This Time article on Edwards is an interesting document, painting Edwards as something near to an insurgent candidate, the underdog behind the campaigns of Obama and Clinton. This, too, is an important point:

For 30 years, Democratic contenders have hugged the political center and avoided such talk because they believed that populism scares away middle-class voters. But Edwards thinks those rules are finally changing, that voters everywhere are ready for a sharp critique of what's gone wrong. And he has one advantage his opponents lack: a sweet-tea voice that makes his tough talk go down easy. He isn't ranting; he's twanging like a bluegrass banjo, rolling along in full control—outraged on behalf of people who have lost their jobs or pensions to corporate restructuring, people who watch their children go off to "this mess of a war in Iraq."[...]

Edwards joins us on the bus, and soon he's musing on electability too. "I think most journalists would agree that I'm the most progressive, Senator Obama next, and Senator Clinton closest to the center. But I'd be willing to bet that if you ask most Americans the same question, they'd reverse it." That's not only, he says, because "she's a woman and he's an African American and Ah talk lahk thee-is. It's simple geography. Ask Middle Americans: You've got three Democratic candidates. One's from New York, one's from Chicago and one's from rural North Carolina. Who do you think is most like you?"

Edwards' ability to speak populism with an accent and tone that's mentally associated with common sense moderation is a significant advantage, one that allows a left-leaning run the other candidates can't replicate. An interesting sidenote to these comments is that Edwards made a similar argument to me when I interviewed him for my profile. But it was off-the-record. That he's making this appeal more publicly and explicitly shows his frustration with the hammerlock Obama and Clinton have on the media coverage, and his own frustration that the ideological differences between the candidates aren't being sussed out.

I'll be on tonight at 5:35 Eastern. Talking Snow, Craig, Gonzales, Katrina, etc....

Was just look,ing through yesterday's press briefing, and this struck me as funny:

Q Tony, since you are in a good mood --

MR. SNOW: Not according to Plante, I'm not. (Laughter.)

Q -- you could give me a serious answer on official motorcades, which I've spoken to you about earlier. Now, in the wake of this tragic -- second tragic death of a motorcycle policemen, and in the wake of, actually, an incident that happened last week to me and lots of others on Rock Creek Park when we were nearly wiped out by Cheney's motorcade, which are the biggest, the fastest and most aggressive I've ever seen in 40 years -- why in this day and age are official motorcades necessary? Can't they avoid narrow and windy roads where you can't get to the side, like Rock Creek? And thirdly, why do they have to be so fast and so huge --

MR. SNOW: Connie, I would refer all those comments to the people that do protective details. But I think in this day and age, a protective motorcade is, in fact, a necessity.

Q Do they have to be faster, do they have to be --

MR. SNOW: Connie, I'm just not competent to comment on that. Again, I would refer you to talk to the protective services.

Anyway, this may all be true. Seems like something DCist could look into...

What would happen if Larry Craig came out as a gay man, apologized for his tortured life in the closet and the unseemly things his personal conflicts made him do, and then said that, nevertheless, he'd always been a good and dedicated senator to the people of Idaho, and he meant to retain his seat and keep fighting for the upward redistribution and failed wars (or whatever) that first turned him onto public service?

He might lose the next election, of course. But maybe he wouldn't. And maybe he'd tap into an unexpected wellspring of libertarian attitudes and relative tolerance. Why not try?

As expected, Tony Snow is resigning his post to, as Atrios put it, "spend more time with his conscience." Sorry, just kidding. I have no idea whether Snow has a conscience. He's resigning because he's out of money. Not long ago, he told Hugh Hewitt that "I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons. I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go."

Snow makes $170,000 a year. Real median income in this country is about $50,000. So this White House spokesperson doesn't think you can live on $170,000, but repeatedly told the press corps that "It is worth reminding people of how good this economy is."

The New York Times has an interesting article on vacation time practices at IBM. The company doesn't track vacation. Every worker gets three weeks, but they don't have to submit requests to use them, plan them in advance, or keep track of how much they've taken. They make informal arrangements with supervisors, leave some contact info, and jet.

Netflix is even better. They don't offer a set number of vacation days. You can take as many as you need, so long as you're getting your work done. "When you have a work force of fully formed professionals who have been working for much of their life,” Patty McCord, the chief talent officer of Netflix, said, “you have a connection between the work you do and how long it takes to do it, so you don’t need to have the clock-in and clock-out mentality.”

But there's a dark side here too. Having a set or tracked number of vacation days meant the company would encourage you to take them, or cash them out. If don't have a set number and they're not tracked, you're not encouraged, nor can you transform them into salary:

Frances Schneider, who retired from an I.B.M. sales division last year, after 34 years, said one thing never changed; there was not one year in which she took all her allotted time off.

“It wasn’t seven days a week, but people ended up putting in longer hours because of all the flexibility, without really thinking about it,” Ms. Schneider said. “Although you had this wonderful freedom to take days when you want, you really couldn’t.

Since IBM doesn't track the days, we don't know if Schneider's experience is representative. According to Netflix, most of their employees take three or four weeks a year, so maybe it's not a big problem.

This, too, was striking: "40 percent of I.B.M.’s employees have no dedicated offices, working instead at home, at a client’s site, or at one of the company’s hundreds of “e-mobility centers” around the world, where workers drop in to use phones, Internet connections and other resources."

Currently, I'm typing from my couch. This makes me feel lazy. But it also ensures I get much more done. I occasionally work from home in the mornings, but only when I have a mid-day event or a piece due. Otherwise, guilt propels me into the office. This is very stupid. On an average day, I wake up at 8, spend a bit of time not wanting to get out of bed, leave for the office around 9:20, spend about 45 minutes walking to/waiting for/taking/walking from the bus, get to the office, spend some time settling in and getting into work mode, and then begin blogging, sometime in the 10 o' clock hour.

If I'm working from home, I roll over, look at my computer, and begin writing by 8:30. Time wasted? Almost none. Productivity difference? High, particularly considering that there's no machinery or infrastructure that makes the office a more efficient spot from which to work. And my guess is that my experience is in no way rare. Yet few folks work from home. For a culture as obsessed with productivity as ours, it's strange we haven't embraced this near-costless way of boosting it.

From EPI's analysis of the Census data:

The Bush years have been really bad if you're black. But they've been pretty weak if you're white, Hispanic, or simply living in this country.

This may shock you, but the answer is more equitable public policies.

This is very funny:

I think it was Abraham Joshua Heschel — after he broke off with Reinhold Niebuhr and formed Jefferson Airplane — who observed that though the ancients counseled, “Know Thyself,” in 87 percent of actual cases, profound self-knowledge is not transforming. It’s just disappointing.

And this is never more true than when the beach self takes over. There is a boardwalk game near where we vacation where you roll balls into holes to try to get your mechanical horse across a track faster than your 11 opponents. You pay a dollar a game and if you win you get a stuffed horse worth 75 cents. My beach self has played that game for 15 years, and I have never once gotten up without secretly wishing I was playing again.

In my heart, I’d be happy to play that game 11 hours a day at the cost of several thousand dollars, and the only thing preventing me is that the Slovakian girl behind the counter might conclude that American men are pathetic.

Though this is definitely a difference -- at least in my experience -- between East Coast "shores" and West Coast beaches. Very few beaches in California have boardwalks, or ski-ball, or stores that sell shirts like this one:

You go to the beach to...sit on the beach. Or possibly surf. That's the activity. The beach isn't cover for a whole lot of other activities that are generally considered gauche, but suddenly --and thankfully -- become acceptable when your shorts have internal netting.

The big factoid in favor of the surge is that violence is down. As Bush put it a few months back, "Within Baghdad, our military reports that despite an upward trend in May, sectarian murders in the capital are significantly down from what they were in January."

Devil, meet details. The Pentagon classifies violence as "sectarian killings," not simple murders. So those numbers don't count, among other things, Shia on Shia violence in the South, Sunni on Sunni violence -- including between al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Iraqis Sunnis -- in the North, carbombings, and much else. But even within this vastly constrained definition, the Pentagon, without letting anyone in on their methodology, is changing the definition from month to month. Ilan Goldberg did the lord's work by graphing the Pentagon's numbers from the last few reports, and watch how the numbers for the very same months change with each successive report:

And we're not just seeing random fluctuations -- they're mainly changing downward, in order to reflect lower sectarian violence. But why would the January 2006 be lower in the June report than in the March report? Were the dead resurrected?

"But wait!" You say (because you're rude, and you interrupt a lot). "In the June report, killings were revised upward! That's true. But the timing matters. As Goldberg explains, "The impact here is that it makes the “pre surge” situation look extraordinarily dire and therefore signals progress thereafter."

The shell game here has to do with the term "sectarian murders," which the Pentagon is apparently defining differently from month to month, albeit without telling anyone what's changed. In other words, you can't trust these numbers. But they're the ones that are being used -- and will be used -- to argue for the Surge's success.

Anthony Cordesman describes the avenues for Iranian-retaliation in the event of an American attack:

1) Iranian retaliation against US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan using Shahab-3 missiles armed with CBR warheads; 2) using proxy groups including...Sadr in Iraq to intensify the insurgency and escalate the attacks against US forces and Iraqi Security Forces; 3) turning the Shi’ite majority in Iraq against the US presence and demanding US forces leave; 4) attacking the US homeland with suicide bombs by proxy groups or delivering CBR weapons to al-Qa’ida to use against the US; 5) using its asymmetric capabilities to attacks US interests in the region including soft targets: e.g. embassies, commercial centers, and American citizens; 6) attacking US naval forces stationed in the Gulf with anti-ship missiles, asymmetric warfare, and mines; 7) attacking Israel with missile attacks possibly with CBR warheads; 8) retaliating against energy targets in the Gulf and temporarily shutting off the flow of oil from the Strait of Hormuz; and 9) stopping all of its oil and gas shipments to increase the price of oil, inflicting damage on the global and US economies.

One of the slightly atypical dynamics of the Iraq War is that the enemy can't really hurt us. It can hurt our ability to occupy Iraq, but unless the jihadists we're training over there decide to refocus their efforts -- which they may well do one day, in which case we'll have created them over there to fight them over here -- the majority of the damage they inflict is localized to our mission in Iraq.

Iran, by contrast, can do us a lot of damage. It's much larger and richer than Iraq, with a much more mature global presence. Additionally, it can unleash hell within Iraq, where our presence vastly enhances Iran's ability to battle us asymmetrically. Americans are used to invading and bombing countries like Bosnia and Iraq -- it's been a long time since we've struck someone who can strike back. For that reason, there's very little talk of the consequences of bombing within the media. You hear a lot about whether such an attack would be effective, but very little about the likely aftermath, and thus almost no serious discussion as to whether a military attack would be worth it. We're simply used to evaluating American military actions as if there will be no retaliatory consequences. And that's very dangerous, and in this case, very untrue.

(via)

To make one more point on Ross Douthat's article projecting a swing towards liberalism in this country, political science professor James Stimson has been using aggregate poll data to track public opinion towards policy over the last few decades. Here's what the trend looks like:

Liberalism, as measured through public attitudes, is higher than at any point since the 60s. Now, foreign affairs often take precedence over domestic populism, our political system is much more responsive to the attitudes of elites than the general sentiments of the electorate, our Madisonian structure makes large-scale change very hard, and so on. But there's serious movement here, and it will have an impact.

Tyro (again!) writes:

even in situations where density is there, we still don't have good transit infrastructure. The I-95 rail corridor is substandard. The DC-metro area's density lends itself to a fuller public transit infrastructure, and Boston remains fixated on planning their new public transit infrastructure around slow moving buses. And these are all places that could support rapid mass-transit. We simply don't have the will to create "showpiece" systems in places where it actually makes sense.

Another funny thing about the metro is that, in the various controversies surrounding some basic renovations, one of the members of the board described the DC metro as "The Cadillac of urban transit systems." This was right on as a description-- a Cadillac was very nice in its hey-day, when little else was available, it is still considered luxurious by the elderly and the poor, it's unreliable, unwieldy, and you can find much better models for what you're looking for that are made in foreign countries.

This week's column is up at TAP. It's an exquisite mixture of Mitt Romney bashing and health wonkery, with a subtle infusion of collectivist principles to balance out the whole. You won't want to miss it.

As it turns out, when you don't fund crucial public services, they don't work very well. It's a fun cycle: The DC Metro has no dedicated source of funding nor particularly united constituency, so it gets shortchanged come funding time. Inevitably, the lack of funds degrade service and lead to failures. This makes the Metro less pleasant, driving people away, serving as an argument that government can't do anything right, and giving fuel to those who say that we should reinvest in more roads and private transportation infrastructure. As Ryan Avent pointed out, here's the result: This year, the government will allot $1.4 billion in federal spending for transit, and $42 billion in federal spending for highways. Sure is a mystery why our public transit systems don't work better.

I also think Ryan's right to say that "while residents of cities with good transit systems understand how popular and helpful those systems are, residents of other places–that is, most of the country–still view transit as a bit utopian and inherently unworkable given population densities." Subways are such an engineering marvel that it's almost impossible for me to believe that they really exist, or that we could build more of them. But they do, and we can.

I think a bigger problem is that the sorts of public transportation that are beloved as an alternative to cars -- namely, systems that don't use roads, and thus evade traffic -- need to hit a critical mass of lines, stops, and, stations before they become a real useful alternative. Building that sort of infrastructure takes time, and our politics doesn't tend to like solutions that won't solve anything before the next few elections end.

Two days ago, I had an Oreo flavored cookie. In other words, a cookie stuffed with other cookie. Today, I just opened up one of my Brazilian chocolates to find...a chocolate stuffed with more chocolate.

I like this trend.

Will Wilkinson, proudly protecting the Cato line of "Americans actually want more risk and financial vulnerability!" against Ross Douthat's pro-populist heresies, is missing the point. While Ross is looking at trends, Will is looking at snapshots -- and not even the right ones. So Ross says, "the pressure of continued outsourcing may also increase the public’s appetite for a smart left populism," and Will replies, "according to another very recent Harris Poll, the level of overall satisfaction is up since 2003, well over half of Americans say their life situation has improved over the last few years, and nearly 2/3 expect it to improve over the next five." Checkmate?

Not quite. Notice, here, that Will uses "life satisfaction" rather than anything directly related to the economic numbers for his point. That's because the economic numbers are very bad for his point, But as Will -- who dearly loves his "alternative status hierarchies" -- fully knows, economic status is not the only determinant of life satisfaction. If you don't have health care but are really happy with your attempts to restore the heat and spark to your marriage, you may be both satisfied and a populist!

Moreover, invoking current polls is completely non-responsive to Ross's claims. Ross -- and Alan Blinder, and everyone else -- expect tens of millions of white collar jobs to come under pressure from outsourcing within the next few decades. If Will doesn't think this will upset anyone, he's got to construct a plausible theory as to why, not note that the Harris poll says many folks are satisfied with their lot now.

And this goes across the board. Will may not like the trends, but it requires some fancy libertarian footwork to argue that continually rising health costs, substantially stagnant wages, the enduring pressures of globalization, the decline of the corporate welfare state, and all the other forces buffeting the bottom 80 percent will elicit no response in the electorate. Indeed, it's hard to argue they've not already done so.

Forget 2008, where all the Democrats are running substantially to the left of where they were in 2004, 2000, or 1996. Look at Bush in 2000, who won the Republican nomination based on a big government conservatism platform that included increasing federal control over the public schools, expanding Medicare, protecting Social Security, and increasing social services to the poor. That wasn't an accident.

If you look at the Pew Typology studies, not only is the Democratic base desirous of increased government involvement and broad social spending, but the majority of the Republican base -- namely the "social conservatives" and the "pro-government conservatives" -- exhibit the same populist tendencies, favoring universal health care and government regulation of business while fearing corporate power and globalization. The "pro-government conservatives," incidentally, are a new group in the typology, reflecting shifting opinions within the electorate, and indeed within the base of the Republican Party.

In fact, there's almost no trend in American life that isn't suggestive of a renewed populism. Not the economic trends, which militate towards more security and guaranteed benefits; not the political trends, which show a strong swing left on economic matters within both parties; not the policy trends, which saw a major expansion of Medicare under Republicans coupled with the overwhelming defeat of Social Security privatization; and not the polling trends, where the surveys regularly pick up on substantial majorities for progressive economics. 9/11 blunted some of these forces, and political elites -- particularly in the GOP -- are astonishingly adept at ignoring the economic desires of their base. But those tactics will only work for so long.

The show takes a turn for the left:

JANIS GOLD
Our source tells us that the terrorists' plan is blow up Broward Dam....This would create mass flooding, cut power to the entire state, and destroy the habitat of the tidewater goby.

JACK BAUER
Dammit! Without that goby, what will our local heron population eat?

JANIS GOLD
Try not to think about that.

JACK BAUER
I can't help it! Every link in the food chain matters!

Jack punches his hand through a wall.

More here.

AJ explains why Ayad Allawi is not the answer to Iraq's leadership woes:

Allawi already had a shot at the position -- and he was terrible. He was appointed interim prime minister in May 2004, keeping the position until he was replaced in April 2005 by Ibrahim Jaafari (following the January '05 elections). If that sounds like the time when the insurgency really started to heat up, well . . . it was. Allawi's tenure was marked by corruption, a feckless approach to basic services, and a widespread perception of thuggishness. In one particularly intense episode, he's said to have personally (and summarily) executed six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station. Perhaps most importantly, his support for the devastating military incursions into Fallujah and Najaf in 2004 earned him the hatred of both Shia and Sunni Iraqis. As a postscript to this illustrious record, after the latest elections, he basically disappeared to London and Jordan -- when Ambassador Crocker was asked about Allawi recently, according to NYTimes, he "said he only spoke to people who actually came to Iraq."

So why are Westerners so intent on hyping him?

Allawi is precisely the kind of leader the uninformed pundit class loves. Just as David Broder can wax pathetic about Michael Bloomberg for his "leadership" and "post-partisan" positioning, other observers label Allawi "tough" and "non-sectarian." These kind of vague labels are music to the ears of pundits, neocons, and deluded war supporters alike, and Allawi gets disproportionate attention because he is essentially a Westerner. He speaks English well, is comfortable among elites from London to Amman to Washington, and knows that the surest route to political acceptance in the US is a massively expensive lobbying campaign by former Bush administration officials. But when it comes down to it, Allawi has about as much support for Iraqi PM as Bloomberg does for US president . . . and from the same types of people.

There's another reason, too: Call it to "Do Something" fallacy. Most American pundits would, in honesty, tell you they don't know that much about Iraq and they really don't know how to fix the country's woes. Most American pundits would, in honesty, get fired for writing columns that reflected such self-awareness. So they need to say something when things are going wrong. Allawi happens to be a name they already know, associated with a period in Iraq that was better than the current moment, and is superficially free of the sectarian bickering which is tearing the country apart. He makes perfect "Do Something" fodder, and that's what pundits need.

And then, of course, there's the massive lobbying campaign designed to sell Allawi to American elites...

Tyro lets slip the real liberal agenda:

If someone was advocating for something because "Europe does it," they'd end up advocating for some hybrid model of public and private to ensure universal coverage. Your explanation does explain why generally liberals aren't advocating for an NHS-like system, since liberals aren't big Anglophiles. However, since we're all closet communists, what we actually want is for an iron-rice-bowl system of guaranteed jobs in nationalized state sector industries followed by patriotic worker songs sung in unison at the end of each work day.

Ssshhh!

Your daily dose of XKCD.

Not only is it immaterial whether Petraeus's graduate thesis is a bit hollow, to argue over it takes you down the wrong path. This whole dispute over whether Petraeus is a genuine saint or a false messiah is part of the same conversation, the one that goes "is David Petraeus man enough to fix everything that has gone wrong in Iraq?"

But that's a bad conversation. It buys the premise that individual American leaders can still fix Iraq so long as they have enough wisdom and pony bait. But whether Petraeus actually shoots insurgent-killing lasers from his eyes or not, Iraq's problems are too substantial and deep-seated to be fixed by an outside country, much less a mere individual. The argument, as relates to Petraeus, isn't whether this man is good or bad. It's whether this situation remains at all susceptible to our military's efforts, or it's now a matter entirely dependent on factions internal to Iraq. If you want to argue against Petraeus, the argument should really be that he's beside the point.

One other bit of McMegan's post that bugged me was her elevation of single-payer as goal in and of itself, as if what interests reformers isn't the health of the populace or the sustainability of the system but the aesthetics of the financing structure. "Look at that funding mechanism," we'll one day whisper in awe. "It's just so redistributive."

You get this occasionally from libertarians, and it's always struck me as an availability bias error: Because the shrinkage of government is an end unto itself for them, they assume the expansion of government is an en unto itself for liberals. Liberals are just libertarians, but backwards, and without the "rtarian."

That, however, isn't true. Liberals want greater public involvement in health care because they've concluded the profit incentive doesn't create optimal outcomes in this particular case. You can't comparison shop during a myocardial infraction. You can't walk away from the table while on a gurney. You don't want to be in the position of second-guessing your doctors. You don't want your neighbors going bankrupt because they failed to adequately save in their HSAs, not suspecting they'd get cancer at 32.

Health care isn't like flat screen televisions -- if I don't have the former, I can die. If I lack the latter, I'll be watching Entourage in slightly lower definition. On the other hand, I really wouldn't want the government taking over the provision of flat screen televisions, as there the market works pretty damn well. The relevant variable isn't the economic theory, but the good in question.

The non-libertarian Megan stated this well a few weeks ago, when she mused that "the people I was arguing with knew their libertarian philosophy well and some econ well, but not, you know, how farming works. So they would prescribe the libertarian economist remedy of markets confident that understanding econ is sufficient to have an accurate opinion. I'd say, 'but the required assumptions simply don't hold', and get back 'but they must, because econ says'...I don't think that libertarians are impervious to evidence, but it has to be evidence in a form sanctified by academic economics. Evidence from the system itself (environment, law) was highly discounted."

And that's about it. Megan's arguing economic theory here, not health care. So I look at our health care system and say it doesn't work, and all these other ones work better (a point on which there's very little serious disagreement), and she says the economic theory underlying my critique is weak, and that government involvement in services has lots of drawbacks, and that wide redistribution isn't terribly efficient. This is true, but the alternatives, in health care, are substantially worse.

Barack Obama's arguing for unscrupulous lenders to be fined, and the proceeds used to bail out borrowers facing foreclosure. That's radical stuff. Is it a good idea? It's certainly a better idea than bailing out the mortgage companies. You don't want profits to be private while losses become public. And administration seems tricky: How you decide who was unscrupulous, how much they should be fined, and how you redistribute the proceeds will be tough. In any case, I'm not an expert in this stuff, and can't really evaluate the proposal. My hunch is nothing like this would ever pass, but it's smart politics, and places Obama on the right side of the issue.

Right. The argument about whether the poverty measure is an accurate measure of poverty is an interesting one (though it's worth saying that the alternate measure developed by the National Academy of Sciences returned a higher poverty estimate, and when you poll Americans on how much nmoney a family needs, they give way high responses), but it's not super important. The current poverty measure tracks how many people live below a somewhat arbitrary, but certainly quite low, yearly income. When that number is bigger, it means more people making very little money. Whether this is a precise definition of what we want to call "poverty," rather than "very low yearly income," is interesting, but not relevant to the trend lines. If you are interested in this argument, though, John Cassidy wrote a great article on the poverty measure for The New Yorker that's worth reading.

In a customarily blase demonstration of data abuse, Mickey Kaus tried to argue that the multi-week crackdown on illegal immigration is already boosting wages across the nation. Kaus didn't have any non-anecdotal evidence of this, but no matter. Having not proven anything, Kaus went on to sneer, "Didn't Kevin Drum and other leftish bloggers sneer when I suggested that rising unskilled wages were in the offing? I think they did! ... How much do the people who serve crow make?" Dunno. Maybe Mickey could actually look up some BLS numbers and find out -- but then, non-anecdotal evidence is so old media.

Even so, now that the new census numbers are being crunched, here's some more fascinating data for Mickey to crow about:

Know what most of those states have in common? Immigrants! Lots of them! So the crackdown is working! Only problem is that these numbers are from 2005-2006, long before the crackdown. Think we'll be seeing this image on Kausfiles anytime soon? [Don't ask me, I don't exist -- ed]

Good news from Iraq is not, in fact, "bad news for the Democrats." Bad news from Iraq is. George W. Bush, who ran on the Iraq War, is no longer a candidate for political office. The great danger for Democrats, who largely support a gradual end to the mission, is not that the country will improve and a stable withdrawal will appear in reach, but that the country will devolve and Republicans will make a case that we have to continue the mission to protect against chaos and devolution. The better Iraq looks, the easier it will be to move on from it, and the more comfortable Americans will be voting for a change in course. This stuff isn't rocket science.

The danger isn't "good news" from Iraq, but bad advice. If Petraeus argues for a continuation of the mission, that's "bad news" for those who support withdrawal. But Petraeus's argument actually requires bad news -- continuing regional instability requiring a large scale deployment of American troops --to make any sense. If there was good news -- were the surge really woerking, and reconciliation being achieved -- then it would be foolish not to begin preparing for the end of the American mission there.

Democrats like to say that the invasion of Iraq was a diversion from the hunt for bin-Laden. They're not kidding. This is from Newsweek's cover story on the history of the hunt for bin-Laden:

When Franks refused to send Army Rangers into the mountains at Tora Bora, he was already in the early stages of planning for the next war. By early 2002, new Predators—aerial drones that might have helped the search for bin Laden—were instead being diverted off the assembly line for possible use in Iraq. The military's most elite commando unit, Delta Force, was transferred from Afghanistan to prep for the invasion of Iraq. The Fifth Special Forces Group, including the best Arabic speakers, was sent home to retool for Iraq, replaced by the Seventh Special Forces Group—Spanish speakers with mostly Latin American experience. The most knowledgeable CIA case officers, the ones with tribal contacts, were rotated out. Replacing a fluent Arabic speaker and intellectual, the new CIA station chief in Kabul was a stickler for starting meetings on time (his own watch was always seven minutes fast) but allowed that he had read only one book on Afghanistan.

People forget this, but in 2002 Bush was already trying to deemphasize the hunt for bin-Laden. "I don’t know where he is," he said. "Nor — you know, I just don’t spend that much time on him really, to be honest with you. I....I truly am not that concerned about him." At the time, the statement was taken as a lie, a way to play down a failed -- but still intense -- manhunt. Turns out it was the truth.

Incidentally, I always thought this should have been the moment that lost Bush the 2004 election. During one of the debates, Kerry brought this comment up, and Bush said, "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations." This was the sort of gaffe the media loves: Both statements were on tape, they could be played next to each other a thousand times, they were about terrorism, they were crucial to the election, they were high drama, they could be used to spark conflict between talking heads, and so on. Instead, in the most impressive diversion campaign I've ever seen in American politics, the rightwing noise machine managed to make that debate about whether or not Kerry had crossed the line by mentioning that Dick Cheney's openly gay daughter was a lesbian. In a functioning nation, this is what we'd have spent the next week seeing:

You know, sometimes I forget just how much the press has done to harm this country.

Ankush writes:

I was rather surprised to learn, for instance, that TNR's fact-checkers don't check quotes with subjects; they just check quotes against the writers' notes, which strikes me as less than optimal, particularly given that Stephen Glass fabricated notes to deceive the checkers.

This is the practice at most places. Here's why: Quite often, a subject will ramble on in an interview and say something they didn't quite mean to say. These are, generally, the quotes most worth using. But if read back, the subject will deny it, or argue over context, or generally try to edit out whatever bit of illumination they actually let slip. So you don't give them the second edit.

What's important isn't so much checking quotes with subjects as checking the existence of subjects. What Glass did, if I remember correctly, is make up individuals he interviewed. That's useful, as they don't read the article and write a furious letter to the editor. Misquoting real people, by contrast, has rather swift consequences. They tend, for one thing, to not appreciate it.

It's worth saying that these systems actually work pretty well. Their haven't been many serial liars in magazines over the past few decades, which is why everyone knows the name Stephen Glass. As I tried to argue the other day, the real action in contemporary mendacity is going on in the category of bullshit argumentation, rather than concocted reporting.

It's true that folks buying Prada are paying for brand -- or style -- over quality. But that seems fine! There's this tendency to assume that folks are getting snookered when they purchase designer goods and aren't rewarded with fine craftsmanship. But honestly, I buy crap, poorly-made clothing all the time. And it works perfectly well! I don't run track in my jeans or tromp through jungles in my t-shirts, so the level of stitching I actually need is fairly minimal. I assume that's all the more true fora D&G purse. And what people are paying for when buying Prada as opposed to, say, Patagonia, is design and status. So that's what they get.

This is an important point by Ann. "Rape" is often used to denote what the victim went through, rather than what the assailant did. So if the (let's just say) woman doesn't feel terrifically traumatized, or it wasn't violent, then it's not rape, but rather some sort of more complicated plane between regrettable sex and violent assault. But, in fact, "the definition of rape doesn't change depending on how you feel afterward. Rape is a nonconsensual sexual act." If you steal a TV, but the bookish type you took it from doesn't really miss it, it doesn't mean you're not a thief. And if you rape someone, but there are no repercussions, doesn't mean you're not a rapist.

