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 ones, winds up being asked about something specific and of course he doesn't want to cut that! But you can't start with a large deficit, add large new tax cuts, pile on a big increase in defense spending, and then make the math add up purely by cutting the most clearly absurd small-bore items.
How is it that we can't have our Republican primary debates moderated by conservatives and our Democratic debates moderated by liberals? Doesn't it seem like a panel of progressives might have a better sense of what Democratic primary voters want to hear about? The Republican Presidential Debate with Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol, the Democratic Presidential Debate with Harold Meyerson and Katrina vanden Heuvel -- something along those lines.
I missed this yesterday, but Adam Blickstein notes John McCain absurd argument that we should ignore his record of catastrophic misjudgments on vital issues of national security:
We can look back at the past and argue about whether we should have gone to war or not, whether we should have invaded or not, and that's a good academic argument.
Over 4,000 people died in this academic arguments. People need to use the term "trillion" to express its fiscal cost. And, obviously, the question about whether or not it was a good idea speaks to some important points of doctrine and theory. This isn't like quibbling over some vote on some amendment back in 1983, it was the biggest national security policy decision of the current era.
Some liberal bloggers are know are tired of the endless primary campaign, which they view as tedious. What they're not considering is that the general election will be much more tedious. All I really have to say about it is that John McCain is a foreign policy hawk and I'm not, I'm a cultural liberal and John McCain isn't, I believe in higher taxes and more generous services and John McCain doesn't.
That one sentence fully explains the case for voting for the Democratic Party's nominee, and yet the campaign will be a huge news story for months and months and all political bloggers everywhere will be required to come up with dozens of new opinions about it every month even though at the end of the day my anti-McCain argument is very, very simple and not very interesting.
Looks like someone on John McCain's staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain's family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn't have any favorite recipes, it's not as if failing to include a "Cindy's recipes" section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.
In other news, Spike from Top Chef is opening a burger joint in DC even though his previous work has primarily been in the Vietnamese genre. That's really too bad, because you know what we could use here in DC? A Vietnamese restaurant! The city's extreme weakness in this category is made all the more galling by the presence of large numbers of Vietnamese people and delicious Vietnamese restaurants right near by in Seven Corners in Fairfax County, VA. I'm pretty sure one of the restaurants from the Eden Center could move to DC, double its prices, and do well for itself. Or Spike could open a Vietnamese restaurant. But someone's got to do something.
Kevin Drum points to the polling data you'll find above taken from Shibley Telhami's report on Arab public opinion. Basically, few Arabs think that us leaving would cause some wider spiral of chaos. Kevin says "Obviously the Arab public could be wrong about this, but this strikes me as a mostly pragmatic question, not the kind of thing driven either by dislike of the U.S. or weird conspiracy mongering." I'm not sure I totally agree with that assessment. I assume that most Arabs take a dim view of U.S. motives in Iraq in maintaining a military presence there for so long and, consequently, their instincts are to believe the rosiest possible scenarios about withdrawal. Conversely, the people in the United States who do want a permanent military presence in Iraq in order to try to dominate the region are also the same people most likely to believe the bleakest possible scenarios about a quick withdrawal.
I'd say the main significance of this finding is that it's yet another piece of information about Arab public opinion that it's vital we ignore and bury, making sure it never enters the elite conversation about American foreign policy. It's vitally, utterly important that all assertions about America's role in the Middle East be guided by a combination of ideology-driven presupposition and the whispers of dictators from the Gulf and Jordan. Just as we ignored the fact that few Arabs believed an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to their region before the war, so too must we ignore the fact that few Arabs view our continued prosecution of the war as vital to their stability. We even manage to ignore the ways in which our Israel policy drives anti-American sentiment.
With that track record, surely we can ignore this, too, and go back to talking about how all hostility to the United States is driven by hatred of freedom and none of it by dislike of American foreign policy priorities. Yes we can!
