question
stringlengths 11
179
| article
stringlengths 522
97.6k
| url
stringlengths 35
310
|
|---|---|---|
Will California Cut A Deal On Mileage Standards? | Late last month, recall, the Obama administration finally tightened federal fuel-economy rulesa combined average of 27.3 miles per gallon for new cars and light trucks in 2011 and 35 miles per gallon by 2020. That's far looser than the standards in Europe and Japan, and, in fact, it's slightly less than what the Bush administration had initially proposed, but most environmentalists praised it as an encouraging first step. It's the first increase in CAFE standards since the mid-1980s, after all. The big question, though, is whether the EPA will grant California a waiver to set its own, stricter fuel-economy rules, as it's allowed to do under the Clean Air Act. The state has proposed rules that could rev up standards to as high as 42 mpg by 2020 (that's about what the Prius and hybrid Honda Civic get now). The Bush EPA denied California a waiver for no good reason, but everyone is expecting the current administration to grant approval. If California is allowed to set those stricter rules, some 17 other states would likely follow. Automakers hate this idea, arguing that they'd have to meet two different standardsthe federal one and the California one. But now InsideEPA is reporting that a compromise between California and the EPA may be in the worksthe Obama administration would issue a single federal standard that had California's more-aggressive targets, but that was structured like a federal CAFE standard. On th latter point, California wants to issue a fleet-wide standard for all automakers, whereas the federal Department of Transportation under Bush proposed a new "attribute-based" system that lets different companies adopt different standards depending on their size of their vehicles. (In essence, Detroit's Big Three, which makes larger vehicles, would face less-stringent standards under the federal approach than, say, Toyota or Honda.) The compromise would likely adopt the latter approach. Now, this attribute-based system always struck me as a little goofy, an overly complicated way to perpetuate America's love affair with big honking vehicles (here's an analysis by the University of Michigan's Walter McManus). Still, the plan seems to placate the automakers, while early reporting suggests environmentalists would be appeased by the stricter standards. Now we'll see whether California officials agree to the deal. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48874/will-california-cut-deal-mileage-standards |
Who won when Boston Red Sox' Benintendi, Seattle Mariners' Swanson faced off at Fenway? | CLOSE Scott Springer with former Madeira standout Andrew Benintendi of the Boston Red Sox The Enquirer/Scott Springer Tonight in the first inning of the Seattle Mariners' game against the Boston Red Sox, former Mariemont High School hurler Erik Swanson faced former Madeira slugger Andrew Benintendi, Boston's lead-off hitter. It comes nearly seven years to the day that Mariemont and Madeira squared off in a second-round Ohio Division III tournament game at Sellman Park behind Madeira Middle School. Boston Red Sox's Andrew Benintendi follows through on a double against the Baltimore Orioles during the first inning of a baseball game Wednesday, May 8, 2019, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Gail Burton) (Photo: The Associated Press) In the bottom of the first at Fenway Friday, Benintendi took the 93 mile per hour first pitch for a ball, then swung and missed on another fastball. With a 1-1 count, the former Mustang lined out to left on a changeup giving the former Warrior Swanson the advantage in their first big league encounter. In the 2012 game, Swanson was overpowering as usual, striking out Benintendi twice. However, the future World Series winner would eventually connect on a fastball and send it just far enough to right helping the Mustangs to a 2-0 victory. Seattle Mariners starting pitcher Erik Swanson throws against the Texas Rangers in the first inning of a baseball game Sunday, April 28, 2019, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson) (Photo: The Associated Press) Swanson went on to junior college and was drafted in 2014 by the Rangers. He was traded to the Yankees and then to the Mariners where he made his major league debut this year. Benintendi went to Arkansas and was the seventh overall player chosen in the 2015 draft. He's been in the bigs since 2016 and was part of last fall's World Series championship squad. "It says something about that league at that time, that's for sure," former Madeira head coach (now Walnut Hills) Jack Kuzniczci said. Added Andrew's father, Chris Benintendi, "No one would have believed you if you had a crystal ball. 'These guys are going to meet again. Seven years at Fenway Park! OK. Whatever you say.'" | https://www.cincinnati.com/story/sports/high-school/ohio-high-school/2019/05/10/former-mariemont-pitcher-erik-swanson-threw-former-madeira-hitter-andrew-benintendi-friday-night-fen/1165936001/ |
Is There A Red Economy And A Blue Economy? | This interesting post up a FiveThirtyEight (via Alex Tabarrok) offers some evidence about the way partisanship influences our perceptions of the economy: A good example comes from the research of Larry Bartels. He analyzed a 1988 survey that asked Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse? Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during Reagans eight years in office. Republicans were similarly biased about the Clinton-era economy: in 1996, a majority of Republicans thought that the budget deficit had increased. This partisan filter was also evident after the Democrats retaking of Congress in 2006. Research by Alan Gerber and Greg Huber shows that Democrats became much more optimistic, and Republicans more pessimistic, about the national economy. I guess it's not so surprising. Most people would be hard-pressed to tell you the inflation rate or the size of the budget deficit at any given time (I'd bet a significant number would struggle to even define those concepts). And if you don't follow the data very closely (or at all), there are only so many things that can shape your perceptions, one of which is likely to be who's in charge. (Another of which is obviously how you're doing personally, though perception can dominate reality even there, leading to distorting feedback.) Still, the speed with which these perceptions change along with a transfer of power says something telling about partisanship. Also telling/interesting: "[T]he extent of the differences in perceptions between Democrats and Republicans has increased in the past thirty years, according to the research of Joseph Bafumi in his Ph.D. thesis on 'the stubborn American voter.'" That seems to coincide with a rise in partisanship over the same time. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49099/there-red-economy-and-blue-economy |
What's Coleman's Angle? | It's easy to understand why Republican Senators like John Cornyn are eager for the Franken-Coleman legal brouhaha to drag on for years: it'll deprive Democrats of a Senate seat for that long. I suppose it's possible he's delusional enough to think that some court, at some point, will actually declare that he and not Franken won the race, but that seems doubtful. And, while it's easy for guys like Cornyn to wage this legal battle, it has to be hell for Coleman. The controversy over payments allegedly ordered by Coleman donor/friend Nasser Kazeminy to an agency where Colemans wife worked has begun to bubble again, adding to Colemans plate and his legal bills. This time, a second source has corroborated that allegation. Coleman announced in December that he would pay lawyers fees related to the case from his campaign fund, and his spokesman said at the time that the campaign was preparing to seek approval from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and Senate Ethics Committee. That means asking the FEC for an advisory opinion. But as of Thursday, more than three months later, Colemans campaign has filed no request for an advisory opinion, according to the FEC website. Putting aside the whole recount battle, Coleman is likely facing some steep personal legal bills from this Kazeminy case, among others. (Politico has a nice run-down of the world of hurt Coleman's likely to be in on the legal front.) Beats me. But it seems like the only other possibility is that he truly is delusional--in that he thinks he might actually win. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48833/whats-colemans-angle |
Should Paulson Have Forced The Merrill-bofa Merger? | The big story yesterday (and into today) was that Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke basically forced Bank of America to go ahead with its merger with Merrill even after BofA realized it would be on the hook for over $15 billion in Merrill losses. The two officials also seem to have pressured BofA CEO Ken Lewis to keep quiet about the losses (or at least gave him the strong impression it was in his interest to do so) so that his shareholders wouldn't torpedo the deal. This all came to light thanks to an investigation Andrew Cuomo conducted into suspiciously large bonuses at the company. I won't lie to you--it's not exactly a victory for transparency in economic policymaking. On the other hand, I do think the action is basically defensible, except for one quibble. The issue comes down to this: Paulson and Bernanke knew the alternative to merging Merrill into BofA would be Merrill's collapse, which could lead to a systemic meltdown. So they had very good reason to make the merger go through. The problem was that, by essentially imposing that outcome, Paulson and Bernanke were shunting Merrill's losses onto BofA shareholders without their knowledge. In normal times, you'd obviously like to avoid that. When the fate of the entire financial system hangs in the balance, I don't think you want to hang yourself on shareholders' rights to information--even highly relevant information. What I think you do need to do, however, is make some small effort to compensate them, since it wasn't their company that screwed up (at least not on a massive scale like Merrill). | https://newrepublic.com/article/49245/should-paulson-have-forced-the-merrill-bofa-merger |
What Will This Week's Climate Forum Accomplish? | Katherine Michonski is a research associate for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations. Yesterday, the Obama administration kicked off its Major Economies Forum on energy and climate change, bringing together 17 countries, including Brazil, China, India, the EU, Indonesia, Japan, Britain, and South Africa, to build momentum for a "successful outcome" at the U.N. climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, as well as explore smaller "concrete" clean-energy steps. This is basically a reformulation of an earlier Bush initiative (the Major Economies Meeting) with a slightly new title. The Bush effort was sometimes criticized for being little more than an attempt to undermine ongoing U.N. talks. But the process is valuableand worth watching. The logic behind the Major Economies Forum is that the U.N. climate talkswith its 192 participating countriesis far too unwieldy to get a number of critical issues resolved effectively. It makes sense to have a smaller, more flexible forum to hash out key issues among the major emitters, who are responsible for 80 percent of the world's carbon emissions and will have to take the biggest steps in curbing that pollution. The MEF would ideally allow these countries to focus on more high-impact "joint ventures" that might not get due consideration or support within the U.N. framework. The forum could also help the major players develop their negotiating positions for Copenhagen and deal with a few of the more contentious issues outside of the U.N. framework. All parties in the U.N. climate talks have met once already, in Bonn, and will meet four more times this year. The rifts between developing and developed countries (over, among other things, financing for mitigation and adaptation) that surface during those U.N. talks could be addressed in more detail in the MEF forum, providing an opportunity for some sort of pre-Copenhagen agreement by the major emitters to emerge before the actual negotiations in Copenhagen begin. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49325/what-will-weeks-climate-forum-accomplish |
Who Wants A Lap-dog Ag Now? | In light of the White House's new coordinated response to the question of whether there will be torture prosecutions--that constitutionally it's not up to the president but the Attorney General--it's interesting to think back to Eric Holder's confirmation hearings. Back then, the conservative case against Holder centered around his role in the Marc Rich pardon, which, some Republicans alleged, proved he wouldn't be sufficiently independent AG. But now, seeing as how Obama pretty clearly doesn't favor the prosecution of Bush administration officials for torture, I wonder how many Republicans are hoping Holder is a yes man for Obama. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49289/who-wants-lap-dog-ag-now |
Is Treasury Being Hoodwinked By A Small Band Of Greedy Investors? | Apparently that's the conclusion of a banking industry analyst highlighted on the Times Deal Book blog yesterday: Mr. Bove said he believed that a small group of investors betting against the banks have persuaded the markets, and perhaps the government, to put too much emphasis on a banks tangible common equity ratio [a measure of bank capital that's more conservative--i.e., requires more capital--than the more commonly-used Tier 1 capital ratio]. He says that no studies exist to validate the connection between a banks health and its level of tangible common equity. In fact, for decades it has been the opposite, he said, as banks were encouraged not to have too much capital lying around. I don't know enough to render a judgment on whether the shift to the more rigorous standard is part of an evil plot to make banks look weaker than they are so investors can make a killing shorting bank stocks. But any argument that takes the form, "banks have been doing it for decades," does not immediately strike me as a winning one. Banks have been doing a lot of things for decades that, in retrospect, look pretty unhealthy--like not reserving enough (i.e., not keeping enough capital "lying around") for potential losses. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48964/treasury-being-hoodwinked-small-band-greedy-investors |
Is The Gop Cynical Or Naive? | Responding to Ezra Klein's contention that the GOP alternative budget unveiled this week was a cynical effort at "messaging," rather than a serious attempt at governance, Ross Douthat suggests: Sure, there may be some cynicism involved in how the Ryan proposal makes its numbers add up. But the overall outline - an across-the-board tax cut and a flatter tax code, substantial means-testing for Social Security and Medicare, and a five-year discretionary spending freeze - strikes me as the opposite of cynical. Rather, there's a kind of deep innocence about it: The purity of its small-government vision is more detached from the grubby realities of American politics than any similar document I can remember.... Sometimes naivete in the short run is wisdom in the long run. And maybe by providing such a rigorously small-government alternative to Obamanomics, the Congressional GOP will succeed in pushing the conversation rightward.... But sometimes naivete is just naivete. Sometimes, putting your least-popular ideas together in one agenda just makes it easier for your opponents to run circles around you. And right now, I think the country could use a right-of-center party that paid a little more attention to its messaging, and a little less attention to its blueprints for the ideal small-government society. It strikes me that they--and a disturbingly large section of the party--are both. Such wild, deliberate deceptions are no part of a "pure" or "rigorous" small-government vision. GOP leaders in the House are trying to sell something, and they're trying to sell it by lying through their teeth. The problem--and this is where the naivete comes in--is that, as Ross notes, what they're trying to sell isn't what most Americans want, ridiculous budgeting gimmicks or no ridiculous budgeting gimmicks. A variety of factors--the media chorus of talk radio and Fox News, the increasing number of GOP House members that come from conservative districts, the vocal pressure groups and riled up voter base--seem to have persuaded a fair number of GOP leaders that this is not merely a center-right nation, but a far-right one, a place where if you just screw around with the numbers a bit, the public will clamor for economic policies far more conservative than any pushed by Reagan or Bush II. That they believe this three months into the term of the most liberal president elected in a generation, at a moment when he is still very popular and they are still very not, is a testament to the imperviousness of the echo chamber. A couple of days ago, I caught a few minutes of conservative talker Mark Levin on the radio, and it was a fascinating trip down the rabbit hole. The subject of his broadcast--or, at least, the few minutes I Iistened to--was what arguments could be used to persuade voters that conservatives had the right answers for these times. And the answer he gave is that they need to hear the broadcast of Ronald Reagan's 1964 speech endorsing Barry Goldwater, "A Time For Choosing." (The show seems to have been rebroadcast from December, suggesting that Reagan's lessons withstand the test of months as well as decades.) Levin interrupted the speech every couple of minutes to extol its virtues and go on at length about the difference between "us" (i.e., conservatives) and "them" (i.e., liberals). To call the praise he heaped upon the former and scorn he dumped on the latter hyperbolic would stretch the word to its limit. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48844/the-gop-cynical-or-naive |
What was FL Gov. Ron DeSantis first veto? | Heres how long it takes for the most common types of trash to decompose in the ocean Trash is a major problem in our oceans, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here's how long it takes for some of the most common types of trash to decompose including straws, plastic bags and balloons. Up Next SHARE COPY LINK Trash is a major problem in our oceans, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Here's how long it takes for some of the most common types of trash to decompose including straws, plastic bags and balloons. Gov. Ron DeSantis flexed his veto power for the first time Friday night, declining to sign an environmental bill that would have prohibited local governments from banning plastic straws for the next five years. In his veto letter to Secretary of State Laurel Lee, he said municipalities that prohibit plastic straws have not frustrated any state policy or harmed the states interest. Under the bill, a study of each ordinance or regulation adopted by local governments related to single-use plastic straws would have to be conducted by the Department of Environmental Protection and then submitted to Senate President Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, and House Speaker Jos Oliva, R-Miami Lakes. The study would focus on the data and conclusions used in adopting local ordinances instead of the environmental impacts, which had irked environmental groups that argue that theres enough evidence of the effect of plastic pollution. Unlimited Digital Access: Only $0.99 For Your First Month Get full access to Miami Herald content across all your devices. SAVE NOW #ReadLocal The bill initially was meant to ban plastic straws, but was heavily amended during a March committee meeting to do the opposite. The state should simply allow local communities to address this issue through the political process, DeSantis wrote. Citizens who oppose plastic straw ordinances can seek recourse by electing people who share their views. DeSantis hinted strongly at his willingness to let cities ban plastic straws late last month during a visit to Key Biscayne to talk up efforts to create a greener Super Bowl in Miami next year. Standing just behind the dunes on Crandon Beach, he said, My general view is locals should make decisions and if you dont like them, you can vote someone else in. If theyre doing things that infringe on peoples constitutional freedoms or frustrate state policy, then that becomes something that can be ripe for state intervention, he said. Unless I see it violating some other principle I usually just let people do that as they see fit. Gov. Ron DeSantis flexed his veto power for the first time Friday night, declining to sign an environmental bill that would have prohibited local governments from banning plastic straws for the next five years. Hes shown here at a press conference a few days earlier talking about his environmental initiatives. Carl Juste [email protected] In 2008, the Legislature enacted a similar law requiring the Department of Environmental Protection to analyze the need for new or different regulation of auxiliary containers, wrappings, or disposable plastic bags used by consumers to carry products from retail establishments. To date, the Legislature has not adopted any recommendations contained in the report, and campaigns to eliminate plastic straws in Florida have continued to pop up. In February 2016, Coral Gables voted to ban the use of Styrofoam containers even after the Legislature passed a law prohibiting cities from banning the polystyrene products. That summer, the city was sued by the Florida Retail Federation Inc., and Super Progreso Inc., which alleged that the ordinance was preempted by state statute. The courts ruled that the ordinance was valid and enforceable. DEP launched its own Skip the Straw campaign earlier this year, and cities like Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach and St. Petersburg have passed regulations about plastic utensils. Recalling how few vetoes were made during his 10-year career in the Legislature, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said the governors veto meant a lot. I am very grateful, Gelber said Friday night. Our residents want to strive to keep our environment as pristine as possible. I think the governor helped us today. Sometimes I think the Legislature does overreach on some of these issues and obviously, the governor thought so too. In a video Gelber shared with lawmakers, he warned that the bill would have a disastrous impact on the environment and economy in Miami Beach. If our residents dont want a more pristine beachfront, they will elect different people, he said. St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Kriseman called DeSantis position refreshing, and thanked him for the veto. This is a victory not just for local control and home rule, but common sense as well as the environment, he said. Miami Herald staff writer David Smiley contributed to this report. | https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article230280599.html |
Is Sarah Palin (implicitly) Pro-choice? | WaPo's Ruth Marcus makes the case, drawing on a speech Palin gave at a pro-life dinner last week. Marcus quotes Palin at length, discussing her second thoughts at the discovery that she was pregnant at 44 and that her baby would have Down syndrome: Oh, dear God, I knew, I had instantly an understanding for that fleeting moment why someone would believe it could seem possible to change those circumstances. Just make it all go away and get some normalcy back in life. Just take care of it. Because at the time only my doctor knew the results, Todd didn't even know. No one would know.... So we went through some things a year ago that now lets me understand a woman's, a girl's temptation to maybe try to make it all go away if she has been influenced by society to believe that she's not strong enough or smart enough or equipped enough or convenienced enough to make the choice to let the child live. I do understand what these women, what these girls go through in that thought process. Marcus then pounces, arguing that "if it were up to Palin, women would have no thought process to go through. The 'good decision to choose life,' as she put it, would be no decision at all, because abortion would not be an option." I'm sympathetic to the intent of this argument, but ultimately I don't think it holds water. There are, after all, plenty of situations in which we applaud someone for doing one thing, even as we believe the alternative should be unacceptable or even illegal. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49142/sarah-palin-implicitly-pro-choice |
What Do John Kiriakou And Lenny Dykstra Have In Common? | The New York Times has a good story today about John Kiriakou and the role he played in shaping the torture debate. In late 2007, Kiriakou told ABC News's Brian Ross that the captured Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah began cooperating with his CIA interrogators after "probably 30, 35 seconds" of waterboarding--leaving the distinct impression that Zubaydah was only waterboarded once. But we now know, courtesy of the declassified Justice Department memos, that Zubaydah was actually waterboarded 83 times. Kiriakou wasn't necessarily lying or trying to cover for the CIA when he gave his interview to ABC (in fact, the CIA briefly considered taking legal action against Kiriakou for revealing classified information). The problem was, Kiriakou was basing his comments about Zubaydah's interrogation on reports from the field. That's because, as the Times article reports, Kiriakou wasn't in the secret Thai prison where Zubaydah was being waterboarded; he was at CIA headquarters in Langley. Amazingly, ABC didn't see fit to mention this when it broadcast Kiriakou's interview. Now, technically, ABC never explicitly said that Kiriakou was physically present for Zubaydah's interrogation, but it never said he wasn't there either. And ABC certainly included enough other information about Kiriakou in its piece--that he was "a leader of the CIA team that captured" Zubaydah; that he himself had "declined to use the enhanced interrogation techniques"--that it left the distinct impression he was there watching Zubaydah get waterboarded. Definitely. At the time he did his interview with ABC, little was known about waterboarding, and even if Kiriakou wasn't physically present for Zubaydah's interrogation, he was, as a CIA intelligence officer, privy to reports from the field. The problem, from ABC's perspective at least, is the fact that he wasn't physically there made his story merely good. The network, however, presumably wanted a blockbuster--and so it failed to include that crucial caveat when it reveal Kiriakou's claim. The true story--which was merely good--had to be sexed up in order to make it great. It's not fabrication, it's not even exaggeration, but it's presenting the facts in such a way that, by excluding certain details--or maybe just switching off the skepticism switch--a journalist can make a story more compelling to his audience. I think this happens in all kinds of journalism--especially magazine journalism, where the need to create a compelling narrative can lead writers to build up the subjects of their pieces into something they aren't. I've been thinking about this a lot lately after reading this article in GQ by the former photo editor of the former baseball star Lenny Dykstra's Players Club magazine. What struck me most about the GQ story is that it completely contradicted a profile of Dykstra the New Yorker did a year earlier. Both pieces go into great detail about Dykstra's eccentricities, but where the New Yorker portrayed Dykstra as a sort of mad business genius--"an exemplar of the transition from professional athletics to respectable civilian life"--the GQ piece shows that Dykstra's business empire was a house of cards. (A recent story on ESPN.com, which reports that Dykstra has been the subject of 24 legal actions, including18 since last November, goes even further than GQ in revealing the charade of Dykstra's alleged success.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/49337/what-do-john-kiriakou-and-lenny-dykstra-have-common |
Who Should Obama Pick For The Court? | The Plank dredged up a 2007 short list of potential nominees to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president. One of the people on it is Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. He is still governor but has written such a dreary record in the office that I doubt even his friend, who happens to be the president of the United States, would risk sending his name to the senate. Not because it wouldn't pass muster on Capitol Hill. But because it wouldn't past muster with what the American people expect from Barack Obama. Of the others, Merrick Garland is about as scholarly, as practical and as genuinely liberal as one might expect. He would bring to the Supremes the disposition of Steve Breyer. Not a bad model to have another such exemplar. Another person on the list Elena Kagan is now solicitor general after having served as Larry Summer's choice as dean of the Harvard Law School. She is on everybody's register, and for good reason. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49421/who-should-obama-pick-the-court |
Why Isn't Obama's Top Pandemic Expert In Her Job Yet? | If you had to conjure up the perfect official to advise President Obama about the swine flu outbreak, it'd probably be somebody who had a strong background in public health--say, somebody who had run the public health department for a vast, densely populated city like New York City. It'd be better, still, if this person had experience in the federal government, as well, perhaps in the Department of Health and Human Servcies. And it'd be just perfect if this person's portfolio included crafting the federal pandemic response strategy. Of course, you'd want this person to have a record of achievement. You'd be pleased to learn this person was the youngest ever to serve as that city's health commissioner--and that, in the job, that person had managed to increase the child vaccination rate while reducing the incidence of tuberculosis. You'd also want to see evidence of this person's judgment and vision--like if, hypothetically, this person had testified to Congress about the threat of bioterrorism in 2001, months before the 9/11 attacks and anthrax scare. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49392/why-isnt-obamas-top-pandemic-expert-her-job-yet |
