To me, thinking about all this mostly reminds us that American politics isn't especially ideological and hasn't historically ever been especially ideological. Tradition and institutional structure have given us a robust two-party system. Geography and immigration have given us an enormous, extremely diverse country. Typical democracies have many fewer people and substantially more political parties. Consequently, practical politics in the United States revolves around a competition between two political coalitions that are, of necessity, pretty slapdash and unwieldy. The primary fact about an American's political allegiance, under the circumstances, is his attitude toward those coalitions not his or her abstract ideas about how things ought to be. A "conservative" in this sense just is someone who supports the Republican coalition versus the Democratic one and who in internal debates tends to support the institutionalized conservative movement's "three pillars" approach against various reformist tendencies.
This is in a lot of respects disappointing for a writer, since it involves people who are interested in ideas spending a lot of our time doing "gotcha" stuff about how the other team is desperately in hoc to malign interests. But I think that if you look at our history overall, you'll see that America has benefitted from having a political system that's relatively comfortable acknowledging the essentially grubby and transactional nature of real-world democratic politics rather than one dominated by a lot of aspirations to purism and total victory.
I got to request to say something about Hannah Rosin's article on the Memphis crime experience. I don't have a ton to say about it other than that you should read the article, since I think the article itself says about everything I would want to say. But to give it a brief gloss, people hoped that tearing down public housing towers and replacing them with Section 8 vouchers would, by dispersing the people on public assistance, help mitigate the social pathologies associated with poverty by breaking up "pockets of poverty." In fact, as Rosin reports, dispersing impoverished people mostly seems to have dispersed rather than dispelled, the crime problems associated with pockets of poverty.
I'm not 100 percent sure where that leaves us. Housing vouchers still seem like a better idea than "the projects" for various reasons related to economic efficiency and choice. And as far as crime goes, we seem to mostly still know what we know -- higher wages for low-skill workers, higher educational attainment, the presence of more police officers patrolling the street, throwing enormous quantities of young men in prison, fewer drug addicts, and reductions in the amount of lead poisoning all seem to lower crime.
Now, there’s no question that men played a big role in Mrs. Clinton’s narrow loss, starting with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Mark Penn. And the evidence of misogyny in the press and elsewhere is irrefutable, even if it was not the determinative factor in the race. But the notion that all female Clinton supporters became “angry white women” once their candidate lost — to the hysterical extreme where even lifelong Democrats would desert their own party en masse — is itself a sexist stereotype. That’s why some of the same talking heads and Republican operatives who gleefully insulted Mrs. Clinton are now peddling this fable on such flimsy anecdotal evidence.
Exactly. In a country of 300 million people, there are bound to be some folks whose preference order is Clinton-McCain-Obama. And some of those people will be women. But the idea that Democratic women would defect en masse to the GOP in a fit of pique is a preposterous notion that seems to be founded on the underlying assumption that women can't respond to their political choices as rationally as men can. Needless to say, as Rich goes on to point out the thus-far available polling shows us the traditional gender gap where the party whose agenda is more favorable to the interests of women gets more support from women.
I'm not sure I agree with the specific claims Jonathan Cohn is making here about Sebelius and Webb, but he does make the correct meta-level point which is that it's a huge mistake for activists and so forth to think about the veepstakes primarily as a question of short-term political tactics. Becoming Vice President of the United States dramatically increases the odds that you'll become President down the road, so it's actually really important -- more important than is generally recognized -- that the person who's picked be someone who's substantively good.
Tyndall said that if he were NBC News President Steve Capus, a short list for the position would include White House correspondent David Gregory, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell — both of whom have guest-hosted “Meet the Press” — as well as political director Chuck Todd and “Hardball” host Chris Matthews. Two dark-horse candidates could be “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough or perhaps former “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw — that is, if he had any interest in returning to such a prominent role.
Matthews seems like the most likely choice to me, since for several years now in addition to Hardball he's been doing a more staid Chris Matthews Show on Sunday mornings that appears to me to have been training wheels for eventually stepping into Russert's shoes. I'd say the best choice would probably be Chuck Todd, who based on his on-camera work during primary evenings would bring a different approach rather than trying to do what Russert did and not doing it as well.
UPDATE: Of course you could really shake things up by going outside the box with Mélissa Theuriau but there's no evidence she speaks English. Closer to the box, several commenters have suggested Gwen Ifill who would be good if NBC is willing to hire someone from outside the network.
I've seen some sentiment to the effect that the Lakers' collapse in Game 4 "proves" the invalidity of comparisons between Kobe and Michael Jordan. That seems silly. The reason comparisons are illegitimate is that Jordan was clearly a much better player.
Kobe Bryant's a great scorer, and in his highest-scoring season (2008) he earned 35.4 points per game. But Jordan scored 37.1 ppq in 1987. And Jordan did it by shooting more efficiently, with a TS% of .562 to .559 for Kobe. In terms of scoring efficiency, Kobe's best season was 2007 when his TS% was .580, but Jordan bested that five times (1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1996). In Kobe's best rebounding year (2003), he got 6 per game, which Jordan bested in 1989, 1990, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, and 2003 and tied in 1991. Kobe topped out at 5.3 assists per game in 2005. Jordan got more in 1985, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993. Kobe's best year for turnovers was 2002 when he only gave it up 2.6 times per game. Jordan did better in 1986, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 2003.
There's just no comparison, and it shouldn't be considered some huge knock on Kobe to observe that he was and is a clearly inferior player to the best player ever. I feel like even though Jordan is generally acknowledged as the greatest, people actually wind up underestimating him because the Jordan they remember best is the Jordan of the second threepeat. But that player, great as he was, was in his thirties and only a shadow of the peak-performance Jordan of the late-1980s and early 1990s.
UPDATE: Consider that in the 1988-89 season Jordan averaged eight boards, eight assists, three steals, and 32.5 points per game shooting 54 percent from the field and 85 percent on free throws; Kobe's never put up anything remotely comparable to that.
You would kind of think that when a major daily newspaper reviews your book, someone would let you know. But apparently not! Heads in the Sand was reviewed by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan a few days ago in The Los Angeles Times. I just wanted to take minor issue with one thing:
Yglesias occasionally assumes the bloggerish pose of an outsider screaming at the Establishment, but in its substance his preferred foreign policy is as Establishment as could be. What he offers is a livelier version of the sort of "liberal internationalist" platform that might be found in, say, a task-force report put out by a center-left think tank.
To me, though, this is the point. My ideas really are basically the ideas that were at the core of the bipartisan, establishment consensus throughout the Cold War years. And they're ideas that could and should have been the key ideas of center-left think tanks in the post-9/11 world. But that's not what actually happened. Instead, a set of ideas that originally existed as a fringe right-wing position wound up being espoused not only by nearly the entire Republican Party but by a huge swathe of the broader establishment. The kind of institutions that you would expect to try to put the country back on an even keel -- The New York Times's foreign affairs columnist, The Washington Post's editorial page, the top foreign policy officials from the second Clinton administration, the Brookings Institution, etc. -- instead hopped aboard George W. Bush's madcap adventure.
Like everyone else, I do enjoy a bit of anti-establishment posturing now and again. But on another level, I'd really like my ideas to be espoused by the establishment. I think they're good ideas! I'd like them to be implemented! And as Kurtz-Phelan says, I think they've traditionally been espoused by the establishment. And America traditionally hasn't engaged in Iraq-scale blunders. But in the wake of 9/11 we saw a massive, system-wide failure of our elites that the country is only beginning to recover from, and that seems -- despite its incredibly disastrous consequences -- to have permanently pushed certain key institutions into loony land where the height of "seriousness" is to think politicians should muse aloud about launching an unprovoked attack on Iran.
In addition to his other ills, apparently George W. Bush is causing massive delays at Heathrow Airport and, as Jim Manzi deftly points out, no doubt breeding massive anti-Americanism among U.K. air travelers.
I like traveling to unusual places. Even a spot that's unpleasant, in a conventional sense, can be fun to visit just to see what it's like, amass the relevant anecdotes, etc. But I think I'll be staying far away from Yakutsk.
No idea how seriously the idea of Wesley Clark as VP is being considered, but he's a good surrogate attacking John McCain's alleged national security credentials who's got the credibility and the guts to take it right to him.
One is accustomed to Barack Obama giving good speeches, and his father's day address is no different. This one will, I expect, be a pretty big hit politically, too, since it has certain conservativish resonances about the centrality of family conditions to our social problems.
The New York Timesremarks that "Obama laid out his case in stark terms that would be difficult for a white candidate to make" which is doubtless true. Nevertheless, it's worth pointing out that while the level of single-parent households is lower in white families than in black ones, the trend is toward increase and has been for some time. The sorts of problems stereotypically associated with black families, in short, are becoming more and more common across the demographic spectrum.
Clayton Williams is a prominent person in Texas politics. Prominent enough to secure the GOP gubernatorial election in 1990. During this election campaign he said various things that decent people find abhorrent, such as joking about rape that "As long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it." These remarks were publicized in Texas and perhaps played a role in Williams' 1990 loss. But this is a big country, and there are lots of non-decent people out there. Thus, Williams was tapped as a fundraiser for John McCain and put together an event that was going to raise $300,00 for McCain. So far, so good -- we already know that McCain has a fondness for sexist jokes.
But uh-oh, this fundraiser was scheduled for the time period when McCain is trying to woo women disappointed by Hillary Clinton's loss by touring his love of Abba. So when the McCain campaign got asked about the "lie back and enjoy it" remark, they swiftly canceled the fundraiser.
So that was the story -- McCain cancels fundraiser. Except now it turns out that the fundraiser's not canceled and the $300,000 is still being banked, the venue is just shifting to someone else's house. But to whatever extent McCain would have owed Williams favors pre-"cancellation" he still owes him favors now. It was the bundling of the contributions, not the use of Williams' house, that was the thing of value Williams was offering McCain.
The answer, of course, is that it would be absurd to judge Duncan's entire career on the basis of one game during which his teammates shot 22-59 from the field, including a combined 10-30 performance from Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. I doubt that anyone thought for one moment about writing such a stupid, slanted article about Duncan in the wake of that game. So it is worth asking why so many people--from heavy hitting mainstream writers to Joe Blogger--instantly had such a visceral anti-Kobe Bryant reaction to game four.
Is this really so hard to figure out? I think if Kobe weren't a rapist people would have fewer visceral anti-Kobe reactions. Across a whole variety of dimensions, Kobe's not "boring" like Duncan but by the same token nobody is predisposed to knock a solid citizen who sports four rings. Obviously, Kobe's extracurricular activities aren't stricty relevant to assessing his hoops skills, but I can imagine greater injustices than an athlete being judged unusually harshly due to his record of bad acts in real life. The fact that Kobe's partisans insist not only that he's an excellent basketball player, but that he deserves to be compared to the clearly superior Jordan doesn't help either. Most guys' fans are prepared to accept a compliment.
Lotta ups and downs in this one. The Lakers don't at all look to me like a team that's poised to win two in Boston, but plenty of weird stuff has happened so far. Consider this your game five thread.
The idea of a Progressive Book Club to help connect progressive authors with progressive audiences has been in the works for some time, and it's very exciting to see it coming to fruition this week.
It doesn't seem to be working thus far, but John McCain continues to make a strong pitch for the support of Clinton-backing women:
"I admire and respect her," McCain said of Clinton.
Aides suggested that McCain's support for a gas tax holiday, a hawkish foreign policy and steps against climate change would appeal to many women.
Indeed, McCain respects Clinton so much that he's willing to say he respects her after joking around for a bit with an audience about calling her a "bitch" calling one's ex-wife a "bitch" (particularly odd considering how well McCain's ex-wife has treated him and how poorly he's treated his ex-wife):
Anyways, we'll see how this goes, but one way of respecting Senator Clinton would be to at least acknowledge that she was running for office to advance certain public policy goals and that John McCain doesn't want to advance those goals.
Via Spencer Ackerman, a brilliant report from Tom Lasseter about folks sent to Gitmo on terrorism charges who turn out not to be terrorists at all. Unless you're George W. Bush or John McCain, you're going to believe that even guilty men are entitled to the due process of law. But as we debate the Bush/McCain position in favor of arbitrary detention, it is worth recalling that one major reason for our procedural rights is that arbitrary and unaccountable power turns out not to be omniscient. Lots of the "terrorists" Bush and McCain want to keep in legal limbo aren't terrorists at all, but if Bush and McCain had their way, we'd never know that and folks in their situation would have no recourse.
In related news, Lasseter also has a story about systematic abuse at the Bagram detention center where "guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain," hung them by their wrists, etc., among other things. Maybe you think this is just terrorists getting what they deserve, but again you can consider the case of Nazar Chaman Gul who was imprisoned and tortured because "When U.S. soldiers raided the house he was visiting, acting on a tip from a tribal rival who was seeking revenge against another man, they apparently confused Gul with a militant with a similar name — who was also imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to an Afghan intelligence official and Gul's American lawyer."
Paulie Abeles has decided that she should dedicate her time and energy to seeking to exclude Sally Hemings's descendants from official gatherings of descendants of Thomas Jefferson. Sounds a bit odd and slightly racist. She's even been known to resort to dirty tricks in her question to keep the Jefferson clan all-white. So far, just a strange tale, but Ben Smith reports that she's also a McCain organizer:
A key organizer of John McCain's meeting Saturday with former supporters of Hillary Clinton is best known for her role in another bitter American fight: The effort by some white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to keep his possible African-American descendants out of family gatherings.
