In seafaring news, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 in favor of ratifying the Law of the Sea today, moving the treaty out of committee and onto the Senate floor. There it will need to win two-thirds approval for the United States to officially join the more than 150 other nations. The last whip count I heard put the number of senators in favor of ratifying the treaty at around 70. The U.S. might well join the rest of the world on a major international accord by the end of the November.
In other news, in celebration of Halloween, Chuck Hagel came to today's Foreign Relations Committee dressed as someone surely terrifying to his fellow Republicans: Joe Biden.
The New York Times put together a fumbling attempt at a gotcha piece yesterday, trying to peg Barack Obama as either a liar or entirely too forgetful. The story's argument seems to be that because he doesn't talk much about living in New York or about his college experiences overall, he must be hiding something. However, Obama does spend a good deal of his memoir discussing his first two years at Occidental College. He just doesn't talk about his time at Columbia much, which I'd wager is a move to counteract the impression that he's just another Ivy Leaguer political insider -- not an attempt to hide some big secret. After all, he's been pretty up front about some potentially scandalous details from his past, noting his cocaine and marijuana use offhandedly and recounting stories that most other politicians would rather not have brought to light.
The article is especially odd because a lot more is known about Obama's early days than those of many other candidates. Everyone knows Hillary Clinton was head of the Young Republicans in her college days at Wellesley, but that hasn't become much of an issue. Nor should it. What the candidates did in college (and in the few years immediately thereafter) is generally unimportant and uninteresting, and it's a distraction from policy discussion and evaluation of everything they've accomplished in their adult and political lives. Sam brought up the question of whether candidates' marriages matter earlier this week, so I throw this one out there: Do candidates' undergrad years matter?
Man, I need to get back to reading The Spine. Marty Peretzreally accused Archbishop Desmond Tutu of demonstrating his "characteristic sneer?" This guy!? I'm not even sure Tutu's face has a sneer setting...
Hillaryclarifies: She does support Gov. Spitzer's (potentially unworkable) plan to issue three different classes of driver's licenses in New York, including one for undocumented immigrants.
Also, she's earned the AFSCME endorsement. From over the cubicle walls, Ann comments, "That's so big in Iowa."
"Archbishop Desmond Tutu preached in Boston on Saturday "in a lengthy and emotional address to a packed Old South Church," according to Sunday's Globe. And what did he preach about? The same topic he's always preaching about these days: the evil the Jews are inflicting on the Palestinians. You wonder why a South African cleric of the Anglican Church is fixated on Israel, or at least I wonder. It could be for the same reason that many Christian clerics have always found reason to damn the Jews.
With his characteristic sneer he actually threatened Israel -- and not just the State but the whole People. 'Remembering what happened to you in Egypt and much more recently in Germany -- remember and act accordingly.'"
This is, quite simply, libelous. I was present at Old South Church on Saturday, and without getting too deep into some of the issues I'm hoping to deal with in an upcoming article relating to the event, I'll just say that the idea that Desmond Tutu, one of the great moral tutors of our age, a man who has dedicated himself to non-violence and reconciliation, at real and repeated risk to his own life, would "threaten" Israel with violence (From the pulpit of a church! With a characteristic sneer!) simply beggars the imagination. More to the point: It didn't happen.
Here is the text of Tutu's address. There is simply no way that any reasonable person could interpret his words as anything other than what he intended: A call for people of all faiths, including Jews (whom he refers to as "my spiritual relatives"), to be true to what Tutu believes is Judaism's prophetic and ethical heritage, which Tutu also explicitly claims as his own heritage, and support the end of Israel's brutal and illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories.
For this, Marty Peretz implies that Tutu is a Jew-hater, and shamefully (if Peretz had any) attempts to tie him to the blood-libels of European anti-Semitism. What a strange moral universe Peretz has created for himself. It's reprehensible that he seems to throw accusations like this around with about as much thought as he gives to breathing.
Last night, Democratic candidates for president gathered for the seventh debate. There are more debates in this election season than I'm pretty sure ever before -- and it's only (almost) November. Still, the debates don't really seem to be productive. Paul WaldmanattacksTim Russert as a moderator, and I think he's mainly right, but to me, the real problem is that as much as we like to think that debates are where candidates hash out issues and prove to us who is the better candidate, they are mainly just pieces of political theater.
People who already like a candidate won't be dissuaded from supporting him or her because of the debate. Everyone likes to use the infamous example of the Kennedy/Nixon debate in 1960. It is largely billed as the moment that Kennedy seized the election for Democrats. Modern debates, however, are lacking. We hear second-tier candidates attack the frontrunner. We hear Obama, perpetually in second place, repeat his mantra of opposing the war before it was cool, and we see the moderators trying to ask "gotcha" questions to win points for, well, themselves. Candidates still don't answer questions they don't want to answer, and seven debates -- or 700 debates -- won't change that.
On principle I'm excited to see that candidates are willing to get in the same room, but ultimately, debates are kinda boring and don't give us any new information. They don't really tell me which candidate will best advocate (instead, their records will) for me or which candidate will have most popular appeal (instead, polling will do that). In fact, they seem to be nothing but stage acts to give us horserace writers something to write about. I'm not sure what the solution is, any ideas folks?
Molly Ivors does a good job with the latest bit of vacuous misogyny from Maureen Dowd, whose presence on a major op-ed page remains and will always be an absolute disgrace. A couple more points are worth emphasizing. First, none of this has the slightest shred of substantive significance; the idea (also now being propounded by Slate) that pop-psych anecdotes about people's marriages tell us anything interesting about a presidential candidate's performance is nothing but a cover for journalists who prefer lazy gossip to actually doing their jobs. The second is that Dowd, as always, doesn't seem to understand feminism. Not only is feminism (to use Jessica Valenti's line) not Maureen Dowd's dating service, most intelligent feminists understand that feminism does not provide any single answer to the question "what should you do if your husband gets a blowjob from somebody else?" Some feminists are in open marriages. Some forgive adultery as anybody in a long-term relationship has to forgive some mistakes. Some will find it intolerable and leave. Feminism is a way of evaluating a relationship, not (leaving aside violence, etc.) a set of one-size-fits-all answers about how to deal with every situation. And finally, it should be obvious (and this is the biggest reason why such analysis is so useless) that Clinton would have been condemned no matter what she did. If she had left her husband, she would be a cold man-hating shrew with no respect for the institution of marriage; since she stayed with her husband, she's somehow an ambitious schemer who is betraying feminism (which is not betrayed, apparently, by sexist smears on her candidacy in the New York Times.) She can't win.
There is one value to Dowd's column: it reminds us of the amount of sexism Clinton is going to be subject to in the general. If Clinton runs against Giuliani, you can bet the ranch that to Dowd, Matthews, Russert et al. the adultery of Clinton's husband will be a bigger issue than the actual adultery (and callous humiliation of his wife and children, etc.) of the Republican candidate.
Paul Waldmanexplains whyTim Russert is a terrible moderator for our presidential debates. He starts with the example of Russert's "favorite Bible verse" question from the Sept. 26 debate:
Russert's Bible question encapsulates everything wrong with him, and with our political coverage more generally. It seeks to make candidates look bad rather than finding out something important about them (if you want to explore a candidate's religious beliefs, you don't do it in pop-quiz form and give them just ten seconds to answer). It substitutes the personal anecdote for the policy position, the sound-bite for the substantive answer. It distills the debate into a series of allegedly symbolic, supposedly meaningful moments that can be replayed.
This type of debate question is not about what the candidate believes and would actually do in office, but about how clever the moderator is for cornering the candidate. And above all, it takes a genuinely relevant matter (a candidate's view of the universe) and crams it through a channel by which the thoughtful candidate will be pilloried and the shallow, pandering, overly rehearsed candidate will garner praise.
I have a fantasy that at one of these moments, a candidate will say, "You know what, Tim, I'm not going to answer that question. This is serious business. And you, sir, are a disgrace."
Anne Applebaumwrites that Dutch anti-Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is "possibly the greatest womens' rights activist of our generation." Seriously? Here's Hirsi Ali interviewed by Reason magazine recently:
Hirsi Ali: There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don’t all follow the rules of Islam, but there’s really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There’s nothing moderate about it.
Reason: So when even a hard-line critic of Islam such as Daniel Pipes says, “Radical Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution,” he’s wrong?
Hirsi Ali: He’s wrong. Sorry about that.
See the full interview for her explanation that we must militarily defeat all of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.
I agreed with Applebaum's original article. Governments should protect their citizens, wherever in the world they may be, if they're under the threat of political violence. But Hirsi Ali, whatever her personal experience, is a dangerous fanatic. She has, it's true, spoken out against the very real oppression of women in many Islamic societies (and suffered it herself) but she has done so in a way that merely alienates the kind of Muslims who stand to do something about the very problem she claims to want to fight. Just because she has the right enemies, she doesn't necessarily have the right ideas.
Dodd's rhetoric last night on driver's licenses being a "privilege" really ticked me off. Undocumented immigrants aren't unruly teenagers, they're adults trying to make a living and care for families. And thanks to America's man-made geography, for many people cars aren't a luxury, but a necessity for simply going to the supermarket, picking kids up at school, and getting to work. I'm not suggesting Hillary Clinton should have phrased her response exactly this way. But denying undocumented immigrants driver's licenses isn't going to stop them from driving -- they have to drive. Rather, it would make our roads more dangerous by increasing the number of drivers on them who haven't gone through the proper licensing procedures. Is this debate about safety, or about punishment?
Ezra, I don't think Obama specified which Rocky-Apollo fight he was referring to. Given that Obama identifies as Rocky, we can probably assume he means the fight Rocky won, in Rocky II. In any case, he wasn't referring to the outcome of the match, as much as to the hype around it, and how that sort of thing can distract from the important issues under discussion, or, to continue the Rocky analogy, from the rustic, unadorned beauty of two human beings beating each other to a permanently brain-damaged pulp.
In regard to Obama's use of the reference, I would offer that, despite being released all the way back in 1976, some awareness of the first Rocky, its plot, central characters and themes, and its contribution of the "training montage set to orchestral funk guitar solo" to the American filmic vocabulary, falls under the heading of "basic pop-cultural literacy." I am interested to hear others' opinions on this.
In his essay on today's New York Times op-ed page, scholar François Furstenberg makes a comparison between the "with-us-or-for-them" rhetoric of the Bush administration and the avec-nous-ou-contre-la-révolution parlance of the pro-war faction that emerged from among the winners of the French Revolution. (As we say in Jersey, pardon my French.)
The piece caught my eye because j'adore anything about the Enlightenment, even if it is a bit passé these days, what with chaos theory and waterboarding and people talking about inertia as if it's a bad thing. Among the so-last-era relics of the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution did warrant a mention or two in last night's Democratic debate. Alas, they came only from the mouth of Dennis Kucinich, the Clown Prince of Peace.
(Note to DK: Keep your UFO sightings to yourself. I'm sure Thomas Jefferson saw a thing or two in the sky in his day, but not even in his own, secret self-made version of the Bible did he mention it.)
To further follow up on Matt'spost and Spencer'sarticle, I'd like to bring us back to this post byMarc Lynch:
I was surprised at the consensus on our panel yesterday (among three people who have never discussed the issue before, and from much of a very knowledgeable and experienced audience based on post-session conversations) about where Iraq was heading: towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state.
As I've argued repeatedly, this is the most likely effect, intended or otherwise, of the Petraeus-Crocker tactics. The US is empowering local actors at the expense of the national level, while both communities are fragmenting at a remarkable rate. The Sunni side is divided among the various insurgency factions (their efforts at forming a Political Council notwithstanding), the various Awakenings (which are themselves internally divided, bickering over power and personalities), tribes and local leaders looking out for their own, and an al-Qaeda movement which peaked last fall when it launched its abortive and self-defeating bid for hegemony with its ill-fated Islamic State of Iraq project. On the Shia side, the UIA has fragmented, the Mahdi Army has fragmented (though reportedly Sadr has used the ceasefire period to try to sort things out), Badrists and Sadrists are fighting in the streeets, Sistani has lost influence and his aides are being murdered at an alarming rate, and as Jon Alterman has pointed out there are some 144 competing militias in Basra alone.
This kind of fragmentation might help the US in its tactical maneuvers at the local level, and buy local stability in the short term. But it is absolute anathema to any kind of national deal.
Indeed, which is why I can't even begin to share Spencer's optimism about Iraq's future. Spencer writes that "there's breathing room for negotiations," but I have to wonder who is supposed to be negotiating. The tribal strategy has not created two blocs in Iraq capable of negotiating with one another. Even if Shia rifts have healed (and it's unclear that's actually happened), US efforts have empowered local, not national or even regional, actors in the Sunni regions. This has reduced violence but, as Lynch points out, has also served to push any kind of national reconciliation into the distant future. We're engaged in anti-state building; it's difficult for me to imagine a strategy that could have been better designed to preclude the emergence of a strong central government. Moreover, given that a strong central government is the most likely precondition for an American withdrawal from Iraq, making such an entity impossible is virtually a guarantee that American troops will be in Iraq for the foreseeable future. That only 30-50 US soldiers will die per month rather than 80-100 is small consolation.
Several things from last night's debate stood out for me. One, I agree with Ezra that Hillary Clinton's answer on driver's licenses was on the right track, though she did try to tiptoe around directly supporting Elliot Spitzer's plan in New York. While others have criticized it, I think she gave a decent response to what was posed as a "gotcha" question. It would be hard – catastrophic even – for Clinton to come right out and say that she wants all illegal immigrants to have drivers' licenses. Her "It makes a lot of sense" response helped spin it to a way to point out the gross failures of immigration reform and the burden it puts on states and municipalities to deal with some very real problems. One of them is the drivers' license issue. She was right on target in pointing out the safety and identification concerns related to having millions of unlicensed drivers on the road, drivers who aren't familiar with driving laws here, who are afraid of the police, who are often unregistered and uninsured because they can't be without a license, and who lack basic identification to make it possible for police to prosecute them if/when they commit traffic offenses. Anyone who has lived in an area with a high volume of immigrants is familiar with these concerns, and it does "make a lot of sense" to try to come up with ways to address them in the absence of a federal plan.
Of course, Dodd's answer that a drivers' license "is a privilege" will appeal to many, as everyone expects there to be things that are available to citizens of the United States that aren't available to everyone else. But the problem is, regardless of who has that "privilege," people who are here illegally will be on the roads. Spitzer, and Clinton, are attempting to address that reality, at least until federal action fills the void. It's a pragmatic move, not ideological.
The other stand out last night was how poorly Richardson came off. His answers were bumbling and long-winded. It seems that he's trying to position himself for a vice-presidential spot at this point in the campaign, and if that's what he's going for, he should probably try to cut down on the rambling at these debates. He was also doing some serious sucking up to Clinton last night. "You know what I'm hearing here, I'm hearing this holier-than-thou attitude toward Senator Clinton," Richardson said at one point. "That is bothering me because it's pretty close to personal attacks that we don't need." He also urged everyone to "save the ammunition for the Republicans."
The Democratic Party has had some issues, to put it mildy, this year when it comes to keeping control over its own voting schedule. Last night's debate in Philadelphia showed that it's having some trouble keeping control over its debates as well. It actually does a disservice to Democratic voters when a moderator like Tim Russert becomes a debate participant and makes a show of only pressing one candidate severely. Part of the point of these debates is to show how the various candidates respond to pressure, and to learn about their thoughts on various issues. If only one candidate is being pressed about differences with other candidates, it is unfair to the voters who are also trying to evaluate the rest of the pack. For example, it would have been interesting and illuminating to have heard from John Edwards and Barack Obama on the Peru trade deal, given how hot a topic trade is in Iowa, and how they clearly disagree with each other on this issue -- and also since Hillary Clinton is still on the fence about the deal. But Peru didn't even come up, because the course of the debate questioning, at least in the first hour, was dictated by and echoed the course of various candidate attacks on Clinton over Social Security and Iran, and then a G.O.P. one on Obama, rather than by questions that would illuminate policy differences between any of the other candidates. After that, the questions were an odd-mix of open-ended softballs to the non-frontrunning candidates and attempts to press Clinton over things other members of the New York delegation support.
Additionally, it's unfair to some of the less well-financed candidates like Joe Biden when they get so little air time, especially at a moment when there's less of a polling gap between Biden -- or Bill Richardson -- and Edwards in the lead-off state than there is between Hillary Clinton and Edwards there. Edwards led Richardson by 8 percentage points in the most recent American Research Group poll of likely Iowa Caucus-goers (and Biden by 10) while Clinton led Edwards by 17 percentage points.
Overall, where early debates showcased the Democratic candidates in such a way that the entire field seemed strong, this was a debate that cast a negative light on them all. Clinton looked brittle, Obama looked unready for prime-time, and Edwards looked so impressively pugnacious that it was ultimately unattractive. And then the whole thing ended with a focus on Dennis Kucinich's claim to have seen a U.F.O. Only Biden came out of the debate looking better than when he went into it.
Here's the "Dodd Talk Clock" showing how much airtime each of the candidates got:
A recent study reported in the New York Times shows that suicide rates among veterans are the same as among civilians as long as they are receiving treatment for depression. There were some differences, though. While suicide rates among civilians typically peak later in life, veterans experience a peak between the ages of 18 to 24. Also, a previous study showed veterans are far more likely (80 percent versus 55 percent) to commit suicide with a gun.
The study only looked at veterans already receiving treatment for depression or post traumatic stress disorder. What this emphasizes is the need for veterans to have access to the Veterans Administration health care system (which Phillip Longman billed as "the best care anywhere"). As long as veterans get the proper treatment for depression or PTSD, they are at lower risk for suicide. The good thing is that such a complicated thing as the mental health of returning soldiers is under examination.
It's all but official: the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution for a prisoner in Mississippi, "and thus gave a nearly indisputable indication that a majority intends to block all executions until the court decides a lethal injection case from Kentucky next spring." Scalia and the man who put the doctrinaire conservative in "moderation" Sam Alito -- but not Thomas or Roberts -- dissented.
It seems almost certain, however, that this stay will be temporary and executions will resume after the case comes down next year. Although the possibility that we're torturing people to death strikes me as more substantial Eighth Amendment grounds than the recent limitations on the death penalty found by the Supreme Court, preventing the execution of adolescents and the mentally handicapped represents a relatively small number of cases, lethal injection involves virtually every execution in the country. I can't imagine Kennedy voting to require stringent standards of evidence from the states in this instance.
I was rooting for Barack Obama last night, I really was. I want this primary race to be a fight to the finish. But although Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy views were the hotly contested subjects of almost an hour of last night's debate, Obama seemed to sideline himself during the conversation as Edwards, Biden, and Dodd critiqued her judgment. Again Obama bragged about his early opposition to the Iraq war without naming names. Most disappointingly, I found his answers to many questions to be soporific, rambling, and tentative. I bit my lip a few times when he spoke -- he just seemed uncomfortable, especially when, like a boy talking to his teacher, he apologized for taking too much time in the lightning round. He had a few funny lines in response to stupid questions, like whether he believed in the afterlife ("I believe in life right here"). And he dealt well with a surprise question on what he'd be for Halloween: a two-faced Mitt Romney. But those moments were few and far between.
The Social Security conversation was terrible for him; Hillary was right to repeat that protecting benefits is more important than dealing with what Professor Obama termed the "actuarial gap." And why won't any candidate stand up to Tim Russert and say, "You know what, protecting Social Security against Bush's privatization scheme was a major accomplishment of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Democrats, and I intend to govern in that tradition?"
I've thought Hillary was the clear "winner" of the past Democratic debates. To me, the story from last night was less Clinton's ability to keep her cool under attack (although she mostly did) than Obama's failure to cast himself rhetorically as a leader among the rest of the field -- the one viable alternative.
More to the point, people forget this, but in the first movie, Rocky...lost. He got a title shot no one expected, did better than anyone could have imagined, but he lost the match. The triumph was in his very ability to go the distance.
A friend e-mailed with an explanation of the convoluted Rocky reference Obama made during the debate's opening moments. This led me to look it up on IMDB. The movie came out in 1976, which is about a decade before many of Obama's young supporters were born. It seems an odd choice of reference for a candidate pitching himself as the candidate of the future.
