• Henry Waxman has come out with an aggressive climate change proposal that would reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, going much further than the Obama administration's proposal, although the stage has already been set for an emboldened EPA to use authority granted by the Clean Air Act to circumvent Congress entirely. Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi is confident that climate change legislation will be passed by July.
• Polls close for today's NY-20 special election at 9:00, and there doesn't appear to be a clear favorite in the race (although it would seem that Tedisco is already prepared to challenge a loss). That being said, I'm with Steve Benen on the significance of the race: this is merely a reflection of the people who show up and vote in that district, not a referendum on the GOP, President Obama, the popularity of the stimulus or a harbinger of the future. Indeed, as this Roll Call article on how the 2010 elections won't resemble the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress notes, special elections only tend to matter in the actual election year, not over a year beforehand.
• Everybody had a great time mocking the Republican alternative "budget" proposal last week, myself included, but I would actually like to see some concrete numbers, if only to get a sense of what the GOP's spending (or lack thereof) priorities are. Well, it seems whole thing is a big ruse, sources telling ABC News that the GOP doesn't plan on offering a real budget, just amendments to the Democrats' proposal. First Read, however, reports that there will be some Republican budget-related program activities going on tomorrow morning at the Capitol, but it sounds to me like another dog-and-pony show.
• There's every reason to be happy that the war against al-Qaeda (and it is a war, as Spencer Ackerman reminds us) will no longer officially be referred to as the "Global War on Terror," but if Brian Beutler is correct, the new phraseology, "Overseas Contingency Operations" doesn't inspire much confidence, either. Virtually all military activities undertaken by the United States are overseas operations, which leaves "contingency" to fill another vague foreign policy framework.
• A new Washington Post/ABC News poll has some interesting finds, not the least of which is the right track/wrong track question, with 42 percent saying the country is on the right track, up nearly 30 points since December and the highest it's been since 2004. Barack Obama remains popular, with a 66 percent approval rating, and gets majority support on his handling of the economy (60 percent) and the budget deficit (52 percent). I fully expect those numbers to drop, but what's clear is that right now voters overwhelmingly blame financial institutions, banks and corporate managers for the tumbling economy -- and only 25 percent blame Obama.
• Perhaps the reason Democratic strategists are turning to Sarah Palin as the new Rush Limbaugh is because of this nugget in an Esquire profile of the talk show host: "The dirty little secret of conservative talk radio is that the average age of listeners is 67 and rising, according to [Air America founding president Jon] Sinton -- the Fox News audience, likewise, is in its mid-60s: 'What sort of continuing power do you have as your audience strokes out?'"
• Remainders: Barack Obama's push for post-partisanship dies a quiet, not-early-enough death; Mark Sanford continues to grandstand for conservatives while the people of South Carolina suffer; Steve Clemons predicts big changes in U.S.-Cuba relations are coming; and unions think Bank of American ought to get the GM treatment from the administration.

--Mori Dinauer

Although there has not yet been an official announcement, word is leaking out about who else President Obama has selected to fill the remaining 10 seats on his Advisory Council for the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. So far, we know that Christian author and hero to under-35 evangelicals Donald Miller has been tapped for one spot. U.S. News and World Report says that former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy has been slated for another spot.

Miller, who campaigned for Obama and delivered a benediction at the Democratic National Convention, is well-known to young evangelicals. His book Blue Like Jazz is distributed to college students through the evangelizing powerhouse Campus Crusade for Christ, and is said to address ambiguity and conflict between evangelicalism and modern life.

Since winning the Super Bowl, Dungy has become a spokesperson for victory in life (and sports!) via faith. A football-themed version of the New Testament, Path to Victory, published by the International Bible Society and bearing Dungy's name, has been distributed to thousands of Americans as an accompaniment to home-delivered newspapers. Didn't want a Bible with your Sunday paper? Too bad.

That's two more men, and two more evangelicals. Eight more slots to go to represent a cross-section of American religion.

--Sarah Posner

Back when liberals were out of power, there was a great debate over "new ideas" -- are they required for political success? Do liberals just need better politicians/ads/campaign tactics instead? One common answer at the time was that the most important liberal ideas were enacted in the great Democratic era of FDR to LBJ, and that the basic platform was tweaking the evolving welfare state and figuring out fixes in the margins for things like trade. A number of "new" issues galvanized liberals, from climate change to the post-Soviet/post-9/11 shifts in foreign policy thinking, but the liberal platform didn't change too much.

I recall the debate because today Patrick Ruffini at Next Right continues a conservative iteration of the same discussion:

One of the biggest reasons for the Right's decline in the Bush era is that we had long since completed most of the items on our to-do list. Low marginal tax rates? Check. The Soviet Union gone? Check. Welfare reform? Check. ...This empty cupboard of ideas had led to progressively more minimalist Republican governing agendas and campaign platforms.

...If nothing else, the first 70 days of Obama -- with an assist from the last 4 months of Bush -- has left government economic policy so off-kilter that it may take a decade or more to fix. Remember that exhausted to-do list? Not a problem any more.

For the first time in decades, Republicans could run on a platform of cutting government by a third and not seem wild-eyed or mean-spirited. When we talk about the dangers of governments running private businesses, we will have contemporary object lessons to teach with, not bogeymen that are decades old or oceans away. When we talk about getting the government out of our lives, more people will nod their head knowing exactly what we mean, having just footed the bill for bailout after bailout, instead of yawning or dismissing it as a non-issue as they did in the prosperous, laissez-faire post-Reagan America.

The whole post is interesting and worth reading, but boy do I disagree with it. That particular section about "cutting government by a third" really seems to miss the national mood right now, and in particular the way people are reacting to the most toxic political legacy of the last six months, the ad hoc bailouts of financial firms. It's axiomatic that no one likes to see their taxes go to fat cats, even if they appreciate the greater macro-economic effect.

But the last thing that people -- especially the people affected by the recession -- are saying is that the government is spending too much time in their lives. Government right now is about jobs (the stimulus), health care and protecting consumers from contaminated products from abroad, it's about coming home from Iraq and preventing the next Katrina. There is, of course, plenty of time to for the new administration to screw it up, but they have done a very good job thus far of ensuring that the average person doesn't feel that they are being held back the government (recall the tax cut for 95 percent of people that doesn't warrant a mention in Ruffini's post?).

A number of conservatives have been up in arms about the ouster of Rick Wagoner, as though it indicated that the government could come into any business and start shaking things up. But of course, GM is taking loans from the government and that's one of the strings attached -- At Ford, the auto company that declined government help, the CEO remains in place. A helpful analogy from my colleague Adam recalls welfare-to-work requirements: Under the logic of the conservative response to Wagoner, we would persumably allow welfare recipients to have free reign with government money. We require welfare recipients to work, and we require companies on the government dole to do things as well. Though Ruffini refuses to believe it, the administration and Democrats in general did not and do not want to nationalize anything; it's dangerous politically and financially and, seriously, the private sector does do it better. Only the macroeconomic consequences of Reaganesque deregulation -- the too big to fail problem -- created the need for this kind of aggressive intervention.

But more importantly to Ruffini's point: Do Americans think that Wagoner shouldn't have been fired? Are they unhappy about it? I haven't seen any polls yet, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that most people are pleased to see Wagoner on his way out.

-- Tim Fernholz

Like Ezra, I strongly recommend Jon Chait's depressing article about Senate obstructionism. Also like Ezra, I think the problems identified are structural and go beyond any particular group of politicians.

Indeed, I would push it even further. While there's some truth to his argument that "[t]he Senate is a broken branch," I don't agree that its inherent problems have symmetrical partisan effects. The fact that it's a lot easier to stop things than to get things done definitely favors conservative interests in the long run. (Although, at least some of the rules that allow for minority obstruction can (and should at the earliest opportunity) be changed.) But more problematic is the gross malapportionment of the Senate, which strongly favors reactionary interests. There are Blue Dogs with a slavish adherence to business interests in the House too, but they're much less of a problem there because urban liberals are more fairly represented (and because the rules give much less leverage to a smaller minority of conservative Dems) .

This isn't to say that Chait's argument isn't useful; the Senate was a really bad idea, but we're stuck with it. The only way to get around it is to create and enforce norms that make obstructionist conservative Dems as politically toxic as possible. But, structurally, conservative obstructionism is going to be the rule, not the exception, in the Senate. It's what the branch was designed to do, and it does it all too well.

--Scott Lemieux

Steve Benen points out that the American people are just that into her:

A Washington Post-ABC News survey conducted over the past few days shows a dramatic turnaround: Her favorability ratings are at 76 percent, up 28 points since summer. The number of people who view her negatively has plummeted. Her most striking inroads have come among Republicans who viewed her negatively last year, perhaps in part because of comments she made about feeling proud of her country for the first time.

This is in a story that quotes far more Republicans than Democrats. The numbers speak for themselves. Michelle Obama just isn't the political vulnerability that many conservatives thought she was, probably because the American people as a whole don't share certain individual hang-ups common to conservative media figures

-- A. Serwer

Let's hear it for the ladies of the Obama administration: first Janet Napolitano and now Hillary Clinton are perfectly happy -- despite denials from OMB chief Peter Orszag -- to admit that they are no longer using the Bush administration's imprecise, fear-mongering "global war on terror" language. At TPM D.C., Brian Beutler reports:

Whether a directive's been issued or not, the administration has dropped GWOT from its lexicon. "I haven't gotten any directive about using it or not using it.... The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself," said Clinton while en route to the Hague.

Here's what Napolitano had to say about the "GWOT" language a few weeks ago, in an interview with the German newsweekly Der Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word "terrorism." Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

NAPOLITANO: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

--Dana Goldstein

At Racialicious, Matt Egan has a very smart analysis of the history of representations of Jewishness in American film and television -- both by Jewish producers/directors/writers and by others. In particular, I found his analysis of the Judd Apatow/Jason Segal oeuvre interesting: Egan sees Peter's choice between Sarah and Rachel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall as a choice between denying his own Jewish ethnicity or embracing it. He plumbs the hidden Jewishness of "Friends" and "X-Files." And Egan has harsh words for recent Holocaust films The Reader and Valkyrie, which he describes as "decenter[ing] Jews to rehabilitate mass murderers."

On the same topic, here is my take on another recent Holocaust movie, Defiance.

--Dana Goldstein

Meanwhile, Paul Waldman considers the epic battle between new media and old.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Yesterday, Jon Chait had a well thought out piece explaining why Democrats are struggling to implement a progressive agenda even though they retain control of Congress and the White House. Today, Michael Barone explains that Democrats are struggling because they're "abnormal".

This is similar but not identical to a point I've often made: that the Republican Party is the party of people who are considered, by themselves and by others, as normal Americans—Northern white Protestants in the 19th century, married white Christians more recently—while the Democratic Party is the party of the out groups who are in some sense seen, by themselves and by others, as not normal—white Southerners and Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, blacks and white seculars more recently. Thus it's natural for the Democrats to be more fissiparous.

Chait surmises that "Barone was probably just trying to find another way to work in his oft-stated belief that Democrats are a bunch of freaks disconnected from middle America." Well, there's actually a more disturbing conclusion to draw from Barone's argument, which is that people of different ethnic, religious, and sexual persuasions simply can't get along with one another. Which, in and of itself, goes a long way towards explaining why the GOP remains a shrinking, monochrome party, a kind of gated community where many people don't feel welcome.

At any rate, Chait also offers the more compelling explanation: "There is a structural assymetry between the parties at work, but it lies in the fact that Republicans draw all their economic support from business and back the business agenda, while Democrats draw support from labor and environmentalists along with business and must navigate compromises between the two." But why go with a compelling argument when you can just point your finger at someone and call them a freak?

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, I raised some questions about Simon Johnson's Atlantic piece urging the IMFification of the administration's financial crisis response. Now long-time IMF critic and Harvard economist Dani Rodrik reacts to Johnson:

... I find it astonishing that Simon would present the IMF as the voice of wisdom on these matters--the same IMF which until recently advocated capital-account liberalization for some of the poorest countries in the world and which was totally tone deaf when it came to the cost of fiscal stringency in countries going through similar upheavals (as during the Asian financial crisis).

Simon's account is based on a very simple, and I believe misguided, theory of politics and economics. It is an odd marriage of populist and technocratic visions. Countries fail because political elites always end up in bed with economic elites. The solution, apparently, is to let the technocrats (read the IMF) run your affairs.

Among the many lessons from the crisis we should have learned is that economists and policy advisors need greater humility. Too many of us thought we had the right model when it turned out that we didn't. We pushed certain policies with much greater confidence than we should have. Over-confidence bred hubris (and the other way around).

Do we really want to exhibit the same self-confidence and assurance now, as we struggle to devise solutions to the crisis caused by our own hubris?

That strikes me as a very good question. In this case, good policymaking is finding the proper balance between speed and haste.

-- Tim Fernholz

Via Noam, a Daily Beast article by Adam Posen brings the criticism on Tim Geithner:

I know that the very same self-limiting discussions took place at Okurasho, the Japanese Ministry of Finance circa 1995-1998. And they ended with the same result, a series of bank-recapitalization plans that tried to mobilize private-sector monies and overpay for distressed bank assets without forcing the banks to truly write off the losses. Even though the top Japanese technocrats at the ministry were even more insulated from a weak Diet than the congressionally unconfirmed advisers currently running economic policy for the Obama administration, they did worse. Whatever the political context, countries usually try to end banking crises on the cheap, with a limited public role at first, overpaying for distressed assets and failing to change banks’ behavior, only to have to go back in a couple of years later.

So the bad news is that Posen doesn't think this will work, but the good news is that we are way ahead of the Japan curve; Japan's crisis began in the late eighties, while ours began in 2007, and was only broadly recognized last year. So the fact that the U.S. is already moving faster than Japan is a good sign; if Posen is right and it doesn't work, more agressive plans will come to the fore faster than in other crises. Like Justin Fox, I'm not sure why this critics of the administration's plan can't put it in perspective:

Krugman, Simon Johnson and a lot of other people think the government should be moving a lot more quickly and decisively to take over the most troubled banks and clean up their balance sheets. The Treasury approach appears to be to do some work on the balance sheets—through efforts to modify mortgages and buy up toxic assets—and then figure out what to do with the most troubled banking companies.

Strategically, if you're an economist who believes that speedy nationalization is the only way out, you're wasting your time talking to the administration. Instead, you ought to be building a constituentcy for that policy in congress, since the only way seizure and reorganization will happen is with new legal authority from congress and a very large check. Berating the administration for not having $1.5 trillion to spend or the ability to seize banks is a nice side-show, but it's nothing compared to having a few leading members of congress stand up and say, "I'd vote for nationalization and the costs that go with it."

-- Tim Fernholz

• The Obama administration has decided to get tough with GM, giving the ailing auto giant a deadline to finalize a merger with Fiat and restructure the company. The president also sacked CEO Rick Wagoner, making the entirely reasonable claim that new management will be needed in order to move the company forward.
  
• Jonathan Chait has a nice piece on why the Democrats can't govern, which gets to the heart of our Senate problem: "Yet the constant recurrence of legislative squabbling and drift suggests a deeper problem than any characterological or tactical failures by these presidents: a congressional party that is congenitally unable to govern." The evidence Chait employs is too legion to be recalled here, but it's worth noting the dynamic on display here: the structure of Senate amplifies the bad behavior of Democratic Senators and the only thing that keeps the GOP in check is total partisan loyalty.
• I agree it's ominous, but I think Sen. John Cornyn's assertion that it might take "years" for the Minnesota Senate election to be resolved is a bit of cheerleading hyperbole. Cornyn, you'll recall, also hinted that his caucus would filibuster the seating of Al Franken until the entire process had been resolved, which I assume would take nothing less than a gut check from the Almighty to make sure Al Franken really should be Minnesota's junior Senator. Brian Beutler has more on the "Importance of being Franken" and Eric Kleefeld sees the potential for a backlash against the Minnesota GOP on account of Cornyn's remarks.
• The fact that a Spanish court has opened a case against six members of the Bush administration for covering up torture at Guantanamo Bay is significant not because it will actually lead to immediate prosecution (it won't) but because it's another small step towards reestablishing accountability for international criminals, even if they come from the mighty United States. Ultimately this means the Bush Six can't travel to Spain without being arrested, although I'm holding out hope that Doug Feith really is as bright as Gen. Tommy Franks said he was and might take a trip to the Iberian Peninsula anyway.
• Speaking of the discredited, it's quite remarkable that someone as full of it as Dick Cheney appears on television so regularly that even David Petraeus has to start correcting him. Even stranger, as dday tallies, is the enduring appeal of John McCain as a fixture on the political talking heads circuit. And the fact that McCain lost the election is only part of it. At the end of said losing campaign, McCain began rapidly shedding all credibility on policy issues, outsourcing them to (literally) some man on the street, and hastening the impression that only one candidate really knew what he was talking about. I don't see much evidence that McCain has changed since yet and there he is, the go-to guy for criticizing the president on policy grounds.
  
• I'm not sure which of these quotes comes closer to pulling back the curtain on uncomfortable truths: Glenn Beck's admission that he knowingly manipulates his viewers or John Murtha's admission that his corruption is exactly what his constituents want.
• Remainders: Newsweek profiles Krugman; Juan Cole talks engaging the Muslim world; DADT gets pushed off the table; The Colorado Independent finds someone more wingnutty than Ann Coulter; the National Popular Vote project chugs along towards its goal; and Texas raises the bar on must-have accessories for the complete college experience.
  

--Mori Dinauer

Early in the convo with Gordy, Napolitano shows that she and President Barack Obama get that the effort needs fuller funding:

We have moved special teams to Louisiana to speed up decisions on projects that need reimbursement or need to be paid for. We have consolidated management so projects don't have to go from one office to another to be approved. And we're working with state and local governments in their own recovery efforts. ... The view of the President is that this recovery needs to proceed as expeditiously as possible. It's also consistent with stimulating the economy, getting dollars out there to create jobs, schools, fire stations, and police stations. Getting the money out to get those rebuilt and replaced, that's what we're focused on now.

Freeing up public monies would, finally, be great, especially given all the financial heavy-lifting that philanthropies and non-profits have had to provide. But there's one point Napolitano didn't get, or better said, overlooked. After acknowledging to Gordy that she didn't think "there ever is a levee big enough to withstand a Katrina-size storm," Napolitano continued:

But my understanding is the levees are being redone, and they will be much stronger than they were before. ... It's that kind of attitude we have: let's identify the problem, let's figure out what we need to do to fix it, and see how quickly we can move.

As Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, wrote in our special report on rebuilding the Gulf Coast, the levees never have, and likely never will, be a sure thing for defending New Orleans. More surety lies in restoring and fortifying the wetlands and marshes, which are the area's most natural and best defenses against storms. Such work isn't exactly in Homeland Security's bailiwick, but neither is the levees system, which itself is a byzantine patchwork of federal, state, local and private ownership and jurisdictions.

-- Brentin Mock

Simon Johnson's fascinating article about the financial crisis has been making the rounds; in it, Johnson draws on his experience as former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund to compare the U.S. financial crisis to similar events in emerging markets and comes up with a lot of disconcerting similarities. He concludes that the U.S. political system has been captured by the financiers and free market ideology, and lacks the incentives that would allow politicians to sacrifice banks and rebuild the economic system. I've got some quibbles with that conclusion, but here's a question: When did the IMF's ideas become so valued, especially on the left?

I'm no expert on the IMF, but looking over the list of successful IMF interventions in the nineties that Johnson sees as models for the America's current quandary, I see a list of events that have been roundly criticized by many left-leaning economists, perhaps most famously by Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik. The central critique, ironically enough, is that the IMF was captured by the free-market ideology of Wall Street financiers and run in such a way as to benefit Western economic elites, and that their policy making was characterized by little regard for the citizens of countries that received IMF attentions. In fact, typical IMF policy called for austerity measures that liberals roundly reject now as contributing to the recession, and the list of free market measures that Johnson decries in his piece could have come have been lifted from a list of IMF recommendations to an emerging market economy in crisis.

It's also my understanding, though, that the IMF has evolved in recent years, and Johnson worked there only in 2007 and 2008, so perhaps things have changed. But the increasing common meme that if only the U.S. policymakers adopted an IMF-style approach to the economic crisis, we'd be fine, seems to be overly reductive and not really in keeping with the IMF's record. Johnson recommends nationalizing troubled banks in his piece, but he doesn't offer any examples of the IMF actually having client governments nationalize banks and what the consequences of those decisions were. A key insight that Stiglitz offered in his commentary on the IMF is that the institution tends to impose the same solution on every economic crisis without carefully considering underlying complexities. Johnson concedes that early in his piece, and proceeds to offer a general solution. But a wiser idea would be to approach these problems as unique events and tailor the solution to them.

Johnson's first suggestion -- government seizure of insolvent banks that leads to receivership -- is in theory a good idea, but also a $1.5 trillion idea and one that will likely come with a lot of unintended consequences that remain unconsidered in the piece. His other idea, breaking up the big banks, is wise and will hopefully gain a constituency in the wake of the crisis, but it speaks to long-term concerns, not short-term recovery.

