• How is one to account for Barack Obama's precipitous drop to 49 percent approval in the latest Gallup daily tracking poll? Is is the grave pronouncements printed in British blog posts? Democratic legislators throwing temper tantrums because Obama isn't doing their job for them? No, as always, for every president, it's the economy. And has frequently been the case, it's instructive to compare Obama's approval to Reagan's, who came into office under similar economic conditions, and who also fell below 50 percent approval by November of his first year.
• Should we be even remotely surprised that John McCain, whether due to electoral pressure or some other factor, is abandoning his climate change centrism? The "Maverick" shtick was always just a media concoction, and let's not forget that the maverick legislator in the first couple years of this decade was acting out of spite towards George Bush and the Republicans, who were back on touchy-feely terms by the time the 2004 election rolled around.
• I'm shocked, just shocked, that the tea party movement, as it were, is riven with factions that don't really know how to organize themselves into an effective protest movement. The only thing that made the very real but ultimately incoherent passions of the don't tread on me crowd into something worthy of our attention were with organizational efforts of old pros who hoped to harness that energy to take back real power in Washington.
• The problem with the belief that war with the government is inevitable is that it takes very little for this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If some band of "patriots" were to stand off against the federal government, the federal government would likely crush them, solidifying in the secessionist mind that the government is out to get them. Waco anyone?
• Remainders: Things get interesting in the 2010 Florida Senate race; why are we in Afghanistan if al Qaeda is a second-tier threat?; right wing prays for Obama to go away, one way or another; things could have been worse for Democrats in next year's Senate races; and sometimes the majority of Americans are really stupid.
  

--Mori Dinauer

So you don't normally expect a lot of snark about financial regulatory reform, but today is different, because House Financial Services Committee Spokesman Steve Adamske just sent out his fisking of a recent National Journal article on regulatory reform, which I've posted in full after the jump. Here's a sampling:

National Journal: What's going on with financial regulatory reform? I know that Dodd has a new plan and that Frank is expected to move his plan out of committee soon, but I still can't tell what the administration's plan is. Why so many plans? Well, for starters, this re-regulation of finance is huge, so it is natural that everyone would want to drive the train. Primarily, though, the many approaches reflect a strategic decision by the Obama administration. Rather than come out with a fully formed plan and guide the negotiations, the president's advisers decided to let Congress work out the details.

HFSC: This is 100% false. President Obama’s team did indeed produce a plan. They delivered to the House Financial Services Committee and to the Senate Banking Committee a 13 title bill totaling several hundred pages, complete with legislative language, and that language is serving as the base text for our deliberations.

...National Journal: It sounds like I should bet on this taking a lot more time. With big reforms, that's usually a good bet.

HFSC: We certainly wish the National Journal would take its time to do some quality reporting.

I can't link to the original article because it is subscription only, but you get a pretty good flavor from the excerpts in the release. This kind of response to a piece from a communications shop isn't the norm outside of campaigns, but National Journal represents a kind of distillation of bland conventional wisdom and is thus quite influential among members of Congress and staff, which no doubt motivated Adamske's to go after the article head on. National Journal does occasionally do in-depth reported pieces on esoteric issues like financial regulatory reform, but this isn't one of those pieces. The article entirely predicated on procedural nonsense -- Adamske's fact-checks are, on the whole, correct -- while ignoring the many substantial critiques of the bill. It's ultimate conclusion that Congress should take more time on the bill is just a silly regurgitation of Republican talking points. The problems faced by the committee can't be solved with more time, they'll be solved with negotiations and votes.

-- Tim Fernholz MORE...

Terence Samuel explains why Democrats need to focus on jobs:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will win his motion to proceed on a health-care reform package that should shave $127 billion off the federal budget deficit over the next decade -- the legislation will come to the floor of the Senate before Thanksgiving. In practical terms, that means the Obama administration will likely get to mark its first year in office with a remarkable set of legislative triumphs that, in addition to health care, could include some kind of financial reform legislation and maybe even a climate change bill.

These are big wins that will change our way of life significantly and constitute an admirable record of campaign promises kept. So it is no small irony that all this success may be of limited political value to Democrats as they go into the next election season: 2010 could be the year of the American job.

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Matt Yglesias asks what, exactly, China is going to do to our economy if the U.S. government steps up its criticisms of their various human rights violations or lack of cooperation on issues like Iran or Afghanistan. The correct answer is, he notes, that they can do very little. I wrote about this in the spring when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner made his own voyage to China:

But outside of the political sideshow, the much-hyped Chinese ownership of U.S. debt and the controversy over exchange rates (which has led some Americans to accuse the Chinese of currency manipulation) isn't likely to change in the near future.

"The truth is … China really has no choice," Michael Pettis, a professor at the Guanghua School of Management in Beijing, says in an e-mail. "China does not want to hurt its export sector (on the contrary, it is trying to prop it up), and since no one else besides the United States can run such large trade deficits, China has no choice but to keep buying dollars."

What's more interesting about the fuss isn't what China could do to the U.S. economy, but what they're doing about their own -- the current Chinese economic policy greatly advantages coastal elites over rural interests, and economic inequality is a big issue. Pettis, whose blog, "China Financial Markets," is really a must-read on these issues, thinks the larger concern is that the Chinese won't heed international advice to about balancing global trade (now, China is saving/investing too much, and the U.S. is overconsuming) because that would require greater household income growth in China, which obviously involves redistribution of income and probably increasingly broad political awareness.

But the insistence of the Chinese government that exports and investment are the way out of the global recession means that China's recovery is weaker than many realize, and could lead to more trade disputes as the Chinese continue to pursue their pro-export policy at the expense of the rest of the world. Ironically, the rebalancing policy that the Obama administration supports -- which would lead to less reliance on U.S. consumption -- is more broadly in the interest of the Chinese people than what Chinese leaders want, which is maintaining the current status quo between the two economies.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, James Carr argues for targeting hardest-hit communities with job training and access.

As this month’s unemployment numbers confirm, the nation’s economy continues to suffer despite recent positive and relatively impressive productivity numbers. Unemployment now exceeds 10 percent for the general population. Unemployment for African Americans and Latinos exceeds 15.5 percent and 13 percent respectively. For Native Americans living on reservations, it is just below the fabled and feared 25 percent of the Great Depression. For all families out of work, the economy is in a depression. Unable to find a suitable job, more than a third of those out of work are classified as long-term unemployed. The longer they remain out of the labor market, the more difficult it will be for them to reenter the workforce. It also makes them less likely to regain a job paying the same or higher wages than the job they have lost, and more likely to run out of unemployment insurance and potentially end up on the streets with few, if any, options. In fact, prior to the recent extension of unemployment benefits, roughly 7,000 people per day were losing their benefits.

Many economists dismiss the bad news on the employment front arguing that unemployment is merely a lagging indicator. But a recovery without jobs is meaningless for families worried about paying their mortgages, purchasing food, affording health care, sending their kids to college, and saving for a decent retirement. And, a recovery without jobs presents the prospect for further damage to the financial system as growing numbers of households are unable to pay their debts. Most concerning, continued significant job losses open the door for a possible “double-dip recession” given the key role played by consumer spending.

More after the jump.

--James Carr

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster James H. Carr is Chief Operating Officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

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Matthew Duss on Iran's legitimacy problem:

The "war on terror" was pretty great for Iran's hardliners. The Bush administration's 2002 inclusion of Iran in the "Axis of Evil" was a major blow to Iranian moderates, discrediting their calls for U.S.-Iran rapprochement and supporting the claims of Iran's hard-liners that engagement with America was pointless. The invasion of Iraq removed Iran's greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, against whom Iran had fought a staggeringly destructive eight-year war. Iraq's postwar government included a significant number of Iran's former clients -- including eventual Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq -- in top leadership positions.

The perceived success of Iran's Lebanese ally Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 -- in a devastating month-long combination of bombing and ground combat hailed by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" -- also proved a huge boost to Iranian hawks. A 2007 poll of Egyptians placed Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as the two most admired leaders in the region. The fact that two Shiite leaders topped an Egyptian poll, even as Iraq's sectarian civil war raged and Arab leaders like Jordan's King Abdullah warned of Shiite inroads into Sunni Arab lands, is a testament to Iran and Hezbollah's success in defying the West.

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A recent survey shows that more than 14 percent of borrowers are having trouble paying their mortgages, especially as unemployment starts to play a larger role than the subprime fiasco that helped kick off the recession. Meanwhile, 9.6 percent of borrowers are delinquent on payments, and 4.5 percent are involved in a foreclosure -- taken together, 7.4 million households, the highest level since 1972.

Especially given the problems with the administration's mortgage modification plan, this isn't welcome news. If anything, it should be another argument for using TARP funds to deal with unemployment rather than deficit reduction, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats, frustrated by the pace of real economic improvement, are urging Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

-- Tim Fernholz

Both the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First were at Guantanamo this week to observe the commencement of the new, revised military commissions. Both were present for the pre-trial hearing of Mohammed Kamin, and both organizations had similar takes on the proceedings.

ACLU:

Continuing the military commission proceedings against Kamin meant more of the same of what we've seen in other proceedings here: uncertainty about the rules, which the government is making up as we go along (even now, the Department of Defense is preparing new rules for the military commissions), and a judge frustrated by delays in the prosecution's failure to hand over fundamental evidence to the defense.

The usual chaos was compounded by uncertainty over where Kamin's case will ultimately be tried. Kamin is accused of a single crime, providing material support for terrorism—an offense that should have been prosecuted in established federal courts. While a military commission conviction for material support for terrorism could possibly be overturned on appeal because such a crime is not a traditional war crime, the offense is covered by the federal criminal law. And federal courts have a proven track record of obtaining convictions for material support for terrorism in numerous cases since 2001.

Human Rights First:

There is a making-it-up-as-we-go feel to these proceedings which is inevitable for a system of trials for which the Congress, courts and executive keep changing the rules. For example, there was discussion today of a new pre-trial hearing date in December in the Kamin case.

But officials said that the new rules for the military commission proceedings - which the Department of Defense needs to alter to conform with reforms passed by Congress on October 29 - have yet to be released by the Department of Defense. Officials with the Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo acknowledged today that they have not even seen a draft set of the new rules.

I think most Americans aren't actually privy to how haphazard the military commissions are--they're essentially a new legal system invented from scratch to try detainees against whom we have dubious evidence or only intelligence information. The adjective "military" may give them a certain sense of authority for those who are unaware just how poorly the process has worked so far compared to federal courts, but this is misleading since the DoJ's civilian lawyers are actually more experienced in trying terrorism cases.

Not to belabor the point, but from a practical point of view, why would you want to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed through this kind of shaky process rather than a civilian trial in the Southern District of New York, which has already handled plenty of these types of cases? A civilian trial is still far less of a roll of the dice than the military commissions, even after the revisions.

-- A. Serwer

Joanne Kenen lays out some progressive solutions to the malpractice problem:

Year after year, Republicans try to pass legislation that would limit medical malpractice awards. Fix the tort system, they argue, and we fix rising health-care costs. And year after year, Democrats resist placing arbitrary caps on awards to people who may have suffered from an egregious medical error. The fight plays out like a predictable old Western -- good guys versus bad guys. Depending on your politics, the villain is either the greedy doctor or the greedy trial lawyer.

Health reform invites a fresh look at malpractice. The Republican tort-reform agenda hasn't magically fixed what ails American health care in states that have tried it. But progressives can test new models of medical malpractice reform because -- done right -- they may lead to a more consistent, more timely, and more equitable approach to compensating people who have been harmed.

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The other day, Jesse Jackson said Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama wasn't black because he voted against health-care reform:

At a CBC dinner on Wednesday night, the famed civil rights leader denounced Davis's vote, saying, "We even have blacks voting against the health care bill from Alabama. You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man."

Jackson then walked it back:

Days after insisting it was impossible to be both black (which Davis is) and vote against health care reform (which Davis did), Jackson said he called the Alabama gubernatorial candidate to "assure him of my abiding admiration."

