Hendrick Hertzberg wrote the obituary Jesse Helms deserves back in September of 2001 when his retirement was announced. There we learn the odd fact that the always-interesting (and this is no exception!) Walter Russell Mead described Helms as "one of a handful of Southern statesmen who ensured the triumph of the civil rights revolution" because even though he was a racist and a segregationist he, unlike the 'Redemption' leaders of the 1960s and 70s, avoided "being directly and openly involved in the murder of black political leaders."
So there you have it: Jesse Helms, not a murderer, just a steadfast political supporter of murderers abroad.
Aspen is a monumental shrine to wealth, clothed in the false modesty of a self-conscious homage to America's small town past. It is the Potemkin Village of the post-consumer culture. The place always puts me in mind of the "American" restaurants abroad--it looks like a diner, and the menu sounds like a diner, but when the food comes the chili cheesedog is made with bratwurst and limburger, and they've slathered your french fries with mayonnaise.
But the mountains are really beautiful.
Of course with "American" restaurants you never know. Back in 1997 at least, Buffalo Bill's in Prague was serviceable tex-mex at a time when the Czech Republic was not offering a ton of edible cuisine. Eleven years later I imagine things are very different, though.
John McCain proves once again that he's aware of the internet: "Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information."
It seems that old people find this anti-blogger campaigning to be worthy of tepid laughter.
Fred Barnes knows just how to revive John McCain's listless presidential campaign -- gay-bashing his way to victory by more strongly emphasizing his desire to frustrate the goals of gay and lesbian Americans who want to serve their country in uniform or get married to people they love. There's perhaps no better time to recall that McCain guru/lobbyist Charlie Black used to be a Jesse Helms guy and liked his race-baiting campaign tactics.
Helms was undoubtedly the living connection between the racial politics of the Old South and the religion-based cultural politics of the New Right. He was the one surviving segregationist of stature who never regretted or retracted his opposition to the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s. His career-long opposition to any national gesture commemorating the civil rights movement (most notably, his interminable and often scurrilous rearguard efforts to taint the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.) made his strident rhetoric against voting rights enforcement and anything approaching affirmative action an afterthought. And Helms's two reelection campaigns (in 1990 and 1996) against African American Democrat Harvey Gantt pivoted on explicit race baiting, as Helms's Congressional Club allies later admitted to Link.
Helms practically invented the modern conservative politics of sexuality, along with the electoral mobilization of white conservative evangelicals, starting back in the 1970s. In 1977, he seized on Anita Bryant's successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami and began building a national backlash against antidiscrimination laws. As early as 1979, he was making speeches about the terrible threat of "secular humanism" to Christianity, making the wonky Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies an unlikely villain. When the AIDS epidemic emerged in the 1980s, Helms began an extended and violently worded campaign to "protect" Americans from the "perverts" whose "disgusting" habits were responsible for AIDS, while attacking efforts to find effective treatments. Most memorably, Helms single-handedly made the National Endowment of the Arts' subsidies for "obscene" and "homosexual" artwork a culture-war staple for nearly two decades.
And there we go. Fortunately, public support for gay and lesbian equality continues to strengthen over time, so these kind of tactics should have a limited shelf life.
Anway, let me now go on the record to say that another McCain staff shake-up is, if not inevitable, very likely. McCain's staff is just too factionalized to remain stable unless McCain is consistently winning. And Schmidt is a Bush 2004 veteran who lacks the deep emotional ties to the candiate that other McCainiacs have. I predict that at some point, probably just before or just after the convention, there will be a move to "Let McCain be McCain," and new boss Steve Schmidt will be replaced with either John Weaver or Mike Murphy, to try to recreate the magic of the 2000 campaign.
It took all the way until July 7 for this story to surface in the NYT:
“I think the depressingly self-absorbed McCain campaign machine needs to get out of the way,” said Mike Murphy, a longtime friend and media adviser who has no role in the current operation but who still talks to Mr. McCain every few days. “They need to just let McCain be McCain.”
You must have had a subscription to What if...? comics when you were a kid. You sure do love counterfactuals. Maybe British colonialism would have done for North America what it did for Africa? Maybe the United States in the latter part of the 20th century more like South Africa than Canada. Maybe if the American revolution happens in 1915 instead of 1775 we find ourselves allied with German nationalists in the late 1930s. Maybe in the 25th century Isiah Thomas will be viewed as the best Knicks GM in history.
Assignment desk: Explain the value of counterfactuals and your affection for them.
My affection for counterfactuals and my sense of their value derives from when I took Richard Heck's class on "Realism and Anti-Realism" and we did a unit on counterfactuals. For that segment of the class we were assigned David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds where I was first exposed to the argument (much less controversial than Lewis' conclusions about the metaphysical status of modal claims) that there's an intimate link between talk about causation and talk about counterfactuals. My thoughts on this matter were further influenced by when I took the final course Robert Nozick ever taught which was on the philosophy of history (some of Nozick's thoughts on the matter are reflected in Invariances).
At any rate, among historians talk of counterfactuals is in a bad air. But philosophers generally find it pretty uncontroversial to say that (modulo certain complications) causal claims can generally be translated into causal claims. So you might say that the Casey v. Planned Parenthood opinion came out the way it did because David Souter turned out to be a moderate, rather than a conservative, replacement for William Brennan. Alternatively, you might say "if Souter had turned out to be as conservative as Ted Kennedy feared, the Casey decisions would have gutted constitutional protection of abortion rights." Now you can't say these things are precisely the same, because maybe Souter would have been a wingnut who got run over by a bus the day after his confirmation etc. etc. etc. but in a commonsense way the "What If?" question is just a vivid way of thinking about causal claims.
I did a sarcastic post on The Washington Post running an op-ed denouncing an Arabic textbook and the comment thread revealed a lot of substantive problems with the column. One commenter, for example, takes issue with the claim that there was anti-Israel cartography in the book:
I learned Arabic at Columbia using that same curriculum. From what I recall, they didn't "eliminate" Israel from the map in the book, but wrote "Israel and Palestine" over Israel and the Occupied Territories. I am pro-Israel, and think that Israel should exist alongside Palestine, and I think that the book was being reasonable just putting both on the map, without delineating the borders of each, which are tough to determine until a treaty is reached.
In fairness, Maha's constant whining got really damned annoying, and could drive anyone over the edge.
He should take Persian, in which our book had some sort of pro-monarchist slant that talked endlessly about Nawruz and Zoroastrianism while almost totally ignoring Islam. Then there are the Hebrew texts which have sample sentences like, "We only want to live in peace."
Not only did I enjoy this week's Frank Rich column but it occurred to me to point out that he deserves special praise for always making sure that the web version of his column include real hyperlinks to outside content, just the way a dedicated web column would:
What Mr. Obama has going for him during this tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.
I would say that beyond that, he also has a press corps that's so in love with the open atmosphere McCain maintains with his traveling press that they don't take advantage of the open atmosphere to ask him any probing questions. What's his plan for Iraq? Does he plan to purge the government of Bush's political appointees? If he's "not one who believes that we need to subsidize things" when asked about renewable energy, then why does he want subsidies for nuclear power? Etc.
The New York Times takes a look at New Mexico's efforts to ban cock-fighting. It seems that they've only had a limited impact. Still, I would that despite the short-term failures, this may have a long-run impact by making it less likely that new New Mexicans (of which there will probably be many in the high-growth southwest) become habituated to the sport.
But should cockfighting really be banned? This doesn't seem like a very nice way to treat animals, I'm skeptical that this is meaningfully worse than the way we treat the chickens we raise for meat and eggs. I'm always interested in where the next "culture wars" will come from after the gay marriage fight is settled and maybe animal rights issues are a plausible candidate.
Meanwhile, if cockfighting's illegal in your jurisdiction but you've got a hankering for some bird-on-bird violence, YouTube's got you covered.
Politico: "To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement."
Mitch McConnell: "Today we lost a senator whose stature in Congress had few equals, . . . Senator Jesse Helms was a leading voice and courageous champion for the many causes he believed in.”
Jesse Helms: "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights."
Of course as tends to be the case with Helms' most repugnantly racist bile, he said that a good ways back in the past. But even at that time, most Americans managed not to be repugnant racists. But not Helms. And unlike a lot of people who did take the white supremacist line in the 1950s and 60s, Helms never apologized and, indeed, never backed down doing things like mounting a filibuster against making Martin Luther King Day into a federal holiday. Remarkably, mainstream American conservatives are eager to tell us that this man is their hero. Even more remarkably, you sometimes hear conservatives talk about reaching out to black voters.
This afternoon, I went to see Wall-E and Hancock. The former is every bit as good as everyone says. The latter, while not as good as the former, is way better than everyone says. Hancock getting a 42 on Metacritic or a 37 percent (!) on RottenTomatoes is absurd. The film has some serious flaws, but also some very real virtues. David Denby, one of the few critics who liked it, goes overboard by calling it "by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer" (that's Iron Man) but it is good.
I would analogize Hancock to Starship Troopers -- an innovative and actually pretty arty film miscast as a genre summer blockbuster that will be a critical and commercial failure but later come to be appreciated.
How to reconcile John McCain's reputation as a fiscal tightwad with his desire for open-ended war in Iraq? It's simple, magical poniesvictory will solve the problem, as a policy paper leaked to Mike Allen at Politico says: "The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit." Jason Furman is skeptical:
"McCain would have to pay for all of his new tax cuts and other proposals and then, on top of that, cut an additional $443 billion from the budget—which is 81 percent of Medicare spending or 78 percent of all discretionary spending outside of defense," Furman said.
And of course even this may be too kind, as McCain has in the past hinted at a desire to increase defense spending back up to a Cold War share of GDP and McCain's plan to keep fighting in Iraq until the last Iraqi who wants us gone is dead seems unlikely to allow us to realize his "victory" savings on any feasible timeframe.
Here's a chart from the Washington Post showing that despite a substantial decline in the DC murder rate, and despite the fact that Baltimore and Detroit have overtaken us as murder hubs, the DC homicide rate is still really really high.
And of course one has to assume that the high crime rate is an impediment to economic opportunity. Depressed commercial corridors like George Avenue and H Street NE would probably have more vitality -- fewer boarded-up storefronts, more job opportunities -- if more people felt safer walking around the city at night. I'm not sure I have a theory as to why DC's crime control efforts are so ineffective compared to some other cities though the fact that the police department has to dedicate substantial resources to special capital-related stuff rather than to patrolling the streets doesn't help.
Megan McArdle, based on a talk by Stephen Carter, comes to the view that "that when Americans say 'someone should do something' to stop a conflict somewhere, this is almost tantamount to saying 'we should do something', because at a most generous estimate, there are four military forces in the world capable of deploying into a conflict zone and shutting down the war: America, Britain, Australia, and Israel . . . when we decide not to intervene, we are making a decision that no one should act to halt the conflict."
There's some truth to that, but I think the perspective needs some nuance. It's true that very few countries can, acting alone, intervene in meaningful ways in civil conflicts. But that's not to say that those countries can't contribute constructively to military undertakings. It's to say that they can only contribute helpfully if the United States is also contributing and is thus able to help out with some of the logistical elements and/or perhaps do the pointiest fighting. But as we're seeing right now in Iraq, even the enormous US military establishment faces meaningful manpower constraints relative to the task of stabilizing medium-sized areas so when you're thinking about the feasibility of doing something or other, whether or not other countries are pitching in makes a real difference.
