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Has the buyer ban worked? | Supporters of the Government's overseas buyer ban would have been heartened by recent headlines. "Foreign home sales fall off a cliff," said one. "Home sales to foreigners drop by 81 per cent," read another. Well, not so fast. An 81 per cent drop in any set of numbers sounds huge, but in the case of overseas buyers it's an 81 per cent drop on the number of foreigners who were buying New Zealand homes before the ban was put in place. And that number was just 3 per cent. Yep, you read that right: just 3 per cent of sales of Kiwi homes were going to overseas buyers, according to Stats NZ. The answer is tied up in politics rather than economics. It's human nature to look for a reason why things happen, and the rapid escalation in house prices particularly in Auckland from 2012 onward had many trying to find a scapegoat. So when Labour suggested, back in July of 2015, that people of Chinese descent had bought 39.5 per cent of house sales in Auckland between February 2015 and April 2015, there was no shortage of people willing to accept that claim (if not necessarily its numbers). Labour had reached that figure by counting "Chinese-sounding names" among home-buyers a methodology strongly condemned by most commentators. The then National Government moved to put more accurate numbers around the impact of house sales to overseas buyers introducing a buyers' register and delegating the task to Land Information NZ (LINZ). LINZ reported back in May 2016 that just 3 per cent of home sales in New Zealand in the first three months of 2016 were to overseas residents and that, of these sales, almost as many were to Australians as to Chinese buyers. The LINZ figures were in turn disputed by those who claimed that they didn't include sales made to Chinese trusts or company structures. But even assuming the LINZ numbers were out by 100 per cent (highly unlikely), that would still mean all non-residents accounted for only 6 per cent of home sales a far cry from the almost 40 per cent claimed a year earlier. This may have been where the matter rested. But in 2017, Labour came to power in coalition with New Zealand First, and a ban on overseas buyers was passed into law in August 2018. By any reasonable analysis at 3 per cent (or even 6 per cent) of all sales the ban was only ever an exercise in political puffery and point scoring. But there are still those who believe that it "saved" the housing market and was responsible for the flattening off in Auckland house prices. This is nonsense. The end of escalating house prices in Auckland was consistent with the four-decade-old property cycle and happened right on cue. The ban simply wasn't a factor. Of course, some might argue that banning non-resident buyers at a time when we have a housing shortage was a prudent thing to do anyway, and on that score the Government's decision to allow non-residents to continue to invest in new dwellings was a smart move, because it focuses activity on the part of the market which most needs investment. Clearly not. The drop in overall housing sales is so small as to be within the statistical margin of error, and the rhetoric in the debate around its introduction was almost all about "Asian" buyers not Australians or Brits, or Canadians, also big buyers of houses. As a result, it's hard to escape the feeling that the ban was more of a victory for political virtue-signalling a rather than good economic management. Ashley Church is the former CEO of the Property Institute of New Zealand and now writes on behalf of OneRoof.co.nz | https://www.nzherald.co.nz/property/news/article.cfm?c_id=8&objectid=12229858 |
Is There a Place in Obamas Export Agenda? | While all the aspects tackled by the National Export Initiative are important, this remains a federally-centered plan. Achieving the national export goal requires a national export strategy, one that fully engages states and, most importantly, metropolitan areas. The NEI report notes the critical role state and local governments play in export promotion, but the combined power of the private, public, non-profit, and academic institutions in our metros, acting in concert, offers much greater potential than some may realize. Call it the power of place. Economic leadership in global markets will be driven by these metros; because they are home to most of our manufacturing capacity, financial resources, human capital, and research and innovation infrastructure. Our research shows the 100 largest metropolitan areas produced an estimated 64 percent of U.S. exports in 2008, including 62 percent of U.S. manufactured goods and 75 percent of services. Of the 11.8 million export related jobs in the United States in 2008, 7.7 million were located in the top 100 metro areas. Exports of high-value-added goods and services, products in which the U.S. excels, originate in competitive clusters located in our metropolitan areas, such as the aviation cluster in Wichita or computers in Portland, Ore. A successful export strategy in todays global market needs to build on the strengths we already have, in the places where those strengths already exist. It requires we invest in the things that matter, such as infrastructure and innovation. It demands we look at our economic geography differently, recognize the importance of industry clusters, and, most of all, the power of our metros; because global competition in the 21st Century is not among nations, but among the metropolitan areas in those nations. This requires a broader export promotion agenda that connects efforts on trade and commercial advocacy with human capital, infrastructure, and innovation policies. The U.S. government should level the playing field on trade and currency for U.S. firms and also help companies to improve their products for export and connect with global markets. And that is even more true in a country like ours where export promotion is a federalist rather than a federal act. Export power houses, such as Germany and China, have understood this. Even more, they actively help their places compete. In a world in which cities account for 70 percent of the global economy, the U.S. still needs to add the term place to its export promotion dictionary. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77725/there-place-in-obamas-export-agenda |
Is The Tea Party Just a Big Scam? | The media have given substantial coverage to tea party rallies and even small demonstrations. Last April, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified themselves as supporters of the tea party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had actually attended a tea party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as tea party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a tea party rally or meeting. The tea party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you'd expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw many fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving people who make revolutionary activity their profession in organizations that must perforce not be very extensive. But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Partys Revolution and the Battle Over American History, observed in an interview that there is a hall of mirrors effect created by the rise of niche opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives. There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the tea party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obamaand now has to defend candidates like ODonnell and Angle. Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it. E.J. Dionne, Jr. is is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of, most recently, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right . (c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group | https://newrepublic.com/article/77868/the-tea-party-just-big-scam |
Should We Start a Solar Panel Trade War with China? | These days I do believe we're supposed to hail China as our clean-energy overlords. The country now produces half the world's wind turbines and half its solar panels. Partly through aggressive renewable-energy laws and various incentives for budding tech industries. And that's to be expectedas long as fossil-fuel externalities go unpriced, renewables are always going to need a little boost. But, according to Keith Bradsher of The New York Times, there's another side to this story. Some of China's subsidies seem to run afoul of international trade rules: Heavily subsidized land and loans for an exporter like Sunzone are the rule, not the exception, for clean energy businesses in Changsha and across China, Chinese executives said in interviews over the last three months. W.T.O. rules allow countries to subsidize goods and services in their home markets, as long as those subsidies do not discriminate against imports. But the rules prohibit export subsidies, to prevent governments from trying to help their companies gain in world markets. If the country with the subsidies fails to remove them, other countries can retaliate by imposing steep tariffs on imports from that country. But multinational companies and trade associations in the clean energy business, as in many other industries, have been wary of filing trade cases, fearing Chinese officials reputation for retaliating against joint ventures in their country and potentially denying market access to any company that takes sides against China. There's a trade-off here. China's policies are helping to bring down the coast of wind and solaras the Times notes: "Solar panel prices have dropped by nearly half in the last two years, and wind turbine prices have fallen by a quarter." But U.S. companies are suffering as a result: BP just shut down a solar manufacturer in Maryland while expanding its Chinese operations; another company, Evergreen Solar, is closing its 300-worker plant in Massachusetts and hightailing it over to China. One possibility would be to retaliate and set up new trade barriers. But that runs the risk of making various renewable technologies more expensive, which would only deepen the world's reliance on cheaper and dirtier energy sources like coal. The U.S. government could also try to match China by speeding up financing for its own domestic industries. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77566/should-we-start-solar-panel-trade-war-china |
Who Cares How Many People Call Themselves Conservative? | David Broder today argues that the rise in self-identified conservatives is a big problem for Democrats: Sometimes the most important clues are hiding in plain view. That was the case in late June, when the Gallup Organization reported that the share of voters who describe themselves as conservative had increased from 37 percent to 42 percent in the past two years. That does not sound like a big change. But given the long-term stability of basic philosophical alignments, the reaction it measured to the economic troubles and the performance of the new Democratic administration is very significant. Hmm. The trouble here is that ideological self-identification is a pretty shaky measure of what voters believe, and the numbers bounce around without much correlation to real-world changed. James Downie created a handy chart comparing the Republican Party share of the two-party vote, on the left, with the percentage of the electorate self-identifying as conservative, along the bottom: | https://newrepublic.com/article/78073/gallup-poll |
Will the Tea Parties Revive the Christian Right? | This weekend in Washington, organizers of the fifth-annual Values Voter Summit gave attendees from the Christian Right a primer on their new conservative counterparts, the Tea Partiers. To assuage any concerns that the Tea Parties, with their razor-sharp focus on fiscal issues, are at odds with traditional social conservatism. Among the three-day summits events was a presentation entitled Who are the Tea Party and Christian Voters and What Do They Believe?; another called We the People: The Tea Partys Place in American Politics; and a get-out-the-vote seminar, led by an operative for the Tea Party Patriots. One by one, big-name Republican politiciansMike Huckabee, Mike Pence, and Michele Bachmann, to name a fewassured the more than 2,000 people gathered for the summit that Tea Party values are not in conflict with the agenda of the Christian Right. Tea Party activists are the new go-to agitators of the conservative base. The 2004 election, when values voters helped push George W. Bush to victory, and the 1994 Republican revolution, when Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, bolstered by the Christian Coalition, ushered in the first GOP-controlled Congress in over 40 years, seem like distant memories. Today, the famed Contract with America has been superseded by the Tea Partys decidedly more secular Contract from America. (And it surely doesnt help the Christian Rights confidence that, when Obama won in 2008, the media claimed Democrats got religion and were leveling the praying field, in their attempts to close the God gap among American voters.) Some Tea Partiers warn that the movement will fracture itself or drive away key supporterslike nonreligious libertarians and independentsif it seems too Republican or Christian. Indeed, they would have us believe that they are pushing a new brand of non-partisan secularity. We should be creating the biggest tent possible around the economic conservative issue, Ryan Hecker, one of the creators of the Contract from America, has said. [S]ocial issues may matter to particular individuals, but at the end of the day, the movement should be agnostic about it. And, according to Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, the diversity of opinion on social issues is part of the beautiful chaos of the Tea Party. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77824/will-the-tea-parties-revive-the-christian-right |
Where Does the Mosque Backlash Fit Into the History of American Tolerance? | Lets disentangle a couple of strands here. The U.S. government has a legitimate interest in maintaining good relations with the Muslim world even when it is behaving irrationally, and so it may from time to time issue statements that soundor arepusillanimous. Similarly, American newspapers and the Yale press may have refrained from reproducing the Danish cartoons out of a genuine fear of violence. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was murdered, its Italian translator was stabbed, and its Norwegian publisher shot. Self-censorship based on fear is not a position to be proud of, but on the other hand its hardly honorable to demand that other peopleeditors, translators, secretaries, clerksendanger their lives for your own heroic principles. (Hitchens points out that the staffs of the bookstores that refused to handle The Satanic Verses passed a resolution expressing their willingness to sell it.) Up till now, the culture clash has moved in one direction only. Muslims have taken offense at something, and the West has rushed to reassure and pacify them. The mosque controversy reverses these roles. Today, its millions of Americans who are feeling aggrieved. Fear of violence is not an issue in this case (though the backers of the center have no doubt been subjected to numerous death threats). If building the center proceeds, there may be demonstrations and protests, and the Democratic Party will pay a political price, but hundreds of people wont die, and any violence directed at the mosque will surely be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The question at this point is whether the center has to be built at the proposed site. Its understandable that the supporters would want to resist yielding to bigotry, irrationality, and intimidation, but on a simply pragmatic basis, everyone should hope that some solution can be reached so that the feelings of millions of Americans are respected. After all, the sponsors of the center say they are interested in building bridges among peoples. This aim would be better served by moving the mosque a few blocks away, even if that means bending a cherished principle. And just think of the good will that would be generated across the country. Nonetheless, if compromise proves to be impossible, then Henry Meigs must be the one to have the final word. By wonderful coincidence, Pastor Terry Joness threat to burn Korans puts the issue of the Islamic center into sharper focus. Jones is a poster child for everything that is wrong with the opposition to the Ground Zero mosque. He is a bigot who has declared that Islam and Sharia law were responsible for 9/11. Last year, to the consternation of its neighbors, his church put up a sign saying Islam is of the devil. And he is ignorant: He has not read the Koran and is obviously unaware of the philosophy associated with book-burning. Right now, we cant know for sure if Jones will follow through on his threat, or if he doesnt, whether some other zealot will. (And just wait till next year and the tenth anniversary of 9/11the opportunity for a true bonfire of the vanities.) Jones has pigheadedly shrugged off arguments that his actions might provoke a violent response in the Muslim world, or could harm the United States. The feelings of others are not his concern. Unlike most of the other individuals caught up in the culture war with Islam, he is a provocateur, and deliberately intends to give offense. (Squint hard enough and you may be able to make out the ghost of Lenny Bruce.) For this reason, he represents a particularly pure case of what we Americans mean when we say we stand for freedom. Its easy enough to defend someone you agree with, much harder to stand up for someone you despise. We can condemn his message of hate. We can lament the damage he may do to the interests of the United States. But at the end of the day we must defend his right to burn the Koranand not just with a sense of disapproval and regret but, because of what it says about the values of our country, with a grudging, embarrassed sense of pride. Barry Gewen has been an editor at The New York Times Book Review for over 20 years. He has written frequently for The Book Review, as well as for other sections ofThe Times. His essays have also appeared in World Affairs, The American Interest,World Policy Journal, and Dissent. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77771/where-does-the-mosque-backlash-fit-the-history-american-tolerance |
Is the Senate Really Paralyzed and Dysfunctional? | Via Bouie, Elizabeth Drew says: It's time to retire the overused and inaccurate words "dysfunctional" and "paralysis" that have appeared in a recent spate of articles and commentary propagating the fashionable view that the current Congress has gotten little or even nothing done. In fact, this has been one of the most productive Congresses in decades. I think it's clearly correct to say that the 111th Congress was extremely productive (see also last month's similar defense of the Senate from Jill Lawrence), and so I agree that "paralysis" is the wrong word to use to describe it. The question, however, is whether "dysfunctional" is correct. First, I'd say the Senate could certainly be both productive and dysfunctional -- it's possible that the particular rules in place don't so much prevent action as distort it. To one extent, I think that's somewhat true; current Senate rules and norms encourage fewer, bigger bills, and one could certainly argue that the quality of lawmaking suffers (and, yes, Superbill! might produce fewer, even bigger, bills, although it's also possible that the threat of Superbill! might lead to smaller bills passing with fewer than 60 votes). And as Jamelle Bouie points out, legislating isn't the Senate's only responsibility, and the statistics for confirming nominations are harder to justify. Of course, if that's a problem, it could be solved without changing the rules on legislation. As I think about it, however, it seems to me that the real question that's driving people to support reform isn't so much what's happened in the 111th Congress, but what it suggests about the possibility of Senate action after a slightly less extreme landslide. That's not a rhetorical question. One possibility is that Democrats would still have moved their agenda after compromising with the 3rd or 4th or 5th least conservative Republican, instead of either having to compromise with Ben Nelson or the Senators from Maine. In other words, the Senate works fine, as long as you accept that what really matters is the 60th vote, not the 51st vote. However, there's another possibility: that polarization and strong partisanship mean that the majority party will not be able to get anything done that requires more than (at most) a couple of minority party votes. I think that would truly count as dysfunctional: if a minority party was unified enough against a 55, 56, or even 58 member majority that it could simply prevent anything from passing. A lot of liberals believe that this describes exactly where were are today. In that reading, Republicans are dedicated to stretching the rules to their fullest with a strategy of rejecting every Democratic initiative, in order to make the Dems unpopular and thus retake control, even if it damages the nation. On the other hand, there's the reality that for two of the Democrats' biggest achievements, the stimulus bill and banking reform, marginal Republicans did, in fact, provide the needed votes. And as for blocking nominations, Republicans have to date failed to act in a unified bloc to prevent cloture on any of Barack Obama's nominees. Unfortunately, it's impossible right now, at least as far as I can see, to determine which of these pictures is accurate. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77528/reading-the-case-against-senate-reform |
How Do Long Wars Become So Long? | In each case the initial failure to take the war effort seriously also shaped the way policymakers viewed their chances when they finally decided to fight in earnest. Several years of poor results werent treated as a legitimate reason to doubt that we could do better if we really tried. America simply hadnt given the problem its best shot. We all remember what candidate Obama said about Afghanistan: The United States was doing badly because the Bush administration took its eye off the ball. General Maxwell Taylor, who was ambassador to Saigon in 1965, said something similar in explaining why the Johnson administration didnt consider withdrawing before it got in too deep. We had not exhausted our alternatives. The United States, Taylor insisted, still had vast resources to bring to bearand new strategies to trybefore we thought of quitting. A long period of half-hearted effort can mean, of course, that by the time a president decides to get serious our soldiers already have their backs to the wall. Turning things around becomes a huge undertaking, and the generals keep asking for more. Obama surely had no thought when he took office that hed soon triple the number of American troops in Afghanistan. In July 1965, Johnson also agreed to triple the size of the U.S. force in Vietnam quicklywithin five monthsand eventually he tripled it again. To some of his advisers, the militarys constantly escalating demands showed the strategy wasnt working. But LBJ was unfazed by the constant increases, at least at first. Claiming to quote Lincoln, he explained that you cant fertilize a field by farting through the fence. Johnson did not, however, think that just because he and his generals had embraced a new strategy they could count on endless popular patience. When he looked at the military plans put before him in the summer of 1965, his electorally-minded question was, Are we starting something that in two or three years we simply cant finish? This was a pretty short deadline for Americas longest war, but Johnsons time frame turned out to be prophetic. Less than two years later, he was in fact no longer willing to keep granting requests for extra troops. And a year after that, the American people were no longer willing to do so either. In March 1968 Dean Acheson summed up the problem when the Wise Men of the Eastern establishment sat down with LBJ. The United States, he argued, could no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77336/when-to-end-afghanistan-war |
Should Obama Have Listened More to Axelrod? To Rahm? Geithner? | But Id add the following: Just because you would have preferred that the president side with Axelrod over Rahm, or Rahm over Geithner, in any particular moment, doesnt mean those guys should have been arguing something different. Take health care. However you feel about the deals Rahm cut with interest groups to advance the legislation (and I actually thought they were the right way to go about it), you can hardly blame the guy charged with passing health care for cutting deals. Now, at some point, you may have wanted the president to step in and say the deal-making is getting out of hand. But Rahm was doing the job he was given, and doing it pretty well, I think. Similarlyand maybe more counter-intuitivelyI dont think you can fault Geithner and Summers for being against reneging on those disastrous AIG retention bonuses back in March 2009. I dont think you want the guys youve hired to manage the economy arguing internally for abrogating contractsyou want them giving you principled economic advice. If it turns out their advice needs to be overridden at a higher level, finethats how the process should work. But youd hate to have them taking big political judgments into their own hands. In fact, I cant think of very many instances in which the senior people around the presidentwhether policy people or politicalhave given him bad advice based on what they knew at the time and the particular hat they happened to be wearing. (This administrations pet term for the latter is equitiesas in, different people argue from a different set of equities based on their respective portfolios.) Obviously, the challenge for any president is to decide which set of equities trumps the others at any given moment. And, while this is never easy, I think its made governing unusually challenging during the last two years. Not only are the political and substantive imperatives frequently pulling in opposite directions, but you have different political imperatives pulling strongly in different directions, and different substantive ones pulling strongly in different directions (for example, deficit-reduction versus additional stimulus). Or even self-contradictory directions. My favorite example of this came by way of an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in June. Asked what the governments top priority should be, 33 percent of respondents said job creation and economic growth while only 15 percent said the deficit and government spending. But when asked whether theyd prefer that the government rein in the deficit even if it delays the recovery, or whether theyd prefer the government to focus on the recovery even if it worsens the deficit, the respondents picked the former by nearly a two-to-one margin. All of which is to say, its always tempting to argue that Obama should be listening more to adviser X. (And, mea culpa, some of the pieces Ive written have certainly encouraged that habit.) But, in the end, the president usually has to balance a bunch of advice that, at least on its own terms, is pretty defensible. Which is why the choices end up being so damn unpalatable. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77975/should-obama-have-listened-more-axelrod-rahm-geithner |
Have Republicans Peaked? | The New Obama (or, rather, the resurrected Old Obama) will be up against a media story line whose self-sustaining quality was brought home by the treatment of Gallup poll findings over the last two months. The media largely ignored a mid-July survey giving Democrats a six-point lead, then devoted huge blocks of print and airtime to last week's Gallup survey dramatizing conventional wisdom by showing Republicans ahead by a whopping 10 pointsonly to have Gallup come out this week with a poll showing Republicans and Democrats tied. All this raises the question of whether the only polls that matter are the ones that reinforce preconceptions. Even Democrats concede a Republican sweep may be in the cards. But there is another possibility: that we are now at the Republican peak, and that Democrats are in a position to claw back enough support to hang on to both houses of Congress. Republican voters simply can't get more enthusiastic without violating the law by casting multiple ballots. Democrats, on the other hand, have a large swath of yet-to-be motivated sympathizers. For Republicans, the costs of Tea Party extremism are beginning to balance the benefits of the movement's energy. Republican pollster David Winston thinks the economy has given his party "an enormous opening," but he cautions against seeing the contest as over and done with. As a technical matter, he argues that likely voter screens applied by pollsters too early exclude a disproportionate number of voters in key Democratic constituencies. And the economic debate Obama tried to reframe this week, Winston said, "is going to have an impact. It's not enough for Obama to be wrong. If Republicans want to get to a majority, they have to lay out where they want to go." Yes, Republicans had better start defining themselves. If they don't, Obama, who labeled them the party of "stagnant growth, eroding competitiveness and a shrinking middle class," is now happy to do it for them. And that's what changed in Milwaukee and Cleveland. E.J. Dionne, Jr. is is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of, most recently, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. (c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group | https://newrepublic.com/article/77539/have-republicans-peaked |
Why Are Athletes and Soldiers So Superstitious? | I always thought I understood the difference between habit and superstition, but I grew unsure when I became a talisman. Army won the second game of that doubleheader against Holy Cross, and people remembered. Youre undefeated, other faculty representatives noted to me in passing. (I wasnt keeping track of their records.) After another regular season game, I was still unbeaten, and Coach started calling me a good luck charm. I tried to duplicate all the things I could remember having done during that first game. I took the same path to the dugout, trotted along the sidewalk, carried the Bazooka in the same bag, exited the field after the game by circling behind home plate and out the third-base gate. I even added a few rituals just in case. On a visit to the Armys elite Ranger Regiment I had been given a ceremonial coin, which I kept in my pocket in the dugout. If things were looking bleak, I switched pockets. The longer the streak went on, the tougher it got. I started to brood: If I lost, I would become an outcast, a Jonah, Coleridges Ancient Mariner. When Army drew Holy Cross in the opening round of the Patriot League conference tournament, I got the call for the first game of a best of three series. Army chalked up another win: 5-1. Clearly, I had the Crusaders number, but I had to skip the second game of the afternoon to give an examand Army lost. Now there seemed to be tangible proof that I was a rabbits foot. I slept fitfully that night, and the next day I was back in the dugout for the decisive game, which Army won 11-0. The following week, I was there as the team swept Lafayette to clinch the Patriot League championship. I ended my season with an unblemished record. In the weeks that followed I watched from home every inning of Armys noble run in the NCAA regionals in Texas. From that distance, I managed to rid myself of superstition, even if my heart still rose or sank with each pitch, and I was left to ponder what everything that had happened over the season really meantthe way in which coincidental patterns began to work on my mind. Perhaps the only people more superstitious than ballplayers are soldiers. In war, of course, unpredictability takes on a much deeper significance. Warding off misfortune becomes an art forma matter of survival. Ulysses S. Grant, who graduated from West Point in 1843, a year behind baseballs mythological founder, Abner Doubleday, wrote freely about his own superstitions in his memoirs: One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go any where, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished. I have frequently started to go places where I had never been and to which I did not know the way and if I got past the place without knowing it, instead of turning back, I would go on until a road was found turning in the right direction, take that, and come in by the other side. Refusing to retrace ones steps in peace is one thing; in war, it is potentially quite another. Maybe Grants superstitious avoidance of the same road was the secret source of his tenacity as a commander. He was known for aggressively, relentlessly pushing ahead. Thats how he won, sometimes at great cost. I asked a few officers I know about their own combat superstitions. One, who had been an intercollegiate athlete as a cadet, told me about a stuffed dinosaur given to him by one of his children before he left for the first Gulf War. The dinosaur has recently redeployed after serving multiple tours in Iraq in two wars: first with this officer and, eventually, with each of his sons. Another officer told me that he always wore the same floppy, wide-brimmed hat in Vietnam. Sure, it shaded him from the sun, but that wasnt the point. He refused to go anywhere without it. He wore it on every helicopter rideeven wore it under his helmetand he lovingly preserved it for years afterward. A former Army football player shared with me the ritual he followed as a captain before every mission in Iraq: I always did the same things. Grab a bottle of water and stow it in the same place by my seat, tap the forward assist on the rifle three times, grab the radio, check the FBCB2 (digital map), and always look at the same place outside the gate from inside the gate, the place where the conditions change. It helped me change my mind from here to there, where the stakes are a little higher. The routine served as a mental checklist, the captain explained. It ensured that he never went out on a mission without taking every precaution. Yet, when the order in which he executed the sequence became non-negotiable, the ritual took on a different quality: Things were normal if I did it that way, and things were not if I didnt. Feeling that things are normal, no matter the irrational means by which a soldier arrives at that conclusion, is no negligible achievement, especially in combat. If a given routine enhances an individuals mission focus, then it becomes difficult to begrudge him certain idiosyncrasies. My luck had rolled over into a new spring, and I was summoned for the first game of the league playoffs against Bucknell on May 15, 2010. Plagued by injury all year long, Army had nevertheless reached the conference tournament once again. I cant tell you what I did differently that dayI know that I believed as fervently as ever in the teams ability to pull out a victorybut they fell behind early and had to play catch-up most of the way. Resilient, Army answered repeatedly but not quite loudly enough. They lost 11-9. My streak had finally snapped at ten games and, with it, a strange spell. The alchemical pinball machine of physiology, psychology, and chance that determines how it will go had produced, at last, a loss that had so very little do with me yet for which I felt gravely responsible. The streak and the moment of its breaking remain inextricable in my mind. I would not for anything have traded those many hours in the wind and cold, those epic afternoons in the baking sun. And Ive finally written it out. This is my version of spring training. Im getting in shape for next season. Never saw anything like it, one of the coaches had said to me the year before as I walked off the field after that championship victory, circled behind home plate, and exited by the obligatory third-base gate. Elizabeth D. Samet is a professor of English at the U.S. Military Academy and the author of Soldiers Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point. The opinions she expresses here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77941/superstitious-athletes-soldiers-army-baseball-military-academy |
