• How is one to account for Barack Obama's precipitous drop to 49 percent approval in the latest Gallup daily tracking poll? Is is the grave pronouncements printed in British blog posts? Democratic legislators throwing temper tantrums because Obama isn't doing their job for them? No, as always, for every president, it's the economy. And has frequently been the case, it's instructive to compare Obama's approval to Reagan's, who came into office under similar economic conditions, and who also fell below 50 percent approval by November of his first year.
• Should we be even remotely surprised that John McCain, whether due to electoral pressure or some other factor, is abandoning his climate change centrism? The "Maverick" shtick was always just a media concoction, and let's not forget that the maverick legislator in the first couple years of this decade was acting out of spite towards George Bush and the Republicans, who were back on touchy-feely terms by the time the 2004 election rolled around.
• I'm shocked, just shocked, that the tea party movement, as it were, is riven with factions that don't really know how to organize themselves into an effective protest movement. The only thing that made the very real but ultimately incoherent passions of the don't tread on me crowd into something worthy of our attention were with organizational efforts of old pros who hoped to harness that energy to take back real power in Washington.
• The problem with the belief that war with the government is inevitable is that it takes very little for this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If some band of "patriots" were to stand off against the federal government, the federal government would likely crush them, solidifying in the secessionist mind that the government is out to get them. Waco anyone?
• Remainders: Things get interesting in the 2010 Florida Senate race; why are we in Afghanistan if al Qaeda is a second-tier threat?; right wing prays for Obama to go away, one way or another; things could have been worse for Democrats in next year's Senate races; and sometimes the majority of Americans are really stupid.
  

--Mori Dinauer

So you don't normally expect a lot of snark about financial regulatory reform, but today is different, because House Financial Services Committee Spokesman Steve Adamske just sent out his fisking of a recent National Journal article on regulatory reform, which I've posted in full after the jump. Here's a sampling:

National Journal: What's going on with financial regulatory reform? I know that Dodd has a new plan and that Frank is expected to move his plan out of committee soon, but I still can't tell what the administration's plan is. Why so many plans? Well, for starters, this re-regulation of finance is huge, so it is natural that everyone would want to drive the train. Primarily, though, the many approaches reflect a strategic decision by the Obama administration. Rather than come out with a fully formed plan and guide the negotiations, the president's advisers decided to let Congress work out the details.

HFSC: This is 100% false. President Obama’s team did indeed produce a plan. They delivered to the House Financial Services Committee and to the Senate Banking Committee a 13 title bill totaling several hundred pages, complete with legislative language, and that language is serving as the base text for our deliberations.

...National Journal: It sounds like I should bet on this taking a lot more time. With big reforms, that's usually a good bet.

HFSC: We certainly wish the National Journal would take its time to do some quality reporting.

I can't link to the original article because it is subscription only, but you get a pretty good flavor from the excerpts in the release. This kind of response to a piece from a communications shop isn't the norm outside of campaigns, but National Journal represents a kind of distillation of bland conventional wisdom and is thus quite influential among members of Congress and staff, which no doubt motivated Adamske's to go after the article head on. National Journal does occasionally do in-depth reported pieces on esoteric issues like financial regulatory reform, but this isn't one of those pieces. The article entirely predicated on procedural nonsense -- Adamske's fact-checks are, on the whole, correct -- while ignoring the many substantial critiques of the bill. It's ultimate conclusion that Congress should take more time on the bill is just a silly regurgitation of Republican talking points. The problems faced by the committee can't be solved with more time, they'll be solved with negotiations and votes.

-- Tim Fernholz

Washington, DC — Today, House Financial Services Committee Communications Director Steve Adamske released the following statement after reading the Nov. 21 National Journal article, “End of the Beginning,” written by John Maggs:

“You have got to be kidding.”

On page 54 of the November 21 edition, reporter John Maggs invents a “question and answer” article that discusses the status of financial regulatory reform. The article has several errors and misrepresentations that have been corrected below:

National Journal: What's going on with financial regulatory reform? I know that Dodd has a new plan and that Frank is expected to move his plan out of committee soon, but I still can't tell what the administration's plan is. Why so many plans? Well, for starters, this re-regulation of finance is huge, so it is natural that everyone would want to drive the train. Primarily, though, the many approaches reflect a strategic decision by the Obama administration. Rather than come out with a fully formed plan and guide the negotiations, the president's advisers decided to let Congress work out the details.

HFSC: This is 100% false. President Obama’s team did indeed produce a plan. They delivered to the House Financial Services Committee and to the Senate Banking Committee a 13 title bill totaling several hundred pages, complete with legislative language, and that language is serving as the base text for our deliberations.

National Journal: But didn't Obama offer a comprehensive bill over the summer? It wasn't a bill; it was called a "blueprint." It was sketchy in its details, and many of its ideas have been changed or abandoned. House and Senate Democratic leaders, for example, now say that regulation by the administration's Consumer Financial Protection Agency should be limited to the largest 10 percent of banks. Other fundamental matters were left unmentioned, such as the way to discourage big banks from taking on too much risk -- how, exactly, to avoid fostering banks that are "too big to fail" and thus take reckless risks because they believe that the government will bail them out. No plan has settled on how to avoid this problem.

HFSC: 100% false again. As discussed above, while President Obama did release a blueprint in early June, he ordered his staff and the Treasury Department to produce a bill. They did. In addition, the National Journal is dead wrong to suggest that we abandoned the administration’s plan. To the contrary, we are implementing the administration’s plans.

The National Journal is also wrong to say that the House Financial Services Committee’s bill, H.R. 3126, limits the reach of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to 10 percent of the banks. This is 100% false. All banks will be subject to the rules and regulations of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The committee only exempted independent examinations of community banks by the CFPA. In addition:

The CFPA will write the rules for all institutions on credit cards, overdraft fees, and all other aspects of financial consumer protection– none of the covered banks will be exempt in any way from these stringent new rules.

The CFPA will receive and monitor all reports on consumer exams done by the prudential regulators at a covered institution, looking for signs of non-compliance by the institution or problems in the regulator’s conduct of exams.

The CFPA may at its discretion send an examiner on any exam of a covered bank, thrift or credit union.
This examiner will participate in all aspects of the exam, from design to final report writing
In an unprecedented move, the CFPA will be able to remove the prudential regulator and take over the exams itself if it finds that the regulator is not adequately pursuing or enforcing violations, or that there are other consumer problems at the bank.

Finally, the CFPA retains complete control of the consumer complaint process, and has authority to investigate and enforce against violations at any institution based on those complaints.

National Journal: Isn't it typical to start with a blueprint? Isn't that how President Reagan did tax reform in the 1980s? Yes, but it's not typical to be as disengaged as the Obama administration seems to be this late in the game. The White House said all along that it wants to complete the reform process this year, and even though it has pushed Congress to vote on the legislation, it opposes some aspects of both chambers' bills. That rush apparently was at least partly responsible for a rift between Dodd and the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama.

HFSC: 100% wrong again. The staff of the House Financial Services Committee has been in regular contact with White House staff and the Treasury Department. It is a complete lie to say the Obama administration has been disengaged.

National Journal: Why did the White House proceed this way, without firm positions? For reasons of style and necessity. On the style point, it should be clear from health care that in implementing his agenda, Obama seems to prefer leaving the details to Congress. His style simply differs from that of past presidents, who have led negotiations rather than let congressional leaders take charge. To cite Obama's predecessors, the Bush team was deeply involved in lining up votes and twisting arms to pass his 2001 tax cut; President Clinton did the same in ending Cold War trade restrictions on China. That doesn't seem to be how this White House likes to do things.

HFSC: Again 100% wrong. They have firm positions and they have worked with us every step of the way — the National Journal just never bothered to find out.

National Journal: What about necessity -- why did the administration have to start out that way? Because even as late as June, Obama's advisers hadn't decided what to do, and in many ways, they still haven't.

HFSC: Again 100% wrong. The administration brought to us a bill composed of 13 titles and hundreds of pages which has served as the base text. Of course we have changed things, but this is normal in the course of legislating. We have worked with them every step of the way.

National Journal: You've got to be kidding. As with every phase of the financial crisis, the government was improvising, trying to stay ahead of events. Arguably, Obama had good reasons for moving forward with something on financial regulation, even if the proposal was incomplete. He had to send the message to the global financial system that there was a plan, some process, to avert a recurrence of the kind of crisis that took hold in 2008 and shut down bank lending. Five months after the inauguration, after an $787 billion stimulus plan, and after deciding that health care would be his focus in 2009, it just wasn't possible to re-design financial regulation in a few weeks. On the other hand, deliberating for months internally, with rumors and details leaking out, could have destabilized the markets.

HFSC: No, you have got to be kidding. As has been discussed in several parts of this rebuttal, the Obama administration within five months of taking office produced a blueprint for reform, and two months after that, produced an extensive, 13 title bill that has served as the base text for our deliberations.

National Journal: Wasn't politics a big reason for the haste? Without some plan, Republicans would have spent the past five months complaining that "Obama is wasting time on socialist health care and neglecting financial reform." Of course politics was a big factor. History will have to judge whether Obama's push on health care led him to neglect more-important matters. With or without health legislation, however, it would have been impossible for Obama to decide fundamental questions of financial regulatory reform so quickly. For one thing, the financial industry was unprepared and hadn't sorted out what it would and would not accept. The White House couldn't take a final stand on matters without getting the banks and other financial institutions on board. The months since June have really been a feeling-out process for both sides.

HFSC: 100% wrong again. The Obama administration has been engaged on all issues of financial regulation reform, producing direction and producing a bill. The Obama administration has not neglected this effort.

National Journal: So banks are holding up this process? That's too simplistic. In our system, where banks and other moneyed interests finance every congressional campaign, banks have a seat at the table. There are other considerations, but it would be silly to pretend that such a large industry has no role. As with health care, the Obama team needed time to determine which parts of the financial industry could kill the process and which parts could be co-opted. For example, after the House's hearings it became clear that smaller banks, with a presence in every congressional district, weren't willing to go along with the consumer protection agency proposal. Administration officials could see that the largest 10 percent of banks accounted for 80 percent of lending, so they let the bottom 90 percent off the hook. It took time to make this judgment, and there are many more to make.

HFSC: 100% wrong again. Banks are not “off the hook” when it comes to consumer protection. As discussed above, all banks are subject to the rules and regulations of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. We only exempted independent examinations of community banks and credit unions from the CFPA. All other rules apply to all banks.

National Journal: Well, where is the process now? Isn't the House going to be voting on the Frank bill in a few weeks? Obviously, the bill won't be finished this year, considering that the Senate plan was unveiled a week and a half ago and is fundamentally different from the House version. The question is whether the process is near the end or much closer to the beginning, and there are signs that it is much closer to the beginning.

HFSC: The House will vote on the reform in mid-December and the Senate is currently marking up their version.

National Journal: What signs? Among the differences between the chambers' proposals, the Senate plan is predicated on a really big change--taking all bank regulation away from the Federal Reserve Board and creating a powerful agency to assume the Fed's role in managing the stability of the financial system, both domestically and internationally. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is against this, and so are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economics adviser Lawrence Summers. This conflict is too fundamental to sort out in routine conference negotiations. Other issues aren't as complicated -- whether to merge two small agencies or four, for example. But some other basic matters remain undecided.

HFSC: Issues are too fundamental to sort our in routine conference negotiations? Says who? You? How else will the differences between the House and Senate be decided?

National Journal: Such as? Such as the whole point of financial regulation. Before the crisis, the government implicity guaranteed that it would do whatever was necessary to prevent the collapse of the financial system. Today, that guarantee is explicit, and it will be codified in this financial regulatory overhaul. The problem is, no one has decided how to guarantee the solvency of giant banks without encouraging the kinds of risky behavior that caused the crisis. How do you prevent the emergence of banks that are too big? There are ideas -- Dodd would use an exotic kind of bond to keep banks in line -- but no decisions. Likewise on derivatives, the privately traded securities that allowed insurance giant American International Group to almost wreck the global financial system. To sum up the House and Senate action on derivatives, the government is still in the early stages of determining how derivatives will be regulated.

HFSC: On the too big to fail issue, I would encourage you to read the excellent coverage by Bill Swindell in today’s (Nov. 20) CongressDaily of our committee’s deliberations on the Kanjorski amendment, and continue reading CongressDaily on page 8 on the Gutierrez amendment. Our whole effort, from regulating subprime mortgages to reining in derivatives and ending bailouts, is to ensure that the taxpayers never again have to foot the bill for other people’s lousy business decisions.

National Journal: When is this going to get done? A bill could be enacted by June, but it is also easy to see action slipping past the fall 2010 election. Obama wants to get reform done to claim credit for Democrats, but Republican opposition is arguably as strong as it is on health care, and the GOP is confident that it will have larger numbers in 2011. The president was able to shorten the customary reform timetable when it came to health care, and perhaps he can do so on financial regulation as well. Big reforms usually take time, however -- Reagan embraced tax reform in 1984, but it was 1986 before it came to a vote. Ironically, as the financial system recovers, the pressure for reform lessens. Dodd, in a tough re-election fight, could be crucial if he seeks to finish action in time to impress voters. He might force a partisan vote this fall to get the issue off his plate, but that might hinder compromises in the final stages.

HFSC: Wrong. Chairman Frank and Chairman Dodd are committed to making financial reform a reality as soon as possible. The American people have waited long enough for meaningful reforms, and they do not deserve to wait any longer.

National Journal: It sounds like I should bet on this taking a lot more time. With big reforms, that's usually a good bet.

HFSC: We certainly wish the National Journal would take its time to do some quality reporting.

###

Terence Samuel explains why Democrats need to focus on jobs:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will win his motion to proceed on a health-care reform package that should shave $127 billion off the federal budget deficit over the next decade -- the legislation will come to the floor of the Senate before Thanksgiving. In practical terms, that means the Obama administration will likely get to mark its first year in office with a remarkable set of legislative triumphs that, in addition to health care, could include some kind of financial reform legislation and maybe even a climate change bill.

These are big wins that will change our way of life significantly and constitute an admirable record of campaign promises kept. So it is no small irony that all this success may be of limited political value to Democrats as they go into the next election season: 2010 could be the year of the American job.

KEEP READING ...

But outside of the political sideshow, the much-hyped Chinese ownership of U.S. debt and the controversy over exchange rates (which has led some Americans to accuse the Chinese of currency manipulation) isn't likely to change in the near future.

"The truth is … China really has no choice," Michael Pettis, a professor at the Guanghua School of Management in Beijing, says in an e-mail. "China does not want to hurt its export sector (on the contrary, it is trying to prop it up), and since no one else besides the United States can run such large trade deficits, China has no choice but to keep buying dollars."

What's more interesting about the fuss isn't what China could do to the U.S. economy, but what they're doing about their own -- the current Chinese economic policy greatly advantages coastal elites over rural interests, and economic inequality is a big issue. Pettis, whose blog, "China Financial Markets," is really a must-read on these issues, thinks the larger concern is that the Chinese won't heed international advice to about balancing global trade (now, China is saving/investing too much, and the U.S. is overconsuming) because that would require greater household income growth in China, which obviously involves redistribution of income and probably increasingly broad political awareness.

But the insistence of the Chinese government that exports and investment are the way out of the global recession means that China's recovery is weaker than many realize, and could lead to more trade disputes as the Chinese continue to pursue their pro-export policy at the expense of the rest of the world. Ironically, the rebalancing policy that the Obama administration supports -- which would lead to less reliance on U.S. consumption -- is more broadly in the interest of the Chinese people than what Chinese leaders want, which is maintaining the current status quo between the two economies.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, James Carr argues for targeting hardest-hit communities with job training and access.

As this month’s unemployment numbers confirm, the nation’s economy continues to suffer despite recent positive and relatively impressive productivity numbers. Unemployment now exceeds 10 percent for the general population. Unemployment for African Americans and Latinos exceeds 15.5 percent and 13 percent respectively. For Native Americans living on reservations, it is just below the fabled and feared 25 percent of the Great Depression. For all families out of work, the economy is in a depression. Unable to find a suitable job, more than a third of those out of work are classified as long-term unemployed. The longer they remain out of the labor market, the more difficult it will be for them to reenter the workforce. It also makes them less likely to regain a job paying the same or higher wages than the job they have lost, and more likely to run out of unemployment insurance and potentially end up on the streets with few, if any, options. In fact, prior to the recent extension of unemployment benefits, roughly 7,000 people per day were losing their benefits.

Many economists dismiss the bad news on the employment front arguing that unemployment is merely a lagging indicator. But a recovery without jobs is meaningless for families worried about paying their mortgages, purchasing food, affording health care, sending their kids to college, and saving for a decent retirement. And, a recovery without jobs presents the prospect for further damage to the financial system as growing numbers of households are unable to pay their debts. Most concerning, continued significant job losses open the door for a possible “double-dip recession” given the key role played by consumer spending.

More after the jump.

--James Carr

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster James H. Carr is Chief Operating Officer of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

While there is legitimate concern over the size of the federal deficit, the threat to the economy of continued high levels of unemployment is more urgent. The foreclosure crisis -- which sparked the collapse of the credit markets and economy -- continues to grow. But unemployment is now the leading reason families are losing their homes. Moreover, more than $13 trillion of household wealth has been lost since the crisis began. While it’s hard to estimate how much of that wealth was an illusion, much of it was real savings. So, more must be done to help the nation recover from its sudden and dramatic loss. Creation, retention, and access to jobs must be a focal point for additional recovery spending, as well as management of current available recovery dollars. Employment strategies should focus on three major efforts:

• Job training that translates directly into real jobs or careers: For those out of the labor market or marginally employed, we should create job-training programs in the form of apprenticeships that are directly linked with job placement and retention strategies or first-source hiring agreements with industry. Job training programs should also focus on long-term career opportunities (i.e. teach transferable skills, create opportunities for future training and education, technical assistance for those who want to start their own businesses), wrap-around services and ongoing case management.
• Increased access to existing jobs for the hardest hit communities: Every agency within the federal government has annual contracting goals to increase the participation of small, disadvantaged, and women-owned businesses. Adherence to these goals varies greatly by agency with some key programs poorly enforced. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that for one of its largest programs (Section 3 requirements), only 25 percent of HUD funded recipients report their compliance and 80 percent of those reporting fail to meet the minimum requirements. Compliance with these types of guidelines consistently across agencies could channel tens of thousands of jobs to the hardest hit families and communities in America.
• Rebuild the middle class - We should implement policies that encourage the creation of reliable and sustainable jobs that allow families to earn a living wage, receive reasonable benefits, build assets, and retire in dignity. Investing in clean energy and energy efficiency programs can replace many manufacturing jobs that have been lost over the past few decades and position the nation to be a leader in many industrial jobs of the future. Federal policies should also protect American workers from direct competition with countries that fail to respect worker rights and not reward firms that ship economic opportunities abroad.

Matthew Duss on Iran's legitimacy problem:

The "war on terror" was pretty great for Iran's hardliners. The Bush administration's 2002 inclusion of Iran in the "Axis of Evil" was a major blow to Iranian moderates, discrediting their calls for U.S.-Iran rapprochement and supporting the claims of Iran's hard-liners that engagement with America was pointless. The invasion of Iraq removed Iran's greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, against whom Iran had fought a staggeringly destructive eight-year war. Iraq's postwar government included a significant number of Iran's former clients -- including eventual Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq -- in top leadership positions.

The perceived success of Iran's Lebanese ally Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 -- in a devastating month-long combination of bombing and ground combat hailed by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" -- also proved a huge boost to Iranian hawks. A 2007 poll of Egyptians placed Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah as the two most admired leaders in the region. The fact that two Shiite leaders topped an Egyptian poll, even as Iraq's sectarian civil war raged and Arab leaders like Jordan's King Abdullah warned of Shiite inroads into Sunni Arab lands, is a testament to Iran and Hezbollah's success in defying the West.

KEEP READING ...

A recent survey shows that more than 14 percent of borrowers are having trouble paying their mortgages, especially as unemployment starts to play a larger role than the subprime fiasco that helped kick off the recession. Meanwhile, 9.6 percent of borrowers are delinquent on payments, and 4.5 percent are involved in a foreclosure -- taken together, 7.4 million households, the highest level since 1972.

Especially given the problems with the administration's mortgage modification plan, this isn't welcome news. If anything, it should be another argument for using TARP funds to deal with unemployment rather than deficit reduction, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional Democrats, frustrated by the pace of real economic improvement, are urging Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

-- Tim Fernholz

Both the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First were at Guantanamo this week to observe the commencement of the new, revised military commissions. Both were present for the pre-trial hearing of Mohammed Kamin, and both organizations had similar takes on the proceedings.

ACLU:

Continuing the military commission proceedings against Kamin meant more of the same of what we've seen in other proceedings here: uncertainty about the rules, which the government is making up as we go along (even now, the Department of Defense is preparing new rules for the military commissions), and a judge frustrated by delays in the prosecution's failure to hand over fundamental evidence to the defense.

The usual chaos was compounded by uncertainty over where Kamin's case will ultimately be tried. Kamin is accused of a single crime, providing material support for terrorism—an offense that should have been prosecuted in established federal courts. While a military commission conviction for material support for terrorism could possibly be overturned on appeal because such a crime is not a traditional war crime, the offense is covered by the federal criminal law. And federal courts have a proven track record of obtaining convictions for material support for terrorism in numerous cases since 2001.

There is a making-it-up-as-we-go feel to these proceedings which is inevitable for a system of trials for which the Congress, courts and executive keep changing the rules. For example, there was discussion today of a new pre-trial hearing date in December in the Kamin case.

But officials said that the new rules for the military commission proceedings - which the Department of Defense needs to alter to conform with reforms passed by Congress on October 29 - have yet to be released by the Department of Defense. Officials with the Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo acknowledged today that they have not even seen a draft set of the new rules.

I think most Americans aren't actually privy to how haphazard the military commissions are--they're essentially a new legal system invented from scratch to try detainees against whom we have dubious evidence or only intelligence information. The adjective "military" may give them a certain sense of authority for those who are unaware just how poorly the process has worked so far compared to federal courts, but this is misleading since the DoJ's civilian lawyers are actually more experienced in trying terrorism cases.

Not to belabor the point, but from a practical point of view, why would you want to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed through this kind of shaky process rather than a civilian trial in the Southern District of New York, which has already handled plenty of these types of cases? A civilian trial is still far less of a roll of the dice than the military commissions, even after the revisions.

