Matt Yglesias

Cowen on Parking

Tyler Cowen’s latest NYT column takes on the hidden scourge of free parking.

Israel, China, Iran, and Economic Doom

I noted Friday that if an Israeli military attack on Iran led to a spiral of violence in the region, the biggest losers would arguably be in China. A reader sent me Andrew Jacobs’ June NYT article about an Israeli delegation to China that apparently made this point in February:

In February, a high-level Israeli delegation traveled to Beijing to present alleged evidence of Iran’s atomic ambitions. Then they unveiled the ostensible purpose of their visit: to explain in sobering detail the economic impact to China from an Israeli strike on Iran — an attack Israel has suggested is all but inevitable should the international community fail to stop Iran from assembling a nuclear weapon.

“The Chinese didn’t seem too surprised by the evidence we showed them, but they really sat up in their chairs when we described what a pre-emptive attack would do to the region and on oil supplies they have come to depend on,” said an Israeli official with knowledge of the meeting and who asked for anonymity so as not to upset his Chinese counterparts

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This argument seems like a double-edged sword to me. If Chinese officials understand the devastating consequences Israeli air strikes could have for the global economy, they become more likely to support sanctions on Iran that might avoid strikes. But if American officials understand the devastating consequences Israeli air strikes could have for the global economy, they become more likely to restrain Israel.

Twenty Years of Progressive Foreign Policy

It’s the 20th anniversary of The American Prospect, and as part of the celebration you can see me try to squeeze a whole bunch of historical perspective into 1,000 words.

A taste:

By contrast, progressives have been much more divided. Much of the controversy over the past two decades has centered on the concept of “humanitarian intervention.” This was exemplified by 1990s arguments over military intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia and ultimately by the 1999 U.S.-led NATO bombing campaign that forced Serbia to concede Kosovo’s de facto independence. In world-historical terms, this war will go down as extremely trivial, but it was a key moment politically. It led, in particular, to the development of a (purportedly) new “liberal hawk” approach to world affairs in which American power would be unleashed to do good all around the world.

In retrospect, there was nothing new about this vision. In its fundamentals, it is identical to the conservative view (albeit at times with different points of rhetorical emphasis) in terms of positing American military primacy and freedom from institutional restraint as key planks of foreign policy. Sensible liberals were able to see the humanitarian ventures of the 1990s as perhaps-praiseworthy things done at a particular time and place without redefining their entire worldview around the idea of serial humanitarian wars. But many intellectuals and political leaders of the Democratic Party ended up following the liberal-hawk line right into the disaster in Iraq.

Read it all!

Wins Over Replacement

One weakness that’s bothered me in Dave Berri’s analysis of the NBA is the tendency to measure players relative to “average” rather than looking more closely. His own research on the low supply of tall people suggests that an average center is actually a pretty valuable commodity, which if true should be taken into account when evaluating moves.

Arturo Galletti has a smart post trying to extend the Wins Produces analysis to include a concept of a “replacement level” player. If you do this “based on the bottom tier of players based on minutes played at each position up to the point where 20% of all player minutes at the position for the season are accounted for” it becomes clear that an average center is normally a good deal more valuable than an average wing player:

The really interesting thing about this, to me, is that point guards also stand out. This is something that I think an intuitive basketball fan would predict but that unlike the center thing isn’t specifically predicted by anything else in the Wages of Wins land of analytics. But a good model should let you confirm unexpected hypotheses, and that’s what we’re seeing here.

The Sweet Stuff

I don’t really have an opinion on whether genetically engineered sugar beets should be allowed. I do know that this whole thing would probably be irrelevant if we allowed Americans who want to buy sugar cane from Latin America do so freely. That would be a more delicious outcome as well as a more economically efficient one. And it would make Latin Americans more prosperous, giving them the income they need to buy goods and services from the United States. Instead it seems that the best we can do is perhaps consider a small increase in the quota determining how much sugar we allow Americans to buy from abroad.

Slightly Improving Fed Governance

Neil Sinhababu notes that one of the less-heralded provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial regulation overhaul is a modest improvement in the scandalous governance structure of the Federal Reserve system. Specifically, this:

Election of Federal Reserve Bank Presidents: Presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks will be elected by class B directors – elected by district member banks to represent the public – and class C directors – appointed by the Board of Governors to represent the public. Class A directors – elected by member banks to represent member banks – will no longer vote for presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks.

