Mongol, a Russian-directed Mongolian-language film about the early life of Genghis Khan that I saw Friday night is kinda weird but also kinda awesome. In the "weird" drawer, it's a very long movie and yet ends with the unification of Mongolia -- all the serious conquering is left for a sequel. But it's awesome enough that I'd definitely go see a sequel.
It also made me a bit interested in the actual history of the period. Are there books on the subject that people would recommend?
Two interesting perspectives on Iraq in Foreign Affairs one in which Colin Kahl outlines a strategy of "conditional engagement" in Iraq and one in which William Odom makes the case for a speedier withdrawal. I've grown sympathetic to what Kahl is trying to get at here as the post-"Awakening" reduction in violence has proven more durable than I would have thought. But one shortcoming of Kahl's article is that it doesn't grapple with Odom's point that "The key to thinking clearly about it is to give regional stability higher priority than some fantasy victory in Iraq."
Odom then goes on to argue that "The first step toward restoring that stability is the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq." That may be right or it may be wrong, but either way any strategy that would have us "conditionally" engaged in iraq needs to take a broader, more regional view of the conditions we're talking about. The next administration desperately needs to undertake a "diplomatic surge" in the region, and Barack Obama seems inclined to do so. But one can't really know in advance what the outcome of efforts at a diplomatic breakthrough with Syria and/or Iran would be. We can say that one of the primary goals of our engagement with both regional players and Iraqi politicians should be to lead to a U.S. departure (rather than the Bush/McCain goal of an indefinite presence) but the schedule needs to be actually negotiated with Iraqis and others.
Obviously readers are aware that I don't watch much college basketball, and therefore my scouting opinions are worthless. But thought Derrick Rose looks like a fine basketball player, talk of picking him ahead of Michael Beasley seems kind of crazy to me:
Beasley scores way more (26.2 versus 14.9) on better shooting from the field (.532 versus .477) from the line (.774 versus .712) and from beyond the arc (.379 versus .337). Beasley's a forward who snags 12.4 rebounds per game (to Rose's 4.5) while Rose is a guard who gets 4.7 assists per game to Beasley's 1.2 while their turnovers are similar (2.9 for Beasley to 2.7 for Rose). Chad Ford's rationale for the pick doesn't make me feel much better about Rose:
Everyone likes scorers and rebounders, which is why Beasley is so appealing. Statistically, as John Hollinger shows, he's one of the best college prospects ever.
However, Paxson is in desperate need of a leader who's willing to sacrifice for the team -- a guy whose value doesn't always show up in the box score, just the win column. He had to be grinning from ear to ear when Rose said, "I'm an unselfish guard that's willing to do anything to win ... I mean anything."
Those intangibles aren't nothing, but the Bulls look to me an awful lot like a team that needs someone who can hit shots reliably and good rebounders are always welcome. Apparently Rose played much better at the end of the season, and if you throw out the first half of his season then the numbers look better for him though Beasley is still better.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
It's a fascinating book, and does a lot to put contemporary issues in an important but essentially forgotten context. See more here.
There's some kind of persistent confusion, both in the punditocracy and among the public at large, as to where John McCain stands on this issue, but he's been fairly clear that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade:
In an ideal world, we'll get an honest debate on this and related subjects during the campaign season, rather than the usual thing where candidates just kind of mutter about "strict constructionists" without saying anything substantive.
The battle between the U.S. Air Force and everyone else gets even hotter as the Army moves to add air support capabilities that press up against the boundary that's traditionally divided the services.
Rich Lowry, diavlogging with Mike Tomasky, says there's basically no reason we shouldn't just drill for oil everywhere because the only downside is "aesthetics":
I assume that people who work in the tourism business, or who live in communities where many other people do, will appreciate that aesthetics can have actual economic value. If we made it so that every spot of the coastal United States became horribly ugly the total economic damage would be pretty large. But even aesthetics for its own sake aren't nothing -- I assume Lowry wouldn't burn Starry Night for $5. And of course the ecological damage done by oil drilling can go far beyond merely ruining the view (oil and ocean life don't mix) which is to say nothing of the environmental problems associated with burning the oil.
Ultimately, though, this kind of thinking is why the "oil addiction" language has gained such popularity. There are things we could do that would set us on a path toward reducing our oil consumption. Alternatively, we can decide that it's somehow just not possible and we need to reconciling ourselves to pumping more and more oil with that quest for oil overriding all other possible considerations.
Here if the government were to ask telecom firms to illegally cooperate with an illegal surveillance operation, we'd ensure the rule of law continues to operate by changing the law so that complying with such requests will be legal in the future and also bestowing retroactive immunity on the cooperating firms. And if the Vice President's top aide were convicted of a crime, the president would need to step in and commute his sentence. It's these kind of procedures that keep our country safe and free!
Buyers' remorse strikes Prince William County in Virginia, home to the DC area's highest foreclosure rates and a situation that's left not-foreclosed-on homeowners with sinking property values and rising taxes.
The weird thing is that in the midst of these problems, county officials (and I suppose citizens) have decided that it would be smart for their local government to devote more time and resources to hounding illegal immigrants out of the county in a manner that's made it generally unpleasant for Hispanics of all stripes and immigrants both legal and illegal. One might think that under the circumstances you'd want as many residents as possible keeping homes occupied and patronizing local businesses, but there's no accounting for some folks' manias.
There Netherlands is poised to ban smoking tobacco in public places, but smoking marijuana will still be allowed in licensed "coffee shops" as long as it's not mixed with tobacco.
I also note that I learned went I went to the Netherlands this past fall that there are fewer coffee shops around than there used to be, and that there have been a variety of measures put into place to make it more difficult to get a license. This is in part a consequence of the socially conservative smallish Christian Union Party joining the governing coalition.
Photo by me, available under a Creative Commons license
McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating.
If only David Broder had some ability to actually impact perceptions of prominent political leaders. Maybe somebody should give him a column in an important newspaper and frequent television appearances. Or maybe if Broder believes that McCain's reputation for straight-talk oughtn't be impugned by the facts, he might deign to offer us an argument as to why that's the case rather than sniffily informing us about auras.
The LA Times has a well-argued editorial about the Bush/McCain proposal to destroy America's coastline:
Enter Bush, who on Wednesday said he would end his father's 1990 presidential moratorium on most coastal drilling if Congress would lift its own, separate ban. His reasoning was so contradictory that it's a wonder he could finish his news conference without cracking up. While conceding that the long-term solution to high oil prices is to pursue alternative energy sources, he argued that "in the short run, the American economy will continue to rely largely on oil, and that means we need to increase supply." The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that even if oil companies are allowed to tap the 18 billion barrels under coastal waters that are currently off-limits, oil prices wouldn't be expected to fall until 2030. How is that a short-term solution?
Coastal drilling isn't just opposed by a bunch of Prius-driving greenies from Santa Barbara. Existing moratoriums were put in place at the behest of tourism interests, fishermen, small businesses and coastal dwellers. That's because drilling in these waters benefits oil companies but causes direct economic harm to everyone else by trashing beaches, poisoning marine life and ruining views.
One flaw in the editorial, however, is that it refers to Bush and McCain as "oil opportunists." This misses the fact that since David Broder likes his aura it's not possible for McCain to be an opportunist. Maybe if the LAT editorialists moved closer to DC they could see these issues more clearly. Maybe they don't realize in Southern California that McCain is a straight-talker and Broder's the Dean. I mean, this is a paper that doesn't even know that Tim Russert was 21st century America's greatest hero so clearly they can't be trusted.
Photo of oil-smeared grebe by Flickr user Wolfraven used under a Creative Commons license
Apparently John Bolton thinks that if Israel (or, presumably, the United States) were to bomb Iran the retaliation wouldn't be so bad because they would worry about "an even greater response" from Israel or from the United States. And indeed they might. Were I in the Iranian government and we were faced with this situation, I'd be sounding notes of caution. But then again, from my perch here in the West I'm sounding notes of caution and there's also John Bolton on teevee talking about how the Iranians wouldn't dare retaliate.
But somewhere in Iran will be the Iranian John Bolton, explaining that the West and Israel are too weak and frightened of Iranian retaliation to counter-attack, so they may as well come at us with all guns blazing. As I've said before our American hawks think and act exactly like the irrational madmen they imagine to be running the show in Teheran.
Countries can either interact with each other in cooperative ways, that make the population of both states better off, or else they can engage in negative-sum conflicts that make both populations worse off. Once you're engaged in a cycle of negative-sum conflict, as the United States and Iran have been since the Revolution, it's very hard to pull out of it. Something like a direct military attack on Iran would clearly be a substantial escalation of that cycle. The rational thing faced with that would be to pull back from the brink, but it's been the case for decades that it would be better for both sides to pull back from the brink -- it's just a hard think to accomplish in the real world and it would become much more difficult in the context of an unprovoked military attack. But what's needed aren't speculations about the Iranian response to bombing, but a good-faith attempt to make a diplomatic breakthrough.
This seems like a problem: "Militants in Pakistan fired rockets at NATO bases across the border in Afghanistan, killing three children in a village and prompting the alliance to launch a pair of retaliatory artillery strikes, officials said Sunday."
Working out some kind of better-than-this arrangement with the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan and local leaders in the border region is a very tall order, but also a vitally important task. And every minute the President and other top U.S. officials are thinking about Iraq is a minute they're not spending on the part of the world where al-Qaeda's leadership is and where nuclear weapons programs and terrorist safe havens aren't hypothetical possibilities but actually existing conditions.
I criticized Colin Kahl's "Conditional Engagement"Foreign Affairs article for not really grappling with the regional dimensions of the Iraq situation, but but the longer report on Iraq he wrote with Michèle Flournoy and Shawn Brimley for CNAS does go into. I largely agree with what they have to say on that subject with the perhaps not-so-minor proviso that in other sections of the paper they define curbing Iranian influence as one of our objectives there.
