Month: December 2010

by Patrick Appel

Jim Burroway refuses to give Obama too much credit on DADT repeal. And he cautions service members against coming out just yet:

If certification were sent to Congress tomorrow, DADT cannot be officially repealed until the end of February. And we know that certification won’t come tomorrow. In fact, we have no idea when it will occur because the new law does not give a timetable. That uncertainty is leading to widespread speculation of how long repeal will actually take. Some say six months; others a year or even longer … The hard work of convincing Congress to repeal the law is over. For that we can celebrate. But now we must roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of pushing the White House and the Defense Department to follow through with repeal.

(Image: Revel&Riot)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Roger Ebert offers his picks.

The Social Network tops his list. If you missed it, Zadie Smith's review is a must read.

by Patrick Appel

Ezra Klein calls the new Ryan-Rivlin Medicare reform plan a cousin to Obamacare:

Under the Ryan-Rivlin plan, the current Medicare program is completely dissolved and replaced by a new Medicare program that "would provide a payment – based on what the average annual per-capita expenditure is in 2021 – to purchase health insurance." You'd get the health insurance from a "Medicare Exchange", and "health plans which choose to participate in the Medicare Exchange must agree to offer insurance to all Medicare beneficiaries, thereby preventing cherry picking and ensuring that Medicare’s sickest and highest cost beneficiaries receive coverage."

Sound familiar?

Yglesias offers an unlikley compromise:

If we agree that Paul Ryan’s proposals for Medicare more-or-less amount to turning it into ObamaCare, then the stage is set for a potential bargain. That would be—Republicans stop trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and in turn Democrats agree to phase Medicare out on Ryan’s schedule. You can further sweeten the deal by throwing in a public option and the replacement of ACA’s Medicare tax hikes with something more regressive.

This is basically “everyone takes a shot of poison” and I don’t expect it to happen, but it would better-align policy with the things people claim to care about. 

 

Hanoi, Vietnam, 10.28 am

by Conor Friedersdorf

E.J. Dionne's most recent column argues that President Obama needs to do a better job cementing a particular sort of alliance with business:

Obama doesn't need to coddle CEOs so they will say warm things about him at parties in the Hamptons. He should figure out which parts of the private sector share an interest in reducing the dreadful inequalities that have metastasized over nearly four decades and in creating an economy that produces well-paying jobs.

Here is the conclusion of the piece:

Anyone who speaks of reviving American manufacturing confronts critics who hear echoes of the supposedly discredited "industrial policy" arguments from the early 1980s. But Carl Pope, the visionary who led the Sierra Club for many years, notes that through trade agreements and other policies, our government already favors certain industries that have done very well as a result: banking and finance, big agriculture, pharmaceutical companies and Hollywood. One might add oil and gas, and defense.

Government policies, no matter how often we use the words "free enterprise," through design or inadvertence, inevitably affect the private economy. Why not choose policies that specifically encourage sectors that create good jobs for Americans? Why not ally with companies and CEOs whose interests lie in doing just that?

There are two answers. The first is that there is no reliable way for a central planner to forecast what sectors are going to create "good jobs" a decade or two hence. The second is that even if that information could be wrung out of current economic data, any Congress that attempted to pass industry-favoring legislation would wind up giving breaks to politically connected sectors, or else industries that were popular with constituents, while the folks capable of producing the "good jobs" if only they had federal help would continue to lack it. (And even if you could direct money to the right sector, how would you prevent the wrong firms within it from gaming the system?)

Is Dionne possibly unaware of this? We're a country that subsidizes ethanol, socializes Wall Street losses, and passes landmark health care legislation without even discussing the indefensible goings on in the medical device industry.

What makes Dionne think we're capable of passing far-sighted industrial policy that better advantages a class of people who exert less influence than average on our political process? I am forever puzzled by commentators who don't acknowledge the most basic constraints of the real world when suggesting what the president ought to do.

by Patrick Appel

Carolyn Johnson reports on the latest research:

Instead of seeing groups as nameless and faceless affiliations that swallow up an individual’s identity, the new work on collective behavior suggests that in company lies opportunity. The field of intelligence testing has long been controversial, in part because of concerns that such scores were crude and biased, pigeon-holing people as stupid or smart. In contrast, collective intelligence offers a new spectrum of possibilities. Instead of pronouncing a person’s intellectual engine good or bad, the research suggests that group intelligence is highly malleable and that concrete steps — such as mixing newcomers into an established team or not allowing a single leader to dominate — could fundamentally alter the group’s intelligence.

by Patrick Appel

Robert Mackey rounds up video of the crackdown while Max Fisher links to commentary. Global Voices does some translating:

My husband, his brother and I carried out a woman covered in blood, [she had a head injury], there were two ambulances behind the government building […] – they were filled with people (6-8 injured people in each one), mainly women with head injuries […]. They were breaking people into groups and chasing them into “pockets” – and there, they were throwing them on the ground and beating them. They were even beating underage girls – […] beating them with their feet and sticks, and happily laughing as they did it. […]

The feeling is that there's a junta and fascism in the country.

