Continuous commentary from The American Prospect Online.
This is a crisis for labor as such for any number of obvious reasons. In terms of labor’s role in the Democratic coalition, it’s a crisis most basically because it means union voters can no longer turn elections. The massive improvement in political advocacy and GOTV efforts that organized labor achieved under John Sweeney -- a transformation Bai can’t find the space to mention even once in 8,000 words of text -- has now been sufficiently undercut by the decline in union density to prevent labor from doing for the party what it was able to do just a few years ago. (That’s a bottom-line reason; the more profound reason why organized labor’s crisis in organizing is also a long-term crisis for liberalism is that, well, it really is impossible to imagine a serious progressive movement without organized labor at the center of it.)
So the crisis is one of union density. It’s a question of organizing and how best to structure institutions and allocate limited resources so as to bring about some truly radical accelerations in the pace of organizing across sectors. The overarching context for this crisis and the intra-labor debate is deindustrialization and America’s transformation into a service economy. As Newman points out, this is not a discussion that Stern just broached out of the blue last year, and there are plenty of reform proposals on the table besides Stern’s that address the crisis to varying degrees. Stern thinks the situation is so hopeless that a truly radical and sweeping overhaul is the only possible way labor can be saved; others disagree, either with the sentiment or Stern’s specific proposals (or both). Bai somehow manages to obscure these basic points, and that’s the biggest shortcoming of the piece.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Still, Democrats know that if they are going to find a way out of the minority, they must do more than simply block the White House, a tactic that led Republicans to define the last Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, as an "obstructionist" and contributed to his defeat in November. They will need to come up with their own idea for revamping Social Security, and Mr. Reid promised they would - but not before Mr. Bush puts forth some specifics. [emphasis added]I see that Noam Scheiber has beaten me to the punch in questioning this completely unsubstantiated analysis of Tom Daschle’s loss. I second everything he says, and will only add that Daschle’s former communications director was pretty emphatic, when talking to me recently about the obstructionist tag, that the conventional wisdom on the subject is just b.s.:
The Thune campaign never ran a single spot in their paid advertising about Daschle’s obstructionism. It was used in right-wing direct mail fundraising, and they would talk about it in the Senate Republican Caucus meetings, but the whole obstruction thing never had salience with voters.The real problem facing Democrats is not the obstructionist label but the popular conception that the party doesn’t stand for much. That’s the real opportunity this fight presents, one that Democrats haven’t yet quite seized to the fullest extent: to remind Americans why they like Social Security, and hammer home the point that this is a Democratic program -- conceived and implemented by Democrats, protected for seventy years by Democrats against Republican assaults, and embodying core Democratic principles about the power of government to meet collective needs. It’s an ideological fight as much as a partisan, political one, and what matters more than any alternative proposals Democrats may or may not offer is how the system itself is described to the public by its protectors and champions.
Nancy Pelosi made an impressive effort on that score this morning in her portion of the Dems’ State of the Union prebuttal. But the identification of Social Security with a legacy of Democratic action and principles will be something to emphasize more and more, particularly if the Democrats actually win the legislative fight and the battle to shape its electoral fallout gets underway. Mark Schmitt thinks that Republicans might still have “plenty to gain by losing” if they successfully manage to paint themselves as bold fighters for a prosperous future, thwarted by stodgy Democratic defenders of the status quo. Surely it’s possible for Dems to make sure the Republicans “lose by losing” -- by reminding people of the value of this system they may have taken for granted before, and by making it as clear as possible which party wants to destroy it and which party does not.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Mark Leon Goldberg
--Jeffrey Dubner
Susan Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said she would prefer to wait and see how “experiments” in new personnel systems at the departments of Defense and Homeland Security work before implementing them at all federal agencies — as the administration has said President Bush will request in his fiscal 2006 budget.What’s more, while Collins’s House counterpart, Government Reform Committee chairman Tom Davis of Virginia, has been mum on the White House’s proposals so far, his record on civil service issues is fairly moderate owing to the huge number of federal employee constituents in his suburban D.C. district. With the relevant committee chairs in both chambers refusing to endorse the White House’s designs on the federal workforce, this looks like it could be an uphill battle in Congress once the president submits his budget proposal next week.“I think it is prudent to see how these systems fare before deciding whether to expand the reforms to other federal agencies,” Collins, R-Maine, said in a written statement.
That suggests that Collins is on the same side of the issue as congressional Democrats and labor unions in what appears to be a major fight over federal personnel rules.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The personal account shifts the timing of existing Social Security costs, but doesn't add costs. A comprehensive personal account plan might move a portion of existing costs off of our children and grandchildren and into the near term.That would be an arguably accurate interpretation of events under a privatization plan where the Republicans intended to actually pay those forward-shifted costs. But instead, having shifted the costs forward in time, they propose to borrow the money to pay them, thus shifting the costs back to where they were on the first place. Meanwhile, bondholders are supposed to swallow this massive quantity of new debt based on a promise to cut benefits in the distant future long after most of the relevant legislators will have left office.
--Matthew Yglesias
In the 1950s, there were about 16 workers paying for every beneficiary. Today, there are about three -- and eventually, there will be only two workers to support each person on Social Security.Right. Social Security survived the transition from a 16:1 worker/retiree ratio to a 3:1 worker/retiree ratio and now the Republicans expect us to believe that moving from 3:1 to 2:1 is impossible? The answer to the riddle, of course, is the magic of productivity growth. One worker circa 2005 -- armed with his higher median level of education, five decades of additional capital accumulation, massive technological improvements, and Flynn effect-driven increases in raw intelligence -- can produce the goods and services of many workers circa 1955. Similar trends will continue into the future and sharply mitigate the adverse demographic trends. That's to say nothing of the intelligent robots who'll be doing our work for us by the time the supposed crisis is upon us, giving us years of solvency in the time before they overthrow their masters.
--Matthew Yglesias
Learn more and get involved in the fight to protect progressive priorities with Moving Ideas' 109th Congress legislative guide. "109th Congress: What to Expect," provides a brief outline of the 109th Congress' legislative agenda, resource materials on the Republican and Democrat priorities, articles and reports from the policy community, and ways to get involved.
Moving Ideas is a project of The American Prospect.
--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org
So who does this embattled former English and French teacher and part-time rancher think is best poised to lead the Democratic party? In what is sure to be good news to the folks over at the New Democratic Network, Dahlman told me her top choice is Simon Rosenberg with Howard Dean coming in a close second.
Dahlman began with lukewarm feelings about Rosenberg. “When I heard him speak in Sacramento, he didn’t immediately appeal to me.” Further, Rosenberg’s former affiliation with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council didn’t resonate too well with the self-described progressive.
However, her initial impressions changed soon after the two chatted one on one. “Simon was fantastic. He told me that DNC members need to be put to work -- and he’s right.” Lamenting that she felt like window dressing at the convention in Boston, she thinks lower-rung DNC members like herself are not called on enough by the party. Rosenberg, she says, would change that.
While Dahlman does appreciate all that Dean has done for the party, and thinks that he would make a fine spokesman, she worries that his profile and penchant for off-the-cuff remarks may distract from the party’s business. “I’m worried that as party chair Dean, not the party, would be the story,” she told me.
Despite her preference for Rosenberg, the anti-Dean movement gaining strength among some state party chairs is having just the opposite effect on her. If the anti-Dean people become too aggressive with their tactics she may switch her alligience and become a full fledged Dean supporter.
Nevertheless, for now, she still prefers Rosenberg. “I give Simon the edge over Dean. Simon has passion. As much as we need money -- and Terry McAuliffe was a skilled fundraiser -- we also need passion.” Dahlman continued to sing Rosenberg’s praise, “I think Simon’s a pragmatist too. I’m an idealist, and for president I’m looking for Plato's philosopher king, but for party chair we need a pragmatist.”
No doubt this is good news for the "blogospheric elites'" favorite candidate.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
--Matthew Yglesias
Members of the United Iraqi Alliance already are thinking about how to include some Sunnis in the government. Ahmad Chalabi, who holds a high position on the slate and was a longtime member of the Iraqi opposition that sought to overthrow Saddam Hussein, said he was confident that a Sunni would get a high position.That's absurd. The Transitional Administrative Law governing Iraq makes it clear that the prime minister's job is far more important than the other two. The assembly speakership, meanwhile, is the least important job out there. Iraq's new leaders are free to do what they want, but this is not looking like a good start on incorporating Sunni Arabs into the political process."A Sunni will get one of the top three jobs: the presidency, the prime minister's job or the speaker of assembly," Chalabi said. "My view is that the speaker of the assembly is the most important job because the assembly will run the show."
--Matthew Yglesias
Near as I can tell, all the outstanding policy issues remain the same. Contrary to the initial hopes of American officials, Sunni Arabs will remain marginalized by the formal political process and unlikely to see it as a viable means of protecting their interests. Iraq will be governed by the same group of exile parties that have been governing it since the days of the Iraqi Governing Counsel and the Coalition Provisional Authority, albeit perhaps with some shuffling of cabinet portfolios. The American military, the insurgency, and various party-affiliated militias will remain more effective sources of power than the official state security apparatus. Underlying questions about American intentions, the status of Kurdistan, the disposal of Iraq's oil wealth, and so forth remain unanswered.
In essence, the policy options facing the United States remain as well, except we no longer have the interim goal of muddling through until election day to defer discussion of the longer-term questions. The president and his supporters will doubtless portray yesterday's events in more glowing and transformative terms than I have -- but if they want to proclaim the election a stunning discrediting of their critics and declare victory, then start preparing to bring the troops home, rebuild the American military, and retrain their focus on al-Qaeda and other global issues, I'd happily take that bargain.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
Secondly, there’s this too-perfect graf:
In another presentation, Senator John Thune of South Dakota introduced senators to the meaning of "blogging," explaining the basics of self-published online political commentary and arguing that it can affect public opinion.I'm sure John Thune's new colleagues learned some useful lessons from his recent experience with blogs, even if attendees from the White House were a few steps ahead.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The Columnists
- David Brooks. Bush says he won't change any of his policies and you should ignore his speeches, but secretly I know he will.
- Nicholas Kristof. Sure this sounds like a good idea, but it might prevent me from putting my whoring on the expense account.
- Jim Hoagland. Iraq is like a Conrad novel. In a good way!
- George Will. Cutting everyone's Social Security benefits is just like giving them all free land. Really.
- Maureen Dowd. Ah, torture jokes. September 11 really did change everything.
- Thomas Friedman. If everyone used less oil the price would go down and then we'd get
higher consumption and higher prices againdemocracy everythere!
- Robert Wright on what Bush doesn't understand about freedom and capitalism.
To the increasing consternation of government officials, the demand for flu vaccine has fallen so sharply that millions of doses remain available across the country. What last fall seemed an imminent national shortage yesterday was deemed "unprecedented supply-and-demand mismatches" by the director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention....It's no secret that public health issues are best handled outside of the political arena, but the specter of clinics throwing away flu vaccine doses because the heavy politicization of this issue scared off takers nonetheless makes that point extremely plain.The situation in the area mirrors the national dilemma. At least a couple of thousand doses of flu vaccine are on hand in public health departments, and numerous agencies are soliciting residents to get vaccinated. Private clinics that were canceled hastily last fall are being rescheduled. The District and Maryland have completely dropped the guidelines that prioritized who should get a shot based on medical conditions or age; Virginia is maintaining them, but loosely.
Everyone's goal is to move remaining supplies fast, before the influenza season peaks late next month and before unused doses must be thrown out.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
On the first claim, of course, Thompson is right; those four stripes on the chief's sleeves don't grant him particularly lofty powers. I'm more skeptical of Thompson's second claim, that Scalia could become "a bulwark against the fusillades coming from everywhere else." While Scalia does thwart conservative goals on occasion, he more frequently tries to push decisions further than the Court's moderate conservatives, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, are willing to go. He's criticized their preference for handing down limited decisions rather than sweeping doctrines; as chief justice, would he move closer to their camp, or would he use what power the post does possess to march forward faster than they like?
But it's the third benefit of a Chief Justice Scalia that seems least likely. Thompson suggests that Senate Dems "demand that the president nominate a moderate associate justice in return and threaten filibuster and gumming up of the Senate in other ways if the deal falls through." Leaving aside how little incentive George W. Bush has to cut such a deal, and how rarely he's voluntarily reached for the smaller piece of a cake, there's the fact that an identical situation brought Scalia onto the Court in the first place. Upon Warren Burger's retirement, Ronald Reagan elevated the arch-conservative (by the Court's standards at the time, at least) William Rehnquist to the chief's seat. Rehnquist made it through a bruising 65-33 vote -- and then the more conservative Scalia won confirmation as an associate justice with a 98-0 vote. The Democrats clearly didn't follow Thompson's bargaining advice, and there's no way to know what would have happened if they had, but I find it hard to believe the outcome would have been much different.
That said, Thompson makes a good case.
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
UPDATE: On another note, does anybody find it odd that Cheney donned this duck-hunting outfit the same day the D.C. Circuit reheard the old energy task force case?
--Jeffrey Dubner
The ceremony at the Nazi death camp was outdoors, so those in attendance, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were wearing dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots. Because it was cold and snowing, they were also wearing gentlemen's hats. In short, they were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event.It's not like the United States has never sent a representative to an event at Auschwitz previously, so the protocol of such events is well known in diplomatic and executive circles. Cheney's flagrant violation can, Givhan rightly suggests, be considered an affront to the dignity of the ceremony and signal that Cheney took it less seriously than previous leaders have. At a time when the United States is widely reviled internationally for its brusque and imperious ways, such an arrogant disregard for protocol can only further damage America's international image.The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.
Cheney stood out in a sea of black-coated world leaders because he was wearing an olive drab parka with a fur-trimmed hood. It is embroidered with his name. It reminded one of the way in which children's clothes are inscribed with their names before they are sent away to camp. And indeed, the vice president looked like an awkward boy amid the well-dressed adults.
Like other attendees, the vice president was wearing a hat. But it was not a fedora or a Stetson or a fur hat or any kind of hat that one might wear to a memorial service as the representative of one's country. Instead, it was a knit ski cap, embroidered with the words "Staff 2001." It was the kind of hat a conventioneer might find in a goodie bag.
It is also worth mentioning that Cheney was wearing hiking boots -- thick, brown, lace-up ones. Did he think he was going to have to hike the 44 miles from Krakow -- where he had made remarks earlier in the day -- to Auschwitz?
It's hard to imagine what Cheney was thinking when he prepped for this event. The Bush administration has been more attuned to the complex semiotics of fashion that virtually any other group of politicians I've seen. Laura Bush's white coat during the inaugural ceremonies alone constituted a complex communication with female viewers about the forward-looking nature of the administration, with undertones of purity, fresh starts and new centuries. For someone in her position to retire the mid-century dictum of "no white after Labor Day" in favor of the fashionable reality of winter white, which is trendier than ever this year, constituted the final stake in the heart of an informal rule at least as old as the Social Security program. The Bush twins routinely dress in the best-regarded emerging American designers favored by the In Style set and are such regulars at chic D.C. boutiques like Sassanova and Urban Chic that Sassanova now posts a picture of the First Lady behind the counter.
There's no question in my mind that Cheney knew what he was doing when he chose to play the role of ugly American in his embroidered parka and knit cap. Perhaps he was trying to signal something about America casting aside the constraints of history. If so, it was a message ill-suited to the occasion. As Paul Fussell noted in his acclaimed book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, even in the United States the wearing of any items of clothing with writing on them signals a lack of sophistication and education on the part of the wearer, and an intention to engage in leisure activities.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Garance Franke-Ruta
It's just one poll, but it's a bit more support for the argument against overemphasizing the role of "values" in 2004. On another note, though, Pew really should find a way to reword the question opposing the statements, "Military force is best way to defeat terrorism" and "Too much force creates hatred that leads to more terrorism." Sure, that dichotomy forces respondents to say which of two non-contradictory statements they identify with more, but I'd like to know how each statement fares on its own. Do Kerry voters accept that military force is the most important component of the fight against terrorism? Do Bush voters recognize that blowback is a legitimate concern? That's something Pew didn't try to find out.
--Jeffrey Dubner
This kind of debate over the ICC was somewhat of an inevitable result of the court’s existence, but the Bush administration’s zealous mission to undermine the court at every turn is making this Security Council showdown more awkward (and irrational) than it should be.
The Bush administration can't be seen as being "against" prosecuting those responsible for genocide, so it has fielded two seperate ideas for bringing the guilty to justice to counter the ICC referral. First they’ve recommended that an independent, ad hoc tribunal be set up somewhere in the region; second, they’ve toyed with the idea of referring the cases to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.
Considering that the ICC is competent to try these kinds of crimes and is already open for business, setting up an ad hoc tribunal for Sudan would be unnecessarily costly and time consuming. Because the duplicative process would be entirely at the United States' urging, we would have to pick up most, if not all, of the tab. On the other hand, referring the Darfur war crimes charges to Rwanda would set the genocide trials up for failure. Unlike its sister court for the former Yugoslavia, the Rwanda tribunal hasn’t been much of a success. Referring certain cases to national courts and training local judges should remain the Rwandan tribunal’s top priority.
Hawks in the Bush administration fear that allowing crimes in Darfur to be tried at the ICC might confer some sort of American legitimacy over the court. This fear displays a level of irrationality towards the court to which, sadly, I’ve grown accustomed. Here we have an operating court with some of the world’s best trained investigators, prosecutors, and judges. Not only that, European countries would basically foot the bill for the whole show. Yet the Bush administration still won't go along. They are being handed a win-win situation for dealing with the genocide in Darfur, yet they are seemingly too blinded by their own ideological opposition to the very idea of an international criminal court that they can’t fathom that the court, in practical terms, might actually serve U.S. interests.
Of course, as I speculated a few weeks ago, the United States may simply opt to let China do its dirty work by vetoing the resolution. Either way, this is sure to make for some uncomfortable moments as Bush meets with leaders across Europe next week.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
Under the new plan, employees will be grouped into eight to 12 clusters based on occupation. Salary ranges will be based, in part, on geographic location and annual market surveys by a new compensation committee of what similar employees earn in the private sector and other government entities. Within each occupational cluster, workers will be assigned to one of four salary ranges, or "pay bands," based on their skill level and experience.This is only one front in a very aggressive White House mobilization against federal labor structures and the civil service unions (who are set to sue DHS over the new changes), an initiative that has met with mixed results during Bush’s first term but that looks to be ramped up in the coming years. I’ve written before about the Office of Management and Budget’s civil service privatization initiatives, the political project undergirding them, and the resistance they’ve encountered in Congress. As battles over the civil service unfold it will be interesting to watch the political dynamic in Congress, and in particular to see how GOP congressmen with large numbers of federal employee constituents and normally mixed-to-warm relations with the civil service unions -- like Tom Davis of Virginia -- play their hands.A raise or promotion -- moving up in a pay range or rising to the next one -- will depend on receiving a satisfactory performance rating from a supervisor, said officials with homeland security and the Office of Personnel Management.
…
Union officials have long contended that the administration's goal was to limit the influence of organized labor rather than to improve homeland security. They said yesterday that the new restrictions on collective bargaining go beyond legal bounds set by Congress in the 2002 law.
Yesterday, union leaders decried provisions that would curtail the power of labor unions by no longer requiring DHS officials to negotiate over such matters as where employees will be deployed, the type of work they will do and the equipment they will use. They also object to provisions that would limit the role of the independent Federal Labor Relations Authority and hand the job of settling labor-management disputes to an internal labor relations board controlled by the DHS secretary.
The system also calls for limiting to about three months an employee discipline and appeals process that now can take much longer to complete. And while employees would still be able to protest what they regard as unfair treatment before the independent Merit Systems Protection Board, the board would have more limited authority to overturn managers' decisions.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The non-selection of Bolton for the Feith slot is interesting precisely for what it portends for Iraq policy. As Lawrence Kaplan described in an excellent March 2004 profile, Bolton's manichean worldview is similar to that of Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men. I’d go one step further and say that he has traces of Colonel Kurtz in him as well; he’s no neocon but an aggressive realist whose policy recommendations for Iraq would most certainly include a revving up of American military action to quell the insurgency.
If Bolton really is somewhat out of favor, it may hint that a post-election toning down of American counterinsurgency strategy in favor of committing more troops to train Iraqi security forces (a la Gen. Gary Luck's recommendations) may be in the works.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
--Jeffrey Dubner
Now, just stop and think a minute. If there were a black, woman Democrat who was nominated for a position and Republicans were doing the same things like this. “I don't really like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally. It's wrong. Undemocratic and it's dangerous.” If some Republicans said that, well, one, the press would jump all over him and Democrats will be jumping all over him, calling them racist and so on.This is rather lazy argumentation. Is Barnes saying that the Democrats’ attacks on Rice actually were racist? If not, what is he arguing? In his online column today, Howard Kurtz puts the matter aptly when criticizing Barnes’s weird non-argument:
…But isn't that playing the race card hypothetically: suggesting that Rice should be above criticism (even on as serious a matter as the Iraq war) because she's black, simply because you imagine that Dems might have made similar charges if the tables were turned?No one's pretending that Dems are averse to playing politics with race, but the separate and rather striking fact remains: A dispute involving a minority conservative simply cannot take place without right-wing pundits bringing up his or her ethnicity. One winces to anticipate what some of the "color-blind" crowd will have to say when the Democrats actually put up a fight against Alberto Gonzales’ confirmation tomorrow.
--Sam Rosenfeld
In 2000, the last full fiscal year of the Clinton Administration, the federal government spent $38.6 million on 64 contracts with major public relations agencies. In 2001, the first year of the Bush Administration, the federal government spent $36.6 million on 67 contracts with major public relations agencies.In 2004 alone -- an election year, perhaps not coincidentally -- the Bush administration spent 17 percent more on PR than the Clinton administration did in its last two budgets combined. The 2004 numbers are still incomplete, too, as many agencies have yet to report full data. (Not that, say, Homeland Security has spent much on PR. Speaking of which, do you have a transistor radio?)In 2002, the first fully budgeted year of the Bush Administration, federal spending on PR contracts increased to $64.7 million on 67 contracts. This spending level remained steady in 2003, during which $64 million was spent on 95 contracts. In 2004, spending by the federal government on PR contracts rose again. Last fiscal year, the federal government spent $88.2 million on 60 contracts with public relations agencies.
As soon as the Armstrong Williams scandal broke, everybody was rushing to say, "The Clinton administration did more of this." In terms of dollars, obviously, they didn't. I'm told there's a GAO report in the works that may shed some light on whether the Clinton administration engaged in either pay-for-play misbehavior or released video news releases in an illegal fashion, so soon we'll know about that aspect as well.
--Jeffrey Dubner
President Bush on Wednesday ordered his Cabinet secretaries not to hire columnists to promote their agendas after disclosure that a second writer was paid to tout an administration initiative.However, also at a news conference today, the president called on and took a question from Jeff Gannon of Talon News, a conservative outfit run by a Republican activist that has been the subject of some tough media criticism in recent years for its cozy relationship with the Bush White House. Gannon, who virtually brags on his Web site that he's a conservative plant with orders to counter the questions of the mainstream press, asked the president this total softball of a question:The president said he expects his agency heads will "make sure that that practice doesn't go forward."
"All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet," Bush said at a news conference....
Bush said there "needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press."
Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?Media Matters is on the case and has the goods on Gannon and his whole outfit:
Although Gannon is a regular at White House press briefings and Talon News claims to be a news organization, Talon appears to be little more than an arm of the Republican Party. Talon News' editor in chief, Bobby Eberle, is a Republican activist who served as a delegate to the 1996, 1998, and 2000 Texas Republican Conventions and to the 2000 national Republican Convention. In 1999, Eberle "was recognized with a unanimously approved resolution of commendation by the Republican Party of Texas for service and dedication to the Republican cause." His biography on Talon's website notes: "Bobby has devoted considerable time and energy to the Republican effort" and "Bobby is a member of Texas Christian Coalition and Texas Right to Life."Now there's a "nice, independent" reporter for you!Eberle is also the president and CEO of GOPUSA.com, a "conservative news, information, and design company dedicated to promoting conservative ideals" that carries articles and commentary by Gannon and Talon News. GOPUSA is also affiliated with MillionsofAmericans.com, a conservative advocacy organization run by Bruce Eberle, a relative of Bobby Eberle and a conservative fundraising consultant. Gannon's articles for Talon News frequently appear on GOPUSA.com....Bruce Eberle and his company have made extensive financial contributions to Republican Party candidates and committees.