To me the point of regional diplomacy would be to get beyond a situation where the US and Iran see each other as engaged in a zero-sum conflict over influence in Iraq. At the moment, both countries want to see Iraq stabilized. But Iran wants to curb US influence in Iraq. And the US wants to curb Iranian influence in Iraq. And as long as Iraq's most important neighbor and the global hegemon are both contending for influence in Iraq, it's hard to see how Iraq can be stable even if both the U.S. and Iran have a second-order desire to Iraq a stable Iraq.
In other thoughts inspired by the report, the fact that the security gains in Iraq have sustained themselves longer than I would have guessed several months ago had lulled me into a bit of complacency. But the checklist of things the CNAS trio wants to see happen in Iraq is a stark reminder that despite the improvement there are literally dozens of ways in which the situation might fall apart again with or without our involvement. The report also helped clarify my thinking on where I disagree with the authors. In particular, I'm much more inclined to what they call "conditional disengagement" -- which would basically focus on heading for the exits but with the proviso that any responsible leader would have to be open to modifying that plan under certain conditions.
Conditional engagement as CNAS lays it out could work, and certainly seems preferable to the Bush/McCain stay forever policy, but to me it's still unduly invested in the idea that the United States should be risking a lot of people's lives (and spending a lot of money and killing people, etc.) in an effort to micromanage the politics of Iraq in a way where I think the prospects for success aren't great and the American interest is hazy.
Conversations about urbanism always eventually end up going in the direction of education policy. After all, absent better schools, the city will always be a place for poor people, very rich people, and young people rather than for the mainstream of American life. To that end, it's worth noting that a lot of people's ideas about the quality of urban schools are mistaken, as you can see from a look inside the results of the NAEP mathematics test as revealed in the Trial Urban District Assessment from 2005. First off, consider the number of eighth grader who rate as "below basic" (this is bad):
That's your classic "big city, bad schools" chart with DC, New York, and Boston all doing far worse than the national average. Except it turns out that demographic factors have a huge influence on school achievement. Big city school systems tend to contain a higher-than-average number of poor kids, and poor kids tend to do worse than middle class kids, so cities wind up with bad test results. What if we restrict our sample and just look at how kids from economically struggling families, the ones eligible for federally subsidized school lunches, are doing?
Here things look very different. Once we control for demographics, it turns out that New York and Boston don't have "failing inner city schools" at all -- on eighth grade math scores, their schools are actually doing a slightly better than average job of educating poor children. Their overall numbers are pulled down by their larger-than-average number of poor kids, but when you add appropriate controls their school system is doing fine. DC, by contrast, does have a challenging population, but also is doing a crappy job relative to the challenge.
Now of course things change a little bit if you look at 4th grade instead of 8th grade or reading instead of math, or middle class kids only instead of poor kids only, or the high end or the low end, but the basic pattern is pretty robust -- New York and especially Boston have average public school systems masked by difficult demographics, whereas DC has a shitty public school system whose badness is masked by clichés about bad big city schools. Here's 4th grade scores among lunch-eligible kids:
And here on the flipside are the number of non-poor kids who did well on the test:
So to make a long story short, when talking about this issue it helps to be precise. All across the United States we have a problem with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds doing poorly in school. We also see kids from disadvantaged backgrounds overrepresented in urban school systems. Consequently, average results from city school systems tend to be below average. But when you use appropriate demographic controls you see that there's huge city-to-city variation and also a huge amount being determined by the demographics.
Some cities -- i.e., Washington DC -- really do have sub-standard school systems and would do well to implement reforms that made DCPS get results more like what you see in Boston or New York. But even if all cities did get the level of performance that you see from the best cities, there would still be a problem insofar as poor kids tend to do badly even in "good" schools in the United States.
I got a rare in-person request on Saturday from a dude who introduced himself to me at a glasses store to write something about Tim Pawlenty, since he seems to be a leading McCain VP candidate but nobody knows anything about him. The best place to start is probably Noam Scheiber's recent TNR profile which lays out the basic facts -- he's a young, smart, hard-working guy who marries social conservatism to a certain amount of populist rhetoric while mostly hewing to GOP fiscal orthodoxy. Like a lot of governors who've had to grapple with opposition party control of the state legislature, he doesn't have much in the way of grand accomplishments and also has a certain aura of moderation about him but it's a little bit hard to know exactly where he stands.
Basically -- he seems like a good VP choice along a bunch of dimensions beyond the fact that this seems like McCain's only hope of putting Minnesota in play.
Why don't you talk about the consequences of permanently high oil for the food production business? Does the high cost of fertilizer mean a drop in productivity and some kind of malthusian nightmare? Or can we sustain a large world population of food production with permanently expensive petroleum?
Good Washington Post article takes a look at the failure of al-Hurra a U.S.-funded, Arabic-language television network that hasn't managed to attract any viewers:
According to critics, the U.S. government miscalculated in assuming that al-Hurra could repeat the success of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when information-starved listeners behind the Iron Curtain tuned in on their shortwave radios.
By contrast, "About 200 other stations beam Arabic-language programming to satellite dishes reaching even the poorest neighborhoods in the Middle East and North Africa. The BBC launched an Arabic-language news channel this year, and more rivals loom." Some of those channels are state-controlled and thus of limited value, but then again al-Hurra is state controlled as well, and the Arab dictatorships are generally not nearly as repressive as the Soviet Union was in terms of this kind of thing.
This is, however, indicative not only of the failure of one particular initiative, but of the Bush administration's broad inability to "get it" with regard to the US and the Arab world, a problem in which they've been joined by many other actors and institutions. The upshot of it all is that though the Arab world has many problems, it's just not a situation like Eastern Europe. Most Eastern Europeans regarded their governments as not only repressive, but as puppets of a Moscow-based Russian empire and many were willing to embrace the idea of US-assisted liberation. A lot of Americans would like Arabs to see the geopolitics of the Greater Middle east in that way, but relatively few actually do. Insofar as the analogy stands up at all (which isn't very far), we're closer to playing the Soviet Union role -- acting as the guarantor of post-colonial successor regimes set up by the British Empire in the Gulf, and as the opponent of anti-imperialist regimes in Syria, Iran, and formerly Iraq.
Even once you understand the situation correctly, there's still a lot of questions to be debated about what's the best way to handle things. But the essential first step is to not let our picture of the situation be clouded by wishful thinking or a weird kind of nostalgia and al-Hurra reflects both.
The Case Against (Government Subsidization of) Homeownership
I briefly argued on Saturday that public policy bias in favor of homeownership was perhaps a not very good idea. Paul Krugman lays out the argument at greater length today. Clive Crook did an even longer column on this for The Atlantic several months ago. Crook and Krugman are not particularly close to each other ideologically, an indication that this aspect of our policy environment is not motivated by any particularly principled considerations.
Let me just add to this that if you look at homeownership rate by state it's clear that a super-high rate of homeownership is neither a sign of economic vitality nor something that creates economic vitality.
Apparently congress created a kind of nuclear terrorism czar position in 2007 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission and the Bush administration has just decided not to fill it. This is about what you'd expect from an administration with a chillingly terrible record on nuclear proliferation, and also a reminder that this -- rather than the vice presidency -- is a job for which Sam Nunn would be an excellent choice.
I'd missed this piece of demagoguery from John McCain about Barack Obama's response to the Supreme Court's ruling about enemy combatants:
"Senator Obama is obviously confused about what the United States Supreme Court decided and what he is calling for," McCain said in a statement issued by his campaign. "After enthusiastically embracing the Supreme Court decision granting habeas in US civilian courts to dangerous terrorist detainees, he is now running away from the consequences of that decision and what it would mean if Osama bin Laden were captured. Senator Obama refuses to clarify whether he believes habeas should be granted to Osama bin Laden, and instead cites the precedent of the Nuremburg war trials. Unfortunately, it is clear Senator Obama does not understand what happened at the Nuremburg trials and what procedures were followed. There was no habeas at Nuremburg and there should be no habeas for Osama bin Laden. Senator Obama cannot have it both ways. In one breath he endorses habeas for terrorists like 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and in the next he denies its logical conclusion of habeas for Osama bin Laden. By citing a historical precedent that does not include habeas, he sends a signal of confusion and indecision to our allies and adversaries and the American people."
I really think it's McCain who's confused here. If Osama bin Laden or anyone else were in the jurisdiction of a properly constituted international tribunal, the U.S. judicial system obviously wouldn't have the authority to rule on his status one way or the other. The ruling had to do, in part, with the Bush administration's silly effort to use the ambiguous status of Guantanmo Bay to hold people in American captivity while somehow also outside the reach of American law. A suspect who's genuinely in someone else's custody (rather than in the fake sense that the Gitmo detainees are in Cuba) is a whole other can of worms.
The other thing is that the right the Court gave the detainees is a pretty basic one -- a legal right to challenge the basis for having classified them as enemy combatants. In the case of bin Laden, this would be child's play -- the man issued a declaration of war against the United States. It's pretty clear that he's an enemy combatant.
To get a persuasive critique of the Court, McCain needs to rely on the names of individuals who are clearly enemy combatants -- guys like KSM and OBL. But in the case of those guys there'll be no problem proving that they're enemy combatants. To generate a good example of the decision creating a legal problem, McCain would need to name someone for whom there's no good evidence of his enemy combatant status. But a guy like that doesn't make for persuasive rhetoric. After all, if there's no sound basis for believing that he's an enemy combatant, why detain him?
It seems that The Washington Post story on al-Hurra that I linked to earlier this afternoon was following an investigation that Dafna Linzer, formerly of the Post and now of the exciting new investigative journalism venture Pro Publica, did as Pro Publica's first story.
"The Border Patrol is one of the few large law enforcement agencies that does not require a college degree or even a high school diploma and can offer pay of $70,000 after just a few years, factoring in overtime." That's from a New York Times article about the Border Patrol's efforts to increase recruiting in African-American communities since the agency is currently hard-up for recruits and only one percent black. The larger issue here is that when you decide that it would be good politics to double the size of an agency during a very brief span of time, you're then left with the difficult task of actually recruiting the manpower.
