Month: December 2003

I blow hot and cold about making them — and I blow mostly cold in terms of keeping them. However, these should be pretty easy to keep:

1) Don’t let the house/office get this messy (link via Jacob Levy).

2) Refrain from making stupid Nazi anologies.

3) Feel less schadenfreude about John Kerry for photos like this (link via Pejman Yousefzadeh)

4) Be more courteous on airplane trips than this person.

And finally:

5) Avoid this level of blog addiction. Link via Jeff Jarvis (posted by Daniel Drezner).

Part two of the L.A. Times investigative report on sanctions-busting arms transfer to Iraq is now online. This part focuses mainly on the Polish connection.

A complaint — at one point the story says:

In Poland, the arms merchants ended up focusing on a new member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and one of the relatively few European countries to support the Bush administration’s war plan. (emphasis added)

The LAT’s memory is faulty — in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the number of European governments that supported U.S. policy in Iraq was much larger than the conventional wisdom remembers.

This isn’t the main point of the story — but casual asides like this affect political short-term memories (posted by Daniel Drezner).

The New York Times runs a great piece suggesting that the 101st Airborne, based in Northern Iraq, has successfully adapted to the role of nation-building. My favorite paragraph:

First Lt. Joe Florczak, 23, of Chicago, pushed his Kevlar helmet back a bit when asked what jobs he had had since his tank-killing Humvees pushed north into Iraq from Kuwait in March. “I’ve been a rifle platoon leader, a police officer, a police trainer and a labor negotiator,” he said, describing his dealings with Iraqi security forces and civic leaders.

The story also has this devastating quote:

“The N.G.O.’s have been a disappointment,” said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Division, speaking of nongovernmental organizations. “Don’t get me wrong, the truck bomb at the U.N. headquarters was horrific. But they seemed as if they were very, very quick to bail out of here, compared to the risks they have run in a variety of other missions.”

I’ve been a big fan of Petraeus for some time, so it’s good to see his storied unit get the credit it richly deserves.

David Adesnik has more (posted by Daniel Drezner)

Irwin Stelzer breaks how the U.S. economy performed over the past year. The “good parts” version:

Big-company share prices rose by more than 20 percent, and the high-tech and small-business sectors soared at twice that rate. Productivity is scaling new heights, profits are up, incomes are rising, inflation is nonexistent, and the dollar is in a so-far agreeable decline, shrinking the trade deficit. The unemployment rate has fallen to the level it averaged in the 1990s, which decade included both boom and bust. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey of households shows that over 2 million more Americans are working at year end than were employed at the start of 2003….

It is fashionable to dismiss these indicators of material prosperity on two grounds. The first is that inequality is rampant and rising; the second is that money can’t produce happiness.

There is no question that statistical measures show a rise in inequality. The main reason: America welcomes more immigrants–legal and illegal–than all the other countries of the world combined. These newcomers typically start at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Exclude them from the statistics, calculates [Gregg] Easterbrook [in his new book The Progress Paradox], and the increase in inequality disappears. Indeed, for the 9 out of 10 Americans that are native born, inequality is declining.* And here is the reason that will surprise America’s critics: The decline in inequality is due in good part to the rising affluence of African Americans.

Which leaves happiness, a commodity many argue cannot be bought with money.

Many, but not everyone — go check out Robert H. Frank‘s argument that money does buy a measure of happiness in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Link via Virginia Postrel, who has a lot of interesting posts up at her blog.

*UPDATE: Virginia fact-checks the Easterbrook assertion cited by Stelzer and finds some problems with it (posted by Daniel Drezner).

… AND LOOKING FORWARD TO 2004: Projections for next year also look promising. The Conference Board predicts the highest rate of growth in twenty years, while this Michigan forecast predicts the creation of 5 million jobs over the next two years.

Two caveats to this — the first is that like political foreacsts, economic predictions are often wrong.

The second is that the structural macroeconomic problem is getting worse — as Julian Sanchez explains (posted by Daniel Drezner).

The Los Angeles Times has a thorough investigative report on how Iraq violated UN sanctions to acquire conventional military hardware — with the significant help of Syrian company linked to the ruling family. Go check it out.

It’s not shocking that Russian companies participated in the sanctions-busting — look at this quote:

“Russia’s foreign minister called the grounds for imposing the sanctions farfetched back then,” said Leonid B. Roshal, deputy director of KBP Tula, in an interview in Moscow. “I was never taught these diplomatic niceties, so I was much more straightforward and said, ‘The dog may bark, but the caravan will proceed.’ “

What is mildly shocking — from someone who knows a thing or two about economic sanctions — is that companies from stalwart U.S. allies (Poland and South Korea) were also complicit in the sanctions-busting.

Read the whole thing — yes, even if you need to register (posted by Daniel Drezner).

The Los Angeles Times, in trying to predict the 2004 election, rolls out this fact: “In every election since 1960, the party in the White House lost when the unemployment rate deteriorated during the first half of the year. If the rate improved, the party in the White House won.” Matthew Yglesias takes this prediction apart:

The generic proposition “rising unemployment is bad for incumbents” is so plausible, that one’s inclined to give this claim a pass on first reading, but the specific claim that the causal factor here is the unemployment rate in the first six months of the year before the election smacks of specification-searching.

