Justin Logan explains why not all Iranian politicians are the same and how American elections can effect Iranian ones:
On May 28, Ali Larijani, former nuclear negotiator and close confidant of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i, won the position of speaker of the Majlis, Iran's parliament. Larijani is a member of the mainline conservative faction in Iran -- which is different from the more radical faction led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Iranian political observers have aptly borrowed the American term "neoconservative" to refer to the Ahmadinejad faction.)
Larijani's rise was the first of a series of political changes in Iran. At about this time next year, Iran will hold a presidential election. Its outcome could depend, in part, on the outcome of the 2008 elections here in the United States. Given the serious disputes between the two countries and the prospect of another war in the Middle East, Americans -- and American presidential candidates -- should take a moment to think about how our election could influence Iran's.
And Mark Schmitt explains why the power-point wielding budget doomsayers are misguided:
Who would vote for blank checks and doomsday? Presenting the options in this way writes its own answer: Create a separate budget for entitlements, as recently proposed by a consortium of think tanks from the center to the far right. The fault is in "the budget decision process," they argue, because "it does not require that Congress and the president conduct a periodic review of how we are committing our limited resources across all of our competing priorities."
In a quiet battle of PowerPoints, however, an alternative view has begun to emerge. It doesn't challenge the fact that on current projections the three big entitlement programs, plus interest on the federal debt, will within a few decades consume all federal revenues. But the alternative view argues that the problem is not "entitlements" but one program, Medicare, and to a lesser extent Medicaid. As Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution asked in the title of a 2007 presentation: "Chronic Deficit: Entitlement Crisis? Or Health Financing Problem?"
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--The Editors