Then beyond that there's the question of politics. The African Union doesn't have a ton of military heft behind it. But there's a huge difference in terms of politics and legitimacy between an operation in Africa led by a western power and supported by AU member states operating joint blessings from the AU and the UN Security Council and an operation in Africa where a western power unilaterally intervenes.
Last, whenever people make these capacities-based arguments you do need to ask as a followup whether this just happens to be an argument they're wielding on behalf of a policy of aggressive unilateralism or whether they're also trying to advocate for steps to ameliorate the capabilities issue. Should there be a UN Standing Force? I think perhaps there should. Was the Center for American Progress correct to recommend that the 2006 QDR involve helping the African Union to build capacity "to solve regional conflicts, thus reducing the need to deploy U.S. forces"? I think they were.
Dr. Irak notes that the continued wrangling over SOFA/SFA issues in Iraq is actually a huge opportunity for the United States to get our Iraq policy sorted out. In particular, with Iraq hinting that they may want the agreement to include a timeline for withdrawal, but also indicating that they would like continued military support of some kind from the United States, the administration is in a position where it "can put a time horizon into the pact and condition the residual support the Iraqi government dearly wants on continued political progress to lock-in recent security gains."
A deal of that sort would serve American interests fairly well and also have the odd consequence of largely defusing the Iraq issue in the presidential campaign. But I see no indication that Bush or McCain are prepared to settle for anything less than open-ended war for open-ended occupation with all kinds of sovereign-infringing immunities for foreign troops and no real dates whatsoever.
This week is economy week for John McCain, so it's worth giving some more scrutiny to McCain's economic policy proposals. For example, suppose that you, like so many Americans in these topys-turvey times, are a large and hugely profitable oil company. Your coffers are groaning under the weight of record profits driven by sky-high commodities prices. And you earn your living by poisoning the planet, all the while plowing a share of your profits back into bribes to ensure that the policy environment leaves most people with few viable alternatives to purchasing your product. You've got a tough life, and John McCain has a plan for you, a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.
The five largest oil companies in America would collectively save $3.8 billion per year under this plan, offering some change you can believe in if you're an ExxonMobil executive. But don't worry, it's not as if he only has plans for oil executives. No. Suppose you're in your late fifties or early sixties and looking to retire soon, but worried you won't be able to since so much of your wealth was tied up in your house and now the market's gone soft. Well never fear, John McCain has a plan to cut your Social Security benefits in an unknown manner and by an unknown amount in order to balance the budget in the face of his huge corporate tax cut.
After all, who needs Social Security when you can retire on a Senator's pension plus live off your heiress wife's vast fortune? In a world where the typical family owns eleven houses and lets their dependent kids spend $50,000 per month on mommy's credit card, there's no real role for the government in providing retirement security.
It's worth saying that reducing the corporate income tax, as per John McCain, is not a terrible idea per se. As far as these things go, the corporate income tax is not a great way of raising revenue in part because it's shot-through with loopholes and such. And then the existence of the loopholes and the desire of various companies to squeeze their revenues into the loopholes has a deleterious impact of some kind on economic growth. I believe the standard center-left technocratic proposal is to eliminate the corporate income tax entirely and replace the lost revenue with a hike in the top individual income tax bracket -- that should ensure that the benefits of a corporate tax cut are captured by the middle class.
That, however, is very much not what John McCain is doing. Rather, he's proposing a cut in the corporate income tax rate and an extension of tax cuts in the top bracket and he's proposing to pay for that through some mix of borrowing and large cuts to domestic spending on retirement security and who knows what else. There's no good case for doing that. The imperfections of the corporate income tax, though real, aren't nearly so terrible as to make it worth paying any price to eliminate them. The kind of technically sound, revenue neutral corporate tax cut I outlined in the first paragraph is the sort of thing you would have expected the McCain of 2001-2003 to propose, but the new-old dogmatic rightwinger McCain is just offering flim-flam and smokescreens.
You can tell that Republicans haven't really lost their touch for the political game because the RNC's latest ad on energy ends on a talking point brilliantly designed to appeal to the lousy instincts of the brain-dead campaign press corps:
No new solutions. Barack Obama: Just the party line.
And it's true. Barack Obama's energy policies -- focused on improving efficiency and developing renewable energy sources -- are pretty much party line answers because the Democratic party line is largely correct. McCain, by contrast, is a mess. He wants a cap and trade system to combat global warming (good) but wants to organize it so that the costs are borne entirely by consumers rather than polluters (bad). He says he's against subsidies for renewable energy because subsidies are a bad idea (understandable if a little pie in the sky) but wants massive subsidies for nuclear energy (because nuclear firms give him campaign contributions). McCain wants to get us off our addiction to oil (good) but he has no record of improving mass transit or fuel efficiency (bad) and his big idea is to wreck the economy of the coastal United States through offshore drilling which he falsely claims will lower short-term fuel prices. On top of all that, he proposes to lower gas prices through a "gas tax holiday" that's been denounced by experts across the ideological spectrum.
It's true, though, that this mish-mash of ideas is far too incoherent to be anyone's party line. And that, I think, will be incredibly impressive to campaign reporters. The voters, I think, are pretty open to a more-or-less orthodox Democrat given the state of the GOP brand but that's another matter. Meanwhile, note the irony of an ad paid for by the Republican National Committee lauding John McCain for his willingness to break with the Republican line. If only the RNC had spoken up sooner on how terrible Republicans are!
A somewhat detailed explanation of how corn ethanol is a waste of energy. The impact on the price of food is obvious, but I keep hearing it said that as much (non-solar) energy goes into ethanol as we get out of it without any description of how this works.
I'm not sure how detailed I'm able to go here, but the basic shape of things is that if you think about a coal power plant you have to recognize that not only does the plant generate energy but it also takes a lot of energy to run the plant. The coal needs to be mined, transported, etc. But coal contains a lot of energy so the whole process is worth doing as an energy-acquisition mechanism. By contrast, planting, raising, and harvesting a field of corn is a relatively labor intensive enterprise. And when you're done, you don't have any ethanol at all -- you just have a bunch of corn. The corn then needs to be transported (and it's bulky) which uses energy, and then turned into ethanol which uses yet more energy. All told, that makes it difficult for corn ethanol to really work as a viable source of net energy.
By contrast, I believe you can just get a lot more ethanol from a ton of sugar cane than you can from a ton of corn. It's just like how sugar cane is a more efficient source of sweetener than is growing fields of corn to make high-fructose corn syrup.
You can find a technical discussion of the energy issues involving several different kinds of crops here. I would say, as a layman, that researchers seem to have obtained a range of results on the question of energy efficiency and that the "right" answer seems to depend both on how you count and and on what the specifics of any given field are. It's also worth considering that chopping down forests to clear land for agriculture can contribute to global warming.
Ultimately, though, rather than "figure this out" what we need to do is price carbon emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme with auctioned permits. As with any other human activity, discerning the overall carbon impact is extremely difficult. For example, maybe corn ethanol by raising grain prices will, over time, make beef substantially more expensive in a way that reduces beef consumption and, in turn, lowers carbon emissions? There's just no real way to figure this stuff out, which is why we should mostly rely on the government to price carbon and let the market adjust accordingly, rather than trying to have the government pick "the best" technology.
Photo by Flickr user Kables used under a Creative Commons license
RoboticGhost asks: "I wondered if you heard anything about water concerns while you were out West. I don't suspect it'd be that big of a deal in lofty Aspen, but many parts of Colorado are caught in the fight for water resources. Its town against town against farmer against industry, with some armed conflicts thrown in for good measure."
I didn't hear anything about that when I was in Colorado, but I did hear a lot about water last year when I was in Southern California and New Mexico. I'm far from an expert in this, but normally when you see shortages you're looking at an effort to allocate a valuable resource by regulatory fiat (and therefore special interest political clout) rather than price. Thus, I was strongly predisposed to favor this proposal for tradeable water rights from Michael Greenstone at Brookings when I read it months ago and reading it again it still seems right.
You can imagine some very difficult water policy questions in a desperately poor country, where people being unable to acquire a subsidence level of clean drinking water is a real issue. The United States is wealthy enough that that's not a real concern -- if people are made to pay market rates to use water, we should find that there's plenty of water around for everyone to do what we really need to do.
Gail Sheehy's Clinton campaign post-mortem is interesting, but like all such articles it's shocking to me how much it downplays Clinton's catastrophic political and substantive error in voting for the 2002 Iraq resolution. That mistake was about a thousand times more consequential than any particular instance of Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson bickering about this or that. It's just impossible for me to imagine her losing the nomination if she'd spent 2002 through early 2004 as a liberal hero and a lonely voice of sanity on the war.
If she'd made that call correctly, Obama never would have gotten in the race and we'd be talking about whether she should do the daring thing and pick that charismatic black Senator from Illinois as her running mate.
There's been a lot of talk about the unbalanced media environment in this election, and how it benefits McCain. What should Democrats actually do to counteract that advantage? (aside from opting out of the public financing system and running a buttload of paid media.)
I think that what Democrats should do is the same as what ordinary citizens should do -- support good media, punish bad media. If you subscribe to The Washington Post stop, and explain to them in a detailed letter why you're stopping. Subscribe to The American Prospect, and The Nation, and Mother Jones. When you read a Media Matters item about some BS on cable read the contact information under the "Take Action" banner and send them a note. If your note is going to the General Electric corporation, make sure to tell them you like Countdown and that Rachel Maddow should host a television show.
Powerful elected officials can do all those things but can also, as Republicans do with conservative media, support progressive media with access and praise to help raise the profile of progressive institutions.
Doing the "ordinary person"-side stuff can be tedious and annoying, but it must be done. Working the refs is hard work, and the right got where it is today by putting in the hours.
The battle may not be avoidable. The current GOP platform is a 100-page document, and all but nine pages mention Bush's name. Virtually the entire platform will have to be rewritten to lessen the imprint of the president, who has the highest disapproval rating of any White House occupant since Richard M. Nixon.
And in the need for the re-write comes the problem, since it seems Republican Party activists are looking to stop McCainified "views on global warming, immigration, stem cell research and campaign finance from becoming enshrined in the party's official declaration of principles." A fight like that will probably be embarrassing for the McCain campaign since, at the end of the day, anything that underscores the hard-right's dislike for the guy is going to help him in this climate. By contrast, the inevitable speech by George W. Bush seems destined to be a disaster for McCain's quest for the White House.
The hopeful side of the LA Times's very bleak account is the suggestion that the government may actually be running out of the necessary cash to keep all its goon squads in operation. Still, even if something happens to force Mugabe from power, one has to think that a lot of these folks in his militias aren't necessarily going to give up their own appetite for robbery, rape, mayhem, etc. no matter what happens at the top.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) says he "was proud to support" the Webb GI Bill that he, in fact, voted against. I like the inclusion of the pride point, since after all we can't really assess his subjective condition. Maybe when he voted against the bill he was secretly ashamed of himself (he should have been) and to him that means he was proud to support it. Something like that. After all, only shrill bloggers call people liars.
It really does seem a bit odd that a mayor with a 67 percent approval rating should be forced from office because of a term limits law. I suppose I understand the theory that presidential-level term limits serve as a check on tyranny, but there doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to worry about that at the local level of government.
