tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67650657927572917062024-03-07T21:20:02.677-08:00DitchblogDitchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-29307627132565035832008-10-31T10:53:00.000-07:002008-10-31T10:55:25.941-07:00McCain vs Obama on policy, part 2<i>Trade</i><br /><br />McCain seems reasonably in the "free trade" camp. He wants a program that would alter the unemployment insurance system to steer it towards retraining, in order to help cushion those who lose jobs due to globalization. Obama is in the "fair trade" camp, and I've said before that I'm sympathetic to that as long as it's done consistently and without playing favorites. He wants to amend NAFTA, which is funny because polls in all three countries show that the populace think the deal is skewed against them. Meaning, it's unlikely anyone would gain in a renegotiation. <br /><br />There are three trade specifics I'm heavily against Obama on. One, he opposes the South Korea trade deal due to there being no guarantee that we would sell them as many cars as the other way around. However, it would lower tariffs on both sides, and right now the ratio is so skewed in South Korea's favor that the ratio could only improve. Perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good, especially when perfect is unattainable. Two, he opposes the Columbia trade deal based on the issue of violence against labor leaders and organizers. This was a reasonable position five or ten years ago, but the Colombian government has done a good job of cracking down, to the point where labor is no more a target of violence than the general population. Union leaders in the US oppose the deal, and Democrats are trying to appease them. Finally, Obama favors maintaining the tariff on Brazilian ethanol, a stance that is utterly baffling to me. It's done to shield the already heavily subsidized (and highly inefficient) domestic corn ethanol industry, and Democrats say that it needs to be done so the US doesn't rely on foreign ethanol like we rely on foreign oil. Then why the hell don't we put a tariff on foreign oil too? Brazil is a reasonably friendly nation, especially compared to Venezuela and Russia, who we don't tariff. It's bad policy, but it's good politics. "Change" my eye.<br /><br /><br /><i>Social Security</i><br /><br />McCain is incredibly vague on social security, probably too scared to do anything after Bush got shellacked in 2005. He talks about "supplementing" the program with personal accounts, whatever that means. But I'll take vague over harmful. Obama, for starters, wants no age hike. Sorry, but as life expectancy increases, the time spent working must go up. Especially because US labor is service-oriented, and manufacturing is heavily mechanized, meaning we aren't expecting grandma and grandpa to do back-breaking work. On top of this, Obama says that those earning over $250,000 aren't paying their "fair share", and should have 2-4% of earnings over the current tax cap shaved off to cover the future deficit. That's false on its face. Anyone in the social security system gets out of it what they put in, and those in higher income brackets certainly don't get MORE than they put in. What's fairer than that? Apparently, turning social security into another wealth redistribution program. <br /><br /><br /><i>Healthcare</i><br /><br />The centerpiece of Obama's plan is a nationwide government-run insurance program. What's odd about it is that there's no real way to determine what the cost or effect is. Will it heavily subsidize coverage for lower-income families? Moderately subsidize? Barely subsidize? Will it be run with a goal of breaking even? Etcetera. <br /><br />Among Obama's other healthcare policies:<br /><br />-Insurance companies will be unable to deny people coverage for pre-existing conditions, AND must offer these people insurance at an "affordable" price. That sounds to me like forcing insurance companies to take on new clients who will cost them a lot of money. Worrisome. <br />-Federal benefit mandates. Benefit mandates are one of the reasons why so many people can't afford health insurance in the first place. An inability to choose NOT to get coverage for things that won't be needed means people can't buy policies tailored to their actual needs. This especially effects younger people, who don't need as many things covered on average. It so happens that younger people are far more likely to be uninsured. <br />-More money for R&D<br />-Expansions of Medicaid and SCHIP<br />-Direct negotiation of drug costs by the federal government, which would be de facto price-setting due to the increasing amount of healthcare dollars controlled by the federal government. I believe this would be a huge blow to the creation of new drugs unless it was offset by a hell of a lot more R&D money than is proposed.<br />-Businesses must give 7 paid sick days per year<br />-All children must have health coverage. This is also confusing, because it doesn't say if parents are responsible for paying or the government. This is separate from the issue of children being covered by a parent's plan. <br />-Hospitals required to keep records and analyze data on how "disparity populations" are treated. I have no idea what the heck that means but it sounds like tedious micromanaging to me.<br />-He says that he'll go after insurance companies that are too profitable and spend too much on administration (ie. paperwork, employees). It's a very strangely worded section, because high administration costs lower profit, and profit is the goal, so why would a company deliberately lose money?<br />-Tax credit for small businesses to pay for health coverage, up to 50%<br />-Large employers must pay an unspecified percentage of total payroll towards the government insurance plan if they don't offer coverage. This could be really important, but no specifics are given. There's a big difference between 1% and 5%, for instance.<br /><br />McCain's plan is very different. The centerpiece is a tax credit for health coverage that would be mostly offset by making employee health benefits taxable income. He claims this wouldn't negatively effect businesses offering health coverage, and that's baffling to me, because the entire point is to move people away from coverage that's dependent on employment. Businesses who pay for healthcare distort the market, because people who don't pay for their own coverage have less incentive to worry about costs. I love the plan but hate the dishonesty. I also worry about the cost, because it would lower taxes for pretty much everyone, and the fact that it's refundable means that millions of households would get thousands of dollars. McCain's tax cuts mean that new spending would need to be offset by cuts elsewhere. He has some generic cost cutting jargon, and the one I like most (tort reform) wouldn't even have much impact on *government* costs.<br /><br />McCain has two other main proposals. One is that he would "develop a plan with governors" in regards to insurance companies covering people with existing conditions, and that the government would help subsidize the cost. That could get really, really expensive, and the lack of a budgetary number there troubles me. Less troublesome is the proposal to allow people to buy insurance across state lines, which would allow people to buy affordable coverage from states with fewer benefit mandates. It would have the odd effect of making state mandate laws moot, and as a states-are-better-than-federal type that rubs me the wrong way a little bit. Do the ends justify the means? Probably, but it would be nice if he acknowledged the other side of the debate.<br /><br />Both plans are flawed and costly, but I much prefer McCain's for the effect of de-centralizing things, as opposed to Obama's which moves towards centralization. Removing consumers from the cost of healthcare prevents the market from properly working to keep costs in check. The primary way for government-run programs to control cost is through rationing, which goes against the entire idea of a "right" to healthcare.<br /><br /><br /><i>Energy & The Environment</i><br /><br />Both McCain and Obama want higher CAFE standards. Both agree on a cap-and-trade program, though Obama's is more ambitious and done differently at the outset. Both would spend some of the cap-and-trade money on R&D. Both want to limit "speculation" in oil markets. Both want to see the electrical grid upgraded, though Obama focuses on linking renewable energy to cities while McCain focuses on cutting red tape. McCain favors more nuclear power, while Obama seems to be opposed for reasons of national security. The way he says it is strange, as though the problems are unsolvable, when that ought to be dealt with in homeland security. Heck he even talks about securing nuclear resources in the homeland security section! Both favor some oil drilling (Obama shifted during the summer), though of course McCain wants more. McCain wants an end to ethanol subsidies; Obama wants more ethanol mandates and by all accounts wants the subsidies to continue.<br /><br />Obama, unsurprisingly, goes into more detail than McCain:<br /><br />-Fight wildfires, including clearing out wildfire fuel. Environmentalists often fight such measures, but it's necessary to prevent the worst wildfire activity. Kudos.<br />-Lots of regulations on pollution<br />-Give money to poorer countries for the prevention of deforestation. It would need to be a LOT of money.<br />-A "Green Job Corps". Whatever that means.<br />-All new buildings must be carbon neutral or emission-free by 2030. That seems like a heck of a high standard, especially compared to cars. <br />-Incentives to utilities to reduce energy usage. That does make some sense, since more energy usage equals more profit for utilities.<br />-Energy conservation measures required on a state level for a state to get federal transportation money<br />-"Smart growth" promotion<br />-"Use it or lose it" on federal oil leases. This is a talking point I've seen in a lot of places, and it makes no sense, because it implies that oil companies are knowingly sitting on available oil supplies. Numbers are often used about the amount of oil available on leased-but-inactive land; said numbers are wild guesstimates based on the assumption that land not being drilled on has as much oil as land being drilled on. The effect of all of the rhetoric is to give an excuse for not allowing offshore drilling (ie. "why don't they drill on land they already have?). If you're opposed to offshore drilling, be opposed, but the "Use it or lose it" talking point is a dishonest way of doing it. <br />-Spending $150 billion over 10 years (from the cap-and-trade taxes) for "5 million green jobs". This is brought up as a way to boost the economy. That doesn't make sense the way Obama promotes it. "Green" jobs would, in theory, improve the environment, reduce energy usage, and reduce global warming. As such spending on those jobs could be justified by reducing harm. However, Obama acts as if the money comes out of thin air and creates jobs, and jobs are good, right? Sorry, no. The money comes from taxes, and the tax money would otherwise be creating jobs in the private sector. Once again it's about honesty: be honest about what the costs are and where the benefits come from. <br /><br />Obama's plan would mean higher costs but less pollution and less energy usage. Another clear choice depending on your personal stance on the overall issue.<br /><br /><i>Taxes</i><br /><br />McCain wants to lower capital gains and corporate taxes, reduce the impact of the estate tax, and double the personal exemption. The corporate tax rate is very important, because the US is suffering in terms of tax competition with other nations. Why a capital gains cut and not an income tax cut, that I'm not sure, because cap gains are already much lower than income for the vast majority of taxpayers. <br /><br />Obama's plan is about rebates:<br /><br />-$1000 per family and $25 billion to states from a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies. Very bad policy. First, it discourages domestic production, which goes against energy independence. Second, oil is cyclical (as we've re-learned in the last few weeks), meaning that the companies alternate between lots of profit and not much profit; it's not nice to remove their ability to make money at the top when they face potential losses at the bottom. Third, they're only being targeted because it's a nice populist talking point, yet other big companies with similar profit levels get left alone. <br />-Up to $3000 for child care<br />-$500 per worker<br />-Expanded Earned Income Tax Credit<br />-No income tax for seniors earning less than $50,000. This really ought to be adjusted to take into account net worth, because seniors with a lot of assets shouldn't get a break like this. <br />-Reduced estate tax levels (though not as much as McCain)<br />-No capital gains tax on small businesses and start-ups (no specifics given)<br /><br />This would be funded by restoring '90s tax rates on upper income brackets, and moving capital gains from 15% to 20%. Obama says that the overall tax burden would be about the same. Sadly, he's wrong. <br /><br />That's because the vast majority of his "tax cuts" are refundable tax credits. That means people with no tax burden to begin with get a check. When that was done earlier in the year it was called stimulus spending, not a tax cut. If he called it stimulus spending, and justified it to boost the domestic economy, that would be honest. Saying that the rebates lower the level of taxation is dishonest. Raising taxes on one person to give another person a check is redistribution, and if you think that's a good thing then say it, but be open about it. Especially when tens of billions of dollars are involved. What's more, because the tax credits are phased out as income increases, middle-class households will face a very high marginal tax rate when you combine the loss of benefits with the progressive tax rate. High marginal rates on the non-wealthy are a serious damper on productivity and entrepreneurial activity, the engines of growth. Obama's tax plan is nice in the short term for the poorest 40%, but is bad in the long term for everyone.<br /><br /><br /><i>Misc. Economy</i><br /><br />Obama favors the Employee Free Choice Act, which would implement "card check" unionization. McCain opposes it. There's rhetoric on both sides about "intimidation" in how employees vote on unionizing, but it's mostly a smoke screen. The bottom line is, the bill would make it easier for unions to be formed. Do you see that as good for the economy or not? Me, I think the UAW and its effect on Detroit is evidence enough that in the long run unions can be very harmful. Plus, unions are less needed now that the economy is more diverse and more specialized, rather than dominated by huge factories full of unskilled (and thus powerless) line workers. Even industrial laborers today are exponentially more skilled than those of a couple generations ago. There should be an ability to unionize, and secret ballots provide that well enough. <br /><br />Obama favors raising the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour and indexing it for inflation. McCain, as best I can tell, is against that. Obama uses "living wage" rhetoric, wherein every job should pay enough to support a household. I strongly disagree, because inflated wages eliminate a lot of starting-level jobs that provide needed experience to those breaking into the workforce, and provide jobs to those who would otherwise be unemployed. I'm okay with some level of minimum wage, but not one that means every job has to be able to pay all the bills. Not every job is worth that much, not every worker is the head of the household, and additionally, different costs of living mean that states should decide, not the federal government. $9.50 an hour doesn't have a big impact in New York City, but it can have a serious effect on jobs and businesses in Topeka.<br /><br /><br /><i>Fiscal policy</i><br /><br />McCain is anti-pork, in case you hadn't heard. Obama claims to be, but hasn't been good on the issue during his legislative career. To Obama's credit he wants to do a lot in the way of public databases on contracts, lobbying, earmarks and corporate/military pork to help add transparency. Both want to cut medicare waste, though McCain goes into more detail there (for a change). McCain wants to balance the budget with a 1 year domestic spending freeze followed by smaller increases thereafter. Obama wants to balance the budget with a faster (than McCain) drawdown in Iraq, PAYGO (which congressmen from both parties have ignored whenever they felt like it), more competitive bidding, eliminating unspecified programs, and raising taxes on high earners. I don't trust either of them to balance the budget, but McCain seems a lot more honest about controlling spending. When you see all the ways Obama wants to increase spending, he has a higher burden on him to point out what he'll cut and how much will be saved. He doesn't come close to meeting that burden.<br /><br /><br /><i>Obama grab bag</i><br /><br />I am in general a small-government conservative, so it was a hard slog for me to get through the entirety of Obama's proposals. He wants to create programs or double spending on dozens of things. <br /><br />-Increase support to organic farmers<br />-Increase prosecutions of civil rights and labor law violations<br />-Increase funding to the National Endowment of the Arts<br />-Create an "Artist Corps" to work in poor schools<br />-Double funds to after school programs<br />-"Fully fund COPS program" to add 50,000 police officers<br />-$60 billion over 10 years for infrastructure<br />-More money for public transportation<br />-More funding for Amtrak, which he bizarrely called "the only form of reliable transportation in some places". Where exactly are there train stations but not roads?<br />-Retraining program for inmates<br />-An "Advanced manufacturing fund"<br />-An Affordable Housing Trust Fund... wait... wait there's no way. He wants to fund it using profits from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? WHAT PROFITS? WE JUST HAD TO BAIL THEM OUT! <br /><br />Other Obama positions:<br /><br />-Reduce number of absent fathers by... combating domestic violence and child support avoiders? I mean I'm all about punishing those bastards but that isn't going to make them less absent. He also wants to "fund support services" and "remove some gov't penalties on married families", both of which are vague.<br />-Opposes "discriminatory photo ID laws", though what photo ID law proposals would be "discriminatory" is left up to the reader. I take this to mean he opposes photo ID laws in general, because the civil rights community accuses all ID laws of being discriminatory. <br />-Obama wants to change the fact that "women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man does". Good boilerplate for the ladies, bad bad policy starting point. That number has far more to do with career choice, full time versus part time, and taking time off for families. The "77 cents" line implies that a woman doing the same job as a man gets paid dramatically less, but that simply isn't the case on a meaningful level. <br />-Cap payday loan interest. This would have the effect of closing down payday loan operations more than it would make them more humane. <br />-Federal action to end local racial profiling. He mentions a law passed in Illinois that made police record race, age and gender of everyone stopped. If that sort of thing was done on a federal level it would be a gigantic pain in the ass for every police officer in the country. <br />-Expanded hate crimes laws. I oppose hate crime legislation in general, but the people they effect aren't anyone I want on the street so I'm not going to shed any tears.<br />-Drug courts for federal drug cases. I've read some good things about drug courts so that's fine by me.<br />-Fight mandatory minimum drug sentencing, and crack/cocaine sentence differences. Both are fair enough. We should have mandatory minimums on a lot of things before we do on drug charges, and there's no good reason for the crack/cocaine disparity.<br />-Modernize air traffic control, which is good in theory but would largely depend on if he opens up the skies to new routes.<br /><br />The reason for this special Obama section is because his site goes into more detail than McCain. Simple as that. <br /><br /><br /><i>Conclusion</i><br /><br />There's a handful of instances where I favor Obama or it's a draw. On the biggest issues, and a majority of the time, I favor McCain. I see people who want to decide based on the little stuff, or the details, or personality, and to me, anyone who pays enough attention to be a good voter shouldn't have a hard choice. However lots of people have opinion sets that don't fit into a "conservative" or "progressive" label as neatly as, say, mine do. For those of you in that category, I suggest taking a close look at the fundamental beliefs of the left and the right. <br /><br />As much as the parties fall short of their idealogical goals, that's still a good starting point. "Living constitution" versus originalism, small government versus active government, progressive taxation versus flatter taxation, carrot-based foreign policy versus stick-based foreign policy. Develop a personal philosophy that's consistent from one issue to the next. Hopefully you'll find that one party better exemplifies your philosophy better than the other, even if for the most part both parties suck. And then, more importantly, get involved with primaries and support people with principles more advanced than just winning elections. It's a sad fact that a lot of people with a lot of potential get defeated by those who are better connected to the political machines. The only solution is to get involved early. Sometimes the good ones actually win.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-40370312779736864452008-10-30T10:29:00.000-07:002008-10-30T10:31:23.250-07:00McCain vs Obama on policy, part 1I've bemoaned the way that the GOP primaries resulted in the choice of a mediocre candidate. John McCain isn't a powerful speaker or a powerful debater and he lacks a coherent vision on a number of issues. Yet I still prefer him decisively over Obama. If you read many right-wing columns or websites, this often comes across as an assumption: "of COURSE McCain is better, he's on our team!". Hardly anyone has gone over their platforms thoroughly. I think those of your reading this deserve a blow-by-blow.<br /><br />Most of the information contained here comes from the McCain and Obama campaign websites. So there's the question of whether or not I trust them to run an administration based on their websites, and I'd say yes, at least as much as you can trust any politician. They've both triangulated and modified positions over the course of the year, but those are the exceptions. There are some issues (especially for McCain) where things they've said in the campaign don't jive with what they said earlier in the decade, but I think anything that survived the last 12 months is here to stay. A small number of positions weren't on their websites, but almost all of those were mentioned in speeches. I might be missing some things (mostly from McCain), but where possible I tried to see where both stand on a given item. Also sometimes the things in quotation marks are paraphrasing.<br /><br />Before breaking it down, a word about the websites. Obama had many "Fact sheets" with way more detail. It's night and day. Granted, McCain couldn't get specific things done in any quantity the way Obama could, given that the Dems will control congress. Still, INFORMATION would be nice. McCain's "details" tend to be brief press releases, versus long .pdf files. Even though a lot of the Obama material is repeated (often several times) from one section to another, the total content is overwhelming. Is it easier for liberals, who can advocate for an endless array of programs? Maybe. But McCain could still stand to provide a hell of a lot more detail on his smaller number of proposals. There's a good McCain "Briefing paper" on the economy, but it's hard to find, and it's the only one of its kind that I can see. Oh and it covers a bunch of issues but isn't linked to most of them!