For the next ten days, I will be away from a computer. I'll be at an undosclosed sandy beach with my family for the first week, and then after that I'll be at a conference for several days [What's the difference between a vacation and a conference?--ed. At conferences, there's like, homework and stuff.] There will be limited to no blogging for the next ten days.

Discussion topic -- Andrew C. McCarthy's essay "The Intelligence Mess: How It Happened, What to Do About It." in the April issue of Commentary. McCarthy led the 1995 prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in connection with the first World Trade Center bombing. He's skeptical that the mantra of "greater interagency coordination" will work:

For one thing, intelligence professionals are correct (if occasionally disingenuous) when they complain that the public has a skewed perception of their operations: while catastrophic lapses are always notorious, intelligence successes are more numerous. These, however, must typically be kept secret in order to preserve sources of information and methods of gathering it. The unfortunate result is a portrait of ceaseless "failure" that, aside from giving intelligence-gathering an undeserved bad name, also obscures other verities.

First, day-to-day cooperation among agencies, and particularly between the FBI and CIA, is actually far better than people have been led to believe. In terrorism cases, in the decade after the 1993 WTC bombing, teamwork improved in leaps and bounds. To be sure, there are occasional breakdowns, usually due to personality conflicts. But this is an unavoidable function of the human condition—which no legislation on earth can repeal—and it is just as frequently a factor in intra-agency disputes as in those between agencies. Today, agents who fail to compare notes are generally acting in violation of information-sharing protocols; it is hard to imagine additional directives improving the situation.

Second, intelligence-gathering is not monolithic. Domestic intelligence is radically different from the foreign variety, and both differ critically from the needs of the military. So polysemous an imperative requires a variety of skills to meet widely divergent situations and assumptions. As both a practical and a political matter, it is inconceivable that the task could be accomplished by a single agency, and proposals that suggest otherwise are certain only to reshuffle, rather than eradicate, natural rivalries while damaging the quality and quantity of information collection.

Third, and most misunderstood, rivalry—overall—is a virtue. In the government’s vast monopoly, it is essential. Naturally, the seamy side of competition being a perennial best-seller, the public record is replete with hair-raising anecdotes of sharp-elbowed investigators pursuing the same quarry to the benefit of criminals, enemies, and traitors. On a macro level, however, the throat-cutting is statistically insignificant. As a rule, competition impels agents to test their premises and press for better information; it results in the generation of more leads and the collection and refinement of more intelligence. In a world where the Supreme Court cannot decide a case without amicus briefs from innumerable interested observers, where Congress declines to pass legislation without the input of scores of experts, do we really want the President, in matters of national security, reduced to a single stream of intelligence-collection and analysis?

If turf-battling is not an enormous obstacle, does that mean there are no obstacles? Hardly. The real problems, though, are not bureaucratic but structural and philosophical. They have taken over 40 years to metastasize, and they would take a lot more than cosmetic surgery to reverse, even assuming the national will to do it.

Read the whole thing.

This month's international relations book is Amy Zegart's Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC [FULL DISCLOSURE: The very talented Ms. Zegart and I went to graduate school together]. This recommendation comes in the wake of important questions about how to reform America's intelligence-gathering apparatus for the war on terror. Zegart demonstrates the bureaucratic hurdles to either reforming or creating efficient foreign policy institutions are considerable.

The general interest book is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Here's a precis of Pinker's argument:

This book returns to that still-controversial territory in order to shore it up in the public sphere. Drawing on decades of research in the "sciences of human nature," Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology at MIT, attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation. For those who have been following the sciences in question including cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's clear and witty presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to writers from Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh.

Plus, as far as I'm concerned, this book has now acquired totemic status.

The good people at Foreign Affairs have started up a monthly bestseller list for foreign affairs books, "based on sales in all 647 Barnes & Noble stores and on Barnes & Noble.com."

