KroydBlog

What Digby Said: CU

2012-01-27T14:47:00.000-05:00

Last night, Digby pre-empted the mistake atrios makes here when he links to BooMan blaming Citizens United for the SuperPAC attack ad mess that the GOP primary has become. She points out that the money in this case is coming from individuals, not corporations, and so Citizens United played no role. Rather, something else has happened. For some reason, cultural perhaps, or perhaps just the rankness of the corruption in our political system, the money boys are not as reticent as they used to be. They don't care, anymore, if you know who they are.

Corruption

2012-01-20T08:31:00.002-05:00

Redolent.

Rank.

Foul.

Elected Democrats no longer see themselves as representing their constituents. They see themselves as representing their donors. In the teeth of huge, well-organized grass roots opposition--hell, universal opposition, Democrats come down on the side of the MPAA and the RIAA. They'll try to find some other way to take away our internet, trying to put the toothpaste of an open network back into the tube.

This is not even a question of stupid or evil. It's stupid and evil.

MOULITSAS: It has been a shameful day. Now let me add that Ron Wyden, who was just on, if it wasn't for him, this thing may have passed already. He was the first person in Congress to stand up against this and fight the way he has. He is the reason this is still being debated. That said, you have a bipartisan group of people who supported it. Today, Republican after Republican has backed out and abandoned support for SOPA and PIPA.

Democrats haven't. They cling to this fiction that this thing can be fixed, and not only is it incredibly stupid, it's incredibly tone-deaf. You are basically ceding a generation of Web-savvy, Web-immersed people who are obsessed with protecting what they see as their very birthright. And they are watching Republicans come out and see the light on this issue, while Democrats continue to cling to the Hollywood studios. It is unfathomable.

I'm embarrassed to be a Democrat, I'm ashamed and I'm angry. You couldn't even begin to believe — because I believe that this legislation is an existential threat to the social Web — that's Daily Kos, that's Reddit, that's Facebook — that's anybody, any time you can interact online, this legislation threatens that ability to do so.

OLBERMANN: Yeah, that's Red State, that's all the other right-wing sites, as well. This is not a liberal thing.

MOULITSAS: It's not. It's liberal, conservative, greens, libertarians, people who don't even pay attention to politics. I don't think I have ever seen this much consensus around an issue.

Unbelievable. The Democratic leadership in the Senate is willing to throw a generation under the bus.

Influence by major donors isn't new, of course. Henry (Scoop) Jackson of Washington was referred to as the Senator from Boeing. But, as with the Health Care Reform negotiations, voters don't even have a seat at the table--especially among Democrats. Unless we in the rank and file can find a way to penetrate the Democratic primary system, we are doomed to a future of bad public policy--a neo-feudalist regime run by monopolists and their "elected officials."

Ron Paul

2012-01-01T15:11:00.002-05:00

Paul's candidacy creates tremendous cognitive dissonance. Digby, in this VS A-Z clip, explains one source for this cognitive dissonance; he isn't really a libertarian so much as a states' rights tenther. A libertarian would focus on the "people" part, rather the "states" part of the clause. Moreover, the 14th amendment considerably weakens the "states" part; the Amendment is about the Federal government protecting individuals from oppressive state governments. So Ron Paul is a statist libertarian, or a libertarian statist. Confusing.

Glenn Greenwald and Matt Stoller write about a different kind of cognitive dissonance, the kind that is infesting discussion that are on the "left" or, rather more accurately, are taking place among rank and file Democrats.

Glenn notes that there's a problem when an odious candidate advocates policies also advocated by progressive activists--opposition to wars of choice, bloated defense budgets, unwavering support for Israel, torture, warrantless detention, an unaccountable president, a disastrous war on drugs et alia.

That problem is parallel to the problem of a good, well-meaning leader who happens to engage in odious policies:

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations withdrones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has wagedan unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

This is very confusing. To combat the confusion, many progressives fall back on issues where they agree with the President, and disagree with Paul, which happen to be issues around social policy, and involve more visceral, tribal issues like the right to choose and civil rights. They deride people like Glenn as saboteurs, trying to undermine our last, best hope to stave off the evil depredations of conservative governance. And they bring up the Courts, both the Supremes and the Federal Circuit. It's hard to write about this clearly, but it's even harder to think clearly--the dissonance is internally deafening.

Stoller points out that there is conflict in the liberal commitment to a large Federal government that does good because a large government can also do evil:

Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.

The other source of dissonance is within the media's reporting. As Stolller notes, part of the current issue is that there really are very few movement liberals among the elected officials of the Democratic Party. The party is dominated by a mix of centrists and establishment Democrats who are uninterested, if not actively hostile to movement liberalism. There is a natural fit between the political centrist and the media's love of centrism. Both groups love the idea of an unelected elite making tough decisions behind closed doors. This is especially the case with respect to foreign policy, where there is a bi-partisan consensus, shared by the Village, for US policy that involves frequent military interventions, and support for non-democratic regimes that serve America's vital interests.

Ron Paul exists outside, and in opposition, to that foreign policy sphere of consensus, as he demonstrated in a 2008 interview with Tim Russert. So he is invariably marginalized, treated as a lesser candidate, even though by any objective standard, he should be receiving much more coverage.

It's also interesting that the issues that marginalize Paul in the Village--opposition to brutal foreign policy, to an increasingly intrusive security state, run by unaccountable banksters--are also the issues that motivate and marginalize the Occupy movement. On the left, these grass roots issues are represented not by any one leader, but by a mass movement.

These are grass roots issues that are simply are not on the table. Without the Occupy movement, and, yes, without Ron Paul, they also would not be part of our political discourse.

At all.

Friedman

2012-01-01T12:12:00.001-05:00

Tom Friedman today:

As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track? After 9/11, the idea of helping to change the context of Arab politics and address the root causes of Arab state dysfunction and Islamist terrorism — which were identified in the 2002 Arab Human Development Report as a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge and a deficit of women’s empowerment — seemed to me to be a legitimate strategic choice.

Tom Friedman then:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?" You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.[28][29][30] ..We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth...

This text is provided as a public service. The email address for the Times Public Editor is public@nytimes.com, for LsTE, letters@nytimes.com

Premium Support

2011-12-13T15:05:00.001-05:00

(By Stuart Zechman and Jay Ackroyd)

Last Thursday, the New York Times ran a story about Democratic support for restructuring Medicare as a premium support plan, as part of the austerity negotiations:

Members of both parties told the panel that Medicare should offer a fixed amount of money to each beneficiary to buy coverage from competing private plans, whose costs and benefits would be tightly regulated by the government.
[snip]
The idea faces opposition from many Democrats, who say it would shift costs to beneficiaries and eliminate the guarantee of affordable health insurance for older Americans. But some Democrats say that — if carefully designed, with enough protections for beneficiaries — it might work.
The idea is sometimes known as premium support, because Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government.

Of course, the Democrats all remain nameless, as do most of the "health policy experts." These same people have been trying to drum up support for premium support as a means of ~~cutting Medicare benefits~~ controlling Medicare costs for years, mostly from Democrats predictably wary of how unpopular this would be. That's why any policy discussion takes place in an atmosphere of anonymity, dishonesty and misdirection, using unrepresentative processes like the creation of unelected commissions or the establishment of a specially empowered SuperCommittee.

Centrist Democrats --the New Democrat Coalition, Democratic Leadership Council, Third Way, Progressive Policy Institute and the Brookings Institute-- have been trying to get "Premium Support" legislation in front of Congress for at least a dozen years. It's the other half of what the PPACA is designed to accomplish, to restructure what they regard as obsolete New Deal social insurance policy. The policy recommendations focus on “private/public partnerships” supplanting public sector programs, while messaging focuses on selling ideologically centrist, “market-based reform" to liberal Democrats. They reassure movement liberals by reciting platitudes that seem to affirm Medicare's sanctity with promises to “strengthen" the program for the 21st century. This has been going on since the mid to late 90s.

For instance, New Democrat John Breaux, chairing President' Clinton's Bipartisan Commission of the Future of Medicare, introduced a premium support plan in 1999. In an Op-Ed in The Hill (pulled from the memory hole by Republican Congressman Tim Griffin), Breaux wrote:

With any restructuring approach, we must preserve Medicare's entitlement and ensure that Medicare does not become a program just for the poor. I would like Medicare, in fact, to become a model for expanding health care coverage to all uninsured Americans. I believe a Medicare premium support system is the best way to achieve that end.

What exactly is a premium support model and what does my particular version do? Premium support means the government would literally support or pay part of the premium for a defined core package of Medicare benefits. This is not a voucher program but an alternative to the current system. Today, Congress micromanages Medicare and the government uses fee schedules and thousands of pages of regulations to set prices for specific services. My plan combines the best that the private sector has to offer with the government protections we need to maintain the social safety net.

I have proposed a premium support Medicare plan modeled after the health care plan serving nearly 10 million federal workers, retirees and their families. Like that plan, my reform plan would also guarantee that the government's contribution keeps pace with health care costs.

This history makes it clear why it was so important for national Democrats, and especially Third Way partisans to differentiate their "premium support" from Paul Ryan's "premium support,” as with Ezra Klein's interview with Henry Aaron, the Brookings' Fellow who originally developed the premium support idea in 1995. It was crucial to centrist talking points to make the case that the GOP "Path To Prosperity" involved a voucher program, totally different from Aaron's "premium support" plan. But, as this story from the Times makes clear, there are core elements among the centrists who dominate the Democratic party leadership committed to premium support under Medicare, core elements who are well aware that reducing Medicare benefits will be extremely unpopular.

Vouchers?

2011-12-13T14:58:00.000-05:00

Members of both parties told the panel that Medicare should offer a fixed amount of money to each beneficiary to buy coverage from competing private plans, whose costs and benefits would be tightly regulated by the government.
[snip]
The idea faces opposition from many Democrats, who say it would shift costs to beneficiaries and eliminate the guarantee of affordable health insurance for older Americans. But some Democrats say that — if carefully designed, with enough protections for beneficiaries — it might work.
The idea is sometimes known as premium support, because Medicare would subsidize premiums charged by private insurers that care for beneficiaries under contract with the government.

With any restructuring approach, we must preserve Medicare's entitlement and ensure that Medicare does not become a program just for the poor. I would like Medicare, in fact, to become a model for expanding health care coverage to all uninsured Americans. I believe a Medicare premium support system is the best way to achieve that end.

What exactly is a premium support model and what does my particular version do? Premium support means the government would literally support or pay part of the premium for a defined core package of Medicare benefits. This is not a voucher program but an alternative to the current system. Today, Congress micromanages Medicare and the government uses fee schedules and thousands of pages of regulations to set prices for specific services. My plan combines the best that the private sector has to offer with the government protections we need to maintain the social safety net.

I have proposed a premium support Medicare plan modeled after the health care plan serving nearly 10 million federal workers, retirees and their families. Like that plan, my reform plan would also guarantee that the government's contribution keeps pace with health care costs.

Victory

2010-06-27T12:23:00.003-04:00

Panetta on victory in Afghanistan (This Week transcript):

PANETTA: Winning in Afghanistan is having a country that is stable enough to ensure that there is no safe haven for Al Qaida or for a militant Taliban that welcomes Al Qaida. That's really the measure of success for the United States. Our purpose, our whole mission there is to make sure that Al Qaida never finds another safe haven from which to attack this country. That's the fundamental goal of why the United States is there. And the measure of success for us is do you have an Afghanistan that is stable enough to make sure that never happens.

My reaction to this has always been "WTF? That's the best you've got?" As Atrios says this morning:

The stability of the state of Afghanistan and its willingness to house bad actors are completely unrelated to each other. More than that, potential bad actors can, roughly, find a "safe haven" just about anywhere they want.

It's a big world! And they don't need a lot of space:

PANETTA: I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaida is actually relatively small. I think at most, we're looking at maybe 60 to 100, maybe less. It's in that vicinity. There's no question that the main location of Al Qaida is in tribal areas of Pakistan.

Yes. He really did just say that the US is spending annually something like twice or thrice the GDP of Afghanistan, facilitating the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, on the pretense that it will keep five dozen people from holding meetings.

It is is easy to think of obviously stupid, silly things the US could do for a tenth, or even a hundredth of the cost of this "war" that would be more effective at keeping these meetings from resulting in successful terrorist attacks on the US.

Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform

2009-08-24T11:06:00.002-04:00

Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform—Now an iPhone App

Posted using ShareThis

Advice

2009-08-05T15:51:00.004-04:00

If I were an elected Democratic official holding a town hall on health care reform, this is the preamble I'd adopt.

So glad to have all you folks here. It shows what an important issue we are talking about today. Now because we are here to share views, I'd appreciate that everyone get a chance to say their piece without interruption.

That includes me. Please give me a chance to answer your questions without interruption.

Before we start, it will help me to know where you folks are coming from.

Who here currently has some form of health insurance? Please raise your hands.

Of those, who is covered under a plan provided by your employer?

And who covers themselves, pays for insurance out of pocket?

Next, who here gets their health care from the government, under Medicare, Medicaid, or the Veterans Administration?

Finally, is there anyone here eligible for Medicare or VA coverage who has opted for private insurance instead? Please raise your hands.

Roids

2009-07-31T16:44:00.002-04:00

So the names of the hundred MLB players who tested positive will come out in ones and twos, in declining order of fame and salary level.

There was a time when I was of the "their bodies, let them do what they want" school of thought.

That view evolved. I gradually realized that if steroids are bad for people, that permitting them would have two bad implications. The first is we, sports fans, would be taking advantage of people willing to damage themselves for fame and fortune. The second is that we, sports fans, would be collaborating in a policy regime that would exclude more talented or hardworking athletes because they refused to juice. The Mark Caminitis would drive out the Frank Robinsons.

Well, that's an exaggeration. What would really happen is the replacement level players who got into the majors would all be juicing. And, if it IS bad for you, then the League would be setting up a system where their most marginal players were risking their health to try to earn enough service time for a pension.

The nice thing about evolution is it never stops. Seeing the ubiquity of juice in the baseball (seriously, is there anybody left who would surprise you, after Petite?), I've come to doubt the "if" part of the syllogism above. And if it is true that taking steroids under a doctor's supervision isn't dangerous (as Manny apparently was doing in LA), then what's the problem?

Players are permitted to use any number of performance enhancing methods. In the drug realm, they are allowed to use caffeine and nicotine (the latter proven to enhance concentration), even though the delivery mechanisms for nicotine are mostly life shortening. Amphetamines were rife throughout the majors (there is a story of a pair of coffee urns, labeled "Coaches" and "Players"), use that didn't stop after Jim Bouton went public with this in Ball Four

They are allowed to have cortisone shots, not just for injuries, but for normal wear and tear on the joints that afflict older players. And, of course, cortisone IS a steroid. It is just not an anabolic steroid.

Players are also allowed to have performance enhancing surgery. One of the complaints about the impact of steroids on baseball is that their use allows older players, especially sluggers, to extend their careers by reversing the effect of aging that reduces muscle mass. Bonds hitting 72 home runs at the age of 37, as Hank Aaron remarked recently, is unnatural. But the same is true of Tommy John, whose "injury" was wear and tear on his left arm. How is replacing a worn out tendon any different from using a drug that allows a player to use weightlifting sessions to retain muscle mass as he ages?

The performance-enhancing surgery that really gets my goat is Lasix. Ted Williams had extraordinary eyesight. In spring training events, he would put pine tar on the bat barrel, and then call out the number of seams (None, 1 0r 2) the bat had hit. Now a player like Derek Jeter (on everybody's never juiced list) can get surgery to duplicate Williams's genetic inheritance.

What is really going here is that the career home run numbers of the players using steroids is wreaking hell with all of the standard Hall of Fame threshholds. It's also raising doubts about win totals of players like Roger Clemens, who would have been a lock for the Hall after he left Toronto. But a key element in evaluating players for the Hall is their career numbers. Jim Rice's rapid fall off hurt him badly in HoF ballotting. Likewise, a compiler like Mussina is helped by the focus on career threshholds.

But one is stuck with the world one is in. If steroids aren't dangerous, when properly used in a doctor supervised weight training program, why not legalize their use? That is certainly better than reading stories of high school kids ordering drugs over the internet from fly by night companies in Mexico because scouts have told them they have to get bigger.

Passage

2009-07-29T11:01:00.002-04:00

In today's NYT David Leonhardt writes the following:

Members of Congress have come up with one idea after another to pay for covering the uninsured. But they still haven’t put together legislation that could pass.

This is simply false. The House HAS passed legisation that covers the uninsured, and provided funding for doing so.

There is also no doubt that there are at least 51 votes in the Senate for the House bill. A filibuster can be beaten if Reid wants to beat it. Between using strong arm tactics within his caucus, and shutting down business on all other matters while taking cloture vote after cloture vote, he will eventually get the bill to the floor. He will also be able to pick off Republicans who really can't go into a 2010 race being seen as opposed to providing up to a fifth of their constituents with health care services they do not currently have. And, of course, there is the reconciliation process that can be used to circumvent the automatic filibuster Reid has created.

It's not just Leonhardt. Scott Lemiux discusses an Ezra Klein post about what compromises are necessary to get passage.

So let's be clear. A good bill, with a public option, would easily pass in both houses. The insurance lobby, through the Senate Finance Committee doing everything it can to gut the Senate bill, and to slow the process down because the lobbyists are well aware that a good bill would pass easily. Slowing down the process allows the lobbyist's disinformation machine more time to operate, more time to confuse voters with false, even crazy ("the government will kill old people!") information.

The media is doing us, once again, a tremendous disservice by treating what can only be called lies as legitimate points of debate. The opponents of a good bill don't care about costs, even though they say so, because a bill with a strong public option that removes current insurance industry subsidies is cheaper than either the status quo or a "reform" plan that adds more subsidies to the insurance industry. All the malarkey that is intended to make old people afraid is totally ridiculous; they will be completely unaffected because they are already on a government health plan that was supposed to lead the country down the path to socialism. The US has the worst health care system in the OECD, but the media parrots, unchallenged nonsensical claims about the US having the best health care in the world and about how awful health care is in Canada. And d0n't get me started on why it is that wars don't have to be paid for, but health care does.

Media support for dishonest GOP spokespeople and Democrat Senators fronting for the insurance companies won't do the trick if a good bill, like the House bill, reaches the floor of the Senate. It will pass. There is no reason for Reid to take elements of a bad Finance committee bill into the Senate bill. He has the votes he needs.

And, in the end,we will get a reasonably good bill.

Really.

Prisoner's Dilemma NOT

2009-07-26T22:32:00.002-04:00

John is right that Matt is wrong. The point of the prisoners' dilemma is that it is not a dilemma. It is a trap.

But John is wrong when he says the upshot of the political situation on health care reform is:

If congresspeople think that regardless of the success of the healthcare bill, they will be better off having voted against it, then they will.

Given a good health care bill with a strong public option, they can:

Vote for it, and be better off with their constituents, but worse off with their donors/future employers.

Vote against it, and be better off with their donors/future employers, but worse off with their constituents.

This is independent of whether or not the bill passes.

Hence their focus is entirely on preventing a good bill with a strong public option from getting to the floor for a vote. They can vote for a bad bill their donors support, and claim to be for reform when they run for re-election.

If Pelosi or Reid are seriously committed to effective health care reform, they will make sure a good bill with a strong public option is what hits the floors. There will be enough Blue Dogs, and Class '10 Senators not willing to risk their seats to kowtow to the lobbies. They'll do all they can to gut the bill behind the scenes. But if presented with a good bill, the majority will vote for it.

Gabba Gabba Hey

2009-07-04T01:41:00.002-04:00

So it looks like Palin quit in order to get in front of an indictment for some serious corruption.

This is incredibly good news. Because you know what she is going to do.

She is going to go around the country raising money for her legal fund, pitching her book. And what will her theme be?