Gannon identifies himself on his personal website as "A Voice of the New Media" and "a conservative journalist embedded with the liberal Washington press corps." The top item on his website reads:
"NOTE TO MY LIBERAL COLLEAGUES: Bush is here for another 4 years. Get over it!
"You threw everything you had at him, even phony documents and he still beat you. Give up."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Now I do have to admit that Reid is opening himself up here to the charge that he's mischaracterizing Bill Thomas' views on the need to bring more racial discrimination into American social policy. The logic of Thomas' statement was that we should make Social Security more, not less generous to African-Americans. But there's a way out! You may notice that while would-be privatizers love to talk about the plight of short-lived African-Americans (yet they tend not to talk about ways we might improve black life expectancy), they never talk about Hispanics, normally the right's favorite minority group. The reason is simple: Latinos make out like bandits under the current system and the Thomas Plan would cut their benefits commensurately. What does George W. Bush have against Hispanics? And, for that matter, white people? These are the questions Americans are asking.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Condoleezza Rice hearings and floor debate have managed to revive this phenomenon, which I’ve noticed in some of the more brow-furrowed press coverage, as during Barbara Boxer’s appearance on Newsnight with Aaron Brown last night. Brown asked her a variation on the standard, incredulous question one hears a lot when the subject of dishonesty comes up, in which the concerned interlocutor says “you said so-and-so was being dishonest when they said such-and-such -- does that mean that you’re actually calling them a liar?” If you take a look at the transcript, you’ll see that Boxer acquitted herself nicely when fielding this question; in particular she alluded to one Condi remark that’s always struck me as a pretty clear-cut lie: her road-to-war assurances that Iraq’s aluminum tubes could only be used for uranium enrichment. As an intelligence analyst told Spencer Ackerman and John Judis in 2003, “You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."
What’s the sense in beating around the bush with this stuff? It was refreshing to see someone like Mark Dayton of Minnesota harp on the “l” word with no hesitation at all:
“Too many Republican senators allow Bush's top aides "to get away with lying," said Sen. Mark Dayton, a Democrat who opposed the war and will face reelection next year in the swing state of Minnesota. "Lying to Congress, lying to our committees and lying to the American people. It's wrong, it's immoral." The only way to stop it, Dayton said, is to keep the administration from promoting officials "who have been instrumental in deceiving Congress and the American people, and regrettably that includes Dr. Rice."Once Evan Bayh musters the gumption to throw out a line like that, I’ll be really impressed.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Matthew Yglesias
From Canada to Tokyo, the group has committees in over 30 countries and is recognized by the DNC as a “state.” As such, Democrats Abroad will send eight DNC members to February’s meeting. Of those eight, one has already endorsed Howard Dean, three remain uncommitted, and the positions of the rest are unknown.
Much like Sam Spencer's efforts in Maine, the group’s Web site is hosting an online poll for its members to weigh in on the race. So far, Dean has an enormous lead, capturing 78 percent of the 628 votes, with Donnie Fowler Jr. a distant second with 8 percent.
Of course, this kind of internet polling is far from reliable. Nevertheless, both the poll and the stated positions of the Democrats Abroad DNC delegates seem to further contribute to the growing body of (anecdotal) evidence I’ve gathered from the non-bigwig DNC types over the past couple of weeks. So far, all the DNC members whom I have spoken with fall into one of two categories: undecided or fully committed to Dean. There seems to be a level of commitment to Dean among DNC backbenchers which simply doesn’t exist with the other candidates.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
The annuity estimate looks fishy as well. Anyone selling me a $49,639 annuity for $521,276 is going to lose money if I live 11 years or more. According to the CDC (PDF) white male life expectancy at 65 is 16.6 years and white male life expectancy at 70 is 13.2 years. My retirement income, in other words, would be dependent on the idea that insurance companies can't read simple actuarial tables. Note also that in the real world, insurance companies like to make a profit when they sell things (and that annuities markets suffer from adverse selection effects), so it would not, in fact, be possible for me to get even the actuarially fair $34,751 annual payment.
Interestingly, the Heritage Foundation's privatization propaganda calculator is telling me that I can expect an annual Social Security benefit of $36,708 -- which is way better than what the Cato calculator is telling me to expect from privatization, once you correct for their most obvious errors. Once I told Heritage my zip code, the calculator seems to have decided I'm black and revised my life expectancy downward to 72.7 (note that a responsible calculator would recognize this number to be irrelevant; African-American male life expectancy at 65 is 14.6 years, not far from white male life expectancy) and decided that I'll have a whopping $1,534,045 in my private account. No explanation is given for how they arrived at that figure, but apparently it will buy me a $149,952 per year annuity. As with the Cato annuity, however, the math only comes out right on this estimate if you use the wrong life expectancy number and falsely anticipate that I'll be able to get an actuarially fair rate.
All this, needless to say, tells us relatively little about Social Security and a great deal about the methods of pro-privatization think tanks. They should try, at least, to get their calculators to agree with each other. Reality would be a stretch.
--Matthew Yglesias
In his AARP article, for example, aside from quotes from the organization itself, [AP reporter David] Espo referred to the savings accounts three times as "personal accounts." Yet last October 17 and December 6 (the latter co-authored with Deb Reichmann), Espo used the phrase "private accounts" eight times, without ever resorting to the warmer and fuzzier usage, "personal accounts." "Personal Accounts" didn't appear in Espo's writing until early December, when the Bush administration was ramping up its publicity campaign to push its agenda for Social Security. On December 7, Espo used "private accounts" -- the phrase frowned upon by the president -- seven times, opting for "personal accounts" just once. By January, the tables had turned and "private" had disappeared from Espo's reporting -- reappearing only yesterday in his story about the spat between the AARP and the Republican pollster.Whether the change was conscious or not, it happened, and reporters shouldn't be letting the White House dictate their word choice for them. The story here is unambiguously out in the public record. The people who devised this plan called it "privatizing" Social Security and called the accounts they wanted to create "private accounts." The issue was debated on those terms for years, and never became popular with the public. Then, in response to focus group data, the privatizers decided to rename things. Obviously, the GOP is welcome to use whatever talking points it cares to devise, but the national media doesn't work for Ken Mehlman and there's no need for them to change anything.When asked about the change, Espo told CJR Daily he was unaware of the adjustment in his own choice of terminology, and said that "on balance" he identifies the savings accounts as "personal accounts." He said if there is an AP directive mandating a particular usage, he is unaware of it.
--Matthew Yglesias
Congress' and the [Education] Department's purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television," Spellings wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to Pat Mitchell, PBS president and chief executive.The response from the Human Rights Campaign was swift:
The Secretary's first act in office denies children an education about the diversity of American families," said HRC Political Director Winnie Stachelberg. "Teaching children about respect for differences promotes tolerance of their fellow human beings. Those are the values our children should be learning. Instead, Secretary Spellings is sending the message that differences should concealed. This creates a dangerous environment for children's growth. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth are disproportionately at risk for suicide. Creating a climate in which children are taught that differences should be feared does nothing to promote understanding for peers."Spelling's reaction is as though PBS was running episodes of
--Sarah Wildman
--Sam Rosenfeld
“Tim Roemer just called,” she told me last week. “We talked about how the party needs a strategy for winning the south.” She agrees, but Roemer is just too conservative for her -- though she concedes that “the south is not so liberal either.”
Nevertheless, she won’t give up on Howard Dean, “I’m not willing to give up on my beliefs just to win elections. I know this is politics and that’s what you’re supposed to do, but I can't do it.”
--Mark Leon Goldberg
A measure in the transitional basic law approved last spring allows just 3 of the country's 18 provinces to nullify a draft of the constitution if two-thirds of their residents vote against it in a referendum. Sunnis are a majority in at least three provinces, and Sunni leaders are now bringing up this measure as leverage to put Shiite, Kurdish and American officials on notice that the minority Sunnis expect a place in postelection politics.The purpose of incorporating countermajoritarian measures like this into a political process is that, hopefully, it will force the leaders of all three major Iraqi communities to reach a compromise that's acceptable by all. The flipside is that when you have a countermajoritarian process, it's often impossible to do anything. Think of the U.S. Constitution, whose amendment process is extremely cumbersome. The result is that we almost never amend the constitution. So far as that goes, that hasn't led to anything terrible and is, in fact, the system operating as designed. The difference, however, is that when constitutional amendments fail, the wheels of government just keep on rolling as before.
Putting steep countermajoritarian hurdles in the way of approving a new constitution raises non-trivial risks that no constitution will be approved at all. Will any document that's acceptable in the three Kurdish provinces and the three Sunni Arab-dominated provinces pass muster in 10 of the 12 remaining provinces? Perhaps not, especially because the people who will be running the interim government won't have an especially strong interest in securing the approval of a new constition seeing as how the status quo would just leave them in charge. As has long been the case, there are real paths out of this mess if everyone opts to bargain in good faith to try and achieve a farsighted compromise. The problem, thus far, is that not everyone has been willing to do so. If that dynamic changes, that will be all for the best, but barring some dramatic shifts in U.S. policy, I see little reason to think that it will.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
In the spring of 2002 I had the dubious honor of meeting Sheik Omar. At the time, I was studying new religious movements at a London school; the sociology department invited him, along with a host of other leaders of more unconventional religious movements, to a panel discussion on religious recruiting on campuses in Britain. Al-Muhajiroun, which takes its name from the group of particularly devoted emigrés who traveled with Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD, had become mired in some controversy about pressuring Muslim students to join their cause, which includes replacing Britain's parliamentary democracy with the rule of ulema and the imposition of sharia.
But that concern was so 2002. According to this New York Times piece from last April, we know that he has urged European Muslims to join al-Qaeda. After Osama bin Laden’s call for a truce with European countries following the Madrid bombing, Sheik Omar had this to say:
All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become [Osama bin Laden’s’ sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death — that is what they are looking for."Now, as today’s piece points out, it seems Sheik Omar has set his sights on aiding the Iraqi insurgency.
His rhetoric aside, the New York Times article highlights the dilemma facing British law enforcement as they scramble for ways to legally silence him via deportation. This is similar to the position that Britain’s Home Office was in back in April, as they struggled to find ways to deport the radical leader of the Notorious Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza. Luckily for them, the U.S. government issued and arrest warrant for Hamza -- charging, among other counts, that he tried to set up a terrorist training facility in Oregon.
Because the United States and Britian have a bilateral extradition treaty, British authorities were able to scoop up Hamza in May. Whether or not Hamza will actually be extradited has yet to be determined. In a pre-trial hearing, British authorities successfully landed a handful of charges against him.
Today's article did not point this out, but in April 2003, two British citizens of Pakistani descent blew themselves up in a Tel Aviv cafe. One of those two had meetings with al-Muhajiroun. I’m no lawyer, but I imagine that if Sheik Omar has similarly solicited young Britons to travel to Iraq to kill American soldiers, as the article suggests, then our own Department of Justice should be able to pursue the case.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
All that notwithstanding, however, it should be said that the Senate Dems under Harry Reid and Byron Dorgan have already been very impressive in using their leverage to make points and cause a little mischief when the opportunity arises. An article like this gives one the impression of a caucus that has blessedly resisted the myth that "obstructionism" is politically deadly and to be avoided. I've been hoping to see (or maybe write) a nice debunking of the conventional wisdom about what it was that caused Tom Daschle to lose his re-election race in South Dakota, but it looks like the Senate caucus at least doesn't require any such education.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The subtext behind the question? According to a Times insider, it's "no secret" that the search for a successor to the paper's big-gun conservative columnist, William Safire, began "two or three years ago." Mr. Safire, who is 73, has been a columnist since 1973. "I don't think there's been a date set, but you can just look at his age and when columnists typically and reasonably have retired," said the source. "There's not forced retirement for writers at The Times, only for editors, but I think it's been on their mind for some time who would succeed him. And I think that they've actually found the best possible person, in that he's a lovely guy and he's a good writer."Now there's nothing obviously wrong with the Times moving from a one-conservative format (as before September 2003) to a two-conservative format on a permanent basis, but that's not a change that should go unnoticed as if there have been two rightwingers on the page since time immemorial. I'm a pretty young guy, but remember the old regime quite clearly. Meanwhile, I don't see The Washington Times or The New York Post lining up to hire two liberal columnists or even milquetoast Nick Kristof/Tom Friedman types, and I certainly don't see them running op-eds by some left-wing equivalent of the thoroughly discredited Charles Murray.
--Matthew Yglesias
Incidentally, one might be inclined to observe that the Social Security status quo discriminates against gay and lesbian couples because it allows surviving spouses (usually wives) to inherit a portion of their dead spouses' benefits. Since gay and lesbian couples can't get married, they can't take advantage of this. Under a system of private accounts, homosexuals could bequeath their assets to their partners or anyone else. Far be it from me to encourage opportunistic deployments of homophobia, but ...
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
You don't get the money till you're 65; meanwhile, the average black man dies at 54. Black people should get Social Security at 29. We don't live that long. Hypertension, high blood pressure, NYPD -- something'll get you!Evidently Congressman Thomas was listening, and he felt Rock’s pain. No word yet on whether the chairman will suggest benefits at 29 in committee discussions.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Of course, the deeper problem of organized labor’s shrinking presence in society is what the movement is properly concerned with at the moment, and presumably a long-term rejuvenation of labor’s organizing capacity and a reversal in its decades-long decline as a sector of the workforce are the only things that will ensure for it a more central role in the liberal coalition and a broader public reacquaintance with labor issues. Still, some initiative in publicizing labor issues -- specifically union-related issues -- from outside the ranks of organized labor itself wouldn’t hurt. While Newman is right to point out that Democratic officials are actually more resolutely pro-labor now than they’ve been historically, I have to say that the absence of any mention of collective bargaining rights in either the Senate Democratic caucus’ just-unveiled legislative agenda (as poined out by a commenter at Max Sawicky’s blog) or the House Dems’ New Partnership for America’s Future is a bit frustrating. The Senate Dems' agenda is very impressive on a number of fronts, and it doesn't lack for solid pro-worker initiatives. But there’s no mention of strengthening labor law, no pledged support for the card check legislation that virtually all congressional Dems back already and that stands as the labor movement’s last, best hope for survival and revival. No reference at all to a basic right to start or join a union at your place of work. It’s a disappointment, because this is an area where I suspect liberal bloggers and activists, for all their blinkered class biases, might actually stand to learn a little and take their cues on the subject from the Democratic leadership in Congress. If a rejuvenated labor movement is a prerequisite for a long-term, durable liberal politics in the United States, it'd be nice if liberal politicians highlighted these issues every once in a while.
UPDATE: Don't miss this terrific primer on the unfolding intra-labor struggle, written by Christopher Hayes in a handy Q&A style tailor-made for clueless bourgeois liberal bloggers. Check it out.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Amidst all this, Thomas managed to bring some semblance of coherence and talking points-style emphasis to his suggestion that the payroll tax be abandoned for some kind of value-added consumption tax. This was the first time Thomas has stated a preference for a specific kind of tax reform, and his backing of a consumption tax aligns him with Jim McCrery, who’s just taken the gavel as the new chair of the Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee and has also stated a desire to combine the debates on Social Security and tax reform.
Thomas’ most recent statements might lend some credence to Noam Schieber’s speculation about what the chairman is trying to do -- that is, attempt to create a situation wherein all sorts of fundamental issues relating to the tax system and Social Security get thrown up and mixed together, and out of the stew will hopefully come actual legislation with cooked numbers that George W. Bush can embrace as the fulfillment of his intentions for Social Security and that other Republicans get behind for the tax reforms at its center. As one senior House Republican told Congressional Quarterly today, “Bill Thomas believes that the more moving parts there are the more chance there is of reaching an agreement.”
The politics of all this seem so unwieldy, though, that it’s hard to say. The chief dispute between the White House and congressional Republicans at the moment has to do with whether or not to shoot out of the gate with votes making the president’s first-term tax cuts permanent. The White House wants to wait on any such moves until the tax reform commission publicizes its findings in the summer, and it wants to do Social Security reform first; Congressional Republicans are cool to the notion of taking on Social Security at all, but more particularly they want to render the tax cuts permanent right away, before the Social Security battle and questions about spent “political capital” endanger their chance. Thomas obviously wants to link a Social Security debate with a discussion of taxes, but his position on the whole question of what the timing should be in making Bush’s first-term tax cuts permanent is unclear. His Meet the Press chat didn't make that, or anything else, any clearer.
--Sam Rosenfeld
On the flipside, George W. Bush won 77 percent of the votes from the 16 percent of the electorate that thinks it should be "always illegal" and 71 percent of the votes from the 26 percent of the voters who think it should be "mostly illegal."
This provides enough fodder to support a political strategy that's in line with just about any substantive view on the issue. If you're an anti-abortion Democrat -- or harbor anti-abortion sympathies -- you note that Bush is winning these huge majorities among the "mostly illegal" crowd and that Democrats could win elections by cutting that number down to, say, 60 percent. Conversely, if you're a pro-choicer who's uncomfortable with much pro-choice rhetoric you can point to the fact that Kerry didn't do nearly as well among the moderately pro-choice "mostly legal" plurality as Bush did with anti-choice moderates and argue that rhetorical repositioning could do the trick.
Alternatively, if you're vehemently pro-choice, there's a strong argument to be made that Democrats should make their rhetoric more incendiary and the debate more divisive and polarizing: If Bush had won every "always illegal" vote and Kerry every "always legal" vote while holding the moderates constant, Kerry would have won the popular vote.
My two cents are that Democrats never do nearly good enough a job of highlighting how extreme the GOP view is. President Bush was never asked, for example, whether or not he agrees with his party's platform statement that "the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children" -- an endorsement of the "always illegal" position favored by fewer Americans than any of the alternatives. How many Americans really think girls raped by their fathers should have to carry the resulting pregnancies to term? At any rate, nobody asked this question in 2004, but according to the LA Times' 2000 exit poll, Gore won among voters citing "Supreme Court appointments" as a voting issue.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
It is a sign of Republican ascendance that the party is already forcing its opponents to re-examine some of their most strongly held positions. Democrats, for example, have been openly discussing whether to decrease their emphasis on one of their touchstone issues, abortion rights, after an election in which Mr. Bush ran aggressively as an opponent of abortion. [emphasis added]Is that even remotely true? Do you remember that slew of hard-hitting anti-abortion TV spots the prez's campaign ran? I don't either. I hardly recall abortion surfacing as a major election issue last year at all.
A confluence of factors -- the early, misguided notion that moral values voters decided the election, the ascension of pro-life Harry Reid to Senate minority leader, the candidacy of pro-life Tim Roemer for DNC chair, and discussion of the looming Supreme Court nomination fight -- have had the odd effect of turning an issue that barely factored at all (at least explicitly) in the last election into the very crux of Democratic soul-searching and internal struggle. There are all sorts of important debates to be aired about this issue, and about the Roe decision and its effects on American politics over the last 30 years, but, as with the battle over Social Security, it's really important not to let the actual contours of last year's presidential election get retroactively scrambled in the process.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
Reporters also might be interested in the Cato Institute's view that "Private Accounts Will Boost National Saving," published on December 23, 2004. Since the term was apparently in good standing with privatization's leading advocates as little as three weeks ago, I see no reason we shouldn't keep using the term. Indeed, Cato's privatization advocacy Web site contains several hundred instances of the term. And in December, the president gathered supporters of his economic agenda for a "conference" in Washington, and "private accounts" are all over the transcript. The Social Security Administration's official description of the 2001 commission report that is the basis for the president's proposal goes like this:
Full report and extensive documentation of the Commission appointed by President George W. Bush in May 2001 to recommend to the President ways to modernize and reform the Social Security system--in particular, by developing options for adding private accounts to Social Security.The SSA also describes Hungary and Poland as having Social Security programs that incoprorate "private accounts." We're also told that Sweden features "unified social insurance plus mandatory private accounts." Perhaps the president should rethink his longstanding opposition to "revisionist history."
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
Shiite leaders say their decision to move away from an Islamist government was largely shaped by the presumption that the Iraqi people would reject such a model. But they concede that it also reflects certain political realities - American officials, who wield vast influence here, would be troubled by an overtly Islamist government. So would the Kurds, who Iraqi and American officials worry might be tempted to break with the Iraqi state.It would be nice to get some more detail on what, exactly, the American role here was. It's also not entirely clear to me what's being conceded here. Filkins reports that "The senior leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance ... have agreed that the Iraqi whom they nominate to be the country's next prime minister would be a lay person, not an Islamic cleric." Adnan Ali of the al-Dawa party says "There will be no turbans [i.e., clerics] in the government." Much discussion of "Iranian-style theocracy" follows, but this was never in the cards simply because none of the senior clerics in Iraq are going to be on the ballot and therefore eligible for office.
Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was always the only cleric who was realistically in a position to obtain high office. If Iraqi leaders want to exclude him from consideration, that's their right, but I'm not sure what purpose it serves. Most observers think that SCIRI will be the largest party in the National Assembly, and as the head of the party he'll therefore be an important figure. Under the circumstances, it seems that things would go more smoothly if that importance were formalized by giving him a role in the government. Either way, he'll be influential after the election, as will Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, even if they don't hold office, just as politicized Christian leaders are important in shaping American policy without normally standing for election personally. One helpful fact the article brings to light is that Muqtada al-Sadr, who's been quiet of late, will likely re-emerge as a source of trouble for the new government, particularly if it seeks to appease Kurdish and secularist public opinion by not going forward with a thorough Islamicization of government policy.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
The Columnists
- David Brooks. If the president had told me he didn't really mean any of that freedom stuff, I could have avoided embarrasing myself like this.
- Nicholas Kristof. My little prostitute-buying gambit didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.
- Maureen Dowd. Bush is like SpongeBob SquarePants, except less gay.
- Thomas Friedman. Must . . . invade . . . France.
- George Will. Dean is evil, but only he can stop the greater evil of Hillaryism.
- Jim Hoagland. I don't even have Brooks' excuse.
- Olivia Judson on science and sex differences.
As faithful readers know, Lopez's NRO colleague Jonah Goldberg thinks this a "shabby form of argumentation," so I'd love to see a debate get going on The Corner on the subject. Is it possible that there are non-racist reasons for Senate Democrats -- yes, even an ex-KKK Senate Democrat -- to want to discuss the nomination of Condi Rice as Secretary of State a bit longer and maybe air some grievances about the war in Iraq?
--Sam Rosenfeld
Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, offers a comprehensive agenda for reproductive rights to commemorate the 32nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade. "Beyond Abortion: A Pro-Choice Vision for America" is our attempt to broaden the public debate beyond just abortion. As always, we include links to resources from the reproductive rights community, organizations in the fight, and opportunities to get involved.
For this year's Roe anniversary, stand up for comprehensive reproductive health options for women!
--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org
DEMS-ARE-NOT-SELF-AWARE FILES [KJL]I'm pretty sure Condoleezza Rice is going to be the second African-American Secretary of State. Second in a row, in fact, so it's not that hard to keep track.
Robert Byrd delays the confirmation of the first black secretary of State. Didn't think that one through, did you?
--Matthew Yglesias
So what does this long-time and well-respected DNC member expect from a new party leader?
“First, they have to be pro-choice.” When asked if that rules out Tim Roemer, she replied, “I need to talk to him one on one about that.” Freedman hopes to make it down to New York on January 29 for an east coast DNC conference with the candidates, where she could grill him -- as well as Simon Rosenberg, who has questioned the utility of the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
That was a perfectly correct analysis of what's wrong with our current policies in the Middle East, but we haven't changed them in the past 14 months and yesterday's speech gives us no reason to think we'll change in the next four years. Condoleezza Rice named six "outposts of tyranny" at her hearings; those labeled -- Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Burma -- were all countries the US has long had poor relations with. Indeed, the Zimbabwe case is particularly clear, as the hostility between Washington and the ZANU-PF regime in Harare dates from a period when it was, relatively speaking, an outpost of liberty in southern Africa. That it has moved backward while the rest of the region has moved forward is more coincidence than anything else. The weirdest thing in the piece, however, is this attestation of whence the president's bona fides stem:
"He really believes it," said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We weren't sure he believed it the first time he said it…. But the election in Afghanistan was an important moment for him."In light of the fact that Afghanistan, as of yet, lacks such elements of democracy as a legislature or a government that can effectively control the countryside, this proclamation of victory seems rather precipitate. That aside, if it really took Afghanistan to convince the president that democracy can flourish in non-western cultures, he's more ignorant of the world than we've suspected. India and Japan seem like significantly more compelling examples. Worse, though, the Afghanistan-as-proof approach is absurdly naive about the difficulties of democratic consolidation. Lots of countries -- Zimbabwe, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan seem especially relevant -- have held reasonably fair elections only to degenerate into dictatorship over time. Under Bush's watch, Russia's gone pretty far down this path.Bush has frequently cited the Afghan election of Oct. 9, in which millions of people voted for the first time despite violent intimidation by supporters of the ousted Taliban regime, as proof that democracy can flourish in any culture.
