Matthew Yglesias: Just as food for thought, what would the ADL say about a poll showing a large majority of Iranians supported the idea of military action aimed at destroying Israel’s nuclear facilities?
Yglesias: Outside the Beltway
Think Progress: Soufan, Zelikow to testify about torture.I don’t have high expectations for political journalism, but this is truly absurd. Steve Benen points out that we have several media outlets describing conservatives as going “outside the beltway” for an event that was held in an Arlington, Virginia pizza shop:
As part of the Republican Party’s rebranding effort, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) hosted a National Council for a New America event at a pizza shop over the weekend. Roll Call reported, “Cantor said the idea of the road show is to gather ideas from outside the Beltway to shape the Republican agenda.”
CQ had a similar item: “After consecutive catastrophic electoral losses … Republican leaders are turning their attention outside the Capital Beltway — and outside their severely diminished party ranks — to gather ideas from the public that they hope will help them rebound.”
The event happened at Pie-tanza which ... is firmly within the Beltway. Surely if political reporters are going to know anything, it’s going to be where the Beltway is located.
Spencer Ackerman reports that the former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, is set to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee next Tuesday, May 13. Zelikow has become an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s torture program. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who has written about how effective his rapport-building methods were in extracting information from Aby Zubaydah, is also expected to testify. Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Foreign Affairs Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) have requested the release of Zelikow’s 2005 memo, which purportedly disputed the Justice Department’s legal rationale for torture.
Cowen: Can people distinguish pâté from dog food?
The forward march of science continues:
Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman's Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05),>
The title of the paper is, appropriately: Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?
Terrific: Ohio Secession! Red State No More!
Priceless:
atrios: Anyone Else
By anyone else, Jane Harman of course means "members of Congress and people named Jane Harman."Sully: In Praise Of Souter
Harman has described the wiretap as an abuse of government power. But sources have told The Washington Post that she was not being surveilled; the tapped phone belonged to the suspected Israeli agent, who happened to talk to her.
"I will not quit on this until I am absolutely sure this can never happen to anyone else," Harman told the AIPAC audience, which warmly applauded her. She said the incident was having "a chilling effect" on members of Congress who "care intensely about the U.S.-Israeli security relationship . . . and have every right to talk to advocacy groups."
The absurdity is obvious. Dirty fucking hippies like me were horrified at the illegal warrantless wiretapping program and general expansion of the surveillance state in part because of the potential for political abuse (frankly, given the rubber stamp FISA court and rubber stamp Congress what other point would there be?). Jane Harman and her pal Joe Klein heaped scorn on dirty fucking hippies for such crazy views. Harman gets caught up in what appears to be a perfectly legal wiretap not aimed directly at her, though the release of the details of it might be evidence of the kind of political abuse possible in any surveillance program. Suddenly Harman is a staunch defender the right of People Like Jane Harman to not be wiretapped.
I have to say I find the accounts of his personal life - the source of some ridicule and amusement in the past - to be moving. Here is an antidote to our current cult of contemporaneity, fame, celebrity and ideology. Souter's judicial philosophy - a modest, gradual, stare decisis conservatism - stands out as an emblem of a Yankee conservatism we need more, not less, of:
Souter's departure offers a timely reminder that when it comes to the courts, we need to be careful about our terms. Though Souter's decisions were welcomed by ideological and partisan liberals, they were judicially conservative decisions. In fact, his were among the only consistently conservative decisions the court has known for the last two decades.
The reason is that there is a difference between an ideological or movement conservative and a judicial conservative. Judicial conservatives generally have great respect for the law, and for legal decisions that have been made. This is the essence of what is called stare decisis--let the decision stand. Upholding precedent staunches the forces of change--and typically, that generates conservative results. But when the precedent you are upholding is precedent set by the Warren Court, holding back the forces of change means enforcing liberal decisions against radical demands for change from movement conservatives.
But what I really admire is Souter's love of normal life, of the joys of quotidian living, of non-celebrity, or history, and quiet community.This is a sane man, only viewed as an eccentric through the prism of our insane culture:
“A lot of people would live up here and hate it,” said Wilbur A. Glahn, a lawyer who has known Justice Souter since 1975 and still hikes with him in the summer. “But David has got a real love for the people and the land and the simple things here. I’m not sure I know a lot of people who are more connected to a place than he is. It’s a very strong, kind of visceral feeling that he has.”I think it was Larkin who said that travel narrows the mind. It was a mischievously provocative statement, but at its core is something true. The world is a mystery; one place is amazement enough. To live well and deeply in one place, to commit to it, to protect and cherish and understand it: this is a great and difficult and rewarding thing. And David Souter is a good man.