Mark my words: Chris Dodd's attack on Clinton for supporting "the privilege of a driver's liscence" for illegal immigrants, even though she said that's not, in fact, what she supports, is going to have legs. The issues of "privileges" for those who don't deserve them is a repeated Republican line of attack against Democrats who support rights for disenfranchised populations, and I was surprised to hear it coming from Dodd, of all people, as he's generally been to the left of the other senators.
The question here -- about foreign students attending schools for 13 more days per year than American students -- is inane, but the candidates are doing their best to use it as a jumping off point to talk substantively about education. Hillary and Edwards both give a plug to early childhood education, while Edwards is quite right here to revise his "two Americas" line in describing our education system, one for the affluent, and one for the poor.
Biden suggests making four years of education beyond high school mandatory.
Clinton: "A family is the child's first school." Great quote for the lightning round. But I've noticed that she's been a bit off her game during this, the final segment of the debate -- not because she's not articulate or clear, but because she's stopped smiling and seems tired or maybe a little exhausted by having been the focal point for the first two-thirds of the debate.
Edwards makes a nice -- and original -- point tying outsourcing of American jobs to the influx of poison Chinese toys. I haven't heard that argument before.
After the contentious Iran and Social Security debates, the retreat to wonkitude must come as a relief. Clinton supports "a crash program on weatherization." Bill Richardson name-checks the Apollo program. Chris Dodd thinks "the corporate carbon tax" is critical, despite the hardships it may cause.
Obama claims Clinton won't admit that on Social Security, there's "an actuarial gap that has to be dealt with." She's too afraid of adopting "Republican talking points" he says. She tries to rise above this, responding that there's isn't a great difference between her and Obama on Social Security, except that she articulates, again and again, that "fiscal responsibility" can't happen "on the backs" of the elderly or middle class. That seems like a good line to me.
Joe Biden says he's not running against Clinton, but to be the leader of the free world, then makes the toughest, most direct case against Rudy Giuliani by any candidate on the stage, while still managing to get in a few jokes and laughs from the audience. "This man is truly not qualified to be president," he concludes.
It's a very quiet audience tonight at Drexel University, but Joe Biden cracks them up: "Rudy Giuliani, he only uses three words in a sentence: A noun, a verb, and 9/11."
He also calls Giuliani the least qualified person to seek the White House since George W. Bush.
She's tougher than Rudy, more experienced than Obama, done more for poor folks than Edwards, and smarter than everybody. That's the subtext of her responses on Social Security and her vote for the Iran resolution. Biden and Dodd are making sense in taking her on about her Iran vote, but her tone and body language trump their pleas. My colleague, Dana, is right about Obama; the offensive stance does not become him. And though it may be sexist of me to notice, Hillary's somber suit -- a black pantsuit with brown accessories (including a pocket square) -- look like fightin' clothes to me.
OK, this is now everybody -- and I do mean everybody -- against Clinton. It makes her look brave for just standing there, this small determined woman being attacked by three men on either side of her, two male moderators, and the entire male Republican field. Each of the critics on his own would be more effective, but taken as whole, the optics of this are uncomfortable.
Obama, to his credit, is trying to make the pivot to talking about the G.O.P., too, but he's even less inspiring on the offensive than when he tries on the stump to talk about something other than himself. Edwards is just more polished on the attack -- the difference between a law professor and a trial lawyer.
Edwards says, "I believe in Santa Claus, i believe in the Tooth Fairy, but i don't believe that's going to happen." Hillary Clinton represents the "status quo," he continues, detailing the corporate sectors that have contributed to her campaign.
Obama implies that Democrats who supported the Iraq war in 2003 are "co-authors" of the disaster there. But he doesn't say who those folks are. Or if any of them are on stage with him.
So far, it's looking like the "Obama on the attack" meme was all hype. Edwards, on the other hand, is doing what he's done in all these events, talking about the "clear choice" between the candidates. He promises to end all combat operations in Iraq, and Clinton responds that she supports only a "very limited mission" of Special Operations forces to "engage" Al Qaeda in Iraq. She also wants American troops to continue to train Iraqi police.
Edwards is really kicking, quoting the New York Times explaining Hillary's Kyl-Lieberman vote as a shift from primary to "general election mode." He says, "Our responsibility as presidential candidates is to be in 'tell the truth mode' all the time. We should not be saying something different in the primary than in the general election."
Is media critique? He can be rambling and tentative, but he's quite cutting when he feels the question is stupid. In response to Tim Russert seeking "pledges" from the candidates to not "allow" Iran to produce a nuclear weapon, Obama snips, "All of us are committed to Iran not having nuclear weapons, so we could potentially short-circuit this."
Clinton explains her vote in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman bill naming the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization as simply a vote in favor of economic sanctions against Iran. She says, "I prefer vigorous diplomacy and I happen to think that economic sanctions are a part of diplomacy."
Chris Dodd takes the bait and criticizes her for not learning from the buildup to Iraq. Of Kyl-Lieberman he says, "That was a critical moment, and the wrong decision was made." Joe Biden suggests that because of that vote, the price of oil went up and President Bush was emboldened to use "World War III" language.
The moderator tonight is Brian Williams, and he began a few minutes ago by cutting right to the chase, asking Barack Obama to distinguish between himself and Hillary Clinton. Obama responded somewhat bumpily, painting himself as the underdog in a complicated Rocky metaphor that went, um, right over my head.
Hillary responds: "The Republicans must not have gotten the message that I'm like them."
Brian Williams wastes no time getting down to business, asking Barack Obama about his recent criticisms of Hillary Clinton. Obama responds nervously, with some sports story that neither I nor Dana got (go women's vote!) and making a stream of accusations against Clinton, including a slightly confused story about her Iraq war vote, when it sounded like he meant her Iran war vote. Clinton responds clearly and cleanly. John Edwards takes a more effective, or at least cleanly articulated, swipe next. Clinton parries deftly, going on the offensive against the president and ignoring the accusations against her in order to get her message out without looking like she's on the defensive.
Will Obama attack Hillary? Will the absence of Mike Gravel be a relief, or will we all get bored? What will Dennis Kucinich be wearing?
To find out answers to all of these pressing questions -- and more substantive stuff, too! -- come by TAPPED tonight at 9 p.m. EST. A few of us will be kicking around.
Following up on Spencer Ackerman's very good article, I think it's important to understand that, while President Bush will of course treat any good news from Iraq as a vindication of his own "steadfastness," the tribal revolt was unforeseen by anyone who took part in planning the surge, and essentially fell into our laps. Through their brutality, arrogance, and disrespect for Iraqi tribal customs, al-Qaeda apparently drove their former hosts to revolt. To General Petraeus' credit, he seems to have quickly grasped what was going on and used the resources given to him for the surge to exploit this development.
Dave Kilcullen posted an excellent summary of the events which led to the revolt, its significant positive effects, as well as some of the possible downsides:
"The negative implications are easy to state, but far-reaching. For one thing, we have spent the last four years carefully building up and supporting an Iraqi political system based on non-tribal institutions. Indeed, the Coalition Provisional Authority deliberately side-lined the tribes in 2003 in order to focus on building a “modern” democratic state in Iraq, which we equated with a non-tribal state. There were good reasons for this at the time, but we are now seeing the most significant political and security progress in years, via a structure outside the one we have been working so hard to create...In the Iraqi polity, tribes’ rights may end up playing a similar role to states’ rights in some other democracies. They will remain a competing power center to the religious political parties, and hence will probably never be popular with Baghdad politicians, but if correctly handled they have the potential to actually enhance pluralism in Iraq over the long-term, by restraining the excesses of any central government or sectarian faction."
"If correctly handled" is a very thin reed upon which to hang our hopes, but I do agree that events of the last few weeks give cause for (cautious, always) optimism.
I can't get away, though, from this grim thought: After four years of bungling by the Bush administration, after "Freedom is messy," after "Bring 'em on," after "Just a comma," after Fallujah, Samarra, after months and years of Iraqi streets choked with Iraqi bodies, we've allowed "success" in Iraq to be defined down so much that the prospect of a Shia-dominated, fundamentalist Islamic state closely allied with Iran but not in all-out civil war makes us wag our little tails.
Missouri Governor Matt Blunt has put an anti-choice group in charge of convening a task force in his name to investigate the "impact of abortion on women." Of course, every member of the task force is anti-choice. I'm sure this will be an "objective overview of the impact of abortion."
The forced-pregnancy movement uses tactics like this -- bullshit committees stacked with anti-choicers and testimony from biased "experts" -- to introduce inaccurate or slanted information about abortion into the public record, which can be used to prop up anti-choice legislation and legal decisions. So trust me, these task forces are a big deal.
As Sarah Blustain and Reva Siegelhave noted, this is exactly what happened in South Dakota. The 2005 task force on abortion was a major factor in the state's abortion ban (which voters overturned last year). State lawmakers used the biased "findings" (over which the only two pro-choice members of the task force quit in protest) to form the basis of the legislation that not only criminalized abortion, but used the "daddy knows best" language that's the hallmark of the anti-choice movement.
So don't you just love how the Associated Press says "Gov. Matt Blunt, an abortion opponent, has launched the state on a scientific quest to determine how abortions affect women," then goes on to use this quote:
“I certainly would begin with the presumption that abortion has a negative impact on Missouri children, Missouri women, Missouri men, because it’s harmful to society,” Blunt said.
Sure sounds like a "scientific quest" to me. Stay tuned for the task force's completely biased findings, and the terrible legislation that is likely to result.
The Guardianreports that officials fear that up to 20,000 UK soldiers have undiagnosed brain injuries. And the DoD says that up to 20 percent of American soldiers may suffer from "mild traumatic brain injuries." The reason this is such a problem is that soldiers are suffering injuries primarily from blasts, so even if they get checked over, minor bruising and blood clots in the brain may go undetected. This can cause symptoms long associated with post-traumatic stress disorder: anxiety, sleep loss, depression, and violence.
This is an interesting development. I've heard many experts say that often soldiers are unwilling to come forward to getting treated for PTSD because they view it as a weakness. There is still a lingering stigma about needing to visit a therapist, even if it's the result of a terrifying and extended situation such as stationed in a war zone. But now, with new developments in research, veterans may feel better about needing treatment for something that has a physical cause.
It's not every day I read something by someone who's work I respect that makes me question whether I should ever take anything they say seriously again. But this post by Megan McArdle qualifies. I should say, before I start in on it, that I'm not personally dead set against vouchers. I wouldn't implement them now myself, but I do think they could be part of a solution in certain circumstances. But Megan's argument almost makes me question that open-mindedness. Here she is on parents who sent their kids to private schools while opposing vouchers:
Vouchers don't work... this argument is incompatible with removing your own children from failing schools. Either the school makes a difference, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, why are you moving to the suburbs in search of a better school district for your kids?
What? Seriously? Lets think about this for a second. What could possibly make a parent who believes vouchers are a bad idea choose to send his or her kids to private school? Perhaps it's the fact that elite private schools spend way more per pupil than public schools because they can. If I'm a rich parent, I put my kid at a disadvantage when I put him or her in public school, not because private schools are somehow superior, but because enrolling him or her in private school allows me to pay for a higher level of education service. It doesn't follow that opposing vouchers makes me a hypocrite. I could support making funding for education more equal, but, since that isn't going to happen tomorrow, I'm not morally obligated to punish my child for the failings of our political system.
And how does McArdle respond to this? With a breathtakingly nasty bit of snark about the current system:
A private school doesn't need to be Groton in order to make it worthwhile sending needy kids there; it just needs to be better than the hell-hole they currently attend. And frankly, that's a really, really low bar. There are a lot of kids for whom a trip to Chuck E. Cheese would be safer and more educational than a day at their district school. I could just as easily turn around and use this argument to prove that we oughtn't to have public schools unless every last one can be Dallas's Talented and Gifted magnet school.
Essentially her argument is that public schools are so incredibly awful that anything, including not attending school, would be better. Remind me to tell my friends who work in urban public schools that they should instead of teaching tomorrow they should send their students off to the local fast food restaurant.
Her argument would be meaningful if she presented any evidence whatsoever that private schools that operate on public-school budgets (the vast majority) are AT ALL superior to public schools. But she doesn't because actual science (something she doesn't bother to bring into the discussion) shows that, as far as we know, this isn't true at all. A vast study released last year by the National Center for Educational Statistics (a government agency) looked at results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the longest-running and most widely respected way of assessing the overall achievement of students across the country, in Mathematics and Reading in 4th and 8th grade in public and private schools. Controlling for inputs (parents' education and such), public schools did better than private ones in 4th grade math, private schools did better in 8th grade reading and in the other two categories they preformed the same.
So no, to answer McArdle's question in a subsequent post, I wouldn't support vouchers if I had a kid in a public school if the only alternative I could afford with my voucher was a parochial school whose education was no better. Would she?
It's a strange thought to entertain while the Turks consider invading Iraqi Kurdistan, but November 2007 is could be a fairly auspicious moment for sectarian reconciliation in Iraq. I know, I know, vain hopes exist to be crushed, and Iraq is a vale of tears and all that, but maybe, just maybe … OK, to be less flippant: Shiites have started to unite as Sunnis have started to expand their power. By some measurements, violence has decreased. November 2007 is a moment to test whether progress on reconciliation is possible, or whether both sides are gearing up for a larger conflict.
Start with the Shiites, who are knitting back together their frayed internal politics. In late August, over 50 Shiite civilians were killed during a power struggle in the holy city of Karbala between Mahdi Army militiamen and government forces -- which, in that city, are largely dominated by militiamen from the Badr Organization, the Mahdi Army's fiercest Shiite rival. The ensuing chaos caused so much disgust among Shiites that Moqtada al-Sadr, fearing his political fortunes might be at risk, ordered the Mahdi Army to stand down for six months. Then, on October 7, something nearly unthinkable happened: Badr overlord Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), signed a truce with Sadr. Imagine 50 Cent appearing on Ja Rule's comeback album and you'll get a sense of the significance here.
Over at Campus Progress (full disclosure: they pay my salary), UC-Santa Barbara student Kristen Tuckerhighlights an army of young conservatives, more commonly known as the Young America's Foundation, who gathered for a weekend of Ronald Reagan-worship and some good old-fashioned Muslim-bashing at a seminar at the Gipper's ranch called "Radical Islam 101: Defining America’s Enemy & Developing A Strategy For Success." It's all in the wake of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, the David Horowitz-orchestrated press campaign.
Many people used to criticize liberals for looking back longingly on the Clinton years, but conservatives have one of their own in the White House. Certainly Bush champions the conservative cause far more than Reagan ever did, especially when it comes to the cultural agenda. And yet, Tucker reports, these young conservatives look back longingly on the Reagan years -- even though they are all too young to have experienced them -- and "resurrecting Reagan and his steely-eyed legacy as America’s only hope." Ah, the state of conservatism today.
Occasionally, you run into a story that so perfectly illustrates a vague concept that it seems unlikely to be actually real, even though it is. Today the political appointee in charge of consumer safety has come out against expanding protections for consumer safety, perfectly illustrating what Rick Perlsteinhas called E. coli conservatism:
On the eve of an important Senate committee meeting to consider the legislation, Nancy A. Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, has asked lawmakers in two letters not to approve the bulk of legislation that would increase the agency’s authority, double its budget and sharply increase its dwindling staff.
Ms. Nord opposes provisions that would increase the maximum penalties for safety violations and make it easier for the government to make public reports of faulty products, protect industry whistle-blowers and prosecute executives of companies that willfully violate laws.
Her position is even more radical than that of the manufacturers she regulates:
Manufacturers had agreed to another provision that would assign independent laboratories to test and certify the safety of products, rather than the agency. But Ms. Nord said she objected to the provision. She preferred that the agency determine the conditions for using independent laboratories.
Some of Ms. Nord’s complaints were similar to the ones that business groups and manufacturers have raised, including that the legislation would be unnecessarily burdensome. But in other areas, like whistle-blower protection, her complaints went beyond those of industry.
While companies generally have not objected to giving protection to whistle-blowers in the industries regulated by the commission, for example, she said it would “dramatically drain the limited resources of the commission, to the direct detriment of public safety.”
I shouldn't be surprised by this stuff anymore, but just when you think it can't get any crazier it does.
Over the weekend, Barack Obamaheld his gospel concert tour stop in Columbia, S.C., complete with "ex-gay" musical star Donnie McClurkin, an inclusion that raised questions about the senator's priorities when it comes to gaining supporters. As the Timesreports, McClurkin made a point to incorporate his anti-gay messages in the concert:
The whole controversy might have been forgotten in the swell of gospel sound except Mr. McClurkin turned the final half hour of the three-hour concert into a revival meeting about the lightning rod he has become for the Obama campaign.
He approached the subject gingerly at first. Then, just when the concert had seemed to reach its pitch and about to end, Mr. McClurkin returned to it with a full-blown plea: "Don’t call me a bigot or anti-gay when I have suffered the same feelings," he cried.
"God delivered me from homosexuality," he added. He then told the audience to believe the Bible over the blogs: "God is the only way." The crowd sang and clapped along in full support.
In order to fend off criticism of McClurkin's role in the tour, Obama put out a statement last week affirming his belief that "gays and lesbians are our brothers and sisters and should be provided the respect, dignity, and rights of all other citizens."
I strongly believe that African Americans and the LGBT community must stand together in the fight for equal rights. And so I strongly disagree with Reverend McClurkin’s views and will continue to fight for these rights as President of the United States to ensure that America is a country that spreads tolerance instead of division.
McClurkin's inclusion has drawn fire from the LGBT community, the Obama campaign letting him go unhinged for half and hour of the three-hour event surely sealed the deal. It's unclear whether any gains among black Christian voters will negate the loss in the LGBT community, but perhaps more importantly, the loss among Democrats in general. Not only did he invite someone who has made hatred a central part of his agenda to take part in his campaign, but they essentially gave him a giant platform to spread his message to the several-thousand people at the tour stop and everyone else in the country via the inevitable news coverage. Some have said it shows how big Obama wants his tent to be; others say it just indicates he hasn't quite figured out how to pitch one yet. But If he's serious about this campaign, this sort of gaffe is both unaffordable and entirely preventable. Rule of thumb: don't invite bigots to speak for your campaign.
It's a minor point, but Ann Friedman notes that Hillary Clinton's campaign has more women staffers because she "promotes lower-level staffers." She quotes Garance: "No other candidate can say, for example, that their campaign is being managed by their female former scheduler."
I don't know a lot about campaigns, but I know one thing: the scheduler is not, or should not be, a "low-level staffer." The scheduler is key. He or (usually) she controls the campaign's most important and finite asset: the candidate's time. Media buyers, "strategists," pollsters are a dime a dozen, and they all come with big egos and big price tags. A great scheduler, however, one who can balance all the political and personal obligations, and use the candidate's time in a savvy way that positively reinforces the message, is a brilliant and rare thing.
It is because schedulers are often women that it is considered a lower-level job, I think. There is a terrible disparity in political work, in which the pollsters and media buyers (usually men) make real money and own houses in Georgetown (sometimes more than one) and horse farms in Virginia, while others (researchers and schedulers, for example) work twice as hard for one tenth the pay. And are invisible.
I would modify Ann's point a bit to suggest that Clinton's strength is not just that she promotes people up from the "women's jobs," but understanding the importance of those jobs in the first place. As evidence, I would note that in 1992 she appointed an extremely high-powered and politically experienced friend -- Susan Thomases -- her scheduler, and that became one of the key positions in the whole Clinton operation. I suspect it's one reason why her campaign operation seems to run so effectively.
Count me among those who find Barack Obama's sudden burst of concern over Social Security to be a bit of an irritating pander. But more than that, it's a sign of the campaign's absence of options. No one really thinks "straight talk" on pension spending will win Obama the primary. Paul Tsongas tried that, and it failed then, too. Bob Kerrey tried something similar, and it was also unsuccessful. Offering to give people their medicine on fake entitlement crises isn't that impressive. And that's not even getting into the fact that if Obama were really concerned with spending, he wouldn't have proposed a health care plan without really meaningful cost control mechanisms. (Obama's plan, like that of the other Democrats, will help control costs down the road, but it doesn't, in the short-term, impose global budgets, large scale negotiations, massive cost sharing, or anything else that will hugely change spending growth. It's politically feasible, but not the "straight talk" he's basing this Social Security argument on.)
