Not owning a car, gasoline prices don't affect me at all (I use the occassional Zipcar like this morning, but the customer doesn't pay extra for gas) but obviously this is a big deal financially for a lot of people, even though gas prices as a share of household income are down from where they were during the late 1970s price spike. Because presidents get both credit and blame for important things, even if the White House doesn't have a lot of control over them, Bush's approval ratings have a tendency to ebb and flow with gas prices. This is what makes the current atmosphere of gloom surrounding the GOP's political prospects interesting -- things are almost certain to get worse.

The summer months lead to higher gas prices, which is bad for Bush. They also feature hurricanes which are going to be bad for Bush. And our troops in Iraq tend to have more problems during the summer (the heat seems to degreade their operational effectiveness, perhaps because it makes body armor and helmets super-uncomfortable) which, of course, is bad for Bush. The tendency in politics is always to underrate the extent to which there's still time for things to change (persuadable voters tend to be fickle and not to pay attention very closely) but we can expect the current bleakness on the right to continue -- and even deepen -- for a while more.

I was struck by RDF's comment in response to John's excellent post on "the security trap":

"China will shortly shift from making cheap stuff for export to making better quality stuff for internal markets. They won't need us anymore. The US needs to plan for a transition from empire to one major power among several, including Japan, China, India and the EU. It is even possible that the old Soviet sphere will re-emerge as an economic zone some day.

The old empires of Spain, England, France, etc. didn't go quietly off the world stage, but they went just the same. We can plan for an orderly transition to a sustainable society or we can expect social unrest and a continual effort to use military power to stem the tide. Excessive militarism has already diverted half our federal budget from infrastructure development and social programs to this useless sector."

Let's think about the world s/he posits for a moment -- a world in which the U.S., EU, India, China, Japan, and perhaps Russia are all major powers. Is that such a terrible vision? Imagine now that China and Russia are either democratic or moving gradually that way. What would we be so afraid of? More importantly, why would it matter to us so vitally to try to be so much more powerful than anyone else in that system -- in the words of the National Security Strategy, "to have no peer competitor"? We would want enough military and economic capacity to defend ourselves, of course. And enough to project military force when necessary either to defend ourselves or to engage in genuinely humanitarian interventions -- in which case we would likely have company any way.

But since when does America have such an obsession with being and staying no. 1?

Read more »

Bloomberg reports that six Republican-held congressional seats in New York State may be seriously in play in November, a pretty nice downpayment on the 15 seats Democrats would need to take back the House. This confirms something that one of the serious analysts of congressional campaigns told me a month ago: that with a national tide in favor of Democrats, and the strength of Senator Clinton's reelection bid and Eliot Spitzer's gubernatorial campaign, all the Republican seats in that state could be vulnerable.

Read more »

Welcome to the TPMCafe Book Club! This is where we regularly invite authors to come and discuss their most recent works with readers and invited commentators. Past Book Club authors include Thomas Frank, Anthony Shadid, Larry Diamond, George Packer, Ivo Daalder/James Lindsay, Robert Dreyfuss, Chris Mooney, Gene Sperling, Gershom Gorenberg, and Kevin Phillips.

This week we'll be discussing Juliet Eilperin's Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives. In her book, Eilperin discusses how warlike strategies and ideological maneuvering have led to a deeply divided House of Representatives where compromise--and the views of ordinary citizens--are generally ignored. Mark Schmitt, P O'Neill, and Thomas Mann will also participate in the discussion.
 - kdc

Even though tax day was nearly a week ago, I can't stop thinking about this proposal to move the filing date to, say, November 1. So that taxpayers get their refunds in time for Christmas, etc., shopping. So that retailers get a boost in their live-or-die season. And so that buyers have more liquidity (read: less need for debt) during their live-or-die season.

Read more »

Read more »

The bust has hit Boston. Foreclosures are growing at a staggering pace. The once hot-hot-hot Boston real estate market has seen a 63% increase in foreclosures in the first quarter this year. Some of those “creative mortgages” are starting to look “creative” in the horror-movie way that spurting blood and slow-mo death were once hailed as creative film-making.

So is the industry cutting back? Heck, no. It’s full-steam-ahead, more creativity, more loans and more spurting blood to come.

Read more »

"Identify a trend and name it," my editor tells me. Mark Schmitt's done a good job of that one, labeling myself, my colleague Sam Rosenfeld, fellow TPMCaféer Nathan Newman, frequent antagonist David Sirota, and some others "The New Parliamentarians" -- to be a bit crass about it, those who dislike Tom Delay's goals but admire at least a substantial portion of his methods. Mark seems to be moving a bit in my direction, so give his post a read then return for additional thoughts as I try to edge him closer to the dark side.

Read more »

My coffee house colleage, Matt Yeglesias, suggests that we engage with him on debate on the already heavily-debated topic of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. I've held back from commenting on this paper so far, but I'm not one to shy away from a debate...

Read more »

Unhappy People -

I have written several articles, made many public statements, and filed several lawsuits saying that New Orleans not only left behind the poorest and most vulnerable when Katrina hit, but is doing it now all over again now. Many disagree. These are some emails from people who disagree quite a bit.

Read more »

So where are we in the grand debate about American national security?

Iran is now at the center of public debate, but there are deeper dilemmas and controversies that beset America’s global position that must be confronted if we are to find a coherent, enlightened, and sustainable post-Bush foreign policy.

Bush foreign policy is failing – but it is important to come to grips with why it is failing. To be sure, it is failing because Bush stumbled into an epic disaster in Iraq. But the problems are not just about policy incompetence, ideological blindness, or high risk policy choices gone bad. I would argue that Bush foreign policy is failing – in the large sense – because it is inconsistent with the realities of a transforming international system that shapes and limits the way the United States can effectively exercise power and – more importantly -- assert its authority.

Because of this, the Bush administration has run into trouble, or as I would put it, it has gotten America caught in a “security trap.” It is a security trap in the sense that as the Bush administration tries to solve the nation’s security problems by exercising its power or using force, it tends to produce resistance and backlash that leaves the country more isolated, bereft of authority, and, ultimately, insecure.

The problem is that when liberals take over the reins of foreign policy, they too will fall into this trap unless they understand the problem and devise a grand strategy that works with rather than against these evolving global realities.

Let me explain.

Read more »

Congress is going to hand the operation of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. Democrats are helping. It's a shame.

Don’t look now, but the House Commerce Committee next Wednesday is likely to vote to turn control of the Internet over to AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and what’s left of the telecommunications industry. It will be one of those stories the MSM writes about as “little noticed” because they haven’t covered it.

Read more »

Here's the press release on SEIU President Andy Stern and SEIU Vice President Eliseo Medina joining the University of Miami hunger strikers on day seventeen of the action.

