No comment -- details in link.

Josh wrote:

As much as I think some exec paychecks are obscene and point to real imbalances in our economy, I'm really leery of limits on pay levels in private companies...But, yeah, when a company would be out of business without taxpayer help? Then we're in your business. Do you really need $15 million as opposed to $2? Is your mortgage that high? Do you have that many kids in school.

It isn't just when derivatives traders come to the taxpayer asking for huge sums of money that taxpayers get riled up.  I hear frequent complaints from my fairly conservative neighbors here in central PA about government workers in general.  They don't have a problem if the operator of a paving machine who works for a private contractor gets paid $25/hour -- if the private contractor is willing to pay that much, so be it -- but if the same person does the same work for the township then $25/hour is too much.  Even though the private contractor has submitted the lowest bid to the township for the work, so we taxpayers are actually paying that $25/hour, or even more when you consider overhead.  When you think about it, if the private contractor was paying the paver less, then their bid could be even lower.

I don't think the social contract is any sort of fixed thing -- I think it has been severely eroded over the past couple of decades, to the point where mistrust of government extends to non-politicians as well.  Maybe even longer than the past couple of decades, I don't really know, but I suspect that back in the 1930s and 40s, it was more generally understood that work is work, no matter whom one is working for; and my feeling is that the erosion has accelerated since Reagan.

And of course you hear this complaint as well from white collar workers and executives who are invited, or nominated, to work in the public sector, that they just can't afford it. 
Public defenders of course make far less than private ones, as do prosecutors. 

In the rare case where a government employee, ie. a public school teacher, makes more than one in the private sector, there is a hue and cry to knock that wage down, through merit pay plans, voucher programs, non-unionized charter schools etc.

Although I agree with Josh that limits on pay levels in private companies are problematic and probably would lead to unintended consequences, on the other hand I am a firm believer in "you get what you pay for" applying to government work as well as to the private sector. And if we want government to work, unless we are willing to raise taxes and raise the salaries of government workers until they are comeasurate with private salaries, it is entirely appropriate to talk about limits to private compensation.

Although it still looks unlikely that the following -- Chambliss losing in GA, Franken winning in MN, Ted Stevens losing in AK and Smith losing in OR -- will ALL occur, giving the Dems in the Senate a supermajority, here's a scary thought. If Joe Lieberman is included in that magic 60 number, then are we back to counting on him to quash a filibuster?  Maybe better to fall one or two seats short in that case.

This YouTube has been out there since at least late September, but this is the first I've seen it.

With the news that even Todd Palin, who is not an Alaska government employee, is going to refuse to testify before the troopergate investigators, someone needs to ask Sarah Palin the following questions:

Why are you going back on your earlier promises to cooperate with the investigation?

If you are asserting that the investigation is political and partisan in nature, how do you account for the fact that the investigation was convened months prior to your nomination, by a Republican assembly?

If you take the position that the investigation should be tabled until after the election, in order to avoid tainting the election, and if you are elected, will you pledge to resign the office of the Vice-Presidency if the investigation eventually uncovers wrongdoing on your part?

Amid all the EXCELLENT NEWS!!!FOR MCCAIN! -- the Dems coming together in Denver, his unpaid advisers telling everyone without health insurance to go to the ER, Gustav bearing down on New Orleans -- I haven't seen much mention of the GOP platform being assembled ahead of next week's Minnesota convention.  NPR had a piece on it this morning.  The highlight, for me, was this bit:

Unlike the last GOP platform, which mentioned George W. Bush on nearly every page, this platform mentions McCain only in its preamble — and some of the positions it takes fly in the face of McCain's own record as something of a Republican maverick.

Pennsylvania state Sen. Jane Orie read the party's stance opposing same-sex marriage: "We call for a constitutional amendment to protect marriage as the union of a man and a woman."

McCain has consistently opposed such a constitutional amendment because he thinks it's an issue for states to resolve.

He has also urged action to curb global warming and favors a cap-and-trade system that many in his party oppose. The GOP platform makes no mention of cap and trade, while it rails against what it calls "doomsday climate change scenarios."

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, considers the platform "very conservative" and says it clearly falls short of what the McCain campaign would have wanted.

"Obviously, they're very interested in not being slapped in the face, and the party's not interested in slapping the candidate in the face," Keene said. "But the party has not taken the position that you would've wanted them to take if you were a campaign operative for John McCain."

It seems McCain has more to worry about from members of his own party than Obama does from Hillary and Bill.  Will the MSM ask him how he's going to reach out to the right wing of the GOP? We're waiting to hear ...

This seems to be a new infection in political campaigning. Farrakhan, Hagee, Ferraro, Wright, Power, Billy Graham.  Each one must be denounced and rejected.  To do so demonstrates "presidential timbre", and that the candidate is not going to allow "loyalties" to take precedence over independence of judgment.

