Greg Sanders

Curse your sudden yet inevitable betrayal

Well, apparently House Republicans are voting against the bailout bill by a large margin and the stock market is dropping dramatically.

From what I’ve been seeing from the economist bloggers, most everyone thought this was an adequate, but only barely so, compromise. Essentially, the Dems tried to do this in a bipartisan way while still improving on the Paulson plan. But if they were going to take the deal, they wanted political cover from the Republicans. The House Republican Caucus is apparently unwilling to give them that cover.

So, time to go all in. Apparently a more appealing alternative, from the liberal side, would be to take the strategy Sweden did n 1992 and just nationalize parts of the financial sector. Short version, rather than dealing with the slow bankruptcy process, the government seizes poorly capitalized firms and puts them in to conservatorship. Matt Yglesias lays out how to run the politics of it:

But it seems to me that if a rescue is really as necessary as informed observers think, then why shouldn’t the GOP’s friends in the business community have forced them to go along? Financial services firms might have been strongly opposed to a Swedish-style scheme, but most companies (of course) aren’t financial services firms for them the strong interest is just in havingsomething done rather than nothing.

To be clear, if the House Republicans panic and want to change their mind, fine, I’m forgiving when the economy is on the line.

Debate Impressions

I though McCain brought his A game but Obama still did just fine. That said, I have no idea how these things play. Happily it looks like the insta-polls favor Obama, good to hear. Also, debate parties can be fun, you get to whoop and hollar when your favored topics come up, course a friendly crowd doesn’t hurt either.

So let me focus on the policy. McCain is generally nuts, so I’ll focus on what this tells us about a potential President Obama.

A prediction

So apparently Sen. McCain was basically passive during the bailout negotiations at the White House and wouldn’t say what he’d support. Main opposition apparently came from House Republican leader John Boehner.

This leads me to the belief that, if things get any worse for McCain, the Feds will seize his campaign and sell it to JP Morgan.

Game on

Via Ezra, apparently Obama has offered to make it worth the media’s while to show up on Friday even if McCain skips the debate:

In McCain’s absence, the Senator is willing to make the scheduled debate a townhall meeting, a one-on-one interview with NewsHour’s Jim Lehrer, or the combination of the two, the official said

That raises the stakes nicely. Also apparently Libertarian candidate Bob Barr is willing to take McCain’s place, that could be fun too.

Update: It’s on. This should be interesting.

No Luck for New Japanese PM

So I'm giving this a try for the first time; Greg has graciously accepted a blog post from me, and I'd like to thank him for the forum. My expertise is mostly with Japan, and I may be back occasionally with further thoughts.

Japan's really had a tough time finding its political footing in the post-Koizumi era. This week saw the rise of the third Prime Minister from the Liberal Democratic Party in the past two years, Taro Aso. Aso's an easy-to-like guy, personally, but he has the misfortune of stepping in at what looks to be the end of LDP rule for at least a little while.

The LDP's been having image problems for a long time, with the Japanese people getting progressively more and more tired of what's viewed as backroom dealing and power-broking unrelated to what the people want. There's long standing traditions for LDP voting in much of Japan, but the resultant PMs by the 1990s often had ridiculously low approval ratings; the one before Koizumi, Mori, got down to 7%. And Koizumi himself become so popular by being an outsider, coming in to reform the party.

Now that Koizumi's gone, the LDP has lost that reforming identity, and their ratings have predictably plummeted. Along with that, the Democratic Party of Japan has gained more and more power, to the point where they now have control over the upper house. Each of the previous post-Koizumi PMs, Abe and Fukuda, only lasted a year, and each time, they were frustrated by their inability to really get anything done, along with perceptions that they couldn't manage the country.

I don't really think there's anything that Aso can actually do to save himself or his party at this point from losing control of the lower house, and thus the PM position, to the DPJ. He's already basically starting off as a lame duck and fairly unpopular; the problems facing Japan in terms of the economy and demographics are pretty stark, and he has very limited power to do anything with them. I see a pretty short term for him, and then we'll get to see if the DPJ, under a likely PM Ichiro Ozawa, can do any better at getting Japan settled and growing again. I think the Japanese people will take more to Ozawa, no matter what; after so much LDP rule, the DPJ can only be viewed as more trustworthy and with more ideas.

Bailout Backlash

From the round ups I’ve seen the bailout gives sweeping new powers to the Executive branch, won’t help homeowners, insures Wall Street against loss rather than against collapse, and thus, in short, is a bad idea. Criticism comes from liberals like Krugman, libertarians like Tyler Cowen, and even from the NRO. Why so much opposition: it gives a $700 billion dollar check to make purchases as he sees fit.