<br /><br />I'm going to largely ignore areas of agreement and things that are easy to say or seem like "common sense" but are said by everyone running for president. <br /><br /><i>National Defense & Foreign Policy</i><br /><br />Both mention military pork, and I'm gladdened by that. Interestingly enough, both want to increase the size of the army and marines. Both want to end the practice of having ongoing military operations (ie. Iraq) be done in supplemental/emergency bills separate from the main budget. McCain is more gung-ho about missile defense, while Obama is very skeptical. Both have a lot of 'homeland security' proposals, none of which strike me as controversial. Obama mentions using more civilian government resources (ie. State Department) for operations overseas, something I'd love to see happen. Soldiers are having to learn things on the fly that we have experts on sitting in DC. Obama wants to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", though he doesn't address what (if anything) he'd do in its place. <br /><br />Obama proposes to double foreign aid from $25 billion a year to $50 billion a year. I think $25 billion is already a waste given that it's largely going to countries that aren't poor (Israel) or to poorly run governments (Egypt, Pakistan). He also wants to negotiate with Iran without precondition, while McCain is focused more on getting Iran to shape up with sanctions. I think that it would be foolish to move towards normalized relations with Iran given their blatant support of militias in Iraq and their defiance of the international community on the nuclear issue. Strategically, saying this in the open only encourages Iran's current bad behavior; better to be like Nixon with China and work under the radar while keeping normalization in hand until something is worked out. <br /><br /><i>Iraq & Afghanistan</i><br /><br />Obama wants to draw down from Iraq by mid-2010, while McCain doesn't have a timetable. As a hawk I prefer no timetable, but at least Obama's is slow and security gains seem to have held this year. I'm troubled by Obama's rhetoric about political progress in Iraq, which ignores several vital bills that have passed or made significant progress over the course of the year. Obama also says he has "Judgment you can trust", and gives the following example:<br /><br />"In January 2007, Obama introduced legislation to responsibly end the war in Iraq, with a phased withdrawal of troops engaged in combat operations". He also says "A phased withdrawal will encourage Iraqis to take the lead in securing their own country". <br /><br />Both of these have been thoroughly disproven over the last year and a half. Iraqis, both Sunni and Shia, saw with the surge that the US was finally serious about security. With Shia in particular, their willingness to take on entrenched militias only happened when the surge gave them some breathing room. McCain had a much better sense of how to move forward in Iraq, and I certainly trust his judgment more than Obama on the issue. Biden was brought in to add foreign policy gravitas, but his judgment was that Iraq should be split into three nations, and that would be an unprecedented disaster. <br /><br />That McCain seems to "own" Iraq due to backing the surge well before Bush doesn't mean he should ignore Afghanistan the way he does. Do I think he'd botch it? No, but Obama is more serious about it, proposing to move two brigades there from Iraq. Afghanistan is more likely to need those brigades in 2010 than Iraq, heck, probably 2009 for that matter. <br /><br /><i>Guns</i><br /><br />McCain: Yay guns! Yayyyyy! <br /><br />Okay I'm paraphrasing there but that's the gist of it. He's against pretty much any regulation you can think of, with a couple exceptions like doing background checks at gun shows. Obama is for most of said regulations, though he mostly focuses on "hunting" and as a result talks about preserving the wilderness more than access to shotguns. Obama saying "(the) Second amendment creates an individual right" is encouraging to this right-winger, although I would be stunned if that position is in the top ten things he'll look for in a Supreme Court nominee. The strangest thing in this section is Obama wanting to spend money on a program to encourage hunting in young people. Oh, and speaking of judges...<br /><br /><i>The Supreme Court</i><br /><br />It's an issue with about ten thousand times more importance than the daily/weekly partisan fixations, but it gets almost no attention. The next four years could well decide the balance of the Supreme Court for twenty years, as four judges (two liberals plus Scalia and Kennedy) could all step down at any time. It's not just 5-4 decisions that would change, but even some 6-3 rulings would be in jeopardy. McCain's rhetoric points towards him bringing forth judges in the mold of Scalia, Thomas and Alito; Obama's points towards Stevens, Breyer and Ginsburg. McCain would likely have to compromise in order to get through congress, though Alito and Robers made it through. This is an issue with a very marked difference between the candidates, and if you have a strong preference one way or the other then this should heavily effect your choice. I'm a Scalia man myself.<br /><br /><i>Abortion</i><br /><br />No federal anti-abortion laws are getting passed any time soon, but abortion is mostly a judicial issue now and thus primarily hinges on the Supremes. The one legislative scenario is Obama getting in and passing the Freedom of Choice act. The bill would void just about every abortion restriction on a federal or state level. McCain would veto, and a veto wouldn't get overridden. So another clear choice.<br /><br /><i>Technology & Science</i><br /><br />Obama supports net neutrality, McCain opposes. I sympathize with arguments on both sides, so I don't feel strongly. Obama supports lots of R&D/research funding. McCain wants a ban on internet taxes. None of that should decide your vote.<br /><br /><i>Immigration</i><br /><br />Both favor a boost in the number of H-1B visas for skilled workers, something that's long overdue. Both favor a path to legalization for current illegals, though McCain says he wants to secure the border first (yeah right). Obama goes into more detail about fixing the abysmal immigration bureaucracy, something that SHOULD be a given for presidential candidates but sadly hasn't been. Obama also favors more border security, though primarily in the form of more guards/patrols, where McCain would have more virtual/actual fences. I favor a tight border and a revamped INS that processes a larger number of immigrants, so I guess I learn Obama here? What do you know, it is possible. <br /><br /><i>Education</i><br /><br />McCain favors school choice, which is wonderful but meaningless at the federal level. Obama wants a "Parental report card" and increased parental responsibility, which is wonderful but meaningless at the federal level. The big thing is that Obama favors a lot of spending: $10 billion a year for early education, more money for teachers, and most importantly, an up to $4000 refundable tax credit towards college. The latter would run into the tens of billions and would be a de facto subsidy for community colleges. There's worse things to spend on, but I'm usually against the federal government doing domestic spending that can be done just as well at a local or state level, and that's the case here.<br /><br /><i>Farming</i><br /><br />McCain wants an end to all agricultural tariffs and most subsidies. I believe this to be Bush's biggest broken promise, because he said the same thing in 2000 but went along with the status quo once in office. Obama wants to cap farm benefits at people earning $250,000 a year, which would be an improvement, and he also seems to want to crack down on farm aid going to big corporations. Either of them would be better than Bush and Clinton, assuming they went through with it.<br /><br /><br />Part 2 will deal with the economy, taxes, energy, the environment, and a special grab bag.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-91370163045322224102008-06-02T10:25:00.000-07:002008-06-02T11:36:07.974-07:00Equal time: hating on non-left-wing columnsFor all my "I'm not a partisan GOP drone" talk, I do mostly go after left-wing writers. I tend to respond more strongly to those who dismiss or ridicule the right-wing POV instead of those who merely do a bad job of defending it. Human nature I suppose. <br /><br />Over the last few months I've spent more and more time reading online content, almost all of which updates 6 days a week or more. The Wall Street Journal has opened more content to the public, I've started following RealClearMarkets, the RalClearPolitics blog roundup is back, and it's hard to keep up with everything. Yet somehow I'm not overwhelmed by new pieces of bad writing. Part of that is my unspoken policy of not doing blog responses; blogs are more inflammatory by nature. Another part is a tendency to avoid hitting the same authors repeatedly (RCP helped by no longer linking to Paul Campos), which over time has reduced the number of targets. <br /><br />The net result will probably be less griping about pundits and more time doing substantive analysis. For instance I plan on doing a lot of comparisons between McCain and Obama using their speeches and websites. This should be more informative than the anti-Kerry writing I did in '04. I anticipate a lot of draws based on my disliking both of their positions, that should be fun. <br /><br />Anyway, back to the griping.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/search-engine-dilemma/story.aspx?guid=%7b89E105B8-E006-4C80-99AA-0E18B9228534%7d&print=true&dist=printTop">John Dvorak</a> of the Wall Street Journal's "Marketwatch" writes about the Microsoft/Yahoo/Google situation. Most financial analysts have been getting into the ins-and-outs of insider politics, revenue streams, market forecasting, that sort of thing. John? Not so much. After a lot of rambling he gets to one of the most spectacular examples of web ignorance I've seen from a professional:<br /><br /><blockquote>What is really needed are new and better search engines. To be honest about it, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all stink. We all know this is true. Sure, you can find the major and obvious sites with any of them. But seriously try and find, for example, the best knitting site. Go ahead: Type in the keywords "best knitting site" into Google and tell me which site, out of the 300,000-plus results Google returns, is really the best knitting site. It cannot be done, despite the fact that there must be a best one. A group of knitters might know, or maybe not. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />There are a lot of adjectives one can use somewhat properly in a web search: biggest, oldest and most viewed come to mind. "Best"? No. That requires subjective analysis and consensus which would be practically impossible to find about websites. It's one thing to search for "Best Mid-sized Sedan" and find the opinion of 'authoritative' sources like JD Power. That's because there are one a handful of them. Now try saying with a straight face that there is one and only one "best" website about practically anything, keeping in mind that you are going to be seen as 'authoritative' on the subject. John seems to think that either Google should judge the "best" on every subject while choosing from across the internet, or he thinks that a term as generic as "best" should only return a few worthy results. <br /><br /><blockquote>It's getting more difficult to find anything with a narrow target using any of these search engines. Recently, I was searching for a Barack Obama citation for an article and could not find it on Google; there were too many results to be useful. </blockquote><br /><br />I might cut him slack if he went into detail about the search he tried, but he doesn't. I would bet that this is because if we knew what he was looking for, we could find it in seconds on Google. Why am I so sure? Because this is the kind of person who thinks Google should be able to tell you what the best knitting website is.<br /><br /><blockquote>While the Google mechanism works great for selling millions of little ads, it's old-fashioned and already dead, as are the rest of these search engines, which basically are all based on decade-old Web-crawling technologies combined with massive caching. To do its job, Google has to maintain up-to-date and redundant copies of the entire Internet on its servers. It's a ridiculous idea. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />I won't even touch "already dead". That's absurd on its face. No, the worst part about the entire column is that he thinks using webcrawlers to comb and cache the internet is 'a ridiculous idea', but determining the best websites about every subject up to and including knitting ought to be a defining test for a search engine. <br /><br />Our second bad column is from a man by the name of <a href="http://townhall.com/Columnists/DennisPrager/2008/05/20/california_decision_will_radically_change_society">Dennis Prager.</a> Let's join this column already in progress.<br /><br /><blockquote>Nothing imaginable -- leftward or rightward -- would constitute as radical a change in the way society is structured ... Not another Prohibition, not government taking over all health care, not changing all public education to private schools, not America leaving the United Nations, not rescinding the income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax. Nothing. <br /><br />...four justices of the California Supreme Court ... have changed American society more than any four individuals since Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madison. </blockquote><br /><br />Wow! That's pretty huge! I mean we're talking about the history of the nation. And what is it they did?<br /><br /><blockquote>...redefining marriage from opposite sex to include members of the same sex...</blockquote><br /><br />Wait, what? Seriously? <br /><br />Dennis goes off the rails at the start and says "screw the rails, more coal!", gorging himself on one bit of slippery-slope hyperbole after another. One might think that for a right-wing Christian, Roe v Wade would be far more historical than the decision of a single state court. One wonders the lengths to which he'd go if you used THAT as the start of his rhetorical exercise, seeing as life itself is bigger than marriage. <br /><br />Prager's hyperventilating and over-reaching do the 'traditional marriage' side a disservice. The extremes to which he goes are so laughable that they couldn't possibly change anyone's mind, and they'll only be effective with those who are already worked up about the issue. What's more he makes it sound as if his side has utterly lost, and defeatism is never an effective position. <br /><br />There are several reasons why Townhall.com went from one of my daily stops to a website I avoid if possible, and people like Dennis Prager are one of them.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-27727669713267914062008-05-12T12:49:00.000-07:002008-05-12T13:57:28.714-07:00More miserable punditryFirst column: <a href="http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1735671,00.html">America's Forgotten Hostages.</a> My goodness, Columbian drug-running terrorists are holding Americans hostage! The Bush administration should do something! And that something is: cave into the demands of the terrorists! Tim Padgett goes for what he sees as middle ground, saying that we can just cut the sentences of some high-level prisoners rather than releasing them entirely. If I may quote one brief exerpt,<br /><br /><blockquote>The U.S. has designated the FARC a terrorist group and can't negotiate with it.</blockquote><br /><br />Hey Tim, has it ever occurred to you that there might be a <strong>reason</strong> for this policy? That if we reward FARC more for kidnapping people rather than guiding them to safety, we encourage more kidnappings? He doesn't even acknowledge the reason, let alone debate it. Thus the hostages are 'forgotten', yet another Bush administration failure. A failure to reward terrorists.<br /><br /><br />Second column: <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/134116/output/print">How the South Won (This) Civil War</a><br /><br />By line: "Southernism is taking over our national dialogue. Maybe it's time for the North to secede from the Union."<br /><br />Oh boy.<br /><br /><blockquote>This thought, which has been recurring to me regularly over the years as I've watched the Southernization of our national politics at the hands of the GOP and its evangelical base, surfaced again when I read a New York Times story today. The article was about an "American Idol" contestant—apparently quite talented—who was eliminated after she sang the title song from "Jesus Christ Superstar." When it debuted 38 years ago, the rock opera was considered controversial for its rather arch portrayal of a doubt-wracked, very human Jesus, but the music was so good and the lyrics so clever that it quickly became a huge hit. In the delicate balance of forces that have always defined American tastes—nativism and yahooism versus eagerness for the new and openness to innovation—art, or at least high craft, it seemed, had triumphed. But our national common denominator of taste is so altered today that the blasphemous dimension of "Jesus Christ Superstar" now trumps the artistic part. And somehow, no one is surprised. Our reaction is more like, "Why would she risk singing a song like that?"</blockquote><br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/arts/television/25idol.html?_r=1&ex=1366862400&en=027813ed03fb45c7&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin">Here's the NYT article in question.</a> You'll notice that as evidence it cites "Online chat boards devoted to 'American Idol'". Now that's powerful stuff! I'm convinced that legions of teenage girls based their decision on a controversy that started when their parents were infants and/or not even born! <br /><br />Can he dig himself deeper? Michael Hirsh says "You bet!"<br /><br /><blockquote>Anatol Lieven, in his 2005 book "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism," describes how the "radical nationalism" that has so dominated the nation's discourse since 9/11 traces its origins to the demographic makeup and mores of the South and much of the West and Southern Midwest—in other words, what we know today as Red State America. This region was heavily settled by Scots-Irish immigrants—the same ethnic mix King James I sent to Northern Ireland to clear out the native Celtic Catholics. After succeeding at that, they then settled the American Frontier, suffering Indian raids and fighting for their lives every step of the way. And the Southern frontiersmen never got over their hatred of the East Coast elites and a belief in the morality and nobility of defying them. The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers—and cultural weight.</blockquote><br /><br />Savage. Yessir, when I think of Topeka or Salt Lake City, the first word that comes to mind is "savage". <br /><br />Hirsh goes on to say that "we have become an intolerant nation", which strikes me as very odd in a year where Obama is the favorite to become president, and when over my short lifetime gays in popular culture went from incredibly rare to utterly commonplace.<br /><br />The kicker is a postscript written after publication:<br /><br /><blockquote>Author's Note: When I wrote this column last week, I used some careless language to describe certain tendencies in Southern and frontier thinking. When I wrote that after the settlement of the South and frontier by Scots-Irish immigrants, "a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores," I didn't mean to say that these tendencies described any particular ethnic group today, or that such mores are representative in general of the thinking of people in the South or West, only that they had emerged historically among some subsections of the population as part of the Jacksonian warrior culture in those regions</blockquote><br /><br />Michael Hirsh isn't some upstart who slipped up. He's a man of journalistic accomplishment, an editor no less, who should know the value and importance of linguical precision. "I didn't mean to say", and then he says what he blatantly meant to say given the context of the article. What a maroon.<br /><br /><br />Final column: <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-turse9-2008may09,0,5302683.story">War's Shopping Cart.</a> This one just boggles the mind. <br /><br /><blockquote>An Associated Press article on the report, however, offered a caveat: "Not all the companies invested in by lawmakers are typical defense contractors. Corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson have at one point received defense-related contracts." <br /><br />But the Associated Press is wrong. The fact is that corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson are, indeed, typical defense contractors. To suggest that such firms, and tens of thousands like them, only receive defense-related contracts at the odd, aberrant moment is specious at best. </blockquote><br /><br />At this point in the article I was very interested. It went against the impression that everything is run by Haliburton, and instead posits the reality that all sorts of companies do business with the military. Can that really shock anyone?<br /><br /><blockquote>In 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his famous farewell address as president, warned of the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by what he called the "military-industrial complex" in the United States. Today, however, the "large arms industry" of Eisenhower's day is only part of a complex equation. Civilian firms such as PepsiCo and IBM form the backbone of what more accurately can be described as a "military-corporate complex." These businesses allow the Pentagon to function, to make war and to carry out foreign occupations. <br /><br />...<br /><br />While the well-known giant arms makers -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics -- remain the largest contractors, they are dwarfed by the sheer number of fellow contractors from all imaginable economic sectors. </blockquote><br /><br />Exactly. Eisenhower's concern was that arms makers could use their political clout to push for military spending and wars in order to boost their profit margins. Now that the spending is spread across companies that have no particular need to lobby for war (ie. Pepsi) and for whom the military is only one of many customers. <br /><br /><blockquote>In reality, whether we like it or not, whether we care or not, we're all participating in it. When we buy Crest toothpaste (Procter & Gamble) or Oscar Mayer hot dogs (Kraft) or a PlayStation 3 (Sony), the fact is we are supporting an increasingly civilian-oriented military economy and an increasingly militarized civilian economy.</blockquote><br /><br />...wait, what?<br /><br /><blockquote>As such, ever more U.S. companies are going to war, and, even if ever fewer Americans are interested in volunteering for military service, it's increasingly true that, by the flow of our dollars, ever more of us are going to war with them. </blockquote><br /><br />Huh? Is he saying what I think he's saying?<br /><br /><blockquote>You might think, of course, that there's nothing wrong with the military buying Pepsi. "What's the problem?" you ask. Soldiers have to drink something, just like the rest of us, so why not Pepsi's self-described "bold, robust, effervescent magic cola"? The same goes for hot dogs and toothpaste. </blockquote><br /><br />Yeah that's what I think, and Nick Turse better have a hell of a punchline to convince me otherwise.<br /><br /><blockquote>This isn't about a bottle of Pepsi or Krispy Kreme Doughnuts or a Sara Lee cake. It isn't about which hot dogs the troops eat or which computers they use -- be it for launching missiles or reading e-mail. This isn't even about boycotting one brand or company or conglomerate in hopes of slowing down the war effort. If you began that, in our militarized economy, you'd eventually be left naked, starving and possessionless.</blockquote><br /><br />Wait, wait, wait. Boycotting a company in the hopes of slowing the war effort?! Is this a concern for more than a very small number of highly motivated doves?<br /><br /><blockquote>On their own, each of these brands, companies or conglomerates appear minor indeed. But together, the effect is stunning: Nearly every product in your pantry, every appliance in your home, every bit of high-tech home entertainment equipment, even your morning newspaper (the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, was a minor Pentagon contractor in 2006 too) is now directly or indirectly tied to the Pentagon through the company that produces it.