-- A. Serwer

Joanne Kenen lays out some progressive solutions to the malpractice problem:

Year after year, Republicans try to pass legislation that would limit medical malpractice awards. Fix the tort system, they argue, and we fix rising health-care costs. And year after year, Democrats resist placing arbitrary caps on awards to people who may have suffered from an egregious medical error. The fight plays out like a predictable old Western -- good guys versus bad guys. Depending on your politics, the villain is either the greedy doctor or the greedy trial lawyer.

Health reform invites a fresh look at malpractice. The Republican tort-reform agenda hasn't magically fixed what ails American health care in states that have tried it. But progressives can test new models of medical malpractice reform because -- done right -- they may lead to a more consistent, more timely, and more equitable approach to compensating people who have been harmed.

KEEP READING ...

The other day, Jesse Jackson said Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama wasn't black because he voted against health-care reform:

At a CBC dinner on Wednesday night, the famed civil rights leader denounced Davis's vote, saying, "We even have blacks voting against the health care bill from Alabama. You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man."

Days after insisting it was impossible to be both black (which Davis is) and vote against health care reform (which Davis did), Jackson said he called the Alabama gubernatorial candidate to "assure him of my abiding admiration."

It's a good sign that even someone who has been associated with civil rights as long as Jesse Jackson can't get away with publicly questioning someone's ethnic loyalties based on their politics without embarrassing himself and having to apologize. If only we could somehow get this dynamic going within the American Jewish community.

-- A. Serwer

Following somewhat in the footsteps of the Constitution Project and former State Department official John Bellinger, former Bush Department of Justice officials Jack Goldsmith and Jim Comey have backed Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court. Goldsmith famously withdrew the administration's torture memos, and Comey backed then Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision not to certify the NSA wiretapping program.

Goldsmith and Comey don't go as far as the Constitution Project in pushing against preventive detention, and they're fine with the two-tiered system of justice for suspected terrorists. In fact, they're painfully honest about it:

It is more likely that Holder decided to use a commission system still learning to walk because the Cole case is relatively weak and will benefit from the marginal advantages the commission system offers the government. It is also likely that the Justice Department will decide that many other terrorists at Guantanamo Bay will not be tried in civilian or military court but, rather, will be held under a military detention rationale more suitable to the circumstances of their cases.

Krauthammer also fears, like other conservatives, the unhinged rants of KSM. There's really nothing more self-implicating than the chattering teeth of Republicans in the face of a terrorists' rants -- in a military commissions trial, KSM's indictment of the United States might have some resonance, particularly in the Middle East. Placing him in a civilian courtroom is a propaganda coup for the U.S., not the other way around. When people get hysterical over what KSM might say, it makes me wonder how much of what they think he might say is actually true. Spencer Ackerman has another theory: Seeing Al Qaeda terrorists being brought low before a court of law demystifies them for a fearful public, diminishing the political currency of terrorism-based fearmongering.

I can see why the GOP would be afraid of that.

-- A. Serwer

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, costs Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a "Medicare-like plan" that competed with private insurers. Who could be against freedom of choice? Fully 70 percent of Americans polled supported the idea. Open to all Americans, such a plan would have the scale and authority to negotiate low prices with drug companies and other providers, and force private insurers to provide better service at lower costs. But private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it would end up too much like what they have up in Canada.

So the compromise was to give the public option only to Americans who wouldn't be covered either by their employers or by Medicaid. And give them coverage pegged to Medicare rates. But private insurers and ... you know the rest.

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.

But even the House's shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and "centrists" in the Senate. So Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than 4 million Americans.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

It's a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word "public."

And yet Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson mumble darkly that they may not even vote to allow debate on the floor of the Senate about the bill if it contains this paltry public option. And Republicans predict a "holy war."

But what more can possibly be compromised? Take away the word "public?" Make it available to only twelve people?

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to ... our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no preexisting conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice -- dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don't take our calls.

But instead of revisiting old disputes, Karzai brought in several cabinet ministers to talk about development and security. He explained details of a new effort to address graft. And halfway through a meal of lamb stew, chicken and rice, he looked across the table and said he had decided that the United States would be a "critical partner" in his second term, according to a senior U.S. official familiar with the meeting.

I'm glad he's decided that the U.S. is a "critical partner," but that's not exactly his decision, is it, given the whole U.S.-military-keeps-him-in-power thing? While Rajiv Chandrasekaran's piece suggests that Karzai's efforts are a result of "top diplomats and generals ... abandoning for now their get-tough tactics with Karzai and attempting to forge a far warmer relationship," I just don't think the chronology adds up. It was only a week ago that Ambassador Karl Eikenberry was arguing that the U.S. shouldn't send more troops specifically to have more leverage over Karzai, leading the president to reject all of his staff's proposals. I doubt that things have since turned around dramatically since then.

Reading on, the change in dynamic seems to be this: The new approach "will entail more engagement with members of Karzai's cabinet and provincial governors, officials said, because they have concluded that the Afghan president lacks the political clout in his highly decentralized nation to purge corrupt local warlords and power brokers." Essentially, U.S. officials have realized Karzai is inept and are bypassing him, which is much better explanation of why he's suddenly decided the U.S. ought to be his critical partner.

That's not to say there is no merit in Chrasekaran's analysis, which does show that the U.S. has pushed Karzai pretty hard throughout the election cycle, and made some diplomatic missteps that led Karzai to seek unsavory allies. But the article concludes with a quote from a senior official saying that Karzai isn't obstructionist, just inept, and with mention that at Clinton's feel-good meeting, she also delivered the news that further U.S. aid would be contingent on the Afghan government hitting certain benchmarks, not exactly a message Karzai wants to hear. Maybe the U.S. is taking a warmer tone with Karzai, but that's because they've realized how ineffectual he is, which in turn has led him to emphasize his value to the American project. The combination of the U.S. dealing with the facts on the ground and Karzai being cooperative might be a very good outcome indeed.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Some conservatives are open about their reverence for the Bush administration's policies. But others, perhaps not wanting to associate themselves with the worst presidency of modern times try to pretend the last eight years didn't happen by comparing Barack Obama to History's Greatest Monster, Jimmy Carter, or pretending that foreign policy initiated by the Bush administration, left to fester for years, is now proof that Obama has "lost" the war in Afghanistan.
• I agree with Robert Farley that basing your foreign policy exclusively on worst-case scenarios is arguably the worst thing you can do, which I think is related to the another common refrain in foreign affairs: portraying your would-be adversary in the personalized terms of a madman who cannot be negotiated with, and who is unwavering in his commitment to destroy you. Fortunately, the Obama administration has opted to return to a fairly conventional carrots-and-sticks approach which gives the United States more leverage than mindless saber-rattling and demonization ever could.
• Needless to say, Republicans did not provide the leadership which led to passage of the Civil Rights Act, but what's most telling about these remarks is that most Republicans probably believe this. As we all know, the only racists left in this country are liberals, whose insistence on big government creates dependency for minorities who would otherwise pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become successful small business owners under the proven deregulatory policies of Republicans.
• Remainders: Voters sour on the stimulus, don't understand recession economics; Michael Tomasky tries to unravel the Blue Dog enigma; the fundraising war continues apace; and the Senate deludes itself into thinking that it can legislate away teenagers' hormones.

--Mori Dinauer

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins argues for clean energy investments that will create 1.7 million jobs for the people who need them the most.

It’s difficult for most Americans to accept data indicating an end to the recession for a simple reason – they don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. Despite a quarter of growth, the unemployment rate has topped 10 percent, the highest it has been since 1983. Among people of color, the rates are even higher, with Latino unemployment exceeding 13 percent, and unemployment in the African-American community just shy of 16 percent. Economic growth does not mean that Americans experience economic relief; without stable jobs for everyday Americans, this cannot be considered a recovery. Recovery necessitates that jobs be created – jobs that provide stable employment for years, not months.

Green shoots of an employment recovery are showing through the investments made under President Obama's Recovery Act, which is already producing impressive innovation and the beginnings of job and wealth creation in green industries. Clean-energy sectors, which hold the promise of being major engines of job growth, are creating opportunities for those communities hit hardest by the recession: low-income communities and communities of color.

Portland, Oregon, for example, is using Recovery Act investments to launch a revolving loan fund that will help residents pay for energy-efficiency improvements to their homes. This program will save energy, save money and create 10,000 local jobs. A groundbreaking Community Workforce Agreement will further ensure that those jobs are available to workers from low-income and other disadvantaged communities.

In New York City, Recovery Act investments are helping the Community Environmental Center (CEC) hire more workers and weatherize more buildings. The largest Weatherization Assistance Program provider in the state, CEC is a union shop providing good wages and benefits. And thanks to a partnership between the union (the Laborers Local 10) and Non-Traditional Employment for Women, women and historically disadvantaged workers have the opportunity to win those jobs.

These local examples reinforce what larger, national investigations have shown. In our report Green Prosperity, Green For All, the Political Economy Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council showed that clean-energy investment creates roughly three to four times as many jobs as comparable investment in fossil fuel industries. The report estimates that investing $150 billion (public and private) in clean energy will create a net gain of 1.7 million jobs. Renewable energy and energy efficiency replace the damage done to our environment by fossil fuels with good, sustainable jobs for American workers. Building a green economy involves more than a shift to clean energy – it will provide a shift to a more skilled and labor-intensive economy.

More after the jump.

-- Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the CEO of Green For All, a national organization working to build an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

The Recovery Act is promising – but it is only a beginning. Congress and the President must take the next step: enacting strong climate and energy legislation. The Clean Energy Jobs Act, just reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, will invest public money in clean energy. But moreover, it will also encourage private investment and innovation by sending a clear message: clean energy is the future of our economy. Those who invest early and robustly will be reap the benefits.

There are ways, though, that the Clean Energy Jobs Act can be made even stronger. We must to increase clean-energy investments while fully protecting low-income consumers from price hikes. We must protect two key provisions: the Green Construction Careers Demonstration Project and funding for the Green Jobs Act. These provisions ensure that the bill not only creates jobs, but that all of America's workers have access to and are ready for these jobs — particularly the workers impacted most severely by the economy’s downturn.

An economic recovery, after all, is not a percentage point noted in a press release. A real recovery is one in which Americans can be confident that, regardless of where they live or what they look like, they have an opportunity to succeed in the economy. We must measure our true progress by a different metric: the number of career-track, green jobs that we create for those Americans who need them most.

All very interesting stuff from the newest Democratic senator. But, when asked what would happen if the president proposed a troop increase -- "I don't think Congress would leap forward with plaudits" -- Specter gave the game away: "When you have Congressman [Joe] Sestak calling for an increase, a major increase, I think his view would be in the minority." Sestak, a retired Admiral, is the Pennsylvania Representative challenging Specter for his senate seat. Asked how much of his forward leaning statements were political positioning, Specter replied,"None, None," pointing to a statement he delivered in September raising similar questions about the war -- which also came after Sestak's decision to run.

Funny to see Specter, the former Republican, is finding ground to the left of Sestak in the Pennsylvania primary on an issue of major importance to progressives. Sestak probably has the advantage on almost every other issue among the Democratic base, but his support of increasing troops in Afghanistan could present a window of opportunity to Specter. It all depends on what the Obama administration chooses, and whether real congressional opposition emerges following that decision.

-- Tim Fernholz

Sady Doyle on the unwarranted backlash against fans of the world's most popular vampire-romance series:

When New Moon, the second film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's four-part Twilight series, opens in theaters this month, those who see it will not be getting great art. The faults of Meyer's immensely popular teen vampire-romance novels have been endlessly, and publicly, rehashed: the retrograde gender roles, the plodding plotlines, the super-heated goofiness of Meyer's prose. I can confirm for you that these faults are real!



Yet I could not stop reading the series. The books -- all about sexy teen vampire Edward Cullen, his sexy teen werewolf rival Jacob Black, and their joint quest to stalk, control, and condescend their way into the ever-turgid affections of sexy teen (human) narrator Bella Swan -- are slow, repetitive, and often unintentionally hilarious. ("If I hadn't seen him undressed, I would have sworn there was nothing more beautiful than Edward in his khakis." Wait. Hold up. The vampire is wearing khakis?) 



KEEP READING ...

Peter Bergen, who testified today before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, made an important point about homegrown radicalization.

An important caveat: Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in recent years looked much like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had lived, is largely ghettoized. Family incomes there average less than $15,000 a year and the unemployment rate is 17%. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the US Army after three weeks and later became a truck driver, a job he quit for good in 2007. The five men in the Fort Dix cell were all illegal immigrants who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs.

A few years ago Spencer Ackerman wrote what I think was a very accurate piece about how American pluralism and economic opportunity had stemmed the growth of homegrown Islamic radicalism. But that was years ago, and things change -- de facto segregation may be creating the conditions for the kinds of radicalization that we've seen in Europe.

Weeks ago I had a conversation with Bergen's colleague at the New America Foundation Andrew Lebovich, who warned that Americans may have gotten complacent about thinking of how to properly counter radical ideologies from spreading because of a certain strain of American exceptionalism -- the idea that American culture is itself a deradicalizing force. I happen to think that's true. Nevertheless, Lebovich points out that what we've seen recently -- most dramatically in Minnesota -- is the rise of isolated, economically depressed "country-or region-specific" communities where radicalization can take root anyway, often as a result of events in the country of their families' origin. It's a problem we're going to have to figure out how to face soon, without alienating or demonizing the communities in question.

As former Vice Chief of Staff of the Army John Keane said in the Senate Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing on the Ft. Hood shootings said earlier today, “you cannot kill this movement, you need moderate Muslims to reject it."

-- A. Serwer

A new poll shows that 52 percent of Republicans think ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama.

I've written about voter fraud pretty extensively -- most Republicans don't know the difference between registration fraud, which is as easy as filling out a ballot application incorrectly, and voter fraud, which means actually casting a ballot. The conservative Ahabs at the Bush Justice Department spent years chasing that white whale and came up with bubkus. The latter is incredibly rare, and there isn't a single documented instance of ACORN anywhere, ever, stealing an election.

Nevertheless, like the idea that the Obama was born abroad, the myth of voter fraud persists -- only a minority of Republicans believe the president was born in the United States.

These issues are ultimately connected -- the segment of the Republican base that imagines itself as "real" Americans finds it incomprehensible that they, and their agenda, could be rejected by a majority of voters. We saw a little bit of this denial from conservative pundits insisting America is a "center-right" country immediately after the election. But for a certain group of Republicans the 2008 election caused a sense of rejection that has fermented into derangement, which is why the weepy, manic Glenn Beck has now become the right's primary ideological voice. It's why so much of that emotion is focused on a time -- right after 9/11--that people were so fearful of terrorism that the right had overwhelming political support.

The 2008 electorate was the most diverse ever--for some people, that is disenfranchisement by definition, since that means America is being increasingly populated by people who aren't "real Americans." Even if ACORN didn't steal the election, those people did, and so whether ACORN literally stole the election matters about as much as literal "death panels". It's "true enough." Hoffman workers in NY-23 mistook one of their own African-American volunteers for a member of ACORN, which wasn't even active in the district.

None of this new far right mythology actually has to make sense. As long as the frayed pieces of the puzzle can be assembled in a manner that allows this part of the right to preserve in their minds the idea that they are the authentic representation of what it means to be American, any explanation will do.

-- A. Serwer

Today, Obama leaves Asia having made no headway on the issue of North Korean denuclearization. In Japan, China, and South Korea, the president reaffirmed each country's commitment to bring North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks. But it's not clear how much good that would do: Pyongyang remains as unpredictable as ever. For the past decade, North Korea has participated in eight rounds of these negotiations -- a process aimed toward ending DPRK's nuclear program that also involves the United States, Russia, China, Japan, and South Korea -- and it's been rewarded with gradual loosening of economic sanctions. The outcome? A trail of broken pledges and two nuclear tests, the most recent one in May.

It may be time to shift toward using trade and academic exchanges to open up North Korea -- an approach that worked with Eastern Europe and China -- and leave more of the heavy lifting on denuclearization to its neighbors. As a recent Asia Society report suggests, integrating North Korea into the world economy could potentially empower its citizens and impose heretofore nonexistent domestic pressure on its leaders to abide by international norms. Having already removed North Korea from the U.S. Trading with Enemy Act last year (only Cuba remains!), we should follow the lead of many European countries to develop trade ties and encourage NGO aid networks to work within the country. The United States could also initiate technological and educational exchanges to expose North Koreans to new ideas and business practices that can be implemented back home.

These societal improvements will be critical to transitioning North Korea out of its currently unthinkable degree of isolation and poverty. In a recent New Yorker article, Barbara Demick describes a famine in North Korea that killed 2.5 million and profiles a woman who led a modern-day hunter-gatherer life in order to combat state-induced food shortage, all the while believing that she was living in the “greatest nation on earth”:

Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Posters went up in the capital, Pyongyang, touting a new slogan, "Let's Eat Two Meals a Day"… Mrs. Song would hike north and west from the city center, carrying a kitchen knife and a basket to collect edible weeds and grass. If you got out to the mountains, you could find dandelions or other weeds that people ate even in good times. Occasionally, Mrs. Song also collected rotten cabbage leaves that had been discarded by a farmer.

This oppression is destabilizing for North Korea's economic system and the country as a whole -- clearly not a good thing when you're talking about a country with nukes.

Meanwhile, we can leave the task of putting pressure on DPRK to its neighbors -- they're within range of Pyongyang's missiles, and they're most vulnerable if it experiences internal instability. Japan, South Korea, and even China are pursuing a denuclearization policy with North Korea that is already roughly in line with U.S. interests. Two days ago, Pyongyang even declared eagerness for inter-Korean dialogue toward unification.

Going forward, the Six-Party Talks will remain an important platform for coordination among the nations invested in North Korea’s nuclear disarmament. However, for the United States, economic engagement with DPRK would be a more practical and sustainable policy focus. By drawing North Korea into the international community, as President Obama wishes, it would indirectly coerce Pyongyang to denuclearize and, more importantly, induce systemic change that bring benefits directly to the North Korean people.

-- Linda Li

The Catholic bishops have gotten a lot of attention for the role they played in pushing the Stupak amendment -- and the House health-care bill -- over the finish line. While there's no doubt the bishops applied the midnight pressure, their role is just one piece of how Democrats yearn for the godly imprimatur.

To be sure, the final outcome on the House side is the result of whip counts simply not adding up to the number needed to pass the bill. But Democrats ending up in the position of having to obtain a particular religious stamp of approval was also the result of seeking out the "faith vote" in the last several election cycles, and confining the definition of "people of faith" to people who oppose abortion.

The Democrats "got religion," but at what cost?

The Democrats failed to tap into pro-choice religious groups as a voice to argue for inclusion of abortion coverage in a health-care bill. Instead, these groups, along with leading pro-choice groups, acquiesced to the Capps amendment, which would have segregated private and public funds and used only private funds to pay for abortions, as a reasonable compromise. But not being met in the middle by the anti-choice side has infuriated the pro-choice side.

The day before the House vote on November 7, pro-choice groups, including religious pro-choice groups like Catholics for Choice, were essentially saying they would hold their noses and not object to an abortion amendment compromise being crafted by Rep. Brad Ellsworth. That proposed amendment would have required a private contractor to oversee disbursement of funds for abortion coverage to ensure that public funds wouldn't be used. The pro-choice side did this reluctantly, though, because they felt they had already compromised by acquiescing to the Capps amendment when they in fact favor full coverage of abortion services.

On November 6, I wrote in a story published at Religion Dispatches:

Indeed, the pro-choice camp has compromised in order to make the bill more palatable to the anti-choice camp, which is not meeting them in the middle. “This is a hard time for us in the pro-choice community,” said [Catholics for Choice president Jon] O'Brien. “We’ve been straightforward and reasonable.” The House bill “is not a win for women. But it’s not a loss for the poor, marginalized, and dispossessed. We see it as a compromise.”

When the Stupak amendment prevailed, these pro-choicers were furious. The midnight pressure applied by the Catholic bishops amounted to the enshrining of one particular religion -- and indeed one version of that particular religion -- into law. Polling data showed that most Catholics not only disagreed with the bishops' position on the Stupak amendment, but also believed they shouldn't be politicizing the health-care debate. While the bishops do have an infrastructure that gives them access to thousands of parishes across the country -- unrivaled in any other denomination -- many pro-choice advocates believe that Congress "drank the Kool-Aid" that the bishops have actual power to sway votes.

The anti-choice Democrats who allowed Bart Stupak to be their ringleader now risk being seen as more aligned with the religious right than with their own party. As I reported at RD, while the Catholic bishops were in Nancy Pelosi's office late that Friday night, the religious right -- and Democrats for Life of America -- were rallying the religious right's base to push members of Congress to settle for nothing less than the Stupak amendment. Their goal, as we know, is blocking access to legal abortion, and a new study from the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services maintains the Stupak amendment would, over time, end all insurance coverage for abortion services. But the Ellsworth compromise, the religious right maintained, was nothing more than a "money-laundering scheme." (Apparently the Catholic bishops believe Catholic organizations are capable of segregating public and private funds, but the government is not.)

But where were the president's vaunted faith allies? The ones who were supposed to bring home the big tent? The broader agenda voters who didn't care about abortion anymore? It seems like there are cracks in their common ground strategy on health care. Religious pro-choice groups are not going to be sidelined in order for "people of faith" to close ranks around a health-care bill, just to support a health-care bill. As I reported earlier this week, religious pro-choice groups might have been foiled on Stupak, but they vowing not going to be silent in their advocacy for abortion coverage in the final bill.

--Sarah Posner

But this corporatism -- made palatable to the Left only by heavy-duty pro-consumer regulations and the public option -- is naturally offensive to progressives and populists of all stripes. More than one conservative has complained to me about these deals as offensive to the free market (as if insurance companies have ever operated in a 'free market'). But instead of taking advantage of this situation and calling out the Democrats on creating a permanent insurance industry, conservative health care proposals are an even bigger gift to the health insurance industry -- their proposals to throw off almost all regulations, allow for many kinds of medical discrimination against customers, and basically let these firms run wild -- would be even worse for consumers. But they're free market, dammit, and it saves them the time of solving the ridiculously hard problem of actual health care reform. Even their moderates, some of whom have good ideas, can't propose them because the caucus can't even agree whether or not denying coverage based on preexisting conditions is OK.

As Matt says, "moving to a less-incoherent posture would have some real benefits, but also disrupt the current sweet deal." Unfortunately, the benefits, in the form of responsible governance, would be more for the country at large than to the Republicans themselves, so I imagine we can expect the current status quo to continue.