Paula Abeles emailed Politico yesterday to complain that her group had gotten short shrift in a blog item, writing, "I initiated the teleconference with McCain on Saturday and was solely responsible for the guest list." Another Clinton backer at the event, Will Bower, confirmed that she was "integral" to assembling the group.
This, of course, is the faction of Clinton supporters -- people who don't like black people -- where McCain has a very good shot at picking up new voters. The people who backed Clinton on feminist grounds or because they thought she had the savvy to deliver big time progressive legislation probably won't be following in Abeles' footsteps.
Peter Boyer has a pretty solid profile of Keith Olberman and how he has and continues to change the cable broadcasting universe. But this paragraph about the response to Olbermann's first "special commentary" bothered me:
His bosses loved it. “I think we’re onto something,” the president of NBC News, Steve Capus, told me. “That’s what we keep hearing from the audience, more and more, is that they appreciate that we have people who are actually speaking truth to power, or being transparent in their own personal viewpoints.” That’s another way of saying that liberals, after many failed attempts, seem finally to have found their own Bill O’Reilly. Fox News still dominates the cable competition, and MSNBC over all continues to lag behind second-place CNN. O’Reilly’s audience is more than twice as big as Olbermann’s, which airs in the same prime-time period. But Olbermann’s ratings grew by nearly seventy-five per cent the year he began doing Special Comments, and the show is making money, a rare hit in MSNBC’s twelve-year run. “All of a sudden, he took off,” Griffin says. “In ways that MSNBC never had a show take off.”
How many failed attempts were there, exactly? My recollection of the relevant history is that first O'Reilly was successful. Then, because you're not allowed to put liberals on television, networks responded to his success by putting more conservatives on. Then someone at MSNBC had the crazy idea of giving Phil Donohue a show. Then Donohue's show became MSNBC's most popular program. At which point MSNBC canceled it because you're not allowed to put liberals on television. Some time after that, MSNBC put Keith Olbermann on intending, as Boyer reports, for his show to be a “newscast of record." Then, by accident, Olbermann started doing some liberal stuff. And it was successful, which based on the track record (one effort to put a liberal on cable and his show became the network's highest-rated program) is exactly what you would expect.
Meanwhile, I was watching This Week on ABC yesterday morning for the first time in a while, and I was surprised to see Robert Reich on their panel 'o pundits since, after all, you're not allowed to put liberals on television. Then they panned out and I saw that the panel also included Torie Clarke and George WIll, thus granting ABC amnesty under the "unless they're outnumbered two to one" exception to the "no liberals on television" rule.
Segway sales booming in response to high gas prices. A couple of weeks ago, I overheard someone who seemed to be an energy policy guy remarking that he thought it was weird that you don't see electric mopeds. I'm enjoying my conventional bicycle a lot. DC's mayor just bought one of those tiny Smart Cars and ditched his SUV. I suspect we'll start seeing a lot more diversity of conveyances in the future, as people and institutions try to tailor their choices more precisely to what they really need.
I have my own personal nomination for vice president for McCain. It's Rudy Giuliani, precisely because he shares the vision of a practical, reforming, war-winning Republican Party that inspires John McCain, plus the stronger-than-usual grounds for hoping that he might be the rare candidate who can make a difference in an essential state--in this case, New Jersey.
Because more warmongering and corrupt associates is exactly what John McCain needs! At a minimum, I think this choice would be good news for liberal bloggers. Tim Pawlenty seems much less mockable.
Photo courtesy of Victory NH used under a Creative Commons license
How does your own experience reflect on the fact that the supposedly democratizing aspects of blogs have been co-opted by the traditional media? Do you think that there is a kind of failure in now being under the imprimatur of the Atlantic? Doesn't the fact that every Atlantic blogger is Ivy-League educated and old media connected undercut the notion that the web has opened up avenues in media previously denied to "regular people"?
I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. The fact that The Atlantic's bloggers tend to have gone to fancy schools reflects the fact that, as has long been the case, it's really helpful to have gone to a fancy school if you want to get a job at a prestigious magazine. The democratizing power of the internet hasn't, in other words, democratized the hiring practices of The Atlantic.
What it has done, however, is democratized acquiring an audience. It used to be that to have a big audience for your writing, you needed to get hired by a periodical with an established audience. But these days, a very large portion of the most-read political blogs are upstart operations -- DailyKos, FireDogLake, Talking Points Memo, Atrios, etc. That's where the democracy comes in. Of course, being associated with a prominent brand can help you get readers. And so can being well-connected more generally. In particular, it's much easier to launch a new online product if it's associated with an existing, successful online product. The Internet has not, in other words, completely eliminated the barriers to entry. But it has reduced them.
It's difficult to start a new blog without institutional support and make it successful, but it's easier than starting a new magazine. And it's easier for institutions of all kinds to launch or acquire blogs that become successful (think of the Center for American Progress's wildly successful ThinkProgress) than it would be for those institutions to start new magazines. Consequently, the competition for eyeballs online is quite a bit fiercer than is the competition for print readers (Time competes with Newsweek, US News and World Report, and that's it -- no blog has such an empty niche -- and most newspapers don't have any competitors at all) and established position isn't nearly as useful as it is in old media.
Does that mean the internet is a level playing field? No. Does it make online communications a completely democratic medium? No. But is the field more level and more democratic than print? Absolutely.
17 years ago, a storm rendered the former Klingle Road through Rock Creek Park unusable. Ever since then, there's been an on-again, off-again controversy about whether to rebuild it. Those in favor say:
"I don't understand her position at all," [Joe] Keyerleber said. "This hiker-biker trail is such a myth. It's way too steep!"
Well to explain things, I suppose it is true that the desire to create a hiking/bike path isn't the premiere issue here. Rather, the larger point is that we have a city most of whose residents don't commute daily to work by car. The city also has some traffic congestion issues. If you opened a new road, that would ease traffic. Which would make driving more attractive. In which case, somewhat more people would start driving to work on their daily commute. So in the end, you'd have the same congestion problem, but a higher overall level of pollution.
If, by contrast, we used the land (which is in the middle of a park) and some of the money for recreational purposes, and the rest of the money to fund our heavily-used-but-in-need-of-repairs transit system we'd be doing a favor to the environment and to public health and in the end the traffic will ultimately be the same either way. I note that my city council representative (and quite possibly yours too if you live in DC and are the sort of person who reads blogs), Jim Graham, is the Council's leading proponent of rebuilding the road and I'm not happy about it.
Obama campaign announces a bunch of new senior hires for the general election:
Constituency Director: Brian Bond – formerly LGBT Outreach Director at the DNC
National Field Director: Jon Carson – formerly Obama for America Voter Contact Director
Senior Advisor to the Campaign and Chief of Staff to Michelle Obama: Stephanie Cutter
Industrial States Regional Director: Paul Diogardi – formerly Political Director for the Democratic Governor’s Association.
Battleground States Director: Jen O’Malley Dillon – formerly Iowa State Director for John Edwards for President
Chief of Staff to the Vice Presidential Nominee: Patti Solis Doyle
Latino Vote Director: Temo Figueroa – formerly Obama for America National Field Director
First Americans Vote Director: Wizipan Garriott
Northeast Regtional Director: Eureka Gilkey – formerly Obama for America Deputy Political Director
50-State Voter Registration Director: Jason Green – formerly Obama for America political and field staff
Campaign Chief of Staff: Jim Messina – formerly Chief of Staff to Senator Max Baucus
LGBT Vote Director: Dave Noble – formerly of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
West Regional Director: Matt Rodriguez –.formerly Obama for America New Hampshire State Director
Senior Advisor: Michael Strautmanis
African American Vote Director: Rick Wade
Patti Solis Doyle, former campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, as the chief of staff-designate for the vice presidential nominee seems like a noteworthy pick. Stephanie Cutter was a key spokesperson for John Kerry's campaign and before that was Communications Director for Ted Kennedy, so that's a pretty high-powered choice to work with Michele Obama.
If America had a President such that political leaders in the U.K. didn't feel the need to apologize about going to meet him? Surely it can't be good that "talks to the President of the United States when he comes to town" counts as a political liability for politicians in friendly countries.
Peter Bautista asks: "How to make public authorities, like New York's MTA, more publicly accountable?"
This is a very good question and I don't have a great answer to it. By way of punting, I'll note that I doubt you could solve the problems in this regard in isolation from the more general problem of lack of accountability in local government. There's very little competition in local elections, which naturally leads to a lack of accountability. And key transit states like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Pennsylvania find themselves in the top ten most corrupt list which doesn't help.
These are important issues. I've increasingly come to believe that questions about the quality of government -- not just in a pure goo-goo sense of avoiding corruption, but in the real-world sense that some public agencies are well-run and others are poorly-run -- are more important that people realize. Effective agencies (the public schools in Massachusetts, the American military, and the bulk of the public sector in Scandinavia) attract public support, public funds, public enthusiasm and wind up in a virtuous circle. Dysfunctional agencies breed cynicism, corruption, low pay, and despair. Merely changing policies in the absence of the ability to actually get the job done (Brazil has very admirable laws against doing this but it doesn't stop anyone, and in theory there are people in charge of preventing stuff like this in DC) doesn't accomplish anything.
Jon Chait wants to rebuild Klingle Road and sees opposition to the project as driven solely by a desire of nearby property owners to keep their backyards quiet. In response to my post on the subject he queries:
If we're going to try to encourage public transit by making life hard for drivers, why do it by randomly closing roads that happen to run through wealthy areas whose residents have the clout to keep them closed? Why not jack up the tax on cars, or have the city periodically scatter shards of broken glass in the streets?
I think the case against periodically scattering shards of broken glass in the streets is pretty clear, but in case it's not -- doing so would be hazardous to pedestrians, cyclists, commercial vehicles, etc., and as such it doesn't suggest itself as a reasonable method of discouraging automobile use. Jacking up the tax on cars sounds like a good idea to me. I'd also favor congestion pricing, reduction in the amount of free parking made available, etc.
But to be clear on the question at hand, I don't own any property that abuts Klingle Road or even live in the area, and I'm not some kind of hypocrite who refuses to apply the same principle generally. Closing down entire roads probably isn't the best way to go, but I would strongly favor eliminating car traffic lanes throughout the city in order to make dedicated bus lanes, bike lanes, or streetcar tracks. And built-up areas should not, in general, be investing money in building new roads or (what amounts to the same thing) rebuilding old ones that have been closed. New road capacity in a place like DC is going to do very little to relieve traffic congestion over the long run (to reduce congestion you need congestion pricing -- otherwise the uncongested, unpriced road is a valuable resource that will swiftly be "overconsumed" by drivers) and therefore makes little sense as a target for public expenditures.
Scientific American: "Microsoft, Google and several more of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies have found a way to provide wireless Internet access that is so fast it makes today’s Wi-Fi networks seem as sluggish as dial-up service. The prospect, however, has big media broadcasters up in arms, because this blazing-fast network access may hamper television signals when they go digital next year."
The trouble, basically, is that this wireless internet service uses the same portion of the spectrum on which TV stations will be broadcasting digital signals. We could resolve the problem if only there were some set of human institutions that allow scarce resources to come into the possession of those capable of deploying them in the most high-value way. Like, say, an auction rather than just giving the space away to TV broadcasters. But that's crazy talk.
John McCain's website features a timeline to highlight his allegedly awesome judgment about Iraq, but as Matt Duss points out the timeline curiously begins in August 2003 skipping over the entire previous 18 month period during which McCain was a leading spokesman for the idea that invading Iraq was a good idea. Indeed, one could go back to McCain's record of judgment dating to his 1999 pronunciation of the idea that we should put "rogue state rollback" at the center of our foreign policy and see that the "more force always everywhere" track record is actually pretty poor.
It seems that Mickey Kaus is hoping that "Obama's election will kill off much of hip-hop, at least the gangsta-inspired parts. But just killing off bling and gangsta fashion would be a start." Belle Waring has some doubts "Because after he becomes president he'll automatically become chair of the crucial monthly meetings at which black people decide what they're going to wear?"
I think the idea is that the highest-ranking African-American politician gets to appoint members to the Black Fashion Board. Kind of like the Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court, but for inner-city style.
Maybe Kaus could debate Mitt "Bling-Bling" Romney about this crucial issue.
It's sometimes difficult for someone like me to remember that many people -- most of them in fact -- don't get the bulk of their political news from the internet and haven't ever watched a political video on YouTube or Brightcove. Still, the pace of the growth remains extremely impressive.
For now, though, we're in an interesting middle ground where for a wide swathe of people online media is a hugely important slice of our information diet. For others, though, it's as if it doesn't exist at all. Consequently, there's a lot of opportunity for very segmented messaging. And in an election cycle where we also seem to be looking at a lot of age polarization in political allegiance, this can wind up having huge impacts. Obama can, for example, use the internet to do "base-energizing" stuff knowing that this will reach a huge proportion of his supporters while also remaining invisible to large groups of other voters who he may want to be courting in different ways.