How Will We Know If Netanyahu Is Serious About Peace? | The other shoe has now dropped in the current round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In place of the partial freeze set to expire by the end of this month, Prime Minister Netanyahu intends to adopt more limited restraints on construction in the West Bank. Haaretz reports that Netanyahu will be going to Sharm El Sheik tomorrow with a proposal identical to one negotiated between his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, and the Bush administration: no construction in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; construction in isolated settlements only in built-up areas; and construction in the large settlement blocs near, as well as within, existing perimeters. (This last provision turned out to permit thousands of new housing units in Maaleh Adumim, Beitar Ilit, Modiin Ilit, and Gush Etzion.) While Netanyahu seems to be gambling that the Palestinians wont respond to this back to the future proposal by pulling out of the talks, the basis for his optimism is unclear. In the wake of the Obama administrations call early in 2009 for a complete freeze, the Israeli government eventually adopted the partial freeze now set to expire in less than three weeks. It took nearly a year of negotiations brokered by George Mitchell and Tony Blair before the Palestinians were willing to join face-to-face talks on that basis. The Palestinians have repeatedly said that they can accept nothing less, and that if the Israelis retrench further, Abbas and his team will quit the talks. At this point, theres no reason not to take them at their word. After all, they were more reluctant than were the Israelis to return to direct talks in the first place. In recent months, Israeli officials have indicated privately their hope that if the Palestinians receive concessions in other areassuch as checkpoints and other restrictive security measuresthat improve daily life on the West Bank, the freeze issue can be sidestepped. No doubt they will explore the viability of such an approach behind the scenes. The other possibility is a somewhat grander bargain. At the cabinet meeting preceding the latest announcement, Netanyahu reportedly remarked, We are saying that the solution is two states for two peoples. To my regret, I am still not hearing the phrase two states for two peoples from the Palestinians. I am hearing them say two states, but I am not hearing them recognize two states for two peoples. This raises an intriguing possibility. Well, theres something Id like from younamely, a recognition of the two states for two peoples principle as the basis for further negotiations. Your need and my need rise or fall together. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77654/how-will-we-know-if-netanyahu-serious-about-peace-israel-palestine-peace-settlements-abbas |
How Important Are The Koch Brothers? | Last month, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer published a long piece on how billionaires David and Charles Koch fund a variety of libertarian causesfrom Tea Parties to the Cato Institute. Given that the brothers own Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held oil company in America, it's no surprise that the Kochs also like to wade into the carbon/climate debate. (The Koch-funded wing of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, for instance, has a... creative... exhibit on climate change.) Pretty central. Via Andrew Restuccia, here's an old Greenpeace report finding that the Kochs have sent nearly $50 million over the past five years to "climate-denial front groups"more than even ExxonMobil. That includes, for instance, $5 million to Americans for Prosperity (AFP) for its "Hot Air Tour" attacking climate policy. Mind you, some of the links Greenpeace details seem slightly overstated. The Kochs give lots of money to the Heritage Foundation, for instance, which does employ several climate-skeptic pseudo-experts. But there are plenty of reasons the Kochs might want to bankroll Heritagethe group promotes a wide variety of right-wing causes. On the other hand, it's also true that none of these Koch-funded groups ever need to worry that their climate-denial message might run afoul of these particular funders. So it'd be naive to think it's wholly inconsequential that two climate-denying oil barons are lavishing money on conservative think tanks. Lobbying, on the other hand, is pretty clear-cut. Greenpeace notes that between 2006 and 2009, the Koch brothersalong with Koch Industries and Koch family membersspent $37.9 million advocating on energy issues, behind only ExxonMobil and Chevron. One place where the Kochs have been extremely active in shaping the climate debate of late is in California. Flint Hills Resources, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, recently gave $1 million to the campaign to overturn California's climate law by ballot initiative, and Koch-backed groups are working overtime to stir up opposition to the law. By the way, the California debate is interesting because not all the oil companies are lined up alongside the Kochs. The big oil giants, such as ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron, are all staying neutral. Shell actually opposes the repeal campaign. It's mainly the mid-sized refinersKoch Industries and Valero and Tesorothat are fighting hardest to scrap the climate law. One possibility is that the major oil companies think they'll be able to handle the new carbon restrictions better than their smaller competitors. The Koch brothers, at least, appear to agree. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77806/the-koch-brothers-vs-the-climate |
Is the Election A Referendum? | It's obviously the case that the 2010 election is mostly going to be about voters holding Democrats accountable for the status quo, rather than coolly comparing the two parties. Still, you can't blame Democrats for trying. And it's beyond absurd for the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost to label Democratic efforts to get voters to compare the two parties as "demagoguery." But, as I said, I think Cost is basically right, as an analytic matter, about the election being a referendum rather than a comparison: For the swing voters who determine elections, it's clear by now that the midterm is going to be about the deeply unpopular policies of President Obama . Attacking the Tea Partiers is not going to distract them because the Tea Partiers have had nothing to do with those policies. This cycle, the GOP has the better argument, and it is not going to take the bait. Of course, after the elections, Republicans will claim that the result is a validation of their policy agenda, which they will claim has a mandate from the public. I will eagerly await columns in the Weekly Standard pointing out that this isn't true, and that voters were merely giving a thumbs down to the incumbent party without paying much attention to the alternative. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77835/the-election-referendum |
Why Are Chinese Millionaires So Stingy? | First, China's wealthy are relatively young, still in the acquisitive stages of their lives. The average age of China's millionaires is 39. Second, it is virtually impossible to become wealthy in todays China without being corrupt and ruthless, and corrupt and ruthless folk are usually not inclined to dispose of their ill-gotten gains. Chinas rich, according to one estimate, are sitting on $1.4 trillion in dirty money. Third, many aspects of Chinese culture discourage giving to help others. You sweep the snow only in front of your own porch, goes a well-known saying. But there is one overriding reason why charity is largely absent from contemporary China: The Communist Party makes it difficult. The party does not want competitors, especially organized ones. Charities, therefore, have to find government sponsors before they can register with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and this requirement severely limits the number of them. Even Hollywood action star Jet Li, a favorite of Beijing because he makes patriotic films, cannot register his One Foundation, which may have to suspend operations soon. Don't be surprised that as of last year there were, in all of China, only 643 foundations not run by the government. There were an estimated 300,000 so-called grass-roots organizations that were operating without registering or had registered as business enterprises. Such organizations, functioning in a highly unorthodox manner, invariably find it hard to raise funding. For one thing, donors cannot obtain tax deductions for contributions to them. But forget about the lack of tax deductions: Some reports indicate that Chinas wealthy are afraid of government reprisals if they make donations. In any event, severe government restrictions have had an effect. Last year, donations in China totaled about $8 billion, less than 3 percent of philanthropic giving in the United States. The public is outraged by the countrys wealthiest ducking out on the Gates-buffet event, as they were when the skinflint rich were labeled Iron Roostersbirds that would not share even a featherbecause they failed to support relief efforts for the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. That reaction, fortunately, is a sign of eventual acceptance of private charitable giving. | https://newrepublic.com/article/78049/chinese-philanthropy-bill-gates-warren-buffett |
Can The Tea Party Be Controlled? | Many Tea Partiers would say that no one does. It's a grassroots movement, decentralized, self-organizing, bottom-upall that jazz. Apart from Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, it doesn't really have any leaders. And yet, there are plenty of groups that would love to channel the Tea Parties' energy (and rage, let's not forget rage) for their own purposes. On top of that, the Tea Party movement may need a bit of centralization and coordination to survive and prosper in the future. But all those competing priorities can create an awful lot of tension. Who knows?). That's hardly pocket change. But Meckler was careful with his words. He himself wasn't going to direct where the money was going. After all, he was only a national coordinatornot, he stressed, the chairman or leader of the TPP. The Tea Party Patriot's local affiliates, about 2,800 all told, could apply for the money, use it as they see fit, and the only restriction was that they couldn't endorse candidates. There are two interesting aspects to this. First, TPP seems to have found a way to avoid transparency in campaign-finance lawsas long as they don't work on behalf of specific candidates, their shadowy funders can stay shadowy and anonymous. (At his press conference, Meckler was cagey on campaign finance questions.) Second, Meckler and Martin were at pains to insist that their Tea Party group best represents the spirit of the Tea Partiesdecentralized, organic, etc. The implication was that other national Tea Party organizations were hucksters. Indeed, Meckler took a swipe at one rival group, the Tea Party Express, which runs a PAC and endorses specific candidates: "We're not a bunch of Republican consultants handpicking candidates from a small office in Sacramento." (See this New York Times piece yesterday on the GOP consultant behind the Tea Party Express.) Meckler's point about decentralization may seem pedantic, but it's not. Over the past year, we've seen a number of attempts to centralize the Tea Party movementand they've always ended disastrously. Earlier this month, for instance, the group Tea Party Nation tried to stage a national convention in Las Vegas, and the whole event ended up disintegrating over infighting. TPMDC's Evan McMorris-Santoro has the story: It seems that a lot of state-level Tea Party groups were boycotting the event because they viewed Tea Party Nation as a fraud, trying to hijack the movement for its own ends and even profit off it. (Tea Party Nation came under criticism back in February when it tried to charge attendees $500 for a conference in Nashville.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/77840/can-the-tea-party-be-controlled |
Is Southwest Airlines Still the Little Guy? | The big news in business yesterday was yet another step towards consolidation in the airline industry, as Southwest announced a plan to acquire AirTran for $1.4 billion. If you're a remotely frequent flier, you may be wondering what this means for flight availability, fares, and the beloved Southwest brand. If you're a student of public policy, or an official involved with crafting it, you may be wondering what this means for competition within the airline industry and, more broadly, for the economy. Well, I really can't answer your questions. I have zero expertise on the airline industry. But a source close to Citizen Cohn does. She recommended a blog called Swelblog, written by an MIT research engineeer named William S. Swelbar. He thinks the acquisition is a smart move for Southwest, on multiple levels. But he also suggests it's a sign that the country's most famous upstart airline isn't such an upstart anymore: With AirTran come slots at New Yorks LaGuardia and Washingtons Reagan National Airports. Along with slots, Southwest gains meaningful entry into the one remaining legacy carrier hub where it offers no service Atlanta. It also gains entry into Charlotte, a US Airways hub. No, and there are a number of reasons why not. First and foremost, the network carriers already compete with the low cost sector for nearly 85 percent of their domestic revenues. Whereas AirTran serves 37 markets that Southwest does not serve, some of them smaller, there will be some new competition for passengers in those markets. But for the most part, those cities already enjoy the low fares delivered via AirTrans initial entry. ... If you ask me, the losers in this announcement are not the network carriers but rather Frontier and Spirit. jetBlue will survive just fine. But Frontier is now confined to one [maybe two] traffic base for all intents and purposes. And that makes them vulnerable. As for Spirit, which just announced its intentions to launch a $300 million Initial Public Offering, it is one thing to have a highly fragmented market competing inside their network. It is a totally different animal to have Southwest and AirTran focused on carrying traffic to the Caribbean. ... In its press release Southwest said: Based on an economic analysis by Campbell-Hill Aviation Group, LLP*, Southwest Airlines more expansive low-fare service at Atlanta, alone, has the potential to stimulate over two million new passengers and over $200 million in consumer savings, annually. These savings would be created from the new low-fare competition that Southwest Airlines would be able to provide as a result of the acquisition, expanding the well-known Southwest Effect of reducing fares and stimulating new passenger traffic wherever it flies. ... [But] the Southwest Effect as we knew it is dead. The truth is todays stimulation is largely diversion from another market or another carrier. ... What I find most interesting in Southwests potential bid for AirTran is that the carrier is being forced to act just like the network legacy carriers in seeking a consolidation scenario that would lead to an improved revenue line systemwide. ... I cant wait to hear the arguments Southwest uses in Washington to gain regulatory approval, particularly as it will be hard pressed to make the argument that acquiring AirTran would further lower airfares in the US domestic marketplace. After all, Southwest is not the only airline offering low fares, no matter what its boosters in Washington may think. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77990/southwest-airlnes-still-the-little-guy |
Is It Demagoguery To Compare the Two Parties? | Jay Cost is one of those conservative political writers whom Ive always respected for his interest in empirical analysis and reasoned debate. But in a Weekly Standard column published this week, which pushes back against Democratic efforts to highlight the growing radicalism of the GOP, he made a frankly offensive statement that strays from analysis to agitprop: At best, this strategy might help swing an odd election here and there to the Democratse.g. Delaware and (maybe) Nevadaand increase the historically low levels of Democratic enthusiasm by a point or two. But that's it. For the swing voters who determine elections, it's clear by now that the midterm is going to be about the deeply unpopular policies of President Obama . Attacking the Tea Partiers is not going to distract them because the Tea Partiers have had nothing to do with those policies. This cycle, the GOP has the better argument, and it is not going to take the bait. Republican candidates everywhere will answer the charge of radicalism with a simple question: "Where are the jobs, Mr. President?" The fact that the White House is thinking about such demagoguery is another strong indication that it is simply looking to keep Democratic turnout high enough to prevent a 1974-style tsunami. Last time I checked, the U.S. Congress hasn't adopted the system that some states have for judicial elections, in which voters simply decide whether to retain or reject incumbents, without knowing anything about their potential replacements. Elections are inherently comparative. Yes, many swing voters do tend to treat elections as a referendum on the party in power, but they don't have to, and many don't. And, far from being demagogic, it's responsible for the major parties to try to educate voters about what they're choosing, rather than simply what they're voting against. Should they have paid more attention to what they were voting for?) In any event, it would be folly for Democrats to accept Cost's view that the ideas of the GOP are off the table in 2010. There is abundant evidence that the ascendant conservative wing of the Republican Party is determined to pursue policies for which there is relatively little public support, from renewed military aggression in the Middle East, to major changes in Social Security and Medicare, to abandonment of a federal role in environmental protection and education, to destruction of progressive taxation, to maintenance of "Dont Ask, Dont Tell" and continued assaults on abortion rights. If anything, the Tea Partiers deserve attention for being honest and even proud about the radicalism of their agendaand Democrats have every right to ask if other Republicans agree with it. Jim DeMint, who has evolved from a lonely extremist into a genuine Big Dog in the GOP, is clearly not indifferent to the ideological agenda of his party. Yesterday, he announced in The Washington Post and on CNN that the Republican Party would soon be dead if it does not keep the outrageous promises it has been making this year. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77832/it-demagoguery-compare-the-two-parties |
What Was David Cameron Thinking? | The British PM is caught up in the 'News of the World' spying scandaland he has no one to blame but himself. An article in The New York Times Magazine doesnt becomes the big political story in London every week, but the Times piece Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond has been a front-pager and led on the TV news here. The tabloid in question is the News of the World, one of whose reporters was imprisoned a few years ago for phone-hacking, or intercepting cell phone calls, most notably from the two young princes, William and Harry. Although Andy Coulson, the editor of the paper at the time, was forced to leave his job, he denied any knowledge of malfeasance. But the Times story cast lengthy and well-sourced doubt on his denials, and his credibility in general. That might not have caused so much comment here if it hadnt been for the truly astonishing fact that, shortly after his departure from the paper, Coulson was hired as communications director (what we called a press officer in less grandiose times) by David Cameron, then the Conservative opposition leader, now prime minister. A storm in the media teacup thus became very big political newsand for the Cameron government, a potential disaster, entirely self-inflicted. If not the most illustrious of the London Sunday papers, the News of the World is one of the oldest. For most of the past century, a diet of sex-and-scandal has made it the best-selling British paper, and, since 1969, it has belonged to Rupert Murdoch. It was his first London paper, after he acquired it in fierce competition with the late Robert Maxwell (what a pair!). Its story has never been more lurid than in early 2007, when Clive Goodman, the papers royal correspondent (what a job title! ), was sent to prison for the phone hacking. Months later, Cameron airily waved aside any misgivings about the wisdom of hiring Coulson, saying that he believed in giving people a second chance, as though the purpose of Tory headquarters was to rehabilitate offenders. But if he hoped that Coulsons record would be quickly forgotten, he could not have been more wrong. Last year, The Guardian returned to the story, showing how extensive hacking had been at the News of the World, which, in the meantime, has paid out huge sums to placate its other hacking victims, such as Gordon Taylor, a sometimes soccer supremo, who received 700,000. (The paper also paid a very large kiss-off to Clive Goodman to buy his silence) In July 2009, Coulson appeared in front of a House of Commons committee and denied any knowledge of the scandal, saying "my instructions to the staff were clearwe did not use subterfuge of any kind." That didnt look very convincing then, and it seems far less so after the Times story, in which several former employees of News of the World said that the culture of illicit bugging and hacking was widespread at the paper and that Coulson was in it up to his neck. Sean Hoare, who worked for Coulson, said that what his former editor told the parliamentary committee was a lie. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77493/what-was-david-cameron-thinking-andy-coulson-news-of-the-world-british-tabloid-prime-minister |
Will Dems Lose the House Because of Nancy Pelosi? | The election is seven weeks away and the outcome, obviously, is far from certain. But a Republican takeover of the House seems more likely than not. And people are already starting to speculate about what it means for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Politico's lead story yesterday was "Dems Plan for a Future Without Pelosi." It quoted several sources suggesting that Pelosi was likely to step down, among them an anonymous House member who said "If we lose it badly, Pelosi would have to leave." The source didn't define "lose it badly," but I've heard political professionals on and around the Hill say similar things. As the argument goes, if Democrats lose the House then it means Pelosi has failed. She'll have to go. I understand the logic. I also don't agree with it. The Speaker's first job is not to make sure her party holds onto its majority. It's to make the country a better place. And while Pelosi presumably believes (as I generally do) that the country is better off when Democrats are in charge, she also believes that the party should enact a particular governing agenda. And by any reasonable reckoning, House Democrats under her leadership have done precisely that. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77671/the-success-nancy-pelosi |
Does Obama's Tax Policy Make Sense? | The New York Times editorial page says so: Mr. Obamas efforts to enact a reasonable tax policy are not just good politics. They make good sense. I half agree. The politics are clear. People like the middle class tax cuts and hate the tax cuts for the rich. The Republican game plan is to attach the two together, so that any opponent of tax cuts for the rich can be depicted as a middle-class tax hiker. Democrats have shrewdly reponded by detaching the two. Now, as policy, this is a clear improvement over the Republican position. Compared with the GOP, the Democrats have a more progressive and more fiscally responsible tax policy. No, it doesn't. Even the middle-class tax cuts are unaffordable: | https://newrepublic.com/article/77658/does-obamas-tax-policy-make-sense |
Will Republican gain seats in New England in the 2010 midterms? | BOSTON "Where are our plans for a New Deal or a Great Society?" asked Edward W. Brooke, the legendary Massachusetts Republican. It's not a question anyone in today's Republican Party would dare get caught even considering, but Brooke had the temerity to raise it in The Challenge of Change, a book published in 1966, the year he became the first African American elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction. The midterm election that year was very good for Republicans in general, including a Californian named Ronald Reagan. But it was an especially fine year for moderate and progressive Republicans of the Brooke stripe across the Northeast. Their prizes included governorships in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and Pennsylvania. In 2010, Republicans run away in horror at the prospect of being called moderate, let alone progressive, and that is an obstacle in the GOP's path to a congressional majority. It will be very hard for Republicans to take the House if they don't break the Democrats' power in the Northeastand they still have to prove they can do that. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77938/moderate-republicans-new-england-2010-midterms |
