McCain is both a principled straight-talker and also an environmentally-minded Republican in the manner of Teddy Roosevelt. Therefore it can't be the case that his "solution" to America's economic problems is a silly, panderific proposal to have a summertime gas tax holiday. I must have imagined the whole thing.
Refugees International has a new report out about Iraq's internally displaced people and the tie-in between this and the militia issue. Ken Bacon, President of RI, noted on a conference call that there's been "much less focus" on the internal dimension of the Iraqi refugee problem, even though it involves a huge number of people -- 2.7 million are internally displaced.
Nir Rosen visited Iraq recently and explained that due to Iraq's lack of state capacity, the primary responsibility for taking care of refugees has fallen on militia leaders who, naturally, use that situation to consolidate their power. He said that Sadrist movements "resettle displaced Shias in the homes of the Sunnis that they displaced" where they are "not charged rent, and often provided with stipends." In turn, he reports that "very often we saw them joining the Mahdi Army, though unlike joining the Awakening groups you don't get a salary." You do, however, get these refugee-related benefits.
Conversely, in Baghdad's Sunni enclaves, Awakening groups are "giving people the homes of displaced Shias, or occasionally of people they say belonged to al-Qaeda." Rosen also described them as "running protection rackets and extorting shopkeepers." Meanwhile, he says that "in every Sunni neighborhood that I visited, displaced Sunnis were joining the Awakening groups" which technically isn't supposed to be allowed (they are, after all, the Concerned Local Citizens) but the Awakening groups want the recruits and they have goodies to hand out so people sign up. According to Rosen, Awakening leaders "very openly say that we have a temporary cease-fire with the Americans because we have a more important enemy -- the Iranian occupation" which is how they see the current ISCI/Dawa government.
Kristele Younes from RI notes that one consequence of the political agendas of both the U.S. and Iraqi governments is that at the moment there's no contingency planning under way to find ways to mitigate humanitarian problems in case large-scale fighting occurs. After all, such contingency planning would involve conceding that things might get worse, and at the moment all the pressure is on talking about how much things are improving and destined to improve. She called for more American humanitarian spending and also for more spending from the Iraq government: "Iraq is sitting on a lot of money and it is only fair that it would spend some of it to respond to the humanitarian crisis."
Just five years after the Ang Lee Hulk, Hollywood is giving us a new version. Not a sequel, it seems, just another Hulk movie. Considering that the first movie sucked, it's not a bad plan:
I like the cast a lot, but I'm missing my "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry."
Via Justin Logan, it seems that David Frum has sketched out a non-apocalyptic scenario in which Iran might use or threaten to use nuclear weapons:
The short answer: The world oil market.
In 1986, the US waged an undeclared proxy naval war to deter Iran from attacking oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. The US won of course and Iran lacked any effective riposte. This US operation played a decisive role in compelling Iran to accept peace in the Iran-Iraq war.
And it may have prompted Iranian leaders to decide: We need an effective counter-deterrent against the US. The US would have been much more reluctant to protect Kuwaiti tankers against a nuclear Iran. An Iranian nuclear bomb would act as a “Keep Out” sign to frighten the US away from a now truly Persian Gulf.
Justin notes that the U.S. would hardly be standing alone in its disquiet if the Iranians started randomly blowing up Kuwaiti oil tankers, and it's really not clear what a small Iranian nuclear arsenal would let them get away with in the face of what would be uniform hostility from every major power and every country in the region. But beyond that, why is Iran blowing up these Kuwait tankers? In the previous Gulf go-round what happened was that Saddam Hussein launched an unprovoked invasion of Iran, the invasion went poorly, the Iranians launched a counter-offensive, then the U.S. and the Gulf states started organizing to help Saddam.
Whatever you think of that series of events, it's certainly not evidence that Iran has long-standing ambitions to mount unprovoked attacks on the world's oil distribution networks. Most likely, what Iran would like to do is sell oil to oil-importing nations and use the resulting funds to buy stuff.
