Month: September 2012

The usual would-be policeman of Washington's discourse on all things to do with Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, takes a break from the Jewish holidays to consign yet another member of the thinking classes to the ranks of "something much darker." Dowd wrote a column in which she noted how Greater Israel fanatics run the Romney campaign's foreign policy (which they do), and their neoconservative bubble is part of what explains Romney's nasty and divisive attempt last week to politicize the recent flare-up of violent anti-Americanism in the Middle East.

You are not allowed to say this in Washington without being accused of anti-Semitism. Let me repeat: you can not write this. If you are a columnist and blogger, like, say, Tom Friedman or yours truly, the consequences are an immediate accusation that you are another Hitler:

On the right, The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper called it "outrageous," while Commentary's Jonathan Tobin described it as "particularly creepy." "Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times," Tobin wrote.

Even if it is the obvious truth. Greater Israel neoconservatives dominate the Romney foreign policy and Senor is chief among them. As Kevin Drum notes:

There's nothing anti-Semitic in Dowd's column. She just doesn't like neocons, and she doesn't like the fact that so many of the neocons responsible for the Iraq debacle are now advisors to Mitt Romney's campaign. Pretending that this makes her guilty of hate-mongering toward Jews is reprehensible.

Goldblog decides to give Maureen just a warning this time:

Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews.

Next time: she's David Duke. This was a drive-by warning shot,

a silly diversion from the fact that Bibi Netanyahu tried to interfere in our election last week, was slapped down for it and tried to cover his tracks on television this morning.

But, on the broader point, does anyone believe that Paul Ryan's adoption of Netanyahu's position on the Middle East has nothing to do with longtime Greater Israel fanatic, Dan Senor, who has been described by the NYT as Romney's chief foreign adviser, organizer of his Israel trip, and channel to the tight neocon circle in Jersualem? Goldblog tries to downplay Senor's neocon connections by saying many neoconservative Jews criticized him when he was working for Paul Bremer. Ira Stoll tries the same tack:

First of all, at least by neoconservative standards, Dan Senor isn't much of a neoconservative. He rose to prominence on the foreign policy side as a spokesman for Paul Bremer. Bremer was a longtime colleague and associate of Henry Kissinger and is thought of as a Kissingerian realist, not a neoconservative.

This is how Senor got his start:

As an ambitious college intern on the Hill, he caught the attention of William Kristol, the editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard, who gave him entree into the neoconservative circle surrounding George W. Bush.

To quote the NYT:

His presence in the tight orbit of advisers around the Republican candidate foreshadows a Romney foreign policy that could take a harder line against Iran, embrace Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move away from being the honest broker in the conflict with Palestinians.

Here's an example of how the neocons's daily obsession with Israel "educates" and "informs" GOP foreign policy, reported in that anti-Semitic rag, The Tablet:

In September 2009, after Romney’s first run for the Republican nomination, he joined Senor onstage at a conference hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, an organization Senor launched with Kristol and Robert Kagan. Romney made passing reference to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, prompting Senor to note it had been written by Bret Stephens, a columnist well known in conservative circles. “Brad Stephens’ piece?” Romney asked, blankly. “Bret Stephens,” Senor corrected. “Bret Stephens,” Romney repeated, and looked out at the audience. “Sorry, Bret.”

This protege of Kristol, Kagan and Stephens has a sister who runs "the Jerusalem office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, [and] has the ear, and the direct phone number, of just about everyone in the Israeli government." So, obviously, as Goldberg and Stoll claim, Senor's a Kissingerian realist, coldly advancing America's interests with respect to Israel and her neighbors. And Maureen joins the growing ranks of alleged Jew-haters.

(Photo-illustration from photo by Robin Platzer/FilmMagic via Getty, with Hitler mustache photo-shopped on.)

Frank Partnoy advocates for mandatory lunch breaks:

A mandatory break would be especially helpful for people who trade stocks during their lunch break. When I worked in Morgan Stanley's derivatives group in Tokyo during the 1990s, there was a mandatory halt to trading every day for 90 minutes during lunch. I was struck by the positive impact of the break on the tempo of trading. The pause led to more rational thinking about the trading day and often helped cooler heads prevail during times of stress. We read. We contemplated strategy. Sometimes we even ate.