Johnson's forecasts rely on some substantial generalizations. He conflates the policy making of the lame duck Bush administration with that of the first months of the Obama administration, and fails to recognize, as others have, that the U.S. is moving relatively quickly, especially compared to the Japanese example, to take action in the financial sector. The administration is trying to put in place a systematic approach to the crisis to prevent the bail-out muddle Johnson predicts. What the policy now looks like is steady movement towards getting assets moving again and identifying the specific solvency problems that will require more aggressive intervention. Johnson doesn't believe that deliberate and decisive can go hand in hand, but the only way for the government to enact his suggested policies is to get legal authority from congress, which takes time, and demonstrate that programs like the Public-Private Investment Program aren't enough to pull the economy in line.

The piece's value, then, isn't as a short-term analysis, but instead in its depiction of how we got where we are, and especially the dangers of an over-large financial sector that will have to be dealt with in order to prevent a future crisis.

Smart Comment Update: Do read nadezhda in the comments for some useful observations and clarification.

-- Tim Fernholz

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made clear that the United States Navy would not take steps to shoot down any North Korean ballistic missiles launched over the next week. North Korea is carrying out clear preparations for such a launch, under the argument that it is deploying a satellite. Japan, which also has sea-based ballistic missile defense capability, also appears unlikely to destroy the North Korean vehicle, unless the missile malfunctions and heads toward Japan. To back up naval capabilities, Patriot air defense batteries have been deployed on Okinawa and around Tokyo.

Gates is dealing with this in an altogether sensible fashion. The North Korean missile launch is legally tricky, and a plausible argument could be developed that would provide cause for the US or Japan to shoot the missile down. However, simply because legal arguments can be marshaled doesn't mean that they should be. The test is fairly harmless in and of itself, and shooting down the missile would significantly heighten tensions with North Korea. Finally, tests can themselves have substantial political effects. If Japan or the US attempted to shoot down the North Korean missile and failed, embarrassment would ensue along with the increased tensions.

In other missile defense news, Feng at Information Dissemination has a good post about evidence of development in China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile program. Instead of targeting a city, an ASBM targets an aircraft carrier. The main problems are accuracy, terminal guidance (the aircraft carrier can move five miles or so between the time when a ballistic missile is fired and when it reaches its target), and surveillance of the target area. According to recent reports, the Chinese may have solved all of these problems. Or maybe not -- military organizations have strong incentives to misrepresent their capabilities.

--Robert Farley

Meanwhile, Tara McKelvey writes about special envoy Richard Holbrooke's experience in Vietnam and how it will shape his strategy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And elsewhere on the Internet, Gershom Gorenberg considers the history of non-violent struggle in Palestine and wonders if the area will ever get its Martin Luther King, Jr.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Marc Thiessen scrambles to defend the torture of Abu Zubayda, repeating the already discredited claims that torture led to Zubayda disclosing valuable intelligence. "The Post also acknowledges that Zubaydah’s “interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla” but dismisses Padilla as the man behind a fanciful “dirty bomb” plot and notes that Padilla was never charged in any such plot," Thiessen writes. He also alleges that Zubayda provided the nickname of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, leading to his capture. Thiessen also claims that torturing Zubayda led to the capture of Ramzi bin Al Shibh. Thiessen concludes: 

Administration officials stressed that the company needed a fresh approach and leadership changes; they said Steven Rattner, the former investment banker who co-chairs the auto task force, delivered the news to Mr. Wagoner.

Emphasis mine. Though I don't think comparisons between the removal of bank CEOs and auto CEOs are helpful, you have to appreciate the incongruity of the banker firing the automaker.

-- Tim Fernholz

Over at Next Right, a contributor writes up a conversation he had with a Republican candidate in the 2010 Alabama governor's race:

When I had the opportunity, I asked [Tim] James if I could ask him a quick question. "Sure," he replied. The question I lobbed at him was whether or not he would absolutely commit to not increasing taxes if elected governor.

"No problem," he responded. "Got a tougher one?"

I pitched the second question a bit harder, but his response came as quickly as the first one. I asked if he'd commit to not increasing state spending. "That's easy," he said. "You got a tough one for me, now?"

"Okay," I responded, and threw him a bit of a curveball. "Would you mind signing a pledge to this effect?"

"I'd love to...," he stated. Later on, we set up a telephone call to deal with speaking arrangements for an upcoming event and the pledge issue.

It all seems so flippant. Even given the conservative predilection for smaller governments and the ubiquity of Grover Norquist' conservative loyalty oaths, is it wise for any potential chief executive to completely tie their hands, especially in a time of recession? It speaks to a rigid ideological prism rather than the attitude of addressing problems on their own merits. Most of America's successful conservative executives would have violated both of those pledges; it's as foolish a set of strictures as if Democrats demanded that their candidates sign pledges to raise taxes and increase spending. Most people have some ideological preference about the general role of government in society, but even more of them want the government to work.

These arguments have been made time and time again, but the real point here that the praise of this approach is appearing at Next Right. Not to ascribe monolithic views to a group blog, but I get how this stance is on the Right -- I just don't see where the "next" part comes in. Watching conservatives go through what progressives did six years ago is interesting, but they don't seem willing -- yet -- to grant their candidates the virtue of flexibility, as the netroots has consistently done.

-- Tim Fernholz

The big news today is the White House decision that General Motors and Chrysler's viability plans didn't cut the mustard; now Chrysler has 30 days to sell itself to Fiat and GM has 60 days to aggressively restructure. Otherwise, it seems, a limited bankruptcy is in their futures. Jon Cohn offers some analysis.

But the real excitement surrounds the news that GM CEO Rick Wagoner has been ousted by the president. This is akin to focusing on the AIG bonuses amid the much more important and expensive bailout as a whole; while seeing a CEO get whacked is sure fun, and no doubt politically good for the president, it's the financing and mechanics of the restructuring that should be getting more attention. Josh Marshall ties the focus on the CEO back to the leadership at major banks:

All that said, though, after that meeting of the major bank CEOs at the White House last week, it's hard for me not to think that, for all that has happened, their clout in Washington is just on a scale where they are accepted as peers of the realm. And simply immune to certain sorts of treatment.

While these bankers do have political power, it's a little paranoid to call them "peers of the realm." As Josh observes, there has been turnover at the top of some of the major banks in the wake of the financial crisis, and likely more to come. But it's not a problem of political clout that allows bankers to be more insulated from political pressure; it's a problem of knowledge. Though the auto industry has a lot of problems that will be difficult to solve, those problems are easier to understand and chart, because at the end of the day, manufacturing is comprehensible industry. Meanwhile, the banks aren't making anything but bets, and they're making insanely complicated bets that are not clearly understood. The White House will avoid taking any aggressive actions until they're ready to own the consequences of those actions; that's half the reason they haven't moved toward nationalization yet. The administration clearly feels ready to handle any fallout from their strategy to deal with automakers. But until the stress tests are complete and more is understood about the nature of the underlying problems in the banks -- for instance, when the solvency vs. liquidity debate is resolved -- then the administration is much more likely to make bolder moves.

-- Tim Fernholz

I spent this past weekend in Cambridge, Mass., where I spoke about covering reproductive health issues at a conference called Women, Action, Media. During the question and answer session at our panel (which also featured Emily Douglas of RH Reality Check, Kiki Zeldes from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health), the audience really wanted to talk about Gardasil, Merck's HPV vaccine. Gardasil provides protection against cervical cancer, and is currently recommended for girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26. Some school systems and states have tried -- and failed -- to mandate the vaccine for middle-school girls. Opposition to mandatory vaccination comes from both the left and right; conservative parents often fear that vaccinating their daughters against an STI tacitly condones sexual behaivor, while many on the left are skeptical of any new drug pushed by a pharmaceutical company after only short-term trials.

But the controversy hasn't stopped the federal government from requiring Gardasil vaccination for immigrant girls and young women applying for U.S. citizenship, a policy opposed by the Latina Institute. In addition, Merck is currently pushing the FDA to approve the vaccination for boys and young men, and for insurance companies to cover vaccination for women into their thirties.

I have been optimistic about Gardasil (I'm vaccinated) and enthusiastic about giving the series of three injections to boys. Nevertheless, a policy of mandatory vaccination for immigrant girls and women, but no one else in our society, raises my eyebrows. And HPV/cervical cancer is not the only public health issue currently subject to a debate about mandatory medicine. A rash of states are now requiring HIV tests for pregnant women, a policy I support, since, with the proper precautions, the rate of HIV transmission between mother and child can be cut to 2 percent. Now Rhode Island is debating allowing doctors to test any patient for HIV without his or her explicit consent, as part of a battery of blood tests. The ACLU opposes the proposed legislation, as does Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, a Boston-based group. They are concerned about patients' rights to refuse treatment and to keep their HIV status confidential. Yet in the past, the public health effects of mandatory testing have been strikingly positive. The Providence Journal reports:

...when the law was amended regarding pregnant women the participation rate jumped from 52 to 92 percent. ... Rhode Island’s rate of children born with the virus dropped from sixth-highest in the country to nil...

That's pretty powerful evidence in favor of testing. Are you convinced?

--Dana Goldstein

The Washington Post reports that Abu Zabayda, one of the Bush administration's "high value" detainees, gave little in the way of actionable intelligence despite being subjected to torture under the administrations' "enhanced interrogations" policy. This isn't exactly news -- Jane Mayer reported the same findings in her book, The Dark Side, last year. The FBI had interrogated him lawfully prior to his being turned over to the CIA, and the agents interrogating him believed they were making progress. After Zubayda was tortured, Bush claimed in 2006 that Zubayda had provided three important sources of intelligence, among them the identity of Jose Padilla, an American who is suspected of planning to plant a "dirty bomb" in an American city. Former administration officials quoted in the article point to Padilla as proof of both Zubayda's value and the effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation." But Mayer writes in her book that it has been "widely reported, and undisputed" that Zubayda told interrogators about Padilla before he was tortured. (Mayer writes that the other two claims were also dubious.) It's also fortunate for Padilla's future prosecutors that Bush's claim about Padilla appears to be false, because otherwise that would make whatever evidence offered by Zabayda regarding Padilla inadmissible. 

Arguing that the torture of terror suspects produces valuable intelligence is necessary for those who defend such methods because they cannot be defended on moral terms. But it's important to note, once again, that the techniques on which the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" procedures were based were intended to elicit false confessions, not actionable intelligence. So it's not surprising that Zubayda "sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads." He just wanted it to stop.

-- A. Serwer

Look out National Restaurant Association -- your workers are mad, they're organized, and they're playing Bruce Springsteen right outside your building.

Workers from NRA subsidiary member U.S. Foodservice stood alongside hundreds of members from the Teamsters this morning to protest the labor practices of their employers.

The protests took place right next door to the Prospect's downtown office in Washington, D.C., proving we can't escape labor issues even when we're not writing about them. Workers disrupted early morning traffic and elicited the curiosity of our 17th Street neighbors on both ends of the ideological spectrum -- from the American Enterprise Institute to the Defenders of Wildlife.

Frank Solice, who has worked for Arizona's chapter of U.S. Foodservice for 12 years, recounted numerous examples of intimidation and outright union-busting by his employers. A few of his friends have been fired for supporting unionization, and even more have suffered in silence for fear of losing their jobs.

"No way we're turning back," he says. "I would hate to see anyone else go through what we've been through."

In addition to protesting, the workers officially filed charges against the NRA U.S. Foodservice, citing 177 cases of unfair and abusive labor practices. Their allegations -- the firing of pro-union employees, the elimination of sick days as retribution for attempted union organizing, and the illegal use of mandatory closed-door meetings to coercively discourage unionization -- are emblematic of the larger problems we frequently highlight.

But Frank and his co-workers have not been deterred. Blocking traffic for nearly three hours this morning, they demanded fair treatment and advocated for EFCA while The Boss' classic American melodies provided thematic support. Whether or not they achieve union representation in the long term remains to be seen (and perhaps largely depends upon the fate of EFCA). But at least for today, the union spirit is alive and well in Washington.

--Josh Linden

Yesterday's unveiling of the House Republican Budget did not go very well, to say the least; now it seems the fallout from the dud proposal has led to some conflict among the Republican leadership. The media's willingness to criticize the plan startled me -- and the Republican leadership, clearly -- given how consistently politicians can get away with saying any old thing and waving around a document to show it off. For an example, see the Republican alternative stimulus, which was attributed to the economic ideas of Obama Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina Romer without challenge from the press despite Romer's personal rebuttals of the economics underlying the plan. My first thought when I saw the GOP's unforced error -- and it was unforced, if waiting until next week would have led them to have real numbers, they could have survived three days-- was, "This is what the Democrats used to do all the time!"

Josh Marshall will often comment that the culture of Washington institutions is still in tune with conservative and Republican politics despite the new Democratic administration, and there is merit in that argument. But yesterday's events show that the balance is starting to shift away from that orientation. Suddenly, just repeating "tax cuts" isn't enough to convince someone of your fiscal seriousness -- although we'll see how long that lasts. A remaining challenge for the GOP is coming up with any convincing specifics at all -- beyond ideological problems that put them in something of a fiscal straight jacket, they simply don't have the staff it takes to put together a serious budget proposal, compared to the majority side of the Budget Committee or the resources of the OMB.

I'll have a piece coming out on the GOP plan on Monday, but future House members, heed this wisdom: if you're going to criticize someone's budget for having huge deficit projections, you probably should know what your alternative budget's deficit projections are.

Further Reading: Why are Republicans divided over releasing an alternate budget, and why is it so hard to make one?

-- Tim Fernholz

Andrew Sullivan was irritated at Obama's response to the marijuana question yesterday.

I'm tired of having the Prohibition issue treated as if it's trivial or a joke. It is neither. It is about freedom and it's deadly serious. As for your online audience, Mr president, have you forgotten who got you elected?

Radley Balko explains why it is in fact, deadly serious:

There have been 7,000 homicides in Mexico over the last two years, the vast majority directly related to black market drug trade. Seventy percent of Mexico’s black market drug rade is marijuana.

Right. But let's remember the question that was asked:

With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?

But "growing the economy" is far from the most compelling, and asking the question that way basically invites derision.

-- A. Serwer

Meanwhile, Dana Goldstein wonders if Michelle Obama should be paid for the work she does in her capacity as first lady.

And Terence Samuel writes that the "too big to fail" argument applies to Main Street as well.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

According to the AP, lobbyists are irate about the Obama administration's restrictions against lobbyists trying to get a piece of the stimulus package, which bars them from speaking to administration officials but instead forces them to issue their statements in writing:

"What disqualifies lobbyists from exercising their First Amendment rights?" said J. Keith Kennedy, a top lobbyist for the Washington firm Baker Donelson.

William Luneburg and Thomas Susman, co-authors of the American Bar Association's manual on lobbying laws, said they knew of no previous administrations curtailing lobbyists' conversations with government officials.

The rules bar lobbyists from conversations or meetings with federal officials about specific stimulus projects. They can talk generally about the measure's policies if projects are not discussed.

The idea behind having lobbyists submit their requests in writing is that correspondence with them will be documented. In response, some lobbyists may simply pull their names from the registration list:

Since the prohibition applies to registered lobbyists, some firms are thinking about having some of their lobbyists rescind their registrations, which could let them pitch stimulus projects to government officials. That, though, would severely limit the time they could spend lobbying each year while undermining disclosure laws requiring registered lobbyists to publicly report their activities.

Obviously, influence peddling in Washington is one of the more difficult things to deal with effectively.

-- A. Serwer

When an ostensibly educated person like Mark Krikorian says something like this:

During slavery and Jim Crow, a number of blacks moved abroad, to Europe or Africa or the USSR, but again, these movements never gained much traction, and many of those who did go regretted it, discovering that they were more American than they'd realized.

One of the great contributions of John Hope Franklin was that he helped weave black history into the larger American narrative. Then you read something like this and you realize how far we have to go. But I also can't help thinking that this level of ignorance for an educated person is somehow willful, a symptom of conservative white guilt that so often manifests by trying to either obscure, minimize or simply ignore the evils of chattel slavery in the United States. Liberals have their own annoying foibles when it comes to white guilt, but obviously I've found those much easier to deal with. At least most of the time, their ears and eyes are open on the subject.

H/T Instaputz

-- A. Serwer

At the Columbia Journalism Review Daniel Luzer has some harsh words for my April print feature, a profile of the "education wars" and, in particular, a look at the crucial role of Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. Luzer makes one excellent point with which I agree -- that the history of education reform in the United States is a history of failed, piecemeal, overly hyped reforms, and we shouldn't forget that. He recommends the book Tinkering Toward Utopia as a primer, and I concur; I read it in college and it has been instrumental to my education writing.

But Luzer's accusations that 1) my piece "cheerleads" for Weingarten and 2) that it ignores the on-the-ground, in-the-classroom effects of school reform efforts, are, I think, off the mark. For starters, Weingarten is fascinating not primarily because she is right or wrong, but because she is powerful. As I state in the piece, Weingarten has more than her fair share of critics. (I interview some of them! And quote them at length!) I also write that her recent pro-reform statements, which have been celebrated in the media, are actually nothing the AFT hasn't said before, for years. Yet despite all this, through careful public relations, Weingarten has "managed to position herself as the face to watch in education policy -- the marker of the moving center."

This is a political triumph. And indeed, my story is one about politics. President Obama has made education policy a linchpin to both his stimulus package and his budget. In his first address to Congress, he emphasized education as the primary way Americans can both better themselves and serve their country. In this moment, there is real utility in examining the role education policy plays in our larger political environment, not least because teachers and their unions are important Democratic constituencies. In addition, though this is not a piece about the research evaluating the effects of various reform proposals on student achievement, I take issue with Luzer's critique that the outcome of the political "education wars" will not effect real people's lives. To the contrary, how teachers are recruited and compensated, for example, will effect millions of American families during a time of recession. Teaching has traditionally been, and remains, a profession that provides a ticket to middle-class stability.

I'd like to write more, but I have a plane to catch to Boston, where I'm speaking on a panel at the Women, Action, Media conference. Hopefully I'll see some of our readers there.

--Dana Goldstein

Today, Vice President Joe Biden published an op-ed in the newspapers of Latin America's major countries -- the op-ed and the list of newspapers is after the jump. It's all part of the preparation for the Summit of the Americas, a major meeting of regional leaders in April. Biden arrived today in Chile to meet with Latin American leaders prior to the Summit, and he'll go to Costa Rica as well. No doubt folks will view this as an opportunity to read the tea leaves about the relationship between Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but this is probably just an easy division of turf, given the broad range of international problems in her portfolio. It does reinforce two developing notions about the administration's diplomatic strategy: One, they are very deliberate and prepared, with a number of steps taken to lay groundwork in the hopes of creating the atmosphere for serious meetings between high-level leaders; two, that the diplomatic message is often directed at citizens at large rather than government officials.

Unfortunately, though, the op-ed is a little too focused on domestic economic issues. I see what the administration is trying to do -- show what it is doing at home to help the international economy, and encourage other countries to follow suit with similar fiscal stimulus efforts in cooperative fashion. But leading with the U.S. stimulus might seem off-putting to foreign citizens. Much better are the areas where Biden talks about the relationship between the U.S. and Latin America more candidly, especially recognizing that dealing with international drug trafficking means taking responsibility for demand here at home and for the weapons that come out of the U.S. and into Latin America. But the op-ed, unsurprisingly, doesn't go far enough in looking at how counterproductive the "War on Drugs" has become. Also, referencing the Bush administration, even in relation to an initiative they began, seems like it will play poorly at best in the region. While the piece implicitly refers to trade issues, it doesn't take up directly the various controversies surrounding free trade agreements in the region, most likely because the administration has yet to settle on a coherent framework for addressing those kind of issues.

But the op-ed -- and the vice-presidential attention -- does indicate that the Obama team is giving more due to some of our closest, though oft-neglected, international neighbors, which can only be a good thing. Hopefully open dialogue at the Summit will lead to better policy choices across the board.

-- Tim Fernholz

A New Day for Partnership in the Americas

By Vice President Joe Biden

Next month, President Obama will travel to Trinidad and Tobago to meet his colleagues from across the Western Hemisphere at the Summit of the Americas. In advance of that historic meeting, I am traveling to Central and South America to consult with Latin American leaders gathered in Chile and Costa Rica about the Summit and the challenges faced by the people of the Americas.

These meetings are an important first step toward a new day in relations and building partnerships with and among the countries and people of the Hemisphere.

The President and I understand that only by working together can our countries overcome the challenges we face. Today, we are more than just independent nations who happen to be on the same side of the globe. In today’s interconnected world, we are all neighbors who face many common concerns.

The current global economic crisis has touched virtually all of us—every country, every community, every family. Citizens everywhere are searching for answers, looking for hope—and turning to their leaders to provide them. It is our duty as global partners to heed their calls, to together forge a shared solution to a common problem.

Our Administration is taking several steps to make this happen. Our Congress has approved the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is designed to promote job creation and to set a course for growth for the next generation. The President has proposed a budget designed to set a foundation for the economy of the future, with important investments in health care, education, and energy. And we are working with our partners in the G-20, who meet next week in London, on a coordinated plan to ensure recovery and restart growth, and to reform the international regulatory and supervisory system to ensure that no such crisis occurs again.

Rekindling the U.S. economy and ensuring that international financial institutions serve the interests of the people are particularly important for the Americas. Our economic interconnection means that a robust U.S. economy is good for the hemisphere and can become an engine for bottom up economic growth and equality throughout the region.