Brendan Nyhan writes about how the need to construct a campaign narrative can lead to people substantially overestimating the importance of this or that campaign occurrence. For example, current polling makes it look likely that Hillary Clinton will beat Barack Obama by a bit more than ten points.
Now if you'd said on March 5 "looks like Clinton will win Pennsylvania by about 12 points" most people would have said "sounds about right, she has a huge advantage in the polls right now but Obama always gains ground through actual campaigning; still, demographically speaking it's very favorable terrain for Clinton." But today it's essentially inevitable that any failure on Obama's part to close the gap will be substantially attributed to "bittergate" even though failure to fully close the gap was not only predictable but widely predicted weeks ago based on Pennsylvania's age structure, educational attainment, and African-American population.
Indur Goklany at the Cato blog gives us one of the genuinely dumbest arguments I've heard in a long time. His started point is James Hansen's argument that the safe, sustainable level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 350 ppm. Then Goklany observes that we're currently well above that level, and passed 350 ppm back in 1988. Then he asks "Is the world better off today compared to 1988?" and concludes that it is. Therefore, we should let catastrophic climate change move forward unabated. After all, "But would we want to go back to the world of 1988 — or even 1998 for that matter?"
I used to think it would be good if we could get the murder rate back down to 1963 levels, but now that Goklany's so sagely pointed out that there were no HDTVs back then we can see the foolishness of wishing to travel back in time. Because, clearly, a literal reversion to 1988 living standards is the only conceivable method of reducing carbon emissions as human beings are, as is well known, utterly incapable of devising technological and organizational methods of enhancing energy efficiency or discovering less-polluting sources.
Everyone's dying to know my picks for the big NBA end-of-the-regular-season awards, right? Defense Player of the Year is, I think, pretty simple -- Kevin Garnett is the anchor of what's not only the best defensive team this season, but actually one of the best defenses of all time. So there.
Tradition dictates that Rookie of the Year should go to Kevin Durant for taking the most shots and thus acquiring the highest points per game average. But I think that's kind of bogus, and as a Durant fan I want to keep the pressure on him to actually shoot accurately and re-acquire some of his rebounding prowess from college. So I say Al Horford. Carl Landry is clearly some kind of basketball god but he didn't play in enough games.
Coach. I hear a lot of talk about Byron Scott who is, in fact, a good coach. But I think you need to give this award not to the "team many underrated in the preseason" but to a coach who faced some clear coaching challenges. In my view, that's Rick Adelman who's steered the Rockets past Yao Ming's injury.
Most Improved: Chris Paul. He's improved a lot!
Plus it's a consolation prize for Paul, because the Most Valuable Player is Kobe Bryant. As is well known, the MVP award is handed out on a highly arbitrary basis. Thus, LeBron James is ruled out for his team being too middling even though nobody thinks this is his fault. Similarly, the best player on the best team always deserves a hard look but Kevin Garnett hasn't scored the requisite 20 points per game. It's down to Kobe and Paul and it fundamentally comes down to Paul being younger and how "it's Kobe's time." So he wins.
That said, I do think every sportwriter who criticized KG's lack of "leadership" or some other BS during the past couple of years when the Timberwolves were bad owes him a personal apology. It's almost as if even the greatest players can only succeed with some good teammates.
UPDATE: Oh, yeah, sixth man. Obviously, that's Manu Ginobili.
Megan rightly bemoans the proliferation of deductions and credits and whatnots that push tax rates higher and make "doing your taxes" this huge pain in the ass rather than some very straightforward math: "All this useless activity is so that our politicians can look like They Care by giving tiny tax breaks to all of their favorite people--that is to say, the people who vote for them and give them money."