They've just come out with March's bestseller list:

On the first list, reflecting sales in March, the #1 position is held by "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror," by former counterterrorism official Richard A. Clarke, whose book was on sale for only one week of the reporting period. Other list leaders are Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars," Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud," James Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans," and Hans Blix's "Disarming Iraq."

If you look at the whole list, there are only three books that could be thought of as sympathetic to Bush's foreign policy -- Frum and Perle's An End to Evil, Richard Miniter's Losing Bin Laden, and Gaddis' Surprise, Security, and the American Experience

Question to readers -- does this mean:

a) A lot of Americans are interested in books that are critical of Bush's foreign policy (which implies a lot of Americans are unimpressed with it)?

b) The kind of people who buy foreign policy books in the first place are predisposed to dislike Bush's brand of hawkishness?

You be the judge!!

Megan McArdle writes what I'm thinking at the moment:

I'm afraid, as a libertarianish commentator, I don't see all that much difference between them [Bush and Kerry].

I mean, really, in this election, what will I be voting about? Gay marriage? I don't think it's a good idea to handle it at the federal level (see Roe, Wade v.)--plus, neither candidate supports it. The budget deficit? While I think there is some marginal effect on interest rates of the budget deficit, ultimately I think that any such effect will be dwarfed by the long term problems of old-age entitlements, which neither party seems prone to touch. This puts me rather in the Milton Friedman camp: what we should worry about is not how spending is financed, but how high is the level of spending. And on that metric, the choice between Republicans and Democrats seems to be a case of "frying pan, meet fire". In general, on any major foreign policy metric, the differences between the Republicans and the Democrats these days seem to be pretty trivial.

I don't really care whether or not George Bush's marginal income tax changes are repealed or not. (I am in favour of the dividend changes and the estate tax changes, but for all I care, the Democrats can recoup all that lost income by raising the top rate even higher) . Nor am I either horrified, or elated, by John Kerry's tax proposals so far. Overall, my reaction to all the policy proposals currently on the table is . . . er . . . akhfialsfahjfhajfhajhfuq93rujhiekhfa

Sorry, I dozed off and my face hit the keyboard.

Read the whole thing.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, your trusty blogger was in LA to give a talk at USC's Center for International Studies. It was quite the experience.

Have any readers experienced a moment during which they realized they were in a place that was way too hip/cool/edgy for them? That's how I felt when I checked into the Standard Hotel in the downtown. The place looked really fab -- clearly they had checked out Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style. As the Guardian put it last year:

Bright red vibrating circular water beds in Star Trek-esque space pods, orange banquettes, white 1950s plastic furniture, red Astroturf and a rooftop swimming pool (complete with nightly skinny-dippers) - this isn't the kind of thing you expect to come across in the downtown business district of Los Angeles.

Alas, I witnessed no nighttime skinnydipping -- I had evening plans (I found out later that there was a private runway show and they booted the hotel's regular patrons from the rooftop bar anyway). Plus, I had dinner plans anyway. I can confirm the Star Trek-style waterbeds that would have made William Shatner proud.

However, the highlight of the trip was eating a fabulous lunch on the rooftop, and then noticing that the guy sitting at the next table bore more than a passing resemblance to Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer!!

Regular readers know that I'm a big Buffy fan, and I always identified with Xander -- the smart aleck who never had any superpowers. [That, plus his character got to make out with Charisma Carpenter, Alyson Hannigan, and Emma Caulfield's characters on camera!--ed. Er, yeah, that too.]

I've been told repeatedly that the residents of LA never ask for authographs -- it's considered gauche. Well, I'm not from LA, baby!! So I asked Mr. Brendon, and he gladly obliged with an autograph on the only blank piece of paper I had -- the back cover to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. Not entirely coincidentally, star blogger Megan McArdle is reading the very same book.

So I now own the ultimate academic geek artifact -- a copy of The Blank Slate autographed by a Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast member.

Oh, and the talk went well, too.

[Why are you posting about all this?--ed. I'm trying to provide this guy some genuine blogosphere gossip.]

