Month: September 2009

This strikes me as huge news and a major coup for the new president. It’s a statement from the Moscow government:

Iran’s construction of a uranium enrichment plant violates decisions of the United Nations Security Council. The International Atomic Energy Agency must investigate this site immediately, and Iran must cooperate with this investigation. Russia will assist in this investigation by any available means. Russia remains committed to a dialogue with Iran on the nuclear issue, and urges Iran to provide proof of its commitment to a peaceful nuclear program by the October 1 meeting of the P5-plus-1.

Meanwhile:

Mr. Obama is planning to visit Beijing and Shanghai in early November, just around the same time that a sanctions resolution is expected to be introduced at the Security Council.

Beep. Beep.

Julian Sanchez gets lyrical about liberal posturing on surveillance reform:

Memo to Democratic legislators: The people there now are relative friendlies.  They’re extending olive branches, which you should probably stop setting on fire. You’re just giving Bushie dead-enders an excuse to paint this as “civil liberties hippies vs. the Brave Americans Fighting Terror.”

I watched John Conyers spend a good chunk of Tuesday’s hearing on the House side being a condescending dick to Todd Hinnen, one of the fiercest critics of Bush-era detention and interrogation policies. This just leaves smarmtastic bottom-feeders like Jim Sensenbrenner and Jeff Sessions to cast themselves as solicitous Grima Wormtongues by contrast.

It makes for an awesome YouTube clip on Firedoglake, right up until the part where you fucking lose.

John Dickerson makes it:

Though the politics of the complaint are irresistible, it doesn't make much sense. Just because lawmakers read legislation doesn't mean they understand it. The reverse is also true: Just because they understand it doesn't mean they've read it. Drafting and reading legislative language is an art form. Staffers who know how to read it and write it are hired to translate the language. They get down in the weeds so the legislators can stay focused on the big principles.

Eric Posner agrees. Jonathan Adler differs.

A reader writes:

I think Larison misses a big point when he writes:

“Egypt and Jordan can remain at peace with Israel despite the profound unpopularity of this arrangement because the governments are unaccountable and authoritarian. Surely the elections in Gaza should tell us that democratization allows people with deep grievances to vent them by empowering the most extreme and radical elements. This has proved to be ruinous for people in Gaza and far from what Israel wants. Democratization and regional stability are incompatible. If you desire one, you cannot have the other.”

People in Egypt and Jordan are able to be as virulently anti-Israel as they are precisely BECAUSE they have no power to affect policy.

If a popularly elected Jordanian government took actions (economic or military) against Israel and then suffered the retaliation, I wager many people would change their minds about the proper foreign policy with regards to Israel. But right now the Arab street doesn’t suffer any consequences for their opinions, so Arab citizens are free to advocate for ideologically pure positions calling for the extinction of Israel. If Middle Eastern autocracies gave their people control of government policy, you might see an initial upsurge of violence. But in the long run democratization would have a significant moderating effect on popular opinion — and if popular opinion moderated so could government policy, which despite authoritarian rule is constrained from being too pro-Israel by the threat of protests and riots.

Tom Ricks reads it:

In the decade or so that I've been keeping an eye on Gen. David Petraeus, I've noticed that the more worried he gets, the more boring his public pronouncements become. If I'm right, his mind-numbing appearance yesterday at a Marine Corps conference on counterinsurgency is a leading indicator that he is profoundly worried. One reporter told me after the event that she fell asleep during it. I am guessing Petraeus is fretting primarily about President Obama's public dithering on Afghanistan strategy, but perhaps also about some weird vibes inside the U.S. official establishment in Baghdad.

We agree that this is an excruciating choice – but he makes the case for doubling down with a full-scale counter-insurgency campaign. It's a compelling piece. The one hole in his argument? How do you fight an insurgency on behalf of a government that is that corrupt and that unpopular and elected through fraud? Then this syndrome:

When you interview people who know little about Afghanistan, they describe an anarchic place that is the graveyard of empires. When you interview people who live there or are experts, they think those stereotypes are rubbish. They usually take a hardened but guardedly optimistic view.

But couldn't that be because the latter are more invested in the place and more likely to wear rose-colored glasses? No one wants to concede failure when they have been invested in success. The job of a political leader is to take the long, cold view of matters. Nonetheless, David's column is well worth reading and pondering.

A reader writes:

Today I sat in my company's annual Benefit Open Enrollment Review where representatives from Human Resources explained the changes that would occur in 2010. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone but the employees will be paying more in premiums and deductibles. Our deductibles have not increased in 10 years so this is a hard pill to swallow.  One slide set forth all the reasons that our health care costs were increasing.  Listed among the reasons for the rising costs

was the impact caused by the uninsured and the under insured.  

One employee raised his hand and said, "if I'm doing the math right, the employee's costs are increasing 20%". Needless to say, the mood in the conference room was just short of hostile. I looked to a coworker sitting next to me and said, if this can't convince people of the need for the public option I don't know what will. October is the month of Open Enrollment for many corporations across the country.  My company cannot be the only one that is passing through the rising costs to its employees next year. I wonder what the impact of these meetings will be in the coming months.

A reader writes:

Of course they are screaming 'socialism'. They've been doing that since the 50s at least. They're not talking about economic redistribution of wealth – they never have been. They've been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time. They called MLK a communist because he wanted blacks to have the same rights as whites, and to them that was a redistribution of the privilege that whites had 'earned'.

In their view, white, Christian, heterosexuals have earned something that gays, non-Christians, and non-heteros have failed to work hard enough at. It's been a class war from the outset, just not one based around income or net worth – mostly because the whites in the south were economically pretty bad off and blacks in the north were catching up to them.

This picture shows they were pushing the same buttons half a century ago that they are today. Anti-christ, communism – it's all the same as it is today and is well known code. It's why the protesters will decry socialism today but wouldn't have under Bush – it's all tied to race and other social objectives and has nothing really to do with taxation, deficits, and big government. You probably missed it when you came to the US, but this is pretty old game – particularly to guys like Carter that grew up around it.

It's striking to me that the polling reveals quite high support among Americans for some kind of government-run back-up, if private insurance is unaffordable. Here's the NYT poll showing 65 percent support for several months and only 26 percent opposition. The WSJ poll, while framing the issue more negatively, also finds a plurality of support and only a minority firmly opposed.

I should come off the fence here.

It seems to me that a public option which allows the government to use its huge buying power to achieve cost cuts that no private company could manage would be a Trojan horse. But a government option forbidden to use such leverage, but allowed to have an edge from administrative and overhead savings, is a useful compromise. It's one more incentive for cost control. The question is: what kind of public option? And what are the limits of its structural advantages?

Obama has pledged that any public option would be of the kind I could support. So why am I not yet reassured entirely?

Bill Bennett goes off on Latimer:

The lowest circle of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal and the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies. Maybe Scott McClellan will chew on this guy’s leg in the after life. So creepy and so disgusting.

Oh the visuals! Friedersdorf tackles the substance of Bennett's point:

[I]nsofar as an administration must work as a team toward common ends, its employees should be loyal so long as they are working under the president. But once their job ends — and especially once the president leaves office — maintaining loyalty for its own sake does nothing for the country, whereas forthrightly giving a behind-the-scenes account serves two ends: 1) it affords history a fuller picture of a president’s tenure; 2) it reveals mistakes and shortcomings that can be avoided by future administrations that learn from the past. Why would anyone value the loyalty that is supposedly owed a former boss over those significant public goods?