It's a good sign that even someone who has been associated with civil rights as long as Jesse Jackson can't get away with publicly questioning someone's ethnic loyalties based on their politics without embarrassing himself and having to apologize. If only we could somehow get this dynamic going within the American Jewish community.

-- A. Serwer

Following somewhat in the footsteps of the Constitution Project and former State Department official John Bellinger, former Bush Department of Justice officials Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey have backed Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court. Goldsmith famously withdrew the administration's torture memos, and Comey backed then Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision not to certify the NSA wiretapping program.

Goldsmith and Comey don't go as far as the Constitution Project in pushing against preventive detention, and they're fine with the two-tiered system of justice for suspected terrorists. In fact, they're painfully honest about it:

It is more likely that Holder decided to use a commission system still learning to walk because the Cole case is relatively weak and will benefit from the marginal advantages the commission system offers the government. It is also likely that the Justice Department will decide that many other terrorists at Guantanamo Bay will not be tried in civilian or military court but, rather, will be held under a military detention rationale more suitable to the circumstances of their cases.

Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer fufills his weekly duty by resurrecting the conservative strawmen of the past week and marching that zombie army across the Post op-ed page. The only valid criticism he raises of the decision to try KSM in a civilian trial is that "whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free." It's hard to see this criticism as based on his concern for due process however, since he's angry that "receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom." The more honest version of this argument is that conservatives don't believe that people accused of terrorism should be given a presumption of innocence -- which undermines the whole "fair trial" thing. That's exactly the point, but you can't just come out and say "I don't believe in fair trials" so you dissemble as above, or in the Obama administration's case, you just tell everyone what a good job you're doing adhering to the rule of law even as you assure people that the accused will be executed.

Krauthammer also fears, like other conservatives, the unhinged rants of KSM. There's really nothing more self-implicating than the chattering teeth of Republicans in the face of a terrorists' rants -- in a military commissions trial, KSM's indictment of the United States might have some resonance, particularly in the Middle East. Placing him in a civilian courtroom is a propaganda coup for the U.S., not the other way around. When people get hysterical over what KSM might say, it makes me wonder how much of what they think he might say is actually true. Spencer Ackerman has another theory: Seeing Al Qaeda terrorists being brought low before a court of law demystifies them for a fearful public, diminishing the political currency of terrorism-based fearmongering.

I can see why the GOP would be afraid of that.

-- A. Serwer

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, costs Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers. Who could be against freedom of choice? Fully 70 percent of Americans polled supported the idea. Open to all Americans, such a plan would have the scale and authority to negotiate low prices with drug companies and other providers, and force private insurers to provide better service at lower costs. But private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it would end up too much like what they have up in Canada.

So the compromise was to give the public option only to Americans who wouldn't be covered either by their employers or by Medicaid. And give them coverage pegged to Medicare rates. But private insurers and ... you know the rest.

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.

But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and "centrists" in the Senate. So Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than 4 million Americans.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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Something is fishy about this article on the U.S. relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Apparently, the White House is hitting the ol' reset button beginning at a recent meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton :

But instead of revisiting old disputes, Karzai brought in several cabinet ministers to talk about development and security. He explained details of a new effort to address graft. And halfway through a meal of lamb stew, chicken and rice, he looked across the table and said he had decided that the United States would be a "critical partner" in his second term, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the meeting.

I'm glad he's decided that the U.S. is a "critical partner," but that's not exactly his decision, is it, given the whole U.S.-military-keeps-him-in-power thing? While Rajiv Chandrasekaran's piece suggests that Karzai's efforts are a result of "top diplomats and generals ... abandoning for now their get-tough tactics with Karzai and attempting to forge a far warmer relationship," I just don't think the chronology adds up. It was only a week ago that Ambassador Karl Eikenberry was arguing that the U.S. shouldn't send more troops specifically to have more leverage over Karzai, leading the president to reject all of his staff's proposals. I doubt that things have since turned around dramatically since then.

Reading on, the change in dynamic seems to be this: The new approach "will entail more engagement with members of Karzai's cabinet and provincial governors, officials said, because they have concluded that the Afghan president lacks the political clout in his highly decentralized nation to purge corrupt local warlords and power brokers." Essentially, U.S. officials have realized Karzai is inept and are bypassing him, which is much better explanation of why he's suddenly decided the U.S. ought to be his critical partner.

That's not to say there is no merit in Chrasekaran's analysis, which does show that the U.S. has pushed Karzai pretty hard throughout the election cycle, and made some diplomatic missteps that led Karzai to seek unsavory allies. But the article concludes with a quote from a senior official saying that Karzai isn't obstructionist, just inept, and with mention that at Clinton's feel-good meeting, she also delivered the news that further U.S. aid would be contingent on the Afghan government hitting certain benchmarks, not exactly a message Karzai wants to hear. Maybe the U.S. is taking a warmer tone with Karzai, but that's because they've realized how ineffectual he is, which in turn has led him to emphasize his value to the American project. The combination of the U.S. dealing with the facts on the ground and Karzai being cooperative might be a very good outcome indeed.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Some conservatives are open about their reverence for the Bush administration's policies. But others, perhaps not wanting to associate themselves with the worst presidency of modern times try to pretend the last eight years didn't happen by comparing Barack Obama to History's Greatest Monster, Jimmy Carter, or pretending that foreign policy initiated by the Bush administration, left to fester for years, is now proof that Obama has "lost" the war in Afghanistan.
• I agree with Robert Farley that basing your foreign policy exclusively on worst-case scenarios is arguably the worst thing you can do, which I think is related to the another common refrain in foreign affairs: portraying your would-be adversary in the personalized terms of a madman who cannot be negotiated with, and who is unwavering in his commitment to destroy you. Fortunately, the Obama administration has opted to return to a fairly conventional carrots-and-sticks approach which gives the United States more leverage than mindless saber-rattling and demonization ever could.
• Needless to say, Republicans did not provide the leadership which led to passage of the Civil Rights Act, but what's most telling about these remarks is that most Republicans probably believe this. As we all know, the only racists left in this country are liberals, whose insistence on big government creates dependency for minorities who would otherwise pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become successful small business owners under the proven deregulatory policies of Republicans.
• Remainders: Voters sour on the stimulus, don't understand recession economics; Michael Tomasky tries to unravel the Blue Dog enigma; the fundraising war continues apace; and the Senate deludes itself into thinking that it can legislate away teenagers' hormones.

--Mori Dinauer

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins argues for clean energy investments that will create 1.7 million jobs for the people who need them the most.

It’s difficult for most Americans to accept data indicating an end to the recession for a simple reason – they don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Despite a quarter of growth, the unemployment rate has topped 10 percent, the highest it has been since 1983. Among people of color, the rates are even higher, with Latino unemployment exceeding 13 percent, and unemployment in the African-American community just shy of 16 percent. Economic growth does not mean that Americans experience economic relief; without stable jobs for everyday Americans, this cannot be considered a recovery. Recovery necessitates that jobs be created – jobs that provide stable employment for years, not months.

Green shoots of an employment recovery are showing through the investments made under President Obama's Recovery Act, which is already producing impressive innovation and the beginnings of job and wealth creation in green industries. Clean-energy sectors, which hold the promise of being major engines of job growth, are creating opportunities for those communities hit hardest by the recession: low-income communities and communities of color.

Portland, Oregon, for example, is using Recovery Act investments to launch a revolving loan fund that will help residents pay for energy-efficiency improvements to their homes. This program will save energy, save money and create 10,000 local jobs. A groundbreaking Community Workforce Agreement will further ensure that those jobs are available to workers from low-income and other disadvantaged communities.

In New York City, Recovery Act investments are helping the Community Environmental Center (CEC) hire more workers and weatherize more buildings. The largest Weatherization Assistance Program provider in the state, CEC is a union shop providing good wages and benefits. And thanks to a partnership between the union (the Laborers Local 10) and Non-Traditional Employment for Women, women and historically disadvantaged workers have the opportunity to win those jobs.

These local examples reinforce what larger, national investigations have shown. In our report Green Prosperity, Green For All, the Political Economy Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council showed that clean-energy investment creates roughly three to four times as many jobs as comparable investment in fossil fuel industries. The report estimates that investing $150 billion (public and private) in clean energy will create a net gain of 1.7 million jobs. Renewable energy and energy efficiency replace the damage done to our environment by fossil fuels with good, sustainable jobs for American workers. Building a green economy involves more than a shift to clean energy – it will provide a shift to a more skilled and labor-intensive economy.

More after the jump.

-- Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the CEO of Green For All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. MORE...

In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, Senator Arlen Specter has said he does not support sending additional troops to Afghanistan because he does not see the fight as central to national security and because such an effort "…requires a reliable ally in the government, and we we do not have that in [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai." The Senator concludes, "I'm unconvinced that it is sensible to add troops. ... there ought to be an exit strategy, and it ought to be geared to our expecations as to what we're looking to accomplish."

All very interesting stuff from the newest Democratic senator. But, when asked what would happen if the president proposed a troop increase -- "I don't think Congress would leap forward with plaudits" -- Specter gave the game away: "When you have Congressman [Joe] Sestak calling for an increase, a major increase, I think his view would be in the minority." Sestak, a retired Admiral, is the Pennsylvania Representative challenging Specter for his senate seat. Asked how much of his forward leaning statements were political positioning, Specter replied,"None, None," pointing to a statement he delivered in September raising similar questions about the war -- which also came after Sestak's decision to run.

Funny to see Specter, the former Republican, is finding ground to the left of Sestak in the Pennsylvania primary on an issue of major importance to progressives. Sestak probably has the advantage on almost every other issue among the Democratic base, but his support of increasing troops in Afghanistan could present a window of opportunity to Specter. It all depends on what the Obama administration chooses, and whether real congressional opposition emerges following that decision.

-- Tim Fernholz

Sady Doyle on the unwarranted backlash against fans of the world's most popular vampire-romance series:

When New Moon, the second film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's four-part Twilight series, opens in theaters this month, those who see it will not be getting great art. The faults of Meyer's immensely popular teen vampire-romance novels have been endlessly, and publicly, rehashed: the retrograde gender roles, the plodding plotlines, the super-heated goofiness of Meyer's prose. I can confirm for you that these faults are real!



Yet I could not stop reading the series. The books -- all about sexy teen vampire Edward Cullen, his sexy teen werewolf rival Jacob Black, and their joint quest to stalk, control, and condescend their way into the ever-turgid affections of sexy teen (human) narrator Bella Swan -- are slow, repetitive, and often unintentionally hilarious. ("If I hadn't seen him undressed, I would have sworn there was nothing more beautiful than Edward in his khakis." Wait. Hold up. The vampire is wearing khakis?) 



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Peter Bergen, who testified today before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, made an important point about homegrown radicalization.

An important caveat: Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in recent years looked much like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had lived, is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than $15,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 17%. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the US Army after three weeks and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. The five men in the Fort Dix cell were all illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs.

A few years ago Spencer Ackerman wrote what I think was a very accurate piece about how American pluralism and economic opportunity had stemmed the growth of homegrown Islamic radicalism. But that was years ago, and things change -- de facto segregation may be creating the conditions for the kinds of radicalization that we've seen in Europe.

Weeks ago I had a conversation with Bergen's colleague at the New America Foundation Andrew Lebovich, who warned that Americans may have gotten complacent about thinking of how to properly counter radical ideologies from spreading because of a certain strain of American exceptionalism -- the idea that American culture is itself a deradicalizing force. I happen to think that's true. Nevertheless, Lebovich points out that what we've seen recently -- most dramatically in Minnesota -- is the rise of isolated, economically depressed "country-or region-specific" communities where radicalization can take root anyway, often as a result of events in the country of their families' origin. It's a problem we're going to have to figure out how to face soon, without alienating or demonizing the communities in question.

As former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army John Keane said in the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing on the Ft. Hood shootings said earlier today, “you cannot kill this movement, you need moderate Muslims to reject it."

