Matt Zeitlin

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is an interesting beast.  To simplify things, on foreign policy it has the rubric of “what policy is most aligned with hating/killing Arabs” and on fiscal policy it primarily answers the question of “what policy will benefit big businesses/rich people the most.”  With the government of Abu Dhabi’s 7.5 billion dollar bail out of Citigroup, these instincts came into stark conflict. Do we support bailing out banks so they can continue risky investing?  Or do we want to complain about how evil Arabs are? Turns out the latter won out:

Most important, no one should be under any illusions that Abu Dhabi’s investment is a normal commercial transaction. It comes from a sovereign wealth fund controlled by a foreign government, which has political as much as business interests; from an Arab government that has a troubling history with American banking laws; and it offers a Middle Eastern entree into the U.S. financial system that since 9/11 plays a pivotal role in the war on terror.

But WSJ, isn’t free exchange and open markets supposed to be a good thing?  Or does that change when it’s Arabs doing the investing.  I’m used to misplaced concerns over so-called “sovereign wealth funds” from populist-right wingers and trade-sceptic liberals, but from the WSJ?  I must say that I was a little surprised.  But there’s no reason to be concerned, Abu Dhabi is absolutely flush with dollars and euros due to increased oil prices, and because there isn’t much of an Arab financial sector, it only makes sense that they would invest in Western companies.  There is little difference between this and CALPERs investing in foreign companies, or a Sweedish pension fund investing in an American company. They have all the political leverage they need from oil, what they want is to simply get a good return on their investments.  Until there is solid evidence that they’re up to no good, this instinctive retreat into market-nationalism is pointless.

The Journal moves on to something approximating conspiracy mongering and/or  arabophobia when discusses the dastardliness of “arab interests”:

Perhaps the Abu Dhabi of today has moved beyond such threats. The United Arab Emirates have helped us in the war on terror, and the U.S. is the ultimate defense for the oil-rich emirates on the edge of the Arabian peninsula. One can argue that investments like Abu Dhabi’s draw both sides more closely to each other, and so are mutually beneficial.

Yet everyone should also admit that this investment means that Arab interests will now have inordinate sway over America’s largest bank. Abu Dhabi’s 4.9% stake combined with the 3.9% stake of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal makes them the bank’s dominant shareholders, and who knows how many other smaller holdings are in Middle Eastern hands. The small Gulf states may be governed separately from Saudi Arabia, but they are closely linked by geography, family ties, and national interests. For purposes of political influence, they often behave as part of the same tribe.

In that regard, the 4.9% gambit looks all the more troubling as a way to avoid Fed scrutiny. If the investors’ motives are merely commercial, why go to such lengths? The wire-transfer system is crucial in the war on terror, and at a minimum the Fed and U.S. Treasury need to know that Citigroup will continue to cooperate in sanctions against terror states and tracking terror financing. Citigroup’s enforcement unit should be given a thorough scrubbing.

Ok, so the WSJ has identified that 8.8% of citibank is controlled by “arab interests.”  Do they have any evidence of Arab sovereign investment funds  using their investments in Western companies to support terror, or advance their geopolitical interests.  The Journal doesn’t say this flat out, but asks us to assume that Arabs making money can only be bad for US interests. More importantly, just because these so-called “Arab interests” control 8.8% of Citibank doesn’t mean they’re running the company.  Last time I checked, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin is in charge over there.  Does the WSJ really think that an uber well-connected former Treasury head is going to lighten up Citibank’s cooperation on anti-terrorism issues?  Really?  This is bogus fear-mongering that they can get away with only because of most peoples’ ignorance of financial markets and inclination to suspect Arab leaders as generally being up to no good.

PS – Read Dani Rodrik on sovereign wealth funds.  This line sums up my view rather well, “The creation of sovereign wealth funds is an attempt to diversify from these low-return investments, not a strategy to increase ownership of U.S. and other assets further…the global financial system depends on investors and traders acting so as to maximize their economic return.”

Via Ned Resnikoff, both Glenn Reynolds and John Ashcroft have claimed that they would be waterboarded in order to prove that it isn’t torture.  This is a transparently stupid idea — the Khmer Rogue, the Spanish Inquisition and most criminal statues define waterboarding as torture.  But they have a kernel of a decent point — waterboarding isn’t deadly and has no long term physical effects to speak of.  I don’t want to sound like Rambo, but I could probably handle waterboarding in a controlled situation where I know it would stop eventually, and knew that the people doing it to me weren’t trying to harm me.  Of course, that’s not how waterboarding is experienced by detainees.  What makes it torture is that when in captivity, you are being interrogated and then get waterboarded.  You do not know that your assailants are every going to stop, you don’t know what else they’re planning for you.  There is no safeword, there is no way out.