So as I was walking out of the Apple store today, I ran into prominent American political blogger Matthew Yglesias, whose power cord had died. And as I was on the Metro back to work, I got a text message from influential American political writer Chris Hayes, who was now at the Apple store as his iPhone had decided to crack.

If a certain proportion of Apple's merchandise insists on blowing up, they should spread it more broadly among people who don't have web sites.

The Center for American progress, in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine, polled 100 top foreign policy experts, Republican and Democratic alike, on how the War on Terror is going. The answer is...not well. Not well at all. 84% disagree that America is winning the war on terror. 91 percent believe the world is becoming more dangerous for us. Experts give us low ratings on handling iraq, Afghanistan, public diplomacy, energy security, democracy promotion, failed states, nuclear non-proliferation, helping Pakistan stabilize against terrorists, etc, etc, etc. In short, we're performing awfully at just about everything.

And yet, where are these analysts? We've got over 100 of them in this survey, and their remarks seem damn near unanimous. Even those identified as conservatives are furious with our performance. Only 20 percent of them believe we're "winning the war on terror," and none of them agree with that statement "strongly." But they're not saying so publicly. You're not seeing hundreds of them at a single event denouncing our mistakes. You're not seeing any serious mobilization against the administration's policies. In short, they're happy to say millions may die in this poll, but not hurt some feelings -- and possibly blunt some careers -- by doing the hard work required to change the country's course. And God knows Giuliani has suffered no public sanction for hiring every discredited neocon he could find. It's deeply irresponsible.

As a postscript to Matt Zeitlin's righteous harangue on inferior American automobiles, I was struck by how small the cars in Brazil were. At one point, I notice a massive car parked on the road only to discover the monster was a Toyota Corolla. And when I got into it -- it was my uncle's Corolla -- it felt like a Bentley.

When everyone else's car is tiny, you don't need a very big car to feel like you're in luxury. Of course, in America, what would happen next is that everyone would get Corollas, leaving some to buy Camrys, at least until Camrys became common, so we'd move onto Explorers, and so on, and so forth, till you have the Hummer. Brazil has prevented that arms race through the novel strategy of keeping everyone too poor to buy bigger cars, which, while effective, probably wouldn't fly here in the States.

In California, part-time foodworkers are seeking the same health benefits their full-time counterparts receive. L.J WIlliamson responds in classic fashion, saying "If health benefits were extended to these part-time workers, the CFPA estimates it would mean that the per-plate meal budget would be reduced from 85 cents to 49 cents. Making healthy food available for that amount would take a miracle of biblical proportions. So we'd be improving the healthcare of nearly 2,000 part-time workers at the expense of the 500,000 children who eat in public school cafeterias every day."

Kevin Drum responds correctly: "I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes."

Notice how the incentives -- or in this case, the grievances -- of the individual are set in opposition to the needs of the collective. Since we don't have universal health care, every single time a group of individuals seeks health coverage, they're forced into direct warfare with their immediate colleagues, place of employment, etc. So in this case, cafeteria workers who need coverage are set in opposition to children who need food. It's a very, very effective method for slowing the expansion of benefits. Every lost battle makes it harder for the next group to win their fight, because it creates yet another set of cafeteria workers or Wal-Mart employees who aren't getting healthcare, and who are thus competing without those labor costs.

So my hard drive appears to have committed suicide. If only I had known...

Dave Weigel is crazy to suggest that "the Homer/Marge stuff [in the Simpson's movie] was as touching as anything in your top-shelf romantic comedies." I liked the film too, but it was unrelenting depressing on these issues. It was a film during which the lead female character realized her husband was a senseless brute who would always put his happiness before her own, and where her son realized the father was an abusive drunk who was continually denying him the emotional support and family environment he needed. And unlike in most Simpson's episodes, both characters recognized these truths fully, and abandoned Homer to begin new lives elsewhere. And shortly thereafter, both took him back, tossing away their opportunities for personal growth and fulfillment despite there being no evidence of an enduring change in their tormentor's psyche. It was a tremendous demonstration of the self-destructive mentality of the abused, and in that, quite unsettling.

Which isn't to say the movie wasn't funny and great and joyous, as it was! But you really had to fight to ignore what was actually going on...

Read Kevin on the surge. His interim report on the venture's progress is much more informative than anything Petraeus is likely to offer up.

One additional note: The surge is doing nothing -- absolutely, literally nothing -- for political reconciliation. And without that, peace is impossible. Folks forget this, but the strategy of the surge was not merely military -- it wasn't simply to increase security, because that would be a Good Thing. Rather, it sought to increase security in order to give the Iraqi government breathing room to advance reconciliation. That hasn't happened. Not only has it not happened, but the Iraqi government's failure has been so total we're thinking of ditching the Iraqi government. Which wasn't the point of the surge. To talk about this in terms of casualties is to move the goalposts. That the surge has produced no political reconciliation and in fact undermined the closest thing to a centralized authority in Iraq suggests that it's been a complete failure, regardless of the security improvements it did (or, depending on who you believe, did not) deliver.

Dennis Ross offers us "one last chance for a stable Iraq," but doesn't produce anything of the sort:

we should do three things. First, we should declare the surge a success and announce that we will negotiate a timetable for our withdrawal with the Iraqi government. This would give Iraqis input into the timing and shape of the withdrawal and doesn't simply impose it on them. Second, we should set a date for the convening of a national reconciliation conference. Unlike previous such conferences, it should not be permitted to disband until agreement has been reached. Success in this conference would mean greater flexibility in our approach to the timetable on withdrawal, and a stalemated conference would produce the opposite. To increase the prospects of the conference working, we should suggest that French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who has credibility across sectarian lines, play a brokering role in setting the agenda of the conference and its ongoing negotiations.

Finally, we should talk to Iraq's neighbors about how to contain the conflict. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey all have little desire to see Iraq either fragment or be convulsed to the point that they get increasingly sucked into the conflict. I have my doubts about whether the neighbors will ever agree on what they want for Iraq, but they can agree on what they fear about it.

That seems like a not-bad way of getting out of Iraq. Insofar as you need to leave with some level of rearguard flexibility and some type of plan that protects you from cut-and-run accusations, Ross's approach -- or retreat, I guess -- seems perfectly adequate.

But there's nothing in here -- genuinely, literally nothing -- that suggests any solution to the problems bedeviling that country. Nothing in here proposes a solution to the intra-Shiite fighting, and the battle between Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps. Nothing in here solves the more serious problems of enduring enmity between Sunnis and Shiites. Nothing in here splits oil revenues, or disarms militias, or does anything at all. There's a promise to lock all the participants -- and I wonder who Roos means by that -- in a room and demand national reconciliation, but if it were really as easy as this McCain style "cut the bullshit," it would've been don already. This is the language and atmospherics of statecraft without an actual plan for resolving differences. That's probably a good idea for withdrawal. But it's not going to leave us a stable Iraq. If the only problem in that country were that no one had sought to hold a meeting, this issue would be considerably easier than it actually is.

Incidentally, Joe Klein's column this week is really very good on these issues...

"I would like to hear from a large number of single-payer advocates," writes McMegan, "who will say that if the American system could be proven to provide higher quality care per dollar on average than other industrialised system, then they would be content to leave 40 million people uninsured." And I would like to hear from a large number of auto enthusiasts who will say that if the car I'm selling them can be proven to go really fast, then they won't care that it's missing two seats, a mufflers, half a door, and three cylinders.

The 45 million are not some puppies-and-rainbows issue we're talking about because they make us feel sad and draw frownie faces in the margins of our notebooks. It's not efficient to have 45 million people going without preventive care. I could name about 45 million reasons why this is so -- ranging from enhanced productivity to the cost-effectiveness of statin drugs to the young uninsured who should be in the risk pool -- but that's the fact of it. The reason policy reformers are so intent on pulling them into the system isn't because policy reformers are Really Great People, it's because their absence is mucking everything up, and causing gross inefficiencies for hospitals, clinics, Medicare, Medicaid, taxpayers, and themselves.

On the other hand, if Megan could decisively prove that a non-single payer system would be more effective than a single payer system -- which would mean it offered full coverage, not sacrificed it to prove its own seriousness -- then most reformers would happily support it. Indeed, most reformers already believe that, which is why so few of us support single-payer systems in the first place, and tend to instead promote hybrid systems like France. But at least this straw reform movement which believes dogmatically in single payer for incomprehensible reasons and laughs at efficiency claims isn't around to menace us any longer. We can thank Megan for that.

A brutal conclusion to Adam Gopnik's profile of Nicolas Sarkozy:

The catastrophe in Iraq has had an unlooked-for effect: not to stoke anti-Americanism in a new generation but to make America seem almost marginal...Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

What Brown, Merkel, and Sarkozy all have in common is that they do not want to be defined by their response to America—either unduly faithful, as with Blair, or unduly hostile, as Chirac became. Instead, as Levitte says, they all want to normalize relations with a great power that is no longer the only power. Its military weakness has been exposed in Iraq, its economic weakness by the rise of the euro, and its once great cultural magnetism has been diminished by post-9/11 paranoia and insularity. America has recovered from worse before, and may do so again. But it is also possible that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy may be seen not as the start of a new pro-American moment in Europe but as a marker of the beginning of the post-American era.

It's an interesting thought. In the 1990s, the formulation was that we were the "indispensable nation." The question, increasingly, is indispensable for what? A land war with China, certainly, but no one's jumping into that. A reduction in carbon emissions, but we don't appear interested in cooperating. Our funding for various developmental projects is important, but not indispensable in the sense that it grants us prestige or unquestioned leadership. Our involvement in various international organizations and treaties -- the International Criminal Court, the UN, the Non-Proliferation treaty -- legitimizes them, but we've pulled away or sought to undermine these institutions and they've survived despite our efforts. Our recent invasion continues to prove an unmitigated disaster, we've lost our prestige and proven unable to bring Iran to heel, and Latin America is now populated with leaders who found political success in anti-Americanism.

It's not a good time for America.

Folks konw I think McMegan is an interesting writer. Some of you even hold it against me. But just this once, you can't stop e-mailing to tell me she wrote a really, really long post on health care. I know! I read it! It's very bad!

It relies on unproven and incorrect premises ("Most advocates of single payer, I think, care most about this justice claim. They may also think that they can make the system more efficient, but if one could somehow prove scientifically that a private system would be cheaper and better, they would still favor a public system as long as a substantial population remained uninsured); brackets the argument about efficiency then pretends it doesn't figure into reformer's claims; radically overstates individual culpability for illnesses; elides the fact that living a healthier life just means you die from something expensive later; mistakes an intergenerational compact (wherein each generation pays for the next, rather than making a one-time transfer) for charity; and appears to miss the fact that Medicare already exists, and so single-payer would not mean more resources would be transferred to the old, thus obviating the central point. And that's just a partial list!

But this is the type of bad I can get behind. McMegan's post is one I disagree with, but do not fear. Indeed, if some eager speechwriter plugged it into Mitt Romney's next address ("My fellow Americans, I think it's time we abolished Medicare, because the old don't deserve our help. And we should also stop caring for the sick, because that colon cancer is your own damn fault Mr. I-Don't-Eat-My-Fiber.") I think we'd have found the straightest line between here and national health care.

Lately, though, I've been trying to think more systematically about which health care arguments are dangerous to reform, rather than just annoying to reformers. Here's what I've got so far:

• The government can't do it. It'll be like the DMV. It's "socialized medicine." Do you love waiting times? etc.
• It'll be too expensive.
• Incrementalism-as-obstruction. i.e, "We should have a more "American" system based on tax credits and deductions!" These proposals don't have the downsides of real reform, but they don't fix anything, either. However, they do make it seem like the politician "has a plan." See Giuliani, Rudy.
• National reform will fail, as it always has, and the cause will be dealt an enormous blow, just like in 1994. Better to be incremental and just cover kids or something.
• It'll reduce pharmaceutical innovation.

Any more?

The estimable Chris Hayes writes:

There are few things that irk me more than when conservatives advocate for increased immigration for low wage workers by saying that immigrants do jobs that Americans don’t want. I don’t want to buy a slice of pizza for $45. It doesn’t mean I don’t like pizza! I’m not particularly interested in writing a book for the total payment of $9. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to write a book!

Raise. The. Wages. You’ll find plenty of workers. I promise.

That's true so far as it goes. The problem is the other end of it: Nobody wants to buy your book for $60, or eat your pizza for $45, or purchase your strawberries for $7.99 a pound. So the issue, in almost all these cases, is how much you can raise wages without decimating the industry in question. In some industries, that's no problem. People pay a lot to go to the doctor. In some industries, it is a problem. If we weren't importing strawberry-pickers, we'd be importing strawberries. If it cost $500 to get your house cleaned, people would just clean their own homes.

Global competition makes all this harder, particularly when you're not talking about service industries. Raise wages here, and we'll often import the good rather than the labor. The forces and incentives that drive a company to make their goods in China -- cheaper labor, mainly -- are the very same ones that drive them to hire immigrant labor domestically. The two strategies are different sides of the same coin.

Sadly, I have no answers to the issues these issues -- nor the empirical data to know how much can be done to raise wages, and where. We're not closing our borders to goods, and I don't think we should close them to people, either. In some of these industries, we can simply lift the wages because the employers can't run their companies from China -- think construction, some sectors of agriculture, much meatpacking -- and in some we simply don't know how to handle the forces of global competition, the Wal-Martization of prices, etc. But raising the wages isn't as broad an answer as it used to be. Back before inter- and intra-continental transport was essentially trivial, you paid higher wages or you closed. Now, in most industries, there's this third option -- you get cheaper labor elsewhere -- and it's just not clear how you restore worker bargaining power so long as that exists.

So remember that new Macbook? The one you readers kindly helped purchase? The one I bought exactly 38 days ago? Yeah, it stopped working. It just spends some time on the initial grey screen, then transfers me to the normal boot-up screen, then leaves me watching the spinning wheel o' death for as long as I care to stare at it. The fine folks at the Apple store -- which I stopped at on my way back from the airport -- helpfully informed me I could...come back tomorrow. During work hours. Thanks guys.

Update: When I try to start up in safe mode, holding "shift," the computer turns itself off. Huh.

Now We're Getting Techie Update: I started in "verbose" mode and the hangs appear to be "disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (undefined)" (which I've no gotten six dozen times) and that "localhost memberd[39] can't find the root user." Does this mean anything to anyone?

Update the Third: Well this doesn't look good...

I don't think I agree that John Edwards' "inability to get any substantive purchase in the national press has a lot to do with the very nature of [his] positions."  So far as I can tell, the only (positive) coverage Edwards gets in the press comes from his poverty focus, health care plan, or general reformism.  These positions, which many in the media agree with, are gradually being overwhelmed by the fact that he's stagnating or dropping in national polls and has lost his once commanding lead in Iowa, which makes him look like an increasingly fading presence.  None of this explains why the haircut stuff has gotten so much play, but I'd actually chalk that up not to the media have a substantive problem with his dislike of insurance companies, but with the media being awful, and all-too-easily led around by the right wing noise machine. Which is, in some ways, worse.

The funny thing is, this is probably Edwards' best hope.  If the media writes him off beforehand, that's better for his campaign, as the media tends to believe its own storylines.  If he really can win Iowa, it's crucial that it doesn't look like he will win Iowa.  Otherwise, his win will have no bounce.  And while I'm increasingly pessimistic on Edwards' chances, this speech could well become the "Two Americas" of this campaign.

I tend to find it very hard to finish books.  So rather than me using a bunch of nice adjectives for it, let me just say that I finished Jon Chait's book, The Big Con, on the rise of crackpot, rightwing, economics in two days.  On the beach.  It's a very, very good piece of work, and contains the clearest, most sustained demolition of supply-siderism I've encountered.  It's also got a lot of very clear, quick writing on economics in general, including this quote-worthy bit on taxes:

You can look at the federal tax code as a kind of layer cake.  At the bottom is the federal payroll tax, used to finance Social Security and Medicare.  This tax is a flat rate and covers wage income only to around $100,000 a year, with all income above that level exempt.  This is the most regressive tax imposed by Washington.  Above the payroll tax sits the income tax.  The income tax is more progressive, exempting low wage workers and making high earners pay a higher rate.  On top of that are taxes on capital gains and dividends.  These taxes are even more concentrated at the top, since they affect only those who receive lots of income from accumulated wealth.  The most progressive tax of all is the estate tax, which is paid by a tiny handful of fabulously wealthy heirs.

Compare that layer cake to President Bush's policies.  The tax at the bottom, the payroll tax, he has not touched at all.  The tax just above that, the income tax, he sliced by about a tenth.  The taxes just above that, the capital gains and dividends, he cut in half.  And the tax at the very top, the estate tax, he abolished altogether (though he has not mustered enough votes to abolish it permanently).  Bush's opposition to any given tax is exactly proportional to the degree that it affects the rich.

The book also has the world's most perfect description of Grover Norquist, about whom it says:

Norquist, like a Bond villain, has an irresistible penchant for spelling out his master plans in their full, nefarious detail.

It's almost impossible to accurately convey how true that is.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will step down:

WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, has resigned. A senior administration official said he would announce the decision later this morning in Washington.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation, submitted his to President Bush by telephone on Friday, the official said. His decision was not immediately announced, the official added, until after the president invited him and his wife to lunch at his ranch near here.

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the resignation had not yet been made public.

Despite intensifying pressure, not to mention the accruing roar from critics on both sides of the aisle, Gonzales has long held firm, refusing to admit any wrongdoing at any time, especially not as pertains to the raft of politically-motivated US attorney firings. The verbal Möbius strips of twisting, false, and oftentimes outright mendacious statements the Attorney General tossed around in sworn testimony before Congress have led some Congressmen to not only raise the question of filing perjury charges, but also start preparing articles of impeachment against him.

And though I follow politics as much as anyone who isn't directly involved in government work--and certainly more than most busy mamas I know--I must admit, this development caught me completely off-guard, just as Rove's resignation did. As Minstrel Boy is fond of saying, when the wrecked ship begins to take on water, follow the rats.

Ross may well be right that in Jim Manzi's manifesto on a sensible rightwing strategy on global warming, "conservatives will find a sensible blueprint for moving from the denialist fringe to the political mainstream, and liberals will get a taste of how a wised-up, heads-out-of-the-sand Right could kick their ass on the issue."  But he should be more specific: Manzi's approach may help the right kick political ass on the issue -- it's global warming as little more than a political football.  And that's a damn irresponsible way of approaching climate change.

Manzi's strategy is, basically, let's do very, very little.  Under Manzi's set of assumptions, that's perfectly fine, as under Manzi's set of assumptions, global warming isn't very bad, and we don't need to do much.  Under most other sets of assumptions, global warming is very bad, and the costs of a carbon tax, or cap-and-trade program, are very slight in comparison to the damage they'll forestall.  But the change from "it doesn't exist" to "it's not very bad, and can be fixed with no pain," is not a change from "the denialist fringe' to "the political mainstream" in anything but rhetoric.  It's a kinder, gentler denialism, based on exactly the same dispute over severity, with exactly the same effects.  Namely, if Manzi's wrong, hundreds of millions of people are fucked.  Nice gamble, that.  On the bright side, it's possible that Manzi's strategy will, in the short-term, help the Republican Party do marginally better in American politics.

Chalk this one up under fascinating visions of the future.

I haven't read Matt Bai's The Argument, though it seems, from the reviews, that the book's flaw was being conceived in 2004, reported in 2005, obviated in 2006, and released in 2007.  That's not really Bai's fault.  Lakoff really did seem like a big deal, and if you immersed yourself in the Democratic Party's search for messaging gurus, it's understandable that you'd ache for a bit of substance.

But that immersion is the key.  The Democratic Party's reworking of its message was a prime Bai story over the last few years.  His critique of it, by contrast, has been that Democrats need ideas, not gurus.  Notably, that they need a social policy capable of withstanding the 21st century, the "information age," or whatever synonym we're using for The Now (zoom!) that week.  But whatever the worth of the gurus, Bai's critique is myopic -- it's a function of what he's reporting on, rather than what's going on in the Party.

As a reporter, I focus on policy ideas.  And damn it, I'm drowning.  Bai seems to think Democrats need a health care plan, but I could show him no fewer than 20 fully-realized plans and outline the basic areas of consensus -- and they're broad -- that outline the Party's essential orientation on the issue.  Same goes for pension planning, trade adjustment plans, or any and every other element of social policy you can think of.

These plans have a common thread -- a social policy for the 21st century, if you will: Globalization and its attendant economic forces have destabilized the working class and the corporate welfare state they relied on, so the government should step into the breach and guarantee what employers no longer can.  And though Bai may not have been paying attention, Democrats have even settled on certain policy gurus -- notably Jacob Hacker, Joseph Stiglitz, and Elizabeth Warren -- who're uniting previously opposed wings of the party, as in Hacker's involvement with both the traditionally left wing EPI and they're bete noire, Robert Rubin's centrist Hamilton Project.  Bai's book may be a good read, but if you only profile politicians and messaging types, you should have some self-awareness that you're unlikely to trip over much new policy thinking along the way, and an affirmative effort to search some out is required before you critique its absence.

By Kathy G.

Blogging here for the past week has been a blast -- I'm going to miss it. For some reason I got my dates confused and thought I would be doing this for a few more days, so I never did get around to posts I'd planned about mine safety, the economics of unions in theory and practice, and Arthur Miller and his Down syndrome son. (All I will say here as to that latter subject is that I strongly recommend you read the stunning article about it in the current issue of Vanity Fair. It will break your heart, but in a completely unexpected way it's inspiring too, because oddly enough it does have a happy ending of a sort). Oh well . . .

Thanks to all of Ezra's readers and commenters for sparking such great discussions and for keeping me on my toes, and a special heartfelt thanks to Ezra for inviting me to do this. I had no idea this blogging thing could be so much fun (or so scarily addictive)!

Finally, I didn't want to leave without saying how sad I am that Max Sawicky is ending his wonderful blog, Maxspeak. Since its inception, Maxspeak has been one of the three or four indispensable blogs for me. I was considering doing my own follow-up post to Ezra's earlier one about five blogs that make me think, and if I had, Maxspeak would have topped the list. Here's what I've loved about Maxspeak:

1. I've admired the way Max brought economic logic to bear on a host of public policy questions, yet never succumbed to the extremely conservative politics and pinched, distorted moral vision that, alas, plagues so many professional economists.

2. I appreciate Max's politics, which unlike so much of blogosphere I inhabit are not merely liberal but left. That has made for some important and salutary differences. Max has always been much more critical and distrustful of the U.S. foreign policy establishment than most liberal bloggers, and man oh man has time proven him right about that. The very interesting and potentially extremely productive conversation that's occurring in the liberal blogosphere these days about the foreign policy community owes a lot to him, I think.

It's true that Max sometimes likes to piss all over the netroots in general, and Kos in particular, but although I'm a lot more optimistic about the netroots than he is, I always welcomed his skepticism. I agree with him that there's a danger of the netroots becoming too much of a cheerleader for the Democratic Party, and that netroots-ers put too much of an emphasis on winning and tactical sophistication, and not enough on developing a coherent and compelling political vision.

3. I admire Max's prose style. The man says a whole lot using few words. I wish my own writing had that kind of pith and punch.

Max hasn't yet spelled out the details about why he's abandoning the blog, but it sounds as if he's entering a new employment situation that precludes him from blogging. I wish him all the best in his future endeavors, and I hope he'll consider a return to the blogosphere at some future date. Viva Maxspeak!

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I'm pretty sure the reason why "conforming mortgage dollar caps have not already been raised substantially" is that George W. Bush is the President. The function of the CEA and NEC under George W. Bush is to act as credentialed mouthpieces for the policy/political goals of George W. Bush, rather than to provide Bush with sound policy advice and then promote said advice in public. In addition, Team Bush, for reasons relating to ideology or interest group brokerage that I simply do not understand, has made constraining the growth of Fannie and Freddie something of a hobbyhorse.

Assuming it's fairly easy to find sixty GOP-held Congressional districts where "do something about the housing mini-meltdown" is a political winner, that leaves the 67th vote in the Senate as the major stumbling block. And I have a hard time figuring out how to get 16 Republicans to vote to force the appropriate agency to raise the mortgage caps on conforming loans. And that's a tall order, when one considers how few Republican Senators represent the states that have had skyrocketing housing values over the last half-decade.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

On several occasions as a high school student in Raleigh, North Carolina, programs and competitions brought me into contact with students from rural parts of the state.  Quite a few of them mentioned that they'd never met anyone of Indian descent before.  I remember one girl asking, "Oh, you're Indian!  do you know so-and-so?"  The idea that India was a nation of nearly a billion people, most of whom do not know each other, was lost on her. 

They were very nice people -- I was happy to have known them, and to have played some role in expanding their cultural horizons.  But I wonder how significant that sort of lack of a diverse upbringing was in getting many people, especially in rural areas, to think there was a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers.  If you haven't ever met any Arabs before, and you have only the vaguest sense of what the world outside America looks like, it probably becomes a lot easier to think that all those brown-skinned Allah worshippers are conspiring to destroy America. 

So when I see that 41% of the country still thinks that Saddam was helping the 9/11 terrorists, I'm not all that surprised.  A fifth of the population can't even find their own country on a map, and the natural flow of ignorant thoughts will blend Iraqi dictators with Saudi terrorists.  And on an even more emotive level, the idea that attacking Iraq was a way to continue our vengeance against the perpetrators of 9/11 has to be based in the same kinds of attitudes. If Iraqis looked like Irishmen, I don't think Americans would've even considered invading the country as a plausible post-9/11 course of action.

By Ankush

I often take it for granted that physical newspapers will one day be a distant memory. Newspapers will continue to survive -- fewer perhaps, and with a different sense of purpose in an age of constantly updated, on-demand news -- but the age of newsprint will one day come to a close.  And would that be so bad?

Bill Powers -- one of only a few media critics consistently worth reading, though hardly infallible -- has a lengthy paper explaining what's so great about paper.  I don't like it as much as his friends do (it's unnecessarily long; if you're interested, you'd do well to start at page 32), but it's a solid meditation on what it is that makes physical paper such an enduring medium. Here's just one reason:

Because online documents have no physical presence, when we’re reading them the eyes and the brain are constantly at work figuring out where we are in the text, not just on the page displayed but in the document as a whole and vis-à-vis other open documents, as well as where we need to go next. The online reader expends a great deal of mental energy just navigating. Paper’s tangibility allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden, freeing up the brain to think.

There's much more of that. Much of it seems self-evident, since paper is such an integral part of our lives, but Powers's methodical explanation of the various advantages that paper affords readers is a useful exercise.

Given the advantages of paper, Powers argues that it's bound to endure, but the purpose to which newspapers put it will probably change. The "long-form, in-depth" material is likely to stick to print, where people prefer reading it, while "hard news and other utilitarian, quick-read content" is left to the web. Again, maybe that seems rather obvious, but when was the last time you thought hard about how great paper actually is?

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Here we go again. Jamie Kirchick goes after Obama's foreign policy worldview via gross distortion. Hilzoy provides a good rejoinder.

What's more, the Kirchick piece contains zero discussion of the capability of US military (or non-military) intervention to
produce the desired humanitarian outcome. I'm sure military analysts could provide more specific insight, but I have to believe the US has much more capability in Darfur or the Congo than in Iraq (Update: to say that military action is more likely to succeed in Darfur or the Congo does not mean that it's likely to succeed; indeed, commenters point out that beyond enforcing the no-fly zone, there's only so much the military can do in Darfur). I'd wager that both African nations [sic] are much poorer, have a less developed infrastructure, possess no military capability to speak of, and have a population that's more likely to view the US favorably. In Iraq, of course, virtually every effort to insure domestic tranquility by force has backfired; "the surge" will at best reduce violence to somewhere below its current level, but above the level seen in 2006. Under these circumstances, it's quite possible that a "Dayton II" type summit that brought together whatever warlords we can find in Iraq might actually do more to dampen the violence than any tactical changes the military might make.

The failure to consider how to use American capabilities to achieve American goals is what got us into this mess in Iraq in the first place. It would be a shame if the same mistake caused our policymakers to miss an opportunity where they might make a difference.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

As Ezra returns tomorrow, I intend to make this my swan song and thank him for letting me fill in. I'm going to close with the immortal Elis Regina.

She could belt them out with the best of them. Here she is singing Belchior's Como Nossos Pais

Probably one of her greatest contributions to popular music in Brazil was championing young songwriters. One of her earliest was the brilliant composer Ivan Lins and his song Madalena. While I couldn't find a clip of her singing this song, I did find this clip of Ivan Lins singing the song with the excellent Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba and João Bosco. Speaking of João Bosco, here is Elis singing his lovely Dois Pra la, Dois Pra Ca, although I've never understand that coda sung in Spanish.