-- A. Serwer

A new poll shows that 52 percent of Republicans think ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama.

I've written about voter fraud pretty extensively -- most Republicans don't know the difference between registration fraud, which is as easy as filling out a ballot application incorrectly, and voter fraud, which means actually casting a ballot. The conservative Ahabs at the Bush Justice Department spent years chasing that white whale and came up with bubkus. The latter is incredibly rare, and there isn't a single documented instance of ACORN anywhere, ever, stealing an election.

Nevertheless, like the idea that the Obama was born abroad, the myth of voter fraud persists -- only a minority of Republicans believe the president was born in the United States.

These issues are ultimately connected -- the segment of the Republican base that imagines itself as "real" Americans finds it incomprehensible that they, and their agenda, could be rejected by a majority of voters. We saw a little bit of this denial from conservative pundits insisting America is a "center-right" country immediately after the election. But for a certain group of Republicans the 2008 election caused a sense of rejection that has fermented into derangement, which is why the weepy, manic Glenn Beck has now become the right's primary ideological voice. It's why so much of that emotion is focused on a time -- right after 9/11--that people were so fearful of terrorism that the right had overwhelming political support.

The 2008 electorate was the most diverse ever--for some people, that is disenfranchisement by definition, since that means America is being increasingly populated by people who aren't "real Americans." Even if ACORN didn't steal the election, those people did, and so whether ACORN literally stole the election matters about as much as literal "death panels". It's "true enough." Hoffman workers in NY-23 mistook one of their own African-American volunteers for a member of ACORN, which wasn't even active in the district.

None of this new far right mythology actually has to make sense. As long as the frayed pieces of the puzzle can be assembled in a manner that allows this part of the right to preserve in their minds the idea that they are the authentic representation of what it means to be American, any explanation will do.

-- A. Serwer

Today, Obama leaves Asia having made no headway on the issue of North Korean denuclearization. In Japan, China, and South Korea, the president reaffirmed each country's commitment to bring North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks. But it's not clear how much good that would do: Pyongyang remains as unpredictable as ever. For the past decade, North Korea has participated in eight rounds of these negotiations -- a process aimed toward ending DPRK's nuclear program that also involves the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea -- and it's been rewarded with gradual loosening of economic sanctions. The outcome? A trail of broken pledges and two nuclear tests, the most recent one in May.

It may be time to shift toward using trade and academic exchanges to open up North Korea -- an approach that worked with Eastern Europe and China -- and leave more of the heavy lifting on denuclearization to its neighbors. As a recent Asia Society report suggests, integrating North Korea into the world economy could potentially empower its citizens and impose heretofore nonexistent domestic pressure on its leaders to abide by international norms. Having already removed North Korea from the U.S. Trading with Enemy Act last year (only Cuba remains!), we should follow the lead of many European countries to develop trade ties and encourage NGO aid networks to work within the country. The United States could also initiate technological and educational exchanges to expose North Koreans to new ideas and business practices that can be implemented back home.

These societal improvements will be critical to transitioning North Korea out of its currently unthinkable degree of isolation and poverty. In a recent New Yorker article, Barbara Demick describes a famine in North Korea that killed 2.5 million and profiles a woman who led a modern-day hunter-gatherer life in order to combat state-induced food shortage, all the while believing that she was living in the “greatest nation on earth”:

Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day"… Mrs. Song would hike north and west from the city center, carrying a kitchen knife and a basket to collect edible weeds and grass. If you got out to the mountains, you could find dandelions or other weeds that people ate even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs. Song also collected rotten cabbage leaves that had been discarded by a farmer.

This oppression is destabilizing for North Korea's economic system and the country as a whole -- clearly not a good thing when you're talking about a country with nukes.

Meanwhile, we can leave the task of putting pressure on DPRK to its neighbors -- they're within range of Pyongyang's missiles, and they're most vulnerable if it experiences internal instability. Japan, South Korea, and even China are pursuing a denuclearization policy with North Korea that is already roughly in line with U.S. interests. Two days ago, Pyongyang even declared eagerness for inter-Korean dialogue toward unification.

Going forward, the Six-Party Talks will remain an important platform for coordination among the nations invested in North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. However, for the United States, economic engagement with DPRK would be a more practical and sustainable policy focus. By drawing North Korea into the international community, as President Obama wishes, it would indirectly coerce Pyongyang to denuclearize and, more importantly, induce systemic change that bring benefits directly to the North Korean people.

-- Linda Li

The Catholic bishops have gotten a lot of attention for the role they played in pushing the Stupak amendment -- and the House health-care bill -- over the finish line. While there's no doubt the bishops applied the midnight pressure, their role is just one piece of how Democrats yearn for the godly imprimatur.

To be sure, the final outcome on the House side is the result of whip counts simply not adding up to the number needed to pass the bill. But Democrats ending up in the position of having to obtain a particular religious stamp of approval was also the result of seeking out the "faith vote" in the last several election cycles, and confining the definition of "people of faith" to people who oppose abortion.

The Democrats "got religion," but at what cost?

The Democrats failed to tap into pro-choice religious groups as a voice to argue for inclusion of abortion coverage in a health-care bill. Instead, these groups, along with leading pro-choice groups, acquiesced to the Capps amendment, which would have segregated private and public funds and used only private funds to pay for abortions, as a reasonable compromise. But not being met in the middle by the anti-choice side has infuriated the pro-choice side.

The day before the House vote on November 7, pro-choice groups, including religious pro-choice groups like Catholics for Choice, were essentially saying they would hold their noses and not object to an abortion amendment compromise being crafted by Rep. Brad Ellsworth. That proposed amendment would have required a private contractor to oversee disbursement of funds for abortion coverage to ensure that public funds wouldn't be used. The pro-choice side did this reluctantly, though, because they felt they had already compromised by acquiescing to the Capps amendment when they in fact favor full coverage of abortion services.

On November 6, I wrote in a story published at Religion Dispatches:

Indeed, the pro-choice camp has compromised in order to make the bill more palatable to the anti-choice camp, which is not meeting them in the middle. “This is a hard time for us in the pro-choice community,” said [Catholics for Choice president Jon] O'Brien. “We’ve been straightforward and reasonable.” The House bill “is not a win for women. But it’s not a loss for the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed. We see it as a compromise.”

When the Stupak amendment prevailed, these pro-choicers were furious. The midnight pressure applied by the Catholic bishops amounted to the enshrining of one particular religion -- and indeed one version of that particular religion -- into law. Polling data showed that most Catholics not only disagreed with the bishops' position on the Stupak amendment, but also believed they shouldn't be politicizing the health-care debate. While the bishops do have an infrastructure that gives them access to thousands of parishes across the country -- unrivaled in any other denomination -- many pro-choice advocates believe that Congress "drank the Kool-Aid" that the bishops have actual power to sway votes.

The anti-choice Democrats who allowed Bart Stupak to be their ringleader now risk being seen as more aligned with the religious right than with their own party. As I reported at RD, while the Catholic bishops were in Nancy Pelosi's office late that Friday night, the religious right -- and Democrats for Life of America -- were rallying the religious right's base to push members of Congress to settle for nothing less than the Stupak amendment. Their goal, as we know, is blocking access to legal abortion, and a new study from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services maintains the Stupak amendment would, over time, end all insurance coverage for abortion services. But the Ellsworth compromise, the religious right maintained, was nothing more than a "money-laundering scheme." (Apparently the Catholic bishops believe Catholic organizations are capable of segregating public and private funds, but the government is not.)

But where were the president's vaunted faith allies? The ones who were supposed to bring home the big tent? The broader agenda voters who didn't care about abortion anymore? It seems like there are cracks in their common ground strategy on health care. Religious pro-choice groups are not going to be sidelined in order for "people of faith" to close ranks around a health-care bill, just to support a health-care bill. As I reported earlier this week, religious pro-choice groups might have been foiled on Stupak, but they vowing not going to be silent in their advocacy for abortion coverage in the final bill.

--Sarah Posner

Matt Yglesias observes the appealing incoherence of the Right, in contrast to the coherent but politically unpleasant and morally questionable policies that the administration has been forced to carry on to prevent economic collapse. Matt observes that the conservative message is predicated on time travel, but as his commenters point out, much of the bad bank policy began before Obama was even president.

A more relevant example is health-care reform, where the administration has made a ton of what are essentially sweetheart deals with insurance companies and Big Pharma and even bought off most of the physicians in order to get universal coverage and deal with the whole wildly out of control costs issue. But, as most people realize and Luke Mitchell points in this (subscriber-only, sorry) article in Harper's, health-care reform essentially creates "a regulatory system that virtually mandates [health insurance companies] existence." This little corporate deal is necessary, Democrats reason, because Republicans would freak out about single-payer and other cheaper, more efficient ways to do health care reform, what with the socialism and all. And Republicans probably would, given that they call this public-private partnership "socialism." (Side query: When unemployment eventually does lead to revolutionaries actually seizing the means of production, will the GOP be at a loss for words?)

But this corporatism -- made palatable to the Left only by heavy-duty pro-consumer regulations and the public option -- is naturally offensive to progressives and populists of all stripes. More than one conservative has complained to me about these deals as offensive to the free market (as if insurance companies have ever operated in a 'free market'). But instead of taking advantage of this situation and calling out the Democrats on creating a permanent insurance industry, conservative health care proposals are an even bigger gift to the health insurance industry -- their proposals to throw off almost all regulations, allow for many kinds of medical discrimination against customers, and basically let these firms run wild -- would be even worse for consumers. But they're free market, dammit, and it saves them the time of solving the ridiculously hard problem of actual health care reform. Even their moderates, some of whom have good ideas, can't propose them because the caucus can't even agree whether or not denying coverage based on preexisting conditions is OK.

As Matt says, "moving to a less-incoherent posture would have some real benefits, but also disrupt the current sweet deal." Unfortunately, the benefits, in the form of responsible governance, would be more for the country at large than to the Republicans themselves, so I imagine we can expect the current status quo to continue.

-- Tim Fernholz

Gershom Gorenberg on selective disobedience in Israel:

Driving through the West Bank recently, I picked up two hitchhikers. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps that have become the mark of young men on the religious right, especially among settlers. Since they were what Israelis call army age (what Americans would call college age), the conversation turned to military service.

Despite Israel's universal draft, the hitchhiker in the back seat said he didn't intend to serve. The Israel Defense Forces, he argued, hurts Jews -- a point he presumed was obvious from the "uprooting" of settlements in Gaza four years ago and the occasional dismantling of tiny, illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank more recently. Besides that, he said, the IDF "doesn't want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world." He didn't want to die because commanders were too concerned with Arabs' lives. As a student at a yeshivah -- a religious seminary -- he had a deferment, and he intended to keep it till he was past draft age.

KEEP READING ...

Tom Ricks summarizes a speech by counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, wherein he says that the U.S. basically needs to go all or nothing -- either put in at least 40,000 troops to control corruption, or start pulling out. Related true story: A to-remain-nameless national security expert told me of a conversation he had the other day, when a congressional aide asked if the U.S. should be all in or all out in Afghanistan, and this security wonk replied, "That’s the stupidest fucking question I’ve ever heard on national security.” Kilcullen's polarity fixation aside, check the post for his comparison of Karzai to the Kuomintang in 1949 and his description of the corruption cycle. Like Ricks, I was most surprised by Kilcullen's take on Al Qaeda.

One surprise to me was that he isn't particularly worried about the possibility of al Qaeda moving back into Afghanistan. "I hope so," he said, explaining that it would be a strategic gain for us to see the terrorist group leave Pakistan and move into parts of Afghanistan that essentially are "the moon with gravity."

If Kilcullen thinks this al Qaeda problem is sorted, and that the situation would in fact be better if they did move back into Afghanistan, why is escalation even on the table? If the justification for being in Afghanistan isn't al Qaeda, then a lot of folks -- particularly President Barack Obama -- are going to be surprised.