But if we go back to what John Ashcroft actually said, “The things that I can survive, if it were necessary to do them to me, I would do.”  Under this standard, just about everything becomes permissable.  Being put into stress positions for days, Ashcroft could survive, sexual humiliation and abuse could be survived, beatings could be survived, being forced into cold rooms could be survived, not being able to sleep for days could be survived.   Do you notice a pattern.  What makes Ashcroft’s wording especially interesting is how neatly it dovetails with the Justice Department definition of torture: “[torture] must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

I haven’t blogged much about torture, because it’s an issue that really does not need to be discussed.  The ticking time bomb scenario is bogus, it doesn’t work, it’s disgusting, destroys our international image and we didn’t need to do it in World War II.  Beyond that, there isn’t much debate to be had.

In response to Daniel Davies screed declaring Milton Friedman’s primary, and only meaningful, contribution to the political debate was support for the GOP, and that dealing with him as an intellectual ignores the ideological and partisan core of his ideas, which Davies neatly sums up as “1. Vote Republican 2. That’s it” Tyler Cowen proposes we do more “anthropology” with positions we don’t agree with.

I’d like to propose a new research convention.  Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I’d like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration.  Davies presents Friedman as a shill for the Republican Party; I’d like to know how many (public or non-public) conversations he has had with Friedman about the topic of the Republican Party…

How many supply-siders has Chait talked to?  It might be a lot, but again I’d like to know.  Has he met with the people who write The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page?  How many of them?  How many leading Republican donors and strategists does he know?  Did they really chat with him, or were they in controlled “interview mode”?  How motivated are they by supply-side doctrine?  What did those say who weren’t so motivated?

Tyler, who rarely talks about politics explicitly, and is well loved by both the left and the right, can easily take the stance of “don’t attack the motivations of your opponents or attribute agendas to them that they don’t explicitly talk about.”  But to us partisans, or more accurately, those of us who think that one’s political contributions and stances are the most important to consider, it really doesn’t matter whether Milton Friedman had liberal ideas about the drug war or civil liberties.  What matters is that, as a public figure, he was an advocate for polices and a political agenda that was implemented as a partisan cudgel for Republicans.

Let’s take supply side economics: if you take Chait’s view that the tax cutting mania that has overtaken the Republican party is primarily motivated by insuring the rich get as much money as possible as well as keeping the GOP in power, advocates for the supply side cause, when they insert themselves in policy debates, necessarily become tarred with the dominant motivation and effects of that policy — even if they themselves aren’t partisan Republicans who want to engorge the rich.

Sometimes I am uncomfortable with this, because I actually do admire Milton Friedman for being a brilliant economist and for some of political interventions — namely advocating for an end to the draft and for years ahead on the drug war — and I also disagree a lot with Democrats and sometimes wish I was writing for the Washington Monthly  in the 1980s:  I totally would have been a card carrying, Hart and Tsongas supporting neoliberal. But still, I don’t see the purpose in having conversations with the WSJ editorial page page editors about their real motivations for supply side crankery.  It’s bad policy promoted by a bad party.  At a certain point, that is really all that matters.

One of the first bloggers to link to me and add me to his blogroll was Ned Resnikoff.  Unfortunately, he has been incommunicado for the last few months, due to a nasty combination of school work and a TPM internship.  Well, he’s back and blogging at full steam.  So I recommend yall check him out.  Also, the title of his blog “Veritosity” is quite clever.

This story is pretty big on Digg, and has appeared on Counterpunch, venezuelanalysis.com andHuffPost – apparently the Venezuelan government has uncovered a CIA memo outlining a plan to destabilize the government:

an internal CIA memorandum has been obtained by Venezuelan counterintelligence from the US Embassy in Caracas that reveals a very sinister – almost fantastical, were it not true – plan to destabilize Venezuela during the coming days. The plan, titled “OPERATION PLIERS” was authored by CIA Officer Michael Middleton Steere and was addressed to CIA Director General Michael Hayden in Washington. Steere is stationed at the US Embassy in Caracas under the guise of a Regional Affairs Officer. The internal memorandum, dated November 20, 2007, references the “Advances of the Final Stage of Operation Pliers”, and confirms that the operation is coordinated by the team of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) in Venezuela. The memo summarizes the different scenarios that the CIA has been working on in Venezuela for the upcoming referendum vote on December 2nd. The Electoral Scenario, as it’s phrased, confirms that the voting tendencies will not change substantially before Sunday, December 2nd, and that the SI (YES) vote in favor of the constitutional reform has an advantage of about 10-13 points over the NO vote. The CIA estimates abstention around 60% and states in the memo that this voting tendency is irreversible before the elections.

I’m conflicted.  While the historical trend is that the US will meddle in Latin America almost as a matter of habit, it’s also very easy to believe that the Chavez government is lying to deligitimize any opposition to his referndum or to the government in general by calling them American stooges.  If the US is doing this, it’s stupid and won’t work, and will only entrench Chavez (see Castro, Fidel).  But we should all be sceptical.  The “copy” of the memo floating around the net is in Spanish, with only an English translation.  My inclination is to think this is BS, but highly plausible BS.

