Month: August 2011

From our bustling new Facebook page:

Reacting to Byrne Hobart, Noah Smith notices that conservative diagnoses of the recession wouldn't pass a basic Economics class:

In all of the recent recessions, faltering output has been accompanied by lower, or even negative, inflation. This means that demand shocks must have been the culprit. If "uncertainty about government policy" were really the cause of the recession, as many conservatives claim, then we would have seen prices rise – as companies grew less willing to make the stuff that people wanted, stuff would become more scarce, and people would bid up the prices (dipping into their savings to do so). I.e, we would have seen inflation. But we didn't see inflation.

So it seems that the stories that conservatives tell about the recession – "policy uncertainty," "recalculation," or even a "negative shock to financial technology" – are not true. The stories that everyone else tells about the recession – "a flight to quality," "increased demand for safe assets," etc. – look much more like what basic introductory macroeconomics would predict.

An important revelation today from the Telegraph's chief political correspondent. We now know that Tony Blair knew about and acquiesced in the war crimes of George W. Bush. But it wasn't the first time that a British prime minister was thus tested:

In the autumn of 1990, in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, British intelligence sought a special kind of permission from Downing Street. They wanted the prime minister to make it clear that they could, in defiance of international law, make use of information which they knew to have been acquired as a result of torture.

Margaret Thatcher, then in the last few weeks of her magnificent premiership, carefully considered this request. She consulted her conscience and pondered what was the right thing to do. Within a very short space of time, a clear and magisterial instruction was issued from Downing Street and dispatched around Whitehall: Mrs Thatcher wanted it known that the British state was not, in any circumstances, to make use of intelligence that might have come from victims of torture…

I am told that there were two principal reasons Margaret Thatcher was so strongly opposed to torture. The first was simply pragmatic: she understood that information extracted from terrified victims under duress could never be relied on or trusted.

But more importantly, she instinctively knew that complicity with torture was an affront to everything that Britain stands for – above all, our respect for tolerance, decency and the rule of law.

Pity Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush didn't have the same core values. There's a chance that Britain may help excavate the recent criminal past of the Bush administration. There's also a chance that incontrovertible evidence could lead to the beginning of a reckoning. If – and only if – Obama wins a second term.

It exists! But Paul McCartney is not, it appears, a member.

Dan O'Connor observes:

The ethics of physical enhancement tend to revolve around issues of fairness and justice, issues which tend in turn to be resolved by context and social constructions of what’s fair and what’s not. Thus had Captain American rather been created to be ‘Johnny America, the Olympic sprinter’, we would likely think the enhancements unethical, due to the context of athletic competition in which we tend to operate within a social construction of fairness which views such enhancements as cheating.

However, all is fair in love and war, and – faced with implacable and unambiguously evil foes (the secret science cult HYDRA is the main villain in the movie, working against everyone, including the Nazis), this kind of physical enhancement seems justified. In fact – considering how bloody dangerous it is to drop soldiers into battle, there’s an argument to be made for making the physical enhancement of military personnel a duty of the state. Consider: if we expect these young men and women to put themselves in extreme physical hardship at the behest of our political system, don’t we owe them the best possible physical advantages we can provide?

Kyle Munkittrich zooms in on whether Cap's "embuffening," to borrow O'Connor's phrase, was ethical research.

(Image via Walking Taco)

"Dow Down 500: Should Obama Resign?" – Pajamas Media headline on a Roger Simon piece. No, I'm not making this up. But it gets even better:

A CEO with such a disastrous first three years as our president has had probably would already have been called upon to resign or been pushed out by his company’s board of directors — more than likely for some time. Obama has failed in virtually every direction, foreign and domestic. His policies indeed are almost non-existent. He is completely rudderless, unless you accept the view that he is following the prescription of Cloward-Piven and has set out to destroy American capitalism from within.

In his July column in NR, John Derbyshire notes something recently written by Peggy Noonan:

The Republican establishment . . . spent the first decade of this century backing things a truly conservative party would not have dreamed of — careless wars, huge spending and, most scandalously, a dreamy and unconservative assumption that it would all work out because life is sweet and the best thing always happens.They were fools.

Funny how Noonan just walked briskly by at the time. Derb notes how Bruce Bartlett was emphatically not a fool, citing his 2006 book on Bush, “Impostor”. Money quote:

Bartlett’s book — I have it on my desk here — reads pretty well after five years. At the time, however, it was greeted with a chorus of Bronx cheers from establishment Republicanism. Bartlett was actually fired from his job at a GOP suck-up think tank — not as bad as being raped by Ajax Minor then slain by Clytemnestra, but humiliating nonetheless. So as we contemplate the current federal fiscal mess — $2 trillion per annum coming in, $4 trillion going out — let’s bow our heads for a moment in apology to the premature anti-spenders.

I’m banned from being mentioned at NRO, but here’s a link to my 2003 Time essay on Bush’s excessive spending. Money quote:

In three short years, this President has so ramped up government spending that he has turned a fiscal surplus into a huge and mounting debt. Far from taking responsibility for the nation’s finances, the President has shirked basic housekeeping and foisted crippling debt on the next generation. If a President is in some sense the father of an extended family, Bush is fast becoming a deadbeat dad, living it up for short-term gain while abandoning his children to a life of insecurity and debt… 

One thing we know: the era of the end of Big Government is over. Bush has ended it. The choice now is between Big Insolvent Government (under the Republicans) or Big Slightly Less Insolvent Government (under the Democrats). No wonder voters are restless. And no wonder fiscal conservatives who backed Bush in 2000 are beginning to feel not so much disappointed as betrayed.

Where were the Tea-Partiers then? Throwing people like me and Bartlett out of mainstream conservatism. I might add that my recent forgiveness for Obama’s spending in a deep recession is not a new position. In that same piece, I wrote:

Not all borrowing is bad, of course. When a recession hits or a war breaks out, it makes sense for governments to borrow–as long as they pledge to run surpluses in better times.

I know it’s a little pathetic to point out I was a tea-partier avant la lettre – unlike the GOP establishment or the current tea party. But surely that gives me some credibility to be more than a little skeptical of them. They say they are against debt, but they did nothing when Bush splurged and even now, rule out one half of the equation, taxes. What they are against is government, especially when run by an effective, mixed-race Democrat, doing his best to deal with the fiscal and military catastrophes they once cheered on.

There's new evidence that the British government was fully aware that its American ally was torturing prisoners against international and domestic law and yet tried to use the "intelligence" results nonetheless. Story here. Government document here.

Dave Roberts says Mitch McConnell, but Kevin Drum thinks the Senate minority leader "just had the easiest job:"

McConnell's sole goal for the past two years has been obstruction, something that Senate rules make easy. And the debt ceiling deal was a dog's breakfast of ideas from various sources. McConnell took credit for its final form, but he could do that mainly because, unlike John Boehner, he didn't have to put up with a big tea party contingent and was able to compromise without fear of losing his job.

Benen expands on Drum's conclusion that Obama is the right choice by listing his many (unheralded) accomplishments. Serwer dissents. I think Obama is easily the winner and currently stupidly under-rated – and drowned out by all the noise in the conservative-media-industrial-complex.

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP's broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.

Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn't happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas and Monicas?

When I read commentaries expounding on the notion that this man is competely out of his depth, I just have to scratch my head. Given his inheritance, this has been the most substantive first term since Ronald Reagan's. And given Obama's long-game mentality, that is setting us up for a hell of a second one.

So about that super-committee …