I was a senior when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Roughly 2,000 of us joined a vigil on the quad for several days. The vigil was an instrument of our grieving and a voice for racial justice on Duke's campus. Higher wages and union recognition for the non-academic employees—cooks, food-servers, maids, and janitors, most of whom were black—became the focal issue. We sat peacefully and largely silent day and night, studying for finals, listening to Dr. King's speeches and singing "We Shall Overcome" every hour. To this day I count it as a major event in my spiritual formation.
Jesse Helms came on the television and said that all of the students sitting on the quad at Duke should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to "marry a Negro" (Duke students were practically all white in those days). Unless the student's parents approved of that prospect, Helms advised, he or she should go back to class. We all took the words as vindication for our cause.
Again, one could imagine a white supremacist television commentator changing his positions and apologizing for some of his past actions (I believe such puny liberals as George Wallace did this) and moving on. But Jesse Helms didn't do that. And George Bush, Mitch McConnell, National Review, and the Heritage Foundation admire him greatly.
With all due respect, I think Ross's notion that "the only sure way for McCain to make the Iraq issue work for him is to make the debate about the recent past rather than the future, and to use the experience of the last two years - where (at least for the moment) he looks good, and Obama looks bad" is a little bit crazy. Once the past is allowed into the debate, the fact that McCain was a strident advocate for this costly fiasco and that -- remarkably -- he continues to think it was a good idea in retrospect will bury him.
The smart Iraq strategy for McCain is the one he was using before the current "Obama's a flip-flopper" tactic came into vogue, namely one that's less focused on lying about Obama and more focused on telling big lies rather than small ones. It's absolutely vital for McCain to repeat, loudly and falsely, that there's a very good chance of al-Qaeda taking over Iraq and using it as a base from which to attack the American homeland and that Obama believes he can appease al-Qaeda by giving them Iraq. He needs to say lots of stuff about how "unlike my opponent, I don't think al-Qaeda will be satisfied with Iraq; unlike him I remember what happened the last time we allowed them to take over a country."
The lie on which the war was initially sold, and the lie on which it retained its popularity, was that the war was directly necessary for U.S. national security in a very simple and straightforward sense. That required, yes, some whoppers but they were whoppers about the sort of thing (preventing a WMD terrorist attack on American soil) that would constitute a good reason for starting a war. All this "success of the surge" business is incredibly abstract and totally disconnect from anything real people care about -- I can tell you which Americans have died because of the surge, but I have no idea which Americans are supposed to have benefited from it.
There's not a ton of fans of the idea of tradeable water rights in my comment thread, but I'm not seeing many better options. Obviously the first-best option would be for the geological facts to just become different such that the pleasantly sunny southwest also had enough water to accommodate everyone's desires. But that's not the case. And scarce resources need to be allocated somehow. Allocating them by price has a couple of advantages. One is that it ensures that high-value uses keep going. If you have two business enterprises, and one can create VERY MUCH value out of a gallon of water and another can create JUST A BIT of value out of a gallon of water, it makes sense for the water to go to the VERY MUCH firm and for JUST A BIT enterprises to only locate themselves in areas where water is plentiful. Which is just a long way of saying that there are certain kinds of water-intensive activities that don't really belong in the arid portions of the United States, just as large solar power plants primarily do belong in those regions.
The other thing is that allocating by price lets different people make different sets of trade-offs. If water is scarce and you put a high value on having a grassy lawn but I put a low value on having one, then allocating by price will let you have a nice big lush lawn while I go without one and buy something else. Under other kind of schemes, I'll get a so-so lawn that I don't really appreciate, and you'll have a so-so lawn that leaves you wanting more.
Ultimately, we're used to the idea that a square foot of land quite properly costs dramatically more in New Jersey than in Arizona because space is more plentiful in Arizona. But why shouldn't water cost dramatically more in Arizona where water is scarce? I dunno, though. I don't have any kind of long-standing commitment to this position and am totally prepared to climb down in the face of a compelling alternative. The question, though, would have to be what policy goal is being advanced by adopting a non-market scheme -- environmental concerns, public health, what?
I suppose I shouldn't get too upset when people have overheated reactions to my annual bout of July 4 skepticism. Let me just make this one point, though, namely that to say it would have been better "had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together" is perfectly consistent with the belief that the English authorities bare the bulk of the blame for the split.
Indeed, my diffidence about independence stems in part from the recognition that war and separation wasn't by any means the first option of most of the men who wound up leading the movement for independence. But their efforts at compromise weren't welcomed in London and the result was a costly war. If you think that mistakes were made exclusively on the English side, I think you're being a bit naive, as these sorts of things never happen without a mutual lack of trust and some errors on both sides. But I don't think that the founders were wrong, sitting in Philadelphia in 1776, to think that under the circumstances independence was their best option. I only think -- as they themselves did -- that it was unfortunate that the course of events had taken them to that position, rather than to some form of compromise.
Robert Pear runs down the evidence that there's no way on earth John McCain is going to balance the budget by 2013 consistent with the priorities he's outlined. To put a hard number on it, according to the CBO if we extend the Bush tax cuts (as McCain has proposed) then even ignoring McCain's proposals to increase defense spending, to further cut taxes, and to continue the war in Iraq, we'll have a deficit of $443 billion.
Obviously, there's uncertainty associated with that projection, but that's the ballpark. That would mean something like an 80 percent reduction in Medicare spending.
It's obvious that the financial problems at daily newspapers around the country have roots that go beyond quality. But still, given the lousy job the AP is doing covering the campaign, and given the extent to which many dailies rely on the AP for a lot of coverage, it's hard to see how anyone will be saved. I get paid money to read newspapers and complain about them, so a newspaper that's riddled with errors still has some value to me. But to an ordinary person, unless the newspaper is going to do a reasonable job of reporting the news there's no real point -- comic books are always going to have prettier pictures.
One issue on which Barack Obama and John McCain differ is Social Security. McCain would like to replace Social Security as we currently understand it with a very different kind of retirement program that wouldn't offer security to retirees and would have no progressive impact on the income distribution. Because this plan is unpopular, he would like to confuse people about his support for privatization of Social Security and he would also like to secure bipartisan cover for privatizing it. Obama, by contrast, wants to keep Social Security very much as it is, and if deficits projected for the future emerge he's interested in altering the payroll tax cap in order to secure more revenue.
Or as the headline writers put it on the front page of The Washington Post"Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security". Because in headlineland, saving a program and destroying a program under pretext of saving it are just two different ways of saving it. Or as Perry Bacon, Jr. writes in the above-headlined story:
Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are both proposing dramatic changes to Social Security, taking on the financially fragile "third rail of American politics" that Congress and recent presidents have been unable to repair.
This is a great lead except for the fact that Obama is not proposing dramatic changes to Social Security. Well, there's also the fact that the projected deficits for Social Security are smaller and more manageable than those projected for the other entitlement programs (Medicare and Medicaid) and that the non-entitlement portion of the budget is running a huge deficit right now. Under the circumstances, Social Security would seem to be the least financial fragile aspect of the federal budget. And one more thing -- to say "that Congress and recent presidents have been unable to repair" Social Security implies that recent presidents and Congresses have been trying to repair it when, in fact, George W. Bush's Social Security proposals were, like John McCain's, aimed at phasing the program out.
I think I'm afraid to read past the lede of that particular story.
Chris Bowers critiques the flip-flop line of attack against Barack Obama and observes "In fact, looking at the national poll trend lines at Pollster.com, the only line of attack that has ever clearly damaged Obama was the Reverend Wright flap back in March." Indeed as you can see above that's true. I might add that Wright-based attacks, while in many ways unfair, had the proverbial "grain of truth" advantage in that I think Obama really is more liberal than the Democratic nominees of the recent past in a way that trying to associate him with radical figures drives home.
The interesting thing about the 2008 election is that the political marketplace has responded to the collapse in support for Bush and the GOP in a pretty efficient manner -- with the Republicans nominating someone who's somewhat less conservative than Bush and whose association with the GOP brand is relatively weak, and the Democrats running on a more liberal agenda than they've had in recent cycles. McCain wants to exaggerate how moderate he is and how left-wing Obama is, not recycle attacks on John Kerry. I bet most people wish Kerry had won (actually, it would be interesting to see polling on this).
Sam Stein provides some details on the planned Health Care For America Now initiative, a $40 million campaign aimed at supporting a post-election drive for major health care reform in 2009. Intelligently, the plan calls not only for paid media but also for organizers to be deployed to a variety of spots around the country including all the districts represented by members of the Blue Dog caucus.
That sounds like the right strategy to me. A big part of the issue with a lot of these Blue Dog types is that they represent areas where there's little to nothing in the way of real progressive organization on the ground. Anyone representing a district like that is going to wind up listing to the right, especially on key votes where there are potentially large sums of money to be made by doing the wrong thing. Winning elections in marginal districts gives a political party a majority, but building infrastructure in those districts creates a working majority for substantial change.
Scott wonders if people are making too big a deal out of FISA:
While I understand there are dozens of real policy difference to disagree with President Bush, I'm not sure FISA quite makes my top 10% list or even top 25%, or put another way I agree with Andrew Sullivan's view this is a venial not cardinal sin. So would be curious if you share the outrage and if not why you think so many people are upset on this topic.
To me, personally, outrage requires surprise and I'm not at all surprised that the man who's likely going to be president in 2009 isn't interested in expending political capital on reducing his own powers. I'm just cynical that way. As to whether the outrage is overblown, I do think some of the rhetoric is overheated but at the same time this is a signature "netroots" issue a key example of what Mark Schmitt's called "politics below the Coasian floor" and the only way to organize effectively is for some key people to be really, really, really passionate about these issues. To put it another way, I'm glad Glenn Greenwald is out there pounding away on these questions and I don't really think it makes a ton of sense to complain that other people don't share my exact same set of issue priorities.
Via Robert Farley, a helpful chart debunking the notion that Iran poses some kind of existential threat to the United States.
It's worth avoiding nuclear proliferation in Iran because, in general, the continued spread of nuclear weapons poses serious risks for the world. But that's a far cry from saying that Iran is, as such, any kind of serious military threat.
This is just a staggering story in The Washington Post. The essence of it is that the mayor of Washington DC has made a couple of fairly minor policy shifts designed to make life better for people who live in Washington DC and pay taxes in Washington DC that have come at the expense of people who don't live in Washington DC and don't pay taxes in Washington DC but do commute to work here in cars.
To which I say: More please! Obviously, there's some point at which you've made things so terrible for suburban commuters that the downtown office market totally collapses and your city is screwed. But we're really, really far from that point. Mayors' priorities should be on creating livable neighborhoods for people, and on creating circumstances in which more people move into their cities. Putting a priority on making suburbanites' car commutes as short as possible is preposterous.
An excellent point by Ezra Klein, namely that it's an enormous dodge for reporters to write that John McCain plans to balance the budgeting by "entitlement programs, including Social Security". Like, overhauling how. If McCain doesn't say how, he might as well be saying he plans to balance the budget by magic. If he does say how, well, some people will get upset but they ought to have their chance to get upset before the election.