That said, the idea that Class B director “represent the public” although they’re actually chosen by the banks strikes me as a bit of an obvious fraud. Still, this is a step in the right direction. But this is all part of the reason why it’s so bad for the President to let Board of Governors vacancies linger. The longer those slots are open, the more influence the regional presidents—guys who are basically representatives of local creditor interests—have over a crucial area of national policy.

History’s Greatest Monster

Conservative bloggers list the 25 worst figures in American history and Barack Obama can’t even take the number one slot:

Instead, it’s still all about Jimmy Carter. Which is too bad. The Carter administration had a lot of problems but was underrated in many ways and in particular the good parts of the Carter legacy are things liberals and conservatives ought to be able to reach some intellectual consensus around. I’m glad to see that despite the right-wing’s distaste for the 14th Amendment they still put John Wilkes Booth on the list rather than Abraham Lincoln. I wonder what theory of ethics or historical causation could lead to the conclusion that Michael Moore was a more pernicious figure than, say, Nathan Bedford Forrest who I’m told is to this day a widely-honored figure in Tennessee.

What Is It About the Economy?

The state of the economy plays an important, though not decisive, role in shaping midterm election outcomes. But it’s worth noting that though the bad state of the economy is well-symbolized by the high unemployment rate, there’s little reason to believe this is an important causal mechanism. It’s not as if a loyal Democrat gets laid off and suddenly he loves Sarah Palin. Rather, as Seth Masket wrote last year, there’s a statistically significant relationship between income and midterm election outcomes.

It’s also worth noting that to some extent you don’t need to “explain” looming giant losses for House Democrats at all. The way the districts are drawn, if half the voters vote Republican, then the GOP will win the majority of the seats. But right now the Democrats have a giant majority. So if the voters split 50-50, that will mean huge gains for the GOP. But a 50-50 vote split would be just that—a 50-50 split—not a massive repudiation of the Democrats.

Good Movies

You should go see The Kids Are All Right and Scott Pilgrim vs The World but especially the former. I’m right smack-dab in Scott Pilgrim’s target demographic, and I still liked Kids a bit more and those of you who aren’t dudes with extensive 8 bit video game experience will probably tilt even stronger in that direction.

Saturday Primate Blogging

“We have the authority to kill the monkeys,” said a state health official, who asked not to be named. “We don’t know which one bit, so they all have to go.”

The animals in question are actually lemurs.

The Limits of Government Debt Statistics

When I saw that Felix Salmon had a post titled “The Limits of Government Debt Statistics” I got afraid he’s psychically poached an idea I wanted to write. But he turned out to sort of be talking about something else. The point I wanted to make is that government budget numbers attract too much attention, and people should think harder about what the numbers mean.

So if you look at Social Security, what those numbers mean is that the share of elderly people in the population is expected to increase. There are several things that might follow from that:

1. A greater share of the incomes of future non-elderly people could be transferred to elderly people through taxes in order to finance elderly people’s consumption.
2. A greater share of the incomes of future non-elderly people could be transferred to elderly people through taxes in order to finance elderly people’s consumption through informal means, like working age people giving money or housing to their parents
3. Per capita consumption of elderly people could decline relative to average per capita consumption.
4. The average age of retirement could go up.
5. The share of GDP dedicated to government spending on the non-elderly could decline.

And of course these things could occur in various combinations. Different policy shifts can influence (though probably not determine) the degree to which those things happen. But none of them are super-appealing, and the only thing that would avoid the tradeoffs would be to try to take action to make the demographic prediction not come true through, e.g., higher immigration. That’s not to argue for any one solution or the other, but to say that it’s more enlightening to think of different policy options in terms of their impact on the world—who gets what—than to narrowly look at the Social Security actuarial balance.

The list set with regard to Medicare is harder to summarize and honestly I don’t know what it would look like. But when you see the cost curve (or proposals to bend it) it’s worth asking not just about the curve, but what does it mean. A higher share of working-age people employed as orderlies and a lower share employed as waitresses? Doctors’ incomes rising relative to non-doctors? Questions about the status of the Medicare Trust Fund are probably the least-important question you can ask about these projections.