Good catch by David Corn who notes that one of Barack Obama's senior hires, Jim Messina, is currently chief of staff for Max Baucus. Joe Lieberman's now winning the "worst Senate Democrat" race in a landslide, but before Lieberman really kicked it into overdrive, Baucus was in contention (see, e.g., here and here) so this isn't a very reassuring move.
Conclusive DNA evidence linking Jefferson or one of his brothers to the black Hemings line has existed since 1998. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded it was likely that Jefferson himself fathered all six of his slave Sally Hemings' children. The dates of their births correspond quite neatly to nine months after the rare times Jefferson and Hemings were simultaneously at the estate. And historical documents indicate, the foundation found, that "several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings' children."
I'm not really a Jefferson admirer (though Monticello is definitely worth visiting) so I'm not sure I sympathize all that much with the desire to secure acknowledgment as an official descendant. But the desire to deny such acknowledgment is substantially more baffling.
I used to have an occasional joke at The American Prospect about how we should stop wasting time with article about wage stagnation and start devoting more energy to real problems -- like the risk of mass extinction caused by an asteroid. But Greg Easterbook actually did the work and wrote a great article about the problem. And the Atlantic web team made a great video to go along with it. Here's a preview:
Full film (it's about ten minutes) available here. Check it out.
So why not have the best of both worlds? Russert was many things, but he wasn't a "moderator." Moderators balance and direct debates. Russert, to his credit, was a prosecutor. Why not make Chuck Todd the actual moderator of the show and have him moderate a panel of journalists?
You could a roster of different panelists, of whom two or three might be on any given episode depending on who the guests are and what's big in the news at the moment.
Watch in amazement as John McCain fails to realize that a cap-and-trade system necessarily involves a "mandatory cap" on carbon emissions. Obviously the root of the issue here is that McCain doesn't understand anything about carbon policy and doesn't care about it either. But he wanted to sign up for a "centrist" solution on the sexy issue of climate change, so his staff came up with a plan. But "mandatory cap" sounds like the lefty position, so McCain thinks he must not have it.
Maybe he should explain to people the real difference between his plan and Barack Obama's, namely that under Obama's plan you need to pay the government for carbon permits whereas under McCain's plan polluters get free permits that they can then sell. Either way, energy's going to get more expensive and some hardship will exist, but under Obama's plan revenue will be generated that can be used to ease the pain. But of course to explain his plan to people McCain would need to get someone to explain it to him first.
The presence of the salt does allow the water temperature to drop below 32 degrees, but this trick also works in part because the salt speeds up the melting of the ice. The phase transition from solid to liquid absorbs heat, which helps keep the water extra cold.
That's why calipygian's trick is related; it simply uses the transition from liquid to gas rather than from solid to liquid. Just like melting ice, evaporating water absorbs heat from its surroundings (in his example, the warm bottle).
A lot of separate questions about how to improve transit in this country come down to the same solution -- decide we want to improve mass transit services. Until then, you get things like the state of Maryland's transportation planning over the next five years:
$2.17 billion for the Intercounty Connector
$74 million for the Purple Line
$57 million for the Silver Spring Transit Center
$55 million to build the Montrose Parkway
$50 million for the Corridor Cities Transitway
$18 million to improve MARC tracks
$2 million to study extending the Green Line north to BWI Airpoirt
The Intercountry Connector, a large highway, accounts for an order of magnitude more spending than do all the mass transit projects (i.e., everything else except the Montrose Parkway) on that list. Meanwhile, the Purple Line has to be light rail rather than a faster, higher-capacity system because heavy rail is "too expensive." But if Maryland politicians are really concerned about the current gas price situation, they'd drop the ICC and use the savings to fund the Purple Line for the medium term and to improve their bus service for the short term. Good transit projects are expensive, but highways are expensive, too -- we live in a rich country and can afford to build the things we decide it's important to build.
In contrast to Barack Obama's efforts to provide viable alternatives to hefty gasoline consumption, John McCain's idea is that we should make regulatory changes to allow more drilling, and then slather on some additional subsidies (or as he puts it "incentives" since he's against subsidies) to allow for more drilling:
Now there's a coherent case for more drilling. It would say something like "the economic benefits of cheap gasoline exceed the environmental and other harms of massive gasoline consumption." But McCain, whether he realizes it or not, has endorsed a carbon cap-and-trade program that will necessarily reduce consumption of fossil fuels and raise the price of gasoline. If you want cheaper gas, you don't cap carbon emissions. And if you want to reduce carbon emissions, you don't try to reduce the price of gasoline.
But McCain wants political credit for breaking with GOP orthodoxy on climate change, and he doesn't want to bite any of the bullets involved in breaking with GOP orthodoxy on climate change, so instead he's come up with an incoherent mess.
Obama's ahead -- "The new survey shows Obama running ahead of McCain by 48 percent to 42 percent among all adults. Among registered voters, the margin is essentially the same -- 49 percent to 45 percent." Obama's also got the support of only 80 percent of Democrats, whereas John McCain has 90 percent of Republicans and John Kerry got 89 percent of Democrats in November 2004. So in principle he could expand his lead by several points purely through base-rallying gestures
Tinisoli asks: "What it means, if anything, that Gore is finally endorsing Obama."
Not much! You saw throughout the primary season that Gore was committed not to getting involved in the primary battle. And I think that even with the endorsement speech he delivered yesterday, Gore is continuing to savor his post-political somewhat above-the-fray status. At this point, there's no issue Gore is more associated with than climate change. And climate change plays a key role in John McCain's political strategy -- he's trying to establish a position that's sufficiently contentless to let him continue to vacuum up vast sums of money from polluting interests, while also getting the press to report that he's broke with Bush on a major issue. But while Gore did mention the climate change issue, he really didn't go after McCain on it.
Photo Courtesy of the World Economic Forum used under a Creative Commons license
he government is testing drugs with severe side effects like psychosis and suicidal behavior on hundreds of military veterans, using small cash payments to attract patients into medical experiments that often target distressed soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, a Washington Times/ABC News investigation has found.
In one such experiment involving the controversial anti-smoking drug Chantix, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took three months to alert its patients about severe mental side effects. The warning did not arrive until after one of the veterans taking the drug had suffered a psychotic episode that ended in a near lethal confrontation with police.
We can invest in rail, so that cities like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis are connected by high-speed trains, and folks have alternatives to air travel.
More in-depth analysis of the speech and the policy agenda contained therein later, but I do love me some high-speed rail.
Senate Committee obtains documents and other evidence that "contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal." Lawmakers, eh? Well, it's not just lawmakers who regard illegal torture as torture and illegal, it seems that "military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002."
We also learn that "Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists." Read the whole thing.
Via Andrew Sullivan new research on the neurobiology of sexual orientation:
The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex. The differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy, says Ivanka Savic, who conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. "This is the most robust measure so far of cerebral differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects," she says.
Previous studies have also shown differences in brain architecture and activity between gay and straight people, but most relied on people's responses to sexuality driven cues that could have been learned, such as rating the attractiveness of male or female faces. To get round this, Savic and her colleague, Per Lindström, chose to measure brain parameters likely to have been fixed at birth. "That was the whole point of the study, to show parameters that differ, but which couldn't be altered by learning or cognitive processes," says Savic.
Liberals tend to believe that sexual orientation is determined by genetics but that gender-difference in behavior is not, whereas conservatives tend to believe the reverse. But, of course, as we see here these are related issues.
Jeff says "I really want you, as critically thinking journalist, to address the reality that Barack Obama is not committed to a real 'troop withdrawal' at all." From Iraq, that is. The tone of the rest of his comment suggests that he thinks I'm part of some kind of conspiracy to cover up for Obama on this. But I'm not. For a while during the primaries I was writing about this a lot, hoping that either Clinton or Obama would join Bill Richardson in really committing to end the war. But neither did.
As best I can tell, it's wrong to assume that there's a real fact of the matter as to what it is Obama is planning to do about Iraq when he becomes president. At the moment, he's running for president and would like as wide a swathe as possible of people to believe that he agrees with them. All indications are that Obama wants some kind of substantial reduction in the number of U.S. forces in Iraq, and some of the people who I'd expect to be serving in an Obama administration favor a complete withdrawal. But other people who I'd expect to be serving in an Obama administration favor various kinds of schemes for a reduced long-term presence. Obama's rhetoric is compatible with either of those alternatives.
To me, the middle ground option doesn't sound viable. My hope would be that when Obama's sitting in the Oval Office talking to people, he'll reach that conclusion, too. But maybe he won't. Presumably the attitude of congress will make a difference. I'd guess that the more Responsible Plan candidates who win, the more likely we are to see an Obama administration leave Iraq expeditiously. But of course in addition to events in congress and events in Obama's mind, events in the world -- including what, if anything, comes of Obama's proposed regional diplomatic initiatives -- are going to make a difference. Fundamentally, presidential campaign season is a bad moment to get a sense of what people are "really" thinking. It is a good moment to try to pin people down to make unambiguous commitments, and during the primary season, the period when liberals had maximum leverage, neither Obama nor Clinton was willing to make such a commitment.
We are proud to announce JStreetPAC's first round of candidate endorsements. The candidates are Donna Edwards (Candidate, MD-04), Debbie Halvorson (Candidate, IL-11), Rep. Charles Boustany (LA-07), Darcy Burner (Candidate, WA-08), Rep. Stephen Cohen (TN-09), Dennis Shulman (Candidate, NJ-05) and Mary Jo Kilroy (Candidate, OH-15).
Excellent choices all. Darcy Burner is probably familiar to blog readers, but for those who don't know her she's the lead actor behind the excellent Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq initiative and also someone who came very close to winning in 2006. Stephen Cohen is an incumbent and a solid progressive who's also a white guy representing a majority-minority constituency and some relatively less progressive forces are trying to leverage that vulnerability against him. Dennis Shulman's a great story, a blind rabbi with a PhD. running in New Jersey on an excellent agenda.
Candidates with sound views on Middle East issues have won before, but it's rarely been the case that there's been specific fundraising and organizing around these issues in congressional campaigns. Pulling off a few wins here will help change a lot of members' perspectives about where the political incentives lie.
With talk in the air of the Obama campaigning trying to target Georgia as a potential pickup reach, I think Nate at 538 raises a cogent objection, noting that it's "very difficult to imagine Obama winning Georgia without winning North Carolina, and if he's won North Carolina, he almost certainly won't need Georgia." That seems right.
Elsewhere in the same post, Nate notes that McCain at least claims to be treating Virginia as a safe state rather than a swing state in which case he may want to read the polls more closely or take note of who's winning statewide elections these days. Of course McCain's campaign HQ is in Virginia, so it's easy enough to do some covert organizing at this point while still maintaining blustery talk about winning Connecticut.
Photo by Flickr user Abbydonkrafts used under a Creative Commons license
Describing the health care vouchers plan from Ezekiel Emanuel and Victor Fuchs, Ezra Klein describes a part of the system that's relevant to a lot of other reform proposals:
Big decisions within the system are made not by Congress or by insurers, but buy a Federal Reserve-style National Health Board that has, in turn, twelve Regional Health Boards. These commissions, staffed by a variety of experts who're appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, will define benefits, carry out research on effectiveness, figure out risk adjustment, and so on (in this, the plan has shades of Tom Daschle's plan).
The con of this proposal is that if you describe it as "decisions made not by elected officials, but by largely unaccountable political appointees" it doesn't sound so good. But if you describe it as "decisions made by appointees insulated from political pressure like the Federal Reserve system" it does sound good. Which is another way of saying that the Federal Reserve system works well, even though it doesn't sound (to me, at least) like something that would work very well.
Unfortunately, I'm not really sure that we as a society have a great grasp on why the Fed does work well. In principle, it's an appealing model that could be applied to various other questions where it seems better to keep congress in more of a supervisory role rather than a direct policymaking one (issues that have a technical dimension or where the geographic nature of congressional constituencies is inappropriate, etc.) but it also holds the potential for disaster. You wouldn't want the Bush FEMA team making these kind of decisions, and you also wouldn't want it to become the locus for constant congressional battles. What you want is something like, well, the Federal Reserve appointments where even Bush has felt obligated to pick people like Ben Bernanke who are genuinely well-qualified and well-respected. What you fear, though, is that this would become a "revolving door" scenario where industry lobbyists go to work as regulators, do favors for industry, and then cash in with cushy jobs once they leave government.
Someone in the requests thread wanted me to cite real sources such as books in my posts on transportation and urban policy, and there have been several request for book recommendations generally. The trouble with making citations to books when you're writing a blog is, of course, that I mostly write the blogs in quick snatches all around town and can't lug the whole library with me. My ideas, however, are all derivative and you, too, can read the works from which I've stolen them.
In a striking turn of events, the McCain campaign has produced a good ad for their candidate:
Of course the idea that if you're primarily concerned about climate change you ought to vote for John McCain is ludicrous on the merits. Not as ludicrous as the idea that McCain is the candidate of peace, but maybe someone should ask McCain how he plans to "curb" carbon emissions while opposing a "mandatory cap" on them. Or why a candidate eager to tackle climate change would vote against the Climate Security Act.
