Month: December 2011

Food Drives Are A Bad Idea?

According to Yglesias they are:

All across America, charitable organizations and the food industry have set up mechanisms through which emergency food providers can get their hands on surplus food for a nominal handling charge. Katherina Rosqueta, executive director of the Center for High Impact Philanthropy at the University of Pennsylvania, explains that food providers can get what they need for “pennies on the dollar.” She estimates that they pay about 10 cents a pound for food that would cost you $2 per pound retail. You’d be doing dramatically more good, in basic dollars and cents terms, by eating that tuna yourself and forking over a check for half the price of a single can of Chicken of the Sea.

Mental Health Break

This time lapse is a culmination of 10,000 RAW images and multiple shoots capturing some of the cities relentless energy and pace of change. Everyone who has visited Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam knows part of the magic (love it or hate it) is in the traffic. Ever since I first set foot in HCMC I have been captivated by the cities energy.

“Mundane But Maddening Red Tape”

Laura Nahmias details how DOMA is discouraging marriages in New York despite the state's historic vote last June:

Empire State Pride Agenda President Ross Levi said the group has seen an upswing in businesses asking for help figuring out whether to keep their domestic partnership plans. Many assumed that same-sex marriage would allow them to stop offering domestic partnerships to employees, but ESPA is urging unions and businesses to wait—saying the taxes and legal tangles are so great, they might deter some people from getting married. … Ernst & Young LLP, for example, did not at first offer domestic partner benefits in states that legalized same-sex marriage, but added them back after it realized the complications, said the company’s Chris Crespo: "It was a big ‘aha’-moment."

The History Of Income Inequality

Robert Frank details it:

The three decades after [WWII] saw incomes grow at an almost uniform 3 percent annual rate for families up and down the income ladder. Since the early 1970s, however, virtually all income gains have accrued to those whose incomes were highest to begin with. It’s a striking fractal pattern. Most of the gains have gone to the top 20 percent of earners, but the lion’s share of the gains within that group have gone to the top 5 percent. And within the top 5 percent, most of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, and so on.

He follows up with a proposal for a progressive consumption tax.

(Video: A global view from a new OECD report, "Divided We Stand".)

Imagine Newt’s Finger On The Button

Larison dissects Gingrich's foreign policy:

Many Republicans flatter Gingrich by treating him as one of the party's intellectuals, but Gingrich frequently shows that he is unable or unwilling to make crucial distinctions in his treatment of international problems. He complains on his campaign website that "we currently view Iraq, Afghanistan, and the many other danger spots of the globe as if they are isolated, independent situations," and that America "lacks a unified grand strategy for defeating radical Islamism." But these conflicts are largely separate from one another, and there is no such thing as a monolithic, global, radical Islamism that can be addressed by one strategy. No conflicts around the world can be properly understood except by focusing on local circumstances, but for Gingrich, the ideological emphasis on a unified global threat takes priority over proper analysis.

Which makes him the perfect antithesis of conservatism. Conservatism is concerned with reality, which it understands shifts with culture, history, region and all the immense complexities of human life. When a conservative approaches a problem like Jihadist violent Islam, he will seek first a grasp of its divisions, analyze the most effective way of defusing and disarming and fighting it, ensure that a strategy in one part of the world is not necessarily salient to another, grapple with unintended consequences, and so on. What Gingrich does is the opposite. What he always longs for is the absolute, eternal principle, the clarifying concept, the rhetorical rallying cry that speaks to the ideological gut rather than the reality-based frontal cortex. And Gingrich's notion of foreign policy – making John Bolton his secretary of state – is essentially a policy of open hostility to the entire world, including allies who differ, and a maximalist military solution to most problems.

Part of me wonders if Gingrich couldn't heighten the absurd contradictions of contemporary "conservatism" and help accelerate its destruction. But the damage he could do as president vastly outweighs the uncertain benefits of that particular scenario.

Are We Done Fighting Insurgencies?

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Andrew Exum suspects not:

According to the Correlates of War dataset, roughly 83% of the conflicts fought since the end of the Napoleonic Era have been civil wars or insurgencies. And while scholarship (.pdf) suggets more recent civil wars are less "irregular" than those fought during the Cold War, it's safe to assume irregular wars will continue to be phenomena military organizations will wrestle with. 

Phil Arena counters:

The fact that most wars are wars of insurgency tells us little about what US funding priorities should be.  It would be more useful to ask whether future US policy makers are going to be more likely to regret having inherited a military that is primarily oriented towards COIN or primarily oriented towards conventional, industrial war.  And note that whether policy makers benefit from having a military with a given set of abilities is not entirely a function of what wars are fought, since the ability to win wars influences whether war occurs in the first place as well as the distribution of benefits that is realized through processes other than war.

Which is not to say that Exum's conclusion is unreasonable.  But there are tradeoffs here.

(Photo: US soldiers wrap their flag during a ceremony to hand over security control in the city of Charikar in Parwan province on December 1, 2011. The second wave of Afghanistan's transition from foreign to local control officially started on December 1 as NATO forces handed over most of a peaceful province to Afghan authorities. All bar two districts of Parwan province, north of the capital Kabul, are being handed to Afghan control. By Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images.)

Secretary Of State John Bolton?

So Newt promises. Juan Cole sighs:

Bolton is an irascible attorney who is horrible to his subordinates, makes Rod Blagojevich look like a paragon of truthfulness, played a role in inserting the notorious, forged “yellowcake uranium from Niger” assertion in George W. Bush’s pre-Iraq War State of the Union address, wants to bomb Iran so badly he sometimes just sits in an F-18 and imagines himself over Isfahan; and, worst of all, he has offered moral support to a terrorist organization, which the Supreme Court rather frowns on.

David Bosco takes a look at Bolton's shockingly congenial tenure at the UN. Stuart Benjamin analyzes the legality of naming your cabinet during the campaign.

The Only Reason Romney Isn’t A Career Politician: He Keeps Losing

Romney has been attacking Gingrich for being a "career politician." Chait expects the attack to be ineffective given Mitt's political history:

The point of the outsider anti-politician pose is that Americans dislike political ambition. They think politicians are grubby and self-interested, and have a higher view of people in other professions. That’s the power of the attack. When you’ve conceded that you wanted to be a career politician but you failed, and so you luckily managed to pick up different experiences, you’ve lost all the punch.