• Do centrist/moderate/conservative Democrats worry that blocking the public option in health-care reform could cost them re-election next year? Blanche Lincoln's constituents, for example, are in favor of the public option, and seem willing to punish her for voting against it. Moreover, the notion that the public option is more important than bipartisanship has started creeping into the conventional wisdom, neutering one of the favored refuges of the centrist scoundrel.
• There isn't much to add to the good news that President Obama has formally lifted the ban on HIV-positive travelers, other than it's about time. The ban was as if the United States had been telling the world for the past 22 years that you could get AIDS from a drinking fountain, so it's a pleasure to see some rationality on display for a change.
  
• It's strange, but not surprising, that Pat Robertson would define hate-crimes legislation as an attempt to muzzle Christians. Since the bill deals with the punitive measures taken after a crime has taken place, I don't see the source of his belief that the bill will censor Christians for "speaking out on certain moral issues." His objection only makes sense if he's ascribing the right to punish homosexuals as a "Christian" virtue.
  
• One can find innumerable examples of Fox News not behaving like a real news organization. But one area where news organizations should be expected to conduct themselves with professional rigor is the business of polling. The principles of scientific polling are well known, and the introduction of statistical bias is detrimental to the poll's accuracy. That being said, Fox's approach to opinion polling is probably the best evidence that they are not a serious news organization.
• Remainders: Obviously this means we need to immediately start bombing Iran back to the stone age; 3.5 percent GDP growth = half a percentage point off unemployment per year; the former governor of Alaska polls like Dan Quayle; and Liz Cheney is reprehensible.

--Mori Dinauer

The upshot of the Washington Post's revelation that a copy of the House's ethics committee's weekly status report was found floating around on a peer-to-peer file-sharing network is that (a) we suddenly know the names of a few more members of Congress on whom Zoe Lofgren's committee has its sights and (b) the prospects for passing legislation restricting file-sharing software have probably just gotten somewhat rosier.

Efforts to get file-sharing software companies like LimeWire and Kazaa to put warning labels on their software have bounced around the Hill for what must be six years now, during which time you may well have moved onto iTunes and forgotten that file-sharing networks exist. A version sponsored by Mary Bono (R-CA) just passed out of committee last week that would dictate that P2P software companies put extensive warnings in their products on the risks they pose. The Recording Industry of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have, as an extension of the copyright wars, nudged Congress, gently and otherwise, to crack down on P2P, on the grounds that when users open up their hard drives to share music and movies, they risk exposing all sorts of sensitive documents. Copyright can be marginalized as an industry interest. But national security is everyone's problem, and every so often something the government doesn't want public pops up on one of these networks, like details about presidential safe-houses. It's probably realistic to expect that this episode -- the unintended exposure of the some of the most sensitive files from one of the Hill's most secretive committees -- is going to make a nice exhibit when Congress next turns its attention to the menace of file sharing.

And with that, my time here is down. It has been a real thrill guest blogging here at TAPPED this week, and as a faithful TAPPED reader I look forward to reading the pinch bloggers lined up next. Catch you around the Internet.

--Nancy Scola

The Parody, from our November issue:

"Every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators." 
 -- A highlight from the 1989 graduate thesis of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell



Other highlights the Prospect has uncovered from the college papers of prominent political leaders: 



"Often unfairly depicted, Moriarty is primarily motivated by self-defense, which forces him to work the dark side, if you will." 
 -- Dick Cheney 
Casper College 



"When Bartleby says, 'I would prefer not to' to every request made of him in the workplace, it may seem as if he is simply offering refusal and obstruction. That is entirely unfair to Bartleby. What Bartleby is really saying is, 'What we all need to do is to slow down, stop this current process, start over, and get it right.'" 
 -- Mitch McConnell, University of Louisville



"A notably unfair negative portrayal is Shakespeare's Richard III, as this ignores the security threats Richard faced during the War of the Roses. He had no choice but to work the dark side, if you will." 
 -- Richard Cheney, 
Casper College



"Konrad Adenauer has 
preserved the essential ambivalence about West German identity that ... 



wait, are you sleeping?" -- John Kerry, Yale

"Atticus Finch is an admirable character in To Kill a Mockingbird, but that does not mean he has the right to question the due process against his client. I have not seen anything in the case of Tom Robinson that would cause me to think that the decision that was made by the courts of the state of Alabama was not correct." 
 -- Rick Perry, Texas A&M

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness." -- Joe Biden, University of Delaware



"Hamlet is a famous work by William Shakespeare that, like all of them, any of them, is very great." 
 -- Sarah Palin, Hawaii Pacific University



"Hamlet is a famous work by William Shakespeare that is very great, like any of them, all of them." 
 -- Sarah Palin, North Idaho College



"Hamlet is a famous work, like any of them, all of them, by William Shakespeare that is very great." 
 -- Sarah Palin, University of Idaho



"Like all of them, any of them, Hamlet is a famous work by William Shakespeare that is very great." 
 -- Sarah Palin, Matanuska-Susitna College



"Macbeth is a famous work by William Shakespeare that, like any of them, all of them, is very great."
 -- Sarah Palin, back at the University of Idaho



--T.A. Frank

Terence Samuel on the fight for the public option:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid grew up 50 miles outside the gaming capital of the world and sparred as an amateur boxer during his teen years. Perhaps this upbringing explains the Nevada politician's urge to take up the risky fight for a public option in the health-care reform bill that will soon come to the Senate floor. In some ways, Reid's willingness to play hardball is a new development for timid, risk-averse Senate Democrats, who have been caught playing defense on an issue that they should own.

Meanwhile, House Democrats unveiled their own bill on Thursday, which includes a public health-insurance option that allows states to opt out and generally matches Reid's promised legislation. What comes next is a new round of attacks from opponents about how "ObamaCare" will ruin the American way of life. That strategy hasn't worked yet, and it's unlikely to succeed at this late stage -- more and more Americans support the idea of a public option, and they're increasingly aware that its existence may not affect them at all.

KEEP READING ...

Today's op-ed from Sens. Orrin Hatch and Jim DeMint against net neutrality is strange all the way through, but one part in particular jumps out:

If there is a perfect encapsulation of the success of Washington's current hands-off approach to the Internet, it's the popular "There's an app for that" advertising campaign. Since the latest introduction of smart phones like Apple's iPhone and Blackberry's Curve, independent software developers have created tens of thousands of applications for mobile devices. There are apps for gamers, bloggers, couch potatoes, foodies, health-care providers and every other niche market you can imagine. These applications have improved people's lives and satisfied consumer demand.

Now, there are a lot of substantive arguments you can make about why it doesn't make sense for the Federal Communications Commission to codify net neutrality regulation right at this moment in time. But celebrating the Apple iTunes App Store is a particularly curious one.

As a business model, the iTunes store has a lot going for it. We users like it because we can get access to apps for our iPhones without worrying about the muss and fuss of dealing with different vendors, secure in the knowledge that the apps have been vetted by Apple's crack team. And independent software developers have an incentive to sell their wares there because, after they pay a $100 fee, they can focus on developing software and letting Apple act as their representative -- handling payments (while taking a 30 percent slice) and taking care of promotion that bundles independent apps in one well-visited marketplace. This all makes it more likely that your genius $.99 SkeeBall app is going to find its audience. As consumers, we make the trade-off between Apple acting as the gatekeeper and the benefits we get from having a controlled experience. Apple has found a successful way to match supply and demand while doing quite well for themselves. The Apple iTunes App Store is a triumph of business innovation.

But man, what the iTunes Store is not is the Internet. Or more accurately, it's really, really, not the World Wide Web, that manifestation of the Internet that many of us know and enjoy as a freewheeling medium and marketplace. Apple Inc. is wholly and completely the gatekeeper, approving and rejecting products submitted to them for whatever reasons they see fit in a process that by Apple's own admission can be opaque and drag on for weeks and months. Programmers, no matter if they're Joe Schmoe or the Google Voice team, are at the mercy of Apple, having to pass each iteration of their software by a corporate approval board. That's their choice. That's our choice. It's a tiny corner of the Internet where we've all agreed to abide by certain rules. But it's more or less the opposite of the open and neutral platform for innovation that the Internet as a whole is.

For now. Even those people who are opposed to the FCC regulating neutrality don't promote the idea that the Internet should turn into a 7-Eleven, where Comcast or AT&T or whoever decides what goes on the shelves. They just say that it's unlikely to happen. Now, you might say, these two senators are just clumsily gloaming on the hot technology of the moment -- iPhones! -- to make their case. But the scarier thought is that there is some Senate communications policy staffer here who doesn't appreciate the rather important difference between the iTunes store and the Web.

--Nancy Scola

In an interview a few minutes ago, House Financial Services Committee Chair Barney Frank responded to criticism of the systemic risk legislation, proposed by the administration, that he is moving through Congress. During a hearing yesterday, several members of Congress, along with regulators like FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, expressed concern about the proposal for dissolving failed banks, which relies on an after-the-fact fee on the rest of the financial system. Bair and Rep. Luis Gutierrez argued that an insurance fund, assessed in advance of a crisis, would be a fairer and more predictable way to prevent the costs of bank failures from falling on consumers. Frank said today that he is now supporting such a provision, saying that:

"The administration felt that it was a mistake to have a fund up front, because that might make [people] think that there was moral hazard, but people are going to think that anyway, so we are going to change it so that there is an up-front fund to be paid for by assessments on these institutions."

He made the decision after listening to the various views expressed at the hearing. Democracy at work!

-- Tim Fernholz

David Brooks wonders if Obama has what it takes:

Their first concerns are about Obama the man. They know he is intellectually sophisticated. They know he is capable of processing complicated arguments and weighing nuanced evidence.

But they do not know if he possesses the trait that is more important than intellectual sophistication and, in fact, stands in tension with it. They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

We've been hearing some version of the "is Obama tough enough" argument since he started running for president, and as always, it's really less about Obama's individual tenacity than whether or not he possesses the same sterling moral qualities that led the questioner to their principled beliefs about public policy. In other words, it's not "is Obama tough enough" but "is Obama tough enough to do what I want him to do?" And in this case, Brooks wants Obama to show some Green Lantern-style willpower and let everyone know the U.S. is there to stay indefinitely.

-- A. Serwer

The Small Bank Exemption. In order to assuage the concerns of community and regional banks, the final version of the bill exempts banks that have less than $10 billion in assets from being examined by or paying fees to the CFPA, although they will still be covered by its rules. Prudential regulators, like the FDIC, the Fed or the proposed "National Bank Supervisor" will be in charge of examining these banks. There are good reasons to do this; politically, it relieves pressure from local bankers against the CFPA, and it also provides an advantage for them over the larger banks, which tend to act more perniciously. Although the cap may be a little too high -- it would only result in about 80 banks being regulated by the CFPA.

The problem is that the prudential regulators proved abysmal at watching out for consumer abuses -- hence the need for the CFPA in the first place -- and, in general, bad practices tend to migrate to wherever the least scrutiny is. The CFPA can regain jurisdiction over these banks as a result of consumer complaints or failure of the prudential regulator to do their job, and the CFPA can send examiners to join the prudential regulators if it so chooses, but without the ability to assess fees on these banks, the agency might not be able to afford to scrutinize them for bad behavior.

Another problem is that large banks might decide to set up smaller subsidiaries to handle certain aspects of consumer credit, like the mortgage lending subsidiaries maintained by many large banks, in order to evade supervision by the CFPA. While Committee members, including Rep. Brad Miller, who introduced the exemption amendment, think that's an unlikely problem, and would be frankly happy to see the banks take action to shrink themselves, the problem of enforcement persists. Miller told me earlier this week that he would support a modification to the compromise that would allow the CFPA to assess fees from smaller financial institutions that, whether through a failure to obey regulations or a laxity on behalf of prudential regulators, end up requiring CFPA examination.

More issues after the jump ...

-- Tim Fernholz

Compromising on State Preemption. While initial reports that federal preemption had been defeated put happy looks on the faces of consumer advocates and ambitious state attorneys general, a new compromise amendment attached to the bill served as something of a letdown. The compromise allows existing preemption rulings (which generally exempt banks from state law) to continue affecting any contracts that were signed prior to the date the law is signed. Going forward, banks will be able to apply to the Office of the Comptroller of Currency (the current national bank regulator, which will likely be replaced by a national bank supervisor or perhaps a "super-regulator") to be exempt from state-level rules on a case-by-case basis. The OCC will review that application in conjunction with the CFPA and can exempt the bank if it finds that the state rule interferes in "the business of banking" and can justify it in a public report.

"I think that provision, while a compromise, is a compromise that’s a clear win for consumer advocates," Miller said, noting that it is a return to a stronger standard that existed pre-2004, when Republicans fought for -- and won -- blanket preemption. Miller warns that protecting this compromise is a top priority, since the financial industry is likely to keep fighting. "Barney [Frank] said that he thought the effort to have the blanket pre-emption was dead; I think it’s perhaps not dead, maybe just mostly dead," Miller said. "If a bill became law resulted in the CFPA that could be captured by the industry, like every other kind of watchdog regulator has been captured in the last generation, and states were precluded from adopting and applying their own laws; it is very possible that consumers would actually be worse off."

Industry exemptions. "The only issue on which we clearly lost was the exemption of car loans by car dealers," Miller says. "It is not hard to imagine that there will quickly be a securitization market for car loans and that will be a gaping exception." There are also concerns that merchants that give loans could also act in a predatory manner, though it is hard to indicate in the case of merchants where regulation will begin or end. Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee and shares jurisdiction with Frank's committee, has suggested that he will support changes to the bill as it moves to the floor in order to make sure that these holes are plugged. "The experience from the last decade or two, is that abusers migrate to the least regulated corners of the market," Miller points out.

Commission Instead of an Agency? There's also some internecine fighting going on between Frank and Waxman after the latter's committee passed an amendment changing the structure of the CFPA and making it into a CFPC -- a Consumer Financial Protection Commission, with a five-member board and Chairman running the show instead of a Director. Frank immediately issued a statement condemning this move, saying that “going from a single executive able to act promptly and efficiently to a five-member commission with staggered terms will weaken the capacity of the agency to provide consumer protection."

While I tend to side with Frank on this measure -- what's needed is one point of accountability that can take action -- Waxman isn't exactly known as an enemy of the common man, and his staff say the move is designed to provide long-term accountability and consistency so that when presidential administrations change, there has to be at least some consensus moving forward, pointing to the example of Republican appointees who haven't deigned to enforce certain rules. But it is a two-edged sword: At some agencies, the SEC in particular, gridlock among commissioners has prevented any action at all being taken. Staffers at Frank's Committee argue that the law is written in such a way that regulators who oppose the agency's mission would have very little discretion -- "We have taken out the guess work in this," one spokesperson said. The conflict will be resolved as the bill comes to the floor, either in the Rules Committee or in conversations between the committee chairs and the Democrat leadership.

It's a symbolic gesture, but it's an important one. If the election in Honduras goes smoothly -- doesn't every foreign-policy article these days include the sentence, "If the election in ________ goes smoothly"? -- then Honduras' democratic system will have been reinforced without harsh sanctions, which would mainly affect the people of the state, or military conflict. Affirming democracy in Latin America is a positive step, especially coming from the United States, which does not have a particularly good history in that department. While the White House's domestic opposition will no doubt call this deal a sham or attack the president for helping restore a controversial leader to power, this outcome will likely improve inter-American relations, and that is a win for a relatively green foreign-policy team.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Seems George Soros is dumping millions into an "Institute for New Economic Thinking" that will "take back the economics profession from the champions of free-market zealotry who have dominated it for decades." That ought to keep the economic right wing busy for a while. It's worth repeating that it's precisely because the once-dominant free-market fundamentalists are so ideologically rigid that these sort of corrective efforts have to be launched in the first place.
• Speaking of conspiracies, this editorial in The Wall Street Journal about the world government being established by the U.N. (not so much) has it all. Ironically, the best substantive criticism one can make of the U.N. -- that it has consistently failed in its charter mission to prevent wars -- completely undermines the right's unsubstantiated critique that the international organization wields more power than it actually has.
• The latest effort by conservatives to circle the wagons around Fox News is to point out the Obama administration's "hypocrisy" for failing to shut out MSNBC because it is the left-wing equivalent of Fox. One assumes the existence of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Ed Schultz are the evidence here, but what of the other personalities on MSNBC? Isn't there a rough "balance" going on at the "liberal" cable news channel that is utterly absent in Fox's approach to the news, despite their slogans?
• The notion that the political moment is ripe for another Reagan-esque upstart is about more than the selective mythologization of the 40th president. It might be true that the limited government pitch might have some purchase with the electorate in the current environment, but that doesn't solve the problem of the messenger delivering that pitch. Even if you find a talented Republican to warn the world about the dangers of socialism, it will still be a Republican giving that message, and unlike in Reagan's time, Republicans are currently loathed by a public which believes that Republicans are responsible for the recession.
• Remainders: Obama's legacy will be the codification of a two-track legal system to accommodate "unprivileged enemy belligerents"; ideological preferences in the electorate have been stable for 35 years and counting; clearly, having women in the work force has had a deleterious effect on our culture; a reminder that conservative Republicans can't, won't govern; Jon Kyl has no problem with letting the unemployed suffer; Barack Obama is the epicenter of everything that is wrong in the world; and the prehistory of “liberal fascism.”

--Mori Dinauer

Whether or not to raise the congressionally mandated cap on H1-B visas for specialized workers (including internationally known fashion models, but this isn't the place to get into that that) is tricky question. It's fairly inarguable that technologists from lands abroad have been a key component in the growth of the American technology sector; Microsoft, for example, has reported that 35 percent of the patents awarded to the company  in 2008 were the product of visa or green-card holders. So tech companies love H1-Bs. But in the eyes of some politicians -- Barack Obama in his candidate days, for one -- visa holders take jobs that Americans could otherwise hold, and sometimes at a depressed pay rate.

But the debate over raising the H1-B cap seems close to moot. Miriam Jordan at the Wall Street Journal reports today that -- of the 65,000 H1-B visa slots approved for FY 2010 00 only 47,000 had been applied for by September 25. In other words, we're not even using the H1-Bs we've got. Putting that in perspective, in FY 2009, all 65,000 visas were applied for within a day. One single day. We're 211 days into the 2010 window, and you can still pretty much get an H1-B on demand.

Jordan cites a number of factors. The rising fortunes of China and India make building companies there suddenly more attractive. Some anecdotal anti-immigrant sentiment might make the U.S. a less attractive place to live and work. And then there's a provision in the stimulus bill, inserted by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that requires that any company receiving stimulus money to certify that they're only hiring under H1-B because they can't possibly find a qualified American at a decent salary to do the work.

The cap question might be tabled for now, but the question about the role of foreign-born technologists in the American economy gets only more important as their numbers dwindle. It will be particularly interesting to check H1-B numbers against the number of patent applications filed by U.S. firms three to five years from now.

--Nancy Scola

(Photo credit: blunck2)

It's been a busy day on the Hill, with the House of Representatives releasing its combined health-care reform bill with an emotional press conference led by Rep. John Dingell (above), the longest-serving member of the House whose efforts on reform -- including his yearly introduction of a Medicare-for-All bill -- were lauded by President Obama during his speech on the subject before Congress.

House Democrats also released this brochure [PDF] in an attempt to make the issues understandable to most Americans. It includes some fun new language -- the public option is now "the Consumer's Choice" -- and tries to communicate simply what's going to happen if the bill becomes law. Think it will convince your grandmother and your uncle?

