The Dish

From Haaretz, the latest in a series of steps to claim all of Jerusalem for the Jewish state:

Last year set an all-time record for the number of Arab residents of East Jerusalem who were stripped of residency rights by the Interior Ministry. Altogether, the ministry revoked the residency of 4,577 East Jerusalemites in 2008 – 21 times the average of the previous 40 years.

In the first 40 years of Israeli rule over East Jerusalem combined, from 1967 to 2007, the ministry deprived only 8,558 Arabs of their residency rights – less than double the number who lost their permits last year alone. Thus of all the East Jerusalem Arabs who have lost their residency rights since 1967, about 35 percent did so in 2008.

Many of these individuals – including 99 children – had not lived in those residences for a long time or lived abroad for more than seven years, and, as such, had no right to return home, if you pardon the expression. But this law only applies to Arabs and not Jews, and the upshot is another provocation – handing over more Palestinian homes to new Jewish residents. But provocation is what Netanyahu lives and breathes.

Yglesias notices a sleight of hand:

[W]hen it comes to military operations you can’t just bracket the question of feasibility. If the administration’s plan is fatally flawed and simply leads to several more years of fighting followed by inevitable withdrawal and Taliban takeover, then we’re not actually helping anyone. This is why things like Richard Just’s insistence on trying to understand everything through a lens of “realism” versus “idealism” are so annoying. If the administration has a workable plan to bring stability to Afghanistan, then implementing that plan will have humanitarian benefits. But if the plan’s not workable, then it’s not workable, and it doesn’t matter how idealistic or ambitious you try to make it.

McArdle modifies the war tax proposal:

Contractionary fiscal policy is not a sound plan when unemployment is up over 10%, and looks set to grow even further.  So if you're going to do a war surtax, you want to delay it a little.  Make it take effect in 2011, and sunset a year after the last troops are withdrawn.  (Or fall below some reference level; we don't want to keep a "war tax" because we've got 20 military advisers still in country.)

Popular Mechanics has a good review of the Climategate scandal:

What does it mean to be a scientific skeptic? If you say you are "sure" (as in the phrase "settled science") typical scientists are suspicious. Certainly, scientists know that some ideas have been tested over and over again, and are 99.999999 percent sure to be accurate. So, for example, we can be pretty sure that a satellite launched to orbit the Earth will go to the right place and do as we predict. And, we do accept scientific results that individually we don't fully understand. Thus, I am not fully conversant with the mathematical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, but I use electron microscopes that take advantage of the wave-like character of matter, and I have seen that those microscopes work really well in just the way predicted by quantum mechanical theory.

The final page sums up what we know about global warming.

(Image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center: ISS007-E-10807)

Jeff Frankels proposes ten ways to fix the budget. Bruce Bartlett challenges alleged fiscal conservatives:

Any member of Congress who wishes to be considered a fiscal conservative should be willing to endorse a plan as detailed as this one and of the same order of magnitude or come up with one of their own.

Today on the Dish we continued to collect commentary on Obama's speech. Andrew delivered another lengthy assessment, Greenwald gave measured praise, Fred Kaplan focused on the timeline, Steve Coll worried about the timeline, Marc Lynch examined the role of fellow skeptics, Crowley read Obama officials, Yglesias worried about financing, and readers responded here, here, and here. We rounded up some thoughtful conservative critics here and noted some toxic commentary here, here, and here. Palin facebooked her response between paid photo shoots with supporters. Meanwhile, we caught news that the proposed timeline could have had a big effect on Afghans already.

In GOP death watch, James Joyner kept hope alive, Frum seemed overly optimistic, a reader dialed him back, and so did Andrew. Sully also elucidated the philosophical core of Oakeshott's conservatism and applied it to the president.

On a disappointing day for marriage equality, a prominent cardinal nudged the Church toward the Dark Ages, Douthat isolated Irish Catholics within the rape controversy, and a reader vented over the Church's involvement in public policy. To cleanse the palate, we watched some soft-core, animated elf-on-elf action.

— C.B.

A reader writes:

Frum doesn't just sound naive, he sounds confused. When Bush was talking about the surge in Iraq, Obama and other Democrats disagreed with the strategy. Of course they didn't support Bush — they thought he was wrong!

By contrast, Frum is encouraging Republicans to support Obama because they agree with his strategy! It's a bizarre attempted equivalence.

Blumenthal studies public opinion around the Afghanistan war:

[T]he most likely impact of last night's speech will be downward pressure on Obama's overall job approval rating if only because of a phenomenon political scientists call "priming." All the stories on the Afghanistan speech will prime the importance of an issue that is an Obama weakness, so for the next few days, expect Obama's overall approval rating to fall slightly, even if the speech helps bump his Afghanistan approval numbers up a few points.

A reader writes:

"Worked" is an interesting word.  Simply citing employment and GDP data as evidence that a public policy "worked" implies that there is no cost-benefit analysis — that infinite spending and debt can be considered to have "worked" if some threshold levels of employment and GDP are achieved.  But a look at what those jobs and what that additional increment of GDP cost us — or more precisely, cost future generations — reveals a different story.

According to Recovery.gov, $234.2 billion of the stimulus money has been spent.  Assuming CBO's jobs estimates are correct, that means that each job cost somewhere between $146,000 and $390,000.  Does spending almost $400,000 to save a job sound like a policy that "worked"?  Not to me.  And on the GDP numbers, 1.2% to 3.2% translates into a range of $170 billion to $453 billion of additional GDP.  Given $234.2 billion in costs, that suggests a multiplier of between 0.73 and 1.94.  So it's not even clear that we've achieved a break-even multiplier of 1.

Another reader:

Based on that report, the CBO does not like tax cuts or bribing seniors as stimulus.
 
Check out the table on page 12 and 13 of the PDF.  The CBO itemizes the low and high estimates of output multipliers–cumulative impact on real gross domestic product over several quarters for each dollar of spending or reduction in tax revenues–for various ARRA "activities".  The CBO liked when the ARRA called for the federal government to buy stuff or provide services (low: 1.0, high: 2.5).  They also liked when the federal government provided cash for infrastructure (1.0, 2.5).
 
Tax cuts?  Notsomuch.  The one year tax cut for higher-income people (.1, .5) and provisions for corporate cash flow ledger trickery were the worst (0, .4).  The first-time homeowner credit?  Nope (.1, .5).
 
And bribing seniors?  Sorry (.2, 1.2).
 
The CBO report is the ARRA's estimated impact as of September 2009 so there's some time to go for some of those underperformers.  The corporate cash flow ledger tricks may actually payoff later.  The rest of the tax cuts and senior bribes are likely to fizzle as their effects were temporary or will end in a year or so.
 
Still, not good for cheerleaders of the homeowner tax credit or anyone who may call for more tax cuts in a possible second stimulus or jobs program.