This is part of the paradox of McCain's famous openness to the press -- the deal seems to be that in exchange for unusual access to the candidate, his traveling press corps agrees not to ask him any obvious questions like "when you put changing the federal government's largest program at the center of your economic strategy, what exactly do you mean?" You probably wouldn't get invited to the next BBQ session or something. But it's a kind of important aspect of the overall picture. Trying to cut Medicare spending is a more reasonable idea than Social Security cuts, but it's an even more conceptually difficult proposition and one really needs to know what kind of overhaul we're talking about before evaluating that kind of proposal.
John McCain runs against hope. And against hippies. Literally.
Perhaps this will be the last we hear about how he doesn't like to discuss his POW experience? Still, I think it's a decent ad that does the job of simultaneously hitting McCain's main biographical theme while also trying to position McCain as a candidate for those who think the country's on the wrong track.
UPDATE: Of course this also puts one in mind of Wesley Clark's remarks. As best I can tell, the argument of this advertisement is that having been shot down over Vietnam and held in captivity qualifies John McCain to run the country's foreign policy. Surely whether or not that's true should be a within-bounds issue for political debate.
Barack Obama's staffing up continues apace as he adds Dana Singiser as a Senior Advisor who "be responsible for the strategic management, development and implementation of a comprehensive national women’s vote program" alongside such existing staff as "Betsy Myers, Chair of Women for Obama, Becky Carroll, National Women’s Field Director and Judy Gold, Women’s Policy Advisor." Previous Singiser was Director of Women’s Outreach for the Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign and also worked for Clinton as Staff Director of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee and before that she was Deputy Political Director for Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign.
In the past decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land, in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request. "Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John's life," says John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. "Taking a chance, playing against the odds." Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress.
The McCains own eleven houses and spent over $200,000 on "household staff" in 2007 so I suppose he can afford tens of thousands of dollars in gambling losses every year. At the same time, you wouldn't want someone to enjoy "playing against the odds" with the country's public policy. The fact that McCain seems to think there's some kind of "betting strategy" that can turn craps into a winning game also raises some questions about his math.
Photo by Flickr user techslut used under a Creative Commons license
It seems that yesterday's Crocs gambit from John McCain was, as Marc Ambinder points out, literally a move straight out of the Bush playbook. Video illustration:
Excellent. It seems that Will Smith's unfairly maligned genre-busting super hero film Hancock made a shitload of money. Any wealthy movie stars / directors / producers involved with the film who want to pay me vast sums to beat the drums of praise for their movie should get in touch at myglesias at gmail dot com. I'm not that principled!
Tim Lee runs down some little-known facts about the original growth of the secret, illegal surveillance state as the FBI, with administration approval, decided to ignore a series of court rulings in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s that attempted to restrain its ability to wiretap in a variety of ways. These practices, of course, were per se abusive in many ways, and led to further abuses, and then under Richard Nixon led to the revelation of massive abuses and the creations of the safeguards we're now busy unwinding.
I suppose at this point I've become fatalistic about FISA and am mostly just waiting for this whole cycle to repeat itself.
UPDATE: See also this important followup about crass politicization of surveillance and this crucial point: "Now, I have no evidence that today’s NSA or FBI is doing anything like this. But of course, someone in the 1960s wouldn’t have realized what the FBI was doing then, either."
I've read a lot of conservative defenses of Jesse Helms' infamous "white hands" ad over the past few days, and I have to say it's all pretty dumb:
Granted, there's a difference between opposing affirmative action and being racist. Yes, this is an anti-affirmative action ad that seeks specifically to motivate white resentments rather than to appeal to an argument about fairness, but still, politics ain't beanbag. But the obvious difference in the case of the Helms ad is that it was an ad for Jesse Helms who started his career running a race-baiting campaign for a white supremacist candidate who went on to become a white supremacist television commentator who left the Democratic Party over the Democratic Party's abandonment of white supremacy who opposed making Martin Luther King Day a holiday who opposed the civil rights act, etc., etc., etc., and who never expressed any regrets about any of those things.
The context is clearly relevant and all points in one direction. The ad, absent Helms' career, would just be a demagogic campaign ad among many demagogic campaign ads. But in the context of Helms' career, it encapsulates his utter lack of remorse for his history of racial bigotry which, in turn, provides the context in which we must understand his anti-gay bigotry.
I think, however, that this will be the last I say on Helms. Ross Douthat takes the line I think conservatives ought to take on this character, as did Jonathan Rauch in 2002 and as does Max Boot. So I'll wish them and whomever else luck in building a post-Helms conservatism and hope for the best.
Just an additional word on John McCain's preposterous plan to balance the budget in part through the savings accrued by his mystery scheme for "victory" in Iraq. When you're talking about budgetary savings, you need to be talking compared to some baseline. So in this case while it's true that securing some undefined victory through undefined methods at an unknown future date would be cheaper than continuing precisely as is forever, that this "endless war" scenario doesn't exist in any of the standard budget projections.
There aren't, in short, any real savings to be achieved here -- only a large question mark as to how much additional deficit spending will take place. McCain, despite a certain amount of flim-flam last week to the contrary, is still the candidate who'll spend more in Iraq over a longer period of time than will the alternative candidate for the presidency.
David asks: "Thoughts about California Proposition 1, which focuses on a high speed rail line in the state?"
Do you really need to ask? Obviously, I'm for building high speed rail. The California coast is a potentially excellent rail corridor with a whole bunch of kinda close urban areas. I'd say that there (potentially extending upcoast to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver) is one of the most promising possible areas for rail improvement. It's an expensive undertaking, but one that will pay large dividends for a long time once it's done.
Related, a question about some rail proposal in Hawaii whose opponents are trying to force a referendum: "What is more important? Direct democracy (which I believe you mostly want more of) or 'elite' driven infrastructure projects (even if it is stipulated that they are long term benefit to a majority of the people.)?"
I don't think I do generally want more direct democracy. My understanding is that excessive direct democracy has contributed to serious governance problems in California. Among other things, I think direct democracy tends to undermine the idea of accountability of officials to the public in a way that's contrary to the nominal objectives.
Interesting map showing that the highest concentration of overweight Americans is in the south and to a lesser extent the Midwest, while New England and a "backward L" from Montana to California that doesn't comport all that well with conventional regionalization are slender. Like James Poulos I want to know more -- a county level map, perhaps, or some kind of demographic controls.
Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief who is now the Republican National Committee’s “Victory Chairman,” was discussing consumer-driven health insurance at a breakfast with reporters when she proposed “a real, live example which I’ve been hearing a lot about from women: There are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication. Those women would like a choice.”
Unfortunately for her, McCain had an opportunity to vote in congress on a measure that would guarantee that health insurance plans cover birth control and he voted against it. As Dana Goldstein points out that's just one piece of a larger reactionary McCain agenda on reproductive rights and safe sex.
Being an American who primarily comments on US politics and public policy I have, over the years, primarily concentrated on the logic for the United States of America to setting a timeline for withdrawal of our forces from Iraq. But with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki talking up the timetable option it's worth considering that it has a solid logic from an Iraqi point of view.
The Iraqi government, it seems clear, would like some continued support from US combat forces. And the United States, for good reason, doesn't want its forces running around Iraq engaged in combat while being subject to Iraqi law rather than the Uniform Code of Military Justice. At the same time, the Iraqi government wants to be the government of a real sovereign country which is incompatible with a foreign army running around the country engaged in active combat and not subject to Iraqi law. One easy way to thread the needle of continued US combat engagement in Iraq while maintaining a meaningful sense of Iraqi sovereignty is to make the US presence temporary in a definitive way. Which is to say -- setting a timetable for withdrawal. That should buy the United States an added degree of public support within which to conduct some additional operations and leave the best possible situation behind.
Just because the slogan "Don't hope for a better life; vote for one" was used by the UK Tories in the late 1970s doesn't, to me, mean that the McCain campaign "plagiarized" anyone by using it. The idea of plagiarism is that you have one writer taking credit for the work of another writer which we think is wrong under a variety of circumstances. But we don't think it's wrong in the context of political campaigning.
Barack Obama didn't single-handedly write "Obama's convention speech" or "Obama's race speech" or "Obama's competitiveness speech." One gets the sense that Obama, who really did write a legitimately good book without recourse to a ghostwriter may play a larger role in his own speechmaking than is typical for a presidential candidate, but even if he doesn't he's not "plagiarizing" his speechwriters, he's giving speeches. Given that context, I think the general principle is that when it comes to political sloganeering you're free to borrow, modify, etc. as you like.
John McCain once again "jokes" about his desire to kill Iranians. This time, the joke is a little bit more of a real joke, but the targets of his lust for killing foreigners are clearly ordinary Iranian civilians. If a major Iranian political leader were to repeatedly joke about bombing the United States and killing Americans, you can just imagine the shit-storm about how Iran isn't a normal country with normal interests, that it's run by irrational fanatics, appeasement won't work, etc.
Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace.
Of course in their day, present-day retirees were working and their tax dollars were paying folks who were retired back then. And in exchange for that service when they were workers, today's retirees get to enjoy a secure retirement. Yes, on my dime. And in exchange I expect that when I retire, ensuing generations will be there for me. I call it generations looking after each other, so that those who built the present with labors in the past get to enjoy some of the fruits of their labor. The federal government calls it Social Security. John McCain calls it a disgrace.
One popular vein of analysis in sports commentary is doing "similarity scores" for different athletes. By analyzing the past career of a current player and seeing which older players he's similar to, you can glean information about his likely future trajectory. Nate Silver, who mainly does quantitative sports analysis though he's recently become known for his political blogging, has done something similar for American states based on a variety of political and demographic factors.
It's an interesting exercise and shows, among other things, that there's less similarity than I might have thought out there. A number of states, including very large ones like Florida and Texas, are essentially unique by this standard and the closest any pair gets (North Carolina and South Carolina) is 71 out of 100.
I hadn't realized this, but apparently the Democratic National Convention's planners are making all kinds of moves to make it the "most sustainable" convention ever, including a search for the elusive carbon neutrality. I think individuals who aim for that kind of objective in their personal lives are acting out of laudable motives, but to me it's actually counterproductive for a political organization to be doing this.
The public policy argument made by liberals is that the United States ought to reduce its carbon emissions, and that this can be accomplished either by a cap/permit scheme or a carbon tax scheme. Either would have the impact of raising the price of carbon emissions, with that added cost transmitted up and down the economic conveyor belt, leaving each consumer free to make each individual choice and tradeoff based on considerations of price and quality. In the end, carbon emissions will fall and climate change will be mitigated. Engaging in the laborious (indeed, impossible) task of calculating the aggregate carbon footprint of each and every individual activity you engage in isn't part of the agenda on any level.
The individual carbon footprint of any particular activity under the current policy regime just isn't relevant -- the point is that the current policy regime is bad and needs to be changed. When you see the Democratic Party aiming for a carbon neutral convention, it does much less to improve the environment than it does to define environmentalism in terms of an unrealistic standard of behavior that few individuals will reach, while rending huge swathes of the progressive community vulnerable to spurious charges of hypocrisy from the right.
Photo by Flickr user Clownfish used under a Creative Commons license
Good article from Robert Gordon and James Kvaal which notes that John McCain has developed a marked tendency for offering contradictory proposals on a wide range of issues.
In his defense, I'd say that constantly contradicting himself is a kind of mavericky thing to do.
