NBA Predictions
Well, the season starts tonight, so I think I ought to go on record with some predictions so we can look back at how laughably wrong I was a few months hence.
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The Party of Ideas
New GOP initiatives of the day — no sex for twentysomething single people and a mass hate of John Kerry (who, one notes, is not actually up for election this year) for having made . . . a sloppily-worded joke about how stupid people such as George W. Bush wind up blundering their countries into horribly misguided military adventures.
The Problematics of Neocolonialism
I’ve been posting for a while now on the odd situation in which the US military has been waging war in Iraq against forces loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, whose movement also includes members of the cabinet of Iraq’s allegedly sovereign government. Well, the inherent tension of that idea seems to have come to a head recently as the US constructed a series of roadblocks in order to blockade Sadr City only to have Prime Minister Maliki tell us today that we need to lift the seige.
And so it goes. The situation is an intractable conceptual and practical muddle. Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and the most effective military forces in Iraq are the US military and the smaller British detatchment. But American troops are under the command of Don Rumsfeld and George W. Bush and ultimately answerable to the dictates of the American political system. The British troops answer to Tony Blair and the British political system. But the supreme political authority in Iraq is Maliki and his government, which has to respond to its own imperatives. It doesn’t make sense to bend the disposition of the bulk of the United States Army to what Maliki feels he needs or wants to do, but it also doesn’t make sense for Maliki’s policies to be bent according to the dictates of US Central Command. Which is just to say that the continuation of a gigantic and open-ended American military presence in Iraq doesn’t make sense.
I agree with Kevin Drum that the generals who are learning to love timetables and deadlines are tragically late to the party. Throughout 2004, Iraq was under a state of formal military occupation. 2005, meanwhile, was a year of political transition in Iraq — elections held, constitutions written, assemblies, referenda, etc. The time for announcing a timetable was late ‘04 or early ‘05 with the actual timetable pegged to the political events of 2005 so that withdrawal was part-and-parcel of the emergence of a new political order in Iraq. That might have contributed to Iraqi stability, and if it didn’t work out would have at least been a face-saving measure. Now, basically, it’s just fucked and there’s really nothing to do but get out of Iraq and start working on diplomacy and so forth aimed at containing the fallout from the subsequent mess.
Show Me The Money!
Jon Chait follows up his article on the gap between productivity and wages, with a published chat with Robert Rubin and Peter Orszag on the issue. The current issue of TAP, meanwhile, has a package of articles on policies to create high-wage jobs.
Let me just observe with regard to Rubin and Orszag that I feel like they’re neglecting the possibility that tax rates influence pre-tax distribution. To take an extreme example for illustrative purposes, if you had a 90 percent tax bracket kick in for people making over $400,000 a year, it would make much more sense to try and hire two people each making $400,000 than to try and hire a “superstar” for $800,000. The additional $400,000 you’d be paying in salary to the superstar would only buy $40,000 worth of labor, which is a pretty crappy deal for the employer. Bush’s cut in the top rate wasn’t super-dramatic on that scale, but if you look at the long-term Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush trajectory, the top marginal income tax rate actually is way lower than it used to be.
Sherri Berman Seminar
Crooked Timber is hosting an online seminar on Sherri Berman’s book, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century featuring, among other things, a contribution from yours truly. Check it all out.
Street Rips
Major Daniels, as we’ve seen on The Wire has an idea that I think all good liberals are supposed to like — the Baltimore Police Department could stop doing “street rips” aimed at nailing low-level offenders and start targeting their energies at building felony cases against high-end drug figures. I wonder, though, how much sense this makes. The guys who pass for high-value targets in Baltimore are, at the end of the day, mid-sized fish at best in the drug trade at large. Arrest as many of them as you like and you’ll still have the wholesalers who bring the coke and heroin into Baltimore around. And you’ll still have all these drug addicts who want to buy drugs. The combination of demand for drugs and supply of drugs is going to ensure an endless stream of middlemen, no matter how many people you arrest.
Street level dealers, by contrast, are a bona fide nuisance. You wouldn’t want those dudes slinging on the corner where you live or right outside the shop where you buy stuff. And there’s no law of nature that says people need to be selling drugs more-or-less openly out in high-traffic public places. Are you going to get the people to stop selling drugs? No. If someone wants to buy them, someone will sell them. But if the cops made it a sufficient hassle to operate an open-air drug market while winking at people who manage to stay discrete, you could envision a world in which the drug dealers start showing some discretion and quality of life for the neighborhood’s taxpayers goes up.
