Against A Carbon Tax

Jim Manzi follows up his first post explaining the problems with a carbon tax with a second. The skepticism endures:

The idealized carbon tax is an almost perfect example of what Coase famously called “blackboard economics”: abstract economic theory that proceeds by ignoring a detailed knowledge of the actual economic system. You can’t separate the “merits” of a carbon tax from the “politics” unless you want to compare the kind of carbon tax you could create in the imaginary world where you are absolute dictator to the alternative policies that have to be developed in the real, messy world of democratic politics. It is this practical recognition that explains why all those “dumb” politicians are blind to the incredible elegance of this academic creation.

Huckabee On Dumond

"It was a horrible situation, horrible, I feel awful about it in every way. I wish that there was some way I could go back and reverse the clock and put him back in prison. But nobody, not me, not Jim Guy Tucker, not Bill Clinton, not that parole board, could ever imagine what might have transpired," – Mike Huckabee, addressing the Wayne Dumond case at a press conference yesterday.

The full transcript can be read after the jump. Since this issue may well come into the forefront in the coming days, it’s worth getting Huckabee’s considered response. I found it candid.

Governor Huckabee was asked if he had pressured the parole board to release Dumond.

Governor Huckabee: No. I did not. Let me categorically say that I did not. And it’s really interesting, if people want to really look into that record. Here’s the chronology, and here’s the timeline. I’m going to try to do it as briefly as I can, because it’s been delved into repeatedly, normally during an election year.

In 1992, Bill Clinton was governor; Jim Guy Tucker was Lieutenant Governor. And during Bill Clinton’s governorship, while he was campaigning for president, Jim Guy Tucker signed the papers to commute the sentence of Wayne DuMond to parole eligibility. That’s what made him parole eligible in 1992. He had been convicted of rape in Forest City Arkansas, during time of awaiting trial, he was hogtied and castrated; his testicles were later placed in a jar on the desk of a sherriff.

It was a brutal, amazingly, just, complicated case. There were all kinds of questions about the case. Many stories were written; I am sure you can Google all the way back to the 1980s and get more information than you even want on the case. For reasons Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker would have to answer, not me, the sentence was commuted in 1992.

I was not elected to anything at that time; I was a candidate for the United States Senate. I was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1993; in 1996, Wayne DuMond had requested another commutation for time served because the parole board had not granted parole even though he was parole eligible.

Let me make it clear, governors in Arkansas cannot parole anybody. The parole process is separated from governor; the governor can commute a sentence to make it parole eligible. The actual parole is handled completely separate from the governor. Jim Guy Tucker had been convicted of Whitewater related felonies, he resigned. When I came into office in July, the file of Wayne DuMond was on my desk and was transferred to me having been sat there for several months prior to my coming of office.

That request for commutation to time served awaited me. I originally considered it, indicated even an intention I that might grant it. There was and incredible outcry over that, I ultimately requested to deny it. Primarily for the reason I believed there needed to be some supervision; I was not completely confident that it would be appropriate for him to get out without supervision. He had a unblemished prison record – an exemplary record in terms of getting along as an inmate. He had met all the qualifications for being paroled, including having a job lined up, a sponsor with a church I think in Houston, TX, originally.

I chose ultimately not to pardon him. I made a visit to the parole board early in my tenure as a governor at the request of chairman, because you gotta remember, every member of that parole board had been appointed by Jim Guy Tucker or Bill Clinton. Not one of them appointed by me. I’m a new Republican governor, they’d never seen one. I think they had real concern on how to interrelate or how to relate to me. And what kind of attitude I had in general to crime, attitude, parole, etc. So at their invitation, I went to the meeting; someone brought up this case.

Frankly, it was simply part of a broader discussion; I did not ask them to do anything. I did indicate it was sitting at my desk; and I was giving thought to it. But this was probably in, I’m thinking maybe September or October when that meeting was held; I can’t remember exactly. The parole board, the following year, early 97 approved his parole plan after I had denied the further commutation.

Subsequent to that, he…I can’t remember exactly the timing, he left there, went to MO, unfortunately was later convicted for the murder of one woman and awaiting trial for the murder of another when he died in prison.