Jonah Goldberg launched an attack yesterday on liberals for not having a detailed history of canonical texts that conservatives could comb through and endlessly misrepresent:

Liberalism’s canon is largely unwritten, it’s dogma made-up as they go along (and yes, I’m over-generalizing to make a point; there are plenty of important liberal philosophical treatises that go unread by politicians and political journalists).

As someone who subscribes to the view that liberalism is a secular religion, it is very frustrating that liberal politicians do not offer up a paper trail for people to scrutinize the way conservatives do. Liberalism has a dogma as rich and serious as conservatism, but you can’t go to a liberal politician and ask: Are you loyal to John Dewey? Richard Rorty? John Rawls? You can’t ask what their bible is because they are acolytes of the bookless faith of good deeds, the cult of do-goodery. So when they argue for keeping “religion” out of politics they are saying “keep your religion out of politics.” When they say that we need to “get past ideology” they are saying we need to get past your ideology. This means that conservatives must constantly defend their own territory rather than demand a similar accounting from liberals.

As a slight concession to Goldberg, I like reading and thinking about political philosophy, so personally, I’d be happy if liberals talked more about whether liberalism is foundational (Rawls, and to lesser extend Mill) or anti-foundational (Rorty) or any other philosophical and theoretical disputes within liberalism. But Goldberg misunderstands what American liberalism has always been about. If you want some philosophical homebase for liberalism, it’s pragmatism. The simple effect is that liberalism involves the bracketing off of these philosophical questions and approaching governance with the question of “how can we improve people’s lives” or, in the Shklarian formulation, “how do we reduce cruelty.” There really isn’t a whole lot to American liberalism, in its idealized form, than that. Conservatives can object to the means with which we try to answer those two questions, and the rise of neo-conservatism is the late 60s and early 70s largely attempted to grapple with that question. Welfare et al wasn’t bad because government shouldn’t try to improve people’s lives, but because it produced bad results. Or so the argument went.

The rejoinder to pragmatism-as-American-liberalism is that if a conservative were to go back to Dewey or even Rorty, they’d easily find much to object to and try to tar modern-day liberals with whatever objections they had. What this analysis misses is that liberalism is (or ought to be) forward looking, we like Dewey or Rorty’s approach to problems, but the circumstances and context of the time should determine the answers more so than any book. Kevin Drum put it best, “We don’t wonder what Charles Beard would think of something? Of course not. The whole point of liberalism is change, so who cares what Beard would have thought? By now he’s just an old fuddy duddy.” Contrast this viewpoint with the standard conservative one, where being forward thinking and present-oriented is the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. Reverence for past thinkers is at the core of the doctrine. Goldberg is playing a rigged game by accusing liberals of some type of shortcoming because they aren’t…conservative. Yes, Jonah, we aren’t conservative. Can we move on now?

The emerging conventional wisdom is that illegal immigration will be the hot-button issue in 2008, perhaps even as a wedge to get voters anxious about their economic security to abandon Democrats because they fear immigrants taking their jobs. You get ten points for realizing that this is the exact same line used for encouraging Democrats to go on the offensive against new trade agreements. In fact, that is exactly Matt Stoller’s plan for countering the anti-immigrant push:

With the most recent election returns, it’s clear that immigration isn’t a Democratic killer. Both Progressive States new memo and Harold Meyerson point out that it’s the economic anxiety caused by free trade agreements that causes the immigration backlash.

The new Peru free trade agreement is coming up for ratification, and the freshmen are opposing it strongly. It may even become an issue in the Presidential race.This is why neoliberalism doesn’t work. Simon Rosenberg has been pushing on the other side of the immigration argument, making the push for Democrats to solidify the Hispanic vote. And that’s smart, but such a strategy requires the coherence of going against corporate written trade agreements.

The candidate who called me in despair is now planning to run against NAFTA, CAFTA, and as Jon Tester put it, SHAFTA.

On a purely analytical level, Stoller’s argument is absurd. For the economically minded, there is little difference between a policy promoting the free movement of good and a policy promoting the free movement of labor (or as we call them in our more lighthearted moments, labor). Stoller also slides in the whammy that economic insecurity and dislocation is primarily caused by free trade agreements. I doubt even the EPI believes this. Paul Krugman thinks this line of argumentation is BS, and it is. There are other industrialized countries with similar or higher levels of trade liberalization than the US and yet still have more economic security for their citizens. All other things being equal, I would not advise Democrats to have their economic security narrative be built around lies and misconceptions.