Whats Eating David Axelrod? | And yet its not as if the mores of contemporary Washington come as news to Axelrod, who has described the capital as a place where too many people spend too much time kneecapping each other to certify their own importance. In terms of the short-term mentality, the unwillingness to take risks, the way every day is scored like the Super Bowlall those things he believed, I think, have been confirmed in the extreme, says David Plouffe, the former Axelrod partner who managed the Obama campaign. But its not like he was caught by surprise. He understood that. Much has been written of the famous December 16, 2008, meeting in Chicago in which the president-elect and his aides debated a massive stimulus package. During the meeting, Christina Romer, whom Obama had asked to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, reviewed the data on the economys spectacular collapse and described the nightmare that would ensue without an adequate response. This is your holy shit moment, Romer announced, playing off a phrase Axelrod had used earlier in the day. Less well known is the reason Axelrod had coined the phrase in the first place. Just before the larger meeting, Axelrod had huddled with the incoming economic team, including Romer and Austan Goolsbee, another senior aide, to hear their prognosis. The political team had polled the publics knowledge of the crisis, and after the economists brought him up to speed, Axelrod lamented how little the average voter grasped its seriousness. The world hasnt had a holy shit moment, where they say, Holy shit, we have to do something, he said, according to Goolsbee. If you want to understand the overwhelming source of Obamas political troubles, you can trace it back to this problem. The Bush and Obama administrations (and the Fed) stopped the spiral into depression. But the ordering of events most people observedfirst the government intervened, then unemployment reached 26-year highsmade the response look like it had either failed or exacerbated the problem. That Axelrod would home in on this from the outsethe told the president-elect after the meeting that his numbers would be in the toilet in twelve to 18 months and all of us who were geniuses are going to be idiotsis a testament to his legendary fatalism. In his recent campaign memoir, Plouffe recalls Axelrod as a brooding presence with a gift for finding the booby trap in every field of daisies. This could be an unmitigated disaster, Axelrod announced to Plouffe and strategist Robert Gibbs as Obama trooped off to his first primary debate. Axelrod had been refining this mordant streak at least since young adulthood, when his career brought him face-to-face with the urban political machineand its knack for crushing aspiring dogooders. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1976, he won a coveted internship at the Tribune and parlayed it into a full-time job. For several years, he covered City Hall, which was dominated by Democratic apparatchiks. He saw the local political establishment as inbred and corrupt and naturally rooted for the reformers. David came in with a different viewpoint, says Bill Griffin, a colleague who hailed from a long line of Chicago cops and took a more sanguine view of the machine. The independentswe would be dismissive of them. David gave them a voice in the paper. By the early 80s, the Tribune had promoted its chief political writer, a more conservative man named Dick Ciccone, to the position of managing editor. It replaced him with Axelrod, who used his weekly columns to flay the citys ruling class. Axelrod observed that, on the one day of the year City Hall welcomed public testimony, the mayor had fled to a nearby hotel to finalize the partys election slate. Another column compared campaign-funding laws in Illinois and Wisconsin. Wisconsin, Axelrod noted, had spending limits and public financing. [O]ur own system of public financing, he wrote, works like this: Employees, unions, lawyers, and businesses that reap tax dollars from government pour some of the money back into the campaigns of the incumbents to keep the spigot open. Only in his late twenties, Axelrod appeared to have landed his ideal job. But there were strains. His predecessor, Ciccone, had the title political editor, but management withheld it from Axelrod. When the paper transferred a writer from its Washington bureau to supplement his coverage, Axelrod was pissed, as he told Chicago magazine in 1987. He also bristled at the way editors treated his copy. He used to grouse, They changed this, didnt let me say that. It happens to everybody, but he was very sensitive, recalls Jeff Lyon, a colleague and close friend at the time. He fumed when they buried a story showing how a leading mayoral candidate had stoked racial fears. Axelrods hypersensitivity notwithstandinghe couldnt touch coffee because it made him too jitteryit became obvious that management was thwarting him. It might have been his politics, Lyon says. The Tribune, even though it had undergone a metamorphosis of sorts ... was still far from liberal. David was a liberal. Whatever the reason, Axelrod grew increasingly frustrated. He came out of a fairly affluent family in Manhattan. So it wasnt like he was devoid of any knowledge that people could do this, says Lyon. But yeah, it affected him a lot. Weve all had those kinds of experiences. They shape you. One Saturday night in 1984, Axelrod met Lyon and a handful of colleagues for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. He announced he was leaving the Tribune to work as press secretary for Congressman Paul Simon, who was running for Senate. He was nervous but resolute. For years, hed toyed with going into politics anyway. Now, he said, he was leaving because he didnt want to be kicked around anymore. His dinner companions were stunned. I dont think anyone said it was a brilliant career move, says Lyon. But, as it happens, the decision almost perfectly distilled Axelrods mix of fatalism and brash idealism. On the one hand, he saw that he was being stymied by forces beyond his control. On the other hand, he was willing to trade a remarkable amount of success for a job that might not last six months (Simon was a big underdog) in a line of work he had no experience in, with a wife and two small children at home. The only explanation is that something about the liberal Simonthe picture of an anti-politician, with his horn-rimmed glasses and bow tiespoke to Axelrod. And so he jumped. In the spring of 2009, White House officials gathered in the Roosevelt Room to discuss the direction of health care reform. One of the looming questions was the so-called tax exclusion. Under the status quo, a worker making $75,000 per year with no benefits would pay taxes on all his compensation. But a worker making $50,000 plus $25,000 in health benefits would only pay taxes on his income; the benefits would be untouched. This gave employers an incentive to provide generous insurance, which, in turn, led workers to consume too much health care. Pretty much every wonk in the administration believed that taxing benefits was essential. But the political team saw a problem: During the presidential campaign, Obama had criticized John McCain for a similar proposal. Axelrod was especially concerned about reversing course. The campaign had run millions of dollars in ads specifically on the issue. To underscore the point, he screened a roughly ten-minute montage of every Obama ad blasting McCain as a tax-raiser. It was to little avail. By late July, when the president held an Oval Office meeting with several prominent health economists, it was clear he intended to endorse the tax (though it ultimately fell hardest on upper-income workers). Axelrod stood off to the side and said little. As long as Axelrod was helping Obama capture the White House, it was easy to assume both men subscribed to the same worldviewnot least because Axelrods reverence for his candidate was irrepressible. Neera Tanden, a top Hillary Clinton campaign aide whom Obama hired for the general election, recalls Axelrods pitch to her as follows: Obama is a leader who tries to do the right thing. Hes running a campaign that is a team and he has a core set of convictions and believes in them. It would be great for you to see that. Back then, the details of Obamas proposals had been less important than the way they advanced the broader narrative. Obama wouldnt just tout the benefits of health care reform. Hed point out that every Democrat since FDR had tried and failed to bring universal coverage; only a different kind of politician could succeed. But, for all they have in common, Axelrod is a liberal with a populist streak; Obama is more of a technocrat who leans left but generally shuns ideology. When it came time to govern, the differences between the president and his top political adviser became harder to finesse. One of the first major political questions the White House faced after the inauguration was how to handle public outrage over bonuses at bailed-out companies. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill offered an answer: a bill preventing any executive at a company on government life-support from making more than the president, or $400,000 per year. David liked that a lot, says a strategist close to the White House. But Obama ultimately sided with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who believed it would discourage firms from participating in programs designed to stabilize the financial system. In the weeks that followed, Axelrod actually blessed the compensation plan the economic team devised. The idea was to tie pay to recoverypermitting large bonuses, but only once the companies had paid back their bailout funds. What Axe railed against was not the idea of high compensation, but where it seemed divorced from the presidents responsibility ethos, says one administration official. Axe was fine with the initial guidance because it said you only get paid well if you bring your company back. But, in mid-March, the press reported that AIG owed executives at its financial products division $165 million in performance bonuses. Taxpayers struggled to understand why they owed anything to the people whose disastrous real-estate bets required a $170 billion government lifeline, much less tens of millions in performance incentives. The development shattered the tentative understanding between Axelrod and the wonks. Geithner believed that you cease to be an advanced economy once the government starts dissolving contracts. Axelrod and other senior political aides, like Gibbs, felt the administration had to respond to the countrys legitimate outrage. They began to worry that Geithners principled caution, while noble, could bring the administration down. The president was exasperated but ultimately sided with Geithner on the letter of the law. Politically, it didnt work. If you were going to pick a moment when the whole thing turned on Obama, says a longtime Democratic consultant, it was the moment the administration saved the AIG bonuses. In late April, Axelrod and two aides met with a group of senior House Democrats in Speaker Nancy Pelosis office. The ostensible reason was to share ideas for promoting the recently passed health care bill. But the meeting quickly evolved into a broader strategic discussion. Pelosi and her colleagues complained that Obama sounded more like an insurgent candidate than the occupant of the Oval Office. A number of members of Congress ... pretty firmly raised the issue of the president going around the country saying Washington is a failure, a mess, recalls one person in attendance. Were in charge. The tensions had been brewing for months. Leading up to Januarys State of the Union speech, the Axelrodian view of the world looked like it was finally ascendant in the West Wing. In December, Obama protested on 60 Minutes that he did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers. In mid-January, he proposed the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent government-insured banks from placing speculative bets with their own money. Axelrod in particular has been on it for a long time, one administration official told me shortly after. When Obama unveiled the idea, he slapped the banks for their stingy lending despite soaring profits and obscene bonuses. But when the president delivered his speech a few days later, the populist resolve had mostly vanished. Instead, Obama harkened back to the 2008 campaign, ridiculing the practice of saying anything about the other side, no matter how false and bashing the Beltway habit of treating every day like Election Day. He elaborated on these anti-Washington themes throughout the winter and spring, despite pleas that he target Republican policies instead. There had in the interim been conversations with some of the folks over at the White House on beginning to draw the contrast more sharply, says one House official. People were surprised that the contrasts werent being drawn. In the months since the April meeting, the presidents language has gradually become tougher, culminating with a searing critique of Republicans shortly after Labor Day in Cleveland. Weve clearly seen a significant change in the way theyre presenting the issues, says an appreciative Representative Chris Van Hollen, who directs the House Democrats campaign arm. Obamas assault on the GOPs maximalist tax-cutting demands has proved particularly effective, according to pollster Stan Greenberg. Still, some Democratic operatives continue to worry that the president isnt as lacerating as the times require, that hes still too attached to his critique of Washington. Even in his Cleveland speech, Obama dwelled on the GOPs game-playing and obstructionismthe only reason theyre holding this up is politics, pure and simple, he said of one bill. His discussion of the partys radical legislative agenda was hardly exhaustive. If voters could elect Republicans with a promise that all they would do is say no to Democrats, not the other crazy stuff, we cant win the election, says Guy Molyneux, a Democratic pollster. Many of these same operatives believe Axelrod has long agreed with their advice but has had trouble nudging the president beyond his comfort zone. With David, [youre] pushing on an open door, says one person whos been in touch with the White House on these matters. Axelrod has always been harder-edged than the president, after all. Barack would go everywhere but to negative. Rahm would cut your heart out. Axelrod is in the middle of that triangle, says Jim Cauley, who managed Obamas 2004 Senate race. But when it comes to the idea of changing Washingtonof uprooting a system that gives outsize influence to special interests and rewards hyperpartisanshipAxelrod and Obama see eye to eye. For good reason. It arguably accounts for the millions of first-time voters who backed Obama by large margins in 2008. Perhaps more importantly, Obama and Axelrod both believe in changing Washington for its own sake. Its in the presidents nature, its also in Davids nature, says Stephanie Cutter, a senior White House aide. Indeed, on the level of worldview, its probably their deepest bond. Dating back to his Tribune days, Axelrod has believed that the biggest problem with interest groups and party hacks is that they take for themselves what belongs to ordinary citizens. In Obamas mind, special interests and partisanship corrupt good policymakingboth for the common man and everyone else. If it were up to Axelrod, the language of the Obama presidency might tilt a bit more populist. If left to his own devices, the presidents words might be a bit wonkier. (Its hard to imagine Axelrod having written Obamas policy manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, for example.) The place where they completely overlap is the belief that Washington must change. And so, rhetorically at least, they wont give up on it. That helps explain why, despite the pressure from members of Congress and every Democratic wise guy in town, Axelrod and Obama keep returning to some version of the anti-Washington message, albeit one that increasingly lays blame with the GOP. The context for the Washington-is-broken argument applies today, to the midterms, says Larry Grisolano, a top Obama campaign official who attends a weekly meeting with Axelrod and other senior consultants from the campaign. Its different than what we had [in 2008]. ... But he hasnt discontinued where hes coming from. Hes applying it to the current context. The problem is that, while the administration remains rhetorically committed to changing Washington, at times it has abandoned the pursuit of that goal. In late February of 2009, Obama faced a small but telling decision. Congress had larded Bushs final budget with earmarks, the spending that members can sneak into legislation without a vote, and which Obama frequently derided. According to The Promise, Jonathan Alters account of Obamas first year in office, the White House legislative staff had heroically trimmed the number of earmarks from over 20,000 to 9,000 and urged the president to sign on. But Axelrod was worried about the old-Washington stench. Nine thousand or twoearmarks are earmarks, he complained, in Alters telling. After some agonizing, Obama sided with his legislative aides. Weve got big stuff going on here, he said. During the campaign and the first months of the administration, it had been possible to believe Obama wouldnt have to choose between his twin goals of passing legislation and taming Washington. But, over time, a combination of structural factors (the effective 60-vote requirement in the Senate) and circumstances (a Republican Party determined to oppose him at every turn) made the choice inescapable. No progressive can begrudge Obamas decision to sacrifice procedural change in order to notch big wins on health care and financial reform. But the tension between the administrations rhetoric and its approach isnt costless. The strategy Obama had [during the campaign] is a great message for getting the country angry at Washington, says an official who joined the administration early on. But some would argue that its not a good message for achieving legislative victory that mires you in not changing Washingtonin using the levers that are available in Washington. If anything, Axelrod feels this tension more acutely than even Obama. Barack is a pragmatist, Axe believes, says Cauley. Last spring, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel began pursuing a series of deals with interest groupsinsurers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospitalsto grease the passage of health care. When Axelrod eventually turned to the issue, he became frustrated. The deals Emanuel was negotiating were moving the legislation forward. But they risked provoking a public backlash. During the campaign we fought against insurance companies, Axelrod said in discussions with Emanuel and the president. After the deals with insurance companies, the deals with Pharmaall these people are supposedly our friends. Its possible that Axelrod was speaking strictly in his role as a communications adviser. Certainly no strategist would relish explaining how changing Washington had given way to co-opting special interests. But there appears to have been a deeper revulsion at work. For one thing, Axelrod had been fighting the health care - industrial complex since his Tribune days, when his daughters medical bills consumed a quarter of his salary. And while he craved the end result of health care reform, the process had a way of mocking his principles. David has a very idealistic streak, says the official. He does not see politics as the art of the transaction. He sees it much more in a human context, that people are motivated by a connection to something bigger than themselves. That view is just very different from passing legislation like health care, where you have to cut deals. That would certainly be consistent with Axelrods longstanding outlook. In late 2003, while he was working for John Edwardss presidential campaign in Iowa, Axelrod began meeting with Joe Trippi, then the campaign manager for Howard Dean. He was one of the few people [in the party] that was interested in what we were doing, Trippi recalls. Most of the other campaigns, candidates, staffs, thought we were Martians from outer space. The two men would sit for hours at the bar in the Hotel Fort Des Moines and riff about the way the Internet empowered ordinary voters and undercut special interests. Trippi sensed Axelrod had a pang of longing for what Dean was pulling off. Im not saying he loved my guy, Trippi allows. But he wanted to change politics, and heres something happening thats changing politics. When Axelrod was five years old, he fell in love with John F. Kennedy after glimpsing him from atop a mailbox in New York City. The first politician he fell in love with as an adult was a Chicago Democrat named Jane Byrne. Byrne was an unlikely reformer. Shed been a protg of the longtime mayor Richard Daley and was serving as his consumer-affairs commissioner when he died in office. But Daleys successor, a gray machine hack named Michael Bilandic, fired her in 1977 after shed accused him of secretly negotiating a fare increase with local cab companies. The following year, Byrne announced she was likely to challenge Bilandic in the primary. His heart is not with the people, its with the bankers, she said, according to a story Axelrod wrote for the Tribune. Ill raise money with contributions from the people. ... I wont make any sweetheart deals. Axelrod and the younger writers at the paper were spellbound. We cheered her on, recalls Lyon. In his story on the night of Byrnes primary victory, Axelrod called it the upset of the century in Chicago. Within months of taking over as mayor, though, Byrne proved to be a spectacular disappointment. She began stocking agencies with friends and family, cutting deals with the machine pols shed promised to sideline. Axelrod was more disillusioned than most. One piece of his straight reportage early in Byrnes term began, Apparently piqued over published reports involving her husband, the normally outspoken Mayor Byrne has curtailed her exchanges with press. (It went on to include this priceless deadpan: Mrs. Byrne, who has declined to discuss her sudden reticence ... ) As a columnist, Axelrod bemoaned Byrnes fundraising quid pro quos. He joked that, for one contractor whod siphoned $1.5 million from city coffers, it was a small sacrifice to return $62,000 to the mayors campaign fund. In the end, Axelrod partly blamed himself for the fiasco. Trying to puzzle through how Byrne became the mayor she ran against, he wrote: [The lesson] is that voters should look at the history of a candidate in assessing the sincerity of their promises. There was little in Jane Byrnes background to suggest she would be the one who would finally clean up Chicago government. Notwithstanding such self-reflection, the pattern of bubbling enthusiasm followed by disillusionment would recur in Axelrods career. The campaign of Byrnes successor, Harold Washington, also inspired a certain romance in him, but soon he was grumbling about the mayors disorganization and fecklessness. (Axelrod did later work for Washington.) As a consultant in 1990, Axelrod helped a wealthy lawyer named Dick Phelan replace George Dunne, the longtime president of the Cook County Board. Axelrod had worked for Dunne four years earlier; he eventually soured on Phelan, too. In 1991, Axelrod signed on to work for another wealthy lawyer, who was challenging Illinois Senator Al Dixon in the Democratic primary. His commercials claimed Dixon was Paid by the Taxpayers. Owned by the Special Interests. Dixon had a well-deserved reputation as a Washington dealmaker, but there was an added wrinkle: He was a close friend of fellow Illinois Senator Paul Simon, the man whod given Axelrod his break in politics. Years later, Axelrod would credit Simons 1984 victory with launching his career. He regarded the liberal Simon as a father figure and would speak of him reverentially. Several weeks before the primary, Simon began vouching for Dixons bona fides and barnstorming the state at his side. Axelrod was crestfallen. In what he assumed was an off-the-record interview with National Journal, he laid into Simon as an aspiring hack trapped in a reformers body. I think its safe to say we were disappointed at Simons rather strong involvement in propping up Dixon, says John Kupper, a longtime Axelrod partner who worked on the campaign. Clearly, Dixon was not the reform candidate in that race. (Axelrod promptly called Simon to apologize and has said the quote was one of his biggest regrets; they reconciled and remained close until Simons death in 2003.) Whatever his tendency to fall in and out of love with politicians, theres no evidence Axelrod has soured on Barack Obama. Quite the contraryhe is said to take enormous pride in the presidents legislative accomplishments. When Obama rejects Axes political advice, Davids attitude is not like, Why isnt he listening to me? says one administration official. Its more like, This is why I love this guy. Hes willing to follow his heart even when the short-term politics are not with him. Instead, the source of Axelrods disillusionment these days is Washington itself. In retrospect, Axelrods diagnosis from 25 years ago wasnt entirely right. The lesson of Jane Byrne isnt that her background left her unprepared to clean up City Hall, though thats certainly one reason she failed. The lesson of Jane Byrne and Harold Washington and George Dunne and Dick Phelanand even Paul Simon and Barack Obamais that cleaning up City Hall is unspeakably hard. Much more so than it appears to an outsider. As long as he was a civilian, Axelrod could blame the pace of change on the flawed politicians he helped elect. He could always move on and invest his hopes in someone else. But now that hes serving in government, its clear that the problem isnt so much flawed peoplethough, like anyone, Obama has his flawsas a ferociously stubborn, possibly irredeemable system. For an idealist like David Axelrod, that may be the most terrifying thought of all. Senior editor Noam Scheiber is a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. This piece ran in the October 14, 2010, issue of the magazine. For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77880/whats-eating-david-axelrod-noam-scheiber |
Why Don't Novelists Care about Katrina? | There are more abstract and philosophical reasons that could also explain the difference. A Manichean dynamic is more readily apparent with September 11; identifiable humans caused the attacks and murdered innocents, while Katrina and its aftershocks were the result of nature and mismanagement. These latter two forces have longstanding precedents and, in the case of mismanagement, dull bureaucratic justifications. Although the consequences of September 11 were lingering and wide-ranging, the tragedy was immediately apparent, taking place on one terrible morning. Katrina, on the other hand, unfolded over the course of several days that dragged into weeks and months. Perhaps single-blow tragedies capture the imagination with greater force. But the lack of a strong literary response to the hurricane appears to have consequences. Five years later, Katrinas legacy seems less tangible than I'd imagined it would be, Josh Levin, a New Orleans native, recently wrote in Slate. Perhaps, in part, this is because our novelists have not yet turned to it. For centuries, novels have done the important job of making devastation more concrete for people by examining individual experience, real or fictional, with that devastation. The importance of novels, in this respect, is far too large to scrutinize here, but it has clearly persisted not only in the past but in our own time as well. Indeed, in addition to motivating the many authors whove written about September 11, this imperative has influenced the few who have written about Katrina. At the end of Zeitoun, Eggers notes that he wrote the book in order to give a story that had been briefly covered in a McSweeneys anthology the space it deserved. Neufeld told The New York Times that he adapted the real-life stories he discovered into a comic book in order to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. And Tom Piazza says that he wrote City of Refuge because he wanted readers to have an actual experience. You cant understand the kind of experience that people in New Orleans went through from an air-conditioned [tour] bus. You need to get the mud and the water and the blood all over you. The more pronounced creative response to Katrina has taken place on film. Werner Herzogs Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and David Simon and Eric Overmerers TV series Treme (2010) are two examples of auteur-driven works, and there have also been a number of well-received documentaries by household-name directors, including a two-part series by Spike Lee. Mainstream television has also looked to New Orleans, hoping to capture (however superficially) some of the poignancy associated with the citys revival. Recently, Fresh Air contributor David Bianculli posited that television brings [Katrina] back the way we first experienced it. We saw the disaster unfolding in real time on our TV screens, and so it makes sense to go back to them to remember it. But a film-based response to Katrina is ultimately insufficient. After all, we saw September 11 happen on television, too, yet weve still turned to books to relive it, understand its wide-ranging consequences, and help order the overwhelming emotions it has elicited. Indeed, no amount of documentary footage eliminates the need for novels that would impress the horrors of Katrina upon our collective consciousness. Novelists have done a commendable job exposing us to the dust and the rubble of September 11. Its time for more of them to churn the mud, water, blood, and decay wrought by Katrina. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77532/why-dont-novelists-care-about-katrina-september-11-chloe-schama |
Is President Obama Mean? | This anecdote from Bob Woodward's new book sure makes it seem so: "It wasn't until well into the Obama presidency," Woodward writes, that veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, "learned definitively how much the president didn't care for him." The two had met and chatted briefly on Jan. 22, 2009, when Obama named him to the job. "'Mr. President, I want to ask you one favor,' Holbrooke had said, expressing gratitude for the highly visible assignment. 'Would you do me the great favor of calling me Richard, for my wife's sake?'" Woodward writes. "... She disliked the name 'Dick,' which the president had been using." Obama referred to Holbrooke as "Richard" during the announcement ceremony but, Woodward writes, "told others he found the request highly unusual and even strange. Holbrooke was horrified when he learned that his request -- which he had repeated to no one -- had been circulated by the president." Whether the president is a nice guy ranks pretty low on my list of criteria. | https://newrepublic.com/article/78029/president-obama-mean |
Does The New York Times Rig Its Polls? | Commentary's Jennifer Rubin offers a glimpse into the paranoid conservative mind: The New York Times poll (invariably more positive for the Democrats than other surveys) contains little good news for the Democrats. The Times has Obamas approval at 45 percent, near his all-time low of 44 percent. His disapproval rating of 47 percent is a record in this poll... The Gray Lady is preparing its readers for the day of reckoning, edging its polling closer to more credible competing polls just in time for Election Day. (Looks bad when you miss the final results by a mile.) So apparently Rubin thinks the Times has been rigging its polls all along to boost Obama and inflate his apparent unpopularity. But now, as the election nears, it needs to start preparing readers for the "real results," and to cover up its past rigging. So it is slowly un-rigging the results to bring them closer into line with reality. I would really like to read Rubin's detailed explanation as to precisely how this process works. Inquiring minds want to know. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77720/does-the-new-york-times-rig-its-polls |
Whose Side Are They On? | Slate's Timothy Noah has put together a ten-part series on inequality, called "The Great Divergence." It's terrific, based on what I've seen so far. It sounds crude, but Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has gone a long way toward proving it. Bartels looked up income growth rates for families at various income percentiles for the years 1948 to 2005, then cross-checked these with whether the president was a Republican or Democrat. He found two distinct and opposite trends. Under Democrats, the biggest income gains were for people in the bottom 20th income percentile ... The income games grew progressively smaller further up the income scale ... But under Republicans, the biggest income gains were for people in the 95th percentile ... The income gains grew progressively smaller further down the income scale. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77515/whos-side-are-they |
Do the Founding Fathers' Views Still Matter? | Now, to the much harder case, regarding the values of the constitution. Im not so sure. It is certainly the case that many of the framers had values Americans today abhor and should and do reject. I tend to support those who argue, however, that most of those values were not, in fact, found in their Constitution (and are certainly not in ours, which contains the Civil War Amendments, among other improvements). Steering away for the moment from race, think just about the question of democracy. Try Hanna Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman). Yet its also the case that the ideas of self-government they derived from liberalism and republicanism turned out, in practice, to be intensely democratic. In other words, whatever they thought about democracy at the time, and whatever their own personal prejudices about elites and masses may have been, what they actually put into the Constitution was extraordinarily democratic. Thats not only true in the sense that it was amazingly democratic for its time (which it was), but in that whatever they thought they were doing, what they actually did was to create self-government. In other words, the values of the Constitution are in my view democratic, even if we should and do reject the anti-democratic side of the Framers values. But, yes, race. The Constitution protected slavery, no question about it. Still...Id argue that even there, the values of the Constitution are not values of racism and dehumanization -- not even the odious 3/5 clause. The values of the Constitution are pragmatism and compromise in the spirit of self-government among real people in the real world. The values of the Constitution say: in a democracy, in true self-government, one sometimes has to learn to work with bigots, with really hateful people, and find a way to keep things together anyway. Now, thats a tough lesson, and it will without a doubt lead to mistakes...theres no question but that Americans who were not themselves bigots have, over time, made many mistakes of pragmatism and compromise that never should have happened. But Im not unhappy that the Constitution forces us to see that self-government involves making terrible choices. The alternative is a kind of happy-talk democracy, in which we pretend that The People are good and pure, and that if only we properly listened to The People then everything would be hunky-dory and flowers and rainbows. Democracy, by that conception, is equivalent at all times with whats good and right. The Constitution, however, says: no! Self-government means nothing more than self-government, and sometimes thats going to mean tragically horrible choices. Believing in democracy -- really believing in democracy -- means accepting that abhorrent things are going to be done in your name, because you are a citizen, not a subject. Even worse, believing in democracy -- really believing in democracy -- means that sometimes you will have to grudgingly support abhorrent things because the alternative is something even worse, and because, as a citizen, you have to choose. Of course, thats not the final word. Its also a Constitutional value of self-government that if you lose this round (or find yourself having to win a terrible compromise), you can move forward and try to do better. You can find better politicians, convince more voters...you,you, can try to improve things. Self-government doesnt mean that the bigots lose, but it does mean that you can educate people, you can find allies, you can choose the party that you believe fights for justice, and if it doesnt you really can stand up and change things. Or at least you can try. The Constitution reminds us that actual people, part of We the People, supported slavery and had to be bought off if the United States of America was going to happen. That actual people, part of We the People, have been bigots and won plenty of battles, with terrible and terrifying consequences. But also that actual people, part of We the People, fought back and won some battles of their own. And we can remember the specific elections and candidates and political parties in which those battles took place. Last bit...I want to think a bit more what Lexington says about one aspect of the Constitution: [Tea-partiers] say that the framers aim was to check the central government and protect the rights of the states. In fact the constitution of 1787 set out to do the opposite: to bolster the centre and weaken the power the states had briefly enjoyed under the new republics Articles of Confederation of 1777. I think thats somewhat, but not completely, true. Madison and Hamilton may have wanted to weaken the power of the states. What the Constitution actually does, however, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, isnt to weaken anyones power: what it does is create power. Thats the secret of separated institutions sharing powers, and the secret of federalism; by creating many different institutions that matter and that can do things on their own (and/or with the cooperation of or in rivalry with other institutions), the system as a whole is far more energetic and dynamic than any one hierarchy could be. Not to be too sappy, but in this sense Yes we can is one of the most important values of the Constitution of the United States of America. We the people can do all these things (Establish justice! Promote the general welfare! ), by creating a government that represents us and can do all these things. So, yes, the Framers had all sort of values that we can and do reject. But for whatever reasons, the Constitution they created through a spirit of pragmatism and compromise doesnt, I dont think, stand for those values. Those, we can admire. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77949/do-the-founding-fathers-views-still-matter |