Milton Nascimento is another songwriter she championed. here they are together singing Caxanga I hope you have all enjoyed these clips. I also hope that it's spurred some interest in Brazilian music and that you'll come visit my blog. Thanks Ezra e bem-vindo em casa!

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

There is no country in Europe that interests me more than Spain. There is no ongoing issue in Spain that frustrates me more than ETA, one hopes the last homegrown terrorist organization in Western Europe.

I've been reading Giles Tremlett's excellent book, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Secret Past and recommend it heartily, especially if you have an interest in Spain. His chapter on ETA is especially compelling.

Why does ETA want independence, especially for what appears to be only the Spanish portion of the historic region? Granted, there is no question that much of the region suffered greatly  under the dictatorship of Franco, who referred to the region as the "rebellious provinces" and who banned the language from being spoken, while rewarding the communities of Alava and Navarre for supporting his uprising. Times have certainly changed, however:

• Basque is acknowledged as an official language in Spain, despite the fact that it is not spoken by a majority of the population within the Basque country and barely has one million speakers and even fewer who speak it as a first language. . Here is the website for the Basque language verson of  Spain's national rail system called RENFE. It's also available in Gallego and Catalan in addition to Castellano.
• The Basque Region has at least as much autonomy as any other region in Spain, if not more.
• The Basque Region has far and away the best economy in Spain, including the most disposable income in the country.

Granted that the government of  former Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez committed acts that probably spurred younger people into supporting ETA, but that was years ago. So, why the desire for independence that leads to such horrid violence? Why the obsession among some with the fact that the Basque population has a higher percentage of RH- in its population or the claims that the Basques have unusual crania? Why the insistence that a referendum be held for independence when recent polls show only 38% of the population would vote for independence?

I wish I knew.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

One of the most misleading polling results I've ever seen came out earlier this month.  According to a NBC/WSJ poll, 53% of Americans want there to be a third-party White House bid.  So why don't third parties get more traction? 

It's because no one third party that could satisfy that 53% of voters.  Third party enthusiasts include Bloomberg-type elite centrists, Minutemen who are angry at the Republicans for not deporting or shooting more immigrants, the dude who called in to one of Ezra's TV appearances and said he wanted a third party that was pro-gay but centrist on abortion, and basically everybody on every edge of the political system from Naderites to those who feel that the Republicans aren't making America a theocracy fast enough.  No party capable of winning a presidential election could be formed from these disparate materials. 

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I was hoping to have some measurement of civilian death rates to accompany my charts of US casualty rates, since one could conceivably make the case that an increase in US casualties is an acceptable loss if it leads to a substantial reduction of violence in Iraq. But apparently I'm not going to get the chance.

This is, of course, sheer lunacy. If the only measurements of the "success" come in anecdote form, there's no way to prove that the violence simply hasn't moved somewhere that the US isn't monitoring as closely. Or that the violence level is the same, but there's just more good news mixed in with the daily grind. Or ... well, you get the picture. The public really deserves empirical evidence that the surge is or isn't working.

By Ankush

After Wayne Barrett's (latest) takedown of Rudy Giuliani came out a few weeks ago, there was some talk about how the piece might have had a greater impact if it had run somewhere besides The Village Voice. 

This week Time runs its version of the Giuliani bubble-burster, and the results, while not nearly as impressive as Barrett's article, are still pretty decent.  It's not as thorough or meticulous as the Voice piece, and the conclusions aren't as direct or damning, but many of the important pieces are there: Giuliani's lies (not "exaggerations," as Time calls them) about his work "studying Islamic terrorism" for 30 years; his substantively counterproductive use of fear mongering as a campaign strategy; his shameless ignorance of even the most basic foreign policy issues; even a line on Iran-crazed superhawk and maniac Norman Podhoretz, adviser to the campaign. 

Considering this comes from a national news magazine, it may be a sign that Giuliani's campaign rhetoric will start to be treated with the skepticism it deserves, and that some people in the national press corps will stop fawning over "America's Mayor" simply because he had the dubious distinction of being present on 9/11.  It's one thing to note that the man is an egomaniac with a tawdry personal life -- which is true -- but the more serious problem is that the entire Giuliani campaign is built on a fraud about his competence, which, by and large, the media has been aiding and abetting.

By Kathy G.

Ah, New Republic! You never really do let me down, do you?

I admit to having had a second thought or two about writing this post. Was it, oh, perhaps a teensy weensy bit over the top? A tad intemperate? Might it be said to be lacking the attribute of scrupulous, Olympian fairness and evenhandedness? After all, in that paragraph about what's good about the New Republic, I left out a few names. Noam Scheiber, for example -- now he's a smartie! And Jonathan Cohn -- how could I forget Jonathan Cohn? As someone else put it, Cohn is "the best health care writer not named Ezra Klein."

But then I saw this, and every one of my self-doubts melted away in an instant. In the post, titled "Another Psychotic Creep Writing at The New Republic," Brad DeLong notes the latest charming addition to the New Republic stable, an academic named Philip Jenkins who's now writing for TNR's Open University.

On that blog, Jenkins has been gracing us with his pensees regarding Muslim history. There's this, for example:

[T]he Arabs actually borrowed their much-cited "Muslim science" (the astrolabe and so on) from the Nestorians and other Eastern Christians...

And this:

[I]t is rather rich to complain that after the Reconquista, "In an act of utter domination, the Christian king orders the great [Córdoba] mosque consecrated as a Catholic church." Actually, that mosque (like most major Spanish mosques) was itself built on the site of an earlier church.... [T]he purveyors of public broadcasting history have learned something; but they are still offering apologetics, not reality.

But wait, wait -- it gets better! Philip Jenkins, I thought: now where have I heard that name before?

And then it came to me -- of course! Philip Jenkins is the author of Pedophiles and Priests, an infamous screed about the child sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. It basically amounts to a defense of said pedophiles -- or "the childfuckers" (as my girl Kathy Griffin referred to them in an episode of this season's My Life on the D List).

As the great Garry Wills pointed out in this* memorable filleting of Jenkins in the New York Review of Books, Jenkins's work has been indispensable to reactionary Catholics who have attempted to cover up, downplay, and otherwise evade responsibility for the sexual abuse scandals. Wills wrote:

The principal villains he [Jenkins] found in the priest-pedophile crisis of the 1990s were anti-Catholics, greedy lawyers, self-promoting prosecutors, sensationalistic newspapers, therapists seeking clients, and feminists with their "theology of abuse." He never seems to consider the possibility that the panic was not manufactured, or that many factors impeded rather than promoted the revelation of priestly misconduct. Reluctance to believe, report on, or expose priests is deeply built into American culture.

American bishops and their defenders gladly promoted Jenkins's claim that there was nothing to the priest-pedophile phenomenon but bad faith on the part of those "exploiting" it. They even said that his testimony was stronger and more disinterested because Jenkins is not a Catholic. With his help they dismissed or minimized the "panic," which allowed Cardinal Bernard Law and others to continue sending accused priests about their ordinary ministry with the results we have seen in Boston and elsewhere. When Cardinal Law in the 1990s called down God's judgment on The Boston Globe, he was just putting in his own way Jenkins's attack on "the political interests of the activists and groups who used the media to project their particular interpretation of the putative crisis."

The New Republic -- employer of a defender of childfuckers. Well hey, I've got to hand it them -- it is entirely consistent with the house style of "contrarianism or death." Because the idea that childfucking is not such a bad thing is indisputably contrarian, is it not?

Congratulations, guys! I didn't think it was possible, but you've really outdone yourselves here! I can't think of a single thing you've done that's a more telling expression of your rotted soul.

*The Wills piece is available to subscribers only, but if you email me I'll send you a copy.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

Damn.  Just...damn.  Go read this (I've linked to Common Dreams, since the source article in Britain's The Independent seems to be, er, not available; the article was first published in The Independent, now with a working link):

My final argument - a clincher, in my view - is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything - militarily, politically diplomatically - it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as the Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon [sic] Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the “raver” bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Seen on the New York City Subway among several Bud Light ads allegedly in Spanish, one with the following text:

Tan bueno como encontrar un parking en frente al building

Good God. I have plenty of Latino friends who, when I tell them about this nonsense, they don't know whether to roll their eyes, laugh, puke or all three. I've informally polled a Colombian, Chilean, Argentinean, Dominican, Cuban, Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican, none of whom said that they have heard people butcher their language quite like that. Your subway advertisements are now as good as your beer.

Psst, Anheuser-Busch: the italicized words are not Spanish. I believe the words you're looking for are estacionamiento and edificio, respectively, if you're trying to say "As nice as finding a parking place in front of the building."

I'm not the only one who thinks they're idiotic.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Revenge is a dish best served cold or at least sarcastically as Richard Kluger hands the execrable Richard Brookhiser his head here. My favorite part? This:

It was an honor to be so subtly awakened from my self-deception by Mr. Brookhiser, who has honed his own skills by laboring for 30 years on the staff of National Review, a beacon of insightful commentary as well as fair and balanced judgment. Thanks, too, to your staff for selecting him. As we say out here in Berkeley, that iniquitous den of bluest liberalism, have a nice day.

Ouch!

By Kathy G.

What are we going to do about these people?

By “these people” I mean the Bush administration. How are we as a nation going to come to terms with the crimes and abuses of this President and his cronies? You know, the illegal (by international standards) war they started. The torture. The spying on political enemies. The unlawful detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. The lying to Congress. The criminal negligence during Katrina. The outing of an undercover intelligence agent for petty political revenge. The politically motivated firings of state attorneys general U.S. attorneys. The clearly unconstitutional claims of executive power. The corrupt deals with war profiteer contractors in Iraq. And on and on and on, the whole sickening mess.

One thing I feel certain we ought to do is to impeach this assclown ASAP. I see no political downside to that one whatsoever.

But beyond that, I’m stuck. Bush, Cheney et al. certainly ought to have their sorry asses hauled before an international tribunal and be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. But sadly -- na ga ha pen.

And have there ever been a President and Vice President more deserving of impeachment? But that probably won’t happen either, and I’m not sure it would even be politically productive. If successful, it would remove Bush and Cheney from office, which of course would be a blessing. But even impeachment and conviction would not necessarily establish a clear standard as to what are and are not acceptable actions by the chief executive. And what if, as seems likely, the effort to impeach failed?

I’m agnostic about the impeachment question (except for impeaching Gonzales, which to me is a no-brainer), but I believe it’s vital for the health of our democracy that Bush and company be held accountable in some meaningful way. Otherwise their behavior in office will set a horrible new precedent – “defining deviancy down” is the phrase, I believe. And next time out those sons of bitches will push the boundaries even further.

We’ve seen it happen in our lifetime. Every two-term Republican President we’ve had from Nixon on has provoked a constitutional crisis: Watergate, Iran-contra, and now the Bush scandals. We seem to have learned nothing from any of these crises – except that the Republicans have learned to be a lot smarter about covering up their crimes. Worse, you see the same people who were discredited in previous Republican criminal regimes coming back again and again. Karl Rove, for example, got his start as a teenage dirty trickster during the Nixon administration. Even people like John Poindexter and Elliot Abrams, who were convicted of crimes connected to the Iran-contra scandal, came back to serve in high-level positions in the Bush administration!

That is seriously fucked up. And I’m sickened by the idea of these bastards once again getting away with it. It reminds me of the lines from that great Watergate-era Bob Dylan song, “Hurricane” – “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / Are free to drink martinis, and watch the sun rise.” Jesus, what a bitter and depressing image. But you just know it’s going to happen.

And the Democrats, unfortunately, are not helping things. They haven’t exactly been profiles in courage on this issue, and that’s putting it mildly. I haven’t heard a single major Democratic presidential candidate even acknowledge that the Bush regime has provoked a constitutional crisis and that we need to find a way to resolve it. They seem as if they just desperately want this problem to disappear.

There is, however, an alternative to head-in-the-sand denial on the one hand, and impeachment on the other. In a post from a few weeks back that did not get nearly the attention it deserved, Mark Schmitt made a novel suggestion as to how we should deal with this mess: transitional justice, a process that would be modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal. He explains:

A post-Bush Truth Commission would have as its goal to discover as much as possible about the full range of conduct during the recent period, not only violations of law but other practices that had the effect of impeding democracy, and making recommendations about preventing them in the future, which might include everything from constitutional amendment to changes in oversight to suggestions for the press. The idea would be to find the boundaries within which democracy can work – lines which should not be crossed. The commission would not be empowered to indict anybody, but should be delegated subpoena power (this is legally complicated) along with a limited power to grant immunity to witnesses, as well as a complete commitment of cooperation from the next administration.

As they say, read the whole thing.

What do you all think? I’d be especially interested in hearing from anyone who has knowledge of or experience with transitional justice processes. What are the strengths and weaknesses of such a system? Would it be a good fit for the crimes and abuses of the Bush administration? What would the obstacles be to setting up such a commission and making sure it would be effective?

I’m dead serious about this. This is one of the most important conversations that those of us who care about the future of our democracy could be having.

By Ezra

Got tagged with one of these meme things, and this one strikes me as useful. So here are five blogs that make me think (to be distinguished from "Blogs I Think Are Always Right):

• Matt Yglesias: Still good after all these years!

• Dani Rodrik: Your best bet for counterintuitive, lefty economic thinking until Jamie Galbraith gets a blog, or Dean Baker generalizes out from media criticism.

• Marginal Revolution: Best understood as the economics version of Clarissa Explains It All. Has had the curious effect of changing the way I think about much of the world (Chinese restaurants and book length being good examples) while strengthening many of my preexisting beliefs on matters related to economic and social policy.

• The American Scene: You only understand 1/6th or so of the best Reihan posts, but they're definitely thought-provoking. They're sort of the Platonic Form of thought provoking, even if the thoughts is sometimes "whaaa?" Also, Peter Suderman is probably my favorite movie reviewer, and in fact one of my favorite rightwing writers, but I don't have the patience to wade through The Corner's oceans of Andy McCarthy to get to him. So it's useful to read him here.

• Kevin Drum: See the rationale for Matt. Additionally, Kevin's something of a reality check for me, as he tends to be clear-headed and careful in moments when I tend to get carried away.

I tag my commenters. Also, this is it for me till Monday, when I'll be back full-time. Thank your guestbloggers, tip your waitresses...

By Ezra

Remember that Simpson's episode where Homer eats Fugu, the poisonous blowfish whose flesh can kill you when improperly prepared? Well, I'm here to tell you that it's flesh is delicious when properly prepared, lightly fried, and doused in lime.

By Kathy G.

First, this one, complete with The. Most. Awesome. Headline. Ever.

"I'm the proud owner of Karl Rove's father's solid gold cock ring!"

(via Phoenix Woman at Firedoglake).

Then this, via Bean at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, in which journalist Gita Smith imagines the "oral arguments" (heh heh) that will ensue if the Supreme Court decides to hear a case about an Alabama law banning vibrators and other sex toys. Fun for the whole family!

Here's the late Molly Ivins in a classic clip, commenting about a similar law in Texas. If you've never seen it before this one it's a must, and well worth watching to the very end, otherwise you'll miss the best line (the clip is about 11 minutes long). God I loved that woman!

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

There's a whole lot that's wrong with the presidential primary system, but the DNC attempted to provide a slight improvement this year by moving Nevada and South Carolina forward.  Part of the thinking was that it would compensate for the whiteness of Iowa and New Hampshire by bringing in Nevada's Hispanics and the large number of black voters in the SC Democratic Party.  It would keep the nominating process in small states, so that the election wouldn't just fall to whoever could raise enough millions to hire an army of organizers and bomb a big media market with ads.  The continued prominence of Iowa and New Hampshire are pretty much indefensible, of course, and I hope that gets revisited next time. 

So the DNC's decision to punish Florida if it keeps trying to leapfrog the schedule is the right one.  Florida knew that they were breaking the schedule when they moved up, and they did it anyway.  At this point, the DNC can either threaten to deprive Florida of delegates, or watch the whole primary calendar disintegrate as states leapfrog each other and schedule surprise primaries for the day after tomorrow. 

One of the more annoying pieces of rhetoric in this comes from Florida Democrats waving the bloody shirt about the 2000 election:

So with time running out before today's showdown in Washington, Florida Democrats started something this week they never bothered with when the law rescheduling the primary was being debated, passed and signed: a full-court public relations offensive.

Party leaders and members of Congress dispatched indignant e-mails to voters, staged conference calls with reporters and even threatened to take Dean to court.

They blamed the Republicans who control the Florida Legislature and invoked the biggest bogeyman of all: the 2000 presidential recount.

''We're going to fight to have Florida Democratic votes counted,'' said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, the state's top Democrat. ``It's always been a top priority for the Democratic National Committee to protect the rights of every eligible American to vote, and we hope the DNC is going to continue to honor this right.''

But a major part of what happened in 2000 involved the Florida Democratic Party screwing the rest of the country -- without Democratic election supervisor Theresa LePore's butterfly ballot, we'd be living in a far better universe. And on that note, let me deliver the earnest snark of Chris Bowers from back when Florida moved its primary forward in violation of the DNC's schedule:

Florida is doing this, I guess, because they feel they don't already have enough say who becomes the next president. No state has suffered more than Florida from the indifference of presidential nominees to non-swing states. If Florida didn't have an early primary, it is highly doubtful that the presidential nominee of either party would ever spend a dime in the state, much less visit. It has been decades since Florida was the deciding state in a presidential election. This is truly a shame, because the air-tight voting systems in Florida fuel more confidence in the hearts of voters than those of any other state in the nation. While in other states, there really isn't a way to ever know who won an election, when people take office in Florida, you know that that person truly has the will of the electorate behind him or her. If more of our elections were like Florida's, then there wouldn't be any need for further election reform in the United States.

(Posted by John.)

So the summer's not even over yet, but Arctic ice is now at a record low.

The latest findings support an alarm issued last week by another climate expert at the University of Illinois that all-time records for maximum meltage of the polar ice cap will be "annihilated" by the time Arctic temperatures start turning colder in mid-September.

"Everyone is seeing the same thing," Mark Serreze, a senior researcher with the Boulder, Colo.-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, told CanWest News Service on Friday.

"The sea ice seems to be on this death spiral," he said. "And this is not some nebulous thing like global temperature rises. You can see this with your own eyes."

Worse still, the ice is already retreating below the limit that the IPCC predicted it would reach... in 2050.  There's going to be a slightly-fresher sea at the top of the world when we're done with this planet.

By Kathy G.

What Nicholas said.

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of meeting Darcy Burner at Yearly Kos. I attended nearly all of the feminist and women's sessions, and so did she. She was most impressive. Here's what was really cool about Darcy: unlike other candidates, she didn't just swoop in, introduce herself, make her little speech, and swoop out. She stayed. She listened. She seemed to care about what people had to say. And she made valuable contributions to the sessions.

For example, at one of the meetings we decided we wanted to create a wiki of women's media resources. Darcy volunteered her services and website to do this. And guess what? It was up the next day.

A little about Darcy: she's from the Seattle area and was a top executive at Microsoft. She's especially strong on women's issues, the environment, and civil liberties. In 2006 she came very close to beating her Republican opponent. She probably would have won if not for a last-minute dirty tricks operation, in the form of Republican headquarters making upwards of 500,000 phone calls spreading malicious lies about her (telling voters that she was going to be indicted, for example).

You can make a contribution to Darcy's campaign here.

By Kathy G.

Today I want to write about a new paper on the labor force participation of married women in the U.S. The paper is of interest in itself, and also for the light it sheds on the so-called opt-out question (the debate over whether women are opting out of the work force).

First, a little about the study. It's in the current (July 2007) issue of the Journal of Labor Economics and it's by Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, two Cornell labor economists who are among the foremost experts in the economics of gender. (The article is available by subscription only, but if you email me I'™ll send you a copy.) They look at married women's labor force participation rates between 1980 and 2000, and they found two very important results:

-- There was a dramatic increase in the labor supply (as measured in hours) of married women between 1980 and 1990, but only a relatively small increase between 1990 and 2000.

-- Married women'€™s labor supply was significantly less responsive to both their own and their husbands' wages.

Now, what does that second statement mean? Traditionally, women'€™s labor supply has been much more elastic than men'€™s. In economics elasticity refers to the percentage change in one thing with respect to a 1% change in another; in the case of labor supply, it refers to the percent change in employment induced by a 1% increase in wages. Historically, men's labor supply has been inelastic -- they'€™ll work about the same number of hours no matter what, whether their wages go up or down.

Women's labor supply, however, has been more sensitive to wages. If the wages they can earn increase, they will work a lot more; if they decrease, they will work a lot less. Their labor supply elasticity has worked in the opposite direction with respect to their husbands'€™ wages --€“ if their husbands wages increase, they will work less, and vice versa. The reason economists give for the difference is that women are much more likely than men are to substitute home production (childcare, housework, etc.) for market labor.

Blau and Kahn report that, over the 1980 to 2000 period, women's labor supply elasticity with respect to their own wage decreased by 50 to 56%, and their labor supply elasticity with respect to their husbands' wage fell by 38 to 47% in absolute value.

The authors use alternative models and estimation methods, but the results are robust to each specification. They also look at various subgroups, including age groups, educational groups, and mothers of young children, and find the same basic results. They write that the decline in women'™s labor supply elasticity

was pervasive and dramatic across a variety of dimensions, including education, race, age, and marital status. It appears that women in general have either become more committed to the idea of working or anticipate spending a larger portion of their lives without spouses, with both phenomena implying reduced own wage labor supply elasticities. The similarity in the decline in elasticities across subgroups suggests that this commitment or expectation cuts across skill levels and even family type.

One of the subgroups the authors looked at is mothers with young children, and here is where the opt-out debate comes in. Over the last several years, there have been numerous articles in the media purporting that women are "opting out" of the workforce. The New York Times, in particular, can'€™t get enough of these stories, which invariably focus on married women who are highly educated, upper middle class, and white.

The problem with these reports is that they tend to be based on anecdotal evidence that has little or no support in social science data. And since these stories are at the same time heavily hyped and thinly sourced, it raises real questions about media bias and reporters' ideological agendas. Experts who are familiar with the data, such as Claudia Goldin, the Harvard economist who is the leading scholar on the economic history of women, have repeatedly debunked the opt-out myth. But many journalists, and even some feminists like Linda Hirshman, continue to propagate the idea that career women are leaving the workforce in significant numbers. And while I find Hirshman's work stimulating and provocative, and agree with a lot of it, the fact that it's based on a false premise is highly problematic.

To be fair, not all of these media reports were pulled out of thin air (or "ex rectum," as a friend of mine likes to put it). A few of them mentioned actual honest-to-goodness data, like the statistics included in this BLS report, which do indeed show a decline in the labor force participation of mothers of young children between the late 90s and early 00s. But Houston, there is a problem here: the BLS reports raw numbers only, and that'€™s not the right way to analyze this question. Just looking at the raw data in isolation can provide a misleading picture.

For instance, if the composition of the labor force changes, something may look like a time trend which in reality is just an artifact of there being more of group X in the population relative to group Y. And indeed, some groups of women with children, like Hispanic women and foreign-born women, now constitute a larger share of the population, and are significantly less likely to be in the labor force than non-Hispanic and native-born women, respectively.

Another issue is the business cycle -- if a recession occurs that causes a decline in employment for both sexes, but you ignore that and just look at the employment of women only, it will look like a supply-side decline, when actually it's a decline that, like the decline in male labor force participation, is a demand-side phenomenon.

So, what has the actual data had to say about women's labor force participation, and particularly the labor force participation of mothers with young children? The afore-mentioned BLS paper claims that the labor force participation for married mothers peaked in 1997, then declined for several years, and has been more or less stable since 2000. But none of the studies I'm familiar with that model for labor force participation and control for population trends, the business cycle, and other issues (like measurement error, selection bias, and omitted variable bias) back up that claim.

The Blau/Kahn paper, for example, finds that, €œat least through the 2000 period, "married women with young children appeared to behave very similarly to married women overall" --“ i.e., they increased their labor supply throughout the entire period, decreasing their labor supply elasticity with respect to their own and their husband'™s rapidly in the 1980s and more slowly in the 1990s. Their paper only looks at data through 2000, and it'€™s possible that women's labor force behavior changed after this date. But according to the BLS paper, the decline in labor force participation among young mothers began in the late 1990s. The Blau and Kahn paper covers that time period but doesn't find evidence of this. (I should point out that these two papers use different datasets -- the BLS uses the monthly CPS data and Blau and Kahn use the annual March CPS survey).

Another paper by Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, looks at the issue using a different methodology. (Like the BLS paper, Boushey's paper is based on the monthly CPS data. Unlike the Blau/Kahn paper, this one has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal). Boushey models what she calls the "child penalty"€ on the likelihood of labor force participation, and finds that "after controlling for changes in demographics and the labor market, the negative effects of children on women's labor supply fell between 2000 and 2004." Though the raw data shows a decline in women's labor force participation during this period, according to Boushey the reason was the business cycle, and "œwhile women had previously been more insulated from cyclical unemployment, compared to men, now they appear to be nearly as vulnerable, although it remains the case that men'€™s employment rates fell further than women's over the past few years."

The bottom line appears to be that, controlling for demographics and the business cycle, the labor force participation of mothers with young children has slowed in recent years, but not declined. Perhaps we should be concerned about this slow-down, and in any case we should strongly support policies like government-mandated paid family leave and publicly provided child care, which better enable women to combine work and family. But the media-driven hype about women leaving the workforce and embracing more traditional roles is not grounded in empirical reality.

Rio gets so much attention and I love the city, but if given the choice between visiting Rio or Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia, I'd choose Salvador. One of the key factors is the musical history of Salvador.

For me it all starts with Dorival Caymmi

Not only has he written so many songs, but blessed us with his son Dori, a gifted songwriter in his own right. Although Toquinho is not a Baiano, few songs conjure up images of Salvador than his lovely Tarde em Itapuã, especially when he performsit with Gilberto Gil here (unfortunately the embedding is disabled). Gal Costa also hails from Salvador as does Caetano Veloso and Daniela Mercury They lift my spirits. i hope they lift yours.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

This is so silly. If Castro dies today, I certainly won't mourn him, but I have enough good sense to know that Cuba doesn't become a democracy tomorrow welcoming the exile community with open arms. Calm down.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

After seeing Barack Obama get nitpicked for saying sensible things about foreign policy, I hope that Hillary gets a lot more grief for saying things that are worse:

"But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world," Clinton told supporters in Concord.

"So I think I'm the best of the Democrats to deal with that," she added.

This is what it looks like when a candidate is simply running scared from the Republicans on foreign policy issues. If Republican incompetence results in loss of life due to terrorist activity, it ought to put them at a disadvantage. A candidate who has confidence on foreign policy issues will be able to make that happen.  And it's absolutely essential that it happen, for the safety of Americans. 

Dodd, Edwards, and Richardson have been criticizing Hillary's remarks, and good for them. 

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

It looks like he's making noises about a comeback. I know Bob Kerrey has an awful history of statements on Iraq, and likes to push his "maverick" image in a very Lieberman-esque manor. But Nebraska is very unfreindly territory; Kerrey's voting record is really quite good; and as awesome as Scott Kleeb or the Omaha mayor may be, I have to believe Kerrey would have a better shot at the seat than either of these two. If he can bring himself to tamp down on the kick-the-base schtick, and not join Lieberman's descent into paranoia when it comes to Middle East policy, he'd be worth fresh consideration.

by Stephen of the Thinkery

To followup on my previous post about sectarian violence in Iraq, the New York Times reports today that the "surge" of American troops, far from reducing sectarian divisions in Iraq, has actually contributed to an increase:

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Actively turning Iraq into a collection of homogeneous, heavily armed, insulated and well-defined geographic regions is hardly going to alleviate sectarian strife.  And here is a disturbing suggestion that the very plan put in action to deal with the problem of sectarian violence and division is making the problem worse.

Update:  ThinkProgress has an excellent compilation of facts - facts, not spin, not assumptions - regarding the results of Bush's "surge."  I'll reproduce the entire post after the jump, because it's just not possible to break it up.

Yesterday, the National Intelligence Estimate reported “measurable but uneven improvements” in the security situation in Iraq. While the White House has rushed to suggest that the modest gains were the result of escalation, the improvement can more plausibly be the product of Iraqi expectations of a U.S. withdrawal. (Some gains have also resulted because large numbers of Iraqis have fled their homes and ethnic cleansing has taken place.)

Much of the touted security gains have come in the Anbar province, a region that was not the target of Bush’s escalation. In fact, progress in Anbar pre-dated the surge and occurred while troop numbers were being reduced in the region.

The NIE states that local security arrangements such as those in Anbar province are being formed in response to imminent U.S. withdrawal, and that these “bottom up” security initiatives “represent the best prospect for improved security over the next six to 12 months”:

“[F]earing a Coalition withdrawal, some tribal elements and Sunni groups probably will continue to seek accommodation with the Coalition to strengthen themselves for a post- Coalition security environment” […]

“The IC assesses that the emergence of ‘bottom-up’ security initiatives, principally among Sunni Arabs and focused on combating AQI, represent the best prospect for improved security over the next six to 12 months, but we judge these initiatives will only translate into widespread political accommodation and enduring stability if the Iraqi Government accepts and supports them.”