Who Will Obama Pick To Replace Souter? | Reports are trickling out that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will soon be retiring from the bench, giving Obama the opportunity to make his first SCOTUS appointment. Back during the presidential primaries, TNR writer Jeffrey Rosen lamented the fact that Democrats have a surprisingly shallow bench to pick from: For several decades, presidents have drawn their Supreme Court nominees from the ranks of appellate judges appointed by previous presidents of the same party. And, because the Democrats have been out of the White House for two terms, most of the sitting Democratic appellate judges are too old to be considered plausible Supreme Court candidates. For this reason, a President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton might have to look for candidates in unexpected places. Follow Bush's example with Roberts by promoting someone from private practice to an appellate court first: A Democratic, female John Roberts would be a highly respected Democratic Supreme Court advocate, and the clear front-runner in that category is Beth S. Brinkmann, 49, a partner at Morrison & Foerster who has argued more than 20 cases before the Court. A lawyer like Brinkmann--moderate, pragmatic, and pro-business--would have no trouble being confirmed to an appellate courtship, but there might not be enough time to get her through: Bush was able to promote Roberts from private practice only because there were no Supreme Court vacancies in his first term. A Democratic president may not have this luxury. Click here to read the rest of the piece, in which Rosen explores other possibilities from the realms of academia and politics. --Zvika Krieger | https://newrepublic.com/article/49420/who-will-obama-pick-replace-souter |
Did Specter And The Dems Miscalculate? | Ramesh Ponnuru has a great find: Arlen Specter's indignant reaction to James Jeffords' 2001 party switch. An excerpt: I intend to propose a rule change which would preclude a future recurrence of a Senator's change in parties, in midsession, organizing with the opposition, to cause the upheaval which is now resulting. I take second place to no one on independence voting. But, it is my view that the organizational vote belongs to the party which supported the election of a particular Senator. I believe that is the expectation. And certainly it has been a very abrupt party change, although they have occurred in the past with only minor ripples, none have caused the major dislocation which this one has. When I first ran in 1980, Congressman Bud Shuster sponsored a fundraiser for me in Altoona where Congressman Jack Kemp was the principal speaker. When some questions were raised as to my political philosophy, Congressman Shuster said my most important vote would be the organizational vote. From that day to this, I have believed that the organizational vote belonged to the party which supported my election. ... Accepting Senator Jeffords ' decision was based on principle for the reasons he gave at his news conference on Thursday morning, a question still remains as to whether any such inducement was offered and whether it played any part in Senator JEFFORDS' decision. Questions on such offers and counteroffers should be considered by Senators and by the Senate in an ethical context, but at this moment I do not see any way to effect such conduct by rulemaking or legislation. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49357/did-specter-and-the-dems-miscalculate |
Should We Follow Germany's Lead On Renewables? | Maybe. So far, the policy discussion has mostly focused on either carbon capswhich, by making fossil fuels more expensive, give a boost to wind, solar, geothermal, and other low-carbon sourcesor else on flat renewable mandates for utilities. Both are sound ideas for reducing emissions. But a carbon price is proving tough to enact, while many states that have put renewable electricity standards in place are struggling to meet their goals. I recently wrote a primer on this idea for Audubon (there are even pictures). The basic idea is that utilities have to buy renewable power from anyone who produces it. Period. If I install a solar panel on my roof, I can sell that power into the grid, and the utility will offer me a 15- to 20-year contract at a fixed rate that will cover my costs and ensure a tidy profit. (The rate is set by regulators, and the utility spreads the extra cost among all ratepayers; in Germany, this has meant $4 more per household per month.) Private investors stampede in. Germany, which gets less sun than Minnesota, now has half the world's installed solar capacity. Even in sleepy towns like Freiburg, nearly everyone's rushing to sell electricity from their rooftop solar panels or set up a wind turbine on their farm. Mariah Blake recently explored this idea at greater length in a terrific piece for The Washington Monthly, noting that Gainesville, Florida, has recently adopted a feed-in tariff for solar power and has seen a stunning burst in new photovoltaic installations. At a New America event today pegged to that piece, Ed Regan, a manager at the Gainesville municipal utility, talked a bit more about the city's experience. He had nothing but good things to say, and noted that the tariffs let just about anyone "invest" in power generation. On the downside, because production is so decentralized, many investor-owned utilities may not love the ideathey'd rather own the wind or solar farm themselves than outsource it to households or farmers or companies who then reap all the profit. So that's where you may see opposition. Also at the event, Toby Couture of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory explained that researchers have been a bit puzzled by feed-in tariffs, trying to figure out why they work so well. Partly it's because they give much-needed certainty to investorsthis isn't like the production tax credit, where companies get jittery about entering the market because the credit might expire within a year. The long-term feed-in contracts, by contrast, remove most of that risk. And the tariffs can also help drive innovationsince the rate offered for renewable power keeps declining each year, manufacturers face pressure to keep increasing the efficiency of panels and turbines. (Solar R&D has been booming in Denmark and Germany for this reason.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/48974/should-we-follow-germanys-lead-renewables |
Is Koh In Trouble? | Jeffrey Toobin thinks so, saying the issue of Koh's purported belief in "transnationalism"--i.e. the belief "that American courts should honor and apply the laws of other nations in our courts"--could derail his nomination to serve as the legal advisor at the State Department. Although the most serious charge in the effort to paint Koh as a transnationalist--the charge that he believes sharia should be applied in U.S. courts--is bogus, that doesn't mean the issue as a whole is a total fabrication. As Toobin writes: The point is that this issue is politically toxic, and a real danger to Kohs confirmation, if its mishandled. The issue taps into deep feelings of nationalism, mostly but not only among conservatives. Citizens of the European Union countries regard the power of that central authority with great concern, but thats nothing compared to the skepticism here about the United Nations and other international organizations. It might be easy to assume, given Kohs manifest qualifications for the job, that he will cruise to confirmation. He still may. But this issue is politically radioactive, and he and his sponsors ought to approach it with great caution. Something to keep an eye on, although I think conservative legal activists are going to have to choose which Obama legal nominee they really want to go after: Koh or Dawn Johnsen. It seems like there's only so much energy and political capital they can expend on this sort of thing. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48960/koh-trouble |
What The Hell Does The Public Want, Anyway? | Trying to tease out What Americans Think about climate change is incredibly frustrating. One will show people hand-wring over rising temperatures. But the next poll will suggest it's a low priority compared with other issues. Then a third poll will find that people are willing to trade some economic growth to protect the environment. Yet another poll will show that people don't want to pay more for, say, gaseven if it'd reduce oil use. Obviously, responses are sensitive to the wording of the questionsa tweak here or there can lead to vastly different sentiments. But the overall mishmash makes you wonder if people have the dimmest idea what they're talking about. That said, this extensive new survey from a Yale and George Mason University research team, which interviewed some 2,164 Americans in late 2008, puts together a fairly coherent picture of public opinion on climate issues, and jibes with many previous findings. Some 72 percent of respondents think global warming is important. But it's a backburner issue compared with our economic woesand ranks just tenth out of eleven national issues. Scientists may be pleading that we're fast approaching a point-of-no-return, as temperatures soar and various "tipping points" lurk around the bend, but people are distracted. Still, there's ample support for certain policies: - 92 percent supported more funding for research on renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power; - 85 percent supported tax rebates for people buying energy efficient vehicles or solar panels; - 80 percent said the government should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant; - 69 percent of Americans said the United States should sign an international treaty that requires the U.S. to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 90% by the year 2050. Tally it up, and the public basically endorses Obama's energy agendaplus supporting more offshore drilling and more nuclear plants. What's more, 67 percent of Americans say we should reduce our greenhouse gas emissions even if China, India, and Brazil haven't already actedthey're perfectly ready for the United States to show some sort of global leadership. Surprisingly, support remains quite sturdy: - 79 percent supported a 45 mpg fuel efficiency standard for cars, trucks, and SUVs, even if that meant a new vehicle cost up to $1,000 more to buy; - 72 percent supported a requirement that electric utilities produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, or other renewable energy sources, even if it costs the average household an extra $100 a year; - 72 percent supported a government subsidy to replace old water heaters, air conditioners, light bulbs, and insulation, even if it cost the average household $5 a month in higher taxes; - 63 percent supported a special fund to make buildings more energy efficient and teach Americans how to reduce their energy use, even if this cost the average household $2.50 a month in higher electric bills. But these results are striking, not least because this survey was taken last fall, when gas prices were soaring past $3.25 per gallon, and everyone was griping about energy costs. Although Gas, by the way, seems to have some bizarre mystical fence around itonly 33 percent of Americans support even a paltry 25-cent gas tax hike, even if the revenues are fully rebated via income tax cuts. Fine. Oh hell no. This seems irrational, but maybe the fact that people can follow the price of gas so avidly, watching it undulate on every billboard in town, gives it some weird untouchable status. I have no idea. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48516/what-the-hell-does-the-public-want-anyway |
Do 9 Out Of 10 Psychologists Really Recommend Waterboarding? | The Federalist Society has decided Dick Cheney shouldn't have to go it alone in sticking up for waterboarding. Ben Smith blogs a conference call the conservative legal group held for journalists to defend the Bush lawyers who wrote the torture memos. One of the Federalist Society members, Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman, had this to say, according to Smith: Eastman responded to The New York Times's Scott Shane about the use of waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition and by the Japanese military, and responded "that psychological reviews of graduates of the military's SERE program, in which members of the U.S. military were waterboarded, is a more relevant example. "Why would I go and look at something the Spanish Inquisition did just because it was also called 'waterboarding'?" he asked. The problem with that argument is that the psychologists who conducted those reviews say you can't compare graduates of the military's SERE program to the detainees who were waterboarded. As Gary Hazlett, a research scientist who studied stress among soldiers who went through SERE training, told NPR: "One group has a lot of control and can say no and stop the process at any point along the way, but that really doesn't hold for the detainee group," he said in an interview. Alas, I'm not aware of any psychological reviews done on those who were waterboarded in the Spanish Inquisition, but if such reviews do exist, it seems like those would be the relevant academic literature. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49298/do-9-out-10-psychologists-really-recommend-waterboarding |
Will Obama Let Iran Keep Enriching? | It's no great surprise that the Obama administration, as reported by today's New York Times, is considering letting Iran continue to enrich uranium even as potential talks begin over its nuclear program. Maybe because there aren't a lot of other options. Even in 2006, when Iran's program was far less advanced, and Condoleezza Rice carefully planned out an offer for a bold new level of US-Iranian engagement--she worked at home through Easter weekend personally devising an elaborate, color-coded action plan, according to David Sanger's The Inheritance--Tehran more or less ignored the idea because it involved the suspension of enrichment. In 2007 Iran's foreign minister declared calls for an enrichment halt "illegal and illegitimate," and said his country would only talk without American preconditions. The trouble is, unless and until the U.S. can win tougher sanctions against Iran, we simply lack the leverage to be making demands. Writing in TNR a year ago, Obama's point man on Iran, Dennis Ross, made this very point: America's readiness to talk to Iran without conditions provides leverage with those who want it to join the negotiations with the Iranians. In particular, the Europeans have been convinced, rightly or wrongly, that a deal with the Iranians on the nuclear issue is possible, but only if the United States is also at the table. It is the United States, they believe, that can provide what the Iranians most want in terms of full acceptance of the regime, security assurances, and an end to sanctions and calls for economic boycotts. Given this view, the next administration must go quietly to the British, French and Germans and make clear that while it is ready to drop the precondition on Iranian suspension of enrichment, join the talks directly, and put a credible comprehensive proposal on the table, it cannot do so until they agree to ratchet up the pressure on Iran at the same time. Europeans would thus need to agree on E.U.-wide sanctions that cut off investment in the Iranian oil and natural gas sectors, commerce with Iranian banks, and all credit guarantees to their companies doing business in Iran. [emphasis added] Interestingly, the precondition was dropped before the EU stepped up the pressure. I don't know if that represents an internal defeat for Ross--or maybe just an acknowledgment that Iran holds most of the cards here. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49019/will-obama-let-iran-keep-enriching |
Is Jay Bybee The Forgotten Man? | Jeffery Toobin says he is, complaining that unlike John Yoo, Bybee, an author of the torture memos who's now a judge on Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, "has never answered questions about them, has never had to defend his conduct, has never endured anywhere near the amount of public scrutiny (and abuse) as Yoo." That's all true, and I'll certainly grant that Yoo has drawn more criticism than Bybee, probably because Yoo's a law prof at Berkeley and someone who's intent on maintaining a high profile, in contrast to Bybee, who's a federal judge (i.e. not someone who has a lot of lefty academic colleagues eager to strip him of tenure) and doesn't pen op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. But Toobin writes as if he's the only person who remembers the Bybee or, as he calls him, "the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era." I guess Toobin doesn't count the front page Washington Post article revealing Bybee's memo offering justifications for torture; the PBS report that calls the "torture memo" the "Bybee memo"; or Bruce Ackerman's article for Slate entitled Impeach Judge Jay Bybee. Seems like plenty of people are like Toobin and haven't exactly forgotten Bybee. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49081/jay-bybee-the-forgotten-man |
How much should Scheers Conservatives be counting on vote-splitting on the centre left? | Conservatives are starting to feel bullish about vote-splitting. Until recently, the ability of New Democrats to pull votes away from Liberals was a source of consternation for Andrew Scheers party. If Jagmeet Singh didnt get his act together, it might be too easy for Justin Trudeau to rally the centre-left behind him, and take a big enough share of public support to block the Tories path to power. Now, another party seems to be changing the equation. Even before this week, Conservatives were wondering aloud if the Green Party coming off a string of seat pickups by its provincial cousins might be as useful as the NDP in providing an alternative for voters who cast ballots for the Liberals in 2015. Story continues below advertisement Such talk is increasing after the Greens impressive by-election win in British Columbias Nanaimo-Ladysmith riding earned them a second seat in the House of Commons. It will reach fever pitch if Elizabeth May succeeds in wooing Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, the dissident former Liberal ministers who seem to be flirting with running for her party. The Tories are right to feel encouraged about the landscape. They face little competition for right-of-centre voters, save for Maxime Berniers Peoples Party, which is polling in the low single digits and looks increasingly desperate to get anyone to pay attention to it. Meanwhile, if the Greens surge and the NDP doesnt totally collapse, there will be a couple of serious options for Canadians who would not vote Conservative, but are disillusioned with Mr. Trudeau. As usual, only one major party the Bloc Qubcois will acknowledge publicly to not doing so. (Whether the Bloc proves resurgent is among the wild cards in the coming campaign, and its unclear whose expense that would be at.) But the current state of the Greens and the NDP suggests that they, too, may zero in on a relatively few regions. For the Greens, its about scale-up capacity. In the past general election, they campaigned effectively in a single riding, where Ms. May became the first MP elected under their banner, but scarcely anywhere else. This campaign, they should be able to do more. But while the Greens set a personal best by fundraising nearly $800,000 in 2019s first quarter, theyre still nowhere near the same ballpark as the Tories or Liberals in what they can afford to spend. Nor do they have large teams of experienced staff and volunteers, reams of voter data, or hundreds of well-vetted candidates. It would be a big victory to reach the dozen seats needed for official party status, and they are likely to focus their resources in a few areas especially Vancouver Island, and places where provincial Greens have established beachheads, such as corners of Atlantic Canada. Story continues below advertisement For the NDP, it may be more about scaling down. It should manage a more typical national campaign than the Greens. Unlike Ms. May, who limits air travel for environmental reasons on top of financial ones, Mr. Singh will presumably run a busy cross-country tour. And his party has far more accumulated resources. But unless their fortunes significantly improve in the next few months, it may be the narrowest national campaign the New Democrats have run since before Jack Layton was their leader. Their recent fundraising totals are not much higher than those of the the Greens, and even a $12-million mortgage on their headquarters probably wont let them spend near the roughly $30-million they did in 2015. Theirs has the makings of a save-the-furniture campaign one that might feel, some New Democrats quietly suggest, more like 30 or 40 by-election races than an ambitious general one as they try to help incumbents hang on, and compete in a handful of other ridings. In other words, there will likely be many places where Canadians never see a Green or NDP advertisement, candidate or volunteer. Money and on-the-ground organization are not the be all and end all. Even where theyre non-competitive, parties messaging will reach some voters, through digital or traditional media, including leaders debates. And the New Democrats or Greens could catch a wave and suddenly be relevant in ridings where they lack presence, as with the NDP in 2011. But the Conservatives probably shouldnt count on that. Story continues below advertisement That there is only one serious party on the centre-right, and now three on the centre-left, is a nice luxury. It can also be a trap, if they keep buying into an idea which took hold under Stephen Harpers leadership that theyre effectively limited to under 40 per cent of the electorate, and need to mostly focus on maximizing their vote efficiency while hoping things break the right way. The more they broaden their own universe, trying to appeal to a bigger plurality or majority of voters, the less theyll have to fret about how much theyre helped by smaller parties that are their ideological opposites, and that have their own election imperatives to worry about. | https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-how-much-should-scheers-conservatives-be-counting-on-vote-splitting/ |
How Viable Is Offshore Wind? | The Interior Department just issued a new report on offshore energy potential, noting that there's technically enough wind potential off the coasts to supply enough electricity for the entire United States. Of course, that's assuming these offshore wind projects can ever get approvedjust witness the wrangling that's held up Cape Wind for the past eight years. (The Interior Department's expected to make a decision on that soonpresumably it will get approved, which should open the gates for other offshore projects.) For now, the easiest places to stick wind turbines are in the relatively shallow waters off the coasttaking advantage of all those sites could provide some 20 percent of the electricity demand for coastal states. Since coastal states include most of the big onesTexas, California, New York, and so onthat's about 16 percent of the nation's electricity needs. Not bad. But offshore wind is still costly. Prices for the turbines themselves are tumbling down, but you also need to factor in platforms to hold the turbines up, undersea transmission lines, and higher maintenance costs. Over at The Wall Street Journal, Keith Johnson points out that oil companies might be able to pitch in herethey have a lot of expertise with offshore platformsbut it's not always a no-brainer investment, especially as long as there's no price on carbon. Ironically, as Johnson notes, the most promising resources could be those much, much further offshore. The main challenges are engineering, since no one's quite perfected a technique for getting platforms to stay stable that far out in choppy waters, but since the wind further offshore is a great deal stronger and steadier, the economics make a lot more sense once those technical hurdles can be cleared. (Flickr photo credit: Tiger Hobbes) | https://newrepublic.com/article/48834/how-viable-offshore-wind |
Is Geithner Carrying Obama? | Tina Brown makes the somewhat counter-intuitive case here. Not quite sure I buy it, but the guy clearly had a good day yesterday. Here's Brown: Even as Obama drops to a 59 percent approval rating from 64 percent last month and is starting to give his supporters little flutters of panic, Geithners geekiness has started to feel reassuringly authentic. The marketthat testosterone-fueled imponderablecertainly loved his bank plan, and the beleaguered Treasury secretary is now being helped by the lowered expectations built up by his botched debut. Maybe thoughtful is OK after all! Maybe being a slight, quizzical infant prodigy is actually right for nowafter all, chrome-domed Hank Paulson looked like a CEO is supposed to look, but he got it all wrong! He wasnt a thinker! He didnt understand financial markets! He was a salesman, not a strategist! When the market jumps by 500 points, Timid Timmy is suddenly Tiger Tim. (Especially when he unveils his plan without cameras.) ... Of course, both of these revived reputations will help Obama keep his. Cuomos effectiveness in shaking down the bonuses helps to go a small way to lance the boil of vindictive outrage that is clouding serious political decisions, while Geithners comeback vindicates the presidents patience and belief in him. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48610/geithner-carrying-obama |
Should We Give Financial Advice To The Poor? | Yale economist and bubble seer Robert Shiller thinks a number of financial mistakes made by millions of Americans could be avoided if personal financial advice was subsidized for all. For example, recent research has shown that a number of homebuyers who obtained subprime mortgages didn't understand the basic terms of their contracts, such as believing they had acquired a fixed-rate mortgage when it was really an ARM. And given the existence of wealth management services for the well-off, it seems that financial advice does have some value. To find out, a group of economists examined the impact of a program in Chicago which mandated third-party reviews of mortgage contracts in 2006 and 2007. Under the program, mortgage applicants with low credit scores in 10 zip codes had to have loan offers reviewed by HUD-certified loan counselors. The economists, Sumit Agarwal, Gene Amromin, and Douglas Evanoff of the Chicago Fed, Itzhak Ben-David of Ohio State University and Souphala Chomsisengphet of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, obtained a number of interesting results: First, mandatory counseling reduced new loan applications by 60 percent, the number of active lenders by 40 percent, and mortgage originations by 20 percent. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49187/should-we-give-financial-advice-the-poor |
Why The Bank/auto Industry Double-standard? | Ever since Obama canned Rick Wagoner the other day (actually even before), a lot of people have wondered why the administration hasn't been nearly as tough on bank management as it's been on auto industry management. I don't think the situation is quite so neat--the banks have certainly taken a few lumps--but the question is fair enough. It does seem like the administration has less patience for the car-makers. In response to which a reader of Josh Marshall's makes a very good point: As a 30+ year veteran of the auto industry let me make the difference very clear; the banks can exist without the auto industry. The same cannot be said for the reverse. The automobile business from the manufacturers down to the consumers rely on banks for one reason or another. Tough to argue with that. Update: Jim Surowiecki has another explanation (not mutually exclusive): | https://newrepublic.com/article/48766/why-the-bankauto-industry-double-standard |
Do Children Make Us Happier? Can We Know? | I've been meaning to comment on this piece Andrew linked to the other day, which tries to explain why having children doesn't seem to make us happier even though we often assume it does. The piece reviews some of the survey evidence establishing the result, then spins out a couple plausible theories for why it is. Among them: One possible explanation for this, according to Daniel Gilbert (2006), is that the belief that children bring happiness transmits itself much more successfully from generation to generation than the belief that children bring misery. The phenomenon, which Gilbert says is a super-replicator, can be explained further by the fact that people who believe that there is no joy in parenthood and who thus stop having them are unlikely to be able to pass on their belief much further beyond their own generation. It is a little bit like Darwins theory of the survival of the fittest. Only the belief that has the best chance of transmission even if it is a faulty one will be passed on. I guess I question how we can actually know whether or not having children makes us happier. I just don't see how you can ever get at the relevant counterfactual. That is, what we really want to know is whether Person A is less happy with kids than Person A would have been without them. But there's no way to know that, because there's no way to re-run someone's life to see what it would look like if they weren't a parent. What we measure instead is whether Person A, who happens to have kids, is less happy than Person B, who doesn't have them. (And I suppose we try to match up Person A and Person B so that they look pretty similar demographically.) Problem is, Person A may be the kind of person who's unhappy with kids, but would be even less happy without them. In fact, I'd venture to say a lot of people fit that description, which is why they made the enormous sacrifice of having kids in the first place. Meanwhile, Person B may be the kind of person who's happy without kids, and would be less happy with them, which is why they decided not to make the sacrifice. I don't see how you avoid this problem empirically, and my guess is that it's a big one. P.S. I realize that this problem exists to some extent with a lot of social-scientific research, and that we have pretty sophisticated methods for mitigating it. But those methods seem a lot more dubious when you're dealing with something as idiosyncratic as happiness and as life-changing as parenthood--much different than dealing with, say, the returns to education. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48824/do-children-make-us-happier-can-we-know |