-- Tim Fernholz

I think Daphne Eviatar is exactly right to point out that Eric Holder's comment that "failure is not an option" in the 9/11 trials sounds eerily similar to one made by Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes on the military commissions prosecutions years ago. Haynes' statement that “We can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions," was used by civil liberties groups at the time to argue that the military commissions were reverse engineered to ensure convictions.

Of course, it's not just Holder making such statements. President Obama said yesterday in response to those criticizing him for not trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in military commissions that such people won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." He's since backed off that statement.

By trying KSM in a civilian court, the Obama administration is circumventing the accusation that the venue is meant to ensure conviction. But what we have here, essentially, is a situation in which there is immense social and political pressure for any judge and jury to convict the accused -- pressure that is coming from the highest reaches of the administration. Now, I personally think KSM is guilty -- but that doesn't change the fact that when the president and attorney general speak so frankly in favor of a particular outcome of a criminal trial, it certainly calls into question whether or not the accused is getting a fair proceeding.

This trial isn't just for the U.S.: It's for the world. Al Qaeda's murderous ideology will be put on trial here, but anything less than real due process will indict the United States instead. Most Americans may be convinced of KSM's guilt, but the rest of the world -- particularly the hearts and minds the U.S. is trying to win, may not be. Which is why getting this right is so important.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, during Attorney General Eric Holder's appearance before the Senate, the right-wing blogosphere crowded around National Review "legal expert" Andy McCarthy as he exposed the "whoppers" in Holder's testimony. Let's take a look at these -- I'll excerpt as much as possible since McCarthy's post is long.

The "tragic shooting" at Ft. Hood. What happened at Ft. Hood was a jihadist massacre — a terrorist act, not a tragedy.

So, right off the bat, we've established that former U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy has no idea what a "fact" is, since whether or not the shooting at Ft. Hood was a "tragedy" is actually a matter of opinion. This man is a lawyer.

The civilian justice system has been handling terrorism cases successfully for years. No mention of Mamdouh Salim, the al-Qaeda founder who was never brought to trial for 1998 U.S. embassy bombings because he maimed a Bureau of Prisons guard in an escape attempt during which he attempted to kidnap is taxpayer-funded defense lawyers.

The federal courts have convicted hundreds of terrorists; during the entire Bush administration the military commissions tried three cases. That one of these people tried to escape and hurt someone has zero to do with whether or not the legal system of the United States can handle trying terrorist suspects. What McCarthy is describing above is a security issue, not a legal issue, but since he can't distinguish between fact and opinion I suppose the above distinction is also too much to ask. Yesterday, former Bush adviser John Bellinger said that military lawyers were so unused to trying terrorism cases that they tried to get them help from the civilian attorneys in the Justice Department. That's not a qualitative judgment on military lawyers -- it's indicative of the fact that terrorism has traditionally been tried in civilian court and so federal prosecutors have more experience with those kinds of cases.

A civilian trial is no more a platform for KSM than a military commission would have been. That's ridiculous. KSM was ready to plead guilty and be executed eleven months ago. Whatever soapbox he was going to have, he'd largely already had, and while we'd have had to let him speak before sentence was imposed, that would have been the end of it. Now, he's going to get a full-blown trial — after combing through the discovery for a couple of years and after putting the Bush administration under the spotlight.

So this is an unforced self-owning. McCarthy wants a military commission for KSM because he's afraid of "putting the Bush administration under the spotlight." In other words, a civilian trial of KSM would expose the Bush administration's illegal behavior, behavior McCarthy supports but doesn't want exposed for what it is. There's nothing more telling about the shaky moral case for torture than torture apologists' fear of their methods being scrutinized before a court of law.

In a civilian trial, America will see KSM for the coward that he is — Holder: "I am not scared of KSM." Submitting a war criminal to a military commission is not an exercise in fear; it is an exercise in justice. We already know all about what kind of animal KSM is, thanks to the exrtraordinary information that has come out in the military proceedings and the CIA interrogations. You could fill a book a book with it, which the 9/11 Commission did. We don't need to bear the risks of a civilian trial either to learn more about KSM or so Mr. Holder can show how brave he is.

Of course, KSM isn't a "war criminal" if he's guilty, he's just a criminal -- a mass murdering criminal, but there's no need to elevate him to the status of warrior. He was captured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, not on a battlefield. He has no right of belligerence. He's not a uniformed soldier or state actor. He is a terrorist. Terrorists are criminals.

For eight years justice has been delayed — no longer, "It is past time to finally act." Holder, of course, does not mention the role of his firm and others in delaying and derailing the military commissions during their representation of America's enemies. Senator Kyl just confronted him with my contentions on that score (from this column). The attorney-general responded that I am a polemecist who says inflammatory things for talk shows, whereas he is concerned with facts. (I guess he means pertinent facts, like how he is not "scared of KSM.") I'm delighted to let people judge that one for themselves.

McCarthy wrote a long screed attacking the "the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers" who gave "free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees," for delaying the military commissions by challenging their constitutionality. The lawyers in question were doing nothing more than following Thomas Paine's counsel, that "he that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Never mind that these "left-wing lawyers" -- many of whom were people in uniform serving their country -- have managed to win 30 out of 38 habeas cases for detainees at Guantanamo. McCarthy's argument is a textbook example of what Armando describes as "the Ed Meese School of Law" wherein being a suspect makes you guilty even if you've been convicted of nothing. Never mind that it was the 2006 Roberts-Alito Supreme Court -- that left-wing cabal that was to the right of the partisans who handed the presidency to George W. Bush -- that decided the Hamdan case ruling the Bush military commissions unconstitutional. Never mind that due process is the legal principle on which a democratic society rests -- McCarthy would throw it all away to have a bad guy waterboarded or thrown in a cell forever.

This man, who in a second would give al-Qaeda the kind of strategic victories it only dreams of without hesitation by needlessly shredding the traditional institutions of American democracy, imagines himself a patriot, and those who defend the Constitution as traitors.

-- A. Serwer

• Of course there are political advantages to calling a "stimulus bill" a "jobs bill." But rhetoric only takes you so far if your jobs bill fails to actually produce jobs. The ARRA, while imperfect, saved a not-insignificant number of jobs, and created some demand where there otherwise would not have been any, but it wasn't designed to create concentrated and targeted job growth. Since the administration reportedly knew the stimulus fell short of the amount of money its economists were recommending for political reasons, perhaps they held off on an actual jobs bill designed to make up for the ARRA's shortcomings.
• Kevin Drum catches a New York Times piece on Obama's trip to China making the assumption that China has become "more willing to say no to the United States," as if in the rosy past China was more deferential to the United States. As much as this narrative stems from a simpleminded understanding of our fiscal relationship to the Chinese, it also draws upon the "rising power" story that places China on an inevitable path to preeminence, regardless of the fact that China is still very, very poor.
• I don't doubt that many Republicans believe their own terrorist-as-supervillian fantasies, but the main reason they would welcome a return to the inspiring politics of 2002-2004 is that they, you know, won those elections. And they won them because they convinced enough people that only they could protect you from the terrorists marching on Main St., USA, and that Democrats were nothing less than traitors.
• It's possible that Chuck Grassley actually believes that in their heart of hearts, Democrats just want to destroy capitalism, but to suggest that they "don't care" if they're hurting the economy doesn't make any sense. Name me a political party that won elections by being indifferent to an ailing economy. If Democrats were really just self-interested power seekers, why would they deliberately ruin their chances for re-election?
• Remainders: The vision of the Senate Robert Byrd recalls doesn't actually exist; Marco Rubio tests whether anti-immigration sentiment or worship of St. Ronnie is more powerful; and this year's War on Christmas is the most clueless yet.
  

--Mori Dinauer

In a story that's provoked justified outrage, the Army has threatened single military mom Spc. Alexis Hutchinson with a military court marshal for refusing leave her 10-month-old and ship off to Afghanistan when none of her family members could care for the child. In a compassionate display of flexibility, her superiors offered her the alternative of putting the child in foster care. The whole episode seems to be a the result of military keeping an inadequate and inconsistent family policy.

The Army requires single parents to have a "family plan" in case they are deployed, but if yours falls through, you're out of luck. Why isn't there a backup plan? Hutchinson -- a chef -- could serve on the base for a certain period until she finds an adequate solution. Worse comes to worse, she could receive an "administrative discharge." Whatever the details of the arrangement are, the default choice should not be to put your child in foster care or face criminal charges.

Hutchison also wouldn't have been in this predicament had she been serving, in say, the Navy. Military women generally get six weeks of maternity leave. But the time period before they can be deployed varies by branch. The Navy and Marine Corps don't require women to deploy for up to a year. The Army, however, is ready to ship you off after four months. Four months of leave isn't enough of a grace period for deployments -- many women are still breastfeeding then. Returning to work after four months might not seem so bad, but it's a huge burden when work is thousands of miles away.

The military's family policies belong in the 1950s, both in their understanding of gender balance and in terms of labor law. The government's requirement for private employers – under the Family and Medical Leave Act – makes companies with 50 employees or more give new mothers 14 weeks, a meager baseline that it fails to follow itself. And after years of prodding, the military finally acknowledged that men take care of kids, too: They get all of 10 days.

--Gabriel Arana

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, David Woolner urges President Obama and Congress to adopt the fearlessness of FDR in directly creating jobs.

The recent news that the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009 while at the same time the national unemployment rate hit a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October, has many economists talking about a “jobless recovery.” What this means, say the experts, is continued economic growth -- and hence a technical end to the recession -- but no improvement in the employment figures for the immediate future. In fact, most economists predict that under current conditions, the unemployment rate will rise even further -- perhaps reaching as high as 11 percent by the summer of 2010.

It appears that the Obama administration is prepared to accept this scenario and will not push for bolder solutions so as to ensure that the so-called recovery includes not just an expansion of the GDP but also a reduction in the alarmingly high unemployment rate. As a consequence, millions of American workers will continue to languish among the ranks of the unemployed, burdened by an anxious present and an uncertain future.

More after the jump.

--David Woolner

Braintruster David Woolner is senior vice president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. MORE...

Bank of America has been one of the least cooperative banks participating in Treasury's slow-going program to modify mortgages and prevent foreclosure, but last week I received a lending report from BofA with a fishy paragraph:

Over the past 21 months, we’ve helped modify mortgage loans for 445,000 homeowners or, on average, more than 21,000 each month. In addition to these results through our own programs, we helped move almost 100,000 customers into trial modifications through the Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) in the third quarter.

Wait a minute. BofA has been performing Treasury modifications through the Home Affordable Mortgage Program more slowly than almost every other peer institution, and had been complaining about how they didn't have the resources or infrastructure to move any faster. But now we find out that even as they complained about the lack of resources, they've been doing hundreds of thousands of non-Treasury modifications, which, as I reported in the spring, are usually worse than getting no modification at all. How are they doing this? Andrew Jakabovics and Pat Garafalo at the Center for American Progress have found out: BofA is directing potential HAMP participants into its proprietary modification program, something the HAMP program is supposed to discourage:

In case there remains any ambiguity as to whether a servicer can pull borrowers out of the pool to offer them a non-HAMP-compliant modification before determining their status under HAMP, Treasury official Herbert Allison recently testified, “under HAMP’s loan modification guidelines, mortgage servicers are prevented from ‘cherry-picking’ which loans to modify in a manner that might deny assistance to borrowers at greatest risk of foreclosure.”

So BofA can’t simply suggest an alternative program to this homeowner without determining eligibility for HAMP, and by doing so, it is potentially lowering the number of successful HAMP modifications it completes. Given the size of BofA’s portfolio, its compliance with program rules — particularly as it pertains to getting eligible borrowers into the program — directly impacts the public’s perception of the success of HAMP. If BofA were performing as well as CitiMortgage, Treasury would have reported an additional quarter million mortgages in its HAMP totals.

This is, of course, ridiculous. The whole point of HAMP was to make modifications that helped troubled borrowers and the broader economy, not use the facade of a government program to trick homeowners into changes that could end with them owing even more money and still potentially losing their homes.

