Matt Yglesias

Iraq Forever

I did a current on the situation in Basra and how its murky dynamics illustrate how current thinking merely ensures that the war will continue forever.

Gilbert’s Knee

Agent Zero says “People who usually have microfracture are usually big players who get off the floor. I don’t jump, I don’t get off the floor.” I dunno, I’m pretty sure he does jump:

It is true that these knee problems are normally associated with big men, but when you get down to it it seems like it’s probably a bigger problem for a perimeter player. A tall guy with skills can be valuable to his team even if he’s a bit slow and doesn’t jump very well. A guy like Arenas, however, really depends on his quickness to make plays.

President Short

Is John McCain really only 5′7″? As Kevin Drum points out, it’s been a mighty long time since we’ve elected a short person to the White House. To be sure, the shorter of two tall candidates sometimes wins, but this is another matter entirely.

Reform in Cuba

The reforms announced today by Raul Castro are hardly the last word in fixing Cuba’s screwed-up economic system (and, of course, as we’ve learned from China economic reform needn’t have any particularly close connection to political reform) but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. It’s high time for the United States to take a step in the right direction of our own by lifting some of the more draconian of our embargo-related restrictions on travel and so forth to Cuba.

At the end of the day, both domestic economic reform and an end to American economic warfare are going to be necessary to alleviate the sorry conditions of the Cuban people.

The Juggernaut

James Fallows points to an affecting example of China’s continued impoverishment as reason why “who worry about China as the all-conquering juggernaut that has coped with every internal challenge and is sitting around thinking about how to take over the world” are off-base. And certainly there’s something to that. But in other respects it’s the still-in-many-ways-bleak reality of contemporary China that makes it seem threatening.

If the PRC is such a juggernaut now what’s it going to be like when the average Chinese person is, say, half as rich as the average American? And that China is still going to see itself as a relatively poor country that owes little to the world but is owed much from it. Depending on what kind of things you’re inclined to worry about, that can look like a looming environmental catastrophe, a looming national security catastrophe, or probably one of any number of other kind of catastrophes. Of course the flipside is that it’s also a great opportunity for a huge number of people to escape grinding poverty. As such it’s difficult for me to let my outlook be dominated by worry. But I think I do see what the worriers are worried about.

The JFK Factor

Joe Lieberman says “When I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.” This will no doubt offend a lot of liberal sensibilities, especially among Obama fans who have a tendency to compare their guy to the youthful energy and excitement that Kennedy inspired.

But I think there really is truth to the idea that McCain’s foreign policy is more JFKennedyesque than is Obama’s. The difference is that Kennedy’s foreign policy wasn’t very good. Under first Truman and then Eisenhower, the United States established a constructive, internationalist approach to policy in Europe — a strong NATO alliance would ensure that the western bloc didn’t fall prey to infighting while also deterring Soviet attack. Combined with a strong bilateral alliance with Japan, the idea, as outlined by George Kennan, was that if the “free world” could stay united and defended it would ultimately outlast the fundamentally unworkable Soviet approach.

In the third world, the Eisenhower administration did develop a taste for imperial adventures, but then first JFK and then LBJ took this much further in Vietnam and no good came of it. As I argue in Heads in the Sand, the Clinton administration mostly, and wisely, followed the internationalist elements of our Cold War policies — policies that emphasized rule-governed cooperation among like-minded countries rather than coercive efforts to manipulate the destiny of foreigners. The Bush administration came into power and, for some reason, decided that the kind of thinking that gave us the Mossadegh coup and the Vietnam War was what the country really needed and McCain fits firmly into that tradition.

Iceland Attack

Via Paul Krugman, reports of a financial speculator attack on Iceland. You’ve got to figure that Iceland is almost uniquely vulnerable to this kind of thing. It’s a rich country, but with a tiny population of only around 300,000 people that still left it with a 2006 PPP-adjusted GDP of just $12 billion. Under the circumstances, lots of individual people and institutions are rich enough to make huge waves in the Icelandic economy if they’re so inclined.

Photo of Reykjavík by me, available under a Creative Commons license

The Threat

It seems that DARPA is developing some kind of robotic attack insects despite clear indications that military robots will rebel and seek to enslave/exterminate us. The defense establishment’s continued ignorance of the basic canons of sci-fi films is genuinely appalling.

The Penny Primary

Patrick Appel notes that Barack Obama is ready to abolish the penny. Good for him.

FEMA and Patronage

Via Robert Farley and the Monkey Cage here’s some hot political science from Jowei Chen:

In the aftermath of the summer 2004 Florida hurricane season, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) distributed $1.2 billion in disaster aid to Florida residents. This research presents two empirical findings that collectively suggest the Bush administration engaged in vote buying behavior. First, by tracking the geographic location of each aid recipient, the data reveal that FEMA treated applicants from Republican neighborhoods much more favorably than those from Democratic or moderate neighborhoods, even conditioning on hurricane severity, home value, and demographic factors. Second, I compare precinct-level vote counts from the post-hurricane (November 2004) and pre-hurricane (November 2002) elections to measure the effect of FEMA aid on Bush’s vote share. Using a two-stage least squares estimator, this analysis reveals that core Republican voters are easily swayed by FEMA aid – $16,800 buys one additional vote for Bush – while Democrats and moderates are not. Collectively, these results suggest the Bush administration maximized its 2004 vote share by concentrating FEMA disaster aid among core Republicans.