The best news, though, is that the bill seems to come in at cost, in large part due to the presence of the public option, and cuts the deficit by some $30 billion over 10 years. That's not a bad start. Now we just have floor votes, and a conference committee, and then more floor votes, and, well, you get the idea -- get ready in particular for fights over the excise tax. But health-care reform has never come this far before.

-- Tim Fernholz

Although I don't actually disagree with the bottom line of Adam Liptak's account of the lawsuit filed by David Boies and Theodore Olson arguing that California's odious Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, the structure of the article is atypically odd. It begins by describing the lawyer defending California's same-sex marriage ban in court pulling a Ross Douthat -- that is, being unwilling to even try to articulate a decent rational and secular reason to stop same-sex couples from marrying. Liptak follows this up by arguing that objections to the lawsuit from advocates for same-sex marriage who preferred a state-by-state strategy of litigation "are waning." Sounds encouraging, right?

I hope readers got to the end of the article, because as (to his credit) Liptak points out the skeptics of this litigation are of course right:

The ultimate destination of Mr. Olson’s suit is the Supreme Court, and it is hardly clear that he will be able to convince five justices to see things his way. Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern and the author of “Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines,” said Mr. Olson would have trouble attracting votes from the current justices. Asked how many justices Mr. Olson could count on, Professor Koppelman said, “I have trouble getting to one.”

It is not obvious that even the more liberal justices will want a piece of this fight.

I'll grant that I very strongly doubt that Justice Stevens, especially with the end of his judicial career imminent, would join an opinion asserting Prop. 8's constitutionality -- he's always been particularly suspicious of arbitrary exclusions from government privileges. But that's the only vote I feel confident about. And ultimately it doesn't matter how many of the Court's liberal members would vote to overturn the ban, because there are five nearly certain votes to uphold. It's true that Kennedy has sometimes been a swing vote on these issues, but this would be very different than half-upholding a popular 20-year-old precedent or voting to strike laws whose impact was relatively trivial (largely unenforced bans on sodomy, rarely used applications of the death penalty). Kennedy has never been ahead of the curve, and there's no reason to believe he'd start here.

I believe that the Boise/Olson lawsuit is right on the merits -- but since I don't sit on the Supreme Court, that doesn't matter. This lawsuit -- if they actually want to advance same-sex marriage rights -- is stupid; its only consequence of a positive lower-court ruling could be to create a Bowers-like bad precedent from a higher court that would hamstring litigation efforts in other states.

--Scott Lemieux

From our October issue: What will Dick Cheney give trick-or-treaters this year?

"A playful waterboarding, followed by threats, if they don't tell him which house is handing out the fun-size Snickers." -- Megan Carpentier, Air America

"An unexpectedly warm and firm hug." -- Baratunde Thurston, The Onion

"70,000 dead salmon from Oregon's Klamath River." -- Michael Grass, DCist.com

"Buckshot in the face, naturally." -- Eric Alterman, The Nation

--The Editors

Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow have both been poking fun at John McCain this week for introducing a bill called the Internet Freedom Act, the stated purpose of which is to block net neutrality. Sure, on its face, the bill seems to follow the up-is-down naming convention that Congress enjoys. But a deeper reading of the bill suggests that S. 1836 might actually be named to perfection. That's because McCain's bill, if enacted, would prevent the federal agency charged with overseeing communications from overseeing the Internet, which by general consensus among sane people is to be the future of communications. What McCain is proposing -- whether he knows it or not -- would have the effect of exempting telecom companies and other interests from regulatory oversight on all things Internet. Freedom!

Brodsky: "It's almost as if he is trying to send a message rather than write serious legislation." Almost. Exactly whose message that would be is a mystery, though it's probably worth noting that McCain is the single largest recipient of funding from telecom industry interests in either the House or Senate.

--Nancy Scola

Matt Yglesias on the impact of J Street's first conference:

Founded 18 months ago to provide a "pro-Israel, pro-peace" perspective on the conflict in the Middle East, advocacy organization J Street hosted its first annual conference this week in Washington, D.C. From a growth perspective, the event was a smashing success. Over 1,500 people attended; the Obama administration took the outfit seriously enough to dispatch National Security Adviser Jim Jones to give a speech, and despite considerable pressure from the Jewish right to freeze out the group, 148 members of Congress agreed to join the host committee, with about half a dozen members participating personally. J Street has its share of critics among the Jewish establishment, but it has survived and even thrived, attracting extensive media coverage and giving the large number of left-wing Jewish political activists and writers a banner under which to gather. In all, the conference was a successful debut event for a group that’s achieved a great deal under difficult circumstances and in a very short time.

Which leads to the awkward point that prospects are bleak for the comprehensive peace two-state solution that J Street supports.

KEEP READING ...

Charlie Savage reports that after a Somali-American teenager from Minnesota participated in a suicide bombing in 2008, the FBI basically started infiltrating Somali-American communities just as the "Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules."

The "relaxed" rules appear to open the way for racial profiling:

One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use ethnicity or religion as a factor — as long as it is not the only one — when selecting subjects for scrutiny.

“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Savage further reports that the portions of the manual that involve "using “ethnic/racial demographics," are actually redacted, so it's hard to know how relaxed the rules are.

Now the FBI defends doing this by using the example of the Somali extremist group Al Shabaab, and saying basically that in this case, they're looking for a group that would be located in a Somali-American community. The thing is, if the FBI is looking for signs of a Somali group in Minneapolis after a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis participated in a suicide bombing--that's not exactly racial profiling, since it really is dependent on other factors. That isn't like stopping someone in an airport because they "look Arab," which is probably why the FBI is comfortable using it as an example. 

My worry would be the FBI randomly infiltrating Muslim communities without that kind of probable cause for concern, particularly since restrictions government surveillance are so lax that the FBI is reportedly processing more information than it can handle. The government needs very little to go on before it starts collecting reams of your private information (to get a better sense of this, read the invaluable Julian Sanchez), and we're not talking about individual people here -- we're talking about the possibility that the FBI is collecting information on entire communities based on little more than race or ethnic origin, in an age where the attorney general and the president are both black. Incidentally, Eric Holder wants to leave the "relaxed" guidelines in place to "to see how well they work."

Back when the Henry Louis Gates fiasco happened, Holder shared his own experience with being racially profiled, and discussed the "work that needs to be done in communities of color where I think people too often want to assume that the police or people in law enforcement are doing the wrong thing, see police policies, law enforcement policies as, you know, misguided or directed only at people of color, when in fact, you know, that's not the case." I don't know if this is what that looks like.

The flip-side of respecting civil liberties is that the government is able to focus on those individuals who might actually pose a danger rather than vacuuming up information about everyone who crosses their path, and then wasting resources on chasing false leads.

-- A. Serwer

Adam Serwer on detention policy in Afghanistan:

When Marine Reserve Gen. Douglas Stone addressed New America's Counterterrorism Conference last week, he almost sounded like a human-rights activist. Calling the Constitution a "Human Rights Document," Stone declared that the fight against terrorism wasn't just a physical one but "a historic debate about the rule of law and human rights," taking place on "the battlefield of the mind."

Stone's battlefield was once the detention centers of Iraq, where he worked to reform the system after the Abu Ghraib scandal, reducing recidivism and therefore the flow of fighters to the insurgents. The same thing, he said, needs to happen in Afghanistan, where prison conditions and lack of due process are creating favorable conditions for the Taliban and al-Qaeda to radicalize the imprisoned.

KEEP READING ...

Some of his ideas were the typical pipe-dreams, like involving substantial numbers of troops from Muslim countries or substantial amounts of money from European allies. More interestingly, though, he seemed to strike back against the idea of focusing on a centralized Afghan Army or police force, suggesting that these institutions would be seen as interlopers in the various ethnic regions of the country. He expressly said that nation-building or a democratic government were not appropriate objectives of American strategy. He closed by warning that, unless "clever" decisions were made, Afghanistan could act as as a serious drain on American resources for a decade to come.

It's a strong critique, and you almost wish Brzezinski had gone further -- he remained, for instance, agnostic on whether more or fewer troops were needed for the mission he outlined. But Brzezinski's warnings -- delivered to audience that included many congressional staffers -- is another sign of growing support for a middle-ground strategy and concerns about what counterinsurgency can do, and whether it is appropriate for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

-- Tim Fernholz

In a piece for Foreign Policy, crack national-security reporter Jeff Stein suggests that the CIA's relationship with Ahmed Wali Karzai was no big deal, comparing it to patronage politics in Massachussetts. Stein also writes:

Rep. Mike Rogers (R - Mich.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee panel that oversees human spying issues, told me in an early October interview that Karzai "cooperates" with U.S. intelligence but is not a controlled agent. "There's a difference between being an intelligence asset and somebody who cooperates," said Rogers, a former FBI agent himself who has visited Afghanistan several times. "'Asset is an overstatement," he continued. "[Ahmed Wali Karzai] is a public official who cooperates ... when he's talked to -- that's different than an asset." Asked about the New York Times' allegations Wednesday, Rogers stuck to his guns. "[Rep. Rogers] stands by his comments to you," the congressman's spokeswoman, Sylvia Warner, said by email. "He is firm about that."

I think the generals dimed out the spooks. The generals are not happy with this. There`s often conflict between the ambassador, the station chief and senior military people. General McChrystal, who`s trying to get tens of thousands more American troops into Afghanistan, cannot be happy with the perception that the Americans -- the American spooks in Afghanistan are behind a crook.

GDP measures for the third quarter of this year have come in, and it's official: The economy grew 3.5 annualized percent, thanks in large part to the stimulus package, the first time it has increased over a quarter since a year ago. Also important: There was no sign of inflation, which should keep deficit hawks quiet. Well, it won't keep them quiet but it should convince policy-makers not to listen to them. Another good sign: exports grew 14.7 annualized percent over the same time period.

But, as readers will recall, GDP is at best an imperfect measure of economic growth, and for progressives the real indicator should be the unemployment rate, which reached a record 26-year high at the end of last month. We've discussed various policy measures that could be taken to relieve unemployment, from a jobs tax credit to "job sharing" to more fiscal aid to states. With concern for a jobless recovery rising as jobs continue to lag behind economic growth, the most worrisome fact is this: Economists still don't understand why we're looking at a jobless recovery, only that it appears more and more likely.

-- Tim Fernholz

Sam Stein reports that the GOP is continuing its strategy of outreach to Latino voters by refusing to support a rather uncontroversial Senate resolution celebrating the role played by the Latino media.

Just to put this in perspective, in the past week or so Republicans in the House have introduced resolutions "honoring" the ACORN sting video and commemorating the 9/12 march, complete with Glenn Beck style overcounts of attendees.

-- A. Serwer

• I'm not sure what the story is in this Washington Times piece that details the Obama White House's showering of perks on big campaign donors. Is it a bit slimy? Sure. Is it uniquely slimy? Not so much. I think Michael Scherer is right: If Obama would just acknowledge that politicians have no choice but to raise money, that candidness would defuse the situation somewhat. Instead we have a press corps which seems determined to hold Obama to the literal standard of his boilerplate campaign slogans.
• Democracy Corps takes a wider view of the 2010 battleground districts and concludes that Democrats are unlikely to lose control of Congress, mostly because Republicans are unable to capitalize on anti-incumbent sentiment due to their own worsening image. While Democrats are sure to lose some seats -- the report suggests 15-20 -- the big picture is that power will not radically shift from one party to the other.
• When Evan Bayh deliberately conflates procedural and up-or-down votes to mask his contempt for health-care reform legislation, or when Joe Lieberman calls the public option an "entitlement," it's worth asking why their Democratic colleagues are so aghast at the notion of punishing partisan disloyalty. At least in Lieberman's case, some Senate Democrats are actually pushing back.
• Remainders: Politico would like to inform you that conservatives are frustrated that Obama isn't being compared to George Bush enough; it's only a matter of time before the libertarian wave sweeps the nation; trickle-down economics has been a towering success; and Arnold Schwarzenegger is all class.

--Mori Dinauer

In the comments, LuisB raises a good point. One argument you hear against the idea of public broadband is that it's too risky from a financial perspective, particularly in places where the market has decided that demand doesn't justify the capital investment. That's something similar, suggests Luis, to what was said before FDR's rural electrification push in the '30s: Farm people just don't want electricity. But then the TVA's electrification of parts of the South suddenly made hand-grinding corn and scrubbing clothes somewhat less romantic. Could something like that happen with broadband?

Given the powerful forces involved in the broadband debate, more concrete demonstrations of demand help. ArsTechnica's Nate Anderson has the story of Monticello, Minnesota, a town that could only convince its local telecom that its people really wanted broadband in their homes when the town started building out its own municipal fiber network.

But whether Americans beyond Monticello really want a 50 Mbps fiber-to-the-home enough to justify the investment is a point of debate. A Pew report found not too long ago that nearly half of Americans who don't have access to broadband Internet don't want it. There are plenty of good reasons why that's the case, a few of which have probably already jumped into your head. For one thing, it's expensive! Pew also found that a full third of dial-up users are waiting until the price drops before they make the switch. Besides that, it's a bit much to expect people to know they want broadband if they've never known broadband. Like Tivo or Twitter, you don't necessarily know what you're missing until you've tried it. That's why the National Broadband Task Force, charged with handing out $20 billion in stimulus funds, has occupied itself in its early months with proving that broadband Internet is a very good thing indeed.

To extend the demand question a bit, there's a reasonable case to be made that blazing fast broadband in every home is a slightly off-target goal, at least right now. Ubiquitous electrification makes sense. The warm glow of a light bulb only travels so far. But Internet can have impact even if it's one step removed. A furniture factory in Appalachia can employ 100 new people because a broadband connection sets the facility up to take orders in from all over the world, even if those workers never step within 50 feet of a computer. That's a nuance to the question of demand that gets somewhat lost when we talk about where we absolutely need to get with broadband in the short term.

--Nancy Scola

Time to update the RSS readers.

Sarah Posner, who wrote 86 FundamentaLists for the Prospect over the years, recently joined Religion Dispatches as an associate editor. We'll miss her blog posts here at TAPPED, but we look forward to reading her thoughts on church and state over at The Devil's Advocate.

--The Editors

Separating commercial and investment banking isn't a bad idea. But don't be fooled: That change wouldn't address the causes of the financial crisis, and it doesn't solve the problem of Too Big To Fail. The banks that were hit first and hardest -- Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. -- were already separate investment banks with no commercial deposits; AIG wasn't a bank at all. All of those institutions, however, were deeply involved in capital markets and had the potential to cause devastating economic problems if they went into a protracted bankruptcy. That's why it's important to focus more on the "fail" part of Too Big to Fail -- what's really needed is an emphasis on resolution authorities that will allow the government to quickly liquidate any financial institution that gets into trouble without causing adverse affects on the economy, whether it is a commercial bank, investment bank, or neither. Combine those authorities, of course, with measures that encourage the banks to shrink and stricter prudential regulations, and we'll have come a long way from 2008.

Further Reading: The Myth of Too Big to Fail.

-- Tim Fernholz

It wasn’t that long ago that the suggestion that there should be more civilian oversight of the CIA provoked hysterical reactions from conservative lawmakers that doing so would put Americans in danger. With the news that Wali Ahmed Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, may have been on the CIA payroll while being involved in the opium trade that also funds the Taliban, it might be time to revisit that assertion. Because if the Times report is true, that means that the CIA has not only been undermining the military’s efforts to cut down the Taliban’s revenue base, but it also means that it’s possible that American tax dollars have inadvertently helped fund the same people who are killing American soldiers. Andrew Exum further says that military officials in southern Afghanistan he's spoken to describe Wali Karzai “and his activities as the biggest problem they [the military] face — bigger than the lack of government services or even the Taliban.”

The Karzai revelation has important strategic implications, namely, how a counterinsurgency strategy is going to work with a corrupt government headed by someone who stole an election and whose sibling is a high-level drug dealer helping to provide the enemy with a revenue source. Spencer Ackerman also points out that there are a number of serious unanswered questions about the CIA and Karzai—my question is, did Congress know about the relationship? Yesterday the House Dems on the intelligence committee accused the CIA of misleading or witholding information from them five times, but only cited four instances. Was yesterday’s revelation one of those times? It's a serious problem either way, but if Congress was aware of the relationship that would seem to me to be a pretty big deal.

Spencer also notes that there may have been a number of reasons why the Bush administration decided to maintain this relationship for eight years--perhaps they believed they needed the relationship to maintain stability in Afghanistan while Iraq was imploding, for example. I would only add that many of the things we have come to think of as major mistakes by the CIA have their origins in the whims of the executive. There's always going to be tension in a democratic society between the impulse for transparency and having an effective intelligence service. That doesn’t make oversight any less important. It makes it more important. That whole new Church Committee thing is looking like a good idea.

— A. Serwer

Via Kevin Drum, Steve Waldman has a smart post about the difference between asset and consumer price inflation, and how inequality contributes to asset bubbles. Essentially, the monetary policy constructed during the "Great Moderation" of the nineties and oughts created an untenable situation where the wealthy were able to invest, driving up asset prices into a bubble, and the middle class relied on credit to fund their purchases as wages stagnated. But ...

[I]n exchange for apparent stability, the central-bank-backstopped "great moderation" has rendered asset prices unreliable as guides to real investment. I think the United States has made terrible aggregate investment decisions over the last 30 years, and will continue to do so as long as a "ride the bubble then hide in banks" strategy pays off. Under the moderation dynamic, resource allocation is managed alternately by compromised capital markets and fiscal stimulators, neither of which make remotely good choices. Second, by relying on credit rather than wages to fund middle-class consumption, the moderation dynamic causes great harm in the form of stress from unwanted financial risk, loss of freedom to pursue nonremunerative activities, and unnecessary catastrophes for isolated families. Finally, maintaining the dynamic requires active use of policy instruments to sustain an inequitable distribution of wealth and income in a manner that I view as unjust. In "good times", central bankers actively suppress the median wage (while applauding increases in the mean wages driven by the upper tail). During the reset phase, policymakers bail out creditors. There is nothing "natural" or "efficient" about these choices.

Inequality, for liberals, is often a justice concern. But it's also problematic for the economy at large. This isn't the first time income inequality has been posited as the cause of the crisis, but it is clear that because the Fed's monetary policy helped set up the conditions for this kind of economy, future Fed policy needs to take this into account -- and that means attempting to stop asset bubbles from forming, not just trying to clean them up when they burst.

-- Tim Fernholz

Ann Friedman on the epidemic of violence against women and the need to respect survivors' wishes:

This year, violence against women -- an issue doggedly championed by feminists but rarely a front-page story -- seemed to make headlines in every section of the newspaper. Sports: A hotel worker accused Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger of raping her. Entertainment: Singer Chris Brown was sentenced to probation for assaulting his girlfriend and fellow hip-hop star, Rihanna. International: After decades on the lam, Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Politics: Recently seated Sen. Al Franken introduced an amendment to withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR if they prevent their employees from speaking out about sexual assault. And the health-reform debate revealed that many insurance companies classify domestic violence as a "pre-existing condition," denying coverage to victims of abuse.

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But a range of officials made the case that many insurgents fighting Americans in distant locations are motivated not by jihadist ideology, but by local grievances, and are not much of a threat to the United States or to the government in Kabul.

At the heart of this strategy is the conclusion that the United States cannot completely eradicate the insurgency in a nation where the Taliban is an indigenous force — nor does it need to in order to protect American national security. Instead, the focus would be on preventing Al Qaeda from returning in force while containing and weakening the Taliban long enough to build Afghan security forces that would eventually take over the mission.