My latest New Republic Online column is up. It's on the hidden constraints that either Bush or Kerry will face in their foreign policies after the November election.

Political scientists in the crowd might notice a hidden 2X2 diagram that didn't make the final piece, but was implicit in how I set up the article. For those of you who aren't political scientists -- poli sci types love a good 2X2.

Go check it out!! [Where's the footnote link? Where's the damn footnote link?!!--ed. For this essay, there's not a lot to link to, except for Kerry's foreign policy page and the February 27th speech that was the source of the quotes in the essay. Oh, and a previous TNR online essay I wrote about Edmund Burke and democratic nation-bulding.]

UPDATE: My apologies to readers that the TNR Online essay is subscriber only. While a TNR subscription makes a charming gift, I was not aware this was going to happen with my essays.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Drezner gets results from TNR!! Non-subscribers can access the whole article by clicking here.

Treasury Secretary John Snow apparently sparked some controversy in a Monday interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer. Why? Snow said what Greg Mankiw said last month -- that the outsourcing of U.S. jobs "is part of trade ... and there can't be any doubt about the fact that trade makes the economy stronger."

Hillary Clinton wasted no time in bashing Snow, saying: "I don't know what reality the Bush administration is living in, but it's certainly not the reality I represent, from one end of New York to the other."

Funny thing, though -- Snow appears to be right, according to this CNN report:

The outsourcing of prized information technology jobs overseas has created tens of thousands of new jobs in the United States, according to a recent study commissioned by the information technology industry....

According to this study, these benefits "ripple" through the economy, leading to about 90,000 net new jobs through the end of 2003. This effect, the study said, should produce a total of 317,000 net new jobs through 2008.

The study also said outsourcing added some $33.6 billion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2003 and could add a total of $124.2 billion through 2008.

And outsourcing lifts the wages of U.S. workers, according to the study, though minimally -- real wages were 0.13 percent higher in 2003 because of outsourcing and could be 0.44 percent higher by 2008.

[C'mon, this study was sponsored by the IT industry -- can it be credible?--ed. According to the relevant Global Insight web page, Novel Nobel Prize winning economist Lawrence Klein was a major contributor to the report. But go read the press release and the executive summary of the report -- you be the judge!]

UPDATE: To clear up one source of confusion from some of the comments -- the study is not claiming that an economy with outsourcing will create only 317,000 jobs by 2008. The study says that holding other factors constant (population growth, fluctuations in aggregate demand, etc.) an American economy creates an additional 317,000 jobs.

One of my great white whales has been the Bush team's poor management of the foreign policy process. I had suggested two months ago that one cause of this was the fact that the Vice President had inserted himself into the National Security Council process in a way that deliberately or accidentally sabotaged the decision-making process:

[T]he difficulty is that even cabinet-level officials can be reluctant in disagreeing with him because he's the vice-president. This leads to a stunted policy debate, which ill-serves both the President and the country.

U.S. News and World Report has a story this week confirming this fear. The highlights:

[Richard] Clarke's insider account opened a new window on policymaking at the National Security Council and on [Condoleezza] Rice's role there--and the view isn't pretty. "This is the most dysfunctional NSC that ever existed," says a senior U.S. official. "But it's not Condi's fault. The person that's made it so dysfunctional is Cheney." For the first time, a vice president is sitting in on meetings with other NSC principals and is constantly involved in the policymaking. A copy of every NSC memo goes to the vice president's staff, so that Cheney can play an active role on issues that interest him.

Having finished Against All Enemies, I was searching for a way to describe my read of Richard Clarke. Christopher Hitchens points out in Slate that in Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror, Clarke is depicted "as an egotistical pain in the ass who had the merit of getting things right."

That's not bad. I'd make it simpler -- Richard Clarke is the perfect bureaucrat. I mean that in the best and worst senses of the word. In the best sense, it's clear that Clarke was adept at maximizing the available resources and authority required to do his job, given the organizational rivalries and cultures that made such a pursuit difficult. In the worst sense, Clarke was a monomaniacal martinet whose focus on his bailiwick to the exclusion of everything else is phenomenal.

