Month: June 2011

Bjorn Lomborg reiterates his somewhat controversial opinion on the impending disaster:

Although Westerners were once reliant on whale oil for lighting, we never actually ran out of whales. Why? High demand and rising prices for whale oil spurred a search for and investment in the 19th-century version of alternative energy. First, kerosene from petroleum replaced whale oil. We didn’t run out of kerosene, either: electricity supplanted it because it was a superior way to light our planet. For generations, we have consistently underestimated our capacity for innovation.

… We forget too easily that innovation and ingenuity have solved most major problems in the past. Living sustainably means learning the lessons from history. And chief among those is that the best legacy we can leave our descendants is to ensure that they are prosperous enough to respond resiliently to the unknown challenges ahead.

I tend to think that this crisis will resolve itself the way Bjorn envisages. The question is: can it happen soon enough? And can we nudge non-carbon energy along by raising taxes on gasoline and carbon? In a sane world, we'd be adding a quarter to the gas tax every quarter from now on … and using all of it to pay for the cost of defense. That might pit one of the strongest forces in American society – the devotion to cheap gasoline – against one of its most draining  burdens, the Pentagon and its many wars.

(Image of monthly temperature increases from 1960 to 2090 in the San Francisco area. California residents can customize their own maps of climate change at Cal-Adapt.org)

"I’m tired of Republican, Democrat politics; I’m tired of blowhard radio people, blowhard television people, blowhard newspapers. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background, I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this," – New York senator Roy J. McDonald, becoming the second Republican in the GOP-controlled senate this week to switch support in favor of marriage equality. More on this week's remarkable turn of events here.

Michael Tomasky claims that this "sure isn't the Republican Party of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld." Greg Scoblete pours cold water on the new meme:

[V]ague declarations on the campaign trail have no meaningful relation to how a candidate would govern if he or she were elected. … The fact of the matter is that any significant "shift" in GOP foreign policy won't happen at the level of presidential hopefuls angling for the limelight. It will occur when the bureaucrats and policy-makers that would staff a future Republican administration turn meaningfully from the doctrines and orthodoxies that have shaped "Republican" foreign policy in the past.

But this is a start. Sanity bubbles up from below. Even Palin has fired lost her resident neo-con fanatic, Michael Goldfarb.

And you simply cannot politically argue for massive cuts in domestic entitlements if you leave the entire Cold War military-industrial complex in place. At some point, something has got to give. And, to my mind, the GOP is oddly our best hope. When even Obama, a president who would never have been elected if he had not opposed a rash intervention, becomes a president who has launched two new wars on his watch, you see the limits of Democratic power. They are too scared to cut defense in any serious way. They have to keep swinging their military dick to prove that national security is safe with them. Only a constitutionally conservative GOP can bring the military to heel.

A small sign of a return to conservatism: in a showdown between Tom Coburn and Grover Norquist, Coburn largely won. Ending tax breaks for business is critical for any chance of raising revenue and getting a bipartisan deal on the budget. Coburn just helped move that along.

“Given the mission you have ordered to the U.S. Armed Forces with respect to Libya and the text of the War Powers Resolution, the House is left to conclude that you have made one of two determinations: either you have concluded the War Powers Resolution does not apply to the mission in Libya, or you have determined the War Powers Resolution is contrary to the Constitution,” – John Boehner, finally discovering the Constitution.

Jonathan Allen rightly notes Boehner's volte-face from his position even under the Clinton administration. But I'd argue that the years since Kosovo have shown a desperate need for the Congress to regain control over the vital issue of war and peace. The Founders put it there for a reason. And yet we have turned the president into an emperor who can launch wars at a moment's notice and face little Congressional bowback.

And this is not an abstract question any more. Obama is now engaged in two illegal wars – in Libya and in Yemen.

There was no Congressional debate or vote on these wars – and one is being waged by the CIA with unmanned drones. I think we have learned a little about what happens when you give the CIA carte blanche to run a war with no accountability except to a president who has a vested interest in covering up errors.

And Boehner is correct that Obama owes us an explanation of his views on the power of the presidency. Can he declare war at will? Are these wars not-wars under his definition? What then qualifies as a war for Obama?

I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that many supported Obama to end wars – not to extend one, try not to quit another too quickly, and add two more for good measure. And Obama is a sophisticated and learned Constitutionalist. He must have thought about this question. What is his answer?