Obama on Religious Freedom

Waking up, I’m also glad to see that the President took a strong stand in defense of religious freedom last night: “But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.”

See Glenn Greenwald for more and I agree with Mark Kleiman that on times like this when elected officials take correct-but-unpopular stands it’s important for progressives to remember to reward good behavior. That’s the necessary flipside of holding people accountable when they’re wrong.

Obama on Social Security

It’s been remarkable to me how quickly after the 2005 debacle Republicans have returned to their deeply unpopular idea of gutting Social Security. But for political purposes, the contrast has been muted by some indications that the White House, via the Fiscal Commission, actually agrees with this agenda. In today’s weekly address, the president took a strong stand on the issue saying Social Security should be honored on its 75th anniversary and not privatized as per Paul Ryan and the conservative orthodoxy.

Gray and Fenty on Smart Growth

Dave Alpert tries to reassure me that there’s no need for smart growth advocates to be “nervous” about Vince Gray’s possibly-impending victory in the mayor’s race since “On Smart Growth, Gray is on the right side.”

I have to say, though, that I didn’t find anything in the post all that reassuring. There are no specific policy commitments here, and it’s easy enough for a reasonably skilled politician—especially someone like Gray who’s smart and detail-oriented and everyone agrees understands what the issues are—to offer generically reassuring rhetoric to a specifically targeted audience. Given Gray’s tendency to emphasis consensus and process issues, what I’d be more interested in is hearing what he says to people who are on the wrong side of these topics. If people tell him they think Gabe Klein at DDOT has built too many bike lanes or Harriet Tregoning at the Office of Planning doesn’t understand the need for all new buildings to come with lots of mandated parking, does he say reassuring things to them? Or does he explain why they’re wrong, and why adopting those viewpoints would undermine his goals of job-creation, affordable housing, and sustainable development?

Ultimately, I don’t want to be a Gray hater but I mostly wish he wasn’t running in this election. If you asked me to assess the overall state of DC governance over the past four years I’d say that Fenty and his team—especially the aforementioned Tregoning & Klein, plus Police Chief Cathy Lanier and Chancellor Michelle Rhee—are doing a good job and so is City Council Chairman Vince Gray. The main upshot of the election is that no matter who wins we’ll almost certainly get a downgrade in Council Chair quality for the sake of possibly displacing a mayor under whose watch crime has fallen, test scores have risen, and the population has grown.

Convicting the Innocent

Dublin Prison (cc photo by ahisget)

One of the more insane aspects of our criminal justice system is that structurally speaking it treats convicting innocent people of crimes they didn’t commit as a kind of close substitute for convicting the guilty. As Mark Kleiman explains, our most routine police procedures are designed to ensure that someone takes the fall whether or not the cops actually have the right guy:

One way innocent people get to prison is the “line-up” or “photo spread” in which a victim or other witness is asked to identify the perpetrator from a group of six people, or six photographs. That creates a strong impression that the perpetrator is somewhere in the group, and there’s overwhelming evidence that someone – whoever looks most like the actual perp – is likely to be selected. Once that happens, everything pushes the witness toward more and more certainty about the identification, no matter how spurious.

It turns out that there’s a different way to do the identification process: give the witness a set of photos, or a group of people, to look at one-by-one, asking in each case, “Is this the guy?” In experiments, this approach is less likely to lead to a positive identification, which is why police and prosecutors don’t like it. But the different between the two techniques consists entirely of false IDs. Yet such is the muscle of law enforcement in the political system that most states still allow, and most police departments still use, the “six-pack” process, with its predictably high false-positive rate.

Personally, I tend to consider myself a pretty “tough on crime” person. Indeed, I’d say that in the wake of the 1990s crime drop, the United States has become unduly complacent about a level of violent crime that’s still extremely high by international or historical standards. I also think people tend to underrate how socially costly that high crime rate is. But punishing innocent people is not an effective crime control strategy.

Endgame

A 747 just left with you:

— 19th century controversies over whether to permit synagogues.

— Large illuminated signs are mandatory in Times Square.

— The journalism job market is healthier than the overall labor market.

— Birth order affects children’s intelligence and personality.

— Virginia congressmen think spending money on Virginia-based defense contractors is crucial to national security.

— John Judis was right the first time.

— Recovery summer!

