• Barbara Boxer and John Kerry introduced the Senate's version of climate change legislation today, and the bill moves in much the same direction as the the Waxman-Markey House bill which passed earlier this year. In other environmental news EPA chief Lisa Jackson confirmed that she would use the regulatory power granted to the administration to curb emissions.
• Newsmax published, then retracted, a column that argued a military coup might be the only way to solve the country's "Obama problem," that is, the supposed constitutional threat stemming from the administration. You can find an archived copy of the article here. And while Obama himself has attracted an unusual amount of unhinged paranoid fear, this latest incident is not exactly, as Jon Chait puts it, "another milestone for the far right." For instance, back in May of 2007, the certifiable Thomas Sowell fantasized that a coup might be necessary to halt "the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia."
• It's tempting to believe that boycotting the Democratic fundraising apparatus will put pressure on conservative Democrats like Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson to show more party unity. But that assumes that these Democrats are primarily concerned about their constituents rather than their donors. And since Nelson is opposed to using budget reconciliation to pass health-care reform (unless it's for budget-busting tax cuts) it's clear his only concern is taking care of the insurance industry.
• John Derbyshire's admission to Alan Colmes that women should not have the right to vote is typical of the ongoing effort of conservatives to define women as subhuman. But his claim that women shouldn't have the vote because they "lean left" is incredibly weak. The implication, then, is that the only votes that count should be those that do not lean left; in other words, we should award the franchise based solely on political ideology. Truly a conservative belief, that.
• Remainders: Congress loves its socialized medicine; Harry Reid cancels the October recess; Nike quits the Chamber of Commerce, and the chamber denies that they ever questioned the science behind climate change; and David Brooks doesn't want you to remember the deregulatory policies of Ronald Reagan.

--Mori Dinauer

Like Tim Fernholz, I'm at the joint conference on "how progressives should think about the deficit," put on by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress. Tim notes that the presence of Franklin Raines, former president of Fannie Mae, and Bob Rubin, formerly of Treasury and Citigroup might "offend those both on the left and the right."

Tim's an awesome reporter, but he left out a key detail: Rubin and Raines weren't on any of the conference panels. They were just hanging out in the audience and listening, like me and Tim -- just another two guys who didn't need to be in the office this morning. And when they asked questions, Rubin identified himself as, "Bob Rubin of the Council on Foreign Relations," and Raines as "Frank Raines, formerly of OMB."

As Tim reports, Paul Krugman was very much the outlier to a general consensus that, as Bob Greenstein of CBPP put it, "Deficit reduction is not antithetical to progressive values." Among the more compelling arguments for that consensus (in which I share) came from former Treasury official Roger Altman, who pointed out that if we don't address deficits that will average more than $1 trillion in each of the next 10 years, "a solution will be imposed on us," either by political or economic circumstances, and an imposed solution is least likely to reflect progressive values.

But looming over the gathering were a set of unspoken, uncertain assumptions about the political process. For Krugman, it was an assumption that the political process was unlikely to be rational enough to accept that a deficit of about 4 percent of GDP was not an economic problem. For others, it was a doubt that the current political system could ever make a set of responsible choices to limit growth in health spending and raise taxes. (A central proposition of the more conservative fiscal hawks such as those around the Concord Coalition and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation is that the political process can never make such choices and thus a bipartisan commission is needed.) Greenstein pointed out that the ordinary political process did make choices to reduce the long-term deficit in 1990 and 1993 (I would add 1997), and could do so again, but there is no doubt that the structure of Congress has changed since then, as have the stakes.

But there may be an opportunity in the fact that the consensus around long-term deficit reduction coincides with a consensus, even among the Peterson Foundation fiscal hawks, that in the short-term, we have to spend more to keep the economy afloat. It is at such moments, when the short-term pain is minimal, that the process might be able to make long-term choices. But it is remarkable how much the unanswered questions at a conference like this one are political, not economic.

-- Mark Schmitt

I recently came upon a political artifact from a different time: The 1994 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Issues Book. A Bible-thick collection of rhetoric and talking points, this was the playbook Democratic operatives thought would sway voters during the ultimately disastrous midterm election of President Bill Clinton's first term.

What might the yellowing pages might have to say about the defeat of Clinton's health-care proposal, which contributed to Democrats losing their majorities in both the House and Senate? Disappointingly, almost nothing. When the book was published in March of 1994, health-care reform hadn't failed yet.

KEEP READING ...

The Supreme Court is set to consider another gun-rights case, McDonald v. Chicago, argued by Alan Gura, who won the historic Heller case that outlawed D.C.'s gun ban. Gura is arguing that Second Amendment rights should be "incorporated," meaning it should be viewed as a "fundamental right" like freedom of speech or religion -- a right that can't be regulated by the states.

Here's the interesting part: Some liberal legal types are supporting Gura's case. Why? Because they believe that a ruling in favor of gun-rights advocates could provide a way of bolstering other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, not just the right to bear arms. From a Legal Times piece written last February:

Use of the due process clause has led to "the constitutional equivalent of a food fight" with conservative justices increasingly wary of expanding or creating new rights because of the clause's process-oriented scope, says Douglas Kendall, founder of the D.C.-based Constitutional Accountability Center. Kendall says invoking "privileges or immunities" would have a "lift-all-boats" effect, strengthening free speech, and possibly even abortion and gay rights, at the same time that it bolsters the right to bear arms.

Kendall had few qualms about joining McDonald on the side of gun-rights advocates. "The conversation on this clause has begun, and there are very important progressive values at stake in the outcome," Kendall says. "We need to be in that conversation."

While handgun bans will likely be outlawed, even Antonin Scalia has written that the Second Amendment doesn't mean people have a right to carry around loaded firearms in schools or courthouses. So not all commonsense gun restrictions will be made unconstitutional, but other fundamental rights may be strengthened if the Court accepts this latest legal argument of gun-rights advocates.

I also want to point out that this is a rather lovely example of conservatives looking for judicial activism. Second Amendment rights have never been read this way before -- so this time, it would be conservatives reading "new rights" into the Constitution. It's just that this time they're in favor of doing so, so it's cool.

-- A. Serwer

Reporters just had a chance to quiz CAP's John Podesta and CBPP's Robert Greenstein at their joint conference on progressives and the debt. Both said some interesting things about health care.

Greenstein said that health care reform efforts currently in Congress stand as a test case for whether real budget reform is possible; noting that past attempts to do the hard work of budget reform in 1990 and 1993 both blew back in the faces of the reformers (George H.W. Bush in the first case, and the Democratic Congress in the second). Greenstein and Podesta agreed that that landmark crime bill passed by the Democrats in August of 1994, including the right-wing angering assault weapons ban, and the failure of health care reform were the major causes of Democratic defeat, which is a theory that ties in well with my column today. Greenstein says that health care reform, a complex bill that accomplishes major goals while remaining deficit neutral, is an ideal opportunity for an object lesson in political courage.

"The first test is the health care bill," Greenstein said. "It's a lot easier to have a big signature initiatives and not pay for it," he said, referring to the Bush administration practice of passing deficit-expanding legislation. "If we can get health care and people don't get punished for it," then political incentives in favor of reform will be much easier to identify.

Podesta, in a more concrete item, suggested that there will be some "vestige" of a public insurance option in the final health care reform bill, saying that "bumpers" have been set up between Snowe's trigger option on the bottom and the House proposal's public option. He expects the final public option to end up landing somewhere between the two.

Both men argued that even the Finance Committee's legislation is a good framework that achieves many of the goals the administration set out with eight months ago, and that it is key for disappointed supporters to understand that reform comes in increments, over years, and not necessarily all in one fell swoop.

-- Tim Fernholz

I'm not sure I can quite endorse Isaac Chotiner's characterization of Robert Harris' op-ed as an example of Roman Polanski apologism getting worse. After all, Bernard-Henri Lévy has set a standard for badness in Polanski apologism that I don't think can ever be surpassed -- I would be particularly interested in further elaboration of the conception of national "honor" that requires that convicted rapists who escape the authorities remain at large, and in what sense the "statute of limitations" is relevant to a case in which a prosecution has been brought and the defendant flees. At least, Lévy's defense is so baldly stupid that it may permanently put to rest the always incompressible idea that he's some major intellectual sage.

But Harris' evasive op-ed is certainly plenty bad, for the reasons Issac states. Juxtaposing it with the pathetic Lévy petition also illustrates the nice catch-22 set up by Polanski's defenders: Apologists describe the oral and vaginal rape of a 13-year old as an "episode," and if someone explains what Polanski actually did they're taking "almost pornographic relish" in "retelling the lurid details of the assault." Harris also gives us an entry in the "proves far too much" category, saying "Mr. Polanski’s own young children, to whom he is a doting father, want him home." So everyone who has kids and cares about them gets one free sexual assault of an adolescent? I don't think I'm going to sign on to this newly minted principle ...

UPDATE:  In fairness to Lévy, I have to admit than Anne Applebaum's latest entry -- which once again blames the rape victim while getting basic facts about the case wrong -- is actually much worse. Never count Fred Hiatt's crew out of any competition for the most immoral and fact-challenged argument!

--Scott Lemieux

Here are some of the great pieces I've had the good fortune to publish this year:

• Michelle Goldberg considers the rise of violence on the right.

• Jessica Hopper reviews the first volume of Susan Sontag's journals and asks why mothers can't be intellectuals:

• Scott Lemieux defends the politics of judicial confirmation.

• Greg Anrig examines how some states successfully raise taxes, even in an economic downturn.

• Chris Hayes asks if depressions are necessary.

• Tom Lee argues Twitter isn't the best place for political discourse.

The American Prospect is a place where thoughtful, in-depth journalism happens every day. We nurture up-and-coming writers, report on the nitty-gritty of political debates, and offer a nuanced view of how policy battles are fought in the nation's capital.

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--Phoebe Connelly

At TNR, Marin Cogan has a good, short profile of Alan Grayson, the freshman Democrat from Florida who announced on the House floor yesterday that the GOP's health care plan is: "Don't get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly." He even used flashcards.

Grayson seems a little unhinged here, and that's too bad -- his theatrics remind me of covering my university's student government for the campus paper. But Grayson's opinions in favor of financial regulation and in opposition to escalation in Afghanistan and Iraq are coherent and progressive. I liked Grayson's effort to recommend constitutional education for the nation's high school seniors.

My slogan for the GOP health care platform would me more like this: Be rich. If you want an abortion, be rich! If you want to avoid bankruptcy in the event of a catastrophic car accident, be rich!

--Dana Goldstein

Harold Meyerson on Germany's election and the fate of socialism in Europe:

The decline of European socialism -- smack-dab in the middle of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism -- continues apace. On Sunday, the pre-eminent party of European socialism, the German Social Democrats (SDP), had their worst election since the end of World War II, winning a scant 23 percent of the vote, down from 34 percent the last time the Germans went to the polls.

The precipitous fall of the German left can be both under-interpreted (it wasn't as bad as it may look) and over-interpreted (it signals a profound crisis for socialism itself). In the spirit of inclusivity, I shall now do both.

KEEP READING ...

Paul Krugman just finished his speaking time on a panel. He's probably the most progressive voice on the panel, maybe at the whole conference, although everyone seems to agree that deficit-cutting efforts need to wait until the economy starts to improve. Today, Krugman made a strenuous case for pushing off "fiscal retrenchment" until full employment returns, perhaps in five years.

This is a really bad time to enage in fiscal retrenchment; it's a bad time on almost every dimension. We have, in effect, a global excess in savings: the amount that people would want to save is greater than the amount that people are willing to invest, even at 0 short-term interest rates. In that world, government deficits do not crowd out private investment; in fact, they crowd private investment in. ... Government deficits are helping the future as well as the present; by sustaining private investment, none of the usual rules apply. Even from the point of view of the fiscal situation, if you try to retrench fiscally now, you shrink the economy.

Even under current projections, Krugman says that long-term situation found in 2019 would not be catastrophic -- it would still be possible to reach a point where the debt-to-GDP ratio began shrinking. But like most of the panelists here, he thinks that the real obstacles aren't economic, they're political, and that the kind of legislating needed to solve the long-term fiscal problem requires a different political environment.

Watch the conference live.

-- Tim Fernholz

"A Primer on Reconciliation," put together by Ken Strickland of NBC at First Read does a nice job of explaining the arcane process and some of the limits that will make it both difficult and risky to push health reform through that process, despite the appealing feature that it can bypass Republican obstruction.

However, Strickland repeats a common misperception about the history of the process, and getting that history right is useful for understanding the limits. Strickland writes, "In 1974, in an effort to cut the nation's soaring deficits, Congress passed a law creating a procedure that could NOT be filibustered and would only need a simple majority of 51 votes to pass. Without a filibuster-proof procedure, lawmakers reasoned, the Senate would face difficulty passing bills that would make cuts in Medicare and Medicaid."

The thing is, deficits were not "soaring" in 1974. The federal budget deficit that year was $6 billion, or four-tenths of 1 percent of GDP. This year's deficit will be about 13 percent of GDP. Reconciliation was not designed to force cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, which were not yet growing rapidly. When I was in the middle of the reconciliation process in 1993, trying to push a complex provision, I suddenly understood the process in a way I never had from the books: It was an effort to impose a modern, public-management type of budget process on top of the existing congressional process without disturbing the powers that be. It was a kludge. Before 1974, the president wrote a budget, but there was no overall congressional budget. The authorizing committees created programs, the appropriations committee funded some of them, others, like Social Security and Medicare, were funded automatically, based on the rules of the programs. There was no overall plan for spending or taxes. The Budget Committee (also created in 1974) was empowered to produce a plan, but in itself that plan would have no power.

To make sure the plan had some connection to the existing process, the Budget Act required Congress to pass a budget resolution, subject to a time limit in the Senate not to force cuts, but to make sure that some kind of budget was created. (Strickland treats the time limit as if it was separate from the 50-vote requirement, while in fact they are the same thing -- there is no 60-vote requirement in the Senate, just a rule that debate is unlimited unless 60 senators vote to end it.) That resolution then creates a set of instructions to each of the relevant committees -- it sets an overall limit for the Appropriations Committee, and then tells each of the other committees how much money it has to save, or spend, in its programs. The biggest of those instructions usually goes, in the Senate, to the Finance Committee because it's jurisdiction (now) includes most of the money the government raises and half of what it spends. Those committees can meet the instructions however they want, but their actions are then put together in a "reconciliation" bill.

This wasn't originally meant to be a grand process for big policy changes. Rather, it was designed to "reconcile" the modern budget process with the arcane congressional process. In 1981, Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, figured out that the process could be used to package together and force a vote on the big budget cuts they envisioned. Later that decade, Sen. Byrd created the rule that bears his name to put some boundaries around the process, although it has still been used for both bipartisan (1990 and 1997 budget deals) and single-party bills, including welfare reform and tax cuts. But even in those cases, legislation has been sharply trimmed to accomodate the constraints of the process -- for example, that's why the Bush tax cuts had to be set to expire.

The reason this history is important is because it is a reminder that reconciliation was not designed to create a "50-vote Senate." It was really a limited scheme intended to connect the old spending process with the new.

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, there was a saying among neoconservatives: "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." Now, among progressives, one might say, "Everyone wants to do health reform. Real men want to use reconciliation" to cut out all Republicans and a few Democrats. But legislative strategy, like foreign policy, is not a test of manhood. It's a very arcane and limited process that will leave many key provisions behind, and a weak and limited health plan.

One way or another, we'll have to compromise. We'll either compromise with the most conservative Democrats and one or two Republicans, or we'll compromise with the limits of a process that was designed for a totally different purpose. The political question is simply going to be which compromise is worse.

-- Mark Schmitt

Note to The New York Times: The correct term for referring to the incorrect notion that this recession primarily affects men is "hecession," not "mancession."

In any case, on the paper's Economix blog today, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago writes that although women's labor force participation has inched up to 49.9 percent since the recession hit, it doesn't mean that women are about to surpass men in the labor force permanently. Why? Mulligan explains that men have been struggling during the recession because of the loss of construction and manufacturing jobs, but that it still takes unemployed men and women about the same time to find a new position after they've been laid off. In other words, women are not suddenly becoming more desirable workers to hire. Rather, certain gender-segregated industries have taken an especially hard hit, leaving more men than women looking for a new job.

Mulligan predicts that women's labor-force participation will fall when we pull out of the recession.

Once the male-intensive industries slow down their layoffs (even if those industries never actually expand again), more men than women will gradually find new positions — remember that more men are searching — and we will see women’s share recede from the 50 percent mark again.

This fits with a historical economic trend: Women's work is more visible during recessions, as men bear the brunt of layoffs. But when the economy rebounds, men remain the most desirable workers, with first pick of jobs -- like those in construction and transportation -- that are unionized and have good benefits. That's why it's crucial to remember that non-college educated women remain clustered in lower-paying jobs than their male counterparts; jobs that are less likely to include health insurance, less likely to be unionized or have stable hours, and more likely to have low wages. Any unemployment program should seek not just to create more jobs for laid-off men, but to address the bad working conditions in many "pink collar" jobs held primarily by women.

--Dana Goldstein

• The Senate Finance Committee voted 15-8 to strike down Jay Rockefeller's public option amendment, and 13-10 to nix Chuck Schumer's weaker bill. Ezra Klein explains why a majority on the committee feels it's more important to protect private profits than to save money and provide better, wider care.
• We all know that Sen. Ben Nelson ("D"-NE) loves arbitrary numbers. But his decree that nothing less than 65 votes in the Senate will be required for health care reform to be "legitimate" is rather shocking. Does Sen. Nelson understand what legitimacy means, and has he considered the consequences of dubbing the current reform proposals as illegitimate? I suspect not, and Nelson's obvious contempt for for small-d democracy should finally resolve the question of whether he is in favor of reform or not.
• I'm glad Sens. Leahy, Dodd, Feingold, and Merkley have introduced a bill to repeal the FISA Amendments Act that granted immunity to telecommunications companies who participated in illegal wiretapping with the blessings of the Bush administration. However, the act passed with 69 votes last year -- including that of then-Sen. Barack Obama -- so I don't expect this one to get very far.
• More deep thoughts from the How Take Back America Conference: Barack Obama is an "enemy of (unborn) humanity"; grave warnings about the coming dictatorship; Obama is the "first Muslim American President"; "the feminist movement is the most dangerous, destructive force in our society today"; defunding SEIU is the next step to thwarting the communist menace; and stock up on guns and ammo for the looming battle against Marxism.
• Remainders: Despite setbacks, the Obama administration has already cleared 78 Gitmo detainees for release; town hall astroturfing is about to go big time; Lou Dobbs doesn't know what a "conspiracy" is but he's going to warn you about it anyway; tea baggers were active during the Ford administration; and when it comes to liberalizing finance we never, ever, learn from history.
  

--Mori Dinauer

The past few months have been none too kind to the issue of immigration. Any lingering hopes that the White House would prioritize comprehensive reform this year were dashed when Obama stated that he didn't anticipate a bill passing before 2010. Repair of the country's broken detention system got that much more complicated with the resignation of Dora Schriro, the Homeland Security special adviser tasked with its overhaul. Not to mention that the health-care fight pretty much poisoned discussion of immigration.

So, some good news! The widow penalty looks like it's done for. Using a recent example, the penalty works like this: A Thai woman with two children marries an American. The couple files naturalization  green card paperwork. Her spouse dies before the paperwork is processed, eight months into the marriage. On top of suffering this huge loss, the woman and her children are now threatened with deportation, since they are no longer considered to be family in the eyes of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

This summer, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called for a temporary suspension of the penalty, and an amendment that would solve the problem permanently was attached to the Homeland Security appropriations bill. This week a slew of cases in Maryland, Florida, Texas, and Missouri that involve spouses presently targeted by the penalty have determined that the immigrant spouses and stepchildren of deceased citizens still qualify as surviving relatives and that USCIS' reading of the current law is wrong.

The ending is certainly a happy one for all of the plaintiffs involved, but the fact that something as uncontroversial as giving a widow a green card -- that she was due to receive anyway! -- was policy for so long highlights how in need of reform our current immigration system is.

--Alexandra Gutierrez

As expected, the Senate Finance Committee just rejected the Rockefeller amendment to include a public option in its health reform bill. During the debate, Chuck Grassley said:

The government is not a fair competitor. It's a predator.

The argument that the public option will kill the private insurance market is bunk: The public option would have to support itself from the premiums and co-pays it brings in from customers -- just as private plans do. And in many other nations, like France, there is a robust private insurance industry that coexists with a universal health care system, in which government guarantees free basic health care. The Dutch model is similar to what some Democrats have in mind.

But putting that aside, it's just really perverse to claim that government is the "predator" in this debate, when we know the havoc the insurance industry is wreaking on American lives: C-sections and domestic violence considered "pre-existing conditions"; annual and lifetime caps on medical spending, even for people who've been in catastrophic accidents; limited benefit plans that don't cover prescriptions, or preventive care, or mental health. The more insurers deny coverage, the more they profit. That's predatory, and it's why Americans deserve another option.

--Dana Goldstein

TTR goes meta this week with rankings to measure which Think Tanks get the most media attention. We also look at how to manage China's rise on the world scene, consider six sure-fire metropolitan policy choices, and take the temperature of the housing market.

