Greg Sanders

Fighting Fusionism

Over at the American Scene, Jim Manzi provides a helpful internal account of the social-conservatism and libertarian alliance (fusionism).

I think that the prevalence of the social conservative worldview, broadly defined, is on a long-term downward trajectory in the United States...

What this means for traditionalists is that the best they can hope for is a national government with minimum scope of authority, because it will tend to use whatever authority it has for ends that they don’t like.

As I’ve argued previously, I think that a proper understanding of libertarian thought should call for restraint in imposing uniform national rules, even some rules designed to prevent localities from restricting some individual autonomy.

This alliance weakened a bit under Bush, hence talk of liberaltarians.  Libertarians are big on the net, not so big in the electorate, so this isn't really a pressing problem, but it is worth discussing briefly.  The local restrictions on individual autonomy is key, without those I can't imagine the social conservatives being that excited about the alliance.  Many things liberals want aren't the opposite of traditional values, same-sex marriage is in many ways a conservative thing and it in no way restricts the availability of opposite-sex marriages.  To really get excited about something, you either need to be personally repressed or get the chance to repress someone else.

To me, this sounds like a recipe for the Republicans going further down the road of becoming a Southern regional party, assuming social conservatives don't change how they feel about immigration.  I can't imagine the libertarians would be that excited about the social restrictions where they live, so the alliance would really rely on geographical separation.  Since libertarians aren't a major voting block, their influence in other regions would be limited.

So, can't say I'm particularly worried about their alliance continuing on this basis.  Probably good for most of the country, bad for the South, and there's no restrictions on internal migration in the U.S.  I tend to see economic populism as the approach that has both more peril and potential.

Random gaming thoughts

Inspired by this Yglesias post:

Dave Weigel has a neat piece on the “going Galt” fad currently reverberating through the loony-bin known as the conservative movement.

With all this Atlas Shrugged talked going around, Bioshock 2 is really going to be incredibly topical.  Here's hoping they can exploit it properly.

Mutual Benefit

One of the reasons that longstanding conflicts are so hard to resolve is that the militants on both sides both benefit by provoking one another.  Since counter-insurgency tends to rarely result in a decisive elimination of the foe, even though these groups are killing each other they ultimately enable each other.  Both societies are dragged down but the militants get to rule in hell.

So, how can this sort of vicious cycle be used for good?  Well, as everyone is noting, the Democratic leadership and Rush Limbaugh are now both playing this game.   Here's Jason Zengerle explaining how it works:

The thing that makes Rush different from past GOP boogeymen--such as Newt and Bush--is that, because his bottom line is ratings (rather than votes), the Dems' demonization of him is actually kind of good for him...

Which is why Republicans' best move, at this point, is probably just to ignore Limbaugh: don't denounce him (and then inevitably recant), don't praise him; and don't appear on his show. And maybe hope that Clear Channel--which pays Limbaugh his $50 million a year salary and whose parent company just posted a $5 billion loss--goes broke.

I'm guessing Limbaugh is still a profit center for Clear Channel and will continue to be so unless his ego and demands for compensation get bigger than his ratings. 

So what are the logical limits of this strategy?  Limbaugh's listener numbers probably have an upper bound in the current political climate and I have to imagine he's running fairly near it.  There's only so many hours in the day and after a while it isn't news any more.  That said, it should be a repeatable trick after this controversy dies down.  If necessary, one could also switch to a different demagogue, say Ann Coulter, to keep things fresh.  As a side note, if that happens, let's stay away from the misogyny people.  Many of the gender-based cracks against her are not clever and ironic because she's such a hater, they're just lame attacks against an easy target.  And yes, I include Jon Stewart in that, I love you man, but that one C-PAC attack was beneath you and hurt an otherwise brilliant segment.

Limbaugh could easily stop this any time he wants to, but so long as he personally benefits I doubt he'll care about what he's doing to the party.

Normally of course the Republicans could just put a stop to this.  Republicans play this game with Democratic entertainers on a regular basis and it works to a degree.  However, our politicians also know how to play the distancing game.  If anything, I think we tend to go to far in slamming our entertainers but we've moderated that in recent years.  Obama is much more resistant to the urge to Sister Souljah someone than prior leaders.  We're at a point now where the choice to defend or distance goes more to the substance of the remarks, and that's a good thing. 

However, the Republicans haven't manged to distance themselves because anyone who criticizes gets brutally smacked down.  I don't really get why that happens so it's difficult to say how that system can break down.  My best guess as to why this is happening is that the Republican base is sufficiently homogenous that those entertainers in a position to challenge Rush don't have distinct fan bases to carry them through.  On the other hand, I think Jason Zengerle is wrong about the utility of ignoring him.  If enough Republicans ignore him it would break his power, but there's a collective action problem here.  The more people that don't appear on his show, the greater the chance to gain publicity from an alliance with him.  Moderate Republicans are probably best off breaking with the party or ignoring him, but that won't break his power.

Finally, what are the costs and benefits of this strategy for the Dems?  Well we're probably maintaining the radicalism of the Republican base.  That said, the Republicans have already practically maxed out their party unity in the House and with several exceptions in the Senate.  They're getting serious diminishing returns from the radicalization, so this isn't a huge problem so long as the Dittoheads don't go literally militant.  This is probably helping us with moderate and independent voters, but they'll ultimately vote based on the state of the economy so that benefit is short term.  As Nate Silver says this is really about three or four votes in the Senate and I think he's right.  We need to continue to invite Republicans to vote with us and talk with us while influencing their constiuents to pressure them to cooperate.

Right now, the Democratic Party is in the midst of an audacious domestic project.  In addition to dealing with the economic crisis, we're trying to take the high ground and remake America as a solvent social democracy.  The core of this project is health care as it is orders of magnitude easier to defend well designed entitlements than to implement them.  This isn't as true with carbon cap and trade, but if we get a job rich green sector going than there will be powerful interests fighting to defend the new regulatory regime.

In the longer term, sparring with GOP entertainers is fine, but not at this level.  We ultimately are going to have to work to deradicalize the segment of the population that actually thought George W. Bush did a good job.  Changing demographics will help with that of course, but in the medium term a two party system where one of the parties is nuts is an extremely dangerous phenomenon. 

But aside from ambition what's also vital though is that in this blitz we take prisoners and show quarter.  Giving the actual political leaders, not the entertainers, of the other side a respectful hearing is a low cost strategy.  Politics is often personal in the Senate and is far more heterogenous with governors and we should exploit that.  Real concessions should be limited to those cases where we get something real in return but for matters of tone the public likes Obama's outreaches even when they aren't returned.

So on the whole, I like this strategy.  Let Limbaugh have his ratings, we'll be busy implementing a second New Deal.  Sounds like a good trade to me.

Our President is learning

Picked this up from both Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates.  The President is starting to try to go public to pressure Congress to pass the stimulus bill.  He used the opportunity of signing the new S-CHIP bill into law yesterday afternoon to get a start on it. 

"In the past few days, I've heard criticisms of this plan that frankly echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis in the first place. The notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems. That we can address this enormous crisis with half steps and piecemeal measures and tinkering around the edges. That we can ignore fundamental challenges like the high cost of health care and still expect our economy and our country to thrive. I reject these theories, and by the way, so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change."

Klein also quotes a few of the good bits on health care, where he also strongly took the offensive and is continues to work to lay the groundwork.  My worry had been that Obama was largely unwilling to go on the attack except for rare occasions.  That had been his campaign tactic and it worked pretty well.  I think it was a mistake that he wasn’t more aggressive, albeit respectively aggressive, with courting public pressure on members of Congress prior to the troubles in the Senate.  As a result, the current bill is probably about as good as we’re going to get.  But I don’t think it’s too late to get something of roughly the same impact as the current bill, even though it’s a flawed one.  This S-Chip speech alone won’t do it, but a series of jabs as good as this one or a few higher profile efforts might just do the job.

Here’s the video:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Do you think you’re what they say you are?

It appears that the stimulus bill can’t get to 60 votes in present form and is going to be pared back by 200 billion and getting closer to a 1:1 spending-tax cut ratio.  Nate Silver has a solid analysis of how this happened:

Still, in essentially passing off both narrative and literal control of the contents of the package to the Congressional Democrats, the Obama administration may have played it too cute by half. Obama is popular; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aren't. The trajectory of the bill might have been different if Obama had devoted a prime time speech toward selling it, with graphs and pie charts and the like. But there hasn't been a Big Obama Moment like that -- a show of force -- something that really resonated outside the Beltway. The closest Obama came, oddly enough, was during his inaugural address, but the references to the stimulus there were abstract, oblique.

The upside is that Obama himself is likely to emerge from the whole affair relatively unscathed.