That's fair enough, but I'd add the point Kwame Anthony Appiah made in Sunday's Washington Post, namely that people are kind of dumb vulnerable to a lot of "framing effects" that make a lot of this stuff popular when, were equivalent policies described differently, they would become unpopular. Most clearly, when you redefine most deductions as penalties for the ineligible a lot of this stuff seems a little perverse -- should people who don't have kids in college pay a special penalty? A tax penalty for renters? Probably not.
Meanwhile, just note that you could eliminate all this, thus capturing 100 percent of the flat tax's virtues, without flattening the tax bracket structure and also that if you did flatten the bracket structure (thus capturing zero percent of the flat tax's virtues), then all the political pressures that create the loopholes would still exist.
Photo by Flick user glass window used under a Creative Commons license
Friends of the Earth seems bitter about John McCain's "we should curb climate emissions but only if a huge giveaway to the nuclear industry is involved":
I oppose huge giveaways to the nuclear industry, but would consider them a price worth paying if necessary to stop global warming. But what kind of person would, on the merits, take the view that stopping global warming is a good idea if and only if it can result in huge giveaways? Note that any carbon-pricing scheme would, as such, be a pro-nuclear measure even without additional subsidies.
If downing shots of liquor is really the truest sign of "being a man (or woman) of the people" then I guess every dude in every frat in America is now working class. Indeed, even Matt Yglesias, certified pointy-headed elite, enjoys a celebratory shot or two every now and again. Meanwhile, a little birdie told me a lot of working class protestant church folk are teetotalers. But who am I to correct Roger Simon, who doubtless has so much working class cred that wine bottles spontaneously combust in his presence.
Contrary to my fears, it looks like Mike Huckabee isn't planning on detonating a nuclear weapon in a major American city. Instead, he's starting a Political Action Committee. Disappointingly, it's not called HuckaPAC or "Huck, a PAC" either of which would have been strong choices. Instead we need to put up with HuckPAC which is lame.
Meanwhile, as I remember it the big first-order problem with Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign is that even when he was surging in the polls he couldn't really raise any money. Conversely, what was so impressive about the Huckabee campaign was its ability to achieve a fair measure of success without money. A PAC, however, is just a money-raising and money-spending machine. So what's Huckabee gonna do? He still might be a decent VP pick for McCain, though.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazetteendorses Obama. Interesting how actual Pennsylvania-based media doesn't seem to see him as nearly so out of touch with blue collar Pennsylvania as does, say, the salt of the earth at The New York Times op-ed page.
I haven't heard much about Doug Feith's new book, War And Decision, but Spencer Ackerman has a two post series which brings to light the amusing fact that Feith's book fails to back up Steven Hayes' various contentions about Iraq/al-Qaeda linkages even though as best anyone can tell Feith was the source for all of Hayes' "reporting" on the subject. This kind of thing, one assumes, is how Feith managed to acquire an unusually bad reputation amidst an administration packed to the ceiling with incompetents and war criminals.
The U.S. House of Representatives, which features a high level of party discipline and where liberals are basically in the driver's seat, produced a pretty good bill to provide relief to people hard hit by the crisis in the housing markets. But over in the U.S. Senate where you need Republican support to pass a bill, and where Democrats with a questionable commitment to progressive values like Max Baucus hold immense sway, the bill has become party central for corporate lobbyists with all kinds of random giveaways to this industry and that larding the thing up.
So it seems that Bill Simmons wanted to do a podcast with Barack Obama. It also seems that Barack Obama wanted to do a podcast with Bill Simmons. Speaking as a new media professional, I can tell you that "major presidential candidate" is usually the kind of podcast guest that people like to have. I bet a Simmons-Obama podcast would have been widely listened to and gotten a lot of attention. Naturally, ESPN decided the right thing to do was kill the idea and cancel the podcast with the Daily News noting that "It's of interest that ESPN president George Bodenheimer has supported Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential bid with a donation of $1,000."
Michael O'Hanlon gets a Washington Post op-ed to lay out his surprising view that the surge is awesome and, indeed, is working so well that we can expect to start taking troops out of Iraq in early 2010 if everything continues to be so awesome.
