The debate this year on illegal immigration has been fierce, with passionate advocates trading arguments on both sides. Perhaps one of the most common arguments is that immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, lead to higher crime rates. But what if this isn’t true? What if more immigrants actually lead to lower crime rates?
I'm not sure that the NYT edit page ought to be ahead of the Lefty Blogosphere in insisting on anti-corruption ethics reform from the new Congress, but that's the way it looks as of now.
Today I read Ken Auletta’s New Yorker profile of Lou Dobbs. The piece does a decent job tracing Dobbs’ transition from softball corporate anchor to hard-charging populist. Dobbs does spend a lot of time reporting on the plight of the middle class, and we’ve mentioned him before here at Warren Reports. To the extent that motivates elected officials, great. Personally, though, I’ve been troubled by Dobbs’ rhetoric for some time, and Auletta’s piece did little to allay my concerns.
Six days and the Gaza cease-fire is still holding.
No one can predict with any certainty what will happen tomorrow, let alone next week, but the possibility of continued calm is infinitely preferable to the certainty of violence.
“Freedom,” the administration frequently proclaimed a few years ago, “is on the march.” But that was then, this is now. Not only have the administration’s paragons of early democratic success — Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon — each descended into sectarian violence and civil war, but the very international forum that was to promote democracy, the rule of law, and press freedom throughout the Middle East and North Africa has become a joke.
With the Bolton nomination dead in the Senate, all's quiet on the Bolton front this week in Washington. Things will stay quiet until this Congress adjourns and Bolton's recess appointment officially expires.
So what happens next? What are the legal, political, and policy considerations for each of the Administration's options? Look below the fold to find out.
Bush’s war in Iraq has been repudiated, the midterm elections did this. There is now wide open intellectual space to debate America’s next foreign policy. Jackson Diehl made this point in his commentary on the Princeton Project in Monday’s Washington Post.
The debate now is really over how deeply flawed Bush foreign policy is. Is Bush failure primarily about Iraq or is it rooted more deeply in philosophy and grand strategy? And if the failure is about philosophy and grand strategy, is this an indictment only of neo-conservative ideas or of liberal internationalism itself?
Two groups are narrowing the critique. First, neo-conservatives are arguing that Bush failure is, well, because of Bush – incompetence and the failure to fully push their ideas. The debacle of today’s foreign policy does not discredit neo-conservatism – the ideas were never fully implemented. This is Bill Kristol's view, expressed last May: “Much of the U.S. government no longer believes in, and is no longer acting to enforce, the Bush doctrine. . . the United States of America is in retreat.” Soon it will be the weak-kneed Democratic congress that will also be implicated in Bush failure. Second, some liberal hawks who supported the war are also making a very limited critique. To be sure, the war itself is now seen as a mistake – certainly its conduct – but the general Bush orientation toward terrorism and the use of force is taken as essentially valid. Indeed, these liberals would say that the primary challenge for Democrats is to convince voters that they can “do national security” like Republicans can. This political imperative makes a thorough-going critique of Bush failure difficult -- and unwise.
But the flaws run deep.
Net Neutrality champion Ed Markey will take the reins of the House Telecom and Internet Subcommittee.
It didn't take long for the bigots to come after Rep.-Elect Keith Ellison (D-Minnesota). Ellison is an African-American and the first Muslim to be elected to Congress. Yesterday, Dennis Prager, the far-right Jewish talk-show host, attacked Ellison because the young Muslim wants to take his oath of office on a Quran and not on the Christian Bible.
Prager went ballistic, sayng “he should not be allowed to do so.” Prager said that "the Bible is America's holiest book. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress.”
I firmly believe that in the future, the person who doesn't dig deeply into this political moment will read the essays of Krugman and Sidney Blumenthal to find out "what it was all about". That is, that these two writers are going to be the "voice" of this political moment in the ears of people who live with the echos have died away. Krugman is an important thinker in his own right, and Sidney Blumenthal has, to my eye, a prose style that is to almost all other columnists what the iPod is to almost all other music players – a smoothness which is perfect in its uniqueness and unique because of its fluid perfection. His current column marks a milestone in his recent flowering into the spokesman of a coming era.
