Month: September 2011

Hitch is irritated by the use of the term as a perjorative:

Human history seems to register many more years of conflict than of tranquillity. In one sense, then, it is fatuous to whine that war is endless. We do have certain permanent enemies—the totalitarian state; the nihilist/terrorist cell—with which "peace" is neither possible nor desirable. Acknowledging this, and preparing for it, might give us some advantages in a war that seems destined to last as long as civilization is willing to defend itself.

But the undefined term here is "war". Hitch seems to apply it to all low-level conflicts, where his point is well-taken. But occupying foreign countries with troops seems to me to be of a very different order – and occupations should be time-limited, not because war will ever go away, but because we do not want to become an "endless empire."

Surprise! Barack is outpacing Dubya:

The Obama administration had deported about 1.06 million as of September 12, against 1.57 million in Bush's two full presidential terms.

Adam Serwer frowns:

Theoretically Obama's strict enforcement policies were supposed to lay the groundwork for comprehensive immigration reform. But being a bigger enforcement hawk than Bush not only didn't bring any Republicans to the table; it also hasn't torn them from the alternate universe in which Obama is mailing green cards to every unauthorized immigrant in the country. Give that more than half of Latino voters know someone who is undocumented, there could be substantial consequences for the president when he seeks to win the Latino vote again in 2012. There's always the possibility, though, that the GOP will rescue the president's standing among Latino voters when they seek to harness the anti-immigrant fervor of their base.

Rick Perry is now a distant fourth in the crucial primary state – underlying the danger of his identity as a regional, Southern candidate who will not appeal much beyond his base. Perhaps Romney's massive lead will be discounted on the next-door-neighbor principle. But there's good news for Paul and Huntsman in the poll:

Romney (41 percent) gained 5 points since June, followed by Ron Paul (14 percent), and Jon Huntsman (10 percent). Huntsman and Paul gained 6 percent each since the last poll.

Perry had 8 percent. This does not look like a two-man race to me, unless Huntsman or Paul keep their momentum up.

The issue was finally aired on The View, thanks to Barbara Walters:

And Levi – who told me he had never seen Sarah Palin fully pregnant "like Bristol was" in private – adds a piece of evidence that backs up Palin's weird story:

HuffPost: You say that Sarah kept Trig's pregnancy a secret until the seventh month.

Johnston: Yes, she kept it very secret. Willow had actually found the pregnancy stick in her bedroom. That's when we all found out because she went around telling everybody. Bristol and the whole family was hurt that their mother couldn't share that with them. Keeping it away from your own family is kind of messed up.

HuffPost: Describe Sarah and Todd's marriage.

Johnston: I'm no marriage counselor here but I had a mother and father growing up my whole life. [The Palins] were completely, 100 percent different from my family. They rarely spoke to each other, they never had family meals. I never saw them really do anything together unless the cameras were on and then they played an American family. Todd always slept on the couch, never in Sarah's room, that I've seen.

All the GOP candidates have come out [NYT] against the Dodd-Frank Act:

Most of the regulations included in the law fall on the big banks that were at the center of the financial crisis — Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. Those names rarely pass the candidates’ lips, however, as Republicans have turned Dodd-Frank into a piñata. Instead, they invoke community bankers — the small-town lenders who are more likely to be seen coaching a Little League team than wearing a pinstripe suit — as the beleaguered victims of overregulation.

I'm a little aghast. Very few people who observed the financial meltdown can possibly believe that the financial industry can be effectively self-regulating. What on earth would it take to pound that point across than the current recession, which emerged from the financial crisis? And yet the GOP's religious doctrines have to be obeyed – even if they have just been spectacularly disproved. Steam pours out of Matthew Boudway's ears:

Some of the candidates — call them the honorable fantasists — have been steadfastly opposed to bailouts: if the bankers run aground again, let them all drown; that’s capitalism. This position is honorable because it’s consistent. It’s fantasy because it fails to acknowledge a basic fact about modern economies like ours: what economists call “externalities.” … When the whole financial industry screws up, everyone suffers.