We can start taking them out, that is, if progress is made on such minor issues as "Basra and the south," "Local and national elections," "Refugee return," "Kirkuk," "A national oil law," and the state of Iraqi Security Forces. In essence, thanks to the super-duper success of the surge, all we need now is several years of additional war and for all of Iraq's problems to solve themselves. Mission accomplished!
Every liberal I know in DC is busy warning every other liberal I know in DC that liberals are too overconfident of our chances in November, direly issuing statements about John McCain's strengths as a candidate and Barack Obama's fatal weaknesses. John Judis has always led the charge of pessimism, but near as I can tell the alleged overconfident attitude doesn't have any adherents, and the "everyone is being overconfident" view is actually universal and utterly dominant.
I'll stand up for overconfidence. Elections are mostly determined by the fundamentals, and the fundamentals are against McCain. On top of that, Democrats have the more charismatic nominee. I look at national polling that shows Obama in a 45-45 tie with McCain, which is a very bad result for a de facto incumbent, and a terrible result for someone facing such a favorable campaign dynamic. We are, right now, at this very moment, witnessing the peak of McCain's electoral stock -- a time when Hillary Clinton is beating up Obama on a daily basis, and virtually no Americans have been exposed to the Democrats' anti-McCain messaging. Anything can happen, in principle, but if someone forced you to make an even odds bet on the outcome of this election, I don't think there can be any serious debate about what the smart play is.
These days, she is more concerned about offending people. “I always fall into the trap of thinking if I’d written it better, surely, surely they would have understood,” she said, referring to the young women who were upset by “Goodbye (#2).” (“Morgan’s essay is incredibly condescending,” one blogger wrote. “It completely fails to recognize that there are a variety of valid reasons younger women might decide to support Obama.”) Morgan put a log on the fire with her good arm. “They think I’m telling them what to do, but they are investing me with an authority I never had. Why is that? Do you know why that is?”
But who is this mystery blogger? Could it be my friend Ann Friedman, Deputy Editor of The American Prospect and Editor of Feministing.com? I think it just might be. Perhaps a casualty of print's sad space constraints, but you'd think that at least the online version of an article that mentions a blog post could link to the post in question. Readers interested in exploring the issue further might like to see the context. Who knows?
Can we imagine a world in which the Bush administration actually took Jamie Kirchick's advice and had Jimmy Carter arrested for violating a never-enforced 1799 law? I might encourage them to do it just for the entertainment value. Does Kirchick seriously think this should happen or is this just one of those "it's Jimmy Carter so you can say whatever about him" kind of situations? I'd say we're more likely to see George W. Bush on trial in the Hague than Carter charged with Logan Act violations.
Alex Rosmiller takes aim at "the myth of meritocracy" as it applies to the blogosphere. I think most of what he says he right -- despite the lack of barriers to entry, there's still a very real sense in which things like timing and social networks are crucial to success in the political blogosphere.
There is, though, one sense in which merit really does play a larger role in the blogosphere than in the dread MSM. That is that, overwhelmingly, the only way for a blogger to succeed in having a lot of readers is for a lot of people (relative to the modest scale of blog enterprises) to genuinely find the blog worth reading. The MSM doesn't really work that way. A newspaper is all bundled together. So as long as The New York Times is worth reading (which it is) and Bill Kristol has a New York Times column (which he does) lots of people are going to see Kristol's columns. Him keeping his job just depends on him continuing to have the favor of the NYT high command. And then the mere fact of his presence on the op-ed page makes the columns "important" and worth reading for anyone who wants to participate in "the conversation."
Similarly, notwithstanding the unbearable inanity of Tim Russert, nobody can make it in big-time politics without submitting to the Russert Probe and a Russert interview with a major politician is, as such, a major news event worth watching. So Meet The Press can be a successful enterprise without anyone even liking it. The much larger number of distribution channels on the internet makes this kind of phenomenon -- where you become important just because someone gave you an important job -- is much less likely. Good blogs can go unfairly neglected, and bad blogs can become popular, but popular blogs are at least well-liked. I may not care for Instapundit, but Instapundit's readers really do like it, which is a real contrast with the typical MSM situation.