Emphasis mine. Interestingly, these are some of the same ideas that Matthew Hoh, the Foreign Service officer who resigned over the strategic muddle in Afghanistan, suggested would be proper in lieu of actual withdrawal. It's not clear to me that sending additional troops is still necessary, but it's good to see at least the glimmerings of realization that a war predicated on destroying al-Qaeda does not call for a massive counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

-- Tim Fernholz

Last week, responding to Jane Mayer's report, I posted on the ethics of drone strikes in Pakistan, particularly on the fact that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have failed to capitalize on anger surrounding the strikes because of their brutal reactions -- which involve killing nearby civilians who they suspect of being CIA informants. The lawyers Mayer talked to concluded the strikes were probably legal, but Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions suggested yesterday that they might break international prohibitions on extrajudicial executions:

The problem with the United States, he said, was that it was making increasing use of drones and “Predators” to fight conflicts in which it was involved, prominently in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The concern was that those weapons were being operated in a framework that might violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

The United States position was untenable, he said, in that it claimed that the Human Rights Council (the successor to the Commission on Human Rights) and the General Assembly, by definition, had no role in relation to killings that took place during armed conflict. That position would remove the great majority of issues that came before those bodies. By example, he said the whole set of issues arising in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the Goldstone report (on the war in Gaza), in Kenya, in Sri Lanka, all concerned areas of armed conflicts. If the United States position were applied, then none of those issues should be discussed by the relevant United Nations bodies.

I'll just rely on Mayer's article for this one:

[I]n order for the U.S. government to legally target civilian terror suspects abroad it has to define a terrorist group as the one engaging in armed conflict, and the use of force must be a "military necessity." There must be no reasonable alternative to killing, such as capture, and to warrant death the target must be "directly participating in hostilities. The use of force has to be considered "proportionate to the threat." Finally the foreign nation in which such targeted killing takes place has to give its permission.

Tim Fernholz on why size doesn't matter:

Amid last fall's financial chaos, executives from Wachovia, at the time the fourth-largest commercial bank in the country, had bad news for their regulators: They were broke. Federal officials deliberated and decided Wachovia was so important to the economy that the government had to save it.

It was only the latest in a series of financial institutions that regulators had deemed "too big to fail." In the preceding months, the government had bailed out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Bear Stearns, and Congress had passed the controversial $700 billion bill to fund yet more financial-sector rescues. Some of the institutions, like the insurance company American International Group (AIG), weren't even banks.

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Why don't we have a public option for broadband Internet? That's what Matt Yglesias wants to know. Several reasons jump to mind. One is that letting government provide Internet service on the infrastructure that cable and telephone companies have built creates unfair competition between government and teleco. Another is that it's too risky and expensive, in many cases, for state and local governments to roll out their own networks in places where there isn't a guarantee that people will pay for high-speed Internet service. But then you realize that those are exactly the arguments Verizon would make against it: So it's worth thinking on more seriously, is a public option for broadband such a crazy idea?

That's an interesting intellectual exercise with long-term potential. But in the shorter term, here's another simpler idea from the realm of health that is totally worth consideration in the broadband debate. The New America Foundation wants for broadband something that looks a lot like the nutrition labels we have on food in the United States. Instead of calorie counts and fiber grams, we get standardized details on upstream and downstream speeds. For those lucky Americans who get to pick amongst multiple broadband providers, a label would help them compare their options. For the too many Americans who only have one choice, a broadband label would let them know if they're getting the bandwidth and uptime they're paying for. It wouldn't be much of a burden on well-behaving ISPs, and it would give customers something concrete to challenge TimeWarner with should their Hulu downloads get janky.

That said, "8Mbps downstream" isn't exactly an intelligible metric for most folks. Maybe it should read more along the lines of "10 iTunes song downloads per minute"?

--Nancy Scola

• Even though the public option is already a fairly big compromise on what should be a much more liberal health-care reform bill, that doesn't mean the "strong" version of it will pass in the House, much less the Senate, where killing it isn't so much a function of a coherent objection to the provision, but rather seems to be based on petty revenge or ego-stroking.
• According to The Hill, some House Republicans are frustrated that the leadership has yet to introduce a health-care reform bill as an alternative to the Democrats' proposals, even citing division in the caucus over whether the GOP should be involved in health-care reform legislation in the first place. Perhaps one reason for the delay is that House Republicans seem more interested in spending their time introducing legislation that writes the 9/12 march on Washington into the annals of American history.
• It's easy to forget that amongst all the daily drama of health-care reform legislation the Senate has begun hearings on the small matter of getting a cap-and-trade bill to the floor. And unlike health-care, which affects people's lives in a direct fashion, climate change is more abstract, but at least one recent poll shows public support for cap-and-trade. The trouble, as always, are the institutional hurdles, and having an opposition party unanimously uninterested in the problem at hand.
• Along with the conservative movement's need to portray local elections of matters of great national import, there's also their tendency to portray local elections as a "referendum" on politicians they don't like, in this case President Obama. It turns out, though, that the people of Virginia, whatever they think about Creigh Deeds, aren't thinking about their election in terms of the political fortunes of the president.
• Remainders: Arlen Specter is a man of principle; stories debunking the global cooling myth belong in the politics section of newspapers; a prime example of how awful Beltway journalism can be; all serious news organizations produce incomprehensible indices of presidential approval; and I fear I will never understand the political appeal of Fred Thompson.

--Mori Dinauer

In your latest TTR dispatch, we find the depressing news that fewer people are taking global warming seriously, a new "job sharing" policy that could help unemployment, some ideas to save energy and stop climate change, and an argument against the home buyer tax credit. Wonky!

• Belief in Global Warming Cools. Fewer Americans see solid evidence of global warming, according to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Results show slightly more than half of the population believes there is proof that global temperatures are rising – a 14 percent drop since 2008. The survey also finds that in terms of policy, the issue has barely registered on the average American’s radar. When asked what they knew about the cap-and-trade policy – which would limit carbon-dioxide emissions -- more than half of respondents had “heard nothing at all.” (In contrast, those who “had heard a lot” about it opposed emissions limits by two-to-one.) -- MH
• A Tax Credit to Create Job Growth? [PDF] The Center for Economic and Policy Research is advocating for a tax credit to boost employment. Known as “job sharing,” companies would use tax dollars to keep salaries at current levels, while shortening hours worked by 5 percent. Demand would remain constant, encouraging companies to hire additional employees to keep up current work levels. According to CEPR, job sharing could create over 2 million jobs and is a politically feasible way to create jobs and offset predictions of high unemployment over the next several years. -- PL
• Why wait on Congress to save energy? Do it yourself! This week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents recommendations for household actions that can immediately and rapidly reduce our carbon emissions. The authors analyze simple upgrades and behavioral adjustments that can reach a 20 percent household emissions reduction, 7.4 percent nationally, over the next 10 years. These are tips that we’ve heard for years: reduce your laundry temperatures, eliminate “stand-by” electricity, install better insulation and ventilation fixtures in your home, etc. But, due to the lack of policy attention and community prioritization, these lifestyles changes have yet to manifest large-scale. Seriously, folks, let’s do this. -- LL
• Don't expand the homebuyer tax credit. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities argues that extending or expanding the $8,000 tax credit offered to first-time home buyers as part of the recovery act is a bad idea. As far as stimulus goes, home buyer tax credits turn out to be inefficient, and the IRS has trouble determining who is complying with its requirements. CBPP advises Congress to focus on unemployment insurance and fiscal aid to states, but if they must use this policy route, to only extend the credit for a limited time and restrict it to first-time home buyers. -- TF

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
10/20/09
10/13/09

Robert Kuttner explains why industry-dictated health reform will be a political wash:

What are our fondest hopes and worst fears for the health legislation now slouching towards the president's desk? On the plus side, it will cover slightly more than half of America's uninsured, qualify more of the near-poor for Medicaid, and it may lead to some greater rationalization of health outlays, though exactly how remains to be seen.

On the minus side, the plan leaves most people dependent on employers for health coverage and reinforces the political and economic power of the private insurance industry. It subsidizes insurers with more than half a trillion public dollars over 10 years, mainly using tax credits. And it gets most of that money by requiring savings in Medicare and other federal health programs of about $400 billion and by taxing so-called Cadillac insurance policies -- many of which are actually Chevrolets that cost a bundle because of the present system's inefficiency and tendency to penalize older and sicker policyholders.

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Last week, the Federal Communications Commission released its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on net neutrality rules that revolve around the idea of “reasonable network management.” Princeton’s Ed Felten points out that this framework would leave regulators with enormous discretion to determine what constitutes permissible manipulation of the Internet by network providers and what would be verboten. Giving the FCC so much leeway has some digital rights advocates nervous. Those advocates support the principles of neutrality, but they’re worried that the FCC’s jurisdiction grab here gives it an opening to exert greater control over the Internet down the road – which, given the Federal Communications Commission’s historic coziness with the industry it regulates, might not play out in the public’s favor. Those advocates might have a point. But adding a wrinkle to things is that Congress hasn't exactly proven itself capable of handling the complexities of the Internet age.

The problem is well described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Corynne McSherry. In the absence of any real express authority to regulate net neutrality, the FCC is relying on what's known as "ancillary jurisdiction." The theory of governing here seems to be that authority magically presents itself to regulators on matters where Congress hasn't yet seen fit itself to act. The Federal Communications Commission invoked that supposed jurisdiction last summer when it condemned Comcast for blocking the peer-to-peer network Bittorrent on its networks. It's all in the name of articulating a "Federal Internet Policy," said the FCC. At the time, New York Law School professor Susan Crawford, who is now doing a stint on the White House's National Economic Council, called the idea that it's the FCC's job to cobble together a vision for the Internet's future on a case-by-case basis simply "nuts."

And nuts the idea may well be. But Congress seems increasingly comfortable ceding the particulars of this great debate to the FCC. That's a shame on a policy level. With the exception of some prominent folks in both the House and Senate, legislators seem content to punt any sort of informed debate on the future of the Internet to regulators. Colorado Democrat Jared Polis, for example, recently had to double back on his signature on a letter sent to the FCC by 70 members of Congress touting the telecom industry line against neutrality regulation. He thought it was a pro-neutrality letter, he says. Whoops.

--Nancy Scola

The reports of Antonin Scalia saying he would have dissented from the 1954 Brown decision striking down school segregation may confirm liberal suspicions of his personal views regarding race. The problem is he didn't say that.

-- A. Serwer

"We're trying to do too much at once," Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now."

Lieberman added that he’d vote against a public option plan “even with an opt-out because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line."

A public insurance option will make health-care reform cheaper. It is less expensive. It's not even a proper entitlement! The only people who stand to lose money on the proposition are insurance companies, who would lose their monopoly status and be forced into actual competition. That Lieberman would stand up and claim to be acting in a fiscally responsible manner is simply intellectually dishonest. Lieberman represents many insurance companies in Connecticut, who have funded him very well in the past. Hey, maybe he's not just schilling for the insurance industry, but the fact that he can't come up with a coherent reason for his opposition doesn't help him make the case that he has any principles whatsoever.

-- Tim Fernholz

While Adam is right to point out the need for more focus on what is actually happening on the ground in Afghanistan, he's overstating, or rather, misidentifying the reasons why Matthew Hoh's arguments about the war don't seem to have the same inevitably that escalation has in the debate over Afghanistan. Adam writes:

My issue is that Hoh's view is one that hasn't been taken seriously because it's not within the spectrum of acceptable political opinion within the Beltway--believing there's a limit to what American military force can achieve is seen as "unpatriotic.

That's not what's happening, though. Many people have announced this view, and not just skeptics like Sens. Russ Feingold and Robert Menendez or experts like Rory Stewart. Sen. John Kerry has talked about this problem, and administration officials like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have made this argument in public and in private. Interestingly, the reason the idea that more troops are spurring the Afghan insurgency rather than controlling it hasn't gotten much traction isn't because of the Cheneys of the world. It's because military experts, like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, are arguing from Afghanistan that it's not true. That's, for instance, why Gates has slow-walked his take on troop levels -- because he found McChrystal convincing. It's the military that's insisting that more troops can quell the insurgents; while there are always concerns about demagoguing war votes, especially on the right, it's clear that reducing forces is definitely part of the Washington conversation, and certainly the public one. This isn't 2003, or even 2006 -- even nominal escalation proponents like Andrew Exum and Stephen Biddle are very circumspect in their analysis of what escalation can produce.

The other reason that troop reduction and small footprint strategies don't seem as likely to be adopted as escalation is because there has yet to be a compelling description of what an alternative strategy would be -- advocates of counter-terrorism have a hard time responding to the problem of obtaining human intelligence, for instance. Kerry has described one middle-ground option in a speech yesterday, which seemed similar to the "enclave" strategy of using the troops we have for counterinsurgency and capacity-building in Afghanistan's urban areas, with the idea of letting Afghans eventually take the lead in fighting insurgents in the rest of the country. None of these options sound very promising, which is why this debate is so hard.

-- Tim Fernholz

Michelle Goldberg on women's rights activists' conflicting views on U.S. presence in Afghanistan:

Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a nongovernmental organization that runs women's shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan, has watched with alarm as American opinion has turned against the occupation. An American withdrawal, its board members say, would be catastrophic for the women they work with. "Every woman who we have talked to in Afghanistan, all the Afghan women in the NGOs, in the government, say the United States and the peacekeeping troops and NATO must stay, they must not leave until the Afghan army is able to take over," says Esther Hyneman, a WAW board member who recently returned from six months in Kabul.

In fact WAW, which has over 100 staffers in Afghanistan and four in New York, is, with some reluctance, calling for a troop increase. "Women for Afghan Women deeply regrets having a position in favor of maintaining, even increasing troops," it said in a recent statement. "We are not advocates for war, and conditions did not have to reach this dire point, but we believe that withdrawing troops means abandoning 15 million women and children to madmen who will sacrifice them to their lust for power."

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Following Matthew Hoh's resignation, I'd like it if some of the Very Serious People who craft Beltway groupthink take this perspective more seriously:

In both RC [Regional Commands] East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.

The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people.

Now, it's clear that public opinion in Afghanistan is complicated--certainly more positive toward U.S. troops than the Taliban, but that doesn't mean Hoh is wrong about the U.S. presence doing more harm than good. Where you come down on Afghanistan in large part amounts to whether, like Peter Bergen, you believe that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have fused--or like Hoh, you think that Taliban strength is largely a function of the American presence there.  My issue is that Hoh's view is one that hasn't been taken seriously because it's not within the spectrum of acceptable political opinion within the Beltway--believing there's a limit to what American military force can achieve is seen as "unpatriotic."

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman on the Fox affair:

This past week, we learned that the White House is "waging war" on Fox News. And what terrifying weapon is the administration wielding? What sinister tactic has the Fox faithful rending their garments? Well, the White House has said that Fox is more a political operation than a news organization, committed to advancing the Republican Party's goals. In other words, the White House is leveling the same charge people have made about Fox for its entire history. Watch the station for more than a few minutes, and you'll see it's true.

What's really been revealed in this little dustup is the way television journalists think that they should get to follow a set of rules different from the set their colleagues whose work appears in other media follow.

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There have, in the last few days, been two pilgrimages of high-ranking Washington officials to geek meccas that are worth noting, though only one of them made any real news. President Obama went to MIT to publicly state that denying climate change is now an extremist position. "The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized," Obama argued in Cambridge on Friday.

It's helpful for Obama to take such an aggressive stand, but it was Energy Secretary Steven Chu's trip to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, that was arguably the more meaningful of the two trips. Chu was at Google headquarters yesterday to announce the first round of $150 million in funding under ARPA-E, the Department of Energy's experimental program for "high risk, high payoff concepts" for transformative energy technologies. The unfortunately named program was actually a Bush-era creation, though Bush never put an actual effort into getting it up and running, and Congress appropriated all of $0 for it at the time. Obama slipped $400 million into the stimulus for the program, and Chu announced today dozens of projects that just might help America find innovative solutions to our energy challenges, from entirely liquid batteries to a pair of bacteria that somehow, together, turn seaweed into butonol.

You might have guessed that ARPA-E is a play on DARPA, the Defense Department office that more or less brought us the Internet. But as promising as it is to have the president out selling the politics of energy innovation and the secretary of energy out handing away cash to stimulate creative discoveries, DARPA's story should serve as a reminder that there's still a leg of the stool missing when it comes to government research. DARPA withered after one senator decided that anything other than mission critical research isn't worth our tax dollars -- blame Mike Mansfield for the fact that we haven't cracked artificial intelligence yet. One innovation left to come is the provision of some sort of reliable funding for ARPA-E after its chunk of stimulus change runs out.

--Nancy Scola

Charlie Savage takes a look at an inspector general's report on the FBI that concludes the bureau is slow to translate intelligence information -- partially because of a lack of translators:

The inspector general report consisted largely of numbers — some of which were disputed by the bureau — and did not contain any specific examples of cases in which the bureau failed to detect a potential terrorist as quickly as possible because of a delay in reviewing material.

The report also contains new information about the bureau’s efforts to hire more translators. It showed that the number of the bureau’s linguists — both staff members and contractors — had fallen slightly to 1,298 as of September 2008, from a peak in 2005. It met its hiring targets in 2008 for only 2 of 14 targeted languages.

The first thing that comes to mind is that this is exactly why prominent conservatives shouldn't be behaving as though we're in an epic clash of civilizations with Islam or treating Muslim Americans as potential fifth columnists, given that many Muslim Americans probably have the kind of language skills the bureau is looking for.

The second is that part of the problem here may be that the FBI is simply gathering too much information in the first place, given that the problem seems to be centered around "backlogs in reviewing audio recordings, including telephone calls, and electronic files, like e-mail messages and Web pages." The proposed reforms to the PATRIOT Act would have prohibited bulk collection of information by requiring that one party to the communication be an actual target. Civil-liberties protections are primarily about protecting people's rights, but they also help intelligence gathering by prohibiting the kind of fishing expeditions that end up draining resources for false leads.

Matthew Hoh, a foreign service officer and Marine veteran of the Iraq War, has resigned his job working as a provincial-level adviser to the Afghan government because he "lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan." The story is fascinating, and Hoh's criticisms are similar to what many feel about the conflict (even Special Envoy Dick Holbrooke confesses to agreeing with his analysis) but I'm not really sure what to make of it.

What confuses me, I think, is the timing. Hoh says this:

If the United States is to remain in Afghanistan, Hoh said, he would advise a reduction in combat forces.

He also would suggest providing more support for Pakistan, better U.S. communication and propaganda skills to match those of al-Qaeda, and more pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to clean up government corruption -- all options being discussed in White House deliberations.

"We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath," Hoh said. "But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve."

What Hoh describes could be the outcome of the current policy process in Washington -- though it is not the most likely option -- and it seems strange that an official might resign before that decision was made, rather than in protest of it. On the other hand, perhaps this was the best way to draw public attention to that drawdown option, although the problem isn't necessarily public support but a lack of advocates willing to face that fact in Washington.

The other point of interest is the extent to which senior American officials from Holbrooke on down met with Hoh and tried to recruit him to higher jobs. Obviously there's a lot of public-relations concern driving those meetings, and the U.S. officials have an agenda of their own, but I don't recall that happening during the Bush administration when various Guanatanmo Bay prosecutors resigned. After reading the New Yorker's Holbrooke profile, though, i don't think that the man's sympathy or interest in working with Hoh is necessarily fake.