Does Christine O'Donnell Think Dinosaur Bones Are Fake? | Yesterday I noted that only one Republican running for a Senate seat this year believed in climate change. That was Delaware's Mike Castle, who got ousted in his state's primary last night by Christine O'Donnell. Well, she doesn't believe in the greenhouse effect. But she also doesn't believe in evolution. New York's Dan Amira dug up an old discussion (I hesitate to use the term "debate") O'Donnell had with a University of Tennessee evolutionary biologist: CHRISTINE O'DONNELL, Concerned Women for America: Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned, evolution is a theory and it's exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory. But creation This is a good time to be crassly commercial and plug TNR contributor Jerry Coyne's excellent book Why Evolution Is True, which explains quite clearly that evolution does "consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests." That's why it's widely accepted as fact by scientists. Anyway, here's where O'Donnell gets nutty: CHRISTINE O'DONNELL: Now, he said that it's based on fact. I just want to point out a couple things. First of all, they use carbon dating, as an example, to prove that something was millions of years old. Well, we have the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens and the carbon dating test that they used then would have to then prove that these were hundreds of millions of years younger, when what happened was they had the exact same results on the fossils and canyons that they did the tests on that were supposedly 100 millions of years old. And it's the kind of inconsistent tests like this that they're basing their 'facts' on. And: | https://newrepublic.com/article/77707/odonnell-carbon-dating-bogus |
What Can France Teach Us About Botched Immigration Policies? | On both sides of the Atlantic, it has been an uncomfortable summer for immigrant groups. Here in the United States there have been the quarrels over the "Ground Zero Mosque," anchor babies, and Arizonas new illegal immigrant bill (not to mention yet more calls for the deportation of our Muslim president to his native Kenya by the surprisingly large proportion of the Republican Party that seems to have taken up permanent residence on Planet Zorg). Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, faced with removal from office by the voters in 2012, has continued to push legislation outlawing the wearing of the burqa in public and acted to expel several hundred Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. This last move in particular has earned him widespread criticism from the media, and widespread support from the French public. Sarkozys actions and Frances continuing struggles with the immigration issue have gotten relatively little coverage in the United States. They are worth taking a closer look at, however, because they starkly illustrate many of the issues that arise from the world-wide movement of populationsissues that the United States will be confronting more and more over the coming decades. In its attitudes toward foreigners and immigrant-origin populations (i.e. both immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants), the French government is increasingly trying to establish French values as a basis for policy. For instance, earlier this summer, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux ordered the deportation of Egyptian Islamist imam Ali Ibrahim El Soudany, claiming that he despised the values of our society, and that his message of religious hatred had nothing to do with religious liberty. The ban on the burqa is similarly justified by reference not only to human rights, but more nebulously to values such as the importance of face-to-face contact. In this shift, France has followed the lead of countries like the Netherlands, where would-be citizens must now watch a film that shows two men kissing, and a topless woman on a beach, so as to understand Dutch values. This all raises the obvious problem of how national values can possibly be defined. Sixty years ago, by most present-day definitions, a large majority of the French (like a large majority in most countries on earth) held homophobic and bigoted attitudes. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77416/france-immigration-policy-roma-sarkozy |
Is National Review Being Smeared? | The Daily Caller, a conservative online tabloid, has attracted some attention by alleging intellectual corruption on the part of National Review. Many conservatives slammed the Republican Party's "Pledge to America," but NR published a positive editorial. Here's the Daily Caller's accusation: Many Republican offices didnt even see it until it leaked to the media Wednesday afternoon, leading one aide to write in an e-mail to fellow legislative directors: We shouldnt have to get our own agenda from CBS News. But skittish rank-and-file members were reassured at a Wednesday night caucus meeting by leadership aides who distributed a National Review editorial praising the Pledge. Two high-level Republican sources said that the National Review editorial had been prearranged, however, by Neil Bradley, a top leadership aide* who is close to April Ponnuru, the executive director of the National Review Institute, and Kate OBeirne, NRIs president. It was a political blowjob, one Republican aide said of the National Review editorial. National Review utterly disputes the allegation. To me, it's not even clear what exactly is being alleged. That's silly -- this is the kind of thing NR exists to editorialize on. It's very common for politicians to seek out favorable coverage among opinion journalists. One way they do that is to meet with them before the release of things like the "Pledge to America" and provide and early leak and try to make their best case in the hopes of securing favorable commentary. (I've never participated is something like this, but I have no problem with the practice.) If that's what "prearranged" means, then it's a nothing story. It's possible something less ethical went down. Obviously it all depends on exactly what happened at this meeting. But the story provides zero evidence -- not even vague characterization -- that the contact with NR was anything more than a routine spin session. And given the Daily Caller's record of utter contempt for basic journalistic norms, the very strong presumption should be that this is a non-story. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77958/national-review-being-smeared |
Is James Holzhauer helping or hurting Jeopardy!? | James Holzhauer, a 34-year-old professional sports gambler from Las Vegas, is shown after April 23's episode of "Jeopardy!" when he became only the second person in the shows history to earn more than $1 million in regular-season (non-tournament) play as his 14th win brought his total winnings to $1,061,554. Courtesy of Jeopardy Productions, Inc. Question: We are fascinated by the continued success of James Holzhauer on Jeopardy! Ive heard rumblings that hes ruining the game, or even that his dominance is somehow boring. Dana Matt Roush: For Jeopardy! to become a national obsession again in its 35th season is remarkable, and so is the game play of Holzhauer. Just about everyone I know (including my mom, who watches precious little TV anymore) is talking about him, almost always admiringly. His bold approach to working the board from the bottom in the first round, amassing a bank that his opponents can rarely keep pace with and then going all-in on Daily Doubles is riveting. The opposite of boring, in fact. Its possible, although when things get back to normal once Holzhauers run is over and one of these nights hell make a big wager, get stumped and not be able to recover well probably learn that very few can successfully adopt his strategy. There will always be players who try to shake things up, but there are just as many who revere the game played traditionally. Im just glad Jeopardy! has become must-see TV again, not that it has ever been anything else but that for me. To submit questions to TV Critic Matt Roush, go to tvinsider.com. | https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/tv/is-james-holzhauer-helping-or-hurting-jeopardy-1660696/ |
Who Created The 1990s Surplus, Clinton Or The GOP? | It was Contract with America-era Republicans that established the rhetorical framework within which the aforementioned budget fights occurred. Heres liberal columnist E.J. Dionne assessing the Clinton presidency in an exchange with Robert Kuttner: "[D]uring the mid-1990s, Clinton himself tacked further to the right than the situation required. He embraced a Republican view of welfare reform. He went along with a brutal immigration bill and assaults on civil liberty in the name of crime control. He accepted the idea of a balanced budgetand then when an economic boom pushed the budget into surplus, he declared that he would pay off the entire national debt." Clinton's declaration in favor of paying off the national debt was indeed a fiscally conservative position. But it wasn't a capitulation to conservatives -- it was a direct repudiation. Republicans proposed to dissipate the surplus through tax cuts. Clinton insisted on saving the surplus, vetoing their plan, though Republicans ultimately succeeded when Clinton left office and was replaced by a Republican who shared their tax cuts uber alles ideology. Republicans deserve approximately the same share of credit for preserving the 1990s surpluses as the America First Committee does for winning World War II. Second, And heres the Clinton White Houses own website, boasting of a rather important piece of legislation conveniently unmentioned in narratives of deficit reduction that stop at 1993: "[H]e signed the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, a major bipartisan agreement to eliminate the national budget deficit, create the conditions for economic growth, and invest in the education and health of our people." I understand why the Clinton administration likes to claim the 1997 Balanced Budget Act as an achievement. But it did nothing to reduce the deficit. By 1997, the deficit was dwindling away to nothing. The role of the "Balanced Budget Act" was to take credit for something that was about to happen anyway. The cuts same in the form of lower discretionary spending caps which were never implemented. It did reduce Medicare spending, but devoted all the savings to a children's health insurance program and a capital gains tax cut. Budget experts I've spoken with believe deficit would have been lower if the Act had never passed into law. Third, Galupo dismisses the 1990s surpluses as mere projections: Its critical to remember, too, that 90s-era surpluses were never cold cash under the federal mattress, but, rather, projections that evaporated with the NASDAQ meltdown, 9/11, and, yes, the Bush tax cuts of 2001. That's not true at all. By the end of the Clinton administration, the federal government was paying off the national debt: | https://newrepublic.com/article/76709/who-created-the-1990s-surplus-clinton-or-the-gop |
Why Do Presidents Do Anything, Anyway, If Voters Don't Care? | Of course, they may do it because they believe it's the right thing to do; because they care about their place in history; or because they haven't read the political science literature (and blogs) and mistakenly believe that there are re-election advantages to policy accomplishments. I don't fully discount those things, but let's just say I'm not convinced that they fully explain the level of presidential involvement in policy initiatives. One reason, and perhaps the most important one on yesterday's topic of foreign policy and national security, is to avoid policy disasters. No, Barack Obama will not win any votes if he manages to "win" in Afghanistan, whatever that actually means. But he'll lose plenty of votes if Americans continue to die there in ever-increasing numbers. He'll also lose votes if Americans leave, the Taliban takes over and shelters bin Laden, and that allows more devastating terror attacks (followed by another invasion, followed by more US casualties). Turning closer to home...as far as I know, the administration did an absolutely terrific job of responding to the swine flu last year (although Obama's response to the Fried Chicken Flu left a lot to be desired). Well, nobody; no one even remembers last year's flu scare, (perhaps) because successful government action turned it into a non-story. But if things had gone wrong, people would have blamed Obama and, beyond that, people would have been more unhappy about everything, which tends to hurt incumbents. Beyond avoiding disasters, however, I think the big answer here is about representation. If we think of representation as a process, it involves politicians who campaign by making promises, certainly including policy promises. If you've never done it, I recommend going through PolitiFact's database of the over 500 specific policy promises that Barack Obama made while campaigning in 2007 and 2008. Campaigning requires making promises...perhaps the better way to say it is that campaigning is making promises. Not all promises are policy; as I've talked about before, sometimes politicians promise explicitly or implicitly to act in certain ways, to look out for allied groups; a pol can even promise to be a specific person, which implies all sorts of behaviors. The need for policy promises, however, is particularly strong in high-profile nomination contests, in which candidates compete for the support of party-aligned groups and even individual voters by making policy commitments. To run for president as a Democrat in 2008 and have any chance of winning, a candidate needed to pledge to attempt health care reform. A candidate needed have a plan to fight climate change. A candidate needed to support card check and other issues that unions cared about. A candidate needed to oppose the war in Iraq and pledge to end American involvement there. We talk a lot about how issues don't really matter much in elections, but usually we're talking about general elections, when party voting dominates. That's not the case in primaries, where voters -- without the help of party cues -- rely on things such as issues, and endorsements by organizations and pols who care about issues. Once those politicians are elected, then, they tend to keep their promises. Partially that's just because they've already set things in motion to keep those promises (for example by hiring staff dedicated to doing so). Partially it's because pols fear being branded as flip-floppers. Partially because they don't want to create enemies, and allies scorned can be powerful enemies. And, related to that, partially because they want to be renominated -- and they want to be renominated by acclamation, without going through the kinds of struggles that Jimmy Carter had in 1980 (when Ted Kennedy almost defeated him for the nomination) or even the annoying problems George H.W. Bush had in 1992 (when Pat Buchanan forced Bush to actively campaign). | https://newrepublic.com/article/76780/why-do-presidents-do-anything-anyway-if-voters-dont-care |
Could Pete Buttigieg make history in LGBTQ-friendly Nevada? | Pete Buttigieg has focused heavily on his background when stumping across the nation, touting his identity as a younger voice in the Democratic party, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and the hands-on mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Now the openly gay White House hopeful will return to Nevada to spotlight the history-making potential of his candidacy, headlining on Saturday a key gathering of LGBTQ leaders in the important early caucus state. "For far too long, LGBTQ people have had to fear that their dreams and their identities are mutually exclusive. We've had to see our rights and dignity debated by government bodies that don't include our voices," Sarah McBride, the Human Rights Campaign's national press secretary, told CBS News. "To see an openly LGBTQ candidate running for president is moving and it's powerful for many LGBTQ people across the country," McBride added. Buttigieg will deliver remarks at the Human Rights Campaign's 14th annual gala in Las Vegas, the first presidential candidate to do so in the history of the event. "He is putting a new face on gay America and that face is coming in people's living rooms. And he's in a lot of ways the all-American boy," said Annise Parker, president and CEO of the Victory Fund and Victory Institute. "What you want your son to grow up to be: thoughtful, and polite, and smart, and served his country, and dedicated public servant. Goes to church, rescues dogs. And he's married," Parker told CBS News. Buttigieg's address is the latest bid by a Democratic contender to court the influential LGBTQ civil rights organization. Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker spoke in March at the Human Rights Campaign's annual dinner in Los Angeles. Former Vice President Joe Biden headlined the group's national dinner in 2018. But as the candidate looks to break out from a crowded field, Nevada's LGBTQ community could be a unique opportunity for the South Bend mayor. Of all states, only Oregon's LGBTQ community outranks Nevada as a share of total population. And Nevada scores well on the Human Rights Campaign's State Equality Index, an assessment of statewide policies affecting LGBTQ equality. According to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign before the 2016 presidential election, there are over 93,000 LGBTQ potential voters over 18 years old in Nevada. "I absolutely do believe that Nevada has become a more open, more accepting, and more friendly place for people in the LGBTQIA space," Joe Oddo, president of The Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Southern Nevada and a vocal supporter of Buttigieg, told CBS News. "Nevada seems to be leading the way, with our state assembly and getting provisions passed in our constitution through elections, that make Nevada a home where LGBTQIA people can live as their authentic selves," Oddo added. "It's important that he campaign in states with good laws on the books for the LGBT community," Parker said, "but, it is actually even more important that he campaign in places where we still can be actively discriminated against it." While potentially an advantage, Buttigieg's identity far from guarantees a sweep in the first-in-the-West caucus state. Chris Miller, the first openly gay chair of Clark County's Democratic Party, endorsed Kamala Harris in late April. And openly gay state Assemblyman Nelson Araujo failed to unseat the state's Republican secretary of state in 2018, in a year when Democrats swept other elections across the state. Oddo doubts those who connect Araujo's sexual orientation to his loss, but plans to celebrate Buttigieg's candidacy regardless of his prospects come February 22, 2020. "On Saturday, I'm going to be at a gala watching the first openly gay candidate for president. What that means to me, personally, is that I can look up the stage and say, 'no longer is the person that I love going to define what I'm capable of,'" Oddo said. "I'll always know, and I feel it right now before it's even happened, an immense joy and fondness in being out," Oddo added. "That being gay is no longer something that is going to hold me back." | https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pere-buttigieg-2020-could-pete-buttigieg-make-history-in-lgbtq-friendly-nevada/ |
Do Politicians Really Learn Anything From Literature? | Hill does not foreground his own political views, but it becomes clear enough that he is at least a social conservative: He dwells often on the sanctity of marriage and family, and on the iniquity of Rousseau and the Enlightenment. Just as much as Obamas liberal admirers, however, Hill is committed to the belief that literature is an indispensable source of wisdom for statesmen. Statecraft cannot be practiced in the absence of literary insight, he writes in his prologue, and he describes the purpose of Grand Strategies as the restoration of literature as a tutor for statecraft. Yet reading the book actually had the reverse effect, at least on me: It offers a few good reasons for believing that literature is a very dubious basis for political leadership. First is the fact that, as the great radical William Hazlitt acknowledged to his own chagrin, the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power." It is only in the very recent past that it has been taken for granted that poets must be pacifists. To read The Iliador The Aeneid or Henry V is to see imperialism and conquest glorified: These books convince us to admire what our reason would condemn. A second, related point is that literature needs heroes, and so it tends to cover the realities of leadership under a veil of heroic mystification. As Hill writes in his discussion of Schillers historical drama Wallenstein, Schiller locates a quality common to many great commanders and statesmen. ... In the end their achievements may be inexplicable." This is not a principle calculated to encourage democratic self-government. There is even a kind of mystification in the way that Hill talks about statecraft, which often seems to be just another name for charisma and luck. Ruination is impressive, but so is restoration; Marvell is sympathetic to Charles I as well as Cromwell and, indeed, would serve both in his lifetime. This leads to the third point demonstrated in Grand Strategies: Because literature is always interpretable, the same text can be used to support many different political beliefs and courses of action. During the Nixon administration, Hill writes, Kissinger brought a cult of Thucydides to the State Department, and soon National Security Council staffers and Foreign Service officers who had never read the work were quoting the Athenians in The Melian Dialogue: The strong exact what they can; the weak concede what they must, the motto of Cold War realists. Yet a cold war hawk could just as well have replied that this maxim of realpolitik is meant to appear despicable, a sign that Athens has lost its virtue and is headed for the arrogant catastrophe of the Sicilian expedition. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77116/obama-books-presidential-literature |
Could Reid Resurrect the Renewable Standard? | First it looked like the Senate might pass a big comprehensive climate-change bill. Then we found out, no, there weren't 60 votes for any such thing. Nope, not enough votes for that either. No, no, and no. And yes, it was awfully quaint for greens to have believed that a legislative body might actually be able to pass legislation. That's the betting line. But earlier today, Harry Reid suggested that the renewable electricity standard might just make a comeback during the lame-duck session after the midterms: Before the August recess, Reid said he doubted an RES which would require utilities to provide escalating amounts of power from sources like wind and solar energy could win 60 votes. It was left on the cutting-room floor when Reid unveiled a modest energy bill in late July. But Reid told reporters on a conference call Tuesday the energy bill is still a work in progress and cited two Republicans who have expressed interest in an RES. He did not name them. Sam Brownback, for one, has spoke out in favor of a (fairly modest) renewable electricity standard, presumably because Kansas has a lot of prime spaces for wind farms. That said, getting sixty votes for anything these days is no stroll on the Mall. Still, from an environmentalist perspective, the renewable standard would be a decent consolation prize now that cap-and-trade's going nowhere. As I've written before, there are a lot of EPA regulations trickling down the pipe that will likely force the closure of a bunch of dirty coal plants in the coming yearspossibly as much as 20 percent of U.S. coal-fired capacity. A renewable standard will ensure that those plants are replaced by cleaner sources of power. (Although there's a fat caveat here that doesn't get mentioned nearly enough: A lot of the RES proposals would lean heavily on biomass, which can devastate forests and kick up a lot of carbon if not done properly.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/77348/could-reid-resurrect-the-renewable-standard |
Are the Big Banks Surrendering on Elizabeth Warren? | [Guest post by Noam Scheiber:] That's been my expectation all along--for the simple reason that Wall Street opposition to Warren as head of the consumer financial protection agency would only make it politically more attractive (or at least politically necessary) for the White House to nominate her and Senate Democrats (even some Republicans) to support her. It's increasingly clear that Wall Street has made the same calculation. For weeks now, the big banks and their Washington representatives have been conspicuously silent on Warren despite their well-known distaste for her views on regulation. Now The Washington Post reports that Warren actually met with one of the big-bank lobbying groups last week: Before the Harvard law professor visited the White House on Thursday to talk with Obama advisers about the consumer bureau job, she spent an hour just down Pennsylvania Avenue at the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents the nation's largest financial firms, said people familiar with the meeting. Warren and Roundtable President Steve Bartlett spoke at length in his office about the role of the new regulatory agency... Meeting with an industry trade group isn't out of the ordinary for Warren. ... She has filled her days in the capital meeting with administration officials, reporters, banking regulators, members of Congress and lobbyists representing community banks, credit unions and other financial industries. For instance, in June she dined with Cam Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, and last month she met in her dingy office near Union Station with Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association. But until last week, Warren and lobbyists representing the nation's largest banks had largely steered clear of each other. There are any number of ways to interpret this meeting. But the most obvious is that the inudstry has decided to play the Warren nomination pretty pragmatically--it's assuming that she's likely to be both nominated and confirmed, and has opted to sue for the best peace it can get, or at least not antagonize her beforehand. Maybe, but I doubt it. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77092/are-the-big-banks-surrendering-elizabeth-warren |
Are the Worst Effects of the BP Spill Yet to Come? | In the latest issue of Mother Jones, Julia Whitty has a great story on how the BP oil spill is likely to affect the complex ecology of the Gulf for years to come. The piece is too hard to summarize, and is well worth reading in full (she covers possible affects on a wide range of different habitats and species), but this section in particularon tubeworms of all thingsunderscored how little we know about what all that dispersed and dissolved oil will do to the region: Least certain of all is what's happening to the life at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Take the life that congregates around cold methane seeps, the first of which ever discovered was found in the Gulf in 1984. Since then, 50 more sites have been located in these waters, some close to the Deepwater Horizon, with hundreds more likely out thereall home to otherworldly collections of crustaceans, snails, bacterial filaments, and tubeworms. The rules of life are different in the gassy depths, where life capitalizes on the same fossil fuels we're drilling for. Some cold-seep tubeworms have lifespans of 250 years. Others recently found in the deepest seeps may live to 500 or 600 years. Though some of these creatures feed on methane, that doesn't mean they can survive the spill. "The quantity of oil and the added effects of dispersants are likely to harm these communities," says Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer and cold-seeps specialist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Oil could smother the animals' feeding apparatus or suffocate the bacteria at the base of the food chain, she adds. "The tubeworms and other seep organisms, including perhaps deepwater corals, are so slow-growing that damage will likely be long lasting." Levin envisions a host of long-term chronic problems throughout the deep Gulf that might not even show up for decades. Now that the well's capped, though, none of these problems are likely to get much press attention in the decades ahead. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76914/are-the-worst-effects-the-bp-spill-yet-come |
Will the Border Bill Stifle More than Illegal Crossings? | Simply, its beefed up enforcement: more border patrol agents, more high-tech surveillance equipment, and better communications equipment for the U.S.-Mexico border to help stop illegal immigrants, drugs, and weapons from coming into the United States. Republicans have been pushing for more enforcement, especially as reaction to Arizonas new immigration law has made it clear that the American public thinks that the federal government is falling down on the job. For their part, key Democrats viewed it as a down payment for further reforms down the road. Interestingly, the bills $600 million price tag will be primarily paid for by major hikes in visa fees for H-1B workers--skilled foreigners working primarily in high-skilled and technology fields. This will not be an across the board increase though. Firms employing more than 50 foreign workers constituting more than half of their workforce will be subject to a quintupling of fees. Indian tech firms seem to be the target, and according to the Senate bill sponsor Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), It will level the playing field for American workers, so they don't lose out on good jobs here in America because it's cheaper to bring in a foreign worker than hiring an American worker." Last year H1-B visas were not snapped up at the breakneck pace of previous years. The new fee structure should both fuel and inform the debate over whether immigrants crowd out jobs and reduce the wages of U.S.-born workers in the tech sector. Will this type of protectionism in the name of border security (!) | https://newrepublic.com/article/77342/will-the-border-bill-stifle-more-illegal-crossings |
Will Charters Save the New Orleans Schools? | Katrina decimated the New Orleans schools, as it did all the citys services. But instead of simply rebuilding the old schools, and putting the old school board back in control, the state decided to stage a near-total takeover--putting the majority of city schools under the Recovery School Districts Authority. The old district, the Orleans Parish School Board, maintained control over only a few. In part because the redevelopment of New Orleans was so uneven, particularly in the first two years, the state decided to institute school choice across the entire district--turning it into the largest full choice system in the country. More important, the state also made chartering schools easier. Today more than half of the citys public schools are charters, run by philanthropies, entrepreneurs, or local universities. Every charter is its own enterprise--making individual decisions on contracting, purchasing, and hiring. Its contract with the district expired in 2006 and was not renewed. The experiment has been highly controversial, as you might expect. To get some first-hand impressions I decided to visit the Thurgood Marshall-UNO High School--which, as the name suggests, is a charter that the University of New Orleans (UNO) runs. Im hardy an expert in education reform. (For that, youll have to read my colleague Seyward Darby.) But Ive been in enough struggling schools to recognize one that is suffering from neglect and poor management. Thurgood Marshall is clearly not one of those. The school operates out of an old building about a mile north of French Quarter, but the facility is in obviously good shape, with fresh paint and working equipment. (The only exception I spotted: A broken clock that hung askew in one of the hallways.) What impressed me more, though, was the culture that administrators and teachers have created within those walls. Thurgood Marshall is an early college high school and all the students are expected to classes at UNO, which is nearby. The commute is two-way, since the administration brings in a steady parade of UNO students to talk about their classes--and the possibilities that await these children if they are serious about their studies. Kyle Kleckner, a ninth grade geography teacher who switched to Thurgood Marshall from one of the Orleans Parish schools, told me that the culture and climate of learning is what makes Thurgood Marshall so distinctive. Irene Beauvais, an 11th grader who spoke to me between classes, said she liked the school because everybody does their work here...youre supposed to learn. When I asked if she wanted to go to college, she said yes, adding I want to go to Harvard. It would be journalistic malpractice to read too much into those two interviews, particularly since I conducted both in the presence of Andre Perry, who is chief executive officer of the UNO charter network and among the areas best-known promoters of charter schools. But, in an essay that Perry co-wrote for the Brookings New Orleans Index at Five report, he presents evidence that schools are performing better across the district. Among other things, he notes, test scores are (mostly) rising faster than they did before Katrina. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77088/new-orleans-schools |