But I fear this will go too far, if it hasn't already.  For one thing, loyalty itself shows good character.  Not to excess, of course, nothing to excess, but still, what does it show when a candidate throws a supporter under a bus for a triviality? For another, look at the flack Obama took when Samantha Power abruptly left his campaign, apparently in response to a demand by the Clinton campaign.  He was immediately excoriated for his "weakness".

What does he have to do, denounce and reject his own wife when she goes off message? (For that matter, is Hillary supposed to denounce and reject Bill when he goes off?) What do we want: for Obama never to have any contact with Rev. Jeremiah Wright again? Where does it stop?

This sort of thing didn't seem to happen in previous presidential campaigns; certainly never to this degree.

Some people are saying that Obama needs to deal with this Wright thing, forcefully and soon.  The calls for him to deal with this are, of course, self-fulfilling prophecies -- if they don't let up, then he will indeed have to.  So it is ironic that they are coming from Obama's supporters.

What I would like to see is for Obama to stand up and say something to the effect of this: I am running for president, not for magician.  I do not have the power to make my supporters stop saying things that they want to say, any more than all of you do.  I don't agree with everything they say, and if you ask me whether I agree with one of their *statements*, I will tell you that I agree with it, or else I will repudiate it: the statement, not the speaker. I nevertheless appreciate their support -- these people are friends and associates, and in the past, have offered me valuable counsel -- if they hadn't, they wouldn't be friends or associates in the first place.  If you want to know my position on an issue, ask me and I will tell you.

Loyalty is a virtue, when did it become a vice? And why are we Obama supporters showing so little of it?

Josh posted this afternoon about a video of a sermon given by Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Barack Obama's church in Chicago. I agree with the crux of Josh's post, but I had a very different reaction to watching the video itself.

Is it just me? Jesus, but we white people seem to have thin skins! I just cannot for the life of me understand what anyone would find offensive in Rev. Wright's sermon.  Maybe the supposition that Hillary Clinton, as a white female person, has never suffered discrimination of any kind? That's about the only thing I can find in his sermon that I disagree with.

Was it his use of the "n-word"? But that was a form of reported speech, or rather the opposite, a report of speech that never happened: "Hillary ain't never been called a n*****."

That's a fact. And it is so highly probable as to be a virtual certainty that Barack Obama *has* been called the n-word in his lifetime.

So what is it that's so offensive in his sermon?  Why is the MSM getting away with labeling Rev. Wright's church "a black radical church"? Is it radical to say that there is racism in America?  If that causes offense, then let me say that I am offended to hear someone deny that there is racism in America. The United Church of Christ is considered to be a mainstream denomination by almost any measure.  The words that Rev. Wright used are used in black society all the time.  And by many whites as well.

In his TPM post, Josh called the sermon "racially charged." Sure, OK. But so what? How can truths about race be told in a non-"racially charged" manner?

And Josh wrote "we wouldn't be seeing this stuff now if it weren't for the fact that this is the kind of campaign Hillary Clinton's campaign has decided to wage -- often directly and at other times indirectly by not reining it in in her supporters when it crops up on its own".  Leaving aside the question about whether it is any candidate's obligation to rein in his or her supporters in the first place (I think it is not), it is truly a shame that "we" wouldn't be seeing this stuff if she didn't conduct her campaign the way she does.  "We" *NEED* to see and hear this stuff.

The New York Times today wonders whether the fact that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone renders him ineligible for the presidency.

When are we going to see pictures of McCain in his native Panamanian garb? Does this mean he is a practitioner of Santería or some other Caribbean/Latin American voodoo religion? Is his middle name Aureliano or Arcadio? or perhaps Chávez? Or even (shudder) Fidel?

The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that Rep Barney Frank "ripped into what he called self-defeating ideological purists on the left who are unhappy with the Democrat-led Congress over issues such as the Iraq war and dropping transgender people from a job discrimination bill."

Frank said

The question is: Can we govern responsibly? And governing responsibly means working with everybody, listening to and exchanging views with the people who care passionately ... but then as you go forward with the goals, taking reality into account. People who then denounce those who take reality into account ... make it impossible for us to govern.

 

This raises the question: how was the political reality that gays and lesbians deserve protection from employment discrimination but transgendered people don't created? Is this Frank's own reading of the body politic? Did some co-sponsor say to him "I'll sign on, but only if you remove that clause about transgendered people"?

I have no way of knowing what went on in Frank's head, or what corridor conversations occurred. But the effect of inclusion of transgendered folks in such a bill on its chances of passage strikes me as marginal. What is more likely to happen, as we've seen over and over with Congresses over the last eight years, and even longer, is that a liberal-sponsored bill gets watered down more and more with amendments, and then goes down to defeat anyway, or gets filibustered, or in the best case, gets vetoed and the attempt to override fails narrowly. If that is what's going to happen here, why not do not only part of the right thing, but all of the right thing?