Is Nicolas Cage The Worst Movie Star Alive? | In the five years I've been writing about film, I've reviewed just one Nicolas Cage movie (2005's Lord of War) and it wasn't awful, which is pretty much the cinematic equivalent of emerging unscathed after tap-dancing through a minefield. It's not merely that Cage makes many, many bad films--though he does--it's that so many of them are very, very bad. I didn't see his latest movie, Knowing, which opened over the weekend, but the review-aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes tells a familiar tale: Only 24 percent of reviews were positive, and a mere 14 percent of those by what the site considers "top critics." These numbers may not seem that awful, but given the number of reviewers who a) like everything; b) like everything they think will make money; or c) want the free publicity of their blurbs being used in promotional materials, they actually represent an impressive negative achievement. Remarkably, they also represent a major step up from his previous flick, Bangkok Dangerous, which scored a 9 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes (8 percent from top critics), and they're basically on a par with a 23/18 average over his last six films (also including National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Next, Ghost Rider, and Wicker Man), every one of which was certified "rotten" by the site. Indeed, since Cage won his Oscar for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas, just 8 of the 23 films he's starred in (6, according to "top critics") have been certified "fresh." This is entering the territory of stopped clocks and monkeys with typewriters. Moreover, this dismal record isn't limited to a single genre, a la Dolph Lundgren or Pauly Shore; rather, Cage has stunk in superhero flicks (Ghost Rider), war movies (Windtalkers), romances (Captain Corelli's Mandolin), caper films (Gone in 60 Seconds), gritty thrillers (8 MM), and horror-mysteries (Wicker Man). He is truly a man who can do all wrong. What makes this perhaps most irritating is that Cage is by no stretch an untalented actor. He showed years of idiosyncratic promise before The Rock and Con-Air sent him spinning off on his current trajectory, and he was nothing short of terrific in Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation. Yet he continues to roll out, at an astonishing rate, what even he must recognize to be wretched movies. --Christopher Orr | https://newrepublic.com/article/48615/nicolas-cage-the-worst-movie-star-alive |
Are The Right States Getting Stimulus Funds? | Two key attributes of a well-designed stimulus plan are that money gets into the hands of those who are most likely to spend it and that private investment isn't crowded out by public monies. The answer appears to be mostly in the affirmative, says San Francisco Fed economist Daniel Wilson. States with big expected budget gaps, i.e. those that are more likely to spend stimulus dollars, will receive a larger share of the $90 billion in fiscal relief funds set aside for states. But $70 billion in transportation funds arent distributed based on economic needs, says Wilson. States will receive these funds based on formulas used by the Dept. of Transportation that take into account things like a states total highway miles and the amount of road repairs needed not a states current economic condition. Still, Wilson has an optimistic view of the stimulus potential effect: While [The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009]'s state allocations do not represent the absolute optimal stimulus, they are on the whole well directed. Overall, that means that the economic impact of this support for state governments is more likely to exceed than to fall short of forecasts. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49155/are-the-right-states-getting-stimulus-funds |
What's Salazar Got Against The Polar Bear? | The honeymoon between environmental groups and the Obama Interior Department is now decidedly over, at least when it comes to endangered-species protections. As Daniel Schulman reports over at Mother Jones, the Interior Departments Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has decided not to add the yellow-billed loon to the endangered-species list, instead putting it on a waiting list of species to be given official endangered status once the agency can come up with guidelines for their protection. The FWS says that the decision to put the loon on the waiting list was nothing more than a concession to its limited staff time and budget for crafting new endangered-species rules. But environmental groups like the Center For Biological Diversity argue that the agencys real motivation was a desire not to interfere with oil drilling thats slated to occur in the loons Alaskan breeding grounds. This may seem like a minor quibblethe loon is just one species, and with population numbers still in the tens of thousands, its not going extinct anytime soonbut it may be a sign of bigger endangered-species fights to come. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar now has to decide whether to reverse three last-minute changes that the Bush administration made to the way the Endangered Species Act is enforced. Due to some language inserted into a recent appropriations bill, the Interior Department has specific Congressional authorization to rescind these regulatory changes, but the authorization expires on May 10. The first regulatory change that Salazar has to decide whether or not to undo allows federal agencies like the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management to consult their own biologistsrather than biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Serviceto determine whether a project would have an impact on endangered species. Environmentalists worry (probably correctly) that allowing agencies to self-consult would make them more likely to ignore endangered-species concerns. The other two changes aim to prevent environmental groups from using the Endangered Species Act to force the government to take action on global warming. They make it impossible for an environmental group to sue to stop the construction of, say, a coal power plant because of the harm that the plants emissions would cause to an endangered speciessay, the polar bearthat is being impacted by global warming. ts easy to see why Salazar, as a moderate Western Democrator the Obama political team, charged with convincing an occasionally-skeptical public to take action on global warmingwould be hesitant to undo these regulatory changes. Having greenhouse-gas regulations written by a judge whose main concern was the protection of bears would be not just a policy nightmare but a political nightmare as well. There may be some sense in using existing environmental laws to start regulating greenhouse emissions, if only as a way to force Congress to get serious about cap and trade. But surely it is better do to so via the Clean Air Actwhich aims to protect human health as well as the biosphererather than the Endangered Species Act, which for many people symbolizes the alleged trees before people attitude of the hard-line environmental movement. Salazar most likely realizes this, which is why these Endangered Species Act changes may be the first big issue on which he and the major environmental groups part ways. (Flickr photo credit: floridapfe) | https://newrepublic.com/article/48724/whats-salazar-got-against-the-polar-bear |
Could Rudy Boost Gay Marriage? | According to the New York Post's Fred Dricker: Rudy Giuliani is declaring war on gay marriage -- vowing to use his strong opposition of it against the Democrats if he runs for governor next year. Ben Smith argues that Rudy isn't a very good anti-gay marriage spokesman since he was a very pro-gay mayor both politically and personally--going so far as to live with a gay couple after he separated from his wife and moved out of Grace Mansion. But I think that could actually bolster Rudy's anti-gay marriage bona fides, since he can legitimately argue that he supports gays and lesbians--he favors civil unions, for instance--he just doesn't believe they should be permitted to get married. The problem with Rudy's war on gay marriage is his own history with the institution: he's currently on wife number three. Since one of the most frequently made arguments against gay marriage is that it will weaken the institution of marriage for straights, I can't imagine a better foil than Rudy for those who favor gay marriage. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49138/could-rudy-boost-gay-marriage |
Will The Banks Go On Strike? | There is no question that the Obama administration has abandoned any vestige of laissez-faire capitalism. It may not be socialism, and its certainly not fascism, as some idiots--sorry, conservative thinkers--have declared, but it is at the least capitalism with a very strong dose of state planning. The real question is on behalf of whom, or under whose dictates is the planning being conducted. The obvious answer is the Obama administration. But that doesnt end the questioning. In an article in the current Atlantic, Simon Johnson argues that a quiet coup has taken place in the United States that has put the financial industry--Wall Street--in charge of the nations economic policy. A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true, Johnson writes. Johnson thinks that Wall Streets dominance has continued during the Obama administration, and defined the limits of what it can do to pull the nation out of its current crisis. Johnson surveys what has been done so far, which has largely been what the banks wanted, and who is occupying high policy positions in Washington. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, there is evidence of still another way in which the banks might wield influence. The article recounts how some bankers say they turned the conversations [with the administration] into complaints about the antibonus crusade consuming Capitol Hill. Some have begun slow-walking the information previously sought by Treasury for stress-testing financial institutions, three bankers say, and considered seeking capital from hedge funds and private-equity funds so they could return federal bailout money, thereby escaping federal restrictions. Seeking money elsewhere--thats fine--but slow-walking the stress tests suggests that the bankers have been threatening to undermine the administrations policies if they dont become more compliant. Thats serious--and it does suggest an attempt to use their power to dictate what the government does. Its the old strategy of the capital strike. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48711/will-the-banks-go-strike |
Are The Credit Markets Thawing? | The Times collects the evidence that they are: The market for securities made from bundles of car loans and student loans a vital source of credit has started to stabilize. Prices of these investments have risen in the last month, suggesting government-run programs to buy or guarantee this type of debt are gaining traction. ... Businesses with better credit ratings issued $200 billion of debt in the first quarter, according to Thomson Reuters , compared with $188 billion a year ago. Even as credit rating agencies predict high rates of default for 2009 and junk-rated companies like General Growth Properties, the shopping mall owner, struggle to avoid bankruptcy, investors are pushing more money into high-yield debt. Junk bonds just ended their best quarter in five years, and a report by AMG Data Services said that $923 million flowed into junk-bond mutual funds last week, the most since 2005. The question to ask is not whether credit markets have improved, said Jeff Rosenberg, head of credit strategy research at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Indisputably, the answer is no. Having said that, I'm not convinced this is such a relevant question. The biggest problem with dysfunctional credit markets is that they act as a drag on the economy and prevent a recovery. If government intervention gets them to stop being a drag--even if the markets couldn't function on their own--then the economy has a chance to recover. And if a recovery materializes, the credit market activity presumably will become self-sustaining at that point. So asking whether the credit market activity is currently self-sustaining seems to miss the point of the intervention a bit. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48898/are-the-credit-markets-thawing |
Does The Pirate Episode Tell Us Anything About Obama? | The AP's Jennifer Loven thinks it does, writing: [I]t goes some way toward dispelling the notion that a liberal Democrat with a known distaste for war Obama campaigned on his consistent opposition to the Iraq invasion doesn't have the chops to call on U.S. military power. But I don't think that's a very widespread notion, and I don't think there's really anything Obama could do--short of launching simultaneous preemptive strikes against Iran, North Korea, and (for good measure) Cuba--to change the minds of those who do hold that notion. People like this blogger at Red State, who writes: In the end, Captain Phillips wasnt saved by the President, but by his own courageous plunge and the deadly professionalism of our men with guns. The President, you see, was saved by the Captain. I'm just surprised that this guy's views are being treated as anything other than fringe by outlets like the AP. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/49003/does-the-pirate-episode-tell-us-anything-about-obama |
What Happens When Ice Bridges Start Shattering? | If you're looking for more news on the shattering of that massive ice bridge that was holding Antarctica's Wilkins Ice Shelf in place, Charlie Petit has a great round-up. Or you can watch the video here, which is grimly fascinating. The Wilkins is roughly the size of Connecticut and is the largest of ten or so shelves to have shrunk or collapsed on the Antarctic Peninsula in recent years. Everyone's fingering climate change as the culprit, as the continent has warmed by about 3C (or 5.4F) in the past half-century. (Here's a good summary of why the poles heat up more rapidly than the rest of the planet.) The good news is that the ice shelves are already submerged in water, so if they do start washing away or melting, it won't directly impact sea levels. The bad news is that when the shelves start shrinking, the glaciers and landed ice behind them start to slide into the ocean more quicklyand that does raise sea levels. His read of recent studies suggests that if we do nothing about emissions, the answer could be as high as three to five feetand that's just the West Antarctic ice sheet's contribution (melting inland glaciers, Greenland's ice sheet, and the thermal expansion of the oceans will also pitch in). Romm also surveys the debate over how stable the West Antarctic Ice Sheet really is, and comes away with a more mixed, though not terribly consoling, picture. The whole thing probably won't collapse this century, fingers crossed, but enough of the sheet can still plunge into the ocean to cause very large sea-level rises. Anyway, it's the same story in Antarctica as you see pretty much anywhere elsethe changes are happening more quickly than most scientists had expected. (See, for example, this Reuters write-up of two new studies showing faster-than-projected melting at both poles.) Turns out the skeptics were right. The models and forecasts were mistaken. They were just off in the wrong direction... | https://newrepublic.com/article/48889/what-happens-when-ice-bridges-start-shattering |
Do We Really Want The Results Of Those Stress Tests? | The Journal says there's still a lot of uncertainty about whether and how much of the stress-test data to release: It isn't clear precisely what information the government might disclose. It remains possible the data won't be specific to individual banks. But some within the administration believe a certain amount of information needs to be released in order to provide assurance about the validity and rigor of the assessments. In addition, these people also are concerned that the tests won't be able to fulfill their basic function of shoring up confidence unless investors are able to see data for themselves. In response to which, Ryan Avent, the former Economist blogger who's apparently replaced Felix Salmon at Portfolio, makes a good point: The problem is this -- if the administration releases information suggesting that the tested banks are all basically fine, then the data is worthless. Markets will go on speculating on which banks are in the most trouble (and possibly be more pessimistic, generally, based on the government's bungling of the tests). If the administration provides meaningful information of any kind, on the other hand, markets will naturally assume that the weakest looking banks are the weakest banks, and will begin trading accordingly. In response to which, Salmon himself makes a good suggestion: The way out of this problem I think is for the government to recapitalize the weakest banks before it releases the stress-test results, and then to release post-money stress tests showing that, as a result of its recapitalizations, all the tested banks are basically fine. Its a risky strategy, but I dont think Treasury has much choice at this point. For what it's worth, I'm still not convinced aggregate data is a worse idea than bank-level data, at least under the circumstances. I know Salmon and others think opacity is dumb and possibly self-defeating. But my thinking is this: If Treasury ends up having to reveal results about individual banks, then it strikes me as highly unlikely that the data will be meaningful. As various Treasury officials have already said, all 19 banks are going to pass. If, on the other hand, Treasury only releases aggregate data, there's a chance it could be worth something. I guess I'd much rather have accurate overall data, so we know how screwed our banking system is, than bogus individual data. | https://newrepublic.com/article/49058/do-we-really-want-the-results-those-stress-tests |
Is The Fda The Most Pathetic Federal Agency? | USA Today has a piece up about how the FDA has taken the unusual step of unleashing federal marshals on Westco Fruit and Nuts--some loser company in New Jersey that has refused government requests to recall products containing peanuts received from everyone's favorite killer-nut-peddler, Peanut Corp. of America. After Westco ignored requests both for a recall and for records showing where its PCA-laced products had been shipped, the FDA decided it had little choice but to send in marshals with an inspection warrant. Here's the bit that caught my eye: "The agency does not have the authority to force companies to recall foods and generally relies on the threat of bad publicity to encourage them to do so." That seems crazy to me. I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable objections to allowing the FDA this power. But knowing what we know about some companies' attitude toward consumer safety--i.e., they prioritize it just below keeping the breakroom stocked with Skittles--I can also think of a few reasonable arguments for revisiting the issue. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48949/the-fda-the-most-pathetic-federal-agency |
Do Madoff Victims Deserve Extra Tax Deductions? | 2.) There's a moral hazard dimension--people will be less vigilant about avoiding Ponzi schemes and con men going forward if they know they can deduct all their losses. 3.) No one's talking about taxing 100 percent of the gains Madoff's investors made along way. (Some people did reap gains, believe it or not, though it was mostly at the expense of others, of course.) Update: Commenter agentzero pushes back, arguing that this is how the IRS pretty much always treats "theft losses" (i.e., money or property that was stolen from you). He/she adds: Here is what is new. If you have a theft loss in these circumstances, your deduction is the amount lost--but you cannot deduct any amount that you have a "reasonable prospect" of recovering until that prospect either pans out (in which case you haven't lost the money, so no deduction) or doesn't (in which case you get a deduction as of the time it was no longer reasonable to expect to get it back). These rules generated a considerable amount of uncertainty in the Madoff case. The new IRS rules about Ponzi schemes try to clear up this gray area. In fairness, my first reader was arguing that the Madoff losses should be treated as analogous to a capital loss rather than a theft loss. (I muddled this distinction in my explication, but I think he was clear on it.) The idea is that you willingly invested money with someone who lost it--it wasn't taken from you--and you should have to suffer the consequences. Hence the incompetent money manager analogy. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48469/do-madoff-victims-deserve-extra-tax-deductions |
What To Make Of That Aig Fper On The Times Op-ed Page? | His resignation letter to AIG CEO Ed Liddy is certainly a fascinating document. On one level I'm open to the guy's claim that there were honest, hard-working people at AIG FP who had nothing to do with the credit default swaps that nearly leveled the company (basically insurance for assets backed by subprime real estate loans). * On the other hand, however honest and hard-working some of these people were, and however far removed they were from the lousy decisions made at AIG FP, it's just not politically tenable for employees of the unit behind its parent company's problems to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in bonus money while the parent receives a government bailout now worth around $200 billion. I guess I ultimately blame Liddy. If the AIG FP people had thought about how this would look to the outside world, it's hard to believe they wouldn't have grasped the problem immediately. But, then, it's not their job to think about how it might look from the outside. That's Liddy's job. And yet, as the writer points out, he either didn't think about it or did and just didn't deal with the obvious upshot. This strikes me as the key passage in the letter: My guess is that in October, when you learned of these retention contracts, you realized that the employees of the financial products unit needed some incentive to stay and that the contracts, being both ethical and useful, should be left to stand. Thats probably why A.I.G. management assured us on three occasions during that month that the company would live up to its commitment to honor the contract guarantees. That may be why you decided to accelerate by three months more than a quarter of the amounts due under the contracts. That action signified to us your support, and was hardly something that one would do if he truly found the contracts distasteful. That may also be why you authorized the balance of the payments on March 13. At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts--until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress. Liddy needed to preempt the problem by renegotiating the bonuses in a way that would have been less offensive to the people paying them (I suggested a model here). Instead, every action he took seemed to reassure the AIG FP employees that there was nothing to worry about. It sounds like the letter-writer is basically blaming the right person. *I say this without knowing how productive these people's efforts were in economic terms, which is a separate question entirely. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48643/what-make-aig-fper-the-times-op-ed-page |
Is Breast Really Best? | I finally got around to reading Hanna Rosin's The Case Against Breast-feeding over at The Atlantic. I've always enjoyed Hanna's writing (the woman has a wicked wit), and this latest offering falls squarely into the category of Pieces I Wish I had Done. And not just because I declined to nurse either of my children for the full year expected of all decent, caring mothers. If you have the time, check out the related "Mother's Milk" podcasts of Rosin and pals discussing the agony and ecstasy of life with Baby "on the boob." Warning: The bit about the indignities of pumping may cause flashbacks among former breast-feeders and their partners. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48997/breast-really-best |
Will Soaking The Rich Go Too Far? | Clive Crook--one of my favorite conservative writers--has a new column in which he warns against raising taxes on the rich to finance new government spending, particularly health care. The U.S. tax code is already very progressive by international standards. Making the tax code even more progressive will, Crook says, push it even more to that extreme. Mr. Obama intends to squeeze the rich, but the scope for this may be more limited than US liberals would wish. Few Americans seem aware that the US income tax code, as a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development study showed, is already one of the most progressive. Even before the rise in top marginal rates promised by Mr Obama, the US income tax collects 45 per cent of its revenues from the highest-income decile. Compare that with Britain at 39 per cent, Canada at 36 per cent, France at 28 per cent, Sweden at 27 per cent and an OECD average of 32 percent. My understanding is that Cook basically right, in this sense: Relative to Europe, we draw income taxes more disproprotionately from wealthy people. But European contries also collect far more taxes overall, as Crook acknolwedges. And they use those tax revenues to finance far more generous welfare states. Particularly in Scandinavia, but also in Western Europe, taxes finance all sorts of public programs--not just universal health care, but also child care, worker retraining, and the like. These programs also have a strongly progressive effect, as this report from the OECD (the same report that Crook cites) makes clear: Redistribution of income by government plays a relatively minor role in the United States. Only in Korea is the effect smaller. This is partly because the level of spending on social benefits such as unemployment benefits and family benefits is low--equivalent to just 9% of household incomes, while the OECD average is 22%. The effectiveness of taxes and transfers in reducing inequality has fallen still further in the past 10 years. In other words, European taxes are more regressive than ours. But, overall, the effect of their government programs--including both taxes and spending--seem to be more progressive. (I say "seem" because I don't have all the relevant statistics in front or me or an economist at hand to guide me through them. But I'm pretty sure that's right.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/48863/will-soaking-the-rich-go-too-far |
What, Patients Don't Count As Stakeholders? | As you may recall, the debate over the economic stimulus featured an intense argument over whether to fund comparative effectiveness studies--that is, research into which drugs, devices, and procedures actually work best and for whom. CE, as the wonks call it, is an essential ingredient of a high-functioning health care system. But the idea came under assault from conservatives who objected to the intrusion of government into medicine and from interest groups whose members profit from less effective treatments. The Institute of Medicine panel slated to make recommendations for the $1.1 billion earmarked for comparative effectiveness research has no representation from broad-based consumer or patient advocacy groups, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. ... While the proposed 16-member panel included five physician specialists, three medical technology assessment experts, three insurers (two of which are also provider networks), and three officials currently or formerly associated with Medicare, the only patient or consumer representative named to the panels tentative roster was from the Alzheimers Association, a single-issue patient advocacy group that receives substantial support from the drug industry. Merrill has the rest of the story over at his blog, Gooznews (which, by the way, you should start reading regularly if you aren't already). | https://newrepublic.com/article/48438/what-patients-dont-count-stakeholders |
Has Obama's Organizing Machine Flopped Already? | Barack Obama's organizing machine was supposed to do more than get him elected president. Once in office, it was supposed to help him enact his agenda, by generating the same sort of grassroots pressure it did during the campaign. But the first attempt at unleashing the Obama organizing machine doesn't seem to have made much difference, according to the Washington Post: in its first big test, the group dubbed Organizing for America (OFA) had little obvious impact on the debate over President Obama's budget, which passed Congress on Thursday with no Republican support and a splintering of votes among conservative Democrats. The capstone of the campaign was the delivery of 214,000 signatures to Capitol Hill, which swayed few, if any, members of Congress, according to legislative aides from both parties. I'm perfectly willing to believe that's the case and, more broadly, I'm perfectly willing to believe that organizing on behalf of the Obama agenda won't be as successful as organizing on behalf of the Obama candidacy was. Still, I'm not ready to write off the political potential for Obama's machine just yet. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48877/has-obamas-organizing-machine-flopped-already |
Can Green Design Be Good Design? | Kriston Capps, at The American Prospect, thinks so: The field of architecture is experiencing a design crisis, with clients ranging from private owners to cities demanding that architects prioritize sustainability above all elseas if design itself were an obnoxious carbon-emitter. This is partly because high designers and the so-called "starchitects," who fear that new methods and materials might not comport with long-established styles, are not taking the lead on sustainability issues, leaving green innovation to younger firms with fewer resources. Both well-known firms and up-and-comers lack experience in working with new, often expensive green materials, which has forced many designers to depend greatly on singular and design-restrictive tactics such as "passive design"essentially, lots of space and windowsto achieve sustainability goals. But with all due respect, Capps must not look at many of today's highest-profile buildings. Otherwise, he'd have noted Renzo Piano's sublime California Academy of Sciences, one of last year's most widely praised buildings and the winner of a platinum rating from the Leadership in Energy and Design (LEED) standard systemthe highest rating from the world's leading eco-rating program. Piano is also, by the way, among the starriest of the starchitects. The Cal Academy is proof positive that an established career and good design are no impediments to sustainable design. The list goes on. LEED Platinum. Platinum. Sir Norman Foster's 30 St. Mary Axe in Londonaka the Gherkinincorporates an innovative natural air-flow system that significantly cuts down on energy use. All great buildings, all eco-friendly. Or take any of the recent work by Antoine Predock or Thom Maynegray hairs both, but also both recognized leaders in environmental design. But more to the point, Capps fails to showoutside of a few sniping quotes from Stefan Behnischthat green design is locked in an "awkward stage." I've toured a lot of new, LEED-certified buildings in recent monthsjust yesterday I was at David Adjaye's Gold-certified Museum of Contemporary Art in Denverand I've yet to see a tradeoff between good design and green design. Adjaye's museum, like Piano's Cal Academy, has been uniformly praised for its use of space and light; that innovative use of light also maximizes the amount of indirect sun in the galleries, dramatically reducing the need for artificial lighting. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48324/can-green-design-be-good-design |