But Obama's out of differences. He failed to define Hillary Clinton on Iraq, and failed to offer a total withdrawal plan he could use to draw distinctions. He failed to come out with a health care plan even as ambitious as Hillary's and Edwards'. He failed to come out with a far-reaching tax plan that could undergird an economic policy. And since there's nothing tangible he can point to where he's the progressive and she's not -- and since she's been quite skilled at fuzzing her differences on Iraq and Iran -- he's got no case to make. The "I'm more honest about entitlement spending" is something of a final shot, though not a very strong one.
Some of this, to be sure, isn't Obama's fault. Clinton has run a really good campaign. The other day, I was trying to think of how, were I in a rival campaign, I'd try and attack it. And I came up with, basically, nothing. I know policy areas where I, using my secret-DC-decoder-ring, think she's weak, but not where I'd be able to make that case to the public. The amount of money she takes from lobbyists -- which Edwards gave a blistering speech about yesterday -- is the only vulnerability I could think of. Indeed, I sort of think Hillary isn't very vulnerable to anything but a massive attack, and that Obama is actually just hoping Edwards takes her out, as Gephardt did Dean in 2004.
In David D. Kirkpatrick's thoughtful piece in the most recent New York Times Magazine, he separates the threads of a tangled skein to give a glimpse of what's going on among the bewildered who populate the religious right. Younger evangelicals, he explains, care at least as much about the environment and the poor as they do about ending abortion and stopping gay marriage. Well, actually, they seem to be less concerned about the threat of liberated women and gay people than they are about the planet and its less fortunate denizens.
Kirkpatrick's piece offers some fascinating and incisive glimpses of the personalities involved in this apparent sea change. His interview of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a favorite of religious right rank-and-file but not of movement leaders, is particularly pointed. Huckabee implies it's his anti-poverty agenda that unnerves the movement's top men:
“Some of [the movement’s leaders] have spent too long in Washington. . . . I think they are going to have a hard time going out into the pews and saying tax policy is what Jesus is about, that he said, ‘Come unto me all you who are overtaxed and I will give you rest.’ ”
While the generational split among evangelicals has been a topic of discussion lately, the reasons why are only beginning to be explored. Kirkpatrick, citing John Green of the Pew Research Center cites the suburban upward mobility of evangelicals over the last two decades. Allow me to offer another: National Coming Out Day, an annual event sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) for more than 10 years. With so many queer folk now out of the closet, most people now know someone close to them who is gay, lesbian, bi, trans, whatever. And that makes all the difference in the world.
In 2004, 41 percent of donors to the John Kerry campaign were women, compared to 30 percent of Bush donors. But women are donating to Democrats at the highest rate ever in anticipation of the 2008 election. As the Dallas Morning Newsreports:
Of contributions over $200, half of the donors to Mrs. Clinton and 46 percent of those to Mr. Obama were from those with common female first names. Comparatively, 30 percent and 28 percent of the donors to Republican frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, respectively, were women.
Because many women are smaller givers -- less than $200 -- and those numbers were not part of the survey, the percentage of female donors for all campaigns is probably higher.
While the number of female donors has soared, men still are writing bigger checks. Even in the Clinton and Obama campaigns, men have given more money – 56 percent of the money raised.
Still, Clinton's record fundraising day was a few weeks ago when she raised $1.5 million at a Women's Summit here in Washington, D.C. As for John Edwards, 40 percent of his donors are female.
Stephen Emerson, arguing that the failure of U.S. prosecutors to convict the members of the Holy Land Foundation is actually proof that the members of Holy Land Foundation are guilty of the crimes with which they were charged:
"To be sure, the mistrial was portrayed as another in a series of setbacks for the government's anti-terror prosecution strategy. Notably, several jurors seemed to discount the testimony of an Israeli security expert, testifying under an assumed name, apparently on the belief that Israelis cannot be trusted on Palestinian matters."
Or, alternatively, on the belief that convicting Americans of supporting terrorism should require more than the word of an Israeli Shin Bet agent testifying under a pseudonym.
"Some jurors may even have bought the defense argument that anti-Israel terror isn't truly terrorism, but merely "resisting the occupation." One juror told the Dallas Morning News of his difficulty in describing Hamas as a terrorist group, stating, "Part of it does terrorist acts, but it's a political movement. It's an uprising."
The Dallas Morning Newsalso noted that the juror "has lived in Europe," which is probably where his "moral clarity" was muddied, and which also might explain his immunity to arguments that portray every act of resistance against Israel’s illegal occupation, including support for medical clinics, as “anti-Israel terror.”
"The indictment essentially conceded that the money HLF donated was used to build hospitals and aid the poor, yet it accused the charity and its officers and fund-raisers of aiding a terrorist organization by helping it spread its ideology and recruit members. Translation: Even those who support good works are guilty of terrorism if the good works make the terrorists look good.
[...]
One might hope that the government's utter failure to obtain even a single conviction in a 197-count indictment in a major terrorism case would prompt a re-evaluation of the evidence and the case—particularly after prosecutors have come up short in several other prosecutions. But the verdict in Texas is unlikely to provoke any prosecutorial second thoughts whatsoever. The truth is that when our sentencing schemes render partial acquittals virtually irrelevant, we've already done substantial damage to our criminal justice system and our essential notions of fairness."
Next time, the U.S. government won't make the same mistake: They're going to make darn sure that the jury is filled with dependable Gomers (remember to ask about any European travel!) who will be more receptive to the idea that feeding orphans is terrorism if the person ladling the soup has ever attended a Hamas rally.
Steve Benen and Digby are upset about Melinda Henneberger's new series on the marriages of presidential candidates. I don't disagree that reporters spend way too much time on this kind of stuff and way too little on the issues (though horse-race coverage is a much bigger problem), but I also don't believe we should completely ignore candidate's personalities. Benen and Digby make two basic arguments:
Since I don't think Melinda Henneberger can possibly know anything about the inner workings of the candidates' marriages and I don't think their most intimate relationship would tell me anything particularly relevant about what kind of president they would be anyway, this doesn't interest me.
That's Digby, but it also covers Benen's objections. There are two separate arguments here that need to be untangled. First the claim that there's no way for a reporter to ever know anything about a candidate's marriage. This is deeply unconvincing. Henneberger's first piece is on the Obamas and, while it could certainly be wrong, it draws upon an impressive variety of sources all of whom seem to present the same basic picture of the relationship. Sure, they don't know everything and it is of course possible that the Obamas are fooling us all, but that's real life. We don't have perfect information about what Obama would do about trade policy either, but we make do with the information we have. Life is full of noisy information. Deal with it.
The second argument is more complicated. Even if we know about a candidate's marriage, should we care? I say we should, though of course it's only one part of a decision. Let's say there were two candidates in a primary whose policy positions were broadly similar except one thought we should raise funding for education by 5 percent and the other argued for 6 percent. Let's say further that the 6 percenter had, say, informed his wife on national television that he was divorcing her and the other had a warm and equal relationship with his first and current wife. Who would you vote for?
Even though I think education spending should be increased by more than 6 percent, I'd vote for the 5 percent guy because policy promises in campaigns have only a vague relationship to actual policy making since things like Congress and budgets tend to be involved as well. I'd like to know that the candidate I'm supporting is not a mean and unfeeling person because that gives me some confidence they're going to at least try to act ethically. Similarly, I'm a lot more confident in a man who treats his wife as an equal than I am in one who has a reputation as a chauvinist (of course a female candidate has a deserved advantage here). It's no guarantee, sure, and plenty of bad people have good marriages and vice versa. But the idea that it should play no part in my decision making-seems bizarre to me.
The basic point is that we have a bunch of poor sources of information about candidates and so we shouldn't reject any of them for being poor. Is there too much scrutiny of politicians' personal lives? Yes, at least relative to coverage of their policy proposals. But we shouldn't, in our frustration, go to the opposite extreme and reject that coverage entirely.
From the "How does he even take himself seriously?" files, Giuliani at a campaign stop in New Hampshire yesterday:
On Iran, Giuliani criticized Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., also a candidate for president, for saying they would engage in diplomatic relations with Iran. Obama has said he would be willing to meet with Iran's leader in the first year of his presidency without conditions; Clinton has said envoys below the presidential level should begin diplomatic work.
"This is the world we live in. It's not this happy, romantic-like world where we'll negotiate with this one, or we'll negotiate with that one and there will be no preconditions, and we'll invite (Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad to the White House, we'll invite Osama (bin Laden) to the White House," Giuliani said.
"Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite them to the inauguration or the inaugural ball," he added.
Ezrapoints to a Dani Rodrikpost lauding the news that worldwide, the gap between men's and women's educational achievement and workforce participation is closing, as it has in the United States. Rodrik writes:
This signals coming changes in the role of women in the family, the economy and in marriage. ... More couples will have a more educated wife whose income earning capacity will exceed that of their husbands. How this will change power relationships and family roles is a fascinating topic.
Although this is good news, I'm skeptical that family relations between men and women will change very much until women's incomes catch up with men's. As we've seen here in the U.S., the gender pay gap is stubborn -- even between men and women with the same level of educational achievement and the same number of years on the job. So we can't just look at women's workforce participation; we have to consider the status of the jobs they're doing and what they're getting paid. After all, across the world, power in relationships can be deeply affected by who is holding the purse strings.
Kate, Garance, Ezra, and Scott all have interesting takes on who the various presidential candidates are likely to pick as running mates. I have no special insights into the thought process of any particular candidate, but I do have opinions about what they should be thinking. Full disclosure: I spent a very brief time doing some work for Obama's campaign as a volunteer.
First off, I think the idea that while voters might be ready for a woman or a black man as a candidate they aren't ready for both is just wrong. In fact, I think that it makes more sense for Obama to pick a woman than for, say, John Edwards to do so. First, it reaches out to women who supported Clinton. Second, if voters are willing to vote for a black man it seems unlikely to me they'd decide not to because his running mate is a woman. Third, Obama has, I've thought for a long time, the perfect running mate in Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius. She's very popular in a red state, a leader on climate change and, most importantly, she reinforces his message about a new politics (which, whatever it's usefulness in the primaries, will be very important in a general election) because she's done an amazing job of winning over Republicans and transforming the political landscape of Kansas. We can argue about balancing vs. reinforcing vice presidents, but for a candidate whose campaign is so centered around a message about changing politics I think picking a VP obviously meant to bring with him a particular swing state would be disastrous.
Clinton, it's true, probably should pick a white guy from a swing state. Ohio Governor Ted Strickland seems to me the best pick. He's an ordained Methodist minister, the popular governor of the mother of all swing states, and a deeply likable person. I worked on a campaign in Ohio when he was a congressman and the respect people had for him was remarkable. For that matter, he'd be a great running mate for Obama too. Of course the big problem with Strickland is that he has only been governor for less than two years and seeking higher office might seem a bit unseemly.
After all, it’s not like there was some huge population of female strategists out there the various campaigns were competing for and Clinton just happened to snap them all up. Clinton created, on her own, a cadre of female strategists to serve her political needs, by spotting talent in the women around her and promoting them up the political food chain. No other candidate can say, for example, that their campaign is being managed by their female former scheduler.
This is one of the reasons I get so frustrated when I hear male editors say they're "really committed" to having more women writing and editing for their publication, while at the same time only cultivating lower-level male employees. I've heard older female editors say it took them years to realize that their male counterparts were being groomed by the older men in the office. It can be a very subtle, everyday kind of thing. So it's important to keep pointing out to people in positions of power (in business, in politics, in media, etc.) that the best way to achieve gender parity higher up the ladder is to develop the skills of women at the bottom and promote them -- not only to look for women to hire in at the top.
If you thought it was crazy when Hugo Chavez announced he wanted to limit legal Venezuelan names to a list of 100, strictly divided by gender, you'll be interested to know he's not alone: The Finnish government also maintains a list of legal names from which parents must choose, with no overlap between male and female varietals.
Here in the United States, we've had a tradition of name sex-changes over the past several decades. Male names in particular have been feminized; in the New York Times Magazine, Sam Keansuggests that might be because parents want their daughters to be as confident and strong as the stereotypical male, and not to feel limited by gender. Over time, male names embraced by parents of girls come to be understood as feminine. After generations of male "Shirelys" or "Ashleys," families cease passing on those names to their sons. The reverse doesn't happen; traditionally female names remain that way, suggesting that parents are reluctant to imbue their sons with feminine characteristics.
Names that have undergone a male-to-female sex change include Taylor, Kim, Peyton, Leslie, and even my own name. But after an initial period of androgyny, most American baby names are coded as clearly pink or blue.
This is an interesting discussion because it reveals just how little insight certain Republicans have into the thinking of the Democratic presidential candidates. It is the informed conventional wisdom of those who cover the campaigns that neither Clinton nor Obama will be seeking additional demographic diversity on their tickets, and instead will both most likely look for a white man from a swing state who can bring its electoral votes to the table with him. Hence, Dianne Feinstein would seem a highly unlikely pick for Obama. Safire's prediction that Clinton might choose Rahm Emanuel, while intriguing, would also seem unlikely, though in choosing him Clinton would gain a real brawler of a campaign partner -- something that's an absolute must for her.
Also, my understanding is that Wesley Clark would be an unlikely choice for Clinton, even though he's got the right sort of demographic background -- white, Southern, military, and from the potentially swingable (for a Clinton) state of Arkansas. His performance in 2004 has raised concerns about his skills and abilities as a campaigner that would need to be assuaged.
The names that come up most frequently in discussions of a possible Obama V.P. pick are Jim Webb and Mark Warner, two centrist Virginia Democrats from the one Southern state that's previously elected an African-American to the governor's mansion. Webb also has a military background. Marc Ambinder reported on the Obama-Warner possibility in June, and The Washington Post's report from yesterday morning on Webb's efforts to stand up to Clinton within the Senate provide intriguing hints of what may be efforts on Webb's part to prove himself a worthy partner for Obama. On the other hand, Webb has also co-sponsored legislation with Clinton, so he's hardly foreclosing his options.
As for Gen. David Petraeus, I'd be surprised if he tossed his hat into the ring before 2012, should he ultimately decide to do so.
UPDATE: A commenter says that Democratic Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is on Clinton's short list, as well. I don't know who the commenter is so can't assess the veracity of that claim, but he sure sounds like a good idea and, though he lacks the military connection, he'd otherwise fit the Clinton bill to a T.
Last week, the White House got caught making some "edits" to Center for Disease Control Director Julie Gerberding's testimony to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on the public health effects of climate change. Then White House Press Secretary Dana Perino tried to make it better somehow by highlighting the public health "benefits" of climate change. Today we learn by edits, they meant cutting 1,607 words -- more than half of her testimony. Essentially, they cut everything that actually focused on the public health effects of extreme weather, air pollution, diseases, strain on food and water resources, allergies, and other health effects. Kevin Grandia gives us the full, pre-edit testimony.
So while I whole-heartedly want to believe that Mark Goldberg is right, and that the Bush administration is softening its position on climate change, all signs point to the fact that they neither take the issue very seriously nor do they want to address the concerns related to global warming. Even if they are more willing to participate in the upcoming deliberations about a post-Kyoto climate change treaty, their actions don't seem to indicate that they'll have anything constructive to offer.
Holly Yeagerreports that early signs point to Democratic wins in Ohio's 2008 congressional races:
In the space of just two months, three Republican members of the state's House delegation -- Deborah Pryce, Ralph Regula and David Hobson -- announced that they would not seek re-election. (A fourth, Paul Gillmor, died in office; a special election to fill his seat is scheduled for December.) It was all enough to make Tom Cole, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, concede that Ohio is a "challenge state."
But the challenge for the GOP isn't limited to Ohio, even though it may be more pronounced here, and happening sooner. Around the rest of the country a total of 12 House Republicans have so far called it quits, and that number is sure to grow. One explanation is the simple, sad facts of life for House Republicans. "I don't like being in the minority," Illinois Rep. Ray LaHood, elected in the 1994 Republican takeover, told the Los Angeles Times. "It's not that much fun, and the prospects for the future don't look that good." He isn't running again.
Add to those open seats the unusual cash advantage the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee already has over Cole's NRCC, and you begin to get a sense of the real challenge Republicans face, not just in Ohio.
I'll play this greatest of all games. I think Clinton will go with Tom Vilsack, or possibly Wesley Clark. Obama should pick Kansas's Kathleen Sebelius, but given his relative newness in politics, it's hard to suss out whom he trusts enough to make a prediction. I wouldn't be surprised to see Edwards pick Evan Bayh, as they're quite close and a moderate midwesterner helps his supposed "electability." I agree that Giuliani might go military, though I wonder if Petraeus is truly craven enough to intervene in the 2008 election. More likely is that Giuliani goes Christian to dodge a third-party primary, choosing Brownback, Huckabee, or some other trusted theist. Romney will pick some other business-savvy executive type -- go down a list of recent, successful Republican governors and see who you end up with. Thompson will pick the Ghost of Ronald Reagan. The Constitution says nothing about vitality.
Reading Kate's rundown of potential VP candidates left my jaw on the floor more than once. As a strong Obama leaner, I was especially appalled. Seriously, Dianne Fienstein? First of all, on the merits she's awful, a wet on many issues even though she has a safe seat (cf. most recently her casting the decisive vote to let Southern-fried Bork Leslie Southwick onto the federal appeals court and her vote for an idiotic flag-burning amendment.) I could live with that if -- and this is the most important aspect of choosing the second member of a ticket -- she could bring a state along, but Feinstein of course comes from a state the Democrats will already win. What's the point? I like the idea of having a woman on the ticket, but he can do a lot better. Like Kate, I also don't understand Clinton "balancing" the ticket with another hawk from a state in which the Dems are a mortal lock.
Of course, this is from Bill Safire, so hopefully it has no basis in reality.
I only caught half of this yesterday while making brunch and listening to Meet the Press yesterday, but William Safire made some curious predictions about vice-presidential candidates. If Hillary Clinton wins the Dem nomination (and Safire seems certain she will), he's betting on Rahm Emanuel over Barack Obama and Bill Richardson. Says Safire:
He’s a hawk. And although he’s a rootin’ tootin’ liberal on domestic affairs, he is a hawk on foreign affairs. I was at the -- a roast for him for Epilepsy Association, and Hillary Clinton was there, and I said, quite frankly, here you have the hawkish side of the Democratic Party. If they get together, the bumper sticker will read "Invade and bomb with Hillary and Rahm."
My violent shuddering caused me to miss his next prediction, but the transcript is online today. If Obama wins, he's betting on Dianne Feinstein as the VP. No guesses on Edwards, though.
On the Republican side, he's betting Rudy Giuliani will go with Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney would choose Gen. David Petraeus, and John McCain would pick Condoleezza Rice.
If the Bush administration taught us one thing, it should be that the VP choice actually can make a difference when it comes to policy. I know it's early, but as they say, bet early and bet often. Predictions?
I've always been fascinated by Lyndon LaRouche, his abundant literature, and band of 20-something followers. Though I don't see many of them here in D.C., they were ubiquitous in Seattle, my last home. I've always wanted to write something on them, mostly because whenever one of the LaRouchies approaches me with a pile of pamphlets and asks if I want to help them impeach Cheney, I can't help but get a little sad for the loss of someone who might have been a progressive activist had they not decided to commit their life to singing in perfect pitch and convincing the world of a need for a trans-Atlantic railroad. What if all these kids were using their power for something constructive?
I never got around to writing about them, but here comes Avi Klein with a fascinating look at the demise of one of LaRouche's most faithful supporters, some of the history of the vanity press surrounding him, and plenty of bizarre background on a crazed weirdo and his followers in this month's Washington Monthly. Seems the LaRouche cult might be exterminated by the suicide of the printer who made all those pamphlets possible, and their fear of the internet. Oh, and their prodigious amount of crazy. Things have gotten so bad, LaRouche isn't even running for president this year – the first time in 32 years that he's not making an attempt. Though LaRouche isn't really relevant to politics in the real world, it's a captivating account of a movement that Klein finds "remarkable in its impotence."
Somali pirates have been more active of late, and have recently seized a Japanese-owned chemical tanker. Piracy off the Horn of Africa dropped precipitously in the six months preceding the Ethiopian invasion, but has (predictably) increased since. Piracy is a problem that is essentially driven by failed states; even in areas of multiple, overlapping, and generally confused sovereignty, navies can do a pretty good job of eradicating piracy when they commit themselves to the project. Piracy in the Straits of Malacca, for example, has fallen substantially from the highs it reached a few years ago, in no small part due to the efforts of Malaysia and Indonesia, facilitated by the United States Navy.