That she is the target of a vast media and establishment conspiracy, because they want to silence the only authentic voice on the national political scene. It is already obvious the media is out to get her. But now the establishment Republicans are joining in. They talk a good game, but in the end they are up there in Washington, living lives regular folks will never know, and making fools of regular folks.

Unlike those Washington Republicans, she actually walks the walk. Her daughters DO practice abstinence. When one of them gets pregnant, she proudly becomes an unwed teenage mother. She doesn't pretend she thinks the Universe is 6,000 years old. She believes it. She speaks in tongues. She doesn't really bother keeping the heathen foreigners straight, because America is good enough for her, and should be good enough for any real American.

She's the real deal. She's one of us, one of the knuckle dragging Know-Nothings. And that is why the media and political elites are out to get her.

The Republican establishment has to be terrified. They've run this scam out ever since Nixon, that they are the party of Real Americans, proudly ignorant (dittoheads!) racist jingoists who have a tenuous grasp of reality. Sarah Palin can make the case that she, not Haley Barbour, not, errrr, player to be named later, is just a big phony.

Town Hall

2009-07-01T13:26:00.003-04:00

Apparently Helen Thomas and Chip Reid had a cow in today's presser with Robert Gibbs. Washington Times reporter Christina Bellantoni tweeted:

Helen Thomas to Gibbs re: town hall format argument: "I'm amazed at you people who call for openness and transparency"

This is in reference to today's Presidential town hall on health care. Leave aside the pearl clutching demand that only the WHPC should be permitted to ask the President questions. Part of what is going on here is that the WHPC, and their colleagues, are using a narrative frame that is completely out of step with both public opinion and, as Obama said in his last press conference, simple logic.

The basic narrative frame the media has adopted is that any policy needs to preserve the existing collection of medical care financing organizations--insurance companies, HMOs--because, well, just because. Here's a collection of NY Times articles, of which this one is representative. (Krugman sneaks one in that search with a solid counter-argument.

There is this Olympia Snowe interview with the AP, where she says (no joke) that she is opposed to the public option because it would lower the cost of financing health care:

"If you establish a public option at the forefront that goes head-to-head and competes with the private health insurance market ... the public option will have significant price advantages," she said.

The media completely accepts that one of the policy objectives in health care reform is the preservation of insurance companies that have created a system where Americans get the worst health care in the OECD, both in terms of covereage and of effectiveness, at the highest cost in the OECD. So they (as in the ABC "town hall") continually focus their questions on the impact on the health finance business, rather than on the health care provided to American citizens.

In other words, they are asking the wrong questions, questions that reflect what the President has pointed out, is a completely illogical position:

"Just conceptually, the notion that all these insurance companies who say they're giving consumers the best possible deal, if they can't compete against a public plan as one option, with consumers making the decision what's the best deal, that defies logic," Obama said.

So if the President is going to actually discuss the real policy issues involved with health care reform, he has to take his questions from the public, and not the press.

Small Business

2009-06-27T15:16:00.003-04:00

One of the things about being a small business person is that you really do want to offer health care to your employees. The public option would help small business development enormously.

Executive testmony

2009-06-25T13:49:00.002-04:00

Wendell Potter, former health industry executive, explains how the industry cheats customers.

15 years ago, when reform was last on the table, 95% of the money collected in premiums went to pay for health care. Now it is less than 80%. The term for this value is the "medical-loss ratio." As Ezra says, this is a telling construction. It means they regard paying medical reimbursements is a cost.

George Lakoff made a similar point in an interview I had with him. In most businesses, the more your customers demand, the better off you are. This is true for people who make good things, like high butterfat ice cream, and people who provide services to correct bad things, like autobody shops. In the case of a health insurance company, the incentive is reversed. Providing services reduces your profits. And that is why we are where we are today.

Humor

2009-06-20T17:52:00.000-04:00

Or, actually, reality.

Ezra's 101

2009-06-19T14:50:00.001-04:00

On this one, Ezra Klein explains how a public plan works in a bloggershead discussion.

Lies Refuted

2009-06-19T14:42:00.002-04:00

Here Howard Dean knocks down all the Frank Luntz talking points that Norah O'Donnell recites to him.

No Coverage

2009-06-19T14:31:00.002-04:00

This is not a video, but a National Public Radio Fresh Air podcast. Karen Tumulty discusses her brother's case of losing his individual catastrophic insurance coverage when he became very ill.

KT (as she calls herself in Swampland comments) is reprising her TIME cover story on her brother's difficulties.

Public Option

2009-06-19T14:26:00.001-04:00

This one, from HCAN, is a simple advocacy ad. But it summarizes the case very nicely.

Recission

2009-06-19T14:20:00.002-04:00

I am going to start collecting videos documenting all that is wrong with the current health care system, and and/or advocating a public option.

This one features insurance company executives saying they indeed retroactively rescind converage when a customer turns out to have a serious and expensively treated medical problem. That is, they collect premiums from their customers until they get really sick, then they comb through their medical records to find a reason to remove their coverage.

Tapper

2009-05-21T09:20:00.003-04:00

So Jake Tapper of ABC tweets the following:

does POTUS think it's safe to put detainees in US prisons?

Throwing hands in the air I tweet back:

@jaketapper You mean as opposed to safely jailing serial killers and domestic terrorists? What is wrong with you people?

I get a direct message saying that I am being "tiresome." Of course, he doesn't follow me, so I cannot DM back.

So I'll put the reply here.

Jake-- the point is that this is such an incredibly stupid question that I find it disturbing that you and other members of the Beltway media take it in the least bit seriously. The people who are raising the question are lying about their concern, and engaging in fearmongering. They know perfectly well that the US military can transport individual prisoners to secure facilities, where people can be kept locked up. The US is very good at imprisonment.

Rather than asking whether Obama thinks it is "safe" to put detainees from Guantanamo in supermax prison facilities, what you should be doing is asking elected Republican officials what the heck they are talking about. Every single Senator's state has a max security prison. Ask them about the rate of jail breaks from those facilities. Ask them if their prisons are so poorly administered that they cannot hold a prisoner.

Fecklessly following whatever idiotic talking point that comes out of Republican mouths is destroying your, and your colleagues, credibility, Jake.

I suppose it is tiresome to hear that. But it's no less true.

Prevention is Underrated

2009-05-08T16:17:00.002-04:00

April 9, 2009 16:38

DKos's public health expert DemFromCT has a link to a Nature editorial that starts out:

Complacency, not overreaction, is the greatest danger posed by the flu pandemic. That's a message scientists would do well to help get across.

As I've read in earlier posts by DemFromCT, the key to preventing a large number of deaths from a virulent swine flu virus is to get the reinfection rate down below 1 per infected person. Then it snuffs itself. The trouble is that this is nearly impossible to do if too many people are infected. So you need to act very early in the process of the flu's spread. Judging by the number of joke threads running through twitterstreams, this is not widely understood. The public health professionals appear to be overreacting to a small number of cases.

So if the CDC and the WHO are successful in limiting the spread of the disease, they will be seen not as successful managers but as nervous nelliew. And it will be harder, next time, to implement effective measures precisely because they were so effective.

This reminded me of the Y2K computer scare. In fact, a lot of work was done, a lot of money was spent, and the crisis was averted. But the very success of the effort led to many people concluding that there really hadn't been an incipient crisis after all.

Moreover, not only did the Y2K software repairs prevent a collapse of corporate computer systems, it also forced the creation of systems of off site backups and disaster recovery. This, in turn, was partly responsible for the speed with which Wall Street was able to restart their systems following 9/11.

Robust systems that prevent disaster are hard to justify to bean-counters, and taxpayers. But that is the right way to design a system.

Convention

2009-05-08T08:57:00.003-04:00

May 8, 2009 09:19

Adam Liptak writes a largely contentless piece about Souter and his possble replacements.

But I noticed two utterly conventional and very irksome elements. The first is that he off-handedly describes Souter as "liberal." This is simply not an accurate characterization. It's true that Souter respects precedent and is not particularly activist in his rulings. It is simply bizarre that a justice who treats stare decisis as an important principle be labeled "liberal," especially in such an off-hand fashion.

This isn't a bad thing for progressives looking for a real liberal to be appointed to the court. But it is an illustration of just how far to the right the Overton Window has shifted. That upholding a 1973 ruling that has been the law of the land for more than a generation, and is widely accepted by rank and file Americans makes a Justice into a "liberal" flies in the face of the dictionary definitions of liberal and conservative.

The second irksome element is this:

Justice Antonin Scalia’s views about the importance of adhering to the text and original meaning of the Constitution and statutes, for instance, has come to dominate conservative judicial thinking.

While it's true that Republicans constantly repeat this claim, it is a canard, just as is their deriding "activist judges." It is hard to find an example of flouting the Founders intent more striking than Bush v Gore, nor an example of more aggressive activism. Another example of Scalia's wing's activist disrespect for the constitution and the legislature was the Lilly Ledbetter opinion.

This article is an excellent illustration of Walter Pincus' analysis of the decline of journalism, posted yesterday in the Columbia Journalism Review:

Today, mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, presenting both or all sides as if they were refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance, and at times even accuracy.

Conservatives have excellled at their PR approach, of falsely characterizing themselves and the opposition, setting the conventional frames for the lazy media to follow.

Just Shoot Me

2009-04-15T22:10:00.004-04:00

John Ensign is a Senator. He is one of the United States' most important, most powerful politicians. We are in a deep economic crisis. And this is what he says, publicly on Twitter, about his view of how best to conduct fiscal policy:

The tax code is too complex. That's why I'm for throwing out the whole tax code.

Sure, it's too complex. But this isn't a policy position. It's not even a bumper sticker slogan. It's just nonsense.

And then he includes a link, and, what does it say?

http://www.johnensign.org/issues/tax-reform

Well, no, he doesn't want to throw out the "tax code." No, he doesn't want to simplify it. He wants to subsidize, through the tax code, some stuff, and penalize some stuff. He wants to further complicate the tax code with special treatment for some activities.

These people are completely incoherent. And they sit in the Senate, setting tax policy.

Oh, and he appreciated my retweet and comment.

@aweaton6388 @5M1L3 @jhilborn @jhilborn @ClaytonCalhoon @BattleBornPAC Thanks for the re-tweets and comments.

My comment? "Laughing, pointing." (Transposition typo on "laughing" corrected here.)

The F Word

2009-04-02T13:01:00.004-04:00

Josh Marshall links to a fairly detailed description of how AIGFP managed what can only be called a fraudulent scheme to cook its own books and those of its counterparties.

While some reinsurers are large, well-capitalized entities that generally avoid these pitfalls, AIG was already a troubled company when it began to write more and more of these risk-shifting transactions more than a decade ago. It is easy to promise the moon when people think that they can deliver, but because AIG and their clients saw how easy it was to fool regulators and investors, the practice grew and most regulators did absolutely nothing to curtail the practice.
It was easy for AIG to become addicted to the use of side letters. The firm, which had already encountered serious financial problems in 2000-2001, reportedly saw the side letters as a way to mint free money and thereby help the insurer to look stronger than it really was. AIG not only helped banks and other companies distort and obfuscate their financial condition, but AIG was supplementing its income by writing more and more of these reinsurance deals and mitigating their perceived exposure via side letters.
A key figure in AIG’s reinsurance schemes, according to several observers, was Joseph Cassano, head of AIG-FP. Whereas the traditional use of side letters was in reinsurance transactions between insurers, in the case of both CELL and PNC neither was an insurer! And in both cases, AIG used sham deals to make two non-insurers, including a regulated bank holding company, look better by manipulating their financial statements. Falsifying the financial statements of a bank or bank holding company is a felony.

Moreover, the folks at AIG knew the jig was up. The AIGFP division showed a large loss in the third quarter of 2007. Hence, in December of 2007, they decided that they had only one more shot at milking the scam before everything fell apart. All you have to do to see this is read the "retention bonus" "contract." (pdf)

(a) Covered Persons Who Are Not Members of the Senior Management Team.
Subject to Sections 3.01(c) and 3.01(d), for the 2008 Compensation Year and the 2009 Compensation Year, each Covered Person (other than members of the Senior Management Team) shall be awarded a Guaranteed Retention Award for each of those Compensation Years equal to one hundred percent (100%) of such Covered Person’s 2007 Total Economic Award.

(b) Covered Persons Who Are Members of the Senior Management Team.
Subject to Sections 3.01(c) and 3.01(d), for the 2008 Compensation Year and the 2009 Compensation Year, each Covered Person who is a member of the Senior Management Team shall be awarded a Guaranteed Retention Award for each of those Compensation Years equal to seventy-five percent (75%) of such Covered Person’s 2007 Total Economic Award.

In other words, the bonus pool under previous, "profitable" years was not going to be replicated in 2008 or 2009. So the firm agreed, with itself, to pay big bonuses anyway to the people who were responsible for these enormous losses, the destruction of the company and its counterparties.

In the first article, the side letters make it clear that neither party expected AIG to ever pay off these CDS instruments--that they were intended to fraudulently overstate the assets on the counterparty's balance sheet.

It is getting increasingly difficult to understand why the operative federal agency in these affairs is the Treasury and not the DOJ.

Dope

2009-04-02T08:29:00.004-04:00

Blogging in spurts.

We'll start with this. More to follow.

A number of people were irked by President Obama smirking and chuckling over the potheads on line. It was irksome; there was no atempt to defend a policy position that is clearly wrong. There was just some throwaway ridicule and a knowing statement to the audience that implicitly said "You know this is NOT happening." And the audience chuckled along.

While I agree with that irked reaction, as far as it goes, it misses a point In responding to a very popular question in this way, Obama was conceding the policy point without engaging it. He was saying, and the audience was agreeing with him, that smoking marijuana isn't a big deal. It's funny, kinda like Vinny in the Bronx in his underwear making fun of Brian Williams, but it 's not really important. Obama would not have cracked this little joke about grand theft auto, or rape or tax evasion, or pretty much any crime that people do time for. But a lot of people are doing time for this funny little indulgence. Not a large fraction of the lawbreaking dope smokers, but a large fraction, internationally speaking, of the general population is in jail because they did something that the elites in that room have also done, and find kinda, well, cute, in their position in the stratosphere.

After all, Obama himself has indulged in the wacky weed. I expect that most of his audience has done so as well. As have I. And, I suspect, you, reading this.

Opposing legalization is indefensible. Nobody even tries anymore to defend the position. It's not just that they find it funny that people point this out. It's that they know it, and don't even try to defend their opposition.

ZOMG PORK!!

2009-03-05T08:57:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, Jake Tapper tweeted this:

WH sez nation/govt need tighten belts BUT POTUS signing the omnibus spending bill (with earmarks) disconnect?

I replied:

Disconnect? No. You're repeating the same behavior--identifying a tiny issue that may or may not be a gotcha and inflating it.

He answered:

9 billion tiny? tell Dem Sens Bayh and Feingold, who say POTUS should veto bill. r they "playing gotcha and inflating it"?

I replied:

Yeah. 9B is tiny. And I've yet to hear of a bridge to nowhere. Good science stuff mostly.The F22. Now THAT'S an earmark.

This demonstrates the limitations imposed by 140 characters.

There are too many things to expand on here to do well, but I will take a crack at them.

First, on the simple substance of this, the 9 billion dollars of "earmarks" are indeed trivial within the scope of federal spending that should include, if necessary, paying people to dig holes and then paying other people to fill them up again. In this climate, even a bridge to nowhere is worth considering. If there is only 9 billion dollars of money "wasted" on projects that don't make sense, that's small potatoes compared to the size of the problem and the size of the solution.

But, as far as I can tell, the "earmarks" that have been identified so far all seem to be pretty good expenditures of government money. Volcano monitoring is a public good, like sea walls and levees. Honeybees are a critical part of our agricultural ecosystem. Helping former gang members reenter civil society is clearly a good thing. I haven't, as I tweeted, read about any of these earmarks that would line up with the bridge to nowhere, a clear waste of public funds.

In context, making a fuss over this makes even less sense. The Federal budget under the Bush administration and Republican legislatures wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, literally shrink-wrapping billions of dollars onto shipping pallets and dropping them off in Iraq. An enormous number of federal jobs have been outsourced to private sector contractors at much higher costs than civil service staff, and to the detriment of institutional memory. Insurance companies are being paid to administer Medicare that can be done with current Federal staff with minimal additional marginal cost. We pitch hundreds of billions of dollars a year on cost overruns on military procurement of equipment that has no discernable mission and often doesn't even work properly. (See America's Defense Meltdown, no longer available as a pdf.) 9 billion dollars spent on small local projects that, as far as I can tell actually are of public benefit, is not in same city, never mind the same ballpark as the torrent of money that has come out of the Treasury for Republican cronies.

Blaming Obama for this makes even less sense. He's not inserting the earmarks. Congress is, with six of the top ten inserters being Republicans. So it doesn't even make sense to blame Democrats.

What is most irksome about this is that it is not merely stenography of, at best, misleading and stunningly hypocritical Republican talking points. It's giving those talking points a megaphone, while focusing on trivial Russert-like gotchas that will make no appreciable difference in how and when the US gets out of the chasm that the Republican party has thrown the country in. It's frittering around the edges, trying to gin up a scandal where none exists.

"Free Market"

2008-12-29T05:10:00.004-05:00

This is an extremely rare edition of "No, not what digby said."

Writing about the dominance of conservative messaging on the economy in the latter half of the 20th century. She quotes a guy who makes a sweeping and false statement, about Keynes dominating the first half of the 20th century and Hayek the second half, noting that it is not clear that it is "exactly true." As part of that correction, she notes:

Free market fundamentalism (which Hayek didn't actually believe in --- he was more of an evangelical) has certainly been the order of the day for at least a quarter of a century and animated the arguments of the aristocracy(.)

It's important to realize that while this is the message of the Republican party, and of other conservatives, it is not their policy position. Free market fundamentalists abhor concentration of economic power, in oligopolies as well as in the state. American conservatives, especially those in the Republican party, are better characterized as, for lack of a better word, fascist. Crony capitalism is a euphemism for this, with the false implication of competition implied by "capitalism." They believe in the adoption of policies that encourage the formation of oligopolies, and that intertwine those oligopolies with the government.

The taxpayer's role is the same as the consumer's role--to provide monopoly pricing and profits to companies protected from free market competition. You see this everywhere. From the taxpayer's perspective, you see this in the replacement of civil service functions by private no-bid contracts, telecommunications companies integrated into the intelligence community, Blackwater, Haliburton, and pretty much all of the military procurement budget.

From the consumer perspective, you see it in the abuse of patents in Big Pharma's interest, elimination of the public domain from copyright law, preservation of monopoly pricing in telecommunications, cable television, practical exemption from anti-trust law, giving away television spectrum, regulations designed to create barriers to entry by new firms and lots of little policies like not allowing people who intend to leave timber standing to participate in the bidding process. Or not allowing the cattle farmer to note on the label of his beef that he tests all his cattle for mad cow disease, not just the federally required sample.

It's very bad that this meme--the idea that American conservatives favor free market solutions--has been allowed to so completely penetrate discussion about economic and regulatory policy. It's simply not the case that Republicans are free market advocates any more than they are free trade advocates. There may have been some possibility for making this claim before the 2000 elections. But with control of all three lawmaking branches of government by Republicans, free market policies were rejected, while policies designed to encourage greater industrial concentration, less competition, and greater concentration of wealth were embraced.

All of these policies had the effect of making government larger, more intrusive, and directly engaged in providing revenue from general revenues to oligopolistic corporations. There is no "free market" in these policy positions.

[Update: some minor edits for clarity]

Over/Under: 50,000 Soldiers

2008-12-20T22:53:00.006-05:00

Joe Klein's Iraq update pushed me to unwrap the Jan/Feb issue of Foreign Affairs. I wanted to see how the main reporting organ of the Serious People in the Washington Foreign Policy Community was projecting the future of Iraq. There it was, an article by Richard Haass, President of CFR and Martin Indyk , "pro-Israel lobbyist," and current director of Brookings' Saban Center.

