Month: May 2010

There's a reason McCain has jumped on the "dang fence" movement:

In March, Goodard led Brewer 45-36%. After signing the immigration bill into law, Brewer led Goodard by 8 — 48-40%. Now her lead is 13 points.

There’s something about her:

A reader writes:

Re: the Goldberg-Beinart interview, I could barely get by the first question:

“…Which is to say: Settlements are wrong, and various Israeli policies are discriminatory, but aren’t liberal-minded American Jews being naive when they think that the Palestinians are blameless in this morass?”

Honestly, I have never in my life heard any Jew say Palestinians are blameless, and I very much doubt Jeffrey has ever heard that either. That’s not even a strawman argument.

I used to go to an Orthodox synagogue (for proximity reasons) and stopped going after Yom Kippur ceremonies in 2001.

The 2nd intifada had just broken out, and there we were, reciting “Kol Nidre” on the eve of Yom Kippur. I’m one of those youngish liberal (Canadian) Jews who went to Hebrew school growing up, but never fully understood all the Hebrew prayers even while I was attending school, so I decided to read the English translation to myself this time around. Part of the Kol Nidre chant includes this:

“May all the people of Israel be forgiven, including all the strangers who live in their midst, for all the people are in fault.”

Of course, Yom Kippur itself deals with atoning for one’s sins. As is customary at this synagogue and likely many others, there was a break in prayers so the Rabbi could address the congregation. That year, there was a guest speaker from Israel’s embassy. He spoke about the Intifida and vigorously defended Israel while attacking all of its critics. He didn’t offer one word of criticism for Israel. Neither did the Rabbi. This didn’t seem to upset anybody in the congregation, even as we were supposedly gathered in a ceremony to acknowledge our faults and atone for our sins. I had enough.

I used to care about being called “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-Israel,” but then I realized that most of the people who throw out these names care more about Jews who criticize Israel “too much” than they do about the fact that Israel is on a path to become a de-facto apartheid State because of its own actions. I also used to care about being called a “bad Jew” because I don’t keep kosher and don’t go to Synagogue, but again, I realized that most of the people who say this kind of thing don’t feel a damn thing when they see Palestinians suffering because of Israeli actions. Just look at Beinart’s article. The orthodox Jews in Israel, the “good Jews,” are the ones most likely to support a pardon for the man who assassinated Rabin.

I don’t need lessons on what it means to be a Zionist, a supporter of Israel, or a good Jew from Goldberg or from AIPAC. Beinart’s article should serve as another wake-up call for some of these folks, but they tuned out a long time ago.

Rand Paul seems not to have understood that it was regulatory and safety corner cutting that allowed this BP explosion to happen and become such a nightmare. What I like about Paul – his artless honesty – is unlikely to survive the media churn.

Bruce Bartlett surveys the radar.

The financial reform bill passed the Senate last night. Daniel Indiviglio on the road ahead:

The House and Senate bills have many similarities; in fact, it's probably not a stretch to say that they are both built on the same foundational ideas. They each create a new systemic risk regulator, non-bank resolution authority, consumer watchdog, and a more aggressive regulatory framework for derivatives and securitization. But there are also some very important differences between the two bills, as the Senate bill is more aggressive in some ways, like on rating agencies and derivatives. But the House's bill contains tougher language in other sections, such as setting leverage limits and creating a truly independent consumer financial protection agency.

In the weeks to come, the two chambers will have to compromise on a final version of the bill. Then it will make its way to President Obama's desk, who will eagerly sign it into law. Given the sense of urgency among Democrats to wrap the bill up, we should see the President sign it this summer.

David Kurtz:

Historians will probably conclude that the package of reforms was surprisingly modest given the depth and severity of the 2008-09 financial crisis. A harsher historical judgment might find that the political and economic power wielded by the financial industry in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was so extensive that it could weather a near total collapse of the system without having to yield its power or privilege.

Clive Crook:

The House and Senate bills — which are a lot alike, fortunately — both  leave the system at least as complicated as it is at the moment. That was a big part of the problem before the crisis, and if anything it has been made worse. (The council of regulators is a weak solution.) But simplification never seemed to be on the agenda at any stage. That is a shame, and something the architects will come to regret.

James Pethokoukis:

A sigh of relief is due on Wall Street. The procedural finale for the Senate’s debate on financial reform came just in time for banks. The bill got tougher as the talk dragged on. But it could have been worse. While banks’ future activities and profitability may get pinched, their core business model appears intact.