Innocence offers no protection when microeconomic imperatives cause a macroeconomic meltdown. This is why it makes sense for an institution designed to protect everyone’s interests — namely, the federal government — to force Wall Street to account for Main Street externalities, and that means more rigorous regulation. What about the Republican candidates who aren’t fantasists? Well, they’re also not honorable. The Mitt Romneys of the world want to have it both ways: minimal regulation but also maximal insurance for financiers, to be paid for by taxpayers.

Stephen Grenville concurs:

The financial sector does not yet accept that what went wrong in 2008 reflected fundamental faults. The veterans of 2008 see their survival as vindication and proof of their resilience. They criticise the reforms, one-by-one in isolation, arguing that none of the individual problems can explain all that went wrong. They ignore the wider reality that if government had not assisted large banks such as Citi and Bank of America, interconnectedness and contagion would have brought others down.

"An Apartheid, Islamic, Judenrein Palestine on the 1967 borders is a prescription for disaster," – Alan Dershowitz.

Harold Meyerson goes after the GOP gambit (pioneered by PA State Senator Dominic Pileggi) to split up the electoral votes in blue states:

Considered in tandem with the drive to reduce voting among minorities and low-income citizens, the emerging Republican opposition to popular-vote democracy makes long-term strategic sense. With each year, the nation’s population and electorate become less white, even as the Republican Party becomes more and more a white folks’ party. As minorities and the poor tend to cluster in cities, in heavily Democratic congressional districts, apportioning a state’s electoral votes by congressional district creates an opportunity for GOP electoral gains even though the party’s share of the popular vote is waning. By contrast, a number of states controlled by Democrats (most recently, California) are trying to scrap the electoral college by conditionally pledging their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote; the shift would take effect if and when enough states to elect a president go this route. It may be that the 2012 presidential election ends in a landslide victory, no matter how the electoral votes are apportioned. But suppose a Republican wins only by virtue of vote suppression and plans such as Pileggi’s. There would be no basis to challenge the legality of the winner’s claim. The same cannot be said of his legitimacy.

Previous coverage here.

Michael Yon documents the constant danger our troops face:

The point man often misses the bomb and is not hit.  The casualty might be the fifth man, or the fifteenth.  One casualty in 4-4 Cav was the 35th troop in the sequence.  In this war, every man, or woman, is on point.  One step from the "cleared" path might as well be a hundred miles off.  During firefights you go for cover.  Before I was here, a Soldier fell off a path and was killed.  The person who triggers the bombs is not always the one who is hit.  The triggers are often at a distance from the charges.  Or, as happens many times on every mission, you are standing there and someone walks by going forward or back, and to pass by they step must off to the side and in that moment you both can go.

Florida?

After a number of feints in the direction of total primary calendar-screwing anarchy, Florida Republicans seem happy to maintain their state’s fifth-place position in the nominating process, just after South Carolina. (A bipartisan but Republican-dominated commission set up by the state legislature is poised to make a decision just in time to comply with the RNC’s October 1 deadline for setting the calendar, with February 21 being the state’s most likely date.) With Romney currently favored in Nevada and New Hampshire and Perry in Iowa and South Carolina, this means Florida could again become—as it was in 2008, when McCain’s victory over Mitt Romney in the state all but sealed the deal—the truly decisive contest.

At least compared to the rest of the West:

The top U.S. marginal tax rate — 35 percent — is low by the standards of developed countries. It's about 51 percent in Britain, 47.5 percent in Germany, and 40 percent in France. Until recently, Denmark's highest tax rate was a whopping 63 percent, but that's been recently cut down to about 51 percent — good news for billionaires like Lego tycoon Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen.

Not all rich countries tax heavily however. At 29 percent, Canada's top rate is actually lower than the United States. But what about the dynamic growing superpowers of the developing world? Things are a little easier for the Learjet set there. Brazil's top income tax rate is 27.5 percent and India's is 30.9 percent. China's is a relatively high 45 percent; however tax evasion is pervasive, so it's unlikely that most of the country's 115 billionaires actually pay that much.