Noting that smoking has become a rather class-bound phenomenon, Tony Horwitz suggests that Barack Obama could try to court working-class voters by abandoning his efforts to quit: "Added bonus — Virginia and North Carolina, two leading tobacco-producing states, are both in play this election."
Note that several of America's greatest recent fictional presidents, including Jed Bartlett and Jeff Bridges' character in The Contender, secretly smoke.
If you want to know why Barack Obama sometimes comes across as a candidate who doesn't like to talk about policy details, look no further than his speech on economic competitiveness yesterday. It's got a lot of details, but like Obama's other more detail-oriented speeches, it lacks the awesome rhetorical flair of the candidate's great speeches.
That said, as a policy speech it's pretty awesome, one of the best efforts to chart a truly progressive, forward-looking approach to the big picture questions that I've seen from a practical politician. Rather than a world in which we try to whether economic storms by slashing taxes and cutting services to the bone, or by sealing our borders to trade and immigration, Obama is outlining a vision in which government plays a crucial positive role in providing human capital (i.e., education), physical infrastructure, basic R&D, and in putting our energy policy on a sustainable basis.
This is the clearest example I've seen of Obama as education reformer, talking about universal preschool and investing more resources in the most challenging classrooms, but also noting that "resources alone won't create the schools that we need to help our children succeed" and we "need to encourage innovation – by adopting curricula and the school calendar to the needs of the 21st century; by updating the schools of education that produce most of our teachers; by welcoming charter schools within the public schools system, and streamlining the certification process for engineers or businesspeople who want to shift careers and teach."
On energy and infrastructure there aren't really any ideas that he hasn't advanced previously in the campaign, but the National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank concept gets a more substantial pitch than I'd heard since the day it was first mooted. Then come the criticisms of McCain and at the end some more lyrical moments:
We have a choice. We can continue the Bush status quo – as Senator McCain wants to do – and we will become a country in which few reap the benefits of the global economy, while a growing number work harder for less and depend upon an overburdened public sector. An America in which we run up deficits and expose ourselves to the whims of oil-rich dictators while the opportunities for our children and grandchildren shrink. That is one course we could take.
Or, we can rise together. If we choose to change, just imagine what we can do. The great manufacturers of the 20th century can turn out cars that run on renewable energy in the 21st. Biotechnology labs can find new cures; new rail lines and roadways can connect our communities; goods made here in Michigan can be exported around the world. Our children can get a world-class education, and their dreams of tomorrow can eclipse even our greatest hopes of today.
Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal, proclaims "Glycerine" by Bush to be his "all-time favorite song." This is perhaps crazier than John McCain running on peace as a campaign theme. I'm a huge apologist for nineties alt-rock, but Bush is just not a very good band. Besides which the best Bush song is clearly "Machine Head"
"Everything Zen" is also better than "Glycerin," IMHO.
The talking points of the day from the McCain camp involve the idea that Barack Obama wants to fight terrorism with law enforcement alone, that he has a "September 10 mentality." As Richard Clarke pointed out on a conference call earlier today, this is a pretty hoary chestnut "they said that about the Clinton administration, they said that about Senator Kerry, and now they’re saying it about Senator Obama" but it's never been true. Michael Goldfarb at McCain's blog alleges that "Obama wants to take us back to the bad old days of going after terrorists with prosecutors rather than predators." This is, of course, not what Obama is proposing -- as Jon Chait says "Obama did propose going after terrorists, which prompted McCain to accuse him of having 'once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan.'"
But of course the GOP philosophy has for years now been that we need to hit the terrorists hard where they aren't, while letting problems in Central Asia fester because they're difficult. Meanwhile, the "old days" Goldfarb is talking about never existed. In retrospect, I think we all wish the Clinton administration had been somewhat more aggressive in its approach to al-Qaeda, but as I note in the book more Americans (and many, many more people overall) have died as a result of the idiotic response to 9/11 that Bush and McCain embraced than actually died on that day.
The shortcomings of previous policy are no reason to go implement a worse policy. Military force will play a role in U.S. counterterrorism strategy, but it simply has a limited utility in dealing with the problem. If you don't recognize that, you wind up blundering down the Bush/Rumsfeld/McCain/Feith road of sending troops to Iraq because Iraq contains good military targets rather than coming up with an actual strategy for fighting terrorism.
Josh Marshall notes the, shall we say ironic, qualities of using James Woolsey as a surrogate to call Barack Obama "delusional." There's a lot of Woolsey-ania out there, but it's important to recall that his September 24, 2001 New Republic article "Blood Baath: The Iraq Connection" (in the magazine's first post-9/11 issue) was one of the very first and boldest strokes in the journalistic campaign for the Iraq War:
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, attention has focused on terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks--whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.
To this end, investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: The mastermind behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit. But late last year, AEI Press published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a careful book about the bombing by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie. The book's startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by James Fox (the FBI's chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his replacement in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi agent who had assumed the latter's identity when police files in Kuwait (where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait. If Mylroie and Fox (who died in 1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again.
Like a lot of other TNR content, the article's vanished from their website and I don't want to infringe their copyrights. But I will post a link to this other guy who seems happy to infringe the copyright on the web version of the article that seems to have been posted on 9/13/2001 and is identical as far as I can tell.
What's this . . . John McCain flip-flops on energy policy and CNN tells the tale! Crazy stuff, don't they know he's a straight-talker who can do no wrong? At any rate, kudos to Dana Bash.
My mother's name was "Margaret Joskow" when she was born and so it remained throughout her life. Thus, I've always taken the traditional family values line and believed that people should hold on to their own names. So I agree with Kay Steiger:
Furthermore, I never really understood, if it's such an important issue for families to all have the same names (because how would you know you belong to one another otherwise?) why it has to be the woman that changes her name. Why can't the man? I've yet to hear a good response to that one. Changing names to become a "unit" is silly. What if you were asked to change your name each time you changed jobs or professions? People would say that's silly, but for me it's no more silly than changing your name each time you change partners.
Fortunately, we don't just need to contemplate how silly it would be to change your name every time you change jobs. Instead, we can read Max Barry's amusing sci-fi satire Jennifer Government, set in a hyper-capitalist future in which individuals use the name of the conglomerate that employs them (Nike, McDonald's, etc.), with "Jennifer Government" thus named because she works for the government.
Back to the topic at hand, isn't the inconvenience of changing your email address reason enough to stick with your original name?
Via Chris Bertram, a nice demonstration of the growing size of food portions in the United States. Naturally, this trend toward increased consumption of calories has not been a good thing for public health.
It's also part of the reason I think rich countries like the United States are going to weather the long-run consequences of higher food and energy prices just fine -- at the low prices that have been prevailing recently, we're consuming substantially more than is good for us. Switching to an equilibrium where less food is eaten and more attention is paid to quality (in terms of both taste and nutrition) will be beneficial once the switching is done. Of course there's always what Keynes said about the long-run, but it still is worth distinguishing between long-run trends that point toward doom, and those that do not.
The manager of the building where my office is writes:
It has been brought to our attention that there is a lack of space on the bike racks near the B2 ramp in the garage. This problem may be caused by people who have abandoned their bikes, and by Clients who are using the bike racks for long term bike storage. To be fair to the daily bike commuters, Clients should not use the bike rack for long term storage.
Of course, an alternative possibility is that the racks are crowded because bike commuting has grown in popularity. But they're going to test their theory out by "removing all bikes that are left on the bike racks in the garage after 9:00 PM on Wednesday, June 18" and then they will "place the bikes in storage for a period of two weeks, after which time, they will be donated to charity." I'll be interested to see what they come up with, but personally I doubt that mass bike-abandonment is really the culprit here.
Either way, eliminating two car parking spots would make room for many bikes, so objective shortage of space should never really be a problem for a garage-equipped building looking to accommodate bike commuters.
Photo by Flickr user Mobikefed used under a Creative Commons license
Some would say this counts as a genuine advance in the Bush Administration understanding of human relations. I think, rather, that they’ve always known this truth, which is why they tried to avoid compromise unless desperate.
I've been remiss -- any thoughts on Boston's crushing win.
I've been thinking, as have a lot of folks, that the Lakers are going to be monstrous next season if Andrew Bynum is able to return at anything like the level he was playing earlier this season. That still seems probable to me, but it's not clear that Bynum solves the defensive problems that mostly seem to me to be holding LA back.
Obama announces his "National Security Working Group"
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
Senator David Boren, former Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
Secretary of State Warren Christopher
Greg Craig, former director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning
Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig
Representative Lee Hamilton, former Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder
Dr. Tony Lake, former National Security Advisor
Senator Sam Nunn, former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Secretary of Defense William Perry
Dr. Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State
Representative Tim Roemer, 9/11 Commissioner
Jim Steinberg, former Deputy National Security Advisor
These are mostly names we've heard before in Obamaworld or else graybeard elder statesman types. But Jim Steinberg is the right age and experience level to get a senior appointment in an Obama administration. He's done a lot of homeland security stuff lately, and I'd be interested to know what his essay "Force and Legitimacy in the Post-9/11 Era: What Principles Should Guide the United States?" in the recent collection Power and Superpower: Global Leadership and Exceptionalism in the 21st Century says so I'll go look it up later.
It seems to me that, as a professional blogger, it's pretty likely that were I to have children I would have a more flexible work schedule than my wife and wind up shouldering more responsibility than is customary for most men. As such, I read Lisa Belkin's article on couples who try to share parenting duty equally (the piece also presents the staggering inequities in current household burdens) with a great deal of interest.
Reading it, one thing that comes through is that equality isn't necessarily a very practical arrangement. A lot of things in life reward the division of labor, and the neotraditional arrangement in which one partner works to maximize career success and does domestic obligations on the side while the other partner treats domestic obligations as the fixed point and earns money around that commitment is in many ways a more efficient way of organizing a household than is strict equality. But of course thanks to entrenched tradition and social expectations, we all know that the "one partner" is a man and the "other partner" is a woman.
One could, however, easily imagine an alternate reality in which the society as a whole featured more-or-less equal sharing of domestic tasks between men and women without it being the case that most individual couples share things precisely equally. And, indeed, according to Belkin "who does what, lesbian couples say, is instead determined by personality and logistics" rather than either pre-existing gender stereotypes (obviously a non-starter) or by a 50-50 rule. Still, the evidence from gay and lesbian couples does suggest that despite some specialization, you tend to get closer to 50-50 than heterosexuals do:
Lesbian couples also have a more equal division of housework. Rothblum found that it is only heterosexual mothers who do the lion’s share of housework for the family each week — between 11 and 20 hours for her survey respondents. Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.
Among other things, that result suggests a certain amount of "leveling down" in terms of housecleaning in gay couples with both partners acting more like a heterosexual man than like a straight woman. Meanwhile, as you see throughout the piece it's difficult for any one couple to decide it's going to unilaterally change how the world works -- part-time work is hard to come by in a lot of fields. This is, presumably, something that will have to change if more couples try to share their responsibilities more equitably. In general, it seems that everyone who has kids would have an easier time dealing with their family responsibilities if we took Ezra Klein's advice and mandated more vacation days.
Alternatively, the fewer children people have, the less domestic work there is to do. For a while now, the trend has been for the number of kids born to adjust to the economic demands for full-time work. We could, conceivably, adopt policies that aim in the other direction, but I haven't seen much indication that anyone in politics really wants to go that way.
I have no particular insight into the accuracy of Quinnipiac's polling but they've got John McCain down 12 in Pennsylvania, down 6 in Ohio, and down 4 in Florida. Obviously, with numbers like that McCain is toasty. Obama has a couple of plausible paths to the nomination that don't involve either Ohio or Florida but McCain needs them both.
When you think about the national security working group that Barack Obama announced today, the most noteworthy names may not be the ones left off the list. Consider Richard Holbrooke, U.N. Ambassador at the end of the Clinton administration, "national security Democrat", and top candidate to be Secretary of State in a Kerry administration.
What's more, back in March, Dan Drezner reported that "I have it on good authority that, not only does the former UN ambassador believe that he'll be Secretary of State if either Clinton or Obama wins, he genuinely thinks he'll have a comparable position if McCain wins." He seems like a noteworthy omission from any effort to gather the great and the good of Democratic foreign policy, not that I'll miss him.
From the missed file, amidst this cluster of former senior officials there's no Zbigniew Brzezinski even though, unlike some of these folks, Zbig endorsed Obama in the primary and was even used to lend heft to an early Obama speech. He was never really a member of the team, however, and when became a lightning rod of criticism he was never heard from again. and the pattern seems to be continuing.
UPDATE: Justin Logan reminds us that William Perry, who is on the list, wanted to bomb North Korea in 2006 and John McCain wanted to bomb North Korea in 2003 (and also, I believe, back in 1994).
Via Chris Hayes, it's LILYPAD A Floating Ecopolis for Ecological Refugees. Neat if it works, I suppose, though these days anyone can make a cool-looking computer-generated image and assert that it's self-sufficient, energy-positive, etc.
Chris Dornan raises an issue that "is not a topic that many people will want to deal with" but I said I was taking requests, so "What is your position on the Goldberg/Walt disagreement over whether Ahmadinejad has called for genocide." You can construe Ahmadenijad's remarks about Israel the way Jeff Goldberg is doing, or you could draw a distinction between the idea of destroying Israel as a political entity and the idea of destroying its population. Independent Poland ceased to exist in the nineteenth century without there being a genocide of the Polish people.