-- Tim Fernholz

Gershom Gorenberg on selective disobedience in Israel:

Driving through the West Bank recently, I picked up two hitchhikers. Both wore the long, thick sidelocks and extra-large skullcaps that have become the mark of young men on the religious right, especially among settlers. Since they were what Israelis call army age (what Americans would call college age), the conversation turned to military service.

Despite Israel's universal draft, the hitchhiker in the back seat said he didn't intend to serve. The Israel Defense Forces, he argued, hurts Jews -- a point he presumed was obvious from the "uprooting" of settlements in Gaza four years ago and the occasional dismantling of tiny, illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank more recently. Besides that, he said, the IDF "doesn't want to kill Arabs because it wants to look nice in the world." He didn't want to die because commanders were too concerned with Arabs' lives. As a student at a yeshivah -- a religious seminary -- he had a deferment, and he intended to keep it till he was past draft age.

KEEP READING ...

Tom Ricks summarizes a speech by counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, wherein he says that the U.S. basically needs to go all or nothing -- either put in at least 40,000 troops to control corruption, or start pulling out. Related true story: A to-remain-nameless national security expert told me of a conversation he had the other day, when a congressional aide asked if the U.S. should be all in or all out in Afghanistan, and this security wonk replied, "That’s the stupidest fucking question I’ve ever heard on national security.” Kilcullen's polarity fixation aside, check the post for his comparison of Karzai to the Kuomintang in 1949 and his description of the corruption cycle. Like Ricks, I was most surprised by Kilcullen's take on Al Qaeda.

One surprise to me was that he isn't particularly worried about the possibility of al Qaeda moving back into Afghanistan. "I hope so," he said, explaining that it would be a strategic gain for us to see the terrorist group leave Pakistan and move into parts of Afghanistan that essentially are "the moon with gravity."

If Kilcullen thinks this al Qaeda problem is sorted, and that the situation would in fact be better if they did move back into Afghanistan, why is escalation even on the table? If the justification for being in Afghanistan isn't al Qaeda, then a lot of folks -- particularly President Barack Obama -- are going to be surprised.

-- Tim Fernholz

I think Daphne Eviatar is exactly right to point out that Eric Holder's comment that "failure is not an option" in the 9/11 trials sounds eerily similar to one made by Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes on the military commissions prosecutions years ago. Haynes' statement that “We can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals. We’ve got to have convictions," was used by civil liberties groups at the time to argue that the military commissions were reverse engineered to ensure convictions.

Of course, it's not just Holder making such statements. President Obama said yesterday in response to those criticizing him for not trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in military commissions that such people won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." He's since backed off that statement.

By trying KSM in a civilian court, the Obama administration is circumventing the accusation that the venue is meant to ensure conviction. But what we have here, essentially, is a situation in which there is immense social and political pressure for any judge and jury to convict the accused -- pressure that is coming from the highest reaches of the administration. Now, I personally think KSM is guilty -- but that doesn't change the fact that when the president and attorney general speak so frankly in favor of a particular outcome of a criminal trial, it certainly calls into question whether or not the accused is getting a fair proceeding.

This trial isn't just for the U.S.: It's for the world. Al Qaeda's murderous ideology will be put on trial here, but anything less than real due process will indict the United States instead. Most Americans may be convinced of KSM's guilt, but the rest of the world -- particularly the hearts and minds the U.S. is trying to win, may not be. Which is why getting this right is so important.

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday, during Attorney General Eric Holder's appearance before the Senate, the right-wing blogosphere crowded around National Review "legal expert" Andy McCarthy as he exposed the "whoppers" in Holder's testimony. Let's take a look at these -- I'll excerpt as much as possible since McCarthy's post is long.

The "tragic shooting" at Ft. Hood. What happened at Ft. Hood was a jihadist massacre — a terrorist act, not a tragedy.

The civilian justice system has been handling terrorism cases successfully for years. No mention of Mamdouh Salim, the al-Qaeda founder who was never brought to trial for 1998 U.S. embassy bombings because he maimed a Bureau of Prisons guard in an escape attempt during which he attempted to kidnap is taxpayer-funded defense lawyers.

A civilian trial is no more a platform for KSM than a military commission would have been. That's ridiculous. KSM was ready to plead guilty and be executed eleven months ago. Whatever soapbox he was going to have, he'd largely already had, and while we'd have had to let him speak before sentence was imposed, that would have been the end of it. Now, he's going to get a full-blown trial — after combing through the discovery for a couple of years and after putting the Bush administration under the spotlight.

So this is an unforced self-owning. McCarthy wants a military commission for KSM because he's afraid of "putting the Bush administration under the spotlight." In other words, a civilian trial of KSM would expose the Bush administration's illegal behavior, behavior McCarthy supports but doesn't want exposed for what it is. There's nothing more telling about the shaky moral case for torture than torture apologists' fear of their methods being scrutinized before a court of law.

In a civilian trial, America will see KSM for the coward that he is — Holder: "I am not scared of KSM." Submitting a war criminal to a military commission is not an exercise in fear; it is an exercise in justice. We already know all about what kind of animal KSM is, thanks to the exrtraordinary information that has come out in the military proceedings and the CIA interrogations. You could fill a book a book with it, which the 9/11 Commission did. We don't need to bear the risks of a civilian trial either to learn more about KSM or so Mr. Holder can show how brave he is.

Of course, KSM isn't a "war criminal" if he's guilty, he's just a criminal -- a mass murdering criminal, but there's no need to elevate him to the status of warrior. He was captured by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, not on a battlefield. He has no right of belligerence. He's not a uniformed soldier or state actor. He is a terrorist. Terrorists are criminals.

For eight years justice has been delayed — no longer, "It is past time to finally act." Holder, of course, does not mention the role of his firm and others in delaying and derailing the military commissions during their representation of America's enemies. Senator Kyl just confronted him with my contentions on that score (from this column). The attorney-general responded that I am a polemecist who says inflammatory things for talk shows, whereas he is concerned with facts. (I guess he means pertinent facts, like how he is not "scared of KSM.") I'm delighted to let people judge that one for themselves.

McCarthy wrote a long screed attacking the "the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers" who gave "free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees," for delaying the military commissions by challenging their constitutionality. The lawyers in question were doing nothing more than following Thomas Paine's counsel, that "he that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."

Never mind that these "left-wing lawyers" -- many of whom were people in uniform serving their country -- have managed to win 30 out of 38 habeas cases for detainees at Guantanamo. McCarthy's argument is a textbook example of what Armando describes as "the Ed Meese School of Law" wherein being a suspect makes you guilty even if you've been convicted of nothing. Never mind that it was the 2006 Roberts-Alito Supreme Court -- that left-wing cabal that was to the right of the partisans who handed the presidency to George W. Bush -- that decided the Hamdan case ruling the Bush military commissions unconstitutional. Never mind that due process is the legal principle on which a democratic society rests -- McCarthy would throw it all away to have a bad guy waterboarded or thrown in a cell forever.

This man, who in a second would give al-Qaeda the kind of strategic victories it only dreams of without hesitation by needlessly shredding the traditional institutions of American democracy, imagines himself a patriot, and those who defend the Constitution as traitors.

-- A. Serwer

• Of course there are political advantages to calling a "stimulus bill" a "jobs bill." But rhetoric only takes you so far if your jobs bill fails to actually produce jobs. The ARRA, while imperfect, saved a not-insignificant number of jobs, and created some demand where there otherwise would not have been any, but it wasn't designed to create concentrated and targeted job growth. Since the administration reportedly knew the stimulus fell short of the amount of money its economists were recommending for political reasons, perhaps they held off on an actual jobs bill designed to make up for the ARRA's shortcomings.
• Kevin Drum catches a New York Times piece on Obama's trip to China making the assumption that China has become "more willing to say no to the United States," as if in the rosy past China was more deferential to the United States. As much as this narrative stems from a simpleminded understanding of our fiscal relationship to the Chinese, it also draws upon the "rising power" story that places China on an inevitable path to preeminence, regardless of the fact that China is still very, very poor.
• I don't doubt that many Republicans believe their own terrorist-as-supervillian fantasies, but the main reason they would welcome a return to the inspiring politics of 2002-2004 is that they, you know, won those elections. And they won them because they convinced enough people that only they could protect you from the terrorists marching on Main St., USA, and that Democrats were nothing less than traitors.
• It's possible that Chuck Grassley actually believes that in their heart of hearts, Democrats just want to destroy capitalism, but to suggest that they "don't care" if they're hurting the economy doesn't make any sense. Name me a political party that won elections by being indifferent to an ailing economy. If Democrats were really just self-interested power seekers, why would they deliberately ruin their chances for re-election?
• Remainders: The vision of the Senate Robert Byrd recalls doesn't actually exist; Marco Rubio tests whether anti-immigration sentiment or worship of St. Ronnie is more powerful; and this year's War on Christmas is the most clueless yet.
  

--Mori Dinauer

In a story that's provoked justified outrage, the Army has threatened single military mom Spc. Alexis Hutchinson with a military court marshal for refusing leave her 10-month-old and ship off to Afghanistan when none of her family members could care for the child. In a compassionate display of flexibility, her superiors offered her the alternative of putting the child in foster care. The whole episode seems to be a the result of military keeping an inadequate and inconsistent family policy.

The Army requires single parents to have a "family plan" in case they are deployed, but if yours falls through, you're out of luck. Why isn't there a backup plan? Hutchinson -- a chef -- could serve on the base for a certain period until she finds an adequate solution. Worse comes to worse, she could receive an "administrative discharge." Whatever the details of the arrangement are, the default choice should not be to put your child in foster care or face criminal charges.

Hutchison also wouldn't have been in this predicament had she been serving, in say, the Navy. Military women generally get six weeks of maternity leave. But the time period before they can be deployed varies by branch. The Navy and Marine Corps don't require women to deploy for up to a year. The Army, however, is ready to ship you off after four months. Four months of leave isn't enough of a grace period for deployments -- many women are still breastfeeding then. Returning to work after four months might not seem so bad, but it's a huge burden when work is thousands of miles away.

The military's family policies belong in the 1950s, both in their understanding of gender balance and in terms of labor law. The government's requirement for private employers – under the Family and Medical Leave Act – makes companies with 50 employees or more give new mothers 14 weeks, a meager baseline that it fails to follow itself. And after years of prodding, the military finally acknowledged that men take care of kids, too: They get all of 10 days.

--Gabriel Arana

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment, David Woolner urges President Obama and Congress to adopt the fearlessness of FDR in directly creating jobs.

The recent news that the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter of 2009 while at the same time the national unemployment rate hit a 26-year high of 10.2 percent in October, has many economists talking about a “jobless recovery.” What this means, say the experts, is continued economic growth -- and hence a technical end to the recession -- but no improvement in the employment figures for the immediate future. In fact, most economists predict that under current conditions, the unemployment rate will rise even further -- perhaps reaching as high as 11 percent by the summer of 2010.

It appears that the Obama administration is prepared to accept this scenario and will not push for bolder solutions so as to ensure that the so-called recovery includes not just an expansion of the GDP but also a reduction in the alarmingly high unemployment rate. As a consequence, millions of American workers will continue to languish among the ranks of the unemployed, burdened by an anxious present and an uncertain future.

More after the jump.

--David Woolner

Braintruster David Woolner is senior vice president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, about 18 million Americans were in immediate need of food, clothing, medical care, and most of all, jobs. For his administration, the notion of a “jobless recovery” would have been an anathema. Indeed, for FDR, the health of the nation was tied directly to the dignity of work. People needed jobs not merely to put food on the table but also to maintain their physical, psychological, and economic well-being. Moreover, FDR firmly believed that it was government’s responsibility to provide for the “general welfare.” So in the midst of an economic crisis that had produced the highest unemployment figures in our nation’s history, he did not hesitate to use the power of the state to provide the jobs the private sector had failed to generate. The Civilian Conservation Corps, which put hundreds of thousands of young men to work regenerating our nation’s depleted forests, preventing soil erosion, and enhancing our national parks; the Civil Works Administration, which provided work for more than 4 million Americans building schools, roads, and bridges, or as teachers in rural districts; the Works Progress Administration, which between 1935 and 1938 employed 5 million people to help build the economic infrastructure we still enjoy today.

These programs were not government hand-outs. Far from it. They provided real jobs to real people doing real work. They improved our natural resources and quality of life and brought America’s economic infrastructure into the modern world. No one -- least of all FDR -- expected these programs to continue indefinitely.

But they dramatically reduced unemployment in a moment of crisis and prevented what FDR called the “atrophy” of the work force. They also brought hope and dignity to millions through the one thing most able-bodied Americans want more than anything else-a job. Isn’t it time we adopted the same approach to our own recovery from the Great Recession?

Bank of America has been one of the least cooperative banks participating in Treasury's slow-going program to modify mortgages and prevent foreclosure, but last week I received a lending report from BofA with a fishy paragraph:

Over the past 21 months, we’ve helped modify mortgage loans for 445,000 homeowners or, on average, more than 21,000 each month. In addition to these results through our own programs, we helped move almost 100,000 customers into trial modifications through the Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) in the third quarter.

Wait a minute. BofA has been performing Treasury modifications through the Home Affordable Mortgage Program more slowly than almost every other peer institution, and had been complaining about how they didn't have the resources or infrastructure to move any faster. But now we find out that even as they complained about the lack of resources, they've been doing hundreds of thousands of non-Treasury modifications, which, as I reported in the spring, are usually worse than getting no modification at all. How are they doing this? Andrew Jakabovics and Pat Garafalo at the Center for American Progress have found out: BofA is directing potential HAMP participants into its proprietary modification program, something the HAMP program is supposed to discourage:

In case there remains any ambiguity as to whether a servicer can pull borrowers out of the pool to offer them a non-HAMP-compliant modification before determining their status under HAMP, Treasury official Herbert Allison recently testified, “under HAMP’s loan modification guidelines, mortgage servicers are prevented from ‘cherry-picking’ which loans to modify in a manner that might deny assistance to borrowers at greatest risk of foreclosure.”

So BofA can’t simply suggest an alternative program to this homeowner without determining eligibility for HAMP, and by doing so, it is potentially lowering the number of successful HAMP modifications it completes. Given the size of BofA’s portfolio, its compliance with program rules — particularly as it pertains to getting eligible borrowers into the program — directly impacts the public’s perception of the success of HAMP. If BofA were performing as well as CitiMortgage, Treasury would have reported an additional quarter million mortgages in its HAMP totals.

This is, of course, ridiculous. The whole point of HAMP was to make modifications that helped troubled borrowers and the broader economy, not use the facade of a government program to trick homeowners into changes that could end with them owing even more money and still potentially losing their homes.

-- Tim Fernholz

At the U.N.'s big World Food Summit in Rome this week, Pope Benedict gave voice to a way of thinking about food that is both seemingly obvious and undervalued in development circles. You hear about the mismatch between the world's sustenance needs and the amount of readily available food attacked from the market angle -- treating food as products that would flow where they need to be if not for subsidies and other protectionist schemes. And you hear food security talked about from the structural-inefficiencies angle -- countries where there is food insecurity suffer from either underdeveloped agricultural industries or malevolent governments. Applying new biotech innovations or focusing on eliminating political bottlenecks thus becomes the goal.

Benedict sees food security differently. Without ignoring the damage done by protectionism and corruption, or the promise of a new green revolution, Benedict is trying to reframe the debate from the bottom up. And at the base is the premise that we should assume that people have secure food, and then muster up outrage when it becomes glaringly clear that they don't. Food insecurity where it exists is not an inefficiency. It's a disgrace. Thus, says Benedict:

[T]he need to oppose those forms of aid that do grave damage to the agricultural sector, those approaches to food production that are geared solely towards consumption and lack a wider perspective, and especially greed, which causes speculation to rear its head even in the marketing of cereals, as if food were to be treated just like any other commodity.

Again, it isn't exactly non-obvious that a billion or so humans being food insecure should be considered a moral question. But Benedict's appeal failed to resonate with the attendees at the U.N. summit, as the countries in attendance -- which included only Italy's Silvio Berlusconi among the G-8 leaders -- issued a squishy statement that failed to set concrete targets for addressing food security, either in terms of economic commitment or goals for a timeline for drawing the global food insecurity crisis to a close.

--Nancy Scola

Tim Fernholz on the need to consider strategy and resources in Afghanistan:

Last week, President Barack Obama rejected four different plans for what to do in Afghanistan, each one including an increase in the number of U.S. troops in the region. Resources -- how much money and how many troops -- are at the forefront of the media's coverage of Obama's decision, and the most tangible measure of the conflict to most Americans.

But as the debate over Afghanistan has progressed, voices within the administration, military commanders like Gen. Stanley McChrystal, former officials like Gen. Colin Powell, and pundits like Fred Kaplan have argued that the focus shouldn't be on how many troops are sent to Afghanistan but what they will do when they get there. This is a misleading formulation that eliminates vital strategic options. In reality, the resources the U.S. commits in Afghanistan, in both troops and treasure, should be at the crux of this debate.

KEEP READING ...

I just got off a conference call held by the Council on Foreign Relations, featuring former adviser to Condoleeza Rice, John B. Bellinger, and National Security expert Steve Simon. Simon has an op-ed in the New York Times today supporting the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in civilian court.

Bellinger said that he thought the administration's "hybrid model" of military commissions and civilian trials makes sense given that some of the people the U.S. is holding were captured on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he also pointed out that federal courts have far more experience dealing with terrorism cases than military commissions.

Bellinger condemned the "demonization" of the military commissions by human rights groups, and argued that the commissions were "in fact a well functioning system with good judges and good lawyers who I think would have been fair," but that "none of the military lawyers were used to dealing with massive terrorism cases like this.” Bellinger said that the Bush administration had in fact planned on "moving to shore up the military prosecutors with people from the Justice Department."

“Federal prosecutors are really more used to doing this kind of thing anyway," Bellinger said.

Another point that Bellinger made was that military commissions cases can be appealed into the federal court system -- meaning that any lawyer who decides to appeal would have his client's case looked at by a civilian judge anyway. He said that even if KSM had been tried by military commission, his case would have ended up in federal court.

As for Simon, he pointed out that trying KSM and the alleged 9/11 conspirators by military commission would read poorly in the Middle East.

“In the Arab Middle East, these sorts of trials are carried out by the military, they are seen as the worst form of pseudo-judicial regime justice, and not the real thing," Simon said. "So when they would look at a trial conducted by the U.S. military, even though it would adhere to more than just a semblance of due process, they’re looking at men in uniform trying other men, and they’re going to draw certain conclusions based on mirror imaging.”

"They’re just going to say that’s what happens here.”

-- A. Serwer

How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people go and, presto, their balance sheets look better and their stock prices rise.

In the old-fashioned kind of recession decades ago, big companies laid off people with the expectation of rehiring them when the economy turned up. Then a few recessions back, companies started laying off people for good, never rehiring them even when the economy recovered.

In the Great Recession of 2008-2009, companies are going a step further. They’re using this sharp downturn to cut payrolls even below where they were when times were good. Outsourcing abroad, setting up shop in China and elsewhere, contracting out, replacing people with software and automated machines – they're doing whatever it takes to get payrolls down so earnings bounce up.

Caterpillar earned $404 million in the third quarter, or 64 cents a share. Analysts had expected only 5 cents. Caterpillar’s stock is up 165 percent since March. How did Caterpillar do it? Not by selling more bulldozers. It did it by cutting over 37,000 jobs.

The result, overall, is an asset-based recovery, not a Main Street recovery. Yes, the economy is growing again, but the surge in productivity is a mirage. Worker output per hour is skyrocketing because companies are generating almost as much output with fewer workers and fewer hours.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

The Fed, meanwhile, has become an enabler to all this, making it as cheap as possible for companies to ax their employees. Money costs so little these days, it’s easy to substitute capital for labor. It’s also easy to buy up foreign assets with cheap American money. And it’s now blissfully easy for Wall Street to borrow money almost free and buy all sorts of interests in foreign assets, especially commodities. That's why we're seeing the prices of foreign commodities and other assets go through the roof.

At the same time, the Treasury continues to be fixated on keeping banks afloat. The administration's mortgage mitigation efforts are lagging. Small businesses are starved of credit. The White House has announced a "jobs summit," which is better than nothing but not nearly as good as pushing immediately for a larger stimulus, a new jobs tax credit, and a WPA-style jobs program.

The Fed and the Treasury have, in effect, placed a huge bet on a recovery driven by asset prices. That’s a bad bet. The great disconnect between the stock market and jobs is pushing stock prices way out of line with the real economy. This isn't sustainable.

No economy can recover without consumers. Yet American consumers, who constitute 70 percent of the U.S. economy, are facing mounting job losses as well as pay cuts. They’re in no mood to buy and won’t be for some time.

Where is this heading? No place good. Without a major shift in policy -- both at the Fed and in the White House -- the economics point to a big stock-market correction and a double dip. The politics point to substantial losses for Democrats next year.

Julie Strawn explains how we can fix our community colleges:

Community colleges, far more than four-year colleges, serve groups that will dominate our undergraduate student populations and our work force for decades to come: students on their own financially, older students, people of color, parents, first-generation college students, and immigrants. Although widely viewed as gateways to the American dream, community colleges face relatively low completion rates. This quandary challenges our national commitment to economic mobility.

Washington state, more than any other, has sought to address this challenge systematically. Researchers mined state data on work-force needs, demographic changes, and student outcomes in community and technical colleges. They found that students needed to reach a "tipping point" in their educational journeys for postsecondary education to translate into significant economic benefits. This tipping point is about a year's worth of post-secondary education, paired with an occupational credential.

KEEP READING ...

Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, and his prepared remarks focus heavily on justifying the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators in federal court. Holder points out that civilian courts have been used very successfully over the years to prosecute terrorists, that the Classified Intelligence Procedures Act will prevent sensitive information from leaking out of a trial, and that KSM's hollow indictments of the United States will be no less present in a military commission than they would be in a civilian court.

The most politically salient part of Holder's speech however, is the part meant to head off conservative criticism that the administration is underestimating the threat posed by terrorism. Holder states unequivocally that "I know we are at war," adding that "We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready."

Here's the relevant excerpt:

I know that we are at war.

I know that we are at war with a vicious enemy who targets our soldiers on the battlefield in Afghanistan and our civilians on the streets here at home. I have personally witnessed that somber fact in the faces of the families who have lost loved ones abroad, and I have seen it in the daily intelligence stream I review each day. Those who suggest otherwise are simply wrong.