But, of course, all other things are not equal. The trade agreements likely to be “put on hold” by a Democratic administration are rather small — Korea and Peru, and so it may be worth it to talk about a “time-out” from trade liberalization if it means picking up voters who could be wedged away by appeals related to immigration. In the long run, however, restrictionism on immigration and restrictionism on trade — and the nativist, fearful rhetoric associated with both of those causes — can only help conservatives and hurt progressives. While I’m sure Stoller and many others would say that they only oppose “corporate trade agreements” and would support a deal with sufficient IP leveling, labor and environmental standards, his rhetoric on the Peru FTA betrays that instinct. As far as I can tell, P-FTA is the most progressive trade agreement the US has ever signed on to. Moreover, what happens if the economic insecurity driving the trade/immigration backlash continues, without the signing of any new trade agreements? Then Stoller’s silver bullet of trade-nativism to counter labor-nativism evaporates.

A broader point: I know Stoller’s bid is to oppose certain trade agreements, but let’s say this sentiment metastasizes, as it did in the 80s with Japan, into a larger backlash against foreigners. At that point, trying to neatly break up economic anxiety into anti-immigrant as opposed to anti-trade will be impossible. There will be a backlash against all of it, and the plan to attract Hispanics into the Democratic caucus through being open to immigration, while keeping anxious rust-belt voters in the caucus through trade demagoguery will blow up in their faces.

A better strategy for American consumers, Peruvians and Democrats would be a beefed up version of the old Clintonite compromise. Yes, trade does cause some dislocations, but on balance it’s a good thing. To deal with those dislocations, we’ll beef up the safety net. The problem for Clinton was that beefing up the safety net, especially on health care, was impossible. After 2008, however, we’ll probably have solid majorities that will make passage of universal health care much easier. Unfortunately for Stoller, no electoral alchemy will make the economy of the 50s, with oligopolistic manufacturing companies dominating the US economy and providing stable manufacturing jobs to the not-very-well educated come back.

A microcosm of this would be John Kerry and his “Benedict Arnold CEOs” line. This rhetoric was short-sighted, misleading and just dumb. It won him no votes and didn’t fit into a broader narrative of economic security. And hell, it turns out that not that job loss due to outsourcing was always minimal. The larger trend was these jobs being rendered unnecessary due to productivity and technological gains.

While protectionist posturing may have worked for freshmen Congressman and Senators, it’s still worth remembering that the last Democratic president who didn’t support expansion of trade was…well, it’s hard to remember. Oh yeah, and if you want the back-door argument against progressive-protectionist types like Stoller, who certainly say they care about global poverty, you can always just tell them that free trade agreements in Latin America benefit the rural poor.

PS – Here’s the paper “What Happened to the Great US Job Machine? The Role of Trade and Electronic Offshoring” that was the basis for what may have appeared to be thinly based assertions.

I’m sure this will fly around the net soon enough, but here is the soon-to-be-classic “Entire Blogosphere Stunned by Blogger’s Special Weekend Post”:

NEW YORK—In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

The landmark post, which updated nearly every member of the global online community on the shelf Tiedemann was building, was linked to by several thousand sites, including Daily Kos, Digg, and The New York Times.

“Wow, what a special treat this was for all of us,” said Talking Points Memo head blogger Joshua Micah Marshal, who, along with all other bloggers, checks Tiedemann’s site every day just in case something monumental occurs. “I thought I was going to have to wait until Monday to find out if Ben decided to put [the shelf] in his bedroom or the living room. The pictures were great, too.”

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann’s 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.

One of the worst aspects of current American politics is that posturing as being “tough on crime” is oftentimes viewed as more important than actually reducing crime rates. Thus Giuliani, who along with Bill Bratton instituted very effective policies, is viewed as “tough on crime” while Bloomberg, who has overseen a continued reduction in crime, has no reputation as a crime fighter. Much (but not all) of Rudy’s reputation stems from the fact that he was a total asshole, specifically towards minority communities, which is seen by many as a necessary attribute if you want be considered a crime fighter.

This is all just a long introduction to a very hopeful story in the Politico reporting that Hillary Clinton now supports federal funding for needle exchange. What makes this signifigant is that “In 1998, the Clinton administration signed a federal law that banned D.C. from using any local tax revenue to fund a needle exchange program. D.C. is the only city in the country to face such a ban, and as a result.. reaches only a third of the estimated 9,700 intravenous drug users in the city.” Why would Clinton pass such an absurd law? Even if he thought needle exchanges were a bad idea, passing the law that only affected DC would not reduce needle exchange programs significantly. It’s only purpose would be to communicate that “Clinton hates drugs too and is tough on crime.” The pattern was repeated with the Defense of Marriage Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act — two pieces of legislation which served no purpose other than to differentiate Clinton from the left wing the party. They are, incidentally, on their merits bad pieces of legislation that no Democratic administration would support in a vacuum.

That Hillary is committed, at least in the primary, to reversing this dreadful policy is a sign of hope.  It’s one of the more perverse aspects of our political scene that to appear “centrist” or “tough on crime” Clinton had to punish HIV-infected Washingtonians.   Hopefully, those days are over.