Jason Sigger of Armchair Generalist has been getting some good material from the Pentagon sponsored Blogger's Roundtable lately. The latest discussion regarded the establishment of AFRICOM, noting that the responsibilities of the new command were primarily going to be maritime for the immediate future. In a previous, related iteration Sigger got a chance to talk to Admiral Gary Roughead, who clarified some aspects of USN strategy. Both of the discussions shed light on precisely what the US military will be doing in and around Africa, and both are worth checking out.
That's the "d'oh!" message New Jersey gay couples are sending lawmakers on the one-year anniversary of civil unions in the state. Hundreds of people reported difficulty in obtaining for their partners shared benefits as basic as health insurance. The New York Timesreports:
Jodi Weiner, an electrician from Montclair, said that when she tried to get health benefits for her partner of nine years, she was told that her union’s plans did not cover civil unions. It was only when she mentioned that they had been married in Massachusetts that her partner was able to get benefits.
“The words ‘civil union’ were not good enough for Sally and me to get equality in New Jersey, but the word ‘marriage’ is,” she said at a hearing of the Civil Union Review Commission last month. “We can all talk about how the civil union law is supposed to work just like marriage. But in my case and others, it doesn’t work that way in the real world.”
"On one extreme of the debate over interrogating terrorists are the Jack Bauers, those who -- like the lead character in Fox’s hit series “24”-- think you do whatever it takes to get the information you need from someone plotting mass murder. At the other extreme is the anti-war left: They wouldn’t harm a hair on 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s head to save Disneyland at Christmas."
Leaving aside the question of why it might be more desirable to save Disneyland on Christmas ("Oh, it's only Arbor Day? Hmm...better get the sheikh some more hot cocoa."), I should point out, once again, that the real difference between the two groups May describes is that the former actually exists. May sets up these two extremes, one which supports the electrocution of genitals and the other which supports reiki massage, in a transparently bogus attempt to locate a "reasonable, waterboard-supporting middle" to which he and all other serious and thoughtful people belong.
Here’s former Master Instructor and Chief of Training at the US Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) Malcolm Nance, with a Small Wars Journal entry entitled ”Waterboarding is Torture…Period":
”With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture.
[…]
Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.
Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again.
"It has been widely reported that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding and, as a result, he surrendered intelligence that led to the foiling of terrorist plots and the saving of innocent lives. Do you regret that? Would you tell those sworn to protect and defend Americans never to do it again – accepting the consequences of that policy?
We won’t be able to answer such difficult questions unless the moral posturing and partisan maneuvering stop, and a serious debate begins."
What was "widely reported" were the Bush administration's claims that the torture of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad saved lives. Given that the "ticking time-bomb" scenario is purely an argumentative construct for the purpose of justifying torture (and for salving the consciences of people who support torture), and given the Bush gang's consistently strained relationship with the truth, as well as the utter lack of compunction they have shown over stoking Americans' worst fears for the slightest political advantage, I remain extremely skeptical.
In any case, I'd offer that the serious debate over torture has already begun. Malcolm Nance is a part of it. Cliff May is not. Until May and others quit playing rhetorical games around the waterboarding technique, until they recognize that waterboarding is, in fact, torture, and proceed from there, they won't be.
Norman Polmar has a nice post up at Defense Tech about the future of the aircraft carrier. The big deck carrier remains an extremely powerful platform, but is also remarkably expensive, especially considering the extended task force needed to support and defend a carrier. I'm a little less skeptical than many about the carrier; people have been predicting the imminent demise of the capital ship for a hundred years, with the culprit variously being the aircraft, the submarine, the mine, and now the ballistic missile, yet the ships continue to have their uses.
Polmar is right, I think, to suggest a future in which the USN concentrates less of its power in big deck platforms (some reduction from the current eleven ship force, perhaps), and relies more on its LHA/LHD vessels, which will, assuming that the F-35B goes forward, be capable within a decade of flying an advanced air superiority aircraft. As I discussed here, the quite sensible direction that the Navy is headed for seems to be a combination of high intensity warfighting capability with the capacity for facilitating maritime cooperation amongst the "1000 Ship Navy", a project that eases the demands on Navy hulls.
Yesterday George Will devoted his column to explaining to pro-choice Californians why they should vote for Rudy Giuliani. He concedes the so-called "pro-choice" Giuliani won't actually govern in the name of reproductive rights -- that he'll appoint anti-choice justices to the Supreme Court who may very well overturn Roe. But Californians shouldn't be concerned, Will argues, because after all, California is a socially liberal state and the legislature there will protect a woman's right to choose:
So, the overturning of Roe might not result from a Republican president's alteration of the court's balance. But suppose it did.
Again, so what? Many, perhaps most, Americans, foggy about the workings of their government, think that overturning Roe would make abortion, one of the nation's most common surgical procedures, illegal everywhere. All it actually would do is restore abortion as a practice subject to state regulation. But because Californians are content with current abortion law, their legislature probably would adopt it in state law.
It is not irrational for voters to care deeply about a candidate's stance regarding abortion because that stance is accurately considered an important signifier of the candidate's sensibilities and sympathies, and of his or her notion of sound constitutional reasoning. But regarding abortion itself, what a candidate thinks about abortion rights is not especially important.
There's so much wrong with this logic. First, is it inconceivable that while women in California and New York understand their own states are likely to protect existing abortion rights, they also believe strongly that other women, in Mississippi and South Dakota and Nebraska, deserve the same freedom? Secondly, Will's argument proceeds from the spurious assumption that in "liberal" states, access to abortion is already universal and protected by the law. In fact, low-income women who rely upon Medicaid for health care are barred by the federal government from using their benefits to access abortion. So the reproductive health priorities of the next president are crucially important not only to protecting choice in individual states, but to expanding it nationwide.
Let's also not forget that the president makes appointments that affect women's sexual health, to the Office of Family Planning, the FDA, and the like. George W. Bush needlessly politicized debates over the morning-after pill and sex-ed by appointing officials who were willing to join him in ignoring near-univeral recommendations from the medical and educational communities. As a result, Plan B was kept behind the counter for years longer than necessary, and our federal government wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on abstinence-only education. A candidate's ideology on abortion is an excellent predictor of his or her ideology on these closely related matters.
George Will asks, "So what?" if we elect an anti-choice president. Earth to George: Women will suffer! And the poorer and more vulnerable they are, the more they'll be adversely affected.
Over at his excellent, if insider-ish, campaign blog The Fix, Chris Cillizza has a video up about an attack ad running against Ernie Fletcher in Kentucky. The ad does a great job of using Fletcher's own promises to run a clean government and contrasting them with the indictments that have destroyed his reputation. As Cillizza points out, this avoids the usual trap for ethics investigations where voters assume both parties must be corrupt if one attacks the other for corruption. Beshear is set to defeat Fletcher in a landslide next month, and Democrats in Alaska and other states with corrupt Republican incumbents should be taking notes.
I've long been skeptical about the Beauchamp stories, and wouldn't be surprised if more elements of them were proven false. Having said that, though, I see nothing objectionable here. Obviously, 1) there's no reason to uncritically believe the self-serving results of an investigation the Army refuses to make public, and 2) a recantation under the supervision of his superiors is hardly credible, especially if it's subsequently withdrawn without his supervisor's presence. The other thing to note is that the easy way out for TNR would be to just throw Beauchamp under the bus, since nothing of any significance turns on the veracity of his stories (contrary to the myths being spun about these cases, nobody cared about his diaries until right-wing bloggers made a big deal about them, and nobody's case against the war turns on the bad behavior of some individual soldiers), especially since it's not as if the magazine is against the war anyway. I think Foer deserves credit for backing up his writer until actual verifiable evidence that further aspects of his stories are false (and "they don't sound right" or "no soldiers would ever do anything against the rules" certainly don't count) emerges.
UPDATE: A correspondent points out that Beauchamp didn't even retract his story to the military, but simply refused to say anything.
A recent Bloomberg/LA Times poll tells us that those surveyed preferred the health insurance policies of the Democratic presidential candidates over those of the Republican candidates:
Americans also back Democrats when presented with specific plans to deal with these issues: Just over half those surveyed say they favor requiring everyone to buy insurance; barring insurers from turning people down or charging extra for medical reasons; and subsidizing those who can't afford coverage. Those proposals have been offered by Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards.
Even many Republicans like the Democratic ideas:
Almost half of Republicans surveyed say they like the idea of requiring large businesses to either offer insurance to their workers or pay a tax to help cover the costs of those who can't afford it on their own, a plan put forth by Clinton, 59, Edwards, 54, and Illinois Senator Barack Obama, 46. More than seven out of 10 Democrats and more than six out of 10 independents support that approach.
Americans back Democrats' ideas partly because the Republicans haven't been as detailed in their proposals, said Jason Furman, director of the Hamilton Project policy initiative at Brookings Institution, a Washington research group.
It's true that the Republicans haven't explained in any detail what their plans might be, assuming that they have such plans. Giving some people more tax cuts without fixing anything else in the current patchwork system of health insurance is not the best way to address the three major problems I see when it comes to health care access: the gaps in employer-based group health insurance system, the treatment of pre-existing conditions, and the lack of alternatives for those too poor to afford private sector coverage but too rich to qualify for Medicaid.
The problems I listed are the major avenues people travel to the dismal land of the uninsured. How the poor get there is pretty obvious, given lack of money and the fact that low-paid jobs usually come without the fringe benefit of health insurance. A pre-existing condition makes health insurance much more expensive to acquire if not unavailable altogether, because a person with such a condition is not likely to make a profit for the health insurance companies. Indeed, one group of the uninsured consists of those who are "medically indigent", with illnesses or chronic conditions so expensive to treat that no private health insurance provider would ever offer them an affordable policy.
The gaps in health insurance tied to employment are the final way to turn into an uninsured person. Many small firms offer no health insurance benefits at all and the number of firms offering this benefit keeps declining. Why is this a problem? Can't the workers of those firms just buy policies on their own?
Of course they can. But individual policies, sold separately from the group plans that are available for employers, tend to cost considerably more. The reasons for this are partly to do with the economies to scale that exist in writing just one policy for hundreds or thousands of workers, when compared to the costs of writing a separate policy for each individual seeking coverage. But the main reason is a phenomenon sometimes called "cream-skimming" or "cherry-picking": The workers covered under group policies offered to corporations are at least healthy enough to go to work every day. These group plans pool relatively low health risks together, whereas the pool for individual policies is more likely to include those who are not well enough to work. This raises the average cost of individual health insurance, and for some individuals the price becomes so high that going uninsured is the preferable option.
Any realistic proposal on how to fix health insurance should address these gaps in the coverage, together with how to control health care costs in general. The Republican proposals I have seen do not achieve this. I'm not sure if they even attempt it.
On the subject of Che Guevara shirts, what I've always found most intriguing about the phenomenon (and if you think they're popular here, spend some time in Latin America -- they're everywhere) is that it was his obsession with his own image that brought him down. Guevara wasn't as concerned with inciting revolution as he was in being the leader of that revolution. He saw himself as some sort of prophet, an icon, the revolutionary figure endowed with the ability to lead all revolutions, which is what drove him to Eastern Europe, Congo, Asia, and to Bolivia. His conceit led him to Bolivia, and it is why he died in Bolivia. After arriving in there, he found that even the dissident Bolivians weren't that interested in his idea of revolution, and he wasn't able to develop much of a movement behind him. They had their own plans for what should happen in their country. And legend has it that photos of Guevara and other guerrillas left behind at their camp site were what tipped Bolivian President René Barrientos off to the fact that they were in the country, who then called for his men to kill Guevara and put his head on display in La Paz. Soon the CIA was involved, and "El Che" was dead in a matter of months.
Which, in addition to all the reasons Kay Steigerpoints out, is precisely why seeing his image emblazoned on so many T-shirts is so disheartening. It was his own self-obsession, his own fixation on his revolutionary image, that brought him down. So it's really disappointing to see people perpetuate that without any recognition that focusing on one person is a problem. It's nice to have leaders to rally behind, visionaries that we can look to as sources of inspiration, but being focused on a particular person is as counter-revolutionary as you can get.
It's great fun to taunt social conservatives with the fact that the Republican front-runner is "pro-choice" and "supports abortion rights." But we're getting to the point where claiming so much is just, well, not factual. "Pro-choice" politicians don't "reassure" Sam Brownback that they'll appoint "strict constructionist" justices to the Supreme Court following the model of John Roberts, as Giuliani did yesterday, according toPolitico's Jonathan Martin.
Rudy simply isn't planning on governing as an abortion-rights supporter. So instead of blithely asserting that we're going to marginalize the theocrats by moving into a period in which abortion will become apolitical, we should call it like it is: Giuliani has become anti-choice, and the only way to protect and expand reproductive rights at the federal level is to elect a Democrat to the White House.
Despite the unbreakable lock Hillary Clinton appears to have on the nomination, there are all kinds of ways for her not to win, because the voters, especially those in Iowa, have a habit -- they seem to take pride, really -- of making the political certainties of the these soft October nights look like absurdities in the cold, harsh light on deep winter.
All of which is to say that Barack Obama, for all the talk of his stalled and faltering campaign, still has a chance. There is hope for the politics of hope.
For that to happen, however, someone needs to go after the Clinton juggernaut, and if you're Barack Obama, you're hoping that John Edwards, very soon, decides to chuck whatever caution he has left and go after Hillary the way Gephardt went after Dean in November and December of 2003.
Get used to that phrase. If any one theme emerged from yesterday's speech Adm. Mike Mullen, the new chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, it was one of protracted engagements around the globe, what Mullen called "a generational conflict," one that would endure throughout the careers of the youngest of today's career military personnel. In an address sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, Mullen used the term "the Long War" much as military and foreign-policy types of an earlier time used the phrase "the Cold War." The Long War has a poetic ring to it, something sad and vaguely musical -- more elegant that Rummy's "long slog" and more poignant than the Global War on Terror, known to military folk as GWOT.
The one hint of optimism I gleaned from Mullen's remarks was his contention that the jihadists will be defeated only when their ideas no longer serve adequately as motivators to their recruits -- in other words, until conditions on the ground make a violent ideology based on resentment and fear irrelevant. Why would I find optimism in that? Because it means that Mullen gets that terrorists are motivated far less by opposition to "our way of life" than they are by U.S. influence on the conditions in which they live.
Speaking of Che shirts, I was in a military surplus store recently picking up some Halloween accessories, and I wandered by their T-shirt aisle. Most of the shirts were military slogans, simple declarations of "ARMY" or "NAVY," or shots at vegetarians. And then there were two Che shirts, and a few Israeli Defense Forces shirts, complete with Hebrew writing. So a ton of pro-American military clothing (complete with urinal targets featuring Jane Fonda's face), a notable communist revolutionary, and some shirts advertising a foreign country's military. Weird.
Kay Steiger has a good piece on the unpleasant reality of perpetual campus icon Che Guevara (which reminded me of one of my favorite t-shirts.)
James Kirchick, while apparently agreeing with Steiger's main points, takes some pot shots at her style (which is pretty funny for anyone who's familiar with Kirchick's own writing, which can most charitably be described as disturbingly self-gratifying), and then criticizes her for not condemning Che in precisely the fashion he would prefer, and for not using her piece on Che to launch a broader attack on the progressive left that he feels should be made.
"Steiger writes of Guevara’s “impatience with governing,” which is a nice euphemism for a belief in the virtues of violent revolution over the comparatively less sexy devotion to the rule of law and individual rights. Steiger is not the first writer to employ such rhetorical sleights-of-hand aimed at whitewashing the brutality of this particular left-wing thug."
No, actually it does refer to Guevera's impatience with governing. Kirchick's accusation of "whitewashing the brutality of this particular left-wing thug" might make some sense if Steiger hadn't actually described, in detail, some of the brutality of this particular left-wing thug later in her article. One wonders why Kirchick even bothered linking to Steiger's piece when he clearly wasn't interested in engaging with any of its ideas, and obviously just wanted an excuse to tee off on some commie-simp lefties.
I can only hope that Commentary will get much more intellectually serious when John Podhoretztakes over.
Before the hearings ... I was fully prepared to endorse Mukasey as the least bad option. This was contingent, however, on his backing away from the policies of the administration on two crucial questions: arbitrary executive power and torture. However, Mukasey's testimony at the second day of hearings was unacceptable. On the issue of executive power, for example, he did not fully repudiate the lawlessness of the Bush administration but rather asserted that the executive can violate congressional statutes under circumstances where the executive claims broad authority to "defend the nation," which (given the vague contours of national security claims) allows the executive potentially substantial discretion to ignore valid congressional statutes. As Marty Lederman pointed out, Mukasey strangely cited the Prize cases in defense of administration lawlessness, although in that case -- which involved the blockade of Southern ports in the initial stages of the Civil War -- Lincoln initially acted in the face of congressional silence (rather than in defiance of a statue, as the president did with FISA) and later had his actions retroactively authorized by Congress.
Well lookie here: Seems a certain Emmy/Oscar/Nobel winner stands at 32 percent -- just five points behind Hillary Clinton and well ahead of either Barack Obama or John Edwards -- in the latest (h/t to MyDD) CBS/NYTimes national poll.
If Obama or Edwards are smart, they would take a cold, hard look at their campaigns and realize they are in trouble, especially Edwards. One of them ought bite down on his ego a bit, dial up Al Gore, and convince the Goracle to get in the race by agreeing to run as Gore's vice presidential choice. (Both men are young and have long, possibly bright futures ahead.) This would totally upend the entire race, the media would go ballistic, the national narrative would change overnight, and Hillary would have the fight of her life on her hands.
Yeah, yeah: I know thats all crazy talk. And, yes, Gore on paper isn't Gore on the stump. But Gore is no Fred Thompson, and keep in mind that, five years ago, Gore's public approval was in the 20s, the presidents was in the 70s, and Gore was doing failed Saturday Night Live bits. If somebody had predicted then that Gore's national and international stature would be what it is today, they'd have been accused of crazy-talkin', too.
I know I was up in arms yesterday over the continuous silly worrying about Hillary Clinton being "too feminine" or "too Mommy-like" to be a competitive nominee. Indeed, I don't think "femininity" will be a problem for Clinton, who voters know is more hawkish that the other leading Democrats on national security. But that doesn't mean the very fact that Clinton is a woman -- regardless of any of her personal attributes -- won't remain challenging for her among a relatively narrow slice of the electorate.
Surprising fact of the day: As the Christian Science Monitorreports, Iowa is one of only two states (along with Mississippi) never to have elected a female governor or Congressional representative. (Back in 2005, Annsuggested some reasons this might be the case.) That makes it all the more extraordinary that Clinton has pulled ahead in the polls there, however narrowly.
Paul Krugman, writing about the missed opportunities to regulate the subprime market and the many warnings offered by respected overseers, says:
In his final paper, Mr. Gramlich stressed the extent to which unregulated lending is prone to the “abusive lending practices” he mentioned in his 2004 warning. The fact is that many borrowers are ill-equipped to make judgments about “exotic” loans, like subprime loans that offer a low initial “teaser” rate that suddenly jumps after two years, and that include prepayment penalties preventing the borrowers from undoing their mistakes.
Yet such loans were primarily offered to those least able to evaluate them. “Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers?” Mr. Gramlich asked. “The question answers itself — the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products.” And “the predictable result was carnage.”
This sort of language freaks people out ("are you saying poor people are stupid!?"), but it's quite important, and quite true. In a market with asymmetrical information -- i.e, a market in which sophisticated banking professionals are encouraging desperate individuals with meager financial knowledge to sign up for loans -- the advantage, the massive advantage, will always go to the side with more information. In some markets, you can't do much about that. The asymmetries are unpredictable, and dispersed. In the subprime market, the asymmetry was structural, and of a single nature. And members of the relevant regulatory authority -- the Federal Reserve -- saw it, and raised the alarm. They were beaten back by those with an ideological allergy to regulation.
For more on all this, I highly recommend Bob Kuttner's recent web article, "The Fed as Enabler."
Reading about yet another terrible stand taken by Senator James "global warming is the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state" Inhofe (leading the fight against the law of the sea), I wondered if there was much chance of getting rid of the man who might be the single worst member of the United States Senate. I knew he was up for reelection in 2008, but I haven't seen his name on any of the lists of possible democratic pickups so I figured he must be popular enough in Oklahoma to be unassailable.