</blockquote><br /><br />By this point it's clear: the Pentagon and military are the enemy and anyone doing business with them is tainted. <br /><br /><blockquote>It's high time we at least recognize that PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson and just about every other corporate giant (and thousands upon thousands of flyweights of the business world) are benefiting not only from our purchases of cola, computers, software and bandages but from our tax dollars, via the Pentagon. We all know what the Pentagon's doing abroad, and what that's meant for Iraqis. </blockquote><br /><br />"What that's meant for Iraqis"? You mean liberating them from Saddam Hussein and attempting to protect them from terrorists? No of course he doesn't mean that. I'm not even asking him to mean that. I <em>am</em> asking that he write a column in the Los Angeles Times, a major daily paper read by millions, in which he doesn't assume that the average reader regularly engages in anti-military boycotts, and doesn't assume the average reader sees the Iraqi war as inherently evil. <br /><br /><blockquote>Napoleon supposedly said, "An army marches on its stomach." Over the years of occupation to come, and for the next invasion too, remember that, whatever land it occupies, the Pentagon marches on a stomach filled with Cap'n Crunch, Rice-A-Roni and Diet Pepsi Vanilla -- and, ever increasingly, you're marching with it too.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />I can imagine Nick typing that out with a sense of triumph. Take THAT, corporate overlords! I have spoken truth to your power! Meanwhile I'm guessing 90% of US voters are either still confused over what he's talking about since they aren't up to date on far-left ideology, or (like me) are laughing at him. <br /><br />It would be one thing to write this in Mother Jones or the American Prospect, but the LA Times? Even granting that the readership would be slightly to the left of average in America, that doesn't excuse such an enormous overreach. People who are in, say, the 75th percentile to the left in America aren't going to be on board with seeing something insidious about companies selling basic goods to the military. Nick should have understood the audience and crafted something more palatable to the average joe who might want troops out of Baghdad, but doesn't take issue with companies who make life easier for the troops while they're 'over there'.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-15695988083598978152008-04-17T12:50:00.000-07:002008-04-17T14:21:06.721-07:00On two subjects<em>On the importance of a 'rape' exception in abortion bans:</em> I've seen many pro-life pundits dismiss the common three abortion exceptions (rape, incest, mother's life in danger) as distractions and rare. Problem is, for any legislation as personal and invasive as an abortion ban (which is the goal of pro-lifers), these exceptional circumstances require exceptional remedies. Failing to find said remedies would create new problems and quickly undermine the laws. <br /><br />Take rape. The pro-life position is, 'abortion is murder and outweighs the woman's right to choose'. In the case of rape, an absolutist pro-life position would be that abortion is still murder and the fetus wasn't guilty of a crime. <a href="http://www.nrlc.org/news/1998/NRL7.98/when.html">Here's an example of that position (towards the bottom).</a> It's one thing to argue that an abortion in the case of rape is wrong; it's quite another to <strong>legally require the victims of rape to bear the children of their attackers</strong>. The difference between 'ought' and 'must' is huge, and pro-life absolutists fail to understand the importance. If abortion is outlawed in the case of rape, the rapist is given indefinite control of the victim. <br /><br />Along those lines, there's an even more fundamental reason to allow abortion in the case of rape: having it banned gives rapists an incentive to commit the crime. Rape is often about power rather than lust, and few things are more powerful than procreation. Forcing the victim to bear and likely care for the child, passing on genes without needing a willing partner, and... well I'm sure there are other perverse incentives rapists could conjure up for themselves. The point is that to the extent that willing procreation is vital to humanity itself, even sacred, it ought not be perverted by forcing women to have the babies of rapists.<br /><br />You might ask yourself, "is banning abortion in the case of rape even an issue?", and to that extent I say, yes. Polls show that 10-15% of the population is pro-life absolutist, and several percent more favor banning abortions where the mother's life isn't at stake. This represents anywhere from 30-50+% of the overall pro-life movement. What's more, absolutists represent the majority of funding and energy in the pro-life movement. If Roe v Wade is overturned pro-life legislation will be passed in many states, and take effect in states where laws are written to begin if Roe is overturned. An example of the latter is Louisiana, and that law does not allow for abortions in the case of rape.<br /><br />To complicate things further, even if an abortion ban allows such abortions, it's crucial that a good system be in place for deciding such situations. For instance, would the standard of proof be a legal conviction, or would it be lower than that? Would litigation be expedited, or would lawyers be able to drag things out until delivery? Go too far in the direction of the victim and you risk branding innocent men rapists. Go too far in the direction of the accused and you risk a de facto ban, harming the victims. <br /><br />I'm a firm believer in 'defeating' political opponents with reason; converting them to your side. Pro-lifers who either haven't considered or refuse to consider the very real consequences of an abortion ban make it much harder to convince pro-choicers to switch, especially women. To a large extent absolutists do the pro-life cause a disservice, because pro-choicers fear that the end of Roe v Wade would lead to abortion policy being set by the kind of people who give no regard to the potential horror visited on rape victims. Serious abortion opponents *must* give more thought to a post-Roe world if they want to become a clear majority in the nation.<br /><br /><em>On the presidential election:</em> The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that there hasn't been a president in modern times whose policies I broadly agreed with. Not even Reagan. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge">Coolidge</a> probably comes closest of those in the last century, but even he was tied to things like racist immigration quotas and appointing a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Fiske_Stone">Supreme Court Justice</a> who did immense damage to the Originalist cause. <br /><br />Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson aren't perfect, but they at least campaigned as unabashed right-wingers. John McCain's flip-flopping and unpredictable populist outbursts, coupled with a guaranteed Democratic congress and his desire to be seen as 'bipartisan', means he won't be the kind of leader I'm hoping for. If you're familiar with my positions you know I dread a win by either Democrat. Thus, whoever wins it means at least 4 more years of disappointment. <br /><br />What I'd like to know is, are any of you out there actually enthusiastic for the policies set out by one of the three remaining candidates? I wonder what it's like to have a candidate you agree with in a position to lead the most powerful nation in the world. Must be nice. Like being a Patriots fan.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-85451239242756386172008-03-18T11:57:00.000-07:002008-03-18T12:41:02.620-07:00EJ Dionne's anti-capitalism meltdownEJ Dionne of the Washington Post is normally someone I categorize as someone I disagree with, but understand. <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/bailing_out_the_capitalists.html">This column,</a> however, goes off the rails.<br /><br /><blockquote>Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries, and how government should keep its hands off the private economy. The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. </blockquote><br /><br />1. What, exactly, is with his use of 'capitalists' in the first sentence? Couldn't that theoretically mean everyone in the private sector? Isn't the guy who runs the car wash down the street a capitalist just as much as the hedge fund manager jumping out of his 50th story office window? It's that kind of careless verbiage that will turn people off from your point of view, especially right off the bat.<br /><br />1a. What conservative in his right mind would say that *all* capitalists are good and perfect? I see references to capitalism and 'the free market'. Part of capitalism is that businesses which are run poorly go out of business. What conservative disagrees with that? If managers at an investment firm flush the firm's assets down the drain with bad investments, they deserve to be out on the street. Who is EJ responding to? He makes a lot of sarcastic quips along these lines and it's a strawman argument.<br /><br />2. How on earth does the government have its hands off of the financial sector? Is the <b>federal reserve</b> not a government agency? Isn't it generally agreed that the housing bubble was born and nurtured by too-low too-long interest rates courtesy of the fed? This is a recurring theme.<br /><br />3. What conservatives believe that the government should pick up the tab for failing firms? That said firms are seeking relief is no shock; any number of corporations rely on political patronage and pork and corporate welfare. It's something worth condemning these *particular* capitalists over, and their governmental enablers. It's not a particularly useful club to use against conservatives unless he has concrete evidence of right-wing desire for bailouts. <br /><br /><blockquote>But if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the last three decades or so, nothing will. We had already learned the hard way -- in the crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed -- that capitalism is quite capable of running off the rails. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was a response to the failure of the geniuses of finance (and their defenders in the economics profession) to realize what was happening or to fix it in time.</blockquote><br /><br />1. What 'capitalist' doesn't believe in the possibility of asset bubbles and recessions? The pure free market cure is to have bubbles pop, the asset (in this case housing) decline to a sustainable level, and whoever goes out of business as a result, tough. Now, I'm of the opinion that there ought to be *some* government action in response to situations like these. Some amount of lending, some amount of interest rate lowering, evaluate what laws and policies might be preventing a recovery, that sort of thing. But nothing in this, not even the collapse of Bear Sterns, is anywhere close to a 'near meltdown of capitalism', and it certainly doesn't repudiate capitalist principles. In THIS case, as with the tech stock bubble, the biggest losers are the guys with the seven-figure salaries. They're the ones with the most invested in failing outfits. And they're the ones who deserve to take the hit, not taxpayers.<br /><br />2. Again, EJ brings up an example of government not doing enough and says the problem is with unfettered capitalism. The Great Depression, however, shows the opposite. Hoover and congress did several things to shove the economy into the dark depths of depression, notably the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1932">Revenue Act</a> and the loathsome <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot-Hawley_Tariff_Act">Smoot-Hawley tariff.</a> Hoover tried to tax and spend and regulate his way to a good economy and made things worse. FDR could have pushed to remove the tariffs and lower taxes in order to help consumers and stimulate investment and entrepreneurship, but instead piled on more spending, more taxes and more regulation. One can argue that in the end government saved the day with spending on WW2, but it's difficult to blame the Great Depression on not enough government action.<br /><br />The rest of the column goes on in similar fashion: pro-market types should feel sorry and embrace more taxes and entitlements. Lots of vitriol and emotion, but the end EJ only wound up defeating his own made-up mirage of conservatives and 'capitalists'. How exactly Bear Sterns et al. proves that taxes aren't high enough is beyond me.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-25416903114499622032008-02-26T13:28:00.000-08:002008-02-26T14:51:35.986-08:00Dissecting anti-war talking pointsNormally, I don't go back and attack a columnist after rebutting an article. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/25/AR2008022502438_pf.html">If it's three people who always write together, I think I can do three.</a> This trio appeared in the "holiday edition" Ditchblog, about 3/4ths of the way down. Before they trotted out a really weak talking point about "strategic drift". Now they're trotting out multiple talking points that, while wrong, are much more serious and deserving of response.<br /><br /><blockquote>Even a cursory examination of American history reveals the complexity of concluding a war that has taken on such a stark partisan tint. The shadow of Vietnam looms, as it has become standard Republican narrative that back then it was the Democrats in Congress who stabbed America in the back by cutting off funding for a winning cause. The fact that the war was lost in Southeast Asia, as opposed to the halls of Congress, is no matter. The Republican machine will press this same theme should it lose the White House in November. A Democratic administration would be accused of surrendering to evildoers, as once more the dovish successors of George McGovern are wrongly said to have pulled defeat out of the jaws of victory.</blockquote><br /><br />So they start with 'nam, and to an extent they have a point. If a Democrat is elected, pulls out of Iraq, and things go south there, the GOP will bring up various talking points in regards to why they think Democrats are to blame for what happened in Vietnam. <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051101faessay84604/melvin-r-laird/iraq-learning-the-lessons-of-vietnam.html?mode=print">Here is the article that does the best job of delivering said talking points I've seen.</a> There are a lot of ways to combat said points, and the three authors decide to wave it away with "fact that the war was lost in Southeast Asia, as opposed to the halls of Congress, is no matter". You can't brush aside Laird's piece so lazily, and Laird is just giving an expanded version of the usual right-wing Vietnam litany.<br /><br />Moving on, the trio returns to an anti-war beef I can sympathize with.<br /><br /><blockquote>Republicans will claim that after four years of disastrous mistakes, the Bush administration finally got it right with its troop "surge." Yet even despite the loss of nearly 1,000 American lives and the expenditure of $150 billion, the surge has failed in its stated purpose: providing the Iraqi government with the breathing space to pass the 18 legislative benchmarks the Bush administration called vital to political reconciliation. To date it has passed only four. </blockquote><br /><br />Dubya, ever the not-so-great-communicator, did not do a very good job of providing a timeframe for the 'political reconciliation' end of things. To the extent that he did, the impression was that it would follow right on the heels of a decline in violence. The surge started up a year ago, reached its manpower peak in June, and by September we had the first round of hearings as to its efficacy. At that point I don't know if any of the 18 benchmarks had been met. What I do know is that more movement has happened on the benchmarks in the last month than in the previous year, and also the strength of the security gains wasn't clear until at least October if not November. Considering the pace at which America's vaunted democracy passes important legislation, just how fast does Iraq need to move on the most important laws imaginable before the entire thing is a failure? Again, this is something that the president should be addressing to the public, rather than me on a blog in response to a newspaper column. <br /><br /><blockquote>Moreover, as part of the surge, the administration has further undermined Iraq's government by providing arms and money to Sunni insurgent groups even though they have not pledged loyalty to Baghdad.</blockquote><br /><br />In the short run, nominal insurgent groups were used to help root out al Qaeda cells. In the medium run, the real Sunni power brokers (tribes) are participating exponentially more in governance and Sunnis are joining Iraq's police and military forces by the thousands. The Iraq-based Sunni uprising against Iraq's central government is over as far as being a threat to the nation's integrity, and nearly all Sunni leaders now understand that in order to effect events in Baghdad they have to participate in the political process. Local insurgent groups in Anbar have no more desire to blow up Shiite markets and certainly aren't going to try to overthrow the green zone with the type of arms we gave them. Sunnis are unhappy with the current Iraqi federal government, but are now willing to settle things with words and ballots rather than bullets. The political process is what matters, not loyalty to sitting politicians. It's a tricky but important distinction. <br /><br /><blockquote>Beyond the impracticalities of the surge, it is important to realistically measure the costs and consequences of a categorical U.S. withdrawal. The prevailing doomsday scenario suggests that an American departure would lead to genocide and mayhem. But is that true? Iraq today belongs to Iraqis; it is an ancient civilization with its own norms and tendencies. It is entirely possible that in the absence of a cumbersome and clumsy American occupation, Iraqis will make their own bargains and compacts, heading off the genocide that many seem to anticipate. Opponents of the war seem to have far more confidence in Iraqis' abilities to manage their affairs than do war advocates. Moreover, a U.S. withdrawal would finally compel the region to claim Iraq, forcing the Saudis, Iranians, Jordanians and others to decide whether a civil war is in their interests. Faced with that stark reality, they may seek to mediate rather than inflame Iraq's squabbles.</blockquote><br /><br />This is wonderful. *Americans* are the cause of conflict, and *other governments* will provide solutions! It's so clear! It's so simple! It's so <strong>utterly and obviously wrong!</strong><br /><br />The rest of the region had their chance in 2005 and 2006. The "cumbersome and clumsy" Americans largely retreated to their bases, an Iraqi federal government was formed, and if the region wanted to promote stability they could have done a diplomatic surge. Instead they aided and condoned the influx of arms and fighters who escalated the sectarian conflict to a boiling point. Saudi Arabia and Syria could have put a lid on al Qaeda; Iran could have put a lid on Sadr. They chose not to. When it looked like Iraq was racked by the exact violence that Korb, Podesta and Takeyh mention above, those governments did exactly the wrong thing if they truly desired stability. <br /><br />The root cause of violence in Iraq isn't Americans, it's other governments trying to put their favored group on top. Iraq's Sunnis were used as a proxy against the unthinkable prospect of Arab Shiites holding power. Iraq's Shiites, once provoked enough, were used as a proxy to try and liquidate the Sunni population of many neighborhoods and cities. It took a surge of American troops to break huge segments of the Sunni and Shia populations free of that pernicious influence, and if America leaves Iraq en masse it will open the door for those regional actors to resume their proxy war and put a stopper in what political progress there has been. Again I point to the utter lack of political progress in the years of rising violence, compared to the compromises reached in Baghdad just a few months after it was secured.<br /><br />While I'm going after that paragraph, I'm just stunned that the authors would characterize America's presence in Iraq that way at this point. "Cumbersome and clumsy" is a great way to describe things in 2003. "Cumbersome", not so much after the Iraqi government was in power. "Clumsy" is absolutely the wrong word to describe things under the leadership of Patraeus. What US troops do on the ground right now is nothing short of amazing, and it certainly isn't <em>getting in the way of</em> Iraqi politicians working together. On the contrary: the US has done an incredible amount to foster and facilitate reconciliation between Sunnis and the central government.<br /><br />They keep layering it on:<br /><br /><blockquote>The strategic necessities of ending the war have never been more compelling. In today's Middle East, America is neither liked nor respected.<br />...<br />America's occupation of Iraq is estranging an entire generation of Arab youths, creating a reservoir of antagonism that will take decades to overcome. A Democratic president who may enjoy a modest honeymoon in the Middle East simply by virtue of not being George W. Bush can take a giant step toward reclaiming America's practical interests and moral standing by leaving Iraq.</blockquote><br /><br />Respect for America in the long run is best served by whatever policies best promote stability and democracy in Iraq. Leave the door open for another round of bloodletting, and America will be the worst of all worlds: a hegemon who can't get the job done. America's presence for years was marked by violence without progress; that isn't the case today. If we stay long enough to leave behind a stable, democratic Iraq, that will do far more for US/Muslim relations than heading to the exit a year or two faster. <br /><br />What's more, the "reservoir of antagonism" is much more complex than Iraq. To the extent that young Arabs are going to take up arms against the infidel, they were already willing to do so for reasons from support of Israel to raunchy pop culture to the invasion of Afghanistan. Moving troops from Mosul to the Pakistani border might play well in blue states and Europe, but it won't make a dent in jihadi sentiment. <br /><br />Finally, the events of the last two years in Iraq have provided a powerful narrative that is changing the way Muslims look at the war on terror. While al Qaeda has time and again shown its willingness to deliberately slaughter innocents, America has worked hand-in-hand with local groups to bring about security and begin the work of rebuilding. The news on al Jazeera is hardly rose-colored, but it's no longer possible to do the "Americans bad, insurgents good" reporting that used to be the norm. Opinion polls in many countries have demonstrated a decline in support of wholesale terrorist violence in general and al Qaeda specifically. The horror of Muslim-on-Muslim terrorism has been made clear, and that momentum is best maintained by assisting Iraq in wiping out the last terrorist cells and making sure they don't come back.<br /><br />It would be one thing for them to publish that column a year or two ago, but today I find it very much lacking.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-38215598678153604252008-02-22T08:56:00.000-08:002008-02-22T10:05:44.677-08:00Various comments<em>On the election:</em> It shouldn't shock any of you to learn that I prefer McCain to Obama and Clinton, and that I would have preferred someone else to McCain. If anyone is interested I'll go into detail about why, but it should be clear enough from my past writings. <br /><br />One thing the 2008 race has made crystal-clear is that if you want a candidate who really fits your beliefs, you need to worry about PRIMARIES the most. If you're a Democrat, you could go for populism (Edwards) or 'hope' (Obama) or competence (Clinton) or down-the-line progressive dogma (Kucinich) or... well there was Dodd and Richardson and Biden at some point and I'm not sure what they brought to the table. But if you think taxes aren't progressive enough, you want out of Iraq, you want universal healthcare, you want judges who support Roe v Wade, and so on and so forth, you had plenty to pick from. I haven't seen any left-wing commentators who didn't like at least one of the initial pool of candidates.