It is no secret that I have serious reservations about Barack Obama’s lack of experience and questionable judgment. And, until recently, the media avoided doing hard hitting pieces on the good Senator. Well, it appears that the main steam media finally is starting to ask some questions that should have been raised months ago. Consider Barack’s stance on Afghanistan. For almost a year, Barack has been pretty clear about the policy he would pursue. During a speech in August 2007 at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barack said:

It is time to turn the page. When I am President, we will wage the war that has to be won, with a comprehensive strategy with five elements: getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing the capabilities and partnerships we need to take out the terrorists and the world’s most deadly weapons; engaging the world to dry up support for terror and extremism; restoring our values; and securing a more resilient homeland.

Read more »

Jim Hamilton thinks the Fed has to choose between lower inflation and higher employment.

He thinks we can't have both.

Perhaps this is why China began acquiring from various countries guaranteed rights to precious commodities many years ago. Perhaps this is why China combined foreign policy, development assistance, trade negotiations and contractual rights to such commodities. It is not the case that our government was unaware of the issue. After all, Alan Greenspan said the Iraq War is "largely" about oil, but the war has plainly failed, so far, to obtain assured access to cheap oil. What is the American government plan to abate the rising cost of necessary commodities?

The next Administration faces a serious macroeconomic problem, if Hamilton is right.

Is the economic "slowdown" (President Bush's term) in the United States related to the Iraq War?

I am familiar with the tired litany that Barack Obama represents "new" politics and a break with the past. Well, count me unconvinced, particularly in light of his preposterous claim that he was showing courage in 2002 because he spoke out against Iraq in the midst of a heated "U.S. Senate" race. It may make for an inspiring story but it is simply not true. When Senator Obama spoke in 2002 he was not making a courageous stand nor marking out an immovable position. Instead, he was pandering to the most liberal district in the state of Illinois during his state senate re-election campaign.

This is one of the issues that came up in last Tuesday's debate and no one in the press seems to have the slightest interest in fact checking.

Senator Clinton said the following:

Read more »

Joe Stiglitz is one of the smartest economists in this country. He used to be Chief Economist of the World Bank. Yesterday in London he said that the total cost of the War in Iraq would be close to $3 trillion. You will remember that when former Bush Economist Larry Lindsay said the War would cost $200 billion, they fired him. Joe's most important point is that the credit crisis that is dragging us into an ugly recession is directly traced to the war needs.

The spending on Iraq was a hidden cause of the current credit crunch because the US central bank responded to the massive financial drain of the war by flooding the American economy with cheap credit.

"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.

That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.

This should be one of the key linkages and themes for Democrats in the fall.

We've seen a number of posts over the past couple days about the seemingly imminent debate over public campaign financing. Reader Don proposes an interesting strategic tack for Obama to take on the issue. Reader north_aufzoo agrees.

Connie Manes points to the painful irony of Defense Secretary Gates's latest request to Turkey.

More on the primaries, vote-suppression, and goings-on about Congress, after the jump.

Read more »

Since the Wisconsin primary, Obama has fought a war on two fronts. Clinton and McCain, both seeking to turn hope into a liability, have gone after what they see as the biggest chink in Obama’s Teflon suit of armor: the idealism of his foreign policy.

With a rigorous assault on whether he is sufficiently “realistic” or “pragmatic” enough to challenge the evil-doers of the world, candidates and pundits alike claim he lacks the steel backbone necessary to stand up against folks who are self-professed enemies of the U.S. As if they were foreign policy older siblings, Clinton and McCain insist Obama does not sufficiently understand the world and that his campaign of hope and daisies and sunshine is a fundamental misapprehension of the world and the evil that lurks within it. In short, Obama doesn’t “get it” when it comes to the bad guys of the world. The challenge facing Obama is that he needs to systematically rebut this argument, but in a way that does not undermine the central rhetorical stance of his candidacy. As he moves to the general election, Obama needs to extend “Change you can believe in” beyond sloganeering into a theme of governance. So, in foreign policy, the game plan is simple: To challenge the notion that he is insufficiently realistic, Obama needs to “out-Realist” the hawks.

Read more »

Dear Brian,

So many deserved and targeted shots have been taken at your colleague Tim Russert in the last 48 hours that one curiosity of your own performance at Tuesday's Cleveland debate has been overlooked. You spoke these words to Senator Obama:

you could be going into a general election against a Republican with vast foreign policy expertise and credibility on national security.