Think I'm exaggerating? According to Against All Enemies, the reason Clinton decides to intervene in Bosnia in 1995 is because Al Qaeda was threatening to capture the Bosnian government. That's an interesting theory to be sure, but somewhat at odds with more authoritative accounts of the intervention (it doesn't help that Clarke misspells Richard Holbrooke's name).

The result is that what's in Against all Enemies is certainly the truth, but as I said before, I doubt it's the whole truth.

Clarke implies that the Bush administration should have made Al Qaeda the highest priority -- as it supposedly was during the second term of the Clinton administration. However, the Clinton sections have a familiar refrain -- Clarke's team tries to get the government to move, the White House is behind the push, and the effort dies somewhere in the bowels of the CIA, FBI, or the Pentagon. Now, the heads of the CIA and FBI were unchanged during the first eight months of the Bush administration, and Rumsfeld's difficulties with the uniformed brass at Defense during those months prompted rumors of resignation. So it's hard to see how anything would have changed unless the Bush team had focused on Al Qaeda to the exclusion of all other foreign policy priorities, which no one, not even Clarke, was suggesting at the time.

As the Washington Post pointed out on Saturday (link via David Adesnik):

For all the sniping over efforts by the Bush and Clinton administrations to thwart terrorism, information from this week's hearings into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks suggests that the two administrations pursued roughly the same policies before the terrorist strikes occurred.

Witness testimony and the findings of the commission investigating the attacks indicate that even the new policy to combat Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts, developed just before Sept. 11, was in most respects similar to the old strategy pursued first by Clinton and then by Bush.

The commission's determination that the two policies were roughly the same calls into question claims made by Bush officials that they were developing a superior terrorism policy. The findings also put into perspective the criticism of President Bush's approach to terrorism by Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief: For all his harsh complaints about Bush administration's lack of urgency in regard to terrorism, he had no serious quarrel with the actual policy Bush was pursuing before the 2001 attacks.

Todd Richissin writes in the Baltimore Sun that despite the frictions over the past year, France still loves MacDonald's. Why? It's their nourriture de confort -- comfort food:

Just a hop down the road, the Decler sisters could have been dining on a couple of tender frog legs or a mixed seafood grill with scallops, or an order of steak tartare so tender that the knife provided with it never comes into play.

But the Declers were having none of it.

They were dining on Les Big Macs and frites, Big Macs and fries -- french fries -- and loving every bite.

"I can love good food and I can also love McDonald's," says Vanesse Decler, 21, in a mini-review that the fast-food chain would have to accept as decidedly mixed. "I like the meat and the sauce and even the bun."

Call the French snooty, or just demanding, for their attention to good food, good wine, good atmosphere in their restaurants, for lingering over their meals. But the French have a dirty little secret: Of all the people in Europe, they like McDonald's more than anyone else does.

Pound for quarter-pound, they eat more of it, more often, than any other nationality on the continent, and the nay-sayers here who predicted the French would give up their beloved aged cheese before adopting the quick-fry meat patties so often seen as emblematic of America's bad taste, have been proven as wrong as red wine with white fish.

The French have taken McDonald's, a classic symbol of Americana, and made it very much their own, with menu variations that range from bite-size clumps of regional cheeses to fondue.

Despite the ability to order just about McAnything here, though, the old McDonald's classics are what keep people like the Declers filling the franchises, which can be found in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, among the street artists surrounding the Louvre and within a whiff of the restaurants at Les Halles, where the Declars were taking a shopping break.

"I love these," says the other half of the Decler sisters, 18-year-old Christelle, closing her eyes and placing a fry on her tongue. "Yes, there is other food around, but this is different, like food you want to eat as a break."