• Ranking the Tanks. Earlier this month, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting released their list of the 25 most-cited Think Tanks in media last year. Predictably, the Brookings Institution took top billing with more than 2,000 mentions – at least double the amount of anyone else on the list. American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation rounded out the top three. Though citations were down for the fourth consecutive year, left-leaning institutions increased their share to 21 percent, up from 17 percent during 2007. In comparison, centrist groups held steady at 48 percent, while right-leaning groups saw a 5 percent decline to 31 percent. -- MH
• Managing China’s Arrival. To prepare for a future of interdependence, scholars at the Center for a New American Security present a strategic framework covering the political, economic, and military facets of this relationship. The report advises U.S. policymakers to support China's economic development, integrate the country into regional and global forums, and maintain our current alliances with other key players in Asia. Rather than regard China’s rise as a threat to our interests, the scholars identify areas in which U.S.-China cooperation will be beneficial for both countries. -- LL
• No More Delay: Proven Policy Solutions for New York City. [PDF] The Drum Major Institute released policy proposals for New York City, based on their success in other cities: guarantee paid sick leave to all workers, videotape police interrogations, require businesses with tax subsidies to create living-wage jobs, ensure construction of affordable housing, provide basic health care for the uninsured, and finance renewable energy systems. These six policies are proven to be cost-effective and don't hurt businesses. While DMI focuses on New York City, these may be good policies for the rest of the country as well.-- PL
• Housing Market Still on Weak Footing. Ted Gayer of the Brookings Institution weighs in on the state of the housing market. Despite modest increases in activity beginning in August, Gayer says the market is “still soft” and remains concerned by the Federal Reserve Bank’s activity in the market. The government, which is purchasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, is the market's primary source of liquidity, an expensive proposition that promises a difficult transition as public assistance programs are unwound in the coming years. -- JL

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
9/22/09
9/15/09

Eugene Robinson:

...there was certainly no artistic merit in the crime he acknowledged committing: During a photo shoot at the Los Angeles home of his friend and "Chinatown" star Jack Nicholson, Polanski plied a 13-year-old girl with champagne and drugs and had sex with her.

That is grotesque. In general, I agree with the European view that Americans tend to be prudish and hypocritical about sex. But a grown man drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl? That's not remotely a close call. It's wrong in any moral universe -- and deserves harsher punishment than three decades of gilded exile.

--Dana Goldstein

Paul Waldman explains why passing health-care reform might not be the political boon you'd expect:

Picture this scene: At a stirring Rose Garden ceremony, President Barack Obama signs health-care reform into law, with members of Congress beaming behind him. They erupt into cheers when he puts down his pen -- hands are shaken vigorously, and even a few hugs are exchanged. Afterward, everyone speaks of how they've honored Ted Kennedy and his lifelong crusade to get every American health coverage. Over the next few days, the news media note many times that Obama accomplished what every Democratic president since Harry Truman tried and failed to do. All agree that this will almost certainly be the defining domestic-policy achievement of his presidency. Republicans grumble but know they've been beaten.

Americans watching at home are pleased and hopeful. Terrific, they say -- I can't wait for my newfound health security! And when do they get it? A little over three years from now. Because in all the versions of reform now moving through Congress, most of the provisions don't take effect until 2013. Although you've probably heard this date, it hasn't been the topic of much discussion outside the wonkiest corners of the American health-policy debate. But we should keep it in mind when we're wondering how the public will respond to reform.

KEEP READING ...

Some reporting from Politico on the Republican health care alternative [PDF] reveals that it is not sponsored by any Republican leaders. Not exactly a strong vote of confidence. The legislation, which hasn't been priced by the Congressional Budget Office, relies on tax credits that don't begin to approach what is needed to provide families with insurance, and takes steps -- like slowing comparative effectiveness research -- that would increase the cost of health care. Even worse, and typical of GOP arguments, it suggests deregulating the insurance industry. (I know, it worked so well for finance!). What does that mean in practice? Mitch Berger explains...

[I]in 2007 a Rutgers University study, "Mandated Health Insurance Benefits: A Critical Review of the Literature" which considered CAHI’s work, among many others, found the following, "Despite exhaustive research, little compelling evidence exists that state health insurance mandates do, in fact, have a significant impact on" the cost of health insurance.

... Insurance companies keep costs down by using their volume-based bargaining power to make agreements with doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers to get lower rates than any individual buyer could ever achieve. But insurers operating from one state may have a difficult time, on their own, bargaining in states where they have relatively small market presence. It is unlikely that an insurer could ever get a doctor or hospital in Massachusetts to agree to the same fee schedule that is acceptable in Idaho. Even Medicare, the largest single "player" in the healthcare market, hasn't figured out a way to pay the same reimbursement rate to all health care providers across the country. It would seem like the only way for insurers to offer cheap insurance across states lines would be to offer less comprehensive and effective coverage--which, if this proposal goes through, is exactly what would happen.

When Democrats accuse Republicans of not offering an alternative policy, the GOP will cite this effort. But the half-baked plan won't save money, increase coverage, or improve the health care system for most Americans. Conservatives can say that Democrats are giving handouts to the insurance industry, but at least the mandate bargain has a quid-pro-quo: better, fairer, cheaper coverage for all Americans. Republicans offer an even better deal to insurers: We'll take off as many constraints on your behavior as we can, no strings attached.

-- Tim Fernholz

Bad news for those of us who've been hoping President Obama would confront members of Congress who are using abortion to delay health reform: The Times reports that Obama called anti-choice Democrat Bart Stupak -- who has sworn to beat back any bill that includes even private plans that cover abortion -- and told him to work the issue out within the Democratic Party. The problem is, the White House has given no indication as to what "working it out" should look like. Should women who receive insurance affordability subsidies be denied access to every health plan covering abortion? (Currently, most employer-provided plans do offer some abortion coverage, so this would be a radical shift.) That's what Stupak and his allies would like to see. They aren't satisfied with provisions that would simply prevent public funds from paying for abortions, by segregating the public money from private premiums and co-pays.

Stupak's logic follows that of the Hyde Amendment, which already prevents federal Medicaid dollars from paying for most abortions. The strategy is to use government health care programs to restrict the reproductive freedom of the poor, and now the middle class. But Stupak's proposed ban on abortion coverage for women receiving subsidies -- women who could earn as much as $43,000 annually -- would have the effect of discouraging abortion coverage across the board, since plans that deny coverage would be eligible for more government support and could legally attract more customers.

A pro-choice White House should be saying a firm "no" to these shenanigans. Reform should expand -- not restrict -- women's access to reproductive health care.

--Dana Goldstein

Courtney Martin says that top commanders of the U.S. Army need to start listening to the opinions of the rank and file:

As the debate over the best course of action to take in Afghanistan heightened last week, I was in a unique setting to consider the implications. As part of a workshop on media and the military at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, I was one of about 25 journalists who were given the opportunity to experience the military, meet soldiers, and even get a taste of life "inside."

The resounding message from Army leadership? "We've changed."

KEEP READING ...

I was unable to reach Ben Wittes on the phone the day the administration's decision not to seek a new preventive detention law came down, but I expected him to be disappointed with the move. I may have underestimated the degree to which he was disappointed -- Wittes takes to the Washington Post op-ed page today to compare the current president to one of his most vocal detractors, Dick Cheney. Wittes had crafted a preventive detention proposal that he thought would provide adequate congressional and judicial oversight over the executive branch's authority to detain terrorist suspects.

[T]he failure to go to Congress to write the rules means that the rules for detention will be written by judges. So far, the judges who have heard habeas cases have disagreed about a great many central issues -- many of which the Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve. The high court, which has not a single national security expert, may end up making good policy or bad. But because the Supreme Court is ideologically split on these issues, it seems likely that its swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, will play a disproportionate role in writing the rules of the road. Is it really better to hand this complex policy problem over to the whim of a single unelected detention czar in robes than to ask the legislature to decide when America is going to detain alleged terrorists, under what rules and with what rights?

One of Wittes' points -- which he made to me in more concise terms in my print feature a few months ago -- is basically that since we are going to have a preventive detention policy anyway, civil-liberties and human-rights groups should have focused on helping craft one that would be consistent with American values. These groups saw that as an oxymoron. Civil-liberties and human-rights groups are relieved that there won't be a preventive detention statute that makes preventive detention a permanent part of our legal system -- but the flipside, Wittes argues, is that policy will be written now anyway in a haphazard manner by unelected judges who may or may not have national security experience.

-- A. Serwer

... is Richard Cohen's Washington Post column. It's all froth, indignant and substance-free:

Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.

"Promiscuous!" I laughed aloud. God forbid the president talk to reporters. Cohen is in a huff because, as far as I can tell, after last week's news about Iran's nuclear enrichment capabilities, the secretary of state didn't make a statement and Obama did, instead of holding his "prestige" in reserve. (Surely, you're all familiar with America's vast strategic prestige reserves, located on a vast plain somewhere in North America?) I'm surmising that Cohen is actually angry because the president doesn't agree with him about this:

Only the United States has the capability to obliterate Tehran's underground facilities. Washington may have to act.

Leaving aside that it's not remotely clear that the U.S. has the capability to destroy Iran's nuclear program, let's all keep in mind that this Iranian crisis resulted in a Washington Times analysis that awarded Obama a "lift. ... Not only did the president look strong, he looked cunning."

Cohen is also angry that, among other slights, Obama is reconsidering the value of the Afghanistan conflict after the disastrous election there, which apparently did not affect whatever Cohen's views are, and that he did not deploy "consequences" against Congress for failing to meet his deadlines (should Obama have obliterated Max Baucus' underground facilities?). The real problem here isn't the Obama hasn't transitioned from candidate to president; it's that Cohen has no idea what the president does and how. The president can't pass a law and has free reign to reconsider U.S. political goals abroad -- one good rule of strategic advice is, don't take it from someone like Cohen who unironically name-checks MacNamara and Bundy.

Apparently, the announcement about Iran's new facility reminded Cohen of the Cuban missile crisis, which is certainly not the impression that I got (or perhaps the Cuban missile crisis wasn't as intense as I'd imagined). The real heart of this column seems to be that Cohen was frightened last week by the bad Iranians -- "These Persians lie like a rug"! -- and the president wasn't. Obama just handled his business, and moved forward, leaving the histrionics to Cohen.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Responding to anonymous sources cited in a New York Times article on Harry Reid's "quarterbacking" of health care reform legislation, a spokesman for the Senate majority leader emphatically denied that Reid plans to scuttle the public option in order to appease Senate "moderates."
• I think most liberals would agree that Democrats have not done enough to curb Wall Street's excesses or institute a more stringent regulatory regime. But from the point of view of our financial overlords, Dems have already gone way too far and are now paying a price for it: "Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party's harsh rhetoric about big business."
• Looking back at the Take Back America Conference in St. Louis this weekend, my main impression about the conservative shindig is that the Republicans who associated themselves with it should never be given any real power in government. Here's Michele Bachmann blathering about "one-world currency." Here's Mike Huckabee engaging in some time-honored substanceless U.N.-bashing. Nothing new, but it still astonishes me how sharply to the right the GOP has allowed itself to be pulled, and with such obvious glee.
• For contextualizing the previous, I highly recommend Conor Friedersdorf's ruminations on what the conservative movement's embrace of Glenn Beck means for conservative political discourse and how their tolerance for cranks and intolerance for apostates is a deadly cocktail.
  
• Weekend Remainders: At this rate, the remaining members of the Chamber of Commerce are destined to be a radical rump; Limbaugh inspires some white supremacists to march for "white civil rights," and the 2010 wave runs into another problem.
  

--Mori Dinauer

I just caught this great Times op-ed from Sunday on standardized test scoring, by Todd Farley, who has published an exposé book on the subject. He writes:

For one project our huge group spent weeks scoring ninth-grade movie reviews, each of us reading approximately 30 essays an hour (yes, one every two minutes), for eight hours a day, five days a week. At one point the woman beside me asked my opinion about the essay she was reading, a review of the X-rated movie “Debbie Does Dallas.” The woman thought it deserved a 3 (on a 6-point scale), but she settled on that only after weighing the student’s strong writing skills against the “inappropriate” subject matter. I argued the essay should be given a 6, as the comprehensive analysis of the movie was artfully written and also made me laugh my head off.

All of the 100 or so scorers in the room soon became embroiled in the debate. Eventually we came to the “consensus” that the essay deserved a 6 (“genius”), or 4 (well-written but “naughty”), or a zero (“filth”). The essay was ultimately given a zero.

I'm cautiously enthusiastic about the National Governors' Association-led effort to move toward national education standards. (Even though the first draft of the English/Language Arts standards was maddeningly vague.) But with national standards will come national standardized tests, so it's an especially good time to rethink how these exams are scored, and by whom. Perhaps teachers and principals should be scoring tests, not $8 an hour part-timers. In that case it would be important, especially with the push for merit pay, to make sure teachers aren't grading their own students' tests, to decrease the temptation to engage in foul play.

The fact of the matter is, scoring isn't fun, and it's not something teachers will want to spend more time doing. In some countries with great schools, like Finland, detailed national educational standards have not led to a major focus on standardized tests. For a variety of reasons, that doesn't look like the likely outcome in the U.S. So I only hope that we learn from past testing mistakes and create a more consistent, humane system, driven by deep respect for the critical thinking and writing skills necessary for success in higher education and on the job market.

--Dana Goldstein

Ajami, the new Israeli film on tense relations between Palestinians and Jews in Jaffa, won the Israeli equivalent of the Oscar -- the Ophir Prize -- for best film at a Haifa ceremony on Saturday night.

Gershom Gorenberg wrote here last week about skipping the news coverage of the Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas meeting to watch the film:

Despite Barack Obama's efforts, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would not be the denouement of successful diplomacy. Emotionally as well as physically, the get-together in New York on Tuesday would be half a world away from the unsolved conflict. Following updates on news sites would be an exercise in escapism, I concluded.

Instead, to stay real, I went to the movies. More specifically, I went to see Ajami.

The movie about Palestinians and Jews not understanding each other is the product of seven years of shared work by Scandar Copti, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Copti grew up in Jaffa. Together they wrote, directed and edited the film. Funding came from the government-backed Israel Film Fund, as well as foreign investors. Rather than use professional actors, Copti and Shani recruited residents of the neighborhood and actual police officers and put them through a year of acting workshops before starting to shoot. The dialogue was improvised, taken from the actors' lives. According to one account of the filming, only three of the dozen or so participants in the clan-arbitration scene knew that it was fictional.

Ajami's Jewish and Palestinian creators, Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti, also won the prizes for best director, best screenplay, and best editing. The film -- in which most of the dialogue is in Arabic -- now becomes Israel's candidate for best foreign film in next year's Academy Awards.

--The Editors

I've been wanting to say a little more about the touching "your mom" moment shared by Senators Debbie Stabenow and John Kyl last week. To refresh our memories:

As a number of people have noted, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee and EMILY's List are using this video as a fundraising tool. And Kyl's ignorant comments sure do get at the cold heart of anti-health reform ideology: A refusal to accept shared responsibility for basic health care, and a misunderstanding of what insurance is supposed to do -- pool risk, so that the fortunate subsidize the care of the unfortunate. That's how the private insurance market already works. By expanding the system and regulating it, the goal is to get the market to work more efficiently, cheaply, and humanely.

But there's something deeper going on here. Stabenow and Kyl's exchange occurred as the Senate Finance Committee debated a Kyl amendment to the Baucus bill that would have prevented the federal government from defining a minimum health benefit package after reform. This minimum benefit package is especially important for women: it includes maternity care and preventive care, which means insurance companies will no longer be able to deny coverage for routine gynecological and prenatal visits. And by mandating such coverage, the Baucus bill ensures an end to gender rating, the practice of insurers charging women -- particularly young women -- more for coverage than they charge men, because women use more health care during their reproductive years.

It is only by mandating reproductive health coverage -- getting everyone to pay into the pool -- that we can do away with gender rating, which is a clear form of discrimination. Thankfully, the Kyl amendment was defeated 14-9.

--Dana Goldstein

If you're trying to understand what President Obama did at last week's G-20 Economic Summit, you could do a lot worse than reading Joe Nocera's column, wherein he imagines Obama's efforts to cajole his reluctant world counterparts on behalf of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner:

What I really like about Tim’s ideas about capital is that even without other reforms, they have the potential to change bank behavior. If a bank wants to be so large that it is too big to fail, it can do so — but it will have to put up much more capital than a smaller competitor. If a bank wants to dabble in derivatives, it will have to pay a price in higher capital requirements. If a bank wants to invest in risky assets — ditto.

Banks hate higher capital requirements because they depress profits. So they’ll have to make a choice: risky assets or lower capital requirements. They won’t be able to do both.

That gets the administration's theory just about right.

-- Tim Fernholz

Greenspan said in an interview that he did not think the Fed was suited to policing lending abuses because of its focus on broader issues, but he added, "I'm not sure anyone could have done it better." He said the administration's plan to create a consumer protection agency was "probably the right decision."

The Fed has in fact done a terrible job policing consumer finance, and a new agency with that task as its number one priority is needed. While I don't expect the financial interests opposing the CFPA are going to come around on Greenspan's say-so, his statement does help disarm their exaggerations about unnecessary government interference. If Greenspan can admit it that more regulation is necessary, and Richard Posner can become a Keynesian, then everyone should be able to reconsider their biases in the wake of the crisis. Especially the people who caused it.

(Incidentally, this whole story on the Fed's failure to regulate consumer lending is worth a read.)

-- Tim Fernholz

The New York Times reports that Liz Cheney's star is rising in the party of torture:

“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”

By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.

For the GOP, torture is no longer a "necessary evil." It is a rally cry, a "values" issue like same-sex marriage or abortion. They don't "grudgingly" support torture, they applaud it. They celebrate it. Liz Cheney's unequivocal support for torture methods gleaned from communist China has people begging her to run for office.

The reason Cheney sounds so much like her father, Mary Cheney told the New York Times, is "not because she’s been indoctrinated. It’s because he’s right.”

Over the past couple of months, events have conspired to prove the Cheneys wrong. The recently released documents Dick Cheney said would unequivocally prove that torture saved American lives did not. While professional interrogators and military leaders have argued against torture, the apologists have had to rely on anonymous pleadings filtered through the same people who brought us Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda. A scientific survey recently proved that torture is counterproductive. Despite the fact that Cheney and his daughter have been claiming the Obama administration's abandonment of torture has made America less safe, the past month or so has seen the U.S. eliminate al-Qaeda leader Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan in Somalia and Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in Afghanistan. In the past week alone, the FBI foiled three bombings, one of which appears to have been a very serious threat.

Reality, it seems, is a nemesis not only for the former vice president but for the entire Cheney family. But because torture is now a "values" issue for the right, it is, like abstinence-only sex education, unmoored from the necessities of proving its usefulness in the real world, which is why someone like Liz Cheney is finding herself where she is. Unfortunately, the consequences of one of the two major parties in America embracing torture will affect us all in the long run.

-- A. Serwer

Ben Smith flags a bit of reporting in the Washington Times:

“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” General Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.

“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.

“That is correct,” the general replied.

Ben thinks this is evidence of "Obama's -- thus far -- limited personal involvement in the Afghan war." No, it's not. It's Obama's return to normal procedure -- I don't think having the president micromanage a conflict a world away is particularly smart. McChrystal reports to General David Petraeus, who in turn reports up the line of command. The videoconference bit made me recall this Steve Coll article on President Bush's approach to managing wars:

The General’s relationship with Bush proved to be one of the easiest to manage. At least once a week, the General and Ambassador Crocker participated in a videoconference with the President, the Vice-President, General Pace or his deputy, and Admiral William Fallon, Abizaid’s successor at CENTCOM, among others. The video meetings allowed Petraeus and Bush to communicate directly, and they also permitted Bush to avoid ponderous Cabinet-level deliberations by making his intentions on Iraq clear to all of his uniformed commanders simultaneously. Fallon, however, was uneasy about the conferences; the Admiral was Petraeus’s superior, and the videoconferences did not conform to a normal chain of command. Pace supported this approach, as an exigency of war. “For the President to be talking directly to his senior commander in the field makes all the sense in the world in a war where you have the capacity” through video links, he believed. Inexorably, however, tensions developed between Fallon’s command staff, headquartered in Tampa, Florida, and Petraeus’s staff at Victory Base.

Not long after the surge began, for example, Fallon undertook his own independent review of Iraq strategy; he dispatched Vice-Admiral James A. Winnefeld, Jr., to Iraq to examine the war. Fallon had to balance troop deployments to Iraq with requirements elsewhere in the Middle East and Afghanistan. He questioned whether Petraeus might be able to plan troop reductions on a faster timetable. Petraeus ultimately had his way, but the back-and-forth ratcheted up the pressure on the General’s staff. Petraeus’s aides felt that Fallon should be trying to win support for Iraq from neighboring Middle Eastern governments, not second-guessing their strategy and deployment timetables.

Essentially, bypassing Central Command made it harder for President Bush to weigh the costs and benefits of actions in Iraq against broader U.S. responsibilities around the world -- a troubling loss of perspective that is doubly concerning as Americans begin to face up to the consequences of our long under-resourced conflict in Afghanistan, which was left by the wayside as the government pivoted to focus on Iraq.

-- Tim Fernholz

Yesterday, the Washington Post revealed a new set of social network guidelines for their reporters, basically limiting reporters' ability to express themselves lest the Post be perceived as "biased." One reporter had tweeted a few observations--and honestly, had his tweets not seemed left-leaning, I wonder if there would be such a panic -- and the Post's executive editor cracked down.

“Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.”

Personally, I think having Post reporters express their personal views every once in a while -- not the politics of the newsroom mind you -- is actually more a needed transparency than a hit to their journalistic credibility. Having a newsroom full of reporters without opinions is actually far less credible. Marcy Wheeler argued that this focus on social networks missed the point, that it's reporter's relationship to the elite figures they cover that influences their reporting:

But it's funny how much this is about appearance. Only electronic social networks matter to the WaPo, not brick and mortar social networks. Walter Pincus can boast that his chumminess with George Tenet helps his reporting ... Weymouth herself can try to replicate the salons of her grandmother ... for a fee. And of all of these meatspace relationships have a tangible impact on the WaPo's reporting. All of these network ties very concretely contribute to WaPo's fatal--yet unacknowledged--bias, that of the Village.