Where Does Ethan Edwards Go? | In 2008, Robert Pippin, professor of Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of Chicago, delivered the Castle Lectures at Yale. They now form the basis of a book with a forbidding picture of John Wayne as Ethan Edwards (from The Searchers) on the cover. So this is a university press book on Political Philosophy, but it is a movie book, too. That at least is the hope; Yale University Press is asking $35 for it. Let me say straightaway that it is a very thoughtful, observant book, well worth the time for any reader who takes Hawks, Ford, and the Western seriously. How far it truly explores political philosophy I cant say. But I take seriously the attempt to look at these films carefully and to interpret them in a much larger national spirit. The films are Red River (1948), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Searchers (1956), and I think its worth sayingor urging Professor Pippin to considerthat we dont make films like that any more. Indeed, we hardly make Westerns, our American genre, let alone pictures with the resonance and lasting power of these three. For instance, I would love to hear Professor Pippins reading of Paul Thomas Andersons There Will Be Blood (2007). Theres no question about the thematic richness of these films, though I would argue that while Red River and The Searchers are made with cinematic passion, Liberty Valance has a disconcerting, rather cursory black-and-white look, plus the flagrant problem of James Stewart (fifty-four at the time) trying to play a much younger man. Never mind. Liberty Valance is an intriguing exploration of one of Fords favorite issuesthe confusion of truth and legend. Red River is a story about a mutiny (or a revolution) in which, actually, the old order is renewed. And The Searchers is a model story of vengeance, deeply scarred by racism, sexual guilt and something that one might call the intractability of the rebel figure in American legend. Of these three films, it is the one Pippin values the most. He calls it one of the greatest and most ambitious films ever made, and he argues very well for Ethan Edwards as an Ahab-like figure, a searcher blind to many of his own problems, a man who has secretly loved his brothers wife and who then goes in pursuit of a niece kidnapped by a Comanche chief named Scar. That search lasts five or seven years (commentators disagree on the exact period, because the film feels eternal), long enough for the girl, Debbie, to become both Scars bride and Natalie Wood (an uneasy combination). Moreover, it becomes clear over the years that Ethan is searching because he means to kill his own niece to erase the damage done to her, their family, and the white race. There is great daring in the film (made on the eve of civil rights anger) and no one would deny its power or mystery. Indeed, it is a movie that exerted enormous influence on many filmmakers who would follow John Ford. At its conclusion, instead of carrying out the execution that obsesses him, there is a scene of extraordinary tenderness (or sentiment) where Ethan reclaims Debbie as his kin and takes her home. But then, with the young woman restored to a community she hardly knows any longer, Ethan himself cannot enter the house. We see him on the threshold in an iconic, hesitant pose. Then he turns away and the door closes, shutting him out. Ethan is unfit for civilization. And that harsh verdict seldom concludes an American film, least of all one with John Wayne as its star. But here we come to a limitation in this book. Professor Pippin is an academic. As such, he is inclined to assume that the films he discusses have been made for his discussion. The political equivalent would be a president tormented by indecision over a right answer who ends up saying something that plays. The media guide the message. Equally, Red Riverwhere the prospect of lethal revenge is set up as Matt Garth takes Tom Dunsons herd of cattle away from his tyrannical controlends happily. The two men supposedly headed for fatal confrontation are told to grow up and recognize that they really love each other. Even those who cherish Red River have had some trouble being reconciled to that sudden switch. But that is more than Warner Bros., Wayne, or Ford could tolerate. In both Red River and The Searchers Wayne found himself as an actor in malice and an intimidating attitude to weakness. But the ending of The Searcherswhile beautifully doneis a compromise. It ignores many thingslike the possibility that Debbie loved Scar (Natalie Wood does not look as if she has been suffering with him). Nor does it take account of the difficulties she will have restored to whiteness. In the real West, white women once taken by Indians were seldom accepted by white society. So this possibility exists: that Ethan goes back to the wilderness because it makes a magnificent gestural ending and because it reaffirms the old and very romantic notion of an essential solitariness in the American hero, an attitude that is fundamentally opposed to politics, but which has been like a lever on manhood in the years since the events of The Searchers. Movies are not novels. They are great public shows. And all these films are more touched by commerce than Pippin ever allows. The legend that Ford preferred, and the dream in which Hawks was immersed are reflections of a story-telling forever diverted or warped by the business of pictures. David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76601/where-does-ethan-edwards-go |
Are Cops and Firefighters Paid Too Much? | If I was going to write an article about the compensation for firefighters and police officers, I might ask those questions and dwell on them for a while. Daniel Foster, writing in National Review, opts for a different approach. In an article about government budgets and public employee compensation, he suggests that first responders are seriously overpaid--and that this is a result, primarily, of their ability to collectively bargain and to play upon either the fears or heart-strings of voters. Cash-strapped local and state governments are trying to reduce compensation for first-responders, Foster explains, but the the fuzz arent taking it lying down. In Bay City, Michigan, for example, a police union threatened with layoffs has taken out billboards warning layoffs might expose people to all sorts of violent crime. Maybe I've misinterpreted his argument, but he seems to be suggesting that the sympathy for, and solidarity with, first-responders is largely misplaced. We must take care that public-safety workers are not allowed to hide behind the badge, Foster warns. Ban collective bargaining for public employees and, in the short term, get unions to accept reductions in compensation. Actually, on that last argument, I would agree in part. As I noted when I wrote on this subject a few weeks ago--and my friend Harold Pollack rightly emphasized in his followup--the budget situation for most cities and states is truly dire right now. Whether or not reducing pay of first-responders is the right thing to do, it may be the necessary thing to do. Local and state governments simply dont have the money the need to meet their immediate needs and, in the long term, they havent planned adequately for future obligations in the form of retiree health benefits and pensions. Precisely because public safety is so important, across-the-board reductions in compensation will frequently make more sense than layoffs. Unions that refuse to consider that possibility do their members, and their communities, a disservice. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77272/are-cops-and-firefighters-paid-too-much |
Is Kagan Obama's Last Justice? | The margins for confirming Supreme Court Justices are getting tighter: Though it confirmed her Thursday as the newest justice by a 63-37 vote, Kagan has the dubious distinction of receiving one of the lowest total of yes votes for a nominee during the past three presidencies and the lowest number of confirmation votes ever for a justice picked by a Democrat. Kagans meager tally is five fewer than Sonia Sotomayor last year, 15 fewer than John Roberts got in 2005 and pales in comparison to the 96-3 coronation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993. That trend has many legal observers lamenting a Supreme Court confirmation process on a steady trajectory toward complete polarization and a seemingly inevitable filibuster. We are well on our way to a huge train wreck, said Tom Goldstein, a veteran Supreme Court litigator. I do think this is a corner we wont be able to turn back [from], or at least theres no sign the Senate will turn back from, for a long time. If 60 yes votes is the best anyone is going to have, a Supreme Court confirmation fight could easily turn into thermonuclear war." Bear in mind that, before Obama picked her, Kagan was touted as the consensus pick most likely to gain Republican support. (Ginsburg had been head of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project -- imagine a nominee like that getting through the Senate today, let alone with 96 votes!) The Republican pretense that judicial nominees, and judicial nominees alone, should be entitled to a majority vote is a hangover from a tactical position the party took during the Bush era. Republicans "didn't filibuster" Kagan because they didn't have 40 votes to stop her. After the 2010 elections, their numbers will almost certainly increase to the point where even a moderate like Kagan stands little chance of clearing the 60 vote threshold. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76831/kagan-obamas-last-justice |
Does China Have Any Friends Left in the Obama Administration? | In an earlier era, Clintons evident eagerness for a role in China policy might have set the stage for Beijing to court her as its principal interlocutor in the Obama administration. But things havent worked out that way. The revised, formal U.S. exchanges with China, now called the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, have become a bureaucratic monstrosity with more memos, participants and plane tickets200 American officials went with Clinton and Geithner to Beijing in June than significant results. At the most recent set of meetings, Clinton urged China to provide greater help in reining in Irans and North Koreas nuclear programs, and made little or no headway. Meanwhile, during one of the sessions, a Chinese military official delivered a scathing attack on American policy. So while snubbing Gates, China isnt doing Clinton any favors, either. And Clinton has clearly decided that after more than a year of conciliatory approaches to China, its time to push back. At a gathering of Asian leaders in Hanoi last month, she took China by surprise by rejecting, in public, its claims to sovereignty throughout the South China Sea. A senior Chinese official made clear he was infuriated. That approach seemed to work when the occupant of the Oval Office was George H.W. Bush. But Obama has far less in the way of personal history with China, a few other things going on, and so far, not much responsiveness from his own dealings with Beijing. His background is centered on dealing with Europe, not Asia; hes involved in other issues like Pakistan. Geithner is the senior Obama official who comes closest to qualifying as an Old Friend of China. His father was a China hand at the Ford Foundation, and the younger Geithner studied Chinese and lived in Beijing while in college. But Geithner handles economic issues, not security issuesand on those economic issues, China has been taking Geithner to the cleaners. The assurances he keeps getting about a significant revaluation of Chinas currency have turned out to be embarrassingly empty. For overall China policy, Geithners not going to be the main guy. It may well be that the old days when China cultivated warm ties with a senior official in each administration are now a thing of the past. Perhaps the differences in perspective are too great. As a symbol of the new climate, lets look again at that Chinese official who responded so angrily to Hillary Clinton in Hanoi. It wasnt some routine Chinese military official or Foreign Ministry diplomat. It was Yang Jiechi, the Chinese foreign minister, who has a long history in maintaining close personal ties at high levels in Washington. Yang began dealing with senior American leaders in 1977, when he was the young Chinese official escorting George H.W. Bush (who had just stepped down as CIA director), James Baker, and James Lilley on a visit to Tibet. Back then, they nicknamed him Tiger Yang, and he became a friend of the Bush family. After the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, it was Yang Jiechi who was sent to Washington on a mission to try to smooth things over with the George H.W. Bush administration. And in 2001, after George W. Bush was elected president, China sent Yang Jiechi as its new ambassador to the United States, again seeking to deepen the personal ties with the top ranks of a new Bush administration. Now, at the top ranks of the Obama administration, these old friendships are gone, and China isnt doing much to forge new ones. James Mann has written three books on Americas relationship with China. He is an author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins Universitys Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77229/china-us-relationship-obama-administration |
Is Health Care Why Dems Are Losing? | Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics continues to argue that health care is a huge part of the cause of Democrats' political difficulties: The Democrats' control of the House did not become tenuous recently. At best, some of the more immediate warning signs - e.g. individual incumbents like Betty Sutton now appear to be in jeopardy - have manifested themselves recently. But there has been a real danger of losing the House for some time, a danger that predates "Recovery Summer" and goes back to the health care debate. ... It was during the health care debate that the essential building block of the Democratic majority - Independent voters - began to crumble. It was evident in the generic ballot. It was evident in the President's job approval numbers. It was evident in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. It's obviously true that the Democrats lost a lot of support "during the health care debate." The health care debate took about a year. My argument is that, during a period in which unemployment was rising and the Democrats controlled the entire government, Democrats would have bled support regardless of what they were debating. If they declined to carry out their campaign promises, they would have lost support. If they cooperated with Republicans to continue or deepen Bush-era tax cuts for the rich -- the only policy upon which bipartisan cooperation was possible -- they may have bled somewhat less support because people like bipartisanship, but it would have been terrible policy. You can make some counter-factual argument that never attempting to pass health care would have been a good political alternative, although you have to account for the massive liberal firestorm this would have provoked. You can make a better argument that passing health care quickly instead of spend month after month sitting on Olympia Snowe's doorstep would have been a shrewder plan. I think the conservative argument that, after investing months and months into health care, taking high profile votes in both chambers, it would have been shrewd to then abandon the whole thing to failure is transparently unconvincing. That's a recipe for absorbing almost all the costs of passing health care reform, getting none of the benefits, and driving your base wild with rage at you. Of course, I can't prove that counter-factual, either. None of these counter-factuals is something that you can prove. But the method of saying that Democrats lost support during (very long) event X, therefore (very long) event X caused them to lose support, is not a persuasive argument. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77328/health-care-why-dems-are-losing |
Did Meghan Markle's Cat Inspire Her and Prince Harry to Name Their Baby Archie? | Royal watchers are buzzing over the rumor that Prince Harryand the Duchess of Sussex possibly named her first son Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor after her beloved pet cat. According to The Sun, a former friend of Meghan's shared that she once had a cat named Archie, who died while the Duchess was in school in Illinois. "Doria rescued Archie and he became an important part of the household. Meghan loved playing with him and she was always talking about him to her friends," the former close friend shared. "It's no surprise she named her new baby Archie. She loved that cat." Meghan was so fond of the kitten, she frequently fed him frozen grapes as a treat. The friend said this also led to the cat's weight gain. | https://www.eonline.com/uk/news/1040497/did-meghan-markle-s-cat-inspire-her-and-prince-harry-to-name-their-baby-archie |
What Is Moderate Islam? | I do not know. I have yet to read his books or peruse his speeches and sermons in all the languages that Mr. Rauf uses. Some of his short essays and interviews in English suggest that he is a preacher of moderate disposition and views. But some of his more tentative, if not deceptive commentary about terrorism against Israelis, Americas culpability for 9/11, and the nobility and value of the Holy Law for Muslims living in the West suggest something different. I have a sneaking suspicion that those who have risen in high dudgeon against critics of the Cordoba Initiatives Ground Zero mosquefor example, Peter Beinart, Richard Cohen, Fareed Zakaria, and Matthew Yglesiasmay also not have done much due diligence on Mr. Rauf. (If they have done so, but have chosen not to reveal their homework in their writing, I apologize.) I can certainly appreciate why devout partisans of religious freedom have recoiled from some of the harsh and philosophically-chaotic commentary opposed to a mosque anywhere near Ground Zero. However, building an Islamic complex where the Twin Towers collapsed is different from building a mosque on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC. With the latter, we may frown on monies flowing to it from Saudi Arabias Wahhabi establishment, given Wahhabisms virulently anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and just all-around anti-fun traditions, but we certainly would not try to shut it down. But standards for judging Mr. Rauf and the Cordoba Initiative should be different. Charles Krauthammer is right: Ground Zero is sacred ground. It would be morally obscene to allow Muslims to build a center near Ground Zero who had not unequivocally denounced (renounced, would be okay, too) the ideas that gave us the maelstrom of 9/11. If Mr. Rauf has collected monies from individuals or Muslim organizations overseas that preach contempt for infidels, have financially supported religiously militant organizations, or, worse, provided aide to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, then his project, which has been approved by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, ought to be cancelled. Any American non-profit organization can tell you exactly whence its money comes. By contrast, it appears that the Cordoba Initiatives funding has not been cross-checked with financial counterterrorist information within the Treasury Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency. (If it had been, we probably would have heard about it.) We also might wonder whether Mayor Bloomberg has asked for and received any alarming information from the FBI and the CIA about Mr. Rauf and his organization (Republican and Democratic members of either the House or Senate select committees on intelligence could do likewise, and receive a much fuller accounting of any information, and then relay, with due attention to Mr. Raufs privacy, a yes or no about any damning intelligence within classified files). | https://newrepublic.com/article/76929/what-moderate-islam |
Is Obama Meaner To Liberals Than To Conservatives? | Over at Daily Kos, David Sirota says President Obama is meaner to the left than he is to Republicans: Yesterday at OpenLeft, I wrote a post about how the Obama administration unduly shies away from confrontation with Republicans and conservatives. Whether this is a product of the president's personal fetishization of conciliation or a product of a right-of-center political ideology none of us can know because none of us are in his head. But it's a pretty obvious statement of fact that the president has reflexively tried to avoid confrontation with the GOP, even when confrontation is necessary. That said, one thing I failed to mention in my post yesterday should also be equally obvious: This president goes out of his way to be very confrontational towards progressives. Periodically, we get clear examples of this. To name a few: There was the time that the Obama administration openly threatened progressive Democrats if they didn't agree to vote for more Afghanistan War funding; There was the time that President Obama publicly insulted progressives by claiming the public option wasn't important; There was the time that the Obama administration aggressively fought progressive legislation to audit the Federal Reserve; And, of course, there is the White House's over-the-top interventions in local Democratic primaries on behalf of corporate conservative candidates in their campaigns against progressive standard-bearers. Okay, we have four examples here of the White House doing extremely nasty things to the left: 1. "Openly threatening" House Democrats who don't vote for the Afghanistan war bill. When you click on the link, it turns out that "openly" is quite a stretch: The White House is playing hardball with Democrats who intend to vote against the supplemental war spending bill, threatening freshmen who oppose it that they won't get help with reelection and will be cut off from the White House, Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) said Friday. "We're not going to help you. You'll never hear from us again," Woolsey said the White House is telling freshmen. She wouldn't say who is issuing the threats, and the White House didn't immediately return a call. [UPDATE: White House spokesman Nick Shapiro says Woolsey's charge is not true.] Woolsey said she herself had not been pressured because the White House and leadership know she's a firm no vote. But she had heard from other members about the White House pressure. I'm sure there was some pressure, but this is a second-hand accusation that the administration denies, and which cites no specific examples of either anybody who exerted or received pressure. I'm sure the administration was lobbying for the war funding. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76790/obama-meaner-liberals-conservatives |
Who's Making Business Nervous Now? | As the argument went, businesses weren't expanding and hiring new workers because they feared struggling with new regulations and taxes. Businesses, the Republicans said, needed certainty and financial relief. Apparently Republican thinking has evolved, as Steve Benen at Washington Monthly and Pat Garofalo at Wonk Room explain today. In late July, the Democrats were poised to pass a small-business assistance bill, full of tax breaks and other incentives designed to reward small businesses that hire new workers. But, as always, the Democrats were one vote short in the Senate. And not one Republican agreed to sign on. Via USA Today: Small businesses have put hiring, supply buying and real estate expansion on hold as they wait out the vote on a small-business-aid bill that stalled in the Senate earlier this summer. The much-debated legislation offers tax breaks and waived loan fees. But it also comes with more divisive components, such as a $30 billion fund that would help community banks give loans to small businesses. Opponents say the fund would be a mini version of the often-criticized TARP large-bank bailout program. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77305/whos-making-business-nervous-now |
How Ridiculous is David Paterson? | [Guest post by Isaac Chotiner] The New York Times is a wonderful newspaper, but it is rarely a humorous one. Indeed, most of the funny or ridiculous things one finds in the paper are unintentionally amusing (Lisa Miller's credulous "report" on reincarnation is a good example). Some reporters (like John Burns, for example) are allowed to stretch their legs and add ironic or opinionated bits to their stories, but generally the news coverage is kept at room temperature. Somewhere deep inside the paper, however, a decision was clearly made that it was simply impossible to write about New York's governor, David Paterson, with a straight face. The result is a delicious story today by N.R. Kleinfield and David W. Chen. The headline gives a hint of what's to come: "With Patterson, the Simple Facts Can Get Complicated." Here is the lede: A thoroughly honest politician has pretty much always been considered an undiscovered species. But for Gov. David A. Paterson, the distinction between the truth and an untruth can get unusually murky. Paterson is in hot water because an independent counsel has accused him of lying about whether he (Paterson) was going to pay for Yankees tickets. The piece's third paragraph is even more remarkable because it basically says that the governor of New York is dumb: | https://newrepublic.com/article/77290/how-ridiculous-david-patterson |
Is the CBC Uniquely Unethical? | This seems to be the only kind of explanation, given data in so far, on Maxine Waters transgression. She consults with Barney Frank about the propriety of setting up a meeting over bailout funds between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and a consortium of minority-owned banks when her husband was a stockholder in one of the banks. To suppose she was concerned solely with preserving her husbands stock returns may have its kicks. But a better fit with her entire careers mission, not to mention her current justifications, is that she felt that saving minority banks was a greater good. Its not hard to see that she, in that position, would readily use as a main conduit the personal connections she naturally had with people at the bank her husband was involved with. Especially if no one was looking. After all, look at what she has sometimes done even while people were lookingI will never forget her dancing on camera with L.A. gang members. The visibility issue is, likely, as key as the sense of greater good. Rangel and Waters are such lions that they havent had to face challenges in eons. Both would still be voted back in by their constituents today. Too often with both of them, nobody has really been looking to catch ethical lapses that have crept in, whether due to a confusion of the boundary between the self and the Civil Rights Movement or to scruffier things like Rangels tax lapses. Note, in contrast, DCs Adrian Fenty and his challenger Vincent Gray throwing mud at each other over petty ethical lapses. Fenty simply cant drift into the openly Tweed-esque dry rot of the kind older generation black pols like Rangel and Waters can. Other cases of black congressmen under the ethical spotlight of late are due, really, to chance. Roland Burris and Jesse Jackson, Jr. happened to get pulled into the slimy realm of Rod Blagojevichs grubby quest to become an old-style city boss, of a once-in-a-generation "Who'd-a-thunk-it?" shamelessness. Chicago has long had a substantial contingent of black lawmakerswhich I assume we consider a good thing in itself. But black lawmakers will be playing The Game as much as white ones, and if a freakish phenomenon like Blagojevich happens into a drivers seat, then big surprise, some of the people who get their toes run over may be black. And then, OCE attention has not been an inevitable death sentence for black lawmakers. One reason few could recall now what the issue was with Californias Laura Richardson, investigated for a questionable break on her mortgage, was that she was cleared of charges. If so, there are two lessons. One is that admitting that racism is no longer black peoples main problem does not mean that all calls to assess whether it is in operation are meaningless. However, another one is that the question Is this about racism? cannot be taken as automatically answering itself in the affirmative. The main lesson from the attention the CBC is getting from the OCE is that the CBC needs to get its act together. After all, they canall they have to do is be more careful and usher new members into a similar frame of mind. Perhaps for the reasons I have proposed its understandable that some of its members would be less inclined to watch their backs and dot every i and cross every t when it comes to conflict of interest issues. But this can serve as explanation only, not excuse. To have not yet reached the mountaintop is not to be exempt from following the rules. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76763/cbc-uniquely-unethical-rangel |
How Can We Help Pakistans Flood Victims While Their Own Government Is Failing? | Compounding things, the international community has moved ponderously, even lethargically, to aid the survivors. According to Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Saudi Arabia has led all countries in providing aid, with about $112 million, followed by the United States with nearly $76 million, and then the United Kingdom's nearly $65 million. Pakistan's neighbor and regional rival, India, has offered very little, while Pakistan's all-weather friend, China, has ponied up a paltry $9 million thus far. The total sum, according to the NDMA, amounts to only $524.93 million. The magnitude of Pakistan's current crisis dwarfs Hurricane Katrina, and yet, the entire response of the international community thus far does not even reach 5 percent of the first spending bill passed by the Congress in the wake of Katrina. Finally, and paradoxically, Pakistan's epic disaster has provided the United States with an enormous opportunity. Here the clichs contain a kernel of truth: The United States cannot succeed in Afghanistan without succeeding in Pakistan, and success in both countries must be political and economic, not simply military. The Islamist extremists understand this well in Pakistan and mean to fill the gap left by the government they despise. Given the massive resources at our disposal next door and our logistics hub within Pakistan itself, the United States ought to step up without delay and simply lead. We have over 100,000 U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan, plus some 60,000 allied troops that belong to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) under U.S. General David Petraeus. President Barack Obama should immediately offer the Pakistani government as many of those troops as can be spared (say 10,000), plus helicopters, transport aircraft, medical teams, engineerswhatever Pakistan needs. We could move troops from Kabul to Islamabad within the space of a day. Next, we should summon the international community to provided aid for Pakistan. Elsewhere, I have called for increasing our aid one hundred-fold, to $7.6 billion, and we can use that funding to send American wheat, doctors, bulldozers, and civil engineers to Pakistan, all emblazoned with "provided by the United States" logos. Such an epic disaster, and our part in cleaning it up, may speed long-needed reforms to Pakistan's political and economic system. Quietly but firmly and progressively, U.S. diplomats must prod Pakistan's elites, both civilian and military, to take the steps required to bring about institutional reform that, long after the floodwaters have receded, will leave the country more stable. In Islamabad, but more to the point in Washington, what is needed is the political courage to lead. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77153/how-can-we-help-pakistans-flood-victims-while-their-own-government-failin |