With five hunger strikers sent to the hospital, with large number of the local community supporting the fasters, and the leader of one of the largest unions in the country joining in, I am curious if the national media will actually start following the story. 

There was a little flurry of national attention when the Donna Shalala connection to the story popped up at the very beginning of the strike, but it's been pretty non-existent during the whole hunger strike.   So we'll see if this escalation of the fight will break through the usual media indifference to labor stories.

The last paragraph of my comments on Juliet Eilperin’s book brought a response that I should have foreseen from an emerging group that might be called The New Parliamentarians, centered in the youth wing of the American Prospect office, although with adjunct members such as Nathan Newman, David Sirota and the “Fighting Dems” of the DailyKos circles.

The New Parliamentarians weighed in here and here

The argument between the New Parliamentarians and the Old Institutionalists (like me) took shape last year in the debate over the Nuclear Option to eliminate filibusters for judicial appointments. Why not embrace the Nuclear Option as the first step to get rid of all filibusters, they argued, since historically the filibuster and other tools that empower congressional minorities have been an impediment to progress, and we are, after all, Progress-ives.

Read more »

Last night, in a speech before a Washington power crowd, Hu Jintao mentioned democracy nine times. Nine times -- and his security team and intelligence/police forces did nothing about it.

Jiang Lijun, however, mentions democracy in a draft, unsent email and is sentenced to four years in prison. But China's willingness to talk about the fate of its imprisoned dissidents in this internet/information age is certainly working at a faster rate -- as it was just as recent as November 2003 when Jiang was jailed.

At the rate Hu is going in building a pro-democracy drumbeat, I only hope that he somehow manages to avoid the fate of so many other of his countrymen.

Read more »

Jonah Goldberg wants a referendum in Iraq on whether American troops should stay or go. Kevin Drum's comments seem smart to me, but I think there's a giant fly in this ointment -- what's the question? Kevin's suggested wording is "Do you want all coalition troops to leave the country within the next 12 months?" I bet that would get a very different answer from a question like "Do you want coalition troops to stay until the security situation improves?" or a dozen other things you could think. The real world, of course, doesn't offer binary options in Iraq ("leave tomorrow or stay indefinitely") but a referendum kind of needs to and would, subsequently, make it hard to change things around.

Partially for this reason, this is an odd question to put to a referendum. After all, why not hold a referendum on Iraq in the United States? Well, because that's not how we make those kind of decisions. For purely informational purposes we do polls in America, and we also do polls in Iraq. Those show various things but, primarily they demonstrate that question framing has a huge impact on what people say.

I want to address the issue of redistricting through algorithms, as well as speculate on the next WH press secretary.

Read more »

The Wall Street Journal today took a gander at Medicare's claim that it's met the enrollment goal, 25 days early. The Administration has been extremely effective at spinning enrollment numbers to prove the program's success. Most of the discrepancy comes from dual eligibles, or those who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid, and seniors getting drug coverage from their employers (who are receiving a subsidy from Medicare).

Matt Holt gives us the most shocking tidbit: according to the numbers, only 7 million people who lacked drug coverage before have new coverage under Medicare Part D. And almost the same number, 6 million, have yet to sign up for anything.

Read more »

Peter Beinart says that someone who opposed invading Iraq like Brent Scowcroft would be a good Don Rumsfeld replacement because this would help with the necessary task of "separating the debate over what we should do now in Iraq from the debate over whether we should have invaded in the first place." I don't think these are genuinely separate questions. As . . . er . . . Peter Beinart argues in his forthcoming book The Good Fight one big problem with the Iraq operation from the beginning has been a lack of legitimacy and that stems more-or-less directly from the question about starting the war.

But that's not my real objection. The issue here is that if you were to ask someone to shake up our Iraq policy, whether for the purpose of in some sense staying the course or in order to leave, you'd need to give that person plenary power to conduct all of American foreign policy. Any effort to make dramatic shifts in Iraq would necessarily implicate America's relationships with Iraq's neighbors (Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Syria) and with our major partner in Iraq, the UK. Shifts in Iran policy require the ability to negotiate with the "EU 3" of England, France, and Germany as well as China and Russia on the Security Council. You'd have to talk to Israel about anything done with regard to Iran and Syria. It'd be a sucker's play to accept responsibility for Iraq without the authority to make -- or at least threaten to make -- sweeping policy changes across the board (see Zalmay Khalilzad).

In today's editorial page of The Philadelphia Inquirer, Carolyn Davis offers a compelling and politically savvy appeal to Ambassador John Bolton to begin marshalling U.N. Security Council support to end the barbaric acts of violence that have systemically engulfed Uganda for over 20 years. While it is a very well-thought out piece, considering a range of vantage points from geo-politics to domestic politics, there’s a part of me that recoils at the strict prerequisites necessary to elicit our sense of humanity.

Read more »

Jon's comments remind me of what my friend Nate Persily (a UPenn law professor who is teaching at Stanford this semester) said this morning as I addressed his seminar: redistricting may not be the only problem with Congress, but it may be part of the solution.

Read more »

For you youngsters out there (if you are thirty two or younger, you are a youngster in my book) today's spectacle at the White House with President Bush playing apologist for the Chinese Communists was rich with irony. I'm not a hardened Cold Warrior who believes we should not deal with China. But, I am an old fashioned conservative who believes that the United States was supposed to offer an alternative model of government to the authoritarian nations, like China and the old Soviet Union. Put it simply, we used to believe that personal liberty superseded the "rights" of the nation.

Remember? Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and called on the Soviets to "tear down this wall". Thanks in part to Reagan's policies the wall came down. Reagan followed in the footsteps of John F. Kennedy, who also stood in front of the wall and pledged America's honor to fight the totalitarian visions advocated by communist rulers in Moscow and Beijing.

Where are we today? A protester is forcibly removed from the White House grounds. The White House, a symbol of the American people, became a backdrop for the new authoritarianism of the Bush era. Rather than show the Chinese leader the beauty of tolerating dissent, Bush presided over the arrest of a woman who dared speak out against her country's leader. Bush furthered the insult to American democracy by apologizing to China's leader for the outburst.

Read more »

As President Hu Jintao visits Washington, news that yet another Chinese internet user has been put in prison based on information provided by Yahoo! has emerged. Members of Congress, human rights advocates, and other China watchers, justifiably angered, are only intensifying their calls for US industry to do something about internet freedom. Many of them note that American IT companies have banded together with some (limited) success to fight Chinese laxity on intellectual property enforcement. Why, they reasonably ask, can’t companies now do the same?