Ever since Cheney remarked that he expected the US to draw down its force commitment in Iraq to 50,000 troops, in six months or so after the fall of Baghdad, I believe the US has been committed to this force level. There are a number of reasons to hold to this belief. The permanent military bases house that many soldiers. Barack Obama has been very cagy in the positions he's taken, speaking always of "combat troops." Iraq has no national defense force, no air power, no armor, no logistical capability, and I strongly doubt the country has a functional chain of command. The US foreign policy establishment would regard this endeavor as failed if the result were not an Iraq allied with the US government, which is impossible if the elections are actually free and open.

The Washington Post op-ed Joe Klein cites, penned by the joined at the hip Senate trio of McCain Lieberman and Graham includes this remark:

Based on our observations and consultations in Baghdad, we are optimistic that President-elect Obama will be able to fulfill a major step of his plan for withdrawal next year by redeploying U.S. combat forces from Iraq's cities while maintaining a residual force to train and mentor our Iraqi allies. We caution, however, that 2009 will be a pivotal year for Iraq, with provincial and then national elections whose secure and legitimate conduct depends on our continued engagement.

So here's what the Haass and Indyk had to say (my bold):

But the situation remains fragile, and the need to pursue a host of second-order tasks should preclude more than modest reductions in U.S. combat and support forces in Iraq through 2009. By mid-2010, however, the Obama administration should be able to reduce U.S. forces significantly, perhaps to half their pre-surge levels. This would be consistent with the accord governing the U.S. troop presence that is currently being negotiated by U.S. and Iraqi officials. In the meantime, the highest political priorities will be ensuring communal reconciliation and an equitable sharing of oil revenues. Diplomatically, as reconciliation gains traction, Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors will have to be persuaded to work with Baghdad's Shiite-led government.

Yep. We're still at 50,000 troops or so. So much for Iraq's sovereignty. 50,000 "residual" troops, with tanks and planes, "supporting" and "training" them is the goal, is certainly not what the majority of Americans, and a larger majority of Iraqis, would describe as withdrawing from Iraq.

And there's a special bonus! In order to keep Israel safe from Iran's still non-existent nuclear capability, a nuclear umbrella must be extended. And, to match fiction for fiction, Israel should be provided with an anti-ballistic missile system:

Preventive military action against Iran by either the United States or Israel is an unattractive option, given its risks and costs. But it needs to be examined carefully as a last-ditch alternative to the dangers of living with an Iranian bomb. To increase Israel's tolerance for extended diplomatic engagement, the U.S. government should bolster Israel's deterrent capabilities by providing an enhanced anti-ballistic-missile defense capability and a nuclear guarantee.

These people are completely insane. It's like walking into an updated version of Dr. Strangelove.

But the skinny is, yes, indeed, the occupation will continue. The over/under bet is still at 50,000. And Foreign Affairs will take the over.

Euphemisms

2008-12-15T12:00:00.002-05:00

First, pardon the format changes. I'll be fiddling some more with this template, but at least the fonts now seem to be in control.

There's a question I've been asking, in different forms, for about four years now. (The oldest versions are in the lost archives of Talking Points Memo. Lesson: Do not trust any server but your own.)

I asked it here, last week, and in Swampland comments a day or two ago.

Today's version goes like this. The end result in Iraq is supposed to be an elected government, a sovereign state that does not have any effective national defense force, with no American "combat troop" presence that is allied with the US.

Because this is pretty clearly defines a null set of outcomes--no representative government in Iraq could be pro-American, given recent past history, America's tight relationship with Israel and the affinity of the majority Shiites with the Iranian government--I've been asking what we really should expect to happen in Iraq in the medium to long term.

Today, Joe Klein provides some of the euphemisms that will be used to describe the permanent occupation of Iraq.

(G)oing forward, the relationship between Iraq's security forces and the U.S. military--locked in by spare parts, logistics and training regimes--could be every bit as significant as Iraq's fraternal Shi'ite ties with Iran.

What this actually means is that the US will have a significant troop presence, including armor and air "training" forces for Iraqi's who aren't allowed to fly planes or drive tanks. The logistical tail for this force will continue to be provided by the US military. And, naturally, the US will play a critical role in deciding who will be allowed to be a candidate for the positions of Prime Minister and President.

Any bets on the over/under for June 2010? I'm going with 50,000. That's the number the permanent bases were built for. That's the number Cheney said the US would draw down to in a few months, after Saddam's capture.

It will be interesting to watch how the euphemisms grow, flower, and take seed in the media. It will also be interesting to see whether Iran will sit still for this. It's no wonder that, worldwide, the US is seen as the most pressing threat to peace.

WOTD

2008-12-14T08:21:00.005-05:00

My nominee, anyway. Peter Baker

Obama's core political advisors were circling the wagons:

Even though Mr. Obama had no known personal involvement, the Clinton veterans understood that was only part of the issue. They had Mr. Obama publicly declare he had never spoken with Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich about the Senate appointment. They imposed a cone of silence on colleagues so they would not make a remark that could come back to haunt them. And they ordered an internal inquiry to document any contacts with the governor’s advisers.
Republicans were ready to pounce, rushing out statements linking Mr. Obama to Mr. Blagojevich within an hour or so after the governor’s arrest was reported. They too knew the script and that any opening must be exploited. Politics in this hyperpartisan age, after all, is the ultimate contact sport.

So we have Republicans making baseless attacks. And the media reporting those baseless attacks. What does this mean?

Indeed, except for brief interludes, Washington in the last decade has been governed by a climate of anger and animosity, a modern-day tribalism pitting faction against faction that some trace to the days of the impeachment.

Right. While the current president has routinely flouted the law, treated Congress with contempt, refused to comply with subpoenas all with the support of bloc voting Republicans, we can be sure that both sides are to blame.

Indeed. Our usual NY Times expert on partisan Democrats speaks out:

“

It definitely poisoned the well on both sides,” said Representative Peter T. King of New York, one of the few Republicans to vote against impeachment. “Without getting into the merits of anything, there’s no doubt there were Democrats waiting from the day George Bush took office to even the score for Bill Clinton. And Republicans are the same today with Barack Obama and the Rod Blagojevich scandal.”

Right. We'rre talking about the Democrats who took impeachment off the table, the Democrats who caved on major policy decisions ranging from the botched invasion and occupation of Iraq to providing immunity to telecommunications companies that violated the law and the Constitution with a domestic spying operation..

And now, Obama is apparently contributing to this poisoned environment by having the termerity to suggest that the baseless charages are, well, baseless.

Of course, the baseless impeachment, unpopular and fruitless--conviction was impossible--poisoned the political environment, but didn't do much damage to Clinton.

In some ways, Mr. Clinton emerged better off than his foes. He remains on the world stage and, with Hillary Rodham Clinton about to become secretary of state, is opening a new chapter. Most of those who pursued the charges have retreated from public life.
Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston and Tom DeLay, the House Republican leaders at the time, all eventually resigned under pressure for various reasons. Only 3 of the 13 House Republican “managers” who prosecuted Mr. Clinton in the Senate trial will still be in Congress when Mr. Obama is inaugurated.

Imagine. The two former speakers who, having been sexually involved with a staffer, pursued impeachment because the president was sexually involved with a staffer. And this didn't work out well for them. The other guy, Tom Delay, crowed about his crookedness, and is on his way to hoosegow.

Of course, Republicans acted from high-minded principle when they impeached Clinton, just before picking the staffer shtupping Livingston:

But those managers still believe they did the right thing holding a president to account for breaking the law. “It was a high-stakes battle over historic American values, the rule of law and the Constitution,” former Representative Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said in an interview this year. “I hope that will be the first line of history — it was a battle over values of extreme importance. Having said that, I think the second line will be that partisan differences meant that they were unable to find a bipartisan solution.”

The bipartisan solution, of course would have been to skip the baseless and doomed impeachment effort.

But the impeachment represented the triumph of partisanship on both sides of the aisle, a partisanship that remains today. Democrats made a calculated decision to stick by a president of their party no matter his transgressions and to promote partisan division in the Congressional proceedings so they could discredit the other side. Republicans were so intent on turning out Mr. Clinton that they turned away from opportunities for a bipartisan solution.

(emphasis mine). That Baker can write this speaks volumes about the Clinton rules, or, as the Blago angle keeps being pursued, the Democratic rules. It's not like Baker is unaware of Bush's transgressions.

The result has been a distaste for impeachment but little appetite for consensus. Liberal Democrats agitated to impeach Mr. Bush in connection with the Iraq war, warrantless surveillance and interrogation policies, but party leaders had no interest in going down that road again. “Although there are powerful arguments that President Bush has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, there are questions about whether it is prudent to do so,” said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale Law School professor.

So the dirty fucking hippies believed, as Patrick Fitzgerald said last week, nobody is above the law. The supposedly hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington made it "imprudent" to impeach the president. Those sternly worded letters from Henry Waxman were pretty much equivalent to the unending, baseless political accusations aimed at Clinton. Sternly worded letters are pretty much the equivalent of accusations of murder and an endless fishing expedition by a special prosecutor.

So now's the time to chime in with the next key Republican talking point--that impeaching Bush for breaking the law would impeachment over "policy differences."

Mr. Bush’s defenders would strenuously disagree. In their minds, the very talk of impeachment over policy differences represents the real cost of the Clinton clash. Mr. Bush, after all, campaigned for office promising to sweep out the toxic atmosphere in Washington, only to find that his disputed election had further polarized the capital and the nation. As he prepares to take leave eight years later, he calls his inability to change the political climate one of his regrets.

Of course, what Bush did when he took office was to do all he could to promote that toxic atmosphere, by making appointments and adopting policies that were more consistent with a landslide than a popular vote defeat. And the effect of the Clinton impeachment was to so politicize the act that even when we had a president who would have been, and should have been, justly impeached, he was allowed to flout the law and behave in the most authoririan of ways. There have now been two impeachments in American history, both for political purposes, which has stripped the nation of its power to remove a corrupt, authoritarian president from office.

It is, in the end, worth noting that when historians do look back, wondering what happened to Congress in this time period, they will spend their time trying to understand why the Republicans chose this president over their country, their constitution, and, for many, their seats. There are many dirty hippies angry at Nancy Pelosi's inaction after a clear message from voters in 2006. But the real culprits were the Republicans, who have become so partisan, so polarized that there is no Howard Baker, no Bill Cohen in the party any longer.

They are going to need wankers like Peter Baker if they are to be anything other than a dwindling regional party of modern Know-Nothings.

Media Matters expands on this.

Duh

2008-12-13T23:14:00.003-05:00

My comment on an Yglesias post was kinda terse.

But the characteristic of the Obama campaign was pretty simple. They were trying to win. They weren't trying to retain their cred, if they lost. They weren't using the well-worn strategies of the past. They weren't mindlessly sucked into new media.

The were running to win. Not IA or NH for its own sake. But the nomination. Not the daily news cycle, but the Presidency.

We can only hope that a similar focus extends into the Presidency--that Obama has a four year vision, not a news cycle vision.

Soft SOFA

2008-12-10T08:31:00.004-05:00

I'm starting to get an Alice in Wonderland feeling about plans for a US withdrawal from Iraq, under the SOFA, following Obama's "combat troops" out in 16 months in the context of the reality of the Iraqi situation.

So, I'm thinking maybe I'm just wrong about stuff, that I've not been keeping up. But, as far as I can tell, the context is still:

Any government, no matter how representative, will have Shiite Arabs running the country, with a practically autonomous province run by Sunni Kurds (with Kirkuk in dispute).

There will be no Iraqi national defense capability, to speak of--no air, no armor, no logistical capability.
The US and Israel are quite unpopular in Iraq, and will be for the foreseeable future
The Iraqis expect to have actual elections

I do not see how an Iraqi government emerges, within this context, that remains allied with the United States, in the absence of occupation forces. Any such government would have to be selected in some way other than through a representative electoral process. I suppose that the US can continue to play its pre-election role in Iraq that the clerics play in Iran through the next election, but after that, I don't see how that can happen.

The original plan, of course, was to install a pro-American, English-speaking*, strong man with trappings of apparent elections, but with a result, as Cheney said in 2003, acceptable to the US. NOT like those Palestinian elections. Leaving aside the insane idea that this strong man was supposed to be Chalabi, I don't see how a pro-American (and hence, pro-Israel) government can possibly come to and hold power in Iraq.

I also don't see how relations between Iraq and Iran do not become closer. Again, this would conflict with the need for a continued US/Iraqi client-state relationship. Even a government installed by the US, propped up with "foreign aid" and supported, in defense terms by air and armor placed over the border would find it difficult to support US bellicosity with Iran.

Now it may be that Obama will retire the Axis of Evil, and try to improve relations with Iran. This certainly is an overripe prospect; the question is whether it has rotted out entirely, as the US position has weakened, steadily if not precipitously, in the region. It may be that Governor Richardson's idea of a regional security pact may be negotiated, with Syria, Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia agreeing to leave a defenseless Iraq alone.

But even so, I simply don't see how the US can withdraw and not leave Iran as the major player in the region, with, at best, a face-saving agreement with Iraq that is pretty much limited to oil concessions. And that's the best case scenario.

The worst is an eruption of civil war by proxies of the surrounding states, with the possibility of the conflict crossing borders along ethnic lines, with Saudi Shiites and Turkish Kurds drawn into the conflict, while the isolated, but still angry Sunni Arab Iraqis keep things complicated in Baghdad.

What's bothering me here, more than anything else, is the absence of any discussion of these issues, publicly. Contingency planning for these instances have to be going on, even if nobody is telling the president about them, right? A real plan is being worked out to not make things still worse, even if that does mean a much diminished US role? The possibility of a two-state solution in Israel as part of an overall plan to tamp down the violence is being discussed? Right? By somebody who has some idea about what they're doing?

----------------

*It's ridiculous that this seems be a required criterion for American support of a ruler. It enormously limits the possible candidates.

Keller

2008-12-08T23:35:00.003-05:00

I cannot believe Bill Keller, NYT Executive Editor, said this referring to Obama:

And even your most devoted admirers don't want to rely just on you for word of what the government's up to, and what it means."

Tell that to Risen and Lichtblau. And to all of the people who voted for Bush, not knowing of his illegal surveillance.

Link, so you know I am not making this up.

Glenn Greenwald, digby talk about Versailles. Seems over the top, sometimes.

It's not.

Billy "Big Government" Kristol

2008-12-08T08:41:00.004-05:00

The countdown is at 5 more flaccid, ill-reasoned pleas for conservatives to find some semblance of rationality, influence, and a vague consistency with some revamped verdict of fifty years of lying rhetoric. Today's is particularly funny.

First off, he admits (discovers, apparently) that the central theme of conservativism--small government--has always been, well, a lie.

It turns out, in the real world of Republican governance, that there aren’t a whole lot of small-government Republicans.
Five Republicans have won the presidency since 1932: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. Only Reagan was even close to being a small-government conservative. And he campaigned in 1980 more as a tax-cutter and national-defense-builder-upper, and less as a small-government enthusiast in the mold of the man he had supported — and who had lost — in 1964, Barry Goldwater. And Reagan’s record as governor and president wasn’t a particularly government-slashing one.
Even the G.O.P.’s 1994 Contract With America made only vague promises to eliminate the budget deficit, and proposed no specific cuts in government programs.

It's true, Billy. Not one Republican Senate, not one Republican Congress, not one Republican President, has ever proposed a budget smaller than the one the year before. Turns out the real difference is that conservatives are all for big government, they just don't want to pay for it.

If you more or less accept big government, you’ll be open to the government’s stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry. But you’ll tend to favor those policies — universal tax cuts, offering everyone a chance to refinance his mortgage, relieving auto makers of burdensome regulations — that, consistent with conservative principles, don’t reward irresponsible behavior and don’t politicize markets.

This one is sort of a laff riot. Universal tax cuts while the budget grows. So we can strike that "fiscally prudent" bit off the list too. And, yeah, he really did put "save the financial system" in just before he said "don't reward irresponsible behavior."

Like Douthat yesterday, it's really remarkable to see these guys squirming, trying to revive their bumper sticker policy-making. Their positions never really made sense, but they were protected by always being able to blame the branches they didn't control from letting true conservatism flower. So they never truly had the opportunity to deregulate, to cut taxes for the rich, to show the power of the marketplace to create jobs and fuel robust economic growth.

Until they did.

It turns out there is still one principle left intact--the mine-shaft gap.

Billy's close includes:

You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security — directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs.

Douthat Compromised

2008-12-08T08:15:00.004-05:00

Yesterday Ross Douthat had an absurdist op-ed in the NYT, where he claimed that pro-choice folks are "absolutist" while the generous, thoughtful and carefully reasoning pro-life people were seeking compromise.

Well, first, what digby said.

But the ball is in the court of the anti-choicers. They refuse to accept the compromise that has been written into law stating that abortions can't be easily obtained after the first trimester and more recently can't be obtained at all after the second. That's a compromise and a very real and serious one. And it's not enough. In fact, nothing will be enough until abortion is outlawed.

And then they will begin the war on condoms in earnest. In fact,they've already started.

This is a pair of key points. First, Roe v Wade IS a compromise, a compromise between the pregnant woman and the developing fetus. It's a compromise that reflects the broad public consensus of safe, legal, rare and early. Second this is not about abortion. It's about reducing women's status, removing their authority over their reproductive lives. Abortion is just the ickiest part of this, so that's where they focus.

The "compromise" Douthat seeks does not reflect the actually difficult social issue of the status of a developing fetus viable some time before birth versus a woman's right to control her own body and her own reproductive decisions. The "compromise" he is talking about is having the state regulate who is eligible to exert this control.

Barely nubile young women raped by their fathers whose lives would be endangered by the pregnancy qualify. After that, eligibility should be determined by how the pregnancy happened. Parental notification to discourage teenagers. Waiting periods. Mandatory "counseling." He doesn't mention shunning, but I'm sure it's on his list. It's this kind of thinking that made (shockingly) Sarah Palin a heroine, because of her daughter's commitment to "abstinence" and the pregnancy that so frequently results.

This isn't a serious argument. The column is labored, because he has to dance around the obvious compromise, the one that has always been on the table--improved sex education for teens, and public health measures to ensure broader availability and use of contraception.

If this were really about abortion, there would be condoms in every pew.

Stupid Hippies

2008-11-29T07:54:00.002-05:00

I am now passed irked and into ticked off. EJ Dionne:

Obama's national security choices are already causing grumbling from parts of the antiwar left, even if Obama made clear six years ago that while he was with them on Iraq, he was not one of them.
Ironically, Obama is likely to show more fidelity to George H.W. Bush's approach to foreign affairs than did the former president's own son. That's change, maybe even change we can believe in, but it's not the change so many expected.

If EJ wants to make claims like this, he needs some quotations. Because none of the dirty fucking hippies I know had any doubts about Obama's foreign policy plans. In fact, Glenn Greenwald has been writing for years about the Democratic establishment in Washington being completely on board with (what I call) the Great American Hegemony Project, that having a seat at a foreign policy table in Washington requires committing to the use of military force, on a routine, unilateral basis.

There was never any indication, whatsoever, that Obama was not part of this Village Society. In fact, it was so clear that he was part of the Village that he was never popular with the left wing of the party. It's true that Obama was forced into voting against a supplemental bill that many of the left believed he supported, in his heart of hearts. And it's true he was forced to distance himself from Samantha Power after she made remarks that cast doubt upon the seriousness of his sixteenth month Iraq withdrawal plan. But nobody is surprised that he has just put Power into a position on his transition team, at least nobody who was paying attention during the campaign.

This narrative--that this is an unexpected direction is taking hold. It's false, and its effect will be to undermine a Presidency that we very badly need to succeed.

