I'm afraid Democratic candidates are going to need to take account of the increasing turmoil across Asia. The list of spots growing ever hotter now includes Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Lebanon, West Bank, and Gaza. Egypt is perhaps close to a place on this bad list.
Under these circumstances, the United States needs to be prepared for a variety of unpredictable developments. Although I cannot imagine any
Just go to the link to read this. Even I, so quick to comment on the censorship of views the pro Likud right does not like, can't find the words for this.
Is there a single other issue that brings on this type of reaction. Think about it. You can write an article calling the President of the United States a fool or a war criminal and so what.
But challenge the CW on the Middle East and academe quakes.
Truly sickening.
For the past several years, Utah has had the dubious distinction of having one of the highest bankruptcy filing rates in the country. In 2004, for example, nearly one in every 41 families in Utah filed for bankruptcy--about twice the national average. Is it the Mormons?
People in Utah have higher educational levels. The dominant religion--the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints--preaches the importance meeting financial responsibilities and warns against debt. So why are so many people in Utah in financial trouble? Some point a finger at Mormon practices such as early marriage, large families, and tithing. But a new study says no: Mormons in Utah are slightly less likely to file for bankruptcy than non-Mormons. The researchers, Jim Wright and Zeke Johnson, say the problem lies elsewhere.
(Note I received permission from David Corn to post his piece in full.)
Received a copy of David Corn's latest brilliance. He takes NY Times columnist David Brooks to task and schools him. What David Corn did not know is that Mr. Brooks lives about 250 feet from my front door. So I took the opportunity to pen the following note, welcoming him to the neighborhood, and giving him a copy of Mr. Corn's excellent work. Here is my letter, which I dropped off tonight (Wednesday):
3 July 2007
Larry Johnson
Bethesda, MD 20817David (Brooks),
Read your NY Times piece today and felt compelled to comment a little more in depth. You are correct in one respect, Plamegate is farce, but not in the way you imagine. The farce is that folks like you are making farfetched excuses for perjury and obstruction of justice. You piece today is dishonest on so many levels. Fortunately, David Corn’s wit and imagination provide the appropriate skewering of your nonsense. I’ve attached a copy.
Stepping lightly into his grave as an American writer in the grand cemetery he and other well-known journalists have designed for the American republic, TIME's Eric Pooley seems as ecstatic as a jihadist ascending to another world. It's frighteningly instructive to read his July 9 apologia-cum-hagiography on Rupert Murdoch for what it tells us about how American journalism is changing, especially now that Murdoch has virtually won his bid for The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones, according to sources on the company's board. The deal is done, they say, though Dow Jones is denying it, perhaps pending a formal announcement expected next week. But even if it fails, something has been lost in the anticipatory applause.
Pooley, TIME's star composer of breathless encomia to great men (like Rudy Giuliani after 9/11) who've broken the rules and borne lesser mortals' uncomprehending rage to change the world, did pause to take note of the rage at Rupert, his latest, weirdest addition to his pantheon.
Apparently Michael Moore's new screed against America's broken health care system is so good that it's causing Texans to organize themselves, before they've even left the theater. A reader writes in to Boing Boing:
When the credits rolled the audience filed out and into the bathrooms. At the urinals, my redneck friend couldn’t stop talking about the film, and I kept listening. He struck up a conversation with a random black man in his 40s standing next to him, and soon everyone was peeing and talking about just how fucked everything is.
I kept my distance, as we all finished and exited at the same time. Outside the restroom doors… the theater was in chaos.
I apologize for my lateness to this book club. I've just been too excited over the Scooter Libby commutation to do anything but raise toast after toast to liberty and law, which has left me with a terrific headache. But two tylenols and a quick read later, it looks to me like Chris and Seth are talking past each other. Seth is focusing on how bad it would be if Iran got the bomb. Chris is focusing on how bad it would be if we attacked Iran. I agree with both of them. These are very bad options. But my sense of the situation is that we're going to be stuck with one of them. And given that premise -- which others are welcome to argue with -- the question is simple: Which is worse?
In the first two posts, I tried to make the case for “fusion” voting as something that will really help liberals, progressives, labor, enviros, anti-poverty activists, climate change campaigners, you name it. Today I’ll try to make the case for fusion as a good reform that Democrats as a party should favor.