Obama’s real power is the ability to ‘go public,’ a coin termed back to describe Reagan’s techniques for appealing to public opinion to put pressure on his political opponents.  Instead, he played it conservative and let the Republicans outmaneuver Reid in the Senate, big surprise there.  Pelosi got her bill past, though instead of letting her run up the margins and start with a strong point, we made concessions in exchange for no Republican votes.  As Ezra Klein points out, the new era of responsibility has meant losing Daschle and nominating Judd Gregg for Treasury did nothing to help the passage of the stimulus and so far gained very little from a policy perspective.  If the recovery doesn’t start by 2010 the elections results are going to be very bad for the Democrats and rightfully so.

My one source of hope is that the President has been routinely underestimated by basically everyone.  His no drama style has given him a lot of endurance as his adversaries flail and embarrass themselves.  However, people will ultimately judge success by the condition of the economy, not the optics.  Perhaps Obama has written the this fight off as a relative loser and will be focusing on the coming health care debate or the infrastructure bill.  He might be able to achieve some of the economic effects by that means in addition to better management by Treasury officials and such.  However, the clock is now running.

My fear is reflected in the title.  That he thinks bipartisanship will save us.  Fortunately, the President is a very smart man and if he thought that a week ago I’d be surprised if he still thinks it now.

How big should government get?

Obviously the $850 billion dollar surplus will temporarily increase the size of government.  If we succeed in achieving universal health care, even without a single payer system, the size will increase permanently.  Kevin Drum thinks he’d prefer to keep the size of government to 40%-45% of GDP.  Matt Yglesias disagrees:

Where markets work well—primarily in the field of producing consumer goods—they create incredibly efficiencies. But there are lots of fields of endeavor in which markets don’t work well. Since well-functioning markets are the best method we know of creating efficiency, this is a problem. It tends to leave those fields of endeavor plagued by certain kinds of inefficiencies. But since some of these things are very important, they wind up getting taken over by the public sector. Which is, yes, less efficient than the private sector. But not because the public sector “doesn’t work” and its responsibilities need to be turned over to the market but because the things that belong in the public sector are precisely those things for which turning it over to the market isn’t a realistic option.

Meanwhile, one needs to understand that, somewhat counterinuitively, when you have a very efficient economic sector what happens is that it tends to go away… Markets, doing their work, will make those sectors more and more efficient leading them to shrink as a share of the overall economic pie.

Tyler Cowen adds some useful caveats, but they aren’t too relevant to the point I’m going to argue.  I don’t think some sort of hard cap is necessary for overall government spending.  Entitlement spending such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has mandated amounts and methods of distribution.  Congress can pass bills to change how entitlements work, but otherwise they proceed on auto-pilot.  Interest payments on the debt also work that way, but are tangential to this discussion.  The other main kind of spending is discretionary, which means Congress passes a budget each year saying how it will be allocated.

I think that there’s a practical upper bound to how much of the GDP can be handled via the discretionary budget.  In 2008 we spent 2.8% of the GDP on domestic discretionary spending and another 5.6% on defense & security issues (Hat tip Richard Kogan of CBPP).  I suspect we’re actually over the limit now, so let’s say that our present legislative process can efficiently allocate something like 8% of the GDP via discretionary spending.

I think growth will work better if further expansion comes primarily through mandated forms with dedicated funding streams.  I’m no expert in public choice theory but I think we can often get better results by using political processes to create rules for managing spending rather than managing the spending directly.  Government reforms could increase the amount of discretionary funding that could be handled efficiently, but those are probably necessary just to keep pace with GDP growth.  Instead I think the way to go is a range of somewhat-independent bureaucracies that are each designed to the relevant problem and using market forces or libertarian paternalism when practical.

Designing such programs is a political problem and will require lots of expertise and political capital to do well.  Fortunately, I think current health care efforts show that people are bringing such expertise and will to bear on one of the biggest problems we’re facing.

Dealing with foreign and domestic adversaries

Jonathan Chait recently argued that liberals often seem to favor negotiation with foreign adversaries but oppose concessions to domestic ones.  This resulted in some quick pushback.  Key points from the pushback: negotiating isn’t a concession and that playing hard ball in politics means very different things than playing hardball in an actual war.  Here’s the key points of  his retort:

Certainly, it's a way of thinking about your adversary that's at least somewhat in tension with the kind of thinking liberals prefer on foreign policy. On foreign policy, liberals like to understand that our adversaries' thinking can't simply be defined as the negation of our own values. (I agree, which is why I'm a liberal, albeit a moderate one on foreign policy.) It's fatuous to think that if we believe in freedom, then Islamic radicals must simply hate us for our freedom, or that if we believe in equal rights, then social conservatives must be motivated by a hatred for equal rights. Moreover, our adversaries are not always monolithic, and there are times when concessions can divide or isolate them from the center, not just encourage them to increase their demands.

I think Chait’s summary of how domestic and foreign policy strategy are similar in this regard is accurate.  That said, the pieces he was responding to were more strategic than the excerpt he cited.    So, is there strategic analysis correct?  Well, coming from the other side, here’s Ross Douthat’s read:

If you're an unconflicted supporter of abortion rights, obviously, then you shouldn't support overturning [Roe vs. Wade], period: If second-trimester abortion is really a fundamental human right, then there's no reason to risk it's availability for some nebulous hope of a less polarized America

So, is a lot of the rhetoric about social conservatives hyperbolic?  Sure.   But that’s true of most any set of rhetoric when you’re dealing with an issue you actually care about.  I think Chait may well be right in that liberals should do a better job of practicing what we preach when it comes to domestic strategy.  That said, Obama’s outreach attempts to the House Republicans on stimulus netted him zero votes, so I don’t think this is a problem our leadership suffers from.

To have a meaningful debate, I think Chait needs to throw out an example where liberal strategic logic is flawed rather than one where the rhetoric is overheated.  On this issue, positions don’t flow from your assumptions on human nature, they flow from how strongly you care about abortion rights and how broadly you define them.

Counties unite in support of the Purple Line

This Tuesday, the Montgomery County Council unanimously supported a light rail Purple Line to connect Maryland’s inner Washington suburbs (Nice WaPo summary by Katherine Shaver).  The line runs through Prince George’s county whose Council already fully supports the proposal.  They also approved a study of single tracking for a few parts of the soon to be rail trail.  I don’t see that happening.  There’s a reason the words “single tracking” strike fear in the hearts of Metro commuters.

The decision to go forward with the project is now in the hands of Maryland’s Governor O’Malley.  That said, if we get an infrastructure bill that appreciates transit more than the stimulus, than things definitely get easier.

There’s a lot of people who worked very hard for to reach this step.  Politicians, transit activists, and environmentalists have all made it possible.  I’m grateful to all of them and many are even friends of the family.  But I think they’ll forgive me if I focus for a moment on the work my father has done.  He’s been trying to get the Purple Line, or its earlier incarnation the Georgetown Branch, for most of my life.  Jay Walljasper, writing for the AARP, was kind enough to briefly profile him along with two others in a recent bulletin.  The photo is by Chris Mueller of Redux, I think he did a rather good job.  Amusingly enough that was the location they spent the least time at, because Silver Spring’s Metro platform can get rather cold.  I’ve long watched all the work this has taken, I’ve helped with part of it, I’m proud of my Dad and of all of you.

Will the Attorney General nominee foreswear justice?

The Obama administration hasn’t shown much interest in prosecuting those members of the Bush administration that committed war crimes.  Even so, Republicans in the Senate are delaying Eric Holder’s nomination for Attorney General until they get absolute assurance of that.  Spencer Ackerman found that Sen. Kit Bond (R-Missouri) is claiming that Holder privately assured him that there will be no prosecutions.  Happily, Holder’s aide is denying that claim.  I’m not really too concerned with which one is lying, a private verbal promise publicly denied can easily be broken.

Elena Schor over at TPM notes Holder’s written response to Sen Kyl (R-Arizona)

Prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law. But where it is clear that a government agent has acted in "reasonable and good-faith reliance on Justice Department legal opinions" authoritatively permitting his conduct, I would find it difficult to justify commencing a full-blown criminal investigation, let alone a prosecution.

I think investigations, not necessarily criminal ones, are key for the agents.  That said, prosecutions should focus on the higher ranking officials absent behavior so egregious it violates the legal standard Holder mentions.  Practically speaking, I think we should probably be willing to trade amnesty for accurate testimony.  I don’t think many of the key perpetrators would take that deal, which would leave them open to later prosecutions when political will was there.  I expect most of the heavy lifting will be done at the behest of Speaker Pelosi.  She’s our best hope at this point for American-based justice.