I like this ad a lot. It appeals, I think, to the most broadly infuriating aspect of the American system which is not so much that a minority of people are uninsured (a huge problem for them, but not such a huge problem for everyone else) but that the entire population needs to always keep health insurance considerations in mind whenever contemplating any life choice or potential uncontrollable turn of events.
Mark Schmitt has an insightful column inspired by "bittergate" that includes the poignant observation that "The problem is none of us have answers that are adequate to the economic circumstances of the depressed Appalachian belt."
One thing that I think is worth saying about this is that it may be a lot harder to help the people who currently live in economically depressed communities than it is to help the communities themselves. Oftentimes the best way for a person to improve his or her economic condition is to move someplace else -- to somewhere where his or her skill set can provide greater rewards. But in the United States, political representation is done by geographical area, so the tendency is for the residents of a given depressed area's representatives to be represented by legislators who want to bring help to the place rather than to the people as such.
This pattern is useful to local political elites, who are thus able to turn their constituents' economic problems into a valuable patronage machine. And it does some good for the people in need. But it often amounts to giving people $20 to stay put, when $10 to facilitate their ability to pursue opportunities elsewhere would do more good. This was one of the things I liked about John Edwards' anti-poverty proposals which were focused, among other things, on helping to break up areas of entrenched poverty. And even beyond the very poor, it's often just not feasible for a broad range of people to leave homes they own in depressed areas in order to seek better opportunities elsewhere. It's hard for me to imagine a government program to turn an economically stagnating area into a growing one -- this just isn't the kind of thing government programs are very good at -- but finding ways to make it easier for people to seize the opportunities that exist around the country seems eminently practical.
If there wasn't a record, you might think that Obama was heading for a major upset victory in PA next week. Zogby has Obama just one point behind Clinton at 45%-44%.
But remember, Zogby was out in front this year predicting Obama's big wins in California and Ohio too. So it's hard for me to put too much weight in this sounding.
This illustrates a real problem with the public polling game, namely the lack of incentives to get things right. Presumably there's some level of consistent wrongness at which people stop giving you the links, readership, buzz, and whatever else it is you're looking for but it's really not clear where that is. And, indeed, for your average media poll where the objective is to produce an "interesting" article accompanying the poll, you're probably better off being wrong.
Suppose I somehow screwed up my polling and got the result that 50 percent of African-Americans say they'll vote for John McCain in November if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination. Does that sound plausible? No. Would it be a big story if I had a poll that said it was true? Yes. And if I'm in the business of producing big stories, then that means I run with the poll and come away very happy with a day's job well done.
I thought last night's debate sucked, but this is unfair:
Stephanopoulos has, over the years, shown tons of willingness to be unfair and/or inept in his coverage of the Clintons so I see no real reason to attribute his unfair or inept coverage of Barack Obama to any larger motive. Beyond that, while the questioning last night was truly egregious, allegations of special bias against Obama don't make sense. When Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner, most of the debate hostility focused on her. Her campaign and her supporters whined about it, but the complaints didn't really make sense -- of course you focus on the frontrunner. It's the same thing now.
The debate was what it was because an awful lot of TV news is silly and horrible, not because anyone was doing Clinton special favors.
One thing that I think gets unduly neglected in a lot of political conversations, especially conversations taking place within the left-of-center family, is that one really needs to know a lot more about a person than what his income is to know what his "economic interests" are.
For example, the median household income in the United States is $48,201. But if you compare a retired person living in Montana with a $48,000 annual income to a first year DC cop, and an average aircraft painter in Phoenix, both of whom would earn about the same amount of money, you'd find three people with rather different economic interests.
For one thing, despite their similar incomes, these three people are actually in rather different objective economic situations. But beyond that, a lot of their economic interests are very narrow and specific -- they have to do with federal retirement programs, or the state of the Arizona aerospace industry, or the DC government's decisions about funding priorities and the police department -- rather than with stuff about "the economy."