I’m more inclined than most to shrug off aspects of Romney’s Mormonism, specifically the are absurd but trivial bits — such as Native Americans being the lost tribe of Israel and the whole variety of historical events Joseph Smith made up — but there is a much stronger case for Romney addressing one of the more disturbing aspects of Mormonism, it’s policy towards African-Americans before 1978. Hitch, despite his overheated recitation of the sillier aspects of the Mormon faith, sums up their policy and subsequent “revelation”

It ought to be borne in mind that Romney is not a mere rank-and-file Mormon. His family is, and has been for generations, part of the dynastic leadership of the mad cult invented by the convicted fraud Joseph Smith. It is not just legitimate that he be asked about the beliefs that he has not just held, but has caused to be spread and caused to be inculcated into children. It is essential. Here is the most salient reason: Until 1978, the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was an officially racist organization. Mitt Romney was an adult in 1978…Until 1978, no black American was permitted to hold even the lowly position of deacon in the Mormon Church, and nor were any (not that there were many applicants) admitted to the sacred rites of the temple. The Mormon elders then had a “revelation” and changed the rules, thus more or less belatedly coming into compliance with the dominant civil rights statutes

In so much as you’re going to interrogate a candidate about his religion, this seems to be one of the more relevant and appropriate lines of questioning. But it really isn’t. What Hitchens fails to understand is that in many cases, one does not “choose” to become a Mormon (or a Catholic, Jew etc). Romney was born a Mormon, and as a pious individual, would have had to find a justification not to be a Mormon. It’s pretty rare for religiously-oriented people to abandon the faith of their childhood, so looking for an explicit act of Romney endorsing this policy is a fool’s errand. People ignore the more unseemly aspects of their faith all the time, and for your average Mormon pre-1978, the policy on blacks wasn’t that large a part of their lives or their faith-experience. Moreover, the Mormon community really has come around on issues of race. Of its roughly 13 million members, 4.5 million are from Latin America and 500,000 are black.

Unless there’s any reason to believe that Mitt Romney has any religiously based animus towards blacks — if he were to start spouting off about the murder of Abel, pre-existence and Ham — it would be pointless to attempt to tie the LDS Church’s pre-1978 policy on race to Romney or pretend that it’s consequential.

I agree with Isaac Chotiner that David Samuels melodramatic, alarmist essay “The Silence of the Lambs” is poor stuff. Specifically, when he begins to talk about the supposed resurgence of anti-Semitism in America, his examples are almost self refuting:

Yes, Jewish life in America remains a flowering paradise compared with the realities of being a Jew in contemporary Britain or France. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that America has changed, too. At bookstores in major airports, I am no longer surprised to be greeted by a pictures of a smiling former U.S. president comparing Israel to the loathsome apartheid government of South Africa, or a Harvard professor explaining how a small but powerful coterie of Jews is responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen America in the Middle East.

Every American Jew has been quietly putting together their own pocket-sized file of stories they would rather not tell the children.

There is the story of the gunman who walked into a Jewish community center in Seattle last year and murdered one community worker and wounded five others. The silence of the mainstream American Jewish leadership in this country was met by widespread silence in the press.

Lobbyists for AIPAC are being put on trial for the crime of gossiping with U.S. government officials over lunch, an offense of which every single foreign lobbyist in Washington – and every working journalist – is guilty. Again, the American Jewish community is silent, for fear of making things worse.

Last week I logged onto the New York Times website and read excerpts from a speech by Senator Joe Lieberman condemning the extremist fringe of the Democratic Party. The comments section – moderated by the Times – began with an attack on Lieberman as the “Senator from Tel Aviv” and went downhill from there, in language that ten years ago would have been confined to white supremacist compounds in Idaho and Washington State.

Let’s go through these claims one by one. There’s the common smear that Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semite. While I disagree with his characterization of Israel, it is within the bounds of acceptable discourse to say that there are similarities between systems where there are functionally two sets of laws based on location. Moreover, I can’t imagine why an anti-Semite would broker a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that been an unqualified success for Israel’s security. There’s also an allusion to Walt-Mearsheimer. I guess if one wants to make the absurd argument that the best place for the safety, freedom, respect and tolerance for Jews in history (the contemporary United States) is having a resurgence in anti-Semitism, it’s necessary to misrepresent The Israel Lobby. WM never claim that Jews, writ large, are responsible for our Israel policy, or are constitutive of the “Israel Lobby.” From their original London Review of Books paper, “This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby […] Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies […] The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals.” While the shooting in Seattle was a tragedy, I was largely informed of it by the Jewish press, and it’s hardly indicative of a greater trend. But smears of Jimmy Carter and blatant misrepersentations of Walt-Mearsheimer are standard practice for this type of essay. What’s starkly original is the defense of Lawrence Franklin.