But the whole discussion seems to be undertaken in bad faith. One way or another, Iran isn't going to destroy Israel. And one way or another, Iran's rhetoric about Israel is ugly. At the same time, you have people in the United States who want to scuttle efforts at good-faith diplomacy with Iran in favor of an approach centered exclusively on coercion up to the point of actual bombing, and semi-pornographic displays of Iranian rhetoric about Israel is part of their political strategy. But bombing Iran is still a bad idea, the "bomb Iran" brigades are still crazy, and a serious, good-faith effort to improve relations with Iran is still a good idea. That's the Iran debate that matters.
Su Bang says: "As I sit here in my cubicle at Ford WHQ after having driven 20 miles to get here from Ann Arbor, I wonder if cheaper and improved broadband access would make the average white-collar worker as productive at home as in the office thus removing the need for big old office buildings sucking up energy removing the need to commute? If so would this be cheaper to implement than improving/providing mass commuter transportation?"
I don't think the quality of broadband is really the issue here. At the moment, I'm sitting at the Big Bear Cafe (pictured above) at a table with my non-journalist housemate. She's working from home (or, rather, the coffee shop) today for special reasons and normally has to go into the office. But whatever the reason is that her employers want her to come in most days, it's not the quality of internet access.
I do think that this is a pattern we may see changing soon. Some employers clearly put a high value on office location and pay top dollar for centrally located offices in the middle of major cities -- think of Condé Nast and Skadden Arps in 4 Times Square. But many companies have decided that specific location isn't all that important to them, so they should save money by getting space in suburban office parks. Arguably, though, given modern telecommunications technology firms like that ought to save even more money by getting substantially less space -- maybe a conference room and a few swing offices -- and having most people do most of their work from home or some friendly venue in the neighborhood.
If transportation costs continue to rise, we'll probably see some change on the margin here. And there are, of course, good reasons to think we should adopt policies that will improve the quality of broadband in the United States. Would that be "cheaper" than new transit construction? Presumably, but it would also be cheaper than new highway construction. I don't think -- and I don't think anyone thinks -- that there's a compelling case for reducing our overall level of infrastructure spending. The question is primarily one of how much of that should be road spending and how much should be transit spending. The telecommuting issue, though interesting in its own right, is basically an independent issue.
UPDATE: Alyssa Rosenberg had a piece about the federal government's teleworking initiatives, which are ahead of most of the private sector and starting to serve as a model.
Photo by Flickr user tvol used under a Creative Commons license
Criticizing the policy is an appropriate way to approach it if you're an Obama supporter, but why begrudge the man for changing his mind as conditions (our general awareness of climate change, the Iraq war, gas prices, etc) have changed? Perhaps he changed his mind for the wrong reason... but that's an argument that one has to make, not just assume.
The point I would make is that McCain's new view undermines an important larger argument he's trying to make. His latest ad features the idea that he broke with the president over climate change -- i.e., he wants to do something about it. Specifically, McCain says he wants to reduce carbon emissions. But you just can't reduce carbon emissions without burning less oil by, in effect, making it more expensive. Offshore drilling is a way to get more oil in order to make oil cheaper. If McCain wants to say that high gas prices have made him abandon his previous views on climate change, fine. But what he wants to do right now is simultaneously get credit for standing up to Bush on climate, while also agreeing with Bush about the particulars.
Live asks: "Since you've got that post up about Bush, I'm going to repeat my earlier question as to whether you (Matt) have any interest in any other kind of music. I'm not (just) snarking -- alt-rock is well and good, but it seems like someone of your intelligence, interests, background, and inquisitiveness would be attracted to other kinds of music as well."
Eh, not so much. I mean, I like mainstream commercial hip-hop pretty well though I don't follow it all that closely. And I like Shostakovich. But the overwhelming majority of what I listen to fits into a broad "rock of the past thirties years" category. I'm afraid I'm just not very interesting.
Will they hook up with robot groupies after the show, you ask? They just might if this Japanese robot girlfriend initiative picks up steam. Be afraid.
Incidentally, wouldn't countering the robot menace be a good issue for John McCain? It seems to play to his combination of cranky old man-ness and national security paranoia. They all laughed at Admiral Adama when he didn't want networked computer on the Galactica but look how that turned out.
In a memorable moment early this year, John McCain had to admit to a reporter that he had no idea what his position on contraceptives is, but "I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it." Igor at the Wonk Room fills you in (via) and it turns out that yes, indeed, McCain shares Bush's extreme views on the subject -- lots of abstinence education (something he perhaps could have used during his first marriage) and no funding for anything else.
The American Medical Association decides to come out against midwives delivering babies at home. Like dentists who won't let hygenists clean your teeth unless they get a piece of the action, obstetricians want to make sure no childbirth revenue slips through the cracks. This business of senseless supply restrictions isn't the health care problem in America, but it does make the other problems all much harder and more expensive to solve than they otherwise might be.
I see my colleague Andrew is getting on board the neo-contrarian argument about climate change -- it's real, it's caused by human activity, but it's just not worth doing anything about:
The key will be private and public innovation of non-carbon energy, and possibly carbon capture technology.
You can find a more elaborated version of the argument from Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus in Democracy. I thought their book, Break Through, made a number of interesting points but this article focuses in on their core bad idea -- "Kyoto is dead—and that’s a good thing. In its place, we need massive global investment in new clean energy technology."
There's just no reason to think of "massive global investment in new clean energy technology" as an alternative to the mainstream environmentalist interest in putting a price on carbon. Massive investment requires a lot of money. And if the point of raising the money is to produce clean energy technology, what better place to get the money from than auctioning permits to generate unclean energy? If you raise the funds through a carbon charge, then you're able to subsidize technology both coming and going. Any alternative way of funding "massive global investment" is ultimately going to involve less efficiency and more economic pain.
For weeks if not months now, a troll by the name of Richard Steven Hack has been popping up in comments alleging that I'm dodging his "two questions" about Iran and so on and so forth. In fact, I just didn't know what his questions were! Now I know:
So he's STILL ducking my two questions. What's so hard about answering my two questions, Matt? You either believe (or don't know whether) Iran has a nuclear weapons program, or you don't. You either believe that a military response is appropriate if Iran DOES have such a program, or you don't.
Obviously I have no personal knowledge of Iran's nuclear program, but I accept the judgment of the Intelligence Community that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. And if Iran does restart its nuclear weapons program, I don't think bombing Iran would be an appropriate response. It seems to me that I've written extensively on both of these questions over the years, though not explicitly in response to Mr RSH. I hope this is the last we'll hear of me "ducking" these topics.
Chris Bowers notes an interesting finding: If you take the current Obama-McCain national polling matchup and compare it to the Kerry-Bush result in 2004, you'll see an 8.1 percent swing in favor of the Democrats in the national popular vote. And if you apply an 8.1 percent swing in favor of the Democrats in each state, you get a map that's really the same as the map produced by the current state-by-state polling:
Not the most earth-shattering result on the planet, but a useful reminder that even though in principle the Electoral College allows for crazy divergences from the popular vote result, in practice gains in national polling tend to be distributed fairly evenly. So if you want to keep tabs on the race over the summer months there's probably no need to bother with the state-by-state polls.
Police officer is called into HQ with the rest of his unit and told everyone's supposed to fill out mail in ballots right in front of three superior officers. He fills it out, puts it in the envelope and then:
They opened his ballot and saw that he had voted for Morgan Tsvangirai and the MDC. He was followed by the Police Internal Security Intelligence (PISI) who attempted to kidnap him that night at his home. He has been on the run ever since. This officer told me another story of another officer in his unit who actually voted his ballot out in the open, on the table, in front of the three senior Police officers, and was immediately arrested and taken to one of the detention centers that are now being called “Reeducation Camps”.
I asked him what “reeducation” means? He told me “People are only taken there to be beaten”.
That's on Joe Trippi's blog via which I see the Friends of Zim site which has much more.
Noam Scheiber says "I talked to eight or so GOP operatives for my Pawlenty piece and brought up Lieberman's name almost every time. About half thought it was a lunatic idea, the other half thought it was a decent idea but still highly unlikely."
Probably everyone's right. As with the previously discussed notion of a McCain-Huckabee ticket, a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be courting disaster -- you would confirm a lot of the conservative movement's fears about McCain, you'd be doubling-down on McCain's support for an unpopular war, Lieberman's not a charismatic guy or effective campaigner, etc.
But I continue to think that if McCain makes his top priority avoiding disaster, then he's just dooming himself to defeat. There's something plausible to be said along the lines of "most people think Bush is a bad president and I agree with them, but Democrats have responded to GOP unpopularity by positioning themselves substantially to the left of where they were in the late 1990s and nothing about Bush's record actually justifies that kind of move." Joe Lieberman is pretty well situated to try and make that argument. But to make it persuasively, McCain would really need to move to the center on non-war topics and make some decisive breaks with the Bush administration. Thus far, he seems to be doing the reverse -- sapping his dissent from Bush on climate and executive power of any content -- which I do think is the safe strategy, but timidity plus extremely unfavorable objective conditions are a recipe for losing.
I said yesterday that I thought James Steinberg was the most interesting name on the Obama National Security Working Group list. The other folks are either people who've been in the Obama circle for a while, or else they're elder statesmen types rather than potential future appointees. Steinberg, however, was Deputy National Security Advisor from 1996-2000 and is thus exactly the sort of person who could get a senior-level job in an Obama administration.
As such, I was interested to read his essay "Force and Legitimacy in the Post 9/11 Era: What Principles Should Guide the United States?" It's a pretty disappointing piece of work. He observes that the UN Charter authorizes the use of force for the purpose of self-defense, for defense of others, or in other circumstances when authorized by the UN Security Council. He then observes that there are a variety of circumstances under which people sometimes think we should use non-defensive force even without Security Council authorizations. And he observes that using force in all of these circumstances is problematic in many ways. And that it's more problematic the more unilateral it is. And then he kind of just concludes that it all depends. The essay is full of thumbsuckers like this:
Thus, the bottom line suggests that preventive force must be part of the policy mix in dealing with the acquisition of dangerous capabilities, especially WMD, but the wisdom of its use is highly fact-dependent and requires a very careful balancing of the real benefits to be achieved against likely costs.
And:
Although there are substantial costs and risks to acting preventively, the calculation may still be favorable in light of the alternatives.
None of this contradicts the bold thinking and new approaches some of us have been excited about, but it's really the reverse of bold thinking and new approaches. Now arguably it's a good idea for an incoming president to leaven some of his big new ideas with a certain amount of mealy-mouthed timidity and Steinberg does have sound views on the key substantive issues but there is a certain "change you can believe in" quality missing here. Part of the issue, as Chris Hayes says, is that you need to staff a national campaign and an administration with people who know what they're doing, and that necessarily entails a certain status quo bias that's bound to disappoint the true believers.
Meanwhile, using the Q Street bike lane the other day I noticed something I'd never seen before -- a bike shop on Q Street between 14th and 15th. Investigating with a colleague earlier this morning it turns out to be The Bike Rack, and advertises itself as "gay owned and operated." Do gay cyclists have distinctive bike shop needs? The comments of Andrew "The End of Gay Culture" Sullivan would be appreciated.
Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — the original partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — along with Chevron and a number of smaller oil companies, are in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields, according to ministry officials, oil company officials and an American diplomat. [...]
The no-bid contracts are unusual for the industry, and the offers prevailed over others by more than 40 companies, including companies in Russia, China and India. The contracts, which would run for one to two years and are relatively small by industry standards, would nonetheless give the companies an advantage in bidding on future contracts in a country that many experts consider to be the best hope for a large-scale increase in oil production.
There was suspicion among many in the Arab world and among parts of the American public that the United States had gone to war in Iraq precisely to secure the oil wealth these contracts seek to extract. The Bush administration has said that the war was necessary to combat terrorism. It is not clear what role the United States played in awarding the contracts; there are still American advisers to Iraq’s Oil Ministry.
I think the evidence is clear that the Bush administration went to war in Iraq because it's run by crazy people. The oil money more plausibly comes into play in explaining the desire to stay at war forever. After all, these companies (or their corporate ancestors) had oil contracts in Iraq in the past and now they're getting them back "36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power." Nationalization, you see, is a substantial risk of doing business -- especially natural resource business -- in unstable countries. But a given government is much, much, much less likely to nationalize western countries' assets if it's dependent on external U.S. military support and especially if its security services are nicely enmeshed with the U.S. military.
Our troops can "curb Iranian influence" and provide "stability" all of which is good for business. But don't call it imperialism, we're there to help!
One thing I'd forgotten during the long debate about Clinton versus Obama on health care, and in speculation about the Senate filibuster, is that the key legislative player, the chokepoint through which health care reform must pass, is Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. But he's not just Finance Committee Chairman, he's also a terrible Senator! Indeed, on core economic policy issues he's probably the worst Senator -- a little bit right-wing, a lot corrupt and unprincipled. Ezra Klein has a piece on Baucus and health reform that nods in the direction of Baucus' critics but then waxes optimistic:
This time around, however, Baucus has given health reformers reason for optimism. He has staffed up, hiring Liz Fowler, a well-regarded health-policy staffer with immense Hill experience. He's held a series of hearings on the need to reform the system, inviting experts to testify on everything from the explosion in costs to the failures of the insurance market. More importantly, his statements at these hearings have been invariably action-oriented. He opened a recent session by saying, "Today let us talk again about health-care reform. Let us hear from the experts about how to do it right. And let us plan, next year, to actually do something about it."