For all my rail enthusiasm, more and better bus service may be a more realistic option for improving urban transit, especially for cities looking to move forward in the absence of radical change in federal policy. And, indeed, even in an Yglesian rail-filled fantasy world there would still be a sizable role for buses, and it would be nice for that bus service to be as good as it can be, rather than what usually prevails today. This plan for 34th street in Manhattan is, in that light, pretty exciting and I bet there are a lot of cities that could do something similar at non-staggering prices.
Okay. In the East. I have Boston and Detroit and Orlando all winning easily (shocking). I think my Wizards will beat the Cavs this time in round three of the NBA's most mediocre rivalry. Next up, Detroit beats Orlando (of course) and (of course) Boston beats Washington and then beats Detroit
In the West, I'm taking the Lakers, Hornets, Jazz, and Suns though I'd really like to see San Antonio prevail and vindicate my skepticism about the Shaq deal. Then I think Lakers beat Jazz and Suns beat Hornets, further un-vindicating my skepticism. Then Lakers beat Suns.
Lee Sigelman writes about a new paper from Christian Grose and Jason Husser on political rhetoric. One of two major conclusions:
We find that more sophisticated campaign speech by a candidate results in a higher likelihood that a citizen will vote for that candidate, though this effect of linguistic sophistication is conditioned by voter cognition. The most highly educated voters are most likely to use the non-policy dimension of complex rhetoric in casting their vote.
In short, you appeal to highly-educated voters not by saying smarter stuff, but just by using smarter words. The really interesting thing, though, is that if I'm reading this right there's no downside to "linguistic sophistication." Non-college voters don't exhibit the effect as strongly, but it doesn't turn them off. Maybe everyone should be more like RFK and quote Aeschylus in their speeches.
I don't wear a flag pin on my lapel. Never have. And while I won't rule out the possibility of doing so in the future, I probably won't. And, yes, this is because I hate my country. But not as much as Jeremiah Wright hates it.
Somewhat related to the issue raised in last night's debate about extending the U.S. nuclear umbrella to cover Israel, it's always worth making the point that one of several reasons it would serve Israel's interests to aggressively seek a resolution of the Palestinian issue is that it would be much more feasible for the United States to extend security guarantees to Israel under those conditions. With a peace deal in place, Israel would be a friendly democracy with internationally recognized borders -- just the sort of place the U.S. would make a formal treaty with.
But as things stand, Israel has no internationally recognized borders to guarantee. Obviously, some actions like a hypothetical unprovoked Iranian nuclear first strike would obviously go far beyond the scope of border ambiguity, but nuclear-armed Israel doesn't actually need U.S. guaranteed to have a credible threat of massive retaliation. Guarantees and formal alliances would be much more useful in a much lower-intensity setting, but country without internationally recognized borders isn't a good candidate for NATO membership or other kinds of similar relationships that might be useful to Israel.
There's been something a bit odd about scanning the news all day and seeing all these accounts of media people lecturing the audience that, contrary to the opinions of the people who watched the debate last night, that the performance of the debate moderators was, in fact, very good. If voters don't think the debate focused on important, interesting topics, then too bad for them! If voters don't think the debate was informative, then too bad for them! The press, once again, gives itself a standing ovation and that's what matters.
On an unrelated note, I've been in about a million conversations navel-gazing conversations about the decline of "old media" like newspapers, magazines, and network television and never once has anyone suggested that declining audience might be in any way related to the quality of the product. Everyone knows that it's the public's duty to read newspapers, whether they find them useful and informative or not.
Nothing succeeds like success: "Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan — 300,000 in all — report symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slight more than half have sought treatment, according to a new RAND Corporation study."
I say we support the troops by continuing the war indefinitely.
I was interested to read in yesterday's bus thread that the problem with buses is that "Yuppies won't ride buses." I don't normally ride the bus because I work from home frequently and live near a Metro station, but I certainly take it some of the time. For example, yesterday morning the WMATA Ride Guide told me the fastest way to get where I was going was to take the 52/54 bus down 14th Street rather than to take the Green Line and then walk west after getting off, so I took the bus and plenty of other yuppies seemed to be on board (what's more, if yuppies aren't on the D2 route then who is?)