Yes, we've only been at war there for a decade and the GOP front-runner cannot even say "Afghans." But let me say I found his comments as a whole refreshing and a sign that the GOP may be finally shucking off some of its more deranged ambitions for a second American century. Obama's surge in Afghanistan is second only to his debacle in Libya in foreign policy choices (although Netanyahu's humiliation of the president is not far behind either). But you can tell this is a real shift from a conservative perspective when the permanent war enthusiasts at AEI are having a cow:

“I’d thought of Romney as a mainstream Republican – supporting American strength and American leadership, but this doesn’t reflect that,” she said. “Romney has proven himself a little bit of a weathervane and I guess he senses that positioning himself in this place is good for his campaign — attempting to appease Ron Paul’s constituents without actually being Ron Paul. You can’t really triangulate on these issues. Either you think we’re fighting a war we need to win or you think we ought to bring all the troops home, but he said it all there.”

There is no path between total war and total retreat? Of course there is. And the more important point, as Romney seems to realize, is that a) this is unaffordable when have a massive late-imperial debt like the US has, b) unconscionable when we are cutting healthcare for the elderly in order to fight a war for a country that is itself half-hearted in its commitment and a government that is corrupt to its core, and c) what on earth would victory look like anyway?

There is a path to restoring American vitality. It involves retrenchment abroad, entitlement reform at home, and a new immigration policy that gives every foreign graduate a green card, and shifts the emphasis from family connections to skills. If Romney can articulate that, he'll do well.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Recently the defense secretary complained about the poor military depth of the European allies. Then he went on to insist that the US would maintain its military hegemony on every part of the world stage! Sam Roogeven gently points out the mixed message:

Why would European NATO members feel under any pressure to take on a bigger role when the US seems so keen to do the job itself, and when they know the US will step in whenever Europe is caught short?

To be fair, the Americans have in some ways made good on their threats that they would not carry the NATO burden alone — US troop numbers in Europe have plummeted since the end of the Cold War. But it's a measure of how secure European NATO members feel that this precipitous decline in the US military commitment to the continent has done nothing to change their defence spending habits. In fact the US is alone among NATO members in not substantially cutting its defence spending since the Soviet collapse.

Gates complains that European NATO members can barely sustain their modest operations in Afghanistan and Libya, and he reads this as a lack of will. But maybe European governments simply see the threat differently. They simply don't regard these two operations as being important enough to their security to really do anything about them, beyond their current meager efforts.

John McWhorter uses the Tracy Morgan incident to confront "the acrid brand of homophobia [that] lies “just underneath” in too many of America’s black men":

CNN’s Don Lemon, who came out last month, pretty neatly nailed the nature of the thing. The problem is partly rooted in the strong role of conservative Christianity in black culture, and then there is a highly traditional conception of black manhood, very John Wayne. Talk about black people’s history: Neither of these things is exactly surprising among a people with a history in subjugation. Both are useful to an urgent brand of community strength. …

It’s really pretty simple: If America is supposed to do a month of penance every time a white person uses the N-word—and even when just referring to it, a la Dr. Laura last year—then it’s time for black people to start buttoning up on “faggot” and other expressions of unenlightened bigotry against gay people. It’s not funny. It’s not overblown—say “get over it” and remember that if T.R. Knight had called Isaiah Washington a nigger, Knight would never have worked again.

What worries me about the rant – unlike Michael Richards' – is that Morgan spoke of knifing his own son to death if he told him he was gay in an effeminate way. Endorsing violence against gay children is beyond a bad joke. It happens too often to be mocked. And this is not the first time he has gone on a tear about God not "making mistakes", i.e. gays.

Pushing his public apology to the limit, Tracy Morgan now comes out strong for marriage equality and plans to campaign against Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay" bill. There's almost a kabuki dance with these things now, isn't there? Well, at least he didn't go into rehab.

Among other objections, Jacob Sullum complains that sex offender registries treat all sex crimes equally:

A man who was convicted of statutory rape when he was 16 for having consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend told Human Rights Watch: “We were in love. And now we are married. So it’s like I am on the registry for having premarital sex. Does having premarital sex make me a danger to society? My wife doesn’t think so.”

The Economist created a useful interactive graph displaying state-level economic, political, and demographic data. The above screenshot shows GDP numbers by state:

In 2010, the Northeast and Midwest enjoyed relatively strong performances. New York and Massachusetts grew by 5.1% and 4.2%, respectively. The Southeast and the West fared worse. Florida's economy grew just 1.4%, and Nevada's continued to shrink.