Do read Hoh's letter of resignation, which articulates a compelling critique of the war.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Rather than making health-care reform contingent on an idea supported by one senator, Majority Leader Harry Reid has done the right thing and included an opt-out public option in the Senate's health-care reform bill, something that virtually all of his caucus can agree to. In fact, Reid doesn't even appear to have submitted a plan with a "trigger" option to the CBO for scoring.
• I'm sure these new results from Gallup breaking down the ideological lean of the electorate will confirm for conservatives what they've always believed: that the United States is a fundamentally conservative nation. This is as good a time as any to remind ourselves that when you let poll respondents self-select labels, those labels immediately lose precision as a way of defining political beliefs. It's also worth noting that the data presented, going back to 1992, hasn't actually changed all that much in those 17 years. And of course a big deal will be made about "moderates" shifting to the right but this tells us more about the ideological malleability of "moderates" than it does about whether American is a "conservative" nation or not.
  
• Because of institutional inertia, Republicans have managed to stay somewhat relevant to the political process without actually contributing anything positive -- good policy ideas -- to the the process. But along the way, vacancies in the administration based solely on the GOP's decision to block Barack Obama's appointments mean that courts have less judges than they need and HHS doesn't have a surgeon general in the midst of a global flu pandemic. And if you really want to grind the government down to a halt, you can always deny a quorum to Senate committees trying to address climate change.
• Weekend Remainders: The rights of defense contractors are truly a national treasure; Newt Gingrich is under the illusion that Americans care what he thinks; Pete Hoekstra wants his constituents to suffer; the world is dying to know why Michael Steele hasn't posted at GOP.com in nearly two weeks; incompetence, thy name is the Bush administration; John McCain wants to be your guide to the wonders of the Internet; many newspapers are inclined to share George Will's descent into dementia with you; and why would anyone care about Mitt Romney's opinions on foreign policy?

--Mori Dinauer

I will be speaking to the American Bankers Association later this morning and one of my messages will be to get in there and support the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). The administration has proposed a new Consumer Protection Agency to establish consistent consumer protection standards for banks and non-banks. I strongly support this new agency. … Looking at indecipherable credit card statement and documents and mortgages you can’t understand and APRs from Payday Loans and high overdraft fees – I don’t see how anybody can say that we’ve done a good job protecting consumers and financial services. I just don’t see it. ... The absence of a national standard was a contributing factor to our current economic turmoil – this uneven nature of regulatory protections and this lack of strong standards that apply across the board. This new agency would eliminate regulatory gaps between insured institutions and non-banks, consistent with the need for consumer protection standards across the board. And it would address another gap with authority -- to examine for the first time non-bank financial providers. We need an examination and enforcement, not just rules, but examination and enforcement as well. By regulating the non-bank shadow sector for the first time, this new agency CAN help future abuses.

This comes after the administration and congressional leaders took some of Bair's suggestions to modify the bill that came out of the House Financial Services Committee last week, but Bair clearly understands the dynamics that helped wreck the economy.

-- Tim Fernholz

There are still a few obstacles in the way of this. A privilege problem could be keeping some men from supporting feminist measures: As Paul Waldman has pointed out, those who do not face discrimination often do not believe it is real. Michael Kimmel, a conference panelist, even posited in a 1994 essay that some men might not be afraid of women exactly, but rather of being emasculated by other men. These sorts of anxieties might prevent some men from becoming allies for equality, even though reforms to improve women’s quality of life are in their best interest as well.

As Courtney Martin discusses in her column today, the work/life balance is not just a women’s issue. Women, men and families need more workplace flexibility: They need paid sick leave, family leave, maternity leave, and paternity leave. These are all worker's -- not just women's -- rights issues, not unlike the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week that labor fought for. Now, we need worker’s rights to be updated to support the modern family with two breadwinners.

Perhaps the best way to attract male support for these goals is to frame the issues in broader, more inclusive terms. As panelists suggested, we might shift the language from a “women’s” to a “family” issue. After all, 80 percent of Americans believe “businesses haven't done enough to address the needs of modern families.” Some men may feel uneasy in a debate about women’s rights, but they might reconsider the need for equality as fathers and husbands.

--Pema Levy

Pema Levy is a Prospect fall 2009 intern.

TPM highlights this editorial from the Watertown Daily Times, a newspaper in New York's 23d Congressional District where a special election is being held to replace Rep. John McHugh, now President Obama's secretary of the Army. Turns out that conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman (who is battling for Republican votes with the GOP candidate, Dede Scozzafava) doesn't know much about local issues:

In a nearly hour-long session, Mr. Hoffman was unable to articulate clear positions on a number of matters specific to Northern New Yorkers rather than the national level campaign being waged in a three-way race .... former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, who accompanied the candidate on a campaign swing, dismissed regional concerns as "parochial" issues that would not determine the outcome of the election. On the contrary, it is just such parochial issues that we expect our representative to understand and be knowledgeable about, if he wants to be our voice in Washington.

That's what happens when you don't support candidates that fit their district, which has been the mantra of the Democratic political committees since 2006. Though that causes tension between moderate and liberal Democrats when policy is made, you don't get to make policy unless you've got a majority, and that means tolerating a diverse party. Scozzafava was nominated by local GOP leaders, and she supports some policies that the national Republicans aren't comfortable with, like the Employee Free Choice Act. (So did McHugh, incidentally). But she is a Republican, and she would have given the Democratic candidate, Bill Owens, a run for his money had not the unelected media arm of the National GOP -- Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Armey and others -- thrown themselves behind Hoffman, who does not even live in the District, but near it, essentially splitting the ballot.

The attention these conservative have gained will no doubt lead them to continue supporting third-party candidates and divisive primaries, a gift Democrats will be happy to receive. Simply put: litmus tests of partisan purity just don't make for effective politics. That doesn't mean, of course, that partisans of any stripe shouldn't stop hounding representatives on their policy choices or reminding them of the differences between their constituents and their funders. But forcing local representatives to toe every single aspect of the party line is a recipe for long-term minority status. I talked about some of these issues Friday on MSNBC, where I engaged in questionable practices like complimenting Newt Gingrich and making "Going Rogue" jokes.

-- Tim Fernholz

Ross Douthat is heartened by Pope Benedict's outreach to Anglicans because, well, there's a war against Islam to fight and Jesus needs foot soldiers:

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

Glenn Greenwald rightfully notes the irony of "someone who is virtually calling for a worldwide religious conflagration is simultaneously condemning his targets for lacking "Western reason." As Greenwald points out, one of the latest examples of the conservative ideal of "Western reason" was Republican members of Congress portraying the presence of Muslim interns on Capitol Hill as part of some fifth columnist threat.

I've already made this point implicitly before, but the kind of anti-Muslim bigotry demonstrated by reasonable conservative Ross Douthat and his ideological cohorts in Congress directly undermines national security. Former FBI Agent Ali Soufan drew attention earlier this year for his opposition to torture, but this diminishes his role in the fight against Al Qaeda. Aside from interrogating Abu Zubayda, Soufan was the lead investigator on the bombing of the U.S.S Cole. It was Soufan's recognition of Osama bin Laden's writing style in the note sent out after the bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that allowed the FBI to identify bin Laden as the mastermind behind them. When 9/11 hit, he was one of eight Arabic speakers in the Bureau -- and it was he who established the evidentiary link between Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks by identifying one of the individuals involved as someone who had been part of the Cole bombing.

For Douthat and like-minded conservatives of course, Soufan, a Lebanese-American, is by definition a "foe." In the fight against Al Qaeda, American cultural and religious pluralism is among its greatest strengths, but one that is consistently undermined by these kinds of noxious prejudices. A country that succumbs to the kinds of views expressed by Douthat in his column today is the kind of country that doesn't produce men like Ali Soufan.

UPDATE: I just want to add that there's a great deal of common ground between Douthat's perception of a grand conflict between Islam and Christianity and the tribalism of Pat Buchanan. Each is grounded in a hostility to cultural pluralism and fear of an encroaching, menacing other. The major difference being that while outright prejudice against black people is largely culturally taboo, prejudice against Muslims is so acceptable as to be found expressed openly in the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

-- A. Serwer

We've reached the point in our American media evolution where it becomes sensible to ask, (a) where did Glenn Beck come from, and (b) how do we get him to go away? Passed out of the House and headed for a likely floor vote by winter break is community radio legislation that helps explicate the first and suggests an answer to the second. No, not the dread Fairness Doctrine. This is a plan to grow the radio dial, not babysit it. The plan would open up the radio spectrum to broadcasters living within spitting distance of their transmitters -- offering up a dash of local diversity to liven up our current steady diet of placeless robojockery a la Glenn Beck.

How we got here has to do, in part, with Congress' befuddlement over science, creating an opening for broadcasting lobbyists waltz right through. After the 1996 Telecom Act loosened media ownership restrictions -- so that Beck's syndicator Clear Channel, for example, ballooned from 16 stations to 1,200 -- the Federal Communications Commission responded by licensing low-wattage broadcasters to use the FM dial to communicate with their communities. The National Association of Broadcasters and its members -- with the notable inclusion of NPR -- complained that those teeny broadcasters interfered with the integrity of their signals. Congress, never exhibiting much of an understanding for the wireless radio spectrum they can't even see, rather unceremoniously yanked the FCC's jurisdiction over low power FM until further notice.

Almost a decade later, that notice seems to be on its way. Science has made bunk out of signal integrity worries, and new FCC chair Julius Genechowski is generally being given wide political berth in Congress, where members on both sides of the aisle retain an admiration for (if not child-like awe of) what the Obama campaign was able to achieve using technology under Genechowski's lead. And that looks likely to add up to a new chance for local radio.

--Nancy Scola

Mark Schmitt explains how a series of roadblocks and compromises shaped the health-care debate -- and why the battle doesn't end when Obama signs a bill:

American presidents have tried seven times to bring us into the community of nations that provide health care to all citizens. Seven times the effort failed. More accurately, it was blocked. In the 1940s, the anti-reform movement was led by doctors, through the American Medical Association. In the 1990s, it was led by the insurance and small-business lobbies.

This time everything has been different. The town hall meetings and right-wing distortions of this summer drew attention away from a far more significant fact: Most of the traditional enemies of reform have been quiet, absent, or divided. Many -- including the conservative American Medical Association -- are almost supportive of reform. Large and small businesses understand that reducing their health-care costs and making them predictable will be good for their bottom line, and the chief lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bruce Josten, has said, "The reality with the business community is that we want reform." Even the National Federation of Independent Business, which took the lead in opposing reform in the Clinton years, now participates in some pro-reform coalitions. And while insurance companies have much to lose from legislation that includes a public option and tight regulations, many large insurers know that they can survive and thrive when every American purchases insurance.

KEEP READING ...

And now there are five -- five Wall Street behemoths, bigger than they were before the Great Meltdown, paying fatter salaries and bonuses to retain their so-called talent, and raking in huge profits. The biggest difference between now and last October is these biggies didn't know then that they were too big to fail and the government would bail them out if they got into trouble. Now they do. And like a giant, gawking adolescent who's just discovered he can crash the Lexus convertible his rich dad gave him and the next morning have a new one waiting in his driveway courtesy of a dad who can't say no, the biggies will drive even faster now, taking even bigger risks.

What to do? Two ideas are floating around Washington, but only one is supported by the Treasury and the White House. Unfortunately, it's the wrong one.

The right idea is to break up the giant banks. I don't often agree with Alan Greenspan but he was right when he said last week that "[i]f they're too big to fail, they're too big." Greenspan noted that the government broke up Standard Oil in 1911, and what happened? "The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that's what we need to do." (Historic footnote: Had Greenspan not supported in 1999 Congress's repeal of the Glass-Stagall Act, which separated investment from commercial banking, we wouldn't be in the soup we're in to begin with.)

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, whose only problem is he's much too tall, last week told the New York Times he'd like to see the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act provisions that would separate the financial giants' deposit-taking activities from their investment and trading businesses. If this separation went into effect, JPMorgan Chase would have to give up the trading operations acquired from Bear Stearns. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch would go back to being separate companies. And Goldman Sachs could no longer be a bank holding company.

But the Obama administration doesn't agree with either Greenspan or Volcker. While it says it doesn't want another bank bailout, its solution to the "too big to fail" problem doesn't go nearly far enough. In fact, it doesn't really go anywhere. The administration would wait until a giant bank was in danger of failing and then put it into a process akin to bankruptcy. The bank's assets would be sold off to pay its creditors, and its shareholders would likely walk off with nothing. The Treasury would determine when such a "resolution" process was needed, and appoint a receiver, such as the FDIC, to wind down the bank's operations.

There should be an orderly process for putting big failing banks out of business. But this isn't nearly enough. By the time a truly big bank gets into trouble -- one that poses a "systemic risk" to the entire economy -- it's too late. Other banks, competing like mad for the same talent and profits, will already have adopted many of the excessively risky banks techniques. And the pending failure will already have rocked the entire financial sector.

Worse yet, the administration's plan gives the big failing bank an escape hatch: The receiver might decide that the bank doesn't need to go out of business after all -- that all it needs is some government money to tide it over until the crisis passes. So the Treasury would also have the authority to provide the bank with financial assistance in the form of loans or guarantees. In other words, back to bailout. (Historical footnote: Summers and Geithner, along with Bob Rubin, while at Treasury in 1999, joined Greenspan in urging Congress to repeal Glass-Steagall. The four of them -- Greenspan, Summers, Rubin and Geithner also refused to regulate derivatives, and pushed Congress to stop the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation from doing so.)

Congress is cooking up a variation on the "resolution" idea that would give the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation authority to trigger and handle the winding-down of big banks in trouble, without Treasury involvement, and without an escape hatch.

Needless to say, Wall Street favors the administration's approach -- which is why the administration chose it to begin with. If I were less charitable I'd say Geithner and Summers continue to bend over backward to make Wall Street happy, and in doing so continue to risk the credibility of the president, as well as the long-term financial stability of the system.

Wall Street could live with the slightly less delectable variation that Congress is coming up with. But Congress won't go as far as to unleash the antitrust laws on the big banks or resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act. After all, the Street is a major benefactor of Congress and the Street's lobbyists and lackeys are all over Capitol Hill.

The Street obviously detests the notion that its behemoths should be broken up. That's why the idea isn't even on the table. But it should be. No important public interest is served by allowing giant banks to grow too big to fail. Winding them down after they get into trouble is no answer. By then the damage will already have been done.

Whether it's using the antitrust laws or enacting a new Glass-Steagall Act, the Wall Street giants should be split up -- and soon.

Robert Reich on health care and employment needs:

Presidents tend to overcompensate for the errors of their predecessors in the same party and in so doing, sow seeds of their own mistakes. Bill Clinton wanted above all to avoid Jimmy Carter's fate -- losing re-election because the economy was heading south on Election Day. So Clinton made a deal with Alan Greenspan to slash the budget deficit and thereby jettison much of his ambitious campaign agenda -- Greenspan's precondition for lowering interest rates and causing an economic boom in time for the re-election -- and then took direction from Dick Morris, who told Clinton to move to the right. The result: Clinton avoided Carter's failure and won re-election handily. But the Clinton years produced few if any major social reforms. Clinton spent so much of his initial political capital, as well as his time and energy, on deficit reduction that he didn't have enough left to enact health care in 1994.

Barack Obama came to the White House intent on not repeating Clinton's failure to enact universal health care. Did he overlearn the Clinton lesson? Obama seems to have made all the right moves to enact something he can credibly label health-care reform: Rather than spend his political capital elsewhere, he reserved most of it for the health-care fight.

KEEP READING ...

Ramesh Ponnuru and I have gone back and forth on Massachusetts' health-care reform effort, in the interest of a meta-debate over whether Mitt Romney ought to be proud or ashamed of the bipartisan overhaul that represents his governing legacy. Paul Krugman talks about Mass Care in his column today, and while I doubt Ponnuru will let me argue with Krugman as my authority, problems of perspective being what they are, I think this data is worth noting, since Ponnuru refuses to believe the thing could be popular:

Earlier this year, many conservatives, citing misleading poll results, claimed that public support for the Massachusetts reform had plunged. Newer, more careful polling paints a very different picture. The key finding: an overwhelming 79 percent of the public think the reform should be continued, while only 11 percent think it should be repealed.

Interestingly, another recent poll shows similar support among the state’s physicians: 75 percent want to continue the policies; only 7 percent want to see them reversed.

Given that the Massachusetts' effort is pretty similar to the current national legislation -- both are compromise plans that involve joint public and private efforts -- this should be an important signifier for those people, and legislators, waffling about federal health-care reform.

-- Tim Fernholz

Courtney Martin on the universal need for family-friendly workplaces:

"Women are in the labor force -- and every other public arena -- to stay. So the choice for men is how we will relate to this transformation. Will we be dragged kicking and screaming into the future? Flee to some male-only preserve, circle the masculine wagons, and regroup?" asks masculinity scholar Michael Kimmel. "Or instead, will the majority of us who are now somewhere between eager embrace and resigned acceptance see instead the opportunity for the 'enthusiastic embrace' of gender equality?"

These are some of the questions at the center of a new report released by the Center for American Progress last week in partnership with Maria Shriver. Despite its title, A Woman's Nation, it's really about a future in which both men and women have the support to live fulfilling, healthy lives. The report features a broad range of public intellectuals, academics, and policy-makers reflecting on this benchmark moment in women's labor participation.

KEEP READING ...

Hey and hello there, TAPPED fans. I'm Nancy Scola, and it is my tremendous pleasure to be your guest blogger for the week. Before we can move on to the fun stuff, some background on me. Prior to coming to my senses and embracing the writing life, I spent time working on the hands-on side of politics. A big chunk of it was spent working on Capitol Hill, for this guy. A smaller chunk went toward helping someone figure out whether or not he wanted to be president. He didn't. For the last year and a half, I've found a happy home at Personal Democracy Forum's techPresident, where I'm associate editor. I'm originally from New Jersey, which probably explains a lot.

As a writer, my hope is to be a guide to those places where the geekiest of life's great topics -- the nuances of telecom policy, the ins and outs of our food safety system, for example -- meet our broader culture. Does that not sound wonderfully exciting? My task here this week is to prove that that can be thrilling stuff, or at least important in a non-mindnumbingly boring way. From the most genuine part of me, I thank you in advance for your attention over the next week. (And for those moments where your attention span tends towards the shorter side, there's always Twitter.)

I wrote about GeoCities' demise for the September print issue of the Prospect. One of my favorite observations about GeoCities came from Jason Scott:

A lot of people see GeoCities as this sea of amateurish, poorly written Web sites. I understand that thinking; I certainly don't want people to think that I'm saying GeoCities is an example of the best the Web could be, but I do think it's an example of what the Web was.

Scott has an eye-bleeding collection of "Under Construction" banners he has pulled from GeoCities as he archives. The Internet Archive's collection of GeoCities sites is here.

--Phoebe Connelly

(Image courtesy Harry the Cat. I highly recommend wasting part of your morning on their collection. Also, give a read to the Wikipedia entry on GIFs. Patent wars!)

Mickey Kaus has a good post evaluating why FOX is not a news organization, coming down to the idea that it has less to do with "neutrality" than it does with independence. Kaus concludes that FOX is not independent because:

I think Fox is also not neutral (which, again, doesn't bother me) but it's also not independent (which does). This isn't because it's owned by Rupert Murdoch--moguls are, typically among the more independent sorts. It's because it's run by Roger Ailes. I have zero faith that Ailes is independent of the Republican party or, specifically, those Republicans who have occupied the White House recently--the Bushes. As I said, I think if Karl Rove called Ailes in 2003 and said "We don't want so much coverage of X" it's extremely likely that X would not be covered on Fox. A ... suggestive example of Fox's loyalty is the debate on immigration, in which Ailes' network initially seemed to try valiantly--against the beliefs of most of its audience--to push the Bush White House line in favor of "comprehensive" legalization (while brushing aside its viewers' views).

There are endless other examples.