Read more »

Via Michael Roston comes this
excellent dispatch from the Morningside Post, a blog written by affiliates of the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Yesterday Bolton visited SIPA and gave what appears to be his stock speech on UN reform. Readers familiar with Bolton know that this usually means quoting Volker (“a culture of inaction”); Rice (“a revolution of reform”); and quite possibly former US Department of Agriculture official and Former World Food Program Chief Catherine Ann Bertini on the wisdom of voluntary funding mechanisms (“Voluntary funding creates an entirely different atmosphere at WFP than the UN. At the WFP every staff member knows that we have to be as efficient, accountable, transparent, and results-oriented as possible. If we are not, donor governments can take their funding elsewhere in a very competitive world among UN agencies, NGOs, and bilateral governments.”)

Regarding Bolton’s proclivity for quoting others in these kinds of settings, Morningside Post’s Tom Glaisyer, makes point I should have articulated long ago:

It was almost as if he realizes that his own words alone don't have the credibility they might.

Still, he hasn't completely lost the Boltonesque turn of phrase and in discussing Security Council reform he almost off-handedly drew less than flattering parallels between the EU and the former Soviet union to illustrate the challenge the Europeans face when they decide if they should be represented by a country or the EU as a whole on the security council.

Zing!

I got a letter from The Heritage Foundation. It asked me if am “fed up” with the anti war left, anti war media, …and the other anti war people, groups and institutions? If yes, I can send them a check. I wonder. Are not all decent human beings anti war?

Read more »

The other night I dreamed that the Mississippi River levee broke. In the dream, I was on my third floor balcony, sipping from my usual morning bowl of dark roast coffee and hot milk and reading The Times-Picayune, when something silvery brown on the riverfront caught my eye. I don't really have a first class view of the river from my balcony but I can see it if I stand up. I stood up and put my distance glasses on and what I saw terrified me.

The river was flowing toward Jackson Square. It was already at the Public Belt Railroad tracks and moving. I started screaming for my husband Joe. The dream ended and I woke up, drenched, thrashing about in the sheets, heart pounding.

Read more »

At a press briefing following talks with China’s President Hu Jintao, President Bush indicated that little progress had been made in resolving disagreements on currency, trade, and human rights between the two countries.  Bush also said that he hopes that Jintao will allow the yuan to rise against the dollar in hopes of decreasing America’s record trade deficit with China.

After the utter failure of yesterday’s curfew, Nepal is…extending it.  More than 100,000 protesters marched against the monarchy of King Gyanendra, disregarding the government’s threat to shoot anyone still in the streets.  Earlier today, police opened fire on protesters, killing three and injuring 40.  The curfew is extended until around 9 o’clock GMT.

Read more »

Much has been written on the landmark health care legislation that Massachusetts passed last week. I want to return the discussion to the centerpiece of the legislation: The individual mandate. It poses the toughest dilemma: support the bill for its objective of promoting universal coverage or sound the alarm bell because it threatens to make things worse.

The individual mandate presents a number of problems, which have been raised in terrific posts by Kate Steadman, Matthew Holt, Ezra Klein, and Nathan Newman. The central issue that results is that the new Massachusetts law has a terrific objective, but an unrealistic implementation. But having an existing policy in place will force the state legislature to deal with some of the most intractable problems, putting Massachusetts firmly on the road toward universal coverage—a net plus.

Read more »

For the law students, lawyers, and other TPM readers interested in the mechanics of the rewritten bankruptcy law, I recommend this post from the ABI's BAPCPA blog.

The housing bubble has been a subject of frequent discussion on The Warren Reports, with one of the primary concerns being that middle-class homeowners, overextended on home-equity lones and with a significant portion of their total wealth tied up in their home values, would face serious hardship from mortgages that exceeded the value of their homes. In the last quarter of 2005, Americans contributed more than 11% of their total disposable income on mortgage payments - the highest ratio on record since 1980, when the Fed's data set begins.

On a positive note, however, consumers may be getting the message ...

Read more »

Hi everyone. I’m filling in for Kate Cambor through early next week. Here’s what’s going on today in TPMCafe... Discussion of Juliet Eiplerin’s Fight Club Politics is well underway at the TPMCafe Book Club. Matthew Yglesias weighs in on the “Israel Lobby.” Meanwhile, Greg Anrig, Jr. responds to an editorial in the American Prospect, and Kate Steadman is at odds with Jeff Cruz over in the Drug Bill Debacle. And finally, After the Levees gets an update from Boyd Blundell on the DNC’s spring meeting in New Orleans.

In the new issue of the American Prospect, editor Michael Tomasky has written a tour de force that tpmcafaholics will enjoy drinking up and discussing. In a nutshell, Michael argues that liberals and Democrats need to return to the idea of “the common good” as our central animating principle.

As he writes, “For many years – during their years of dominance and success, the period of the New Deal up through the first part of the Great Society – the Democrats practiced a brand of liberalism quite different from today’s. Yes, it certainly sought to expand both rights and prosperity. But it did something more: That liberalism was built around the idea -- the philosophical principle -- that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest. This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance -- not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens that they balance self-interest with common interest. Any rank-and-file liberal is a liberal because she or he somehow or another, through reading or experience or both, came to believe in this principle. And every leading Democrat became a Democrat because on some level, she or he believes this, too.”

Read more »

Peru is the latest Latin American country with a rising populist leader, joining a trend throughout the region, its most prominent example being Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But today's New York Times article has to rank as one of the most pathetic explanations of the fury from the impoverished masses in the streets.  Except for a phrase that people are "frustrated with Washington-backed economic prescriptions," the article completely ignores the US government's role in propping up dictators and using international institutions like the IMF and World Bank to transfer natural assets to giant multinationals at the expense of the people in the region. 

Read more »

I've been wondering for a while when the Democrats were going to realize that the Katrina disaster is a big fat pitch over the middle of the plate and knock the thing out of the park. Now the DNC has shown up in town for their spring meeting (and to gut a few houses), and we'll see whether they can generate a plan capitalize on the signature failure of the Bush administration. Some are blogging about their experience, and it will be interesting to watch their reactions to the city evolve over the weekend. It is an oddly important event. The 400 delgates are people who actually do things in the political arena. If exposure to the city enables them to generate a vision that connects relentlessly flogging the Republicans about the Katrina failure and creating positive political momentum for Democrats, then the chances of getting real and effective help for the city increases.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft says he's worse than Bush on the war in Iraq. Well, at least his headline writer says that.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with my co-blogger, Jeff Cruz, and say that we shouldn't be working to extend the deadline.

When you design public insurance programs, you must include ample incentives to encourage people to sign up, and ample penalties for not doing so. The first problem with Part D, unlike Medicare (and you can refer to my general primer on Medicare here), is that enrollment is opt-in, rather than opt-out. That makes it extremely difficult to get enough people enrolled to ensure community rating, or the participation of lots of healthy people to off-set the costs of the sick.