What is the nature of Senator McCain's "vast foreign policy expertise"? On which piece of this expertise did he rely while "pushing for Saddam Hussein's forcible overthrow" starting in 1997 (John B. Judis, "Neo-McCain," TNR, 10/6/06)? When he advocated "rogue-state rollback"? When he "welcomed Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), to Washington and pressured the administration to give him money"? When he replied to Chris Matthews in March 2003, who had asked him whether the Iraqis would treat Americans as liberators, "Absolutely, absolutely"? Did he acquire it while graduating 894th out of 899 in his class in Annapolis (Matt Welch, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, p. 24)?

So will you pledge to tell us on what basis you speak of his "expertise"?

I walked in to the Coffee House yesterday, and started to talk before introducing my self. I'll remedy that now.

I'm a professor at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. My main area of concentration is what I call Digital Political Economy. How Moore's Law, Free Software and all the other components of the Digital Revolution are driving down the costs of collaboration and throwing Republican Adam Smith (everyone has to be a selfish economic actor) economics out the window.

I graduated from Princeton in 1969 and went to work for Bob Dylan and The Band and then George Harrison. I came to California in 1973 and produced Martin Scorsese's first major film, Mean Streets.Since then I've been an investment banker, a television producer and the co-founder of the first IP Video On Demand company, Intertainer.

I figure I will post a couple of times a week, mostly talking about my area of expertise. If You want to see more of my work, its here.

Let us pause, for a moment, to remember that one of the great activists of the 20th century died on February 27th, of lung cancer, leaving behind a legacy of critical challenges to the medical and pharmaceutical industries. Though many people may not know her work--because she was blacklisted from so many newspapers and magazines for her crusading muckraking---all of us owe enormous gratitude for her relentless pursuit of the truth.

I have suggested elsewhere that the women's health movement was arguably the greatest accomplishment of the modern women's movement. If I am right, then Barbara Seaman was also one of the most important activists and journalists who challenged the over-medicalization of women's lives.

Fiercely skeptical, Barbara Seaman early warned women about the dangers of the birth control pill in her controversial book "The Doctor's Case Against the Pill" in 1969. As a result of her pioneering work and the hearings that followed in the wake of its publication, strengthened warnings appeared on birth control packages.

She never stopped.

Read more »

"It's been going on so long, it's hard to control and contain it. Why is it still there?

Skid Row isn't a problem with an exclusively monetary solution, the roots are much deeper than that."

Part 3 of Good Magazine's documentary on the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles focuses in on the drug trade (Part 2 on kids is here, the introductory episode is here). For those of you who have been following the series, I'd love to hear thoughts.

I've spent a lot of time around serious scholarship and even more around real journalism-- the kind that, in print or online, requires "leg work," climbing tenement stairs the second time or making that last phone call or watching the expression on the campaign manager's face as you pop your question. Sometimes there's no substitute for going there to get the story, even if you think you've already figured it out or heard it all before.

Scholars uphold equivalent standards, but in today's New Republic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz shows us only the arrogance and opportunism of a man who'd hoped to be the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. of a Hillary Clinton Administration. Here, Wilentz treats one of his forays into journalism as slumming to help his side and mess up Barack Obama's effort by spinning charges that Wilentz doesn't trouble to substantiate with interviews or research of his own.

Read more »

Starting next Tuesday night, the interest of all of the TV News networks will diverge radically from the interest of the American Public. It will be in the interest of the networks to keep the Democratic Race going for at least another six weeks. Their viewership and ad revenues have never been higher. If the Democratic Party moved to support Obama with the same unity the Republicans moved to McCain's side, they would save themselves millions that could be used to fight McCain. And also save us from the soul damage the Cinton's scorched earth policies (sending pictures to Drudge) do to all of us.

In the early 20th Century, there were "time outs" in the summer for the Presidential campaigns where strategists and ideas could move to the fore and the candidate did not have to work the crowd every day. If on Tuesday, Obama wins 2 of the 4 states (with one being Ohio or Texas), then Hillary should step down for the sake of the party.

McCain tried to hurt Barack Obama tonight on his remarks-- looking towards a time-- if Al Queda went back into Iraq after our withdrawal of most troops in 2010 and 2011. But what he essentially did was to crown Obama as the Democratic presumptive victor and say the General is starting today. And then Obama fired back, with the perfect kind of rhetoric that shows that McCain will not own the National Security Card in a 2008 General.