As Farley says, this kind of finding makes you think about Katrina and New Orleans; would the response have been nearly so inept and ineffective if the victimized area had been more of a GOP-friendly kind of place?

New Blog on the Block

Do check out Kathy G.’s new blog, the G Spot; which I’m sure will be must-reading. Check her out on paid family leave, for example.

Sardoodledum

I would never make light of another person’s spelling-related difficulties, but this is pretty amusing:

“Sardoodledom.”

Richardson as Judas

I think James Carville’s Washington Post column declaring Bill Richardson a “Judas” because apparently when Rep. Richardson accepted a post in Bill Clinton’s administration he was making an ironclad commitment to support his wife’s future presidential campaign misses the point pretty badly. Among other things, he seems to completely miss the lack of perspective involved in implicitly analogizing Hillary to Jesus.

But more to the point, it really is a strange conception of the underlying dynamics. I imagine that many of the people Bill Clinton appointed to executive offices believed, as Richardson no doubt believed, that they were getting something more than patronage job offers. They believed they’d been selected for reasons that had at least something to do with their merits and that accepting didn’t imply a commitment beyond service to their country and the administration for the duration of their appointment. Are we supposed to take it for granted that anyone who’s not prepared to back a Michelle Obama 2024 presidential campaign ought to decline a position in Barack Obama’s cabinet?

Intermediaries

Just as a reminder of how absurd the notion that we need to stay in Iraq indefinitely to somehow curb Iranian influence, note that it took an Iranian general to help resolve the fighting in Basra. Ultimately, all that Iranian influence in Iraq shows is how badly we need to make some effort at a diplomatic opening with Iran. At the end of the day, we have very compatible interests in terms of wanting to fight al-Qaeda and ensure that oil general flows out of the Persian Gulf.

Klobuchar Call

I’m on a conference call right now with Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar who’s announcing her endorsement of Barack Obama. In an interesting effort to change the tone of the campaign, she started out by emphasizing that she believes the “Democratic Party is truly blessed this year with two presidents who would each be a strong president” and declined an invitation from David Corn to condemn Clinton for continuing her campaign. She just likes Obama better. In particular, she says Obama “has inspired an enthusiasm and idealism that we haven’t seen in this country in a long time” and recalls that back in 2006, Obama “came to Minnesota several times during my own campaign for the senate and even then we saw the incredible enthusiasm he could generate.”

In terms of specific issues, she spoke about Obama’s leadership on ethics reform following the 2006 election. She recalled that she “actually spoke with Barack” about the issue on the phone as she was driving across country to Washington after the election “and talked about ethics reform and then got a bunch of freshman senators together on a conference call” on the issue. A lot of the Democrats who won in ‘06 regarded ethics issues as having been crucial to their victory and were frustrated by the fact that many longstanding Democratic legislators weren’t so keen on pushing it later. Obama, as someone who’d just been elected in the previous cycle, helped build bridges across that divide and make sure that something happened. Klobuchar also noted Obama’s work on the risks of lead in kids’ toys as “just another example of where he took on an issue that was ahead of its time.”

The Horror

There was a time when I never could have imagined I’d be reading stuff like this about my own country:

At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America’s shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

Read the whole thing; I don’t really have the heart to make a witty remark.

Summers on the Shitpile

Lawrence Summers pronounces himself optimistic that actions already taken have set the stage for us to avoid further financial calamities and get back on the road to recovery without major dislocations. But he says we ought to take several further steps, including passing the Dodd-Frank bill to reduce foreclosures, and that efforts need to be made to get financial institutions to raise more capital and for the shareholders in the GSEs to accept more obligations to the public rather than have “their shareholders’ ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ bet with the taxpayer be expanded for this purpose.”

In general, Summers says that “at a time when much is being given to financial institution shareholders and management, action to help the economy and protect the taxpayer should be expected in return.” This seems right to me. It doesn’t make sense to let large institutions fail purely out of spite at a time when it’s possible to rescue them and keep the economy humming along. But with great power to fail in a way that brings down the whole economy ought to come great responsibility to submit yourself to formal or informal regulatory oversight. Meanwhile, we need measures like Dodd-Frank and, in general, a social safety net that works for the broad public and not just for large financial institutions.

Overclass Blues

Daniel Gross brings some quality snark:

Conservative critics constantly carp that the culture of poverty has encouraged a sense of dependency on Washington. Of course, in recent months, the bureaucracy—the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac—has generally ignored the struggles of poor homeowners. Yet it vaulted into action to save the bankers from their own disastrous bets. When Bear Stearns, the nation’s fifth-largest investment bank, approached insolvency, the Feds orchestrated JPMorgan’s acquisition of it.