-- Tim Fernholz

At the U.N.'s big World Food Summit in Rome this week, Pope Benedict gave voice to a way of thinking about food that is both seemingly obvious and undervalued in development circles. You hear about the mismatch between the world's sustenance needs and the amount of readily available food attacked from the market angle -- treating food as products that would flow where they need to be if not for subsidies and other protectionist schemes. And you hear food security talked about from the structural-inefficiencies angle -- countries where there is food insecurity suffer from either underdeveloped agricultural industries or malevolent governments. Applying new biotech innovations or focusing on eliminating political bottlenecks thus becomes the goal.

Benedict sees food security differently. Without ignoring the damage done by protectionism and corruption, or the promise of a new green revolution, Benedict is trying to reframe the debate from the bottom up. And at the base is the premise that we should assume that people have secure food, and then muster up outrage when it becomes glaringly clear that they don't. Food insecurity where it exists is not an inefficiency. It's a disgrace. Thus, says Benedict:

[T]he need to oppose those forms of aid that do grave damage to the agricultural sector, those approaches to food production that are geared solely towards consumption and lack a wider perspective, and especially greed, which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity.

Again, it isn't exactly non-obvious that a billion or so humans being food insecure should be considered a moral question. But Benedict's appeal failed to resonate with the attendees at the U.N. summit, as the countries in attendance -- which included only Italy's Silvio Berlusconi among the G-8 leaders -- issued a squishy statement that failed to set concrete targets for addressing food security, either in terms of economic commitment or goals for a timeline for drawing the global food insecurity crisis to a close.

--Nancy Scola

Tim Fernholz on the need to consider strategy and resources in Afghanistan:

Last week, President Barack Obama rejected four different plans for what to do in Afghanistan, each one including an increase in the number of U.S. troops in the region. Resources -- how much money and how many troops -- are at the forefront of the media's coverage of Obama's decision, and the most tangible measure of the conflict to most Americans.

But as the debate over Afghanistan has progressed, voices within the administration, military commanders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former officials like Gen. Colin Powell, and pundits like Fred Kaplan have argued that the focus shouldn't be on how many troops are sent to Afghanistan but what they will do when they get there. This is a misleading formulation that eliminates vital strategic options. In reality, the resources the U.S. commits in Afghanistan, in both troops and treasure, should be at the crux of this debate.

KEEP READING ...

I just got off a conference call held by the Council on Foreign Relations, featuring former adviser to Condoleeza Rice, John B. Bellinger, and National Security expert Steve Simon. Simon has an op-ed in the New York Times today supporting the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian court.

Bellinger said that he thought the administration's "hybrid model" of military commissions and civilian trials makes sense given that some of the people the U.S. is holding were captured on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he also pointed out that federal courts have far more experience dealing with terrorism cases than military commissions.

Bellinger condemned the "demonization" of the military commissions by human rights groups, and argued that the commissions were "in fact a well functioning system with good judges and good lawyers who I think would have been fair," but that "none of the military lawyers were used to dealing with massive terrorism cases like this.” Bellinger said that the Bush administration had in fact planned on "moving to shore up the military prosecutors with people from the Justice Department."

“Federal prosecutors are really more used to doing this kind of thing anyway," Bellinger said.

Another point that Bellinger made was that military commissions cases can be appealed into the federal court system -- meaning that any lawyer who decides to appeal would have his client's case looked at by a civilian judge anyway. He said that even if KSM had been tried by military commission, his case would have ended up in federal court.

As for Simon, he pointed out that trying KSM and the alleged 9/11 conspirators by military commission would read poorly in the Middle East.

“In the Arab Middle East, these sorts of trials are carried out by the military, they are seen as the worst form of pseudo-judicial regime justice, and not the real thing," Simon said. "So when they would look at a trial conducted by the U.S. military, even though it would adhere to more than just a semblance of due process, they’re looking at men in uniform trying other men, and they’re going to draw certain conclusions based on mirror imaging.”

"They’re just going to say that’s what happens here.”

-- A. Serwer

How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.

In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered.

In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, companies are going a step further. They’re using this sharp downturn to cut payrolls even below where they were when times were good. Outsourcing abroad, setting up shop in China and elsewhere, contracting out, replacing people with software and automated machines – they're doing whatever it takes to get payrolls down so earnings bounce up.

Caterpillar earned $404 million in the third quarter, or 64 cents a share. Analysts had expected only 5 cents. Caterpillar’s stock is up 165 percent since March. How did Caterpillar do it? Not by selling more bulldozers. It did it by cutting over 37,000 jobs.

The result, overall, is an asset-based recovery, not a Main Street recovery. Yes, the economy is growing again, but the surge in productivity is a mirage. Worker output per hour is skyrocketing because companies are generating almost as much output with fewer workers and fewer hours.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

Julie Strawn explains how we can fix our community colleges:

Community colleges, far more than four-year colleges, serve groups that will dominate our undergraduate student populations and our work force for decades to come: students on their own financially, older students, people of color, parents, first-generation college students, and immigrants. Although widely viewed as gateways to the American dream, community colleges face relatively low completion rates. This quandary challenges our national commitment to economic mobility.

Washington state, more than any other, has sought to address this challenge systematically. Researchers mined state data on work-force needs, demographic changes, and student outcomes in community and technical colleges. They found that students needed to reach a "tipping point" in their educational journeys for postsecondary education to translate into significant economic benefits. This tipping point is about a year's worth of post-secondary education, paired with an occupational credential.

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Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and his prepared remarks focus heavily on justifying the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in federal court. Holder points out that civilian courts have been used very successfully over the years to prosecute terrorists, that the Classified Intelligence Procedures Act will prevent sensitive information from leaking out of a trial, and that KSM's hollow indictments of the United States will be no less present in a military commission than they would be in a civilian court.

The most politically salient part of Holder's speech however, is the part meant to head off conservative criticism that the administration is underestimating the threat posed by terrorism. Holder states unequivocally that "I know we are at war," adding that "We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready."

Here's the relevant excerpt:

I know that we are at war.

I know that we are at war with a vicious enemy who targets our soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and our civilians on the streets here at home. I have personally witnessed that somber fact in the faces of the families who have lost loved ones abroad, and I have seen it in the daily intelligence stream I review each day. Those who suggest otherwise are simply wrong.

Prosecuting the 9/11 defendants in federal court does not represent some larger judgment about whether or not we are at war. We are at war, and we will use every instrument of national power – civilian, military, law enforcement, intelligence, diplomatic, and others – to win. We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready.

We will also use every instrument of our national power to bring to justice those responsible for terrorist attacks against our people. For eight years, justice has been delayed for the victims of the 9/11 attacks. It has been delayed even further for the victims of the attack on the USS Cole. No longer. No more delays. It is time, it is past time, to act. By bringing prosecutions in both our courts and military commissions, by seeking the death penalty, by holding these terrorists responsible for their actions, we are finally taking ultimate steps toward justice. That is why I made this decision.

In making this and every other decision I have made as Attorney General, my paramount concern is the safety of the American people and the preservation of American values. I am confident this decision meets those goals, and that it will withstand the judgment of history.

I'm skeptical that this two-tiered justice system, where military commissions are used to try not soldiers breaking the laws of war but criminals against whom we have shaky cases, will stand the test of time. Military commissions have historically been used for dispensing battlefield justice, not for trying people months or years after the fact.

That said, Holder's right that "we need not cower in the face of the enemy". Al Qaeda cannot destroy the United States. It can only make us so fearful that we destroy ourselves.

-- A. Serwer

Marc Ambinder points to this Washington Post article that appears to describe exactly how many detainees at Guantanamo Bay fall into the so-called fifth category, those detainees who are "too dangerous to let go" but against whom we have scant evidence to prosecute:

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

Shortly after the Mohammed Jawad verdict, his defense attorney, David Frakt, suggested to me that the administration might change its mind about the fact that this category existed at all. David Kris, head of the Department of Justice's National Security Division told Congress in July that half the Gitmo cases had been reviewed and none had been put in the fifth category. White House counterterrorism official John Brennan suggested that these detainees might simply be transferred to other countries. It wasn't clear until now that the fifth category still existed at all -- but it appears it does.

I gave some background on how this group of detainees came to exist in my feature on Jawad: Basically, the Bush administration dispensed entirely with gathering useable evidence on terrorist suspects, instead relying on intelligence information that is often nebulous and inconclusive by legal standards. At the time, the Bush administration felt it was better safe than sorry, and the Obama administration got stuck with the sorry.

Spencer Ackerman speculates that these detainees might be sent to Bagram. That was the Bush administration's solution for avoiding judicial scrutiny of detention, but that approach is distinct from what Ken Gude and the Center for American Progress are proposing. The CAP proposal is to send those detainees who were captured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, and who have lost the first round of their habeas appeals, back to Bagram. Sending "fifth category" detainees captured in third countries would jeopardize the government's position in appealing the judicial ruling that granted detainees captured in third countries and held at Bagram habeas rights.

I spoke to Matthew Waxman, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs under the Bush administration for the story I wrote on CAP's report last week, and he explained to me (in a quote that didn't make it into the final piece) why that wouldn't be a good idea.

"To defend against claims that habeas rights should also apply at Bagram, the administration needs to highlight the differences between the two sites, such as security issues, practical challenges of detention operations, the degree of U.S. control," Waxman said. "If the government starts simply swapping detainees among the facilities, it hurts its case that for all these reasons Bagram should be treated differently as a legal matter."

So Bagram is not a solution. Neither, in my mind, is preventive detention outside of an ongoing theater of military combat.

-- A. Serwer

Christopher Jencks looks at higher education's problems:

American higher education, once the envy of the world, is losing its competitive edge. Most of the world's top universities are still located in the United States, but our other great accomplishment, making higher education available to an ever-larger fraction of young people, has succumbed to our hatred of taxes. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, young people in Australia, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and Scandinavia, where students and families do not bear such a large share of college costs, are now all more likely to earn a bachelor's degree than are young people in the United States. That is not because American employers no longer want more college graduates. The pay premium for workers with a bachelor's has doubled since the mid-1970s and is now greater than the gap in almost any other rich nation. This trend has been one factor (among many) in the rise of economic inequality. Richard Rothstein discusses the many other steps that would be needed to reverse that rise.

What has gone wrong? The problem has three parts. First, the college graduation rate has traditionally grown in tandem with the high school graduation rate -- which hasn't risen since the early 1970s. In addition, while the proportion of high school graduates entering college has risen, the proportion of college entrants earning a four-year degree has fallen. Meanwhile, college costs have soared, and financial aid has not kept up.

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Spencer Ackerman reminds us that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. Can the U.S. deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan without violating soldiers' rotation policies or becoming dangerously underprepared for a crisis?

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

That's the real talk. There are other variables in the mix -- how much of the force is made up of Marines, how smoothly drawdown goes in Iraq -- but getting troop levels up to where Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants them won't be easy. When McChrystal made his original requests at the end of the summer, his strategic review described a 12-month window for changing the dynamic of the war, a window that is rapidly shrinking -- even if the first deployments began in January, it's not clear that overall levels could rise until the spring, nearly eight months after his deadline, and I'm curious what effect that would have on the conflict.

Meanwhile, in amateur news, my column this week is about how you can't elide the troop factor when talking about strategic issues, either, because doing so cuts several critical options off the table, not the least of which is getting Hamid Karzai to clean up his act.

-- Tim Fernholz

• One can draw many conclusions from the list of senators who voted for the debt-financed Medicare Part D legislation in 2003 and now complain about the debt supposedly produced by the deficit-neutral health-care reform legislation hitting the Senate floor this week. Are they economically illiterate? Clearly. Hypocritical? Absolutely. And is anybody in the press talking about it? Of course not -- they've got to compete with Entertainment Tonight this week, it seems.
  