Barack Obama's lead in the polls is good news for his prospects, right? Wrong, says Gallup, who points out that the July polling leader lost in six of the last nine competitive US presidential elections. It seems to me that Gallup is generating a spurious level of counterintuitiveness through use of the "competitive" qualifier. If you look at the most recent fifteen presidential elections, the July polling leader has won big six times, won narrowly three times, and lost narrowly six times. That gives you the totally intuitive result that leading in July is better news that losing in July, but that it doesn't guarantee anything.
Ezra Klein, writing yesterday about Obama and ethanol, argued that rather than subsidies for corn per se the "bigger problem is that Obama supports the 45 cent tariff on Brazilian sugar cane, which is about four times more energy efficient than corn as an ethanol base."
I'm not sure which is the bigger problem. It reminds me, though, that the ridiculous tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol is just one small slice of the larger set of terrible sugar policies in the United States which are aimed at making sugar cane expensive in order to boost the fortunes of America's beet sugar producers and, indirectly, the high fructose corn syrup industry. What kind of justification one could mount for this perverse effort at sweetener autarky are couldn't quite say, but I have a longstanding dream of a politician handing out bottles of Mexican Coke (made with real sugar) at rallies, drawing vast crowds and powering a massive grassroots campaign for proper sugar.
Barack Obama thinks America's schools should be the best in the world, and that means doing as good a job as other countries do of teaching our children foreign languages. This, it seems, makes him a snob in the eyes of The Weekly Standard (via Julian Sanchez) where they apparently feel that a healthy respect for the common man requires a vote for John McCain and a willingness to settle for low-performing public services.
Ta-Nehisi Coates had a very interesting post the other day on the difficult subject of race and crime. I wanted to flag a bit of a side theme, though, both in his post and in some of the comments which is about fear of crime. He talks about how even when he lived in DC years ago and the crime rate was much higher, he wasn't frightened:
The AFL-CIO has (pretty cleverly, in my view) created a Union Vets Council to do stuff like air this ad:
I think liberals sometimes go overboard in terms of thinking that the right way to appeal to veterans is to double-down on social services for veterans as a kind of pure transactional interest group politics. But this ad smartly links the specific critique of McCain's record on veterans issues to broader economic concerns.
I suppose I should be over it by now, but every time something happens like a provocative Iranian missile launch I'm shocked at how hawks are able to spin the continuing failure of their approach to the region as evidence of their own correctness. But the evidence is clear that the Bush administration's approach is leading to a downward spiral of hostilities and that nothing good is going to come from John McCain continuing that approach. The alternative is to try good-faith negotiations. It might not work, but it really might, and that would be much better than continuing this cycle.
Oilman T. Boone Pickens is launching an ambitious energy initiative called the Pickens Plan whereby we're going to build lots of wind power for electricity, allowing us to take natural gas out of the electricity business and use it as a transportation fuel. Joseph Romm calls the plan half brilliant and and half dumb, citing the visionary leadership on winding power but expressing serious doubts about the natural gas element.
Read Romm for full details, but the crux of the matter is that burning gas in a power plant is a lot more efficient than burning it in an internal combustion engine. Natural gas, meanwhile, is so-so on the cleanliness front. Put those two things together and an electric car getting its juice from a natural gas power plant is much cleaner than a car burning natural gas. And since our current infrastructure is already geared to using gas in power plants there's no really good reason to switch things up.
It's good to hear that WMATA is set to expand MetroExtra service adding new routes for these faster buses that stop less frequently and have "signal priority" technology that lets them briefly hold green lights so the bus can make it past the intersection. Given the flexibility and relative lack of expense involved in buses, these are the kind of measures that jurisdictions all across the country should be looking at.
The next step, and the one that could really change things, would be the implementation of dedicated (and well-enforced) bus lanes. As pictured above, an equal number of people can fit into a vastly smaller space if they're riding a bus than if they're in single passenger cars so ultimately the best way to deal with the problem of a large number of people wanting to pass through a limited roadspace is to make it more appealing to take the bus.
A dedicated bus lane means that your bus can go faster (especially when combined with signal priority) which makes for a shorter commute, thus making the bus a more attractive option. But a faster bus also means it reaches the end point sooner and then goes back the other way. That means that, even holding the number of buses constant, a dedicated bus lane makes bus service more frequent which makes taking the bus a more attractive option. And, of course, if the bus becomes more attractive there'll be more demand on the route and therefore more fares, which makes it more viable to run buses more frequently which, again, will make it a more desirable option.
In a better world, we'd be past the debate over whether to enact legislation to curb America's carbon emissions and we could all spend our time glorying in things like Peter Orszag's recommendations on how to structure and implement a cap and trade scheme so as to maximize the room for economic growth and avoid doing anything that's unduly regressive.
He says the two most important points are (a) that we need to allow for some banking and borrowing of emissions permits, so that reductions can happen at the most economically opportune times rather than on an arbitrary schedule, and (b) that we need to auction the permits so as to generate revenue that can offset some of the problems caused by the imposition of the cap.
Photo by Flickr user futureatlas used under a Creative Commons license
Here's a fascinating result via Henry Farrell and Larry Bartels' book, Unequal Democracy. As you can see, among people with low levels of political information (as measured by knowing things like which party had more members in the House or which party was more conservative) liberals and conservatives alike are aware that inequality between rich and poor has grown in recent decades.
When you shift from low-information liberals to high information liberals, the proportion of liberals getting the inequality facts right goes up. But when you shift from low-information conservatives to high information conservatives, you see evidence not of growing awareness of the facts but of growing familiarity with conservative talking points and thus a decreasing proclivity to answer the question correctly. And I seriously doubt things would turn out any differently if you found a question where the shoe was on the other foot.
This relates to the skepticism I expressed last week that the "flip-flopper" allegation really hurt John Kerry quite as much as it sometimes appears. There's a lot of evidence from various sources that what happens when people pay attention to politics is they better align self-reports of their beliefs with the talking points associated with "their side." So you can get a lot of people claiming to dislike John Kerry because he's a flip-flopper when more likely they think Kerry's a flip-flopper because they don't like John Kerry and that's what Kerry's enemies were saying. If conservatives had decided to say that Kerry was stubborn, huge numbers of people would have believed that instead.
Madeleine Albright and Bill Perry take to the pages of The LA Times to explain why John McCain's plan to boot Russia from the G-8 is crazy:
The next U.S. president will have no choice but to seek Russia's cooperation on a range of vital issues even while managing the differences that are sure to arise. We will have a far better chance of succeeding if our disagreements on matters of substance -- the future of NATO, for example -- are not aggravated unnecessarily by questions of symbolism and protocol. We cannot expect help from a government we are attempting to blackball, nor would it be in our interest to push Russia further in the direction of an alliance of autocracies with such countries as China and Iran.
At the end of the day, this stuff -- McCain's penchant for bad, ill-conceived ideas that squander US power rather than advancing our goals in practical ways -- deserves much more attention than McCain's personal courage decades ago.
The other day the Washington Post ran a preposterous article deeming a few commonsense measures taken by the Fenty administration to serve the interests of people live, work, and pay taxes in the District of Columbia a "war against workers who drive into the city." Yesterday, Megan McArdle signed on as a war supporter.
Today, I think I'd like to offer some suggestions in case the Fenty administration decides to prosecute the war more vigorously. For one thing, all the reversible-lane (lanes that run inbound during the morning rush hour and outbound during the afternoon rush hour) streets should be made into regular streets. The SE Freeway should be turned into a boulevard, as should the part of 295 that runs east from the Air Force and Naval bases (this will allow the eventual construction of a nice Anacostia riverfront). The stretch of New York Avenue running east from North Capitol Street to the border should be made into a more normal city street rather than a quasi-highway as should the stretch of North Capitol Street running north from Michigan Avenue.
Major thoroughfares like Connecticut Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, Rhode Island Avenue, H Street, 16th Street should have either parking or traffic lanes removed to make way for dedicated bus lanes that may lay the groundwork for eventual light rail. Everyplace throughout the central city that's currently painted for diagonal or perpendicular parking should be put to parallel parking with the space freed up dedicated to sidewalk, green space, bike lanes, something. Developers and landowners should be freed from any regulatory mandate to build parking lots or garages (one assumes most will still want to provide some parking that may or may not be free).
With less space dedicated to moving and parking private cars there will, of course, be a scarcity problem which should be ameliorated by congestion pricing and performance parking. Revenue thereby generated can go to enhance Metro and Metrobus service.
Photo by Flickr user Alex Massie used under a Creative Commons license
With regard to the post below it is, of course, worth saying that engineering our cities so as to support the needs of all the users of our streets, rather than the desire of suburban commuters to move very quickly, is at times literally a matter of life and death. Take the example of Alice Swanson the 22 year-old bicycle commuter killed yesterday as she attempted to bike west on R Street through the intersection with 20th Street by a garbage truck that seems to have turned right without looking to see if anyone was in the bike lane moving forward.
This particular intersection is not an especially dangerous one, in my view, which goes to show that terrible things can happen even with decent traffic engineering. But it also serves as a reminder that at other, worse-designed elements of our streets, huge risks are taken every day with the safety of pedestrians and cyclists.
Here's the video of John McCain calling Social Security an "absolute disgrace":
Another thing for his campaign to complain is being taken out of context, I suppose. McCain's just the sort of candidate who's too awesome to be quoted accurately lest the public understand his agenda, something we must be shielded from at all costs by war stories and vague stuff about patriotism and reform.
When you look at something like the AP's covering for John McCain as he embarrassingly jokes about his desire to kill Iranian civilians, it's worth considering how the AP would have reported this if the shoe were on the other foot. Ahmadenijad makes a "joke," at a political rally, about killing Americans. Soft-focus human interest story? I doubt it. Heck, what would John McCain's reaction be if that happened?
Her office puts out a good statement that reaches the correct conclusion:
Congress must vigorously check and balance the president even in the face of dangerous enemies and at a time of war. That is what sets us apart. And that is what is vital to ensuring that any tool designed to protect us is used – and used within the law – for that purpose and that purpose alone. I believe my responsibility requires that I vote against this compromise, and I will continue to pursue reforms that will improve our ability to collect intelligence in our efforts to combat terror and to oversee that authority in Congress.
I don't believe that if Clinton and Obama swapped roles that they'd be acting any differently. But the reality is that as long as Obama thinks he's going to be wielding executive authority, he's going to be useless as a check on out-of-control executive authority. If Clinton wants to channel whatever regrets she has about losing the primary into taking up that cause, well, I think that would be an excellent decision for her to make.
The endorsement could hardly have been stronger. On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”
There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.
There's not a shred of doubt in my mind that this scandal will dominate the cable news coverage of the campaign to an even greater extent than did coverage of Wesley Clark observing that being a POW is not the same as running the country. After all, the McCain campaign is lying here. And lying about their campaign's macroeconomic policies, which is a very consequential matter. So this is going to be a huge story on teevee, right? Of course it will.
It's been a hectic day so I haven't had a chance to note that Elton Brand decided to sign with the Philadelphia 76ers rather than re-up with the new LA Clippers featuring Baron Davis. That means another trip to the lottery for the Clips, and it also means the creation of a Philly squad that's pretty damn good by Eastern Conference standards. Boston and Detroit still seem better, but Brand and Andre Iguodala is a solid inside-outside combination, Andre Miller's been underrated for years, and Samuel Dalembert is a solid role player. If this means Thaddeus Young can start at the three with Iguodala sliding over to shooting guard, thus plugging the big hole in their starting lineup.