Rather than admit and try to manage that bias, though, the WaPo would rather just curtail the free speech of its reporters.

Almost as if to prove Wheeler's point, Anne Applebaum yesterday wrote a blog post in support of Roman Polanksi -- who is being extradited on decades-old rape charges -- without disclosing that her husband, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, is lobbying for Polanski's release. Obviously Applebaum is a columnist and not a news reporter, but you'd think the Post would see failing to disclose that connection as "tarnishing their journalistic credibility."

One final observation: It never ceases to amaze me how elite opinionmakers develop the sensibilities of college freshmen when it comes to the criminal justice system when someone important might end up doing time -- whether it's Scooter Libby, Roman Polanski, or John Yoo. They could care less about the anonymous millions in prison in this country, but when someone important enough for them to sympathize with is facing potential prosecution and prison time, it's time to break out the protest signs and bumper stickers.

-- A. Serwer

Even at a J Street event I attended in Washington two weeks ago, there was some condemnation of the United Nations' Goldstone Report on last winter's Gaza war. The report found that both the Israeli army and Hamas were guilty of war crimes -- Israel of using excessive force to deliberately target civilians (such as bombing a Mosque during a service), and Hamas of launching rockets into Israel and using its own civilians as human shields.

Richard Goldstone, the report's lead author, is a South African judge and internationally respected human-rights lawyer; he prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. To compile the report, he worked alongside mainstream human-rights groups, including the Israeli organization B'Tselem. And the report is perfectly in line with journalism that came out of Israel and the Occupied Territories during the war, in which 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

So on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, it's appropriate to look honestly at the Goldstone Report, instead of vilifying its author, a Jewish man who considers himself a Zionist. Brant Rosen, a Reconstructionist rabbi based in Evanston, Illinois, has an important op-ed in the Chicago Tribune:

...painful as it is for us to admit, Israel's behavior in Gaza has consistently betrayed our shared Jewish ethical legacy.

This was true before the war, when the Israeli blockade denied Palestinians basic necessities; it was true during the war, when Israel responded with disproportionate force to Hamas rockets; and it has been true since the war, as Israel has deepened the blockade, preventing Gazans from rebuilding their homes. As a result of Israeli actions, some 60 percent of Gazans don't have continual access to water and face near-daily power outages of up to 10 hours at a time, while hundreds of thousands are dependent on foreign aid agencies for food.

A humanitarian crisis of this magnitude demands a response from within the Jewish faith community -- and knee-jerk rejection of any and all criticism of Israel won't change the facts. It will only distance us from a just and peaceful solution to this conflict.

Hat tip: Mondoweiss.

--Dana Goldstein

You've probably heard that Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland. I think this is a very good thing, and find most of the outrage over it baffling.

One thing to note here is that the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired was an absolutely appalling whitewash. Bill Wyman has a great deal of detail about this, but you know that you're in for a disgraceful rape apologia when early on the film conveniently truncates the victim's testimony before she actually describes the rape, preserving the illusion that it's a "he said/she said" case even though if you pay attention you'll notice that nobody actually disputes her version of events. The film's portrait of the judge is just as sloppy and morally odious; it's not just that the details about his life are both irrelevant and not very damning (he may have had sexual relations outside the sacred bounds of matrimony! With two women!), but that the attempt to create hypocrisy where there isn't any plays into the fundamental misdirection of the Polanski camp -- i.e. that he was prosecuted for being a European roue just too sexually sophisticated for provincial Americans, not because he raped a 13-year old. And the way in which Zenovich allows people to speculate about the victim's (again, completely irrelevant even if true) possible history of consensual sex is even more disgusting, although it inadvertently reminds us that one reason she probably went along with a far-too-light plea bargain is that she wasn't looking forward to the similar victim-blaming that would have undoubtedly happened in court.

In addition to any issues with a conflict of interest, most of what Anne Applebaum says is similarly unconvincing. The fact that the victim forgives Polanski doesn't give him a license to skip out on his punishment, first of all. Even worse is her bringing up alleged "evidence that Polanski did not know her real age." Since the sexual relations were not even nominally "consensual," I fail to see how this is relevant to anything -- it's OK to rape a 16-year-old but not a 13-year-old? And as with Zenovich's film, the allegations of "judicial misconduct" remain frustratingly vague -- there's some evidence that he acted oddly, much less that he actually went beyond his legal discretion. In any event, the proper venue for determining whether the judge acted properly is a court of law, and Polanski has the resources to get a fair hearing.

I've said before that evaluations of Polanski's art should be kept distinct from from his crimes, but this cuts both ways -- the fact that he's produced great art shouldn't give him immunity for a severe violent crime. As Kieran Healy says with the proper acid, "I look forward to more detailed explanations of who the Real Victim is here, and more fine-grained elaboration of the criteria — other than “marvelous dinner guest” — for being issued a Get Out of Child Rape Free card."

--Scott Lemieux

Barry Lynn on how outsourcing helped destroy domestic auto production:

Outsourcing offered a quick path to cash, as it enabled managers simultaneously to sell off in-house operations and to offload costly liabilities like union pensions. Outsourcing also promised longer-term savings as managers began to take advantage of the more lax competition laws to pool some production activities with rival companies. In the automotive industry this pooling took place in two ways. First, managers gathered in-house operations into new units and then spun these units off as independent firms that were free to serve competitors; two of the biggest products of this reorganization were Delphi, spun off by General Motors, and Visteon, spun off by Ford. Second, managers at different automakers increasingly turned to the same existing suppliers, like Bosch and C&A, for the same parts.

Top auto-industry managers never expected that the pooling of supply activities would continue to a point where any outside supplier would manage to capture nearly complete control over a production activity. On the other hand, no manager at a top-tier firm appears ever to have made any concerted effort to prevent such consolidations. The general assumption seemed to be that this industrial system would somehow regulate itself and that new suppliers would continue to emerge naturally.

And so the path was left open for private financiers like David Stockman, and for managers at parastatal corporations in nations like Japan and China, to grab whatever production activities they wished and to consolidate them to whatever degree they desired.

KEEP READING ...

This report, on how the health care debate has become Republicans versus everyone else on the issue of controlling Medicare spending, really goes to the heart of the dishonest opposition to the health care reform bill. If the GOP in Congress prioritzied the substance of their beliefs, they would be all for curbing rising prices -- cutting spending is supposedly their raison d'être. (The last round of savings in Medicare was passed by a Republican Congress.) A Republican in Congress who actually cared about spending but opposed health care reform on other principles would support these cuts, but not the whole bill.

Instead, they are trying to scare seniors with false claims about benefit cuts (for example) and gain political traction with the issue, throwing their historical search for entitlement control to the winds of political expediency. It's going to be very hard to take them seriously in years to come when they complain about Social Security spending, for instance. To understand the actual costs and benefits of bending the Medicare cost curve, this historical reality check seems useful:

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 was expected to save $112 billion over five years -- a 9 percent reduction in projected spending on par with the 10 percent in the Baucus bill. The cuts wound up saving so much more than expected that Congress reversed some of them in 1999 and 2000, said Jon Gabel, a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center.

Service to seniors was largely unaffected, said Robert Berenson, a Medicare expert at the left-leaning Urban Institute who also serves on the congressional Medicare Payment Advisory Commission. "There was anguish from the hospital industry, but I don't think anybody documented quality problems. And it dramatically added to the solvency of Medicare," he said, extending the life of the trust fund by 15 years.

Unfortunately, what was a bipartisan compromise in the 1990s has become a socialism in the oughts. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your congressional Republicans.

-- Tim Fernholz

A few days ago on Twitter, Marc Lynch sarcastically noted that the Washington Post had managed to publish a strategic debate on Afghanistan in which all of the people participating basically agreed with each other.

What I found most interesting though, is that every one of them was focused on a different aspect of counterinsurgency strategy. Jane Harmon argued that the U.S. needed to "focus on better governance as the way to persuade Afghans to side with NATO forces against the Taliban." Kurt Volcker said that "the whole notion of "killing terrorists" without supporting a responsible society in their place is fallacy." Gilles Dorronsoro focused on the importance of institution building. John Nagl emphasized the importance of a shift in strategy that placed an emphasis on protecting the Afghan population rather than just killing the enemy. Carl Levin also focused on institution-building, particularly the Afghan army and police. You get the idea.

So everyone agreed COIN was the way to go, which isn't much of a "debate," but their emphasis on different aspects of COIN inadvertently shows how difficult it will be for this strategy to work. There are so many difficult objectives that need to be achieved, and the whole COIN strategy falls apart if the U.S. fails to achieve any one of them. With no legitimate government, there's nothing for COIN to strengthen. With no strong civil society, the Afghan government will collapse. If the U.S. can't persuade the Afghan population to see American soldiers as being on their side, there's no way for a U.S. backed government to gain the trust of the Afghan people. Without functioning police and army, there's no one for the U.S. to hand over the job of protecting the Afghans over to. And so on and so forth.

Rather than convincing people that COIN will work, this "debate" really just showed how small the bull's-eye actually is.

-- A. Serwer

• The Washington Post reports that President Obama's vow to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is running behind schedule and a plan isn't yet in place to actually fulfill the promise. The clearest indication that the administration's strategy is being rebooted: White House Counsel Greg Craig is no longer in charge of the project.
• Greg Sargent digs through the latest New York Times/CBS News poll and finds a public that is very confused about what it means to be bipartisan: "The poll finds that an overwhelming majority of 64 percent think Republicans are opposing Obama’s health care plans mostly for political reasons. But it also finds that an equally large number, 65 percent, say Democrats shouldn’t pass a bill without Republicans -- even if they think it’s right for the country -- and should instead compromise to win over some GOPers."
• Ben Nelson refuses to say whether he'll vote for or against cloture on health care reform legislation, and his spokesperson is referring the curious to his "voting record." I was going to go through Nelson's voting record, but I think his legislative philosophy is pretty much explained by him being one of two Democrats to vote in favor of massive tax cuts just months after invading Iraq.
  
• Shorter Michael Gerson: Anonymous commenting on the Internet is like the Nazi propaganda radio. What's striking in this case is that Gerson is comparing hatred being disseminated in one medium to hatred being disseminated in a different medium when he didn't even have to change mediums. You know, there's plenty of hatred being spewed on talk radio in America every single day. It's not anonymous, has national sponsors, and draws significant attention to fringe issues. But apparently the real problem is some illiterate typing in all caps on a message board.
• Remainders: Another local energy concern quits the Chamber of Commerce; Ken Burns is a socialist propagandist; and if I had to do 130 grab-and-grins, I'd probably opt for a corrugated surrogate as well.

--Mori Dinauer

National Preparedness Month is almost over. Girl Scouts scouts long ago earned their badges by learning the art of ducking and covering; the Coast Guard drilled home the fact that we can never be too cautious, never be too vigilant, and never be too skittish earlier this month. And Homeland Security closed the comment period for its quadrennial security review weeks ago.

While we wait for the review's results, we thought it would be a good time to offer T.A. Frank's alternate vision for the threat-level system, as featured in our current print issue. To enlarge, just click.

--The Editors

Michael Crowley has some thoughts on the alleged terrorist plot involving Najibullah Zazi:

Doesn't this seem like something approaching the "ticking time bomb" scenario that constantly bedevils debates about interrogation techniques? How hard are the feds working Zazi for information about possible would-be terrorists inside the U.S. right now? How hard should they be working him? I keep leaning towards one conclusion--then imagining how I would feel about that conclusion if a bomb kills someone I know on the New York subway next week.

This week alone, in addition to the alleged Zazi plot, law enforcement agencies stopped an attempted bombing in Dallas and an attempted bombing in Springfield. In both of these instances, they made contact with the suspects at a very early stage. Obviously, until all the details of the alleged Zazi plot come to light, it's difficult to speculate how much danger the country is still in. But if anything, it's been a great week for domestic counterterrorism as a domain of law enforcement, and it's been a terrible week for people who think we need to break out the confinement boxes and waterboards every time the government captures someone it believes is dangerous. Crowley's point assumes that torturing Zazi would yield accurate information, and thus far, we have little reason to believe that's the case. In fact, recent scientific evidence suggests the opposite.

Let's say we did torture Zazi, and the scenario Crowley envisions occurs anyway. Would we then believe that torture doesn't work, or that we simply didn't "work him" hard enough? Once you've accepted the premise that torture is a magic bullet, the conclusion when it fails is going to be that we simply didn't torture as much as we should have.

From now on, are we going to have a debate over whether or not to violate the law every single time there's news of a potential terrorist attack?

-- A. Serwer

I wrote yesterday about the Obama administration's ambitious, yet somehow narrow definition of school reform. Today in the Washington Post, Randi Weingarten, the nation's most influential teachers' union leader, speaks in rather harsh terms about the administration:

"It looks like the only strategies they have are charter schools and measurement. ... That's Bush III." Weingarten, who praises Obama for massive federal aid to help schools through the recession, said her 1.4 million-member union is engaged in "a constructive but tart dialogue" with the administration about reform.

When I profiled Weingarten for the Prospect earlier this year, she was much warmer toward the White House. She even made a point of returning a call to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan during our interview, emphasizing their good relationship. But this was back during the stimulus fight, in which local school districts won big, preventing teacher and support staff layoffs. And it was before the depth of the administration's commitment to a pro-charter school and merit pay agenda emerged. The tone has changed.

Whatever your assessment of Obama's education agenda, there's little doubt that he is racking up successes, as Ruth Marcus noted earlier this week. I think the secret ingredient has been the excitement that the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition engenders at the state level, particularly among governors. Only eight to 12 states are expected to win the grants, meant to foster school reform with a focus on standards and accountability. Every governor would like to run for reelection with that feather in his or her cap. That's why state legislatures are moving quickly to overturn laws capping charter schools and limiting teacher merit pay, as the Department of Education has asked them to do.

--Dana Goldstein

Two weeks ago, I wondered whether, based on a WorldNetDaily smear job linking her communists and other nefarious people, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett would be Glenn Beck's next target.

Today, referring to Yosi Sargent's resignation from the National Endowment for the Arts, Beck is saying on his radio program that Sargent is small fry. "The one you need to start asking questions on is Valerie Jarrett. . . . it's the ones at the top of the ladder that you have to pay attention to."

More evidence of Beck's source: WorldNetDaily, co-host of this weekend's How to Take Back America Conference.

--Sarah Posner

On the floor of the Senate, Debbie Stabenow vs. Jon Kyl:

--Dana Goldstein

I don't think the Democrats should panic yet. It is still very early, and right now is an awful time for them to be polling: They simply haven't accomplished any of the major policy goals that they set in the 2008 campaign. Their biggest danger is seeing the current numbers and saying, well, we better just lie low. But that's not how you win an election. If the Democrats lose next year, they'll only have themselves to blame. Why?

- They didn't pass health-care reform, an energy bill or financial regulatory reform. Passing one or all of these bills is necessary to winning next year. Democrats need to demonstrate that they can govern effectively and fulfill their electoral promises. Wimping out, or compromising bills down to nothing, will not only fail to appease angry voters, it will give them nothing to bring back to their base.

- They didn't do enough to improve the economy. Much of the disapproval rises and falls with unemployment. If the Dems end up losing seats because the economy isn't strong enough, they'll have to look back at their bad decisions on the stimulus -- not just the size of the package, but how it was constructed, whether it was cutting state funding, not providing enough infrastructure investment, or including the AMT fix in the bill. Don't get me wrong, the stimulus has been a success, but that doesn't answer the question of whether it was successful enough.

- They didn't run with the president. President Obama is much more popular than Congress these days, and it shows. Democrats' efforts to distance themselves from the president may be a traditional way to demonstrate independence, but the mid-term elections depend on getting the Democratic base, particularly young people and minorities, excited. While some House districts where McCain beat the president might demand more cautious tactics, even there the benefits of Obama probably outweigh the costs. (And don't forget all those Republican seats where Obama beat McCain).

- Corruption dragged them down. The Democrats in Congress aren't as corrupt as the Republicans of the Delay years, when a network of lobbyist-instigated boondoggles spread throughout the GOP leadership. But there are enough individually corrupt Democrats that Republicans could build a narrative of problems during campaign season. In particular, Charlie Rangel and John Murtha are embarrassments to the Democrats. Democratic leadership should actively reprimand these members and reduce their power over committees, and soon.

Making a prediction right now, I'd say the Democrats face a net loss of 10 to 20 House seats, and a net gain of two or three Senate seats, where the map is very favorable to them; it's also my impression that the Democrats continue to have a stronger congressional campaign apparatus than the Republicans. Take all that with a whole shaker of salt, since it is so early. It all that depends on what congressional Democrats choose to do about their problems: Whether they take their majority for granted or decide to use it to pass legislation and make a case for staying in power.

-- Tim Fernholz

*Keep in mind, this story was pretty clearly planted by Democrats looking to invigorate their fundraising base; they're still on par with Republicans and most of the comparisons in the piece come with past Dem years, not with Republican success now.

Pema Levy talks to John Grubb of Repair California, the coalition attempting to call a constitutional convention in the country's messiest democracy:

The recession has left California, the most populous state in the U.S. and the eighth largest economy in the world, reeling. The latest budget cuts $8.5 billion from education and $2.3 billion from health care. California's governance problems, however, reach back decades; ever since 1978, Proposition 13 has capped property taxes. The fiscal situation is made even more dysfunctional by the requirement that two-thirds of the state legislature approve any budget, giving the Republican minority disproportionate power.

In the coming weeks, the coalition Repair California will begin the official process of calling a state constitutional convention, submitting ballot-initiative language to Attorney General Jerry Brown's office. Repair California proposes to restructure government through a state constitutional convention. The Prospect talked to John Grubb, official spokesperson for Repair California, about the crisis in California and the emerging movement to reform government.

KEEP READING ...

Last night, Katherine Tiedemann tweeted that the case of Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi is "looking more and more like the real thing." Indeed, over the past eight years, we became accustomed to the Bush administration trumpeting the arrests of incompetent wannabes as major counterterrorism successes -- but with Zazi, the New York Times reports, national security experts believe law enforcement may have foiled a plot that allegedly rivaled the 2005 bombings in London:

Jarret Brachman, author of “Global Jihadism” and a consultant to the government about terrorism, said some details — like what individuals trained Mr. Zazi in Pakistan — remained to be learned. But he said the case was “shaping up to be one of the most serious terrorist bomb plots developed in the United States,” one resembling the London public transit attacks of July 2005.

Yesterday, the FBI made two similar terror arrests in Illinois and Texas involving FBI agents posing as Al Qaeda operatives who provided suspects with dummy explosives. According to the Times, the alleged Zazi plot was far more serious -- "operational" rather than "aspirational." Zazi had attended an Al Qaeda training camp; he had the knowledge of how to build a bomb; and he was collecting the materials to complete the job.

There's still a lot we still don't know about the Zazi case -- how many others were involved, whether those people are in custody, or if the danger is really passed.

-- A. Serwer

Considering that the instinct in some quarters to panic over the revelation that Iran has a second secret nuclear program, the Obama administration seems to have played this one pretty well. American intelligence appears to have known about the plant for some time, which was part of the reason Iran came forward in the first place. By improving relations with Russia by dismantling the missile shield and making nuclear non-proliferation a focus of the G-20 summit, the president has succeeded in putting the U.S. on high ground diplomatically and embarrassing Iran: first because of the deception, and second because the deception failed. The sanctions that the right has been clamoring for for months can now be applied with more international support.

Obviously, none of that means that the news should be dismissed -- but Gary Sick argues convincingly that the people who have been crying for urgent armed interference with Iran have been consistently wrong, and Marc Lynch thinks that the way this situation has played out may hamper Iran's ability to reasonably "oppose the intrusive inspections and monitoring regime" Sick argues for as an alternative to war.

So seriously, don't panic.

-- A. Serwer

Michelle Goldberg reviews Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide:

Reading Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column is rarely fun. Week after week, he tries to humanize the world's most pressing problems through intrepid, immersive reporting, struggling to make his audience care the way he cares. Like his colleague Bob Herbert, he is relentlessly earnest -- both men insist on discussing things many would rather not hear about, and they are averse to glib contrarianism and snark. Kristof's moral urgency can seem hectoring, though that's not really his fault. It's an almost impossible task to channel outrage so consistently without leaving readers overwhelmed and tempted to tune out.

That's one reason why Half the Sky, written by Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is particularly impressive. The book presents a catalogue of horrors, including sex slavery, obstetric fistula, female genital mutilation, gang rape, honor killing, and AIDS. The authors are clear-eyed about the difficulties facing those trying to make change, the failures of foreign aid, and the occasionally terrible unintended consequences of foreign interventions. Yet Half the Sky manages to be inspiring and engrossing rather than numbing.

KEEP READING ...

Yesterday, Paul Volcker testified about systemic risk and criticized the administration's ideas about financial regulation. Though all of his criticisms weren't exactly convincing, a few were useful.

First, he went after the administration's decision to publicly recognize which firms are systemically risky (too big or interconnected to fail) and force them to carry more capital, have less leverage -- making them much less profitable -- and prepare detailed plans to dismantle themselves in the case of failure. He says merely identifying the firms carries with it the implicit promise of government bail-outs and increases moral hazard.