Is Axelrod A P.r. Liability? | If Alex Conant can help it, yes, as this piece the former RNC press secretary wrote for Politico makes clear. But the weird thing about Conant's article attacking David Axelrod is its strained use of the passive voice. To wit: Axelrod is now a pillar for Barack Obama, but he will likely become a lightning rod for public concern. The public is naturally leery of Machiavellian advisers inside the White House, yet thats exactly Axelrods function. [snip] Axelrod is a ripe target for anyone who wants to raise public concerns about his influence. [snip] [G]iven his unequaled influence over Obama and the publics intuitive unease with such Machiavellian relationships, it should be only a matter of time before he is a public-relations liability for the White House. I suppose the conventions for this sort of piece necessitate the use of the passive voice, but they're dumb conventions. Why can't Conant just come out and explicitly say what he wants to say--that the GOP should focus their political attacks on Axelrod, rather than Rahm Emanuel--rather than say that, at some point, the public will come to view him as such. Perhaps he's trying to harken back to John DiIullio's description of Karl Rove and other Bush advisers as "Mayberry Machiavellis," but I don't think I understand what "Machiavellian relationships" Conant's referring to. One last thing. Conant hits Axelrod for having major influence behind the scenes and for assuming such a high-profile role on the public stage. But isn't that a good thing, just in terms of transparency in government. One of the things that was so sinister about Rove was this Oz-like image he created for himself. Axelrod, by contrast, seems willing to give reporters a (admittedly blinkered) glimpse of what's going on behind the curtain. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48897/axelrod-pr-liability |
Will The Senate Sink Waxman-markey's Climate Plans? | According to E&E News, Dick Durbin, the Democratic whip in the Senate, is saying there aren't 60 votes in that chamber to overcome a filibuster and approve climate legislation similar to the draft bill Waxman and Markey just unveiled in House. To get a sense of how thorny this will be, Senate Republicans have recently been putting forward amendments to prevent cap and trade from even being considered this year. (That's curious: If they're so sure of their arguments that climate legislation will destroy the economy, why are they afraid of debating it?) Meanwhile, North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, who sits on the Senate energy committee, thinks it's unwise for the House to lump a cap-and-trade bill together with a bill to promote renewable power and efficiency and a bill to bolster the grid. He wants to do those all things separately, which would likely mean first the grid bill and energy bill (which should attract some GOP votes) in 2009, while carbon caps probably wait until 2010. But here's why Waxman and Markey want to lump them all together, from E&E Daily: Going forward, Waxman and Markey are banking on a combined energy and climate bill to build support for their legislation. Aides explain that the measure offers a new way of thinking compared with previous and more limited attempts in the Senate. The economic models, for example, will show that combining cap-and-trade legislation with an RES and the energy efficiency programs can lower compliance costs for households and industry. In other words, when the impacts of the cap-and-trade portions are tallied up by the CBO and other economic models, the projected costs will likely be lower when you include stuff like the efficiency and grid provisionsmany of which could help reduce overall energy costs, even as the price of coal and gas goes up. By contrast, a bill that only has a mandatory carbon cap will seem a lot costlier. Still, this could turn into a point of dispute between the House and Senate. One thing to observe is that the House has just one committee to deal with energy and climate mattersWaxman's committeeso it's easy to pack everything in, whereas the Senate has two relevant committees: Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works, which is drafting the cap-and-trade portions, and Jeff Bingaman's Energy and Natural Resources, which is working on the measures to promote efficiency, renewable power, grid infrastructure, and the like. So you could see more jurisdictional disputes in the Senate, making it trickier to cram everything into one big bill. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48792/will-the-senate-sink-waxman-markeys-climate-plans |
Did Cuomo Know About The Aig Bonuses Last Fall? | Tom Edsall sifts through the evidence here. One intriguing piece of the picture: One of the AIG officials most concerned with the employee retention plan was William Dooley, head of AIG's financial services division (AIGFP). Dooley oversees the division that engaged in the transactions - credit default swaps -- widely viewed as the cause of the collapse of AIG. In an October 22, 2008 email obtained by the Huffington Post -- the authenticity of which was affirmed by AIG Senior VP for Communications Nicholas J. Ashooh -- Dooley sought to reassure his staff: many staffers were depending on bonuses for their entire yearly income , having agreed to work without salary . Dooley wrote: | https://newrepublic.com/article/48869/did-cuomo-know-about-the-aig-bonuses-last-fall |
Why Did Aig Melt Down? | I have a piece in our latest issue that tries to answer that question. The turning point seems to come in March/April 2005, when longtime CEO Hank Greenberg resigned amid allegations of accounting improprieties and the company lost its triple-A credit rating. From then till the end of the year, AIG Financial Products, under then-CEO Joe Cassano, binged on credit-default swaps related to subprime real estate--which, uh, didn't turn out so well. Here's the relevant passage from my piece: [The downgrade] was a body blow to AIG-FP, which relied on the rating to secure favorable terms for the contracts it signed. Many were so-called credit-default swaps (CDS)--essentially insurance for bonds that investors had purchased. The weaker its credit rating, the more AIG had to pledge in collateral to grease the deals--money it would have to fork over if the bonds suddenly depreciated. In general, the downgrade made AIG-FP less attractive to customers, who relied on the company's credit rating as a guarantee it would pay up if the insurance were needed. A colleague recalls that Cassano became enraged by the development. He first turned on Greenberg, blaming his former benefactor and casting himself as a victim who'd been let down by the company. Cassano would rant about the cosmic unfairness of it all and refer to Greenberg as a "shithead" who'd always given him a hard time. He began frantically groping for ways to sell outsiders on the idea that, for all the parent company's problems, AIG-FP had produced enormous returns. Though the immaculate credit rating had been the foundation of his business, Cassano would routinely insist that "there are only a few things we do that are dependent on the triple-A rating." "I remember thinking he just desperately wanted to figure out a way to attract business back to himself," says the colleague. Most of these efforts were for naught. ... But there was one type of creditdefault-swap customer still keen on doing business with him: the investors then gobbling up bundles of securities backed by subprime real-estate loans. ... Worse, in contrast with the Greenberg era, there was now effectively a vacuum at the top of AIG. P.S. One of the things that's still a little unclear is when the compensation structure changed at AIG-FP. Greenberg told me that, when he was CEO, AIG-FP split its profits 30-70 with the parent company, and that half of AIG-FP's 30-percent take had to stay with AIG for five years to give the AIG-FPers the right long-term incentives. It's possible that this structure stayed intact until the famous retention bonuses were negotiated in 2008, but maybe not. Either way, Cassano himself was making a killing. As reported in this excellent Washington Post series (which I cite in my piece), Cassano himself made $43.6 million in 2006 and $24.2 million in 2007. (He was ousted in 2008, though for a while he still received $1 million a month under a "consulting" arrangement.) --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48760/why-did-aig-melt-down |
Is Massachusetts A Model, A Mirage...or Moot? | Massachusetts was already in the top ten of states with the lowest uninsured rate. (Now it's tied with Hawaii with the lowest uninsured rate.) Massachusetts has an employment market with a lot of higher-wage workers, and an overall high rate of employers offering coverage to their workers. Massachusetts has traditionally funded its health care safety-net system more generously than most, which allowed the health reform to be funded largely through redistributing funding within the system, rather than raising significant new revenue. Massachusetts had a much more robust regulation of insurers--which in MA are all nonprofit--that many other states. Massachusetts was already one of five states requiring "guaranteed issue," where people could get coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions. Whatever you think of the Massachusetts' "Chapter 58," the nation's needs dictate a policy solution that bigger and bolder, and just simply different. When California policymakers-as in Massachusetts, a Republican Governor and Democratic Legislature-looked at health reform last year, they found that, as described in this Health Access report, they needed to go significantly beyond the Massachusetts plan, for policy and political reasons. California has one of the lowest rates of health insurance and of employers offering insurance; has one of the worst rates of per-patient Medicaid spending; and has a "wild west" of an individual insurance market. The California proposal included significant public program expansions and these elements that went beyond Massachusetts: subsidies up to and above four times the poverty level; significant new insurance market reforms and rules on insurers; a meaningful employer contribution requirement to shore up on-the-job benefits; an option to get coverage through a public purchasing pool and public health insurance options; and the raising of significant new revenues to pay for the expansion. That said, California's effort stalled, partially due to obstacles unique to our state (an unparalleled budget crisis, a requirement to pass revenues with a 2/3 vote in the legislature that make 60 votes in the U.S. Senate look easy, etc. ), and because some argued, with some merit, that it needed to go even farther. For national reformers, I've argued previously that the up-and-running Healthy San Francisco offers a more relevant model than Massachusetts to look at, although SF has some unique characteristics as well. So Gruber and Cohn are right that the big lesson from Massachusetts is not any specific policy component, but that health reform and coverage expansions are possible; Archer is right in her policy recommendations of what is needed in a federal reform, including the public health coverage option. Some of that is based on the needs of the nation, which face a different set of challenges that what Massachusetts did. So let's not get distracted in refighting past battles in Massachusetts when there's a far more significant fight brewing over the future of federal reform. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48604/massachusetts-model-mirageor-moot |
What's So Great About Fiat? | Announcing his auto industry plan yesterday, President Obama had this to say about a possible Chrysler-Fiat merger: Recently, Chrysler reached out and found what could be a potential partner -- the international car company Fiat, where the current management team has executed an impressive turnaround. Fiat is prepared to transfer its cutting-edge technology to Chrysler and, after working closely with my team, has committed to build -- building new fuel-efficient cars and engines right here in the United States. Fortunately, The Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece about the man behind it, CEO Sergio Marchionne, back in January. Some highlights: When Mr. Marchionne was brought in to run Fiat in June 2004, the company was on the brink of collapse, and Mr. Marchionne's qualifications for saving it looked slim. ... Mr. Marchionne had no experience in the auto industry beyond his brief stint as a Fiat board member. Since 2002, he had been running SGS SA, a Swiss company that inspects and certifies traded goods. He also showed little interest in adapting to the global auto industry's clubby nature and conventional wisdom. For years, car makers had sought to reduce costs by cutting manufacturing jobs and closing factories. Mr. Marchionne took the opposite approach: He pledged to keep Fiat's network of inefficient Italian factories open and fired 30% of the company's managers. The move won him praise among Italy's militant unions. Mr. Marchionne also eschewed the practice of forging broad industrial alliances to gain economies of scale. Instead, he secured targeted joint ventures to produce single models with car makers including Tata Motors Ltd. of India and Ford Motor Co. of the U.S. There appear to have been a handful of other critical moves, including negotiating the break-up of a partnership with GM on favorable terms, which isn't super replicable. | https://newrepublic.com/article/48765/whats-so-great-about-fiat |
Why Does Aig Have To Post Collateral? | The Times' Gretchen Morgenson and former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg touched on this on "Charlie Rose" last night: One of the things that's so frustrating about the money AIG is paying to various banks around the world is that it's frequently not to compensate these institutions for losses it insured. It's just collateral AIG is forced to put up because its credit rating has been downgraded. In many cases, the losses haven't happened yet (though there have obviously been losses, too). The Journal has a great example this morning: In 2005, Deutsche found a willing taker for a chunk of the mortgage risks held by START: AIG Financial Products. The derivatives arm of AIG agreed to pay out up to $1 billion under two of the START vehicles, if underlying assets deteriorated or the insurer's own credit rating fell below a certain threshold. AIG stood to earn a fraction of a penny each year for every dollar of protection it sold, according to securities filings, meaning it made less than $10 million annually on the $1 billion in insurance. ... Last fall, after AIG's credit rating was cut, the insurer paid roughly $800 million to START, according to two people familiar with the matter. Much of the money is being held in escrow and will be used to pay off Deutsche's swap contracts if mortgage defaults in the portfolio rise above a certain level. [emphasis added.] With the government owning 80 percent of the company, you'd think people would feel comfortable that AIG would make good on its payments should the need arise (i.e., in the event of actual losses). If they didn't feel comfortable, the government could just state that it would make good on them--it would certainly be cheaper than posting billions and billions in collateral now. (Greenberg proposed something like this last night.) In effect, AIG's obligations have the backing of the U.S. government, which has the strongest credit rating in the world. And yet it still has to post collateral like a less-than-fully-credible operation. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/48480/why-does-aig-have-post-collateral |
Should Larry Kudlow Go To Prison? | Yes, I know, being a supply-side loving blowhard isn't a crime, but burning currency is. From the U.S. Code: Sec. 333. Mutilation of national bank obligations Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both. But, with only a six-month max sentence, Kudlow still should be out of the pokey in time to run for the Senate. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/48520/should-larry-kudlow-go-prison |
Does The Waziristan Library Carry 'current Research In Social Psychology'? | Noam ponders the question of why bin Laden chose not to grace us with a videotape before the election and answers: bin Laden probably realized a tape might cut into Obama's lead, but not enough to result in a McCain victory, thus making him look impotent. I'd add one more thought: it's possible a bin Laden videotape might have actually widened Obama's lead. I base that conclusion on an interesting paper by a couple of Berkeley sociologists, Robb Willer and Nick Adams, that recently appeared in Current Research in Social Psychology. Earlier this a year, Willer and Adams conducted a national survey in which some respondents were shown a fake newspaper article about an imminent terrorist attack on the U.S. and others weren't. All the respondents were then asked for their opinions of McCain and Obama. To quote from the article's abstract: Overall, we find that exposure to terror threats increased concerns about "homeland security" without affecting candidate preferences. However, analysis of politically moderate respondents - a substantial subset of the total sample (40%) with a high rate of undecided, likely voters - showed that this group expressed significantly lower support for Senator John McCain when exposed to the terror threat than in the control condition. These findings converge with past research suggesting that Americans' views of the war on terror have changed significantly (Davis and Silver 2004) and that terror threats may serve as "anti-rally" events for candidates with unpopular foreign policies, especially among moderate or undecided voters (Bali 2007). Maybe bin Laden isn't just the Colin Powell of Waziristan, he's the Malcolm Gladwell of Waziristan, as well. (H/t K.L.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/45727/does-the-waziristan-library-carry-current-research-social-psychology |
Can Organic Farming Feed Africa? | David King, the British government's former chief scientist, caused a stir last month when he accused organic-farming activists of "keeping Africa poor." His argument was that Africa needs to significantly increase its food production and the only way to do that was to move toward technology-intensive, industrial-scale agriculture. Using small-scale organic agriculture, King said, would result only in "hundreds of people with little piles of their crops for sale"hardly the most efficient way to go about feeding a continent. It's a critique of organic farming that refuses to go away: Going organic results in lower per-acre yields, making it a fine choice for a handful of arugula-munching global elites, but not for poor countries, where starvation is a real concern. Yet the critique has little basis in fact. Switching to organic does result in lower per-acre yields when done in richer countries, but it can actually increase per-acre yields in the developing world. The reason is that organic agriculture is less-dependent on external inputs like fertilizer or other chemicalsinputs that can fluctuate wildly in price, especially in recent years, as fertilizer prices have soared. Farmers in poor countries who use green manure to add nitrogen to their soil are now faring better than their counterparts who depend on synthetic fertilizers. So perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that the U.N. just released a report pointing toward organic agriculture as the path to food security in Africa. The study doesn't argue that getting rid of pesticides and fertilizers on the few African farms that can afford them will magically cause yields on those farms to rise. Rather, it suggests that the most cost-effective way to increase food production on under-producing farms is to teach those farmers how to use low-cost organic technologies. You might call it a strategy of farming smarter, not harder. It makes a lot of sense in a world of crazily fluctuating input and commodity prices, where a farmer's own expertise is the one input that's not going to become too expensive to afford. --Rob Inglis, High Country News | https://newrepublic.com/article/45855/can-organic-farming-feed-africa |
What About A Seme? | It was Thursday, barely 36 hours since Barack Obama was recognized to have won the American presidency, that some editorialist at the London Financial Times sat down to do his Friday leader. It was the paper's first instructions to Obama. The previous day's commentary was a cliche: a reminder, as if neither he nor his party grasped the truism, that Obama needed to be president of the "whole" country. It was not on the international economic calamity about which, we may presume, the newspaper possesses some special authority. It was not directed to other domestic issues--race, health care, the environment, infrastructure, education--about which Great Britain is, if anything, far more in trouble (though less in panic) than we are. Yes, it was about foreign policy, though not about Russia and NATO or the Korean bomb or, for that matter, Iran's much more ambitious nuclear designs. Not about the corroded moral authority of the United Nations either. Or even about the confrontation between democratic political interests and moral ideals and the new Islamic militancy sweeping across West Asia to the gates of China and planting itself west, north, and south of Vienna where a Muslim siege had been rebuffed in 1683. In all of these matters, London still retains some authority as a European power and also as the seedbed of democracy itself. But on none of these urgent matters does the FT offer any counsel to Obama. Its first counseling is about the long and tortuous dispute between Israel and the political sects and clannish tribes which aspire to (isn't it really all of?) Palestine. It is really a gimmick: Appoint Bill Clinton as "special envoy for the Middle East with plenipotentiary powers." Yes, with plenipotentiary powers, no less. A special envoy for the Middle East is an old hat idea. In fact, it is not exactly an idea and certainly not a new idea. By my count, there have been perhaps a dozen special envoys to the region in the last dozen years, perhaps more, and many of them appointed by the president of the United States as his personal representative to the disputants. Here are a few of the designees of the White House: Philip Habib, William Burns, Anthony Zinni, James Jones, Curtis Wilson. Then, of course, there is the present special envoy of the Quartet, come straight out of 10 Downing Street to the Middle East bazaar, Tony Blair. Very important person, accomplished nothing. Someone once suggested that George Bush Sr. be appointed to this prestigious office. And someone else suggested that James Baker be the one to do the miracle of Middle East peace. The problem with the last two men is that they don't much like Jews. This might be called a disqualification. There have also been U.N. special representatives to the conflict and the region: Count Folke Bernadotte and Ralph Bunche 60 years ago, up to Terje Roed-Larsen ten minutes ago. The E.U. has its own emissary: Marc Otte. Russia, China, Japan, and the two most sanctimonious meddlers in the region, Sweden and Norway, are always appointing special thises and thats to the neighborhood. Right now the Philippines has also sent a new person to collect frequent flyer points in Israel and the Arab capitals. an acronym) was originally broached in the Huffington Post, which gives you some sense of how serious it is. (Irony!) There are several reasons why the very notion should not appeal to Barack Obama. First of all, Bill Clinton is by now a very frivolous man. He is full of self-love and, thus, can no longer be trusted with an important public chore, as Obama must have noticed during the campaign. It is true that Clinton is invested in the historic struggle between Israel and the fissiparous Palestinians. It is hard to imagine that he is not still committed to the Camp David principles to which Ehud Barak committed but Yassir Arafat would not even discuss. Much blood has been shed since the fall of 2000 and Gaza was given over five years later, to also an unhappy consequence. The Israelis cannot be expected to start a negotiation with its old concessions carved in stone. Which is what the Palestinians expect for starters, and only for starters. Clinton would do anything to get the Palestinians to sign on. But that would happen--and the "would happen" is remote--if the Israelis were to sign away not only more territory but not insist on realistic conditions without which free Palestinian Gaza immediately became a base for rockets and missiles into Israel, as it has become in the last days again. Clinton once told a Jewish audience that, if Israel were endangered, he would pick up a gun in its defense. Israel would be in peril only if it yielded the concessions it gave to Clinton in 2000. A bit more than a year ago a "special envoy" was again being widely touted. Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner wrote a piece in Ha'aretz calling "a special envoy for Middle East peace ... a diplomatic tool that has become a cliche, an envoy in the guise of a messiah." Which is apparently just what the FT wants. This begins with the "parameters" drawn up by Mr. Clinton in December 2000 after the collapse after the Camp David summit. Here in the FT's own words: "the creation of a viable Palestinian state on nearly all the occupied West Bank with Arab east Jerusalem as its capital, with agreed and equal land swaps, and fair treatment for 4.4 million Palestinian refugees, largely through compensation." Of course, this is such a skewed view of the conflict. Four and a half million refugees, indeed. Wait another few years and it will be five million and then six and seven. This is not an abstract matter. No, he and the lead writers of the FT have not and will not. The first prerequisite for any solution to this conflict and for the acceptance of a real Palestinian entity is that the Palestinians demonstrate concretely that they do not still yearn to vitiate a Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45925/what-about-seme |
Should Republicans Pray For Rain In Nh? | While RealClearPolitics has listed New Hampshire as a "solid" for Obama (up by 12.3), McCain is still putting in time in the state where he launched his national career and came back from behind to win the Republican primary, speaking last week in Manchester. Manchester is a town in Hillsborough County (population 402,302), where the vote was split down the middle for Kerry and Bush. Also in this county is Deering, which was split 50-50, as well as Mason, Lydenborough, Greenville, and Antrim, all by which Kerry won by only one percent--not to mention several other towns by which Bush only won by an equally slim margin. To say the least, this county would appear to be quite a toss-up and maybe that's part of the reason McCain is still focusing energy there when the state would otherwise seem like a lost cause. All over the county, the weather forecast seems to be pretty consistent at mostly sunny with a 20 percent chance of precipitation. But the monthly averages around Hillsborough County for November are pretty high--4.11 in Greenville and 4.13 in Antrim. Because the margins are so slim in this county, like we said about the other Hillsborough County in Florida yesterday, weather could end up pushing the state's four Electoral College votes towards the GOP. McCain certainly appears to think there's a chance. In his speech last Wednesday he said, "I love New Hampshire. I know I can count on you. I'm asking you to come out for me one more time"--rain or shine. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45643/should-republicans-pray-rain-nh |
Should Obama Go To Georgia? | In a story Jason flagged earlier, Saxby Chambliss's Democratic opponent, Jim Martin, is imploring him to come down there for the likely December 2 Senate runoff election: One of the big question marks in Georgias ongoing U.S. Senate campaign is how much President-elect Barack Obama will get involved. Democrat Jim Martin desperately wants Obama to come here to boost Martins campaign against Republican incumbent U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who has already secured a promise from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to visit the state on Chambliss behalf. Our campaign has talked to their campaign, said Martin spokeswoman Kate Hansen. And that it as far as it has gone. We would be honored to have him. We know his operation is incredibly busy right now. Attempts to reach a spokesman for the Obama-Biden transition team were unsuccessful Sunday. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45949/should-obama-go-georgia |