In fact, it may be the case that transgendered people are more accepted by society than gays and lesbian, not less. By certain (misguided) standards, some of them are attempting to conform to "nature's dictate" that sex only occur between men and women, by changing their gender to conform to their attraction.

As for the "reality" that the electorate wants the Congress to back down from challenging the Bush administration on the Iraq war, this so-called reality was created out of whole cloth by Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush, et. al.

Sorry, Barney, I like and applaud the work you do, but the "reality" of politics is that you have to fight for what is right.

I haven't seen any discussion of this here at the Cafe, and though I don't really have much to add to Hendrik Hertzberg's excellent note in the New Yorker, I feel compelled to spread the word.

This initiative would change the way California apportions presidential electoral votes, from a statewide winner-take-all rule, as almost every other state does it, to a system where electoral votes are awarded to the winner in each congressional district. As Hertzberg writes, this would "spot the Republican ticket something in the neighborhood of twenty electoral votes — votes that it wouldn’t get under the rules prevailing in every other sizable state in the Union."

At a first, superficial glance, this seems more "fair" than awarding all 55 electoral votes to the winner, but as Hertzberg points out, the system is still winner-take-all, just on a district by district basis. And since big Republican states like Texas and Georgia aren't going to change the way they do it, the possible outcome would be to snatch a Republican victory in '08 from the jaws of ignominy and defeat.

This is not a shortcut to the elimination of the "injustice" of the electoral college, but it may just appear to be that to California voters if they aren't paying attention.

Josh linked to Michael Walzer's piece in TNR (sub req). There's a whole lotta elision goin' on. I'm certainly not going to argue about who started this, or that the Hamas and Hezbollah's part in the war is just. I'm also not going to take issue with Walzer's conclusion as much as with the "therefores" in his argument.

1) It is an important principle of just war theory that justice, though it rules out many ways of fighting, cannot rule out fighting itself--since fighting is sometimes morally and politically necessary. A military response to the capture of the three Israeli soldiers wasn't, literally, necessary; in the past, Israel has negotiated instead of fighting and then exchanged prisoners. But, since Hamas and Hezbollah describe the captures as legitimate military operations--acts of war--they can hardly claim that further acts of war, in response, are illegitimate. The further acts have to be proportional, but Israel's goal is to prevent future raids, as well as to rescue the soldiers, so proportionality must be measured not only against what Hamas and Hezbollah have already done, but also against what they are (and what they say they are) trying to do.

Not exactly. Just war theory does not rule out fighting since fighting is sometimes morally necessary. Political considerations do not enter into the question, however. And any putative claims by Hamas and Hezbollah that further acts of war by Israel are illegitimate are irrelevant. Just because they can't claim that further acts of war are illegitimate does not make them legitimate.

2) It doesn't matter that, so far, the Gazan rockets have done minimal damage; the intention every time one is fired is to hit a home or a school, and, sooner or later, that intention will be realized.

If this could be shown to be true, Israel would have a much stronger case, in my opinion. But this is just an unsubstantiated claim on Walzer's part.

3) When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible--and no one else is--for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire. But (the dialectical argument continues) Israeli soldiers are required to aim as precisely as they can at the militants, to take risks in order to do that, and to call off counterattacks that would kill large numbers of civilians.

Clearly the thesis can only be true if the antithesis (Israel being careful) is also true. Practically speaking, in war this never happens, so the thesis is refuted; the responsibility for civilian deaths is shared.

4) The trickiest part of Walzer's argument is the final section. Here he argues that

a) Attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah were not inevitable since they commenced after Israel's withdrawal.

b) Said attacks have probably made future unilateral withdrawals impossible.

c) Israel's actions make it less, rather than more, likely that it will have a security partner on the other side.

d) Until Israel has such a partner (with help from the US and the international community required), it is entitled to act militarily on its own behalf.

Even taking his assumptions at face value, it is a strange perspective on inevitability that holds that things that happened in the past were not inevitable, but things Walzer thinks will happen in the future are. Especially c) and d), taken together, call his conclusion into question.

Most of Walzer's argument is about jus in bello (the conduct of just war once war has begun). I don't have a problem with much of what he says in this regard. I do have a problem with his eliding this to a general defense of Israel's decision to enter into the war in the first place, at the scale that it did. Especially the principle of last resort seems not to have been followed. To my mind the thorniest question to answer when assessing jus ad bellum (whether going to war in the first place is just) is this: if both sides have legitimate grievances, can either side claim that their warmaking is just?