<br /><br />The same goes for the right, at least if you really surveyed the field. For all the grousing about how none of the 'major' candidates followed the straight-and-narrow of conservative dogma, there was Duncan Hunter who got zero support from the conservative establishment and never gained traction. Hunter was as conservative as you could ask for. Incredibly, the ins-and-outs of the GOP field was entirely based on media coverage. Who was viable and who wasn't, who was hot and who wasn't, who was electable and who wasn't. After so many years of the GOP falling so very short of the ideology they supposedly represent, the Rush Limbaughs of the world stayed on the sidelines until long after it was too late. Watching the right-wing bigwigs have a fit over McCain is maddening since they had more than enough time to back someone else. <br /><br />People who complain about politics and 'the system' never seem to recognize that there are opportunities for them to have an effect. There are primaries for many offices, and I've found that in general there's at least one good choice for the ideologically-minded in any given primary. That person doesn't always win, but at least there's a choice. And in a primary, the efforts of one supporter can effect things exponentially more than in a general election. That's the time to get involved. <br /><br /><em>On earmarks:</em> I've seen many 'realist' political writers scoff at those who fixate on less than 1% of the federal budget. The real money is in (entitlements / the military), they say. If the entitlements go away, the money would still be spent by the government! <br /><br />If pork is so small, why does it get so much attention among those concerned about the fiscal health of the nation? I think of it as applying the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows">"broken windows"</a> theory to the federal budget. Pork/earmark spending, whether it be for bike paths or boondoggle military hardware, is something that directly corrupts politicians. Campaign contributors and lobbyists and those with the right connections get a big piece of the pie, and politicians lose sight of what their real job is supposed to be. If we can't get rid of spending that both left-wingers and right-wingers agree should be cut, if we can't get rid of a pernicious influence on those in charge of the most powerful nation in the world, then what chance is there of changing the big stuff? 'Broken windows' theory worked to reduce street crime in many cities. True earmark reform could start to do the same to crimes being committed in Washington DC.<br /><br /><em>The usual response-to-a-column-I-dislike:</em> <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kinsley22feb22,0,2873550,print.story">Michael Kinsley says the surge is a failure.</a> Not because security hasn't improved; it has. Not because political goals are stalled; several key bills have progressed and/or passed in the last few months. No, Kinsley says the surge has failed because the total number of troops in Iraq isn't going down fast enough. <br /><br /><blockquote>In fact, the surge was presented as part of a larger plan for troop withdrawal. It was also, implicitly, part of a deal between Bush and the majority of the people in this country who want out of Iraq. The deal was: Just let me have a few more soldiers to get Baghdad under control, and then everybody, or almost everybody, can pack up and come home. In other words: You have to increase the troops in order to reduce them. This is so perverse on its face that it begins to sound Zen-like and brilliant, like something out of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." <br /><br />...<br /><br />But we needn't quarrel about all this -- or deny the reality of the good news -- to say that, at the very least, the surge has not worked yet. The test is simple and built into the concept of a surge: Has it allowed us to reduce troop levels to below where they were when it started? And the answer is no. </blockquote><br /><br />This is so petty. First off, the 'implication' he says Bush used in pushing the surge was never there. Bush used words like 'victory' about a thousand times, meaning that the key goals were security and political gains, not troop reduction. Secondly, the surge only started a year ago, and there was absolutely nothing implied about how soon troop levels would go below 2006 levels.<br /><br />The point of the surge is that you could keep troop levels where they were indefinitely and things weren't going to improve enough for a responsible withdrawal. The "stay the course" 2005-2006 disaster adequately proved that. By surging in enough troops we gave confidence to Sunni tribal leaders that we could protect and assist them in the process of kicking foreign terrorists out of Anbar. We had enough manpower to take and hold cities and parts of Baghdad that had never really been under control. Iraqis who wanted to join security forces were no longer blown up waiting to apply. By getting so many of these places securable for the long-term, by making the environment more conducive for Iraqi self-policing, it will allow for that responsible withdrawal in the coming years. <br /><br />He continues:<br /><br /><blockquote>The surge will have surged in and surged out, leaving us back where we started. Maybe the situation in Baghdad, or the whole country, will have improved. But apparently it won't have improved enough to risk an actual reduction in the American troop commitment. <br /><br />And consider how modest the administration's standard of success has become. Can there be any doubt that it would go for a reduction to 100,000 troops -- and claim victory -- if it had any confidence at all that the gains it brags about would hold at that level of support? The proper comparison isn't with the situation a year ago. It's with the situation before we got there. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />Prudence is a sign of failure? The administration, having seen security gains from past mini-surges fail to hold, is taking it slowly. You might even say they're being cynical. Golly, I wonder why they'd be cynical about things taking a turn for the worse in Iraq? <br /><br />It would be irresponsible and stupid to flee Iraq as soon as things got better. There are still terrorist cells to be flushed out, there are still security forces to train, and there is still a fear in parts of Iraq that security will be fleeting. A gradual drawdown will give recently secured parts of the country time to relax, it will give newly minted security forces time to get experience before being given the reigns, and it will make sure that terrorists aren't allowed to gain new footholds. Kinsley is opposed to the war, that's fine. My problem is that he's setting a standard of success that has nothing to do with actually accomplishing the goals of the surge, and in fact works against it.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com61tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-84356610194302367492008-02-04T13:02:00.000-08:002008-02-05T09:53:15.836-08:00A column based on a book based on a strawman<a href="http://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military">If I'm going after someone writing in Le Monde,</a> one might assume I'm attacking a Frenchman. Happily in this case I'm attacking an American by the name of Chalmers Johnson. Perhaps someone with the last name of Ditch shouldn't mock someone's name, but <em>Chalmers?</em> Really? That must have been a fun childhood. Most of his ideas are much more worthy of ridicule than his moniker.<br /><br />The gist of his argument is that US military spending is causing huge deficits, which in turn greatly harm US financial health. I will begin by noting the few things which we agree on. <br /><br /><blockquote>There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand ... but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defence jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense.</blockquote><br /><br />There is no way around the fact that a significant percentage of military spending is pork, and in many cases pork that utterly dwarfs more famous things like the 'bridge to nowhere'. Congressmen push for the purchase of billion-dollar hardware that the military doesn't want, Senators demand that superfluous domestic bases remain open, and it's been going on for decades. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in a way that would irk hawks just as much as doves, though for some reason military pork isn't as widely reported as domestic pork.<br /><br />The second area of agreement is that government spending financed by deficits for the purpose of 'job creation', which is the functional definition of Keynesian economics, is not good policy. A congressman who lobbies for a military project in his or her district because it would 'create jobs' either does so by diverting funds from the general public through taxes, or by deficit spending. Some level of deficit spending is tolerable, but after a certain point it isn't. Chalmers things that the US debt is too high, and I agree. <br /><br />If only those areas of agreement covered even a fraction of his column, which is from what I can tell little more than an extended book plug. <br /><br /><blockquote>There are three broad aspects to the US debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defence” projects that bear no relation to the national security of the US. We are also keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segment of the population at strikingly low levels.</blockquote><br /><br />Whoa, whoa, whoa, when did tax policy come into play? What does that have to do with the military? Ah, it has to do with the debt. Chalmers wants to raise taxes and gain more revenue to start paying off the debt. Taxes are relevant in a debate about deficits, and you know what else is? <strong>The rest of the federal budget, most of which is non-military.</strong> Chalmers bases his 'three broad aspects' on three broad (false) assumptions, the first being that only military spending and too-low tax rates are the cause of deficit spending.<br /><br />Chalmers expands on this later, and comes up with $1.1 trillion in annual military spending. Included in this number are such items as "$1.9bn to the Department of Justice for the paramilitary activities of the FBI" and "$200bn in interest for past debt-financed defence outlays". The military's portion of debt financing is certainly into the billions, but unless debt financing is well over $500 billion it makes no sense to say that the military is responsible for that much. It makes even less sense to lump that, homeland defence (which is mostly about 'first responders') and veterans affairs into "military spending", and then compare that with armies-and-armaments spending of other nations. Chalmers doesn't even NEED to high-ball the military spending number, since the amount that can't be contested is in the 600-800 billion range, but he does anyway just to get the maximum outrage impact. $1 trillion is the magic number. <br /><br />UPDATE: In regards to the $200 billion in interest counted as military spending, the 2009 budget has $260 billion in interest. This means for 2007, Chalmers is counting all or the vast majority of debt interest payment as being from military spending, even though military spending hasn't been a majority of the federal budget in generations. <br /><br />Moving on, Chalmers provides the following as 'no relation to the national security' items:<br /><br />-Pork-barrel military projects wanted by congressmen<br />-Excess nuclear weaponry<br />-????<br /><br />One might assume that he views the war in Iraq as being in this category, but he doesn't even come out in opposition to it. An article thousands of words long, discussing current US military spending, contains the word Iraq 4 times, and all of them are neutral! Johnson doesn't attempt to say that the mission is wasteful, or the way it's done is wasteful... he doesn't SAY anything about a war that adds hundreds of billions to the current spending level! He references pork projects without saying how much they total, and notes that much military spending is obscured from public view, but surely there must be some way to explicitly bring up what he sees as bad spending, what a reasonable level would be, etc. This would be a perfect place to try and hype a military version of the 'bridge to nowhere', something that doves and fiscal libertarians can unite against... nope. Just a vague "look at how much is being spent, it must be mostly waste!". Granted, there's the "for more details, buy my book" aspect of things, but if he has time to give line-items like *the FBI*, and lots of debt-related minutiae, why so little that directly impacts the core of his argument?<br /><br />Oh and he doesn't actually address the "we aren't taxing the rich enough" part either, meaning that he makes no serious attempt to prove the first of his three 'broad aspects'. Let's move on to the second.<br /><br /><blockquote>Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — “military Keynesianism”. By that, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.</blockquote><br /><br />I'm not even sure what to do with this. Who has ever, EVER said anything like this? I've heard politicians say this in the context of government spending on the environment, but not the military. Chalmers dredges up some obscure government quote about the US economy being able to provide a high standard of living and a strong military- which is true by the way- and then says that this proves his claim of the existence of 'military Keynesianism'. This is really his core argument, and it's a blatant strawman. I won't even go into the "public policies focused on frequent wars" argument, which is a nod to "military-industrial complex" conspiracies. The term comes from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military-industrial_complex">Eisenhower</a>, who was primarily referring to pork projects, not imperialism. 'Military Keynesianism' can perhaps explain some of the wasteful spending, though political greed is a better explanation. It certainly doesn't explain the bulk of hawkish military spending since WW2, from the anti-Soviet buildup to the current war on terror. <br /><br />Here we see Johnson's second broad (false) assumption, that most military spending is done not in the interest of securing the country, but in a vain attempt to do 'make work'. For instance, this passage:<br /><br /><blockquote>Between the 1940s and 1996, the US spent at least $5.8 trillion on the development, testing and construction of nuclear bombs. By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the US possessed some 32,500 deliverable atomic and hydrogen bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. They perfectly illustrate the Keynesian principle that the government can provide make-work jobs to keep people employed. Nuclear weapons were not just America’s secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them. There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to higher education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.</blockquote><br /><br />I'm willing to grant that we didn't REALLY need that many nukes. Why have enough to blanket the earth so many times over when a much smaller number spread out in enough locations could have provided the same deterrence capacity? Chalmers is really slick here. If we didn't need most of the bombs (never mind that many people actually believed they were needed), then most of the spending was wasteful, and it could have been given to starving orphans and union workers! Sadly, no. The production of the first nuclear weapon was several orders of magnitude greater than the production of the last. An enormous amount was spent on theorizing, researching and testing. Even assuming the $5.8 trillion number is accurate, there's no way of knowing how much went to 'excess' or 'make work' nuclear warheads, as opposed to baseline keeping-up-with-Stalin, etc. <br /><br />The second 'broad aspect' is a thinly-constructed strawman. Let's move on to the third. <br /><br /><blockquote>in our devotion to socialism (despite our limited resources), we are damaging the long-term fiscal health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have reduced the incentive to achieve, stunted job growth, and created dependency on the government. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than entitlements</blockquote><br /><br />Oh wait, we're not allowed to talk about the tens of trillions spent on wealth transfer payments and federal bureaucrats, my bad. Here's what he actually said:<br /><br /><blockquote>Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of the US. These are what economists call opportunity costs, things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs, an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing.</blockquote><br /><br />Leaving aside left-leaning budget priorities, I will continue to agree that excess military spending burdens the economy. It wastes resources. If only he would make ANY attempt to distinguish between what's necessary, what's debatable, and what's wasteful, but he doesn't. As a result all military spending is maligned as a burden we should seek to be rid of. For instance, he approvingly quotes the following passage:<br /><br /><blockquote>According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over _$7.29 trillion… The amount spent over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock</blockquote><br /><br />YES! What fools we were! We could have just spent ABSOLUTELY NOTHING on defense and we'd be twice as wealthy! Brilliant! <br /><br />He also says the following:<br /><br /> <blockquote>It was believed that the US could afford both a massive military establishment and a high standard of living, and that it needed both to maintain full employment. But it did not work out that way. By the 1960s it was becoming apparent that turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense and producing goods without any investment or consumption value was starting to crowd out civilian economic activities. The historian Thomas E Woods Jr observes that, during the 1950s and 1960s, between one-third and two-thirds of all US research talent was siphoned off into the military sector</blockquote><br /><br />Woods is the source of the earlier 'total military spending versus total infrastructure value' comparison. "Between 1/3rd and 2/3rds"... ummmmmm... okay. <a href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods81.html">Let's take a look at the data used to derive this figure:</a><br /><br /><br /><br />Oh there isn't any? Well shucks. I mean, Chalmers isn't making an unsubstantiated claim, he's just approvingly quoting some other guy making an unsubstantiated claim! Can't blame him for that, can we? And when he talks about "turning over the nation’s largest manufacturing enterprises to the Department of Defense", which is his own claim, why that has ample evidence:<br /><br /><br /><br />Oh, well I'm sure it's in the book!<br /><br />Chalmers goes on to discuss US manufacturing woes, and by this point in my blog response I'm not even sure if it's worth continuing. He just keeps bringing up military spending numbers and interspersing economic woe numbers and it's the thinnest of thin "correlation equals causation" gruel. Why is the only reason, the ONLY reason for the decline of the US manufacturing sector, military spending? Is it taxes? No, those aren't high enough. Could it have something to do with jobs 'lost' to machines? Considering that the value of goods manufactured in the US is higher than ever, I'm guessing the mechanization of industry plays a significant role. Perhaps globalization, which gives an advantage to foreign manufacturers who use low-cost labor? Maybe, just maybe, cushy union contracts make US labor less competitive compared to said overseas laborers? No. No, my friends, it's all the military. <br /><br />This is his third and final broad (false) assumption: that defense spending, which accounts for only a couple percent of GDP, was the primary factor in reducing America's manufacturing competitiveness. Just like the only federal spending that matters to him is military spending, the only government resource use and opportunity cost that he sees is for the military. <br /><br />I'm sure Chalmers provides much more data, lots of quotes of experts who agree with him, and much more logical justification in his books. In the context of a column, however, he's using very few facts to support his biggest logical leaps and lots of space to prove the one thing everyone already knows (the US military spends a lot). As with so many other articles I've targeted, even long ones, going for too many big assertions at once makes it very difficult to properly make a case for any of them. A piece going after military pork, excess bases and redundant nukes would still have the impact of hundreds of billions worth of spending, opportunity costs and so on, and could sow the seeds of his other main points. Instead he uses an overly broad brush to paint all military spending. Maybe he thinks he can get away with it because he's preaching to the choir.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-71065587677104935672008-01-18T12:01:00.000-08:002008-01-18T13:01:19.310-08:00Thomas Walkom: my least favorite Canadian<a href="http://www.thestar.com/News/article/295277">Well, well, well,</a> what have we here?<br /><br /><blockquote>American Defence Secretary Robert Gates may well be right when he says that Canadian and European troops in Afghanistan are not well equipped to fight a counter-insurgency campaign. But what has been lost in the controversy over his impolitic remarks is that we did not sign on to fight insurgents – there or anywhere else.</blockquote><br /><br />Right, you signed on to fight terrorists. Sadly, in Afghanistan and elsewhere there is little distinction, and if you want to be nice and leave "insurgents" alone that tends to open things up for terrorists. The Taliban was in essence an insurgency when it obtained power in Afghanistan, and al Qaeda continues to exist under its cross-border protection. <br /><br /><blockquote>It was only after 2003, when the U.S. found itself troop-short and bogged down in Iraq, that Washington changed the rules of engagement for its allies. Gradually, Afghanistan became NATO's war. Washington's plan then was to gradually reduce its 20,000 troop commitment to Afghanistan and switch them over to Iraq.<br /><br />Which is why, since 2006, Canadian troops have found themselves under fire in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />This is so close to being a fair complaint. It's one thing for the US to say "oh, don't worry about sending troops to Iraq". It's another to say that and then add "by the way, we need you to send troops to Afghanistan because we don't have enough". Perfectly reasonable for a Canadian opposed to the Iraq war to be grumpy over that. Yet what did he say earlier?<br /><br /><blockquote>we did not sign on to fight insurgents </blockquote><br /><br />The shape of the fight in Afghanistan when Canadian troops started taking enemy fire was the same then as it is today. Canada DID sign on to fight insurgents, because by the end of 2001 the Taliban had shifted from government to insurgency. Mr. Walkom doesn't say if he opposed the deployment at the time, but the use of "we" signifies that Canada as a whole was duped into its current role in Afghanistan. Sorry, no dice. If Canada had taken a position of "we won't deploy to Afghanistan because that will only be enabling the war in Iraq", I'd have disagreed, but it is principled. Canada knew what it was doing, and Walkom is being silly with this point. <br /><br />If only he stopped at "silly".<br /><br /><blockquote>It's worth remembering that we keep sending soldiers to Afghanistan not because Canada has been attacked by the Taliban, but because our friends, the Americans, feel they are at war with them.<br />...