Franklin is the DoD employee who passed along classified government documents about Iran to two AIPAC employees and an Israeli government official. Franklin plead guilty to the espionage charges. This is more than just “gossiping,” it’s the unauthorized sharing of classified information with agents of a foreign country. It’s a pretty cut and dry case, and Samuels is crying wolf by trying to turn this matter into a latter day Dreyfus Affair. Moreover, defending blatantly illegal activity by calling its prosecution anti-Semitic is playing into the hands of the more conspiratorial, anti-Israel fringe. If the American Jewish community were to rise to the defense of the two AIPAC staffers committing espionage, it would be shameful. Samuels is demanding the worse type of dual loyalty, whereby American Jews have an obligation to defend every action of the Israeli government. And yet, Samuels and his ilk are so quick to criticize others for saying that some hawkish Israel boosters clearly exhibit dual loyalties

The final proof that Samuels case for the rise of anti-Semitism in America is quite weak is when he looks to an anonymous comment thread about Joe Lieberman. There’s the snide implication that the Times encouraged or at least condoned this apparently awful language, despite the fact that the worse thing Samuels could find was calling Lieberman the “senator from Tel Aviv”

If Samuels is so concerned about anti-Semitism in the United States, I wonder what he thinks about Rudy Giuliani. Of course, Giuiliani would probably appeal to Samuels because of his denigration of Palestinian statehood and hawkish militarism in the Middle Eat and Israel. On the other hand, Giuliani gladly accepted the endorsement of a real anti-Semite, Pat Robertson. But in Samuels’ world, if you disagree with him about Israel or AIPAC, that’s a surefire sign that America is devolving into Jew hatred.

What makes the entire iPhone phenomenon very odd is that if one wants the coolest handset, ones has to sign up for crappy Cingular service. If you want Verizon, which is the consensus best service, you can’t have the iPhone.* Now, it would follow that Verizon, whose advantage is their network, would open up their service to those who don’t sign contracts and get deals on Verizon affiliated phones. The Times Bits blog reports:

Verizon Wireless has stunned the wireless world by announcing that by sometime next year it will open its network to “any apps, any device.”

There is a lot of fine print, but the essence appears to be that Verizon will offer two flavors of service: its traditional bundle, which typically includes a subsidy for phone purchase and various other features, and “bring your own” device service, which will be open to any device that meets “minimum technical standards.”

The downside, or the trade-off, if all networks adopt open access, is that the price of cell phones will shoot up because the networks would have no reason to subsidize them. The long term effect could still be beneficial. If people buy and own their own cell phones, networks will compete solely on the basis of their quality, rather than the deals they’ve locked up with Apple. A more speculative outcome will be that, in the long run, handset makers will transition to cell phones that are likely to function for more than 18 months. So maybe the growth in phones overladen with new features will slow down as phone-churn decreaes, but the actual ability to make phone calls will surely go up.

* This is an oversimplification.  Even if Verizon and Cingular both had open networks, you still wouldn’t be able to run an iPhone on the Verizon network.  Verizon is CDMA, while the iPhone is GSM.

PRE-UPDATE:  I wrote this post last night, before Sullivan’s posted his own dreadful, race-and-IQ based case for getting rid of affirmative action.  As a preemption, allow me to link to and endorse Ezra’s take-down of Sully.

Dana Goldstein’s piece for TAP examining various state efforts lead by Ward Connerly to ban affrimative actions practices has this interesting conclusion:

So the challenge for affirmative action supporters in 2008 will be to convince white voters that these policies are more about helping women, people of color, and the poor than about hurting white men. But with affirmative action such a contentious topic in American political discourse and the economy a major worry, progressive organizers know they are facing an uphill battle. They’re focusing not just on defeating Connerly’s initiatives, but also on isolating the damage a debate about affirmative action could do to Democratic candidates up the ticket.

Kristina Wilfore, executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center in Washington, said that although Colorado, Arizona, and Missouri are expected to be presidential swing states, “affirmative action can be neutralized politically through bipartisan opposition to Connerly. We can protect broader progressive goals.”

In Michigan, Granholm won re-election last year despite the divisive battle. Perhaps that’s because the same party affiliated with support for affirmative action — the Democratic party — is the party many anti-affirmative action voters are hoping can bring back economic security.

Dana and many other AA supporters explain much of the recent backlash on voter’s perceived problems with their own economic security and overall financial situation. Seeing as economic insecurity, for at least the next 5-10 years, will probably be endemic, it makes sense for liberals to substantially reposition on this issue. First, we need to identify a broad area of consensus: government should provide a leg-up for the disadvantaged in school admissions and to participate in the institutions necessary for meaingful participation in society and the economy. The natural extension of this notion is class or income based affirmative action programs.

The idea of race-based affirmative action is largely the product of there being racial interest groups who can influence egalitarian minded liberals to favor their group-based notion of affirmative action. Since the big upsurge in egalitarianism was largely along racial lines following the civil rights movement, and because race-based interest groups become a key wing of the Democratic party, affirmative action as we know it was the result. The perverse effect of this process is that when economic insecurity increases, middle class whites are easily riled up about affirmative action (and immigration) as opposed to demanding universal health care or increased social outlays. It’s hard to blame them, since being poor is being poor. It’s easy to get angry when the child of a black doctor receives more points in college admissions than the child of a white janitor. It’s also fundamentally unfair.