The economy isn’t the only challenge requiring our cooperation. We also face dual challenges of security – both for our countries and for the individuals who inhabit them. Our countries are plagued by gang violence and the illegal trafficking of weapons and narcotics.

In the United States, we need to do more to reduce demand for illicit drugs and stem the flow of weapons and bulk cash south across our borders. We applaud Mexico’s courageous stand against violent drug cartels, as well as Colombia’s anti-drug efforts, but we know that they will have the side effect of pushing traffickers into Central America. We will build on the Meridá Initiative – started last year under President Bush – to assist Mexico and the Central American nations in a joint effort to confront that threat head-on. The drug trade is a problem we all share and one whose ultimate solution we must devise together.

Consistent with the Inter-American Democratic Charter, we must also focus on building and encouraging strong democracies, where basic fairness, social equality, and a deep respect for human rights and the rule of law are the guiding principles of everything we do. Democracy is about more than elections; it’s about strong, transparent governance and a thriving civil society. It is also about addressing as effectively as possible the challenges of poverty, inequality and social exclusion

We recognize that the United States is still striving to meet its constitutional goal of forming a “more perfect union” and that we have, in the past, fallen short of our own ideals. But we pledge every day to honor the values that animate our democracy, and to lead by example. This is why, on his third day in office, the President ordered the closure of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Finally, we all face the threat to our planet posed by the changing climate, and, so, we share the need to develop clean energy sources to combat—and reverse—this critical threat. The President and I are deeply committed to leading in the development of an urgent and coordinated response to climate change. Working as partners, we must harness the potential of green energy in a way that protects our planet for future generations, while also catalyzing economic growth for the generations of today.

As we face these threats and as we confront the most serious economic crisis in generations, the countries of the Hemisphere must look forward. And we must work together, as partners, to give our citizens hope that brighter days lie ahead.

Published in:

La Nación (Argentina)

O Globo (Brazil)

El Mercurio (Chile)

El Tiempo (Colombia)

La Nación (Costa Rica)

El Comercio (Ecuador)

El Universal (México)

El Comercio (Perú)

El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico)

El País (Uruguay)

El Nacional (Venezuela)

Yesterday, I wrote about how the punitive impulse often overwhelms the interest in public safety when it comes to our corrections policy. In introducing the Criminal Justice Act of 2009, which establishes a commission to study our criminal justice system, Sen. Jim Webb attempted to shift the terms of our public debate in the direction of putting public safety first:

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace. Its irregularities and inequities cut against the notion that we are a society founded on fundamental fairness. Our failure to address this problem has caused the nation's prisons to burst their seams with massive overcrowding, even as our neighborhoods have become more dangerous. We are wasting billions of dollars and diminishing millions of lives.

We need to fix the system. Doing so will require a major nationwide recalculation of who goes to prison and for how long and of how we address the long-term consequences of incarceration.

Several Democratic senators (including the two newbies, Kirsten Gillibrand and Roland Burris) as well as Republican Arlen Specter, have signed onto the legislation, which acknowledges that America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, also points out:

Minorities make up a disproportionately large share of prison populations. Black males have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 percent chance; white males have a 6 percent chance.

I generally try not to talk about corrections policy in these terms, because the quickest way to sink public approval for better public policy these days seems to be in explicitly acknowledging race to be a part of why our policy is such a disgrace. It shouldn't be papered over, but it shouldn't become the driving rhetoric behind reform: The issue here is that our criminal justice policy isn't serving the public interest.

There are a number of states, such as New York and Kansas, that have successfully reduced their prison population through reforming parole, focusing on re-entry and pursuing alternatives to incarceration. Let's hope the commission listens to them.

-- A. Serwer

With the Employee Free Choice Act's path through Congress held up for the foreseeable future, Democrats and the administration will likely look for other ways to help workers gain a greater voice in the workplace. One key area is reforming the Department of Labor itself, which has serious authority to help out workers -- if only that authority were used and regulations were enforced.

Folks have probably seen this article on the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour division -- if not, read it -- which stunningly screwed up 9 out of 10 cases brought to its attention, costing workers hundreds of thousands of dollars. The workers in question are often those with minimum wage jobs and little ability to use the legal system to their advantage, and rely on the government to help them get what they've earned. But more often than not, the employees at DOL wouldn't even pressure employers to pay workers their rightful wages. The good news, though, is that new Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis says she's going to hire 250 more investigators; hopefully she'll work to change what is obviously a bankrupt institutional culture.

But as long as she's checking out the agencies under her authority, I'd suggest Solis revist the Occupational Safety and Health administration as well, which is in a similar position to the Wage and Hours division after years of underfunding and lack of attention during the Bush administration. I examined some of the options for putting OSHA to good use in a piece last month:

OSHA needs to target high-risk industries for inspection. Identifying low-wage sectors, like the garment industry, where abuse of minimum-wage and overtime laws is frequent, will allow enforcement actions to be more effective. Edward Montgomery, a former Department of Labor official, recommends performing several "high-impact enforcement actions" within the first year of the new administration to send a sector-wide message that OSHA will be using its authority to protect workers.

-- TIm Fernholz

• The House GOP called Barack Obama's bluff today, unveiling their "alternative budget proposal" [PDF] to prove they can do more than simply oppose the President's agenda. Contract with America it ain't. I was pleasantly surprised to see MSNBC's First Read describe the plan as "A GOP budget with no hard numbers" because that's precisely what it is. Apparently the details are forthcoming but what we do know is this: 1) there are no deficit projections 2) it proposes large tax cuts for the wealthy 3) it recycles a 16-year old attack on health care reform 4) it has lots of meaningless charts that describe goals, not process and 5) it slashes from the budget funding for foreign aid, green jobs growth, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Americorps, Title X Family Planning, ACORN, and replacing the recently-passed omnibus spending bill with a spending freeze for the rest of 2009. In other words, it's a conservative wet dream. I'm speechless.
• Back in the real world, Timothy Geithner was back on Capitol Hill elaborating on the administration's plans for revamping regulation of the financial sector, Steny Hoyer was giving a lecture on the historical use of the budget reconciliation process, Nouriel Roubini defended the PPIP, and Olympia Snowe touted the success of the stimulus in Maine (she did vote for it, after all).
• This tendency of elite media figures to insert themselves into the political process and describe the back-and-forth between government and the fourth estate in sports metaphors is not new but it is highly disturbing. Fortunately, Obama himself knows that the press -- the cable networks in particular -- likes to focus on the imaginary drama of the daily (sometimes hourly) news cycle, and isn't particularly interested in playing along. Of course, that won't halt the tiring onslaught of recycled memes from the campaign describing Obama as the next Al Gore (he's sooooo boring!), leader of a party in disarray, or simply "overexposed" (i.e. the "celebrity" attack from last summer).
• Increasingly it seems as though conservative hyperventilation comes in two, not necessarily distinct, forms: wild-eyed paranoia or outright and proud ignorance on substantive policy issues. A casual perusal of the 'tubes finds Michele Bachmann introducing legislation to ensure the dollar remains independent from a not-remotely-real "global currency"; Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) parleying his admitted ignorance of climate change into a prediction that humanity can simply "adapt to it"; an increasingly complex and less plausible unified theory behind the "birther" conspiracy; and the truly baffling obsession with the fact that Barack Obama, like most public figures, uses a teleprompter (apparently to hide the fact that's he's just not all that bright).
• So it looks like Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan are getting the band back together. "The Foreign Policy Initiative" -- PNAC 2.0 -- will tackle a misguided tendency towards isolationism, support our allies, protect human rights and freedom, build a strong military, and foster international economic engagement. Frankly, Iiked it better when neocons didn't hide their intentions behind generic foreign policy boilerplate and openly advocated for regime change through military force and seizing our "unipolar moment."
• Remainders: Obama headlines his first fundraisers as president; Niall Ferguson describes the "trilemma" facing conservative politicians around the world; the DoD stumbles over the GWOT; the FBI fast tracks prosecutions of white-collar criminals; Republicans are suddenly very interested in what Michelle Obama is doing; the Obama Justice Department tries to arrest the recent slide toward the right; self-financed candidates could make a big splash in 2010; and the administration has a new FOIA policy.

--Mori Dinauer

H/t Carrie.

-- Tim Fernholz

Recently, legislation that would grant the District real representation in the House was stalled by a D.C.-specific anti-gun control amendment introduced by Sen. John Ensign. Since this makes apparent that the Nevada Republican thinks that state and local rights are no big, Brown doesn't see a problem with messing with the Silver State's tradition of legal prostitution. In a letter addressed to D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and House majority leader Steny Hoyer, Brown encourages them to propose the 'Roses Amendment':

[It] would revise the Mann Act by prohibiting US citizens from crossing state borders to solicit sex in states where prostitution is legal. The amendment would further prohibit these states from using the Internet as a portal to advertise or solicit prostitution. Furthermore, the amendment would make it illegal to complete financial transactions where electronic data or information is shared with any entity located outside of the state for which prostitution is legalized…

If elected officials from states, namely Nevada, can introduce legislation that alters the local laws of the District, I believe the District should offer an amendment that imposes our moral values on such states where prostitution is legal… I believe we should fight guns with roses and continue moving the DC Voting Rights Act forward.

Full letter after the jump, via the DC Vote blog.

--Alexandra Gutierrez

Representative Steny H. Hoyer
House Democratic Majority Leader
H-107, The Capitol
Washington, DC 20515

Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton
2136 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Majority Leader Hoyer and Congresswoman Norton:

The residents of the District of Columbia are wholeheartedly dedicated to achieving full statehood with representation in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The DC Voting Rights Act is an important step towards achieving that goal. As you know, there are still representatives who would withhold even a single vote in the House from over a half a million United States citizens. They have used a legislative maneuver in an attempt to override the will of District residents and their local government.

I propose we challenge the irony of Senator John Ensign’s (R-Nev) introduction of the gun amendment by introducing an amendment of our own. I recommend you co-introduce the “Roses Amendment.” The “Roses Amendment” would revise the Mann Act by prohibiting US citizens from crossing state borders to solicit sex in states where prostitution is legal. The amendment would further prohibit these states from using the Internet as a portal to advertise or solicit prostitution. Furthermore, the amendment would make it illegal to complete financial transactions where electronic data or information is shared with any entity located outside of the state for which prostitution is legalized. The federal government would be within its constitutional authority to regulate this type of interstate commerce.

As have other states, District residents have fought to rid our community of prostitution in an effort to revitalize our neighborhoods. If elected officials from states, namely Nevada, can introduce legislation that alters the local laws of the District, I believe the District should offer an amendment that imposes our moral values on such states where prostitution is legal.

As a local elected official, in addition to having full federal representation, I believe that citizens have the right to determine the best means by which to secure the safety of themselves and their families. If we must compromise our local governing authority in order to satisfy the moral arguments of a few representatives, I believe it is reasonable to ask them to consider our moral values in return. Therefore, I believe we should fight guns with roses and continue moving the DC Voting Rights Act forward. Please consider discussing this strategy further with your colleagues, District officials and representatives of local voting rights organizations.

Sincerely,

Kwame R. Brown

CC:
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty
Chairman Vincent C. Gray
At-Large Councilmember Michael A. Brown
Members of the Council Committee on Statehood
Ilir Zherka, Executive Director, DC Vote

We literally have no agenda. How can they be threatened by a group that has taken no policy positions? -- Senator Evan Bayh

Er, that's exactly the problem. If there were a "moderate" agenda, perhaps you could argue it on the merits. But the moderate agenda seems to be focused on making sure people who actually have ideas about policy are considered extreme.

-- Tim Fernholz

Earlier this week, I expressed hope that Vermont governor Jim Douglas wouldn't veto legislation granting same-sex marriage rights -- legislation that is poised to pass both houses of the state legislature overwhelmingly (it has already passed 26-4 in the state senate). Alas, it seems that Douglas will veto the legislation.

And, as Andrew Sullivan notes, he is doing so with an argument that is transparently not serious even by the standards of anti-gay marriage arguments:

The urgency of our state's economic and budgetary challenges demands the full focus of every member and every committee of this Legislature.

--Scott Lemieux

One of the arguments being made by those who advocate repealing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which forces regions with a history of discrimination to have their election law changes "pre-cleared" by the Justice Department, is that it's no longer needed and is therefore an unconstitutional infringement on state's rights, and that Section 5 operates as a kind of "scarlet letter" by punishing states for their past.

Part of the paradox is that preclearance prevents some of the most egregious and discriminatory changes from being enacted at all, which in turn allows the plaintiffs in the case to argue such discrimination is nonexistent. As for the "Scarlet Letter" thing, there is a "bailout" provision in the VRA that allows covered jurisdictions to prove that they no longer need be covered by preclearance. The Campaign Legal Center’s Executive Director J. Gerald Hebert, a former acting chief of the Voting Rights Section of the Justice Department, has filed an amicus brief in the upcoming Supreme Court case Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, which will revisit the constitutionality of the VRA. The brief was filed on behalf of seven Virginia jurisdictions that have "bailed out" of preclearance, and argues that the conditions for bailing out are not cumbersome or complicated.

Although the VRA was recently renewed by a majority Republican Congress and signed by a Republican president, there is some concern that the conservative leaning Supreme Court may find Section 5 unconstitutional anyway, especially after the recent Supreme Court ruling that many voting rights advocates saw as weakening some of the VRA's protections.

-- A. Serwer

James Carville has never really impressed me as far as political consultants go; it feels like he's been living off his success in the early nineties, since, well, his success in the early nineties. But today he makes a good point about Barack Obama's communication skills. Basically, the president is a very skilled communicator, it's just that the topics he must discuss, especially regarding the financial crisis, are esoteric:

Mr Obama had a relatively easy time communicating the value of the recent economic stimulus package. After all, we know what bridges look like. We use them every day. And we know that repairing infrastructure creates jobs.

The same can be said with the trickier concept of unemployment compensation insurance/benefits. We all know someone who has lost a job and needs the extra aid. We can argue about whether the ends justify the means (i.e. deficit spending) but the public can grasp the need for such a mechanism.

The same cannot be said, however, about the banking crisis that has handcuffed the US and world economies. It is impossible to break the explanation of the crisis into a sound bite or image.

The result is that it seems to the average American that the government is simply throwing excessive sums at banks and insurance companies. Now they read that the government is buying “toxic assets”. I do not know about you but I would rather not buy toxic anything. As someone who has prided himself on being able to reduce complex problems to simple messages, I am totally stumped by derivatives.

This isn't just a problem for the president, it's also a problem for the press; watching political reporters (myself included) scramble to figure out the ways and means of high finance over the last eight months has been both entertaining and somewhat worrying.

Update: This prescient 1994 article by Senator Byron Dorgan has been floating around the intertubes today and offers a relatively simple explanation of the derivatives market.

-- Tim Fernholz

Clay Risen worries that the lack of movement in the toxic assets market reflects badly on the government's plan. The thinking goes, if people think the plan will work, why wouldn't they want to get in on the ground floor before those asset prices rise -- and if they're not doing that, maybe the plan won't work. But there are several compelling reasons why they might wait for the program to actually begin. One is likely continued skepticism that the government will follow through with this plan, and another is that the the concerns the government has about the private sector's unwillingness to accept risk are accurate.

The article that Clay links to lists several other reasons why investors might want to wait for the government to take the plunge before they do, first among them uncertainty but also concerns about the value of the underlying assets and questions about the scale of the plan, as well as its liquidity problem vs. solvency problem assumptions. But I'm not convinced that the market's unwillingness to respond to a program that hasn't yet begun means that program will fail -- more likely the slow change reflects a lack of confidence that can only be ameliorated by the careful execution of the new strategy. As well, the report doesn't square with other news indicating that the major banks are purchasing up the kinds of assets targeted by the plan in the hopes of catching the price up-swing and taking advantage of the government subsidized market. Admittedly, that situation isn't necessarily great, either, but it does indicate that at least some financial actors expect the government's plan to have a positive affect on troubled assets.

-- Tim Fernholz

Given the woefully imperfect information that Wall Street outsiders have about the financial world, what aspects are they allowed to criticize? Insiders would likely say "very little"; TAP executive editor Mark Schmitt and columnist Matthew Yglesias think most everything is fair game. The two recently discussed media coverage of the economy on Bloggingheads:

Watch the whole thing here.

--The Editors

Politico's Josh Gerstein reports on a fascinating Republican attempt to subject Michelle Obama's policy role to greater scrutiny. At issue is whether the president's spouse is a public citizen or a member of the administration:

Under [Rep. Darrell] Issa’s amendment, any government policy group that Mrs. Obama or another first spouse regularly participates in would be subject to a law requiring meetings to be announced in advance and, in most instances, public. ... Issa’s amendment would have effectively overturned a 1993 federal appeals court decision which held that First Lady Hillary Clinton could be considered the equivalent of a federal employee. The court ruled that Clinton’s involvement in a presidential Health Care Task Force was not enough to render the group an outside advisory panel which had to meet in public and disclose its records.

In the April print issue, I have a column (not yet available to non-subscribers) discussing Michelle Obama's tour of federal agencies and her evolving political role. In that piece, I suggest the first lady should, indeed, be considered a federal employee, and should earn a salary garnished from her husband's wages. "Since we expect our presidents to be just one half of a 24/7 public-relations team," I write, "why not pay the president less--say $300,000--and make out the remainder of the check to his wife?" The idea of conjugal wage sharing is one I borrow from feminist political philosopher Susan Moller Okin.

The reality is that throughout American history, first ladies have consistently played a role more akin to an employee of the administration than to that of a regular citizen. The 1993 ruling should stand, as it protects this historic role and keeps the first lady from being shunted into purely "wifely," domestic duties. And the first lady should also be paid. (But I'm not holding my breath for that.)

--Dana Goldstein

I've been a sort of half-hearted defender of the Public-Private Investment Program, proposed by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner on Monday. While other, more aggressive policy options seem to have a greater chance of success and carry less water for Wall Street, they are also much more expensive and politically complicated, and certainly not feasible in the near term. Now, Nouriel Roubini, one economist who was ahead of the crowd in predicting and understanding the financial crisis, sees positive notes in this plan, particularly because it will reveal more information about the banks' balance sheets in a public and official way, allowing for more direct government intervention down the line with the banks that truly need it.

“I see the option of nationalization” and the one presented by the Obama administration “as being complementary,” Mr. Roubini said. He believes that the stress tests the government plans on conducting on the banks will reveal which are solvent and which are insolvent.

In his view, those banks that are deemed insolvent will not participate in the toxic-asset plan and will be taken over by the government. Banks deemed solvent will be the ones that get to participate.

Nationalization “is fully on the table for banks that are insolvent,” Mr. Roubini said.

...“The most important thing is what Bernanke and Geithner said today about the need for an insolvency regime for systemically important institutions,” Mr. Roubini said. “You are going to need that not just for the A.I.G.’s of the world, but also the bank holding companies as they go into Chapter 11.”

He added, “You are going to need that in shutting down, potentially, a bank like Citigroup.”

Thinking of the PPIP as a part of a larger, moving structure helps to clarify it's value. While I've heard a lot of convincing arguments that this is too much subsidy to bankers and that it's possible to game the system, I haven't been convinced that the plan won't work in its intended function of moving troubled assets off bank balance sheets -- or simply reveal in a public manner the nature of those balance sheets as a first step towards broader action. It's well worth reading Noam Scheiber's piece on the political situation that Geithner finds himself in as he tries to lay the ground for the temporary nationalization option. He's caught in a very sticky situation, and the PPIP could give him the time and the flexibility to move forward.

-- Tim Fernholz

Isaac Chotiner takes a look at Atwul Gawande's piece exploring whether solitary confinement is equivalent to torture:

...Gawande never considers the idea of punishment as an end in itself, and it is here, I think, where liberal writers tend to miss a major motivating factor in our crime policy. There are numerous historical and religious reasons for this belief, and without getting bogged down in too many details, it is worth pointing out that many people believe wrongdoers "deserve" punishment for bad deeds. Others like, I would assume, Gawande, see no value in punishing people unless it serves distinct ends (keeping criminals off the street, deterring crime, etc.). Now, I happen to agree with Gawande, and I see no value in punishment for punishment's sake, but it is probably safe to say this is not a majority opinion in America. It also might help explain the sad state of our criminal justice system and prisons.

With corrections, there are number of emotional impulses that override the public interest -- the main one being our appetite for punitive measures at the expense of public safety. Human beings are vengeful; we want people who hurt others to be hurt in turn. And so we tend to turn a deaf ear to horrifying tales of mistreatment in American prisons. It would be one thing if the punitive impulse ended there -- and I want to distinguish between punishment as a deterrent, which is in the public interest, and punishment as retribution, which isn't -- but measures meant to rehabilitate inmates in the interest of public safety are often viewed as some sort of gift to the formerly and currently incarcerated, rather than an investment in our own protection. People who are re-incarcerated have, by definition, hurt someone else to get there, so we want to prevent that from happening.

Anyone who allows themselves to relax their punitive impulse while reading Gawande's piece has to come away fairly certain that long-term solitary confinement is a form of torture: It drives a third of the people who experience it insane. Like other forms of torture, it is rationalized as a necessary measure to protect the public. Military and civilian interrogators who utilized torture no doubt believed that these measures would be effective at gathering intelligence from suspected terrorists. But the law must make other considerations -- punishment meted out by the state must eschew cruelty as a rule. What makes changing this practice all the more difficult is that it's been used for so long; abandoning long-term solitary confinement necessitates an admission that the practice is cruel and anyone whose spent time observing our national conversation on torture must realize how difficult it is for Americans to make such admissions. The other problem is that we are significantly invested in its use as a society given the proliferation of "supermax" prisons. If Obama tries terror suspects within the criminal justice system, these prisons are the most likely destination for convicts.

