Month: July 2010

by Patrick Appel

Larison compares Palin's 2012 run to Giuliani's doomed 2008 campaign:

You will immediately object that Giuliani and Palin are completely different, and in most respects that’s true. Regardless, in one of the most important respects they are very much alike: pundits and journalists took Giuliani seriously as a candidate for the Republican nomination when there was absolutely no reason to do so, and now more than a few of them are doing the same thing with Palin. If Giuliani’s candidacy wasn’t viable because of his social liberalism and his, er, colorful personal life, Palin’s won’t be viable because she will be seen as unprepared, out of her depth and inexperienced, which are all of the things that Republicans have said about Obama for years and will want to use to attack him again in 2012.

I'm basically where Jonathan Bernstein is on the Palin question, but much could change between now and 2012. It's easy to see how this next cycle could provide an opening for a dark horse candidate. The GOP is likely to do very well with governorships in 2010. And if we continue to stumble unevenly towards recovery, this new crop of politicians can take credit for the upturn without being tainted by the downturn. The only question is whether a politician who won in 2010 would have enough time to stage a presidential run.

by Chris Bodenner

Susan Gardner insists that supporters of raising the retirement age are focused on the wrong statistics:

The fact is, men are living less than three years longer, women about five. Yes, there are more people living longer because they didn't die at age 3 of whooping cough or polio, but the life expectancy for an individual has not been extended very much at all once age 65 is reached. Disturbingly, pushing the retirement age out five years as is currently proposed actually means an individual male retiree today is at risk of being cheated of two years more retirement than our supposedly drastically shorter-lived forebears received more than half a century ago.

Ezra Klein continues with the class angle by posting a chart that Drum finds "pretty astonishing":

It shows that since 1972 the life expectancy of men with low incomes has increased by two years while life expectancy for men with high incomes has increased by more than six years. … Obviously, increasing the retirement age to, say, 70, is a much bigger deal for someone likely to live to 79 than it is for someone likely to live to 85. In my book, this is yet another reason not to try to balance Social Security's books by changing the retirement age dramatically.

And we probably don't have to. There are plenty of other ways we could do it instead.

And if we do do it, this chart suggests a couple of things: (a) the change should be modest (maybe going from 67 to 68) and (b) it should be accompanied by an explicit acknowledgement that disability retirements will be routinely available at the same age as now to workers who perform body-draining physical labor.

A Drum reader makes a shrewd point and ties together another thread followed by the Dish:

The [chart's] data is a very strong argument for removing the ceiling on Social Security payments — that is, collecting Social Security on 100% of wages, no matter how high (while not adjusting benefits). That's because the Social Security system, now, assumes that life expectancy is the same for low-income and high-income workers, while in fact low-income workers collect benefits for far fewer years. So higher-income workers *should* pay more than they do today.

by Chris Bodenner

In three words:

(Hat tip: TDW)

by David Frum

Barry Rubin debunks the President's insulting explanation of Israeli mistrust of him. 

Israelis, after all, have dealt with two famous Husseins: King Hussein of Jordan and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. The former was a good friend, the most popular Arab leader in Israeli history. (Note 1)

So one can be a good Hussein or a bad Hussein. Of course the issue with this third Hussein is his policies. And that's why I find his saying this thing far more upsetting.

I'd respect Obama more, and perhaps trust him a little more, if he had said something like this:

We've had our differences and we don't see everything the same way. But we are so fundamentally on the same side that our friendship and alliance will overcome these smaller issues. And, of course, we know that our mutual enemies are out to destroy us and favor totalitarian dictatorship rather than democracy.

By denying there were ever some problems and underplaying the reality of what I'll call for brevity's sake the "bad guys", Obama shows an ability to rewrite history in his own mind and forget what has happened. This may signal that in six months he will forget all of Israel's cooperation and concessions, which is precisely what happened last time, between October 2009 and March 2010.

by Patrick Appel

Conor Friedersdorf calls this article by Mariah Blake on the medical industry "the most important story of the year." It's about Thomas Shaw, a man who invented a syringe that dramatically cuts down on infections. The devices only cost a few pennies more but they haven't been adopted. The story is about how laws governing Group Purchasing Organizations are disrupting the implementation of innovations such as Shaw's:

For Shaw this unsolvable riddle has become a kind of obsession. He turns it over and over in his head like an engineering problem, as if the fix might come to him if he just looks at it from enough different angles. Perhaps the part he finds most perplexing is that it was largely government grants that paid for him to develop his retractable syringe. “I’ve spent twenty years fighting to return my obligation to the American taxpayer and to a government that turns its head from its responsibility to protect the free market,” he says. “The taxpayers got screwed out of the technology they paid for.”

by Dave Weigel

Well, no, that headline is a joke. Adam Serwer, who's worked like the devil to debunk theories about why the Department of Justice isn't gunning for the New Black Panther Party, makes an important find:

[T]he case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division.