My sense is that the main determinants of yuppie bus usage are the determinants of everyone else's transit choices -- it all has to do with the speed and cost of taking the bus versus the speed and cost of getting around some other way. If you internalize more of the costs of driving & parking and implement strategies to make bus service faster and more frequent, more people will take the bus. Obviously, a bus can't be made to go as fast as a grade-separated heavy rail system, nor can it carry as many people, so it's better to build heavy rail where you see potential for a lot of demand, but there's not some law of nature keeping people off the bus.
Charles Krauthammer says non-proliferation is dead because the multilateral non-proliferation process has failed in Iran and North Korea. One problem with this is that though North Korea is hanging by a thread and we're arguably in the neighborhood of failure in Iran, we haven't quite definitively failed yet. The other problem is that, as Robert Farley points out, the reason we've had problems in Iran and North Korea is that the Bush administration, on the recommendation of the Krauthammers of the world, "decided to reject any and all multilateral efforts at nonproliferation in favor of... well, it's not even clear that what the US tried can be referred to as a coherent strategy."
The logical response isn't to get more invested in the kind of unilateralism and doomed bigs for hegemony that got us into this mess. Rather, everyone needs to first read Heads in the Sand and second return to the kind of internationalism that was working pretty well as non-proliferation policy before Bush came along.
Here's an interesting story about the resilience of marine life at the Bikini Atoll nuclear test site. Back in 1954, an extremely powerful nuclear weapon was detonated there that "generated a wave of heat measuring 99,000ºF and spread mist-like radioactive fallout as far as Japan and Australia." Nevertheless, "much to the surprise of a team of research divers who explored the area, the mile-wide crater left by the detonation has made a remarkable recovery and is now home to a thriving underwater ecosystem." Naturally, like any sensible person, Cato's Indur Goklany reacted to this with a post about how global warming's not so bad:
99,000 degrees Fahrenheit! By comparison the upper-bound estimate for global warming is a puny global temperature increase of 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit (less in the ocean). So even if global warming wipes out life on earth, global warming catastrophists can take comfort that nature will, as it inevitably must, reassert itself.
I miss the good old days of denialism. That at least make sense. If the environmentalists were just mistaken and there was no global warming, then of course we wouldn't want to take action to stop it. But now there's still demand for rationales for inaction, but the straightforward denialist position has become untenable, so we're getting a lot of really weird ideas.
Public domain photo of Operation Crossroads Event Baker explosion
Although he has abandoned his rallying cry to retake the majority, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Ensign of Nevada is using the specter of an almost filibuster-proof Democratic majority to motivate potential GOP supporters in November.
You know things are bad when your political party won't even pretend it's possible that they'll pick up seats months ahead of an election. Back in January 2007, the congressional Republicans reached the conclusion that lockstep support for the wildly unpopular president and his wildly unpopular war was the right way to respond to the Democrats' big win in 2006. I think some folks are going to be standing around in January 2009 wondering why they thought that was a good idea.
Smells like success: "Trying to stem the infiltration of militia fighters, American forces have begun to build a massive concrete wall that will partition Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite neighborhood in the Iraqi capital." Whatever happened to destroying the village in order to save it?
Larry Bartels compares the political behavior of people who live in small towns, make less than $60,000 a year, and don't have college degrees (the "small town working class") with those who live in cities or suburbs, make more than $60,000 a year, and do have college degrees:
Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.
Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.
When you get down to it, this is about what you would expect. As people get more affluent, their votes are based more an airy ethical concerns -- religious views and things like environmentalism or concern for gay rights loom larger -- whereas people facing larger objective economic struggles tend to focus more on the search for solutions to their economic problems.
You may have seen The New York Times' April 17 article on insurance companies "tiering" their pharmaceutical coverage so that for some of the more expensive drugs patients can't use the standard flat plan co-payment, but instead need to pay out of pocket a percentage of the (very high) underlying cost of the drugs.