Prosecuting the 9/11 defendants in federal court does not represent some larger judgment about whether or not we are at war. We are at war, and we will use every instrument of national power – civilian, military, law enforcement, intelligence, diplomatic, and others – to win. We need not cower in the face of this enemy. Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready.

We will also use every instrument of our national power to bring to justice those responsible for terrorist attacks against our people. For eight years, justice has been delayed for the victims of the 9/11 attacks. It has been delayed even further for the victims of the attack on the USS Cole. No longer. No more delays. It is time, it is past time, to act. By bringing prosecutions in both our courts and military commissions, by seeking the death penalty, by holding these terrorists responsible for their actions, we are finally taking ultimate steps toward justice. That is why I made this decision.

In making this and every other decision I have made as Attorney General, my paramount concern is the safety of the American people and the preservation of American values. I am confident this decision meets those goals, and that it will withstand the judgment of history.

That said, Holder's right that "we need not cower in the face of the enemy". Al Qaeda cannot destroy the United States. It can only make us so fearful that we destroy ourselves.

-- A. Serwer

Marc Ambinder points to this Washington Post article that appears to describe exactly how many detainees at Guantanamo Bay fall into the so-called fifth category, those detainees who are "too dangerous to let go" but against whom we have scant evidence to prosecute:

Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions. About 90 others have been cleared for repatriation or resettlement in a third country, and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material.

Shortly after the Mohammed Jawad verdict, his defense attorney, David Frakt, suggested to me that the administration might change its mind about the fact that this category existed at all. David Kris, head of the Department of Justice's National Security Division told Congress in July that half the Gitmo cases had been reviewed and none had been put in the fifth category. White House counterterrorism official John Brennan suggested that these detainees might simply be transferred to other countries. It wasn't clear until now that the fifth category still existed at all -- but it appears it does.

I gave some background on how this group of detainees came to exist in my feature on Jawad: Basically, the Bush administration dispensed entirely with gathering useable evidence on terrorist suspects, instead relying on intelligence information that is often nebulous and inconclusive by legal standards. At the time, the Bush administration felt it was better safe than sorry, and the Obama administration got stuck with the sorry.

Spencer Ackerman speculates that these detainees might be sent to Bagram. That was the Bush administration's solution for avoiding judicial scrutiny of detention, but that approach is distinct from what Ken Gude and the Center for American Progress are proposing. The CAP proposal is to send those detainees who were captured in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area, and who have lost the first round of their habeas appeals, back to Bagram. Sending "fifth category" detainees captured in third countries would jeopardize the government's position in appealing the judicial ruling that granted detainees captured in third countries and held at Bagram habeas rights.

I spoke to Matthew Waxman, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs under the Bush administration for the story I wrote on CAP's report last week, and he explained to me (in a quote that didn't make it into the final piece) why that wouldn't be a good idea.

"To defend against claims that habeas rights should also apply at Bagram, the administration needs to highlight the differences between the two sites, such as security issues, practical challenges of detention operations, the degree of U.S. control," Waxman said. "If the government starts simply swapping detainees among the facilities, it hurts its case that for all these reasons Bagram should be treated differently as a legal matter."

So Bagram is not a solution. Neither, in my mind, is preventive detention outside of an ongoing theater of military combat.

-- A. Serwer

Christopher Jencks looks at higher education's problems:

American higher education, once the envy of the world, is losing its competitive edge. Most of the world's top universities are still located in the United States, but our other great accomplishment, making higher education available to an ever-larger fraction of young people, has succumbed to our hatred of taxes. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, young people in Australia, Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, and Scandinavia, where students and families do not bear such a large share of college costs, are now all more likely to earn a bachelor's degree than are young people in the United States. That is not because American employers no longer want more college graduates. The pay premium for workers with a bachelor's has doubled since the mid-1970s and is now greater than the gap in almost any other rich nation. This trend has been one factor (among many) in the rise of economic inequality. Richard Rothstein discusses the many other steps that would be needed to reverse that rise.

What has gone wrong? The problem has three parts. First, the college graduation rate has traditionally grown in tandem with the high school graduation rate -- which hasn't risen since the early 1970s. In addition, while the proportion of high school graduates entering college has risen, the proportion of college entrants earning a four-year degree has fallen. Meanwhile, college costs have soared, and financial aid has not kept up.

KEEP READING ...

Spencer Ackerman reminds us that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. Can the U.S. deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan without violating soldiers' rotation policies or becoming dangerously underprepared for a crisis?

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

That's the real talk. There are other variables in the mix -- how much of the force is made up of Marines, how smoothly drawdown goes in Iraq -- but getting troop levels up to where Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants them won't be easy. When McChrystal made his original requests at the end of the summer, his strategic review described a 12-month window for changing the dynamic of the war, a window that is rapidly shrinking -- even if the first deployments began in January, it's not clear that overall levels could rise until the spring, nearly eight months after his deadline, and I'm curious what effect that would have on the conflict.

Meanwhile, in amateur news, my column this week is about how you can't elide the troop factor when talking about strategic issues, either, because doing so cuts several critical options off the table, not the least of which is getting Hamid Karzai to clean up his act.

-- Tim Fernholz

• One can draw many conclusions from the list of senators who voted for the debt-financed Medicare Part D legislation in 2003 and now complain about the debt supposedly produced by the deficit-neutral health-care reform legislation hitting the Senate floor this week. Are they economically illiterate? Clearly. Hypocritical? Absolutely. And is anybody in the press talking about it? Of course not -- they've got to compete with Entertainment Tonight this week, it seems.
  
• It is inevitable that politicians contradict themselves, but in the case of Tim Pawlenty, who is clearly laying the groundwork for achieving higher office, his flip on climate change is especially egregious. His new-found climate change skepticism is designed to appease the conservative base, but like Mitt Romney, Pawlenty's wider appeal was supposed to be his reputation as a reformer. Now Romney is a joke, and the man behind "Sam's Club" Republicanism is probably headed down the same path.
• The 2010 elections are a year away but I still see this situation where anti-incumbent sentiment runs high yet the opposition party remains deeply unpopular to be unique in midterm elections. Throw the lack of open congressional seats into the mix and it isn't clear how the GOP picks up more than a handful of seats.
• Remainders: The Senate blocks James Inhofe's Terrorism Cowardice amendment; Glenn Beck uses the power of analogy to argue against health-care reform; at some point in the past 20 years, conservative talking points eliminated hunger in America; Hoffmania is back in NY-23; and doesn't American journalism have enough problems without having to defend their decision to run columns from former Bush aides?

--Mori Dinauer

At 10.2 percent, unemployment is now at its highest level since 1983. Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though we are constantly being told that the worst recession since the Great Depression has officially ended. Yet instead of trying to revive the productive economy, most of the Obama administration’s recovery efforts still remain focused on cardio-shock treatment for Wall Street. The president still seems curiously hamstrung by his Herbert Hoover-like devotion to fiscal rectitude: he wants to spend but not add “one dime to the deficit,” as he announced at his congressional address on health care in September. He does this even though deficits are a natural consequence of slowing economic growth, falling tax revenues, and higher social welfare payments.

To all of the “Chicken Littles” (including the president), who fret about “excessive” government spending, we would simply point out that it is far better to deploy government spending in a way that reduces unemployment instead of settling for having it rise as a consequence of this spending.

We therefore suggest a new approach: Government as Employer of Last Resort (ELR). The U.S. government can proceed directly to zero unemployment by hiring all of the labor that cannot find private sector employment. Furthermore, by fixing the wage paid under this ELR program at a level that does not disrupt existing labor markets, i.e., a wage level close to the existing minimum wage, substantive price stability can be expected. A sizable benefits package should be provided, including vacation and sick leave, contributions to Social Security and, most important, health care benefits, providing scope for a bottom-up reform of the current patchwork health-care system.

More about the ELR program after the jump.

--Marshall Auerback

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.

Government as ELR would not be introducing another element of intrusive bureaucracy into our economy, but simply better utilizing the existing stock of unemployed, who are now dependent on the public purse -- especially the chronically long-term unemployed. The current system we have relies on unemployed labor and excess capacity to try to dampen wage and price increases; however, it pays unemployed labor for not working and allows that labor to depreciate and develop behaviors that act as barriers to future private-sector employment. Social spending on the unemployed prevents aggregate demand from collapsing into a depression-like state, but little is done to enhance future growth and demand, which can be done via the ELR by providing the currently unemployed with jobs, greater education, and higher skill levels.

The ELR program would allow for the elimination of many existing government welfare payments for anyone not specifically targeted for exemption. It would also command greater political legitimacy, as society places a high value on work as the means through which individuals earn a livelihood. Labor would welcome the safety net of a guaranteed job, and business would recognize the benefit of a pool of available labor it could draw from at some spread to the government wage paid to ELR employees. Additionally, the guaranteed public service job would be a countercyclical influence, automatically increasing government employment and spending as jobs were lost in the private sector, and decreasing government jobs and spending as the private sector expanded. It would therefore remain a permanent feature of our economy. In effect, it would act as a buffer stock to put a floor under unemployment. The program helps maintain price stability whereby government offers a fixed wage that does not “outbid” the private sector, but simply creates a stabilizing floor and thereby prevents deflation.

A more or less “free market” system does not (and, perhaps, cannot) continuously generate true full employment. And no civilized nation should allow a large portion of its population to go without adequate food, clothing and shelter. One of the best features of the ELR program is that it creates a stock of employed people, rather than a buffered stock of unemployed, where social capital depletes rapidly, and several long-term social pathologies develop.

The way we’re approaching our labor force now isn’t working. It’s time to try something that can put as many Americans as possible into productive employment.

This week's TTR brings some surprising data about faith-based programs, some unpleasant facts about economic mobility and how to improve it, a simple solution to the problems of youth unemployment and poverty, and the challenges of getting an international clean energy agreement off the ground.

• Faith-Based Favor. New Pew Research Center data shows continued support for faith-based programs, with nearly 70 percent of Americans in favor of allowing churches and other religious organizations to apply for government dollars when providing social services. That's slightly down from 2001 -- when President Bush introduced his faith-based initiative -- but surprisingly, Democrats are now more supportive than Republicans: 77 percent to 66 percent. The survey notes that concerns remain about church-state relations, with three-quarters opposing government-funded organizations hiring only people with those specific beliefs. Additionally, not all religions received consistent support: more than half of respondents are against allowing Muslim mosques to apply for funds. -- MH
• Halting the Economic Backsliding. The Pew Economic Mobility Project has unveiled an ambitious road map to restore American prosperity, ranging from comprehensive investment and savings tutorials for underprivileged parents and students to early-life investment accounts automatically assigned to children. Today, 42 percent of Americans born into the bottom of the economic ladder remain there, a figure that exceeds many industrial nations by a factor of two. Women continue to lag behind men in upward mobility, while African Americans are more likely to fall from the middle class than whites. When almost 50 percent of black children born to middle class parents end up in lower income brackets compared to only 16 percent of white children, new approaches are necessary. -- MZ
• National Service to Combat the Recession. The Center for American Progress proposes a simple policy solution for two casualties of the Great Recession: unemployed youth and the growing number of Americans in poverty. The answer is to increase funding for national service programs such as AmeriCorps and VISTA so that young people can get job experience while helping those in need. For $1.5 billion, the government could create 100,000 jobs for young people in the next year. Additionally, such an investment in youth unemployment has long-term benefits, preparing both youth and the poor for jobs in a better economy while hastening recovery by increasing aid and employment. -- PL
• Leading the Race to the Bottom. The path to achieving a legally binding energy and emissions agreement in Copenhagen is littered with institutional and domestic roadblocks, reports the World Resources Institute. Several countries, including the United States, are expected to reject international compliance standards. Instead, the U.S. proposal is even less ambitious than the House ACES Bill, explicitly putting domestic law above multilateral enforcement, making international accounting standards and comparisons a waste of time. -- LL

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
11/10/09
11/3/09

Over at DCist, Sommer Mathis gives us the latest from the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, which was asked to consider whether a referendum on gay marriage would violate D.C.'s human-rights law by putting the civil rights of the LGBT community up to a vote. Like the question of whether recognition of gay marriage from other states should be subject to a referendum that the Board considered earlier this year, the answer was a no-brainer:

In an opinion released today, the Board made much the same argument that it did in a previous decision that barred a ballot initiative on the matter of recognizing same-sex marriages that are performed legally in other jurisdictions. In both decisions, the Board held that such initiatives do 'not present a proper subject of initiative because it would authorize discrimination prohibited under the Human Rights Act (“HRA”).'

The HRA of course, is part of the long game that D.C. LGBT rights activists have been playing. The 1970s-era human-rights law contains a provision, inserted by marriage-equality opponent Marion Barry, that the referendum process could never be used to "interfere with basic human and civil rights." Marriage is obviously one of those. At the time, the GLAA, a local LGBT rights group, lobbied hard to ensure that LGBTs would be among the protected groups named in the law -- meaning that when the National Organization for Marriage came to town with Bishop Harry Jackson as their front man, the battle had already mostly been won. That old line about one side playing chess and the other playing checkers? That's what this looks like.

With no referendum, and with a mostly Democratic Congress unlikely to interfere, and the D.C. City Council set to vote on a marriage equality bill in early December, marriage equality in D.C. is looking like more of a sure thing than health-care reform. After all the criticism of the black community we've seen in the past year over marriage equality, a majority black city is about to become among the first to recognize unions between same-sex couples.

-- A. Serwer

I've already written too much about Jim Wallis' apologia for the odious Stupak-Pitts amendment. Suffice it to say that if we were to take Wallis' argument seriously, we wouldn't need health-care reform at all: After all, the current system doesn't literally ban private insurance for people who can't afford it, so access must not be a problem, right? Still, this strawman demands a response:

But some of the most hysterical comments from the Left this week have suggested the problem is that progressive religious groups have been listened to by the Democratic Party; some members of the Left long for the good old days when their party was avowedly secular and properly hostile to religion and all this talk about those annoying moral values voters.

Truly a definitive example of this kind of argument. First of all, the "good old days" when the Democratic Party was "hostile to religion" don't exist. (When was this exactly -- when it was led by the Southern Baptist Bill Clinton? The Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter? For the decades in which its most influential member of Congress was the devout Roman Catholic Ted Kennedy? Help me out here.) Secondly, when you invoke "hysterical comments" indicating that people of faith need to be driven from the Democratic Party, you really need to name names and cite examples, or people can safely assume that your examples are either trivial or don't exist at all.

But most important, the debate over Stupak-Pitts isn't about the influence of religion -- it's about people who want to restrict access to abortion, whether motivated by religious or secular reasons. Democratic leaders who tried for a less restrictive amendment were seeking to protect the party's core values of equality for women and reproductive freedom, not trying to drive people of faith out of the party. This conflation of religious belief with reactionary social policies is both false and plays directly into Republican talking points. Just as it was people opposed to a women's right to choose -- not pro-choicers -- who introduced a cultural wedge issue that threatened to derail health-care reform, it's Wallis who wants to make this a debate about the Democratic Party being "avowedly secular."  And while I can understand Wallis' reluctance to defend his position on the merits, that's simply not the issue here.

--Scott Lemieux

President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese ... just are selling everything to us, we're taking out a bunch of credit-card debt or home equity loans, but we're not selling anything to them." He hopes that hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers will make up for the inability of American consumers to return to debt-binge spending.

This is wishful thinking. True, the Chinese market is huge and growing fast. By 2009, China was second only to the U.S. in computer sales, with a larger proportion of first-time buyers. It already had more cell-phone users. And excluding SUVs, last year Chinese consumers bought as many cars as Americans (as recently as 2006, Americans bought twice as many).

Even as the U.S. government was bailing out General Motors and Chrysler, the two firms' sales in China were soaring; GM's sales there are almost 50 percent higher this year than last. Proctor & Gamble is so well-established in China that many Chinese think its products (such as green-tea-flavored Crest toothpaste) are Chinese brands. If the Chinese economy continues to grow at or near its current rate and the benefits of that growth trickle down to 1.3 billion Chinese consumers, the country would become the largest shopping bazaar in the history of the world. They'll be driving over a billion cars and will be the world's biggest purchasers of household electronics, clothing, appliances, and almost everything else produced on the planet.

So this will mean millions of American export jobs, right? No.

Why that's not the case, after the jump.

--Robert Reich

In fact China is heading in the opposite direction of "rebalancing." Its productive capacity keeps soaring, but Chinese consumers are taking home a shrinking proportion of the total economy. Last year, personal consumption in China amounted to only 35 percent of the Chinese economy; 10 years ago consumption was almost 50 percent. Capital investment, by contrast, rose to 44 percent from 35 percent over the decade.

China's capital spending is on the way to exceeding that of the U.S., but its consumer spending is barely a sixth as large. Chinese companies are plowing their rising profits back into more productive capacity -- additional factories, more equipment, new technologies. China's massive $600 billion stimulus package has been directed at further enlarging China's productive capacity rather than consumption. So where will this productive capacity go if not to Chinese consumers? Net exports to other nations, especially the U.S. and Europe.

Many explanations have been offered for the parsimony of Chinese consumers. Social safety nets are still inadequate, so Chinese families have to cover the costs of health care, education and retirement. Young Chinese men outnumber young Chinese women by a wide margin, so households with sons have to accumulate and save enough assets to compete in the marriage market. Chinese society is aging quickly because the government has kept a tight lid on population growth for three decades, with the result that households are supporting lots of elderly dependents.

But the larger explanation for Chinese frugality is that the nation is oriented to production, not consumption. China wants to become the world's preeminent producer nation. It also wants to take the lead in the production of advanced technologies. The U.S. would like to retain the lead, but our economy is oriented to consumption rather than production.

Deep down inside the cerebral cortex of our national consciousness we assume that the basic purpose of an economy is to provide more opportunities to consume. We grudgingly support government efforts to rebuild our infrastructure. We want our companies to invest in new equipment and technologies but also want them to pay generous dividends. We approve of government investments in basic research and development, but mainly for the purpose of making the nation more secure through advanced military technologies. (We regard spillovers to the private sector as incidental.)

China's industrial and technological policy is unapologetically direct. It especially wants America's know-how, and the best way to capture know-how is to get it firsthand. So China continues to condition many sales by U.S. and foreign companies on production in China—often in joint ventures with Chinese companies.

American firms are now helping China build a "smart" infrastructure, tackle pollution with clean technologies, develop a new generation of photovoltaics and wind turbines, find new applications for nanotechnologies, and build commercial jets and jet engines. GM recently announced it was planning to make a new subcompact in China designed and developed primarily by the Pan-Asia Technical Automotive Center, a joint venture between GM and SAIC Motor in Shanghai. General Electric is producing wind turbine components in China. Earlier this month, Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar announced it will be moving its solar panel production to China.

The Chinese government also wants to create more jobs in China, and it will continue to rely on exports. Each year, tens of millions of poor Chinese pour into large cities from the countryside in pursuit of better-paying work. If they don't find it, China risks riots and other upheaval. Massive disorder is one of the greatest risks facing China's governing elite. That elite would much rather create export jobs, even at the cost of subsidizing foreign buyers, than allow the yuan to rise and thereby risk job shortages at home.

To this extent, China's export policy is really a social policy, designed to maintain order. Despite the Obama administration's entreaties, China will continue to peg the yuan to the dollar—when the dollar drops, selling yuan in the foreign-exchange market and adding to its pile of foreign assets in order to maintain the yuan's fixed relation to the dollar. This is costly to China, of course, but for the purposes of industrial and social policy, China figures the cost is worth it.

The dirty little secret on both sides of the Pacific is that both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt. Inequality is also widening in China, but the problem there is a declining share of the fruits of economic growth going to average Chinese and an increasing share going to capital investment.

Both societies are threatened by the disconnect between production and consumption. In China, the threat is civil unrest. In the U.S., it's a prolonged jobs and earnings recession that, when combined with widening inequality, could create political backlash.

Matthew Yglesias on what lowered expectations mean for climate change:

Barack Obama's concession on Sunday that the upcoming Copenhagen meeting on climate change will not result in a comprehensive climate deal is little more than an official acknowledgment of what everyone already suspected. Simply put, there's no time. The combination of the economic crisis, which sucked up an enormous amount of time at previous multilateral meetings and the exceedingly slow pace with which the U.S. Congress has moved to address health care made it, in practice, impossible to imagine an agreement emerging. Indeed, though the downgrading of Copenhagen makes for a bad headline, it counts as good news.

This is born out by the fact that neither environmental groups nor the Danish government is upset. Indeed, they'd been trying to accomplish precisely this lowering of expectations for a couple of months. The Danes would like, in essence, to host a conference that counts as a success. And greens recognize that high expectations would be counterproductive. The risk was that a "failed conference" would set off a downward spiral that derailed efforts to halt climate catastrophe. In the United States, the collapse of talks aimed at an international agreement would be yet another excuse for risk-averse senators to avoid voting for a tough climate bill. In the developing world, U.S. inaction would become another reason to avoid emissions reductions. Lather, rinse, repeat, and the next thing you know, the planet is boiling.

KEEP READING ...

Eric Kleefield looks at the results of a new Marist poll showing a narrow majority of New Yorkers like the idea of trying the alleged 9/11 plotters in the city:

"Do you think it is a good idea or a bad idea to have this trial located in New York City?" the poll asked. The answer is 45% good idea, 41% bad idea, with a ±4% margin of error.

Also, New Yorkers don't seem to be quite as frightened as the GOP about potential security problems:

One question does receive wider agreement, though: Whether New York City will be able to handle the potential security risks. Here 67% say they are confident, to 22% who are not confident.

Last night, Rep. John Shadegg asked Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supports trying the 9/11 suspects in New York, "How are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist?" You might have thought that Republicans asking the old Mike Dukakis question had gone out of style, but it clearly hasn't.

It's not like that can't be flipped around though. I wonder how opponents of trying terrorists in civilian court would react to being asked how they'd feel if their children were imprisoned without trial for years and tortured on suspicion of being a bad guy. Of course, some people are fine with unconstitutional government behavior as long as they're not on the receiving end. True tyranny is raising the top marginal tax rate to 39.2 percent.