What's Happening In Philly Now? What Will Happen Tonight? | PHILADELPHIA, PA--At 6:30 a.m., the line outside Slater's Auto Repair in Southwest Philadelphia was around the block. For a decade, the garage has doubled as a polling place on Election Day. Garrett Allen, the local Democratic committeeman, says the number of people stepping over grease puddles to vote is about double what it was at this time four years ago. Ordinarily, residents in this mostly blue-collar, mostly African American swatch of the city don't start turning out until late in the day. Not today. At 8:30, there's still a throng of people sporting uniforms--workers at the airport, a driver for Kellogg's--laden with Obama buttons. "They're coming early," says Allen, a subway station cashier who for two decades has served as a committeeman in the 51st ward's first division, the lowest rung of the party machine apparatus. Both, Allen says. "And they're bringing their children. They want to show them." A few blocks away, a vacant storefront serves as the polling place for the ward's 23rd division. The line was just as long here, though it had dwindled by 9 a.m., as people headed to work. The number of registered voters in the division is 504--up from about 200 last year, when the city saw a hotly contested mayoral election. "Happy Election Day," exclaims one voter as she steps inside. "There's a lot of people who go into tears at the excitement of voting," says Tommy Weeks, the local committeeman. "I equate this to the days when MLK went down into Tennessee and got people to vote. You never see lines except then." In fact, one of the duties of the Obama folks at the polls is to serve as line manager, keeping frustrated would-be voters from leaving. "I just keep everyone happy and active and energized," explains one of them, outside the Flavor In Ya Hair barber shop. Like all the Obama volunteers, she's been instructed not to talk to the press. One colleague, though, passes word of alleged opposition shenanigans: names missing from the rolls or rumors spread that voters could be picked up on child-support charges. The stuff is par for the course here. Not that most of the Obama team would know: They're from out of town. Weeks says that at about 3 p.m., he'll look at the voter rolls and figure out who hasn't voted. Then, he'll dispatch assistants to their houses to encourage them to vote. He also has a bullhorn that he calls "our fog horn." At about five, "before anyone has time to take off their shoes after work," he'll send someone out on the streets to alert anyone who might not have gotten the message about this being a special day. "We're going to get at least 400 votes out of here," he says. "It's amazing." As for what'll happen if all those votes add up to an Obama win, he's more nervous. "I hate to say it, but I think there'll be some gunfire and some fireworks out there." "It'll be like the Phillies all over again," says Shelsea Looney, a pollworker at a nearby barber shop. Last week's World Series celebration included all sorts of joyous street scenes, but also the looting of a few stores. (Philly fans, like Democrats, aren't very used to winning.) "I've been praying on this all week," says Allen. "Restrain yourself, please. Jubilation is one thing, but think about the future. You need to hold hands and say a prayer because there's going to be a lot of work for this man." | https://newrepublic.com/article/45736/whats-happening-philly-now-what-will-happen-tonight |
Will Franken Win The Recount? | I wouldn't expect too much optical scan overvote. If optical scan ballots are centrally counted like punchcard ballots, a lot of overvotes go unnoticed. This was the case in some key counties Florida. However, most optical scan ballots are precinct counted and the machines that voters feed them into are usually programmed (especially after 2000) to warn voters if they overvoted. Voters then have the opportunity to revote. There may, however, be a number of overvotes on Minnesota absentee ballots that were (by necessity) scanned centrally. Also, precinct optical scan machines are usually not programmed to warn of undervotes (especially on down ballot races). Thus, there may be a number of imperfectly filled in arrows on Minnesota ballots that would be discernible to humans but were not discernible to the machines. It is possible, however, that the machines in Minnesota were programmed to warn of undervotes, which reduce this potential trove of votes. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45907/will-franken-win-the-recount |
What's Larry Sabato Doing Today? | We asked a few politicos if they have any Election Day rituals or superstitions that they adhere to. Here's Larry Sabato, political analyst and director of the UVA Center for Politics. I refuse to return any telephone calls asking me what Ive heard about turnout. I refuse to watch any news shows because they distort whats actually going on. I learned that theres no such thing as light or medium turnout--turnout is always massive and heavy, it just so happens that this year it is, but every single time they always say its going to be. I actually clear out my mind and get rid of all the media on Election Day. So many things you hear are phony. I refuse to look at the exit poll data; I want to see the real vote. Ive already done all my studies and absorbed everything that I want to know--I look at the returns. --Suzy Khimm | https://newrepublic.com/article/45752/whats-larry-sabato-doing-today |
Should Republicans Pray For Rain In Va? | Tomorrow, the national forecast, particularly in battleground states, looks overall to be pretty nice--sunny in Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Florida, and Ohio--which should bode well for Obama and other Democrats. But one forecast should be troubling for the Dems. Weather.com has predicted that Virginia, where Obama is currently up by 4.3, is going to get a lot of rain all over the state tomorrow. Prince William County, which is home to Manassas and Quantico Marine Base, could prove a "critical county" according to Politico; a George Mason professor described the county as where "old Virginia meets new Virginia." While Obama is currently up by eight points as of October 17, Virginia GOP Chair M. Frederick confirmed the county's importance in an October 15 press release: "Prince William is the key to Senator McCain winning Virginia, and his visit here will only reinforce that Prince William is McCain country." Well it may be his lucky day tomorrow. There's a 70 percent chance of rain in Manassas and the precipitation average for November is 3.1 inches, which could be a big deterrent for possible voters. Prince William County is not alone in the grim forecasts. It's also supposed to rain in Loudon County, where Obama campaigned as recently as last week, and of which Ben Adler wrote in The Atlantic, "If Barack Obama wins Loudon County, he will all but certainly win Virginia's thirteen Electoral College votes." Maybe they already have been. Last week Palin told the crowd on a chilly evening in Salem, VA, "And Virginia, by the way, this is so beautiful out here tonight and I love the weather...." | https://newrepublic.com/article/45712/should-republicans-pray-rain-va |
Is Daylight Saving Time A Total Waste? | It's doubtful that DST actually helps us conserve energy, which was the original logic. Here are a raft of studies on the subject: Most find that while households do use less lighting during DST, thanks to the longer, brighter afternoons, they also end up cranking up the A/C more, which makes it either a wash or a net loser for energy use. (Hey, if that's the case, maybe we should just permanently set our clocks back two or three hours and live in darkness so that we can really start conserving...) On the, er, bright side, it's possible that DST reduces traffic fatalities and even violent crime, so perhaps it's not a total waste. --Bradford Plumer | https://newrepublic.com/article/45664/daylight-saving-time-total-waste |
Why No Bin Laden Tape? | Like a lot of you, I spent last week worrying that northwest Pakistan's most famous spokesmodel might release another demo tape in time for the election, as he did four years ago. But the tape never came. Surely he prefers McCain to a president named Barack Hussein Obama--much harder to argue that America is anti-Muslim in the latter instance. (And, no, I'm not saying Obama is a Muslim.) Here's the logic I used to reassure myself: Bin Laden is, if nothing else, a pretty canny self-promoter who can read polls (or at least Pollster.com) like the rest of us. Four years ago, Bush appeared to have a slight lead heading into the homestretch. Conversely, in the final week or so before today's election, Obama appeared to have a pretty insurmountable lead. Even if a bin Laden tape would have narrowed the margin, it probably wouldn't have made a winner of McCain. In which case it would have exposed bin Laden to be kind of impotent. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45718/why-no-bin-laden-tape |
Should The Obama Kids Go To Public School? | Today's NYT has a thorough story about Michelle Rhee and her efforts to reform D.C.'s supremely screwed up public school system--efforts that, since they involve abolishing tenure, are being fought tooth and nail by the teacher's union. Basically, Rhee is the best thing to happen to the public school system in the District since, well, maybe ever. And if she pulls it off, D.C.'s public school system might actually serve as a model for other public school systems across the country--which, if you know much about D.C. public schools, is more implausible than the notion that the United States would ever elect an African-American as its president. I think it's inappropriate to tell someone where to send his or her children to school, but I'll confess that I'm rooting for the Obamas to send their children to a D.C. public school--which, according to Politico, is something they're seriously considering. A president picking a D.C. public school for his children is significant whenever it happens (and it hasn't happened since Amy Carter lived in the White House); but, given Rhee's efforts and what she's up against, it would be especially significant right now. Again, that's not a reason for the Obamas to choose a public school for their daughters, nor is it a reason to criticize them if they don't. But it's the truth. P.S. On a pettier note, if the Obamas do send their kids to public schools, the schadenfreude to be had from watching current Sidwell and GDS parents gnash their teeth will be ample. And so will the relief among those in D.C. who are hoping to one day send their own kids to those schools since, if the Obamas' do choose one, getting in will become that much harder. P.P.S. TalkBackers johnlcm and rozenson are right: this Atlantic story on Rhee by Clay Risen is great--even better than the NYT one I linked to above. And jhildner is right: I'm terrible with apostrophes; typos now fixed! | https://newrepublic.com/article/46024/should-the-obama-kids-go-public-school |
Where Should The Press Camp Out? | At a packed press briefing in Washington today, transition co-chair John Podesta announced ethics rules for the next nine weeks and took questions on topics ranging from a reported spat with the White House to how Obama's team will participate--behind the scenes, because "we have one president at a time"--at the Bush administration's upcoming financial summit. You can read about it here. What seemed to weigh on the minds of reporters, though, many of whom were still exhausted from the campaign trail, was the perennial anxiety about access. Of particular concern was where major announcements will be made--about Cabinet appointments and other personnel. Podesta offered few details. "We will try to give you as much advance as possible, but I have none for you today," he said. He added that announcements "most likely will take place in Chicago, although I can't guarantee that." Translation: Be ready to hop a flight to the Windy City on a moment's notice. No rest for the weary, it appears. --Seyward Darby | https://newrepublic.com/article/45974/where-should-the-press-camp-out |
What's Grover Norquist Doing Today? | We asked a few politicos if they have any Election Day rituals or superstitions that they adhere to. Here's anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. During the day I write, because there's not too much else to do. In 2004 I got a call from Zogby at 2 p.m. telling me that Kerry is sweeping the country. I had an article due the next day, so I wrote about what happens now that Democrats control the White House. So, of course, I had to re-write that. Normally, I also go out to a party at night. But this time, since my wife and I just adopted a child, I'll be putting in a car seat and getting the baby's room ready. --Eric Zimmermann | https://newrepublic.com/article/45732/whats-grover-norquist-doing-today |
What If Mccain Wins Pa? | I'm no Nate Silver, but it doesn't seem easy to dismiss two polls in the past three days showing Obama with just a four-point lead in Pennsylvania (even if one of them is the work of the GOP-friendly Rasmussen). Bear in mind, though, that Obama can easily win the election without carrying Pennsylvania. Indeed, McCain could also carry Ohio and Florida and still come up short--so long as Obama carries the western swing states (Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico) plus Iowa and Virginia. He doesn't even need North Carolina here to reach a 270-268 win. The response to this might be that if Obama loses OH PA and FL then something has gone terribly wrong in the home stretch and he can't expect to win those other states. Perhaps, but remember that McCain has targeted quite a lot of time and money on PA specifically, making it reasonable that it would break from the national norm. Another response: That scenario would be an incredible letdown for Democrats looking for a mandate and to remake the electoral map. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45652/what-if-mccain-wins-pa |
Who's On Top? | I was visiting a friend in Harlem this morning and we took a walk around the newest neighborhood in the city to be going chic. Very chic. Already now it is probably the most integrated area in the city and, believe me, it had nothing to do with Bill Clinton moving in. I knew Harlem was in the midst of a real revival when my good friend Henry Louis (Skip) Gates Jr. said he wanted to buy a brownstone in the area. Some of this movement can be traced to the rich programs for school kids that have been going on there for a decade and more. Much of it also can be traced to the movement of youngish white professionals and the new stratum of upwardly mobile, ethnically and racially undefined people. They will not be left behind. They will move (or be moved) to the Bronx. Of course, much of old Harlem lingers on. Well, "lingers" is not exactly the word I want. What I to convey is that part of Harlem that persists, like a bronchial infection. For example, that block of "title eight" or "title whatever" housing that is named after Woodrow Wilson. Yes, there are other apartment complexes named after Herbert Lehman and Robert Taft. But they were senators who fought for public housing, dehumanizingly ugly as these projects are. Yes, a president of the United States. But a racist president of the United States. There's another form of patronizing the locals in Harlem, and it is in the form of election posters. Strictly speaking, election posters are altogether superfluous. After all, it's not just Harlem; it's also New York. Obama will win very big. But voting is an act of citizenship, and acts of citizenship in our society are in short supply. The posters are for Barack Obama and Charles Rangel. OK. Maybe it's just that Rangel's ego is so huge that he thinks he's the draw. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45655/whos-top |
Is Beijing Fudging Its Pollution Numbers? | During the Beijing Olympic Games in August, fears of choking pollution were quickly forgotten thanks to a bevy of anti-smog measures and good (partially man-made) weather. According to the government, all but one of the days in August were "Blue Sky" daysBeijing's term for a day with only "moderate pollution," when the Air Pollution Index hits 100 or below. (The API is based on an average of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and fine dust readings at 27 monitoring stationsozone data is not releasedand has nothing to do with the actual color of the sky that day.) As a result, attention turned toward more pressing controversies, like lip-synching and underage gymnasts. But now, a paper published in the latest issue of Environmental Research Letters (pdf) by researcher Steve Andrews concludes that Beijing's claims to air quality improvement over the past decade may be more a matter of cooking the books than cleaning the skies. Even for those of us with an unlikely and perhaps unhealthy optimism about China's environmental situation, it wasn't hard to be suspicious of Beijing's pollution progress in recent years. In 2007, the Beijing government managed to meet its target of 246 "Blue Sky" days largely thanks to a disproportionate number of days when the API reading was exactly 100. More than a few people wondered if pollution readings weren't being shaved to meet the official goal. One of those people was Andrews, a young researcher working for a green NGO in China. After digging into official data available on public web sites (like this one and this one), Andrews found that Beijing had been moving its air sampling stations to areas with less traffic and industry to create the appearance of less pollution. His research, first published last year in the Wall Street Journal, showed that if the same monitoring station locations used in Beijing from 1998 to 2005 continued to be used in 2006, 38 of that year's 'Blue Sky' days would have exceeded the "Blue Sky" standard. It's as if New York City were measuring its pollution by putting monitoring stations in Stony Brook. When I asked Du Shaozhang, a senior Beijing environmental official, why the city had moved its monitoring stations, he would switch between condemning Andrews's findings (saying, "This phenomenon does not exist, because this is a misunderstanding") and pledging "improvements" to the monitoring network, conceding that Beijing needed "to enhance observation and enforcement and supervision" of the air-quality data. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45963/beijing-fudging-its-pollution-numbers |
Who Has Obama's Ear On India? | Obama's presidential foreign policy team is, of course, not yet filled out. And his spokespeople don't like to single out specific advisors. But based on the word of regional experts and published reports, it's possible to identify a few key figures who closely advised the campaign and are quite likely offering their input right now. One is Jonah Blank, a former foreign correspondent (and author of a historically-based travelogue through India) who also served as the top South Asia specialist on the Senate Foreign Relations under Joe Biden. Bruce Reidel of the Brookings Institution spent a long career at the CIA and State Department and National Security Council. Reidel advocates a new push to resolve the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir as a way of defusing tensions in the region. And there's Karl Inderfurth, currently a professor at George Washington U's Elliott School of International Affairs, another veteran of the foreign policy bureaucracy who was assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs in Bill Clinton's second term. His name is often mentioned in Indian media as a possible US Ambassador to New Delhi. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46252/who-has-obamas-ear-india |
Will A National Energy Council Solve The Problem? | I'm sifting through the impeccably organized 55-chapter "Change for America" volume released today by the Center for American Progress. A call for swift and sound environmental action, from infrastructure development to the creation of a White House level "National Energy Council" wafts through several of the sections on general domestic, economic and national security policy. CAP also includes microtargeted chapters on the Departments of Transportation, Energy, Environmental Protection, Agriculture and the Interior (yes, that one). The entire book operates under the presumption that 1) policy will be "driven by inclusion," at the White House (something that Bush, who has been accused of outsourcing policy to agencies, didn't mimic) and that, according to co-editor and senior fellow Michelle Jolin, 2) agency heads will need advice "on day one, in the first 100 days, in the first year and in the long term." "Change" offers that advice. And in that vein, each of the sections dealing with the green stuff emphasizes that at both the first instant and in the very long term, smart growth, national security and sustainable environmental practices are one and the same. Mark Green cautioned that Change for America is not a catechism, its a menu. But here's one provocative new mission statement for the suggested "NEC": The president-elect should nominate the new energy team early, shortly after the national security team and the economc team, signaling the importance of this issue. This new team would form the core of a new White House National Energy Council, which would inclue the secretaries of most cabinet agencies and the heads of the Council on Environmental Qualty, the National Economic Council, and the National Security Council, and would be led by a national energy adviser with stature comparable to the national security adviser and the national economic adviser. [My emphasis] Whoa. That would surely make a statement--let the jockeying begin! The book also boasts an entire section near and dear to my heart, penned by CAP senior fellows Bracken Hendricks and Van Jones, entitled "Building a Vibrant Low-Carbon Economy." Here they yoke together many of the recommendations from other chapters, and provide a kind of philosophical canopy for a sane approach to our relationship with the planet--involving civil engineering, national regulatory standards, and a return to "middle-skill" manufacturing jobs as an economic engine. Much, as usual, depends on the sale: The 44th president will need to galvanize new constituencies for action, including labor, business, urban, farm, civil rights, and other stakeholders. By having a clear message on the economic benefits of action for the poor and middle class, for ratepayers and small businesses, the new administration will be able to answer predictable attacks based on costs, as businesses and markets adjust....The power of the Oval office to convene industry and interest groups to create a national consensus for action should not be underestimated. It might also fall to a new "NEC" head. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46004/will-national-energy-council-solve-the-problem |
How did Harvey change the way Houstonians react to floods? | On Facebook, as parts of Houston were flooding and the forecast called for more rain, I asked how Hurricane Harvey changed their reaction to floods. Here, lightly edited, are some of their responses. Lisa Gray Lisa McFarland: I shift into hunker-in-place mode at the first notice of flood warnings, in a slightly obsessive way. Randy Smith: Growing up in Houston, flooding kinda became something you expect and got used too until I was so severely affected. I lost my home in Houston and had to move. Now, I live on a hill outside of Houston in the country because I feel safer from floods. But I still get an uneasy feeling and am on edge whenever storms bring potential flooding, even though I know we are safe where we are. Brian Cweren: I keep sandbags on hand and put them out sooner than later. Leah Lax: Someone talk about the dogs! Mine was fine in storms until Harvey now every storm means dealing all night with a terrified animal. Ive been asking around, and a lot of dog owners tell me the same. Somehow, my Gracies recurring terror brings those awful days back every time. Jaime Gonzlez Santana I changed jobs to be more active in working with others to meet Houston's many resiliency challenges like flooding (but also climate change, biodiversity loss, air quality, urban heat, etc. all of which are intersected). Rick Roederer: Yep, I moved to the Hill Country. I enjoy the weather report more now, watching you all. David Proler: I partake in spending hundreds of dollars in food, vino and vodka and just hunker down. Melissa Noriega: We need to think, educate and help each other as a region. No one is coming (to quote Angela Blanchards wisdom), and we need to deal with our business ourselves. We need a flood response at the human level, not just the concrete level, an infrastructure that stays in place and ready. The feds and the state treat each of these as a one-off and make us start over each time. We lose all the expertise and support. It takes months and years to get folks what they need, even as there are lots of resources. Henry Tony Hodges: I live in Katy. My house did not flood, but my insurance went up $200! John Baker: Hurricane Harvey was the third hurricane to cause damage to my house in Bridge Cty, Texas. I repaired the house one last time, sold it, and moved to Delaware. Eddie Cortes: Since Allison, I cannot stand it when some girl says, I love the rain. Cyndi Martin Lawrence: [During Harvey] my poor niece was one of the ones in Friendswood who were rescued on the news. She told me this morning she is having major anxiety with fear of flooding. Debora Morris: Im beginning to dread any kind of rain event. We still havent cleaned up entirely from Ike. It angers me that developers are still allowed to build in low-lying areas. Olga Luiza Dentzien-Keller: I worry about my friends who flooded and are likely to flood again. And I take the turn around, dont drown warning seriously. Scott R. Furtwengler: Now when storms like this are forecast, I map out my route home from work so that I don't have to drive through underpasses or low-lying areas. Ruth E. Cornelius: I notice that we have more flooding, widespread, more often. I look out my windows or open door more often to check if its flooding on my cross streets. Michael Hart: I'm still surprised at all the frequent flooding. Not what I was used to in Arkansas. I'm more prepared not just stockpiling stuff but knowing in advance how to deal with it. I am also more discouraged about doing business in Houston. Businesses almost recover and then there is yet another one. Kenny Browning: I now check the drain channels next to my house from my neighbors houses to make sure they are not plugged so water will not back up into my home like during Harvey. Larissa Lindsay: Im having to be more sympathetic to friends who flooded during Harvey, understanding that the threat of potentially flooding rains is an emotional trigger. They may be having a lot more anxiety than others, and I need to understand a meltdown may happen over minor disruptions. Cindy Clifford: It changed the way I feel about rain. I used to love the sound of it at night at home. Now, it just scares me. | https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/letters/article/How-did-Harvey-change-the-way-Houstonians-react-13836968.php |
Can Terrorism Halt India's Global Rise? | Nayan Chanda is editor of YaleGlobal Online and author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization. In recent years, terrorist attacks in India have become as much a part of life as the monsoon squalls. The only difference has been their unpredictability, as opposed to the regularity of the monsoons. The well-coordinated and large scale assault on Mumbai this week are not only qualitatively different, but also came with a chillingly new message. The jeans and t-shirt clad, youthful terrorists, who looked like backpackers out on a hiking expedition, delivered an unmistakable warning to the world: Foreigners stay away from India. Their special note to the Jewish community: You are safe nowhere. Previous attacks by Islamist youth and Kashmiri separatists were aimed at damaging Indias economic and political stability and inciting violence between majority Hindus and its substantial Muslim minority. They have tried to jolt Indias political system (the attack on the Parliament), hurt Indias business centers (repeated attacks on Mumbai aimed at people in finance and technology sectors) and science and technology hub (attack on the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore), provoke inter-religious strife (attacking Hindu shrines and people during Hindu celebrations), and promote a sense of terror and helplessness among citizens. Never before have terrorists tried to seek out foreigners. During the attacks on Mumbais plush hotels this week, Westerners, especially Americans and Brits, were specifically sought out as hostages. In telephoned messages to TV stations, the terrorists asked for the release of holy fighters from Indian jails in exchange for the release of hostages. It is hard to know if they really believe that they would achieve their stated goal. But taking foreign hostages at Indias fanciest hotels sends out an unmistakable message: India is a dangerous place, and you invest in India or visit here at your own risk. The terrorists want to show that the so-called shining India, the new emerging power and a poster-child of globalization, has feet of clay. Globalization, which brought foreign investments and tourists from far corners of the world--as evidenced by the roster of nationalities present at the Taj and Oberoi hotels--can be brought to its knees by dozens of armed men landing on inflatable rafts from the Arabian Sea. Their seaborne landing--a first in the bloody history of terrorism in India--in and of itself carried a message. There are no borders. The other sinister message of the terrorists this time is that they have an international agenda. Despite their talk of Indian Muslims being oppressed and Kashmiris being killed, their focus on Americans and British citizens and Jewish nationals shows their global concern. The U.S. has emerged as a key ally of India, but Britain is not any closer than other European countries like France and Germany. The search for American and British citizens most probably has to do with the Iraq war, echoing the terrorist attacks in Britain on charges of British involvement in the suffering of Muslims. The terrorists global objective was clearly demonstrated in their targeting of a little-known Jewish outreach center in Mumbai. Before the terrorists burst into the Chabad Center located in an office and residential complex to take the rabbi, his wife, and assembled Jewish visitors hostage, most in Mumbai had no idea about their existence. Only six years earlier, a young Brooklyn rabbi and his wife set up the Chabad Center to quietly offer Jewish visitors kosher meals, Torah classes, and a place to stay. That anonymity was no protection from a group that wants to hurt the Jews as part of a global struggle. The attack on the Jewish community is particularly poignant, as over a thousand years ago, India offered the earliest shelter to persecuted Jews; the wall of an old synagogue in Kerala shows a mosaic image of their early arrival by boat. For the past two millennia, Indias open doors have always allowed traders, travelers, and invaders to pass through and settle. However dramatic the latest attempt to frighten people might be, it is impossible to sever Indias global connections. --Nayan Chanda | https://newrepublic.com/article/46258/can-terrorism-halt-indias-global-rise |