<br />Yet this was never our war. It was always America's. The U.S. chose to declare Afghanistan the enemy after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Had Washington elected to avenge 9/11 by invading the country from which most of those terrorists came, Canadian troops would now be fighting in Saudi Arabia. Their call, their war, their show. </blockquote><br /><br />It's points like this where I wonder if I need to say anything. I've seen a fair number of talking points aimed at the war in Afghanistan, and as much as I disagree with them, few are as blatantly IGNORANT as that. The "why don't we invade Saudi Arabia" talking point was barely tolerable on 9/18/01; saying it on 1/18/08 is pathetic for someone who's published. Saudi Arabia deserved a heck of a lot more diplomatic pressure than it got, but the 9/11 attacks were planned and coordinated by al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan. What part of the Taliban/al Qaeda alliance is difficult to grasp? How can anyone who gets paid to write about world affairs not grasp the difference between the bad but legal spread of Wahabi Sunni Islam by Saudi Arabia, and the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists based in Afghanistan and protected by the Taliban, and why military action would be used against one and not the other?<br /><br />Wait, I just found <a href="http://www.thestar.com/News/article/228833">an earlier column</a> that explains Tom's viewpoint a bit more. <br /><br /><blockquote>Exactly why it made sense to overthrow the government of Afghanistan for an outrage perpetrated by Saudis and planned in Germany was never explained.</blockquote><br /><br />Really? That's what you're going with? "It was never explained"? I'm absolutely baffled by that kind of sophistry. <br /><br /><blockquote>For a while, the ostensible aim of the war was to capture alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden and destroy his training camps. But after he escaped and the camps relocated to neighbouring Pakistan, that rationale was quietly dropped. </blockquote><br /><br />Except that it wasn't dropped at all? When the Taliban/AQ group moved its center of gravity to Pakistan, they continued to mount attacks on Afghanistan with the goal of retaking it. Going after terrorists whenever they crossed into Afghanistan was better than not going after them at all, and additionally it allowed allied forces to launch attacks into Pakistan whenever we got a not-so-subtle OK from their government. <br /><br /><blockquote>Then we were told we were fighting in Afghanistan to destroy terrorists there before they attacked us here. But as the citizens of London and Madrid discovered, war is not so easily contained by geography.</blockquote><br /><br />So we should just let the Taliban retake Afghanistan? So attempting to prevent al Qaeda from having a base of operations should be dropped if they manage additional attacks? <br /><br />There's no small number of different ways to debate the war on terror. A Canadian has even MORE avenues, because Canada wasn't attacked and isn't liable for the mess in Iraq. Yet Walkom decides to make statements that combine extreme ignorance, pathetic strawmen, and "lalala I'm not listening". He's so actively bad that he damages his side of the argument by proxy.<br /><br />Good job, Toronto Star.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-41544470756478069442007-12-12T10:18:00.000-08:002007-12-12T11:23:29.290-08:00Ridiculous historical comparisons and strawmen......so naturally venerable Time Magazine decides to publish <a href="http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1692059,00.html">this gem</a>.<br /><br />Michael Kinsley is going after the standpoint associated with right-wingers on immigration, that is to say, opposing normalization of illegals and such. He manages to brush aside or ignore any number of salient points, he makes assumptions, and he wraps it up with a hilariously bad ode to border-hoppers. Since there's only one article I'm going after I'll tackle it in full.<br /><br /><blockquote>What you are supposed to say about immigration--what most of the presidential candidates say, what the radio talk jocks say--is that you are not against immigration. Not at all. You salute the hard work and noble aspirations of those who are lining up at American consulates around the world. But that is legal immigration. What you oppose is illegal immigration.<br /><br />This formula is not very helpful. We all oppose breaking the law, or we ought to. Saying that you oppose illegal immigration is like saying you oppose illegal drug use or illegal speeding. Of course you do, or should. The question is whether you think the law draws the line in the right place. Should using marijuana be illegal? Should the speed limit be raised--or lowered? The fact that you believe in obeying the law reveals nothing about what you think the law ought to be, or why.<br /><br />Another question: Why are you so upset about this particular form of lawbreaking? After all, there are lots of laws, not all of them enforced with vigor. The suspicion naturally arises that the illegality is not what bothers you. What bothers you is the immigration. There is an easy way to test this. Reducing illegal immigration is hard, but increasing legal immigration would be easy. If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration. This is a debate about immigration.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />On its face this seems so close to being reasonable, but it really isn't. First, it ignores large numbers of people who don't have any issue with large numbers of illegal immigrants, who oppose enforcement of existing laws, and who oppose measures designed to stem the future flow of illegals. This is the position of no small number of activists and lobbyists on the issue. <br /><br />Kinsley goes on to essentially say that the only sides in the debate are pro-immigration and anti-immigration, but that's not the case; there are a rainbow of possible positions. It would be like boiling down tax policy to 'pro-tax' and 'anti-tax'. The 'enforcement first' position wants the law enforced. Kinsley concedes that immigration laws aren't enforced well, but then says that enforcement doesn't matter, and it's all about where to 'draw the line'. He brings up speeding, and it's an interesting point, but it's wrong.<br /><br />The debate about speed limits tends to be where to set the limit, not about enforcement. If the debate was about enforcement, we would discuss things like whether or not to put more cops on the street to set more radar traps and thus catch more speeders. Try to imagine someone saying "there should be more police monitoring the roads", and the response being "let's raise the speed limit". Not a very cogent rebuttal. Yes, raising the speed limit would reduce the number of people in violation of the law, but the limit was set there for a reason. The immigration debate has both a 'where to set the limit' aspect and a 'what's the best way to enforce the limit' aspect. Kinsley presents a false dichotomy by saying that you can only care about one aspect. <br /><br />"You can't care about enforcement because some other laws aren't enforced properly" is a pitiful argument. "You can't care about enforcement because we could easily increase the number of legal immigrants" is fatuous; INS can't even properly handle the current number of legal immigrants. In a perfect world the INS would have excess capacity, and it would just be a matter of setting the quotas. In the real world, the INS mailed visas to 9/11 hijackers in 2002. Kinsley shows no sign of recognizing the potential problems involved with jacking up immigration limits. It's one thing for a theorist to try to say why he or she favors more immigration; it's another for a writer published in a major magazine to say that 'increasing legal immigration is easy'.<br /><br />These lines are maybe worse: "If your view is that legal immigration is good and illegal immigration is bad, how about increasing legal immigration? How about doubling it? Any takers? So in the end, this is not really a debate about illegal immigration." Which in essence conflates favoring SOME level of legal immigration with favoring ANY level of legal immigration. To apply the speed limit debate, imagine someone saying "if your view is that going 55 miles per hour on the freeway is good, how about doubling the speed limit?". Imagine that being said in response to "there should be more radar traps". It is in fact possible to care about large numbers of people in the country illegally while at the same time being in favor of some level of legal immigration. Just because that level might not be Kinsley's preferred one doesn't change a thing.<br /><br /><blockquote>And it's barely a debate at all. ... Now, for whatever reason, support for immigration is limited to an eccentric alliance of high-minded Council on Foreign Relations types, the mainstream media, high-tech entrepreneurs, Latinos, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and President George W. Bush. Everyone else, it seems, is agin.<br /><br />Maybe the aginners are right, and immigration is now damaging our country, stealing jobs and opportunity, ripping off taxpayers, fragmenting our culture. I doubt it, but maybe so. Certainly, it's true that we can't let in everyone who wants to come. There is some number of immigrants that is too many. I don't believe we're past that point, but maybe we are. In any event, a democracy has the right to decide that it has reached such a point. There is no obligation to be fair to foreigners.<br /><br />But let's not kid ourselves that all we care about is obeying the law and all we are asking illegals to do is go home and get in line like everybody else. We know perfectly well that the line is too long, and we are basically telling people to go home and not come back.</blockquote><br /><br />'We know that the line is too long'. There. Right there, even more than earlier in the piece, Kinsley assumes that everyone else sees things the way he does. What if someone doesn't think the line is long enough, or that it's acceptable? And for that matter, since there IS in fact thousands upon thousands of legal immigrants let into the US every year, how exactly does that equate to current illegals having no chance to return? But since "we know perfectly well", that's not up for debate. Everyone knows it. Going back to the tax analogy, "we know perfectly well that taxes are too high" would not be a compelling argument to be made in favor of cutting taxes. The fact that there is an opposing side means that the all-inclusive "we" is being improperly used. <br /><br /><blockquote>Let's not kid ourselves, either, about who we are telling this to. To characterize illegal immigrants as queue-jumping, lawbreaking scum is seriously unjust. The motives of illegal immigrants--which can be summarized as "a better life"--are identical to those of legal immigrants. In fact, they are largely identical to the motives of our own parents, grandparents and great-grandparents when they immigrated. And not just that. Ask yourself, of these three groups--today's legal and illegal immigrants and the immigrants of generations ago--which one has proven most dramatically its appreciation of our country? Which one has shown the most gumption, the most willingness to risk all to get to the U.S. and the most willingness to work hard once here? Well, everyone's story is unique. But who loves the U.S. most? On average, probably, the winners of this American-values contest would be the illegals, doing our dirty work under constant fear of eviction, getting thrown out and returning again and again.<br /><br />And how about those of us lucky enough to have been born here? How would we do against the typical illegal alien in a "prove how much you love America" reality TV show?</blockquote><br /><br />What's riskier: crossing the US/Mexico border in 2007, or crossing the Atlantic Ocean in 1887? Which cost more for those immigrants? Or how about this: are there any illegal immigrants working and living in the kind of conditions seen in the days of the Industrial Revolution? Upton Sinclair's <em>The Jungle</em> was exaggerated at worst but it certainly wasn't very far off when you examine things like life expectancies and standards of living. The people Sinclair wrote about were immigrants living in urban ghettos. Harvesting produce, cutting grass, scrubbing toilets and nannying might be rough compared to accounting but not in comparison to sweatshops and subsistence farming. "Who loves America more"? It must be today's illegals! Why? Because that way anyone who opposes mass legalization or a doubling of quotas is a monster. Who loves America more? It can't be the pro-enforcement crowd, because they don't agree with Michael Kinsley.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-46835463312754077292007-11-28T12:26:00.000-08:002007-11-28T13:54:21.259-08:00Bad Columns: Holiday EditionI've been quite busy thanks to a combination of good and bad circumstances, and as such there's a bit of a bad column backlog. Time to flush.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.reason.com/news/printer/123195.html">Reason Magazine</a> would tend to not be a place where I link in this context, but here we are. Brian Doherty isn't a fan of the Iraq war and has a heavy dose of pessimism in regards to security gains from the surge. I can't argue with "bad things have a way of happening in Iraq" as a line of thinking, but Brian doesn't stop there, and thus my rebuttal.<br /><br /><blockquote>After all, we can be pretty confident, barring eco-catastrophe or full-on nuclear World War III, that things will, someday, be better in Iraq—on the whole, for most people—than they are now, than they were in 2004, or than they were under Saddam. <br />...<br />Judging whether the Iraq war and occupation was a good idea or the right thing to do based on the principle that things are, or seem like they soon will be, better there than they were before treats war as merely a neutral policy tool. </blockquote><br /><br />Brian is attacking a strawman that I've never seen before. Pre-war, hawks had a number of varying reasons for backing the invasion, the bottom line of which was that it would improve national/regional security. You can disagree with the conclusion, but you can't disagree that this was the stated goal. Even the basic neocon/Wilsonian boilerplate is focused on long-term security through democracy-spreading, not generic "things are slightly better in Iraq". <br /><br />Not content to strawman hawks, Brian then strawmans AMERICA. <br /><br /><blockquote>Just as public perception of whether the war was worth it didn’t shift toward “no” until May 2004—the first month U.S. troop deaths broke 100 in a month—a continuing decline in Iraq violence seems likely to calm down American dudgeon over a war that, after all, in a draftless world, most of us are affected by only as tragic TV entertainment. It could well be the standard accepted opinion a year from now that Iraq, while perhaps not always managed best every step of the way, has turned out well enough in the end, or so far.<br />...<br />If this turns out to be true, what will this mean for the future of American foreign policy? The Republicans will be emboldened to think that any move they can frame as part of the “war on terror” will work out for them in the end, making future wars in Iran and maybe Syria far more likely. <br />...<br />The real question before a war needs to be: “is this absolutely necessary given a fair consideration of the horrors and unpredictability of war and the purpose of the U.S. military?” Which is not: “make the world a better place, somewhere down the line, killing lots of people on the way.” For America's future, this kind of victory in Iraq could really mean defeat.<br /><br />Still, the next war will doubtless begin with high approval ratings. <br /></blockquote><br />What utter dreck. First of all, polls are drifting towards the "things are getting better in Iraq", but they aren't drifting towards "boy howdy invading Iraq sure was great" and they aren't even in the same neighborhood as "let's go bomb Damascus!". Secondly, current poll movements are just that, poll movements; to end with that line based on a couple polls is shoddy analysis. Third, he's taking the strawman hawk mindset and is applying it to the entire US public. Finally, he's implying that we'd be better off if there was more carnage in Iraq, which is always a sure sign that someone has gone off the deep end. <br /><br />The bottom line is this: hawks don't think that way, the public is a hell of a lot less "let's roll" than it was in early 2003, and Brian Doherty as a "senior editor" makes me question Reason's reason.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071126&s=klein">Naomi Klein</a> is someone I find quite disagreeable, but with a column of this length I'm not going to go for an in-depth rebuttal. Instead I'm going to just focus on the start.<br /><br /><blockquote>In less than two years, the lease on the largest and most important US military base in Latin America will run out. The base is in Manta, Ecuador, and Rafael Correa, the country's leftist president, has pronounced that he will renew the lease "on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami--an Ecuadorean base. If there is no problem having foreign soldiers on a country's soil, surely they'll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States." <br /><br />Since an Ecuadorean military outpost in South Beach is a long shot, it is very likely that the Manta base, which serves as a staging area for the "war on drugs," will soon shut down. Correa's defiant stand is not, as some have claimed, about anti-Americanism. Rather, it is part of a broad range of measures being taken by Latin American governments to make the continent less vulnerable to externally provoked crises and shocks.<br />...<br />If the US military loses its bases and training programs, its power to inflict shocks on the continent will be greatly eroded. <br /></blockquote><br />See, that US military base exposes Ecuador to 'shocks'. Or something. This is a statement that could lead to a rousing debate during the Reagan administration, but is just silly today. When was the last time the US was neck-deep in a big coup/civil war in Central or South America? There are good reasons to dislike the "our son-of-a-bitch" Cold War policy towards Latin America, but to make that statement primarily based on things circa Pinochet is baffling to me. Naomi spends most of the time railing against capitalism, which is standard fare for her... and which also demonstrates why the military base comment is so out of place. But for Naomi, the US military is bad, so anyone opposed to it is good and deserves to be highlighted. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/the_end_of_the_reagan_era.html">David Shribman</a> combines a lack of recent historical knowledge with overemphasizing trends. He wants to prove that the Reagan Era is over. That doesn't seem terribly difficult to me, but he manages to bumble worse than JP Losman in the red zone. <br /><br /><blockquote>But some of the vital elements of the Reagan era have already passed into the mists of history:<br /><br />The iron bond between religious conservatives and Republicans. <br />...<br />It didn't matter that Reagan hardly went to church and was estranged from some of his children. What mattered was that every GOP platform carried a strong anti-abortion message. And then, with the election of a true religious conservative, George W. Bush, the bond seemed stronger than ever. <br /><br />Now the leading Republican presidential candidate supports abortion rights, has been married three times and doesn't possess the sort of family-values personal life religious conservatives demand in their leaders. Do not doubt that the political earth has shifted.</blockquote><br />Rudy leads in the polls, without 50% of GOP support mind you, and this by itself is proof that the Christian/Republican link is gone. Riiiiiiiight.<br /><br /><blockquote>The conviction that a smaller government is a better government. Reagan spoke of this precept in his inaugural address, a remark that pleased his supporters and sent trembles of fear through liberals. The extent of the conversion of the American people to the smaller-government ethos can be measured by the fact that Bill Clinton himself declared the era of big government to be over.</blockquote><br />Except that Reagan signed off on massive amounts of entitlement spending and oversaw large growth in real, per capita federal spending in both the military and domestic spheres. That Democrats in congress drove much of the spending is moot; Reagan went along, and thus the "Reagan = smaller government" sentiment is flat-out wrong. I've seen this meme used by people across the political spectrum and it's wrong every time. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/would_tehran_do_the_unthinkabl.html">Gregory Scoblete</a> has an example of a meme I despise: that if Iran gets nukes it can easily be "contained" and thus there's no real threat. This ignores several very real problems even if Iran never uses its nukes. First, Iran has shown a willingness to engage in arms trade with rogue nations and groups. Its nuclear expertise would not necessarily stay put. Second, and more immediately, Iran with nukes would have much more of a free hand to support and foment terrorism. At present Iran barely disguises its arming of Hezbollah and Iraqi Shiite militias; with nukes on hand it can do more and do so openly with no fear of military retaliation. This would not only help terrorist groups materially, but also it would make them feel more confident, as they would have a nuclear sponsor. <br /><br />Those issues by themselves don't lead to "we need to be dropping bombs on Tehran and anyone who disagrees is a terrorist". Rather, those issues absolutely must be addressed by those who argue that a nuclear Iran is okay because it can be contained. I've seen many anti-war laundry lists of problems that would happen if the US bombs Iranian nuclear facilities, but hardly anything that deals with these things from the perspective of a dove. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/14/AR2007111402029_pf.html">A trio of gentlemen</a> argue that it's important for Democrats to oppose Bush. They do this by saying "drift" a lot. There's just so many bad talking points I have a hard time focusing on any one thing.<br /><br />-They never make an attempt to say WHY the surge represents 'drift'. Drift tends to imply just going with the flow, which would be accurate for "stay the course"-era Bush policy, but isn't accurate this year. By the end of the column it's clear that "drift" means "a policy that doesn't involve a firm withdrawal date", and that's incredibly ineffective when you're on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.<br /><br />-They complain that the surge has been 'accompanied by' large sectarian migrations, as though the surge caused it. In fact, the migrations were caused by the security breakdowns, and now that security is being restored, refugees have stopped leaving and are in fact returning by the thousands. If the surge is helping the refugee situation, how is the refugee situation a refutation of the surge?<br /><br />-"progress being made at the local level often undermines the stated goal of creating a unified, stable, democratic Iraq". And they say this because... oh wait they don't say why. Lovely.<br /><br />-They say that foreign governments won't meddle in Iraq after we leave because they don't want Iraq to fail. This ignores what foreign governments want in Iraq: to have their chosen groups in charge. Saudi radicals supported Sunni terrorists in the hope of restored Sunni dominance. Iran backs one big Shiite group against another in the hopes of having control of the Iraqi government. That's how they do things in the Middle East. Why would Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia et al work in harmony in the absence of a US presence? They tolerated a very chaotic situation in Iraq before the surge, they tolerate chaos in Lebanon and Palestine, why is Iraq different? A very sloppy rehash of an old talking point here.<br /><br />These are serious foreign-policy bigwigs; they can do a lot better.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/11/19/the_road_to_energy_conservation/">Allen Smith</a> must not proofread.<br /><br /><blockquote>In arresting climate change and solving related energy issues, we should follow the physicians' oath - first, do no harm - and avoid alternatives with equal or greater impacts than our present energy supply.