• It is inevitable that politicians contradict themselves, but in the case of Tim Pawlenty, who is clearly laying the groundwork for achieving higher office, his flip on climate change is especially egregious. His new-found climate change skepticism is designed to appease the conservative base, but like Mitt Romney, Pawlenty's wider appeal was supposed to be his reputation as a reformer. Now Romney is a joke, and the man behind "Sam's Club" Republicanism is probably headed down the same path.
• The 2010 elections are a year away but I still see this situation where anti-incumbent sentiment runs high yet the opposition party remains deeply unpopular to be unique in midterm elections. Throw the lack of open congressional seats into the mix and it isn't clear how the GOP picks up more than a handful of seats.
• Remainders: The Senate blocks James Inhofe's Terrorism Cowardice amendment; Glenn Beck uses the power of analogy to argue against health-care reform; at some point in the past 20 years, conservative talking points eliminated hunger in America; Hoffmania is back in NY-23; and doesn't American journalism have enough problems without having to defend their decision to run columns from former Bush aides?

--Mori Dinauer

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, Marshall Auerback calls for government to step in as employer of last resort.

At 10.2 percent, unemployment is now at its highest level since 1983. Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though we are constantly being told that the worst recession since the Great Depression has officially ended. Yet instead of trying to revive the productive economy, most of the Obama administration’s recovery efforts still remain focused on cardio-shock treatment for Wall Street. The president still seems curiously hamstrung by his Herbert Hoover-like devotion to fiscal rectitude: he wants to spend but not add “one dime to the deficit,” as he announced at his congressional address on health care in September. He does this even though deficits are a natural consequence of slowing economic growth, falling tax revenues, and higher social welfare payments.

To all of the “Chicken Littles” (including the president), who fret about “excessive” government spending, we would simply point out that it is far better to deploy government spending in a way that reduces unemployment instead of settling for having it rise as a consequence of this spending.

We therefore suggest a new approach: Government as Employer of Last Resort (ELR). The U.S. government can proceed directly to zero unemployment by hiring all of the labor that cannot find private sector employment. Furthermore, by fixing the wage paid under this ELR program at a level that does not disrupt existing labor markets, i.e., a wage level close to the existing minimum wage, substantive price stability can be expected. A sizable benefits package should be provided, including vacation and sick leave, contributions to Social Security and, most important, health care benefits, providing scope for a bottom-up reform of the current patchwork health-care system.

More about the ELR program after the jump.

--Marshall Auerback

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator. MORE...

This week's TTR brings some surprising data about faith-based programs, some unpleasant facts about economic mobility and how to improve it, a simple solution to the problems of youth unemployment and poverty, and the challenges of getting an international clean energy agreement off the ground.

• Faith-Based Favor. New Pew Research Center data shows continued support for faith-based programs, with nearly 70 percent of Americans in favor of allowing churches and other religious organizations to apply for government dollars when providing social services. That's slightly down from 2001 -- when President Bush introduced his faith-based initiative -- but surprisingly, Democrats are now more supportive than Republicans: 77 percent to 66 percent. The survey notes that concerns remain about church-state relations, with three-quarters opposing government-funded organizations hiring only people with those specific beliefs. Additionally, not all religions received consistent support: more than half of respondents are against allowing Muslim mosques to apply for funds. -- MH
• Halting the Economic Backsliding. The Pew Economic Mobility Project has unveiled an ambitious road map to restore American prosperity, ranging from comprehensive investment and savings tutorials for underprivileged parents and students to early-life investment accounts automatically assigned to children. Today, 42 percent of Americans born into the bottom of the economic ladder remain there, a figure that exceeds many industrial nations by a factor of two. Women continue to lag behind men in upward mobility, while African Americans are more likely to fall from the middle class than whites. When almost 50 percent of black children born to middle class parents end up in lower income brackets compared to only 16 percent of white children, new approaches are necessary. -- MZ
• National Service to Combat the Recession. The Center for American Progress proposes a simple policy solution for two casualties of the Great Recession: unemployed youth and the growing number of Americans in poverty. The answer is to increase funding for national service programs such as AmeriCorps and VISTA so that young people can get job experience while helping those in need. For $1.5 billion, the government could create 100,000 jobs for young people in the next year. Additionally, such an investment in youth unemployment has long-term benefits, preparing both youth and the poor for jobs in a better economy while hastening recovery by increasing aid and employment. -- PL
• Leading the Race to the Bottom. The path to achieving a legally binding energy and emissions agreement in Copenhagen is littered with institutional and domestic roadblocks, reports the World Resources Institute. Several countries, including the United States, are expected to reject international compliance standards. Instead, the U.S. proposal is even less ambitious than the House ACES Bill, explicitly putting domestic law above multilateral enforcement, making international accounting standards and comparisons a waste of time. -- LL

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
11/10/09
11/3/09

Over at DCist, Sommer Mathis gives us the latest from the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, which was asked to consider whether a referendum on gay marriage would violate D.C.'s human-rights law by putting the civil rights of the LGBT community up to a vote. Like the question of whether recognition of gay marriage from other states should be subject to a referendum that the Board considered earlier this year, the answer was a no-brainer:

In an opinion released today, the Board made much the same argument that it did in a previous decision that barred a ballot initiative on the matter of recognizing same-sex marriages that are performed legally in other jurisdictions. In both decisions, the Board held that such initiatives do 'not present a proper subject of initiative because it would authorize discrimination prohibited under the Human Rights Act (“HRA”).'

The HRA of course, is part of the long game that D.C. LGBT rights activists have been playing. The 1970s-era human-rights law contains a provision, inserted by marriage-equality opponent Marion Barry, that the referendum process could never be used to "interfere with basic human and civil rights." Marriage is obviously one of those. At the time, the GLAA, a local LGBT rights group, lobbied hard to ensure that LGBTs would be among the protected groups named in the law -- meaning that when the National Organization for Marriage came to town with Bishop Harry Jackson as their front man, the battle had already mostly been won. That old line about one side playing chess and the other playing checkers? That's what this looks like.

With no referendum, and with a mostly Democratic Congress unlikely to interfere, and the D.C. City Council set to vote on a marriage equality bill in early December, marriage equality in D.C. is looking like more of a sure thing than health-care reform. After all the criticism of the black community we've seen in the past year over marriage equality, a majority black city is about to become among the first to recognize unions between same-sex couples.

-- A. Serwer

I've already written too much about Jim Wallis' apologia for the odious Stupak-Pitts amendment. Suffice it to say that if we were to take Wallis' argument seriously, we wouldn't need health-care reform at all: After all, the current system doesn't literally ban private insurance for people who can't afford it, so access must not be a problem, right? Still, this strawman demands a response:

But some of the most hysterical comments from the Left this week have suggested the problem is that progressive religious groups have been listened to by the Democratic Party; some members of the Left long for the good old days when their party was avowedly secular and properly hostile to religion and all this talk about those annoying moral values voters.

Truly a definitive example of this kind of argument. First of all, the "good old days" when the Democratic Party was "hostile to religion" don't exist. (When was this exactly -- when it was led by the Southern Baptist Bill Clinton? The Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter? For the decades in which its most influential member of Congress was the devout Roman Catholic Ted Kennedy? Help me out here.) Secondly, when you invoke "hysterical comments" indicating that people of faith need to be driven from the Democratic Party, you really need to name names and cite examples, or people can safely assume that your examples are either trivial or don't exist at all.

But most important, the debate over Stupak-Pitts isn't about the influence of religion -- it's about people who want to restrict access to abortion, whether motivated by religious or secular reasons. Democratic leaders who tried for a less restrictive amendment were seeking to protect the party's core values of equality for women and reproductive freedom, not trying to drive people of faith out of the party. This conflation of religious belief with reactionary social policies is both false and plays directly into Republican talking points. Just as it was people opposed to a women's right to choose -- not pro-choicers -- who introduced a cultural wedge issue that threatened to derail health-care reform, it's Wallis who wants to make this a debate about the Democratic Party being "avowedly secular."  And while I can understand Wallis' reluctance to defend his position on the merits, that's simply not the issue here.

--Scott Lemieux

President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese ... just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending.

This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cell-phone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many).

Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50 percent higher this year than last. Proctor & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at or near its current rate and the benefits of that growth trickle down to 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, the country would become the largest shopping bazaar in the history of the world. They'll be driving over a billion cars and will be the world's biggest purchasers of household electronics, clothing, appliances, and almost everything else produced on the planet.

So this will mean millions of American export jobs, right? No.

Why that's not the case, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

MORE...

Matthew Yglesias on what lowered expectations mean for climate change:

Barack Obama's concession on Sunday that the upcoming Copenhagen meeting on climate change will not result in a comprehensive climate deal is little more than an official acknowledgment of what everyone already suspected. Simply put, there's no time. The combination of the economic crisis, which sucked up an enormous amount of time at previous multilateral meetings and the exceedingly slow pace with which the U.S. Congress has moved to address health care made it, in practice, impossible to imagine an agreement emerging. Indeed, though the downgrading of Copenhagen makes for a bad headline, it counts as good news.

This is born out by the fact that neither environmental groups nor the Danish government is upset. Indeed, they'd been trying to accomplish precisely this lowering of expectations for a couple of months. The Danes would like, in essence, to host a conference that counts as a success. And greens recognize that high expectations would be counterproductive. The risk was that a "failed conference" would set off a downward spiral that derailed efforts to halt climate catastrophe. In the United States, the collapse of talks aimed at an international agreement would be yet another excuse for risk-averse senators to avoid voting for a tough climate bill. In the developing world, U.S. inaction would become another reason to avoid emissions reductions. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the next thing you know, the planet is boiling.

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Eric Kleefield looks at the results of a new Marist poll showing a narrow majority of New Yorkers like the idea of trying the alleged 9/11 plotters in the city:

"Do you think it is a good idea or a bad idea to have this trial located in New York City?" the poll asked. The answer is 45% good idea, 41% bad idea, with a ±4% margin of error.

Also, New Yorkers don't seem to be quite as frightened as the GOP about potential security problems:

One question does receive wider agreement, though: Whether New York City will be able to handle the potential security risks. Here 67% say they are confident, to 22% who are not confident.

Last night, Rep. John Shadegg asked Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supports trying the 9/11 suspects in New York, "How are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist?" You might have thought that Republicans asking the old Mike Dukakis question had gone out of style, but it clearly hasn't.

It's not like that can't be flipped around though. I wonder how opponents of trying terrorists in civilian court would react to being asked how they'd feel if their children were imprisoned without trial for years and tortured on suspicion of being a bad guy. Of course, some people are fine with unconstitutional government behavior as long as they're not on the receiving end. True tyranny is raising the top marginal tax rate to 39.2 percent.

-- A. Serwer

Alexandra Gutierrez reviews Michael Bérubé's new book The Left at War:

In June of 2002, a British university dissolved one of its smaller departments. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was shuttered, and students eager to research the culture of soccer hooliganism or the effect of teen-rag advice columns on adolescents' burgeoning sexuality were effectively cast adrift. Officials at the University of Birmingham cited low marks on research evaluations as reason for the closure. The Centre's defenders cried foul, speculating it was punishment for the department's history of radicalism. Nine months later, the United States would lead an invasion of Iraq, setting in motion a war still not yet over. Could the prevention of the former have helped stop the latter -- save the cultural theorists, save the world?

Liberal blogger and "dangerous" academic Michael Bérubé would like us to at least consider it. In The Left at War, Bérubé links progressives' inability to control the conversation on national security during the Bush administration to cultural studies' failure to deliver on its promise of a vibrant New Left. And in the process, he also tries to imagine a newer and better one -- a left that both knows what is worth fighting for and how to fight for it.

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"Hello, everybody. Don't mistake me for being an expert, because I've been here for three months. And I've come to the conclusion that "China expert" is kind of an oxymoron. And those who consider themselves to be China experts are kind of morons. So you take what you can, you learn what you can, and you begin to pull all the pieces together, and still it kind of remains sometimes a somewhat confused environment." -- U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, introducing a press briefing during Barack Obama's trip to China.

I've always had a bit of soft spot for Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah, and he seems to be maintaining his, hm, folksy charm? Look for more China blogging here later today ...