--Matthew Yglesias
After the ceremony, former President Bill Clinton walked the halls of the Capitol. During a congressional luncheon honoring Bush, Clinton shared a table with the president’s political adviser, Karl Rove.Who says bipartisanship is dead?Another moment of bipartisanship created some confusion.
House leaders from both parties, as well as committee chairmen and ranking Democrats, were asked to meet before the ceremony in the office of Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas -- an event so rare that Clyburn and Thompson had trouble figuring out where to go. They had to ask a police officer for directions.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Nicholas Kralev of The Washington Times picked up on a more significant piece of rhetoric from our new Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, at her confirmation hearings. Rice explained that the operationalization of Bush's commitment to the spread of liberty is through policies that "help create a balance of power in the world that favors freedom." This catchphrase was the title of a 2002 address Rice gave to the Manhattan Institute and helps explain why Bush's policies look a lot like old-fashioned American hegemonism with a shiny rhetorical gloss. Freedom is good; the United States is free; we want a balance of power that favors freedom, so we must create a balance of power that favors the United States. That's quite the sleight of hand, and I'd even deem it clever, except the actual policies undertaken in its name don't seem to have actually improved our position in the balance of power or done much to spread the blessings of liberty.
--Matthew Yglesias
The tentative consensus among Democrats I’ve talked to is that Frist is bluffing -- that he still doesn’t have 50 votes ready to support such a rule change even after the gains the Republicans made in November. As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, it seems more than likely that there are enough moderates and institutionalists left in the GOP caucus to stymie the effort. Even if they can pull it off, however, Frist and his allies likely know that Harry Reid is deadly serious about what the Democratic response would be: force roll call votes on every minor procedural measure and every piece of legislation, then defeat all cloture attempts, essentially shutting the Senate down and forcing the Republicans to escalate their assault by declaring all filibusters unconstitutional.
Even given all this mitigating against the possibility, it’s still too close to call; Frist will presumably show his cards in February, and we’ll either witness a full-scale institutional breakdown in the Senate or more of the usual pissing and moaning from the Republicans, akin to that silly 30-hour talkathon on judicial filibusters they staged last year. But the fact that the former is still a legitimate possibility -- more of a possibility than it has ever been in the Senate -- is in and of itself a real reflection of the pressures the Senate is feeling as an institution. This is something I’ve mentioned before; The Hill had an editorial yesterday, entitled “The Senate’s cold war,” that captured the basic point deftly:
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) is indicating that the time for threats has passed and he’s ready to move next month to the ‘nuclear option’ to confirm President Bush’s filibustered judicial nominees.Of course, the editorial errs in not drawing basic Senate/House distinctions. The House has always been characterized by party discipline and top-down procedural authority to a far greater extent than the Senate, and the changes that Republicans have made to the House since taking power have accelerated those characteristics. The dual-track trend here might be better termed the parliamentarization of the House and the House-ification of the Senate. (For insights that touch on this trend but also a good deal more, Mark Schmitt’s discussion from last year about the institutional culture of the Senate and the changes it is undergoing remains invaluable.)This newspaper has long said the nominees should get a floor vote. But whatever one thinks of the candidates themselves, or of the probity of Frist’s plan, the success or failure of the tactic will signal how far the U.S. Congress has progressed toward a parliamentary system.
There is a strong tide flowing toward party discipline on both sides of the aisle that is making Congress look more and more like legislatures overseas in which cohesive parties are the norm and ornery individuals a rarity.
The Hill has reported already on effective steps taken this month by the leaders of both parties in the House to ensure caucus unity and loyalty. The nuclear option will test whether parallel efforts in the Senate have pushed that body similarly far.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Over at The New Republic Online, meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, in a bid to remind readers that he's still a conservative despite his support for gay marriage, John Kerry, and fiscal sanity, praises Summers' remarks as recognizing an essential truth and derides MIT professor Nancy Hopkins' reaction as "a parody of a p.c. response." However, the Harvard Crimson reports she's finding support from the researchers whose data Summers, as well as some bloggers, cited as suggestive of innate differences:
Two sociologists whose research University President Lawrence H. Summers cited at an economics conference Friday said yesterday their findings do not support Summers’ suggestion that “innate differences” may account for the under-representation of women in the sciences.Hopkins was upset, she initially told The Boston Globe, precisely because the evidence did not support the hypothesis Summers was discussing. Worth recalling, too, is that she is a well-regarded molecular geneticist and a bit of a female pioneer in the sciences, what with being part of the last generation to attend college before the rise of second-wave feminism. My sense is that hard scientists as a rule find social scientists' attempts to talk about genetics annoying and superficial, because people so often speculate about the role of genes in explaining highly complex social phenomenon or make the error of assuming that just because something is biologically observable it's also "innate." Biology is impacted by the environment as well as genes -- think about the impact of nutrition on height, or the impact of experieces on the formation of neural networks -- and the study Summers discussed wasn't a even a biological study. It was a sociological one whose authors explicitly rejected the hypothesis Summers took to be its conclusion.University of California-Davis sociologist Kimberlee A. Shauman said that Summers’ remarks were “uninformed.” The other researcher, University of Michigan sociologist Yu Xie, said he accepted Summers’ comments as “scholarly propositions,” although he said his own analysis “goes against Larry’s suggestion that math ability is something innate.”...
Summers read a substantial portion of Xie and Shauman’s acclaimed 2003 book Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes, published by Harvard University Press, in preparation for Friday’s conference. “For the biological interpretation [of the gender gap] to hold, it is necessary that both of the following assumptions be true,” the authors write on page 41. “[First,] the relationship between the measured aspects of brain functioning and math/science achievement is causal. [Second,] gender differences in thee aspects of brain functioning are biologically biased.”
“Neither of these two assumptions is supported by the scientific evidence,” Xie and Shauman conclude.
The other work that seems to have influences Summers' comments, according to the Crimson, was The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. I haven't read this book, but if you look at the amazon.com readers' comments, it appears that some female readers found its discussions of rape and the maternal instinct highly offensive and sexist. One newspaper reviewer described Pinker's book, in 2002, as "breathtaking, rabid stuff.... likely to reduce most university common-rooms to states of gibbering apoplexy." (Mission accomplished, clearly.) If Summers based his remarks in part on a reading of Pinker's book, the response he generated was something that was not only predictable but predicted.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
After a stint as an aide to Al Gore in the Clinton White House, Spencer returned to Maine and beat out an eight-year incumbent in a party race for the DNC spot. “I ran on a platform of pledging to better connect local Maine Democrats to the national party,” he told me. “Maine Democrats can be resentful of the national party and we need to do a better job connecting the two.”
To that end, he's trying to turn his vote for the DNC chair into as much of an interactive process as possible. Tonight, he’ll send out an email to 15,000 Maine Democrats asking them for whom he should cast his ballot, and directing them to a Web site and blog he’s created for the sole purpose of soliciting their advice. Spencer sent me an early copy of the email he’s about to distribute (which I’ve abridged):
Dear Fellow Maine Democrat,So far, the five comments on his post all express unanimous support for Howard Dean, but that’s bound to change once his email hits inboxes.As one of your representatives to the Democratic National Committee from Maine, I would like to hear your ideas about how we can work together to rebuild the party from the grassroots up. In February, I will be traveling to Washington for the annual Winter Meeting of the DNC at which we will elect a new chair and set a course for the future of our party. I'd like to bring your ideas with me.
President Bush has made it clear he wants to continue to divide our country by privatizing Social Security, shifting more of the tax burden onto the middle class, and appointing more right-wing Supreme Court justices. We must stop this assault on our core Democratic values. Democrats must unite to oppose the worst of the Bush Administration's policies and propose an alternative progressive agenda for the country.
I'm writing today to invite you to join the dialogue with other Maine Democrats. I want to hear your views so I can best represent you at the Democratic National Committee. I hope you'll visit my new website, www.samspencer.org, to voice your opinion on the future of our party and who the next chairman of the DNC should be.
This past year was remarkable. So many Maine Democrats were involved with the campaign in a personal way, from door-to-door canvassing to phone banking to online activism. The work paid off. John Kerry won Maine by nearly 10 points, we re-elected Tom Allen and Mike Michaud, and we retained control of the State House. With this continued dedication, we will re-elect Governor John Baldacci in 2006 and, I believe, take back the White House in 2008…
UPDATE: In terms of identifying the youngest DNC member to vote in February, it should be noted that both the College Democrats of America and the Young Democrats of America have two representatives each. Spencer doesn't quite have the title.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
--Jeffrey Dubner
But the MPAA certainly heard the message loud and clear, with The Hill reporting today that “studio executives recognize that they need balance at the senior levels and that doing so would bring them a measure of comfort.” After hiring Republicans for lower-level positions recently and letting it be known that it was looking to hire a Republican for a top executive post to help balance out Democratic president Dan Glickman, the association appears to have made a choice: none other than John Feehery, longtime spokesman to Speaker Dennis Hastert. The article also mentions that, as the outfit retools post-Jack Valenti and adjusts to the GOP’s control of Washington, it “is trying to recast itself as a lobbying organization for wider business interests.” That’s pretty vague, but it might reflect something close to one of the overarching goals of the GOP’s pressures on K Street -- to get all industry lobbyists on board in support of the party’s business agenda even when specific legislation falls outside a given association’s parochial interests.
--Sam Rosenfeld
At a time when the per-capita costs of private health insurance rose by 12.6 percent and the Medicare program for seniors increased by 7.1 percent, Medicaid rose by 4.5 percent, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said. "That does not mean to me it is inefficient," he said.This is the same as the pattern we're seeing with discretionary spending -- steep cuts in relatively small programs aimed at helping the poor who, being poor, have trouble hiring lobbyists. It's an inversion of Reagan OMB Director David Stockman's slogan that cuts should be aimed at "weak claims, not weak clients." Of course it didn't quite work out that way in the Reagan years, either, but they at least had the decency to pretend.
--Matthew Yglesias
Want to learn more? Express your outrage? Moving Ideas, a project of The American Prospect, provides you with the definitive, in-depth guide to saving Social Security, with links to Prospect Social Security report articles, resources from leading public policy organizations, links to source documents, and opportunities to take action. Don't stand by and watch your Social Security benefits slashed and hopes of a secure retirement taken away!
--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org
On Jan. 6, 12 Democratic County Chairs from the rural Hill Country west of Austin met and unanimously endorsed Howard Dean for National Chair. We have communicated our decision to Charles Soechting, Texas State Chair, and the entire voting delegation to DNC.Though the writer is not one of the 447, this rural, west Texan unanimity for Dean bodes well for the Northeastern doctor.We let them know we are tired of seeing the same old policies and same entrenched people lead our party to defeat after defeat…Dean arouses enthusiasm among a wide spectrum of Democrats, will stand firm and push back against Bush and the Congressional Republicans and would be an articulate spokesman on television and in person. Plus, his use of the internet both to fund his campaign for President and to interact with his supporters is the single most innovative technique to emerge from the election.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now" -- they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.This has a superficial similarity to the standard Bush-era conservative spiel of "God: good! Freedom: fantastic! America: wonderful!" But it really does displays the clear influence of the more sophisticated take you'll find in The Phenomenology of Spirit or Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Perhaps more to the point, Francis Fukuyama deployed a similar reading of Hegel in his oft-misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, which puts forward a number of policy-relevant ideas. Interestingly, Fukuyama himself, though traditionally associated with the neoconservative tendency in American intellectual life, has emerged as a strident critic of the Iraq War and the Bush foreign policy in general.
Now, personally, I think this belief that the goodness of our cause constitutes a reason to believe in the inevitability of its success is a dangerous delusion. It's the deep, philosophical version of a narrow, political tactic we've often seen -- a flight away from questions about what's actually going on toward questions about whether or not the president means well. The Iraq War must be a good idea, because we're on the side of liberty and the people we're fighting are repugnant. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work this way. It's not good enough to love freedom and really, really, really want your policies to cause its spread. You need policies that will actually advance the cause. And that's what we still don't have.
--Matthew Yglesias
So we want it brought back to the basics. The Prospect is hosting a contest to define the liberal ideology. Make it simple: In no more than 30 words, tell us what liberalism stands for. There's a reason you care about politics and a reason you read The American Prospect; what do you want to see accomplished in and by this great country? It may seem like a lot to fit into 30 words -- or it may be more straightforward than you think.
More details about the contest can be found here, and you can enter by emailing us. We'll post some of the best responses we receive over the next few weeks, and pick a winner in February (who will receive exciting prizes!). Enter early and, heck, if you've got a lot to say -- enter often.
UPDATE: Sorry, "enter early" wasn't really meant seriously. To answer the question a few people have asked, you can post the first thing you think of, or think about it for a while, or anything you'd like. In any case, we've received quite a few good suggestions already and we'll put the first batch up tomorrow.
--The Editors
Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of money. This will enhance the economic dynamism conducive to an open society. Personal accounts will respect individuals' autonomy and competence and will narrow the wealth gap by facilitating the accumulation of wealth -- bequeathable wealth -- by people of modest incomes.It's notable that most of Will's reasons here do not, in fact, have anything to do with philosophy. "Philosophic," apparently, is an archaic term meaning "slipshod economics." Would Social Security really "narrow the wealth gap?" Well, no. As far as I know, the only people out there who've done a proper distributive analysis are at the Urban Institute, where they've concluded that privatization will raise poverty rates. The only people who'll be able to bequeath their assets to anyone are poor people who die before retirement age, or people rich enough to have cash left over in their accounts after the forced annuitization of their assets.It used to be the political left that had an exaggerated confidence in the transparency of the future. The left believed -- because Marx had deciphered history's unfolding, or because the social sciences had new analytic tools -- that the future had become knowable. Hence government could boldly act, sure of society's predictable trajectory. Today some conservatives, beginning their admirable project of Social Security reform, lack the conservative virtue of sobriety about the limits of prophecy. The sober truth is that the philosophic reasons for reforming Social Security are more compelling than the fiscal reasons.
I'm not quite sure what Will means about "economic dynamism," but one issue in contention here is whether or not Social Security privatization will boost the national savings rate and, therefore, enhance economic growth. Since the accounts will be financed with new borrowing, it won't. And there's a strong case to be made (see the update at the end) that privatization will reduce savings.
So we're left with freedom. "Personal accounts will respect individuals' autonomy and competence." But how so? What kind of freedom? Not the freedom to do what you want with your money. Not even the freedom to invest your money however you want. Instead, it'll be the freedom to invest a fixed proportion of your income in one of a small number of privately managed index funds. All that's being enhanced here is the level of risk you need to bear and the profit levels of the companies that will manage the funds. You don't get to make any meaningful choices about anything. Will wants to make this a debate about individuals' "competence" to invest but, by definition, exactly half of private accounts will underperform the average (i.e., median) account. In Lake Wobegon we all might come out ahead due to our awesome competence and autonomy, but here in the real world we're just creating a situation where unlucky retirees will be living their lives in poverty.
--Matthew Yglesias
“Each time I hear them speak,” Krusor told me Tuesday, “it narrows it down for me.” Though she’s now trying to choose between two or three candidates, Krusor politely rebuffed my (numerous) attempts to find out for whom she’s inclined to vote. “I just don’t want to discourage any of the candidates,” she told me.
Krusor, who is Hispanic, had only good things to say about Terry McAuliffe, but acknowledged that “you have to change with the times, and the Democrats could be doing a lot more to reach out to Hispanic voters.”
Interestingly, while Krusor has spoken with each of the candidates, she only came to loggerheads with Tim Roemer. “Usually, they always just agree with everything I say. … Tim Roemer was actually the only one to disagree with me.” The point of contention here was Krusor’s insistence that Kansas, a Republican state that was all but written off in the 2004 election, be given a more equal share of the funding as other states. “Yesterday when he called,” said Krusor, “Tim Roemer questioned that. My point is, Kansas doesn’t get its fair share.”
--Mark Leon Goldberg
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Matthew Yglesias
LOOKING TO HIS OWN. One of the funny things about Ivy League schools is that the further from them you get in time the more you realize that they are not always the best institutions to be at to accomplish a variety of things. They garner great gobs of media attention, and pronouncements from them can create national controversies. But while teenagers, ambitious parents, and competitive graduate students may idolize places like Harvard, Ivy institutions are not always on the cutting edge.
Case in point: Despite the fact that 91 percent of tenured faculty in the natural sciences at Harvard are male, and thus, according to the university's president Larry Summers, possibly capable of greater excellence than women, the last time one of the university's own was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry, physics, or medicine was in 1990.
Since then, Harvard has been outpaced by a couple of powerhouse public universities, according to records at nobelprize.org. The University of California, Santa Barbara, saw four of its scholars win Nobels in these fields since 1990, and UC Irvine scholars were awarded three. Several of the other Ivy League or Ivy-like schools similarly saw more scholars and scientists awarded Nobels than did Harvard. Since 1990, Harvard has been beaten by Princeton (four scholars), Columbia (three scholars), and Stanford (with an astonishing five scholars awarded Nobels, all in physics). Meanwhile, Cambridge neighbor MIT, whose professor Nancy Hopkins was sickened by Summers' remarks on women and walked out of his presentation, has seen eight scholars win Nobels since 1990.
Harvard was a leader in nurturing Nobel Laureates in the past, but, according to this analysis, it's had a bit of a dry spell and did not rank as one of the top five institutions nurturing Nobel-caliber scholars in economics, chemistry, physics, or physiology and medicine in the 1988-2002 period.
Harvard still recruits from the ranks of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and doubtless trains many men who will go on to win them. (Only 10 women have ever won a Nobel in the sciences, the last in 1988.) But after having publicly criticized Cornel West for his lack of academic output, Harvard Law School for its "idiosyncratic" hires, and female students and scholars for their alleged innate inability to achieve excellence, perhaps Summers might turn his attentions to the needs of the science faculty he does have, instead of forcing them to write apologetic notes to undergraduates.
UPDATE. I stand corrected: Reader D.M. point outs that Linda Buck was awarded the Nobel in physiology or medicine in 2004 for her work on odorant receptors and the olfactory system, making her the most recent female Nobel Laureate in the sciences, not 1988's recipient, Gertrude Elion. According to the book Nobel Prize Women in Science, nine women were awarded ten Nobels in the sciences from the inception of the prize in 1901 through 1993; Marie Curie was awarded Nobels in both physics and chemistry. And Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard of the Max-Planck-Institut für Entwicklungsbiologie in Tübingen, Germany, shared the 1995 Nobel in physiology or medicine, as well. Interestingly, then, of the 11 female Nobel Laureates in the sciences, more than half won that honor in just the past 27 years, which tracks pretty closely with some rather significant social changes in the status of women and opportunities available to them.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Matthew Yglesias
When I caught Burgoyne at his office yesterday, he told me that he hasn’t ruled out any candidates yet, though Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Leland has inexplicably failed to contact Burgoyne. “To get on my shortlist,” Burgoyne conceded, “you at least have to call me up and talk.”
When the candidates do call to give their spiel, Burgoyne tries to vet out the sincerity of each candidate's desire to reform the party from a top-down, DC-run operation. As if reading from Michael Lind's January Prospect article, mapquest.dem, Burgoyne told me his main concern is to “return to the days when the national party was more of a reflection of the states’ parties.”
Whoever gets the job will come up against entrenched constituencies more interested in going after “the shrinking blue-state pie” than expanding the appeal of the party in red states like Idaho, Burgoyne warned. “What I’m interested in is which candidate can deliver on their promises to broaden the base of the party.”
I asked Burgoyne what the Democrats could do to make inroads in Idaho, a decidedly Republican state. He tells me that to win over more voters in Ada County, which encompasses his own Boise and the inner-mountain region of Idaho, Democrats must transcend the values debate:
We need to look the Republicans and the religious right in the eye and tell them that abortion is no longer an issue. In a recent poll, 57 percent of the state said they were pro-choice. In four years, the Republicans in Congress and Bush have enacted no anti-choice legislation. The fight is over, the choice crowd won, let's talk about something else.--Mark Leon Goldberg
Of course many of these 447 DNC members are long-time Democratic hands that you’ve heard of; Donna Brazile, Alexis Herman, and Harold Ickes are seasoned insiders and used to the attention. But being simply “famous for DC” doesn’t give them any more votes than, say, a party loyalist in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, or the vice chairwoman of the Kansas state Democratic Party. Indeed, in a race this wide open, the four-person delegation from American Samoa could tip the results one way or the other.
So from now until the February 12 vote, Tapped will seek out the thoughts of Joe and Jane Delegate. Check back regularly to find out who's gaining traction, whose telephone pitch is most compelling, and what DNC members from Portsmouth to Pago Pago expect from a new party boss.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
Dr. Allawi said that he would call for a "conditions-paced" rather than a "calendar-paced" gradual withdrawal program, a formulation that appears to signal that he favors tying an American military pullout to progress in the war here instead of setting a strict timetable for the drawdown of more than 170,000 American troops currently in Iraq.In principle, the Allawi position on this makes more sense. The capacity of the Iraqi government to protect its population is by far the more relevant variable than the mere duration of the American presence. The question, in my mind, is whether we're actually making any progress at all in the training mission. Take a look at what Joe Biden had to say at yesterday's confirmation hearings for Condoleezza Rice:A new American intelligence estimate has warned that the government likely to emerge from the elections will almost certainly press Washington to set a firm date for the troops' departure. Leaders of a coalition of Shiite parties that are expected to win the election have promised voters that they will push for such a commitment. By contrast, American officials have said they wish to link the withdrawal to progress made in creating a new Iraqi security force capable of facing down insurgents, a position in line with that expressed by Dr. Allawi, himself a Shiite.
I've gone to the training facility for police in Jordan. With the American head trainer, I said without anybody there and I believe my friend and person who has an ideological bent considerably different than mine, my friend from South Carolina was there. I said, There's no one in the room. Please cut all the malarkey. Is this training program worth a darn? And the answer was no -- from our own trainer.Later, Biden remarked that "if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces." Now, unfortunately, Biden said that right before his time ran out and so Rice didn't respond. But the next questioner, Chuck Hagel did ask something about the training program, so Rice did have a chance to offer a convincing reply if one was available. Apparently one wasn't.
--Matthew Yglesias
During the campaign season, the "we don't care about the press" attitude was more a posture than a genuine disregard. But now? The inaugural could remind people of the Kerik embarrassment -- and they don't care! It could reunite Bush with the focus of the most expensive 527 ad buy of the campaign, even though Bush ostensibly deplores 527 organizations -- and they don't care!
Is this indicative of an administration unconcerned about handling bad press or confident it won't receive any? Either way, should be fun (if frustrating) times for political junkies.
--Jeffrey Dubner
At the same time, this is a chance to get out of the defensive crouch on Social Security and start attacking. A plan that doesn't have the support of the House Ways and Means Chairman or the Senate Finance Committee Chairman is in no danger of passing in the near future. Democrats would be well-advised to spend less time focusing on defending their position and more time launching vituperative attacks on the Bush view. It would be a shame to just let Bush wiggle out of this without paying a major price.
--Matthew Yglesias
Indeed, Summers has designed an interesting experiment of his own. Will Harvard lose out on talented female scholars because of its current leaders? If the number of women granted tenure continues to decline, as it has during each of the three years the university has been led by Summers, I think we can safely conclude that the answer here is very likely not due to an innate problem with the institution or all womankind, but rather related to its current leadership. The decline in female faculty at Harvard under Summers is not simply a function of an inability to find Nobel-winning female scientists, a category that I will grant holds extremely few members. According to a 2004 article in the Harvard Crimson, female junior faculty in the humanities are also less common under Summers than they used to be:
Thirty-five percent of the junior Faculty in the humanities are women, down from almost 50 percent in the 1990s.While non-tenured humanties professors are increasingly male, it has been female professors in the sciences who have rapidly increased at the non-tenured level:
Despite the humanities decline, women comprise 42 percent of junior Faculty in the social sciences and 17 percent of junior Faculty in the natural sciences, which is two times the natural science percentage from five years ago, according to the letter.Nor are there fewer junior professors in the humanities because they are becoming tenured professors at Harvard. In the 2000-01 academic year, according to a letter signed by 26 Harvard professors last June and sent to Summers urging him to address the decline in female faculty, 37 percent of tenure offers were to female scholars. That number had shrunk to just 11 percent by 2002-03. (Summers' appointment began in July '01.)