Paul Krugman asked a question near and dear to this native-born New Yorker's heart:
I understand why it’s political poison to show disrespect for small-town values — dignity is precious to all of us, and often trumps material interest. But why is it OK to disrespect big city values, even to suggest — as Bush has — that big-city dwellers aren’t part of the “real America”?
I think the answer is that it isn't okay. Not only was I born in New York City, but both of my parents were and three of my four grandparents were. The great-grandparents all came from foreign countries. That's a very American story, an American Tail, if you will, yet the conservative movement in America treats it as some kind of elitist put-on that my dad has the temerity to live in the city where he was born:
I think you can see in the election results that GOP rhetoric of this sort has the expected effect. Look at the 1988 election results and you'll see Bush's dad winning California and dominating in the New York suburbs -- carrying New Jersey & Connecticut and Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk counties in New York. Some of that's issues, but some of it is surely metropolitan America not liking GOP atmospherics and condescension.
But the press covers this stuff in different ways. Obama made a gaffe, whereas Bush has a masterful political strategy to exploit Democrats' out-of-touchiness. That's because Republicans have dominated recent American politics, so the press is primed to find Democratic blunders and GOP masterstrokes. If we wake up in January 2009 and the government is dominated by a Democrat named Barack Obama and a congressional leadership from San Francisco (Pelosi), Las Vegas (Reid), Chicago (Emmannuel and Durbin), suburban Maryland (Hoyer), and Brooklyn (Schumer) I assume we'll start hearing more about potential downsides to GOP political tactics. But they would need to lose first.
I'd say the odds are overwhelmingly against the United States having its first woman president, but at the same time "The 16 women serving in the U.S. Senate and 74 women members in the House of Representatives represent an all-time high in both chambers." Obviously, with women being 50-51 percent of the population that's as much a sign of how far we fall short as of how far we've come, but it's still worth noting.
The number of women in the House is very likely to rise as a result of Democratic pickups, and Jeanne Shaheen is extremely likely to become a U.S. Senator though she may be offset by the Louisiana race. Turnover in the congress is, due to the large incumbent advantage, a slow process but I think we are inching toward equity. Meanwhile, it still seems to me that Nancy Pelosi's ascension to become the first woman Speaker has been under-remarked-upon. I suppose the public at large doesn't quite realize how powerful that office is.
The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply--it almost determines the order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer--the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and "at home" in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which "YOU know nothing"!
Ogged says this is John McCain. At the end of the day, though, I'm skeptical that McCain's life story really explains much of anything about his political ideas for good or for ill.
The "Easterlin Paradox" which seemed to show that an increase in national wealth doesn't lead to an increase in national happiness seems to be one of those paradoxes that's just not true. The relationship isn't super-strong, so there are poorer countries that are happier than richer countries, but in general while money can't buy you happiness, it can buy you stuff that makes you happy.
Incidentally, if you're looking for a detailed and sophisticated account of white working class voting behavior in recent decades this paper by Ruy Teixeira released last week is the place to go.
I would really only add one thing, which is a bit to one side of the main point of the paper, namely that discussion among coastal media elites of the white working class tends to sometimes implicitly conceptualize the WWC group as much poorer than it is. I believe, for example, that David Brooks once wrote a column on white working class conservatism where he referred to the people in question as "poorer folk" whereas Thomas Frank sometimes gives you the impression that the wretched of the earth are voting Republican. As I've pointed out in the past, "The median household income of non– college-educated whites was $47,500 in 2004, slightly above the national median."