<br /><br />Consider the example of ethanol. Production requires large amounts of petroleum, farmland, corn, and water, yet it has questionable alternative energy value, has its own emissions and siting problems, directly competes with food supply, and its transport requires special vehicles instead of pipelines. Market-driven production capacity has raced ahead of available delivery infrastructure. This has caused the price of ethanol to crash from overproduction, while at the same time increased demand for corn to produce ethanol has raised corn prices and reduced the availability of corn for food, raising food prices.<br /><br />Our preoccupation with letting the free market determine our national energy policy is wasteful folly and not in the public interest.<br /></blockquote><br />Yes, the current state of ethanol proves that the free market has failed. Except for the fact that ethanol has been ENTIRELY DRIVEN BY GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES AND FUEL MANDATES. *gives Allen a backdrop driver*<br /><br />Finally, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/16/AR2007111601213_pf.html">Mark Winne</a> tugs on your heartstrings by discussing the plight of food banks and feeding the poor. He wants to solve it. His solution is simple: end poverty. Boy, thanks Mark, I had no idea poverty and hunger were tied! Mark eventually stumbles into a progressive fantasy sequence of food pantry volunteers solving hunger by picketing governments on minimum wage laws. News flash, Mark: everyone wants to solve poverty, we just disagree on how to do it. Acting as though 'we should end poverty' is a revelation is not the mark of a writer who, once again, is published on the Washington Post op-ed page. It would be like me saying "let's stop our fiscal problems by ending all crime so we don't need police or prisons anymore". <br /><br />Am I asking for too much out of these writers? I sure hope not.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-44754078889815336482007-10-17T10:56:00.000-07:002008-01-02T14:15:45.188-08:00Simon Jenkins and his incoherent stance on terrorism<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article2652762.ece">"The biggest threat to the West lies within itself, not with Islam"</a> is a title obviously designed to grab one's attention. What he leaves unspoken but we're supposed to know is that hawks view the entirety of Islam as a menace. This is an opinion which is shared by the extreme and ignorant on the right but not the mainstream. That we're starting off with a strawman bodes ill.<br /><br />The first half of the column makes some decent points: the west isn't REALLY in peril of being wiped out by terrorists any time soon, it isn't helpful to describe the war on terror as being the west against all of Islam, etc. The problem is that he's not clear about who exactly he's arguing with. Observe:<br /><br /><blockquote>To portray Islam as a whole as a concerted threat to western security, and to imply that the West’s democratic institutions and freedoms are not proof against that threat, is absurd and close to treason. </blockquote><br /><br />Who, exactly, is saying this? Why spend so much time using precious space at a major newspaper without naming names? I read dozens of pieces from the biggest names on the right every week and I never see anything along those lines. I read a heck of a lot more about needing to be able to counter the might of a different billion-people group, China. Neocons argue that we should seek to transform the Islamic world, and while the goal and its means are very debatable it's certainly nothing like the rhetoric used against (for example) the Soviet Bloc during the cold war. <br /><br />Eh, wasted time and a strawman isn't what I came to gripe about anyway. This is:<br /><br /><blockquote>This poison has not been generated by the teaching of Sayyid Qutb and his Al-Qaeda fanatics, but in the overreaction to them. After sowing their mayhem they, and not Iraq, should have been targeted and eliminated. </blockquote><br /><br />Wait a second, I can't be upset that someone wrote that, even if I disagree it's a perfectly reasonable and defensible... but that isn't what he wrote.<br /><br /><blockquote>This poison has not been generated by the teaching of Sayyid Qutb and his Al-Qaeda fanatics, but in the overreaction to them. After sowing their mayhem they, and not <b>Afghanistan</b> and Iraq, should have been targeted and eliminated. </blockquote><br /><br />Excuse me? It's one thing to say that Saddam's Iraq, which wasn't a major base of Al Qaeda in 2002, should be left alone. It's quite another to say that we overreacted by attacking the Taliban, which refused to give up Al Qaeda and which is allied with them to this day. To imply that we "eliminated" either Iraq or Afghanistan, I'll chalk that up to simple word order, but at the very least it's obvious he means "targeted". First off it's just silly to say we targeted the entire countries, especially when it comes to Afghanistan. I'll skip back a moment for more insight on his mindset.<br /><br /><blockquote>The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. </blockquote><br /><br />In other words, we should have a small fight against small groups of terrorists. That's all well and good if Al Qaeda was based in say the Swiss Alps, without the support of the Swiss. No need to depose a government there, just work with them to stage counterterrorism activities and clear out the bad guys. The problem is that when an active terrorist group is supported by a government, it is imperative that said government either renounce terrorism or pay the price. Let's ignore the notion that we committed some sort of moral crime in liberating Afghanistan; let's just focus on the fundamentals of the situation. <br /><br />It is unimaginable to me that following 9/11 we should have tolerated the Taliban giving harbor to Al Qaeda. Even without the 9/11 attacks, everyone knew who Osama was and what his group stood for. The Taliban was comfortable with that. They gave a nod to "how do you know it was Al Qaeda" in refusing to authorize action against the AQ camps, but nobody really expected them to go along because the alliance between the groups was too deep. The point at which we go after Al Qaeda is the point at which it is necessary to deploy a significant military force, and since the Taliban refused to allow it the choice was between either taking the Taliban out as well or assuming that they'd just ignore our use of their roads and airports for military operations. I mean, I honestly don't understand this position.<br /><br />It's one thing to say, "9/11 was an inside job and thus I opposed the war in Afghanistan". It's one thing to say, "we should show we're better by not fighting back and thus I opposed the war in Afghanistan". I disagree, but I understand. It's quite another to say "we should have attacked Al Qaeda but left the Taliban alone". If we'd tried to do that the Taliban wouldn't have left <i>us</i> alone to do our thing in Afghanistan. I almost feel like I'm trying to explain why one plus one equals two here, and I'm not sure if it's worth going into why the Taliban would have attacked our soldiers in Afghanistan if they were left in power. <br /><br />We targeted the government of Afghanistan for facilitating the staging ground of the 9/11 attacks, and then refusing to end this policy after the attacks. Simply lobbing a couple missiles wouldn't have been sufficient unless they were nukes, thus there had to be a military deployment. This gets to the core of the problem behind the "we should only be targeting a few extremists" talking point: state sponsorship changes the equation. When a government is sheltering the extremists in question, going after them militarily with reasonable efficacy requires neutralizing the government as well. It's nasty but that's the reality of the situation. <br /><br />Jenkins wants it both ways: he wants people to know he's against war, but he also wants to present himself as being willing to strike terrorists. When it comes to the aftermath of 9/11 those two things are very much contradictory.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-25998763259742384412007-10-08T22:20:00.000-07:002007-10-08T22:23:26.646-07:00My blood hurtsI hate the Bills. I hate them because I love them. <br /><br />But I hate the Cowboys more.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-73359563272954324502007-10-05T10:55:00.000-07:002007-10-05T14:21:02.844-07:00Columns on war & taxes, and "our broken economy"<a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/10/a_tax_test_for_the_war.html">EJ Dionne</a> is a respectable liberal. I disagree with 99% of what he says but he's not disagreeable to me. In this column he talks about the dead-on-arrival "war tax" bill proposed in congress. Let me highlight the conclusion.<br /><br /><blockquote>And if the president believes in this war so much and doesn't want to raise taxes, let him propose the deep spending cuts it would take to cover the costs. Then Bush would show how much of a priority he believes this war is -- and he wouldn't be playing small ball. </blockquote><br /><br />I disagree with the "war tax" for a number of reasons, for instance the rate levels seem high given the revenue goal, but I can't see any way to combat that line. It goes back to my 'failure to lead' post: Bush talks about the importance of Iraq but he doesn't act like it. 9/12/01, with a GOP congress and an 80% approval rating, was Bush's chance to be serious and make big plays. Change the military budget from what's best for politicians to what's best for the military; put the kibosh on pork spending; take a hard look at the $2 trillion budget and find ways to offset military spending in order to keep things in the black. <br /><br />Instead Bush did the exact opposite, and now he has no political capital to fight waste or new domestic spending. If he'd gone to the public in 2001 and said that the time for using the federal budget to protect incumbents was over, he'd have won the battle and could have carved out enough cash to cover even Iraq. Now he looks fiscally irresponsible and unserious for acting as though the money comes out of thin air. It's bad policy and bad politics.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20071022&s=madrick">Jeff Madrick</a> has a beefy entry that advocates a big change in government policy. If you're at all familiar with The Nation, you can guess as to what kind of changes and why I'm responding. To start with, for a column of such length he gives hardly any concrete proposals, just a very generic "grow government and tax more". Also he spends way too much time re-hashing ideas he disagrees with, when a briefer summary followed by longer criticisms would do far better in proving his points. <br /><br />Some of what he says seems... off. For instance this: "After growing robustly for a few years, productivity growth since 2003 is as low as it was before the Internet boom." And your point is what, exactly? The economy was still ailing in 2003 but made a nice comeback between 2004 and 2006. Certain national statistics take time to come in, but productivity isn't one of them, and using 4 year old data makes his argument look weak. <br /><br />Jeff makes on argument I'll agree with wholeheartedly: rising wages don't necessarily mean inflation. Some economists similarly think that low unemployment causes inflation. In fact, both need to be measured against productivity growth. Wage inflation occurs only when a company has to pay more for the same level of production, so if wages go up only about as much as productivity then there's no inflation. <br /><br />Madrick proposes a return to Keynesian economics, in which the government spends a lot and is willing to run up deficits in the hope of growing the economy. In theory, the economy will grow faster than interest on the debt, which will make the policy sustainable. Madrick to his credit isn't advocating for government ownership of or investment in private industry, and he isn't proposing busywork spending-for-spending's-sake. That said, he needs to do two big magic tricks to get to where he wants to go.<br /><br />Madrick's first trick is claiming that higher taxes don't have an effect on the economy. Check this out: "No economist has ever made a defensible case that high taxes impede economic growth in the long run." Wow. How can someone write a column for a major publication like The Nation and think it's okay to toss out such a gigantic statement without any sort of backing before or after? Just proving that line would take more words than he spends on this piece which covers the entire economy. <br /><br />Madrick's second trick is to say that running a bigger deficit is okay by default, based on Keynesian theory. "The budget deficit is low", we're assured. The <em>annual deficit</em>, perhaps. However it would be a large stretch to say that the <em>national debt</em>, ie. the total from past years, is low... and it's downright incredible to me that anyone talking about the future of the economy can ignore the <em>future debt</em>, that is, the gap between future liabilities and reasonably expected future revenues. Keynesian economic theory was formed at a time when Social Security could be continued for the foreseeable future, and when the elderly died at 65 instead of generating huge medical expenses. Even if one grants that Keynesian economics worked in the past, it's simply not acceptable to ignore the huge difference between the future as of 2007 and the future as of 1937 or 1967. <br /><br />Now, it's one thing to propose additional spending for things like infrastructure and early education. Infrastructure is an important public good, and early education can shape minds for the better at a time when minds are most changeable. It's quite another to say that a little more taxation and a lot more spending is fine without also addressing future budgetary needs. Whether a right-winger or a left-winger, one absolutely must address entitlement spending when one is discussing long-term federal budget priorities. The US got away with big deficits in the past but it can't indefinitely. If Madrick was looking at the big picture in a responsible manner he wouldn't be so flippant about the deficit, which he sees as needed for the spending he proposes. <br /><br />Let's go back to the point I agreed with him on: fast wage growth is not bad by default. If only he would make it easy for me. <br /><br /><blockquote>Such a theory means that federal policies to promote higher wages have an additional justification: economic growth. Higher minimum wages, support of living wages and laws more favorable to unionized labor may actually improve productivity and benefit us all rather than being a cost to society.<br /><br />...<br /><br />The wage share of the nation's income has fallen sharply since rising in the late '90s. Inflation is at rock bottom and inflationary expectations are weak.</blockquote><br /><br />Thus he claims that the government can force businesses to pay higher wages to the benefit of the economy. Ah, but he makes a mistake I see from many progressives: he fixates entirely on wages as the only form of employee compensation. The true cost of labor includes benefits, especially health benefits whose costs have skyrocketed. Perhaps his call for universal coverage would eliminate that in theory? No mention of that. Jeff implies that the economy hasn't done well by workers because wages haven't gone up fast enough, but an accurate picture requires determining how much employees cost their employers. <br /><br />Why am I putting so much into 'total cost of labor'? Because he's calling for massive government-mandated increases in wages as a way of raising them, and he's defended this proposition by saying that fast wage growth isn't necessarily a bad thing and by saying that wages aren't rising fast enough. Since he isn't claiming to offset the cost of benefits, he wants wages to go up independent of productivity growth. Even putting aside the basket of anti-minimum wage right-wing talking points, there's one obvious result of this: inflation. Jeff implies that because of productivity gains over the last few decades that there's lots of room for a sudden jump in wages, but that room quickly evaporates when you factor in benefits. Hiking wages to the extent he seems to propose (as I mentioned earlier he's vague) would cause the cost of labor to rise faster than productivity, which is the definition of wage inflation. <br /><br />Last but not least I'll touch on his idea of what I'd call "progressive protectionism". That is, it's de facto protectionism in the guise of good intentions.<br /><br /><blockquote>The objective of trade pacts should not be to protect American workers per se but to bring to the rest of the world the progressive revolution in living standards that US factory workers started to enjoy a century ago. Higher minimum wages, protection against labor abuses, adequate healthcare and a decent environment will help develop domestic markets in these nations, which will in turn stimulate their productivity growth and make them less dependent on exporting to the United States. Meanwhile, Americans will compete on a more level playing field and find export markets for their goods. </blockquote><br /><br />I can't get over the use of "per se". That implies he wants to 'protect workers' (ie. protectionism), but doesn't want this to be the stated rationale. I've seen a lot of proposals along these lines, and it's an issue on which I believe a person is either unserious or dishonest. <br /><br />Protectionism, that is putting tariffs on goods for the sole purpose of giving domestic producers an advantage, is a long-since discredited theory. It's something that we can thank for the length and depth of the Great Depression. It's something that sadly has roots in both the left and right of politics in many countries. 'Progressive protectionism' seeks to impose costs on foreign manufacturing for insufficient wages, work standards, benefits and other such things. The implication is that mighty America will dictate to other nations how they handle their economy. <br /><br />Unilateral sanctions as a "we don't like your specific dictatorship" foreign policy tool have had minimal effect; why would this be any different? Multilateral sanctions, such as those brought against South Africa, have worked. Good luck getting that to happen today. Germany won't put sanctions on Iran for sponsoring terrorism and building nukes, why would they stop doing business with Laos or Chad over minimum wage? It's wildly unrealistic to think that in an age where the US is becoming a smaller and smaller portion of the global economy, we can single-handedly force the third world to raise their standards. <br /><br />Again, put aside free market talking points on the issue, let's just look at the practical effect. The US threatens the third world with trade barriers, nobody else joins in, and the third world by and large keeps doing what it's doing just without the US. This would be the best way possible to make sure the US misses out on the benefits of globalization. Meanwhile I could talk about how countries with decently free markets have moved into the global middle class thanks to trade without the attempted use of progressive-minded economic hegemony, but hey, it doesn't matter because everybody knows we won't be a global economic overlord for long. Jeff either believes that such a trade policy would work exactly as he says, or he's using it as a mask for populist protectionism. Politicians tend to do the latter, but I believe Jeff is honest. And by honest I mean incredibly wrong.<br /><br />When you accumulate all of the ways to "fix" the economy you're left with wage inflation, a bigger debt leading into the entitlement crunch, one-way trade barriers and higher taxes. Sounds like the solution is worse than the problem to me.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-53852253865215416282007-10-02T12:22:00.000-07:002007-10-02T13:40:41.263-07:00Healthcare: two columns, and I'm not grumpy about either<a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/10/childrens_health_care_in_the_a.html">Here's a column I would be tearing apart</a> if it was really possible for me to do so. Harrop is, from my experience, one of the better left-wing columnists and this is a perfect example of why. If you dislike Bush, you enjoy the way she tears apart the uncontestable contradiction in Bush's stance on healthcare today compared to in his first term. If you're on the right, you're given a reminder of the size and scope of the drug program Bush pushed. If you're a moderate who is somewhat inclined to take the Democrat's side on the issue, Bush looks heartless and unreasonable. When I talk about the way people should write, ie. to convince people that their point of view is correct, this is what I'm talking about. <br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/30/AR2007093001035.html">Another column from a similar point of view</a> is slightly more problematic. It's not Campos-esque or anything, but I feel the need to address some of the content which reflects some of the flaws in the debate. These flaws extend to both sides of the debate. <br /><br /><blockquote>The larger point is that private markets in health care are not necessarily better than the government-run variety. <br /><br />Given the shocking waste in U.S. health care, it's embarrassing that Bush still fails to see this. The United States spends nearly twice as much per person on health care as "socialized" Sweden or France, yet Americans' life expectancy is shorter. The profligate spending comes because doctors and patients make indulgent medical decisions while sticking third-party insurers with the cost.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Where unfettered private initiative produces evidently bad outcomes, most people prefer an alternative. </blockquote><br /><br />I'm going to ignore lines like "the free market has no solution for the uninsured", which would pretty much require an entire litany of right-wing talking points to properly refute. I'm not interested in doing much of that. <br /><br />Behind the above sentences is an assumption: US healthcare today is the result of 'free market' policies. On the left and the right this assumption is used as a comparison to 'universal'-style healthcare in other countries. If they have a government/public system, we must therefore have a private one. Right-wingers say "socialism will lead to more costs!" and left-wingers say "then how come the US pays twice as much?" <br /><br />The problem with the assumption is that it fails to recall the origin of today's US healthcare system. In olden times before most people reading this were born, there was a system of "wage and price controls", meaning there were regulations on how much you could pay for something and how much you could pay someone. It didn't cover absolutely everything but it was endemic enough to cause businesses to find a major loophole: benefits. The recent GM/UAW deal centered around benefits doled out half a century ago, benefits that only existed because of governmental regulation. Businesses couldn't compete with each other or entice employees with cold hard cash, so they did it with items like medical care. <br /><br />Healthcare thus took on the primary characteristics of socialized medicine: the person receiving care was not directly responsible for the cost of medical care. If a person received medical insurance from his or her employer in one country, and a person received comparable insurance from the government in another, what would the difference be in how the insured consume medical care? I can't think of any significance there. The crux of the libertarian/conservative opposition to universal healthcare is that it takes away personal responsibility, but said responsibility has largely been removed anyway, even in cases where people have to buy their own insurance. <br /><br />The health insurance industry in the US is far removed from other types of insurance, which center around major events. Mallaby references the need of some type of insurance in his column:<br /><br /><blockquote>But a large share of health spending comes when people face emergencies: when they are sick, scared and about as far from feeling "empowered" as they possibly could be. Moreover, emergencies involve huge hospital bills that consumers are not going to pay out of pocket, even in the Bush team's shiniest scenario. Catastrophes will always have to be covered by insurers, so consumers' incentive to control this important component of health-care costs will always be imperfect. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />Granted, but try finding a health insurance policy that's emergencies-only. Today's policies were spawned by businesses wanting something employees would be interested in, and that meant more than just getting a hospital stay covered if you break a leg. It meant things like minor doctor visits, the relative nickel-and-dime stuff that represents the majority of incidents if not spending. Insurers soon entangled themselves in all aspects of medical care, and their internal bureaucracies have hassled doctors and patients alike, creating incalculable amounts of paperwork and anxiety. It would be like homeowners' insurance getting involved when you call a plumber to fix a clogged sink. The insurance company represents a third party who leeches off the first two *and* costs them time with paperwork. <br /><br />This mindset became the norm, and eventually state governments made the situation permanent by mandating what things *must* be covered by any health insurance sold within their borders. Insurers thus craft policies for every state, and few states have so little regulation that it could reasonably called "unfettered private initiative". The end result is the hassle, inefficiency and lack-of-personal-responsibility associated with 'big government', without the socially harmonizing benefit of universiality. <br /><br />That's not to say I favor socialized medicine. Rather, I'm annoyed that so many people fail to see the roots of the current US healthcare system and the ways in which it's nothing like 'free market'. Those on the left should be skeptical that replacing one bureaucracy with another will have a significant positive effect; those on the right should realize that just because something is technically private-sector doesn't mean it should be defended from criticism. It's possible to be libertarian AND a critic of the healthcare system; as I've demonstrated it's actually quite easy. Sadly partisanship leads many on the right to oppose universal coverage proposals with no substantive counter-proposal, which leads the public to think that the right is satisfied with the problematic status quo. <br /><br />For all the reasons I outlined, the right should be just as upset as the left. Because it isn't, the debate is being won handily by the left. The poor quality of debate on this issue is bad for everyone, and sadly I don't see that changing any time soon.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-10756922376304760072007-09-26T07:43:00.000-07:002007-09-26T08:29:13.805-07:00'National service', 'sacrifice' & the draftIn the last couple years I haven't written quite so much about politics and current events. Thus there are a number of topics where I have something to say, but need something to trigger my opinions. I wasn't planning on writing anything until I saw a column that I *agree* with, which goes against my anti-punditry norm, but there you go. <br /><br />A trio of topics have come up over the last few years, all draped in the flag and country and "giving back". The underlying principles behind each differs quite a lot, from partisanship to misplaced patriotism. I'll start with the latter and work my way to the former.<br /><br />1) Several politicians have proposed that young Americans donate a significant amount of their time to some form of civic or charitable cause. As a right-winger I'm opposed to large amounts of government-mandated charity, so immediately my defenses are up even though at age 26 I'm not likely to be effected by it (most plans call for 18-25 year olds). One of the key things that makes charity meaningful and rewarding is that it's voluntary. You do better by yourself in doing better by others. What's really irked me about the issue is the number of times I've seen it brought up as a who-could-object-to-this common-sense proposal. <br /><br />Mandatory service would involve a lot more than just teenagers picking up trash on the side of a road. You're talking about monitoring, enforcing, punishing, certifying what does and doesn't count, and who knows what else. If it's for only a short period of time then the labor won't accomplish nearly enough to make up for the cost and hassle of operating the program. If it's for a long period of time then you're talking about what amounts to slave labor and seriously disrupting lives. In either case it's not going to foster 'civic responsibility' as much as civic unrest. It's one thing to draft men at a time of vital war, it's another to demand busywork because of a generic "young people today aren't nice" mentality. <br /><br />2) I've seen a few people on several locations of the political rainbow call for a return of the draft. Some want it because they think it would reduce militarism. I think that wanting to do a draft for political reasons is indefensible, and if you can't raise enough anti-war protests that's your own problem. Politicians shouldn't mess with the military any more than they already do (see: questionable weapons programs, military base decisions, Donald Rumsfeld). Wanting a draft because "we're running out of soldiers" is sheer laziness. <br /><br />We don't pay soldiers even a fraction of what they deserve, and the fact that so many are willing to serve at current pay scales is a testament to the character of our military. Considering that they have to leave home, give up many basic freedoms, are on the job 24/7 and risk their lives, and that they get paid less than many/most policemen, it's amazing that anyone signs up. If the military was seriously on the verge of needing more men, while at the same time taking up a much smaller % of GDP than it did even during many recent times of peace, to me the logical first step would be to increase pay and see if that would get more recruits. Some people might want to serve but couldn't really afford to right now. Others might be indifferent to serving now but go for the money. The prospect of a 'mercenary' army might not appeal to some of you, but to me in a situation like we're in today it's a lot more morally defensible than forced service. The bottom line is that the military does compete with the rest of the economy for manpower, and if it needs more then it should first be willing to at least try paying more for it. Speaking of paying more, I'd like to wrap this up by going after one of the most lackluster talking points of the last five years.<br /><br />3) "There isn't enough sacrificing for the Iraq war, just look at what people went through in WW2". There are a couple variations on this. I have yet to see one where the point was "you should donate more time and money to veterans groups". The point is usually "we can't have tax cuts and a war and conservatives should give up one or another". This is what's called a false dilemma. Take two things that are marginally connected at best (war funding and taxation) and say there one or the other must be sacrificed. The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes far too many things, but perhaps most importantly it assumes that if a conservative got what he wanted (war and tax cuts) there would be an unsustainable budget deficit. Thing is, if you ask any halfway respectable conservative he'll come up with several hundred billion dollars worth of spending to cut and thus balance the budget. I won't even go into the whole "sometimes tax cuts lead to more/not much less revenue" talking point because that's a whole 'nother debate. <br /><br />I'm annoyed so much by the talking point because it's usually employed in a very dishonest, partisan way, and it also tries to use an end-around on the tax debate (since war is more serious than taxes). It's a "gotcha". I hate a "gotcha" debate mindset. Even if you 'win' a debate like that it's going to do more to cause discord rather than change minds. <br /><br />So in conclusion: charity is awesome but it should come from the heart, pay the troops more, and the federal budget is big enough for there to be some leeway on what people want without making assumptions. <br /><br />On a final note, thanks for the positive feedback so far, especially from those of you who don't agree with all of it.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-72146330463772429922007-09-20T11:09:00.000-07:002007-09-20T13:35:42.545-07:009/11/07: never forget (the bad memes and arguments)Before I start, does anyone know of a way to do those column expand/contract things without my using things like "xml editor" and such? The Blogger Help section gives directions that are impossible to follow. The reason I ask is because I'm going to be posting mostly long entries and older ones will be buried under the likes of... well, this. (WARNING: INCONCEIVABLY LONG)<br /><br />------------------<br /><br />Every Monday I spend a big hunk of time playing catch-up on RealClearPolitics' endless array of links. Since I didn't get to it on Monday the 10th, I had four days worth of material to read on the 11th. On a typical Monday I'll come across 2-5 irritating columns, but on the 11th it was a full set of 10, and all on the same subject. The war.<br /><br />As I've said many times and will repeat again, I don't hold any ill will towards those who were opposed to the war at the start, and I'm not angry at those who want to end it now. It's an absolute muddle. In any given three month period there's some new really bad event or trend to show how far Iraq is from anything remotely considered 'mission accomplished'. That said, I am touchy on the subject. <br /><br />My church has a very large military contingent for its size, and probably the bravest person my hometown produced in my lifetime was fortunate to avoid being killed in Ramadi during the height of violence there. I don't take the mission lightly, and I hate it when people either for or against the war debate it like a partisan political fight. I've gone over the administration's inability to make a decent case in the past, and I think part of that is the Rove-created media approach which works wonders when things are simple but falls apart when it gets hairy. Other right-wing pundits (ie. Limbaugh) drive me crazy by explaining the war exclusively through a Republican vs Democrat prism or oversimplifying. <br /><br />Before jumping into my original plan of lambasting war critics, let me point out two right-wing memes I dislike. First is "they're fighting for our freedom". In Iraq? I'm as hawkish as it gets and even I'm not willing to step out on that limb. I view Iraq as a US obligation and a vital security interest, but it's not like World War II where the fate of the free world directly hung in the balance. Another is the "if we leave then al Qaeda will take over Iraq" talking point, one that I've seen bandied about from far too many commentators. Even at its most powerful, al Qaeda and its related jihadi groups were never a threat to conquer Baghdad. When they bombed the golden mosque, the Shiite militias rose up and expelled Sunnis wholesale from many neighborhoods in the capital (and probably elsewhere). Al Qaeda never had a chance to defeat the raw manpower of the Shiites. The worst case scenario has always been a bigger, badder version of the sectarian violence witnessed after the Samarra bombing. Both of those talking points are simplistic and appeal to base emotions rather than being concerned about accuracy. And speaking of lacking accuracy...<br /><br /><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article2414611.ece">Simon Jenkins</a> spent quite a lot of time running through the usual criticisms, which most anyone can repeat by heart. That he classifies all Sunni chieftains as "Saddamist" is irritating but it's minor. What makes me target this column is the part where he does the most original thinking, that is, his call for the US to emulate the UK's withdrawal plan. In essence, cut a deal to empower local militias who will keep order. <br /><br />This just might work in Basra, I don't know enough about that area of Iraq to argue. What little I do know about Basra is that there's no way to apply any lessons from there to the rest of Iraq. You don't have the Sunni/Shia tensions, and you don't have to worry about insurgents using Basra as a base of operations. The flashy, foreign-led section of the Sunni insurgency has actively targeted other provinces from wherever it's headquartered at the time. Sunnis in Anbar rose up against al Qaeda's Iraq franchise but still oppose the government or its current leaders. Rival Shiite groups might bicker and occasionally shoot at each other but they do so in order to control, not fight, the government. Getting two Shiite groups to leave each other alone, which is an uneasy truce to begin with, is an apple. Getting Sunnis and Shiites to leave each other alone isn't even an orange. Far more complicated, far more likely to break down into violence. Jenkins isn't a "so what if a genocidal civil war breaks out" type, he agrees that the US has a duty to the Iraqi people. It's puzzling to me why he thinks that such a facile solution as the UK/Basra model (which is still wholly unproven) is the way to uphold that duty.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-takeyh8sep08,0,4848593.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail">Simon and Takeyh</a> spin things a bit too hard. All Shia demand more vengeance on Sunnis, all Sunnis demand majority power? That's reductionism almost to the point of being racist. Saying that the surge hasn't had a measurable impact on insurgent activity is flat-out wrong, since it not only stopped the steady uptick in violence but also halved it. The "all it did was move insurgents elsewhere" talking point proves that they aren't looking seriously at the differences between the surge and other past offensives. Before we couldn't even get al Qaeda et al to leave Anbar, which was by far the easiest terrain for them. Now they're having to go into places with significant Shia populations, significant Iraqi military positions, or both. Clear/build/hold was the mantra since late 2004 but it wasn't a reality until now, as we're finally helping local populations get the confidence they need to fight back and keep the radicals from returning. Last but not least they trot out another drastic oversimplification, that the US being friendly towards Sunnis will automatically turn the Shia population against us. I have no doubt that some Shiite leaders are upset but their implication is that we should have snubbed the Sunnis forever and that's about as idiotic a prescription for Iraq as I can think of.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/09/09/2007-09-09_cia_agent_says_were_letting_bin_laden_wi.html?print=1">Scheuer</a> provides this gem:<br /><br /><blockquote>Bin Laden and his boys sit unmolested on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, planning more attacks in America because our bipartisan elite long ago delegated America's protection to a beleaguered Third World dictator.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />Unmolested? That would be news to the thousands of incredibly elite soldiers in the area who kill Taliban by the hundreds on a regular basis. Maybe he means that they're unmolested in Pakistan. Okay, I'll give him that. And yes we rely on Third World dictator (Musharraf). The alternative is what, exactly? Pakistan has nukes and their major political figures are at least two of a very nasty subset (corrupt, incompetent, dictatorial, jihadist). Scheuer prides himself on being an expert on the region but he completely glosses over the very things which make the Afghanistan situation difficult. It would be like me ignoring demography when talking about future entitlement obligation. (I'll be coming back to that one soon enough)<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_09/012029.php">Kevin Drum</a> writes a staggeringly bad piece. I'm not sure where to begin. "The surge has produced only tiny gains in a few highly localized areas and has no chance of replicating those successes on a wide scale" is a whopper; 50%+ gains have been made in several of the most violent provinces and Baghdad neighborhoods, which in turn account for 90% of violence in Iraq. Saying that there is "no chance" of replicating the Anbar model dismisses the hard-earned people skills of our troops, and while I'm not going to pull a Jenkins and say that it's absolutely going to work it has worked everywhere the surge has gone. He goes on to wave away a post-withdrawal bloodbath by saying it would be bloody but short, and because he waves away hard-fought gains by our troops that makes it easy for him to reach his conclusion in 8 paragraphs.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070924&s=editors">The Nation</a> thinks that if the US pulls out, the UN and the Arab League will be able to bring peace. I'm not going to dignify that with a response.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/09/11/911_lessons/print.html">Gary Kamiya</a> trips right out of the gate: <br /><br /><blockquote>It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' "anxiously awaited" evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11. <br /></blockquote><br /><br />Congress scheduled the hearings. That's just sloppy. He then goes on to say that the war on terror is "a palatable cover for vengeance and racism" and "the massacre in Haditha on a global scale", which is especially interesting because as the facts came out it became clear that the early 'Haditha massacre' narrative was incorrect and already most of the soldiers involved have been cleared. I'm not going to put more energy into this because it's primarily partisan bomb-throwing of the kind I so detest.<br /><br />BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! The war isn't the only thing to generate bad columns!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/07/AR2007090702053_pf.html">Anthony Zinni</a> is a heavy-hitter in foreign policy ranks, which makes it all the more silly for him to hand-wave his way around the fact that Musharraf is almost the worst possible "he's an SOB but he's our SOB" in that he's a dictator who can't secure his country against US enemies. As I mentioned earlier it's not as though we have better options per se, but Zinni takes things too far. Bush has handled Musharraf with kid gloves for 6 years now, we've hardly been unkind.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/what_unites_politicians_big_go.html">Richard Reeves</a> goes after Fred Thompson with a huge logical leap. He points out that Reagan didn't really fight the growth in the size of government (true) and that Bush II has backed a lot of new spending (also true). Here's the conclusion of the column.<br /><br /><blockquote>As for Thompson, it is hard to understand what the former senator really believes about the big government he wants to run. In his announcement speech he contradicts himself, saying:<br /><br />"When I went to the Senate, I wanted to balance the budget, cut taxes, reform welfare, require Congress to live under the laws that they had imposed on others, and I wanted to begin the modernizing of our military ...<br /><br />"Now these problems have only grown worse since that time. ... On our present course, deficit financing will saddle future generations with enormous taxes, jeopardize our economy and endanger our retirement programs. ... This path is economically unsustainable."<br /><br />That sounds like he wants to rescue the nation from his party and his party's leader -- because all the terrible things he's talking about happened while George Bush and other Republicans were running the country. In the end, Thompson is telling us that, like Bush, he is a big-government conservative spending his children's and grandchildren's money.</blockquote><br /><br />How is that a contradiction? How is that proof that Fred wants a bigger government? If you're going to do partisan attacks at least make it easy to follow. Fred is talking about governing with conservative ideals, Reagan and Dubya and the GOP congress often didn't, soooooo... Fred's lying? Wuh?<br /><br /><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/printpage/?url=http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/dont_sweat_low_birthrates.html">Last but not least it's John Tammy</a> to hand-wave away the coming entitlement crunch. I have yet to see an economist, even with the most rose-colored glasses imaginable, provide figures to show how the US/EU/Japan/Russia/China Axis of Aging will be able to cope with the growing number of retirees without some combination of unsustainable taxes or massive benefit cuts or both. Tammy trots out productivity gains, without even trying to show how that will close the gap. He trots out globalization as though people in Bombay will be paying taxes to Washington DC or Rome. He even has the audacity to say that we'll be better off in the long run because raising children is expensive. Because workers are amazingly productive, <strong>just not productive enough to offset the cost of being born.</strong> Or something. John's logic is on par with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25AT2EyAIw4">the reviving elbow</a>, only in one case it's pro wrestling and in the other it's economics. I think Tammy should be held to a higher standard than Hulk Hogan. <br /><br />-------------------<br /><br />See what I mean about wanting to do the expand/contract thing? My gosh.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-66178382677070429892007-09-19T09:34:00.000-07:002007-09-19T10:36:42.767-07:00Paul Campos gets paid for this dreck.Some op-ed columnists are trolls. They aren't so much trying to prove a point or change minds so much as get attention, rile up the opposition and entertain those who agree with them. Trolls don't always really believe what they're saying.<br /><br />I don't think Paul Campos of Rocky Mountain News is a troll, which in a way is worse. For instance, this <a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/cda/article_print/0,1983,DRMN_23972_5700595_ARTICLE-DETAIL-PRINT,00.html">from yesterday.</a> He writes about football coaches and extensively quotes "my friend JJ" to help prove that Notre Dame's treatment of Charlie Weis is an example of racism. Not that it was, say, a well-intentioned mistake. Oh no. Let's not go into the merits or demerits of giving Weis the job and a big contract. Let's just point out that he's white and the last coach was black. Case closed. <br /><br />For that he gets published, much less paid? But wait there's more!<br /><br /><a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_5661530,00.html">Steroids are okay! Let's use an obviously false hypothetical to prove it!</a> Or how about <a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_5641813,00.html">Vick's plight is Orwellian and we're only outraged because poor people do it!</a> Don't care about sports? Never fear, he's a veritable buffet of buffoonery. <a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_5631897,00.html">Nobody has proven that obesity has negative health effects!</a> That's a real keeper, because he takes a perfectly reasonable argument (American obesity contributes to high healthcare costs), strawmans it, and then does a bad job of attacking the strawman. I want to go into a little more detail on this because it's beyond me how a professional writer would turn out something like this for mass consumption.<br /><br /><blockquote>The logic of Huckabee's position goes something like this: People get sick because they're fat. If they became thin, they wouldn't get sick, or at least not nearly so often. </blockquote><br /><br />The logic isn't that thin people won't get sick, nobody says that, but Campos just has to throw that in to try and smear his opposition. And, mind you, the opposition is <em>people who think Americans are too fat.</em><br /><br /><blockquote>France spends half as much per person on health care as we do but has a much healthier populace, despite higher rates of smoking and drinking, and a high-fat diet that horrifies our puritanical public health authorities, who define "healthy" food as food people eat only out of a sense of nutritional obligation. </blockquote><br /><br />Campos thinks this is a good shot at Huckabee, or else he wouldn't include it. But did Huckabee say that all foods with fat in them are bad? No. He's talking about obesity. A diet can have fat in it and not lead to obesity, and hey, France is proof! Smaller portions, healthier fats, it all works out. Pulling the France card is a non-sequitur.