Who is Royce Lamberth? | U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth made headlines yesterday for ruling that President Obamas program providing funding for embryonic-stem-cell research is illegal. Here are four things you should know: 1. Hes a long-time public servant: Lamberth got his bachelors and law degrees from the University of Texas and then spent the next six years in the Army JAG Corps. From 1974 to 1987, he was the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and led its civil division from 1978 to 1987, when President Reagan appointed him to the D.C. U.S. District Court. In 2008, he became the courts chief judge. 2. He earned a strong reputation opposing the Clintons: In 1997, he fined the government more than $285,000 because Ira Magaziner, a top healthcare advisor, lied about the composition of a task force. The fine was overturned on appeal in 1999. Lamberth also allowed Judicial Watch bulldog Larry Klayman to depose everyone from George Stephanopoulos to famous fundraiser John Huang in suits against the administration that most judges would probably have thrown out as frivolous, according to Washington Monthly. 3. He doesnt just pick on Democrats: From 1996 through 2006, Lamberth presided over a class action lawsuit by Native Americans alleging the government had mismanaged billions of dollars in trust-fund money. Lamberth consistently sided with the Indians and held Bush Interior Secretary Gale Norton (and Clinton-era Interior chief Bruce Babbitt) in contempt of court, the New York Times reported. In 2006, an appeals panel removed him from the case for losing his impartiality, citing, among other things, a 2005 ruling that labeled Interior a dinosaur -- the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77203/who-royce-lamberth |
Do the Rich Need *Bigger* Tax Cuts? | Yes, I have more to say about the debate over extending all of the Bush tax cuts, including those that affect only the top income brackets. And I'm going to start by quoting what Paul Krugman said, in this morning's column, about who would benefit from such an extension: According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. ... Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But thats the least of it: the policy centers estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; hes going to get the majority of that groups tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few--the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year--would be $3 million over the course of the next decade. But even Krugman's column doesn't capture the full absurdity of what the Republicans and some conservative Democrats are proposing to do. Suppose this effort fails and the tax cuts for the top brackets expire, just as President Obama and his allies hope. The wealthiest Americans would still get a tax cut. In fact, they'd still get a larger tax cut than everybody else. The reason is simple. Tax brackets affect everybody, regardless of total income. Let's say I make $50,000 a year and you make $50 million a year. We both pay the same tax rate on the first $50,000 of income--and if tax reductions affecting that level of income remain in place, as they would if Obama and his allies prevail, we'd get identical tax cuts on that $50,000. But my tax cuts would stop there, since I have no more income. You'd get additional cuts on income above $50,000, all the way up to money at the very top brackets. In other words, your tax cut would be bigger than mine. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77173/do-the-rich-need-bigger-tax-cuts |
Does Flood Insurance Just Make Things Worse? | When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana on August 29, 2005, it caused extreme flooding up and down the Gulf coastline. Four years later, the Gulf has made a dramatic recoverythanks in part to the billions of dollars in aid sent via the national flood insurance program. The hurricane certainly underscored the need for federal aid in the event of a natural disaster. Some background: The National Flood Insurance Program, run by FEMA, provides insurance to homes that lie in floodplains. These policies are almost always the homeowners only option, since private companies rarely offer flood insurance. That means the government is taking on a large number of risky policies, but it can't take measures to bolster its bottom line, like increasing rates, eliminating coverage for the most disaster-prone properties, or holding reserve funds. Even the process of updating floodplain maps is contentious and politicized. The end result is that the government has to borrow billions to pay out when disaster strikes$19 billion in the case of Katrina. What's more, distortions in the program mean that it doesn't always direct taxpayer dollars to flood victims who need the most help. A good portion of the funds ends up benefiting owners of expensive homes at significant cost to taxpayers. (Over the past ten years, excluding Katrina, the wealthiest counties in the Gulf filed 3.5 times as many claimsand received $1 billion more in paymentsthan the poorest counties.) Worse, as it's currently structured, the program may encourage development in risky, low-lying and coastal locations, places that are often the most ecologically sensitive. Rather than living with a system that can increase environmental damages and is at constant risk of requiring taxpayer bailouts, we could devise an alternative system that requires policies to be sold at market rates or reduces the cap on coverage. One solution would be for the government to get out of the business of providing insurance to everyone living in a flood zone and focus instead on delivering aid to those most in need. Victims of natural disasters do need aid, but flood insurance has proven to be clumsy and inefficient in many ways. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77281/does-flood-insurance-just-make-things-worse |
What led to Broward cops violent arrest of Delucca Rolle? | Video shows Broward deputies pepper-spraying, punching teen Video posted on social media shows Broward sheriff's deputies pepper-spraying and punching a teen during a confrontation near J.P. Taravella High. Up Next SHARE COPY LINK Video posted on social media shows Broward sheriff's deputies pepper-spraying and punching a teen during a confrontation near J.P. Taravella High. It should have come as no surprise for Broward deputies to find hundreds of teens gathered at a McDonalds restaurant near J.P. Taravella Senior High School. For years, Taravella students have frequented the fast-food parking lot at Tamarac Square West Shopping Plaza just about every weekday afternoon after classes let out. There isnt enough room on campus for all 3,100 students to wait there for their parents to pick them up, students say, so many instead gather at the nearby McDonalds. Its also a spot along North Pine Island Road where students can grab the Route 88 bus to head north or south. Cops know it well. Records obtained by the Miami Herald from the Broward County Sheriffs Office show police have been called there 85 times since last August. Those calls range from suspicious people or packages to trespassing to disturbances and vandalism. Unlimited Digital Access: Only $0.99 For Your First Month Get full access to Miami Herald content across all your devices. SAVE NOW #ReadLocal This McDonalds near JP Taravella High School, 10600 Riverside Dr., Coral Springs, is thhe site of where Delucca Rolle had his head smashed in by the Broward Sheriff Deputy on April 18. Its a gathering hotspot for kids after school and police have been called there more than 130 times in the past year. Carl Juste [email protected] But for reasons still in dispute, when two white deputies showed up at McDonalds last month, a seemingly everyday gathering erupting into a tense confrontation. A cellphone video went viral, catching deputies pepper-spraying and roughly arresting Delucca Rolle, a 15-year-old black student, and banging his head on the ground. The encounter has spiraled into suspensions of the deputies, accusations of racism from black community leaders and complaints of out-of-control cops. Whether the deputies came in spoiling for trouble and over-reacted or the kids provoked them, a number of students who talked to the Herald and the BSO agree there was a different vibe in the air on April 18. It was way scarier. You could tell something was about to happen, said Taravella junior Aaliya Pierre, 16. Normally everyone is just chillin and waiting for our parents to get us. Aaliyas friend Leona Foster, a 16-year-old junior, said more students than normal had gathered because somebody was going to get jumped. A day earlier, a fight had broken out in the McDonalds parking lot. A car was dented. Earlier on the day Delucca was arrested, at least two fights broke out at the school, according to students. So that afternoon at McDonalds there were more students than unusual in anticipation of a fight. And law enforcement had prepped as well, sending a Crime Suppression Team dressed in military-like gear in preparation of any type of melee. The combination of hyped-up students and Broward deputies ready to intervene proved a volatile mix. Almost a month later, Broward County School Board member Dr. Rosalind Osgood still believes race played into Deluccas arrest. She questioned the need to send a tactical unit to a parking lot where kids were expected to get into a fight. Osgood said community leaders also have been working hard to teach kids, especially black kids, to deal respectfully with law enforcement and unnecessarily violent take-downs by officers undermine that message. When these things happen, you lose ground, said Osgood. Nikolas Cruz [who is white] got an escort to jail. He murdered 17 people there [at nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School]. BSO spokeswoman Gina Carter said her agency deployed a tactical squad called the Crime Suppression Unit because of its expertise in handling volatile situations after the agency was alerted to a crowd moving toward McDonalds by Coral Springs police. She defended the agencys training protocols, saying that for the past three years all deputies have received 10 hours of training on how to deal with large crowds and civil disorders. When the officers arrived they saw close to 200 juveniles had already gathered, she said. Many in the community remain convinced that the deputies actions simply inflamed the situation. It wasnt just that they made arrests. It was how the did it. Students, family members, friends of Delucca and civil rights groups say there was not need for Deputy Christopher Krickovich to slam Deluccas head on the pavement and punch the student after the officer had him under control on the ground. I think they [the deputies] were scared too. But all he had to do was tell him [Delucca] to back up. He didnt have to put out the mace, said Aaliya, who witnessed the incident and was stung by the mace. Jeff Bell, president of BSOs largest union said the officers responded by the book to a tense situation. Delucca, confronting the officers, was a potential threat, he said. They did exactly what were now being told to do. So I have to support the deputies because theyre following their training. Carter, the BSO spokeswoman, said its not unusual for large, sometimes unruly crowds, to gather at the plaza and there have been constant complaints. Vendors in the plaza have been dealing with groups of juveniles meeting there. BSO is often called to deal with incidents of trespassing, fights and vandalism, to name a few. The incidents are more frequent during the school year, she said. Though records obtained from BSO by the the Miami Herald dont offer much detail on individual incidents, they show that 62 of the 85 calls for service to the plaza over the past nine months were between 2 p.m. and 4:30 p.m., a time when students gather at the strip mall after school. They also show that dating back to last August, 22 of the calls were for disturbances involving juveniles and 12 of them involved fights. One McDonalds worker, who asked to remain anonymous, said there are rarely any issues with the students. Students, too, say problems at the plaza after school are rare, though they admit to an occasional fight. But thats what teenagers do, said Aaliyah. The police see it differently. Vendors in the plaza have been dealing with groups of juveniles meeting there, said BSO spokeswoman Gina Carter. BSO is often called to deal with incidents of trespassing, fights, vandalism, to name a few. The incidents are more frequent during the school year. Delucca was arrested after police had taken custody of another teen in the same parking lot. The teen, who police have not named, was involved in a fight there a day earlier, according to Krickovichs report. Delucca was arrested after reaching down to pick up the teens cellphone which had fallen to the ground. Krickovich said Delucca disobeyed BSO Sgt. Greg LaCerras command to stay back and took an aggressive stance toward the sergeant. The male with the red tank top bladed his body and began clenching his fists, Krickovich wrote in Deluccas arrest report. That isnt clear on the video, which shows a deputy push a teen wearing a blue top out of the way, then pepper spray Delucca two seconds after he stood up after reaching down for the cellphone. Its all made up, school board member Osgood said of Krikovichs after-the-incident report. The cellphone video then shows Krickovich pulling Delucca to the ground. As he kneels on the students back, the deputy punches the teen on the right side of his head and smashes his head onto the pavement at least twice. Kids scream for the officer to stop. The backlash was immediate. After Delucca was charged with assaulting an officer and obstruction without violence, Krickovich and LaCerra were relieved of duty by newly-sworn Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony. The deputies were later suspended in full, forced to turn in badges and stay off sheriffs property until an investigation is completed. Some political leaders questioned the sheriff on his departments use-of-force policies and he bickered with a Tamarac commissioner who asked that the officers involved be removed from Tamarac. After viewing the video, Broward State Attorney Michael Satz dropped the charges against Delucca. Delucca hired civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Delucca had his nose broken during the arrest, according to his mother. Periodic protests, using the slogan #Justiceforlucca, continue. Taravella students say teachers havent discussed the incident with them, but warned them to obey police and stay away from the plaza. That hasnt happened. Earlier this week dozens of students once again swarmed the McDonalds parking lot after school, waiting on rides or taking the bus. There was no visible police presence. Looking back to the day of Deluccas arrest, Taravella High senior Armoni Stanley, 17, said it seemed like the BSO deputies got nervous as the crowd grew. I dont think they were expecting so many kids to come, she said. Still, Osgood, the school board member, said if the deputies were concerned a fight was going to break out, they could have de-escalated the scene by showing up in the parking lot ahead of the students. Why would you send those cops to the kids? Osgood wondered. These officers could have easily ignited a riot. As for Delucca, Osgood said hes back at school. He just wants things to be over with, she said. Hes going to be traumatized for the rest of his life and thats not okay. SHARE COPY LINK Taravella High students feel police reaction was extreme after BSO Deputy arrested Tarvella high teenager DeLucca Rolle and smashed his head to the ground. | https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article229858339.html |
Could The California Gay Marriage Verdict Stand Unchallenged? | From the moment nearly 15 months ago that two master legal tacticians, David Boies and Theodore Olson, launched the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, it was almost universally expected that it would become a historic Supreme Court test of gay marriage and the Constitution. Now, perhaps for the first time, it seems realistic to suggest that this particular high-stakes battle may never get much beyond California, especially in terms of its impact on the Constitution. That prospect came into view Thursday as U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker suggested that the appeal of his sweeping ruling against Californias Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage may end on what everyone but lawyers would consider a mere legal technicality. It might end, in other words, because no one with a right to do so would opt to take the case beyond Judge Walkers San Francisco courtroom. Make no mistake about it: there will be energetic efforts to keep the case going, initially through the Ninth Circuit Court (also based in San Francisco) and, perhaps, through the Supreme Court in Washington. But the fight, perhaps at every level, could focus on a concept that is anything but familiar to the average American. The legal label for this concept tells nothing about what it is, although hinting that it finds its origin in the Constitution: Article III standing. For the supporters of Proposition 8, Article III standing is probably not a legal arena where they want to be tested; the current Supreme Courts majority does not have an expansive view of who can qualify for standing. If the case does falter because of a lack of standing, Judge Walkers 136-page opinion on August 4 against Proposition 8 would stand as a precedent, but one that represented the judgment of a single federal jurist, without the enlarging endorsement of a federal appeals court or of the Supreme Court. District Court rulings, even those that are widely admired within the legal community, do not have the compelling force behind them that a higher courts decisions do. It seems bizarre that such a major ruling could go unchallenged merely because, despite the many gay marriage opponents desperate to overturn the decision, nobody has legal standing to challenge it. On the other hand, it would be sort of fitting. The fundamental issue with gay marriage is that opponents have never been able to adequately explain who is hurt by letting gays marry. The concept of "standing" is about finding a person who is hurt by a ruling. There are no such people. Hence the basic justice. | https://newrepublic.com/article/77026/could-the-california-gay-marriage-verdict-stand-unchallenged |
Where Did BP's Oil Go? | Then there's the dispersed oil. The crude that's been naturally dispersed will biodegrade more rapidly, thanks to bacteria that thrive in the warm Gulf waters. But then there are the chemical dispersants that BP used to break up the oil and send it into deeper waters (rather than have it wash up onshore). These chemicals had never been used on such a broad scale before, and no one is quite sure what effect they'll have on the ocean ecosystem. On Tuesday, the EPA announced the results of a second round of tests on the chemical dispersants used by BP, and found that a dispersant/oil mixture was no more toxic than oil alone to silverside fish and mysid fish. That still leaves a lot of questions, however. At a Senate hearing on dispersants today, Lousiana State University environmental scientist Edward Overton pointed out that these tests "have no relevance at all to the deep sea." What's more, the effects of dispersants on other organisms may not be visible for yearssay, if sea turtles feed on the toxins and then their hatchlings die. All told, there were good reasons to disperse the oil and prevent it from reaching the salt marshes on the Gulf shorewhere the crude was certain to cause serious long-term damage. But as NRDC's Lisa Suatoni notes, it's still too early to conclude that dispersant use was ultimately the safer option. We still don't know where all the dispersed oil went, or what organisms it encountered, or how it's affecting the Gulf's food web. BP may have capped its leaking well, but we're still very far from knowing just how bad the spill really was. P.S. Kate Sheppard makes a good framing point. It may be the case that only one-quarter of the oil is left in big, thick, visible doses, but that's still more than 50 million gallons of oilabout five times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76785/where-did-all-the-oil-go |
Why Does Warren Spook Dodd? | Senator Christopher Dodd obviously hasn't gotten over his doubts that the Senate would confirm Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dodd recently approached Sheila Bair, head of the FDIC, to see if she might be interested in the job. She apparently said no thanks. The Journal notes that Dodd isn't the only Democrat nervous about Warren's prospects: Many Democrats feel they need someone in the post who won't be swayed by bankers. Others worry that choosing someone seen as too activist--a charge leveled at Ms. Warren--could turn public sentiment against from the agency. For the record, I'm also not sure the Senate would confirm her. A lot of groups might fight her appointment. But, like my colleague Noam, I think the politics strongly favor the Democrats here. I'm sure opponents will attack her as an "activist," in the hopes that taps into the public's widespread distrust of government. But Warren is not some anonymous character onto which the right-wing attack machine can project any image it wants. She's a well-liked public figure with a clear identity as a consumer crusader. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76712/why-are-dodd-some-ds-afraid-appoint-warren |
What Would Lincoln Say? | When the GOP attacks the Fourteenth Amendment, it trashes its own legacy. Honestly, I thought our politics could not get worse, and suddenly there appears this attack on birthright citizenship and the introduction into popular use of the hideous term "anchor babies," children that illegal immigrants have for the alleged purpose of "anchoring" themselves to American rights and the welfare state. Particularly depressing is the fact that the idea of repealing the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" was given momentum by one of the nation's most reasonable conservatives. "People come here to have babies," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "They come here to drop a child. It's called, 'drop and leave.' To have a child in America, they cross the border, they go to the emergency room, have a child, and that child's automatically an American citizen. That shouldn't be the case. That attracts people here for all the wrong reasons." | https://newrepublic.com/article/76782/14th-amendment-anchor-baby-drop-citizenship-graham-immigration |
Was I Just Insulted? | I'm always gratified to see content at TNR praised by outsiders. Here's Pete Wehner on Bill Galston: William Galston is something of a rarity a blogger at the New Republic who is both mature and worth reading. How nice! Oh, wait... I'm a blogger at the New Republic as well. Wait. Ouch. Wehner says that it's rare that TNR has a blogger who is both mature and worth reading. I'm sure the part about "immature" is a shot at Jonathan Cohn (whose "number of the day" feature is literally stolen from Sesame Street -- you can't get any less mature than that, unless you starting borrowing Baby Einstein features.) Nobody could possibly think I'm immature. I'm authoring the only blog on the internet offering wall-to-wall Wehner coverage. If Wehner himself turns out not to be reading me, that would be a crushing blow. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76993/was-i-just-insulted |
Can The Energy Bill Come Back After Recess? | Hey, it's the U.S. Senate. Harry Reid's now yanking even the stripped-down, hyper-modest energy bill from consideration until after the August recess. Republicans, along with a few Democrats like Mary Landrieu, had strongly opposed the part of the bill that would remove the liability cap for oil companies that spilled crude into the sea. Reid told Greenwire yesterday that, There's a chance we're going to bring a broader bill. Right now, the energy bill is limited to oil-spill provisions, plus a bit of money for home-efficiency retrofits, natural-gas powered trucks, and electric cars. At the very least, environmental advocates have been pushing for a renewable-electricity standard for utilities (while John Kerry's still holding out hope for a limited cap-and-trade system). It's hard to imagine that Reid could compile 60 votes for an even stronger bill so soon before the midterms, but that's still a live possibility. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76783/can-the-energy-bill-come-back-after-recess |
Is Edujobs Dead? | Last night, the Senate passed a pared-down version of a war funding bill that the House passed earlier this month. Billions in domestic spending, which the House had attached to the legislation, got the bootincluding all of the money intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs. Edujobs, as the provision is known, had been in trouble for months. It was initially a bill unto itself in the Senate, with a $23 billion price tag. But the Senate dropped it, after Republicans and conservative Democrats attacked it as a bailout (the nefarious political term of the moment). The House picked it back up as an amendment on the war funding bill, but it reduced the measure to just $10 billion and agreed to pay for it by slashing money from important education reform initiatives like Race to the Top. This prompted Obama to threaten a vetobut thats now moot, thanks to the Senates decision not to include education funding, or any other domestic spending, in the war bill. Only 46 Democrats (and no Republicans) supported the House's version of the legislation. Majority Leader Harry Reid, who chastised Republicans for continu[ing] to push their job-killing agenda, said Thursday that the Senate would look for other ways to pass the education funding. (Im playing phone tag with Tom Harkins officeHarkin is chair of the Senate Health, Education, and Labor committee and the architect of the original edujobs billabout what alternate routes might exist.) One way could be through an omnibus billa catch-all appropriations bill that might come up later this year, but after schools have already reopened for the fall. Omnibus is the big endgame, one education expert told me. Education Week's blog Politics K-12 has also reported that the funding could be put in a measure targeted at the Small Business Administration. A more immediate question, and one that could influence the Senates actions, is what the reaction to this latest development in the edujobs saga will be. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76539/edujobs-dead |
What If California's Climate Law Gets Killed, Too? | Over the past few years, large polluters have become pretty adept at blocking climate legislation in Congress. But there are still plenty of individual states out there trying to put limits on carbon emissions. Why, bring the battle to the states, of course. Back in 2006, California passed AB32, a law that would set up a cap-and-trade system and cut the state's emissions 15 percent by 2020. The oil and coal industry has been fighting it every step of the way, and they may finally get a chance to kill it this fall, when the state votes on a ballot proposition to stop the law from being enacted. Here's Josh Harkinson: Yet coal companies see the battle over California's climate policy as a proxy for the ongoing battle over climate legislation in Washington, DC. The state's strict controls on pollution, energy efficiency, and workplace safety have often presaged similar federal laws. "Decisions made in California and other states have a tendency to spread throughout the nation, and that is something we cannot afford," notes a recent blog post on the website of the Adam Smith Foundation, a Missouri-based think tank that recently donated $498,000 to the California Jobs Initiative, the group spearheading Proposition 23. The foundation won't name its donors, though its blog suggests the coal industry is its main concern. "Coal is the cheapest and most sensible option for Missouri consumers," it says, "but it and other fuels that are readily available in the Midwest are the biggest targets of liberal environmental legislation." The Adam Smith Foundation is right to be worried. California has quite often been a breeding ground for environmental policies. The Clean Air Act can trace its roots back to an a small air-pollution agency founded in Los Angeles in 1947. The state has pioneered a variety of clean-energy measures, from white roofs to Berkeley's creative financing scheme for solar installations. And a lot of these ideas have ended up hopping to other states: It was Arnold Schwarzenegger's former environmental secretary, Terry Tamminen, who persuaded Charlie Crist to start cracking down on carbon pollution in Florida. The key point here is that in the past decade, there's been a significant outbreak of state-level climate policy. Renewable standards, efficiency laws, a utility-only carbon-trade system that's currently operating in the Northeast And looking ahead, a number of Western states are watching California closely and mulling the possibility of linking up with its cap-and-trade system down the road. Assuming that Congress doesn't pass its own climate bill, then these states are going to shoulder a good deal of the burden in cutting carbon emissions. And California plays an outsized role. You can understand why the coal and oil lobbies are so desperate to stop it. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76201/what-if-californias-climate-law-gets-killed-too |
Is The Coal Industry Suicidal? | For years, the coal industry's strategy for dealing with climate change has gone something like this: 1) Fight off caps on carbon pollution for as long as possible. 2) Convince politicians to throw gobs of money at fancy low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and sequestration. 3) Pray that those fancy technologies actually work. The strategy has succeeded so far. Seeing as how half the electricity in the United States comes from coal, there's never a shortage of members of Congress willing to do whatever the industry wants. And yet... some of the smarter coal backers out there are starting to realize that this could turn out to be an absolutely terrible strategy. Last year, West Virginia's Robert Byrd came to realize that the coal industry was stuck in a counterproductive 19th-century mindset. Local companies like Massey Energy were ripping apart mountains, poisoning streams, and flouting mining safety rules, all the while insisting that it was downright un-American to ask the coal industry to change its ways. And so Byrd suddenly became a strong advocate for reforming the industryand that included pushing for a cap on carbon pollution. Now Byron Dorgan is making a similar shift. Politico's Coral Davenport reports that the North Dakota senator has started pleading with coal executives to stop being so recalcitrant on energy policy: Regulations are coming in the future. If coal does nothing, coal will lose, Dorgan said in an interview with POLITICO. The reason I have reached out to the coal industry is that theyve been on the defensive position, not negotiating with anyone, and theyre going to lose under that. With or without carbon regulations, there will be a substantial conversion to natural gas, and coal will lose. Dorgan said that while it looks increasingly unlikely that a climate change bill will pass this year, he does believe a price on carbon is inevitable in the coming yearsa message he also pressed on his coal allies. There are a couple important things going at play here. First, the EPA is finally starting to enforce a variety of Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act rules, after eight years of inaction under the Bush administration. There's the new interstate rule that will crack down on smog- and haze-forming pollutants like sulfur-dioxide and nitrogen-oxide from power plants. The EPA is also likely to tighten restrictions on coal ash and mountaintop-removal mining in the near future. And new miner-safety regulations are on the way. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76464/the-coal-industry-suicidal |
Is There Still Time Left For An Energy Bill? | Via The Hill, a research note from FBR Capital sums up everything you need to know about where the energy-bill talks stand: "Senate scheduled to debate something next week." Yup, something. No one knows what will be in the bill yet. Reid is scheduled to meet with the Democratic caucus on Thursday; Kerry and Lieberman are asking for an extension so that they can try to salvage a utility-only cap; and it's likely that the whole debate could get pushed back until after August recess. The biggest danger, at this point, is that Republicans will run out the clock on energy legislation. This, after all, is one of the under-appreciated points about the filibuster. It doesn't just allow the minority to block bills; it also makes day-to-day Senate business absurdly inefficient. Every cloture vote takes two days, so the GOP has been forcing them for all sorts of minor procedural movesjust to chew up time. Plus, as Ezra Klein observes, Republicans are taking 30 hours of post-cloture debate today, not because they need to, but just because it leaves even less time for the majority to pass legislation. And on top of all that, the intra-Democratic squabbling over the energy bill is eating up even more time. Yesterday, George Voinovich (R-Ohio) told reporters: "Anybody that's being intellectually honest has got to say we do not have the time to do anything meaningful at this point in time when it comes to climate change." That's not literally true. There's plenty of time left. Months, in fact. Senators could skip the August recess, take their jobs seriously, and get to work addressing perhaps the biggest issue facing the country (and planet). Republicans could stop senselessly filibustering every little Senate procedure. The clock may be winding down, yes, but that's not because of some abstract celestial force. It's not a logical necessity. It's a conscious choice that individual senators are making. (Flickr photo credit: Cuba Gallery) | https://newrepublic.com/article/76445/there-even-any-time-left-energy-bill |