I'm not actually sure what the reason for optimism is. At a minimum, while Baucus' evident interest in the subject does seem to boost the chances that something called "health care reform" will pass, I don't see any reason to be confident that good health care reform will pass. Baucus was an architect of the 2003 Medicare Reform bill so we might get something like that -- a bill that does, just as liberals wanted, provide seniors with a prescription drug benefit under Medicare but does so at enormous fiscal cost in terms of bribes to drug companies and pharmaceutical companies and bad structural changes to Medicare.
But I dunno. Maybe Baucus has changed his ways. His campaign website does include this stirring section on economic justice:
As Chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, Max was a chief architect of the 2008 Stimulus Bill designed to limit the economic downturn in the U.S. by boosting Main Street economies through tax relief for individuals and businesses. Using his seniority on the Senate Finance Committee, Max co-wrote the largest tax cut in a generation, providing $1.35 trillion in relief, including more than $115 million for Montanans to pump into local economies.
Max improved the 2001 tax relief package to make sure that more than 34,000 moderate and low-income Montanans got the tax relief they deserve by expanding the child tax credit. That money is best spent in neighborhood stores.
Coming from a seven-generation ranching family, Max know how important passing family farms and businesses on to the next generation is, which is why he fought to repeal the estate tax in the 2001 tax package.
That's right -- thanks to Max Baucus, Bush's hugely unaffordable and massively regressive tax cut package cut ever-so-slightly less regressive at the cost of a bipartisan imprimateur that scuttled any hopes of defeating in the Senate. And he fought for estate tax repeal, because if you're a rancher who also happens to be a multi-millionaire -- or, indeed, if you're an extraordinarily wealthy person of any sort -- then Max Baucus is on your side.
Needless to say, his number one, three, four, and five contributors this cycle are firms in the health care or insurance industries. Of course it's natural for anyone who has his job to rake in a lot of bucks from those kind of companies as they seek to influence legislation, but Baucus isn't exactly the kind of guy with a long record of standing up to special interests.
Excellent satire of the view that gay marriage is going to imperil heterosexual couples:
In addition to the issue of justice for gay and lesbian couples, and to the vital need to mock conservatives, there's really a larger problem here. It's genuinely the case that we have a lot of social problems that are complicated by family instability -- children are expensive and time-consuming and tend to be much better off if both parents are involved in bringing them up. So the idea that marriage and family life could, in some sense, use some shoring-up isn't a crazy one. But conservatives don't seem to have many actual ideas about doing this apart from blaming the gays. But I think serious social conservative ideas on this front would be welcome.
Jeffrey Goldberg notes that the number of Jewish members of congress is at an all-time high and seemingly set to rise. The same, I note, is also true of Mormons. Apparently mainstream Christianity can't get ahead in America.
Botswana Meat Commission FC says: "I dig all the talk about transportation/transit around here. How about some analysis of light rail and 'express bus' options that are sort of a halfway point between city buses and heavy rail." A few points on this.
As a mainline transit option, the great virtue of bus routes is that they're easy to set up. In ideal circumstances, I think the service on Georgia Avenue currently provided by the 79 Express Bus line in DC should be a full-fledged Metro line. There could be a separated Yellow Line extending north from the Shaw/Howard station along Georgia Avenue with transfers to the Green Line at Petworth and to the Red Line at Silver Spring. But that would be very expensive, wouldn't really be my first priority for expensive projects, and would take a long time to finish. So the 79 is a solid, practical solution. But by the same token that bus lines are easy to set up, they're easy to shut down and it's very easy to shift the stations around and consequently they aren't going to do a good job of becoming a locus of private sector investment and altered development patterns. A light rail line can do more to create dense hubs around stations with a vibrant commercial corridor running between them.
The choice between a light rail and heavy rail line, ideally, ought to be made not on the basis of the fact that the light rail line is cheaper but by thinking about what it is you're trying to accomplish. Light rail doesn't move as many people and, consequently, can't serve as the transportation backbone for as dense an area. But maybe you don't want to build a super-dense area, but you do want to have a workable transit link. Light rail's a good solution.
Across an entire metro area, you should expect the transportation network to genuinely be a network that involves heavy rail on some routes, light rail or BRT on some others, and then probably various kinds of local bus routes that work for shorter trips or bring people to hubs for other transportation modes. If you look at the best transit cities in Europe, you'll see that they have all kinds of stuff going on in terms of light rail and subways and commuter rail and intercity rail and buses all on top of each other.
Photo by Flickr user Intangible Arts used under a Creative Commons license
So Michael, I don't disagree with a word of your review of the relative merits of law enforcement versus military action in combatting terrorism. Except I no longer believe the Right is really making an argument for the military as a counterterror tool. Think about it, how often do we hear proposals from political leaders for how our military can and will win the war on terror for us.
Right. We've moved past a debate about "law and enforcement and intelligence" versus "military action" to a debate where the alternative to law enforcement is just lawlessness -- people get arrested and thrown in prison, just like with law enforcement, but they have no recourse and no opportunity to prove they don't belong there. But a system based on arbitrary indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, and torture isn't a system of war it's just a system of indiscriminate criminality and abuse of power.
Ross had an interesting post several days ago that I've been meaning to respond to, centered around the limited utility of theory in guiding action on foreign policy:
That being said, I do think that the ease with which many liberal hawks who would have been cool to the idea of invading Iraq circa 1999 went over to the interventionist position after 2001 suggests a deeper problem with Matt's attempt - or any attempt - to build systematic theories for international engagement: Namely, that unless you're a very stringent non-interventionist (or a pacifist), no matter what theory of foreign policy you choose, you'll always be able to find justification within the confines of that theory whenever a particular intervention seems like a good idea. In this vein, I sometimes think too much of the debate over the Iraq War has been bogged down by arguments over theory - by Christians arguing over whetherjust war tradition accommodates the invasion; by liberals arguing (sometimes withthemselves) over whether it fits within the Truman paradigm, by everybody arguing about neoconservatism'splace in American political history - when to my mind the chief lessons of the war have to do with issues of prudence and practicality, and more specifically with the question of when the costs of war, in lives and treasure, are worth the risk involved and the gains that might be won.
There's definitely something to that. No theory worth having is going to have totally unambiguous applications to specific cases, and besides which there's no substitute for factual information and good judgment. That said, just saying we're going to take a prudent, empirical approach to questions turns out to not have any real content. In part, this is for formal reasons like "the interdependence of fact and theory" where people's empirical assessments of situations are influenced by their theoretical precommitments. In part the issue is that foreign crises play out in real time, and decisions need to be made with imperfect information and typically by people who aren't specialists in the region of the world at hand. On top of all that, the questions of costs and benefits is going to implicate ideas about goals and "grand strategy." These are topics that can't help but be debated with some reference to theory. Your approach to a lot of issues can be strongly affected by whether or not you think US-Chinese conflict is inevitable, and if not whether you think an "appeasement invites aggression" frame or a "if we're reasonable, they'll be reasonable too" frame is the most important way of thinking about the risks of conflict.
In short, we can't get by without theory, so we have good reason to debate theory. And eve if particular cases can't "prove" a given theory wrong or right, it's natural to cite cases in making arguments about theory.
Ultimately, I think Ross's insight is most persuasive in batting down certain kinds of objections to certain theoretical positions. I've sometimes heard the objection raised that since my preferred theoretical position can't provide an unambiguous answer to all real and possible cases, it must be a flawed theory. Or that since past presidents have sometimes deviated from internationalist course (Mossadegh, Vietnam, the Cuba Embargo), it can't be the case that liberal internationalism has generally been the guiding principle of our policy. That kind of thing is just the wrong way to think about what theoretical considerations are supposed to do -- they're supposed to provide some guidance as to relevant considerations and plausible courses of action, not completely determine policy.
As the endless ANWR debate continues, George W. Bush said yesterday that allowing drilling would "bring enormous benefits to the American people." Given how well-rehearsed this issue is, I know that to be false, but I didn't realize what Ben at ThinkProgress pointed out, namely that the Department of Energy did a report just last month showing that drilling in ANWR would reduce the price of oil by 75 cents a barrel. That's not 75 cents per gallon for your gasoline, it's 75 cents per barrel of oil -- meaning a reduction in price of substantially less than one percent wholesale and doubtless less than that in terms of retail gasoline.
The striking thing about this is that I doubt anyone is really all that shocked to learn that the president might make statements that contradict the findings of official government reports about the merits of his preferred policy vis-a-vis ANWR. He favors drilling, so he's overstating the benefits. Whether he's lying or not depends on the subjective status of his brain in a way that we can't ever literally know, but he's saying stuff that government reports say is false.
And of course it's well-known that Bush has made claims that contradict official government reports about all kinds of topics, ranging from climate change to tax policy to oil drilling and beyond. And yet if you say he did this exact same thing with regard to making the case for invading Iraq, you're treated as a member of the lunatic fringe. But it's hardly unusual for politicians in general, or Bush in particular, to understate the costs and overstate the benefits of their preferred policies.
The campaign says they're running it on a very aggressive 18 state play that includes Alaska, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Virginia. Obama's fundraising edge should give his campaign the chance to buy plenty of ads in cheap, depopulated, unlikely spots like the MT/ND/AK trio where Democrats don't normally campaign at all.
UPDATE: Look, I'm not saying it's a bad idea to release a hilarious unsubtle ad. But if everyone can just take their "meta" hats off for a second, I'm sure they'll see that this is a hilariously unsubtle ad.
A DC edition of a website where bike riders photograph the license plates of cars blocking bike lanes has launched. I intend to make a pain of myself submitting photos.
I'm a bit surprised their isn't more enforcement of this. Given the currently large number of violations, it seems to me that hiring an additional traffic enforcement officer, giving him or her a bike, and having him or her ride around handing out tickets (especially on the busy, frequently violated lanes on E Street, 14th Street, and New Hampshire Aveneue) would be an easy net source of revenue for the city.
I was a bit surprised to see a few Nirvana haters popping up in the "Glycerin" thread the day before yesterday. Thinking it over, though, I'm actually glad they showed up because it inspired me to listen to some Nirvana, which is always a worthwhile experience:
In general, for a much-praised and undoubtedly influential band, Nirvana strikes me as shockingly little listened-to in practice. Perhaps that's because the band actually sucks and people don't like them, but in my experience people are almost always surprised by how good Nirvana actually is when their stuff comes on. In short, they're not just a band that people say was great -- they're actually great.
Here's a request. What, exactly, is the US plan for Afghanistan? What would "success" in Afghanistan even look like, and how would America get there?
This is, indeed, the question we need to be asking. The fact that the original mission in Afghanistan, to whip the Taliban and uproot al-Qaeda, didn't quite work and then we went and invaded Iraq and stopped paying attention for several years has left us with a mission in Afghanistan that seems very unclear. When you hear things like our commander in Afghanistan saying we need 400,000 troops you begin to think that the mission he has in mind isn't the appropriate one. Whatever it is you need 400,000 troops to do is something we're going to have to get by without doing, since we're not sending 400,000 troops to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, it seems to me that the "Anbar Awakening" model in which we took some guys who'd been fighting us, and gave them money to kill al-Qaeda irreconciliables instead, would have a lot of promise in Afghanistan. I think the big problem with the past two years worth of our policy in Iraq hasn't been that it "doesn't work" but that we don't have any reasonable policy objectives and are getting bogged down in a senseless quest for bases, "influence," and a vague sense of victory. Afghanistan seems like a more promising venue for clearer, more limited objectives -- no southern factions playing host to al-Qaeda and the de jure government strong enough to remain the de facto government in the Kabul area.
Stabilizing the whole country would be great, and I'd be happy to send more troops to Afghanistan to do so (especially because I think doing so would bring forth increased involvement from our international partners) since as best I can tell most segments of the Afghan population don't have a real problem with foreign troops being there. But if it's really true that we would need to send 400,000 soldiers over there to accomplish a nationwide stabilization mission then it makes sense to re-redefine our objectives in a more limited way.
But consider that all somewhat provisional, as I'm not really up to speed on the situation and promise to look into it.
Interesting chart. But the accompanying analysis says "Barack Obama's appeal to younger voters and John McCain's support among older voters may have created a situation where the outcome will turn on the preferences of middle-aged voters -- particularly those in their 40s." You see analysis of this sort all the time, but it's all based on a mistake -- there's not a demographic electoral college where "winning" particular sub-samples of the population is the key to victory and therefore it's important to focus attention on the most evenly divided demographic groups. If John McCain persuades an Obama-supporting 25 year-old to switch to his camp, that has just as big an impact as one 45 year-old one 65 year-old or one 85 year-old.
Beyond that, if you do want to label any particular group as key (for the sake of deciding which TV shows to advertise on, for example) the reasonable approach isn't to look for closely divided groups, it's to look for groups with lots of people who haven't stated a preference on the theory that those people might be easier to persuade. Voters over sixty have a marked predilection for John McCain, but there are also a lot of undecided voters in this bloc that might be worth going after. For either campaign, who "wins" seniors is irrelevant, you just go after persuadable voters, and it's arguably among seniors where the biggest group of persuadables is.
