Month: November 2008

In an addendum to his article, Noam Scheiber imagines how Geithner and Summers will divide up work:

1.) Substantively, Geithner will have the chief responsibility for resuscitating and reforming the financial markets, an area where he’s developed extensive expertise at the New York Fed. Summers will, in turn, be the guy the administration defers to on broad macroeconomic decisions–how big a stimulus bill should be, how the money should be allocated between unemployment benefits, aid to states, infrastructure projects, tax cuts, etc. (One thing to keep in mind about Geithner: He’s one of the least territorial people ever to work in government, with the possible exception of his old boss Bob Rubin, who was also famous for this. If Geithner thinks a colleague is in a better position tackle something, his impulse is to get out of the way.)

2.) Geithner and Summers will also have complementary procedural roles when dispensing advice to Obama. Summers’s instincts are pretty activist–he tends to favor aggressive government intervention during a crisis. Obama is innately cautious. Even when his head tells him to be aggressive, his gut tells him to slow down. The problem with a combination like this is that it can lead to stalemate: The activist guy pushes and the cautious guy clams up.

Which is where Geithner comes in. Geithner has, over the years, displayed a knack for getting to where Summers is headed, but with less indigestion all around. For example, in the fall of 1997, Geithner, Summers, and then-Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin had to formulate a response to the Korean financial crisis, which was on the verge of spreading around the globe. Summers wanted a huge show of force–accelerating an existing IMF package and kicking in a U.S. bailout to boot–which made Rubin queasy. Geithner helped broker the compromise that won Rubin over. (It involved asking private banks to re-schedule Korea’s debts so the country wouldn’t need as big a bailout.) I can imagine a similar situation arising under Obama.

3.) Geithner will take the lead on all things political. He’s developed strong relationships up and down Wall Street over the last five years, so he shouldn’t have trouble selling his reform agenda there. He also has extensive experience navigating Capitol Hill, having helped advance the Clinton administration’s debt relief agenda there during the mid-to-late ‘90s, over deep conservative opposition. Anyone who can convince the Jesse Helmses of the world to ease up on third-world countries can probably guide a stimulus bill through Congress.

The season of good will approacheth. Last night’s Colbert Special was pure, nihilist (well, almost nihilist) heaven. But I’m sitting in Starbucks and they’re already playing Christmas fucking carols. I have one simple request: the nightmare of Christmas is bad enough. So could we wait till after Thanksgiving before we have it force-fed down our throats and ears?

I feel better now.

Here’s some useful perspective for those of us caught up in the Prop 8 fight:

Fifty years ago today, on November 24, 1958, several people gathered in the studios of KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California, to participate in a groundbreaking two-hour broadcast on the problems that gay people faced in society. This is not only believed to be the first radio broadcast to deal favorably with gay people, it is also believed to be the first to include an actual gay person to speak directly of his experience. The first hour also featured the mother of a gay son.

Update:

Update: I received the following info in an email from James Sears, author of Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation. He wrote that first TV broadcast with an acknowledged homosexual was in Los Angeles by the vice-president of the Mattachine Society on the Paul Coates Show in 1956. His face was disguised. The first to feature an acknowledged homosexual on the east coast was March 10, 1956 with Tony Segura on the show (but he was in a mask). Also, WRCA of NYC produced a series of 3 panel discussions on its Open Minds on Aug 24, Sept 29 1956 and a third on Jan. 12, 1957.

Ross knows how tough getting out of Iraq will be:

…there will be difficulties – maybe a lot of difficulties – along the way, and it’s very easy to imagine a scenario in which the withdrawal from Iraq ends up dominating the foreign-affairs side of the ledger in Obama’s first term, and not necessarily in a good way. And by putting the job in the hands of Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton – a Republican appointee and a primary-season rival who attacked him from the right on foreign policy – Obama has effectively given realists and liberal hawks partial ownership of whatever happens in Iraq between now and 2011. In a best-case scenario for progressives, Gates and Clinton will play the role Colin Powell played in the run-up to the Iraq War (except with a better final outcome, obviously): Their association with the policy will help keep non-progressives on board when things get dicey, and then once the job is done they’ll be pushed aside and someone like Susan Rice will take over Obama’s post-occupation foreign policy.

Hannity and Colmes loses Colmes.

From Yglesias’ blog:

Never forget – this was a guy Glenn Reynolds considered a genius.

Man, that was a very meta post: a kind of blogger five-way via a comments section. Do I get insidery points?

A Canadian court ruled last week that obese people have the right to two seats for the price of one. Althouse asks:

If you get a free extra seat now, won’t people be clamoring to be considered one of the truly obese? Does some government agency certify that you are fat to the point of disability and thus entitled to accommodation? Or is this just a matter of airlines telling some people they’ll have to pay for a second seat — and now, they’re being told they will need to give that seat for free? If the latter, some of the chubbier passengers may decide to sprawl strategically to extort extra space from the airline. If the plane is full, who gets bumped?

This time, the barrier is not race or gender, but caste. Again, the shift is generational:

"The recent rise in violence actually shows that the younger generation — especially women — are slowly gaining individual freedom in marriage. But the older generation still cling to the old ways where marriage is still a symbol of status, not emotional love," said Shashi Kiran, a lawyer in India’s Supreme Court who married outside her caste and is handling several honor-killing cases. "It shows a society still in transition and wrestling with deep change."

Peter Klein:

The proposed bailout of GM, Ford, and Chrysler overlooks an important fact. The US has one of the most vibrant, dynamic, and efficient automobile industries in the world. It produces several million cars, trucks, and SUVs per year, employing (in 2006) 402,800 Americans at an average salary of $63,358. That’s vehicle assembly alone; the rest of the supply chain employs even more people and generates more income. It’s an industry to be proud of. Its products are among the best in the world.

Their names are Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, Hyundai, Mazda, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker. The Vapours attended my English high school. They were the coolest thing for miles.)

Eric Posner uses a Brookings report to argue that the Iraq War may turn out to be a humanitarian success. In short: if we never invaded, Iraqi civilian deaths due to sanctions may well have been greater than the wartime deaths.