I wrote a post last week saying that I understood why some journalists were defending FOX, and that it should be reporters, rather than the White House, holding FOX to account. But reporters feel uncomfortable doing that, because it would make them look as though they are "biased" against Republicans--while defending FOX makes them look solicitous of Republicans' views and concerns. In other words, FOX's lack of independence from the GOP is reiterated by the fact that attacking FOX would be seen as a partisan act. Liberals may be the ones saying FOX is the communications arm of the GOP, but everyone, including those who are vocally disagreeing, are actually behaving as though it is, pretending they don't see the pink elephant in the room but somehow managing to walk around it every time.

-- A. Serwer

And the American International Group is contractually obliged to make bonus payments of nearly $200 million in March 2010. The company has promised to try to reduce that amount by 30 percent. But once again, there is nothing Mr. Feinberg can do because those bonuses were already written into contracts — and there is a high likelihood that the bonuses will create another furor in Congress, just as they did earlier this year.

... and autoworker contracts a year ago ...

For instance, it is critical for General Motors to be able to break its contracts with both its unions and its dealers. It needs to dramatically reduce its legacy benefits, perhaps even eliminating health care benefits for union retirees. It needs to close plants. It needs to pay its workers what Toyota workers are paid in the United States — and not a penny more. It needs to reduce the number of brands it sells — which means closing down thousands of dealerships, which is difficult to do because of state laws that protect car dealers.

It's like certain writers hear the word "union" and the lights shut off inside their heads. (Ruth Marcus is also in the club.) In a related phenomenon during the auto rescues, bond holders at both companies accused the government of undermining capitalism itself when GM and Chrysler went into bankruptcy because some of their contracts were abrogated and they took losses on loans, despite the fact that the procedure was entirely legal and the bondholders came out better off through the government process than if the firms had been liquidated. I'll take them seriously when they're defending everybody's contracts, including those of union workers.

-- Tim Fernholz

Image of an ancient Sumerian contract via Wikimedia.

Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff over at Newsweek report that the government plans to bring 25 Gitmo detainees to the U.S. for trial under the new law that just passed, including, potentially, alleged 9/11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin Al Shibh.

A public announcement of the decision is expected to come by Nov. 16—the task force’s self imposed deadline—but could come earlier. When it does, it is sure to ignite a loud public debate: in just the past few days, conservatives—including former Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey—have stepped up their warnings that such trials could compromise national security, expose sensitive intelligence methods in open court, and cause logistical nightmares.

The new military commissions have higher due-process standards than the ones used during the Bush administration, but they give the executive branch more leeway to decide what can be kept secret. Aside from Mukasey, Daphne Eviatar reported last week that Lindsey Graham and John McCain are also fiercely opposing the trial of the alleged 9/11 plotters in civilian courts.

I'm skeptical that the Classified Information Procedures Act, the statute governing the disclosure of classified information in federal court, is inadequate to prevent whatever national security information might be disclosed in any of these trials. But remember, if you look at the more declassified version of the 2006 CIA Inspector General's report that was recently released, there are 24 straight pages of redacted information describing what was done to KSM. If you're wondering what Mukasey and the others are worried about a civilian trial disclosing, it's a good bet that some of it is probably in there.

-- A. Serwer

• Perhaps the highs and lows of international diplomacy just aren't interesting enough for segments of the press, which is why the "where is Richard Holbrooke?" question gained some currency after Sen. John Kerry's breakthrough earlier this week. But sometimes there just isn't any real palace intrigue, and Holbrooke's absence could be explained by fairly mundane reasons: "I didn't know I was missing in action because I was kind of busy all day ... The truth is that I go [sic] Afghanistan every two months and I was there less than two months ago. When I came back, I knew we were plunging into the biggest imaginable policy debate so [Secretary of State] Hillary [Clinton] and I mutually felt that my place at this time was to stay here."
• Another day, another poll showing the GOP at record lows in popularity. What's interesting is what happens if today's political conditions remain the same a year from now: Congress unpopular in general and congressional Democrats unpopular in particular, but with an alternative that is loathed by much of the country. Like Dave Weigel observed yesterday, any talk about about unemployment, Afghanistan, federal spending and bailouts -- potentially political winners for Republicans -- is being rendered incoherent by the GOP's continuing embrace of fantasy issues being driven by Glenn Beck, et al.
• I can tell you, with 100 percent certainty -- yes 100 percent -- that Fox News chief Roger Ailes will not be a Republican candidate for president in 2012. I could have told you that even before Ailes laughed it off. Clearly his handlers are interpreting the currently high-profile yet ultimately transitory standoff between the White House and the cable channel as some sort of wellspring of popular support that will sustain the proto-candidacy of an largely unknown partisan for the next two years.
• Remainders: I don't think anyone knows what's happening with the public option; the FEC doesn't stand in the way of allowing for greater spending by outside groups during campaigns; and the Michigan State House has enough free time on their hands to introduce legislation dehumanizing women.
  

--Mori Dinauer

It seems my week here at TAPPED has come to an end far too quickly. Thanks again to the Prospect for having me, to Alexandra and Phoebe for their ever-helpful edits, and to you all for reading. TAP has some great guest bloggers lined up for the next month, so be sure to stick around.

--Dylan Matthews

Hate-crimes legislation is symbolic: It sends the message that anti-gay prejudice is abhorrent. But it does little for gay victims. Stricter sentencing might send a message to bigots, but by then it is probably too late. Even the bill's proponents concede that it is unlikely to prevent violence against gays and lesbians. If that is really the goal -- and it should be -- why not prioritize education and activism instead?

I don't think that all crimes are hate crimes and that this is a form of thought-policing like some, but I do question whether the movement should have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours fighting for a bill that kicks in after damage is done when gays and lesbians can still be fired in most states for being gay. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) would have a significant and concrete effect on how most gay people live their lives, but it's taken a backseat to the HRC's strangely single-minded campaign to get the Matthew Shepard Act passed.

Congress' heart may be in the right place, but it would be better for them to make a move where it makes a difference.

--Gabriel Arana

While Maine is set to vote on whether to preserve marriage equality a week from Tuesday, new strides are being made on the other side of the Atlantic:

The Lutheran Church of Sweden - the country's largest - is to conduct same-sex marriages from next month.

…

Sweden's government introduced a new law in May allowing gay couples the same marriage rights as heterosexuals.

Three-quarters of Swedes are members of the Lutheran church, though church attendance is low.

This poses a dilemma for the Anglican Communion's leader, Rowan Williams. The issue of homosexuality has been splitting the Communion for years now, with the Episcopal Church in the U.S. taking a more liberal stance resisted by developing nations. Williams has tried to assuage the Communion's more conservative elements by blocking the appointment of an openly gay bishop in England and opposing ecclesiastical recognition of same-sex unions. It is unclear how he will deal with the Church of Sweden's decision. If he declines to recognize same-sex marriages performed by a full communion partner, he puts that communion in jeopardy. If he decides to recognize them, however, he both contradicts himself and pushes conservative Anglican churches closer to schism.

I do not begrudge Williams for trying to keep conservative churches within the Anglican fold, especially given that the most anti-gay churches have also seen the most growth in attendance. That said, his obligation to both his communion partners in Sweden and his LGBT members ought to take precedence over a desire to grow the church at any cost.

--Dylan Matthews

Terence Samuel on the war between Fox News and the White House:

In normal times, it would make no sense for the White House to engage Fox News Channel in battle. That tactical decision would make as much sense as a dog chasing a crocodile into a swamp -- the White House is on Fox's turf, and the cable network has all the advantages. But these are not normal times, and the White House is not dealing with a typical media outlet.

Fox News is everything that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs says it is: It's an arm of the conservative movement and an opposition research shop for the GOP. And now, the Fox affair is a test case about the future of American political journalism.

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No, but you might think so from reading Robert Reich below, who says:

Eight months ago it looked as if Wall Street was in store for strong financial regulation -- oversight of derivative trading, pay linked to long-term performance, much higher capital requirements, an end to conflicts of interest (i.e. credit rating agencies being paid by the very companies whose securities they're rating), and even resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking.

Now, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street.

Reich doesn't present any evidence that this statement is true, because there isn't much evidence in support of his position. Nearly everything he describes is still very much part of financial regulatory reform and is moving forward on the Hill. Yesterday, Barney Frank's committee in the House passed the first legislation for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is a major victory for progressives. House Committees also passed the first derivatives regulations bills, which represent a step in the right direction if not a complete solution. Both provisions will be strengthened on the House floor, and it is likely, in an unusual twist, the the Senate will actually provide a stronger bill than the House.

Higher capital requirements, leverage limits, and compensation reform are all moving forward in the executive branch and on Capitol Hill as well, albeit slowly thanks to the fact that health-care reform is sucking up much of Washington's oxygen. True, returning to the days of Glass-Steagall isn't on the table, and the proposals surrounding rating agencies are weak at best -- no one is arguing that this is a perfect plan, or that it can't be improved. The money that banks are giving to politicians is both unpleasant and unsurprising. But though it may be fashionable to throw up one's hands and proclaim the end of financial regulatory reform, the facts of the situation are much more complex, and promising, than that simplistic depiction.

-- Tim Fernholz

Daphne Eviatar has a copy of the protocol for military commissions, and it clearly favors the use of military commissions not just for those captured in a theater of active combat but for those whom, by any objective measurement, would be considered criminals rather than battlefield combatants--which is against the administration's stated preference of trying suspected terrorists in civilian courts "where possible."

I would be careful about imputing Congress' preferences about how the military commissions should be used to the White House. As I reported a while ago, Congress and the White House were at odds over the new rules for the military commissions with civil-liberties groups in the middle, advocating for the administration's stricter standards for due-process protections and eschewing coerced evidence but opposing the commissions as a whole. Congress pretty much did what they wanted.

At the same time, it's not clear that the administration won't take advantage of Congress' stubbornness--when I asked David Kris, head of the National Security Division at the Justice Department whether the administration would choose not to charge detainees tried by military commissions with "material support for terrorism" after the administration urged Congress to remove that from the list of potential war crimes charges, Kris demurred. What that means is that it's very likely that we'll see the administration choosing to charge suspected terrorists in military commissions based on the strength of the government's case and not the nature of the offense. 

-- A. Serwer

At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009 -- up 46 percent from a year earlier -- Griffiths told us not to worry. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,” he said.

Eight months ago it looked as if Wall Street was in store for strong financial regulation -- oversight of derivative trading, pay linked to long-term performance, much higher capital requirements, an end to conflicts of interest (i.e. credit rating agencies being paid by the very companies whose securities they're rating), and even resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banking.

Now, Congress is struggling to produce the tiniest shards of regulation that would at least give the appearance of doing something to rein in the Street.

What happened in the intervening months? Two things. First, America's attention wandered. We're now focusing on health care, Letterman's frolics, and little boys who hide in attics rather than balloons. And, hey, the Dow is up again. The politicians who put off Wall Street regulation for 10 months knew that the public would probably lose interest by now.

Second, the banks keep paying off Congress. The big guns on Wall Street increased their political donations last month after increasing their lobbying muscle. Morgan Stanley's Political Action Committee donated $110,000 in September, for example, of which Democrats got $43,000.

Official Wall Street PAC donations are piddling compared to the tens of millions of dollars that Wall Street executives dole out to candidates on their own (or with a gentle nudge from their firms). Remember -- the Street is where the money is. Executives and traders on the Street have become the single biggest sources of money for Democrats as well as Republicans. And with mid-term elections looming next year, you can bet every member of Congress has a glint in his or her eye directed at the Street.

That's why the president went to Wall Street to raise money Tuesday night, gleaning about $2 million for the effort. He politely asked the crowd to cooperate with reform -- “If there are members of the financial industry in the audience today, I would ask that you join us in passing necessary reforms" -- but those were hardly fighting words. It's hard to fight people you're trying to squeeze money out of.

Which is the essential problem.

Ken Feinberg, the President's "pay czar" came down hard on executive pay yesterday, for those banks still collecting money under TARP, as well he should. But Feinberg isn't trying to pass new financial reform legislation, and TARP no longer covers several of the biggest banks with the highest pay and bonuses -- although they're still getting subsidized by the government with low-interest loans.

Wall Street and the Treasury want us to believe that the TARP money will be repaid to taxpayers, but Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general keeping watch over TARP, said yesterday that just 17 percent of the TARP money has been repaid, and “[i]t’s extremely unlikely that taxpayers will see a full return on their investment." Later he told a reporter that it's unlikely "we'll get a lot of our money back at all."

Griffiths, the aforementioned Goldman international adviser who told us inequality is good for us, doesn't know what he's talking about. America is lurching toward inequality once again, led by the financial industry. The Street is back to where it was in 2007, but most of the rest of us are poorer than we were then -- largely due to the meltdown that occurred because Wall Street overreached. The oddity is that we bailed out the Street, including Griffiths and his colleagues, but apparently won't even be repaid.

And now that Griffiths et al. knows his firm and the other big ones on the Street are too big to fail, he and his colleagues will make even bigger gambles in the future with our money.

Freakonomics and now SuperFreakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner may still be denying claims that they are climate-change skeptics, but Dave Weigel talked to some self-proclaimed skeptics who beg to differ:

“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”

…

[Cato fellow Patrick] Michaels, who has not read the book but is planning to pick it up, saluted Levitt and Dubner for tackling an issue that few popular economists touch. “It’s about time that people who do popular economics tell people the truth,” he said. “Fortunately, the planet is not warming.”

Indeed, I would argue that they are doing far more damage to the public discourse –- and in turn to the planet's health –- than Ebell or Michaels. Conservative think-tankers are expected to deny all manner of environmental catastrophes. Popular social science writers are not, and non-ideological ones especially have a greater impact as a result.

--Dylan Matthews

Carl T. Bogus reviews The Death of Conservatism:

Four days after Barack Obama's decisive victory in November 2008, I attended a conference at Yale University titled "The Next American Conservatism?" The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized the conference in advance of the election -- in the face of oncoming doom, as it were -- to try to figure out what sort of conservatism might rise from the ashes. But although the intellectuals on the program seemed to take for granted that conservatism as we know it is dead, none of them ventured an opinion as to why it died, whether it deserved to die, or what was, or should be, next.

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review as well as the author of an acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, offers his postmortem in an elegant little volume. Tanenhaus would not have been surprised that the participants at Yale did not even attempt meaningful speculation. "Today's conservatives," he writes, "resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." When a volcano erupts in your face, it is difficult to be reflective.

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Dawn Johnsen, the Obama administration's nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, has been held up for months ostensibly because of her positions on reproductive rights, but more likely because of her views on torture and her strong criticism of the previous administration's OLC, which rubber-stamped the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

Daphne Eviatar reports that Arlen Specter, once one of Johnsen's harshest critics, is reconsidering his position. Eviatar posted this note from Specter's press shop:

Senator Specter has several concerns about Ms. Johnsen’s nomination, including her views on executive power and abortion. Senator Specter is solidly pro-choice, but he disagrees with her position equating limitations with involuntary servitude. Senator Specter had a second meeting with her to get clarification on her positions and he is still considering her nomination.

We can count this as another public service contribution from Joe Sestak, Specter's Democratic primary opponent. But ultimately Harry Reid makes the choice of whether or not to push for cloture, and right now both he and the administration have put almost everything on the back burner to deal with health care. Getting Johnsen through will likely require some active pushing on the White House's part, so I doubt we'll see movement on Johnsen before we have a health-care bill.

-- A. Serwer

"When we have gone to Afghanistan repeatedly, we're asked not to forget them, not to desert them again; it definitely is a factor, whether or not we need more troops to do that," Schakowsky said. "For a lot of us who have been there, the future of the women in Afghanistan is a factor that has to be considered."

It's hard to think it couldn't be -- women's rights were a much ballyhooed reason to support the invasion of Afghanistan in the first place (remember when they tracked down the girl from the famous National Geographic cover photo?) and the number of girls in school became an important development metric. (Girls in school should be an important development metric everywhere, of course, given the many studies linking the empowerment of women with economic success.) And, as Schakowsky points out, "There would be no girls in school if the Taliban was in charge, period, end of story."

At the same time, though, none seemed too eager to commit more resources to the conflict; Lowey took time to praise the president's deliberative approach to policy-making. Given the questions of whether an escalation in Afghanistan could succeed in building up state capacity, it is a wise approach, but it does highlight the implicit tensions that arise when American liberals meet a human-rights crisis abroad. Those who oppose putting more troops in Afghanistan will observe that women are oppressed in many other states, including U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, and that more constructive global efforts there will do more good than emphasizing a military solution in Afghanistan.

I saw the other end of the spectrum later in the day at a hearing on the International Violence Against Women Act, where the subcommittee's top Republican, Dana Rohrbacher, had committed to support the bill in large part, it seemed, because of his dislike of cultural relativism and Islam in particular. Delivering an impassioned speech on behalf of preventing violence against women, he said, "We need to confront those governments in the world, and we have not been confronting them in the past, because this is their Islamic faith. I happen to believe that rights are given to all people by God." That approach, though, is likely to alienate the very people the legislation is trying to help -- the bill's advocates emphasize that their message will come in a culturally specific package. Women's rights are human rights, but they aren't a cudgel for beating down any group perceived to be an enemy of the U.S.

These aren't easy questions, and I think anyone who has a pat answer for how the U.S. should forge ahead in Afghanistan isn't considering the many dynamics, among them the situation of women there. Perhaps a strategy exists to build the Afghan government short of a major escalation that will continue to improve their lives, or perhaps a massive counterinsurgency campaign is the only way to establish institutions that will treat women equally. Even then, improving the lot of women is a global problem, and making Afghanistan the locus of that effort suggests a narrow approach predicated on solving a problem only when U.S. troops are within a hundred miles of it.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Just so we're clear, Obama shutting out Fox News is some combination of a) tearing up the Constitution and Bill of Rights, b) the brutal thuggery of "Chicago-level politics," c) censorship and an abuse of power, or d) a litmus test for executing people. Don't say we weren't all warned.
  
• I believe that under very specific circumstances (viz this James Fallows piece from four years ago) a third-party candidate could emerge as a credible alternative to Barack Obama and whatever hero the GOP pits against him, but this won't be fueled by the "rise" of independent voters. Fortunately, Cillizza gets that virtually all self-described independents are actually Democratic- or Republican-leaning voters, and notes the tremendous institutional hurdles facing third-party candidates. I would add that the truly "independent" voter has never been (and probably can't be) adequately defined, which means they're always going to be all things to all people.
• I suppose it was inevitable that public attitudes about global warming would eventually begin to cite a lack of "solid evidence" as reason to turn against the need for action. After all, even under the worst-case scenario, the effects of dumping millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere won't be felt for decades, and the effects will be highly concentrated in the poorest parts of the world. That isn't a recipe for getting Americans concerned that maybe we ought to be taking steps to avert this catastrophe.
• These two items from National Review's "Off the Page" truly capture the strength of imagination in today's "conservative" mind. Item 1: "What If the GOP Were in Charge? Yuval Levin describes what could have been -- had the other guys won last fall. Tune in to today's episode of Off the Page for a thought-provoking alternative history." Item 2: "End Women's Suffrage? John Derbyshire examines the effects that female voting has had upon our culture in this episode of Off the Page."
• Remainders: I'm curious how Olympia Snowe is going to explain support for a health care filibuster to her constituents; Mary Landrieu is an uninformed hypocrite; Alan Grayson discovers the intellectual limits of his House Republican colleagues; keep your eyes on this "gas tax" nonsense; and this ought to be the final word on the risks involved with contrarian arguments.