The Renewal of America will be YouTubed

In his speech at the kick off, President-elect Obama called for everyone to work together to renew America.  Based solely on that event, I think it’s starting to work.  In the old America, I’d never seen U2 live, in Obama’s, I’ve seen them perform two songs (from quite a distance but still live).  That’s change I can believe in.

From the survey, it looks like people want more travel pictures.  I’ll do that one better for now.  My taping of In the Name of Love wasn’t that great.  It’s split between an intro and the body of the song.  Also, more critically, it has me among other people singing along.  I’m not a good singer, at least not in the range of U2 songs.  That said, while I do love the band, in general they can be a bit tricky to sing along.  The crowd was having some trouble with the ooooOOOahooo bits.  Might have been better closer to the stege.

On the other hand, I think the clip of City of Blinding Lights came out pretty well.  It was a theme song for the campaign, so can’t say I’m surprised they played it.  There’s some laughter at the shout-out to Joe Biden, but I think that’s just part of the live music experience.  If you can catch the actual video (I think it’s on HBO but unscrambled) it’s worth doing, Bono has great stage presence and plays around with the song some. 

Anyhow, since this was some combination of a campaign event and government event, I think it might effectively be in the public domain for all anyone cares.  If I’m wrong, it’ll get pulled.

Update: Oh, I’d have to check the video to be sure, but if memory served Bono actually made a gesture that clearly referenced the Black Power salute.  That said the resolution isn’t high enough on this video to judge what’s on the Jumbotron.

Is Bishop Gene Robinson enough to make up for Rick Warren?

I tend to think so.  Nancy Goldstein over at Salon’s Broadsheet disagrees.

So one can hardly say that Team Obama had never dealt with a similar situation before. I’m going to bet that whether we ever deal with it again depends largely on whether we give Obama a pass -- yet again -- for playing the “inclusivity” card, but only when it comes to LGBT people having to tolerate virulent homophobes, or give him hell. I vote for giving him hell.

Politics always makes strange bedfellows and involves tricky calculations. My beef with Obama isn’t that he’s involved in some interesting ménages, or that he does his math -- only that he seems to think the LGBT community is such an easy lay and comes so cheap.

I’m actually a mainline Protestant, so I’m more impressed by the Robinson pick as he was controversial enough to cause a schism and when he wasn’t invited to an Anglican leadership conference in England he proved no shrinking violet.  Similarly, while the kick-off is a lower profile event, there is a definite symbolism to doing it from the Lincoln memorial.  I think the ‘symbolism off’ will ultimately come down to the two speeches and what Obama says of course.  Obama’s victory speech explicitly had a shout out for sexual and gender equality, so I’m hopeful.

That said I’m linking to this because I’m open to disagreement.  I welcome comments on this one if you think one or both of us are wrong.

The inauguration just got a whole lot more inclusive

I hadn’t addressed it yet, but there was a fair amount of controversy regarding the Obama’s choice of mega-church Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the inauguration.  Warren had invited Obama to participate in one debate and is willing to work with progressives on some issues.  However, he is still a definite social conservative and actively worked to pass Prop 8 in California.  Particularly the disappointment after Prop 8’s passage, a lot of equality activist were really angry by this pick.  Other’s derided it as concern over a merely symbolic way to pick up political capital.  I’m with the activists, symbolism matters, particularly since during the first year Obama’s probably going to be focusing on the economy and health care and not social issues.

The complaining has paid dividends.  First off, in the hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue category, America Blog noticed that Warren’s website scrubbed some of the homophobic rhetoric (hat tip Eve Fairbanks).  Second, Nate Silver noticed that  back on the 26th, after the controversy over the Warren pick, the transition website got more upfront than the campaign website about equality issues:

In the area of 'Civil Rights', however, there is a significant difference between the campaign website and Change.gov, the transition website. Specifically, the transition website makes a much broader range of commitments to the gay and lesbian community.

Third, on Change.gov, on the ninth Kevin Drum noticed that Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs reaffirmed that the new administration was planning to get rid of Don’t ask Don’t Tell.

Finally, this morning, Mike Allen at Politico reported that openly gay Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Bishop of the Episcopal Church, will give the invocation at the Sunday kickoff event for the inauguration.  In a nice bit of synergy with existing symbolism, that kick off will be at the Lincoln Memorial, the location of the “I have a Dream” speech.

Ezra Klein notes the strategic implications of all this:

This is, incidentally, why it's useful for progressives to criticize the president. Politicians respond to incentives. To noise. To anger. Warren, on some level, was a response to the loud protestations of evangelicals who believed the Democratic Party had no place for them. It's hard to see Robinson is anything but a response to progressive activists who sense that Obama was more willing to risk cross those who supported him than those who opposed him... If it was the plan all along, the Obama administration sure did a good job keeping the secret. And if it wasn't, then equality activists have something to be proud of this morning. They changed the incentives.

Related: GQ's profile "Let God Love Gene Robinson." Will really help convey the symbolism of this choice.

Good work people.  Think I might try to make the kickoff now.  Also, bizarrely, I had a dream last night that involved driving and seeing the Saddleback church on a somewhat distant hill side.  It was actually shaped saddle-like, but I quick Google image search found that my imagination was wrong. 

Meh, seat Burris

So I do tend to think the allegations against Illinois governor compelling.  He’s now picked Burris, an African American former opponent for the Senate seat and is trying to play the race card to get him in.  I think Ta-Nehisi Coates effectively demolishes that argument.

What I do find persuasive is Sandy Levinson’s argument:

I suppose it's true that the Senate could/should consider the bona fides of a gubernatorial appointment if there is good evidence that it was procured by criminal means, including bribery. The problem is that there is not a scintilla of such evidence in this case. Governor B. might well be guilty of "attempted sale of the Senate seat," but it's clear that it didn't work, and that he, clever politician that he is, reached out to strengthen himself with a key constituency and, an added bonus, to discomfort many of his erstwhile Democratic Party allies. I don't see how one can mount a good-faith argument against seating Burris unless one is willing to open each and every gubernatorial appointment to some kind of "good-government" scrutiny. Consider, for example, the shameful appointment of Lisa Murkowski to the Senate by her father, the former Senator who became Governor of Alaska. There is no plausible evidence that anything other than nepostism explains the appointment…

If one feels "stuck" by that incredibly stupid clause, with consequences far, far worse than allowing a presumptively competent, if somewhat superannuated Illinois politician to serve a couple of years in the Senate, then I think we should recognize that the 17th Amendment, too, generates a relatively hard-wired rule that limits the possibilities of further Senate scrutiny and the political mischief it invites. (Imagine, for starters, that the Senate is closely divided and that accepting the appointment would change the political control of the Senate (as in 2001) or provide/prevent a "filibuster-proof" majority.)

I’d say seat the Senator and let the Illinois legislature decide whether to remove the governor.  In the longer term, I think Yglesias is right and we should switch over all Senators to being picked by special election (absent rather short period of service or national emergency).

December 16th Link round-up

Spencer Ackerman notes that Muntader al-Zaidi, the guy who threw his shoes at President Bush, is still being interrogated in Baghdad by the Maliki government which probably means he’s being tortured.  Sounds like he’s got a lot of credibility on the streets though so I’d expect Maliki to back off once they realize they can’t effectively discredit the guy.

Also, my friend Lirazel (let me know if you want a link) who answers the question of whether people ever throw shoes in a non-insulting manner:

I did a little poking... in addition to tying shoes to the vehicles of the newly married as a symbol of fertility, apparently in the North of England the wives of fishermen used to throw old shoes at their husband's departing boats as a charm to bring them back safely!"

Robert Wright and Joel Achenbach did another fun blogging heads on Thanksgiving.  Good for people that like banter.

Apparently the presence of the American flag tends to strengthen nationalism more than patriotism in Americans.  Those findings come courtesy of the Lee Sigelman. Wonder if that’s true of other flags.  Also, before I acknowledge the validity of the nationalism/patriotism distinction, I’d like to see more research about how much of the population just have patriotism.

Brad Delong notes that even with perfect information, traders tend not to be rational in their valuing of assets.  Why?  Because if you buy an overpriced good, you can still make money selling it to someone willing to buy it at an even greater mark-up.  Apparently the people who make the most money are those that buy a lot at the beginning of declining resources a sim and sell mid-way through.  Momentum traders, those who buy when things rise and sell when they fall, do worst.  In other words, now is probably a good time to buy stock.

The difference between national interest and national security

So, does the U.S. still care if Osama bin Laden is alive or dead?  Robert Baer argues no in Time and Hanna Ludqvist over at Democracy arsenal disagrees with him and argues yes.