Alyssa Rosenberg looked into a related issue for Government Executive and found that many of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program plans are doing this now. Stranger, the Office of Personnel Management seems to have managed to approve these plans without people quite realizing what was happening. It's a reminder, among other things, that when we talk about everyone having health insurance that still leaves a broad range of possible scenarios that hinge on the issue of what "health insurance" amounts to. In other words, how generous will the coverage be? With underlying medical costs soaring, there's tons of pressure to simply save money by making the coverage not-so-generous. But a brave new world in which we all have health insurance but it's bad insurance isn't such an appealing scenario.
Ken Silverstein kindly mentions my book over at Harper's in the course of disagreeing with me about the merits of U.S. diplomatic outreach to Hamas in the absence of Israeli willingness to talk with the Hamas leadership. He writes:
Why would the United States government allow Israel to determine to whom it talks? The only way to reach a political settlement in the Middle East is for an American president to pressure Israel to make concessions. It’s hard to exert much pressure if our government allows Israel to determine who speaks for the Palestinians.
I don't think our substantive positions are very far apart here. It seems to me that Israel needs to try to talk with the Hamas leadership (the idea that this would give them "credibility," much-mooted in the hawkish press, strikes me as bizarre -- as if the Arab public finds people more credible the more closely associated with Israel they are) and that the U.S. government ought to pressure Israel to do so. But it's a little hard for me to see what we could talk to Hamas about in the absence of Israeli participation -- the U.S. can and should play a constructive role in trying to resolve the conflict, but talks on the Israeli-Arab conflict need Israeli participation.
A later Silverstein post notes that Israel and Hamas are almost certainly already talking through backchannels. Which is good. The United States can and should participate in whatever's happening in that regard and try to lay the groundwork (including by pressuring Israel insofar as that's necessary) for all the stakeholders to start meeting against and talking resolution.
Former Senators Sam Nunn and David Boren, two leading members of what I guess will be the penultimate generation (counting Sens. Pryor, Lincoln, and Landrieux as the last of their specieis) of white southern moderate Democratic legislators announced their support of Barack Obama today. The Obama campaign is playing this as a national security thing, with everything in the press release being security-related. That's probably for the best -- Nunn and Boren are both Very Serious People who actually deserve to be taken pretty seriously -- whereas on domestic issues Boren was horrible and I don't really know anything about Nunn.
UPDATE: Okay, not "Dixiecrats" like Strom Thurmond 1948 segregationists. That's not what I meant, and it's unfair. But we need a word that's more specific than "southern Democrats" that distinguishes old-school white moderate Democrats from either southern black Democrats or politicians like Tim Kaine and Mark Warner who have a more "post-Southern" vibe.
I'm finding conservative arguments about the centrality of family breakdown issues to a lot of social problems in the United States increasingly compelling. The trouble is that few conservatives seem to have policy proposals that are reasonably likely to make a serious dent in the problem. And then there's Finland: "A proposed bill before Parliament would grant Finnish workers, already entitled to 25 paid days of vacation a year and as many as 10 paid public holidays, one more week of 'love vacation' to reduce, its sponsor said, a high divorce rate and revive passion in a population whose workdays are growing longer."
At least one member of the center-right Christian Democratic party says he might be willing to sign on if you made it unpaid leave.
Kevin and Ezra note that Hillary Clinton seems to have made a huge tactical error by directly inserting herself into the "bitter" controversy.
I think this is a misreading of the situation. It's almost impossible for Clinton to win the nomination at this point. She can't afford to "do the smart thing," help her campaign do a bit better, and then lose anyway. She can't afford to let the game come to her. If she's not going to drop out (which is what she ought to do), then she needs to push everything as hard as she can. She needs to make long-odds plays, because only long-odds plays have any chance of resulting in a Clinton win. It's smart, disciplined, rational politics. It's also extremely selfish, but that's another matter.