But a quick reminder if you’re just joining: “fusion” is a simple election reform that allows voters to vote for a candidate on more than one party line.
In New York, Governor Eliot Spitzer won last year running on both the Democratic and Working Families lines. The 155,000 New Yorkers who voted for him on the Working Families line were helping elect a Democrat and end 12 years of Republican misrule in Albany, but they were also helping to build an independent progressive third party and signal that they wanted the new governor to focus on the economic interests of working people – affordable health care, stronger unions, fairer taxes and support for working parents. One result – Gubernatorial support for a universal Paid Family Leave program.
For progressives, fusion is a no-brainer. And it will be even more so in the – knock on wood! – coming era of Democratic dominance on a national level. We’ll be constantly faced with the choice of devoting our energy to supporting the Democrats or maintaining an independent presence to their left. Fusion lets us do both.
But what’s in it for the Democrats?
There's a common theme to Nathan Newman's post,
"Campaign
Finance Reform is Dead; Long Live Clean Money," and Dan Cantor's
welcome
visit to the "Table for One" to talk about fusion voting and the Working
Families Party in New York, and it's not just that I agree with both of them.
Rather, both are pointing toward a new way of thinking about the political
process, and steps toward reform, that puts people back in -- people, and
the possibilities of organized power.
Seth writes: "Still, I think it's a big risk to think that the influence of those who adhere to the most apocalyptic aspects of "Hidden Iman" doctrine, don't or will not have any influence in a nuclear Iran." I agree. I think apocalyptic doctrines running loose among a nation's leaders are always a danger, as Seth wisely points out. In fact, I too would state categorically that it's a big risk to think that the influence of those who adhere to the most apocalyptic aspects of the "End Times" doctrine don't or will not have any influence in a nuclear United States. Right now, there are people roaming the halls of Congress, the corridors of the Pentagon and the stately rooms of the White House who believe that Jesus Christ will return with sword and fire to destroy the earth, plunge unbelievers into everlasting hellfire and establish eternal paradise on earth for the holy remnant. Many of these apocalyptics command vast earthly armies; some of them even have their fingers on nuclear triggers.
Call me unimaginative, but I find the fact of apocalyptic extremists in possession of actual nuclear weapons somewhat more disturbing than the possibility that apocalyptic extremists might someday possess nuclear weapons, somewhere down the road.
I’ve discerned three central objections to my contention that Iran constitutes a threat from Chris and others: 1) Iran is a long way off from being able to weaponize nuclear power; 2) even if Iran developed nuclear weapons, this would not constitute a threat to the United States; 3) a nuclear Iran is no different than other nations that have developed such weapons. I would note I’ve yet to hear a compelling counterpoint to my suggestion that Iran is waging a “war by proxy” throughout the Middle East right now.
It is boundless.
In the post that Josh linked to earlier this afternoon, Alan Dershowitz declares that the three appeal judges' sustaining of Judge Walton's denial of bail to Libby amounted to "Playing Politics with Libby":
That judicial decision was entirely political.
And:
The trial judge too acted politically, when he imposed the harshly excessive sentence on Libby, virtually provoking the president into commuting it.
Little thing about facts:
Yesterday I wrote about how fusion voting works in New York:
By allowing voters to support a major party candidate on a minor-party line, fusion solves the “wasted vote” and “spoiler” dilemmas that otherwise plague third parties. There have been many fusion parties in our nation’s history – the Populists being the most famous – but it can be used by left, right and center. Democracy means everyone gets to play.
Seth Gitell asks: What to do if and when Iran develops a nuclear weapon? Why, I imagine the United States will do what it has done with North Korea: finally sit down and negotiate. Or perhaps, as with India -- which illicitly created a bristling nuclear arsenal that destabilized a volatile region of the world -- we'll just shrug our shoulders and strike juicy deals that "legitimize" their illegal nuke program. Or maybe we'll follow the Bush example with Pakistan -- which not only built its own illicit nuclear arsenal but peddled the technology to "rogue states" around the world -- and give the Iranians billions of dollars in arms and aid. Or we could even adopt the approach used with Israel -- yet another nation with an illicit nuclear arsenal outside all international supervision -- and award Iran with unlimited military and economic largess and unstinting support for its treatment of certain religious and ethnic minorities within its borders.