Turns out, that's not true. His approve/disapprove is at 47/42, not a great place for an incumbent to be, and as recently as last year it was at 40/49. He also has drawn a challenger who has gotten pretty good press -- Andrew Rice, a first term state senator who lost a brother on 9/11 and who seems to have a good handle on how to run as a Democrat in a conservative state.
Judging by his website, the strategy is to portray Inhofe as a radical, divisive partisan, which isn't too hard because that is in fact what he is. Furthermore, I'd guess that portraying Inhofe as embarrassing Oklahoma will be a powerful tactic. This is tricky, but Inhofe is so out there and crazy that he could be portrayed as making the state look out of touch and backwards
Anyway, I'm still curious why this race hasn't gotten more attention, but hopefully as we move into next year it will become more visible. After all, at this time in 2005, essentially no one was talking about Jon Tester in Montana.
An attempt to relax the FCC rules about media concentration in specific markets is once again alive. The FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin wants to get rid of that troublesome 1970s ruling which barred media conglomerates from owning both a broadcast station and a newspaper in the same area. The Nation's Peter Rothbergcalled Martin's proposal "both a mogul's dream and a citizen's nightmare.":
As my friend and colleague John Nichols wrote last week, "Bush's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has initiated a scheme to radically rewrite media ownership rules so that one corporation can own the daily newspapers, the weekly 'alternative' newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in even the largest American city."
If all this gives you a feeling of deja vu, you are correct.
A similar attempt not that long ago was stopped by an astonishingly bipartisan opposition. This time it is Senators Trent Lott and Byron Dorgan, from different sides of the political aisle, who are opposing this FCC move.
Their reasons are many: The FCC is planning to ram the proposal through by December. That doesn't give the opposition much time to prepare, does it? Then there is the tiny problem that much of the FCC research in this area has been criticized:
"The FCC should not rush forward and repeat mistakes of the past. We applaud this Commission for its efforts to include the public through a series of hearings around the country," wrote Sens. Lott and Dorgan. "However, we understand there have been a series of problems with the process, including the selection of study authors, the peer review and the brief length of the studies comment period, which give us additional cause for concern."
A number of the Congress members who responded to Chairman Martin's proposed December 18th vote on media ownership rules referred to the crisis of credibility at the FCC. With recent reports of flawed research, agency leaks, and a track record of ignoring public input, policy makers agree that the FCC has a long way to go before they can make reasonable and responsible changes to media ownership rules.
Dorgan also points out that the FCC's own research shows that further media concentration would cause a net loss in local news coverage.
Then there is the question of female and minority ownership. The FCC apparently hasn't managed to figure out which stations might be owned by the members of those rare and mysterious demographic groups. Why would this matter in the criticisms of the proposal?
If we are going to give most of the power in the news industry to a very small group of very rich people we should at least guarantee that Americans of all stripes get a representative in that group. This explanation has the extra merit of pointing out that increased media concentration will benefit one demographic group of Americans over all others: the wealthy ones. It is their judgment of what makes news which will rule in those concentrated media markets, and that is the real flaw in Martin's proposal.
Words matter in health care politics, and the confusion around the terms "managed care" and "HMOs" (health maintenance organizations) perfectly illustrates why. I don't think managed care has a prayer of being more efficient than our current fragmented system. I do think HMOs are superior, and any serious student of American health care policy, and Arnold Kling is clearly one of them, needs to know the difference.
There are only a few real HMOs in the U.S., the best known being Kaiser Permanente, which is based in northern California, and Group Health of Puget Sound, in Seattle. A cousin of the HMO, the salaried group practice, is only a bit more common, with notable examples being the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin. These two types of organizations share several key qualities. First, their physicians are salaried, though they differ in how they get paid. HMOs are "prepaid" -- they are provider and payer rolled into one. Group practices bill insurers as if they were fee-for-service providers, but they divvy the receipts among their salaried physicians, thus insulating physicians to some degree from the financial incentive to overtreat patients.
Kate Sheppardasserts that this story is a dispute over environmental policy, and I'm sure there's something there, but I think she's missing the other part of it, which is that it's also a campaign finance story in a year when two of the top Democratic presidential campaigns have been prominently pointing to their positions on campaign finance issues to argue that they represent change and a break with business as usual in Washington.
Recall that John Edwards has made it a major plank of his presidential campaign that he does not take money from lobbyists or PACs, and that he seeks the transformation of our present campaign financing system to a more transparent and publicly-supported one in order to reduce the power of lobbyists and PACs. Recall also that Edwards has been on an anti-PAC crusade since his 1998 Senate race.
And yet here you have a situation where a former Edwards low-dollar donor (Glenn Hurowitz donated $250 to Edwards in June) was touted by the campaign as one of its "National Environmentalists for Edwards Leaders" while also heading a PAC, founded Sept. 24, according to the FEC, dedicated to criticizing one of Edwards' primary field opponents. And we won't know who is bankrolling that PAC effort until January.
(Full disclosure: Over the summer, Hurowitz also contributed three pieces to TAP Online.)
It is not unusual for maxed out donors who support a candidate to give to independent expenditure groups as a way of supplementing their support for a campaign. Such efforts are controversial and commonly understood as efforts to get around campaign finance limits by exploiting legal loopholes. In August, for example, Obama fundraiser Wayne Jordan and his wife contibuted $50,000 each to the pro-Obama 527 independent expenditure committee Vote Hope, according to the San Francisco Chronicle story "Obama's supporters get around money limit."
Because the anti-Clinton group, which is also critical of Obama, will not have to reveal its donors until 2008, there's no way of knowing until then if they are the maxed out donors of a competing campaign looking to exploit the same legal loopholes while going negative on a rival.
Clearly worried about being seen as too close to the Edwards campaign, Hurowitz removed the Edwards campaign -- the only campaign it linked to -- from Democratic Courage's blogroll overnight.
"Democratic Courage has never endorsed anyone. We have supporters of different candidates involved in our effort," Hurowitz told me in an e-mail. Asked to specify who those other candidates were, he wrote, "Just look at the FEC." According to FEC records, however, Hurowtiz is the only one of the three Democratic Courage leaders who has donated to a presidential candidate, John Edwards.
The Edwards campaign sought to emphasize the distance between Hurowitz and the campaign, as well. "He's one of many Edwards supporters from across the country, but we have had no contact with him about any of his activities outside of the campaign," said spokesman Eric Schultz, "and we will of course ensure that he is not involved in any aspect of the campaign going forward."
Ezrareflects onPaul Wellstone's legacy today, the fifth anniversary of his death.
To say that Wellstone cared about the "little guy" may seem like sentimentalism, a cliché, even a hokey affectation for the purpose of this remembrance. It is not. Before I was ever into politics, before I ever had a blog, or a writing fellowship, I was just another pimply teenager, awkward and insecure and chunky and tentative. My older brother lived in Los Angeles, practicing environmental law and living a life that represented, to me, the pinnacle of commitment to social justice. Every weekend was a farmworker's march or an interfaith dialogue or a community benefit. It was this involvement, I assume, that led him to dive into Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign ("Keep studying," Bradley wrote when my brother asked him to autograph a note for me), where he served as Bradley's driver in Los Angeles. Which, one weekend, had him driving around Paul Wellstone.
Also today, Ezra sat down for a chat with Paul Krugman about his new book, The Conscience of a Liberal:
EK: You are, as you've said, sort of a radicalized moderate at this point, a mainstream liberal who's been living in a radicalizing time. And it struck me that five, ten years ago, that there was a real difference between the sort of technocratic liberal that Paul Krugman was and the sort of populist labor liberal that Paul Wellstone was. There's been a convergence of those -- George W. Bush has expanded liberalism. Do you think that's right?
PK: Oh sure. You know, [under Bush], you realize who you actually have only technical disputes with, and that, more fundamentally, you share values. I think I said to Eric Alterman once that while people like you and me are having our disputes over trade policy, Sauron was gathering his forces in Mordor. There are arguments we can have that will eventually have to be hashed out, but they're relatively minor compared with this huge difference, do we believe in democracy, do we really believe in a broadly shared prosperity? And so now we have a lot of ground giving in all sides so that we have amazing consensus on things like healthcare.
Plus, from the archives, check out a piece that Harold Meyerson wrote for TAP Online in the wake of Wellstone's death.
According to a new report from the D.C. Fiscal Policy institute, only two American cities, Atlanta and Tampa, have income inequality as great as Washington's. Half of all African Americans and people without college degrees are unemployed here, despite a boom in gentrification and real estate construction that was supposed to lift all boats.
The photo above is one I took earlier this year to demonstrate inequality in D.C: A Columbia Heights public health clinic serving the immigrant population puts out a sign to assure patients it will remain "Open During Construction" of the luxury condos next door.
It's not just that Mark Penn, Union Buster has made a career out of slicing the electorate into arbitrary subgroups inevitably calculated to push the Democratic Party to the right and to focus on the interests of the affluent. It's also that he would seem to be completely incompetent (or, at least, so sloppy and tendentious that he might as well be.) Given that he's very likely to be a major adviser for the Democratic candidate for president in 2008, this strikes me as a serious problem. (Although maybe it also means that Clinton isn't the near-mortal lock I believe her to be...)
Scott is quite right. There might be some legitimate complaint about Italy, Germany, and Spain devoting insufficient forces and enthusiasm to the Afghanistan operation, were it not for the fact that the United States had launched the single most destructive initiative to that campaign, the invasion of Iraq. Iraq colors everything; it empowers opponents of using military force in the European countries in question, makes them (in the case of Spain) a target for terrorists, and throws tremendous resources down a hole. Indeed, to the extent that poppy eradication is a U.S.-led program, the Germans are literally being more productive by doing nothing than the Americans are by spraying crops. The negative impact of the invasion of Iraq does not, unfortunately, stop at Iraq's borders.
--Robert Farley
Slate has a good explainer about the rush to claim the arctic seabed and its possible natural resources. I was familiar with that fight, but what I didn't realize is that the U.S. is somewhat hamstrung in the competition by its failure to ratify the Law of the Sea as the other involved nations have (for more on the Law of the Sea and why conservative opposition to it is totally wacky see this piece by Kate). Most amusingly, Russia has asserted it's claim by dropping a flag onto the sea floor last month, which reminds me of this:
Hearty congratulations are due Noah Shachtman and the rest of the folks at Danger Room. A part of Wired News, Danger Room just won an Online Journalism Award for best beat reporting. To get a sense of how good Danger Room really is, check out this post on Blackwater, which contains links to all of the other posts that the site has published on Blackwater dating back to before the recent controversy broke.
Don't look now, but the Senate Democrats got enough Republican votes yesterday to overturn a filibuster on a critically important social issue. Eleven GOPniks joined the Democrats in favor of ending the filibuster against the DREAM Act -- the bill that enables undocumented-immigrant young persons to stay in the U.S. and eventually win citizenship if they were brought here as children, graduate high school, and then either complete two years of college or serve two years in the military.
What's that? You missed the story on how the Democrats broke a Republican filibuster? Of course you did -- because eight Democrats voted to sustain it. Worse yet, most of those eight come from states that have experienced the least immigration.
Fifty-two senators voted to end the filibuster -- 41 Democrats, 11 Republicans. Nor did all those Republicans come from the moderate wing of the party (there aren't 11 Republican moderates in the Senate). The list of Republican Dream Act supporters included not only Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Chuck Hagel, but also Sam Brownback, Larry Craig, Orrin Hatch, Kay Bailey Hutchison and, believe it or not, Trent Lott. Looked at with an unjaundiced eye, it's easy to understand why such a bill might appeal even to conservatives: After all, its chief effect is simply to declare that it's public policy to hold children harmless for the infractions of their parents, provided those children grow up to be responsible adults.
But this logic didn't seem to sway the eight Democrats who voted to kill the bill by filibuster. Some were up for re-election next year in socially conservative states -- Arkansas' David Pryor, Montana's Max Baucus, and embattled Mary Landrieu of what is the increasingly ethnically-cleansed Louisiana. Two had come to the Senate in narrow victories last year (and don't face voters for another five): Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana. And three -- Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad from North Dakota and Old Bobby Byrd from West Virginia -- are neither neophytes nor facing voters any time soon.
What's striking about this list of anti-DREAM Dems is how it overrepresents states that have minimal immigrant presence. Precisely because immigrants come to work, they tend not to migrate to states with a dearth of economic activity, states like West Virginia and North Dakota. Montana isn't exactly clogged with south-of-the-border immigrants, either. Yet those three states are represented by five of the eight dissenting Democrats. What West Virginia and North Dakota do have in abundance, however, are working-class whites adrift in economic backwaters. Talk radio tells them that their problems are the fault of illegal immigrants. Marx once famously referred to the idiocy of rural life, which is still a pretty good encapsulation of what's wrong with the Senate, the legislative house that represents land rather than people. Still, it's worth noting that a number of Democrats from socially conservative states -- not least, South Dakota's Tim Johnson, who's up for re-election next year, and Jim Webb from the presumably anti-immigrant hotbed of Virginia -- voted to support the DREAM Act.
Profiles in courage aside, however, the DREAM Act was just about the only pro-immigrant bill that stood even the slightest chance of passing these days, rooted as it is in the moral precept that the sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the children. Wednesday's vote suggests that it will take a Democrat president with a strong commitment to justice for immigrants just to line up Democratic votes for a comprehensive and humane reform of our immigration laws.
It's becoming more and more apparent that David Paul Kuhn's M.O. has less to do with analyzing Democratic electoral strategy than with a deep aversion toward women's leadership. Kuhn is the Politico writer currently promoting a book, The Neglected Voter, on why white men are the future of the Democratic Party. As devoted readers will remember, I disagree. Strongly. But I'm willing to let bygones be bygones. After all, I've read his book, and it seems Kuhn and I both think it would be nice if more people, generally, voted for Democrats.
But then I came across Kuhn's latest offering. Ostensibly a story about "Voters' choice in 2008: Mom versus Dad," Kuhn spends the great majority of the article trashing Hillary Clinton for being too feminine, playing too much into the myth of Democrats as the' "Mommy Party." His evidence? Last week, Hillary spent a paltry five days discussing women's issues. Five days. What Kuhn doesn't address at all is that voters -- the people who actually matter -- think Clinton is the "toughest" politician in the race. As the Christian Science Monitorreported last month:
While historically, Americans have usually preferred the more likable candidate for president, this time around, the coin of the realm appears to be toughness. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, Democrats overwhelmingly associated Clinton with the word "tough;" she beat Obama on that quality 67 percent to 14 percent.
Let's get real. A race between Clinton and Rudy Giuliani won't be about nurturing Mommy versus tough Daddy. It will be a bare-knuckled fight between two warriors of their parties.
Indeed, Clinton is so focused on "toughness," on not overplaying women's issues, that when Guardian America editor Mike Tomaskyasked her to name one issue on which she had led in the Senate, she bypassed the most obvious answer: procuring Plan B over-the-counter access, which she did alongside Sen. Patty Murray by placing a "hold" on President Bush's FDA nominee. This was back when the Democrats were in the minority. Instead, Clinton talked about trying to end the war in Iraq, an issue on which she, um, hasn't been a leader at all.
Enough fretting about Clinton's femininity! You may have other problems with her. If so, let's discuss those instead. Because what we have here is an amazing, historical situation. The female candidate is the candidate viewed both as the most experienced and the toughest, traditionally the hardest attributes for female politicians to crack. The more we hand-wring over Hillary being a chick, the more we encourage voters to do the same. So far, thankfully, they appear to be tuning much of this chatter out.
Ezra has encouraged me to jump in to what has become an energetic debate on vouchers for poor urban public schools, so here I go. Quick run-down: Megan McArdleseethes with rage over rich liberals who essentially practice "school choice" by picking up and moving to expensive suburbs, but who don't support vouchers so poor parents can also get their kids out of bad schools. Ezra responds that vouchers aren't the answer, because they won't do away with concentrated poverty, which he considers the root of educational inequality. Kevin Careyswings in to say they're both wrong: Schools that educate poor kids can be great schools in spite of concentrated poverty, and school choice is okay when choice is confined to the public system. Carey also takes a jab at the Prospect for prioritizing longterm poverty fixes and downplaying the importance of education reform. To this, I'd only respond that there is a variety of opinions on education at TAP, and that I, for one, have argued againandagain for serious attention to be paid to our schools as engines of equality, and will continue to do so.
But back to the issue at hand. Kevin is right that private vouchers aren't a systemic fix for urban education. As he writes, "Voucherizing a whole city like DC wouldn't work. There aren't enough good private schools to teach all those students in the short run, and -- more importantly -- there wouldn't be enough in the long run." Nor is busing city kids en masse to the suburbs a great solution, since that would be unworkable politically and logistically. Poor kids certainly do deserve top-flight schools within their own communities. And although it's not necessary for those school buildings to be race and class integrated for children to receive a good education within them, it would be preferable if they were. Integrated schools do a better job of readying children for the workforce, tend to have more resources at their disposal in terms of money and parental investment, and perhaps most importantly, teach kids tolerance and comfort around people different from themselves.
What I would like to see is public school choice that regionalizes education in such a way as to encourage kids from more affluent families to attend high quality public magnet and public charter schools in nearby poorer neighborhoods or cities. This provides a good, close-to-home education for poor kids and integrates schools without having to wait for concentrated poverty and wealth to be wiped off the map. It also encourages average or under-performing urban schools to catch up with better specimens within their system, and provides them with models for success. Alongside suburban transfers into the city could be a program of voluntary urban transfers to the suburbs, with extra funding for the schools that take on the city kids. John Edwards has proposed basically this plan.
In a city like D.C., with many wealthy, close-in suburbs, this could be a workable model. In New York City, whose geography is much more complicated, public school choice has successfully brought many hundreds of middle and upper middle class families into the system who in not-so-distant times would have almost certainly moved to the suburbs or rented out their basements for private school tuition. We shouldn't be afraid of educational choices, but we should ensure that they bolster the public system and are equally available to everyone. That's difficult to do, since the most stable families are the first to figure out how to game the system and get their kids into the best public magnets or charters. Lotteries are a good work-around. To sum up, there's so much that can be done to make public schools better without resorting to sending kids to private schools. So let's not give up.
I'm failing to understand why Garance is up in arms about Glenn Hurowitz being both involved in an anti-Hillary PAC and endorsing Edwards. If he's against Clinton, and he's a Democrat, I'd reckon he would be for someone ... and you've probably got a 50-50 shot on guessing who that person would be (if he's at all interested in efficacy ... I mean sure, he could go for Dodd or Kucinich, but that's doubtful). So his previous endorsement of Edwards doesn't really seem that newsworthy.
And Hurowitz is active in environmental circles, which is one area where Clinton's not enjoying as much support these days as both Edwards and Obama have come out with much more comprehensive, progressive climate and energy plans. It's plenty justifiable for groups and individuals to challenge Clinton's progressive credibility and work to counter what seems to be accepted gospel around these parts on her inevitability. Up until the primary, actual conversation and disagreements about the progressive merits of the candidates is a good thing, from what I gather. After that ... well, then Dems can fall in line behind the candidate.
New anti-Hillary Clinton PAC president Glenn Hurowitz of DemocraticCourage.com has previously endorsed Clinton rival John Edwards for president, according to an October 14 press release from the Edwards campaign.
On the morning of Oct. 14, the Edwards campaign sent out a press release headlined "EDWARDS WINS ENDORSEMENT FROM FRIENDS OF THE EARTH ACTION." Following news of that endorsement, the release read:
Edwards has already earned the endorsement of several influential environmental leaders, including:
National Environmentalists for Edwards Leaders
Scott Rutledge, Nevada Conservation Leader
Lana Pollack, National LCV Board Member*
Lisa Guthrie, National LCV Board Member, Executive Director of VA LCV*
Carrie Clark, National LCV Board Member, Executive Director of NC Conservation Council*
Brownie Newman, Political Director NC Conservation Council*
Nina Szolsberg, President of NC Conservation Council*
Carol Piszczek-Sheffield, Board Member AZ Sierra Club Chapter*
Jeff Anderson, CA Environmental Business Leader
Gail Slocum, Former Mayor of Menlo Park, CA/ Chief Environmental Consultant for Emerging Sustainability Technologies, Pacific Gas & Electric*
Sara Feldman, Vice President for Southern CA, CA State Parks Foundation*
Kevin Mueller, Executive Director Utah Environmental Congress*
Jim Marston, Director of Energy Programs for Environmental Defense Fund TX*
Joseph Minott, Executive Director of PA Clean Air Council*
James Coman, Executive Director of Blue Ridge Land Trust*
Lance Holter, Board Member of HI Sierra Club, Chair of Maui Sierra Club Chapter* Glen Hurowitz, Principal of Democratic Courage
Jared Duval, Writer, Former National Director of Sierra Student Coalition*
Molly Diggins, NC Environmental Leader
Bill Holman, Former Secretary of NC Department of Environmental and Natural Resources
David Knight, Director of Government Relations of Nature Conservancy North Carolina Chapter*
*Organizational title for identification purposes only
Hurowitz's name is not listed on a truncated version of the press release currently on the John Edwards for President web site, however a copy of the release posted on Oct. 15 on the Democratic Talk Radio Blog listing Hurowitz among the "National Environmentalists for Edwards Leaders" remains available online. I also have a copy of the original press release with Hurowitz's (misspelled) name on it in my e-mail inbox.