Foreign Policy lists five reasons to love $4 gasoline. And it's true, expensive gas has a lot of public benefits. And if we made gasoline more expensive through, say, higher gas taxes or a carbon tax then not only would we secure the public health, congestion, and environmental benefits of expensive gas but the government would have a good source of revenue with which to mitigate some of the consumer pain. As things stand, gas is expensive (and getting pricier) anyway, but oil companies and oil-exporting nations are reaping a huge share of the benefits.
The long, drawn-out search for a fig leaf behind which the House Democrats can capitulate on FISA appears to have arrived as Democrats back a "compromise" by which telecom firms that illegally assisted the Bush administration's surveillance efforts can be sued with the proviso that they get off scot-free if they can produce evidence that the Bush administration promised them (cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye) that their illegal request was, in fact, legal. Since everyone already knows this happened, the companies all get off scot-free.
The problem with retaining Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense is the same as the problem with the idea of appointing Chuck Hagel or when Bill Clinton about William Cohen -- these guys are Republicans. It's desperately important for the Democratic Party's leaders to avoid re-enforcing the idea that Democrats can't run national security. If you find a moderate Republican with sound views on key environmental issues and make him or her head of the EPA, that says "climate change is an important issue and there's bipartisan support for taking action." If you put a Republican in charge of the Pentagon it says "Obama likes diplomacy, but even he knows that when the going gets tough you need to call in the GOP."
Meanwhile, in the annals of cabinet speculation, why not wonder which Bush administration secretaries John McCain might keep on? Will he keep Bob Gates at Defense? Condi at State? Paulson at Treasury? And why or why not? Answering those questions would give us a better sense of where Obama stands vis-a-vis the status quo.
Two more points on FISA. One, it's not correct to say that companies need to can "get off scot-free if they can produce evidence that the Bush administration promised them (cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye) that their illegal request was, in fact, legal. " In fact, all they need is for the Attorney-General to state that this happened. That's less than nothing.
Second, one shouldn't say that "the Democrats" caved on this. Enough Democrats did cave for it to pass, but others didn't cave. Distinctions matter.
A lot of people seem to have gotten it into their heads that nuclear power is a cost-effective, carbon-free method of generating electricity being foiled by nefarious environmentalists. But as Cato's Jerry Taylor explains, it's just not true:
The reason we hear politicians like John McCain talk so much about the need for the federal government to promote nuclear power is because investors in the private sector take one look at the economics and run screaming for the hills. Investment banks tell utilities who want to borrow money to build these things that not one red cent will be coming their way unless and until the federal taxpayer guarrantees that the entire loan will be repaid in case of default. If nuclear power were such a good economic bet, those taxpayer guarantees would not be necessary.
McCain and other big nuke-heads are talking about large subsidies for nuclear power, not about getting green tape out of the way. Personally, I don't really think we should be subsidizing any form of power generation -- a cap on carbon emissions (or a tax) would be a large de facto subsidy to everything that's not fossil fuels. But insofar as we are going to subsidize electricity it makes more sense to subsidize genuinely clean power.
Barack Obama says he's a reformer, but apparently he's in hoc to Big Bike: "In a private 20-minute meeting with members of the Bikes Belong board of directors, told them if he were elected president he would increase funding for cycling and pedestrian projects." I think it'll be fun to have a president from a big city.
Jim Henley on Barack Obama's lack of leadership on FISA: "If the House and Senate leadership really did sneak the bill past him last week, which I’m not inclined to believe, still nothing stopped him from shutting them down this week. Except if he either doesn’t consider it important enough to be worth his time and credibility, or if he’s just as happy that the measure might pass." And of course if I were Barack Obama it's very possible that I wouldn't think giving the executive branch unlimited surveillance powers was a bad idea at all -- I'm going to be president in a few months.
For the rest of us, this is a concern. But it's still baffling to me how little concern congressional Republicans seem to have about this. It's not that I expect logical consistency to restrain them -- they complained about Bill Clinton's expansions of executive power in the 1990s then turned on a dime when Bush entered office and they'll turn again in 2009. But while they'll be able to whine about the inevitable abuses Bush-era policymaking has opened the door to, they won't actually be able to do anything about it. Meanwhile, I guess I hope President Obama uses his powers responsibly, but on some level I'm sort of rooting for massive abuses so the right can get what they've been asking for.
Photo courtesy of BarackObama.com used under a Creative Commons license
Obviously, it's somewhat hypocritical for Barack Obama to have implied that he would accept public financing in the general election and then back out of that once it became clear that he could get more money by not doing so. John McCain, by contrast, is just straightforwardly breaking the law on this issue. Which doesn't make Obama's gambit un-hypocritical, but it shows that if you're voting on the basis of "doesn't play funny games with campaign finance law" you should back Obama.
Clearly there's a larger issue with our campaign finance system here, and the past couple of decades worth of reforms seem to have mostly made things worse rather than better. I think Mark Schmitt's article on "Small Donor Democracy" points the way forward to a better tomorrow.
Spencer Ackerman notes that there are plenty of non-Republicans well-qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense:
Jim Webb. Richard Danzig. Michele Flournoy. John Hamre. My personal favorite — though apparently not eligible to be secretary until 2010 — Tony Zinni. (Who probably isn’t actually a Democrat, but is also not a Republican, and whom the building would greet with sweets and flowers.) Ash Carter.
Right-o. Two other ideas -- Lee Hamilton, Larry Korb.
Interesting CJR piece on John McCain's "incoherent environmentalism"
McCain’s wholesale abandonment of a month-long environmental PR strategy is more than a knee-jerk response to a new peak in oil prices. It is a sign that the McCain campaign’s efforts to define the 2008 election narrative are in disarray. Oddly, the political press—which has a Midas touch for turning policy disputes into process stories—seems to have missed the full political significance of this policy shift.
Of course it's not that odd: The press loves John McCain! What's more, to understand the extent to which McCain has turned himself around on environmental issues, you need some kind of grasp of how the logic of his gasoline demagoguery conflicts with the logic of his cap-and-trade proposals, and that seems to be beyond the grasp of many reporters.
When last we saw McCain campaign manager Rick Davis' ties to the pro-Kremlin party in Ukraine, campaign spokesman Brian Rogers told ABC News that "He was not involved in any work his firm did on Ukraine" even though at the time the firm was doing this work they were sharing office space with McCain's non-profit, the Reform Institute. Now along comes Seth Colter Walls reporting that:
That denial -- which shoots past the question of whether Davis merely worked with politicians in Ukraine to the point of denying any business activity in the country whatsoever -- is now being questioned by another American consultant who served as an adviser to a Ukrainian business group during 2004. This source, who requested anonymity from The Huffington Post in order to protect his business interests, said that Davis bragged to him in 2007 about the continuing profitability of real estate investments that he held in Ukraine.
An anonymous accusation isn't worth a huge amount necessarily, but "Multiple emails to top officials within the McCain campaign on Thursday asking about Davis's investments in Ukraine were not returned" so for now at least it seems like the McCain team may be looking to revise their earlier statements on this matter.
Following up on yesterday's promise to catch up on the situation in Afghanistan I read, among other things, The Forgotten Front, a report for the Center for American Progress by Caroline Wadhams and Lawrence Korb. They make the case that a relatively ambitious set of aims can still be achieved, namely:
Deny sanctuary to Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
Build a stable, secure state that is not threatened by internal conflict and does not threaten its neighbors.
There's a lot of ins-and-outs to the "how" part, but perhaps the most interesting argument is the "Afghanistan Is Not Iraq" sidebar section which makes the following points:
Afghanistan has a legitimate government led by President Hamid Karzai that is representative of its people, despite problems with corruption, lack of capacity, and an insufficient presence outside of Kabul. While Karzai’s popularity has decreased since 2005, the majority of Afghan citizens are still supportive of his leadership.
A functioning parliament exists that is an effective counterweight to executive power in Afghanistan.
A general consensus exists among Afghanistan’s different ethnicities and communities over the government of Afghanistan.
The United States is not alone in Afghanistan; 37 countries make up the NATO-International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, and the United Nations is also playing a strong role. The Afghan
government and the international community have a shared agenda and set of goals, embodied by the Afghanistan Compact, which was negotiated by 53 countries in January 2006 and is supported by the Asian Development Bank, the G8 countries, the European Union, and the World Bank.
The Afghan National Army is loyal to the Afghan government and not to a specific sectarian group, and sectarian strife is not dividing the country.
Polling of the Afghan people shows that majorities support an international troop presence and few support the Taliban. While these numbers vary regionally, and are lower in the south, the overall support is positive.
While more should be done, progress has been made in reconstruction efforts, including the expansion of independent media and communications, and building roads.
That seems plausible enough to me. The authors also argue that while more troops (and in particular, special forces troops trained in the appropriate kind of missions) are needed in Afghanistan, they say we don't need a huge increase. Instead, they say we need diplomatic breakthroughs with Iran and Pakistan that will create the circumstances in which stabilization is possible and go through what that might involve.
Ultimately, how plausible this is hinges on the diplomatic calculus and I really have no idea the extent to which it would be possible to convince Pakistan to do X, Y, and Z in exchange for A, B, and C. Iran is an easier case as they actually were cooperating with us in Afghanistan for a long time and then decided to change their mind, which seems ot indicate that they're not oppose in principle to cooperation. So what we have hear is a blueprint of a strategy that sounds worth attempting to me -- it's just hard to know how optimistic we should really be about a new administration's efforts at regional diplomacy.
Under what circumstances would you support offshore oil drilling or drilling in ANWR? Is there a compromise position -- oil companies promise to follow certain environmental restrictions/expanded funding for public transportation/windfall taxes -- where you feel that giving oil companies access to explore and drill in these areas would be worth it?
I don't think there's a "compromise" on these topics that I'd support. What would be worth supporting, by contrast, is a logroll. If something resembling Barack Obama's climate change plan were poised to pass the congress but needed the votes of two additional Senators to clear a filibuster, and giving way on ANWR would get the Alaska Senators on board, then, sure, you strike the deal. In practice, I think offshore drilling would be a net loser of legislative votes in this context, since it's an issue whose opponents (representatives from coastal areas) care more about than do its proponents. Plenty of Republicans with middling-to-terrible environmental records are against offshore drilling. ANWR is probably the reverse -- a big deal in Alaska, where people tend to favor it, and not a big deal elsewhere -- so in theory one could imagine a deal.
I can't really tell what Kirchick is trying to get at here but it inspired Justin Logan to tell me something I didn't know namely that French television asked Ahmadenijad what he meant about how Israel should be wiped from the map, and he replied: "Why are you worried? Where is the Soviet Union? It has disappeared, has it not?"
Now I think it's actually clear enough why one might worry about this, and I have no objection to anyone worrying, but it really is different from threatening to kill all the inhabitants.
It seems that not only did John McCain hold a private meeting with Latino leaders in Chicago at which he tacked left on immigration (after having tacked right after having tacked left earlier) but that his staff let an Illinois Minutemen leader (who happens to be Hispanic) into the meeting so he could hear everything and get pissed off:
So she went to the meeting, a room full of 150-200 people. "Sure enough," Pulido says, "his mantra at the meeting was comprehensive immigration reform.' And there were cheers and applause whenever he mentioned comprehensive immigration reform."
"Then he said, 'I bet some of you don't know this -- did you know Spanish was spoken in Arizona before English?' And the crowd roared. I was appalled," Pulido said. "He was pandering to these people -- that's what they wanted to hear."
I guess I basically agree with what appears to be McCain's real position on immigration, and I look forward to David Brooks' column on McCain's unprincipled flip-flopping on this subject.
Scott Horton has an interesting article in The New Republic about the likelihood that Bush administration figures will face indictment abroad for war crimes and thus, as Larry Wilkerson put it, "Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales and--at the apex--Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel." Horton writes:
Is it likely that prosecutions will be brought overseas? Yes. It is reasonably likely. Sands's book contains an interview with an investigating magistrate in a European nation, which he describes as a NATO nation with a solidly pro-American orientation which supported U.S. engagement in Iraq with its own soldiers. The magistrate makes clear that he is already assembling a case, and is focused on American policymakers. I read these remarks and they seemed very familiar to me. In the past two years, I have spoken with two investigating magistrates in two different European nations, both pro-Iraq war NATO allies. Both were assembling war crimes charges against a small group of Bush administration officials. "You can rest assured that no charges will be brought before January 20, 2009," one told me. And after that? "It depends. We don't expect extradition. But if one of the targets lands on our territory or on the territory of one of our cooperating jurisdictions, then we'll be prepared to act."
Doesn't it seem overwhelmingly likely that the anonymous magistrate here is Baltasar Garzón of Spain, the king of universal jurisdiction?
Peter asks "Matt, what do you think about AFRICOM?"