Healthy policy analysts have genuine concern for the long term viabiliy of this program. If mostly ill, high cost seniors sign up, insurers will reevaluate up the costs of their plans, and that can force people to stop paying, newly minted seniors not to enroll, and create a vicious cycle where the costs of the program get larger and larger.

Read more »

I'm glad to see Anne-Marie Slaughter wading into the fray over the "Israel Lobby" controversy, and at the risk of imperiling everyone's careers I'd like to see if anyone else here at this fine café can be persuaded to wade a bit deeper. As I think pretty much everyone agrees, the Walt/Mearsheimer causal analysis here is pretty oversimplified. We can also agree that their normative analysis of America's Israel policy stems from a realist point-of-view that liberals are disinclined to share (this comes at the end of Anne-Marie's post). Nevertheless, I'm curious as to views on the main policy question here -- granting that liberals are going to want to give Israel a "democracy bonus," is the current American level of aid to Israel really justifiable?

Israel, after all, is hardly the world's only democracy, but it gets substantially more money from the United States than does any other democracy. In pure liberal/idealist terms, wouldn't it make more sense to provide high levels of financial support to poor democracies rather than to a middle-income one? India? Costa Rica? South Africa? There's not a zero-sum foreign aid pool, of course, but it's still worth thinking about the logic of the situation -- it seems perfectly consistent to both think that we should "support" Israel's existence as a democracy and its national security concerns and also to recognize that it's hardly the world's most pressing charity case. We're talking about wealthy country with a top-notch military and a nuclear arsenal. If Israel is getting the appropriate level of aid for a country in those circumstances, we're shortchanging the world's poor democracies to an absurdly large degree.

This New York Times article seems to implicitly explain the strange delay in the release of the Social Security Trustees' Report this year. It seems that for a while now, Bush has been trying to re-appoint two trustees over the opposition of both Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus. Now, Bush has decided to just give the guys recess appointments. This hold-up, it seems, may have been delaying the report.

Other commenters have already indicated that they think something more than redistricting alone is going on. One useful point of comparison is with the UK, where elections are also decided by the plurality method but constituencies are drawn by non-political boundary commissions. Yet this system exhibits a similar phenomenon of mostly non-competitive seats and a high rate of incumbent return -- though not as high as Juliet documents for the House in the last couple of elections. Nevertheless, the comparison points to some fundamental forces at work beyond the drawing of district lines.

Read more »

Timothy Garton Ash's chilling tale of Iranian retaliation after a hypothetical US/UK military strike on Iran ends on a puzzling note: "But Dr Patrick Smith of the Washington-based Committee for a Better World, which had long advocated bombing Iran, demanded of the critics: 'What was your alternative?'"

My alternative would be, you know, not bombing Iran. I think there are various things we can and should try to do in order to convince Iran that it'd be better off not going down the nuclear road, but I really think war skeptics should reject the notion that we have an obligation to provide an air-tight alternative to war. It's quite possible that the sort of diplomatic efforts I would favor would fail. And if they fail, they fail, and we'll have to live with a nuclear Iran. That won't be good, but the fact that something would be bad is no reason to do something much worse.

Iraq’s prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said today that he will let Shiite leaders reconsider his nomination. Many leaders in and out of Iraq have been calling for Jaafari to step down as a first move toward unifying Iraq’s government and ending the insurgency. A meeting of the Iraqi parliament planned for today was postponed until Saturday.

President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao are meeting today at the White House to discuss America’s $202 billion trade deficit with China, which is blamed by some for the loss of nearly 3 million jobs in the US since 2001. Outside the White House, protesters gathered to demonstrate against China’s human rights policies.

Read more »

Tony Judt's piece in the New York Times today on the controversy over Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer's article on "the Israel Lobby" convinced me that it is time for us at America Abroad to join the discussion.

Walt and Mearsheimer's two opening paragraphs summarize their argument:

"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Read more »

I've been on the road all day in California, but I want to a) defend my book b) give an update on what's happening on the ground in congressional races and c) address some of the interesting points Mark made about McCain, which may only be tangentially related to Fight Club Politics, but he remains the politician journalists love to track.

Read more »

I can't pass up the debate on the
"real" John McCain. "http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-chait16apr16,1,103535.column?coll=la-util-op-ed"
TARGET="_self">Jon Chait, who zigs when others zag, makes a
pretty good case that John McCain can be considered a liberal or
moderate, based on some of his actions in the 2002-2003 period,
including having dinner with Tom Daschle and hinting that he might
switch parties. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias disagree in various
subtle ways over at TAPPED, and I made "http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=11285"
TARGET="_self">the argument against McCain in that magazine
last month. (I made The Prospect put the column on line before it
came out, because I could feel the "Oh my gosh, we thought he
was one of us, but he's really a right-wing Republican"
tide building.)

Now just to be clear, my position has been
specifically that McCain’s overall record makes him, as I put it,
"a worthy heir to Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat."

Read more »

I haven't read Fight Club Politics and I'm not officially "in" this week's book club but I did want to say something about the end of Mark Schmitt's remarks on the book where he worries about "Democrats . . . who became interested or involved in politics only in the last few galvanizing years." Unless I'm mistaken, Mark's talking 'bout my generation here. The concern is that we think "that an era of one-party absolute control will be or should be followed by another."

I think the "will be" and "should be" questions here need to be separated.

Read more »

Nigerian militants who have attacked oil installations and kidnapped foreign workers say that they won’t settle for a proposed bargain from President Olusegun Obasanjo.  Obasanjo has offered thousands of jobs and a new highway, but the militants say they want more local control of oil.  “We do not need any further mismanagement of the fast diminishing resources of our land,” said a statement from the group.

Oil hit a high of $74 a barrel today as tension over the U.S. dispute with Iran increases.  Meanwhile, stocks in U.S. gasoline dropped.  Speaking to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the U.S. would use  various means: “political, economic, and others” to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

Read more »

As Presidential candidates for 2008 already canvassing the hinterland, the debate about the direction foreign policy is to take after Bush has just started in earnest. A major turning point came when a leading public intellectual, Francis Fukuyama, broke ranks with his fellow neoconservatives in a kind of public spat reminiscent of the old fights between Stalinists and Trotskyites. In a recent New York Times Magazine essay entitled “After Neoconservatism” Fukuyama denounces the Bush foreign policy and calls on the to absorb a cardinal sociological lesson: history cannot be much accelerated, although one might here and there accord it a helping hand.

Read more »

Today at TPMCafe, Book Club author Juliet Eilperin has an excerpt from her book, Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives, and Larry Johnson takes a look at the Rumsfeld spin machine. America Abroad’s Ivo Daalder asks if war with Iran is inevitable and re-examines China’s role in a global political context. Jeffrey Lewis explains Iran’s P2 centrifuge research, and Matt Yglesias wants to know how many people work for the for-profit sector. Readers discuss Iran, the November races, and Yahoo.