Treasury Sec. Paulson did not perform with distinction in the lead up to the crisis, let alone showing enough skill to have unfettered access to $700 billion. Fed chair Ben Bernanke merits more respect but it does seem clear that some sort of fiscal, not just monetary, intervention will be necessary; so we are going to need a different plan. Brad Delong offers an alternative of how to do this with oversight. Joel Achenbach, from whom this post title is stolen, suggest that there are seeds of populist opposition to the bailout. McCain is already critical of the plan, Obama and the Congressional Dems will be criticized if we pass it and if we fight for something better, so let’s take the hit and fight. Obama’s laying out some good principles, but first and foremost this is going to be a political fight, it’s not enough to have good dieas, they need to get implemented.

So what can we do? Let your member of Congress know that this idea makes you angry. Get them more scared of their constituents then of the financial crisis. Stoke the populist backlash. And do it by email or phone, a letter won’t get there in time.

Talk Like a Modern Pirate Day

See here. Reading Medium Large? If not you should.

Once I was the King of Spain...

Now John McCain won’t commit to meet with me...

In McCain’s bizarre interview with Spanish owned Union Radio he refused to say whether he would meet with Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Listening to the interview repeatedly, it simply seemed that McCain had no idea who Zapatero actually was. McCain seemed to think he was a Latin American autocrat - despite the reporter repeatedly saying "I am talking about Spain." This gaffe would seem to have very significant implications.

To be fair, I didn’t have Zapatero’s name at the top of my head either, although I would have memorized it before talking with a Spanish owned radio station. See Max Bergmann over at Democracy Arsenal for a detailed write-up.

McCain won’t meet with a NATO ally, that has nearly 1,000 troops in Afghanistan, that has lost more than 20 soldiers there, has been brutally attacked by Al Qaeda, is incredibly influential in Latin America, has the seventh largest economy in the world, is a DEMOCRACY, and is a large and influential country in the EU. Won’t meet with them?

Initially this was probably just a gaffe, but his campaign is standing by it (see here for the clip). The other explanation is that McCain is still angry that Spain pulled out of Iraq. Yglesias also links to a list of the top 10 McCain foreign policy gaffes and tries to explain why he is treated as credible on foreign policy:

The problem is in the underlying assumption that McCain has some deep underlying national security expertise. In conventional Washington terms, expertise and credibility on security issues basically just requires you to (a) enjoy talking about security issues and (b) support starting wars. Support for launching a war that turns out well is the best thing to do (+5 cred points), but support for launching a war that doesn’t get launched is pretty good (+3 cred points), and even support for launching a war that turns out poorly is okay (+1 cred points) — the important thing is to support launching wars.

The governments new secret weapon, revealed guessed at

So Bob Woodward has been saying the government has a new secret weapon that’s a game changer the same way the tank made WWI tactics obsolete. Here’s a summary from Mark Irvine over at the PCR blog:

We still don’t know enough to evaluate Woodward’s extraordinary claim, but today’s Los Angeles Timesprovides a better descriptionof what he was alluding to in the interview. At least part of the secret is a car battery-sized device attached to a predator drone used to identify and target individuals even while indoors:

But officials said the previously unacknowledged devices have become a powerful part of the American arsenal, allowing the tracking of human targets even when they are inside buildings or otherwise hidden from Predator surveillance cameras. Equally important, officials said, the systems have significantly speeded up decisions on when to strike. The technology gives remote pilots a means beyond images from the Predator’s lens of confirming a target’s identity and precise location.

Putting together the pieces, we’ve got a technology that can work through walls and provide a secondary form of ID. I don’t think heat sensors or sonar imaging would help on the identification. Similarly, I don’t think we could pick up a scent through walls. So that probably leaves sound. In various spy games and movies I’ve seen heartbeat sensors that go through doors and laser eavesdropping tech that can listen through windows using vibrations. This would seem like the logical extension of that stuff, assuming it actually exists.

It would also be relatively easy to build up a voiceprint database. Many of our enemies are kind enough to provide videos taunting us, and hopefully the NSA can pick up some of the rest. It may also be possible to get a voiceprint ID without being able to fully eavesdrop. Probably the lowest registers are easiest to pick up through other materials, think subwoofers, so we might just be comparing bass samples to what we have on file. The fidelity necessary for an identification might be lower than the fidelity required to understand the conversation.

Anyways, this is entirely speculation, if I knew things I wouldn’t be saying things, so take it for what it’s worth.

Palin is unqualified, but her judgment is still better than McCain's

In an interview with Charlie Gibson, (see Ezra Klein for the video) Gov. Palin wasn’t familiar with the Bush Doctrine. James Fallows explains why this is a problem:

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the "Bush Doctrine" exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

For me, the big question is which is scarier: that Gov. Palin hasn’t followed foreign policy or that her judgment in ignorance is still better than John McCain’s?

Details after the cut

Geek Joy

I read John Ostrander’s message board because I’ve long been a fan of Suicide Squad and his other works (including Oracle: Year One which I haven’t read yet). In short, his comics tend to be some of my favorites because they are excellent stories but at the same time feel more real to me than many conventional stories, let alone other superhero ones. (Thanks to my friend Nic for recommending the Squad to me originally and then setting me up with the comics).