As with "enhanced interrogations" the empirical evidence on long-term solitary confinement suggests the practice does not make us safer. The SERE techniques on which "enhanced interrogations" were based were not originally designed to extract information, they were designed to elicit false confessions and the like. The Bush administration was aware of this when they authorized those techniques, which belies their true purpose: punishment, even at the expense of our values and even the collection of usable intelligence. As Gawande points out, the bipartisan Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons found little safety benefit to long-term solitary confinement, and plenty of drawbacks, the most obvious of which is that we are punishing people in a way that may make them insane before releasing them back into society. While the use of rewards and incentives for good behavior has had more success in controlling inmate violence, this is less "punitive" and therefore more politically perilous.

Chotiner is probably correct about the political realities of punishment, but our lawmakers should be guided by more than their emotional impulses or those of their constituents. Public safety must be the overriding interest.

Meanwhile, Mark Schmitt reconnects the words "tax" and "spend" -- in a good way! Services like Social Security and Medicaid don't pay for themselves, after all.

And Bruce Ackerman argues for a commission on presidential power.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

U.S. News and World Report religion blogger Dan Gilgoff has been blogging away about the alleged sins of pro-choice Democrats in the eyes of Catholic America. His coverage, though, is lost in the fog of right-wing press releases.

For several days, Gilgoff has fanned the Catholics-are-up-in-arms-about-Obama's-Notre-Dame-commencement-speech fire. His tweet yesterday afternoon read, "Protests of Obama at Notre Dame are still mounting. Looks like the furor caught the White House and lberal [sic] Catholic groups caught off guard."

Really? None other than the editor of the National Catholic Reporter, Joe Feuerherd, this week laid bare the machinations behind the manufactured controversy. Mincing no words, Feuerherd accused Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, of drumming up opposition to Obama's speech, calling Reilly the "self-appointed ayatollah to Catholic academia."

Jon O'Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, told me, "The Cardinal Newman Society and Patrick Reilly are masters of being outraged and disgusted," adding, "The majority of Catholics voted for Obama and Catholics want to see our President speak at one of our leading Universities."

Part II of Gilgoff's drummed-up Catholic outrage is his promotion of a highly questionable story by Julia Duin in the Washington Times, which claims that Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Kathleen Sebelius (who has been denied communion by the archbishop of her diocese) will be denied communion in Washington if she is confirmed by the Senate. "So far Archbishop [of Washington Donald] Wuerl has not denied communion to anybody and in fact he was one of the leaders among the bishops saying that this was not a good strategy," Fr. Thomas Reese, a Senior Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told me. Reese added, "I really doubt that he will get into the business of denying communion to [Sebelius]. . . . I don't think it will become an issue."

--Sarah Posner

• As expected, cautious Democratic Senators, namely Kent Conrad, have begun extracting their pound of flesh from President Obama's progressive budget, slashing spending for health care and stripping a tax credit for working families. Ezra has more on what Conrad's cuts actually mean vis-a-vis working with the opposition. Tim looks at the all-bark, no-bite approach of Evan Bayh's band of moderates, whose grandstanding about deficits and spending has been a distraction on the road to supporting the president's agenda and trying to woo moderate Republicans to their side. Meanwhile, outside interest groups step up their own ad campaigns to win support for the president's budget.
• As for the GOP, it's striking how relatively quiet they've been for the past couple weeks. It's almost as if they've run out of ways to oppose Barack Obama and are sitting around waiting for him to fail (as they know he will) so they can wrestle back political power and unveil their next Contract with America.
• Barack Obama has made his first foray into election endorsements since assuming the presidency, making an email pitch for Scott Murphy, running in the March 31 special election for the NY-20 seat.
• I haven't commented on the unresolved Minnesota Senate race in some time. For the blow-by-blow I would recommend Eric Kleefeld's tireless reporting/blogging at TPMDC. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that the contest has now broken the previous state record for longest unresolved election result, just as the court battle is coming to a close. And even though Norm Coleman has remarked that he has no intention of taking him case all the way to the Supreme Court, I see no reason why he wouldn't appeal his case as far as he can considering he really little future in politics and that the FEC has granted him and Al Franken the privilege of tapping maxed-out donors for recount fundraising.
• EFCA might (or might not!) be imperiled this year because of Arlen Specter's decision to challenge Pat Toomey next year, but at least according to Quinniapac, he would lose by double-digits to his more conservative challenger in a hypothetical 2010 primary matchup.
• Remainders: Obama continues to travel down the "state secrets" road blazed by his predecessor; Howard Dean announces that Democracy for America will be making a big push for keeping the public insurance option part of Obama's health care reform agenda; Cornerites have short memories when it comes to mocking presidential halos; Glenn Thrush makes the offhand comment that Joe Lieberman "is inching back into Democratic respectability by the hour"; the Lone Star state makes its bid to be the next Dover, PA; Mark Blumenthal takes a characteristically thorough look at unionization polling; Obama decides the music industry's failed business model is worth preserving too; and behold the Bachmann Effect!

--Mori Dinauer

Barack Obama has finally endorsed Scott Murphy, the Democratic candidate in the special election to claim Kirstin Gillibrand's former house seat. The president sent an e-mail to 50,000 residents in or near the district on Murphy's behalf. Though I'd like to think someone in the White House is reading TAPPED, it's really just a smart political calculation. One Democratic operative in the district tells me the Obama endorsement is "overwhelming" all other news, which ought to help Murphy, who has been dogged recently by questions about the AIG bonus provision of the stimulus bill and whether he would support the death penalty for Osama bin Laden. But his Republican opponent, Jim Tedisco, is still opposing the popular economic stimulus legislation and has suffered in recent polls for his association with the national Republican party. Get ready for an exciting finish next Tuesday.

-- Tim Fernholz

The trailblazing African American historian John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94. Chair of President Bill Clinton's Presidential Initiative on Race and a winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Franklin was best known for his research on the lives of free blacks living in the pre-Civil War South. I was lucky to meet Franklin four years ago and write a profile of him for my college paper. Here is an excerpt of that piece:

Another piece of accepted history Franklin questions is the notion that there are uniquely white and black "cultures" within the United States, as opposed to uniquely white and black experiences. Because Franklin maintains that Americans of different races have more in common than they realize, he is skeptical of attempts to tackle the issue of race in homogenous settings.

"I don't believe you can get anywhere doing it separately - you've got to have communication," he said.

Franklin continued, "I have a feeling that this difference in cultures is overdrawn, overblown sometimes. How different is my culture from yours? Well, there's food. Black food is Southern food. ... Or dress? What is dress? Most people wear clothes like I wear, like you wear, like we all wear. And when they're not wearing that, they're wearing a costume. An African dashiki is a costume in this country. Religion. What's religion? Blacks didn't have any Christianity - they got it from whites."

More controversially, Franklin argued that American blacks might be willing to give up some of their group cultural identity in exchange for complete tolerance. "Blacks have been lonely and have tried to create a culture," he said. "Kwanzaa - that was just created whole cloth. It's so contrived. ... There's more of a culture in common that blacks and whites have. Unless there's a deliberate effort to create a separate culture."

--Dana Goldstein

What I found most bothersome about Ron Fournier's Drudge-ready analysis of President Obama's press conference for the AP wasn't his clumsy effort to push the "teleprompter" meme (watch out for that one, Jindal lovers) but it's abdication of the journalistic impulse. Take this passage:

Pressed again, Obama cited the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's handling of the IndyMac Bank as an example of government properly using its authority.

The government did something right? That's news to most Americans.

The answer is, in short, yes: As Tim Fernholz wrote about on Friday, the FDIC took over IndyMac when it failed, managed it, and kept it intact rather than breaking it up. (The administration has generally erred on the side of caution as to its authority to take over larger banks, and doing so would be much more complicated.) All the insured deposits were protected. Although it sold IndyMac at a ten billion dollar loss, Ryan Avent points out over gmail that selling a failed bank in an economy like this one is entirely different from selling a failed bank in a strong economy.

In other words, the FDIC did what it was supposed to do, and did it fairly well, given the circumstances. But Fournier didn't even bother to ask the question. He'd already made up his mind.

-- A. Serwer

Internal political developments in the Czech Republic may affect the Obama administration's calculations on missile defense, and on economic stimulus. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek lost a no-confidence vote in parliament yesterday, possibly forcing his resignation. Topolanek has been an advocate of deploying a US anti-ballistic missile system on Czech territory, but the rest of the Czech political class is rather less enthusiastic; Topolanek decided not to push for ratification of the treaties necessary for the missile defense system out of fear that he would lose those votes. This morning, Topolanek further complicated the situation by announcing that President Obama's stimulus measures "will undermine the stability of the global financial market," and represented a "way to hell." The Czech Republic currently holds the rotating Presidency of the European Union, giving Topolanek's comments an unusually high profile. The Obama administration has pushed for more vigorous European effort at economic stimulus, and a number of independent analysts have questioned Europe's relatively slow response to the economic crisis.

None of this is likely to make President Obama feel very generous towards the Czech Prime Minister. As Obama has already indicated a profound lack of excitement about the European anti-ballistic missile system, it's unlikely that the Czechs will be able to force any cooperation from the United States on the issue. However, the difficulties in the Czech Republic may make the "grand bargain" between Russia and the U.S. over the issue of missile defense less likely. As I argued last month, bargains involve giving something in order to get something; it's becoming increasingly apparent that the European ABM is DOA, with our without Russian concessions on Iran.

--Robert Farley

Ross Douthat ponders a push for prison reform on the right:

This political dynamic explains why the chances for effective prison reform probably depend on Nixon-to-China conservatives, who can put the credibility the Right has built up on law and order to good use. (It wouldn't hurt if conservatives were willing to champion some alternative approaches to crime reduction as well.) But they probably also depend on crime rates staying flat, or falling - and in the current downturn that may be too much to hope for.

There are a lot of reasons for conservatives to push for reforming the criminal justice system outside of the libertarian case against excessive incarceration, draconian drug laws and paramilitary policing. For fiscal conservatives, there's the knowledge that corrections spending costs taxpayer 60 million dollars a year. Many religious conservatives, such as Chuck Colson, are adamant about the power of and potential for redemption among the incarcerated, and the fact is the impact of mass incarceration on families is devastating. 

We've already seen some religious conservatives heading in this direction. Sam Brownback's support was vital to reforming parole in Kansas, and George W. Bush supported and signed the Second Chance Act last year, which provided government funds for reentry programs. In both cases, their support for reentry was informed by their religious background.

Anyway, it's possible that recession and unemployment will make running on traditional "crime prevention" strategies too attractive for conservatives looking to win elections, and drain public support for policies that appear not to be "tough on crime." But both on the state and federal level, the momentum is on the side of prison reform advocates, who seem to be winning some converts on the right and have a sympathetic ally in the White House. I actually think it's possible that substantive changes, some of which are already taking place, will occur on the state level, without a big national conversation.

UPDATE: I accidentally published an early and not so edited draft of this post, rather than the one that was finished.

-- A. Serwer

The banking plan: everybody's talking about it! Well, everybody except for the White House press corps. Tim Fernholz attended Obama's presser last night, and reports back that the president is in fighting mode when it comes to pushing through his agenda.

Meanwhile, Robert Reich does some financial fortunetelling. And whadda ya know -- the economy is going to be all right at some point in the near to semi-distant future.

And Sarah Posner talks to members of the religious left about reforming Wall Street.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

On a conference call with reporters to discuss the role of education in the president's budget, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan laid out four principles for performance pay for teachers. They were:

1. Rewarding teacher excellence
2. Getting the best and brightest into the toughest inner city and rural classrooms
3. Higher compensation for teachers in shortage areas, including math, science, and foreign languages
4. Support for alternative certification programs such as Teach for America, opening up teaching to non-education majors

Points two through four here are not particularly controversial. The rub, of course, is the details involved with point one -- how exactly do we determine "teacher excellence?" And most importantly, especially in the minds of teachers, what role do student test scores play in that determination?

Duncan wouldn't say, though he did tell a Colorado reporter on the call that Denver's celebrated Pro-Comp system, which includes student achievement as just one metric to assess teacher excellence, is not the only model he supports. Duncan noted that 36 districts across the country are doing "interesting things around compensation," and that he hopes federal dollars will increase that number to 150.

--Dana Goldstein

Conservatives have been complaining loudly about Obama giving the commencement speech at Notre Dame because of his pro-choice views. Aside from the personal hypocrisy of some of the critics, there's a more disconcerting reality conservatives need to face. Students at Notre Dame supported Obama over John McCain. According to the Dayton Daily News, 52 percent of Notre Dame students supported Obama in a mock election held last year.

52 is also the percentage of the Catholic vote Obama won in the November election, over John McCain's 45 percent. There are a number of conservative Catholic organizations and figures taking shots at Obama over his appearance at Notre Dame, but they don't appear to represent the opinion of the majority of students at Notre Dame or Catholic voters in general.

UPDATE: I should have been more clear, the notion that Obama represents "anti-Catholic values" doesn't really jibe with his support among Catholics, unless you're willing to argue that a majority of Catholics are also anti-Catholic.


-- A. Serwer

I may have jumped the gun just a little in yesterday's post about the Employee Free Choice Act. At the time, I said that the legislation is basically finished for the rest of the congress, barring another GOP Senator stepping in to fulfill the Specter role of voting for cloture. I suggested this was a bad idea for conservatives because this is perhaps their one near-term opportunity where the balance of power could allow them some opportunity to reach a compromise that weakens the bill. But it's not clear that anyone from labor or their allies in the congress are at all interested in such a thing, especially after both sides rejected outright last week's middle-ground proposal from more progressive businesses.

In any case, Specter's speech announcing that he would not vote for cloture on the act as written also included a list of potential changes to the bill that would presumably persuade him to vote for it. (I've included the list after the jump). Anyone following the debate is familiar with these ideas, which include an accelerated election process, stricter enforcement of NLRA regulations and other tweaks designed to even the process witout disturbing the status quo too much. I think, for labor, the calculus on whether to pursue this deal is directly connected to the Democrats 2010 Senate map. Right now, it looks like Democrats could gain enough seats to do EFCA without Republicans. Our commenters, I know, despair of red state Dems ever voting for the bill, but with sixty-plus votes I'm confident that the president can whip them into line. But if the political climate deteriorates for Democrats, then perhaps this compromise would be on the table. Labor won't be pleased with this, but the administration might, since health care reform and green jobs are the next two priorities on the union lists.

-- Tim Fernholz

SOME SUGGESTED REVISIONS TO THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT

(1) Establishing a timetable:

(a) Require that an election must be held within 10 days of a filing of a joint petition from the employer and the union

(b) In the absence of a joint petition, require the NLRB to resolve issues on the bargaining unit and eligibility to vote within 14 days from the filing of the petition and the election 7 days thereafter. The Board may extend the time for the election to 14 additional days if the Board sets forth specifics on factual or legal issues of exceptional complexity justifying the extension.

(c) Challenges to the voting would have to be filed within 5 days with the Board having 15 days to resolve any disputes with an additional 10 days if they find issues of exceptional complexity.

(2) Adding unfair labor practices:

(a) an employer or union official visits to an employee at his/her home without prior consent for any purpose related to a representation campaign;

(b) an employer holds employees in a “captive audience” speech unless the union has equal time under identical circumstances;

(c) an employer or union engages in campaign related activities aimed at employees within 24 hours prior to an election.

(3) Authorizing the NLRB to impose treble back pay without reduction for mitigation when an employee is unlawfully fired

(4) Authorizing civil penalties up to $20,000 per violation on an NLRB finding of willful and repeated violations of employees’ statutory rights by an employer or union during an election campaign

(5) Require the parties to begin negotiations within 21 days after a union is certified. If there is no agreement after 120 days from the first meeting, either party may call for mediation by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service

(6) On a finding that a party is not negotiating in good faith, an order may be issued establishing a schedule for negotiation and imposing costs and attorney fees.

(7) Broaden the provisions for injunctive relief with reasonable attorneys’ fees on a finding that either party is not acting in good faith

(8) Require a dissent by a member of the Board to be completed 45 days after the majority opinion is filed;

(9) Establish a certiorari-type process where the Board would exercise discretion on reviewing challenges from decisions by an administrative law judge or regional director.

(10) If the Board does not grant review or fails to issue a decision within 180 days after receiving the record, the decision of the administrative judge or regional director would be final.

(11) Authorizing the award of reasonable attorneys’ fees on a finding of harassment, causing unnecessary delay or bad faith

(12) Modify the NLRA to give the court broader discretion to impose a Gissel order on a finding that the environment has deteriorated to the extent that a fair election is not possible.

The Senate moderates have come together -- in the pages of the Washington Post, natch -- to reassure the world of their support of President Obama's agenda. Sens. Evan Bayh, Tom Carper, and Blanche Lincoln are only forming a new moderate caucus in the Senate because:

1) The Republican leadership isn't doing a good job and they feel they can whip GOP votes. (Seriously, that's what they say.)

2) They have no idea what they're talking about. I've lamented in the past the fact that these senators rarely deign to explain why the make the choices they do, leading people to infer that it has more to do with their campaign contributions than their principles. Read this paragraph and you'll understand their whole gambit:

As moderate leaders, it is not our intent to water down the president's agenda. We intend to strengthen and sustain it. Moderation is not a mathematical process of finding the center for its own sake. Practical solutions are practical because they offer our best chance to make a difference in people's lives today without forcing our children to pick up the tab tomorrow.

This is truly beautiful nonsense. Being practical is good because ... being practical is good. Let me offer a few other riffs on this passage:

• "Communist solutions are communist because they offer our best chance to make a difference..."
• "Republican solutions are Republican because they offer our best chance to make a difference..."
• "Fascist solutions are are Fascist because they offer our best chance to make a difference ..."

You get the idea.

3) They worry that the president's agenda is going to alienate moderates and cost him his his political support, just as it did Bill Clinton in 1993. Except, you know, that Obama won a lot more votes than Clinton -- moderate votes! -- and that he continues to have the approval of moderates, all while saying the same things. Meanwhile, Bayh has the political experience of winning statewide elections in Indiana -- Obama won Indiana -- and losing national presidential campaigns -- didn't Obama win one of those, too? Bayh continues to misunderstand the current political dynamic, or he's stuck in the past.

It's a good sign, at least, that Bayh et. al. have faced enough political pressure that they felt it necessary to come forward and reiterate their support for the president. To be sure, the work they've done in the Senate to persuade moderate Republicans to back the president's agenda has been important and necessary, even as their cheerful willingness to say nonsensical things and take stands against their constituents' interests has been a drag. But if there's a middle ground between helping build consensus for important legislation and completely ignoring consequences of the policies they support, these moderates can find it. After all, tea-weakening incrementalism is tea-weakening incrementalism because it offers our best chance to make a difference in people's lives today without forcing our children to pick up the tab tomorrow. Right?

--Tim Fernholz

As Jesse Taylor and TBogg have noted, this is a case that will test just how far the Supreme Court is willing to let the War On (Some Classes of People Who Use Some) Drugs' war on the Fourth Amendment go:

Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on — black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt — the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade.

An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.”

Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.

--Scott Lemieux

During Bobby Jindal's (second) attempt at a response to Obama last night, he said this:

I have just learned that because of President Obama's opposition to torture, it is now illegal to show my speech to prisoners at Gitmo.

There's something disturbing about Republicans supporting torture, which is illegal, shielding those who enabled those crimes, suggesting the president is making the country less safe by not engaging in criminal behavior, and then making light of it after the fact, all while denying that the crimes actually took place. Part of the reason that the Obama administration is having such a hard time dealing with the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo is that the evidence against them was illegally acquired through torture, making convictions potentially impossible to get. The use of torture wasn't just a violation of domestic and international law, it has harmed our foreign-policy interests and put American troops at greater risk of receiving the same treatment if captured.

But the most disturbing thing about Jindal's joke and the laughter it provoked among some Beltway insiders is that it's a frank admission that the previous administration committed crimes in its treatment of terrorism suspects, an admission that couldn't possibly be made, and certainly not made into a joke, if the GOP weren't completely confident that no one will ever be held to account for those crimes. The joke simply makes a mockery of the rule of law.

No wonder his audience thought the joke was funny. We live in a country where all the executive branch needs to do to avoid legal consequences for committing a crime is to get an OLC lawyer to write a memo saying it's actually legal. 

Get it? Ha. Ha.

-- A. Serwer

A reminder that despite the Obama administration's unprecedented investment in infrastructure, all is not well -- far from it -- for the nation's public-transit riders: After scuttling Mayor Mike Bloomberg's congestion-pricing plan last year, legislators in Albany are once again twiddling their thumbs as New York City's MTA faces an insurmountable budget gap. By the end of today, commuting to and from work could cost New Yorkers, in the middle of a recession, more than ever before. The Times reports:

The base subway and bus fare in New York City would rise to $2.50, up from $2. A 30-day MetroCard would cost $103, up from $81. A monthly ticket on the Long Island Rail Road for a commuter who travels between Ronkonkoma and Pennsylvania Station would increase to $352, up from $278.