While I agree with Kevin Drum that the phrase "speaking truth to power" ought to be retired as an annoying sixties-ism, the essential point made by the female scientists offended by Summers' presentation holds. There has been a lot of a research into why there are so few female professors in the sciences -- and overall -- including this excellent article on faculty diversity published in Harvard magazine in 2002. As that article noted:
The popular explanation of the problem holds that there are insufficient numbers of women and minorities on the pathway from graduate student to faculty member. Academics label this the "pipeline problem." As the data that follow indicate, this is only half right: true for minorities, false for women. Indeed, if the problem were the pipeline, one might expect that 30 years of the "good-faith effort" required of universities by affirmative-action regulations would have borne more fruit.Summers' remarks, by questioning women's innate capacities, have only made this problem worse. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Lorna J. Gibson, who chaired the Committee on Women Faculty in that university's school of engineering, has noted that "[t]he same way money and interest compounds, the marginalization also compounds....You can sort of shrug it off if it happens once.” But over time, the impact of the small incidents wears away at women. MIT has done much to study the issue, and launched a landmark initiative in the late '90s to make life more welcoming for female professors -- an initiative that bore fruit with a significant upsurge in female tenured professors in the hard sciences and an outpacing of Harvard University in this arena.The lack of success invites another hypothesis: that the pipeline is not the basic problem. In fact, even if the pipeline were awash with women and minorities, a fundamental challenge would remain: the pipeline empties in-to territory women and faculty of color too often experience as uninviting, un-accommodating, and unappealing. For that reason, many otherwise qualified candidates forgo graduate school altogether, others withdraw midstream, and still others--doctorate in hand--opt for alternative careers. In short, the pipeline leaks....
The trouble for women is not the lack of numbers in the pipeline; the problem is that their status, once in the academy, is low.
Women have made great strides in the past decades, but we do not yet live in a world so free of gendered pressures that we can speak with any certainty of what women's natural capacities are. Each generation of women proves capable of more than the one that came before it, and so many have now passed through Harvard's halls that it seems worthwhile for them to again put some pressure on the institution, so that the next generation has even greater opportunities to discover what they're capable of doing.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
The President last week surrounded himself with citizens ranging from children to an 80-year-old and warned that the Social Security system will be "flat bust, bankrupt" by the time workers in their 20s retire. As early as 2018, Bush said, "you're either going to have to raise the taxes of people or reduce the benefits." At another appearance intended to promote federal standards for testing high school students, Bush went off script to warn a group of teenagers, "The system will be bankrupt by the year 2040."Not "Democrats say ..." but "it's not true ..." -- exactly the right approach. We also get an accurate summary of private accounts' relevance to the alleged crisis: "What about Bush's proposed individual accounts? On their own, they do nothing to solve Social Security's funding problems." And some much-warranted skepticism about the value of "choice" in this domain: "What's more, studies of how Americans invest their 401(k) accounts suggest that, given the chance to make choices, most can't even beat a basic index fund." Excellent stuff overall. If only they'd put their coverage of the most important issue in American politics on the cover instead of this thing about twixters (I can't tell if I count) we'd really be getting somewhere.That sounds pretty scary--except that it's not true. What will actually happen in 2018, according to the Social Security trustees who oversee the program, is that the money paid out in benefits will begin to exceed the amount collected in taxes. And since Social Security will run a surplus until then (and has been running one for some time), it has billions available that it can tap to fill the gap. Even under conservative estimates, the system as it stands will have enough money to pay all its promised benefits until 2042 and most of its obligations for decades after.
--Matthew Yglesias
Liberals, for their part, aren't bereft of philosophy. They support Social Security because it's redistributive. In other words, it's welfare for old people. The politically correct term for this is "social insurance." Liberals are willing to keep paying rich people Social Security in the hopes that the payments will keep those rich people from figuring out that Social Security is a redistributive transfer program. . . .The implication here is that the conception of Social Security as a social insurance program is some kind of left-wing fraud, but it isn't. For one thing, while providing proportionally higher benefits to people with lower lifetime earnings is one important way in which the program transfers wealth, another major transfer is away from short-lived people to long-lived ones. In a world without Social Security, retired people facing uncertainty about how long they live would need to convert some substantial portion of their savings into what's known as an "annuity," where you pay a big lump sum to a company in exchange for which they promise to pay you a smaller annual (or monthly or what have you) sum of money. This is a kind of longevity insurance, to guarantee that you don't run out of money at age 83 after living longer than you expected.Here's what a straightforward discussion of the philosophy behind the Social Security system would look like: Democrats support welfare for old people, on the grounds that it creates a safety net for capitalism's losers, who might otherwise live in poverty. Republicans oppose welfare for old people, on the grounds that it reduces incentives to work and save, it gives the government too much money to spend, and it makes people overly dependent on the government for their retirement. That's an honest debate. Let's have it.
This kind of insurance device, however, suffers from the same basic problem as private-sector health insurance: adverse selection. Individuals know more than insurance companies do about whether or not they're likely to live a long time (or, conversely, need medical care). People who know (or who can at least be reasonably certain) that they're not going to live very long aren't going to want to buy annuities. That means companies are going to need to make the terms of purchase pretty unfavorable in order to make a profit. That will drive more people out of the annuity market, and make the terms even less favorable. Lather, rinse, and repeat. This is the same reason it's hard to buy a decent health insurance plan as an individual on the private market. Social Security effectively collectivizes the risk of the entire population, and (like Medicare, its health care equivalent) therefore lets seniors get better terms than they could obtain in a pure market system. That's genuine social insurance and not welfare at all.
Last, the conservative thought that welfare for old people would reduce incentives to work and save is one very good reason why Social Security isn't structured as a welfare (i.e., sharply means-tested) program. If people with non-trivial savings of their own didn't get to draw Social Security benefits, then millions of Americans would find that it wasn't worth their while to save anymore. Very rich people would be able to save a lot, and find that the loss of benefits was minor in comparison. But for people who would, at best, be able to build up a modest nest egg, loss of benefits would wipe out the gains to savings. Avoiding these perverse incentives requires that the redistributive dimension of Social Security be very mild, even though that makes the program significantly bigger than a strict anti-poverty program would be.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Sarah Wildman
Allawi has declared martial law up through and past January 30. A good chunk of Allawi's support will come from absentee ballots, many of which will be counted in Jordan—which is notoriously pro-Allawi and wary of the religious Shiites (and has serious beef with Ahmed Chalabi, who is on the United Iraqi List). Meanwhile, other absentee ballots will be counted in Iran, which is notoriously pro-religious Shiite and wary of Allawi. From a god's-eye view, yes, it's possible this will all go off smoothly and there will be no fraud at all. But no one has a god's-eye view, and if either Allawi or Sistani or anyone else doesn't like the election results, there's ample room for conspiracy-mongering.Not only is there ample room for conspiracy-mongering, but even the most honest third-party observers won't have a good handle on who's telling the truth. The security situation is too poor to put any sort of proper election monitoring or exit polling in place to help detect fraud. The International Republican Institute, which has the contracts for doing opinion polls in Iraq, has never asked people who they plan to vote for. Even the much-cited figure that Iraq is 60 percent Shiite is a guesstimate rather than rigorous census data. If the factions inside the political process start fighting with each other and pointing fingers, the U.S. government is going to be forced to choose sides in a basically arbitrary manner with potentially disastrous results.
--Matthew Yglesias
Mr. Cheney wields considerable influence over personnel issues, and late last year quietly helped shop around for a possible replacement for Mr. Snow before Mr. Bush decided to keep him on for the start of his second term, Republicans familiar with the situation said.Quietly shopped around, huh?
--Sam Rosenfeld
The Times says that Carteret ought to inspire states to mandate that DRE machines be accompanied by a voter-verified paper receipt:
North Carolina agriculture commissioner may not be the loftiest of offices. But if the same glitch had occurred in Washington, where Christine Gregoire was just elected governor by 129 votes, it would have destabilized the entire state government. If it had occurred in Florida in 2000, where President Bush's margin was just 537 votes, it would have undermined an entire presidential election.Incidents like the one in Carteret County and myriad other Election Day machine malfunctions have been recorded by the Verified Voting Foundation, a valuable resource for those who follow this issue -- but they do not suggest a pattern of widespread fraud. Rumors aside, there is no hard evidence of a nefarious election-day conspiracy plot involving the much-maligned Diebold, or any other machine vendor, to hand-deliver the election to George W. Bush. But with no auditable paper trail to provide empirical evidence either way, there’s really no way to know.North Carolina's plight underscores a basic point about elections: because there are often problems, there must be a mechanism for a recount. If the Carteret County voting machine had produced a voter-verified paper record each time a vote was cast, these paper records could have been be counted and the matter would be resolved. But electronic voting machines that do not produce paper records make recounts impossible.
Despite these Election Day problems, and despite the wonderful advocacy of The New York Times editorial page on this issue, a national mandate that DRE machines produce a paper trail is not likely. In my reporting on this issue for our January special report on the elections, I found the voting machine manufacturers generally hostile to the idea of fitting their DRE machines with voter-verified paper receipts. The startling collusion between this industry and secretaries of state who oversee their operations does not help the cause either. But unless state legislatures and state election officials mandate that they will only allow state funds to purchase machines that offer a paper trail (as is the case in Nevada), DRE machines will continue to undermine our confidence in the voting process in 2006 and beyond.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
--Jeffrey Dubner
Anyone who paid any attention to the Martin Frost-Pete Sessions race in re-redistricted Texas last year knows that it was one extraordinary fight, hands down the ugliest and most tenacious race in the entire 2004 cycle. After the Tom DeLay-orchestrated redistricting plan was pushed through, nobody expected that Frost had a prayer. It took the Democrat’s astounding fundraising prowess and willingness to deploy jaw-droppingly nasty campaign advertising (including an attack ad featuring footage of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center) to make people take notice, and to give Sessions a real race. This was an existential, whatever-it-takes enterprise on Frost’s part; I’d say it’s not the best place to look to gauge how he would serve as DNC chair. Yes, it would be much more impressive if Frost had somehow managed to wage a successful campaign in a heavily Republican district against a popular Republican congressman that effectively highlighted differences between the parties and celebrated the values and achievements of the Democratic Party, but perhaps a little realism is in order here.
To judge Frost as a candidate, I’d suggest looking at his record as a Democratic congressman and former DCCC head. Frost’s policy stances are far more orthodox than Roemer’s, he has a long history as an engaged partisan, and his energy and fundraising abilities are held in the highest regard among his colleagues; under his tenure at the DCCC during the 1996 and 1998 cycles, the Democrats gained 14 seats. That is to say, all indications are that he’d bring the kind of skills to the DNC that the position has normally called for in the past. (Why Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid let it be known early on that Roemer, rather than Frost, had their support as the anti-Howard Dean establishment candidate remains an open question. If Pelosi's preference stemmed from Frost's earlier challenge against her for the minority leader post, it's a disappointing reflection on her priorities.)
For the many, many Democrats interested in a fundamental rethinking of what the DNC’s role should be and how the party itself should be organized, Frost clearly is not the best candidate. But among the candidates falling outside the "reform" wing, it’s important at least to keep some basic categorical distinctions in mind.
--Sam Rosenfeld
The good news for Democrats is that the Democratic "brand" on this issue is very strong and the Republican brand is very weak. I take that to mean Democrats need not concede Bush's framing of the issue; despite his access to a bigger bully-pulpit, a forcefully worded Democratic message will get a hearing. And if it ultimately comes down to Bush's word against the Democrats' there's a very good chance the public will side with the party that created Social Security and has sustained it over the decades rather than the one that's been trying to destroy it for generations.
--Matthew Yglesias
Hello, you've reached the Mississippi State Tax Commission. On Monday, January the 17th, the state tax commission offices will be closed in observance of Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthdays. Tax Comission offices will reopen on Tuesday, January the 18th. Office hours are from eight until five. Thank you. Have a safe and happy holiday.Northerners surprised to learn that the two men are celebrated on the same day in parts of the south wound up zinging the number around the net yesterday on listservs and personal networks, and their southern brethen replied right back that before MLK Day became a holiday, Robert E. Lee's Jan. 19 birthday was what some schools south of the Mason-Dixon celebrated. Today, the rebel general's birthday is celebrated as a state holiday in South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and -- of course -- South Carolina. That the efforts to honor two men who played such different roles in American history should now overlap is either one of the great ironies of this nation's history, or somehow strangely fitting.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
NEW ALLIANCES ON THE SOCIAL SECURITY PUSHBACK FRONT? Looks like the newest hardball Democratic Party player is working concurrently with one of the most established and traditional heavyweights to fight George Bush's Social Security privatization plan. MoveOn.org yesterday created a united front with the AFL-CIO by announcing a simultaneous petition effort informally linking their millions of members in a protest of Bush's privatization plan. Each organization is independently asking its members to contact their representatives, but the timing is hardly accidental. Former AFL-CIO online organizer and Kerry-Edwards campaign online communications director Tom Matzzie just signed on as MoveOn's new Washington director, and so far the manufacturing and service sector stalwarts have been one step ahead of MoveOn in cyberspace on this issue. Though the two groups arose through completely different pathways in response to unique historical circumstances, it actually makes a lot of sense for them to take cues from each other in the years ahead. Few other interest groups are as committed to grassroots politicial organizing as the unions and MoveOn, and both have served as a training ground for innovators. It'll be interesting to see if they create any formal alliances in the future.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Targeting low-profile and politically vulnerable discretionary programs for spending cuts in the name of budget-balancing is, of course, hilariously disingenuous, but it’s where the starve-the-beast gambit will actually have an effect. You’ll read nothing more absurd all week than this line from the Post piece on how the proposal to trim an $8 billion HUD branch is “one of the first concrete examples of the types of cuts in the works as the administration comes to grips with a soaring deficit” -- as if some still-undisclosed fraction of $8 billion amounts to a hill of beans in terms of actually shrinking the structural deficits spawned by gigantic tax cuts and spending hikes.
In starve-the-beast news reaching beyond discretionary spending, reports indicate that the new Senate Budget Committee chairman, Judd Gregg is ready to carry the White House’s water in attempting to transform Medicaid into a block grant to states (and is also looking to target the employer subsidy provision of last year’s Medicare drug monstrosity). But the ridiculousness of the notion that the cuts Republicans are eyeing would really effect the deficit remains even when these proposed entitlement reforms are taken into account. As Congressional Quarterly (subscription only) puts it:
Any savings from budget reconciliation likely would make only a modest dent in the deficit — and would come at a substantial political cost. A reconciliation bill that would save $100 billion over five years, for example, would guarantee turmoil over Medicare and Medicaid cuts but would only nip at deficits running at $300 billion to $400 billion a year.“Nip,” indeed.
UPDATE: This post orginally misstated Judd Gregg's new position -- he is the new chairman of the Budget Committee, not the Finance Committee. Thanks to reader D.D. for the catch.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide.This whole things strikes me as somewhat ridiculous. Zephyr Teachout, who sparked the controversy, is not a journalist; she is an attorney and political operative. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is not a journalist or pundit, either; he is a political activist, Democratic fundraiser, and liberal blogger. The fact that a political campaign would pay political activists the tiny sum of $12,000 to do consulting work is not a scandal. It's simply how political campaigns work. That the activist was an online activist strikes me as irrelevant. No one goes to Daily Kos for "objective reporting" on political campaigns. They go there for his very opinionated perspective on a highly selective series of stories about what's happening in the world today.Zephyr Teachout, the former head of Internet outreach for Mr. Dean's campaign, made the disclosure earlier this week in her own Web log, Zonkette. She said "to be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal." The hiring of the consultants was noted in several publications at the time.
The issue of political payments to commentators has become hot following disclosures that the Bush administration paid a conservative radio and newspaper pundit, Armstrong Williams, $240,000 to plug its "No Child Left Behind" education policy....
The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.
Similarly, the fact that the political operatives at the Dean campaign might have thought they were buying loyalty with the sums they paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong, while the bloggers thought they were simply finally being recognized and validated for all the pro-Dean work they'd already done by being brought into the fold of the campaign, is no surprise either. That, too, is simply how politics works. People come to agreements for different reasons, and everyone likes to interpret whatever has happened in a way that makes them look maximally powerful and in charge of the situation. For example, the Kerry campaign created councils to bring policy experts into the campaign. These allowed their component individuals to portray themselves in their communities as being intimately involved in an important and insidery operation, when people on the campaign may just have looked at the councils as a cheap way of creating loyalty and good will within an elite community so that there would be fewer snarky blind quotes in the media. Yet the councils may also have contributed to something useful for the party by allowing people to buy into the campaign and feel a part of it and talk to each other about important issues and form bonds and relationships that will last beyond that campaign season. And at times, they actually did help inform the campaign itself. Was this, too, an ethical problem? Or was it just politics as usual? I'd come down on the side of the latter. This is simply how politics works, and has always worked.
The relevant point here is that Markos is not a journalist, or even a pundit. He is a blogger and political activist, which is something different entirely -- and new. The fact that the role Markos has created is novel is what makes it interesting from an ethics perspective, because people aren't exactly sure how to peg him or what to expect.
That said, I always thought the way Markos and Jerome of MyDD.com handled their work for the Dean campaign was a model for how to combine blogging and political activism. As ABC's The Note notes today, everyone in political journalism knew where Markos stood on Dean and that he was doing some work for the campaign. There was no question of hidden motivations. For example, I recall talking to Markos by phone when he was up in Burlington one weekend just starting his work for Dean. He never tried to hide anything. Instead, he was incredibly excited and proud to have the opportunity to transition away from the work he'd been doing in San Francisco into consulting for someone whose campaign he had supported publicly and privately for months. "Blogging," he told me during that August 29, 2003 interview, "it’s the most ideal thing I've ever done in my life. If I could make a living off blogging, it would be perfect. Being a political consultant is a dream job. What I want to do is help elect Democrats."
In the end, rather than the Dean campaign buying Markos and Jerome, I'd say the blogging duo got more for themselves out of the alliance. Dean crashed and burned in Iowa. And while he may yet get a second shot at the national stage as head of the Democratic National Committee, by becoming leading figures in the online Dean movement, Markos and Jerome built their reputations and fame and gained thousands of new readers (well, at least Markos did; Jerome put his blog on hold while working for Dean). Markos went on to raise thousands of dollars for John Kerry and for Democratic political candidates during the general election cycle. He's spoken at New Democrat Network events and last week gave a presentation to the Senate Democratic Caucus. He's in. He matters. Dean helped him do that, but in the end, Markos became a player on his own. And today, he has his dream job: he makes a living blogging (thanks the miraculous advent of blogads), and focuses his life on electing Democratic candidates.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
This means that throughout my working life, I'll see economic growth reduced and my spending power eroded by a weak dollar. Then, when I retire, the time will come to start paying this debt down by sharply reducing my Social Security benefits. Worse, while people who own lots of stock right now will see the values of their shares skyrocket as private accounts force new money into the system, my generation of forced stock owners won't be able to benefit from this one-time windfall. Instead, we'll see stock returns driven below their historical rates by the artificial run-up in prices over the previous decades. People somewhat older than me who've been paying full FICA for 10-15 years will get screwed even worse as some large proportion of those contributions are simply written off in exchange for no benefits whatsoever. All this is being done, meanwhile, to forestall the mere possibility that our benefits might need to be cut by rather less than Bush is promising to cut them.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
[H]uge landslides and the mega-tsunami that they cause are extremely rare - the last one happened 4,000 years ago on the island of Réunion. The growing concern is that the ideal conditions for just such a landslide - and consequent mega-tsunami - now exist on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. In 1949 the southern volcano on the island erupted. During the eruption an enormous crack appeared across one side of the volcano, as the western half slipped a few metres towards the Atlantic before stopping in its tracks. Although the volcano presents no danger while it is quiescent, scientists believe the western flank will give way completely during some future eruption on the summit of the volcano. In other words, any time in the next few thousand years a huge section of southern La Palma, weighing 500 thousand million tonnes, will fall into the Atlantic ocean.Needless to say, that would be very bad, and it would be well worth spending some money to make sure we have the chance to minimize the loss of life.What will happen when the volcano on La Palma collapses? Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean.
--Matthew Yglesias
After the Afghan War, despite the fact that many al-Qaeda personnel were in hiding, the jihad no longer had a clear address. That made it hard to plug new people into the network even though the popularity of jihadi ideology was, if anything, larger than ever. Now, thanks to the fighting in Iraq, people who want to sign up once again know where to go to get involved and gain practical experience in assymetrical warfare against the United States. Most of the people involved in the insurgency are native-born Iraqis with little to no interest in any broader struggle, but some come from elsewhere, and some Iraqis may well get interested in the larger war with the United States.
Right now, they're fighting us in Iraq, but in the future they'll be waging their struggle in Europe, the United States, elsewhere in the Middle East, or wherever else they can go. Importantly, this is bound to happen whether or not we in some sense "win" in Iraq. Either the jihadis will be driven out of the country, in which case they'll be fighting somewhere else; or else we'll be driven out, in which case some of them will go somewhere else to fight.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Sam Rosenfeld
...Once [the United States] has declared its firm commitment to withdraw—or perhaps, given the widespread conviction that the United States entered Iraq to exploit its resources, once visible physical preparations for an evacuation have begun—the calculus of other parties will change.Luttwak then describes in detail the particular stakes Syria, Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and (to a lesser extent) Jordan have in preventing Iraq from descending into total anarchy and suggests how, according to those prudential interests, each country can help to stabilize Iraq once the United States is gone. Further, Luttwak argues, a firm commitment of U.S. withdrawal will all but force the EU to assume some greater responsibility over Iraq’s stability.…[Disengagement] would be soundly based on the most fundamental of realities: geography that alone ensures all other parties are far more exposed to the dangers of an anarchical Iraq than is the United States itself.
To be sure, Luttwak presents a varient of the, “the United States cooks, Europe does the dishes,” theory of transatlantic relations, and the feats of diplomatic jujitsu needed to engage the neighboring countries are probably well beyond the ability of those who bungled this mess in the first place, but as a thought experiment his argument is fascinating.
At the moment, the article costs six bucks, but if you have lunch money and 20 minutes to spare I highly recommend checking it out.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
This may be thinking a few steps ahead (Dems need to successfully halt George W. Bush in his tracks first), but given that, unlike in the early 1980s, Social Security really is not facing a looming funding disaster, shouldn’t Dems think hard about whether a responsible remedy to a non-pressing problem is more desirable than reaping a major and consequential political benefit from taking a GOP failure on Social Security and smothering it in their faces? As Matt says, the way to wrest a real compromise from the Republicans is to convince them that “a failure to achieve one is going to bring the rest of their agenda crashing down around them,” and the way to convince them of that is to demonstrate an eagerness to use Social Security “as a political bludgeon with which to destroy the Republican Party.” But jeez, if a compromise reform in 2005 would be responsible and desirable but not really urgent, shouldn’t the Dems consider actually bringing the rest of the Republicans’ agenda crashing down around them by using Social Security as a bludgeon to destroy the Republican Party?