Should Businesses Be Run Like the Post Office? | The post office plans to raise stamp prices again. The usual groans about government inefficiency are sure to follow. But the post office doesnt get the credit it deserves. Contrary to popular perception, it receives no federal funding for its operations, subsisting almost entirely on the fees it charges for delivering mail. Its a great bargain: Itll take your letter anywhere in the country for whats still a modest fee. And when Consumer Reports compared package services, it concluded that the good old U.S. Postal Service is often cheapest by far. But put all of that aside. The post office bests the private sector in another way: Its actually put the money aside to pay for its workers retirements. Audits show that, at the end of fiscal 2009, it had contributed enough funds to cover all but 1 percent of future pension obligations to its current workers. The post office does this because it must: Federal law mandates that the post office, like all other federal agencies, finance pensions fully. The private sector faces a similar requirement, but many firms use loopholes to wiggle out of their responsibilities. A recent study shows that pensions among S&P 1500 companies are underfunded by 21 percent. In other words, theyve promised workers money that may not be there when they retire. If the companies attempt to shed their pension obligations by declaring bankruptcy, as theyve been known to do, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation will become responsible for paying the retireespotentially putting taxpayers on the hook for tens of billions of dollars. And, even then, workers will lose out, since PBGC payments are often smaller than what corporate pensions originally promised. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76191/should-businesses-be-run-the-post-office |
Are Dems About To Crush Republicans In November? | Last month, the Gallup poll a six-point advantage for Republicans in the House "generic ballot" question. Former Bush administration Minister of Propaganda Pete Wehner undertook his characteristic gloating spasms: Gallups generic ballot poll (courtesy of the indispensible RealClearPolitics) shows a 49-43 percent lead for the GOP, the largest lead for Republicans since the poll started in the midpoint of the last century. The fact that this is almost unsurprising is evidence of the dangers facing the Democratic Party, and the modern liberal agenda, this November. Among the problems for Democrats is that the narrative of the election a bad economy, profligate spending, misplaced priorities, and the Obama administrations general incompetence is just about baked into the cake, absent some extraordinary intervening events. And the news for President Obama and Democrats continues to get worse rather than better. Even David Gergen is turning on the president. ... The political noose continues to tighten around the necks of Democrats. Cheerleaders of the president and there are still plenty of those in the political class will explain all this as the result of bad luck or blame it on the previous administration. The rest of America considers this the results of a president whose agenda is failing virtually across the board. Buwahahaha! Anyway, I bring this up because today's Gallup poll shows Democrats jumping into a six-point lead: | https://newrepublic.com/article/76391/are-dems-about-crush-republicans-in-november |
Is Cheerleading A Sport? | No, says a federal judge: Competitive cheerleading is not an official sport that colleges can use to meet gender-equity requirements, a federal judge ruled Wednesday in ordering Quinnipiac University to keep its womens volleyball team. The parties in the case said it was the first time the issue had been decided by a judge. Several volleyball players and their coach sued Quinnipiac, in Hamden, Conn., after it announced in March 2009 that it would eliminate the team for budgetary reasons and replace it with a competitive cheer squad. I remember arguing about this with cheerleaders in high school. (Yes, I got into debates with cheerleaders. No, I didn't get a lot of dates in high school. Why do you ask?) Their position was that cheerleading was a sport, even though their version was almost completely devoid of athletic skill -- it was just hopping up and down and clapping -- and nothing but a sidelight to football. Competitive cheerleading is a laudable effort to move away from its sexist roots. But it's still hard to make the case that an activity rooting in expressing support for members of a sport that you're not participating in can itself be a sport. It's nice to be vindicated in federal court 20 years later. Take that, 1989 Bloomfield Hills Andover cheerleading squad! | https://newrepublic.com/article/76505/cheerleading-sport |
Where Is The Money? | Some leftover business from my vacation. Last week I posted a chart from Paul Krugman showing that business investment was not lower than you'd expect given the state of the economy, and thus the notion that President Obama's anti-business policies were responsible for the lack of investment is bunk. Jonah Goldberg replied: Yesterday, in a post titled The Non-Existent Confidence Crisis, Jonathan Chait poured scornlargely borrowed from Paul Krugmanat any hint, suggestion, or argument that lack of business confidence in the economy has anything to do with our economic doldrums generally and the failure of businesses to invest and hire in particular. Ever the Keynesian, Chait asserts flatly: Investment is lower because theres not enough consumer demand. Thats the whole story. The same day Politico ran a whole different story about how President Obama is desperate to shed his (well-deserved) anti-business reputation. ... But wait a second! Someone get them a subscription to the New Republic. I must not have made my point clearly enough because Goldberg seems to have translated my post as arguing the exact opposite of what it did. I was not disputing the contention that "lack of business confidence in the economy has anything to do with our economic doldrums generally and the failure of businesses to invest and hire in particular." I was arguing that lack of business confidence in the economy has everything to do with our economic doldrums generally and the failure of businesses to invest and hire in particular. I was arguing that A is entirely the function of B, not that it's unrelated to B. Let me explain this again. Suppose it were true that business is failing to invest not just because there's insufficient demand for its existing products but because business is frightened of Obama. To establish that such a thing was happening, you'd want to show that business investment was unusually low given the state of the economy. It isn't. Here's Krugman's chart: | https://newrepublic.com/article/76248/where-the-money |
Will Anti-Nuke Activists Buy Washington Again? | The Heritage Foundation emails: Today, Heritage Action for America launched a national campaign to block the New START Treaty. The multi-pronged campaign will include a public petition, launched today, which will give Americans a powerful mechanism to express their opposition to the treaty. Among other concerns, the New START Treaty effectively guts Americas ability to maintain a strong missile defense shield and puts Russia on par with the United States as a nuclear power. It is time that the American people had their say on this treaty, Heritage Action CEO Michael A. Needham said. For too long, this has been an inside-the-beltway debate dominated by special interests and those who seek to curry favor with the international community. I didn't know there was a lot of money to be made in nuclear disarmament. Must be the hidden hand of Big Peace at work. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76115/will-anti-nuke-activists-buy-washington-again |
Why Is Everyone So Obsessed With Inception? | A theory. There are plenty of moments in its 150 minutes when Inception is flying in mid-air, uncertain whether there is a safety net or a parachute of coherent plot to explain its entire exhilarating enterprise. Dont ask to have its theory of dreaming spelled out in foolproof detail, just know that the age-old love affair between dreaming and the movies has been reasserted. Above all, treasure the films serene lack of exhausting violence or ingenious cruelty. Yes, there is action aplenty, with car-chases and gun-battles, all edited with insolent speed, as if to admit that we all know a chase and a shoot-out are just familiar riffs, shaggy dog stories, the tunes of nostalgia, like Edith Piaf. And shiver a little that Piaf has been used in a movie where Marion Cotillard is the raw-eyed emblem of hurt feelings. This absence of R-heavy violence isnt just a way of letting the teenage audience into the theatres without subterfuge. Its part of the airy sense of play that oxygenizes the picture. Indeed, the thing I like best about Christopher Nolans film is that with all the attendant prospects of a Big-Time Metaphor (film equals dreaming), and the chance of major World-Ending Political Intrigue, the mission impossible here is as silly and evanescent as why people play golf, chess, or postmans knock. Its just that the game is pretty and passes time in an elegant, harmless way. So, projected enemies are shot down, like the phantom figures in a videogame, but all the characters survivebecause we are asked to like them, and to admire the spirit with which they play the game. Its true that Leonardo DiCaprios Mr. Cobb has a wound and a loss, plus a destiny we want to see fulfilled, but they are borne lightly, as if to say, well, an actor needs a character and a situation, so let it be thisits like choosing the top hat, the dog, or the boot in Monopoly. You get attached enough to the plucky stance of the dog for a couple of hours, but you could as easily have admired the splendor of the pocket battleship. Of course, this detachability in feelings and needs is very fair to the relaxed and rootless air of dreamingthat aspect of experience (so like the movies) where we learn that the show is everything, so long as it doesnt matter so much that you start taking it seriously and believing its Life. The deepest link between film and dream is that we are safe in our dark, no matter that the bright hurtling locomotive (the screen) comes so close. If you want a measure of the films wit, of its tongue- in-cheek delicacy, just notice how the intrigue is all achieved in the first-class cabin of a long-distance air flight. No matter the dreams turmoil, these people are cushioned and placed in the most artful bed-seat, gently mulling over the flights choicesthe game hen in cilantro aspic, or the chilled lobster DeMille. There may not be such a dish, except in dream, but I name it to hark back to the impassioned vulgarity, the urge to see new things, that inspired that pioneer filmmaker. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76461/why-everyone-so-obsessed-inception |
What's an Extra Hungry Kid or Two a Few Years from Now? | Congress has decided the best way to avoid widespread teacher layoffs and Medicaid cuts is to reduce food stamp spending instead. No. And yes. Here's the story. As you probably know by now, states face a huge budget crunch because of the recession: More people are out of work and need financial assistance of some sort, yet slow economic activity means the states aren't getting as much tax revenue. In the past, the federal government has frequently provided extra, temporary funding to the states, to help avoid those cuts while also putting some more money into the economy. But this time, Republicans and conservative Democrats have blocked these efforts, saying they're not fiscally responsible and demanding offsets in the form of alternative spending cuts. Stymied, Democratic leaders finally turned to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is what the food stamp program is called now. Not only do food stamps address an immediate and urgent human need. They're also among the very best ways to stimulate economic growth, since a dollar in extra government spending on food stamps goes right back into the economy--whoever gets that dollar is going to use it, quickly, to buy something at the grocery store. Here's where the situation isn't quite as bad as it might seem, although it's a bit complicated to explain. It turns out that last year's Recovery Act included a temporary boost in food stamp spending via a special formula that would, by design, phase out in a few years--specifically, 2014, according to projections at the time. But recently the projections have changed, thanks to lower-than-expected inflation. As a result, the formula would keep the higher food stamp spending in place an extra few years--until 2018--according to the latest available predictions. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76688/whats-extra-hungry-kid-or-two-few-years-now |
Is Joe Manchin Too Young? | Politico has a headline, "Manchin Gets Veteran Dem Challenger." "Veteran" turns out to be something of an understatement here: Former West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler, a nonagenarian Democrat who has held office in the state on and off since 1958, has filed to run in his partys Senate primary against Gov. Joe Manchin. The West Virginia secretary of states office confirmed that Hechler filed the appropriate paperwork by fax and paid the $1,740 fee to enter the special election race for the late Sen. Robert Byrds seat. At 95, Hechler is three years old than Byrd was at the time of his death on June 28. I get the logic here. In West Virginia, they like their Senators older than dirt. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76438/joe-manchin-too-young |
Who's On Team Crist? | I've always thought that you can understand about 90% of what you need to know about a politician's beliefs by looking at who advises them. Charlie Crist now has a lot of Democrats working for him: Two of the major power players now steering the Crist ship are Eric Johnson, who was chief of staff for former Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Josh Isay, the former chief of staff to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and co-founder of Knickerbocker SKD, the consulting firm. Isay will handle media, and Johnson will direct the political operation in population-heavy South Florida, where the critical counties of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe are seated. Thirty percent of the votes in a general election come from the four southeastern counties, Doster said. Democrats can win in Florida by carrying seven to 12 counties out of the 67, if they do it right. Charlie has built a team designed to help him find Democratic votes in southeastern Florida. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76696/whos-team-crist |
Whos The Happiest One Of All? | This is one of those slightly hokey surveys that measures the happiness of nations. Done by the Gallup World Poll and written up for Forbes by Francesca Levy, its results are not entirely surprising. Rich countries generally do better than others, although Saudi Arabia ranks 58th just ahead of Pakistan . Almost three times as many Saudis are struggling than thriving. On the other hand, the United Arab Emirates (which is a country made up of wealthy scions and resident ex-pats) and Kuwait register respectably 20th and 23rd. It shares the 115th ranking with Zimbabwe , India , Morocco , Syria and... Afghanistan ! Just ahead of Peoples China which, at 125, leads a cohort of Congo ( Brazzaville ), Sudan and Djibouti . At the 96th spot, ahead of Turkey 103. And I thought that the Palestinians were suffering, really suffering. Of course, suffering is also a subjective category. How could you not be suffering with Israel right next door but checking in at 8th spot, just in front of Australia and Switzerland , right behind Canada . Moreover, these numbers must also take into account the Israeli Arabs whose unhappy striving surely was not ignored. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76663/whos-the-happiest-one-all |
What Is Free Market Clean Energy? | A new report shows that solar energy has become cheaper than nuclear: In a historic crossover, the costs of solar photovoltaic systems have declined to the point where they are lower than the rising projected costs of new nuclear plants, according to a paper published this month. Solar photovoltaics have joined the ranks of lower-cost alternatives to new nuclear plants, John O. Blackburn, a professor of economics at Duke University, in North Carolina, and Sam Cunningham, a graduate student, wrote in the paper, Solar and Nuclear Costs The Historic Crossover. Sounds great! Except the problem is that the political influence of various energy sources is proportionate to their current size. Traditional dirty energy sources like coal and oil are very large, and thus wield enormous clout in Congress. Nuclear energy is the one clean energy source with a large enough foothold to command and political clout. Indeed, the right-of-center members of Congress with any sympathy to climate legislation tend to insist the measure be packed with nuclear subsidies. Conservative supporters of climate change, like the old John McCain, harp on nuclear power because it's a good way to allay the suspicions of the conservative base -- climate legislation will build more nuclear plants, and hippies hate nuclear plants, therefore conservatives should support it. But the problem here is that this requires the government to pick winners and losers. The more free market approach would be to set a price on carbon and let the market decide which clean energy source can do the job more cheaply. That, however, is the ultraliberal position in the debate. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76577/what-free-market-clean-energy |
What Happened To American Exceptionalism? | David Brooks says the deficit should be reduced mainly through spending cuts: The international evidence shows that if you want to balance the budget, something like 66 percent to 80 percent of your effort should go into cutting spending and something like a third to a fifth should consist of tax increases. If you rely on tax increases too much, you end up messing up the incentives for people who save and invest. That's usually the liberals' tool. The problem with using this comparison to apply lessons to the United States is that we already have low levels of government spending compared with most countries: Moreover, a disproportionately high share of American spending goes to defense. So, first of all, tax hikes hurt less in the U.S. than in most other because countries because tax rates start from a lower level. (And taxes in the United States are less redistributive than in most Western countries.) Second, social spending is very low in the U.S., since overall spending tends toward the low end and defense spending consumes an unusually high proportion. So the United States has less room to cut social spending than most advanced countries do. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76535/what-happened-american-exceptionalism |
Did Spain Deserve to Win? | The best part of this match was that it ended before penalty kicks, where the Dutch could have squeezed out a win and enjoyed the fruits of their goonish performance. Simon Kuper wrote a great column in last weeks Financial Times, where he bemoaned how Holland had turned away from idealism in its football and in its politics. This performance should bury the myth of Dutch Total Football for good. I need to re-watch the 1994 final to be sureand I wont do that outside of an enhanced interrogationbut I think that this rates only a notch less turgid than that one. This wasnt one of the great triumphs in World Cup history, not by a mile. Im not sure how much of this was truly Spains fault. They are the European Championsand most of Spains players toil for Barcelona, the club team of the decade. Their opponents considered them unstoppable by conventional means, so they countered Spains passing with turgid defensive tactics, and, in Hollands case, ugly fouling. Yet, in the face of all that, Spain never veered from its tika-taka identity. Spanish football is not boring, but when opponents deploy those kinds of tactics, youll look boring. I think this victory needs to be treated as a kind of lifetime achievement award for Spanish football. They have spent the past four years dominating the game, both at the club and international level. They have the best players in the world and produced the closest thing in recent memory to a new paradigm in tactics. The sum of Spain's achievements and play has no match. Their victory wasnt great, but it was deserved. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76193/did-spain-deserve-win |
Is It Okay to Root For Germany? | There was nothing German in my grandparents house. My grandfather would spit when we passed by the Mercedes dealer near our town. My grandmother -- an otherwise incredibly tolerant woman -- lost the ability to forgive on the day the last letter arrived from the old country. I began this World Cup pulling for the United States and England. I assumed Spain would win. I had spent the last two years watching the EPL and La Liga every weekend. I don't think I watched a single Bundesliga match during that time. I was not rooting for Germany. I'm still not sure it's ok to cheer the men in black, but its hard not to admire their play. Whereas the Dutch have appeared lucky, and the Spanish seem content to play keep away and assume that time of possession equates with victory, the Germans have struck a wonderful balance of discipline and bold individual creativity; youth (Muller and Schweinsteiger ) and experience (the resurgent Klose). And while I am not convinced that Ozil's presence on the team says all that much about a new, multicultural Germany, I am also unwilling to dismiss this storyline entirely. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76078/it-okay-root-germany |
Are The Deficit Commission's Democrats Capitulating? | Unlike some other liberals, I have no problem with the deficit commission to reduce the unsustainably large long-term deficit. I do have a problem with the fact that the Democratic co-chairman of the commission, Erskine Bowles, proposes that the commission's plan hold federal spending at 21% of GDP. As Matt Miller notes, government spending averaged 22% of GDP during the Reagan administration. The aging population and explosion of health care costs that have followed mean a long-term level of 21% would mean slashing other functions of government. A 21% goal means that the commission would not be producing a compromise between the Democratic and Republican preferences. It would be a wholesale adoption of the conservative plan, as CBPP points out: The Committee on the Fiscal Future of the United States, a joint effort of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Public Administration, recently developed four budget paths or scenarios to illustrate the range of available policy choices for federal spending and revenues.One was a low-spending path that eschewed revenue increases and accomplished nearly all of its deficit reduction by cutting programs. At the other end of the spectrum was a path that accomplished most of its deficit reduction by raising taxes. Between these two paths, the committee outlined two intermediate scenarios. (See Figure 3.) Committee co-chair Rudolph Penner has described both the low-spending and high-spending paths as extreme, explaining that At one extreme, the committee asked what spending cuts would be necessary to stabilize the debt-GDP target at 60 percent if the total tax burden was maintained at its historical level between 18 and 19 percent of GDP. Under the committees extreme low path that secured almost all of its deficit reduction through budget cuts, federal spending would be about 21 percent of GDP. Again, I'm very open to some middle-ground compromise to reduce the deficit. It's going to require liberals to accept some spending cuts we don't want, because liberals don't have the political clout to enact tax levels to pay for them. A deal tilted almost entirely toward the conservative vision is a total non-starter. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76669/are-the-deficit-commissions-democrats-capitulating |
Should We Intervene? | Rieff also sets the bar for judging interventions too high. He argues that the intervention in Kosovo was a failure because it led to undesirable outcomesnamely, it allowed the Kosovars to commit crimes against the vanquished Serbs. But the appropriate question to ask is not whether an intervention (military or non-military) leads to a good outcome; it is whether the outcome ends up being significantly better than the likely alternative. Similarly, Rieff counters those of us who called for intervention in Darfur by noting that it would have culminated either in the overthrow of the Sudanese regime or the establishment of a protectorate in Darfur. Either of these outcomes would have been problematic, of course, though I think the latter would have been less problematicand more likely. Its not a cut-and-dried case, partly because, as Rieff notes, some (though far from all) of these deaths took place before we in the West were aware of them. Still, huge numbers of people died after the genocide came to our attentionafter, that is, we might have done something about it. If you think that such deaths, plus the displacement of millions, ought to weigh heavily in any kind of moral calculus, then you have to at least consider the possibility that intervention would have, on balance, led to a more decent outcome than abstention. Further, one of Rieffs core objections is that, far from serving any moral purpose, interventions just tip the balance of power toward one group at the expense of the other. Well, sometimes thats necessaryas when one group wields its power to inflict horrible depredations on another. In Rwanda, for instance, Rieff says that todays oppressed are quite often yesterdays oppressors, and todays victims tomorrows victimizers. I share what I take to be Rieffs concerns about the current Tutsi-led regime of Paul Kagame. But while Kagame may not be a democrat, you simply cant compare his crimes to those of the Hutu regime he replacedwhich murdered 800,000 people in the course of three months. Lets say we had intervened in 1994, and, in the course of doing so, tipped the balance of power in favor of the Tutsis, allowing them to win the warand halt the killinga month or two earlier than they actually did. This would probably have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Shifting the balance of power in an ethnic conflict isnt always a terrible thingeven when, as in Rwanda, the good guys turn out to be less than perfect over the long haul. Finally, Im always struck by how little weight advocates of non-intervention seem to give to the opinions of the people who would be most affected by such interventionsas if they dont trust the oppressed and victimized to judge for themselves what is in their best interest. Sometimes people do not want our help; sometimes they do. And it seems to me this ought to be a key criterion in deciding whether we offer such help. One small example is currently on my mind, only because last weekend I happened to watch a remarkable documentary called Burma VJ. The film chronicles the work of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a courageous group of Burmese journalists who report on conditions inside that totalitarian state. After learning about an incident during the 2007 uprising in which government agents have beaten a group of monks, one Burmese reporter says, Dont worry. The whole world is going to know about it. Implicit in this statement is the conviction that such knowledge matters. The reporter does not go on to explain what kind of response he thinks this information might spur. I doubt he expected a military response. But it seems clear that he expected something. Rieff is undoubtedly right that our tools in such situations are limited, but theyre hardly non-existent. In Burma, for instance, we should probably be placing more diplomatic pressure on India and China to withdraw their support for the regime. And in extreme situations, like genocides, our military remains capable of, at minimum, making it costly for governments to engage in mass murderas we did in Kosovo. But whatever response we choose, when severely oppressed people tell us that they want our help, I dont think any of us would beor should bewilling to look them in the eye and deliver a lecture about their failure to appreciate, say, the odds of unintended consequences or the possibility that they themselves might become tomorrows victimizers. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76137/liberal-interventionism-makes-plenty-sense |
Is Our Favorite Renewable Energy Source A Disaster? | When most people hear the phrase "renewable power," they tend to think of solar panels and wind turbines. But in the United States, the reality is quite different. Right now, the country gets about 8 percent of its power from renewables, and most of that is from large hydropower dams (2.6 percent) and biomass (2.3 percent). And even if Congress were to pass some sort of clean-energy legislation, that would remain the case for the foreseeable future. A recent IIE analysis of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill found that much of the growth in renewable electricity through 2030 would come from burning wood for fuel. Likewise, if the EPA forced coal plants to limit their emissions, many operators would likely start mixing coal with biomass in their boilers. On one level, this all makes sense. America has a lot of forests, and we're pretty skilled at chopping down trees. In some areas, like the Southeast, biomass is the most abundant renewable resource around. You can burn wood whenever it's neededno need to worry about what happens when the wind dies down or the sun sets. And, in theory, it's carbon neutral. A tree grows and absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere. When it's burned for fuel, the CO2 is exhaled back into the air. And when a new tree is planted in the old one's place, the cycle can start anew. Well, no, not so simple. For a variety of reasons, it's quite hard to make biomass carbon neutral. There's a timing problem, for one. Most trees have spent decades and decades absorbing carbon and growing to full size. Burning that tree sends up all that carbon in an instant. If you plant a new tree, it will again take decades to absorb an equivalent amount of CO2and in that time lag, there's extra carbon in the air, heating up the planet. And it gets even more complicated than that, as this excellent article over at Depleted Cranium explains. Yes, all trees eventually die, but they don't necessarily release all of their carbon on death. Acidic soils in pine forests can prevent a full decay of the wood. And some of the biomass can get absorbed into the subsoil, where it reaches a stable state and doesn't decay further. So if you're cutting down and burning a tree because you assume that all that carbon would've eventually gone up into the air anyway, you're running the risk of faulty accounting. (Likewise, many trees absorb carbon into their leaves, many of which then fall to the forest floor and become humus, which essentially keep the carbon locked in the soil.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/76135/how-clean-americas-favorite-renewable-source |
Was BP Uniquely Reckless? | Last month, Henry Waxman and Ed Markey summoned the chairmen of the world's five big oil companies to testify before Congress. The execs from Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron spent much of their time trying to distance themselves from BP. We wouldn't have poisoned the Gulf the way BP did, they insisted. Unfortunately for them, Waxman and Markey weren't buying it, and noted that all the other oil companies had the exact same error-filled spill-response plans that BP did. "Two other plans are such dead ringers for BP's," Markey pointed out, "that they list a phone number for the same long-dead expert." Fair enough. Except today's New York Times makes a pretty persuasive case that BP really did stand out in its disregard for safety, and that not all oil companies are equal. First up, Jad Mouwad wrote a profile of ExxonMobil, which revamped its management culture after the Exxon Valdez tanker spill in 1989, and now "stands out among its peers for its obsessive attention to safety." In fact, back in 2006, Exxon ran into problems in a deepwater well similar to what BP faced at Macondonatural gas kicking upand the company decided to abandon the well rather than keep drilling. (Exxon was savaged by financial analysts at the time, but the decision looks pretty shrewd in retrospect.) The picture looks very different when you turn to the Times' excellent profile of BP. The company has a long record of safety violationsin 2005, an aging BP plant in Texas exploded, killing 15 people, and an after-action report blamed "organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of BP." Then came a large leak that poured 267,000 gallons of oil into Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in 2006, thanks to poorly maintained pipes. And just this year, federal inspectors have found 62 safety violations at BP's Ohio refinery. Yet BP never underwent the same cultural shift that ExxonMobil underwent. And, so, in retrospect, it's no surprise that BP cut so many corners: | https://newrepublic.com/article/76241/was-bp-uniquely-reckless |