The Finnish Border Guard has a comparable mission of securing a long land border with a much poorer country but I think it's a relatively elite force. The United States is trying to maintain global military commitments, needs good people to police our large cities (indeed, we need more and better of them), run FBI counter-terrorism and organized crime operations, etc. Unless we're prepared to seriously bump the border patrol in the list of public sector priorities, which sounds like a bad idea to me, it seems to me that we'd be better off with a relatively small but high-quality force than with a large one riddled with problems like the recruit who "was recently ejected from the training academy after being arrested in a gun smuggling case."
Photo by Flickr user StormyRed 28 used under a Creative Commons license
Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.
Josh Marshall runs this under an "uppity watch" heading, but I'm not sure I detect any racial animosity here. But what about the class cues? How many Americans have had the experience of being at a country club and watching some dude with a beautiful date hold a martini and smoke a cigarette? Certainly I haven't. Rove assumes that "you know this guy" but unless "you" are a wealthy person from the past, you probably don't know a guy like that.
Via Ryan Avent, it seems that train ridership is way up: "Amtrak set records in May, both for the number of passengers it carried and for ticket revenues — all the more remarkable because May is not usually a strong travel month." Nevertheless, "the railroad, and its suppliers, have shrunk so much, largely because of financial constraints, that they would have difficulty growing quickly to meet the demand."
We could, however, expand train service at a medium pace to meet the demand were we so inclined. It's also worth noting a few things about the state of passenger rail in the United States. One is that outside the northeast corridor the general quality of service is pretty poor. The other is that outside the northeast corridor most of the focus is perversely on long-distance routes rather than on the short routes where the demand is. And last, on the northeast corridor where a decent train runs on a reasonable route the supply is so limited that the fares are absurdly high.
Nevertheless, ridership is growing. If we were to invest money in expanding capacity on the Acela corridor, and servicing the shorter inter-city trips (Miami-Tampa, Chicago-Milwaukee rather than NY-New Orleans) for which rail is well-suited, then we'd really be getting somewhere. This is to say nothing of adopting Barack Obama's goal of actually having the fastest trains in the world.
Photo by Flickr user red arrow used under a Creative Commons license
It's interesting that the result of not one but both major parties nominating presidential candidates known as process-oriented reformers has merely resulted in an usually large volume of campaign finance shenanigans -- from McCain illegally backing out of the system after having used public financing to secure a loan, to Obama wriggling out of a commitment to use public financing for the general election. I bet that two years ago, reformers would have told you that a McCain-Obama matchup would be great for their cause. In practice, it's turned out to be terrible.
And I think it's not a coincidence. McCain and Obama both feel they can take the hit on these issues in part because they're both branded as "reformers" and thus don't need to worry as much about being perceived as corrupt. Years ago, of course, McCain had a different reputation as a consequence of the Keating 5 business and became a reformer in part in order to change that reputation. But politicians who have the clean image can feel free to ditch process constraints whenever convenient.
I only recently became aware that John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer. I suppose it's not that shocking, a lot of people his age aren't necessarily adept with newish technologies and a U.S. Senator is in a position to have his computing done for him. Still, I could see having some concerns about the leadership of someone who doesn't use the dominant new technology of our time. Eve Fairbanks reports that Mark SooHoo, deputy e-campaign manager for McCain, had this to say on the matter at the Personal Democracy Forum:
You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country. … John McCain is aware of the Internet.
I dunno. Do you have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country? I think you might. If we had a president who didn't know how to drive a car, that would probably strike us as pretty odd. But I think you could plausibly claim that you don't necessarily have to have a driver's license in order to understand how automobiles shape the country. But that's because we assume that even someone who doesn't have a license has still been in cars sees highways, onramps and offramps, parking lots, quiet winding roads, overpasses, bridges, etc. If you hadn't done any of that stuff, then I think it really would be difficult to understand the implications of the technology.
But while people ride as passengers in cars all the time, I would imagine that someone who doesn't use a computer doesn't peer over the shoulder of his staff either. And under those circumstances, I think it really might be difficult to understand. But of course that's a defeasible assumption -- McCain could say something really insightful about information technology and its implications for politics and society and I guess we'd have to say "wow, that was smart." But I don't think he's done so and I don't think I'm going to hold my breath waiting.
Going to play professionally in Europe for a year or two certainly strikes me as a superior option for a talented 18 year-old American basketball player than going to play for a fake-amateur team affiliated with an American college or university. Indeed, it seems like something of a no-brainer. And maybe if more people did it, the NCAA would start feeling pressure to erode the cartel's rules against compensating athletes for the work they do on behalf of the college.
Or who knows, maybe some colleges might even decide that managing for-profit sports franchises is an odd side-business for institutions of higher education to be running.
In my Twitter feed -- "the new Girl Talk record is a necessity for modern living"; "the new Girl Talk record is aware of all internet traditions" -- it's downloading as we speak and available for sale on a "pay what you want" basis here. I've been enjoying the newish Ladytron for the past week or so.
Charlie Black's statement that "certainly it would be a big advantage to" John McCain for American civilians to be slaughtered by international terrorists helps bring to the surface the central paradox of our times. How reasonable is it to trust that a political movement will bring safety to the country when they themselves believe that doing so would ill-serve their interests? Insofar as representative democracy works as a system of government, the general idea is that politicians expect to be rewarded for good stuff happening and punished for bad stuff happening, and thus make some effort to try to see that good stuff rather than bad stuff happens. The post-9/11 GOP upends that relationship, and you repeatedly see instances of conservatives openly yearning for disaster to strike on the theory that that'll show the liberals or boost Republican electoral fortunes.
Meanwhile, if I were Barack Obama I'd be trying to think of a plan to counter the fact that not only does al-Qaeda scaring people serve GOP interests, but Republicans keeping power also serves al-Qaeda's interest in pushing the West into conflict with a broader circle of Muslims. According to Ron Suskind, the CIA's view was that bin Laden released a tape shortly before the 2004 election specifically in order to boost George W. Bush's re-election fortunes and there's no particular reason to think that that sort of tactic won't come back into play.
John requests comment on "Barack Obama's support for corn ethanol subsidies and tariffs on the more energy-efficient Brazilian sugarcane stuff, please." There was a good New York Timesarticle on this yesteday and Obama turns out to be sort of worse than I'd thought -- not just shuffling along the Midwestern party line but really in tight with a bunch of corn ethanol people.
The problems with corn ethanol are pretty well-rehearsed at this point, and obviously anyone trying to block the importation of foreign ethanol isn't actually serious about this topic as an alternative fuel and is just trying to hand out yet more money to Big Corn. I'm not sure how much the president's attitude toward this issue really matters, but if Obama wins let's hope it doesn't matter too much.
Barack Obama's official line of state-specific Obama t-shirts doesn't include a DC for Obama shirt. Well that's fair, you say, as we're not a real state. But such other colonial entities as Guam and Puerto Rico have shirts.
Joseph Bruno, the GOP boss in New York State who's run the State Senate forever, is retiring. He's terrible and part of a whole terrible corrupt system. There's a chance that the Democrats will take control of the incredibly gerrymandered state senate, and if that happens it's gonna be a huge redistricting party afterwards.
How much does the picture of urban school systems I was painting yesterday change if you look at race as an indicator of socioeconomic disadvantage rather than family income? The answer is that even though studies show that race exhibits a substantial, income-independent influence on school achievement, the qualitative picture is similar if instead of looking at how cities do with educating poor kids we look at how they do with black kids:
As you can see here, nationwide performance by black children is pretty deplorable with 59 percent rating as "below basic." But given that unfortunate baseline, you can see that several urban school systems -- Charlotte, Austin, Houston, New York, and Boston -- are doing somewhat better than average, while others are doing quite a bit worse than average.
Now it's worth saying that this way of slicing up the demographics is no substitute for a proper regression analysis. You can really see this if you look, for example, at white test scores where suddenly the otherwise poor-performing DC public schools start looking good because the DC white population is unusually affluent and well-educated compared to whites nationwide. Unfortunately, the data available to talk about in order to get city versus city detail is a little sparse. The NAEP TUDA is the best way of getting apples-to-apples comparisons of different urban districts, but it doesn't cover very many cities and doesn't let you get nearly as rigorous as would be desirable.
Still, I believe the overall basic point holds. Demographic factors have a large impact on educational outcomes. When you try to control for demographic differences, suddenly big city school systems don't look uniformly dysfunction -- some are above average. But demographics aren't destiny -- some cities are doing much worse than others. Beyond that, on a nationwide basis poor children and non-white children are doing unacceptably badly even in "good" school districts.
It seems John McCain is prepared to admit that his drilling schemes won't actually bring down gas prices but still defends the plan by saying: "Even though it may take some years, the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial."
Um, okay. But if even conservatives agree that "aesthetics" are a valid reason against drilling, why doesn't that override the psychic benefits of drilling? More to the point, couldn't people use some policies that are beneficial in non-psychological ways. Maybe the federal government should provide a cash infusion to mass transit systems so that instead of buckling under increased demand we can improve the quality of people's experience and start running trains and buses more quickly? That wouldn't solve everyone's problems by any means, but it would deliver genuine help to many people in the short run.
Via Brendan Nyhan, some puzzling remarks from a leader of the white supremacist community:
"I haven't seen this much anger in a long, long time," said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. "Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president."
Have we had a covertly nonwhite president? Warren Harding, perhaps?
The Stanley Foundation has an excellent new report on the US-Iranian relationship titled "Iranian and Western Interests Are Closer Than You Think." They're not necessarily closer than I think, since I already sympathized with this line of argument, but they're certainly closer than is generally supposed in the United States. Highly recommended.
I think the idea of using prizes to try to spur innovation is a promising idea, but I'm not quite sure why John McCain's decided that a better battery for an electric car is the thing to offer the prize for. Electric vehicles would be good from an environmental perspective, but insofar as so much of our electricity comes from fossil fuels car electrification also has a large element of just pushing the problem around. The thing to offer the prize for is either some kind of clean electricity breakthrough, some kind of carbon scrubbing or sequestration technology, or maybe something to make nuclear waste disappear.