The most interesting part of Baer's piece comes at the end, however, when he asks:

But what if bin Laden really is dead, buried under a hundred tons of rock at Tora Bora or so weakened that he might as well be dead? Indefinitely crashing around Afghanistan and Pakistan's wild, mountainous tribal region on a ghost hunt cannot serve our interests. The longer we leave troops in Afghanistan the worse the civil war there will become. One day Obama will need to give up the hunt — declare bin Laden either dead or irrelevant. He has more important enemies to deal with, from Iran to Russia.

Baer seems to be saying here that terrorism, specifically from al Qaeda and the Af-Pak region, is no longer the greatest threat to the United States. Wow, that's bold. Also wrong, according to CIA director Hayden, who also said last week that "If there is a major strike on [the United States], it will bear the fingerprints of al Qaeda" and that al Qaeda "remains a determined, adaptive enemy unlike any our nation has ever faced... The war is far from over." While the United States has not been attacked since 9/11, Europe has and numerous al Qaeda plots have been uncovered. Those al Qaeda actions came from safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Part of this is a discussion of the importance of Bin Laden.  I don’t buy that he’s irrelevant, though he may well be dead and we should continue to raise that issue regularly.  Either he’ll release another video at some point or we can work on making him much more irrelevant by encouraging speculation as to his survival.

That said, regardless of the best tactics in handling that particular villain, it is rather odd to think of a group like Al Qaeda, ruthless though they may be, as the greatest threat to the U.S.  In determining a threat, you’ve got to balance odds of a problem with magnitude.  Russia’s nuclear arsenal means it’s still the greatest magnitude threat, but even with Putin’s nostalgic turn full fledged conflict is fairly unlikely.  Same with China.  The magnitude of a potential Al Qaeda attack is definitely much smaller, but unlike any nation at the moment they’re actually likely to throw all they can at us.

That said, even after 9/11 it seems fairly odd to think that a bunch of guys primarily living in the mountains of Afghanistan are really the main thing the U.S. needs to be worried about.  Between fixing the economy and defeating Al Qaeda, I think it’s safe to say that the economy is the higher priority.  The trouble is that national security often acts as a trump card in debates.  We don’t have an industrial policy, because that would be an affront to capitalism, except when it comes to defense. 

Often people try to challenge this view by describing environmentalism or economic prosperity as a security issue.  However, that still leads to a warped definition of our national interests.  We’re a superpower that spends as much on our military as the rest of the world does and the number block is the EU, not China or Russia.  A monomaniacal focus on security is more likely to cause problems like Iraq than to make our lives even marginally safer.  I think liberals and progressives ultimately have to be willing to talk about America’s national interests and that security issues will generally make the top 10 but not necessarily the top three.

Two areas where I give libertarians some credit

First local housing regs.  Many of the things wrong with the suburbs and exurbs are not the result of free market forces so much as single-use zoning regs, minimum parking requirements, and uncapped mortgage tax deductions.  Communities that evolve more naturally are often walker friendly with a greater mix of shops and housing rather than just vast stretches of ‘burbs with occasional mini-malls.  On the micro level, the local governments sometimes make inexplicable decisions like Metro offering free parking on inauguration day.  That will obviously lead to even more demand for the lots and provide no incentive for those who live in walking distance to leave the car at home.  Oddly enough even people who oppose universal healthcare seem to believe in a right to free parking.  That said, I do tend to think that contracts can lead to neighborhoods with discriminatory policies even without any government policies.  I think such policies can slip in much the way anti-competitive cartels can.

The other area where I give them so credit is the war on drugs.  I’m perfectly happily with heavily regulated tobacco companies and even tougher regs, but I wouldn’t support a ban.  I do see Democratic candidates saying some good things about criminal justice reforms and focusing on harm minimization strategies, but at the national level we’ve been largely unwilling to take on the ‘war on drugs’ to the degree that we’ve been willing to take on the ‘war on terror’ (could have done more there too obviously).  Thus I’m a bit worried that the proposed Attorney General, Eric Holder, supported mandatory minimums for drugs.  Hopefully that’s not his current stance.

Question of the Day: VP showdown

Aaron Burr vs. Dick Cheney.  Who would you bet on.  Burr is presumably the better duelist but Cheney is much more subtle and you may not see it coming.  Seems like the classic fighter vs. rogue conflict.

Light posting this weekend as I’ll be in Virginia beach.

Only Waxman can save a planet in peril!

The current head of the House Energy and Commerce committee is Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan.  Not surprisingly he takes a great interest in the health of the auto industry but isn’t always the most reliable vote on environmental issues.  Waxman has been doing a great job on oversight and after reading one of his reports on government contracting I was tempted to try for a staffer job as he then wouldn’t have to rely on contractors to run the data.

Yglesais reports that Waxman is apparently doing better than some expected with his challenge:

Rep. Henry Waxman won a round in his quest to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee as the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee recommended that he chair it. The issue is destined to go to the full caucus for a vote, since this is too important to be handled at this level, but for the challenger any kind of win can help build momentum.

If Waxman pulls this off, I wonder who gets oversight.

[Update: Waxman wins it!]

Dancing in the Streets

After volunteering at a MD precinct I headed down to Front Page, a Dupont Circle bar where a bunch of my work friends were gathered. I’d also been there for the first debate and as then, the place was packed and each CNN projection for Obama was greeted with cheers. I put enough faith in Nate Silver that I rested easy after Pennsylvania was called, but it was still exhilarating to stay through the whole process. Being without a watch or cell phone, I was actually in the bathroom close to 11 eastern when I heard some cheers from upstairs. Rushed up after I heard cheers starting. Thankfully, I managed to get there while they were still calling states, got back to my friends in time for it to be come official. President Elect Barack Hussein Obama.

Stuck around for the speeches, McCain’s gracious, Obama’s inspiring. While we were waiting it was thrilling each time I heard President Elect Obama. Everyone was hugging one another, taking pictures with themselves and the announcement, toasting the results, and of course cheering like mad. Normally staid think tankers were in tears or waxing poetic about the moment, this is our chance to wipe the slate clean, the chance to awaken from an eight year national nightmare.

When we spilled out into the streets the city was alive. Cars driving in the circle were honking their horns and drawing cheers in response. Chants were being started at any giving minute. First time I’ve ever high-fived a passing stranger and I think I did it at least a dozen times. One image that will particularly stick with me was a passing Mack Truck blowing his horn to a "Yes, We Can" beat. On the streets people went with that, "Yes, We Did" or just a simple "Obama!"

I’ve never seen anything like it in person. I didn’t tend to participate when UMD had post-victory sports riots celebrations, but I doubt those weren’t as oriented on the country and they certainly weren’t as broadly based. The closest I’ve seen on TV were World Cup victories or the celebration of a newly emerging, or reemerging democracy after the fall of a hated leader.

For me, the occasion was only slightly dampened by the realization that the Metro closed, I had no easy way to get back to Silver Spring, and there were scores of people in the same predicament trying to get taxis. Fortunately I was able to get a hold of a friend who was kind enough to let me crash on her couch. Thanks again!

I didn’t bring my camera, but check out the DCist (via Monica) or Joel Achenbach for a description of the gathering at the White House.

Battleground polling

This bit of awesome via Ezra Klein:

This is really surprisingly professional. Not sure how big the sample size was, but I’m rather amused by the polling results at the end. Interviewer had a good dry sense of humor.

This year's key demographic: a guy named Joe

First, as a quick programming note, I’m having a few friends, such as Moti, Arwen, and my fiance, post on the blog when they have something to say. Thanks guys! I may add a few more depending on interest. Consider this a bit of a consolation prize for my laxity in posting over the past few months, probably time to downgrade myself to posting at least four times each week or the like. As health issues get dealt with that rate should rise again.

Second, on the debate tonight. John McCain seems to think that there are relatively few Americans that want to "spread the wealth" and a great number of Americans that are ready to buy their own business (like Joe the Plumber, who had apparently talked to Obama). I’ll take that bet.

That said, I do give points to McCain for consistently opposing Ethanol subsidies. The corn varieties don’t produce an energy efficient fuel and raise food prices.

Finally, this from Ezra Klein, for a slightly more effective version of the McCain guilt by association strategy.

Saw a wild PUMA in the neighborhood today

I always kind of thought they were a myth. But there was actually someone with a Hillary Clinton sticker on their back window with 2012 written underneath it. They also wrote out the URL for a Party Unity My Ass website. Frakking weird.

Tigh / Roslin '08 (not an endorsement)

Ross Douthat notices the similarities but it takes a correction from a reader to get it right.

Jonathan Last comes through with the perfect pop-culture analogy.

Update: Except, as a reader notes, that Tigh-Roslin is even more perfect - though rather less reassuring.

I went Googling for a relevant picture and found that there's already articles and a campaign site.