Long Island Bus would no longer accept New York City monthly unlimited MetroCards, and single bus rides would cost $3.50 instead of $2.00. This is a travesty. It is only the poorest of suburbanites, such as recent immigrants, who regularly rely on bus service. In addition, two subway lines and 35 bus routes would be discontinued, and 1,100 transit workers would lose their jobs, even though demand for transit service is higher than ever before.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Compromise legislation is circulating in the state Assembly that would raise fares by a mere 8 percent, impose at least a $2 toll on all car commuters taking bridges and tunnels into New York City, and use payroll tax revenue to make up for some of the rest of the budget gap. Given Albany's history of ignoring the needs of public-transit riders, I'm not holding my breath. New York's wonderful Streetsblog is calling the likely scenario "doomsday." Sad.

For more on the history of transit policy in New York under the Bloomberg administration, check out my November feature on the topic.

--Dana Goldstein

• Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke appeared before the House Financial Services Committee this morning, making their case for expanded authority to seize troubled non-banking financial institutions as a means of avoiding additional large collapses. Additionally, Barack Obama has penned an op-ed appearing in 30 newspapers around the world arguing for cooperation on an economic crisis whose influence stops at no shores. But on Wall Street, the game is different. This isn't about saving the economy or pitching in to help your country. This is about preserving your status as a king among men. This is about retaining lavish bonuses for demonstrable failure. This is about looting America and then blackmailing the country into keeping your privilege intact. Like Ezra, I feel total contempt for these people but I have yet to see a political figure emerge with the courage necessary to take on these thieves and welcome their hatred.
  
• And how does the rest of the country feel about the blackmail of America? Gallup finds heavy dissatisfaction for AIG, Congress, and Geithner -- and yet Barack Obama still receives majority support, despite being implicated in the AIG bonuses scandal. Also odd: While 46 percent of the public blames AIG for the bonus scandal and 18 percent reserve their scorn for Congress, only 8, 7, and 7 percent blame Geithner, Obama and "all equally," respectively. Meanwhile, CBS News finds a thin majority has "some" or "a lot" of confidence in Geithner.
• Tonight, President Obama will hold an 8:00 EST press conference to discuss his budget and the economy and I can only assume that Faiz Shakir's credentialing will draw scorn from the White House press corps should he be called upon by the President.
• There are several ways to read the politics of Arlen Specter's decision to vote no on EFCA. But first, and most important, card check is more or less DOA until the next Congress, as Tim says.
• I, too, would like to know who the next NASA administrator is going to be, given that the President is taking time to have for-the-kids conversations with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Let's just hope that Stephen Colbert doesn't make a bid for the job.
• If Fox News officially declared themselves a conservative news network that is committed to being the "voice of opposition" during the Obama administration, I would applaud their candor. It's the fact that they pretend to be otherwise that is insulting.
• Remainders: The Senate gives the green light to a new National Service Corps bill and considers stiffer regulation of predatory credit card lending practices; Krugman wonders if Larry Summers is just playing dumb; Philip Longman reminds us that the United States has successfully bailed out troubled industries before -- and under Republican administrations, no less; and the GOP begs Dick Cheney to go back to his secret lair.

--Mori Dinauer

Most TAPPED readers, I assume, are familiar with the conventional non-wisdom that judicial victories favoring same-sex marriage (or at least civil union) benefits are counterproductive. Recent events allow us to make a relevant comparison. In Vermont, one of the first states where the courts required the state to provide the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples, the result has been a massive backlash undermining gay and lesbian rights in perpetuity a political context where the state Senate favors same-sex marriage by an overwhelming margin:

The Vermont Senate on Monday evening overwhelmingly passed a bill legalizing gay marriage, making the state the first in the nation to take legislative rather than judicial steps toward granting marriage rights to same-sex couples.

The state Senate voted 26-4 in favor of the measure introduced by Democratic state Sen. John Campbell. The bill now goes to the state House, where Speaker Shap Smith, also a Democrat, predicted a majority would vote in favor of the "marriage equality" act. The House Judiciary Committee is expected to begin debating the bill Tuesday. A second vote in the state Senate also is expected Tuesday.

Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, a Republican, has refused to answer questions about whether he would sign the measure, veto it or allow it to become law without his signature. He has said that he believes marriage should be between one man and one woman.

One hopes that Douglas will want to be on the right side of history and not veto the legislation, but his silence makes it clear that he's not confident that his opposition to same-sex marriage rights remains politically popular. Meanwhile, in New York -- where the refusal of the courts to end the denial of fundamental rights was allegedly a panacea for gay and lesbian New Yorkers -- the state seems to be no closer to same-sex marriage rights than it was four years ago. And the evidence that judicial victories produce some kind of unique backlash remains exceptionally weak.

--Scott Lemieux

This is actually sort of adorable. At today's AIG hearing, Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner sported identical ensembles. While their shared sartorial choice doesn't exactly blow minds, the outfit suggests a prudent decision-making process and an all-business-no-nonsense attitude -- exactly the sort of message you want to send when you're trying to convince people that your plan can totally repair an economy in shambles.

Plus, those blue ties are pretty calming…

Have a good photo caption? Leave it in the comments.

Via Gawker.

--Alexandra Gutierrez

The indispensable J Street has a new poll surveying the attitudes of 800 American Jews toward Israel. And while there is lots of encouraging news about support for a two-state solution -- and for increased American push back against Israel's nativist right -- what really jumped out at me were the contradictory opinions many American Jews have regarding Israel's recent military incursion into Gaza. The survey's authors, Gerstein/Agne Strategic Communications, write that these numbers prove American Jews are "sophisticated." I see them as deeply problematic:

• 75 percent of American Jews approved of Israel’s military action [in Gaza]. But at the same time, 59 percent felt that the military action had no impact on Israel’s security
• Nearly 7-in-10 Jews felt that Israel’s military action was not disproportionate, yet 56 percent believe that military action that kills Palestinian civilians – even if it targets terrorists – actually creates more terrorism instead of preventing terrorism

This means a significant majority of American Jews support Israeli militarism, even when they believe such militarism does nothing to advance Israeli or Jewish interests. In other words, there is a contradiction between American Jews' generally secular, humanist, progressive political convictions and our strong identification with Israel and, indeed, with the IDF itself.

In part, this contradiction can be explained by ignorance of the toll Israeli military action takes on civilian populations in Gaza and the West Bank. There is also widespread American ignorance of the specific, disturbing beliefs of Israeli conservatives such as Avigdor Lieberman. But there is something deeper going on: an internal debate taking place within many American Jews in which we ask ourselves whether our liberalism supports or calls into question the very idea of Israel that we've been taught, often since early childhood, to support. Until this debate is resolved, many younger American Jews, in particular, will hold Jewish institutions and even our own Jewish identity at arm's length. That is disastrous for the future of American Judaism, and is just one reason why open discussion of these issues is necessary. After all, we do not want the only vocal, committed, politically influential American Jews to be those with conservative convictions.

For more analysis of the J Street poll, check out Philip Weiss.

--Dana Goldstein

Sen. Arlen Specter, self-described "decisive vote," announces his opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. Does it effectively kill the bill this year? Yes, unless you can think of another Republican who will vote for it. Is this a good idea for Republicans? No, actually. It's a gamble: Despite the political climate and some surprising noises from Connecticut, odds still are that the Democrats will have a net gain of at least one seat in the upper chamber in 2010 -- the map favors them and the NRSC has had a tough time recruiting solid candidates. (Usual disclaimers for political prognostication apply).

It would be better for conservatives to force some kind of compromise on the legislation now than see it go through completely intact in two years. But that's where an opposition mentality will get you: a deep bias toward short-term political wins (EFCA is presumably finished for two years, although I await replies from labor sources to hear how they plan to get around this setback) over long-term policy movement. Specter himself may not make it through the 2010 elections unscathed; even if he survives his primary, the lack of union support that will result from this decision could be deeply problematic in the general election.

-- Tim Fernholz

TTR knows that unions don't cause companies to fail, that conservatives love deregulation, dictators hate recessions and that Columbia Colombia has a spotty human rights record. Now, you can know those things, too:

• Union myth-busters. An instructive report published by the Economic Policy Institute counters the conservatives who blame organized labor for over-burdening American business. The theory of union-induced failure is primarily grounded in the presumption that organized labor artificially raises costs above market-determined rates, thus hindering a firm's ability to compete with non-union shops at home and abroad. EPI shows that unionization does not correlate to a firm's chances of failing. As the percentage of employees who vote for a union grows larger than 50 percent (the magic number needed for representation), the likelihood of the firm's failure begins to decrease ever so slightly. This raises an important point about the under appreciated benefits of collective bargaining, discussed by our very own Mark Schmitt last week. A union's power lies not only in its ability to squeeze out benefits for its members, but also in its capacity for organizing collective concessions if a company's health is at risk (as we saw recently with the UAW). After all, if the firm fails, the union and its members suffer as well. -- JL
• The best of the worst. The free-marketeers at the Heartland Institute, known for its global warming skepticism, published a report card on state insurance laws that bestows the highest marks to states with the least regulated insurance industries. It gives each state a score in each of nine categories and picks five states for more in-depth case studies, two with "A" grades, two "D's" and one "F." The study's primary target is states whose laws affect insurance rates; the authors claim that government interference with the price mechanism leads to "wealth redistribution"; they would rather limit the state's role to rooting out fraud. Perhaps not coincidentally, all but one of the chief insurance regulators in the five states with "A" grades are Republican appointees (the exception being Illinois' Insurance Commissioner, appointed by none other than impeached ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich). -- MK
• "The Logic of Authoritarian Bargains." Brutal repression will only get a tyrant so far. A heavy hand can embitter the populace and lead to insurrection. What is a prudent dictator to do? According to a recent study by the Brookings Institute, in addition to terror tactics, tyrannical regimes rely on an ‘‘authoritarian bargain’’, an implicit redistribution deal "whereby citizens relinquish political influence in exchange for public spending." Another successful tactic is partial political liberalization, allowing opposition groups to be partially incorporated into the political apparatus in an attempt to de-fang them. Of particular interest is the study's report that "recessions or financial crises" put dictatorships in an uncomfortable, and potentially destabilizing, position. If a regime performs poorly in the economic arena the authoritarian bargain they have implicitly struck with the populace will deteriorate, leaving them vulnerable to supporter defection, increased political opposition, and rising individual support for "revolutionary action." -- JB
• Think for yourself. In case you were gunning for congress to ratify the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, take a look at this Human Rights First report on Colombia's prosecution of human rights defenders. The report examines 32 recent investigations of nonviolent human rights promoters, urging Colombia, the U.S., and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to turn this injustice around. Prosecutions against human rights defenders "follow a clear pattern," HRF says. "The prosecution usually relies on innuendo and the assertion that the defender is covertly involved with the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia]." This stigma can sentence a human rights defender to death. FTA aside, if you can't stomach 63 pages outlining human rights affronts, a two-minute video summary, put to flute music, accompanies the report.-- CP

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
3/17/09
3/10/09

Word came out a few weeks ago that the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force was building a contingency plan to shoot down any North Korean ballistic missiles that might threaten Japanese territory. Japanese destroyers have the same anti-ballistic missile (ABM) capabilities as U.S. destroyers, and the North Korean satellite launch would provide an almost unique opportunity to test the system in real-life conditions. Simply promising to shoot the missile down also gave Japan the opportunity to flex its military muscle in the region. The North Korean reaction to this news was predictably hostile, both to the prospect of outside interference with the launch, and to the notion that the missile would accidentally land in Japan. Noah Shachtman now notes that the U.S. has deployed one anti-ballistic missile capable destroyer to the region, perhaps indicating that we'd like to get in on the game.

The success or failure of the ship-borne anti-ballistic missile system could have wide-ranging implications. Josh Keating opines:

It would be a lot harder for the Obama administration to continue to use the "effectiveness dodge" -- the argument that missile-defense systems should not be deployed because they cannot be proven effective -- if the Japanese are able to successfully shoot down a North Korean missile. On the other had, if the interceptors were to miss and Japan was embarrassed, it would actually make Obama's grand bargain a lot easier to pull off.

Hopefully, however, we won't find any of this out; if the Japanese do end up shooting down the North Korean missile, things could get very dicey in northeast Asia.

--Robert Farley

A federal judge in Los Angeles is awaiting word from the Justice Department on the federal government's policy on medical marijuana dispensaries, The New York Times reports. The Bush administration's position was that federal laws outlawing marijuana trumped local laws allowing its distribution for medical purposes. Attorney General Eric Holder said last week that the federal government would not prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries as long as those facilities were in compliance with state and local laws.

Until the Justice Department clarifies its position, it's hard to know how this would affect the case in question, in which the defendant, Charles Lynch, is charged with distributing marijuana to persons under 21, which is illegal even under current laws allowing the distribution of marijuana in California for medical purposes. Lynch is currently facing a minimum of five years in prison if convicted.

-- A. Serwer

Meanwhile, Paul Waldman grieves the decline of print media.

And Robert Kuttner offers 10 policy recommendations oriented toward creating a just economy.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

That's the number of times Mt. Redoubt in Alaska has erupted in the past 24 hours. Someone should tell Bobby Jindal.

-- A. Serwer

Benjamin Sarlin interviews former Swedish Finance Minister Bo Lundgren, who seems to think the Obama administration is starting approach the financial crisis correctly. He pushes back against the idea that Sweden's now-infamous bank nationalization plan -- which saved the country's economy in the late nineties -- was "socialist":

"I'm a market liberal. My party that I used to lead, the Moderate Party, is the conservative party in Sweden and the parallel to the Republican Party in America," Lundgren said. "When I nationalized the banks, it wasn't because I wanted to: It was crisis management. Their owners had been wiped out, the banks were black holes, they had no equity left, and there was no alternative but to take them over."

He added that foreign observers often confuse Sweden's socialized income distribution and government services with its privatized business environment, leading to inaccurate claims that their government is fundamentally different than other free-market economies. One example of Sweden's privatization chops: The government is refusing to bail out the famed car company Saab this week, as officials say they don't think running an auto manufacturer is within the state's job description.

He also has nice words for the new Public-Private Investment Program announced yesterday by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. This interview is part of an emerging narrative that suggests PPIP is a necessary precursor to any kind of receivership scheme, for political reasons, time to figure out the legal authorities, and with the knowledge that if it doesn't work it will reveal the need for broader federal intervention.

-- Tim Fernholz

It's worth considering the full context of Tammy Bruce's comments on Michelle Obama yesterday. Bruce said this of the first lady:

"That's what he's married to," Bruce said. ... "You know what we've got? We've got trash in the White House. Trash is a thing that is colorblind, it can cross all eco-socionomic ... categories. You can work on Wall Street, or you can work at the Wal-Mart. Trash, are people who use other people to get things, who patronize others, who consider you bitter and clingy."

Right. Nothing that makes a racist comment more obvious than a self-conscious attempt to qualify it as not being racist.

In any case, this is what Bruce was reacting to:

As a kid growing up on the south side of Chicago, Michelle Obama remembers being ridiculed for trying to be educated and get good grades.

"I wanted an "A." I wanted to be smart. I wanted to be the person who had the right answer. And I didn't care if it was cool -- 'cause I remember there were kids around my neighborhood who would say 'ooh -- you talk funny. you talk -- like a white girl.' I heard that growing up my whole life.”

So Obama was telling children -- black children in particular, to pursue scholarly excellence even in the face of ridicule for talking "like a white girl." It's hard to see what's offensive about this advice. Except when you consider that Bruce previously suggested Bill Cosby caused his son's death by giving him access to an expensive car and that civil-rights luminaries Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks had "pushed us into the maze of Thought Police totalitarianism that we face today." You start to get the impression that Bruce's hostility toward Michelle Obama really isn't personal at all. She just has a problem with black people, particularly black people who deign to rise above their station. Bruce's words are just a clumsy attempt to put Michelle Obama back in her place.

Good luck with that, Tammy.

-- A. Serwer

After being held as an enemy combatant in a military brig in South Carolina for six years, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri appeared in court yesterday, charged with providing aid to terrorists. Al-Marri plead not guilty. Al-Marri is suspected of being an al-Qaeda "sleeper agent" who was meant to participate in a terrorist attack immediately following 9/11.

Because Al-Marri was already being held on American soil, charging him was less politically complicated than charging detainees who are currently held at Guantanamo Bay. A number of legislators have expressed their opposition to holding suspected or convicted terrorists within their states.

-- A. Serwer

John Heilemann has a fascinating look at the White House economic team, well worth a read but probably outstripped a little by yesterday's events -- it was a very good day for the Treasury secretary, a lot of policy criticism notwithstanding, simply because he offered a concrete plan that played well in the public and, yes, because the markets rallied. But Heilemann's sketches of the relevant personalities is certainly of interest, especially Paul Volcker's desire to get in on the action. It also has some delightfully catty blind quotes, including this observation: "“All I can tell you is that Larry [Summers] seems quite happy with [the banking proposal] being known as the Geithner Plan.” No doubt, but from here on out I'll try to avoid that term just to make sure credit goes where credit is due -- this plan has the stamp of the whole administration, however politically convenient it may be to have the Treasury secretary own it.

-- Tim Fernholz

President Barack Obama had a semi-secret meeting with former Soviet Presidet Mikhail Gorbachev, apparently as preparation for further engagement with the Russians. Reasonable! (We sent Henry Kissinger over there recently in a similar capacity). But the meeting wasn't officially announced, and you know that Robert Gibbs secretly enjoyed telling reporters the following:

The president tends to roam around the larger (White) House and sometimes walks into meetings that weren't previously on his schedule.

I thought that sort of transparent flim-flammery was the province of a show like "West Wing," but apparently they really do it. One hopes that Obama and Gorby engaged in a kind of elaborate pantomime when they "accidentally" met, telling each other how surprised they were by the other's coincidental presence.

-- Tim Fernholz

• On late Friday, the Geithner banking rescue plan was leaked, leading to a flurry of weekend criticism, some of which Tim captures here. The plan was officially unveiled today, with Geithner himself penning an explanation/defense in The Wall Street Journal. Overall, though, the response has been mostly negative but among the more disinterested optimists are Brad DeLong, whose useful FAQ may or may not get the pricing issue correct. It could be that the failure of the Geithner plan leads to nationalization, but I'd concur with Kevin Drum that nationalization would introduce political problems that would be present regardless whether we pushed for it initially or if we did so down the road.
  
• Appearing last night on 60 Minutes, President Obama sharply criticized former vice president Dick Cheney for promoting policies that have done less to protect us from terrorist threats than they have to radicalize and recruit more potential terrorists. Interestingly, as Greg Sargent points out, it really does appear that the president all but directly accused Cheney of authorizing torture, which opens the door a bit more towards his administration bearing a responsibility to investigate illegalities committed by senior members of the Bush administration. Indeed, this Newsweek story on the administration's moves to declassify and make public three of the Bush-era "torture memos," describing in detail these interrogation techniques, appears to be setting up a situation where the evidence overwhelms Obama's desire to "move forward, not look back." Then again, Obama's "flexible" attitude toward the rule of law threatens the chances of a comprehensive investigation into the Bush administration's crimes.
• It would seem that an EFCA "compromise" is in the works, although I've rarely seen it referred to without the scare quotes. Indeed, the proposal being pushed by Costco, Starbucks and Whole Foods would scrap EFCA and instead require a 70-vote supermajority to form a union. The good news is that Hill Democrats aren't particularly interested in softer labor legislation. Meanwhile, The Washington Post and Associated Press are doing some top-shelf lazy labor reporting.
• You might recall that last month George Will recycled one of his old columns which was full of easily refutable errors about climate change and The Washington Post ultimately decided that maintaining an alternate universe in which Will's truthiness reigns supreme was more important than reaffirming truth based on fact. The Post has now issued probably the closest we'll ever get to a correction in the form of a polite but firm Chris Mooney column that puts Will's fantasyland in its place. Oh, and an international organization of professional meteorologists has an equally polite and definitive takedown as well. It's great to see this fact-checking being done but it doesn't alter the reality that The Post's editors are still in denial about the paper's disturbing forays into epistemological relativism.
• It seems like ages since we've seen a Republican publicly criticize Rush Limbaugh only to supplicate himself before Mr. Excellence in Broadcasting mere days later. But now it seems Jim Tedisco, running in a close special election race to grab Kirsten Gillibrand's NY-20 seat, has become the latest to undergo the ritual embarrassment.
• I think the greatest appeal of the "Obama is turning us into a banana republic" argument for conservatives is that it lets them conflate their desire to portray Obama as incompetent with their desire to portray him as a tyrant. And I'll be honest: if I were an unscrupulous conservative, I'd find this argument too convenient to pass up, either.
• While I'm all for having a critical voice like Howard Dean on CNBC, I'm not sure what in Dean's background makes him a good choice to provide financial analysis. Then again, everyone else at CNBC does have relevant experience in finance and still gives out bad advice, so it's probably best to simply evaluate Dr. Dean on the merits of what he says. I also like how Jason Zengerle ties Dean's dismissal of the "great man" theory of history to the dominance of Randian hyper-individualism on display at the network.
• Weekend Remainders: Steele outraises Kaine; Schumer comes out in favor of same-sex marriage; Democrats shift their feet on executive oversight; John Yoo's employer mulls punishment; a glimpse at the future of lobbyist reform; recession charts tell different stories; and why Obama should end the White House press briefing.