David Frum:

Some conservatives and liberals alike are complaining that the bill won’t prevent future bailouts. That’s the wrong mission. Bank bailouts are necessary and inevitable, as we learned in 1933: that’s why we have deposit insurance. What people most disliked about 2008, I’d hypothesize, is not that non-bank financial firms were “bailed out,” but that the bailees profited so handsomely from their bailout. “Bailouts” would not be a dirty word today if shareholders and executives at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, etc. had shared in the kinds of losses that were suffered at Lehmann Brothers and AIG.

The “resolution authority” invented in the finreg bill purports to authorize the feds to do just that. It doesn’t stop bailouts. It does * try * (key word) to do something better and more worthwhile: it tries to deter them by adding to their future potential painfulness to the parties who cause them.

Noam Scheiber:

[T]he upshot of financial reform will have been to make it costlier to be a big bank relative to being a small or medium-sized bank—which is to say, it has effectively taxed bigness. That’s because the legislation imposes a handful of new mandates and regulations—like oversight by a soon-to-be-established consumer financial protection agency, as well as limits on fees for debit-card transactions—from which small and medium-sized banks are exempt. Other reforms—such as a bill Congress passed last year to limit hidden credit-card fees and make statements more transparent, and new restrictions on trading derivatives—would disproportionately dent profits at megabanks. These banks tend to have far bigger credit card operations, and are the only bona fide derivatives brokers around.

The big banks typically complain that these efforts will drive them out of this or that line of business, or at least curtail their activity significantly. And there may be something to those concerns. But in a world in which we worry about megabanks doing too much rather than too little, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If only there were a bit more of it.

Ezra Klein:

Like with health-care reform or stimulus, what we have here is a major achievement and a clear step forward, but an insufficient solution to a problem that will continue to dog us. And so the question is not just what the 111th Congress did, but whether the process has educated the members who will continue onto the 112th and 113th and 114th Congresses and has persuaded them to keep paying attention to these issues and to continue building on their legislation.

Edmund Andrews:

You can argue that some of these reforms will backfire, and some probably will.    But you cannot argue that the reforms amount to little or nothing.   These are big changes.

(Image: Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on May 17, 2010 in New York, New York. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A Nature article complicates the conventional wisdom. The Economist's take away:

People who are thinking about what to do about malaria should bear in mind that the biological basis of its distribution may change in a warmer world. Those thinking about the overall danger that climate change represents should not spend their time worrying about its impact on malaria.

Bradford Plumer's two cents:

As the IPCC details in its chapter on climate and human health, malaria isn't the only disease-based problem we're likely to face in a warming world—there's malnutrition, heat-wave deaths, shifting vectors for infectious and diarrheoal diseases, and so forth. Interestingly, the effects on malaria seemed to be the one thing this IPCC chapter was "mixed" about, even though malaria turned out to get all the headlines whenever the subject of global warming and disease came up. Let's see if this new study changes that.

A reader writes:

Here's the problem with Rand Paul's statements over the Civil Rights Act.  If he were truly a pure libertarian, they'd be defensible theoretical views, as you point out.  But, as Time magazine notes:

Paul has lately said he would not leave abortion to the states, he doesn't believe in legalizing drugs like marijuana and cocaine, he'd support federal drug laws, he'd vote to support Kentucky's coal interests and he'd be tough on national security.

Paul is willing to bend the issue of pure personal freedom for drug laws, abortion, and even coal subsidies … but he thinks telling a restaurant it cannot discriminate is a bridge too far?  I still don't think he's racist, but what he chooses to be ideologically pure about certainly raises my eyebrow.

Frum last week highlighted a pretty damning piece from the WSJ:

Tea party favorite Rand Paul has rocketed to the lead ahead of Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary here on a resolute pledge to balance the federal budget and slash the size of government. But on Thursday evening, the ophthalmologist from Bowling Green said there was one thing he would not cut: Medicare physician payments. In fact, Paul — who says 50% of his patients are on Medicare — wants to end cuts to physician payments under a program now in place called the sustained growth rate, or SGR. “Physicians should be allowed to make a comfortable living,” he told a gathering of neighbors in the back yard of Chris and Linda Wakild, just behind the 10th hole of a golf course. …

He also said he plans to continue practicing ophthalmology if elected.

A map of international number ones.

Fred Kaplan peers inside the machines flying missions above Afghanistan:

What has happened, in fact, is not so much a revolution in warfare as a revolution in the U.S. Air Force. Far from fulfilling the dream of wars waged far above the crude skirmish of terrestrial battle, the age of the drones has brought back the days when the chief mission of the Air Force was to support troops on the ground.