The Democratic positioning on affirmative action is boneheaded. When the public largely supports government efforts to affirmatively assist the disadvantaged, providing those benefits in a way to alienate those who won’t receive them, or will simply feel looked over, is just bad politics. If Democrats embraced income-based affirmative action, Ward Connerly and his ilk wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. Getting rid of the affirmative action backlash would have other progressive benefits. Deprived of the opportunity to backlash against race-based preferences, the working and middle classes wouldn’t be wedged away from their progressive inclinations and the threat of “damage up the ticket” would be neutralized.

Of course, it will be hard to get interest groups built up around affirmative action to adopt a set of policies and a framework that won’t have to struggle to convince a skeptical public that they are for the common good, but can easily be framed that way. For all its merits, race-based affirmative action has always had an uneasy relationship with the mantra of the common good.

This isn’t a perfect solution. Dana outlines health and financial programs targeted specifically at minorities and women that seem to be doing some real good. Redressing sex-related disparities in the sciences could still pursued while at the same time putting a brake on race-based preferences for things like general college admissions. Similarly, those programs, especially the financial literacy one, could still be implicitly targeted at blacks, seeing as they are disproportionally poor and financially illiterate. Moreover, I’m sure poor whites could use some help with financially literacy, there’s no reason not to include them.

Ultimately, affirmative action and race-based preferences are losing favor across the country. And when there is backlash against them, there are usually problems for Democrats up the ticket, making achieving any progressive ends more diffucult. In face of this decline, liberals could totally neutralize the issue and achieve very similar egalitarian ends by adopting explicit income or class based preferences. Or we can fight for an issue whose time in the sun is passed and is now more of an albatross around our necks than a pathway to equality.

I’ll just say that, contra Sullivan, I can think of at least 25 very good explanations for Africa’s lack of internet infrastructure than hereditary differences in intelligence.  Sullivan appears to have, for the moment, gone off the deep end and is now  writing posts praising James Watson and titling them “The Darker Continent” just to piss people like me off.

Before 9/11, William Kristol and much of the militaristic right was talking about the emerging threat of China in military, political and economic realms. As Francis Fukuyama remembered, “There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn’t do as well.” Gordon Chang is back at it, fulminating against China for no reason:

Mandelson’s address and Sarkozy’s criticism come on the eve of the 10th China-European Union summit. Despite the fact that Beijing just placed large orders with Airbus and France’s Areva, observers say that the discussions this week in the Chinese capital will be tense. “For Europe, the ‘China honeymoon’ is over,” writes David Shambaugh of George Washington University.

We may think that Europeans are effete and spineless, but when was the last time someone from the Bush administration publicly told the Chinese off in their own capital? American officials like to speak about working cooperatively with China to solve “concerns,” while the Europeans are venting frustrations after years of useless dialogue. The welcomed departures of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder mark a change of mood in the heart of the EU. Perhaps President Bush should now take his cue from the new version of Old Europe.

Chang is celebrating Sarkozy, who went into Beijing and talked some smack to Hu Jintao about intellectual property, the currency and human rights. What’s weird is that Sarkozy, and also Mendelson complaining about product safety, haven’t actually pursued any policy changes. For Chang, it is worth celebrating whenever leaders simply talk tough to the Chinese.

Chang’s post is schizophrenic, he mentions yet ignores the fact that the EU is still pursuing high-level commercial ties with China, specifically the deal with Airbus. Isn’t it weird that a magazine who devotes much of its pages to decrying the utility of negotiating with Iran is so desperate to seek out confrontation with China that they’ll go head over heals when European leaders get blustery for domestic consumption. I wonder what Commentary thought about Gerhard Schroeder anti-American pose he put on for the German public. The parallels are obvious.

John Edwards released his heating oil cost plan today.  The plan consists of a few planks

• Release “a portion of both the home heating oil and crude oil reserves”
• fully fund Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to serve more than 3 million more Americans, including more than 20,000 from New Hampshire.
• Double the weatherization budget to $500.
• helping non-profits and states administer low- or no-interest emergency loans as alternatives to high-cost credit

The rest is more regulations on the oil industry, fewer subsidies, higher CAFE and more biofuels.  The mishmash of proposals shows a kind of schizophrenia at the heart of the Edwards campaign.  Surely he knows that releasing oil from the strategic reserves is the type of band-aid, short term solution that is meaningless in face of rising oil prices. Same with the LIHEAP expansion.  If oil prices are going to continue to rise, LIHEAP will have a similiar trivial effect to the strategic reserve release.  It may be hard for the populist prince to just straight up say that heating oil will be more expensive, and that to curb carbon emissions we should make even more expensive.  But, eventually, energy policy will have to be more of the latter part of Edwards plan (the long term investment and substantial policy changes) and less of the first part, which is just a mishmash of regulation and subsidy that won’t achieve anything and may actually work counter to this stated goal of lowering carbon output.

via the essential “wonk wars” feature by Kate Sheppard.