It sort of sounds correct that the key to more effective crime control policy would be taking up Daniels’ suggestion and doing more highly professional police work — complicated investigations and the like — but the important thing is really to focus on what things are and aren’t achievable. A police department’s ability to influence the fact that people use drugs and other people sell drugs to them is going to be pretty minimal. Their influence over where, when, and how drugs get sold, by contrast, could be pretty large as long as you went at it with some focus.
UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman responds with, in part, some recollections of living in Columbia Heights during the great MS-13 War of 2002-2003. I was in that neighborhood for the tail end of the conflict and, I dunno, I recall it as having been scary as shit notwithstanding the fact that I knew, rationally, that virtually everyone getting hurt was in the game and that my odds of being killed were, in fact, extremely low no matter how often one heard sirens by night and saw police tape by day.
Stand Up, Stand Down
The strategy, of course, is that as the Iraqi security forces stand up, American forces will be able to stand down, providing not for a precipitous withdrawal, but rather a slow-but-steady drawdown of the US military presence in Iraq as victory is achieved. Except, as Jim Henley notes, our troop strength in Iraq is somehow back up to 150,000, right in the neighborhood of the peak level. It’s almost as if the administration’s strategy for Iraq is a horrible failure, a plan for perpetual war. But that couldn’t be right, could it?
Well, of course it could. After all, “the only defeat is leaving”, according to Bush. Meaning that “winning” just means continuing to do what we’re doing — staying in Iraq — for as long as it takes for us to . . . keep on staying in Iraq.
Message Discipline
I’m behind the curve on Amy Sullivan on David Kuo, but I thought this was interesting:
“I think the good news here is that people working in the White House think that Pat Robertson is nuts,” he said. “They should. Pat Robertson is nuts.” It seemed a little off-message–after all, this was a politically embarrassing book for the Bushies, and here O’Donnell was praising them. True, Robertson does regularly spout off truly nutty and dangerous statements (his call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez; his prayer for the death of liberal Supreme Court justices; his belief that UPC symbols are the Mark of the Beast as foretold in Revelation). But what rankled O’Donnell the most was Robertson’s “insane” belief that Jews are going to burn in hell. ”
While most of them would put it more delicately than Robertson, it is an article of faith for millions and millions of evangelicals that the only way into heaven is through belief in Jesus Christ. (The good reverend has also said he believes Methodists will burn in hell, but that’s not really the point.) By condemning and mocking that doctrine, O’Donnell managed an impressive feat. He took Robertson, a figure widely disliked and discredited throughout the evangelical community, and found a way to criticize him that would also insult and alienate evangelicals. Congratulations, Lawrence O’Donnell–you’re the new poster-boy for secular liberal intolerance.
Now Amy’s right. It would be useful, for the purposes of electoral politics, for liberals in the media to avoid expressing the view that the belief — adhered to by millions of Americans — that failure to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior will result in eternal damnation is daft. On the other hand, the evangelical view of this matter is, in fact, completely absurd. And not just absurd in a virgin birth, water-into-wine, I-believe-an-angel-watches-over-me kind of way. On this view, a person who led an entirely exemplary life in terms of his impact on the world (would an example help? Gandhi, maybe?) but who didn’t accept Jesus as his personal savior would be subjected to a life of eternal torment after his death and we’re supposed to understand that as a right and just outcome. That, I think, is seriously messed up.
But I shouldn’t say so!
UPDATE: Since this post got Atrios’d, let me say that I don’t especially think Amy merits a Two Minute Hate here and I agree with her point in the article that what Sam Rosenfeld called “theocracy hype” (for example) is both analytically wrong and tactically misguided. But I think there’s a real dilemma here — some things that are impolitic to say are also true.
Bias: It’s Not in the Head
John Harris is doing a Slate exchange with Mark Halperin and says “I’m protective of you (and of myself), especially since most of the people who attack you and The Note do so with radically misguided assumptions about your actual opinions and professional values.” To me, this is revealing. The presumption here is that the correct way to assess The Note is with regard to Halperin’s “actual opinions.” But, of course, there’s no real way for readers of The Note to assess Halperin’s “actual opinions.” The only thing they have to go on is the writing that appears in The Note. As Derrida says, there’s nothing outside the text.