Bruce Bartlett examines the Kerry tax proposals and comes away unimpressed:

There are many problems with Kerry's plan to tax the unrepatriated overseas profits of U.S. companies. The main one is that few other countries tax the foreign profits of their companies at all. Consequently, U.S. firms are already at a competitive disadvantage tax-wise. Kerry's plan would make the situation worse, encouraging U.S. companies to reincorporate in other countries.

As far as jobs are concerned, the Kerry plan probably would reduce employment in the U.S. That is because a very considerable amount of exports go from U.S. businesses to their foreign affiliates. And, contrary to Kerry's implication, the bulk of earnings on sales by foreign affiliates are repatriated to the U.S. annually, thereby offsetting a significant portion of the trade deficit.

I also received an e-mail that's worth re-printing:

I've worked in Operations/Supply Chain for one of those gigantic multi-nationals for almost 20 years, and I have outsourced product and services since the early 90s. I have done dozens of "Make/Buy" analyses and can recite the formulas we use almost by heart.

We NEVER justify an outsourcing decision on TAX alone. In fact, I just finished a major analysis to centralize some of our far-flung operations in an region with no (read 0%) corporate tax...BUT yet, tax considerations weren't part of the analysis. We make our decisions based on all the other reasons: labor content & costs, logistics, ability of the local supplier to generate ongoing productivity, technical skills of the local population... pretty textbook stuff.

We'll look at potential tax savings after we make our decision as "icing on the cake." The reason is simple: tax laws change. We'd never make a major move and cause a business disruption betting on the assumption that politicians would leave things alone.

So John Kerry's plan won't factor into our decisions at all.

Just one person's account? Not according to Kerry's economic advisors. From the New York Times:

Would ending deferral keep jobs at home? Or would other cost savings from going abroad - in particular, lower wages - override the loss of the tax advantage? Mr. [Jason] Furman [a Harvard-trained economist] argues that absent the tax advantage, many more jobs would stay in America, but he does not brim over with conviction on that score.

"There is a conceit among people in the business community that you don't make decisions for tax reasons," he said. "You make them because of the underlying fundamentals and then you ask the accountant to figure out, given the choice you've made, how to lower the tax. I don't think that is a rational explanation of the thinking of executives who are trying to maximize profits."

This story has additional lukewarm sentiment from the business community.

So, I'm underwhelmed -- but oddly encouraged.

Why? This is much less populist than I had feared based on Kerry's rhetoric during the primary season. This is a key point of the Times article cited above. The key bits:

What is striking about the candidate's economics team is that all of its members - not to mention nearly every adviser they are reaching out to - served the Clinton administration in one way or another....

...the fixes that Mr. Kerry and his core economic advisers are beginning to offer are clearly rooted in Clinton economics, which is resolutely centrist. Fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction, hallmarks of the Clinton years, are bedrock orthodoxy in the Kerry camp, too.

So is faith in the private sector's powers to generate prosperity. Job creation will come from corporate America, not government, once the right incentives and subsidies are in place, the war room says. In fact, the Clinton-era god of deficit reduction and private-sector supremacy is also worshiped in the Kerry camp. "This group is consulting literally daily with Bob Rubin," Mr. Altman said. "He was the best secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton and he is the single most influential figure in business and finance."....

The galaxy forming around Mr. Altman is particularly important. Mr. Rubin is there, of course. Lawrence H. Summers, Mr. Rubin's successor as Treasury secretary, is consulted - although now, as president of Harvard, Mr. Summers takes no active role in the campaign.

OK, The praise of Rubin might be a bit over the top, but I find a lot of this reassuring. The fact that, as the article reports, "[this] sort of thinking does not appear to sit so well with Senator Edward M. Kennedy" is just gravy.