New Pornographers, “A Bite Out of My Bed”

End of McNeelyblogging

By Ryan McNeely

Today is my last day as an intern with the Center for American Progress and my last day working with Matt on his blog.

Given my limited experience, Matt’s decision to take me on as his first-ever intern was truly a leap of faith. Matt treated me as a peer, allowing me to write for his blog — which I’ve read and learned from for years — and for this I owe him a debt of gratitude. And everyone at CAP, including ThinkProgress Editor Faiz Shakir, Deputy Editor Amanda Terkel, and the rest of the team has treated me with kindness and respect, always willing to share their limitless blogging wisdom.

I’m still undecided as to what exactly I will be doing next (before returning to school in September), but for now, you can follow me on Twitter at @RTMcNeely. Or, you can say hello in the comment section, where I can return to my natural state of participant rather than moderator.

Thanks, everyone!

Who Picks Regional Fed Presidents?

As you read about Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig’s plan to increase the unemployment rate by pushing inflation even further down below target, it’s worth asking yourself “How does a person get to be President of the Kansas City Fed?” Well, you get picked by the Board of Directors. And who picks the Board? Local bankers, mostly:

Each Federal Reserve Bank has a nine-member board of directors: The member banks elect the three Class A and three Class B directors, and the Board of Governors appoints the three directors in Class C. Directors are chosen without discrimination as to race, creed, color, or national origin. The directors in each class serve staggered three-year terms.

Class A directors of each Reserve Bank represent the stockholding member banks of the Federal Reserve District. Class B and Class C directors represent the public and are chosen with due, but not exclusive, consideration to the interests of agriculture, commerce, industry, services, labor, and consumers; Class B and Class C directors may not be officers, directors, or employees of any bank. In addition, Class C directors may not be stockholders of any bank. The Board of Governors annually designates one Class C director at each District Bank as chair of the board of directors and another Class C director as deputy chair.

This system has never made any real sense. The Fed’s Open Market Committee is an important maker of public policy. There’s no reason private firms should have such a large role in its governance. But many aspects of Fed governance have escaped scrutiny in recent decades thanks to the perception that the Volcker, Greenspan, and Bernanke era Feds were doing a good job. Increasingly, however, it’s clear that the Fed is not doing a good job—it seems incapable of hitting its inflation target, for example— which should spark increased discussion of the matter.

A Message for You, Hu Jintao

One common interpretation of the message behind Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article is that Israeli officials are trying to scare the United States about the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran in order to inspire us to take more dramatic anti-Iranian action. That’s very plausible. But I would join James Fallows in noting that it’s China that would take the heaviest economic blow if an Israeli-Iranian war led to a major disruption of global oil supplies. The implications of Jim Hamilton’s research do forecast economic doom for the United States, but at a minimum our political system could survive this, which you can’t necessarily say for China.

One related point is that “China and Russia” are often lumped together on Iran-related issues, but their interests in this regard are sharply divergent. Russia would (along with Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria, and a few others) be a major beneficiary of a disruption in Gulf oil supplies whereas China would be hammered.

Last, though Iranian doves would be unlikely to prevail in the wake of an Israeli attack, I think the most rational Iranian response to an Israeli strike would be to do very little. Publicly urge calm, and reiterate that Iran is a peace-loving country with no intention of retaliating or escalating in any way and no desire to see war. Go to the United Nations and ask for a Security Council resolution denouncing this unprovoked attack and wait for the inevitable US veto. Then keep working on your nuclear program in your surviving facilities secure in the knowledge that international political support for the sanctions regime will be weaker than ever, and that countries around the world will become more sympathetic to Iranian efforts to secure a deterrent against nuclear-armed Israel. Only non-Gulf oil producers win in a military escalation.

What’s Different This Time?

Ezra Klein explains the difference between the rapid recovery of Ronald Reagan’s first term from the sluggish one of Barack Obama’s in terms of initial causation:

The problem for the Obama-Reagan comparison is that this isn’t a Fed-created recession. It’s a financial crisis. And they take longer to recover from. For the economy to recover in 1982, the Fed just had to lower interest rates. For our economy to recover, consumers need to get out from the debt they’re under and then figure out how to keep spending more and more — or exporting more and more — under some paradigm that isn’t based on debt.