Who Is Jim Jones? | With many, including us, focused on the likelihood of Barack Obama naming James Steinberg as his national security adviser, word comes today that the job may go to Marine General James L. Jones, who retired last year after serving as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and Commander of U.S. European Command. If true, like a Steinberg appointment, it would reinforce the impression that Obama is surrounding himself with powerful advisers known for their pragmatism. Jones has been less bipartisan than nonpartisan, hewing to the traditional idea of an apolitical military. He has no declared party affiliation and, as the Wall Street Journal reported last year, was courted by both parties during the 2008 campaign, with Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, going so far as to compare him to "Eisenhower, who belonged to no camp and everyone wanted him." During the primaries, Hillary Clinton mentioned that she could see a place for Jones in her cabinet, and Obama is taken with the general, whose tough-guy background is complimented by intellectual curiosity and even cosmopolitanism. (Jones grew up in Paris and speaks fluent French.) At the same time, Jones has close ties to prominent Republicans. In fact, when he was named Marine liaison to the Senate in 1979, his boss was then-Captain John McCain. The two remain friends, and Jones appeared alongside McCain at least once during the campaign. Which is not to say he's remained neutral in the foreign policy fights of the last eight years. Although holding high military posts during the Bush years, Jones kept his distance from the administration. In State of Denial, Bob Woodward writes that in 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld was interviewing candidates for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Jones refused to even discuss the possibility. And, when his friend, Marine General Peter Pace, was up for the top military post four years later, Jones tried to dissuade him from taking the job, complaining that the Chiefs had been neutered by Rumsfeld. Jones also turned down an offer to head Central Command-the position David Petraeus recently assumed. Nor was his evasion of Bush appointments limited to Pentagon jobs. In 2006, Condoleezza Rice reportedly asked Jones to serve as her deputy at the State Department. Jones declined-twice. Of course, what's most important is what Jones would advise Obama vis- | https://newrepublic.com/article/46171/who-jim-jones |
Has *any* Country Had Luck Cutting Emissions? | Next month, international talks for a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol will kick off in Poland. First, the good news: According to new U.N. data, the world is on pace to meet its Kyoto targetsright now, the 39 signatory states have reduced their greenhouse-gas emissions, on average, about 17 percent below 1990 levels. (The treaty calls for the states to be, on average, 5 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.) Well, there's also an unsightly snag: Much of this dramatic plunge came about because of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent downturn in Eastern and Central Europe during the 1990s. Lately, though, those countries have been roaring back to life, spewing up carbon galore, while emissions in richer nations andespeciallydeveloping countries outside the treaty, like China and India, are still skyrocketing. Insofar as Kyoto can be dubbed a "success," it's an uneven one at best. But a couple of comments. First, it's not at all clear that the wealthier EU countries are actually going to miss their targets. Some countries, especially Sweden and Britain, are doing quite well. And, as a recent European Environment Agency report laid out, the EU-15 is working to implement a new plan to ratchet down overall emissions in the next 48 months. Much of this will come from tightening its cap-and-trade regime, though they're also planning to plant trees and use (dubious) offsets to inch under the finish line. Plus, of course, a global recession could make the jobs easier, since energy use will shrink. On the flipside, the European Parliament, currently led by Nicholas Sarkozy, might only be able to move forward stronger climate rules by adding a few concessionsespecially for coal-heavy Poland. Meanwhile, Japan just announced that its greenhouse-gas emissions rose to a record high in 2007, leading most onlookers to predict that it could miss its targets entirely over the next four years. Part of the carbon leap came because the country's biggest nuclear plant had to close last year after being rocked by an earthquake. But Japan also doesn't have a mandatory cap or tax on company emissionssteelmakers and manufacturers have resisted one. Instead, various sectors make entirely voluntary "pledges" to cut emissionsan approach that's likely not sustainable going forward. --Bradford Plumer | https://newrepublic.com/article/46120/has-any-country-had-luck-cutting-emissions |
Can Clean-water Laws... Clean The Air? | Lawsuits may seem like a quixoticor even counterproductivestrategy for tackling a problem as big as global warming, but lately they seem to be working. Last week, the EPA's appeals board blocked the permit for a new coal-fired plant in Utah, ruling that before the EPA handed out any more permits, the agency needed to determine whether the coal plants should employ "best available control technology" for carbon-dioxide emissions. The decision was, in effect, an implementation of the Supreme Court's ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA last year, which effectively held that the EPA has a responsibility, under the Clean Air Act, to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. That seems to be the legal philosophy of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), one of the three organizations that sued to have the polar bear listed under the Endangered Species Act, hoping to use the connection between the loss of Arctic sea ice and the bear's decline as a legal argument for limiting emissions. The polar-bear lawsuit was only partially successfulthe bear was listed as threatened, but Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced that his agency would make no move to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions as a result. Now, though, the CBD has announced its plans to file another climate lawsuit, this time using the Clean Water Act. Their argument is that rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels are causing ocean acidification, a form of water pollution that the Clean Water Act requires the EPA to regulate. It's an argument grounded firmly in science. The world's oceans have absorbed roughly half of all the carbon dioxide that humans have emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution, a process that has caused the average pH of ocean water to drop by about 0.1 units. If carbon-dioxide emissions keep rising at their current rate, the result will be another 0.3 to 0.4 unit pH drop by the end of the centurywhich doesn't sound like a big deal until you remember that pH is expressed on a logarithmic scale. Ocean acidification makes it harder for marine organisms to build shells from calcium carbonate. It is already killing coral, and it could start to affect some of the hard-shelled plankton at the very bottom of the ocean food chain. None of this exactly means that the Clean Water Act is the best reason for the EPA to start regulating carbon-dioxide emissions. Nor is it particularly clear, especially after last week, that the EPA really needs yet another legal reason to start regulating carbon dioxide. But you've got to hand it to the CBD for being persistentand for making it tough to ignore the fact that there's hardly an inch of the globe, even underwater, that greenhouse-gas emissions aren't starting to impact. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46121/can-clean-water-laws-clean-the-air |
Did Bush Miss His Deadline For 11th-hour Meddling? | Here's the catch: Any rules that Bush officials deem "non-major" are only subject to a 30-day aging process. Non-major rules are usually defined as regulations with an annual effect on the economy of less than $100 million. Many of the environmental rules under consideration do not easily fit into this categoryit's hard to imagine any deregulation that makes it easier to blow up the tops of mountains as not reaching that threshold. But Bush officials may be willing to shoehorn their regs into the definition anyway. The proposed rules on the Endangered Species Act, mountaintop mining, and grandfathered coal-burning plants are all reportedly in final drafts and ready to go soon. If they do take this route, there are a couple of ways Congress and the Obama administration could overturn these last-minute regulations, but none of them will be easy. Opponents could challenge the "non-major" classification, forcing courts to determine the scope of the judicial power to review agency actions under the Congressional Review Act. Alternatively, Obama could try to re-categorize the rule as "major" and then disqualify it under the original 60-day deadline. But litigants who would benefit from Bush's handouts could come forward and challenge Obama's actions under the Administrative Procedure Act, which limits the power of the president and agencies to change regulations without going through a lengthy formal process. Meanwhile, Congress could step in, either attempting to use its powers under the Congressional Review Act to disqualify Bush's rule, or by passing new laws that would prospectively reverse the rules. But all of these options would take up valuable time, at precisely the moment that the government has many other major issues to tangle with, not least fixing the economy. The modus operandi of the Bush administration's agencies has been to ignore both science and economics in favor of an antiregulatory agenda. A new report released by the Institute for Policy Integrity, The Price of Neglect: The Hidden Environmental and Public Health Costs of Bad Economics documents how, on issues like workplace safety, clean air, and global climate change, the Bush Administration has weakened various protections despite evidence from scientists and economists that more regulation was necessary. It will be important for the Obama administration to learn the right lessons from Bush's failures. Bush came into office ostensibly committed to using economic analysis to craft to "smarter" regulation. Instead, we have seen the Administration ignore and twist economics to produce a paralyzed regulatory system with inadequate protections across the board. The lesson to learn is not that the Bush Administration used too much economics when setting policy, but that it didn't use nearly enough. --Michael A. Livermore | https://newrepublic.com/article/46155/did-bush-miss-his-deadline-11th-hour-meddling |
Is Rahm Proposing A Health Care Horse Trade? | Another quick thought on that WSJ article about Rahm's comments to business leaders yesterday. These portions of the Journal piece stood out for me: He was asked his views on the push by labor unions to allow workplaces to be organized with the signing of cards attesting to union support rather than a secret ballot. Mr. Emanuel declined to say whether the White House would support the legislation, but he said the unions are addressing the concerns of a middle class that has seen U.S. median income slide over the past eight years, while health care, energy and education costs have soared. He said business leaders should help find solutions to the middle-class squeeze or face a revolt. "We need a strategy as a country to make sure they have an opportunity to move up that ladder," he said. ... He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said. Is it possible that Rahm's essentially saying to corporate America: Look, we have to help middle-class workers. We have a number of ways we'd like to do that--health care reform, tax cuts, green-energy investments, other infrastructure projects, education, on down to card check. But we also understand that card check is absolutely anathema to you. So work with us on our other priorities and maybe we can make card check go away for a while. --Noam Scheiber | https://newrepublic.com/article/46112/rahm-proposing-health-care-horse-trade |
What Does Obama Do With His Machine? | Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten have a terrific piece in today's L.A. Times mulling over what becomes of Obama's hugely powerful grassroots infrastructure once he's sworn in. Apparently there's some debate in Obamaland: Traditionally, the new president would blend his campaign operation with his party's national committee. Some of Obama's closest advisors lean toward that pragmatic view. But others, who built the grass-roots organization, worry that linking it too closely to the party could cause the unusual network to unravel -- and squander an extraordinary resource. The Obama machinery relied heavily on idealistic political outsiders committed to breaking free from old ways of doing politics. The worry is that these enthusiastic activists might drift away if they are turned over to the Democratic National Committee, where the party might ask them to support Democrats and target Republicans. Instead, Obama advisors involved in building the force think it should remain an independent entity -- organized around the "Obama brand." The goal, they say, is to integrate Obama's political organization into his new role as president without damaging its zeal for a candidate who promised to change Washington. For what it's worth, I tend to share the view of Steve Hildebrand, Obama's deputy campaign manager, that the infrastructure will be most effective if it's not folded into the party apparatus: Hildebrand offered another argument for an independent network: It could be used to challenge Democratic lawmakers if they didn't hew to the Obama agenda. The organization, he said, could "pressure anybody who we would need to build a coalition of votes in the House and Senate." If nothing else, Obama just hired a chief of staff who's perfectly positioned to bring this organization to bear on the legislative process. It would be kind of a waste if the White House didn't give him the tools to get the job done. (H/t Ben Smith and First Read.) | https://newrepublic.com/article/46044/what-does-obama-do-his-machine |
What Exactly Does "renewing The U.s.-u.n. Relationship" Mean? | At the core of the international liberal elites is a hollow. Nothing confirms this so much as an advertisement published in Thursday's New York Times that costs anywhere from $50,000 to $150,000 depending on the ideological proximity of the sponsors to the editorial positions of the paper. Now, I don't really know how much cash was transferred to the Times for printing this hokey pronouncement. But I bet it wasn't anywheres near top rate. In any case, the statement and its signatories were put together by the Partnership For A Secure America (whatever that means or is) and the United Nations Foundation, which was founded by that profound thinker Ted Turner who is also one of the endorsers of the manifesto. The principles of "We Agree: Renew the U.S.-UN Relationship" are not exactly dangerous. But they aren't anodyne either. Instead, they are portentous in the sense that the document presumes to address significant issues while what it actually does is simply assert high-minded attitudes. But they are high-minded attitudes altogether out of context. And worse: in utterly distorted context. All addressed to the United States and, at least inferentially, to Barack Obama. Here, actually, is one of its nine points that is utterly banal: "Place well-qualified Americans in open positions at the UN." Maybe both. Here's one that's totally out of context: "Help the growing workload assigned to UN peacekeeping by providing logistical and management expertise and support needed to enhance UN capacities." Being about the UN, the command is quite naturally built on gobbledygook. But it insinuates a falsehood, and that is that it is the U.S., rather than, say, China and Russia, that cripple U.N. peacekeeping. Here's my favorite that assumes fixability of one of the U.N. organs, the Human Rights Council, but one that is simply unfixable. "Obtain a seat on the faltering Human Rights Council and work to influence it from within." This assumes that the United States had not expended energy, thought, resources and diplomatic capital on taking the Human Rights Council (and, before that, the Human Rights Commission) from the absolute control of the worst abridgers and aborters of freedoms in the international arena. The fact is that the U.N. is dominated by countries which themselves are traducers of human rights or by countries that really don't care a fig about violations of liberties unless, of course, they can attribute somehow them to Israel. The Council is actually a council on Israel. Nothing more, nothing less. America has little sway with the two of the five permanent members of the Security Council or with many of the 150-off governments in the General Assembly which are in New York as a vacation from home. Please take a look at this innocent-sounding but pernicious document. There are 38 including the excitable Mme. Albright, General Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Lee Hamilton who is the axiomatic co-chairman of any national bi-partisan commission that is set up for any reason or excuse. Also Sandy Berger who, though unable to heed the simplest rules of national security, still purports to tell the city and the world what to do. Rita Hauser, well, too angry, too pathetic and too unknown to characterize. And Gary Hart who managed George McGovern's 1972 campaign, still has McGovern's politics and once ran for the Democratic nomination for president from which running he escaped when caught doing "monkee business." Almost all of these eminences are aged. Their ideas might have made some sense when the United Nations was founded six decades ago in Flushing Meadows, Lake Success, New York. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46190/what-exactly-does-quotrenewing-the-us-un-relationshipquot-mean |
What About Bob? | Jonathan Martin has a curious article over at Politico reporting the view from the Republican trenches that "it looks increasingly unlikely that Obama will break new ground when it comes to fashioning a bipartisan government." Evidently, keeping Bob Gates at the Pentagon isn't bipartisan or high-profile enough: [I]t would hardly signal a dramatically new style of partisan bridge-building. For one, Gates is not a sharply partisan figure. Before becoming president of Texas A&M, he was a lifelong national security official, spending most of his career in the CIA and heading the spy agency under the first President George Bush. For another, he almost certainly would be a transition figure, rather than one expected by the public or colleagues to stay put or be a decisive policymaking voice for a full term. Nor would there be novelty in Obama reaching to a moderate figure from the opposition party to lead the Pentagon. That was exactly what Bill Clinton did in 1997 when he tapped then-Sen. William Cohen (R-Maine) to be his second-term defense secretary. I concede that Obama booting Gates and bringing back Don Rumsfeld--who, wouldn't you know it, has got some opinions about the way forward in Afghanistan--would be a more novel move. But I don't think we should underestimate the novelty and partisan bridge-building nature of Obama keeping on Gates. For all his moderation, Gates is still George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense. And for Obama to turn over one of the top three cabinet posts to someone who's not only a Republican but who's associated with the outgoing (and reviled) Republican president would be no small gesture. Now, if Obama chooses Gates, he'll have reasons other than novelty and partisan bridge-building for doing so. But it's unfortunate--and telling--that some conservatives are already laying the groundwork to claim that Obama's a hyper-partisan divider. In short, there's no pleasing some people. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/46189/what-about-bob-0 |
Can The Power Industry Bail Out Detroit? | Major electric utilities are mulling over whether to buy upwell, preorderthousands of electric cars from U.S. automakers, reports The Wall Street Journal. Now, it's no surprise that utilities would love for plug-ins to become the future of transportit means they can sell more electrons without having to build tons of new plants. (One federal study found that 73 percent of the nation's light vehicles could be recharged using existing infrastructure if the cars were plugged in overnight; doing so would replace about 52 percent of America's current oil imports.) But, right now, utility execs appear worried that GM's collapse and the general financial malaise among carmakers could set back work on the electric car. So the idea is that power companies would buy up tens of thousands of vehicles for their own company fleets to help give Congress confidence that there will actually be a market for the cleaner cars that a bailed-out Detroit would have to promise to make. (Indeed, that's one lingering question in this debate: Even if Congress gave the automakers $25 billion and required the companies to build more fuel-efficient cars, who's to say anyone will actually buy the new models?) Of course, utilities aren't necessarily just thinking about supporting plug-ins to prop up GM. One interesting point the Journal piece gets into is that utilities want to play a much bigger role in managing the shift to electrified transport, to ensure that it doesn't put strain on the grid the way that the sudden burst in popularity of air conditioners did after World War II, taking the power industry by surprise. Anyway, these talks are all very early and it's unclear whether anything will come of thisbut it's worth keeping an eye on. --Bradford Plumer | https://newrepublic.com/article/46111/can-the-power-industry-bail-out-detroit |
What Will Obama's Bipartisanship Look Like? | Ed Kilgore makes some typically smart points about just what exactly Obama might do to fulfill his pledge of bipartisanship. Hint: it might not involve keeping Gates at the Pentagon or finding some out-of-the-way cabinet post for the likes of Jim Leach. There is, however, one form of "bipartisanship" that Bush never took seriously, and that is very consistent with everything Barack Obama has said on the subject. Back in 2001, I described it as an "outside-in" coalition: This variety, typically used by incoming Presidents during their "honeymoon" period, involves the aggressive, direct stimulation of public opinion to push members of the opposing party, especially those from states or districts where the President is popular, to come across the line. This is essentially bipartisanship (or if you wish, post-partisanship) from the ground up, which reaches out to rank-and-file Republicans and independents to mobilize support for big national initiatives. I contrasted this with the "inside-out" coalition--often known later as High Broderism--which involves deal-cutting in Washington across party lines. I raise this distinction partly because it's important in and of itself, and also because it provides the essential context for the decisions Obama makes on appointments. It's one thing to appoint Republicans to positions as a signal that the new administration is interested in a broader agenda of bipartisan deal-cutting in Washington. It's another thing altogether to appoint a diverse team of officials who are all pledged to implement a clear progressive agenda. You have to imagine that the 10 million email addresses the Obama people now have in their system could help, uh, stimulate public opinion to bring reluctant Republicans to Obama's side. Update: Reader MY emails to point out that this will be more of an issue in the Senate, where GOP votes are more necessary--and there you've got Sens Collins, Snowe, Burr, Specter, Voinovich, Martinez, Lugar, Grassley, and Ensign all representing states Obama won. Later Update: And, per TalkBacker kyoung, Judd Gregg. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46227/what-will-obamas-bipartisanship-look |
Are We Wasting Less Water Than We Think? | Switching to drip irrigation seems like a pretty commonsense way for farmers to save water. Instead of using giant sprinkler systems or ditches to get water to cropslosing much of it along the way to runoff, seepage, or evaporationdrip irrigation uses a system of hoses that delivers water directly to the plants' roots. It allows farmers to use no more water than their crops actually need, an alluring prospect in a world of diminishing usable water supplies and a growing number of mouths to feed. This promise of getting more "crop per drop" has caused drip irrigation to become the standard prescription for making agriculture work in arid regions, both in the American Southwest and the dry parts of the developing world. That's the conclusion of a new paper by Frank Ward and Manuel Pulido-Velazquez that models the hypothetical results of varying levels of drip-irrigation subsidies on water use in the Rio Grande basin of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. The question is not whether drip irrigation is efficientit unquestionably isbut whether traditional irrigation actually wastes as much water as critics say it does. Some of the water used in sprinkler or flood irrigation evaporates and is lost from the watershed. But a lot of it runs off into streams or percolates into the ground, where it helps recharge the basin's aquifers. If these return flows are taken into account, traditional irrigation doesn't look as bad. The broader point is that in regions suffering from water shortages, there's a big difference between consumptive and non-consumptive uses of water. Letting the water run while you brush your teeth is not actually that big of a problem, because the water just ends up back in a local river to be used by people downstream. Irrigation water that flows back into creeks or soaks into the ground isn't lost, it's just temporarily relocated. Evaporation is the only way that a watershed really loses water. Unfortunately, while some U.S. citieslike Las Vegasget credit for water they return to its source, the end-users of water do not. A Las Vegas resident gets charged the same amount for a gallon of water used to take a shower, which eventually goes back into the Colorado River, or a gallon of water used to water the lawn, which probably does not. If water utilities wanted to get serious about discouraging the consumptive use of water, they would charge differential rates for water from outdoor spigots, which is far more likely to be lost to evaporation than water used indoors, or give customers some kind of credit for the water they return through their sewer pipes. But for now, at least, water is too cheap to make the extra metering costs worthwhile. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46203/are-we-wasting-less-water-we-think |
Why Are The Captains Of Commerce Still Employed? | There were the AIG retreats at fun places and the GM executive travel by private super-jets. But these were the only routine excesses that were snared in the press. Be assured that in all the sinking vessels of American capitalism there is still open-handed spending. All of this, however, is only small potatoes, showing the captains of commerce have no inner core by which they can read their own misdeeds. And by "guardians" I mean the top five or so executives at each of these institutions and their directors whose remuneration has not been cut or even, for that matter, examined. There is grumbling in the street and and a bit in Congress. But no action. And no real pressure for actions either. But justice will not be done until pay and other favors are cut in keeping with the measure of the disasters over which these men and women presided and of which they approved. Or rubber-stamped. The Wall Street Journal has raised what might otherwise be only a populist--and probably ignored--issue in an editorial, "Citi's Taxpayer Parachute," that asks the stark question: "Why are Robert Rubin and other directors still employed?" It's a question that begs for answers. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46236/why-are-the-captains-commerce-still-employed |
Are Foodies The New Teachers Unions? | First, the Washington Post says that Tom Vilsack is a "near shoo-in" as Secretary of Agriculture. Next, anti-corn demagogues like Ezra Klein howl in protest. And now, via Seyward, I see that Vilsack has told the Des Moines Register that he won't be going to the USDA after all. Update: The locavore lobby isn't as monolithic as I'd assumed. It appears that Klein is leading a schismatic faction opposed to Michael Pollan as USDA chief. Klein et al have yet to rally around a consensus candidate, but I suspect they'll ultimately settle on Tom Colicchio--for his management experience. --Jason Zengerle | https://newrepublic.com/article/46208/are-foodies-the-new-teachers-unions |