Image from http://www.tighroslin.com/

I'm really amazed how well this fits.  Roslin was near the bottom of the line of succession as Secretary of Education which seems roughly on par, experience wise, with being Governor of Alaska.  She also is a favorite of the religious and has banned abortion, although I think her personal attitudes are far more feminist than Palin's.  Tigh is a navy man, a great guy to have at your back in a fight, has a bit of a temper, and was an abused P.O.W. although his experience is more recent.  Also their administration shows no understanding of economics.

Obvious lessons: The lesson for anyone who has noticed the McCain parallel is that he'd make a poor President.  The Roslin examples suggests that we shouldn't underestimate Palin just yet.  I don't think we'll have that much trouble beating her, but lets not get cocky.

Convention time

I'm up in Maine visiting Acadia National Park among other things.  Having a pretty good time and enjoying the convention at night.  Missed the first night, but was impressed by the speeches by Sen. Clinton as well as the one by the Gov. Napolitano.  Although my favorite line was from Bob Casey that McCain's support for Bush means that "he's not a maverick, he's a side kick."

Tonight's been even better so far.  Pres. Clinton did a superb argument for Obama's qualifications and the most disciplined speech I've ever seen him give.  Best line, we can convince more people "with the power of our example than the example of our power."  Sen. Kerry was freaking on fire tonight, lots of good lines against McCain, he should really be used as a surrogate and get some payback for 2004.

Probably going to bed before Biden is up, but since I haven't commented yet, I think he's a good choice.  He doesn't really consolidate a key issue or double down on change.  However, he's got good experience and knows foreign policy issues cold.  He's not always right, he was too supportive of the war in Iraq and his partition proposal isn't actually popular there.  However, the surge practically speaking is a soft partition strategy, that's what the whole Sons of Iraq mean in practice and why integrating them with government forces will be such an issue.  On other issues he was the leading proponent of the Violence Against Women act and commutes by train from Delaware, good stuff there.  So I think he's qualified to be President, but the main trait he'll bring to campaign is that of happy confident warrior.  I can't wait to hear the equivalent of his "A noun, a verb, and 9/11" jab against Giuliani.

What's the logic of Kansas

Kevin Drum has an excellent review of Grand New Party, a book by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam outlining how the GOP could try to better appeal to the working clas. I haven’t read it, and don’t really intend to as while I enjoy the writers I’m not really the target audience here.

That said, they do make some interesting points, notably a counter to Thomas Frank’s argument that the GOP manages to trick lower income voters into going against their economic interest by supporting social conservativism.

If [working class] were as poorly off as they were in the 1930s, abortion and gay rights wouldn’t mean much to them, but as long these voters are comfortable—not rich, maybe, but not too badly off, either—then why not vote for the party that represents their social values?

This is especially true, Douthat and Salam argue, since maintenance of traditional social values has more economic value to the working class than it does to the college-educated middle class. In the well-off suburbs, divorce is rare, crime is low, and kids mostly don’t have children out of wedlock. What’s more, when those things do happen, the better-off classes have the resources to deal with them. To the upper middle class, then, the constellation of issues revolving around the breakdown of the traditional family seems a distant concern...

But as Douthat and Salam point out, doesn’t it make sense that the people who are most often face-to-face with these problems are also the ones who are most concerned about them? Put that way, of course it does. What’s more, things like divorce, single-parent families, and teen pregnancy incur costs that are harder to deal with the poorer you are, so to a large extent, when working class whites vote for socially conservative Republicans they’re also voting their economic self-interest.

I think the trade-off being made is that traditional values restrict the freedom of women in exchange for increasing the economic stability of the family unit. The shared interests model of marriage is really the premium model, if you’re lower on the economic totem pole you might find the old opposite attracts specialization model much more practical. There’s no real economic benefit to oppressing gays, but that is more of a side-cost of the support structure of traditional religion. The trade offs don’t seem advantageous to me, but at least I can see the logic.

On the liberal side, we can probably find ways to address these concerns without resorting to patriarchy. I tend to think we should find a way to subsidize child care in a way that is also appealing to stay at home mothers. That said, we’re not offering a return to the old ways, so we’re just going to lose some of this demographic.

The War Powers act that doesn't do anything

So there’s a new proposal on how to revamp the War Powers act, which gives Congress a mechanism to force withdrawals under certain condition but that is a mechanism that Congress has never used. In any event a proposal to fix it seems fairly worthless as enforcing the act would require overcoming a veto. If you can overcome a veto you already can basically do what you want, why do you need a war powers act?

Timothy Noah also picked up on this and provides some explanation as to why this whole area is so messed up: Congress doesn’t want that responsibility. He cites a historical example.

What amazed and shocked me, and moved me to write up the debate for the New Republic, was the unembarrassed manner in which members of Congress declared as their paramount interest the absence of any legislative fingerprints on whatever might result from allowing (or not allowing) the Navy convoys to enter an area of violent conflict. In fact, it was pretty much taken as a given that the War Powers Resolution would not be invoked, not because the president was not complying with it (no president ever has) but because doing so would require Congress to either approve or revoke Reagan’s decision.

If he’s right, we’ve got a structural flaw in the Constitution. We need a Congress willing to actually exercise or deny the ability to declare war. Absent that, we need an alternate check to ensure accountability for one of the executive branches most dangerous powers. The only alternative I’m coming up with is a no confidence vote as an alternate means to impeachment of removing a president.

On Patriotism

Via Yglesias:

Via Justin Logan, John McCain on patriotism: "Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything."

Like Justin, I’m going to have to cop to not being so patriotic that there’s literally nothing I would put above my country. Indeed, I believe that most Americans, whether secular or religious, put stock in some kind of universal ethical obligations that extend beyond national boundaries.

Definitely agree. One addition, I do think one of the neat things about America is that we have a good sized immigration population that chose to come here and put down roots here.

In some ways, our ties with nations are a lot like the institution of marriage with arranged marriage being quite common and divorce far less so. Often we’re stuck with the one we’re born with or can go abroad but acquire citizenship there. This is changing in the EU, although I think it has remained fairly cyclical world wide. Patriotism may have a greater and indeed better meaning when we can pick our countries. As for me, even if I had more options, I think I shall stick it out here defending what I think is great about the U.S. and hoping to improve the rest.

Obama opposes the anti-gay marriage California amendment

Good news from the Advocate:

In a letter to the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club read yesterday at the group’s annual Pride Breakfast, Senator Obama wrote, “I am proud to join with and support the LGBT community in an effort to set our nation on a course that recognizes LGBT Americans with full equality under the law … that is why I oppose the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution, and similar efforts to amend the U.S. Constitution or those of other states.”...

Obama also stated his support for “extending fully equal rights and benefits to same-sex couples under both state and federal law,” and reiterated his desire to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and “don’t ask, don’t tell” as well pass legislation to protect LGBT American against hate crimes and employment discrimination. Obama closed the letter by congratulating those who have chosen to celebrate their love by getting married in the past several weeks.

The amendment vote may be close, so every little bit helps. More importantly, I think this is the best stand I’ve yet heard taken by the national Democratic leadership. I haven’t been as excited lately about the race as Obama dropped public financing, ran to the center on FISA among other issues, and didn’t back Gen. Clark. I could deal with that but it isn’t the kind of behavior that inspires me to make donations. This sort of statement does.

Also Reihan Salam at the American scene does a bit of analysis as to why Obama would stake this position if he personally opposes same sex marraige. I just assumed Obama was lying.

Via Sullivan passing on Kirchick’s post

Justifications for death

I enjoy reading the American Scene in large part because the range of writers there provide some insight into how the other sides think and a rather enjoyable to read. The one I tend to agree with most is Noah Millman who recently wrote on the Supreme Court decisions finding that a child rapist who had not committed murder could not be executed.

If you’re interested, I think his whole argument does a good job analyzing the ideas systematically. However, to keep things short, I’ll just quote his conclusion:

I’m more confortable arguing against the death penalty on the pragmatic grounds that we don’t want to grant ourselves the power lest we misuse it than arguing on the grounds that it violates a criminal’s inalienable right to life. But it does seem to me that if you start from a premise of such a right to life, then you can only barely justify the death penalty in cases of murder (on the grounds of satisfaction and/or expiation – the consequentialist justifications will never fly), and certainly not in any other cases.

I also reject the death penalty, at least outside of traditional federal criminal cases (not that Gitmo craziness), as being so unevenly and unjustly administered as to be unacceptable. Beyond that, were working with a reliable system, I’m torn; however murders are certainly the outer bound of people I’d consider executing.

Low-fidelity world

So an article covering neuroscience from a New Yorker article made me think of computer games (via Brad Delong):

...The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.