A different way of looking at it is to think of the recessions in nominal terms. Here’s Nominal GDP from 1980 to 1985:

The double-dip was associated with some flattening of Nominal GDP growth, but the deviation isn’t gigantic. What’s more, the super-rapid “catch-up” growth in real output that led us out of the recession didn’t involve anything unusually looking in nominal terms relative to the pre-recession trend. What happened was that the composition of nominal growth switched to one that involved less inflation and more “real” growth.

Compare that to more recent events:

That’s an entirely different kettle of fish. In nominal terms, we experienced a dramatically bigger recession than happened in the early eighties. Normally people think of “real” GDP as more important (that’s why they call it real) but for many purposes nominal numbers are very meaningful. My mortgage payments are denominated in nominal terms, as are my cable & phone bills, my salary, and various other contracts I’m involved with. When a huge gap opens up between the actual and trend levels of nominal economic activity, that means the best-laid plans of firms and households are all thrown out of whack. This is probably a situation the Federal Reserve could ameliorate if they were willing to produce enough inflation to push the price level back into line with trend, but if they continue to insist on a policy of opportunistic disinflation the adjustments will take longer.

Winning Friends By Helping People

A Pew poll released several weeks ago revealed that despite various American efforts since 9/11 to improve our image in Pakistan most Pakistani regard the United States as an enemy of their nation. China, by contrast, is very well-regarded.

This is presumably linked to the ongoing American policy of secretly-but-not-really bombing targets located in Pakistan, without any kind of declaration of war or proper legal authority. When asked whether these attacks are necessary, 32 percent say yes and 56 percent disagree. Ninety percent of Pakistanis think American bombing “kills too many innocent people.” The reason Americans generally feel okay about this policy is that it’s widely understood in the United States that the Pakistani government approves of these activities and is cooperating with them. But 49 percent of Pakistanis believe they’re done without government approval—only 33 percent disagree. This is a toxic dynamic for the United States. If we had official Pakistani permission for these activities, then we’d have proper legal authority and perhaps Pakistani leaders would persuade people that the bombing is necessary. But without it, most Pakistanis believe we’re conducting an unnecessary and illegal set of military operations against the wishes of their properly constituted government.

Here’s a different kind of policy—using America’s expeditionary capabilities to help people afflicted by natural disasters:

The rescue effort represents the most visible element of a broader, $55 million U.S. assistance package following Pakistan’s worst-ever natural disaster. While the ultimate impact on Pakistani public opinion is unknown, the United States has earned rare and almost universal praise here for acting quickly to speed aid to those hit hardest.

The Pakistanis rescued Wednesday were among more than 2,700 picked up over the past week by six U.S. choppers that have also delivered bags of flour and biscuits to stranded residents of the flood-ravaged Swat Valley, in the country’s northwest. Nineteen larger helicopters will take over that effort, the U.S. Central Command announced Wednesday night.

“The American assistance has been considerable, it has been prompt, and it has been effective,” said Tanvir Ahmad Khan, a former Pakistani foreign secretary and now chairman of the Islamabad-based Institute of Strategic Studies. “The sheer visibility of American personnel and helicopters working in the field gives a feeling of very welcome assistance from the United States.”

Shockingly, the “helping” approach works better. Of course, we haven’t yet had a scientific survey of Pakistani public opinion. But after the US played a key role in assisting Indonesia’s recovery from the deadly tsunami we saw a large statistically valid effect. Helping works!

Home-Based Businesses

(cc photo by tracyelaine)

Jack Shafer may think the good thing about the new local DC news site TBD.com is that it has weather and traffic updates, but I’m mostly just glad to see some granual reporting on communities. You can learn a lot. For example, Sommer Mathis’ profile of the people behind one noteworthy house with flamingoes in the window pulls back the curtain on some of the endless cycle of zoning issues that undergird urban life:

The stretch of 11th Street NW that runs through Shaw is already unique compared to the rest of the neighborhood. Zoning rules allow a number of the street’s modest rowhouses to double as home-based businesses, giving way to a patchwork of beauty salons, locksmiths, and legal practices mixed right in alongside purely residential addresses.

Hence, David Toran’s chandelier business:

He got his start in the chandelier business in Philadelphia, when he was still in high school. Back then, Toran worked part-time for his father, a factory rep for a lighting fixture manufacturer and importer, and soon learned the rare skill of being able to assemble and install chandeliers.