Faeries

2008-11-28T11:06:00.003-05:00

Karl Rove, via a Matt Browner-Hamlin tweet, quotes Michael Boskin:

Stanford economist Michael Boskin reminds us that conservatives favor permanent, or long-lived, measures to revive the economy -- incentives like lower income-tax rates, actions to speed recovery of capital costs like bonus depreciation, and steps with an immediate effect on job creation such as cuts in corporate tax rate.

He left out the fairy dust. What makes them think that they can just keep repeating this stuff, over and over again, and thus make it true? Any cuts like this are necessary temporary, mostly driven by manipulation of tax returns, and proven not to work over the eight year Bush administration implementation of such policies.

Permanent policies like this can't have any particular effect. One of the things that is bad about such policies is that, if markets work, their value gets incorporated into the price of whatever securities are involved. Take the home mortgage deduction. The value of that tax deduction is in the price of the house you buy. Look at this two ways. First, if you've ever been to a realtor, they have this work sheet, entitled "How much can you pay?" and work up the highest possible monthly payment you can afford, net of the tax benefit. This was true even when banks required 20 percent downpayments. Second, think what would happen if the mortgage tax deduction were eliminated. Prices would fall, right?

Same thing here. If investors demand X% return after tax, lowering taxes can only have a one-time effect, not a permanent effect. In practice, what happens is that these taxes get jerked around, shifting spending according to the tax calendar rather than business requirements. In a first best world, there would be no corporate income tax in any case. There would be individual taxes, at the rate regardless of source.

(And, in my first best world, confiscatory estate taxes.)

Thankgiving Change

2008-11-28T08:49:00.003-05:00

Well, it took several conversations, but I finally understand. I've been finding it pretty inexplicable that people regard it as surprising that Obama's appointments are in the least bit unexpected, or inconsistent with his message of change. I've been seeing on the blogosphere more of the former, but I'm having a hard time distinguishing these posts as actual disappointment, or lobbying for a leftward shift in the appointments. As folks at FireDogLake, Eschaton, DailyKos have been saying all along, the guy ran as a centrist. It's not surprising that he is making appointments from the center of the party. Obama promised to get things done. He is not going to get things done if his appointees spend the first six months getting up to speed.

Jane did a nice job on Rachel Maddow's show summarizing this point of view, in the video above.

(Nice to see a guest lineup that represents a little more of America. Just sayin'.)

In any case, I haven't heard much, other than in the traditional media, that these appointments are an indication that Obama has backed away from his campaign commitment to "Change,' by not choosing radically enough. I thought this was just a lazy media narrative, and another application of the Clinton rules. Since all Obama can do, visibly, at this stage is make high-level appointments, it's an easy story to write to say "Okay, so, where's the Change?" As atrios has pointed out, as well, this seems to reflect the media buying McCain's campaign's presentation of Obama as some kind of wild-eyed, socialist radical who would be putting David Sirota in as Treasury Secretary and Cliff Schecter as Chief Spokesman.

However, I didn't figure it out until the T-Day conversations, but there is something else going on here. When I tried to say that if you want change, good places to start are ending the radical policies of the Bush administration, returning to Constitutional precepts, the resuming the foreign policy consensus of the last 50 years (the "pragmatic," "realistic" Great American Hegemony Project discussed in each issue of Foreign Affairs), sane fiscal policy, a shift to a less regressive system of taxation, and the application of laws and regulations passed by Congress and signed by the President. Pointing out this is quite a bit of change was met with, shall we say, skepticism.

Of course, I said that a little less succinctly, in the event. And used different pieces of it at a time.

The point is that most people do not seem to regard the last administration as significantly different in form or philosophy from the Clinton administration. They simply see it as less effective, and less competent. And, frankly, not that much less competent. As the media focuses on the seeds of some of these policies of fiscal deregulation as set in the Clinton era, the extreme nature of the Bush administration is going to become blurred.

It's ironic that the left blogosphere assists in this blurring, with many people viewing the Clinton administration as not progressive. Just be aware that this was Ralph Nader's argument in 2000, that the two parties are essentially identical. It was for this reason that Summers looks to have been a bad choice, even in a behind the scenes advisory role. He and Rubin are seen as progenitors in the current narrative, even though Greenspan and the Fed look to be the source of most of the difficulty. Oh, and the Bush SEC relaxing leverage rules ( to 30-1) on uninsured institutions that were too big to fail.

But that's neither here nor there. The Change theme is going to cause trouble throughout the transition. Not enough movement leftward for either lobbying or disillusioned lefties, not different enough for centrists who don't understand just how radical the Bush Administration was, and a source of derision of the "Drill baby drill" style from the right. "So where's all the change?"

The only response that can be made is that there have been a few dozen people, nameless, who have been working on the policy elements of the new administration for months. All indications are that policy is going to come from the White House, not the Cabinet. And as much as Little Tommy Friedman would like to move the inauguration up, putting his Suck.On. This. nightmare into the past, this will have to wait until January 20th.

FDIC

2008-11-24T20:04:00.002-05:00

I tweeted this already. It's probably not any better with more characters.

The story we invidual suckers have been told is that if you want to keep your money safe, then it should be in FDIC insured accounts, with the maximum of 100,000 dollars. At my co-op (a 40 unit building in NYC), we manage our holdings to make sure that none of our capital reserve exceeds that amount at any one bank.

So we have, for years, accepted lower yields than we could have gotten in other investments because our investments were safe.

I suppose they are just as safe. But it turns out that if you were betting the corporation, over and over again, on red vs black you were also safe.

Moral hazard? It's what for breakfast.

Why would anybody, ever, be prudent?

Netroots Primer Part 1

2008-11-23T10:47:00.004-05:00

Predictably enough, the last week’s developments, particularly the first round of Cabinet appointments, and Joe Lieberman’s continued chairmanship generated a lot of blogospheric discussion. And just as predictably, the traditional media and their unnamed sources made remarks regarding the unhinged left once again not getting their way. Of course, now the codeword for “the unhinged left” is “the netroots,” or as we like to call ourselves, in parody of the attendant derision, the dirty fucking hippies*.

Reading a couple of articles, several posts and some comment threads, I realized we need a primer for those who came to the movement during this election cycle.

“The netroots” is obviously a coinage related to “grassroots.” People who regard themselves as members of the netroots see themselves as a collection of ordinary citizens using the internet to organize. The simplest way to think of the netroots is as an open source citizens’ lobbyist group.

“Open source” means “anyone can participate.” “Citizens’ lobbyist group” means “people who are trying to influence government in the general public interest.”

All lobbyists say this bit about the general public interest, of course. I suspect even the guy who lobbies for the retention of mohair subsidy has a spiel worked out on how terribly important it is to America that mohair producers not be subjected to foreign competition. I doubt he uses the original national security argument, as we stopped using mohair in Army uniforms sometime after World War I.

But we really mean it. It turns out this is disconcerting to elected officials. At least, in my personal experience you get a double-take if, in response to a staffer who says (and they do invariably say this) “Who are you with?”, you say, “Nobody.”

Lobbyists try to advance the interests of the causes they represent by

1) Talking to elected officials and their staffs, explaining the importance of their clients’ interests

2) Providing information about the impact of legislation on their clients, to the point that they are frequently involved in early drafts of the relevant parts of that legislation

3) Bribing elected officials.

The first two methods are self-evident, and actually make some sense. Most people don’t know a whole lot about the mohair industry, and it’s entirely possible that nobody on some Congressional staffs that are charged with reviewing the current set of tariffs and subsidies knows anything at all about mohair production. However, it also seems self-evidently wrong to have an industry being regulated actually writing the legislation.

The bribery thing needs some explanation. (By the way, one reason they call us dirty fucking hippies is we say stuff like this out loud in polite company.) There are all sorts of ways that lobbyists bribe Congressmen. The first, most open, and therefore, least effective is through campaign contributions. That is not to say that it is not effective. One reason the turnover rate in Congress, up until the last two sessions anyway, was less than that of the Politburo’s, is because incumbents provide a very high rate of return on campaign contributions. 40,000 dollars from your industry can easily generate a hundred million dollars worth of contracts. One way to see this rate of return is by checking the relationship between an elected official’s committee assignments and his donors.

Less visible is lifestyle enhancement. Senators and Members of Congress don’t make very much money relative to the amounts of money they control the disbursement of, even when you include perqs. The people seeking to influence those disbursements don’t make large fractions of those disbursements for influencing them, but small fractions of those very large numbers still leaves them with salaries in the millions and tens of millions. So lobbyists provide access to a lifestyle substantially swankier than the public servant salaries would support. As Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens demonstrate, there are limits to how much of this lifestyle enhancement you can get away with. And, as William Jefferson demonstrated, you’re much better off sticking to enhancement in kind.

Next up are lucrative jobs for spouses and staff. Spouses can be very complicated. Elected officials are often already married to wealthy people with interests in government affairs before they assume office. Sometimes it’s probably true that they would not have been able to get elected at all without those spousal connections. Other times, the spouse finds doors open for lucrative employment, following the election, that would not have been available beforehand. Likewise, elected officials are dependent on staff who are very talented, very well educated, very diligent and very underpaid. Long term relationships with staffers often leads to their spending parts of their careers in lobbying organizations making boatloads of money. (It’s easy to think of McCain here, but he’s just been very visible lately. Recall the recent stories about Democrats telling K Street that there better be some Democratic jobs opening up.)

Last and not least are jobs for yourself when you leave office. Tom Daschle left office, and walked into a job that pays millions. So, in office, you can be sure that you will be able to continue your swanky lifestyle when you leave, thanks to your lobbyist friends.

Of course, it’s not as crass as this description. What really happens is that if you’re a Senator, you are treated the same way as a captain of industry, hob-nobbing with other rich people, even married to one, becoming concerned for their needs, and they for yours (Bob Dole spent his entire career, pre-retirement, in public service, and left office a rich man). You come to take a certain lifestyle for granted, a certain deference, a certain collection of friends. There comes a time when it is not self-evidently a bad idea to have them writing legislation regulating themselves.

This also means you don’t see many ordinary citizens.

This is where the netroots come in. People have noticed that it is hard to get in touch with your Member of Congress or Senator (despite, as Christy Hardin Smith likes to say, he or she works for you) unless you are part of these lobbying groups. But there wasn’t a whole lot you could do about that, other than throwing things at the teevee and stomping around.

Moreover, many people have noticed that our elected officials aren’t passing laws in the interest of the general public, but rather in the interests of the lobbyists they spend so much time with. The internet made it possible for people who had been throwing things at their teevees to meet each other and organize, in the hopes of turning more legislators' attention to the common good.

The netroots have two goals.

Lobbying public officials to vote in their constituents’ interest and in the public interest.
Getting public officials elected who will vote in their constituents’ interest, and in the public interest.

You’ll note there is no ideology in this formulation. However, it turns out that most of the time when actions are taken that are in the public interest, they end up falling to the left of the currently defined political spectrum. There are exceptions. The Wall Street bailout covered the political spectrum. Everybody was against it, left, right and center. Many, many people told their elected officials they were against it. It passed nonetheless. (More and more it looks like the general public was right about this.) But, in general, the issues that interest the netroots involve preservation of civil liberties, women's reproductive rights, reduced use and size of the military, more effective regulation of corporations, a more equal income distribution, recognition of climate change as a problem, and a generally reality-based approach to governance. As things currently stand these are positions left of center, hence the term “left blogosphere.”

But you will find that most of the positions the left blogosphere support are positions that are also supported by the majority of Americans, often by wide margins. Mainstream America is against the war in Iraq, against domestic surveillance, against immunity for lawbreaking corporations, in favor of products being tested for safety, in favor of products being labeled accurately, for universal health care coverage, for the right to get a morning after pill and so forth. Oh, and they don't like President Bush. At all.

This is the end of part 1 of this primer.

Summary:

The netroots is an open source citizens’ lobbying group, that tries to advance causes in the public interest through citizen actions and through support of candidates who vote in the public interest.

-------------------------

*Exegesis of this phrase, which I suspect was coined by Atrios, is worth a footnote. It’s a shorthand reference to various narratives about commentators in the left blogosphere. The “hippie” part are those that make us out to be a bunch a crazy, flower-tossing, stoned fantasists, with no understanding of the real world, hopelessly trapped in a mythical version of the sixties. The dirty part refers to our being unfit for polite company, Vinny from Queens, posting drivel from his parents’ basement dressed in his underwear while covered in Cheetoh dust. The “fucking” part refers to the fact some of us actually use the words in our phosphor print that are used in august places like the Senate cloakroom or the New York Times newsroom.

We embraced the phrase because it is shorthand way of noting the absurdity of these characterizations.

Policy vs Power

2008-11-22T09:15:00.004-05:00

Fifteen years ago, Bill Kristol famously wrote a memo* saying that Clinton's health care plan had to be stopped at all costs, because it would be so popular in the general public that Republicans would lose the middle class. Steve Benen has a piece in the Monthly this morning about the current plan to stop reform at all costs. The key point to take away from this is they oppose universal health care because, in parallel with Social Security, it would be very effective policy, and therefore popular with the middle class and most Americans.

And therefore must be stopped.

There could not be a clearer statement of where these people's interest lies. They do not decide that they need to find a market based method that will be just as effective. They work as hard as they can to make millions of Americans are without health care, miserable thereby, and will be willing to vote Republican.

----------------

*December 2, 1993 - Leading conservative operative William Kristol privately circulates a strategy document to Republicans in Congress. Kristol writes that congressional Republicans should work to "kill" -- not amend -- the Clinton plan because it presents a real danger to the Republican future: Its passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party. Nearly a full year before Republicans will unite behind the "Contract With America," Kristol has provided the rationale and the steel for them to achieve their aims of winning control of Congress and becoming America's majority party. Killing health care will serve both ends. The timing of the memo dovetails with a growing private consensus among Republicans that all-out opposition to the Clinton plan is in their best political interest. Until the memo surfaces, most opponents prefer behind-the-scenes warfare largely shielded from public view. The boldness of Kristol's strategy signals a new turn in the battle. Not only is it politically acceptable to criticize the Clinton plan on policy grounds, it is also politically advantageous. By the end of 1993, blocking reform poses little risk as the public becomes increasingly fearful of what it has heard about the Clinton plan.

Republican Collapse

2008-11-21T14:03:00.002-05:00

Josh wonders about two consecutive wave elections, for the same party. These are as he points out very rare. To have a large number of swing seats fall to one party in one year means there shouldn't be any left for following election, and that some of them should swing back.

Instead, it surged, with the Republicans losing MS-2, Delay's seat and Hastert's seat before the election proper and still more after that. Nobody predicted 56+1+1 (which still may become 57+1+1) in the Senate in 2006, although people like digby (and myself) were more optimistic than the conventional wisdom.

Josh wonders about this, which is the key, IMO.

For a brief interlude after the election, it looked like the congressional GOP might move into some sort of quasi-opposition to the president, at least distance themselves significantly from him. If you remember, there was a brief period of equivocation on Iraq. And then, nothing. Within a month or so, it was clear that elected Republicans were doubling down on President Bush, the Iraq War and pretty much everything else. And that decision was reflected in the presidential nominating campaign as well.

Josh wasn't the only person confused by this. I recall, very distinctly, Schumer saying he expected withdrawal from Iraq to receive Republican support by the end of the summer. While this was just one more Friedman unit, the 2006 election had made it clear that the public was very unhappy. When the Republicans remained in their bloc, and decided they were going to drive their party over a cliff in fealty to Bush, Reid and Schumer were perfectly well pleased.

It seemed crazy that people like Chris Shays and Gordon Smith would risk their seats over an occupation that could be, at best, a foreign policy disaster, one that the public had firmly said they wanted nothing to do with. The President's popularity was cratering, the undermining of Social Security had failed, and the Republicans could point to not one single success. It seemed, at the time, that you'd have to be crazy not to start voting against the President if you wanted to keep your seat in a fair number of districts. Moreso in the Senate, where there were a lot of seats up, immune from gerrymandering.

As one of Josh's reader points out, then came Katrina, which both illustrated and symbolized the Republicans incapacity for governing, at least under this president. And yet, still, they doubled down.

And still, with their favorability falling to low double digits, the Democrats on the Hill continued to mount feeble protests of "I've fallen down and I can't get up" variety, and let the Republicans control the agenda. Only on issues where there was broad Republican support were bills successful. If the Republicans voted in unanimity, then the bills were killed.

The effect was (and I'm still surprised that it worked) that the Republicans owned every bad thing that happened over the last eight years. People were indeed angry at the Democrats too, as in that link from November 2007 where I also raised this issue, but it's one thing to blame Schumer for Mukasey (and I did, and I do) but Bush nominated him and all the Republicans, from Coleman to Smith voted for him.

I still don't understand why. All I can think is that they thought they could suppress enough votes, legally and illegally, to keep a reasonable number of seats, without having to risk being subject to a primary from the right. So I guess it's appropriate that Josh Marshall inspired this post. Because it may that when historians look back, they will point to his work in exposing the plans to win the purple states by hook or by crook. Further irony here is that, if this was the case, the blowback was brutal. The response to the problems in 2004 and 2006 was to implement early voting more widely. Early voting is death to the Republican suppression tactics, from the legal (last minute false oppo ad that can't be refuted in time, challenges at the polling place) to the unethical (scaring people into thinking they'll be arrested) to the illegal (phone-jamming, filing false charges) to the beyond reprehensible (putting a governor in jail for having the temerity to win.

Conservative Principles

2008-11-21T10:00:00.004-05:00

DemfromCT points me to Russ Douthat, who tries to make an argument about restoring conservativism :

This problem is not, repeat not, a matter of conservatives needing to abandon their core convictions in order to win elections, as right-of-center reformers are often accused of doing. Rather, it's a matter of conservatives needing to apply their core convictions to questions like "how do we mitigate the worst effects of climate change?" and "how do we modernize our infrastructure?" and "how do we encourage excellence and competition within our public school bureaucracy?" instead of just letting liberals completely monopolize these debates, while the Right talks about porkbusting and not much else.

This attempt to rekindle the faith is touching. But it's no longer possible to sustain the set of lies that conservatives have been telling about their core principles. The mythological conservative, firm believer in market principles and their application to sound policy formation demonstrably does not exist. The people who believe that sort of thing are called economists, and reside all across the ideological spectrum, although with their reflexive belief in market processes generally lean somewhat to the right of center. Sometimes their ideas are hijacked by conservatives; that's pretty much what AEI is about. But when they, say, advocate a voucher system of education, that is no more about a voucher system for education as is an anti-abortion stance about abortion. The former is about breaking the teachers unions. The latter is about the central goal of the conservative program: the restoration of the supremacy of the white (straight) male.

We went through a version of this during the Reagan administration, when the manager of the Office of Management and Budget styled himself a libertarian. The oxymoronic nature of that stylization seemed to escape most observers, but there it was.

At this point, though, it's impossible to do anything other than echo Chico Marx: "Who you gonna believe? Me? Or your own lying eyes?" Given the keys to the castle, the sports car, not to mention the liquor cabinet, conservatives have demonstrated that they are, if anything, the polar opposite of principles they espouse when out of power. That it's Douthat's generation's turn is his misfortune, because this time, they held power for long enough to expose that these conservative principles are shams.

The policy direction under not merely Republican control, but conservative Republican control--Inhofe, not Snowe, Delay, not Shays--has been toward centralization of political power in the executive, centralization of economic power in the hands of a large corporations, at the expense of small businesses, and a rapid growth in government engaged essentially in income transfers from households to corporate management and shareholders. These transfers take various forms: direct subsidy as with big agribusiness, price hikes through monopolies create by patent and copyright law as with big media and big pharma, replacement of civil servants and soldiers with private contractors like Blackwater and Verizon and, of course, the socialization of any losses--financial or environmental--that unfortunately happen from time to time.