Is the wind blowing from a different direction on credit card issues? Today the Center for American Progress is hosting a program called “Who’s in Charge?” CAP doesn’t spend much time on lost causes; this is their second major event on consumer debt in less than six months.
The CAP event showcases strong, new voices in the consumer credit fights. CAP is also using the event to unveil an innovative idea to make credit safer for consumers using rating systems modeled on car safety systems. The people are terrific and the policy proposal is interesting, but what interests me most is whether middle class economic issues are beginning to take hold on the political agenda. Today a powerful senator, backed up by a professor and a GAO official presenting two pieces of solid research on credit cards, will be turning up the heat under the credit card issuers. A single conference won't spell the end of credit card influence, but it may signal that the climate for the card issues will not be so favorable in the future.
So let me get this straight. The President of the ostensibly most powerful country in the world travels halfway around the world to meet with the Prime Minister of a much less powerful country, indeed one on which the more powerful country has spent over $400 billion, for which it has lost almost 3000 lives, and in the name of which has been violating some of its own most basic tenets of democracy at home in the process --- and it's the leader of the weaker recipient country that snubs the more powerful patron's dinner invite?
There's a lot that's enmeshed here. One pattern that strikes me is another case of the United States over-committing to a state it considers a client state and falling into the "tail-wagging-the-dog" pattern of diplomacy. We think we have leverage over them, but they end up with more over us. Some past cases with their differences but with important lessons about our illusions about our leverage:
Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports on the Bush-Maliki press conference on the NYT site, but either she or her editor buries the lede. First comes 13 grafs of boilerplate about Bush slathering praise on Maliki, starting with:
President Bush today proclaimed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki "the right guy for Iraq," and said the two had agreed to speed the turnover of security responsibility from American to Iraqi forces.
Eventually, the news arrives:
Still, tensions seemed to bubble just under the surface. The two leaders barely looked at one another during the news conference. And when Mr. Bush, at one point, asked the prime minister if he wanted to continue taking questions from reporters, the prime minister swiveled his head toward the president and shot Mr. Bush an incredulous look.
"We said six questions, now this is the seventh – this is the eighth – eight questions," Mr. Maliki said.
The following article is good for a holiday chuckle: Credit Card Appeal: A New Look, Smell. Besides the obvious humor (note the quote calling the AMEX Blue card "sexy"), I confess that I was pleased to read this story. Not that I'm excited for my new titanium "plunk factor" or lemon-scented credit card; to the contrary, the idea is ridiculous. There is, however, something to be said for good, old-fashioned marketing competition in an industry that's dominated by contract trickery and well-concealed traps. If someone gets duped into a high-APR, high-fee debt situation based on their uncontrollable attraction to Battlestar Galactica products, well, that might be just a little easier to accept than a 0% promo APR that disappears after six weeks due to an unexpected "change in terms." So have at it, Citibank, and welcome to the realm of the absurd. I only have one lingering question: how long before you partner up and give the world a $400 gold-colored credit card with a brand-name stamp?
If Tom Friedman's famous choice, in NYT today, were the real choice presented to the President, it would be ridiculed right out of the Oval Office. Neither option is plausible. There aren't 150,000 more troops and no President conceivably could announce that the United States intended to stay a decade. Indeed, nothing could be more likely to increase the intensity of the civil war in Iraq than such an announcement.
The Louisiana Recovery Authority’s (LRA) most recent population estimates for Katrina-affected parishes (i.e., counties) are in dispute as parish officials jockey for government rebuilding funds. The LRA puts New Orleans’s population at 200,000, about forty percent of its pre-storm make-up. Mayor Ray Nagin disagrees, and it's feasible that a large invisible population exists in an urban world so tenuous as in parts of his city. A recent survey on the quality of life of New Orleanians indicates that one-third of interviewees are considering moving in the coming two years.