A series of careers later, Toran came to D.C. in the late 1980s as a locomotive engineer for Amtrak, and then later worked at Maurice Electric in Rockville. It was there that he got back in touch with his childhood trade of working with chandeliers — Toran’s father had actually worked with the electrical distributor decades earlier as part of his sales territory, so the company had access to a client list that Toran would eventually be able to mine in order to get Chandelier Services off the ground.

Obviously, there are only so many many chandelier-servicing businesses a city is going to support. But in general, it strikes me as a good thing if a city makes it relatively easy for people with skills to start new businesses. I’ve walked down that stretch of 11th Street many times—indeed, used to live between 10th and 11th—and it never struck me as a nuisance that a handful of professionals and craftsmen were working there. I think it would be better to expand the range of locations in which it’s possible to do this. A person who owns a rowhouse and knows how to work with chandeliers and wants to start a home-based chandelier-repair business shouldn’t need to find a way to sell his house and buy a new one on 11th Street (which has gotten a lot more expensive over the past ten years anyway) in order to do so.

Science Fiction Budgeting

Along with the fact that Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate the national debt by 2080 would not, in fact, eliminate the national debt by 2080 I think there needs to be more attention paid to the fact that sitting around in 2010 talking about the 2080 budget is insane. After all, that’s seventy years from now. Long-term planning is nice, but it’s useless unless you have some realistic grip on the timeframe you’re talking about. Turn your time machine seventy years back in time and consider the fate of a member of congress in 1940 trying to eliminate the national debt by 2010.

He’d have a hard time taking account of America’ entrance in World War II, the end of the war, the start of the Cold War, the “small” Korean and Vietnam wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the decision to maintain a global military presence, 9/11, Iraq, etc. And that’s to say nothing of the creation of Medicare, the substantial expansion of Social Security, the creation of Medicaid, the inflation of the 1970, the Great Recession of 2007-2010, etc., etc., etc. Long story short, he’d be flying blind. In 1940, out of 35 million private homes over 10 million lacked running water. In 2010, 60 percent of households have broadband internet.

Zephram Cochrane is projected to master faster than light travel by the 2060s. It’s worth thinking about the enduring consequences of decisions we take today, but it’s really not worth spending much time thinking about far-future budget conditions. Over the next ten years, Ryan’s plan would increase the deficit, whereas the distant future is necessarily out of the hands of today’s members of congress.

Oil Shocks and the Economy

Interested in trying to better-understand the under-discussed issue of the economic consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran I tried to see what exists in terms of research on the macroeconomic impact of oil price shocks. A lot of the Googlable discussion of this point dates from 2004 and is summarized (PDF) by Roubini and Setser who observe that “Private sector estimates generally suggest that a persistent 10% increase in the price of oil – say from an average $30 to $35 – would reduce the US and G7 growth rate by about 0.3%-0.4% within a year.”

Specifically, Global Insight (PDF) came up with this:

According to a 2007 estimate from Standard & Poor’s if Iran managed to close the Straights of Hormuz to shipping, oil might go to $250 a barrel which is much more than a $10 increase.

GOP Blocks Confirmation of Turkey Ambassador

It’s slightly absurd that we require Senate confirmation for every United States Ambassador, a rule that’s a legacy of a very different period in world history. It’s also slightly absurd that we let individual Senators block nominations. But at the intersection of the two lies Sam Brownback’s hold on the nomination of veteran diplomatic professional Frank Ricciardone to the post of Ambassador to Turkey:

The controversy over the nomination is mired in the history of U.S. relations with several of the countries in which Ricciardone has served, including Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan.

To his supporters, Ricciardone is a distinguished 34-year veteran of the Foreign Service who has taken on tough assignments in dangerous places on behalf of both Democratic and Republican administrations. To his critics, Ricciardone’s record shows a pattern of being too close to the governments he is interacting with and too tepid on the mission to push values such as democracy and human rights with tyrannical regimes.

Tyrannical regimes like Turkey? The conservative movement’s recent effort to redefine Turkey as an enemy of the United States on the grounds that culturally conservative populist nationalists—people just like them!—are now allowed to participate fully in Turkish political life is not quite as absurd as when Randy Scheunemann said President McCain would refuse to meet with the Prime Minister of Spain but it’s close.