--Mori Dinauer

With Ben Nelson and Kent Conrad telling reporters that the Obama administration and Harry Reid are leaning toward including a public option in the combined Senate health-care reform bill, today should be a banner one for progressive advocacy. When that news is combined with this reporting from Brian Beutler, however, it feels more like a disaster:

In a huddle with reporters moments ago, I asked Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) for her thoughts on a public option compromise that would allow states to opt out of a national government insurance program, and her answer could slow down the proposal's considerable momentum.

"I don't support that," Snowe said.

Asked further whether she would participate in a filibuster on a bill with a public option, she went almost all the way.

"I've said, I'm against a public option...yes...it would be difficult" to support allowing the bill to proceed to a vote.

--Dylan Matthews

Conor Friedersdorf attempts to defend Ross Douthat's tacit acknowledgment that there aren't any good arguments against marriage equality.

I mean, really? That’s your lead? A guy on a panel was “uncomfortable” for “a moment”? Call Drudge and cue the siren! What kind of weird place have we reached when it’s news that a guy, being peppered with the most difficult questions a roomful of smart people can muster, once during a session displays a moment of discomfort? I’ll tell you what kind. We’ve reached a place where a stunning number of folks you see commenting on television or other public venues care so little about the substance of what they’re saying that even when they and everyone else knows their words are utter idiocy, they still refrain from displaying actual discomfort, because to them it’s all a game, unconnected to any sense that words have consequences, or that integrity is partly a matter of challenging one’s own own ideas out of a lingering sense that commenting on public affairs confers some responsibility, and that it is shameful to frivolously and lightly proffer arguments that one isn’t able to defend.

[...]

Elsewhere in New York this week, hundreds of makeup slathered pundits spewed forth transparently idiotic talking points on all manner of subjects, without betraying any sign of thought or shame. As yet, the New York Observer hasn’t found that worth remarking upon.

Honestly, Douthat's discomfort puts him at more moral fault than the dumber pundits Friedersdorf is comparing him to. To borrow Friedersdorf's flawed legal analogy in regards to racism, Douthat's political position is taken with "malice aforethought." He knows that, as Scott Lemieux puts it using Douthat's own words, secular arguments against gay marriage are in fact all ones of "bigotry and or custom." Yet Douthat continues to oppose gays' secular right to marry because of his own religious beliefs--a position he apparently realizes is indefensible.

That's worthy of remarking on--at least the people who are "transparently idiotic" don't know any better.You don't get points for being "reflective" if you then knowingly make the wrong decision. We all know he's "reflective"; he's a New York Times op-ed columnist. He "reflects" for a living. How much more credit for being "reflective" is one supposed to get?

-- A. Serwer

Seyward Darby has a good analysis of some stupid anti-same-sex-marriage arguments being made in the context of a Maine restore-inequality initiative. Essentially, the situation in Maine is similar to that in California in 2008 -- similar arguments against SSM (in this case, in some cases by the same public relations firm) made by well-funded interests to a closely divided public.

This parity teaches a valuable lesson. We were often informed by pundits that the backlash against SSM in California was a distinctive feature of change created by judicial decisions. But, of course, it wasn't. Just as Anita Bryant's campaign against gay and lesbian rights was instigated by decisions made by elected local governments, not courts, opponents of same-sex marriage in Maine haven't abjured the initiative process or avoided making "divisive" arguments simply because it was a legislature, rather than a court, that announced a change in the status quo. Rhetoric about "judicial activists" can easily be changed to rhetoric about "[a] handful of politicians." And there's no good reason -- theoretical or empirical -- to expect otherwise. Decisions about whether to ligate for equal marriage rights should be driven about its likelihood of success, not on the myth that opposition can somehow be preempted if change is achieved in the "right" way. After all, it never can be according to its opponents anyway.

--Scott Lemieux

This TNR article advising Obama about how to handle the politics of Afghanistan tries too hard to capitalize on old stereotypes about the different parties and in the process becomes a bit of a muddle. You get passages like this:

Additionally, Democratic presidents like Obama face a particular handicap when making major foreign policy moves: For decades, the public has distrusted the Democrats on issues related to national security.

Followed by this:

While it is true that the Democrats' reputation on foreign policy has experienced a recent uptick--in Pew's August survey, Democrats enjoyed a 13-point lead on foreign policy and a nine-point advantage on Afghanistan--Obama shouldn't allow that fact to lull him into thinking his party has conquered the American public's skepticism.

And sure, they have a good point about the fact that it takes a long time to establish credibility on an issue. But then they say that Bill Clinton can make missteps on a Democratic issue like health care and still get re-elected because Democrats are strong on domestic issues (what about Somalia? Gays in the military?) and that George W. Bush can recover from a massive failure in Iraq because Republicans are strong on foreign policy (Bush also turned a record budget-surplus into a then-record deficit). It's all way too simplistic. But my favorite contradiction is still coming. First this:

No matter what choice Obama makes, he should not be deluded into thinking that his rhetorical gifts can move public opinion on this issue. According to research by Professor George Edwards of Texas A&M University, recent presidents, no matter how golden-tongued, have had virtually no power to change public opinion on foreign policy.

Then this:

It is crucial that he make the most of this one-time opportunity to reassure people about his own ability to manage U.S. foreign policy, and lay the groundwork for continued long-term improvements in the public's perception of Democrats on defense-related issues. To do this, Obama should follow the same format that President Bush used to announce his "surge" in Iraq: an address to the nation from the White House, without the back-and-forth of a press conference. His speech should focus on one theme and one theme only--U.S. national security.

This works, I suppose, because the authors make a clever distinction between "changing public opinion on an issue" and "framing an issue so that public opinion about it changes." Too clever by half, really. Their point is simple: Whatever Obama chooses, he should make sure to argue that he is protecting the country, which is something of a given. A more important point is to make sure that whatever course Obama chooses actually does enhance our national security.

-- Tim Fernholz

Steve Fraser on labor relations and military production:

The era of Franklin D. Roosevelt transformed the power of workers to achieve a better life. The New Deal facilitated the mass organization of the industrial working class into militant unions and also relied on the state through measures such as the Fair Labor Standards Act and Social Security. But though the New Deal of the 1930s is often remembered as the zenith of progressivism, in many ways World War II marked the high point of this collaboration. Ironically, the war's strengthened military-industrial complex also proved its undoing.

Deficit spending required by war mobilization rapidly produced full employment. The nation's gross national product soared from $91 billion in 1939 to $166 billion in 1945. The military and civilian sectors together saw the creation of 17 million new jobs, mainly high-wage positions in new industries powered by new plants, equipment, and technologies. It was the egalitarian nature and consequences of that growth, however, that was most striking. Progressive-minded public officials and representatives of the labor movement honeycombed newly created agencies charged with manpower mobilization and labor relations, price stabilization, and conversion to military production.

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So yesterday I read Jane Mayer's incredible story in The New Yorker on the use of drone strikes in Pakistan to target al-Qaeda and the Taliban -- and there's almost universal agreement at this point that the drone strikes a) kill lots of civilians and b) produce insurgents. Attempts to draw distinctions between drone strikes and old-school assassinations based on the fact that the strikes ostensibly occur in a theater of war have to contend with the knowledge that the strikes themselves kill so many noncombatants as to be a serious moral issue. Defenders of drone strikes can argue that the killing of non-combatants in these circumstances is either justified by the circumstances or is mitigated by the fact that the U.S. isn't deliberately targeting them.

Here's the thing, though: David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum have argued persuasively that the drone attacks produce insurgents (or the perception that the drone attacks are killing civilians produces insurgents), but they are appealing because they've successfully killed high value targets. But at some point, the benefits of the drone strikes have to outweigh the cost, because the U.S. will be producing more insurgents than the U.S. is killing. That hasn't happened yet, and as I pointed out the other day, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are viewed in an increasingly negative light by Pakistanis despite the increase in drone strikes. David Rohde's account of his capture by the Taliban hints why this might be the case:

The strikes also created a paranoia among the Taliban. They believed that a network of local informants guided the missiles. Innocent civilians were rounded up, accused of working as American spies and then executed.

Several days after the drone strike near our house in Makeen, we heard that foreign militants had arrested a local man. He confessed to being a spy after they disemboweled him and chopped off his leg. Then they decapitated him and hung his body in the local bazaar as a warning.

This type of behavior is corroborated by Mayer, who notes that "militants have been so unnerved by the drone program that they have released a video showing the execution of accused informants."

At the New America Foundation's counterterrorism conference yesterday, FBI official Phil Mudd reiterated that the most discrediting factor for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups has been their wholesale slaughter of Muslim civilians. If the cost of the drone strikes hasn't outweighed the benefits, that probably has a great deal to do with the reaction of the Taliban, which is to brutally torture nearby residents into confessing to being informants and then making a public spectacle of executing them.

In other words, it's not as though the death of civilians is peripheral to drone strikes. The fact that the drone strikes provoke the Taliban into acts of savage, murderous paranoia creates a negative feedback loop that mitigates blowback and allows the U.S. to keep using them. The continued use of drones in such frequency may rely in part on the Taliban killing civilians in response.

There are other serious ethical questions about drone strikes Mayer considers, among them, the fact that -- like prisoners sent to Guantanamo Bay -- decisions about who is targeted depends on information given by "allies" who may be pursuing their own interests. The secrecy of the program has led to its metastasizing: Like torture, it was originally meant for only "the worst of the worst," but that's not the case now that the strikes are increasingly more common. Are the strikes war crimes? The lawyers Mayer talks to concludes that they probably aren't. But I don't find that all that comforting.

-- A. Serwer

Gershom Gorenberg on the Israeli left's leadership vacuum:

Danny Ben-Simon has quit. If anyone needed more evidence of the disarray of the Israeli left, this is it -- but then, no one actually needs any more evidence.

Ben-Simon became the whip of the Labor Party's Knesset delegation just five months ago. That sounds like a prominent position for a first-time Knesset member, until you remember that the once-powerful party now has just 13 representatives in the 120-seat parliament and that at least four of them have had nothing to do with Labor since its leader, Ehud Barak, insisted on joining Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government in order to become defense minister.

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It doesn't bend the cost curve!: Ponnuru thinks these ideas are just nice words. But he cuts the second half of my sentence in his quote -- tsk, tsk, cherrypicking! -- which points out that you can't adopt cost-cutting policies without the framework provided universal coverage. Without the information that comes from having everyone in the system, the economies of scale, and the ability to eliminate waste like people using the emergency room as a clinic, you can't have cost-cutting. It's a basic lesson on health-care reform that almost any health policy expert will tell you, and Massachusetts is well ahead of the rest of the country on that front.

It's costing money! Though experts think the plan isn't bankrupting the state, Ponnuru believes it's a problem that "the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates." But that is true of any universal health-care plan! Eliminating inefficiencies in the insurance market and bargaining with pharmaceutical companies should be part of saving costs, unless Ponnuru thinks that private insurers are making too much money. More importantly, the Massachusetts plan was in part a success because it got more people to use employer-provided health insurance rather than public subsidies, something you'd think a conservative would support. Along with people getting their own health insurance, the federal government should contribute to health-care costs for people on Medicare, Medicaid and in the VA system. The fact that Romney and his Democratic legislature could design a plan that doesn't require massive state government spending should be a point in its favor.

It's not popular! Over a year where wild attacks on health care-reform have been a constant refrain, the popularity of the plan dropped from 68 percent to 59 percent. Gosh, what a terrible plunge. 59 percent approval is something almost any politician or public policy would kill to have -- especially in the GOP. Some things that don't have 59 percent public approval: Sarah Palin, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Republicans in Congress, and, yes, Mitt Romney himself. Maybe he ought to take more credit for Mass Care ...

Wait times! The fact that it's harder to find a primary care physician in Massachusetts is influenced largely by the shortage of primary care doctors in the United States. But it's also a sign that health-care reform is working -- lots of new people are going to see the doctor, and it's no surprise that it will take time for the system to adapt. If Ponnuru wants to make the argument that we should ration health care by income, so that people who can't afford insurance won't have regular access to medical care, I look forward to it.

So, yes, I do think I'm disputing Ponnuru's points, and I think I'm right! That's not to say Mass Care is without it it's problems, but on the whole it's a success. And I stand by my original point: If Romney can't campaign on a cheap, bipartisan health-care overhaul, the GOP is going to have a very hard time indeed.

-- Tim Fernholz

Let's be clear: FOX News is a GOP opposition research dump more than it is a news organization. They reprint Republican press releases verbatim, they have no compunction about airing stories without having verified the information in them, they unabashedly promoted -- not covered -- the anti-Obama protests this year, and their coverage of the current president verges from mundane to absolutely deranged.

So why are reporters like Helen Thomas and Jake Tapper defending them?

I think the answer goes back to one of the most important disputes in the history of American free-speech law: the Whitney v. California case, which upheld the conviction of a Communist Party member accused of "advocating, teaching or aiding and abetting the commission of crime." In his concurring opinion, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote what is (ironically) probably the most famous legal defense of free speech in which he counsels that "the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and supposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones."

Brandeis actually had a far more restrictive view of free speech than we have today, but his point still stands: the best way to beat back lies in public discourse is with the truth. Using the force of government against the media is wrong and should make us uncomfortable even if it's just the bully pulpit. For some journalists, ignoring the administration's criticism of FOX means agreeing to be treated the same way next time one of them writes a story critical of the White House that gains traction. For them, there's a larger question of free speech -- and in journalism, such questions have often centered around less-than-reputable journalistic organizations.

Conservatives have marched out a number of outrageous straw men to argue against the White House's stance on FOX, accusing the White House of "censorship." That's not what's happening. The administration's behavior is not, as Tucker Carlson writes, the same as Ari Fleischer's threat that reporters should "watch what they say, watch what they do" -- this would be like comparing Joe Wilson's "You Lie" to the massive amount of death threats that are currently overwhelming the Secret Service. It is an attempt by the White House to delegitimize their domestic political enemies--and while we've certainly seen worse before, that doesn't mean people should unequivocally endorse what the White House is doing.

Yet the circumstances bring up another problem. If we believe that Brandeis is right, that the solution to "evil counsels is good ones," it stands to reason that it is the role of the press, not the government, to remedy FOX's propaganda. But because of years of conservative bellyaching over the "liberal" press, the media is reluctant to criticize FOX News, as though it were the only free expression available to an embattled minority. Indeed, some in the press have exaggerated the White House behavior, comparing it to that of Richard Nixon -- for some self-conscious reporters, the White House criticism of FOX is nothing more than an opportunity for a Sista Soulja moment where they can show conservatives just how much they care.

It won't matter. Conservatives have reaped incredible political dividends by attacking the press, even the very idea of a free press, and they won't stop merely because some reporters see that accepting this administration's demonization of FOX could lead to the demonization of real news organizations down the line. It is the media's job to ensure an accurate public discourse--no administration will watchdog itself. The problem is that, as it stands, much of the press is not fulfilling its role in fighting lies with truth. This is what Jacob Weisberg was advocating -- that real reporters stop legitimizing FOX. He was not endorsing censorship of any kind. He was encouraging the press to remedy bad counsels with good ones. That's not really happening.

-- A. Serwer

Ha'aretz's report that the governments of Israel and Iran have been conducting discussions on nuclear issues is encouraging enough, but this specific tidbit is astonishing (via Blake Hounshell):

During the meetings, [Israeli diplomat Meirav] Zafary-Odiz explained the Israeli policy of being willing, in principle, to discuss the Middle East as a nuclear-free zone. She also detailed Israel's unique strategic situation, saying regional security must be strengthened, security arrangements must be agreed upon and a peace agreement must be sealed before Israel would feel at liberty to discuss this topic.

Zafary-Odiz said Israel lived in a complex geopolitical reality, noting that in three decades, four countries in the region broke their commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria. She said Israel takes a responsible approach to the nuclear issue as a whole and that the far horizon of its vision did include the possibility of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, even if the chances for this were slim.

Of course, Zafary-Odiz and the Netanyahu administration more generally may be bluffing, but even so the fact that this is on the table is encouraging.

--Dylan Matthews

It's certainly a good idea to bring the executives directly benefiting from TARP under the stricter rules (it should have been part and parcel to the original program) even if doesn't go far enough. I'm less stressed about most of the other Treasury/Fed programs, since many of those were designed to support markets and not institutions. But while cutting banker pay is satisfying, what is far more important is realigning the payment incentives for Wall Street bankers. Feinberg is following along with the Fed's new rules, which are also going to be expanded in the regulatory reform legislation currently moving through Congress:

The portion of salary given in stock would vest immediately, although executives will have to wait two years before redeeming the shares. Even then, they will be able to cash in on only a third of that stock. The executives will be able to cash in another third after three years and the rest after four years. Because it is considered salary, executives get to keep the stock even if they leave their employers.

The final component of an employee's compensation under Feinberg's plan would come in the form of long-term stock. The awards would be based on performance and could be redeemed after three years, or sooner if the company repays its government aid, the source said.

Tying up the value of compensation with the success of the firm over three to four years is a good start toward aligning long-term incentives of bankers toward sustainable growth rather than risky cash-outs. Other measures that make banks slower and safer -- higher capital requirements and limits on leverage -- will also make banks less profitable going forward and also lower salaries. Ultimately, what Feinberg does this year is less important than ensuring the reforms are done right.

-- Tim Fernholz

Pew comes through with another essential insight about journalism and human nature. Basically, whether or not you believe in a "watchdog" role for the press depends on who's president, and who's team you happen to be on. Hopefully they won't mind if I borrow this chart:

I don't really think it should be all that comforting to liberals that they're more likely to believe in a watchdog press with a Democratic president than the reverse.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, torture advocate Dick Cheney emerged to accept an award from the Center for Security Policy, and gave a speech blasting the Obama administration for "dithering" on Afghanistan, saying, "Signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries."

Cheney said the Obama administration seems to be pulling back and blaming others for its own failure to implement the strategy it had embraced earlier in the year.

"The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger," the former vice president said. "It's time for President Obama to do what it takes to win a war he has repeatedly and rightly called a war of necessity."

The Obama administration raised troop levels in Afghanistan and increased drone strikes in the region (whether one agrees with those choices or not) -- to the extent that they haven't implemented a new strategy, they've been following the one the Bush administration put in place for the past eight years give or take. So Cheney is basically admitting that the Bush administration strategy was itself "dithering," which doesn't seem to be a strong point from which to launch criticism. Cheney claims the Bush administration conducted its own strategy review before they left office that had similar results, but that just seems to bolster my above point: The Bush administration implemented a strategy of "dithering" in Afghanistan for years, and now that he's out of office, Cheney wants to lecture the Obama administration on expediency.

Setting aside the fact that a domestic opponent accusing the president of being weak would have been the height of treason in the Bush years (remember the phrase "giving aid and comfort to the enemy"?) -- holding off until it's clear what the U.S. has to work with in terms of a local partner in Afghanistan is key to deciding on a strategy. Even most counterinsurgency advocates concede that COIN can't work without a legitimate government to defend.