Here's the thing: The government doesn't decide if a firm's failure will be systemically risky or not, the market does. For instance, last year we thought Lehman wasn't a systemic risk because it wasn't very big, and when it failed and nearly brought the financial system to a halt, that was a big surprise that required extraordinary and expensive Federal action. But if regulators try to identify those firms, make them act more safely, and explicitly tell them that they will get no help if they fail while requiring them to create a plan for failure, I think that does a pretty good job making clear they won't get a bail out. Volcker's solution seems to be making sure bailouts are available only for commercial banking, whatever the consequences, which could lead to a situation where a future AIG takes down the banking system, and even then he concedes that some kind of regulator will need to identify institutions that are too big to fail and set rules for them, so it even gets a bit incoherent in the end.

Volcker also said that commercial banks shouldn't be allowed to have private equity or hedge funds in-house, or have proprietary trading desks. This is a good idea, and it ought to be in the plan. But Volcker also said, weirdly, that the Fed isn't getting enough power under the administration's plan, which would take away many of the Fed's regulatory powers in other areas while making it the main regulatory of systemically risky firms. The administration's plan has come under fire from all across the board for giving the Fed too much new power, so I don't know quite what Volcker is complaining about, except that Treasury would get additional checks over some of the Fed's actions to give the institution more political accountability.

On a side note, progressives often complain about how Volcker is excluded from the administration's deliberations. But Volcker is a creature of the Fed and the banks, having shuttled bank-and-forth between them for his entire career. And though his policies at the Fed brought us out of stagflation, they also involved a tough recession that had populists up in arms in Washington, D.C. While he's certainly advocated smart ideas, it's funny that the critics of banks and the Fed seem to forget everything Volcker did prior to, oh, 2006. Not say that Volcker wasn't right; though his decisions were hated at the time, they are now considered sensible -- might be some parallels with the bank bailouts in the future.

-- Tim Fernholz

• It's difficult to believe that a political party that constantly struggles with Senators like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, and Blanche Lincoln could actually muster the discipline to get the entire Senate Democratic caucus to break a Republican filibuster on health care reform legislation. This is merely a reminder that the real problem with these "moderate" Democrats isn't whether or not they support reform, it's that we have no idea whether they do or not.
• David Broder (I will not sully TAPPED with a link) believes the problem with the last three Democratic presidents is that they cared too much about the details of policy, whereas they should have governed more like, apparently, President Bush: "Obama has made it even more explicit, regularly proclaiming his determination to rely on rational analysis, rather than narrow decisions, on everything from missile defense to Afghanistan -- and all the big issues at home." Seriously? Yeah, relying on "narrow decisions" worked out great in the last administration.
• Let there be no doubt: Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) does not respect your intelligence. Speaking on a conference call with Iowa reporters, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee who repeatedly negotiated in bad faith to craft a "bipartisan" health care reform bill, wants to form a new "gang of six" in order to "coalesce around something that could eventually become more bipartisan." Max Baucus knows better than this, candidly admitting what everyone already knows: there is no such thing as a Republican health care reform bill.
• Karl Rove's least proud moment during his time in the White House was not doing more to "oppose Democrats more fervently in 2003 when they said the president lied about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction." Rove then added that "We should have stood up and taken a two-by-four to them in a polite and respectful fashion." Demonization, branding Dems as traitors -- this wasn't Karl's A-game. If his heart had been in it, he would have also made sure Democrats suffered for daring to point out BS when they saw it.
  
• Remainders: Behold the elegance of the free market in the fossil fuels industry; marvel at the efficiency of the for-profit news business; working for Matt Drudge apparently induces a form of dementia upon you; and libertarians ponder why their nominative party fared so poorly in 2008, anticipate that electoral success is right around the corner.

--Mori Dinauer

Gershom Gorenberg on why an indie film has more to say about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process than the politicians:

The advance publicity accurately predicted that this week's U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian summit would fall short of great historical drama. Despite Barack Obama's efforts, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would not be the denouement of successful diplomacy. Emotionally as well as physically, the get-together in New York on Tuesday would be half a world away from the unsolved conflict. Following updates on news sites would be an exercise in escapism, I concluded.

Instead, to stay real, I went to the movies. More specifically, I went to see Ajami. Like last year's Waltz With Bashir, it's an example of Israeli cinema's maturation as engaged art, harsh and sympathetic. Ajami focuses on Israel's Palestinian citizens, who are fated to live on both sides of the conflict. In the process, the film's Palestinian and Jewish co-directors blur the boundary between fiction and documentary.

KEEP READING ...

Kai Wright looks at the Center for American Progress' new report on how the recession is affecting people of color and points to this relevant excerpt:

African Americans and Hispanics have lost more economic ground and done so more quickly than their white counterparts from the end of 2007 to the summer of 2009, and the economic fortunes of minorities have fallen from lower levels than those of whites to begin with. This means that the gap in the economic security between minorities and whites is widening in this recession, as it has in previous ones.

[...]

The data show that there are apparent structural problems such as labor market segmentation, credit market steering, and discrimination in the U.S. economy and particularly in the labor market that present an unlevel playing field for minorities. Policymakers need to pay closer attention to these problems.

As Wright notes, there's a bizarre hunt for villains when it comes to racism that often misses the point--that nominally "color blind" public policy often results in outcomes that are indistinguishable from those that might arise from past policies that were deliberately structured to harm people of color. Wright also points out that changing policy to mitigate such outcomes is the kind of thing the right likes to demonize:

Those are the “concrete policy steps” that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have said add up to Obama’s secret “reparations” plan. Whether or not these people are racist is beside the point; they are working to build a racist world. That’s the debate, and we cannot allow them to hide it behind coded language about the size and nature of government.

There is frankly, something to this. Leaving aside the fact that the South developed its allergy to "big government" around the time that black people started to be included in the social safety net, last week UNC Chapel Hill Professor Marc J. Hetherington and Vanderbilt Professor Jonathan D. Weiler did a study on opposition to health reform with racial resentment and concluded the following (via Yglesias):

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.

Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

An appreciated little surprise in Education Secretary Arne Duncan's big speech today, in which he seemed to put NCLB reauthorization on the legislative agenda for 2010: While reminiscing about Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," penned in 1963, Duncan mentioned the persistence of school segregation:

This was nine years after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools violated the Constitution, but most minorities were still isolated in their own classrooms. Many still are today and we must work together to change that.

That's a significant hat-tip from an official not known for being deeply invested in this issue. But Duncan should put his agency's money where its mouth is. Currently, draft guidelines for the $4.3 billion Race to the Top grant program do not cite integration as a goal. Similarly, the topic never came up in Duncan's speech last month previewing the $650 million "Invest in Innovation" education reform program, another stimulus project.

What can the federal government do to foster school integration? It can create financial incentives for urban and suburban school districts to form partnerships, in which suburban kids can attend elite city magnet schools in exchange for suburban classroom seats for low-income city kids. The administration is already pressuring states to lift laws that cap the number of charter schools and prevent teacher merit pay. How about incentives for states that equalize school funding across district lines, so property tax revenue doesn't solely determine funding?

It's encouraging to see the administration moving quickly on its ambitious education agenda. But the definition of "reform" needs to be broader, even to accomplish Duncan's own stated goals.

--Dana Goldstein

Joe Mathews on Jerry Brown's non-campaign to be the next governor of California:

While his opponents have been campaigning for more than six months, the front-runner won't admit he's a candidate. (However, Brown and his aides are happy to brag about his fundraising -- as of this summer, he had eight times more cash in his political account than Newsom.) His public schedule consists almost entirely of press conferences where he limits the discussion to his current job as state attorney general.

For someone of my age -- I was a toddler when Brown was elected governor in 1974 and a fourth-grader when he left office at the end of 1982 -- the Brown that shows up for these press conferences doesn't seem like the rebel politician who once dated a pop star and ran for president and suggested the state have its own satellite. This new Brown looks conventional. Bald except for a ring of whitish hair around the back of his head, the 71-year-old attorney general wears a conservative charcoal suit with white shirt and dark tie, stands in front of a tableau of cartoonish charts, and tries to make a no-brainer policy -- demanding that "mortgage modification" firms prove they help homeowners -- sound sexy enough to make the 6 o'clock news.

KEEP READING ...

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner testified before the House Financial Services Committee to kick off this fall's attempt to pass Financial Regulatory reform. While Geithner delivered a surprisingly forceful performance -- perhaps his best public appearance -- the show was stolen by a memo [PDF] released by Chairman Barney Frank's office the day before, announcing modifications to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency legislation designed to make it more palatable to skeptical members of Congress.

The modifications come in response to charges of regulatory over-reach and explicitly spell out what ought to be common sense to preempt the Chamber of Commerce's fear campaign (no, butchers and doctors will not be affected by the CFPA) and a few technical fixes that shouldn't worry consumer advocates. The biggest worry is the elimination of the "plain vanilla" requirements, which would mandate that lenders offer simple, basic financial products alongside whatever other options, risky or not, they would normally lend. But for the time being, that's out the window.

Is it the end of the world, consumer-protection wise? According to consumer advocates, not really. Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates, e-mails to say "the devil is in the details -- but I think you can still have a pretty effective agency." Others made similar points, noting that the agency will still have broad rule-making power over the entire industry. And the loss of plain vanilla isn't the end of the world: The agency can still right rules to ensure that standardized, understandable contracts are used by lenders so that consumers are still protected.

Interestingly, Geithner wouldn't commit to supporting Frank's specific changes; asked about the elimination of plain vanilla by Representatives Maxine Waters and Jeb Hensarling, Geithner said that the chairman's ideas were "helpful" but declined to take the plain vanilla option off the table:

Look, our judgment was -- in shaping these recommendations ... the sort of simple proposition that consumers should be given the choice of opting for a simple 30-year fixed mortgage, for example. Now, they shouldn't be restricted from the ability to do something different to better meet their needs, but that should be one of the options they're able to choose from. And we want to make sure the system as a whole does a good job of providing that choice. ... These are judgments the committee's going to have to work through. And, as I said and we've always said, there are different ways to find this balance.

There are still a lot of moving parts in this bill, and a lot of opposition to surmount. These concessions are mostly smart politics, not undermining policy, that you have to be leery about going forward, especially in the Senate. Whatever happened to these guys?

-- Tim Fernholz

During the last G-20 meeting, in April, I noted that the husbands of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Argentine President Cristina Kirchner were no-shows for the big spouse photo-op. Well, they've done it again: According to Sandra McElwaine at The Daily Beast, neither gentleman will be appearing at a two-day "spousal program" hosted by Michelle Obama to coincide with this week's Pittsburgh G-20 meeting. (There's no word yet on whether India's First Gentleman, former politician Devisingh Ransingh Shekhawat, will attend the spouse-only festivities.)

Eighteen wives will meet at Rosemount, the country estate of Theresa Heinz Kerry. They'll be entertained there by the Pittsburgh Philharmonic Orchestra’s Jazz Trio and are expected to dine on organic, locally grown produce. During the trip, the wives will also meet cellist Yo-Yo Ma and visit the Andy Warhol Museum, whose director plans to open one of the artist's famous time capsules in front of the dignitaries.

It sounds like fun! But once again, in their refusal to participate in these events, male political spouses demonstrate just how regressive it is that political wives are expected to spend so much time on ceremonial help meet duties. Not only that, but their interests are assumed to be traditionally feminine: art, music, cuisine. In truth, many of these women, like Michelle Obama, thrive on working alongside their husbands on policy detail and political strategy. Mexican Fist Lady Margarita Zavala is a former legislator. Other spouses have totally separate careers; Chinese President Hu Jintao's wife, Liu Yongqing, is an engineer.

But that's not the face political wives are expected to project to the world. And these expectations won't change until half of all political spouses are male, at which point I doubt we'll expect very much of political spouses at all.

To be fair, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, of France, ditched the last G-20 meeting in Madrid and has traveled internationally this past year promoting her new album. This week, she will be in Pittsburgh, and on Saturday night will entertain at a clambake for the world leaders.

--Dana Goldstein

New research (PDF) from the London School of Economics says that, when it comes to fighting climate change, investing in contraception is five times more effective than technologies such as wind and solar power.

Meeting basic family planning needs along the lines suggested would save 34 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of CO2 between now and 2050 - equivalent to nearly six times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK's annual total.

In response to the report, some enviro-bloggers have called for "breaking the taboo" on linking population policy with environmental policy. Writes Lydia DePillis at TNR,

[I]t's simply about reducing the number of footprints as well as their size, through increasing access to reproductive choice--a key element of the development agenda, and something the Obama administration itself endorsed eight months ago, by scrapping the gag rule on family planning. Too bad it looks like that's totally off-limits in the American environmental discourse.

Now, I do understand that rapid population growth can exacerbate the impact of climate change. And I'm all for meeting global family planning needs. But linking these goals is problematic. I know the LSE report contains a prominent caveat that this is about non-coercive family planning, but using fears about climate change as a way to expand contraceptive use is eerily reminiscent of "population control" policies, some of which were coercive and all of which were rooted in the idea that certain people should be having fewer babies. (For some examples of the historically problematic use of "population control," check out this report from Hampshire College.) I wonder whether liberals who are favorably linking to the LSE research are aware of how close its rhetoric is to racist talking points about population. Some taboos exist for a reason.

Of course, the LSE report is carefully worded and clearly aware of this history. But it still doesn't sit right with me. I mean, the study was commissioned by a group called the Optimum Population Trust. Apparently "optimum population" is the new way of saying "population control." And it seems that Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, is one of the group's patrons. In the late 1960s, Ehrlich's book set off a panic that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation in the coming decades -- and spurred the U.S. to create its first global family-planning policies, which were not super feminist. (Read Michelle Goldberg's book for more on this.) 

As Claire, guest-blogging at Feministe recently, asked, "Has science ever actually defined the number of people the world and it's resources can support, or is this fear of a "population bomb" about something else, more to do with which babies are being born than how many are being born?" (Emphasis mine.) Which is why I reject the "population control" frame altogether. Put another way, by Adam Werbach in a 2005 article about population and immigration,

In the population-control frame, the number of people and their placement on the planet is the root problem that needs to be solved. But is that really the problem? Family planning has succeeded only where economic security has been improved for women, including access to food and shelter, health care, and education. With this as background, the real population problem may be the treatment of women on the planet.

Richard Prince has corrected his original item reporting that Tavis Smiley severed ties to Wells Fargo after an article by Mary Kane in the Washington Independent, which I posted on Monday, citing Prince's original report. In the article, Kane reported on allegations made by Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan that Wells Fargo recruited Smiley specifically to target black borrowers with sub-prime loans. Smiley actually severed ties with the bank in 2007, when they were initially sued.

UPDATE: Mary Kane points out that, despite Smiley's insistence that he "severed ties" with Wells Fargo in 2007 he said this at the STOBU conference in February of this year:

In his latest statement, Smiley says he actually made that decision in “the first quarter of this year,” some time “shortly after the State of the Black Union” and announced it then in a statement he posted on his Website.

The undated pdf file, which was not issued as a press release, notes that “Wells Fargo currently is not a sponsor of TSG or Tavis Smiley Foundation programs or events and will not be a sponsor for SOBU for 2010.” Wells had sponsored the State of the Black Union 2009, which was held on February 27-28. According to C-SPAN footage, Smiley lauded the bank at the symposium, telling the predominantly African American audience that “Wells Fargo is your financial action planning guide to every stage of life.” Later that day Smiley praised Wells Fargo for its generosity and said, “This conference is free this year because of Wells Fargo. Give them some love.”

Smiley wasn't exactly being accurate then, when he says that ties with Wells Fargo were "severed" in 2007.

-- A. Serwer

I measure the seriousness of a politician by how willing they are to work against their own interests to enact good policy. It is a rarity. As McKinnon points out, Obama's unwillingness to close the political shop - to elevate governance above politics - is a sign that he'll probably be an effective advocate of his policies....but he certainly wasn't serious when he wrote "it's not enough to just change the players. We have to change the game."

Sigh. It's weird to read Henke, a political consultant, complain that a politician might consult people about politics, especially linking McKinnon's piece, which is complimentary of Obama's political efforts. And it's embarrassing that Henke would take the line he quotes from Obama out of context -- Obama is arguing in favor of stronger conflict of interest rules and an independent ethics watchdog for Congress, not that advisers to previous administrations shouldn't be able to join his staff, or that politics has no place in a politician's office. (As a sidenote, the problem with Karl Rove was never that President Bush had political advisers. It was that political advisers were doing all the policymaking, and from time to time doing things like firing U.S. Attorneys. That isn't a problem in the current White House.)

But the debate about the political office has been had before. Obama has long explained that his political vision is one of organizing -- that is, political work -- that leads to policy change. The change that Obama ran on is the new foreign policy he promotes, the universal health care bill he's trying to pass, and the financial regulations he's trying to reform. All of that requires politicking.

This is just concern-trolling on Henke's part, but I'm curious what he thinks would have happened if Obama had foolishly chosen to scuttle the political office in the White House. How would that have helped him enact the agenda he promised voters? No doubt Republicans, seeing that move, would have lined up to work with him on the issues.

Incidentally, the other good reason to have a political office -- besides the fact that it helps a president pursue his agenda -- is that it is good for democracy. It keeps the president in touch with his constituents and his electoral coalition. A world where politicians don't think about politics isn't a democracy, it's a technocracy. While sometimes I think it would be nice if soulless bureaucrats just consulted science to make appropriate politics, at the end of the day that's not a vision where the people can hold their government accountable. In the American system, we meld together policymaking with politicking and hope for the best. Sometimes, we get it.

-- Tim Fernholz

President Obama has decided not to seek a preventive detention statute from Congress, despite having suggested he would during his national security speech at the National Archives earlier this year, reports the New York Times. Instead, the administration will continue to detain terror suspects under the authority given by the Authorization to Use Military Force. It's not clear whether the authority would apply merely to the "hard cases" left over by the Bush administration--people who were either tortured or were detained on the basis of intelligence that might not hold up as evidence in court--or whether they'll try to detain more suspects indefinitely in the future.

This development marks a pretty significant victory--if not the end of the war--for civil liberties advocates, who had been fighting furiously against any attempt to pass a new preventive detention law. Under the current system, lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees have won 30 out of 38 habeas cases, meaning that the administration's preventive detention authority is far from absolute, and less airtight than it might of been with a whole new statute.

That said, former military commissions defense lawyer Major Eric Montalvo (Ret.) called the move "a political decision, not a legal one," and warned that the habeas process was inadequate for providing due process to detainees. "The burden of proof in habeas proceedings is low," Montalvo says, adding that "most of the "bad guys" are not represented by military counsel so their cases have not been referred, and therefore no military/civilian defense counsel has access to the case to develop the information necessary to effectively debunk the government's position." Montalvo represented former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed Jawad in his military commissions trial.

Other civil liberties advocates were similarly unsatisfied. “It may be one of the better results we could hope for, but in reality indefinite detention continues,” said Michael W. Macleod-Ball, Chief Legislative and Policy Council for the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "That’s antithetical to the American justice system.”

ACLU Lawyer Jonathan Hafetz, who also represented former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed Jawad, in his Habeas case, was even more critical. "This hardly constitutes meaningful change," Hafetz said. "In fact, Obama is continuing to make the same core assertion Bush did: the right to seize individuals anywhere in the world and deny them a fair trial based on the notion of a global "war on terror....[T]he best way to fight terrorists is to treat them as criminals, not combatants."

Ken Gude, a human rights expert at the Center for American Progress, was present at a White House meeting with civil liberties advocates regarding changes to the military commissons where the decision not to pursue a preventive detention statute was relayed. “I’m pleased that it doesn’t look like they’re going to go to Congress for any new detention authority," Gude says. "But I think we have to remember that that would have been the worst case scenario, because what would have resulted, regardless of the administration’s intentions, would have been a broad preventive detention scheme that would have been disastrous."

The question now Gude adds, is whether or not the administration will stick with its rather broad assertion of detention authority outlined in its March 13 filing or whether it will go further than that.

-- A. Serwer

You may have heard about the Kentucky Census worker, Bill Sparkman, whose body was found in a state park with the word "fed" scrawled on it -- on Sept. 12, the same day as nationwide "tea party" protests against President Obama's health reform effort.

Well, the story is even more tragic: It turns out Sparkman was a single father who recently survived cancer and earned a college degree through online correspondence courses. In addition to working a few days a month for the Census, he was a substitute teacher. One of Sparkman's Western Governor’s University professors found his story so inspiring that Sparkman was asked to travel to Salt Lake City to address his graduating class. The local paper wrote a story about the event. "There are no failures," Sparkman said in his speech, "just teaching moments.”

--Dana Goldstein

General David Petraeus didn't make much news yesterday at the Counterinsurgency symposium being hosted by Marine Corps University--when asked by a reporter how he felt about the alternative "containment" strategy reportedly being considered by the administration and how it stacked up against General McChrystal's recent recommendations, he demurred. But only in public. In fact while most of the active duty military staff there avoided commenting on what course the president should take in Afghanistan, there seemed to be an undercurrent of frustration among some in attendance that McChrystal's suggestions weren't immediately embraced, expressed most prominently by Eliot Cohen, a former adviser to Condoleeza Rice. While I found the conference interesting, I ultimately left with the concern that COIN has so many moving parts, and success relies on so many external factors--like the character and quality of local leadership--that the decision to simply apply McChrystal's recommendations is far from an easy one to make.

Petraeus made a number of important points--one of them being that "[w]e need to make sure we’re not prisoners of our experience in Iraq, and make sure we don’t try to solve every problem with solutions that worked in Iraq." Some supporters of escalation in Afghanistan have been quick to say "we just need to do what we did in Iraq" without much mind to the vastly different circumstances in Afghanistan. Petraeus also warned that the U.S. shouldn't overlearn the lessons of Vietnam, adding that "the lessons of history can illuminate but they can also obfuscate."