-- A. Serwer

Alexandra Gutierrez reviews Michael Bérubé's new book The Left at War:

In June of 2002, a British university dissolved one of its smaller departments. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was shuttered, and students eager to research the culture of soccer hooliganism or the effect of teen-rag advice columns on adolescents' burgeoning sexuality were effectively cast adrift. Officials at the University of Birmingham cited low marks on research evaluations as reason for the closure. The Centre's defenders cried foul, speculating it was punishment for the department's history of radicalism. Nine months later, the United States would lead an invasion of Iraq, setting in motion a war still not yet over. Could the prevention of the former have helped stop the latter -- save the cultural theorists, save the world?

Liberal blogger and "dangerous" academic Michael Bérubé would like us to at least consider it. In The Left at War, Bérubé links progressives' inability to control the conversation on national security during the Bush administration to cultural studies' failure to deliver on its promise of a vibrant New Left. And in the process, he also tries to imagine a newer and better one -- a left that both knows what is worth fighting for and how to fight for it.

KEEP READING ...

I've always had a bit of soft spot for Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah, and he seems to be maintaining his, hm, folksy charm? Look for more China blogging here later today ...

-- Tim Fernholz

The Washington Times Wes Pruden on President Barack Obama (via Thinkprogress):

It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of “the 57 states” is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.

Kathleen Parker said pretty much the same thing during the election last year. I've already expressed my feelings on people who believe being "American" is a genetic exclusivity that belongs solely to whites, and I won't repeat those arguments here. I'll just note that it's still OK in 2009 to make the argument that white people are the only "true Americans" in major newspapers, even with a black man in the White House. No, especially because there's a black man in the White House. For some reason, suggesting that black people as a whole aren't really "American" is justified because it's seen as a personal attack on the president, rather than what it really is: soft white nationalism.

But hey, these days, you can drop n-bombs like loose change or refuse to marry interracial couples "for the children" and not be a racist. There are no racists in America, except for people who think that Americans of color should be entitled to the same rights as those with the white skin "blood impulse" of "real Americans."

-- A. Serwer

Yesterday on MSNBC, Sen. John Cornyn suggested that it would be safer to try 9/11 suspects in military commissions because -- I'm paraphrasing here -- you wouldn't have to worry about them "being released." He then added, without irony, that military commissions could "protect the rights of terrorists." Orwell lives: Under what circumstance is a procedurally assured conviction protecting the rights of the accused?

Look, Khalid Sheik Mohammed has confessed -- I have little doubt that he'll be convicted. The Obama administration wouldn't be bringing him to trial in civilian court if they thought there was a chance of his being let go. The same legal rationale that could have been used to hold him indefinitely will be used to hold him in case of an acquittal. As I reported a few months ago, because the U.S.has declared war against al-Qaeda -- and KSM is quite obviously a member of al-Qaeda -- they can claim legal authority to detain him even post-acquittal, until the end of hostilities, under the authority granted by the Authorization to Use Military Force. The Bush administration considered doing this briefly with Osama bin Laden's limo driver, Salim Hamdan; but because it makes a mockery of the American system of justice, they decided against it. But the options don't actually end there.

"They have three sources of authority that would allow him to detain [KSM], one of which is the AUMF, because it directly cites the 9/11 attacks in its language -- the people who planned the 9/11 attacks are combatants and are detainable under the AUMF," explains Ken Gude, a human-rights expert at the Center for American Progress. "Under the .000001 chance that they are acquitted, they will have that authority to detain them."

The attorney general could detain him as an "international terrorist" indefinitely, in renewable six-month periods, based on a provision in the PATRIOT Act. And if things really get desperate, they could detain him as someone who is in the United States illegally, pending deportation. Since no country is going to take a mass murdering terrorist, that detention will essentially be indefinite.

On the prospect of KSM being released, Gude shrugs, "It isn't even in the realm of possibility."

An acquittal would be a political disaster for the administration -- but there's really no way that KSM is getting away, because the government has at least three different ways to detain him indefinitely post-acquittal. It doesn't matter under what venue he's tried. That may make some of us feel safer, but it's also part of the reason why the ACLU's Jonathan Hafetz argues that U.S. detention policy is "essentially lawless."

-- A. Serwer

Paul Waldman explains that Obama's rhetorical skills do not make him omnipotent:

"We campaign in poetry. But when we're elected we're forced to govern in prose," said Mario Cuomo, then-governor of New York, in a 1985 speech. "And when we govern -- as distinguished from when we campaign -- we come to understand the difference between a speech and a statute. It's here that the noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality."

The man then hailed as the Democratic Party's greatest orator knew what he was talking about. And there is no doubt that the party's current lead orator, Barack Obama, has understood this truth all along. But those swept up in the oratory still seem to need occasional reminding of this reality. As health-care reform teeters between success and failure, the economy limps along, and more and more Americans wonder what we're doing in Afghanistan, the prose of governing is more than a little unsettling for some.

KEEP READING ...

For GOP leaders, the best strategy for defeating the Senate bill is to sow doubts among vulnerable Democrats, convincing them that [Majority Leader] Reid is leading them off a political cliff.

"There's a great effort under way here to convince their members to ignore public opinion" on health-care reform, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters last week. "I hope it will not be lost on our Democratic friends where the public is, how the public feels about this measure. They're speaking increasingly loudly that they do not think it ought to pass."

Given how easy it is to recognize McConnell's ploy, you'd think more moderates would see through it. Especially, in Lincoln's case, because public opinion remains split in Arkansas:

Recent polls suggest that reform is a difficult sell in Lincoln's home state. The Arkansas Poll, conducted in mid-October by the University of Arkansas's Survey Research Center, found that 39 percent of voters support a public option and 48 percent oppose the idea. And respondents split about evenly on the question of whether reform would improve or hurt their quality of care.

"It's hard to draw firm conclusions," said Arkansas Poll Director Janine Parry. "People are dissatisfied, but they haven't signed on with an alternative." Lincoln, said Parry, appears to be "right with her constituents -- convinced that we need to do something, and not convinced it's this."

I would interpret those poll numbers a bit differently than Parry: The state is split because no one is offering any real leadership on the issue -- all of the Arkansas Democrats, who are mentioned in this profile, have been publicly waffling about health-care reform for months, and dropping lines like Lincoln's factually incorrect comments on the public option. Of course the public is unconvinced that this is a good alternative -- no one is explaining to them what health-care reform means. If Lincoln were to actually take a stand, she could move public opinion. But instead she'll waver and stumble, and her approval will drop, because voters don't generally want senators who waver and stumble. And instead of listening to her putative friends in the Democratic Party, she's going to trust McConnell's analysis right up until the GOP candidate beats her next year.

-- Tim Fernholz

• In light of the latest conservative freakout over diplomatic protocol and following the rule of law, here's a handy fill-in-the-blanks statement you can use for the next one: "I am shocked and appalled that this president would take the unprecedented step of _____ before ______ on his overseas trip to _____. This fits into a familiar pattern of the Obama administration, most recently seen at home in his decision to ______, which emboldens our enemies and further pushes America into a _____ state that would have been unrecognizable just ______ months ago."
• I've said it before and I'll say it again: no one ever won elected office running on "first principles," but this is the concept behind the latest Newt Gingrich-Michael Steele joint venture to take back Congress. I'm sure voters will be hotly discussing Burke and Disraeli and the media will be be debating the importance of virtue and prudence while high-profile conservative-moderate civil wars engulf the GOP in Florida and California, and tea party protesters ponder the value of burning members of Congress in effigy. Welcome to 2010.
• Matt Yglesias makes a good point on the importance of high per-capita income toward being a great power in the world, but it's more than PPP. After all, Luxembourg is in the top three of the lists he links to, but certainly we don't consider it to be a great power and that's because of population. It's the fact that the United States has a relatively wealthy population AND 300 million people AND the ability to effectively mobilize its people and resources that makes it the preeminent power in the world. China only has two of those three characteristics, and could end up losing the third if the CCP loses its grip on power.
• Weekend Remainders: It appears that Bart Stupak is that rare combination of incompetent legislator and moral monster that is the pride of the Democratic caucus; Republicans are shocked that there's a backlash against their vote against legislation that would protect rape victims; the former mayor of New York lost his mind on 9/11, and it never came back; the White House calls out the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; in addition to providing abortions until recently, the RNC health plan also provides end-of-life (A.K.A. "death panels") counseling; and what is it with aging Washington columnists pining for George W. Bush's "leadership" style?

--Mori Dinauer

Window Media, the nation's largest owner of gay newspapers, shut its doors today bringing D.C.'s local gay newspaper The Washington Blade as well as four others down with it.

The Washington Blade, you could say, was the New York Times of LGBT news. It was the second-largest gay newspaper by circulation (beside Gay City News) and covered national issues as well as local D.C. politics. It was widely recognized for its reporting on the AIDS crisis and the marriage fight and has served as a bulletin board for local events, including political rallies. Most obviously, gay D.C. residents will be less informed about issues that affect them without the Blade -- and less likely to be drawn to activism, which is no small blow for groups that are already underrepresented in politics anyway.

I regularly wrote for the New York Blade, its sister publication, until it shuttered its operations in July. Whenever I had an idea I thought would be too "gay" for mainstream media, or when I wanted to write about a certain politician's gay-rights record, I went to the NY Blade.

Much has been made of local city papers like the Rocky Mountain News closing their doors, but if anything, the disappearance of publications that cater to minorities -- the "ethnic" or "minority" media -- is even more troubling. Papers like the Blade not only provide a voice to dispossessed groups, they're how a community talks to itself – and sounds the alarm when there's a threat. Next time a D.C. police officer roughs up and arrests someone gay while calling him a "faggot," I question whether the Washington Post will immediately run to the scene. Who will?

--Gabriel Arana

Via Mike Crowley, I see that gossip columnist Lloyd Grove has a piece detailing all of the people that Barack Obama has supposedly "thrown under the bus" over the last year or so, with Grove implying that most of these people deserved better (Greg Craig, for one, did) and that this dastardly president of ours will do anything to further his ambitions. Except that the phrase he uses actually implies taking advantage of someone who is blameless. But why is Obama is responsible for Steve Rattner's pay-to-play scandal, the tax problems of his various withdrawn nominees, James Johnson's sweetheart mortgage deal, the federal investigation of Bill Richardson's campaign finances, Creigh Deeds' crappy gubernatorial campaign, Rick Wagoner running GM into the ground, Van Jones' decision to sign a Truther petition or David Paterson's inept job as governor?

Since Grove can't seem to think clearly, let me help: There is a difference between throwing someone under the bus -- letting them take the hit for a mistake you were complicit in, or using their loss to advance your own ambitions -- and declining to expend political capital defending someone who has made their own mistakes. In almost all of these cases, Obama and his staff declined to waste time fighting on behalf of people who made mistakes before they even worked with or for him. Loyalty is important, of course, but it can be pernicious, as we saw in the Bush administration. Obama, like all politicians, has been known to be politically expedient, and he ought to be reprimanded when he does so in violation of his stated principles. But Grove's decision to attribute so many people's mistakes to Obama is inexplicable.Then again, Grove's job is to gin up scandals.

-- Tim Fernholz

It's not that surprising, though. Castle was/is considered a very strong contender for the vice president's old Senate seat, but he's only popular in Delaware so long as he is a moderate Republican. Now that he's joined the rest of the House Republicans in opposing President Obama's agenda, his moderation has to be called into question. At some point, the Republican leadership is going to have to ask themselves what forcing their entire caucus to vote against each major Obama agenda item is getting them. Voters are already pretty clear that Republicans oppose the Democrats' vision, but when GOP leaders turn every vote into a litmus test for the moderate members of their caucus, it's going to have electoral results that end with fewer Republicans in office. Those votes don't really help Castle on the right, either -- the usual crowd is already lambasting Castle for his moderate reputation, and, of course, there is a conservative primary challenger.

It should go without saying, but the usual poll caveats apply for an election set to take place a year from now.

-- Tim Fernholz

With the unemployment rate the highest it's been in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog. In this installment,TAP's own Dean Baker argues for a work-share program that would save 5 million jobs.

The unemployment rate is 10.2 percent and virtually certain to rise even higher in the months ahead. Even with the prospect of extended benefits, unemployment is still a crisis for the families affected, as they struggle to pay their mortgage or rent and cover other essential expenses. Millions will end up falling behind, losing their home — in some cases leading to homelessness and/or family break-ups.

Fortunately, there is an easy and quick way to begin to get these unemployed workers back to work. It involves paying workers to work shorter hours. The mechanism can take the form of a tax credit to employers. The government can give them a tax credit of up to $3,000 to shorten their workers’ hours while leaving their pay unchanged. The reduction in hours can take the form of paid sick days, paid family leave, shorter workweeks or longer vacations. The employer can choose the method that is best for her workers and the workplace.

If take-home pay is left unchanged as a result of the credit, then demand should be left unchanged. If workers are putting in fewer hours and demand is unchanged, then employers will need to hire more workers.

This logic is as simple as it gets. The process is also quick and cheap. In principle, the government can go this route to save jobs at a cost of a bit more than $20,000 per job - far less than the cost per job saved through the stimulus package.

More after the jump.

--Dean Baker

Germany has used this policy to keep its unemployment rate at 7.6 percent, about the same as it was before the recession. Imagine if workers in the United States, like workers in Germany, were dealing with the recession by putting in four-day weeks (while getting paid for five) or getting an extra two weeks of paid vacation. This sure beats being unemployed.

Seventeen states already have a “work-share” program in place that allows employers to use unemployment insurance money to cover a reduction in work hours, without a corresponding reduction in pay. More than 100,000 layoffs have been prevented as result of this program.

Sen. Jack Reed has a bill that would increase funding for work-share programs and remove some of the bureaucracy. The bill also provides start-up money for the states that don’t have programs.

The Reed bill would be a big step toward following the Germany model, taking advantage of a program that is already in place. It could quickly make a big dent in the unemployment rate, by preserving many of the jobs that are now being lost.

In this respect, it is important to clear up a common confusion about the economy. The monthly job growth number is a net figure. Approximately 4 million people leave their jobs every month, half involuntarily. We have job growth if we either create more than 4 million jobs or reduce the number of jobs lost below 4 million.

If a work share program reduced involuntary job loss by 20 percent, or 400,000 per month, it would have the same effect as adding 400,000 new jobs. Over a full year, this would generate nearly 5 million new jobs. This would be a quick and effective way to reduce unemployment.

David Callahan on how one industrial city is leading the way in preparing all schoolchildren to succeed in college:

The debate over what it takes to get low-income kids ready for college, and then to actually earn a degree, has long been polarized. Some argue that better schools alone can ensure that such students are ready to enter and finish college. Others see this view as naive, pointing to the many socioeconomic obstacles facing low-income kids along with the high costs of college.

Who's right in this debate? Both sides. Or at least that is the premise of one of the most ambitious experiments now under way in urban education.

This September, in the battered upstate New York city of Syracuse -- the very picture of postindustrial decline -- every student, from kindergarten through 12th grade, was made a tantalizing promise: Complete high school with decent grades, and you'll be guaranteed a college scholarship.

KEEP READING ...

David Ignatius writes a column about how Chris Dodd's financial regulation plan is attacking the Fed's political independence, but mostly it just shows that Ignatius doesn't understand the Fed -- he seems to be confusing its role as a bank regulator with its job setting monetary policy, and doesn't seem to even understand the need for financial regulatory reform. As Kevin Drum correctly points out, none of what Dodd is suggesting would endanger the Fed's independence; in fact, Dodd's plan would make the Fed more independent by lessening the influence of major banks on the institution. Now, unless you are pretending that the financial industry doesn't have political interests, it seems pretty obvious that this is, as Drum observes, making the Fed a more independent institution.

The bigger problem here is that Ignatius is arguing in favor of the status quo not because he thinks it's good, but because he can't seem to tell the difference between Goldbug Fed Bashers of the libertarian ilk and people like Dodd and Barney Frank who want a financial system that doesn't need to be reset with billions of dollars of public money every few years. Ignatius starts throwing out words like "Fed basher" and "neopopulist" as if Dodd was either of those things -- despite his political interests, he's not -- and as if the history of the Fed's influence on the financial industry began sometime during the summer of 2008, and not before, when the Fed's regulatory supervision of both consumer lending and major financial institutions was an abysmal failure. A reformed Fed ought to have a role in financial regulation, and Bernanke's actions during the crisis do deserve praise, but trying to paint the Fed's role in the financial sector over the last decade as positive is ridiculous.

Our noble columnist isn't even familiar with the broader outlines of the ongoing regulatory reform project, because he seems to think that the Fed is going to be solely responsible for being the lender of last resort in the future. In fact, both the House and the Senate are seating those powers in a systemic risk council or consolidated regulator. The Fed will play a role in either the council or need a good relationship with the super-regulator, but whatever the final reform structure is deals with his objections already. Ignatius seems to think that we should enshrine the same system we had during the financial crisis last year, when bailouts were basically the only option besides economic disaster. It's a good thing that the Fed bailed out the banks in that particular case, but it's not a normatively good idea -- why not improve the system so that regulators don't have to make choices between two bad options in the future?

-- Tim Fernholz

In light of Pfizer's decision to pull out of New London, ending an ugly saga of misguided corporate welfare, several commentators in this New York Times roundtable join any number of others in asserting that this proves that the Supreme Court's Kelo decision upholding New London's use of eminent domain was incorrect.

With the limited exception of Ilya Somin, however, you'll note that the Kelo critics are not making arguments about constitutional law. For example, Paul Bass 's argument that "Clarence Thomas was right" is very convincing about Thomas' arguments that New London was engaged in dumb public policy, but doesn't seem to realize that these arguments are insufficient to show that they were legally impermissible. The Bush administration's tax cuts were economically wasteful and were both influenced by and directly benefited powerful moneyed interests, but that doesn't make them unconstitutional.

There are, of course, serious constitutional arguments to be made on behalf of the unconstitutionality of New London's takings of property. But there were sound reasons for the Court's deference. The core of the takings clause is to ensure that people who have their property taken by eminent domain are compensated, not giving the courts the authority to second-guess decisions about when policies encouraging economic development constitute "public uses" of property and when they don't.

Moreover, the strongest basis for exercises of judicial review in interpreting vague constitutional provisions exists when the court is defending the rights of citizens who are greatly underrepresented in the political process. As the fact that more than 40 states have reformed their eminent domain policies in light of Kelo shows that this isn't the case -- in fact, the Court has been completely vindicated in its assumption that the legislative process could strike reasonable balances. A judicial ruling in favor of Kelo, by contrast, would have applied not just to this case but to future cases, driving up the cost of legitimate uses of eminent domain as well as stupid ones by encouraging more litigation.

At any rate, the final collapse of New London's economic development schemes is neither here nor there in terms of whether its use of eminent domain was constitutional. The fact that it was engaged in a misguided economic development plan doesn't show that it didn't have an economic development plan at all.

--Scott Lemieux

I was quite critical of conservatives who have reacted hysterically to the trial of the 9/11 suspects, but it's important to point out that there are some conservatives who are doing just the opposite. Sam Stein reports that the conservative Constitution Project has put out a joint statement with Human Rights First supporting Obama's decision to prosecute in civilian courts, opposing indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, and advocating for an approach that will "preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition." The signatories include Grover Norquist, David Keene, and Bob Barr.

We, the undersigned, urge Congress and the President to support a policy for detention, treatment and trial of suspected terrorists that is consistent with U.S. treaty obligations and constitutional principles. As it moves to close Guantanamo and develop policies for handling terrorism suspects going forward, the government should rely upon our established, traditional system of justice. We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries.

For what it's worth, the above is a very small-c "conservative" statement--deferential to tradition, opposed to inventing new institutions to replace old ones that work.

Dana Goldstein on the White House's "newer is better" approach to problems:

Every single one of you has something you're good at," President Barack Obama told children in his Sept. 8 back-to-school address. He went on to list future occupations toward which students could strive -- doctor, teacher, police officer, architect, lawyer. Also included in that list was a career option no previous president had ever named: innovator.

Indeed, the Obama administration has been promoting "innovation" to anyone who will listen. The stimulus package includes more than $100 billion for innovation efforts across fields as diverse as school reform, energy research, health care, and poverty alleviation. In July, first lady Michelle Obama spoke at two "innovation events" honoring architects and product designers. On Sept. 21, the president delivered a speech at Hudson Valley Community College in upstate New York on how innovation can create jobs. A search of WhiteHouse.gov turned up 531 documents mentioning the term.

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I doubt anyone will be particularly surprised that the Chamber of Commerce is investing in some predetermined research, but seeing the actual e-mail really makes the whole thing seem quite brazen:

The e-mail, written by the Chamber's senior health policy manager and obtained by The Washington Post, proposes spending $50,000 to hire a "respected economist" to study the impact of health-care legislation, which is expected to come to the Senate floor this week, would have on jobs and the economy.

Step two, according to the e-mail, appears to assume the outcome of the economic review: "The economist will then circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy. We will then be able to use this open letter to produce advertisements, and as a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document."

I wonder how many "respected economists" will sign on to this letter now that the cat is out of the bag. Since lobbyists will always do whatever they can to influence legislation, one welcome trend of late is seeing their stooges get embarrassed, since that may make it harder for these interests to recruit supposedly legitimate spokespeople for their misleading reports. The last time this happened, when PriceWaterhouseCoopers did a fishy study for America's Health Insurance Plans, PWC looked just as foolish as AHIP when the report was quickly discredited. Let that be a warning to any researcher or business tempted by Mammon to fudge the facts about public policy -- your own reputation is also on the line.

-- Tim Fernholz

On Friday, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates used his newly granted authority to exempt photos of detainee abuse from Freedom of Information Act requests to block the release of several photographs that are the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the ACLU. The White House-supported amendment granting the secretary of defense this authority was added to the Homeland Security Appropriations bill by Sen. Joe Lieberman.

I've been reluctant to blame the Obama administration for the Bush administration's failings. But the Obama administration, while making some laudable moves in the direction of transparency on some matters -- and behaving in a virtually indistinguishable manner in others -- has nevertheless, in many instances, taken on the responsibility of covering up the wrongdoing of his predecessor, whether it's through blocking judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition or now, censoring photos of detainee abuse. As that New York Times editorial from a few weeks ago noted, this is now "Barack Obama's coverup."

The stated reason for blocking these photographs is to protect American troops abroad from a backlash. Frankly, I'm not sure suppressing these photos makes American troops any more safe than they can be expected to be in two war zones -- but even if that's the case, I think allowing the government to cover up its own wrongdoing sets a terrible precedent.