So basically our connection with the real world has low bandwidth and we make up for that with our onboard graphics/sensory processor. I’d be curious what the breakdown is among other animals, is this common for most life forms or do those with less complex brains primarily rely on raw inputs?

In any event, that particular analogy makes it a bit easier for me to process this. It doesn’t mean we’re disconnected from the world, it just means we’ve got a client side intensive way of processing the world. Presumably higher bandwidths proved the more difficult to implement biological solution.

One cool thing about Sen. Webb

Given that I support the argument against making him Veep, I think it’s only fair to also highlight one area where he’s a Democratic standout.

Take it away Spencer Ackerman:

Katrina vanden Heuvel reports on Jim Webb’s efforts to do something profoundly valuable for the country: end the drug war.

In addition to the drug supply remaining constant, the incarceration epidemic has failed to curb illegal drug use while also “devastating our minority communities.” Senator Webb said, “the number of persons in custody on drug charges increased thirteen times in the past 25 years…[And] when it comes to incarceration for drug offenses, the racial disparities are truly alarming. Although African Americans constitute 14 percent of regular drug users, they are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56 percent of persons in state prisons for drug crimes…Our current combination of enforcement, diversion, interdiction, treatment and prevention is not working the way we need it to…There has been little effort to take a comprehensive look at the relationship between the many interlocking pieces of drug policy.”

And that’s by design. For an entire generation, avaricious white politicians have ignored how the repeatedly-refuted drug war has compounded, not alleviated, the scourge of narcotics in minority communities. Why? Because there aren’t enough votes in solving the problems of poor, non-white America.

For me, it was actually international relations that took me from skeptical of the war on drugs to strongly opposed. Civil wars and organized crime the world over are financed by drugs. It all sees so futile to me. We’re genuinely winning in Columbia, FARC has lost a lot of men and leadership and the country is doing better as a whole, but even so the amount of coca cultivation rises. Trying to fight poppy cultivation is a critical complicating factors we’re facing in Afghanistan.

To be clear I love the U.S.’s moves against smoking in recent years. They’ve been highly effective and made many places much more pleasant for non-smokers to boot. I’m perfectly fine with even some harsh public health measures, but how about we do it without shooting people, eh?

Belated note on Hillary Clinton's Presidential bid

Between various distractions I didn’t get around to blogging Sen. Clinton’s concession speech (link goes to Rebecca Traister’s write up; for the full text, go here). I caught part of it live and thought it was lovely and went a long way to reuniting the party and I certainly thank her for that. Ezra Klein points to a nice American Prospect article on lasting consequences of Sen. Clinton’s run. The ones I found most notably of the positive observations:

• There’s now precedent for a female frontrunner who was strong on a range of feminist issues.
• Sexism was made obvious by the campaign and did inspire some backlash and greater awareness.
• The Senator figured out an ambitious but achievable health plan.

As is obvious from the above list, I do agree with Paul Krugman that there was some raw sexism deployed against her, although in my opinion fairly little of note from the Obama campaign itself (as compared to some of his supporters). The sexism was certainly a contributing if not the decisive factor in her loss (which is all that most of her supporters are saying). That said, I do agree with Kevin Drum’s commentary that not all the alleged race-baiting from the Clinton camp was a media fabrication. On the upside, Mark Penn makes an excellent scapegoat for almost everything.

Anyways, also in the interest of unity, I tend to accept Kathy G’s argument that Obama should not pick Sen. Webb as VP. As she document, while he presently favors having women in the military, he made life rather hard for some early female entrants. Spencer Ackerman doesn’t dispute her main charges but does add some nuance on Webb’s better relevant positions. Nonetheless, after Sen. Clinton’s loss there are bridges to be rebuilt and legitimate desires to be addressed. Avoiding a Veep who is a great Democrat but has a problematic history on gender relations would probably be a good start.

As for Sen. Clinton, I hope Obama works with her on health care because she does have good experience and is a real wonk on both the policy and politics.

Clinton challenges Obama to Lincoln-Douglass style unmoderated debate

Via Ezra Klein:

I understand the Obama campaign’s decision to refuse more media-driven debates before the North Carolina primaries. The last one was an unenlightening debacle, and a distraction from the issues of the race.
But now the Clinton campaign is challenging Obama to unmediated,
Lincoln-Douglas style debates. I’d certainly watch. And though it’s
easy to forget, Obama and Clinton actually look great when talking
about real issues in a serious way.

From the challenge (also included in Ezra’s piece):

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the famous Lincoln-Douglas
debates, a series of public debates across Illinois where two
candidates put their ideas, their visions, and their values before the
American people. I have no doubt that Senator Obama, who hails from
that great state, understands how valuable and vital these national
conversations were to the heart of America. We can surely meet the
standard our forbearers did. Our final two primary candidates to date
have had three fewer debates than Lincoln and Douglas held in single
state over 60 days in 1858.

I’m ready for this primary to be over, but still, well played Senator. This could be pretty awesome. I say go for it. While we often talk about the importance of uniting against the Republicans there’s also times to unite against another common foe: media hackery.

The Case for Partisanship

Matt Yglesias has a new column on his old issue:

But for voters, the boring new ways can be looked at in another way—they’re straightforward. Elections have a predictable and easy-to-understand relationship to government action. Electing a Democrat means, on the margin, more spending on the federal safety net and more government regulation, while electing a Republican produces policies more favorable to business interests. You don’t necessarily get everything you want (ask any liberal disappointed by the continued flow of funds for the Iraq War), but at least on domestic measures, things move predictably.

Another advantage he points out is that lobbyist have less power.  Anyways, the old situation with righty Dems and left Republicans was in many ways a holdover from the segregation days.   My personal favorite case was that Spiro Agnew was Governor of Maryland for a good reason, his Democratic opponent was George Mahoney, an outright segregationist.  And aside from clearer labels, stronger parties do weaken lobbyists, as Yglesias points out, there’s a reason Delay was able to bully K-Street into hiring more Republicans.

Anyhow, the trouble with stronger parties is that we only have two of them.  I strongly identify with the Democratic party, but that arrangement kinda sucks for people without a clear party preference.  I personally favor changes that would probably keep two big parties, if not necessarily the ones we have now, but also allow a bunch of smaller ones to actually meaningfully participate. 

I think more effective parties may deal with some voter dissatisfaction and help clean up one party states.  This will require some voting system changes, but aside from the dropping the Electoral College it doesn’t require fiddling with the constitution.  That said, parties are an area where the founders screwed up.  Trying to avoid having parties at all failed and meant that the system wasn’t designed to properly check them.

Areas of my expertise professional experience

Lorelei Kelly had a great post on how we Spend More on Defense but Purchase less Security.

We’re spending upwards of 500 billion this year, more when you add in the war costs (then the numbers make my head explode Wheeeeeee!) A pittance of this money is dedicated to funding the direction that our whole ship of state needs to go (away from the bully principle and toward the
persuasion one) But the skeptic in me thinks that the USA never will right itself with all the gold-plated barnacles on its hull.

She throws out a few examples.

1. She pokes wholes in the idea of bribing Poland to take an unproven ground base missile defense base.
2. Kelly then attacks legislation that would pin the military budget to 4% of GDP. The legislation is a result of the fact that while we are spending more on defense the economy as a whole has generally managed to grow faster. That’s a good thing. National defense isn’t some video game where as you grow stronger all of your enemies get more challenging. Our spending should be based on the threats we face, not the size of our economy.
3. She points out that the airforce is falling apart. We rely heavily on older fighters but we can’t replace them at a 1:1 rate because all of our recent systems, the B-2, the F-22, the F-35, are basically luxury models. Famously Norm Augustine, onetime head of Lockheed Martin, has noted that if present trends continue the Air Force will eventually just be down to one uber-aircraft. I’d add to this that the Air Force has also had problems with its nuclear mission.

The general problem here is that in an environment of U.S. defense supremacy we have failed to make hard choices. As Kevin Drum notes in a review of Fred Kaplan’s new book there’s a philosophy that: "’the Pentagon should focus on weapons and strategies that would give the United States such overwhelming superiority that other countries wouldn’t even bother trying to compete.’ The goal wasn’t American power, it was uncontested American power."

Anyone familiar with the term asymmetrical warfare will of course realize that this is lunacy. Our power can always be contested, if our conventional military strength is practically invulnerable than foes will invest their efforts on finding unconventional weaknesses. At the same time, our other national interests e.g. climate change and disaster response will go begging.

Since the cold war, we’ve consistently been spending will beyond the point of diminishing returns on technological aspects of our conventional capacity. Not surprisingly, these programs face massive overruns and delays. At the same time, we’ve been unwilling to cut back the scope of other key missions, (do we even need fleets of nuclear bombers at this point?) and these overly ambitious missions are putting strain on our forces.