Is Carbon Legislation Too Complex For Its Own Good? | It's going to be tough getting any bill that reduces U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions through Congress in the next two years, and scores of different legislative strategies are no doubt being dreamed up as we speak. As we've been reporting here, Democrats like Barbara Boxer and Jeff Bingaman have talked about the need to put out a "streamlined" cap-and-trade bill that's less complex than the 548-page Lieberman-Warner behemoth that died in the Senate this summer. Keith Johnson of The Wall Street Journal rightly questions whether a streamlined bill is even possibleand whether it'd actually be easier to pass: But establishing economy-wide limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, and a market to trade those emissions rights, is a rather complex task in its own right. At the same time, the kinds of things that make cap-and-trade bills complex also make them politically palatable to a broader audience, making them easier to pass, if harder to understand and implement. For example: The question of whether to sell or give away emissions permits can make the difference between securing broad support from business or fighting it tooth and nail. Those are all very good questions. Now, there are number of "simple" climate bills floating around in CongressRep. Pete Stark has a carbon-tax bill that runs just six pages. Bingaman wrote a cap-and-trade bill that, while criticized for having weak CO2 reduction targets, was only about 100 pages long. But once the horse-trading starts, these bills naturally get more complicatedfor instance, during the Lieberman-Warner debate, the bill's sponsors needed to add $4 billion in allowances for coal-burning rural cooperatives in Montana and Virginia to win support from Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus and, for that matter, Warner himself. And so on. Coalition-building makes things more complicated. Handouts help grease the skids. That's how you get to 548 pages very quickly. Likewise, it's all well and good for cap-and-trade advocates to say, "Well, let's just auction off all of the pollution permits and rebate the proceeds to consumersthat'll make things simple." But, as Johnson says, auctions increase opposition from business groups, who want to get pollution permits for free so that they can reap profits from this whole scheme. (Here's a simple explanation of allocating vs. auctioning. Interestingly, Obama's new OMB director, Peter Orszag, is a major proponent of having the government auction off pollution permits rather than giving them out for freeindeed, many experts believe that messy and inaccurate allocation procedures help explain why Europe's emissions-trading scheme stumbled so badly at first: The EU gave away too many permits, which meant that companies didn't have to make meaningful reductions at first.) I'm not sure. A bill that deferred thorny questions to some other agency would certainly have never passed muster with John Dingell, who was famous for his fastidiousness during markupshe wanted Congress to spell out every last detail. Then again, Dingell's not the House energy chair anymore. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46164/carbon-legislation-too-complex-its-own-good |
Is The Sachs Appeal Wearing Off? | Given the drilling hes taken over the last few weeks, Hank Paulson may come to regret his decision to leave Goldman Sachs for the Treasury. But his erstwhile employer may also soon regret sending so many of its top executives to Washington. Grumblings about Government Sachs have been echoing ever since Paulson took office. But the latest and potentially most significant backlash came late last week, when Sen. Charles Grassley asked the Treasurys inspector general to investigate a tax change implemented by Treasury in late September, just in time for Wells Fargo to reap up to $20 billion in its Wachovia takeover. As Grassley explains in a Nov. 14 letter to IG Eric Thorson: Without the issuance of the Notice, Wells Fargo would have only been able to shelter a limited amount of income. Under the Notice, however, Wells Fargo could reportedly shelter up to $74 billion in profits. It also potentially enabled Wachovia's senior executives to qualify for parachute payments that may not have been available under the Citibank deal. As Grassley explains, Wachovias CEO is Bob Steel, until this summer the undersecretary for domestic finance at Treasuryand before that a vice chairman at Goldman Sachs. Grassley uses this fact to open speculation about the bevy of Goldman figures occupying high positions in Washington: As you know, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr. was formerly the Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. Former Goldman Sachs board member Edward M. Liddy was selected to lead AIG when the Treasury loaned AIG the first $85 billion of $150 billion of taxpayer funds. Neel Kashkari is the head of Treasurys new Office of Financial Stability, created to oversee the $700 billion of funds authorized by Congress for the bailout, and was a former vice-president at Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulsons team at Treasury also includes senior advisors formerly at Goldman Sachs, such as Dan Jester and Steve Shafran. Given these relationships, there is reason for concern about the appearance of preferential treatment created by the Treasury Department's decision to issue [the tax change]. | https://newrepublic.com/article/46078/the-sachs-appeal-wearing |
Was The Mccain Campaign Suspension Really A Stunt? | Mark Salter, the McCain adviser and speechwriter, has a piece today over at The Daily Beast that serves as a defense of the senator's honor. He makes some useful points, and I respect his loyalty to a man with some clearly heroic qualities. But this particular passage struck me as a little too convenient: No doubt, we made our share of mistakes. In hindsight, the decision to briefly suspend our campaign to help find support for legislation to address the collapse of the global credit system is probably one of them. But the criticism that it was nothing but a stunt that failed is mistaken. The morning of the announcement, senior economic advisors to the campaign impressed on the candidate that failure to pass some rescue package would lead to a disaster of monumental proportions. We were also aware that support for the legislation among House Republicans was virtually non-existent. He and his senior staff believed he had three options. The most politically appealing was to remain quiet, and then weigh in against the legislation as it was put to a vote, which would have put him on the side of about seventy percent of voters. The second was to offer a vague appeal for improvements to the bill and then keep his distance, mindful that it would probably fail because of House Republican opposition. The third was to become personally involved in finding a compromise that could pass with Republican support and try to convince Senator Obama to join us. He chose the third course, and all his senior staff agreed with him. And while it turned out to be politically costly, I dont think it was anything less than the responsible decision. Nor do I think it proved to be a fatal injury to his campaign. The financial crisis he was responding to had already very likely made the steep hill he was climbing insurmountable. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45934/was-the-mccain-campaign-suspension-really-stunt |
Where's Warren Christopher? | A transition micro-drama played out this week after former Secretary of State Warren Christopher's name surfaced in Al Kamen's column as the leader of Obama's Foggy Bottom transition team. I soon recieved emails from two smart foreign policy thinkers marvelling that Christopher, whose tenure at State under Bill Clinton was spotty at best, and whom many Democrats think failed them during the 2000 Florida recount, would be returning to the fold. Today the Obama camp forcefully corrected a subsequent AP story mentioning Christopher--taking the additional step of circulating that correction via its press email list, lest anyone miss the news. (See Seyward's earlier item for details.) As far as I've seen, however, the Obama camp has not commented on Kamen's report that Christopher's longtime deputy, Tom Donilon, is also playing a transition role. Donlin makes plenty of sense, not only because he's a former '92 Clinton transition official--but also a longtime Joe Biden loyalist. It's possible that Donilon's involvement was mistaken for a Christopher comeback. More generally, it will be interesting to see whether Biden is puts a personal on the State Department, which he knows as well as anyone who hasn't actually served there. P.S. Also on the Foggy Bottom front, Kamen had an interesting nugget on another apparent transition absentee: Richard Holbrooke: "He is not part of any transition team," we were told, and he "hasn't been to Washington since before Election Day." Update: An Obama transition release late this afternoon officially names Donilon and Wendy Sherman, a Madeleine Albright protege, as "Agency Review Team leads" for the State Department. | https://newrepublic.com/article/45997/wheres-warren-christopher |
Have accessory dwellings eased the Twin Cities housing gap? | MINNEAPOLIS As homeowners in Minneapolis' Longfellow neighborhood, Stephanie and Ross knew they needed to tear down their detached garage when they were expecting their first child about two years ago. The old structure was in bad shape and couldn't meet their new needs for space with a child on the way. That's when they decided to build a new one-bedroom apartment on top of a future two-stall garage, making for a home-improvement project that felt like one for the benefits of two. "For us to stay here (in Longfellow), we needed more room," said Stephanie, standing in the apartment over the weekend. Crews had recently finished the unit, which shares a lot with the family's main residence and has a private entrance via an alley. ___ The nonprofit news outlet MinnPost provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News. ___ Dubbed an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), the new space is one of some 150 similar structures in Twin Cities' neighborhoods that are mostly for single-family homes, according to the Family Housing Fund, a Twin Cities housing nonprofit. Since cities have passed ordinances permitting ADUs in recent years, property owners and city planners have touted the housing structures as a low-key solution to adding more housing without changing the look and feel of neighborhoods, or upsetting people who do not want taller or bigger houses near their own homes. Urban planners and elected officials across the metro and state say they are working with new urgency to try and fill a shortage of housing by building more. From new language in city codes that aims to protect renters to a first-of-its-kind zoning change in Minneapolis to increase residential density everywhere (via Minneapolis 2040), politicians in the Twin Cities have introduced a slew of new policies over the past year as possible solutions to the housing gap. But less discussed has been if, or to what extent, ADU's have made a dent in that problem. According to local architects and experts in housing trends, the structures' high cost of construction which can range between $140,000 and $320,000 in Minneapolis and building requirements can deter people from adding the new type of development. Sarah Berke, a program officer at the Family Housing Fund, said accessory dwelling units aren't as common in the Twin Cities as they are in other places. "The potential for ADU development in the metro is still, I would say, largely untapped," she said. According to code, ADUs can be attached to homes as mother-in-law units, detached as cottage houses, in yards as garage apartments or inside the main residence (such as a basement or attic apartment), among other housing types. All must have plumbing, electricity and basic amenities for living, as well as their own entrances. Homeowners typically build them for similar reasons: to host overflow guests, to gain extra rental income, as a smaller home to move into later in life or to provide a new house for adult children. In Minneapolis, ADUs must be at least 300-square feet and owners of the main residence must live on the property. "In Minneapolis, it was about allowing more housing choice . but not really altering the character of the neighborhood," said Shanna Sether, a principal city planner. From the perspective of local architect Theo Grothe, who works for the firm that designed Stephanie and Ross' new detached garage-apartment, more and more residents are interested in ADUs as time progresses. Since 2015 the first year in which Minneapolis residents could apply for permits following a new ordinance by the City Council construction peaked in 2017 with 38 new ADUs. In total, the city has permitted 137 ADUs. They are on about 0.2% of single-family lots. "It's about what we expected," said City Council President Lisa Bender, who authored the zoning-code change in 2014. Meanwhile, St. Paul has four permitted ADUs. The city adopted an ordinance that allows the housing type in certain parts of the city after Minneapolis, in 2016. But it's not just the urban core that's home to accessory dwelling units. Many Twin Cities suburbs have passed ADU ordinances in recent years. Roseville passed an ADU ordinance nearly a decade ago. Since then, a handful of residents have gone through the permitting process to build an extra unit on their property, said senior city planner Bryan Lloyd. When a resident applies for a permit, the city mails notices to neighbors. How can I do that,'" Lloyd said, "As opposed to 'We can't have another house in my neighborhood.'" That seems to be the case in Minneapolis, too. Bender said despite initial concerns when the council adopted the ordinance most of which from a group of residents who argued ADUs would complicate parking and traffic she too has not heard opposition to their construction in recent years. "One of the concerns we heard was that suddenly neighborhoods would change very quickly," she said. "(But instead) it has felt that this is a way to add housing very gradually in neighborhoods, in a way that neighbors probably don't even notice." For Joe Slavec, owner of a Minneapolis construction company, the topic of ADUs is exhausting. He said he and other local construction businesses spend a lot of time talking about them with potential clients and even sometimes do bids on projects yet some 90% of plans don't materialize because of the structure's price. "We've done the math, and we've built a few. They take a lot of extra work," said Slavec, of Minneapolis Garage Builders, LLC. Across the country, the price of new construction is at its highest it's been in 70 years, a BuildZoom analysis of R.S. Means' construction price index found. Another challenge for interested homeowners: Borrowing the money to build an ADU isn't necessarily the same process as borrowing to build a house. Financing can be an impediment, since there's still a lot of gray area in terms of assessing a property with an ADU on it, and there can be hurdles to getting a loan to build an ADU intended as a rental unit, said Berke, of the Family Housing Fund. "If we want to see more accessory dwelling units, the big barrier is cost," Bender said. Beyond price, Slavec said clients' expectations on timing for construction can also be a challenge homeowners often want ADUs built fast. But the accessory units require special inspections and building requirements compared to other residential properties that can slow the process. Bender said the inspections which should include all rental spaces inside existing homes, under the ADU ordinance aim to ensure that people are living in spaces that are safe and legal. "We make sure that the existing structure is allowed in that zoning district. We make sure the principal use is already allowed. We verify owner occupancy because that's one of the requirements today in the books," said Sether, the principal city planner in Minneapolis. "We're also checking for height, setbacks things like that." In other cities, the number of ADUs increased after city planners relaxed regulations, and in some cases offered incentives or outreach campaigns, according to a report by housing researchers at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California-Berkeley and other housing research organizations. In Portland there are ADUs on about 1.5% of single family home lots, Berke said. In order to hit that benchmark Minneapolis would need about 1,200 ADUs, St. Paul would need 888, and the Twin Cities region would need about 11,000, according to a MinnPost analysis of MetCouncil data. Portland's modest ADU boom is relatively new. The number of accessory units increased as housing costs have risen and as the city took steps to make it easier, and less expensive, to build them, waiving some fees associated with new construction on ADUs; allowing short-term rentals in ADUs and loosening design and setback rules. (Sether, a principal city planner in Minneapolis, said they studied ADUs in Portland and other cities as the city wrote its local ordinance years ago.) Other cities have seen the number of ADUs increase after removing barriers to building them, too, the report found. The Family Housing Fund suggests practices to help boost ADU construction and relieve housing pressures in Minnesota cities. Among them are allowing all different kinds of ADUs attached, detached, and interior units and reducing or removing rules like parking minimums, design and occupancy standards, height limits and size limits. "Cities can really pass ordinances that make ADU development easier and more likely to happen," Berke said. St. Paul loosened restrictions on ADUs recently. Initially, in 2016, the city adopted an ordinance that allowed ADUs within a certain area: a half-mile north and south of University Avenue, from Lexington Parkway to Emerald Street. In 2018, it revised its ordinance to allow them throughout the city. St. Paul has permitted four ADUs, but expects to see more now that they're allowed citywide, based on inquiries from residents, said Suzanne Donovan, a spokesperson for the city's Department of Safety and Inspections especially as construction season starts. Across the river, Bender described the 2014 ADU ordinance as a "baby step" to diversifying housing options. The city's long-term plan for development, Minneapolis 2040, which the City Council finalized in December, eliminates all single-family zoning to allow multi-family housing of up to three units on every lot. She said that call for more residential density essentially loosens ADU rules since owners of single-family lots who don't live onsite would be able to rent out units, as well. "Five, six years ago that conversation was different. Now, there's more support and awareness around the need for rental housing in our city, which is a majority renter city," said Bender, who represents Ward 10 neighborhoods that include Lowry Hill East, Whittier, South Uptown and East Harriet. "Places like Ward 10, which are 80% renter units, there wasn't an opportunity to do an ADU, and in other parts of the city that have high demand for rental housing." After that change, the council president wants the city to take note of other metro areas' use of accessory dwelling units to ease a shortage of affordable housing, specifically. "I do expect that, over time, we will slowly start to see more of these depending on how, you know, the housing market is going, what construction costs look like all of those factors," she said. "Over time as we learn more about ADU's, and now that we've made them possible to have in renter-occupied housing, you know, I think we can expand the opportunity to use it as an affordable housing strategy." The nonprofit news outlet MinnPost provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News. | http://www.startribune.com/have-accessory-dwellings-eased-the-twin-cities-housing-gap/509789072/ |
Did Ernest Hemingway copy his friends ideas for Cuban classics? | One was a Cuban newspaper reporter working to support his family andwriting fiction in his spare time. The other was one of the worlds most famous novelists on the planet, a larger-than-life Americanwho came to Havana in search of inspiration. New research shows that Enrique Serpa, a little-known Cuban author, wrote in a way that sparked the creative genius of Ernest Hemingway, who wrote some of his most celebrated works while living in Cuba in the middle of the twentieth century. Professor Andrew Feldman, a US academic, said there were strong parallels between Serpas stories and works later written by Hemingway, including To Have and Have Not and The Old Man and the Sea. Although not a plagiarism situation, the stories were incredibly similar, a striking resemblance in terms of themes and style. He said: Serpas The Marlin, first published in 1936, is about a boy and an old man fishing. The old man is actually killed by the marlin during the struggle. So this looks very much like The Old Man and the Sea of 1952. Serpas novel, Contraband, a story of rum-running, is very much like To Have and Have Not, a story of running contraband. Although Contraband was published in Havana in 1938 and Hemingways book came out in the previous year, Feldman has firm evidence Hemingway read the Contraband manuscript before first meeting Serpa in 1934. He has also discovered a previously unpublished letter in which Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter briefly married to Hemingway, apparently wrote on his behalf to his editor, trying unsuccessfully to get Serpas work published in English. She said Hemingway thought his friend was a wonder. | https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/11/little-known-cuban-whose-writing-inspired-ernest-hemingway |
How does Rockets' loss compare to Houston's most disappointing finishes? | The Rockets season reached its end Friday night. Unfortunately, they lived up to their Run It Back, slogan, getting eliminated at home for the second straight year by the two-time defending NBA champion Warriors. Losing to Golden State might not necessarily come as a surprise to many, as thats how four of the past five Rockets postseasons have concluded. But the way the Rockets' latest playoff ouster occurred leaves us to wonder how it compares to Houston's most disappointing defeats. The series, it could be argued, was there for the taking after the Warriors lost star forward Kevin Durant to a calf injury in the third quarter of Wednesdays Game 5. Instead, their veteran nucleus that won a championship and came within a minute of winning another before Durant arrived gutted out a win. That was a huge opportunity lost for the Rockets, who then found themselves facing elimination in Friday's Game 6. Despite Stephen Curry going pointless in the first half, the Warriors hung with the Rockets. Curry then caught fire in the second half and put the dagger in the Rockets during the final minutes, stunning them and the Toyota Center crowd with a 118-113 victory. For the second straight year, the Warriors knocked out the Rockets on their floor. Last year, it came in Game 7 amid an unfathomable 27 consecutive missed 3-pointers by the Rockets. It also came without Chris Paul, as the veteran guard was injured during a Game 5 victory and was sidelined as his team squandered a 3-2 lead and double-digit halftime leads in the final two games. This year, it was the Warriors who were minus two starters as Durant and DeMarcus Cousins were sidelined with injuries. It proved to be more of a speed bump than obstacle, as theyre moving on to their fifth straight Western Conference finals and the Rockets are done. So where does the loss rank among Houstons most disappointing finishes. Heres a look at some of Houstons most disappointing setbacks. A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN 1992 Oilers This arguably is the defining Houston pro sports loss. It featured a blown 35-3 lead during the second half against a Bills team without Hall of Fame quarterback Jim Kelly and running back Thurman Thomas and then losing 41-38 in overtime. Bills backup QB Frank Reich did in the Oilers then and continues to stick it to Houston as the Colts coach, masterminding the Texans' wild-card loss at home in January. A simple 'We Choked.' 1983 UH basketball This is a loss that lingers for the Cougars. Phi Slama Jama was at its peak, led by the iconic pair of Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. But instead of running Cinderella N.C. State out of The Pit in Albuquerque, the Cougars were undone by foul trouble, poor free-throw shooting, a curious decision by coach Guy V. Lewis to slow things down (there was no shot clock in college basketball then) and the final blow was Lorenzo Charles dunking in an airball at the buzzer to cap the stunning upset. OTHERS THAT HURT 1979 Cotton Bowl On New Years Day in Dallas with a minus-7 wind chill, Joe Montana (remember that name) led Notre Dame to a 35-34 win over UH after trailing 34-12 with seven minutes left. Luv Ya Blue Oilers The 1979 Oilers, making their second straight trip to the AFC Championship Game, remain the last Houston team to make the NFLs final four. They lost both times to the Steelers, a reigning dynasty much like the Warriors. The losses hurt given the teams close bond with the city but shouldnt have come as surprises. 1980 Astros Their first postseason trip ended in heartbreak against the Phillies in the NLCS. With a chance to punch their ticket to the World Series, the Astros gave up three eighth-innings runs before losing Game 4 in extra innings. Game 5 was just as galling, with ace Nolan Ryan taking a three-run lead into the eighth inning before Philadelphia scored five times and later triumphed in 10 innings. A brutal loss with the Fall Classic within their reach on multiple occasions. 1986 Astros Against the swaggering Mets, the Astros trailed 3-2 after two walkoff losses in New York that both featured controversial umpiring decisions that went against them. Starter Bob Knepper dominated Game 6 for eight innings and had a 3-0 lead in the ninth, only to lose that advantage. The Astros then dropped a 16-inning, 7-6 heartbreaker with the tying and winning runs on base when Jesse Orosco struck out Kevin Bass to end the series. The Game 6 collapse was even more galling given ace Mike Scott, who had dominated the Mets twice, was to start Game 7. 1991 Oilers With a trip to the AFC championship game one stop away, they let John Elway drive from his 2-yard line while converting a pair of fourth downs to set up the Broncos game-winning field goal in a 26-24 divisional playoff loss at Denver. 1993 Oilers They started 1-4, then won 11 consecutive games and hosted the Chiefs in the divisional round at the Astrodome. But they gave up 21 fourth-quarter points in Joe Montanas final great playoff performance in a gut-wrenching 28-20 loss. 1997 Rockets This was the last hurrah for the Clutch City era that brought the Rockets championships in 1994 and 1995. In the summer of 1996, the Rockets acquired Charles Barkley to get past Seattle (the SuperSonics had knocked them out in 1993 and 1996) and made it to the Western Conference finals against perennial playoff rival Utah. But at home in Game 6, they blew a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter and saw their season ended by Jazz star John Stocktons 3-pointer at the buzzer. 1998 Astros Until the Astros won 103 games in 2018, the 1998 team set the franchises standard for regular-season success with 102 wins. The best team of the Bagwell/Biggio era featured a deep lineup and pitching staff headlined by trade-deadline acquisition Randy Johnson. But San Diegos Kevin Brown outdueled Johnson in Game 1 of the NLDS at the Astrodome and thanks to a scheduling quirk, also started Game 3 and shut down the Astros again. The Astros again let Johnson down with little run support in dropping Game 4 and the series. 2004 Astros After going on a second-half tear to take the NL wild card, the Astros exorcised their Atlanta demons by beating the Braves in five games in the NLDS. In the NLCS against the Cardinals, they took a 3-2 lead after Jeff Kents walkoff three-run homer in Game 5. But Jim Edmonds evened the series with his own walkoff homer in the 12th inning of Game 6 and the Cardinals overcame Roger Clemens and an early Astros lead in Game 7 to take the series. 2014 Rockets The first season of the James Harden/Dwight Howard partnership saw the Rockets drop the first two games at home to Portland and be forced to play catch-up from there. Then in Game 6, the Blazers Damian Lillard hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to end Houstons season. 2015 Astros After nine seasons out of the playoffs, the Astros returned to prominence led by a core of homegrown players such as Jose Altuve, Dallas Keuchel, George Springer and Carlos Correa. After beating the Yankees in the wild-card game in New York, they led the Royals 2-1 in the ALDS and had a 6-2 lead in the eighth inning of Game 4 before the bullpen imploded. They lost that game and also Game 5 in Kansas City to put an end to a promising breakthrough season. 2017 Rockets Under new coach Mike DAntoni, the Rockets battled the Spurs through four games of their second-round series. With the series lead at stake in Game 5, the Spurs lost star forward Kawhi Leonard to an ankle injury late in regulation but still got past the Rockets in overtime, with Manu Ginobili blocking James Hardens tying 3-point attempt at the buzzer. Then without Leonard and Tony Parker in Game 6, the Spurs skunked the Rockets by 39 points at Toyota Center in arguably the most humiliating loss in franchise history. 2018 Rockets The top-seeded Rockets had the defending champion Warriors on the ropes, taking a 3-2 series lead. Despite not having star guard Chris Paul because of injury, they took double-digit halftime leads in Games 6 and 7 only to lose both. The latter, at home, included an infamous stretch of 27 consecutive missed 3-pointers. Its likely not at the level of the 1992 Oilers or 1983 Cougars, as the pain of losses have stuck with fans through the years and remain the standard for Houston sports disappointment. The fact its an all-time great team in Golden State that continues to send the Rockets packing may make this year's and last year's result more bearable (and inevitable) for some. One things indisputable, though: the 2018-19 Rockets have plenty of company when it comes to Houstons heartbreak club. | https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/texas-sports-nation/rockets/article/How-does-Rockets-loss-compare-to-Houston-s-most-13837609.php |