That would mean a strategy that is slightly more analogous to the GOP’s in 1993-1994 than to the Dems’ a decade earlier. As Ryan Lizza puts it in his latest New Republic piece on the Democratic strategy, the fall of Hillarycare offers several instructive lessons for the party, including the notion that “It's not just about Social Security”:
If there is one lesson that leaps off the page when rereading the history of Hillarycare, it is that Clinton's foes were ruthless and systematic in their opposition to the president's plan. When Hillary Clinton tried to reach out to Senate Republicans in the spring of 1993, she found she could never schedule any meetings. It turned out that aides to Bob Dole had prohibited any Republican senator from sitting down with the first lady. A year later, when Democrats were trying to save the plan, Representative John Dingell reached out to a House Republican but was reportedly told, "John, there's no way you're going to get a single vote on this side of the aisle. You will not only not get a vote here, but we've been instructed that if we participate in that undertaking at all, those of us who do will lose our seniority and will not be ranking minority members within the Republican Party."Lizza quotes from Bill Kristol’s famous strategy memos urging Republicans to reject any and all health care proposals from the White House “sight unseen.” He could have quoted more, however: Kristol penned these memos as head of the Project for a Republican Majority, launched in November 1993 to “frame a new Republicanism by challenging not just the particulars of big-government policies, but their very premises and purposes.” Kristol warned of the political and ideological repercussions of a successfully passed health care bill -- it would revive the Democrats’ reputation as “the generous protector of middle-class interests” and “relegitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation” -- but he also promised that a successful and total defeat of Clinton’s plan, if handled in the correct way by the Republicans, would mark “a watershed in the resurgence of a newly bold and principled Republican politics.”Many Democrats today argue that their route back to power depends on transforming themselves into a party of reform. Some of these Democrats are scared that mere opposition -- and denying Bush's claim that Social Security faces a "crisis" -- hampers their efforts. But Republicans faced the same challenge in the early '90s and found that the two goals were not mutually exclusive. They didn't just kill health care reform, they used its corpse as a platform to redefine themselves as a reform movement that swept away the Democratic majority.
Lo and behold, Kristol was right! (Except for the "principled" part.) In her book on the health care fight, Theda Skocpol put the matter succinctly:
Advocates of Health Security were disorganized and the Clinton administration did not adequately explain the changes it was proposing. But if this were all of the story, the President’s attempt at comprehensive health reform might simply have faded away, dying with a whimper rather than a bang. Instead, the Health Security legislation -- so conveniently laid out in detail for critics to pick over -- became a perfect foil for mobilization against government.Congressional Republican leaders used the health care debacle as the engine for nationalizing the midterm elections in 1994. It was their chief bludgeon, a perfect symbol of the ideological distinctions between the parties that they wished to hammer home. It’s a tall order to expect the Democrats to be able to pull something like that off, but assuming Bush’s Social Security proposal turns out to be beatable as legislation (and it looks like it very well may be), they would do well to think of how to turn the legislative victory into an electoral one -- and a lasting ideological one. That will take more work and effort than simply beating the legislation in Congress.
What’s the common Democratic lament? The public doesn’t know what the party stands for. This can be a clarifying fight. Following a successful defeat of the proposal, Democrats could scream to the hilltops: This is a successful and popular program, one that succeeds in using the power of government to ensure security for all citizens, and the Republicans tried to destroy it. It is a Democratic program -- the Democrats created it, and the Democrats have preserved it from Republican attacks for decades.
If they could make that case and translate it into a real electoral revival, I’d be hard-pressed to recommend the more principled course of bipartisan compromise.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Garance Franke-Ruta
I think Kevin's premise is off base. The California congressional delegation is 40 percent Republican. That's about what George W. Bush got statewide in 2000 and only a bit below what he won in 2004. The Democratic legislature simply hasn't implemented a highly partisan gerrymander in the Golden State. Instead, they've implement a risk-averse incumbent protection plan that makes it almost impossible for any CA Democrats to lose their seats, but also almost impossible for the Democrats to pick up any new ones. That's nice if you're a member of Congress, but not so nice if you care about liberal politics. A non-partisan redistricting in California might lead the GOP to pick up some seats, but it holds out an equal chance of handing more seats to the Democrats. Since the Democrats are in the minority in Congress as a whole, that's a good bet for liberals to take even if the anti-gerrymandering cause doesn't go nationwide. And, of course, it really would lay the groundwork for a broader reform agenda aimed against the ethical cesspool the GOP has made of Washington.
--Matthew Yglesias
Instead, led by Tip O'Neill, the party waged a campaign of ruthless, partisan demagoguery that not only blocked the Reagan proposal but also drained the Reagan Revolution of most of its momentum and seemingly imperiled the entire GOP project. It was then that the White House got interested in a compromise, and it worked out a reasonable personnel roster for a bipartisan commission to study the problem. They came up with some recommendations, which were then implemented, and everyone went home and fought about other things. The point, simply put, is that you only negotiate from a position of strength.
Right now, strictly speaking, the White House doesn't need any Democratic support to pass a bill and doesn't expect to give much up in order to get it. That means there's no basis for a genuine compromise. The only way to get a compromise is to convince the Republicans that a failure to achieve one is going to bring the rest of their agenda crashing down around them. That calls for demonstrating an eagerness not for compromising with the GOP but for using Social Security as a political bludgeon with which to destroy the Republican Party. After all, liberals have been moaning since forever that cultural politics prevent them from getting voters to focus on the left's popular economic ideas. Well, what better way to get the voters to focus on economics than to have a president whose top agenda items are gutting Social Security and enacting drastic budget cuts? This is a fight Democrats should be thrilled to have. And if they win -- not just blocking the carve-out, but humiliating everyone associated with it -- that, and only that, will lay the groundwork for a sensible compromise that adjusts the benefit structure, tax rates, and retirement age of Social Security while creating new ways to boost private savings.
--Matthew Yglesias
- Paul Starr on why Social Security is so crucial
- Roger Hickey on the progressive campaign to save Social Security
- Dean Baker's refutation of Bush's dire claims
- Robert Kuttner on privatization's long odds in Congress
- Norma Cohen's illuminative history of Britain's failed attempt at privatizaton
--Jeffrey Dubner
At this point it's clear that the much-vaunted "successes" in Ramadi, Fallujah, etc. have utterly failed to create a safe environment for a vote. There may or may not be deadly attacks on polling places come election day, but when you're at a point where important political figures are gunned down in the street (top security officers, too), it's clear that you don't have a stable situation. And now the administration scarcely even pretends to think that holding the election will change the dynamic. Instead, holding the vote is just something we have to do (and we do have to do it) and solving the problems will need to be deferred until the new regime is in place. We saw this before with the June 28 (née June 30) sovereignty transfer, and none of it changes the fact that the White House doesn't seem to have any coherent goals in mind for Iraq or any plan for accomplishing them.
--Matthew Yglesias
But perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective."Rich pillories the “hard-hitting” co-hosts of Crossfire for lobbing marshmallows at Williams during his January 7 appearance, caressing him with chummy bromides and puffery. Indeed, I’d say that the most serious issues that the Williams story raises have little to do with the bottomless hackery of a single lame VRWC peon. The two real stories here are this White House’s regular use of taxpayer money for openly partisan propaganda campaigns, and the grotesque clubbiness and complacency of a punditry class (particularly its cable news component) that no longer has the ability to recognize the problem to which it is so central. The latter problem abets the former -- it has for the last four years.This is a scenario out of "The Manchurian Candidate." Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel's "Nightline" recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor," under the rubric of "news" in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of "objective" news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn't have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry.
Meanwhile, George Will has penned a column on the subject that’s worth a read. Will doesn’t bother to take the Dubner oath, but his tone is sufficiently outraged -- nay, shrill -- to convince me that he’s not on the government’s propaganda payroll (just Conrad Black’s). Will comments both on the Williams gambit and the phony news programs touting the Medicare drug law, and while he offers a weasely “to be sure” clause insisting that Democrats have also “violated the spirit, and perhaps the letter,” of propaganda laws -- who, George? when? -- in general his ire is well-directed: “When conservatives break with their principles, they seem to become casual about breaking the law, too.”
--Sam Rosenfeld
Then the inspectors came back to Iraq and went searching around. They didn't find any WMD stockpiles or evidence of advanced WMD programs. They did find some banned missiles with ranges beyond what was permitted by the Gulf War cease-fire. Those missiles were duly destroyed. At that point, rational people began to think that the intelligence consensus was, perhaps, mistaken. It already became clear that several of the specific charges the Bush administration had raised were false, and that despite repeated statements from administration officials that they were sure Saddam had WMD, they couldn't provide the inspectors with any useful clues to their whereabouts. But the United States wasn't being governered by rational people, so they, along with their cheerleaders in the press, proclaimed that if inspections weren't finding the weapons, that wasn't because the weapons weren't there but because the inspectors were corrupt, incompetent, or something like that. Therefore, an invasion was necessary.
This judgment -- the judgment that took us to war, the judgment that's led to all the many American casualties and the many more Iraqi casualties, didn't reflect any sort of international consensus whatsoever. If people aren't aware of that fact (which they largely aren't) it's because the "liberal media" was so busy gearing up to "embed" reporters and put on a show of patriotic pomp when the shooting started that they couldn't be bothered to tell anyone what was going on. Needless to say, unlike with the Killian memo story, no one has been held accountable for this and no one ever will be.
--Matthew Yglesias
Rule 1 Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over by the time the next morning's paper is out.On the basis of these universal truths about Middle Easterners, Friedman then argues that the elections should go ahead on schedule, unless the Shiites and Kurds ask for a delay. To be sure, a fair argument to make, but why must he first engage in such a tactless effort to paint for a caricature of Mideast politics first? We are trying to understand the particular nuances of Iraqi politics and the insurgency, Tom; this requires fresh reporting. Generalizations about Middle Easterners en masse are tired -- and worse, unhelpful.Rule 2 Never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person who is supposed to be doing the conceding. If I had a dime for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I would be a wealthy man today.
Rule 3 The Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure that they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.
Rule 4 In the Middle East, if you can't explain something with a conspiracy theory, then don't try to explain it at all - people there won't believe it.
Rule 5 In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away - unless the coast is completely clear.
Rule 6 The most oft-used phrase of Mideast moderates is: "We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it's too late. It's all your fault for being so stupid."
Rule 7 In Middle East politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, "How can I compromise?" And the minute it becomes strong, it will tell you, "Why should I compromise?"
Rule 8 What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in Arabic, in Hebrew or in any other local language. Anything said in English doesn't count.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
Several years of the president’s psychotic “candy for everyone” fiscal policies (massive hikes in defense spending, a giant new entitlement program, huge tax cuts, and virtually no restraint on congressional pork) have instilled a notion among a lot of political observers that this is an era of big-government conservatism and that the whole notion of a Grover Norquist–style hidden GOP agenda of “starving the beast” through tax cuts is basically bunk. What’s actually, finally starting to happen, though, is more complicated: Entitlement spending is proceeding apace (whilst Bush attempts to transform the crowning American middle-class entitlement and plans to take on Medicaid) and earmarking and pork are far worse than they were under Democratic control, but the crippling budget deficits that the tax cuts helped to create have at last become an effective pretext for Republicans to squeeze domestic discretionary spending. That portion of the federal budget -- covering all those do-goodery social initiatives Republicans sneer at, like home heating subsidies, Pell Grants, and community development -- is where the “starve the beast” gambit is actually beginning to have a real effect. As a colleague reminded me, this is precisely what happened in the 1980s, when discretionary domestic spending really did suffer even as the broader Reagan revolution largely stalled.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
But for Alice Froeschle, a retired teacher from Jenks, Okla., Social Security is a "guarantee that workers who retire will not be destitute in their old age." Speaking to a reporter Tuesday at the request of congressional Democrats, Froeschle said the current system was far better than having workers "gamble their retirement away in the stock market."It's nice of the Times to try and offer some balance, but Froeschle's thoughts on the matter -- while important -- are totally non-responsive to the president's false claims. What if, instead, the Times had written:
But according to the Social Security Administration, if no changes are made workers who retire in 2041, when Wright will turn 65, the program will have enough money to pay full benefits. For workers retiring in 2043 and beyond, there will have to be benefit cuts unless taxes are raised, but guaranteed benefits would still be higher in real terms than those paid today and higher than the ones offered by Bush's proposal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, full benefits can be paid until 2052. Because of its dedicated revenue stream, Social Security can never "go bust" no matter what happens, though benefits may need to become less generous.That makes it clear that Bush was lying without the reporter needing to do anything as daring as write the sentence "Bush was lying." It also happens to be the truth. Save Froeschle's argument for later in the piece where they start talking about privatization's role in the Bush vision of an ownership society. There are two different debates here: an ideological one between Bush and Froeschle about whether the country should have social insurance or a greater degree of individual risk, and a second debate between Bush and reality about whether or not Social Security is going to go bankrupt. Mixing and matching the two confuses readers and encourages politicians to lie. Eventually, Democrats are going to get sick and tired of losing and realize that if the rules of the game let politicians get away with making things up, that they'd better start making more things up in their public statements.
--Matthew Yglesias
This story is yet another example of the second-class status before the law that gay and lesbian couples face, even in blue states like New York. It's a particularly striking story when you look at how other countries have handled domestic partnership. Take Israel, which 10 years ago last November granted Jonathan Danilowitz, a steward on El Al, full benefits for his partner of 25 years. Said Chief Justice Aharon Barak writing the majority opinion:
The grant of a benefit to an employee for a spouse or common law spouse and the refusal to grant that benefit to a domestic partner of the same sex, constitutes violation of the principle or equality ... The grant of a benefit to an employee in the form of a flight ticket, will enable him to take with him the one with whom he shares his life. Concerning this issue, any differentiation between the shared life of persons of opposite sexes and the shared life of persons of the same sex is clear and blunt discrimination.He makes it sound so obvious.
--Sarah Wildman
I hope Democrats seize the opportunity presented by the fact that this pro-privatization group is also a Bush-skeptical group to break with tradition and not merely rely on seniors to try and beat this plan back. Bush has tried to cleverly structure his plan so that people who are old today won't really pay a price. That may or may not work out, depending on the Bank of China's willingness to extend us a $2 trillion low-interest loan. What we can know for sure is that people my age are going to get the shaft, spending the bulk of our working lives in a period of reduced economic growth due to massive debt only to find when we retire that our benefits have been slashed.
It's important to understand the dynamics of this. The Gallup poll confirms what my casual conversation with my peers also indicates -- young people support privatization because they believe that under the status quo we will receive no Social Security benefits whatsoever. Twenty percent of average wages sounds a lot better than zero percent, even if it's worse than 40 percent. They believe this because they've been lied to massively over the years, in a campaign the president continued yesterday at a launch event that a friend who works as a cog in the privatization machine described to me as "very well staged." Democrats need to address these concerns. They've got the facts on their side, but that doesn't get you very far without a solid media strategy behind it.
--Matthew Yglesias
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, we have a fight going on for DNC chairman, are you for Dean, Joe Trippi?Rosenberg's planning to announce some other new endorsements tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. But Trippi's is sure to generate plenty of buzz.TRIPPI: I'm coming out for Simon Rosenberg, the head of the New Democratic Network. I think he's somebody I think that's going to make a big difference, pull the party together and actually is very savvy about the internet grassroots and I think has proven himself...
MATTHEWS: So you're putting your old horse out to pasture here tonight? You mean you're so down on Howard Dean that here you are on national television dropping him?
TRIPPI: No, it's not about Howard, it's not about opposing him. I think Howard Dean should run for-- if he asked me for advice, he doesn't do that these days-- but I'd tell him to run for the U.S. Senate, to run for President in 2008 if he wanted to, I think he's got a lot of assets. But I think this is, right now, about building this party.
MATTHEWS: Why wouldn't Howard Dean make a good Democratic National Committee chairman?
TRIPPI: I think this is really about pulling all the party elements into one house and moving forward, and really rebuilding this party from the ground up but knowing how to do that. I think Simon-- I've worked with all these guys, all of them, and I think Simon Rosenberg is the best person.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
The thinking goes like this: The ozone layer protects us from the sun's rays, fending off sunburns, skin cancer, and the like. But the ozone layer is thinning, so there's no harm in trying to patch up that protective coating with a little man-made ozone from, say, auto emissions. Sure, ground-level ozone, the key ingredient in smog, has been blamed for everything from kids' breathing problems to global warming. But there's no point trying to fight those ill effects if it just means more people, in the end, wind up suffering from sunstroke.Mercatus also argued the wrong side of the arsenic-in-the-water debate that went on to become the first debacle of the Bush presidency, now little remembered because it pre-dated September 11:So declared a precursor to the Mercatus Center of George Mason University (GMU) in a 1997 public comment on a proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule setting new standards for ambient ozone. "Ozone protects against harmful ultra-violet radiation, and the detrimental health effects of increased UV-B penetration are likely to be greater than the projected health benefits of lowering ozone concentrations," the center wrote.
...individual choice, in the Mercatus mind-set, means leaving things like water purification up to the consumer. Last October, Mercatus submitted a carefully calibrated comment to the EPA when it was evaluating the final version of the new, more stringent national standards for arsenic levels in drinking water originally developed under President Bill Clinton....The center drew much of its funding from the usual right-wing foundations and companies, as well as some Enron leaders, a fact that was notable at the time because Enron board member Wendy Gramm ran Mercatus' staunchly deregulationist Regulatory Studies Program before Dudley took over:Not only were the regulations not supported by the data on arsenic, the center asserted, but communities like ours would be better served by efforts that focused on putting new products on the shelves of hardware stores rather than new national rules on the books. "[C]ommunities concerned about elevated arsenic levels in their drinking water can implement controls to reduce those levels, and individual households can install filters at their taps to remove arsenic," noted the public comment. "Compelling communities to reduce arsenic takes money that could be used to protect against bio-terrorism threats, or to buy better schools, new emergency response equipment, or increased traffic safety."
...Mercatus, an oil-money-backed quasi-think-tank ... received $50,000 in donations from Enron over the past six years -- as well as $10,000 from former Enron Chief Executive Officer Kenneth L. Lay and his wife, Linda Lay....Democrats, such as Roemer, who shill for the Mercatus Center are giving bi-partisan cover to an institution that has a long track record of working against much of what the Democratic Party's leadership and interest groups have fought for over the past 35 years. I'd be curious to know what Mercatus paid Roemer to promote their Capitol Hill Campus outreach and education program. Dave Johnson has asked what sorts of things get discussed at their Chief of Staff Retreat, to which Roemer has personally invited senior Congressional staffers.The center, which gained its current name in 1998, wouldn't exist without $16 million in grants from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, one of the largest funders of conservative causes in the country. Last year, Koch dollars made up 37 percent of Mercatus' $5.3 million budget, despite incoming monies from nearly 6,000 other contributors.
Certainly the Koch (pronounced "Koke") Foundation, backed by money from oil conglomerate Koch Industries Inc., has good reason to fight the feds. In early 2000, the Department of Justice and the EPA levied a $30 million fine against Koch Industries for causing more than 300 oil spills in six states -- the largest civil penalty ever secured under federal environmental laws. A further 97-count indictment against Koch Industries and Koch Petroleum Group LP for violating the Clean Air Act and hazardous-waste laws, filed in 2000, was settled last year with a $20 million assessment and an admission by the company that it had vented benzene, a carcinogen, directly into the air at its Corpus Christi, Texas, plant. Koch Petroleum Group also received a five-year probation term....
Mercatus benefactor Charles G. Koch helped create the libertarian Cato Institute in 1977, and his brother, David Koch, was the Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 1980. The overlap between the Koch-funded organizations is so apparent that some GMU staffers jokingly call the Mercatus Center the "Mercato Institute." Susan Dudley, the 46-year-old deputy director of the Regulatory Studies Program, even writes a three-page update for the Cato quarterly journal, Regulation.
Tom Firey, managing editor of Regulation, first proposed the relationship last year and, he says, has been very pleased with Dudley's work. But Mercatus occasionally goes a bit overboard on the anti-regulation language for even the Cato crowd, says Firey. "The material that they send to us, they try to tone down," he says. "Cato is more of a public policy research organization. We may be a little more academic than they are."
...In addition to the Koch grants, Mercatus received $100,000 from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, run by archconservative former American Spectator financier Richard Mellon Scaife, along with tens of thousands of dollars from the conservative Philip M. McKenna Foundation.
After the first Koch bequest, in 1997, big corporations and trade associations also started ponying up thousands. Along with Enron, the American Petroleum Institute and Phillip Morris Cos. each threw in more than $10,000. The Electric Power Supply Co. and the Business Roundtable gave enough to join the Liberty Circle.
Richard Boykin, chief of staff to Rep. Danny Davis, had gone to three Mercatus retreats when I spoke to him about this in 2002. He said: "Mercatus tends to be a little right. Let's just say it for what it is....They had a couple of Democrats at the last retreat -- but I guess they were Reagan Democrats."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
Outside Congress, several party activists are sounding similar alarms after word spread last week that Bush is planning to reduce future benefits as part of the restructuring. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) is warning that Republicans could lose their 10-year House majority if the White House follows through with that proposal.Kristol even went so far as to publish a sensible article on Social Security by Irwin Stelzer. At any rate, it would behoove Democrats to remind Republicans whose main interests lie in other areas -- tax cuts, the culture war, national security, regulatory favors, nihilistic power-lust, etc. -- that the Reagan Revolution was largely derailed, and almost killed, by the Gipper's overreaching on Social Security. And Ronald Reagan at least was in office during a moment when the program was facing a bona fide crisis, so he had an excuse. The financial services industry has much to gain from privatization and little to lose even if it fails, but every other element of the GOP coalition faces the opposite incentives.William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, is challenging the president's assertions that Social Security is in crisis and that Republicans will be rewarded for fixing it. Republicans are privately "bewildered why this is such a White House priority," he said. "I am a skeptic politically and a little bit substantively."
The downside risk here is enormous, and there's no real upside. Peter Wehner's White House memo on the subject betrays a quasi-mystical faith that the magic of mandatory stock ownership will not only solve non-existent fiscal problems, but effect some sort of sweeping spiritual reconstruction of the electorate around conservative principles. But the Bush campaign's skillful victory in November shouldn't blind people to their proclivity for utterly misjudging this sort of thing. How many Republican congressmen and senators voted for a Medicare bill they knew perfectly well to be awful on the basis of Karl Rove's promises it would lead to an earth-shaking realignment, only to discover that the president wound up barely mentioning the embarrassing legislation (and attendant criminality) come election season?
--Matthew Yglesias
Over at NRO, Frum conjures up a grand Scowcroftian plot to undermine the president’s Iraq policy.
Just this morning, [ed. note: yesterday] for example, the New York Times has a front page story that reads as if dictated by Scowcroft - which, come to think of it, it probably was.Of course, Scowcroft said no such thing last Thursday. At the event, which I attended, Scowcroft said that we may be seeing an incipient civil war in Iraq; "incipient," i.e. starting to show signs of life -- not "imminent," i.e. about to be upon us.The theme of the piece is that civil war is imminent in Iraq, that the elections are making things worse, and that there's nothing to do but scuttle. The result of such a policy would be chaos - but chaos in Iraq, the sources for the story seem to think, is well worth it if they can get in return a political defeat for President Bush.
Linguistics aside, Frum seeks to discredit the merits of Scowcroft’s critiques of Iraq policy by implying that his motives are simply political. As Scowcroft was recently replaced as chairman the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Frum implies, he's willing to do or say anything to damage the reputation of the administration. Of course, misappropriating his words and questioning Scowcroft’s motives is a rather convenient way to avoid an honest discussion based on the merits of his argument. To me, this hack job says far more about Frum (and by extension, administration policy) than Scowcroft.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
For all the fanfare that surrounds the Bush administration’s efforts to present a bold new idea on pension reform, the truth is that it is not new at all. In fact, the proposal looks suspiciously like the plan set in train during [Margaret] Thatcher’s first term in 1979 and which has since led Britain to the brink of a crisis. Since then, the nation’s basic pension, which is paid for out of tax receipts, has shrunk dramatically. The United Kingdom has the stingiest state pension program of any G8 nation, and there is growing consensus -- even among British conservatives -- that reform is needed. And ironically enough, considering that America is on the verge of copying Britain’s mistake, most experts seek reform in the direction of a more generous, and simpler, basic state pension -- one similar in design, in other words, to America’s Social Security program. ..."And this," Cohen asks, "is the system that the United States is seeking to emulate?" Her article is from our forthcoming Social Security package in the February issue of The American Prospect. Check back next week for more from Dean Baker, Roger Hickey, Robert Kuttner, and many others.Britain’s experiment with substituting private savings accounts for a portion of state benefits has been a failure. A shorthand explanation for what has gone wrong is that the costs and risks of running private investment accounts outweigh the value of the returns they are likely to earn. On average, fees and charges can reduce pension lump sums by up to 30 percent on retirement. The nation’s savings industry, which sells those private accounts, has already acknowledged this. Which brings us to irony No. 2: Just as the United States prepares to funnel untold billions to its private sector for the management of private accounts, back in 2002, many U.K. insurance companies, mindful of tough new rules against giving bad advice, began to write to their customers urging them to consider abandoning their private savings and returning to the state pension system -- something hundreds of thousands of Britons have done already.