All too true — predictive models of elections are far from perfect. It’s worth remembering that every election model worth its salt predicted Al Gore clearing 53% in the popular vote in 2000. The one thing everyone could agree on after the 2000 election was that these models obviously needed some rejiggering.

To be fair, it’s the intersection of these models and journalists looking for hooks that produce junk predictions like the one above. The relationship between electoral victory and the six-month unemployment trend in the LAT story sounds good, but it’s the political equivalent of an ESPN commentator saying, “The Patriots have never lost a home playoff game the week after winning on the road by more than two touchdowns.” It’s largely meaningless.

Clearly, unemployment will be a factor in the 2004 election — but it won’t be the only factor (posted by Daniel Drezner).

The New York Times reports that Howard Dean is acting huffy:

Dean… implied that many of his supporters, particularly young people, might stay home in November if another Democrat’s name ends up on the ballot.

“I don’t know where they’re going to go, but they’re certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician,” he said.

Though Dr. Dean has repeatedly said he would back whichever Democrat wins the nomination, he said Sunday that support was “not transferable anymore” and that endorsements, including his own, “don’t guarantee anything.”

Josh Marshall takes Dean to task:

The price of admission to the Democratic primary race is a pledge of committed support to whomever wins the nomination, period. (The sense of entitlement to other Democrats’ support comes after you win the nomination, not before.) If Dean can’t sign on that dotted-line, he has no business asking for the party’s nomination.

Marshall has a valid point — the attacks that John McCain took in 2000 were far worse than anything Dean’s experienced to date. Despite this, McCain was on the podium at the Republican convention with a full-throated (well… at least three-quarters-throated) endorsement of George W. Bush — even though he’d had minor surgery earlier that week and had to wear a bandage on his face. If Dean is acting petulant now, imagine how he’ll act as the Democratic standard-bearer.

Meanwhile Wesley Clark tries to woo the Clinton wing of the party (posted by Daniel Drezner).

Tim Luckhurst writes at The New Republic (subscription required) that the government’s reaction to the mad cow (BSE) case sounds spooky:

Today, comments like those made by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman are producing an alarming feeling of déjà vu in Britain. Her insistence last week that “[p]eople should continue to feel very confident in the safety of our meat supply” was powerfully–and frighteningly–reminiscent of the tone adopted by British officials [during the outbreak of BSE in the U.K. in the late eighties].

On the other hand, Sandy Szwarc at Tech Central Station echoes Douglas Adams and says “DON’T PANIC”:

We can be assured of one thing when it comes to the safety of our food: media hysteria will be inversely proportional to actual risks….

Those fretting about mad cow probably think nothing of taking a bath (which kills 320 Americans a year), walking downstairs (which kills 1,421 Americans annually) or driving their car (which kills 42,000 of us each year). Our odds of getting vCJD from eating British beef, said the CDC, is about one in ten billion….

[T]he USDA commissioned a study by the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis to study worst case scenarios. Their report found that should BSE be introduced in the U.S., measures taken during the last five years by the government and industry, while not foolproof, will arrest and eradicate the disease. The risk isn’t zero, said David Ropeik, director of risk communication, “but it’s as close to zero as you can get.”

The cow in question was born before these measures were taken, but the executive summary of the study cited by Sczwarc has the following info:

The import of one sick animal yields on average less than one new BSE case in 20 years and the disease and the disease is likely to be quickly eliminated from the U.S. following its introduction. Similarly, there appears to be no potential for an epidemic of BSE resulting from scrapie, chronic wasting disease, or other crossspecies transmission of similar diseases found in the U.S. Even if they existed, these hypothetical sources of BSE could give rise to only one to two cases per year.

Remember this study when lax regulation is blamed for this (posted by Daniel Drezner).

UPDATE: Scott Ratzan has more in the New York Times.

The American Family Association is running an online poll about gay marriage. They pledge: “Results of this poll will be presented to Congress.”

Looking at the results to date, I wonder if the AFA is going to honor its promise. Eugene Volokh and Julian Sanchez have more (posted by Daniel Drezner).

The New York Times, which has been aggressive in covering the contracts given to Halliburton during the Iraq war, comes to the following conclusion about their performance in Iraq:

An examination of what has grown into a multibillion-dollar contract to restore Iraq’s oil infrastructure shows no evidence of profiteering by Halliburton, the Houston-based oil services company, but it does demonstrate a struggle between price controls and the uncertainties of war, with price controls frequently losing.

A little later on:

So far this year, Halliburton’s profits from Iraq have been minimal. The company’s latest report to the Securities and Exchange Commission shows $1.3 billion in revenues from work in Iraq and $46 million in pretax profits for the first nine months of 2003.

It shouldn’t be surprising that price controls have fallen by the wayside in a place where speed is important — click here for more background (posted by Daniel Drezner).