In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged, “The debate in Congress…has been helpful in demonstrating to the Iraqis that American patience is limited.” It appears that the Iraqi expectation of a U.S. troop reduction has actually produced tangible progress.

The New York Times reported that Sunnis’ perception of an impending withdrawal changed their attitudes. “Many Sunnis, for their part, are less inclined to see the soldiers as occupiers now that it is clear that American troop reductions are all but inevitable, and they are more concerned with strengthening their ability to fend off threats from Sunni jihadists and Shiite militias,” the Times wrote in July. In fact, leading Sunnis continue to demand a timetable for withdrawal.

Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reported recently, “The apparent success of Petraeus’s shift from relying on U.S. military force to relying on Sunni troops to take care of al Qaeda could be used as an argument against continuation of the U.S. military presence in Anbar.” He added:

Recognition that there is a far more effective alternative to U.S. military operations to reduce al Qaeda’s influence would be a major blow to George W. Bush’s argument against a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops, which has relied increasingly on the threat of an al Qaeda haven in Iraq.

When we look at facts instead of assumptions about the nature of the Iraqi people, we start to see that perhaps what's really needed to secure Iraq is to do the following:

• Remove Iraq as a favorable destination for foreign terrorist groups
• Remove different groups' ability to claim favoritism on the part of American forces
• Remove outside meddling in everything from the highest levels of the Iraqi government down to where a particular police unit will patrol for the evening
• Give the people who actually live in Iraq, who understand the culture, who are a part of the various factions themselves to work on their own security problems and solutions.  This is happening, right now, in Anbar province and is, as noted above, the majority of the "success" that the Bush Administration is claiming for themselves.

What, pray tell, can we possibly take seriously from the Bush Administration?  They ram a "surge" down everone's throat, send tired, ill-equipped and even injured troops back to Iraq, claim that the "surge" will produce results within months and then, when their grand plans fail once again, take credit for what the Iraqis have been able to accomplish all on their own.

Oh, and they've whined constantly about the inability of the Iraqis to "take responsibility" for themselves the entire time.  How classy.

Obviously the lives of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens are worth far less to the Bush Administration and its enablers among the Very Serious People in DC than the fear that the same people who were right all along about the inadvisability of invading Iraq in the first place just might also be right about what a ridiculous idea the "surge" was in the first place.

The American presence in Iraq is a catalyst for violence, even sectarian conflict, as various groups believe that others are collaborating with the occupying force.  Our presence hinders Iraqi forces from acting as they see fit.  For the good of American soldiers and the Iraqi people, it's time to get out.  Anyone - anyone - who thinks that withdrawing American forces from Iraq would guarantee a worse situation that what we have now is misinformed to the point of possibly being delusional.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

How could I have missed this bit of lovely on Tuesday?  Oh yeah, it was the first full-day of school.  No matter--is it any less relevant today?  Sadly, No.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I can't really say I know why Darcy Burner has become such a netroots darling, but I am certainly not complaining, since she's awesome. Darcy represents a new generation of political leadership, and since she's not a career politician, she's capable of holding a conversation without immediately slipping into campaignspeak. She has a real commitment to civil libertarianism in an era that has almost none, and having worked in the tech sector understands the need to maintain the trust of average people that video recordings or telephone conversations will not be put to nefarious uses.

The GOP is going all out to protect her opponent, Dave Reichert, which will cost roughly $3 million dollars; money that they might spend defending lower-cost districts in the Midwest, Great Plains, or Mountain West. Reichert is holding a $500,000 fundraiser with George W. Bush next week.

This is your chance to fight back.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Over at TNR's The Plank, Christopher Orr points out that mainstream country music, while not quite reaching  Willie Nelson/Steve Earle levels of anti-war sentiment, is at least getting a lot more ambiguous than it was back in the crazy days of '02-'03. I wonder if David Brooks and all those other East Coast pundits who look to NASCAR and country music as a proxy for "Real America" will take notice.

Now if we can just get Tim McGraw to run for Senate against Lamar! Though I don't think he'll be swayed by conventional inducements like a seat on the Appropriations Committee. Perhaps someone can place a few calls and fix this year's CMAs ...

Update:  Sorry about the lack of a title; I know how it interrupts the flow of the page.

by Stephen of the Thinkery, who writes really long posts.  You have been warned.

I've been spending some time with McClatchy's Daily Iraq Violence Roundup, and it's fascinating and horrifying. Unlike what we might read in our local newspapers or hear on the US versions of cable news networks, this attempts to be as exhaustive a list as possible of the shootings, kidnappings, suicide bombs, IEDs, pitched battles, car bombs, mortar attacks - everything that goes on in a single day in Iraq. Even though McClatchy relies upon their own correspondents in Iraq who peruse police, military (US and Iraqi) and medical reports - as well as their own sources, to be sure - they admit that there is no way to give a complete record of all that happens.

Here's the report for yesterday, August 23rd:

    Baghdad

- Around 8 a.m., mortars hit the Green Zone ( IZ) . No casualties reported.

- Around 9 a.m., a roadside bomb exploded at Na’iriya area of New Baghdad neighborhood ( east Baghdad) killing 1 person and injuring 5 others.

- Police found (12 ) dead bodies in the following of Baghdad’s neighborhoods ( 8 ) in west Baghdad( Karkh bank) ; 2 in Amil, 2 in Huriyah , 1 in Saidiyah , 1in Mansour , 1 in Jihad and 1 in I’laam. While ( 4 ) were found in east Baghdad ( Risafa bank); 2 in Sadr city , 1 in Ur and 1 in New Baghdad.

- Soldiers from Troop C, 3rd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, were targeted by insurgents while patrolling in Jisr Diyala, southeast of Baghdad, Aug. 21. U.S. Soldiers were unhurt, but two local children were caught in a roadside bomb explosion, killing one child and injuring another. Capt. Darrell Melton, Troop C commander, a native of San Antonio, described the incident. “The trail Bradley gunner was waving at two kids who were riding their bikes and were waving at my guys,” Melton said. “The next thing the Bradley commander knew, one of the kids was gone in a puff and he was thrown backward in the hatch. When he looked back, the other kid was crawling on the ground.” Melton said his Soldiers immediately dismounted their Bradley Fighting Vehicle and cautiously approached the wounded child. It is not uncommon for improvised explosive devices to be emplaced in groups and detonated on first responders coming to provide aid. “He (the wounded child) crawled a few feet, when the medic on site, despite the danger, ran out to him, picked him up and ran back to the Bradley to administer first aid,” Melton said. The medic was able to stabilize the wounded child, Melton said. Troop C then evacuated the child to a U.S. Army medical facility nearby. Such incidents are not unique to Troop C. Soldiers from Company A, 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, came upon a grieving family in the course of a routine combat patrol Aug. 13 in Salman Pak. Capt. Chris Pearson, of Birmingham, Ala., met with a local banking official in Salman Pak to discuss issues and prospective solutions concerning the banking industry in the local area. After the meeting, a town councilman approached him with a father who had lost his son earlier in the day to a roadside bomb. Pearson said he did not talk directly to the father, but the councilman explained the father just wanted to bury his son in accordance with Muslim tradition. “I expressed the Coalition’s condolences,” Pearson said. “Even though the IEDs target police or Coalition Forces, they can hit children and families. They are the ones that suffer.” The councilman informed Pearson that the family was having trouble getting through checkpoints and requested U.S. Soldier assistance in traveling to the cemetery. “Just to make it easier, we had them travel with us,” Pearson said. After dropping off the family, Pearson’s element began movement to Combat Outpost Cahill, north of Salman Pak. While traveling to COP Cahill, Pearson’s unit received word that the grieving family had run into another IED as they were returning from the burial. No one was seriously injured in the second incident. Pearson further explained that National Police, local Iraqi Police, governmental leaders and Coalition Forces all play a role in maintaining security in the area. When Pearson’s unit arrived in March, the local populace and Iraqi Security Forces had not yet developed a trusting relationship. “There are still a lot of improvements that need to be made,” Pearson said. “Everyday it gets better. There are highs and lows. They’ve begun attending meetings together and as long as they are communicating, it’s helpful.”

Anbar

- On Tuesday ( August 21) , a suicide bomber targeted a police check point at Dam street in Falluja (62 km west of Baghdad) injuring two people and he was killed by police.

Kirkuk

- Police found a dead body on Wednesday night for a civilian man ( 40 to 45 years old) at Ajaj village of Riadh district ( west of Kirkuk).

- Wednesday night, a car bomb targeted a convoy for a member of Hawija council board ( west of Kirkuk) injuring one guard who was transferred to hospital.

- Wednesday night, police arrested the media man of 1920th battalions in Kirkuk during a raid in Wahid Huzayran ( June 1st ) neighborhood in Kirkuk city.

Mosul

- Wednesday night, Iraqi army killed four gunmen during clashes took place at Noor neighborhood ( downtown Mosul city). In addition to that ,the army defused two car bombs at Harmat ( west Mosul) , Iraqi army said.

That medic from Troop C is a hero. He shouldn't have to buy his own drinks for the rest of his life. Even as our political leaders play their stupid games with each other, making our soldiers' mission more and more impossible, American troops do this type of thing every day. How I wish the rest of us could provide leadership worthy of their sacrifices and heroics.

Aside from the report on American troops, what you may notice is how it is Iraqi government forces and interests that are attacked the most. This bears out when looking through the other daily violence roundups. The majority of the attacks are upon Iraqi police, military and political leaders, along with government buildings. After that it's usually American patrols that are targeted. There's always dead bodies that have been found in various parts of Baghdad and at times other cities. Usually there's some mortar attacks (which seem to be rather ineffective), and then there's some car bombs and suicide bomb attacks.

What has really struck me about all this is how it doesn't completely fit the narrative of ethnic/religious violence about which we are constantly told. Don't misunderstand:  I know that Iraq has serious problems with ethnic and religious violence. However, most of the reports that come straight from the source, as opposed to being run through a White House/Pentagon/media filter, paint a picture of most of the violence being Iraqi and American forces under direct attack. And much of the rest of the violence simply has an unknown motivation. Was X attack that occurred in Y neighborhood religiously motivated? We don't know.

In a nation as awash in military-level ordnance as Iraq, it stands to reason that the violent crime wave which always accompanies the chaos of war would feature explosives and automatic weapons. How much of the violence that occurs in Iraq each day is a result of rival crime factions fighting one another? Or takes place during the a crime committed for monetary gain rather than ethnic strife? Again, we don't know.

What I do know, however, is that attributing the chaos and violence in Iraq almost completely to ethnic and religious motivations fits into a longstanding attitude that Americans have regarding themselves and other peoples. One of the legacies of Enlightenment thought is that technological development is accompanied by spiritual and moral development, and this is as true of "secular" people as it is Christians. In fact, the reason Fundamentalist Christians are trying to push things like Intelligent Design has more to do with the need to see their belief system as fundamentally rational than it does proselytization.  (See more I wrote about this here.)

Violence committed in the name of religion or ethnicity is irrational; everyone knows that. That's why we only commit violence in the name of democracy, freedom and defense. The fact that we have a higher level of technological development in this country than say, Iraq, means that we're more rational than they. If Iraqis are less rational, it stands to reason that their motivations for committing violence will be ethnic and religious in nature. Even if the target of that violence happens to be American soldiers, we can safely assume that it was Sunni or Shiite or Kurdish hatred that motivated it. Even if the target is an Iraqi police patrol made up of both Sunnis and Shiites, we can be sure that the motivation for the attack was hatred of either Sunnis or Shiites.

Again, I'm not trying to suggest that ethnic and religious violence doesn't happen. But making the assumption that all or even most of the violence in Iraq comes from those motives simply ignores the facts on the ground.

More troubling, though, is how such a belief plays into the Bush Administration's hands regarding the continued presence of American soldiers in Iraq. If much of the violence in Iraq is motivated by the presence of American soldiers and the perception that the Iraqi government is a bunch of puppets doing their American masters' bidding, then the longer American soldiers stay in Iraq, the worse the violence will be. If the Iraqi government is hated because people think that it's supporting American interests in opposition to Iraqi interests, then the longer American dictates its actions, the worse the violence will get.

However, if the violence in Iraq can be traced to the irrationality of ethnic and religious violence, then the presence of inherently rational actors like Americans will only improve the situation. Obviously, then, things will only get worse if Americans leave, because we would then just be leaving the irrational Iraqis to fend for themselves, and they will not be able to stop themselves from exploding into a vicious orgy of violence.

That outcome is by no means assured. Perhaps American troops are having a net benefit upon the levels of violence in Iraq. However, the discussion that needs to happen is an honest assessment of the truth of this, rather than assumptions based more in a belief of American exceptionalism than the facts coming out of Iraq.

Yum.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

I don't know about you, but after a week of getting up at 5:30 am, packing lunches and wrestling with three boys who are loathe to give up their summer sleep-ins, I am utterly wiped-out this morning. So here's a little selfishly-motivated something to get the old blood flowing--there will be plenty of time for the relaxing stuff later today.

FZ said Peaches En Regalia was one of his favorite pieces.  Mine, too. Tearing up the drums is brilliant Terry Bozzio, whose audition for Mr. Zappa was reportedly so over-the-top stunning, the remaining dummers who'd been waiting in line turned around and left. I'm uncertain as to the year (and place) this was performed From SNL's December 11th, 1976 episode--help me out thanks, Darkblack and kingmob.

Bon Weekend, everyone.

(H/T MiNo20320514)

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

John Edwards once got a debate question about how he could consistently rail against corporate lobbyists while accepting lots of donations from trial lawyers.  Aren't they just as bad?  And how about the other group that likes Edwards so much -- organized labor? 

The answer is simple.  If you think that consumers have been robbing corporations blind, or that the balance of power between workers and executives is unfairly tilted against executives, then these donors should make you look darkly at John Edwards.  But if you think consumers need better protection against corporations whose products disembowel little girls, or if you think that the next president needs to fight tooth and nail for working people's interests, you should be happy that trial lawyers and unions support him.  If you like the status quo, or if you want a candidate who can be an impartial referee between the interests of corporations and consumers, or between business and labor, you might want a candidate who has no strong ties to either side.  But the teams aren't equal in this country.  America needs a president who's wearing the progressive movement's jersey, not a referee's stripes. 

I take that to be at the core of the big speech that John Edwards gave in New Hampshire.  He provides three examples of areas where corporate money has blocked progress in Washington -- health care, energy, and economic policy.  He describes how he'll fight his way through corporate opposition to pass a number of specific policies to deal with these problems -- his much-admired universal health care plan, a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a whole basket of progressive economic policies including minimum wage increases and pro-union reforms.  And then:

I have stood with ordinary Americans at the most difficult times in their lives, when all the power of corporate America was arrayed against them. I have walked into courtrooms alone to face an army of corporate lawyers with all the money in the world. I have walked off the Senate elevator and been besieged by an army of corporate lobbyists. And I have beaten them over and over again.

But let me tell you one thing I have learned from my experience -- you cannot deal with them on their terms. You cannot play by their rules, sit at their table, or give them a seat at yours. They will not give up their power -- you have to take it from them.

We cannot triangulate our way to real change. We cannot compromise our way to real change. But we can lead to real change. And we can start today.

That's the message of a man who knows which side he's fighting for, and who's under no illusions about how hard he's going to have to fight.  If we pass fundamental health care reform or any number of other major progressive measures in the next presidential term, it'll be under this kind of leadership, and nothing less.  So this poor graduate student is happy to join the trial lawyers and the men and women of organized labor by throwing another hundred dollars to the John Edwards campaign.  Click here if you'd like to join me.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

I have listened to Paulinho da Viola for years and have never been disappointed by this wonderful, joyous musician. He's equally adept at playing choro and samba and is a gifted composer.

Here he is performing with Marisa Monte one of his best works, the haunting Dança de Solidão

They are paired again for what may be one of the world's greatest love songs, Carinhoso, written by Pixinguinha and João Braguinha:

Paulinho is also fascinating on his own

I have just recently become acquainted with Yamandu Costa, an uncommonly talented guitarist featured in the film Brasileirinho. He plays the challenging 7-string guitar. One wonders how what is in his heart comes out so beautifully through his fingers.

Here he is in a trio setting. I'm wondering why he had the bass player. After all he plays a pretty decent bass himself with that seventh string.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

This is why I really believe as I mentioned here that easing the overcrowding of prisons is so important in fighting crime in Brazil:

Twenty-five inmates died in a fire early Thursday after inmates rounded up rivals in a cell and set mattresses ablaze to kill them, police said.

The prisoners could not escape the blaze in what appeared to be a settling of scores between rival gangs in the lockup in Ponte Nova in the south-central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, said police Lt. Andrea Amara Lopes.

Prisons in Brazil have too often become training grounds for criminal enterprises and development centers for gangs. Overcrowding adds fuel to the fire and the result is what happened today. The only good news to come out of the this - and it really not very good news - is that the prison will be emptied for now with the prisoners going to other prisons throughout Minas Gerais. The reason being that the fire destroyed the top floor of the prison.

One wonders what the guards were doing.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Knowing that Fiorella Maza is  back in Peru certainly makes me feel safer. This Peruvian track star, college student and ballet dancer was clearly a threat to our values:

Fiorella Maza, a standout student, ballet dancer and track star, had just started her freshman year at Miami Dade College when immigration agents knocked on her door.

Instantly, her middle-class American life was turned upside down.

Maza now spends most of her time inside a drafty old home in Peru's capital city. She's dislodged from her circle of friends, socially disoriented. She speaks only rudimentary Spanish.

''I never thought I could be sent to Peru,'' said Maza, 19, who was brought to West Kendall illegally as a toddler and was deported in March. ``It's like a foreign country to me.''

Don't get outraged just yet. Save your anger for this:

A federal judge dropped charges against former CIA operative and anti-Castro Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles on Tuesday, blasting what she called government "fraud, deceit and trickery" in an interview with Posada that led to the charges.  

Posada, 79, was charged with seven counts of immigration fraud. He was arrested in Miami in May 2005 after entering the country illegally.

U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone ordered Posada's electronic bracelet cut off in the courtroom Tuesday and cleared the way for him to return to Miami a free man.  

Posada's attorney, Arturo Hernandez, told CNN the ruling was "an incredible legal victory."

The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security said they were reviewing Cardone's decision.

Remember Orlando Bosch?

On October 6th, 1976 Cubana Flight 455 was destroyed after takeoff by a bomb detonation that had been placed in the aircraft toilets in which all seventy-three people on board were killed, including many young members of a Cuban fencing team. Five people from North Korea were also killed on board the flight. This bombing would have been plotted at the same meeting, attended by Luis Posada Carriles and DINA agent Michael Townley, where Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier's assassination, in Washington, D.C. in 1976, was decided. Bosch was jailed in Venezuela awaiting trial for his role concerning the Cubana Flight 455 bombing, but he was never convicted of these charges.

In 1968 Bosch was arrested in Florida for an attack on a Polish freighter with a 57 mm recoilless rifle and was as a result sent to prison for a ten year term. In 1987, almost a decade after the Flight 455 incident, Bosch was freed from Venezuelan charges and went to the United States, assisted by US Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich; there, he was ultimately arrested for a parole violation. Bosch was pardoned of all American charges by President George H.W. Bush on July 18, 1990 at the request of his son Jeb Bush, who later became Governor of Florida; this pardon was despite objections by the then President's own defense department, that Bosch was one of the most deadly terrorists working "within the hemisphere." Although many countries seek Bosch's extradition he remains free in the United States. The political pressure to grant Bosch a pardon was begun during the congressional campaign run by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, herself a Cuban American, and overseen by her campaign manager Jeb Bush. The resultant pardon reputedly saw huge celebrations in Miami, in what was then called 'Free Orlando Day.'"

Like father, like son.

George Bush's America: protecting us against Peruvian teenagers, providing refuge for a terrorist. The mind reels.

By Kathy G.

Via James Wolcott comes the sad news that Grace Paley has passed away.

Paley, who was 84, was a great stalwart of the antiwar and women's movements, a New Yorker through and through, and a prodigiously gifted writer. If you've never read her, do yourself a favor and pick up her Collected Stories. You'll be dazzled by her warmth, wit, passion, empathy, and colloquial eloquence.

By Ezra

Though I sympathize with many of the sentiments in Kathy's blast against TNR, I feel compelled to say that I don't think this is right:

The obnoxious white boy entitlement complex probably also explains why TNR has harbored more than its share of frauds and fantasists. Because if you’re as special as we are who needs fact-checkers, right?

I know a lot of the folks in the TNR fact-checking department, and I don't know of another Washington magazine where verification is taken half so seriously. There are various theories as to why TNR's gotten punk'd so many times -- including that they strive for Atlantic-style long-form narrative articles while on an American Prospect style budget -- but the place is littered with fact-checkers , and they do their best. The nature of this medium lends itself to fabulists, and only so much can actually be fact-checked. TNR has come in for more than their share of liars, but that seems more like bad luck and a soft spot for narrative work -- which can evade fact-checking, as it relies on personal integrity -- than an attitudinal issue. And given the mania over Beauchamp's article, I think it's important to point that out.

Indeed, it's a shame that so much attention is given to untrue narratives -- which, really, can only be protected against so much, and are published because readers love them -- and so little offered to untrue arguments. The Weekly Standard, which led the charge against Beauchamp, is a locus of bullshit, from flagrantly untrue portrayals of Iraq to discredited supply-siderism, but somehow, such quackery never attracts The New York Times' notice. We demand truth in our colorful tales but accept lies in our serious arguments about public policy. It's infuriating.

By Kathy G.

I’ve been mulling over this post for a while, but postponed writing it. Then I saw this (via Yglesias), and I decided, you know what? That is the last fucking straw.

New Republic, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:

1. I hate the way it is, and has always been, such an Ivy League white boy wankfest. The late, great Steve Gilliard used to say that TNR’s motto was “Looking for a qualified black since 1916” and there is much truth in that. The women writers are also few and far between, and tend to be relegated to girly subjects like poetry and book reviews, not the manly realms of politics and policy.

The sexual and racial uniformity is offensive on principal, of course. Moreover, in practice, it is one of the factors that has caused TNR to suck so hard. For example, there’s the classic TNR genre of pointless look-how-clever-I-am contrarianism. Only in a culture as insular, inbred, and out-of-touch as TNR’s could a style of argument as inane and precious as this one flourish. The obnoxious white boy entitlement complex probably also explains why TNR has harbored more than its share of frauds and fantasists. Because if you’re as special as we are who needs fact-checkers, right?

2. TNR is the Great Journalistic Wanker Machine. Have you ever been reading something on the internets, or listening to some Very Serious Person on the radio or teevee – and thought to yourself: “Shit, the dude who wrote this, or is yammering away on my teevee, is one serious wanker. That just might be the most wankeriffic thing I’ve heard all month! Or all year, even!”

Well, chances are, my friend, that the wanker you’ve had inflicted on you got his start in journalism at, or otherwise spent a significant chunk of their career at, The New Republic. TNR is responsible for foisting more first-class wankers on a blameless public than virtually any other media outlet.

Why, there’s Wanker Most Valuable Player Martin Peretz! Wanker All-Stars Lee Siegel, Peter Beinart, and Jeffrey Rosen! And Wanker Rookie of the Year James Kirchick!

Along with, of course, a veritable Hall of Fame of Wankers Emeritus: Mickey Kaus! Fred Barnes! Morton Kondracke! Charles Krauthammer! James K. Glassman (remember Dow 36,000? Sure you do!)! Michael Kelly! Robert Kagan! Robert Kaplan! Benjamin Wittes! Gregg Easterbrook! Jacob Weisberg! William Saletan! Andrew Sullivan! Camille Paglia!

I know, I know – Mommy, make it stop!

3. The biggest reason of all why I hate TNR, though, is this: the New Republic is the Number One Bitch of the American right.

Whenever conservatives needed the bipartisan cover of an allegedly liberal institution to promote their latest harebrained foreign policy adventure, or reactionary reversal of a longstanding progressive public policy, or vicious smear of progressive American ideas, institutions, and individuals, the New Republic was at the ready, as eager to service them as a brothel full of open-ass punks.

Latecomers to this sordid tale may be under the impression that the New Republic’s fall from grace began with its shameless shilling for the Iraq War, but it didn’t begin there, and it won’t end there, either. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and revisit some of those golden moments of yesteryear, shall we?

Over the past two decades, as the right gathered strength and began their attempt to systematically destroy each and every venerable accomplishment of liberalism, here are some of the policies and ideas the New Republic enthusiastically endorsed:

-- a full-service menu of wingnut foreign policy positions, from aid to the contras in Nicaragua during the 80s to saber-rattling against Iran today to the full-throated support of every batshit crazy thing Israel has ever done;

-- well, to put it bluntly, racism – through everything from TNR’s obsessive attempts to discredit Jesse Jackson and its opposition to affirmative action to Martin Peretz’s many ugly insinuations about Arabs and, in what is perhaps the most shameful episode in the magazine’s history, the publication of an excerpt from Charles Murray’s crackpot pseudoscientific racist tract, The Bell Curve;

-- via an error-ridden article by a hack from a wingnut think tank, the torpedoing of Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal, which was the only real shot we’ve had at universal health care in decades;

-- a host of reverse Robin Hood neoliberal economic policies and ideas, from NAFTA to welfare reform to privatizing Social Security to reflexive union-bashing;

-- the gutting of Roe v. Wade (via Jeffrey Rosen’s cute argument that because of alleged flaws in the legal reasoning of Roe, we’d all be better off if abortion was left to the states – try telling that to any poor, pregnant, and desperate woman in red state America);

-- the wingnut persecution of Bill Clinton, in the form of the bullshit Whitewater and Monica “scandals;”

-- Joe Lieberman’s ass-tastic 2004 campaign for President (yes, believe it or not, he got their endorsement); and

-- the recent changes to the FISA law that more or less gave the Bush administration a license to spy on any and all of their political enemies.

Have I forgotten anything?

It could be argued that, in recent years, TNR has reversed course on a host of issues, and indeed it has – it did a 180 on affirmative action, the economic policies it now endorses are a lot more populist, and many of its writers have reversed themselves on the Iraq war.

And it could be pointed out that even today, The New Republic still produces some first-rate journalism – just in the past week, for example, there was this and this. Interspersed occasionally among the wankers, it’s also published a host of terrific writers, including Thomas Frank, Rick Perlstein, Chris Hayes, Spencer Ackerman, James Wolcott, and Terry Castle. It gave my favorite political writer, Thomas Geoghegan, his start in journalism. It must be said, however, that none of those writers, except Ackerman (now departed) and I believe Geoghegan, has ever held a staff position on TNR.

Among current and recent staff writers, I’m a fan of Jonathan Chait’s writing on economics and tax policy. I thought Ryan Lizza’s devastating piece on George Allen was a service to the nation (because, believe me, without it the Senate would still be in Republican hands and we’d be dealing with that gigantic asshole as the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination).

But if you focus on the high points of TNR, you miss the forest for the trees. As a journalistic institution, TNR plays a unique role in the development of policy and politics. Its circulation has always been low (and in recent years has declined drastically), but many of the people who read it are very powerful: media elites, D.C. lobbyists and activists, and policymakers in the White House and the Senate, and on Capitol Hill. If TNR supports a particular policy or idea, that carries serious weight, especially when what it supports is conservative. It enables the right to say, “Even the liberal New Republic endorses X,” and that has tremendous credibility and resonance. It doesn’t matter if 19 out of 20 articles in a given issue are liberal; the one wingnutty one out of the 20 will, by virtue of its setting, be all the more influential.

To explain it a little more fully: I remember an example I had in a game theory class, where a leader is deciding to go to war or not. The leader has two advisers, one known to be a hawk and the other known to be a dove. The basic insight was that the leader would tend to listen more seriously to a dove urging war or a hawk urging peace, because the advice each was giving would be against type, and thus had extra credibility. That’s why politicians like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman are so deeply damaging to Democrats, because when they say anti-war Democrats are unpatriotic, uninformed people will think there’s something to it. Whereas when Bush and Cheney say such things it’s par for the course.

The same principle applies to the New Republic: when a venerable liberal institution like TNR strongly endorses a breathtaking range of illiberal positions, and starts smearing liberals who disagree with them as extremist and unpatriotic in the bargain, the damage it does to the liberal cause is profound.

The New Republic’s 25-year jihad against liberalism has had dire consequences for this country, and the world. Under this administration, we have seen the needless and tragic annihilation of one of the great American cities. We’ve seen economic inequality soar to near-record levels. We’ve seen a Supreme Court habitually given to reactionary reversals of long-settled doctrines, like Brown v. Board of Education. We’ve seen a religious right sufficiently emboldened to broaden its anti-abortion campaign and start targeting a woman’s right to birth control as well. We’ve seen global warming develop apace, with our leaders making zero serious efforts to control it. We’ve seen a dangerously ignorant and frighteningly out-of-control chief executive who seemingly delights in pissing all over the Constitution at any opportunity.