This is relevant because one of the key things that makes The Note — irregardless of Halperin’s “actual opinions” about politics — a rightwing publications is its insistence that the media is a liberal institution. And, again, The Note’s basis for endless reiteration of this rightwing talking point is that the “actual opinions” of the bulk of the people producing political journalism are liberal. As best I can tell living and working in this town, this is, in fact, fairly accurate. It’s also completely irrelevant. Journalists’ “actual opinions” about things don’t matter at all. What matters is what they write, what they say, what they broadcast. One of the great strengths of the blog-based media criticism, I think, is precisely that the people writing the blogs tend to know virtually nothing about the world of professional political journalism — the only thing they have to go on is the work, not the “actual opinions” or even “professional values” of the people doing the work.
What matters is what you do and what the impact of what you do is. The impact of what The Note does is to help the Republican Party win elections. I don’t really know why The Note is so deeply invested in doing that, but that’s what they’re doing and, at the end of the day, that’s what matters.
Times Change
Let’s just hope [Rove]’s not implying that Bush will follow FDR’s lead and turn his attention to taking the country to war.
That’s Peter Beinart, shrill Bush-hater and anti-war “doughface” for the record. It seems to me that if Democrats do take congress and create a hostile legislative environment, this really might increase the odds that Bush turns his attention to taking the country to war. Lame-duck status and congressional opposition have traditionally spurred presidents to take refuge in the greater autonomy offered by foreign policy adventures. The public might not stand for it, but Bush doesn’t have a designated successor sitting in the naval observatory whose political fortunes he needs to defend.
Poll: 57 Percent Support Ponies for All
Jim Harper at the Cato blog is psyched by a poll showing that “54 percent of the 1,013 adults polled said they thought [the government] was trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.” The good news for libertarianism as a political movement is that polls almost always show that. The bad news for libertarianism as a political movement is that, um, polls almost always show that. Meanwhile, polls don’t show any serious support for cutting spending on anything in particular, which makes it very hard to cut spending.
Feldman on Iranian Nukes
Noah Feldman’s long article on the Iranian nuclear program manages to be equivocal on such minor issues as “why is Iran building this bomb?” and “what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program?” so I think that if I’d read it blind, I wouldn’t have found it especially obnoxious, except insofar as it’s weird to write such a long article on an important subject and not really say anything about it. But I didn’t read it blind — I got a panicked email from my dad asking if this was “some sort of soft campaign for March’s surprise strike” and saw Martin Peretz call it a “really smart” article. So one starts to worry. And, indeed, there’s much to complain about. So let’s get to the carping.
Wire: The Return
Episode 44 aired last night after the tragic skip week. The show continues to be utterly uncompromising in its refusal to advance the pace of the crime narrative. Herc and Carver are circling in the vicinity of Randy’s knowledge of where Marlo stashes his bodies, but can’t think to ask the right question. Freamon was convinced to drop his inquiry into the case of the missing bodies just before Randy showed up on the cops’ radar, so nobody’s pushing it. It appeared, briefly, that Omar’s arrest would drag McNulty back toward the center of action, but instead they gave us another entirely McNulty-free episode. Instead, the focus stays on season four’s main plotlines — the kids and city hall.
Trade as Foreign Policy
Suzanne Nossel has a smart list up of “of 5 issues where progressives are well-positioned to build public support based on existing policies, and 5 areas where more work needs to be done” and wisely includes trade on the list of things where viable progressive consensus seems lacking. A big part of the problem here, I think, is that not only are liberals famously divided about trade issues, but these disagreements almost exclusively conceptualize trade issues as economic policy disputes rather than foreign policy ones. Obviously, though, trade agreements are diplomatic pacts formed with foreign countries and form — along with formal and informal military alliances, economic sanctions, international legal institutions, etc. — part of the wide range of non-military tools that can impact foreign governments’ behavior.
