Chart Of The Day

WeeklyClaimsDec3

From Calculated Risk. Free Exchange wonders if December will bring job growth:

Tomorrow, the payroll numbers for November will come out, and they are expected to show a decline of about 100,000. It could be the last drop in payrolls for this recession, if these jobless claims improvements hold up. And with four straight months of expansion in the manufacturing sector, this is not entirely unexpected.

Email From Kandahar: “We’re Going To Win This One”

A military reader writes:

I've written you a few times. You've responded, once. I'm usually not too happy with you.

Anyway, I'm now in Kandahar, working for Stan. That Stan. 

I was anti-Iraq.  Beginning to now, in the US and in Anbar with a gun in my hand.  I was anti-Afghanistan … the Bush/Rummy version, after about week six. So … here's my tip:

We're going to win this one.  We have

a plan.  I call it C2.  COIN and cordwood. 

We're trying to learn counter insurgency, while at the same time, we're stacking insurgent (the only accepted term at the moment) bodies like cordwood.  They've gotten a little bit afraid, and are growing more so every day.  The relatively fast 30k is going to relatively quickly change the picture, in noticeable way, in Helmand and Kandahar.  We're booting the Canadians out of command of Kandahar City.  Omar's town.  We're putting a bright, smart, tough, funny Brit 2 star in charge of RC South, where the battle really matters. 

Come on out.  I'll show you around.  But, please, avenge your Iraq mistakes by backing us when we need you, and other reasonably sane guys with platforms, to help out a little.  Obama has taken some huge brave risks; but they're smart risks, and we're going to prove him right. 

I've said, in so far as this matters, that I am backing you and will back you until 2011, just as I hoped the surge that I opposed would somehow work (which has yet, alas, to be proven).  But the Dish has a responsibility to make a judgment but also to subject that judgment in the future to constant scrutiny and new evidence. In war, where everything is unpredictable, that holds particularly true. I'd leave now just as I would have left Iraq two years ago. But I understand the counter-arguments and certainly hope we can get a better outcome within a reasonable time-frame.

Show me. And may God protect you.

After New York II

David Link notes one staggering fact from yesterday's New York state senate debate. There was no debate. Only one senator spoke against marriage equality, and his rambling diatribe had no actual arguments in it:

Diaz’s oratorical contribution did not bother to include any explanation of what might be wrong with equality.  The first six minutes of his speech were an appeal to Republicans.  He is a Democrat, and wanted to stir up resentment among his colleagues on the other side who don’t get much gay support (e.g., in Diaz’s pretty naked words, money).  He then launched into a lengthy recitation of the obvious fact that there are religions that oppose homosexuality, and offered a complete roll call of the 31 states that voted gay marriage down.  Finally, Diaz urged his fellow popularly elected senators not to “do away with the people’s will.”

Amidst all of this, there was no argument against same-sex marriage (procreation, preserving the state’s economic resources, supporting heterosexual families), and it is telling that Diaz felt no need to do so.

It reminds me of this moment when a gay constituent actually confronted her own state representative with argument and evidence and civility and was greeted with a simple statement of no. No reason. Just no:

After New York I

AllahPundit surveys the landscape after yesterday’s vote against marriage equality:

In New York, [which lacks a referendum process,] the only outlet for displeasure is to throw the bums out, which made the pressure on the senate more intense. As for why the final tally wasn’t close, I assume the same thing happened here as happened when the amnesty bill went down in flames two years ago: Once the voting started and it became clear that the numbers weren’t there, fencesitters started peeling off. It’s fascinating to think that even in NYS, there’d be eight Democratic state senators who think a no vote is safer for them than a yes. Good luck with fundraising next year, kids. New York doesn’t even have civil unions, so expect that to be the next step to try to make amends. (Either that or a movement to, um, ban divorce.)

The real significance of this, I think, is that with each new blue or bluish state that defeats a marriage initiative, it becomes marginally harder for the Supreme Court to do what I think it’ll probably do and agree with Ted Olson that straights-only marriage laws are a violation of equal protection. Kennedy is the swing vote, of course, and Kennedy has been sympathetic to federalist concerns in the past — albeit not when it comes to gays. But if even New York and California are unwilling to join the liberal consensus, maybe he’ll think twice.

I do think we are in a moment of backlash in a very difficult economic period. But I wonder how Ted Olson would respond to being told his position is the “liberal consensus.”

There are plenty of principled conservatives who believe that civil equality in such a fundamental matter of human rights should be extended to all citizens. The overwhelming opposition to this is not right or left, but religious. The secular arguments about the horrifying consequences of allowing me and Aaron to live together as a married couple have slowly withered away into the final desperate arguments about “corrupting” children by allowing them to know that married gay couples exist or restricting religious freedom. 

And that federal case will take a while to take its course. All I take from New York is that the Democratic party remains what it always has been: a bunch of cowards. And the Republican party remains, with some important exceptions: a bunch of people afraid to alienate bigots. Between the bigots and the cowards, we have the winning argument. And yet in this democracy, right now, argument cedes to fear.

Why Obama Didn’t Channel Churchill

George Packer called Obama's speech the "least rousing, most skeptical call to arms I’ve ever heard." Frum explains the tone:

If President Obama’s speech can mobilize the public to endurance and patience, it will count as a success, even without stirring clips to replay before the endlessly fluttering electronic flags over the shoulders of the cable pundits. Who would understand that better than the actual Winston Churchill, who devoted much of his last prime ministership to the successful quelling of an insurgency in Malaya – without delivering a single memorable speech?

Busting Cap And Trade

It seems important to me to keep two things in our head at the same time on climate change: 1) the overwhelming evidence suggests grave risks (however hard they are to model accurately) of future planetary distress because of too much CO2; and 2) how we try to rectify this is a separate question and can lead to several different answers.

The Dish has aired the cap-and-trade vs carbon-tax debate exhaustively this past year. I have to say that, as the debate has unfolded, my own inclination to support a small and gradually increasing carbon/gas tax has strengthened. Here is one of the founding fathers of climate change science,

James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, boycotting Copenhagen over this very question:

“The fundamental problem is that fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy. As long as they are, they are going to be used,” he said. “It’s remarkable. They refuse to recognise and address the fundamental problem and the obvious solution.” He dismisses government announcements of national targets for greenhouse gas emissions as promises that will not be kept, noting that even Japan missed its goals under the Kyoto Protocol.

He said that it would be better for the summit to fail rather than reach the type of cap and trade-based system envisaged.

“If they sign on to anything like they are talking about then it’s definitely counter-productive. Any time you start down that path, it’s time wasted. We would do better taking a year time-out and figuring out a better path.”

Dr Hansen, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, argued that the only effective way to control global warming was to institute an increasing “carbon tax”, not “cap and trade”.

“We are going to have to move beyond fossil fuels at some point. Why continue to stretch it out longer?” he said. “The only way we can do that is by putting a price on carbon emissions. The business community and the public need to understand that there will be a gradually increasing price on carbon emissions.”

He proposes that the “carbon tax” start at the equivalent of about $1 per gallon of petrol but rise in future years. The tax revenues should be returned directly to the public in the form a dividend, he said.

He added that the world must be prepared to abandon coal unless its emissions are captured and embrace a new generation of nuclear power.

Why is this country's political system unable even to contemplate the most obvious, cleanest, simplest response to this emerging problem?