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr is eyeing a promising effort at sentencing reform:

Indiana’s prison population has spiked in recent years, and state officials realized that they were going to have to spend about $1 billion in new prisons over the next 7 years to fit all the prisoners in the state prison system. In response, Governor Daniels announced a plan to study the State’s sentencing laws, together with two non-profit groups, the Pew Center on the States and the Council of State Governments Justice Center, to see if the state’s criminal sentences had become too punitive. The groups published their report, which found that the drug laws had become too draconian and “one size fits all,” and that there wasn’t enough support for susbtance abuse treatment. The report recommended less punitive and more nuanced sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses as well as better substance abuse counseling as a way to lessen the prison population and avoid having to build new prisons. Last week, Daniels endorsed the report. Now the attention will turn to translating the report’s recommendations to statutory language, and Daniels will then have to get those recommendations through the state legislature.

I highly doubt any of this does anything for Daniels’ chances of getting the GOP nomination, and for that matter it’s still unclear if Daniels has any interest in running for President. But given how fears of seeming “soft on crime” so dominate criminal justice policy, it is a breath of fresh air to see a state Governor trying to make sure that sentences are appropriate, fair, and cost-justified rather than just high.

All sorts of dysfunctional policies have a major fiscal component. Examples: The War on Drugs, Iraq, ethanol subsidies, defined benefit public employee pensions, and the embargo against Cuba. Is it possible that reform might come about more easily if politicians who fear addressing these issues turn them into arguments about spending?

Surely that is part of Mitch Daniel's political calculus. It is far more helpful for a GOP aspirant to be seen as a rock solid deficit hawk than to guard against the unlikely possibility that his next race will turn on who is "soft-on-crime." Perhaps one day, the profligate spending necessary to finance the War On Drugs will damage office-seekers more than being attacked as "soft on drugs" for advocating an end to prohibition.

by Conor Friedersdorf

"So what to make of this recent spate of conservative crying?  It should stop.  Immediately.  A crying conservative is a vulnerable conservative.  Both Bushes were inclined to tear up and I have little doubt it was a sign they were soft on spending," – John Vecchione

by Patrick Appel

That's the logic of the Palin-wing of the GOP when it comes to START. A group called The National Republican Trust PAC has promised "to defeat any Republican senator who votes to ratify the New START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia in the lame-duck session of Congress." Larison sighs:

Launching a single-issue primary challenge over an arms control treaty that 70-80% of Americans support is a stunning waste of time and resources. The donors to this PAC must be pleased to know that their money is going to be thrown away for no reason.

And here's a little bit from Larison's brilliant rebuttal to Palin's anti-START op-ed:

Despite the best efforts of some hawkish interventionists to pretend that arms control is a relic of the past and irrelevant to today’s problems, they are the ones most likely to portray Russia as an existing or emerging threat to its neighbors. They should be the ones most eager to limit and constrain Russia through treaty obligations. Even if they don’t believe that Russia will comply with the treaty, it is hawks who should want to impose obligations and limits on Russia’s arsenal. Instead, it is the most anti-Russian and hawkish figures who are effectively enabling Russian power. What is remarkable about this is that these are the same people who could not stop haranguing the administration for betraying Poland and the Czech Republic when there was no betrayal, and they are the ones who remain convinced that it is the administration that is giving in to Russian demands when Russia has obtained virtually nothing tangible from the “reset.” Now that they are presented with an opportunity to side with European allies in support of greater U.S. and European security, they have opted instead for a rejectionist position that would keep the U.S. largely blind to Russian activities, increase uncertainty about Russia’s arsenal, and add to allied anxieties about potential Russian threats. 

Further destruction of Republican talking points here. Adam Serwer's bottom line: 

[E]ither the GOP senators opposed to START know something the rest of the country doesn't, and the entire U.S. military and bipartisan foreign policy apparatus is conspiring to sell U.S. national security out to Russia, or Republicans in the Senate have reached a new low in their efforts to humiliate the president.