What suppressing the photos probably also does is help prevent the kind of widespread public reaction to torture that we saw following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. It's one thing to hear about torture in the abstract; it's another to see its effects visually. By suppressing the photographs, the White House is also circumventing potential criticism of its decision to seek as little accountability as possible for the behavior the pictures portray.

In China today, the president, discussing China's practice of Internet censorship, described himself as "a big supporter of non-censorship." Obviously not true across the board.

-- A. Serwer

Over the past few days, two men who have spent their careers in the American justice system committed their considerable public status to the idea that the system is useless against terrorism. Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey all but predicted that New York would suffer a terrorist attack as a result of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the alleged 9/11 conspirators being transferred there for trial. Meanwhile, New York Mayor and former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani suggested we should try KSM by military commission. On Friday, Giuliani appeared on FOX News and said (via Nexis):

There are going to be military tribunals for other terrorists. Why wouldn't you have military tribunals for this terrorist? And of course it's going to create more security concerns. Just wait and see how much money New York City spends on this in order to protect him.

And finally, we're kind of granting his wish. His wish was to be brought to New York. It really makes no sense to me to be granting him his wish. He should be tried in a military tribunal. He is a war criminal. This was an act of war.

We made this mistake once before in 1993. We didn't read the intentions correctly. And then we ended up with three more attacks on American soldiers and the attack of September 11th.

According to Human Rights Watch, the civilian courts tried 145.

Human Rights First examined the government's success rate in trying terrorism cases in civilian court and found the government had a 91 percent success rate, with the government managing to get those acquitted in the remaining 9 percent imprisoned on lesser charges after the fact. That's a track record so good it should make us question whether the system is working properly on behalf of the defendants. 

Back in the 1990s, following the trial of the first World Trade Center bombers, Giuliani said, “I think it shows you put terrorism on one side, you put our legal system on the other, and our legal system comes out ahead.” Well, that's the kind of thing that you would expect a former federal prosecutor to say. But in this case, conservatives -- even those who have worked in the American justice system their entire lives -- have decided that the system no longer works, either out of an irrational fear of terrorism or because they all think denigrating the established institutions of American democracy is worth scoring a few partisan points on the president.

One of the most important and fundamental insights of conservatism, it seems to me, is the idea that you don't throw existing institutions in the trash -- especially not if they're working -- just to try something new. Well, the Bush administration tried to do just that. They tried to reinvent the wheel with "military commissions" that would reverse engineer convictions while giving the illusion of due process. Because their commissions didn't pass constitutional muster, they were all but useless in trying terrorism suspects. Meanwhile, the criminal justice system functioned properly and efficiently.

We'll have to wait and see if the Obama administration version works any better. But choosing to try KSM and the alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian courts seems to me as less of a gamble than trying to do it by military commission.

Glenn Greenwald wrote over the weekend that the hysteria over KSM is the textbook definition of "surrendering to terrorism." I think it's actually worse than that. The United States will never be invaded and defeated by al-Qaeda. The only way al-Qaeda wins is by manipulating Americans into destroying their own society in an effort to "protect" it.  It's why the founding fathers had the president swear an oath to defend the Constitution, rather than the people of the United States: They knew how the latter oath could be perverted into helping destroy the nation they were trying to build. 

-- A. Serwer

Once again, I had the pleasure of joining Matt Lewis on Bloggingheads to talk about a few of the big issues this week -- the netroots boycott of the DNC over promises President Barack Obama made to the LGBTQ community, the Stupak-Pitts amendment, and the attack at Fort Hood. The above excerpt is our discussion of the role of political correctness in the Fort Hood matter, but you can watch the whole thing here. This segment in particular, wherein Matt harkens back to a rosy past and I wonder whether that past in fact ever existed, is a lovely distillation of the conservative-liberal argument of the past decades.

-- Tim Fernholz

• Perhaps the Obama administration thinks talking about reducing the deficit in next year's State of the Union address will win them political points. This is a mistake. Closing the gap between revenues and outlays can only be accomplished by taking policy initiatives that are currently very unpopular politically (slashing defense, entitlements, and raising taxes). And besides, it's the jobs picture that's really important, and if the government is to get involved with job creation, that's going to involve, you know, the government spending money. And that money is going to increase the debt. If all the options are unpopular, then why not do the right thing to begin with?
• Farhad Manjoo takes us on a trip down memory lane and asks why the world was able to decisively and forcefully organize to tackle the Y2k scare but can't get together on things like climate change. The U.S. economy sunk $100 billion ($9 billion by the federal government) into Y2k upgrades. Comparatively, Bradford Plumer informs us, the world will need to spend about $37 trillion over the next two decades in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• The problem isn't hack writers writing embarrassingly unpersuasive columns on how awesome the former governor of Alaska is and how much she'll be loved by Americans in the future (not worth linking to). The problem is that the non-ideological news media writes about the former governor of Alaska's every movement every single day. This despite not holding elected office, having nothing interesting to say about public policy, and being despised by two-thirds of the country. To put it another way, who cares what she's up to?
• Remainders: Demographics that like, dislike President Obama most; the administration cracks down on burrowing; the Federalist Society convention is little more than a genteel tea party; the real tea partiers continue to bring the power of reason to bear on our elected officials; and the lengths our public officials go to to express their contempt for homosexuals is astonishing.

--Mori Dinauer

This has been a fun, challenging, educational week, and I want to thank you all for reading my posts. And of course, I appreciate The Prospect letting me write about everything from paid sick leave to Rupert Murdoch to chocolate milk.

I'm sending special shout-outs to Adam, Phoebe, and most especially Alexandra (whose kidnapping I've been planning since mid-week) for her helpful editing. I'd try to get her to come back with me to PostBourgie legally, but we only pay in grape drink.

Catch you all later!

--Shani O. Hilton

In the wake of the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, The Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. TAPPED will be cross-posting the 10-part series with the New Deal 2.0 blog over the course of the next two weeks. In this installment, Majora Carter argues for a massive scale, green-collar-job creation effort to revitalize our cities.

People with jobs are better off than people without jobs. But it turns out that people with jobs are even better off if other people are fully employed too – and l am not referring to the alleged “benefits” of increased consumer activity.

One of the reasons our country is the world leader in per capita incarceration and recidivism rates is that jobs in the illegal economy are easier to find than legitimate entry-level jobs in some areas. By “some areas” I mean ghettos, and by “ghettos” I mean anywhere poor people are concentrated.

Often, these are people returning from prison, people who have lived in generational poverty, or returning combat veterans – some fit all three of these demographics. Each group commonly suffers from, among other things, a deep sense of social isolation that inhibits their participation in the marketplace, increases their social services footprint, and negatively affects the health and educational outcomes of both themselves and the people around them. Typically, these places are the environmental sacrifice zones that make our dirty-energy economy possible.

They have been creating expensive and ever-widening cost vectors for decades – if one looks at how many people are coming out of our prisons, going into poverty, and coming back from multiple deployments for wars with no end in sight. We need to turn those cost vectors around as soon as possible using the tools we can control on regional and community levels.

More after the jump.

--Majora Carter

Majora Carter is the President of the Majora Carter Group, LLC. She is an environmental justice advocate and economic consultant.

During my time at the non-profit, Sustainable South Bronx, we created green-job training and placement systems that successfully aligned environmental remediation jobs with the people who could benefit most from the work. We developed horticultural engineering projects like urban forestry, green roofing, brown-field remediation, and river/wetland restoration and stabilization.

These are the climate change adaption practices that are growing in demand as more people move to cities, and climate-related weather changes take hold over the next 30 years – which is shorter than our most expensive citizens are currently maintained as “cost-burdens.”

Horticultural infrastructure work is highly therapeutic for certain psychological barriers to full participation in society. It’s more cost-effective than pharmaceutical methods too, so this can contribute to public heath savings.

Projects like these, on a massive scale throughout our cities, shorelines, and over-stressed water management systems, can turn some of our most expensive citizens into some of our most productive in three important ways:

1. Improve the public health in the immediate geographical area
2. Provide cost-effective environmental services and reduced infrastructure expense
3. Provide legitimate entry-level jobs with career potential

I am working hard to get large-scale investment-grade projects up and running in the New Orleans/Mississippi Delta region with wetland restoration, in Detroit with intensive urban-agriculture production, and anywhere people can be trained and employed to leave long-lasting improvements to our nation.

If we work together, we can stop going into debt building tributes to our collective failures, and start creating living monuments to hope and possibility for everyone.

Adam Serwer asks if sending some Guantanamo detainees to Bagram is a good or bad idea:

On his second day in office, President Barack Obama ordered Guantanamo Bay Prison closed by January of 2010. Since then, the administration has struggled to meet its self-imposed deadline -- Congress has blocked the administration from releasing cleared detainees into the United States, and only recently agreed to allow Guantanamo detainees to be brought to U.S. soil for trial. Several administration officials have admitted publicly that it is unlikely Guantanamo Bay prison will be closed by January. Despite Congress' apprehension over closing Guantanamo, a consensus has emerged among military officials and human rights activists: that the prison, which has become the symbol of U.S. human rights abuses and lack of due process, harms the our image abroad. Former President George W. Bush, Gen. David Petraeus, and Sen. John McCain have all called for it to be closed.

With Congress refusing to resettle cleared detainees in the United States, and Republicans like Pete Hoekstra fighting any effort to create a prison facility on U.S. soil to house those the administration does not want to release or transfer, the White House has been left with few options. Other countries have been reluctant to take detainees when the United States itself has been willing to take none.

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...it would be a shame if anything happened to it.

That's basically what the Catholic Church is telling the D.C. city council, in an effort to get them to drop an anti-discrimination clause in the same-sex marriage bill that's going to a vote soon. The Church's social services division currently serves 68,000 Washingtonians, including a third of the homeless who use the city's facilities run by the Church. According to the Washington Post, "fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city."

Taking on the Church's attempt to strong-arm the city council, Jamelle Bouie explains how the politicization of the Church has shifted in recent years:

Conservative evangelicals have been thoroughly politicized for nearly three decades and the focus of their rage has always been the nation’s “moral decline,” in the form of reproductive freedom and gay rights. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has always been a bit more measured in its approach. This might be my naivety talking, but I expected a bit more of the Catholic leadership. Sure, the Catholic Church isn’t particularly enamored of gays, but as an institution (and at least in the United States) it’s always seemed much more concerned with fighting the war on poverty than the war on gays. What’s more, unlike evangelicals – who are overwhelmingly Southern and conservative – Catholics represent a wider geographic and ideological cross-section of America, which had a moderating influence on the church’s leadership.

But things changed, and in the past decade or so, Catholic leadership has become more and more committed to a socially conservative political agenda. If given the choice between saving the needy and sticking it to the gays, these Church “elders” would rather let 68,000 of the most vulnerable Washingtonians suffer in the dead of winter than have to extend basic legal protections to gay people.

However, the Church's influence over the city council seems to be limited, and its presence as a social service provider may not irreplaceable. Council member David A. Cantania, who sponsored the bill, says, "They don't represent, in my mind, an indispensable component of our social services infrastructure."

--Shani O. Hilton

Terence Samuel on the looming conservative comeback:

The GOP has officially declared its 2010 resurgence, and why not? This is as good a time as any. The party won all the big statewide elections last week, and it's pulling ahead in Gallup's generic congressional ballot this week. For the first time this year, more people say they will vote for the Republican candidate in next year's midterm congressional election than for the Democrat. No wonder conservatives are happy.

But in so many ways this GOP "resurgence" reminds me of the Democratic resurgence of 1998, when the Democrats needed 12 seats to take control of the House and only got five. Or maybe it's more akin to the resurgence of 2000, when Democrats won the popular vote but lost the White House, and picked up four seats in the Senate but only mustered a split that could be broken by Dick Cheney. Then, of course, there were the 2002 midterms where the Democratic "resurgence" defied expectations and lost two seats in the Senate and eight seats in the House, giving Republicans clear majorities in both chambers. And for all of Democrats' hope and hype in 2004, George W. Bush stayed on in the White House and the GOP remained firmly in control of Congress. Oftentimes, party revivals are not what you'd expect.

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Jeffrey Rosen steps into the Stupak amendment fray by making an argument that the rest of his article completely undermines. All you need is the first sentence:

Is it worth sacrificing health care reform for ideological purity on abortion?

As I wrote the other day, to pretend that this is a choice between "purity" and "health care reform" is to deceptive: The Stupak amendment, if it is included in the final bill, represents a choice between moving backwards on reproductive rights and health-care reform. Saying otherwise makes it easier for people who want to avoid making that hard choice feel like they are being reasonable. But as Rosen demonstrates in his piece, the amendment would set back women's access to abortion in very real ways, and it doesn't look like the courts would be able to reverse the legislation.

There is one observation in the article that hadn't struck me before and is worth repeating: Religious conservatives are holding abortion funding to a much higher standard than the federal subsidies that go to religious organizations -- "Pro-life groups have resisted the segregation of public and private funds, arguing that the two are ultimately fungible. (They are less concerned about fungibility when it comes to federal grants for soup kitchens run by churches, which can then free up funds to celebrate Mass.)" This could be leverage for Democrats, who ought to propose that if Stupak stays in the bill, his funding standard should apply to religious organizations as well.

Interestingly, folks on the right are convinced that this amendment won't be in the final version of health-care reform, and many are angry that anti-choice Republicans supported the amendment, giving cover to conservative Democrats who voted for the House health-care reform bill. Let's hope that this is the case -- and that pro-choice groups are working the phones and organizing to get the language back to the Hyde standard, at the very least. If not, pro-choice Democrats are going to face a very hard choice when they have the chance to vote on the final, post-conference health-care reform bill.

-- Tim Fernholz

This RedState "action alert," is just mind-boggling (via John Cole):

Today Barack Obama is going to announce that the terrorist mastermind of September 11th, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be sent to New York City for a criminal trial in a civilian court.

In that trial, the terrorist will get all the rights afforded an American citizen in a criminal trial, including the right to a fair trial, the right to a taxpayer funded attorney, the right to review all the evidence against him, potentially including classified intelligence matters, the right to exclude evidence against him including, potentially, any confession obtained through enhanced interrogation techniques, etc.

At best, this will be a show trial fit not for the American Republic, but a third world kleptocratic totalitarian regime. At worse, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will gain access to classified material he can then leak to other terrorists while New York yet again becomes a target for terrorists. We have already had occasions in this country where terrorists’ sympathetic lawyers have conveyed information, orders, and plans to other terrorists.

Yesterday's big righteous-anger-for-progressives moment came when Politico reported that the Republican National Committee has been covering elective abortions through its Cigna health-care plan since 1991.

But, says RNC chairman Michael Steele, this will not continue!

"Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose," Steele said. "I don't know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled."

I think this might be a bad move for the party. As Kate Harding notes at Broadsheet, the GOP is already repulsing women voters in myriad ways, and the number of women candidates in the party is falling. Take a look at the GOP's "Young Guns" program, which was created by Minority Whip Eric Cantor to promote a group of handpicked representatives tasked to "fix Washington." Of its 22 members, 3 are women.

And it's definitely bad for the women who work for the GOP. I suppose something could be said for women who work against the interests of women getting what they deserve, but as Ann Friedman said earlier this week, "Many, many women who are opposed abortion rights have exercised those rights themselves -- whether for health reasons or because, when it came right down to it, they simply found themselves making a different choice than they thought they would in that situation." I feel empathy for these anti-choice women who have had a choice for the last 18 years, if only because some things are unknowable until you go through them.

While the Stupak Amendment -- which could affect private insurer abortion coverage -- hasn't taken effect (and hopefully it never will), I'm hesitant to rail against the GOP over the hypocrisy of covering abortions for its own employees while decrying abortion access. One, because making abortion available to all women is important, and two because Steele's knee-jerk reaction of cutting off that coverage will do more harm to women than good for the party.

--Shani O. Hilton

Tim Fernholz asks if we can learn to fight from our Canadian neighbors:

It was a public-relations stunt worthy of P.T. Barnum, perfect for getting the attention of a uninterested American audience: Tuck an Afghan village, complete with authentic Afghans, into the heart of Washington, D.C., right between the White House and Capitol Hill. Then, blow it the hell up. 



The most surprising part of the whole idea was who came up with it: the Canadian government.



Boom! 



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Earlier this morning, I posted about the administration's decision to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is a suspect in the bombing the U.S.S. Cole, will face trial by military commission. Glenn Greenwald argues that this exposes "a multi-tiered justice system, where only certain individuals are entitled to real trials." Many civil liberties advocates have protested the use of military commissions on the grounds that the basis for their use appears to be the quality of the government's case against the suspect, not the nature of the crime--it's hard to see how the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole was a war crime rather than a criminal act of terrorism--particularly given that the U.S. is trying the alleged 9/11 conspirators in civilian court.

But as I explained earlier, the new military commissions are much closer to civilian trials than the Bush version--but they still give the government the ability to more easily suppress information it wants to keep secret. That may explain why the administration doesn't want to try al-Nashiri in civilian court. Al-Nashiri, if you remember, aside from being waterboarded, had a gun held close to his head by an interrogator, and was led to believe that he would be rendered to a country where his female relatives would be raped in front of him. All of this is illegal under American law.

Unlike KSM, who has confessed--al-Nashiri maintains his innocence and has said confessions he gave previously were the result of torture, which means his treatment will likely be a big part of his trial. This may explain the choice of venue. 

UPDATE: In case it isn't clear, I'm trying to explain the likely reason for al-Nashiri's trial by military commission, which I think is a bad idea. I'm not endorsing it. Not even close.

-- A. Serwer

Congressional Democrats have been pressing the White House to do more to create jobs. But hemmed in by exploding budget deficits and criticism from Republicans that the $787 billion economic stimulus plan enacted in February has been ineffective, the White House has been reluctant to embrace any sweeping new initiatives.

In recent weeks, Obama has taken smaller steps to continue stimulating the economy. Last Friday, the president signed legislation that extends unemployment insurance benefits by up to 20 weeks and renews an $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers while expanding eligibility. Earlier, the administration backed a $250 payment to senior citizens as a means of stimulating economic activity.

Congress is pressing the White House to do more to help the labor market, and the president is taking steps when he signs legislation? Someone is having a laugh. The cult of the presidency has obscured the fact that Congress is the biggest obstacle to new job-creating policy. Do Congressional leaders think that the president would veto a jobs tax credit if they passed one, or refuse to sign a package of fiscal aid to states? It's a sad day when Congress is apparently sitting around and fretting until the White House comes to do the legislating for them. Of course, I understand the value of having the White House publicly pulling for a piece of legislation, and importance of coordinating with the executive branch, but it is still crazy to suggest that Obama is the one gumming up the process here.

It's all comes down to our dilettante congress, happy to punt the hard decisions on almost everything to almost anyone -- Medicare Commissions for Medicare! Budget Commissions for the Budget! -- and then complain about the deficit while trying to lift the estate tax or refusing to cut agricultural subsidies, much less considering sensible ideas about reforming the charitable deduction so it applies fairly to all citizens. People joke about Obama's summits, but that is apparently the new requirement for Congress to do anything these days, so direct your scorn down Pennsylvania Ave a few more blocks.

-- Tim Fernholz

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, long alleged to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks that destroyed the Twin Towers and killed nearly 3000 people, is headed to the Southern District Court of New York to face trial in a civilian court alongside five other alleged co-conspirators, according to the Associated Press. 

The move comes over the objections of Republicans and some Democrats who wanted to see the alleged 9/11 conspirators tried by military commission. Sen. Lindsey Graham notably tried to add an amendment to an appropriations bill that would have stopped the Obama administration from bringing the alleged conspirators to a criminal court. Democrats Jim Webb, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor all supported the measure, along with Joe Lieberman. At the time, Graham said:

"Khalid Sheik Mohammed didn't rob a liquor store," Graham said. "He took this nation to war, and he killed 3,000 of our innocent citizens."

That's a bizarre statement -- it's not as though American courts are incapable of handling crimes more serious than petty larceny. A number of convicted terrorists reside in American prisons -- many of them prosecuted in the Southern District of New York. The eyes of the world will be on this trial, and anything less than a full and fair proceeding will undermine the legitimacy of the ultimate result.

Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld, a former military commissions prosecutor who resigned over the way the commissions were conducted, praised the administration's decision to try the alleged conspirators in criminal court.  "This is a welcome decision," Vandeveld wrote in an email. "Fundamentally, the defendants are criminals, terrorists, whom it would pain Lady Justice to shoehorn into military commissions."

So what were Graham and others afraid of? The primary feature of the new military commissions is their ability to keep certain information secret. In a public proceeding, the information about the torture of KSM and others is bound to be a part of the process. I suspect that's the real reason Graham and others would prefer KSM be tried by military commission. KSM was waterboarded 183 times while in American custody.

It's unclear as of now whether the administration will seek the death penalty -- a recent report from the Center for American Progress urged the administration not to, on the grounds that it would grant KSM martyrdom. KSM told a military judge last year that "I wish to be martyred".

Maj. Eric Monalvo (Ret.), who defended former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed Jawad in his military commissions trial, dissented from this view. "I believe taking death off the table is a sign of weakness because in dealing with these radicals, killing and death are all they understand," Montalvo said. "I am not advocating that the only way to go on this is the death penalty, but it should certainly not be taken off the table for fear of martyrdom."

-- A. Serwer

• Doug Elmendorf doesn't have to face voters, so he has the freedom to point out that it's contradictory for Americans to demand government services that they aren't willing to pay for. But I often wonder what the reaction would be to a politician who honestly made the pitch for higher taxes to pay for these services. Instead we live in a world where revenue is detached from spending, the Defense Department uses Monopoly money, and cutting taxes for the super-wealthy is the highest moral imperative.
• Liberals are often accused of having a bias against business or being insufficiently pro-free market. I think it would be fair to say that liberals are skeptical about the business community's commitment to anything beyond the bottom line, and to that end have tended to side with labor over business elites. A good example of why this is is captured in this Think Progress which quotes the Inside U.S. Trade business newsletter: "Business groups are worried by the potential effects of provisions banning the import of all goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or forced or indentured child labor that were included in a customs bill sponsored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) and Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-IA)."
• The tea party movement thinks dissolution of the American republic is imminent. Matt Compton responds: "When a movement, which claims to fight socialist fascism in the name of freedom, promotes the ideas of a former KGB agent as a way to offer some intellectual heft to its arguments, it becomes increasingly difficult to lend that movement any credibility whatsoever."
• Remainders: Barack Obama "now carries the heavy burden of command"; why does Jon Klein want to hurt America?; a side effect of anti-Muslim bigotry is the inability to comprehend proportional arithmetic; the GOP's $3,000 lie simply will not die; and more apostasy from Joseph Cao.