Which Edmonton festivals will welcome weed smokers this summer? | EDMONTONYoull be allowed to spark a joint at folk fest this summer, but youll have to go off-site to toke with your food at A Taste of Edmonton or heritage fest. The Edmonton Folk Music Festival is one of the few major local events planning to have a designated cannabis smoking area for the first summer since legalization in Canada. The Edmonton Folk Music Festival will allow cannabis at the venue this summer. Yes, that will happen, festival producer Terry Wickham said. If we said to people, you cant smoke in here, everybody would go outside and be smoking in Cloverdale and they wouldnt like that. Wickham said he has to talk to city officials to work out exactly what the space, or spaces, will look like when folk fest returns Aug. 8 to Aug. 11 at Gallagher Park. Article Continued Below If people are sitting at a stage, they shouldnt be exposed to any kind of smoke, especially children, Wickham said. Julie Stormer, supervisor of festivals and events with the City of Edmonton, said cannabis smoking areas have to be fenced off and separate from beer gardens and cigarette-smoking areas. Article Continued Below Anyone entering has to provide ID to prove theyre over the age of 18, requiring additional security. Wickham says fencing and security are just the cost of doing business, but other festival organizers see it differently. Events Edmonton general manager Paul Lucas said the requirements for creating a designated cannabis area seemed too expensive and logistically challenging for A Taste of Edmonton. Having to add additional bodies to secure something like that in the festival world, were already pretty stretched for dollars at the end of the year, Lucas said. Edmonton Heritage Festival Association executive director Jim Gibbon plans to stick with the festival's no-smoking policy this year. ( Kevin Maimann / Star Edmonton File ) The food-centred event, running July 18 to July 28 at Capital Plaza on 99 Ave. and 108 St., wont have a smoking area for cigarettes either, so all smoking and vaping will have to be done off-site on public property. But it will still have a beer garden. Lucas said organizers will have to reconsider their cannabis policy next year, however, when cannabis-infused food and drinks are expected to be legal and vendors will be vying to show off their new products. Thats something that Taste of Edmonton for 2020 is certainly going to get its head wrapped around at the end of this year and see how the industry reacts to that and how the restaurants react to it, he said. Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival artistic producer Murray Utas says the festival will crack down on smokers this year. ( Kevin Tuong / Star Edmonton File ) Edmonton Heritage Festival executive director Jim Gibbon said his event, happening Aug. 3 to Aug. 5 at Hawrelak Park, will also maintain its usual no-smoking policy this year, which bans cannabis, vaping and hookah at the festival. Smoking just doesnt really go with the rest of the mandate. To be honest, its just easier, too, Gibbon said. Interstellar Rodeo, a music festival taking place at Hawrelak Park from July 26 to July 28, has yet to decide whether cannabis will be allowed at the venue. The Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival, meanwhile, will not only maintain its status as a smoke-free site, but will step up enforcement this year due to legalization. Artistic producer Murray Utas said the festival will have new signage throughout the Old Strathcona site from Aug. 15 to Aug. 25, and security will have conversations with patrons who break the rules. Weve been (smoke-free) for a while, but we havent really been enforcing it, he said. Now that weve created the signage ... were looking to really put it out there and follow up with the idea of us being smoke-free. Because we are such a family-based thing and it just makes sense for us when it comes to our main site. The Edmonton International Street Performers Festival, also slated for Old Strathcona from July 5 to July 14, will be smoke- and drink-free. Producer Shelley Switzer said there are plenty of public spaces nearby where people can go if they feel a need to get buzzed. Our mission and mandate is about access, its not about putting up any kind of fence anyway, Switzer said. Theres lots of places for people to smoke close by and thats fine. K-Days, one of the citys biggest festivals running July 19 to July 28 on the Northlands grounds, is still working to finalize its cannabis strategy. Stormer said the city has not heard a lot of requests from festival organizers for creating designated pot-smoking spaces, and expects to mostly see them at events where re-entry is not allowed. She said the city has a framework and is ready to work with organizers on plans that suit their needs. The application process is similar to trying for a temporary smoking or non-smoking area. I dont really know what the public will want, which will be interesting to see, Stormer said. Those that do go through it, obviously lots of things to learn this year just to see how it all plays out. Wickham said legalization has been a long time coming and hes not worried there will be any problems with smoking at folk fest. What does concern him is the changing weather, and the potential return of heavy smoke from wildfires that drifted over the city from British Columbia at last years event. Im more worried about weather than anything else these days, Wickham said. Thats the smoke that worries me the smoke coming from B.C. Kevin Maimann is an Edmonton-based reporter covering education and marijuana legalization. Follow him on Twitter: @TheMaimann Read more about: | https://www.thestar.com/news/cannabis/2019/05/11/which-edmonton-festivals-will-welcome-weed-smokers-this-summer.html |
Would trolls, fake news and privacy invasions go away with a new Facebook? | Mark Zuckerberg's former college roommate and co-founder of Facebook posted a fascinating proposal this week: break up the social network and watch the problems start to disappear. <b>19. Mark Zuckerberg</b><br /> <b> Most recent annual compensation:</b> $22.6 million<br /> <b> Company:</b> Facebook<br /> <b> Revenue:</b> $40.7 billion<br /> <b> Number of employees:</b> 25,105 (Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) Much of the online chatter can be summed up in two words: nice dream. "It would not solve the problem," says Boston based blogger Josh Bernoff. "Breaking up Facebook would enable us to have 3 data abusers (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) instead of one, and I'm not sure why thats better." Breaking up Facebook (into what?) will not remedy the issues of overuse, nor fake news, nor extremist views, nor privacy. Breakup is a romantic fantasy. Study the long history of anti-trust and AT&T, beginning in 1913. Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) May 9, 2019 The gist of Hughes' Op-Ed and subsequent media tour among many TV shows is that the government needs to take action on behalf of consumers, as it did with AT&T back in 1984. Running for president, candidate Elizabeth Warren agreed with Hughes, weighing in on the side of a breakup, and using the hashtag #BreakUpBigTech. Senator Warren (D-Mass. ), who wants to apply the hatchet to Facebook, Google and Amazon, says the big tech firms have "bulldozed competition, used our private info for profit, hurt small businesses and stifled innovation." Chris Hughes is right. Todays big tech companies have too much powerover our economy, our society, & our democracy. Theyve bulldozed competition, used our private info for profit, hurt small businesses & stifled innovation. It's time to #BreakUpBigTech. https://t.co/rZMftEwlkN Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) May 9, 2019 Alex Kruglov, the founder of small online video gaming startup pop.in, is with Warren and Hughes. Taking away Instagram and WhatsApp would "create an environment of more competition," he says. Snapchat invented the idea of disappearing photos, and when Facebook embraced the idea and tried to buy the company, but was rebuffed, Facebook responded by copying the idea and using it on Instagram. The Instagram Story feature is now used by over 500 million people daily, while Snapchat has under 200 million active daily users. Kruglov says situations like this, with government monitoring, would open the playing field and make it fairer. What it wouldn't do is get rid of fake news, trolls and the like, but he believes government regulation that enabled competition would have a natural effect of diluting these voices. Just like with regulation of utilities and auto companies, regulation would shift the power from the social network back to users, says Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst with Kaleido Insights. He doesn't support the idea of a breakup, however, because that would just create consumer confusion, he says. We like connecting via Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, because it makes it easier to use the services, just like we like signing on to websites via Facebook connect. And if Facebook had that taken away, some other company, probably Google, would just swoop in and try to connect everyone via its system, he says. Google's Kayitta Johnson gives a demonstration of the Nest Hub Max at the Google I/O conference in Mountain View, Calif., Tuesday, May 7, 2019. (Photo: Jeff Chiu, AP) In other tech news this week: Google held it's big I/O conference for app developers this week, announcing new low-cost phones and a rebranding of Google Home products. Google looked to address consumer burnout over super-expensive smartphones with a new Pixel smartphone for $399. It's not waterproof and doesn't offer wireless charging, but then it doesn't cost $1,000 either. Our Ed Baig says the Pixel 3A phone is a better deal that the Pixel 3, which starts at $799. Google also lent some confusion to its Alexa rival, the Google Home line. It's now called the Nest Home Hub because, well, Google owns Nest, which makes several home automation products, and wanted to beef up the Nest name. A larger edition, selling for $230, the Nest Home Hub Max, will be released in the summer. It will also feature a video camera that follows users around the home, similar to Facebook's Portal device. Bret Kinsella, who pens the Voicebot,.ai blog, says we could expect Google to change the name of the Google Home speakers to Nest Home later this year. Ride-hailing company Uber went public on Friday, but didn't have a great day, closinbg at $41.57, down from the opening price of $45 a share. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a detailed pitch for flying astronauts to the moon by 2024. Blue Origin, the rocket venture from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, will launch a manned mission to the moon, in just a few years. Only three nations have successfully landed on the moon: U.S., Russia and China. This week's Talking Tech podcasts: While we were away visiting Spain and Portugal, we had several talented folks filling in for us on Talking Tech, and some reruns as well. Veteran analyst Tim Bajarin offered us a preview of Apple's upcoming WWDC developer conference. Shannon Rae Green and Dusty Terrill, the duo that hosts USA TODAY's "I Tell My Husband The News," podcast, weighed in on schools banning Uber Eats. From the vault: our #TalkingTech sitdown with singer Ariana Grande. Melissa Kirsch from "The Upgrade by Lifehacker podcast filled for us with thoughts on how to get off the grid. From the vault: one of our all-time favorites, Talking Tech with comedian Lewis Black. That's a wrap for the Talking Tech newsletter. Please subscribe at http://technewsletter.usatoday.com, follow me (@jeffersongraham) on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and listen to the daily Talking Tech podcast wherever you listen to online audio. Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/05/11/would-fake-news-and-trolls-go-away-government-facebook-breakup/1166459001/ | https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/05/11/would-fake-news-and-trolls-go-away-government-facebook-breakup/1166459001/ |
Who will join Liam Stewart in Queenstown? | Liam Stewart, the son of Rachel Hunter and rocker Sir Rod Stewart, is expected to join the Queenstown's SkyCity Stampede ice hockey team within the next fortnight, after the club confirmed his signing this week. It's a sure bet his mum will come home to see some of his games and his sister Renee too. Sir Rod is a huge fan of his son's sporting career, often attending his games. Two years ago, he made headlines when he was joined by Lancaster and ex-wife Rachel to watch 24-year-old Liam play for Great Britain, winning against Japan at the Hockey Division 1B World Championship in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Advertisement Maybe Sir Rod can mix business with pleasure and turn on a concert for fans at NZ's winter playground when he visits his son. Nicole Artukovich and Liam Stewart. Photo / Supplied He did just that last year in Croatia the Dubrovnik Times reported that Sir Rod was to combine a concert in Zagreb with sailing along the Croatian coast upon recommendation from his future daughter-in-law Nicole Artukovich. Artukovich, 24, grew up in Long Beach, California, and is an experienced events' co-ordinator. She and Stewart have been most recently based in Los Angeles where Liam played ice hockey at the Staples Centre in March. In his ice hockey career Stewart spent four years with Washington's Spokane Chiefs in the Western Hockey League, and a season with the Quad City Mallards and Alaska Aces before moving to Britain, where he played a season for Coventry Blaze and most recently Surrey's Guildford Flames in the Elite Ice Hockey League. Spy will be keeping an eye out for the couple and their celebrity family when they land in Queenstown. By Ricardo Simich | https://www.nzherald.co.nz/spy/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503840&objectid=12229322 |
Can Wolves find the next big thing in basketball analytics? | At his introductory news conference Monday, Timberwolves President of Basketball Operations Gersson Rosas declared, Were going to question the norm with everything that we do. The Wolves have lagged behind the NBA three-point revolution in recent years. But the question today isnt how to catch up to the pack there, since three-point shooting has become the norm. First take: Michael Rand From a purely basketball standpoint, the game seems to be trending toward a positionless model. The Rockets, where Rosas worked for 17 years, employ two Hall of Fame point guards who often share the floor. Part of what makes the Warriors so good is that they have four starters Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green who can handle the ball. I could envision a future NBA where there basically arent any true centers and all five players are expected to be adept at passing, shooting and dribbling. Chris Hine, Wolves beat writer: Then its a good thing the Wolves have a center whos versatile in Karl-Anthony Towns, if hes going to become a tall guard in this future NBA. The NBA is already trending in this direction. You hear coaches talk all the time about players needing the ability to guard multiple positions because of this. The NBA has already nailed down the value of different shots on the floor and where its players need to shoot from in order to score. I think the next big thing is coming up with some way to ensure the mental health and well-being of players. Commissioner Adam Silver recently said a lot of NBA players are unhappy or depressed thanks in part to social media. If theres a way for teams to keep players happy and in a good frame of mind during an 82-game season, the on-court product could benefit as well. Rand: Thats a good thought and obviously a challenge that extends beyond the NBA into greater society. From a competitive standpoint, another big frontier on the analytics side is physical health and injury prevention. Like Silvers comments, which came in March at the MIT Sloan Analytics Sports Conference, injury prevention was a hot topic at the annual meeting of the minds in Boston. Whether its improved sleep, smarter training or secrets to recovery, teams and players that find an edge in this area reap benefits. Just think of how different the Wolves season might have played out, for instance, if Robert Covington and others had been healthy all year. Hine: They did look good for a few weeks there in November! Its hard for me to envision a radical change coming to basketball on the court. It seems like its going to come off the court in rest, health, sleep and nutrition. Ill also be interested to see what Rosas thinks of the Wolves grueling travel schedule and if he has any plans to alter how the Wolves handle road trips. Rand: If he can get them moved to the Eastern Conference, hed be the real MVP. Final word: Hine I wouldnt mind multiple trips to Miami and Chicago per season on the company dime. More Rand: startribune.com/RandBall More North Score: startribune.com/NorthScore | http://www.startribune.com/can-wolves-find-the-next-big-thing-in-basketball-analytics/509802802/ |
Could miscarriages land American women in jail? | Abortion legislation in Georgia and Alabama ascended in the news cycle this week, with Georgia's governor signing a "heartbeat bill" into law on Tuesday and Alabama's Senate postponing until next week its vote on a near-total abortion ban. The Georgia law will ban abortions after a doctor is able to detect "a fetal heartbeat in the womb," usually at about six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. It was one of the nation's most stringent proposals until the all-out ban introduced in Alabama, reports The Washington Post. Under the proposed Alabama bill, doctors would not be able to perform the procedure once a fetus is "in utero." That version caught national attention because the bill that passed in the House allowed for a single exception, in cases involving a serious health risk "to the unborn child's mother." Cases of rape and incest were not exempt as they are in other states. The abortion bills are not simple. Advertisement "In Georgia, you have to go down a rabbit hole and have to be a lawyer to understand what you're reading," said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, director of Planned Parenthood state media campaigns. Since Tuesday, fear has spread, confusing further reporting on the bills. Information has been misconstrued, criminal penalties have been misstated, and social media platforms have morphed into prime false-narrative territory. And while there has been much attention on the issue of bans on early-stage abortions, women who miscarry are not going to be sent to prison for life. So, let's correct the record. ABORTION IS NOT OUTLAWED RIGHT NOW Neither Alabama's proposed ban nor Georgia's abortion law is currently in effect. The Georgia law is scheduled to become enforceable in 2020, though "everyone in America expects it will be challenged in court before then," said Mary Ziegler, professor at Florida State University College of Law and author of "After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate." "Courts may block it from being enforced even in 2020." The bill introduced in Alabama was tabled on Thursday; because it was not passed, there is nothing to enforce. Other states, including Mississippi and Ohio, recently passed "heartbeat" laws. Neither state's law is currently in effect either. State Rep. Terri Collins, R, who sponsored the hotly debated Alabama bill, reiterated during an interview on Friday with The Post that abortions are currently allowed in the state. The bill must pass through the Senate and then the governor must sign it. It will take an additional six months after that to go into effect. Michelle Disher, from Roswell, and others dressed as characters from 'The Handmaid's Tale', protest outside the Capitol. Photo / AP Several states have signed abortion legislation into law, but any law that has moved through the courts has ultimately been blocked or struck down, Zeigler said. Iowa, North Dakota and Kentucky have seen related laws blocked. "Women who are panicked should know they have time," said Alexa Kolbi-Molinas of the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, and patients should not cancel their appointments. Kolbi-Molinas was also confident that the ACLU would "be able to overturn these laws because they violate decades of Supreme Court laws." "We've been inundated with calls from patients who think abortions are already illegal," said Staci Fox, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast. "They don't understand that we'll challenge this in court and it will likely be blocked." What worries her more, though, are the patients who aren't calling. They need to know that "compassionate, nonjudgmental care is still legal." WOMAN IN ALABAMA AND GEORGIA WILL NOT BE CRIMINALISED Unlike other states - which have passed limited abortion bills such as bans on the types of abortion procedure and gestational age of the fetus - Alabama's proposed bill is an all-out ban on abortion. "This bill is very simple," said Collins. "It's not about birth control or the morning after the pill. It's about not allowing abortion once the woman is pregnant. The entire bill was designed to overturn [Roe v. Wade] and allow states to decide what is best for them." However, the bill explicitly states that women are exempt from criminal and civil liability, a tenet that Alabama lawmakers have repeatedly reinforced. "In my bill, women would not under any circumstances face jail time if they got an abortion," Collins said. Instead, the law targets doctors, who can be prosecuted for performing an abortion, a felony punishable by up to 99 years imprisonment. Carol Sanger, professor at Columbia Law School, said such penalties on doctors were "just another way to make women frightened" and create "more disincentives for physicians and residents to take up this practice." The Georgia law is more complex. Like Alabama, it explicitly states that doctors who perform abortions will be prosecuted. It is clear about those penalties. The bill is more vague about the prosecution (or non-prosecution) of women. On Tuesday, Slate published an article with a not-entirely-accurate headline: "Georgia just criminalised abortion. Women who terminate their pregnancies would receive life in prison." It suggested that under the Georgia law, women who terminate their pregnancies would be prosecuted and sentenced to either life in prison or death. That is incorrect. Protestors rally outside of the Georgia State Capitol following the signing. Photo / AP "The news headlines and social media headlines that speculate about the bills' unintended consequences are - at the very least - not productive. At most, they're harmful," Planned Parenthood's Staci Fox told The Post on Friday. HB 481 could not be used to successfully prosecute women, she argued. But if a woman had a miscarriage, she could be pulled into an investigation looking at whether someone performed an illegal abortion on her. "You don't want a woman to be forced to prove how she lost her baby," said Sanger. Georgia's law does not unequivocally say that women are exempt, but legal experts point to other areas of Georgia's penal code which have specific defenses for women, including those who miscarry. A ROE V. WADE CHALLENGE IS THE GOAL In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided that the right to privacy and liberty was broad enough to encompass a woman's choice to continue her pregnancy with consulting with her doctor. "In addition to giving women the right to choose whether to terminate a pregnant, the court also said that right is not absolute and there are certain rules that govern how long that right lasts," Sanger explained. To do that, it looks to trimesters and viability, ignoring that reason a woman chose to have an abortion. The recent spate of abortion bills that try to ban abortion early into pregnancy focus on duration - some states picked 16 weeks, others (like Georgia) are down to six. Alabama took it one step further. Under the new legislation, the state has said all it requires is pregnancy. "By making the fetus a person, it's an end run around Roe," she said. "Once you determine a fetus is a person, you can't kill." For Collins, the Alabama state representative, the bill's true purpose is to trigger litigation that would force the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. "My point on keeping an amendment about rape or incest out of this bill is that Roe v. Wade does not mention that issue and I want this bill to focus on the reasoning used in the Roe v. Wade decision, 'Is the baby in the womb a person?' Any amendment would contradict that point." Even in Alabama, it seems, there's still a dispute over why a woman should be able to have an abortion. "That's what Roe is all about - no one should be able to decide why a woman should have an abortion," Sanger said. The Supreme Court decides which cases it wants to hear, and legal experts believe there are some things to suggest the court would not take one of the length-of-pregnancy ban cases. The justices prefer taking cases that are disputed in jurisdictions across the country, according to Sanger. They want uniformity across the states, and since no state has upheld the durational requirements, there has not yet been a split circuit. The antiabortion legal and political community seems confident it has the votes to overrule Roe. "They're saying, 'We dare you to take us to court because we think we'll win,'" Collins said, but there are rules that govern when it's appropriate for the Supreme Court to overturn a case. According to a doctrine known as stare decisis, judges are bound by precedent. They cannot overturn a case simply because new justices have joined the court. Sanger explained, "We want the law to have more durability than that. We want it to be more stable and not change when a new administration comes in." | https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12230129&ref=rss |
Could climate change submerge Joe Biden's presidential bid? | The former vice-president has yet to put forward a plan to address global warming, which polls suggest is the single most important issue for Democrats Climate change is transforming life by redrawing coastlines, turning vast areas of forest into infernos, stirring enormous storms and spreading exotic diseases. An indirect casualty of this upheaval could be Joe Bidens hopes of becoming US president. Biden, frontrunner in the polls to secure the Democratic nomination, has not laid out a plan to address the crisis. This is set to change, according to Reuters, with the Biden campaign working on a strategy to reinstate climate policies torn down by Donald Trump, such as restrictions on coal-fired power plants and vehicle fuel efficiency requirements. Sign up for the US morning briefing The plan, which is being worked on by the former Barack Obama adviser Heather Zichal, would see the US remain in the Paris climate agreement and offer support for nuclear energy and also natural gas, which is generally cleaner than coal but still emits planet-warming pollutants. Biden is also said to favour nascent carbon capture technology, which aims to contain and store emissions from industrial facilities. But this middle ground approach has been roundly attacked by environmental groups and progressive Democrats for being woefully insufficient. More importantly, it does not appear to chime with the urgent action scientists say is required to avert disastrous climate change. A landmark UN report last year stated that unprecedented, rapid and far-reaching transformations across energy, land use and transportation are needed to avoid increasingly dire flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, food insecurity and unrest. A middle ground policy thats supportive of more fossil fuel development is a death sentence for our generation and the millions of people on the frontlines of the climate crisis, said Varshini Prakash, director of the Sunrise Movement, a youth climate change organization allied to progressive Democrats such as the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Nearly two dozen Democrats want to be president. Only two have a climate change plan Read more Bidens betting that a retreat to mediocrity and tepid policymaking will garner him the Democratic nomination, but climate change is a top issue in this election and voters expect candidates to put forward solutions in line with the crisis. Ocasio-Cortez has championed the Green New Deal, which calls for a national mobilization against climate change on a par with the second world war. The concept has garnered support among some of Bidens rival presidential nominees including senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The GND, perhaps alongside the severe hurricanes and wildfires that have rattled Americans over the past two years, has helped elevate the issue of climate change to a leading priority for Democratic voters. A CNN poll in April found that climate change was the single most important matter for Democrats, eclipsing healthcare, gun control and impeaching Trump, with 96% saying it was somewhat or very important to them. This rapid shift in priorities threatens to cast Bidens candidacy as out of touch, even at this early stage. A climate plan deemed feeble by primary voters could harm the former vice-president in a new landscape where the Democratic National Committee is being pushed to hold a climate change-only debate and one candidate, the Washington governor, Jay Inslee, is running solely on the issue of global warming. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Green New Deal, supported by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is setting the agenda on climate change for the Democrats. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images We cannot simply go back to the past; we need a bold climate plan for our future, Inslee said of Bidens stance on climate change. Facing a crisis does not permit half-measures. Half-measures mean full extinction of millions of species and full economic damage to communities across America. Biden has never been at the forefront of the climate movement but is positioning himself as a pragmatic operator who gets things done, including having aided the passage of the Paris climate deal. In a recent rally in Iowa, Biden said he was one of the first guys to introduce a climate change bill, way, way back in 87, a reference to his successful attempt to get President Ronald Reagan to set up a taskforce on the issue. TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden, tweeted that the former vice-president had called climate change an existential threat. He knows how high the stakes are, Ducklo tweeted. As president, Biden would enact a bold policy to tackle climate change in a meaningful and lasting way, and will be discussing the specifics of that plan in the near future. Any assertions otherwise are not accurate. Proponents of the GND hope that if Biden does manage to secure the Democratic nomination he will embrace the plan due to its focus on creating high-paying jobs in clean energy generation. The worry for climate activists is that the issue could revert to being largely overlooked, much like in the 2016 election, should Biden end up facing Trump in the 2020 contest. If youre running to lead the nation, you need to have a plan on climate change given it will be the most catastrophic thing to happen to us, said Rhiana Gunn-Wright, policy director at New Consensus, which helped design the Green New Deal. Its disappointing Joe Biden hasnt said more. Beto [ORourke], Warren and Inslee have all released a plan, so Biden in many ways is an outlier. The next presidential election will be crucial, but this is a movement not solely focused on that. The Green New Deal is built to exist beyond this election season. People are energized and they want to fix this, Gunn-Wright said. | https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/11/could-climate-change-submerge-joe-bidens-presidential-bid |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.