Yglesias: In Defense of Flu Vigilance
Now that the “swine flu” epidemic is maybe looking not-so-bad, there are signs in the air of a backlash against the speed with which the US government, the World Health Organization, and other government agencies worked to ring the alarm bell. I think that would be a big mistake. Part of the essence of the emergence of a new flu strain is that you can’t get a solid, statistically valid sense of how deadly it is until it’s already infected tons and tons of people. But by then it’s way too late to ring the alarm. You need to act, in the first instance, on the fact that a new flu strain could be extremely dangerous so it’s highly desirable to stop it from spreading widely.
Second, the way you stop a flu virus from spreading widely is that you’ve got to raise the level of public concern. There are several billion people living on the planet earth. If each of them becomes a bit more vigilant about washing their hands, a bit more vigilant about staying home from school or work from feeling ill, a bit more hesitant to travel to infection hotspots, a bit more careful about where they sneeze, etc., that all can ad up to a big reduction in the transmission rate. And if it works, you sit back and say “oh, well, I got all panicked over nothing.” But while it’s never good to panic, people haven’t been concerned over nothing—they’ve been concerned over the fact that unless people start acting more concerned, something bad could happen. But a prudent level of concern can solve the problem. That’s the system working, not a pointless gesture.
Drum: Bankers and Congress
Ezra Klein (who will soon be blogging at the Post): WHAT IF THERE HAD BEEN NO HOUSING BUBBLE?The power of the financial lobby, even in the wake of an epic economic collapse fueled largely by its own excesses, never ceases to amaze. The current front, of course, is a Senate proposal to curb credit card abuses. Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports:
The proposal, sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), would prohibit rate hikes on existing balances, give cardholders longer notice to pay their bills, and prevent card companies from charging fees when customers pay their bills on time.
....A similar credit card reform proposal, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), passed the House easily last week, but the Senate bill goes even further to protect card users from unexplained fees and surprise rate hikes. The question now on the minds of many anxious consumer and lending advocates is this: How strong can Senate Democrats keep those consumer protections and still have the bill pass the upper chamber?
....For consumers, there’s a great deal hinging on what credit card reform provisions the Senate can pass. The Maloney bill in the House, for example, allows card companies to hike rates on existing balances when the borrower is more than 30 days late on a payment. The Dodd bill, by contrast, prevents retroactive rate increases in all cases. An analysis conducted by The National Consumer Law Center found that roughly 10 million Americans would still be vulnerable to those retroactive hikes if Maloney’s version of the provision were adopted instead of Dodd’s.
Really, this is beyond belief. Retroactive rate hikes on existing balances are indefensible under any circumstances. A third grader on a playground would understand why. Despite this, every single effort to ban the practice has failed. Over and over and over, they've failed. And now, even with the finance industry on its knees, hated and despised for its lavish compensation packages financed by trillions in taxpayer bailout cash, there's still some question about whether Congress can pass this no-brainer of a bill. Instead, we might end up merely banning retroactive rate hikes for 30 days.
This practice (which goes by the charming name of "universal default") should have been banned the first time it ever reared its ugly head. The fact that there's even a chance of it continuing to survive in any form at all after the events of the past couple of years should dispel any questions about the death grip the finance industry has on American politics. It's the smoking gun that bankers own the country.
Drum: Awakening UpdateJames Surowiecki does a nice job making a point I've been hearing occasionally. Most bubbles leave the country with something of worth. The tech bubble, say, gave the country the tech sector. The initial enthusiasm leaves the country with a bit of a hangover, but you've still got a pocket of phone numbers from the night before. It was worth it. This is all very predictable in mathematical simulations: Economic changes almost always produce bubbles. The weird thing about the housing bubble is that it was effectively worthless. Surowiecki explains:
There have been three big banking booms in modern U.S. history. The first began in the late nineteenth century, during the Second Industrial Revolution, when bankers like J. P. Morgan funded the creation of industrial giants like U.S. Steel and International Harvester. The second wave came in the twenties, as electrification transformed manufacturing, and the modern consumer economy took hold. The third wave accompanied the information-technology revolution. Each wave, Philippon shows, was propelled by the need to fund new businesses, and each left finance significantly bigger than before. In all these cases, it wasn’t so much that the bankers had changed; the world had.