As commentators with impoverished imaginations plunder historical memory and mythology in search of easy analogies for Iraq, there arrives in this morning's Washington Post a pungent reminder of why such exercises should be ditched in the interest of real-time, reality-based imagination. There, Harold Meyerson makes the pungent point that
the parallels to Vietnam are way too optimistic. In Vietnam, at least the United States could identify a government and some genuinely anti-communist constituencies with which it was plainly allied. But with whom do we stand, and who stands with us, in Iraq?
Even as millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans were dying, there was a certain starkness to that terrible warfare. There was, in the language of the time, a puppet government vs. an insurgency with major support from a well-organized army. Today, it’s obvious that instead of a puppet there’s a whole puppet show—Punch and Judy, but with an unsupporting cast of thousands. All the strings are knotted. If you're looking for an analogy, it looks a hell of a lot more like Somalia than Vietnam. (Commenter Terry Hallinan, below, is dead right.)
There are many interesting things in the Hadley Memo that the New York Times unearthed about how to deal with Maliki — not least the continuing belief that, despite all the violence and other evidence to the contrary, the authors still believe there are a sufficient number of moderate Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish forces in Iraq to build a winning coalition of political and military power. But what caught my eye most was the assertion that the Iraqi prime minister might have a mistaken view of what was actually happening in his country: “The information he receives is undoubtedly skewed by his small circle of Dawa advisers, coloring his actions and interpretation of reality.”
At a panel discussion this morning about the pending Supreme Court case on school integration, Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the conservative movement’s “Center for Equal Opportunity,” (sic) began straight from page one of the right’s playbook. Referring to research on what happens when low-income minority children attend schools with middle-class whites, Clegg said, “You can find social scientists on both sides of most issues.” Even when the vast preponderance of social science evidence points in one direction, as in the case of the clear-cut benefits to poor African-American and Hispanic kids enrolled in middle-class white schools, Clegg is right. There are indeed academics who dispute what the research clearly shows. And for that, as on so many other issues, he and his movement can thank the Olin, Bradley, Scaife, and Koch Foundations.
It’s getting down to the end of this Congressional session, and any number of commentators are bemoaning the fact that telecom legislation has been stuffed, in large part, due to the opposition of those favoring Net Neutrality.
That’s fine. The bills that were up for consideration this year had some good things, but tremendous flaws as well, and shouldn’t have been considered in a hurry. At the same time, though, we shouldn’t rush to any conclusions about how the issue will play out next year, when the Democrats take over Congress. Some people are saying the Bell companies won’t want to pursue telecom legislation because they will work through the states to get what they want. Others are saying that Net Neutrality, the idea that telephone and cable companies can’t make special deals to favor transmission of some content over other content, will have a great chance next year with the Democrats in charge.
The best prediction is somewhere in the middle, in part because some of the factors involved aren’t yet known and in part because some of the old politics is still in play.
There's a dirty little secret in the mortgage industry called a yield spread premium (or "YSP".) Basically, a YSP is a kickback for the mortgage broker - one he earns by upselling you. Say you qualify for a thirty year $100,000 mortgage at 7%. If the broker can sell you the mortgage for 7.5% instead, he gets a tidy payout from the mortgage lender - at 10%, an even juicier one. Conveniently, brokers have no legal obligation to disclose the YSP to borrowers. So the mortgage company ups its profits, the broker takes his cut, and the homeowner gets equity-stripped.
It is a crime that Pat Lang was not named to the Iraq Survey Group. Here's a man who established the Arabic program at West Point, who served as Defense Attache in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and who headed the Middle East Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency. There are few people in the world who know the region better than Pat. Oh well, our loss. Anyway, check out the latest post from Pat.
Senator McCain, AEI and a lot of other interested parties are now advocating a medium to large troop increase in Iraq to take more aggressive action, have a greater US presence and secure large parts of the country long enough to create effective security forces. Numbers suggested range from 50,000 to 250,000 as increases in the number of combatants we should send into Iraq. Some people are plainly advocating a policy of annihilation against the Shia militia armies. Others want to re-take Anbar Province. Others just seem to want more "street presence." Abizeid wants more US advisers (he has a euphemism) with small units. A lot of people have a variety of proposed uses for a "troop increase." Would any or all of these measures change the ultimate result? They might if the US persisted long enough. How long? Another 5 to 10 years probably would be my guess.