It was a horrible situation, horrible, I feel awful about it in every way. I wish that there was some way I could go back and reverse the clock and put him back in prison. But nobody, not me, not Jim Guy Tucker, not Bill Clinton, not that parole board, could ever imagine what might have transpired.

For people to say that I was responsible in getting him out makes a few presumptions – number one, it presumes, I had an influence on Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker in 1992. The second presumption, it assumes I had the amazing persuasive power to go into a board of seven people, all of them appointed by Democratic governors before me and persuade them to do something they didn’t wish to do.

It also assumes that, not only did I have that power, but that only two of them changed story about what happened and they didn’t do so until 6 years later when we were in the middle of an election year. And after, and subsequent to the fact that I had not reappointed them to their $75,000 jobs on the parole board.

Now if you can follow that line and believe that I am solely responsible, then you’ll believe that. But you’ll believe a lot of other things as well. I am deeply sorry, and I mean, awfully, just horrified of what happened to (inaudible). And there is not a single person that will ever bring those women back to their families. But that’s the story, that’s what happened.

And yes it will come up in the presidential campaign. It came up in my governor’s campaign. There will be people who are victims who will probably be brought forth to make statements but, you know, I can’t fix it. I can only tell the truth and let the truth be my judge.

The Old Man In The Slum

A reader tipped me off to this haunting and beautifully written blog by an active duty soldier in Iraq. Read as much as you can. It’s a humbling experience. My favorite recent post among many is about the soldier’s accidentally trashing an old Kurdish man’s car with his military truck. He breaks protocol, and gets out to apologize. He tells the old man he will repair the damage. A week later, he returns to the scene of the mishap and looks for the man:

The old man, the elder of this part of the endless slum meets me at his door. He is doubled over, hobbling along with the aide of his cane and his son. His wife is crying and smiling, a unique combination that catches my attention. The old man didn’t appear so frail, so broken when we saw him last. But I realize in that moment, that he had never stood, he had sat in the door way and refused to move all those nights ago. He extends his frail, almost shattered looking hand that bears the scars of foregone dictator, and we shake hands. I look at him the eye, clutch his other shoulder with my free hand and say to him, "I kept my word sir. I told you that I wouldn’t do you wrong." My interpreter and him exchange some durkas and then he replies through sammy, "I never expected an American soldier to understand his word, his promise"…

Our exchange goes on for several minutes and I lay out the details of how he is to collect the money entitled to him for our damage. In fact, the money will be enough probably to replace the entire car but I don’t tell him that, why ruin the surprise. At one point the conversation goes from business to personal and takes on an air of familiarity. This old man begins to feel not like an old man in a ghetto in some city in northern Iraq, but rather an old man, broken and impoverished by a society that moves too fast to notice, much like many of the older men and women back home…

Towards the end of our talk, that has gone from politics to sports (soccer). We even talk of our our women, he shows me pictures of his grandchildren and I show him a picture of my own heart, my lady. At the end of our time together, he pulls me in close, almost to an embrace, grabs my arm and almost in a raspy whisper says "You are a good man. You have the kindest eyes I have known in my life, too kind to be a man of soldiering. You are a man of honor and your heart is kinder than your years.". He releases me, shakes my hand and then turns to walk back into his house. There are tears in my eyes, my legs are shaky and a strong chill startles my spine. Despite being blown -up, shot at, hated, spit at, had shit thrown at, in the middle of this ghetto in some no name neighborhood in the backwoods of a city in northern Iraq, two men met and became friends in the gravest of places. I couldn’t invent that man’s words if given all the time in the world. "You have the kindest eyes.." I will tell my girl that later on the phone and she says nothing, but I can hear the tears on her cheeks and the soft sniffle in her nose. Whats wrong baby I will ask her, why are you crying… I will never forget the old man in the slum.