Defense reform efforts aimed at doing more with less or doing the same thing only better may result in short term improvements but are doomed to failure. We need to make hard choices about what we should be doing and do that right.

My ideas aren't so crazy!

So via Kevin Drum, Juan Cole and I seem to have a similar read.

My reading is that the US faced a dilemma in Iraq. It needed to have new provincial elections in an attempt to mollify the Sunni Arabs, especially in Sunni-majority provinces like Diyala, which has nevertheless been ruled by the Shiite Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq [ISCI]. But if they have provincial elections, their chief ally, the Islamic Supreme Council, might well lose southern provinces to the Sadr Movement. In turn, the Sadrists are demanding a timetable for US withdrawal, whereas ISCI wants US troops to remain. So the setting of October, 2008, as the date for provincial elections provoked this crisis.

I think Cheney probably told ISCI and Prime Minister al-Maliki that the way to fix this problem and forestall the Sadrists coming to power in Iraq, was to destroy the Mahdi Army, the Sadrists’ paramilitary.

For those of you who don’t remember, here’s my post from two days earlier. I won’t quote myself, as that’s silly.

Kevin Drum agrees and adds a few thoughts I also back:

First, Cheney’s visit came ten days ago and this operation seems to have been in the planning stages for several weeks. My guess is that this operation is Maliki’s idea, not ours, and Cheney merely offered his blessing and a promise of U.S. air/ground support.

Second, I continue to be slightly mystified that Muqtada al-Sadr continues to make such soothing noises. It seems increasingly unlikely that Maliki is targeting only rogue Sadrist groups, but despite this, "A statement released late Thursday by Sadr’s political office said the cleric remained committed to the cease-fire he imposed on his militia in August."

I’m not sure why Sadr is sticking to the ceasefire. My guess is that he feels sufficiently secure that he’s looking at the long game. While Maliki doesn’t really distinguish between Sadr’s people and "special groups" I think the U.S. does (although we might not in this offensive). So Sadr sticks this one out, the ceasefire with the U.S. kicks in again, and he’s facing no real threats that can keep his people from taking power in the provincial elections.

The end of the beginning for Obama

Joel Achenbach has a good write-up on the negative response of many right wing pundits to Obama’s speech.

Obama says he wants to unite the country. Right-wing pundits say: Over our dead bodies.

Obama gave what this reporter thought was an honest, thoughtful, nuanced speech on one of America’s most sensitive issues. And he did it right in the middle of sound-bite season. (I retract my statement of yesterday saying it was the best speech since Lincoln’s Second Inaugural: It was actually the best since Henry V offered that excellent pep talk on Saint Crispen’s Day before the Battle of Agincourt.)

But a number of pundits on the right really loathed the speech. They have called it dishonest and cynical. They basically say you can’t believe a thing Obama says. No doubt they believe Obama’s latest book should have been titled "The Mendacity of Hope."

This was always going to happen at some point. The big question was how many of the moderates he lost. Ross Douthat respected the speech but is now more skeptical about Obama in general. I was surprised that Michael Gerson went so hard against him.

Interestingly, some Clinton supporters are offering to underwrite a new Michigan Primary. Orioles owner Peter Angelos is one of them, but I won’t hold that against her.

Oh drat

Apparently there’s trouble getting a caucus in Michigan. Sullivan thinks this "can’t be good news for Clinton."

I think he’s quite wrong. Good news for Obama would be putting this to bed. If Michigan isn’t resolved, Clinton can hang on to the possibility of seating the full delegation and can make her argument based on that.

Here’s hoping the news is wrong.

Good speech

So on Rev. Wright again, here’s the whole Obama race speech. Kevin Drum did a good job picking excerpts that in which Obama shows how he intends to reach across America’s racial divides. James Fallows says that this, not the Mitt Romney’s speech, is equivalent to the JFK speech on Catholicism.

The really short version is that there’s resentment in the African American community as a result of terrible treatment by the government, with older members like Rev. Wright having lived through segregation. Moreover, the legacy of that discrimination does still live on, even though the situation has improved.

At the same time, many white and other Americans had the immigrant experience, feel they earned what they got, didn’t directly discriminate against anyone, and have been having a hard time economically. With the stagnating median wage and many people losing jobs, things look like a zero-sum game and any advantage given to someone else breeds resentment as well.

People tend not to talk about these resentments in mixed company and any discussion tends to be controversial, which further widens the gap. That said, he specified that Rev. Wright’s mistake was seeing America as static and missing both some changes that had happened and the hope for the future. Obama proposes both an ethic of individual responsibility and economic and education policies to benefit all American workers and break the cycle of poverty.

Anyways, that’s obviously a vast oversimplification, but if you want more detail click above. Suffice to say I’m proud to be backing him. As he said, no election or candidate is really going to magical heal America’s race divides, but I think he may be in a position to make real progress both against drivers of resentment and some of the factors that lead to some elements of the African American community being in a poverty trap.

On the latest campaign fight

So as most of you know, there’s a flap now regarding incendiary comments made by Obama’s pastor, Rev. Wright. Obama has condemned the remarks but not the man. I’m quite satisfied with that response.

To get a bit more detailed my take is that Rev. Wright has made some comments that can accurately be described as anti-American. That said, I don’t think the "Chickens coming home to roost" comment qualifies as slander, it’s just a fairly hurtful thing to say shortly after 9/11. However, Wright’s undermined his credibility some by citing conspiracy theories on other occasions. I think his comments on Sen. Clinton (well, more directly about Bill Clinton) were not necessarily sexist but were vulgar and inappropriate.

In short, I think given Obama’s close relationship it’s appropriate that the Senator condemned the remarks and formally distanced himself. That said, I think it’s also appropriate that Obama didn’t condemn the man who has done other good works. While Rev. Wright is definitely fairly critical of America it appears that crossing the line was the exception rather than his standard sermon. Similarly, unlike say Louis Farrakkan or Ward Churchill I don’t think any of the Wright’s statements I’ve read sink to the level of bigotry.

Ross Douthat argues that Obama’s taking criticism mainly because Wright’s comments are not just controversial but outside of the mainstream American conversation. I’d say the mainstream American conversation has definite double standards, but at the same time I’m happy to criticize conservatives when they say things I disagree with that are out of the mainstream. That said, I think it’s ridiculous to say that remarks Obama has condemned reflect negatively on his character.

Sullivan notes that Obama plans to give a major speech tomorrow on race issues in the campaign. I’d say what he’s already said is fine, but it’s probably politically wise to go for the full speech.

Persepolis

I finally got around to seeing Persepolisthanks to some friends who took the initiative of suggesting it. The story covers a girl who grows up during the Iranian revolution escapes to Vienna for a bit, runs into some trouble, and goes back to be a young adult in theocratic Iran.

I think the film is a great success because of terrific often hilarious animation, excellent pacing, and appealing if flawed characters. The story never dwells too long in one section of Marjane’s life. There’s a fair amount of down moment, but they’re interspersed with humor and inspiration. You won’t come away an expert on Iran, but you’ll get a better feel for what life is like there. The purpose of the film was explicitly to show the humanity of the Iranian people, and I think it succeeded.

My only complaint was that the previews leading up to the movie sucked! They were like the indy versions of Matthew McConaughey’s ’Fool’s Gold.’ Unsympathetic characters having fights or sex and in one case dealing with the first arrival of aids. Wow. How hard is it to have at least three minutes of appealing content in a movie? That and they accidentally put on the wrong real so we started out watching Be Kind Rewind which confused everyone. But it allowed my late friends to show up with the popcorn and not miss anything, so that’s okay.

Picture from the Sony Movie Website. I do wish they’d explicitly state their use rules.

What's taking so long on the Texas Caucuses?

The Explainer has the answer:

Snail mail. According to the rules of the Texas Democratic Party, the chair for each election precinct doesn’t have to mail local caucus results to the state party headquarters in Austin until the third day after the convention, Friday. Party officials tried to speed things up this year; they set up an 800 number so that chairs could call in results on Tuesday night, instead of dropping them in the mailbox. But, ultimately, they couldn’t force anyone to actually pick up the phone.

Caucuses in Texas were supposed to start relatively late anyhow—at 7:15 p.m. CST or whenever the last ballot was cast at the poll—but there were so many voters that some conventions didn’t get going until after 9 p.m., by which time TV networks had already forecasted winners in other states. When meetings finally did start, some fights broke out between Obama and Clinton supporters; in Dallas County, one chairwoman fled to the police station.

Oi! We definitely need to clean a lot of the detritus out of the system once this election is over.