I’ve been negligent on my reviews but I’ll have some more on his stuff coming up as well as my other favorites: Brian K. Vaughan (Y the Last Man, Runaways, Ex Machina) and Gail Simone (Birds of Prey and the Secret Six). But for the moment, I’m basking in geek joy from a post I read today.

John, you’re a hero of mine and one of the finest and smartest writers the industry has everhad. You are a huge inspiration to me, and clearly, with BOP and Secret Six, I’ve been ungraciously
swimming in your wake for a good while now.

You know I’ve always been a fan, but I just recently found some of my old Suicide Squad issues and yep,sure enough, even with the code, they were grittier and more disturbing and powerful than almost anythingfrom the majors yet to this day.

Thanks for the Squad, thanks for Oracle, but mainly, thanks for all the great, great stories.

Gail Simone

Yay! I wonder if Simone has ever done anything with Waller. I’ve recently been catching up on Birds of Prey and will probably get into the Secret Six next. I’d already been planning to do that because it was my favorite part of the event in question (I forget the name, crises and or infinity were involved), but hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

Sen. Lieberman is a crazy person

Matt at the Project on Middle East Democracy has tidbits from Joseph Lieberman at a Republican foreign policy forum.

Lieberman notified the audience that his candidate would shake up the U.S. foreign policy structure by committing more support to State, USAID, and public diplomacy efforts that span several agencies. Lieberman said McCain understood the need for “better public diplomacy to get our case out in the Islamic world,” saying, “we’ve tried, but we still haven’t figured out how to do it.”

No, no you haven’t. One possibility, less bombings. More seriously, McCain is keeping the Bush tax cuts, keeping the war in Iraq, and may rework military spending but I don’t think he’s proposed cutting it. More support to State, USAID, and public diplomacy is a good idea, but where’s the money coming from?

Discussing Iraq, the Observer quotes Lieberman as adding, “whatever one thinks about whether we should have gone into Iraq, Iraq now is potentially a great model for the future in the Islamic world.” [emphasis mine]

Wow.

Etymology

Catherine Price has a rather depressing entry up about women being murdered because they married for love.  The details are particularly horrific, but worse yet the perpetrators probably won't even be pursued.

The girls died over one and a half months ago and no one has been arrested; when the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization, tried to register a criminal complaint about the case, the local police refused. Worse, several male legislators from Baluchistan (the province where the killings occurred) defended the killings in Pakistan's national parliament. "These are centuries-old traditions and I will continue to defend them," said one senator from Baluchistan, Israrullah Zehri. "Only those who indulge in immoral acts should be afraid."

One might argue that shooting someone and burying her alive are the definition of an "immoral act," but hey -- why let rationality get in the way of a centuries-old tradition? After all, as Samar Minallah, a human rights activist who investigated the killings, stated to the Globe and Mail, "Never in Pakistan's history have we seen the perpetrators of such crimes punished."

One thought on the matter.  Would we do better describing these murders as lynchings rather than honor killings?  Based on the wikipedia description, it sounds like the key aspect of lynching is that two or more people are involved.  I don't know whether these killings normally have multiple perpetrators, but that protection by the community seems to get at the essence of what constitutes a lynching.  I've never been big on the whole "honor" concept, but it's still a positive word, and I don't think it's one that should be associated with such a dreadful practice.

The utility of thinking of them as lynching is that at least in America we've found techniques to deal with these practices.  (One could argue that some police brutality still qualifies as a lynching, but the order of magnitude is far lower than number of incidents decades ago.)  That may help us have the proper frame of mind when working with reformers in other countries to help them find solutions.

I don't always approve of trying to give things nastier names.  I think calling "suicide bombers" "murder bombers" is just redundant.  We certainly shouldn't call them martyrs, but suicide is the key descriptive term.  It isn't as if suicide has any positive moral connotations in English.

Sigh

I’m with Spencer Ackerman on the latest VP news.

There are many, many, many reasons to be concerned about Sarah Palin’s fitness for vice president. A scurrilous and unfounded rumor about her family is absolutely not one of them. Same goes for her appearance. As progressives, we have an absolute obligation to defend Palin when it comes to the same kind of private crap that the right put on Clinton or on John Edwards or any number of others...

Update: Yeah yeah so Bristol Palin is pregnant, so what.

I believe in playing hardball, but there are times to act like we lived in the country we want to live in and not the country we inhabit. This sort of family stuff should be off the table. I wasn’t bothered by the mentions that Lynn Cheney was gay, she’s out after all, nothing to be ashamed of. Teenage pregnancy is a whole different ball game.

Update: Also agree with Kevin Drum and more importantly, Obama. Not on board with Sullivan, but he provided the Obama link, so hat tip.