Earlier today, The Politico's Ben Smithreported that Hurowitz had previously donated money to Edwards.
"We think there are other Democratic presidential candidates who are both more progressive and have a better chance of beating the Republicans than she does," Hurowitz told Smith.
New Nobel laureate Doris Lessingspeaks a little-said truth. Terrorism is a fact in the world. 9/11 was spectacular, but it was not unique:
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible,” she told Spanish newspaper El Pais.
"Some Americans will think I'm crazy. Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be," she said of the Americans.
"Do you know what people forget? That the IRA attacked with bombs against our Government.”
Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the Sept 11 attacks of 2001. More than 3,500 died and thousands more were injured in more than 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.
Indeed. She could have added that for the money we've spent on Iraq we could have save 3,000 lives many times over, even in the US. Or that the real threat to our lives is nuclear terrorism, which we've done little to prevent. This kind of argument pops up periodically on blogs, and then is ignored because it's impossible to talk about without being made to seem, at best, callous, and at worst, sympathetic to evil.
I actually agree with Samand Ezra that Ron Paul is not more viable than Mike Huckabee, though I'm deeply skeptical about Huckabee's chances of winning Iowa, despite the support of the local home schooling associations and FairTax.org, on account of the complexity of the caucus system (more than 1,700 precincts) and Mitt Romney's committment to buying victory at all costs.
That Huckabee is polling higher than Rudy Giuliani in Iowa should be no surprise to anyone who's watched Giuliani campaign in that state. But that doesn't mean that he has a shot at the nomination.
And don't count Romney out yet. Romney is the John Kerry of this race, the underestimated, weak-looking, self-financing figure with no serious national polling support who nonetheless has a clear and time-tested strategy for victory. Giuliani may be riding high in national polls, but he is weak on the ground in the early states and is pursuing an unproven theory of how to win the nomination. If Romney can hang on and win Iowa, he'll get enough of a momentum boost that he'll likely win New Hampshire, as well. A Republican who wins both those states has little chance of losing his party's nomination, even with the new primary calendar.
At best, Huckabee looks to be the John Edwards of the race, potentially coming in second in Iowa and dogging the nominee until South Carolina, which he could easily win (again, like Edwards), before dropping out in February due to a lack of money to take the campaign nationwide. And then, like Edwards was for Kerry, Huckabee will be a perfect vice presidential pick for whichever Republican has won the nomination.
On the least-bad Republican front, I figure someone should argue for Huckabee on this one. Sure, he's got that whole Christian Right issue, which disconcerts me plenty. But on several policy fronts, he's light years ahead of the rest of the GOP candidates. For one, he's got the energy independence thing going for him, as well as the acknowledgment of climate change and the need to curb emissions, all of which I delved into last night.
On immigration, he's steered clear of the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming out of many of the other candidates. While he advocates tighter border security and has said he wouldn't grant "amnesty," he's also well aware of the difference between sensible immigration policy and the racist, nationalist streak in his party. He acknowledges the very real employment needs here in the U.S., and wants to see a system in place that will help meet those needs and create an efficient, effective means for legalization of those already here. And he's opposed efforts to deny state benefits to illegal aliens, calling them un-Christian and un-American. "I don't understand how a practicing Christian can turn his back on a child from this or any other state," he said.
In the education realm, as governor he supported massive increases in public school investments. He's even into arts and music education, which should warm some liberal hearts. He also signed legislation to provide insurance to children from families who don’t qualify for Medicaid but can't afford private insurance.
His Iraq talking points are mostly terrible, but he does "support a regional summit so that Iraq's neighbors become financially and militarily committed to stabilizing Iraq now rather than financially and militarily committed to widening the war later. This summit will add more voices, Muslim voices, to the pressure to perform we're already applying to the Maliki government."
In the very least, he's a lot more firm in his positions on the issues, and you pretty much know what you're going to get. His stances on issues like abortion and gay marriage would be similar to Romney's, and he actually seems to have thought other issues through. And he's had a fairly competent administrative record in Arkansas. If he were elected, the Dems in the Congress could prevent him from imposing his socially conservative agenda in most areas, and he at least seems to get some of the other major issues of the election.
I'll echo Sam Boyd on one point: Ron Paul more viable than Mike Huckabee? Unless the internets get a vote, I think not. Huckabee has a serious shot at winning Iowa. He's also proving powerfully appealing to one of the GOP's most important constituencies -- the Christian Right -- and one of the longshot candidates' most important allies -- the media. If the Huck's current upward trend continues and he squeaks out a win in Iowa, then the Christian Right's fears as to his electability would be allayed, and they'd come out in full force to support him. Add in the media hype, his folksy, telegenic charisma, and I think he'd likely win the thing.
One interesting element to Huckabee is that the GOP's corporate class hates him. The Club for Growth has a website devoted to killing his campaign. The fiscal conservatives would absolutely flip. Were he to take the nomination, it might actually shatter their coalition with the social conservatives. In theory, that would be good. In practice, I remain worried about any candidate too reliant on the Christian Right -- I find them to be one of the world's more worrying interest groups. If he seemed to be making a serious effort to refocus that movement on social and economic justice, that would be interesting. But so far, his actual policies are just more of the regressive same, like the absurd FairTax idea (of which Huckabee says, in what sounds like a self-parody, "When the FairTax becomes law, it will be like waving a magic wand releasing us from pain and unfairness.") That said, Chuck Norris has endorsed him, and I take Norris very, very, seriously.
Ron Paul, on the other hand, has no shot. No natural constituency capable of carrying him through the Republican primaries. No unexpected polling strength in an early primary state. And wait till his views on such weighty matters as abolishing the federal Medicare entitlement come into play. If he even inched towards a threat, he'd get crushed by the other candidates. As President, he probably wouldn't do much damage as he'd be unable, both ideologically and operationally, to do anything at all, but speaking of Paul as president is like speaking of my parakeet as emperor. And though Mr. Tweets would be a fine emperor, it's not a terribly useful thought experiment.
Would actually be Tom Tancredo.The man has advocated bombing Mecca, which makes even Rudy Giuliani look like Ron Paul. I mention this not so much because I care (he's never going to be president), but because it occurs to me that he hasn't done nearly as well as many people predicted when he got in. With so much of the Republican base agitated about immigrants it's pretty weird that the candidate who embodies the hard-line xenophobic wing of the Republican party hasn't had any success or even any buzz. Of course I'm happy about that, but I'm also confused. Any TAPPED contributors or commenters have a theory?
That's my somewhat facetious image of Romney. Nixon's opportunism and guile without his vicious resentment (this would make Giuliani Nixon on crystal meth). I think Garanceis right (and I should have cited her original article in my post) that Romney isn't particularly liberal and that his experience running for the Republican nomination will shape a lot of his policy views for the next few years if he's elected. However, while he is likely to remain conservative, I don't doubt he'd, as president do pretty much whatever he thought would be popular, ideological consistency and policy merit be damned.
To answer Ezra's question, this would result in some good things -- probably some draw down in Iraq in a gradual Nixonian peace-with-honor sorta way (like pulling a bandaid off very slowly) and also no real threats to social security or other social programs. On the other hand, it would also be, I think, a bad thing for many many other issues. We'd likely see a continuation of tax-cut-and-spend economic policies, a continued bullying approach to other countries (one fast way to bump your approval ratings up is to bomb something), and a continued attempt to pander to the religious right with nutty judicial nominees and appointees to head federal agencies.
On the other hand, I have zero reverence for Romney's supposed technocratic competence. Running a business is just not like running a government. The incentive structure is completely different, management works with different tools, and decisions are made... democratically. Besides health care reform, my impression is that his time as governor wasn't very notable and he ran for president in part because he wasn't going to be reelected.
I actually like the case for Huckabee, contra Ezra. Basically it goes like this: whoever wins the White House, Democrats are almost certain to have a majority in the Senate for at least two years (and four is much more likely than not if a Republican wins) and a majority in the house after that. Given that Bush, for all his social conservative rhetoric, didn't manage any large-scale roll-back of reproductive rights, I'm not sure what Huckabee, committed though he is, could accomplish with an opposition congress. On economic and foreign policy issues, where a president has more control, I don't think anyone thinks he's likely to be as bad as any of the other major candidates.
I also should say that I disagree with Garance about Huckabee's chances at the nomination. Sure, neither one has much money or much of a field operation, but Huckabee has way more appeal to Republican voters. Ron Paul is a fringe candidate because his message just doesn't represent most Republicans. Huckabee has ceased to be a fringe candidate because his message does represent most Republicans and free media has finally brought it to then. Also, he's polling at 12.3 in Iowa compared to Ron Paul's 3.6. If current trends continue (always a big if) he'll beat Giuliani in Iowa.
Also, the idea of Ron Paul as president is terrifying in other ways. He doesn't believe in the Federal Reserve! He's actually quite conservative on social issues, and he has an ideology so pure it would threaten to shut down government. I can easily see him vetoing budgets ad infinitum because they include things he thinks are unconstitutional for example.
Finally, I think Scott has the right takes on McCain and Thompson. Giuliuani, of course, would be unmitigated disaster.
The attendees co-opt the language of the civil rights movement, award Giuliani a few points for trying, and wonder if hot-shot endorsements really matter. Read the whole thing here.
Obama will vote to filibuster any immunization of corporations who abetted illegal government behavior by violating the privacy of their customers. Excellent news, and credit Dodd for forcing his hand as well. Obviously, if Clinton won't follow suit no progressive should give even a second thought to supporting her in the primary.
Paul Waldman has some thoughts on Clinton and the right:
A specter is haunting the 2008 presidential campaign. It is a terrifying beast that walks through mud, dances to eerie music, wears strange garments, and copulates wantonly. It smells vaguely of patchouli.
I speak, of course, of the hippie.
Or rather, the conservative image of the hippie, grafted onto a woman who could barely have been less countercultural back in the times when the actual species roamed the Earth: Hillary Clinton. If you thought we'd get through this campaign without the people who were too square to be down with the scene in the 1960s once again venting their resentment at their cooler peers, think again. But this time around, it's even less likely to work than it has in the past.
Not that they won't be trying. Imagine the quivers of delight over at RNC headquarters when they learned last week that back in June, senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton inserted a $1 million earmark into the health and education appropriations bill for the Museum at Bethel Woods in upstate New York, commemorating the Woodstock concert that took place there in 1969.
Ezra asked readers to name "the least bad Republican" and Tapped readers seem to agree: the real least bad Republican is clearly he who shall not be named, Ron Paul, not Mitt Romney. Though, in fairness, as one commenter noted:
The Internet loves Ron Paul and hates all those other guys. So that's the comments you're going to get, like it or not. What's more, this post has been cataloged by the Google News spider, so everyone subscribed to news stories containing "Ron Paul" is directed to your post.
Still, I'd tend to agree with those commenters that Ron Paul is, given his recent fundraising success, at least as viable as Mike Huckabee, who consistantly polls well in groups of a couple thousand hard-core social conservatives but has shown little ability to raise funds or build an in-house field operation.
As for whether I was misunderstanding M.J. Rosenberg's assertion that Romney is preferable because "he does not believe the right-wing garbage he puts out with such abandon," I think M.J.'s statement speaks for itself. Ezra may prefer Romney on different grounds, though some of the commenters on my item from yesterday clearly beg to differ with his assessment of Romney's competence, and it is also not just arguable but argued how successful such "competence" candidates have been as presidents in the past.
President Bush is planning to issue a stern warning Wednesday that the United States will not accept a political transition in Cuba in which power changes from one Castro brother to another, rather than to the Cuban people.
As described by an official in a background briefing to reporters on Tuesday evening, Mr. Bush’s remarks will amount to the most detailed response — mainly an unbending one — to the political changes that began in Cuba more than a year ago, when Fidel Castro fell ill and handed power to his brother Raúl.
Here's the problem. I want a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba as much as the next guy, but one of the consequences of adopting a 47 year hardline policy on the current regime is that your threats become pretty hollow. Short of invading Cuba or subjecting it to airstrikes, there's just not much that the U.S. can do to Cuba in terms of the "stick" part of diplomacy. All of the leverage is on the carrot side. This administration isn't wholly averse to carrots; it eventually made the North Korea deal, and the Libya deal was far more carrot than stick based (even if it was primarily at the behest of Tony Blair), but given the combination of John Bolton's continuing efforts to scuttle the North Korea deal and the power of the dread Cuba Lobby, we're unlikely to see any realistic policy initiative. The consequence is that, whether or not Fidel manages to outlast his tenth American president, the political transition in Cuba will happen largely without U.S. influence.
The World Series starts tonight and I’m rooting for my team, the Red Sox.
Putting aside as much as possible my built-in biases for them, I still predict they’ll win in six games or fewer. Josh Beckett looks unstoppable lately, and the Sox battled .306 in their league championship while the Rockies batted just .242.
I don’t really dislike the Rox: Just last month, in fact, I caught my first game at Coors Field, a great stadium ideally situated in a fun city that’s capital of a simply gorgeous state. Sure, I have known for some time about the Coors family’s conservative background -- and, of course, good old James Dobson is just down the road a stretch. But I didn’t figure that evangelism factored at all in managing the Rockies…
…until I saw this, from Sam Smith of Scholars & Rogues. So now I’m hoping for the Sox to not just win, but sweep.
It's impossible to tie the raging wildfires in California directly to climate change -- and it would be irresponsible to do so -- but like hurricanes, droughts, and floods, what's certain is that if climate change continues unabated, the world can expect more of these sorts of disasters, on increasingly larger scales. Researchers have found that these "mega-fires" are already becoming both more frequent and more severe, and they paint a bleak picture for the future.
60 Minutes did a good piece on it here, and both Science, Scientific American, and Grist had good features on climate change and wildfires last year after some alarming new studies came out about the increases in fire activity in the American West. What researchers found was that and the fire season has expanded by more than two months in the past two decades alone, and temperatures in Western states averaged one degree higher between 1987 and 2003 than during the period of 1970-1987. The snowpack is melting earlier, meaning soil and vegetation dry out sooner and stay dry for longer periods of time, leaving them more susceptible to fire. There were nearly seven times more fires between 1987 and 2003, compared to the previous 17 years, and when fires occurred, they took much longer to control. In the 1970-1986 period, they took an average of 7.5 days to control; the average over the next 17 years jumped to 37.1 days.
And just this summer, the National Parks Conservation Association released a grim report (PDF) on the multitude of impacts climate change will have on parks, not to mention all the people who live in or near these wooded areas, which cited a study in which models have suggested that without limits on greenhouse gas emissions, the number of large wildfires in California alone could increase by 50 percent by the end of the century.
So while it would be irresponsible to say that global warming is causing the devastating California fires, it's not unreasonable to point to them as part of the picture of what a changed and changing climate will mean for humans, and for humans right here in the United States.
With respect to the debate between Garance, Ezra and Matt referenced below, I think the answer is that they're all right. I certainly agree with Garance (and I don't think anybody disagrees) that there's no hidden liberal technocrat waiting to emerge if Romney becomes President. Obviously, the relatively liberal Republican that governed in Massachusetts was the product of an institutional context very different than what would exist in D.C. and would not reappear. But, as Ezra says, the key is that Romney is at least a technocrat, and the fact that he has a proven record of competent governance is actually meaningful; although a Republican president will make policy outcomes worse, as Bush has demonstrated it's important to have someone capable of actually running the basic functions of government.
And while he wouldn't govern as a liberal there's no reason to believe that Romney is more conservative than any of his competitors. McCain's fabled moderation is almost entirely mythical, a vanished artifact of a very brief period in which he was furious at the smear campaign run against him by the Christian right. And his foreign policy views have consistently been to the right of Bush. (One of Matt's commenters asks: "Do you really think that if McCain had been elected President in 2000 that we'd be in Iraq?" Uh, yes.) Thompson lacks not only most of Romney's moderate history but also any record of competent governance, and his indolent campaign is hardly reassuring on this score. Ezra gets the comparison to Huckabee right; I'm not sure why a known competent social conservative is preferable to one whose level of commitment to conservatism is unclear. And particularly since his social liberalism will be mostly irrelevant as a president, Giuliani's authoritarian tendencies and lunatic foreign policy views make him easily the least desirable major candidate. The fact that Romney is almost certainly the least likely to win is icing on the cake.
We last saw Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush's surgeon general appointee, at his Senate confirmation hearings, forswearing decades of religiously-motivated homophobia and ignorance about HIV/AIDS. He claimed that he had evolved into a more tolerant individual and doctor.
Today the United Methodist News Service released a press release announcing that Holsinger, the president of the national United Methodist Judicial Council, won't be attending this week's Council meeting, in which the body will discuss the fate of a pastor who underwent a female-to-male sex change. As recently as 2000, Holsinger voted alongside the Judicial Council to deny church membership to a gay man and prevent a lesbian from becoming a minister.
According to the press release, Holsinger decided his presence and the controversy over his views would distract the Judicial Council from its work. But really -- wouldn't this meeting have been a perfect opportunity for the good doctor to prove he's no longer bigoted against queer people? I guess he'd rather leave the senators guessing.
Via Roy Edroso, I see that conservatives are whining about the great day 20 years ago on which arch-reactionary Robert Bork was justly rejected by the Senate. First if all, it's worth repeating that in this case the Senate functioned as it should, focusing on constitutional philosophy rather than trivial details, and that attempts to turn "Borking" into a pejorative notwithstanding, it's ridiculous to argue that the president can consider ideology in nominations but the Senate cannot consider in in confirmation.
In addition, for the occasion it's worth once again excerpting Bruce Ackerman's devastating review of Bork's shoddy, transparently outcome-orietnted attempt to defend his "originalism" in The Tempting of America:
Bork has succumbed to his own temptation. Proclaiming his fidelity to history, his constitutional vision is radically ahistorical. Pronouncing an anathema on value relativism, his jurisprudence brings skepticism to new heights. Insisting on the sharpest possible line between law and politics, his bitter concluding section transforms a legal treatise into a Red-baiting n3 political tract. Tempting reveals that Bork's ordeal has transformed him into a human type that I, at least, had previously encountered only in Dostoyevsky novels. Mutatis mutandis, he is America's Grand Inquisitor -- grimly excommunicating heretics in the name of a Cause he has inwardly betrayed.
[...]
The historical vacuum at the core of Bork's orthodoxy may seem surprising, since the man spent much of his life as a professor at Yale and had the time to engage in the disciplined historical reflection that his orthodoxy demands. The mystery dissolves when one recalls that Bork's principal academic specialty was antitrust, not constitutional law. He did not win national leadership in this field by dint of historical research, but by championing the Chicago School of Economics' notably ahistorical and theory-laden approach to antitrust. Few readers of Bork's major book, The Antitrust Paradox, would guess that its author would next try to make a name for himself by championing the use of historical methods against the seductions of abstract theory. Indeed, one question left unresolved in Tempting is the extent to which Bork himself is aware of the tension between the ostentatiously theoretical methods of Paradox and the putatively historical concerns of Tempting.
Particularly telling is Bork's remarkable dismissal of the Ninth Amendment, and its obvious implications for his jurisprudence:
Perhaps we should be grateful, then, that Bork tries to decipher the Ninth Amendment without an independent examination of extrinsic sources. Sticking to the text, he reports that it "states simply, if enigmatically, that '[t]he enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.'"