I saw this proposal on what I think is the campaign website for the Green Party candidate for Mayor of Paris. To read about it, you'll need to either know French or else trust the whims of Google's automatic translator, but the basic idea, as seen on the card, is to create a generous program along the lines of food stamps here in the U.S. but specifically targeted at the purchase of fresh produce.
In the developed world we're (fortunately) past the point where inability to afford an adequate quantity of calories is a series problem, but instead we've got a serious problem of people getting too fat while simultaneously not getting enough nutrition. This sort of targeted program could help, though so would altering our absurd health- and environment-destroying agricultural subsidies policies. We could even keep subsidizing agriculture to a ridiculous extent but just try to shift to subsidizing healthy stuff instead of corn, beet sugar, corn-bases sugar substitutes, etc.
On the Clinton conference call this morning, Howard Wolfson--under rather aggressive questioning from Mother Jones' David Corn--said he didn't know how Hillary felt about her husbands pardons of two former Weathermen. But he drew a distinction by pointing out that no Weathermen ever held fundraisers for Hillary Clinton.
Wolfson's got a distinction drawn, alright, but doesn't it cut the other way -- I'd much rather vote for a politician who received favors from a bad person than a politician who's given favors to a bad person. This whole subject is, however, essentially BS when flying in either direction.
Jon Chait makes some pretty short work of his colleague Kirchick's dumb post on Joe Lieberman (if only other Planksters did the same more often...) but if anything Jon concedes too much. For example, agreeing that Lieberman "ran as a pro-war candidate."
Did he? I dunno. He ran ads saying things like "I'm staying because I want to help end the war in Iraq in a way that brings stability to the Mid-East and doesn't leave us even more vulnerable" and made statements on the trail about how "No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do." That kind of thing isn't literally inconsistent with his post-election position on Iraq, but I think it's clear that Lieberman was trying to use artful wording to present himself as much less of an Iraq hawk than he really is.
Certainly, Lieberman very much argued that Connecticut voters shouldn't view the election as a referendum on the war. After all, a referendum on the war would have meant Lieberman would lose the election since the war, enormously unpopular around the country by 2006, was even more unpopular in Connecticut. Instead, Lieberman tried to imply that he and Lamont were both for ending the war, and also argued that it would be foolish to base your support on a single issue. Today, Lieberman is arguing that John McCain's fanatical support for endless war in Iraq is a decisive reason to vote for him even though Lieberman nominally disagrees with McCain's positions on a whole host of other issues. That's a substantial change from the Lieberman who ran in 2006, on both what to think about the war and it's salience as an issue.
My understanding, meanwhile, is that small proprietors are just about the most hard-core rightwingers in America in terms of their political allegiances (really big companies need to hedge their bets politically) so it's hard to believe that the (alleged) decline of local ownership in small towns is responsible for any political shifts to the right that may or may not have occurred.
John McCain's campaign released the Senators tax returns, but with a catch -- we don't get to see Mrs. McCain's taxes, even though she's an extremely wealthy heiress who actually has the bulk of the family's money. That's a preposterous dodge, but it's actually somewhat less preposterous than the official rationale for the dodge: "In the interest of protecting the privacy of her children, Mrs. McCain will not be releasing her personal tax returns."
What could that possibly mean? Suppose the Clintons tried to use Chelsea's privacy as an excuse not to release their financial information -- people would have laughed. Then screamed.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the rather silly controversy over whether or not Hillary Clinton said "screw 'em" with regard to white working class southern conservatives at a meeting thirteen years ago (yes, this is the stuff of which controversies are made), but I'd say Theda Skocpol has the definitive take on the matter.
Here's the margin of victory differentials for the Western Conference. As you can see, Utah and Phoenix both underperformed in terms of wins and losses relative to the margin of victory metric, whereas the Hornets and Spurs both overperformed. Margin of victory is, however, the better predictor of future performance.
Steve Simon has a great article in Foreign Affairs putting things like the "awakening" strategy in a proper historical and strategic context, arguing that rather than a success in a state-building mission in Iraq we're bolstering the centripetal forces that are tearing the country apart: "The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state. If anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against the central government and against one another. In other words, the recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq."