I'm working on some thoughts about Josh Marshall's long series of posts on what's wrong with John McCain, but consider that in the works. For now, let me note this from The Note:
McCain is writing the latest script with Steve Schmidt, who brings discipline, decisiveness, and determination to his new role -- and most importantly, the perception of all three qualities for the journalists and GOP insiders who were almost ready to give up on McCain.
It doesn't really surprise me to learn that The Note considerations "perception" of positive qualities among "journalists and GOP insiders" to be the most important thing a new campaign manager could have. But clearly that's a silly thing to believe. But I get the sense that McCain himself believes it -- that if he jiggers things just right GOP Machers + McCain Fanboys in the Press = National Electoral Majority.
Am I the only one who still doesn't understand why Jesse Jackson said he wanted to cut Barack Obama's nuts off? Jackson seems to be so deep in apologizing-and-backpedaling mode, that we're not getting much of an explanation of what he was saying.
Roger Cohen lobbies hard for the inclusion of Richard Holbrooke in a very powerful role in an Obama administration. I would say the fact that this seems relatively unlikely to happen was emblematic of the reasons to prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton. I think nobody doubts that Holbrooke is an very able practitioner of a certain brand of diplomacy, but his judgment and substantive ideas about broad policy questions leaves much to be desired.
He's the leading light of the clan of self-proclaimed "national security Democrats", that faction of the party sufficiently "serious" about foreign affairs to have seen the deep wisdom of a costly and destructive invasion of Iraq. Holbrooke's big critique of the war is that "It was a mistake to seek the second -- and unnecessary -- Security Council resolution. I wrote an op-ed about this six weeks before the disaster in The Washington Post, and predicted that we were heading into a diplomatic train wreck, so this is not simply hindsight."
Steven Levitt writes up some new research on race, speech patterns, and earnings done by Jeffrey Grogger:
His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)
Follow at the link for an explanation of how who "sounds black" was determined. Whites with strong southern accents appear to suffer from a similar problem, though I think that since the experiment wasn't really designed to measure that the estimate is very imprecise.
AirTran got ahold of my email address somehow or other over the years and sends me occasional doses of spam. Normally, it's to promote some deal or something. But now they're giving me rants against the evils of oil speculators:
Speculators buy up large amounts of oil and then sell it to each other again and again. A barrel of oil may trade 20-plus times before it is delivered and used; the price goes up with each trade and consumers pick up the final tab. Some market experts estimate that current prices reflect as much as $30 to $60 per barrel in unnecessary speculative costs.
Over seventy years ago, Congress established regulations to control excessive, largely unchecked market speculation and manipulation. However, over the past two decades, these regulatory limits have been weakened or removed. We believe that restoring and enforcing these limits, along with several other modest measures, will provide more disclosure, transparency and sound market oversight. Together, these reforms will help cool the over-heated oil market and permit the economy to prosper.
I've found the arguments of Paul Krugman and other skeptics of the "blame the speculators" story pretty convincing. But if I were an airline, I would badly want it to be true.
The Flint, MI police department decides to crack down on loose-fitting pants. Apparently Flint has seen a large drop in its once sky-high murder rate over the past couple of years so maybe they have nothing better to do.
Here's something from the "issue I should have been following" file -- it seems there's a measure working its way through the congress, House Concurrent Resolution 362, that, though non-binding, could be construed as expressing the sense of the congress that the president ought to use military force against Iran. Specifically, force to impose a blockade on Iran -- an act of war. The folks pushing the resolution deny that this is their intent, but they also seem disinclined to modify the language. Now Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) who was originally one of the cosponsors of the bill has a HuffPo item urging that the resolution by altered or rejected.
This all comes to me via Justin Logan who sensibly asks why Wexler was cosponsoring it in the first place (answer: because the decision to sign on to non-binding resolutions is often made thoughtlessly and at a relatively low level of a legislative operation), which is of course a good point, but still it's good work on Wexler's part to turn around here and draw some attention to the problem.
I've just been watching the McCain campaign's video about their candidate's jobs plan. One thing that jumps out as amusing is during the discussion of energy policy, when the text on the screen talks about the genius of a gas tax holiday but Doug Holtz-Eakin, who's trying to provide the voiceover while maintaining his reputation, doesn't actually say anything about it, sticking instead to some good points about ethanol -- an issue where McCain is definitely right and Obama is definitely wrong.
The overarching frame of the video is the assertion that John McCain "looks at every policy, everything his administration will do, through the lens of providing Americans with the jobs they need." Running through the whole thing, however, two things become apparent. One is that this assertion is an effort to kind of distract you from the fact that John McCain does not, in fact, have a jobs policy. Instead, he's taken a miscellaneous group of other policy measures and labeled them his "Jobs for America" plan. The other is that it's clearly not the case that McCain "looks at every policy, everything his administration will do, through the lens of providing Americans with the jobs they need." After energy, the video leaps to McCain's longstanding passion for porkbusting and Holtz-Eakin reiterates McCain's vow to veto any appropriation with an earmark attached. You can say what you will about this pledge, but it's certainly not a jobs plan -- people are hard at work on those earmarked projects as we speak.
Wouldn't real straight talk be for McCain to just admit that conservatives don't really believe in labor market interventions and economic stimulus? Yes, that would be a losing election strategy, but the McCain brand is supposed to be about telling the truth no matter what the political price.
Excellent points from Kevin Drum and Timothy Noah who observe that you can't understand the erosion of congressional authority over warmaking without recognizing that members of congress fundamentally don't want to take responsibility for these kinds of decisions. I would extend the analysis and observe that much the same can be said of the judicial system's large role in making policy over certain kinds of "hot button" social issues -- members of congress like to whine about this when decisions go in unpopular directions, but they don't want to do anything about it because it's convenient for them to avoid dealing with it.
In the ideal world of a member of congress he would have tons of authority over issues that allow him to funnel money or other favors to powerful in-district groups, but get to dodge making decisions about everything else under the sun.
Iraqi spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in Baghdad on Wednesday that a U.S. pullout could be completed in several years. "It can be 2011 or 2012," he said. "We don't have a specific date in mind, but we need to agree on the principle of setting a deadline."
This, I should say, is why even though Obama's determination to maintain some wiggle room throughout the primaries gave me some concern, it's also not a crazy idea. If the Iraqi government has some strong desire for the last American troops to leave in January 2011 instead of May 2010 I think it's common sense to at least consider accommodating that. Meanwhile, the hawk line here seems to be that the Iraqi government doesn't really want a timeline for American departure, they're just pretending to want one because public opinion is so hostile to our presence that they need to demand one.
That set of facts may be true, but the implicit interpretation of them is crazy. If public opinion to our presence is so hostile that Iraqi political leaders feel compelled to set a timeline for the departure of the US military then we should set a timeline as there's no sense trying to wage counterinsurgency under those conditions.
Former Senator Phil Gramm, one of John McCain's economic gurus, seems to think that current economic problems are purely subjective, talking to The Washington Times about a "mental recession" and whining that "we have sort of become a nation of whiners."
My understand is that economic downturns do have a certain psychological component insofar as expectations make a different to the economy, but we're clearly living through some very real supply shocks. The rising cost of food and energy, coming at a time when many people are seeing the value of their main asset decline, naturally causes hardship and slows economic growth. The fact that everyone has more difficulty obtaining credit than they did a couple of years ago doesn't help matters. These are all very real phenomena.
Some Brookings Institution worthies teamed up with the Heritage Foundation and the Concord Coalition along with such centrist stars as Will Marshall of DLC/PPI and Maya MacGuiness of New America to produce a report called "Taking Back Our Fiscal Future" (PDF) that nicely reflects the center-right Beltway consensus that (a) budget deficits are very bad, and (b) they should be tamed primarily by cuts to federal retirement security programs.
A rival and, in my view, sounder approach is offered under the auspices of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities with the title "A Balanced Approach to Restoring Fiscal Responsibility" (PDF). Brad Delong, one of the "Balanced Approach" team, offers a blog post sized summary of the problems with the TBOFF approach and the following alternative recommendations:
We believe that rather than spending time trying to design complicated budget procedures of dubious merit and effectiveness, we should focus on concrete legislative steps: policies that raise more revenue, increase economic growth, slow the rate of health care spending systemwide and nationwide, reform Medicare, and bring Social Security expenditures into balance with Social Security resources. Specifically:
Slash farm supports.
Slash tax loopholes and tax expenditures.
Halt Medicare Advantage overpayments to private insurance companies.
Adopt the other recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.
Increase Medicare premiums for the well-off.
Institute vigorous research programs to determine the comparative cost-effectiveness of different treatments and procedures.
Institute vigorous research programs to determine the causes of the extraordinary nationwide variation in health-care spending.
Use the results of research to devise policies to restrain health care cost growth without seriously compromising quality.
Index entitlement benefits by a proper cost-of-living rather than a consumer price index.
Index tax brackets by a proper cost-of-living rather than a consumer price index.
Adhere to the time-tested and effective pay-as-you-go rules.
I would add that in my view it's not reasonable to talk about fiscal policy with no mention of the Defense Department budget. All too often U.S. military posture is discussed as if the budgetary costs involved aren't real, and U.S. fiscal policy is discussed as if the Defense Department isn't there. In fact, the military is by far the biggest expenditure item on the balance sheet and needs to be on the table for discussion. That doesn't mean that draconian defense spending cuts are called for, but we need to consider the fact that given the scale of the Pentagon budget even small efforts at restraint involve large sums of money.
And of course in addition to the formal budget, there's the question of ongoing policy. If I were to propose a domestic spending initiative with a bill of over $100 billion a year it would be subjected to some pretty serious scrutiny as to whether the benefits can justify that kind of cost. The continuing operation in Iraq, however, is typically discussed as if any benefits whatsoever serve to justify a massive and costly undertaking, a standard that we (rightly) don't apply in thinking about any other portion of the pie.
For context here, McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina was arguing the other day that it's unfair for insurance companies not to cover birth control as part of her pitch to women voters. Then it was pointed out that McCain had voted against legislation that would address the issue. When asked about it he, well, didn't have much to say.
Here's a fascinating result from Jing Feng, Ian Spence, and Jay Pratt on the subject of the well-known male edge on visiuspatial tests. One such test is known as the Field of Vision test. The researchers gave people the test before, after, and several months after "training" for it by playing two different video games. One game, Ballance (a 3-D puzzle game) didn't do much. But the action game Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault did make a big difference, improving scores for men and women but doing so in a way that drastically narrowed the performance gap. They say they got similar results on the Mental Rotation test.
This seems to suggest that a larger portion of the male/female visiospatial gap may be rooted in socialization than is generally thought. Or else that insofar as the gap is rooted in genetics it's through the mechanism of a male preference for violent video games.
Looks like the salmonella problem is spreading to our nation's valuable jalapeno reserves. Discussions are already under way in my house as to whether you might be able to use a habanero/poblano blend as a viable alternative in making some pico.