The puzzle here is why Bork should find the text "enigmatic." It seems, almost preternaturally, to be written with him in mind. What Bork is up to is precisely to use "the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights" to "disparage" the idea that there are other constitutional rights of fundamental importance. I especially admire the Framers' choice of the word "disparage." I can think of no better word to describe Bork's general tone. Nonetheless, Bork finds the text enigmatic and yearns for greater clarity...
[...]
It is, of course, an old lawyer's trick to create uncertainty by writing hypothetical texts that, in the writer's mind, do a better job than the Framers'. Bork, however, does not seem to recognize that what the Framers wrote is stronger, not weaker, than the texts he considers as replacements. His hypothetical "clarifications" would narrowly address the courts and explain to them that they should not "disparage" unenumerated rights. In contrast, the Ninth Amendment speaks to all interpreters of the Constitution, presidents no less than courts, citizens no less than legislators, and expressly cautions all of them against committing the interpretive blunder that Bork would impose in the name of the Framers.
Bork's jurisprudence in fact had a great deal to do with reaching conservative policy outcomes and very little to do with "originalism." From the right, Glenn Reynoldsmakes a similar point.
I'm not sure that anyone is backing down on the claim that Mitt Romney is the least-bad (viable) Republican candidate, but I think Garance is slightly misunderstanding the argument beneath the assertion. My thinking does not go something like: Romney used to have better views than he does today, ergo he's probably just pandering, and will revert the "real" Mitt once he's in office. Rather, I dont hang any predictions based on the guy's cre ideology. I think Romney's got less core than a, uh, err, sigh...cored apple (damn -- need to think these metaphors through!), and he'll happily discriminate against gays and resist a sensible tax policy and all the rest of it.
But here's what Romney does have: A habituation to a set of analytical techniques and norms that will lead to a more competent White House, and a set of priorities and interests which do not focus on bombing Iran. The guy may be a panderer, but his appetite for data, and management consultant's mind, actually exist. As example, there's no reason George W. Bush had to gut FEMA and put a hack in charge of the agency. It wasn't a core tenet of conservatism, nor were his funders clamoring for less effective disaster relief. Bush just isn't a good executive. I think, based off both his history and his record in Massachusetts, that Romney is, technically speaking, fairly good. That was certainly the impression I got reporting out an article on his health care plan -- all the folks I spoke to in the Massachusetts bureaucracy had good things to say about Mitt's procedural comportment, if not about his priorities.
Nor are his interests particularly centered on foreign policy. Unlike Giuliani, whose self-conception really is linked to "the War on Islamofascistterrocommunism," I'm pretty sure that Romney's interested in finance, international trade, budgetary policy, etc. He may push policies in those areas that I dislike, but Congress has more oversight in those sectors than they do on when the executive launches the bomb, and even if they didn't, I believe that bad trade policy is relatively less damaging than bad bomb Iran policy.
I think the counter-argument to this goes something like "Mike Huckabee," but the degree to which a Huckabee presidency would rely on, and empower, the Christian Right, unnerves me too much to choose the Huck.
That said, I'd be interested in opening this one up to the floor. Tapped contributors: Who do you think would be the least bad Republican? Tapped readers: Put your choice in the comments. And no answering Ron Paul. Viable candidates only.
Predictions of Muqtada al-Sadr's imminent demise are to conservative warbloggers what power ballads were to hair metal bands. For some reason, they all seemed to think they needed to write one at some time, and none of them have aged particularly well. (Except for "Sweet Child O' Mine.")
"The New York Times reported last week that many Shias in Baghdad, including some tribal sheikhs, are now turning against the Mahdi Army and working with the Americans to evict them. Sadr’s base is collapsing from right underneath him, and it’s a direct result of the successful assault on radical Sunnis by General Petraeus’s surge forces and the Mahdi Army itself.
The Mahdi Army picked up substantial local support thanks to its defense of Shias from Sunni insurgents and death squads. Neither the American soldiers nor the Iraqi security forces were able to secure the streets of the neighborhoods, so Sadr’s militia was called on for the job. Many portions of Baghdad have since been purged of Sunni extremists, partly due to the notorious sectarian “cleansing” and population transfers. The Mahdi Army is a victim of its own success, in a way: it has outlived its perceived usefulness and has degenerated into an ideology-free gang of murderous street thugs who do not want to let go of power. A militia need not be as deranged as al Qaeda to wear out its welcome, even in Baghdad."
I commented last week on that NY Times article, which I found bizarre and misleading. (Here's a longer piece I wrote last July on Muqtada and his place in the Shia scene. And some comments on Michael Totten's past assertions about the Mahdi Army and other groups.)
Remember that, in the wake of the Karbala violence in late August, Muqtada declared a six-month cease-fire. Part of the point of this was basically take a head count, to identify those groups committed to his movement and ideology, to identify rogue elements operating under his Mahdi Army banner, and disavow them. This is something that he has done repeatedly over the last few years as he has increasingly focused his efforts on consolidating political power, increasing his services network, and solidifying his social base.
It's extremely important to understand that Sadr's organization is more than just a militia; it is a deeply-rooted political movement that speaks to and for a substantial portion of Iraq's poor Shias. I haven't seen any evidence that Iraqis are turning against Muqtada himself, as much as against these criminal elements that have been using the legitimacy of the Mahdi Army to facilitate their gangsterism (A U.S. officer I spoke to to last week also gave significant credit for the drop in violence in Baghdad to Muqtada's cease-fire). Again, I think what's going on here is that Muqtada has signaled that these criminal gangs are not under his protection, and so local Iraqis feel more comfortable reporting their activities to coalition forces, who then take care of them.
To be clear, I'm not trying to present Sadr as some kind of mastermind. I think he has been extraordinarily lucky in the years since the U.S. invasion, and has repeatedly benefited from the decisions and mistakes of the U.S. (starting with the decision to invade) and other actors in Iraq. But Sadr has also consistently shown an ability to capitalize on that luck. Like any good poker player, he's shown that he knows what to do with the cards when he gets them, and he's gotten some very good cards over the last four years. He's accumulated a pretty sizable chip stack, so he can afford to bleed off a few here and there and play around with some more borderline hands. He's also mucked around in a few pots that he really had no business playing, but I'm going to abandon this metaphor now.
It does not portend good things that Fred Thompson's first policy announcement is a broadside against immigrants. The GOP ain't even dog whistling anymore -- they're just screaming xenophobia at the top of their lungs. On the other hand, they really have no choice. It's literally the only policy area on which they're still favored.
The blog FireDogLake has long used as a sub-hed the above line from the Bad Religion song, "Los Angeles is Burning," which was written in response to the 2004 California fire season. There is something very post-modern about a disaster of such epic proportions already being the subject of a song and (warning: disturbing) video.
Romney's feints to the center have been enough to lead some liberal bloggers to pronounce Romney "the least bad Republican contender" and "the least bad [GOP] President if he should win." As M.J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis at the Israel Policy Forum, wrote at liberal blog TPMCafe, "He was, for a Republican, not a terrible governor and the Kennedy-Romney health care plan is better than most states have. He is a flip-flopper. To me that means he does not believe the right-wing garbage he puts out with such abandon."
Such perspectives, though understandable, are beside the point. It does not really matter which Mitt is the real Mitt or what he authentically believes. After seven years of Bush, liberals should know better than to imagine that the Republican base will nominate someone with secret plans to govern as a liberal, or even a moderate, regardless of what positions he once held in the past. The GOP will not, even accidentally, nominate someone still acceptable to a voter in Cambridge or Falmouth -- voters whose views Romney has already begun to use as a foil. The GOP will only choose Romney if it can first change him, too.
Romney may occasionally sound like a Democrat and he may sometimes talk like one. He is an immensely appealing personality in the flesh -- warm, funny, quick on his feet. But when it comes to all the most important issues of the day, the Republican primary process is turning him into the second coming of George W. Bush....
Was Romney a relatively liberal Republican as Massachusetts governor? Yes. Did he help back service programs that Democrats can cheer? He did indeed. Again, however, the critical question is: Does any of that matter today? And here the answer is a decisive no. Over the course of the next six months, as Romney runs for the GOP nomination, story after story will review the course of his life, his time in the governor's mansion, even his father's influence on his personality and campaign style. None of that will matter, though. If you want to know about what kind of president Mitt Romney would be, all you have to do is listen to what he is promising, and to whom. As Bush himself once said: "Fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." At least on that, we should hope Bush is right.
With all the talk about the Huck in the past few days, here's another thing worth noting: he also supports some relatively progressive climate and energy policies. Well, at least compared to his opponents. Last week, he came out in support of a cap-and-trade system.
"It goes to the moral issue,'' Huckabee said, in a press conference in New Hampshire. "We have a responsibility to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, to conserve energy, to find alternative forms of energy that are renewable and sustainable and environmentally friendly."
He joins John McCain as the only Republican candidates to support cap-and-trade, and to actively discuss policy that would address the issue.
Huckabee was also the only GOP candidate to mention getting America off oil at the Values Voter Summit over the weekend, though of course it in the "energy independence" frame. He's promised to achieve energy independence by the end of his second term should he be elected (and reelected), and supports expanding use of nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, clean coal, biodiesel, and biomass. Also, he's voiced support for raising CAFE standards and a renewable portfolio standard.
Sure, he evades the subject of whether or not human activity is causing climate change, and his concern about the planet is steeped in "caring for God's creation" rhetoric rather than acknowledging the very real consequences of climate change. But hey, he's engaging in the policy debate at least, whereas the others (outside of McCain) aren't. More on Huckabee's climate and energy stances here and here.
George Bush is asking the Congress for an additional 46 billion dollars for the Iraq war effort. The sum includes $3.6 billion more for the State Department. This is the same State Department which apparently does not know what happened to an earlier billion-dollar contract:
The State Department does not know specifically what it received for a billion-dollar contract with security firm DynCorp International to provide training services for Iraqi police, a U.S. watchdog agency said on Tuesday.
The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) said it was forced to suspend its audit of the DynCorp contract after administration officials told investigators they had no confidence in their own accounting records.
The inspector general said the agency had not validated the accuracy of invoices received before October 2006 and described bills and supporting documents as being in disarray.
Among the problems identified before the audit was suspended were duplicate payments, the purchase of a never-used $1.8 million X-ray scanner and payments of $387,000 to house DynCorp officials in hotels rather than other available accommodation.
I am trying to think how a conservative would criticize this combination of events. Based on my understanding of the relevant ideology and in the light of the recent SCHIP debates it might go something like this:
Should we really throw good money after bad? And what about the conservative principles of limited government expenditures and the idea of personal responsibility? It looks like the State Department made some bad choices in the past. Why should others pay for these choices now?
Amanda Terkelnotes that, despite the White House's leap to claim victory on S-CHIP, in reality Bush is playing defense, forced to rely on vetoes and executive orders to swat down the progressive legislation Congress has sent his way.
The veto is actually a tool of last resort. As Rutgers University professor Ross K. Baker told the Associated Press, "It's the veto, and the veto alone, that is the last line of defense for a president whose administration's life is waning away." Bush did all he could to threaten lawmakers, but he was ultimately powerless from stopping 69 senators and 265 representatives from voting to expand S-CHIP.
The fact that the House was unable to override Bush's veto has no bearing on the chamber's Democratic leadership. Opponents of Bush's veto actually picked up eight extra votes from the original September roll call passing the bill. Forty-four Republicans broke rank and joined Democrats to vote for the override last week, whereas just two Democrats voted to sustain Bush's veto.
At Politico, Ben Adlerreports that student campaigners in Iowa are concerned that the probable holiday-time caucus date of the first week of January -- the GOP has already settled on Jan. 3 -- will depress student turn-out. Colleges and universities are on winter break and many dormitories will be closed, making it harder for out-of-state students to caucus. The calculus is different for various candidates: Obama, who enjoys heavy support on campuses, is encouraging Iowa students to caucus at home with their parents, in districts where their votes are more likely to make a difference. Edwards, on the other hand, is less popular in college towns, and so some of his young supporters are planning to caucus there.
What occurs to me though, is that the early January caucus date isn't just inconvenient for students, but for everybody. It's a stressful time of year, marked by the comings and goings of guests, trips out of state, and yes, the immodest consumption of alcohol. It'll be interesting to see if turnout holds steady from past years.
UPDATE: Our very own GFR was all over the troubles an early caucus date would pose to young voters in August, while I was on an extended leave from work. Go Prospect!
The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has a fantastic feature out today on the impact former Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has had on the John Edwards campaign, and the close bond between Trippi and Elizabeth Edwards. It's a total must-read if you want to understand where that campaign is going, and why.
The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow...
Last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth. Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case event -- dry faucets.
I think there are a few things going on here. The first has to do with the fact that state governments in the South are, more than anywhere else in the U.S., vehicles for patronage rather than institutions capable of solving problems. Combine that with massive exurban growth and a cultural hostility to anything that smacks of liberalism, and the stage is set for some serious environmental problems. Of course, southwestern states also face serious water problems and haven't covered themselves with glory in trying to solve them, but at least those states don't seem to be caught as flatfooted as Southern states have been.
In his "Prospects" column from our November issue, Paul Starrcontemplates war with Iran:
Now is the season of Republican lethargy and discontent. A wave of retirements is dimming GOP congressional prospects, while the Republican presidential candidates have generated so little excitement that they are running behind the Democrats in fundraising and in the opinion polls. But there is one cheerful possibility on the horizon, and that is war with Iran.
Until recently, I had thought that an attack on Iran, besides being strategically reckless for America, would be politically suicidal for the Republican Party. I am still convinced an attack would be reckless for the country, but I am beginning to see how it could work for the GOP.
In a list of the top 25 American cities, what locale ranks number 4 in "intelligence," dead last for "fun," number 24 in attractiveness of its residents, but supposedly number 1 in "wordliness," "museums," and "architecture"? Why, it's Washington, D.C! At least according to tourists polled by Travel & Leisure magazine.
Perfectly reflecting the malaise of D.C.'s upper middle class residents, who often feel marooned here to advance their careers, we politicos, non-profit toilers, and scheming lobbyists ranked ourselves first in only one category: "Historical sites/monuments." On the whole, Washingtonians prefer the museums in New York. We're unsatisfied with the weather (too humid) and bored by our shopping options (too mall-ified). We consider our neighbors hopelessly unstylish and lamentably unsexy, although every one of us considers ourselves an exception to those rules, don't we? Why, it was just last week that I heard one male journalist say to another, "The dilemma of being a young male journalist in Washington is that there aren't very many cute young female journalists here." I could not stop laughing -- internally.
D.C. really is so special! After all, I can't think of another city sporting a popular blog that declares its self-hatred: Why I Hate D.C. Maybe it's no big surprise that one of the best ways to win the American presidency is to swear up and down that you have nothing to do with Washington.
There's been a lot of talk about the Huck lately, and why he's not getting the elite support from Christian Right leaders that an observer may expect. Some argue it's because he'll shatter the coalition with fiscal conservatives. Others say it's because he's too much of a longshot. But either way, Amy Sullivan's suggestion that this may redound to the detriment of the Christian Right's leadership is important:
The conflict has been brewing underneath the surface, but the results of the straw poll at Saturday's Values Voters Summit made it official: the real struggle in the 2008 Republican primaries will be not between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney or social conservatives and fiscal conservatives but between Christian Right leaders and the conservatives in the pews.
Coming off a heady week of endorsements from heavyweights in the Christian Right world, including Bob Jones III and Don Wilton, former president of the South Carolina Southern Baptist Convention, Mitt Romney technically won the straw poll with 1,585 of the total 5,576 votes cast. But it was former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who lit up the crowd with a fiery sermon as the last candidate to address the gathering. He took second place, just 30 votes behind Romney. When organizers broke the votes down into those cast online and those of summit attendees, the results revealed a true thrashing. In the tally of those present at the summit, Huckabee swamped his opponents, capturing 50% of the vote. By contrast, Romney was the choice of only 10% of on-site values voters.
The Christian Right, by virtue of its religious, rather than political, roots, would seem to have a nearly unique problem arguing for pragmatism over principle. And as Sullivan reports, Huckabee, with his knowledge of the Bible, is making the argument for principle very, very, forcefully. I assume that the movement's leadership would pull back before actually breaking with its believers, but given the incentives of the situation, my hunch is that if one prominent Christian leader gets loudly behind Huckabee, the pressure on the others to fall in line will be enormous. And if they back Huckabee and Giuliani wins, well, can they really support a candidate who captured the nomination over their principled objections?
Danapoints to a piece by Anita Hill that highlights how much more likely it is that women homebuyers will get a bad deal on a mortgage. It's not just women; black and Latino homebuyers are also much more likely to get a subprime loan.
This piece on the racial disparities when it comes to subprime mortgages in New York City puts some shocking statistics behind a story like this one in Washington's City Paper a few weeks ago. One study the Times examined found that even in the same income groupings, black and Hispanic borrowers in New York were much more likely to get a bad deal: among those in the $125,000 to $150,000 annual income bracket, 24 percent of white borrowers took out a subprime mortgage, compared to 52 percent of Hispanics and 63 percent of African Americans in 2006. Another New York study found that blacks were five times as likely to pay higher interest rates as whites; Hispanics were nearly four times as likely. Across the boards, predatory lenders target historically disadvantaged groups. Just one more way the system works to keep women and minorities at a disadvantage.
Last week, Jim WebbechoedRobert Kaplan'sclaim that the United States Navy is in danger of becoming too small. This isn't terribly surprising; Webb was Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, and resigned because he felt the Navy was getting short shrift. It's still wrong, though.
I go into more detail in the article, but what the USN seems to be aiming for right now is a force that can destroy any opponent or any plausible combination of opponents, while at the same time serving as the core of a network of navies that do the job of global maritime maintenance. To me, this makes a tremendous amount of sense; it spares us the expense of having to build a 500 ship fleet (or however many we might need), while allowing us to do what we want, and to cement positive relationships with navies around the world. This is soft hegemony at its best. We help provide a public good, while not bankrupting ourselves along the way.
Former Bossman of TAP Mike Tomasky just put out the welcome mat at his new shop, The Guardian's freshly-unveiled American edition. And he starts off in style, interviewingHillary Clinton, and getting her to admit an openness to rolling back the executive authority Bush has amassed if and when she takes office. Now, Clinton doesn't specify which powers she'll give up, and it's sort of one of those devil in the details type things, but it's an interesting admission.
To follow up on Sam Boyd's post (and welcome back to Tapped, Sam!) on Dodd, what I find strange is not Dodd's fervency in pursuit of the nomination, but the strange absence of tactical thought in playing up his advantages. Dodd is a tremendously popular senator from a fundamentally blue state. He can do, during this election, what he wants. And frankly, he's done a good job of it. If I were to float down from Mars and land in a Democratic debate, my hunch is Dodd would be the guy best able to turn my head.
But since neither Dodd nor I are opening the escape hatch of our space pods, we both know that he's far behind and needs a wedge with which he can force his way into the top tier. And for awhile, I assumed that wedge would be policy. Dodd had the right combination of liberal beliefs and establishment gravitas to undergird a supremely credible push for single-payer health care, vastly expanded labor rights, renewed activist government, etc. But, in fact, his policies, while good, have not been constructed so as to differentiate him from the field -- they place him right where the frontrunners are, by and large, leaving him with no actual points of disagreement he can use to topple the race's status quo. And he needs to topple the status quo. So my question isn't why Dodd appears to be running to win, but why he's not actually taking the risks that could help him win. Maybe his courageous hold on the FISA Bill is a sign that he's ready to start.
Anita Hillfocuses on the particular toll predatory lending takes on female home-owners. In Massachusetts, for example, one-third of first-time home buyers are single women, as are a quarter of all home buyers. Like many buyers, single women who qualify for conventional loans are often steered toward subprimes anyhow. But unlike men, brokers push women at much higher income levels to accept subprime conditions:
Women borrowers are overrepresented in the subprime lending market according to studies done by both the Consumer Federation of America and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. Across the economic spectrum, women receive less favorable terms than similarly situated men on home purchase, refinance, and home improvement loans. The studies also show that the gap between women and men receiving subprime loans actually increases as women's income increases.
Via Pam Spaulding: Barack Obama, in an effort to attract more religious voters, is taking a gospel band on tour with him in South Carolina. The show will feature gospel acts Mary Mary, Donnie McClurkin, Hezekiah Walker, Byron Cage and the Mighty Clouds of Joy, according to reports.
