Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel
Alex Morris’s article on women allegedly drinking more because of Second Wave feminism earns her the ire of Kerry Howley:

First and most obviously, the entire piece treats the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) as some kind of objective brain trust, filled with people thinking new and Important Thoughts on the relative merits of those substances called “drugs.” But CASA is a prohibitionist organizaton.

When CASA publishes gems such as “Non-medical Marijuana: Rite of Passage or Russian Roulette?”, nobody cracks open the report wondering “Gosh, I wonder what they decided?” This is an organization that compares the smoking of a joint to a game with a 17 percent chance of death, and proceeds to deem this comparison worthy not of a mere footnote but of a report title.

Howley continues:

I’ve always felt that people were more willing to grant the concept of life stages for men than for women; that dude crumpled over in the frat house is just going through his few years of drunken stupification; but the 24-year-old woman in an LES apartment who’s had a few too many Martinis– well, she’s ruined.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, 4.49 pm.

By Patrick Appel
Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D) is calling for Obama to "keep the country’s current national intelligence director and CIA chief in place" and says that "some parts of the CIA’s controversial alternative interrogation program should be allowed to continue." Greenwald responds:

…as I’ve been arguing for several weeks, it is unrealistic in the extreme to think that these Bush policies are going to magically vanish without a major fight now simply because Democrats are in control.  There are many factions in Washington working hard to ensure that these policies remain largely in place, and many of those factions are found at the highest levels of the Democratic Congressional leadership.

By Patrick Appel
Teachout defends himself. Megan counsels: "Do not, repeat NOT, tangle with Terry Teachout."

By Patrick Appel
David Kurtz feels for Jesse Jackson Jr.:

It’s looking increasingly like Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., was truly uninvolved in Rod Blagojevich’s alleged Senate-seat-for-sale scheme, other than expressing the usual interest in getting the appointment. Most telling was the report from Jackson’s lawyer today that the feds called Jackson as Blagojevich was being arrested to give him a heads up that the arrest was happening and that Jackson might see his name in the news. If this all bears out and Jackson turns out to be a victim here, too, it’s hard not to feel pretty bad for the guy.

By Patrick Appel
In case, like David Gergen, you are still struggling to pronounce "Blagojevich," Slate‘s here to help.

By Patrick Appel
Blagojevich: "the human lego":

By Patrick Appel
The Oil Drum:

We often hear that "soon" oil prices will hit a bottom, and start shooting back up again. I am less and less certain that this will be the case. Instead, I am concerned that we may on a relentless path to a point far below the point where energy companies can expect to have any chance of making money. We may be on a path toward more and more bankruptcies and defaults of all types–energy companies, owners of commercial real estate, homeowners, financial institutions, auto makers, airlines, and many more. If this is the case, there will be a huge strain on governments, and some may find it necessary to default on their debt.

By Patrick Appel
AL writes:

…it’s encouraging to me that the Obama team is at least trying to find someone who is free of taint from the Bush administration. Ultimately, though, I think the person Obama selects to head up the Justice Department (Eric Holder) and the Office of Legal Counsel (not yet announced) will be much more important in steering the country away from the policies of the last eight years. The intelligence agencies will always want to do as much as they are legally permitted to do. The key is having someone at the OLC who respects the law and the Constitution and is willing to draw the lines where they should be.

By Patrick Appel
Marc reports on how Obama’s team sees the economic situation and the possible foreign policy consequences. It’s a scary read:

It’s quite unsettling to talk to members of Barack Obama’s transition teams these days, especially those who are helping with the economics portfolio. Without going into details, the sense I get from them is that they are very worried that the economy will get a lot worse before it gets better. Not just worse… a lot worse.

As in — double digit unemployment without the wiggle factors. Huge declines in aggregate demand. Significant, persistent deficits. That’s one reason why the Obama administration seems to be open to listening to every economist with an idea and is stocking the staff with the leading lights of the field. In one sense, the general level of concern among Obama advisers and transition staffers is reassuring; they get the magnitude of the problems, and they’re not going to assume that, just because the bottom has never dropped out before — certainly not in the lifetimes of most people doing policy these days, the bottom will never drop out.

Where the discussion isn’t going, at least in public,  (or the PR level), is the possibility that the first foreign policy crisis the administration will face will be the complete economic collapse of a large, unstable nation. To be sure, Pakistan is nearly broke, and U.S. policy makers seem to be aware of that; but a worldwide demand crisis could lead to social unrest in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore, the Ukraine, Japan, Turkey or Egypt (which is facing an internal political crisis of epic proportions already). The U.S. won’t have the resources to, say, engineer the rescue of the peso again, or intervene in Asia as in 1997.