In any event, I will venture the thought that almost all of those talking about this do not understand the facts of the matter, the time, numbers, structures part of the problem.
It's the issue churning the political waters. Who should chair the House intel committee in the new Congress? Current ranking member Jane Harman (D-CA), next in line in seniority Alcee Hastings (D-FL) or someone else entirely. Let us know what you think. And, of course, play nice ;-)
>Matthew King is the little fellow who was born with a serious heart problem. He has endured aggressive surgeries, but that doesn’t keep him down. He is a lively little boy with a beautiful smile.
The Chattering Class has focused much of their post-election commentary on the political implications of the Democrats’ Congressional takeover. Policy discussions have understandably focused on our presence in Iraq. Domestic policy, however, has received little attention. While the war certainly played a starring role in driving the mid-term results, domestic economic issues were by no means unimportant. According to a Democracy Corps post-election analysis, 75% put “changing our economic policies so middle class families can prosper again” in their top-three most important issues when voting or considering voting for a Democratic candidate in this month’s elections. “Getting us out of the mess in Iraq” had the same score, suggesting that many voters view the nation’s domestic economic woes as a problem on par with the entanglement in Iraq.
The first domestic social policy on the Democrats’ 100 Hours Agenda is a hike in the minimum wage, from its current $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour. Democrats are right to put the minimum wage at the top of their list, but not for the reasons many advocates and supporters believe. While policy makers and advocates for low-wage workers argue that the hike in the minimum wage will improve the lives of workers – nearly 15 million, according to Speaker-Elect Pelosi – the economic impact will likely be modest. The pay-off to successful passage of a minimum wage increase is a political prize, not an economic one. In other words, the economic impact of a federal minimum wage increase is likely to be minor compared to the popular good-will Democrats are likely to inspire.
The Progressive States Network today rolled out its legislative agenda for the 2007 session and is looking to promote it to the netroots and get activists to sign up as "citizen cosponsors."
Folks who sign up in each state will have a key role in making sure legislative bills pass -- by working with legislators and raising the profile of agenda items in the media. You can see the list of organizations signed up on task forces to help coordinate legislative campaigns in the states and provide the expertise and firepower to take on rightwing opposition.
Below the fold is the email we sent out to supporters today outlining the issues and strategy behind the agenda.
In his first graph, Matt says the job of EPI and economic populists is to scare the rich into endorsing "Hamilton-style technocratic tinkering." This is not a good start. Speaking for myself, not necessarily for anyone at EPI, I don't really look forward to more Clintonoid policies. It's not that they are too small. It's a difference of kind, not degree.
The converse is more to the point: the Clintons are making careers out of triangulation -- using caricatures of leftist bogeymen to advance their own rotten agenda. What is that agenda? Kiss the arse of Wall Street to secure political power. On the domestic side we have Gene Sperling's "pro-growth progressive" spiel (sic); in foreign policy, it's Peter Beinart "doughface" canard. David Ignatius of the Post says that Democrats under the leadership of the Hamilton Project (i.e., Robert Rubin) should harness populist rage on behalf of "budget-balancing entitlement reform." Daily Kos chief economist Stirling Newberry says populists have good hearts but dumb thoughts. Get the picture?
Robert Fink, UCLA musicologist, calls the late 20th century the "Culture of Repetition", ably reviewed at Amsteg. Now, however, we are leaving this phase - though the traits that he hallmarks as part of it will be with us for some time. The whole book is published by the University of California Press.
Instead we are now in the culture of "depetition". What does this mean? In English we create words out of bases and prefixes. repeat is very old in English, and petition a perfectly good base. We engage in repetition when we entreat, attack or ask again. We are depeating when we fall from a goal, or ask to give back what we prayed for.
From L.Uchitelle, NYTimes:
With the Democrats having won a majority in Congress, and disquiet over globalization growing, a party faction that has been powerless — the economic populists — is emerging and strongly promoting an alternative to Rubinomics.