I’ll be out for about a week for medical reasons. Paul Kiel will bring you "What's New" in my absence.

Juliet has written an engaging and informative account of the deterioration of relations between the parties in the House of Representatives over the last decade or more. It's a great read, informed by her experience covering Capitol Hill and her reporting for this volume. I agree with the thrust of her account and argument but would place a somewhat different emphasis on the roots of partisan polarization, the importance of redistricting, and the symmetry between the parties in pursing institutionally-harmful strategies of governance.

Read more »

Prevailing wage rates in India are, as we all know, much lower than in the United States. Ergo, offshore outsourcing, which, it seems, is now moving into the surrogate mothering field, where you can apparently rent a womb for the low, low price of 5,000 -- a mere fraction of what it would cost to pay an American to do the job.

The bad news is that in today's America a Veterans' Affairs employee can be charged with sedition for criticizing the president in a letter to the editor. The good news is that she beat the rap.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what Senator Stabenow has to say in regards to extending the deadline. Earlier today, Senators Nelson and Snowe submitted a letter signed by 46 of their colleagues to Senate Leader Frist calling on him to extend the deadline. With only a few more Senators we'll be able to pass of legistlation extending the deadline.

In the House, the Democrats are united but it will be vital to get some Republicans on board. We’ll see what Rep. Starks thinks the possibilities of this are.

When I'm talking about all Americans, I'm including Republicans.

Read more »

Read more »

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said today that he is resigning.  Bush said it would be hard to replace McClellan, adding, “One of these days, he and I are going to be rocking in chairs in Texas and talking about the good old days.”  An anonymous administration official said that Bush’s deputy chief of staff Karl Rove will be giving up his oversight on policy to focus on politics.  These changes comes on the heels of White House chief of staff Josh Bolton replacing Andy Card last month.  No replacement for McClellan has been announced.

Read more »

I mentioned The Wealth of Networks a few days ago and have been reading it since -- tons of thought-provoking stuff. One of the main themes that goes through the book is grounded in the simple observation that people do plenty of stuff other than work for financial gain. Some people play golf, others start blogs, some play poker, some write open-source software, some are in fantasy baseball leagues, whatever. A related point is that lots of stuff gets done by organizations that aren't for-profit companies -- you've got universities, foundations, The American Prospect, labor unions, fantasy baseball leagues, what have you. This raised a tangentially related question in my mind -- how many people actually do work in the for-profit sector? I couldn't quite figure it out with some quick web searching, but here's what I came up with.

Read more »

With the arrival of President Hu Jintao in the U.S. for his first (state or official) visit, it may be useful to take stock of what China’s rise portends for international politics and U.S. foreign policy. There can be little doubt that China’s rise is the defining feature of the first quarter of this century. In historic terms, it exceeds in strategic importance the rise of Germany, Soviet Russia, and Japan during the 20^th century and it is on a par with the rise of America in the late 19^th and early 29^th century.

But the global context within which China is rising is very different from the context that prevailed at the time of these earlier power transitions. The USA, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Japan rose to prominence in the Age of Geopolitics — an age in which the relative power of states was the key determinant of international politics, including of questions relating to war and peace. China’s rise occurs in a very different age — the Age of Global Politics — in which the power of states (both relative and absolute) is transformed by globalization. This essential difference has profound implications for how America should approach this newest power transition.

Read more »

Part of the information operation that Don Rumsfeld has executed against the American people includes the periodic briefings with select retired military personnel who, for the most part, are willing to carry the Administration's water and regurgitate talking points. In case you do not recall, Rummy used this forum in early 2003 to brief on the Iraqi "effort" to buy uranium in West Africa. This was recounted by retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis in an op-ed he wrote shortly before the President's State of the Union. Please note that even though the intelligence community was telling Don Rumsfeld and other policymakers that the Iraqi/Niger info was bogus and baseless, Rummy pressed ahead and used this gathering of military officers as a tool to spread disinformation.

Pat Lang, friend and mentor, has posted his experience with this crowd. It is worth a read:

Pentagon Pow Wow
Pat Lang
A couple of years ago I was in London on business and received a phone call from the Pentagon. On the line was a woman from the PR branch of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She had been trying to reach me for a couple of days. In those days I was doing a lot of television interviews. I have since stopped doing that.

Read more »

Actually, the move by the NRCC in Ohio plays into one of Fight Club Politics' major themes.

Read more »

A couple of news organizations -- I am looking at you, New York Times and the Associated Press -- have gotten all hot and bothered over a parenthetical reference to Iran's research on the P2 centrifuge -- a more advanced model than Iran currently operates.

The New York Times quoted a Bush Administration official describing the revelation as "the first time I've ever heard the Iranians admit" to a significant effort on the P2 centrifuge, adding that Iran "has never come clean on this program, and now its president is talking about it." AP reported the "assertion is sure to raise concerns that Iran might have a more sophisticated atomic program than had been believed," raising the specter of a undetected, secret Iranian program.

These news organizations bit the spin -- Iran's research on the P2 was probably disclosed in Iran's additional protocol declarations -- and missed the real story about the IAEA Additional Protocol: What it is, why it is important and what it means for negotiations with Iran.

Read more »

The emerging consensus in Washington and the blogosphere (including here at TPM Café) appears to be that war with Iran is just a matter of time. There are plenty of good reasons to think the consensus is right. Some within the administration having been gunning for Tehran ever since Saddam Hussein was ousted from office three years ago. “Take a number,” was the advice one senior administration official (sounding suspiciously like John Bolton) offered Iran at the time. And the drumbeat for war with Iran has continued off and on ever since. With Tehran’s proud pronouncements about its nuclear achievements and the publication of Sy Hersh’s article last week, the beat of late has become particularly strong.

But is war with Iran inevitable? I’m not so sure. And the main reason I’m not is that the circumstances that enabled Bush to go to war three years ago are now pointing in the opposite direction. That doesn’t mean Bush won’t decide to launch an attack, but it does mean that he faces many obstacles along the way to that decision — obstacles that are bound to get larger rather than smaller over time.

Read more »

Contra John Bolton and the administration’s recent calls for punitive measures on Iran due to its non-compliance with a U.N. Security Council Resolution, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on the U.S. to dialogue with Iran as a means to reign in the confrontational rhetorical exchanges of late. Joined on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” by his colleague Sen. Evan Byah (D-IN), Lugar voiced support for direct talks on a range of regional energy and security issues, in step with former administration officials from the State Department, Undersecretary Richard Armitage and the former director of policy planning, Richard Haass.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Should there be direct talks with Iran now?