This renders some of the allegedly paradoxical behavior of the white working class much less paradoxical. Non-college whites are about half of the population. So if you divided the public into two groups -- Group A and Group B -- and then I told you that all the non-white people are in Group B and Group B is also slightly poorer on average than Group A, nobody would find it strange to learn that Group A tends to support the Republicans.
Via Kevin Drum, George W. Bush admits to ABC News that he was knowingly lying to the public about conditions in Iraq all throughout 2006. He says he was doing it to keep up morale for the troops in the field. Phil Carter, who was serving in Iraq at the time, is unimpressed by this observing that the troops in the field knew perfectly well what was going on and their morale was undermined by an out of touch leadership.
Both Phil and Kevin seem a bit too delicate to note that the President, even in his admission of past lying, is pretty clearly coming up with a new lie here. He wasn't pretending things were going well in Iraq for the troops, he was doing it for the midterm elections.
John McCain's big economic policy speech hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves from progressive blogs. But recall that we've heard in earlier McCain addresses that he wants to continue the war in Iraq indefinitely and also that he thinks we need to boost baseline defense spending. In his economic speech, he does what Republicans do and proposes a huge raft of tax cuts. Naturally, being a straight-talker, he's not afraid to tell people that a certain price will be paid for these defense hikes and tax cuts. As he explains, paying for his program will require "taking the savings from earmark, program review, and other budget reforms."
Straight talk!
Or, in reality, obfuscation. Clearly the reforms per se aren't going to save any money. McCain is proposing processes that could lead to program cuts. But he won't, you know, actually name any programs that he think ought to be cut. Because, after all, if he told people what he was planning to cut, they might realize that they liked these programs. So better to refer to them in a vague way. But in essence, McCain is saying we should reduce funding for our transportation infrastructure. And that at a time of rising food prices, poor people should get less in the way of food assistance. And that the federal law enforcement apparatus should do more with less. That product safety inspections can be pared back. That maybe environmental and labor regulations don't really need to be enforced. Or perhaps the national parks should fall into a state of disrepair. Who knows? McCain won't tell us what'll get the ax, but there's just no way to do what he's proposing to do on the tax-and-warmongering sides of the budget without seriously scaling back on domestic programs.
When you hear that some folks are starting up a "pro Israel, pro peace" lobby organization to provide an alternate voice on Middle East questions to the neoconnish one that bizarrely prevails at the moment in most American Jewish institutions, you don't expect the most neocon-dominated of American Jewish institutions to applaud. So it's by no means shocking to read Noah Pollack at the Commentary blog dumping on the new J Street organization.
What is consistently shocking to me, however, is the arrogance and tone of disdain that Pollack and his ilk are capable of mustering for this sort of thing.
For a more substantive take on today's edition of Michael O'Hanlon's "prominent newspapers can't stop letting me write op-eds" gravy train, read Ilan Goldenberg's detailed effort at a rebuttal. To sum up Ilan's points, however, I would just note that it's hard to rebut an argument that doesn't feature a real argument. O'Hanlon lists six things that it would be good to see happen in Iraq, and then proclaims those six things to be a good reason to keep 140,000 American troops in Iraq at a cost of billions per week for the next 90 weeks or so, but he doesn't explain why doing this will actually help resolve any of those problems.
This, though, has been the time-honored debating ploy of the Iraq forever crowd for years. I recall in 2005 when the troops needed to stay or else there would be ethnic cleansing. So the troops stayed and guess what happened in 2006? Ethnic cleansing. Then when the ethnic cleansing ended, that proved our deployment was working and had to be continued.
I'm with Stoller nothing I've seen or heard from the 2008 primary compares with this from 2004:
Under the circumstances, it seems wrong to call this "the most bitter and negative Democratic primary in the last forty years." The difference is just that the 2004 primary, though extremely negative at its height, also had a very short duration in terms of peak negativity before quickly morphing into the odd dynamic where Edwards refused to seriously attack Kerry and got rewarded with the VP slot.