The populists argue that the national income has flowed disproportionately into corporate coffers and the nation’s wealthiest households, and that the imbalance has grown worse in recent years. They want to rethink America’s role in the global economy. They would intervene in markets and regulate them much more than the Rubinites would. For a start, they would declare a moratorium on new trade agreements until clauses were included that would, for example, restrict layoffs and protect incomes.
But once "they" are labelled "populists" the policy debate is prejudiced against them. Once they are labelled 'regulators" they have to carry another albatross. Once they are designated as against free trade, still another burden must be borne.
The New York Times Magazine takes up the many children “still left behind” in its Sunday cover story. The Times piece contrasts the success of the increasingly famous KIPP schools with the slow (or non-existent) progress under NCLB, and concludes that we do have the ability to break the link between family poverty and achievement, but that it will require a greater investment than we have been willing to devote thus far. As someone who is writing a book on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I think the piece has a lot to recommend it, but making the exception the rule will be much more difficult than the story lets on.
You're forgiven if you had failed to notice this, but the original reason for Bush's trip abroad this week was to meet up with the 25 other NATO leaders of the Alliance for a biannual summit meeting in Riga, Latvia. As James Goldgeier and I argue in a piece that appears in a number of European newspapers this morning, the reason for this summit occurring largely unnoticed are that key leaders assembling in Riga are political lame-ducks, NATO is confronting growing difficulties in stabilizing Afghanistan, and the allies have failed to adapt to the new realities of a globalized world. (On this last point, see our earlier piece here.)
Read more below the fold.
It's often thought inconceivable that a party's nominee for vice president could be from the other party. The reasons are: that slot is used to reward party factions not delighted by the presidential nominee; the slot is thought to lead to a nomination for president in the future, so it must be given to one of the party's own members; it would be difficult for a vice president from the opposing party to operate successfully in the White House; the person might be an enemy within, politically speaking.
And so conventional thinking goes. But in fact if Republican Colin Powell had been willing to run as Al Gore's vice presidential nominee, not only would President Gore have been sworn in -- since Powell would have added a million votes nationally and certainly more than 500 in Florida to the D ticket -- but also the Gore Administration would have handled the country's challenges in a vastly different and superior manner, focussing on building a centrist approach to the Arab world, global warming, income inequality, and the rising business challenge from China.
Powell now would be able to change parties and run as a centrist Democrat and win the party's nomination for President. Of course, he could not run as a Republican, since they do not welcome apostates, but of course history shows he did not feel he could do that in any case.
In 2008, any Democratic presidential nominee would be lucky to have Republican Senator Chuck Hagel agree to run as the vice president on his or her ticket. On many social issues he is far more conservative than most Democrats but his fiscal and foreign policy views are intelligent, moral, and courageous. He not only showed immense personal courage fighting in Vietnam, but also has developed a deep understanding of security matters since then.
Of course the Republicans should want him to be their Presidential nominee, but Americans should not expect to see such wisdom on the part of the party formerly known as the "majority."
In any event, the likely Democratic nominees for President may well want a military man as vice president.
A Lévy flight is a random walk where the size of the steps has an infinite variation – they can be small, and tend to be, but there is no limit to how large they can become, and while large steps get smaller and smaller in frequency, they never die out - and where the amount of time between steps is not related to distance. This is the property known as having a heavy tail, and many mathematicians distinguish flights from walks by saying that walks have steps whose time taken is in proportion to the distance travelled.
Congratulations to the LAT's Matt Welch for this morning's penetrating column on John McCain. No, it's not exactly pioneering to write about the ever camera-ready Arizonan now saddling up to gallop in from the West to rescue the rotten hulk of the Republican Party. But Welch has the audacity to write about...McCain's views! Imagine, the Senator has notions about the country! He's not just a straight shooter with an adorable face!
Welch writes rightly:
You can read 1,000 profiles of GOP presidential front-runner John McCain without encountering a single paragraph examining his core ideological philosophy....
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 David Sirota: Wither the Autocratic Progressives? |
 Jared Bernstein: Uprisings: Bottom Up and Top Down |
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