The Economist has an article marking the 10-year anniversary of the Rwandan genocide and the lessons learned from it. There's an interesting contrast between the lessons learned by the "international community" and the lessons learned by the survivors of the genocide:

Though they would deny it, Rwanda's ruling party and its tough-as-kevlar president, Paul Kagame, have concluded that the only way to guarantee the survival of the Tutsis is to remain in power indefinitely. In many respects, they rule well: Rwanda has seen a remarkable recovery since 1994. But they tolerate no serious domestic opposition, nor much in the way of free speech. Rwanda today is a thinly-disguised autocracy, where dissidents, who are usually accused of genocidal tendencies, live in fear, or exile, or both. The regime is also a menace to its neighbours. It was justified in invading Congo to disperse the génocidaires who were using the place as a base for attacks on Rwanda, but it surely did not have to kill 200,000 people in the process.

The rest of the world has learned different lessons from its failure ten years ago. Then, the West's reluctance to get involved was largely a consequence of America's shambolic intervention in Somalia the previous year. Since then, the response to all remotely similar emergencies has been guided by a desire not to allow a repeat of Rwanda. Some of the results have been encouraging. NATO eventually checked Serb aggression in the Balkans, though only after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. British troops ended Sierra Leone's terrible civil war. Last year, in Congo's Ituri region, UN peacekeepers found themselves in a position with ominous echoes of Rwanda in April 1994: outnumbered, lightly armed and unable to prevent horrific tribal killings. Instead of cutting and running, Europe sent a French-led force to restore order, with some success.

The genocide has also jolted the world into reconsidering how to prosecute mass killers. Ad hoc international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, though slow and costly, are gradually securing convictions. Several countries have passed laws allowing their courts to try those accused of genocide, regardless of where the crime was committed. The impetus to set up an International Criminal Court sprang partly from the world's shame over Rwanda. Legally, genocide is oddly defined—why is it worse to seek to eliminate an ethnic group than a socio-economic one? It is also hard to prove. Few cases are as clear-cut as Rwanda's; Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serb leader, may be acquitted of genocide, though probably not of other grave charges.

UPDATE: Nicholas Kristof points out why this is a far from academic conversation:

For decades, whenever the topic of genocide has come up, the refrain has been, "Never again."

Yet right now, the government of Sudan is engaging in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region here. Some 1,000 people are being killed a week, tribeswomen are being systematically raped, 700,000 people have been driven from their homes, and Sudan's Army is even bombing the survivors.

And the world yawns.

David Gelernter writes in the Weekly Standard about the relevancy of genocide prevention to Iraq as well. Both articles are worth checking out (and thanks to commenters for raising both topics).

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that my outsourcing essay is starting to attract some attention. Here's my day today:

1) Wake up to do phone interview on outsourcing with WPTT's Jerry Bowyer in Pittsburgh.

2) Log on, discover that Arts & Letters Daily has linked to "The Outsourcing Bogeyman."

3) See mention of outsourcing piece by Bruce Bartlett in his latest column (Bruce has links to two other reports on outsourcing that are worth checking out).

4) Arrange to do radio interview with Rick Jensen on WDEL next week.

5) Receive e-mail notification that the Foreign Affairs web editor is very pleased with the web traffic. Thanks for that should go to MetaFilter and Kuro5hin for highlighting the piece. [UPDATE: Thanks to Dan Gillmor as well.]

6) Receive phone call from ABC News Business correspondent Betsy Stark requesting interview on Kerry's economic speech and outsourcing. Have camera crew invade office and bemuse colleagues.

So, it looks like there's a decent chance that I'll be on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings this evening. Check your local listings!!

Here's the funny/scary thing -- I have no idea how the interview will be framed. I was critical of Kerry on outsourcing but I also said that the corporate taxation proposal he announced today indicated a change in rhetoric from "Benedict Arnold CEO's." We talked for ten minutes, and there was a lot of tape -- they could go either way with it. [You should have followed Brad DeLong's advice on interviews--ed. Now you remember to tell me.]

UPDATE: Nope, they cut me. C'est la vie.