-- Tim Fernholz

The Washington Times Wes Pruden on President Barack Obama (via Thinkprogress):

It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

Kathleen Parker said pretty much the same thing during the election last year. I've already expressed my feelings on people who believe being "American" is a genetic exclusivity that belongs solely to whites, and I won't repeat those arguments here. I'll just note that it's still OK in 2009 to make the argument that white people are the only "true Americans" in major newspapers, even with a black man in the White House. No, especially because there's a black man in the White House. For some reason, suggesting that black people as a whole aren't really "American" is justified because it's seen as a personal attack on the president, rather than what it really is: soft white nationalism.

But hey, these days, you can drop n-bombs like loose change or refuse to marry interracial couples "for the children" and not be a racist. There are no racists in America, except for people who think that Americans of color should be entitled to the same rights as those with the white skin "blood impulse" of "real Americans."

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday on MSNBC, Sen. John Cornyn suggested that it would be safer to try 9/11 suspects in military commissions because -- I'm paraphrasing here -- you wouldn't have to worry about them "being released." He then added, without irony, that military commissions could "protect the rights of terrorists." Orwell lives: Under what circumstance is a procedurally assured conviction protecting the rights of the accused?

Look, Khalid Sheik Mohammed has confessed -- I have little doubt that he'll be convicted. The Obama administration wouldn't be bringing him to trial in civilian court if they thought there was a chance of his being let go. The same legal rationale that could have been used to hold him indefinitely will be used to hold him in case of an acquittal. As I reported a few months ago, because the U.S.has declared war against al-Qaeda -- and KSM is quite obviously a member of al-Qaeda -- they can claim legal authority to detain him even post-acquittal, until the end of hostilities, under the authority granted by the Authorization to Use Military Force. The Bush administration considered doing this briefly with Osama bin Laden's limo driver, Salim Hamdan; but because it makes a mockery of the American system of justice, they decided against it. But the options don't actually end there.

"They have three sources of authority that would allow him to detain [KSM], one of which is the AUMF, because it directly cites the 9/11 attacks in its language -- the people who planned the 9/11 attacks are combatants and are detainable under the AUMF," explains Ken Gude, a human-rights expert at the Center for American Progress. "Under the .000001 chance that they are acquitted, they will have that authority to detain them."

The attorney general could detain him as an "international terrorist" indefinitely, in renewable six-month periods, based on a provision in the PATRIOT Act. And if things really get desperate, they could detain him as someone who is in the United States illegally, pending deportation. Since no country is going to take a mass murdering terrorist, that detention will essentially be indefinite.

On the prospect of KSM being released, Gude shrugs, "It isn't even in the realm of possibility."

An acquittal would be a political disaster for the administration -- but there's really no way that KSM is getting away, because the government has at least three different ways to detain him indefinitely post-acquittal. It doesn't matter under what venue he's tried. That may make some of us feel safer, but it's also part of the reason why the ACLU's Jonathan Hafetz argues that U.S. detention policy is "essentially lawless."

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman explains that Obama's rhetorical skills do not make him omnipotent:

"We campaign in poetry. But when we're elected we're forced to govern in prose," said Mario Cuomo, then-governor of New York, in a 1985 speech. "And when we govern -- as distinguished from when we campaign -- we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It's here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality."

The man then hailed as the Democratic Party's greatest orator knew what he was talking about. And there is no doubt that the party's current lead orator, Barack Obama, has understood this truth all along. But those swept up in the oratory still seem to need occasional reminding of this reality. As health-care reform teeters between success and failure, the economy limps along, and more and more Americans wonder what we're doing in Afghanistan, the prose of governing is more than a little unsettling for some.

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Blanche Lincoln merits the profile treatment in the Post today, and boy, she is having trouble making up her mind about health care. We can talk about where she is on the facts (absent) -- "I would not support a solely government-funded public option," Lincoln says. "We can't afford that" -- as if anyone was suggesting the public option would be soley government funded and not a money-saver. But what's more interesting is that the GOP strategy is plain to see, and she is still happy to walk into the trap:

For GOP leaders, the best strategy for defeating the Senate bill is to sow doubts among vulnerable Democrats, convincing them that [Majority Leader] Reid is leading them off a political cliff.

"There's a great effort under way here to convince their members to ignore public opinion" on health-care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters last week. "I hope it will not be lost on our Democratic friends where the public is, how the public feels about this measure. They're speaking increasingly loudly that they do not think it ought to pass."

Given how easy it is to recognize McConnell's ploy, you'd think more moderates would see through it. Especially, in Lincoln's case, because public opinion remains split in Arkansas:

Recent polls suggest that reform is a difficult sell in Lincoln's home state. The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas's Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea. And respondents split about evenly on the question of whether reform would improve or hurt their quality of care.

"It's hard to draw firm conclusions," said Arkansas Poll Director Janine Parry. "People are dissatisfied, but they haven't signed on with an alternative." Lincoln, said Parry, appears to be "right with her constituents -- convinced that we need to do something, and not convinced it's this."

I would interpret those poll numbers a bit differently than Parry: The state is split because no one is offering any real leadership on the issue -- all of the Arkansas Democrats, who are mentioned in this profile, have been publicly waffling about health-care reform for months, and dropping lines like Lincoln's factually incorrect comments on the public option. Of course the public is unconvinced that this is a good alternative -- no one is explaining to them what health-care reform means. If Lincoln were to actually take a stand, she could move public opinion. But instead she'll waver and stumble, and her approval will drop, because voters don't generally want senators who waver and stumble. And instead of listening to her putative friends in the Democratic Party, she's going to trust McConnell's analysis right up until the GOP candidate beats her next year.

-- Tim Fernholz

• In light of the latest conservative freakout over diplomatic protocol and following the rule of law, here's a handy fill-in-the-blanks statement you can use for the next one: "I am shocked and appalled that this president would take the unprecedented step of _____ before ______ on his overseas trip to _____. This fits into a familiar pattern of the Obama administration, most recently seen at home in his decision to ______, which emboldens our enemies and further pushes America into a _____ state that would have been unrecognizable just ______ months ago."
• I've said it before and I'll say it again: no one ever won elected office running on "first principles," but this is the concept behind the latest Newt Gingrich-Michael Steele joint venture to take back Congress. I'm sure voters will be hotly discussing Burke and Disraeli and the media will be be debating the importance of virtue and prudence while high-profile conservative-moderate civil wars engulf the GOP in Florida and California, and tea party protesters ponder the value of burning members of Congress in effigy. Welcome to 2010.
• Matt Yglesias makes a good point on the importance of high per-capita income toward being a great power in the world, but it's more than PPP. After all, Luxembourg is in the top three of the lists he links to, but certainly we don't consider it to be a great power and that's because of population. It's the fact that the United States has a relatively wealthy population AND 300 million people AND the ability to effectively mobilize its people and resources that makes it the preeminent power in the world. China only has two of those three characteristics, and could end up losing the third if the CCP loses its grip on power.
• Weekend Remainders: It appears that Bart Stupak is that rare combination of incompetent legislator and moral monster that is the pride of the Democratic caucus; Republicans are shocked that there's a backlash against their vote against legislation that would protect rape victims; the former mayor of New York lost his mind on 9/11, and it never came back; the White House calls out the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; in addition to providing abortions until recently, the RNC health plan also provides end-of-life (A.K.A. "death panels") counseling; and what is it with aging Washington columnists pining for George W. Bush's "leadership" style?

--Mori Dinauer

Window Media, the nation's largest owner of gay newspapers, shut its doors today bringing D.C.'s local gay newspaper The Washington Blade as well as four others down with it.

The Washington Blade, you could say, was the New York Times of LGBT news. It was the second-largest gay newspaper by circulation (beside Gay City News) and covered national issues as well as local D.C. politics. It was widely recognized for its reporting on the AIDS crisis and the marriage fight and has served as a bulletin board for local events, including political rallies. Most obviously, gay D.C. residents will be less informed about issues that affect them without the Blade -- and less likely to be drawn to activism, which is no small blow for groups that are already underrepresented in politics anyway.

I regularly wrote for the New York Blade, its sister publication, until it shuttered its operations in July. Whenever I had an idea I thought would be too "gay" for mainstream media, or when I wanted to write about a certain politician's gay-rights record, I went to the NY Blade.

Much has been made of local city papers like the Rocky Mountain News closing their doors, but if anything, the disappearance of publications that cater to minorities -- the "ethnic" or "minority" media -- is even more troubling. Papers like the Blade not only provide a voice to dispossessed groups, they're how a community talks to itself – and sounds the alarm when there's a threat. Next time a D.C. police officer roughs up and arrests someone gay while calling him a "faggot," I question whether the Washington Post will immediately run to the scene. Who will?

--Gabriel Arana

Via Mike Crowley, I see that gossip columnist Lloyd Grove has a piece detailing all of the people that Barack Obama has supposedly "thrown under the bus" over the last year or so, with Grove implying that most of these people deserved better (Greg Craig, for one, did) and that this dastardly president of ours will do anything to further his ambitions. Except that the phrase he uses actually implies taking advantage of someone who is blameless. But why is Obama is responsible for Steve Rattner's pay-to-play scandal, the tax problems of his various withdrawn nominees, James Johnson's sweetheart mortgage deal, the federal investigation of Bill Richardson's campaign finances, Creigh Deeds' crappy gubernatorial campaign, Rick Wagoner running GM into the ground, Van Jones' decision to sign a Truther petition or David Paterson's inept job as governor?

Since Grove can't seem to think clearly, let me help: There is a difference between throwing someone under the bus -- letting them take the hit for a mistake you were complicit in, or using their loss to advance your own ambitions -- and declining to expend political capital defending someone who has made their own mistakes. In almost all of these cases, Obama and his staff declined to waste time fighting on behalf of people who made mistakes before they even worked with or for him. Loyalty is important, of course, but it can be pernicious, as we saw in the Bush administration. Obama, like all politicians, has been known to be politically expedient, and he ought to be reprimanded when he does so in violation of his stated principles. But Grove's decision to attribute so many people's mistakes to Obama is inexplicable.Then again, Grove's job is to gin up scandals.

-- Tim Fernholz

Crack reporter Dave Weigel is surprised by news that Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, son of Vice President Joe Biden and putative Senate candidate, has suddenly jumped into a five-point lead over Delaware Representative Mike Castle, the popular moderate Republican who is the state's only representative to the House. Delaware is a blue state, with a seven-point advantage for Democrats, and Castle is in trouble in part because of "negative publicity [Castle] received in the state after casting a ‘no’ vote for President Obama’s health care reform bill in the U.S. Congress.” Castle also voted against the stimulus and for the Stupak-Pitts amendment.

It's not that surprising, though. Castle was/is considered a very strong contender for the vice president's old Senate seat, but he's only popular in Delaware so long as he is a moderate Republican. Now that he's joined the rest of the House Republicans in opposing President Obama's agenda, his moderation has to be called into question. At some point, the Republican leadership is going to have to ask themselves what forcing their entire caucus to vote against each major Obama agenda item is getting them. Voters are already pretty clear that Republicans oppose the Democrats' vision, but when GOP leaders turn every vote into a litmus test for the moderate members of their caucus, it's going to have electoral results that end with fewer Republicans in office. Those votes don't really help Castle on the right, either -- the usual crowd is already lambasting Castle for his moderate reputation, and, of course, there is a conservative primary challenger.

It should go without saying, but the usual poll caveats apply for an election set to take place a year from now.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment,TAP's own Dean Baker argues for a work-share program that would save 5 million jobs.

The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent and virtually certain to rise even higher in the months ahead. Even with the prospect of extended benefits, unemployment is still a crisis for the families affected, as they struggle to pay their mortgage or rent and cover other essential expenses. Millions will end up falling behind, losing their home — in some cases leading to homelessness and/or family break-ups.

Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 to shorten their workers’ hours while leaving their pay unchanged. The reduction in hours can take the form of paid sick days, paid family leave, shorter workweeks or longer vacations. The employer can choose the method that is best for her workers and the workplace.