Framing the debate over the strategy in Afghanistan are the political realities there and in the United States. McChrystal emphasized a 12-month timeline for turning things around in Afghanistan--that goal seems sensitive both to the political circumstances here, in which support for the mission is floundering--and in Afghanistan, where in a year the parliamentary, regional, and district elections will provide another opportunity to shore up the legitimacy of government institutions after the recent presidential election, which was marred by fraud. COIN can't work without a legitimate government to protect. As MCU professor Dr. Amin Tarzi put it, the election "helped the insurgency and not us," because it shored up the insurgents' claim that "this democracy is fake."

Hidden in all this is the reality that if the United States does pursue a COIN strategy, American military forces are likely to be there for years and years to come--even if McChrystal is successful at turning things around within a year. No matter what the administration says about its goals in Afghanistan being limited, this is still Objective 3b:

Promote a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people and can eventually function, especially regarding internal security, with limited international support.

No matter how well things go in the next 12 months, that will take years. I'm guessing that the hope is that, by then, an improved situation in Afghanistan will mean less political pressure to leave, as well as an opportunity to show tangible improvements with another election, thereby validating the decision to stay.

"If next year’s elections are botched again," Dr. Tarzai said, "we are not going to do well."

-- A. Serwer

• The headline of this Roll Call article might be "Pelosi backs away from deal with Blue Dogs" but read eight paragraphs in: "Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.) and a group of fellow Blue Dogs had negotiated a deal with Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) in July that would remove the link to Medicare. ... But Ross returned from the August break saying he couldn't support a public option under any circumstances, essentially withdrawing his support for the deal." Something to keep in mind as the inevitable Pelosi-the-backstabber myth develops.
• This latest piece of "analysis" from The Atlantic's least persuasive blogger assumes that not only do the American people want bipartisan legislation, but that they demand it. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll confirms that the public likes bipartisan solutions, but that doesn't mean they punish politicians who "ram" legislation through Congress on a party line vote. Furthermore, while only 23 percent of the public would blame both parties for failing to pass health care reform, 37 percent would blame congressional Republicans.
• Ryan Grim reports on a funny side effect of the Republicans' zeal to go after ACORN: "The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to 'any organization' that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things."
• Has a sitting Senator ever led a delegation to a international conference with the explicit intent to undermine the official position of the United States on an international matter? Leave it to Senator James Inhofe. The president has always had the widest latitude in international affairs, with the Senate limited to treaty ratification and funding war. Inhofe is throwing that basic institutional relationship out the window because of the conspiracies in his fevered mind.
• Speaking of global warming, I think it's a pretty big deal that PG&E is leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest of the business lobby's fanatic climate change denial. Undergirding every flavor of climate change denial is a belief that regulating emissions will utterly transform the economy for the worse. PG&E's departure is a challenge to the idea that profits are so fundamental to a healthy economy that not even the slow destruction of the planet is worth slightly reducing them.
• Remainders: You can always count on the editor of National Review to respond to the president's foreign policy priorities with the equivalent of junior high school joke; anti-government sentiment might be on the rise, but it's nowhere near the levels that ushered in the GOP class of '94, Kevin Drum yawns at the Great NEA Conference Call Scandal of aught-nine; and I think inviting the former governor of Alaska to speak to an investor's forum ought to call into question to judgment of the investing class in general.
  

--Mori Dinauer

In her review of CBS' new drama The Good Wife which premiered last night, Alessandra Stanley notes that "television dramas rarely do very well with the underbelly of politics." The show promises the story of the political wife who, as Dana memorably wrote, is asked to "stand by your man" in the wake of a sex scandal.

But, in fact, the show moves on from the sordid political scandal very quickly, and takes up the larger question of what happens when women on the Mommy track attempt to re-enter the workforce:

The Good Wife puts an incredibly romantic spin on the challenges of going back to work. Within the first episode, Florrick lands a plum firm job and wins a high-profile criminal defense case, humiliating her stereotype of a female boss (Christine Baranski), the kind of woman who pretends to mentor younger women, but is actually threatened by their success.

But what happens to the real-life Alicia Florricks -- the women who attempt to claw back to the top after years or even decades at home with the kids? For one thing, their income suffers: A woman can expect her salary to drop by 2 percent for each year she stays home from work. That means a woman who earned $80,000 10 years ago, then quit her job, can expect her new salary to be $64,000.

Read the rest of Dana's take here.

--The Editors

Kevin Mattson on Irving Kristol and the current shape of the conservative movement:

As fate would have it, Irving Kristol's death was announced amid continued debates about the significance, or lack thereof, of the tea baggers' march on Washington. Sliced into reports about screaming marchers who called Nancy Pelosi a Nazi and threatened to come back armed next time, there was the passing of Kristol (1920-2009). What better contrast could this coincidence present: screaming paranoids passing through the streets of the nation's capital versus a New York Jew and sophisticated man of ideas passing away. You could even construct a narrative around this: Once a movement of ideas, small magazines, and intellectual levity, conservativism was now only paranoid and irrational. It's a nice story. Too bad Kristol's life doesn't bear it out.

KEEP READING ...

Tim Fernholz on why Democrats can't escape the comparison between Afghanistan and Vietnam:

The Republican Party in general has denied the lessons of Vietnam, long associated with two Democratic presidents and ended by a Republican, however disgraced. With a Democratic administration now in power, the specter of Vietnam is hanging over U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan. Democrats, still haunted by the legacy of that conflict, are trying to apply its lessons to today's war.

The return of the Vietnam comparisons is partially a question of personnel. Of President George W. Bush's top advisers, only Secretary of State Colin Powell had served in the conflict and represented the most cautious strain of Republican foreign policy. Among the current president's advisers there is Richard Holbrooke, the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who was a Foreign Service officer in Saigon, and National Security Adviser Jim Jones, who served as a platoon and company commander in Vietnam. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was an Air Force intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, though he was not stationed there. And, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could not serve in Vietnam, her opposition to the war caused her break with her Republican roots.

KEEP READING ...

It should be obvious at this point that Michelle Malkin doesn't believe that racism is wrong in principle; she believes it's wrong if it's applied to white people in general or applied to her in particular. Today, responding to the suspected terrorist plot the feds may have foiled last week, Malkin reiterates her support for denying people their constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure:

The bust reminded America that while the annual September 11 memorials are over, the jihadi threat looms. Yet, homeland security remains crippled by a 9/10 mentality.

Remember: The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the New York Police Department a few years ago to try and stop random bag searches. The civil liberties absolutists are against random searches because they constitute “unreasonable” invasions of privacy. They’re against targeted searches because they amount to racial, religious, or ethnic “profiling.” And they’re against across-the-board searches because they lack “individualized suspicion.”

There are constitutional arguments against stopping people based on the fact that they "look Muslim," but there are also practical arguments--namely that terrorist organizations are quite aware of the lure of racial bias as policy for some Americans, and as far back as 2005 were "looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces."

Now maybe it's just that I'm at a counterinsurgency symposium today, but I think COIN doctrine has a relevant point to offer here: it's impossible to get good human intelligence if people see you as the enemy. Were the government to adopt a policy of racial profiling as Malkin suggests, it would alienate the population we're depending on to feed us information about potential attacks. Also, if you're worrying about ethnicity rather than evidence, you're going to waste a lot of resources chasing innocent people.

So not only is racial profiling morally reprehensible, it's also just a bad policy. Unless of course, you see all Muslims as the enemy and you want to punish them for simply existing.

At any rate, what's with conservatives using potential terrorist attacks to argue for their own terrible policy ideas? There's something amusing going on here: since Obama is president, conservatives can't take credit for successful arrests, and the success itself makes it harder for them to argue that Obama's national security policies are putting Americans at risk.

-- A. Serwer

The Justice Department has sent out the new guidelines for using the state secrets doctrine. They fall well short of the standards that would be set by Senator Leahy's bill, but they seem more rigorous than I would have expected:

Facilitation of Court Review – The policy ensures that before approving invocation of the state secrets privilege in court, the Department must be satisfied that there is strong evidentiary support for it. In order to facilitate meaningful judicial scrutiny of the privilege assertions, the Department will submit evidence to the court for review.

Significant Harm Standard – The policy adopts a more rigorous standard to govern when the Department will defend assertions of the state secrets privilege in new cases. Under the new policy, the Department will now defend the assertion of the privilege only to the extent necessary to protect against the risk of significant harm to national security.

Narrow Tailoring of Privilege Assertions – Under this policy, the Department will narrowly tailor the use of the states secrets privilege whenever possible to allow cases to move forward in the event that the sensitive information at issue is not critical to the case. As part of this policy, the Department also commits not to invoke the privilege for the purpose of concealing government wrongdoing or avoiding embarrassment to government agencies or officials.

State Secrets Review Committee – A State Secrets Review Committee will be formed consisting of senior Department officials designated by the Attorney General who will evaluate any recommendation by the Assistant Attorney General of the relevant Division to invoke the privilege. The Committee would make its recommendation to the Associate Attorney General, who would review and refer to the Deputy Attorney General for a final recommendation to the Attorney General or his designee.

Approval by the Attorney General -- The policy requires the approval of the Attorney General prior to the invocation of the states secret privilege, except when the Attorney General is recused or unavailable. Previously, the invocation of the state secrets privilege could be approved by the appropriate Assistant Attorney General

Referral to Inspectors General. The policy implements a referral process to relevant Offices of Inspector General whenever there are credible allegations of government wrongdoing in a case, but the assertion of state secrets privilege might preclude the case from moving forward.

The DoJ also "commits to provide periodic reports on all cases in which the privilege is asserted to the appropriate oversight Committees in Congress. "

Most of this stuff seems pretty toothless to me, with two exceptions, the first being the submission of evidence to the judge for court review, and the second being the referral to the Inspector General's office in cases where there are "credible allegations of government wrongdoing." In the past few years, IG's have been pretty important in exposing abuses of executive power, and there's reason to believe the administration would take a potential IG investigation seriously.

The guidelines are certainly better than I would have expected from the preliminary reports, but we'll see if they satisfy the senators sponsoring the state secrets bill. Leahy gave some positive feedback, (he also takes credit for some of the changes) but he didn't say that he would abandon the bill.

-- A. Serwer

Obama's entire address to the United Nations this morning is worth a read, but I just want to highlight this section on Israel/Palestine:

We continue to call on Palestinians to end incitement against Israel, and we continue to emphasize that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. The time has come to re-launch negotiations – without preconditions – that address the permanent-status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians; borders, refugees and Jerusalem. The goal is clear: two states living side by side in peace and security – a Jewish State of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.

Note the choice of language: not just "a state" for Palestinians, but one that is "viable," "independent," and "contiguous" -- code words for an end to Israeli army checkpoints in the Palestinian territories. Obama also repeats, unequivocally, his call for an end to Israeli settlement activity. And in a recognition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's insistence that Palestinians agree to recognize the Jewishness of Israel -- an implicit understanding that past Israeli governments did not bring up at the negotiating table -- Obama references "a Jewish State of Israel."

Compare this careful positioning to the vagueness of George W. Bush's statements on Israeli/Palestine to the UN, over the course of his two terms. In 2002:

America stands committed to an independent and democratic Palestine, living side by side with Israel in peace and security. Like all other people, Palestinians deserve a government that serves their interests and listens to their voices. My nation will continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and comprehensive settlement to the conflict.

And in 2008, in which the word "Israel" did not even appear in Bush's speech:

We must stand united in our support of other young democracies, from the people of Lebanon struggling to maintain their hard-won independence, to the people of the Palestinian Territories, who deserve a free and peaceful state of their own.

Bush's vagueness supported the status quo. Hopefully, Obama's willingness to wrestle with the details speaks to his administration's commitment to resolving the issue.

--Dana Goldstein

A letter [PDF] has been going around Capitol Hill, written by a number of legal experts who study consumer financial protection. It argues in favor of the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Noam Scheiber has broken down some of the key points, but one interesting thing he didn't touch on was how the agency would interact with state financial regulators, which have often been overruled by federal-level regulators. Unlike other banking regulators, the CFPA is designed to provide a floor, not a ceiling, to state level consumer regulators:

The traditional police power of states to regulate commercial practices in the interest of their citizens has been undermined by federal banking regulators, whose assertion of preemption has worked to the advantage of financial institutions at the expense of effective consumer protection by states and localities. Two developments are illustrative. In 1978, the Comptroller of the Currency helped to deregulate the credit card business by issuing interpretations of preemptive effect which prevented the states from enforcing their own usury laws. Almost twenty years later, in the 1996 decision Smiley v. Citibank, S.D., N.A., the Court unanimously upheld the interpretation of the Comptroller of Currency that late payment fees were deemed "interest" for the purposes of preempting state regulation of late fee amounts ... Subsequent federal decisions have accepted the principle of deference to the Comptroller's interpretation of the scope of nationalized banking regulation.

The importance of a more balanced federalism is widely endorsed in the scholarship. In our view, whatever merit arguments in favor of preemption have are outweighed by the value of having states operate as laboratories, trying different approaches to lending problems, particularly in dealing with the relatively young problems of predatory lending. It is important that Congress not take a simplistic approach favoring only federal development of consumer protection laws in financial products and services; and that Congress not limit the role of the states to enforcement of state and federal law. State legislatures and courts need to be able to continue to develop consumer protection law. Many of the types of non-bank financial products that will be within the jurisdiction of the CFPA have been regulated up until now only by the states, and their good work should not be undermined. In addition, problems are much more likely to grow larger if they can be addressed only at the federal level and not also by states where they first appear.

-- Tim Fernholz

Eric Holder told Russ Feingold a long time ago that he shared Feingold's concerns about abuse of the state secrets privilege--the legal doctrine used to protect information vital to national security in court cases--but the administration continued to invoke the privilege to block entire lawsuits related to torture, rendition, and surveillance, rather than using it to block specific pieces of evidence, as it was originally intended. The Obama administration's abuse of the state secrets privilege mirrors the Bush administration's, and that's despite months of promises to reform its use.

The Obama administration's behavior prompted Patrick Leahy, Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy to propose a bill that would give judges more power to regulate the use of the privilege. In order to avoid that outcome, the administration promised to set new guidelines and reign itself in, and this is the result:

The new policy, which could be announced as early as Wednesday, would require approval by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. if military or espionage agencies wanted to assert the privilege to withhold classified evidence sought in court or to ask a judge to dismiss a lawsuit at its onset.

“The department is adopting these policies and procedures to strengthen public confidence that the U.S. government will invoke the privilege in court only when genuine and significant harm to national defense or foreign relations is at stake and only to the extent necessary to safeguard those interests,” says a draft of a memorandum from Mr. Holder laying out the policy and obtained by The New York Times.

If that sounds, familiar, it's because it's exactly what Holder told Feingold in February, that he would "review significant pending cases in which DOJ has invoked the state secrets privilege, and will work with leaders in other agencies and professionals at the Department of Justice to ensure that the United States invokes the state secrets privilege only in legally appropriate situations." The difference between the new policy and the old policy is that the old way was "more informal," according to Charlie Savage. In other words, the new policy seems to formalize the process by which we got the results that had civil liberties groups crying foul in the first place.

As for the timing of this announcement, bmaz points out that oral arguments are scheduled soon for the al-Haramain v. Obama case, in which the administration is attempting to block judicial scrutiny into the use of warrantless wiretapping--a case in which the plaintiff, an Islamic charity that was wiretapped by the NSA, is wiping the floor with the administration. If anything, the "new policy" seems designed to obscure the fact that the government intends to invoke the privilege again very soon.

-- A. Serwer

In a Washington Post op-ed this morning, some refreshingly direct rhetoric on taxes from Creigh Deeds, Virginia's Democratic candidate for governor. Deeds wants to overhaul the state's transportation system, with new investments in high speed rail, bus rapid transit, and road and bridge upkeep. Theoretically, Deeds' opponent, Bob McDonnell, agrees on the priorities. But McDonnell won't raise taxes to fund improvements. Democrats across the country should take a lesson from Deeds, who writes frankly, "We can't solve this problem without new revenue."

Let me be clear regarding taxes. I will sign a bill that is the product of bipartisan compromise that provides a comprehensive transportation solution. As a legislator, I have voted for a number of mechanisms to fund transportation, including a gas tax. And I'll sign a bipartisan bill with a dedicated funding mechanism for transportation -- even if it includes new taxes.

It takes some guts to say this at a time when the conservative grassroots is in full-on tax revolt. Most disturbingly, opposition to health reform has revealed that a significant chunk of Americans do not understand that taxes pay for the services they use, and do not realize that their Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits are coming to them via government. Good for Deeds. He won't let the ignorant and irrational frame the debate.

--Dana Goldstein

• If you want to know the details of the more than 500 amendments proposed to Max Baucus' health care bill, I suggest you glance at Igor Volsky's useful tables at the Wonk Room. The vast majority are frivolous Republican proposals designed to slow down the whole process, but there are also some serious proposals, mostly from Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), to increase subsidies, include the public option, and otherwise try to make this a better bill.
• Bradford Plumer observes that while the global recession has decreased global carbon emissions, a new IEA report confirms that good emissions policy in Europe, China, and even the United States is having an impact. I predict this will lead to a major error of causation by Republicans who will assume the good policies created the recession and thus must be rolled back before the economy goes into meltdown. Indeed, right on cue, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) wants to strip the EPA of any funding used to "regulate or control carbon dioxide from any sources" other than from a "mobile source."
• Scott Lemieux flags this Wall Street Journal piece on Sonia Sotomayor's early queries during oral arguments as a Supreme Court justice and highlights some interesting news: Sotomayor feels the Court ought to re-examine the long-held assumption that corporations have the same rights as a living person. Not only is this a good idea, but it serves as a reminder that market capitalism is less the product of an invisible hand than it is the result of the laws, rulings and regulations that shape it.
  
• Chris Orr thinks a pop-up ad at The American Spectator's web site distills the American right because it expresses the single-minded conservative pursuit of pissing off liberals. Maybe. But I think Young Americans for Freedom spokesman Jason Mattera's "argument" that the conservative movement's women "are hot" whereas the left's are not more succinctly captures the sophomoric immaturity and lack of intellectual seriousness which seem to be the qualifying attributes for aspiring movement conservatives.
• Remainders: Massachusetts is on its way to approving Senator Dukakis (or somebody); the U.S. Senate provides excellent opportunities for grown men to regress into whining infants; a reminder that Condoleeza Rice was National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State for eight years; I'd have so much more respect for Fox News if they openly admitted to being the GOP's cable television PR division; and Newt Gingrich, friend of the Latino community.

--Mori Dinauer

This week's TTR preps you for the big issues at the upcoming Copenhagen Summit on climate change, checks in on Pakistan's counterinsurgency capabilities, tracks the economic decline, and keeps an eye out on which U.S. cities are best weathering the crisis. We're also pleased to welcome our final fall intern, Melissa Harrison.

• Will China and the U.S. cooperate on Green policy? [PDF] With the Copenhagen Conference on global warming looming, the U.S. and China are feeling the heat on energy policy, argues Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution. The past year has marked large strides in cooperation between the two countries on clean-energy issues, but there has been very little real progress in terms of legislation. Cap-and-trade policy, a sticky subject for both countries, needs to be the point of agreement. With the support of cohesive U.S. and Chinese policy, it is much more likely that the Copenhagen Conference will be able to meet the world's expectations. -- JL
• Can Pakistan wage a counter-insurgency campaign? [PDF] The New America Foundation assesses the military contributions Pakistan can make along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Border. Many are calling on Pakistan to employ counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics to fight the Taliban: “build[ing] popular support for a government while marginalizing the insurgents.” However, the study is skeptical that Pakistan is up for the task because India remains its most pressing national security concern, and American support for a counterinsurgency campaign could do more harm than good by stoking anti-American sentiment. -- PL
• The decline continues. [PDF] A September 2009 report from the Center for American Progress rounds up the latest economic statistics as unemployment rates and job losses deepen. Last month, the U.S. economy lost 216,000 jobs -- upping the national unemployment rate to 9.7 percent. African Americans and Hispanics are most affected by job loss, with their unemployment rates at 15.1 percent and 13 percent, respectively. That’s second only to youth unemployment, which now stands at 25.5 percent. -- MH
• Texas wins. The Brookings second-quarter MetroMonitor reports most cities in Texas outperforming other cities in the country on employment, unemployment, gross metropolitan product, and housing price indicators. Our own Washington metro area deserves a mention as one of three cities that has recovered to pre-recession levels of economic output. By contrast, the cities that experienced the sharpest declines from April to June 2009 compared to the first quarter were concentrated in Central California and Florida. The pace of urban recovery varied widely across regions and industries, but those areas engaged in a diverse set of economic activities have been shielded from the worst. -- LL

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
9/15/09
9/8/09

Riffing off of Josh Marshall's confidence in drones, Mike Crowley observes that, even in the event of a complete takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, U.S. forces would be able to have a pretty credible deterrent threat against them, given our 2001 demonstration of force. But performing counter-terror missions -- i.e., drone strikes against terrorist leaders -- in the area would be another question entirely, as Stephen Biddle explained at a congressional hearing last week:

I disagree fundamentally with Rory Stewart on the function that havens provide and the ability of the United States to thwart geographic haven with Special Forces strikes or with drone attacks from a distance.

What havens do is not to provide real estate for the construction of tent farms where you can conduct training seminars. What havens do is to protect insurgent organizations or terrorists from human intelligence penetration on the ground, which is the primary threat to their survival. The efficacy of our drone attacks turns importantly on our ability to find intelligence on where these organizations and where these individuals are located. That intelligence comes, to an important degree -- not wholly, but to an important degree -- from human intelligence through penetration on the ground, which would be made extraordinarily difficult by the presence of a hostile government that actively prevented people from getting access to the members of the organization.