Now of course there’s a reason for that; the poor and the middle class aren’t “too big to fail.” Still, this is where basic issues of justice come in — the Bush/McCain policy in this regard is simply outrageous. People in need deserve some help, too.

Photo by Flickr user Toni V used under a Creative Commons license

Strange Bedfellows

Richard Mellon-Scaife, well-known friend of progressive causes, announces that he has “a very different impression of Hillary Clinton today” than he used to, and “it’s a very favorable one indeed.” No doubt he fears that Barack Obama’s rhetoric of unity indicates that he may sell out to the right wing once in office. Lanny Davis, Clinton attack dog and Joe Lieberman fan, remarks of Scaife that he “would like to shake his hands for keeping his mind open despite the predisposed prejudice toward her.” How nice.

Helen Yglesias

I haven’t really known what to say about this, but my maternal grandmother, Helen Yglesias, died early Friday morning. It’s a sad thing to have happen, but she was an old woman (born in 1915), had been ailing, and went peacefully and comfortably after a full and successful life. Like my father and his father, she was a writer and published several novels after an unusually late debut in her fifties. Previously, she worked at literary editor at The Nation so you can see that the family is slowly moving right and selling out over time.

There are a couple of brief biographies available online for those who are interested here and here though of course it’s always slightly bizarre to read a “professional” account of someone like your own grandmother who you came to know and love at an early age when you didn’t know anything about this sort of thing. Nevertheless, she led a fairly inspiring life when you get right down to it, always committed to her passions.

Opening Day

You’ve got to wonder why the Nationals asked Bush to throw out the first pitch at the new stadium — it was pretty much inevitable that he’d get booed by a DC crowd. And rightly so, the man deserves to be booed. But the fan’s deserve a first pitch thrower who’s not so boo-worthy. Couldn’t they have gotten Mayor Fenty to open the Nats’ season and sent Bush to a minor league game in Utah or some other place where he’s still got a good approval rating?

The Latest On Basra

As best I can tell nobody’s quite sure what’s happening. Sadr offered a cease-fire, and a government spokesman kinda sorta appeared to accept the terms, but the fighting continues and it remains a bit unclear who’s in control of which forces or what this is even about. What seems certain, though, is that Maliki badly miscalculated his ability to crush Sadr and is prepared for some kind of climbdown far short of his initial demands.

Training

One thing to keep in mind about the repeated failures of our effort to train Iraqi security forces is that it’s always been a bit odd to think of this as a situation where more/better training is actually what’s needed. At the end of the day, whatever the shortcomings of our training and equipping mission in Iraq, after all, it’s better than anything the Mahdi Army or the domestic Sunni Arab insurgency or AQI or the Badr Organization has. The issue is one of politics, legitimacy, motivation, and leadership.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s men aren’t well-trained or especially disciplined, but they are fighting for a cause they believe in and that’s at least a first step toward creating an effective military force. No American-led training program is going to be able to make up for that kind of shortfall in the political legitimacy of the central government.

Threats

One thing to note about Hillary Clinton’s Florida and Michigan strategy is the utter selfishness of it. Her best shot at getting her way on this issue is to keep observing, in a meta kind of way, that if the DNC disses Florida and Michigan by not seating their delegates, that this could hurt Democratic fortunes in Florida and Michigan in November.

There are, however, any number of solutions to this problem. One, if Clinton dropped out and endorsed Obama, the delegates could be seated no problem. Two, 50-50 delegations could be seated without controversy, again removing the concern about MI and FL lacking representation. Three, leaders of the Democratic Party from all factions could reiterate that everybody knew the rules going in and the voters of Michigan and Florida have nobody to blame but their own state party leaders for creating this situation. But instead Clinton has chosen path four of deliberately setting up a train wreck, hoping that by credibly committing to the idea that she’s happy to sink the party’s fortunes in FL and MI if she doesn’t get her way, she can thereby get her way.

Basically, it’s the same old kind of threats you saw with her big dollar fundraisers — either the Democratic Party needs to serve the narrow needs of the Clinton family, or else the Clinton family will do their best to hobble the party. It’s not a very appealing kind of message and I have a hard time imagining it’ll work in the end.

Reliability

Asked how to choose a good mechanic, Tyler Cowen responds that you should buy a Honda or a Toyota and you probably won’t need a mechanic to do anything beyond the super-routine. I’ve never owned a car, but in second-hand anecdotal terms that definitely seems to be the case — folks who own Hondas or Toyotas, even pretty cheap ones, rarely have problems whereas American cars are plagued with reliability issues. This often strikes me as an under-analyzed element in the saga of American deindustrialization; maybe it’s not even true that American durable goods are far less reliable than Japanese brands, but it’s certainly what a lot of people think.