Government mandated vaccinations for school children is  are one of the more effective public health measures out there. Vaccinations are incredibly simple measures to prevent contraction of a wide range diseases. Moreover, public schools, where young kids spend hours in close physical contact with their classmates, are fantastic places for disease spread. It goes without saying that I don’t share Jesse Jenny Odegard’s sentiment that Maryland needs to “stop being so dramatic” in mandating that kids receive basic shots or else not be allowed to attend school along with fining the parents for each day absent. Of all civil liberties, I don’t see the one to pigheadedly endanger and inconvenience children, who by law have to attend public school, with your un-immunized, disease-ridden child because you’re too twee to see your kid get some shots as one that needs urgent protection.

Gordan Chang is indignant at the thought of Chinese peacekeepers in Sudan. He notes, correctly, that China has very close ties to the government in Khartoum. The basic exchange is that China gives Sudan infrastructure investment and weapons, and get oil in exchange. It seems natural to complain that a peacekeeping force with a substantial Chinese contingent isn’t a peacekeeping force at all. Unfortunately for Chang, there simply isn’t any other way to go. For better or for worse, Sudan gets to set the terms of any UN presence within its borders. The only non-western states they’ll tolerate are Pakistan and China. If you want the operation to have competent engineers acceptable to Sudan, than China is the only way to go. Fulminating against the “Chinese going there wearing the blue berets and scarves of the United Nations” isn’t very productive. If you want a standard UN PKO going on in Sudan, this is how it’s going to be.

Fred Hiatt is a very solipsistic man. He equates Obama’s profession to telling “hard truths” to saying things that, he, Fred Hiatt thinks are true. For example, criticizing Clinton for supporting hawkish legislation on Iran becomes “keeping with the pacifism of much of the Iowa caucus electorate.” Middle class tax credits, for no other reason than because Fred Hiatt thinks they’re silly, are shameful pandering to the primary electorate. Hiatt isn’t even satisfied with Obama’s boneheaded hyping of the Social Security crises, because Obama’s preferred fix — removing the payroll cap — isn’t Hiatt approved. The entire column is a display of the worst type of inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom . For a Democrat to be acceptable, he must turn against his fellow Democrats and kiss the ideological ring of Fred Hiatt. It’s unclear what any liberal politician would gain from the self-immolation Hiatt suggests, but that seems to not affect him in the least.

Tim Lee has a smart post discussing the relevance of improving COIN capabilities in the face of the overwhelming empirical evidence that the best counter insurgency strategy is not getting involved in the first place.

But I think it’s hard to draw from Iraq the lesson that the only problem was the lack of proper counterinsurgency training. Obviously, if our troops had been well trained in counterinsurgency tactics, the odds of success would have been higher. But they still would have been quite small. My understanding of the history of counterinsurgency is that they practically never work, and in the rare case where they do work the costs are often unacceptably high.

All of which is to say that it’s almost never a good idea to get ourselves into counter-insurgency operations. And indeed, if we get to the point where counter-insurgency forces seem desirable, that should be a sign that we ought to start looking for the exits. Creating a dedicated counterinsurgency unit will create institutional pressures for near-perpetual counterinsurgency operations. I suspect that most of the time even the best counterinsurgency efforts won’t be effective, but if we’ve got a hammer, we’ll be awfully tempted to keep pounding any nails we see.

I certainly agree with the sentiment, but I think Lee ignores other factors that will lead to the prosecution and subsequent execution of any given war.  While I agree that in Iraq, the best strategy was to never invade and is to withdraw, the new emphasis on intelligent counter insurgency capabilities is still probably a good thing. The most obvious reason why we should emphasize intelligent COIN is a place like Afghanistan, where our reliance on air strikes is assisting the Taliban’s resurgence.  Also, what Iraq and Afghanistan both show us is that wars whose purpose has nothing to do with counter-insurgency can quickly devolve into them.  If we’re likely to be engaged, as many think, in a series of small wars, including ones where the US troop commitment isn’t very high (like our deployments in the Philippines or Djibouti), we should try to do our best to effectively achieve our goals.

Essentially, the institutional pressures for both potentially starting new wars and continuing the ones we’re in are already present — our military is the best in the world, the public gets belligerent following terrorist attacks etc.  This may be a  reductio ad absurdum, but one could take Lee’s argument to mean that we should intentionally cripple our forces so as to demonstrate to the public that any war or counter-insurgency operation will be impossible.  I’d much rather, for example, direct our defense spending (as many COIN theorists suggest) away from big ticket weapons systems that have little utility to training soldiers to be more knowledgeable about populations under the assumption that not every future administration will be as tragically misguided and inept than our current one. That seems like a better option than just throwing up our hands and saying that we can do no better than Ricardo Sanchez and Tommy Franks.