And then there’s the little matter of those 500,000 rotting corpses in Iraq, and a national reputation that is in tatters all over the world, and will likely remain that way for decades.

Though God knows they weren’t the only ones, New Republic played an indispensable role in enabling these maniacs, every step of the way.

And now these pricks want to say they’re sorry? Well -- cry me a river, bitches.

In short: New Republic, fuck you very much.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Over the past few days, you may have noticed a story on the Internets about Michigan's attempts to push its state primary or caucus to January 15th. This is the front page of the Lansing State Journal's website, the paper of record in Michigan's state capitol.

You won't find mention of the 2008 primary in this image; you have to go to the "Capitol" section, and even there its the second story behind the state budget. I don't have anything insightful to say on this topic; I just thought it was worth pointing out.

To make up for the Churrascaria blogging earlier. Here's the sun breaking through the clouds over Ipanema. And on that note, I'm off to the beach.

By Ezra

Andrew Sullivan is quite pleased that the US is #1 in cancer survival rates. So am I! Problem is, we don't know what that means. The US has the most aggressive tumor screening in the world. That means we find some tumors earlier, but we also find many tumors that would have been non-lethal, or proven so slow-growing that something else would have killed the individual before the cancer did. In those cases, our treatments are, at best, an enormous waste of money, and at worst, more damaging than the disease. The question is how many otherwise lethal cancers we're curing, not merely how many cancers we're curing (or slowing).

Moreover, simply having the highest survival rates isn't a particularly useful metric of whether we're getting good value for our money. Our 5-year cancer survival rate, according to the study Andrew links, is 62.9%. Italy's is 59%. Italy spends about $2,532 per person. America spends about $6,100. And these numbers, incidentally, are adjusted for purchasing power parity. Then there's the question of who our treatment is best for. Not the poor. Studies show significantly lower mortality rates for the low-income cancer patients in Canada than in the US. Is this all a good deal? Maybe. But Sullivan should explain why we should believe that.

At the end of the day, the question is never American health care: Good or bad. It's whether it can be better. It's whether we get good value for our dollar. It would be absurd if a system that spends twice what anyone else does didn't demonstrate superiority in some areas. The question is why so few, and why by such minor margins (a percent or two, in this case). It baffles me -- genuinely baffles me -- that conservatives seem so intent on defending an obviously bad deal. I don't know if it's a reflexive, for-what-the-left-is-against kind of thing, or whether they're worried about the specter of a single-payer system very few people support, but it leaves them clinging to scraps of evidence, and ignoring vast swaths of the story.

For more on the cancer question, see Jon Cohn's excellent column on the subject.

By Ezra

A Churrascaria is a type of Brazilian eatery where you pay a fixed amount of money in exchange for an unlimited amount of meat. Tuxedoed waiters wander the floor with spits of meat, carving off slices for every customer whose mouth is too full or whose Portuguese is too rudimentary to say no. For awhile, this is The Most Awesome Thing Ever. But then the meat comes faster and faster, and you get fuller and fuller, and you rapidly begin to feel like Lucy at the chocolate factory, only instead of delicious pieces of chocolate, your plate is piled high with cooling cuts of partially cooked flesh. This is sort of awesome. Which is why I took a picture of it. It's also sort of gross. Which is why the picture is below the fold:

By Kathy G.

Via Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok has a unique and highly diverting solution to the low-information voter problem. He proposes a multi-part game show for the candidates:

Coase it Out: Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. (Bonus points are awarded if the candidate convinces the couple to stay together.)

Game Theory: Candidates compete in a game of Diplomacy. I would also include several ringers - say Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan and Salma Hayek. Why these three? Robin is cold, calculating and merciless - make a logical mistake and he will make you pay. Bryan is crafty and experienced. And Salma? I couldn't refuse her anything but presidents should be made of stronger stuff so we need a test.

Spot the Fraud: Presidential candidates are provided with an economic scenario (mortgage defaults are up, hedge funds are crashing, liquidity is tight). Three experts propose plans. The candidate must choose one of the plans. After the candidate chooses, the true identities of the "experts" are revealed. One is a trucker, another a scuba diver instructor and the last a distinguished economist. Which did the candidate choose?

It takes a special breed of economics nerd to imagine something like this, but I kind of like it.

One objection I have is putting Salma Hayek on the Game Theory panel, because unless a male equivalent is added, Hillary would have an unfair advantage. So I suggest we include George Clooney as well. I already think Hillary is tougher than the rest of the candidates put together. But if she can withstand a sultry glance from Clooney without dissolving into a warm puddle on the spot, she truly is an Iron Lady. Or made up of far sterner stuff than I am, at least.

N.B.: Tabarrok says he is dead serious about this. What do you think?

And do you think part of Tabarrok's attraction to Salma Hayek might be his unconscious association of her with this dude, who shares the same last name?

Let's start with Hermeto Pascoal. Multinstrumentalist doesn't do him justice. Put him in the kitchen and he'll play your teakettle. Put him in your daughter's room and he'll make music from her dolls. Got some pvc pipe and cinderblocks? He's got a marimba of sorts.

He grew up albino in Brazil's Northeast, which meant that when his friends headed for the sun and the beach, he had to escape to the forest and the shade. The sounds of the forest continue to haunt his playing.

Of course he does play in somewhat larger venues, too:

A more straight ahead player - and a brilliant composer and arranger - is Moacir Santos

Carlos Malta, who used to be a member of Hermeto's band, in addition to playing with artists such as Gilberto Gil, also leads a band called Pife Muderno, playing instrumental popular in the Northeast of Brazil.

This clip is even better:

Finally, there is the late, lamented Sivuca. You've probably never an accordion played quite like this: Enjoy!

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

After backing it up with expert opinion, Scott Lemieux makes the commonsense response to the argument that giving people health insurance creates moral hazard:

The thing is, being healthy is its own powerful incentive. Maybe I'm unusual, but even though I have decent health insurance I don't actually enjoy being sick, bedridden, in physical pain, spending time in doctor's offices, etc. Do people really think it's common -- even subconsciously -- for someone with a relatively healthy lifestyle to get health insurance and see that as an opportunity to go on that all Popeye's, deep-fried HoHos, and Cutty Sark diet they've been hankering for? I don't understand this reasoning at all. There may be room for some minor disincentives at the margin, but the idea that universal healthcare won't work because the possibility of being bankrupted by medical bills is the major incentive people have to be healthy is bizarre.

The fact that insurance will cover your tracheotomy doesn't make smoking more appealing.  When people with the means to do otherwise persist in unhealthy lifestyles, it's usually because they're pursuing some minor present satisfaction at the expense of what they acknowledge as a greater future good.  It's among the most common forms of human irrationality, and it's something that public policy has to deal with in a lot of areas. You're not going to change their behavior by throwing a future financial crisis on top of the future medical crisis that they're already risking.  If the heart attack or the tracheotomy is too far in the future to motivate them, adding the threat of future bankruptcy isn't going to make a difference. 

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Grim, one of the faintly reasonable contributors at BLACKFIVE, lays out the stakes in the Petraeus/Crocker/White House report:

We're getting closer to the Petraeus report, and therefore to the next phase of the national debate on Iraq.  Let us be clear what our alternatives are.  Commitment by America to see things through is one option.  The other set of options pursues withdrawal on one set of terms or another, sooner or later, according to one of several plans or sets of guidelines.

Grim then proceeds to lay out a dire scenario where Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey engage in a series of proxy wars in the land currently know as Iraq. But this scenario implies that the United States will pull its troops and private contractors out of Iraq and do nothing else, which is a total strawman. Indeed, everyone running for President on this side of the aisle recognizes the potential for dire consequences of withdrawal; they just tend to think that vigorous diplomacy has a just as much if not greater chance of offsetting the damage as an indefinite troop presence of 150,000+ that actively patrols city streets and engages in air strikes. The US has carrots and sticks to use in potential negotiations with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran as well as some the various bad actors in Iraq that we might convince to help build up an unoccupied Iraq rather than tear it down.

Meanwhile, as I've said before, war supporters really do bear some burden in demonstrating that the Petraeus plan can lead to relative stability even after US troops leave. The Anbar stories are modest success, but Anbar doesn't have the same inter-ethnic conflict that you find in places like Baghdad or Kirkuk. How the US military is going to convince local Shia and Sunni leaders to sit at a table and hash out a deal still seems to be an unanswered question.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Via Steve Clemons, Nir Rosen seems to have it right: "First of all, the Iraqi government doesn't matter." Changing the names that go alongside titles in the Iraqi government will do very little, since at this point the government has no legitimacy with the average Iraqi on the streets and is not providing them with any security, electricity, or ... well ... anything. The question at this point is how to salvage a "least bad" outcome, which is going to mean the US must be willing to work with the leaders who do have legitimacy on the streets of Kirkuk, Mosul, and elsewhere. This isn't something that can really be done solely by career military and civil service professionals; politically appointed principals will have to get involved to show the rest of the Middle East and the Iraqi public that they care enough to try to make a difference.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

Crackpotpress contributor Dave, a freelance writer and Type 1 diabetic whose health care has been covered by COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985) for the past year, just learned that the carrier has cancelled his policy:

Here's the deal, I've been working freelance for the last year and been paying Cobra.

Well, the jackasses at the COBRA SERVE NATION (sic) (from Florida) upped my policy by $15 and changed my due date UP two weeks. I received no notification of this.

When they got the regular payment I had been electronically transferring every month, they said "Whoa! You're late! You're short! You're CANCELLED! Effective immediately." I’m not quoting but that was the feel.

Here's the rub, as many of you know, I am a type-one diabetic. This means I am uninsurable across the board. I have about a month’s worth of insulin left. I am truly lucky to have the cash today to pay uninsured premiums. Today.

   According to the Department of Labor website:

The initial premium payment must be made within 45 days  after the date of the COBRA election by the qualified beneficiary.  Payment generally must cover the period of coverage from the date of COBRA election retroactive to the date of the loss of coverage due to the qualifying event.  Premiums for successive periods of coverage are due on the date stated in the plan with a minimum 30-day grace period for payments.  Payment is considered to be made on the date it is sent to the plan.

If premiums are not paid by the first day of the period of coverage, the plan has the option to cancel coverage until payment is received and then reinstate coverage retroactively to the beginning of the period of coverage.       If the amount of the payment made to the plan is made in error but is not significantly less than the amount due, the plan is required to notify you of the deficiency and grant a reasonable period (for this purpose, 30 days is considered reasonable) to pay the difference.  The plan is not obligated to send monthly premium notices.   

Dave paid his premiums regularly, and on time, using an electronic payment system accepted--and presumably set up--by the carrier.  And while the company may not be obligated to send monthly premium notices, surely they are obligated to notify a person, in writing, when and if they have raised said premiums and moved up the due date, particularly when that person is on record as using an automated, pre-scheduled payment system?

Feel free to offer your thoughts on this, along with any helpful suggestions you might have for Dave, in comments.  (And of course you may also contact him directly: Dave at Crackpotpress dot com.)

(Via Blue Gal)

By Ezra, Who's Not At The Beach Because Ro De Janeiro Decided to Rain on Him.

One quick addendum to the no-new-ideas-needed argument: The press corps, which doesn't get paid based on their familiarity with the world of policy proposals, really isn't looking for "New Ideas." Social Security privatization, the "New Idea" around which the Chait piece and this whole conversation originally took place had, after all, been kicking around Cato since the 70s. Chile had implemented it decades prior. It just seemed new to the press.

Indeed, the word new" is actually muddling the conversation a bit. What the press is interested in is better described as "fresh." It could be an idea they haven't heard. Or it could be an old idea that's more radical than they're used to. Or demonstrates an approach they weren't expecting. Or is sold in a way they haven't grown inured to. John Edwards got a lot of press for a health care plan that wasn't in any sense new thinking, but which was expansive enough to seem worthy of buzz. Bush got his new idea cred for an old, bad idea that was unsettlingly radical, and which his administration kept selling as new. The difference between a new idea and an old idea is largely good press management*. And Democrats do need to get better at that.

*The corollary to this is that a new idea is what the press says it is, and so there are certain ideas they don't like and will bash as old thinking simply because it's an easy attack. For instance, anything that makes the welfare state more, rather than less, expansive, will probably be derided by Robert Samuelson and Sebastian Mallaby as old, industrial age, thinking. Not much to be done about that.

By Ezra

Quick note: Yes I'm in Brazil. Yes I'm occasionally blogging. Don't laugh at me, I have a problem. Also, I have nothing to do in the morning till the unwieldy organism that is my family decides what's on the agenda. And it's raining. And I want to hear Kathy and Chris's thoughts on this...

When Time picked the Man of the Century in 2000, they played it safe. Albert Einstein, baby. That wouldn't have been my choice. I'd have picked the Economic Agent.

It's the economic agent, after all, who's sat at the center of every economic current and fad in the last century. He's the oppressed worker or fattened landowner mindlessly pursuing his class interests. He's the hyper-rationalist merrily -- and nearly-infallibly -- pursuing self-interest and rendering free market economics viable. He's the "bounded rationalist" and imperfect creature whose blind spots and missteps require a community of similarly flawed beings to pool their resources and protect. He is, basically, everything. And it's only through imagining his preferences and extrapolating his actions that economics works. So it's quite kind of New School professor Duncan Foley to have charted (some) of the Economic Agent's many incarnations in the last few decades. Here he is, for instance, as Marx imagined him:

The economic agent of Classical political economy is thus basically a representative of his class, a Worker struggling to survive under the pressure of downward pressure on wages towards subsistence through a hand-to-mouth way of life, a Capitalist boldly building the future by obsessively accumulating the profits won from the exploitation of workers, or a Landowner parasitically and idly consuming rents by maintaining armies of unproductive personal servants and enormous numbers of horses. The individual behavior of these agents, such as they are, is of importance only insofar as they instantiate the social situation of their class.

And here she is as Milton Friedman imagined her:

The Rational Consumer’s function is to Choose. Thus he (or perhaps even she) becomes Sovereign in the neoclassical picture of the function of the capitalist society. The immense investment of resources in productive facilities and infrastructure is simply the most convenient device by which the Rational Consumer can transfer her wealth from the present to the future. Her Tastes govern the allocation of social resources among competing ends. Though to the undiscriminating eye the enormous capitalist firms and trusts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century might appear as formidable centers of economic and social power, the penetrating economist recognizes that they are actually pussycats under the heel of the Rational Consumer, whose whim expressed as demands on the market bring them to heel.[...]

the Rational Consumer also has some extraordinary, even superhuman, capacities, particularly in the area of information processing and computation. She is somehow able, in her role as an investor, to collect and integrate an enormous amount of information about investment opportunities and prospects and management competence of firms so that she can correctly price them on the stock market. She is equally adept at sifting through the properties of millions of perhaps billions of commodities offered on the market to allocate her purchasing power optimally among them. This is all in the day’s work. Actually this is all even before the real day’s work of the Rational Consumer, which is the generation of utility from the actual consumption of her rationally chosen basket of commodities, that being the end of the whole elaborate process of social production.

Economic liberals were less impressed, and so constructed a counter-agent -- one capable of correcting for the old agent's flaws and failings. Enter the Clever Civil Servant:

Keynes sees no hope for the rehabilitation of the Economic agent, and proposes instead to replace him in his most important economic functions, particularly determining the volume and direction of social investment, with another figure, the Clever Civil Servant. This public-spirited manipulator, who is brighter and more charming than the Economic Agent, and who bears more than passing resemblance to Keynes himself, can be counted on to provide investment adequate to maintain Full Employment, alleviate human suffering, and in a generation or so eliminate the Economic Problem by driving the rate of profit down to zero. At this point the average standard of living in industrial capitalist societies will be so high that people will be relieved of most of the anxiety of earning a living and can devote their attention to exploring their sexual identities, following the path pioneered by Keynes and his Bloomsbury friends.

To some degree, sane people eventually came to a sort of synthesis of this set, and trust the economic agent to act rationally at times, recognize that those actions may reflect class biases, blind spots and failures of judgment, and try to employ the clever civil servant in limited capacities when his intervention can correct for an obvious failure. Sadly, very few of these sane people govern the country or the discourse, and we're still stuck with Larry Kudlow on the financial channels, and George W. Bush in the White House...

By Kathy G.

Claude Rains is shocked, shocked!

Salon reports the shocking, shocking! news that the DC "hot" reporter contest was rigged.

Hard to believe, I know. But we all know who the rightful heirs to the title of hotness would have been -- had not this diabolical conspiracy denied them. Curse those infernal bots, I say!

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

These SurveyUSA state polls mean very little. Modeling turnout this early is impossible. Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney don't have Clinton's name recognition. Opinions change over time. I could go on. It's encouraging news that the GOP doesn't have a substantial advantage, but this doesn't strike me as sufficient evidence that Tom Schaller is wrong.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Lately I've focused on some of Brazil's major talents and their music, but now I'd like to showcase some musicians deserving wider recognition in the US.

First up: Monica Salmaso, an uncommonly gifted singer

It should come as no surprise that Brazil is gifted with fine guitarists. Among my favorites are Romero Lubambo,

Ulisses Rocha,

and Toninho Horta.

Enjoy!

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Today I had a medical procedure performed in the morning that necessitated my fasting from Sunday night at 9 p.m. until after the procedure at about 10:30 Tuesday morning. Instead of taking a day off yesterday, I decided to go to work as I figured it would keep my mind off of hunger.

Hah! Fat chance that! I was alright at work until about noon. I filled myself with fluids until I had to make the long walk to down the hallway that I refer to as the "Bladder Causeway" that leads to the bathroom. About 2 p.m. I was getting cranky. My usual cheery self was snapping at people, I found that I couldn't concentrate as well as normal and those trips up and down the stairs that I make with elan between the two floors my employer takes up were being punctuated with Lurch-like sighs and significantly slower ascents. The bagel I had to break my fast was positively ambrosial.

I can only imagine then, how difficult it must have been for needy children to have accomplished much of anything before the advent of both the National School Lunch Act, and the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, which provided for subsidized lunches and breakfasts, respectively, for needy children. The former was signed into law by Harry Truman and the latter by Lyndon Johnson. Let's hope their need to exist will someday disappear.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Arthur Miller (yes, that Arthur Miller) and Michael Bérubé.

One of whom I have met and admire and one of whom I have lost all respect for. Draw your own conclusions.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Nothing related to Iraq on 9/11. Nothing.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Ross Douthat makes an effort. It's close to convincing. "Given the state of the economy and the post-impeachment unpopularity of the Congressional GOP, 2000 should have been a banner year for Democrats, and the fact that George W. Bush did as well as he did had a great deal to do with his (Rove-crafted) image as a 'reformer with results,' particularly where education policy was concerned." It's true that Bush lost Latinos and education voters by lower margins than Bob Dole, but Dole's platform included abolishing the Department of Education and making English the official national language. That said, Bush's ability to hold down the margin among ed voters and "cares about people like me" voters, while racking up huge margins in the "honest and trustworthy" category, all while claiming to offer what Clinton called  "the same government, only smaller and with a bigger tax cut" is certainly to his credit. How much blame to ascribe to the media for their hideous coverage, or the Gore campaign to their paranoia surrounding "Clinton fatigue" (which Mark Penn (!) showed was an unfounded fabrication of Washington insiderism), is unclear. So the initial Rove campaign strategy seems to have been somewhat effective, even if some of his tactics (e.g. trips to California) were based on faulty assumptions.

On the other hand, the Bush/Rove governance strategy seems to be a miserable failure. You cannot staff the federal government with political hacks from top to bottom and expect various branches of government to function effectively. At some point, policy and expertise matter. See Katrina, staffing Iraq reconstruction jobs with Young Turks, etc.  You can get away with this when it comes to the small stuff like mine safety or consumer products from China as long as it stays out of the public eye, but at some point, something big will happen and the federal government has to be in a position to respond. Meanwhile, the 2001 and 2003 tax shifts will expire; the occupation of Iraq is a mess (see also "something big"), and the immigration bill simply won't happen, leaving only No Child Left Behind and Medicare expansion. NCLB was basically a Kennedy bill with a few changes to attract Republican votes, so that means that the only real success story is the fact that seniors are mostly happy with the Medicare drug benefit, even though the federal government is overpaying by a ridiculous margin.

As for the 2000 House and Senate results, the Dems won 5 of 19 GOP-held Senate seats while losing one of their own. Yes, they failed to knock off some weak sisters from the class of 1994, most notable Mike DeWine and Rick Santorum. But overall, for the party that includes the urban coasts to get a 50-50 split in the Senate is a substantial win, when one considers the small-state bias of the institution. I suspect a population count of the Senators' constituents will reveal that the Democrats represented a clear majority of the public. The House is another matter, though, and the relatively small gains for either party in the post-1994 environment seem to reflect a bipartisan consultant consensus to spend $3 million in the top 10 House races more than anything else.

By Kathy G.

I agree with James Wolcott -- Terry Castle is a wonderful writer. She's a Stanford literature prof who wrote a brilliant book about one of my all-time favorite novels (it's got to be in my top five favorite novels, at least), as well as a fascinating study analyzing cultural representations of lesbians.

For a number of years now, she's been contributing the occasional article to the London Review of Books, and every one of them I've read, the literary reviews as well as the autobiographical essays, has been a gem. The latest one is a memorable piece about a trip to New Mexico with her elderly mom. But I think her all-time classic has got to be her gimlet-eyed and hilarious essay about her frenemy Susan Sontag.

I agree with Wolcott that her personal essays should be collected together and published as a memoir in book form. They're way too good to be consigned to the ephemeral format of a journal article.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Snakes on a plane! Snakes on a m%@#)%@!98ing plane!

Via Keith Olbermann

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

One more piece in my series on press coverage (previous installments here, here, and here), and then I promise I'll go find some polls to crunch.

The third bit of insight needed to understand the DC press corps is the latest field guide to the institution itself. Today, that field guide Mark Halperin and John Harris's book The Way To Win. Halperin has been something of a whipping boy in the blogosphere, with good reason; he's symptomatic of bubble of DC "conventional wisdom" that is convinced that ideas outside the DC status quo are "unacceptable", cause candidates to "fail the test of commander in chief", he openly states that "Matt Drudge rules our world", etc. But that makes the book a useful descriptive analysis of how the media operates, rather than a prescriptive recipe for the way it should operate.

The key observations of The Way to Win revolve around the forces that drive press coverage, and the relationship between the Press and political candidates. The authors perceive that the root cause of much of the media's dysfunction is due to the rise of cable news and the Internet, which tends to emphasize the salacious and controversial, rather than the substantive. Because cable news, particularly Fox, and the internet, particularly Drudge, but now also the "liberal blogosphere", have been the ratings winners over the last decade, other news outlets tend to respond by striking vague fox-esque or Drudge-esque poses. Also, importantly, news outlets are highly conscious of what other news outlets are covering. They will attempt to quickly follow a new story from a competitor, presumably to avoid losing readers or viewers. All of these phenomena-the aping of conservative outlets, the pack journalism, the focus on scandal, the inflation of small controversies, etc.- along with other trends, such as news outlets moving to even shorter segments, Halperin and Harris ascribe to "competition". But this is, I submit, a warped and unhealthy view of marketplace competition.

By working so hard to match the content and style of their competitors, each individual news outlet is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the rest. Here we reach Seth Godin's point; in a world where viewers are overloaded with choices, the winners will be those that are remarkable. News outlets are at least somewhat aware of the phenomenon of remarkability, but their decisions on this front have fallen flat. In most cases, cable news has decided that 'remarkable' and 'controversial' are synonymous, so reporters anchors blow small controversies out of proportion to their actual magnitude, hype out-of-the-ordinary threats that, while dangerous, are low probability (cf. "To Catch a Predator", Chinese product paranoia), or book totally ridiculous guests like Ann Coulter and Bill Donohue.

But the universe of potential news viewers isn't interested in Ann Coulter or Bill Donohue, or even Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith. If the audience wanted celebrity news, they'd just tune to E!, or read whatever the equivalent of MrShowbiz.com is these days. You might keep some interest and levity in your broadcasts by referencing tabloid or sports news, in roughly the way that Sportscenter, Pardon the Interruption, or The Best Damn Sports Show, Period reference pop culture or tabloid news, but there's no reason to waste substantial minutes on it. This is a Godin's secondary point: in a "long tail" world, you're no longer going to win by making average products for average people; you win by making products for early adopters and heavy consumers, and work like hell to make sure they tell their friends that they like your products. In a world where consumers have too many choices, the marginal consumer is no longer "average" in any way; they're more likely the friend of an early adopter who can be influenced. And the ratings illustrate my point. The top-rated cable news program, The O'Reilly Factor, gets 2.2 million viewers. Countdown, the highest rated show not on Fox News, gets just under 800,000 on an average night. Even network nightly news now reaches only 25 million viewers a night -- less than 10% of the American public! This means that the marginal news consumer, person number 25,000,001 who's currently not watching any news but might be convinced to watch network news, is not the median American; it's someone who is in the top quarter of news consumers. For cable news, the marginal consumer is a news junkie who is in the top 1% or so of news consumers. Let me repeat this, one last time: targeting news content towards average Americans makes no sense when only 20% of the public is watching news, and less than 1% are watching cable news.

This takes us to James Fallows point about the public's surprising appetite for policy issues, the ability of most news consumers to tune out tabloid news and inside-the-beltway stories in favor of subjects that are more likely to affect everyday Americans, and the fact that debates where the hoi polloi are allowed to submit questions end up being more substantive than debates moderated by Washington journalists. The undecided voters who care enough to be participants in town hall debates or submit questions via Youtube are unlikely to be average news consumers; they're likely to be at least somewhat more engaged, if not substantially more engaged, than the general public. And even the general public, as measured by the pew survey, is much less interested in the who and the how and the why of politics than they are in the what of policy.

Okay, I lied, I do have one more post; where I'll try to condense all of these observations into concrete ideas on how to make news coverage better and more appealing.

By Kathy G.

Max reports the cheering news that the state of Virginia is seriously considering a proposal for universal pre-K.

Of all the social programs the U.S. could possibly institute, universal pre-K is perhaps the most important. It is that rare initiative that meets the gold standard of public policy by simultaneously fulfilling the goals of equity and efficiency. Equity, because preschool and other early education programs have a lasting, powerful and well-documented positive impact on the outcomes of poor children. And efficiency, because it is extremely cost efficient. Few if any government investments produce a higher rate of return.

No one has been more instrumental in establishing the social science case for early childhood education than the economist James Heckman. Heckman is a quant god and he won his Nobel for his econometric work. (Statistics nerds know him for the “Heckman two-step,” an econometric technique that controls for selection bias. Though whenever I hear “Heckman two-step” weird images of Fred Astaire pop up in my head. Anyway . . .).

Heckman is a University of Chicago economist in every sense of the word – a very conservative dude. But he’s done phenomenal work showing that investment in children pays off in very substantial ways. As he wrote in the Wall Street Journal last year (subscription only), “There are many reasons why investing in disadvantaged young children has a high economic return. Early interventions for disadvantaged children promote schooling, raise the quality of the work force, enhance the productivity of schools, and reduce crime, teenage pregnancy and welfare dependency. They raise earnings and promote social attachment. Focusing solely on earnings gains, returns to dollars invested are as high as 15% to 17%.”

If you want to immerse yourself in the wonky details of Heckman’s research, this overview is an excellent place to start. It gives you the economic theory on human capital and skill formation, and also provides the empirical results from a variety of early and not-so-early childhood intervention programs, giving you the impact on the kids themselves as well as the estimated costs and benefits to society. I'd post some of the tables and charts but I still haven't figured out how to do it in Typepad yet. The one on page 122 is my favorite.

Besides the fact that it helps children and is a wise social investment, to me, an added bonus of universal pre-K is that it could be a means of getting universal child care in through the back door. The idea being, you start by covering 4-year olds and gradually work your way down until you’ve got the 1- and 2-year olds. I consider universal child care to be the most important of the missing pieces of the unfinished business of the feminist movement.

I’m actually optimistic about the possibility of instituting a national pre-K program in this country. Liberals, of course, are already big fans of the idea. But I also think we can get through to the market-oriented conservatives by making the economic, return-on-investment argument to them. I’m probably the only person who remembers this, but Al Gore proposed a universal pre-K program when he ran for president in 2000. I always thought it was the best thing he did in that campaign.

And yeah, like Max says, fer chrissakes Virginia’s pre-K plan should be universal, not means-tested. As he points out, among other things, a means test would limit the efficiency of the program and basically amounts to “taxing children according to the incomes of parents they have not chosen.”