As you can see, our president has given us a wide range of policy options to choose from when dealing with nations who develop illicit WMD arsenals. (He has also given us -- and the Iranians -- an instructive example of what happens to nations which, like Iraq, do not have WMD programs: they get it in the neck.)
I got a little glib at the end of a piece on bad economics yesterday, and wanted to elaborate today, channeling the work of EPI’s crack educational team, notably Larry Mishel, Joydeep Roy, and Richard Rothstein.
In yesterday’s post, I asserted that some economists, motivated by the ideological view that market competition almost always leads to better outcomes, support school vouchers, despite lack of evidence for this view.
I should have noted that it’s a contentious area of debate, and there’s research on both sides. But I believe my original point stands: there is a strong ideology that believes injecting market competition into public schools will improve student outcomes, and I don't think the evidence supports the claim.
Overlooked in the commentary I've seen is that Judge Reggie B. Walton, whose sentence of Scooter Libby was just obliterated by George W. Bush, was appointed to the bench three times by Republican presidents. According to his website, Judge Walton was nominated to the Federal District Court by...George W. Bush. His previous judicial experience, in D. C. courts, came as a result of nominations by...Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. During the interim two years between the latter appointments, he served in White House advisory positions, including that of Bush I's Senior White House Advisor for Crime.
Overruling Judge Walton's sentence is not (as some of this morning's articles have suggested) an exceptional act of hypocrisy, a peculiar moment when the president finds it useful to shovel red meat into the maw of the base. It's a representative act of what, in the old Communist bloc, they called "politics takes command," or choosing "redness over expertise."
Progressives must love to lose. Why else would they always adopt the right’s rhetoric in framing political debates?
This suicidal pattern is being highlighted in the debate sparked by Michael Moore’s new movie. The response of all reasonable people is to decry the fact that the United States, alone among rich countries, does not guarantee health care to its people. And we still pay more than twice as much per person for our health care system as do the people in countries with universal health care insurance.
The right notes these incontestable facts and then quickly runs to values – the issue is how much government involvement the public wants in its health care. They then tell us that the public doesn’t want the government telling it what health care it should or should not get. This leads us to a silly debate about what the public does or does not want in terms of government involvement.
Glenn’s put a lot on the table. But he fails to address a central problem: what to do if and when Iran develops nuclear weapons? At the point Iran achieves an ability to produce a nuclear weapon, a reality coming closer every day according to the International Agency for Atomic Energy, the regional calculus of the entire region changes. Nations, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel, immediately become subject to an immediate and, in the case of Israel, existential threat. Even if Iran refrains from an immediate, direct attack, it gains an ability to hold the whole region hostage as it did American hostages twenty-eight years ago.
As I wrote earlier this year, the very best outcome of a war with Iran – the most benign result possible to imagine – will be the deaths of thousands of innocent people and a floodtide of terror and carnage set loose on a world in overwhelming economic crisis. And that's the best outcome. The worst is the slaughter of millions of innocent people from the nuclear attacks that we know George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have advocated in their war planning: perhaps tens of millions dead, hundreds of millions poisoned, whole nations brought to ruin and a planet mortally sickened. Between these two poles of ungodly mass slaughter and unfathomable genocide lie the only possible realistic outcomes of a war with Iran. And we stand on the very brink.
500,000 sold in one weekend.
The potential to sell 50 million in two years.
And the service costs three times as much (over two years) as the phone itself.
See the jump. Self-interest warning is: ON.
President Bush just commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence. Libby will still have to pay the "harsh punishment" of a $250,000 and 2 years probation, but he won't have to go to jail.
Shameless.
Update: Here at TPM we're on Clinton watch, expecting a wave of "Clinton did it!" from the Right. Redstate gets things started:
"Now, we get to hear what Hillary Clinton thinks about the proper uses of the pardon power."Let's use this thread to record the winger talking points and record every case of propagandistic ahistorical absurdism.
After the break.