Ths authoritarian program exists in a framework of unreality. Douthat mentions climate change as something that conservatives need to deal with using market mechanisms. This is, of course, what those economists I mentioned above recommend. But this is not what modern conservatives recommend. They recommend denial. This denial extends across a remarkable swath of reality, to the point that a candidate for Vice President's family planning practice consisted of recommending abstience with crossed fingers, and celebrating any teenaged, unwed pregnancy that results. This denial of reality in the realm of the individual household, "the castle" consists of advocating the state impose these fantasies onto non-compliant individuals. This is not hypothetical. Whenever possible they act to impose their fantastic beliefs onto their fellow citizens, as in North Dakota and its abortion law, in the president's executive order defining a 4 cell blastocyst as a child or with the insistence that the state purposely teach other people's children outright falsehoods.

That is, the answer to Douthat's three questions is, "They don't." They don't believe in climate change. They don't believe in maintaining infrastructure. They don't believe in better public education.

Douthat can say that he believes in these things. But American conservatives do not. Republicans do not. He really needs to get his nose out of The Fountainhead and look around, because if he believes this stuff, he is not a conservative.

Answering JMM

2008-11-20T16:17:00.002-05:00

JMM

It's a question worth considering in very real terms. How much would things be different if Barack Obama had been sworn in on November 5th?

It would be worse. Time is needed to make these transitions. We've made them earlier as transportation and communication technology has improved.

There's a tendency to focus on the shit that is happening now, is breathing hard, and is getting covered. But it's a lot better to follow Obama's model, with a longer view.

It's funny. Since Ford, he's our JockEst president. He enjoys team sports, and plays at least one well. One thing that you do get.in team sports, is a commitment to the common goal. There's a lot of "Team of Rivals" dissin' out there. But every basketball team is a team of rivals. Working together for a common cause.

Obama needs to build a team. They will, in the event, be unhappy with their minutes. But that's the way it goes. Speeding the transition would make it harder to define roles, and build the team.

Homer? Or Some Other Guy With the Same Name?

2008-11-18T15:46:00.005-05:00

Michael Scherer pointing out Mike Huckabee's failure to get some biblical detail right inspired this, and I can't just leave it in a comment thread that nobody is gonna read. Better to put it here for people to not read, I figure.

This stuff really makes me laugh. Getting the details of things that aren't true, or real, but have been written down, right.

It was like reading the piece in the WSJ over the weekend about the Professor of Islam in Germany who was questioning the existence of an actual guy named Mohamed. Some other academic noted that the evidence for an actual guy named Jesus was a heckuva lot more tenuous, so the Mohamed thing was looking pretty good to him.

"Low bar," I said to myself. And it doesn't matter, really, because there are any number of details, like God coming down and dictating the thing to him that are obviously not true. There are so many details attributed to the figure that are clearly false that it doesn't really matter if the guy was a guy or is a composite of several guys, or whether there is some guy who one could generally say was the guy to whom (thanks Ben, playing KO quoting Churchill, caught that trailing preposition) they attribute all this not true stuff.

And then I mentioned this to someone else, and SHE said "Low bar on the Jesus thing? What about the God evidence? Goodness knows there isn't any of that. Not to mention a fair amount to the contrary."

Lieberman

2008-11-11T07:18:00.002-05:00

It's odd that with the election over, and Lieberman's traitorous ways having had no tangible effect, that it somehow makes perfect sense to me that Reid and Obama are more concerned about how many noses than they can count in the next year than with whom was standing beside McCain on platforms this year. Nobody has ticked me off more. Lamont would have been a great Democratic senator, and, instead, we have, well, Lieberman. As they say, more, better Democrats is what is needed, and Lieberman is neither.

So I understand why people are angry about this. But I ask those people to consider how they would react if Snowe or Collins (pro-choice, New Englanders who supported McCain but have the most liberal Republican voting records on the National Journal scorecard) switched parties. Would they say no, we don't want your kind?

New Rule

2008-11-07T08:55:00.003-05:00

Only pundits who excoriated Bush for appointing a divisive, ideological cabinet in 2000 is permitted to suggest that Obama should appoint a bipartisan cabinet.

Even that's a stretch; Bush lost the popular vote, almost certainly had more Floridians vote against him than for him, and was put in office in the worst way since Adams in 1824 (yes, worse than Hayes in 1876). But at least it would cut down on the number of them.

BoBo Variations

2008-11-07T08:17:00.004-05:00

David Brooks is concerned today.

Only 17 percent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most or all of the time, according to an October New York Times/CBS News poll.

So, therefore, the most intrusive elements of government, domestic spying, suspension of habeus corpus, secret executive orders, and the suspension of other Constitutional protections against untrustworthy government should be immediately revoked upon Obama's inauguration?

No.

So the members of my dream Obama administration understand that they cannot impose an ideological program the country does not accept. New presidents in 1932 and 1964 could presuppose a basic level of trust in government. But today, as Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution observes, the new president is going to have to build that trust deliberately and step by step.

Ah. So despite a decade of polling that shows broad support for a greater role in government in providing health care, education, and other social services, the case has not been made. Moreover, after two consecutive elections reject and repudiate, in no uncertain terms, the use of the Federal tax, regulatory and contracting apparatus to transfer income from poor to rich, any change must be taken deliberately.

What's the best way?

That means there won’t just be a few token liberal Republicans in marginal jobs. There will be people like Robert Gates at Defense and Ray LaHood, Stuart Butler, Diane Ravitch, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Jim Talent at other important jobs.

The Obama administration of my dreams will insist that Congressional Democrats reinstate bipartisan conference committees. They’ll invite G.O.P. leaders to the White House for real meetings and then re-invite them, even if they give hostile press conferences on the White House driveway.

Yep, the right way to restore trust in the US government is to reinstate the people who have just been repudiated, to the sounds of spontaneous cheers throughout the country--throughout the world for that matter. The most important step to be taken in a country where the government is not trusted to do its job is to put back into power the people who invaded Iraq and couldn't get around to dealing with Katrina, who have presided over the looting of the Treasury, and the destruction of the US credit marketplace.

Yeah. that's the ticket. Even if they give hostile press conferences after playing a significant policy-making role in a new bipartisan administration. That was the "bipartisanship" thing that just a few months ago was synonymous with "date rape."

They’ll do things conservatives disagree with, but they’ll also show that they’re not toadies of the liberal interest groups. They’ll insist on merit pay and preserving No Child Left Behind’s accountability standards, no matter what the teachers’ unions say. They’ll postpone contentious fights on things like card check legislation.
Most of all, they’ll take significant action on the problems facing the country without causing a mass freak-out among voters to the right of Nancy Pelosi.

That is, defense spending is off the table. And, yes, of course we can't freak out the country by ending the Cold War occupation of Germany, in the light of the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation ago and Japan, in light of the Chinese government holding markers on a good chunk of the American economy. (You don't knock off folks who owe you money.)

And then, Obama will turn the line item veto over to a Blue Dog Congressman:

My dream administration will announce a Budget Rebalancing Initiative. Somebody like Representative Jim Cooper would go through the budget and take out the programs and tax expenditures that don’t work. “If we have no spending cuts, then we’re saying government is perfect. Nobody believes that,” Cooper says

Yep. That's the kind of change BoBo believes in.

Underfunded

2008-10-31T12:10:00.003-04:00

The Washington Post has an article about McCain's closing advertising push, noting

The desire for parity on television comes at the expense of investment in paid boots on the ground," said one top Republican strategist who has been privy to McCain's plans. "The folks who will oversee the volunteer operation have been told to get out into the field on their own nickel."

This has been the central strategic issue of the campaign. McCain has suffered from being far behind Obama in money throughout the race. During the primaries, when McCain was down to a skeleton staff, Obama was opening field offices and developing ground forces in both primary and caucus states.

During advertising the general, McCain has caught a double-whammy. Not only is he limited to his federal matching funds (which is more than he could have raised), he's getting no support to speak of from 527 organizations. Not only does this stretch his ad dollars still more thinly, but the campaign iteself has to own all the most loathsome tactics that have been adopted.

Translation? He never sold his candidacy to the base. The campaign did everything they could, even picked a "whack-job" for Vice President, and he still isn't getting the love. Worse, no matter how heinous the tactic, he is still being criticized for going too easy on Obama from his right.

From, the beginning this was going to be a national media campaign, with expectations of a lot of earned media from a press corps that adored him. Kowtowing to the base not only cost McCain that critical adoration, but has turned also him into a figure of scorn and mockery in much of the traditional media.

It may not have mattered, though. Even if he had spurned the base, put Lieberman on the ticket, won the floor fight that his staff said would ensue and run a positive campaign, he'd still be the same terrible, incoherent candidate advocating a failed foreign and domestic policy regime.

Saddest news of all for the Republicans is that he probably was also their best shot.

The New Normal for Credit Markets

2008-10-02T07:12:00.003-04:00

I'm still in the wilds of Northern New England, online for just a half hour or so in the morning, lagging by a day on the NYT, and getting most of my news from NPR.

Yesterday was the day for the Media to make the case that Main Street really IS in trouble if taxpayers don't make an income transfer from the bottom four quintiles to the top decile, in the amount of $700 billion, off-budget, of course. Only stuff like CHIPS is on budget.

Yesterday David Leonhardt. invoked the Depression, citing the experience of Fed Board member Frederic Mishkin's grandfather's experience. He tried to make the case that there is some enormous risk for ordinary citizens that they just don't understand.

He failed. Like all the other arguments we've heard, the mechanisms that will affect Main Street are left undefined, and the way in which purchasing toxic waste will "restore confidence" and open up credit markets are still unstated.

Closing graf:

But in the end, this really isn’t about Wall Street. It’s about reducing the risk that something really bad happens. It’s about limiting the damage from the past decade’s financial excesses. Unfortunately, there is no way to accomplish that without also extending a helping hand to Wall Street. That is where our credit markets are, and we need them to start working again.
“We are facing a major national crisis,” as Meyer Mishkin’s grandson says. “To do nothing right now is to do what was done during the Great Depression.”

The only evidence for this grave situation presented is that Wachovia went under. Wachovia indeed went under, was bought out, and all depositors' money is safe. All we seems to get from the "financial press" is hyperbolic restatements of the bailout backers.

On "public" (whole lotta advertising there) radio yesterday, there were two interesting stories. The first was with local bank officials, who say they have been unaffected. As long as Fannie and Freddie are still in busines, one banker said, his mortgage supply is unlimited, and his lending practices have not changed. The president of Chittenden Bank pointed out that Vermont banks have continued to follow prudent banking practices, knowing their business customers, and staying away from mortgage securities. He anticipates no difficulties.

The second story had to do with the drying up of credit for consumers looking for loans. This was a national story. The report said, echoing a New York Times piece from the day before, that people with sub-prime credit ratings were having a hard time getting an auto loan. And. the report said, if your credit rating is bad, you may not be able to get a mortgage without a downpayment, of as much as "three to five percent."

WTF?

This is something I actually found worrisome. It seems like the irresponsible practices of the last decade or so--of lending money to risky borrowers with inadequate collateral is going to be established as the normal state of affairs. It seems insane, to me anyway, for a banker to make a long term loan funded by short term borrowing (demand deposits, savings accounts etc) without some substantial skin in the game from the borrower. If the "restoration of credit markets" means the resumption of making high risk loans, then our troubles are not going away any time soon.

Core Inflation

2008-09-12T14:58:00.002-04:00

Everybody has noticed that prices are up on pretty much everything. Sometimes those price increases show up in quantity decreases when you're in the grocery store, but for me, anyway, everything from dry cleaning to toothpaste has increased in price over the last year.

The question is "Is this inflation?" It could be that we are seeing a one time price rise, as the increase in energy prices ripple through the economy. But, unless the government engages in stimulus (as Nixon/Burns did in 1973 in response to the embargo), there should be no inflationary spiral.

What we should get, in that case, is a recession, as wages hold steady and prices rise. That's a reduction in real income in econspeak. In English, it means people have to buy less stuff, because prices are higher and wages are not.

Krugman says that it does indeed look this way.

It's Alive!!

2008-09-12T13:36:00.004-04:00

I've said, for some time, that McCain can't win, in part because he is such a terrible candidate, and would not be able to survive national scrutiny. Without his "base" of journalists cleaning up his statements, he would have to face the cameras himself. Incoherent, untelegenic, unable to stay on message, once the general election campaign started, he wouldn't have a chance.

That's how it looked until Steve Schmidt signed on.

Schmidt's strategy has been to get the spotlight off McCain, and put it somewhere, anywhere else. Pick an incompetent, but female, energetic and attractive, unknown as a running mate. Launch an ad campaign consiting almost entirely of lies attacking Obama. Cut off press access to both candidates. Run a media campaign, bully the teevee producers, shift the narrative away from any substances.

And hope for a nation-wide blackout during the debates.

I still don't think it will be enough. They're on their 6th theme, and that theme is Obama's theme--change. Their advertising campaign is more of the same old politics, and eventually the chorus of "liar, liar" in the print media is going to penetrate the consciousness of Wolf's producers.

Still, they've jolted the corpse.

There He Goes Again

2008-09-12T00:35:00.003-04:00

McCain has this really bad habit of saying hyperbolic, obviously wrong things when pressed, like the time he said he had never supported an earmark.

Today's example: Palin "probably knows more about energy than anybody in the United States of America." In fact, she doesn't even know more about petroleum, never mind other energy sources, than any number of people who have spent their lives studying it. People like Daniel Yergin, to just pull a name out of the air.

Palin's Doctrine

2008-09-11T22:31:00.005-04:00

I missed the broadcast-- had my weekly interview show to do. And would have probably missed it anyway, because the format and the process of selecting ABC didn't seem like journalism to me. But even in that friendly setting, it looks like she couldn't walk the very narrow "Georgia and Ukraine in NATO" line. TPM has the detail and the key commentary. I.e. it is a very stupid idea to have Georgia and the Ukraine join NATO unless there is a fundamental change in what "NATO" is and what NATO membership means.

Palin seems to be dimly aware of the problem with putting a hair trigger inside what nuclear- armed Russia regards as its sphere of influence. But she is in a bind, one which is ironically largely of McCain's and the media's making. Because nobody has pressed him for what his "League of Democracy" means and what NATO membership would entail, she didn't have an answer to the obvious "An attack on one is an attack on all, right?" question.

Or at least she didn't have an answer that either made sense, or reflected a standard formula, as with, say China and Taiwan. She was forced to freelance, and despite help from Charlie, just dug herself in deeper.

This is actually good news; the biggest problem we have had over the last 8 years is the combination of Republican lies and Republican chest pounding has prevented any public discussion of any substantive foreign policy or national security question. From the invasion and occupation of Iraq to the placement of provocative, but useless, anti-missile missiles in Europe, there has been no policy discussion.

Palin's inability to answer this question is not a result of her not remembering her talking points. There ARE no talking points that make sense in response to the question, "But doesn't that mean we risk a nuclear war if we add Georgia under the current NATO doctrine?" So she had to make some up. And, since all she has is McCain's "Fight" and "Victory" and "Democracy" bluster to draw on, she was in deep trouble.

Not her fault.

UPDATE

Steve Benen discusses her rejection (apparently unknowingly) of the Bush Doctrine of preventative war.

One the of the inside the beltway rules McCain has broken with this selection is that you can't really pick a complete incompetent to be VP. Just as a basic requirement of governance, you have to pick somebody who could at least plausibly take on the role. Agnew may be a counter-example to that, but even Quayle had spent 12 years in the Senate and, if he didn't know stuff like what the equivalent of Bush's sea change in American foreign policy consisted of, he had by then acquired staff who did.

Palin is coming with nothing. No personal knowledge. No trusted adviser. No national security staffer she can rely on. No intelligence staffer. Just her, and her moose-gutting knife. That's not the kind of VP we can believe in.

UPDATE 2:

A TPM reader provides MAP detail. It is very like the EC admission process, as posited in comments, and includes the proviso that the incoming country be free of border or territorial disputes.

Sexism: A Controlled Experiment

2008-09-11T09:26:00.003-04:00

James Fallows nails it:

Twice in the last six months we've had the spectacle of a candidate clinging to a provably false personal narrative. Each tale was meant to show something admirable and significant about the candidate's character. But in each case the press had the goods to show that the tale was too tall to be believed.

One, of course, was Hillary Clinton's "hail of bullets" account of her arrival at the airport in Bosnia.

The other is Sarah Palin's "thanks but no thanks" claim to have opposed funding for the "bridge to nowhere."

In Senator Clinton's case, the more often she repeated the story, the more relentlessly the press said the story was not true. All parts of the press did this: right, left, middle. They didn't say that there was a "controversy" about her story. They said it was false. And eventually she bowed to the inevitable and stopped telling the story any more.

His experiment:

So here are the controlled-experiment questions:

1) At any point will the right-wing press join the effort to hold Palin accountable for her false claim, as all of the press held Clinton responsible?

2) If Palin keeps making the claim, will press critics redouble their debunking, as they did with Clinton, or taper off for fear of seeming biased or boring?

3) At any point will Palin herself -- or, far more significant, McCain -- acknowledge that there are such things as fact and fantasy, and stop making a demonstrably false claim?

There is no more stark illustration of the bias involved in this campaign. Bias, some of it sexist, against Clinton during the primaries, with a pass, some of it sexist, for Palin. This is apparently more pronounced in the television coverage; there's plenty of debunking going on in print, or on the web, in the traditional media, as Fallows post demonstrates. But it was Tweety and his friends who made Clinton back off. When will they do the same to Palin?

Earmarks

2008-09-11T08:59:00.002-04:00

So I'm reading this book, Lost Country Life, about agricultural methods in medieval England. One of the things the author keeps doing is noting elements of those methods that remain in the language. For example, "by hook or by crook," but not by saw or axe, regulates how shepherds are allowed to take wood from a tree. They can knock down dead wood, but can't cut live branches, using only their hooks and their crooks in the process.

"Earmarks" are notches and holes in the ear of a sheep that document its ownership and breeding history.

McCain: Cut off all funds to Israel

2008-09-10T15:29:00.002-04:00

Steve Benen over at Washington Monthly pulls out something that I'd missed:

[W]hen I was chatting this morning with a friend who works in Democratic campaign politics. We commiserated over the fact that Obama has become efficient in responding to the constant barrage of deceptive attacks from the McCain campaign, but doesn't launch deceptive attacks of his own against the McCain campaign.
My friend asked me what Atwater/Rove/Schmidt would do if they worked for Obama. What kind of attacks would they make against McCain? It got me thinking.
My first ad would probably be pretty straightforward: John McCain wants to cut off all U.S. aid to Israel.

He's referring to Holtz-Eakins using the Congressional Research Service's list of 65 billion dollars of earmarks, as Think Progress pointed out last month includes all aid to Israel, which is roughly ten percent of the total. Once this was pointed out to the McCain campaign, they backed away.

Steve's point is that this would make an attack ad similar to the McCain attack ads--false, obviously false, but with a basis in reality. As many people have pointed out, once you start explaining, you're losing. I happen to disagree with Steve on the notion that there is any basis in reality for the sex education ad, but his point is clear. It would be a dishonest ad, but it would be effective, and force McCain on the defensive.

I would approach this differently. I'd run an ad saying that the earmark veto promise is, like all other McCain promised, just a slogan, using this as an example. (Whenever an actual earmark comes up, McCain invariably says that he would keep that one. This usually happens when he poses in front of some local landmark that turns out to be the result of an earmark. )

But then pivot, and say that McCain wants to talk about bridges because he doesn't want to talk about the real things that affect people's lives. Because he doesn't care about you or your family.

Swing Voting

2008-09-10T13:15:00.003-04:00

The difference between the parties that is most striking is the nastiness and negativity of Republicans in general, and of this redolent campaign in particular.