Also, if McCain's cap-and-trade plan involved auctioning the permits (the way Barack Obama's does) then it could raise money for these prize schemes. Something he might want to think about.
On top of all that, $300 million seems preposterously low. A good electric car battery would earn you way more money than that in the course of things. For a prize to make sense, the scale of the prize needs to be large relative to the potential profitability of the invention.
Intrepid commenter Alex on this very site cracked the code that revealed the DC for Obama t-shirt that DCist had previously reported did not exist. Now they say "The shirt still isn't included on the main state shirt page of the Obama online store, however. Should we have been able to figure out that it was hidden there all along? Perhaps. Should we have had to? At the very least, it's sloppy web design."
So be that as it may, my friends, that's still not change you can believe in [hideous scowl]. John McCain could design a better page and he doesn't even know how to use a computer.
Are American metropolitan areas outside of the Northeast Corridor dense enough or well layed out enough to support inter-city rail? Beyond putting light- or medium-rail in those cities, how much would have to change before inter-city rail made sense as a way to travel from, say, Milwaukee to Indianapolis?
As a general matter, rail works better as an alternative to driving when the destination is someplace with a good walking/transit network. That said, for a lot of trips it's not really necessary to have a car at your destination even if your destination is a very car-dependent area. I went to Forth Worth for a conference once and both the hotel and the convention center are in Fort Worth's smallish walkable downtown. Combined with a cab ride to the Fort Worth Cultural District to see the Kimbell Museum and the Fort Worth Modern that contained plenty of things to do for a few days without the expense of renting a car and that kind of thing is reasonably common for business travel.
Second rail is not only an alternative to driving, but also an alternative to flying. There are a lot of flights between Portland and Seattle, for example or between Chicago and Detroit. Any time you have two cities that are pretty close by and serviced by a lot of flights, you have a situation where a good inter-city rail option would attract customers notwithstanding any issues related to the density of the destination city. Replacing air trips with train trips is good for the environment, and any time you have a viable rail option that'll displace some of the intercity car travel which is also good. Meanwhile, a passenger rail hub can become a focal point for neighborhood development and a node on a growing urban transit network.
So, yes, under George W. Bush the United States of America is regressing to an understanding of humane treatment of people that doesn't reflect the enlightened views of Genghis Khan. That's your feel-good thought of the day.
A new study from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies says the U.S. housing market is likely to keep slumping for a long time. Here's coverage from the Washington Post. That makes sense to me -- to have a speedy turnaround, you'd really need to have a speedy crash and that goes against the psychology of the whole enterprise. I believe the way these things usually work is that nominal prices stagnated for a while, allowing real prices to fall (and especially allowing real prices to fall as a share of household income) over time without people engaging in steep price cutting.
They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.
Now I think that captures an important part of the contortions around the debate. But if you really want to be intellectually honest about the surge debate, the essence of the matter is that the whole question of "working" or "not working" is avoiding the bigger debate. To its proponents, the surge is working so well that it sets the stage for years and years of further American military engagement in Iraq. And it's true -- the security gains of the past year do make the Bush/McCain strategy of perpetual military entanglement in Iraq look a lot more viable than it looked a year ago. But it's also true that the security gains of the past year make a strategy of leaving Iraq look a lot more viable than it looked a year ago.
Basically, when Iraq was hellishly violent, all possibly strategies seemed likely to lead to more hellish violence. The cliché was to start every discussion of Iraq by saying "there are no good options, but..." Now insofar as things look better, all options really do look better as a consequence.
Dafna Linzer and Paul Kiel follow up on their al-Hurra reporting noting that a number of media and political figures have gotten cash money from al-Hurra in exchange for appearing on the network. Now to be fair, a lot of the people who've gotten this money (David Corn, say) are hardly administration shills.
But it's an inherently problematic situation for a government-run entity to be in -- it naturally tends to build goodwill and shield the network from much-needed scrutiny.
Spencer Ackerman has a new new blog home at http://attackerman.firedoglake.com and today he's finishing up his first day there. It's a cool-looking site, and a great get for FDL.
Via John Aravosis, the UK is sensibly reacting to energy trends by expanding rail capacity substantially. We, of course, can't afford to do any such thing even though we're substantially richer than Britain and even though we absolutely can afford to spend over $100 billion per year in Iraq indefinitely -- after all, our troops are dying there at a lower rate than they were before, so what's the harm?
Several people have asked me to comment on the announced roster of the US Senior Men's Basketball Team set to compete in Beijing. The way I think about it is this. The biggest stars in the NBA tend to be guys who can score frequently by getting shots in the paint either through low-post play or through dribble penetration. We also know from bitter experience that our international foes will try to counter our scorers by playing a zone defense designed to pack the paint. We also know that big-time NBA stars aren't necessarily top-notch defenders. Conclusion -- you want to focus on guys who can shoot from outside and who can defend.
It's not that those are the only important skills. But Kobe Bryant fits comfortably within that framework and he's also got more to his offensive game than that. So you've got Kobe. Then you need to ask, what do we want Kobe to do when he drives and finds the lane swarming with foreigners? Well, we don't want him to kick it out to Jason Kidd, who's a poor shot. But Deron Williams? Now we're getting somewhere. I think the ideal lineup, from big to small, would be something like Tim Duncan, Shawn Marion, Tayshaun Prince, Kobe Bryant, and Deron Williams. That's a lineup that could space the floor extremely well and defend superbly.
The problem with the roster they've assembled is that it doesn't include Marion or anyone with an Marion-like ability to defend the power forward position and shoot from outside. At the same time, the team includes non-shooters Jason Kidd, LeBron James, and Dwayne Wade on the perimeter. Those guys are both good players, obviously, but it's kind of suboptimal. Wade and James are such huge stars that it's hard to see doing without them, but I'd feel a lot better with Marion instead of Kidd (we don't need three point guards anyway). It also continues to baffle me that Mike D'Antoni isn't the coach of the team -- he has experience coaching NBA players and he has experience coaching FIBA-rules basketball; since we're asking NBA players to coach a FIBA-rules game that sounds like what we're looking for. Coach K has experience doing neither of those things.
More broadly, I think the discussion around this topic needs to pay more attention to the fact that the rules are different. You need to design teams that can beat true zone defense. The closer-in location of the three point line changes how effective some people are. And if you've been playing the game one way professionally for years, it's difficult to just switch to a different set of rules -- especially when your opponents are more familiar with those rules.
I've written before about how most developing countries have even more screwed-up energy policies than we do -- with the government expending large sums of money on environmentally destructive gasoline subsidies that are almost always regressive in the context of a poor country. One consequence of this that I hadn't considered, but which makes sense as soon as you think about it, is that if you live in the American Southwest you can head south of the border and fill up on cheap gas:
And while here he would pick up six-packs of Tecate beer and produce like passion fruit, and even visit an orthodontist. In all, he expected to save $200. The border, he said, flashing a mouthful of braces, is “our advantage.”
Things like buying passion fruit and an affordable orthodontist are conventional gains from trade, and ought to be encouraged but the kind of subsidy arbitrage represented by the gas issue isn't all that awesome. The good news, I suppose, is that this may put pressure on Mexico to start phasing these subsidies out.
Jeff Goldberg thinks it's "an odd phenomenon" that some Americans object when people make false claims about statements Mahmoud Ahmedenijad has made in the past. I don't think it's odd at all. You don't need to be an apologist for a very bad man to still think it's worth lowering the rhetorical temperature around Iran policy. The United States is facing some very serious questions about our approach to Iran, and so it's important that the issue be discussed in a calm and accurate manner.
You'd never know this guy was the Republican candidate as opposed to maybe someone running on a Democrat/Green fusion ticket or something. Bill Burton put out a statement for the Obama campaign saying: "Barack Obama has a long record of bipartisan accomplishment and we appreciate that it is respected by his Democratic and Republican colleagues in the Senate. But in this race, Oregonians should know that Barack Obama supports Jeff Merkley for Senate. Merkley will help Obama bring about the fundamental change we need in Washington."
NYT: "A bipartisan group of 200 former government officials, retired generals and religious leaders plans to issue a statement on Wednesday calling for a presidential order to outlaw some interrogation and detention practices used by the Bush administration over the last six years." Yes it seems that the Genghis Khan view of the matter is gaining popularity vis-à-vis the Bush position.
John McCain, meanwhile, is kinda sorta against torture unless the CIA does it in which case it's fine.
I feel it's likely that very few of the people reading this blog are conservative movement leaders looking for ways to orient their movement in a more humane direction that would give it a better shot at winning votes without resorting to terrible flim-flam and massive dishonesty. But in case you are out there, or maybe if you're just interested in American politics, I hope you'll read Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by my colleagues Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.
The book is, in essence, a call for conservatives to get real about acknowledging some of the economic problems facing the country and an attempt to develop meaningful solutions to these problems. I'm not sure how well some of these solutions will qualify as conservative, and others I don't really agree with, but on the hole I think the kind of things they're putting on the table would be a huge step in the right direction. I'm a bit skeptical that this is a realistic vision for what the Republican Party might be like, but on some level I think it makes more sense to let conservative reformers have their shot at winning their internal battles than for liberals sitting on the sidelines to just sort of speculate about the possibilities.
As Tom Lee points out any discussion of a project like My Bike Lane aimed at getting motorists to stop practices that endanger the lives of motorists inevitably cycles back to someone pointing out that cyclists sometimes misbehave as well. And that's true enough. However, from a policy perspective you need to consider the costs and benefits to different weightings of priorities. A measure like stricter bike lane enforcement that makes life easier for bike riders and harder for car drivers has some clear environmental and public health benefits in terms of at the margin encouraging drivers to shift to walking, transit, or biking.
By contrast, a measure that would be convenient for drivers of private cars but inconvenient for cyclists doesn't seem to have much to recommend it. By contrast, in a conflict between a bike and a bus the policy merits seem to lie with the bus. Buses loading and unloading passengers are constantly interfering with the bike lanes on 7th Street and 14th Street which is annoying if you're on a bike but probably not A Bad Thing in a broader sense since clearly many more people fit on a bus than fit on my bike. The problem here is that the city has seen fit to put its two biggest north-south bike lanes on two of the top three north-south routes for bus frequency. A smarter idea would be to reduce the volume of space on those roads given to private cars and make wider bus/bike lanes (but unlike the alleged bus/bike only lane on 9th street and a part of 7th street north of the mall you'd actually need to enforce it) which would remove the problem of buses needing to cross back-and-forth past the bike lane.