If take-home pay is left unchanged as a result of the credit, then demand should be left unchanged. If workers are putting in fewer hours and demand is unchanged, then employers will need to hire more workers.

This logic is as simple as it gets. The process is also quick and cheap. In principle, the government can go this route to save jobs at a cost of a bit more than $20,000 per job - far less than the cost per job saved through the stimulus package.

More after the jump.

--Dean Baker

MORE...

David Callahan on how one industrial city is leading the way in preparing all schoolchildren to succeed in college:

The debate over what it takes to get low-income kids ready for college, and then to actually earn a degree, has long been polarized. Some argue that better schools alone can ensure that such students are ready to enter and finish college. Others see this view as naive, pointing to the many socioeconomic obstacles facing low-income kids along with the high costs of college.

Who's right in this debate? Both sides. Or at least that is the premise of one of the most ambitious experiments now under way in urban education.

This September, in the battered upstate New York city of Syracuse -- the very picture of postindustrial decline -- every student, from kindergarten through 12th grade, was made a tantalizing promise: Complete high school with decent grades, and you'll be guaranteed a college scholarship.

KEEP READING ...

David Ignatius writes a column about how Chris Dodd's financial regulation plan is attacking the Fed's political independence, but mostly it just shows that Ignatius doesn't understand the Fed -- he seems to be confusing its role as a bank regulator with its job setting monetary policy, and doesn't seem to even understand the need for financial regulatory reform. As Kevin Drum correctly points out, none of what Dodd is suggesting would endanger the Fed's independence; in fact, Dodd's plan would make the Fed more independent by lessening the influence of major banks on the institution. Now, unless you are pretending that the financial industry doesn't have political interests, it seems pretty obvious that this is, as Drum observes, making the Fed a more independent institution.

The bigger problem here is that Ignatius is arguing in favor of the status quo not because he thinks it's good, but because he can't seem to tell the difference between Goldbug Fed Bashers of the libertarian ilk and people like Dodd and Barney Frank who want a financial system that doesn't need to be reset with billions of dollars of public money every few years. Ignatius starts throwing out words like "Fed basher" and "neopopulist" as if Dodd was either of those things -- despite his political interests, he's not -- and as if the history of the Fed's influence on the financial industry began sometime during the summer of 2008, and not before, when the Fed's regulatory supervision of both consumer lending and major financial institutions was an abysmal failure. A reformed Fed ought to have a role in financial regulation, and Bernanke's actions during the crisis do deserve praise, but trying to paint the Fed's role in the financial sector over the last decade as positive is ridiculous.

Our noble columnist isn't even familiar with the broader outlines of the ongoing regulatory reform project, because he seems to think that the Fed is going to be solely responsible for being the lender of last resort in the future. In fact, both the House and the Senate are seating those powers in a systemic risk council or consolidated regulator. The Fed will play a role in either the council or need a good relationship with the super-regulator, but whatever the final reform structure is deals with his objections already. Ignatius seems to think that we should enshrine the same system we had during the financial crisis last year, when bailouts were basically the only option besides economic disaster. It's a good thing that the Fed bailed out the banks in that particular case, but it's not a normatively good idea -- why not improve the system so that regulators don't have to make choices between two bad options in the future?

-- Tim Fernholz

In light of Pfizer's decision to pull out of New London, ending an ugly saga of misguided corporate welfare, several commentators in this New York Times roundtable join any number of others in asserting that this proves that the Supreme Court's Kelo decision upholding New London's use of eminent domain was incorrect.

With the limited exception of Ilya Somin, however, you'll note that the Kelo critics are not making arguments about constitutional law. For example, Paul Bass 's argument that "Clarence Thomas was right" is very convincing about Thomas' arguments that New London was engaged in dumb public policy, but doesn't seem to realize that these arguments are insufficient to show that they were legally impermissible. The Bush administration's tax cuts were economically wasteful and were both influenced by and directly benefited powerful moneyed interests, but that doesn't make them unconstitutional.

There are, of course, serious constitutional arguments to be made on behalf of the unconstitutionality of New London's takings of property. But there were sound reasons for the Court's deference. The core of the takings clause is to ensure that people who have their property taken by eminent domain are compensated, not giving the courts the authority to second-guess decisions about when policies encouraging economic development constitute "public uses" of property and when they don't.

Moreover, the strongest basis for exercises of judicial review in interpreting vague constitutional provisions exists when the court is defending the rights of citizens who are greatly underrepresented in the political process. As the fact that more than 40 states have reformed their eminent domain policies in light of Kelo shows that this isn't the case -- in fact, the Court has been completely vindicated in its assumption that the legislative process could strike reasonable balances. A judicial ruling in favor of Kelo, by contrast, would have applied not just to this case but to future cases, driving up the cost of legitimate uses of eminent domain as well as stupid ones by encouraging more litigation.

At any rate, the final collapse of New London's economic development schemes is neither here nor there in terms of whether its use of eminent domain was constitutional. The fact that it was engaged in a misguided economic development plan doesn't show that it didn't have an economic development plan at all.

--Scott Lemieux

I was quite critical of conservatives who have reacted hysterically to the trial of the 9/11 suspects, but it's important to point out that there are some conservatives who are doing just the opposite. Sam Stein reports that the conservative Constitution Project has put out a joint statement with Human Rights First supporting Obama's decision to prosecute in civilian courts, opposing indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, and advocating for an approach that will "preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition." The signatories include Grover Norquist, David Keene, and Bob Barr.

We, the undersigned, urge Congress and the President to support a policy for detention, treatment and trial of suspected terrorists that is consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and constitutional principles. As it moves to close Guantanamo and develop policies for handling terrorism suspects going forward, the government should rely upon our established, traditional system of justice. We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries.

For what it's worth, the above is a very small-c "conservative" statement--deferential to tradition, opposed to inventing new institutions to replace old ones that work.

-- A. Serwer

Dana Goldstein on the White House's "newer is better" approach to problems:

Every single one of you has something you're good at," President Barack Obama told children in his Sept. 8 back-to-school address. He went on to list future occupations toward which students could strive -- doctor, teacher, police officer, architect, lawyer. Also included in that list was a career option no previous president had ever named: innovator.

Indeed, the Obama administration has been promoting "innovation" to anyone who will listen. The stimulus package includes more than $100 billion for innovation efforts across fields as diverse as school reform, energy research, health care, and poverty alleviation. In July, first lady Michelle Obama spoke at two "innovation events" honoring architects and product designers. On Sept. 21, the president delivered a speech at Hudson Valley Community College in upstate New York on how innovation can create jobs. A search of WhiteHouse.gov turned up 531 documents mentioning the term.

KEEP READING ...

I doubt anyone will be particularly surprised that the Chamber of Commerce is investing in some predetermined research, but seeing the actual e-mail really makes the whole thing seem quite brazen:

The e-mail, written by the Chamber's senior health policy manager and obtained by The Washington Post, proposes spending $50,000 to hire a "respected economist" to study the impact of health-care legislation, which is expected to come to the Senate floor this week, would have on jobs and the economy.

Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."

I wonder how many "respected economists" will sign on to this letter now that the cat is out of the bag. Since lobbyists will always do whatever they can to influence legislation, one welcome trend of late is seeing their stooges get embarrassed, since that may make it harder for these interests to recruit supposedly legitimate spokespeople for their misleading reports. The last time this happened, when PriceWaterhouseCoopers did a fishy study for America's Health Insurance Plans, PWC looked just as foolish as AHIP when the report was quickly discredited. Let that be a warning to any researcher or business tempted by Mammon to fudge the facts about public policy -- your own reputation is also on the line.

-- Tim Fernholz

On Friday, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates used his newly granted authority to exempt photos of detainee abuse from Freedom of Information Act requests to block the release of several photographs that are the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the ACLU. The White House-supported amendment granting the secretary of defense this authority was added to the Homeland Security Appropriations bill by Sen. Joe Lieberman.

I've been reluctant to blame the Obama administration for the Bush administration's failings. But the Obama administration, while making some laudable moves in the direction of transparency on some matters -- and behaving in a virtually indistinguishable manner in others -- has nevertheless, in many instances, taken on the responsibility of covering up the wrongdoing of his predecessor, whether it's through blocking judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition or now, censoring photos of detainee abuse. As that New York Times editorial from a few weeks ago noted, this is now "Barack Obama's coverup."

The stated reason for blocking these photographs is to protect American troops abroad from a backlash. Frankly, I'm not sure suppressing these photos makes American troops any more safe than they can be expected to be in two war zones -- but even if that's the case, I think allowing the government to cover up its own wrongdoing sets a terrible precedent.

What suppressing the photos probably also does is help prevent the kind of widespread public reaction to torture that we saw following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. It's one thing to hear about torture in the abstract; it's another to see its effects visually. By suppressing the photographs, the White House is also circumventing potential criticism of its decision to seek as little accountability as possible for the behavior the pictures portray.

In China today, the president, discussing China's practice of Internet censorship, described himself as "a big supporter of non-censorship." Obviously not true across the board.

-- A. Serwer

Over the past few days, two men who have spent their careers in the American justice system committed their considerable public status to the idea that the system is useless against terrorism. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey all but predicted that New York would suffer a terrorist attack as a result of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the alleged 9/11 conspirators being transferred there for trial. Meanwhile, New York Mayor and former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani suggested we should try KSM by military commission. On Friday, Giuliani appeared on FOX News and said (via Nexis):

There are going to be military tribunals for other terrorists. Why wouldn't you have military tribunals for this terrorist? And of course it's going to create more security concerns. Just wait and see how much money New York City spends on this in order to protect him.

And finally, we're kind of granting his wish. His wish was to be brought to New York. It really makes no sense to me to be granting him his wish. He should be tried in a military tribunal. He is a war criminal. This was an act of war.

We made this mistake once before in 1993. We didn't read the intentions correctly. And then we ended up with three more attacks on American soldiers and the attack of September 11th.

That's quite the insinuation.

But let's take Giuliani's suggestion about "military tribunals" seriously. In the time between the Bush military commissions were proposed and implemented and the Obama administration came into office and suspended them, the commissions tried three terrorism cases.

According to Human Rights Watch, the civilian courts tried 145.

Human Rights First examined the government's success rate in trying terrorism cases in civilian court and found the government had a 91 percent success rate, with the government managing to get those acquitted in the remaining 9 percent imprisoned on lesser charges after the fact. That's a track record so good it should make us question whether the system is working properly on behalf of the defendants. 

Back in the 1990s, following the trial of the first World Trade Center bombers, Giuliani said, “I think it shows you put terrorism on one side, you put our legal system on the other, and our legal system comes out ahead.” Well, that's the kind of thing that you would expect a former federal prosecutor to say. But in this case, conservatives -- even those who have worked in the American justice system their entire lives -- have decided that the system no longer works, either out of an irrational fear of terrorism or because they all think denigrating the established institutions of American democracy is worth scoring a few partisan points on the president.

One of the most important and fundamental insights of conservatism, it seems to me, is the idea that you don't throw existing institutions in the trash -- especially not if they're working -- just to try something new. Well, the Bush administration tried to do just that. They tried to reinvent the wheel with "military commissions" that would reverse engineer convictions while giving the illusion of due process. Because their commissions didn't pass constitutional muster, they were all but useless in trying terrorism suspects. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system functioned properly and efficiently.

We'll have to wait and see if the Obama administration version works any better. But choosing to try KSM and the alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian courts seems to me as less of a gamble than trying to do it by military commission.

Glenn Greenwald wrote over the weekend that the hysteria over KSM is the textbook definition of "surrendering to terrorism." I think it's actually worse than that. The United States will never be invaded and defeated by al-Qaeda. The only way al-Qaeda wins is by manipulating Americans into destroying their own society in an effort to "protect" it.  It's why the founding fathers had the president swear an oath to defend the Constitution, rather than the people of the United States: They knew how the latter oath could be perverted into helping destroy the nation they were trying to build. 

-- A. Serwer