The contrast with the fun Democrats have, and Obama supporters in particular shows up in so many ways, like this example.

The Payoff

2008-09-10T09:49:00.003-04:00

Halperin and Cooper, via Swampland Commenter rmrd0000:

MH: No. And it's another thing I get that I'm embarrassed about our profession for. She should be held more accountable for that. The "bridge to nowhere" thing is outrageous. And if you press them on that, they falter because they know they can't defend what they're saying. They're saying it on the stump, as a core part of their message. It's in their advertising. I'm not saying the press should be out to get John McCain and Sarah Palin. But if a core part of their message is something that every journalist...journalism organization in the country has looked at and says it's demonstrably false, again, we're not doing our jobs if we just treat this as one of many things that's happening.

AC: And yet, we're getting tons of e-mails from people saying that we're attacking Sarah Palin by looking at her record. So it's fascinating to see how polarized people are...

For the last two decades, the Republicans have sought to make the press irrelevant in political campaigns. First, they created the myth of the liberal media. Hammered that for so long that the media responded by setting the left boundary at The New Republic, and the boundary on the right at Michael Savage and Pat Buchanan. Hammered that message for so long that the Sunday gasbag shows responded by essentially eliminating liberal voices, putting Republican operatives up against "impartial journalists." At the same time, they got the message out to the dittoheads with constant repetition on the radio shows.

For the last eight years, the Bush administration has embarked on a concerted effort to remake reality as a political construct. The famous Suskind quote, where the official said that the Administration makes its own reality was no exaggeration. We're not just talking global warming or Iraq war propaganda. The goal was to eliminate facts from the political process.

This dovetails very nicely with the systematic denunciation of the media as a collective liberal operation. The Republicans have developed their own channels for delivering messages to their supporters, so that when they release their redefinitions of reality, it is immediately echoed in email and phone calls to the liberal media operatives,

Those supposed operatives then conclude that the country is "polarized" and that actually pointing out that one set of statements is true and the other set is false would be falling into a polarizing trap. So they effectively concede to the Republicans that reality is a matter of politics. Some of this (see atrios' wanker of the day) is that tired balance business that has been exploited for the last eight years, but more of it has to do with a complete folding of the tent of any kind of journalistic commitment to the truth.

On the teevee, anyway.

I see the print people are waking up, and discovering that maybe when McCain said all those opportunistic, pandering things, it was because he was a narcissistic opportunist panderer, and when he walked to the back of the bus to sneer at the voters, he was opportunistically pandering to the boys on the bus. They were played for saps.

In any case, now is the payoff. There is absolutely no way, in a political world where reality plays any role, that a Republican, especially another incoherent, bellicose neo-con committed to the preservation of oligopolies and unfunded big government could win a presidential race in the wake of a Republican record of disastrous failure--a failure reflected in a 20/80 right track/wrong track assessment.

But now, because there is no trusted third party to assess the accuracy of the claims of a candidate willing to lie, baldly, without compunction, there is actually some possibility that this could happen. These decades of Republican investment in Big Lies, in undermining media credibility, and in exploiting their inability to call a lie a lie is now paying off.

And now some of those columnists and reporters who enabled St. John McCain's position in American politics are now impotently waving their arms and shouting.

Suckers.

Balancing Home and Work

2008-09-09T13:19:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, having noticed that Alaska's First Dude apparently spends three and four consecutive days in the field working his oil job, I wondered who was taking care of the Palin children when he was away. Of course, there are some older teenagers in the family who are baby-sitting ages, but that doesn't seem viable as a daily thing. They'll want to go to the mall, or trap beaver or something, with their friends. And of course there are school holidays and such, including the glorious Alaskan summer (Juneau really is beautiful in June). This leaves aside the difficulties of a 600 mile commute, or what to do in an emergency when Dad's in the field and Mom's in Juneau (which I didn't know about, either, until today--that "home" was still Wasilla).

But now, with this revelation that out of the 570 working days (by my finger counting calculation)in those 19 months, Palin was at home drawing a per diem for 312 of them, it's now clear. For more than half that time she was at home with the kids.

And governor.

Billing the state for "lodging."

Nice work if you can get it.

UPDATE:

Reading the NYT today (9/10/08), I see that there is an adjunct office for the governor in Anchorage (which makes a lot of sense--over 40 percent of Alaskans live around there, and it's a long way from Juneau, which also cannot be reached by any land route). So I think it's unfair to surmise she was working from home, but rather commuting to Anchorage on those days in Wissila. That makes it more of a latch key kid situation, which is pretty common. I was one of those kids, although we didn't lock the doors.

Ezra States the Media Conundrum

2008-09-09T02:07:00.003-04:00

In many ways, the blogosphere's raison d'etre is to dissect, analyze and criticize the way the traditional media works in the United States. Someone in the distant past noticed that the "stories" in the news generally fit inside a narrative arc, much as individual episodes in a television program fit inside a broader narration, a narration defined not just by plot, but by characters, their interactions and the other material in a show's "bible." George Lakoff, first, and then Jeffrey Feldman wrote about the fact that politicians were aware of the importance of this overarching narrative, and that they therefore tried to create "frames" around events of the day that was meant to influence, even control, that narrative. Peter Daou worked out the idea of the Triangle, the need for the politicians, the traditional media, and the netroots coming together as the necessary conditions for offsetting the narratives Republicans had established using think tanks and talk radio.

I could go on. I could talk about the Froomkin Flap, when the White House wanted Dan Froomkin's White House Watch on the Post website marginalized, and sent Jim vandeHei and John Harris to management to arrange it. There we learned a lot about the way in which the White House managed narratives by manipulating reporters with access and selective leaking. We learned still more at the Libby trial.

Learning more and more about this, blogospheric derision and anger directed toward the traditional Washington Media grew and grew. The Village simply seemed to have no interest in accuracy, but rather in some kind of 4th dimensional Broderian Balance. The journalists, derisive in return, dismissed the dirty hippies as ignorant losers, justifying their retention of the electronic equivalent of a mailroom intern protecting them from the full force of their readers' criticism by focusing on vitriolic messages, and willfully ignoring the substantive commentary that was arising through blogospheric natural selection.

I always found this willful ignorance baffling. The arguments that bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and digby were making were very easy to follow, and were obviously based on sound principles and clear logic. But these arguments were dismissed without engagement.

Yesterday, Ezra Klein pinpointed a key reason for this. His argument is too elegantly made to summarize well, s0 I'll just excerpt a couple of paragraphs.

First, the journalist's task today is not so much as finding information as it is prioritizing and organizing it:

(T)here's too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role -- they didn't create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as "political entertainment."

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day's events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to. It's sort of like a TV show: If Friends had had an episode where Ross and Rachel hooked up, but never mentioned it again, that would've been weird, but their tryst wouldn't have been a big part of the story. Since they mentioned it all the time, and came back to it, and fit future events into that context, it was a big story. Similarly, if the press reports something and never mentions it again, the public knows to forget it. It's not important. If they mention it constantly -- "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" -- they know it is important. The job of the media, in other words, is now to also emphasize the right parts of the story.

Second, the media cannot admit that this is now their role:

The press isn't allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can't transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

This is the basis for the derisive treatment of the Village. They are obviously constructing narratives, and bending stories to fit those narratives. A narrative spreads like kudzu, and in no time everyone is writing about Al Gore's difficulty telling the truth. But since the media can't admit that they construct these narratives, and really can't admit that they practice a kind of group-think, we're left with what Jane Hamsher has called a "titanium bubble" surrounding the Beltway.

Third, they really can't admit their role in constructing the narrative because that means they are no longer, in their eyes, reporting the campaign. But in many ways, they are the campaign:

Ambinder waves this media conversation away as a "Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press" because he thinks of all this as media criticism. But this isn't about the press, it's about the campaign. And he's the guy we all look to for that type of coverage. His job is to report on the motivations and actions and effects of the major political players in the election (and he's among the best at it). But there is arguably no political player as important in the election as the aggregate media. But the media won't report on itself. Which means they can't really report on the campaign: They can only report on the campaign-minus-the-media, which is an impossible thing to do, and requires them to invent all sorts of explanations for how the things that they're doing are happening

This is another thing that drives us batshit crazy. Michael Scherer or Jay Carney (update: or Mark Halperin) will write a story or a post in this weird passive voice, as if they are not making a decision about what is important to write about and what is not, but rather as if there were an intervention by the Angel Moroni sometime in the night that determined the universally received wisdom. At times they seem, to us, like Kipling's bander-log, who say it must be true because we all say so. But it is not what they are saying. It's what they are doing that matters.

So when it is said that the campaigns are trying to "work the refs," this is not the right metaphor. The press does not consist of putatively impartial observors, keeping both sides honest. They are, instead, fully engaged participants in the process of determining the dominant narrative,the setters on the volleyball team. It's interesting that this participatory role is increasingly taken for granted, with roles for political operatives like Karl Rove, Markos, Mike Murphy, James Carville and Bill Kristol as putative political commentators.

These guys are all a far cry from David Brinkley.

Baked Alaskan

2008-09-09T01:23:00.002-04:00

Josh:

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it

This was not going to get traction just on the Obama campaign's say-so. By being patient, letting McCain and Palin repeat an obviously false and frankly unbelievable (no governor turns down earmarks), the Obama campaign has been way better served by having this takedown come from the traditional media, with just a couple of sardonically humorous assists.

What's especially sweet about this is that at this point McCain can't just dump her, the way McGovern dumped Eagleton, because he himself was pushing this nonsense. To 40 million people, posed in front of Walter Reed Middle School, he uttered these plainly false, and absolutely ridiculous statements.

Here's the AP factcheck:

Palin did abandon plans to build the nearly $400 million bridge from Ketchikan to an island with 50 residents and an airport. But she made her decision after the project had become an embarrassment to the state, after federal dollars for the project were pulled back and diverted to other uses in Alaska, and after she had appeared to support the bridge during her campaign for governor.
McCain and Palin together have told a broader story about the bridge that is misleading. She is portrayed as a crusader for the thrifty use of tax dollars who turned down an offer from Washington to build an expensive bridge of little value to the state.
"I told the Congress 'thanks but no thanks' for that Bridge to Nowhere," she said in her convention speech last week.
That's not what she told Alaskans when she announced a year ago that she was ordering state transportation officials to ditch the project. Her explanation then was that it would be fruitless to try to persuade Congress to come up with the money.
"It's clear that Congress has little interest in spending any more money on a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island," Palin said then.
Palin indicated during her 2006 campaign for governor that she supported the bridge, but was wishy-washy about it. She told local officials that money appropriated for the bridge "should remain available for a link, an access process as we continue to evaluate the scope and just how best to just get this done."
She vowed to defend Southeast Alaska "when proposals are on the table like the bridge and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative" - something that McCain was busy doing at the time, as a fierce critic of the bridge.
Even so, she called the bridge design "grandiose" during her campaign and said something more modest might be appropriate.
Palin's reputation for standing up to entrenched interests in Alaska is genuine. Her self-description as a leader who "championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress" is harder to square with the facts.
The governor has cut back on pork-barrel project requests, but in her two years in office, Alaska has requested nearly $750 million in special federal spending, by far the largest per-capita request in the nation. And as mayor of Wasilla, Palin hired a lobbyist and traveled to Washington annually to support earmarks for the town totaling $27 million.

So now what is Charlie Gibson going to do?

Breaking: Bumiller Reports on Hugs and Kisses.

2008-09-08T23:37:00.004-04:00

Where would we be without intrepid reporters analyzing the key issues of the day.

Elizabeth Bumiller has the goods. John McCain hugs Sarah, but kisses Cindy. Who gets introduced first? Big question. Good thing Bumiller is on the trail, following McCain's every move. Else we'd miss this critical information.

Update:

Dependable Renegade scooped Bumiller:

No Groins

Clammy Hands

Face the Nation 65 Times

2008-09-08T17:15:00.003-04:00

This clip at TPM kicks off with Schieffer saying that McCain has broken Bob Dole's appearances record with his 65th Mavericky, outside of Washington appearance.

In response to the "Why Palin?" question, McCain says

"She gave money back to the taxpayers."
Well that's not true. She increased taxes on oil producers, and used that to increase the annual stipend received by Alaskan citizens.

Combatting Lies

2008-09-08T15:40:00.004-04:00

There's a lot of outrage out there in the blogosphere, especially in comment threads, over McCain's and Palin's constant repetition of lies that have been repeatedly debunked.

For example, here's Mad as Hell at Swampland:

I want the Palin-McCain lies nailed and called out for what they are, lies. Obama has to do it as the media won't do it for him.

The frustration being expressed here is that they are being allowed to get away with blatant, bald, obvious lies, and nothing seems to happen to them. Having watched a campaign where Al Gore may well have lost because he was portrayed as an elitist liar, it is extremely painful to watch these people never get called on it. So there are complaints that since the media won't do it, Obama has to call out these lies.

But that would be a mistake. When atrios says they like to piss off liberals, this is part of what is going on when they brazenly lie. They want to make you mad. They want you to get into a big fight over 300 million dollar earmarks. They want you to start shouting "Liar!! Liar!!". They want to talk about pretty much anything other than the occupation, the collapse of the housing market, unemployment, falling real wages, global warming, the deficit and health care. They want this to be about trivia and personalities. So if Obama responds in-kind, he is falling into a trap.

This is particularly true about the campaign trying to label McCain/Palin as serial liars. One of the central goals of Republican campaigns is to reinforce the idea that all politicians are alike--they all lie, they all make promises they won't keep, and they're all phonies. That's why they love negative advertising. If their opponent doesn't respond in kind, the negative image sticks. If the opponent flings mud back, then that reinforces the idea that they're all the same, suppressing turnout.

There would be no better week for McCain than to have it spent with Axelrod and Black exchanging charges about the other side being liars.

Only the media can call out the lies. If the media won't do it, then it won't get done. The facts are out there. Obama's sardonic, consistent association of McCain and Bush is a much more effective message than getting sucked into a debate about lies over earmarks.

UPDATE:

Obama is calling McCain out on the falseness of the Maverick brand, and on the Bridge to Nowhere:

If we're gonna nationalize

2008-09-08T10:15:00.003-04:00

Freddie and Fannie, then shouldn't we start doing things in citizens' interests?

Like how about offering 50 year fixed refi deals for people who want to lower their monthly payments? Even subprime borrowers, with some kind of IRS repayment enforcement in the event of default?

Letter to David Carr

2008-09-08T07:58:00.003-04:00

Carr has a bit of Republican stenography on Sarah Palin. I sent a note of protest:

Mr. Carr:

Here's today's lede:

"Before Gov. Sarah Palin came flying in from the wilds of Alaska [she came from Juneau] for the Republican convention in St. Paul, there was a lot of sniggering in media rooms and satellite trucks about her beauty queen looks and rustic hobbies, and the suggestion that she was better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land."

You will note, as I did, that there is no mention of any media coverage in this paragraph--just a reference to a phenomenon that must be pretty much constant, sardonic and cynical comments behind the scenes. I'm sure there was sniggering at their own talent at various times in the satellite truck. Of course, you will agree that what people are saying behind the scenes has matters little. What matters is what the editorial decision-makers decide to broadcast and print.

What they decided to print and broadcast, with a very few exceptions, was stenography of the Republican image machine. You yourself join in here, offering a piece that supports Palin's contention that the media will be a force for her to contend with while providing another bit of extremely positive coverage of her "personal history," with nary an expression of dubiousness and no mention of her capability for the office of Vice President. Take this hyperbolic paragraph:

"She’s not an alien to modern media. She’s one of its archetypes: a Rachael Ray with a 4x4, who can not only make a meal in under 30 minutes but hunt and kill the main course. And while Ms. Palin probably wouldn’t look comfortable on Cosmopolitan with all that sex talk, there was more than a little Helen Gurley Brown in her confident speech on Wednesday. The fact that she is the proud parent of a child with special needs is seen as a credential, not an impediment, to performing a job that seems a little short on real duties anyway."

Tucker Bounds couldn't have said it better. She's a newfound media superstar because of her good looks and compelling personal story. But when Bounds was unable to answer a single question from Campbell Brown regarding her capability to serve as Commander in Chief (in an environment where Obama's capacity for same has been routinely questioned), the campaign threw a tantrum.

And the tantrums apparently worked. Because your coverage is right down the Republican line, gushing over the image they've creatred for Palin, while ignoring any substantive issue associated with choosing an extraordinarily unqualified candidate for naked and cynical political reasons (as Peggy Noonan and Mike Murphy inadvertently confirmed when a mic stayed live a little longer than they realized). The presentation of the Republican portrait of field-dressing, moose-gnawing Sarah in your piece would be a little more excusable if the piece had not also included the demonstrably false claim that she has received negative coverage in the traditional media, as demonstrated by your need to justify this argument by referring to attitudes of people behind the scenes.

To the contrary, the traditional media have lined up as you have, with very few exceptions, to advance the Republican (to quote Noonan and Murphy) "cynical political narrative." This is underscored by the complete absence of any reference to any actual negative coverage in your column. In fact, later in the column, you again refer to reactions that took place behind the scenes:

"In the press galleries at the convention, journalists wrinkled their noses in disgust when Piper, Ms. Palin’s youngest daughter, was filmed kitty-licking her baby brother’s hair into place. But to many Americans — including some I talked to in the convention hall — that looked like family church on Sunday, evidence of good breeding and sibling regard."

I've seen no stories expressing that elitist "disgust," while there have been repeated clips shown of that heartwarming moment on television, aimed precisely at those "Americans" (an attendee at the Republican National Convention!) who find the image cute and charming.

Somehow it seems to me that a media analyst's job is not to repeat a political message, but dissect its construction, determine the degree to which it is true or false, and then look to see how those elements play. But, hey, what do I know?

Jay Ackroyd

PS

Oh, and by the way, when a Republican operative asks you this:

"'Conservatives have a bad history with The New York Times,' she said, looking at my press ID, still smiling and still very friendly. 'How can I be sure that you won’t take my words and twist them to suit some agenda that you already have?'"

I suggest you point out that Keller spiking the Risen/Lichtblau illegal domestic surveillance story almost certainly won the 2004 election for Bush. So if she's worried about your credibility, tell her that management has her back, and that's what really matters.

Sunday Morning

2008-06-29T06:35:00.002-04:00

The thing about McCain and computers is not just about age. It's also about privilege. He has people to print out his email and highlight the important stuff. Here's a stupid illustration of the same principle.

Fear Inflation

2008-05-27T08:03:00.004-04:00

The War on Terra narrative is starting to break down.

In the beginning, it was only security experts trying to calm people down, and recognize that WTC attack was unique, not replicable, and that al qaeda did not have the resources to pose a serious threat. Bruce Scheier, for example, was one of the voices of calm, as James Fallows pointed out earlier this week (after, ahem, I reminded him about Bruce's work. Aha. I also see he read the same article in the Times I read yesterday.)

When I say the narrative is breaking down, I mean that legacy media people like Fareed Zakaria are writing (and getting stories past their editors) about the excess of fear has been driven by the US government brazenly exaggerating the terrorist threat. In this case, the Bush administration has done so by counting civilian deaths in Iraq as victims of terroism:

[T]here is a reason you're scared. The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups—and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START—it was almost never described as such." To take just two examples, Mack pointed out that in 2004, the Janjaweed militia killed at least 723 civilians in Sudan (as documented by independent studies). The MIPT recorded zero deaths in Sudan from terrorism that year; START counted only 17. In Congo in 1999, independent studies identified hundreds killed by militia actions.

If you subtract out the war victims in Iraq, terrorist incidents are down.

But Bush is still flogging the War on Terror meme, still insisting that Iraq is the front in the a war directed at the United States by a few thousand stateless, resourceless people hiding in caves.

So is McCain. Obama is going to have to confront this directly.