Ben Mathis-Lilly brings us the crucial point that contra Spike TV's current marketing, Chewbacca was not, in fact, the original wingman. Chewie was Han Solo's co-pilot, Wedge Antilles was Luke's wingman.
It's funny, those two don't play the same position, but DeShawn told Caron that he'll guard LeBron (sounds like a children's nursery school rhyme) so that Caron can rest his legs. DeShawn was like, "I'll run him around and play D on him and get the fouls so you can just go off on the other end." So we have our own little gimmicks we're brewing. With a team like the Cavaliers and a player like LeBron, all you need is distractions. We got to be Bush. We got to be Bush-league. We're having everybody talking about the war, when we just want to get the oil. We're Bushing it. That's all we're doing. We're trying distract LeBron over here while we try to get some wins over there. That's all we're doing.
Of course if the war had gotten us some oil, it would have at least gotten us something. But last I checked, oil costs more than ever.
UPDATE: Perhaps if Agent Zero bought Heads in the Sand he'd be in a position to offer a more nuanced critique of the Bush foreign policy. Matt Berman says it's "highly readable and filled with great insights."
How is it that Charlie Gibson is challenging the candidates with reference to a constitutional provision that was overridden by Amendment XII over 200 years ago? I've seen a lot of dumb TV news stunts over the years, but that really takes the cake.
I had thought the Clinton campaign couldn't sink any lower, but thus far she's really just been giving us the full GOP. Listening to her talk about Barack Obama is like reading a Weekly Standard blog post. The lame excuse that she's making this and that outrageous smear because the Republicans will do it later is pathetic. Maybe they will. But she's the one doing it now.
I'd forgotten that for months now Charlie Gibson has been asserting that $200,000 is a solid middle-class income, blissfully unaware that just 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more. You could be richer than 96 percent of your fellow citizens, but still just folks to Gibson. Obviously that's not on a par with being bad at bowling or anything on the "out of touch" scale, but it's still disappointing to learn that even our salt of the earth working class multimillionaire television news personalities aren't utterly infallible.
That chart's via Brad DeLong. Certainly isn't a good time to be in the construction business. In principle, things should all rebalance -- as the dollar falls, net exports rise, and employment shifts out of the construction sector and into exporting or import-competing sectors and the trade deficit narrows. But in the meantime, the friction imposes great hardship on folks who lose their jobs and need to find new ones.
I suppose you could say the good news here is that a very sharp decline in new construction is the scenario most consistent with prices for existing homes not collapsing. The population is going to continue to grow, after all.
For a few cycles now, I keep hearing talk that South Florida may be ready for a somewhat more enlightened approach to Cuba than the "starve them until they give us back our confiscated property" model that's done so very little to drive Castro from power over the past 50 years. It seems like Joe Garcia's ready to put that theory to the test in his race against Mario Diaz-Balart:
Real leaders don’t compromise principles for petty politics. I stood up and challenged the Clinton administration when they wrongly held Cuban refugees in Guantanamo; and I stood up to the Bush administration because of its policy of dividing Cuban families. This is the kind of leadership I will bring to Washington. [...] But Mario Diaz-Balart doesn't want to work with other members of Congress to find solutions; he'd rather distract from the issues and muddy the waters. He's made a whole career of intimidating opponents and accusing them of being Castro-sympathizers, but he can't pull that stunt with me. I've spent my entire life working for human rights and freedom in Cuba and I can debate, point-for-point with him on this or any other issue.
At issue here is the fairly small beer point of the Bush administration's restrictions on travel and family remittances, but any change for the better would be nice, and seeing the far-right position fail in Florida could cause a lot of people in Congress to rethink our whole approach to this subject.
And right there you have a great example of the vacuity of McCain's budget proposals. It's easy to propose sweeping budget cuts in the abstract. But then when you start looking at it, it turns out that behind every large spending commitment there's a politically powerful constituency. And so McCain, having initially declined to promise specific spending cuts, preferring instead to propose vague general