--Jeffrey Dubner
D.C. officials said yesterday that the Bush administration is refusing to reimburse the District for most of the costs associated with next week's inauguration, breaking with precedent and forcing the city to divert $11.9 million from homeland security projects.The president's channeling family consigliere James A. Baker: "F*** the D.C. residents, they don't vote for us anyway."Federal officials have told the District that it should cover the expenses by using some of the $240 million in federal homeland security grants it has received in the past three years -- money awarded to the city because it is among the places at highest risk of a terrorist attack.
But that grant money is earmarked for other security needs, Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said in a Dec. 27 letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua B. Bolten and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Williams's office released the letter yesterday.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Key Democratic sources said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last week spoke privately with Levin to urge him to take the slot. Those same sources said Levin, now ranking member on the trade subcommittee, was at first reluctant but later told Pelosi he would handle the job.That sounds like a very smart move by Pelosi. Meanwhile, Harry Reid has made the slightly scarier decision to entrust the Democratic leadership in negotiating over any Social Security legislation on the Senate side with Max Baucus. (This is Baucus’s rightful role as ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee; Reid would have likely changed something around if he had wanted to backbench the senator on Social Security.) Baucus has a robust history of screwing over his caucus by negotiating with the majority. While he has stated explicitly his opposition to the notion of private accounts, and Democratic sources indicate in this Roll Call piece that the leadership is keeping him on a shorter leash this time, Baucus’ whole approach in this fight still doesn’t quite seem to gel with the broader Democratic strategy:Leadership aides said Pelosi and several other prominent Democrats wanted to replace Matsui with a liberal standard-bearer who would hold fast to the party’s position on Social Security. The Minority Leader feared another more moderate ranking member -- such as Rep. Ben Cardin (Md.), who is outranked on the panel by Levin -- would be too willing to negotiate with Republicans and cede some ground to the majority.
But Baucus does differ in his overall strategy from the bulk of Democrats. He and other Democratic moderates are quietly signaling that they don’t necessarily agree with the rest of the Caucus on waiting for the White House to roll out a specific plan before Democrats decide whether to respond with their own legislative proposal.I think Baucus is likely right in thinking that an alternative Democratic proposal is in order here, but I’m skeptical that the right kind of fruitful alternative will come out of discussions with Lindsey Graham and Chuck Grassley. As people keep asking, what’s to discuss with these folks if you really do oppose their core reform proposal from the outset?In fact, the Baucus aide said the Montana Democrat would “spend the next month or so trying to get agreement and consensus” on another plan to shore up the Social Security trust fund. He’ll do that, the aide said, by working with the Senate Democratic Caucus “in small groups and individually” to come up with guiding principles.
Baucus has already responded to Republican entreaties on Social Security, though he doesn’t seem to be biting at their proposals just yet. Last Thursday, he joined a bipartisan group organized by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) to discuss Social Security proposals. The group included Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and moderate Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Ben Nelson (Neb.).
--Sam Rosenfeld
There was a great deal of hope among legal and activist circles that Lofton would follow in the footsteps of Lawrence v. Texas, the case decided over the summer of 2003 that favored the privacy of gay men by shooting down Texas' archaic sodomy laws. Florida is the only state that explicitly denies "homosexuals" the right to adopt (though same-sex couples cannot adopt in Mississippi and cannot be foster parents in Arkansas). The case itself has been in the news for years, partly because it became something of a cause celebre for Rosie O'Donnell and partly because, quite simply, it is so patently unfair. You can read about the Lofton family here, but to pull out the relevant story line:
Steve Lofton, 44, and Roger Croteau, 46, live in Portland, Oregon, with their five foster kids: Frank, 14, Tracy, 14, Bert, 10, Wayne, 8, and Ernie, 5. When they were infants, Frank, Tracy, and Bert were placed with Steve and Roger by Florida's Department of Children and Families. Wayne and Ernie were placed with the family by the state of Oregon three years ago. ...The concern now is that copycat laws will spring up. Conservative groups are championing bogus science and the idea that adoption is a privilege not a right; both are claims which state that kids are better off with a married mom and dad. It's a grossly false statement, as studies have consistently shown that children do not need married parents, or opposite-sex parents, to be successful or healthy. Those who support the Florida ban would apparently rather see thousands of children shuttled from foster home to foster home. The reasoning of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in the decision that the Supreme Court has just declined to hear is worth looking at in this bitter moment. As Legal Times explains:At the state's request, Steve quit his job to be with the children full time and handle their complex medical needs. ...
As they were getting settled into a new home and new schools, the kids' new pediatrician told a state caseworker what good parents Steve and Roger were and how well the kids were doing. The caseworker asked Steve and Roger to take in Wayne and Ernie, two kids with HIV from difficult backgrounds. And so the family grew by two. ...
Every few weeks, a letter comes from the state, giving an update on the status of finding another family to adopt Bert. Because he no longer tests positive for HIV and is under the age of 14, Bert is deemed "adoptable." Steve and Roger are legally prohibited from adopting him because of Florida's ban. So the state continues its effort to find him another home, even though this is the only family he's ever known.
The appeals panel ruled that the Florida law was constitutional and did not violate equal protection or due process principles.Unfortunately, given the current political climate we may see many more of such throwback decisions stick -- especially if the Supreme Court has no interest in stepping into the fray and broadening gay rights in America beyond Lawrence. In a statement, Matt Coles, director of the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, said:While acknowledging that the decision in Lawrence established "a greater respect than previously existed in the law for the right of consenting adults to engage in private sexual conduct," the panel said that right was not fundamental.
In a passage unusually critical of a high court decision, 11th Circuit Judge Stanley Birch Jr. added, "We are particularly hesitant to infer a new fundamental liberty interest from an opinion whose language and reasoning are inconsistent with standard fundamental-rights analysis."
As a result, the 11th Circuit panel applied a relaxed "rational basis" standard when examining the Florida rule rather than the kind of "strict scrutiny" that would be used to weigh laws that interfere with fundamental rights.
Using the less-stringent standard, the appeals court accepted Florida's rationale for the ban, namely that placing children in homes with married fathers and mothers provides 'the stability that marriage affords and the presence of both male and female authority figures, which it considers critical to optimal childhood development and socialization."
Birch said the state's preference for homes with married mothers and fathers is based on "unprovable assumptions," but those assumptions are a sufficient basis for legislation. "Any argument that the Florida legislature was misguided in its decision is one of legislative policy, not constitutional law."
There are more than 8,000 children in Florida foster care, some of whom surely would have found permanent homes if the law had been struck down. No judge in this case ever looked at the social science on the ability of gay people to parent. Since this case was decided, however, a court in Little Rock heard from the top experts in America and concluded that sexual orientation has nothing to do with whether someone is a good parent.Shouldn't it count for something that Florida's major child welfare organizations were against this law? Shouldn't it count for something that gay men and lesbians are, hypocritically, allowed to be foster parents, but not to adopt?
--Sarah Wildman
All in all, judged strictly on his TV skills as a party spokesman, the guy was unimpressive. He was fairly ineloquent; he seemed very inauthentic. It might just have been nervous jitters, but I doubt Roemer did much to boost his DNC prospects with this appearance. He seems to lack the requisite sizzle as much as the appropriate substance.
Take a look at Chris Bowers’ thoughts. He notes that the most important sticking point regarding Roemer’s credibility as a candidate -- his longstanding association with the libertarian Mercatus Institute -- did not come up on This Week. But Bowers fails to note the oddest thing about the interview: Maybe it was me, but Roemer seemed to be sporting some bizarrely heavy eye makeup. It reminded me of nothing so much as mid-’80s Bob Dylan.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Stelzer should read the rest of his own article. He knows perfectly well that Social Security benefits are tied to wages, and he knows that productivity growth raises wages. So why can't he see that higher productivity will mean higher benefits? Increased growth, whatever its other virtues, cannot make Social Security solvent -- which is why the trustees of the program rate its chances of remaining solvent over the next 75 years at less than 5 percent.I have no idea where that 5 percent figure comes from, but let's leave that aside. Is it true that faster economic growth can't make Social Security solvent? No. Now it is true that faster growth leads to higher wages, and that higher wages lead to higher benefits along with higher revenue. But faster growth (driven by higher productivity and resulting in higher wages) increases revenue by more than it increases benefits. It does so because a retiree's benefits only get adjusted by the wage index once, when you first start drawing checks. After that initial check, future increases are pegged to the slower-growing Consumer Price Index.
At any rate, the math is complicated, but seeing that the Ponnuru/Longman line is wrong isn't. Just ask yourself why the projected doomsday year for the Social Security trust fund has moved 13 years into the future over the past seven years. It wasn't the magic of mandatory stock ownership (the Ponnuru plan) or a sharp increase in the birth rate (Longman's favored solution) -- it was the end of the 1973-1995 productivity slump and a return to the higher historical pattern. The persistence of a weak labor market over the past several years in the context of strong productivity growth (manifested in the statistics by labor's declining share of national income) suggests that the economy could actually be growing significantly faster in real terms than it is now, especially if we avoid the sort of fiscal meltdown that could be precipitated by the $2 trillion borrowing binge implicit in privatization plans.
--Matthew Yglesias
No, this is the sort of task that can only be solved by one method: process of elimination. I'll start it off:
I swear that I have never taken money -- neither directly nor indirectly -- from any political campaign or government agency -- whether federal, state, or local -- in exchange for any service performed in my job as a journalist (or commentator, or blogger, or whatever you think I should be called).I see no reason for anybody with a keyboard or a microphone to have a problem with taking this oath, and no reason that it can't show up at the end of, say, Bill Safire's or Bob Novak's next columns. So far, that's one down. There's a gang of well over 500 left to go.
UPDATE: Thanks to reader feedback, I see two problems with the oath. One is a little stylistic sloppiness: "neither directly nor indirectly" should probably be "whether directly or indirectly." But more importantly, the oath is a problem for anybody working at NPR or PBS, as well as many other institutions that receive perfectly legitimate government grants. Send in suggestions for a better formulation to tapped@prospect.org.
--Jeffrey Dubner
“I think you see the arrogance of power,” he said, “and with that arrogance come mistakes that not only are regrettable for the country but ultimately will be seen as regrettable for the Republican caucus and party. This is exactly what got Democrats in trouble in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Ironically, we’re seeing some of the same mistakes being made again.” [emphasis added]In Sunday’s Washington Post, Mike Allen assesses the House GOP leadership’s consolidation of power with the rules changes and committee appointments it pushed through last week:
House Republican leaders moved swiftly last week to tighten and centralize control of the new Congress by replacing uncooperative committee chairmen and changing the chamber's rules to deter ethics investigations of leaders.I’ve harped on this before, but I think it’s somewhat important: Was the level of corruption and party autocracy during the latter years of Democratic congressional control really comparable to what we’re seeing now, or was the widespread association of that period with rampant Democratic corruption and dirty pool in fact an early example of the effective right-wing P.R. offensives to which we've all grown accustomed -- this one a particular credit to a certain scrappy and ruthless minority whip named Newt Gingrich? I suspect the latter, though there are people out there who can speak to this with much more specificity and authority than I can.The Republicans expanded their majority by only three seats in the Nov. 2 election, yet party leaders have been emboldened by GOP domination of all branches of government and appear determined to squelch dissent in their own ranks and to freeze Democrats out of key decisions.
…
But Republicans had already made other changes, both large and small, to diminish the influence of Democratic lawmakers. For instance, Republicans have made it harder for Democrats to offer amendments to pending bills or participate in conference committees, where House and Senate versions of bills are reconciled. Democrats complain that Republicans even make it hard for voters to reach Democratic committee Web sites by making users going through the majority's home page. Republicans respond that the system is designed to avoid confusion since there is only one committee, and add that if they wanted to be tyrannical, they would not let the minority have Web pages at all.
Democrats and some Republicans, troubled by the moves, cite parallels between today's Republicans and the Democrats who lost their 40-year hold on the House in 1994 after Gingrich and other conservatives campaigned against them as autocratic and corrupt, and gained 52 seats.
"It took Democrats 40 years to get as arrogant as we have become in 10," one Republican leadership aide said. [emphasis added]
I can’t say that as a Beltway-savvy ten-year-old I followed, say, the House Bank scandal of the early 1990s very closely as it unfolded, but a bit of retrospective Nexis research at least persuaded me that the whole brouhaha bore a very high ratio of smoke to fire. (Nelson Polsby’s most recent book on Congress conveys that same sense.) I’m not saying the same could be said of all the scandals and outrages that Newt and his band of bomb-throwers made such hay out of in the 1980s and early 1990s, but from what I’ve read of the period it seems like it could be said of quite a bit.
Mark Schmitt posted a comprehensive and probably definitive critique of this bogus moral equivalence several months ago. On the “autocratic majority” front, the Boston Globe marshaled ample statistical evidence to support the notion that what the Republicans are doing, particularly in the House but increasingly in the Senate also, goes well beyond any procedural abuses an arrogant Dem majority indulged in fifteen years ago. This stems in part from a longstanding institutional trend away from the autonomous authority of committee chairs and toward centralized party control in Congress; in part from the increased ideological homogeneity of the parties; and, in part, from the unique ideological fervor and insurgent energy of the GOP’s ascendant right wing. As for corruption, TAPPED’s illustrious alumnus Nick Confessore explained two years ago why the GOP’s pro-business ideology ensures a far more holistic and thoroughgoing marriage of K Street and Congress than was ever the case under the Democrats, who always had countervailing ideological impulses and interest group pressures mitigating their cronyist tendencies.
It really is a whole new ballgame in Congress, and it only legitimizes phony conservative claims of just desserts -- and obscures the reformist appeal that Democrats so desperately need to be making -- to have someone like Daschle perpetuate the myth of an early-’90s Democratic autocracy.
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
But opponents of Mr. Bush's approach say he is greatly exaggerating the problems to sell his plan to scale back Social Security, the government's biggest and oldest social program.Now for the complaining. Do these facts support the thesis that privatization opponents say Bush is greatly exaggerating the problems, or do they support the thesis that he is greatly exaggerating the problems? We know for sure that the projected Social Security gap is smaller than the projected Medicare drug benefit gap, and that Bush doesn't think his drug plan needs to be fundamental revamped. We know for sure that the projected Social Security gap is smaller than the projected tax cut gap, and that Bush doesn't think his tax cut plan needs to be fundamentally revamped. Would it be so hard to report what everyone in town knows (and George Will and other semi-honest foes of Social Security admit): The desire to eliminate the program has nothing to do with its financial health. I, for one, would welcome the opportunity to join Will's battle of principle: Does or does not the government have a fundamental responsibility to ensure a dignified retirement for all? But the president wants to dodge the issue. Nevertheless, if the press can rouse itself from its dogmatic slumbers, we may get the principled debate.Outside analysts say Social Security's long-term financial gap, which the government estimates to be $3.7 trillion over 75 years, is smaller than the projected cost of Mr. Bush's tax cuts or the Medicare prescription drug program that he pushed through Congress in 2003.
The Social Security trust fund has accumulated more than $1.5 trillion in reserves, held in Treasury bonds. Even if no changes are made, the government's actuaries predict that the program will be able to pay full benefits until at least 2042 and at least 70 percent of benefits after that.
That is a far brighter outlook than in 1983, the last time Congress shored up Social Security, when the trust fund was just days from insolvency.
The government's long-term projections for Social Security have become more optimistic over the last eight years. Since 1997, government actuaries have pushed back the date of projected insolvency from 2029 to 2042.
--Matthew Yglesias
Even more than the substantive problems and the class bias plaguing the Post’s editorial, its blindness to the ideological component of this whole debate is striking. The editorial, which makes the pitch for switching from wage- to price-indexing for Social Security benefits, refers to the now-famous Peter Wehner memo in a nicely offhand manner that gives no indication the email is anything more than a technical policy proposal:
AS IT INCHES its way toward a Social Security proposal, the Bush administration appears ready to control the rising cost of benefits for retirees. Some sort of cost control is likely to be part of any honest reform to the system, and the Bush proposal has some logic. According to a White House e-mail circulating last week, the administration wants to break the link between Social Security benefits and the general increase in earnings in the country, a proposal that formed part of the leading recommendation from the Social Security commission in Mr. Bush's first term.So that’s the Post’s reasonable bottom line -- the Bush proposal is “excessive” and should be tweaked to protect the poor, but the overall approach is consistent with a sound and “honest” reform proposal. Nowhere to be seen is any indication that the Wehner memo refers to this moment being the best opportunity in 60 years for Republicans to seize control of Social Security and transform it into something else -- to “promote both an ownership society and advance the idea of limited government.” The class myopia of the Post editorialists and their inability to recognize an ideological campaign for what it is are of course inextricably linked. It’s creeping Broderism of the first order, and we’ll be seeing it again and again as this fight unfolds.…
The administration is grappling with a big challenge; until it goes public with a proposal, it's impossible to be sure how it may finesse these issues. But, as it refines its thinking, it should consider scaling back what appears to be its current plan. Gentler cost control, designed to protect the vulnerable above all, would represent a better balance.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Of course, those government officials probably would have refrained from signing a treaty which may result in their imprisonment. Nevertheless, aside from what might be considered a moral obligation to punish those who commit crimes against humanity, criminal prosecutions for those government officials who used genocide and displacement as a means of consolidating their power may serve as a deterrent to other rogue leaders who think they can behave the same way.
Fortunately, there is a parallel mechanism for investigating crimes against humanity in Darfur. The UN Security Council commissioned an international inquiry into genocide and other violations of international humanitarian law in Darfur. The Commission of Inquiry, as it is called, is due to report its findings to the Security Council later this month. As Leslie Lefkow writes of the commission's work in the Guardian:
The commission is conducting a three-month investigation into serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law that have been committed, and is tasked with identifying perpetrators of crimes with a view to ensuring accountability. This body offers real hope that those who have led and implemented the heinous abuses in Darfur will be brought to book.When the commission reports to the Security Council, it may recommend that the Darfur dossier be forwarded to the International Criminal Court. As Sudan is not a signatory to the Court’s founding treaty, the only avenue for the prosecution of war crimes in Darfur is through a Security Council vote to refer the case to the ICC.
Any Security Council vote for referring Darfur to the ICC would put the Bush administration in a rather awkward spot. On the one hand, they can’t be seen as defending Sudanese genocidaires, but neither does it seem likely that the Bush administration would lend legitimacy to the ICC by voting in its favor.
Enter China.
China has long been a defender of Khartoum, prioritizing its desire for Sudanese oil reserves over the plight of Sudan’s citizens. To this end, Beijing has watered down any punitive Security Council resolutions condemning human rights violations in Sudan, and a resolution to refer Darfur war crimes to the ICC would likely be met by a Chinese veto.
For all the neocon tough talk on China, it seems that China could actually bail out the Bush administration here. If the United States were to simply abstain from the vote and China used its veto, the Bush administration’s dirty work would be effectively outsourced to China, the crisis of conscience averted.
--Mark Leon Goldberg
Along with various other problems, Kagan seems to believe that Rumsfeld could have appropriated way more money for the military if he'd wanted to. But this sort of thing is the president's decision, not the secretary of defense's. You go to war with the budget you have, not the budget you might want. And the reason there wasn't money in the budget for a massive military buildup is that the president had made a series of huge and unaffordable tax cuts the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. If you want to blame someone, blame the president. Or blame The Weekly Standard and other hawk intellectuals who loudly supported all the cuts and are currently supporting the president's plan to eliminate Social Security by taking on trillions in new debt.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Columnists
- David Brooks. Since my motivations for favoring Social Security privatization are purely partisan, I'll just assume the opposition feels the same way.
- Nicholas Kristof. This column would have been shocking and counterintuitive four years ago.
- George Will. Bush is lying about why he wants to privatize Social Security and I hold Democrats responsible for it.
- David Broder. Man, I still love bipartisanship, no matter how inappropriate it is to the moment.
- Jim Hoagland. Maybe Tony Blair will save us. That's the ticket!
- Maureen Dowd. Iraq is so bad I've been reduced to writing normal op-eds about it.
- Thomas Friedman. If the good guys win, that will be good -- but if they lose, it will be bad.
The Op-Ed You Actually Need To Read
- Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks on doctors, war crimes, and torture.
[Iraq National Intelligence Service Director Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani] said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."The goal, in other words, is to terrorize the Sunni Arab civilian population. As the hawks and death squad enthusiasts at Stratagy Page explain (via Jim Henley) "Family members will be arrested and held hostage" which is okay because it's "a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender." Of course, we've already been doing a good deal of that sort of thing, in violation of international law. Nevertheless, "in the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up."
Newsweek is unsure whether we're looking at "a policy of assassination or so-called 'snatch' operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation," but I think it's safe to assume that both would take place. The plan they're reporting on is called the "Salvador model" after the tactics adopted by the American-backed rightwing dictatorship there, and they found time to kill and kidnap. Meanwhile, what do you suppose is going to be going on in those secret interrogation facilities?
I've been frustrated lately by everyone's tendency to pretend their ethical beliefs and their pragmatic ones just happen to line up all the time, so I won't deny that this may well "work" in some sense. Indeed, in light of the fact that the best alternative plans I've seen put on the table call for the deployment of hundreds of thousands of additional troops who won't be forthcoming (and who in many instances don't even exist) this plan at least has a sort of cold-blooded realism about it. What it won't achieve, of course, is any of the Iraq War's ex post goals now that we know the WMD threat was 90 percent hype. This isn't much of a way to run a humanitarian intervention, nor is anyone in the world's Sunni Muslim population going to be dissuaded from jihad by the knowledge that the American method of democracy-promotion involves unleashing U.S.-trained Kurdish and Shiite assassination squads against people who are not "obviously guilty."
--Matthew Yglesias
UPDATE: This is pure speculation, but I would not be surprised to find out that the Williams money had something to do with this group, which the Department of Education has funded in the past.
--Jeffrey Dubner
The point I’m trying to establish here is simply that—contrary to the impression it is trying to convey to Congress and the public—the Administration has likely concluded that the CIA is not bound by any of these restrictions on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. ...It's entirely consistent with Alberto Gonzales' testimony yesterday:With this in mind, it becomes clear that perhaps the most important part of the new Levin Opinion is footnote 8, which reads: “While we have identified various disagreements with the August 2002 Memorandum, we have reviewed this Office's prior opinions addressing issues involving treatment of detainees and do not believe that any of their conclusions would be different under the standards set forth in this memorandum." In other words, despite its admirable and considerable repudiation of the 2002 OLC Opinion, the new OLC Opinion does not in any significant way affect what the CIA has already been specifically authorized to do. (emphasis Lederman's)
Thus, for example, the President's February 7, 2002 "humane treatment" directive was carefully worded to apply only to the Armed Forces—not to the CIA. Similarly, in recent months the Senate has twice voted to prohibit the CIA, and all U.S. personnel, from engaging in cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment—but on each occasion, the Administration has resisted, and that language has been stripped from the bills in conference (even after the 9/11 Commission recommended it). Note, as well, that in yesterday's hearing Judge Gonzales was very careful to qualify his statement that “[i]t has always been the case that everyone should be treated—that the military would treat detainees humanely, consistent with the president's February order.” ...Make of that what you will. Lederman also highlights Michael Dorf's read on the memo, which touches on my concern about presidential authority yesterday. Dorf finds himself "left to worry that OLC declined to assert limits on Presidential authority because OLC may continue to entertain a dangerously broad view of that authority."But it appears increasingly clear that the Administration has concluded that the CIA is not required to act “humanely” in this context, and is not required to refrain from conduct that shocks the conscience. So, for example, when Senator Durbin asked him point-blank yesterday "whether or not it is legally permissible for U.S. personnel to engage in cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment that does not rise to the level of torture," Judge Gonzales did not answer with a simple "no"; instead, he provided a very cautous and ambiguous answer, the gist of which was "that all authorized techniques were presented to the Department of Justice, to the lawyers, to verify that they met all legal obligations, and I have been told that that is the case."
Judging by the stack of documents Patrick Leahy was pounding yesterday, I don't think the Senate Judiciary Committee needs help coming up with questions. But there are quite a few that still need answers.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Via Atrios I see that Frank Lautenberg, Harry Reid, and Ted Kennedy have written the president a letter demanding to know if other journalists have been paid by the administration or agencies to promote other administration priorities, such as Social Security privatization. The senators further assert that the payments to Williams violate the "Publicity and Propaganda" laws and the Antideficiency Act.