No, let's not "recreate '68."

In 1968, the leadership of the Democratic Party was strongly in favor of (like, in the process of prosecuting) the war in Vietnam. Today, the leadership of the party (despite some past errors) is strongly opposed to the war and in favor of withdrawal.

If you're an anti-war protester, this should not be an insignificant distinction.

The FCC held a hearing in Boston on Tuesday to delve into the subject of Network Neutrality. Comcast had been caught blocking Bit Torrent on its high speed network. The reason Comcast is blocking P2P is that it uses extensive upstream bandwidth. All cable Internet is architected asymmetrically for 20-1 downstream. They never thought customers would want to send big file upstream. Now they are probably going to have to completely overhaul the way they have built their networks.

Comcast decided not to leave anything to chance with the FCC so they hired a bunch of locals to fill all the seats in the hearing so the Internet activists could not get in. Save The Internet put the whole fiasco up on You Tube. A reluctant FCC is going to have to weigh in on keep the Net an open space. We are in a Telecom Duopoly and any economist will tell you that that means a regulator has got to weigh in.

The whole dustup this weekend over mandates and affordability in health care between Clinton and Obama just begs the question-- are we really going to impose a mandate to buy health care on working people if it's not affordable, and if health care is truly affordable, do people think any but a small group will not get coverage? 

The key issue is what counts as "affordable" health care, and it's not just cheap premiums, since "cheap" insurance just means large numbers of people go bankrupt in out-of-pocket expenses.  It happens that Progressive States released a new policy brief, Individual Health Care Mandates and the Problem of Affordability, last week which emphasized that before you even talk about applying a mandate, we all need a real definition of affordability-- and a number of state governments are starting to develop a decent working definition that might get us past the whole conflict of mandates versus affordability altogether.

Read more »

William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the modern conservative movement, died today at 82.

Frankly, I admired that man. That may seem like an odd thing for someone of the left (and someone of my age) to say, but it's true. Whatever his politics, few people in American history have had such an effect on both mainstream politics and American intellectual life. Fewer still with his wit and a basic decency even toward those with whom he disagreed.

After the fold, I've embedded a fascinating retrospective from the Charlie Rose show. It includes clips from a half a dozen interviews and will give you a sense of what I'm talking about.

Update: Also, let me recommend to you Rick Perlstein's thoughts. As a historian of American conservatism and a friend of Buckley's, his perspective is unique and important.

Read more »

To everyone who says, "Let the homeowners with bad mortgages go down," I say "Cleveland." The subprime crisis has hit the city hard, and it is clear that it isn't possible to limit the effects of bad mortgages to the homeowners and investors who were involved in those deals. Cleveland demonstrates that a critical mass of bad loans can threaten the survival of a community.

With little help anywhere on the horizon, Cleveland is using the presidential primary to draw attention to the crisis. The Cleveland City Council has asked the presidential candidates to send senior representatives to a meeting today on fighting foreclosures and abandonment. Cleveland plans to present its proposals to get some new federal laws to deal with the crisis. What better time to gather promises than when the presidential candidates are stumping for votes?

Watch the proceedings live, 10-1 today. And think about the effects of subprime lending on a whole city.

Apparently an interesting point of political doctrine and liturgical procedure emerged late in tonight’s debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and my readers are all abuzz about it! Let’s go to the mailbag:

Read more »

Hillary Clinton gave a major foreign policy address yesterday that has some great strengths. I disagree with her take on Cuba and find it unfortunate that she can't move to roughly the same position of managed cooperation and conflict with Cuba that she advocates with China.

But then I looked for references to Israel and Palestine -- particularly given my presence this week in In the region and my upcoming meetings with lots of Israeli and Palestinian political and thought leaders about the state of the Annapolis Summit process. Condoleezza Rice, in fact, will be here on Monday doing the same.

But Hillary doesn't say the words "Israel" or "Palestine" in the entire speech. I think that Hillary Clinton gets a lot right in her foreign policy commentary -- particularly the sense she conveys that this is a "discontinuous" or "different" time in American history that requires a changed approach.

Read more »

Though some have already gone so far as to call Democratic primary race for Sen. Obama, the inter-candidate debate is still going on full-throttle at TPMCafe.