LUGAR: I think that would be useful, and I think furthermore, direct talks with Russia and with China with regard to their activities in the Security Council, with other members of the council. I've mentioned earlier tidying up the situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, thinking through energy developments long before we get to crucial moments in Iran. The Iranians are a part of the energy picture. Clearly their ties with India and with China quite apart from others are really critical to all the above. We need to talk about that. Maybe we need to focus our attention less right now on the centrifuges than on how power is going to come - how energy power, at least through nuclear, is going to come to all of these countries in some more satisfying way. Furthermore we have an agenda with Iran to talk about as far as their interference in Iraq. And there are issues there in which ironically we may come out on the same side with some of the Iranians. 

Swimming against this recent tide in defense of Bolton and the administration’s position, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute argues against direct talks, instead favoring immediate sanctions en route to possible military strikes. Rubin’s piece boils down to four arguments: 1) direct talks have failed with North Korea; 2) dealing with an illegitimate government forecloses on possibilities for a popular uprising; 3) negotiations with Iran have empirically backfired; and 4) a military strike, accompanied by its consequences, would still be preferable to a nuclear-armed Iran. I think there is a compelling case to be made that Rubin is wrong on all four counts and Sen. Lugar in fact has the right idea of directly engaging Iran.

Read more »

With less then a month to go, the time to extend the May 15th Part D deadline is now. Under the current law, after the May 15th deadline the millions of seniors who haven’t signed up for a private plan will be hit with a minimum 7% lifetime penalty known as the “Medicare complexity tax.”

My organization is part of the coalition of groups calling on Congress to extend this deadline. We are hosting a conference call to discuss the campaign to extend the deadline with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) on Wednesday, April 19th at 12:00 noon EST. I want to invite all of the TPM Cafe Drug Bill Debacle readers to RSVP, listen to the live webcast and email any questions they might have by clicking here.

Read more »

Some months ago, Ivo Daalder and Lee Feinstein squared off against Anne-Marie Slaughter and me with they applauding and we criticizing John Bolton for his stance and politicking during the U.N. Human Rights Council debate.

I am now going to applaud a more enlightened Republican-led effort than anything John Bolton might be associated with and offer some support for a new initiative that the press has yet to catch under the direction of Condoleezza Rice's lawyer, John Bellinger.

Read more »

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a press briefing today that he does not plan to resign.  In recent weeks, seven retired generals have publicly called on Rumsfeld to resign.  Earlier today in the White House Rose Garden, Bush told reporters that he plans to keep Rumsfeld in the position, “I’m the decider and I decide what’s best.”

Bush also said today that “all options are on the table” with regard to halting Iran’s nuclear program.  Meanwhile, diplomats from the members nations of the UN Security Council and Germany, met in Moscow to plan the next step.  Russia and China, which have closer ties with Iran, are reluctant to place sanctions on Iran.

Read more »

As to the core perniciousness of the Euston manifesto let me merely quote this from the end of Part C:

Read more »

You can read Euston manifesto bashing elsewhere, and it's almost all warranted. Nevertheless, they do have a neat statement on intellectual property:

As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature.

Read more »

Today at TPMCafe, the Book Club discussion about Juliet Eilperin’s Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives continues with new posts from Mark Schmitt and Juliet. Greg Anrig gives us another reason to be skeptical of both Harvard and the WSJ op-ed page. Also, America Abroad’s Ivo Daalder considers new European restrictions on civil liberties, and Michael Levi responds to Jeffrey Lewis’s post about mounting tension between Iran and the US. Matt Yglesias tells us about some good books he’s been reading, and Jo-Ann Mort applauds the peace efforts of Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters. Joshua Hudelson has the news of the day here, and readers are talking about Rusmfeld and the generals and Al Gore’s new film.

It's hard to offer anything save tepid support to Wal-Mart's "generous" extension of health benefits to its part time workforce. For the average Wal-Mart "team member" (or associate, or whatever this week's consultant jargon is) who works 24 hours a week and makes around $10,000 a year, a $3,000 deductible not, shall we say, feasible. Indeed, such folks are, if they qualify, far better off going on Medicaid, which offers better benefits at a lower cost, than Wal-Mart's insurance. Were Medicaid a better program that simply covered folks up to 250% of the poverty line and then subsidized on a sliding scale up to 350%, the choice would be easy. As it is, many Wal-Mart employees probably don't fall into Medicaid's weird categories, or don't know they do, so this might be a minor improvement for them. Yippee, the corporate welfare state proves its worth once again.

It's time to scrap this thing, folks.

Read more »

I don't think anyone would say that greed is not a problem in Congress, as we can see from the guilty pleas recently entered by Duke Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon and Tony Rudy in federal court.

Read more »

If you want to understand the how the Bush administration can score political points while taking a minimalist approach to the crisis in Darfur, observe how the press reacts to Ambassador John Bolton’s forthcoming disclosure of the names of four individuals slated for Security Council sanctions for their role in the atrocities there. As I write, the Security Council is discussing these sanctions, and by disclosing these names Bolton is trying to force Russia and China into going public with their objections. Says Bolton today, "These are people who are involved in atrocities and killing people and turning people into refugees."

Read more »

Yes, Newt Gingrich recently revived the idea of insisting fundraisers only happen outside of D.C.

Read more »

Today Harvard economist George J. Borjas declares himself the victor in a debate that’s actually far from settled about the impact of immigration on wages. In a disingenuous Wall Street Journal op-ed, he writes: “Recent research has finally begun to demolish the peculiar (yet influential) notion that an influx of more than 16 million foreign-born workers, which increased the size of the workforce by 15 percent (from 1980 to 2000), had little impact on wages.” Borjas then goes on to explain how his own widely cited research with Lawrence Katz found that in the short-run, wages of high school dropouts fell by 8.2 percent due to immigration and, in the proverbial long-run, 4.8 percent.

But the Borjas and Katz research is by no means the only respectable work exploring  the question, which poses enormously difficult research challenges. Brad DeLong has a nice summary and analysis of the longstanding methodological debate between Borjas and Katz and Berkeley’s David Card, whose work has found a “surprisingly weak relationship between immigration and less-skilled wages.”  

Read more »

Maybe they think their new banking scheme will pay for this:

Wal-Mart Stores said today it will relax eligibility requirements for part-time employees who want health insurance, allowing an additional 150,000 workers to gain coverage if they choose.

Until now, the employees have had to work for Wal-Mart for two years to qualify for employer-sponsored insurance. Beginning next month, they will have to work at the company for one. The coverage also will extend to their children.