That's why control of the government underneath the drones is so important to the efficacy of drone-based counterterrorism, and another reason why, again, I think the problem here is that the component elements of what people talk about when they talk about counterinsurgency are very difficult to pull out of context and make them work on their own without the rest.

Essentially, without control over the airspace and the ability to move with relative freedom on the ground, we're not going to be able to do targeted drone strikes against terrorist leaders in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan -- U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan depend on cooperation with Pakistani intelligence. Let's say the U.S. does scale down to a light footprint approach, and al-Qaeda returns to Afghanistan. The only deterrent we could use would be a 2001-style assault. Is the U.S. government going to be willing to undertake an operation of that nature, based on what will surely be inconclusive intelligence? Probably not without a lot of dithering.

None of this is to elide the debate about whether safe havens are actually the issue here, since potential terrorist safe havens abound in the world, or whether fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan is actually destabilizing Pakistan, our greater national concern. Nor should we set aside the question of whether the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan is something the United States should be willing to concede.

-- Tim Fernholz

Via Andrew Sullivan, this Al Jazeera report on how Israelis in Jerusalem feel about Barack Obama--feelings are mixed, but at least one interviewee suggests he should be assassinated:

I think what I find remarkable is the one guy who accused Obama of being a Muslim and of being naive about "the Arab mentality." I mean I supposed those aren't mutually exclusive, but if the idea is that Obama is Muslim and therefore is about helping Arabs instead of Jews, doesn't that suggest that he understands whatever sinister motives they supposedly have, and that's why he's helping them in the first place?

Racism rarely makes real sense, so it doesn't matter if the beliefs contradict one another.

-- A. Serwer

So how can the Dow be flirting with 10,000 when consumers, who make up 70 percent of the economy, have had to cut way back on buying because they have no money? Jobs continue to disappear. One out of six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. Homes can no longer function as piggy banks because they’re worth almost a third less than they were two years ago. And for the first time in more than a decade, Americans are now having to pay down their debts and start to save.

Even more curious, how can the Dow be so far up when every business and Wall Street executive I come across tells me government is crushing the economy with its huge deficits, and its supposed “takeover” of health care, autos, housing, energy, and finance? Their anguished cries of “socialism” are almost drowning out all their cheering over the surging Dow.

The explanation is simple. The great consumer retreat from the market is being offset by government’s advance into the market. Consumer debt is way down from its peak in 2006; government debt is way up. Consumer spending is down, government spending is up. Why have new housing starts begun? Because the Fed is buying up Fannie and Freddie’s paper, and government-owned Fannie and Freddie are now just about the only mortgage games remaining in play.

Why are health care stocks booming? Because the government is about to expand coverage to tens of millions more Americans, and the White House has assured Big Pharma and health insurers that their profits will soar. Why are auto sales up? Because the cash-for-clunkers program has been subsidizing new car sales. Why is the financial sector surging? Because the Fed is keeping interest rates near zero, and the rest of the government is still guaranteeing any bank too big to fail will be bailed out. Why are federal contractors doing so well? Because the stimulus has kicked in.

In other words, the Dow is up despite the biggest consumer retreat from the market since the Great Depression because of the very thing so many executives are complaining about, which is government’s expansion. And regardless of what you call it – Keynesianism, socialism, or just pragmatism – it’s doing wonders for business, especially big business and Wall Street. Consumer spending is falling back to 60 to 65 percent of the economy, as government spending expands to fill the gap.

The problem is, our newly expanded government isn't doing much for average working Americans who continue to lose their jobs and whose belts continue to tighten, and who are getting almost nothing out of the rising Dow because they own few if any shares of stock. Despite the happy Dow and notwithstanding the upbeat corporate earnings, most corporations are still shedding workers and slashing payrolls. And the big banks still aren't lending to Main Street.

Trickle-down economics didn't work when the supply-siders were in charge. And it's not working now, at a time when -- despite all their cries of "socialism" -- big business and Wall Street are more politically potent than ever.

--Robert Reich

Paul Waldman on how Glenn Beck ended up de facto leader of the GOP:

When you're out of power, stirring up trouble is a lot more fun than writing policy papers. But the problem for the GOP today is that it is increasingly being defined by its ugliest impulses, its most gullible conspiracy theorists, and its acceptance of a rising tide of nuttiness. Conservatives are having quite a bit of success drumming up manufactured controversies, but each one makes them look less and less like the kind of people you'd trust to run the country.

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This summer, the National Governors Association partnered with the standardized testing industry and 47 states to create national education standards for high school students. Yesterday the coalition released its initial draft standards in English/language arts and math.

On English/language arts in particular, it would be too generous to call the results a "curriculum;" the draft focuses more on skills than knowledge, and in some ways, is even vaguer than predecessor efforts. For example, 35 states already roughly align their standards through the American Diploma Project. That program calls for students to write at least one six to 10 page research paper before graduating from high school. But the new Common Core standards only require that students "gather the information needed to build an argument, provide an explanation, or address a research question." In writing, they must be able to "sustain focus on a specific topic or argument," but there's no word on what "sustain" really means. Is it a five-paragraph essay? A meaty research paper? A persuasive letter to the editor?

For comparison's sake, in Finland, whose schools are rated best in the world by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, students are required to write a research paper in every single high school course, including the sciences.

This Common Core draft would represent an improvement on the current patchwork system. But the coalition must produce much more detailed standards if the goal is really to guarantee that every American high school student is exposed to a rigorous curriculum that prepares them for either higher education or the job market.

--Dana Goldstein

I haven't commented on the arrest of three men in Queens in connection with an alleged terrorist plot to attack the nation's transit systems because it's not clear to me what's going on. The three men, Najibullah Zazi, his father Mohammed Wali Zazi, and Queens Imam Ahmad Wais Afzali have only been charged with lying to investigators--according to the Washington Post, more serious charges are likely to follow.

There has been speculation that part of the reason for the light charges so far is that the FBI and NYPD acted too soon. Andy McCarthy's solution to this problem isn't better coordination between local law enforcement and the Feds; it's a domestic spying agency:

I hope this isn't what happened, but, sad to say, I would not be surprised if it did. And if it did, expect a renewed debate over whether we need a British style MI-5 because, critics have long contended, our law-enforcement agencies are not competent to do effective spying.

Americans don't like the idea of a domestic spying agency, and for good reason--they're an open invitation to government abuse of power. The CIA is technically barred from operating domestically, but several times in its history it has turned inward and spied on Americans, including political dissidents. Why conservatives like McCarthy would advocate for something as blatantly fascist as a domestic spying agency with torture powers while Obama the dictator is in office is beyond me.

But let's just reiterate really quickly: a government-run public insurance option: fascism. Andy McCarthy's "domestic spying agency": not fascism.

-- A. Serwer

Bank of America is trying to convince government regulators that it is solvent enough to repay the government's rescue funding. Here's how one financial analyst characterizes the situation:

“What the bank is trying to show is that it’s come back to health and that it’s operated solely as a private entity in the marketplace,” said Richard X. Bove, a banking analyst at Rochdale Securities. “But the bank is still under this enormous political pressure from Congress, the S.E.C. and the attorney general of New York.”

But of course "political pressure" isn't quite the right way to characterize the situation. Political pressure is when Sen. Russ Feingold tells the president he's not going to vote for more troops in Iraq. Bank of America, meanwhile, is under investigation for breaking the law:

In August, the SEC accused Bank of America of concealing from investors the plans to pay billions of dollars in bonuses to employees of Merrill Lynch, the troubled Wall Street firm it bought at the peak of the financial crisis. Bank of America agreed to settle, without admitting or denying charges.

But Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York rejected the settlement, saying it suited the immediate interests of the SEC and Bank of America, but neither the public interest nor that of Bank of America's shareholders.

Now the S.E.C. is going to trial, New York AG Andrew Cuomo is planning to file charges, and Congressman Edolphus Towns is expanding his investigation. Bankers love to complain about all the pressure they face from regulators (even after the government took extraordinary steps to bail them out), but the reality is that pressure generally comes when they act like criminals. Lying to shareholders and blowing taxpayer money on extravagant bonuses are indicative of bad management, not problematic regulation.

-- Tim Fernholz

This slipped my mind yesterday, but Mary Matalin made an outrageous statement on John King's CNN show on Sunday, referring to President Obama (transcript via Nexis):

So he can be rational, particularly since he knows these clods and demagogues in his party use references to him, from Jimmy Carter to Nancy Pelosi -- they're clever and come out and play the race card. And the -- and the Obama people themselves played the race card against, of all people, Bill Clinton -- yes, they did -- who is -- arguably had a more authentic black American experience than Barack Obama. But the Democratic Party has a long history of playing all the hate cards. If you're pro-marriage, you hate gays. If you're pro- life, you hate women. If you're pro-freedom, you hate government.

I'm curious--was it Matlin's work for Dick Cheney or George Allen that made her such an expert on blackness? Oh I know--it was being chief of staff to Lee Atwater. That must have been it. How exactly is Obama's experience not "authentically black"? What exactly makes Bill Clinton's experience more "authentically black" than Barack Obama's? Maybe she's riffing off Andy Young or Shelby Steele. Who knows. But the next time Matalin appears on CNN, she should be asked to explain what she meant.

In a debate about whether or not race is playing a part in the health care debate, Matlin made an indefensible and racially charged comment--one that at the very least, begged an explanation--and neither John King nor James Carville actually had a word to say about it. Matalin felt comfortable making such a statement on television, and with good reason! Neither of the other two people on the show felt there was anything wrong with it, or tried to correct her or ask what she could possibly mean. Imagine what she says in private.

Matalin made a ridiculous statement--and no one batted an eye. But it's almost understandable--had someone said something, they would have been accused of "playing the race card" because for some people, racism doesn't make them uncomfortable. Calling it what it is makes them uncomfortable. So neither of Matalin's colleagues said a word.

Daniel Lyons is coming a bit late to the "Twitter sucks" party, and he wants everyone to get off his lawn already:

Twitter has become a playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers: Shaquille O'Neal, Kim Kardashian, Ryan Seacrest. Sure, some serious people, like George Stephanopoulos and Al Gore, use Twitter. And a lot of publishing companies and bloggers (myself included) use Twitter to send links to articles we've published. But most of what streams across Twitter is junk. One recent study concluded that 40 percent of the messages are "pointless babble."

Then again, look at TV: fat people dancing, talentless people singing, Glenn Beck slinging lunatic conspiracy theories. Stupid stuff sells. The genius of Twitter is that it manages to be even stupider than TV. It's so stupid that it's brilliant. No person with an IQ above 100 could possibly care what Ashton Kutcher or Ashlee Simpson has to say about anything. But Kutcher has 3.5 million Twitter followers, and Simpson has 1.5 million. Who are these millions of people? If you're an investor in Twitter, you probably think, who cares? Kutcher and Simpson might be buffoons, but they've built bigger audiences than a lot of TV shows.

Lyons' complaints could apply to any popular application on the Web that involves user-generated content. In fact, if you go back to when people first started getting Internet access in their homes, I'm pretty sure you could find a print columnist somewhere making a similar complaint about the Web in general. Does the presence of an infinite amount of "pointless babble" on the Internet make it "stupid" or not worth using?

-- A. Serwer

Ben Smith asks who leaked General McChrystal's report on conditions in Afghanistan, and gets a variety of answers. The most common is that this move must compel the president to increase the number of troops, and so must have come from someone in the Defense Department. Indeed, I glimpsed Charles Krauthammer on television yesterday making the common argument that once a theater commander requests more troops, he is constitutionally elevated to the position of commander-in-chief and becomes what is known as "the Decider." Well, not in so many words, but you get the idea.

Still, anyone who believes that this review makes an open-and-shut case for more troops hasn't read it. It paints a picture of the Afghan conflict that is very dire, as I noted yesterday, and raises questions about whether creating the capacity to rebuild the Afghan government and military is necessary to U.S. interests. It describes a task that, while similar to the surge in Iraq, is by no means the same in the scale of either challenges or resources required for them, and lacks the coincidence of other factors that allowed the surge to work.

The simplest explanation is that someone wanted to look good in Bob Woodward's next book, and we'll all no doubt find out the identity of this leaker in the next year. But whatever that person's intent, this is a document that can be interpreted to justify all manner of decisions.

-- Tim Fernholz

• A new Gallup poll has found that 57 percent of Americans think the government is "doing too much," prompting some concern that perhaps Barack Obama has missed his window of opportunity to convince Americans that government can be a positive force in their lives. But this makes it sound like the public just needed to be intellectually persuaded about this. Rather, people need concrete examples of government working for them. In retrospect, it was far easier for Ronald Reagan to convince people that "government is the problem" after the collapse of liberalism in social policy in the late 1960s and 1970s.
• Kevin Drum is cautiously optimistic after reading a Washington Post story about the FCC's new guidelines concerning net neutrality, and indeed FCC Chair Julius Genachowski appears to have strongly embraced the principles of neutrality at a speech at the Brookings Institute today. Good policy and sound regulations are always welcome, but it's important to keep in mind that it's pretty amazing the Internet even exists in its present form in the first place.
  
• Bruce Bartlett magnificently takes apart the idea that we can solve all our deficit problems by cutting government spending, pointing out that no politician is willing to go after non-discretionary spending, which accounts for the bulk of the federal budget: "[T]here is no evidence that it is politically possible to cut spending enough to make more than a trivial difference in our nation's fiscal problems. The votes aren't there and never will be. Those who continue to insist otherwise are living in a dream world and deserve no attention from serious people." And yet, Newt Gingrich is probably in some green room somewhere, about to make this very claim to a national audience with little if any objection from our media gatekeepers.
• Weekend Remainders: Support for health care reform remains unfazed after August; former White House czars demystify role of czars; some more glorious features of our world-renowned private health insurance system; it truly is a mystery why Fox News isn't taken seriously as a source of objective information; and Tim Pawlenty, anti-tax crusader.

--Mori Dinauer

I linked to this in my last post, but it's worth a post all on its own. Despite the media clamor to get President Obama to absolve his political opponents of racism (and by extension, everyone everywhere), you have Senate Republicans sending out mailers asking questions like this:

Are you concerned that health care rationing could lead to:

23. Denial of treatment in cases where the patient's prospects are deemed not good?
24. A "lottery" system of determining who will get priority treatment?
25. A "quota" system which would determine who would determine who would get treatment on the basis of race or age?

-- A. Serwer

"Success is achievable, but it will not be attained simply by trying harder or 'doubling down' on the previous strategy. Additional resources are required, but focusing on force or resource requirements misses the point entirely. The key take away from this assessment is the urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate."

That's true in a larger sense, as well: As both Marc Lynch and Ezra point out, McChrystal and his team asking for more troops was inevitable; similarly, observers of Afghanistan policy have been prepared for a polemic in favor of a counterinsurgency strategy for months. But the question that concerns most people about Afghanistan isn't answered in this document, which is a blueprint for how the U.S. could defeat the multi-party insurgency in Afghanistan. Rather, the fundamental question is whether the U.S. ought to be spending the resources necessary to defeat this multi-party insurgency. And ultimately, that's a question for Barack Obama and Congress.

Within the confines of this assessment from McChrystal, though, it's still unclear if this conflict can be won. The report does not specify how many additional American troops would be required -- at a hearing last week, counterinsurgency expert Jon Nagl said that very rough estimate would be 600,000 counterinsurgents; right now, the International Security Assistance Force comprises some 60,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan and 35,000 or so from our NATO allies. What the report does say is that gaining the initiative in the next 12 months will be decisive -- or else the U.S. "risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." This, in turn, depends on simultaneously rolling out a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy and rebuilding the legitimacy of the Afghan government. The report says,

ISAF is a conventional force that is poorly configured for COIN, inexperienced in local languages and culture, and struggling with challenges inherent to coalition warfare. These intrinsic disadvantages are exacerbated by our current operational culture. ... The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have givcen Afghans littel reason to support their government.

This report was delivered nearly a month ago. Even if the president decides to convince Congress to authorize more troops and money for Afghanistan, and he succeeds, that won't happen for months and months. When you combine that time line with the tremendous legitimacy complications presented by the recent elections in Afghanistan, it's very difficult to imagine McChrystal turning around one, much less both, of those two dynamics in only eleven months. But "gaining the initiative" is a nebulous term itself, and I wonder how you know when that happens.

-- Tim Fernholz

Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian, is releasing a new book this month called The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. A friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton dating back to their days on the McGovern campaign in Texas, Branch and President Clinton recorded hundreds of hours of interviews together over the 8-year course of the Clinton presidency, often in the middle of the night. GQ has a fascinating interview with Branch about the book, in which he discusses why, as a liberal, he finds Bill Clinton more inspiring than either JFK or Lyndon Johnson, how Clinton's infidelities compare to Martin Luther King's, and what the Clintons were like as a couple early in their marriage. A fun excerpt:

GQ: Was he a Lothario in 1972?

No, and I was sharing an apartment with he and Hillary. I had just separated from my wife, had virtually no social life, and they were all over each other. The only story was that we were having a hard time getting this woman politician to endorse McGovern, and the McGovern campaign sent in a guy who had worked for Jack Kennedy. So he met her, and came back and said, “She just needs to get laid. I know just the guy.” We were stunned. And then we realized he was serious! He went to the phone to call this guy in Boston and bring him down to Texas! And Clinton took the phone from him and said, “We’re not gonna do that, and if you do that, we’re leaving.” I didn’t do anything. I was paralyzed. And in retrospect, if Clinton was cynical about women, I would think he would have been more like that guy. Now, maybe he developed it later. I really don’t know.

It was interesting to read your descriptions of Bill and Hillary. Halfway through the impeachment trial, the doorman at the White House refused to let you in because they were making out in a hallway.

Well, that only happened once. I don’t know if their relationship is romantic, but it’s not cold. Sometimes when I tell people that they finish each other’s sentences, people say, “That’s because it’s a power alliance.” Like a medieval marriage between the prince of Spain and the queen of Austria. But there’s warmth there. There’s communion. They would hold hands. How much eroticism is in there, I have no idea. But it was striking.

The whole thing is worth a read.

--Dana Goldstein

Paul Starr makes the case for making compromises -- within the Democratic Party:

As the debate over health reform enters its decisive stage, there is a lot of talk about the need for compromise between Democrats and Republicans. That was a sensible point to make in years past when Republicans offered alternatives for reform to compete with Democratic proposals. But this year there are two problems with the idea of bipartisan compromise. The first is that Republicans in Congress have not even made a pretense of offering constructive alternatives. The second is that the Democratic proposals are built around the ideas that Republicans used to favor -- those proposals already are bipartisan compromises. Unfortunately, they are compromises with a Republican Party that no longer exists.

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Dave Weigel points out the hypocrisy of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's professed admiration for W. Cleon Skousen, the Glenn Beck ideological godfather and anti-Communist oddball, at this weekend's Values Voters Summit. While many in the Christian right sidelined Mitt Romney because of his Mormonism, now Mormons like Skousen and Beck are all the rage.

But it's not that surprising -- because it's not that new. The conservative movement has long admired Skousen, and he has a long list of Republican and movement insider admirers. Mark Skousen, a frequent contributor to Human Events, is Skousen's nephew. When Beck started promoting his uncle's book, The 5,000 Year Leap, on his television program, Skousen wrote a paean to his uncle and Beck in Human Events, "Glenn Beck Re-Energizes the Conservative Movement."

Skousen did not overestimate his uncle's influence, even though Beck's discovery of him was recent. (Skousen called that "hope we can believe in.")

When the elder Skousen died in 2006, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), paid tribute to him on the Senate floor, and even included a poem he wrote about his friend. Hatch detailed how Skousen helped launch his political career, sending a letter to 8,000 "friends," urging them to support Hatch's 1976 Senate candidacy. According to a 1980 account in the New York Times by the inimitable Molly Ivins, Skousen's Freeman Institute was active in several other Republican campaigns as well, including one to unseat Sen. Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who chaired the Church Commission that investigated intelligence abuses in the wake of Watergate.

"From that first campaign," Hatch went on in his tribute on the Senate floor, "to every day I have served in the U.S. Senate--Cleon has been there for me, through highs and lows--buoying me up, giving suggestions, discussing principles and issues, and above all else being a true, supportive friend. I can never overstate what his support has meant to me throughout my years of service." Hatch added that Skousen's writings, including The 5,000 Year Leap, "have been used by foundations, and in forums across America for many years. His writings and words leave an indelible legacy of knowledge and beliefs that have touched many people and will continue to inspire and educate generations to come."

John Doolittle -- who at the time was a state senator but later went on to serve in Congress, rise to become Republican Deputy Whip, and then become embroiled in the Abramoff scandal -- was caught up in controversy in 1987, when he endorsed a history book Skousen wrote. According to coverage in the Sacramento Bee, the book, The Making of America, "reprints a 1930s essay on slavery that refers to black children as 'pickaninnies'' and suggests slave owners were the real victims of an economic system in which slaves were generally well treated." The book also suggested "that the Bill of Rights should be rewritten, the Constitution was inspired by the Bible and that there is biblical precedent for returning to the gold standard," according to the Bee coverage. (The article is available only through paid archives.)

Doolittle praised Skousen and said he preferred the book to "the perversions that have been taught for more than 50 years in our schools'' about the Constitution. The Bee coverage tied Skousen and his organizations to the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Moral Majority, and the John Birch Society. (For more on Skousen's conservative movement ties, read this.) Doolittle said at the time, according to the Bee, that "he had been aware of Moon's role in the seminars in which he participated, but he praised Moon's church and said those who brand its members 'Moonies' are guilty of a 'McCarthyistic tactic.'"