The Obama campaign's NAFTA mailers (hitting Clinton on her alleged support for the agreement, reached during Bill Clinton's presidency) have caused quite a stir this week. Reader dintofinley tries to set the record straight (hint: neither candidate is entirely in the clear), while one_wilson asks whether, in the melee, the merits and faults of NAFTA itself have been forgotten.

David Seaton pushes the argument that Obama's lack of military experience will be a formidable problem if he finds himself the Commander in Chief. (Also, check out David's post on the link between Kosovo and Israel policy). Reader tpmgary, on the other hand, contends that Military experience is good. But it's not everything.

Read more »

The House recently voted down a provision which would have made it easier to discharge private student loans in bankruptcy. Currently student loans may not be discharged except in cases of undue hardship; the Davis amendment would have allowed discharge of private student loans dischargeable after the first five years of payments. Student loans would still be treated better than most other types of unsecured debt, most of which is dischargeable at any time.

Read more »

"The average age of a homeless person living in the US is 9-years-old. 3.5 million people. That 1.35 million children..."

Part 2 of Good Magazine's documentary on the homelessness epidemic in Los Angeles focuses on children (part one is here). Again, this is tough to watch, so be warned. That being said, even tougher to live, so take a few minutes to watch.

The current debate about the foreign policy of the next administration focuses on select hot spots (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan). Sometimes, Russia and Chain are mentioned. Very little attention is paid to what over arching principles are going to direct the new foreign policy and what basic strategy it is going to follow. Above all, no one is willing to come clean and openly admit that the United States –“the richest nation in the world”— can do much less than we wish, and hence must set priorities. Moreover, the United States may very well be unable to get very far down the list of what ought to be done, leaving much uncovered.

Read more »

Here's the thing about hate speech: you can't do it or usefully repeat it while attributing it to others. In both forms -- expression and comment about such expression -- racial and gender-based hate speech is becoming increasingly common in this election. All candidates, campaign staff, commentators, opinion writers, reporters, and media managers of all kinds should agree publicly and clearly to eschewing both hate speech and also speculations about the hatred that others will surely feel.

When one utters hate speech, as in "I hate so-and-so", you do wrong. You spark hatred in others and add to the misery of life.

But it is also true that when one repeats extensively the hate speech of others, as various writers have been doing just recently, one also does harm.

Hating and explaining in the major media that others are filled with hatred are both wrong, and both contribute to the misery of humanity.

Read more »

Manufacturing jobs, and especially unionized manufacturing jobs, were an important route into the middle class for African American families in the half century following World War II. This is no longer the case today, as manufacturing has shrunk and the share of the workforce represented by unions has declined. The decline in union representation was especially steep in manufacturing, which now has a slightly lower union representation rate than the economy as a whole. Union jobs in manufacturing now account for just 1 percent of total employment.

These trends have hit African American workers especially hard. African American workers were 50 percent more likely to be represented by a union than whites 25 years ago. Today, they are only 30 percent more likely. And African Americans are actually slightly less likely to be employed in manufacturing today than whites.

The bottom line here is that an important source of entry to the middle class for African Americans is being closed off.

Read more »

The pending bankruptcy amendment that would let judges make a downward adjustment on mortgages when the loan exceeds the value of the property goes to a vote in the Senate tomorrow. It will take 60 votes to push the bill forward. The mortgage lenders think they can block it, giving the Republicans a chance to kill the bill through filibuster.

Right now this is the only bill pending in Congress that would have any meaningful impact on the slide in the real estate market. The bill would provide critical benefits: It would put an estimated 500,000 families into long term, permanent mortgages that they could afford, and it would cost investors far less than a foreclosure. Best of all, it would force the write downs to be absorbed by the investors, not the taxpayers.

The mortgage industry is opposed. Perhaps the industry believes it can squeeze out more by talking people into handing over the keys to their homes or in pushing through to foreclosure. Or perhaps the industry believes that if things get bad enough, the government will bail them out. Either way, the industry doesn't want to have to write down the loans.

Read more »

I had mixed feelings when some friends of mine pointed out that Ralph Nader had mentioned me as an "independent military analyst" in his Sunday appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. In responding to a question from Tim Russert about why he was running yet again, he cited a recent article of mine about how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have not only ignored the Pentagon's record spending spree, but have adopted policies that may well involve increasing the military budget.

My point was that we need to get the Democratic frontrunners to address this issue in some fashion before they take office in 2009 (assuming a Democrat wins, which is not guaranteed by any means). It was NOT meant to suggest that we need a third party candidate in the race -- although obviously Ralph Nader is free to use the information as he sees fit.