Fear and Fantasy

2008-05-27T06:57:00.003-04:00

Yesterday's New York Times had an article describing conflict between state governments and the Department of Homeland Security. States, like Massachusetts, want to use DHS grants to enhance citizens' safety from actual threats. DHS insists they spend a quarter of their grant money on, wait for it.....

defense against Improvised Explosive Devices:

Juliette N. Kayyem, the Massachusetts homeland security adviser, was in her office in early February when an aide brought her startling news. To qualify for its full allotment of federal money, Massachusetts had to come up with a plan to protect the state from an almost unheard-of threat: improvised explosive devices, known as I.E.D.’s.

“I.E.D.’s? As in Iraq I.E.D.’s?” Ms. Kayyem said in an interview, recalling her response. No one had ever suggested homemade roadside bombs might begin exploding on the highways of Massachusetts. “There was no new intelligence about this,” she said. “It just came out of nowhere.”

More openly than at any time since the Sept. 11 attacks, state and local authorities have begun to complain that the federal financing for domestic security is being too closely tied to combating potential terrorist threats, at a time when they say they have more urgent priorities.

“I have a healthy respect for the federal government and the importance of keeping this nation safe,” said Col. Dean Esserman, the police chief in Providence, R.I. “But I also live every day as a police chief in an American city where violence every day is not foreign and is not anonymous but is right out there in the neighborhoods.”

It gets harder and harder to figure out whether these people are venal, idiotic or both. Is the need to hype a Terra Threat so deeply seated that it drives all public policy? Or do people like Chertoff actually believe that the good citizens of Amhearst or Brockton need to worry about Iraqis will sneak past the terrorist watchlist and attack them here using the methods they use to attack us there?

Speaking Clearly

2008-05-26T14:44:00.003-04:00

In Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, he recounts a television address on the eve of the 1970 midterms, given by Ed Muskie, who was expected to be the frontrunner for the nomination in 1972:

Calmly, he said the charge Democrats appeased thugs was "a lie, and the American people know it is a lie"--a lie about the party "which led us out of depression and to victory over international barbarism ; the party of John Kennedy, who was slain in the service of the country he inspired; the party of Lyndon Johnson, wh0 withstood the fury of countless demonstrations in order to pursue a course he believed in; the party of Robert Kennedy, murdered on the eve of his greatest triumph. How dare they tell us that this party is less devoted or less courageous in maintaining American principles and values than they are themselves?"...

His tone turned rueful: "This attack is not simply the oversealousness of a few local leaders. It has been led, inspired and guided from the highest offices in the land."

"Let me try to bring some clarity to this deliberate confusion."... The Republicans? "They oppose your interests" and really believe that they can make you afraid enough or angry enough, you can be tricked into voting against yourself. It is all part of the same contempt, and tomorrow you can show them the mistake they have made."... [The debate is between] the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men."

There's quite bit here. First, of course, the song remains the same, nearly forty years later. Then the bogeymen were the dirty hippies and the commies. Now it's scary brown people wearing turbans. But the deal the Republicans proffer hasn't changed. Just the cover story has changed. It wasn't true then. It's not true now. Still the same deal. And still the same calumnies directed at the patriotism of Democrats.

Second, what has happened to our party's leadership? I challenge you to find a speech by Pelosi or Reid that calls out the president for his "lies," or for the contempt for voters that is inherent in their tactics of thuggish threats. Why can't our leaders speak out with this kind of directness and clarity?

The administration's favorability rating and the right track/wrong track numbers make it clear that Americans are ready to hear a direct attack on the Republican party, the President and McCain's plans to continue the contemptuous disregard for the democratic process and voters themselves that has characterized this administration.

Paging Howard Dean.

HIllary

2008-05-24T12:27:00.002-04:00

The problem with what Clinton has been doing is not just that she is tilting at windmills.

She's making bad arguments while doing so. Silly arguments.

Saying that 1968 and 1992 prove that it is common for the process to continue into June is ridiculous. In 1992, Tsongas had suspended his campaign in March, leaving Clinton well ahead of Jerry Brown. In 1968, the nomination process did not much reflect primaries--the eventual nominee entered no primaries. The convention really did make the candidate selection, with a large number of uncommitted delegates, with power-wielding delegation chairs. This method of insulating the nominating process from rank and file democrats led to some unpleasantness at the '68 convention, which is what led to the reforms implemented in 1972. The 1972 primary-driven process is still the basic template we user today.

But none of that really is all that important, because in '68 the incumbent president withdrew his candidacy after losing a primary to an insurgent. There's no way that wasn't going to be a messy process of selection, or that it would not go to the convention.

So this is a bad argument.

But she has a good one to make. The race is very close. It's closer than any nomination process since the primary system was put into place. Carter had a 600 delegate lead over Kennedy in 1980. And the superdelegates make no sense if they are not meant to arbitrate a close race.

Her case is a simple one. Her candidacy is as popular with the rank and file as Obama's is, certainly within the margin error of the arcane process involved. So, she can say, leave it up to them.

At the very least, she deserves to have her delegates at the convention, she can say. The convention is not just about choosing a presidential candidate. It is about, among other things, reviewing the nominating process.

If she had kept her focus on the delegates, she would not sound so, frankly, desperate and illogical as she tries to weave tales of electability and which states count.

Obama's religious preference

2008-05-24T12:19:00.001-04:00

Simple answers to simple questions

NYC Public Transit

2008-05-24T12:05:00.002-04:00

Atrios talks about getting from A to B as missing the point when discussing/designing mass transit. The system in Manhattan, as he says, works because you can get from anywhere to anywhere. It's an interlocking network of bus lines and subway lines that has no center.

This is in contrast to Philadelphia, where everything goes through Center City. There's no easy way to get from one part of the system to another if they are not on the same line. It really is "commuter rail" while the NYC system serves everybody, not just commuters.

This is partly because (or has caused it be) that there is no "downtown" in NYC, no Centrum, as they call it on the European highway systems. "Downtown" means "South" not a destination. Instead there is a collection of geographical centroids, neighborhoods, that are fully equipped with all services for businesses and residences. I am not exaggerating the fully equipped part. It's not surprising, I suppose, that I'm a block away from half a dozen dry cleaners or places that will make me a pizza. But I'm also only a few (4) blocks away from a lumberyard and a place that sells marble and granite, and one block away from the most fully stocked plumbing supply store you'll ever see.

Not to mention the place where I get my shoes resoled.

So travel is between these neighborhoods, all mixed residential and commercial, with some neighborhoods, like mine, more residential than not, while others more commercial than residential, like the financial district. This can only work, or can only have come about, if you can get anywhere from anywhere.

Out in the Boondocks

2008-05-24T01:51:00.003-04:00

It was fun hosting at Eschaton, but now it's time to return to this drafty place.

Boondocks, by the way, is derived from the Tagalog bundok, referring to remote and inaccessible areas in what we now call the Philippine Islands. The Philip part in the name refers to Philip the Second.

Allawi thinks this is the appropriate occupation that will help you understand what the US is doing in Iraq:

I sat with Allawi for two hours, sharing coffee and chocolate pastries. It was a deeply depressing experience. Allawi tried as hard as any Iraqi to make a go of the new Iraq, and he is thoroughly disillusioned. He says he is resigned to the likelihood that Iraq will end up a sort of protectorate of the United States for the next several decades, not unlike the Philippines was for much of the 20th century — dependent, violent, crippled. “The history of the Philippines,” he noted, “is not a happy one.”

So I'll clean up the digs, add some blogroll, and post daily.

Fer shure. Next coupla days.

Al Qaeda Declares Victory in Iraq

2008-04-18T07:02:00.003-04:00

NPR is reporting (podcast) that al Zawahiri, the Egyptian strategist from al qaeda has released a new recording, claiming victory in Iraq. Five years have passed, the recording, still unsubstantiated by US intelligence, says, and the US is still bogged down. He mocks Bush as a failure, remaining in Iraq only because he does not want to be the one who has to withdraw.

Now you may recall that one of the reasons we are given by president, and now John McCain, is that if the US withdraws, it will be tremendous propaganda victory for al qaeda. It looks like remaining in an indefinite quagmire is also a tremendous propaganda victory for al qaeda.

This is deeply ironic. It's, of course, ironic because the pretext for remaining turns out to come about as a result of the policy. But it's also ironic because it is just what happened in Afghanistan when the Soviets were defeated. As in Iraq, al qaeda played a trivial role in the defeat of the Soviet Army. US and Saudi supplies of Stinger missiles to other, more effective native rebel forces. Al qaeda played little to no role in the victory of the Afghan opposition. Bin Laden greatly exaggerated the role of al qaeda in that war, propagandizing his role, while ingratiating himself with the Taliban, which is discussed in detail in Steve Coll's Ghost Wars.

In Iraq, US policy has actually enhanced the reputation of al qaeda by relentlessly exaggerating the role of al qaeda in the opposition to the occupation, and its role in inter-faction fighting. There not only aren't that many of them:

"They'll just say al-Qaida," Venzke said of the U.S. command, "and the media frequently simplify it to that level because they think nobody thinks there are other groups."

Terrorism analyst Lydia Khalil, of Washington's Jamestown Foundation research group, said something more complex may also be going on.

"I talked to a lot of guys over there (U.S. officials in Iraq) and they are aware that the majority of fighters are not al-Qaida," said this former U.S. political adviser in Baghdad.

Bush's warning about al-Qaida and Iraq "serves mostly to buttress the administration's claim that Iraq's problems are the work of outsiders, and not the result of the administration's mismanagement of the occupation and internal Iraqi factionalism," said Steven Simon, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But they are also not closely affiliated with bin Laden's group:

The University of Michigan's Juan Cole questions how strong the links are between international al-Qaida and the local Iraqi variety, which he describes as Salafists — fundamentalist Sunnis — "who style themselves al-Qaida."

Just as bin Laden found it in his interests to endorse Bush before the 2004 election, Bush has found it in his interest to inflate the risk that al qaeda represents, both in Iraq and in the rest of the world.

Now that particular collection of lies and distortions has, as so many other failed policies have, backfired on the Bush administration.

Secure ID

2008-03-29T11:11:00.002-04:00

Identification card issues have come to my attention lately. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is trying to bludgeon states into committing to implementation of Real ID, a yet to be defined system to be implement sometime in the middle of the next decade, at state expense. State governments in the libertarian mountain West and in the cranky Yankee Northeast have passed legislation rejecting participation in the program. DHS has been scrambling to save face by declaring these rejections to be equivalent of apply for an extension in committing to the program. Wyoming Governor Brian Schweitzer dismisses the DHS Sturm and Drang, in particular the threat to declare driver licenses from non-compliant states invalid for getting on a commercial aircraft, as bureaucratic bluffing. I have a DK diary up about Schweitzer's stand.

At the same time, I received email from someone who wanted to know whether he should participate in a new private sector ID card, called FlyClear. The idea is that you get a secure ID, complete with embedded biometric information that is pre-cleared. At the airport, a proprietary device transmit you ID to the current TSA watchlist, confirming that you are not on it. The question from the person sending me the email reminded me that most people don’t understand, at all, how a well designed biometrically driven ID system would work.

A good ID card would be unique and universal. It would contain biometric information encoded, and encrypted, on the card and nowhere else. It should not be stored on a central, (or distributed) database. A digital fingerprint or iris scan should never be transmitted anywhere. The whole ID of a biometric identification mechanism is that it is always with you, and never anywhere else.

The way it would work is you’d swipe your card through a reader, and then put your thumb in the reader. If the thumbprint matches the digital thumbprint that is on the card, then a green light goes on (“The person holding this card is the person whose thumbprint is on the card.”) If anything further needed to be done, like a lookup of your presence on the TSA watchlist, or your card’s available balance checked, then a unique ID assigned to you is transmitted to the entity doing the lookup. The key is that the authentication should always be entirely local, between the card, the reader and physical biometric input.

Storing or transmitting the digitized biometric ID means a copy of your thumbprint exists. But the whole point of using your thumb is that it doesn’t exist anywhere else. Storing or transmitting the digital image creates the possibility that someone else may obtain the digital print, becoming you in the process. Transmission is clearly the greater risk because transmission is necessarily less secure than storage for capturing the digital rendition. Much more important, though, is that with a transmission system, you can no longer be certain that the source of the digital rendition is in fact the physical, analog object being rendered. If you permit a digital image of your thumb to be transmitted, then that transmission can be simulated without your thumb.

How well do the two ID systems I mentioned above implement these design rules? There’s no way to know for sure how the Real ID system will work, because the system isn’t designed yet. However, as Schweitzer points out in an NPR interview that’s linked in the DK diary above, the reliability of the Real ID will only be as good as the identification documents that are used to obtain it. He notes that half a dozen teenagers in a Kinkos can do a reasonable job of forging the birth certificate that is a primary source for the planned Real ID. A more important indication of the quality to expect from a Real ID program (if it is ever implemented, which I strongly doubt) is the way the program is proceeding. Good security tools, like encryption methods, are created with a great deal of public scrutiny. Bureaucratic authoritarians do not use such systems; they tend to prefer what is called security by obscurity working in secret. Security by obscurity is the design philosophy that led to a SONY CD music encryption technology that was cracked by using a magic marker on a disk.

There is a host of other reasons to believe that 50 individual state implementation of “standards” set in Washington will fail.

The FlyClear system is actually pretty good. The biometric information is indeed stored on the card. The authentication process at the airport does indeed consist of local authentication against a digital biometric signature on the card, and then sending of an identification number to a database updated with TSA information. The digital thumbprint is not transmitted, only the ID is. The only problem is that they do store the biometric information in a “secure” database. There is, of course, no such thing. It’s possible to conceive of a series of security measures that one would have to take to be sure that the information is in fact secure, involving complicated measures for protection from everything from disgruntled employees to off-site backups.

They do it this way because it makes creating the end product easier; they have to do a bunch of pre-processing with the TSA before they issue the card. It’s easier if they have the biographical and biometric data in the database, and then create the card, than to create the card first, and then modify it. This also makes it easier to recreate a lost card. (Note that a lost card is of no value to anyone else, and that making a false replacement card request doesn’t do a bad guy any good, because the card is only useful to somebody with the user’s thumbprint.)

I haven’t said a word about DNA here. DNA would indeed play a role in a well-defined identification system, but it won’t work as a biometric authentication method on an ID card, because, unlike your thumb, you leave lots of copies of your DNA everywhere you go. I’ll write something up about how you’d work DNA into a national identification system later on. In the meantime, the one sentence takeaway is “If someone offers you a biometric ID card that does not do its authentication locally, back away slowly.”

If you have any further interest in this topic, and you should, because the numbskulls running DHS have no understanding of good security practice, a good source is Bruce Schneier, who wrote a very good book Secrets and Lies and maintains an excellent web site (http://www.schneier.com) where you can signup for a monthly e-newsletter.

On the Democrats' Nomination Process

2008-03-22T13:57:00.004-04:00

There's been a lot of tooth-gnashing over the Democratic nominating process. There are complaints that there are too many caucuses, the caucuses are unrepresentative because of low turnout, delegate allocation rules are arcane, the process lasts too long, and on and on. But you have to realize that the nomination process is not about just one objective. If the objective were to pick the most popular candidate among Democrats at a single moment in time, then it would be easy. If the objective were to pick the candidate the party elders thought had the best chance of winning, it would also be easy. The trouble is that those are both objectives, and they are in conflict. The nomination process is replete with conflicting objectives like this. So if you want to talk about what reform should look like next time (and believe me, there will be changes made), you need to keep in mind that the nomination process is not just a method for picking a presidential nominee from a pool of candidates.

You need a process that, among other things:

1) Picks a candidate who reasonably represents the party rank and file

2) Provides an opportunity for low name recognition/low initial money candidates to compete

3) Picks a candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning the general election

4) Provides enough time to assess the relative strengths of candidates, to engage in on-the-job national campaign training and for dirty laundry to be aired.

5) Picks a candidate the party can embrace as a whole, including party leaders and key voting blocs

6) Has reasonably balanced regional appeal

7) Picks a clear winner

8) Grows and strengthen the party

9) Provides an unambiguous nominee

These objectives conflict. 1 and 6 are met by a national primary decided by popular vote, but directly conflicts with 2, 4 and 8, for example. If you think about other systemic change, I think you will see that no method satisfies all these objectives. That’s why the process is constantly being modified, because one or the other objective is not met in most competitive nominating cycles. This year, “picking a clear winner,” which is almost certainly the first and most important objective, is at risk, which is both divisive and upsetting. However, over-reacting to that potential failure is a risk. The last time the party over-reacted, in 1968, it gave Gary Hart’s McGovern campaign an inside track, picking a candidate who was probably not the best choice. In particular, railing about the undemocratic nature of the current process misses the point. It is not just about picking the most popular candidate among the rank and file at a particular moment in time.

For what it's worth, if I were made Democratic Flying Spaghetti Monster for the day I'd drop IA, keep NH, add a primary in a low population state west of the Mississippi shortly after NH. Let those primaries be open. Then I’d divide the rest of the country into quarters by state, randomly, and have closed primaries on the same day, 3-4 weeks apart, winner take all in each state. Delegate allocation identical to the electoral college. Non-state voters, like PR and DC, are assigned delegates proportional to population, and vote in the last superprimary. In the event of no clear winner, a closed national run-off of the top two in delegate count, straight popular vote.

Such a reform would weaken the state parties considerably, which would have to be addressed in other ways. The caucuses create interest, and provide a public and meaningful role for state conventions, especially in low population states. The national convention becomes officially meaningless in the presidential selection process defined here. Any kind of reform will have negative side effects, as thisone does, which reformers need to acknowledge, and deal with, if they are to be taken seriously.

Debbie We Hardly Knew Ye

2008-03-21T12:02:00.003-04:00

Back in the day, early 2006, when the liberal netroots were trying to get themselves organized, there were some actions organized by different blogs. One of my favorites was the Republican Rubberstamp action, where an enterprising FireDogLaker set up an account at a rubber stamp manufacturer, commissioning a stamp that said "Rubberstamp Republicans."

This was great symbology. In fact, it's become a permanent part of the lexicon, as witness today, when House Intelligence Committee Chairman Reyes called out Crazy US Rep Michelle Bachman for lying about the House version of the FISA legislation in Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The congresswoman suggests that Democrats should simply pass the bill the Senate approved. But the people have elected us not simply to rubber-stamp the actions of the Senate, but to exercise our judgment and pass bills that are in the best interests of the American people.

One of the netroots' favorite Members also picked up on the symbology. Debbie Wasserman-Schulz gave a great, very funny speech about the stamps, including my favorite bit:

Mr. Meeks has a much bigger rubber stamp.... I feel privileged to hold it, but I don't want to hold it too long, because it will rub off.....The people on the other side of the aisle come into this room, they're checking I don't know their brains, opinions, their convictions at the door."

And now, as a Co-Chair of the Red to Blue Program, Rep Wasserman Schulz seems to have forgotten those rubberstamp days. It seems that, after all, it did rub off.

Two years is about a decade ago in Internet years, but it's just one Congress ago in political years. How can she have forgotten, so quickly, how the members of her delegation refused to stand with her on issue after issue. Instead, they rubberstamped the dictates of the Republican leadership, putting their constituents behind party loyalty on their list of priorities. We have challengers who will represent their constituents. If there are votes, or issues, where they, and Representative Wasserman Schulz feels the need to vote the economic interests of her district, or her region, in opposition to the Democratic leadership, that is something we all can understand.

But to refuse to support Democrats for these seats is to forget those days of the brainless, arm-twisting, deeply corrupt Rubberstamp Congress.

McCain on al qaeda deconstructed

2008-03-21T11:28:00.004-04:00

It's taken me a while to figure it out, but last night, during an interview with mcjoan for my Virtually Speaking program, I finally understood what's going on with McCain wrt to Iraq, al qaeda and Iran. What's going on is he is having trouble getting on message. The messaging on Iraq is very tricky, because what the message is supposed to convey is something false, but you're not supposed to actually lie while delivering the message.