Can Bingaman Pass A Climate Bill? | Politico's Coral Davenport reports today that Jeff Bingaman may replace John Kerry as the new point person on a Senate energy bill. When we last checked in, a bunch of other senators were griping that they were annoyed by Kerry's obsession with averting a major climate catastrophe. Presumably the far more low-key Bingaman won't offend their delicate sensibilities. But on a substantive note, this could signal a real shift in the Senate's energy ambitions. Last week, Senate Democrats caucused together andas Dave Roberts reportedseemed to rally around a strategy for binding a price on carbon to various Gulf-related bills and then daring the GOP to block the whole thing. It was a go-for-broke move. It might've worked. But lately, Bingaman's been insisting that it's "difficult" to envision a cap on carbon pollution getting 60 votes. That's not the sort of thing you say when you're preparing for a showdown. Instead, Bingaman's cobbling together a more modest bill that would only cap pollution from electric utilities (see here for the merits of that approach). He also has an energy bill that passed out of his committee last fall that would offer subsidies to various alternative-energy industries and force utilities to buy (a very modest amount) of renewable power. Combine all those together and you have a fairly weak bill that wouldn't do nearly enough to put a dent in greenhouse gases and stop global warming. Joe Lieberman recently told reporters that some Republicans have "promised to keep talking" about a utility-only cap. Update: And now Bingaman's sounding dubious about even a utility-only cap. | https://newrepublic.com/article/75990/can-bingaman-pass-climate-bill |
Who Or What Caused The Giant Deficit? | Mitch McConnell repeats the claim that George W. Bush left the budget in kinds-decent shape before President Obama ruined it: The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, its almost 10 percent. Paul Krugman replies: First, theyre hoping that you wont know that standard budget data is presented for fiscal years, which start on October 1 of the previous calendar year. So this isnt the last year of the Bush administration theyve conveniently lopped off everything that happened post-Lehman TARP and all. Second, theyre hoping you wont look at what was happening quarter by quarter. Heres net federal borrowing as a percentage of GDP, quarter by quarter, since 2007: BEA | https://newrepublic.com/article/76375/who-or-what-caused-the-giant-deficit |
Why Don't We Take the Russian Spies Seriously? | In a season of crises, from Iran to North Korea to the Gulf of Mexico, the revelation of a Russian spy ring in the United States has been greeted as a source of welcome comic relief. Its not just Jon Stewart, or the headline writers of the New York Post, who cant keep a straight face talking about the eleven Russian illegals, long-term secret agents who built up elaborate cover identities as ordinary Americans. For one thing, there is the failure of the illegals to actually get any American secretsindeed, they are not even being charged with espionage, only with failure to register as agents of a foreign government. It is not just the harmlessness of the spies that the media has focused on, however, but the obsolescence of their techniques. The use of invisible ink and money caches and garish code phrases all seem to come, in the words that have become mandatory in reporting this story, like something out of a Cold War thriller. When you think about it, this is a silly observation: Real spies seem to act like fictional spies only because fictional spies are modeled on real spies. What the mockery of spycraft is really meant to communicate, I suspect, is not that this or that particular spying tactic is obsolete, but that the idea of Russia as an enemy is obsolete. In popular culture, when the obsolete makes an unexpected re-appearance, it takes the form of kitsch or camp, and we all know the proper attitude of superior disdain to adopt toward it. Theodor Adorno, writing in the 1940s about the contempt people show for obsolete styles of music, suggested that this hostility was a way of taking retroactive revenge on the culture industry, for having made us embrace music we never actually liked in the first place. This same sense of superiority is what Americans are now allowed to feel toward Russia, our conquered enemy. Russian espionage is the past, and their failure to recognize our monopoly on the future provokes a sense less of outrage than of knowing contempt. The other reason why we cant take Russian espionage too seriously is that it has been shorn of exactly the element that made Soviet espionage so serious: ideology. Americans who became Soviet spies were not just betraying their country, they were endorsing an ideological critique of their country. In the most dramatic sense, they were voting with their feet for Communism; and as long as Communism had the power to win such dedicated converts, it could not be dismissed as a philosophical rival to liberal democracy. When Alger Hiss was exposed as a Soviet spy, it forced a whole generation of left-liberals to examine their own consciences, since they had professed sympathy with the same principles that led Hiss to become a traitor. Certainly, a generation was on trial with Hiss, Leslie Fiedler wrote in his essay Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence: the half-deliberate blindness of so many decent people is a vital part of the total Hiss case. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76216/why-dont-we-take-the-russian-spies-seriously |
Will Climate Change Lead to Mass Immigration from Mexico? | In some places, yes, that's quite possible. Earlier this week, a team of researchers led by Princeton's Michael Oppenheimer published a study suggesting that as global warming causes agricultural yields in Mexico to decline, an additional 1.4 million to 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the United States by 2080. (The team analyzed data on emigration, crop yields, and climate from 1995 to 2005 in order to make their forecasts.) As always, caveats abound. The social consequences of global warming are always the hardest things to predict. Immigration rates are never driven by physics alone, but depend on plenty of other factors, such as U.S. border policies or the changing structure of Mexico's economy. And it's always difficult to tie specific social trends to climate change. People in rural areas have been migrating for a long time, whether to seek out work or because the rainfall's dried up or the soil's eroded. Global warming will exacerbate these pressures, yes, but it's hard to attribute any single eventor single migrantto man-made climate change. That's one reason why forecasts of "climate refugees" vary so wildly. Still, climate-driven migration is a concept that's received a lot of attention in recent years. As the planet heats up, droughts spread, and sea levels rise, millions of people are going to be uprooted from their homes and farms and move elsewhere. According to a 2007 World Bank report, the vast bulk of this migration is expected to take place within developing countries, with people moving from rural villages to urban centers. One big concern here is that places like Lagos or Dhaka are already swelling exponentially, and their infrastructure can barely keep up, which is why so many "megacities" now sport massive slums. But there's also likely to be a fair amount of migration between countriesand the consequences there are much harder to predict. As the rising oceans chomp away at Bangladesh, for instance, as many as 15 million people may have to abandon their towns and villages by mid-century. Partly in response, India has been constructing a 2,100-mile long fence to barricade itself against the predicted influx of climate refugees. This old Greenwire piece by Lisa Friedman features a number of national security experts in India openly fretting about how rising seas will destabilize the borders between the two countries. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76587/immigration-and-climate-change |
Is the World Cup Too Long? | Its not that I want fewer games or fewer teams or anything. What Id like to avoid is that sad feeling of diffusion, mixed with an odd short-term nostalgia, that always rears its head around now. Summer hadnt even officially started at the time now the East Coast is setting heat records. Friends have had babies since then. We were still talking about elaborate new schemes to plug the leak in the Gulf. That pro wrestler guy who everyone hated still had a shot at the Bachelorette. The thing about that first match, though: Tshabalalas strike aside, it wasnt actually that good a game. But the memory of it still glows with the sense of promise for what lay ahead. On June 11 we could believe anything: That South Africa were somehow going to ride their countrys excitement into the next round; that this time, Mexico had the finishing to go beyond the Round of 16; that Rooney and England had finally figured out how to fuse speed and strength with technical proficiency; that Xavi and Torres were going to pick up exactly where they left off at Euro 2008; that Ivory Coast, in those gorgeous orange shirts, were going to beat Brazil and Portugal or at least lose 3-2 in trying; that Messi was going to reinvent football as we know it. None of those things has quite happened. Its not that this has been a bad World Cup. On balance and with the exception of the refereeing -- it feels like its been pretty good, especially the drama of the later stages. Its just that it exists now in reality with all the imperfections and disappointments that reality involves -- rather than in our minds. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76085/the-world-cup-too-long |
What Went On Between Obama and Netanyahu? | Well, there was no divorce between the U.S. and Israel. And there was even some respect, if not affection. Affections, we know, is kept for the Arabs. But this was not quite the venue for showering kisses on the Palestinians. After they are still maintaining the distance of "proximity" talks which means Abbas in Ramallah with Netanyahu and his team in Jerusalem. That's six miles apart, very remote miles. And it's the Palestinians who are keeping the distance. Barry Rubin, a real expert and a true scholar, is not fooled by anyone. This is still the beginning of a long road. I doubt Obama will see the end, and it will be his fault if he doesn't. The answer is simple though not all the reasons are publicly known. So I'll tell you about them. The president couldn't have been more effusive. They had an "excellent" discussion, Netanyahu's sttement was "wonderful" and the U.S.-Israel relationship is "extraordinary." Hard to believe this is the Obama we've seen before. Obama wants to improve relations with Israel for several reasons. Obviously, he doesn't want to be bashing Israel in the period leading up to the November elections is an important incentive. Polls show that for Americans his administration's relative hostility toward Israel is its least popular policy. But there is more to this trend than just that point. What Obama wants is to be able to claim a diplomatic success in advancing the Israel-Palestinian "peace process," perhaps the only one he can so spin. Keeping indirect talks going and even better, moving them up to direct talks is his goal. So he wants Netanyahu's cooperation for that. The same point holds regarding the Gaza Strip, where Obama wants to claim he has defused a crisis he has called "unsustainable." (I hate that word. When you hear something is "unsustainable" immediately become suspicious. This has everything to do with perceptions and little to do with realities where quite a lot of things are quite sustainable. Pretty much every single Middle East problem has been sustained for decades.) And he also wants to keep the Israel-Arab front calm while he deals with Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, seeking above all to avoid crises and confrontations and to keep up his (bogus) bargain of trading flattery for popularity. So here's the deal. Give Israel some U.S. support in exchange for modest steps that the administration hopes accomplishes its goals. Israel will give some things that don't appreciably hurt its interests in order to maintain good relations with the United States. Make sure to read the rest over at the Gloria Center. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76073/what-went-between-obama-and-netanyahu |
Is The Drilling Moratorium A Bad Idea? | The logic behind a moratorium on deepwater drilling seems sound enough. Until we have a better idea of exactly why Deepwater Horizon blew up and gushed millions of gallons of crude into the Gulfand what other risks are still lurking out thereit's probably not a good idea to go ahead with a whole bunch of new insanely complex projects. At least, that's what the Obama administration is thinking. Last month, it proposed a six-month halt on drilling that would affect 33 rigs under construction. After a federal judge struck that moratorium down, the administration came back with a slightly refurbished proposal. But, as always, these decisions are never uncontroversialor cost-free. Politicians along the Gulf, particularly Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and David Vitter, have been warning that a moratorium will cost jobs. Those 33 rigs employ 8,000 people, to say nothing of the indirect costs and job losses (rig supply boats, for instance, are losing about $1 million per day). Oil firms have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to maintain and protect the idle rigs. Not surprisingly, two drilling companies, Murphy Oil Corp. and Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc., just announced that they couldn't handle the uncertainty and are shifting their operations to the Congo (where, we can assume, safety regulations are considerably shoddier). And in Louisiana, people are legitimately upset about the disruption to drilling. Time's Bryan Walsh reports from the first public hearings of the presidential oil spill commission yesterday, where many locals insisted that the moratorium was going to do more damage than the spill itself. "We are at the epicenter of the drilling suspension," said Charlotte Randolph, the president of Lafourche Parish. "The spill has decimated the fishing industry, but the moratorium will end life as we know it in our parish." The numbers back her up: The energy industry, as Walsh notes, is worth $65 billion to Louisiana; tourism and fishing only brings in about $10 billion. Some members of the oil-spill commission seem to think so. At a news conference yesterday, Bob Graham, one of the new co-chairmen, compared the situation with a recent order by the FAA to inspect cockpit window heaters on 1,200 Boeing airliners: "I'm sure they didn't wait until all 1,200 airplanes had been evaluated to release the first ones back." Graham also questioned whether a flat six-month moratorium was really appropriateand suggested that rigs should be able to start operating again once regulators were satisfied that they've met safety guidelines. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76269/could-drilling-moratorium-do-more-harm-good |
Is There Anything Obama Could Have Done To Remain Popular? | The New York Times lead news analysis today contrasts President Obama's legislative success with his mediocre poll ratings: If passage of the financial regulatory overhaul on Thursday proves anything about President Obama, it is this: He knows how to push big bills through a balky Congress. But Mr. Obamas legislative success poses a paradox: while he may be winning on Capitol Hill, he is losing with voters at a time of economic distress, and soon may be forced to scale back his ambitions.... Today, with unemployment remaining persistently near double digits despite the scale of the stimulus program and the BP oil spill having raised questions about his administrations competence, Mr. Obamas signature legislation is providing ammunition to conservatives who argue that government is the problem, not the solution. Politico's big news analysis yesterday made a similar point. Some downsides spring to mind immediately: he'd be abandoning his campaign platform, he'd be seen as weak and ineffectual, his base would be in full revolt. They were no less apoplectic at Bill Clinton even after Clinton abandoned his ambitious agenda. The conservative mood is like the sound system in Spinal Tap, always set at 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, but occasionally cranked up to 11. Suppose furthermore that he enacted a much smaller stimulus, and let's suppose that conservatives are right that such a plan would have helped the economy as much or more. And suppose that he decided not to pursue financial reform -- or, at least, pursued a plan that gained the assent of Wall Street and, thus, many Republicans. Let me answer this question with another question: Am I the only person who remembers George H.W. He presided over a recession, albeit a far milder one. And he was lambasted for lacking an agenda. The notion that Bush lacked a domestic agenda was the defining indictment of his presidency. Here's a very typical piece of analysis, also from the New York Times, from April 30, 1992: | https://newrepublic.com/article/76314/there-anything-obama-could-have-done-remain-popular |
Has Liberal Interventionism Run Its Course? | I wish Kosovo were an exceptional case. But it is not. At the very best, the record of these interventions based on humanitarian or human rights concerns is mixed. The American intervention in Iraq secured a de facto Kurdish state, unseated Sunni political domination and sounded the death-knell for Christianity in Iraq, since the reality is that it was Saddam who protected the Iraqi Christians. Neither they nor the Yazidis can expect any such indulgence from the Shia, or from the Kurds for that matter. My own view is that history shows that we are not, and because we are not climbing down from our plinth would be anything but immorality or dereliction. Take Darfur, which is often thought of by activists as the intervention that should have happened had Washington taken its obligations to freedom seriously. Leave aside the fact that, even if you believe a genocide did take place in Darfur, it is generally thought to have ended several years before the rise of Save Darfur and other activist groups (as Saddams Anfal campaign against the Kurds ended long before the Bush administration began mobilizing for war). Imagine we had intervened in 2005 or 2006, as the activists were demanding. In all likelihood, we would have needed either to force regime change in Khartoum or establish an open-ended protectorate in Darfur, or, more likely, both. It is one thing to love justice, and to want there to be more of it in the world, and quite another to imagine that your own countrywhich like most countries is a volatile mixture of virtue and vicehas the wisdom to be its global midwife, even when it has the power to take on the role. Part of the problem, I think, is that when we speak of democracy or human rights, the mental map that we conjure up is the binary one of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, into which we Americans can insert ourselves as vindicator (again, I am talking about national self-conceptions and, in this context, taking the claim at face value). But this account simply does not conform to the sad reality that todays oppressed are quite often yesterdays oppressors, and todays victims tomorrows victimizers. Rwanda is a good example of both phenomena. And if history is not a progressive narrative, but rather, as I believe it to be, something more akin to a Mobius Strip, then liberal interventionism, with its Lincolnesque moral ambitions writ globalAs He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, and all thathas failure inscribed on its DNA. I am not only talking about democracy at the point of a gun, though of course it offers the most egregious examples of this kind of moral over-reach. To say this is emphatically not to argue that the United States or the European Union should side with Mubarak, pere et fils, but rather that in Egypt, as in most places in the world, democracy is not necessarily an unalloyed good andthis, for me, is the central pointjustice is not within Washingtons gift. No, this is not the world American idealism would choose to live in if it could choose, as during the age of American preponderance now ending as we follow other insolvent empires into relative decline, it imagined it could. And perhaps the interventionists are right, and I am wrong, and that world would be a better and more decent one. But mourn the fact, or, as I do, welcome it, if that world ever existed, it is gone for good. David Rieff is the author of eight books including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76050/has-liberal-interventionism-run-its-course |
Which Obama Is the Good Obama? | Health care reform was a replica of a proposal first developed by Republicans in 1993, and more recently a bipartisan plan endorsed by Bob Dole, Howard Baker and George Mitchell. (It also takes the basic model of Mitt Romney's health care plan but adds a series of measures to encourage delivery-system reforms to reduce costs.) Brooks also puts the stimulus in the bad, big government box. But the stimulus consisted of 40% tax cuts. And of course the concept of fiscal stimulus to respond to a liquidity trap used to be so controversial that Republicans advocated it in 2001 even when interest rates had not hit the zero bound and the substantive merits were much murkier. I also assume that Obama's financial rescue plan is part of his old, stale big government agenda. But of course that plan relied on private capital and infuriated liberals by declining to temporarily nationalize failed banks. More confusingly still, Brooks's example of new, category-scrambling initiatives consist of direct federal spending of the sort that old-fashioned liberals have advocated for decades. Federal infrastructure spending is a perennial item on the liberal agenda. Investing in new energy technologies is what used to get derided as "industrial policy." It's government picking winners and losers. Now, it may be justified, but it's actually the most paleoliberal thing Obama has done. Even more confusingly, all these great category-scrambling ideas were financed through the bad old-fashioned big government stimulus. Education reform is a genuine example of a non-traditionally Democratic issue. But that too was financed through the stimulus and involves more central government. Not a whole lot. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76576/which-obama-the-good-obama |
What Does Mayoral Candidate Vincent Gray Really Think About Education in D.C.? | Last week, D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee announced that she had fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received low ratings under the Districts new teacher evaluation system, called IMPACT. As I wrote on Friday, the firings represent a big step for education reform. Teacher evaluations across the country are badly constructed and executed, as are the processes used to remove bad teachers. D.C. is leading the way in improving both. But this story runs deeper. Rhee is at the heart of D.C.s heated mayoral race, between incumbent Adrian Fenty and City Council Chairman Vincent Gray. Fenty, who hired Rhee, remains her most vocal supporter. Gray has not indicated what he would do with Rhee if he won, in an apparent attempt to please both those who love Rhee and those who love to hate her. (A Washington Post poll from January showed that 44 percent of D.C. residents disapprove of the job shes doing; among black residents, disapproval hit 62 percent.) Not surprisingly, Rhee recently hinted in two interviews, including one with the Post, that shed leave her job if Gray ousts Fenty. Fenty stood by Rhee, yet again: As Mayor, I will not sit still, and I will not be satisfied until a highly effective teacher is in every classroom. Today's action puts us one step closer to that goal. Gray, perhaps just as predictably, waffled: According to the Post, he said he "wanted to look further at the basis for the dismissals" and noted that there is "still controversy" surrounding IMPACT. (That last part is certainly true: A recent poll by the Washington Teachers Union found that 52 percent of 1,000 respondentsthere are about 4,000 teachers in D.C. Public Schoolssaid they dont understand what is required of them to do well according to new system.) To find out, I revisited his platform, which he released a few weeks ago. Gray says he supports remov[ing] low-performing teachers from the system. But he hasnt endorsed IMPACT. Rather, he says he would [m]ove swiftly to implement the independent evaluation of the current IMPACT evaluation system and [e]nsure that we have a fair and research-based evaluation system that holds our teachers accountable but also provides multiple strategies for assessing student growth (e.g., teacher portfolios) and teacher effectiveness. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76564/what-does-mayoral-candidate-vincent-gray-really-think-about-education-in-dc |
What Do Liberals Want From Obama? | Bob isnt that impressed and, I know, neither are many other liberals. Among other things, they think Obama made too many compromises. The recovery act was too small. Financial reform wont break up the big banks. Health care reform has no public option. Etc etc. The compromises are real enough. But, to make what should be a familiar point by now, so are the political constraints. Corporate money and lobbying magnifies the power of conservatives, who already have disproportionate representation in the Senate--where, of course, it takes a ridiculously-super-majority of 60 to pass just about anything. Obama simply cant pass legislation through Congress without compromising with conservative Democrats and (now) at least one Republican. Bob thinks Obama could do a better job of educating the public, starting with the reality about deficits and the economy. I can see that, at least to a point. Obama could defend government more explicitly. Im certainly getting sick and tired of that paragraph, seemingly cut and pasted into every speech, in which Obama insists he wants good government not big government. But Ive always thought the presidents biggest ability to shape the political conversation is by setting the agenda--that is, by choosing what causes to embrace and then elevating them issue through his speeches and actions. Critics on the left seem to think the choice was between a pretty good plan and a spectacular one. It wasnt. The choice was between a pretty good plan and nothing at all. Even plenty of Democrats thought Obama shouldnt also pursue climate change and financial reform. Yet hes continued to pursue both, albeit with varying results. That's not to say Obama is as liberal as some of his more liberal fans (like me) want. Finding fault with his presidency isnt impossible, or even that hard. A good starting point would be the utterly avoidable regulatory failures, documented by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone and Brad Plumer here at TNR, that enabled the Gulf oil spill. But those failures and mistakes are part of a bigger story, one I would have thought made more liberals proud. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76046/what-do-liberals-want-obama |
What's Really Spooking Business? | Theres a legitimate argument to be made that President Obama has not done enough to nurse the economy back to health. And the survey shows only 39 percent of small-business owners somewhat or strongly approve of how Obama is handling the economy. But the fault is not entirely his. Congressional Republicans, for example, forced over $100 billion in cuts from a more substantial stimulus proposal. And most of the money for a new jobs bill went poof by the time the Republicans, working with some conservative Democrats were done: a wide-ranging bill priced at nearly $200 billion became a $34 billion extension of unemployment benefits. The government isnt doing enough to make things better, I agree. With so many businesses seeing the economy as getting worse, however, the investment spending needed to accelerate the economy isnt going to materialize. Thats not caused by a fear of regulations. | https://newrepublic.com/article/76559/whats-really-spooking-business |
Who are the Cincinnati Bengals 2019 undrafted college free agent signings? | CLOSE Zac Taylor talks about the focus of the draft being around the run game. Albert Cesare, [email protected] Standing at 6-foot-7, Jake Dolegala stood out at Cincinnati Bengals minicamp on Friday as the tallest player working out. The quarterback out of Central Connecticut State was one of 10 undrafted college free agent signings in attendance alongside the team's 10 2019 draft picks and two dozen veteran and rookie invites. Dolegala rotated reps with fourth-round pick Ryan Finley. "We're all in the same room," Dolegala said. "I do (feel confident), 100 percent, yes. I belong here." The rookie quarterbacks threw passes to a trio of undrafted free agent wideouts Nebraska's Stanley Morgan, Tiffin's Charles Holland and Troy's Damion Willis a spot of interest after the team passed on the position in the draft. "You see some raw talent there," said Bengals coach Zac Taylor. "We signed three free agents who all had great college careers and certainly three guys that could have gotten drafted and didn't." Here's a look at each of the Bengals undrafted college free agent signings: Linebacker Curtis Akins; 6-1, 235; Memphis Ran the 40-yard dash in the 4.5s and recorded a 34.5-inch vertical jump at Memphis Pro Day. As a senior, he totaled 100 tackles (62 solo) with three for a loss and a sack. Cornerback Anthony Chesley; 6-0, 188; Coastal Carolina Was the only junior voted as a team captain at Coastal Carolina for the 2017 season and was a member of the team's leadership council in each season of his four-year career. Quarterback Jake Dolegala; 6-7, 242; Central Connecticut State Holds CCSU's all-time career passing yards record at 8,129. Threw 48 touchdowns and 29 interceptions. "Big, tall guy, strong arm," Taylor said. "Had a good career there at Central Connecticut State, so we're excited to get a guy like that in here and get a chance to evaluate him in person." Offensive guard/tackle OShea Dugas; 6-4, 330; Louisiana Tech A four-year contributor for the Bulldogs, Dugas earned Conference USA All-Conference honors as a junior and senior. He has the ability to play both guard and tackle, though Dugas said he worked out solely at tackle on Friday. Running back Jordan Ellis; 5-10, 229; Virginia; Suwanee, Ga. NEWSLETTERS Get the Bengals Beat newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-876-4500. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Bengals Beat Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters Rushed for 1,997 yards and 19 touchdowns in his four-year career in Charlottesville. Before the draft last month, NFL analyst Lance Zierlein wrote Ellis' "ability to create yardage through power gives him a roster shot as a potential priority free agent." Wide receiver Charles Holland; 6-2, 194; Tiffin Considered one of the best players in the history of the Division II Tiffin program, Holland finished second in the school record book with 40 touchdowns and 3,603 career receiving yards. Safety Tyree Kinnel; 5-11, 207; Michigan Ran a 4.48-second 40-yard dash at Michigan Pro Day and spent time at nickel cornerback for the Wolverines. Said to be a sure tackler whose lack of coverage instincts likely kept teams from drafting him. Wide receiver Stanley Morgan; 6-0, 202; Nebraska Not related to the former New England Patriots All Pro. This Stanley Morgan became the first player in Nebraska Cornhuskers history to record more than 1,000 yards receiving in a season. He holds school record for receptions (189), receiving yards (2,689), consecutive games with a reception (38) and caught 22 career touchdowns. Offensive guard/tackle Keaton Sutherland; 6-5, 316; Texas A&M A versatile o-lineman that Bengals assistant Jim Turner is familiar with, Sutherland is said to have have the size and strength to make it at the pro level, though his run blocking and pass pro technique must develop. Wide receiver Damion Willis; 6-3, 204; Troy Ran a 4.48 40-yard dash time at Troy Pro Day. As a senior, he caught 56 passes for 876 yards and 10 touchdowns. More: Cincinnati Bengals 2019 roster: Team announces undrafted free agents, rookie-camp invites More: Cincinnati Bengals acquire RB Darrin Hall on waivers from Cleveland Browns | https://www.cincinnati.com/story/sports/nfl/bengals/2019/05/10/cincinnati-bengals-zac-taylor-college-free-agent-signings/1165935001/ |
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