--Mori Dinauer

Yesterday, Matt observed that, though he thinks economic justice would be furthered by nationalization, Geithner's plan could work perfectly and still leave us with the same kind of unsustainable and unproductive financial system we used to have. He follows up today:

My biggest concern about the PPIP approach to the banking system is that even if it works, what it does essentially is return us to the pre-crisis status quo—banks that are so large that they’re too politically powerful to regulate effective and too systemically important to be allowed to fail.

Which raises the question, should the administration try to fundamentally change the character of the financial system, or should it just try to get it running again and worry about sustainability later? James Galbraith, in an article well worth your time, argues that the two are one in the same. But the up-front political and financial costs of the kind of program Galbraith might prefer are probably too much for the U.S. government to face at this time. Perhaps all this talk of populism will provide an opportunity for that kind of agenda, but the administration would probably be happy just to have a functioning, or even semi-functioning, financial system, damn the moral hazard. It could work.

The administration is politically smart to focus on the short-term functionality of the credit markets, but like Matt I do worry that they aren't preparing rhetorically for the kind of regulatory reforms and trust-busting that would create a sustainable system. There needs to be more preparation for the pivot that has to occur after stability has returned. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the PPIP will fail to work, and in so doing reveal that nationalization is the only option left. That would give the administration the ability to fix the banks for both recovery purposes and for long-term economic productivity.

-- Tim Fernholz

Ezra asks important questions about the new financial plan, and since we've been shouting at each other here in TAP HQ all day, it's time to take it to the blog. Here's the crux of Ezra's concern:

The question, at some point, becomes what value the private investors are adding. Some, to be sure. They're also going to manage the investments. But you have to ask: How much is it worth to say that the price of the asset is a "private price" after Treasury has systematically biased the pricing in a particular direction -- which explicitly suggests they don't trust the private market's natural pricing mechanism -- and the FDIC has assessed the asset's integrity and decided on the leverage offer that will further influence the private investor's pricing decision? Is it really worth giving up fully half the profit the taxpayer could otherwise expect and subsidizing most of the debt?

Short answer: yes. Or so the administration would tell you. Obviously this new market isn't a perfect free market, but you start to walk down a very laissez-faire path when you start worrying about government interventions distorting the prices of things. Of course the government doesn't trust the private market's natural pricing mechanism -- it's broken right now. There is no market for these assets and loans, and thus we have no idea how much they cost except that it is probably less than their original value but likely, in the long run, more than fire-sale value, and certainly more than zero. But they are sitting on banks' balance sheets, promoting both insolvency and uncertainty.

The administration sees this problem: People are not willing to take enough risk right now. The investments in question with this plan, which are based in various ways around the failing mortgage market, are likely undervalued, especially given the amount of money and effort the government is just beginning to put behind improving the housing market through nearly every possible avenue. It's hard to imagine that an investment fund could find any bank to finance an investment in them today, so the FDIC (or TALF, in the case of securities) fulfills that role. The fact that they are going to adjust the subsidized loan agreement on a case-by-case basis is a good thing, since it helps control government risk by ensuring that subsidies are as close as possible to the point where they create incentives and aren't overpriced themselves. Yes, all of that information will play into the private manager's bidding decision, just as availability of financing from a regular bank would. But they still make the ultimate decision about what price to accept within those constraints, and still stand to lose their money and their fund if they choose wrong.

Why does the government need the private sector? First, they want to share risk. An entirely public plan would leave all of the risk on the government's books; including private investors offers at least some risk sharing, even if the ratios may not be perfect. Second, they want to leverage their limited funding for maximum impact, and so any extra capital helps even if the debt structure leans on the government. Third, they do need the market pricing. While Ezra rightly recognizes that this system does have biases, a properly managed auction will do a quicker and cheap job of setting prices than the various forms of nationalization, which will either rely on fire sales or long-term management of these assets. While critics of the new plan like to point out single cases where the investor can calculate very carefully how to maximize their profit, I haven't seen anyone model what happens when two -- or more -- investors reach that same calculation over the same asset pools in the bidding process, save that they could increase their risk. Finally, Treasury is not confident in their ability to manage these funds, especially with the numerous political problems that would undoubtedly arise.

Ez is chiefly concerned with profit, as in, why should we help those financial-industry bastards make all the money when we could just do it in a public vehicle? It's a compelling critique, though I think the reasons above represent a good response to it. But in a bigger sense, this isn't about profit. It's about improving credit flow. The most important thing about the program is to create incentives for people to start buying and selling these assets. Many critics are complaining that these are subsidies for bankers, and yes, they are -- although they are also subsidies for regular people as well, since the government will include mutual funds, pension funds, and other long-term institutional investors in the plan -- but they are toward a goal that is not profit, it is toward macroeconomic health. So if prices are biased to be a little higher, that goes toward the problem of bank solvency in a more profitable way for taxpayers than capital injections.

Oh, and a final note on this plan from Noam Schieber:

But what if you set up the market and the prices are still so low they leave the banks insolvent? Even if the banks don't sell, you've not only revealed what a lot of people believe to be true, you've also stamped that belief with your imprimatur.

It may be an intentional exit strategy which just happens to leave you, really, with only one policy tool left. It happens to be popular with Paul Krugman.

-- Tim Fernholz

Thanks to a federal court, within 30 days Plan B will be available without a prescription to all women aged 17 and older. Previously, you had to be 18 to buy the drug. And the FDA has been ordered to reconsider the Bush administration edict banning younger teenagers from accessing the drug over-the-counter. Good news for preventing unplanned pregnancies.

--Dana Goldstein

I think Amanda Terkel has said most of what needs to be said about Bill O'Reilly's producers stalking and then ambushing her while she was in Virginia on a weekend trip. What's most obscene is that O'Reilly posits these events as journalistic "confrontations" as though there was some value to springing on someone and pelting them with aggressive questions rather than just picking up the phone and asking them in a civilized manner. It's not as though these moments provide any kind of insight or valuable information, rather they're meant to intimidate the subject of the confrontation for something they've said--in this case, Terkel questioning O'Reilly's dubious statements on rape victims suggesting that they're somehow responsible for being raped. What makes it even more distasteful is that, as Steve Benen points out, O'Reilly seems to think that such behavior is unacceptable when celebrities are the subject -- which is to say that if someone did the same thing to him, it would be totally out of line, because, you know, he's famous.

-- A. Serwer

As I predicted, Republicans are always glad to agree with the Congressional Budget Office if they see a political advantage. Here's Sen. Chuck Grassley:

"CBO's word is the gospel. Congress and the administration need to get the message. The buck stops with the American taxpayer. People can afford only so much government spending, even for the worthiest-sounding causes."

Although the economy is likely to continue to deteriorate for some time, the enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and very aggressive actions by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are projected to help end the recession in the fall of 2009. In CBO’s forecast, on a fourth-quarter-to-fourth-quarter basis, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP falls by 1.5 percent in 2009 before growing by 4.1 percent in both 2010 and 2011.

Grassley even requested a special analysis of the stimulus which had similar findings. When the senator voted against the ARRA, was he voting against the gospel?

More to the point: There are a lot of different institutions invoked as sources of authority, whether it is the CBO or the stock market. The former is certainly more useful than the latter, but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to live and die by your source. Which is why liberals aren't going around announcing the complete success of the Obama presidency, or the new banks plan, now that the stock market is improving -- the Dow is up 300 today thus far -- and why Grassley shouldn't be calling the CBO "gospel" if he only takes it seriously sometimes. Note that neither the administration nor its allies is attacking the CBO as a source of foolishness, but instead trying to identify why their analysis is different and how to deal with its political implications.

-- Tim Fernholz

ACORN baiting is the new red baiting. Michelle Malkin cries out, "An ACORN fund-raiser on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals? I’m kidding, right?" At The American Spectator, Matthew Vadum writes, "The Judicial Confirmation Network notes that Hamilton previously worked as a fundraiser for ACORN, the radical direct-action group that not only resurrects the dead and gets them to the polls every election but also shakes down banks and pressures them to make home loans to people who can't afford to pay them back." I challenge Vadum to name a single instance of someone registered by ACORN and impersonating a dead person actually casting a vote. Just one.

In the meantime, the judge just named to the 7th Circuit, David F. Hamilton, did work as an ACORN fundraiser, but Malkin and Vadum are leaving out a few important details. Like the fact that Hamilton did so 30 years ago, in 1979. For a month.

-- A. Serwer

The fight over the future of the public school system is not just important -- it's also pretty vicious. Dana Goldstein assesses the state of the education wars, which pit members of the Democratic coalition against each other.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein wonders if the reconciliation process could be successfully used to bring us back to a 50-vote Senate.

And Robert Kuttner calls the securitization system a "doomsday machine."

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Earlier this month, I highlighted the case of the 9-year old Brazilian girl who received an abortion after being raped by her stepfather. Cardinal Cardoso Sobrinho swiftly excommunicated the doctors who provided the abortion and the girl's mother, who approved it -- while maintaining that the rapist himself was worthy of forgiveness.

Last week the story got more complicated, with the Vatican’s top bioethics official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, writing in the Vatican's newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, that the doctors did not, after all, deserve excommunication. Ross Douthat had some thoughtful words on the topic, writing:

...while the institutional Church is not a democracy, neither is it a monolith: Save on rare occasions, it will always speak with a multiplicity of voices, some of them wise and loving and some of them ignorant, or tone-deaf, or legalistic, or cruel. But for the Church to carry out its mission, and turn outward to the world rather than inward on itself, the latter sort of voices can't always be the ones that speak up first and loudest, and have their words carried halfway around the world before wisdom and charity have even gotten out of bed.

Now Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for a Free Choice, has written an essay for Religion Dispatches analyzing the Church's mixed messages on this case. Fisichella has done nothing to fundamentally transform the Church's teachings on abortion, Kissling explains -- and indeed, he calls abortion an "intrinsically wicked act." But under some interpretations, Catholic teaching already allows abortion in cases -- such as the removal of a cancerous uterus -- in which the death of the fetus can be seen as a "byproduct" of some other life-saving medical procedure. In the Brazilian case, in which the physical and psychological life of a child were threatened by carrying a pregnancy to term after rape, Fisichella implies that moral Catholic doctors could reasonably disagree about whether abortion is a life-saving measure or simply a means to kill a fetus. Kissling's take-away? "[T]the fact that he acknowledges any moral discretion for physicians is extremely important," she writes. "You can bet that there will be an outcry from the ultra conservatives in the church, perhaps a clarification by the Archbishop, but the fact is that he has unlocked a door through which women, doctors and policy makers can creep. I am thankful for small favors."

--Dana Goldstein

The one success of No Child Left Behind hailed by folks across the political spectrum is the law's requirement that states collect data on student achievement according to race, class, and English language-learner status. This policy shines a light on the achievement gap that is impossible to ignore, offering up terrifying statistics such as the fact that white high school seniors are, on average, four years ahead of their African American peers in reading and math.

But it has long been an issue that multiracial students had to choose just one box to check when identifying their race: either Hispanic or non-Hispanic; either black, white, or Asian. Today the Washington Post outlines new Department of Education rules that ask states, beginning in 2010, to allow students to check as many boxes as apply to their racial and ethnic identities. And while children and families may feel better about accurately representing their background, civil rights groups are concerned that the new policy will once again obscure the achievement gap, with schools having considerable latitude in how they report test score results according to race.

For example, all students who identify as "Hispanic" will be classified that way, regardless of their race or native language. An early test of the new system found that the number of students counted as "Hispanic" rose, leading to higher reading scores for the group. Meanwhile, with black/white biracial students counted in a separate "multiracial" category, scores for "black" students went down.

It seems that the only way to preserve NCLB's diagnostic rigor under this new system is to require states to break out scores for the most common multiracial identities, such as black/white, black/Hispanic, white/Hispanic, and white/Native American. Without that specificity, it will become more difficult to assess how race and language identities affect students' opportunities and achievement.

--Dana Goldstein

I think it's worth asking what Obama and Cheney are really arguing about, because the exchanges have been somewhat vague. This is what Cheney said a few weeks ago:

When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which I sense is what they’re doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, that they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that’s required, and that concept of military threat that is essential if you’re going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks.

This is, on it's face, hard to square with what the Obama administration has done so far. Whatever the Obama administration's final decisions on detainee policy, they won't be rescinding the military's authority to detain combatants in a war zone. Thus far, they've maintained a wide detention authority and upheld the Bush policy of treating the entire world as the battlefield in the war on terrorism, which means that terrorist suspects will be treated as "enemy combatants" (even if they're not referred to as such) and subject to the approach outlined in the AUMF rather than the criminal justice system. They Obama administration may eventually move to treating terror suspects captured outside the zone of active combat as criminals, but there's no evidence yet that they're doing that.

Meanwhile, Obama offered a response on 60 Minutes yesterday:

Well, I think we're going to have to figure out a mechanism to make sure that they not released and do us harm. But-- do so in a way that is consistent with both our traditions, sense of due process, international law. But this is-- this is the legacy that's been left behind. And, you know, I'm surprised that-- the Vice President is eager-- to defend-- a legacy that was unsustainable. 

[...]

I fundamentally disagree with Dick Cheney. Not surprisingly. You know, I think that-- Vice President Cheney has been-- at the head of a-- movement whose notion is somehow that we can't reconcile our core values, our Constitution, our belief that we don't torture, with our national security interests. I think he's drawing the l-- wrong lesson from history.

As I said above, there's no indication, beyond rhetoric, that the Obama administration is moving to a "law enforcement" approach to dealing with terrorism as of yet, and some evidence they're doing the opposite. So what is Obama referring to when he talks about consistency with American traditions and international law? What are Obama and Cheney really arguing about?

It seems fairly obvious to me that the former vice president and the current president are arguing about torture and interrogation procedures, simply by process of elimination. What's been unfolding before our eyes is essentially an argument about whether or not the United States can continue to torture terrorism suspects. The "concept of military threat" that Cheney is referring to is the same concept that, in his view, justified America's turn to the "dark side." The fundamental departure that Obama has made from the prior administration thus far is binding all agents of the government to interrogation procedures outlined in the Army Field Manual and closing the black sites, so it's hard to assume he can really be talking about anything else. Obama's response also seems to assume that Cheney, when he refers to abandoning the "concept of military threat" is talking about abandoning those interrogation policies "justified" by the threat of terrorism. 

Obama and Cheney have been arguing over whether the United States should torture in the public eye for the past two weeks. Because of the former vice president's use of euphemism, that wasn't entirely clear at first.

UPDATE: Greg Sargent notes that Obama seems to have come "awfully close to directly accusing Cheney of torture."

-- A. Serwer

"This scheme dominates all the alternatives." -- Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, this morning.

Say what you will about Geithner, he's confident in his plan, or rather, how today's part of the plan -- the public-private market for what he calls "legacy loans and securities" -- fits into the overall financial recovery plan, which now includes capital assistance (TARP original), the housing plan, and the various Fed and Treasury asset-purchasing schemes. At this morning's briefing for reporters, Geithner tried to convince a skeptical audience that this new mechanism to fix the financial system is not just a good idea but better than the other options. In his view, those options are minimal public intervention into the markets -- not an option at all, really -- or direct purchase of assets by the government, which requires the government to assume all risk. Whether or not you agree with that frame probably determines how you feel about his plan. I tend to think Brad Delong has a better approach than Paul Krugman, but your results may vary.

Geithner said he sees a large problem of risk aversion right now; this plan is designed to create incentives for people to take risks and purchase these troubled assets. But make no mistake, private investors have some skin in the game -- though not as much as the government -- and will see their equity stakes wiped out in the case of a loss. But because most of these legacy assets are based on the mortgage markets, you have to see the plan as kind of a complicated bank shot. The government is betting that these assets are undervalued, both because the recession has driven down values more than the actual popping of the housing bubble, and because the new housing policy package, in stemming foreclosures and backstopping home values, will lead to gains in that sector, as will the forecast and much-hoped for return of economic growth in the fall of 2009. That is why Treasury is in particular encouraging long-term investors to participate in this program -- buying a pool of mortgages now could prove quite lucrative for taxpayers and investors down the road. Of course, if Krugman is right, and the bad assets continue losing value over time, then this is going to be a very expensive failure, but also the kind of failure that could create the political incentives for the kind of insolvent bank seizure he advocates.

Without some more detail about the financing structure and implementation, it's hard to assess the outcome of that failure, but government losses might not be much more (or less) than the upfront costs of more agressive forms of intervention. One reason I think this plan may be a good decision is that my recent reporting on the FDIC has made me increasing skeptical about the relative ease of temporary nationalization on the scale that would be needed to alleviate the crisis, and particularly what the outcome of a failure of that policy would look like. While we need to act quickly to turn around the financial sector, even if the government decided to pursue an aggressive bank seizure right now, Treasury officials simply do not know yet which banks merit seizing and which methods of temporary government control would be successful in that strategy; nor do they have the management capacity or legal authority (yet) to control the banks.

Remember that the overall goal is to get credit moving again to fuel recovery. When asked how to tell if the plan is working, Geithner urged people to track statistics for the price of credit, the value of the assets in question, and the issuance of new securities, suggesting that participation rates in the program may not be indicative of broader dynamics the plan influences in the market.

-- Tim Fernholz

An interlocutor has taken issue with this post, arguing that there were a clear series of connections between al-Qaeda and the ICU prior to 2006, and thus that the United States was entirely justified in supporting Ethiopia's drive for regional hegemony counterterrorism operation in Somalia. A few words on this are in order...

The phrase "connection" does a lot of work in conversations about terrorism. Hezbollah has connections with Iran, as does Hamas. Various Palestinian political organizations had connections with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Al-Qaeda had connections with the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia. Al-Qaeda may have connections with Iran, and the most fevered neocons still argue that al-Qaeda had connections with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The first problem is that the word "connection" doesn't do justice to the multiplicity of relationships that are being invoked here; advising, sponsoring, undertaking benevolent neutrality toward, and actively conspiring with can all be included under the umbrella of "connection," even though these distinct relationships are quite different in meaning and political import. In this sense, "connection" obscures much more than it illuminates. Indeed, it has always been the point of hacks like Stephen Hayes to conduct this particular kind of operation, in order to produce a cloud of data that seems really, really dangerous, as long as you don't pay too close attention.

The second problem is that noting that two groups are "connected" really doesn't lead to any specific policy recommendations. One response to discovering that the ICU has been working with al-Qaeda is to sponsor an invasion of Somalia; another response is to undertake a political effort to split al-Qaeda from the ICU. The ICU, after all, is a different organization than al-Qaeda, with different interests and priorities. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the same organization; they have different interests, and they each have goals distinct from those of their purported sponsor, Iran. Arguments to the effect that Hamas and Hezbollah will march lock-step to the dictates of Tehran, or that the ICU is a creature of al-Qaeda, are worse than useless; they ignore the fact that organizations share only some interests, and consequently will collaborate under only some circumstances.

Even a casual glance at the history of relations between the United States and its various state and non-state proxies would serve to demonstrate that the proxies have different interests than the U.S., and that they often work at cross-purposes. For example, many advocates of the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia managed to convince themselves that Ethiopia was interested in the same thing we were. It turns out not so much; Ethiopia wanted to destroy nascent Somali state institutions, didn't overly concern itself about how that was to be done, and didn't care at all about al-Qaeda. The core of the principal-agent problem is that actors with different interests tend to act differently. While neoconservatives do their best to hide this fact by imagining a vast, nebulous cloud of Islamo-fascism, it's as true of terrorist organizations and "rogue" states as it is of the U.S. and its allies.

The strategic idiocy of the "connection" argument only complements its analytical flaws. Had Britain and France adopted this logic during World War II, they would have declared war on Spain and the Soviet Union shortly after declaring war on Germany, simply because the former had connections with the latter. Uniting one's enemies into a seamless front has the virtue of creating a morally simple world, but the drawback of, well, uniting one's enemies into a seamless front.

--Robert Farley

The media roll-out of the government's new plan to fix the financial sector continues apace with a press briefing this morning by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. After about 45 minutes of explanation and questions, the briefing concluded with a request from the Treasury spokesperson for a temporary embargo on the information, which was first greeted with stunned silence and then laughter and cries of "too late!" -- reporters had been variously writing for wires, blogging, and, yes, twittering throughout the meeting. Clearly there's a trial-and-error approach for everything at Treasury. More on the plan's substance in a minute.

-- Tim Fernholz

Some Republicans weren't too impressed with the fact that Michael Steele brought in only $5.1 million last month in fundraising. The total drew more speculation that Steele might be let go, particularly if Republicans are unable to pick up Kirsten Gillibrand's former seat in New York. But that was before the DNC fundraising numbers came in: the Democrats only raised $3.26 million last month under new DNC Chair Timothy Kaine. Obviously the political situation is very different for Democrats than it is for Republicans right now, and Dems may not feel like donating as much after shelling out for the past year. But I'd say, judging by the numbers, that rumors of Steele's demise are probably greatly exaggerated, whatever happens in NY-20.

UPDATE: On the other hand, it looks like the DCCC is doing pretty well.

-- A. Serwer

The New York Times editorial page hits President Obama for dragging his feet on reversing Bush policies on counterterrorism and government secrecy, arguing that "Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas." That's quite true. Ron Chusid argues that "it is far too early to come to any conclusions as to the ultimate policies of the Obama administration with regards to handling of terrorism suspects."