The System Is Working

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Maybe this isn’t acknowledged enough, but it seems to me that the Founders would for the first time be pleased with how the United States has been adjusting policy and personnel in wartime this past year. I think when historians look back, they will note a few things. The first is that an untrammeled executive branch, high on its own rightness, certain of everything, contemptuous of critics and empowered by understandable public fear … made all the mistakes you’d expect from one-man rule in a permanent "emergency". The half-assed commitment to Afghanistan, the reckless over-reach with Iraq, the embrace of torture as a primary weapon in the war against Islamic terrorism, the loss of critical allies, the collapse of American moral standing, and then apocalyptic rhetoric over Iran: all this was fueled by a president with no impediments, sealed in an ideological cocoon wound more tightly by his re-election, a victory that reinforced all of his worst instincts in the first term, and lost us two critical years in Iraq. The Supreme Court made some effort to rein in the president in 2005 and 2006. But the Republican Congress was AWOL, the press cowed, and the government professionals intimidated. All this only really changed in November 2006 with the country sending the opposition party to run the Congress. It was a classic moment of one branch of American government checking the other – saving the other – and correcting course. The Democrats may not have stopped the war, but they helped shift its course. That, in turn, saved the war in Iraq from becoming a complete disaster. Now it’s merely a rescuable disaster.

It remains an inconvenient truth that those neocons now hailing the surge’s success would not be able to do so if Americans had taken their advice and voted Republican in 2006. Rumsfeld would still be defense secretary and Cheney’s grip on national policy would remain unshakable. But it has been shaken, as a reader points out:

Your suggestion that Robert Gates had a hand in the release of the NIE report highlights something that I’ve thought for along time, namely that the single biggest change in the course of the Iraq War was Gates’ replacement of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.  When Rush Limbaugh and others slam the Democrats for failing to keep their campaign promise to end the War, I think they fail to give credit to the Democrats for the course correction the administration had to make at the time of the last election.

Without a vote for the Democrats in 2006, Gates would probably not be at the Pentagon, and Rice would not have been emboldened to shift course on the peace process, and the CIA might not have had the stomach to fight back against Cheney on Iran intelligence. That was the turning point.

And although it was a Democratic victory, it may help salvage something for the Bush administration’s legacy in the Middle East. And that is the deeper point. No single party in our polity can claim credit for all of this. The course adjustment was a function of different entities fighting one another, reacting to events and facts, and thereby forging a more sensible war policy. What no single entity wanted came eventually to pass. It’s shaping up to be a text-book lesson in the virtues of separating powers. Dictatorships cannot do this in wartime, which is why they often lose; neither can unchecked executives in democracies. But it’s a good thing.

The key players will only emerge definitively with the judgment of history. But my roster of those who helped get us back toward a rational war-policy would put Bob Gates and David Petraeus at the top of the list. Mukasey has a chance to do the same kind of thing at Justice. The system that looked rather fragile for a couple of years has begun to assert itself again. It works. And if the president is wise, he’ll allow all this to shift, and take some of the credit. And if the country is wise, they’ll pick a successor who can unite the country around a prudent path forward.

(Photo: U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates smiles December 4, 2007 during a tour of the Kabul Military Training Center in Kabul, Afghanistan. Gates is visiting Afghanistan to evaluate rising violence levels. By Haraz N. Ghanbari-Pool/Getty Images.)

Cheney On Iran

Matt parses the veep:

It’s not as if Cheney read the NIE and decided he had some reason to believe it was incorrect. Rather, he read it, decided he’d better not contradict it, but also decided that bottom line conclusions about how Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program were inconvenient, and thus decided to talk around that minor point and try to get the American people confused about what’s happening. Stunningly cynical and yes I’m resolving once again to never be stunned.

“Just Last Week” Ctd.

A reader writes:

No matter how many times he does this kind of thing, it will never ever cease to amaze me that Bush thinks it looks better for him to have been completely ignorant of the NIE on the country he’s been portraying as America’s greatest threat in the world, than for him to have actually been informed but issuing public contradictory statements anyway. 

"Lucky" for us he’s obviously lying, but really, when can we all wake up and let our leaders and media know that being ignorant of critically important knowledge is no better than lying? In fact, I’d say it’s worse, because a liar can promise to tell the truth next time and has at least a chance of making good on that promise. Those who plead ignorance as some kind of vindication aren’t even trying to pretend they’ll be less ignorant in the future.