Bike/pedestrian conflicts are, similarly, to be lamented. But the problem here is less evil cyclists encroaching on the sidewalk than the simple fact that such a huge proportion of public space in dense, walkable areas is nonetheless given over to cars. If bikes had more space specifically dedicated to them, then they wouldn't be in the way of people trying to walk around. Go to Amsterdam and you'll almost certainly have a near-collision experience if you stand around in a bike lane, but not otherwise because the bikes are in the bike lanes which are plentiful and well-marked.
Tyler Cowen asks if there's anything new to say about Barack Obama: "I, for one, have nothing new to say about Barack Obama, even though I am exposed to more news about him than any other single person. I wish I did, but I don't."
Doesn't it seem, though, that he has nothing new to say about Obama because we're exposed to more news about Obama than about anyone else rather than it being an "even though" issue? That's about all I've got -- meta-commentary on things people are saying about not having anything new to say about Obama.
A nice item from Fareed Zakaria on conservative charging Ronald Reagan with "appeasement" for sitting down with Soviet leaders and how that seems to have worked out okay:
That's via Andrew. One thing I say in my book and that I've especially tried to emphasize in book talks I've given is that the country was basically fortunate during the Cold War years in that at key moments Republican Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan wound up rejecting the advice of the conservative movement that brought them to power -- Ike in rejecting "rollback," Nixon in pursuing détente, and Reagan in sitting down with Gorbachev -- whereas George W. Bush has come much closer to hewing to the straight conservative ideal and the results have been disastrous.
Via Andrew Sullivan, Ralph Nader's not very taken with Barack Obama:
There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?
I would find this more persuasive were it not for the fact that Obama does want to crack down on predatory lending and other forms of financial exploitation of the poor. And then there's this:
Still, key players who worked with Obama at Altgeld Gardens said he deserves credit for pulling together a team of hundreds of residents who rallied for improvements at their housing projects. Obama helped secure grants for a jobs program and pushed for asbestos removal. His biggest accomplishment may have been to leave in place a group of activist mothers, some of whom continue to work or live at Altgeld Gardens.
And then there's Obama's lead abatement bill. All that is to say nothing of minor details like Obama's support for programs that would create universal access to preschool and health insurance. You don't need to be blind to the very real flaws of Obama and his agenda to recognize that it really is a substantially different one from what's being offered by John McCain.
John McCain's answer that it would take an "all-out World War III" before the country instituted conscription was meant to reassure people that it wouldn't happen. But as Faiz Shakir notes, McCain has flirted with the idea that we're in a third world war right now.
Barack Obama reveals what's on his iPod. Relative to the musical information he was prepared to release in spring 2007 he seems to have evolved in a more hip-hop direction.
UPDATE: Friend and reader JT reminds me that Obama's awesomely named body man Reggie Love is responsible for the hip-hopificiation of Obama's playlist. I want him to download some Girl Talk and think about the intellectual property law ramifications.
It seems the Obama campaign has an ambitious plan to put staff resources into states it's unlikely to win, such as Texas and Wyoming, in order to be able to help out with registration and organization to assist downballot Democrats. In Texas, for example, Democrats are close to gaining control of the State Legislature (and thus the redistricting process). The best part, though, is this comeback from the McCain campaign:
"It’s revealing that Barack Obama has now been forced to expand the states on his map because he’s so weak in traditional Democratic targets such as West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, not to mention his ongoing problems in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.
Uh huh. Here's the latest polling:
I'm not sure that being ahead in Ohio (and Pennsylvania) and tied in Florida when winning either would deliver you the election qualifies as "weak."
Barack Obama announces a bunch of state directors:
Jackie Norris, Senior Advisor to Obama during the Iowa Caucuses will serve as the Iowa State Director. Mike Dorsey, who served as Obama’s Midwest Political Director in the fall and state director in Missouri, is heading to Montana. Adrian Saenz, the state director for Texas primary and caucuses, will lead the New Mexico campaign. Kat Pustay, an Alaska native who served as state director for the caucuses, has returned to Anchorage. Rob Hill, who directed the Oregon primary, will be staying in Portland.
I don't really know anything about any of those people, but Kat Pustay "who served as state director for the caucuses" seems to have done an excellent job so it's interesting that they're sending her back to her native Alaska rather than to a more traditional swing state.
Last week I linked to a report for the Center for American Progress by Caroline Wadhams and Lawrence Korb called "The Forgotten Front" about Afghanistan. Some of you weren't convinced by their argument that continued U.S. engagement in Afghanistan could, if married to a new strategic approach, bear fruit for Americans and Afghans alike. Wadhams was kind enough to email some thoughts in response to some of the issues raised in comments:
The LA Timeswrites about the Think City a small but functional electric car coming from a Norwegian company. This isn't going to suit most Americans' automotive desires, but I think it would be very promising in the European market where a lot of people like little cars that are well-suited to occasional trips through narrow urban streets and small parking spaces. Meanwhile, at least some Americans seem to be buying Smart Cars these days, which are comparable in size to the City, so you could see a niche market for this in the USA which would certainly count as a step in the right direction toward a better transportation future.
Boy, but America's infrastructure looks baaad, people. And everything is dirty! The girls were like, what's wrong with this bridge? (a metal bridge in Jersey leading from the Newark airport to the Holland Tunnel, I don't know what it's called). Old metal that's just black with soot! And graffiti! Man, if I fully acclimatize to the level of cleanliness, safety, and well-built massive public investment projects of Singapore I'll never be able to move home.
I believe it's the Pulaski Skyway (pictured above). In part, a country like the United States just isn't going to be able to compete infrastructure-wise with a newly-prosperous country like Singapore -- we have a lot of stuff that's oldish, but still usable, and shutting it down to fix or replace it would be extremely inconvenient. But it's also the case that Singapore's not spending 1 percent of GDP a year on a misguided effort to control Iraq. So, yes, we badly need a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank.
Photo by Flickr user Doc Searls used under a Creative Commons license
If you, like me, have ever wondered where all those "Democratic strategist" and "Republican strategist" types who show up on cable networks come from, you won't want to miss Daniel Libit's Politico article on the subject. Basically, as you might suspect the whole thing is basically just made-up but all the relevant people are happy enough with the system so it persists.
The excellent news out of East Asia is that Ambassador Chris Hill has not only managed to strike an okay deal with the North Koreans over their nuclear program, but also triumphed over administration hawks and gotten Bush to do the sensible thing. For a while now, Bush has been tilting in a reasonable direction with regard to the DPRK (after years-worth of screw-ups that have forced us to accept a much worse deal than we could have had years ago), a direction that John McCain has denounced in favor of the only approach he knows -- coercion, escalating conflict, and the risk of war. And, indeed, since at least 1999 McCain has been calling on us to reject pragmatism in Korea in favor of war:
McCain repeated this trope throughout the speech, drawing on his personal history and adopting the rhetoric of moral seriousness about the consequences of committing American forces. But awareness of the consequences was, for McCain, no reason to avoid starting a war. Indeed, McCain almost seemed disappointed that the Clinton administration managed to peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis with the "agreed framework" of 1994. He remarked in Kansas that "a firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price." McCain was sophisticated enough to recognize that other policy options such as refusing aid to the North might nonetheless have resulted in conflict "as the North's last desperate measure."
This analysis, in the hands of a normal person, becomes a defense of the Clinton administration's policy -- though a bit distasteful, the agreed framework was the only way to avoid a destructive war. Not, however, to McCain. In his view, efforts at conflict prevention are fundamentally misguided. He told the Kansas State audience that notwithstanding the Clinton administration's efforts, Korea's leaders "remain quite capable of launching in their country's death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed." In short -- war is inevitable, so better to get it over with as soon as possible.
As everyone knows, the country is going to undergo some significant "graying" over the next few decades with the proportion of senior citizens going up substantial. That's going to pose a challenge on many levels, but one level is that building more and better transit will help us cope with the problem that seniors often aren't comfortable driving, especially in sub-optimal conditions, and it often isn't safe to have them on the road. If we don't want to see a huge proportion of the population immobilized, we're going to need more ways for people to get around.
Lurking at the end of this Reuters article on potential vulnerabilities in McCain's alleged strong suit of foreign policy is this intriguing remark about McCain's idiotic plan to kick Russia out of the G8:
He also dismissed McCain's comment last October on Russia and the G-8 as "a holdover from an earlier period," adding: "It doesn't reflect where he is right now."
Matt Corley points out that this isn't quite right. As recently as March, McCain told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council that "We should start by ensuring that the G-8, the group of eight highly industrialized states, becomes again a club of leading market democracies: it should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia."
My guess is that the McCain adviser here is mistaken -- he knows this is a bad idea, so he'd like to think that McCain has flip-flopped away from it. But thought McCain has changed positions on a lot of issues over the years, he's been pretty consistent ever since 1999 or so on foreign policy questions -- taking the most hawkish line on every issue, seeking to ratchet-up tensions with every potential rival, etc. But if McCain has changed his mind about this, and I hope he has, he should say so clearly rather than through an anonymous quote.
Doubtless conservative pundits all across the land will howl with outrage at the gross judicial activism of the Supreme Court in slashing punitive damages in the Exxon Valdez case from $5 billion to $500 million, thus saving ExxonMobil, $4,500 million dollars.
I also doubt that conservatives will be too upset by the "judicial activism" involved in the Supreme Court overturning the DC handgun ban. I don't really understand the details of the ruling at this point, but I'm not complaining about it either. From a policy perspective, what DC is trying to accomplish is just futile -- as long as the District is a very small patch of land adjacent to Virginia, there's no way gun regulations of this sort will prevent criminals from acquiring weapons.