I've heard that argument before, and it's impossible to know if that's the case or not. But it seems to me that if you're concerned that the Obama administration may retain some of the more outrageous Bush era interpretations of executive power, there's an incentive not to cut him much slack on the subject.

-- A. Serwer

• The Congressional Budget Office released its latest projections and concluded that the federal government could run a $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009. It's hard to say exactly how this will affect the political process in Congress but at least you can count on conservative Democrats confusing deficits with spending and conservative Republicans calling Obama's budget a "threat to the nation." You can also count on David Brooks going back to his default "Obama is trying to do too much" position, even after he was earlier so convinced by the White House of the interconnectedness of all these problems that he wrote a column about it.
• While the deficit is certainly a political problem, there is a silver lining for the Obama administration: it draws attention away from the mindless hyping of ultimately inconsequential presidential gaffes. After all, were it not for the CBO's projections, we might need to spend all day picking apart the wisdom of presidents appearing on late night television, or making sure we know about apologies the instant they're issued.
• It sometimes feels like health care reform, cap-and-trade, and EFCA will never pass in this Congress, regardless of how many Democrats are in the majority. So it comes as a relief that freshman Democrats are not letting anti-EFCA intimidation deter them (even The Wall St. Journal is abandoning the fear-mongering), and Republicans are seeing the that the writing's on the wall for health care and climate change, whether it's of their own accord or the result of an ultimatum.
• It's true that the issue of executive bonuses is substantively silly considering that they amount to one tenth of one percent of the total money issued to bail out AIG, but politically it's incredibly indicative of Timothy Geithner's (and the Obama administration's) reluctance to send these "indispensible" executives packing and get to the business of temporary nationalization and restructuring. Naturally, the clowns at CNBC think a salary of at least $250,000 is a prerequisite for fielding top Wall St. talent, which unintentionally boosts Brad DeLong's argument that we ought to be paying these execs like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
• If we lived in a world where books like Liberal Fascism would never even be considered by a respectable publishing house, Alan Wolfe's patient essay explaining how liberals differ from socialists wouldn't be necessary. But since we live in a world where conservatives believe liberals = socialists = fascists = terrorists and such a view is taken seriously by our ever-vigilant mainstream media, necessity dictates its existence.
• Remainders: Public support for Obama's handling of the economy might be slipping; Americans for Tax Reform is truly a principled organization; like Mark Sanford, Sarah Palin has noting but contempt for the people of her state; Arlen Specter is looking forward to losing in the GOP primary next year; I love the headline, "Conservative Anti-Illegal Immigration Group Makes Strong Case for Legalization"; a washed-up pol makes overtures to a political movement whose best days are behind it; Michael Steele, conservatives, Constitutionally illiterate; Howard Dean can't get no respect; and it's never too early (well, ok, it is) to play 2012 Republican primary brackets!

--Mori Dinauer

Every so often, a perfect parody comes along. This is one of them. Watching dorky guys sing about their anatomy while gyrating really really brings home how grossly most music videos objectify women as animalistic pieces of sex-meat. Enjoy. (Probably NSFW. Though totally safe for my work!)

--Dana Goldstein

LA Times blogger Andrew Malcolm started a web freakout this morning when he suggested that the White House was blocking press access to a ceremony with the National Newspaper Publisher's Association today. In fact, part of the ceremony was an exclusive interview which naturally, the NNPA didn't want other reporters to have access to.

Lost in the hubbub is the fact that the NNPA is an association of a formerly thriving breed, the black community newspaper. Obviously the decline of the newspaper has hurt even very successful publications, but these newspapers, which report in great detail on issues and events that often get overlooked by larger publications, have been hurting for a long time. The black newspaper in America has a long, often heroic history: when white papers ignored crimes of lynching and brutality against black folks in the South, black newspapers published stories about them.

The NNPA itself has only been around for about 70 years, but it's the last of its kind. The fact that the president is giving the NNPA an exclusive interview is both a recognition of the perilous status of the black community newspaper and its illustrious history. Currently, the NNPA offices are located at Howard University, where in addition to publishing pieces from member papers, they train journalism students there in the craft of reporting.

You'd think, given the state of the press these days, that this would be something worth writing about. But like the stories that the NNPA member papers themselves cover, this one isn't worth the big boys' time. 

-- A. Serwer

I spoke with David Barr, the FDIC's spokesperson, after I had written this post about the re-privatization of Indymac, the California bank that failed last summer and was managed by the government. Barr points out that even though the FDIC took a $10.7 billion loss on Indymac's failure, more often losses from failed banks are much lower in proportion to the size of the bank's assets -- losses on Indymac represented about one-third of its assets; typical loss rates on smaller banks are about 22 percent. Barr also said that, most important from his institution's point of view, all insured deposits were protected.

Barr also noted that in the case of Washington Mutual, the largest bank failure ($300 billion in assets) during the FDIC's 75-year history, estimated federal losses are zero -- that's right, zero -- dollars. (It's an estimation because some of WaMu's assets remain in government receivership, a process that takes three to five years to complete). Typically, banks under federal control are not directly managed but instead quickly dismantled and sold. Of the 75 banks that have failed in the last three years, Indymac is the only bank the federal government has actually managed; it is the first time the FDIC has used conservatorship since 2001.

"[Banks] are like snow flakes, each and every failure is unique," Barr said. "FDIC's preference is not to run banks. ... It's not something we do all that often; it's one of the tools we have at our disposal."

This may be instructive as policy-makers contemplate similar policies for the large investment banks at the center of the financial crisis, often referencing the FDIC's experience in that arena. Balancing the need to act broadly and to deal with individual banks' specific problems is a difficult task, and figuring out in advance what the costs are is apparently no easy one. That may explain the stress tests the Treasury is performing on the remaining large banks. It's the only way to figure out the costs and benefits of the different policy options for fixing the financial system.

-- Tim Fernholz

As has often been noted, while AIG's bonuses were apparently bound by the sanctity of contract (and the ruthless Connecticut Wage Law), the autoworkers' contracts were renegotiated as a condition of the industry recovery plan. Mostly this is treated as a matter of class justice -- the workers made sacrifices, the Wall Streeters (or, more accurately in the case of AIG-FP, the Wiltonians) were untouched.

But there's more to it than that. How were the auto workers' benefits cut? Not involuntarily. They agreed to it. They agreed to it because they were able to act collectively. The United Auto Workers came to the table and agreed that the survival of GM and Chrysler was a more important common goal than everyone getting exactly what they were promised. The presence of the union created a collective sense of loyalty to the industry as well as to their own self-interest.

That's why I thought Ruth Marcus badly missed the point in her recent column, dismissing the auto worker/AIG comparison by saying, "If an autoworker doesn't want to show up on the assembly line under the terms of a new deal, he or she doesn't have to." No, it's not an individual choice not to show up -- it's a collective one, and they had already made it.

Now, what if you were able to get all the bonus-eligible employees at AIG together, and ask them to jointly make a choice -- give up much of their bonus, and the company might survive and remain eligible for federal cash, or demand exactly what they were promised a year ago and watch the company die, in part because of political backlash?

Who knows what the collective choice might be. But since these are all individuals, with individual contracts, the logical move for any one person, acting alone and not knowing what others might do, is to demand every penny. If you agree to reduce your bonus, and the others don't, you are the classic loser in a Prisoners' Dilemma -- you don't get the money and the firm goes under. In this case, the incentive is for the individuals to take the money, and then leave the firm.

The classic argument for unionization is that acting together, workers have a stronger negotiating hand than workers acting alone, negotiating individual contracts. That's demonstrably true. But it also works in the other direction. When the time calls not for soaking as much profit out of the company as possible, but for making some sacrifices, out of loyalty and a sense of shared economic destiny, unions can do that too. Individuals cannot. Solidarity is good for the economy.

-- Mark Schmitt.

A new Congressional Budget Office report released today analyzes the president's budget projections and finds that costs are higher than were initially expected by the administration. Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, just spoke with reporters about the findings. He harped on a simple message: This is normal, it's part of the budget process, and everything is running smoothly. His explanation for the differences between the projections of his office and the CBO (which he recently led) came in several parts; first, the CBO is working with newer data than the OMB had when it was writing this projection, second, they make different technical assumptions about the impact of a wide range of policies, and third, even small changes in revenue or cost assumptions are magnified in the overall deficit number.

What about that overall deficit number?

CBO’s baseline projections of the deficit have risen by more than $400 billion in both 2009 and 2010 and by smaller amounts thereafter. Those projections assume that current laws and policies remain in place. Under that assumption, CBO now estimates that the deficit will total almost $1.7 trillion (12 percent of GDP) this year and $1.1 trillion (8 percent of GDP) next year—the largest deficits as a share of GDP since 1945. Deficits would shrink to about 2 percent of GDP by 2012 and remain in that vicinity through 2019.

Fiscal hawks will be focused on those increases in the 2009 and 2010 projections during the coming debate, though "it's easy to exaggerate fluctuations in the deficit projectiosn that are driven by small changes in the underlying estimates," Orszag observed.

Note, though, that the budget is still on track to cut the deficit in half by the end of the president's term, reaching a sustainable 2 percent of GDP. Orszag acknowledged, however, that the budget resolutions will be written from CBO numbers and that the administration has (wisely enough) always expected changes to come in the legislative process. Nonetheless, he remains confident that the administration's four "key principles" -- significant investments in health care, education, and renewable energy, and cutting the deficit in half by 2012, are all still within reach. According to Orszag, the chairs of the various House and Senate budget committees have confirmed that to him.

The OMB director also observed that the CBO's GDP growth projections are on the lower end compared to the Blue Chip average, the Federal Reserve's estimates and the OMB's calculations, all of which are about .3 - .4 percent higher. Which is why this may be the most important graph in the document:

GDP growth projections range, and they range more the further out from the present you look. But those are the numbers that will determine what kind of revenue, and what kind of deficits, the government will have going forward.

Minor additional thought: The report does basically say that the recession is going to end in the fall of 2009 because of the stimulus and the Fed's aggressive actions. Wonder if critics will mention that inconvenient fact when they start going after the president's plan?

-- Tim Fernholz

So I've been trying to get a straight answer on this for a while, but it seems that one of the banks that the NAACP is suing, alleging that they knowingly steered black folks into subprime loans, has given money to the organization in the past. Wells Fargo has previously been a sponsor of the NAACP's annual convention, although the NAACP says it doesn't disclose donor amounts. The NAACP spokesman said they were also not aware of HSBC having donated in the past.

The reason I wanted to know whether the banks had donated to the NAACP is because generally, the way the hustle is supposed to work is that civil rights groups get money from companies that they then leave alone or give positive publicity to. Last year, while the country was just beginning to realize the scale of the mortgage crisis, Charles Steele Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, took to the Washington Post to defend subprime lending and criticized efforts at greater regulation. Well it turns out that the SCLC had formed a partnership with with CompuCredit, a subprime credit card issuer and payday lending company, which the Federal Trade Commission later sued for unfair and deceptive trade practices. They weren't the only ones with these kinds of relationships with subprime lenders, as Stephanie Mencimer reported for Mother Jones:

Three years ago, Al Sharpton went so far as to appear in TV commercials for LoanMax, a company that specializes in auto-title loans, whose 300 percent interest rates consumer advocates consider deeply predatory. CompuCredit has participated in Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's career fairs and economic summits. Local affiliates of the National Urban League, one of the nation's oldest civil rights groups, have worked with the payday lending industry trade group, the Consumer Financial Services Association (CFSA), to conduct financial literacy seminars. Denise Harrod, CompuCredit's vice president, has served on business committees of the National Conference of Black Mayors and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, both of which have received money from the payday lending industry.

On the one hand, black folks have historically been cut out of mainstream banks, something laws like the Community Reinvestment Act were meant to address. (The vast majority of subprime lending took place in institutions not covered by the CRA). But it's still startling to know the length that some of these groups and individuals went to defend predatory lending practices simply because these companies lent to black folks.

So there's something heartening about the NAACP and it's new president, Ben Jealous, not letting the money Wells Fargo gave dissuade them from their mission.

-- A. Serwer

American Rights at Work, a pro-union advocacy group, passes along this bit of research to characterize Republicans opposed to the Employee Free Choice Act as hypocrites. Although the most-cited talking point for conservatives lobbying against the legislation is that it denies workers a secret ballot, ARW observes that the Republican National Committee's by-laws deny their own members a secret ballot vote. To wit:

Republican National Committee Rules Prohibit Secret Ballots: The bylaws of the Republican National Committee read, “No votes (except elections to office when properly ordered pursuant to the provisions of Robert’s Rules of Order) shall be taken by secret ballot in any open meeting of the Republican National Committee or of any committee thereof.” [RNC Rules, Rule No. 7(d), pg. 7] From the RNC’s 2008 platform: Protecting Union Workers Stopping the Assault on the Secret Ballot

The recent attempt by congressional Democrats to deny workers a secret ballot in union referenda is an assault, not only against a fundamental principle of labor law, but even more against the dignity and honor of the American work force. We oppose “card check” legislation, which deprives workers of their privacy and their right to vote, because it exposes workers to intimidation by union organizers.

The elections to office exception is a pretty big one and will no doubt figure in the Republican response, but it's a nice reminder that democratic practice is not solely the secret ballot but has other sufficient conditions -- free speech, equal access, a lack of intimidation -- currently forbidden by law to workers organizing unions.

-- Tim Fernholz

Meanwhile, Zach Carter wonders why the government is relying on discredited rating agencies to help stop the credit crunch. Yet another case of the "arsonist as firefighter" meme.

And Terence Samuel says that Obama must present a strong narrative of success to the public if he is to counter doomsaying media outlets.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

Mike Crowley reads Iran's response to President Obama's message and finds it defiant, observing that "the Iranians are again asking the U.S. to apologize for various historical offenses, including our support for a 1953 coup, backing Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian passenger jet in 1988." Mike also notes that Madeline Albright gave a speech in 2000 where she implicitly apologizes for two of those things. On the other hand, apologies phrased like this -- "it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs" -- don't always work. See how well the old "I'm sorry you're mad at me" tack works in your personal life.

In any case, Mike is dubious, reasonably enough, that actually responding to Iran's request for these rhetorical concessions would have any success, wondering if "maybe this is just one more Iranian stalling tactic."

But this kind of stalling tactic only works for the Iranians if the Obama administration actually stalls; if he calls the Iranian bluff and offers a blunt apology, the worst that can happen is that Iran hawks are proven correct in their assumption that Iran is an intractable and untrustworthy enemey -- ironically, a proper benefit for those most likely to argue against offering the statement. I'm not sure what the U.S. has to lose by going out and saying explicitly that those three things were mistakes, and include the word "apology." One imagines the nationalistic right will freak out about appeasement and showing weakness, but does admitting past mistakes make our military any less powerful or our economy, such as it is, any less important on the world stage? It's clear that Obama's strategy is about reaching out to the Iranian people and convincing them of the U.S.' benign intention. If he offers such an act of contrition and we are still rebuffed by Iran, then policy-makers can adapt appropriately. I'm sure readers are familiar with that saying about assumptions.

-- Tim Fernholz

As teachers at the Brooklyn charter school KIPP AMP continue to pursue unionization under the United Federation of Teachers, their peers at two other New York City KIPP schools have sent a powerful message to the union -- stay back. In a win for the KIPP administration, which has been resisting the Brooklyn teachers' push to organize, teachers at the KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity schools in Manhattan have submitted petitions to disaffiliate from the UFT, which currently has only a loose relationship with the two schools but has sought in recent months to become more involved. Elizabeth Green has the full story over at GothamSchools.

On Monday, you'll be able to read online my big April print feature about the evolving debate between free market education reformers and teachers' unions. This latest news from New York is a blow to one of the main subjects of my piece: Randi Weingarten, president of both the UFT and its national parent, the American Federation of Teachers. Weingarten has convincingly embraced the "reformer" mantle, most notably in a speech to the National Press Club in November, in which she came out in support of charter schools, curriculum standards, and performance-based pay for teachers. But key to Weingarten's vision -- and her power-base -- is teachers' unions' ability to retain their dominance over the profession, which means organizing in the expanding charter school sector. Currently, about 70 percent of public school teachers nationwide are unionized, but only about 86 of the country's 4,000 charter school staffs are represented. With even President Obama voicing enthusiastic support for opening new charter schools, unions are understandably nervous about their ability -- or lack thereof -- to be involved with this project.

--Dana Goldstein

Ruth Marcus, among too many others, informed us that we have little choice to shower a financial division responsible for losing a billion dollars a week, because their incompetence was of a nature that only the incompetents itself can fix it -- after all, where are you going to find people who know anything about finance in a booming economy with such a tight labor market? They're almost as indispensable as people who write third-rate center-right op-eds for prominent newspapers. (Skilled autoworkers, to hell with them, if they don't like having their negotiated contracts changed after the fact and their health benefits stripped, too bad!) Absent from her argument, however, is any actual evidence that only the actual arsonists know how to put out the fire. Simon Johnson and James Kwak, conversely, are more properly skeptical about such self-serving and implausible claims:

A.I.G. can hardly claim that its generous bonuses attract the best and the brightest. So instead, it defends the payments by arguing they’re needed to retain employees who are crucial for winding down transactions that are “difficult to understand and manage.” In other words, only the people who stuck the knife into the American International Group can neatly extract it for a decent burial.

There is no reason to believe this.

[...]

The lesson of all this is that when insiders have broken a financial institution, the most direct remedy is to kick them out. Traders are hardly in short supply, and you don’t need to rely on the ones who made the toxic trades in the first place. Companies must always plan around the potential departure of even their star traders, or they are certain to fail. A.I.G. does not need to keep all of its traders, especially since it takes far fewer people to unwind a portfolio than to build it up.

If A.I.G. wants to argue that complex transactions, hedging positions and counterparty relationships require employees who are intimately familiar with those trades, it should at least provide evidence that the arguments for doing so are sounder than the ones made in Indonesia in 1997, when leading bank-owning conglomerates claimed that only they understood their financing arrangements, which certainly were complex. Or the Russian bankers in 1998 who were convinced that only they and their friends could possibly close the deals that they had taken on. We heard variants of the same idea in Poland in 1990, Ukraine in 1994 (and in the Ukrainian crises subsequently), and Argentina in 2002.

In most industries, it would go without saying that getting rid of people who repeatedly screw up is the first step to avoiding screw-ups. If you believe that this doesn't apply to the financial sector, it seems pretty obvious that the burden of proof is on you to justify it.

--Scott Lemieux

Huh, I wonder why Jake Tapper, press access warrior, has blocked me from following his Twitter feed.

Time for a blogger ethics panel?

UPDATE: Tapper has also blocked Talking Points Memo.

Bonus Tapper: His exchange with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs* over "transparency that you and the president herald so much." I think you're supposed to believe in transparency too, Jake.

* Sorry ya'll. Grew up in DC, I'm a Skins fan.

UPDATE II: As far as I can tell, I've been unblocked and the Twitter war with Jake Tapper is at an end. For the record, I apologized to Tapper for an untoward comment I made about him after I was blocked.
 

-- A. Serwer

The news that Attorney General Eric Holder has set FOIA guidelines for releasing information unless doing so would cause “foreseeable harm” is welcome. The guidelines also call for government agencies to “readily and systematically post information online in advance of any public request.”

Traditionally, Republican administrations have been more strict about releasing information, and would “defend any “substantial legal basis” for withholding records,” while Democratic administrations have been more open.

Holder’s policy isn’t so much new as it is a return to the standard set during the Clinton administration under Janet Reno. Civil libertarians will likely use the new guidelines to get access to material that they weren’t able to under the prior administration.

— A. Serwer

Today, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation announced the sale of Indymac Federal, which was once Indymac Bank until it went under and the FDIC took it over in order to protect depositors. Following standard procedures, the feds managed the bank -- in the process learning a thing or two about loan modification -- attempted to clear the balance sheets, and ultimately sold the company back into private hands. At a $10.7 billion loss. Losses on that scale -- Indymac was a much smaller bank than those causing real problems in the economy -- are a main concern of more aggressive government intervention. But compared to the costs, both to the institutions and the economy as a whole, of maintaining "zombie banks," the current practice, or even the still vague plan to produce a public-private market to price "toxic" assets, those kind of losses could look increasingly acceptable. With even former McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin now advocating seizure, reorganization, and sale, policy-makers are hopefully converging on some kind of nationalization as the ideal solution. But given the size and complexity of the task, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous.

-- Tim Fernholz

* Receivership, really, or federal management. But headlines call for broad terms ...

Last night Barack Obama said something he shouldn't have said last night during his appearance on Jay Leno's new show. He made a joke about his bowling score being like "the special olympics," which is pretty offensive.

The same reporters who were wringing their hands all week about whether the president was "doing too much," (two wars and an economic crisis and all that) are reluctantly hyping the president's comments. Jake Tapper writes on his Twitter feed:

Breaking- PrezObama on Leno jokes about being a bad bowler- says it's "like the Special Olympics or something"

Tapper got his Drudge Link, and several hours later he was still preoccupied with the joke:

Am trying to imagine the reaction if President Bush joked that his bowling skills recalled the Special Olympics. 3 am- we just landed in dc

This morning, Tapper was dreading the hypocrisy ahead: 

Preparing for day of hypocrisy: conservs who would normally defend the SpecOlymp joke acting offended, liberals saying lighten up. Sigh

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about press who moments ago believed the president had "too much on his plate" now deciding that the country should spend a whole day talking about an offensive joke.