<br /><br /><blockquote>It's no exaggeration to say that behind statements like Huckabee's lurks the idea that, when people get sick, it's their own fault. If people didn't believe this, then the arguments of the defenders of the health care status quo would be recognized for what they are: attempts to defend the indefensible. </blockquote><br /><br />Except that obesity is a choice in the vast majority of cases and those resulting diseases are, in fact, the sick person's fault? The obesity of Americans, myself included, is a moral and cultural failure which is incredibly expensive and degrades the quality of life. Campos is afraid that going after obesity is a smokescreen for not having universal healthcare. I can vaguely sympathize, but Campos doesn't focus on removing the smokescreen. He focuses on trying to minimize the perceived harm of obesity, just like he tried to minimize the harm that Bonds and Vick caused their sports.<br /><br /><blockquote>For several years now, I've been documenting and describing the obsession the American public health establishment has with the absurd notion that the biggest health crisis facing the nation is the increasing weight of the populace and the even crazier idea that trying to make Americans thinner represents a sensible use of scarce public health dollars. </blockquote><br /><br />Do I even need to bother going after this? How is obesity not the biggest problem? How is making Americans thinner an unworthy goal? How are public health dollars 'scarce'?! Campos continues and concludes:<br /><br /><blockquote>There's actually little correlation between weight and health except at real extremes. There's almost literally no evidence that weight loss in and of itself improves health. And we don't know how to make people thin. <br /><br />It's difficult to express how exasperating it is to deal with the utterly irrational denial this last point elicits. A new meta-analysis of 31 long-term weight-loss studies by UCLA psychologist Traci Mann and her colleagues drives the point home with overwhelming force: When people try to do what Huckabee says they should do, to lose weight, the vast majority of them don't achieve any long-term weight loss. His response to this, of course, would be that they need to try harder. <br /><br />Suppose Mike Huckabee were to give a lecture to 100 children of poor, inner-city single mothers, in which he told them that by staying in school and working hard they could escape poverty, and 20 years later he discovered that 95 of the kids were still poor. Would he still believe that telling such children to "try harder" constitutes an adequate response to the problem of inner-city poverty? <br /><br />Wait, don't answer that. </blockquote><br /><br />Most people who try to lose weight fail. Campos takes that fact, one which I don't think many people would deny, and uses it to prove that there's no benefit to be derived from fighting obesity. Campos says there's no correlation except at the extremes. I think he hasn't been to a chain restaurant or a mall or a ballgame lately because there are a LOT of Americans at the 'extreme' end of obesity. Last year I went to Japan and weighed about 195 pounds, when I should weigh around 160. That's a goodly amount of flab, yet walking down Main Street USA I wouldn't come close to standing out. Yet in Japan I was easily in the top 3% of the fattest people in a given crowd. Walk into a crowded Applebee's and you'll see more 250+ pound lardbuckets than you would from walking the teeming streets of Tokyo for a month. We ARE the extreme! Campos is trying to obfuscate reality to score political points against a C-level Republican presidential candidate, and I just can't grasp why he feels the need to do so.<br /><br />Then he tosses out a really sloppy hypothetical cheap-shot, and I hope that those of you reading this from the leftward end of the political spectrum can see what a poor example of argumentation this is.<br /><br />And one more for the road: <a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_5612768,00.html">if conservatives agree with John Roberts court decisions then the decisions must be political!</a> Which is a great way to dismiss the possibility that there is legal merit behind them, or that they could result from a steady and reasonable but non-partisan judicial philosophy.<br /><br />Campos is a hack's hack and it's a wonder he gets to deposit money into his bank account for such efforts.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-53476623529886329242007-09-18T13:28:00.000-07:002007-09-18T13:42:52.797-07:00RISK~The last few years I've gone through a number of different hobbies to fill my spare time at work. Fantasy football was always fun until the last few weeks of the year, when my top players would go cold or get hurt no matter how many teams I had. Mercury was a nice high-end e-fed but it required big chunks of time too often in the week for me to keep it up. Writing a new puropulse every week became difficult to do after I'd gone over all the basics/theories behind puro and had complained several times about every promotion's booking. <br /><br />Two weeks ago I played Risk for the first time in about 15 years with a group of friends. Though I only came in 3rd of 5, it sparked something in me. Here was a game I could control (unlike fantasy football), it didn't force me to dwell on negative things (like the puropulse), and if I could find the right website it wouldn't be time-intensive at all. I didn't find one site like that; I found three.<br /><br /><a href="http://conquerclub.com">Conquer Club</a>, <a href="http://landgrab.net/landgrab/Home">Landgrab</a> and <a href="http://www.denizengames.com/grandstrategy">Grand Strategy</a> all give you the ability to test your strategic thinking online for free. Give them a try (well not so much landgrab) and maybe you'll stumble across me.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-71962550121081535772007-09-14T11:04:00.000-07:002007-09-14T11:55:55.851-07:00Failure to leadThe more time goes by, the less I enjoy our political system. Granted there is the "worst except for all the others" bromide, but that stopped calming my nerves a while ago. <br /><br />I realize I'm to the right of 80, maybe 90 percent of the country. I accept that I can't possibly get all that I want. What gets me is that I can't vote for someone and expect to use the campaign platform as an indicator of future policies. Dubya came in against farm subsidies and yet didn't blink at signing record increases that went primarily to wealthy landowners and connected corporations. Republicans voted into congress to fight things like wasteful spending were going hog-wild within four years. Throw in the steady trickle of sexual and financial scandals on every level of government and it's easy to be jaded. <br /><br />In 2004 I was more anti-Kerry than pro-Bush. I see that many people who were that way at the time are now more anti-Bush and want their votes back. Not me. However, I'm much less pro-Bush now than I was then, which has caused me to write a lot less about politics and current events over the last two years even though I read much more about both. The best example is the war.<br /><br />In 2004, the Sunni insurgency started up. I figured they would be crushed quickly, and that we wouldn't tolerate any safehavens for Ba'athists or foreign terrorists. As it turns out, during the 2004 campaign Bush knew that there were large sections of the country with no coalition presence whatsoever and he never made the case for additional troops. I'd read stories from the front where US troops were winning battles and winning over civilians, and I figured that was happening across the nation and thus victory was around the corner. However, that progress was only made where soldiers were, which in turn was far too small a portion of the country. <br /><br />I can understand being fed up with the Iraqis today, saying that we've done enough and that we don't need to shed any more blood for them. However, in 2004 the Iraqis hadn't been given half a chance and we were responsible for at least trying to secure the country as best we were able to. Looking at how much the surge has accomplished in the last three months, it's obvious that 2004 was not "as best we were able to". Neither was 2005 or 2006. But what's more, in 2004 we had far more soldiers who hadn't spent the maximum amount of time on the front the way there is today. A surge in 2004 could have used more soldiers, it wouldn't have needed even a fraction as much in targeting Shia militants, and it would have trampled the Sunni insurgency long before the 2006 mosque bombing that sent violence levels through the roof. <br /><br />A quality leader in the White House would never half-ass a war. Doing so put more of our troops in danger over the long haul, and I can guarantee it was done in an effort to maintain Bush's poll numbers. A leader would have success and doing good by the troops as the top goal, not politics. I firmly believe the rhetoric Bush uses about the importance of Iraq in the war on terror and the world overall, but Bush doesn't act as if HE believes it. Let me give you some examples.<br /><br />If he really believed it, he would put public pressure on Saudi Arabia to stop the flow of arms and men through Syria and into Iraq. Saudi state-sponsored religious leaders and media have supported the insurgency from the start. American troops put their lives on the line for the sake of regional security; the least the Sauds can do is get out of the way.<br /><br />If he really believed it, he would gather as much data as possible about Syrian and Iranian complicity in the violence and mount a diplomatic campaign to lobby for sanctions. Whatever behind-the-scenes assurances would be needed that the campaign was not a run-up to more wars, he'd have to give them. Instead there hasn't been any sign that they're doing more than just leaks to the press about suspect weapons and supply trails. If Iran is really providing the IEDs that kill troops by the dozen every month, why not pressure Japan to buy their oil elsewhere? Why not pressure France and Germany to have their large (and often state-tied) corporations pull out of Tehran? The administration has no qualms about levelling accusations but nobody puts much stock into them because they don't take the obvious next step and try to hit back at Syria and Iran over their actions in Iraq. Compare to what we've done to Syria over Lebanon and Iran over the nuclear issue.<br /><br />If Bush really believed in the importance of Iraq and the war on terror he would have called for an expansion of the military long ago. Don't support the surge? It doesn't matter because in a few months we won't have enough soldiers for it unless we extend tours of duty to an absurd length! It's not as though there's no money for it, I mean, we have enough to fill the coffers of Archer Daniels Midland and build bridges for fifty people in Alaska and support money pits like corn-based ethanol (other crops make better fuel). He could have made the case, beaten up congressional Republicans, and tried to make sure we have enough manpower to win in Iraq and more effectively hold Afghanistan. Would it have been risky? Yes. But fully acknowledging the difficulties and the cost involved in winning would have the benefit of being the truth and war supporters like me would have backed him twice as much. <br /><br />Talking about preventing another 9/11 while relying on a 'light footprint' in Iraq and a shrunken force in Afghanistan isn't leadership. It's partisan cowardice. I'm glad that the surge finally happened but the delay has cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and there's no guarantee we'll even succeed in the end. The insecurity of Iraq in 2004, 2005 and 2006 helped shape the dysfunctional politics in Baghdad today and it might be beyond repair at this point. <br /><br />You might be against the US presence in Iraq. This post isn't an attempt to justify that. Rather, I'm trying to say that the Bush 2 administration has been an object lesson in how not to govern as a hawk. Poor leadership has meant that those who opposed the invasion are almost entirely opposed to the occupation, and many who supported the invasion have either turned or are now demoralized, which is bad politics. Poor leadership also let a bad situation get much, much worse. <br /><br />I'm hoping for better from the 2008 candidates but I'm keeping my expectations low.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-29740360500174419532007-09-13T13:50:00.000-07:002007-09-13T15:44:23.775-07:00I hate bad punditry<div align="left">Every day I spend a hunk of time on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">realclearpolitics</span>.com. They include the important political writings of the day from across the spectrum: columnists, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">bloggers</span>, editorials, magazines, think-tanks and more. I skip quite a lot, depending on the source and subject. I'm not focusing on the 2008 horse-race because today's news and analysis will be forgotten in a month or less. I don't read cheerleaders or trolls, which means that despite my staunch right-wing politics I click on American Prospect columns exponentially more often than Ann <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Coulter</span>.<br /><br />There are times when I read a column from the left and nod my head. It can be from outright agreement or just "that's a fair argument", and reading such columns has given me a lot of respect for my ideological opponents. Many writers have enough intellectual honesty and intelligence to overcome my initial <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">contrarianism</span>. However, not everyone is so skilled.<br /><br />On most days I stumble upon a sentence, or a paragraph, or a piece of writing whose contents grate on me. Whether it's bad information, faulty reasoning or a worn-out talking point, it drives me crazy that I have no means of response. Or I should say it drove me crazy, because now I have this blog to vent my spleen onto for literally TENS of people to read. So here's an incredibly long example:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_myth_of_the_balanced_court">http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_myth_of_the_balanced_court</a><br /><br />Cass R. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Sunstein</span> is complaining that the court is too far to the right. Considering that Kennedy is the center, the court can be fairly called right-leaning, so it makes sense for a Prospect writer to be concerned. However rather than making a straightforward, strong case that it will take a couple new nominations by a Democrat to rectify the situation, Cass grasps at every straw.<br /><br /></div><blockquote>In 1980, John Paul Stevens stood at the center of the Supreme Court. Today, he is its most left-wing member -- and he hasn't changed.</blockquote><p>That's the tag line, and it tells you exactly where things are headed. 1980 is the benchmark that courts should be judged by, and Stevens ought to be the center. Now, Cass should desire that the court move that far to the left, but the concern isn't based on pure ideological wishing. Look at the title: "The Myth of the Balanced Court". Meaning that the goal is balance, with a few clear leftists and a few clear rightists and one or more centrists to balance things out. Me, I'd prefer a court with Roberts at the center, but I can't expect Cass to feel that way. Cass however has set the table <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">thusly</span>: <em>Stevens</em> was the center and that's how to achieve a balanced court. Not a progressive court, a balanced court. </p><p>The body of the column starts by establishing a fair point: that the court is tilted to the right and that the media should report it as such. I'd say that there isn't really a problem because I hear far more of "Kennedy is the center" than I do "Kennedy is a centrist", but I won't quibble over this point. Now we get to the red meat.</p><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote></blockquote><blockquote>Cautious on the lower courts, Ginsburg and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Breyer</span> were <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">prescreened</span> by and fully acceptable to Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both their votes and their opinions have been far more moderate than those of the great liberal visionaries of the Court's past, such as William O. Douglas and William Brennan. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Souter</span> is a Republican appointee. His approach to constitutional law is in the general mold of Justice John Harlan, the great conservative dissenter on the Warren Court. Stevens, also a Republican appointee, was a maverick on the Burger Court, far to the right of three of its members. Contrary to what you hear, Stevens hasn't much changed in the last decades. </blockquote><p>'Cautious on lower courts' is meaningless. Judges are often more reserved before reaching the top, especially when they know they'll have to be screened by partisans. As for whether they're left or right, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Sunstein</span> notes that they're less-left than several past judges. That doesn't prove anything either as far as whether they should be considered centrists. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Souter</span> was nominated by Bush 1, which is meaningless in determining where he stands. His approach being theoretically in the mold of Harlan doesn't mean it actually is. He was nominated in the hopes of getting someone like Harlan; very few court watchers would say he fulfilled those hopes. Stevens being a maverick on the Burger court doesn't disprove that he's currently a liberal, and "hasn't changed that much" is an admission that he has shifted at least somewhat to the left.</p><blockquote>In 1980, when I clerked at the Court, the justices were, roughly from left to right, Brennan, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Thurgood</span> Marshall, Harry <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Blackmun</span>, Byron White, John Paul Stevens, Lewis Powell, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, and William Rehnquist. Believe it or not, this Court was widely thought to be conservative. </blockquote><p>So you've got four solid leftists, Powell and Stewart were centrists, Stevens is acknowledged as to the left of them in 1980 and has moved further left since, and Burner and Rehnquist can be considered on the right. That's a 4-3-2 or 5-2-2 split leaning to the left. The only way I can imagine that being considered conservative is if it was compared to past courts rather than actual, you know, conservatism. By calling the 1980 court conservative, when even a tiny bit of knowledge or inquiry shows otherwise, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Sunstein</span> is trying to say that it should be the model of a balanced court. There's a debate to be had as to whether 1980 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">centerpoint</span> Stevens was more to the left than 2007 <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">centerpoint</span> Kennedy is to the right, but the fact is, Stevens was leftist at the time and thus the court was leftist as well. </p><p>Again, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Sunstein</span> could have handily proven an easy point and focused on how the media portrays today's court and Kennedy. Instead, the coverage is assumed to be biased and the 1980 court being conservative, which is a reach, quickly becomes an assumption as well.</p><blockquote>But think, just for a moment, about how much would have to change in order for the Court of 2007 to look like the supposedly conservative Court of 1980. </blockquote><p>So he goes on an extended mental exercise of showing how far the 2007 court is to the right of the 1980 court. Hey, I won't disagree that the court has shifted to the right. The problem is that "1980 = conservative court" is the central premise. It would take a much longer, and much more detailed column to even begin to prove that, if it's possible to begin with. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Sunstein's</span> hand is tipped even more in the next section.</p><blockquote>The consequences are huge, both for constitutional law and for public debate. When Kennedy, rather than Stevens, looks like the moderate, people's sense of constitutional possibilities, and of what counts as sensible or, instead, extreme and unthinkable, shift dramatically. Not long ago, Marshall and Brennan served as the Court's visionaries, offering a large-scale sense of where constitutional law should move. They thought it preposterous that affirmative action should be treated the same as old-fashioned racial discrimination, and their views on that question put real pressure on the Court's center. They wrote in clear, bold strokes against decisions to invalidate campaign-finance restrictions and to restrict access to federal court; their opinions pressed the Court toward moderation on those subjects. </blockquote><p>So he's essentially saying that Kennedy is 'extreme and unthinkable'. Marshall and Brennan, who were the leftmost of the 1980 court, moved the court in a moderate direction. Opposition to affirmative action is no longer simply a different point of view, but an untenable one. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Sunstein's</span> entire column is supposed to be about how to get to a moderate court, but now it's clear that a progressive court is the true goal. I wouldn't have a problem with someone writing about wanting a progressive court, especially in the Prospect, but he disguises it as wanting moderation. </p><blockquote>The results of the shift have been momentous. Where once it seemed clear that the Court would generally accept congressional judgments in favor of affirmative-action programs, the Court has now made clear that such judgments will be subject to "strict scrutiny" (and generally struck down).</blockquote><p>Or in other words, he wants a default leftist court and now it isn't. Even <em>questioning</em> affirmative action is intolerable. He doesn't want a centrist court, he wants a progressive rubber-stamp. That's poor argumentation for a professor of law. This same kind of argument is then extended to other issues: the court isn't on the left so it isn't balanced. His own words disprove his assertion that the 1980 court was conservative, because he wants a court that debates how progressive to be rather than whether or not to be progressive.</p><blockquote>The upshot of all these shifts is that what was once on the extreme right is now merely conservative. What was once conservative is now centrist. What was centrist is now left wing. What was once on the left no longer exists. </blockquote><p>This is only true if you're basing it on where the court was at and before 1980, not if you base it on overall political and legal thought in America. Is there nobody as far to the left as Marshall on today's court? Probably. Does that mean nobody on the court today is leftist? Hardly. An easy way to tell is to see how often progressives complain about decisions which Stevens or Ginsburg or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Breyer</span> are in the majority, and compare it to how many conservatives complain about decisions where Kennedy is in the majority. I've seen lots of the latter and very little of the former. If Ginsburg was merely centrist then she'd be to the right of progressives 50% of the time and would regularly draw fire from them. </p><p>Cass goes for far too much early on and never stops reaching. That would be tolerable in a standard partisan cheerleader, but I'd hope for more from someone of his seniority and experience in the field of law.</p>Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6765065792757291706.post-87748423633675405782007-09-13T13:40:00.000-07:002007-09-14T08:35:44.083-07:00First postI'm making a blog. It's gonna have stuff on it. Thrilling!<br /><br />The content will vary. Sometimes politics, sometimes wrestling, sometimes completely random stuff. I figure, this way YOU the reader can directly respond.Ditchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01781393824483359698noreply@blogger.com2