The same can’t be said, though, of the boom of the past decade. The housing bubble was unique, and uniquely awful. Each of the previous waves had come in response to a profound shift in the real economy. With the housing bubble, by contrast, there was no meaningful development in the real economy that could explain why homes were suddenly so much more attractive or valuable. The only thing that had changed, really, was that banks were flinging cheap money at would-be homeowners, essentially conjuring up profits out of nowhere. And while previous booms (at least, those of the twenties and the nineties) did end in tears, along the way they made the economy more productive and more innovative in a lasting way. That’s not true of the past decade. Banking grew bigger and more profitable. But all we got in exchange was acres of empty houses in Phoenix.
My understanding of the going theory here -- and it is, admittedly, a bit choppy -- is that the housing bubble emerged somewhat differently than most bubbles. It's not that we found a new sector to lavish with money and just got overexcited. It's that we had too much money -- that "global glut" you sometimes hear about, or the "giant pool of money" that This American Life famously tracked -- and had to find a way to spend it. The housing bubble was a bad solution to a problem of excess money, in other words. But if we hadn't bubbled up the housing sector, we would have inflated something else.
But I'd like to phrase the question differently. Given the glut of money that ended up in American banks (more on that here), what would have been the best-case scenario for our economy? Obviously the housing bubble wouldn't have been it. But was there a best-case scenario? Or were we simply letting so much currency dock on our shores that some sort of bubble-ish outcome was effectively inevitable?
The Sunni Awakening played a major role in the reduction of violence in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, as Sunni tribes that had been fighting the government turned their attention to fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq instead. So how's that working out? In Anbar Province, Liz Sly of the LA Times reports that things look pretty hopeful:
"The Awakening is an economic and political entity now, and our strategy is financial and economic," said Abu Risha, who has led the Awakening since his brother's assassination in 2007....Here in Anbar province, birthplace of the Awakening movement, the Sunni Arab paramilitaries who turned their guns on fellow Sunni insurgents have become the government.
....It promises to be quite a transformation for a movement that started out in 2006 as a tribal uprising against the insurgents who had sought to impose a vicious interpretation of Islamic law on the western desert province. Photographs on Abu Risha's wall show his slain brother, Abdul-Sattar, who founded the movement, dressed in robes, slung with bullets and surrounded by Kalashnikov-wielding militiamen.
In Baghdad and Mosul, however, the London Times reports that the news is grim:
A leading member of the Political Council of Iraqi Resistance, which represents six Sunni militant groups, said: “The resistance has now returned to the field and is intensifying its attacks against the enemy. The number of coalition forces killed is on the rise.”
The increase in attacks by such groups, combined with a spate of bombings blamed on Al-Qaeda, has had a chilling effect on the streets of Iraq. More than 370 Iraqi civilians and military — and 80 Iranian pilgrims — lost their lives in April, making it the bloodiest month since last September. On Wednesday, five car bombs exploded in a crowded market in Sadr City, Baghdad, killing 51 people and injuring 76. Three US soldiers were killed on Thursday and two more yesterday when a gunman in Iraqi army uniform opened fire near Mosul.
Broadly speaking, this is the result of a missed opportunity. The point of the surge was to provide "breathing space" for political reconciliation, but Nouri al-Maliki, for reasons that are ultimately unknowable, either couldn't or wouldn't take advantage of it. In Anbar, the Sunni tribes acquired political power and the Awakening is still a going concern. In Baghdad, they were shut out, and violence is on the rise.
It's not clear to me that there's anything the United States can do about this. It's true that George Bush's open-ended commitment to Iraq probably reduced the pressure on Maliki to make concessions to the Sunnis — after all, why bother if the Americans are going to be around forever to protect you? — but aside from that Petraeus and Crocker and the rest of the Bush team worked pretty hard to press Maliki into coming up with a political settlement that was broadly agreeable to all. He didn't. American influence just wasn't enough to make a difference then, and it probably isn't now. This is still, at root, a political problem, not a military one. It's up to Maliki to solve it, not the U.S. Army.
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