Read more »

A quick word on the lovely "Coming Soon" banner you see at your right.

A reader way back when asked that we let you all know when authors are on their way so you can come prepared having read the book. This is me making good on that promise (and vowing to do so whenever possible from now on).

Next week, Mike Connery is going to sit down at the Table for One to blog about about his new book Youth to Power: How Today's Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow's Progressive Majority. Connery is a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and blogs fulltime about progressive youth politics at Future Majority.

The week after that, we'll be doing a Book Club with Steven Waldman on his new book Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. Waldman is the co-founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief of Beliefnet.com, the largest faith and spirituality website.

Then, to mark the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we'll be doing a Book Club with Greg Mitchell on his new book So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the President--Failed on Iraq. Mitchell is the editor of Editor & Publisher magazine.

That's what we have so far for March. Who would you like to see? What books are you looking forward to reading? Share some wisdom in the comments.

Lawrence Lessig has decided, ahead of schedule, that's he's not going to run for congress. His explanation, in characteristic power point, is below the fold.

Read more »

I think he's right, but isn't this kind of an insane thing to say about your boss when you're already on suspension? David Shuster:

"Does it bother me that I was thrown under the bus to pay for the sins of the father?" Shuster asks rhetorically in the interview. "No. As somebody who's covered politics for a while, I understand all the forces that were in play."

In 2000 and 2004 Democrats thought for quite a long time that it was wise to ignore Nader. Everyone knew he ran with clear intent to elect a Republican president. Everyone understood that according to his twisted logic it was better to have George Bush be president than to have a very different foreign and domestic policy, than to attend in a timely manner to climate change, to have wise and courageous people occupy the Oval Office -- for the reason that if the country were led in the wrong direction for a long time then somehow redemption could arrive in 2008.

But now in 2008 Nader is not the name of redemption. People can disagree about whether the corrective leader is Clinton, McCain or Obama, yet all but extreme, angry, illogical, and utterly estranged people will agree that Nader has no business again trying to tilt an election in a divided country to someone with whom he surely disagrees, namely, John McCain. So why is the press covering him?

Read more »

This sounds about right to me:

On the low road, Obama's black and foreign. On the middle road, he's unpatriotic. And on the high-road he's one of those post-American tranzies. Which is, of course, a fancy way of saying he's black and foreign. And thus the loop is closed.

Recently Albert Winn, a long-time Democratic Congressman from Maryland, was challenged in the primary for his seat. His opponent, Donna Edwards, campaigned on several issues, but among the most prominent was her opponent's vote for the 2005 bankruptcy legislation. He had ignored the needs of his constituents, she argued, and favored the financial interests whose executives (not coincidentally) gave his campaign financial support. Ms. Edwards defeated that incumbent in a landslide (60%-32%).

Last month, in a nationally televised debate among Sen. Edwards, Sen. Clinton, and Sen. Obama, Tim Russert essentially asked, How could two of you have voted for the 2003 legislation (much like the 2005 legislation), even though it never became law (because of a dispute within the Republican House caucus over the dischargeability of judgment debt arising from protests at abortion clinics)? Sen. Edwards immediately said that his vote for the bill was a mistake. Sen. Clinton expressed regret for the vote, adding she was glad it never had become law. Sen. Obama pointed out his steadfast opposition to the bill once he got into Congress.

Why is a three-year-old, highly-technical set of amendments to an obscure law now the stuff of popular political discussion?

Read more »

The bankers are on the offensive again, demanding hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars to protect them against their massive losses on bad mortgages. They have hostages this time. They claim that millions of low and moderate income homeowners will lose their homes if we don’t meet their demand.

Unfortunately, it seems that many in Congress may be willing to surrender to their demands, including some members who are usually considered liberals. This is unfortunate not only because these bailout schemes hand taxpayer dollars to some of the very richest people, but because the plans will actually do very little to benefit most homeowners. Furthermore, the government money that goes to bankers is money that will not be used to pay for child care or children’s health care.

Let’s looks at the numbers and see how the deal works.

Read more »

My guess is that Cuba will be a significant issue in the general election, because it is a telltale for the approach of the opposing candidates toward communism, a test of American capability and willingness to promote economic development in poor countries, and inevitably the major thumb on the scales of voting in Florida.

If the Republican candidate does not win Florida, he has little chance to win the election.

The Republicans are likely to

Read more »