I went to an event at New America yesterday where Tom Gallagher, Senior Managing Director at the International Strategy and Investment Group, put forward an idea I hadn't heard before regarding the current debate over whether or not the Fed is making a mistake by setting interest rates too low and setting off inflation. Gallagher's take on this is that loose monetary policy is appropriate given the current state of the U.S. economy, but that the problem is that developing countries, especially China, are loathe to let their currencies appreciate too much against the dollar. Consequently, they wind up "importing" a good deal of American monetary policy even though they're not in slowdown conditions. And the upshot is inflation over there which then, via the global commodities markets, becomes exported to the United States.
The ideal response to this, he said, would be for Bernanke to keep our monetary policy loose but for other countries to tighten. But if that doesn't happen, we may be forced into a situation where we need to tighten our monetary policy in order to halt inflation even though really it would be better to keep things loose. Long story short, some financial diplomacy is badly needed in order to help us avoid an unfortunate macroeconomic policy conundrum.
Talk about the hybrid car scam! With the exception of the Prius, it seems like most hybrids have highway mileage somewhere in the 30--35 mpg range. This is a little better than those same car models with a gas engine. But I own a 1984 Honda hatchback, obviously not a hybrid, which gets 40-odd mpg on the highway, and I remember it being pretty routine in the 1980s and 1990s for economy cars or even 4 door models to have comparable mileage. I imagine it mostly has to do with the massive increase in horsepower in recent years, or maybe heavier cars as a result of safety features. But how are hybrids supposed to help us out of the global warming/foreign oil dependence trap when they are less efficient than a 24 year old non-hybrid beater? And why not just make cars like the aforesaid beater, with a hybrid engine in them?
Over time, technology improves, and we develop more efficient ways of burning gasoline as a way of making a car move forward. Those kind of advances can be used to reduce the overall quantity of gasoline burned, but they can also be used to increase the overall power of engines. That's the basic problem being pointed to here, and it's why if you want to reduce carbon emissions there's ultimately no substitute for an emissions cap or a carbon tax. If you create a financial incentive to reduce emissions, then our vast ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit will produce vehicles that accomplish that goal. If we don't, it won't, as even the very same technologies that could reduce gasoline consumption are instead turned to other purposes.
Meanwhile, it's important to remember that for the short-tun the most important thing isn't to develop futuristic new low-emissions vehicles. The low hanging fruit is to replace the very least efficient vehicles with more efficient ones. Replacing an SUV with a standard sedan does more to cut consumption than does replacing a sedan with a hybrid. Even replacing an SUV with a minivan brings about substantial reductions.
John McCain's website's gotten a nifty makeover, giving no indication that he's a Republican and aimed at convincing people that he's the real environmentalist candidate in this race even though I don't believe you could find a single actual environmentalist or environmental group to bac that claim up. But it also has a navigation sidebar on the right-hand side reproduced over here on the left. As is common with John McCain, the idea of supporting a cause greater than self-interest is invoked. But in this case, it's an invocation to give money to John McCain.
The cause, in short, is greater than your self -- it's the greater glory of John McCain. That, my friends, is the kind of change you can really believe in.
The pretended meaning is, The US increased troop strength in Iraq for a period of time beginning in 2007. The actual meaning is, the US increased troop strength WHILE ramping up a program to pay off Sunni resistance leaders WHILE Iraq’s warring ethno-religious factions finished completely remaking Iraq’s demographic patterns, owing to tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of exiled and internally displaced, WHILE the US turned the capital into a warren of barricades. The net result of all those changes has been a less obtrusively violent Iraq for the time being, and the whole arrangement is "The Surge" in practice, but the cheerleaders talk as if it was all due to The Surge in pretense. Meanwhile Iraq’s "calm" would count as calamity almost anywhere on earth but Darfur or Zimbabwe.
Quite so. Understanding the true nature of the business doesn't undermine the reality of the achievement, but the achievement is to make somewhat more feasible a misguided, costly, and immoral scheme for imposing a semi-permanent semi-colonial status on Iraq. But rather than selling the public on the whole disreputable salami, we're supposed to swallow it in slices. First, we need to give "the surge" a try, so we can't leave this year. Now, since "the surge" is working, we need to stay another year. Then the year after that, there'll be another reason. When conditions are worsening that is the reason to stay (see 2005, 2006) and when conditions are improving that's the reason to stay.
In a post the other day, Elizabeth Edwards made the point that individual markets in health insurance, à la John McCain's proposals, would be disadvantageous to women. For whatever reason this doesn't seem to get talked about much, but there's a significant gender disparity in health care costs and that plays a role in thinking about insurance in a variety of ways.
For example, in a world where everyone must buy insurance, and insurers must sell insurance to all customers at a flat rate, you have a strong incentive to try to attract a disproportionately male client base -- lots of ads on Spike TV and sports programming, no ads on Lifetime or Gray's Anatomy. How big a deal that would prove to be in the end is hard to predict in advance, but in general any system that involves consumer choice and for profit insurance firms is going to encourage people to design plans that better-fit the desires of men than of women.
A Prince George's Country merit pay plan for teachers seems to have gained support among the local union, which will certainly make the experiment noteworthy. I'll be interested to see how it turns out. You can mark me down as a skeptic, though, since it seems very likely to me that linking teacher compensation to test scores this directly mostly creates incentives for teachers to help their students cheat on tests.
However, given that this is a pretty obvious idea and we have a whole lot of school districts in this country, I think it's essentially inevitable that this will be tried out in some places and we'll see what the results are. I think, however, that there are probably more promising ways of caching out the idea of "merit pay" that would focus more on the idea of giving administrators flexibility with teacher salaries and then holding them accountable for getting results.
Nate Silver created the above chart out of Rasmussen data and it shows a fascinating difference between Obama's relationship to his base and McCain's relationship to his. A pretty hefty chunk of Democrats hate Obama and are certain to defect to McCain. But an absolutely giant number of Republicans feel kind of "meh" about McCain. As Nate observes, this is a perfectly fine situation for McCain to be in if it's a close election, "But if the election doesn't look like it's going to be close, there could be a snowball effect in which Republican turnout is quite low."
I'd also say that this represents Bob Barr's opening to have an impact on the race -- all these Republicans with mixed feelings about McCain could, in principle, be drawn to a different take on conservatism.
I haven't been following the Euro '08 tournament at all, but I did watch Turkey-Germany yesterday intrigued by the prospect of ethnic conflict. What a match! It's my sense that soccer isn't typically that thrilling, but it was certainly enough to sell me on watching Spain-Russia this afternoon. I have some Spanish ancestry (I think my father's father's father was born in Spain before emigrating to Cuba) but I'm a serious Russophile despite that country's unfortunate habit of putting dill in everything, so I'll be rooting for them.
Seth Pearce has a very kind review of Heads in the Sand as a "Living Liberally Page Turner" feature. He says "I really hope that Barack Obama and the other Democratic candidates running in 2008 read Matthew Yglesias's Heads in the Sands, and take its vision of a comprehensive liberal national security policy seriously." I hope so, too, but even more I just hope that you, the blog readers of the world, will buy the book. Saving the world would be nice, but it's sales that really matter.
I forgot to say anything about the Court's ruling on the child rape case. My evolving view of the death penalty is that there are situations one could envision wherein punishment by execution would be a just outcome but given the realities of the world a "no executions" policy would be the best way to go. At the end of the day, to be haunted by a nagging fear that somewhere there lurks a criminal who deserves death but who is, instead, suffering a lifetime of imprisonment doesn't strike me as especially reasonable. So from that perspective, I both sympathize with any effort to limit the constitutional scope of the death penalty while also thinking that these efforts to draw distinctions -- to tinker with the machinery of death -- are fundamentally misguided.
In the specific case of people who rape children, it's worth saying that the death penalty is bad crime control policy. You want to make it the case that no matter what terrible things a criminal has done, he would get an even worse penalty if he killed the victim/witness. Getting bogged down into a debate over the relative heinousness of various crimes is a bit of a red herring -- there's an internal logic to the deterrent system that requires murder to carry a unique and maximally severe penalty.
Swapping Jermaine O'Neal for TJ Ford, Rasho Nesterovic's expiring deal, and a Toronto draft pick seems like a reasonable move for Indiana and an excellent pickup for the Raptors. Toronto was overstocked with Ford and Calderon at the point so even though Ford's a good player they're not, in practice, giving very much up. And O'Neal should help add some frontcourt toughness and defense and create a situation where they don't feel compelled to give many minutes to Bargnani.
On the subject of analogies between the idea of establishing an enduring US military presence in Iraq and establishing one in Germany, mostly what Andrew said. But more broadly, you have to ask yourself what the point is of bothering to construct analogies across obviously non-analogous situations. Nothing about the trajectory of US policy in Iraq since the fall of Saddam has resembled the years 1945-1950 in Germany at all. One hardly needs to enumerate specific points of difference.
The problems with this strategy, meanwhile, have nothing to do with analogies. The problem has to do with the fact that there are large and influential segments of Iraqi opinion that are fundamentally opposed to a permanent American military presence in Iraq and other segments of opinion that are deeply skeptical of it. Meanwhile, the major Iraqi social movement that does favor a permanent US presence is Kurdish separatism. That's the problem right there. When you define the mission in Iraq as, in part, the construction of an Iraqi government that will be amenable to an intimate long-term security arrangement featuring a permanent American military presence you make the mission much, much more complicated. The pursuit of this policy by the Bush administration makes the American military in Iraq a divisive, destabilizing force int he country despite the best efforts of our soldiers to be playing a constructive role. And as long as we're there, our presence will always be a divisive, destabilizing force.
Because it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture in the Senate, a lot of liberal groups are organizing around a "60 votes" narrative. Matt Stoller has some doubts, citing the fact that most major pieces of legislation pass with substantially more than 60 votes. I think, however, that that mostly reflects the fact that Senators don't like to vote "no" to no avail. A whopping 12 Senate Democrats, for example, voted for the first Bush tax cut bill to their neverending shame.