"This is another example of how Barack Obama is defying conventional wisdom about how politics is done and giving new meaning to meeting people at the grassroots level," the campaign’s religious affairs director said in a press release. "This concert tour is going to bring new people into the political process and engage people of faith in an unprecedented way."
But as Pam highlights, one of the artists on his tour is Donnie McClurkin, an "ex-gay" who has said homosexuals are liars who have a "lack of character." They can, however, be cured through prayer he argues. McClurkin also appeared at the Republican National Convention in 2004, where surely his "ex-gay" message went over a lot better. (See here for more.)
It's an effort to attract more black voters in a state where he's locked head to head with Hillary Clinton and half the Democratic primary voters are black. While it's doubtful McClurkin would use the tour to spread his ex-gay agenda, it unnecessarily creates tension between more conservative black voters and gay voters, tension that many are already trying to exploit. Even if it helps draw South Carolina primary voters, it's a poor choice on the publicity front.
Matt graciously endorses my point about the impossibility of knowing the "real" Mitt Romney and adds this:
It's not as if once in office Romney is going to blossom into a kind of politician totally different from the one he's currently campaigning as. We're learning about his willingness to adopt whichever views are most politically expedient. And doing something like going back on the reckless "no taxes" pledge he's made on the campaign trail would probably be pretty costly. Obviously, flipping back around on abortion or gay rights would look absurd and there'd be no reason to do it. The Mitt we're gonna get if he wins is substantially the one we're looking at during this campaign season.
I'm not sure about that. As Ryan Lizzapointed out in his excellent New Yorker profile of Romney the man has a pretty bottomless well of chutzpah:
Politicians tend to pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani, also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of the Republican Party.
So, while I agree we're not too likely to get a pro-choice Romney ever again, we might get a sudden re-embrace of, say, health care reform or a newly moderate position on Iraq if he wins the Republican nomination. A couple of prominent tacks left like that would make him a more formidable opponent and, really, if people aren't already convinced he's a complete opportunist will they ever be? Ridiculous as a newly moderate Romney would be, he has shown an impressive ability to advocate passionately for things he recently abhorred and has had a remarkable degree of success doing it. He already looks absurd and, if he continues to embrace that he might just succeed in neutralizing it.
We've given regular TAPPED contributor Robert Farley some space over at TAP Online to air his concerns about Robert Kaplan's piece in the November issue of The Atlantic:
The centerpiece of Kaplan’s argument is a comparison of the current U.S. Navy to the British Royal Navy at the end of the 19th century. The decline of the Royal Navy heralded the collapse of British hegemony, and the decline of the U.S. Navy threatens a similar fate for the United States. The only problem with this argument is that similarities between the 21st century United States and the 19th century United Kingdom are more imagined than real. It’s true that the relative strength of the Royal Navy declined at the end of the 19th century, but this was due entirely the rise of the United States and Germany. But the absolute strength of the Royal Navy increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the United Kingdom strove to maintain naval dominance over two countries that possessed larger economies and larger industrial bases than that of Great Britain. In other words, the position of the Royal Navy declined because the position of the United Kingdom declined; in spite of this decline, the Royal Navy continued to dominate the seas against all comers until 1941. Britain’s relative economic decline preceded its naval decline, although the efforts to keep up with Germany, the United States, and later Japan did serious damage to the British economy. The United States faces a situation which is in no way similar.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has announced that Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, in many ways the moral center of her wizarding universe, should be understood as gay. If only this had been revealed in the books!
Why, I'm wondering, did Rowling wait until now to reveal this? And will the crazies renew their attempts to ban the Potter books from children's libraries?
Via David Roberts, we get some insight into what the Bush administration wants from the energy bill. Long story short: give us the sort of pork-filled, toothless energy bill the Republicans gave us in 2005, or we're vetoing, because we can. Our demands: you pledge more money for wasteful biofuel projects, soften up on your CAFE demands, let the oil industry keep enjoying massive tax breaks, and don't set any concrete goals for increasing the amount of renewable energy sources in our portfolio.
In a letter to Nancy Pelosi last week, Bush's assistant for economic policy Allan B. Hubbard concludes:
Statements of Administration Policy describe additional concerns with the energy legislation. The Administration would like to work with Congress to resolve these concerns. Two years ago, the President signed into law energy legislation that was crafted in a bipartisan manner. We hope for the opportunity to work with you in a similar fashion to move America toward a stronger, cleaner energy future.
But no, really, he's just writing to "reiterate the administration's commitment to work with Congress." Congress is still trying to hash out the differences between the House and Senate bills, and my guess is they'll come out with a strong bill that moves us in the right direction (despite the fact that some are growing increasingly cynical that they'll do that this term), and the Bush administration will just come off looking like the petulant partisans they are when they veto it. And we'll just have to wait until something changes in 2008 to allow Congress to actually accomplish something.
Courtney Martin's web piece on today's generation of young liberals is one of the most honest and clear things I've read in a long time. Some paragraphs crystallize so clearly things I've thought a thousand times (the bit about the emptiness of modern protest in particular). I just wanted to add a few thoughts as someone who has had so many similar conversations and at times been pretty damn overwhelmed himself:
It's not surprising that a more informed and in many ways more empowered generation has more trouble doing anything. The well-known paradox of choice is essentially that, when you give people more choices--be it flavors of jam or possible careers--they actually have more trouble making a decision and, in some cases, are less likely to make a choice at all. Give people a choice of twenty different ways to change the world, each with it's own sacrifices, possible disappointments, and the inevitable uncertainty over just how much good you'll be doing and it's no wonder some of them get so confused and flummoxed that they don't do much of anything.
This, incidentally, is one reason Teach For America is uniquely effective at recruiting young people despite its deeply controversial approach to education reform. As I've discovered, its recruiting methods are far more aggressive than even most private sector companies. It thereby makes itself a very clear option for college graduates whereas other options that should be equally attractive (and are much more in need of fresh help) are much less easy to get into.
Another reason we at least seem less active is that we're way more skeptical about our ability to effect change in the world than previous generations. This is good and bad. On the one hand, I'd argue we're in better touch with reality than say the students of the '60s (not that it was their fault necessarily). On the other, it takes a certain amount of overconfidence to have the courage to make real change. On the whole, I'd rather be skeptical and right than confident and wrong, but there are costs either way.
In addition, I'm not quite sure we're more depressed about the world than earlier generations. We are, certainly, more aware of the problems, but on the the other hand we've also seen huge progress on a great number of things. Your mileage will vary. Regardless, I think choice is again a problem with a greater variety of problems as with a variety of solutions. Should I try and get involved in international development where western help is of uncertain value but the problems are obvious or should I stay in the US where I have a better idea of what to do, but there isn't as much absolute need? It's those kind of questions that are really overwhelming.
Finally, I'm not as sure as Friedman and maybe Courtney that we really are doing less. Sure there are fewer marches and our work is less colorful (quieter as Friedman would have it)-- but more people work in nonprofits as a percentage of the population, there are more options for students who do want to make change, and, I'd argue, we're more likely to be effective when we do make change because we do have a better idea of what's going on in the world. Our activism may not be as fun and it may not be as obvious, but it might just be as successful. I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be so skeptical about us just yet.
Kate Sheppard has the run-down on a treaty Democrats should be rallying around:
This fall, legislators have one solid shot at simultaneously pleasing George W. Bush, angering Michelle Malkin and Pat Buchanan, appeasing both oil company executives and environmentalists, and proving to the rest of the world that the United States is ready to re-engage in global diplomacy. How? Through a little-known treaty called the Law of the Sea. With the specter of a post-Kyoto climate treaty looming in the distance, an easy victory on an international agreement regulating the high seas is the quickest way to give Democrats and the United States some wind in the proverbial sails for ratifying other global pacts, while pointing out the opposition from the right wing for what it really is: knee-jerk nationalism.
The story behind the Law of the Sea begins in the 1960s. Before then, the 70 percent of the earth's surface covered by oceans had been generally considered neutral territory, but there was growing international pressure to create a system for negotiating drilling, mining, and fishing rights.
More evidence -- as if we needed any after this weekend's Values Voters Summit -- that Fred Thompson's star is fading as the "true conservative" candidate. After previously dodging such questions, Thompson told a local reporter in Tampa today that he is opposed to the federal or state governments interfering in end of life issues, as Congress did in the infamous Terri Shiavo circus of 2005. In 2002, Thompson helped make the decision to take his own daughter, Betsy Panici, off of life support. He said:
Making this into a political football is something that I don't welcome, and this will probably be the last time I ever address it. It should be decided by the family. The federal government -- and the state government too, except for the court system -- should stay out of these matters, as far as I'm concerned."
Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan, who says, "For all his weaknesses as a candidate, Thompson has one attribute now rare among Republicans: a lack of zeal."
You hear about various candidates "moving" to Iowa but Chris Doddhas taken that one step further by literally moving his family to the state. His daughter is enrolled in Kindergarten in Des Moines, and he and his wife have rented a house for the next few months. This raises a few questions: Is this even legal? He's still a Senator from Connecticut after all, and I'd have thought that involves at least pretending to live there.
Also, how are his actual constituents going to feel about this when he inevitably loses the nomination? He's never going to be president. He's averaging 0.9% in Iowa polls and shows no momentum at all. Basically, I just don't get his campaign. What's his elevator pitch? Sure, he's somewhat more liberal on some issues than the big three candidates and he has a longer record on them, but that's hardly enough to make it clear that he's the best candidate. As Michael Kinsley has said, some people run for president because everyone needs a hobby, but Dodd is at least making a show of believing he has a chance of winning he nomination... Really, I don't get it. Anyone have a theory?
Via a commenter, And Still I Persist, a blog about the California fires written by a former Marine and data specialist, with maps of the evacuation areas. The news photos at the LA Times are more dramatic than his, but the shots on this site will give you a feel for what it's like to have an out of control blaze threatening your suburban cul-de-sac, while smoke clouds out the sun.
I'm never going to get the rules of American politics quite right. I have just begun to understand why a live boy in a politician's bed is equal not to a live girl but a dead girl, and now I have to learn all those intricate rules about how to rank the possible ill-treatment of political pets.
For example, Mitt Romneyonce strapped the dog crate on top of the family car for an eight-hour fun tour, with the dog still in the crate. Is this really no worse, politically speaking, than the Clinton cat, Socks, being given away to a secretary whom the cat loved best anyway?
Perhaps the cautionary tale of Socks the cat will make a difference. "Hillary's insistence that we follow her example in pet ownership, when she really should be on Cat Fancy's Most Wanted List, makes her a tiresome bore," Flanagan writes.
So what are these pet-owning political rules? Do they follow the usual pattern of balance, I wonder, so that a Democratic presidential candidate finding a new home for a pet is as bad as a Republican candidate treating a dog in a way which made the dog's bowels empty themselves all over the station wagon windows?
And what is it that we learn from all these pet stories?
Former Sen. John Edwards' decision last month to accept public financing for the Democratic primaries made news because all the other leading candidates had abandoned the public system in favor of relying on private donations. But Edwards later clarified that he would not rule out accepting private funds for the general election. The reality is that the present presidential public-financing system isn't working and that all the leading Democratic contenders have endorsed fixing it.
What hasn't made headlines, but should, is substantial activity to enact new comprehensive public-financing systems in several states. Last month, for example, Democrats in the New Hampshire House of Representatives made it a priority to establish a framework for public financing of state elections for the 2008 legislative session. This was a startling development, considering that the state legislature had not even considered a public-financing bill in the last seven years.
The wildfires that started in the Malibu region have now spread through San Diego County and are burning all the way to Mexico. More than 250,000 Californians have already been forced from their homes, which I believe now qualifies the fires as a disaster of memorable and epic proportions. The reasons for the fire include unusual weather patterns of record drought and violent wind:
The fires were being fueled by stronger than usual Santa Ana winds roaring out of the region's canyons, scientists said Monday. The powerful, dry winds typically blow between October and February and peak in December.
Typically, Santa Ana conditions last about a day, but the ones that flared up over the weekend were expected to last through Tuesday.
"For it to be this strong for so many days is unusual," said Stuart Seto, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
It's unclear if these weather patterns are related to climate changes, but overall the American West is drying out thanks to decreasing snowpack due to higher temperatures, as The New York Times magazine detailed in this frighteningly well-timed cover story over the weekend.
We've got two pieces from our new November issue free as a preview to non-subscribers today.
First up, John Judisexplains how the Iraq war is a throwback to the great power imperialism that led to World War I:
Bush's foreign policy has been variously described as unilateralist, militarist, and hyper-nationalist. But the term that fits it best is imperialist. That's not because it is the most incendiary term, but because it is the most historically accurate. Bush's foreign policy was framed as an alternative to the liberal internationalist policies that Woodrow Wilson espoused and that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton tried to put into effect as an alternative to the imperialist strategies that helped cause two world wars and even the Cold War. Bush's foreign policy represents a return not to the simple unilateralism of 19th-century American foreign policy, but to the imperial strategy that the great powers of Europe -- and, for a brief period, America, too -- followed and that resulted in utter disaster.
The war in Iraq can sometimes feel like a military commitment in search of a rationale. Yet there has never been any doubt among insiders that the Bush administration intended Iraq to become an outpost of U.S. power projection throughout the Middle East. "A future Iraq would be a major player in and partner of the U.S. with regard to the U.S.’ security strategy and presence in the Middle East," recalls Paul Pillar, who from 2001 until 2006 was the U.S. intelligence community’s chief Mideast analyst. "This wasn’t going to be just an altruistic endeavor -- ‘we’ll overthrow Saddam and then politely bow out.' ... That was never envisioned."
You may have heard about this embrace of utter crackpottery from new social conservative darling Mike Huckabee:
Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust.
“Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”
Leaving aside the rather problematic economic assumptions here, we have two classic pieces of stupidity and exploitation common to the rhetoric of the forced pregnancy lobby. First, if abortion is a "holocaust," one wonders why most anti-choicers believe that the alleged primary perpetrators of this genocide should face fewer legal sanctions than if they spat on the sidewalk. And Huckabee would have signed the North Dakota law that also exempted women from punishment for contributing to the "holocaust." Does Huckabee believe that Eichmann should have been exempt from punishment? Or maybe he should stop using this idiotic and spectacularly offensive analogy?
In addition to the bizarre causal logic, the "Oh no! Giving reproductive rights to women means more furriners undermining the values of Good White Americans by coming here to feed their families!" argument has perhaps broader implications than he intends. If the key problem with abortion is lower birthrates, forget abortion: we need to stop the production and distribution of contraception immediately! Passing arbitrary laws forcing poor women to obtain unsafe abortions will do nothing while Trojans are freely produced! Oh the humanity!
Again, there are few things as bizarre in American politics as "pro-lifers" who demand constant congratulation for having Unyielding Moral Principles as they advance positions that are a moral, legal, logical, and political shambles.
The question of whether Hillary Clinton is uniquely polarizing is actually pretty hard to answer. For instance: The metric you use matters quite a lot. If you're going by how many voters "definitely would not" vote for her, she's less polarizing than John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Fred Thompson, or Mitt Romney. But some say that number is a function of name recognition -- that folks are sure they won't vote for candidates they don't know. So if you're going by favorability numbers, then Clinton's 44% unfavorable is fairly high. But that may just mean she's further along in a process that any high profile Democrat will undergo. At this point in the 2004 cycle, John Kerry's unfavorables were between 13% and 20% -- by the time the election rolled around, he was in the mid-40s, posting numbers pretty comparable to Hillary's.
So that's the question: Not whether Hillary Clinton is more polarizing right this second. Given that everyone knows who she is, that simply has to be true. But whether she'll be more polarizing than John Edwards after eight months of haircut and hedge fund smears, or Barack Obama, after an election full of madrassa insinuations. Clinton's numbers probably reflect the end point of that process -- she's been smeared with maximum energy and efficiency for 15 years now. Edwards and Obama haven't, but if either captures the nomination, the GOP's attack machine will boot up, and do to them exactly what it did to John Kerry. If someone has an argument for why, at the end of that political war, they'll be less polarizing than Clinton, than that's a fair comparison. But the current numbers are not.
Taiwan is set to develop a non-lethal graphite bomb designed to disable rival China’s power supplies, it was reported Oct. 21.
Should war break out, the so-called “blackout bombs” would be carried by Hsiungfeng 2E cruise missiles to paralyze the power systems of China’s southeastern coastal cities, the United Daily News said. The bombs work by sprinkling a cloud of chemically treated carbon fibers over power supplies, causing them to short-circuit, but without killing people.
According to the article, the U.S. used similar weapons to good effect against Iraq. The Taiwanese have been making some recent efforts to develop an offensive capability against the PRC (to deter invasion, not to launch an actual attack), although US advice on the subject has usually been to concentrate on the buildup of defensive capabilities. While this weapon might cause considerable economic and social dislocation in China, I'm not sure that it could compare with the economic problems that would be caused by the political fallout of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Treasury officials say they believe in free markets, Robert Kuttnerwrites, but spent the past month arm-twisting other banks to mount a government-induced rescue of Citigroup. He explains:
Citigroup's affiliates have exposure totaling at least $80 billion. The Treasury persuaded several other banks to put up a huge pool of capital that will promise to buy securities that markets may not want, in order to keep market confidence (and bank balance sheets) from collapsing. In effect, the Treasury just added another layer to what may be a house of cards.
The Treasury made sure to leak details of the plan over the weekend, presumably to offset the grim news of Citigroup's quarterly report on Monday, which showed a 57 percent drop in earnings. Officials familiar with the plan say one purpose is to prevent the banks from having to mark down the value of assets in a depressed market, which would further weaken their balance sheets.
Nobody knows whether this plan will work, since at the end of the daisy chain somebody has to be willing to buy debt partly backed by assets that may never pay off. The Treasury is gambling that if a big enough pool of money is organized, markets that panicked will begin functioning normally again. Bad debt and good debt will be sorted out and life will go on.
It's one of the most stubborn ethical and personal dilemmas many affluent, politically progressive families face: The decision on whether to send one's child to public or private school. There's very little discussion in the American press of how families' decisions on this matter affect their communities and society at large. So I was heartened to see the Times of London attribute the rise in urban inequality, at least in part, to wealthy parents' choices, en masse, to enroll their offspring in independent schools costing an average of £11,000 annually, or $22,532. In the London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, about half of all children attend private schools, but almost 40 percent are in poverty. And of course, there is almost no overlap between those two groups.
Last week when I participated in a TPM Café discusson on Daniel Brook's The Trap, I was ridiculed for suggesting that educated people might send their children to the Washington, D.C. public schools in order to avoid the temptation to leave jobs they love in exchange for an enormous paycheck. Many of the public schools in D.C. are troubled, and they are certainly not the best choice for all families living in all neighborhoods of the city. Yet quite a few wonderful, progressive, intellectual parents I know have their children enrolled in public schools here, all the way through high school. There's a disconnect between the fears of what will happen to the average privileged child in an integrated public school, and what actually does happen. Indeed, decades of research shows that children from affluent families have similar academic and life outcomes whether they attend private or public schools, segregated or integrated. Poor kids, on the other hand, are much more likely to land a good job after high school if they graduate from an integrated school.
In other words, we shouldn't be content with the assumption that rich, mostly white people in Washington, D.C., London, New York, or any other city will send their kids to private schools, while most public schools continue to look as they did prior to the civil rights movement. Last year in the Washington City Paper, Ryan Grimreported on a group of upper middle class parents in Dupont Circle who vowed together to send their kids to the neighborhood elementary school. After myriad frustrations with the school and its administration, most families backed out. But attempts like that to engage parents in the public schools are to be applauded. Public schools need to do more to offer something to all families in a district, and parents need to meet them halfway by seriously considering a public education. In the end, it's the children educated among diverse peers who benefit.
At the end of an otherwise compelling analysis of last night's Republican presidential debate on TNR's new campaign blog, Noam Scheiber has this to say about Mitt Romney:
There are obvious tactical reasons for Romney to run as a conservative. But sometimes you can't help wishing he'd run more authentically -- as the moderate technocrat he is at heart.
The context is a discussion of McCain, Romney, Thompson and Giuliani's attempts to deal with their embarrassingly non-crazy policy histories. But why should we assume that Romney's moderate record is in any way more representative of his true beliefs (if he has any) than his cu
Feeds: 
symbol identifies content for paid subscribers only.