Conservative activist and former Voting Section Attorney J. Christian Adams identified United States Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli as the person who ordered the case dismissed, but he wasn't confirmed until March, three months after the case was downgraded. Adams also said that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes declared, “Never bring another lawsuit against a black or other national minority, apparently no matter what they do.” But according to the Raben Group, a progressive PR firm Fernades worked for prior to the Justice Department, she didn't leave her job with them until June 22, 2009, more than six months after the criminal case against the NBPP members was dropped. Even if she did say that — and none of my sources in the Voting Section ever heard her say anything of the sort — it wouldn't have had any bearing on the NBPP case, because she wasn't there when it was dismissed.

The conservative narrative goes like this: Eric Holder's DOJ got into office and skunked a successful case against the racist fringe New Black Panther Party because it doesn't want to defend white voting rights. (If anyone has a bunch of examples of white voters being repressed in the Obama era, please, send 'em my way.) In several segments about the case, Glenn Beck has tied the Panthers to Bill Ayers, Charles Ogletree, and Van Jones as the latest "militant group" pulling the strings on Obama policies. A simple issue — whether the Panthers should be prosecuted further for briefly showing off their nightsticks and glowering at voters outside of a mostly-black Philadelphia polling place — has been conflated into a catch-all storyline that really makes no sense.

by David Frum

Today, July 12, is not only Orange Day, but also the birthday of my paternal grandfather Saul Frum. Born in the Czarist empire in 1904, he migrated to Canada with his wife, my grandmother, in 1930. My father was born the next year. That lucky bit of timing is the reason I am typing at this computer today: Those in his family who remained behind in Europe were all murdered, with only one survivor. 

I think of my grandfather often, more and more as I near the age when I knew him. My own son is named for him. Saul was a man of little formal education, but considerable acquired culture. He would have greatly enjoyed the new Jewish Review of Books, a very exciting new magazine that has just published its second issue. An ardent Zionist (he died in Israel in 1978), he would I think have especially liked the contribution by Walter Russell Mead reviewing a study of Christian Zionism. 

[T]he establishment of the state of Israel was not just a Jewish project. Jews did the heavy lifting: the settlement of Palestine, defense of the Jewish community, and the development of national institutions were Jewish achievements. But the contribution of the Anglo-Protestant world to the rise of the Jewish state was not limited to occasional interventions by heavily lobbied political leaders. British and American Protestant support was more than an ace in the hole that Zionists were able to deploy at key moments like the Balfour Declaration or Truman's recognition of Israeli independence. …

All of this needs to be remembered. Neglect of the crucial and strategic contribution of gentiles to the success of the Zionist movement can lead to an impoverished and unrealistic understanding of Israel's history. It contributes to the view today that support for Israel by the United States reflects the occult power of Jews in American society. When a historical idea is false, and when it contributes to anti-Semitic ideas around the world, it is time for a new look at an old story.

by Chris Bodenner

It's really not fair to other advertisers to have Japan compete in this category:

by David Frum

Australia's Labor government acts to limit spending of welfare benefits on alcohol and drugs. (h/t Tim Montgomerie)

by Chris Bodenner

The latest FEC filings for SarahPAC – ostensibly to support conservative candidates – show a politician serious about building a campaign of her own. Kenneth Vogel parses the huge haul:

[P]erhaps most indicative of a more traditional, robust political operation were the $330,000 in fundraising costs reflected in the report, including $154,000 to HSP Direct, a direct-mail vendor that put together SarahPAC’s first direct-mail campaign. Palin had previously used primarily online fundraising techniques, which tend to have lower overhead but cannot necessarily equal the return rate of a well-targeted but more expensive traditional direct-mail campaign.

Reid Wilson digs deeper:

What's most notable is the number of small contributors Palin has attracted. More than 3/4 of her donations are listed as unitemized, meaning the individuals who wrote checks sent in less than $200. Much of Pres. Obama's fundraising success in '08 came from these small-dollar donors, meaning Palin has a grassroots folllowing — one she's started to build significantly earlier than Obama did.

Jay Newton-Small connects the dots of her of burgeoning campaign and notes that it "flies in the face of the MSM group think inside the Beltway." Ben Smith begins to come around:

This is a big political story, and one that has me rethinking Palin's future a bit