I'm fairly certain, however, that some of those Senators could have been persuaded to vote "no" if their votes would have been decisive. The trouble is that whipping becomes very difficult once your side is going to lose anyway, while being willing to hop on board often gives you an opportunity to make minor modifications/additions to legislation that you like.
Candidates whose biographies provide compelling campaign material use that fact to their advantage. And John McCain's biography does just that. Not only is it regularly mentioned explicitly by his supporters, but it underlies many of the implicit themes of the campaign. Which is really no surprise since it was his war record that launched his status as a political celebrity (feted by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) and fueled his rise in the early days (I've seen a John Birch Society newsletter featuring an interview with McCain the "War Hero Who's Running for Barry Goldwater's Seat" from the 1980s) as a man without deep roots in Arizona sought to beat out rivals in a competitive primary.
There's nothing wrong with any of that, it's how politics works. But as Brendan Nyhan points out the press has a baffling habit of constantly claiming that McCain doesn't talk about his war record, or labeling each and every one of his frequent references to it as a rare break with his usual habit of not talking about his war record. He talks about it all the time!
It always surprises me that Jews have been able to get ahead in the United States. This is, after all, a country that's almost unique in the western world in that even in the 21st century it seems to include so many anti-semites in prominent places. Indeed, a frightening large proportion of prominent American Jews have their political views motivated by a racist loathing of their co-religionists and co-ethnics. Joe Klein, for example and again here is a big-time Jew-hater as you can see in not-at-all hysterical remarks from Commentary and the Anti-Defamation League that are in no way cynical political interventions masquerading as deeply implausible accusations of anti-semitism.
On the larger subject of so-called "dual loyalties" I think the psychological model of someone sitting at home scheming, twirling his moustache and saying "this idiotic military venture will be a disaster for the United States, but a brilliant victory for Israel!" is a little implausible. But the whole broader neoconservative ideological framework is obviously fraught with implications for Israel -- one reason to prefer wild thrashing about at a miscellaneous and ever-shifting cast of Arab-and-or-Muslim "bad guys" rather than a focused and disciplined campaign against al-Qaeda would be that the former implies that Israel's enemies and America's enemies are fundamentally one and the same.
The conservative movement seems to be running out of steam, but Rep. Eric Cantor has the solution -- a virtual "solutions factory." Hm. Alternatively, the right could take David Brooks' advice and read more blogs written by my right-of-center friends (and even a few people who I've never met) and buy Grand New Party. Brooks has, I think, the sounder view. Ultimately, though, the trouble even with his solution is that some of these folks' ideas are bad, whereas the ones that are good will never be implemented by conservatives. Why? Because, as I've said before, "the problem is actually much worse -- the problem with the conservative movement is that it's fundamentally malign." If we're lucky, liberals will steal the right's better ideas only to see the conservative movement eventually turn on them (see, e.g., EITC, Section 8 vouchers, cap-and-trade) in the interests of greater evil.
Buses have some substantial advantages over rail as a transit modality, notably being cheaper, quicker, and more flexible. But some of these advantages can also serve as flaws -- bus systems tempt administrators into creating shoddy service and tend not to spur development. So one important issue moving forward is going to be thinking more rigorously and more creatively about buses and bus networks and what can we really do with them. The new Shirlington Bus Transfer Station in a part of Arlington County that's far from Metro seems promising in several respects. Chris Zimmerman, who's on the County board and the WMATA board, is quoted as calling it "a great example of where you can do transit-oriented development even where you don't have a rail station."
If that really works, it could be a promising model for other parts of the country where new rail construction would be infeasible but where density is sufficient to support multiple bus routes that have some frequency.
The Yongbyon nuclear facility is no more. A great triumph for diplomacy:
I did a scan of NRO and The Weekly Standard and the silence on this issue seems a bit deafening. But this is a big deal. Either Bush has, whatever criticisms one might have of his early policy toward the DPRK, done a good an important thing here or else he's become a victim of the very "false comfort of appeasement" he's warned against.
At a minimum, there seem to be obvious implications for the ongoing Iran debate. Most of them -- diplomacy works, there's no substitute for talks and mutual concessions, etc. -- reenforce liberal points unless you're willing to turn around and denounce Bush. But one can also observe here that working out a reasonable accommodation didn't require a presidential summit and it's actually possible to conduct constructing diplomacy while also maintaining the sort of hex on "evil" regimes that Obama wants to dispose of.
UPDATE: I obviously didn't scan NRO very well since I missed their editorial on the subject which does, indeed, slam the deal. My apologies, I don't know how I made that mistake since it's right on top of their site. I believe it was even before National Review's founding that William F. Buckley was condemning Ike as an appeaser for holding some meeting with Khruschev. So let's give three cheers for consistency here.
Creative Capitalism is a fascinating venture from Michael Kinsley and my friend Conor Clarke that "takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos" and hopes to develop into a book of smart reflections and debates around the central idea. At the moment the ground has been seeded by some of the great minds of the center-right but the pool of contributors is going to expand and random submissions are welcome. Eventually, a book will result.
Ezra Klein's getting into cocktail-blogging. I had a classic cocktails phase back in 2001-2002 when I first discovered Angel's Share and Milk & Honey (the establishments and I were all cooler back then) in New York. My favorite was the sidecar:
These days I'm radically more lowbrow and you can find me with a Miller High Life or some Jim Bean.
I'm a Jewish liberal from New York City so naturally I grew up to believe in gun control. Crime is bad, gun crimes are deadly, gun enthusiasts are weird, the NRA should get off our backs. I changed my mind on the subject because I started reading Mark Kleiman, who's also very much the sort of person who'd be for gun control -- a liberal Jewish professor living in Los Angeles. But he's a professor of public policy and specializes in crime control issues and well it turns out:
There's simply no evidence that keeping guns out of the hands of those currently eligible to own them under Federal law (adults with no felony convictions, no domestic-violence misdemeanors or restraining orders, and no history of involuntary commitment for mental illness) reduces the level of criminal violence. Nor is there evidence that allowing anyone who can pass a background check and a gun-safety course to carry a concealed weapon increases the level of criminal violence. All that matters is keeping guns away from people who demonstrably shouldn't have them. Present law does that, but the gun lobby has done many things to make that law impossible to enforce.
With any luck, taking the "gun confiscation" card out of the political pack might actually reduce the fervor of the opposition the NRA can whip up to sensible measures such as requiring background checks for gun sales by private individuals (the current rule that requires them only for purchases from gun dealers), computerizing data on which dealers are selling the guns that get used in crimes, and developing and deploying technology that would allow police to identify, from a bullet or a shell casing found at a crime scene, when, to whom, and by whom the gun that produced that metal was lawfully transferred.
Maybe that optimistic take is right, or maybe that optimistic take is wrong, but either way there's no reason to be afraid of the Heller decision and Kleiman here points the way toward the compromise we should be seeking. Gun confiscation formally and credibly off the table, with a firm understanding that law-abiding competent adults have a right to buy and own guns if they so choose combined with an understanding that law enforcement agencies need serious tools with which to track and identify guns used to commit crimes.
Photo by Flickr user Robert Nelson used under a Creative Commons license
Gotta say I'm a little baffled by Knicks fans booing the Danillo Gallinari pick. Maybe he'll work out well as an NBA player and maybe he won't -- about the same thing you could say about anyone picked sixth in an average draft year. This is about where all the "draft experts" expecting him to go and John Hollinger's Euroleague translation formula says he'll be . . . the sixth-best player in the draft:
Wizards get JaVale McGee, meanwhile, but I would have rather seen Kosta Koufos.
Kevin Drum kind of answered his own question here, but certainly my reaction to Colin Powell coming out and supporting Barack Obama and "the possibility of him having any influence in an Obama administration" would have everything to do with what Powell actually said. There's a kind of notional shadow Powell who we've all heard about -- this guy thought invading Iraq was a terrible idea, thinks Dick Cheney is a dangerous madnam, and is furious at George W. Bush for running the government in such a terrible way.
Call that guy "Larry Wilkerson". "Larry Wilkerson" is a great guy -- someone who'll not only give the Bush administration and the neocons around McCain hell, but someone who can speak with authority as a former insider. But in public, Powell has always been, well, Colin Powell -- a mild-mannered dude who ultimately put his reputation for moderation and good sense to work providing a patina of cover to the insane agenda of the Bush administration's neoconservative faction. If Powell decides to becomes Larry Wilkerson that could be a huge asset to Obama. But if Powell stays Powell, it's not just that an endorsement would likely feel a bit icky, it's hard to imagine the endorsement even happening. Powell wouldn't endorse Obama. Some of Powell's friends would tell reporters off the record that Powell prefers Obama, while Powell himself stays studiously neutral. And since Powell is Powell, I think that's what Powell will do.
I wish Barack Obama wouldn't frame his big picture talks about the economy as a "competitiveness" issue because competitiveness is a bogus concept (ask Paul Krugman) and since there's no such thing as competitiveness none of the items in Obama's competitiveness agenda will improve our competitiveness. This is all especially unfortunately, because I like the content a lot, and especially the felicity with which Obama makes the case for an activist, progressive government as a necessary complement to a vibrant market economy. From his remarks at yesterday's "competitiveness summit"
If we remain dependent on oil from dictators, we’ll endanger our security, imperil our planet, pay more at the pump, and sit on the sidelines while the jobs of the future are created abroad.
If we can’t give every child in America the chance to get a world-class education, we’ll cripple their ability to make a living in a knowledge-based economy, and watch China and India move ahead in the race for the 21st century.
If we can’t control skyrocketing health care costs, we’ll confront a mounting moral crisis, and a major anchor on the ability of American business to compete.
If we don’t rebuild our crumbling roads, rail bridges and electrical grid, we’ll see our standard of living suffer, while we leave our communities less safe from terror or natural disaster.
And if we don’t invest in and encourage innovation, we could cede America’s historic role as the engine of growth, and progress, and discovery for the entire world.
This is good stuff and insofar as it's inevitable that politicians address the public's sort of irrational fears of being "overtaken" by China and India this is the right way to talk about the issue -- as something that should inspire us to do better by investing in our citizens' capabilities rather than cause us to try to shut the world out.