Spencer Ackerman takes a look at the substantial problems facing oil companies looking to do business in Iraq. Some contracts were handed out recently, but those "aren't production contracts, but preliminary technical contracts" and really pumping oil would need to wait on Iraq writing a hydrocarbon law and the security situation improving to the point where Western companies are prepared to send their people over. The larger issue, though, is that to make big money in Iraq you'd have to make big infrastructure investments in Iraq. Investments with an uncertain payoff:
The oil conglomerates "are the toughest negotiators," said Martha Brill Olcott, a former Unocal adviser now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They'll work out a contract that insulates themselves from political risk. That's where countries get upset -- they paid too great a price to protect Western companies from political risk. That's a problem: Iraqis might agree to one set of terms now, but you can imagine in 2015, if we're lucky and it's stable [in Iraq], then they'll say, 'Why the hell did we agree to these terms?'"
Now I'll be quick to agree that this isn't the only factor at play, but it seems to me that a healthy portion of what's driving interest in a long-term US military presence in Iraq is precisely a desire to continue exercising "influence" in Iraq such that we can mitigate the political risk faced by your friendly neighborhood oil companies. Western companies don't like it when their developing world investments are lost to nationalization, and their desire to prevent this from happening has often had a powerful pull on American foreign policy.
I've wondered from time to time if anyone take's M.I.A.'s third world revolutionary lyrics seriously. The answer appears to be yes as Leighton Meester tells Vanity Fair "I like fun music, too, like M.I.A. She has good things to say."
Also, I consider myself a huge Garbage apologist, but Taylor Momsem strains credulity when she says "Garbage is my all-time favorite band." Meanwhile, it's a bit shocking to learn that there now exist famous people who were two years old when "Stupid Girl" was released.
Arroyo isn't a sexy name, but the market has a shortage of point guards, and Arroyo was more than adequate as a backup in Orlando last season.
Recalling my use-mention distinction, it's true that Arroyo isn't a sexy name (he's a basketball player) but I think "Arroyo" is about as sexy a name as any other on the list. Certainly I'd take it over "Dooling" (number six, too close to "drooling") or "Nachbar" (number nine, too Serbian). Nachbar, meanwhile, might be the shooting the new-look sixers need at a price they can afford.
McCain says today that Phil Gramm doesn't speak for him when he calls the United States a "nation of whiners" suffering from a "mental recession" but today is also the day that McCain sent Phil Gramm to speak for him to the Wall Street Journal editorial board. There whole question of whether or not the current economic downturn is real or else some kind of mass hallucination doesn't strike me as a minor economic policy issue -- if McCain doesn't agree with his top economics surrogates about it, he probably needs a new team.
Josh Marshall had a series of posts up yesterday seeking a "Grand Unified Theory of McCain Crappiness." Some good points are made, but I think most of these posts wind up implicitly overstating the extent to which McCain was an effective politician at some point in the past and has only recently become crappy.
The reality is that he's been coasting for his entire political career, and his toughest race -- the 2000 GOP presidential primary -- was won where he lost badly. This feat of getting trounced by George W. Bush has somehow entered the collective imagination as an astounding political feat, but I'm willing to venture that it would actually be pretty easy for any vaguely plausible Senator or Governor to go up against the GOP frontrunner, imply that the party had become too right-wing, and lose the primary while winning a few contests in liberalish states with moderatish Republican Parties. McCain's 2000 campaign was appealing to liberals because it consisted of us watching a Republican talk smack about Republicans, comparing the conservative machine to the Death Star, pointing out that GOP tax policies serve only the interests of a tiny elite, etc. But as an electoral strategy this was perverse and the results were predictable.
This whole fiasco gained McCain "Maverick" status which he spent the next several years deploying quite cannily to "corner the market" on bipartisanship in the US Senate and turn himself into a very influential legislator. And, clearly, even though he comes off as utterly uncharismatic to us peons who have to watch him on television he's great at wooing the press in person. But this is his strong-suit -- he's a phenomenal Beltway player and operator, heir to a long line of skilled legislative players. But there's a huge difference between the kind of actions that appeal to the sensibilities of the press (breaking with your party, campaign finance reform, "straight talk," bashing Social Security) and the kind of actions that appeal to voters -- projecting empathy and outlining ideas that will make people's lives better.
On top of all that, McCain is currently facing the stark dilemma Reihan Salan points to of "keeping the Bush bundlers on side while also reaching out to working class voters" and I would say more generally the large majority of people who think Bush has been a terrible president. To win, McCain needs a coalition of basically everyone who still likes Bush (and he needs some of them to support him enthusiastically) plus almost a third of the normal anti-Bush people. That'd be hard for even the most charismatic of leaders to pull off.
Photo by Flickr user soggydan used under a Creative Commons license
Mark Schmitt argues that the center-right "Taking Back Our Fiscal Future" document discussed yesterday is the Stuart Butler's Leninist Strategy (PDF) for destroying Social Security in a new Popular Front phase.
Certainly the "centrist" elements of this team seem to be making a good run at being useful idiots. Why, if you're interested in balanced budgets, would you team up with folks like Butler who supported Bush's budget-busting tax cuts. The "balanced budgets are the most important thing in the world when Democrats are in power, but don't matter at all when there's a Republican President worldview" has a certain logic to it, but it's not one anyone who claims to be any sort of progressive ought to embrace.
Photo by Flickr user wordcat used under a Creative Commons license
Amanda Terkel has a staggering list of things John McCain has done that have earned him praise from campaign reporters, including riding first class on the Acela ("John McCain traveled like a man of the people"), joking about killing Iranian civilians ("like any guy you’d want to have around the dinner table"), joking about killing John Steward with an IED ("a guy with a good sense of humor") and so forth. It's almost as if they think Strangers on a Train is a depiction of typical early 21st century American life, all rail travel and murder.
It seems like she's out of the running, but my sentimental favorite for VP is Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano who's got a compelling personality and a solid substantive record for a politician who's had success winning statewide three times in a conservative state. Napolitano is well-profiled by The American Prospect's Dana Goldstein who emphasized Napolitano's role as a party-builder in difficult circumstances.
Dana thinks this won't be Napolitano's last high-profile job, and I certainly hope she's write. If the Vice Presidency is out of the question, she seems like she'd be an excellent choice for Attorney-General and also a logical candidate to replace John McCain in the Senate whenever he vacates that seat.
I really like gadgets in general and Apple stuff in particular, so I fully intend to buy one of the new iPhones when doing so becomes convenient. But I don't really understand the psychology of camping out to get in line to get one on the very first morning -- I was very pleased to spend last night in my regular bed. But Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman don't see things that way and they have some extensive coverage of the scene at the Clarendon Apple Store if you're curious. I mostly continue to find it a disgrace that our nation's capital lacks an Apple Store of its own.
By Request: Does This Blog Suck? Do All Blogs Suck?
DeliciousPundit asks "What'd you think about David Appell's smackdown of you?"
The only thing I have to say to defend myself from those charges is that I don't think the post was really about why I suck, it was about why the punditsphere as a whole sucks with me just as a prominent example. And he's right. To gain any worthwhile information about any topic whatsoever, you need to be reading the work of someone with real expertise. To develop real expertise requires years of study, research, etc. And years of study, research, etc. can't be adequately condensed into a blog post. Thus, blog reading is a completely worthless exercise and nobody should really engage in it. I started writing this blog as a hobby; I thought it would be a fun thing to do. And I not only continue to enjoy writing it, but people pay me to write it. But the mere fact that I'm writing it doesn't make it a worthwhile thing to read, which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans have never read this blog and never will.
Paul Krugman says the Democrats' success in pushing a bill that would redirect funds from the Medicare Advantage program (which provides generous subsidies to insurance companies) into higher reimbursement rates for doctors shows that progressives have a winning political strategy that could turn into universal health care next year. Jonathan Cohn agrees also citing the importance of measures that aim to cleave the doctor lobby away from the insurance insurance.
But on the other hand, Cohn cautions "In the long run, no health care reform can succeed without doing something about cost and quality--which will mean changing the way we pay for medical care and, in some cases, paying doctors less." Realistically, I think this means that even if progressives in some sense "win" a big health care fight next year, it's still going to leave us with a system that leaves a lot to be desired.
The Washington Post reports that Barack Obama is running into some unexpected fundraising trouble with efforts to recruit big-dollar Clinton donors to his side not going as well as he hoped, and internet contributions falling off their previous furious pace. I wondered about this possibility in late June, and it seems to be coming true. The combination of Obama mostly focusing on showing his more centrist side while also maintaining a stable lead in the polls seems to me to discourage activists from giving to the campaign. People are thinking to themselves, why not save that money and by a G3 iPhone or give it to progressive Senate candidate?
If you're going to Austin next week for Netroots Nation, I'd encourage you to come see me on Friday July 18, at 1:30 PM, in Ballroom E where I'll be on a panel on "Iraq in strategic context" with such internet luminaries as Ilan Goldenberg, Alex Rosmiller, and Spencer Ackerman. And if you're not planning on going to Netroots Nation, you should change your plans. This magical link should allow you to register at a discount. Discount! Netroots! And curse the scheduling Gods for counterprogramming my panel against this unstoppable juggernaut.
I'm doing a debate/discussion with Peter Beinart about the future of liberal foreign policy that you can read in progress hosted at the Progressive Book Club.
The Progressive Book Club, if you haven't heard, is both a book club for progressives and also a club for progressive books. If you get my meaning. A much-needed new institutions that should help get progressive ideas out there in the mainstream, support progressive authors, and hopefully give readers something worth reading. If you join, you get discounts on books (including Heads in the Sand of course) and so forth so check it out.
Taricha asks "How long will McCain be able to keep up the balancing act of telling fiscal conservatives/economic & tax experts privately that he doesn't support the things he talks about publicly?" My guess is a very long time. The general quality of campaign coverage is very low, the press likes being kind to John McCain, and the press also likes being kind to the candidate who's losing so expect very little scrutiny here.
What's more, the pixie dust that makes this "all things to all people" magic work is the reality that President McCain is going to be facing expanded Democratic majorities in 2009 so people assume that McCain's campaign pledges are quasi-meaningless and that all this stuff would be reopened once he has to sit down with Reid & Pelosi.
Steve Clemons rides the Shanghai maglev that speeds passengers from the airport into the city in 7 minutes and 20 seconds reaching a top speed of 270 mph and is suddenly not so happy with the state of things in the United States:
And when I left Washington ten days ago, I was reading that it was going to take 15 years to extend a subway line from the DC metro to Dulles Airport -- and that it would still take 1 hour and 20 minutes when completed to travel from downtown Washington to the Airport. Our social objectives should be higher than they are.
Indeed. There are sound reasons why we can't do infrastructure upgrades as quickly as the Chinese, but we ought to do much better than we are.
Here's Stefan with another variant on the question of whether or not I suck:
I still want to know how you feel about writing about Middle East policy without knowing Arabic.
In all honesty, I don't feel that good about it. But it's not as if the political conversation in the United States is dominated by people with a deep understanding of the Arabic language, fully immersed in primary sources, and here comes Matt Yglesias with his blog ruining everything. I read people who do read and speak Arabic (and Persian), try to be appropriately humble about my knowledge level, and try to call out people who are putting bad information out there. I think that, at the margin, the public debate is better off for me participating in it rather than leaving things entirely to Tom Friedman, Fred Hiatt, and Charles Krauthammer. Meanwhile, it's not as if language competency is some guarantee of clairvoyance -- Bernard Lewis is a bona fide scholar of the Ottoman Empire and I assume his Middle Eastern language skills could trounce mine, but he's still talked a lot of nonsense about the contemporary Middle East and US policy toward it.