For my part, I’ve become considerably more skeptical about the economic case for the multilateral trade regime as it currently exists than I was three or four or five years ago. At the same time, though, I’ve become more convinced of the central role efforts to construct a globalized marketplace have traditionally played — and should continue to play — in the liberal view of American foreign policy. What’s more, I worry that the people who outline trade policy don’t really consider the national security consequences of some of our ideas. People who are rightly leery of things that might provoke a new arms race with China strike me as all-too-eager to embrace policies that will play in Beijing or New Delhi as America-led efforts to strangle Chinese or Indian prosperity in the crib. Adopting such policies would be, I think, a major problem. At the same time, the existing multilateral process has pretty clearly run aground and is creating way too many problems for far too many people to stay viable. The world pretty desperately needs creative ways to get things back on track and redress the many valid concerns about the impact of these agreements in a way that actually facilitates the opening of markets.
A Dark Lining in Every Silver Cloud
This is really just too much. As you’ll recall, after the 2004 election we were greeted to an endless series of articles about the how the problem with the Democrats was that, stuck in the iron clutches of out-of-touch left-wing interest groups, they refused to nominate candidates who veered from the liberal orthodoxy on cultural issues, even in culturally conservative districts. This wasn’t especially accurate, but never mind. Certainly, in the 2006 cycle, Democrats have tended to nominate candidates who are relatively culturally conservative in constituencies that are culturally conservative. That’s how the game is played. But along comes The New York Times with the dire warning that “if candidates like Mr. Shuler do help the Democrats gain majority control of Congress, it could come at a political price, which may include tensions in the party between its new centrists and its more liberal political base.”
Uh, okay.
A few things to note. One is that while this trend certainly is present — ironically, much more pronouncedly so in Senate races than in the House ones that are the focus of the article — a countertrend is also under way. Lots and lots of the endangered Republican seats involve center-left districts in the Northeast where voters are getting sick of the fraud caucus sham. Ask Chris Shays, or any umber of other endangered Republicans in Connecticut, New York, or Pennsylvania how they’re feeling. The other point is that agenda control matters, especially in the House. A Hastert-run House gets to try and gin up votes on issues that are going to be awkward for marginal Democrats. A Pelosi-run House won’t do that — issues that are going to create problems for the Democrats just won’t go to the floor. Instead, issues where Democrats are united but that put Republicans in awkward spots are going to be highlighted. That’s a big part of the reason why control of the House matters.
Labyrinth
I find this idea strangely hilarious — it turns out that the US Naval Academy has a literary magazine, Labyrinth. Here’s a poem about Jesus.
Party Photos
What happens when pundits stop being polite and start getting dressed up for Julian Sanchez’s “Party of Death?” Photographic evidence here. For Wonkette’s sake, Adrienne and I restaged the shot from the 2005 edition he found so fascinating.
The Armey Line
For an interpretation of current GOP political problems that is, I think, completely wrong take a look at Dick Armey’s argument that insufficient fealty to low-spending dogma is responsible for the situation. The thing you’ll notice is that there’s not much of an argument here as such. Instead, it’s a simple correlation observation — the Bush Republicans have spent a lot of money, and now they’re poised to lose seats. But all of the key policy steps that Armey’s citing actually came before the 2004 election, which went fine for the GOP. What’s changed between now and then isn’t domestic policy (indeed, the economy, though still soft in many respects, is almost unquestionably better than it was two years ago) but the war in Iraq.
The Two Faces of Rick Santorum
Today’s David Brooks column makes a good point. While Rick Santorum is one of the very most odious Senators on “culture war” issues, he’s also — for a Republican — something of a creative thinker and semi-serious thinker on questions related to the wretched of the earth, both at home and in the third world. Mark Schmitt actually did a fantastic column on this a ways back reviewing Santorum’s book and came to this conclusion:
These innovative solutions may have caused liberals some discomfort decades ago, but a dozen years after the passage of federal empowerment zones and Bill Clinton’s legislation to support community banks, “empowerment” is now very much the core strategy of modern liberalism. One might be tempted to say, as Santorum does of Senator Clinton, that behind Santorum’s rhetoric is a “left agenda,” but that wouldn’t be fair.
That’s because Santorum is prepared for this challenge. In his conclusion, he warns that “some will dismiss my ideas as an extended version of ‘compassionate conservatism.’” But it is not, he insists, because of his insistence on “moral capital,” at least as defined by him. In other words, even if liberals advocate some of the same policy solutions, they are doomed simply because they are associated with the moral tolerance of liberals. And so, in the end, it is not as easy as I had hoped it would be to separate Santorum’s interesting and laudable ideas on poverty and work-family balance from his mean-spirited and intolerant social views; they are wholly interdependent. Rather than compassionate conservatism, Santorum has fashioned something new: a mean-spirited, intolerant liberalism.