The Washington Post reports that John Kerry is giving a major economic speech in Detroit today, proposing a mixture of temporary and permanent cuts in corporate tax rates in return for "the most sweeping reform of international tax law in over 40 years." The gist:

In today's speech at Wayne State University in Detroit, Kerry will reiterate his call for the elimination of all tax breaks that encourage U.S. companies to locate operations and jobs overseas. For the first time, he will target a popular tax incentive, known as "deferral," offered to most U.S. companies that do business in lower-taxed foreign countries.

To soften the blow to corporations, Kerry will propose a one-time, one-year offer to tax at 10 percent any profits a company brings back to the United States and invests here, an expanded tax credit to companies that create domestic jobs, and a reduction in the corporate tax rate to 33.25 percent from 35 percent -- a 5 percent cut.

"The most salient feature, or at least symbolic feature, is the corporate tax rate [cut]," said Roger Altman, a top economic adviser to Kerry. "When is the last time you saw a Democrat propose a corporate tax cut?"

Gene Sperling, another Kerry economic adviser, said the tax cuts for business will be fully funded by the international tax changes.

But R. Bruce Josten of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the Kerry plan seems to ignore the complexity of the global economy. "There is a broader point he completely misses: There are companies that open up overseas" for reasons other than tax avoidance, he said.

Here's the Associated Press analysis: "[Kerry] settled on a blend of loophole-cutting populism and business-friendly moderation, casting his package as jobs-producing tax reform."

Discuss below.

UPDATE: Reaction at The Corner and Hit & Run. Here's a link to the details of the proposal. My gut reaction is three-fold:

1) This is a lot more about symbolism than substance. According to the Post story, the total sums involved in these tax changes are around $12 billion. That sounds like a lot, but it's around 1% of the federal budget. Not a lot of money either way.

2) That said, the symbolism is important, in that "corprate tax reductions" sound a lot better to the business community than "Benedict Arnold CEOs."

3) The economic advisors quoted in the Post story are Roger Altman and Gene Sperling. They fall decidedly into the "sane" camp of Democratic economic advisors.

In the wake of the second intifada and the increase in suicide bombings over the past four years, it's tempting -- particularly post 9/11 -- to pidgeonhole all Palestinians as a feckless, violent people. Sheik Yassin's assassination and the resulting protests in the occupied territories only reinforce that perception.

That kind of easy stereotyping is dangerous, because it obscures the complexities within Palestinian society that I've discussed in the past. I'm not saying that Palestinian civil society is in a healthy state -- merely that it would be a mistake to assume that Hamas/Islamic Jihad/Al-Aqsa = Palestine.

On that note, the Chicago Tribune reports the following:

Sixty prominent Palestinian political figures and intellectuals published a statement Thursday urging restraint and peaceful protest instead of violent revenge for Israel's assassination this week of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of the militant group Hamas.

The unusual appeal came after Hamas and other armed factions vowed to strike Israel on an unprecedented scale in retaliation for the killing of Yassin in a helicopter missile strike Monday in the Gaza Strip. It also came a day after a 16-year-old boy wearing an explosives vest was disarmed in the West Bank, an event that shocked many, including the boy's family.

The Palestinian statement, published on half a page of the Al-Ayyam newspaper, called on Palestinians to break the violent cycle of strike and response, reflecting a growing assessment among mainstream leaders that armed attacks have hurt the Palestinian cause....

The signatories included senior members of the mainstream Fatah movement, lawmakers, academics and peace advocates.

"We feel Sharon has dictated his agenda on both sides, condemning the Israeli people to acts of retaliation and more suicide bombings, and he has also forced the hand of the Palestinian organizations to exact revenge," said Hanan Ashrawi, a lawmaker who signed the statement.

"We want to expose Sharon's policy and prevent the Palestinians from reacting constantly, and to say that there is a way to resist occupation through non-violent means," she added.

Another signer, Ahmad Hilles, the head of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip, said that "it is not in the Palestinians' interest for the conflict to become an armed conflict, . . . the arena preferred by Sharon."