-- A. Serwer

• John Kerry is rightfully receiving accolades for successfully getting Hamid Karzai to agree to a runoff election to address the clear irregularities in the recent Afghan elections. But at National Review, this diplomatic victory is an excuse to bash Richard Holbrooke and describe meaningful small-d democracy promotion as "bringing around Hamid Karzai to the Obama administration's point of view." Wasn't this the same magazine that believed the U.S. government should intervene in Iranian affairs during their disputed election in the name of democracy promotion?
• The fact that the Obama White House is aggressively going after critics of his administration is not going over well with conservatives and Republicans accustomed to mercilessly assaulting more passive opponents. Dana Perino thinks calling out Fox News is dictatorial behavior, although she herself is on the record going after MSNBC, among other networks. She also believes that Obama is "burning his bridges" with conservatives, as if there were any bridges in place to begin with. But strangest of all is the meme that Obama is "Nixonian" and is keeping an "enemies list." Only when I see evidence of Obama ordering the FBI to spy on his enemies and using the IRS to launch tax-audit vendettas will I have any reason to take this nonsense seriously.
• The conservative effort to whitewash the reputation of George W. Bush is quite the spectacle to behold. The latest riposte to the fact that Obama did in fact inherit problems that were initiated by or allowed to fester under Bush is that Obama is some sort of whiner who can't go two minutes without blaming everything on his predecessor's actions. A good example is an exceptionally dishonest editorial by NR chief cheerleader Rich Lowry, who paints Obama in this light without mentioning a single example of "Obama's perpetual campaign against Bush." Moreover, the editorial doesn't even mention the gravity of the problems Obama was handed on Jan. 20 -- nope, the important thing is that we recognize Obama's constant evocation of his "eternal foil," George W. Bush so we might all start to conveniently forget the utter disaster the Bush presidency was.
• I think Pat Buchanan's shockingly honest lament for white racial superiority has induced others to offer up candid summations of anachronistic world views. How else to explain a Goldman Sachs adviser's remarks that "we have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all" or an Oklahoma state representative's explanation that in the Sooner State "we have a very strong feeling that women aren’t capable of making reproductive decisions when it comes to terminating a pregnancy."
• Remainders: Be on guard when Senate "centrists" get together; Congress votes against further funding for an ineffectual Great Wall; this "Martin Eisenstadt" character is pure genius; and does progressive legislation have an aura of inevitability?

--Mori Dinauer

Despite the negotiation roadblocks, it is a subject worth pursuing: “It is clear that the idea of using nuclear weapons as an instrument of politics is very dear to the current Russian leadership,” according to a Russian Strategy Nuclear Forces blogger, upon reading an Isvestia interview with Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council, pointing out that Russians have been “considering a nuclear option in local wars.”

The view that START agreement discussions were in some way sacred -- at least in the sense that U.S. and Russian officials have unequivocally claimed that things were going forward -- may truly be a stumbling block in actually getting it done. Without a pragmatic and sensible approach to the agreements, there's a chance that important issues such as "operational readiness" may not end up on the START agenda. Behind the scenes, Russia is fighting hard on several aspects of the agreement, and it would have been better if the American officials had been more realistic about the prospects for reaching an agreement by December and had started trying to work things out with the Russian long ago. Maybe then they would not be facing a deadline that appears impossible to meet.

--Tara McKelvey

Robert Farley responds to my criticism of Pat Buchanan:

White America, as the construct exists in the mind of many Americans, is disappearing, even by some objective criteria; it's retreating deeper into exurban communities, and it's very, very slowly ceding political and financial power. Moreover, the idea of America is changing; Buchanan has a very definite vision of what America is, and is smart enough to understand that his vision is losing traction. In this context, it's hardly surprising that the response is a combination of rage and raw panic. That the ideological structure that supports White America is racist and has a disturbing narrative of American history is academically relevant, but it's also not the central point. Those who hold Buchanan's vision (and many do, although often not in terms as explicit as Pat is willing to put forth) really do find themselves under siege, and pointing out that these beliefs are both crazy and immoral has very limited effect.

And so I don't really begrudge Pat the platform to make this argument. Rather, I think that it helps to clarify the source and meaning of much of the rage on the right, especially coming as it does from a longterm advocate of movement conservatism. It's altogether more readable and interesting than most of what rolls down from the Weekly Standard or the National Review, in any case.

Farley puts this a lot more elegantly than I did, but these were some of the very reasons why I argued, and continue to believe, that Buchanan should not be fired from MSNBC.

-- A. Serwer

Following Gen. Doug Stone's presentation on de-radicalizing former insurgents at the New America Foundation's counterterrorism conference earlier today, National Security experts Kenneth Ballen and Gregory Johnsen sought to throw a little cold water on the idea that terrorists could be rehabilitated -- pointing to the fact that the rehab program developed by the Saudis hasn't been in existence long enough to be carefully evaluated and that the Yemeni terrorist rehabilitation program looks to be a failure.

The problem is that Stone wasn't talking about rehabilitating terrorists. He was talking about rehabilitating former insurgents. While the former is motivated by ideology, the latter might be motivated to fight by a whole host of reasons -- hardcore, career terrorists are a relatively small group. Ballen and Johnsen may be right about the ideologically committed few being beyond rehabilitation, I have no idea. But that description can't be applied to most of the insurgents fighting in Afghanistan, if recent reporting is to be believed. A recent Boston Globe story described the current Taliban as mostly "vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes."

“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’

-- Tim Fernholz

Stephen Franklin on the illegal treatment of day laborers:

Another dead day on the street corner and Gonzalo Mejia is wondering how he will get by. He's been finding work just one or two days a week lately. Worse yet, a contractor recently stiffed him out of $400 worth of pay.

"All the time there is less work," grumbles Mejia, a short, muscular man in his mid-50s. His pals nod in agreement as they wait like hawks, ready to swoop down on the next contractor who pulls up. But it's well past 9 A.M., only three cars have trolled by in search of workers, and hardly anyone has budged off the street.

KEEP READING ...

I'm fresh back from the counterterrorism conference being hosted by the New America Foundation today, and I can tell you unequivocally that the most compelling lecture I heard there was the one given by Marine Gen. Doug Stone, who headed the detention, deradicalization, and reintegration effort in Iraq, to what appears to be great success.

Stone's basic argument was this: The fight against terrorism is as much an ideological "debate" as a physical battle, and it's a battle that is increasingly taking place in spaces of detention--Bagram, Pol-e-Charki, Guantanamo Bay. Stone says the goal should be to "empower moderates and isolate extremists" so the United States' detention policy--it's humaneness or lack thereof, its adherence to the rule of law--is essential, as is engaging the assistance of local religious leaders in offering an alternative ideology.

"I took an oath to defend and support the Constitution of the United States ... what is the Constitution?" Stone asked. "It is a rule of law [document], it is, with the Declaration [of Independence], perhaps the most profound human-rights statement in the history of civilization that we know. ... The debate we're engaged in is about the rule of law and human rights."

The conditions in Afghan prisons have long been the focus of human-rights groups -- but recently Gen. Stanley McChrystal cited them as a key factor in the growth of Islamic radicalism. Among his recommendations for reforming the system in Afghanistan, Stone suggested streamlining the process so that detainees are dealt with in a timely manner, and giving them meaningful opportunities to challenge their detention -- not necessarily in U.S. courts, however. I'll get more into his specific recommendations later, when I'm done transcribing the entire speech.

But I was struck by how forcefully Stone emphasized respect for human rights as an essential part of fighting terrorism, as well as the reality that many of the people detained aren't necessarily terrorists -- the exact opposite of the Bush claim that everyone they captured was necessarily among "the worst of the worst."

"An individual in an orange jumpsuit in detention, may be an enemy, or may not be an enemy," Stone said. "Just because they're in a jumpsuit, doesn't mean anything."

-- A. Serwer

Reason just published an incredibly revealing discussion on the question of whether libertarians should oppose interference from cultural actors -- such as religion or the patriarchy -- as well as from government. Kerry Howley persuasively argues those who oppose coercion from the state have an obligation to oppose coercion from oppressive non-state actors like, say, fundamentalist religious sects. Todd Seavey disagrees:

Most libertarians would say that once the side constraint of property rights adherence is established, people have a right to engage in whatever social patterns they wish to follow so long as the property side constraints are not themselves undermined. Howley mentions “fundamentalist compounds” dismissively, but isn’t the whole point of liberty that people are free to construct fundamentalist compounds, sexist strip clubs, respectable female-run corporations, gender-indifferent science labs, or all-male hunting lodges as they choose, so long as they do so voluntarily?

If not, we can be forgiven for wondering why someone who thinks like Howley would embrace the basic political stance of libertarianism in the strict property-defending sense at all. If people telling you “fat chicks should be shunned” is as oppressive as being hauled off to jail, why not pass laws banning anti-fat-chick discrimination? Why not endorse affirmative action laws? Why not tell Catholic-run charities they must hire gays? The traditional libertarian answer is that rights violations are fundamentally different from behavior that merely strikes you as narrow-minded.

Seavey's argument does make sense, however, if one views libertarianism not as an ideology devoted to personal liberty but to defending existing power structure. Banning obesity discrimination would not decrease individual liberty, but it would decrease the power of business management. Countering patriarchal attitudes more generally would be a great gain for individual freedom of action, but it would endanger the power of the patriarchy.

Why anyone would want to embrace a libertarianism having nothing to do with defending liberty in any real sense, however, I have no idea.

--Dylan Matthews

... except the last two paragraphs, where Smith becomes too pessimistic, in my view, and basically throws up her hands. I'm more confident about the reforms coming through Congress -- particularly the resolution authority for large, non-bank financial institutions (in theory, it will put an end to bailout culture by allowing the government to liquidate firms in such a way that they don't damage the broader economy). Further, the incentives for banks to become smaller -- like limits on federal preemption and the all-important capital and leverage limits -- will begin to rein in the banks. All of this depends on who the regulators are; one thing that structural reform can never solve is ensuring that the people in those institutions have the right knowledge and attitude to use their new tools. In the next print issue of TAP, I have a piece making just this case.

-- Tim Fernholz

Tim Fernholz on the health-insurance excise tax:

Though hopes for bipartisan cooperation on health-care reform were dashed months ago, there is at least one part of the program that unites labor, Republicans, and Democrats: They all hate the health-insurance excise tax.

"Does the Senate really expect the House to tax the middle class?" asks Rep. Joe Courtney of Connecticut, an opponent of the provision. Courtney recently sent a letter opposing the tax, the key funding mechanism in the Senate Finance Committee's version of the health-reform bill, to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was joined by 180 of his colleagues -- most of the Democratic caucus, including many senior members. "It is potentially more problematic than the public option."

KEEP READING ...

Over the past few years, there have been a number of stories about how relaxed military recruitment standards have resulted in members of white supremacist groups infiltrating the armed forces. The Defense Authorization Act moving through Congress contains a provision that "bars enlistment of anyone who has been an active participant in an extremist group."

At National Review, this is a bad thing. Mark Krikorian derides the provision as a "litmus test":

Obviously, the military already excludes dangerous radicals of various sorts through regulation, and should continue to do so, but the point of the bill is to remove discretion by cementing it in legislation and also to delegitimize non-preferred political views (like the DHS report on us dangerous extremists).

So a provision that is meant to stem the rather embarrassing flow of right-wing extremists into the armed forces bother Krikorian because ... he imagines himself to be one of them. Likewise, Krikorian's colleague at National Review, Anthony Dick concurs, speculating that the provision is a violation of the First Amendment:

Even if open bigotry is disruptive within the military ranks, it's doubtful that this concern would apply so broadly — to former members of borderline discriminatory groups, for example. So the ban is probably too sweeping.

-- A. Serwer

A few weeks ago I mentioned the growing support for some kind jobs tax credit, and now it looks like the Economic Policy Institute has come up with a template for the actual policy -- two, in fact.

The proposal promises to create 2.8 million jobs in 2010 with a 15 percent refund of the wages of new workers, and 2.3 million in 2011 with a 10 percent refund of the wages of new workers before the credit is phased out. It will also, EPI says, give a temporary advantage to entrepeneurs looking to get a new business off the ground during the recession. This seems like smart policy, but the key is making sure it is temporary so that the government doesn't end up subsidizing workers for years.

However, considering the amount of money the government has spent subsidizing various markets, from housing to student loans to securities trading, it's time for the government to subsidize the labor market as well. It'll cost $27 billion over those two years -- not much in bailout world -- "but half of these costs would likely be recouped in lower spending on unemployment insurance, Medicaid spending, and other safety net programs." That would be nice.

-- Tim Fernholz

Big news out of Vienna this morning, as International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei announced that the US, Russia, and France had reached a limited deal with Iran to curb its nuclear programs. Here are what details we know at the moment:

If approved, the deal would commit Iran to temporarily exporting 75 percent of its known stockpile of low-grade nuclear fuel to Russia, or about 2,600 pounds of low-enriched uranium, for additional enrichment. Negotiators say that would prevent the possibility that Iran could turn the fuel into weapons-grade material anytime soon.
…
But the key to the agreement reached in the talks, if it works, would be in the timing of the shipments — a detail officials were not discussing in Vienna in the hours after the announcement. If Iran actually sends the low-enriched uranium to Russia in a single shipment, as the draft document states, it would have too little fuel on hand to build a nuclear weapon for roughly a year, according to the agency’s experts. If the fuel leaves Iran in batches, the experts warn, Iran would have the ability to replace it almost as quickly as it leaves the country.

That said, I worry about the specifics of financing here. I would prefer to have Russia or France pay the bulk of the expenses -- not because I don't think the project is worthy of American budget dollars but because I fear Iran would reject them. One of the main reasons the Agreed Framework collapsed in 2002 was because the Republican Congress refused to adequately fund the construction of nuclear reactors in North Korea, a key American obligation under the agreement. If a combination of conservatives and hawkish liberals in Congress is able to block or limit funding for the fuel transfer in Iran, it would seriously undermine the administration's ability to negotiate a broader deal. After all, what incentive would Iran have to make a deal when America politically cannot hold up its end of the bargain?

In any case, the details of the deal should be available soon enough. Hopefully the administration had enough foresight to limit Congress' ability to obstruct it.

--Dylan Matthews

While the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings ended in PATRIOT Act reauthorization proposal that provoked Russ Feingold to dub it the "prosecutors committee," House Democrats John Conyers, Jerry Nadler, and Bobby Scott have proposed a bill that contains most of the reforms Feingold proposed in the JUSTICE Act -- absent his proposed changes to FISA. (For a good summary of what was in the JUSTICE Act, read Julian Sanchez' piece from a couple of weeks ago.) Marcy Wheeler has a good explanation of what's in yesterday's bill here. The House Dems have proposed the FISA reforms in a separate bill, which makes them less likely to get through.

Separately, the Homeland Security Appropriations bill is just about ready for President Obama's signature, and it contains two wins for the White House: The Joe Lieberman engineered FISA amendment that allows the Secretary of Defense to exempt photographs of detainee abuse taken between 2001 and 2009, preempting the ongoing FOIA lawsuit over the photos the ACLU is pursuing, and a provision that allows Guantanamo Bay detainees to be brought to the United States, but only for trial.

Michael Maceod-Ball, chief legislative and policy counsel for the ACLU's Washington office, said the Guantanamo provision "recognizes the legitimacy and the value of using the criminal justice system to try these guys. It’s the only place to make sure their convictions stand the test of time and will be viewed as legitimate in the eyes of the rest of the world.” He added that the provision, because it still does not allow Guantanamo Bay detainees to be settled inside the United States still “places a big hurdle in front of the administration in terms of closing Guantanamo.”

-- A. Serwer

• Perusing the numbers in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, Greg Sargent notices that Democrats are favored over Republicans by 51 to 39 percent -- nearly the same deficit that preceded the 2006 and 2008 elections. And while Democrats and President Obama have taken hits in their approval ratings, congressional Republicans only manage to earn a 19 percent approval rating, continuing a trend of being unable to translate anti-incumbent sentiment into gains for their party.
• In another sign that the 2010 elections are unlikely to mark the beginning of a Republican comeback, September's fundraising numbers for the RNC and DNC show a good degree of parity. The RNC raised $8.7 million in September and $22.9 million in the 3rd quarter while the DNC raised about $8 million in September and $24.2 million for the quarter. Both parties would be wise to invest that money in GOTV drives to gain the edge.
  
• The headline item in the aforementioned WaPo/ABC poll is that 57 percent of Americans support a public option in a health care reform bill and 51 percent prefer it over getting a "bipartisan" bill. Results like this explain why some on Capitol Hill are practically begging the White House to take the lead and come out strongly in favor of the the public option. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi would prefer to let the CBO score speak for itself.
• Speaking of health-care reform, Jonathan Chait use the latest conservative attack on Obama's fiscal policies -- that he's honest about ugly budget numbers -- to point out the hypocrisy of the GOP's commitment to "fiscal responsibility:" "George W. Bush and the Republicans created a new health care entitlement in 2003 that was completely unfinanced. Not a dime was paid for. The Democrats have decided to completely finance every cent of health care reform, and they're taking a hundred times more flack for fiscal irresponsibility than the Republicans ever did."
• Remainders: It might shock you to learn that Glenn Beck does not understand what net neutrality means; few jokes are as timeless as hunting liberals; and Senator Tom Coburn, friend of the LGBT community.

--Mori Dinauer

This week's TTR wonders if curriculum reform is the best way to fix our education problem, looks at how the modern workplace works for women, examines the latest thinking on the future of Afghanistan, and considers how to put science to work promoting human rights.

• We don't need education reform, we need curriculum reform. A new Brookings report shows that effective curricula in math, reading comprehension, and dropout prevention lead to greater improvements in those areas than going to a charter school, reconstituting the teacher workforce, and attending early childhood education programs. Furthermore, curriculum reform is likely to cost less than the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Obama administration has earmarked for other education initiatives that show variable success. Rather than have “governance people” in the administration take over the education agenda, the author proposes to prioritize the evaluation of curriculum effectiveness among teachers and local agencies. -- LL
• Workplace Must Adapt to Modern Women and Families. The Center for American Progress has released a large report on the status of working women and their families. “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” discusses the ways that society has changed now that women represent half of the workforce. It urges both individuals and government to adapt to these realities. The report is intended as a launching point for a campaign for more family-friendly policies such as paid family leave and maternity leave. -- PL
• Three ways to say "Afghanistan." [PDF] Counter-insurgency expert Andrew Exum has written an Afghanistan policy brief for the Center for a New American Security that outlines three rather dismal scenarios for U.S. policy in that conflict. The potential outcomes range from the least likely, a Taliban regime taking over the country, to the most likely, an on-going proxy war against the Taliban, to Exum's best-case scenario, which is for the U.S. to expend the resources needed to build a functioning Afghan state. "Ultimately," Exum concludes, "the president must select the option he considers least undesirable." Great. -- TF
• New Tools, Old Traumas. A report from the Center For American Progress encourages the U.S. government to use modern technology to combat human rights abuses. Authors Sarah Dreier and William F. Schulz acknowledge that, while the nation has made significant advances in addressing economic, social and political concerns via technology -- for example, electronic data analysis and using the Internet as an advocacy platform – there is still more to be done. The report suggests increasing government funding to subsidize satellite imagery, forensic efforts and wide-spread communication outlets – crucial elements in bridging the “digital divide.” -- MH

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups::
10/13/09
10/6/09

Dean Boyd at the National Security Division of the Department of Justice sent over the government's position on the impending Uighur case the Supreme Court decided to accept this morning, which could determine whether or not courts have the authority to order Gitmo detainees who have been cleared released into the United States.

Basically the government's position is this:

This Administration remains as committed to closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, which has served as a prime recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and strained our alliances overseas, as it was on the day the President signed the Executive Order. Much progress has been made to date.

The interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force has completed its initial review of all the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and has approved a significant number for transfer to foreign nations. Thus far, the Administration has successfully transferred 19 detainees abroad, some of whom had been ordered released by the courts years ago. Our friends and allies have accepted or agreed to accept many other detainees who cannot be sent home due to humane treatment concerns, and are seriously considering taking more.