The following year, Skousen's bestowed an award on former Attorney General and conservative movement luminary Edwin Meese, who was honored for his "defense of the Constitution." In his acceptance speech, Meese asserted, according to contemporaneous press coverage, "the greatest constitutional crisis of this century is the Congress' usurpation of powers constitutionally designated for the executive branch." Which, of course, is the heart of Cheney-esque conservatism.

As more journalists and bloggers dig into Skousen's ties, the more we'll find that as much as he's seen as a "nutjob" and "crank" by conservatives like Mark Hemingway and David Frum, he has been more influential to the conservative movement than they would like to admit.

--Sarah Posner

I've argued before that black people shouldn't expect President Obama to be a "black leader" in the sense that we commonly use the term -- as someone who represents the interests of the black community. As president, his responsibility is larger than that, and so his focus should be too.

Here's the thing, though; that door swings both ways. Just as Obama shouldn't be expected to prioritize every issue that affects the black community, he shouldn't be expected to coddle American insecurities when it comes to race. Despite the fact that the question of whether Obama believed opposition to his policies was based on race had already been asked, the president was asked some version of this question on every single show. The question was always predicated, not on the racially charged language and images put forth by some political opponents, but by Jimmy Carter's comments -- the modern racial dynamic is that nothing is racist until someone says so, and that person is in fact racist for noticing. I've already said that I don't think most of the opposition to Obama is based on race or racism -- but that there is an element of this in the right's arguments against his policies is undeniable.

It was like a significant other who won't stop with the nagging questions about their own insecurities -- the question answered itself by the frequency with which it was asked. Moreover, as I've pointed out before, the political incentives are aligned for a denial no matter what the president actually thinks -- and the people asking the questions have to know that, which is why they're asking them. Everyone wants to be reassured that racism is over, and that the only people who would argue that race affects public policy debates is themselves a racist or a fool.

That's not the president's job.

-- A. Serwer

“To suggest that this is about the corner grocery store, when that is not what this legislation says or what we support, is in many ways similar to the ‘death panel’ charges,’’ Summers, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said in an interview.

I noted this trend two weeks ago:

Business interests oppose the plan, mainly because it would curtail highly profitable practices, like sub-prime loans. But that's not what they say publicly. The Chamber of Commerce, the business community's umbrella group in Washington, recently organized a conference call coordinating some 200 representatives of groups who oppose the legislation. The call doesn't mention any of the serious problems that led to the financial crisis or why consumer regulation is important. Instead, it follows a "death panel" approach to political discussion: Scare the hell out of everyone.

-- Tim Fernholz

Since Irving Kristol's death, there's been a lot of blogging about neoconservatism's legacy. I think this post from Andrew Sullivan on Kristol's view that there were "no enemies to the right" and Matthew Yglesias' post on how Kristol knowingly embraced faulty economics in order to help the right win elections gets to the core of what neoconservatism has ultimately become.

Democracy promotion, anti-communism, limited support for the welfare state -- ultimately all of the tenets of neoconservatism were subservient to the destruction of the enemy, foreign or domestic, by any means necessary, including outright deception. Because America is good and just by definition, nothing that the U.S. does that would be considered immoral is immoral when the U.S. does it, because it's ultimately in service to the greater good, which is U.S. hegemony.

This is how we go from anti-communism to being misled into war with Iraq, torturing those the U.S. suspects of being enemies, and Bill Kristol supporting Sarah Palin as a candidate for vice president. The core of neoconservatism is that nothing matters except for beating the other guy to a pulp, and no course of action taken in pursuit of that goal is immoral. It's just ironic that such a philosophy is generally understood as having grown out of a disgust with the "excesses of the left."

-- A. Serwer

Mark Schmitt on Obama's contrarian approach to politics:

Every Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson's (that is, both of them) has followed a pattern: A fresh face enters the White House bringing new hope and big ideas, delivers his agenda to Congress, and quickly gets the back of the hand from the contemptuous grandees of his own party. With little accomplished, congressional Democrats suffer major losses in the midterm elections. Over the next two years, even less progress is made.

Barack Obama knew this. He knew it so well that the organizing principle of his administration seemed to be the Costanza Doctrine, after Seinfeld character George Costanza's insight that if everything you do turns out wrong, "then the opposite would have to be right." Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter packed their White Houses with Washington newcomers like themselves, so Obama surrounded himself with insiders like Rahm Emanuel and Tom Daschle. Clinton and Carter gave Congress detailed legislative plans, so Obama set a rough destination and let the World's Greatest Deliberative Body do its thing. Clinton and Carter counted on Democrats to deliver their agenda, so Obama started with the premise of bipartisanship.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote in my story about Mohammed Jawad's return to Afghanistan -- and near return to prison -- that the incident highlighted the lack of a clear policy for the repatriation and reintegration of former Afghan terrorist detainees. I've also written before that the ultimate goal of many human-rights groups is to have the detainees be under Afghan control -- and in that leaked Afghanistan assessment, Gen. Stanley McChrystal says that local control and reintegration should be part of the new strategy:

Detainee Operations. Effective detainee operations are essential to success. The ability to remove insurgents from the battlefield is critical to effective protection of the population. Further, the precision demanded in effective counterinsurgency operations must be intelligence-driven; detainee operations are a critical part of this. Getting the right information and evidence from those detained in military operations is also necessary to support rule of law and reintegration programs and help ensure that only insurgents are detained and civilians are not unduly affected.

Detainee operations are both complex and politically sensitive. There are strategic vulnerabilities in a non-Afghan system. By contrast, an Afghan system reinforces their sense of sovereignty and responsibility. As always, the detention process must be effective in providing key intelligence and avoid 'catch and release' approaches that endanger coalition and ANSF forces. It is therefore imperative to evolve to a more holistic model centered on an Afghan-run system. This will require a comprehensive system that addresses the entire "life-cycle" and extends from point of capture to eventual reintegration or prosecution.

ISAF has completed a full review of current detainee pollcles and practices with recommendations for substantial revisions to complement ISAF's revised strategy. Key elements of a new detention policy should include transferring responsibility for longterm detention of insurgents to GIRoA, establishing procedures with GIRoA for ISAF access to detainees for interrogation within the bounds of national caveats, application of counter-radicalization and disengagement practices, and training of ISAF forces to better collect intelligence for continued operations and evidence for prosecution in the Afghan judicial system. Afghanistan must develop detention capabilities and operations that respect the Afghan people. A failure to address GIRoA incapacity in this area presents a serious risk to the mission.

Such an effort is likely to come under the auspices of Marine Gen. Doug Stone, who ran a similar program in Iraq that met with success. The problem is that Afghanistan has less infrastructure and fewer resources than Iraq, and it's not clear what an effective reintegration program would look like -- and whether it could be effective under such conditions.

-- A. Serwer

Although Barack Obama is the president of the United States, it's often easy to forget he is also the national leader of the Democratic Party, with his stubbornly bipartisan strategy on almost every policy issue. Not so yesterday. I was in New York, and the front pages of the Times, Daily News, and New York Post all screamed the news that Obama has sent word asking flailing Gov. David Paterson not to run for re-election. This should be a no-brainer; the unelected Paterson's approval ratings are as low as George W. Bush's, while his Democratic rival Andrew Cuomo has rebounded from some youthful political indiscretions to become a popular, crusading attorney general, in the mold of a pre-scandal Spitzer.

Paterson's refusal to cede the office, though, allows for the re-emergence on the national scene of Rudy Giuliani, who remains popular among upstate conservatives and suburban moderates. Giuliani has shown a real facility for exploiting conservative populist moments like the one we're in right now, with the grass-roots revolt against Obama's health plan and the racial animus bubbling over throughout the country. As New York City mayor, his approach to crime, police violence, and public hiring alienated the black community.

Equally important from the White House's perspective, Giuliani could energize Republican voters, increase turnout, and help down-ticket races, leading to New York Democrats losing their weak hold over the state Senate. Why is dysfunctional Albany of interest to Obama? Because it controls the congressional redistricting process, and the administration, looking ahead to even its second-term policy priorities, does not want to lose a single Democratic House seat. That's why the White House was so enraged when Paterson named Kirstin Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton's old Senate seat; it removed Gillibrand from a swing district House seat she could have safely held. And that's why, during campaign season, Team Obama sent 15 paid organizers to Texas -- not to win the state's electoral votes but to help the state Democratic Party flip the legislature, which would've given Democrats more House seats in 2010. (It didn't happen, but you can't say they didn't try.)

The key administration player on the New York story is White House Director of the Office of Political Affairs Patrick Gaspard, a former New York union operative and veteran of the David Dinkins and Jesse Jackson campaigns. Gaspard has Karl Rove's old job. And there's no love lost between Gaspard's former employer, the SEIU 1199 Health Care Workers East, and Gov. Paterson. The union has marched against Paterson's proposed $3.5 billion in health-care budget cuts, even as he opposed raising taxes on the super-rich.

Gaspard has a history of interfering in Albany politics on behalf of Obama, such as during the brief, hostile Republican takeover of the state Senate in June. PolitickerNY writer Jason Horowitz reported that Al Sharpton has told members of the Obama administration, "It’s hard for me to march against you if I ever get mad, because you’ve got our best organizer." Sharpton was referring to Gaspard.

--Dana Goldstein

Treasury considered this move last spring, but decided against it because it will be a hard political fight -- as well as battling the financial industry and Senate Republicans who oppose more stringent regulatory reform in the first place, this bill will require overcoming opposition from within the agencies themselves, who will fight fiercely for their turf. Interestingly, the administration has not directly criticized this idea; Treasury officials will tell you that their plan was designed to be passable and accomplish what is necessary, and they're not sure they can pull a super-regulator over the hump. (They do have concerns about putting the authority to take over failed banks in the hands of a committee, but this isn't that.)

Dodd, of course, has different incentives -- he's got to make it clear to his constituents that he's not the bankers' errand boy on Capitol Hill, and passing this plan would do just that. Whether or not he can actually pull it off is another question; either he's more in touch with what's possible than the administration (and he and his staff, as well as his House counterpart Barney Frank, were all involved in drafting the administration's plan) or he's actually starting off with his maximal demands, intending to negotiate from there, rather than presenting a prepackaged compromise, the latter of which has become a White House standby in the past year and hasn't seemed like the most effective legislative strategy.

-- Tim Fernholz

When the NAACP filed suit against Wells Fargo for allegedly targeting black people regardless of income or credit history or sub-prime loans, the bank became a symbol of how greed and racism contributed to the outsize effect the foreclosure crisis has had on the black community. In court affidavits, former Wells Fargo employees testified that the bank deliberately targeted the sub-prime loans -- or "ghetto loans" as they were referred to internally -- at "mud people." In Baltimore, for example, 71 percent of the homes vacated due to foreclosure on a Wells Fargo loan were in black neighborhoods. Wells Fargo was the eighth largest recipient of bailout money -- they received $25 billion.

Wells Fargo, however, has also long been a sponsor of the State of the Black Union, Tavis Smiley's annual black political symposium. Mary Kane reported that Smiley had been hosting "wealth building seminars" in black communities since 2005 -- according to Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, the seminars were part of Wells Fargo's attempt to lure black voters into buying sub-prime loans. One employee was even told she was "too white" to speak at one of the seminars -- the company wanted a face nervous black folks buying a home for the first time could trust. A black face. Someone well-known and trustworthy. Someone like Tavis Smiley. Wells Fargo maintains they have done nothing wrong and are fighting the suit.

Smiley would also hardly be the first important black political figure to have ties to sub-prime lenders. As Stephanie Mercimer reported for Mother Jones last year, Charles Steele Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference defended sub-prime lenders in the Washington Post last year, Al Sharpton has cut commercials for LoanMax, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition has worked with Compucredit on "job fairs and economic summits," and the Urban Leage has worked with the Consumer Financial Services Association to conduct "financial literacy seminars."

Following Kane's article, Richard Prince reported that Smiley was cutting all ties with the bank.

“I cut everything off with Wells Fargo,” Smiley declared. He said the move cost “a lot of money”; he said he did not know how much.

I'm not sure how much moving away from Wells Fargo cost Smiley. But if the information in the suits against Wells Fargo are accurate, probably less than the folks who lost their homes because the bank foreclosed on their "ghetto loan."

The revelation of Smiley's efforts in helping Wells Fargo sell sub-prime loans in the black community is likely to further erode Smiley's standing among black folks. During the 2008 campaign, Smiley criticized Barack Obama for not attending one of his symposiums, which many felt was somewhat self-serving and unfair. At the time, Smiley said, "Just because Barack Obama is black, doesn't mean he gets a pass on being held accountable on issues that matter to black people."

-- A. Serwer

Check it out.

--Sarah Posner

• It's a good thing Max Baucus made six big concessions to Republicans and got nothing in return in crafting the Senate Finance Committee's health care bill. It's even better that not one Republican will vote for it, not even Oympia Snowe. Yet there are signs that Snowe is becoming tired of the pressure being applied to her by the Republican caucus, observing that she hasn't changed -- it's the GOP which has.
• I couldn't tell you what a "values voter" is. Nor could I tell you what the Family Research Council researches. But on the basis of the titles of some of the panels at their summit in DC this weekend, they seem interested in things like the left-wing "thugocracy," the "threat" of illegal immigration, how "redefining" marriage "threatens religious liberty" and my favorite, "The New Masculinity."
• Matt Yglesias has a challenge for libertarians: Denounce publicly-funded parking garages, which receive a far larger slice of tax dollars than any efforts at promoting bicycle commuting. Unsurprisingly, a response from the Cato Institute confirms that when it comes to limited government, libertarians are often quite selective about what they find abhorrent. Almost every day you can read something in Reason about how wasteful the war on drugs is. They're right! But almost as frequently you'll find something about how smoking bans are crushing our liberties. These two issues aren't even remotely comparable, yet they're treated like equals down the road to serfdom.
• Time magazine showed a real lapse of editorial judgment by putting Glenn Beck on the cover of their latest issue. The piece itself seems more interested in portraying Beck as the hot new media thing rather than taking the stronger stance that he's at best a demagogue, at worst an inciter of rebellion. Most insultingly, David von Drehle, the author of the piece, is convinced that there isn't anything uniquely corrosive about Beck -- he's just a right-wing version of Rachel Maaddow or Keith Olbermann, who, as everyone knows, have "opinions based on nothing."
  
• Remainders: Former Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton is in big trouble; cap-and-trade isn't all that unpopular in some conservative districts held by Democrats; Massachusetts takes one step closer to allowing an interim replacement for the late Edward Kennedy; CNN wonders whether tea party protesters carrying signs featuring Obama as a witch doctor aren't just misunderstood satirists; and the private insurance industry is an abomination.

--Mori Dinauer

FOX News took out a full page ad today in several newspapers today asking how their competitors could have "missed" the 9/12 protest in Washington DC. Of course, they didn't "miss" it -- the march got considerably more attention than larger ones arranged by liberals in the past.

The point of the ad, I suspect, isn't really to suggest that the networks didn't cover the story as much as they didn't cover it like FOX. Which is to say, they weren't actively promoting the event. Meaning that next time around, networks will bend over backwards to give whatever right-wing event is occurring even more prominence, lest they be accused of "missing it," if FOX has its way.

-- A. Serwer

The Army is big on ceremonies: There are induction ceremonies, re-enlistment ceremonies, promotional ceremonies, and, of course, the heart-breaking military funeral with its final roll call. And yet in the Iraq war, the protocol slipped. “There have been reports of people getting [medals] in the mail, which doesn’t sound like the way that you would do it,” Rep. Jo Ann Davis, a Republican from Virginia, said at a hearing before a military-personnel subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee in December 2006. Most of the troops who fought in Iraq – and certainly after the ill-fated attempts to turn Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman into heroes – did not get the kind of attention that they deserve, or that they would have gotten in the past. Army officials shied away from stories of individual heroism after the public-relations disasters after the Lynch's capture and the Tillman's death. And overall, the number of medals that have been awarded in both wars has been limited, and when they have been given out, they were often not presented in a ceremony at all. It has been much more common for soldiers, whether on active duty in the Army or serving in the National Guard, to receive nothing at all, regardless of how they performed under fire.

In previous conflicts, military officials were more generous. Indeed, if you were involved in the 1983 invasion of Grenada -- even in a peripheral way -- the odds were pretty great that you would receive a medal. During that conflict, 8,600 decorations were awarded – though only 7,200 troops ever made it to the island. “It’s known as the Junior Olympics of medals,” a U.S. Army colonel tells me. During the Bush administration, officials tried to pretend there was not really a war going on – and the medals tended to draw attention to it. Critics of the military say that the Army responded by giving out fewer medals. Monti deserved his medal and was justly recognized in a White House ceremony. Many other men and women who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan do, too, and they are still waiting for theirs.

--Tara McKelvey

In the column that Adam and Michael Kazin already demolished, David Brooks quotes the libertarian econo-blogger Arnold Kling: "One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy. The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice-versa."

One could argue that. The thing is, we know what a crisis of legitimacy looks like: we just had eight years of what in a less-stable country would have been an actual crisis of legitimacy: A president who got fewer votes than his opponent, a war based on lies, that sort of thing. We lived through it, and in 2008, we seem to have come out of it, with a president and government that had won not only a clear majority in a democratic vote, but the consent of a far broader majority.

But Kling's term is one I'd been thinking about also. What unifies the right-wing reaction, from the Birthers, to the Tea-Partiers, to the Town Halls, to the crusade against "Czars" seems to be a concerted effort to pull us back into a crisis of legitimacy, in any way possible. Consider, for example, the insistence that Obama is trying to "shove through" health reform. (If only he were!) If you really thought there were "death panels" in the bill, for example, in a democratic society one might offer an amendment to have the provision removed. Instead it is proof that the bill has to be stopped. While people given the informal title of "czar" in addition to their formal job are essentially powerless (at best they can encourage some inter-agency coordination), portraying them as if they were actually an American version of Ivan the Terrible (or Stalin, since the Tea-Partiers aren't much on the nuances of Russian history) helps support a story that Obama is governing without consent or democracy. While the range in tone and sanity between the birthers, the anti-Czarists, and the ordinary health-reform opponents is enormous, they are all engaged in a single project -- validating the defection of a sizable minority from the process of governing the country.

I see Kling's and Brooks's "vice-versa" -- Southern white America's dismissal of the governing majority as illegitimate. I don't see the reverse. We progressive elites didn't treat Southern white America as "illegitimate" when it held almost total power in the Bush years (I've substituted Southern for "rural," which I think is appropriate) and we don't consider them "illegitimate" now. The difference seems to be that some people are happy living in a state of legitimation crisis, and other people -- notably Barack Obama -- want nothing more than to end it. This, too, is a divide in American politics -- not the divide between Hamilton and Jefferson that Brooks sees, but between, say, Calhoun and Lincoln. But it is also a divide that has a right and wrong side.

-- Mark Schmitt

The Indiana Court of Appeals struck down the Voter ID Act that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court last year. The opinion gets right to the heart of the issue:

All qualified voters must be treated uniformly and impartially. We fail to see how the Voter I.D. Law's exception of those residing in state licensed care facilities, which happen to also be a polling place, would be a uniform or impartial regulation. Furthermore, the Voter I.D. Law treats in-person voters disparate from mail-in voters, conferring partial treatment upon mail-in voters.

The disparate treatment of mail-in and ballot-box voters is particularly indefensible given 1) the obvious political self-dealing (absentee voters are predominantly Republican, voters without IDs primarily Democratic) and 2) the fact that the few cited examples of vote fraud involved absentee ballots, not in-person voting. So it's not just that the rights of a discrete and insular minority are burdened in ways that benefit the partisan interests of the majority party. There's also the problem that this was done with a law is farcically under-inclusive given the state's asserted justification. So what you have here is an equal protection/privileges and immunities violation. Good for the Indiana courts for doing what the Supreme Court shamefully wouldn't.

--Scott Lemieux

The White House farmers market opened yesterday. It's located just north of the White House on a block of Vermont Ave. between H and I and will operate from 3 to 7 p.m. on Thursdays through the end of October.

I am all for more farmers markets -- I work at one myself on Sundays -- but, like Lydia DePillis over at The Vine, I questioned the logic of opening a market in the middle of a neighborhood that is mainly office buildings.

I spoke with Bernadine Prince, co-director of FRESHFARM markets, which operates the White House market, along with markets in DuPont circle and Penn Quarter. Prince made the point that placing markets where we work, as well as where we live, allows for more opportunities for us to consume fresh produce.

This market is trying to serve the commuter population. That area has a lot of federal agencies. And there are offices, like the Bureau of Land Management, where there is a shift split—workers start at 7 a.m. and leave their offices at 3 p.m.

We're not interested in the tourist population; they may come and say, "This is nice," and take a peach or an apple, but they aren't going to take a peck of tomatoes home and roast them.

Prince says FRESHFARM has been contacted by law firms and office complexes about setting up markets or CSAs so that employees are guaranteed regular access to fresh, local produce.

This is a positive move for the food movement. Decoupling farmers markets and local/organic food from neighborhoods will only increase the points where people can interact with food. Consider how much easier it might be for a working parent to spend 20 minutes at market on the way home from work, rather than having to find that time on a Saturday morning. It creates an access to fresh food that doesn't involve a separate trip to the store.

--Phoebe Connelly

In an interview with a Florida affiliate of Spain's Union Radio, [Senator John] McCain was asked, if elected president, would he invite Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to the White House.

"I would be willing to meet with those leaders who are friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion," McCain said. He then mentioned Mexican President Calderon, who he said "is fighting a very tough fight against the drug cartels."

