Month: October 2009

John Kerry – fresh from his trip to Afghanistan and flush from his success with Karzai – comes down between the counterinsurgency of McChrystal and the counterterrorism of Biden:

… although he leaned far closer to McChrystal than to Biden. Kerry dismissed a “narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban” as flirting with the risk of “civil war,” and doubted that such a counterterrorism mission could accomplish its objectives without a robust military presence to collect intelligence in support of counterterrorism operations. “For now, we need the boots on the ground to get the information and protect our interests,” he said.

Bolstered by his credibility in delivering the biggest tangible diplomatic success for the Obama administration on Afghanistan to date, Kerry endorsed a counterinsurgency strategy in the Pashtun areas of “the southern and eastern theaters of Afghanistan,” and limited to “major population centers,” saying “we cannot and should not undertake a manpower intensive counterinsurgency operation on a national scale.” He praised McChrystal as “understand[ing] the necessity of conducting a smart counterinsurgency in a limited geographic area,” but said McChrystal’s current plan “reaches too far, too fast.”

Mark Moyar, a scholar at the Marine Corps University who focuses on counterinsurgency, said narrowing U.S. focus on south and east Afghanistan “makes a certain amount of sense,” as the Taliban-centered insurgency is based in that region. But it runs the risk of allowing insurgents to disperse and set up shop unchallenged elsewhere in the country. “There is a danger, as there has been in a number of other counterinsurgencies, to focus on area, make it a high priority, but [insurgents] eventually figure it out and go somewhere else,” said Moyar, author of a new book about counterinsurgency, “A Question of Command.” “Already, [the insurgency is] starting to get stronger in the north and west” of Afghanistan.

One has to wonder if Oprah will indeed ask Sarah Palin about the bizarre stories she has told about her fifth pregnancy. I mean: why not ask her to recount that astonishing intercontinental, multiple day labor experience across several time zones and past nearby children's hospitals? Why not ask her if Levi was telling the truth when he claimed that Sarah kept nagging him to allow Tripp to be adopted by his nearly-mother-in-law?

My guess is that Oprah will punt, like everyone else. But we don't know what's in Lynn Vincent's "book" yet, do we?

David Sirota asks why it is socially acceptable for Lance Armstrong to hawk alcohol, which the International Journal of Cancer estimates causes "roughly one in 30 of the world's cancer cases":

[L]ess than a year after Phelps was crucified for merely smoking weed in private, few noticed or protested the planet's most famous cancer survivor becoming the public face of a possible carcinogen. "Apparently, it’s perfectly acceptable for a world-class athlete to endorse a substance like alcohol that contributes to thousands of deaths each year, as well as hundreds of thousands of violent crimes and injuries," says Mason Tvert, a co-author of the new book "Marijuana Is Safer." "Yet a world-class athlete like Michael Phelps is ridiculed, punished and forced to apologize for marijuana, the use of which contributes to zero deaths, and has never been linked to violent or reckless behavior. Why the double standard?"

I have a very hard time understanding how someone as high up in the Obama administration as Anita Dunn could ever have any kind words for Mao. I don't think that makes her a closet commie, and I'm not joining Glenn Beck's new McCarthyism, but it does make her a clueless, morally bankrupt lefty – the kind who wears a Guevara t-shirt or a CCCP ball-cap and expects to be taken seriously. Of course, the cluelessness is on both sides, as Scott Horton reminds us in this dispatch from Chon Tash in the Kyrgyz Republic:

The crimes of the old regime were on exhibition to those swearing an oath to uphold the new order. In the museum at the site the possessions of many of the victims were displayed with some biographical details. Documents from the archives of the NKVD/KGB showed the trappings of legal formalism that accompanied the brutal deeds, every murder judicially authorized with a sentence stamped and sealed. The execution of the sentence was scrupulously documented. And on one wall was a simple display that spoke powerfully: a portrait of Stalin, and below it a skull, resting on stones taken from the pit.

In America today, the name and image of Stalin are invoked heavily by fringe critics of Barack Obama.

The critics disagree with his policies on health care and see in it the basis for increasing power of the state. The role the state will play in the healthcare system is a legitimate political issue on which well-informed citizens can have different views. But the comparison to Stalin makes clear that these critics really have no inkling of who Joseph Stalin was, what he did, and why his name lives in special infamy at hallowed spots like the pit at Chon Tash. This frivolous use of his name and image cheapens our nation’s political dialogue, and it is also a mark of disrespect to his victims. And it points to the fundamental crisis of which Aitmatov wrote so powerfully: the failure to know the past, to be informed by it, and to distill guidance from it. The age of the mankurt, alas, has not passed.

Godwin's law has become a form of Internet code. It's worth recalling that resisting silly analogies to the evil that Hitler, Stalin and Mao perpetrated is also a moral duty – to the victims of all those monsters.

By Jessica Hagy.

Richard Posner floats the idea:

I said that the separation of commercial banking from other financial intermediation should be considered–not that it should be ordered forthwith. It would be a formidable undertaking, fiercely opposed; and the argument that separation would sacrifice significant economies of scale and scope, while unsubstantiated and rather implausible (think of Citigroup and Bank of America, whose travails seem to have been amplified rather than diminished by the scope of these banks' activities), would have to be carefully appraised.

Merely reenacting the Glass-Steagall Act (and repealing the statute that repealed it)–the New Deal statute that separated commercial from investment banking–would not avoid the complexities involved in divestiture. As explained by Robert Pozen ("Stop Pining for Glass-Steagall," Forbes, Oct. 5, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1005/opinions-glass-steagall-on-my-mind.html (visited Oct. 13, 2009)), "Even under Glass-Steagall commercial banks could invest in bonds, manage mutual funds, execute securities trades on the order of their customers and underwrite government-related securities. The main thing they couldn't do was underwrite corporate stocks and bonds…The main impact of repealing Glass-Steagall was to allow banking organizations to become more active in underwriting." So a greater rollback of financial deregulation than merely re-enacting the Glass-Steagall Act would be necessary for a clean separation of commercial banking from other financial intermediation. (Greater, but in one respect lesser, as there is no good reason to forbid commercial banks from underwriting securities issues, a central prohibition in Glass-Steagall.)

Such a rollback is conceivable, if barely…

Derek Thompson unearths a point from Bruce Bartlett's chat with Ezra Klein earlier this summer:

Suppose you had a 10 percent VAT and we said we weren't going to collect it for the next 10 months. People would buy like crazy. They'd buy toilet paper, they'd buy anything they could get their hands on that they knew they'd need in the future. We're depriving ourselves of a great stimulant tool by ignoring this.

Erik Voeten is delighted that researchers have picked up on the political implications of the sport:

My favorite example is a working paper by Edward Miguel, Sebastián Saiegh and Shanker Satyanath that uses evidence from professional soccer (football) matches to evaluate whether exposure to civil wars increases the propensity of young men to behave violently. They find that players from countries that have had more exposure to civil wars are much more likely to get yellow and red cards (cautions) than are players from countries that have had little or no recent exposure to civil wars. The findings are substantively strong and robust to a host of controls. The evidence comes from the main European football leagues, which are very cosmopolitan. This strikes me as an example of research that is both clever and important.

David Kotok worries:

There are no solid models of rising gas prices that I can find which give good estimates of what happens to consumers when the unemployment rate is 10% instead of 5% and when many household balance sheets are wrecked, and when the credit mechanism is damaged.

I told you it would get worse before it gets better.