I don't know enough about the laws in question to speak to that, but the collusion between Williams and the administration clearly does a great disservice to other working journalists by raising further questions in the public mind about the independence and credibility of the press. And while the politicians pursue this as a political issue, it seems to me journalists can easily institute some policies that will keep this sort of thing from happening in the future and help preserve or bolster their own credibility.
Media institutions could simply add a clause or two into the contracts they already make their writers or commentators sign that the journalist has not received and will not receive any funds from any person or institution mentioned in the story or likely to be impacted by the outcome of the story. If the authors have, they need to declare this up front and the editors of Op-Ed pages need to include notice of this affiliation in the author's one line bio -- i.e. "Armstrong Williams is a lobbyist for the Department of Education" -- at the time of publication, should they still choose to publish the piece in question. For TV contracts, failure to disclose financial conflicts of interest should become immediate grounds for termination of the contract in question.
Newspapers and TV news programs need to do more to protect themselves and their credibility in this crazy, mixed-up new world we're living in where the long-standing, unwritten norms of journalism are clearly no longer enough to reign people in. There is also, Josh Marshall has pointed out, an ongoing "Op-Ed Payola" problem where lobbyists launder their opinions through paid writers. A requirement to fully disclose conflicts-of-interest or paid advocacy work on Op-Ed pages and on broadcast TV would very likely reduce the incentive to try to use Op-Ed pages or TV commentary for covert advocacy and propaganda. At the same time, if editors do choose to run pieces by paid advocates -- as they do all the time on Op-Ed pages -- a commitment to publicly disclosing the payments or affiliations would allow editors to present a fuller and more honest picture to their readers about the motivations behind those pieces they publish.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Today he's gone and done it all over again, but this time the subject is tax reform. A bipartisan panel to discussion revisions to the tax code is an excellent idea but, again, if you were serious about it you would let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pick the Democrats. Instead, Bush will pick them all himself, starting with corporate whore John Breaux, perhaps the prominent Democrat least-suited to representing the party's views on the subject. I can't wait to see what kind of train wreck of a proposal they come up with.
--Matthew Yglesias
The Bush administration's foreign policy is centered around fighting a highly expensive counterinsurgency in Iraq. The administration's domestic policy is centered around driving federal tax revenues to ever-lower levels.A good joke, to be sure, but I don't think it'll work. Excluding the Social Security surplus, the U.S. on-budget deficit is around $600 billion this year. The combined GDPs of the Weekly Standard hit list of Syria, North Korea, and Iran only comes out to $566 billion. And, obviously, we wouldn't be able to attract the entire economic output of any of our tributary countries. Right now, the U.S. current account deficit is at around 5.5 percent of GDP, which few regard as sustainable; using that as a benchmark, let's assume we could extract 5.5 percent of those countries' GDPs as tribute. That leaves us with just $31.13 billion in new revenue, hardly enough to make a dent. Add in the Gulf Cooperation Council states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain and you're still only up to $982 billion in annual economic output: Nowhere near enough.Some observers say there's an unsolvable contradiction here. I say those people just aren't thinking creatively enough. There's a simple, logical way to reconcile President Bush's foreign and domestic policies: Start demanding tribute from foreign countries. ...
Implementing the policy would be quite simple. We would inform heads of militarily vulnerable states that if they did not wish to have their regime changed -- or, at least, to have large chunks of it blown to smithereens -- they had better make an annual contribution to the U.S. Treasury. I envision receiving sums more than sufficient to cover our budget deficit.
--Matthew Yglesias
The contract, detailed in documents obtained by USA TODAY through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that the Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America's Black Forum, a group of black broadcast journalists, "to encourage the producers to periodically address" NCLB. He persuaded radio and TV personality Steve Harvey to invite Paige onto his show twice. Harvey's manager, Rushion McDonald, confirmed the appearances. ...Ketchum is the same PR firm that contracted with self-described "political roadkill" Karen Ryan for the Medicare video news releases (VNRs). Back in October, months after the fuss over the Medicare VNRs died down, it came to light that Ketchum and Ryan had done the same for No Child Left Behind; Williams was part of the same effort, according to USA Today.Ketchum referred questions to the Education Department, whose spokesman, John Gibbons, said the contract followed standard government procedures. He said there are no plans to continue with "similar outreach."
Williams' contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced "video news releases" designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers' dollars. ...
And don't forget, the Ryan reports were illegal. Back in September, I talked with a Government Accountability (GAO) employee responsible for looking into the VNR mini-scandal; he said that, since the determination (pdf) in May that Health and Human Services (HHS) had misappropriated funds, the GAO had been contacting HHS once a month to get corrective action taken. HHS wasn't even returning the calls, if I remember right, and I imagine it's the same way now.
USA Today and People for the American Way have filed Freedom of Information Act requests on Ketchum and No Child Left Behind. Has anybody done the same with the Medicare bill? And just how will the administration be "enlisting" help on Social Security reform?
Thanks to loyal Tapped reader N.S. for the Ketchum catch.
--Jeffrey Dubner
Later, he seemed to turn that around and suggest that simply because of the tsunami aid, we might be close to turning world opinion around. The first version of the point is very right, but the second version seems very wrong. That aside, Abu Aardvark reports on a more promising strand of tsunami optimism. Arab regimes came in for a lot of criticism in the Arabic-language media for the relative stinginess with tsunami relief money, and in response to criticism the regimes are now boosting aid levels. Just like what happened in America! That's not the same as democracy arriving tomorrow, but it does indicate that we're seeing the emergence of an Arab public sphere that's vibrant and powerful enough to start influencing policy. There's a lesson to be learned here: In the long run, the Arab media could be our friend. Criticism of U.S. policies may be hard to stomach, but the Arab regimes take their fair share of licks, too, and they're starting to listen.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Matthew Yglesias
Zoellick's one of those guys who is, as they say in Washington, "well respected," but it's a bit hard to get a read on what he actually thinks. His previous jobs have almost all been in the realm of international economics. That's a dimension that's largely been missing from Bush's foreign policy thus far, so it's probably reasonable. But it gives us little guide to his views on the meat-and-potatoes military and political aspects of State Department work. His past associates are mostly moderates, but he was one of the original regime changers on Iraq. His job in the first Bush term was dealing with international trade issues, but even here reports conflict as to what was going on. I've heard it said that he's a principled free trader who's just happened to lose a lot of internal battles with the White House political team, but I've also heard it said that he's a committed mercantilist whose views have made it hard for the White House economic team to get a proper hearing for their views.
The other x-factor in all this is simply the question of efficacy. The old Colin Powell/Dick Armitage State Department was certainly turning out better policy ideas than the rest of the Bush administration, but it lost most of the major battles to the Dick Cheney/Don Rumsfeld axis. Will Rice wind up doing a better job of representing the Foggy Bottom point of view in virtue of the fact that unlike Powell she's personally liked by the president, or will a younger secretary and a deputy with an unorthodox background have an even harder time?
--Matthew Yglesias
The recent acts of terrorism, such as the bombing of the U.N. headquarters and the mosque in Najaf, show a couple of things. First, that Iraq is still a dangerous place. They also show, I think, the desperation -- the desperation of the adversaries that we face. We're actively engaged in rooting out this threat with more and more Iraqis coming forward with information and a willingness to help us.But they must be really desperate this time, right?-- Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, September 9, 2003.
You'll see the threat go to, again, more suicide attacks, vehicle- borne IEDs, which I think shows desperation for both so they can get themselves in the news so people around the world can see them, and to show that they are in fact frustrated that they can't really make an impact any other way.
-- Major General Raymond T. Odierno, January 22, 2004.
We have said for quite a while that one of the signs not only of desperation on the part of the terrorists and the former regime elements but also, quite frankly, the cowardice of these forces is that, in opposition to six months ago, when many of the attacks -- most of the attacks were against the coalition forces, we have seen over the past few months that they are starting to go after softer targets. That is a concern of ours, but it also ought to demonstrate the desperation of these people because they decide, rather than attack coalition forces and Iraqi security forces, they'll attack women that are working for the coalition, washing clothes to make their lives better.
-- Coalition Provisional Authority senior adviser Dan Senor, March 31, 2004.
[General Thomas Metz] said that the recent run of gruesome suicide bombings, which have killed dozens of civilians, was a measure of desperation among the insurgents, who have put forward no political vision beyond expelling the Americans.
-- The New York Times, January 6, 2005.
--Matthew Yglesias
On a related note, in response to a question Arlen Specter just asked, Gonzales just said that he "reject[s]" the March 2003 Pentagon working group's assertion (pdf) that “Congress may no more regulate the President’s authority … to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.” That's certainly a step forward. He's mostly been dodging that sort of question today, not deigning to answer a "hypothetical" question -- but that concept is not a notion to write off lightly, as I wrote about today and Michael Froomkin excellently analyzed when it first surfaced last June.
--Jeffrey Dubner
This person noted that we've heard a lot of reports recently coming from various administration officials of Syrian and/or Iranian complicity in the Iraqi insurgency. As he said, these are serious allegations which, if true, would seem to call for retaliatory action of some sort, or at least threats of such retaliatory action. The problem is that he has no idea to what extent these reports should be believed, and to what extent they should simply be viewed as an effort to maniupulate public opinion to gain support for a policy motivated by other factors. I have no idea either. And speaking as someone who's been around for a lot longer than I have, he was able to bring home the point that this is a rather novel state of affairs.
Ordinary citizens, and even attentive journalists, have never had the capacity to gain the sort of picture of what's going on in the world that the president and the secretaries of state and defense have. Much intelligence information is -- quite rightly -- classified and not available for external scrutiny. You basically have to take the administration's word for it that something's happening if they say it's happening. But right now, neither he nor I nor any other sensible person has any intention of taking their word for it about anything. But what if Bush says something that is true and won't be believed, either by the public or by foreign governments and populations? Real threats might go ignored because we've all lost confidence in the government's truth-telling abilities. It's the administration that cried wolf, and it's a dangerous situation.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Sam Rosenfeld
Moving Ideas is a project of The American Prospect.
--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org
Senate Republicans signaled their wariness yesterday in a private retreat on the year's legislative agenda with White House adviser Karl Rove. An attendee said the senators gave Mr. Rove "a subtle but clearly identifiable message that the GOP [Grand Old Party] would go along...but they were scared to death." The senators indicated that the president "had to step up his activity" to sell his initiative to Americans, which Mr. Rove said Mr. Bush would do. But the attendee said senators also warned the Social Security proposal "needed to be bipartisan or else no go."This raises two questions. Have Republicans in Congress actually come to internalize the “don’t cross the commander in chief when we’re at war” line they’ve laid on Dems so effectively to cow them into submission ever since September 11? Do they now believe their own BS? Secondly, the spectacle of one Republican senator and representative after another (and not just those in the party’s milquetoasty moderate wing) signaling major aversions to waging this fight now, only to acknowledge that they’ll likely fall in line since this is something George W. Bush is just so darned “determined” about, is as pathetic as it is puzzling. Wasn’t there just a spate of press articles touting the new independence and combativeness of congressional Republicans coming into the new session, now that they enjoy slightly expanded majorities and no longer have to remain in constant consideration of the president’s reelection needs when setting legislative priorities? Was that all just bluff?Still, some Republicans are resigned to uniting behind the president, given his determination. "The president is going to go ahead," said Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a Republican leadership lieutenant. "He cannot afford to fail. It would have repercussions for the rest of his program, including foreign policy. We can't hand the president a defeat on his major domestic initiative at a time of war."
Look above at that Tom Cole quote again. The guy sounds like he’s repeating some mind-control mantra. He sounds like Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. As Dr. Yen Lo put it: “His brain has not only been washed, as they say -- it has been dry cleaned.”
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
Also joining the war room from the Kerry team is Jon Steinberg, who had been the Wesley Clark campaign's deputy research director before serving as a policy analyst with Kerry. He'll be working rapid response in his new position as research director. And Ari Rabin-Havt will move up from his Kerry campaign role as deputy director of internet communications by becoming director of internet communications. Notably, Rabin-Havt worked with the MoveOn Voter Fund's Click Back America project before joining Kerry, giving him a wealth of connections beyond the typical inside-the-Beltway Democratic circles and a pretty sophisticated understanding of the blogosphere.
Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli, who headed specialty media at the Democratic National Committee and reached out to Hispanics for the Kerry-Edwards campaign as director of Hispanic media, will fill the same critical position for the Senate Dems. Reid's long-time spokesperson Tessa Hafen is the center's press secretary.
More positions will be filled as the center staffs up to about 15 people.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
The first thing is don’t just negate the other sides' frame. Don’t just say, "I'm against private accounts." That’s like Nixon saying, "I am not a crook."So there you have it, from the man himself.The second thing is that simply stating a fact doesn’t overcome frames. They have framed Social Security as a crisis. In terms of the idea, that is a combination of many frames they put together into one trope: bloated inefficient government, you spend your money better than the government. The arguments about Social Security make use of frames that are general and that do not just talk about Social Security. There isn’t a notion that privatization is inefficient and costly. There's a whole bunch of ideas about Social Security that have to be gotten out there. The only way the general frames get out there is by constant repetition over the years.
I'm asked asked all the time, "How do we reframe Social Security?" The facts do not overcome the conservative spin. In order to change frames you have to have everybody saying the same thing at once. Facts alone won't set you free without having a system of frames.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
At the end of the day, we want to promote both an ownership society and advance the idea of limited government ...This is about ideology, not fixing Social Security.For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win -- and in doing so, we can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of the country. We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government and toward giving greater power and responsibility to individuals.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter, who has helped craft nearly every one of Bush's speeches during his first term, is leaving his job. Gerson is expected to move into the policy arena and be replaced as head speechwriter by Wall Street Journal editorial-page writer William McGurn ...William McGurn, like Gerson, has an ear for religious language and a tendency to write with a kind of old-fashioned, natural law certainty that must be appealing to the president. A Roman Catholic, McGurn has written frequently and feelingly on abortion and knows how to artfully bring the creator into an argument about the market, so there's no reason to expect any diminishment in the quality of the written words that are set before Bush, especially in any coming debates on cultural issues, if he takes over the speechwriting shop. McGurn's post-election post-mortem on the Democrats, abortion, and culture (for example) puts forward a critique that, at least in its last three paragraphs, has been echoed by a lot of Democrats in the past weeks. This will probably make Bush even more formidable if and when he next decides to make a big push on abortion.Gerson is one of the best-known presidential speechwriters, on par with Ronald Reagan's Peggy Noonan or John Kennedy's Theodore Sorenson. One sign that he was no ordinary speechwriter is the fact that instead of being housed, as speechwriters usually are, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Gerson shared an office suite with Bartlett on the second floor of the West Wing. A Christian evangelical and a former theology student, Gerson shares his boss's brand of compassionate conservatism. His trademark has been the religious language and Biblical references that populate Bush's speeches. To those who believe the president uses his speeches to send signals to conservative evangelicals, Gerson is the master of the code. He was a major proponent of Bush directly confronting America's shameful history of slavery on a visit to Senegal's Goree Island in 2003. With the House of Slaves as his backdrop, Bush delivered one of Gerson's most memorable speeches that included the passage, "In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters."
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Jeffrey Dubner
For every dollar a man made in 2003, women made 75.5 cents, the Census Bureau said in its annual report on income. That was down from the record 76.6 cents that women earned vs. men's $1 in 2002. The median income for men working full time in 2003 was $40,668, not significantly different from the prior year, while the median income for women working full time was $30,724, down 0.6% from 2002.During Bill Clinton's tenure, a Council of Economic Advisors report exhaustively wrung its hands over the continued wage gap. Somehow, though John Kerry did touch on it (albeit obtusely), both candidates missed an opportunity in 2004 to address this. While you will see from time to time conservative dimissals of the wage gap (like this
--Sarah Wildman
Ultimately, Osama's masquerade unravels, and she faces a gruesome punishment from an Islamic court. The ending, which I won't give away, is enough to make anyone shudder -- and give thanks that U.S. troops have toppled the Taliban. Yet I don't recall a single Hollywood feminist expressing gratitude to the U.S. military or its commander in chief for the liberation of Afghan women. No doubt Streisand, Sarandon & Co. were too busy inveighing against the horrors perpetrated by John Ashcroft.Fortunately, one of the virtues of the Internet age is that you don't need to depend on what Boot recalls. Thanks to the magic of Nexis, I found a December 6, 2001, Guardian article reporting that "Mainstream websites are fairly keen on self-censorship, and include the likes of Barbara Streisand removing anti-Bush remarks in the interests of 'national unity.'" Then there's the Associated Press' coverage of the November 2001 Emmy Awards:
Sunday's show featured a new tribute to entertainers who visit troops during wartime, and included a surprise finale by Barbra Streisand, singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" before a wall decorated with the names of Sept. 11 victims.That's how much she hates America. As for Susan Sarandon, let me quote from a December 19 story in the Sacramento Observer:
[Danny] Glover recently co-hosted a benefit with actress Susan Sarandon in which celebrities read from the writings of figures such as author James Baldwin, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.The notion that the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in order to help Afghan women is, of course, preposterous. Look at his remarks from the time and you'll see that though the Taliban's oppression was certainly mentioned, the war was motivated by the small matter of 9-11 and al-Qaeda. Equally preposterous is the suggestion that feminists are or were unconcerned with the fate of Afghan women. When I heard this stuff in the winter of 2001-2002, I assumed it reflected a kind of ignorance coming from the right. Years after the evident, it's just a kind of malicious slander. Check out the Feminist Majority Foundation's Afghanistan page and take note of the fact that, unlike Boot and his friends, their interest in this topic didn't begin in September of 2001.The event raised money for the women of Afghanistan and the families of undocumented workers who died in the September 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, the notion that Osama (which I actually thought suffered from slow pacing and a problematic narrative structure, despite its compelling theme) has been the victim of some kind of liberal Hollywood coverup is absurd. It got North American distribution from MGM and United Artists, an enviable position for a foreign film. I saw it amidst a packed crowd in Dupont Circle. If more Americans should have seen it, blame red America's well-known aversion to subtitles.
--Matthew Yglesias
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--Diane Greenhalgh, MovingIdeas.Org
The House Republican Steering Committee (comprised of the leadership) made its choice for Appropriations Committee chair yesterday: California’s Jerry Lewis, chosen over Ohio’s Ralph Regula and Kentucky’s Hal Rogers. Congressional Quarterly cuts to the chase:
The selection of Lewis demonstrates yet again that fundraising ability and loyalty to the Republican leadership trump seniority in the awarding of gavels. Regula was the most senior of the three aspirants, but Lewis had raised the most money for the GOP last year.The Washington Post fleshes it out a bit more:
Lewis's selection appears to leave the traditionally independent Appropriations Committee safely under the sway of the House leadership. All three candidates, a GOP aide said, were required to "jump through hoops" to prove they would cooperate closely with the White House and the speaker's office to stave off spending pressures from colleagues in both parties.A good deal of this came down to brass tacks. As the Post noted yesterday, Lewis ponied up $600,000 to the NRCC in 2004, over $200,000 more than Rogers or Regula, and contributed $5,000 or more to each of over a dozen state Republican parties. On Sunday The Los Angeles Times noted that Lewis “has raised and contributed $1.3 million to GOP candidates and party committees from Jan. 1, 2003, through Nov. 22, 2004;” as for the all-important Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust, Lewis helped to “rally his House colleagues to contribute another $90,000” on top of the $5,000 he personally kicked in last year.In November 1998, then-Appropriations Committee Chairman Bob Livingston (R-La.) asserted in a letter to Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) that "I shall run the committee as I see fit and in the best interest of the Republican majority, with full consultation with the leadership but without being subject to the dictates of any other member of Congress."
Such assertions of a chairman's prerogatives are largely a thing of the past in the more centralized system controlled by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.).
"No matter which of these fellows was selected, this process marks a dramatic consolidation of power in the hands of a few key leadership types," said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic chief of staff of the Appropriations Committee who is a fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Meanwhile, Dennis Hastert is set to oust that pesky ethics committee chairman Joel Hefley. Technically Hefley is being term-limited out of his post, though it would be easy for Hastert to grant him a waiver to continue and, judging by quotes both from Hefley and anonymous Republicans in this piece and throughout these last months since the committee handed out three admonishments to DeLay, it’s not exactly a secret that the caucus and the leadership want Hefley punished. Leading the pack to replace Hefley: loyal Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust contributor Lamar Smith of Texas.
The leadership has officially decided to replace Veterans Affairs committee chair Chris H. Smith (who was not facing term limits) with Indiana’s Steve Buyer, a move that is widely seen as punishment against Smith for being, um, too generous to veterans and not enough of a “team player.” The Republican Party: supports our troops! . . . just not that much.
Less of interest has been happening across the aisle, though apparently House Dems are set to tap Rahm Emanuel (whose savvy messaging on the Social Security front Garance has noted recently) to replace the late Bob Matsui as head of the DCCC.
--Sam Rosenfeld
No one's got your back. Sorry 'bout that.Now, you can find stuff like this at virtually any financial planning advice site you go to -- and if you meet with a planner in person, he'll tell you the same thing. No one's got your back. You can't rely on the government to provide for you in old age. If you want anything done, you'll have to do it by yourself and for yourself. The stock market is the answer. There is a common langauage in use already for talking about retirement, and it's been developed by financial planners and self-help gurus, not politicians. And while politically and ideologically Democrats may disagree with this message, I suspect that, individually at least, many of them have planned their own retirements with a healthy measure of individualistic, self-interested, and market-invested behavior. In that gap between language of politics and the language of real life lies the challenge for the party. There are public sources of thinking on these issues outside of the political sphere, and it's useful to recognize their reach and power.If you put your retirement on that proverbial three-legged stool, there's a good chance it's going to collapse. Why? Let's do a little structural engineering and see how each "leg" is holding up.
Social Security: As of 2004, the average annual Social Security retirement benefit is approximately $11,000. In other words, retirees cannot live on Social Security alone. And don't expect that to change. As the baby boomers retire and put a strain on Social Security, benefits will have to be cut or taxes raised. For those in or near retirement, your benefits are pretty safe. (See? We don't have it out for the in-laws at all.) For the younger crowd, don't count on receiving all of the benefit estimated in the statement sent to you by the Social Security Administration every year, three months before your birthday.
Defined-benefit plans (a.k.a. traditional pensions): The amount you'll receive from a traditional pension depends, first of all, on whether you work for a company that offers one. Most of us don't. In fact, only 20% of Americans have such a benefit, down from 40% in 1975. If you are among the lucky one in five, the benefit you'll receive is based on your salary and the number of years you worked for that employer. Since we've become a mobile workforce, many people don't stay in a plan long enough to accrue significant benefits. The average annual defined-benefit payout is less than $10,000. Plus -- unlike Social Security benefits -- most benefits aren't adjusted for inflation over the years.
Savings: Of the three legs that may prop up your retirement, your personal savings are what you have the most control over. So while two out of three of those stool legs have some pretty serious cracks, this leg is as strong as you want to make it. The good news is that this one decision -- to save or not to save -- will have the biggest impact on the quality of your post- work life.
For example, that "nest egg" the president keeps talking about letting people build through "personal accounts" just makes him sound like a financial planner.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
The fact that many members are even considering something so insane simply goes to show the dirty secret of the privatization debate: Even though the Washington press corps appears to be universally possessed of a longstanding hatred for Social Security and a deep desire to destroy it at all costs, the voters like it and the politicians who represent them know it. Hence, as long as the Democrats stick together and make it clear to nervous Republicans that they won't get even a veneer of bipartisan cover for their plan, it's very unlikely that the GOP can round up the votes necessary to pass any particular plan.
It's important to remember that despite Republican majorities, most of the major legislation of the Bush era provoked sufficient numbers of defections that it wouldn't have passed had a handful of Democrats not crossed the aisle. If they stick together this time, they'll win. And there's really no reason they shouldn't stick together. Unlike on the cultural issues, there's no special region of the country where the orthodox liberal view on Social Security is grossly unpopular. Indeed, I'd be very interested to know if anyone can point to any examples of any races anywhere where a politician has lost an election because he refused to countenance steep cuts in guaranteed Social Security benefits. Certainly I've never heard of anything like that. On the contrary, over the past few months I've heard Social Security's foes loudly champion the fact that, for the first time ever, some candidates who advocated cuts managed not to lose. But politicians who can survive something like that without simply lying all the time are still a rarity, no one's ever turned it into a winning issue. And many Republicans know it, hence the desire to eliminate the program's funding base without eliminating any of the benefits.