Rerun Florida and Michigan

Michigan’s working on financing. It’d take $10 M. They’d probably allow everyone who didn’t vote in the Republican primary which seems fair. There’s a note in one of the comments that some Dems crossed over to do strategic voting for Mitt Romney. I’m sympathetic (particularly since they’re Obama voters) but crossover voting like that shouldn’t be without a price.

It’d be run by the party and not the State with both absentee and internet voting, the latter raised my eyebrows. Although apparently ballots would be public, so internet voting would be easier to safeguard. (Ballots are public in a caucus anyways, so it isn’t like that’s unprecedented for a party vote). See Cohn for a summary or the Detroit Free Press for details.

Florida’s primary would cost around $20 million. The Republican State government is open to it occurring, but wouldn’t pay for it.

Democratic Party Chairman Dean was supportive of reruns but wasn’t offering any funding. I tend to think they should kick in something because the DNC screwed this up. We should have followed the Republican model and just cut their delegate counts in half.

So basically, it’s really just a matter of who pays. Eve Fairbanks notes that straight up caucuses would be cheaper, although I don’t have any numbers for their price. Here’s my suggestion, Obama suggests both campaigns kick in, and that if Sen. Clinton doesn’t agree he offers enough to pay for a caucus (or perhaps pay for one in cooperation with the states, there’d be negotiations). At that point she’s put in a position to either put up some money, accept a format favorable to Obama, or risk alienating the support she desperately needs from those states. If the moneys just not there we could accept Florida at half (everyone was on the ballot) but rerun Michigan (only Clinton on the ballot).

On the other side, Jame Poulos over at the America Screed has an amusing and explicitly crazy screed against do-overs. Rules are more important that groveling before "small d" democracy and all that. Eh, I’m okay with do-overs so long as everyone involved realized that there is a very literal price to be paid. In this case, the price may be as high as $30 million. I think it might be fair to still only have Michigan and Florida half count, but allow them to raise that half based on how much money the state parties raise towards the re-run.

I tend to think a convention fight and angry Florida and Michigan voters would ultimately prove more damaging to the Democrats than some form of do-over. I think Obama, so long as he gets better at going negative against Clinton, can still easily have this in the bag with a Michigan redo even if Florida counts at half.

Primary Update

Congrats to Sen. Clinton for her wins in Texas and Ohio. Those were hard fought battles and after all his rather vicious attacks on the Senator I must say I’m enjoying watching Andrew Sullivan stew.

That said, even a 10 point margin in Ohio isn’t enough to reverse her delegate disadvantage. Still to be determined is the result of the Texas caucuses. Obama’s presently leading but by a pretty small margin. Much to my frustration the percentage reporting has been at 36% since 5:30 am this morning. What’s up with that? Gah!

On responding to provocateurs

Kevin Drum has a good new post on how to handle the a bit of misogynist tripe that was published in the Post.

OUTLOOK HELL....Ezra Klein writes about Charlotte Allen’s already infamous op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post:

I don’t want to engage with the article because, sometimes in Washington, editors take controversy as a sign of success. "The response is heated, but that just shows we hit a nerve, forced people to discuss an important issue. Namely, whether women are idiots." So instead, I’ll say this: They should be ashamed of publishing an article of such poor quality.

...I dunno. Take it on a case-by-case basis, I guess. Or do what I’m doing now and and respond to someone else’s post instead of to the original piece itself. But I’ll second Ezra’s further comment: Charlotte Allen may be a nitwit, but the world is full of nitwits. The real fault here is with the Post’s Outlook editor, John Pomfret, who apparently thought it was cute to run a plainly moronic article solely because it would get some attention when lots of people attacked it for being moronic. He needs to find a new job if that’s what he thinks his current job is all about.

I like that approach and am taking it up. My letter to the editor, ombudsman, and Outlook (thanks Feministing for organizing the links) section after the cut. Going after insipid provocateurs is pointless, instead it’s necessary to put pressure on their sponsors, publishers, and other media enablers. In this case, that enabler is Outlook editor John Pomfret. Might not have been his personal decision, but if it wasn’t than I want him directing his wrath at the one responsible.

[Update: According to Politico, the Post is feeling the heat and going with the satire defense. Funny, I don’t think hyperbole regarding something you basically believe qualifies as satire. Regardless, this is why I included the note about Style being the appropriate location for ’light-hearted’ stuff. (Via Pandagon)]

Local politics is exhausting

Went to a meeting of the South Oaks Evanswood Citizens Association tonight and am now pretty exhausted. We were debating the Purple line, there were three proposals, one offering conditional support for any option, one supporting a tunnel only, and one generally opposed. Vote tallying is still going on but after about two hours of meeting I was ready to go home.

Based on applause, I’m not sure if the vote is going for us, but us pro-Purple Line folks matched the other side speaker for speaker at least. Said my piece in under my minute even, I take some pride in not filibustering. The event was moderated pretty well, the President kept things moving and was reasonably strict with time limits.

I think Community Associations on average are leery of any change that comes with trade-offs. It’s easy to just assume that all of your concerns are unique and should take top priority with the county’s limited funds. That said they are an important part of the process. Without local organization, then low cost high return concessions would be overlooked.

Anyhow, turnout was great and it’s nice to see democracy in action.

The threat we don't face from robots

From an article on military robots (via Sullivan)

Washington plans to spend four billion dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don’t know why that has not happened already," he said.

Why haven’t terrorists already started using robots?  Hm... difficult question.   

Could it be, I don’t know, that most terrorist groups are labor and not capital intensive and thus are using suicide bombing and IEDs as a low-cost form of stealth technology.  Unless the U.S. military has found a cheap way to deploy Transformers technology robotics doesn’t fill that niche. 

Admittedly robots are easier to capture than say missiles, but taken over remote control of one hardly gives you the ability to mass produce them.  There was a cool sequence in Once Upon a Time in Mexico where an insurgent used a remote control car to deliver to deliver an explosive, but somehow I think the terrorists already have access to that level of tech.

Robots capable of killing without a human in someway pulling the trigger are definitely worrisome.  However, terrorists or insurgents deploying robot armies is not why they’re worrisome.  If you want to read a real article about robots in the battlefield, try here.

Movie sign

So at my friend’s birthday party we watched some of the Oscars as well as some clips from Filmmaking Frenzy. The later a contest to do five minute remakes of movies to promote the new film Be Kind Rewind. I’ve heard mixed things about but will see if given an easy opportunity.

The contest winner, Beastmaster, for Filmmaking frenzy wasn’t that great in our view. The party was bored about half-way through. Die Hard was better but it was hard to hear the dialog. Another finalist, the Princess Bride, was excellent. Better than I would have expected, the sheer amount of fandom for that movie would make it too easy to just reference crowd pleasers and nothing else.

On the Oscars. I thought Jon Stewart did pretty well and was glad he brought the female singer for Once back on stage after she was cut off. That and the binocular/periscope montage was hilarious. That said, the writers strike is over, why were there so many other montages. Okay, it’s the 80th anniversary, I don’t care, stop showing us strings of 15 people giving out or getting old awards. I think I’ll resume my habit of not watching the Oscars, but it can be fun at a party.

Feeling good about supporting Obama on Foreign Policy grounds

Two new differences opened up between

There was a bill to ban cluster bombs, Obama voted for it, Clinton against. Cluster bombs are fairly nasty because a percentage of them don’t explode when dropped and become a kind of second-hand landmines.

Same holds on Cuba, although Obama is not as strong as normalization as he has been in the past. In essence, I tend to think favor diplomatic relations in all but the most extreme situations. Diplomacy is a tool, not a reward. Doesn’t mean you don’t sometimes recall your ambassador for consultation, but that’s most effective as a temporary measure and not a policy.

At the same time, Obama is still wrong about mandates and Clinton’s attack on that point is fair.

So why privilege foreign policy over domestic policy? Well I’m a foreign policy wonk, it’s what I do. Also as Dan Drezner argues, the President has much more authority and agenda setting ability and foreign policy than in domestic policy.

10 Easy Steps?

My friend Moti asked me the other day about Naomi Wolf’s article/book on "Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps"

Interesting article, but not a rigorous one.  The article lists a bunch of bad authoritarian behavior but doesn’t list thresh-holds.  Calling someone a traitor isn’t the same as arresting them.  Denial of travel rights isn’t the same as full detention.  There’s a fair amount of bad stuff going on, but speaking as an analyst, going by those metrics the authoritarian risk isn’t yet critical.

Going off her list, I’ll give her points 1 and 4 unqualified.  2 and 3 have major warning signs.  5 and 8 have some rather bad cases.  6, 7, 9, and 10 I think she’s seriously pushing it.  So I think the article mostly works on the "another reason all this stuff is bad" but despite a lot of anecdotes doesn’t get to the level of putting this all in a historical or theoretical context.

After the break, more details on the her 10 steps.