Read more »

To begin with, I want to congratulate Juliet Eilperin on an insightful, well-reported, very well written and engaging book on a topic of enormous importance. While issues such as partisanship and civility within a single political institution may seem purely procedural and abstract, relevant only to those involved, they are in fact deeply relevant to all the matters of substance - taxes, health care, foreign policy - we care about.

I’ll make some modestly critical points about the book, but first, I want to identify two points in Eilperin’s argument that were generally persuasive to me, or at least lifted some of my skepticism.

Read more »

When I diavlogged with Amy Sullivan, I said I thought the San Antonio Spurs would repeat as NBA champions over the favored Detroit Pistons, but looking back I don't think I made the strongest argument.

Read more »

President Bush announced today that he will nominate US Trade Representative Rob Portman to be head of the Office of Management and Budget.  “He’ll be a powerful voice for pro-growth policies and spending restraint,” said Bush.  If confirmed, Portman will take the position formerly held by Joshua Bolten, now the White House chief of staff.

An attack against Iran will be dealt with by “cutting off the hand of the aggressor,” according to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, responding to reports last week that the US was considering military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program.  The UN Security Council and Germany plan to meet in Moscow to discuss the situation.

Read more »

I continue to think both that it's too early to think about 2008, and that Al Gore should run in 2008. David Remnick's article on Gore and Ezra Klein's rather different article on Gore both make me feel that way. Sadly, he's apparently not running.

On the same day that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority applauded a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed at least 9 people, Roger Waters--the cofounder of Pink Floyd--announced that he would move his scheduled June 22 concert from North Tel Aviv's Hayarkon Park to the bucolic Neve Shalom village outside of Jerusalem. Neve Shalom is an experiment in Israeli living, populated by both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.

Waters did this in response to those Palestinian activists who criticized him for performing in Israel at all, especially since he has been an outspoken critic of the wall/fence that Israel is building (largely as a reaction to the suicide bombings). Waters should perform in Israel and feel free to express his political views while he's there--and when he leaves. His fans would expect nothing less.

Read more »

Sometimes people send me free copies of books, so I feel it's my duty to recommend them when they turn out to be good in order to keep the flow flowing. This past weekend saw me finish two good ones, Tyler Cowen's Good and Plenty: The Creative Success of American Arts Funding and Jeff Faux's The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future -- And What It Will Take To Win It Back.

Read more »

If you believe the popular press, we Americans now see our homes as investments more than ever before. And when ordinary Americans invest, it's mostly for retirement. Add that up, and it means that many of us are looking to our homes to provide retirement security.

Read more »

The Times reported yesterday that Europeans are putting new restrictions on civil liberties to combat terror. The president's supporters are sure to greet this as yet more evidence of European hypocrisy for criticizing America's secret prisons and extraordinary renditions as well as more reason to justify the many efforts to curtail our freedom at home.

There's just one difference, which The Times failed to point out: While in Europe the new restrictions on civil liberties are openly legislated by elected parliaments and assemblies, here the most drastic changes — from setting up military tribunals and holding people without charge for years to extraordinary renditions and warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States — have been the result of executive fiat.

In one case we see the rule of law; in the other the rule of potentates.

Kudos to Nicholas Kristof on winning the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. The award was given, as stated in the Pulitzer citation, “for his graphic, deeply reported columns that, at personal risk, focused attention on genocide in Darfur and that gave voice to the voiceless in other parts of the world.” For all the vows that “never again” would there be another genocide, the reality has been “yet again”. The legal and political particulars of the term genocide and its application to this or that case can continue to be debated. For accuracy we may need to speak in some cases “only” of ethnic cleansing, mass killings, deadly conflict, humanitarian emergencies, and the like. The reality remains that millions of people have continued to be killed, maimed, raped, displaced and otherwise victimized while the international community --- the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, China and others --- has continued too often to do too little too late.

Read more »

So I want to just comment on a few interesting things he wrote about the book.

Read more »

Catching up on a few comments, let's discuss Hoover, redistricting reform and other issues.

Read more »

Martin Peretz notes that Iran's $50 million appropriation for the new Hamasified Palestinian Authority is actually quite stingy in the scheme of things: "Europe has suspended its $600 million annual subvention, as the United States has cancelled its $400 million yearly subsidy. Iran has just not stepped up to the plate." Quite so, and quite expected. As I well remember from the talking points I was taught back in Hebrew school, Israel's regional adversaries talk a big game about Palestine but have shown virtually no inclination to do anything especially since the Yom Kippur War (the classic example is the deplorable treatment Palestinian refugees and their descendants have received from their erstwhile hosts).

That observation could lead in various directions, but it's worth recalling that this is all taking place at a time when many prominent people are asking us to take seriously the notion that the Iranian government would court the total destruction of Iran and the death of its entire population in order to strike at Israel. But when the Palestinian Authority gets taken over by radicals and needs to make up a billion dollar shortfall in funds, Teheran comes up with . . . fifty million bucks. Think about that for a little while. National suicide is not on the agenda. As Michael Levi points out, Iran has perfectly non-crazy grounds for its nuclear aspirations.

Jeff Lewis finds a “bright side” to recent developments in Iran, claiming that they may offer “a face-saving way to accept a negotiated compromise.” But he effectively ignores the core of the nuclear problem.

Read more »

An op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal today defends Secretary Donald Rumsfeld  by claiming that his critics “do not understand the true nature of this radical ideology, Islamic extremism.”  The piece was authored by four retired generals.  Last week, six retired generals publicly called for Rumsfeld’s resignation.

A witness in the defense portion of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui said that Moussaoui’s family has a history of mental illness.  Jan Vogelsan, a clinical social worker, also said that Moussaoui’s life was fraught with violence and abandonment since an early age.  Moussaoui’s lawyers are arguing that their client, who is accused of hindering federal security agents from preventing the 9/11 attacks, should receive life in prison, rather than a death sentence. 

Read more »

Looking for a bright side to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim that Iran has achieved "uranium with the desired enrichment for nuclear power plants" on Apirl 9, 2006 (that's the 20th of Farvardin, 1385 for you old school types)?

One possible upside is that Ahmadinejad's claim that "Iran has joined the nuclear countries of the world" offers a face saving way to accept a negotiated compromise -- not that either Tehran or West seems particularly interested in that right now.

Read more »

Today at TPMCafe, the Book Club discussion about Juliet Eilperin’s Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives has taken off. Mark Schmitt, Thomas Mann, Josh Marshall and others will be joining in later this week. Also at TPMCafe, Ernest Wilson and Steve Clemons examine the controversy surrounding Rumsfield and the Generals calling for his resignation, and Juliette Kayyem looks at Cheney’s daughter’s role in promoting democracy in Iran. Nathan Newman discusses what states can do to promote job growth, and Todd Gitlin wonders why the NYT editorial page has more news than the actual newsroom. Joshua Hudelson has the day’s news, and readers discuss today’s guilty verdict against the former governor of Illinois and religion maps. 