And defends the Ryan budget. He denies he is endorsing Romney but it is impossible to read the interview without inferring it. The Catholic hierarchy is now indistinguishable from the GOP.

Mielno, Poland, 3.17 pm

“Romney is in a very bad place. He’s got the Republican intelligentsia second-guessing him, publicly and privately. The party base has never trusted him and thinks that everything bad it ever thought about him is being borne out now. And he’s got the media believing that he can’t win. He’s right on the edge of a self-­fulfilling downward spiral,” – a “senior Republican strategist” to John Heilemann.

After a terrific David Leonhardt piece, Derek Thompson highlights the findings of a Congressional Research Service study (pdf) – that tax cuts don't generate economic growth. Thompson summarizes:

Analysis of six decades of data found that top tax rates "have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth." However, the study found that reductions of capital gains taxes and top marginal rate taxes have led to greater income inequality…. Well into the 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90%. Today it's 35%. But both real GDP and real per capita GDP were growing more than twice as fast in the 1950s as in the 2000s. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top tenth of a percent fell from about 50% to 25% in the last 60 years, while their share of income increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% before the recession.

Meanwhile, Leonhardt recalls how Paul Ryan reflected on the above chart in one of their conversations:

“I wouldn’t say that correlation is causation,” Mr. Ryan replied. “I would say Clinton had the tech-productivity boom, which was enormous. Trade barriers were going down in the Clinton years. He had the peace dividend he was enjoying…. Some of this is just the timing, not the person,” he said.

He then made an analogy. “Just as the Keynesians say the economy would have been worse without the stimulus” that Mr. Obama signed, Mr. Ryan said, “the flip side is true from our perspective.” Without the Bush tax cuts, that is, the worst economic decade since World War II would have been even worse.

I don't understand why these people cannot grasp that bringing a tax rate of over 70 percent way down to the 30s can make a big difference, especially if you cut loopholes. But that cannot be repeated. Once you're in the 30s, the ammunition is much much smaller. The idea that bankrupting the government under Bush and Cheney would have been worse if they had not cut taxes requires the kind of voodoo that George H W Bush once elegantly pointed out.

You probably recognize Hodgman from his appearances on The Daily Show and those ubiquitous Apple ads, but be sure to check out his book, That Is All, an audio and paperback version of which are being released October 2, along with The Complete World Knowledge box set. Check out his podcast here. Previous videos of John here, here, here, here, here, here and here. “Ask Anything” archive here.

Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, is being blamed for Romney’s recent troubles. Ambers pushes back:

The truth is that President Obama’s recent polling success has more to do with President Obama, and Mitt Romney’s problems have to do with decisions that Mitt Romney made much earlier this year. If Mitt Romney loses, he will lose because he is Mitt Romney, and not because Stuart Stevens is a disorganized, charming, inconsistent half-brilliant half-crazy consultant.

But firing Wehner and Scully and McConnell? And then giving us Eastwood and that pabulum of an acceptance speech that had less punch and specificity than an ad for Depends? I’m sorry but those were, we’re told, Stevens’ decisions.

Good news from Colorado – Amendment 64, which would legalize marijuana, has 51 percent support from likely voters:

Across every income bracket and in every age group except those 65 and older, more voters told pollsters they support the measure than oppose it, though some of the leads fall within the 4-percentage-point margin of error. Voters younger than 35 support the measure by a margin of 30 percentage points, 61 percent to 31 percent, according to the poll.

Paul Armentano rounds up more polling on various marijuana measures. On Washington state’s legalization initiative:

[I]n Washington, nearly six out of ten voters say they intend to decide in favor of I-502, according to a Survey USA poll released [last] week. Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that they will vote ‘yes’ on the measure, versus only 34 percent who said they would vote ‘no.’ Nine percent remain undecided.

These are good numbers, but in the past, support has evaporated the closer we get to election day. Here’s hoping the sanity will last this time.

Bob Wright sees three factors behind the convulsion triggered by a Youtube that looks at times like the stoning scene in Life of Brian (better not show that one in Yemen, either, I’d wager). Here they are: drone strikes; Greater Israel’s evisceration of Barack Obama; and American troops in Muslim countries.