--Mori Dinauer

In 2005, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver successfully experimented with healthy whole foods in school lunch. Now, Tom Laskawy at Grist reports that first lady Michelle Obama could be preparing policy to wrest school lunch from the grip of food conglomerates. And earlier this year, Obama planted an organic garden at the White House (recently harvested by local schoolkids) and called for the food in school lunches to be as healthy as possible.

Now, with signs that the less-than-nutritional school lunch status quo is in danger, the milk industry is on the offensive. Their mission: trying to save chocolate milk from being eliminated from schools because of its added sugar.

According to an AP report, the milk industry is claiming that sweet, artificial flavors are the best way to get kids to choose milk over soda or juice. (For the record, I'm a big milk drinker, but I've never much cared for flavored milks. Even in school, where we had a vending machine that sold strawberry and chocolate milks, I would always go for the plain stuff. Apparently, I'm an anomaly.)

Obesity experts and nutritionists have disagreed, insisting that kids will drink milk without added sugars, dyes or artificial flavors, if that's the only milk available. The Boulder Valley School District in Boulder, Colo. jettisoned flavored milk at the insistence of their director of nutrition services, Ann Cooper (a self-described "renegade lunch lady"), and now has kids who "happily drink white milk."

The new flavored milk campaign, run by the same people behind the popular "Got Milk?" ads, is called "Raise Your Hand for Chocolate Milk" and it has its own promotional video. In the video, various nutritionists, moms, and celebrities talk about how wonderful chocolate milk is, while downplaying its extra calories and additives.

One serving of chocolate milk has four teaspoons, or 16 grams, of sugar, notes Sarah Gilbert at Daily Finance, who writes, "In the past few decades, food makers seem to have been asking themselves the question 'without sugar, would kids eat anything?' And based on the types of products they've released, it seems they're arrived at 'of course not' as their answer."

There's nothing inherently wrong with a moderate amount of sweeteners, but sugar and high fructose corn syrup are in nearly all processed foods (and are often disguised under names that don't look anything like "sugar"), and sugar is in whole fruits and vegetables. And now kids are being diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes. There's simply too much sugar in the American diet, and it needs to be reduced. Eliminating sugary drink options in schools seems like the perfect way to do that.

--Shani O. Hilton

What perplexes me is that we have been here before, and we know how to solve the unemployment problem: create jobs through a new, New Deal-style jobs program.

I am advocating using those same principles, but creating something both broader and permanent: a universal job guarantee available through the thick and thin of the business cycle. The federal government would ensure a job offer to anyone ready and willing to work, at the established program compensation level (including wages and a healthy benefits package). To keep it simple, the program wage could be set at the current federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), and then adjusted periodically as that is raised. The usual benefits would be provided, including vacation and sick leave, and contributions to Social Security.

Let’s call this the Job Guarantee (JG) program.

The original New Deal programs included large–scale infrastructure projects with direction coming from Washington. A permanent and universal JG program should be decentralized, with projects created and administered locally–where the workers are, and for the benefit of their communities. The federal government would provide the wages, plus a portion of capital and supervisory expenses (perhaps capped at 25% of total wages paid for each JG project). Local governments and nonprofits would propose projects and cover the rest of the expenses. State unemployment offices would be converted to employment offices, helping to match workers and projects.

Project proposals would be submitted to regional councils and, if approved, would be evaluated by state councils and then by a federal council. Wages and benefits would be paid directly to workers (using Social Security numbers and direct bank deposits) to minimize fraud. Organizations submitting proposals would be prevented from replacing paid workers with JG workers. For-profit business would be excluded, because the temptation to substitute would be too great. At the same time, businesses would be protected from unfair competition because all JG projects would have to demonstrate they’d fulfill unmet public purposes. If at some future date, a for-profit firm decided to provide services that a JG project is performing, the JG project could be phased out. There is neither need nor desire for the JG program to compete with the private for-profit sector.

This brings us to the fundamental principle of the JG program: it is a complement that provides jobs to those who would otherwise be jobless and it provides public services and infrastructure that otherwise would not be supplied. It is important that JG jobs do useful work-so that workers can feel proud of their contributions and to maintain the community’s support. At the same time, JG workers will be gaining useful work experience and training, making them more appealing to other employers. When firms hire, they will recruit from the JG program, offering a slightly higher wage.

There will be two main categories of JG projects-those that are permanent and those that are “off the shelf,” undertaken in recession as the number of JG workers grows. The first will probably consist mostly of public services (care of the aged, playground supervision) while the second could include public infrastructure construction and repair. There is no sharp dividing line, but the point is that between boom and bust the number of employees in the JG programs will probably fluctuate by some 5 million (perhaps 20% of the total). It is important, however, that this fluctuation is not permitted to disrupt provision of services to which the community has become accustomed.

At the same time, the program’s fluctuation allows it to act as an employed “buffer stock”-or “reserve army of the employed”-helping to attenuate the business cycle while maintaining full employment without setting off a wage-price spiral. An economic boom will shrink the size of the JG program; in a recession the program will grow.

Thus, an effort like the Job Guarantee program I am proposing would act as an automatic stabilizer — a feature most would agree is desperately needed in our current rollercoaster economy.

It may be that Obama will prove to be a poor President, and he could inaugurate policies that will fail as spectacularly as Bush’s did, but we would not be able to conclude from this that he did not love his country or share American values. If we could conclude such things from what politicians do, surely the man who launched aggressive wars, and who sanctioned illegal, arbitrary detention, illegal wiretapping and torture would not come out looking very good at all.

Seasoned observers took the wise cracks heard in the Supreme Court this week as a sign that the nine are doubting the wisdom of business methods patents. Sounds bland, but it's really quite provocative stuff. U.S. patent practice has evolved so that inventors win monopolies over ways of doing business, even when there's no tangible invention involved. That's likely to stop in short order. The court practically mocked the very idea of patenting creative ways of making a buck. What's extra intriguing, though, is that the Supreme Court went even further and threw into sharp relief the questionable thinking behind software patents, too.

On the business method patent front, the justices dug deep into their reserves of sarcasm to find non-digital work practices that common sense suggests rightly belong to no one. How about horse whispering?, asked a mischievous Antonin Scalia. Sonia Sotomayor asked the attorney for the petitioner -- the creator of a method for hedging energy costs based on the weather -- whether speed dating could earn a patent. Anthony Kennedy offered by the innovation of selling insurance based on risk. And Stephen Breyer asked the petitioner whether his "wonderful, really original method of teaching antitrust law [that] kept 80 percent of the students awake" was patentable. Maybe, answered the daring attorney. Nobody seemed to buy it.

But here's where software patents come in, and things quickly get complicated. The U.S. has been operating under what's called the machine-or-transformation test, where patent eligibility requires either a tangible invention or a change of some kind from state A to state B. No one quite understands exactly what either "machine" or "transformation" means when it comes to bits and bytes. Software, though, have been free-riding on the back of business method patents -- it is, the thinking goes, just ways of doing business embodied in code. That's how Amazon won a patent for 1-Click. But with methods patents out the window, we have to start judging the wisdom of software patents on its own merits. Chief Justice John Roberts' own line of questioning suggested that if business method patents go down, software patents -- hated by many, particularly those in the open source community -- might just go down with them.

Roberts was dubious about the U.S. Patent Office's claim that transferring a business method to a computer automagically makes the unpatentable patentable. "Instead of looking in the Yellow Pages," asked a doubting Roberts, "you look on the computer, and that makes all the difference to you?"

--Nancy Scola

Lou Dobbs' abrupt departure from CNN seems to be the product of ongoing wrangling between the anchor and network executives, who gave him the choice of either making his show more "objective" or resigning. CNN had been under increasing pressure from immigrants' rights groups to fire the news anchor: His histrionics in the last few years have included blaming immigrants for 7,000 cases of leprosy in 2007 and joining certifiable crazy Orly Taitz in demanding Obama turn over his real birth certificate even as CNN repeatedly debunked the birther myth.

CNN's demand that Dobbs tone it down seems to be part of an effort to hold firm against the editorialization of the news that happens at networks like Fox and MSNBC. But I'm not sure that purging the loudest scaremongers will necessarily guarantee CNN objective coverage -- this might be a futile endeavor on their part. Sure, a story can strike a tone that isn't alarmist, but any journalist can tell you that the types of stories an outlet covers -- and doesn't cover -- are themselves an indication of politically informed priorities.

The bias question isn't just a matter of whether or not the title of Dobbs' news series had been "Broken Borders." Simply reporting on the immigration "problem" -- as opposed to our failure to plan for the regular influx of new citizens -- is a political decision. As James Poniewozik writes in Time, all it means for a news outlet to be "moderate" or neutral is that it reflects the values and prejudices that are the status quo. Still, it's nice not to watch the nightly news and be told that Armageddon is around the corner. CNN is better off without Dobbs' senile, paranoid invective.

Setting aside the issue of whether one can be an "objective" journalist, the more important question is what it means to be a good journalist. It means not being a prisoner to ideology and instead pointing the skeptical, journalistic lens on yourself as well as on the government officials and organizations you cover. Dobbs is a font of certainty, and now, the subject of reports rather than the reporter. He belongs there.

--Gabriel Arana

Not that easy. Matt also disagrees with Ezra's contention that the politics will line up on the side of the reformers. If you've been following the debate in the House, you'll see complete opposition from Republicans, as well as the banks and the regulators -- the GOP literally want to change nothing. The Senate has different politics that arguably make for a stronger bill -- the House Financial Services Committee is home to a lot of new Dems and freshmen who are there mainly for the fundraising, while the smaller Senate Banking Committee, though it has its moderates, has more willingness to make serious changes and more skeptical of the Fed -- but even in the upper chamber Republicans are still uncommitted to much of the broad regulatory reform agenda, and Chris Dodd's bill is harsher on regulators than the House version, so there could be more pushback from them. They've already started their by-now ritual calls for more "time" to "talk" about issues that have been under discussion for months.

Ezra is right that, unlike health care reform, where Republicans have made it their mission to try and kill the bill outright, regulatory reform is not something they feel they can oppose directly as a package -- the question is what the final product looks like. Whether it passes with or without the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, for instance, which Republicans are set on destroying, or whether derivatives reform or capital requirements are meaningful -- look for a forthcoming story on that front in the next issue of the Prospect. But even if there is consensus on restrictions on the Fed, regulatory reform will be incomplete without other, more controversial measures. Because financial regulatory reform has so many moving parts, reformers will have to keep a very close eye on each section to make sure reform actually means something. Even worse, if the final bill turns out to be weakened to the point where progressives want to kill it and start again -- not an impossible outcome -- it will be challenging for them to fight against what Republicans and conservative Dems call "reform."

-- Tim Fernholz

Jessica Clark looks at how zines became a natural outlet for feminist ideas:

Scrawled and stapled, filled with rough-edged collages and BLARING CAPS, often achingly, embarrassingly personal, zines hardly seem like the founding documents of a movement. But, in the first book-length treatment of this topic, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, Alison Piepmeier argues that zines played a signature role in the development of third-wave feminism. "These hopeful interventions are not identical to traditional modes of doing politics," she writes, "but they are political nonetheless, because they are drawing attention to what's wrong with the world, awakening their readers' outrage, and providing tools for challenging existing power structures."

Piepmeier begins reclaiming zines from the male-dominated culture of punk. Instead, she connects them with what she identifies as earlier forms of feminist "participatory media": the scrapbooks kept by suffragettes to document and respond to sexist characterizations of their work; the pamphlets that transmitted contraband information about contraception and sexual health to women in the early 1900s; the mimeographed flyers that called women's libbers to consciousness and revolt. "Participatory media represent a way of engaging with unfriendly mass culture and transforming it -- if not always on a broad scale, at least at the level of the local," she notes.

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I'm kidding of course, but it never ceases to amaze me when our "objective" journalists engage in a little faux-populist contempt for the very institutions that make America a democracy -- institutions like fair trials. Yesterday, Wolf Blitzer slathered himself in red meat demanding to know why former Judge Advocate General Col. John Galligan (Ret.) was defending Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan as his counsel:

Before the interview ended, the CNN anchor said of Hasan, "I'm sure he will get a much fairer hearing than those 13 Americans who were brutally gunned down the other day. I'm sure he will get all of the rights that are applied by the military code of justice."

Galligan bristled. "The difficulty that I have, of course, is when people end discussions with me with references like the one that you just made."

The implication of course, is that for some reason Hasan should be denied a fair trial because of the nature of the crime. This is Salem Witch Trial justice: If the crime is heinous, the accused is automatically guilty. That the evidence may be overwhelming doesn't matter: You don't just "skip" a fair trial because you feel like it. There's a word for systems of justice that selectively afford due process -- that word is "corrupt."

Part of the reason this kind of commentary disturbs me so much is that the Bush administration made a deliberate effort to tag all the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay as "the worst of the worst" -- and since they were all incorrigible terrorists, they didn't need fair trials. Of course, 750 detainees have been released from Guantanamo, and the released have a recidivism rate of about four percent. Now either the Pentagon has developed some magic formula for reducing recidivism that ought to be shared with the people who run our criminal justice system, or the folks at Guantanamo aren't actually "the worst of the worst."

There was a time though, where that claim went unquestioned. And during that time, it was the JAGs, the military lawyers, whose reverence for the American system of justice caused them to defy the Bush administration and push for due process rights for their clients, who were believed to be terrorists by much of the country, because that's exactly what the president was telling them. Opinions like that one Blitzer expresses above were everywhere. And of course, it turned out that most of the people detained at Guantanamo weren't guilty of anything (with some important exceptions) -- not that we've been any less willing to toss out our own system of justice when it comes to trying people suspected of terrorism.

As Thomas Paine put it:

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Frankly, we ought to be thankful that people like Col. Galligan exist. Because I don't know what our society would look like without them. I'm not even actually sure Blitzer was being sincere -- I suspect he was just trying to show everyone what a patriotic American he is. Instead, he showed contempt for the very institutions that make this country what it is.

-- A. Serwer

Scott Lemieux on the meaning of Maine's Question1:

In an unfortunate exception to a happy election night for progressives in 2008, California voters passed Proposition 8, which overturned a state court decision holding that the state's ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. This led to another predictable round of claims that judicial opinions produce a disproportionate backlash and that therefore using litigation to pursue changes to the status quo is always a mistake. The California justices, argued Jeffrey Rosen, were "naive and overconfident blunderers." "The issue was pressed too quickly," asserted The Atlantic's Megan McArdle, "and in the wrong venue." The conventional wisdom of pundits assures us that landmarks like Roe v. Wade and Goodridge v. Massachusetts represent similar counterproductive "blunders."

Oddly, this same group has had very little to say about the failure of the 2009 initiative seeking to overrule Maine's same-sex marriage law. In broad outlines, the outcome was strikingly similar to California's in 2008: Well-motivated conservative groups attacked the state's legalization of same-sex marriage using similar arguments and successfully overturned it via the ballot. Maine was ignored by professional contrarians, however, for the obvious reason that Question 1 overturned an act of the legislature, not a judicial ruling. Maine represents another example of a fact that should be obvious: Opposition to judicial decisions legalizing same-sex marriage is substantive, not procedural. Prop. 8 and similar initiatives are motivated by opposition to same-sex marriage, not by some principled opposition to judicial review.

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Ambassador Karl Eikenberry's cables highlight a paradox that keeps coming up in my conversations with policy analysts and State Department officials: The more U.S. officials call Afghanistan a necessary war, the less leverage they have over Karzai, who knows that the Obama administration will be hard pressed to withdraw troops from a war they've framed as essential for national security. But without the ability to force the Karzai regime to deal with issues of corruption and incompetence, U.S. efforts in Afghanistan are going to be very hard-pressed to succeed. If it assumed in Kabul -- as it was in Washington -- that more troops are a fait accompli, than there is no incentive at all for Karzai to change his behavior. It's a near-perfect illustration of making choices about resources that seem unconnected with your broader strategy.

Hence Eikenberry's memo urging the president not to send more troops until Karzai cleans up his act. It illustrates also the need for more clarity in how the president frames the conflict: Without a clear end-state, as Adam observes, it's nearly impossible to maintain any kind of flexibility in how policymakers approach the conflict. Given the difficulties in even deploying more troops to Afghanistan -- the necessary brigades simply aren't available -- there is no real need to make the decision now. Tell Karzai that we're getting the troops ready, and perhaps they'll be sent if he can demonstrate his ability to improve his government's legitimacy and solidify his coalition with a broader cabinet.

I'm about to hear a Q&A with Gen. David Petraeus, whose command now encompasses the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I look forward to hearing what he has to say about this topic.

Update: Petraeus said nothing, unsurprisingly, about on-going discussions, although interviewer Michael O'Hanlon didn't even bother to raise the question (or really ask any tough questions at all -- afterwards he told me he is simply a "conversation facilitator" but the conversation he facilitated was light on substance and bathed in the weakest of sauces.) But Helene Cooper has a smart article on the topic in the Times today.

-- TIm Fernholz

Late yesterday afternoon, news broke that former U.S. Army General and current Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry told the White House twice last week that it would be a mistake to send more troops to Afghanistan before the issues with Hamid Karzai's government are resolved. He also stated that the U.S. commitment to Afghanistan should not be open ended. If this story from the Associated Press is correct, then President Obama is thinking along the same lines, having rejected all the options offered by his national security team because they lack a clarity on "how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government."

The lack of "they will greet us as liberators" rhetoric not withstanding, the public debate over Afghanistan has taken place within some very familiar and narrow parameters, focused almost entirely on the question of troop levels and only occasionally on U.S. interests in the region and how they are served -- or not -- by our presence there. This news is likely to accelerate criticism of the president as "dithering," as various factions work to exert even more public pressure on the president to choose the option they prefer.

Frankly, I found this news to be a great relief. There are no points for choosing quickly if the president makes the wrong choice. Obama ran on a platform of not just wanting to end the war in Iraq, but to end the mindset that gets us into "dumb wars" in the first place. Part of ending that mindset is refusing to submit to political pressure to raise troop levels without a coherent plan to end the war. Essentially, Obama is saying exactly what Gen. David Petraeus famously said about Iraq years ago: "Tell me how this ends." It's the kind of thing the president should be thinking about.

-- A. Serwer

• Obviously, cuing up a jobs bill became something of a political necessity once the unemployment rate cracked double digits, because Washington loves attributing special significance to round numbers. The bill will undoubtedly be another round of stimulus spending that will studiously avoid reference to the s-word, be a gentle courtship of Senate moderates whose consciences demand reducing the bill's cost by arbitrary amounts of money, and be introduced just in time for the Spring tea party season.
  
• As annoying (and cowardly, in the case of the anonymous version) as the now-routine Senate hold is, the real prize in institutional reform of the Senate is of course eliminating the filibuster once and for all. It's frustrating to know that unprincipled centrists owe their relevance to parliamentary precedent that can be overruled with a simple majority vote, but one which no Democrats are providing leadership for.
• National Review hauls out the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, to confirm the conservative movement's fundamental prejudice about climate change, namely that communism and environmentalism are "structurally very similar." I understand the impulse to believe that survivors of communist regimes are able to recognize the road to serfdom much sooner than other mere mortals but Klaus' contention that environmentalism is a totalitarian nightmare where faceless bureaucrats control our behavior and establish a command economy is patently absurd.
  
• Remainders: Private military firms are something every American should be proud of; Pete Hoekstra does not deserve the privilege of knowing intelligence secrets; I'm dying to know the "strategic consulting" to be provided by the RiceHadley Group; and this guy probably has a bright future in national Republican politics.

--Mori Dinauer

In general, I agree with Peter: The Democratic party is better for being bigger, even it is trickier to assemble decent legislation because of that fact. Sometimes the sausage-making is going to get ugly and compromises will be hard for progressives to stomach. In this case, though, Peter is wrong. For him, the Stupak Amendment is just one of those ugly compromises, but his analysis is flawed -- and offers a warning today's progressives and Democrats would be wise to heed.

The most important reason he is wrong is that the Stupak Amendment isn't responsible pragmatism -- it is retrograde. The amendment would actively remove existing access to abortion by creating incentives for private health insurance plans that already have coverage to remove it if health care reform passes, and it narrows the exceptions to the ban on abortion coverage in health insurance exchanges to the point where many reasonable claims would be denied. Many middle-of-the-road health care proponents cite the example of Social Security's creation, which essentially exempted all African-Americans from coverage to placate Southern Democrats. It was ugly and racist, but it created a framework that could be expanded over the years to include all Americans. This amendment, meanwhile, doesn't just recognize the ugly status quo, as Social Security did, it makes it worse.

More broadly, Peter also separates gender equality and civil rights from a "broader progressive agenda." One more example of the uselessness of "progressive" as a political term, but I digress. Most progressives would argue that gender equality, civil rights and, yes, reproductive rights are all major parts of the their agenda. What Peter is really saying is that Democrats now, as then, are happy to emphasize the economic equality portion of the progressive agenda over other issues, consciously or unconsciously, because economic inequality has become such a huge problem. Nonetheless, Peter could afford more clarity about what he is choosing to give up.

Ultimately, he fails to understand that every majority contains the seeds of its own undoing. While Peter focuses on the economic aspects of the previous big-tent Democratic majority, he downplays the advances made on civil rights and gender equality, especially by LBJ. As Peter recognizes, the Civil Rights Act and other culturally progressive victories led to the Democratic majority's defeat as racists and social conservatives fled to the Republican party. He suggests that this was a result of a decision for the party to become more "pure" under pressure from activists, but that's foolish. It was because the party decided to do the right thing under pressure from activists. Does Peter think this was a bad decision? He doesn't say.

Believers in the Big Tent, like Peter and myself, have to be very careful about the compromises they make. If you lose track of what the point of politics is -- what you leave behind -- then you risk betraying the entire progressive agenda. If Peter thinks today's progressives should choose economic issues over other ones, he should make that case explicitly. But he shouldn't pretend that it's a normatively good choice. There's going to come a time when this Democratic majority has the chance to do something so big and important that it will destroy itself by alienating its conservative and moderate members. Maybe it will be gay marriage, maybe it will be the Freedom of Choice Act, who knows. I hope the leadership at the time has the principles and the guts to pass the law and blow up their majority. That's what it's there for, after all.