I will never understand these neo-liberal wankers and their infatuation with means tests, private-public partnerships, market-based solutions, yadda yadda yadda. What don’t they get about the power, justice, political durability, and elegant simplicity of free, universal government programs? It reminds me of this great quote by Nick Reville (via Chris Hayes): “If libraries didn’t already exist, there’d be no way they could ever come into existence now. Can you imagine telling the publishing industry that the government was going to pay to set up buildings where they gave away their product for free?”

by Nicholas Beaudrot of electoral Math

Via Oliver Willis (whose mom thankfully seems to have avoided the worst of Hurricane Dean), NBC will air Countdown with Keith Olbermann prior to this Sunday's NFL preseason game. Perhaps, with enough success, The Legendary K.O. might end up as a semi-permanent or permanent fixture on Sunday nights, a sort of 60 Minutes for the 21st Century.

If you live in a Nielsen household, do your part and watch. Part of Olbermann's appeal is that he bashes Bush, but another part is that he just doesn't take BS from either party; nor does he allow an "objectivity" fetish to force him into a false sense of balance. One can only hope that high ratings for Olbermann will lead nightly news directors to ape his style, if not his apparent partisanship. Or, if a station wanted to get really experimental, they could ditch nightly half hour program in favor of an hour long news program twice a week that had fewer, longer segments.

But I am just some guy with a web site, so what do I know.

—Signed, not ezra Klein

by Christopher Hayes

Matt links to a McClatchy piece about how the Bush administration, in concert with the Chinese government, worked against tightening inspection and regulation of toys manufactured in China. Dog bites man, to be sure. But what's really striking to me is how Democrats have completely failed to use the steady and growing trickle of stories about dangerous products emanating from the unregulated factories of China to make the broader case for importance of regulation. When I took intro economics at the University of Chicago, I remember my professor dismissing with a caustic laugh the very notion of public health inspection of local restaurants. "I don't think the Medici would stay in business very long if they took to poisoning their customers."

That's more or less the belief system (if you can call it that) that the Bush administration has marshalled to combat something as commonsensical as, you know, making sure children's toys aren't coated in lead paint. So this is as teachable moment as they come, and you can bet that, if, say, the national healthcare system in France was accidentally poisoning its patients, we'd be hearing a chorus of conservatives making the case that this was example of the ideological bankruptcy of state-run healthcare.

So where's the chorus on the other side? Rick Perlstein has been eloquent and consisent in calling attention to the connection between the ideological commitments of modern-day conservatism and the inevitable degradation of public infrastructure and regulatory standards. Other bloggers have joined him, but this is an object lesson in the inability of Democratic politicians to wholistically articulate a social democratic vision even when the opportunity is handed to them on a platter.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has unveiled his program to fight crime in Brazil. There are plenty of good ideas here:

Brazil's prisons suffer from chronic overcrowding and as part of the plan160 new ones will be built with special facilities to provide jobs and education.

Brazilian prisons are notorious for corruption and especially for overcrowding and it has been festering for years, culminating in the massacre at Carandiru prison, resulting in the deaths of 111 prisoners. Prison guards are poorly paid, making them easy targets for drug dealers to compromise them. Torture and abuse of prisoners is endemic to the system. While this may please some with the impression that the authorities are being tough on crime, it is essential to remember that no one in Brazil serves more than thirty years in jail no matter the crime. Those who are treated badly will be back on the streets again with years of resentment and rage at Brazilian society - and precious little in the way of hope.

The proposals also aim to confront some of the problems faced by poorly paid police officers who have in the past often been accused of corruption. Grants are to be made available for training and housing aimed at officers working in the most violent areas.

This is an excellent idea and has taken far too long to implement. Police in Brazil are very poorly paid and are expected to risk their lives for wages that often is barely above subsistence. Moreover, the poor pay and poor training often fails to attract those with the skills necessary to be effective and humane police oficers.

More than 400,000 young people, including former convicts, will  receive job training and financial aid.

It is virtually an article of faith that those on the lower rungs of Brazilian society have litle reason to be optimistic about their future. While much more needs to be done in this area, this seems like a good start.

I agree with the comment from Viva Rio's director that the question is whether this can be implemented and Lula's comment that this is "not enough to compensate for centuries of inequality that gave rise to violence," but it is a start. While I would like to see other issues being addressed more directly, including torture committed by police and impunity for these acts, I'm glad to see that crime is being addressed in Brazil on a national level with more than just an iron fist and that the root causes are being addressed.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of electoral Math

There have been a lot of these, so I will try to keep mine brief. Contra Neil, I think it's a stretch to read "devious strategic malice" into Karl Rove's various tactical moves during the 2004 election. To repeat a point that's been made before, Rove is one butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County away from being in permanent exile from GOP politics, having wasted millions of dollars and the last weekend of in-person candidate appearances on his ridiculous "bandwagon theory". Rove does seem to have correctly identified that the relative cost of mobilizing a base voter was cheaper than previously estimated, and that the internet and viral marketing techniques can help (e.g. microtargeting, making sure GOTV volunteers stayed close to home and were a demographic match for their voter universe), but that was a short term advantage that Democrats quickly matched through vigorous organizing. The 50%+1 legislative strategy of pandering to the base and striking fear into the heart of moderate Democrats to get just enough votes to pass your agenda worked like a charm for 2002, 2003, and 2004, but in most (not all; witness the FISA vote) cases, it's imploded just like a Ruined Hedge Fund.

So, this ex post facto analysis of Rove's intervention into the 2004 Democratic primaries seems like, well, not a fabrication, but, maybe one of those "exaggerations". I don't really recall any statements from the Bush White House or the RNC making a big difference; edwards was simply short on resources after the Iowa caucuses, and both the donor and the activist class were eager to end the primaries with any electable candidate and get on with the business of taking down George Bush. Nor, I think, should we read his statements that Dean was a weak general election candidate to mean that he necessarily would have been a strong one. The best thing to do is let Rove ride off into the lecture circuit and book writing sunset. To quote a wise man, "Sometimes they just have no idea what they're doing."

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

As an Edwards supporter since early 2004, you can guess how frustrating it is for me to read about how Karl Rove influenced the Democratic primary that year:

The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush's reelection.

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove's team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party's nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.

Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn't easily be painted as "nutty."

If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd's own words:

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds.

"So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards," Dowd said. "And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce" around Kerry.

"It wasn't like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped," he said.

Nicolle Wallace, the 2004 Bush campaign communications director, recalled at the Harvard conference that the campaign "refused" to even respond to Edwards' attacks on Bush, not wanting to make him seem like a threat.

So the first question you're asking is, if Matthew Dowd is telling us that his people were faking us out before, why should we believe what's said here?  Remember that the quotes here are from a forum at Harvard one month after the election.  With victory behind him, his incentive is to talk about what a brilliant strategy he was involved with, so that he'll look like a star and do really well next time he's looking for a job.  And it's not like he and Wallace can keep the strategy a secret, or lie about it -- everybody on the team was in on it, and in the years until the next election, somebody's going to talk.  So it's time for him to sit back and boast. 

Most of the vitriol that Republicans cast at Hillary doesn't come out of this kind of devious strategic insight.  Most ordinary Republicans still buy into the Hillary Clinton scare stories that were fed to them on talk radio during the 1990s, and they're just expressing the unfounded fears that they've had since then.  But whether it comes from honest irrational fear or devious strategic malice, the effects on us can be the same.  So don't listen too much to noises Republicans make.  Look at the polling data and the issue positions, and make up your own mind. 

by Stephen of the Thinkery

Elvira Arellano was just deported from the United States after more than a year of living in a Chicago church.  I wrote about this some time ago, and was surprised even then that she had lasted so long with no more "protection" than a tradition that exists more in vampire fiction than reality.  Ms. Arellano was arrested in LA after leaving the church to travel the country speaking about her issue and lobbying members of Congress to reform our immigration laws.  Apparently the concept of "sanctuary" is stronger than I thought.

The important part of this story, as Atrios notes, is that there is now an 8-year-old American citizen who is without his mother.  The US government, of course, has no ability - yet, at least - to deport an American citizen because of the misdemeanor committed by their relative.

This is Saul Arellano:

Saul Arellano is 8 years old, and he is an American citizen.  You can call him "anchor baby" if you want, or any other pejorative you can think of that will help to dehumanize him and separate him from the rest of this nation's citizens.  But he is, as I said and cannot say enough, an American citizen, due all the rights and privileges that status carries.

Is there any other misdemeanor in our legal system that can deprive an 8-year-old boy of his mother?  Should the US Government really be able to separate a child from his mother over this?

Is this who we really want to be?

By Kathy G.

The results of the time use study I wrote about in the last post might seem to confirm the conservatives’ argument that Americans don’t want or need mandated time off. The logic would be that economic growth has enabled us to purchase more leisure, in the form of labor-saving devices and outsourced domestic work. So it could be argued that we’ve chosen to take our productivity gains in the form of higher wages rather than more vacation time.

There may be something to this, especially for workers with families. Given the choice of a) few or no vacation days, but higher wages, which can be used to outsource domestic work, which in turn provides more leisure time to be with their kids on a daily basis, b) lower wages, more domestic work, and less time with the kids on a daily basis, but more extended time with them (in the form of a long vacation), I suspect most people who have kids would choose a).

But ultimately I'm not buying this argument. The fact is that no one really knows what employees’ preferences are, because no one has asked us. Few workers have the power to negotiate this kind of thing directly with their employer. And even those who do may be reluctant to take time off, because of the collective action problem Ezra described in his piece. There's a wonderful book called Time Bind by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild that documents this phenomenon. It’s a case study of a company that had great work-family policies, but few workers who were taking advantage of them. It turned out that, although corporate policy said one thing, the corporate culture was to work long hours, and most employees who wanted to get ahead put in lots of overtime and took very little time off.

The institution best suited to communicate employee preferences to employers is, of course, a union. But very few U.S. workers belong to unions, and this state of affairs is unlikely to change any time soon. I’m not a lawyer but I do know something about labor law – I took a law school course in it. And one big problem with American labor law is that it doesn’t allow any employee organizations except unions. No workers’ councils, no advisory committees, no nothing – it’s a union or nothing at all.

Apparently, most employers and most unions want it that way. But there’s a good case to be made that this works to the disadvantage of the American worker. In fact, the economist Richard Freeman makes this argument in a very interesting book. However, to have worker committees that could discuss employment conditions with management, we’d have to substantially rewrite labor law, and that will probably only occur if we have a Democratic president, a Democratic House, and at least 60 solid Democratic votes in the Senate.

By Kathy G.

Lots of great posts here, but not a single really wonky one since Friday. Being that this is Ezra’s blog, that’s a state of affairs bordering on scandalous. So I thought I’d write about an important new study on trends in leisure time in the U.S.

Last month Ezra wrote an article lamenting the fact that the U.S. is the only advanced economy in the world that doesn’t guarantee its workers any vacation. That led to a discussion in the comments thread about whether Americans have more or less leisure time than they used to. I strongly implied that we have less (partly because of a well-known book from the 90s that argued this). Well, I was wrong -- it turns out that on average Americans today have significantly more leisure than they did 40 years ago. However, there is growing inequality in leisure, with less educated workers having significantly more leisure time than their more educated counterparts. I’ll explain.

The study, which is by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, appears in the current Journal of Quarterly Economics Quarterly Journal of Economics. You can find a newspaper article on the study here. The journal the study was published in is subscription-only, but I’d be happy to email a copy to anyone who requests one.

Detailed study results after the jump.

Here are the main results:

-- Using the narrowest definition of leisure, women on average gained 4.9 hours of leisure per week between 1965 and 2003. During that time, their total hours of work (which includes both market and nonmarket work) declined by 7.8 hours.

-- For men, again using the narrowest definition of leisure, leisure on average increased by 6.2 hours per week, and work declined by 8.3 hours.

-- Women’s market work increased by 2.5 hours, while men’s decreased by 12 hours

-- Women’s nonmarket work decreased by 10.3 hours, while men’s increased by 3.8 hours

-- Conditional on having a child, time spent on child care increased by 5 hours per week on average (this figure is not broken down by sex)

-- Over time, there was growing inequality in leisure that mirrors inequality in wages. The most highly educated workers had less leisure and workers with less education had more. For example, in 2003 male college graduates had 0.2 fewer hours of leisure than that group had in 1965, while male high school drop-outs had 12.2 hours more. Among women, college grads had 1.3 more hours of leisure in 2003 than in 1965, while high school drop-outs had 7.9 hours more.

-- What are we doing with all this extra leisure time? Mostly watching more television, apparently.

Critics quoted in the Globe article say one problem with the study is that it does not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary leisure, and I agree that this is a problem. Yes, there’s all that increase in leisure at the bottom of the income scale, but a lot of that comes from people, men especially, who can’t find good jobs. The authors counter that half of the increase in leisure comes from people who are employed full-time.

Others make the point that by focusing what’s going on “on average” we lose sight of the fact that certain groups are working a lot more. One expert in the article points out that there’s been a significant increase in the number of individuals who work more than 50 hours a week, and also the number of couples who work more than 100 hours a week.

Here are some more strengths and weaknesses of the study.

First, the strengths:

-- It’s based on detailed time diaries, which are more reliable than other data that has been used, such as BLS data where subjects are asked to estimate how many hours they worked in the past week (people are notoriously bad at estimating this kind of thing in retrospect).

-- The sample sizes are large – between 1600 and 15,000 for each decade’s worth of data (it’s based on five separate surveys taken in 1965, 1975-76, 1985-86, and 1992-94 and 2003).

-- The authors control for changing demographics, so we can feel more confident that these are real time trends we’re seeing, and not results that are driven by there being relatively more or less of certain groups in the population.

-- They use differing definitions and measures of leisure, market work, and nonmarket work, and their basic results (that on average Americans have more leisure) are robust to these alternatives, no matter how they’re defined.

Now the weaknesses:

-- There’s a question as to whether people who are willing to fill out time use diaries are a self-selected sample. If they have the time to do this in the first place, there’s reason to suspect they may have more leisure than the actual population does.

-- No people over 65 are included, and since many people are retiring later these days, this may have biased the results. I worked as a research assistant on a study of low-wage workers at a retail chain, and a good 6% or so of our monthly sample of about 1500 was over 65, with some workers as old as 86! In the past, I doubt that very many people that old were still working.

-- Although the authors are careful to use alternative measures, it’s often difficult to say what, exactly, is leisure, and what is work. Socializing is classified leisure, but if you go to a party mainly because you want to network with people in your field, isn’t it really more like work? Also, cooking is counted as nonmarket work, but for some people, it’s more like a recreational hobby. There are many other examples of this kind of ambiguity.

-- This isn’t a criticism of this paper per se, but it would be nice if we had more studies like this one. However, this is the only big, recent diary-based time use study in the U.S. that I know of. A study this huge and this detailed is extremely expensive and work-intensive – I mean, can you imagine inputting and coding all that data, from thousands of subjects? In general, though, it’s best to have more than one study or dataset on a particular subject, because if there’s just one there’s always the chance that it’s an outlier. Though the fact that the sample size for this one is so big by and large puts those fears to rest.

by Stephen of the Thinkery

Perhaps you've heard of the "Clergy Response Teams" created and trained by the Department of Homeland Security.  My response to this information is from a theological perspective, and in order to allow people to decide for themselves just how much theology they want to invade their minds, I've put it all below the fold.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, US Soldiers were sent in to New Orleans and surrounding towns. Since we know that people were not, in fact, evacuated with anything approaching haste, and we know that there were no attempts by the Federal Government to put up defenses against flooding, one might wonder just what those federal troops were doing.

Along with the New Orleans police, US soldiers were seizing guns.

As disturbing as that is - why yes, like most liberals, I understand what the 2nd Amendment says, even better than the gun fetishists at the NRA, thank you very much - we now have some new and even more troubling information. Apparently the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was the debut of the Department of Homeland Security's "Clergy Response Teams," clergy members* that have been trained by the Federal Government to quell unrest and to convince people that whatever the political authorities decided to do in an emergency is to be accepted without complaint. These pastors have been instructed to preach and teach from Romans 13 which says, as the American Federal Government happily points out, that governments are from God and should be obeyed. The US Government seems to be somewhat concerned about a restive population. It's certainly worrying to see that Homeland Security has set up such thorough plans and mechanisms for placating American citizens.

As far as the theology thats involved, Romans 13 is pretty clear:

Everyone must submit to governing authorities. For all authority comes from God, and those in positions of authority have been placed there by God. 2 So anyone who rebels against authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and they will be punished. 3 For the authorities do not strike fear in people who are doing right, but in those who are doing wrong. Would you like to live without fear of the authorities? Do what is right, and they will honor you. 4 The authorities are God’s servants, sent for your good. But if you are doing wrong, of course you should be afraid, for they have the power to punish you. They are God’s servants, sent for the very purpose of punishing those who do what is wrong. 5 So you must submit to them, not only to avoid punishment, but also to keep a clear conscience. (NLT)

In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton was President, I attend Point Loma Nazarene University and Nazarene Theological Seminary. I attended Nazarene churches and had a couple of staff positions, positions on the Church Board, etc. I can tell you - not merely "anecdotally" - that this chapter in Romans gave Evangelical Christians fits throughout that entire decade. Even George Bush Sr. was cause for concern, because of his "new world order" talk and his lack of Christianist code words throughout his speeches.

Aside from the blatant, casual hypocrisy that infuses Evangelical attitudes toward American government - "God-ordained when dominated by Republicans, "Ant-christ breeding ground" when it's Democrats in the majority - this blasé attitude toward Romans 13 and the claim that it commands not only submission but cooperation with earthly authorities is troubling, to say the least. The ancient Church certainly didn't have this attitude. For the first couple of centuries, converts to Christianity were to have no professional ties to the Roman government at all. If a soldier or other government functionary wanted to join the Church, he was to renounce his oath to Caesar, since it represented to the Church idolatry. If a member of the Church became functionary of the government - in any capacity but especially as a soldier - they were removed from the Church body until and unless they renounced such decision and went through a type of probation.

St. Augustine, so important to the development of Western thought, first rose to prominence because of the Donatist crisis, when a significant number of Christians believed that anyone who had renounced their faith during the most recent persecution of Christians should not be allowed back into the Church, and especially that sacraments performed by priests and bishops who had done so were not efficacious. It was Augustine who came up with the doctrine of ex opere operato, "by the work performed," which states that the value of the sacraments comes from God alone and is not dependent upon the righteousness of the priest or bishop in question. While it did allow for the reconciliation of those Christians who had cooperated and/or simply knuckled under to the Roman government's pressure, Augustine's solution to the problem said nothing about the inherent righteousness of always obeying earthly political authorities, and in fact recognized that what they had done was wrong and required repentance and reconciliation.

The first decades of the Church were marked by an extreme eschatological expectation, that Jesus would come back in a matter of months or years. As time passed, of course, this expectation started to wane among the larger Church, though there have always been groups within the Church that expect an imminent return and behave accordingly. There was an indifference to earthly political authorities because of the early Christians belief that Jesus would return and sweep them away quickly. Later, of course, we can see the development of doctrines and ideas of how exactly Christians were to live with the idea that perhaps Jesus wasn't going to come back right away. And so the later Epistles of the New Testament - ones like Romans and Ephesians - talk about ordering congregations and society in ways that would ensure the long-term existence of the Church, while it's the earlier letters - such as Galatians - that have the more radical statements such as God doing away with all earthly distinctions of gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status.

But we have to understand passages like Romans 13 within the context of the continuing eschatological expectation - the admonition to always be prepared for Christ's return - and the idea of the Kingdom of God. Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God more than just about anything else - much more than he did "hell," whatever you may have heard - and told his followers that their loyalties, their treasure, their present and future all lay in that Kingdom and not really here on earth. Christians are citizens of various nations, but their true citizenship is to be in heaven, their true master is God and God alone. This is accepted Christian doctrine, though obviously the interpretation differs.

Romans 13, as seen in the light of the attitudes and actions of the early Church, is more about the Church's indifference to earthly powers and allegiance to a heavenly Kingdom than it is about alliances with the government of Herod, Nero or even George Bush. We are to obey earthly authority because all authority really belongs to God and so can be said to ontologically be derived from him. But it's not because God puts his stamp of approval upon all earthly governments or all that they do. And most of all Christians are to submit to rulers and laws because anything that happens to us here on earth is of far less value and import than what awaits us in heaven.**

The Church simply has no business cooperating with any government, because their aims are entirely different. The Church exists to spread "good news" about God's love and forgiveness, to feed, clothe, heal, house, and otherwise care for any and all who need it. Pastors and other Church leaders are to facilitate these activities and to provide spiritual care and direction. That's it. If a government has a program which coincides with these duties, great. But the Church is really not supposed to rely upon any government*** to do its work for it.

Neither does the Church need to care about the 2nd Amendment - or the 1st, for that matter - or about a docile population, or any of those things over which an earthly government obsesses. Individual Christians can care about these things and even get involved, but not as the Church, not with the authority of the Church itself, saying that God wants everyone to support this government idea or that government action. In fact, even though I'm far more sympathetic to things such as Liberation Theology, I still believe that the Church as a whole should not take part and I'm wary of individual Christians - especially priests - doing so. Of course, I believe that if the Church is doing its job it makes things much harder for a repressive government to function well, but what matters is intention.

No matter what Romans 13 says, any pastor that preaches to his or her congregation that they are to cooperate fully with the government and all its decisions is betraying their call and the Church they supposedly serve. They are allying themselves with an earthly power and effectively renouncing their belief and citizenship in the Kingdom of God.

*Alternet also has an article about it, and of course there's a couple of people at Shakes' place that have commented on this. But I linked to WorldNet Daily to show how this is considered egregious - to say the least - even to those predisposed to defend Bush and his policies.

**This isn't about Christians needing some big sky fairy to reward them in order for them to be moral, so please don't even bring it up.

***I'm a liberal who supports government intervention in these areas because I have seen the Church abdicate its responsibility for those in need, while the poor - just as Jesus said - have unfortunately continued to exist despite certain portions of Christianity desperately trying to ignore them. When the Church takes up its responsibilities again, I might change my philosophy of government.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

There is probably no more complete musician in Brazil than Joyce, a gifted composer, guitarist with one of the loveliest voices in popular music. She is also arguably the best Brazilian singer to sing in English, having studied the language for two years to gain proficiency to sing well.

Listening to her always lifts my mood, so I thought she'd be good for a Monday morning.

Here she is singing Feminina, one of her signature songs

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

I'm hardly an America love it or leave it type. I have no problem with making informed, well-grounded criticisms of my nation's government when merited.

However, should I take seriously a multiple-rehabbed, possibly brain-damaged, ex-footballer who cannot control his addictive behavior or ignorant statements, whose sole World Cup Championship will forever be tainted by the fact that he cheated to attain a major victory in the run to the championship and who blamed his inability to defend the championship on the mafia, when he says “I hate everything that comes from the United States. I hate it with all my strength?”

Naah.

Here's  an artist's  rendering of Maradona's first training session of national team coach:

Fortunately, even the AFA has more sense than to give Maradona that job.

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Mark Krikorian, in his latest post at the Corner:

Good for Israel in announcing it will turn back all Darfur refugees sneaking across the border from Egypt — thousands of Muslims claiming asylum would present an existential threat to the Jewish state.  But here’s what the government has to deal with: the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, what appears to be the country’s equivalent of the ACLU, said that it is "Israel's moral and legal obligation to accept any refugees or asylum seekers facing life-threatening danger or infringements on their freedom." That last bit is great – “infringements on their freedoms.” So, apparently anyone, anywhere who doesn’t enjoy complete political freedom and manages to sneak into Israel should be allowed to stay. This kind of post-nationalism is bad enough in Europe and the U.S., but we at least have some strategic depth, as it were – the very existence of such sentiments in a country as small and insecure as Israel doesn’t bode well for its long-term viability.

2300 refugees have come into Israel, which has a population over seven million, over the last six months.  Israel already has over a million Arab residents.  Existential threats don't come in the form of a couple thousand people fleeing genocide who would quickly fall in love with a country that rescued them. [Update:  Is there any reason to think that the incoming Darfuris are Muslim?  I was just going on Krikorian's word there, but the persecuted populations in Darfur mostly follow Christianity or some tribal religion.  Update2: Apparently the persecuted populations in Southern Sudan are Christian and animist, while the Darfuris are Muslim.]

From the Washington Post article he cites:

The announcement, raising new concerns over the refugees' safety, heightened a debate in Israel over what responsibilities a nation created by survivors of genocide in Europe bore toward people fleeing mass killing in Africa.

It was unclear Sunday whether Egypt would in turn deport the refugees to their countries of origin. Israel had received assurances from Egypt that it would not send Sudanese refugees to their troubled home country, an Israeli official said by telephone, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Egyptian police told the Associated Press, however, that Egypt would send the Sudanese back to Sudan. An Egyptian Foreign Ministry official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel had sought no assurances about the future of the refugees. "Israel just said, 'Please take them,' " the Egyptian official said.

Refugees from Darfur are escaping what President Bush and others have called genocide by government-allied Arab militias against ethnic African villagers. In addition, Sudan and Israel officially are enemies, and Sudan's government has said any refugees sent back from Israel would be considered as having dealt with an enemy state and treated accordingly.

"If deported to Sudan, they will be tried for treason," said Madhal Aguer,  a private aid worker in Cairo for refugees from a separate conflict in southern Sudan; a long-running civil war between the north and south killed up to 1 million people before a peace deal in 2005.

Krikorian is the most intense immigration opponent at the Corner, but I didn't know that he'd gone this far.  This isn't even a case where he has to balance a small benefit to his countrymen against a much larger benefit to outsiders.  This is a case where some of the most deserving asylum seekers in the world are trying to escape genocide, and attacking post-nationalism, Krikorian praises the foreign country that turns them away.  I'm reminded of this fellow from the Onion:

As a true patriot, I would gladly die in battle defending my homeland. I love my country more than my own life. But I would also be more than willing to give my last breath in the name of, say, Mexico, Panama, Japan, or the Czech Republic. The most honorable thing a man can do is lay down his life for his country. Or another country. The important thing is that it's a country.

By Kathy G.

This is a little old, but better late than never.

It’s a piece by James Kirchick, a New Republic writer who happens to be Martin Peretz’s assistant. He’s a wanker of the first order, but interesting because he embodies a lot of the worst tendencies of “centrist” (read: neoconservative) media discourse in general and the New Republic in particular.

In this piece, he bitches about how hard it is to find a date when you’re gay and conservative. But he doesn’t blame that on the paucity of out, gay conservatives. Instead, it’s somehow the liberals’ fault. Here’s his reaction after his most recent boyfriend dumps him, allegedly because of their different political orientations:

So much for dating a proud, progressive, and ostensibly tolerant liberal. But with him, as with other liberals I know, tolerance does not always extend to appreciating someone else’s differing political views. Now living in Cambridge and having grown up in the suburbs of Boston and gone to school at Yale, I’ve been surrounded by liberals for nearly all of my life. Most would be astonished to hear that they’re the most intolerant people I’ve ever met.

First of all, Kirchick has a confused notion about what tolerance is. Tolerance is a civic virtue, not a personal one. It means that you have the right to freely express your political and religious views without government interference. It means you have the right to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodations. It means that your neighbors and co-workers are obligated to treat you with respect.

But dude, “tolerance” does not mean anyone is required to like you, be your friend, or want to date you. Let alone fuck you.

Secondly, he doesn’t seem to have any real understanding of why so many gay men are not exactly big fans of conservatism. Well, let me spell it out for him: for the GLBT community, politics is not some abstract realm. It is a life and death issue. Countless GLBT men and women have died because of homophobia -- from hate crimes, suicide, and the delayed government response to AIDS. And the conservative movement is the force in this country which has legitimized and institutionalized the hate.

I realize that, more and more, the AIDS crisis is falling out of our public consciousness. I’m probably sounding like the Ancient Mariner here, but I remember walking the streets of New York City in the early and mid-90s, where every day I would see men in the prime of life with skin covered with lesions and sores, so frail they could barely walk. AIDS was, and continues to be, a national tragedy, and it should never be forgotten that many thousands of people in this country died from it needlessly, because of the inaction and outright hatred of conservative politicians.

It’s interesting that in this piece, Kirchick avoids identifying himself as a conservative. He describes himself as a libertarian – always a sure give-away that yes, of course you’re a conservative, but too ashamed to identify as such, given the gigantic clusterfuck conservatism has been in practice. He also smugly alludes to his “political independence.” Yeah, that’s real “independent” of him – holding wingnut views on everything from Iraq and Cuba to unions and the minimum wage, but being liberal only on the one issue where his self-interest is involved, gay rights.

Kirchick mentions the Mary Matalin/James Carville relationship as if it’s a model he’d like to emulate. Excuse me while I vomit. I know the media likes to portray that relationship like it’s some sort of cute Hepburn-and-Tracy romantic comedy. But I find the two of them repulsive, and their relationship to be the ultimate in shallow Beltway careerism, cynicism, and mutual exploitation. And the exploitation may actually be a lot more one-sided than it appears, given that Carville reportedly leaked information about John Kerry’s election strategy to his wife (who, let’s not forget, is a top aide to He Who Shall Not Be Named).