We're likely to see a lot more nuclear energy globally because of global warming and energy prices. What is the right way to reduce the proliferation risk?
You can also see "Multilateralism as a Dual-Use Technique: Encouraging Nuclear Energy and Avoiding Proliferation" by John Thomson and Geoffrey Forden for the Stanley Foundation which I've recommended in the past. I note that proliferation risk is one of several good reasons to hope that we don't respond to global warming with huge new investments in civilian nuclear power, but as at least some expansion of nuclear power seems inevitable it's important that we get this right from a security standpoint.
That picture above is, according to Gallup, the underlying issue preferences of the American public. It's interesting to note that even in these polarized times, there appear to be a substantial number of people who are at least in some sense torn between McCain and Obama preferring one on some issues and the other on some other issues.
You also see that national security has turned into a substantial disadvantage for Obama -- he's tied on the question of Iraq and losing badly on the question of terrorism. But he's in the lead because these are, at the moment, relatively low-salience issues compared to people's economic grievances. This leaves Obama with a choice of campaign strategies, he can try to emphasize the issues he's winning on, hoping to maintain the current low salience of security, or he can attempt to shore up his weaknesses by talking about national security and trying to persuade people that his vision of an aggressive, but focused and disciplined, full-spectrum campaign against al-Qaeda is the best way to keep the country safe.
The conventional Democratic strategy would be to try to duck the debate and hope the economy will carry him through. That kind of thinking is, however, one of the reasons Democrats have had their Heads in the Sand for many years. It's relatively likely that events in the world will lead to a renewed focus on national security at some point in the coming months, and it's also relatively easy for the McCain campaign to change subjects in this direction at a time of their choosing since security issues are, by their nature, visceral and frightening.
At the same time, McCain is the heir to eight years of failed policymaking from the Bush administration and Obama has a very solid case to make that he can do better. But will he make it aggressively?
Obama campaign announces that Melody Barnes (from CAP and formerly Ted Kennedy) and Neera Tanden (from Hillarland) are joining the policy team as Senior Domestic Policy Advisor and Domestic Policy Director. Both excellent hires.
Everyone seems to agree that the New Jersey Nets shipping Richard Jefferson to Milwaukee for Bobby Simmons and Yi Jianlian was fundamentally about clearing cap space to try to lure LeBron James to the future Brooklyn Nets. One could imagine this happening, but I have to say I've always been skeptical of the idea that James would have substantially more marketing power in the Big Apple.
I could see that for, maybe, Michael Redd who tends to languish in obscurity right now because the Bucks aren't a great team and they're located in Milwaukee whereas the best player on a mediocre Knicks squad would be a star. But given James' current level of fame, if I were his manager I would tell him that team success is going to be a much more important factor than team location. James is already well-known and you could make the case that he's the best player in the league right now. If he wins championships, more people will make that case. If he plays with inadequate teammates and exits the playoffs in the first round people will start talking about how he's overrated and the world will move on to its next basketball savior.
To me, that would have to be the reason to leave Cleveland -- to move to a team with a better shot of winning. Ultimately, it's hard to sustain success as an NBA star without being on teams that go deep in the playoffs.
Ian Dew-Becker and Robert J. Gordon take an interesting look at the growth in inequality in the United States:
Within the top 10 percent, SBTC has certainly still been an issue, and there is a role of SBTC in contributing to pay premia of entertainment and sports superstars. In a variety of settings, technology has allowed superstars to distribute their talent to a wider variety of consumers. This has driven their incomes up exponentially. Their earnings are an outcome of market forces, and the only policy measure available to achieve greater after-tax equality is an increase in tax rates at the top balanced by a decrease at the bottom. However, for top corporate executives, there is strong evidence that incomes have been driven by non-market forces. This is where policy can have the most positive impact on inequality; increased disclosure and improved corporate governance laws can not only raise firm value but help distribute economic gains more evenly across society.
This treatment of the "superstar" issue seems wrongheaded to me. The point of understanding the causes of the growth in inequality isn't to assemble a prosecutor's brief against very rich people and then dole out appropriate punishment. If that was the point then, yes, we'd have to deem superstar athletes and entertainers (and presumably the agents, managers, and lawyers who take home a percentage of their gross) who've taken advantage of the globalization of the entertainment space to become richer than ever "innocent." But the point of understanding the situation is to enable us to think clearly about forward-looking policy options.
It seems to be the case at first blush, for example, that policies which tax the incomes of the very rich in order to pay for widely used public services are very appealing policies. But, an opponent may counter, such policies will actually crush economic growth and make us all worse off! To the extent that the super-rich class is composed of superstar entertainers and their hangers-on this counterargument seems to me to be weaker -- ever-growing after-tax income for movie stars is not integral to the long-term future of the American economy in the way that potential uses of the money to provide for adequate infrastructure and a healthy, well-educated population are.
I'm heading off this afternoon to Chicago for the weekend where Sara's going to be speaking at the DLC National Conversation and I intend to return believing that only spending cuts and endless war can save the Democratic Party from the McGovernite wilderness (actually, surely liberals and centrists alike can agree on the national popular vote), so expect weekend blogging to be perhaps lighter than usual.
Then after that, I'll be continuing my jetset lifestyle by going directly from Chicago to Aspen, Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival co-sponsored by The Atlantic (or as we like to think of it, the Atlantic Ideas Festival in Some Town in Colorado) so expect a lot of posts about what the famous people say. Also stuff about how you should make Allstate, Altria, Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Chevron, Ernst & Young, JP Morgan, Mercedes Benz, and Thompson Reuters your choice for fine insurance, tobacco, aerospace, government contracting, oil, accounting, financial services, luxury cars, and "intelligent, information-based solutions, software tools, and applications" products respectively.
Photo by Flickr user cesposito 2035 used under a Creative Commons license
1. Take out your iPod (or Zune, I guess...really, who buys a Zune?) 2. Press shuffle songs. 3. Answer the following: a) How many songs before you come to one that would absolutely disqualify you from being President? b) What is that song?
My fourth song was the Decemberists' "When The War Came" but despite the political themes I think it's okay. Then at 18 we get Metric's "Too Little, Too Late" which is too obscure to cause a scandal, but in principle sentiments like "Meet me at the motel / Tie my right hand to the bible" aren't what middle America is looking for. Finally, at number 24 Metric comes up again and ends my political career with "I.O.U." and "Every ten year-old enemy soldier / Thinks falling bombs are shooting stars sometimes" and the rest of the Left's tired blame America first schtick.
I flipped over to the "Notes" function on my iPhone and found a note I apparently wrote a couple of weeks ago and forgot about. It reads simply "Populism With Results: What the GOP Could Learn from Hamas and Hezbollah." Talk about a grand new party!
The latest sign of problems in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area is that the Taliban's felt confident enough to launch an operation on the Pakistan side of the border in the Peshawar area. The Pakistani military is fighting back and presumably ought to be able to drive the Taliban away from a key town but that'll hardly resolve the underlying problems.
I screwed up yesterday and said the Bush administration had gotten the North Koreans to blow up the Yongbyon facility. In fact, they merely blew up the cooling tower which renders the facility unusable but could be rebuilt much more easily than the overall structure. Read Fred Kaplan for a good take on the deficiencies of this bargain and the blunders that got us to this point.
One objection you often hear to pro-transit, pro-walking, anti-driving measures is a social justice argument that these measures will hit the poor hardest. In fact, as this Kevin Drum post makes clear poor people do relatively little driving. They differ from middle class and wealthy people in that utility bills take up a very large proportion of their income.
Not only should this specific point be remembered, but one should also recall as a general rule of thumb that if you see a large, powerful, well-organized lobby citing the needs of the poor as the rationale for something or other they're almost certainly full of it. In the real world, poor people have extremely little political clout and anything that's attracting a lot of political attention is almost certainly doing so because it's of concern to the non-poor.
I think Tim Fernholtz makes several good points in response to what Ross says about the alleged “false choices” in our Iraq policy. From way back in 2002 the main intellectual and political drivers behind the Iraq War have envisioned a very long-term, very ambitious undertaking in that country. And from way back in 2002, they’ve mostly understood that while this kind of thing can work for the odd Weekly Standard article or Commentary blog post, it’s not a viable political agenda. So politicians have been slicing the salami into digestible bits.
It’s true, of course, that electing John McCain doesn’t, in reality, actually commit the United States to a 100 year effort at semi-colonial control over Iraq -- a McCain administration would have no real capacity to tie the hands of its successors in distant decades. But unless you want that kind of enduring entanglement, you have to stop entangling at some point, and there’s really no time like the present (or, rather, early 2009 when we’ll have a new administration).
Here's a neat opportunity -- the magazine is looking to recruit members of a panel ("Atlantic Exchange") of readers of the magazine and website who'd be surveyed no more than twice a month to gauge your thoughts about what we're doing so that we can better shape the various aspect of our editorial product to deliver stuff people want to read. Click here to learn more.
Good news! Larry Craig and David Vitter are on the case. Some liberals see irony here, but I see two men well-positioned to know what a tenuous strand it is holding the institution together and how easily a handful of gay weddings could plunge us all into an endless wide-stance, hooker-filled dystopia.
School buses are the practical way for most school districts to ensure that kids can get to school. But in some cities, it's cheaper and simpler to contract with the local transit authority to provide extra service on routes needed to take people to school. That's what DC does for most kids, but now the rapaciously anti-transit Bush FTA says cities can't do it -- good bye economies of scale, hello inefficiency.
Things like BP's ongoing "greenwashing" campaign where they run ads trying to convince us that they're the good kind of polluting oil company seem to have been a boon for people working in media oriented around public affairs. It's not a business that's been doing very well lately, but it's a natural target for this sort of advertising. But does it work? I'm not even sure I understand what it working would look like. Is BP going to be exempted from cap and trade regulations? Get a special "we like you better than ExxonMobil" ribbon? We're going to drive an extra mile to fill up with BP oil instead of Shell oil?
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Heads in the Sand