Well in a banal sense, putting responsibility for the U.S. military's involvement in Africa under the umbrella of a new Africa Command makes a lot more sense than splitting responsibility between EURCOM and CENTCOM. So in that sense it's a good idea. But in the real world, it seems the impetus for the reorganization is the Defense Department's intention to start getting more involved in Africa issues. I'm, shall we say, skeptical of the merits of this idea. Some people seem to think that security-ifying humanitarian problems by overstating the extent to which poverty and state failure in Africa are a national security problem for the United States is a good idea because when you shift a situation from the "charity" box to the "national security" box you get more resources. Which is true, but you also get the wrong kind of resources. The last thing Africa needs is to become the venue for a continent wide struggle for "influence" and a re-injection of great power conflicts, weapons, funding for armed groups, etc.
But the literal question of AFRICOM is a done deal at this point, so there's no real reason to fret about it instead of specific policy issues. There are a lot of folks with a background in Africa issues in Obama's inner circle, so I an Obama administration will probably be able to avoid blundering into fiascos by accident.
Approximately one-third of those who say they were raised Catholic no longer describe themselves as Catholic; which means that roughly 10% of all Americans are former Catholics. Other surveys -- such as the General Social Surveys, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972 -- find that the Catholic share of the U.S. adult population has held fairly steady in recent decades, at around 25%. What this apparent stability obscures, however, is the large number of people who have left the Catholic Church. Losses have been partly offset by the number of people who have changed their affiliation to Catholicism but more importantly by the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.
The emergence of new demographic groups to proclaim "vital" "swing" constituencies is vital to keeping America's political pundits employed, so I proclaim this A Good Thing.
Michael Cohen snarks away at John McCain's op-ed on the US-Canada relationship but the fact of the matter is that the US-Canadian relationship is vitally important. Nobody talks about it here in the United States, but when you look at the combination of our trade with Canada and the extent of our security cooperation, the Canadians are probably our most important allies.
Everyone running for president should have to offer his thoughts on this subject.
The Obama campaign finally released a statement on the FISA compromise:
It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people.
As I said this morning if I were the next President of the United States I'd be happy to be handed unlimited power by the GOP, too. The trouble is that unlike Barack Obama, I'm not going to be President and odds are neither are you.
And boy-oh-boy is he pissed at Barack Obama, citing campaign finance shenanigans while ignoring the blatant criminality of John McCain's own shenanigans. This anti-Obama fervor is probably to be expected -- Brooks is a smart, perceptive, conservative Republican and Obama is not a conservative Republican so I wouldn't expect Brooks to find his campaign appealing. But earlier in the cycle, Brooks seemed surprisingly positive about Obama, and his current wave of detraction is a bit odd.
Lots of folks are upset at "the Democrats" over the FISA business, but while the party leadership (including Obama) has been bad on this, it's worth noting that more House Democrats voted no (128) than voted yea (105). Full list of "no" voters is below the fold. The two members of the House who I had occasion to vote for (Nadler and Capuano) before decamping to the land of taxation without representation were both on the right side of this.
It seems George W. Bush and John McCain, after having worked hard to scuttle Jim Webb's veterans' benefits bill, have now decided to try and take credit for it.
Greater Boston Legal Services "provides free civil (non-criminal) legal assistance to low-income people in Boston and thirty-one additional cities and towns. The help we offer ranges from legal advice to full case representation, depending on client need." Naturally, rampaging Celtics fans decided to trash it:
s the conventional wisdom has it, neither senator has been serious about the long-term budget deficit; both have made rosy assumptions about the revenue that will come from cracking down on waste, fraud, abuse, overseas tax loopholes and other vague fiscal bogeymen.
All this is true enough. Mr. Obama, for instance, relies on hypothetical savings from electronic medical records to claim that he can reduce the deficit, and he hasn’t been totally clear about his tax plans. But the unknowns about the McCain agenda are simply on a different scale.
So far, Mr. McCain is having it both ways. On the campaign trail, he has sounded like a bold tax cutter. To budget wonks, though, his campaign has gingerly inched away from those plans, saying details will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the most-cited analysis of his proposed budget doesn’t square with what he is saying on the stump.
What he doesn't understand here is that McCain is a well-known straight-talker whom everyone respects and knows is honest. Therefore, this analysis can't be right.
I heard part of a conference call the National Security Network organized yesterday about the negotiations for a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq. Skip Gnehm, who's been ambassador to Kuwait, Australia, and Jordan as well as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and a number of other prominent positions made a couple of provocative points. One, he points out that "in all of my experience, there are no SOFA agreements that authorize military action." In other words, we have agreements with Germany, Italy, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other countries governing the presence of U.S. military forces in those countries, but none of them authorize the use of military force inside the host country or against the host country's citizens. Analogies between the SOFA the Bush administration is putting together with Iraq and standard alliance relationships are, in other words, totally invalid.
The other point he made had to do with the problems, historically, that have been posed by pushing too aggressively for these basing deals. He said that Britain had long had a security agreement with Iraq, but "post-WWII there was a moment in time when the British really insisted on the Iraqis that they needed to extend that agreement" which led to "riots on the streets, broad opposition across tribes and ethnic groups" and eventually the Prime Minister had to flee the country. Long story short, "British pressure undermined the government in Iraq, and undermined their own standing in the country.” Here's Wikipedia's account of the matter:
Meanwhile, Britain attempted to legalize a permanent military presence in Iraq even beyond the terms of the 1930 treaty, although it no longer had World War II to justify its continued presence there. Both Nuri and the regent increasingly saw their unpopular links with Great Britain as the best guarantee of their own position, and accordingly set about cooperating in the creation of a new Anglo-Iraqi Treaty. In early January 1948 Nuri himself joined the negotiating delegation in England, and on 15 January the treaty was signed.
The response on the streets of Baghdad was immediate and furious. After six years of British occupation, no single act could have been less popular than giving the British an even larger legal role in Iraq's affairs. Demonstrations broke out the following day, with students playing a prominent part and the Communist Party guiding much of the anti-government activity. The protests intensified over the following days, until the police fired on a mass demonstration (20 January), leaving many casualties. On the following dayt, `Abd al-Ilah disavowed the new treaty. Nuri returned to Baghdad on 26 January and immediately implemented a harsh policy of repression against the protesters. At mass demonstration the next day, police fired again at the protesters, leaving many more dead.
The Monarchy held on to power until the late 1950s, at which point Nuri "was shot dead and buried that same day, but an angry mob disinterred his corpse and dragged it through the streets of Baghdad, where it was hung up, burned, and mutilated."
Now on the flipside, the Western oil companies who are securing no-bid contracts in Iraq are going to want to hire Western security contractors to defend their interests, and apparently one of the things the Bush administration is pushing for is a continuation of the situation where legally unaccountable foreign mercenaries can be introduced into Iraq willy-nilly.
Jon Chait musters more patience than I'm capable of, and explains why you sometimes need a law enforcement approach to terrorism:
[T]errorists often operate in our country, or in friendly countries, which makes military action against them tricky. McCain (through his campaign blog) assailed Obama for favoring "prosecutors rather than predators." But, when the terrorists are holed up in New York City, as was the case with the 1993 bombers Obama referred to, simply arresting them strikes me as more efficient than leveling their apartment with a drone-fired missile.
Now I suppose that knowing how conservatives feel about Western Europe and America's large coastal cities, maybe they do think we should be launching airstrikes in these venues and maybe we shouldn't be giving them ideas.
Post ombudsman Deborah Howell follows up on David Broder's buckraking speeches:
The NAM, the ACCF and the national parents of the Minnesota group and Northern Virginia Realtors do lobby Congress. Broder later said he broke the rules on those speeches. He also said he had cleared his speeches with Milton Coleman, deputy managing editor, or Tom Wilkinson, an assistant managing editor, but neither remembered him mentioning them. Wilkinson said Broder had cleared speeches in the past. Editors should have been consulted on all of the speeches as well as the cruise.
"I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper,'' Broder said.
Is it just me, or does this seem a little unsatisfying as a resolution? Broder broke the basic norms of professional conduct, and he broke the specific procedural rules of The Washington Post, and never disclosed these conflicts of interest, then he got caught, and now he's sorry so we just wash our hands of the whole thing because, after all, he's the Dean? That's that, I suppose, but it tells you what kind of business I'm in. Imagine the press's treatment of a politician caught up in a serious scandal we tried to get away with just mumbling "sorry." I can't imagine Mark Foley or Elliot Spitzer getting away with that.
I think it's clear enough that this rise in the number of people renting their homes has, in practice, been driven by economic hardship. And hardship, obviously, is a bad thing. But at the same time, I think the habit of using the homeownership rate as a general indicator of economic progress is a bad one. There are pros and cons to owning versus renting, plus at any given time in any given market the financial imperatives may point in one way or another.
Given all that, it seems that there's no reason for our policy and rhetoric to include a strong bias in favor of homeownership. Renting gives people more flexibility about where they live, which is probably a good thing in a continent-sized economy where there can be a lot of localized booms and busts. What's more, a house you own combines two elements -- a consumption good element and a savings element. Renting separates that out -- you rent as much house as you feel like consuming, and then you save money by buying mutual funds or whatever. When people own they tend to wind up living inside they mutual fund, which means buying a bigger house than they might have rented, which distorts energy consumption patterns and all kinds of other things.
Consequently, I think that over the long term we should try to shift toward policies -- especially tax policies -- that are more neutral between buying and renting. This can probably be accomplished by capping the home mortgage interest tax deduction at some inoffensively high number, and then not raising the cap as inflation eats it away. Lots of people would still own homes if we did that, but it would be somewhat fewer people, and they'd probably own somewhat smaller homes, and national savings could then be more focused on potentially production investments.
As I noted when talking about his competitiveness speech, Barack Obama just doesn't seem to be able to reach his true rhetorical heights when going into detail about policy. But he has pretty good policies, as evidenced again by a speech he gave earlier today in Miami on "metropolitan policy." Like Ezra Klein I think it's good to see him frame it in this terms, since we're at a point where the boundaries of our functional economic units -- metro areas -- have very little correspondence with formal government boundaries. Another good framing point:
To seize the possibility of this moment, we need to promote strong cities as the backbone of regional growth. And yet, Washington remains trapped in an earlier era, wedded to an outdated “urban” agenda that focuses exclusively on the problems in our cities, and ignores our growing metro areas; an agenda that confuses anti-poverty policy with a metropolitan strategy, and ends up hurting both.
This is a point that urban policy people have been trying to push into the mainstream for a while. The fact that Obama's saying this means, among other things, that his team is paying attention to the right people. But we have poor people who don't live in cities, and cities are facing issues besides poverty -- among other things, we have the question of how to make it affordable for non-rich people to live in nice urban areas. Other highlights:
This is putting enormous pressure on the Highway Trust Fund, which can no longer keep up with all the repairs that have to be made. Yet Senator McCain is actually proposing a gas tax gimmick that would take $3 billion a month out of the Highway Trust Fund and hand it over to the oil companies. Well, at a time when the Highway Trust Fund is beginning to run a deficit for the first time in history, I think that’s the last thing we can afford to do. [...]
But when it comes to rebuilding America’s essential but crumbling infrastructure, we need to do more, not less. Cities across the Midwest are under water right now or courting disaster not just because of the weather, but because we’ve failed to protect them. Maintaining our levees and dams isn’t pork barrel spending, it’s an urgent priority, and that’s what we’ll do when I’m President. I’ll also launch a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years, and create nearly two million new jobs. The work will be determined by what will maximize our safety, security, and shared prosperity. Instead of building bridges to nowhere, let’s build communities that meet the needs and reflect the dreams of our families. That’s what this bank will help us do. [...]
Let’s invest that money in a world-class transit system. Let’s re-commit federal dollars to strengthen mass transit and reform our tax code to give folks a reason to take the bus instead of driving to work – because investing in mass transit helps make metro areas more livable and can help our regional economies grow. And while we’re at it, we’ll partner with our mayors to invest in green energy technology and ensure that your buses and buildings are energy efficient. And we’ll also invest in our ports, roads, and high-speed rails – because I don’t want to see the fastest train in the world built halfway around the world in Shanghai, I want to see it built right here in the United States of America.
Not that America was the world's leader in high-speed rail until the Chinese came along, but whatever -- I want to see the fastest train here, too. I'll be interested to see how much of a difference a somewhat different set of federal transportation policy priorities makes in practice. The Bush administration has been extremely hostile to rail transportation and not very interested in anything that's not cars. Nevertheless, the country's actually seen quite a lot in terms of light rail projects undertaken and cities trying to make themselves more bike friendly. It's at least conceivable that a relatively small change in federal policy could have a pretty big impact on decision-making at the state and local level -- as with education policy, the feds aren't really the key drivers, but they sometimes have the ability to leverage big changes with relatively small sums of money.
Nobody seems concerned about this but me, but given how accustomed we've all become to the idea that Barack Obama will be able to raise vast sums of money for his campaign, isn't this factoid a little bit striking: "Mr. Obama’s fund-raising slowed abruptly in May, when the campaign raised $22 million, $10 million less than it had in April and an even sharper drop relative to his monthly performances earlier in the year."
What if the small donors who powered Obama's rise look at a guy who's ahead in the polls and who everyone is predicting will shatter financial records and think to themselves, "why bother." Small dollar fundraising requires you to overcome collective action problems and too much success may make that difficult. The psychology of donation seems to me to require both "buy-in" on the part of the donor and also a sense of being embattled.
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Heads in the Sand