Over and above all that, I've tried to make awareness of my own shortcomings influence the opinions I express about American policy. One presupposition of a lot of current US policy -- but also of a lot of proposed alternatives to US policy -- is that the American government is actually or potentially capable of being really effective at micromanaging political outcomes in Iraq or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or wherever. I try to remind people that for a variety of reasons, language competence being high on the list, Pakistanis are almost certainly going to be better at manipulating the American elite than vice-versa.
Breaking: Republicans are Racists Now So It's Okay
I'm not quite I understand what conservatives are doing when they bring this kind of thing up:
The original targets of the Ku Klux Klan were Republicans, both black and white, according to a new television program and book, which describe how the Democrats started the KKK and for decades harassed the GOP with lynchings and threats.
Which is precisely the point. Decades ago, the Democratic Party was, among other things, the political home of white supremacy in the United States. In the 1960s, the party's leadership decisively broke with that record. At around the same time, part of the rise of the conservative movement inside the Republican Party was the growing prominence of folks like Barry Goldwater who opposed the Civil Rights Act and who found in his 1964 campaign that the main electoral constituency for his brand of conservatism was . . . white supremacists. Other white supremacist politicians (some of whom, unlike Goldwater, would forever remain unrepentant) like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms moved into the GOP column. And of course while explicit advocacy of segregation has long since vanished from the top ranks of the Republican Party, major conservative leaders have been heard in recent years issuing paens to the work of Thurmond and Helms, with key legislative leaders specifically regretting that Thurmond's 1948 white supremacist presidential campaign failed, and pointing to Helms as exemplifying what conservatism is all about.
To echo what Ezra Klein says here obviously the low quality of the public schools in some cities makes them a not-so-hot place to raise children, but there's nothing in general about urban areas that makes them bad places for kids. I grew up in a big city and I think it was great. Among other advantages, my parents didn't need to spend my early teen years acting as my chauffeur and throughout high school they were able to rest assured that I wasn't driving drunk.
Just as for non-children, in other words, there are pluses and minuses to having a smaller home in a denser area versus a larger home in a less-dense one. I imagine that many people, both with and without children, will have a strong preference for houses with substantial yards and there's nothing wrong with that. But there's also nothing wrong with raising kids in a city if that's what you like. From a policy perspective, this is just one more reason why it's important to improve educational opportunities in troubled urban school systems but some suburbs have problematic school systems too -- it's not as if proximity to strip malls guarantees educational excellence.
Beyond all that, one important factor keeping people -- but especially families -- out of a lot of pleasant urban neighborhoods is the "no one wants to live there, it's too expensive" phenomenon. To buy a multiple bedroom apartment in the neighborhood where I grew up would, these days, cost about a zillion dollars real estate crash notwithstanding. Sky-high prices in fashionable central cities are going to push people further out who might, were the prices the same, prefer to live in the central cities. That, in my view, is a good reason to try to alleviate some of the regulatory restrictions on building more housing in desirable areas but, again, it doesn't point to some metaphysical problem with the concept of raising children in the city.
Yesterday, John Quiggin was speculating about the potential for a nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. With today's news that bailout packages of various kinds are under consideration, it seems to me that this option should be up for discussion. As Quiggin argues, these things need to be on the table at some level when you're talking about institutions that are "too big to fail."
As he says: "The shareholders of these companies have been happy to accept the higher returns associated with an implicit government guarantee and they should pay the price when the guarantee is needed."
AS asks: "Why is it twenty times more likely if you see an African-American political strategist on TV that they will be a REPUBLICAN strategists? Do cable news executives and producers get off on cognitive dissonance or something? It's really shocking."
I wonder about this myself. Step one of wisdom on this subject is to recognize that the "strategist" label is handed out in arbitrary ways to people who aren't really strategists. But step two is to recognize that I couldn't prove to you that African-American TV strategists are usually Republican. That's my sense, but I'd want to see a real quantitative analysis of the subject but certainly have no desire to do one myself.
John McCain's odds of winning the presidential election seem pretty dismal to be, but one does have to consider the possibility that enough active campaigning against Obama from active duty Army officers could be a big boost to McCain's cause.
It seems that Chris Dodd's documents are going in the vetting process but Joe Bidens aren't. I like Dodd a lot, qua Senator, but one wonders how much he really brings to the table as a VP. Obama could definitely do worse, though.
I felt better after talking to the bubbly [Florida Governor Charlie] Crist, who's like human Prozac. "How can you not be optimistic about Florida?" he asked. "Is there a more beautiful place on the planet?" He then recounted a story that probably won't help him in the GOP Veepstakes: "John McCain told me, 'It's tough in those Rust Belt states. You really feel a bit of depression in people's outlook. But when you get to Florida, people feel great.'"
I'm quite a bit too young to remember the last time we had major banks failing in this country and I'll admit that it's pretty unsettling. Brad DeLong gives me some confidence that the appropriate people have the tools and judgment necessary to prevent things from getting too bad. But who knows -- I'm kind of an optimist by nature, and optimism hasn't been paying off well lately.
It seems that John "Straight Talk" McCain has ads up claiming that Barack Obama has voted to raise taxes on individuals earning "as little as $32,000 per year." This claim is indisputably false. Beyond that, Doug Holtz-Eakin's defense of the claim, namely that Obama voted for a budget resolution that would raise the tax rate for people currently in the 25 percent bracket, and that bracket "begins at an income level of $31,850" is positively risible. Holtz-Eakin is referring to the level of taxable income not current income at which the bracket begins, the correct figure is $32,500 for 2008, and Obama's vote was for 2009 at which point the cutoff would be higher. But that would be a taxable income level translating to something over $41,500 for an individual with no dependents or over $83,000 for a married couple.
The Stanley Foundation has put together a totally awesome-looking web tool called "Rising Powers: The New Global Reality" aimed at helping people understand the newly influential nations and non-state actors that increasingly shape our world.
Amity Shlaes mounts a stirring defense of Phil Gramm's "mental recession . . . nation of whiners" argument. I think it's telling that some strain of conservatism thinks that the debater's point that the economy's not technically in a recession until we see two consecutive quarters of GDP shrinkage should be at the center of how we understand this. The relevant point, it seems to me, is that the economic suffering is quite real, recession or otherwise.
[Among other things, if we experienced eighty straight years of 0.1 percent GDP growth, that would be an unprecedented recession-free span but also a large drop in per capita living standards]
Remember when the rule of law was a hot topic among conservatives? Obviously, 9/11 changed everything so in the name of national security we should ignore laws against torture and laws against warrantless wiretapping, but what many fail to realize is that 9/11 made environmental regulations obsolete as well:
The Supreme Court, in a decision 15 months ago that startled the government, ordered the EPA to decide whether human health and welfare are being harmed by greenhouse gas pollution from cars, power plants and other sources, or to provide a good explanation for not doing so.
The administration, naturally, decided to comply with the court order "opted to postpone action instead, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post." Ah, opted to postpone. And how does that work?
To defer compliance with the Supreme Court's demand, the White House has walked a tortured policy path, editing its officials' congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action.
The decision to solicit further comment overrides the EPA's written recommendation from December. Officials said a few senior White House officials were unwilling to allow the EPA to state officially that global warming harms human welfare. Doing so would legally trigger sweeping regulatory requirements under the 45-year-old Clean Air Act, one of the pillars of U.S. environmental protection, and would cost utilities, automakers and others billions of dollars while also bringing economic benefits, EPA's analyses found.
Or maybe it wasn't 9/11 after all. Maybe they're just whoring for the coal and oil companies who fund them. Crazy notion, yes. Since we all know that John McCain (a) is a maverick (b) is in no sense running for Bush's third term and (c) has heroically broken with the GOP on climate change no doubt he'll be issuing a call for impeachment or something.
I saw this for sale at a conservative t-shirts website. I'm not necessarily one to say that torture is a subject about which we shouldn't joke. Torture-related satire and other forms of torture humor are, I think, a clear way of coming to grips with the horror of what our government have become. It's a difficult subject to contemplate, and express a view on, without resorting to humor on some level.
But that of course isn't what's happening here. Instead we see conservatives deciding to embrace torture as constitutive of conservative identity. If you're a conservative, you like torture. If you're against torture, you're not a conservative.
It seems that an increasing number of people adhere to the basic populist frame about the state of our economy:
On the other hand, most people still see themselves as "haves" which should blunt the appeal of populist remedies somewhat:
The fact that the trends are diverging is interesting and it's hard to know what to make of it. As you can read here household income is a strong predictor of whether or not you think of yourself as a "have" but there's also a large racial/ethnic component with middle income non-hispanic whites tending to see themselves as "haves" whereas middle income blacks and hispanics tend to see themselves as "have nots." It would be interesting to look at wealth in this regard (it seems like a better correlate of "have"-ness than income anyway) and see how much of the racial element survives independently of wealth effects.
I have to agree that it's incredibly unhelpful to have Bill Clinton and Al Gore praising John McCain on climate change. It's true, in a sense, that McCain is better than your average Republican on this issue. But that was much more true a couple of years ago when he was cosponsoring the McCain-Lieberman climate change half-measures bill. These days, though, that bill, inadequate as it is, has become the Lieberman-Warner bill because McCain dropped his support for it.
If McCain's not even going to support the most conservative cap-and-trade bill in the mix, then what is his nominal support for cap-and-trade worth, exactly? It's hard to construct an appropriate analogy here, but if Barack Obama claimed to be "for" something, and yet opposed every concrete effort to make it happen, I doubt GOP eminences grises would be leaping forward to praise him.
Good work, Washington Post opinion section for publishing this hard-hitting, fact-based piece by Matthew DeBord titled "Hummer We Need Thee"
When General Motors announced that it would subject its Hummer division to what in the automotive business is known as a "review," you could hear the tree huggers, the unreconstructed hippies, the postmodern Greens, Al Gore's organic peanut gallery, every single customer at the Pasadena Whole Foods and the United Prius Owners of America shove aside their alfalfa sprouts and commence clapping. [...]
It takes a certain kind of man -- it's almost always the owner of a Y chromosome -- to take a gander at the Hummer, in all its broad, burly, paramilitary gas-guzzling glory, and see himself behind the wheel, striking fear and loathing in the hearts of ecologically sensitive motorists. Oprah does not drive a Hummer. But Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a proud owner. As has Sylvester Stallone. The Hummer appeals to large men of even larger ego, men who aren't worried about their carbon footprint and believe that obstacles in life are meant not just to be surmounted but squashed flat. They like owning the beast because, when it bears down on lesser rides on the freeway, those lesser rides -- even the Teutonic triple threat of Porsche/BMW/Mercedes -- get out of the way. Every once in while, you see a little guy clambering out of a Hummer, painfully in need of a ladder, and you realize that it can also be viewed as a $57,000 ticket to enlarged self-esteem.
What kind of value do the Post's editors think this kind of thing is adding to the public conversation? The Post opinion pages are way less entertaining than Gossip Girl summer reruns or the copy of Tintin in Tibet I picked up earlier today (somehow missed reading that one when I was a kid) and if they're not going to be informative either then what are they for?
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Heads in the Sand