The following is an excerpt from A Tragic Legacy on the question of whether Iran is a threat to the U.S. and, to the extent it is, the role which Bush's belligerent policies have played in exacerbating that threat:
The cartoonish depiction of Iran embraced by Bush and his supporters is nothing more than pure fiction, completely removed from reality. The view of the Iranian government as irrational, intractable, single-minded evil-doers bent on threatening the United States and wreaking world destruction stands in stark contrast to their actions over the last several years.
It is simply beyond dispute that Iran’s behavior since the 9/11 attacks empirically disproves the President’s assertions about what motivates them and how they behave. Indeed, the gap between reality and the President’s rhetoric concerning Iran is almost impossible to overstate.
After our debate in March on campaign finance reform and clean elections in March, the the Supreme Court's decision on McCain-Feinfold has made any serious limitations on spending by corporations and the wealthy almost impossible to implement.
Between FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, which will unleash a mass of corporate "issue" ads around election time and last year's Randall v. Sorrell, which struck down Vermont's tight limits on campaign contributions, the Court is increasingly making any limits on spending by monied interests impossible.
Which returns us to public financing of elections as the ONLY serious approach to ending corporate dominance of elections.
Over the last 9 years, there has been an interesting political experiment in New York State that I hope to inject into the broader strategic discussion among progressives, liberals, labor folk, environmentalists, civil rights activists and anyone else who still believes in the promise of democracy.
The experiment has been the creation of the Working Families Party. Since 1998, a good chunk of progressive energy has been invested in this party, some of it institutional [ACORN, CWA, SEIU, UAW, Citizen Action, UNITE-HERE, UFCW, etc.] and some of it from free-floating environmentalists, tenants, political donors, and students. It has taken a serious amount of time, money and energy, and I’ve no doubt that all involved have found it valuable and exciting.
A provocative oped in today’s New York Times offers one answer to the question posed above: our understanding of incentives is too simplistic.
The piece in the Times got me thinking about this question of why members of my profession are competing with weathermen for accuracy kudos. So let me count the ways: here’s a list of reasons I think economists often get it wrong.
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.
This week we'll be discussing Glenn Greenwald's A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.
In the book, Greenwald dissects the Bush Administration's binary approach to the world and the ways it has infected our politics and ruined our policies. This week in particular, we will examine the ways in which that perspectives is a part of our approach, and may be leading us into a war whether the American people want it or not.
Joining the conversation will be Ezra Klein, Seth Gitell, Danny Postel, and Chris Floyd.
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, Peter Beinart, Kevin Phillips, Sidney Blumenthal, Reed Hundt, Anne-Marie Slaughter, John Ikenberry, Jonathan Cohn, Daniel Gross, Steven Cook, Chris Hayes, and Josh Kurlantzick.
-ahg
Boy howdy did we open up some troll bait or what? I apologize for not responding in a more timely manner to the flood of comments but I was in Williamsburg, Virginia attending the wedding of a CIA colleague's daughter. Great wedding and terrific barbecue. But I digress. (I am referring to a piece originally posted at NoQuarter that sparked an onslaught of angry rightwingers).
So where do we stand? Maybe it is time to give Tony Blair and George Bush some credit for a solid achievement in the war on terror--the current lot of muslim extremists in the UK had major problems building a reliable, effective incendiary device. Is Al Qaeda on the decline? Remember when they could do a simultaneous bomb attack in Kenya and Tanzania? And now? They could only torch one Land Rover and part of the overhang at Glasgow's International Airport.
Edward Lazarus argues in the Washington Post -- to simplify it -- that progressives must just accept the fact that the Supreme Court won't advance their agenda, on the grounds that in history it normally hasn't.
Certainly, the Supreme Court since Marbury has often exercised its power to frustrate legislative action, and occasionally -- but much more rarely -- has checked the President. Routinely, however, it has thwarted, twisted, and turned around regulatory actions. Perhaps in this latter area more than any, the Supreme Court has little to brag about for its existence, but in the other areas as well it's hard to chalk up to the Court's credit over the history of the Republic much of positive record. Generally, it has gotten in the way of progress. If that's what it means not to be progressive, then we have to agree with Lazarus.
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