-- Tim Fernholz

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks:

... am I the only African-American gamer who makes his toons look as black as possible? It's the weirdest thing. My younger brother takes this to laughable extremes--in WoW he made his tauren druid as dark as he could. Even on my blood elf pally, I made sure he had a tan. Still got the shock of red hair though. I need that.

My answer? Nope, you're not alone. While I'm not a serious gamer, I do play The Sims 3, and I consciously create "sims of color." Most are black; others are Asian, South Asian and Latino. Most of the sims that come with the game are white, and I just really like to break that up a bit. So I think I understand Ta-Nehisi's compulsion to, um, black it up.

But for those who participate multiplayer online role-playing games (like TNC-favorite World of Warcraft), going black might not be the best idea. A recent Northwestern University study finds that race affects social influence in virtual worlds, writes Jesse at Racism Review.

Researchers used a platform similar to Second Life, leading different avatars through the There universe and interacting with its inhabitants. The avatars would make requests of other users and try to persuade them into agreeing by using the Door In The Face (DITF) technique -- where one person makes an unreasonably large demand of another only to follow up with a more reasonable one when the first is denied. The moderate request is more likely to be accepted when preceded by an outrageous one than if just asked cold.

But DITF doesn't work equally for all avatars. Science Daily notes:

In one of the most striking findings, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the requesting avatar was dark-toned. The white avatars in the DITF experiment received about a 20 percent increase in compliance with the moderate request; the increase for the dark-toned avatars was 8 percent.

There's a 12 percent difference in how requests from white and black avatars were received. Paul W. Eastwick, one of the study's conductors, said, "You would think when you're wandering around this fantasyland, operating outside of the normal laws of time, space and gravity and meeting all types of strange characters, that you might behave differently. But people exhibited the same type of behavior -- and the same type of racial bias -- that they show in the real world all the time."

What strikes me about all of this is that when people of color enter virtual realities, there's often a desire to increase the diversity in the field by creating characters who look like us. It parallels the real-life fight for diversity and inclusion. But when we enter those virtual realities with our brown-skinned avatars, we often face the same problems that our brown-skinned selves would face in real life. As Eastwick said, the behavior from the real world transfers to our escapist realities.

But what does that leave us with?

--Shani Hilton

Yesterday,

You may hear that Treasury officials disagree with Dodd about his bill, but don't get misled: There is a lot of substantive agreement, but the Obama folks (and Barney Frank) are skeptical that Dodd can get his vision through the Senate, especially with his Republican ranking member, Richard Shelby, already moaning about the plan. Dodd is a savvy legislator, though, and perhaps knows to start with the big ask -- unlike the administration -- and also has the pressure to prove himself a real reformer coming from his constituents back in Connecticut, who continue to suspect him of being far too close to the financial industry.

I do share some of Felix Salmon's concerns about taking the Fed out of the systemic risk picture, especially if the Dodd bill, as I had hoped, makes the the institution more publicly accountable. But the heavy lifting will be combining all the current bank supervisory agencies: If Dodd can overcome the objections of regulators, banks and Republicans, and pass his ideas in the senate, I think, somewhat counter intuitively, it won't be too hard to combine that version with the House bill because the underlying philosophies are so close.

-- Tim Fernholz

Tim Fernholz considers how our allies in the Middle East help abet conflict:

Last weekend, Tom Friedman, America's favorite middle-brow international optimist, threw up his hands in disgust. Though he made his name as a journalist covering Israel and its rivals and gained notoriety with continued calls to take just one more six-month stint in Iraq, Friedman now says enough is enough in the Middle East peace process:

Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: 'My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.'

…Indeed, it’s time for us to dust off James Baker’s line: 'When you’re serious, give us a call: 202-456-1414. Ask for Barack.'

It has a certain appeal, doesn't it? The United States has spent so much time out in the world trying to solve problems that our involvement seems to prolong the status quo as often as change it. Given the challenges we face at home, the idea that we should remove ourselves from certain conflicts until we're asked back in -- not withdrawing from the international system, just from international quagmires -- seems intuitive.

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Dave Gaubatz, author of the Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that's Conspiring to Islamize America, literally called for a "backlash" against "the Muslim community and their leaders" following the Fort Hood shootings. If you take a look at some of the offerings around the fevered swamps lately it's obvious there are a number of folks on the right who probably agree.

The problem is, the American people don't seem to concur. Rasumussen, a polling outfit that has kind of become the place to go for conservatives looking to confirm their long held suspicions about [blank], released a poll this morning headlined “60% Want Fort Hood Shooting Investigated as Terrorist Act.” But Greg Sargent took a look at the internals, and found something interesting: 57% of those polled are very or somewhat concerned that the shooting will trigger a backlash against Muslims in the armed forces.

Gotta be pretty disappointing for those who were hoping one man's actions might serve as a pretext for treating all American Muslims, servicemen and women in particular, as potential traitors--even if they see the Fort Hood shootins as an act of terrorism.

-- A. Serwer

I want to highlight one other recommendation from the Center from American Progress report on Guantanamo, which I think is seriously worth looking at.

Prosecute 9/11 conspirators in federal court and limit military commissions to battlefield crimes. The prosecution of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his co-conspirators is the most important of all cases at Guantanamo. U.S. federal criminal courts can handle this prosecution, and it will demonstrate meaningful change, setting the tone for broader U.S. detention policy. It is in the United States’ strategic interest to refrain from seeking the death penalty no matter which forum it chooses, thus denying martyrdom to the 9/11 conspirators. Military commissions remain tainted by Bush-era mistakes, and must be limited—if used at all—to battlefield crimes in order to gain a measure of legitimacy.

Trying the alleged 9/11 conspirators by military commission, or giving them the death penalty if they are convicted would be a supremely bad idea. Because of the more robust military commissions rules, there's little to be gained through trying someone like KSM by military commission -- but a lot of international legitimacy to lose. Why put someone who most people already believe is guilty through a questionable legal proceeding? All that would do is cast doubt on the government's case against him.

Martyrdom is a big part of the Al Qaeda worldview, and granting martyrdom to KSM through execution would merely be giving him what he wants. If he's convicted, let him spend the rest of his life in a cell rather than becoming an inspiration to his comrades.

-- A. Serwer

The Center for American Progress released a new report yesterday on Guantanamo, anticipating a missed deadline and urging the administration to set a new deadline for July 2010. That's a good idea -- although from the administration's perspective, setting a new deadline might be a risky proposition, even given the virtual certainty that the prison will not close on time. The Obama administration may be able to hold Congress responsible for the delay this time around -- and Congress has played no small role in keeping Gitmo open -- but I doubt they would be able to use that excuse again if they missed a second deadline.

The report does include one recommendation that might be controversial: Transferring those detainees who lose their habeas cases to Bagram prison:

Waiting to send a Guantanamo detainee to Bagram until after his habeas case is resolved would forestall at least two concerns about sending them there: detainee access to counsel and the differing legal rights afforded detainees held at the two prisons. Sending Guantanamo detainees to Bagram while their cases are still pending would increase an already difficult burden on lawyers’ access to their clients. Bringing them to the Washington, D.C. area would actually be a measurable improvement on the current situation. Even if a detainee loses his habeas case and is sent to Bagram, he would still be represented by counsel and possess the right to file a new habeas claim at a later date, but he would not need the kind of regular access to his attorney that is required now.

Guantanamo detainees possess the right to contest their detention through habeas corpus, and no decision to transfer those detainees could remove that right. Bagram detainees do not have habeas rights, however, and the Obama administration is fighting a U.S. district court decision that would extend habeas to those Bagram detainees that were brought to Afghanistan after being captured in other countries.58 Having no pending habeas cases for any Guantanamo detainees would be easier to manage from a practical perspective and simpler from a legal one.

The report continues, "[c]oncerns that Bagram would be perceived as the 'new Guantanamo' are legitimate, but this danger is outweighed by the benefits in this context," and concludes that legitimacy problems could be dealt with by reforming the detention system at Bagram, including adopting "a transparent and binding agreement with the Afghan government that formalizes U.S. detention authority and links the system to Afghan law." Some factions within the administration already seem interested in doing the latter. But I can't imagine that the lawyers representing detainees at Guantanamo would be happy with this kind of arrangement -- since it puts their clients far out of reach -- even if it helps close the prison faster. To my knowledge, not a single civilian lawyer for any detainee has ever set foot in Bagram.

-- A. Serwer

We'll still be blogging, of course, but take a moment to remember U.S. veterans of wars past and present. President Obama's speech yesterday at the memorial service for the soldiers killed at Fort Hood -- one of the strongest of his tenure -- seems an appropriate way to commemorate the holiday.

We need not look to the past for greatness, because it is before our very eyes.

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in the time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known. They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places. They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains. They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war. They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and all stations -- all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.

-- Tim Fernholz

Ariel Levy writes a piece for the New Yorker criticizing Leslie Sanchez's book, You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary, and the Shaping of the New American Woman. In the book, Republican strategist Sanchez calls for: "No bra burning. No belting out Helen Reddy. Just calm concern for how women were faring in the world," and says feminists are of an "earlier and disruptive time." She also bristles at Gloria Steinem's critique of Sarah Palin as a woman who "shares nothing but a chromosome with [Hillary] Clinton." All this repudiation of the women's right movement from Sanchez to say she believes we should applaud and support Palin's candidacy ... because she's a woman.

After debunking the bra-burning myth, Levy places feminism in its historical context, noting the evolution from a fight for equal representation to a challenge of systemic sexism and misogyny. Pillorying the suggestion that it's enough for a woman, any woman, to have equal representation, Levy writes:

Identity politics isn’t much concerned with abstract ideals, like justice. It’s a version of the old spoils system: align yourself with other members of a group—Irish, Italian, women, or whatever—and try to get a bigger slice of the resources that are being allocated. If a demand for revolution is tamed into a simple insistence on representation, then one woman is as good as another. You could have, in a sense, feminism without feminists.

Aside from being amazed that Sanchez doesn't seem to realize she has feminism itself to thank for her ability to criticize the movement, I appreciate an acknowledgment from Levy that two-thirds of American families are either headed by women or have a woman as the co-breadwinner. For many of these women, "equal representation" isn't the point -- supporting their families is. And to go further, it's important to remember that 22 percent of black families are headed by women, as are 14 percent of Latino families. Too often, the lives of poor women and women of color are ignored in the battle over feminism's relevance. Not only are they trying to survive and feed their families, they're doing it in a country that's not just hard on women, but also hard on poor people and people of color -- these women need the support of feminism and feminists more than any group, even if Sanchez thinks feminists are obsolete. And maybe especially because of that.

--Shani O. Hilton

• It's entirely possible that Harry Reid will bring the Senate health-care reform bill to the floor next week, but I don't see how he's going to cut deals with or twist the arms of the Joe Liebermans and Ben Nelsons of the world who keep making public statements promising to filibuster the legislation. Perhaps if the stories about Reid being fed up about Republican obstructionism are true, he might start making some threats about passing the bill through reconciliation, or better, going after the filibuster directly to get around the real obstructionists in his own party.
• It goes without saying that Robert Kaplan's thesis that war is the only thing that gives European civilization meaning is first order nonsense and a poor imitation of Orsen Welles' cuckoo clock speech. But what's most stunning is his ignorance of recent European history. Does the senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security really not know that Europeans eagerly threw themselves into the first World War, and in its devastating aftermath, have spent the decades since trying to make sure such a thing never happens again? Maybe if he read the Prospect's book reviews he'd learn a thing or two.
• I realize this is impossible for the "drill baby, drill" crowd to comprehend, but fossil fuels are a finite resource that will ultimately be outpaced by demand, and that the sooner we start preparing for the transition away from fossil fuels, the better off the planet will be. Of course, if the best estimates about the status of global oil production is potentially an inflated guess based on political considerations, then the problem before us becomes that much more difficult to resolve.
• Remainders: The New York Post seems like a great place to work if you have no interest in journalism, are sexist/bigoted; for Dick Armey, freedom is making sure the poor and disadvantaged suffer; maybe Dinesh D'Souza can write another book about the synergy between Islamic extremists and American conservatives; and David Vitter shares the latest evidence of the coming Obama dictatorship.

--Mori Dinauer

Noam Scheiber considers the problem of Too Big To Fail, writing that skeptics of "breaking up the banks" who focus on the fact that size wasn't the major factor that lead to the crisis are merely gaining a "rhetorical advantage." Linking to James Kwak, who admits that the problem is not just size but other factors, Noam concludes:

Why don't we call it "too spooky to fail" and agree that we don't want to live with anything like it.

Now we can get out our spooky-meters and use them to measure the banks, and break up the ones that are too spooky. Sounds like awesome public policy.

Jokes aside, the problem breaking up the banks is that no one -- not Noam, not Kwak, neither Paul Volcker nor Mervyn King, has come up with a standard for when it becomes necessary to break them up. If they merely want regulators to force banks to divest based on their discretionary identification of systemic risk, then they're set -- those powers are already in the House and Senate regulatory reform bills, and they should be. But if they want to institute broad limits on bank size and interconnectedness, which is what the argument appears to be, then they should say what that standard would be and why.

Some people suggest returning to Glass-Steagall. Fine, but separating commercial banking from investment banking wouldn't stop investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman from getting into trouble. Prevent commercial banks from running hedge or private equity funds? Do it, but that's not what caused the crisis. Regulating derivatives, stopping sub-prime loans, and all the other parts of regulatory reform are all more important to preventing a repeat of 2008's crash than splitting banks apart.

But we do want to prevent future bank bailouts in the (likely) event that some unexpected financial innovation (ugh) leads banks to fail again. Kwak says it's tricky to measure the overall importance of financial institutions. And it is! Maybe that's a sign that, in order to prevent taxpayers from holding the bag on future finance disasters, we shouldn't be focusing on finding an exact standard of Too Big To Fail, but instead making sure that even important institutions can be dissolved in such a way that they don't impact the overall economy. Sure, that's also a hard thing to do, but at least we know that federal regulators are already really good at dissolving banks -- certainly much better at that than identifying systemic risk in advance.

-- Tim Fernholz

Conor Friedersdorf responds to my post on the Stupak Amendment. Mr. Friedersdorf writes,

a) The bigger role the federal government takes in funding health care, the more you’re going to see politicians interfering in matters that would otherwise be left to doctors and patients, and the more controversial these battles are going to become among the public. This seems obvious to me, but I never see progressive writers worrying about it.

There are bound to be downsides to increased government involvement in health care, yes. I'll grant that. But we already live in a world where government makes a lot of interventions into health care -- the FDA, state insurance commissions, medical licensing boards, etc. Nothing in this bill -- other than the Stupak-Pitts Amendment -- proposes to tell insurance companies which procedures they cannot cover. Progressives aren't the ones advocating for a government intervention between patients and their doctors. The only people who are arguing for that type of intervention are anti-choicers -- who have been trying to restrict women's health-care options for decades.

b) There are many women in the United States who oppose abortion, and if asked would agree that federal money shouldn’t fund it, so the assertion that the amendment throws 50 percent of the population under the bus isn’t accurate, unless one takes the position that these anti-abortion women are suffering from false consciousness.

Actually, no matter what their beliefs about abortion, every woman in this country is indeed screwed over by this amendment. Many, many women who are opposed abortion rights have exercised those rights themselves -- whether for health reasons or because, when it came right down to it, they simply found themselves making a different choice than they thought they would in that situation. They might not think they're under the bus, but they probably don't think they'll ever need an abortion, either. Doesn't mean either statement is true.

c) The unknowable thing for me is when human life begins, when it is morally required to protect it, etc. ... My uncertainty makes me loathe to impose a legally binding answer on other people, so you’ll never see me in a pro-life rally — but the same uncertainty makes me deeply uncomfortable with abortion, insofar as my personal take is that uncertainty in life or death circumstances calls for erring on the side of caution.

That’s why I’ve always taken great care to never be in a position where I inadvertently conceive a child, and why if I ever were in that position, I’d rather dramatically reorganize my life forever than see the abortion even of a child I wish I hadn’t helped conceive. So you can see why I’d feel uncomfortable with the notion of my tax dollars being used to fund abortions — just as I am presently uncomfortable that my tax dollars are used to fund the death penalty — and wish that they weren’t, even as I strongly support all sorts of reproductive health care for women, including abortions in cases when the life of the mother is at risk.

First of all, if you are having sex with women, please to enlighten us as to this fail-safe "no babies" position you are using! Secondly, the thing about the Stupak Amendment is that it goes beyond the Hyde Amendment, which bars public funding for abortion under Medicaid. Stupak would actually prevent employer-based plans -- ones that are not supported by your tax dollars -- from covering abortion.

--Ann Friedman

TTR prepares to celebrate Veterans' Day with, what else, the latest public policy research. Check out the latest on the potential for clean energy to revitalize manufacturing, an argument for increased multilateralism in Asia, an update on the demographics of union workers, and an evaluation of charter schools.

• Clean Energy To the Rescue. A policy paper from the Center for American Progress shows that the dismal unemployment numbers could be remedied by a boost in clean energy manufacturing. CAP outlines several bills currently pending in the House and Senate that would revive American manufacturing. Beyond the obvious benefits to the economy, a strong manufacturing sector will make us competitive in the future, since nations like Germany and China have already invested substantially in manufacturing. As Congress mulls over comprehensive climate legislation, establishing a green manufacturing sector should be a top priority for labor as well as the environment. -- PL
• A new strategy for Asia. In advance of President Obama’s visit to Asia later this week, a Council on Foreign Relations report advises the administration to take Asian multilateralism and regional institutions seriously. The old model of U.S. involvement in Asia solely via bilateral ties is no longer sustainable due to the increasing centrality of Asia in the world and China’s economic rise. Rather than imposing US ideology on the region, the report recommends engaging with organizations such as ASEAN and APEC in a way that allows us to guide the streamlining and enforcement capabilities of these regional institutions. -- LL
• State of the Unions. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research sums up changes in the makeup of labor unions over the last quarter century: In 2008, union workers tended to be older (average age: 45) and more educated (38 percent hold a 4-year degree) than their 1983 counterparts. Minorities are also on the rise, with Latinos and Asian Americans reporting increased memberships as the number of White members declines. More than 45 percent of unionized workers are women -- a ten-percent jump since the ‘80s. CEPR predicts that if current growth rates continue, women will make up the majority of union workers before 2020. -- MH
• Charting the School Divide. In a recent RAND research brief, charter schools were revealed to have little to no effect on the performance and racial composition of nearby public schools. Suggesting that the two forms of public education can exist mutually, charter schools do not induce a flight of the best students from nearby public schools and performance achievements are similar. Crucially, the findings do reveal charter school students in Chicago and Florida are 7 to 15 percent more likely to graduate high school, while their college matriculation rate increases by 8 to 10 percent compared to traditional public schools. This study,the authors say, demonstrates the need to examine performance indicators in “a broader and deeper range of student outcomes.” -- MZ

-- TAP Staff

Previous Round-Ups:
11/3/09
10/27/09

Mark Pike on juvenile sentencing:

In back-to-back cases on Monday morning, advocates argued for a constitutional ban on life-without-parole sentences for juveniles guilty of non-homicidal crimes.

Many will argue that these cases are about arbitrary line drawing -- but this is a line that symbolizes the standards of decency in our society. The United States is the only country in the world that imposes sentences lifetime without parole on juveniles. That could change.

"Kids are different," said Bryan Gowdy, counsel for one of the juvenile defendants, standing at the Supreme Court steps following his case. "Scientists say this, and we all know it from experience."

The cases, Graham v. Florida and Sullivan v. Florida, involve teenagers who were 17 and 13 at the time of their offenses -- two of the 111 youths nationwide given lifetime imprisonment without parole for crimes less than murder.

KEEP READING ...

Spencer Ackerman tags this paragraph as the part of President Obama's Fort Hood remarks most likely to draw conservative ire over "political correctness":

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in a time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known. They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places. They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains. They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war. They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and stations – all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.

Maybe it will--it's hard to underestimate the GOP's commitment to being as monochrome as possible. But if one actually reads the speech, in which Obama lists the fallen by name, you see that the nod to diversity in the above paragraph is almost unnecessary. The fallen being honored today have names like Frederick Greene and Amy Krueger, but they also have names like Libardo Eduardo Caraveo, Francheska Velez, and Kham Xiong. To say that our armed forces are "man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and stations" isn't "politically correct."

It's just correct.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments (1, 2) yesterday in the criminal justice cases I discussed on Friday, which concern the constitutionality of sentencing minors to life in prison without parole . Dahlia Lithwick tries to count the votes:

At the end of two hours, I think I can count three votes for a case-by-case proportionality review, three votes for a categorical rule, one vote for something I can't yet identify, one vote I can't quite discern, and one vote for not asking questions. Does all that add up to five votes for anything?

The disposition of the cases, in other words, seems likely to be the kind of "minimalism" the Court has become particularly enamored of -- that is, it may dispose of the cases while not developing a rule that would give significant guidance to future cases. With respect to Sullivan -- the case involving a 13-year-old given life without parole in a sexual assault conviction riddled with procedural defects -- a majority of the Court strongly signaled that, under current law, Joe Sullivan was procedurally barred from bringing a suit. And as Lithwick notes, even a minimalist decision giving Terrance Graham a new sentencing hearing would at least have the advantage of allowing Sullivan to challenge his sentence under the new rule (or quasi-rule as the case may be).

As for the content of a new potential standard, Lyle Denniston predicts that at least a plurality of the Court is likely to rule "in favor of giving juveniles more chance to use their age to challenge life-without-parole prison terms, as an alternative to a flat constitutional bar against ever imposing that sentence." So the Court may create the possibility of ruling that a few outlying life-without-parole sentences given to adolescents are unconstitutional while upholding others. Given the inherent vagueness of such a standard, whether such a ruling would help either prisoner in Florida or federal courts going forward is anyone's guess.

--Scott Lemieux

Michelle Goldberg on health reform and reproductive rights:

We've reached a point where health-care reform threatens to leave access to abortion in worse shape than it is right now. The Stupak Amendment, added to the health-care bill in last-minute negotiations this weekend, goes beyond the existent ban on federal funding of abortion. By prohibiting anyone receiving federal health-insurance subsidies from buying plans that cover abortion, it's almost certain to compel many plans to drop abortion coverage for everyone.

Almost all progressives have realized that passing health-insurance reform was going to require some bitter compromises. But it's both maddening and heartbreaking that a pro-choice president and a Democratic Congress are pois