When the reporter repeated that he was talking about Spain, McCain responded: "I know the issues, I know the leaders."

Asked again if he would invite Zapatero, McCain shot back:

"All I can tell you is that I have a clear record of working with leaders in the Hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not and that's judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region."

9/2009:

"President Obama will welcome President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain to the White House on Tuesday, October 13. Spain and the United States enjoy strong bilateral relations and partner together around the world to promote peace, and prosperity. Spain, a NATO ally and holder of the EU Presidency in the first half of 2010, is a strong contributor to the NATO mission in Afghanistan as we fight together against Al Qaeda and its extremist allies." -- White House press release.

-- Tim Fernholz

Terence Samuel on the bombastic politicians of South Carolina and the state of the Republican Party:

There must be some powerful atmospheric agents shaping the politics of South Carolina. How else can the Palmetto State's tendency to repeatedly produce odd and bombastic figures be explained? Here, I'm not talking about the increasingly infamous and boorish Rep. Joe Wilson, who interrupted the president's health-care speech by shouting, "You lie." Nor am I even talking about the similarly infamous and boorish incumbent Gov. Mark Sanford, whose affair with an Argentine woman fueled a summer spectacle. No, I'm thinking of the reformed segregationists like retired Sen. Ernest Hollings and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, who turned out to have fathered a black child. These gigantic personalities possessed boundless political skill but ultimately had a difficult time with their aspirations. They were hampered by a political age defined by the debate over civil rights -- a debate in which they were compromised.

KEEP READING ...

For the past two days, it's been going around liberal blogs that Rush Limbaugh called for segregated school buses. He didn't. This is what he said:

I think the guy's wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that's the lesson we're being taught here today. Kid shouldn't have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses -- it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama's America.

Limbaugh wasn't calling for segregated buses -- he was suggesting that Obama wants segregated buses, that in "Obama's America." if a white kid doesn't want to get his butt kicked, he needs to find his own bus, because Obama won't stand up for white people. It's sick, but it's not a call for segregated school buses.

Limbaugh has made a number of outrageous statements over the past few days, so there's no reason to misrepresent what he said -- especially since his supporters will use it as proof in the future that Limbaugh's views really aren't all that abhorrent. Granted, I think it's kind of confusing as text, and it was only after several listens that I understood what he was saying, so it's not surprising to me that some people thought he was calling for segregated buses. But that's not what he was doing.

-- A. Serwer

In that David Brooks column I posted on earlier, Brooks cited historian Michael Kazin's definition of "producerism" to described the views of the right-wing protest movement we've seen so much of lately--and in order to argue that the movement has nothing to do with race. Here's what Brooks said:

The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.

And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

Well, I reached out to Kazin, and it sounds like Brooks may not have read his book very carefully, because the idea that "producerism" on the right is completely decoupled from race is not one Kazin agrees with. This is what he said to me in an email:

"In the history of the modern right, producerism (which is the core of populist ideology) has almost always been linked with racism. Wallace and Reagan (and many others) appealed to white wage-earners by attacking pro-busing judges and liberal pols who they charged were taking the people's money and wasting it on lazy minorities. The racial undercurrent never lay far from the surface."

So much for right-wing producerism having nothing to do with race.

-- A. Serwer

Via Mike Tomasky, Joe Conason puts the (somewhat justifiable) outrage over the ACORN scandal in context:

Yet ACORN's troubles should be considered in the context of a history of honorable service to the dispossessed and impoverished. No doubt it was fun to dupe a few morons into providing tax advice to a "pimp and ho," but what ACORN actually does, every day, is help struggling families with the Earned Income Tax Credit (whose benefits were expanded by both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). And while the idea of getting housing assistance for a brothel was clever, what ACORN really does, every day, is help those same working families avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes.

Let's not forget that the "pimp and ho" scandal isn't the root of the right's animosity toward ACORN; their work on behalf of low-income people is. The video may have exposed ACORN's difficulty in enforcing professional standards in the workplace, and denying them federal funding until they fix those problems may be justifiable--but it's noteworthy that institutions advocating on behalf of more powerful interests haven't faced a similar fate.

The right however, has looked at the ACORN scandal as a kind of vindication of all their paranoid fantasies of what ACORN was responsible for--namely that ACORN really was trying to "steal" the 2008 election through voter fraud and that it caused the sub-prime crisis by advocating against housing policies that discriminate against people of color--are true. They seem to believe that because ACORN employees acted improperly, that means outlawing housing discrimination based on race caused the economic meltdown and voter fraud is a real problem.

Neither of those things are true, but they do point to the real reason the right hates ACORN, and it's not because of their past issues with embezzlement, or misbehaving employees. It's because they try to look out for the interests of people the right likes to blame for the nation's problems.

-- A. Serwer

Alexandra Gutierrez on how feminist horror movie Jennifer's Body is neither one of these things:

As in biology, sex and death are the two elemental components of the horror film. Nowadays, critics' warnings of gratuitous nudity and violence in scary movies seem, quite frankly, gratuitous. Psycho's iconic shower scene long ago evolved into the literal bloodbath found in films like Hostel II. As far as the exploitation goes, it's hard to deny that the losers under the scythes are largely -- and plainly -- women.

Enter Diablo Cody, feminist screenwriter of Juno and avowed horror aficionado. Her second film, Jennifer's Body, directed by Girlfight creator Karyn Kusama, is out to reclaim the genre and "subvert [its] tropes" in an effort to speak to the growing audience of female horror fans. Could Jennifer's Body offer a feminist twist on a genre that seems hostile to women on its face? Their project could have -- and should have -- worked.

KEEP READING ...

David Brooks argues today that the heated opposition to Obama has nothing to do with race, but rather diverging American instincts that originate with Hamilton and Jefferson. Brooks:

The populist tendency has always used the same sort of rhetoric: for the ordinary people and against the fat cats and the educated class; for the small towns and against the financial centers.

And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.

In the past eight years, Ron Brownstein reports, "While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked." As Tim blogged a couple of weeks ago, the top 1 percent of the population is making a quarter of total income, more than at any time since the 1920s. If we're simply talking about health care, Ezra Klein wrote earlier this week that "over the past ten years, premiums have increased by 131 percent, while wages have grown 38 percent and inflation has grown 28 percent." "Ordinary people" are paying those premiums, not making money off them.

In other words, if Brooks and the protesters he's describing were really all that "producerist" and worried about the fruits of their labor being "sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites," they'd be pretty pissed about the past eight years, during which Barack Obama was not president and the rich got richer while everyone else got poorer. In fact, the "producerist" argument, on the right, essentially boils down to "rich people should keep all the money they make off the backs of workers, because if workers really worked, they'd be rich" not "workers shouldn't have to pay for those who don't work."

We also see a xenophobic right making a "producerist" argument almost exclusively within the context of a shadowy, undeserving, and immoral other--the uninsured--neither has the right been shy in defining that other as nonwhite.

I'll actually agree with Brooks that to the extent that most Americans are concerned about, or do not support health care reform, doesn't have all that much to do with race. That's a separate question from whether the argument against health care on the right has a racial subtext to it--and one of the real problems with dealing with race in this country is that there's no understanding of degree when it comes to racism. Good people can succumb, or be manipulated into indulging their prejudices, and not all acts motivated by race are the same or motivated by malice. What's disgusting is when political parties have no compunctions about manipulating people in this manner--or how it affects the country in turn.

-- A. Serwer

Senator Evan Bayh mounts the ramparts at the Wall Street Journal to argue in favor of cutting spending to control the debt. In so doing, he makes a wild prediction of "stagflation" if future policies continue, which is entirely too much. And his proposed solution?

Efficiency and frugality, common virtues in the private sector, must be incorporated into government. Congress should enact health-care reform that actually lowers the deficit. For the next fiscal year, assuming the economy has gathered sufficient momentum, we should freeze domestic discretionary spending, limit increases in defense spending to the rate of inflation, forgo pay raises for federal workers, and institute a federal hiring freeze.

There's a lot to unpack here. For starters, I'm not sure "frugality" is really the appropriate word to describe the private sector. And, sure, we should back health care reform to lower the deficit; it would be easier if you would support a public option, or any of the various revenue proposals that you've rejected, including making sure the charitable donations of the wealthy have the same tax benefits as those of the poor. Freezing domestic discretionary spending is insane during a recovery, as is freezing federal hiring -- that's the recipe for a double-dip recession.

But it's easy to look at Bayh's record and see that this is merely posturing. Bayh voted on a bill to lower the estate tax on families with more than $7 million in wealth. Would fiscal responsiblity be supporting a $250 billion giveaway to wealthy families? Apparently, yes.

Sure, there are spending problems in the federal budget, but Bayh doesn't take them seriously. He grumbles about earmarks, a tiny portion of the federal budget, but not about subsidies to student lenders or the agribussineses. He doesn't have much to say about raising taxes, even though that's the only way to really balance the budget. And though he does recognize that most of the debt is not the president's fault, he doesn't recognize that under the president's policy the deficits do get cut down, to the point at the end of seven years the deficits will only be interest payments, not government spending.

But the best part is the blatant concern trolling. He argues in favor of a "progressive" government -- without mentioning what that would entail -- in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Both Bayh and his advisers know the slant of the WSJ op-ed page and its readers. They aren't looking to argue that progressives should be more responsible -- they're looking to increase the senator's burnish in the eyes of conservatives.

-- TIm Fernholz

Bank of America announced Thursday that starting in October, consumers will be able to apply for its Basic Visa card. The new card offers one rate for all transactions -- including balance transfers and cash advances, which are typically charged different rates than purchases. That one rate, prime rate plus a margin of 14 percentage points, would only change if the prime rate fluctuates. There would also be a flat late charge of $39. Many companies charge late fees based on the amount owed.

...Bank of America's Basic card won't impose a fee when customers exceed their credit limit; under the new law it must be disclosed before the transaction goes through. Discover and American Express recently announced that they were eliminating over-limit fees.

"Some of what they're doing there is eliminating some of what caused the anger and resulted in limits on what they can do," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for U.S. PIRG, a consumer advocacy group. "They're responding to market demand for a card that people can understand, that won't require a 45-page disclosure. It's pretty close to plain vanilla in some ways."

It's no coincidence that Mierzwinski is saying "plain vanilla" in this context. One major function of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that the administration hopes to create this fall is mandating that all lenders, whether they offer mortgages, auto loans or what have you, offer a line of plain vanilla products, like these credit cards, so that consumers have a reliable and safe option when they need credit. More exotic credit lines will still be available, but you'll have to demonstrate you understand what you're getting into before you sign up for those. Consider these cards a preview of a post-CFPA world, not the economic apocalypse foreseen by business interests.

It will be interesting to see how consumers respond to these new cards. I'd consider switching from my current card to save some hassle.

Update: Commenter Swift Loris has a good catch after the jump, looks like B of A is still being tricky, tricky. That said, at least this is an interest rate hike that is not entirely arbitrary.

-- Tim Fernholz

• The Obama administration has canceled a Bush-era proposal to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, prompting predictable cries of appeasement from the bellicose right wing which would love nothing more than to escalate tensions between the United States and Russia. If only Obama had looked to history, he would have learned that Reagan the Great caused the Soviet Union to collapse with the mere prospect of unproven, fantastically expensive space lasers.
  
• It's a regular occurrence, but Democrats need to stop playing along with every would-be scandal concocted by Republicans, in this case the business of Obama's czars. I realize this has been a pet issue for Russ Feingold for some time now, so at least he's being consistent. But for the DNC to take it's cues from, ultimately, the likes of Glenn Beck is to buy into the right wing's ceaseless efforts to question the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency. And worse, as Dave Weigel points out, it distracts from the very real issue of Senate Republicans blocking Obama's appointments that are confirmed by the Senate.
• Kate Sheppard points to a study from the Competitive Enterprise Institute which claims climate change legislation will cost the average American family $1,761 per year. The problem is that the study analyzes a legislative proposal that doesn't actually exist. And now, thanks to the vigilance of CBS News, the meme has now graduated from conservative think tank to the legitimate mainstream media. Even worse, Declan McCullagh, the author of the CBS News report, is refusing to acknowledge this basic problem with the study and is instead forcing it into the familiar "he said she said" storyline. Time for another blogger ethics panel.
• Rarely do you see conservative contempt for democracy so plainly stated. Speaking at the American Conservative Union conference yesterday, The Wall Street Journal's John Fund gravely warned the attendees that should Democrats pass health care reform, the next step would be to "ram universal voter registration through Congress." It's funny how conservatives constantly whine that everything liberals and Democrats do goes against the will of the American people, yet consistently work to ensure that the only votes that matter are those that are friendly to Republicans.
• Remainders: Nobody could have predicted that the Baucus "compromise" bill would have less overall support than one written with liberals in mind; shockingly, a majority of the public thinks Republicans are using scare tactics in the health-care debate; Orly Taitz is a pathetic advocate of perjury; Operation Rescue is broke -- good riddance; and according to The Corner, stimulus spending never works.

--Mori Dinauer

It's never a good sign when you use an argument that's already been tried by Michael Goldfarb, and that's the case with this from Megan McArdle:

I'm reliably informed that the Democrats think they're better off doing this alone than not doing it at all, and so it has to pass. If so, it will be the first time in history that I can think of that a single party passed anything of this size--certainly not a major new entitlement. Medicare and Social Security both had considerable Republican votes, something I don't see this time around.

Noting that Medicare and Social Security had significant Republican support is about is relevant as noting that prior to 1992 it was extremely unusual for a Democrat to win the White House without carrying Mississippi. The rather obvious difference with the current situation and the laws that McArdle cites is that parties have become aligned ideologically. Of course Medicare and Social Security had lots of Republican support: There were lots of northern liberal Republicans in Congress, whose support was often needed to counterbalance the reactionary segregationists in the Democratic caucus. In the current context, conversely, the liberal northern Republican is virtually extinct, and the few remaining ones are 1) subject to much stronger party discipline than was the case in 1937 or 1965, and 2) are more heterodox on social than fiscal matters. So thinking that the same kind of legislative coalition was viable would be silly.

More importantly, looking beyond the very short-term, it's all irrelevant politically. The evidence is overwhelming that the public evaluates policy by how it affects them, not based on the process by which it was enacted. A bill passed along partisan lines that people like will be popular. A bipartisan bill that forces people to pay large percentages of their incomes for crappy insurance will be extremely unpopular (and hurt the governing Democrats.) It's really that simple.

--Scott Lemieux

The House passed, 253-171, a bill this afternoon that cuts away a massive subsidy to the student lending industry, saving some $90 billion over the next 10 years, much of which will be directed towards stabilizing Pell Grants and lowering student loan interest rates. It is a key victory for the Obama administration, which long supported the idea, and no doubt hopes it won't get lost in the news shuffle. Says House Education and Labor Committee Chair George Miller, who wrote the bill:

No student in America should have to mortgage their future to get a good education. This legislation provides students and families with the single largest investment in federal student aid ever and makes landmark investments to improve education for students of all ages – and all without costing taxpayers a dime. Today the House made a clear choice to stop funneling vital taxpayer dollars through board rooms and start sending them directly to dorm rooms. This vote was a historic triumph for America’s students, families and taxpayers – and will ensure that their interests never again take a backseat to lenders and big banks.

In essence, the legislation simply cuts out the middleman. Right now, the government provides loan guarantees and fees to lenders, who in turn provide loans to students. This group of lenders has been the source of a number of different corruption scandals in recent years. What the new bill does is put all lending under the umbrella of the Federal Direct Lending program, which will make loans directly to students, saving money on administrative costs and profits for private companies.

Next up, of course, is the Senate, where good legislation goes to die. However, like health care, this bill can be passed under reconciliation rules (i.e., it can't be filibustered) and because the mechanisms within the legislation are relatively simple, it promises to be a relatively smooth passage. However, the usual crew of senators allied to the lending industry will be doing what they can to dilute or kill the legislation.

-- Tim Fernholz

This is really a pretty quality example of how the right isn't so much allergic to public goods as it is allergic to paying for them. Greg Sargent:

You may have heard that GOP Rep. Kevin Brady, staunch tea partier, is protesting that the taxpayer-funded D.C. Metro didn’t adequately prepare for the anti-government 9/12 rally. He’s even suggesting Metro’s failure to transport tea partiers may have hurt turnout.

A Democrat, however, points out to me that Brady voted against Federal funding for the very same Metro he’s blaming for offering the tea partiers substandard service.

[...]

But earlier this year, Brady voted against the stimulus package. It provided millions upon millions of dollars for all manner of improvements to … the D.C. Metro.

So even while they were attending a protest against higher taxes, the tea partiers were complaining about government services they opposed funding.

What this really says is that Americans of all ideological persuasions want quality public services, but that means higher taxes. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Republicans don't want to pay for them, and particularly not if they see them as benefiting "someone else."  

-- A. Serwer

Manuel Pastor on how neighborhood approaches fit into the national poverty strategy:

The Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) has given new meaning to the adage that failure is an orphan but success has a thousand parents. The zone, a public-private partnership founded and led by the charismatic Geoffrey Canada, has produced significant gains in student achievement in the context of a deeply troubled neighborhood. This has made it both a darling of some conservatives and a supposed paradigm for the Obama administration's approach to urban distress.

It is a worthy model, but utilizing it to make a dent in our national poverty problem will require two realizations: first, that the conservative enthusiasm, most recently voiced by columnist David Brooks, is decidedly partial, and second, that any neighborhood-based approach, including the HCZ, must be nested in a far broader strategy to revitalize urban America -- including everything from the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit to changes in transportation funding to targeted training

KEEP READING ...

In the past few days, there has been a lot of discussion about the role race plays in the rising tide of birther/tenther/teabagger opposition to President Obama, mostly because of the column I wrote the other day here at TAP about the topic. (Ha! Not really – it had to do more with Jimmy Carter and Maureen Dowd.) But since I wrote that column, I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from conservatives, saying in one form or another, “Opposing President Obama does not make me a racist!”

Of course it doesn’t. But I want to focus on one particular aspect of this controversy for a moment, the people with the great big megaphones. I had one correspondent claim to me that he listens to Rush Limbaugh every day, and Limbaugh has never said anything racist. I realized that what he meant was that Limbaugh had, in his time listening, never actually burst out, “Obama is a ni**er!!!” My correspondent also assured me that Limbaugh is close friends with Clarence Thomas, certifying to the lack of prejudice in his heart.

But here’s the thing. I have no way of knowing what’s in Rush Limbaugh’s heart (though I have my suspicions). I don’t know if he is a racist, but what I do know is this: He is, most assuredly, a race-baiter. He regularly attempts to encourage his listeners to nurture whatever racism they may have, and to feel animosity toward those who are not white. When he trumpets a random incident on a school bus in which a white kid got beat up by saying, “In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering,” he’s trying to get white people to feel angry at, and afraid of, black people. When he calls Sonia Sotomayor a racist and spends hours talking about the one case in which Sotomayor ruled against a white guy, he may or may not be revealing his own anti-Latino feelings, but he is definitely trying to get his white audience to hate Sotomayor because of her race. The same is true of Glenn Beck; whatever happens to lie in Beck’s heart, when he says that Barack Obama harbors “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” he’s telling his white audience that they should hate and fear Obama because of his race. The other part of the message is that white people are aggrieved and oppressed, and should be as resentful as possible at those uppity minorities who are the cause of all their troubles.

This is an old Republican tradition, of course. You could argue that most of their electoral success over the last 40 years was built on race-baiting, from Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” to Ronald Reagan's campaigning against “welfare queens,” to Newt Gingrich railing against “midnight basketball.” Were they racists? We don’t know, and we really shouldn’t much care. But what we do know is that like Limbaugh and Beck, they were race-baiters.

I’m sure that today’s race-baiters would prefer that the emotions they’re working so hard to stir up stay just below the surface; when people start showing up at rallies with signs saying things like, “The zoo has an African lion; the White House has a lyin’ African,” it kind of gives away the game. But let’s stop worrying about whether one or another political or media figure is a racist. If you want to call them out for something, call them out for the race-baiting.

And if you haven’t yet, you should check out the extremely awesome Jay Smooth on the what you said/what you are distinction. It’ll be the most worthwhile 3 minutes of your day:

--Paul Waldman

- Given the membership [PDF], I worried that the committee would be beset with partisan bickering and/or clashing ideologies, like the Congressional Oversight Panel. The COP, appointed by Congress to provide oversight of the bank rescues, is regularly undermined by dissents from Representative Jeb Hensarling, whose deeply conservative economic views preclude almost any reasonable discussion about regulation and finance. But though some tensions showed, I though the conservative New Pecora commissioners seemed open-minded; former Bush administration economic official Keith Hennessey and McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin made productive comments, though Peter Wallison, a more doctrinaire conservative than either of the other two, seemed to have his mind made up about the financial crisis, essentially blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac right from the outset. He may be the poison pill on this committee.

- Most surprising was Vice-Chairman Bill Thomas, a former Republican Congressman and Committee Chair. Thomas seemed to agree broadly with Chairman Phil Angelides goals of non-partisan fact-finding, and went out of his way to compliment the views of every member of the commission. He even singled out Commissioner Brooksley Born, who strongly advocated regulating derivatives during the Clinton administration, telling her that the crisis would have been much more manageable had her advice been acted on. Later, asked by a reporter if the issue of regulating markets would divide the committee, Thomas stepped forward to say that he thought regulatory reform was inevitable and that making it work correctly was critical. Though it is easy for him to say that now, Thomas' early impressions are much less doctrinaire than had been anticipated.

- One concern: There is no liberal economist on the committee, while there are three conservative economic thinkers in Hennessey, Holtz-Eakin and Wallison. The D