[Part of the problem with the immigration debate is the assumption that we are trapped in a zero-sum supply of jobs, where any jobs for one group means less for others -- instead of talking how to expand good jobs throughout the economy, so here's a repost on that topic from today's PLAN Stateside Dispatch.-- NN]

How do states encourage job growth? For too long, the answer by many state governments had been to hand out fat tax subsidy checks to corporations with little accountability and with little for the taxpayer to show at the end of the day.

But that's changing. States are increasingly taking a more active approach to job creation and becoming direct investors in job growth. When states invest funds directly, the returns on those investments come back to the taxpayer for reinvestment in new ventures, whether for technological innovation or revitalization of previously abandoned communities.

In an age when progressives are asked to answer the question of how their policies can create new jobs and new opportunities, these programs provide at least one large answer.

Read more »

Retired Marine Lt. General Michael DeLong published a significant retort to the growing league of generals calling for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign. The piece titled "A General Misunderstanding" ran in the New York Times over the weekend as well as the International Herald Tribune today.

Read more »

But it will be hard to convince the people in power to give up power, as Rep. John Tanner (D-Tenn.) likes to say.

Read more »

Much has been made recently about Elizabeth Cheney's (the lesser known daughter of the VP) position as Deputy Assistant Secreatry of State for Near Eastern affairs. In that role, she is in charge of spending the 85 million (up from 10 million last year) dollars to promote democracy in Iran.

She is described as being different than her father, and I'm not exactly sure what that means. Her last name remains the same, and one might expect that her influence exceeds her title simply because of fears from those who might disagree with her that she has the ear of the VP. Since there is no love lost between the State Department and the VP's office, her presence may be in fact beneficial in promoting more diplomatic responses to all the fear (mongering) about Iran.

But, we seem to be missing the story if we just focus on Cheney herself. What's more important is how the money is getting spent and the impact that will have in Iran.

Read more »

It's true that the two parties tend to dominate politics on the local and state level, as well as the federal level.

Read more »

P., you make a good point about one state reforming its system while the others stick with rigged congressional maps.

Read more »

For the past week or so the Bush administration has suffered incoming firepower from an unusual source – very critical, highly visible salvos lobbed at the Pentagon by retired senior military officers. They are especially angry at Rumsfeld and Co. at the Defense Department. These are critiques the Democrats should take on board, but with a big caveat.

Read more »

Just after the November 2004 election, I got an offer I couldn't refuse.

A senior fellow from Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the libertarian think tank, made a proposal over a nice Italian meal in Washington D.C. How about writing an uncensored book about the House of Representatives?

At that point I thought I was done with Congress. I had spent nearly a third of my life covering the House, starting right before the Republicans took control of the place in 1994. It had become a bitter, dysfunctional institution, and I had decided in the spring of 2004 to switch to the environmental beat at The Washington Post (a subject that can be depressing in its own way, of course, but in a different sense, and with the allure of interesting travel). I had my fill of Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as a dutiful member of the mainstream media, and I was moving on.

Read more »

Eight people were killed and 60 were wounded in Tel Aviv, Israel, today by a Palestinian suicide bomber.  The explosion occurred outside a fast food and is the first suicide attack since Hamas took power just over two weeks ago.

Nepalese soldiers opened fire on a crowd protesting the country’s royal dictatorship, killing one person and wounding five.  This marks the fifth death in a series of attacks on protesters in recent days.

Read more »

Belle Waring writes:

You should really read the Vodkapundit post and accompanying thread. He says you’ll need a drink, and the man is not kidding at all. The story he links to takes grave misreadings of Thucydides to a whole new level, a category in which the competition is stiff. He’s sure to win this year’s coveted “Golden Hanson”. The trophy features a stern VDH uprooting an olive tree with one hand and hitting himself repeatedly on the head with an axe handle with the other.

Read more »

Once more the NYT editorial page is doing indispensable work. It happens to be work left undone by the news pages.

The breakthrough today comes from editorial boad member Adam Cohen, who writes an "editorial observer" piece on the hanky-panky involving Republican goon James Tobin, convicted in December for tying up phone-bank lines of New Hampshire's Democrats in 2002.

Readers of Josh's motherblog have known all about the Tobin case for months (most recently, here). Until this morning, readers of the NYT knew only this 106-word AP dispatch last December, noting that Tobin was convicted by a jury.

Cohen notes that the funders of Tobin's scheme for smashing up the 2002 senatorial election were Tom DeLay and...two Indian tribes. Hmm.

Read more »

Much has been written on The Warren Reports about bankruptcy legislation that has been passed under the guise of curbing purported abuse by consumers. As stories of unkept pension promises are splashed across the daily newspapers, one sadly realizes that the most disturbing abuses of the bankruptcy system have been left unaddressed and that the reforms that truly matter to middle class Americans have not yet been made.

Journalist Mark Reutter is an expert on corporate abuse of bankruptcy law. I asked him whether he would be willing to share his views on the flaws of Chapter 11 with The Warren Reports. He kindly submitted the thoughtful text below for our consideration.

Read more »

"Everybody wants change. At the same time, everybody does everything so that things don't change."

I could not help but think of New Orleans when I saw this quote in The New York Times from German economist Wolfgang Nowak. He was talking about the economies of major European countries but he could have been talking about the Big Easy.

Read more »

Like Max Sawicky, I have a kind of fondness for the environmentalist case for nuclear power, but I don't know that much about it. But Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, is on the nuclear bandwagon. Mark Kleiman, too. And see Michael Crowley's two posts on the subject. Basically, nuclear power seems to be the only realistic way to both combat global warming and keep generating lots of electricity.

UPDATE: Man, folks seem mad. And quite possibly I'm wrong about this, you'll note that I don't dedicate tons of time and energy to campaigning for nuclear power. The objection that nuclear is too expensive, however, seems unpersuasive. It's significantly more expensive than coal but the premise here is that we'd be using nuclear as one of several sources of electicity to replace the current reliance on fossile fuels (note that if we move substantially in the direction of electric or hydrogen cars to replace oil we're going to need a lot of additional energy). My understanding is that nuclear isn't more expensive than trying to replace coal entirely with wind and solar power (I think we're all for using more wind and solar power, though; it's a question of how far you can scale this up given that we're not going to cover the entire country with windmills) would be though if people have what they consider decisive rebuttals to this to write or link to I'm happy to read more.

I should say, I suppose, that my uncle, Paul Joskow, was on this nuclear power commission that MIT put together a couple of years ago that came up with some recommendations as to how and make this option safer and more cost-effective and endorsed the use of more nuclear power as one ingredient in a better overall energy policy.