In any case, you should know that Tapper's really disappointed about his 9 PM blog post getting picked up by Drudge, possibly driving the day and leading to all this "hypocrisy" when we have two wars and an economic crisis to deal with. That's the last thing Tapper wanted when he hyped this "breaking" news last night. 

Today marks the begining of the Nowruz holidays, the Iranian secular New Year celebration that apparently dates back to Persian times (it is also celebrated in Afghanistan and Kurdistan). Like any New Year celebration, it's a time for wiping the slate clean. In that spirit, President Obama has taped a Nowruz message -- which presidents do on many major cultural holidays -- that includes a special message for Iran -- which presidents don't do so often:

So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

A lot of this is familiar rhetoric, but I thought that this line -- "this process will not be advanced by threats" -- was interesting, giving the noises in the administration and Dennis Ross' expressed predeliction for starting engagement off with further sanctions. Perhaps the phrase was simply meant as a warning to Iranian leadership. It will be very interesting to see their reaction, that of the Iranian public, and if the embeddable YouTube video (available with Persian captions) will spread in the Iranian blogosphere. The full transcript of the president's remarks are after the jump.

Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak, everybody!

UPDATE: Iran offers a "cautious welcome."

-- Tim Fernholz

IDEOTAPED REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT

IN CELEBRATION OF NOWRUZ

THE PRESIDENT: Today I want to extend my very best wishes to all who are celebrating Nowruz around the world.

This holiday is both an ancient ritual and a moment of renewal, and I hope that you enjoy this special time of year with friends and family.

In particular, I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nowruz is just one part of your great and celebrated culture. Over many centuries your art, your music, literature and innovation have made the world a better and more beautiful place.

Here in the United States our own communities have been enhanced by the contributions of Iranian Americans. We know that you are a great civilization, and your accomplishments have earned the respect of the United States and the world.

For nearly three decades relations between our nations have been strained. But at this holiday we are reminded of the common humanity that binds us together. Indeed, you will be celebrating your New Year in much the same way that we Americans mark our holidays -- by gathering with friends and family, exchanging gifts and stories, and looking to the future with a renewed sense of hope.

Within these celebrations lies the promise of a new day, the promise of opportunity for our children, security for our families, progress for our communities, and peace between nations. Those are shared hopes, those are common dreams.

So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

So on the occasion of your New Year, I want you, the people and leaders of Iran, to understand the future that we seek. It's a future with renewed exchanges among our people, and greater opportunities for partnership and commerce. It's a future where the old divisions are overcome, where you and all of your neighbors and the wider world can live in greater security and greater peace.

I know that this won't be reached easily. There are those who insist that we be defined by our differences. But let us remember the words that were written by the poet Saadi, so many years ago: "The children of Adam are limbs to each other, having been created of one essence."

With the coming of a new season, we're reminded of this precious humanity that we all share. And we can once again call upon this spirit as we seek the promise of a new beginning.

Thank you, and Eid-eh Shoma Mobarak.

END

• Today marks the sixth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a milestone that has been oddly and conspicuously absent from most major news outlets. Speaking with Charlie Rose last night, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the claim that "No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11" despite the fact that the administration repeatedly implied the connection was there, both publicly and privately, the most recent example being former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer's remarks that we couldn't "take a chance that Saddam Hussein might not strike again."
• As Ezra points out, the stranglehold the AIG bonus story has had over the news cycle has all but drowned out the small matter of the Fed pumping $1.15 trillion into the economy via bond purchases, a nod towards "quantitative easing" -- that's "printing more money" to you and me -- in order to combat deflation. Yet according to CNBC "financial analyst" and Cornerite Larry Kudlow, the real problem is non-existent inflation! Tell me Larry, what color is the sky in your world?
• Hopefully the AIG distraction is coming to an end, seeing as the House just passed a bill that will tax the bonuses at 90 percent, in the process exposing deep division in the GOP ranks over how to vote. Indeed, as Greg Sargent observes, there's not only division within the GOP caucus, but between the House GOP leadership and the broader conservative media, which has diluted a unified message on an issue that has already revealed some serious chutzpah from prominent Republicans. Meanwhile, Chris Dodd has owned up to helping the Treasury write in the loophole that allowed for the bonuses in the first place, and despite David Axelrod's musings that "People are not sitting around their kitchen tables thinking about AIG" it turns out that nearly 90 percent of Americans surveyed in this Rasmussen poll have been following the story "very closely" or "somewhat closely."
• In a good piece of policy news, the Obama administration has put the kibosh on a proposal to privatize veteran health benefits after a strong appeal from Nancy Pelosi.
• President Obama will appear on the Jay Leno show tonight, after spending two days in the Golden State and touring green manufacturing plants. Jon Wiener takes a brief look at the electoral shifts in affluent Orange County and how it went from Goldwater country to voting Democratic in 2008.
• Recommended read: James Galbraith's "No Return to Normal."
• Remainders: The EFCA fight narrows in on three would-be persuadable Senators; Michael Steele's RNC brings in $5 million for February; Corner-bashing never quite goes out of style; and 13 bailed-out firms have a bit of a tax problem.

--Mori Dinauer

Politico reports that, good gawd, freshmen Democrats in the House are co-sponsoring the Employee Free Choice Act without fear of retribution. But consider this: Seven of the eight freshmen Democratic senators were elected, in states like North Carolina, Alaska and New Hampshire, in spite of both their support of the Employee Free Choice Act and millions of dollars in attack ads attacking them for that support (the one exception was Mark Warner in Virginia, who didn't announce his position on the legislation). This slide show may be informative on that front. Despite the intense debate over the bill here in Washington, when it comes down to voting time, it seems that most people don't make their final choices based on labor policy, in part, I'd imagine, because of low union density. But it's not clear from recent events that support of EFCA will lead to an elected official losing their seat, even in contested states.

-- Tim Fernholz

Osama Bin Laden has released an audio tape denouncing Somali President Shariff Sheikh Ahmed, and calling for Somalis to resist the new government's rule. Shariff Sheikh Ahmed is formerly the head of the Islamic Courts Union, which Ethiopia overthrew in 2006 with American assistance. The United States was concerned that the ICU was closely associated with Al Qaeda, and that it might harbor terrorists. Bin Laden's tape is either an elaborate ruse to make the Bush administration look incomparably stupid, or further evidence that the Bush administration was incomparably stupid.

--Robert Farley

Today the National Center for Health Statistics reported that, for the second year in a row, the teen birth rate has increased by about 1 percent, ending a 14-year decline. In 2007, there were about 42.7 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 19. The shift is part of an overall increase in fertility; the birth rate for women of all ages is also up 1 percent.

Unsurprisingly, this news has reignited the sex-ed wars, with abstinence-only proponents arguing that their know-nothing approach is needed now more than ever. (In truth, ever since the 1950s, 95 percent of all Americans have had pre-marital sex. Teaching abstinence is to willfully ignore this reality.) Meanwhile, supporters of comprehensive sex-ed are blaming federal abstinence funding for leaving teens ignorant about contraception.

But this small uptick in the teen birth rate may have little to do with education policy. As Nancy Goldstein points out at Broadsheet, the statistic tells us nothing about how many teens actually got pregnant in 2007 -- they may have chosen abortion -- or whether the pregnancies were planned or unplanned. Indeed, evidence suggests the teen abortion rate is decreasing over time, meaning that the overall pregnancy rate may be fairly consistent, but that abortion has become both less available and more stigmatized in many communities.

Regardless of the whys, the United States' high teen birth rate is a major concern, and sets us apart from our developed world peers. Our teen pregnancy rate is more than 10 times that of the Netherlands, for example. The U.K. has a teen birth rate of 26.7 compared to our 42.7. Even traditionally Catholic countries such as Spain and Portugal are light years ahead of us. And lest you think that the United States' teen birth rate is increasing mostly due to immigration, think again: The birthrate actually decreased 2 percent among Latina teens even as it increased 2 percent among whites and Asians and 1 percent among blacks.

--Dana Goldstein

Senator Russ Feingold has proposed S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, which would force Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically. This would make the files easier to organize and access and therefore make campaign financial records more transparent. There are also problems with the way we currently handle such records: they're entered by hand, which increases the possibility of error and takes a great deal of time, contributor information is put into the FEC database while expenditure information is not, and the whole process is done by independent contractor which costs the government a quarter of a million a year. Both Senate and Presidential candidates are already required to disclose their records electronically. So it seems like a no-brainer. But according to the Campaign Legal Center, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas is planning to insert a provision into the bill that might kill it entirely.

What's the provision? It would require full donor disclosure by any organization that files an ethics complaint against Senators. In other words, it would discourage organizations from making ethics complaints by potentially providing Senators who want to avoid them with political ammunition. As the CLC notes, the provision "is more likely to be used as a tool of intimidation than as a source of needed or valuable disclosure," and has little to do with making the financial doings of Senate candidates more transparent. Better record-keeping shouldn't be conditional on whether or not Senators are able to get better access to information about their potential critics, especially when they're the only ones still filing their financial disclosure forms in paper form.

-- A. Serwer

The results of the Af-Pak policy review are starting to dribble out, and the first news is that the U.S. wants to massively increase the Afghan Army and National Police forces to nearly 400,000. This is definitely a good idea in terms of improving security and increasing the government of Afghanistan's capacity for eventual U.S. withdrawal, but at the same time a worrisome development. Why? It's a totally unsustainable expansion for the Afghan government, which is currently supported almost entirely by foreign aid.

But even members of Mr. Obama’s national security team appeared taken aback by the cost projections of the program, which range from $10 billion to $20 billion over the next six or seven years.

By comparison, the annual budget for the entire Afghan government, which is largely provided by the United States and other international donors, is about $1.1 billion, which means the annual price of the program would be about twice the cost of operating the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Those figures include only the cost of training and establishing the forces, and officials are still trying to determine what the cost would be to sustain the security forces over the long term.

While some of the costs are related to getting the program off the ground, the Afghan economy can't supply an army that large. Of course, one hopes over the next several years that the new strategy works and we see economic development scenarios looking more rosy, but my understanding is that even a best-case scenario couldn't sustain this kind of troop build-up. Which leads me to envision a world five or six years down the road where we have a large Afghan Army that suddenly can't paid anymore. That sounds like a recipe for more warlords, or a recipe for a very large long-term U.S. financial commitment; neither scenario is particularly attractive. For more, see Spencer.

-- Tim Fernholz

The Washington Post reports today on the near-halting of migration to D.C.'s outer ring suburbs. Exurban Loudon County in Virginia, for example, has dropped from the second fastest growing county in the nation to the 20th. Due to the collapse in the housing market, consumers are shying away from the risky mortgages that once fueled Loudon's growth. Brentin has more on how this affects new housing construction, particularly in the "urban fringe."

But are center cities the beneficiaries of buyers' decreasing interest in the exurbs? Not necessarily. The District itself continued to lose more native-born American residents than it gained between July 2007 and July 2008. It seems that those who can choose where to live continue to be moving outward from central cities, albeit at a slower pace. What would it take to reverse that preference? Higher gas prices? Better transit and schools? All of the above?

Hat tip: DCist.

--Dana Goldstein

What should we do about Afghanistan? No one seems to have a definitive answer yet, but Matthew Yglesias wonders if an Iraq-style surge could solve all of the country's problems. Spoiler alert: No, it probably couldn't.

Meanwhile, Daniel Rodgers considers the influence of two pioneers of liberalism, Lincoln and Darwin.

As always, subscribe to our RSS feed to receive our articles as soon as they are published. Also, follow us on Twitter for highlights from our blog.

--The Editors

The Environmental Protection Agency released a report today examining whether there has been a fundamental shift away from suburban residential construction to urban residential. Through studying residential building permits in the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the EPA found that there have been significant shifts from the 'burbs back to the city in over half of them. The center-city core saw its share of residential construction double in 15 metro regions, and this trend has increased dramatically over the past five years. While a large share of home construction still takes place in the "urban fringe," the foreclosure crisis seems to be effectively pushing more people out of the suburbs.

At least until the housing crunch, minorities had been increasingly ending up in the suburbs, which at least seems to be making progressive electoral political change in those areas. As Nate Silver pointed out in Esquire a couple of months ago, President Obama didn't need the suburban vote to win the election, given his command of urban votes, but he won it anyway. Silver stated that this may have owed to the fact that "suburban voters are starting to look -- and behave -- like their urban brethren," noting from a National Center for Suburban Studies poll that 20 percent of suburban voters were not white, and 44 percent lived in racially mixed neighborhoods.

According to Andrew Weise, author of Places of Their Own, African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, the number of African Americans who fled to the suburbs between 1960 and 2000 -- nine million -- was more than the number of black Americans who fled to Northern urban centers during the Great Migration period of the early- to mid-20th century. A Brookings study from 2002 found that from 1980 to 2000, 54 percent of Latino-Americans ended up living in the suburbs, while about a third of all African-American households, and almost half of all Asian and "other minority" households were in the suburbs. For the volumes of minorities who lost suburban homes in the foreclosure fiasco, it remains to be seen if most of them will end up back in the city.

From the EPA report, it was found that cities like Atlanta and Washington D.C., which, have numerous predominantly non-white suburbs, have remarkably increased their central city residential construction loads -- in Atlanta as much as 20 percent. In New York City, the increase of residential construction permits in the center city skyrocketed over 50 percent in 2007 alone. This could, in effect, be seen as the U.S. getting closer to the end of sprawl, even as minorities continue to locate (or be displaced) to the suburbs. It could also mean that Republicans' traditional electoral holds on previously WASPy, non-urban districts will continue getting more slippery.

-- Brentin Mock

Via Calculated Risk, this observation from Morgan Stanley's David Greenlaw:

The Fed’s announcement signals a clear intent to continue to drive mortgage rates lower and we expect them to meet this objective. This could represent a powerful source of stimulus for the household sector of the economy. In 2008, the average mortgage rate on the outstanding stock of loans was about 6.50%. So, if the Fed brings 30-yr fixed rate mortgages down to 4.50% and all homeowners are able refi, the aggregate permanent cash flow savings would be on the order of $200 billion per year.

CR observes that even if half of homeowners were able to do this, the stimulus would be significant. Similarly, the administration's housing plan, including both loan modification and Fannie/Freddie refinancing, will also act as a stimulus, saving homeowners hundreds to thousands of dollars a month that, instead of paying for bloated housing loans, could be spent and help grow the economy. One reason that the administration's housing focus has been on monthly payments is that it's another way to inject more money into the system. As well as counteracting the bad effects of foreclosure and helping prop up the financial system by stabilizing the mortgage market, both the Fed plan and the administration's housing strategy are a kind of secret stimulus.

-- Tim Fernholz

At National Review, Wendy Long reports that nominee to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals David Hamilton once worked as a fundraiser for ACORN. Naturally, the entire right wing freaks out because ACORN is the new communist party--any minor affiliation denotes a radical ideology and secret desire to overthrow the government and install Hugo Chavez as dictator. Long suggests that there's some quid pro quo involved between the president and ACORN over Hamilton's nomination, perhaps because ACORN fraudulently produced the nine-million vote margin between Barack Obama and John McCain.

But as Kyle points out at Right Wing Watch (via Steve Benen), Long left out some fairly important details. Like the fact that Hamiliton was a fundraiser for ACORN in 1979. For a month. Right after he graduated from college.

Naturally, Long hasn't updated her blog to note that crucial bit of information. She did however, correct a minor error involving Hamilton throwing out evidence based on the fact that law enforcement coerced information out of the defendant's daughter through a high school social worker.

Newsbusters, Powerline, and several other right wing blogs linked to her original post on Hamilton and ACORN. Long couldn't ruin her big "scoop" now could she?

-- A. Serwer

Jackie Calmes is a bit over the top:

Fair or not, questions about why Mr. Geithner did not know sooner about the A.I.G. bonuses and act to stop them threaten to overwhelm his achievements and undermine Mr. Obama’s overall economic agenda.

Not, I think. As irritating as the AIG bonus sideshow has been, it is clear that that money will be recouped, perhaps doubly, as the Treasury will subtract that $165 million from the next scheduled AIG loan, congress will tax the bonuses away from the recipients, and apparently some have already given money back. Say what you will about the political mistakes of not noticing these contracts amidst dealing with the entire financial crisis, this is responsive government: concerns have been heard and action has been taken. Noam Scheiber's post is the most sensible commentary on the troubles surrounding the Treasury Secretary.

On the other hand, I disagree with Dana's post, particularly this observation: "It's beginning to look as if the administration's links to Wall Street -- in the person of Tim Geithner -- blinded it to this quite foreseeable PR disaster." First, Geithner really isn't a "Wall Street figure" -- he never worked at a Wall Street firm. He was a central banker and a Treasury official. If he were a Wall Street figure, he would have known how those bonuses work. As well, observers familiar with the Fed and Treasury role have noted that this situation was not entirely foreseeable, since the people who knew about aren't political appointees but technocrats, and that's probably the way it should be. Given the amount of anger over how the new administration's bank plan hasn't addressed the root issues of why we are funding concerns like AIG and what the next steps should be -- you know, the problem Geithner is working on -- it's not unsurprising that he wasn't personally monitoring a small percentage of the bailout funds that went out under the last administration. Though there are worries about stoking anger, I think Obama is responsibly reacting to folks' outrage -- which can't be ignored -- even as his advisers try to reframe the issue.

Meanwhile, the markets are starting to regain their confidence -- not that's an indicator of overall success, but it is something -- bank stress tests are proceeding, and the stimulus and housing plans are barely underway. There are two approaches to criticizing Geithner. One is the "you're not doing X strategy that I prefer," which is reasonable enough, but as a personnel question you have to realize that X strategy isn't entirely determined by Geithner. Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and, uh, Barack Obama, among others, are also included. Geithner may be a figurehead for these discussions -- and the administration would clearly like him to be should things get more heated -- but don't forget where the buck stops. The second approach is the score political points by changing your position on government economic intervention. This is mostly the province of Republicans who could care less what policies the administration is promoting.

It's not clear to me yet that Geithner has made bad decisions, it's just that he either hasn't made necessary decisions yet, or that the execution of some of his plans hasn't been perfect. Calling for his head now would be counter-productive at minimum and disastrous at worst. Just imagine the confirmation hearings. Imagine the inevitable hold put on a hypothetical replacement by Republican senators until promises are extracted from the administration. Imaging the three week focus on senate battles while the economy goes to hell in a hand cart. No, I hope we're not finished with Geithner yet. He has got to do better, especially on the politics, but it's hard to be hard-charging when you work for No-drama Obama.

-- Tim Fernholz

I'll second Dana's earlier theory of "aspirational voting" among the younger end of the conservative base, and here's why. While David Frum and Michael Barone suggest that lower marriage (and higher divorce) rates in this group make them less likely to vote "values" (i.e., Republican), what Barone calls their "chaotic and undisciplined" lifestyles might just make them perfect targets for conversion to the cause.

Young people who have had drug addictions, skirmishes with the law, relationship problems, abortions, divorce, and any manner of youthful indiscretion are a key audience for the seeker-sensitive mega-church/Christian festival-type outreach that hammers home the notion that if you get right with Jesus, you'll not only be forgiven for your hedonistic lifestyle, your life will actually improve in every conceivable way, including economically. ("Seeker-sensitive" means the church caters to non-believers, attempting to draw in new followers, and making the Gospel more hip, friendly, accessible, and self-affirming.) Embedded in that type of evangelism, more often than not, is a deeply conservative and traditional view of world, including militant opposition to abortion and homosexuality and an emphasis on sexual purity.

Many televangelists and youth ministries, like Ron Luce's Teen Mania, which graces the cover of Charisma magazine this month, tell their own come-to-Jesus histories as a morality tale in which they are saved from the temptations of the secular world. The theology is anti-liberal, meaning that government and secular society provide no answers to personal or global problems.

--Sarah Posner

As John Dickerson notes at Slate, there is real risk inherent to President Obama's strategy of stoking "outrage" over the AIG bonuses -- seeming too angry could hurt the administration's credibility when and if it needs to ask the American people to support another industry bailout. But there is more at stake. As Robert Reich wrote here yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner likely knew weeks ago that AIG was planning big bonuses for its executives. Even more damning, TPM Muckraker reported last night that Chris Dodd is saying that Congress was pressed by unnamed Treasury Department "staff" to remove a key anti-bonus provision from the stimulus package.

It's good to see that the president is, in a vague way, taking responsibility for the fracas. But it's beginning to look as if the administration's links to Wall Street -- in the person of Tim Geithner -- blinded it to this quite foreseeable PR disaster.

--Dana Goldstein

I was so angry about the substance of the Obama administration's court filing dealing with detention policy last week that I neglected to note one of the more important changes. While the detention authority claimed by the Obama administration is largely the same as the prior one, with the exception of undefined "substantial" support terrorists as the threshold, the source of that power is different. While the Bush administration maintained that the president had the "inherent" authority to detain terrorist suspects, the Obama administration is drawing this authority from the AUMF. This is important because it acknowledges limits to the president's power, limits the prior administration would not have conceded.

At Balkinization, Rick Pildes offers another important