Kirchick’s best bet would probably be to stick to dating conservatives. And there certainly are more than a few gay, conservative men out there. Oh, but wait . . . they’re mostly a bunch of creepy closet cases. Now whose fault is that, I wonder? Hint: not the liberals’.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Read this from the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Given the Reagan administration's policy of denying asylum applications to those fleeing the regimes he supported in Central America, there is little doubt in my mind that Dale Maharidge's uncharacteristic act as a journalist saved lives. In addition, he helped a young woman become a productive US citizen.

I wish that would make some of the knees stop jerking.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Jacqueline had made the suggestion in the comments to my previous post, so here goes.

First off is Djavan. I love this clip of his song Samurai and I believe you will, too. The little boy  he jokes with at the beginning is his grandson!

Finally, as I know Ezra likes Jorge Ben, you can see the song that Rod Stewart ripped off for D'Ya Think I'm Sexy, Taj Mahal

By Kathy G.

This summer, we’ve seen the deaths of quite a few important cultural figures, from major film artists like Bergman, Antonioni, and Ousmane Sembene to the jazz great Max Roach.

One person whose passing didn’t get nearly the attention he deserved was singer/songwriter/producer Lee Hazlewood (perhaps because, due to the similarity in their names, people have perennially confused him with this jackass). In the grand scheme of things, Hazlewood wasn’t as important as the other folks I mentioned. But his musical vision was unique and compelling, and his best work still has the power to surprise and delight.

How to describe the music of Lee Hazlewood? I came up with this rough formulation:

Lee Hazlewood = Johnny Cash + LSD + Phil Spector – The Crazy

To explain: Johnny Cash references the fact that Hazlewood’s roots were in country music, and he never traveled too far afield from there. LSD because, by the late 60s, a psychedelic turn was quite pronounced. Phil Spector for the poppy girl-group influence and his lush, complex orchestrations. But minus The Crazy, because although Hazlewood was certainly an eccentric, unlike Spector he wasn’t known for, um, imprisoning his wives or pulling guns on people.

I’m going to post some YouTube videos of some of his most interesting work. Hazlewood was best known for his work with Nancy Sinatra, so I’ll start with their biggie. This is from Sinatra’s wonderful 1967 television special, Movin’ with Nancy, of which more later. But for now, just check this out. It’s totally outrageous.

Seriously, this one must have launched a million fetish fantasies.

Hazlewood was mostly known for being the man-behind-the-scenes Svengali for Duane Eddy in the 50s and Nancy Sinatra in the 60s. But although he didn’t look or sound like anyone’s idea of a pop star – he had a big droopy moustache and a somewhat goofy baritone voice – by the late 60s he started to come out front and center and do some of his own singing. He recorded a number of duets with Sinatra, of which “Some Velvet Morning” is the most memorable – an exceedingly strange yet haunting and eerily beautiful song with some absolutely gorgeous, magisterial orchestration. Check out it below (the clip here is also from the television special):

Here’s another Lee and Nancy duet, “Summer Wine”:

And another one below, “Jackson.” Unfortunately it’s audio-only, but it’s such a great song and I love what they do with it. I think it’s even better than the Johnny Cash/June Carter version, and that’s saying a lot, because I worship Johnny Cash. Lee and Nancy did a number of excellent covers of country hits – I'm especially fond of their version of Dolly Parton’s great “Down from Dover.”

Now, about that Nancy Sinatra television special, Movin’ with Nancy. Unfortunately Netflix doesn’t seem to have it but it is available from Amazon, and I highly recommend it. If ever a television show screamed “pure 60s,” this is the one. Watching it is like being inside a frenzied, pop-psychedelic dayglo dream. Not only does it have the high-concept, music video-like segments with Nancy and Lee, but there are several delirious production numbers in which Nancy is accompanied by small army of mini-skirted dancers in go-go boots. Plus, there’s a duet between Nancy and her dad that goes beyond Freudian. I think Nancy also duets with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. – though maybe I just dreamed that.

One of the bonuses of Movin’ with Nancy is that it includes the original commercials, which are fascinating. Here’s one of the groovy ads from the sponsor, RC Cola – “It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad cola!”:

(Posted by John.)

Publius at Obsidian Wings writes:

[Tom] Friedman had actual reason to know better. He was, after all, the man who wrote the truly-fantastic From Beirut to Jerusalem...  Most importantly, his book included first-hand accounts and harsh criticism of the war – the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – that is perhaps the closest historical analogue to the Iraq War (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan would be a close second). [At my old place, I posted a number of passages from FBTJ that are downright creepy in their similarities to Iraq.]

This is why I think the whole question of "expert" versus actual-expert misses something.  Friedman speaks beyond his actual knowledge on a lot of things, but he's not ignorant when it comes to the Middle East.  But the much-quoted "suck on this" passage makes it clear that he took leave of what senses he had.

There was something very profoundly wrong in America in 2002 and early 2003, and it didn't start to go right again for some time after that.  People who knew better were saying downright crazy things, and otherwise intelligent people nodded their heads and listened as if these were the words of Solomon.

War -- driven by fear and anger -- is inherently an irrational exercise, and once a nation is put on a war footing, it becomes nearly impossible for people to combat warmongering with reason.  This is especially the case for people at the center of the storm, like the Friedmans of the world.

The only wise foreign policy is to not let war-hucksters try and sell you on war.  Once you've started going down that path, it's incredibly hard to get off.  Doors close, options evaporate, and before you know it you're going to war just because not going to war seems weak and all the troops are on the border anyway...

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

As promised  in the thread about Frank Zappa and the issue of PMRC labels yesterday, here is the video of Frank Zappa's prescient and pro-First Amendment brilliance as seen on Crossfire in 1986. Also in this post, I've uploaded a film short of FZ's Czechoslovakian adventures. And later today, I'll type out a portion of the transcript from the 1975 British lawsuit in which Frank Zappa sued the Crown and post that, too. You readers deserve the best, right?!

Okay, then, let's get started. What you're about to see is a video clip--in three parts--of Maestro Zappa appearing on the CNN program Crossfire. Also appearing are On the left! Tom Braden, On the right! Robert Novak, and along with Mr. Zappa--In the crossfire!--is Washington Times columnist John Lofton.

Also offered in three parts, here is a film short of Frank Zappa during his historic visit to Prague, where he met and socialized with mutual fan and friend Vaclav Havel. In comments at the FZ thread yesterday, Captain Goto wrote:

Vaclav Havel was an enormous fan, who invited Zappa to visit Czechoslovakia as a sort of cultural ambassador. Zappa was quoted as saying to Havel how sorry he was that Havel would have to meet with Reagan, mincing no words about his opinion of Ronnie's intelligence.

In Zappa's retelling, in less time than it takes to blink, US officials roared into Prague to inform the Czechs, in no uncertain terms, that Frank would be have *no* part of *any* kind of meeting with Havel for *any* reason, under *any* circumstances...

Some of the soundtrack is in English while other parts are in Czech, which I don't speak; even so, I thoroughly enjoyed--and therefore highly recommend--this rare and unusual film.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Let me be clear. I really can't stand Charles Krauthammer, but my heart goes out to him for the fact that he is confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life due to a diving accident. I couldn't stand Ronald Reagan, but I feel for him and his family for enduring the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. I detested Michael Kelly, but I feel for his survivors for losing someone they loved so young.

That being said, one can only wonder what sort of twisted, demented, scabrous soul would refer to Max Cleland as "Stumpy," simply because they disagreed with his politics.

I wish this person would call Cleland that to his face and perhaps in front of his own (the demented one's) children. One wonders what limits of common decency some people avoid putting on themselves.

By Kathy G.

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

Today Digby writes about the disgraceful way the media has kowtowed to Bob Murray, the owner of the mine that collapsed in Utah. Sadly, the media (the teevee media at least) have by and large let Murray set the agenda and have failed to ask hard questions about dubious safety practices in this and other mines he owns. In addition, they have all but ignored the way the right in general and the Bush administration in particular have done their best to destroy unions and gut the enforcement of workplace safety regulations, two enormously important contributing factors to this disaster.

Next week I’ll have more to say about the policy issues implicated in this tragedy. But for now I want to heartily second Digby's recommendation that you check out Billy Wilder’s film, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival). This film, when it was originally released, was a box office and critical disaster. It was out of circulation for many years, but lately it’s been showing up on Turner Classic Movies with some frequency (it will be broadcast there again on August 26th), and recently it (finally) was released on DVD.

The reason Digby brings up Ace in the Hole in the context of the Utah mine disaster is that the film’s plot revolves around a somewhat similar media circus. It concerns a man trapped in a mine collapse. A reporter (Kirk Douglas) gets wind of the story, but rather than helping to rescue him, he conspires with local officials to keep him trapped there as long as possible. The reason? The longer he’s there the better it is for Douglas’s career, because it’s a great story that sells newspapers. The local officials and business people also have their own self-interested reasons for not going to the man’s aid.

Given that Ace in the Hole has a mixed reputation at best, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But in general I’m a big fan of Wilder’s work so when it screened on TCM earlier this year I decided to check it out. I watched it with three of my best cinephile friends. None of us had ever seen it. I remember at a certain point, we all looked at one another, and my friend Kyle pronounced, “This is a totally fucking awesome movie!”

Which it is. It is certainly one of Wilder’s strongest films, and I think a lot of people are now realizing this for the first time.

But Jesus Christ, this is one cynical film! It’s cynical even for Wilder, who, let’s not forget, is the dude who made films like Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd., which are about as dark as Hollywood gets. Yet Ace in the Hole outdoes them both in its sour view of human nature. Watching it is like a full-body immersion in an acid bath. I mean, up until that time, was there ever a character in a Hollywood film consumed with as much self-loathing as Kirk Douglas is here?

As I mentioned before, contemporary critics mostly hated this film, even the more discerning ones. Pauline Kael said of the film, “Some people have tried to claim some sort of satirical brilliance for it, but it's really just nasty, in a sociologically pushy way.” Andrew Sarris said that the film “proved” that Wilder was “inadequate for the more serious demands of . . . social allegory.” That was before Sarris’s famous reversal on Wilder, whom he now considers to be among the pantheon of great directors. But still . . .

I think part of the reason critics like Sarris and Kael recoiled from the film is that they thought the portrayal of the media was completely over the top. Wilder’s depiction of the media’s utter heartlessness and craven devotion to nothing bigger than its own self-interest must have seemed grotesquely exaggerated. But you know what? In the post-Iraq, post-Judy Miller era, it’s not especially hard to accept the film’s premise, and Wilder’s pitch black view of the media. In 1951, though, people weren’t ready for this film. Ace in the Hole is a great example of a work of art that was misunderstood in its own time. But man, does it ever speak to our own.

Btw, the title of this post refers to one of my favorite Wilderian touches in the movie. The mine collapse has become a 24-7 media circus, drawing crowds so large that enterprising hucksters set up an actual carnival on the site. The name on the carnival trucks? “The Great S&M Amusement Corp.”

One last thing: I also join Digby and Jane Hamsher in urging that you check out the classic documentary Harlan County U.S.A., which also is now available on DVD. It’s often cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, which it totally is – politically galvanizing and emotionally heart-wrenching. Though it’s over 30 years old, I saw it earlier this year and it holds up beautifully.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

Oh, this is just great.  Way to go, Dems:

Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.

They also emphasized that there would be strict rules in place to minimize the extent to which Americans would be caught up in the surveillance.

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. The new legislation is set to expire in less than six months; two weeks after it was signed into law, there is still heated debate over how much power Congress gave to the president.

“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

I like Bossa Nova as much as the next person, but let's blaze some trails outside of Rio and explore some music from Minas Gerais and Pernambuco.

My intro to non-Bossa Nova Brazilian music came via Milton Nascimento. Milton grew up in Minas Gerais, the inland state where my wife comes from and which has a culture markedly different from Rio. The focus is on the mountains, not on the ocean. While this clip has had its embedding disabled, it clearly shows that Milton has admirers among the jazz community.

This is a moving rendition of San Vicente with Nana Vasconcelos. You can truly hear the beauty of Milton's voice.

In addition to his talent as a performer, Milton is a terrific songwriter, especially with the lyricist Fernando Brant. Since Terry in Arizona requested some Elis Regina in the comments to Kathy G.s post linked to above, allow me to put Milton's songwriting skills on display via Elis Regina

Arguably one of the most intriguing talents to emerge from the Northeast region of Brazil is Lenine. Lenine comes from Recife, the capital of Pernambuco. He incorporates some traditional elements of his region such as the wooden flutes known as pifanos with rock, tongue-twisting lyrics and electronics. See if you can keep your feet still.

By Kathy G.

Scott Lemieux's review of a new book on why "centrist" abortion regulations don't work. Here's the gist of it:

The particularly salient lesson to draw from Silverstein's book is that it's important to ask whether abortion regulations actually accomplish anything, even on their own terms. "Basing a policy that regulates the right to abortion on confidence that the law stands outside of politics and free of bureaucratic red tape," writes Silverstein, "is a mistake fraught with consequences for those whom the right ostensibly protects."

Support for these laws is often more about the assumption that compromise on abortion is inherently desirable rather than arguments about what benefits will come from the legislation. Is there any evidence, for example, that the lack of abortion regulation makes the decisions of Canadian women less responsible? Whatever their merits in the abstract, in practice "centrist" abortion regulations do little but put up obstacles in the path of the most vulnerable women while not accomplishing any useful objective. Parental involvement laws -- which are largely superfluous for young women in good family situations and potentially dangerous for young women in bad situations -- are a case in point, especially since the safeguards intended to protect the latter don't work. Silverstein makes a careful, meticulous, and ultimately powerful case that even those who support the ends of parental involvement laws should reject them in practice.

By Kathy G.

What Max said.

Adding, that the argument that Hillary shouldn't be the nominee because she's too "divisive" never made a lot of sense to me. I agree with Ezra that she probably wouldn't be the best choice for the nomination, because by temperament she's an extremely cautious centrist and I think we need a Democratic president who's far more willing to pursue strategies and policies that are about change.

But let's face it, by the time of the Democratic convention, the Democratic nominee, whoever it is, is going to be portrayed by the media, and is going to be seen by a significant swathe of the public, as "divisive." They did this with candidates as bland and moderate as Gore and Kerry, so what's going to stop them from viciously smearing Obama or Edwards? As Max points out, Obama will be tarred as "an Islamicist version of the Manchurian Candidate."

As for Edwards, Ann Coulter has already unveiled the ultra-classy Republican strategy of dealing with him: call him a faggot! If he's the candidate, come November '08 I predict that at least 30% of the electorate will be convinced he's gayer than Gay Gayerson at the Gay Pride parade.

And actually, I think the allegedly "divisive" Hillary has an advantage, in that she'll exceed expectations. In the fantasy world of the wingnuts, of course, Hillary is a shrieking Marxist harridan from hell, but in debates and speeches, she sounds reasonable, quietly authoritative, like a normal person. People will see this, and I think even a lot of the Republicans who are so hostile to her will calm the fuck down a little. They'll never like her or vote for her, but they may be a lot less motivated to defeat her than people think.

It leaves me with a question, though: why aren't Democrats doing more to aggressively discredit the Republican candidates? It's essential that we shape the negative narratives about those bozos right now, before it's too late. Yet none of the operatives on our side seem to be doing that. Why is it that the Republicans always seem to be thinking and planning at least three steps ahead of the Democrats?

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

For those of you who do not know my blog, I write primarily about Latin America with a special interest in Brazil (more about me here). So, while Ezrinho is revisiting his raizes brasileiras, he was kind enough to ask me to fill in.

Matt Yglesias made the following comment here about Wednesday's earthquake in Peru:

I have nothing to say about it, but it seems wrong not to recognize these tragedies and their victims.

Of course it's not wrong to recognize these tragedies and their victims. What is wrong is that so much of what we hear in the news about Latin America involves these sorts of tragedies and political upheaval.

In the early 1980's I read a book that profoundly changed my view of how media in the US report the developing world back to us. The book, Coups and Earthquakes was written by Mort Rosenblum and it was a compelling analysis of media coverage in the US of the world outside the US and Europe. The title essentially reiterates the MSM focus on the developing world.

Unfortunately, precious little has changed. Google "bus plunge" and you'll see what I mean. Do the same with "coup de etat" or "strongman dictator" and you'll get the idea. How many media outlets report the fact that Brazil is leading the way in developing smaller commercial jets via Embraer and created 247 jobs in Ft. Lauderdale? How often do we hear that Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) is the world's leading miner of iron ore? Before Hugo Chávez, how often did the MSM mention that Citgo was owned by PDVSA, the state-owned oil company of Venezuela? Much was made of the fact that in Michael Moore's film Sicko, that the US was just ahead of Slovenia in terms of health care, but I don't recall anyone mentioning that the US was just behind Costa Rica. Has anyone heard any mention that Banco Bradesco was the third bank in the world to provide online banking to its customers in 1996?

Admittedly, much of this wonkish, but it bears pointing out. I hope in my short stay here to perhaps dispel some myths about and spur some interest in Latin America.

By Kathy G.

First of all, my profuse thanks to Ezra for inviting me to post here, and for his kind words. It's an honor, especially since I'm in the company of such talented co-bloggers. I'm feeling a little Wayne and Garth about all this ("I'm not worthy!") but I'll try to overcome that.

I wanted to start with a more substantive post but unfortunately I have another project that I need to finish today. So I'll start off with some quickies and get to the meatier stuff later today or tomorrow.

In honor of Ezra's Brazilian travels I thought I'd post some YouTube clips of classic Brazilian jazz, which I love. If a sexier genre of music has ever been invented, I don't know about it.

I'll start with the master, the great Antonio Carlos Jobim, seen here on piano with Joao Gilberto on guitar and vocals. The song is "Chega de saudade (No More Blues)"; English translation of the lyrics can be found here.

This one is audio-only, but worth it:

Finally, there's this one. I tried to find the Astrud Gilberto version but was unable to. This one is not bad, however (English lyrics here):

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

We're not seeing a lot of this yet, because  primary season doesn't give the best opportunities for the media to obsess over the blue state / red state stereotypes that are played to make Democrats look out of touch in general elections.  But it's pretty neat to see that the biggest purveyor of those stereotypes has been hooked by John Edwards.  I'm talking about David Brooks' latest NYT op-ed, "The Ascent of a Common Man".  It's full of all the David Brooks tropes that we hate -- how the only authentic Americans are from the non-urban parts of red states, and how only cultural conservatives can connect with them.  But this time, all of that is working for us.  Brooks goes to Iowa, sees John Edwards and his southern accent connecting with rural voters, and writes things like

I came out to Iowa having read that Edwards had swung left this election campaign. He was going to outflank Clinton and Obama among liberals and then sweep his way to the nomination.

But out here it’s clear that the Edwards campaign is based on the same conviction that organized his last campaign: no one understands regular people the way he does. No one else can get out of a bus in places like Pocahontas, Iowa, and bond with the farmers, nurses and hairstylists the way he can. No one else comes from their ranks the way he does.

Brooks sees the guy with the southern accent connecting with some rural voters and gets such a regionalist crush that it's a wonder he kept his pants on.  The implication that Edwards isn't swinging left arises solely from Brooks' misplaced belief that a small-town Southerner who connects so well with other rural folks just couldn't be that far left, no matter what his health care plan looks like.  He calls Edwards a "culturally conservative anti-Washington liberal", but the only evidence of cultural conservatism he cites are, as Matt Yglesias points out, complete banalities that would be "pretty uncontroversial among secular Jews in Greenwich Village."  Matt continues: "this is one of the strongest parts of the Case for Edwards: out of his mouth, totally banal phrases strike many people as culturally conservative." 

I've liked telling people that swing voters will average Edwards' solidly left-wing policy positions and his Southern accent, and come out thinking that he's a moderate just like them.  If David Brooks is any indication, more spectacular things could happen.  It's not just a great thing for winning elections, but a great thing for transforming American politics.  If accent and cultural background can get people to think of a future President Edwards' policy proposals as moderate or even conservative, American politics could shift leftward in a way that we haven't seen for a very long time. 

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

The stock market turmoil appears to be only partly related to the housing turmoil; rather, the days of "easy credit" seem to have ended, which has hurt the Countrywides of the world as well as companies who have been issuing corporate bonds with unusually low yields. But to focus on housing, this chart from Brad DeLong tells a nice story: subprime loans are not the problem; "insane" subprime loans like ARMs, no-doc, option paments, and other "non-traditional" terms are the problem.

—signed, not Ezra Klein, dagnabbit

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

litbrit's invocation of Frank Zappa reminded me of a spectacular moment in history.  In 1985, the Parents' Music Resource Center, led by Tipper Gore, was trying to impose a ratings system on music similar to the ratings system for movies.  The incongruous trio of Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, and John Denver were called before Congress to testify in defense of music.  From Barry Miles' Zappa:

Pressured by their wives, the congressmen held an impartial forum to investigate the sorry state of the record industry. Senator Hollings (whose wife was a signatory to the RIAA letter) said, 'If I could do away with all of this music constitutionally, I would'.  The Senate hearing on 19 September 1985 was fixed in favor of the PMRC.  The five-hour event was a media circus with 35 television feeds, 50 photographers, plus reporters and members of the public. 

At the Senate hearing, Zappa was by far the most eloquent speaker, though he undermined his credibility by imitating the southern accents of some of the PMRC wives.  Dee Snider from Twisted Sister proved to be much more articulate than the PMRC had expected and was able to contradict much of their testimony, but it was John Denver who did the most damage to the PMRC cause.  Clean-cut and all-American, he held fast to the First Amendment, telling the Chairman, "Sir, we cannot have any kind of censorship whatsoever."

Dee Snider described Denver's testimony. "And here they were, falling all over themselves, complimenting him about the work he'd done for world peace and hunger and all his good efforts, and saying 'But Mr. Denver, don't you think we could have just a little bit, just some ratings on records?'  And he says 'Absolutely not.' He wouldn't budge.  He had everything backed up.  He was devastating.  But to watch the press coverage, you wouldn't even know that John Denver was there for the most part.  He was the most damaging, they gave him the least press."

John Denver's testimony (along with that of the others) is here, if you're curious to read more. 

by Nicholas Beaudrot of electoral Math

• The UK doesn't have a subject exam for Arabic or Chinese? Really? Or were there just not enough test-takers in those subjects to count? Update: oh there they are, lumped in the "Other Modern Languages" category.
• Philip Greenspun thinks smart women aren't going into fields like physics because it's just not very lucrative. He overstates the case, but there is a lot to agree with here; when salaries for top executives, i-bankers, and lawyers were not so far from that of professors, people complained less about the lack of scientists and engineers. Also, the geeks at NASA were much more in the public eye. More recent thinking here.
• Also, grade inflation: not just a problem for the Ivy League

by Nicholas Beaudrot of electoral Math

The WSJ's political news blog has Chris Dodd (D-CT) criticizing the Bush administration for not letting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the entities responsible for loan guarantees on a large number of mortgages, expand their portfolios to take on more mortgage debt to help provide some liquidity in the markets during the credit crunch. I saw Chuck Schumer (D-NY) make a similar complaint.

I really have no clue who's looking out for whom. Which side is doing the work of Big Finance? Is letting Fannie and Freddie take on more (riskier) debt a good idea? Help me, oh Lazyweb!

elsewhere, I note an analyst with Inside Mortgage Finance suggests that Countrywide is "too large to fail" and that our nominally pro-free market Republican administration would have to intervene to keep from failing due to its willingness to take on high risk mortgages. Market hysteria makes people say crazy things.

by Stephen of the Thinkery

Behold what we have wrought:

The women are too afraid and ashamed to show their faces or have their real names used. They have been driven to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their children -- for as little as $8 a day.

"People shouldn't criticize women, or talk badly about them," says 37-year-old Suha as she adjusts the light colored scarf she wears these days to avoid extremists who insist women cover themselves. "They all say we have lost our way, but they never ask why we had to take this path."

Suha has three children.  She's married; her husband thinks that she cleans houses.

"I don't have money to take my kid to the doctor. I have to do anything that I can to preserve my child, because I am a mother," she says, explaining why she prostitutes herself.

Anger and frustration rise in her voice as she speaks.

   "No matter what else I may be, no matter how off the path I may be, I am a mother!"

Karima, another woman forced into prostitution to feed her family, has five children. Her oldest son is old enough to work, but she doesn't allow it because of how dangerous Iraq is. Another woman lives with her three children in just one room. She hosts her "clients" in that room, with each child in a different corner, facing the wall.

The cost of living in Iraq has risen. The nation's infrastructure is of course horribly damaged. Women who once could drive cars, travel freely outside their homes and hold legitimate jobs now are denied drivers' licenses, must cover themselves with scarves or burkas, cannot travel anywhere without a man's permission, and are denied many of the jobs that were once open to them. Women in today's Iraq don't go to school even if there happens to be a school nearby that hasn't had its fresh coat of paint bombed and burned off.

As is always the case, the same fanatics who deny women a place in society because of "religion" are the ones who ensure that they can earn money as prostitutes, indeed are much happier with prostitution being the main way that a woman can make money independently of a man, because it allows them to indulge their own dark desires while maintaining their own auras of purity and piety in their public facade.

This is the American legacy in Iraq. There is no functioning democracy. The few freedoms enjoyed by Iraq's citizens under Saddam are functionally gone even as pieces of paper proclaim their existence, even as American rhetoric claims the presence of far more. The Iraqi people simply are not better off now than they were under Saddam Hussein.

Nor are we, with North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons due in large part to the Bush administration's indifference, Osama still free due completely to the Bush Administration's indifference, the strong possibility that Iran is developing nuclear weapons to counter the threat they see in the USA due to the Bush Administration's provocation, and Iraq as the most effective propaganda tool and training ground for terroristic organizations the world has ever seen.

People of course argue that if the USA were to withdraw its forces - and, one would hope, its thumb from on top of the Iraqi government - things there would become far worse. That may be, but the point is that we simply don't know for sure. What we can know definitely is that continuing to do what we have been doing, only more of it, will ensure the exact same results we have been getting, only more of them.

The Iraqi women and children - always the most vulnerable in war - are living in Hell. The more bombs we drop, the more people we kill, the more instability we instigate and allow to fester throughout that country, the worse it will get for them. It's time to get out. It's time to stop this insanity, this monument to foolishness, this disaster of American arrogance and ignorance.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

The Pew Center for the People and the Press has compiled the results of the last two decades worth of surveys on interest in the news. It turns out that preferences for various types of news has remained mostly constant over time. Disasters (man-made or natural), personal finance, and the weather (!) generate the most interest, while international news not involving Americans and tabloid news generates the least interest. But, the amount of coverage a story gets is frequently out of whack with the amount of interest it generates. Global warming is severely undercovered. Stories about inside-the-beltway personalities (Scooter Libby) get too much coverage. Stories about political issues that affect more everyday Americans (Walter Reed) get too little.

In general, interest in political news splits into two categories. Stories about the who or how of politics generate below-average interest. Stories about scandals involving individual Washington personalities (DeLay's ethics violations, Whitewhater, Jim Wright in the '80s) generate slightly less interest despite often intensive coverage. But both these interest levels are a few percentage points lower than interest in a broad category called "domestic policy", which includes things like Supreme Court decisions, Bush's Social Security privatization drive, debates about campaign finance reform and so forth.

The moral of this story is, the American public may be smarter than you think, and actually care about policy more than they do about who's up and who's down in Washington.

—signed, not Ezra Klein, dagnabbit

By Deborah Newell Tornello
a.k.a. litbrit

Not that this was entirely unexpected (though I read plenty of self-assured speculation that Bernanke would hold out--for a while, at least).  But still.

With risks to the economy from financial market turbulence rising "appreciably," the Federal Reserve on Friday lowered the rate it charges banks on loans they receive from the Fed's discount window, though it opted not to cut its primary policy tool, the federal funds rate.

The Fed's decision to lower the discount rate and ease the terms of discount borrowing but not to cut the fed funds target suggests that for now it believes the problems in the markets are mostly related to the availability of cash, not the price of cash. (Read the Fed's statement.)

One wonders if (and when) the interest rate might be treated similarly, and how long it will be before the nasty I-word fully rears its head.  Economic reporters may be great looking--some even earn nicknames like The Money Honey--but economic realities tend to be rather less attractive, at least in the opinion of this observer.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

Over in my tiny, eponymously-titled island protectorate, located in the mid-left waters of Blogistan, we have a tradition known as Friday Frank.  This regular four-minute (give-or-take) bit entails sharing the genius of the late Frank Zappa with one another and sometimes even dragging new listeners kicking, screaming, and quizzically eyebrow-raising into the fray, never again to look at a snowcone or stack of pancakes in quite the same way.  Given that commercial airplay of FZ's music has, to the detriment of independent musical thinking everywhere, long been limited to a few of the humor pieces like Valley Girl and Dancin' Fool, far too many Americans miss out on the staggeringly broad and undeniably wonderful body of work Mr. Zappa left behind when he died of prostate cancer in 1993 at the age of 52.