I think that’s probably right. At any rate, Santorum will almost certainly lose his seat and that will almost certainly be a change for the better. I do think, however, that Santorum was gesturing in the direction of the future of the Republican Party. These days, most of the cool kids seem to be writing books (accurately) accusing Bush of abandonning much of what’s traditionally been understood as “conservatism” and then arguing (much less persuasively) that this abandonmnet of small government orthodoxy has been the problem with Bush. Much more plausible, I think, is that Bush had the idea roughly correct — the GOP needs something like “compassionate conservatism,” an American Christian Democracy — but ran a policy shop that was far too inept and corrupt to put much meat on the bones. Someday, though, someone will figure it out.
All About Gilbert
Gilbert Arenas has been getting a lot more press attention recently, but this profile in The Washington Post was the first time I ever really saw the sad, but also touching, story of his relationship with his parents explained.
UPDATE: It has nothing to do with basketball, but I find this sort of thing — “Under the alias Alexandra Delphing, Francis [i.e., Gilbert's mom] has a criminal record in the Miami Police Department database dating from 1989, according to a public information officer at the department” — surprising. You would think that what with all the money we spend on prisons in the United States somebody would try and invest a little time and energy in ascertaining the real names of people who get arrested.
Iraq: Who Rules?
The opening stories of today’s violence and conflict in Iraq are, naturally, sad and horrifying, but they’re also sort of old news. A newer development is closer to the end of the article, as you see the Iraqi government increasingly chafing at being treated as subcontractors for an American colonial administration.
At the end of the day, I think this is a major problem for all so-called “plans” for Iraq. At this point, things have simply gone too far for the U.S. government to really impose its will on any of the major Iraqi actors, call them insurgents, militias, the Iraqi government, or whatever else you like.
Death of a President
I went to see this “controversial” fake documentary about the October 2007 assassination of George W. Bush and I can ensure you that, contrary to Robert Reich’s fears, it’s in no way incitement to kill the president or advocacy of the same. It rather soberly posits that elevating Dick Cheney to the White House through acts of political violence would not achieve anything worthwhile. For the first two-thirds or so of the film, moreover, it’s got a lot of very clever, highly enjoyable filmmaking techniques, using clever editing and pastiche techniques to insert fictional people into scenes with the real White House staff, repurposing footage of Ronald Reagan’s funeral as Cheney’s eulogy for Bush, things like that. Near the end, it really drags as they develop a not-so-interesting plotline about the investigation into the assassin’s identity.
The Money
Business seems to be heding its bets more firmly, ramping up late donations to the Democrats who, it seems, a lot of major business PACs expect to take over the House. This, of course, raises the question of exactly how in hock to K Street Democrats intend to make themselves if they do take over. Thanks to the party’s more diverse interest-group base, the Democrats are inevitably going to be less of a front for the business lobby than the GOP but there’s still a widish range of possibilities out there.
A Modest Proposal
Tyler Cowen remarked offhand the other day that “The long-term consequences of a slightly lower growth rate are in any case troubling, no matter how well a society works at any moment in time.” Will Wilkinson made the case for economic growth at some length on the Cato blog. And, certainly, a rapidly growing economy is an excellent thing to have and I’m not the sort of person inclined to say, “hey — we’re really rich by historical standards, let’s leave well enough alone.” Still, it doesn’t make much sense to look at something and proclaim it good and important without saying good and important compared to what. The issue, always, is what kind of tradeoffs people think we’re making, or could make, and what are the merits of those tradeoffs.
To take an example, at least part of the reason France is poorer than the United States is that the French policy environment is designed in a variety of ways (workweek limitations, vacation mandates, etc.) to encourage people to spend less time working and more time engaged in leisure than is the American policy environment. France could generate more GDP by shifting policies to encourage people to spend more time doing paid, market workand less time doing other stuff.
The American policy climate is much more work-oriented but we, too, have failed to adopt work-maximizing policies. Surely if we thought about it creatively, we could come up with lots of ways to get people doing more paid work and less other stuff.
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