I've forgotten to wish everyone a happy Passover. And also, of course, a happy first day of the NBA playoffs. Good thing there are no Jewish players I guess.
It's a showdown of epic proportions as Mayor Adrian Fenty is threatening to levy $1,000 fines on any DC cabs that don't shift to charging people via a meter, but with less than two weeks to go few drivers have installed meters. One friend of mine says he's seen a meter in a cab, but I haven't and nobody else I know seems to have seen one.
All are recommended for those interested in the subject, but obviously you won't have time to read any of them because you'll be busy with Heads in the Sand.
Since MoveOn endorsed Hillary Clinton's opponent, it's hardly surprising that Clinton has not-so-nice things to say about MoveOn. But the bad dynamic between Clinton and MoveOn is a reminder of one of the fundamental problems with her candidacy. The Clintons, and many of their key supporters, come out of a school of political analysis which holds that the problem with the Democratic Party in the United States is that progressive institutions are too strong. Only by curbing the influence of these institutions, the theory goes, can Democratic Party politicians engage in the tactical repositioning necessary to win elections.
Whether or not that was true in 1988-92 or, indeed, whether or not it remains true today, this is clearly not a long-term strategy for progressive politics. This "crush the left, move to the right" theory of electoral political may or may not work for politicians in the short run, but to create big change you need to strengthen progressive institutions and move the entire spectrum to the left.
As we head into the final minutes, let me just note that there's something a bit odd about a rivalry that's this intense -- driven by three-straight first-round playoff matchups -- between teams that are basically unimpressive. I mean, it would be a genuinely shocking Black Swan event if either of these squads won a championship. Probably nobody outside of DC or Cleveland really cares about this matchup, but we care a lot.
Gene Healy published this post on John McCain's fetishization of the idea of serving great causes a while ago, but I really like this one parenthetical joke:
McCain’s sometime ideological guru and op-ed page cheerleader, David Brooks, expresses similar themes in his writings. Even in Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s foray into “comic sociology,” he warns darkly of “the temptations that accompany affluence.” “The fear is that America will decline not because it overstretches, but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service.” (As a young man, Brooks served abroad with the Wall Street Journal Europe.)
This is a theme with a substantial lineage including, notably, important affinities with a lot of Theodore Roosevelt's thinking. I have a piece forthcoming about McCain's foreign policy which notes that one distressing possibility is that he actually believes this stuff and sees war-induced hardship as a benefit rather than a cost when thinking about foreign policy decisions. The President was, I think, getting at a similar idea when he claimed to envy our troops serving on the front lines since he was missing out on on the "exciting" and "romantic" opportunity to experience "great danger."
Normally when you hear this kind of stuff it mostly seems foolish, as when middle aged men such as Brooks or Bush who chose not to serve when they had the chance start musing about the romance of war. Coming from someone with John McCain's background and experiences it has much more credibility (which I think Brooks was and is shrewd enough to understand -- part of his initial late-nineties enthusiasm for McCain is precisely driven by the reality that McCain is one of the few politicians who can say this kind of stuff in a credible way) but also more troubling in some respects. McCain, after all, knows what he's talking about so it seems relatively unlikely that he's going to suddenly realize how perverse this is (the risk is that life will get good, we need policies to ensure a healthy baseline of death and destruction ) and reconsider.
Paul Krugman reiterates: "Malthus was right for the whole of human history until his own time." Now here's my question -- is it a coincidence that Malthus' work appeared just at the time when his conclusions were, for the first time ever, no longer true? Or is the origin of Malthus' level of understanding of the economic system inextricably linked to the fact that the Malthusian era was ending.
This is must-read stuff from the New York Times. It's about the ex-generals who show up on television as "military analysts" presumably there to provide a neutral point of view. In practice, however, it seems that they mostly have close ties to defense contractors as lobbyists or executives and are, in fact, just part of the Bush administration communications apparatus.
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Heads in the Sand