So when Bush uttered the 16 words about yellowcake acquired by Iraq, he didn't say that Iraq had acquired yellowcake. He said that British intelligence had reported that Iraq may have acquired yellowcake. This way, the audience took away the yellowcake acquistion, but he could still say that he hadn't lied. Likewise, he didn't say that Iraq had a nuclear weapon, he said that we didn't the first proof to be a mushroom cloud.

When talking about Iraq, al qaeda and Iran, you're supposed to say something like this:

"Waving the white flag of surrender would leave Iraq in a perilous position, with an operational, aggressive enemy of America, al qaeda growing in strength. Likewise, we must remain in place to stop Iran from training extremists in their country, and then sending them across the border to kill American troops. Al qaeda is an existential threat the we must defeat, and we will defeat. This is not the time to give up."

His problem is he keeps forgetting that he's not supposed to put "Iran" and "al qaeda" in the same sentence. It's important to convey, especially to media superstars like Kyra Phillips, that al qaeda and Iran are linked. The Sunni al qaeda is much too fundamentalist to make common cause with the heretic Shi-ites. And Iran, despite its membership in the the "axis of evil" club, doesn't pose any threat to the US. The country does threaten Israel, but given Israel's nuclear capability, even that threat is hyperbolically overstated.

None of the reality of any threat enters into this political manipulation of language. The idea is simple: Say al qaeda, Iran, al qaeda in consecutive sentences. Lieberman understands it; he stepped up during the press conference in Jerusalem and audibly gave him the "extremist" talking point. (Leave aside as well the idea that any Iraqi fighting against an occupying force is an "extremist.")

McCain is either too dumb, or too unused to robotically repeating talking points, to keep straight this very simple strategy of misleading the media, and the voters into believing that Iran, too, in its support of al qaeda, was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks.

Employees Good, Contractors Bad

2008-03-21T05:03:00.003-04:00

There has been a concerted effort by the Bush administration to replace civil service worker with contract employees. I've been hearing about it around the extended family dinner table for years. I have a relative who works for a Federal regulatory agency who has said this has been policy from day 1.

There are good reasons for this, from a Bush perspective, especially wrt regulatory agencies:

1) Directing Federal funds to cronies, as the agency providing the contractor takes its cut. This is obviously a real potential boost to fund-raising.

2) Providing a channel to influence how people working at civil service rather than politically appointed jobs. Contractors have two bosses, the one at the agency, and the one at the office.

3) Weakening institutional memory and stability. By using short-term contractors, the administration makes it more difficult to use agency experience with past events to more wisely deal with current issues.

4) Making it easier to shrink the agency. It's hard to fire civil servants. It's easy no to renew a contract.

5) Making it easier to influence civil servants to break work rules. One of the reasons rules controlling access to, say, passport records, have teeth is that if you do break the rules, and are fired, you stop contributing to your pension, stop accumulating service time toward retirement and are booted out of a great health care plan. If your contract is terminated, all that happens is your employer sends you to some other assignment.

The Obama passport snooping incident is made more suspicious because the perps were contractors. The sanctions that applied to them are weaker than those applied to civil service staff, they could well have more loyalty to the interests of the agency that put them into the job.

Of course, the use of contractors creates the possibility of dirty tricksters penetrating the agency intentionally. It's a lot harder to turn a civil service employee than it is to introduce a mole.

Clinton Bets Her Stake

2008-03-20T12:50:00.007-04:00

As we watch Clinton try to keep her hopes alive in the minds of the press and the superdelegates, you have both admire her persistence, and shake your head about the train wreck to come.

She had to win on March 4th, take both Texas and Ohio in the primary, and win one of them reasonably big. March 4 was do or die day. She could not afford to think strategically, at all. She had to find a way to take Obama down no matter what it took, and so she adopted the kitchen sink approach. This meant hauling out tactics that would win the OH and TX contests, without regard to what that would mean on March 21. The worst of her positions, the ones that would not stand scrutiny over time, were pulled out on the weekend before the primary.

So, just before the primaries, she pulled out the NAFTA card, with a boost from the Conservative Canadian cabinet. She doubled down on the 35 years experience business, making specific claims about foreign policy initiatives she claimed to have been involved with. Also, if you were in comments sections that weekend you saw what looked like proponents with talking points that included a claim that she was Bill's real Vice President, referring to a metaphor Gail Sheehy used in a Vanity Fair article.

Taken individually, these are all weak arguments. To attack NAFTA was to attack the Clinton administration that she claims as her virtual incumbency. The foreign policy claim was ridiculous; she was not even cleared to read secure cables coming in from embassies around. The nearly VP claim was absurd,especially given the unprecedented role Gore played in the Clinton administration.

One by one, they arguments all kinda suck But taken together, these things were even worse, because she had to claim to be inconsequential on NAFTA, while terribly consequential on Kosovo and that Gore spent his time in office on the equivalent of playing golf with Dan Quayle.

The campaign recognized these were bad arguments, and they dropped them immediately, switching to "ZOMG he's BLACK" and therefore can't win, pitching to the press and to the superdelegates that his race made Obama fundamentally flawed. This was done using surrogates, and does not in the least bit imply that Clinton, or her most prominent surrogate, Geraldine Ferraro, is racist. Clinton was prefiguring the coming race, getting a boost from the cable television constant looping of the Wright content. (Chris Bowers confirms that Clinton is pushing the Wright story.)

Obama's Unity speech ended that attack, at least for now, and answered questions superdelegates had about Obama's capability under fire. However, polling indicates that she has raised doubts among key demographic groups in PA. Obama may not be able to repeat his past performances of closing an initial polling gap to either win, or lose narrowly.

We are in danger what several commentators have called the worst case scenario, a candidate selected in a less than transparent way, or a candidate with lagging, even negative momentum. A lot depends on how Obama's big speeches this week play out in the media over the next week.

Don't...Read....Edward....Rothstein

2008-03-20T11:57:00.002-04:00

There are things you know you shouldn't do. You've done them before, and nothing good came of it. You tell yourself never to do it again. I'm not talking about mind-altering substances, or ill-thought out liaisons that don't look so good just before sunup. I'm talking about reading stuff that makes your brain hurt.

Edward Rothstein, who writes about culture is someone I really try not to read. And when I do forget, and read him, I mentally kick myself and swear never to do it again.

But today I saw the headline, and I had to read it. Mistake, but this time my brain didn't hurt as much as I got angry.

On the death of Arthur C. Clark

He starts out very nicely, actually:

“Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral” were the instructions left by Arthur C. Clarke, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90.

This is, of course, not easy to do. It's very difficult to keep religion out of death. Death's avoidance is at the heart of religious belief, whether it is through personal immortality or immortality through your offspring. So it's a challenge to fend it off.

So what does Rothstein do? He writes about he religious elements of Clarke's work, declaring, at the end:

For all his acclaimed forecasting ability, though, it is unclear whether Mr. Clarke knew precisely what he saw in that future. There is something cold in his vision, particularly when he imagines the evolutionary transformation of humanity. He leaves behind all the things that we recognize and know, and he doesn’t provide much guidance for how to live within the world we recognize and know. In that sense his work has little to do with religion.

But overall religion is unavoidable. Mr. Clarke famously — and accurately — said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Perhaps any sufficiently sophisticated science fiction, at least in his case, is nearly indistinguishable from religion.

The body of the article is about some of the stories Clarke wrote that had religion in them, like the famous short story "The Nine Billion Names of God" where two computer technicians help an Eastern sect print out all God's names, thereby ending the universe.

Along the way he peddles this tripe:

Mr. Clarke’s writings were the most biblical, the most prepared to amplify reason with mystical conviction, the most religious in the largest sense of religion: speculating about beginnings and endings, and how we get from one to the other.

The fact that Clarke noticed that other people believed in this stuff, and that there was fodder for irony and pathos doesn't make him mystical or religious. Another story he might have mentioned, "The Star," is about a Jesuit astronomer who discovers that the nova that Magi followed destroyed a thriving civilization. (I happen to think this story inspired George RR Martin's "The Way of Cross and Dragon," which is about another Jesuit who has challenges to his faith).

But the fact that Clarke was a keen observer of what motivates people, had the strong sense of irony that makes for a great short story writer--the best of the Golden Age authors at that length--doesn't in anyway make him religious, any more than Larry Niven creating a compelling alien makes him a Pearson's Puppeteer.

It's an insult to Clarke's memory to put his work in this frame, and Edward Rothstein should be ashamed.

Of course, if he knew shame, he wouldn't keep writing.

Revival

2008-03-18T04:44:00.001-04:00

I enjoy give and take in comments. I'm not real big on pronouncements from above. So my blog attempts have always been abortive. But, lately, I find I have more to say, at greater length, than fits into blog posts. So I'm gonna take another crack here.

Kurtz in Circles

2007-07-01T10:58:00.000-04:00

So Howie ends his criticism of Ken Silverstein's undercover story on lobbyists by saying:

The reason is that, no matter how good the story, lying to get it raises as many questions about journalists as their subjects.

And he proceeds to his next subject:

Why do journalists keep making political contributions?

which has this fascinating coda:

The news outlets that don't ban donations seem to regard them as a matter of personal preference, like joining the PTA. But they seriously underestimate the public distrust of journalists, which is only fueled by such practices. Those who work for opinion magazines or are employed as commentators have a stronger case that their views are no secret. But there is still an important distinction between rhetorically supporting a candidate and helping bankroll one.

The scorecard -- 125 of 144 donations to Democrats -- provides fresh ammunition to those who say the press has a liberal tilt. It's hard to argue you don't favor one party when you've just coughed up cash for that party.

So, working undercover to get an accurate news story raises questions. And it's imperative that reporters keep their political positions a secret--that they lie to their readers, by omission, about their political views.

In both cases, not in order to get the readership more information, but to get them less information, all in order to preserve people like Howie in their positions of august authority and cocktail weenie consumption.

Occupational Reality

2007-06-22T06:16:00.000-04:00

For at least three years, I have been calling attention in comments, and in emails to people who do not have comment sections, that the US is, and has been from the outset, engaged in a policy of permanent occupation in Iraq. This has been clear since the decision was made to build "enduring bases" in Iraq.

As time has past, all the other pretexts have been stripped away by events, and we are left, at this point with nothing more nor less than permanent occupation in support of a puppet government. I have despaired of anybody, in the MSM or in the blogosphere writing clearly about this--or about the severe difficulty involved in ending the US involvement in the occupation because of Iraq's status as a failed state with no national defense capability, surrounded by four states that have reason to have designs on its territory, and who are, in some ways natural enemies.

This is complicated further by the fact that one of those states, Turkey, is a member of NATO, and has legitimate concerns over border security. The positions taken by democratic candidates--the wiggle room in their detailed statements about their plans for Iraq--make it clear that they understand these difficulties, but fear saying so out loud, because of the enormous unpopularity of this catastrophic occupation.

The blathering from the beltway pundits, spouting the FU justification of the week also impedes serious discussion of what is to be done, and is frequently characterized by arm waving that presumes that the US is both sovereign and if not omnipotent, effectively able to impose conditions, like a tripartite division, or the dissolution of the current government or alliance with "good" ex-Baathists. But there is very little written that discusses the reality of the strategic situation.

Last night, over at FDL, swopa outlined these issues in the context of parsing democratic presidential candidates' statements. He describes why these issues pose difficulties for those who want to end the occupation, and what realistically we have to worry about. The US will not be able to withdraw substantial forces without facing these issues, and making clear decisions about what the least horrific outcome is, and how it can be pursued.

This is a debate that is long overdue. I urge people to read that post.

It's not just the blogosphere

2007-06-19T18:58:00.001-04:00

So everybody reacted to Richard Cohen's ill-reasoned column with derision yesterday. Literally a thousand comments taking him to task for demanding a get out of jail free card for Scooter Libby because, well, because he's part of Sally Quinn's salon. Sure, atrios gave him the WotD award, and Glenn applied his writing scalpel, but it was the hoi polloi in the comments section that tells you just how completely out of touch those Beltway pundits have become.

In a less widely publicized instance, Chris Matthews endured catcalls at the AFSCME event yesterday, when he decided that one of the most pressing issues of the day was Senator Clinton's view on the question of pardoning Libby.

Those dirty effin' hippies are everywhere. And they keep making noise.

The latest enabler: Roger Cohen

2007-06-18T07:46:00.000-04:00

Unfortunately, this piece by Roger Cohen of the IHT is behind the NYTimes subscription wall.

But I can give you the skinny. It's the first line:

The Iraqi conflict is going to be with us for years if not decades.

This is the latest in a series of breaking-it-to-you-slowly pieces about the plans for permanent occupation in Iraq. The first mention came a couple of Sundays ago, when the NYT quoted anonymous sources that there was the possibility of Iraq being like Korea--with a long term occupation force of about 50,000 troops. I'm gonna pull a few bits out of the piece to demonstrate just how completely out of touch or complicit the media continues to be.

The last military build-up will not be repeated. Americans have no stomach for a further "surge" and the U.S. armed forces have no capacity for one.

When the escalation was first proposed in mid January 2007as Bush's response to the ISG report calling for diplomacy and drawdown, the media spent some time reversing direction from the certainty, expressed by Time and Newsweek, that this would provide political cover for a drawdown. By the time they had finished adjusting their conventional wisdom cocktail weenie goggles, it was March, so the law of the Friedman unit decreed that September was when All Would Be Settled. The Last Chance For Bush, because Republicans Would Turn On Him. There was a brief introduction of a Boehner Interval of 90 days, but that was much too imminent to preserve the fiction that something would be different at the end of the requisite period.

What Cohen says here does not, of course, reflect reality. The decision to escalate came after the 2006 elections, which confirmed what the polls had been saying for some time--that Americans had no stomach for an escalation. And the time it took, and the corners cut in terms of training, equipment readiness and extensions of tours of duty indicated that the armed forces did not have the capacity for the escalation.

In fact, Americans had no stomach for the last escalation, and the US Armed Forces clearly had insufficient capacity for it—training was curtailed, equipment was provided upon arrival in theatre, injured soldiers were sent back into battle, rotation length was increased and any number of other indicators demonstrated this. Whether you read polls, or just talk to people, it is very clear that Americans have turned decisively against this war.. And it is also very clear that this simply does not matter to our policymakers, our elected officials or the Beltway punditocracy. The escalation happened anyway.

I see four core American interests in Iraq that cannot be abandoned. There must be no Afghan-like Al Qaeda takeover of wide areas. There must be no genocide (say a Shiite sweep against Sunnis). There must be no regional conflagration (for example, a Turkish invasion). And there must be no return to the old order (murderous Stalinist dictatorship).

And now let's just tack on one more "must." Everybody gets a pony.

We use the the Friedman Unit not just because it's snarky and derisive. We also use it because it encapsulates, in only two words, a sense of pseudo analysis, wishful thinking and a Mr Micawber-like belief that something will turn up that has characterized MSM coverage of the war from the beginning. It also connotes the unwillingness of advocates of this disaster,especially the “liberal hawks,” to admit that it is a disaster, and to accept the inevitable catastrophic results.

Moreover, those uacceptable conditions that must be avoided are largely happening now. There is genocide going on. There is a regional conflagration taking place, with Saudi, Syrian and Iranian proxy forces doing battle, as well as a very nervous line drawn through the center of would-be Kurdistan. It can be argued that the US has established a murderous dictatorship. The death rate is a lot higher now than it was under Saddam Hussein. People are rousted out of their homes at night, and arrested and held with no due process. People have been tortured. And there is no way to ensure that the end game will not be another strong man.

I'm sure Gorbachev saw four core interests that couldn’t be abandoned when he announced glasnost, too. Sometimes the world is not what you wish it to be.

To ensure this, the United States must keep a military presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future. The size of this deterrent force is up for debate, but 50,000 soldiers, or 105,000 less than today, is one talked-about figure. The timing of the drawdown will have to be discussed with Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, but it should begin soon after September.

Oh there is so much here to write about here. Let’s start with the first sentence. The US must keep a military presence in Iraq indefinitely. Let’s think about what that must entail. First, it must entail that the Iraq government not be representative of the popular view of Iraqis. There is no way that an openly nominated, freely elected government of Iraq would support a permanent 50,000 soldier occupation that would be in place, in part, in support of Israel and in opposition to the Palestinians, Iran, and the arab states in the region. Further, this sentence is a declaration of hegemony and denies the existence of a sovereign Iraq. There are no holds barred here in this statement, no pretext that there are Thieu supporters throughout the South. The USmust occupy Iraq for the foreseeable future. The US, and only the US, will decide the nature of the occupation of Iraq.

Now as to the size of the, ahem, proposed “deterrent” force. Shortly after Saddam fell, the administration was talking about a residual force of 30,000 to 50,000 troops (see a contemporary TNR article as an example). Permanent occupation has always been the plan.

The notion that we are slowly coming to the realization that a permanent presence in Iraq will, unfortunately, become necessary is either profoundly dishonest or disturbingly naive and uninformed. The plan for tens of thousands of occupying soldiers has been in place from the outset. The infrastructure to support this occupation has been systematically put into place over the last four years, with the building of hardened “enduring bases” complete with Baskin Robbins and Pizza Huts. The embassy has clearly been built as the quarters for a viceroy and bureaucracy for ruling the country. The idea that there is now “one talked about figure” carries the implication that we have just come to this realization. Not so.

This has been the plan from the outset. And, for some reason, the reporting on this has been very limited. The Chicago Tribune had a piece in 2004 about the plans for enduring bases. George Packer visited ones of the bases for the New Yorker. Fred Kaplan finally did write a column about them in Slate. By and large, though, these very clear plans have not been reported upon, and now columns like yours today are facilitating the myth that these are new plans, a new recognition of reality. In fact, had there been any plan for a real withdrawal, the US would have been working to rebuild the Iraq national defense force, including air power, armor and logistical capability. Instead the US has left the Iraqi defense capability gutted, leaving little option to continued occupation in a country surrounded by armed, potentially hostile both to Iraqi subpopulations and each other . The reference to Korea and Japan is not idle. We’ll leave aside whether this kind of occupation in the face of hostile opposition is actually possible.

And now, in the third sentence of the graf, it turns out that, of course, we have to let the Iraqi Prime Minisiter, former exile and recipient of CIA funds, know what our plans are. The US will, of course, “discuss” how the US plans to dispose of of its troops in his country. Can there be no clearer statement of the nature of this operation that will continue into the foreseeable future? I’m sure Stalin discussed his plans with Bolesław Bierut, as well.

The piece ends with this bizarre coda:

That chance will be increased if, as the United States steps down, the United Nations steps up.

Where does the UN charter specify support for an occupying power? And where will the US have the moral authority to move UN delegates in support of this occupation? Especially given his starting point—that the US will occupy the country for the foreseeable future--the idea that the UN will have anything to do with a US satrapy in Iraq is not even worthy of discussion.

But this where the traditional media is. The Beltway is still committed to supporting whatever the latest talking points are, and to grease the skids as much as necessary for a continuation of this occupation, ad infinitum, regardless of what the electorate thinks.

2005-07-06T02:11:00.000-04:00

Hat Number 2

2005-07-06T02:10:00.000-04:00

Hat number 1

2005-06-22T14:37:00.000-04:00

Cloudy day, from kayak

2005-06-22T14:36:00.001-04:00

Blue ice seen on foot

2005-06-22T14:36:00.000-04:00

Blue ice from kayak

2005-06-22T14:14:00.000-04:00

Sunflower star

2005-06-22T14:10:00.000-04:00

Humpback whale, exhaling

2005-06-22T14:09:00.001-04:00

Glacier, with calves

2005-06-22T14:09:00.000-04:00

Approach to a glacier, through a maze of ice floes