You can't pigeonhole this sort of genius--neither the music nor the man.  Frank Zappa was an Italian-American autodidactic musician, composer, and conductor; he claimed, in his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, that because he was self-taught and couldn't play absolutely everything, he didn't consider himself a virtuoso.  Yet most devotees would argue he was that and more--he's certainly one of one of my all-time favorite guitarists.  One of my favorite classical composers too.  Politically, FZ was a conservative (yes, you read that correctly--conservative in the true, old-school, fiscal responsibility sense) who regularly encouraged his fans to register to vote and even run for office; in the last years of his life, voter registration booths were a fixture at Zappa concerts.  He was also an ardent supporter of First Amendment rights, a man with whom Tipper Gore--wife of then soon-to-be Vice President and avowed FZ fan Al--famously tangled over the issue of labeling music with "offensive lyrics".

Anyway, to my ear, this piece--Alien Orifice--is signature Zappa, combining as it does the shifting time signatures, blasting brass, mellow vibes, and blistering guitar for which Maestro's music was and is beloved, forging a sound that's at once rock, jazz, and pure flowing-from-elsewhere inspiration.  Enjoy.

(H/T Farksisten)

By Deborah Newell Tornello
a.k.a. litbrit

One of Wikipedia's greatest strengths--the open-editing format that (nearly always) permits ordinary citizens to add, subtract, or alter content--is also one of its largest liabilities, since persons with less-than-honorable intentions can manipulate data for any number of nefarious reasons: discrediting a competing company, say, or spreading disinformation. At least, they can and will until someone else notices and re-edits an entry. And while Wiki is undeniably useful for writers and researchers of every stripe, the very fact that its insta-data is so easily manipulable by anyone and everyone should serve as a whisper in the ear--if not a huge and wildly undulating red flag--that it might be a good idea to double-check the content against another source, that it would be prudent to ask oneself, before quoting a Wiki entry at length, I wonder whose fingerprints are on this stuff, anyway?

Cal Tech graduate student Virgil Griffith had that very thought. And the computation and neural-systems academic decided that not only was it time to figure out who was behind all the edits, but that it would also be a boon to the free and open marketplace of ideas to offer the general public a way to know, too.

And thus Wikipedia Scanner was born.  From Wired Magazine:

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.

In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.

Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.

"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.

This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.

The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.

Wired invites readers who've used Wikipedia Scanner and unearthed any companies or government spooks fiddling around with data or rewriting history to submit their finds--and vote on other readers' discoveries--at the magazine's blog.

What's also brilliant about Griffith's brainchild is that it injects a much-needed dose of accountability into the sprawling corpus indicium that is Wikipedia. Corporations and politicians seeking to shape (or outright change) information won't be able to hide their self-interested edits behind anonymous user names, and, one hopes, knowing that their IP addresses now point Wikipedia Scanner to their identities will deter them from making mercenary, dishonest, and unscrupulous edits in the first place. One always hopes.

In any case, it's refreshing to learn of an all-too-infrequent case of youth and reason overcoming wealth and tyranny. Cheers to you, Mr. Griffith.

(H/T Lisa in Baltimore)

UPDATE:  Wikipedia Scanner is already embarassing some government agencies, tying numerous unethical edits to computers at the CIA and FBI:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People using CIA and FBI computers have edited entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on topics including the Iraq war and the Guantanamo prison, according to a new tracing program.

The changes may violate Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines, a spokeswoman for the site said on Thursday.

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Via Matthew Yglesias, actual libertarian Julian Sanchez woorries whether satellite imagery will not constitute a "search" and thus not require a warrant. One one hand, the most direct precedent is on his side, with Dow Chemical v US holding that photography by airplane does not violate the fourth amendment. More recently, however, we have Kyllo v US. In this 2001 case, police used thermal imaging to determine that the defendants were probably using heat lamps, and therefore perhaps growing pot. A 5-4 court held that the use of such technology did not constitute a reasonable search and was thus not permitted without warrant.

You might think that a post-Roberts, post-Alito nose count would suggest that if the case were argued today, the case would come out the other way. But no; oddly, Rehnquist and O'Connor were in the minority that supported the thermal imaging search, while Scalia and Thomas sided with the defendants. So, there is a glimmer of hope, though obviously Matt is correct that if technology is changing our surveillance capabilities Congress could clarify the situation by, you know, changing the law.

—signed, not Ezra Klein, dagnabbit

I'm off to beautiful Rio de Janeiro for my cousin's wedding and and my own beach-going. And I'm taking some of that actual vacation-time I'm always going on about. Leisure, yo! In my absence, the normal superteam of guestbloggers will be contributing, along with Nation-fellow Chris Hayes, Beautiful Horizon's Randy Paul, and the brilliant Kathy G. I'll send postcards.

Seriously, don't let me forget to comment on this article later. It's important. Right now, I have to run and have lunch with health-wonk-to-the-stars Len Nichols, which means that I'll be significantly smarter on these issues come two o'clock, and thus better able to write on medical debt.

So in the continuing argument over whether high health spending actually does you any good, there's yet a bit more evidence that it does. This mixes in with some evidence that it doesn't. It's all quite confusing.

Well, superficially so. These are not arguments over whether taking statin drugs to reduce cholesterol is a medically effective therapy. It is. If your doctor tells you to do that, listen to her. The question is whether being treated in an area with high health expenditures -- i.e, where they do more to you -- is better than being treated in an area with low health expenditures.

The reason this is even an issue is that health treatments have a negative impact, too. Surgeries are dangerous, and mistakes, combined with post-operation infections, can kill you. Hospitals transmit diseases and pharmaceuticals can be rough on the system. So the actual argument here is over net effect: Whether the good outweighs the bad. Whether getting everything and the kitchen sink creates improvements at the margins, or whether most of these additional therapies offer little benefit and occasional harm.

Which makes these studies comparing high and low spending areas a bit useless. Not useless in that they don't tell you anything, but useless in that they just point to what every health wonk and medical researcher already knows: We need more data. We need to find, and then focus on, cost-effective treatments.

A system in which the incentives for the doctor and hospital are always to do more -- and where patients simplistically think more is better -- is not a system that's going to offer cost-effective health care. And in that system, more will not necessarily be better, because the incentives are on the more, not the better. We could set up a system -- like they've done in France, begun doing in England, or done in the VA -- where better takes precedence, and more coverage is offered to cost-effective treatments and less to unproven therapies, but that would mean a lot of people currently making a lot of money would start doing somewhat worse, and they ad the politicians they fund don't want that.

The New York Times editorial page gives in to its inner progressive today:

You would think that we were living in the lap of the Nanny State. One of the most puzzling facts of the political debate is how much traction Republicans still get from their calls to cut taxes and public spending, and how timorous Democrats are in arguing against them.

The United States has long had one of the most meager tax takes in the industrial world. America’s social spending — on programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security to food stamps — is almost the stingiest among industrial nations. Among the 30 industrialized countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only four — Turkey, Mexico, South Korea and Ireland — spend less on social programs as a share of their economy.

Long a moral outrage, this tightfisted approach to public needs is becoming an economic handicap. Shortchanging public health impairs America’s competitiveness. If the United States is to reap the rewards of globalization, the government must provide a much more robust safety net — to ensure public support for an open economy and protect vulnerable workers.

This is sort of the point my Richardson article hinges on: More social spending can actually be a growth-accelerant. There are certain things the market can't provide efficiently, and many things the government can't provide efficiently. Only a few of those are in the overlapping part of the venn diagram. And you improve your economy -- not to mention the lives of your citizenry -- when you move goods that could be better provided by the government out of the market's grasp. In the Joseph Stiglitz talk I reference in the Richardson piece, Stiglitz said:

Yesterday, I was talking to the former Finance Minister of Sweden. And Sweden has been one of the countries that has been most successful in facing the challenges of globalization. It’s a small economy, very open, with a significant manufacturing sector. In terms of some of the rhetoric that you hear in Washington and elsewhere, it should have been a disaster case. They have one of the highest tax rates. And it’s not only true in Sweden: Finland and all the other Scandinavian also have very high tax rates. If you only looked at tax rates, you would say these countries would be a disaster. And we had a discussion in which the view was that their success was in spite of. No, it’s not only in spite of, it was because of the high tax rates.

Why is that? It sounds counterintuitive. Well, the answer is it’s how the money is spent. Again, looking at both sides of the balance sheet. It was spent in ways that led to a stronger economy, enabling the economy to face some of the challenges of globalization. The net result of this is that, for instance, Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries do much better than the United States on broader measures of success like human development indicators that look at not just GDP per capita, but also look at health and longevity in terms of labor force participation. They’re doing very well.

The government can complement and enhance the market. The Right's desire to set the two in constant opposition actually holds us back.

The Starbucks Oracle. The best quote I found so far came with the caramel macciato" (which is, incidentally, revolting): "Most people who drink caramel macciatos are strippers."

My latest column at TAP:

My problem with Bill Richardson is that he's a pro-growth Democrat.

This should not be taken to mean that I'm anti-growth: I hereby pledge to never support a presidential candidate who runs on a platform of economic contraction. (I'm objectively anti-contraction!) That said, it's hard to swallow a Democrat who continually implies that vast swaths of the party hew to an anti-growth platform. It's even harder when that Democrat refuses to name names.

And Richardson refuses to name names. I interviewed Richardson by phone as he drove through rural New Hampshire, cell phone crackling in and out as his caravan snaked through the mountains. (Full transcript here.) We were talking about his support for a Balanced Budget Amendment -- more about that in a second -- when Richardson trotted out his "look, I'm a pro-growth Democrat," line. He says this a lot, and I've always found it curious. "Can you name some anti-growth Democrats?" I asked. "No," Richardson replied. "I'm not going to do that. But I know some." Well, could he tell me what part of the Democratic party, or strain of progressive economic thinking, he considered anti-growth? "I'm not going to specify," he said.

Here's the good news: I no longer think Richardson is an economic conservative...

Read the rest.

I'm not yet finished with my copy of Tyler Cowen's Discovering Your Inner Economist (it's very good, though!), so maybe this is included deeper into the book. But given that Cowen upholds that expensive drinks subsidizes food, particularly at fine restaurants where they make hefty margins off wine, etc, do we have any data on what the average mark-up is? If it's high, presumably the most cost-effective strategy be to forego drinking in fine establishments -- what you can't get at home is such fine cooking, and this way it's being subsidized for you. If it's relatively modest, there's certainly some added utility, even if it's partly imagined, to pairing a nice meal with good drink, so maybe it's worth it.

At Tapped, Davis X Machina replies to my concern that some liberals have a serene confidence that Giuliani will self-destruct, saying:

Assume arguendo, that for every turned-off fundie who looks at Giuliani and stays home, a fear-addict, or authority-worshiper, or closet racist, who couldn't otherwise bring him or herself to vote for a southern, Talibornagain Republican comes off the bench.

Are we sure the former outnumber the latter? Is the superego vote really bigger than the id vote?

In American politics, I always bet on the id.

It occurs to me that just about every time the GOP actually carries out some of their favored policies, Andrew Sullivan turns violently on them. So he loathes -- rightfully -- their hateful social rhetoric. He's grown suitably contemptuous of their foreign policy (and he quotes Jim Henley to great effect on Giuliani's inchoate, maddening foriegn policy manifesto). But then he goes on to laud the everything they've not been able to do. "[Giuliani's] inclusive and largely right about healthcare policy. I like his low tax emphasis."

I wonder how Sullivan would really feel in a world where the tax incentives were set-up to incentivize sparse health care coverage and high deductibles. That's a land that's very good for the healthy, and quite bad for the chronically sick. Sullivan increasingly strikes me as a first order idealist who ably sees the principles behind things (freedom! choice! equality!) and is stunned when policies based on those concepts don't appear to work.

But here's why they don't work. Take Giuliani's health care plan, which basically rests of tax exemptions to help purchase care. It sets a standard deduction of $7,500 for individuals and $15,000 for families. Everyone will get precisely those deductions no matter what they spend. If you're 23 and your health care costs $2,000 a year, you still deduct $7,500, pocketing the difference. And that's the actual point of the plan. That's the incentive the plan is hoping will change health care -- it will incentivize everyone to buy less of it, and pocket more of their exemption.

If you're healthy, a world in which Giuliani's plan was law would be a world in which it was economically foolish of you to purchase high quality, comprehensive coverage. And that would be fine -- for the healthy individual. But insurance works based on risk pooling. If our hypothetical 23-year-old only uses $10 of health care a year, but is now paying $80 rather than $100 for his plan, that's less money that can subsidize someone with a chronic illness. Their costs go up. Their ability to cover their treatments go down. And they get sick and they die. And one day, ironically, this happens to the 23-year-old, too, because he's now 55 with heart disease, and the current generation of 23-year-olds are purchasing $50 plans.

Sullivan likes the plan because it superficially incentivizes individuals to take more control of their own health. But what it really does is incentivize them to buy less insurance -- we're just pushing them in a different direction. And it's a direction that hurts a lot of people -- people I'm going to guess Sullivan would one day decide shouldn't be getting hurt, and should be able to get medicine. And then he'd become an eloquent and outraged opponent of that plan, too. It would just be too late.

On Clinton:

“Rage Over Cleavage!” was the headline that turned me into a Clinton booster. Other than that typically understated summation from the Times of India, last month’s spat over the state of Clinton’s décolletage saw wave after peristaltic wave of pious vapidity, followed by the occasional spasm of outright misogyny.

Smart, too:

Lacking a Y chromosome almost certainly puts half the population at a disadvantage in the quest to signal competence and authority. Women are repeatedly judged as having performed better in blind assessments of their abilities, from thesis papers to orchestra tryouts, than they are judged when their gender is revealed. They respond by flocking to careers where competence is most directly signaled, like those in medicine and law. Implicit bias studies, though controversial, indicate that even the most progressive among us harbor stereotyped associations (pdf) about gender, family, and work.

Peter Beinart has a column today calling for the GOP to create their own DLC -- an institution capable of facing down the party's base and freeing the candidates from some of their more insane litmus tests.

Today's GOP needs an organization strong enough to fight the hegemony of the Iowa caucuses, where hard-right activists dominate and centrist candidates go to die. It needs think tanks that offer serious answers on global warming and universal health care, where conservative orthodoxy is increasingly detached from political reality. And it needs to open up more primary voting to independents, the people who powered John McCain's crusade against the party base in 2000.

And maybe it does! But I'm unconvinced. The Democrats took over in 2006 because the Iraq War went to hell and a few key members of the GOP went to jail. I'd like to believe that the electorate was reacting to the party's position on stem cell research and health care financing, but I don't buy it. That said, these narratives telling parties to change everything in the wake of defeat rarely tend to have much connection to the reality of the exit polls and the context of the election, so we may as well try to use this moment to push the GOP towards becoming a constructive force in American life rather than a bundle of xenophobic anxieties and class resentments. So I'm with Peter. "Serious answers on global warming and universal health care" are the Republican Party's only path back to relevance.

I got into the office today to find a big ol' box o' music from the fine folks at History Major Records. I haven't listened to any of it yet, but the packaging is all very promising. I'm mostly interested in the CD from Bedford Academy, which came with a post-it note describing them as "Ex-hardcore kids from post-industrial New England making soft emo pop," which is the most hilarious thing I've just about ever heard. Forget the music, I'm thinking profile!

Meanwhile, I'm currently listening to a lot of Matt Pond PA, and just found his cover of Oasis's Champagne Supernova:

According to new research (pdf) by Spyros Konstantopoulos, the answer is no. Small classes are better across the board, but the thesis that they are relatively more beneficial for kids being left behind doesn't appear to hold. From the paper: "The results consistently indicated that higher-achieving students benefited more from being in small classes in early grades than other students. The findings also indicated that although all types of students benefited from being in small classes, reductions in class size did not reduce the achievement gap between low and high achievers."

Personally, I blame the teacher's unions.

From the “Welfare State and Life Satisfaction: Evidence from Public Health Care,” by Kaisa Kotakorpi and Jani-Petri Laamanen:

We examine the effect of publicly provided health care on welfare by combining local level data on public health care, and individual level data on life satisfaction. It is shown that relatively high expenditures in health care have a positive effect on individuals life satisfaction in our data. We further illustrate how life satisfaction data can be used to directly test theoretical hypotheses about how the welfare effect of public provision should vary among different groups in the population. We find some evidence for an “ends-against-the-middle” equilibrium (Epple and Romano, 1996) in the provision of public health care, where middle-income individuals prefer higher public expenditure at the margin than low-income or high-income individuals. Further, our results indicate that valuation for health care depends on individual political orientation.

More to come when I've read the whole study. (Via, via)

The Bush administration is taking the extraordinary -- and unsettling -- step of naming a sanctioned armed force of a sovereign country a terrorist group. The designation is going to the Ahmadinejad-allied Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which receives a host of independent funding from outside sources, and which can now be targeted financially by the Bush administration. In other words, this is an intermediary -- and inflammatory -- step towards much tougher, more intrusive sanctions meant to target a key element of the Iranian state. Joe Cirincione, an expert on nuclear proliferation, comments:

It would tie an end to Iran's nuclear program to an end to its support of allies in Hezbollah and Hamas. The only way you could get a nuclear deal is as part of a grand bargain, which at this point is completely out of reach.[...]

Sanctions can serve as a prod, but they have very rarely forced a country to capitulate or collapse. All of us want to back Iran into a corner, but we want to give them a way out, too. [The designation] will convince many in Iran's elite that there's no point in talking with us and that the only thing that will satisfy us is regime change.

I don't know how much likelier this makes war, but it certainly doesn't render it less likely, and it's hard to imagine the causal chain wherein the angered Iranian Revolutionary Guard doesn't create a self-fulfilling prophecy and begin increasing strikes at American interests within Iraq, if they haven't already.

Just to be clear, I never said -- or meant to imply -- that liberal hawks didn't consider the weapons a central reason to invade Iraq. I merely said that their arguments didn't rely on "Iraq's threat to us, or connection to 9/11." Insofar as the weapons were considered important, it was in the context of a Dead Man's Gamble narrative, wherein Crazy Mad Saddam Hussein would threaten to detonate a nuke in Saudi Arabia or Tel Aviv unless we let him invade Kuwait without interference. The reason that's important in retrospect is that Saddam's direct threat to America was the central case made by the Bush administration, and the fact that this rationale was completely non-credible was utterly dismissed by the hawks. The policy was evaluated in a vacuum, rather than in the words and emphases of those who would be carrying it out.

You know, I was about to do a post on Huckabee's smart and humane position on the drug war, which Roberto Rivera mentioned in comments. Problem was, when I went to search for the whole quote, it turned out that the top result was, well, me, as I'd posted on it months ago.

[Huckabee] has refused to take the predictable path by talking tough on crime to deflect the DuMond criticism. Instead, he campaigns on a compassionate approach to wrongdoers, especially those whose crimes are the result of drug or alcohol addiction. At Philly's Finest, he condemned the "revenge-based corrections system," sounding every bit the sort of squishy liberal that the Bill O'Reillys of the world long ago scared into the shadows. "We lock up a lot of people we are mad at rather than the ones we are really afraid of," he said. "We incarcerate more people than anybody on earth." As governor, Huckabee pushed for drug treatment instead of incarceration for non-violent offenders. He pushed for faith-based prison programs, and was critical of governors who "gladly pull the switch" on death penalty cases, an apparent knock on President Bush, who was criticized as governor of Texas for being cavalier about capital punishment.

According to Rivera, he also calls the "three-strikes" law "the dumbest piece of public-policy legislation in a long time" and argues that "We don't have a massive crime problem; we have a massive drug problem. And you don't treat that by locking drug addicts up." Its good enough rhetoric to post twice.

The Council of Foreign Relations is providing a useful public service by getting the candidates to articulate their foreign policies at think tank -- that is to say, excruciating -- length. Rudy Giuliani's manifesto went up today, and it's interesting, if only for its intense attention to new names for the War on Terror. First we get "the Terrorists' War on Us," followed quickly by "the terrorists' war on global order" and "the long war." The War on Us" neologism seems best suited for fear-mongering and aggressive self-righteousness, their war on "the global order" is probably for those times when Giuliani wants to pretend to be a multilateralist, and "the long war" is for all those NeoCons desperate to imagine themselves in some sort of World War II style clash.

From there, Giuliani promises to expand the military by at least 10 brigades, which probably means between 15,000 and 35,000 new soldiers. We also need a missile defense system, because "Rogue regimes that know they can threaten America, our allies, and our interests with ballistic missiles will behave more aggressively, including by increasing their support for terrorists. On the other hand, the knowledge that America and our allies could intercept and destroy incoming missiles would not only make blackmail less likely but also decrease the appeal of ballistic missile programs and so help to slow their development and proliferation." This makes, so far as I can tell, no sense.

Giuliani also calls for a Reagn-esque type of diplomacy, wherein we "The next U.S. president should take inspiration from Ronald Reagan's actions during his summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík in 1986: he was open to the possibility of negotiations but ready to walk away if talking went nowhere. The lesson is never talk for the sake of talking and never accept a bad deal for the sake of making a deal," before taking a shot at Pelosi: "Members of Congress who talk directly to rogue regimes at cross-purposes with the White House are not practicing diplomacy; they are undermining it."

Giuliani also calls for expanding NATO to "to any state that meets basic standards of good governance, military readiness, and global responsibility," presumably so it can serve as a replacement for the UN, which he says "has proved irrelevant to the resolution of almost every major dispute of the last 50 years," and though it "can be useful for some humanitarian and peacekeeping functions...we should not expect much more of it."

So let's be clear: Giuliani, who's advised by Norman Podhoretz, is running to uphold the foreign policy of the NeoCons. He is their champion, and his platform reflects their influence. He's the closest thing to Cheney in the race -- right down to the authoritative, secretive streak -- and is probably the most dangerous of the Republican contenders.

From Glenn Loury's article in The Boston Review:

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

Italics mine. I find that to be an utterly astounding statistic. The size of our workforce dedicated to imprisoning mostly-non-violent Americans is not merely equal, but significantly larger, than the workforces of our country's most massive three employers combined. And the population they exist to serve keeps growing, even as crime keeps dropping. Why? Because that's how we want it:

One simple measure of punitiveness is the likelihood that a person who is arrested will be subsequently incarcerated. Between 1980 and 2001, there was no real change in the chances of being arrested in response to a complaint: the rate was just under 50 percent. But the likelihood that an arrest would result in imprisonment more than doubled, from 13 to 28 percent. And because the amount of time served and the rate of prison admission both increased, the incarceration rate for violent crime almost tripled, despite the decline in the level of violence. The incarceration rate for nonviolent and drug offenses increased at an even faster pace: between 1980 and 1997 the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent offenses tripled, and the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses increased by a factor of 11. Indeed, the criminal-justice researcher Alfred Blumstein has argued that none of the growth in incarceration between 1980 and 1996 can be attributed to more crime.

This growth in punitiveness was accompanied by a shift in thinking about the basic purpose of criminal justice. In the 1970s, the sociologist David Garland argues, the corrections system was commonly seen as a way to prepare offenders to rejoin society. Since then, the focus has shifted from rehabilitation to punishment and stayed there. Felons are no longer persons to be supported, but risks to be dealt with. And the way to deal with the risks is to keep them locked up.

This, of course, affected policing priorities, to the point that researchers now find that "higher incarceration in a given neighborhood in one year seemed to predict higher crime rates in that same neighborhood one year later," as policing becomes more intensive and less-lenient in high crime neighborhoods, parolees returning to their homes are closely monitored, and sentencing laws for repeat felons come into play. In other words, imprisonment begets imprisonment -- because we want these populations imprisoned.

Pollster Stan Greenberg runs through some of the trends that he thinks will render 2008 a unique, and possibly even transformative, election:

* The Democrats’ lead in both the Presidential and Congressional races is undiminished in the ‘core’ group of the most likely voters. Usually, the Republicans cut some of the margin on Election Day because of turnout patterns, but that is not likely in 2008.

* Education - one of the best predictors of vote over the past decade - is losing its power, with both well-educated and blue collar voters moving to the Democrats. In the Congressional ballot, for example, the high school educated give the Democrat an 11- point lead, dropping to 10 points among those with some high school and 8 points among the college educated. In short, the rush to be done with the Republicans is turning America a little classless.

* The ‘opinion elite’ in the country - those with a college education and earning more than $75,000 - are supporting the Democratic presidential candidate by 11 points (52 to 41 percent). The elites are apparently fed up with the state of the country under George Bush.

* While the Democratic Presidential candidate is winning the Kerry counties by a two-toone margin, the Republican candidate is only winning the Bush counties by 1 point (46 to 45 percent). The Republican nominee will struggle to come back in the battleground states. Just as important, a lot of Republican incumbents will be running in supposedly ‘red’ districts and states, but find them evenly divided. The Republican Presidential candidate is barely ahead among white rural voters (48 to 41 percent).

* The Democratic Presidential candidate is carrying those with family members serving in Iraq by almost the same margin as for voters overall, 50 to 43 percent. Democratic Congressional candidates who have been prominently trying to change Iraq policy have an even larger lead, 53 to 42 percent.

* The Democratic Presidential candidate is carrying all Catholics by 18 points and white Catholics by 13 (51 to 38 percent). This would represent a major change in political direction. In fact, the Democrat is running marginally ahead among white Catholics who attend Church every week.

Keep in mind that this is the generic ballot, which Democrats tend to do better on, and which has them running against an unnamed Republican -- which actually means Bush -- rather than a named Republican, who won't be Bush. When you look at the general election match-ups right now, the Democrats retain an edge, though not an insurmountable one. It's worth noting that Hillary Clinton polls far, far worse than Obama and Edwards do. I don't know if that's because they're standing in for "unnamed Democrat" or because Hillary really is weak, but the durability and occasional size of her underperformance -- she beats Thompson by 3%, Obama and Edwards beat him by about 13% -- is worrying.

The New York Times had a good editorial this weekend detailing the many metrics and categories in which our health care system underperforms those of other developed countries. It's not new stuff for anyone who's been reading this site for awhile, but it's nice to see the data getting the play it deserves. I'm particularly pleased that the Times took on satisfaction ratings, as you often hear that Americans are the happiest with their system, and that's simply not true:

Patient satisfaction. Despite the declarations of their political leaders, many Americans hold surprisingly negative views of their health care system. Polls in Europe and North America seven to nine years ago found that only 40 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s health care system, placing us 14th out of 17 countries. In recent Commonwealth Fund surveys of five countries, American attitudes stand out as the most negative, with a third of the adults surveyed calling for rebuilding the entire system, compared with only 13 percent who feel that way in Britain and 14 percent in Canada.

What surprised me, though, is that the editorial has no entry for "Cost." The most damning fact about the American health care system is not its lower quality, its 45 million uninsured, or its piss-poor mortality rates. It's that all these failings come in context of a price tag that's double what anyone else pays. Hilary Clinton, in her defense of universal health care, also ignored the cost factor, focusing instead on the uninsured and mortality rates. But the cost issue is the most intuitive and hard-to-rebut claim within the reformer's rhetorical arsenal. We pay much more, and get slightly less, than all other developed countries -- and that's simply the reality of it. Let the Republicans and the corporations argue that Americans should pay out the nose for a uniquely bad deal. Let them try.

Reading this profile of Robert Gates, you'd get the impression he's some sort of independent actor within the war debate -- a quiet, thoughtful man who will, at some point, render an honest judgment that George W. Bush and the Democratic Congress will have to react to. You would not get the impression that this is but one more functionary who serves at the pleasure of the president, who won't publicly speak his mind if his conclusions conflict with the administration's favored path forward, and who, like Colin Powell and the Iraq Study Group before him, can be easily ignored in private.

The media's enduring tendency to try and create new heroes and pivot points for the war is, at this point, playing a genuinely obfuscatory role. George W. Bush has not picked cabinet officials and commanders who will cross him before Congress. This war, and its continuation, remain his initiative, and the media has to cease pretending that it's a more open and fluid process than it has ever been shown to be.

One other notable thing about Packer's taxonomy of war arguments (which, I should have said more clearly, detailed the arguments he saw among liberal hawks) is that nowhere on the list does he mention Iraq's threat to us, or connection to 9/11. These arguments, though central to the case for war, were utterly derided by liberal hawks, who chalked their (obviously mendacious) existence up to basic fear-mongering needed to placate the rubes. No liberals I know of bought the war based on Bush's stated case -- they bought it based on Ken Pollack's or Tom Friedman's cases. But, at the end of the day, it was still George W. Bush's war. The efforts of the liberal hawks to support their own versions of the conflict were sheer exercises in ego, brought on by folks whose usefuness in the moment led them to believe they would wield far more influence than they actually possessed..

Before America invaded Iraq, George Packer wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine on the liberal hawks that sought to categorize the pro- and anti-war arguments. Given that you often hear war supporters say that the doves opposed this war for the wrong reasons, it's interesting to see what Packer