--Matthew Yglesias
That said -- and this is Kevin's point -- the average person is still better off in the "do nothing" scenario no matter which year you're scheduled to retire in.
If everybody was aware of this fact, then it would be a good idea to keep the rhetorical emphasis on plans to improve Social Security and avoid the goofy mid-2050s benefit drop. But people aren't aware of this fact. Words like "crisis," "bankrupt," and "insolvent" are getting tossed around and are designed to make people think that without major change there won't be any Social Security at all. Against that background assumption, the privatization plan looks pretty good. You get a modest guaranteed benefit, and if you're smart -- or lucky -- with your investments, you might even wind up with a comfortable retirement. Against an accurate picture of Social Security's future, however, the privatization plan doesn't look good at all. A small number of lucky investors will be better off, and brokerage firms will be better off, but most people will have less money and everyone will be exposed to major uncertainty about their future.
The conversation about making changes to flatten out that benefit curve is worth having. But it's only worth having after the public understands that there's no need to panic. Until that messages has started to sink in, loose talk about the necessity of change just confuses the issue. If the president was interested in an honest debate, it would be worth trying to explain the situation in all its nuance. But instead he's trying to take advantage of a crisis mentality of his own creation to cram a proposal of dubious merits down Congress' throat. Lifting that crisis mentality needs to be the first task.
--Matthew Yglesias
But I want to say that I was in Algeria during the mid-1990s. I was the political officer at the American embassy then, and the violence in Algeria in the mid-1990s -- (audio break) -- go back and look at it, really was not any less than what we're seeing in some of the Sunni provinces here. Yet they were able to conduct an election in those -- in the worst-hit part of Algeria, they got voter turnout 50 percent. I think the Algerian experience showed that people look at elections and look at democracy as a way out of the problem, not an intensification of it. So, if given a chance to vote, I think that they will turn out. And we're working very hard to get them that chance to vote.The backstory here is that the Algerian government canceled elections in 1992 when it appeared that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS, based on its French acronym) was poised to win, setting off a bloody civil war. In the midst of this violence, Algeria did, in fact, hold a 1997 presidential election that was successful in logistical terms, with no attacks on polling places and a decent turnout. Since the opposition FIS had been banned, pro-government parties won handily. Today, Algeria's president is Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who won in 1999 after all other candidates dropped out to protest fraud. In 2004 he was re-elected with a stunning 83.5 percent of the vote amid -- shockingly -- allegations of fraud.
Today, the State Department regards the Algerian government's human rights record as "poor," due to arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial killings, and restrictions on "freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, and movement." Perhaps more to the point, the resumption of elections hasn't yet brought the government success in its now 12-year-old counterinsurgency campaign. "Press reports estimated that approximately 1,162 civilians, terrorists, and security force members died during the year, a 61 percent decrease in violent deaths from 2002."
This, then, is the case for optimism. Despite problems, the State Department is confident that we can create a situation where, years from now and after sharp decreases in the level of violence, over 1,000 people are still being killed each year, and the government stays in power through a combination of fraud and restrictions of civil liberties. I feel much better now, don't you?
--Matthew Yglesias
Carl Hulse and Mike Allen, respectively, write this action up as if it’s some kind of a revelation -- a surprise move the GOP made yesterday. Yet the retention of the proposal requiring a committee majority to launch ethics investigations was known on Monday night, when Republicans ostentatiously backed off from two other ethics rule changes. I mentioned it yesterday morning, and indeed, so did these very same political reporters, though they buried it in their Tuesday stories that touted the GOP’s supposed “reversal” on gutting the ethics process. Those front-page Tuesday stories, meanwhile, were attached to helpful headlines like "GOP Abandons Ethics Changes", making it clear to busy readers that the gist of the story was a chastened GOP finally doing the right thing on ethics, rather than a cynical GOP making an obvious effort to continue doing the wrong thing on ethics under the guise of chastened retreat. Might they have emphasized what remained on the Republicans' ethics rules agenda in yesterday's pieces? This isn’t rocket science, folks.
On another note, in Allen’s Post piece today there’s a priceless line from one Republican representative making the obligatory reference to that 1980s-early ’90s era of supposedly unbridled criminal lawlessness on the part of the Democratic House majority:
Some Republican lawmakers said that it looked like hubris, and that their constituents had begun to complain. One member of the leadership, who declined to be named so he could speak about his views, said he thought the changes were "the wrong thing to do" because it reminded him of the overreaching by Democrats before Republicans won control in 1994. "I said, 'My God, we're not going to be like them,' " he said.Oh, God forbid. This is something that deserves continuous revisiting, but for now I'd just suggest that the combination of legislative dictatorship and unfettered corruption in which the decadent and hubristic Democratic majority supposedly wallowed in the years preceding the 1994 GOP takeover may not have actually amounted to much of real substance. Upon closer inspection, scandals like the House bank brouhaha, which over the years have coalesced in elite political memory as emblems of an age of power-drunk ethical lassitude, seem more a testament to Newt Gingrich’s skills at trumping up outrages and lobbing bombs than to any serious ethical breakdown in the House in the early 1990s. Mark Schmitt spoke to this notion recently in a slightly different context (referring to the Jack Abramoff casino lobbying scandal):
The Republicans did change Washington; they made it fundamentally and profoundly more corrupt. There was plenty of corruption in "Democratic Washington," but even leaving out the "peculiar grossness" of this one, you won't find anything remotely comparable to this in the decades of Democratic control. . .The Democrats’ effective handling of the ethics issues since the DeLay rule was instituted in the fall indicates that they may be heeding such advice. It would help matters if the country’s top political reporters weren’t quite so easily gulled by faux GOP retreats on ethics abuses.Like the idea that there is a "Social Security crisis," the unchallenged assumption that pre-1994 "Democratic Washington" was a cesspool of corruption has been a protective shield behind which the Republicans operate with impunity. It will take some time to break this down, but it is about time for Democrats to stop apologizing for Speaker Jim Wright's $55,000 book deal 15 years ago, and start talking about Reform, Reform, Reform.
--Sam Rosenfeld
But as an interested party was eager to point out to me last night, there's rather more to the story than that. Along with being a social conservative, Roemer's also a distinguished scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This is basically a libertarian outfit dedicated to driving a right-wing economic agenda. Or, as their Web site says, it's "the premier university source for market-based ideas." Now, they do some good work at George Mason in particular and Mercatus in general. I'm a great fan of the blog their General Director, Tyler Cowen, writes with his GMU colleague Alex Tabarrok. I know several current and former staffers there, and they're smart, wonderful people.
But they're not liberals, they're libertarians. This might explain why you find Roemer doing things like voting against Bill Clinton's 1993 budget. And Roemer's not a libertarian; he's a social conservative, too. Nobody's a perfectly orthodox Democrat (certainly I'm not) so it would be silly to demand that the DNC chair toe the line on everything. But surely it should be someone who toes the line on something. At a minimum, you'd like to see a political party headed by someone with a bit of the old partisan fervor, and signing up for a gig at one of the nodes of the fabled vast right-wing conspiracy doesn't really fit the bill.
--Matthew Yglesias
To give you a real direct answer, I have to wait and see what they're actually proposing. But the fact is, let's say this, Social Security is one of the best things the government has ever done. Tens of millions of senior citizens in this country are above the poverty level only because of Social Security.The only impression I was left with after Lieberman's appearance is that the Democrats have no fresh faces and nothing memorable or clear to say about Social Security or the president's partial-privatization plan, and are not going to try to defend their own most important accomplishment very fiercely. A false impression, no doubt, but as The Note noted this morning, the Democratic "carping, themeless-pudding approach ... that it brought to most everything in 2004" seems to still be the leading operational style for the opposition. Even the House Democrats' list of "Priorities for the New Year" could only come up with a tepid "we will defend the security and stability of our retirement system" tacked onto the end of a paragraph that led off by reminding people that "45 million Americans are without health insurance." Which is an important issue, to be sure, but not one that's going to be dominating the legislative agenda in the months ahead. And not any kind of memorable or sophisticated way to talk about Social Security, either.But in the long run, Social Security is not sustainable....
I think in fairness you can't dismiss anything, if we want to keep Social Security secure for seniors in America for the long term.
Here are the key graphs from Barnes:
To sell Social Security reform, the president has already adopted strategies associated with Republican consultant Frank Luntz and Presentation Testing's Richard Thau. They've derived lessons from dozens of focus groups and polls on this issue. One is that most Americans believe Social Security needs to be fixed. That's "axiomatic with the American public," Thau insists. It doesn't mean a majority agrees with the president that "the crisis is now." But neither do they accept the idea that reform should be put off until a crisis hits. So the public is receptive to the case for reform now, if Bush can make it convincingly.Inspired by Barnes, I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations this morning about what my own wealth-creation obligation would be under the Bush plan, as discussed in today's Post. It seems I'd have to save or create something like an additional $60,000, assuming a post-retirement lifespan similar to that of my grandmothers, under the new dispensation, were it to pass in the form described in today's article, just to make up for the predicted 18 percent decline in Social Security outlays by the time of my likely retirement. This doesn't sound so bad at first -- many D.C. yuppies of my acquaintance have been able to pick off lump sums greater than this just from real estate deals during the past five years -- but when you think about another 35 years of 3 percent inflation added onto that, it probably means I'd actually have to save/create $169,000, in addition to whatever monies I'd already planned to sock away. And I think most young people who are not corporate attorneys might agree this is a pretty hefty new financial burden to have to take on, especially as the Bush plan, vague as it may be, seems to be likely to require the funds be invested in the stock market through one instrument or another, rather than, say, in real estate or in the acquisition of an Inka Essenhigh, so that you're not even really getting control over your own money or investment strategy in the end. At least with real estate, after all, you can still live in the place even if it never appreciates, but once you've lost your money in the stock market that's it, it's all gone.Where Bush is following the advice of Luntz and Thau is in avoiding certain poisonous words. Chief among these is "privatization." Supporters of reform toss that word around to describe the process of creating investment accounts controlled by individual workers. To the public, however, it indicates corporate control of Social Security, which they oppose. Bush never utters the word. Instead of calling investment accounts funded by payroll taxes "private," he calls them "personal."
Another word dropped from the Bush lexicon is wealth, as in, Personal investment accounts would help Americans build wealth of their own. What's wrong with this? Thau has found that most Americans don't believe they're capable of creating wealth. That's for rich people. "Economists use the word 'wealth,'" says Luntz. "Average Americans use the word 'savings.'" And their saving produces a "nest egg." Thus, "nest egg" has become an operative phrase for the president. Here is what he said in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last summer: "We must strengthen Social Security by allowing younger workers to save some of their taxes in a personal account, a nest egg you can call your own and government can never take away."
That, in fact, was an almost perfect sentence for selling Social Security reform. It had two of the three "s" words Luntz says are critical: "strengthen" and "save." Somehow the president left out the third, "secure." It would have fit as a description of the nest egg. Luntz isn't kidding about this. His "Luntzisms" often work. His recommendation that Republicans drop the phrase "estate tax" in favor of "death tax" has bolstered the drive to eliminate that tax altogether.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
Sure, torture is more substantive, and what Gonzales did in that regard is incalculably worse for America than that time he took the fall for George W. Bush's impulsive homeland security nomination. But as the Dems seem to realize, torture isn't enough to stop Gonzales' nomination, and -- I would argue, at least -- it isn't a particularly effective public galvanizer. The segment of the public that is outraged about the White House's choices hardly needs stoking; the segment of the population that doesn't understand the connection between what happened in Washington and what happens in Guantanamo won't be illuminated by another round of administration stonewalling; and a disturbingly large segment of the population has no objection to what some might say are simply overzealous efforts to defend the United States. There's a lot to be said for standing on principle and trying to further the understanding of this issue -- but there's not much to be gained.
Kerik, on the other hand, was a huge embarrassment, and the administration's claims made the situation all the worse. The only reason Kerik "withdrew his nomination" was the nanny problem. Other than that, the administration "did significant due diligence," Dan Bartlett said. "We were aware of many of the issues that have been reported." And it was Gonzales who conducted "hours of confrontational interviews" with Kerik before endorsing his nomination.
So if stated plainly, the White House line is: Alberto Gonzales looked at a man with known and thick mob ties, and decided he would be an appropriate man to head up domestic security. Alberto Gonzales looked at a man with a record of abusing power, and decided he should be in charge of a $40 billion budget. Alberto Gonzales thought that a man who catastrophically blew our attempt to build an Iraqi police force, then left after 3 months, should oversee our nation's long-term security upgrades. And that's without even getting into workplace harrassment, unethical affairs, and miscellaneous graft.
Americans do take the department of homeland security seriously, and Bush and Gonzales' combination of sloppiness and low standards is a very accessible issue to put front and center. It builds into the "party of corruption" notion that the Democrats have to emphasize. And there's no way to blame it on Lynndie England.
--Jeffrey Dubner
"A what?" I replied.
Such was my introduction to what was then a pretty small community of political bloggers and readers. At the time -- April 2002 -- the only magazine with a blog was The National Review. Duncan Black had only just begun blogging under the pseudonym "Atrios;" Markos Zúniga was still a few weeks from starting Daily Kos. When newspapers took notice of blogs, they still called them "Web logs," without even the lagniappe of "or blogs" to finish the sentence. I didn't know what I was getting into, and frankly, it seemed like it would be a big pain in the ass to have to write several posts a day.
Luckily, Chris convinced me to give it a try. I got hooked pretty quickly, and I've been blogging on Tapped just about every weekday since. It's been a great pleasure writing for, and hearing back from, the dedicated readers who have made Tapped one of the best-read political blogs on the Web. It's also been fun exchanging arguments and ideas -- and, okay, the occasional insult -- with other bloggers, right and left.
But it's time to say goodbye. As of this week, I'll no longer be contributing to Tapped. In fact, I won't be writing much about national politics at all, at least for a while; I'm off to a newspaper job in New York, where most of the time I'll be covering the city and its suburbs. But I hope the readers and bloggers I've corresponded with will stay in touch at the usual email, nconfessore-at-gmail.com.
--Nick Confessore
--Garance Franke-Ruta
--Jeffrey Dubner
Over the past month, the administration seems to have largely shifted back in the other direction, as in Powell's statement today, or this assessment of the insurgency (via Spencer Ackerman) from Iraq's intelligence chief. According to General Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, "a resurgent Baath Party" is "key to the insurgency's might." The Baath are said to constitue 20,000 members of the insurgency's core strength of 40,000 fighters, who form the center of a larger block of "more than 200,000 members counting part-time fighters and volunteers who provide rebels everything from intelligence and logistics to shelter." As Spencer notes, that's far higher than previous U.S. estimates, which is disturbing in and of itself. More disturbing, to my way of thinking, is this quotation the AFP got from a "senior U.S. military officer":
"As for the size of the insurgency, we don't have good resolution on the size," the officer said on condition of anonymity. Past U.S. military assessments on the insurgency's size have been revised upwards from 5,000 to 20,000 full and part-time members, in the last half year, most recently in October.This, combined with the Baathist/jihadist equivocation, suggests to me that the military just doesn't really have a good understand of who they're fighting or what's going on. That has disturbing implications for the prospects of both the "easy" search-and-destroy element of counterinsurgency warfare and for the harder task of resolving the political issues that underlie an insurgent force. You can't beat an enemy if you don't know what it is or what the war you're fighting is about.
--Matthew Yglesias
More to the point, the leadership by all accounts still intends to remove Joel Hefley as chair of the committee, replacing him with party lackey and Tom DeLay legal defense fund contributor Lamar Smith -- who also happens to be the guy who proposed the now-disgraced ethics rule change in the first place. The Republicans' newfound appreciation for the integrity of the ethics oversight process in the House doesn't exactly ring with bell-like clarity.
The next big House leadership decision to watch this week is the Steering Committee's selection (expected tomorrow) of the new Appropriations chairman. It's a three-way race between Ralph Regula of Ohio, Jerry Lewis of California, and Hal Rogers of Kentucky. All are big-time fundraisers for their colleagues -- a prerequisite for the job. Another factor will certainly be support for DeLay's proposed Appropriations Committee reforms, which would streamline and rationalize subcommittee priorities to curb bloated spending on sissy Democratic social policy programs. But the consideration might just come down to how much each candidate ponyed up to DeLay's legal defense fund. All three are contributors: Rogers has raised $100,000 for it from outside corporate donors; Lewis has helped to raise $90,000 from his GOP colleagues; Regula has contributed $5,000 to the fund, but just hasn't put in the extra effort to drum up serious cash. Keep an eye out to see how far their money goes -- and rejoice in the new era of ethics in the Republican House!
--Sam Rosenfeld
"It's like saying elderly people today should live at a 1940 standard of living," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. "Part of our social contract has been to allow seniors to participate in rising standards of living rather than consigning them to some second-class status in retirement."The true shell game only gets started, however, when the advocates of cuts get around to explaining that nothing's really being cut here because people can make up the difference with the earnings from their private accounts. As we've seen previously, the estimated level of stock market growth that could make this true depends on an underlying assumption of an economic growth rate that's high enough to keep Social Security fully solvent without any changes. Michael Kinsley's offered a similar argument to likewise show that private accounts can't make up the difference, which prompted the bizarre rebuttal from White House economic advisor Gregory Mankiw that now was not a good time "to engage in an on-the-record debate ... on the validity of [Kinsley's] economic theorems." When the White House tells you it doesn't think a debate over the logic of its proposed changes is an appropriate thing to engage in, you might start to suspect that its proposal's not such a hot idea.
--Matthew Yglesias
--Jeffrey Dubner
“This is not the way to effect meaningful reform,” Hefley said in a written statement. “Ethics reform must be bipartisan and this package is not bipartisan. If the House is to have a meaningful, bipartisan ethics process, changes of this magnitude can be made — as they were made in 1997 and 1989 — only after thoughtful, careful consideration on a bipartisan basis.”Hefley plans to speak out against these proposals tomorrow on the House floor before they’re put to a vote -- and the House GOP leadership has signaled its appreciation for Hefley’s contributions and willingness to consider his input by leaking its plans to remove Hefley from the committee (as payback for his admonishments of Tom DeLay) and replace him with a team player from Texas who coughed up $5,000 this summer for DeLay’s legal defense fund. Happy New Year!Hefley said he wants to speak against changing the ethics process by prohibiting the committee from finding a member in violation of the House code of conduct unless a specific law or House rule is violated.
--Sam Rosenfeld
Jordan's king, meanwhile, has recently been joining with Iyad Allawi to suggest that the Sistani-approved United Iraqi Alliance is a stalking horse for an Iranian-style theocracy. As a result, if either Allawi or UIA leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is unhappy with the results of the election, he's going to have plenty of opportunity to argue that fraud facilitated by a foreign government is responsible for the adverse result. Close elections in America are often the subject of significant controversies, but we have a well-established system here and (the occasional "bourgeois riot" aside) they don't degenerate into violence. In Iraq, however, it would be unwise to have such confidence. The worst of it is that due to the poor security situation, we have very little in the way of reliable polling data and will have very little in the way of reliable election monitoring, meaning that if a controversy does break out, the United States -- and, indeed, fairminded Iraqis -- will have no way of knowing who's right.
--Matthew Yglesias
"By anathematizing privatization plans but not offering a progressive alternative, Democrats risk ceding the initiative entirely to the Republicans who have what purports to be a reform even if it's flawed," says Will Marshall, president of the centrist Democrats' centrist Progressive Policy Institute.On the surface, I think there's a compelling logic here. Whether or not Social Security is "in crisis," it isn't perfect, either. And not all private accounts proposals are created equal. If the GOP know that their bill stands no chance of gaining any Democratic support, then they'll wind up writing a maximally regressive, maximally irresponsible plan. Maybe, then, it would be better for the Democrats to let it be known that they're open to compromise, thus ensuring that Congress passes a sane, responsible, somewhat progressive private accounts plan rather than a nutty one.
It's compelling logic, that is, if you've been living under a rock for the past four years. Democrats have tried this approach several times during the first term, and with only the partial exception of No Child Left Behind, they've gotten screwed each and every time. At some point, you've got to learn the lesson that the White House and the GOP leadership isn't interested in constructive compromise. Ask Charlie Stenholm where his bipartisanship on Social Security got him. Now if Bush miraculously decides to put forward something akin to Marshall's "Grand Bargain" -- a paid-for plan offering progressively funded private accounts and a higher minimum benefits floor than exists today -- liberals will have a responsibility to take that proposal seriously. But the onus should be on Bush -- the man who's decided that Social Security reform should take precedence over the general fund deficit and ballooning health care costs -- to put a proposal on the table with a realistic chance of bipartisan support. Democrats have gone down this road too many times already only to discover that the president isn't interested in anything other than cynical political advantage and the interests of his financial supporters.
--Matthew Yglesias
The week before that, Standard editor Bill Kristol argued that we should "bomb Syrian military facilities" and "occupy the town of Abu Kamal in eastern Syria." A week before that, Nicholas Eberstadt took to the pages of the Standard to make the case for "readying the nondiplomatic instruments for North Korea threat reduction," also known as "the deliberate use of nonconsensual, non-diplomatic options." Meanwhile, they also want us to send more troops to Iraq.
Now there's nothing especially unusual about a magazine's writers disagreeing with one another. But if this is disagreement (and it's hard to tell that it is; no one explicitly says that in the course of bombing one country we might want to lay off bombing another) it's disagreement of a strange sort -- everywhere you turn the answer is the same: Diplomatic isolation followed by air strikes. As I think should be obvious, this simply can't be the way we solve every foreign policy problem lest we find ourself fighting a nine-front war. There's always a certain appeal to military options. As the song says, bombing's "nice and quick and clean and gets things done" and lets us preserve our cherished moral clarity. But with the country already fighting one war (plus a semi-war in Afghanistan), endless reiteration of the same theme isn't a very serious approach to the world. Unfortunately, the right doesn't seem to have anything else to offer.
--Matthew Yglesias
In his Wall Street Journal column today (subscription only), David Wessel divides Dems into three camps on the issue: those who say that there is no serious Social Security problem at all; those who believe there is and advocate responsible, “eat your vegetables” remedies like tax hikes and benefit cuts; and those who buy into the crisis notion and also like the idea of partial privatization:
The third camp says: There's a problem, and Democrats needn't be allergic to private accounts.What Marshall has advocated in the past is not, significantly, a Gramlich-like plan to add a private account option to the existing benefit package, but rather diverting a portion of the existing Social Security stream into private accounts -- just like George W. Bush’s plan, only without all the insanely irresponsible fiscal mischief."By anathematizing privatization plans but not offering a progressive alternative, Democrats risk ceding the initiative entirely to the Republicans who have what purports to be a reform even if it's flawed," says Will Marshall, president of the centrist Democrats' centrist Progressive Policy Institute. After all, even Sweden has private accounts, though -- unlike Mr. Bush's -- they're mandatory.
Mr. Marshall doesn't have a fleshed-out proposal. Democrats of his persuasion are casting about for one. He would "retool" Social Security so it encourages and helps Americans to save more and build wealth. Edward Gramlich, before he joined the Federal Reserve Board, crafted a plan to tack private accounts on top of existing Social Security. He got few takers. Gene Sperling, the former Clinton aide, talks up a "universal 401(k)," a private savings account, perhaps structured so the government would match savings by low-income Americans, alongside Social Security.
As the debate shapes up, it’ll be interesting to see where the DLC places its chips. If private accounts really do end up being shut out of most mainstream Democratic responses to the Republicans’ proposals and the caucus manages, as it seems to be doing at the moment, to put up a near-united front of opposition in Congress, one would suspect that an outfit as established as the DLC wouldn’t want to marginalize itself in the debate. Moreover, the sheer recklessness of the plan the president is sure to propose, combined with the utter dishonesty he’ll employ to sell it to the public, will likely serve to further bolster the unity the party’s ideological wings have enjoyed since he took office.
Marshall’s comment raises a reasonable question, however: Should the very notion of private accounts be “anathematized” in the Dems’ response? Would Gramlich-style proposals merely confuse the debate and muddy the contrasts the Dems need to be emphasizing? Surely part of what needs to be conveyed in the next few months is the notion that private accounts are essentially a totally separate issue from Social Security’s funding shortfall; they're a proposed solution to a completely unrelated problem -- a problem that, of course, doesn’t actually exist anyway. (It's tough to grapple with all this mendacity at once; effective, multi-pronged dishonesty has always been one of Bush's big strengths.)
--Sam Rosenfeld
--Jeffrey Dubner
--Matthew Yglesias