Furthermore, the Task Force has recommended to the Justice Department a number of detainees for potential prosecution in either federal court or reformed military commissions. In the coming weeks, the Attorney General, in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, will determine the appropriate forum for prosecuting those detainees. By Nov. 16, the Administration will announce a first wave of decisions about whether certain detainees will be prosecuted in federal courts or in the reformed military commissions system. We are on track to meet that goal ahead of the deadline.

The perspective of the folks representing the detainees is that once a court determines that the government has no right to detain a particular individual, they should be let go. In practice they say, the entire process has slowed down because the courts know that the only thing they can do is recommend that the government initiate the diplomatic process for facilitating a detainee's release.

As a result, despite the fact that 30 out of 38 habeas petitions have been granted to Gitmo detainees, no more than 13 have been released. In other words, the administration and the task force ultimately decide when and where detainees are released--which from the perspective of civil libertarians, means the habeas proceedings are almost meaningless. But if the SCOTUS decides in the detainees' favor, it would mean giving the courts the authority to order the detainees' release into the United States if they can't be sent home (because of persecution, for example) or quick arrangements aren't made to resettle them elsewhere.

Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantanamo Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the Uighurs, explained that “it really has implications for everybody, whether Boumediene is just an empty shell. ... It’s not just about these 14 people who can’t be sent home and have no place to go."

-- A. Serwer

Michelle Goldberg asks why the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham isn't provoking more outrage:

It's lucky for Texas governor Rick Perry that he's not suspected of doing something truly shocking, like having an affair. Instead, it merely seems that he's helped cover up a homicide. Apparently that's not enough to make much of a national splash.

Last month, the New Yorker published a remarkable piece by David Grann about the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for a crime that all the evidence suggests he didn't commit. In 1991, Willingham's house caught on fire, burning his three daughters to death. Ill-trained investigators accused Willingham of arson. At his trial, a family therapist who had never met Willingham was called as an expert witness, and suggested that Willingham's heavy metal posters indicated that he might be a Satanist.

KEEP READING ...

Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, is highly disappointed that his organization would apply the same standards to Israel that it does to every other nation. Scott Lemieux has ably picked apart his curious claim that any nation acting in self-defense gets to play by some looser set of moral standards. His relativism about democratic regimes, however, I find particularly galling:

[Human Rights Watch] sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Bernstein should know that when he uses this logic to attack HRW for criticizing Israel, he's also attacking large swathes of the work the organization does in countless other parts of the world. Is the United States branch illegitimate for trying to secure the rights of military detainees? After all, the US is an open society, and the detainees are at least according to the government fighting in defense of a closed one. Does Bernstein support shutting down the LGBT division of HRW for criticizing democracies like Jamaica and Lithuania alongside dictatorships?

The only reason HRW has any legitimacy is because it refuses to allow the rhetoric of the administrations it criticizes -- including the rhetoric of democracy and self-defense -- to prevent it from calling out real abuses on the ground. The HRW of Bernstein's dreams would almost certainly be seen as a Western institution devoted to defending Western governments by both the governments and opposition movements of criticized nations. It would neither be a trusted documenter of abuses nor an effective pressure group, two roles at which it has been tremendously effective to date.

HRW can be a tool for lashing out at governments that Bernstein doesn't like, or it can be an effective and dispassionate research group. It cannot be both.

--Dylan Matthews

Pat Buchanan knows who America really belongs to. After a litany of what he sees as white working class grievances in his latest column, Buchanan concludes: (via TPM)

America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

There's been a lot of attention paid to that Democracy Corps report saying that the insane paranoia on the far right about President Obama has nothing to do with race, that it's not about the anxiety and social turmoil in reaction to the deterioration of America's traditional racial caste system. But as long as people like Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan are making the explicit case that white Americans lose something precious with the election of a black president, I think that conclusion is not entirely credible. It's one thing to say opposition to Obama is not primarily motivated by race. It's another to say it has nothing to do with it. Clearly, for some people, it's a huge factor how they express their opposition -- even if they'd be opposing a Democratic president anyway.

Plus, even Mika Brzezinski of the "liberal" MSNBC thinks Buchanan "says what we are all thinking.” Someone should really ask her about that.

I'd love to just leave this post with snark, but I have to say one last thing. Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.

Good riddance.

-- A. Serwer

Over the weekend, Rahm Emanuel emphasized that the ultimate strategic decision on Afghanistan would be contingent on whether or not the U.S. had a "credible Afghan partner." Yesterday, Hamid Karzai agreed to a second round of elections against opponent Abdullah Abdullah, despite rumors of a potential powersharing agreement.

I spoke briefly to Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, who was in Afghanistan during the first round of voting, which was marred by massive fraud. While cautioning that there's no way to handle the logistical problems that led to the previous outcome before November 7th date, pushing for a vote rather than a power-sharing agreement has the best chance of producing a government the Afghan people can see as legitimate.

"This option, in addition to having the possibility of fraud, also has the possibility of being a fairly clean election," says Katulis. "Elections, if they’re conducted well, and if the voters who participate in them see them as reflecting their views, have more legitimacy than any deal that might be struck in the backrooms of Kabul."

Basically, the runoff could turn out to be a logistical nightmare, with all the problems that the first one had. But it could also potentially end with at least a fairly credible Afghan government, and the Obama administration clearly thinks that's an outcome worth rolling the dice for.

-- A. Serwer

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case of several Chinese Uighurs still being held at Guantanamo Bay prison despite the fact that they were determined not to be enemy combatants. The Uighurs, members of an embattled Chinese Muslim ethnic minority, have not been released to China because of fear that they might be abused -- but a DC circuit court decision last February also determined that U.S. courts had no authority to order their release into the United States. The Supreme Court will be reconsidering the lower court's decision, which civil libertarians contend unfairly curtails the habeas rights of detainees.

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer for the ACLU's National Security Project, which filed an amicus brief in favor of the SCOTUS hearing the case, praised the court's decision. “If a court rules that a detention is illegal but cannot issue a remedy by directing a detainees release," Hafetz says, "then habeas is essentially a dead letter, and the courts are powerless to correct lawless executive action.” He added that the lower court's decision was a "direct assault" on the Supreme Court's decision in the Bourmediene v. Bush case that granted habeas rights to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Part of the administration's apprehension about releasing the Uighurs into the United States is that Republicans, including Newt Gingrich, sought to portray them as dangerous terrorists who were a security risk. In an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, Gingrich called them "trained mass killers instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001." Gingrich also linked the Uighurs to the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, an Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist group the detained Uighurs said they've never heard of.

The Uighurs seemed puzzled -- at the time they responded through a translator, asking, "Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things?"

Earlier this year, the U.S. transferred four Uighurs to Bermuda, and arranged for the transfer of several others to Palau.

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman on the insurance industry's self-defeating campaign against the public option:

For months, the insurance industry was remarkably quiet. Despite fears that it would publicly fight reform with a scorched-earth campaign of television ads like it did in 1993, until now it's been subdued. It was part of a carefully planned inside-outside strategy: On the outside, the industry constantly stressed its support of reform, while noting that it objected to some of reform's potential components, like the public option. On the inside, it was furiously lobbying to make sure the bill would maximize its profits and minimize its costs.

Outside the halls of Congress -- and even inside those halls -- few took notice. Until last week, when the industry's lobbying group, America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) released a study it had commissioned attacking the bill about to be passed by the Senate Finance Committee. They claimed the bill would increase costs, resulting in skyrocketing premiums for consumers. The report was quickly eviscerated for its methodological howlers, including the fact that it pretended that the subsidies the bill grants to low- and middle-income Americans didn't exist.

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Amanda Hess looks at the marriage numbers for Washington DC:

According to a recent Pew Research study, the District of Columbia has the lowest marriage rate in the country. Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide.

Coincidentally, Hess points out, DC also has among the largest percentages of same-sex couples in the country relative to its population. Which means that legalizing same-sex marriage in the District would lead to a rise in the city's extremely low marriage rate, something that conservatives would applaud, if they weren't trying so hard to stop it from happening. 

Conservatives have argued for years for marriage as a catch-all solution to poverty, but in a city where the percentage of people living below poverty is four points higher than the national average, they're doing the best they can to keep same-sex couples from getting married. Discriminating against gay people is more important than fighting poverty, I guess.

-- A. Serwer

Thank goodness Grassley is not on the relevant committee. This is someone who can say that "The Fed's got a full-time job on monetary policy," so it shouldn't be a systemic risk regulator, and then say that there is no need for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, since the existing institutions can handle the problem. That's hard to understand, since right now the Fed is the existing institution regulating consumer financial products. Why don't consumers deserve someone whose full-time job is protecting their interests?

And yes, Grassley is worried that regulation would stifle innovation:

"I believe that, in the dynamics of our economy, that it would be just practically impossible to set up an entirely risk-free system without total government regulation," he said.

Sure, but who is trying to set up a risk-free system? All that Financial Regulation Reform is setting out to do is make sure that the right people -- in the private sector -- bear reasonable risk, not taxpayers. Throughout his remarks, Grassley repeatedly defends the status quo and does not mention a single thing he'd change. That's all very conservative, but it's not going to stop the next financial crisis. I never thought I'd say this, but, please, Chuck, stick to health care!

-- Tim Fernholz

• It might not be as amusing as a practical joke, but according to Politico, the Obama administration is planning to deal with the Chamber of Commerce with the time-honored tactic of cutting out the middleman. This shows a White House that is very flexible with how it neutralizes opposition. The CoC approach obviously would not have worked on, say Fox News. Nor would it work against right-wing lobbying groups like the NRA.
• What's annoying about conservatives and libertarians who blithely dismiss the existence of an extremist right-wing fringe is that they're deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary. When the Secret Service suddenly starts investigating an "unprecedented" number of threats against the president, perhaps one ought to take seriously the effect the current political climate has on those who have given up on the political system.
• David Frum suggests that conservative entertainers whose private and public beliefs once clashed synchronized them out of convenience and predicts which of them would play for the other team if the incentives were good enough. I'm skeptical. Some of the people he name-checks probably started out as opportunists, but there had to be a kernel of belief that motivated them to become conservative rather than liberal entertainers in the first place. And now they've moved beyond opportunism into full-fledged conservative brands. To accommodate the switch they would have to engineer a full-fledged public political conversion that, frankly, would be impossible to believe.
• Weekend Remainders: Michael Steele has his finger on the pulse of America; Kevin Drum expects a highly consequential tenure for Hillary Clinton as secretary of State; eliminating the payroll "tax" is a really bad idea; the 2010 Republican wave will presumably be funded with monopoly money; National Review continues its slide into an unfunny conservative version of the Harvard Lampoon with its latest cover; and Ayn Rand is so awesome that she'll posthumously eliminate India's caste system.

--Mori Dinauer

Last week saw the preposterous spectacle of members of Congress calling for an investigation of the allegedly seditious activities of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Republicans Sue Myrick, John Shadegg, Paul Broun, and Trent Franks, who accused CAIR of planting interns to work as spies on Capitol Hill, based their charges on the book Muslim Mafia. The book was published by WND Books, the publishing arm of World Net Daily, which solidified its reputation for McCarthy-esque tinfoil hat "journalism" long before Glenn Beck's tears were even a twinkle in Roger Ailes' eye.

Now the Clarion Fund, producer of the film The Third Jihad -- which also peddles the alleged Holy Land and Muslim Brotherhood connections -- is calling for an investigation, too. The Third Jihad charges that Muslim groups like CAIR intend to supplant the Constitution with sharia law, and have links to jihadists.

CAIR and numerous other Muslim organizations were identified as unindicted co-conspirators in a case the United States brought against the Holy Land Foundation, which earlier this year was found guilty of illegally financing Hamas. In 2008, the government introduced a document as an exhibit to a brief -- contrary to Department of Justice policy -- publicly identifying these alleged "unindicted co-conspirators." The policy is not to publicly identify unindicted co-conspirators because it contravenes constitutional protections guaranteeing the accused the right to defend itself in court.

The Clarion Fund, which has ties to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish group Aish Hatorah, promotes its films to neoconservative and Christian-right audiences, who no doubt hear a familiar ring to the charges of Myrick et al. But despite its efforts to make these charges seem like a "moderate" view, they are far outside the mainstream. When I wrote about the Clarion Fund and its films last year, Paul Barrett, an editor at Business Week and author of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, told me, "Saying that organizations like CAIR and ISNA aim to institute Islamic religious law in the United States is similar to saying that Jewish or Catholic religious organizations aim to institute rabbinic or church law in the U.S. The notion that they are threat to the republic, a fifth column, is both laughable and very pernicious.”

--Sarah Posner

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann have a new report out on drone strikes in Pakistan, coming to the conclusion that about a third of the deaths caused by drone strikes are civilians. Spencer Ackerman suggests the estimate may be low.

In the report, Bergen and Tiedemann note that Pakistanis have a very low opinion of the drone strikes, 9 percent according to the Gallup poll they cite. At the same time, both a recent Pew poll from August and a poll that was released earlier this month show Pakistanis growing more concerned about religious extremists and more unfavorable toward al-Qaeda and the Taliban even as the administration was upping the use of drone strikes--and even as frustration with the United States was growing. 

So they're certainly controversial, and they appear to have caused the loss of a great deal of civilian life. But for some reason, they're not earning AQ or the Taliban any sympathy. 

UPDATE: I feel the need to emphasize that this isn't an endorsement of drone strikes--merely an observation that while they certainly make Pakistanis dislike us, AQ and the Taliban don't seem to be benefiting from that.

-- A. Serwer

The first [obstacle] is the health-care plan he signed as governor of Massachusetts. Republican opinion has hardened against that plan, which can reasonably be described as the national Democrats’ plan minus the public option. Potential rivals for the 2012 nomination such as Pawlenty and Huckabee have taken shots at the plan.

Romney makes three arguments in his defense. The first is that a Democratic legislature and his Democratic successor made the plan worse than his original conception. The second is that he has no intention of pushing the Massachusetts plan on the entire country. Health-care reform, he tells me, “should occur on a state-by-state basis.” The third is that the plan has worked out well for his state. “The plan is well within budget and has accomplished its objectives at a relatively modest cost.”

It’s that third point that could get Romney into trouble. The cost to the state government has indeed been modest. But the plan was designed so that the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates, with the federal government and the private sector absorbing the rest. Premiums are growing much faster than in the rest of the nation. Waiting times are up, too, which imposes costs on people. The plan is losing popularity in Massachusetts. Ideally, Romney would learn from this experience that a reform centered on state governments’ manipulation of federal dollars is a mistake. At the very least, Romney would be foolish to keep defending the plan.

But Ponnuru's critiques are pretty nebulous on closer inspection. For one, Massachusetts is set to do some pretty revolutionary cost-curve-bending that wouldn't have been possible without the framework that universal coverage efforts put in place, and the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation says the plan isn't bankrupting the state. Secondly, the plan isn't losing much popularity in Massachusetts: Last month, 58 percent of residents who had heard of the plan said they supported it. That's pretty popular, although only 35 percent of Republicans support the plan, and that gets to the heart of the GOP conundrum: Massachusetts Health Care Reform isn't a problem for Romney because it's bad policy; it's a problem because it's good policy.

Right now, any kind of serious policy proposal simply won't pass muster among the Republican base, but I remember when the fact that Howard Dean had balanced the budget in Vermont was a selling point for him in the 2003 Democratic primary, not a liability. A governor who has actually enacted a successful state-level health-care reform ought to be promoting it, not hiding from it -- especially when the Mass Reform, like the federal-level plan in Congress now, is a compromise between public and private programs that resulted in more people joining employer-based insurance plans and fewer taking public subsidies. Neither Huckabee nor Palin have a success that begins to compare with Romney's reform. He could be the Bill Clinton of the Republican Party, but Romney can't talk about his biggest achievement as governor!

When Romney isn't acting ashamed of enacting a bipartisan health care reform plan that succeeded, came in under budget, and remains broadly popular years after it was enacted, well, that's when you can take the GOP seriously again.

-- Tim Fernholz

Blaming HIV rates on black men who were "on the down low" always struck some folks I know as a way to maintain the perception of HIV as a "gay disease," and therefore a pretext for scapegoating the LGBT community for rising HIV/AIDS rates in the black community. This recent comment from Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention, seems to vindicate that theory (from Alvin McEwen at Pam's House Blend):

“We know that a lot of the infections are actually coming from male partners who have high-risk behavior,” Fenton said in an interview in his Atlanta office. “In fact, we have looked to see what proportion of infections is coming from male partners who are bisexual and found there are actually relatively few. More are male partners who are having female partners and are injecting drugs or using drugs or have some other risks that may put those female partners at risk of acquiring HIV.”

That's not to say that HIV and AIDS aren't ravaging the black community, just to say that the HIV rate among African Americans isn't the result of men who are hiding their sexual orientation from their partners.

It's peripherally related, but you really should be reading the Washington Post's series on how the AIDS crisis in Washington, D.C., was completely mismanaged--and how millions were squandered on disreputable nonprofits that took the money and then did nothing. It's both an example of how one can't simply throw money at a problem--and how sometimes doing so is less an indication that governments recognize the urgency of an issue than that they aren't that interested in dealing with it.

-- A. Serwer

Peter Dreier on how city governments can encourage sustainable growth:

Lately, more and more city governments, prodded by local activists, have been using their gatekeeper powers to successfully promote growth with equity, starting with wages. The movement began in the early 1990s in Baltimore, where a community-labor coalition called BUILD mobilized a successful grass-roots campaign to pass the nation's first "living wage" law in 1994, requiring companies with municipal contracts and subsidies to pay employees decently. Since then, more than 100 cities have followed suit. The living-wage movement's success has led to other local government tools to induce private companies to create middle-class jobs and upgrade low-wage work.

This approach calls for greater community participation, transparent standards, a clearer understanding of how businesses make investment and location choices, and public benefits proportional to public subsidies for developers. It means redefining a "healthy business climate" to mean prosperity shared by working people -- a more enlightened view of business' responsibility to the broader community.

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I would recommend reading Glenn Greenwald's take on the new drug enforcement guidelines for dealing with medical marijuana users and suppliers. This isn't the only place where sanity is beginning to creep into federal drug policy. While Rep. Bobby Scott's Fairness In Cocaine Sentencing Act, which would eliminate the powder/crack cocaine disparity is awaiting a vote in the House, Sen. Dick Durbin -- along with Arlen Specter and Patrick Leahy -- introduced a similar bill in the Senate last Thursday.

The Obama administration has expressed vocal support for eliminating the disparity, which disproportionately affects African Americans because they are more likely to be caught with crack rather than powder cocaine. Possession of crack currently carries a much harsher sentence, although the Supreme Court decided two years ago to give judges greater discretion in sentencing. Currently, possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum -- it takes possession of a hundred times that much to trigger the same sentence with powder cocaine. The harsher laws were originally passed because of the widespread false belief that crack cocaine was more "dangerous" than powder cocaine.

This is only a small step in dealing with mass incarceration -- which will require smarter enforcement strategies in lieu of harsher punishment. But it's an important step.

-- A. Serwer

David Moberg on how outsourcing is denying those employed by the federal government a living wage:

Most of the nation's 420,000 school cafeteria workers are directly employed by school districts, but a growing number -- approximately 50,000 -- work for private companies, often giant global "multiservice companies" like Aramark, Compass, or Sodexho, that contract to deliver food services. Driven by fiscal pressures, school boards in states like New Jersey, with the nation's second-highest contracting-out rate, have turned to these contractors to save money.

But a study from the Rutgers University Center for Women and Work concluded that "the majority of cost savings derive from the significant cuts in wages and benefits for food service workers who previously were employed by the school district -- as much as $4.00 to $6.00 an hour" plus elimination of health insurance.

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